A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians by Timothy Larsen (review)

Timothy Larsen’s A People of One Book is a book of one idea. The Victorians, he argues, were obsessed with the Bible, and post-Victorian historians and literary critics have failed to acknowledge fully the truth of that generalization. Larsen supports his claim by choosing twelve representative Victorians, each of them corresponding to a theological (or anti-theological) point of view. In the order that he discusses them, they are Edward Pusey (Anglo-Catholic), Nicholas Wiseman (Roman Catholic), Charles Brad-laugh and Annie Besant (atheist), Catherine Booth and William Cooke (Methodist/Holiness), Florence Nightingale (liberal Anglican), Mary Carpenter (Unitarian), Elizabeth Fry (Quaker), T. H. Huxley (agnostic), Josephine Butler (evangelical Anglican), and Charles Haddon Spurgeon (orthodox dissent).

Larsen acknowledges a body of secondary literature on the importance of the Bible for nineteenth-century poets, novelists, critics, and painters. Larsen’s figures are instead public intellectuals and institution builders, known less for their attachment to the Bible than as founders of the nursing profession, the Salvation Army, the London School Board, the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, and the most famous Victorian megachurch, the Metropolitan Tabernacle in South London. They conducted campaigns to reform British prisons, repeal the Contagious Diseases Act, allow atheists to sit in Parliament, defend the theory of natural selection, establish schools for women in India, and reestablish the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England.

It is well known that the Victorian age saw a revival of Christianity in Britain, where a religious nineteenth century is often contrasted with a secular twentieth century. Larsen’s point, though, is not that the Victorian age was an Age of Faith, but that the importance of the Bible for these eminent Victorians has been either downplayed or overlooked for two reasons. The first is the theological assumption on the part of evangelical Protestants that the Reformation principle of biblical authority, which had never been observed by Roman Catholics, had been further downgraded by Anglo-Catholics, Unitarians, Quakers, and liberal Protestants, leading them to neglect biblical truth. The second reason is the tendency of post-Victorian historians to ransack the Victorian age for precursors of the secular achievements of the twentieth century, including the triumph of natural selection, the humane treatment of prisoners, greatly expanded professional and educational opportunities for women, and practical religious neutrality on the part of the state.

Fry, Nightingale, Carpenter, and Butler have been treated as harbingers of modernity rather than as women with diverse theological points of view whose writings were saturated with biblical quotations. Each of them used the Bible in a daily routine of personal devotions. The most interesting of these women is Nightingale, who fully accepted the findings of the higher criticism about the historical unreliability of the Bible, and whose theological views were so liberal as to barely qualify as Christian at all. Nonetheless she remained a devoted supporter of the Church of England, used the Bible for daily devotional readings, quoted the scripture readily all her life, wrote sermons, and required biblical study for probationer nurses in her training institutions.

The biblical engagement of atheists such as Bradlaugh and Besant was anchored in a tradition of anti-biblical commentary dating from the deist controversies of the early eighteenth century, and drawing heavily on Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794–1807). They were furious with their fellow Victorians for taking seriously a book that was not only untrue, but immoral. The agnostic Huxley is a more thought-provoking case, for his public defense of science and natural selection was combined with a deep engagement with the Bible. Like Nightingale, he did not regard the Bible as reliable, and like Bradlaugh and Besant, he recognized that it contained many passages that were not suitable for children. Nonetheless, he not only devoted his last years to biblical commentary (to the dismay and even disgust of many of...