The View from the Pulpit: Victorian Ministers and Society ed. by P.T. Phillips (review)

4'4 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 that it is usually necessary to quote at greater length than he finds possible, he is able to demonstrate Trollope's skill through sound observations and, in addition, he is aware of Trollope's irony without being false to the sentimentality. This is not a book that breaks much new ground in critical theory (James Kincaid's The Novels ofAnthony Trollope takes a large step forward here), but it is a sound book, one which assists a new reader to place Trollope adequately. (MICHAEL LAINE) P.T. Phillips, editor. The View from the Pulpit: Victorian Ministers and Society Macmillan of Canada. 326. $'9.95 These studies of Anglican, Protestant nonconformist, and Roman Catholic clergy and ministers contain useful information for the student of nineteenth-century religion and social affairs in England and Ireland. The essays are all on individual men. They are not the great minds of Victorian Christianity; but those who belong most irrecoverably to their own period interest us just because their lives and works are so intensely of the time that they have immense social significance. (We can imagine that in another century Norman Vincent Peale and c.P. Snow will be studied closely by the historian of morals and manners, not at all by the theologian or the literary critic.) Alexander Dallas, to whom Professor Desmond Bowen introduces us, is the oddest fish in this net. He is a Sisyphus who strove to convert the Catholic Irish to Protestantism; in his old age he tried to get up a debate with the cardinal archbishop of Santiago. Others such as Julius Hare, W.F. Hook (the Vicar of Leeds who was so tormented by the humourless Pusey), and William Hale White ('Mark Rutherford') are better known but not much studied today. Others we recall more easily because they occur to us in connection with matters that are still of interest. Wiseman reminds us of 'Papal Aggression ' and of Blougram in Browning's poem, and Paul Cullen we remember as the wretched prelate who tried to contain the awkward fact of Newman's being the rector of the new Catholic university by not answering his letters. The unity of this collection is in its illuminating the lower depths of Victorian religion. (William Hale White is the odd man out: the author of two or three minorclassics, the Chekhov ofEnglish nonconformity, he has a distinction of mind the others lack.) I am puzzled by the editor's choice of figures to be written about. The Broad church is too richly represented. Apart from the eccentric Dallas, there is no one from the Anglican evangelicals, no one to illustrate the impact of post-Tractarian AngloCatholicism on the poor of the great cities, no one from the Salvation HUMANITIES 415 Army. Wiseman and Cullen are well done, and Professor Schiefen is able to use the Wiseman material to show the interdependence of the condition of the poor and the religious state of the Catholic masses. But Faber and Father Mathew, even Manning, would have fitted in better with what seems to be the editor's wish to set clergy and ministers firmly within the societies to which they preached. The editor does in fact suggest why some are surprisingly present, others surprisingly absent: 'The interests of our contributors largely governed our choices.' Such an ordering principle is suitable and even inevitable in the compiling of a Festschrift but not in the making of a collection with the present title. But it is good to have all the pieces assembled here. In particular, since Anglicans, arguably a religious minority, certainly by the nineteenth century, perhaps since the seventeenth century, have received disproportionate attention from ecclesiastical historians, it is gratifying to have fine studies of such heroes of the nonconformist tradition as Spurgeon and R.W. Dale. Spurgeon must have been a knockout as a preacher, though in retrospect he strikes us as a confused and unattractive man. Dale was an intelligent man whose mind was always working. Itis odd to think that he and Newman captivated, in very different ways, the public of Birmingham, the great capital of the philistines. The publishers have given us a...