The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain

This paper explores the Victorian fascination with Mormonism from the 1830s through the end of the century. By reading a range of journalism, novels, and travel writing, I argue that what intrigued Victorian writers about Joseph Smith’s followers was not simply their practice of plural marriage but also the way that they seemed to be experimenting with religion’s role in modernity. While early accounts often portrayed the Mormons as atavists seeking to revive Iron Age institutions, later writers like William Hepworth Dixon and Arthur Conan Doyle came to see Mormonism as a striking hybrid of the ancient and the modern—one that ultimately reflected back upon the hybridity of English civilization itself and its settler colonies around the globe.