Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1904

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Edward Bickersteth, The Present Duties of the Protestant Churches. A Sermon Preached Before the British Society for Promoting the Religious Principles of the Reformation, on Friday Evening, May 5, 1837, at Percy Chapel, London (London: G. Norman, 1837), 37. Bickersteth (1786–1850) was lawyerturned -evangelical and missionary and father of Edward Henry Bickersteth (1825–1906), bishop of Exeter and hymnodist. 2. E.G. Rupp, “The Influence of Victorian Nonconformity,” The Listener 1359 (March 17, 1955): 469. 3. One of the reasons so much work on literature and religion focuses on canonical texts, I would argue, is simply that such texts mesh well with the expectations of contemporary professional criticism. They are “difficult,” “complex,” or “subtle”; they must be carefully “unpacked.” 4. The locus classicus for such discussions is perhaps Olive Anderson, “The Political Uses of History in Mid-Nineteenth Century England,” Past and Present 36 (April 1967): 87–105. More recently and most famously, see the essays collected in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 5. George Levine, Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 210, 214. 6. I use evangelicalism as defined by David Bebbington to describe those Protestants across all denominations who took “[c]onversionism, activism , biblicism, and crucicentrism” to be fundamental to their beliefs (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the Present [1989; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992], 4). 7. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–1895 (New York: Routledge, 1997), 72. The best study of fictional conversion 219 narratives is Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question ” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); see also Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 59–65. On nonfiction evangelical conversion narratives in the Victorian period , see Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), 59–85. 8. Maureen Moran, “Pater’s ‘Great Change’: Marius the Epicurean as Historical Conversion Romance,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Leslie Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), 173. 9. As it happens, the scant handful of novels about the Irish Reformation do not fit this pattern at all: authors subordinate or virtually eliminate representations of religious conflict in favor of the problems of warfare and the possibility of sustaining Irish national identity under English oppression. This is true even when the author normally writes controversial fiction, like Selina Bunbury. For that reason, these novels do not appear in this book, although I hope to pursue the questions they raise in another venue. 10. J. Russell Perkin, Theology and the Victorian Novel (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 69. 11. Grace Kennedy, Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Tale (1823; repr., Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Son, 1838), 344. 12. Notable responses included the Italian-American Charles Constantine Pise’s Father Rowland: A North American Tale (1829), Mrs. Robertson’s Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829), the anonymous The Biblicals; Or, Glenmoyle Castle, A Tale of Modern Times (1831), E.C. Agnew’s Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience (1837–39), the anonymous The Converts: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1837), and the anonymous Father Oswald (1842). 13. See Samuel Pickering Jr., The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785–1850 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976), 96–105. 14. Hutcheon defines the term in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 105–23. 15. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 21. 16. Harry Shaw identifies Scott as “the greatest historical novelist” (148) but only in the course of pointing out that Scott’s approach to the historical novel is hardly the only one; see The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 17. Fiona Price, “Resisting ‘The Spirit of Innovation’: The Other Historical Novel and Jane Porter,” Modern Language Review 101 (2006): 640. 18. A. Dwight Culler is on point when he argues of John Henry Newman ’s Callista that “[i]n third-century Africa there had occurred the same life220 | Notes to Pages 4–6 and-death struggle between Christianity and...