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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Victorian Protestants of all denominations insisted that without the Reformation, there would be no economic success, no intellectual and scientific growth, no political liberty—in other words, no modern Britain. And yet, the Reformation’s success apparently foretold its undoing. “As Protestants we had greatly lost, through disuse and long ease and prosperity, the armour of the Reformation,” thundered the evangelical Edward Bickersteth, exploding into a battery of mixed metaphors. “While we slept the enemy has been busy sowing tares, and the tares are rapidly multiplying. The plague of popery is spreading through the camp, and it is needful to make haste and withstand it.”1 By the end of the nineteenth century, praising the Reformation and mourning its incipient loss had become one of the leading hallmarks of popular anti-Catholic discourse, spilling into tracts, lectures, poems, catechisms, histories, biographies, and novels. Nor were Protestants alone in worrying about the Reformation’s cultural significance : increasingly as the decades wore on, Roman Catholic and AngloCatholic historians, controversialists, and novelists appropriated the Protestants’ favorite topic in order to narrate an entirely different 1 history, one in which the Reformation’s “success” actually marked the beginning of widespread cultural and political collapse. Writing about and debating the Reformation became one of the Victorian era’s most popular, and most loaded, national pastimes. This phenomenon, however, is virtually unknown in literary studies , even though the heat of the debates fueled poetry, drama, and (most importantly for my purposes here) several dozen novels. The reason is not hard to find: this popular obsession with the Reformation , so crucial for Protestant and even Catholic identities, was carried on not by now-canonical authors but by some of the most successful religious novelists—figures like Deborah Alcock, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, A.D. Crake, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Emily Sarah Holt, Emma Leslie, George E. Sargent, and Frances Taylor. Their work was widely reviewed in the leading Christian periodicals, pirated in the United States, and translated into languages ranging from French to Bengali; some of the most successful were reprinted well into the twentieth century. For example, Charles’s Chronicles of the SchönbergCotta Family (1863), in which Martin Luther plays a leading role, went through over a dozen editions in Britain and as many in the United States; was translated into German (also going through multiple editions ), French, and Arabic; and was re-released as late as 2003, in an edited version, by an evangelical small press. John Scott Lidgett, a leading Methodist activist and theologian from the late Victorian period to the mid-twentieth century, remembered his father reading The Pilgrim ’s Progress with as much fondness as he remembered him reading the Chronicles.2 Thus, this book insists not only that controversial fiction played a crucial role in nineteenth-century popular religious and literary cultures , but that any study of religion and literature that dismisses them in favor of canonical works will badly skew our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape. Although such familiar figures as Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot will appear in the course of this study, when it comes to understanding the complexities of Victorian religious narratives, close reading of classic works for traces of religious controversy is not, in the end, the most productive strategy. 2 | Victorian Reformations Working with popular religious fiction poses its own problems, such as a nonexistent canon, frequently unanswerable questions about authorship , and difficulties in establishing reception histories. Moreover , by their very nature, these works push an explicit rather than an implicit agenda; theoretical approaches that emphasize decoding or a “hermeneutics of suspicion” founder when faced with a text that, at first, seems all surface.3 For this reason, the chapters that follow will combine close reading with the interrelations of novelistic groups, as narrative patterns and thematic elements emerge, consolidate, and eventually disperse across time. More specifically, this study focuses on how such popular religious fictions—by authors of any denomination—imagine historical processes at work, processes that, for these authors and their readers, led beyond nineteenth-century national history to the apocalypse itself . It is by now a commonplace that the Victorian era was quintessentially “historical” in its attitudes, seeking to position every political, economic, cultural, or religious event against a sweeping, explanatory backdrop.4 These novels, however, narrate the past in accord with a providential, eschatological framework that often remains buried in modern studies...