Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (review)

The commitment of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) to offer the scriptures 'without note or comment' has hitherto been interpreted in terms of sidestepping doctrinal differences among Evangelicals in Britain and as a critique of Roman Catholic insistence on clerical mediation between Christians and the word of God. Now Mary Wilson Carpenter advances another explanation. She reads the contemporary commentary incorporated with the sacred text in commercially published Bibles - especially those designated as 'Family Bibles' - as well as the accompanying visual imagery. For Carpenter, these paratextual elements functioned at the time as sources of knowledge (and can now be interpreted as sites of discourse) on such taboo subjects as homosexuality, masturbation, menstruation, and circumcision.

Part 1 is based on Carpenter's research with books designated as 'family' or 'domestic' Bibles in the British Library's catalogue. She identifies two stages in the history of this ubiquitous yet under-researched literary genre, each marked by a 'sudden shift.' The eighteenth-century version had addressed only the paterfamilias; but early in the nineteenth century the entire family became the target market. 'Suddenly, parts of the Family Bible are no longer suitable for the family to read.' In Foucauldian mode, Carpenter finds it remarkable that such passages as Leviticus and the Song of Solomon were typographically marked off and in at least one case designated as being appropriate only for the gentleman's 'closet' (where their transgressive sexuality might anyway be located). And then later in the nineteenth century, Family Bibles were marketed to women. Presumably still bracketed, the books were now replete with domestic imagery alongside the genealogical register. The 1890s saw the demise of the genre: Carpenter suggests that Family Bibles had so successfully constructed Victorian women's subjectivity that they had fostered the development of the New Woman, and hence written themselves out of the market.

Part 2 reads work by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning through their use of biblical imagery, with that imagery in turn enhanced by Carpenter's cultural reading of the commentary which these authors could presumably have been expected to read.

Much of Carpenter's argument is based on the commercial nature of Family Bibles, published with illustrations and commentaries to be attractive, and often made available to consumers in parts, to be affordable. However, a question remains of how many middle-class people would have been able to afford books furnished with the lavish illustrations to which Carpenter has devoted such ingenious interpretation. A scan of the Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of the English Bible (known as DMH: originally compiled by Darlow and Moule in 1903 from the BFBS Library, and revised and expanded by A.S. Herbert in 1968 to include the British Library, the Bodleian, and other collections) reveals few illustrated editions until late in the nineteenth century. Carpenter does not appear to know of DMH; that reference work includes numerous other Bibles with commentary, as well as various editions that might have been of interest, such as an 1828 edition designated 'to facilitate the audible or social reading of the Sacred Scriptures' with certain indelicate passages printed in italics below the text. Bible commentary was a substantial industry in nineteenth-century Britain, but only a fraction of it was devoted to preparing editions for family use. And price remains an important factor: the Bible Society was founded because poor people could not obtain, or afford, even the stripped-down text authorized to be printed by the privileged presses. Even their middle-class contemporaries may not have invested in the illustrated versions.

Mary Wilson Carpenter's reading of the commentaries and illustrations that accompanied the scriptural text when it was marketed for 'family' reading is plausible, as well as intriguing. But it remains a critical reading by a modern commentator. Methodologies for analysing the Victorian reading experience still cannot measure the strength of contemporary reactions to those sexual and patriarchal references that...