The Theological and Ethical Writings of Frances Power Cobbe, 1822-1904 (review)

Frances Cobbe has received considerable attention as a feminist and as a leading figure in the anti-vivisection movement. This, however, is the first sustained and detailed discussion of her theological and ethical writings. The book is all the more important because, as its author Sandra Peacock argues, religious and ethical questions were of great significance to Cobbe and were interwoven into all her other activities and concerns. Cobbe's views on such questions were often controversial, but were always taken seriously: Peacock includes revealing discussions of her disagreements and correspondence with Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer and suggests that Cobbe was the primary target of John Ruskin's well-known fulmination against women who meddle with theology in his Sesame and Lilies (1865).

What Peacock offers is not so much an analysis of Cobbe's theological and ethical writings as an account of how they developed and changed across the course of her life. This seems by far the best approach to Cobbe; the reading of her life is sympathetic and sensitive, and certainly helps to provide the framework for exploring the development of her views. Peacock particularly emphasizes Cobbe's unhappiness at home and the familial basis of her dislike of organised religion and especially of Evangelicalism. This leads to an insightful discussion of Cobbe's search for intellectual and spiritual father figures to replace the despotic and unlovable father who ignored her as a child, deprived her of a fair share of the family assets, and cast her out when she made clear the extent to which she had moved away from his religious faith. Immanuel Kant and especially Theodore Parker provided much of the basis for Cobbe's ideas on intuitive morals.

Once Cobbe had established an appropriate intellectual paternity through Parker and Kant, Peacock argues, she was ready to begin building her own system of beliefs and to establish her version of Theism, one that relied on intuition and on human intelligence as the basis of religion. In her endeavour to establish this new approach, Cobbe saw the established churches as the greatest enemy, and she attacked them with fervour, turning often to science for support. In view of her well-known attacks on scientists and on the medical profession in her later years, it is interesting how readily she turned to science in earlier years, as offering the most cogent basis for questioning and rejecting any form of revealed or organised religion. Cobbe's alliance with science and scientists did not last long, however, as she soon found the arrogance of scientific claims and the materialism of many scientists intolerable. Cobbe had welcomed some of Darwin's ideas, but his belief that intellectual capacity, outlook, forms of behaviour, and moral beliefs were heritable and evolved was completely unacceptable to her. She attempted to persuade Darwin that morality was intuitive—but to no avail.

Cobbe's religious writings address not only Christianity and Theism, but also Judaism and Islam. Peacock shows very clearly the limitations of Cobbe's understanding of these other religions and points particularly to her inability either to understand the nature and intensity of religious feeling amongst Jews and Muslims, or to recognise adequately the extent of the hostility to which they were often subject. While acknowledging Cobbe's racism, she treats it rather gently, stressing the extent to which Cobbe's approach to different ethnic groups was shared by her contemporaries.

In many ways, Peacock's account of Cobbe's views is a more coherent and cogent one than Cobbe—a fundamentally eccentric and unsystematic thinker—herself could ever provide. Deprived as she was of an adequate formal education, Cobbe was essentially self-educated, and her somewhat haphazard reading and lack of intellectual rigour are evident in much of what she wrote. Her ideas were often presented in...