Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity by Ian Hesketh (review)

In January 1866 a book was published that would generate furious debate and discussion for much of the coming year. "This is a dangerous book to review," declared a reviewer in the weekly Guardian shortly after its launch. The book was Ecce Homo, published anonymously by the London based Macmillan & Co., and it controversially attempted to apply scientific and historical methodology to the study of the life and moral character of Jesus, carefully skirting overtly doctrinal interpretations that could be used to identify to which Anglican or other religious groups the author was linked. Praise by the prime minister, William Gladstone, in a letter to the publishers, was later used to promote the work, which would go on to be a sensational non-fiction bestseller, selling over 20,000 copies over the next two years.

Sales were in part driven not just by debate over its content, but also by questions as to its authorship. Speculation grew feverish as time passed, with commentators suggesting authorial candidates ranging from George Eliot, the historian J.A. Froude, and the editor and commentator R.H. Hutton, to less probable Scottish poets, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Emperor Napoleon III. One of the attractions of the work as a result was the latitude it gave readers and critics to impose their own interpretation on the work's content and meaning: floating freely from an overt identification with a specific religious orthodoxy, it invited readers to consider the issue of the place of Jesus's teachings and role in more social and historical terms.

Not everyone found this to their liking. In fact, as Ian Hesketh notes in his careful and detailed study of the production, promotion, and reception of this mid-century, bestselling work, many High Anglican church elders saw it as a threat, an attempt to undermine and attack the Anglican faith directly, and so quickly rushed to denounce it in print and in public forae. The evangelical Anglican Lord Shaftesbury, for example, condemned it in a widely reported speech in May 1866 as "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell," though this hyperbolic pronouncement led to much ridicule in the press. Hesketh spends a good deal of time exploring in minute fashion the intricacies of the arguments and counter-debates that raged in contemporary reviews, letters, and speeches of key religious and cultural players and journals.

The book's publisher, Alexander Macmillan, cannily exploited such outrage and the ongoing debates over authorship and authorial meaning in subsequent publicity and marketing material: choice quotes were extracted and promoted in book ads in leading journals, as well as through strategically placed billboards and posters, and the work was issued in cheap formats to be sold at railway station book stalls. The result was a wide promotion of the work to lay readers beyond the niche religious audiences Ecce's author had originally intended. The secret of its authorship was eventually revealed in November 1866, when gossip by loose-lipped friends led The Spectator to unmask the author as J.R. Seeley, then professor of Latin at University College, London. (Seeley would go on to become Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University in 1869, due in large part to Glad-stone's continuing support.)

As Ian Hesketh points out in clear fashion, Ecce Homo was seen as a dangerous book at the time because it attempted to deal with the relevance of Jesus in non-theological terms. It played into contemporary debates then raging in the wake of the Christian Socialist movement led by F.D. Maurice, the nineteenth-century positivist, philosophical enquiries led by August Comte and his followers, and the anthropological and scientific implications of Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859, which challenged general assumptions about human development and its connection to the animal kingdom.

At the...