Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community by Richard Hughes Gibson (review)

depictions of earth and sky that are the very reason one reads Thoreau—or wants to read more about him—in the first place. Nathan Bechtold State Fair Community College Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community. By Richard Hughes Gibson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. ISBN 978-1-7809-3711-3. Pp. xiv + 169. $39.95. To many 19th-century scholars, Richard Hughes Gibson’s topic will undoubtedly seem a rather broad one. Yet, despite the scope of the study, and the fact that it deals with canonical authors from the era, Gibson’s text does not at all feel obsolete. This is primarily due to the fact that literary scholarship as a whole, and 19th-century scholarship in particular, is still in the process of rediscovering the importance of religious belief and practice to Victorian-era literature. As such, any recent criticism which focuses on a subject like the use of forgiveness in Victorian Literature seems to be entirely absent. For the most part, Gibson’s analysis focuses solely on his primary texts. In the first chapter (which also serves as an introduction), Richard Hughes Gibson lays out his analytical methodology—the venues by which he will approach the uses of forgiveness in the era’s literature. The venues are ‘grammar ’, which deals with the necessity of a shared linguistic understanding of forgiveness between characters; ‘narrative’, which suggests that forgiveness must happen in individual ‘scenes’ as well as over time, and ‘community’, which looks at how a private wrong may engender public scorn. Finally, in addition to these venues, Gibson acknowledges the important contextual role religious belief plays in the understanding of the concept as a whole. Gibson is certainly aware of the traditional ‘‘secularization narrative’’ when dealing with a religiously charged topic like forgiveness, and gives careful attention to the fact that each of these authors represent various shades of the sectarian fragmentation that was taking place in the religious landscape of England at the time. If an understanding of forgiveness is couched in religious language and belief, then a Unitarian (Dickens) would approach the concept of forgiveness differently from a High Church Anglican (Trollope), someone with an Evangelical background (Eliot), an agnostic (Hardy), or questioning Catholic (Wilde). The structure of the chapters (from early Victorian to mid-century and then fin de siècle authors) is of course also important, as it imitates the passage of time and thus the movement toward the religious fragmentation and modern ‘‘secularization’’ that the traditional narrative regarding the period embodied. In Gibson’s second chapter, which deals with Dickens, he notes that in The Life of Our Lord, ‘‘Dickens’s Jesus rarely teaches on a topic other than forgiveness or the related dispositions of compassion and mercy’’ (45). In his analysis of Dickens’s 518 Christianity & Literature 65(4) uses of forgiveness, Gibson argues that this virtue in Dickens’s writings wavers constantly between two oppositional characteristics—liberality (the unconditional, extravagant expression of forgiveness) and liability (forgiveness dependent on moral self-correction and adherence to one’s ‘duty’). In Life, Dickens retells portions of the gospel that highlight both these extremes. On the one hand, ‘‘Dickens emphasizes . . . the extravagance of Jesus’s forgiveness . . . [it] is depicted as strange, excessive, and utterly unreasonable to many around him’’ (45). At the same time, however, Dickens relates stories from the Gospels in which forgiveness seems to be a ‘‘reward of duty done.’’ As Gibson states, ‘‘The narrative is thus animated by competing impulses: on the one hand, we have the picture of unconditional forgiveness and ethical generosity that emerges in the forgiveness stories; on the other, the ‘duty passages’ underscore the need to do one’s duty and be good always in order to get to heaven in the end’’ (48–49). Dickens’s other works represented follow this same pattern. For example, liberality and liability are both seen in the plan of the reform house for fallen women Dickens designs with the help of Angela Burdett-Coutts. The house itself is divided into two separate sections. The first section welcomed any woman regardless of how long they had been involved in prostitution. The second section, however, was more exclusive , and could...