Forum Introduction: Varieties and Denominations of Victorian Christianity

Varietal difference within Christianity presents a real challenge to scholars of Victorian culture. Victorianists generally acknowledge Christianity's importance to the period's history, literature, and art, but we often depict it as a static and even monochrome background context. Any serious look at the historical and literary record, however, shows that nineteenth-century Christian identity was everywhere marked by internal divisions, competing identity markers, denominational conflict, and flux.

Mary Ellis Gibson of Colby College and I have assembled this collection of mini-essays at the request of Victorian Review to address some of the variation and conflict that marks nineteenth-century Christianity, in the hopes that we may better appreciate its contours and evolution. The religious and global turns in twenty-first-century humanities work have made the present time a good one for such a forum. Scholars of all sorts and from a variety of fields are newly alive to the enduring importance of religion in secular modernity, as well as to its historical complexity. We are deeply grateful to our forum members for loaning us their expertise.

Denominational difference mattered immensely throughout the Victorian era, but the differences varied by region. In cultures where more or less everyone was presumed to be a Christian, specific varieties of Christianity meant more, and differences between, say, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Catholics loomed larger. Umbrella terms such as "Christian," accordingly, meant less where their presence could be taken for granted. To identify as a Christian in nineteenth-century Cambridge meant something different from identifying as one in nineteenth-century Toronto, which meant something different from identifying as one in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Denominational distinctions existed in all three places, of course, but they registered in very different ways. Likewise, the rejection of theism by nonbelievers, atheists, or agnostics registers differently in different historical milieux.

Complicating matters further, the adjective "Christian" was often used in this period to distinguish a writer's own true Christianity from the ersatz versions practised by others (vainly, of course). Thus Elizabeth Gaskell writes in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) of "the soi-disant Christians" who protested against the appointment of Patrick Brontë's predecessor at Haworth, who held what she calls a "heathen brotherhood" with local Dissenters, "the soi-disant Christians of Heckmondwike" Chapel (87). Victorian Christians regularly evidenced this complex mix of kinship and animosity toward those who did not belong to their particular branches of the faith, to their particular churches, or to their particular attitudes within those churches.

Historical figures whom we, in retrospect, might reasonably take for coreligionists did not always feel like co-religionists with one another. One's fellow Christians might be "walking … in darkness," as the naturalist Philip Gosse labelled those falling outside the bounds of his own strict Calvinism (6), or practising mere "humbug," as Charlotte Brontë described the Catholics among whom she lived in Belgium (181). John Henry Newman describes coming to view Protestants and Anglicans as heretics in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Thinkers and writers who aspired to ecumenism and who embraced broader philosophical categories likewise had to grapple with what A.P. Stanley calls "the evils of sectarianism" (336). (It must be allowed that Gosse, Brontë, and Newman all desired Christian unity, but on differing terms.)

Enlightenment ideals of religious tolerance grew throughout the period and remained the groundwork for secular reform. But such tolerance had to overcome various forms of partisanship and religious esprit de corps, and of course secularism could devolve into its own forms of partisanship. Among the working classes, religious and ideological rivalries often emerged, and these frequently held up right through the Second World War, lending weight to Callum Brown's argument that secularization might better be conceived of as a later twentieth-century social phenomenon than a nineteenth-century one.

At the same time, intra-religious differences in Christianity created unlikely kinships. The key lines were not always denominational. In the Gaskell quotation above, for instance, a Unitarian author (Gaskell) defends an Evangelical Anglican clergyman (P. Brontë) against the attacks of his own congregation (Haworth parishioners) and their Methodist allies...