Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula by Christopher Herbert (review)

Over three-plus decades and several noteworthy monographs, Christopher Herbert has established the scholarly persona of a paradoxically preserving iconoclast. His work often attends to canonical Victorian literature but rereads it by means of a reconceived cultural or theoretical context; the monuments he aims to topple are less literary than they are critical. At the opening of Trollope and Comic Pleasure (1987), for example, he announced that "we can only judge the inability to reach even the beginnings of a consensus as to the nature of comedy one of the striking failures of modern literary criticism" ([University of Chicago Press], 10). In War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (2008), he declared that "the purportedly universal Victorian insistence that the [1857] rebellion in India was only a mutiny is … nothing but a kind of ideological mirage … that seems rarely to have been subjected to even cursory verification by latter-day scholarship" ([Princeton University Press], 11). For Herbert, literary criticism is a minefield of such "striking failures" and "ideological mirages." In Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula, he has found another such mirage, and he once again aims to "assist Victorian cultural history to break out of or at least loosen the laces of some of its most venerable conceptual straitjackets," this time by reconsidering the relationship between Evangelicalism and the nineteenth-century novel (16).

Herbert's argument is that the tendency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Evangelicalism toward antinomianism (expressed, in an admittedly somewhat watered-down version, as "the all-important lesson of the radical worthlessness of moral goodness apart from faith" [72]) led to an irreconcilability with the values of the novel, which he presents as fundamentally grounded in "humanitarian moral culture" and "moral didacticism" (68). Therefore, Herbert proposes, novelistic representations of Evangelicalism were strongly hostile, turning persistently to gothic imagery and rhetoric to represent Evangelical theology and practice as monstrous. (The term "Evangelical gothic" here primarily means gothically inflected depictions of Evangelicals, not gothic produced by Evangelicals.) In Herbert's account, the "venerable conceptual straitjackets" in this case manifest as the fact that "it is axiomatic in nineteenth-century studies that the Victorian mentality … was the long-term derivative of the Great Awakening" (11). This axiom can only be maintained, he posits, because cultural historians of Evangelicalism have uniformly downplayed its "potentially scandalous formulation[s]" through a preference for softer or more humanistic statements (6). The book begins with two scene-setting chapters, one on the theology of such central Evangelical and Methodist figures as John Wesley, George Whitefield, and William Wilberforce, and one establishing what Herbert calls "The Impossibility of the Evangelical Novel." That contextual work is followed by four chapters, each of which focuses on one or more representative fictional narratives, detailing the conflict between Evangelical and novelistic values as it is represented in those narratives: Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816) and James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824); Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53); George Eliot's "Janet's Repentance" in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), and Romola (1863); and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).

It is a pleasure to follow Herbert's analysis of the novels, which is almost always enlightening; I find a real delight in the sustained readings he provides, unfolded over long and unhurried chapters. Rather than touching briefly upon hundreds of literary works to support his historical claims, he pays ample attention to the details of a few well-known novels' prose, closely reading the rich webs of meaning they construct through explicit and implicit allusions to Evangelicalism. Herbert writes with a swashbuckling verve, and he has a knack for making both the literature and the theological debates come alive. It is true that not all...