A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (review)

In recent years, Timothy Larsen has published studies of Jesus’s preaching (The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries with Jeffrey P. Greenman and Stephen R. Spencer, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007), religion and politics (Friends of Religious Equality, Waynesboro, GA, 2007), “fundamentalism and feminism” (Christabel Pankhurst, Rochester, NY, 2002), and nineteenth-century conversions from doubt to faith (Crisis of Doubt, New York, 2006). This project is an examination of Victorian “biblicism, ” of the ways in which the scriptures permeated the thought and work of people of many denominations—and, somewhat paradoxically, of people who professed no faith at all.

Larsen takes roughly the same approach in each of the ten chapters in the book. In the title, he names a religious tradition and identifies the man or woman whom he sees as “a fitting representative” (p. 12) of that tradition: E. B. Pusey of Anglo-Catholicism, Mary Carpenter of Unitarianism, and of course C. H. Spurgeon of Baptists and “Orthodox Old Dissent” (three others—Spiritualism, Judaism, and the Plymouth Brethren—could not be included in the study proper, but are briefly surveyed in the conclusion). That person’s commitment to the scriptures is then the primary—but not necessarily the only—focus of the chapter itself, as Larsen often also provides a biographical sketch, discussions of another important people, or an “excursus” into “denominational history” (pp. 104, 138).

In many cases, Larsen helps us to see familiar people in unfamiliar ways. For the purposes of this study, for example, Florence Nightingale, Charles Bradlaugh, and T. H. Huxley are not significant, respectively, for their nursing during the Crimean War, the lawsuit that permitted an avowed atheist to take his seat in Parliament in the 1880s, or scientific lectures and work as “Darwin’s bulldog.” Rather, Larsen portrays them respectively as a liberal preacher and author of the apologetic work Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truths; a man who once taught Sunday School and whose “first freethinking work” followed all of the conventions of Victorian “biblical commentary” (p. 71); and someone who advocated the study of the scriptures while protesting, in the style of “an Old Testament prophet” (p. 206), what he saw as the idolatry—and specifically the “bibliolatry” (p. 207)—that characterized Victorian Christendom.

What is not consistent is the way in which Larsen has organized the study. He tells us in the introduction that “the order of the chapters is simply the order in which they were researched” (p. 7). This leads to a somewhat disjointed sequence: we read about Anglicans in chapters 1, 5, and 9; Roman Catholics in chapter 2; Methodists, Unitarians, and Quakers in chapters 4, 6, and 7; Spurgeon in chapter 10; and atheists and agnostics in chapters 3 and 8. This organizational scheme also makes it difficult to smoothly segue from one topic to the next; most of the chapters seem to come to a rather abrupt end. These may be rough edges, but they are not fatal flaws. Although A People of One Book cannot be given an unqualified endorsement here, it is nonetheless a worthwhile project by a prolific and insightful scholar. Many of us have probably grown skeptical of the promotional language on dust jackets, but, in this case, the claim that the book is a story of religious “diversity” told through a “series of lively case studies” is not far off the mark.