The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Robert H. Ellison; pp. 178. Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1998, $34.50.

Robert H. Ellison aims to fill a perceived gap in Victorian studies: the absence of work on prominent Victorian "pulpiteers" and their production of sermons. His book begins with discussions of Victorian homiletic theory, methods of sermon delivery, and sermon publishing, and continues with chapters devoted to three famous individual preachers: Charles Haddon Spurgeon, John Henry Newman, and George MacDonald. He concludes with a rhetorical comparison of these three Victorian sermon writers. Ellison approaches Victorian sermon literature through "orality-literacy studies," which would seem an appropriate methodology for the study of a form both written and spoken. His work exhibits clarity of style and organization. Altogether, this slim book, based on Ellison's doctoral thesis, promises to provide a needed introduction to and resource on the art and the impact of Victorian sermons.

But The Victorian Pulpit falls short of this promise in a number of ways. Despite his repeated insistence that "virtually" no studies take preaching as their primary focus, or that "virtually" no work has been done on "prominent nineteenth-century pulpiteers," Ellison overlooks important recent texts that have done both (11). His methodological restriction to "orality-literacy studies" leads him to exclude cultural aspects of Victorian preaching and sermon writing that would have given his work a far richer perspective on sermon literature and its place in Victorian society. And finally, his decision to limit his study of individual preachers to Spurgeon, Newman, and MacDonald squeezes an enormous sector of Victorian literature and culture into such a narrow compass as to inevitably distort understanding of this mammoth genre. In short, Ellison's study is admirable as a doctoral thesis, but it would have benefitted greatly as a book by an expansion and complication of its focus.

Ellison's opening analysis of Victorian homiletic theory suggests that the Victorian sermon combined the precepts of classical oral rhetoric with an emphasis on simplicity of style and manner: "Sermons were no longer regarded primarily as orations, but rather as 'written pieces'; consequently, they were expected to 'follow the rule of all other writings'" (31). Ellison's analysis is scrupulously pruned of all reference to content here, and this attempt artificially to divorce form from substance tends toward reductive readings. Surprisingly, Ellison makes no reference to George P. Landow's Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (1980), in which the interpretive methodology of Victorian sermons is discussed, nor his Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (1986), in which Landow analyzes secular "sages," some of whose works--most notably Thomas Carlyle's--also exemplify the crossover between the spoken and the written word.

Similarly, Ellison's discussion of "methods of delivery" would have been interestingly and usefully complicated had he compared the exclusively male "pulpiteers" with the women preachers discussed in Christine L. Krueger's The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (1992), and in Deborah M. Valenze's Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (1985). As Krueger demonstrates, English women preachers tended much more toward the "orality" end of the spectrum, in part because publication of their written works was discouraged. Ellison's discussion of sermon publishing does provide a useful overview of this extremely popular and financially profitable aspect of Victorian literary publication, noting that an observer writing in 1827 compared novels and sermons as "the two most remarkable departments of modern literature" (qtd. 46).

The chapters on Spurgeon, Newman, and MacDonald align these three preachers on the orality-literacy spectrum, with Spurgeon considered the most "oral" and MacDonald the most "literary"--Newman falls somewhere in the middle. Ellison states categorically that "only one book on the Victorian pulpit--Eric Mackerness's The Heeded Voice: Studies in the Literary...