Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing (review)

Prefacing this collection of essays is a 2002 sermon by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the life and work of W. E. Gladstone. Gladstone's recognition, which should be ours, Archbishop Williams argues, was that God deals with humans through a "net of relations" (xiv), visible in diverse human forms and composing a complex unity. Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams bring together in this volume twelve studies of those forms, of the shapes that belief takes, in nineteenth-century Britain and America.

The idea that religious belief flowed into and shaped secular forms in the Victorian era is, of course, an old one. The essays that comprise Shaping Belief seek to move beyond or to complicate this realization. In their introduction, "Revisioning Belief in Nineteenth-Century Writing," the editors claim that what makes this work new is the realization that "belief" must be understood as "social, cultural and political phenomena," rather than as "a specifically religious conviction" (xv). In particular, they emphasize the diverse and dynamic nature of nineteenth-century belief. Explaining that "the energy that had once been contained within religion flowed out into society and its writings" (xv-xvi), Morgan and Williams offer twelve essays that trace some of these tributaries. Shaping Belief is divided into three sections: "Religious Discourse: Transmission and Appropriation," "Shaping Subjectivities: Belief, Aesthetics and Space," and "Mediating Culture: Inscribing Democracy, Class and Social Identity." Together, the essays cover a range of examples and demonstrate the fluidities of form. Readers will find connections and resonances throughout the volume. Finally, though, the principles of selection appear arbitrary: the book is a bit of a miscellany, and Morgan and Williams's repetitive and awkwardly written preface does little to make the case for the volume's integrity. (They do better in their own essays: Morgan's on Emily Dickinson and Williams's on Thomas Carlyle.)

That said, several of the contributions are very strong. The best-written of these is Philip Davis's lively "Isaiah and Ezekiel—But What about Charley? An Essay on 'Wanting to Believe'" (reprinted from The Reader), which urges us to take seriously the idea, and the feeling, of wanting to believe. Davis uses examples ranging from George MacDonald to William James to discuss the uses of the "instrumental and provisional" in matters of belief (65). Rather than distancing ourselves from Victorians' crises of faith, we might better deploy their strategies of behaving "as if."

Although their arguments and tones differ, Davis joins Archbishop Williams as preacher, exhorting audiences to look to the Victorians. Both writers maintain that we can, and should, find in the nineteenth century modern models for sophisticated, even skeptical, believing. Other contributors to this volume also offer what might be viewed as apologia for nineteenth-century modes of thought. Implicit here is the felt need to combat the Modernist legacy of discomfort with—and disdain for—religious belief. While Victorian studies has been less warped by this academic prejudice than other fields, the study of religion has been taken up with new interest and energy over the past decade. In Shaping Belief discussions of F. D. Maurice, Octavia Hill, Josephine Butler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold all describe convincingly the complex subjectivities engendered by the problem of belief in the period. For example, addressing both Dickens's critics and his defenders, Juliet John rejects "the idea that his commercial humanism must be viewed as decisively sincere or insincere, personal or wholesale" (205). Situating Dickens's notions of personal and public within the marketplace, John astutely analyzes Dickens's self-representations, including, especially, that of the "Shadow." She argues that both the private and the public personae of "Charles Dickens" were "himself and not himself" (205).

Other fine essays are those by Alison Milbank on sacrifice, violence, and doubles in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Kirstie Blair on church architecture and Tractarian poetry...