Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860 (review)

As I worked through Victorian Reformation, my first response was one of irritation. I was particularly aggravated by the book's lack of details about the many Victorian conflicts over material objects in the Church of England and by the lack of attention to the theological basis for those debates. At the very least, these are somewhat serious omissions that make this book most suitable for those already knowledgeable about these conflicts. By the last third or so of the book, however, as Dominic Janes's argument came into focus, I became increasingly intrigued, and having finished, I am now ready to recommend it heartily.

Much of my initial disappointment with the book stemmed from the introduction, or my reading of it. Janes describes the different types of Anglicans (appropriately noting that there are no airtight definitions) and their theological and liturgical debates. He also informs the reader that "this is a textually informed study of the material culture of religion and of its interaction with the wider material culture of its time. . . . T his is a cultural history that seeks to understand the way in which people in the nineteenth century 'thought with sacred things' even whilst many of them sought to deny it" (14). This emphasis on the value of material things to understandings of religious culture—an approach I endorse—led me to expect a work along the lines of Colleen McDannell's The Christian Home in Victorian America (1986) and Material Christianity (1995), or Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (2006). Imagine my disappointment when I found that chapter 2, "Art and Sacrament," has less about the specific objects in, and design of, ritualist churches and more about the debates over these objects. Likewise, while chapter 3 purports to be a case study of the disruptions in the parish of St. Paul's Knightsbridge, and its chapel, St. Barnabas's, Pimlico, between 1840 and 1860, it focuses more on St. Barnabas's and the controversies there in the 1850s rather than on the equally significant controversies over materiality and idolatry that forced William James Earl Bennett to resign in 1850. Perhaps Janes would dismiss these concerns, for although he does discuss specific objects—and helpfully provides a number of illustrations of them—he is really not so much interested in the individual objects as he is in how the objects used and practices introduced by ritualists caused other Anglicans to fear that they were witnessing the spread of corruption in their church.

This focus on corruption, or pollution, is present from the introduction and it becomes stronger in chapters 4 and 5, which discuss, respectively, the rise of interest in comparative religion and the flourishing of the gothic in building style as well as literary form. Janes details how Catholic artifacts and practices—including the crucifix—were associated for Anglicans primarily with lewd carnality, which they often connected to primitive practices. He situates this argument in the larger academic discussion of pollution, beginning with the work of Mary Douglas. This fear-producing construct, he argues, actually served the interests of anti-Catholics, who could then position themselves as the guardians of purity, in both religion and daily life. Janes links the production of the gothic with the positioning of both Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics as degraded and dirty, a construction that allowed their opponents to both condemn and be titillated by them. In this chapter, the central contribution of this work—the connection of commerce to religion—becomes clear. Anti-Catholicism could be financially remunerative and thus, Janes argues, "the belief system that was becoming predominant was not any form of Christianity, but of capitalism" (160). This helps to explain why the religious debates declined: as religious objects and texts became part of the commercial marketplace, they lost their power to offend, because the only offence that could...