St. John and the Victorians by Michael Wheeler (review)

In this handsomely produced book, Michael Wheeler takes up the task of defining the Victorian age. For historians with an interest in religion, the definition of an age poses distinctive difficulties. Since the Enlightenment, many people have regarded their own age as a secular age. John Stuart Mill thought that the Victorian age was secular, acknowledging the importance of religious belief only to dismiss it as purely instrumental without any basis in genuine faith. T. H. Huxley acknowledged that Victorian religion was important but took comfort in the sure and certain knowledge that Christianity was doomed to fall victim to the hidden hand of secularization. Wheeler acknowledges the influence of Walter Edwards Houghton, who in his influential The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (1957) echoed Victorian secularists in defining the Victorian age as one dominated by doubt rather than faith.

Due to the hegemonic power of the master narrative of secularization, all recent ages are arranged on a path to a secular age. As time passes, the advent of the secular age shifts relentlessly toward the present, and ages formerly defined as secular become classified as religious. Wheeler solves the problem of religious chronology by reversing Houghton’s definition. Instead of an age of doubt, the Victorian age was an age of faith, “the most religious age in recent British history” (xiv). Like Timothy Larsen in A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011), Wheeler asserts the hegemony of Christian ideas in the Victorian age. Larsen documented the pervasiveness of the Bible, especially the King James version, in the Victorian age. Wheeler extends this argument with an analysis of exactly how one book of the Bible appealed to Victorian painters, hymnodists, poets, essayists, and biblical critics.

The Book of John is the most enigmatic of the four gospels, containing stories—not found in the other three—that are puzzling and lacking in coherence. Wheeler appears to accept the dating of the Book of John to the very late first century, but he has no interest in recent scholarship that attributes the enigmas of John to later rewritings by orthodox Christians who demoted the status of Jesus’s family, fragmented the characters of James and Mary, and attributed to the Apostles a kind of cluelessness about Jesus’s true mission.

The origins of these enigmas do not much matter to Wheeler because they did not matter for liberal Christians of the Victorian age, who discounted the importance of historical accuracy and reinterpreted the stories in John for their emotional truths. Accounts of Jesus turning water into wine, embracing the woman at the well, raising Lazarus from the dead, instructing John to care for his mother Mary after his death, and—most important of all—appearing as the risen Christ first to Mary Magdalene: all provided opportunities for liberal Victorian Christians to defend the Bible for its emotional truth. Some liberal Christians identified Mary Magdalene as the true founder of Christianity, a woman with a vision of the risen Christ that spread to others and created a new religion. Many Victorians of course believed in the literal accuracy of the Book of John, but they could unite with those who dismissed the importance of historical accuracy in stressing the moral and emotional power of these stories.

Wheeler is more interested in the established church than in other denominations, which leads him at some points to confuse Anglicanism with the churchgoing nation. The 1851 census of church attendance shocked many people when it showed that only half the nation attended church, and only half of church-goers were Anglican, but those figures are transformed by Wheeler into a nation that was fifty percent church-going Anglican, all reading from the Book of Common Prayer. In fact, roughly half of all church-goers attended a nonconformist chapel in 1851, and the social divide between Anglican and nonconformist was far more important than the divide between Roman...