Theology and the Victorian Novel, by J Russell Perkin; pp. x + 273. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009,  $95.00.

This is a broadly focussed study of the Victorian novel’s relationship to theological issues,  ranging from Thackeray to Hardy. Many chapters concentrate on a single novel, with Charlotte Brontë being represented by Shirley (1847), Thackeray by Vanity Fair (1847-48), and Trollope by the little-known novel The Bertrams (1859);  other chapters contrast pairs of novels, in Eliot’s case Adam Bede (1859) and Daniel Deronda (1874-76) and in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Some less canonical figures also appear: a chapter is devoted to The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), a best-selling novel by Tractarian novelist Charlotte M Yonge, and the concluding chapter compares Mary Augusta Ward’s novel of religious doubt Robert Elsmere (1888) with Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), considered as an example of “the popular Victorian genre of the early church novel” (196).

Although Perkin is critical of what he sees as the preoccupation of recent commentary on Victorian religion with “elements that prefigure the concerns of postmodernity” (8), and states his own aim as being “to engage as far as possible with Victorian religious experience and literature on their own terms” (8), in practice the organization of this study precludes much detailed engagement with the historical contexts  of Victorian religion. Despite aligning his position with “the radical orthodoxy movement” (26), Perkin adopts a largely Arnoldian perspective which often seems to privilege a vaguely defined spirituality over specific religious doctrine, although he is alert to some of the contradictions created in the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal Christianity by its unreflecting embrace of modernity, drawing attention to the ethnocentric characterization of western Christianity by figures such as Arnold (105), and to the moral intolerance of the Comtean religion of humanity embraced by Eliot and Ward (201) and embodied in Hardy’s contrast between the moral responses to sexuality of Angel Clare and his Evangelical parents (181).

Perkin’s combination of an Arnoldian approach with a critique of religious liberalism works best in the final chapter, where he makes a convincing case for Marius the Epicurean as “a version of Christianity that is possible for postmodernity” (223), contrasting, in an argument that is indebted to Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Pater’s reappropriation of Catholic sacramentalism as an aesthetic of eroticized male friendship  with Ward’s “late-Victorian liberal earnestness” (208). Perkin is much less comfortable with the more specific doctrinal commitments of a writer such as Charlotte M Yonge, an uneasiness expressed in his conclusion that although The Heir of Redclyffe is “an important Christian novel,” perhaps “its appeal is much greater to those who share Yonge’s beliefs” (102), which ignores the fact that Yonge’s work was popular with Victorian readers holding a wide variety of religious views. The suggestion of moral rigidity implied by Perkin’s comment that “there is always the sense with Yonge that she is above all a lady” (102) is puzzling, given that he situates Yonge’s writing in the context of the Tractarian poetics of  Keble’s lectures on poetry, exactly the same context  which in his account enables the Paterian aesthetic reinterpretation of orthodoxy. The  presence of characters in Yonge’s fiction who fit the late nineteenth-century category of “sexual inversion” suggests that a reading which was prepared to probe a little more between the lines of Yonge’s necessarily somewhat reticent writing might also be able to  make a case for her viewpoint as a “radically orthodox” one.

This tendency to characterize Yonge as a merely dogmatic writer highlights a limitation in the book’s critical methodology, which brackets off issues defined, from Perkin’s Arnoldian perspectve, as “theological” from other concerns in Victorian culture which Victorians themselves would have thought relevant to discussion of religion. Although Perkin acknowledges the kinship of the Tractarian novel to other writings on the “condition of England” (59), and his reading of Shirley interprets the novel as a critique of the Oxford Movement’s  aim of a “revived feudalism” (73), this political and social context is absent from his assessment of Yonge.  Despite the presence of mesmeric kinds of experience in both The Heir of Redclyffe and Shirley, there is no mention of mesmerism in the book, or of the related phenomenon of spiritualism, surely issues of great importance for the Victorian religious world. In Perkin’s interpretations, writers without strongly marked religious positions, such as Thackeray, Brontë, Trollope and even Pater, all tend to be described as “broad church,” and some historical discussion of what this term implied at different points in the nineteenth century would have been helpful. The persuasive discussion of Vanity Fair, for example, as a text characterized by a deliberate religious reticence rather than by moral relativism, would have benefited from some contextualization of the strategy of reticence in Victorian religious discourse, whilst the religious stance represented by the New Brotherhood in Robert Elsmere would have been illuminated by more discussion of its Carlylean affiliations, and by some attention to its context in the late Victorian settlement movement.

The overly compartmentalized nature of the chapters becomes particularly evident in the chapter on Hardy, where a perceptive argument about Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure as novels “organized by a principle of negative typology” (187) in which “the mystical halo of natural supernaturalism” (175) is reduced to material causes, seems to beg some discussion of poems such as “Neutral Tones,” or the many Hardy poems which mention ghosts, to which this Weberian theme of the disenchantment of the world is highly relevant. Whilst this study is accessibly written, and contains many locally convincing interpretations, a more contextualized approach to Victorian theology would have better addressed the study’s aim of locating  religious issues at the heart of Victorian culture.

Contributor’s Note:

Biographical notice

Dr Gavin Budge is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. Recent publications include a monograph, Charlotte M Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Lang 2007), and an edited collection of essays, Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense (Bucknell University Press 2007). He is currently working on a study of “Romanticism, Medicine and the Supernatural, 1780-1852” to be published by Palgrave.