Introduction

Abstract

Until the last two or three decades, historians tended to see the ‘crisis of faith’ in Victorian England in relatively simple terms. They regarded it as an intellectual and emotional upheaval, stemming from challenges to the historicity of the Bible, discoveries in geology and biology, and concerns about morality, or rather, the apparent lack of it, in nature. Science and religion, more precisely science and theology, were deemed to be ‘in conflict’, the battle lines clearly drawn, and for some time, the Victorian champions of science and unbelief seemed to carry the day with the historians.