Abstract
In the past scholars have generally regarded Victorian faith in crisis as primarily an intellectual experience. They have tended to point to works of dissolvent literature associated with enlightenment rationalism, the higher criticism of the Bible, or new theories of physical science as the chief causes for particular persons modifying or rejecting the faith of their childhoods. The nineteenth-century documents recording the loss-of-faith experience in no small measure themselves led to that conclusion. In their autobiographies Victorian doubters or unbelievers often recalled the impact of advanced works of science, biblical criticism, or history upon their religious thought and then recounted the manner in which those new ideas had led them to renounce major Christian doctrines, to stop attending church, to change denominations, to leave the Christian ministry, or to embrace atheism, agnosticism, or some other substitute for traditional Christianity. Many of the loss-of-faith novels, such as Robert Elsmere (1888) and The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), embodied this same scenario. Furthermore, the earliest histories that examined the rise of religiously dissolvent literature, such as A Critical History of Free Thought (1862) by A.A. Farrar, History of Rationalism (1867) by J.F. Hurst, and The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (1906) by A.W. Benn set forth this intellectualist analysis. Twentieth-century historians and literary scholars generally continued this mode of analysis. They rather uncritically assumed that intellectual factors or motivations alone must have moulded actions claimed by the Victorians to have been taken for intellectual reasons.
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Notes
James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (New York, 1979) 19–76.
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Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols (New York, 1966) 1: 7–66; P.T. Marsh, The Victorian Church in Decline (London, 1969); Kenneth Inglis, The Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1964); George Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (Cambridge, Mass., 1962) 147–205; J. Edwin Orr, The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain (London, 1949); Olive J. Brose, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England, 1828–1860 (Stanford, 1959); G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977); Henriques, Religious Toleration, 1–174; Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York, 1982) 3–47.
Geoffrey Best, ‘Evangelicalism and the Victorians’, in The Victorian Crisis of Faith, ed. Anthony Symondson (London, 1970) 37–56, and his ‘The Evangelicals and the Established Church in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Theological Studies, 10 (1959) 63–78; F.K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1961); Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness; The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London, 1976); Elizabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979).
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Bernard Lightman, Tope Huxley and the Church Agnostic: The Religion of Science’, Historical Papers (1983) 150–63, and his ‘Scientific Agnosticism and the New Natural Theology’, unpublished essay presented to the American Historical Association and the History of Science Society, Chicago, December 1984; Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1974) 8–37; Turner, ‘Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle’, Victorian Studies, 18 (1975) 325–34; Turner, ‘Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales: A Chapter in the Conflict of Religion and Science’, Journal of British Studies, 8 (1974) 45–65; Ieuan Ellis, Seven against Christ: A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’ (Leiden, 1980).
Jeffrey Paul von Arx, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Frank M. Turner, ‘The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension’, Isis, 69 (1978) 372–4.
Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and His Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
T.H. Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols (New York, 1894) 1: 54.
ibid., 9: 46–116.
The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall, vols 1–6 (1978–84), vols 11–31 (1961–77), 1 (Oxford, 1978) 66; V.A. Burd, The Ruskin Family Letters: The Correspondence of John James Ruskin, His Wife, and Their Son, John, 1801–1843, 2 vols (Ithaca, 1973) 2: 421–674; Jeffrey L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and His Tradition in Social Criticism (New York, 1984) 25–9.
George John Romanes, A Candid Examination of Theism, by Physicus (Boston, 1878) 113–14. For a fuller discussion of Romanes’s religious and intellectual development, see Turner, Between Science and Religion, 134–63.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907; New York, 1982) 208–24.
The Family Letters of Samuel Butler, 1841–1886, ed. Arnold Silver (Stanford, Calif., 1962) 59–90.
Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819–1859 (New Haven, 1985) 253–79; George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, NJ, 1971) 265–93.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1954–78) 1: 128.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York, 1968) 40.
For a discussion of the entire incident of Marian Evans’s rebellion against her father, see Haight, George Eliot, 32–67; The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, 1: 124–51; and John W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 3 vols (1885; New York, n.d.) 1: 61–106.
Frances Power Cobbe, The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, by Herself, 2 vols (Boston, Mass., 1894) 1: 75–6.
ibid., 1: 70–196. Cobbe’s account presents an interesting confirmation of the family dimension of loss of faith on the part of women in regard to her comments on Marian Evans. Cobbe had read the Cross biography of George Eliot, which did not include the important letter of February 1842 discussed in this chapter. In her autobiography Cobbe indicates her envy and implied puzzlement at Marian Evans’s apparently easy and entirely intellectual movement out of evangelicalism (1: 81). Such was the manner in which Cross’s narrative and selection of documents portrayed the event, and it was exactly that intellectualist portrayal that disturbed Cobbe when comparing her experience to Evans’s.
Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols (New York, 1900) 1: 240.
J.D. Hooker to C. Darwin, 6 October 1865, in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 2 vols (London, 1918) 2: 54.
Perry Butler, Gladstone: Church, State, and Tractarianism: A Study of His Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford, 1982); Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (New York, 1884) 1: 22–60; David Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning: The Parting of Friends (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); Evelyn Barish Greenberger, Arthur Hugh Clough: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
A.W. Levi, ‘The “Mental Crisis” of John Stuart Mill’, Psychoanalytic Review, 32 (1945) 86–101; Michael St. J. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954); Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975). It should also be noted that scholars have just as often criticised the role of the politically and philosophically radical Harriet Taylor in Mill’s intellectual life as they have criticised the role of devout wives in the intellectual lives of Victorian agnostics.
Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) 84.
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© 1990 Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman
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Turner, F.M. (1990). The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith That was Lost. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_2
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