Abstract
Though the extent of the so-called Victorian “crisis of faith” is still in dispute, it was, nevertheless, a phenomenon rooted in the previous century. Confronted with unsettling discoveries in science, new academic approaches to scripture, and a church bitterly divided over how best to worship, many of England’s most influential thinkers lost their faith in traditional Christianity. This chapter explores a topical approach to teaching the literature produced by the Victorian faith conflict. It surveys a diverse group of texts: novels by Trollope and Hardy; poems by Arnold, Tennyson, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Rossetti; autobiographies by Newman, Oliphant, Gosse and others; works of science by Darwin, Huxley, Lyell and others; works of theology by Jowett, Colenso, and Strauss; along with contemporary hymns and paintings; and a 1992 novel—Graham Swift’s Ever After—that looks back on the faith conflicts of the age. The chapter also reflects on the politics of teaching matters of faith in today’s academic climate.
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Claxton, M. (2017). Faith and Doubt in the Nineteenth Century. In: Cadwallader, J., Mazzeno, L. (eds) Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_9
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