Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula

By Christopher Herbert

Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813943411

Book preview

Evangelical Gothic

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Herbert F. Tucker, Editor

William R. McKelvy, Jill Rappoport, and Andrew M. Stauffer, Associate Editors

Evangelical Gothic

The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula

Christopher Herbert

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2019

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herbert, Christopher, author.

Title: Evangelical gothic : the English novel and the religious war on virtue from Wesley to Dracula / Christopher Herbert.

Other titles: English novel and the religious war on virtue from Wesley to Dracula.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Series: Victorian literature and culture series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019015595 (print) | LCCN 2019021464 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813943411 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813943404 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Evangelicalism in literature. | Religious literature, English—History and criticism. | Religion in literature. | Religion and literature—England—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PR830.E85 (ebook) | LCC PR830. E85 H47 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.809382—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015595

Cover art: From woodcut portrait of Rev. George Whitefield, M.A. (Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales); bat, Shutterstock/lynea

For Bernadette

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Religious Critique of Virtue: Wesley, Whitefield, Wilberforce

2. The Impossibility of the Evangelical Novel

3. Ghastly Apparitions: Specters of Piety in Scott and Hogg

4. The Curse of the Holy Law and Glimpses of Angels in Bleak House

5. The Ideology of Faith in the Early Career of George Eliot

Afterword: Fanatical Imagination in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

In completing the unexpectedly lengthy process of writing this book, I once again have the pleasure of expressing my gratitude for the generous support I have long received from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Most of all, I thank my departmental and extradepartmental colleagues at Northwestern for the friendship and intellectual stimulation that have sustained me for so long. I’m indebted particularly to my learned fellow Victorianists Jules Law and Chris Lane, brilliant scholars, uncomplaining friends, and models of academic citizenship. I hope that Wendy, Sarah and Sean, Laurie, Susannah, and Julia will be pleased to know that I’m thinking of them as I sign off. The office staff of the English Department, especially Nathan Mead and Dave Kuzel, have with unfailing patience helped me deal with many self-inflicted emergencies. George Levine will not agree with every facet of this book but must accept my thanks even so for hashing over Victorian Evangelicalism and other topics with me in the course of many a birding tramp over the years. My wife, Bernadette Fort, has borne with Evangelical Gothic for too long and will thank me at least as warmly for finishing it as I thank her for facilitating it in a multitude of practical and immaterial ways. I’ve been blessed with networks of friends on two continents who must also get their share of acknowledgment for the help they didn’t know they were giving: Curt and Linda, Martin and Jeanne, George and Ellen, Michel and France, among many others. Sophie and Stéphane occupy as they always will their unique places in my universe. My warm thanks to Eric Brandt of the University of Virginia Press for his unswerving faith in this book, which I hope will justify it, and to Chip Tucker, editor of the Victorian Literature and Culture series, for his friendship, tact, and kindness, and for his incomparable emails. My principal debt, however, is to those eloquent nineteenth-century writers whose works define the path of argument I have attempted to follow in this study: Frances Power Cobbe, Charles Dickens, Robert Fellowes, Ludwig Feuerbach, J. S. Mill, Francis W. Newman, Isaac Taylor, Frances Trollope, and other courageous investigators of the religious disorders of those times.

Evangelical Gothic incorporates revised excerpts from two previously published articles of mine, one from long ago: "Preachers and the Schemes of Nature in Adam Bede," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1975): 412–27; and Vampire Religion, Representations 79 (2002): 100–121. I am grateful to the University of California Press for permission to reprint these materials.

Evangelical Gothic

Introduction

In this book I focus attention upon the long-running conflict between Evangelicalism and the popular nineteenth-century British novel—a conflict that no student of the period could possibly fail to notice but that perhaps has yet to be fully assessed. Particularly in the early decades of the century, Victorian and pre-Victorian Evangelicals brand novel-reading a deadly addiction and the road to spiritual and worldly ruin. For their part, novelists—and not only well-recognized adversaries of Evangelicalism like Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, or Samuel Butler—so insistently hold Evangelicals up to ridicule and aversion as to rouse a suspicion that contesting the militant neo-Calvinism of the day formed a core function of this historical phase of the novelistic vocation. It would be a mistake to oversimplify the relation between Evangelicals and the novel, which was one not just of conflict but also of interdependency and indeed of powerful mutual fascination. Some moderate Evangelicals did not necessarily obey the strict interdict on the popular fiction of the times; nor are sympathetic portrayals of Evangelicals unknown in mainstream novels. (Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey [1847] offers a case in point.) Even so, I take the rooted antagonism between these two key cultural institutions of the time, Evangelicalism and the popular British novel, to represent a crux of nineteenth-century middle-class life, and I set forth in this book a partial interpretation of it. Departing to some extent from the usual tenor of scholarly work in this area, I make no presumption that Evangelicalism and its governing theology are any more entitled to deference or immunity from criticism than any other ideological formation. I do not, for example, take for granted that even the most vindictive portraits of Evangelicals in nineteenth-century novels—Frances Trollope’s Mr. Cartwright in The Vicar of Wrexhill, Dickens’s Rev. Chadband in Bleak House—can safely be dismissed out of hand by a cultural historian as caricatures and malicious misrepresentations, grossly exaggerated (Bradley 27). On the contrary: I propose the experiment of adopting something like the novelists’ perspective on their extended quarrel with Evangelicalism, if only for heuristic reasons and because it is arguably high time that someone attempted to do so.

In Evangelical Gothic, I contend, in a nutshell, that nineteenth-century novelists pilloried Evangelicalism because they saw it as the vehicle of what George Eliot in an 1855 essay called "the perverted moral judgment inherent in the dogmatic system which [the preacher Dr. Cumming, the immediate object of her satire] shares with all evangelical believers (Evangelical Teaching" 184).¹ More precisely, they saw it as the vehicle of that sweeping denial of the moral law itself known theologically as antinomianism, being against the law. Though they were accused of it and though it is a point to which we need to return, normal Evangelicals did not declare themselves exempt from the rules of morality (this would be antinomianism in its strict definition); nor did they, in spite of uttering a lot of language to this effect, deny the existence of moral virtue. They did deny as a fundamental point of belief that anyone outside their sect was capable of it, and they asserted that admiring moral excellence for its own sake, unlinked to their own model of piety, ran counter to religious principle. It was the foundational tenet of their theology that blameless moral character and devotion to good works were by themselves, considered in their own right, without religious value. Most generally speaking, they promoted an ideology in which moral excellence was made secondary to faith or merely a derivative of it—or even, in more extreme formulations, was portrayed as a menace to religion itself. Now and again they went so far as to assert that the commission of what normally would be regarded as odious crimes would be praiseworthy if performed for religious motives. To argue that the Evangelical embrace of such views was widely seen as morally objectionable in the nineteenth century and to seek to show, as I do in this book, why exactly many critics took this view is, as I said, to go against the grain of much previous scholarship. We will see in chapter 1 that a long—not an unbroken—line of historians and literary critics has described the Evangelical revival in Britain as an impulse of national moral renewal and has argued that its principles and its moral tone came on the strength of its specifically moral gospel to permeate every aspect of nineteenth-century life in Britain. Even atheists, agnostics, and nominal adversaries of Evangelicalism fell under its morally galvanizing influence, we have long been told. This presumption leaves to be explained the enmity displayed by so many novelists toward the resurgent puritanical Protestantism of the times; it leaves equally to be explained the appreciation for harshly negative portrayals of Evangelicalism that obviously was prevalent among these authors’ legions of middle-class readers. To put the point slightly differently: if Evangelicalism was indeed producing in nineteenth-century Britain an epochal moral and social improvement, why could Dickens, for example, not see it? In his valuable study Dickens and Charity, Norris Pope, an enthusiastic admirer of Evangelicalism, asks exactly this question, the import of which he fully acknowledges. The only reply he can muster is that Dickens’s excessive zeal in blaming evangelicals reflects his prejudices against them (105, 34, 35, 39).² Elisabeth Jay similarly indicts the prejudice which lay behind so many of the caricatures of Evangelicalism seen in the work of [Victorian novelists other than George Eliot] (242).³ Evangelical Gothic aims to offer a fuller account of novelists’ and other critics’ views of Evangelicalism grounded more securely in the cultural history of the times.

I begin by looking closely at sermons and homiletic writings of John Wesley and William Wilberforce, the principal formulators of the Evangelical creed as it came down to Victorian times; and I give attention, as well, to prominent nineteenth-century exponents of the Evangelical cause such as Jabez Bunting, C. H. Spurgeon, J. C. Ryle, and others. I take these authors to mean what they say in their public discourse, though of course that is something of an arbitrary assumption or even, it may be said, a tendentious one. When, for instance, they declare, as they regularly do, that even—or, rather, especially—their most morally upright fellow citizens, if they are not born again, are to be regarded as filthy reprobates hated by God, I presume for purposes of analysis that this is precisely the idea they mean to instill in their congregations, not a mere figure of speech that a cultural historian can safely gloss over. It is not too much to assert that the central strand of thought running through the writings of all these authors is the denial, often couched in violently denunciatory language, of the religious significance or value of morally good conduct. Such at all events is the premise and the main theme of the present study.

I pursue this theme in a sharply focused way, highlighting in chapter 1 some of its principal ramifications in Evangelical doctrine and ideology. Readers may object to this way of proceeding on the ground that it gives in the end a distorted, unfairly one-sided view of Evangelicalism, failing to bring forward palliative evidence of various kinds that might serve to rebut such a sweeping indictment as the one pronounced against it by George Eliot—that all its system of belief is preyed upon by "perverted moral judgment." To this objection I reply in advance that my goal in Evangelical Gothic is not to set forth a comprehensive, fully nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism (a task well beyond my capabilities even if I wanted to attempt it) or to reach a considered verdict on the practical moral influence exercised by Evangelicalism during the period of its ascendancy in Britain. Granted that the rise of the new religious spirit made the manners of many British people stricter and more austere, more serious, did it make these same people kinder, more self-sacrificing, more idealistic, more responsive to human need, or did it, as many alleged, make them more intolerant and bigoted, harder of heart, more morally impaired? No less a figure than Wilberforce’s collaborator Hannah More, we shall see, warned that Evangelical denunciations of the ethic of good works could lead to an atrophy of conscience among believers, and anti-Evangelicals claimed that such atrophy was visible and widespread in nineteenth-century Britain. It would be foolish nonetheless to draw hasty suppositions as to the moral character of nineteenth-century Evangelicals from evidence of antinomian thinking in Evangelical pulpit discourse or for that matter from hostile portrayals of Evangelicals in fictional writing, and it is no part of the project of this book to do so. Many Evangelicals were conspicuous in the nineteenth century for the strength of their moral commitments. Leading figures in the movement like More or Charles Simeon were ardent philanthropists who donated large portions of their incomes to charity, seeming to confirm the Evangelical tenet that the born again inevitably become inclined to Christian humanitarianism or holiness and exemplary citizenship, and many less eminent Evangelicals devoted themselves to philanthropic good works of various kinds. It seems likely that a unified theory of the Evangelical moral spirit would need to describe it at last as an essentially paradoxical or self-contradicting system in which the relentless assault from Evangelical pulpits on the exalting of moral virtue and the impulse to the performance of good works were in some manner inseparably linked together, with what could only have been destabilizing consequences in the lives of some or many Evangelicals. But pursuing any such hypothesis is a task for another day. I leave the paradox I have mentioned, if that is what it is, for the most part unannotated in what follows in order to focus attention in a more or less undivided way upon the strain of moral negation that ran decisively through Evangelical teaching and upon its reverberations in a range of texts of the times.

This book follows a method anchored firmly, for better or for worse, in literary study, taking the close reading and the intensive collating of literary texts—texts sometimes as long as a brief passage or a single problematic sentence—as my nearly exclusive sources of materials for analysis and for the practice of cultural history. Research that comes at its topic from such an angle is not necessarily a superior way of studying history as compared to a more traditional model of historiography that relies heavily on sociological, institutional, and demographic evidence, proceeds by averaging aggregates of data, and perhaps mistrusts interpretation. The very different method I adopt comes with a range of frailties which perhaps there is no need to dwell upon here. It has, though, the potential to bring a researcher into vivid and direct contact with historical structures of thinking that can go unrecognized otherwise, being only with difficulty inferred from other kinds of data and perhaps being veiled from sight by one’s own prevailing assumptions. A significant literary passage will necessarily be fraught with problems of legibility, and computing what might be called its historical specific gravity—the degree to which it embodies characteristic modes of thinking of its age—will never be self-evident. (Presenting such issues is in effect what defines it as specifically literary to begin with.) It constitutes even so a precious quantum of tangible historical information, or as close to such a thing as a historian of culture is perhaps ever likely to get. A scholar of a certain temperament and training looks avidly in any event for those textual moments when thought processes of another time reveal themselves in surprising configurations and may even seem to call for revisions of broader fields of knowledge.

I state the above scholarly credo in part to suggest why (apart from limitations of space and time) in my discussions of Wesley, Wilberforce, and other Evangelical propagandists in chapter 1, I do not attempt to unravel all the qualifications, theological and biblical quibbles, and outright contradictions with which their pronouncements on the negative religious value of moral virtue are hedged. Analysts of their writings have operated typically on the principle that a potentially scandalous formulation in, say, one sermon of Wesley’s—let us say a categorical assertion that one’s moral character is of no interest to God—is considered to be superseded or definitively nullified by a less heretical-sounding version of that formulation, or a seeming denial of it, in another, or for that matter by evidence drawn from the preacher’s personal biography showing that he didn’t necessarily practice or even believe the strict code he preached. The effect if not the intent of such an approach has been the safeguarding of the images of these influential religious leaders as champions of, in the words of one historian, a new and higher morality (Perkin 280). My own intellectual reflex is to be skeptical of scholars’ attempts to render innocuous and fully respectable, to rob of their startling impact, the kinds of potentially morally destructive formulations on which the present study focuses. The risk of blinding oneself to important insights appears to me too significant in these matters to take any other interpretive attitude.

Associated with the style of apologetic analysis described above has been the identification of the morally negativistic streak of the revival movement with Calvinism in the person of George Whitefield in order to cast him out as Wesley’s perverse opposite. Whitefield is made by this common trope into the perpetual scapegoat of the Evangelical moral revolution. Apart from significant questions of factual accuracy that may be raised against it, this story line makes it impossible to grasp why a series of nineteenth-century observers described the advent of Evangelicalism in Britain not just as a triumph of intellectually bankrupt theology but first and foremost as a national moral catastrophe. A scholar today need not embrace any such judgment, of course. (To do so would mean rewriting the history of the great revival.) Evangelical Gothic starts even so with the presumption that any account of Evangelical ideology that is unable to make convincing sense of this fact of contemporary reactions against it (other than by labeling hostility to Evangelicalism prejudice or perhaps by speaking vaguely of objections to its excessive seriousness) will never be entirely credible. The tradition of scholarship in which the Evangelical movement is at every moment identified with a supposed creed of moral improvement has at the same time made it next to impossible to grasp the radicalism that impelled the religious revival of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the first place and gave it its electrifying revolutionary appeal. At the very heart of that appeal, if the pulpit rhetoric of the movement is in any degree to be trusted, was the proposition, emblazoned in countless Evangelical sermons, that God awarded salvation wholly via unmerited grace and faith, and that striving for moral excellence had nothing whatever to do with it. For many auditors of the new gospel, this announcement must have seemed like an exhilarating emancipation from the whole entrenched structure of contemporary social and religious ideologies—while for others it seemed like (this was the term of abuse insistently used against Evangelicals at the time) fanaticism. We water down the shocking and galvanizing message of the revivalist preachers by minimizing or remaining oblivious to their concerted and, it turns out, notorious, widely denounced attack on the moral system of the nation. We do so, that is, at the risk of leaving historical knowledge watered down as well.

I focus in this book on documenting and privileging nineteenth-century anti-Evangelical critique not, then, in order to refute the very different views of the great revival that have come to prevail in historiography and literary criticism, but to add contradictory-seeming information to them and in this way, as I hope, to enrich historical understanding. I claim simply that much scholarship on nineteenth-century Evangelicalism has been inflected by an apologetic impulse—to speak frankly, at times an almost homiletic impulse—toward its subject and has failed as a result to attend fully to certain refractory phenomena of the times. Some of these refractory phenomena reside at the heart of Evangelical discourse itself. I attempt therefore in the first chapter to show by reference to the writings of Wesley, Whitefield, Wilberforce, and some of their followers that the strident anti-Evangelical polemics of the nineteenth century arose in response to principles that were integral to Evangelical thought and that set it fundamentally at odds with humanitarian ethics. Not to highlight these principles, I argue, is to render Evangelicalism itself essentially undefinable. I seek at the same time, in chapter 1 and throughout this book, to bring to light the very existence of a coherent nineteenth-century literature of anti-Evangelicalism, a richly diversified and influential body of writing scarcely even glimpsed in fragments and rarely granted even a semblance of possible legitimacy in scholarship on the religious revival. The chief unifying strand of this largely unrecognized dissident literature (I mean unrecognized as a literature), I seek to show, is its analysis of what it portrays as the religious reformers’ fanatical assault on the moral creed of their country.

Subsequent chapters focalize the study of the historical crisis represented by the rise of Evangelicalism by considering reflections of this crisis in the history of the English novel. I argue that novelists over many decades took Evangelicals as preferred objects of satirical abuse (hardly in itself a noteworthy discovery) and that often, in a characteristic stylistic figure, the satire becomes surrounded with specifically gothic tonalities and implications; and I try to make sense of these arguably important features of the fiction of the times. I argue further that the very constitution of the popular novel took form in part as a repudiation of the Evangelical teaching that seemed to many to be engulfing the British mind and nation. To tell made-up stories in a certain way and to foster readers’ taste for them was expressly or implicitly to counteract the influence of Evangelical preaching: so at least I contend, just as nineteenth-century Evangelicals themselves did. In chapter 2 I examine a dozen or so attempts in the first half of the century to reconcile the constitutional principles of popular realistic fiction with the newly ascendant fundamentalist gospel. The contradictions and the structural incoherences to which these attempts infallibly lead, I argue, signify the impossibility of the Evangelical novel. Chapter 3 takes as exempla of the militant fictional critique of Evangelicalism a pair of harshly anti-Evangelical texts from early in the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816) and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), two parallel fables of the overturning of moral law by fanatical religion. Chapter 4 is devoted to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), the supreme Victorian commentary on the dire religious condition of nineteenth-century Britain and, in particular, on what Dickens portrays as the moral nihilism injected by Evangelical theology, with apocalyptic results, into the social life of the times. Chapter 5 considers several early works of George Eliot as sustained but fatally self-contradicting attempts to produce that ultimately impossible anomaly, the Evangelical novel. Evangelical Gothic closes with an afterword devoted to Bram Stoker’s supernatural horror story Dracula (1897), which I take as a meditation on certain lingering strains of Evangelical imagination that all along were laced with the gothic delirium that erupts in this novel. In each of these chapters devoted to novels, I highlight specific religious issues by means of very close but not hermetically closed textual analysis. That is, I put the works I study into intimate and I hope reverberant dialogue with other contemporary writings (tracts, sermons, argumentative essays, nonfictional literary works) that they seem to echo or challenge or, equally importantly, that they may seem to make a point of not acknowledging. In particular, I collate these novels generously with citations from anti-Evangelical polemical writing of the times, both as a technique of focused reading and as a way of bringing to the foreground the latter body of writing. I operate from the presumption that a work of literature is constituted as an object of interpretation in part by the matrix of writing that it inhabits. This is a presumption and a practical method of scholarship that is always open to the charge of being employed tendentiously, especially in connection with the study of sensitive topics like religion. I seek not to be guilty of this charge, with what success my readers will judge.

What follows, then, is principally a (succinct and highly selective) literary history of responses to the rise of Evangelical thinking in nineteenth-century Britain. It cannot claim to be free of its author’s ethical prejudices, but I hope it can justifiably claim to pursue its argument with rigorous attention to evidence and to bring to light a facet of nineteenth-century cultural history that has never to my knowledge been closely traced heretofore.

1

The Religious Critique of Virtue

Wesley, Whitefield, Wilberforce

Do not suppose that honesty, justice, and whatever is called morality . . . is religion.

—John Wesley

It is axiomatic in nineteenth-century studies that the Victorian mentality, which is to say the culturally dominant Victorian middle-class mentality, was the long-term derivative of the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century under the leadership of the Methodists John and Charles Wesley and their Calvinist colleague George Whitefield. The religious enthusiasm aroused among the working classes by these famous preachers mutated in the 1790s, according to the standard historical model, into the Evangelical movement presided over by William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and their Clapham sect coadjutors, whose achievement it was to make the Methodist brand of puritanical piety not just acceptable but, for a time, pervasively influential in the middle and upper reaches of society.¹ This schema is at the heart of the founding text of sophisticated Victorian cultural studies, Walter E. Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957). Underlying the sectarian differences between Arnold, Newman, and the Evangelicals, says Houghton remarkably, there is . . . a common indebtedness to John Wesley and the religious movement he initiated in the eighteenth century (228). Scholars have sometimes questioned the accuracy of viewing Methodism and Evangelicalism as successive forms of a single historical development, but it is undeniable that the inseparability of the two phases of religious revival, despite important differences in their institutional manifestations and social characteristics, and despite the keenness of Evangelicals not to be confounded with their Methodist forebears, was taken for granted as an obvious fact by people at the time.² It was taken for granted, for instance, by the liberal churchman Mark Pattison, a percipient observer of religious politics. The great rekindling of the religious consciousness of the people, he states in Essays and Reviews (1860), "without the Established Church, became Methodism, and within its pale has obtained the name of the Evangelical movement" (388). There seems no good reason to doubt this formula.

Nor, at least initially, does there seem to be reason to question a set of intertwined truisms that follow from it. The first of these is the portrayal of the religious revival as an event of epochal scale and impact. Nineteenth-century observers and latter-day historians have often rehearsed the narrative of the transformation of post-Enlightenment Britain by a tidal wave of religious enthusiasm. As early as 1820, Robert Southey declared that John Wesley had enacted nothing less than [one of] the great moral and intellectual revolutions of history (Life 1:2). The religious revolution in England launched by Whitefield and his colleagues, wrote W. E. H. Lecky in 1860, was destined to exercise an influence far greater and more permanent than the orators and the philosophers who then attracted the admiration of the world (4, 2). The hundred years or so before the First World War . . . deserve to be called the Evangelical century, writes D. W. Bebbington (149). Many another writer has echoed this estimate.³

The second truism is an elaboration of the first. It asserts that the morally earnest, ascetic Evangelical personality type, insistently preoccupied with strict notions of duty and propriety, became an all-pervading ideal in the middle and upper classes of nineteenth-century Britain. Houghton so strongly emphasized the point in The Victorian Frame of Mind that I will call it the Houghton Doctrine. The creed of earnestness pushed its way beyond the church walls into the community at large, he writes. Its ideals penetrated into the homes—and consciences—of half-believers and outright agnostics (238). This thesis, an indispensable one for holistic Victorian studies, may in fact have taken its most extreme form well before Houghton in G. M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936). On one of its sides, Young wrote provocatively, Victorian history is the story of the English mind employing the energy imparted by Evangelical conviction to rid itself of the restraints which Evangelicalism had laid on the senses and the intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, art; on curiosity, on criticism, on science (5). On one of its own sides, Young’s statement sheds a welcome bright light on the potentially misleading consequences of taking too quickly for granted the supposed dominance of Evangelical earnestness in the nineteenth century and thus neglecting that portion of the collective and individual moral life of the time that was galvanized by resistance to what he terms the imponderable pressure of the Evangelical discipline (1). Yet Young evokes this resistance as always inescapably co-opted in advance by the Evangelical ethos against which it is ostensibly directed. To rebel against the oppressive regime of Evangelical earnestness laid upon the senses and the intellect is only, in Young’s formula, to demonstrate after all one’s indebtedness to the energizing power of Evangelical conviction. Anti-Evangelicalism turns out to have been another form of Evangelicalism all along. The dominion of the puritan conscience is evidently absolute in Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.⁴

The third governing proposition of the scholarly literature on Evangelicalism is the one particularly engaged in this study, and again, it flows from the other two. It is that the great Methodist/Evangelical revolution was fundamentally a moral revolution based, that is, on the dissemination in Britain of certain culturally transformative ideas of right and wrong—a claim that potentially affords more purchase for analysis than do conventional generalities about the rise of the creed of earnestness. Most striking in the literature, moreover, is the repeated assertion not only that the founders of the revival owed their appeal to a national desire for, in Harold Perkin’s phrase, a new and higher morality but that they achieved a momentous success in their campaign to renovate and lift up the moral character of the British people. One early observer to formulate this thesis in its full panegyric form was no less an authority than George Eliot herself. In her 1857 novella Janet’s Repentance (discussed in chapter 5), she declares that the Evangelical movement raised the nation out of its previously degraded and torpid condition; instituted, evidently for the first time in history, the idea of duty; taught English people that sin was to be avoided and resisted; and transformed a debased eighteenth-century England almost overnight into a refined, moral, and enlightened nation (Scenes 320, 353). This great myth—to call it a myth is not to disparage it—of the redemption of the sinful nation by the ministry of the Methodists and their heirs the more aristocratic Evangelicals is rehearsed again by John Richard Green in his 1874 Short History of the English People. Prior to the religious revival, the English poor were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive and their social betters were debauched and profligate, Green declares. At this unpropitious moment, religion carried to the hearts of the poor a fresh spirit of moral zeal, while it purified our literature and our manners. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education. In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone (707–8, 710). The echoing of Eliot’s paean to Evangelicalism by Green suggests the tremendous ideological importance vested by many patriotic Victorians in this narrative of the redemptive moral power of Calvinistic religion—not that its Calvinistic essence or the particulars of Calvinistic theology were ever given their full weight in proclamations like these. Indeed, the enveloping of the Calvinistic basis of Victorian spirituality in a cloud of nonrecognition came to be a key and persisting function of the historical study of the age, as we shall see.

Historians more recently have sometimes departed, sharply on occasion, from the laudatory view of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, as the works of John and Barbara Hammond, E. P. Thompson, Timothy