Simplicity and the Religious Past in Victorian Britain

Abstract

The two books under consideration here are complementary studies in the conceptualization of Christian history and its impact on nineteenth-century Britain. They both explore how particular segments of European Christendom perceived the impact of the Reformation and the resulting divisions within the Christian church. It is only mildly ironic, given the state of historical and literary studies, that the one cast in terms of “imagination,” “myth,” and “fantasy” is the history. In The Fantasy of Reunion, Mark D. Chapman explores “alternative ways of imagining” church history, from the dreamy uncertainty of the Tractarian endgame to “the triumph of the church of the present,” embodied in the Vatican Council of 1870 (7). The book that “sees” is the study of the texts of lesser novels of the nineteenth century, focusing on “Protestants celebrating the triumph of the Reformation [...] and Catholics arguing that failure lurked at the heart of the Reformation project from the beginning” (Victorian Reformations 203). Whether it was evangelical authors reading their nineteenth-century anxieties into the Protestant Reformation, or romantic churchmen fantasizing that the great schism might be overcome, the conclusion that the subjects of these studies drew was that the past was a weapon, or a tool to be used for higher spiritual ends.