Introduction: Religion and Prose

Abstract

Shortly after I began my graduate program and long before I could claim any academic specialty, Richard Levine edited a series of essays entitled The Victorian Experience (1982), which included separate volumes on novelists, poets, and prose writers. Being a student of high politics and much in need of cultural context, I remember how useful this was. Eight prose masters: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater – big names and a challenging corpus, but more or less well-defined. I occasionally dipped into the books on poets and novelists, but it was the prose writers who seemed to be about the kind of social change that informed legislative politics, which was of most interest to me. I was attracted, too, by Levine’s editorial approach, which encouraged recognition of the “contemporary relevance” of Victo-rian prose, and insisted on “a style as close as possible to the lucid and fluent of the best writers among us.”1 This was probably the first time I had thought seriously about the importance of style, as opposed to the function, of writing. Levine’s admonition also began to erode in my mind those artificial barriers between literary and academic work, and I learned to appreciate it when people like John Henry Newman and Wal-ter Bagehot did both at the same time. It also set me to thinking about style in its relation to prose, two words that then existed for me in dic-tionary definition, but now began to suggest themselves as larger, more amorphous, and potentially more powerful concepts.