The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement began as a conservative reaction to the reforming measures of the 1820s and 1830s and in particular to the Whig government’s passing of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1832. For the Tractarians, the cumulative effect of such legislation was that the authority of the Church was being seriously compromised by interference from the secular government, which could now include those who were not necessarily Anglicans or even Christians. While it was these overtly political concerns that moved John Keble to preach his ‘Assize Sermon’ which has. traditionally been seen as marking the beginning of the movement in July 1833, the Oxford Movement was to develop into a spiritual revival whose concerns went far beyond politics. In rejecting the established relationship between Church and state the Tractarians came to emphasize the Church’s innate spiritual autonomy and appealed increasingly to the authority of tradition as reflected in the writings of the church fathers of the third and fourth centuries. In doing so their emphasis on certain beliefs and practices of the primitive Church, such as baptismal regeneration, the real presence and the apostolic succession, was seen as betraying sympathy for Roman Catholicism and disloyalty towards the Church of England.

In the 1830s a small group of Anglican clerics, mainly resident tutors and fellows of Oxford University, initiated a campaign for the revitalization of their Church, which they perceived to be threatened by secular forces. The inspiration for this was derived from the pre-Reformation roots of Anglicanism, specifically from a study of the fathers of the Early Church, supplemented by the post-Reformation Caroline divines of the seventeenth century. One of the main vehicles for propagating these ideas was the series known as the Tracts for the Times, which ran to ninety tides issued between 1833 and 1841, and from which this growing Oxford Movement derived its more popular title of’Tractarian’.

Discussing the conflict Gerard Manley Hopkins perceived between his two vocations of priest and poet, W. H. Gardner distinguished between ‘character … the stamp imposed upon the individual by tradition and moral training; which may also be desired and self-imposed, … maintained by an effort of the will’ and ‘personality … the free or comparatively untrammeled psychic individuality, that complex of native faculties … which find their expression in art’. Such a dichotomy can also be seen in a less familiar figure, Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–85), a novelist who for decades sought in vain to reconcile the demands of her religious aspirations with her drive for self-expression.

‘It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale.’ I This line from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit encapsulates the common view that the nineteenth-century Sabbath was a tedious, gloomy and tiresome institution that embodied the full weight of Victorian Britain’s old-fashioned, sombre and somewhat hypocritical evangelical piety. Taking such contemporary portrayals at face value, historian John Wigley, whose thirty-year-old monograph remains the only full treatment of the subject, depicted the Victorian Sabbath as ‘a day which had a funereal character, notorious for its symbols – the hushed voice, the half-drawn blind and the best clothes’. Sabbatarianism, he argued, ‘appeared to consist of a perverse reluctance to enjoy oneself on Sundays and a determination to stop other people enjoying themselves too’.

[The Pastor spoke.] The whole audience listened to this brief but emphatic address as if spell-bound. Curiosity had moved them to listen; amazement at the supernatural calmness of the speaker held them attentive; and as he uttered the last words and turned his eyes from the human throng beneath him, to the clear, blue vault of heaven, his countenance became so radiant with hope and joy, so indicative of a soul already severed from the things of time, and sharing - ere yet stripped of its clay tabernacle - in ‘the blessedness of the just made perfect,’ that every eye became riveted upon it, with the rapture of admiring awe; and it was the breathless silence of the spectators which at length roused Jacomel from the oblivion to which alone all were indebted for the unwonted mercy of such a pause.

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

In September 1844 Charles Dickens had a vivid dream while he was staying at the Villa Peschiere in Genoa. He dreamed that he was ‘in an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness’ and he was visited by a spirit which wore blue drapery, ‘as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael’, but which bore no resemblance to anyone he had known. He recognized a voice, however, and concluded that this was the spirit of his much loved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. The seventeen-year-old Mary had died in his arms on 7 May 1837, six years before she conjured herself up in Dickens’s dream. At the time he had been distraught. For months after her death he had dreamed of her ‘sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness’. Those dreams had long ceased, but the new manifestation of Mary in Genoa was evidently of a different kind. He beheld this visionary Mary ‘in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it “Dear.”’ He then entered into a dialogue with the spirit. ‘Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!’, he pleaded.’Form a wish’, the spirit replied. Dickens then asked that Mary’s mother might be released from ‘great distresses’ and he was told that this would be so. He then posed a new question: ‘What is the True religion?’ The spirit seems to have hesitated, and Dickens blurted out:’Good God … You think, as I do that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? – or’ (the ghost still hesitated) ‘perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? Perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?’ ‘“For you,” said the spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; “For you, it is the best!”’ Dickens then woke up, with tears running down his cheeks.

“Dizzy’s attachment to moderate Oxfordism is something like Bonaparte’s to moderate Mahomedanism’, observed George Smythe in 1842. ‘Could I only satisfy myself, wrote his fellow Young Englander, Lord John Manners, a year later, ‘that d’Israeli believed all that he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?’ As a politician, Disraeli was and remains a man of mystery, an identity which he took some care to cultivate. His protean career in public life found a counterpart in his literary works, in which likewise over the years he appeared to assume a range of different positions. His religious allegiance is similarly elusive. He had attended a Unitarian school, and his theological position, with little sense of the divinity of Jesus, reflected that branch of Christianity most akin to Judaism. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the rituals of Roman Catholicism and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and it was perhaps natural that he should find his spiritual home in the Church of England, that house of many mansions which to his mind reflected the rich diversity of national life. How far there was an underlying principle in Disraeli’s life and art is a question that has intrigued numerous historians, and it will be the chief concern also of this essay in respect of two key issues: religion and national identity.

Attitudes change. They broaden as well as contract. They reflect the permeation of dissenting ideas in apparently settled communities and the assimilation of conventionally accepted ideas by dissenters. The process is transformative. Literature is a prime medium for the transmission of ideas. It shapes attitudes. What, then, of the role of popular literature, especially fiction, in shaping the attitudes, especially the religious attitudes, of a rapidly growing, clearly intelligent and significandy female reading public? This paper considers an Anglican writer, formed in part by Dissent, whose work particularly appealed to Nonconformists exercising their citizenship in a complex but now promisingly open society. This Broad Churchwoman enlarged the minds of her readers in liberal directions without diminishing their Dissenting formation. She is now quite forgotten, but her apparently modest achievement was in fact considerable.

Writing pseudonymously in the New Age in February 1909, Arnold Bennett, acerbic chronicler of Edwardian chapel culture, deplored the lack of proper bookshops in English provincial towns. A substantial manufacturing community, he claimed, might be served only by a stationers shop, offering ‘Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn books, Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example, except the brothers Hocking.’ Bennett’s lament was an unintended compliment to the ubiquity of the novels of Silas and Joseph Hocking, brothers whose literary careers spanned more than half a century, generating almost two hundred novels and innumerable serials and short stories. Silas Hocking (1850–1935), whose first book was published in 1878 and last in 1934, has been described as the most popular novelist of the late nineteenth century. By 1900 his sales already exceeded one million volumes. The career of Joseph Hocking (1860–1937) was slightly shorter, stretching from 1887 to 1936, but his output was equally impressive. The Hockings’ works have attracted interest principally among scholars of Cornish life and culture. It will be argued here, however, that they have significance for the history of late Victorian and Edwardian Nonconformity, both reflecting and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and prejudices of their large and appreciative readership.

In 1850 the Roman Catholic hierarchy was re-established in England. Although this caused widespread resentment, one consequence was, as its critics had feared, that the pope once again became a part of English social and religious life. This change was reflected in English creative writing during the next hundred years. Here and throughout this essay I use the term English rather than British advisedly, because different conditions obtained in other parts of the United Kingdom. This essay will examine how five writers with widely different viewpoints represented the pope, and will consider how their work may reflect attitudes to the papacy among the reading public.

The successful and highly authoritative Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850 to assert Catholic values in the face of ‘the Revolution’, an allegedly nefarious process that had begun with the Revolution of 1789 and was seen by the Jesuit writers as continuing with the 1848 revolution in Italy and the ongoing Risorgimento movement; this called the temporal power of the papacy into question and also entailed wider issues of secularization. For these writers, the periodical press was a dangerous new force and the only way to combat it effectively was on its own ground. The serial novels which ran in the fortnightly journal from 1850 until 1927 were evidendy written in the belief that the devil should not be left with all the most gripping yarns. The dangers to morality posed by romantic novels were constantly emphasized in the journal’s own fiction. The dominant tone of this fiction was polemical. The villains represented the forces of Jacobinism, the secret societies of the early Risorgimento, and Freemasonry. Conspiracy was a constant theme. Indeed, the leitmotifs of anti-Jesuit polemic depicting the Society of Jesus as an occult conspiratorial organization were in turn deployed by the Jesuit writers against Freemasonry. In the present study, however, the emphasis will be primarily on what the works of Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), the pioneer Jesuit novelist between 1850 and 1861, had to say about Christian life and values. This, in fact, has most relevance to the genre of the romantic novel.

‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.

‘Take my camel, dear’, said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Thus begins, with one of the most memorable opening sentences in twentieth-century Anglophone fiction, Dame Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond. It is now largely seen as a somewhat quirky ‘niche novel’ for Anglican aunts or a perfect present for the diminishing number of ordinands with historical and literary interests. In fact, Trebizond was a transatlantic literary sensation, a best-seller as well as a critical success. It won Macaulay the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was no doubt partly responsible for her being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.

It was ever the lot of the archbishops of Canterbury to be involved in seemingly incongruous affairs. The position of the archbishop at the heart of the Establishment engendered requests to be patron, advocate or opponent of almost every conceivable development in national life. One such entanglement was his role as unofficial advisor to the Lord Chamberlain in the matter of the licensing of stage plays.

‘Now firmly established as a modernist novelist’, D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) remains a controversial writer, especially for the ambiguity of his attitudes to fascism and feminism. This essay considers the role played by the then forty-one-year-old bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, in offering evidence for the defence in the Old Bailey trial in 1960 which acquitted Penguin Books of obscenity in publishing Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In taking part in the trial Robinson acquired notoriety (or credit). His public admiration for Lawrence’s writing placed him at odds with the two postwar archbishops, Geoffrey Fisher (Canterbury) and Cyril Garbett (York). In the words of Mark Roodhouse in a pioneering article, ‘for ecclesiastical historians the Lady Chatterley trial not only reveals changing social attitudes but also growing division within the Church of England between “two Christianities” over the way to respond to these changes’. Robinson did not receive further advancement in the Church.

The monastic day continued at its steady, unhurried, unvarying pace. Vespers was sung in church, followed by a light supper of bread and fruit, washed down with a glass of ale.

Kenelm and Elaf were absent from the table, however. Hungry by the time of Vespers, they were famished when the bell for Compline summoned the monks to the last service of the day. As they shuffled off to the dormitory with the other novices, they were feeling the pangs with great intensity.

Escaping the dormitory to look for something to eat as soon as their peers were asleep, the novices are disturbed and take refuge in the bell tower. There Elaf falls across an obstruction and lets out a yell of sheer terror: he is lying across the stiff, stinking body of a man. ‘The missing Brother Nicholas had at last been found’.

No one studying the impact of Evangelicalism’s most successful cultural products could doubt their mass-market appeal both within and beyond the ‘conservative revolution’ of contemporary America. With concerns to fashion the spirituality of their readers, the Left Behind novels (1995–2007) represent the ‘first outlines of a fully commercialised, fully mediatised Christian blockbuster culture’. The series dramatizes the end-time expectations of a popular evangelical system of eschatological thinking, known as dispensational pre-millennialism. This system maintains that Christ could return imminently to ‘rapture’ true believers to heaven; that this rapture will be followed by a catastrophic seven-year period known as the ‘Great Tribulation’, in which the Antichrist will rise to power to persecute those who, despite being ‘left behind’, have converted to evangelical faith; and that the tribulation will end with the ‘glorious appearing’ of Christ, the last judgement and the inauguration of a thousand-year reign of peace known as the millennium. Despite the complexity of its theology, the series has sold over sixty-five million copies since the publication of their eponymous debut novel in 1995, and has been identified as the best-selling fiction series in American literary history. After 1998, successive instalments in the series topped the New York Times best-seller lists. The seventh novel in the series, The Indwelling (2000), topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.