A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians.

Stephenson, Mimosa

A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. By Timothy Larsen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-957009-6. Pp. 336. $55.00

In A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, Timothy Larsen continues his interest in historical religious trends, especially regarding women, attempting to set the record straight and fill in gaps left by those biographers who ignore the Christianity of their subjects. Larsen has previously published several books on Christianity in the Victorian period and in the early twentieth century, especially works related to evangelicals and non-conformists. His 1999 book Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England attempts to correct the view that nonconformists were bent on forcing everyone to worship and believe as they did. Larsen does this by studying Congregationalists and Baptists who involved themselves in the political arena between 1847 and 1867 and worked for "religious equality before the law;' not only for themselves but also for other groups such as Roman Catholics and Jews (1). His interests appear clearly in his 2002 Christabel Pankhurst: Fundmentalism and Feminism in Coalition, which tells about the militant English Suffragette in the first chapter and then attempts to set the record straight by describing her Christian ministry and authorship in Canada and the United States for the remainder of the book. Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (2004) also counters unfounded assumptions that Victorian Christians were either in a "golden age" or "in crisis and retreat, being routed by doubt, crumbling on all sides against intellectual, social, cultural, and political forces," arguing instead that the field was contested (1-2). Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006) treats prominent figures in the secular movement who overcame their doubt, worked diligently to bring people to Christ, and wrote vigorously to undo the damage they had previously done by their sermonizing to rid people of faith. Typical of Larsen's work, Crisis of Doubt serves as a corrective, as many contemporary scholars writing about Victorian culture have jumped to the conclusion that thinking Victorians only left their childhood faith, taking authors such as George Eliot as representative and ignoring the majority of people who retained their faith or regained it. In 2007 Larsen collaborated with Mark Husbands in editing Women, Ministry and the Gospel: Exploring New Paradigms, a superb collection of essays on the controversial issue of women in leadership roles in the church, in which the two warring sides called themselves the complementarians and the egalitarians. His own essay on historical evangelical practice points out that women were regularly used in leadership roles until after the Second World War and discusses the "strong social and cultural pressures to restrict the roles of women" during the 1950s when men returning from the war wanted to set up ideal domestic spheres (231).

In A People of One Book, Larsen again studies Victorian religious trends, demonstrating that Victorian writers and thinkers read the Bible, whether they considered themselves Christians or not, and argued for its inclusion in education even if they did not believe its doctrines. They wrote habitually using biblical phrasing, whether to prove the Bible or disprove it. This eminently informed study starts with Victorian assumptions that one must read, memorize, and study the Bible on a daily basis whether a staunch believer or an atheist. Larsen states in his introduction, "There are only two kinds of eminent Victorian authors--the kind who have had a whole book written about their use of Scripture and the kind who are ripe for such attention" (2). Larsen surveys biblical use by choosing a representative figure from each doctrinal position, pointing out that even atheists focus on the Bible to point out its inconsistencies. Structuring his book "to show that [the centrality of the Bible] holds true across the religious and sceptical traditions" (6), he aims to provide insight into "the varieties of spiritual communities and schools of thought used by historians of religion" (5). He deliberately chose to make half of the figures studied women and "to allow each tradition to stand on its own and speak for itself" (7).

Larsen chooses the eminent and learned E. B. (Edward Bouverie) Pusey, who argued for the accuracy and authority of the Bible but also saw the church fathers as "the interpretative guide" (16), to represent the Anglo-Catholics, explaining his importance in the Oxford Movement. Nicholas Wiseman, who spearheaded the Catholic revival in England and believed that "the Bible should be read with the church and that to thrust it into the hands of unsuitable recipients devoid of her guidance was to tempt them to become heretics or scoffers" (52), represents Roman Catholics. Chapter 3 takes Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant to argue that atheists read and studied the Bible, principally to show inconsistencies and the foolishness of the book. Catherine Booth of the Salvation Army and William Cooke represent the Methodists. Booth began lecturing in 1857 arguing for temperance, but was soon filling sermons with biblical passages, personally confronting drunken men, and reading Scripture passages to them to sober them up. Representing liberal Anglicans is Florence Nightingale, who wrote that she did not believe in the miracles of the Bible, hell, the Virgin birth, or the deity of Christ, but in fact that the Bible is not any more inspired than other books, but who read her Bible every day, prayed, and, when training nurses, included Bible study in the curriculum.

Larsen's treatment of Mary Carpenter, who stands in for the Unitarians, illustrates his attempt to correct errors in the historical record. Mary Carpenter, a social reformer working for the care and education of deprived and delinquent children, "spent her whole working life tirelessly advocating for a reforming rather than punitive approach to delinquents and criminals, and frequently fired off Rom. 12:19 in defence of this stance: 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord'" (163). Larsen argues that, though frequently mislabeled, Carpenter was in the mainstream of Unitarian thought in the nineteenth century. Her friend Frances Power Cobbe, a theist, tried to convert Mary to her view, and, when she could not, branded Mary's faith "as a stubborn clinging to an outmoded theological system. In truth, it is readily apparent that Carpenter was not being a conservative obscurantist but rather that she, and not Cobbe, was the true liberal of the two--graciously deflecting the annoying proselytizing of her friend" (140-41). According to Larsen, "biblical Unitarianism is persistently marginalized, ignored, underrepresented, or minimized because scholars have found it uninteresting, if not an embarrassment" (138).

Larsen attempts to correct the errors of Carpenter's biographers. Larsen insists that Jo Manton, in Mary Carpenter and the Children of the Streets (1976), is incorrect in claiming that Victorians who read the Bible objected to "the use of chloroform in childbirth as contrary to God's will," stating that this was an urban legend (Manton 28; Larsen 162); that Mary Carpenter secretly rather than openly dedicated her devotional book Morning and Evening Meditations, for Every Day in a Month (1845) to her father, Larsen suggesting that Manton never looked at the book (Manton 70; Larsen 154); and that Carpenter disliked quoting from the Bible, though Larsen shows her writings fraught with biblical quotations (Manton 212; Larsen 162). He also argues with Dennis G. Wigmore-Beddoes in Yesterday's Radicals: A Study of the Ajfinity Between Unitarianism and Broad Church Anglicanism in the Nineteenth Century (1971), who claims the liberal wing of the Unitarian Church, "which recognized supreme authority not in Scripture but in reason, conscience and the soul," as the dominant one (27), while Larsen attempts to prove, with Mary Carpenter's example, that "biblical Unitarianism was the exclusive tradition for over a third of the century and the dominant one for most of the nineteenth century" (Larsen 138). Throughout his study Larsen converses with other scholars and notes their biases.

Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker Larsen writes about, worked to reform the prison system in England by reading Scripture to the inmates. T. H. Huxley invented the term agnostic, insisting all of his life that he was not an atheist and that to "all their ways & works I have a peculiar abhorrence" (Huxley quoted in Larsen 196). To him "the correct, agnostic position, given the current level of evidence, was neither to affirm nor to deny the existence of God" (196). Still Huxley read the Bible and steadily wrote using biblical phrasing, even insisting "that the Bible must be included in the core curriculum" when public schooling became compulsory (210). The evangelical Anglicans are represented by Josephine Butler, who is best known for her advocacy of women's rights in the campaign to have the Contagious Diseases Acts repealed. Under these laws a woman could be stopped in the street and forcibly examined to see if she carried a venereal disease. Ironically, if she was found healthy, her name was put on a list of clean prostitutes. Fry thought the biblical Hagar represented the fallen woman, the woman that a man has sex with and then throws out (242). Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the most popular preacher in the world during his day, is the dissenter. His family was Congregationalist, but he became Baptist when studying the New Testament as he could not find any warrant for sprinkling in the New Testament. In his sermons, he read and commented on Scripture, and he and his household read the Bible every day. Though he collected and studied biblical commentaries, "Spurgeon gloried in the sole authority of the Bible in matters of faith and doctrine" (266).

Larsen concentrates on showing that Victorians of all persuasions read the Bible, knew it, and took for granted that their allusions would be recognized. He studies not how literature uses the Bible but how representatives of various religious persuasions used it. Literary studies detail biblical allusions in many writers of belles lettres, including Thomas Hardy (Biblical References in the Major Novels of Thomas Hardy by Raymond A. Duehlmeier, 1966). Likewise, Suzy Anger in Victorian Interpretation (2005) shows that from methods of biblical exegesis Victorians developed techniques of literary explication that have been passed down to the present. For the topic of the Bible in English literature see The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009), edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland, which has chapters on the Brownings, Tennyson, the Brontes, Ruskin, Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Hopkins. The prevalence of biblical allusion in their work attests to the accuracy of Larsen's thesis. Christian or not, Victorians in England knew and read the Bible. Larsen's careful study attempts to rectify errors that have crept into works on Victorian thought and is a welcome addition to the field of historical and religious cultural studies.

Mimosa Stephenson

University of Texas at Brownsville