The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880.

King, Joshua

The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880. By William R. McKelvy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8139-2571-4. Pp. 336. $45.00 cloth.

In The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, William R. McKelvy unsettles orthodoxies about the relationship of religion and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, chief of which is the doctrine that "knock-kneed religion, circa 1800, yields the way to hale and hearty literature" (28). From Thomas Carlyle to Terry Eagleton, a long line of critics has claimed that a literary cult arose in England only as the sea of faith withdrew from the island's shores. McKelvy, however, has done the historical research to offer a countering and groundbreaking conclusion. Rather than growing up in a space vacated by religion, the sacred authority of literature was strengthened by the resilient activity of priests and clerical figures, and consolidated by an equally persistent political movement for religious liberty.

The English Cult of Literature therefore strengthens a burgeoning scholarly argument for the decisive role of religion in nineteenth-century culture. Yet McKelvy's study stands out from existing contributions, especially two recent titles, Michael Wheeler's The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006) and Mark Knight and Emma Masons Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006). Unlike these works, McKelvy's book is not a history of religious controversy that draws on literary evidence (Wheeler) or a survey of religious beliefs and practices as they affect imaginative literature (Knight and Mason). His book is distinguished by the way it situates familiar (e.g., George Eliot's Daniel Deronda [1876]) and more obscure works (e.g., Robert Lowth's Isaiah: A New Translation [1778]) within four developing contexts: religious history, as indicated by clerical culture and religious debate; literary history, as indicated by generic, aesthetic, philological, and historiographic developments; reading / book history, as indicated by conditions of publication and reception; and political history, as indicated by legislation.

Densely argued and fluidly written, but often digressive, the central chapters of McKelvy's revisionary history are best approached after having digested his framing argument in the introductory first chapter, "Orthodox Narratives of Literary Sacralization." Here he explains his departure from previous scholarship, which has variously coordinated the waxing of literary authority with the waning of religion. By contrast, in this chapter McKelvy links literatures sacralization with the emergence "of a reading nation" enabled by a "program for religious liberty" (32). Building especially on the work of William St. Clair (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [2004]), McKelvy argues that "the nineteenth century begins in the 1770s" with the 1774 House of Lords ruling on copyright law (16). The ruling stimulated an explosion in reading that culminated in a truly national body of readers by the 1880s, and it made economically feasible the anthologies that first presented English literature as a tradition, an inheritance whose sacred value continued to rise in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, reading "English literature" in "elementary schools" was a rite of initiation into a British society in which literacy was a requirement for functional citizenship (34). McKelvy's subtitle, Devoted Readers, 1774-1880, is meant to capture this "new nineteenth century" (35), one defined by the evolution of a nation of devoted readers.

McKelvy demonstrates that this sacralized reading nation came about because of movements for freedom of worship. Only when "the state no longer recognized religious heresies;' when it ceased to require adherence to Anglican doctrine for full access to civic life and education, did state-administered primary education become a reality and English literature a required object of national instruction (34). The English Cult of Literature, then, proposes a new definition of "secularization" in the long nineteenth century. "It is a political and legal process that leads to the state relinquishing opinions on theological subjects" (28), and it provides the "political context in which the individual reader, and the evolving reading of the nation" were "sacralized" (35). On this count, McKelvy's book furthers in a local context the widespread scholarly revaluation of secularization, a trend most recently and powerfully represented by Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007).

One of McKelvy's main points in his revisionary narrative is that literature achieved its sacred vocation with the aid of ecclesiastical figures. He takes up this concern in his second chapter, "Zealous Protestants in Literature," where he highlights three authors long recognized for their roles in inventing our modern concept of "English Literature" (37): the innovator of a new, historical and aesthetic approach to the Old Testament, Robert Lowth, the pioneering author of English literary history, Thomas Warton; and the architect of the ballad revival, Thomas Percy. Strangely, literary critics and historians have overlooked or apologized for an obvious shared trait of these three founders of English literature: their clerical profession. McKelvy corrects this trend by tracking the literary influence of these ecclesiastic authors and their professional associates, revealing the eighteenth-century clergy as mediators of "a cultural ideal poised between tradition and innovation" (89), and enablers of the "competition and exchange between the literary and religious" in the nineteenth century (56).

The third chapter takes up an early and profound admirer of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1865), Sir Walter Scott, and the sacred and profane strains of his early poetry. Through a probing reading of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), McKelvy demonstrates that Scott won the hearts of his reading public and the continued admiration of secularists and Tractarians alike by joining "repeated references to poetry's sacred task" (94) with a critical historical perspective, blasphemous parody, and frank acknowledgement of the materialistic terms on which he addressed his readers. In chapter 4, one of Scott's ardent later admirers, the priest and poet John Keble, appears next to the historian, Whig politician, and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay. McKelvy helps us see these authors' respective blockbusters, The Christian Year (1827) and The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), as sophisticated and opposed responses to a dispute stimulated (in England) by Anglican clerics over the historical criticism of ancient and biblical texts. Keble's and Macaulay's pseudo-liturgical volumes of poetry show that this debate was directly connected to speculations about the increasing freedom of "the individual reader" (131) and the threatened "theological foundations of the Anglican state" (176). In the next chapter, McKelvy assesses W. E. Gladstone's off-dismissed, but prolific, scholarship on Homer and delves into the Prime Minister's detailed, lifelong commentary upon his reading in his diaries. Closely attending to bibliographic details, biography, intellectual history, and parliamentary debate, McKelvy argues that "Gladstone's Homeric work highlights an uncertain distinction between literature and revelation that defines the religiously plural polity more or less in place by the end of his career" a functionally agnostic state that Gladstone helped create (220). In chapter 6, McKelvy resumes his focus on the proliferation of clerical figures that attended the rise of the cult of literature, following the "pseudo-ecclesiastical career of George Eliot" up to her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) (220). In this most sophisticated instance of Eliot's fictions about clerical figures and callings, McKelvy suggests, we can see Eliot questioning "the century's cult of culture" and finding an answer to this "morally decadent order" in "varieties of priestcraft" and a "rudimentary yet redeeming" form of "reading" (231).

McKelvy circles back to his larger argument about literary sacralization and political secularization in his conclusion, turning to the late 1870s when the agenda for religious liberty was nearing total victory and the dream of a reading nation had become a reality. He demonstrates the variety and intensity of priestly contributions to print culture made possible by the state's functional agnosticism, and argues that "the creation of a reading nation ... was widely perceived to be a religious event" (255). As evidence for this perception, he points to London's Caxton Exhibition of 1877, which celebrated the nation's emergence as a host of readers and printing's 400th anniversary in England. Prime Minister Gladstone opened the ceremonies by presenting a Bible, one of one hundred miraculously produced that morning by Oxford University Press. McKelvy draws home the significance of this "ritual in the age's religion of the book" (265) with a well-chosen quotation from an exhibition organizer: "The secular history of the HOLY SCRIPTURES is the sacred history of PRINTING" (265).

For all my admiration of McKelvy's study, I must admit a few disappointments. The first is the least serious, in my view, but more systematically-minded readers might find it cause for concern: McKelvy deploys "religion" and "religious" with exceptional, if irksome, flexibility. For example, McKevly applies "religious" to phenomena as diverse as John Keble's lyric accompaniment to the Prayer Book, The Christian Year (1827), and the "Positivist" worship services in the "Church of Humanity" at London's Chapel Street in the 1870s (256). This has the admirable result of keeping out of his book reductive attempts at a comprehensive definition of "religion" Yet this accommodating approach has its shortcomings. When, for instance, McKelvy discusses the "cult" that grew up around George Eliot and her writings, and which included "Sunday services" at her home, known as "The Priory" he somewhat arbitrarily concludes that this phenomenon reveals the novelist's "literary" authority (256). If the positivists at Chapel Street hold a "religious" gathering, why should we withhold this adjective from meetings of the literary enthusiasts at Eliot's Priory, or from the authority she exercised over them?

My second and major disappointment has to do with McKelvy's treatment of reading. From his subtitle (Devoted Readers) to his statements of intent ("my primary goal is ... to highlight ... the transformation Of reading in a culture of print" [7]), McKelvy advertises a history of reading that he never provides. In actual practice, he is concerned with authors' constructions of reading and with reconstructing their debates about how to interpret texts. He gives only passing attention to devoted readers' responses to his authors, rarely discusses particular reading constituencies, and, as far as I have discerned, never analyzes audience-specific practices and habits of reading. These omissions sabotage the full force of McKelvy's hard-won thesis about the sacralization of "the individual reader, and the evolving reading of the nation" (35).

The virtue of McKelvy's book is that such criticisms only point out the need to develop further its provocative new story about the religious vocation of literature. The English Cult of Literature may not do enough to recognize the readers in its subtitle, but it has done more than enough to inspire a devoted readership to continue the narrative it leaves unfinished. It should be on the shelf and in the mind of any serious scholar of nineteenth-century religion, literature, and culture.

Joshua King

Baylor University