Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture

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Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture Edited by

Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-15

Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture

10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan



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Edited by

Andrew Bradstock Sean Gill Anne Hogan and

Sue Morgan



Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–23561–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture / edited by Andrew Bradstock ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–23561–5 (hardcover) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Christianity and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Spirituality—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Religion and literature—History—19th century. 5. Great Britain—Religion—19th century. 6. Men—Great Britain– –Religious life. 7. Spirituality in literature. 8. Masculinity in literature. 9. Men in literature. I. Bradstock, Andrew. PR468.R44 M37 2000 820.9'352041—dc21 00–033339 Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan 2000 Chapter 4 © Anne Hogan 2000 Chapter 11 © Sean Gill 2000 Chapter 12 © Sue Morgan 2000 Chapter 14 © Andrew Bradstock 2000 Chapters 1–3, 5–10, 13 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


ISBN 0–333–80253–5

Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan 1

Soldiers and Saints: the Fighting Man and the Christian Life J. R. Watson

1

10

2

The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism Lori M. Miller

27

3

Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary Carol Marie Engelhardt

44

4

‘Reading Men More Truly’: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Anne Hogan

58

5

Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge Catherine Wells-Cole

71

Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery Frederick S. Roden

85

6

7

8

9

Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century Philip Healy

100

Male Sexuality, Religion and the Problem of Action: John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough Howard J. Booth

116

‘The Mightiest Evangel of the Alpine Club’: Masculinity and Agnosticism in the Alpine Writing of John Tyndall Francis O’Gorman

134

v 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


Contents

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11

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13

14

Contents

‘Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails’? George Eliot, Masculinity and the (Ir)religion of Nationalism Neil McCaw

149

Ecce Homo: Representations of Christ as the Model of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Lives of Jesus Sean Gill

164

‘Writing the Male Body’: Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard, 1884–94 Sue Morgan

179

Soul-saving Partnerships and Pacifist Soldiers: the Ideal of Masculinity in the Salvation Army Laura Lauer

194

‘A Man of God is a Manly Man’: Spurgeon, Luther and ‘Holy Boldness’ Andrew Bradstock

209

Index

226



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We would like to thank Sandra Barwise and Debbie Hughes for their invaluable secretarial help; David Hirst and Ronald Haynes for equally vital technical support; Ruth Willats for her work at the copyediting stage; and Charmian Hearne and Eleanor Birne our editors at Macmillan for their enthusiasm for the book and sound advice and guidance during its production. ‘The Shadow of Death’, by William Holman Hunt, is reproduced as the frontispiece to this volume, by courtesy of Manchester City Art Galleries.

vii 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


Acknowledgements




Howard J. Booth is Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester. He is author of a number of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and co-editor of Modernism and Empire (2000). Andrew Bradstock teaches church history and political theology at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. With Anne Hogan he edited the companion volume to this, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (1998), and his other books include Saints and Sandinistas (1987) and Faith in the Revolution (1997). He has contributed the entry on Spurgeon to Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century (2000). Carol Marie Engelhardt completed her PhD in modern British history at Indiana University and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio. She is author of ‘The Paradigmatic Angel in the House: The Virgin Mary and Victorian Anglicans’ in Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock, eds, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture (1998), and of several reviews of books on Victorian religion for Victorian Studies. Sean Gill is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in the University of Bristol. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of religion, gender and sexuality, and his publications include A History of Women and the Church of England from the 18th Century to the Present (1994) and Campaigning for Justice, Truth and Love: A History and Reader of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (1998). Philip Healy is Deputy Director (Public Programmes), Oxford University, Department for Continuing Education. His publications include an edition of John Gray’s Park: a fantastic story (1984) and a Foreword to Frederick Rolfe’s The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1986). Anne Hogan is Lecturer in English in the School of Culture and Language, University of Southampton New College, where she teaches the nineteenth-century novel and contemporary women’s writing. She is editor, with Andrew Bradstock, of the companion volume to this, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (1998). ix 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


Notes on the Contributors

x Notes on the Contributors

Neil McCaw is Lecturer in English Studies at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, where he teaches nineteenth-century culture and literature. His publications include George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past (2000) as well as chapters and articles on Victorian Ireland, British Cultural Studies, and nineteenth-century historical writing. Lori M. Miller is a PhD candidate at Indiana University. She is currently researching and writing her dissertation, ‘Gender Consciousness and Anglican Religious Orders, 1850–1920’. Her other research interests include nineteenth-century Ritualism, the history of education in Britain and the US and 1950s gender ideology in both countries. Sue Morgan is Head of History at University College Chichester where she teaches modern gender and cultural history. She has published a monograph and several articles and chapters on women’s history, religious history and feminist theology. Her most recent works include ‘Feminist Approaches to the Study of Religion’ in Peter Connolly, ed., Approaches to the Study of Religion (1999) and A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the politics of gender in the late-Victorian Church (1999). She is currently editing a collection of essays on women, religion and the dynamics of feminism in modern Britain and co-authoring a book on women and spirituality in modern England. Francis O’Gorman is Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He is author of many essays on Victorian literature and culture, and of the books John Ruskin (1999) and Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2000). With Dinah Birch he is preparing a collection, Ruskin and Gender. Frederick S. Roden is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has published several essays on Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Hildegard von Bingen, and is currently at work on a book entitled Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. J. R. Watson is Research Professor of English, University of Durham. He has particular interests in the Romantic and Victorian periods, and is author of Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (1970),



Laura Lauer completed a D.Phil on Nonconformist churchwomen’s organisations in England, 1880–1920, in 1998, and is currently coauthoring a book on women’s spirituality in the nineteenth century. She has taught at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and at the University of Liverpool.

Wordsworth’s Vital Soul (1982), English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (1985, second ed. 1992), and The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1988). His interests also extend to landscape and hymnology, and his critical study, The English Hymn (1997), has recently been issued in paperback. He is currently working on a book on Romanticism and War. Catherine Wells-Cole is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey Roehampton. She is a member of the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship, and has written the Introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of The Heir of Redclyffe.



Notes on the Contributors xi




Introduction

According to one of the last great exponents and exemplars of Victorian Christian manliness, ‘God made men to be men’.1 But Robert BadenPowell’s assumption that there is an unproblematic correlation between masculine identity and religion today seems far from obvious and raises a number of questions. Advanced so confidently by the founder of the Scouting Movement, does this aphorism not indicate a close link between religious belief and patriarchal configurations of masculinity that disadvantaged women and damaged the psyches of generations of men? To what extent, if at all, were religious belief and practice capable of generating alternative and less destructive masculine identities? Or to put the point in a slightly different way, was Victorian spirituality in any sense an independent variable in the formulation of masculinity, or did it merely reflect existing patterns of gender and of social change? This book is a companion piece to the volume Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House, which was published in 1998.2 Like its predecessor, it deploys a multidisciplinary strategy in seeking to delineate some of the complex interrelationships between religion and gender which existed in Victorian society. Both books therefore bring to the task a range of critical insights from the fields of historical, literary and cultural studies. Both too are premissed on a rejection of essentialist understandings of gender as biologically and transhistorically determined, in favour of a social constructionist paradigm in which Victorian configurations of femininity and masculinity are seen as unstable, multiple and changing.3 Drawing on Foucauldian and poststructuralist insights into the way in which discourse creates rather than describes biologically determined notions of gender also makes it possible to explore the ways in which specifically religious 1 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan




discourse could either sustain and reflect, or rupture and transform, existing gender norms and identities for both men and women. It does, however, need to be borne in mind that there are important methodological and historiographical differences between the two books which reflect the extent to which the study of masculinity lags behind that of femininity. One reason for this is, as John Tosh has argued, that a deep-seated dualism in western thought has served to render masculinity unproblematic, with the paradoxical consequence that men’s presence within the historical record is both ubiquitous and invisible.4 It is true that, spurred on by the challenge of feminism and the perception of a crisis within contemporary masculinity, a great deal of research has recently been undertaken in what has come to be called the new men’s studies.5 Nevertheless, in comparison with work on the representation of women in literature and art, and on gender as a category of analysis within women’s history, critical discussion of masculinity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English society remains both patchy and under-theorized.6 For scholars intent on exploring the links between masculinity and religion, such problems are further exacerbated by the unwillingness of some social historians to give sufficient weight to the influence of either traditional religion or less orthodox forms of spirituality on men’s lives. In the case of middle-class men, attention has often been focused on the impact of doubt and the loss of religious faith, whilst their working-class counterparts have been portrayed as overwhelmingly alienated from institutional religion.7 At the same time, historians of religion might benefit from a greater comprehension of the sexual politics of nineteenth-century piety and the way in which gender dynamics operating within the family connected with the exercise of male authority within wider ecclesiastical and political structures. In the most recent synthesis of research in the field of religion and gender in Victorian society, Frances Knight has stressed the need for scholars to be sensitive to questions of religious and denominational affiliation as well as of social status. Understandings of gender were, for example, very different as between Quakers and Roman Catholics. Knight ends with a challenge for future research, arguing that ‘Whilst churches, chapels and synagogues had different expectations of their male and female adherents, the case for a fundamentally different spiritual experience between men and women of the same social class and religious tradition seems not proven.’8 The aim of the following chapters is to break new ground by suggesting that there were distinctive patterns of men’s spiritual experience, and to examine these not only



2

within a wide range of denominational and religious contexts, but also to do so by extending the definition of spirituality beyond the constricting limits imposed by traditional ecclesiastical historians.9 One of the first topics in this field which attracted the attention of literary critics and historians was the connection between the growing cult of Victorian manliness and Evangelical and Broad Church forms of Christianity.10 Whatever his reservations about the label, Charles Kingsley’s advocacy of ‘muscular Christianity’ fed easily into the swelling strain of militarism and imperialism which characterized the second half of the century.11 This is a process which J. R. Watson’s chapter traces through an analysis of a number of Victorian hymns, which reveal the transmutation of the ideal of the warfare of the Christian hero and martyr from a defensive and essentially internalized stance, to one that was much more public and offensive. Because the cult of Christian manliness has been so closely associated by both historians and literary critics with the staunchly Protestant nationalism of figures such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, Anglo-Catholicism has usually been depicted as a counter-cultural movement whose exaltation of priestly celibacy represents a dissident and subversive construction of Christian masculinity.12 Yet as Lori Miller shows in her study of three of the movement’s leading figures – J. M. Neale, E. B. Pusey and T. T. Carter – Anglo-Catholicism did often reproduce many of the norms of conventional masculinity including those of muscular Christianity, and she warns us against accepting static and unnuanced accounts of the relationship between particular modes of Victorian Christian spirituality and constructions of masculinity. Carol Engelhardt’s chapter on Victorian masculinity and the Virgin Mary does the same from a rather different perspective and provides a further counterweight to the excessive emphasis on Protestantism which has characterized much recent research. Engelhardt’s essay examines the way in which three very different Victorian men – Charles Kingsley, Edward Bouverie Pusey and Frederick Faber – used their disparate understandings of the Virgin Mary to construct or bolster their masculine sense of identity. She shows that whilst at the level of theology the staunchly Protestant Kingsley and the Roman Catholic convert Faber differed sharply in their view of the role and status of the Virgin Mary, in other respects their interpretations of her place within the divine economy of salvation served to reinforce a patriarchal understanding of gender relations within both Church and society. Valuable early studies of the links between religion and Victorian constructions of masculinity were characterized not only by a concentration



Introduction 3


on Protestantism, but also by a focus on the lives of men within singlesex institutions and environments. This was true, for example, of studies of the ideal of Christian manliness, which saw the largely Anglican religious ethos of the public schools as its matrix. Studies which discussed the links between religion and the manly values of imperialism and athleticism further reinforced this trend.13 Yet it is increasingly being realized that notwithstanding the sharply polarized gender norms of the period, and the division between the public and private spheres, masculinity and femininity can only be fully understood as relational.14 In this area explorations of the theme of masculinity and spirituality by women writers can be particularly revealing. Anne Hogan’s discussion of the novel Villette (1853) shows how Charlotte Brontë’s characterization of the two central male characters, Paul Emanuel and Graham Bretton, offers a shrewd critique of both men and aspects of Victorian masculinity. In the particular emphasis given to the spiritual in the development of Paul Emanuel’s character, the novel suggests that a richer, more fully human, version of masculinity might be possible and more desirable. The sense of crisis and instability which men experienced in the face of social changes such as industrialization and the women’s movement is also evident in a more unlikely source – the novels of Charlotte Yonge. As Catherine Wells-Cole shows in her study of anger and masculinity in her novels, Yonge vividly portrays the dilemmas and insecurities of bourgeois masculinity in a society in which codes of conduct based on physical prowess, or the power of wealth, gave way to a new and much more demanding ideal of spiritual and moral worth. This involved the domestication and reconfiguration of traditional notions of upper-class behaviour such as that of chivalry into a new code of gentlemanly behaviour for the middle-class male.15 Central to much recent theorizing on masculinity in the social sciences has been an increasing emphasis on the need to recognize multiple masculinities based on class, race and sexual orientation – though interestingly religious belief and practice rarely figure as independent variables in such discussions.16 It is not coincidental that the earliest historical and sociological usage of the concept of masculinities appears in the context of gay men’s studies with its problematization of overarching definitions of masculine behaviour and identity.17 Three of the chapters in this volume explore some of the complex linkages between homoerotic desire and religious expression – a particularly difficult and under-researched area given the strong taboos surrounding the subject within the period, and the resulting problems of lack of evidence and of making anachronistic assumptions in interpreting it.18



4

Frederick Roden’s chapter focuses on John Dobree Dalgairns’s 1844 study of the medieval abbot of Rievaulx, St Aelred, to gauge the extent to which awareness of same-sex desire was present in the Victorian historiography of medieval monasticsm and in the life of late nineteenthcentury monastic communities. Philip Healy’s subject is the work of two homosexual Roman Catholic writers, Frederick Rolfe and John Gray, both of whom in their respective works, Hadrian the Seventh (1904) and Park: a fantastic story (1932), take the priesthood as their theme. Howard J. Booth’s chapter reveals the way in which John Addington Symonds’s critical engagement with the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough in the late 1860s contributed to the former’s attempts to fuse his religious and sexual impulses into a stable and creative whole. It also serves as a corrective to much recent work in gay studies which has tended to emphasize Symonds’s career as a pioneer of homosexual liberation and to neglect his life-long interest in religious and spiritual matters. Symonds, of course, was far from being an orthodox Christian and two other chapters in this collection seek to expand our understanding of spirituality and masculine identity in this broader context. Here, as elsewhere, studies of men’s lives in the second half of the nineteenth century tend to lag behind those on Victorian women. There is, for example, nothing comparable to Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England.19 This is odd given the interest in unorthodox spiritualities in men’s lives in the high Romantic period – Blake is the most obvious example – and it may indicate that historians and critics have taken too much at face value the period’s disjunction between emotion and piety as essentially feminine qualities and rationality and lack of religious feeling as characteristic of men. Francis O’Gorman’s reading of the Alpine writings of the distinguished mountaineer and controversial Victorian agnostic John Tyndall explores the ways in which his intense experience of the grandeur of the natural world formed part of a discourse of muscular spiritual manliness beyond the confines of orthodox religious belief. In his analysis of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Neil McCaw illustrates the way in which the novelist portrays in the characters of Grandcourt and Deronda two contrasting masculinities. The novel is also for Eliot a vehicle for commending a complex model of spiritual manhood, part-religious, part-liberal humanitarian. It also seeks to define an ersatz and liberating religion, which she found to be so singularly lacking in the England of her day. The recent emphasis on the multiplicity of masculinities within any given society does not seek to deny the importance of what Bob Connell



Introduction 5


has called hegemonic modes of masculinity which serve to sustain relations of power not only of men over women but also between men.20 Religious discourse has often been complicit in this process. Yet, as Sean Gill shows in his study of the depiction of Jesus as the ideal of Christian manhood in Victorian religious biography and in art, the hegemonizing project was often compromised by the very differences of class and race which it sought to transcend. Hegemonic masculinity and the control of the male body is the central focus of Sue Morgan’s discussion of the Church of England Purity Society’s endeavours to promote the ideals of heterosexual relations within marriage and to deter all other forms of male sexual activity. She also suggests that historians who have emphasized the dominance of an increasingly medicalized and secular discourse of sexual regulation at the end of the nineteenth century have failed to give due weight to the importance of specifically religious constructions of gender in general and of masculinity in particular.21 The hegemonic model which has informed much recent work in the field is based on the cultural predominance of normative masculinities from which most if not all men derive benefit. It does not imply that the majority of men in practice measure up to the standards which it posits, or that counter-cultural forms of masculinity may not also be present – though often at the cost of the marginalization and exclusion of those perceived as posing a threat to the norm.22 Yet even such a qualified and nuanced research paradigm may not do justice to the reality and complexity of men’s lives. Laura Lauer’s consideration of masculine identity in the Salvation Army and in the life of its founder William Booth highlights one reason why this is the case. As she shows, the ideal of true Christian manhood which the Army espoused is not easy to classify as straightforwardly either a reiteration or a repudiation of the predominant patterns of masculinity in late nineteenth-century English society. In so far as the Army made use of both familial and militaristic imagery and organizational practices, it might appear to suggest the former; on the other hand, its stringently puritanical and sectarian theology and life-style challenged many traditional aspects of masculine culture.23 Lauer’s approach of exploring the relationship between the life of Booth as an individual and the social movement which he founded is also adopted by Andrew Bradstock in his examination of the private as well as the public life of one of the nineteenth century’s great hierarchs, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a powerful exponent of a distinctively nonconformist brand of Christian manliness. Bradstock’s chapter highlights the challenge of relating the



6

individual’s gendered subjectivity to the wider social and denominational forces which helped to shape it. Historians and literary critics need to be sensitive to the fact that spirituality and masculinity have both a social and a personal and existential dimension.24 Finally, can we draw any overall conclusions from the multiplicity of case studies presented in this collection? First, it is clear that an overemphasis on muscular Christian manliness runs the risk of simplifying the complex, contradictory and often evanescent connections between masculinities and spiritualities. Second, a great deal of further research remains to be done in this field which gives due weight to the very different modalities of theology and praxis within diverse Christian denominations. There is also much that is unknown with regard to both popular piety and non-orthodox expressions of religiosity. Finally, before we too readily adopt a stance of condescending superiority towards the dilemmas of men who struggled to hold together their spiritual aspirations and their gendered self-identities, we ought to reflect that the sense of a crisis of masculinity which permeates our own society suggests that we are far from having solved the problems with which they wrestled so manfully.

Notes 1. This is from Robert Baden-Powell’s 1922 book Rovering to Success, quoted in Allen Warren, ‘Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting, and the Development of Manly Character’, in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800– 1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 199–219, 203. 2. Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock, eds, Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House (London: Macmillan, 1998). 3. See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) for a very important series of essays on postmodern approaches to gender. Two recent collections provide helpful overviews of this approach and its implications: Carol C. Gould, ed., Key Concepts in Critical Theory. Gender (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997); and Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent, eds, Gender and History in Western Europe (London: Arnold, 1998). 4. John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain’, in History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), pp. 179–202, 180. 5. Harry Brod, ed., The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987). 6. For comments on the development and limitations of studies of masculinity within the field of nineteenth-century historical studies, see Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800



Introduction 7

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–24; for similar comments in the area of literary studies see Antony Rowland, Emma Liggins and Eriks Uskalis, eds, Signs of Masculinity: Men in Literature 1700 to the Present (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1998), pp. 3–36. For a balanced and judicious discussion of these issues, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Works on middle-class masculinity which do give due weight to religious influences include Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); and John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). There are also a number of relevant chapters in R. N. Swanson, ed., Gender and Christian Religion. Studies in Church History, 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998). F. Knight, ‘ “Male and Female He Created Them”: Men, Women and the Question of Gender’, in John Wolffe, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, V, Culture and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 23–57(55). For a discussion of some of the methodological issues surrounding the definition of spirituality in the extended sense in which it is used in this volume, see Peter H. Van Ness, ed., Spirituality and the Secular Quest (London: SCM Press, 1996), pp. 1–17. Important discussions of this theme include David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: Cassell, 1961); Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Donald Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Herbert Sussman, ed., Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Victorian England’, The English Historical Review, 86 (1971), pp. 46–72. For a powerful recent restatement of this view, see John Shelton Reed, The Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), pp. 219–21. See for example Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991); J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986); John Nought and Timothy J. L. Chandler, Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity (London: Frank Cass, 1996). Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, pp. 11–16. Tosh, A Man’s Place, pp. 6–7, stresses the extent to which this new ideal was built around the home, but also argues that it was increasingly under strain from the 1860s, partly as a result of the decline in orthodox Christianity which had provided one of its primary ideological underpinnings. An important exception is the work of Harry Brod. See, for example, his chapter ‘Some Thoughts on Some Histories of Some Masculinities. Jews



8

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

and Other Others’, in Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, eds, Theorizing Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 82–96. See also John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Religion and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for a helpful discussion of the strategic relationship between religious and sexual identities. One of the seminal works here is Jeffrey Weeks’s Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). A pioneering historical study is David Hilliard, ‘ “Unenglish and Unmanly”: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), pp. 181–210. Seth Koven’s ‘From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture and Social Reform’, in Andrew Parker et al., eds, Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992) suggests underlying interconnections between homoerotic desire, religious belief and national identities in the welfare schemes of the 1880s and 1890s. In literary studies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) has been influential. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989). R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 77–8. For a wide ranging historical survey of the modern period which adopts this approach, see George L. Mosse, The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See for example Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society. The Regulation of Society Since 1800, 2nd edition (London: Longmans, 1989), and Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995). For Morgan’s own wider contribution to this debate, see Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the late-Victorian Church (Bristol: University of Bristol, Department of Theology and Religious Studies Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender Monograph Series, 2, 1999). For a helpful and stimulating introduction to the history of the body, see Roy Porter, ‘History of the Body’, in Peter Burke ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 206–32. Connell, Masculinities, pp. 79–80. This last point is well made in Pamela Walker’s essay ‘ “I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me”: Men and Masculinity in the Salvation Army, 1865–90’, in Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, pp. 92–112. Brod, The Making of Masculinities, pp. 5–6. See also the comments on the use of individual life histories in the social sciences in Connell, Masculinities, pp. 89–90.



Introduction 9

Soldiers and Saints: the Fighting Man and the Christian Life J. R. Watson

Courage is a virtue that has always been prized. The Old French source of the word, ‘corage’, goes back to the Latin root ‘cor’, heart, and signifies the spirit of a man: ‘lion-heart’ is a traditional image for bravery (as in the portrayal of Richard I in Scott’s Ivanhoe). Epic heroes were expected to have courage: the Aeneid begins ‘Arma virumque cano’ – I sing of arms and the man – and Aeneas is one who is not only ‘pius’ – respectful of the loyalties to family and country – and one who is ‘buffeted on sea and land’, but also one who is ‘multa quoque et bello passus’ – much enduring in war also. Although Milton endeavoured to write another kind of epic, rejecting ‘Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed’, he too would have recognized the importance of the image of war as signifying the spiritual battle that takes place between good and evil in the human soul. The idea was common as a book-title in the seventeenth century: Benjamin Keach published War with the Devil in 1673, and Bunyan’s The Holy War appeared in 1672. In Bunyan’s narrative Diabolus gets possession of the town of Mansoul, which has to be retaken by Emmanuel. It is an elaborate recasting of the Christian life in terms of siege warfare, which Bunyan was familiar with from his service in the Parliamentary army. Bunyan’s awareness of the importance of fighting is found supremely in The Pilgrim’s Progress, where in Part II there is the noble figure of Mr Valiant-for-Truth. He sings the song of Christian courage, ‘Who would true valour see’, with its militant second verse: Whoso beset him round With dismal stories Do but themselves confound; His strength the more is. 10 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Bunyan’s Puritan straightforwardness is evident here: the patterns of thought behind this and The Holy War are direct and uncomplicated. They have their origin and justification, however, as Puritan theology invariably did, in the Bible. There, in the Old Testament, were the accounts of the holy wars of God and his children of Israel against the kings and peoples who believed in false gods, and who endeavoured to capture or annihilate the covenant people of the Jews. In the Gospels, the story of the temptation in the wilderness (Luke 4:1–13) was traditionally taken as an account of struggle, conflict and endurance; and in Matthew 10:34 Jesus is recorded as saying: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword.’ This is at variance with his other proclamations of peace and love, and his refusal to resist arrest (and the rebuke to Peter for cutting off the High Priest’s servant’s ear), but its spiritual meaning is clear: there are times when Christianity involves conflict, and Christians may be called to stand up for what they believe. Saint Paul, with characteristic subtlety, shifted the emphasis to individual experience: his hermeneutics proposes an inner conflict in which the Christian casts away the works of darkness and puts on the armour of light (Romans 13:12). Armour occurs again in 2 Corinthians 6:7, but in 2 Corinthians 10:4 its function as a metaphor is made quite clear: ‘For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.’ So the breastplate in 1 Thessalonians 5:8 is ‘the breastplate of faith and love’, and the helmet is ‘the hope of salvation’. The most complete working-out of this idea is in Ephesians 6, where the Christian is urged to ‘Put on the whole armour of God’: in the verses which follow (14 –17), the various elements of that armour are catalogued: the loins girt about with truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit. With these the Christian is able ‘to withstand in the evil day’, because the shield of faith (given the highest importance in the ‘above all’ of verse 16) is able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked. The result of it all is the very important verb ‘to stand’: the donning of Christian armour allows the wearer ‘having done all, to stand’.



No lion can him fright; He’ll with a giant fight, But he will have a right To be a pilgrim.

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The verb has two meanings: the winner of a contest is the one who is standing, and he or she can stand ‘for’ something, or ‘stand up’ for something. ‘Here I stand’, said Luther, in words that rang round Europe; and Milton celebrated Christ’s victory over Satan with the words: ‘Tempt not the Lord the God, he said, and stood’ (Paradise Regained, IV. 561). The full stop at the end of the sentence, and of the poetic line, indicates a splendid and unequivocal finality, with Christ in the position of ‘stander’. Similarly in Paradise Lost, Christ speaks to the loyal angels (VI.801), ‘Stand still in bright array, ye Saints, here stand … ’. The force is conveyed here by the word order: Milton is using a figure of Renaissance rhetoric, Epanalepsis (‘when ye make one worde both beginne and end your verse’) to make the point. Bunyan does it with Mr Standfast, who makes an exemplary pilgrim in Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, when he resists the temptations of Madam Bubble. The primary examples of ‘standers’ are the martyrs, who refused to be deflected or moved from their position of belief. A reference of 1588 in the Oxford English Dictionary quotes the phrase ‘martyrdoms of such as have stood’, and not surprisingly they are referred to in the Te Deum as ‘the noble army of martyrs’. They are the saints who have been brave to the uttermost, who have been prepared to face death in the battle between good and evil: their examples have been seen as prototypes for soldiers in battle, especially in twentieth-century wars, most notably in the ‘Great War’ of 1914 –18, in which soldiers were seen as making ‘the supreme sacrifice’, for which they are (rightly) memorialized each November. This conjunction between the fighting soldier, involved in all the violent processes of killing and wounding and imprisoning the enemy, and the noble army of martyrs, is the subject of this essay. It is an odd conjunction: as Norman Vance has written, ‘The entertaining and healthy activism of the manly hero, whether in fact or fiction, was bound to jar with the less vivid religious imperatives: patience and heroic martyrdom, self-abnegation and the discipline of the will.’1 What happens on Remembrance Sunday, I shall argue, is a culmination of a process which develops very interestingly in the nineteenth century: what have been termed by Herbert Sussman ‘inscriptions of varied male practices of the self’2 become increasingly associated with warfare, both temporal and spiritual: in the use of war imagery in hymns, in which the campaign is no longer defensive but offensive (so that the most important weapon is no longer the shield, as it was for Saint Paul, but the sword); and in the extraordinary appearance in the British army of figures who became nationally famous as ‘soldier-saints’,



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such as Captain Hedley Vicars, Sir Henry Havelock or General Gordon. The founding of the Salvation Army in 1878 is another manifestation of the same conjunction of ideas.3 Sussman has argued that the primary forms of the masculine are found in the figure of the monk – ‘the celibate male working and praying within an enclosed all-male community’ who ‘becomes the central figure through which the contradictions and anxieties about manliness are registered’.4 But in the British Army, and in the inscriptions of masculinity found in worship and hymnody, the same patterns are found: ‘the young man must leave his mother, reject domestic life to enter a male community’.5 In the army he enters the world in which we find the soldier-saints, in fact as well as in hymnic idea. The concept of ‘soldier-saints’ is found in Browning’s ‘The Statue and the Bust’. He describes the lovers, who failed to act because of their lack of courage, waiting for judgement day: Only they see not God, I know Nor all that chivalry of his, The soldier-saints who, row on row, Burn upward each to his point of bliss – Since, the end of life being manifest, He had burned his way thro’ the world to this. The concept of ‘God’s chivalry’ must be understood broadly as involving all those who were dedicated and courageous in their loyalty and fidelity. But the image is significant in 1855 (when the poem was published) as evidence of an idea which found its home in Browning’s quicksilver brain. It demonstrates the return of an idea that derives ultimately from Saint Paul, but which finds an embodiment in the military religious orders of the Middle Ages, such as the Knights Templar or the Hospitallers of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. These orders, founded in the twelfth century, pledged their members to follow religious duties and practices, and to defend Christendom against the infidel. They were involved in the Crusades, and in the reconquest of Spain. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 –1153) had written the justification of the idea of a military religious order in his Liber de laude novae militiae; and a figure such as Saint Martin, who as a Roman soldier divided his cloak and gave half of it to a beggar, became not only a national saint (as the apostle to the Gauls) but also the focus for community life in Tours. Other soldier-saints, or saints associated with the militant life, include Saint George, Saint Maurice and Saint James




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the Greater, while Saint Barbara is the patron saint of gunners. The iconography of Saint Martin almost always shows him as a soldier on horseback, dividing his cloak for the beggar; very little is made of his time as Abbot of Ligugé or as Bishop of Tours, which is an indication of the power not only of the dramatic moment and the significant gesture, but also of the enduring image of the soldier who became a saint (even though he left the army to become a priest).6 The ideas of fighting (loyalty, discipline, courage, endurance) are found in the legends of medieval Christianity, in the belligerent metrical psalms of the Reformation and in the Counter-Reformation ideology of the Jesuit movement; they occur again in Bunyan, and in the battle in heaven in Paradise Lost, which lasts for three days and is complete with artillery. The persistence of the idea in the eighteenth century is found, even in the self-absorption of the evangelical revival, in the contents page of John Wesley’s 1780 hymn book, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists. This is a volume ‘of experimental and practical divinity’ (Wesley’s own description), which is based on individual experience rather than on the Church’s year. Part IV, therefore, is divided into sections beginning ‘For Believers Rejoicing/Fighting/ Praying/Watching/Working’, and so forth: the section of ‘Believers Fighting’ contains 29 hymns, many of them by Charles Wesley, including three extracted from the best known of all fighting hymns, ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise’. This hymn, first published in 1742, contains many of the features which might be expected of a hymn based on Ephesians 6: in its original form it was of considerable length, with 16 Double Short Metre verses (128 lines). It contained verses on ‘faith’s victorious shield’, on the need for constant vigilance (‘Pray, without ceasing pray’) and on military training (‘And always exercise your arms’). As in Ephesians 6, the most important piece of armour is the shield: But above all, lay hold On faith’s victorious shield … The most important stylistic feature of the hymn, appropriately for a military text, is its use of the imperative mode, together with its strong marching rhythms. The verb ‘Stand’ is again prominent, for it begins two verses (‘Stand then in his great might’ … ‘Stand then against your foes’). Charles Wesley beautifully keeps the balance between the military terminology and its spiritual application, exhorting the Christian so that: Ye may o’ercome through Christ alone, And stand entire at last.



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The Son of God goes forth to war A kingly crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar! Who follows in his train? This is by Reginald Heber (1783–1826). It was printed in his posthumous Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (1827) as the hymn for Saint Stephen’s Day. Naturally, as a hymn for such an occasion, it drew on the idea of the noble army of martyrs, but it also suggests a military campaign. The idea that the Son of God ‘goes forth’ suggests an offensive against the enemy; this is perhaps owing to the Napoleonic marches and counter-marches which Heber would have been familiar with (he wrote Europe: Lines on the Present War in 1809), but it may also be connected with an increasing belief that the Christian religion ought to go on the offensive against social injustice (most obviously in the case of slavery and the slave trade) and against ‘heathenism’. Heber himself went to what became known as ‘the mission field’ in 1823, when he became Bishop of Calcutta (he died three years later, while swimming in a plunge pool at the end of an exhausting day, perhaps as a result of overwork; so that he became, in his way, a martyr, a soldier dying for the cause. The plunge into the pool is perhaps also significant of a Christian manliness or muscularity). His bestknown hymn carries the underlying demand for struggle and sacrifice: From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand, Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error’s chain! What was an inner conflict in Charles Wesley has now become an external one: this is nothing less than a revolutionary war, to free those who live in bondage because they do not know the gospel: What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,



The emphasis is still, as it was with Saint Paul, defensive: the aim is to stand, to withstand, to remain upright, not to give in. In the nineteenth century, a new kind of aggressive military strategy appears:

J. R. Watson

Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile: In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown, The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone! The assumptions behind these verses may be difficult to accept today, but it is clear that the missionaries of Heber’s day were seen as the shock troops of the Christian army, charged with the task of liberating what were thought of as oppressed peoples. And although the example of the French Revolution would have been far from the minds of those who were preaching the gospel (not least because of the Revolutionary attitude to the Church), its libertarian ideologies may have been transferred to the mission field. That ‘field’ was one in which the harvest of souls was cultivated, but also a ‘field’ in which missionaries fought and died. It is this which permits Charlotte Brontë, 20 years after Heber’s death, to end Jane Eyre with an extraordinary passage about St John Rivers, who has (up to that point) been a cold and unattractive figure. Rivers, who has gone to India, is enrolled among the noble army of martyrs as a soldier of the faith: Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race. He clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. (Jane Eyre, chapter 38) ‘The sternness of the warrior’: the phrase was to be echoed by Tennyson in his epitaph on General Gordon, whom he describes as ‘Warrior of God’. It is one of the many phrases which inscribe the ideal of Christian masculinity, based on a conception of what Vance has called ‘the intensely human manly Christ’.7 This leads to a natural association between religion and fighting, and this is confirmed by the large number of hymns which use imagery of this kind: ‘Carry the standard bravely’; ‘Pass the word along the line’; ‘A helmet on my brow I wear’ (by S. J. Stone, who wrote ‘The church’s one foundation’); ‘March, march onward’ (by E. H. Plumptre, who wrote ‘Thy hand, O God, hath guided’). In America, there were ‘Hold the fort,



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for I am coming’, based on Sherman’s battle for Kenesaw mountain; and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ward Howe after witnessing a troop review in 1861, which owes its impetus to the belief that the Union side was engaged in a war of liberation: ‘As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.’ Other examples of the genre include ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus’; ‘Fight the good fight, with all thy might’; and ‘Onward! Christian soldiers’. The last of these is a hymn for children: it was written by Sabine Baring-Gould for the Sunday School at Horbury Bridge, near Wakefield in Yorkshire, and entitled ‘Hymn for Procession with Cross and Banners’: Onward! Christian soldiers, Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus Going on before. The children are allowed to see themselves as marching down the road to victory, in a heady mixture of enthusiasm and piety: At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee; On then, Christian soldiers, On to victory! This is all too easy, and it can be seen that the children are ‘playing soldiers’. The forces of evil run away before any fighting has begun, because one side shows the cross and shouts: Hell’s foundations quiver At the shout of praise; Brothers, lift your voices, Loud your anthems raise. The victory is ascribed to the cross and the banners, and to the strength of the undivided Church: ‘Like a mighty army / Moves the Church of God’. This is patently untrue, but it serves to emphasize the idea of an all-enveloping happiness which is quite suitable for the occasion: Onward then, ye people! Join our happy throng; Blend with ours your voices In the triumph song …




J. R. Watson

Not many fighting hymns are as child-centred as this (fighting being a man’s business), although some of them appeal to a simple idea of ‘picking sides’, such as Frances Ridley Havergal’s ‘Who is on the Lord’s side?’ Havergal, who was keenness personified, a girl guide avant la lettre, loved to pose such questions. Others were more aware of the potential dangers: Soldiers of the Cross arise! Gird you with your armour bright; Mighty are your enemies, Hard the battle ye must fight. In its heavy obviousness, this is a pale imitation of Charles Wesley, but at least it uses the word ‘hard’, which comes from 2 Timothy 2:3: ‘endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.’ This verse is the foundation of many of these fighting hymns; ‘Soldiers of the Cross arise’ is by William Walsham How, who wrote a supreme example: ‘For all the saints’. The idea of sainthood is inextricably associated with warfare in this hymn about the final battle: O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old, And win, with them, the victor’s crown of gold, Alleluia! The battle continues all day long, and courage fails (it is implied) until another sound is heard: And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, Steals on the ear the distant triumph song, And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong, Alleluia! It is then that the evening comes, when ‘Soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest’; and the vision ends with the countless host streaming into heaven, joyfully singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost, in a powerful application of the idea of a day-long battle and its exhausted but triumphant ending. *

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The transition from a defensive mode to an offensive one in fighting hymns coincides with a recognition of manly heroism in nineteenthcentury Britain. The Victoria Cross was instituted in 1856, ‘For Valour’;



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and paradoxically, the short and few wars after 1815 seem to have sharpened public awareness of what was involved in fighting for one’s country. Fighting hymns, concerned as they were with Christian experience, contained imagery which was ‘realized’ in conflicts which were fought out in the mud of the Crimea or the heat of India. Metaphors of hardness, of weariness, of victory and defeat became juxtaposed to newspaper reports from Sebastopol or despatches from Cawnpore. This did not mean that the hymns ceased to be metaphorical, statements of the conflicts of the Christian soul; but it did present the reader with the possibility that fighting for the British Empire or for its allies was part of a pattern of defeating wrong and defending right. In the Crimea, Tsar Nicholas was widely seen as an aggressor who needed to be stopped (Tennyson’s Maud has the line ‘Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant liar’, which is a brief assertion that the Crimean War was a just war, God’s war); and in India, the Mutiny was an obvious threat to stability, order and what was believed to be the essential goodness of British rule. In both cases, and for different reasons, war was inescapable as a response to a political situation: those who fought did so in support of a government that thought itself right to go to war. In the course of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny there emerged two figures who embodied ideals of Christian heroism. In their lives they were examples of godly living, and in their deaths examples of martyrdom. Each made the supreme sacrifice and each became a national hero. In them the rhetoric of hymns became a reality, so that a phrase such as ‘Am I a soldier of the Cross?’ became embodied in their lives and their work. It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is some connection between the prevalence of fighting hymns in the nineteenth century and the esteem in which these figures were held. They were Captain Hedley Vicars and Sir Henry Havelock. Vicars was killed before Sebastopol; Havelock died just after the relief of Lucknow. Hedley Vicars was a captain in the Ninety-Seventh Regiment. On the night of 22 March 1855 he was in the trenches outside Sebastopol when the Russians made a surprise attack. The French on his flank fell back, exposing a weakness in the British line: Vicars ordered his men to lie low until the Russians were close upon them, and then gave the order to charge. He led the charge himself and his action saved the situation, but he was severely wounded in the process and died on the following morning. Shortly after his death his letters and diaries were published, with a connecting narrative, as Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment (London, 1856). It was described as being ‘by the author of “The Victory Won”’, who was a certain Catherine M. Marsh: its popularity is indicated by its translation into




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French, German and Italian. Another account was entitled Walking with God before Sebastopol: Reminiscences of the late Captain Vicars (London, 1855). The title ‘The Victory Won’ is characteristic of the blurring between metaphor and literal truth in the matter of fighting. It suggests not only the repulse of the Russians but also 1 Corinthians 15:57 (‘But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’). Vicars in his death becomes not only a martyr-figure, but also a means of victory (over his own sin, and over the Russians), and hence a Christfigure; while his mother, to whom the book is dedicated, becomes a type of the Virgin Mary: ‘This record of the faith of a son is affectionately inscribed to her whom God graciously chose to sow in his young heart its first imperishable seed.’ Vicars (born 1826) was a young man when he died. Catherine Marsh’s account of his life, which is liberally supported by letters and diaries, treats his 29 years as a classic example of the evangelical pattern of heroism, containing sin, awakening, conversion and martyrdom. As a child he was wayward and self-willed, and as a young man he continued in his wicked ways and got into debt. His repentance was followed by a conversion experience: turning over a Bible in November 1851, he came across a central statement of justification by faith, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin’ (1 John 1:7). ‘Closing the book, he said “If this be true for me, henceforth I will live, by the grace of God, as a man should live who has been washed in the blood of Jesus Christ”’ (p. 32).9 He then bought a large Bible, which he placed on a table in his sitting-room, ‘determining that “an open Bible”, for the future, should be “his colours”’ (p. 35).10 He made friends with Dr Twining, the garrison chaplain, although the other officers, not surprisingly, thought that he had ‘turned Methodist’. In spite of this, he was made Adjutant of his Regiment, a post which he discharged in a most trustworthy manner. His conduct as a soldier seems to have been exemplary. This is always recorded, if only because it was seen as evidence that a man could be a Christian and a soldier: and although Vicars held prayer-meetings and maintained his patterns of worship very publicly, he also discharged his military duties with conspicuous bravery. He slept in the open before Sebastopol, giving up his tent to the men; and his courage in the night attack was gallantry of the finest sort. This allowed the author of the Memorials to claim in her introduction: There are those who, in the face of examples to the contrary, still maintain that entire devotion of the heart to God must withdraw a



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Vicars was therefore ‘the noble example of a Christian soldier’. In a letter he quotes a hymn about another kind of soldiership: Am I a soldier of the Cross, A follower of the Lamb; And shall I fear to own his cause, Or blush to speak his name? This is one of a number of occasions in which Vicars quotes hymns, such as the first two verses of ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’, or the first verse of ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’; on his way to the Crimea in 1854 we find him quoting, not surprisingly perhaps, Tate and Brady’s version of Psalm 34: ‘Through all the changing scenes of life’. As so often, the literal and the metaphorical blend: the changing scenes were no doubt those of Greece and Asia Minor, but they turned Vicars’ thoughts inevitably to the landscapes of the mind and to the vicissitudes of fortune. Vicars became a glorious example of the hero-martyr. Only a few voices were raised in doubt, and one of them is interesting, because it calls into question the whole concept of the soldier-saint. It appears in an anonymous pamphlet of 1856, reviewing Catherine Marsh’s Memorials, entitled Soldiership and Christianity. In the opinion of the author, the ‘soldier of the Cross’ has a duty not to be the soldier of the Queen: Captain Vicars going forth from ‘precious communion with his Saviour’, to bayonet poor Russian peasants, or pour infernal fire upon the devoted town of Sebastopol, is as violent and revolting a contradiction, as that of John Newton, combining a similar exercise with the man-stealing and manacles of the African slave-trade.8 Having produced this caricature of a soldier’s life, the author goes on to be patronizing: For our part, we have the fullest conviction that, had Captain Vicars’ life been spared, he could not have failed, as his knowledge of the



man from many of the active duties of life, and who would be prepared to concede that in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier. To them the subject of this memoir affords a fresh and ample refutation. (p. ix)11

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This shows that the view of the fighting soldier which I have outlined was not universally held; but against it may be set the overwhelming response, two years later, to the death of Havelock. Sermons were preached in churches and chapels throughout the country on the theme of ‘Christian Soldiership’ or ‘The Soldier and the Saint’. Sometimes they were so popular that they had to be preached twice; and clergymen who had never seen a front line strove to bring before their congregations an ideal of manly virtue and civic loyalty, and from there to transfer the message back to the Christian life itself. ‘Henry Havelock enlisted in two armies’, said the Reverend Frederick S. Williams of Birkenhead: ‘a carnal and a spiritual’: Religion was the basis of his character: all his principles were rooted in it – all his actions emanated from it … His life may truly be said to have been one long hymn of praise to his Creator. Every one who came into contact with Havelock felt that he was sincere; and even those least accessible to devotional sentiment, sympathised with and reverenced it in him.14 Williams’s exhortation takes the literal and makes it metaphorical again: Is not life a warfare? Are not those alien forces of truth and error, of right and wrong, of God and Satan, struggling for the mastery? Has not the Christian a Captain of his salvation? and is there not a prince of the power of the air?15 Havelock (born 1795) was longer lived than Vicars. As with Vicars, his biographer notes the importance of the mother in forming religious views (‘To his excellent mother he was indebted for those early religious impressions, which are so often found to triumph over the assaults of scepticism on the enquiring mind of youth, and to exercise a permanent and salutary influence on the character of the man’),16 but the subsequent development of his life is not so simple as the evangelical progress of Vicars. He joined the army in 1815, the year of Waterloo, and went to India in 1823. On the voyage there, he shook off a certain scepticism, and ‘through the instrumentality of a fellowpassenger, he was drawn to a more earnest perusal of the Holy Scriptures, and led to an exclusive and quickening reliance on the



Christian system became more intimate and profound, to have forced upon him the conviction, that the profession of a Christian and a soldier could not possibly be reconciled.9


There were some who did not hesitate to jeer him as a religious enthusiast, but he stood so high in public estimation, from his sterling attainments, and his strength of character, that contempt for the methodist was lost in admiration of the soldier.18 After years of inactivity, he took part in the ill-fated Afghan campaign of 1841– 42, where he found himself in Jellalabad when Dr Brydon returned from Kabul, the sole survivor of the failed expedition. On the following Sunday he read the service at Church parade, substituting for the psalm of the day the 46th Psalm, ‘which’, he remarked, ‘Luther was wont to use in seasons of peculiar difficulty and depression’19 (Havelock thought compulsory Church parades were useless, but that ‘great good is to be expected from voluntary attendance of soldiers on effective preaching’).20 His soldiers were often preached to, and he encouraged temperance among them: ‘I wish the whole regiment were Baptists,’ said his Colonel, ‘for their names are never in the defaulters’ roll.’21 Lord Gough is reported to have said that ‘he wished Havelock would baptize the whole army’. Havelock’s own career caused him much grief and frustration, for he found that others, more wealthy than himself, were able to purchase promotion; only after 1838, and then slowly, did he begin to rise. Much was made of his stoicism and patience in the sermons which were preached after his death: ‘twenty years ago,’ said the Reverend W. H. Aylen, Minister of Carlisle Chapel, Kennington, ‘he was promoted to a company, after serving twenty-three years as a subaltern. Reflect on that! General Havelock was for twenty-three years a subaltern.’22 His conduct of the march to the relief of the Residence at Lucknow was widely held to be a masterpiece of military strategy, and his death immediately following the raising of the siege produced an outpouring of national grief. He was, in the Reverend Aylen’s words, ‘The Illustrious, the Heroic, the Lamented Havelock!’ James P. Grant, in The Christian Soldier. Memorials of Major General Sir Henry Havelock, saw him as a type of the active Christian (with a side-swipe at Newman and the Oxford Movement): ‘If anything were needed to shew the folly and falsehood of Romish retirement and seclusion from the world, the life of Havelock is a sufficient rebuke.’23



merits of the Atonement.’17 In Bombay he met Reginald Heber and heard him preach; and at Serampore he married Hannah Marshman, the daughter of a distinguished Baptist missionary. His way of life became ‘serious’:

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So be it, Lord: thy throne shall never, Like earth’s proud empires, pass away; Thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever, Till all thy creatures own thy sway. ‘In this hymn,’ she writes, ‘the expanding Christian British Empire becomes synonymous with the Kingdom of God.’24 It is a neat formulation, although the second line of this final verse would seem to suggest that the kingdom of God is in contrast to the earthly empires. What Ellerton is suggesting, however, is a global situation in which other religions will acknowledge (‘own’) the supremacy of the Christian God. The fighting is over: but until that happens, the missionary work has to go on. And although his text does not entirely support Tamke’s interpretation, there can be no doubt that in the Victorian mind there was a sense that the British Empire and Christianity were part of the same process of clearing away error and bringing order to parts of the world which needed both of these things. In pursuit of this aim, the public schools sang hymns in chapel which would encourage the development of the idea that spiritual warfare and literal warfare were indistinguishable. Tamke’s comment on ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’ is correct: ‘The language is … the language of the public school boy: competition, fighting, racing, winning prizes.’25 That education fitted young men to go out and govern an empire: it also helped them to see themselves as heroic, fighters in a good cause. The powerful ideology of Imperial greatness and benevolence had its apotheosis in the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria, Queen and Empress, in 1897; it has been steadily undermined in the twentieth century, and some of the admiration for postcolonial literature is owing to its ability to reflect the aspirations and hopes of newly independent peoples. In the nineteenth century, however, we can see that the examples of figures such as Vicars, Havelock and Gordon, and of dedicated missionaries, did much to create an atmosphere in which the fighting imagery of Saint Paul first became offensive rather than defensive, and then became subsumed into a general culture of political and religious expansionism. This in turn fed religious movements, such as the Christian



In her account on nineteenth-century hymnody, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord, Susan S. Tamke discusses the end of John Ellerton’s celebrated and moving hymn, ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’:

Endeavour Movement, which has a hymn book with a large section entitled ‘For Endeavourers on Active Service’. One result of all this was the patriotism and dedication of the Great War; another was the inevitable reaction after it, which has caused us to undervalue heroism, especially that strange combination of battle-field and religious heroism which has been the subject of this essay.22

Notes 01. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit. The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 7. 02. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 11. 03. St John G. Ervine’s biography of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, is entitled God’s Soldier. 04. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 16. 05. Ibid., p. 47. 06. For a detailed account of the cult of Saint Martin, see Sharon Farmer, Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). 07. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, p. 6. Vance uses, rightly I think, the term ‘Christian manliness’: Donald Hall and his colleagues return to the betterknown (but now inextricably associated with body-language) ‘muscular Christianity’. See the essays in Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity. Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 08. Anon., Soldiership and Christianity: Being a Review of the Memoirs of the late Captain Hedley Vicars (London, 1856), p. 9. 09. Ibid., p. 16. 10. General Havelock and Christian Soldiership. A Sermon by the Rev. Frederick S. Williams, Birkenhead. Delivered January 17th 1858 (London and Liverpool, 1858), p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 9. 12. John Clark Marshman, Memoirs of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, K. C. B. (London, 1860), p. 3. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Ibid., p. 14. 15. Ibid., p. 100. 16. Ibid., p. 95. 17. Ibid., p. 42. 18. The Soldier and the Saint; or, Two Heroes in One. A Christian Lecture in Memory of the Late General Havelock. By the Rev. W. H. Aylen, B. A., Minister of Carlisle Chapel, Kennington (London, 1858), p. 4. 19. James P. Grant, The Christian Soldier. Memorials of Major General Sir Henry Havelock, K. C. B. (London, 1858). See also A Good Soldier. A Sermon preached




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In Hoc Signo, pale nor dim, Lit the battle-field for him, And the prize he sought and won, Was the Crown for Duty done. 20. Susan S. Tamke, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 131–2. 21. Ibid., p. 63. 22. The finest study of the subject, though concentrating on a later period than this essay, is Lionel Adey’s Class and Idol in the English Hymn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), which contains a devastating critique of the use of battle-imagery in school hymn books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See especially chapter 13, ‘Wild Tongues Unloosed: Patriotic Hymns for Edwardian Schools’, and chapter 14, neatly entitled ‘Soldiers of Christ and the Sovereign’.



on the Occasion of the Death of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock Bart. K. C. B. by the Rev. Andrew Reed, B. A., Minister of Bedford Chapel, St Pancras. Published by request. London, n.d., but almost certainly 1858. Punch printed a poem in honour of Havelock, beginning ‘In Hoc Signo’:

The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism Lori M. Miller

Emily Scobell joined the Society of St. Margaret, an Anglican sisterhood, in 1857 against the vociferous objections of her elderly father.1 Two months after she joined the Order, she died of scarlet fever which she had contracted when nursing the poor. The bitterness which the Reverend Scobell harboured towards the St. Margaret’s Sisters and the founder of their Order, J. M. Neale, was quite apparent at her funeral in Lewes. In effect, her biological and spiritual families confronted each other across her coffin. The tension soon spilled over to a riot among the onlookers, the majority of whom seemed to be on her father’s side. Neale and the Sisters were forced to take refuge in the village pub until the mob lost interest. For Neale, one of the most troublesome things about the riot was his perception that Scobell deliberately failed to protect the Sisters. Neale claimed that when the riot began, ‘I stepped up to [Scobell] and said, “Mr. Scobell, you see how threatening the mob is, will you not protect the Sisters?” He bowed and passed … a rush was immediately made upon us.’2 Some scholars, notably John Shelton Reed and Susan Mumm, have discussed the Lewes riot as a testament to the threat that Anglican sisterhoods posed to the Victorian family as a source of an alternative role for women.3 But as much as this incident tells us about women’s place and the nature of Victorian femininity, it can also help us to understand Victorian ideas about masculinity. As we shall see, Neale expected Scobell to transcend his personal dislike of the St. Margaret’s Sisters to uphold his obligation as a man and protect them – even in the face of the palpable ill will that Scobell bore him and the Society. Scobell discerned no such obligation. Neale’s and Scobell’s actions at Emily’s funeral suggest that there was more than one conception of masculinity among Anglicans. 27 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Lori M. Miller

Using the writings of three prominent high Anglican men – Neale, E. B. Pusey and T. T. Carter – I shall argue that constructions of masculinity were not uniform even among Anglo-Catholics. Moreover, contrary to the prevailing interpretation in the historical literature, I contend that Anglo-Catholic masculinity was not altogether different from muscular Christianity, or indeed from Evangelical masculinity. To some extent, these figures’ enactments of masculinity were dependent on the audiences they were addressing; therefore, I also suggest that they may have ‘performed’ masculinity differently according to different situations.4 The figure of the male Anglo-Catholic has been somewhat difficult for scholars to sketch. The first treatment of the subject, David Hilliard’s pathbreaking 1982 article ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, suffers somewhat from its reliance on the accusatory tracts produced by Anglo-Catholicism’s opponents.5 In more recent works focusing specifically on the relationship of religion to masculinity, the Anglo-Catholic man has been somewhat neglected in favor of the evangelical and/or the muscular Christian.6 Biographical treatments focusing on the personal introspection of men who began as tractarian High Anglicans but ended as celebrated Roman Catholics – Newman and Manning, for example – have also been more prominent than those of men whose loyalties remained with the Church of England.7 An expanding body of literature on High Anglicanism’s appeal for women8 has made it very tempting for other scholars to reaffirm Hilliard’s basic premiss and link Anglo-Catholic sympathies in men to effeminacy and/or homosexuality. For example, John Shelton Reed, in his 1996 work Glorious Battle, has argued that ‘[Ritualism’s opponents] … believed that the movement often attracted and nourished young men who were indifferent to or repelled by the Victorians’ rigorous standards of manliness, and they were correct.’9 Here Reed seems to assume, as many historians have, that Victorian notions of manliness were uniform, unbending and rather static. Reed also describes muscular Christianity as the ‘cultural antithesis’ of AngloCatholicism.10 But another recent work, James Eli Adams’s Dandies and Desert Saints, strongly suggests that the two movements were not as diametrically opposed as we have previously thought.11 The writings of Pusey and Neale provide strong support for Adams’s assertion. Both Pusey and Neale frequently displayed elements of thought that were similar to muscular Christianity.



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The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism 29

E. B. Pusey had a hand in several High Anglican enterprises, ranging from writing some of the original Tracts for the Times to helping to found the first sisterhood at Park Village in 1845. As Regius Professor of Hebrew and a Canon of Christ Church, he also came into frequent contact with Oxford undergraduates. Attendance at Oxford would become something of a watchword for youthful male religious extravagance as the century progressed, but it is important to remind ourselves that such attendance did not necessarily result in a lemming-like dash over the cliffs of Ritualism and/or Roman Catholicism. Furthermore, Pusey’s example indicates that Oxford professors did not constitute a single cadre of Roman Catholic Svengalis out to corrupt undergraduates. Far from encouraging Oxford undergraduates in youthful religious excesses, Pusey consistently counselled them in the virtues of sobriety, stoicism and moderation – qualities that would have won applause from his Evangelical contemporaries. In fact, Pusey expressed some concern that a university town such as Oxford represented new temptations to naive young men.12 In the tradition of Evangelicals who admonished their flocks to know their spiritual enemies, he thought that early identification of one’s particular bête noire was the best way to begin combating it. In an 1861 sermon, he advised them: ‘Observe well, whence mostly thy temptation begins now: from imagination? or from the eye? or from past memories? or from over-fulness of food? For there the entrance on thy battle lies. It is for thy soul.’13 The potential seductions about which Pusey fretted seem relatively trivial to modern eyes, but even minor infractions could put an impressionable young man on the road to damnation in Pusey’s projections. Significantly, bodily transgressions could lead to spiritual consequences. But corporeal temptations could be overcome with corporeal solutions. In asking his audience to observe self-restraint, Pusey noted: I am not setting before you now hard things … I am speaking only of that self-discipline which your companions at times use, in order to fit their frames for a race. That moderate use of God’s creatures which He gives us for food, and that bodily exercise, which keeps the body in a tempered, unluxuriant state, save the soul from many trials.14 Pusey’s reference to the benefits of physical exercise – and his connection between those benefits and the state of one’s soul – would have



Muscular Anglo-Catholicism

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seemed familiar to ardent proponents of muscular Christianity.15 Clearly he believed that discipline of the physical self would keep the soul on course for salvation. Pusey’s mantra may not have resonated for all of the members of his audience, but it still serves as an important reminder that Oxford undergraduates were not served a steady diet of rhetoric romanticizing religion – even from one of the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement. The version of masculinity that Pusey promulgated depended heavily on the recognition of the connections between physical and spiritual discipline. Pusey’s emphasis on the physical experience was not unique among Anglo-Catholic clergymen.16 John Mason Neale also used language that linked masculinity to athleticism. Neale, however, did so when preaching to an overwhelmingly female audience. In an 1865 Good Friday sermon for the St. Margaret’s Sisters, Neale described Christ in this manner: ‘Now then, the Captain of our salvation has entered on His last battle. Now then, the Author and Finisher of our faith is nearly at the end of the race.’17 With this beginning to the sermon, Neale placed Christ in a situation that would have been familiar to many middleand upper-class Victorian men.18 Neale often compared Christ’s struggles to war, as did many nineteenth-century clergymen from both Anglican and nonconformist backgrounds. His placing of Christ in the context of a foot race, though, was quite striking, giving his audience a sense of urgency and immediacy. Since this particular sermon was preached on Good Friday, the day that Christ was crucified, Neale would have conjured the horrifying possibility of Christ being overtaken by the forces of evil in the home stretch of the race. But the hero – Christ – will of course emerge victorious and triumphant. In this respect, Neale’s imagery of the physical was quite strikingly similar to that of proponents of ‘muscular Christianity’, such as Kingsley and Hughes.19

Masculinity and the Hierarchy of the Church One of the central features of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is the power of Rugby’s headmaster, Dr Arnold, to rechannel the physicality of his charges towards higher Christian purposes. From the sermons he preached to Oxford undergraduates, we can gather that Pusey was possessed of similar impulses. Pusey’s commitment to moulding the minds of young men was of long standing; his positions as Regius Professor and Canon of Christ Church began in 1828. Pusey also devoted some thought to the spiritual training of young men who would take Holy Orders. In a neglected 1833 work, Remarks on the Prospective and Past



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would bring the young candidates for orders at once into the society and under the influence of their future Bishop and Diocesan, and of the elder Clergy. The Bishop, who now has scarcely any opportunity of becoming acquainted with those over whom he is afterwards to preside, and whom, as a father, he is to direct, until within a short time before their ordination, might with no great sacrifice of leisure, establish an intercourse with them, which would win their confidence, would often determine their character, and gain a cheerful and willing obedience to all his subsequent admonitions.20 Pusey expected proximity to one’s future Bishop to produce ‘cheerful and willing obedience’ in subsequent years. He also assumed that such proximity would put the definitive stamp on the candidates’ characters, and that the Bishop in each case would not abuse his potential influence. But perhaps the most intriguing part of Pusey’s vision was his assumption that Bishops would be better ‘fathers’ if they became better acquainted with their spiritual ‘sons’ in the early stages of training. As spiritual fathers, Bishops in Pusey’s schema would have possessed a good deal of authority, and the obedience they could have expected to exact would have derived from filial duty. The notion of spiritual ‘fatherhood’ would have been associated with Roman Catholicism and as such would have been viewed with suspicion by both Low and Broad Churchmen. For Pusey, however, the division of Anglican clergy into groups of fathers and sons derived from his conviction that the Church must have a hierarchy if it was to function effectively. He argued that ‘With regard … to the Clergy generally, it might be pointed out at length, of what advantage a gradation of rank is in every order of men, provided that gradation be formed upon [the] right principles [of piety, learning and experience].’21 We must note, then, that Pusey’s construction of masculinity encouraged submission to men with more accrued seniority and/or status in the system. Despite the fact that Pusey’s intended audience seems to have been the members of the very hierarchy that he sought to empower, the plan never came to fruition. The issue of episcopal authority, of course, would become an increasingly vexing issue for the Anglican Church in



Benefits of Cathedral Institutions in the Promotion of Sound Religious Knowledge and of Clerical Education, he set out a fairly detailed apprenticeship plan for newly ordained Anglican priests. The linchpin of Pusey’s plan was the attachment of theological training institutions to cathedrals of the Anglican Communion. In his view, such establishments

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the wake of the Gorham Case22 in 1848; the generation of Ritualists who came after Pusey would chafe at what they saw as reactionary resistance to Catholic innovations among the Bishops.23 But for Pusey, deference to the episcopacy was an important feature of how he judged himself as a man and as a priest. Throughout his long life, he would continue to uphold the authority of Bishops over the clerical rank and file, even when his own interests were at stake.24 Although J. M. Neale never intentionally flouted the authority of the episcopacy to the extent that the Ritualists would, he did encounter difficulties with his Bishop, which he found more difficult to resolve than Pusey had. Neale’s first (and last) clerical appointment of significant duration was to the Wardenship of Sackville College in East Grinstead, Sussex.25 Soon after his appointment, the Bishop of Chichester received complaints about his liturgical innovations. Although the grumblings did not originate with the residents of the College, in 1847 the Bishop took them seriously enough to inhibit Neale from performing priestly functions in the diocese under his jurisdiction.26 As Warden of the College, ‘[Neale’s] position was practically that of Chaplain to Lord De la Warr’, the patron of Sackville who controlled its endowment; therefore, the Bishop could not technically circumscribe Neale’s actions within the College walls.27 But effectively, the inhibition did mean that Neale could not preach outside Sackville, nor could he have performed baptisms or marriages had he been asked to do so. The Bishop eventually lifted the inhibition in 1852, but the tension between them remained. Neale felt that he had been unfairly treated, and he felt even more aggrieved as the Emily Scobell affair played out. After the Lewes riot in 1857, Mr Scobell published two pamphlets which forcefully articulated his belief that Neale had transgressed against paternal privilege by sheltering Emily in the sisterhood.28 Neale initially professed reluctance – out of respect for Emily Scobell’s memory – to respond publicly to Mr Scobell’s charges.29 When Neale’s rebuttal, The Lewes Riot, Its Causes and Consequences, did appear, it became clear that Neale also harboured resentment towards the Bishop of Chichester for his role in the affair. In Neale’s view, the Bishop had behaved both unfairly and improperly in the aftermath of Emily’s death. He had plainly sided with Scobell, even penning a fulsome letter of condolence to Scobell and signing himself ‘Your brother’.30 Neale sent the Mother Superior of the sisterhood to the Bishop to present their side of the story, but he refused to see her. In disgust, Neale wrote, ‘That anyone, be his rank or station what it may, should thus repulse a lady, whose only object in requesting an



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interview was to set herself right in his good opinion, I could not have believed.’31 Again, courtesy to women as a general rule – despite any personal antipathy to specific members of the sex – was an important part of Neale’s public tenets of masculinity. By stating that this trait was shared by men across class boundaries, Neale intimated that the Bishop’s offence was particularly egregious. Because the Bishop had failed to exhibit manners and chivalry in the presence of a lady, Neale could hint that the Bishop had, in effect, unsexed himself.32

Masculinity defined in relation to women In public, Neale tried to cultivate a demeanour that was consistent with his status as a man and a cleric. In his pamphlets, Scobell questioned Neale’s claims to both appellations. These accusations, as John Shelton Reed has noted, almost certainly stemmed from Scobell’s sense of entitlement to dictate the life of an unmarried daughter.33 What I wish to examine here is Neale’s interpretation of the events as they related to his conception of masculinity – his own and that of others. Despite his original reluctance to respond to Scobell, Neale finally did rise to his own defence and published a pamphlet. The subtext of Scobell’s bluster was a fear that Neale had emasculated him, not only by stealing his daughter, but by usurping his position as her parish priest. In one list of grievances he sent to Neale, Scobell wrote: ‘That you assume to yourself, and allow yourself to be viewed by my daughter and parishioner in the character of her spiritual guide and adviser, to my detriment as her natural parent and lawful parish priest.’34 I would venture to argue that Scobell felt nearly as threatened by Neale’s poaching of a parishioner as he was by his theft of a daughter. Indeed, throughout the letter, Scobell continually emphasized that his rights as a father and as a rightful spiritual adviser had been disregarded. Therefore, it is plausible to suggest that both roles were important to how he saw himself as a man. Neale defended his actions on the basis of Scobell’s failure to fulfil both roles adequately. He did not understand how Scobell could object to what he perceived as Emily Scobell’s genuine spiritual calling as a sister. Nor could he condone Scobell’s apparent violence towards his daughter and other family members. In a letter to Neale written shortly before she ran away to join the Society of St. Margaret, Emily stated: ‘There is no moment of the day I can feel in any degree safe from his anger; and the states of anger he goes into are truly awful: there have been times in which I have feared even for my life.’35 Neale claimed that he




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had always urged Emily to be open about her intentions to leave her father’s household and join the Sisterhood and, in fact, to seek his permission to do so.36 But when it became apparent that that permission would not be forthcoming, I believe that Neale began to cast himself as Emily’s rescuer. He seems to have seen it as his duty to ensure that she could test her spiritual vocation and to save her from her father’s wrath.37 Fundamentally, Neale sought to safeguard Emily’s spiritual and physical safety – goals that had originated with his perception of his responsibilities as a man. Despite the fact that he challenged the conventional prerogative of a father to direct the life of his daughter, Neale was clearly puzzled by the hostility he encountered after Emily’s death. In part, what distinguished Neale’s construction of masculinity from that of men like Pusey and Scobell was his ability selectively to enact conventional norms of masculinity. Neale, in fact, expressed some degree of bemusement at Scobell’s unwillingness or inability to present different public and private personas. Let us return to the scene of the Lewes riot, at the point when the surliness of the crowd boiled over into violence. Recall that Neale appealed to Scobell’s sense of chivalry and asked him to shelter the St. Margaret Sisters from the wrath of the mob. When Scobell demurred, Neale expressed amazement that male bystanders (presumably including Scobell himself) ‘could stand by and see ladies dashed this way and that, their veils dragged off, and their dresses torn’.38 Scobell’s actions suggest that he felt no responsibility for the Sisters, women who had left the protection of their fathers and brothers to join the Society of St. Margaret. In this respect, Scobell’s public behaviour mirrored his private opinions about the Sisters. Neale, on the other hand, expected that Scobell would put aside his personal antipathy to preserve appearances. Emily Scobell’s death became a cause célèbre among opponents of Sisterhoods, who often complained that women unsexed themselves by rejecting temporal families for spiritual ones. Such claims were frequently based on the notion that masculinity and femininity were fundamental opposites. Anglo-Catholicism’s appeal to women often meant that male adherents were decried as effeminate by their opponents. Unfortunately, some historians have emphasized this truism without investigating possible connections between Anglo-Catholic masculinity and other nineteenth-century versions of masculinity. For example, E. B. Pusey’s sermons to Oxford undergraduates reveal a



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decided belief that more stereotypically male characteristics were to be preferred – a belief that would certainly have resonated in other enclaves dominated by men. Pusey preached sermons similar to Evangelical sermons in their emphasis on a theology with little or no room for equivocation. He encouraged his audience of undergraduates to identify their central weaknesses in order to eliminate them, and thus have a better chance at achieving salvation. He admonished: Now, whereas the greatest peril of each of you is, lest he be yielding to his master-passion, and letting it gain dominion over him, the arch-deceit of Satan is to persuade you, that it is all well with you, because you are only yielding to that one. When you take account of yourselves, or when conscience smites you for having again yielded to your master-sin, he would persuade you to look away from it, and would suggest to you, that you are kind-hearted, or gentle, or noble-minded, generous, soon-forgiving, or the like. As if one, sick of consumption, were to think well of himself, because his heart was sound; or one dying of fever were to hope for life, because he had no atrophy!39 Pusey argued that young men should not delude themselves that easy virtues would compensate for yielding to a singular temptation. He did mention nobility of mind and generosity in the category of false redemptive qualities – features that could conceivably fall within the spectrum of desirable traits for men or women. But, more significantly, some of the qualities that Satan characterizes as reparative in Pusey’s scenario are what the Victorians would have considered to be appropriately feminine traits. In Pusey’s vision, kind-heartedness, gentleness and an easily forgiving nature were not in themselves enough to ensure salvation. These virtues would also permit the youthful sinner to congratulate himself for minor goodnesses, while overlooking potentially fatal flaws elsewhere in his character. In Pusey’s scenario, feminine traits were reinforced as weak and undesirable, ones that his male audience was told to avoid. Pusey’s attention to bodily metaphors is also important. To make his point more immediate, he cast spiritual danger in terms of bodily death. Both Pusey’s division of male and female and his attention to bodily metaphors would have resonated with men sympathetic to ideals of muscular Christianity, broadly construed. Charles Kingsley himself




Lori M. Miller

referred to ‘a healthy and manful Christianity, one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine’ when preaching to an audience of Cambridge undergraduates.40 In these respects, we can see that Anglo-Catholic masculinity – at least as promulgated by Pusey – had some things in common with a movement widely touted as its direct opposite or nemesis. Pusey, though, was not alone among Anglo-Catholics in defining the masculine in contrast to the feminine. Even though he was certainly one of the best friends that Anglican sisterhoods ever had, Thomas Thellusson Carter was also firmly of the mind that women should be subordinate to men, and that men and women were essentially different. Like Pusey, Carter was the founder of a sisterhood, the Community of St. John the Baptist in Clewer. This sisterhood engendered less controversy than did Neale’s Society of St. Margaret, in part because its first Mother Superior, Harriet Monsell, was a widow and therefore arguably less inclined to discount the benefits of earthly marriage to prospective postulants. We might also account for the relative lack of controversy attached to the Clewer community by noting that Monsell’s autonomy from Carter’s direction – at least in theory – was limited. In an undated letter, Carter wrote: ‘I have thought strongly that authority is needed in our English Communities, and that a male spiritual superior needs to have authority felt, otherwise the female element has it all in its own way.’41 Clearly, Carter gendered ‘authority’ as a male concept; women were not supposed to wield it. The implication here is also that English (read: Anglican) communities should be marked by their adherence to male authority, in presumed contrast to Roman Catholic communities in Ireland and on the Continent. Carter made distinct assumptions about what ‘male’ and ‘female’ meant, and his self-identity depended in some measure on distinguishing authority as a male privilege. Anything else would have been un-English.

A more fluid masculinity While Pusey’s and Carter’s constructions of masculinity were similar to mainstream norms, the ideas of J. M. Neale reveal a more complex and fluid process of gendering. At the beginning of his career, Neale was more inclined to accept a prevailing dichotomy between male and female domains. But in his sermons and letters to members of the Society of St. Margaret, which he founded in 1856, he gendered God and himself in different ways according to the circumstances.



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A hymn was given out – the Bishopess arose and led the singing, leaning gracefully over the pew door. Even at the very moment when silence is kept awhile, the Bishop’s wife commenced singing the Veni Creator Spiritus. Oh … is it not grievous? It was Ordination domesticated.42 Barely implicit here is Neale’s feeling that the ceremony was altogether too Low for his taste. The other, more interesting, aspect of this passage is that Neale was also lamenting the role of the Bishop’s wife in the liturgy.43 In his youthful estimation, she had usurped clerical functions that were reserved for men; at that point in his life, Neale was not prepared to accept deviations from the prescribed standard of male and female roles within the Church of England. Ordination was not to be a domestic event in which women participated. Later Neale found the boundary between masculine and feminine to be more permeable; men did not necessarily devalue themselves in his eyes if they expressed traits more commonly associated with women. Consider, for example, this passage from an 1856 sermon in which Neale reassured the St. Margaret’s Sisters that failing to attain complete self-assurance did not mean inevitable failure. Neale informed them: If you are discouraged with any difficulties, it is not leaving CHRIST crucified to say ‘I do not think I shall ever succeed.’ For consider how, at the very beginning of His ascent of Mount Calvary, He was not, to speak as a man, discouraged by His bodily weakness … not discouraged in that He fell three times under the weight of the Cross, not discouraged in that Simon the Cyrenian had to assist in bearing it.44 In other words, Christ’s manhood was not diminished by his admission of weakness. On the contrary, Neale implied that Christ’s ability to ask for assistance was crucial to the continuation of his journey. Therefore, if Christ, whose manhood subsumed his divinity in this instance, could admit to his weakness, then it was more than acceptable for the Sisters to admit to theirs. Neale kept up a constant stream of encouragement to the Sisters in his sermons, which was usually couched in very general terms. In 1855, though, one of the Sisters who was completing her nursing training at Westminster Hospital apparently needed more concrete reassurance.



In 1841, when he was 21, Neale was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester. Describing the service, Neale wrote to a friend,

Lori M. Miller

Neale wrote to her: ‘Remember that the meanest thing you have to do in the Hospital is glorious, if it is done for Him. I say from my heart, I would rather make one poultice, or clean one saucepan for His sake, than write the most learned book that ever was written, for my own.’45 Imagining Neale – the accomplished author and her spiritual mentor – up to his elbows in dirty dishes and bandage rolling must have been both amusing and jarring for this Sister. It is significant that Neale chose to illustrate the point in reference to himself, rather than merely repeating the value of self-sacrifice for women generally and Sisters specifically. Although the identity of this particular Sister is not known, it seems probable that her class background before her profession may not have equipped her to deal with saucepans and poultices.46 Neale may have been trying to help her to accept tasks not usually performed by members of her social class, by putting himself in her place and hypothetically assuming tasks usually performed by women. More commonly, Neale used analogies to war to encourage the St. Margaret’s Sisters to keep on with their work. He was not alone in using warlike imagery to describe spiritual battles, of course, but what is important is that he seems to have sanctioned bellicosity for both men and women. Joining a sisterhood was frequently decried as a too easy way out of the world; critics often held that women could more appropriately serve God within the frameworks of their families. In a sermon to the St. Margaret’s Sisters, Neale objected to this perception and encouraged them to persevere: I have said before now, how little, how infinitely little, they know about the matter, who say that a Sister’s life is a cowardly retiring from temptation: that they who remain in the world bear the brunt of the battle, while they who retire from it are in comparative shelter and safety! Ah! if they could read the records of Sisters’ lives in other ages – marvellously like those of the present day – how they would know that they and you voluntarily have gone forth into the thickest of the battle; that our dear LORD has placed you, as Joab did Uriah, in a place where He knew that the valiant men were!47 To Neale’s way of thinking, joining a sisterhood meant that a woman would be pitched headlong into ‘the thickest of the battle’ against the evils of the world. Courage in the face of adversity was not to be a trait limited to men. The reference to Uriah, who was sent on a suicide mission so that King David might have his wife Bathsheba, would have suggested to the Sisters that they must reconcile themselves to



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the possibility of a noble death (figurative or literal) for a cause that the outside world might see as hopeless or inglorious. Neale’s method of framing this point suggests a belief that women as well as men could be proactive participants in improving the world. Indeed, in this respect, the argument could be made that Neale encouraged women to partake of what Mark Girouard has dubbed ‘muscular chivalry’.48 Perhaps Neale’s most uncompromising depiction of the war theme came in an 1857 sermon in which he emphasized that the profession of a St. Margaret Sister was irrevocable. Once professed, she would not be able to rejoin the temporal world. In ‘No Turning Back’, Neale compared the possible soul-searching of the Sisters on their profession to his own assumption of clerical orders: ‘before, I was free to choose whether I would be devoted to GOD’s especial service or not, now I had no power to turn back; now I was like those generals who have landed on an enemy’s land, and then burnt their ships; now, what was before free choice, had become necessity.’49 In placing the options of Sisters alongside his own, Neale encouraged them to assume some of the culturally sanctioned attributes of Victorian masculinity: decisiveness, stoicism and even pugnacity to some extent. Neale did not always claim these attributes for himself publicly. Nor would he have chosen publicly to affirm his then unpopular belief that the vows of an Anglican religious were necessarily permanent. ‘No Turning Back’ was not published until after his death. Within the more private, otherwise all-female enclave of the sisterhood, Neale’s performance of his own masculinity was fairly fluid. Sometimes he emphasized aggression; on at least one occasion, he supported one of his spiritual charges through a difficult period by assuming the mantle of femininity himself. Likewise, he portrayed Christ differently according to the situation. Neale’s Christ sometimes upheld values very similar to what we remember as muscular Christianity, but at other times – when it seemed to Neale that despondency might overtake the Sisters – he displayed a more feminine side.

Conclusion It is important to note, as John Shelton Reed does, that men such as Pusey and Carter would have been at least one generation removed from the most extravagant Ritualists, who are more often linked with effeminacy and/or homosexuality.50 It is also important, however, to use their examples to illustrate that there were Anglo-Catholics who did attempt to reproduce conventional norms of masculinity.




Lori M. Miller

High Anglicanism and displays of conventional norms of masculinity (including muscular Christianity) were not mutually exclusive – even in the case of someone like Neale, who must be counted among the Highest of High Anglicans. This analysis, however, should not be read simply as an attempt to reclaim the English equivalent of machismo for Anglo-Catholicism. More work is needed to reach a more nuanced understanding of the complex and shifting relationships between expressions of gender and religion in the mid-Victorian period. As John Shelton Reed has rightly noted, Anglo-Catholicism appealed to some women and men because it had the potential to undermine various Victorian patriarchies.51 I have argued here that some threads of Anglo-Catholic thought did, in fact, buttress the privileges and responsibilities of stereotypically drawn Victorian manhood, while others diverged from conventional norms. Finally, Neale’s life and work indicate that ideas about what was appropriately masculine or feminine were neither static nor uniform in the mid-nineteenth century among High Anglicans. As we continue to witness the revival of interest in nineteenth-century British religion, I would urge scholars to pose questions about the intersections of spirituality and gender that resist the temptation to make reductive assumptions about Victorian beliefs.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in October 1998. My thanks to James Adams, Lydia Murdoch and other participants at the conference who made helpful comments about this work. This work has also benefited from the suggestions of M. Jeanne Peterson. 2. J. M. Neale, The Lewes Riot, Its Causes and Consequences (London: J. Masters, 1857), p. 28. In addition to Neale’s own account, my summary of the events of the Lewes riot is drawn mainly from John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), pp. 199–200 and 205–6, and Susan Mumm, ‘ “Lady Guerillas of Philanthropy”: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian England’ PhD diss. (Sussex University, 1992), p. 240. 3. Reed, Glorious Battle, pp. 205–6; Mumm, ‘Lady Guerillas’, pp. 239– 40. 4. I have borrowed the idea of gender as a performance, of course, from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 134 – 41. 5. David Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies (Winter 1982), pp. 181–210. See especially pp. 185–91.



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06. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, ‘ “Ye Are All One in Christ Jesus” ’, in Family Fortunes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 108–14; Donald Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 07. Newman in particular seems to be enjoying a revival at present. See, for example, Ian Ker, ed., Newman and Conversion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997) and David Goslee, Romanticism and the Anglican Newman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996). Two recent works that consider both Newman and Manning are David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals (London: John Murray, 1993), and Stuart Mews, ed., Modern Religious Rebels (London: Epworth Press, 1993). For Manning, see, for example, John Fitzsimons, ed., Manning, Anglican and Catholic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). In contrast, there has been only one book-length study of Pusey completed since 1960: David Forrester’s Young Doctor Pusey (London: Mowbray, 1989). 08. See, for example, Mumm; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England (London: SPCK, 1994). 09. Reed, Glorious Battle, p. 223. 10. Ibid., p. 219. 11. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). See, for example, Chapter 2, in which Adams considers Newman’s community at Littlemore with Arnold’s Rugby as two similar types of Victorian ‘brotherhoods’ (Adams does not use the term to refer to formally established Anglican religious orders for men). Adams also comes to the conclusion that the two leaders themselves have something in common: ‘For all their theological antagonism … both Newman and Arnold were identified with a newly energetic regimen of spiritual and ethical discipline’ (p. 76). 12. Oxford during most of Pusey’s tenure was still an exclusively male preserve. The first Oxford college for women opened in 1879. 13. E. B. Pusey, ‘The Thought of the Love of Jesus for Us, The Remedy for Sins of the Body’, in Lenten Sermons, Preached Chiefly to Young Men at the Universities, Between A.D. 1858–1874 (Oxford: Rivingtons for the Society of the Holy Trinity, 1874), p. 379. 14. Ibid., pp. 379–80. 15. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, for example, contains numerous accounts of athletic contests with undertones of moral struggles. For a particularly useful treatment of Hughes, see Dennis Brown, ‘Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” ’, in Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity. 16. In fact, M. Jeanne Peterson has recently argued that High Anglicanism defined itself through bodily metaphors, in contrast to Low Church theology, which stressed the acquisition of faith through words and knowledge. Peterson, ‘The Body in Victorian Religion’, unpublished paper. 17. Neale, ‘The Sevenfold Trumpet-Blast’, in Sermons for the Church Year, vol. 2 (London: J. T. Hayes, 1876), p. 269. 18. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Sisters would have been able to recognize these traits in their own fathers and brothers. In one sample of




19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Lori M. Miller Anglican Sisters professed between 1845 and 1900, Susan Mumm found that 66 per cent of them came from either aristocratic, gentry or professional families. See Mumm, ‘Lady Guerillas’, p. 358. For example, see Hughes’s description of the hare and hounds race in part I, chapter 6 of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 [ed. Andrew Sanders]), pp. 146–52. Pusey, Remarks on the Prospective and Past Benefits of Cathedral Institutions in the Promotion of Sound Religious Knowledge and of Clerical Education (in The Oxford Movement: Tractarian Pamphlets at Pusey House, Halifax and Church sub-collections; London: World Microfilms Publications, 1986, microfilm), p. 74, Reel 5, number 93. Ibid., pp. 10 –11. The Gorham case originated in a dispute between Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, and a priest appointed to his diocese, George C. Gorham, over the meaning of baptism: the latter held that baptism was a precursor to moral regeneration later in life, the former that, as a sacrament, baptism meant that one would be wholly regenerated. Phillpotts refused to confirm Gorham’s appointment, a decision upheld by the episcopal Court of Arches, but Gorham won an appeal on the grounds that his interpretation could be consistent with Church of England doctrine. Among other things, the judgment implied that a bishop’s control over his diocese was not absolute, although it did not clearly define the limits of such authority. The High Church party, in the person of Phillpotts, lost this particular round; ironically, Ritualists would later suggest that the result established a precedent for questioning the authority of bishops. For an accessible account of the Gorham Judgment, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, part I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 250 –9. See, for example, Reed’s account of Pusey’s difficulties with Bishop Longley over the construction of his church of St. Saviour’s, Leeds; Reed, Glorious Battle, pp. 21–5. Sackville College was a private almshouse for aged pensioners. Inhibition in the nineteenth century, and in the present time, is a relatively rare and serious procedure by which a bishop suspends a member of the clergy in his diocese from the performance of routine duties. Eleanor A. Towle, John Mason Neale, D.D., a Memoir (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 150. See John Scobell, A Letter to the Rev. John M. Neale, Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead (London: Nisbet, 1857), and The Reverend J. M. Neale and the Institute of St. Margaret’s, East Grinstead (London: Nisbet, 1857). See appendix in Neale, The Lewes Riot, p. 39. Appendix in ibid., p. 37. The Bishop of Chichester subsequently inhibited Neale again; this inhibition was to be removed in 1860. Neale, The Lewes Riot, p. 5. For more on the connections between masculinity and chivalry in nineteenth-century England, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). In my view, Neale’s conception of masculinity does not correspond easily to Girouard’s depiction because Neale expected chivalry to cross class lines.



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33. Reed, Glorious Battle, pp. 200 and 206. 34. Letter from John Scobell to J. M. Neale, February 1857, reprinted in Neale, The Lewes Riot, p. 18. 35. Letter from Emily Scobell to J. M. Neale, April 1857, excerpted in Neale, The Lewes Riot, p. 15. The emphasis is either Emily Scobell’s or Neale’s. 36. Neale, The Lewes Riot, p. 10. 37. Ibid., pp. 14 –15 and 39. 38. Ibid., p. 28. 39. Pusey, ‘Almost Thou Persuadest Me to Be a Christian’, in Lenten Sermons, pp. 60 –1. 40. Charles Kingsley, David: Four Sermons (1865), quoted in Girouard, p. 143. 41. Thomas Thellusson Carter, Life and Letters of Thomas Thellusson Carter, 3rd edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), p. 139. Emphasis in the original. 42. J. M. Neale to E. W. Webb, 17 August 1841, in Letters of John Mason Neale D.D., ‘selected and edited by his daughter’ [Katharine Ermenild Neale, at that time the Mother Superior of the Society of St. Margaret] (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), p. 26. 43. ‘Bishopess’ in this context seems to indicate derision on Neale’s part. 44. J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year (London: J. T. Hayes, 1876), vol. 2, p. 121. The emphasis is mine. 45. Letters of John Mason Neale D.D., p. 241. 46. Mumm, ‘Lady Guerillas’, p. 358. 47. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year, vol. 2, p. 60. 48. See Girouard, Chapter 9, ‘Muscular Chivalry,’ pp. 130 – 44. 49. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, ser. 2 vol. 1 (London: J. Masters, 1879), p. 217. 50. Reed, Glorious Battle, pp. 125–6. 51. Reed, ‘ “A Female Movement”: The Feminization of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Catholicism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 57 (1988): pp. 200 –1.




Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary Carol Marie Engelhardt

The Virgin Mary was one of the most controversial figures in Victorian England, a powerful presence who embodied what many Victorians considered to be the errors of the Roman Catholic Church.1 These included pagan idolatry, superstition and wilful ignorance of the Bible, all of which were summed up in a single word: Mariolatry. Such attacks on the Virgin Mary were an important feature of England’s long and sometimes violent history of anti-Roman Catholicism, which dates back to the Henrician Schism of the 1530s and 1540s. They were also an expression of some of the very real theological and liturgical differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation and post-Reformation Churches. While acknowledging the historical and religious roots of Marian controversies, this essay considers another – and given the simultaneous importance and instability of gender as a defining characteristic in Victorian England, possibly more pressing – reason why Mary inspired such outrage. This woman, whom Roman Catholics addressed as the ‘Queen of Heaven’, the ‘Queen of Mercy’, the ‘Most powerful Mediatrix’ and the ‘Dispensatrix of Divine Grace’, appeared to usurp the power of her son. Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford from 1845 to 1869, spoke for many Victorian Christians when he accused the Roman Catholic Church of promoting ‘a whole system which does place on the Mediator’s throne the Virgin mother instead of the incarnate Son’.2 Wilberforce’s criticism exemplified the confluence between two of the major forces that shaped Victorian culture: Christianity and the ideology of separate spheres. This coincidence was obvious in the criticisms of the Virgin Mary’s position in the Roman Catholic Church that recurred throughout the nineteenth century. The vast majority of those who publicly detailed their protests against the Virgin Mary’s expanded 44 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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role were men whose comments necessarily reflected their culture’s idealization of men as rational and self-controlled Christians. George Mosse reminds us that ‘Men cannot be seen in isolation; women are always present in men’s own self-image.’3 Therefore, delineating the Virgin Mary’s realm of action allowed Victorian men to define and defend a masculine sphere. This essay examines how three very different Victorian clergymen used their disparate understandings of the Virgin Mary to reinforce Victorian normative masculine identity. Charles Kingsley (1819–75), Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82) and Frederick W. Faber (1814–63) were fierce antagonists during their lifetimes. This antagonism was manifested, ironically, in their defending markedly different types of Christianity. Kingsley was a pugnacious supporter of the Protestant identity of the Church of England, while Faber was one of the most prominent English spokesmen for the ornate form of Roman Catholicism which was more typical of the Continent than of England. Pusey was positioned between the two, guarding the Catholic identity of the Church of England against both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Their differences sometimes brought these men into open conflict: for example, in 1863 Pusey blocked Kingsley from receiving an honorary degree from the University of Oxford on the grounds that his novel Hypatia was immoral. They also represented very different types of masculinity. Kingsley’s name is inextricably linked with ‘muscular Christianity’ (a phrase he loathed), which was largely defined in contrast to Pusey’s ascetic, cerebral image. Faber’s celibacy rendered his masculinity suspect to many Victorians of his class, and more than one biographer has noted the ‘homosexual element in Faber’s early friendships’.4 Even their similarities divided them: although Kingsley and Faber were both intensely emotional (and were often described as ‘feminine’ in this regard), their affections sought different ends: Kingsley’s emotionalism was directed towards his wife, children, friends and the objects of his social reforming zeal; while Faber’s was inspired by his religious brothers, his fellow Roman Catholics and the saints – especially the Virgin Mary. Despite their significant differences, these men were similar in a number of important ways. They were all prominent public figures who spanned a single generation and shared a profession, an Oxbridge education and a fervent devotion to Christianity. Furthermore, their descriptions of, and reactions to, the Virgin Mary revealed a shared purpose. Each used the Virgin Mary to define his masculinity. In describing the Virgin Mary, each was also describing an idealized image of himself as a man. Examining the conflicting views that Kingsley,



Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary 45

Carol Marie Engelhardt

Pusey and Faber held regarding the Virgin Mary will illuminate the role of the feminine in the construction of Victorian masculinity and suggest that these men had more in common than any of them might have liked to admit. Charles Kingsley spent much of his life combatting Catholicism, both Roman Catholicism and the movement within his own Church which came to be called Anglo-Catholicism. His opposition to Catholicism stemmed from a variety of factors, including his wife’s early intention to join a Tractarian Order (a plan that was derailed in 1839 when she met Kingsley and fell in love), and his belief that the Roman Catholic Church ignored the problem of poverty, which so preoccupied him.5 Therefore, it is not surprising that he approached the Virgin Mary with outright hostility. His view of her as a domineering mother who reduced grown men to helpless infants is evident in an exchange between Lancelot, the Protestant hero of his novel Yeast: A Problem (1851), and Lancelot’s cousin Luke, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. Luke is a pathetic creature who admits to his cousin that the Virgin Mary satisfies his desire for a mother who will guide and protect him, even though he is an adult: I am weak … I am longing to be once more an infant on a mother’s breast … . I am a weary child, who knows nothing … . Will you reproach me because when I see a soft cradle lying open for me … [sic] with a Virgin Mother’s face smiling down all woman[’s] love above it … [sic] I long to crawl into it, and sleep awhile? I want loving, indulgent sympathy [sic] I want detailed, explicit guidance.6 Luke’s regression to infancy is especially condemned in the novel because his father has just become a bankrupt. However, instead of struggling in the masculine world to restore the family’s fortune and honour, Luke seeks the refuge of a cradle and the reassurance of a loving mother. The comfort Mary provides seems to have been the impetus for Luke’s conversion, which further demonstrates Kingsley’s conviction that the Roman Catholic Church offered only a corrupting effeminacy. Weakness manifested as love for the Virgin Mary leads Luke to disavow his manly duties and seek out a church that many Victorians almost reflexively believed was pagan. Echoing the author’s preference for a God who was a strong man, Lancelot rejects the saccharine comfort his cousin seeks, declaring, ‘I am not a child, but a man; I want not a mother to pet, but a man to



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rule me.’7 Paradoxically, Lancelot’s masculine strength is revealed by his deference to a masculine God who alone can limit his independence. Yet Lancelot does not reject women entirely: he seeks the love of Argemone, the woman whom he hopes will be his wife, helper and spiritual guide. Her death, however, enables Lancelot to join two male companions in searching the world for wisdom. This conclusion only confirms the novel’s underlying premiss that women – whether the ethereal Argemone or the absent Virgin Mary – distract men from their duty to struggle, and ultimately to triumph, in the wider world. The most obvious reason for Kingsley’s dislike of Mary was his wellknown hatred of Catholicism. We cannot, however, ascribe his attacks on the Virgin Mary solely to anti-Catholicism, for they also illuminate his conception of the proper relationship between men and women. Kingsley’s very Victorian conviction that women were to be angels who would inspire the men around them to greatness was integral to his conception of masculinity.8 This view, which informed Lancelot’s request that the devout Argemone save him, was the pattern of Kingsley’s own marriage. Neither author nor hero relinquished any real power to the women they loved; rather, their reliance on feminine spirituality and domesticity excluded women from the public world. The world outside the home was the preserve of men whose fitness to govern there was confirmed by their refusal to be ruled by anyone other than a masculine God. These attacks also revealed Kingsley’s anxieties about his own masculinity. As James Eli Adams has noted: Kingsley’s obsessive, furious attacks on ‘Jesuit’ effeminacy and treachery, not only in his famous controversy with Newman but throughout novels, periodical articles, sermons, and letters, have suggested to many commentators a nearly hysterical disavowal of unsettling features of his own character.9 Earlier in his life, Kingsley had been drawn towards Roman Catholicism. He had, he confessed, ‘longed for Rome, and boldly faced the consequences of joining Rome’.10 Roman Catholicism was popularly stereotyped as an irrational, emotional and highly decorative religion, which particularly appealed to women and unmanly men. It was no wonder, then, that Kingsley felt compelled to reject vociferously the most feminine part of this allegedly effeminate religion. Kingsley was not just denouncing Mary; he was repudiating what he considered to be his own weakness and error in desiring Rome.





Owen Chadwick has noted the connection between Kingsley’s sensual nature and his anti-Catholicism.11 Kingsley was firmly opposed to celibacy, partly because a fulfilling sex life was important to him. The ascetic masculine ideal personified by Roman Catholic saints Kingsley condemned as ‘a prayer-mongering eunuch’.12 Kingsley’s equation of celibacy and untrustworthiness was certainly obvious in his famous – and, for him, unfortunate – controversy with John Henry Newman in 1864. Sexuality was not at all incongruous with his Christianity, for as Kingsley’s drawings of himself and his fiancée nude on a cross rather shockingly demonstrated, he did not separate sex and religion. Surely another reason for Kingsley’s opposition to the Virgin Mary, then, was her identity as an eternal virgin. A man as committed to family life as Kingsley would see the choice of virginity not simply as a private matter, but as one that affected others – particularly the celibate’s potential marriage partner. Kingsley had personal experience in combatting the celibate ideal. As noted above, his wife, Fanny, had considered entering a Tractarian convent before she met Kingsley, and her sister Charlotte was on the verge of entering a Roman Catholic convent when she met her future husband, James Anthony Froude, at the Kingsleys’ home. The choice of virginity would have been, for Kingsley, even more untenable had it been made by a married woman. If Mary had remained a virgin even after the birth of Jesus – as Christians had traditionally agreed, at least until the nineteenth century, that she did, and which Catholics continued to maintain13 – her husband would have been bound by her choice, willingly or not. Kingsley viewed this decision as unacceptable and even unnatural, both because it denied physical pleasure and because it went against his belief that virility was proof of masculinity. As important as marital sexual satisfaction was to Kingsley, he was disturbed by more than the repudiation of that pleasure. Mary Daly has argued that the ‘absurdity’ of the belief in Mary’s eternal virginity ‘literally screams that biology and abstinence from sexual activity are not the essential dimensions of the symbol of Mary as a virgin.’ ‘Instead’, Daly contends, an eternally virgin Mary embodies ‘female autonomy within the context of sexual and patriarchal relationships’.14 Kingsley’s anxiety about Mary’s status was surely generated by this perceived autonomy more than by her lack of a sexual identity. It was not merely the renouncing of physical pleasure and corporeal union, but the independence that virginity conferred that Kingsley found objectionable. Kingsley’s intense dislike of this independence was manifest when he described his horror at hearing that ‘a Romish priest’ had advised a



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Ah! thought I, if your head had once rested on a lover’s bosom, and your heart had known the mighty stay of a man’s affection, you would have learned to go now in your sore need, not to the Mother but to the Son – not to the indulgent Virgin, but to the strong man, Christ Jesus – stern because loving – who does not shrink from punishing, and yet does it as a man would do it, ‘mighty to save’.15 The misguided attraction to the Virgin Mother could be cured, in other words, by physical passion. In seeking ‘the mighty stay of a man’s affection’, the errant woman would also turn back to the true religion offered by ‘the strong man, Christ Jesus’. Kingsley’s appeal to a dichotomy between male and female was a staple of Victorian culture. Even the corollary belief that the feminine was the weaker and less desirable alternative to the masculine was characteristic of both the man and the period, for underlying the praise of women’s domestic virtues was the assumption that they were incapable of competing in the masculine world. Yet Kingsley’s rejection of the Virgin Mary is striking, for it presented the weaker woman as the aggressive interloper. The ‘indulgent’ Mary that Kingsley described was actually a real threat to Jesus, whose role she usurped, as well as to those sinners whom she prevented from turning to Him for comfort and guidance. This inadvertent admission of the Virgin Mary’s power undercut Kingsley’s dismissal of the Virgin Mary as it revealed his uncertainty about masculinity. The straw woman Kingsley had set out to dethrone turned out to be a tenacious threat to the masculine preserve. Although Kingsley’s hostility towards the Virgin Mary represented the majority viewpoint in Victorian England, it was not the only one. As members of the Oxford Movement reasserted the Catholic identity of the Church of England, they revived older forms of piety, including the Marian devotion of the Caroline divines, and thus many of them held a more nuanced view of Jesus’ mother. Edward Bouverie Pusey, a leader of the advanced High Church movement, was one of the most prominent Anglicans who urged that the Church of England allow a limited devotion towards the Virgin. Pusey showed his esteem for the Virgin Mary by reserving the Patristic title Theotokos (literally, ‘God-bearer’, but usually translated as ‘Mother of God’) to describe her, and he praised her for being ‘a moral



woman in need of solace to ‘Go to the Blessed Virgin. She, you know, is a woman, and can understand all a woman’s feelings.’ Not surprisingly, Kingsley rejected this advice by proclaiming the virtues of romantic love and manly strength:


instrument of our common redemption’.16 Echoing the approbation of female piety that was common in Victorian rhetoric, he placed Mary in the role of the devout woman when he asserted that ‘she with all the inhabitants of heaven, and she more eminently than all, does pray for us’.17 Disagreeing with the vast majority of Victorians who believed that ascribing any special characteristics to the Virgin Mary would lead to the worship of her, Pusey was even willing to accept that Mary’s soul was sanctified ‘at the first moment of existence’. However, he resisted assenting to the Immaculate Conception – the Roman Catholic belief that Mary had been conceived without sin, which became dogma in 1854 – for fear that it would be applied to Mary’s body as well as to her soul.18 The Virgin Mary that Pusey admired was essentially the stereotypical Angel in the House writ large: her primary purpose in life was fulfilled when she became a mother; her prayers were not only constant but were also exceptionally effective; and her moral superiority was evidenced by her being free of sin. Though the angelic woman was credited with wielding moral power, Pusey’s description of the Virgin Mary reminds us that the same ideology that bestowed that power also severely limited it. Pusey’s admiration for Mary did not extend to allowing her a significant role in Jesus’ work. He was certain that human redemption did not depend on her agreeing to bear Jesus, for had she declined – an impossibility, he argued, because God had prepared her to say yes – ‘the Incarnation might have been delayed for a while; it could not have failed’.19 He further denied that Mary was an active participant in divine affairs when he declared that she had no influence over Jesus and was not the channel of all graces.20 Although his praise for Mary’s virtues seemed to suggest that he accepted her as an actor in the drama of human redemption, Pusey, like Kingsley, ultimately believed that Mary’s virtue gave her no access to real power. While commending Mary’s obedience to God’s will, Pusey declared that she neither guided her son nor played any substantive role in the salvation of humanity. Pusey and Kingsley were at odds theologically and liturgically, yet they agreed that Roman Catholics frequently looked to Mary rather than to God. Echoing Kingsley’s account of the ‘Romish priest’, Pusey said Roman Catholics had frequently recommended that he pray to Mary rather than to Jesus. This fundamental difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, he asserted, was recognized even ‘In Southern India and Ceylon, [where] our Churches are called by the natives ‘Jesus-Churches’; the Roman Catholic Churches ‘MaryChurches’.21



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The bulk of Pusey’s protests against Marian devotion were directed against what he called ‘the whole system contained in [St. Alphonsus Liguori’s] The Glories of Mary’.22 Victorian clergymen often targeted Liguori (1696–1787), the Italian founder of the missionary Redemptorist Order, as typifying Roman Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. Liguori’s devotion was indeed richly baroque. Mary was his ‘most holy Queen’,23 ‘the most beautiful, the most holy, the most amiable, and the most beloved of God’,24 while he himself was her ‘most loving, though most unworthy servant’.25 Pusey and other Victorian clergymen accused Liguori of, among other sins, idolatry, blasphemy and paganism in his Marian writings.26 Pusey was therefore only joining the Victorian chorus when he declared that Liguori’s works were representative of Roman Catholicism and warned potential converts that they should not ‘join it [the Roman Catholic Church], unless [they] could receive the practical system, as taught by Liguori’.27 However, Liguori’s devotional style was not typical of Victorian Roman Catholicism. Mary Heimann has shown that Richard Challoner’s recusant (and therefore more restrained) The Garden of the Soul (c. 1740) was more representative of Victorian Roman Catholic piety, for it ‘continued to be easily the most frequently reprinted Catholic prayer-book in England throughout the period 1850–1914’.28 The effusive piety that Liguori typified was useful to opponents of Roman Catholicism because it allowed them to claim that Mary, not her son, was the object of worship in English Roman Catholic churches. It also encouraged alliances, such as that between Pusey and Kingsley, which would otherwise have been unlikely, if not impossible. Pusey’s image of Mary reflected his view of women, a view that shaped his relationships with his wife and Priscilla Lydia Sellon, the foundress of the Society of Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Trinity in Devenport. Although he deeply loved his wife, Maria, he was in charge of the household; it was at his instigation that the Pusey children were punished severely for minor infractions and that the family fasted, even when his wife was dying of tuberculosis and the children were ill.29 Likewise, his relationship with Sellon was a paternal one, as marked by the fact that she addressed him as ‘Father’ (which indicated her association with Tractarianism as well as her filial devotion to him). A. M. Allchin has argued convincingly, in The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845–1900, that the Sisterhoods established and supported by members of the Oxford Movement gave women useful work to do and thus were an integral part of ‘the first phases of the drive for the emancipation of women’.30 However, Pusey’s reluctance





to allow female autonomy reminds us that these Sisterhoods were not intended to give women a public role equal to that accorded to men. All Pusey’s relationships with women – with his wife, Sellon, the Virgin Mary – were therefore marked by his insistence on establishing masculine authority. Although his persona was less aggressively masculine than his sometime rival’s, he was more successful in defending a sphere of masculine authority than was Kingsley. Because Pusey’s serious and austere personality manifested no hint of any feminine tendencies, his reaction to the presence of the Virgin Mary was unmarred by an hysterical disavowal of what he feared in himself. Pusey’s ability to praise the Virgin as a model of devout femininity enabled him also to limit her activities to those that supported masculine and divine authority. The trepidation and even horror with which Pusey and Kingsley viewed the Virgin Mary was alien to Roman Catholics, who encouraged Christians to see Mary as an attentive mother who could protect and aid them in times of trouble. One of the most ardent advocates of this viewpoint was Frederick W. Faber, who joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. Faber quickly adopted an intensely emotional devotional style, which included inviting his co-religionists to join him in addressing Mary as ‘Dear Mama’ or even ‘Dearest Mama’.31 Faber offered a view of the Virgin Mary that was so baroque that he could have easily been the model for Luke in Yeast. Although he reminded his audience (and possibly himself as well) that Mary was a human being who needed divine redemption and that God was the ultimate object of worship, within these boundaries his devotion to this maternal figure who was the subject of many of his works was effusive and as easily misunderstood by many non-Roman Catholics as it was uncongenial to English Roman Catholics. Unlike Pusey and Kingsley – and this is a crucial distinction – Faber did not see Mary as essentially independent; for him her primary identification as mother meant that she was always understood in relation to others. Faber, like Luke, found in Mary a mother who loved, comforted and attended to him. Physical absence was no barrier to their relationship: shortly after his conversion, he confided to a friend that he had ‘asked a great thing of our dear Lady in the Santa Casa and she got it for me in ten minutes’.32 Faber’s enthusiastic embrace of the traditional Roman Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary was mother of all33 was attributable at least in part to the catastrophe of his adolescence: the death of his beloved mother in 1829, when he was 15 years old and away at school. Deprived of his earthly mother, he turned to a more



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powerful heavenly mother. This transference of filial love was not unique: after the mother of Herbert Vaughan, the future Cardinal of Westminster, died in 1853, Vaughan assured his father that ‘The Blessed Virgin will now more than ever be to us a mother.’34 Unlike Kingsley and Pusey, Faber believed that Mary’s identity as the mother of Jesus allowed her such authority and influence that she became the central figure – after the Trinity – in the story of salvation. He emphasized the connection between Mary and the divine by frequently describing Mary’s closeness to her son throughout his earthly life. Paralleling the praise of young mothers which was prominent in Victorian fiction, Faber imagined the infant Jesus clasping Mary’s neck ‘In timid tight embrace’, playing with her hair and obeying her.35 However, he extended Mary’s role beyond the time Victorians might expect her son to rely on her when he asserted that Jesus appeared to Mary immediately after his resurrection (an event for which there is no scriptural evidence).36 Faber also credited Mary with having a central role in the earthly Church when he described her, in various hymns and poems, as the Queen of the early Church and the mother who ‘rul[ed] their [the apostles’] infant ways’ in the time between Jesus’ ascension into heaven and Pentecost (he attributed the latter event in part to Mary’s prayer).37 Although Faber’s opponents often objected to his extension of Mary’s authority over Jesus during his earthly life, his description of the apostles – those adult men whom Jesus had chosen to be his companions and to carry on his work – as babies in need of maternal supervision was equally subversive of male – and priestly – authority. This vision of the early Church found little sympathy in a faith and a culture that did not allow women such authority over the male hierarchy. (Queen Victoria, of course, was the head of the Church of England, but she was certainly not a mother who ruled ‘the infant ways’ of Anglican prelates.) The influence and authority Faber attributed to the Virgin Mary explains why his view of Mary was a minority one, within both the small community of the English Roman Catholic Church and the larger Victorian culture. The discomfort or distaste Victorians expressed about Faber’s Marian spirituality was, however, ironic, for the Mary that Faber portrayed was the logical extension of the angelic image that was a significant characteristic of Victorian culture. Unlike Pusey’s vision of Mary as a compliant Angel in the House, Faber’s Mary showed the potential power of this persona. Mary’s will accorded with heaven’s, she was the eternal virgin and mother who cherished her





multitudinous children, and her virtue allowed her unparalleled influence. As Kingsley’s and Pusey’s limiting of Mary’s role revealed, however, Mary’s conformity to and extension of the angelic ideal ultimately had the potential to destabilize gender roles that were central to Victorian culture. In her most extravagant incarnation as the exceptionally powerful woman who reduced men to infants, she overshadowed the Victorian ideal of the powerful man who was the ultimate authority figure. It is tempting to see Faber, both as a Christian and as a man, as the antithesis of Kingsley and Pusey, both of whom insisted on preserving masculine authority. However, Faber actually shared their conservative views of gender relations. Although Faber’s Victorian opponents charged that his praise of Mary undermined masculine authority, the opposite was true. Claiming Mary as his mother reinforced Faber’s priestly identification with Jesus: if they shared a mother as well as a heavenly Father, they were truly brothers. While the Roman Catholic identification of Mary as the mother of all meant that this familial relationship was open to all, the authority it conveyed was not. In the case of Faber and other priests, whose role was that of God’s representatives on earth, this identification strengthened their association with Jesus, and thus their claim to speak for him on earth. Nor did the Virgin Mary provide a model for female leadership in Faber’s theology. Mary’s unique role as divine mother meant that her authority was not transferrable to other women. Her example did not lift her earthly sisters from their traditional place as the inferior daughters of Eve; instead, the power she wielded only emphasized their weakness. As Adrienne Munich has noted about Queen Victoria, ‘One queen does not make room for others.’38 The inability of other women to gain access to the Virgin Mary’s source of authority – her divine motherhood – prevented them from being her representatives on earth. Faber’s invocation of the Virgin Mary, then, allowed him to accomplish in one way what Pusey and Kingsley had in another. While Faber linked himself with Jesus by asserting that they shared a mother, Pusey and Kingsley identified themselves with Jesus by protecting his prerogatives and his realm of action against the usurping woman. While Faber eliminated female virtue as a challenge to masculine authority by embracing the Virgin Mary and highlighting her unique qualities, Pusey and Kingsley accomplished the same goal by minimizing or denying those same qualities. Although Kingsley’s hysterical reaction to the Virgin Mary suggested her potential capacity to destabilize Victorian gender norms, Pusey’s and Faber’s praise of Mary revealed



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the means by which that danger could be minimized or eliminated. The Virgin Mary was therefore not as dangerous as Victorians generally believed her to be. Rather than being a subversive figure who jeopardized the gender distinctions on which Victorian culture relied, she ultimately proved useful in a variety of ways to confirm male superiority.

Notes 01. A version of this chapter was read at the 1998 North American Conference on British Studies. I wish to thank the other panel members and the audience for their comments. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the history department at Radford University and to James Eli Adams for their comments on this essay. 02. [Samuel Wilberforce], Rome – Her New Dogma and Our Duties. A Sermon, preached before the University, at St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1855 (Oxford and London: John Henry Parker, n.d. [1855?]), p. 22. 03. George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 53. 04. Ronald Chapman, Father Faber (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1961), p. 48. 05. Brenda Colloms, Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley (London: Constable, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), p. 268. 06. Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (London: John W. Parker, 1851), p. 86. 07. Kingsley, Yeast, p. 282. Lancelot was the spokesman for Kingsley’s view of Marian devotion: in a letter to a country rector, dated 26 Jan 1851, Kingsley complained that the Roman Catholic Church ‘substitut[ed] a Virgin Mary, who is to nurse them like infants, for a Father in whom they are men and brothers’ (Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life (2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890), 1: p. 100, emphasis in original. See also pp. 104–5). 08. Although some scholars question whether the importance of the angelic ideal in Victorian culture has been overemphasized, in Kingsley’s case the term is accurate, for he often described women as angels. For example, Argemone’s sister Honoria is ‘an angel of holiness’ (Yeast, p. 51). 09. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 132. 10. Charles Kingsley, letter to an unnamed correspondent, 11 May 1849. British Library, Kingsley Papers, vol. 2, f. 42. Reprinted in Margaret Farrand Thorp, Charles Kingsley 1819–1875 (1937; NY: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 20. 11. Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 126. 12. 11 May 1849, f. 46. 13. Mary’s perpetual virginity had been a belief of the early Church and was affirmed by the Protestant reformers, including Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Wesley. See Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine




14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

Carol Marie Engelhardt and Devotion (NY: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 2, pp. 8, 13, 14 and John Wesley, letter to ‘a Roman Catholic’, July 18, 1749, in The Letters of John Wesley, ed. John Telford (London: Epworth, 1931): 3, p. 9. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 85. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life, edited by his wife (London and New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 104–5, emphasis in original. E. B. Pusey, First Letter to the Very Rev. J.H. Newman D.D., in Explanation Chiefly in Regard to the Reverential Love Due to the Ever-Blessed Theotokos, and the Doctrine of her Immaculate Conception, with an analysis of Cardinal de Turrecremata’s Work on the Immaculate Conception (Oxford: James Parker, London: Rivingtons, 1869), 23, emphasis in original. Pusey, First Letter to Newman, p. 33. Pusey, First Letter to Newman, pp. 52, 58–9. Pusey, First Letter to Newman, p. 23. Pusey, First Letter to Newman, pp. 36, 39. Pusey, Eirenicon, pp. 107–8. E. B. Pusey, letter to John Henry Newman, n.d. [5 January 1865?]. Pusey House, LBV 121/7. Alphonsus Liguori, Visits to the Most Holy Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin Mary. A new translation, edited by the Rev. R. A. Coffin, C.SS.R. (London: Burns and Lambert, 1858), 1–2. Liguori, pp. 1–2. Liguori, p. 128. For examples of Victorian criticisms of Liguori, see Pusey, First Letter to Newman; [Thomas Hartwell Home], Mariolatry: or, Facts and Evidences Demonstrating the Worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Church of Rome, 2nd edition (London: William Edward Painter, 1841), p. 75; Charles Hastings Collette, Invocation of Saints: The Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome (London: Wertheim and Macintosh, 1857), p. 15. Pusey, letter to J. H. Newman, 6 November, 1865 (Pusey House, LBV121/15). Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 72. David Forrester, Young Doctor Pusey: A Study in Development (London: Mowbray, 1989), pp. 66–8, 70–1. A. M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845–1900 (London: SCM Press, 1958), p. 116. Even Faber’s Roman Catholic contemporaries generally declined this invitation. See Chapman, Father Faber, pp. 148, 328. For a contemporary’s objections to Faber’s addressing Mary as ‘mama’ see Noel, Do Roman Catholics Worship the Blessed Virgin Mary? A Sermon Preached at S. Barnabas’, Oxford on the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 1872 (Oxford: A.R. Mowbray & Co., London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., n.d. [1872?]), p. 16. F. W. Faber, letter to J. B. Morris, reprinted in Faber: Poet and Priest, ed, Raleigh Addington (Glamorgan, Wales: D. Brown and Sons, 1974), p. 147. This belief was based on Jesus’ consigning Mary and his favourite disciple into each other’s care at the crucifixion (John 19: 26–7). J. G. Snead-Cox, The Life of Cardinal Vaughan (London, 1910), 1, p. 40; quoted in Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 348.



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35. ‘The Infant Jesus,’ in Frederick W. Faber, Jesus and Mary: or, Catholic Hymns (London: James Burns, 1849), pp. 19–21. 36. Faber, ‘The Apparition of Jesus to our Blessed Lady,’ in: Jesus and Mary, 40–5. 37. Faber, ‘The Mission of the Holy Ghost’ (58–64), ‘The Descent of the Holy Ghost’ (65–72), in: Jesus and Mary, pp. 58–64 and 65–72. 38. Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 131.




‘Reading Men More Truly’: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Anne Hogan

When Caroline Helstone, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, states that ‘authors’ heroines are almost as good as authoress’s heroes’, her spirited friend Shirley disagrees, and declares: ‘women read men more truly than men read women. I’ll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I’ve time.’1 In Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë’s characterizations of Paul Emanuel and Graham Bretton offer a shrewd critique of both men and aspects of Victorian masculinity. Paul Emanuel, for example, is an assertive and strong-minded man who displays ‘tenderness … affection … and … sincere pious enthusiasm’,2 and for whom ‘the selfdenying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul’.3 This configuration of the manly with the spiritual – where spiritual might be defined as ‘an age-old human quest to seek fulfilment, liberation and pointers towards transcendence’ (Ursula King)4 – was not a distinctive feature of the Victorian ‘bourgeois masculinity,’5 which Herbert Sussman opines had become, in a society ‘transformed by industrialization’,6 the dominant model for middleclass male behaviour by the 1850s. Characterized rather by ‘emotional control and clear-eyed scientific objectivity’,7 this influential ‘bourgeois masculinity’ is portrayed as at least one aspect of the ‘true young English gentleman’,8 Graham Bretton, a handsome doctor of great charm, whose interests appear to lie more in science than religion. It is in the relationship that both men have with Lucy Snowe, the novel’s central heroine – described aptly by Kate Millett as a woman ‘who has watched men and can tell you what they are as seen by the women they fail to notice’9 – that we see aspects of Brontë’s critique of masculinity most clearly expressed. Paul Emanuel is an exceptional professor of literature at the school in the Belgian town Villette, where Lucy Snowe is also a teacher, where in 58 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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spite of a reputation for being difficult, he is greatly respected by the Director, Madame Beck, and by his pupils. As a surgeon, in which role he is known as Dr John, Graham Bretton attends the same school professionally and eventually discovers (however unlikely this might appear to the reader) that he and his widowed mother are former friends of Lucy Snowe’s from her previous life in England. With his easy charm, this most personable young man is a perfect foil for the small, dark Belgian professor, and it is first with Graham that Lucy believes herself to be in love. When they pay a visit to the town’s art gallery, she describes how We took one turn around the gallery; with Graham it was very pleasant to take such a turn. I always liked dearly to hear what he had to say about either pictures or books; because … he always spoke his thought … he listened so kindly … unformalized by scruples lest so to bend his bright handsome head to gather a woman’s rather obscure and stammering explanation, should emperil the dignity of his manhood.10 Graham’s more relaxed social manner provides a marked contrast here with Paul, who, when he comes across Lucy during this same visit to the gallery, expresses anger at finding her viewing the painting ‘Cleopatra’, which he considers an unsuitable subject for an unmarried respectable woman. M. Paul packs her off to look at a set of four more appropriate paintings, called ‘La vie d’une femme’, which Lucy declares to be ‘grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts’.11 She also finds them ‘as bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers’.12 At this earlier stage, then, in Lucy’s relations with the men, M. Paul’s overbearing manner might suggest that he is the more conventionally masculine figure. Lucy’s love for Graham initially prevents her from seeing clearly, but a more realistic view of her childhood friend coincides with the painful recognition that her feelings will not be reciprocated with anything stronger than friendship. This observant narrator now understands that with his ‘masculine self-love’13 and an indulgent mother – standing ‘for a stale and selfless maternity’,14 (Millett) – who allows her son to be master in the house, there are both ‘public and private’ views which can be taken of Dr John; ‘the fireside picture’ displays a certain smug ‘pleasure in homage’.15 A significant occasion, which seems to begin the process of distancing herself from Graham, occurs when he takes her on another social outing, this time to the theatre to see the



‘Reading Men More Truly’: Brontë’s Villette

Anne Hogan

notorious actress Vashti. Lucy finds Vashti (who is probably based on the French actress Rachel (Elisa Felix) whom Charlotte Brontë was taken to see in London)16 both ‘a marvellous sight’ and ‘a spectacle low, horrible, immoral’.17 These lines, according to Jane Miller, ‘catch Lucy’s and Charlotte Brontë’s unresolved and perhaps unresolvable double focus on the woman artist’.18 When a fire breaks out and the audience has urgently to vacate their seats, it could be said that Vashti’s performance proves so powerful the theatre burns down as a result. It is also a profoundly significant performance for Lucy, who notes how, unlike the ambivalence she feels, Graham can only see Vashti as ‘a woman, not an artist: it was a branding judgment’.19 She understands now that: Dr John could think and think well, but he was rather a man of action than of thought; he could feel, and feel vividly in his way, but his heart had no chord for enthusiasm … for what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense … he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion.20 Graham is ‘in fact a rather unfortunate choice for Lucy to love’ (Maynard);21 he is, as she notes herself, ‘a man of action’ – an extrovert, where she is more inward-looking. Unlike M. Paul, the conversations Graham has with Lucy do not touch on the introspective or spiritual. At the time of writing Villette, Charlotte Brontë was reading Harriet Martineau’s Letters on the Nature and Development of Man and she writes about her emotional response to the work in this letter to James Taylor: It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen. In judging of such exposition and declaration, one would wish entirely to put aside the sort of instinctive horror they awaken, and to consider them in an impartial spirit and collected mood. This is I find difficult to do. The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank – to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain – to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who could do this if he would?22 It is interesting to note, then, how Graham, while not portrayed as an atheist, is primarily shown to be a materialist, a man of science, and in this way provides yet another contrast to M. Paul, for whom the Roman Catholic faith is a significant moral influence. Graham has behaved immaturely before in his infatuation with the pretty and empty-headed Ginevra Fanshawe, a pupil at the school.



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As Maynard notes: ‘when he dashes all Lucy’s hopes by swinging from his own hopeless love of Ginevra to his requited love for Paulina, he shows no realization that Lucy responded toward him emotionally.’23 It is no great surprise, therefore, that a conventional wife is his final choice, a wife who offers no threat to his Victorian manhood. Paulina, who has known Graham since her infancy, is noteworthy for her childlike devotion to him, and she confides at one point to Lucy: ‘To me he seems now all sacred … and … I feel a sort of fear when I look at his firm, marble chin, at his straight Greek features.’24 Charlotte Brontë acknowledged in a letter to her publisher, George Smith, that Paulina is the ‘weakest character in the book’ and that she ‘lacked substance’.25 Unlike Lucy, she fits neatly into the Victorian Angel in the House role where it is from her husband and father she ‘drew her happiness’26 and over whom she has ‘become a bond to both, an influence over each, a mutual concord’.27 Lucy is aware of the attractions of this domestic happiness that society is quick to endorse and celebrate, and one might detect some envy expressed in this her last comment on their marriage: ‘In short, I do but speak the truth when I say that these two lives of Graham and Paulina were blessed, like that of Jacob’s favoured son, with “blessings of Heaven above”.’28 When she finally abandons her romantic hopes for Graham, however, any dreams of this type of marriage are also painfully relinquished. In the novel, Lucy’s life takes her into ‘two countries, two languages, two cultures’ ( Jane Miller);29 she also falls in love with two men, first with Graham as we have seen, and then with M. Paul. It was this aspect of the novel which caused Harriet Martineau to observe critically in a review how ‘the heroine … leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of her having either entertained a double love or allowed one to supersede another without notification of the transition.’30 Throughout her infatuation with Graham, her friendship with M. Paul continues, and as her feelings for him deepen we watch Lucy gradually recognize that a more profoundly satisfying relationship might be possible for her. The professor of French bullies on occasion and he does not have the obvious charms of the English doctor, but there is truth in his declaration that he is no stereotyped male ‘tyrant and Blue-beard’.31 This is shown particularly well in the scene where Paul, after considerable efforts of persuasion, gets Lucy’s agreement to take a leading part in a school play: A thousand objections rushed into my mind. The foreign language, the limited time, the public display … but looking up at M. Paul,




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Anne Hogan

and seeing in his vexed, fiery, and searching eye, a sort of appeal behind all its menace – my lips dropped the word ‘oui.’32

What I felt that night, and what I did, I no more expected to feel and do, than to be lifted into a trance to the seventh heaven. Cold, reluctant, apprehensive, I had accepted a part to please another: ere long, warming, becoming interested, taking courage, I acted to please myself.33 This is the same note of passionate self-assertion struck by another of Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, Jane Eyre; it is also this unfeminine quality that led some contemporary reviewers to criticize the earlier novel as coarse and unladylike.34 The potentially subversive quality of these feelings does not go unrecognized by Lucy, who is alarmed, on further reflection, by her discovery of the pleasure of pleasing oneself; the day after the theatricals, she appears to dissociate herself from her previous thoughts: I quite disapproved of these amateur performances; and though glad that I had obliged M. Paul, and tried my own strength for once, I took a firm resolution never to be drawn into a similar affair … it would not do for a mere looker-on at life: the strength and longing must be put by.35 In this way Brontë illustrates the difficulty Lucy encounters at first in acting on her own ‘unladylike’ desires when they conflict with powerful societal norms, and reveals how, in addition to interrogating masculinity, the novel challenges aspects of conventional femininity. Unlike Graham Bretton, however, M. Paul is shown to have the maturity and imagination to see beyond the conventional face that Lucy presents to the world, where she forces herself to deny feelings of ‘strength and longing’. As their friendship grows, he encourages her, rather, ‘to reveal what have seemed to her until now the possibly “horrible, immoral” incongruities of her nature’ ( Jane Miller).36 For Maynard the novel’s concern is ‘with fine articulation of the complexities of sexual feelings within the total psychology’,37 and he makes a forceful case for reading the novel in this way, where the focus of ‘Villette is not on a series of issues and problems but on one person and on the epic of her initiation into sexual awareness.’38 Certainly



After the performance has been given, Lucy acknowledges that:

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sensual desire is strongly evoked in Brontë’s account of the developing relationship between the couple; for example, after Paul has left gifts in her desk, Lucy savours, with some secret pleasure, the pungent smell of his cigar which lingers among her books. While one might therefore readily agree with Jane Miller that Brontë’s heroines ‘admit to feeling love for men and admit that such love is physical and sexual’,39 a significant aspect of the relationship between Lucy and M. Paul, which has not been given the same critical attention, is a deeply held spirituality which the couple express and seek to encompass in any life that they might envisage together. Lucy, who for most people remains ‘no one because she lacks any trait that might render her visible: beauty, money, conformity’ (Millett),40 is revealed to the reader as having a rich inner life. The novel can be seen as her ‘heretic narrative’41 which, alongside the external story, also gives an account of a spiritual quest, which goes beyond conventional pieties. While living and working in Villette, she maintains her Protestant religious observances, and her faith is an important comfort to her; it is also an aspect of a proudly maintained national identity for an Englishwoman living in a foreign country. A spiritual crisis follows therefore when, left alone in the school during the long summer vacation, Lucy makes her confession to a Catholic priest in a state of acute emotional distress. The confession brings some emotional relief at a time of particular vulnerability, and although she does not return to take further instructions as the ‘kind’ priest suggests, Lucy acknowledges her susceptibility to certain aspects of Catholicism, a faith that is not ‘too dry, cold prosaic’.42 Helene Moglen argues that: ‘there is that in Catholicism to which she profoundly responds – both in the sublimity of nature and in the mysticism of her own soul; feelings which represent spiritual and erotic transcendence: the dual temptations of the romantic experience.’43 After the crisis passes, however, Lucy can imagine not without some humour that: ‘had I visited Numero 10, Rue des Mages, at the hour and day appointed, I might just now … be counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of Crecy in Villette.’44 It is not, however, as a celibate nun that she is finally to find spiritual fulfilment and, in spite of being drawn emotionally to aspects of Roman Catholic worship, her Protestant faith remains solid; a critical stance is maintained on a Church where, as Lucy puts it, ‘men were overwrought, and women most murderously sacrificed … that they might serve Rome.’45 As Lucy’s relationship with Paul develops, in spite of a shared sense of the importance of leading a Christian life, their different




Anne Hogan

faiths – Protestants and Catholics were generally polarized and antagonistic faiths in Victorian society in the 1850s – seem to present a huge obstacle, particularly as M. Paul at first seeks to convert Lucy and leaves theological works in her desk that ‘preached Romanism’.46 M. Paul, professor of literature, however, does not underestimate Lucy’s intellect in the arguments they have and in the choice of books he suggests she read. When they argue, Lucy describes how ‘at ease with him, I could defend my creed and faith in my own fashion; in some degree I could lull his prejudices’.47 These theological discussions – which do not generally feature in fictional accounts of courtship in the 1850s – allow them to reveal themselves more fully and profoundly to each other. Having attempted to understand Catholicism better for his sake, Lucy feels able finally to speak her mind, and explain to M. Paul that his Church, for all its richness, seems to her ‘tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual’.48 How, then, does the devout Catholic respond to this declaration? ‘Whatever say priests … God is good, and loves all the sincere. Believe, then, what you can; believe it as you can … God guide us all! God bless you, Lucy.’49 Masculinity in the Victorian period was sometimes associated with emotional immaturity,50 yet what we see in this scene – a recognition by a man of spiritual and emotional equality with a woman he loves and respects – suggests considerable depth of character. That M. Paul expresses this inclusive view might seem at first surprising – implausible even – when we remember his earlier conservatism displayed, for example, in the scene at the art gallery where he censors the viewing of certain paintings and provokes the declaration: ‘A more despotic little man than M. Paul never filled a professor’s chair.’51 As Miller suggests, however, M. Paul ‘finally … has changed himself, made concessions’,52 and he could be said to have gone through the ‘process of transformation and growth’53 that Ursula King argues, in Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise, plays a defining part in a spirituality that is also an ‘organic and dynamic part of human development’.54 Another significant stage in maturing for M. Paul occurs when he, like Lucy, has learnt to give up an earlier immature love, in his case for a young girl who died, and for a long time, encouraged by his Catholic friends, he idealized as an angel. On being shown a portrait of this her dead rival Lucy notes how: Imperfectly seen, I had taken it for a Madonna; revealed by clearer light, it proved to be a woman’s portrait in a nun’s dress. The face,



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When he falls in love with Lucy, however, it is with a quite different woman from that so often idealized; a woman of flesh and blood, and one, moreover, drawn by an author who was famously described by Matthew Arnold as displaying nothing in her fiction but ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage’.56 In a period where the configuration of intellect, sexuality and spirituality did not generally feature in the dominant discourse of Victorian middle-class femininity, Brontë envisaged a romantic hero who comes to accept the full complexity of a woman such as Lucy Snowe, and does not seek to alter her. M. Paul reaches a position where, having moved beyond friendship to love, he openly acknowledges the differences between Lucy and himself, but can declare: ‘Remain a Protestant. My little English Puritan, I love Protestantism in you. … There is something in its ritual I cannot receive myself, but it is the sole creed for “Lucy”.’57 For her part what Lucy sees in M. Paul is a man who ‘freely left me my pure faith’,58 and his ‘tenderness … his affection, his devotedness, his sincere pious enthusiasm blinded his kind eyes sometimes … but these are faults so rare to find … we scarce know whether they will not one day be reckoned amongst the jewels.’59 Lucy Snowe’s critical stance on aspects of the organized faith, Roman Catholicism, remains as we have seen, but it is finally with a Catholic that she falls in love; Catholicism is a faith about which Lyndall Gordon suggests Brontë felt some profound ambiguity, as revealed in this extract from her biography: Eighteen-fifty was the year of the so-called ‘papal aggression’, when the Pope’s establishment of territorial bishoprics in England, and his appointment of Wiseman as Archbishop, led to fierce anti-Catholic outbursts in which Charlotte participated with an intolerance she reserved for Catholicism alone – an intolerance which may have derived, in part, from fear of her own susceptibility.60 In spite of her public criticism of Catholicism, therefore, it seems possible to surmise that M. Paul’s exotic, taboo faith, combined with his foreign nationality, provided the imaginative stimulus for Brontë to create a rather different hero from the more conventional Graham Bretton, a hero whom Gordon describes as the ‘Victorian embodiment



though not beautiful, was pleasing … it was not … intellectual: its very amiability was the amiability of a weak frame, inactive passion, acquiescent habits.’55

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of manliness, has benevolence, consideration, and all sorts of goodness. But he proves facile: involved; then offhand’.61 Lyndall Gordon also surmises that M. Paul is drawn in part from Brontë’s relations with ‘her animating teacher, M. Heger’,62 who taught French at the school in Brussels that Emily and Charlotte attended in 1842. He is certainly drawn with a sympathetic eye, and M. Paul’s less conventional charms (when compared with Graham Bretton) were not overlooked by some first readers of the novel, as Charlotte Brontë reveals in this letter to W. S. Williams: The note you sent this morning from Lady Harriet St Clair, is precisely to the same purport as Miss Mudlock’s request, – an application for exact and authentic information respecting the fate of M. Paul Emanuel! You see how much the ladies think of this little man, whom you none of you like. I had a letter the other day, announcing that a lady of some note, who had always determined that whenever she married, her husband should be the counterpart of ‘Mr Knightly’ in Miss Austen’s ‘Emma,’ had now changed her mind, and vowed she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel, or remain for ever single!63 Paul encompasses enough aspects of traditional masculinity – namely, a strong intellect and an assertive manner – to reassure readers that he deserves the role of romantic hero, but what makes him of particular interest is that Brontë has drawn a version of Victorian masculinity that successfully encompasses aspects of both the manly – where, for example, in spite of teaching literature in a girls’ school it is clear that M. Paul is not effeminate – and the spiritual; his nature is ‘not confused … not insecure … but complex and whole’ (Moglen).64 It is instructive to contrast M. Paul with another of Brontë’s male characters, St. John Rivers, who appears in Jane Eyre, as they share a deep and sincere faith. St. John Rivers is an Evangelical Protestant who gives up his love of a beautiful heiress to be a missionary in India. Although he does not desire Jane or love her in the same way, he tries to persuade her to accompany him as his wife to help him fulfil God’s work. As Maynard puts it, St. John Rivers is ‘a study of extreme selfsuppression’.65 The adjectives most commonly associated with him are frigid and icy – he even gives ‘marble kisses’.66 As Jane tries at first to accept his offer, she observes their relationship develop in this way: I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master … By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that



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Although clearly tempted to please him and agree to be a missionary, she finally recoils from his sterile offer to be his wife, ‘not for my pleasure, but for my Sovreign’s [sic] service’,68 and he refuses to allow her to accompany him on any other terms. She admires his religious convictions, but clearly sees his approach to choosing a partner in life as misguided, even cruel, and knows that as his wife she would be forced to ‘keep the fire of my nature continually low’.69 Terry Eagleton suggests that there is an ambiguity in how Brontë represents Evangelicals such as St. John Rivers: In so far as Evangelicalism sets out to crush the Romantic spirit, it is a tangible symbol of social violence and must be resisted. Jane Eyre rebels against … Rivers’s deathly Calvinism … But she is at the same time … disapproving of worldly libertinism; and in this sense she is torn between respect for and instinctive distrust of stringent religious discipline.70 Like St. John Rivers the ‘despot’ Paul as we have seen has tried to dominate and control Lucy, but there the comparison ends. ‘Paul unites a “sensible” anti-radicalism with fiery reformist zeal, Protestant rationalism with Catholic spirit’ (Eagleton).71 Indeed, there are possibly more similarities to be found between the characters of St. John Rivers and Dr John, where both fit more readily within conventional versions of masculinity, and Maynard goes as far as to describe Graham as ‘at heart … a less zealous member of the sect of St John’.72 When the much anticipated moment finally arrives, then, and M. Paul declares his love, Lucy readily and without hesitation responds, for she clearly does not fear that his influence will cause her anything other than happiness: Once – unknown, and unloved, I held him harsh and strange; the low stature, the wiry make … the darkness, the manner displeased me. Now, penetrated with his influence, and living by his affection, having his worth by intellect, and his goodness by heart – I preferred him before all humanity.73 Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, looks at how Villette gives ‘some intelligible account of the relation of literature



took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference … I wished, many a time, he had continued to neglect me.67

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to the social order’.74 His reading of the novel sees it as torn between ‘pious submission and defiant rebellion’,75 where the ‘latent rebel’76 Lucy is checked by the ‘overriding need to celebrate bourgeois security’.77 It is true that the novel’s ending is inconclusive, where we are only allowed to picture, if we will, the possibility of a ‘union and a happy succeeding life’.78 Once he has declared his feelings and ensured Lucy’s future security and independence by setting her up as director of a school, M. Paul feels obliged to undertake a possibly hazardous journey to the West Indies in an attempt to assure the financial position of his demanding Catholic friends who have investments there. Lucy is left, therefore, at the end of the novel in an emotional limbo, hoping and praying for his safe return, while fully aware that Paul may have been killed in a storm at sea. This ambiguous ending can be construed as an imaginative failure of nerve by Charlotte Brontë, a failure to take her fictional critique of relations between the sexes – which includes, as we have seen, creating a hero who offers ‘the promise of equality’ (Moglen)79 – to a more radical conclusion. This ending might, for example, have envisaged marital happiness for Lucy and Paul based on a mature and loving tolerance of national and religious difference, which is an important part of their friendship. On the other hand, in her description of their unusual courtship, Brontë already goes beyond some of the conventional boundaries of the ‘bourgeois security’ suggested by, say, Dr John’s marriage. While not wishing to leave this reading of Villette open to the charge of having corrected it ‘into a false coherence’ ( Jacobus),80 the novel’s open ending does draw attention to the considerable obstacles which still stand in the way of Lucy and Paul achieving a marriage of ‘true minds and hearts’, in a society that requires the repression of feelings of ‘strength and longing’,81 and where strict codes of appropriate behaviour for men and women are often enforced with a fierce zeal.

Notes 1. Shirley (Collins edition, 1972, edited by Phyllis Bentley), p. 285. 2. Villette (Penguin edition, 1979, edited by Mark Lilley, introduced by Tony Tanner), p. 595. 3. Ibid., p. 279. 4. Ursula King, Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 5. 5. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 4 –6.



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06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 14. Villette, p. 125. Kate Millett, ‘Sexual Politics in “Villette” ’, in Pauline Nestor, ed., New Casebooks: Villette (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 32. Villette, p. 282. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid. Ibid., p. 272. Millett, p. 34. Villette, p. 273. See the letter that Charlotte Brontë wrote to James Taylor of her response to seeing the French tragedienne, Rachel (Elisa Felix), included in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford University Press edition, 1966, edited by Angus Easson), p. 394. Villette, p. 339. Jane Miller, Women Writing about Men (London: Virago, 1986), p. 95. Villette, p. 342. Ibid., p. 341. John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 191. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, pp. 374 –5. Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, p. 191. Villette, p. 519. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 418. Villette, p. 532. Ibid. Ibid., p. 533. Miller, Women Writing about Men, p. 86. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, eds, The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (London: 1932), 4, p. 44. Villette, p. 206. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 211. See, for example, Miss Rigby’s notorious review of Jane Eyre which can be found in Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background (London: Macmillan, 1973). Villette, p. 211. Miller, Women Writing about Men, p. 97. Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, p. 164. Ibid. Miller, Women Writing about Men, p. 82. Millett, ‘Sexual Politics in “Villette” ’, p. 32. Villette, p. 235. Ibid., p. 234. Helene Moglen, ‘ “Villette”: the Romantic Experience as Psychoanalysis’, in New Casebooks: Villette, p. 20. Villette, p. 235. Ibid., p. 515.




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46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., p. 507. Ibid., p. 513. Ibid., p. 516. Ibid., p. 517. For a discussion of the types of Victorian manliness, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Ibid., p. 278. Miller, Women Writing about Men, p. 97. King, Women and Spirituality, p. 5. Ibid. Villette, pp. 483– 4. Matthew Arnold to Mrs Foster, 14 April 1853: see Miriam Allott, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 201. Villette, pp. 594 –5. Ibid., p. 594. Ibid., p. 595. Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 226. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 253. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 430. Moglen, ‘ “Villette” ’ , p. 17. Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, p. 109. Jane Eyre (Penguin 1966 edition, edited by Q. D. Leavis), p. 424. Ibid., p. 422. Ibid., p. 428. Ibid., p. 433. Terry Eagleton, ‘Myths of Power in “Villette” ’, in New Casebooks: Villette, p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, p. 191. Villette, p. 592. Quoted in Pauline Nestor’s Introduction to New Casebooks: Villette, p. 10. Eagleton, ‘Myths of Power in “Villette” ’, p. 112. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 116. Villette, p. 596. Moglen, ‘ “Villette” ’, p. 17. Mary Jacobus, ‘Feminism and Romanticism in “Villette” ’, in New Casebooks: Villette, p. 134. Villette, p. 211.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.



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Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge Catherine Wells-Cole

On the face of it, Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901) seems likely to produce idealized versions of nineteenth-century masculinity. She was a profoundly conservative writer whose early work was supervised by her father and by her mentor, John Keble;1 she wrote to promote the doctrines and teaching of the Anglican Church;2 and she had a marked tendency to hero-worship.3 Yet in her work the representation of male perfection is a problematic issue; her heroes strive towards a spiritually informed ideal, but rarely achieve it. They are not milksops, despite her religious priorities and her own protested inability to do manly men: ‘eager to make public confessions of [her] deficiencies in male portraiture’,4 she declares her need for ‘more manly power’5 in her stories, notes her lack of the ‘full and sympathetic grasp of a man’s powerful mind’,6 and claims that ‘a woman cannot do a man truthfully from within’.7 Although they are always seen within the context of Oxford Movement piety8 and the domestic sphere, her male characters are none the less informed by contemporary debates about the nature of masculinity. They are not models of perfection but seekers after improvement: if we look in vain for strongly asserted masculine force in Yonge, we nevertheless do find masculine anxiety and masculine failing. These do not, however, tend to centre on spiritual difficulties – the hero’s character is not tested by doubt. Spiritual issues are treated with a reticence attributable to the influence of Keble: ‘he taught her that reserve … was necessary on important subjects, and that one avoided discussing one’s deepest feelings.’9 Instead, anger is used in her novels to probe the fragility of an early nineteenth-century masculine identity still in the process of being forged10 to accommodate new social realities. Christian manhood especially had ‘to be created anew from 71 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Catherine Wells-Cole

the tissue of ideas associated with masculinity in the eighteenth century’; former gentry assumptions about a masculinity ‘based on sport and [military] codes of honour’11 were giving way to an ‘insistence on the primacy of the inner spirit’:12 an image of manliness emerged, ‘based on moral authority rather than physical prowess or the power of wealth and office’.13 One effect is the democratization and domestication of the traditional notion of chivalry by writers such as Dickens and Trollope: ‘by the 1850s,’ Norman Vance argues, ‘chivalry had come to be regarded as one of the attributes of the English gentleman’, while still retaining ‘something of the dignity and glamour of high social standing’.14 The ‘amiably preposterous’ Victorian cult of chivalry was none the less ‘a valuable imaginative resource in the midst of the social and economic dislocations of the industrial revolution’.15 The chivalric note in early Victorian constructions of masculinity is most thrillingly present in the early and influential hero Guy Morville, the ‘modern knight’16 of The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). Guy leaves semifeudal Redclyffe as a 17-year-old orphan to live with the Edmonstones and their children, Laura, Charlie, Amabel (Amy) and Charlotte. His cousin, Philip Morville, wary of Guy (‘ “I don’t like such excess of openness about his feelings” ’ (p. 42)) and of his anger (Guy has only to slam a door for Philip to murmur ‘ “Redclyffe temper” ’ (p. 47)), manoeuvres to make the Edmonstones reject him. Finally, however, Guy marries Amy and, on honeymoon in Italy, nurses Philip through a dangerous fever – a selfless reconciliation leading to the death which is Guy’s spiritual triumph. Philip, despite inheriting Redclyffe and marrying Laura, is never able to forgive himself for his judgemental behaviour towards Guy. The tension between the backward-looking identification of Guy as a medieval knight and more contemporary associations of masculinity is suggested by the novel’s contrasting settings: Gothic Redclyffe, ‘more like a scene in a romance than anything real’ (p. 10), and bourgeois Hollywell, the Edmonstones’ home, with its rooms of ‘great snugness’ (p. 15). Rumours of a family feud and Guy’s inherited ‘doom of the Morvilles’ belong to romance, but the novel also attempts to insert Guy’s brand of manliness into its dominant mode of domestic realism.17 As long as he is still fallibly struggling with his temper, Guy belongs comfortably in the bourgeois setting which is also home to the crippled Charlie and the weak Mr Edmonstone. In the domestic circle he emerges as an impetuous, warm-hearted young man with a tendency to hero-worship: during a family game he identifies as his favourite fictional character Malory’s Sir Galahad ‘ “the knight of the Siege Perilous – who won the Saint Greal” ’ (p. 150). The image of Galahad conveys the



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spiritual qualities which made Guy the perfect Tractarian hero, combining ‘enthusiasm and … sacramental grace’.18 But his chivalrous qualities are animated by an energy which prevents him becoming one of the ‘goody men’ deplored by a contemporary of Yonge’s.19 As a boy he was ‘always in wild spirits’, ‘rushing about, playing antics … shouting, whooping, singing, whistling’ and generally ‘springing about with animation’ (p. 10). At Hollywell he proves to have ‘rather a superabundance of energy than otherwise’ (p. 29), denoted by frequent references to his flashing eyes, ‘[gleaming] with light like an eagle’s’ (p. 63). Provoking this response is dangerous, ‘playing with edge tools’ (p. 63), suggesting an alarming side to him; even his fidgeting threatens both domestic harmony and himself: ‘Scissors, pencil, paper-knife, or anything that came in his way, was sure to be twisted or tormented; or if nothing else was at hand, he opened and shut his own knife so as to put all spectators in fear for his fingers’ (p. 82). This fidgeting could have been curbed by proper womanly control: ‘ “it is only a trick which your mother would have stopped at five years old,” ’ Mrs Edmonstone tells him (p. 84). Consistent references to Guy’s powerful internal energy function in the novel to suggest both his animation and the need to control it; this is what gives him, despite Yonge’s disavowals’,20 his ‘manly dash’, and makes him a spiritual model for a generation of young men. It also aligns him with what Herbert Sussman calls ‘the central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity, the proper regulation of an innate male energy’.21 At its most threatening, Guy’s energy becomes an anger painful to control; he bites his lips until they bleed to ‘keep down’ hasty words (p. 48) and causes anxiety in the family: ‘it appeared as if the force of his anger might be fearful, if once it broke forth without control’ (p. 82). Lacking any significant engagement with the public sphere, where male anger might be legitimized, Yonge’s novels, by confining such a potentially cataclysmic force to the home, make anger a testcase for acceptable limits of male behaviour and locate ‘inchoate male energy’22 within the female sphere. Guy’s worst eruption of anger is witnessed by Philip’s sister Margaret and firmly located in the domestic setting of her home, where he receives a provoking letter from Mr Edmonstone (p. 22). Making ‘purposely slow progress, along a railed gallery overlooking the hall, and down a winding staircase’, Margaret sees Guy’s ‘features almost convulsed … [the] temples swollen with the blood that rushed through them’. In a voice ‘like the low distant sweep of the tempest’, he calls Mr Edmonstone ‘ “a mere weak fool” ’, and can only gain control of



Anger and Masculinity in Charlotte M. Yonge 73


himself once he has ‘[burst] out of the house’. The ‘almost appalling’ (p. 223) force of anger here cannot be contained in the home; only when he has rushed ‘far over moor and hill’ (p. 224) does Guy recall his ‘true and better self’ at the sight of the ‘flood of gold’ of a glorious sunset (p. 225). Alarmed by all the strength of his ‘early manhood’ (p. 227) passion, he prays until ‘the foe is driven back’ (p. 226) and he has regained his spiritual equilibrium. Guy’s anger gives him a masculine dimension by posing a threat to the feminine sphere of the home and by suggesting a male force of emotion in him. It also exposes the fragile balance of acceptable masculine behaviour; if he gives way to too much anger he threatens to revert to the unacceptable gentry patterns of behaviour of his father, ‘ruined by his wild temper and impatience of restraint’ (p. 289), and his grandfather’s criminal duelling, amounting in effect to murder, which was provoked by ‘rage’ (p. 78). This is not to suggest that anger was seen as an exclusively male emotion in the period. Although by the early nineteenth century ‘anger control [was] a key emotional ingredient of the haven-home’,23 there was only implicitly a greater focus on boys than on girls in advice manuals of the period. It is possible to see Guy’s anger as a major part of the ‘crossover’ appeal of The Heir, providing a model for male readers as well as wish-fulfilment for female readers longing for an emotional and expressive freedom not granted to them.24 Yonge’s own girlhood temper, acknowledged in her ‘Autobiography’,25 and controlled in adulthood, may come into play here. But anger is unthinkable for women in The Heir. Amy, hearing of Guy’s outburst, says: ‘ “He has spoken hasty words of papa! How sorry he must be!” ’ (p. 236). Guy’s strong assertion of feelings, and in particular his anger, is the novel’s principal means of representing his masculinity.26 Water is the dominant metaphor for Guy’s ‘[i]nnate, distinctively male energy’.27 His outward and inner life are ‘like a stream, pure as crystal, but into which the eye cannot penetrate from its depth’ (p. 80); Redclyffe is a place of sea, floods and ‘the sudden, angry rush of the mountain streams, eddying fiercely along’ (p. 42), which captivate the younger Guy: ‘ “Oh! a great flood is famous fun” ’ (p. 42). In his single most conventionally heroic exploit he conquers the ‘thunder of wind and wave’ (p. 308) to rescue a party of shipwrecked sailors from off the Shag Stone, which ‘with [its] progeny of nearly sunken rocks’ (p. 301) dominates Redclyffe Bay and hints at the dangers of ‘progeny’ being swamped by excessive and possibly sexual feeling. Guy brings his ‘freight of rescued lives’ (p. 308) all safe to shore, converting this



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dangerous conjunction of ‘boys, water and rocks’ (p. 300) into a submissive thankfulness to God, “who held the storm in His hand”’ (p. 311). Guy’s safe emergence from the turmoil is paralleled by that of Ben Robinson, a young man of the village, ‘wild, reckless … full of mischief’ (p. 303) who is ‘steadied’ by Guy’s example and is last seen dutifully following his father into church. On his final visit to Redclyffe, before his marriage, Guy ‘takes leave of … the feelings of his boyhood’ (p. 370) in a boat on the ‘rippling whispering waters’ of the Bay. Looking back at the cliff he sees two streams, ‘one more quiet than its brother [which] brawls with a tone of its own’, (p. 370, my emphasis). The moment suggests his choice of the quieter, more subdued and spiritual male identity; he then looks up at the hitherto Gothic Redclyffe, ‘a fit eyrie for the eagles of Morville’ (p. 370), and is struck by nothing so much as its lack of soft furnishings: ‘how many of the dark windows were without the linings of blinds and curtains, that alone give the look of life and habitation to a house’ (p. 370). ‘Brawling’ masculinity gives way to the creation of a domestic hero. But opting for the ‘quieter stream’ means that Guy is also in danger of losing the energy needed to sustain life. During his last illness, Amy has to cut the ‘tumble-down wave’ of hair (my emphasis), which ‘always seemed to have so much sympathy with his moods’ (p. 437). Like the last efflorescence of his energy, ‘it was too troublesome not to go’ (p. 437). Although he has acquired the control needed to marry Amy and be reconciled with Philip (‘never had Philip’s manner been more vexatious … never had temper been more entirely subdued’ (p. 407)), Guy’s energy is not, finally, to be ‘deployed for productive purposes’.28 Unlike Dickens’ David Copperfield he does not function in this novel as a young man learning to channel his forces into profitable work. Work is rare in The Heir, and its marginal appearances serve to indicate that Yonge is not constructing a hero to fit the Victorian work ethic. At harvesting, ruddy-faced agricultural labourers are seen toiling at some distance from the Edmonstones, who are pretending ‘to make hay but are really building nests with it’ (p. 94). Only Guy sets to work ‘like a real haymaker’ (my emphasis) to rebuild the damaged stooks, but work is never a serious option for him. His function in the narrative instead is to reach spiritual perfection in the self-sacrificing death which, against the physical evidence, is inevitable in the narrative: ‘it seemed as if there was nothing to prevent absolute recovery’, yet his ‘strength was perceptibly wasting’ (p. 456). As Guy’s death approaches the parallel with Galahad becomes increasingly marked. At his wedding to Amy, a gleam of sunshine





sheds ‘a golden glory on the wave of brown hair over [his] forehead’ (p. 383); on their honeymoon an artist asks him to model for a sketch of ‘Sir Galahad, when he kneels to adore the Saint Greal’ (p. 403). His death occurs at sunrise and like Galahad’s it is hard to say precisely when life ceases:29 ‘the light streamed in at the open window, and over the bed; but it was “another dawn than ours” that he beheld, as his most beautiful of all smiles beamed over his face, and he said, “Glory in the Highest! – peace goodwill” – A struggle for breath gave an instant’s look of pain; then he whispered so that she could but just hear – “the last prayer”. She read the Commendatory Prayer. She knew not the exact moment, but even as she said “Amen” she perceived it was over’ (p. 468). Guy’s death was recognized as the emotional climax of the novel,30 but is not its end; a long final section deals with the blemished Philip’s return to everyday life. Galahad does not function only as a model of spiritual perfection; because he is virtually alone among Malory’s knights to die in the Grail quest, he does not have the problem of returning to the mundane after experiencing the sublime. The Edmonstones’ home is, significantly, Hollywell not Holywell. Philip might on the surface seem closer to the sort of male hero to be looked for in a conservative writer like Yonge. Also fatherless, he has had to support his sisters, abandoning university ambitions for an army commission. His air of judgement and authority gives him influence over the Edmonstones; Laura falls in love with this ‘cool and prudent’ (p. 35) young man. Her brother Charlie, however, finds him a self-satisfied ‘pattern hero’ (p. 85).31 Yet although Philip appears confidently masculine, the novel consistently reveals his insecure hold on this identity; by gradually dismantling Philip’s controlling and repressive exterior it shows how ‘masculinity is never fully possessed but must perpetually be achieved, asserted, and renegotiated’.32 Even a minor challenge from another man shakes his complacency, leaving him with ‘more need for self assertion’ (p. 144). Men-only scenes with both Mr Edmonstone and Guy become power struggles in which Philip shows the need to assert a tenuous masculine authority. The first comes after Mr Edmonstone has been (wrongly) informed that Guy is gambling. His trust in Guy is worn down by Philip’s implacability: ‘there was something in the unmoved way in which Philip waited till he had patience to listen, which gradually mastered him’ (p. 204; my emphasis). Philip has a harder interview later with Guy himself, at Oxford: Guy refuses to explain why he has asked his guardian for £1,000 (he wants the



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money to finance a lay Sisterhood). Philip is used to making other men ‘bend and give way beneath his superior force of mind’ (p. 255), but finds unexpected resistance in the younger man: ‘With Guy alone it was not so … he had no mastery, and could no more bend that spirit than a bar of steel. This he could not bear, for it obliged him to be continually making efforts to preserve his own sense of superiority’ (p. 255; my emphasis). Philip’s loss of superiority is heightened when he meets Guy and Amy on their honeymoon: ‘here Sir Guy was somebody, the captain nobody, and even the advantage of age was lost, now that Guy was married and head of a family, while Philip was a stray young man and his guest’ (p. 98). Here the connection between masculinity and power over women is clear,34 even while we note with amusement that the family Guy is now ‘head’ of consists only of Amy. Thus Philip is at his most securely masculine with Laura; his gender giving him unquestioned authority over her once they are declared lovers. Their clandestine understanding is treated in terms of power and control; Laura becomes his ‘slave and automaton’ (p. 447), loving him ‘only the better’ (p. 134) for his rigid control; as a young girl she poses no challenge to his superiority. While the novel cannot forgive their moral lapse, it nevertheless seizes the opportunity to explore the repressive side of Philip which the relationship reveals. In public he shoots ‘monitory’ glances at Laura, whispering, ‘ “Take care; you must be cautious – self-command” ’ when her ‘strange restlessness’ (p. 133) begins to give her away. When the strain begins to tell, Philip urges her to ‘strengthen her mind’ with mathematics: ‘ “I will send you my first book of algebra, and it will help you to work down many useless dreams and anxieties” ’ (p. 153). After Guy’s death Laura alone retains her admiration of Philip. Yet when they are finally united, he is no longer the sexually commanding man he was: after their first kiss he looks so ‘wretchedly unwell’ that she begs him to lie down on the sofa (p. 537). Although Charlotte Edmonstone is annoyed by Philip’s apparent good fortune at the end of the novel: ‘ “just like a good hero in a book, [he will live] very happy ever after!” ’ (p. 15), his semi-invalid state and persistent self-reproach indicate the opposite. The reducing of Philip provides The Heir of Redclyffe with a surprisingly sharp critique of authoritative manhood. The relationship between Guy and Philip is the novel’s structural core; their contrast fuels its exploration of masculinity, challenging conventional models of manhood and proving them hollow, while reaching a narrative impasse with the figure of the spiritually perfect





hero. As if to emphasize this, Guy re-enters the narrative in the form of the sketch for Galahad, returned by Mr Shene after Guy’s death: ‘It was … unfinished … but Guy’s was a face to be better represented by being somewhat idealized, than by copying merely the material form of the features’ (p. 499). Amy carries this image ‘of Guy from room to room with her; it spends the nights on her bedroom mantel-shelf,’ and she ‘brought it into the dressing-room with her in the morning, setting it up opposite to the sofa, before settling herself (p. 449). This is the only way the perfect hero can finally be accommodated among the furniture and ordinariness of the home.’35 While writing The Heir, Yonge was simultaneously working on another story in which the necessity of controlling anger, but not the total quenching of liveliness to which Guy Morville is subject, is central to the construction of masculinity. Yonge was working on The Heir during autumn 1850 and spring 1851; The Little Duke first appeared in serial form in January 1851.36 It is an historical novel written for The Monthly Packet, the journal edited by Yonge and aimed at ‘the young ladies of the schoolroom’;37 it soon found a place in ‘the parental study’. The Macmillan edition went into 18 reprints between 1864 and 1901, indicating the enormous popularity of this coming-to-manhood story. It also has a fatherless boy making his way in the world; an exile-andreturn structure within which the hero learns self-control; and a struggle against potentially dangerous anger. Alethea Hayter has suggested38 that Yonge was imaginatively freer in historical fiction than in her novels of domestic realism; The Little Duke’s tenth-century Normandy setting, and its status as a story primarily for younger readers, does permit a less sceptical attitude to the possibility of achieving male heroism. Duke Richard of Normandy, the ‘little duke’ of the title, is eight when his father Richard the Fearless is murdered. A range of surrogate fathers, including Martin Abbot of Jumieges, ‘his father’s chief friend and councillor’ (p. 35), the deceitful French king Louis and the terrifying Danish king, Harald Blue-tooth, offer role models. There is also his father’s ambivalent example in manliness; after his death the powerful warrior is found to have worn a hair-shirt and contemplated the monastic life. What Richard achieves is the middle way between these competing models; he learns to rule with forgiveness as well as strength. When he is taken hostage by Louis and held captive at Laon, Richard’s ‘imperious manner’ foils an escape attempt: ‘ “If I had not flown into a passion … I might have been safe!,” ’ he exclaims, too late (p. 79). Gradually, he learns to control himself, and a second escape, this time necessitating his total self-suppression as he is smuggled out of prison in a bale of straw, succeeds: ‘ “I will be quite still – I will make



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no noise – I will hold my breath” ’ (p. 149). Once safely returned to Normandy, Richard vows to be ‘a less hasty and overbearing boy’ (p. 160). In fact, he has left childhood behind and is now taller, ‘princely and promising’ (p. 161). The imagined world of tenth-century French politics gives Yonge a less problematic arena than everyday domestic life for male perfection; his lesson learned, Richard can return home. Its historical setting and status as children’s story frees The Little Duke to construct, in its own terms, a credible ideal of Christian manliness without ever being overtly pious or explicitly spiritual: it concludes with an episode which shows a much older Richard, in company with the Abbot, forgiving his father’s murderer. The Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands (1874), her only full-length biography, offered Yonge the opportunity to construct a narrative of unquestioned male goodness. Patteson was Yonge’s cousin, distant enough to be idealized: ‘I have only twice seen him … and so he has always seemed to me like the saintliness one believes in and gives thanks for. I don’t mean that knowing him more intimately at home would have made this less, I believe it would more, but it would have been more mixed up with common life.’39 Yet the absence of ‘common life’ makes for a work that is ‘respectable but not enthralling’;40 whatever the constraints of realism, fiction did allow her, albeit guardedly, to explore male faults. Working almost entirely from his letters and journals, Yonge rarely probes below the outward circumstances of Patteson’s life. The ‘saintliness’ shown is practical rather than spiritual; the biography dwells on the physical and intellectual rigours of missionary life and applies a ‘decent impersonality’41 to its religious and devotional aspects. Other elements of the hero-pattern are, however, present in the narrative of Patteson’s life as shaped by Yonge. The biography shows a man using his energies and living a model life far away from home; what authorial interventions there are are stimulated by ideas of distance and return. Volume One is shaped by Patteson’s relationship with his father; he takes up the call to missionary work only when his father offers a one-way ticket: ‘ “I will not have him thinking he must come home again to see me” ’ (vol. 1, p. 172). ‘ “Should he have gone?” ’ Yonge asks in a rare intervention. Yes; because he would otherwise have suffered ‘the trials of cramped and unemployed energies’ in his country parish (vol. 1, p. 180). He resembles Guy Morville in his quality of masculine energy: at home, he writes, ‘there was nothing about me to indicate energy’ (vol. 1, p. 254); but in the islands ‘strength of purpose, resolution, energy of character [will make me] … very different from what I was – more of a man’ (vol. 1, p. 255).





He expends energy, too, on preserving the distance between himself and home, seeing the prospect of a return journey, or even a visit from his family, as a threat to the ‘unreserved surrender’ a man ‘must make to colonial work’. He thanks his father ‘for your great love in never calling me away from my work even to see your face once more on earth’ (vol. 1, p. 255). Resolute refusal to return means he never has to reconcile the ‘great difference’ between life in the islands and ‘the rule of an English gentleman’s household’ (vol. 1, p. 521). He becomes, by the end of his life, the sort of man the mission needs, one ‘who [has] really sought to sit very loosely to this world’ (vol. 1, p. 520). Far from home, his energies undistracted, Patteson can be seen as the ideal Christian hero, evoking at his consecration ‘the figure of some young knight watching his armour’ (vol. 2, p. 491); the willing giving of his life in the martyr’s death ‘he had always looked for’ (vol. 2, p. 570) also suggests Guy Morville. Writing the life of Patteson allowed Yonge to examine a male heroism explicitly and deliberately distanced from the constraints and littleness of domestic life and to exalt an energy channelled into what to her was the truly productive end: claiming souls for the Church. In fiction by the 1860s, however, the conditions which made a spiritually idealized hero like Guy Morville possible no longer flourished. As Valerie Sanders says, ‘it became harder as the century wore on to preserve an untarnished … notion of men’s virtues, while the domestic setting of the novel between 1850 and 1870 brought the daily failings of husbands and lovers more closely under the microscope.’42 The Trial (1864) is reluctant to idealize any of its central young male characters, and is generally sceptical about the possibility of male heroism. It tells the story of fatherless Leonard Ward, falsely accused of murdering his uncle. Also involved are the May family, familiar from The Daisy Chain. Tom May clears Leonard’s name, although Leonard never fully recovers from his period in prison. His sisters also suffer from the shame of his trial, fleeing to the United States where little Minna dies. These events take place against a backdrop of combative or sporting masculine activity: a cricket match where ‘young champions [exert] all the ardour and even the chivalry of their nature’ (p. 63), rifle practice which women watch ‘from a safe distance’ (p. 100), lines of ‘sturdy, bearded backwoodsmen, rifle on shoulder’ (p. 272), marching away to fight in the American Civil War. These all suggest a proper harnessing of male energy, as does the return of the soldier Aubrey May, Leonard’s boyhood friend: ‘definite thought, purpose, and action had moulded his whole countenance and person into hopeful manhood’ (p. 319).



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Leonard is the angry young man of this novel; his anger is more violent than Guy Morville’s and less successfully channelled; at a pivotal moment it is directed against a member of his own family, resulting in the novel’s strenuous efforts to control and subdue him. Although he starts out as a potentially chivalrous boy, debating nobility of conduct with Ethel May and ‘fired’ (p. 52) by Sir Walter Scott, his early promise is checked by the stifling circumstances of his home. He finds his brother Harold’s ‘requirements of exact order … in all the arrangements of his house’ unmanly: ‘ “one has no patience with finikin ways in a man” ’ (p. 62). His anger comes to a head when Harold, having planned a dinner party, comes home to find ‘the drawing-room bestrewn with … rough stones’; Leonard has had the May children over to look at fossils. Annoyed, Harold seizes Leonard’s dog, asleep on a cushion; Leonard rushes to her rescue, but, ‘finding his advance … impeded by a barricade of the crowded and disarranged furniture’, grows ‘mad with passion’ and launches ‘a long sharp-pointed belemnite’ at his brother. It misses, but cracks a mirror, while Leonard, ‘pushing sofa and ottoman to the right and left … thunders up [to Harold] … with uplifted hand’. The attack stops short: Harold, however, says: ‘This boy … has very nearly killed me’ (p. 110). This domestic brawl among the upholstery and furnishings brings the danger of male anger into the heart of the home. In total contrast is the domestic regulation of the May family, where sisters are more successful in directing male energy to spiritual ends. Returned from a naval engagement, midshipman Harry May shows his sister Mary the Prayer-Book given to him by their dead sister Margaret ‘Soiled and stained with dark brownish red … a straight round hole perforated it from cover to cover’ (p. 85); it has saved his life. Thoughts of home, he tells her, ‘ “kept me to reading the Psalms, and so having the book about me” ’. On deck at night, watching the stars, he imagined Orion ‘ “like the Christian warrior, climbing up with his shield before him and his. A home like this is a shield to a man in more ways than one, Mary” ’ (p. 86). Lacking this protection, Leonard’s anger comes close to actual violence, although he never quite commits it. He disorders the stability of the home, but the full implications of his violence are displaced on to the murder of his uncle, for whom he has gone to work. The actual murderer, Sam Axworthy, escapes unsuspected while Leonard goes to prison; this punishment without crime is necessary to subdue his angry self, and is typical of The Trial’s simultaneous fascination for the implications of male anger and reluctance to face them directly.





Prison crushes ‘the handsome spirited lad on whom the trouble had fallen’ (p. 318); when, by the efforts of Tom May, the truth is discovered and Leonard is released, he is docile and passive: ‘ “I never saw spirit so quenched,” ’ says Dr May (p. 318). ‘Ill and haggard’ (p. 328), with ‘hollow eyes’ (p. 67), he struggles to reinsert himself into everyday life, ‘avoiding the town by daylight, and only coming to Dr May’s in the dark evenings’ (p. 322). Having started with some of Guy Morville’s impetuous boyishness, he seems to have become, after prison, a Philip Morville, reduced and blighted. The novel does, however, offer him an escape route: missionary life ‘in the great harvest of the Southern Seas’ (p. 328), where he will even use the manual skills learned in prison so long as he can ‘ “[make] known to others the way to that Grace that held me up” ’ (p. 372). Yet this also functions to expel from the novel disruptive associations which cling to Leonard even after his release. He admits to having had dangerous thoughts in prison: ‘ “there can hardly be a wicked thought that did not surge over me” ’; his rescue of little Dickie May from the church parapet covers him with blood, making him ‘a ghastly spectacle from head to foot’ (p. 341) and is a reminder of his threatening potential. Huge punitive effort – not just prison but the death of his adored sister Minna – is exerted on a young man whose worst fault is to throw a stone. Leonard’s subdued acceptance of missionary life signifies both the wish for male perfection and the impossibility of achieving it in the domestic sphere. In creating a hero whose masculine anger is almost too problematic to deal with, Yonge has moved a long way from the attempted spiritual perfection of Guy Morville.

Notes 1. ‘To their influence and, in earlier times, their actual criticism all that is best in my work is owing’. Quoted in Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 337. 2. ‘Pro ecclesia et Deo was her favourite motto’, Coleridge, ibid., p. 185. 3. Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 145. 4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 134. 5. Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 337. 6. Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life (London: Constable, 1943), p. 135. 7. Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘Authorship’, 1892, reprinted in Georgina Battiscombe and Marghanita Laski, eds, A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge (London: Cresset, 1965), pp. 185–92. 8. ‘The Heir of Redclyffe embodied the spirit of the Oxford Movement in its purest and sweetest form’ Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 183.



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09. David Brownell, ‘The Two Worlds of Charlotte Yonge’, in J. H. Buckley, ed., The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 166. 10. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 ( London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 229. 11. Ibid., p. 110. 12. Ibid., p. 450. 13. Ibid., p. 111. 14. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 17. 15. Ibid., p. 19. 16. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 42. 17. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlstrom, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction, A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form (Stockholm: Sweden, 1984), has an extended discussion of The Heir’s interweaving of romance and realistic elements, ultimately finding romance predominant. 18. Ibid., p. 50. 19. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘Women’s Men’, in The Girl of the Period, II (1883), 246–7, cited in Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 134. 20. Charlotte Yonge, ‘Authorship’, 1892. 21. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 10. 23. Peter N. Stearns, ‘Men, Boys and Anger in American Society, 1860 –1940’, in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 78. 24. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 136. 25. She was by her own admission, ‘eager, excitable and at that time passionate’: Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 57. 26. In In Memoriam (1850) Tennyson also associates anger with male potency: ‘A warmth within the breast would melt/ The freezing reason’s colder part,/ And like a man in wrath the heart/ Stood up and answered “I have felt” ’, cxxiv, 13–16. 27. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 10. He continues: ‘This interior energy was consistently imagined or fantasized in a metaphorics of fluid, suggestively seminal, and in an imagery of flame.’ 28. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 11: ‘Manhood as self-discipline, as the ability to control male energy and to deploy this power not for sexual but for productive purposes was clearly specific to bourgeois man.’ 29. Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 607: ‘And therewith he kneled downe tofore the table and made hys prayers. And so suddeynly departed hys soule to Jesu Cryste, and a grete multitude of angels bare hit up to hevyn in the syght of hys two felowis.’ 30. Nicola Diane Thompson, Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 91. 31. While writing The Heir, Yonge worried ‘whether Philip will not strike those who do not know him as intended for the perfect hero’: Coleridge, Charlotte




32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Catherine Wells-Cole Mary Yonge, p. 175. Coleridge notes astringently, ‘the public, I am sure, was never so stupid.’ Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 18. The Prospective Review, no. x (1854) 460, cited in Nicola Diane Thompson, p. 95. There are several short but powerful men-only scenes in The Heir. Roper and Tosh: ‘masculinity takes on a sharper focus when women are [not] removed from the scene,’ (Manful Assertions, p. 3). Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge (p. 183) says that Guy was a hero ‘so congenial … that … he was taken as what his creator would have called a “Bild”, that is, a hero model’. Ibid., pp. 163– 4. Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival, Victorian Best-seller: The World of Charlotte M. Yonge (London: Harrap, 1947), p. 140. Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 42. Letter to Patteson’s sister, quoted in Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 268. Hayter, Charlotte Yonge, p. 45. Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge, p. 51. Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 98. Elaine Showalter comments on the ‘good grey Charlotte Yonge’[s]’ love of all things military’ (A Literature of Their Own, p. 137).



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Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery Frederick S. Roden

It has been roughly 20 years since historian John Boswell dubbed St Aelred the ‘gay’ abbot of Rievaulx.1 While this naming may be located in a very particular time and place, over the past decade a considerable amount of work on the abbot has been produced. More recently, Brian Patrick McGuire has written a lengthy essay on the awareness of same-sex desire in Aelred, as well as a biography of the saint.2 In 1844, a lengthy study of Aelred of Rievaulx by John Dobree Dalgairns appeared in Newman’s Lives of the English Saints. Dalgairns was a colleague of the future cardinal at Littlemore, Newman’s pseudomedieval, quasi-monastic community of friends. Littlemore was organized in the early 1840s, shortly after religious houses first reappeared in the post-Reformation Church of England. Dalgairns was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 29 September 1845 by Father Dominic the Passionist. The same clergyman converted Newman on 9 October of that year. Dalgairns later became a priest and a member of Newman’s Birmingham Oratory. In his biography of Aelred, Dalgairns emphasizes the abbot’s devoted friendships, his charity, kindness and compassion. St Aelred is important in considering the place of men in Anglo- and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Throughout this period and well into the twentieth century, many monks and abbots have adopted this name in religious life. In this essay, I wish to argue that an awareness of same-sex desire was present in Victorian historiography of medieval monasticism and in the practice of community foundation. The monastery in nineteenth-century England – particularly as it is seen in relation to models from the earlier Church – may be deemed a queer space. Dalgairns’ portrait provided Victorian High Church men with a model for loving brotherhoods, both spiritual and emotional. I assert that 85 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Frederick S. Roden

same-sex dynamics which have recently been suggested in the abbot’s works and vita were apparent to devout nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury males who similarly desired close emotional relationships with other men. The high proportion of homoerotically inclined men within later Victorian Anglo- and Roman-Catholicism has been well established by scholars such as David Hilliard, John Reed and Douglass Shand-Tucci.3 John Dalgairns’ correspondence reflects his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the connection he makes between the Eucharist and the community of religious friends. He writes: ‘I do not know that I have ever been to Mass without offering your [intention?] up with that adorable sacrifice.’4 ‘Every evening about 1/4 to 7 when I am kneeling in church before the Holy Sacrament I will pray for you.’5 I go to mass every morning at seven and it is very seldom that your name does not ascend with those of my friends at the time of the adorable sacrifice. God has connected us together when it seemed utterly improbable that we should ever be friends, after having sat together at the same table for years, without exchanging a word; and cannot but think that He does not intend to separate us permanently now.6 The doctrine of the Transubstantiation, the Real Presence of the body of Christ at the Eucharist, glorifies the male flesh of the Divine. The Incarnation, God taking human flesh in Christ, also redeems the mortal physical body in devotion. In monasticism, a single-sex community sets its hours by the repeated consecration and evocation of the latens Deitas, the hidden God in the Eucharist, which is consumed into one’s own flesh. I suggest that the eucharistic theology of Anglo- and Roman Catholicism reminds the devout of one’s physical body and its relation to others who may be embraced in communitas. The importance of the Real Presence in Tractarian theology may be understood as a communion rite among friends, Divine and human. Dalgairns’ emphasis on friendship is evident in his evaluation of Newman’s place in Oxford and his founding of a monastery: You can have no conception of what importance Newman is here; he alone can for a moment hold things together. I attribute this less to his wonderful powers of mind than to his wonderful love for all men. He thinks no human misery beneath him, and seems to love persons the better, the wilder and younger they are … His scheme



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Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery 87

Dalgairns later describes Newman’s character as both ‘sweetness and manly integrity’.8 He observes his culture’s suspicions of Catholicism. ‘There is at this moment in Oxford a horrid Romo-phobia and also what may be called a young-man-phobia’, both of which he calls ‘diseases’.9 By the time he is in Littlemore on Epiphany in 1843, he implicates himself in the feared categories: ‘You must know enough of me to know that, probably from being more perverse and irreverential than my neighbours, I think very highly indeed of Rome.’10 If ‘Romo-phobia’ may be conjectured as a humorous, while anachronistically-inflected, homophobia, then conversion seems to carry with it an equally strong resemblance to the contemporary trope of coming out: I have lately passed a more miserable time than I ever remember to have done, from the pain which I have caused to my dear mother by telling her as much as I have told you now. But, thank God, she is reconciled to the notion of my being a Roman Catholic, and I hope that time will still more soften her sorrow.11 Dalgairns concludes on 21 February 1848: ‘I am now a priest and I am dressed in costume, for we all walk about in Cassocks, notwithstanding the oaths etc which now and then assail us. I sometimes felt queer walking about London in such conspicuous dress, but it is time that Catholic priests should dare to show their faces.’12 Putting on the garments of the priest, when viewed in light of current theory of gender as performance, suggests the defining power of Victorian religious Ritualism as comparable to modern identity-making categories. In Dalgairns’ introduction to the Aelred vita, he reflects on St John, whom he thinks of ‘not as the old man with the golden mitre, but as ever young and beautiful as we have been used to see him in ecclesiastical pictures and sculptures’.13 Aelred looked to John as a model for ‘spiritual friendship’, as he alludes to him in the tract of that name. ‘Shall I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, says of charity: “God is friendship”?’14 ‘ “He that abides in friendship, abides in God, and God in him.” ’15 For Dalgairns, the Aelred vita is an opportunity to link the monastic revival in England with the history of brotherhoods in the West. Dalgairns demonstrates Aelred’s bookishness, as opposed to a love for tournaments. Unlike a Kingsleyan ‘Muscular Christianity’, Aelred was



about Littlemore goes on, and I love to cherish a vision of one day being there with him, though I am quite aware it is a mere vision.7

Frederick S. Roden

given to Tractarian reserve. ‘From his boyhood, his sole ambition was loving and being loved; his text-book was Cicero on friendship, which he read with avidity, and endeavoured to carry out in real life.’16 Aelred’s loving is read in the context of Biblical friendship, contrasted with masculine achievement in sport and charm of woman in romance. ‘The friendship however of David and Jonathan in Scripture affected him more than all the feats of the Round Table and the love of Queen Guenever to boot.’17 Dalgairns’ biography mythologizes a medieval ideal distinct from the Arthurian: one devoted to study, friendship and spiritual life in a community which does not privilege biological reproduction. The use of the David/Jonathan trope underscores Dalgairns’ valuation of covenanted male love in same-sex friendship. The pairing is employed elsewhere in the literature of the Victorian period, as Jeffrey Richards has discussed.18 The emphasis demonstrated by this coupling may be compared with the legal and emotional power of marriage to be found in the genre of the nineteenth-century novel. In a chapter entitled ‘The Struggle’, Dalgairns discusses with apprehension Aelred’s youthful desires for friendship: The heart as well as the understanding can be filled but by one object alone. It was not wonderful that Aelred found his high notions of friendship sink under him. Was it altogether Christian, this craving for being loved, this insatiable desire for winning hearts? It was not admiration or honor he sought – it was love; and is this not only a more subtle form of inordinate affection?19 The desire to be loved is interrogated for its Christian orthodoxy, although ‘inordinate affection’ is not defined or explained further. In the twelfth-century Spiritual Friendship, Aelred inquires: ‘Who, I ask, among men, especially among the young, is able to preserve his purity or restrain his sensual appetite without very great grief or fear?’20 For Dalgairns in this biography, the desire to love and be loved is suspected of interfering with love of God. Attachments and affections are questioned, que[e]ried, as it were. Dalgairns compares Aelred to an archbishop who was ‘of classical taste’, suggesting Victorian anxiety over male relationships of antiquity.21 He observes that the prelate ‘was dead to all things but one, and that was human affection. God in his mercy separated him from the being whom he loved most on earth.’22 Dalgairns constructs such affections as sins of pride committed by one who wishes to be well loved. He quotes Fénelon’s Nécessité du renoncement: ‘ “If those whom this man loves and assists, do not pay



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him back with friendship, esteem, and confidence, he is touched to the quick.”’23 Fénelon is clear in pointing out that it is not mawkish praise that is desired, but others’ acceptance. From this model, Aelred’s desire becomes romance, courtly love on a homosocial continuum. The attachment by affection and pathological need for approval is set within a context of devoted same-sex friendship. While such amicitia may not contain eros for all men, the circumstances surrounding this vita suggest it for Aelred. It is this period of Aelred’s life that modern critics and historians cite as evidence for his homoerotic desire. Medievalists such as John Boswell, Brian Patrick McGuire and Douglass Roby have all pointed towards an early crisis of male–male love.24 Dalgairns similarly tells us that Aelred awakens to the fact that ‘his glowing thoughts of friendship looked like a dream of romance’.25 He describes the youth’s reaction in terms we might now call, post-Sedgwick, male homosexual panic: ‘He saw that his soul was in danger, and he must fly’.26 In addressing Aelred’s anxiety, Dalgairns is careful not to articulate friendship as sinful per se. ‘True it is that our Blessed Lord has ennobled [friendship] by His wonderful condescension in loving St. John, but in ennobling it he has declared that it must be sacrificed, if need be, to God’s will.’27 Obedience is crucial, as it later serves as a regulatory mechanism in the cloister. Dalgairns concludes: This was the lesson which Aelred learned; he recognized that he had made human affection paramount even to the love of God, and the thought struck him at once that he must fly. He turned pale and trembled at it. Oh! how comes it that it is always the most loving who are called upon to sacrifice their love? why are the tenderest hearts chosen to be torn? why are they who love father and mother, and brethren and sisters, and friends, more intensely than others, ever singled out to stand forth and give them up?28 Modern readers have read Aelred’s crisis as homosexual. While Dalgairns does not articulate this point explicitly, he instead suggests that human friendship had grown too intense and come to mean too much for Aelred. Such association could imply same-sex desire. Dalgairns’ position indicates both the power and danger of affection between men in the religious culture of the nineteenth century. Dalgairns’ description of separation from family does not function as a Victorian son plot: Aelred is not called to go and make his way in the world. Instead, he makes his way out of the world. The sentimental exclamation on the loss of family suggests, rather, a girl’s departure




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How many things were in array against him, keen arguments, tender delicacy, good feeling, to say nothing of pride and the love of ease! Was the High Steward of Scotland to take his place as the lowest brother in an obscure convent? the elegant scholar to take to digging? the trim courtier to put on the coarse monkish cowl? It was fanaticism to leave the sphere in which he had been placed, and where he might do good.29 Dalgairns’ description suggests a young Roman or Anglo-Catholic in the nineteenth century undergoing similar accusations of ‘fanaticism’. The story of Aelred’s departure is poignantly concluded with an allusion to a special friendship. He had a friend whom he loved more than life; he does not tell us his name, but this was the sorest pain of all. Nothing but the full conviction that his soul was in danger where he was could have enabled him to break away from so many ties.30 Although the threat is never articulated, Dalgairns makes Aelred’s response to the trauma of parting clear. ‘And where was he to go, when he once turned himself on the wide world?’31 ‘In those days, there could be but one answer to the question, he could but be a monk.’32 As Dalgairns develops later in his biography, renunciation, life in the monastery, would offer the young man favours unavailable in the world. If monasticism requires a celibate, religious vocation, it also provides a homosocial, socially-sanctioned and therefore ‘safe’, space for the cultivation of friendship. Dalgairns concludes ‘The Struggle’ with extensive quotations from Aelred’s Mirror of Charity, detailing a corporeal conversion process of the mystic’s dark night of the soul.33 The biographer’s translation demonstrates the power of the conversion narrative in Victorian discourse. Preparing for a state of compunction, the soul focuses on its wretchedness, unworthiness and hard-heartedness. Dalgairns can name and warn against special friendships by plotting them on the twelfth century, directly translating rather than paraphrasing Aelred.



from her childhood home upon marriage. Aelred’s attachment to the domestic sphere opposes the construction of a public man of the world. The future monk is described as a dandy:


‘for I lay, polluted and rolled in filth, bound, and a captive, in the nest of iniquity, crushed under the weight of inveterate habit … the chains of vile bodily habit bound me, the love of flesh and blood held me in bonds, the graces of social life tightened them; above all there were the ties of a certain friendship sweet to me above all the sweets of life … And men looking on my smiling outside, and knowing nothing of what was going on within, used to say of me, Oh! how well it is with him, how well! they did not know that all was wrong where alone all ought to be right. For my wound was deep-seated within, tormenting, scaring me, and filling all within me with its intolerable corruption … I loathed all that I saw, and still the habit of fleshly pleasure held me down. But thou, who hearest the groans of the captives, who loosest those appointed unto death, Thou didst burst my chains; Thou, who bringest publicans and harlots into Paradise, has converted me, the chief of sinners, to Thyself.’34 While the convert’s sense of his own unworthiness is present in all such confessions, Aelred’s indication of an unspeakable sin, shrouded in mystery, is noteworthy. Through a modern and indeed postmodern lens, it is easy to give this premodern conversion experience a psychoanalytic reading. Aelred’s discourse on deep-seated corruption invites it. Without the extensive discussion of the great attachment of friendship that precedes this passage, a reading suggesting the presence of male-male desire might appear reductive. Dalgairns’ narrative is silent on the specific nature of Aelred’s sin. Translation and direct quotation seem to have been the safest way to handle the mysterious corruption.35 ‘The Struggle’ finally concludes in Dalgairns’ chapter, as the cure for Aelred’s ailment is love. In further translation from the Mirror of Charity, Dalgairns’ Aelred speaks to God: ‘“I began then to consider as much as one who had no experience could do, what a great sweetness there is in Thy love, how much peace in that sweetness, how much security in Thy peace.”’36 As Dalgairns represents it, Aelred’s sensual engagement turns from friendship in the world to the experience of Divine Love. Aelred’s devotional life is sweetness and light. For both the abbot and the biographer, there is safety in speaking from a post-conversion position. Aelred’s description of the Divine is defined by sensory experience. Dalgairns does not hesitate to recount pleasure in the experience of love once it is located in a religious space. Following this literal ‘turn’ in the narrative, the biographer demonstrates that while the call to the



The abbot exclaims:

Frederick S. Roden

cloister may be an end for certain possibilities as they exist in the world, many better things may be found in monasticism. In the mundane community, corporeality can exist outside of a spiritual framework. In monastic communitas, the spiritual life is cultivated through the senses, in the love between the soul and Christ, expressed through love for a brother. In the monastery, Aelred finds spiritual consolation in the physical form of a younger novice, in Dalgairns’ representation. ‘The grave sweetness of his face, and the depth of his recollection struck’ him.37 Simon’s passion for Christ serves as a devotional example. Aelred found it of use to look upon this monk, who was utterly unconscious of the admiration which he was exciting. When his eyes and his thoughts wandered in the choir, one glance at the modest face of Simon chaunting devoutly with his eyes fixed on the ground was enough to recall him to himself.38 Simon’s body becomes Aelred’s vector for attaining Divine Love. Dalgairns quotes Aelred’s discussion of young Simon in relation to Jesus in The Mirror of Charity. The twelfth-century abbot describes Simon using a decidedly corporeal amatory theology. Aelred’s love for the youth exists in a substituent relationship with his love for Christ. The monks’ passion for Christ’s body stands in for a more than fraternal relationship with one another. Sublimation maintains a sense of control, within which designated, ritualized ecstasy for God regulates the danger of burning for another who is not Divine and is hence too tangible. Dalgairns translates with the safe distance of seven centuries. In this passage, Aelred elaborates on the novice’s devotion to Christ, Who has incited his love. He utilizes the sensual imagery of the Song of Songs: ‘He knew … who was leading thee on, who had set on fire thy yet tender heart with the flame of His love, and thou didst run to the odour of His ointments. He went before thee, beautiful in form above the sons of men, anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows, and thou didst run after the odour of his ointments. He went before thee, that One who was lowly in spirit, over the steeps and over the mountains, sprinkling thy path with the fragrance of myrrh and frankincense, and thou didst run after the odour of His ointments.’39



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There was no danger in this mute veneration and love, for Cistercian strictness forbade his addressing Simon, and it was of use for him to choose this youthful monk for his model. ‘The rule of the order,’ says he, ‘forbade our speaking, but his countenance spoke to me, his gait spoke, and his very silence spoke.’40 Dalgairns discusses the nature of personal relationships which exist in cloistered life, and reflects upon their dynamics. In the privileged space of the religious community, fanaticism, considered deviant, perhaps queer, to the world, is institutionalized: The very object of Monasticism is to give a proper outlet to devotional feelings, which are stifled in the world, because it would be fanatical to indulge them; it must therefore be made up to a great extent of external actions. To throw oneself at the feet of another, and call oneself a miserable sinner, in a convent is part of the rule.41 Behaviour unusual by the world’s standards is proper there, as all passions are directed toward Christ. Friendship in nineteenth-century communities, as in twelfth-century Cistercian ones, allowed men a measure of freedom to explore relationships with other men in the very environment designated ‘safe’. Dalgairns observes that Aelred and Simon were eventually permitted to converse, noting that ‘It is curious that the Cistercians do not seem to have been so jealous of particular friendships in their communities as were other orders.’42 This peculiarity is explained by notions of communitas. ‘It was a first principle in monastic life that each individual should devote himself body and mind to the service of his brethren. The monastic system was an expansion of the love of the domestic circle upon a large community.’43 Monastic life schematizes patterns of relationship decidedly ‘other’ to the culture which contains it. There love is directed outward to a spiritual being, expressed non-genitally and non-generatively to a whole group of people rather than a single special individual. Intuitively, this practice seems promiscuous, the very opposite of mundane monogamy; yet it is committed to singular love of God. Dalgairns observes: ‘It was necessary then that all within the circle should share this love alike.’44



In the context of the warnings against particular friendship in religious life, Dalgairns comments on Aelred’s relationship with Simon:

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If brother Ambrose and brother Benedict were to swear a deathless friendship, and to put their black cowls together in recreation-time, and never talk to anyone else, the other brethren might well think themselves aggrieved. And if the same brethren were to proceed also to sit together in cloister, and to nod and wink, when they could not talk, if they were discontented and cross when the Prior set them to work in different parts of the grounds of the monastery, then the father Abbot would have just cause for punishing the refractory brethren.45 Following the traditional explanation of Benedict’s condemnation of friendship in the monastery, Dalgairns demonstrates the threat particular relationships pose to the harmony of communitas. However, he warns further: ‘Human love, if not submitted to rules, is a wayward, fantastic, moonstruck thing, flitting from object to object and never satisfied; or if fixed upon one in a wrong way, overleaping the bounds of law, human and divine.’46 This anxiety goes well beyond Dalgairns’ exemplum on the Rule. Such concern manifests more directly than in his discussion of Aelred’s youthful crisis the threat that consummation of same-sex desire poses. Its transgression of ‘human and divine’ law is apparent. The presence of such desire in religious life seems clearly to be acknowledged to the nineteenth-century reader. Dalgairns nevertheless asserts monastic life as privileged space. In Protestant culture, the sole depository for passion is heterosexual marriage. Homosocial communal life restructures private space, expanding domesticity beyond a biologically procreative system. Aelred’s sublimation of love demonstrates to Dalgairns that ‘fanaticism’ may be safely directed to God, and indeed that some cultures are able to create a place for such expressions of difference, a point of crucial importance for Victorian Catholics. Dalgairns concludes his discussion of monastic love by contrasting it with Aelred’s life in the world. Those feelings which had once been his curse became his blessing in the cloister. He quotes the Archbishop of Cambray on the rewards of monastic life: ‘God then gives back friendship with all his other gifts an hundredfold. Then revive all the old loves for true friends. A man no longer loves them in himself, and for himself, but in God, and for God, and that with a love, lively, tender, full of sweetness and of feeling,



Boundaries to love’s expression for preserving communal stasis and integrity are crucial, as the biographer explains:


The spirit of mentorship that Dalgairns praises in Aelred served as a model for men who established religious brotherhoods in the nineteenth century. Peter Anson’s 1958 biography of Abbot Aelred Carlyle (1874 –1955) demonstrates the importance of Dalgairns’ vita of St Aelred for later generations of Catholic men. I conclude this essay, therefore, with a brief discussion of the influence of Dalgairns’ Aelred on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century monasticism. As a London youth in the 1880s and 1890s, Carlyle attended St Alban’s, Holborn, an Anglo-Catholic parish notorious for the large number of homosexual men who worshipped there.48 Clothed as a Benedictine oblate in 1893 at St Austin’s Priory, a site favoured by the aesthete Walter Pater, Carlyle adopted the name Aelred after reading Dalgairns’ vita. Anson writes: As he read he came to many a passage which proved that he had found a canonized saint who was a kindred spirit. For Aelred of Rievaulx ‘went about the world seeking for objects on which to expend his affection, and feeling pained if his love met with no return’ … This twelfth-century abbot was ‘always looking for someone to love’ … Carlyle discovered that ‘Cistercians do not seem to have been so jealous of particular friendships in their communities as were other orders,’ and that their ‘monastic system was an expression of the love of the domestic circle upon a large community’ … This little book revealed a world in which natural and spiritual relationships were just what the would-be Anglican monk craved for, and he must have felt that it would be possible to emulate this saint in almost everything.49 In monastic communitas, ‘natural’ friendships may be celebrated without violating natural law, as all desire is directed to God. For Carlyle, who, according to Anson, ‘seemed to live from boyhood in a romantic dream’, was a ‘devotee of friendship and affection’, who took ‘delight in friendships with “charming young men” ’, there was much to be found in Dalgairns’ vita.50 Peter Anson, born in 1889, lived as a young man in Aelred Carlyle’s community on Caldey in the early part of the twentieth century.



for God can easily purify feeling. It is not feeling but self-love which corrupts friendship.’ So Aelred gave himself up without scruple to his holy friendship, for it was God, who by the order of His Providence, bound them together and inspired them with His love: and it was Him whom they loved in each other.47

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I cannot help feeling that many of the vocations in the Caldey community depended largely on personal affection for the Abbot; in fact, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to remain in the monastery without a real love for him as a man … in this respect there was a certain affinity between the spirit of our community and that of the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries.51 Anson is particularly aware of the historical dimension of Aelred Carlyle’s self-image as abbot: Aelred of Rievaulx, as is clear from his writings … could conceive of nothing so perfect as to love and to be loved. It must be admitted that ‘he was inclined to favouritism and the joys of spiritual friendship with charming young men’ … Our Abbot, like his patron, generally had his ‘Simon,’ ‘Hugh,’ ‘Ivo,’ or ‘Little Ralph.’ It was not only the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot who chose a young monk who soothed him, when he was worried, and refreshed his leisure.52 Both medieval history and Biblical typologies shaped the interpersonal dynamics of turn-of-the-century monastic life: If any specially favoured novice or professed monk decided that he was not called to the cloister and left the Island, Aelred of Caldey would mourn his loss in much the same words as Aelred of Rievaulx used in the famous lamentation for Simon … which must have been inspired by David’s lament for the death of Jonathan.53 Anson concludes his historical discussion by locating the place of spiritual friendship in Carlyle’s monastic communitas: Spiritual friendships were not discouraged in our community, and their expressions sometimes took a form which would not be found in any normal monastery to-day, but which appears to have been common enough in the early Middle Ages. Embraces, ceremonial and non-ceremonial, were regarded as symbolical of fraternal charity, so our variant of the Roman rite permitted a real hug and kisses on the cheek … the Caldey ceremonial had medieval precedent, because



He indicates the role of the medieval model in shaping the monastic revival of the nineteenth century and English monasticism that followed it. He observes in 1958:


As is evident in Anson’s statements, there is a space for personal affection in this brand of religious life. The glorification of love in the monastery encompasses various forms of desire. While monasticism in the nineteenth century may not be described as a homosexual, or even homoerotic space, it may certainly be designated queer in its sense of difference.55 In this respect, the medievalism of Victorian religion was not just a search for a spiritual continuum, but at moments a historical mapping of the development, and indeed affirmation, of a transubstantiating and beneficent same-sex desire. As the century progressed, an awareness of this sense of difference is further articulated. By Carlyle’s, and certainly Anson’s, time, medical discourse had made homosexuality a firm identity characteristic of the pathological individual rather than a sinful fall from grace. However, Anson’s prose acknowledges that the queer space of the monastery allowed behaviour different from the world outside. Whether the celibate passion of the monk’s queerness seems foreign or obvious to a contemporary audience, religious culture must be thoroughly evaluated in constructing histories of sexuality.

Notes 1. Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era through the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 222. 2. ‘Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx (1110 –67)’, American Benedictine Review 45(1994): 184 –226, and Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx (New York: Crossroad, 1994). Current interest in gay theology – more often in practice than theory – has shown concern with Aelred as well. Aelred has been hailed as a model for gay Christians in our own era, particularly within the Anglican Communion. He is the patron saint of Integrity, the lesbian and gay organization within the American Episcopal Church (ECUSA). According to Paul Halsall, Boswell’s work prompted the Church to include Aelred’s day among the lesser feasts of its calendar. ‘Calendar of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Saints’, Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Catholic Handbook, Online, Internet, 5 June 1997 available, http://www.bway. net/~halsall/lgbh/lgbh-gaysts.html 3. David Hilliard, ‘ “Unenglish and Unmanly”: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181–210; John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996); Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).



a kiss on the mouth was expressly stipulated in the earlier forms of the Cistercian and Premonstratensian rites.54

Frederick S. Roden

04. Quotations from John D. Dalgairns’ unpublished correspondence are reprinted here with the kind permission of the Principal and Chapter of Pusey House, Oxford. 22 October 1845. 05. Ibid., 16 January 1846. 06. Ibid., 3rd Sunday of Advent 1845. 07. Ibid., 1 December 1841. 08. Ibid., 14 March 1843. 09. Ibid., 23 March 1842. 10. Ibid., Epiphany 1843. 11. Ibid., 11 March 1845. 12. Ibid., 21 February 1848. 13. John Dobree Dalgairns, ‘Life of St. Aelred’, The Lives of the English Saints, ed. John Henry Newman (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), p. 59. 14. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, trans. Mary Eugenia Laker (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Press, 1977) 1: 69. 15. Ibid., 1: 70. 16. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, pp. 94 –5. 17. Ibid., p. 95. 18. ‘ “Passing the Love of Women”: Manly Love and Victorian Society’, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 92–122. David Halperin, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990) discusses David and Jonathan within their historical context. The pair’s homoerotic significance remain in popular culture, as the French lesbigay Catholic organization is named David and Jonathan. 19. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, p. 99. 20. Aelred, 2: 50. 21. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, p. 99. 22. Ibid., p. 100. 23. Ibid., p. 101. 24. Boswell, Christianity; McGuire, ‘Sexual’ and Brother, and Roby, ‘Introduction,’ Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship. 25. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, p. 101. 26. Ibid., p. 101. 27. Ibid., pp. 101–2. 28. Ibid., p. 102. 29. Ibid., p. 102. 30. Ibid., p. 102. 31. Ibid., p. 103. 32. Ibid., p. 103. 33. Sue-Ellen Case discusses the queerness of male mystical writing using the example of the noche oscura of John of the Cross in ‘Tracking the Vampire’, Differences 3.2 (1991): 1–20. Cassandra Laity further analyses the appropriation of John in T. S. Eliot, in ‘H. D. and T. S. Eliot: The Decadent Trope of the Slain Youth’, ALA Convention, H. D. Session, Baltimore, 23 May 1997. Carolyn Dinshaw has likewise evaluated queer appropriations of medieval mystics in her reading of Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe: ‘Margery Kempe Fights Back’, New York University, 25 March 1996.



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34. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, pp. 110 –11. 35. In addition to the suggestions that this essay makes – that same-sex desire may have been ‘concealed’ or present through indirection in the Victorian Catholic movement – there is a specific practice of the High Church that reifies the epistemological system upon which such a movement is based. Auricular confession was part of the English High Church in the nineteenth century. John Shelton Reed describes this ritual as a ‘secret privilege of young Anglo-Catholics’, Glorious Battle, p. 49. The institutionalization of secrecy as part of religious observance would seem to both allow rhetorically and suggest intellectually a whole range of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ secrets. On same-sex desire and secrecy, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 36. Dalgairns, ‘Life’, p. 110. 37. Ibid., p. 126. 38. Ibid., p. 127. 39. Ibid., pp. 126–7. 40. Ibid., p. 127. 41. Ibid., pp. 129–30. 42. Ibid., p. 131. 43. Ibid., p. 131. 44. Ibid., p. 131. 45. Ibid., p. 132. 46. Ibid., p. 132. 47. Ibid., pp. 133– 4. 48. See Hilliard, ‘ “Unenglish and Unmanly” ’, and Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 49. Peter Anson, Abbot Extraordinary: Memoirs of Aelred Carlyle (Leighton Buzzard: Faith Press, 1958), pp. 29–30. 50. Ibid., pp. 10, 7. 51. Ibid., p. 124. 52. Ibid., p. 125 53. Ibid., pp. 125–6. 54. Ibid., p. 126. 55. See Eve Sedgwick’s broad use of the term ‘queer’ in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).




Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century Philip Healy

There is what I take to be an observable phenomenon in British culture: namely the attractiveness of the celibate Roman Catholic priesthood to certain male homosexuals at the end of the nineteenth century.1 Whether this has always been the case, and indeed whether the phenomenon has a wider geographical range, is beyond our immediate focus. Certainly, however, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early decades of the twentieth, there is a recognizable pattern of homosexual orientation, if not necessarily practice,2 which is brought to mind by names such as J. H. Newman, F. W. Faber, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frederick Rolfe, John Gray, R. H. Benson. I take it, too, that these are merely the tip of what might be called a cultural iceberg. Whether the pattern continues to the present is also beyond the scope of this study. I would only observe that, since the start of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, the terms of the debate have changed and the discreetness of the past, with its room for ambivalence, has evaporated. And it is precisely this ambivalence about sexual identity during the late nineteenth century which gives rise to our late twentieth-century curiosity.3 Gender and sexuality are issues much in the foreground of our contemporary cultural debates; in the late nineteenth century, discussion was only just under way and still at the classificatory stage. Exploration of the sexual identity of historical figures faces innumerable obstacles, not least the paucity and obliqueness of the extant evidence.4 Study of their spirituality, an essentially evanescent subject, presents its own challenge. Yet the collocation of the sexual and the spiritual within the same personality is justification enough for trying to identify the various elements and to study their interrelationship. When, however, priests are the focus of study, there is the additional 100 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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problem that prurience can so easily scotch the whole project. No doubt, the celibate Catholic priesthood appealed to a wide range of personality types in the late nineteenth century. But in its appeal to certain homosexual men it was clearly offering a model which brought together, however ambivalently, both the spiritual and the sexual aspects of their personality.

I Before turning to the work of two homosexual Catholic writers, Frederick Rolfe and John Gray, both of whom take the Catholic priesthood as their theme, I want to look in more detail at what was understood in the late nineteenth century by the priesthood and, in particular, the requirement of celibacy. In 1896, Pope Leo XIII pronounced that ordinations according to the Anglican rite were ‘completely null and void’.5 Leo’s Apostolic Letter, Apostolicae Curae, was intended to close off the hope that Anglican clergy converting to Rome in the wake of the Oxford Movement might continue their priestly ministry in their new Church. The structure of Apostolicae Curae is essentially negative in its declaration of the defectiveness of form and intention in the Anglican rite. The Catholic doctrine of orders implicit in the Letter is only occasionally, and fleetingly, brought into the open: ‘there [is] in the whole Ordinal no clear mention of sacrifice, of consecration, of priesthood (sacerdotium), of the power to consecrate and offer sacrifice … ’ 6 Similarly, the Catholic understanding of the episcopate as ‘the priesthood in the highest degree’7 is only touched on in passing. It was not, of course, the business of an Apostolic Letter, occasioned by a particular controversy, to elaborate the full richness of the Catholic teaching on holy orders. That could be found easily enough elsewhere. This was, after all, the high noon of Ultramontanism, and the clerical party was in the ascendant in the Church; the dignity and functions of the priesthood were everywhere held up for the veneration of the laity. In England, this Catholic revival entailed a rediscovery of Roman customs either through outright conversion to Rome herself or through the occasionally even more extreme vehicle of Anglo-Catholicism. At the heart of the Catholic theology of ordination is the belief that the priest becomes alterus Christus, that he is configured to Christ as he offers the sacrifice of the mass. Theological language, of its very nature, can only move indirectly, by metaphor, symbolism and analogy. But it is also of the nature of imagery to leave strong traces on the mind’s eye.



Priesthood and Homosexuality 101

Philip Healy

The covenantal relationship between God and his people is lyrically expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition in nuptial terms, which are intended to emphasize the faithfulness and fruitfulness of the mutual bond of love; in Catholic theology Christ is described as the Bridegroom and the Church as his Bride. There is an equivocal quality to the sexual imagery of the Catholic theology of orders; the point of reference is highly unstable. At one moment the maleness of the ordained priest is emphasized as he is subsumed into the person of Christ the Bridegroom. But the theology of orders also sees the priest as representative of the Church, the Bride, as she brings her offerings to the altar. There is, therefore, a sexual ambivalence latent in the sacerdotal character as symbolized by Catholic theology, which, if circumstances and personal predisposition favour it, may encourage a certain type of homosexual orientation. And, in the context of the second half of the nineteenth century, with sexual psychology only just beginning, it is unsurprising that for these men, even the well educated, a combination of ignorance and reticence inhibited a fuller understanding of their sexuality. Contemporary Protestant observers sensed this sexual ambivalence within the ranks of the Catholic clergy. It is noteworthy, for example, that one of the most famous works by a leading figure of the revival, Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), was occasioned by published remarks of Charles Kingsley,8 which, while ostensibly on the subject of the untruthfulness of the Catholic clergy, were really the shudder of revulsion of a full-blooded heterosexual Protestant patriarch at the Catholic rule of celibacy, together with an incoherent intimation of what might lie beneath it: Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which heaven has given to the Saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.9 The Catholic priest, then, was perceived by his enemies as not like other men. At his ordination, with the laying on of the bishop’s hands, and the anointing of his own, the priest is dedicated to the exclusive service of the Lord. The traditional discipline within the Latin rite of clerical celibacy emphasizes that exclusivity and dedication. And given that,



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at this period, most priests would have embarked on their celibate lives as virgins, the rite of ordination and its symbolism would give an almost visceral sense of integrity to the priest’s self-understanding of being a man apart. Again, Newman provides the prototype. He recalls, with much diffidence, in the Apologia the early awakening of his sense of a vocation to the celibate state: I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me, – there can be no mistake about the fact: viz. that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since, – with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all, – was more or less connected in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance, missionary work among the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for some years. It also strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world, of which I have spoken above.10 If Newman’s early sense of a vocation to the celibate life was real enough, his explanation, with its emphasis on practical considerations, such as the availability of the missionary, was far too superficial. In later life, he came to understand that something more spiritually sustaining would be required if celibacy were not to become a merely negative and sterile gesture. Virginity was a prophetic stance against the world in anticipation of the Kingdom, where gender was transcended: ‘For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 4. 27–8). Virginity, then, was a counter-cultural sign, denoting an exclusive relationship with the Lord. But that, in turn, within the sacramental and analogical mindset of Catholicism was described in nuptial terms. Newman himself, writing as an Oratorian, was to distinguish between the empty, institutional celibacy of many priests and religious and the spiritual ideal. Of the former, a celibacy adopted merely for its own sake, he wrote: ‘I do not know whether such a state of life is more melancholy or more unamiable, melancholy from its unrequited desolateness and unamiable from the pride and self-esteem




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Philip Healy

This is not the Virginity of the Gospel – it is not a state of independence or isolation, or dreary pride, or barren indolence, or crushed affections; man is made for sympathy, for the interchange of love, for self-denial for the sake of another dearer to him than himself. The Virginity of the Christian soul is a marriage with Christ.11 Newman discreetly establishes the spousal relationship between the male Christ and the female soul (anima) of the Christian. In earlier centuries, patristic paradox or scholastic intellectualism would happily have navigated the sexual ambiguity of the relationship. Steeped as he was in the Fathers, Newman, too, could handle the terms. But for many of his contemporaries, the century’s empiricism in science, realism in art and naturalism in ethics, encumbered the imagination. It is easy, therefore, to see the scope afforded by the traditional nuptial imagery for sexual ambivalence. For the homosexual who understood himself as such and who wished to live according to the norms of society and the moral teaching of his Church, the celibate male priesthood was a refuge and a bastion; for those whose sexuality was as yet undetermined and a source of puzzlement and distress, it was a protection; and, no doubt, for some, it was a screen for their sexual practices. I have no reason to suspect that this last category constituted any significant number. The middle group, however, those whose sexual orientation was late in determining itself and a source of confusion to them, was, I am sure, quite large.12 Of the size of the first category, those secure in their sexual identity and turning to the priesthood as a way of living their lives, we can, at this distance, make no definite calculation. But it was an acknowledged pathway. The sexual psychologist, André Raffalovich, writing in the wake of the Wilde trials, recognized the attraction of the Catholic priesthood for the chaste male homosexual and urged that a corresponding welcome be afforded him by the Church: L’Eglise catholique a, certes, compris que souvent l’inversion était moins scandaleuse que la sexualité hétérosexuelle; elle en a aussi toujours connu l’étendue et les ramifications; elle doit être dépositaire de bien de recettes pour l’éducation des invertis, et elle doit choisir pour prêtres encore aujourd’hui les invertis supérieures, chastes, dévoués, de préférence; puis les hétérosexuels qui ont rompu avec le monde ou qui ont la force de caractère nécessaire; et l’inverti grossier doit naturellement être un des pires dangers d’une institution religieuse quelconque.13



on which it is based.’ But, he continued:


Entered in the Register of the Scots College, Rome, just a decade apart, we find the names of two English writers of the so-called Decadent movement: Frederick Rolfe and John Gray. Both men were converts to Catholicism, albeit a Catholicism which owed as much to Walter Pater as to Cardinal Newman, and both had found their way to the Scottish seminary in Rome in search of ordination to the priesthood; only one was to gain it. Frederick Rolfe, whose Toto stories were to appear in The Yellow Book during the 1890s, registered at the College in 1889, only to be expelled within six months. Nor was this the first time that he had been asked to leave a seminary. This double rejection by the Church of what he believed to be his God-given vocation rankled. In time, with the many other slights, real or imagined, from members of the Church and the literary establishment, Rolfe would fall irretrievably into a state of persecution mania, only occasionally relieved by vigorous sexual encounters with the young gondoliers of Venice. He died there in 1913. His writing, which at its best has a distinctive verve, is all too often marred by either preciosity or paranoia. His life-story, of course, gave rise to one of the classics of English biography, A. J. A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo (1934).14 John Gray, whose Silverpoints (1893), a volume exquisitely designed by Charles Ricketts, and containing original poems and English translations of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, is one of the finest book productions of the 1890s, registered at the Scots College in 1898.15 Gray’s decision to enter the priesthood followed the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, which had affected him deeply, for he had preceded Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde’s affections. And Wilde, in a gesture of flattery, had given his lover’s name to the hero of his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; revised 1891).16 Gray was ordained in Rome in 1901 and, in due course, moved to Edinburgh, where he served as a priest until his death in 1934.17 Rolfe and Gray each wrote a novel which has the theme of the Catholic priesthood at its heart. Perhaps it is not surprising that Rolfe should turn his disappointment at his thwarted vocation into Hadrian the Seventh (1904), a flight of fantasy in which his autobiographical protagonist, George Arthur Rose, not only becomes a priest, but pope. By contrast, Gray’s novella, Park: a fantastic story (1932), which is also autobiographical, gives voice to something of a crisis of identity about his own priesthood. The spiritual and the sexual dimensions of the



II

Philip Healy

priest-characters are evident in both works, although the personalities revealed are different in each case. In 1898 an Aberdeen newspaper subjected Rolfe to a long and detailed attack. That was bitter enough in itself; what Rolfe was never able to forgive or forget was that a Catholic newspaper reprinted the assault. His novel, Hadrian the Seventh, was an attempt to defend himself. For, if the doyen of English Catholic converts, John Henry Newman, had been attacked in print and had defended himself in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, why should Frederick William Rolfe not follow suit? The Apologia had first appeared in the form of eight pamphlets, one of which, ‘Answer in Detail to Mr. Kingsley’s Accusations’, had identified and refuted 39 ‘blots’ in Kingsley’s argument.18 The number was, no doubt, significant, and was a sly reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Rolfe was not to be outdone. When the newspaper attack appears in Hadrian the Seventh, the Pope informs his Cardinal-Secretaryof-State that there are ‘thirty-three absolute and deliberate lies, exclusive of gratuitous or ignorant misrepresentations of fact, in a column and three-quarters of print’.19 The significance of the number 33, Jesus’ age at the time of his crucifixion, would not be lost on the pious reader, as it certainly was not on the paranoid author. And if Newman could become in due course a cardinal, a prince of the Church, then George Arthur Rose (otherwise Frederick William Rolfe) could become, at least in his own imagination, not only a priest but the supreme pontiff himself. In the novel, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Pimlico, following a stalemate in the conclave to elect a successor to Pope Leo XIII, and struck by the physical resemblance of one of his fellow cardinals to George Arthur Rose, whose case is on his conscience, returns to London to seek out the latter. He finds that Rose, despite his ill treatment at the hands of his co-religionists, has persisted in his vocation. The Cardinal apologizes for the wrongs that he has suffered and offers him ordination. Rose is to accompany the Cardinal to Rome, where he finds himself elected pope. Hadrian’s pontificate begins controversially as he insists on giving his blessing from the balcony above St Peter’s Square, which had been sealed since 1870 in the papal dispute with the newly united Kingdom of Italy. He continues with the same independence of mind; he disperses the treasures of the Vatican to the poor, he permits married convert Anglican clergy to minister as married Catholic priests, and he is reconciled with the King of Italy. Finally, however, he is shot down by a crazed Scottish socialist, but not before he has divided the world into mutually respectful power blocs.



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What is noteworthy about Hadrian the Seventh is the ideal of the priest which it presents. One might have expected the celebration of mass to be at the heart of a novel by an author long thwarted in his vocation. Not so. Rose informs the Cardinal-Archbishop of Pimlico that his first mass will be ‘a black mass’,20 a Requiem, and that is all that is said on the subject. The only occasion when we see Hadrian as celebrant is during his coronation mass, and the emphasis here is on power, the power of the priest and of the pontiff: Slowly, and with all the unspeakable solemnity accumulated during centuries, the mass was sung. The Apostle elevated the Host to the four quarters of the globe. Cardinals ruffled like huge flamingoes round Him. He always was white and still. … Down the nave, He went again toward the great porch. Out of the crowd a voice cried ‘Christus regnat.’ As he sat enthroned amid the surging peoples, Macca crowned Him, saying: ‘Receive this tiara adorned with three crowns, and know Thyself to be Ruler of the World, the Father of Princes and Kings, the earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ Our Saviour.’ Hadrian understood the formula in no metaphorical, but in the plain and literal, sense of the words. He neither minimised nor magnified their significance. He had an opportunity which was entirely grateful to Him. He was Ruler, Father, Vicar. And He was altogether unafraid. He stood up, and blessed the City and the World.21 The novel does not explore imaginatively what it might be like to be a priest offering the sacrifice of the mass. Instead, it is a novel of sensibility, the sensibility of a certain type of highly fastidious priest. George Arthur Rose is an individualist. His exquisite aesthetic taste, as well as his homoeroticism, is displayed in the pictures on his garret walls in London: photographs of the Hermes of Herculaneum, the terra-cotta Sebastian of South Kensington, Donatello’s liparose David and the vivid David of Verrochio, the wax model of Cellini’s Perseys, an unknown Rugger XV. prized for a single example of the rare feline-human type, and the O.U.D.S. Sebastian of Twelfth Night of 1900.22 The same fastidiousness, although without the art, is demonstrated in his choice of rooms for the papal apartments in the Vatican.




Philip Healy

Rolfe emphasizes the singularity of the priestly persona by two devices: the protagonist at confession and the protagonist at prayer. Both, of course, create the interior life of the character. Before his ordination, Rose makes his confession to the Bishop of Caerleon: he confesses to distractions at mass because of ‘the brogue of the priest’,23 that he stopped reading the Office because of ‘a bit of nasty vulgar Latin’;24 that he has entertained impure thoughts ‘perhaps half a dozen times’ inspired ‘by a verse of John Addington Symonds in the Artist’.25 Significantly, he tells his confessor that he does not love his neighbour: ‘I seem to be a thing apart. I can’t understand my neighbour.’26 He admits that he does not know what love is. The same projection of exquisite taste and homoeroticism manifest themselves in Hadrian’s prayers, which are often taken from the ancient Greek poets and dramatists. He commissions a new pontifical gold cross, which is to be a combination of the Apoxyomenos and the Antinous of the Belvedere. ‘ “The cross will be of the kind called Potent, elongate: the Figure will combine the body and limbs of the Apoxyomenos with the head and bust of the Antinous … ” ’ This is to be a ‘soaring and triumphing’ Christ.27 Although we are told of George Arthur Rose that his method of prayer was ‘intellectual rather than formal’,28 Hadrian’s contemplation of the cross is decidedly aesthetic, not to say sensuous: He used to gaze at His cross by the hour together, planning combinations of lights and shades and backgrounds of book-backs: placing the golden symbol there, and revelling in the supple splendour of the Form, its dignity, its grace, the majestic youth of the Face, noble and grave. He would close His eyes and learn the lovely planes and contours with delicate reverent touch. It pleased Him to think that He had created a type of incarnate divinity, which neither was the Orpheys of the catacombs, nor the Tragic Mask of the Vernicle, nor the gross sexless indecencies wherewith pious Catholics in their churches insult the One among ten thousand, the Altogether Lovely.29 Hadrian’s sense of himself as a man apart is, clearly, all of a piece with his understanding of his priestly vocation and his homosexual orientation. Ironically, however, the one thing needful is missing: love. In a chance encounter with the five-year-old Prince Filiberto, Hadrian believes that he has, at last, discovered the meaning of love: not giving



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Yes, He was a thing apart. That was His trouble. And – what did the boy say? – ‘I had better keep it myself.’ The content of that saying was to Hadrian just like a thunderbolt. It was Love – yes, that was quintessential Love, from the clear eyes and the stainless lips of childhood, – to keep one’s troubles oneself. For in that way one relieved others.30 But what Hadrian believes to be ‘the secret of the method’31 of love merely compounds the underlying problem. Spiritually, there is no development between George Arthur Rose’s state at the beginning of the novel – ‘In mind he was tired, worn out, by years of hope deferred, of loneliness, of unrewarded toil’32 – and Hadrian’s at the end – ‘Pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired.’33 The condition, of course, is well-documented in traditional accounts of spirituality, where it is known as accidie: a certain lethargy of spirit, a dryness and sterility of spirit. It is also an aspect of that ‘melancholy’ and ‘unamiable’ type of clerical celibacy, which drew criticism from Newman. When we turn to John Gray’s novella, Park: a fantastic story, which also has a priest as protagonist, the mood is quite different. Dr Mungo Park is a professor of moral theology; he is on a walking holiday in the Cotswolds. On the road from Burford to Oxford, he undergoes a strange experience, following which he finds himself in the same place but at a different time, some undefined future period, and in a very different culture. The country, known to the inhabitants as Ia, is occupied by two populations, a surface one, which is black, and a Wellsian, subterranean one, which is white and rodent-like. Unlike Hadrian, Park has no difficulties in forming friendships, particularly with fellow priests. In fact, what we see of Park only goes to corroborate Newman’s general observation that ‘man is made for sympathy, for the interchange of love’. But this is a sympathy and a love firmly set within the context of Park’s priestly celibacy. In discussing whether Park is ‘the most priestly novel in the language’, Fr Brocard Sewell has stated that it ‘is perhaps the only English novel of which it could be said that it must have been written by a priest’.34 But as well as the priestliness of the narrative voice, not to mention of the narrative itself, we detect that there is something awry in the world of the novel; it is not unlike an anxiety dream. Mungo Park’s disorientation communicates itself to the reader.



trouble to others but keeping it to oneself. As he ponders the meeting, he perceives his singularity as his ‘trouble’:

Philip Healy

The most striking feature of Ia is that it is Catholic. Indeed, its form of government would appear to be theocratic. Culturally, it is hieratic; the forms of the Latin rite abound, as do members of various religious orders, the Cistercians, Dominicans, Carmelites, Carthusians. And since this is the Latin Church, celibacy is the rule. Park, while well looked after, is clearly a source of great puzzlement to the Wapami, the people of Ia. His clerical captors sense that Park is a fellow priest, but he cannot prove it; he lacks a ‘celebret’, the letter from his bishop conferring on him priestly faculties. This is the cause of the anxiety which suffuses Park’s consciousness, and the narrative itself. Without a celebret, Park cannot say mass. At Christmas, he can act only as an acolyte: The procession formed. Park, with his restless, distracted habit, had begun by noticing the types, the linen, the vestments, the processional cross, the candlestick he himself carried; until, moved with contrition, he said to himself: There is nothing more beautiful nor more terrible than the mass; and, with eyes downcast, he went about his business as an acolyte. On the way to the altar the antiphon pealed: Ecce sacerdos magnus. The bishop, he reflected; and that was all. He recalled his days as a student in Rome, when he had assisted at great functions; and felt happy. One feature affected him deeply, the genuflection at the words Et incarnatus est; but it always did. But then another. When the credo had been sung, priests in stoles came before the altar for reverence; there were hundreds of them; and dispersed by great groups in all directions of the church. He supposed that they were going to administer the Bread of Life to that world of famished souls. And with that he went to carry wine and water to the deacons. After the ministers, the sovereign & the other princes, nobles and gentlemen knelt and received Holy Communion at the stretched cloth. When all had risen, Park observed that the deacons moved with the cloth down towards the entrance to the sanctuary. The acolytes took their torches to accompany the bishop and the assistant priest. It was one child kneeling on the step, whose face was the colour of an altar-bread, with shut eyes, and streaming black hair, with lips and tongue like a rose. – Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam amen.



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Although the liturgy is dwelt on in aesthetic detail in much the same way as Rolfe’s account of the papal coronation mass, the focus is quite other. In Park, the mass is at the heart of the priest’s spirituality. There is a poignancy in Park’s regret that he could not say mass on the feast of St Gertrude because of his lack of a celebret,36 which is quite foreign to George Arthur Rose’s frustration at his denied vocation. The theme of Park seems to be the protagonist’s anxiety about his selfidentity as a priest; a sense of misgiving pervades the narrative. The novella was published in 1932. It was, as I have argued elsewhere,37 almost certainly occasioned by the newspaper accounts of the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in 1930, as was Evelyn Waugh’s very different novel of the same year, Black Mischief. But this was only the proximate occasion. Behind that lay events in Gray’s personal life in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when he was taken up by Oscar Wilde and became for a short time his lover. His rejection by Wilde in favour of Lord Alfred Douglas, followed by Wilde’s trials, were clearly traumatic for Gray, and his decision in 1898 to seek ordination was an attempt to put his past behind him. He carried, however, a residual burden of guilt. As a young man, Gray had known the French poet Verlaine, and as a priest he had offered mass on the anniversary of the poet’s death. Verlaine’s homosexual relationship with the younger poet Rimbaud mirrored in some respects Wilde’s affair with Gray. After his split with Verlaine, Rimbaud had spent the rest of his life in Ethiopia. Haile Selassie’s coronation would have brought back past associations. But Africa could cause Gray even more shame. On his second day in Ia, Park is taken to mass at a church dedicated to the Martyrs of Uganda. Gray the priest had, no doubt, often reflected on the example of the 22 Catholic young men, pages of King Mwanga of Buganda, who had been put to death between 1885 and 1887 for refusing the king’s homosexual advances. These were the years that Gray had begun to make his way in the literary and homosexual worlds of London. In the novella, the protagonist’s historical namesake, Mungo Park, the eighteenth-century Scottish explorer of West Africa, is a decoy. East Africa is the real source of the narrative. Jerusha McCormack has correctly argued that ‘what the story delineates is no less than a psychic map of the consciousness of John Gray’.38 According to my reading, however, that consciousness is repressing



Park served private masses all night. At one of them his fellowserver was the archprince.35

Philip Healy

various homosexual associations from the author’s youth. The East/West transposition is both a device for, and a cypher of, that repression in the novella. Nevertheless, for all the anxiety about sacerdotal identity and the narrative strategies for repression, Park arguably remains ‘the most priestly novel in the language’. Gray’s own sense of personal unworthiness before the ideal of the Catholic priesthood, the alterus Christus, is evident throughout. But so also is a final self-acceptance. If we see beyond the decoy of Mungo Park from West Africa to East Africa and to Ethiopia, we shall encounter the world of Prester John, the priest John. Park registers for John Gray the ambivalence which must affect all priests, a feeling of being unworthy of the high calling of their sacramental orders. Hadrian the Seventh and Park offer two very different experiences of priesthood. In Rolfe’s paranoid fantasy, it is the power and the glory of the office of the high priest, the supreme pontiff, which holds the author’s imagination in thrall. While Gray’s sense of his own unworthiness finds literary expression in the elusive codes of Park. For all their differences, however, both works share the same Tridentine model of the Catholic priesthood: the man set apart, anointed for the service of the Lord, and whose celibacy is the sign both of distinctiveness and of distinction. This is priesthood as indisputably male and gathering to itself, and valorizing, separateness. It had obvious attraction as a psychological strategy for integration for the homosexual personality in a society, such as that of England in the late nineteenth century, which saw only vice or disease in the condition. In his pioneering essay on Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality, Hilliard, while drawing attention to the theological and pastoral aspects of the Anglo-Catholic revival, with its emphasis on the doctrine of the Incarnation39 and its use of auricular confession,40 ultimately provides a sociological interpretation of the relationship: ‘AngloCatholicism provided a visible network of supportive and protective institutions … ’ 41 In addition, its somewhat controversial position within the Church of England was both a symbol of, and a protection for, the dissident sexuality of certain of its members: At the heart of the correlation between Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality was an affinity in outlook between a sexual minority and a minority religious movement within the established church. Both were at variance with entrenched beliefs and both outraged the older generation.42



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If, as Hilliard argues, the Anglo-Catholics regarded ‘their religion as “much smarter” than its rival, Roman Catholicism’,43 then, I would suggest, there must have been something else to attract the homosexual to the latter, especially since for many it was not the religion of their birth and had involved the often painful decision to convert. The secret of the attractiveness of the Roman Catholic priesthood to certain homosexuals in the late nineteenth century lay, I believe, at the psychological level. The Roman Catholic priesthood, with its rule of celibacy, offered a paradigm for the male homosexual to live out his sexuality, however implicitly, in an integrated way. His religion conferred great value on his choice of life which was reflected in the esteem and respect of his flock. Moreover, the disciplines of the clerical state, especially celibacy, with its emphasis on being set apart and not as other men, provided the structures of a distinctive type of male spirituality.

Notes 01. A comparable phenomenon has been identified in the attractiveness of Anglo-Catholicism to homosexual men in the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. See David Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25, No. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 181–210. 02. Compare ibid, p. 187. 03. This ambivalence calls for caution in the contemporary reader. James Eli Adams, for example, has warned against too ready an association of dissident masculinities with transgressive sexualities in the Victorian period. See Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 230. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes a useful distinction between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual’ to theorize the relationship between sexuality, class and gender. See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, reissued with new preface, 1992), pp. 1–20. 04. Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, p. 186. 05. Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae (1896), trans. J. D. Smith, revised and annotated by Francis Clark (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1967), (para. 36), p. 22. 06. Ibid. (para. 30), p. 19. 07. Ibid. (para. 29), p. 18. 08. See also Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, p. 188 and Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 84. 09. J. H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 20. 11. Quoted in Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 133.




Philip Healy

12. This was, for example, one of the criticisms of George Tyrrell against the Jesuits, even before his expulsion and subsequent excommunication during the Modernist crisis. See Nicholas Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’: A life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 135 and 183. 13. ‘The Catholic Church has, indeed, recognised that inversion was often less scandalous than heterosexual sexuality; she has also always known the extent and ramifications of it; she ought to be the storehouse of rules for the education of inverts, and still today she ought for preference to choose for priests superior inverts, chaste and devoted men; and then heterosexuals who have broken with the world or who have the strength of character necessary; and the coarse invert ought naturally to be one of the worst dangers in any religious institution.’ Marc André Raffalovich, Uranisme et unisexualité. Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (Lyon: A. Storck, 1896), p. 32. My translation. 14. See also Donald Weeks, Corvo (London: Michael Joseph, 1971) and Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977). 15. W. E. Brown et al., The Scots College, Rome (London and Edinburgh: Sands & Co., 1930), pp. 118–19. 16. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 290. 17. See Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray: 1866–1934 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1983), and Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray, Poet, Dandy & Priest (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/ University Press of New England, 1991) for accounts of John Gray’s life and work. 18. Newman, Apologia, ed. Svaglic, pp. 408–64. 19. Fr. Rolfe (Frederick Baron Corvo), Hadrian the Seventh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), p. 301. 20. Ibid., p. 61. 21. Ibid., p. 103. 22. Ibid., p. 8. 23. Ibid., p. 46. 24. Ibid., p. 47. 25. Ibid., p. 51. 26. Ibid., p. 54. 27. Ibid., pp. 177–8. 28. Ibid., p. 81. 29. Ibid., pp. 369–70. 30. Ibid., pp. 223– 4. 31. Ibid., p. 373. 32. Ibid., p. 1. 33. Ibid., p. 413. The same combination of weariness and the search for love, in this case rather more explicitly than in Hadrian the Seventh, is found in the notorious short story about an Anglo-Catholic priest, J. H. Bloxham’s ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, which appeared in the short-lived Oxford undergraduate literary magazine The Chameleon in 1894 and was made much of by the prosecution in Wilde’s trials. (A facsimile edition of the single issue of The Chameleon was published by The Eighteen Nineties Society (London, 1978).) 34. Fr Brocard Sewell ed., Two Friends: John Gray & André Raffalovich (Aylesford: St Albert’s Press, 1963), pp. 44 –5.



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35. John Gray, Park: a fantastic story, ed. Philip Healy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), pp. 91–2. 36. Ibid., p. 67. 37. Philip Healy, ‘Text and Context in John Gray’s Park: Prester John’s “Black Mischief” ’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 36, No. 4 (1993), pp. 413–27. 38. McCormack, John Gray, p. 244. 39. Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, pp. 206–7. 40. Ibid., pp. 207–9. 41. Ibid., p. 209. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., p. 210.




Male Sexuality, Religion and the Problem of Action: John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough Howard J. Booth

I For Western subjects today a crisis is often experienced in terms of sexuality and relationships, and there are many well-established discourses that encourage, support and sustain us in seeing life in this way, as can be confirmed by a quick glance at the titles in newsagents and bookshops. Interestingly, though on reflection perhaps rather strangely, this language addressing success and happiness in ‘private life’ is often separated from achievement and fulfilment in terms of career. In the Britain of the period 1840 –70, such distinctions had yet to emerge, and there was another place where such questions around fulfilment in a life were often asked in the society of this period, namely Christian texts on spiritual reflection and selfexamination. Modern male sexual identities were only beginning to form and build towards their present-day importance, indeed the very notion that a person had a ‘sexuality’ was new. To examine how male identity was seen in ways that stretched across religion, sexuality and work I shall explore the most significant crisis in the life of the critic, cultural historian and homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds (1840 –93). Part of Symonds’ response to his situation in the 1860s was to think and write about the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in 1861, a Victorian male he saw as having faced similar questions to his own a generation earlier. Symonds’ interest in Clough as ‘the crux of criticism’1 shows the important role played by engaging with texts for individuals negotiating masculine identity at this time.

116 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Walter E. Houghton, discussing the anxiety induced by religious doubt in his 1957 text The Victorian Frame of Mind, noted that ‘No Victorian, I think, suffered from that state of mind more acutely than J. A. Symonds for, in his case, aided by the bad condition of his health, it lasted for many years.’2 Reading Horatio Brown’s biography of John Addington Symonds, published in 1895, Houghton would indeed have seen an account of a man who appeared to have spent much time engaged in worrying about his religious faith and its implications for his health of mind. One event in the Brown biography, in particular, stands out as the major crisis before some stability was established. Symonds was in the South of France with his wife, Catherine. He experienced a night of ‘despair’ in Cannes in January 1868, and Brown repeated what Symonds had written of his experience the following day: The last night I spent in Cannes was the worst of my whole life. I lay awake motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling what is meant by spiritual blackness and darkness. If it should last for ever? As I lay, a tightening approached my heart. It came nearer, the grasp grew firmer, I was cold and lifeless in the clutch of a great agony. If this were death? Catherine, who kept hold of me, seemed far away. I was alone, so utterly desolate that I drank the very cup of the terror of the grave. The Valley of the Shadow was opened, and the shadow lies still upon my soul.3 Symonds then goes on to regard this night of doubt as offering a compensation in the form of a new belief: ‘Until I found this Hell I had no notion of the voice of God. The solitude of this despair asserts Him. I am not alone.’4 The Brown biography suggests that religion remained highly important for Symonds, though never again was the tension and strain so unsettling. A freer view was adopted, emphasizing a general, benign force in the Universe, rather than traditional Christian orthodoxy. With Symonds’ health stabilized, the work was undertaken that made him a leading critic in the late nineteenth century, the author of The Renaissance in Italy (seven volumes, 1875–86), Studies in the Greek Poets (two volumes, 1873) and an excellent Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (two volumes, 1893) – among many other texts, translations, editions, volumes of poetry and travel books. But there were other factors in Symonds’ crisis in early 1868 than religion. For Houghton the Brown biography was the standard Life, but



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it is a strange book. It uses extensive quotation from Symonds’ Memoirs, written in the late 1880s, with linking passages written by Brown, who was his literary executor. The whole autobiographical text was not placed before the public.5 Brown left the manuscript of the Memoirs to the London Library on his death, with the condition that it was placed under embargo. In 1939 even Symonds’ daughter had to ask the permission of the Library’s committee to consult her father’s work. His modern biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, was granted access to the Memoirs in the early 1960s, and her biography showed the wider public that Symonds spent much of his life trying to come to terms with his sexual desires for other men. She pointed out that the crisis of January 1868 came at a crucial turning point when he accepted that it would be permissible to act on these sexual wishes.6 As Symonds wrote in his Memoirs concerning the aftermath of the Cannes experience: I emerged at last into Stoical acceptance of my place in the world, combined with Epicurean indulgence of my ruling passion for the male. Together, these two motives restored me to comparative health, gave me religion, and enabled me, in spite of broken nerves and diseased lungs, to do what I have done in literature. I am certain of this fact; and I regard the utter blackness of despair at Cannes as the midnight in which there lay a budding spiritual morrow.7 Symonds sees accepting the sexual as contributing to a positive religious state, and so to a ‘budding spiritual morrow’. When Brown quoted this passage he removed the words ‘of my ruling passion for the male’, turning Symonds’ mixing of religion and sexual issues into a purely spiritual crisis.8 Modern accounts of gay male history have come to see Symonds as, even before Edward Carpenter, one of the very earliest people to speak for the legitimacy of male–male sexual desire in Britain. It has been shown by authors such as Jeffrey Weeks in his influential study of homosexual identities in Britain, Coming Out, that, working within the constraints of his society, he drew attention to the precedents in other times and cultures for regarding same-sex desire as legitimate and widespread, and showed that it played an important role in the lives of many of the great and the creative. Symonds was also the first to evaluate Continental sexological works in a (privately printed and circulated) English text, A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), and at the time of his death was collaborating with Havelock Ellis on the volume



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Sexual Inversion. However, in Weeks’ text the pendulum simply swung to the other extreme: where Brown excluded homosexuality from his account of Symonds’ life, Weeks ignores religion. Publishing the first edition in 1977, not long after the embargo on the Memoirs was lifted, Weeks claimed that Brown ‘in his biography made Symonds’ life appear to be a search for religious rather than emotional satisfaction’.9 This suggests that Brown imposed the religious interpretation when Symonds had no such concern. But the Memoirs, finally published in 1984, confirm that religion was always of great importance to Symonds. What the accounts of Symonds’ life tell us, contrary to Brown’s biography and to work on Symonds in gay studies from the late 1970s on, is that we need, when addressing the inception of modern male homosexual identities in the Victorian period, to think about the individual in relation to interlinked religious and sexual concerns.

III The widespread popular belief today is that sexuality and religion are wholly separate forms of speech, with each suggesting different ways in which meaning and fulfilment in a life can be found. Work in lesbian and gay studies accepts this separation, and focuses on how medical and legal discourses show the historical emergence of the notion of human ‘sexuality’ in the Victorian period.10 In fact, much of this work relies on the pioneering texts of Michel Foucault who was actually highly sensitive to the importance of religion in his writing on sexuality.11 In volume one of The History of Sexuality he argued that religious discourse along with medicine and the law sought to form and mould sexual practice.12 Later in the project he was to note that, for all the apparent tensions between orthodox Christianity and sexual activity, both the Christian and sexual discourses shared a similar conception of the human subject, what he called ‘desiring man’.13 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then, what occurred was a shift in the interrelations between linked sexual-religious discourses, and not a rupture between a religious age and a modern period concerned with sexuality and relationships. In the 1990s, with texts such as John Maynard’s Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (1993), there has been a move towards considering sexuality and religion in the nineteenth century together.14 Further, closely related are issues of productive ‘work’. Herbert Sussman has considered manliness in the first half of the Victorian period in terms




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of the sustainable regulation of the flow of male energies. Responding to the need for the productive in a time of industrialization, attitudes to masculinity were already changing, but as yet this was not managed, as it was to be from the end of the nineteenth century, by organizing goods and power through male–male homosocial relations that were policed to exclude homosexuality. For Sussman, rather, the early Victorians defined maleness as the possession of an innate, distinctively male energy that, in contrast to Freud, they did not represent as necessarily sexualized, but as an inchoate force that could be expressed in a variety of ways, only one of which is sexual. This interior energy was consistently imagined or fantasized in a metaphorics of fluid, suggestively seminal, and in an imagery of flame.15 Sussman contends that the pressure on the male in this period between the 1830s and the 1860s was to regulate the flow of male energies productively, avoiding the dangers of either repression or an unfocused, and so unproductive, externalization. Failure to balance the flow of energies would not simply result in career misfortune, but spread over all aspects of life, leading, it was felt, to forms of male physical and mental illness. Sussman often refers in his study to the Victorian fascination with the figure of the celibate monk (for example, in the writings of Carlyle, Browning and Pater) as a limit case of an extreme form of self-regulation. His study suggests that in this period issues around masculinity ranged widely, interconnecting issues of work, religion and emerging male sexual identities. Yet while the ways in which it was possible to figure manliness were widely spread, achieving a balanced regulation of the male self was experienced as being difficult and challenging. Here, looking at Symonds on Clough, it will be seen that a somewhat different imagery was used, with personal wholeness being explored through reference to plant life and generation.

IV Symonds linked sex and religion from his schooldays.16 Though the Symonds family had a Plymouth Brethren background, his father, a distinguished Bristol doctor well connected with the intellectual Establishment of the time, brought him up in the Church of England and sent him to Harrow. But early contacts through other parts of his family with ‘evangelical Christianity’ left Symonds, he wrote in later



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life, with ‘a morbid sense of sin’.17 His headmaster at Harrow, the Revd C. J. Vaughan, had been a favourite pupil of Dr Arnold; he had been in the year above Clough at Rugby. Histories of Harrow from later in the century praised Vaughan for what they saw as his reform of the school after the Rugby model. Symonds had a different view and his Memoirs, for all the attitudes to homosexuality that he had adopted by the time of writing, describe the unashamed sexual activities in the school in a tone of moral horror. The writing slips back into the perspective of the fastidious young boy encountering the world of an unreformed public school.18 Vaughan did make church attendance frequent and opposed the culture of love affairs and the ‘feminizing’ of the younger boys. He personally prepared Symonds for his confirmation; and his preparatory classes were undertaken with his closest friends, including one Alfred Pretor. In January 1858 Pretor told Symonds that he was having an affair with his headmaster, and produced letters from Vaughan as proof. Symonds kept quiet until he had left Harrow, but he told the story to one of his Fellows at Oxford. In his Memoirs, though the tone of the section is generally self-justificatory, he felt he should have owed first loyalty to Pretor and other close friends. Professor Connington insisted that Symonds tell his father, who had Vaughan resign from his position. One precondition of Dr Symonds’ guarantee of no publicity was that Vaughan would not take up a major Church position. In 1863 he tried the resolve of Dr Symonds by accepting the Bishopric of Rochester from Lord Palmerston. A telegram was dispatched from Dr Symonds, and, to the bafflement of the wider public, Vaughan withdrew. Knowledge of the affair was extended across a circle of men: even Symonds’ sister was not told the reason for Vaughan’s departure from Harrow, and her family’s role in it. Vaughan’s wife, though, was aware of the details, and she (a daughter of the Bishop of Norwich and sister of the then Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, later to be Dean of Westminster) visited Dr Symonds to plead for her husband’s career. He was, apparently, greatly moved, but in no way varied his strictures. This story, told first and with great skill by Grosskurth, can be presented in a way that shows the underbelly of Victorian morality, or as part of an account of how Victorians handled sexual scandals. (Brown, censoring this material, said that Symonds’ accounts of his Harrow days were ‘not copious’. Rather than the Memoirs he drew on Symonds’ letters to his sister from this period, and played up the meagre references to his healthy masculine sporting activity while at school.19)




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For Symonds the Vaughan affair posed a series of ethically awkward questions – the disclosure came as he was himself starting to realize that he was attracted to those of his own sex. Vaughan had been his priest as well as his headmaster, and his inconsistency produced a crisis of belief. This was stabilized not by recourse to a Christian text but by a first reading of Plato’s Phaedrus and then, the same night through to the dawn, the Symposium. Writing in his Memoirs, Symonds records that ‘I thought I had transcended crude sensuality through the aesthetic idealization of erotic instinct’.20 Thinking of the beautiful male was all to the good, and indeed gave entry into a world of beauty but, following Plato, sensuality was wrong. Offending against the Christian ethical code could be avoided. Symonds here also linked his sexuality to his interest in the arts – he was drawn anyway to what he called the ‘aesthetic side of religion’ and High Church practices.21 Symonds was not alone in his position. Those men closest to him in his undergraduate days and early manhood were non-practising homosexual schoolmasters. The letters exchanged by this group of friends encouraged each other in the cultivation of some beautiful young pupil. However, they would counsel against any physical relationship, intervening strongly if the boundary looked like being crossed by the friend. The complex language of Symonds’ letters to these male friends used religious discourse, with the sadness of the relationships being expressed as the agony of religious doubt. Biblical language would be gently, though not (at least in Symonds’ eyes) irreverently, appropriated to allow him to express how he would like to enter into the friend’s Platonic affair. An example of this would be a letter of 22 October 1866 to his then closest friend Henry Graham Dakyns, at this time a master at Clifton College (he later became a friend of the Tennysons and a translator of Xenophon), who had befriended a boy at his school named Arthur Carré. Symonds replied to a letter from Dakyns and returned a poem of Arthur’s that he had been shown: The letter was itself a Poem & gladdened my heart like the song of birds in May. For when thou singest I sing, & when thy heart is glad I too am light of heart – even though the days are dark, the eyes weary, & the brain oppressed. Let us thank God for the good that hath fallen to thee, the good for wh. thou wast made, the good of others & thy own. Yea & thou shalt have greater good than this. Even for thyself shall it be poured forth more abundantly. ‘For in the wilderness shall waters gush forth & streams in the Desert.’ These are to me not words but Music. Write to me more about the deep things of thy soul.22



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Modern readers may very well feel that there is an element of exaggeration here that gives it a comic edge, indeed a suggestion of a Victorian-religious form of ‘camp’. Two forms of speech are mixed as the religious language is used by Symonds to help him enter into another man’s same-sex love affair. A pederastic affair, restrained by a Platonic distaste for the sensual, is described in the language the Old Testament used for the fecundity of the Promised Land. The letter builds to a misquotation of Isaiah 35:6, which actually runs: ‘for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and the streams in the desert’ (Authorised Version). The form taken by Symonds’ misremembering is telling: his ‘gush forth’ instead of ‘break out’ suggests that thoughts of male sexual release lie beneath the Platonic surface. Symonds was to remain fascinated by ancient Greece, but he later felt that a position that sought the beauty in male–male love without addressing the natural needs of the body was unsustainable. His sexual relationships, as far as is known, were to be with adults only. The end of Symonds’ time at Oxford was accelerated by a scandal that involved questions about his sexuality. He had left his Fellowship at Magdelen College and tried the law, but lack of enthusiasm and poor health had left him adrift, without a clear direction in terms of ‘work’, that all-important element for successful manliness in Victorian culture. His doctors felt that his poor health would be eased by some sexual outlet (a proto-Freudian conclusion) and though they, and his main adviser and father, Dr Symonds, knew of his homosexuality, they prescribed marriage. By the late 1860s the problems in his subsequent marriage to Catherine North were beginning to surface, and Symonds remained in poor health. In January 1868, then, the time of the Cannes experience, Symonds may have been in the South of France with his wife and children, and with friends such as the entertaining Edward Lear nearby (Lear wrote The Owl and The Pussy Cat for Symonds’ daughter, Janet, at this time), but the problems of finding an accommodation between the religious and the sexual, along with a place in the world of work and action, remained.23

V In his Memoirs Symonds was to note of his own religious development in the 1860s, ‘I sympathized much with Arthur Clough.’24 Two articles he wrote either side of the night at Cannes show Symonds using Clough as someone from the preceding generation who had also dealt with interconnected sexual-religious concerns. Clough was the most important writer for Symonds as he changed his understanding of his




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relationship with God and his attitude to sex, something that has not been noted in the literature on Symonds. Clough, like Symonds, had experienced a questioning of belief and also sexual temptation. He too had left Oxford, in his case resigning his Fellowship because of doubts over the Thirty-Nine Articles.25 The two periodical pieces see Symonds at once working to the expectations of his readership (which he knew included the poet’s widow, Blanche Clough) while increasingly identifying what fascinated him most in the author, namely those poems which addressed together issues of religious doubt, sexual temptation and the problem of action. Clough was sexually interested in women rather than men, and this might seem to us today a major difference between the two, making Symonds’ intense interest in Clough unlikely.26 Interestingly, at this stage in the development of discourses of male ‘sexuality’ what mattered was not so much the sex of the object of desire but whether sexual acts outside marriage were permissable, and any concomitant renegotiation of attitudes to religion. Clough re-entered the conventional mainstream in the last ten years of his short life, and Symonds’ interest in Clough was to fade after the Cannes experience as he took a different course. But Clough provided Symonds with a way of viewing his own life in the male contexts of school, Oxford and after through the thoughts and experiences of someone who had contended with similar issues. Writing about Clough was a necessary clearing of the way for the new departure. Symonds had first heard of Clough in 1861 from that great figure in Oxford Liberalism and Hellenism, Benjamin Jowett. Going to read an essay, Symonds was stopped by Jowett before he had sat down. Jowett said, ‘I cannot listen to your essay tonight. I have just had news that Clough is dead … He was the only man of genius – whom one felt to be a man of genius – I have known among the younger men of Balliol.’27 Such praise from the usually taciturn Jowett must have promoted Symonds’ curiosity. A volume of Clough’s Poems had been posthumously published to supplement the slim volumes published in the 1840s, and Jowett had given Dr Symonds a copy of the privately circulated 1865 Letters and Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough. Symonds decided to write an article on Clough and he asked Mrs Clough for permission to draw on the private edition, using Jowett’s name to pave the way. She wished to preserve her husband’s reputation for religious orthodoxy and moral uprightness, while simultaneously seeking to raise his reputation as a writer. Symonds’ first article on Clough was published in the Cornhill Magazine for October 1866.28 His first major piece, it devotes little space to the poetry, though because little was in print about Clough’s life the poetry had in fact been consulted to reach the sweeping



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biographical conclusions. Symonds imposed his own preoccupations on Clough, beginning with the importance of schooldays. In his view, ‘Clough seems never to have recovered from the hotbed system of Rugby’. Symonds thus attacks the institution that brought forth Vaughan, his old headmaster, but he also suggests that Rugby was better than some other schools (including, he no doubt thinks, Harrow): ‘We cannot but compare this spirit, if overstrained yet vigorous, with the selfishness, low aims, and lack of purity in many schools.’29 J. R. de S. Honey has noted that the word ‘purity’ was frequently used in debates on schooling to refer to worries about boys’ sexual behaviour.30 Symonds then focuses on Clough in maturity as afflicted not only by the legacy of Rugby but by doubt at Oxford. The forces of scepticism in the Universities are seen by Symonds as destroying Clough’s chances of success: ‘Thus the great force of character which in times of more settled opinion would have rendered him distinguished as a man of action was neutralized; and the genius which might have been employed upon some solid work of art, was frittered away and obscured by doubts.’31 Symonds identifies with Clough in this and his self-pitying side shows through. But he also uses Clough, half a page on, to bolster his own sense that there are fixed laws: In the midst of doubt about the proper object of life, he never swerved from the conviction that there was a duty to be obeyed, a law of right and wrong which should not be transgressed. And though all kinds of moral and religious questions plagued his reason, he held fast to the belief that truth immutable abode behind the clouds, that God, the source of all good things, was cognizant of what we thought or did or said. The importance of such a faith as this will not be undervalued by any one who has observed the want of tone and moral helplessness to which mere scepticism leads … 32 Symonds introduces the ‘moral’ element here, clearly gesturing towards sexual issues. Scepticism about religious truth is linked to moral collapse, and the argument suggests a line being held by Symonds that he was afraid to cross. It captures his position before the night in Cannes. In the Cornhill article there is, though, a split between what he feels he can present to his readers – the ‘official’ argument of the piece – and evidence of his own interest in this nexus of doubt, sexuality and action. He claims that the ‘speculations out of which Dipsychus, Easter Day and Amour de Voyage were woven interrupted the healthy development of Clough’s genius’, and he welcomes the move in life and work, and in the late Mari Magno poems, to ‘subjects outside himself’.33 Yet it




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is the speculative texts that attract Symonds. While condemning sections of Dipsychus as ‘tedious from their length and ambiguity’, the poem fascinates him and he ends the piece with a long quotation. It could be argued that this interest resulted from the text’s unavailability to most readers (only excerpts had received full publication), but Symonds was also pulled towards the poem: Dipsychus, as its name implies, is the story of a man with a double soul – or rather with two voices in his soul; one impelling him to seek the world and action and indulge his instincts, the other leading him aside to meditation and the purity of a secluded life. It is the old contest between flesh and spirit, real and ideal, action and dreaming, the world as it is and as it might be, viewed through the peculiar medium of Clough’s perturbations at the time when he composed it. … It is a curious example of the powerlessness to take any course, the wire-drawn subtlety, the high moral tone, and the mixed motives of modern scepticism.34 If Clough’s interests are ‘peculiar’, then Symonds is certainly capable of entering in to them; there is a ‘lift’ in the energy of the writing in this passage which runs against the main thesis that Clough found his greatest success in marriage, a job in an office and near-silence as a poet. Mrs Clough was not pleased. From a soothing reply Symonds wrote to her it appears that she questioned his confident assertions about her husband’s doubts, based on the poems and a limited knowledge of the man. Part of Symonds’ strategy in his answer to her was retreat (while also trying to get her to say more about that life) as well as the assertion of how important Clough was to ‘many men of my age’. He says in a postscript to the letter that ‘I may say that there are several at Cambridge and at Oxford who look on Mr Clough’s poems as the expression of their deepest convictions and seek in him a mirror of themselves, deriving strength and support from his example’.35 For Symonds – and he extends this to others of his generation of University educated men – Clough’s life and poems could provide the testing ground for the concerns of their own minds. After the Cannes crisis Symonds continued to work on Clough, pursuing with greater resolution the kernel of what interested him in the writer. He claimed to have written an article on Clough and theology (which never appeared in print).36 In May 1868, at Jowett’s suggestion, he was asked by Mrs Clough to help her edit her husband’s literary remains for general publication. She was cautious and marked some texts and passages for exclusion, but Symonds told friends that he was



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urging that the widest range of material possible should be placed before the public. While the 1869 volume was published under the name of Mrs Clough alone, with an acknowledgement to Symonds, it appears that his involvement was extensive. It may even have included his penning the introductory memoir (finished by November 1868) which appeared under Mrs Clough’s name. While much of the editing was done in early 1869, it is known that Symonds had been sent unpublished Clough manuscripts by post, and he had been invited by Mrs Clough to visit her at Combe Hurst.37 It was as part of the effort to create a climate for the publication that Symonds wrote his second article on Clough for the 1 December 1868 issue of the Fortnightly Review.38 The piece remains cautious about the likely views of its audience, but it now asserts that the doubt is manly. Symonds quotes a note by Mrs Clough to Easter Day that its most famous statement ‘Christ is not Risen’ should not be taken as Clough’s ‘habitual belief’, and that the poem does not lead towards doubt but rather from doubt to faith. Symonds, though, is firm in his opinion that the poem is the work of ‘a mind steeped in the disintegrating solvents of nineteenth-century criticism’.39 Symonds has a section on Clough and religion that, one can surmise, draws on the previously drafted Clough and Theology article. Doubt, following the Cannes experience, is presented by Symonds as a way to move beyond what is outdated in religious belief. Clough is praised for getting to the ‘essence, as distinguished from the forms, of religion and morality’: Manfully and boldly he admitted all the difficulties that occurred to his mind, faced them, scrutinised them, and maintained in spite of them an invincible confidence in the moral supremacy of good, and in the relation of his own soul to God. He had the strength to cast off much that was dear and honoured in his earliest beliefs, and to fling himself upon a sea of anxious questioning.40 Manly exploration by Clough challenges received views: he is not praised, as in the first article, for embracing marriage and administrative work. Symonds’ own post-Cannes voice comes to the fore as he describes the process of stripping away the accumulated detritus that has gathered around religious truth: The primal religious instincts of mankind are apt in the course of centuries to gather round them metaphysical husks, which are partly protective of the germs within, and partly restrictive of their




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true vitality. Times arrive at which these outward shells are felt to have become too hard and narrow. They must then be broken through in order to free the kernels that lie within them. The most clear-sighted men at such periods try to discriminate between what is essential and what is unimportant in religion; but the majority cling always to the human and material rubbish with which it is clogged, as if it were the very living and life-giving divine truth.41 The imagery here is of natural growth and fecundity which, along with references to running water, we have already seen Symonds associating with love affairs, religious growth and a successful masculinity. The lack of both religious and sexual fulfilment is described using the language of the failure of plant generation, and of the need for humankind to develop and evolve. Symonds analyses Clough’s views on religion as set out in a then unpublished manuscript entitled ‘Religious Tradition’ (it was included in the 1869 volumes). This conception of ‘tradition’ is not the dogma of the Churches of Europe, or even the Unitarian approach to religion which Clough had explored during his time in America with Emerson, but the best of the Christian past along with other religions and cultures. Through this text of Clough’s, Symonds was preparing himself for his religious quest which would parallel his break with sexual convention. Clough had seen a path and pulled back, whereas Symonds would take this interest further finding, too, other thinkers and writers than Clough to guide him as he contributed to the reconfiguring of male identities in this period. Symonds works round in this second article to the Clough poems that treat together doubt, love and action. He sees Clough as going beyond what he sees as the ‘trivial domesticities’ of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House: he did not shut his eyes and dream that the Englishman’s paradise of clean hearth and a kind wife is the only object of existence, or, that if it were, it would be easy to obtain entrance into it. The patient insight, refusing to be deceived by any illusion, however sweet, in its unwavering courage, which we have traced in his treatment of religion, appears no less in his treatment of love. He is able to see men and women as they are, very imperfect in their affections, often too weak even to love without an arrière pensée, letting priceless opportunity slip by, and killing the flower of one part of their nature by the drought and dryness of the other part.42



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Symonds links religion and love, refusing to rest in conventional marriage if it leaves arid and undeveloped the possibility of other, as he sees it more spontaneous, ways of loving. The imagery of plant growth and generation is here used to describe a failed form of human sexuality. Symonds is now drawing on a belief that repressing sexual desires is injurious to health. Less than a year after his first article appeared Symonds has found the resolution to mount a different argument about Clough. Symonds, among critics of Clough down to the present day,43 placed an unusually strong emphasis on the unfinished Dipsychus, responding to it with more force than to The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich or Amours de Voyage. The latter is, like Dipsychus, set in Italy and its main figure, Claude, is concerned with the problems of action and love that face the modern male. It is, though, more political in its concerns than Dipsychus, and centres on a conventional male-female love affair. In Dipsychus, though the forms of sexual temptation remain heterosexual, the concerns of sexuality and religious doubt are further to the fore and this is aired in terms of a close relationship between two ‘men’, Dipsychus and the very earthy Spirit. It is fascinating to speculate whether Symonds saw the manuscript versions of the poem while working with Mrs Clough. Whichever version one reads, it is clear that Dipsychus eventually resists the temptations – in part, sexual temptations – offered by the Spirit. In his recent article setting out the textual history of the poem J. B. Phelan has noted through the course of Clough’s own revisions ‘a clear restriction in the poem’s moral amplitude’.44 Printed versions of the poem have gradually revealed more of the originally marked sexual content, but it is clear that the 1974 Oxford University Press collected edition of Clough’s poetry did not make available all the material, and so wholly reverse the censorship of sexual references found in the first edition of 1951.45 Phelan quotes lines scored through in Clough’s Venice notebook, relating to the possibilities of sex with Venetian prostitutes, that are more explicit than any reproduced in editions of Clough’s poems.46 Symonds certainly alighted, in Dipsychus, on the midVictorian poem that more than any other – and one can include in this Tennyson’s In Memoriam – explored together sexuality and religion.

VI Symonds major crisis occurred on the Continent, where he was to spend much of his later life. Mainland Europe provided Symonds with




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other forms of masculinity to which to respond, alerting us to the role of different places and cultures in the shifting constructions of masculinity. England, with its social mores, religious climate and associations with lethargy and bad health, had many negative associations for Symonds. He spent little time there in the last 20 years of his life, being one of the first to discover that living in the Alps could help tuberculosis sufferers. But his playground, where he occupied rooms belonging to his close friend Horatio Brown, was Venice. The memory of the setting of Clough’s Dipsychus perhaps contributed to his deepening love of the city, which, like many other writers,47 he associated with sexual and aesthetic pleasure. In a rare reference to Clough in the correspondence of the last 25 years of his life, Symonds linked his poetry to the city: ‘The days go so nonchalantly that one realises that desire of Clough’s “Were life but like the gondola!” ’ There have been a succession of sad sumptuous autumn days: the lagoons asleep, gently heaving, in long undulations, beneath the immense vault of varied greys, modulating from the warmest violet to the coldest slaty hues.’48 Clough is now associated with a relaxed and calm sensuality. It must be doubted whether, in Symonds’ later years, as his boat made its way round the city with his gondolier and lover Angelo Fusato, the memory of the tempting Spirit in Clough’s Dipsychus urging submission had the same force and resonance it had once possessed. After Symonds’ Cannes crisis a religion that was not dominated by rules and internal self-searching came to the fore. He looked for God in all things in the Universe as part of a belief system called the ‘Higher Pantheism’, and a belief in an evolutionary tendency for humankind’s improvement. The chapter on ‘Religious development’ in his Memoirs shows that religion remained highly important,49 though pained outbursts in that text show that sexual guilt and religious anxiety never wholly departed. Clough’s writings helped Symonds negotiate a major shift in his personal development which appears to have led to better health and the capacity for work, though it was to be Walt Whitman that came to interest Symonds most as a poet of relationships and spirituality.50 Examining Symonds’ life and writing helps in the wider consideration of issues of male identity in the period, and the consideration of how the male subject had to negotiate with an interlocking series of forces around work, religion and the increasing emphasis on the significance of ‘sexuality’. In the period before the widespread deployment of sexology and psychology the narratives left by writers who had themselves dealt with similar issues of male identity were of great importance. Symonds changed from upholding Clough



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as an example of the need to hold to fixed religious precepts towards a view of him as encouraging a questioning approach to orthodoxy and conventional ethics, and as someone who had begun the task of rethinking religion in ways that would allow for greater freedom. His engagement with Clough began to show him that his path to productive work lay in writing; and the texts he produced were then available to influence other men.

Notes 01. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume 2, 1869–84, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Roberts L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), p. 81. 02. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 75. 03. Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds. A Biography (1895. 2nd edition, London: Smith, Elder, 1903), pp. 255–6. 04. Ibid., p. 256. 05. For an excellent analysis of the forces that prevented a fuller account of Symonds’ life appearing, and which, indeed, resulted in the destruction of many of his papers, see John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 50 –70. 06. ‘The experience at Cannes had tellingly revealed to him that peace would elude him as long as he resisted his own nature’. Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds. A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), p. 127. 07. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 173. 08. Brown, John Addington Symonds, p. 254. 09. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out. Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 56. 10. See, for example, Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents. Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990). 11. Indeed, Foucault had seen the link between the increased emphasis on sex and debates about religion as early as his essay on Bataille. There Foucault notes that the growth of interest in ‘sexuality’ had a complex relation to the ‘death of God’, the mid-nineteenth century crisis of faith that resulted from Biblical criticism and scientific discovery. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 31–2. 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). 13. In Volume I of The History of Sexuality Foucault appeared to be suggesting that there was, to use his own terminology, an ‘epistemic break’ around 1850 which saw a system of thought centred on religion give way to a preoccupation with sexuality. When Foucault resumed the History of




14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

Howard J. Booth Sexuality project, he announced that he now felt it necessary to take a different approach because of the similarity of the conception of ‘the subject’ in Christianity and the discourses of sexuality. His new project was to construct ‘the history of desiring man’, a project that was to begin with different conceptions of the body and pleasure in Greek texts and to end with a volume – uncompleted at his death – entitled The Confession of the Flesh, about fourth-century Christian texts. He felt he had to follow through how ‘in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of a “sexuality”, it was essential first to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire’ (Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality. Volume Two, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 6). It was impossible to begin a history of sexuality in modern times, he now felt, because by then ‘the notion of desire, or of the desiring subject, constituted if not a theory then at least a generally accepted theoretical theme. … It was this theme, too, that appeared to have been inherited, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from a long Christian tradition. While the experience of sexuality, as a singular historical figure, is perhaps quite distinct from the Christian experience of the “flesh”, both appear nonetheless to be dominated by the principle of “desiring man”.’ (Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 5.) John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also the similar approach pursued by Renée V. Overholser in ‘ “Looking with Terrible Temptation”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Beautiful Bodies’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1991), pp. 25–53. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities. Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 10. See also pp. 1–15. The account that follows draws on Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds, pp. 22– 41; and The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, pp. 94 –117. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, pp. 37, 39. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, pp. 94 –5. Brown, John Addington Symonds, pp. 47–63; the quoted phrase comes from p. 62. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, p. 96. Ibid., p. 103. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume 1, 1844–1868, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), pp. 670 –1. See Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds, pp. 94 –127; The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, pp. 129–81. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, p. 244. Biographical material on Clough is drawn from Robindra Kumar Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough. Towards a Reconsideration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). That said, the critic Joseph Bristow has explored the ‘homosocial’ relationship between Clough and Matthew Arnold in his article, ‘ “Love, let us be true to one another”: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and “our Aqueous Ages” ’, Literature and History, Third Series 4: 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 27–49.



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27. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, p. 256. 28. [John Addington Symonds], ‘Clough’s Life and Poems’, Cornhill Magazine, 14 (October 1866), pp. 410 –21. 29. Ibid., p. 411. 30. J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe. The Development of the Victorian Public School (London: Millington Books, 1977), p. 194. 31. [John Addington Symonds], ‘Clough’s Life and Poems’, p. 412. 32. Ibid., p. 413. 33. Ibid., p. 419. 34. Ibid., p. 421. 35. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume 1, pp. 669–70. 36. Letter to Dakyns, 4 January 1867, in The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume 1, p. 689. 37. Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds. A Biography, pp. 131–3 and pp. 338–9, no. 18. 38. John Addington Symonds, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough’, Fortnightly Review, 24 (1 December 1868), pp. 589–617. 39. Ibid., p. 598. 40. Ibid., p. 591. 41. Ibid., p. 592. 42. Ibid., pp. 600 –1. 43. For the best recent discussion of Clough, see the chapter ‘The Radical in Crisis: Clough’, in Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 178–204. 44. J. P. Phelan, ‘The Textual Evolution of Clough’s Dipsychus and the Spirit’, Review of English Studies, 46 (May 1995), 230 –39, 238. 45. The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). The 1951 first edition was edited by H. F. Lowry, A. L. P. Norrington and F. L. Mulhauser. 46. The Spirit, in St Mark’s Square, encourages Dipsychus to visit a nearby prostitute. He recounts one of his own experiences. Once in her room the prostitute had not delayed, she goes ‘Up with her petticoats, and hands me / Much as one might a pot de chambre / The vessel that relieves le membre / No would-be pretty hesitation / Most businesslike in her vocation / She but the brief half-instant lingers – / That strikes her bargain with five fingers – / Twas well enough; I do not mean / Lovely, but for this country, clean.’ Clough’s ‘Venice Notebook’, in Phelan, ‘The Textual Evolution of Clough’s Dipsychus and the Spirit’, p. 238. 47. See Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered. 48. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Volume 3, 1885–1893, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), p. 768. 49. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, pp. 242–52. 50. Symonds wrote well on the American poet in his book Walt Whitman: A Study (London: John C. Nimmo, 1893).




‘The Mightiest Evangel of the Alpine Club’: Masculinity and Agnosticism in the Alpine Writing of John Tyndall Francis O’Gorman

Muscular Christianity, in its multiform appearances, provided a prestigious model for the aggregation of courageous manliness with Christian conduct in the mid- to late Victorian period.1 This chapter looks at a competing and overlooked discourse which sought to affirm certain terms of masculine identity, but which, for the most part, contested aspects of the traditional language of western Christianity. I examine, through a number of close readings, the Alpine texts of John Tyndall (1820 –93), the Royal Institution’s Professor of Natural Philosophy from 1853 to 1887, a well-known and controversial agnostic, and a distinguished Alpine mountaineer. I discuss them, sometimes through comparison with the Alpine writing of another agnostic, Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), as written spaces for the construction of particular forms of masculine identity, and also as sites for the fashioning of specifically agnostic responses to the Alpine landscape in the face of a considerable tradition of writing which had privileged the Alps as the locus of Christian or theist spiritual experience and epiphany. Taken together, the discourses assimilated within Tyndall’s texts constitute what might be called the language of muscular agnosticism, a language born from the broad terms of muscular Christianity, but epistemologically resistant to them, and which gives an indication of some of the verbal resources available in the male culture during the period for the expression of intense experience of the natural world, its grandeur and sublimity, outside the parameters of Christian belief and beyond the established lexicon of Christian spiritual experience. For many Victorian Alpine climbers,2 religious or otherwise, the strenuous activity of mountaineering allowed for the projection of a certain kind of heroic masculine identity beyond the complications and ties of quotidian life. The climber’s bravery in facing the physical 134 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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dangers of the mountains was emphasized repeatedly as a key to his manliness.3 Ruskin, who had initially thought Alpine mountaineering no better than climbing ‘soaped poles in a bear-garden’,4 repented of this description in the second Preface (1865) to Sesame and Lilies, a volume much concerned with what he saw as the special characteristics of male and female, emphasizing the ‘experience of distant peril’ as ideal in the formation of ‘manly character’.5 The Alpinist, novelist and critic H. Schutz Wilson (1824 –1902) compared Alpine climbing to facing the deadly dangers of war. Climbing, he said, supplied the ‘high-hearted English character’ with excitement in the ‘quiet days in which there are no noble wars’.6 The climber and political economist Albert Frederick Mummery, writing in 1895 and reflecting on what he took to be the effeminizing consequences of Aestheticism,7 thought that mountaineering was one of the few truly masculine activities still being practised in the fin de siècle because it brought a man into contact with grave danger: ‘I am of course aware,’ he said, ‘that it is an age which cares little for the more manly virtues, and which looks askance at any form of sport that can, by any stretch of extremest imagination, be regarded as dangerous [ … but] something may surely be urged in favour of a sport that teaches, as no other teaches, endurance and mutual trust, and forces men occasionally to look death in its grimmest aspect frankly and squarely in the face.’8 Mummery, it might be added, was killed by an avalanche while climbing in the Kashmirian Himalayas in the year these words were first published. The identity of manliness is structured here in terms of physical bravery and the encounter with peril, and certainly Tyndall, who reflected in his essay about Alpine dangers, ‘Life in the Alps’, that its title ‘might perhaps, with more appropriateness, have been ‘Life and Death in the Alps’,9 is informed by this conception of the masculine too. Hours of Exercise in the Alps (1871), for instance, the title of which reads like a parody of a text of spirituality, contains a number of narratives emphasizing heroic bravery before danger. But Tyndall’s texts most frequently construct authorial masculinity in terms of physical labour, situating Tyndall favourably as tireless worker alongside his repeatedly exhausted companions, and constituting his heroic masculinity in terms of persistent physical strength. Tyndall’s most important Alpine book, The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), for instance, narrates an ascent of Mont Blanc in 1857 where the author is accompanied by Huxley, who provides him with an ideal foil for the measurement of Tyndall’s greater resilience. Huxley, though his ‘strength is great’,10 quickly becomes exhausted in the laborious ascent,



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‘an expression of fatigue stamped upon his countenance’.11 Tyndall, preserved from such decline, watches over Huxley as he sleeps and before he abandons the ascent, burnt out. Such strategies of comparison, positioning Tyndall’s unimpeded strength against the fatigue of other men, however initially strong, continue throughout The Glaciers. Arriving at a ‘vertical precipice’, Tyndall notices ‘a haggard expression upon the countenance of our guide’ and realizes that he must ‘now take the lead’. ‘Marking a number of points upon the slope as resting places,’ Tyndall writes, ‘I went swiftly from one to the other.’ Possessed of far greater fortitude, it seems, than his guide, he proceeds up the slope with speed: indeed, ‘My motion was complained of as too quick.’12 A little later, another one of the party ‘engaged in cutting steps’ in a solid ice bank in order to cross a crevasse appears overcome by the exertion: ‘the listless strokes of his axe proclaimed his exhaustion’. Tyndall, again affirming his own strength against that of another, takes the ‘implement out of his hands, and change[s] places with him’, tirelessly performing the task of his companion: ‘I hewed sixty steps upon this slope,’13 he remarks, and ‘The thought of being absolutely exhausted … never occurred to me.’14 At one point in this narrative, however, Tyndall’s strength unexpectedly lets him down when Hirst, another companion, falls from a steep slope. Despite being attached by a rope to Tyndall, it is of no avail: ‘fixing my feet suddenly in the snow,’ Tyndall writes, ‘[I] endeavoured to check his fall, but I seemed a mere feather in opposition to the force with which he descended.’15 This expression of physical weakness, however, is not allowed to stand unqualified for Tyndall adds in a note, ‘I believe that I could stop him now’,16 assuring his reader that his strength is now increased. Although Tyndall has come to the Alps as the brain-worker, as the London-based professor of science seeking data in an intellectual inquiry, he projects himself as capable of more than the ordinary man’s share of physical labour. Brain-work, he implies, has had no deleterious consequences on strength of body, and his masculinity, as constituted in terms of capacity for physical labour, remains unimpaired. Tyndall’s inscription of his masculine identity in the language of physical labour comes more sharply into focus when compared with the strategies of self-representation of Leslie Stephen, critic, biographer, editor, father of Virginia Woolf, and, in 1865, President of the Alpine Club. Where Tyndall writes himself as possessed of formidable strength, the rhetoric of Stephen’s self-construction minimizes the physical difficulty of Alpine ascent, presenting the physical challenge of mountaineering simply as



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something he takes in his stride. In his narrative ‘Sunset on Mont Blanc’, for instance, he describes the morning on which he and his party set off, remarking, of the ascent which quickly exhausted Huxley in The Glaciers: ‘The heavy, sodden framework of flesh and blood which I languidly dragged along London streets has undergone a strange transformation, and it is with scarcely a conscious effort that I breast the monstrous hill which towers above me.’17 Stephen erases traces of arduous difficulty, narrating ascent in terms more appropriate for an ordinary walk: ‘Carefully calculating our time, we advanced along the “dromedary’s hump” and stepped upon the culminating ridge of the mountain about an hour before sunset.’18 Where Tyndall hews footholds in the ice for his exhausted companion, Stephen merely ‘steps’ up Mont Blanc, a ‘hill which,’ he says, ‘recalls lazy picnics rather than any more strenuous memories.’19 Tyndall’s strategy of inscribing masculinity partly in terms of his physical labour also allows him to sustain a more general power relationship between himself, the well-educated metropolitan man of science, and the apparently more easily fatigued Swiss guides who assist his journey. But male identity is structured not only in outdoor physical labour in Tyndall’s Alpine work: it is also constituted in interior spaces. Tyndall emphasizes the Alps as a male zone, freed from female presence, a site of male friendship, facilitating the convivialities of homosociality. His heroic, outdoor, muscular masculinity is supplemented by an identity which is actualized in scenes of domestic contentment from which the female is excluded and his male identity partly constituted in the pleasures of all-male friendship before the homosocial hearth.20 At the end of his first account of the Mont Blanc ascent in The Glaciers, for instance, Tyndall remarks on the evenings ‘of perfect enjoyment’ after arduous work in the mountains. Eating ‘mutton and fried potatoes’ and drinking ‘capital Sallenches beer’ each evening preluded an exclusively male domestic satisfaction: After dinner we gathered round the pine-fire, and I can hardly think it possible for three men to be more happy than we then were. It was not the goodness of the conversation, nor any high intellectual element, which gave the charm to our gatherings; the gladness grew naturally out of our own perfect health, and out of the circumstances of our position. Every fibre seemed a repository of latent joy, which the slightest stimulus sufficed to bring into conscious action.21




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Homosociality slips almost into the homoerotic here. Ending his first account, in The Glaciers, of the ascent of Mont Blanc, moreover, Tyndall continues to affirm the bonds of all-male relationships in a tribute to Edouard Simond, his ‘very valuable assistant’. He is ‘intelligent and perfectly trustworthy’,22 Tyndall writes, and his kindnesses serve ‘only to confirm my first estimate of his worthiness’.23 Tyndall keeps the relationship of power clear between himself and his ‘assistant’, but underscores the bonds of homosociality which the Alps permit. Tyndall’s Alpine texts recruit discourses of gendered identity, configuring masculinity in labour, and in scenes of all-male domestic pleasure. However they concern themselves not only with the inscription of manliness, but also with the formation of an alternative discourse to that of religious experience in the Alps; they fashion competing verbal configurations which resist the traditional identification of the Alps as a site of religious revelation and modify the privileging of the mountains as the locus of the religious man’s spiritual experience. Variously representing his response to the natural world, gathering an array of rhetorical strategies to narrate its purchase on his intellectual, emotional and moral faculties, Tyndall pieces together an agnostic discourse of the sublime, which stands in for and overwrites the Christian’s spiritual experience of nature but which none the less tries to preserve in places an adequate sense of the impact of such encounters – momentous, moving and awe-inspiring – with the vast natural forms of the Alpine range. In Tyndall’s Alpine writing we witness the terms of a heavily masculinized response to natural grandeur which, while resisting reference to, or openly contesting, the truth-claims of Christianity or theism more generally, none the less essays in places to record its deep human significance, a significance habitually represented, from the Romantics onwards, in terms of Christian or theist spiritual experience. The Romantic tradition of Alpine writing, the terms of the spiritual experience largely contested in Tyndall’s texts, are well exemplified in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1802).24 There are earlier, pre-Romantic examples which anticipate the Romantic posture, most famously Thomas Gray’s wellknown letter to Richard West in 1739 in which Gray, referring to a journey to the Grande Chartreuse, remarks: ‘Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief.’25 But Coleridge’s poem is a useful exemplum, particularly in this discussion of Tyndall, of the Romantic inscription of the Alps as a locus of divine presence and site of spiritual experience, a poem which deploys with particular clarity the Romantic discourse of the sublime, even though, ironically,



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Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun Earth, with her thousand voices, praises GOD. (11.83–5) Cognate experiences of the presence of the divine, on Mont Blanc especially, continued to be written in many Victorian Alpine texts including in Alpine poetry.27 H. Schultz Wilson’s Alpine Ascents and Adventures (1878), for instance, described the summit of Mont Blanc as a place where the believer joyfully experiences the proximity of God: ‘It is worth having a life,’ he declared, ‘which may soar once to the brief, intense gladness of looking with joy-bright eyes upon a prospect so glorious that the mind is elevated to nearness to the Great Creator.’28 Tyndall’s texts negotiate with such language, mobilizing various rhetorics which largely represent the Alps as a site of secular rather than sacred experience, but which are also propelled by the aspiration to do justice to the intense experience of a non-religious subjectivity in a landscape which irresistibly compels strong feelings and invites philosophical speculation. The most striking instance of the reconfiguration of the Coleridgean in Tyndall is literal revisionism, a rewriting of the ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’ in The Glaciers of the Alps within different terms which occlude divine revelation, replacing them with an anthropomorphized drama of the passing of night.29 Tyndall constructs a language for non-religious experience of natural beauty here by explicitly writing against a prior account of its apprehension in theological terms, by placing the work of a literary forefather under erasure. ‘Many years ago,’ The Glaciers of the Alps narrates, ‘I had read with delight Coleridge’s poem entitled “Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni,” and to witness in all perfection the scene described by the poet, I waited at Chamouni a day longer than was otherwise necessary.’30 Tyndall’s omission of the religious ‘Hymn Before’ in the poem’s title prefigures The Glaciers’ rather more extensive revisionism: On the morning of Wednesday, the 15th July, I rose before the sun; Mont Blanc and his wondrous staff of Aiguilles were without a cloud; eastward the sky was of a pale orange which gradually shaded



Coleridge had not visited the scene he describes.26 Hailing the ‘sovran Blanc’ (1.3) as monarch and priest, Coleridge’s poem describes the poet, entranced in prayer’ (1.15), worshipping the ‘Invisible alone’ (1.16). The ‘Hymn’ concludes:

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off to a kind of rosy violet, and this again blended by imperceptible degrees with the deep zenithal blue. The morning star was still shining to the right, and the moon also turned a pale face towards the rising day. The valley was full of music; from the adjacent woods issues a gush of song, while the sound of the Arve formed a suitable base to the shriller melody of the birds. The mountain rose for a time cold and grand, with no apparent stain upon his snows. Suddenly the sunbeams struck his crown and converted it into a boss of gold. For some time it remained the only gilded summit in view, holding communion with the dawn while all the others waited in silence. These, in the order of their heights, came afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams struck each in succession, into a blush and smile.31 The Coleridgean sense of the ‘Invisible alone’ is overwritten: through anthropomorphization in which Mont Blanc serves as male monarch surrounded by hierarchized female attendants, Tyndall’s narrative securely confines the experience to the human rather than the divine. A swift change of register after this account, moreover, with the brisk words: ‘On the same day we had our luggage transported to the Montanvert’,32 bathetically relocates the narrative within the quotidian, further distancing it from the declamatory and prophetic Coleridgean mode. Elsewhere, instead of responding to the natural grandeur of the Alps in religious terms, Tyndall confines his narration to the aesthetic, writing nature as pleasurable artefact, as object to be gazed at. Beauty is emphasized, but it is not revelatory of anything other than itself. ‘We were environed by an atmosphere of perfect purity,’ he says in The Glaciers, ‘the larger stars hung like gems above us, and the moon, about half full, shone with wondrous radiance in the dark firmament’;33 nature is startling, ‘at once wild, grand, and beautiful’,34 and it prompts metaphorization: ‘The firmament between the clouds faded from a bloodred through orange and daffodil into an exquisite green, which spread like a sea of glory through which those magnificent argosies slowly sailed.’35 Tyndall is the consumer of ‘exquisite’ natural beauty here, the gazer entranced by it, but it is self-contained beauty which, though compared with other things metaphorically, provides no access to knowledge of anything transcendental. Where descriptions of nature as aesthetic object are supplemented by other discourses, it is often when nature is represented through the professional lexis of modern science, its particularities named with the precision of technical vocabulary. The sun is ‘surrounded by a glory of interference spectra of the most gorgeous colours’36 in The Glaciers,



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or has ‘interference-spectra dart[ing] from it on all sides’.37 In Hours of Exercise dramatic natural description moves into scientific analysis and explanation seamlessly: ‘The dense covering above us was sometimes torn asunder by the wind, which whirled the detached cloud-tufts round the peaks. Contending air-currents were thus revealed, and thunder, which is the common associate, if not the product, of such contention, began to rattle among the crags.’38 In The Glaciers Tyndall provocatively takes the idea of nature as a language of higher truths, and scientizes it, making clouds not the signs of God, not legible in terms of divine revelation, but as materially revealing physical law. Watching clouds ‘forming, and melting, and massing themselves together’, Tyndall hails them as ‘nature’s language addressed to the intellect’, but not the conduit of supernatural revelation: they are ‘visible symbols which enabled us to understand what was going on in the invisible air’, the activity of ‘unseen currents, possessing different temperatures, mixing their contents both of humidity and motion, producing a mean temperature unable to hold their moisture in a state of vapour’.39 Tyndall here contests the Coleridgean symbol which, as Coleridge makes clear in Biographia Literaria, is precisely that which cannot be rationally understood, reading the ‘visible symbols’ of the air as rationally comprehensible. Nature is not only pleasing artefact, but the knowable object of the scientific gaze, to be probed with the empirical eye seeking knowledge of physical law. This secularization of nature is taken in another direction by Leslie Stephen, and the established tradition of the experience of Alpine sublimity in spiritual terms differently negotiated. Where Coleridge had found in sunrise the experience of revelation, Stephen, narrating the opposite end of the day in ‘Sunset on Mont Blanc’, deploys the language of secular entertainment, figuring the natural world as theatre, as dramatic spectacle for the appreciative audience to enjoy as they might a stage play. It is a discourse which controls and reduces the impact of the natural phenomena, confining it to the world of familiar human entertainment where the appropriate response is pleasure and applause rather than anything more profound. Sunset on Mont Blanc is a ‘grand spectacle’,40 a ‘performance’41 with a ‘programme’;42 it is a revelation only in the same way that the stage is revealed by the lifting of the curtain. ‘There had been rehearsals enough,’ Stephen writes, pursuing his metaphor in various directions, ‘in all conscience to secure a perfect performance. For millions of ages the lamps had been lighted and the transparencies had been shown with no human eye to observe or hand to applaud. Twice, I believe only twice, before, an audience had taken its place in this lofty gallery … ’43 The sunset is a dramatic experience,




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an extravaganza for the spectators to consume for their pleasure, and the language of the theatre secures the barriers between a sacred and secular apprehension of the phenomenon of Alpine sunset. At the centre of Stephen’s narrative is the sunset itself, a ‘display’ which is ‘inexpressibly gorgeous’.44 But a further strategy of representation restricts the impact of this climatic moment of spectacular natural splendour. Avoiding any prolonged narration of Stephen’s own response to the scene, whether aesthetic, emotional or philosophical, the text, recording the very moment of the sunset, positions in the foreground the frantic, half-comic and caricatured efforts of Gabriel Loppé, the French Alpine artist, to reproduce the scene on canvas: Loppé sat resolutely on the snow, at the risk, as we might have thought, of following the example of Lot’s wife. Superior, as it appeared, to all the frailties which beset the human frame suddenly plunged into a temperature I know not how many degrees below freezing-point, he worked with ever increasing fury in a desperate attempt to fix upon canvas some of the magic beauties of the scene. Glancing from earth to heaven and from north to south, sketching with breathless rapidity the appearance of the eastern ranges, then wheeling round like a weathercock to make hasty notes of the western clouds, breaking out at times into uncontrollable exclamations of delight, or reproving his thoughtless companions when their opaque bodies eclipsed a whole quarter of the heavens, he enjoyed, I should fancy, an hour of as keen delight as not often occurs to an enthusiastic lover of the sublime in nature. We laughed, envied, and admired, and he escaped frost-bites.45 Comedy, energetic Dickensian caricature and hyperbole are accumulated here at this apparent apogee in the narrative as Stephen resists fashioning the moment of sunset as momentous, or significantly affective, activating a different rhetoric from Tyndall but none the less writing against an Alpine tradition which valorized spectacular moments of natural phenomena as revelatory of the divine. Tyndall hails the Alps as aesthetic artefact or object for the scientific gaze, reinscribing them as sites of empirical knowledge rather than metaphysical. This knowledge is pleasurable, the vistas of landscape aesthetically rewarding. At times, however, the affective power of the Alps requires a different register of response from Tyndall, and, seeking to represent the depth of his reaction – much deeper than that suggested



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by Stephen’s natural theatre – he appropriates other discourses which foreground his interiority. He writes himself occasionally as a subjectivity who experiences the ‘grand and affecting’46 Alps morally: ‘There was a nobility in this glacier scene,’ he says of the Dôme du Goûter in The Glaciers, ‘which I think I have never seen surpassed; – a strength of nature, and yet a tenderness, which at once raised and purified the soul.’47 Tyndall not only gazes at the landscape, made humanly relevant by the pathetic fallacy, but is inwardly modified by it as the scene serves as the locus for what he describes as the purification of the soul. At other points, the limitations of the verbal resources available in the culture to express a non-Christian reaction to the natural world prompt paradoxically the re-activation of the explicitly theological lexicon which elsewhere Tyndall resists. He invokes fragments from the language of spiritual experience as a metaphorical representation of his own, annexing the very terms he epistemologically contests in other locations. Of the Weisshorn, he declares in Hours of Exercise, ‘silent worship was the “reasonable service” ’48 and, seeing an Alpine summit suffused with crimson light, he records: ‘there was something in the whole scene which baffled analysis, and the words of Tennyson rose to my lips as I gazed upon it: – ‘ “God made Himself an awful rose of dawn”.’49 Inserting, albeit via the words of the Laureate, the notion of divine authority over the natural world into his prose, Tyndall momentarily reanimates the conception of the Alps as a place where God is sensed, and, summoning to his aid terms of spiritual experience, endeavours to represent something of the profundity of his agnostic apprehension of the sublime. A Coleridge poem, within the agnostic economy of signification of Tyndall’s Alpine work, provides the text which The Glaciers explicitly rewrites, moving its epistemological terrain from the metaphysical to the earthbound and human-centred. It is pleasingly appropriate, therefore, that Tyndall should verbalize his most plain statement of Alpine agnosticism not in prose but in verse, in a poem which moves the claims of ‘Hymn Before Sun-rise’ in another very different direction. Tyndall wrote poetry from an early age, but his ‘A Morning on Alp Lusgen’, one of his few published poems, is late: it is the final piece in New Fragments (1892), his second collection of miscellaneous essays, reviews and lectures. Here, though less explicitly than in The Glaciers, he rewrites Coleridge once more,50 resisting Coleridgean prophetic certainty in the Alps and replacing it with the interrogative and inconclusive terms of agnosticism, asking recurrent and unanswerable questions,




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Whence the craft Which shook these gentian atoms into form, And dyed the flower with azure deeper far Than that of heaven itself on days serene? What built these marigolds? What clothed these knolls With fiery whortle leaves? What gave the heath Its purple bloom – the Alpine rose its glow? Shew us the power which fills each tuft of grass With sentient swarms? – the art transcending thought, Which paints against the canvas of the eye These crests sublime and pure, and then transmutes The picture into worship? Science dumb – Oh babbling Gnostic! cease to beat the air. We yearn, and grope, and guess, but cannot know.51 Tyndall’s poem signifies the response to Alpine grandeur as ‘worship’, but beyond this, and beyond the questions about the origin of botanical forms, the poem offers only the resolution to make do with uncertainty (the original drafts of the poem gave ‘Evolution’ as the answer to the question of origin).52 It is another written site which takes Coleridge into a new epistemological domain, resisting the inscription of the Alps as locus for religious experience, as Tyndall had with other secularizing strategies in The Glaciers and Stephen had by representing the ‘inexpressibly gorgeous’ Alpine sunset as pleasurable, theatrical spectacle. Tyndall’s Alpine writing projects the strong figure of the heroic male labourer, a self-representation which assures a culture in which Victorian patriarchy ‘called into question the “manliness” of intellectual labor’,53 that Tyndall, the distinguished scientist and eminent intellectual, has preserved a masculinity both vigorous and admirable. This commendable manliness helps frame Tyndall within prestigious cultural terms, an important identification for a man preoccupied elsewhere with heterodox and controversial opinion,54 and, most particularly, a scientist who disavowed the terms of normative Victorian Christianity and whose work, according to Ruskin, would throw people into ‘stupid atheism’.55 But Tyndall’s aggressive masculinization of self in his Alpine writing is not only an effort to assist in the legitimation of heterodox opinion. It is an important element of a new form of male identity constituted in his texts: muscular but not Christian; alive to the grandeur and



and shifting declamatory religious conviction into the language of persistent, unresolved speculation:

affective potential of the sublime, but from an agnostic point of view; intellectual, and seeking meaningful, empirical knowledge from nature, sensitive to its power to move and aware of it morally but essentially resistant to the truth-claims of Christian spiritual experience even when appropriating, briefly, its very language in an effort to indicate the vitality of an agnostic response to nature. Masculinity is heartily asserted in Tyndall’s Alpine texts and the terms of a Romantic spiritual experience are diversely contested there, yet also, on occasions, paradoxically annexed. The combined result is the extrusion of the new, suggestive discourse of Victorian muscular agnosticism.

Acknowledgement Thanks to Dr Simon Dentith, Chris O’Gorman, Dr Clare Palmer and Dr Katherine Turner, and to the editorial board of the present book for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. The title of this chapter refers to T. H. Huxley’s description of John Tyndall, quoted in Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 151.

Notes 1. Muscular Christianity is a term of broad coverage. Norman Vance in The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) provides a reliable history and other related issues are discussed in Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, in Manliness and Morality: Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), look more generally at the relationships between ‘manliness and morality’ in the period. David Newsome’s Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: Cassell, 1961), pp. 195–239 is very useful on the purchase of muscular Christianity on the later Victorian public school system. 2. For a good account of the rise in popularity of Alpine climbing among the Victorian middle class, and usually university educated male, see David Robertson, ‘Mid-Victorians Amongst the Alps’, in Nature and the Victorian Imagination eds. U. C. Knoepflmacher and C. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 113–36. 3. There is a general discussion of the role of combat, struggle and labour in the construction of manhood in a variety of cultures in David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For a textbook of muscular Christianity




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04. which privileges courage in the face of danger as key descriptor of masculinity, see Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London: Macmillan, 1879). 04. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen, 1903–12), 18.90. 05. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 18.21. 06. H. Schutz Wilson, Alpine Ascents and Adventures; or, Rock and Snow Sketches (London: Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1878), p. x. 07. For discussion of the reception of Aestheticism in terms of bodily health, see J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 08. A. F . Mummery, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, 3rd edition (London: Fisher Unwin; New York: Scribner’s, 1895), p. 333. Though this citation is to the 3rd edition, the lst edition was also published in 1895. 09. John Tyndall, New Fragments (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), p. 327. 10. John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps: Being a Narrative of Excursions and Ascents, an Account of the Origin and Phenomena of Glaciers, and an Exposition of the Physical Principles to Which They are Related (London: Murray, 1860), p. 71. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 77. 13. Ibid., p. 78. 14. Ibid., pp. 78–9. 15. Ibid., p. 84. 16. Ibid., p. 84n. 17. Leslie Stephen (with Geoffrey Winthrop Young), The Playground of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), p. 183. 18. Ibid., p. 185. 19. Ibid., p. 183. Leslie Stephen and discourses of masculinity are examined from another angle – that of literary labour – in Antonia Ward, ‘Men at Work: Masculinity and Late-Victorian Literary Labour’, in Scholarship in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Hewitt, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, Volume 1 (Leeds: TASC, 1998), pp. 78–89. 20. For a discussion of colonial territories as a space later in the century where ‘male comradeship and male hierarchies found their full scope, freed from feminine ties’ (pp. 67–8), see John Tosh, ‘Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 44 –73. This chapter is expanded and placed in a broader context in John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). For more on the links between colonialism and masculinity across a range of periods and nationalities, see C. E. Gittings, ed., Imperialism and Gender: Constructions of Masculinity (Hebden Bridge: Dangaroo, 1996). 21. Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps, p. 86. 22. Ibid., p. 90. 23. Ibid., p. 91. An important discussion of homosociality in early Victorian culture is to be found in Herbert L. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).



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24. Line number references to The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1912). 25. Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, eds Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, corrected by H. W. Starr, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1, p. 128. 26. The Unitarian context of Coleridge’s poem does not disqualify its status as an exemplum of this discourse. 27. For an example of mid-Victorian religious poetry of the Alps, see ‘A Lady’, Alpine Byways or Light Leaves Gathered in 1859 and 1860 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861). 28. Schutz Wilson, Alpine Ascents, pp. 99–100. 29. Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1816) is an earlier revision of Coleridge, replacing Coleridgean certainty with less settled speculation about human knowledge. For some recent discussions of this much debated poem, and instabilities at the heart of the Romantic discourse of the sublime, see Hugo Donnolly, ‘Beyond Rational Discourse: The Mysterious Tongue of “Mont Blanc” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 29 (1990), pp. 571–81, and Frances Ferguson, ‘Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”: What the Mountain Said’, in Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, ed. Peter J. Kitson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 30. Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps, pp. 38–9. 31. Ibid., p. 39. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 73. 34. Ibid., p. 72. 35. Ibid., p. 184. 36. Ibid., p. 76. 37. Ibid., p. 178. 38. John Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), p. 175. The scientization of the Alpine gaze evidenced in Tyndall is anticipated in the work of the eighteenth-century traveller, Patrick Brydone. See P[atrick] Brydone, A Tour Through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, 2 vols (London: Stranhan and Cadell, 1773). 39. Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps, p. 183. 40. Stephen, The Playground of Europe, p. 185. 41. Ibid., p. 190. 42. Ibid., p. 191. 43. Ibid., pp. 185–6. 44. Ibid., p. 190. 45. Ibid., pp. 186–7. 46. Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 121. 47. Ibid., pp. 187–8. 48. Quoted in Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism, p. 152. 49. Quoted in ibid., p. 151. 50. It is possible that Tyndall is also rewriting the opening of ‘The Simplon’ chapter in Ruskin’s Praeterita (The Complete Works of John Ruskin, XXXV.320), where Ruskin too asks a set of similar questions about the creational force behind the Alps. 51. Tyndall, New Fragments, pp. 498–9. The related religious position of T. H. Huxley is discussed in Philip Thody, ‘Huxley and Religion: From




52. 53. 54.

55.

Francis O’Gorman Agnosticism to Mystical Disbelief’, in Nigel Bernfield, ed., Now More Than Ever (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995), pp. 271–81. See Francis O’Gorman, ‘John Tyndall as Poet: Agnosticism and “A Morning on Alp Lusgen” ’, Review of English Studies, 48 (1997), pp. 353–8. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 1. For more on the rhetorical strategies deployed for the legitimation of science during the late Victorian period, see Frank M. Turner, ‘Public Science in Britain, 1880 –1919’, Isis, 71 (1980), pp. 589–608. More on Tyndall’s role in the legitimation of mid-Victorian empirical science is found in Ruth Barton, ‘ “Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others”: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–1864’, Isis, 89 (1998), 410 – 44. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 26.183.



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‘Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails’? George Eliot, Masculinity and the (Ir)religion of Nationalism Neil McCaw

Structurally, Daniel Deronda is a novel in crisis. To say so is merely to repeat what has become a critical commonplace.1 However, it is also a novel about a nation in crisis. Godless, directionless, purposeless, England is the bleak Other of the divinely sanctioned ideal of Judaism that is propounded by George Eliot as offering the only way out of the social and cultural malaise within which the English people are all culpable subjects. This doom-laden scenario reveals a deep anxiety in the mid-Victorian English psyche. As Gillian Beer has pointed out, it is ‘a novel haunted by (among other things) the future’.2 It is an angst that manifests itself in the fractured form of the text. This anxiety is, however, also embodied in a symbolic face-off between contrasting masculinities.3 In effect, Eliot transposes her profound concern about the state of the nation onto a clash of differing conceptions of masculine identity. Implicit in this is an acknowledgement by Eliot that these Victorian masculinities are not ‘consensual or unitary formations’ and, furthermore, they are also acutely in tension.4 One, shown in Henleigh Grandcourt, is spiritually barren and nihilistic. It is also destructive, manipulative, deceitful and morally bankrupt. In this guise manhood is a means by which to exploit and abuse others, with profoundly negative social consequences. The conflicting vision of masculinity, expressed through the character of Daniel Deronda, blends a radical nationalism with a more conservative metaphysics of belonging. This is represented as distinctly positive, giving coherence to fragmented, previously impotent social forces, and providing the quasi-religious locus for fundamental political and social change. It is akin to Carlyle’s broad model of the heroic Great Man of History: the ‘leaders of men … the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men 149 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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contrived to do or to attain’.5 However, in Eliot’s case this sees a more secular religiosity of nationalism replacing the explicitly Christian foundation more typical of Carlyle. The profoundly hostile nature of Eliot’s critique of mid-century English masculinity is clear from her attack on prevailing attitudes towards Jewry in a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe (1876): can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called ‘educated’ making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek … to my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness – in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.6 This same tone is evident throughout the depiction of the English dimension of Daniel Deronda. It is what E. S. Shaffer has called ‘the harshest social satire’, an ‘unflinching indictment of English society’, as extreme as that found ‘anywhere in the English novel’.7 The central element of this is the creation of Henleigh Grandcourt as the epitome of ‘English’ upper-class masculinity. He becomes a metaphor for his times, the most pronounced example of the impact of a debauched aristocracy on the national psyche. This characterization serves to reinforce the negative stereotype of the public school system, personifying what Mangan has called the ‘godless world of cold, hunger, competition and endurance’.8 On the surface, Grandcourt appears to share the maxim of Bulwer’s dandy ‘Pelham’, who resolves ‘never to be unpleasantly employed, even in thought, if I can help it’.9 However, the virulence of Eliot’s character goes far beyond the paradigm of the Regency Dandy figure. Grandcourt is symptomatic of the pervading moral bankruptcy of English society, a man who has ‘no idea of a moral repulsion’10 because there is a lack of a pervading morality to make the basis of such a judgement. The paradox is that though beyond influence, he enjoys a social position that is maintained by a circle of patronage. Nevertheless, there is still nothing in life that moves Grandcourt into a course of action



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that conflicts with his desire for personal gratification. As Badri Raina has noted, this compares to a Schopenhauerian ‘motiveless, disembodied Will’, a ‘realized vision of pure power’.11 To live is to crave each ‘gratification of mere will, sublimely independent of definite motive’.12 Even when Sir Hugo offers his nephew a handsome cash sum to surrender his rights to the family estate, a sum that would ensure his financial security, Grandcourt does not accept the offer, simply because he is aware that others wish for such an acceptance. The power-drive even overcomes a wider concern for his longer-term personal fate. Therein Eliot illustrates what happens when a man is freed from social constraints, anticipating Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). For, in the decadent world of Lord Henry Wotton ‘the terror of society, which is the basis of morals, [and] the terror of God, which is the secret of religion’ are ‘the two things that govern us’.13 And, in Grandcourt’s world there is little sign of any socially cohesive religion, and ‘society’ more generally has disintegrated. He can run free, unfettered by social or cultural restriction. This freedom from influence is reflected in his profound indolence, playing his role as aristocrat ‘at a small expense of vital energy’.14 He refuses to engage with the codes and practices of mainstream society (and there is nothing that can make him do so), and in the final analysis he is even condoned by this society. His sexual misdemeanours are, it seems, common knowledge amongst male society, a world in which, as Mr Vandernoodt points out, ‘such stories get packed away like old letters’.15 This is an action that simultaneously condemns it by highlighting the way in which, beneath surface appearances, it is little more than what Irving Howe has called ‘a system of dehumanized personal relations’ (original emphasis).16 This provides the reader with a personification of ‘all those elements in the psychology of aristocratic rulers … that destroy human affections, spontaneity of feeling, and mutual respect’.17 As the plot-narrative unfolds, this begins to take on even greater dimensions. Ultimately, Grandcourt is compared in both his moral obtuseness and in his lack of sympathetic imagination to Mephistopheles.18 He represents a hypermasculinity in which dominant male characteristics, notably an overt sexual drive and an intimidating physical presence, are perverted into a caricature of both national and masculine identity. This explains his tangential relationship with History, the broad canvas of male-oriented public events. For both the sense of alienation and estrangement that permeates the depiction of England and the profound national indolence are indicative of a particular dynamic (if dynamic is really the correct word here) of the historical process.



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‘Grandcourt’s importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land.’19 As such this is a corrupted, and corrupting, process. Inheriting rather than earning wealth encapsulates exactly the passivity of the almost incidental effect that he and his kind have on the unfolding of the grand historical narrative. As the narrator comments: … political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic.20 Grandcourt cares nothing for this public, historical dimension of existence. When Gascoigne suggests he take up a career in politics, this is obviously an absurdity; he is a man who has ‘worn out all his natural healthy interest in things’.21 This withdrawal from social engagement is symptomatic of a life disconnected from the historical flow: ‘his long narrow eyes expressed nothing but indifference.’22 However, it is not just a personal alienation, for Eliot makes a direct connection between this vision of masculine (in)activity and a debilitating nation-state, a state peopled by individuals who have no defined historical consciousness. This stands in clear contrast with Deronda who is both catalyst and activant. Grandcourt does not actively choose to be detached from history, he does so more by default. Rather, as Mr Vandernoodt suggests, it is a case of him having ‘gone rather deep into pleasures … lazy as he is’,23 and a role in public life is not a desirable option. His central and overriding concern is for his own personal, undisturbed contentment, such that he recoils from public exertion. This reluctance to tussle with a wider society is evident in his demeanour: ‘no rigidity … inclined rather to be flaccid.’24 He is, in other words, more a domestic bully; rather the micro- than the macro-imperialist, feeding off drawing room triumphs to satisfy his sadistic hunger for power. It is a depiction of mid-century Englishness, and primarily of English masculinity, that runs counter to Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of George Eliot’s work, for it lacks the underlying Christian moral framework that he saw as ubiquitous in her work. Clearly, it would be difficult to encapsulate a more faithless society than that which Eliot portrays. Nietzsche claimed that Eliot was unable to free herself from the shackles of the Christian religion she once adhered to. His unwillingness to accept that ethics and spirituality could exist separately from



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organized institutional Christianity meant that in his eyes Eliot was the archetypal religious humanist: apparently disavowing Christian religion whilst clinging on to a moral code which he believed ‘has truth only if God is the truth – it stands and falls with faith in God’.25 Moreover, not only do the English aspects of the novel illustrate ways in which Eliot was able to work outside the parameters of such a religious framework, but the Jewish dimensions of the text actually make clear that the paradox Nietzsche so gleefully seized on is not in fact a paradox at all. For he overlooked the possibility of a fundamental transposition of faith from one object to another; in Eliot’s case from a godhead to a national unit as an alternative spiritual foundation. This allows for the maintenance of a dominant moral-spiritual authority in the midst of a sustained rejection of an overarching, explicitly Christian metanarrative. Daniel Deronda encapsulates such a transposition of faith. Bleak, quasi-Nietzschean nihilism is confronted and ultimately thrown aside in favour of the metaphysical comfort of a national spiritualism. This is Eliot’s remedy for the soulless, spiritually bankrupt wasteland of midcentury England, characterized by ‘the automatism of moral and political reflexes’.26 It is prescribed for its potent combination of national and spiritual identity, providing religious sustenance and ideological invigoration, via the conflation of the Judaic faith and the Zionist political imperative. However, it is only in the Jewish aspects of the text that Eliot is able most effectively to work through her philosophical resolution of the crisis of English masculinity that she represents through Grandcourt. The nature of this philosophical resolution is apparent in her relationship with, and construction of, Judaism and Jewish national identity. It is, paradoxically, a relationship that began as one of profound hostility. Hence, in 1838, whilst still a committed Christian, she wrote: ‘I humbly conceive it to be little less than blasphemy for such words as “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ” to be taken on the lips of such a man as Braham (a Jew too!).’27 The hostility she felt is even more apparent in her vitriolic attack on the Jews in a letter to John Sibree: I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very




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During the period immediately following the writing of the letter to Sibree, Eliot abandoned her Christian faith. Crucially, her less dogmatic retention of Christian principles, the loss of what Haight describes as her ‘evangelical severity’,29 led her to shift from her previous antiSemitism. The Jews were no longer disparaged as being of low grade, with a corrupted or base culture and history, for she found a way of accommodating them into her world-view. They were instead celebrated as a noble, divinely inspired, providentially ordained race of people. Part of this special status related to their historical existence as persecuted minorities within a multiplicity of hostile majority cultures.30 Thus, in 1854, after a visit to see Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, a play with a central message of the need for religious tolerance toward the Jews, she wrote: it thrilled me to think that Lessing dared nearly a hundred years ago to write the grand sentiments and profound thoughts which this play contains … in England the words which call down applause here [Germany] would make the pit rise in horror.31 The subsequent publication of Daniel Deronda saw George Eliot at the forefront of the literary-artistic reaction against anti-Semitism, a reaction that was, to an extent, against a previous incarnation of herself. The position of the Jews in England had become a barometer as to nineteenth-century English advancement. It was inextricably linked to a liberal political agenda, with the Restoration of Palestine seen as an ultimate triumph of liberty and of the freedom of the individual nation or race to achieve the fulfilment of their destiny. This accords with Bryan Cheyette’s identification of the Jews as ‘at the heart’ of Eliot’s ‘understanding of liberal progress’.32 By the latter stages of her literary career she had begun to see increasing connections between Jewish and English history, valuing Judaism for exactly those aspects that she perceived as absent from her own nation during the mid-nineteenth century. As such she was furthering the typological paradigm most apparently typified by Blake’s ‘Milton’, but also employed by a range of other writers including Wordsworth, Carlyle and previously Cowper, Pope and Milton. England was constructed as the closest of relatives to the biblically sanctioned eretz Israel, with the Jewish



exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.28

homeland as the ideal example, and the Jews themselves as models of children of a chosen race.33 Judaism stood as a metaphor; a metaphor, as Bernard Semmel has indicated, ‘of [national] inheritance’.34 Eliot’s identification of the fate of the Jewish people as inextricably connected to the English is clear from her letter to Beecher Stowe. It is also implicit in her publisher John Blackwood’s announcement of Daniel Deronda as ‘George Eliot’s New Story of English Life’ (my emphasis).35 The novel in which she proposes an historical resolution of the Jewish situation is one in which she is also concerned to remodel, fictionally, the social landscape of England. Therein she identifies the defined characteristics implicit in her notion of the ideal of national identity, and openly acknowledges that it is only within the Jewish Diaspora that they can be found. The Jews were applauded for their steadfastness and inherent capacities for duty, honour and humanitarianism, providing a rebuff to the privileging of Hellenism over Hebraism in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). This is the foundation of Eliot’s attempt to subsume the moral and spiritual vacuum that she perceived to be at the heart of the modern English nation within her Jewish organic ideal. The proto-Zionist quest is thus the counterbalance to the bleak representation of English cultural life evident in the other spheres of the novel. Deronda’s desire is to return to the homeland, and to fulfil a role that is strictly in accordance with ancient biblical wisdoms, represented by the figure of Joseph Kalonymos. This quest drowns out other elements of Jewish existence, for example the assimilating, workingclass life of the Cohens, who are clearly viewed as less esteemed forms of existence. The romance and restoration narrative is privileged over the narrative of working-class Jewish immigrant life in Victorian London. This is evident, for example, in how George Eliot represents Daniel’s view of Ezra Cohen: [his] phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament; and no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage.36 In terms of what Eliot values most in the Jewish race, Cohen simply does not meet her specification. He is not special enough. There is no divinity in this form of national identity, no identification of his type of man as divinely chosen. As such, there is a marked favouring of the type of aristocratic male who engages with the proto-Zionist quest; namely the Sephardim




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influenced by the Kabbalah. The most desirable Jews are seen as those that wish to leave England and return to their biblically ordained homeland. Those Jews that remain in England, the Ashkenazim or reformist Jews who are engaged in the active process of a gradual, slow assimilation into mainstream English society, are viewed as somehow less Jewish. Proto-Zionism stands overtly as a trope for Eliot’s ideal of national identity, whereas assimilative Judaism falls short of this ideal. The predominance of the words and beliefs of the Restorationist Mordecai leave the reader in no doubt as to where the author’s real sympathies lie. There is a bravery, a romance, an honour in the Zionist quest as it manifests itself in the novel, whereas there is a dullness, a resigned and ignoble condition humaine of the Jews who are attempting to assimilate into English society. Hence the nature of the representation of the movement for the Restoration of the Jewish homeland, an element of the Jewish experience that within the novel is not seriously addressed even as a possible project for the majority of the Jews. It takes a Jew (Deronda) who has first been educated in the ways of the English aristocracy to engage with it actively. He is the only person who acts on his inclinations and beliefs. It may well be the prophetic words and knowledge of Mordecai that inspire Deronda, leading him in the direction he ultimately takes. It is also the case that his later revealed Jewishness plays a key part in his full conversion to the national cause. However, there is no escaping the fact that he is a man who has grown up within the English education system. The Zionist quest therefore becomes closely, and ultimately solely, identified with one male individual. The effect of this is to play out what Jameson has called the ‘reduction of the alien collective’ to the ‘valorized individual biography’.37 The understanding and accommodation of the foreign group comes through the reduction of its particularity and diversity to an individual life of a particular, significant member. Crucially, this member is only valorized for the way in which he exhibits qualities that further the pervading ideology of the textual world. As a reconstructed, refined version of the Carlylean ‘Great Man’ of History, ‘predestined to be a saviour and redeemer’,38 Deronda falls squarely within this category. He is a product of the English aristocracy, and has effectively been sponsored and patronized by the upper classes, like Grandcourt but to an entirely different effect. Without this patronage the ultimate quest could and would not have even been considered. However, though the bankrupt upper-class English society is eventually rejected, with the Jewish quest seen as embodying everything that is



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lacking in mid–late nineteenth-century England, Deronda has first had to be educated by it. His maturation as a quasi-Englishman, as a version of the English gentleman, has provided him with the enhanced powers of discrimination and perspicacity that underpin the decision to reject England. England has supplied the means, intellectual, psychological, and even material, by which to make such a decision. Thus his conversion is part of what Wohlfarth calls ‘the modulation of Jewishness into an idea of Judaism that could speak to the moral and nationalist concerns of England’.39 As a result, it is only Deronda, with the qualified and problematic exception of Gwendolen Harleth, who sees England for what it has really become. The Englishness of his upbringing ensures that Deronda’s Jewish quest is filtered through the ideology of Western Imperialism. As Edward Said points out, ‘everything the Zionists did in Palestine they did of course as settler-Colonialists’.40 As such, Zionism and European colonialism share ‘common origins’: ‘the early Jewish settlers in Palestine ignored the Arabs in exactly the same way that white Europeans in Africa, Asia, and the Americas believed the natives of those places to be non-existent and their lands uninhabited’.41 This voyage, by which Deronda is to transplant himself and his English education and manners into the land of his people in the East, echoes with contemporaneous Victorian ideas about exporting civilisation to primitive and barbaric peoples abroad. This colonizing ‘mission’ falls under the umbrella of a wider bourgeois paternalism, the central dynamic of which is a conviction that even the merest contact with the hallowed cultures of the West inevitably precipitates the positive improvement of a foreign culture. The imperialist ideological framework through which this is articulated is made apparent with the silencing of the resident inhabitants of Palestine, who are denied even the privilege of being acknowledged. Palestine is the empty Other of the quasi-imperialist project.42 These nondescript, unpopulated, but religiously sacred acres are to be claimed by their rightful owners, led by an Englishman43 who has been fundamentally shaped by Western culture. The fact of there being an indigenous people does not ever enter the consciousness of the novel. So, the fashioning of this ersatz religion of nationalism centres on a very particular ideology of masculine identity, an intoxicating blend of political dynamism and an overarching spiritual liberalism. The pilloried masculinity of the decadent British Empire (embodied in Grandcourt) is thrown over for a motivated, humanitarian, essentially spiritual reconfiguring of an Imperialist national identity wherein to be




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male (hence to be on the inside) is everything. This tends towards the silencing or exclusion of the less overtly masculine characters, which explains the inability of Mordecai to carry his religious philosophizing to a material conclusion. His lack of the requisite masculine dynamism is illustrated by his frail physical health. The unsuitability of Lapidoth and the Cohen family to engage with this restoration project is made apparent, in the former case, through an unspiritual immorality, and in the latter case through an evident lack of social standing and politico-spiritual awareness. This results in the identification of Daniel Deronda as the only person who can bring about fundamental change. It is not only the less ideally masculine characters that are disempowered. All female characters experience just such a lack of influence. This enables George Eliot to represent the dominant masculine nature of the Zionist-Jewish quest on which Deronda embarks through the very different relationship her male and female characters have with the Restoration movement. This difference acts as a signifier of gender status within her conceptualization of Judaism, most obviously encapsulated in the relationship between Deronda and Mirah Lapidoth. For, despite the fact that Mordecai is her brother, Mirah has a tangential relationship with the key Restorationist philosophy and debate at the heart of the novel, and even less purchase on the resettlement quest itself. Significantly, almost every occasion on which Deronda learns about his Jewishness, or Judaism more generally, Mirah is not present. For instance, she does not visit the Cohen family with him, nor the ‘Hand and Banner’, and he is on his own when he experiences his final revelation in Genoa. Though she is the one who is identified most clearly in relation to her religion in the early stages of the novel, she is excluded from the type of Judaism with which Daniel becomes synonymous. The quest to restore the homeland is his quest, and she travels to the East with him as his wife and vassal: necessary only because it is through women such as her that the Jewish race must be sustained. She is just one of the many women who act as ‘gate-keeping elements for the boundaries of the national collectivity’.44 Reina Lewis, in Gendering Orientalism,45 argues that if Eliot had portrayed the assimilationist tradition of Jewry in greater detail, she may have offered more opportunity for Jewish women to engage actively with Jewish history. For her it is the grand scale of the historical narrative with which Deronda engages that prohibits active female participation. However, because of the Jewish matrilineal succession, whereby women are always inextricably associated with and defined by the act



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of childbirth, there appears to be little to suggest that Jewish women within the assimilationist tradition would fair any better than women such as Mirah. Indeed, the depictions of the female characters in the Cohen family appear to bear this out. The opportunity for women to engage with power structures is thus limited. Within the framework of the ideal of national identity delineated in the novel the overriding obligation is to contribute to the social and national organism, an organism Brennan calls a ‘trope for such things as “belonging”, “bordering”, and “commitment” ’.46 Women are contained very much within the more traditional areas of participation in ethnic and national histories, as biological reproducers, the chief socialisers of children, or as signifiers of difference and as nurturers of men in their many and various political struggles.47 Eliot privileges what Newman calls a ‘mythic ideal of personal and collective redemption’. This is founded on the ‘individual identification with the group, the historic group with its glorious … past, its present claims upon individual volition, its mission toward future power and freedom’.48 Within this context, any form of overt political or social articulation is out of the question for women. It is a form of national history and national identity which is produced, as Christina Crosby points out, as ‘man’s truth, the truth of a necessarily historical Humanity’. It places women ‘outside history, above, below, or beyond properly historical and political life’.49 This is evidenced in the novel most clearly through the character of the Princess Halm-Eberstein. The only way in which she is able to express herself and find any level of individual autonomy is by abandoning her Jewish roots, and this is what leads her to place her son in the care of Sir Hugo. It is her wish for Daniel to suffer none of the hardships and handicaps that she endured because she was born a Jew. To be a singer, a performance artist in one of the less esteemed spheres of performance, she had to escape the rigidity and restrictions of her Jewish faith. She is evidence of the extent to which the Jewish social ideal Eliot offers in opposition to England is an acutely conservative one. It is what Katherine Bailey Linehan has called ‘making patriarchally based family ties the paradigm for humane social relations’.50 An unfortunate consequence of this is an impulse towards ‘re-establishing social hierarchies’51 that restrict personal development. The character of the Princess allows George Eliot to confront a familiar theme, the metaphorical incarceration of her female characters within the fixed parameters of male-oriented social structures. This leads to the subordination of




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female talent and potential to male desire. She identifies with, as Daniel Cottom puts it, ‘a form of thought that systematically demeaned women as well as other groups of people’.52 This ideology also acts as a framework for the empowerment of male actors. Jewish nationalism is portrayed as what Hoch calls ‘religion as an assertion of collective manhood’. It sees the ‘combative masculinity’ of an identified individual ‘raised to the communal level’,53 acting as the catalyst to a new national state, namely a Jewish Palestine. The English masculinity of Grandcourt is displaced, and Eliot redefines the masculine through a privileging of a religious dimension that allows not only for personal development and growth, but also communal progress towards a defined destiny. It is an idealised, spiritualised view of the male subject that denies the association between Christianity and ‘a feminine piety and emotionalism’.54 Eliot’s reconstructed EastWestern maleness is to be aspired to at a personal level, yet in achieving the ideal the individual becomes a prime mover in the unfolding group narrative. The Great Man of History that she creates becomes the catalyst for wider communal change. Crucially, this change can only be imagined as occurring outside the English national unit, hence the removal of Daniel Deronda to the far-reaches of Palestine. Ultimately, both the catalyst for Jewish success, and also the panacea for England’s ills, is characterized as a multi-faceted, but problematic conception of Victorian masculinity. Part-gentleman, part-religious leader, part-political activist, part-humanitarian liberal, Daniel Deronda is the type of man on which enlightened, progressive nations must rely, so Eliot believes. It is only a man such as this who can provide the potent combination of spiritual wellbeing and political organization that is most lacking from the mid-century nation with which she is so disillusioned. For her, political praxis relies on just such a dynamic spiritualism. It is only when the profound qualities of this very particular male individual are publicly acknowledged, and individual wills and aspirations are suppressed for the collective good, that the imaginary community of the nation can finally be (re)materialized. It is only then that the dispiriting national identity so typical of the English aspects of Daniel Deronda can be radically transformed into a coherent, organic ersatz religion.

Notes 01. The problematics of the structure of the novel were commented on by Victorian reviewers. However, the notion that the novel was fatally fractured



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02. 03.

04.

05. 06. 07.

08.

09. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

was crystallised most conspicuously by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948). The history of Eliot criticism has since been littered with reworkings of what is in truth the same assumption. In the wake of Leavis came Maurice Beebe’s ‘Visions and Creators: The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Boston University Studies (Autumn 1955), pp. 166–77, David Carroll’s ‘The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Essays in Criticism, 9 (1959), pp. 369–80, and Jerome Beaty’s ‘Daniel Deronda and the Question of Unity in Fiction’, Victorian Newsletter, 15 (1959), pp. 16–20. More recently there have been Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution (1981), Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller, eds, Jewish Presences in English Literature (1990), and David Morse, High Victorian Culture (1993). Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 181. In White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto, 1979), Paul Hoch argues that the dominant binary opposition within representations of nineteenth-century masculinity was that between the ‘Playboy’ and the ‘Puritan’. However, though this has some resemblances to the tension being delineated in this paper, it fails to address the implications of what I believe to be the key issues; viz. religion and nationalism. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 2–3. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), p. 185. George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876, George Eliot Letters, 6 (London: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 302. E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 233. J. A. Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism and Upper-class Education in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 142. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, Or Adventures of a Gentleman (London: Routledge, 1885), p. 255. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 734. Badri Raina, ‘Daniel Deronda: A View of Grandcourt’, Studies in the Novel, 17 (1985), p. 377. Daniel Deronda, p. 187. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Vol. II, edited by Robert Ross (Boston: Wyman-Fogg, 1959), p. 21. Daniel Deronda, p. 19. Ibid., p. 488. Irving Howe, ‘George Eliot and the Jews’, Partisan Review, 46 (1979), p. 365. Ibid., p. 370. This point is made at greater length by Herbert J. Levine, ‘The Marriage of Allegory and Realism in Daniel Deronda’, Genre, 15 (1982), pp. 421–45. Daniel Deronda, p. 44. Ibid., pp. 644–5. Ibid., p. 456.




22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

Neil McCaw Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 458. Ibid., p. 146. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 516. Marc E. Wohlfarth, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53 (September 1998), p. 189. George Eliot to Maria Lewis, Griff, 6–8 November 1838, George Eliot Letters, I, p. 13. George Eliot to John Sibree Jr., Foleshill, 11 February 1848, George Eliot Letters, I, p. 247. Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 22. Both the Folger Shakespeare Library Notebook and the Yale University Library Notebook (copies of which are held as M892 and M890 of the British Library microfilm collection), contain the following: ‘Out of the whole population of the world 31.2% are Buddhists, 13.4% are Brahamists, 15.7% are Mohammedans, 30.7% are Christians, 0.3% are Jews’ (it is dated August 1868). The fact that these statistics are transcribed suggests an interest on Eliot’s part as to the minority status of the Jews; that they are repeated in a second notebook serves to emphasize this further. George Eliot to Charles Bray, Berlin, 12 November 1854, George Eliot Letters, II, p. 185. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 43. Examples of this typological paradigm range across works as diverse as, Milton’s Paradise Regained, when he confidently states ‘the Kingdom shall to Israel be restor’d’, Pope’s ‘Messiah’, where he associates the appearance of the son of God on Earth with ‘Ye Nymphs of Solyma’, Cowper’s ‘What nation will you find, where annals prove / So rich an int’rest in almighty love?’ (‘Exposulation’), and Browning’s identification in ‘Holy-Cross Day’ (1855) of ‘the children of the chosen race’. There was an especial concern for this theme amongst Romantics including Blake in his Jersualem, Wordsworth in ‘A Jewish Family’, and Lord Byron in Hebrew Melodies. Each writer laments the inequity of the Jewish situation; for example Byron’s ‘when shall Zion’s songs again seem sweet?’, and Wordsworth’s call for the Jews and their ‘proud Jerusalem’ to be justly restored. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 14. This advertisement is discussed at greater length in Carol A. Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), p. 236. Daniel Deronda, p. 443. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 30. Jameson rejects this strategy, citing the example of the re-readings of the Old Testament in light of the subsequent life of Christ as an undesirable example of this. Edward Dowden, ‘Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda’, Contemporary Review, 29 (1877), p. 356.



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39. Wohlfarth, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism’, p. 190. 40. Edward Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’, Social Text, I (1978), p. 12. 41. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 150. 42. This aspect of the novel is discussed at length in Said’s ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’, 7–58. 43. It is probably worth noting that in the essay ‘George Eliot and Feminism: The Case of Daniel Deronda’ (in Rhoda B. Nathan, ed., Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World (London: Greenwood, 1986)) Bonnie Zimmerman offers a contradictory viewpoint. Deronda is, for her, a conflation of male and female tendencies (p. 36). This is not an argument I am in agreement with, especially as it risks reanimating the age-old criticism of Eliot that she was unable to create authentic male characters. 44. Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘National Reproduction and “the Demographic Race” in Israel’, in N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias, Woman–Nation–State (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 106. 45. Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 208. 46. Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longings for Form’, in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabba (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 47. 47. These five major influences on ethnic and national culture are discussed at greater length in N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias, Women–Nation–State, p. 7. 48. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 125. 49. Christine Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 1. 50. Katherine Bailey Linehan, ‘Mixed Politics: The Critique of Imperialism in Daniel Deronda’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 34 (1992), p. 325. 51. Susan Lynn Meyer, ‘Gender and Empire: Figurative Structures in the Fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot’, DPhil Dissertation (Yale University, 1989), p. 181. 52. Daniel Cottom, Social Figures (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1987), p. xxi. 53. Hoch, White Hero, Black Beast, p. 116. 54. Daniel Deronda, p. 187.




Ecce Homo: Representations of Christ as the Model of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Lives of Jesus Sean Gill

Of late years, on all hands, special interest has been manifested in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, by writers of the widest differences of view; in old days diverse motives compelled painters to dwell more frequently upon the miraculous, the mysterious, and the simply sublime events of His history, than on those which engage us now; and so it has come about that to this day there is no picture representing Christ in full manhood enduring the burden of common toil. (Mr Holman Hunt’s Picture ‘The Shadow of Death’)1

Holman Hunt’s painting the ‘Shadow of Death’ was first exhibited in 1873 and, as the accompanying catalogue makes clear, the attempt to create ‘authentic’ representations of Christ’s humanity, either on canvas or in print, was a major literary, artistic and theological preoccupation of the second half of the Victorian period. Orthodox Christians such as Hunt and the Anglican clergyman Frederick William Farrar, whose Life of Christ was published the year after ‘The Shadow of Death’ was first exhibited, felt themselves to be enlisted in a battle to defend the credibility of the gospel narratives. This, they feared, had been seriously impugned by the sceptical presuppositions underpinning works such as Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which appeared in an English translation by George Eliot in 1845, and Renan’s Vie de Jésus of 1863.2 One of the means by which Christian writers and artists sought to accomplish this task was by recourse to detailed archaeological, geographical and ethnographical research. As is well known, a number of Holman Hunt’s religious pictures were based on painstaking observation in the Holy Land and it was on his arrival in Jerusalem in 1869 that he first read 164 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


11

Renan, having previously been warned that the book threatened to overturn entirely his faith in the veracity of the gospel writers. The research which he carried out there for ‘The Shadow of Death’ and the final painting itself represent a quite explicit engagement with the questions of historical methodology raised by Renan.3 In the same way, as preparation for writing a life of Christ which was widely regarded as the most convincing nineteenth-century defence of the traditional view, Farrar visited Palestine in 1870.4 As the evangelical Christian Observer noted approvingly, ‘many things came home to him for the first time, with a reality and vividness unknown before’5 – as if somehow the accumulation of minute historical and ethnographical detail could stem the rising tide of scientific, biblical critical and moral objections to orthodox faith. However this shift of emphasis from depicting the divine Christ of tradition to representing the human Jesus of history involved far more than a response to the controverted hermeneutical issues which weighed so heavily on Hunt and Farrar. The portrayal of what the exhibition catalogue of 1873 called ‘Christ in full manhood’ also raised complex questions about the relationship between Christian theology and Victorian configurations of masculinity. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have argued, changes in Victorian religious discourse made possible what they call ‘the construction of a new subject – the Christian middle class man’.6 For Victorian Protestants an identification with Jesus was central to that process. As the clerical writer of Christian Manliness. A Book of Examples and Principles For Young Men stressed, it was in Christ that they would find ‘the example and type of Christian manhood’.7 For the Broad Church writer and Christian Socialist Thomas Hughes, whose book The Manliness of Christ appeared in 1879, identifying with and modelling his life on that of the human Jesus provided far more than the answer to his intellectual doubts about the truth of the Christian faith. It was also the means of assuaging profound emotional insecurities: When I came to think for myself I found the want, the longing for a perfectly righteous king and head, the deepest of which I was conscious – for a being in whom I could rest, who was in perfect sympathy with me and all men.8 Hughes’s personal and highly charged engagement with his subject should warn us against seeing the writing of lives of Jesus as no more than an intellectual exercise in historical reconstruction in the interests of some theological parti pris. What was often at stake in



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such endeavours was the author’s sense of self as a man. This is equally evident in Holman Hunt’s objection to the use of the term realist as attached to his art, and his insistence that a picture must be more than merely ‘an icy double of the facts themselves’. One of the revealing justifications that he gave for rejecting this method of working was that it threatened to ‘put out of operation the faculty making man “like a God” ’.9 As Hunt’s carefully wrought memoir Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood makes clear, he consciously fashioned his masculine self-identity as the pioneer and restorer of national artistic greatness very much in the divine-heroic mould of the Christ figure whom he sought to depict.10 Literary and artistic portrayals of Christ can thus provide us with important insights into nineteenthcentury assumptions about the nature of Christian male identities and spiritualities. The ambiguities and contradictions which are evident in such representations can also suggest reasons why the sense of Christian male selfhood was so multifarious and unstable throughout the second half of the century – a fact that has often been obscured by an over-reliance on stereotypical formulations, such as ‘muscular Christianity’.11 No understanding of Christian gendered identity in Victorian society is possible without the recognition that masculinity and femininity were defined in relation to each other.12 Whilst it is true that at first sight masculinity appears less problematic than femininity, since men were traditionally regarded as made in the image of God and women as the troublesome ‘Other’, both the increasing emphasis on the home as the cradle of religious education and the focus of spiritual life, and the greatly expanded role which women played in the life of the Victorian churches, led to a partial but pronounced feminization of Christian values. As William Wilberforce and later writers recognized, the qualities of love and gentleness on which the Christian character was founded were increasingly the preserve of women within the home, and were incompatible with the tasks that middle-class men were called on to perform in a competitive capitalist economy – tasks that called for the exercise of disembodied rationality not feeling, and calculation rather than compassion. It was women not men, Wilberforce claimed, who would in future be ‘our medium of intercourse with the heavenly world’.13 Yet if women as well as men were to be able to identify with representations of the human Christ, these would have to embody the highest attributes of both femininity and of masculinity as they were understood in a society in which gender identities were sharply polarized. For men, Christ had also to exemplify those qualities traditionally regarded as feminine and now considered by Christians to



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be desirable in both genders, but without any loss of their traditional masculine identity. This image of Christ as the hypostatic union of gendered opposites on which the Victorian Christian male was to model his life was further destabilized by ideologies of class, race and sexuality. Both Holman Hunt and Hughes were explicit about their desire to fashion a realistic picture of Christ with which the working class could identify, yet such hegemonizing models of masculinity were premissed on middle-class values and assumptions which resulted in reactions of acute discomfort when the physical realities of working-class life obtruded too obviously in their work. Similarly the portrayal of Christ as a Palestinian Jew sat uneasily beside the growing strain of Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnocentricism and imperialism of which Hughes’s fellow novelist and Christian Socialist the Rev. Charles Kingsley was the leading exponent. For the rest of this chapter I want to explore in more detail the ways in which issues of gender, class, sexuality and race impacted upon the attempts to fashion a viable picture of Jesus’ humanity from which the Victorian Christian male could draw inspiration. The feminization of Victorian Christianity both in terms of spiritual values and of the increasing role which women assumed in the life of the churches, albeit in carefully circumscribed ways, helped to create an acute identity crisis amongst many Christian men which was reflected in their engagement with the character of the earthly Jesus conveyed by artists and writers. As one clergyman lamented: The Christian life has often been strangely and mischievously misapprehended as to this, so that men have come to think of it as a state of dreamy and dreary sentimentalism, fit only for women, or for soft and effeminate men, and not calling forth or giving room for the exercise of the sterner and stronger virtues. Evidently Christ did not think so.14 The Rev. F. D. Maurice agreed, dismissing for similar reasons what he called the ‘passive or feminine character which has often been ascribed to the Sermon on the Mount’.15 In the introduction to his biographical work, The Manliness of Christ, Thomas Hughes refers in the same vein to the worrying lack of success of branches of the YMCA in reaching young men: Their tone is said to lack manliness, and the want of manliness is attributed to their avowed profession of Christianity. If you pursue the inquiry, you will often come upon a distinct belief that this




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Hughes’s own work sets out to counteract this impression by portraying an heroic figure without any taint of weakness or cowardice. Yet he was also well aware that Christ had to be the model for the whole of humanity and his description of him as ‘this most tender and sensitive of the sons of men – with fibres answering to every touch and breath of human sympathy’ would have been recognized by his readers as encapsulating the ideal virtues of pious Victorian femininity.17 The difficulty here was whether such a balance could be sustained, for there was a constant danger of creating what might be perceived as an overfeminized picture of Christ. Fear of effeminacy and of the feminine as other thus haunt many artistic and literary attempts to convey the reality of Christ’s humanity. No one wrestled with the problem more doggedly than Holman Hunt as his contemporaries were quick to perceive. His early champion, the art critic F. G. Stephens, believed that in his famous picture ‘The Light of the World’ (1851–3), Hunt had triumphantly risen to the challenge. The face of Christ, he enthused, was ‘inexpressibly awful and beautiful’, and he went on: It is not merely the countenance of an intellectual man, neither is it feminine in softness and delicacy, but a wonderful combination of expression and feature, suggestive of love, and goodness, and godlike judgement, when engaged in the performance of a godlike act and function.18 That this was a delicate balancing act is evident from the Rev. Richard Glover’s very different reaction to the face of Christ as painted by Hunt. For Glover it is the Victorian sense of the feminine which predominates: But I see a tenderer emotion than wonder. Mark those eyes and that mouth! Do you not see grief. I can almost see the tears welling up from that loving heart and filling those tender eyes, as one might have seen them on the day when this ‘same Jesus’ met the funeral procession which bore to the grave the widow’s only son, or on that day when beside the grave of Lazarus, ‘Jesus wept’.19



weakness is inherent in our English religion; that our Christianity does appeal and must appeal habitually and mainly to men’s fears – to that in them which is timid and shrinking, rather than to that which is courageous and outspoken.16

Glover’s description of the face was not perhaps surprising since in modelling it Hunt had used both female and male sitters, and it was precisely this kind of image which offended Thomas Carlyle, the author of On Heroes, and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, and one of the principal progenitors of the Victorian cult of heroic manliness. As Hunt ruefully recalled, Carlyle indignantly dismissed the work as ‘a poor misshaped presentation of the noblest, the brotherliest, and the most heroic-minded Being that ever walked God’s earth’.20 The same concerns were also evident in the largely favourable responses to the artist’s 1854–5 canvass ‘The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple’. This was fulsomely praised by Farrar as an unsurpassable achievement on the grounds that ‘the great aim of the painter in this picture has been to avoid all mere prettiness, all touch of effeminacy in the figure of the Boy Christ’.21 Macmillan’s Magazine agreed, noting that: There is a marked difference between Hunt’s idea of the corporeal appearance of our Lord, and that usually chosen by the painters, who have shown him as a delicate valetudinary; for such is the character imparted by their allowing a certain feminine quality to overweigh the robustness required for the simple performance of his labours.22 Hunt’s painting ‘The Shadow of Death’ represents the summation of his attempts to create an icon of Christ for his time. As George Landow has shown, in this picture Hunt sought to overcome the difficulties of wedding narrative realism to religious idealization by deploying an elaborate iconography of typological symbolism.23 For example, the shadow cast by the stretching figure prefigures the crucifixion, an image which is reinforced by the young carpenter’s tools, which are also the instruments of the passion. But in another sense this complex composition was also the artist’s answer to the challenge thrown down by Carlyle. Unlike the Christ of ‘The Light of the World’ it presents the viewer with a tautly muscular heroic figure of the kind he had urged Hunt to create. Yet the effect on the viewer is both puzzling and uncomfortable and has given rise to widely differing interpretations of the work’s genesis and significance. As Norman Vance suggests, Hunt’s picture is intended as a visual representation of the manly Christ advocated by writers such as Hughes and Pugh.24 As such it could be read as Charles Kingsley’s muscular Christianity fleshed out on canvas. Yet for Marcia Pointon, the masochism so evident in the figure of Christ, and the chaotic fragmentation of the harshly lit room, are indicative in Lacanian psychoanalytical terms of the artist’s own deep-seated anxiety




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and aggression – the former evident in the fear of death which he experienced whilst working on the picture in the Holy Land, and the latter only too obvious in his ethnocentric response to the people and culture amongst whom he lived.25 Both readings of the work are plausible, and part of the feeling of ambiguity which surrounds it derives from the combination of Christ’s physical power and vigour with the self-immolation and weakness of the martyrdom which it portends. Faced with the challenge of fashioning an image of Christ on whom the Victorian bourgeois male could model himself, and yet which at the same time embodied the highest ideals of both masculine assertiveness and feminine self-abnegation, Victorian Christian writers resorted to the trope of chivalry. As Charles Kingsley put it, the image of Christ on the cross revealed ‘the true prowess, the true valour, the true chivalry, the true glory, the true manhood’ to which we should aspire.26 Identifications of this kind mined the rich vein of nostalgic neo-medievalism which featured so prominently in Victorian literature and art. They are evident, for example, in the High Church artist William Dyce’s work ‘Religion: The Vision of Sir Galahad and His Company’, which was one of a series of fresco paintings on Arthurian themes, which he began to paint in 1849 for the Queen’s Robing Room in the Palace of Westminster. Here he records the moment in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur when Percival, Bors and Galahad see a vision of Christ, his arms outstretched in the same symbolic representation of the selfsacrifice of the cross which Hunt was later to adopt.27 For artists and writers seeking to re-envisage Victorian masculinity in Christian terms, one advantage of the voluntary relinquishing of male power which was at the heart of the chivalric ideal was that it ultimately sought to reinforce rather than subvert traditional gender stereotypes. As the Rev. Pugh reassured his young male readership, ‘A man who is strong, who in fidelity and courage and self-reliance and self-mastery can keep the even tenor of his ways, can afford to be gentle without fearing to be suspected of weakness.’28 Hunt’s picture captures the essence of such chivalrous self-giving, the exact moment when Christ realizes and voluntarily accepts his future suffering on behalf of weak and sinful humanity. Yet as a mediating concept chivalry could not succeed in transcending the polarized ideals of gendered identity on which Victorian society was premissed. This is very evident in the passage from Kingsley from which I have just quoted with its encomium on Christian chivalry. Here Kingsley appears to repudiate the ideal of heroic male toughness implied by the label muscular Christianity which had been



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attached to his writings. Yet his preferred definition of a ‘healthy and manful Christianity, one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine’ implies both a clear sense of gender boundaries and an anxiety lest they be subverted. That such a transgression had in fact occurred forms the basis for his subsequent attack on the monastic life as unsuitable for men since it is ‘essentially a feminine life’. But the qualities of character which he adduces to prove this point turn out to be identical to those which he commends as the essence of the chivalrous life: ‘gentleness, patience, resignation, selfsacrifice and self-devotion, – all that is loveliest in the ideal feminine character’.29 Kingley’s difficulty in making a clear distinction between gentleness and self-sacrifice as essentially feminine qualities but also as the epitome of masculinity in the context of the chivalrous is also evident in Hunt’s depiction of Christ, where the tensile strength of the aggressively foregrounded male body sits uneasily with the facial expression of ecstatic self-surrender.30 Depictions of Christ’s humanity had also to negotiate issues of class. Hunt saw ‘The Shadow of Death’ as exemplifying the way in which Christ’s life affirmed the dignity of labour, and he recorded with pleasure its favourable reception amongst artisans in the North of England, some of whom paid two guineas for prints of the picture to hang in their homes. Working-class deference and the importance of maintaining the existing social order were lessons which Hunt fervently hoped would be learnt from a true contemplation of Christ’s life. As he explained on hearing of the success of his print, ‘this was exactly what I most desired, the dutiful humility of Christ’s life thus conveying its deepest lesson’.31 The transmission of the ideals of Christian manliness from middle-class to working-class culture was a key part of the evangelistic work of the Churches as evidenced by the creation of organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade in 1872, and the portrayal of a working-class Christ as the exemplar of the virtues of hard work, thrift, obedience and sobriety featured prominently in such efforts.32 A representative example was six sermons preached by the future Bishop of London and ardent Christian militarist A. F. Winnington-Ingram while he was working as Rector of Bethnal Green in the East End of London and Warden of Oxford House, an Anglo-Catholic centre for spiritual outreach amongst the poor. Christ, he emphasized, ‘was a real young working man’ with whom ordinary men could identify.33 However, the extent to which the imposition of a hegemonizing model of bourgeois masculinity on the poor was successful may be doubted. Those receptive to Hunt’s message were after all the labour aristocracy who




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had both the money and the social aspirations to pay two guineas for a print of his work. Similarly, Winnington-Ingram’s target may have been the working-class of Bethnal Green, but his sermons were actually preached to middle-class audiences in West End churches. As with questions of gender, attempts to create an image of Christ which could transcend class differences also resulted in tensions and ambiguities which go some way to explaining their lack of success. For the Christian middle-class man, work as a religious vocation featured prominently in his sense of identity and self-worth and was one of the most significant ways in which religious discourse contributed to class formation in Victorian England. As Farrar argued in his Life of Christ, Jesus chose to be a worker and by doing so challenged the value of idleness and ‘the tendency to regard it as a stamp of aristocracy’.34 But the depiction of the realities of Christ’s everyday working existence offended against middle-class canons of propriety and respectability. It was on these grounds that Millais’ 1849–50 painting ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ was savaged by critics, including Dickens. One reason for the greater success of Hunt’s ‘The Shadow of Death’ was that it minimizes this problem for the viewer since the evident dirt and disorder of the everyday working life of the carpenter with his tools scattered throughout the shop are transfigured into reverence and devotion by means of allusive symbolic references to the passion. Even so, not all critics were convinced. As the Saturday Review cautioned: We are not certain that we follow the artist so readily when the endeavour is made to exalt the dignity of labour by representing the Saviour ‘gaining His bread by the sweat of His brow’. Yet, by way of apology, we are told that this is the only picture which has ventured to show ‘Christ in full manhood enduring the burden of common toil.’ What had been lost, the reviewer concluded, was the balance between the actual and the ideal – one that, it was claimed, had been far more successfully sustained in a work such as Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’.35 The same kind of critique was advanced in the Spectator where the reviewer charged that: This is not the Christ; this is a peasant full of troubled hope and sanguine adoration but not one who wears either the visible or invisible crown; in him no lines of external reason have moulded the flesh into a living tabernacle of kingly grace and truth; he may well be



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In 1894 Farrar built on the earlier success of his Life of Christ by producing a historical survey of artistic representations of Christ. Here too the tension between realism and idealization proved troublesome and led him into some convoluted reasoning. A central part of Farrar’s thesis was that no trustworthy likeness of the historical figure of Jesus had been preserved in the Early Church and therefore that all those in existence were no more than conjectural. Yet he still felt it important to quote with approval the opinion of the German biblical scholar Theodor Keim, that Christ’s ‘was a manly, commanding prophetic figure’. Justin Martyr’s suggestion that Jesus was ‘base in aspect and uncomely’ found no favour with Farrar, for whom ‘Jesus wore on earth an aspect of dignity and beauty’.37 In his earlier biography Farrar had also alluded to another potential source of discomfort in essaying realistic portrayals of Jesus’ humanity: that of his sexuality. Central to the middle-class ideal of respectable Christian manhood was the virtue of sexual continence and chastity for which, Farrar claimed, Christ again provided the paradigm: But our Lord wished to show that labour is a pure and noble thing; it is the salt of life; it is the girdle of manliness; it saves the body from effeminate languor; and the soul from polluting thoughts.38 Literary presentations of Christ’s life could reinforce this image by emphasizing the chasteness of his relationships with women and his resistance to all forms of human temptation. It was less clear that depictions of his naked body in art functioned in the same way. In 1852 Ford Madox Brown exhibited a work ‘Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet’ at the Royal Academy. The picture presented a striking and unconventional image of a muscular but plain Christ. In its original form the figure wore only a cloth around his waist. The Art Journal contrasted it unfavourably with the artist’s previous depiction of Chaucer in his 1853 work ‘The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry’: This was scarcely to be expected after the Chaucer picture. Humility was then sufficiently described by a draped impersonation, but we have here a nude figure of the Saviour washing the feet of Peter. We care not whether the exhibitor affect pre- or post-Raffaelism, but we contend that coarseness and indignity in painting are always objectionable.



the Son of Man, but can hardly be, in the special sense of Scripture, the Son of God.36

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And the reviewer concluded that ‘It is not the office of Art to present to us truths of an offensive kind; these are abundant in every-day life, and it is in Art that we seek refuge from them.’39 Finding that as a result of hostile public reaction he could not sell his picture, Brown reworked it and clothed the figure of Christ.40 Part of the problem for Hunt was that the ideal of middle-class Protestant manhood increasingly exalted heterosexuality and marriage, and followed the lead given by Charles Kingsley in condemning celibacy as either popish or unnatural or both.41 Hunt’s figure of Christ in ‘The Shadow of Death’ does not represent an erasure but rather a sublimation of erotic male energy, the presence of which remains all too pronounced in the final composition and provides one more element making for the destablization and disintegration of the iconic image of masculinity which the picture seeks to project.42 One final test which any image of Christ had to pass was that created by a swelling strain of ethnocentrism which equated British imperial power and economic success with a highly mythologized version of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage and its values. The problem here was that if taken to their logical conclusion, painstaking attempts to recreate the Jesus of history would result in a portrait of him as a Palestinian Jew, a figure alien to the sympathies of the Victorian public. Avoiding this outcome necessitated a number of rather pronounced compromises with the much vaunted principles of authenticity. Thus in the case of his 1854–5 work ‘The Finding of Christ in the Temple’, Hunt chose not a Palestinian Jew but an English schoolboy from Eton as his model for the young Christ; whilst in his struggle to paint the heroically muscular figure of ‘The Shadow of Death’ he rejected several sitters, either because ‘the habit of Orientals to sit cross-legged from infancy tends to destroy the delicate form of the lower limbs’, or because their skin was too dark from over-exposure to the sun.43 Hunt’s sensitivity to questions of skin colour did not go unnoticed. In praising the virtuosity of the artist’s technique, the Athenaeum drew attention to the skin tones, ‘which have at once the ruddy hue of the race of men to which Christ belonged, the fairness of civilization, and the inner golden tint which delights all flesh painters’.44 Ultimately, however much ethnographical and historical detail were worked into Hunt’s paintings or into Farrar’s Life of Christ, what predominates is a kind of cultural docetism in which highly abstract qualities of character are attributed to Christ which bear little if any relationship to context and were thus readily transmuted into Victorian Protestant values. For example, in commending Hunt’s 1860 painting of ‘The Finding of



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Mr Hunt is essentially an English painter, and has taken a thoroughly national idea of his work, by representing both Christ and the Virgin from a point of view which has seldom been attempted before; in showing the former, not as an ideal youth whose countenance is a mere exponent of the painter’s thoughts respecting psychical or physical beauty; but while giving full heed to these qualities, expressing the English idea of duty to be performed by the very action of the principal figure in his work.45 In his survey of artistic depictions of Christ down the centuries, Farrar also gave a strongly nationalistic and Protestant tinge to his oracular pronuncements, contrasting the integrity and power of Hunt’s work with the faults of earlier painters. In his view, ‘Gloom, Asceticism, Wrath, Fear, Effeminacy, Pharisaism, Priestcraft – these have been the most powerful and the most deadly corrupters of the true ideal of the Lord of Life and Love’. In the case of early Byzantine images of Christ, Farrar found what he called ‘an unspiritual asceticism’ caused by ‘the errors and ignorance of self-torturing monks’; whilst the unrelieved gloom which he saw in the Spanish School was explicable by the fact that artists were ‘bondslaves of the Romish Church’ and of the Inquisition in particular. This in turn spawned a reaction which ‘led in later centuries to the effeminate, langorous, pietistic Christ with fair hair and blue eyes, of a later sentimentalism’ – trends that, in Farrar’s view, reached their deplorable culmination in the works of Sassoferrato and Carlo Dolci. Not surprisingly, he had some difficulty in fitting Michaelangelo into this schematized history of Catholicism’s wilful distortions of the image of Christ, since his powerfully athletic figures approximated much more closely to Victorian taste than those of the other artists who were the butt of his strictures. This exception was explicable, Farrar ingeniously suggested, as a case ‘in which the pride of Science plays a far greater part than the faith of the Gospels’.46 The distorting effects of these and other kinds of value judgements which permeate the efforts of Victorian writers and artists to represent Christ’s humanity in a form which was relevant to the temporal and spiritual aspirations of middle-class Christian men of the period, would have come as no surprise to the great musician, philanthropist and theologian Albert Schweitzer. In 1910 the first English edition of his magisterial survey of nineteenth-century theological endeavours in this field was published with the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus.



Christ in the Temple’ the Athenaeum commented approvingly:

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Schweitzer was in no doubt that the real Jesus of history, in so far as he could be perceived at all, was an alien figure steeped in Jewish apocalyptic and that all attempts to recreate him in a form which later ages could apprehend were doomed to failure. ‘There is,’ he wrote, ‘no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a life of Jesus’, and on another occasion he likened the attempt to that of a man looking down a deep well and seeing only his own reflection.47 For the Victorian middle-class Christian male who did so, the surface of the water was anything but calm, and the fractured and multifaceted image of Christ which met his gaze was indeed only that of his own anxiously self-reflexive masculinity.

Notes 1. Anon., Mr Holman Hunt’s Picture, ‘The Shadow of Death’ Exhibited at No. 393 Old Bond Street (London: Thomas Agnew & Sons, n.d), p. 3. George Landow suggests that this unsigned pamphlet was almost certainly written by the artist himself or under his close direction. See G. P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 183. 2. The standard account of the theological aspects of this controversy is D. Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1982). 3. W. Holman Hunt, A History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1905), 2, pp. 409–10. 4. Farrar’s Life of Christ went through more than 30 editions and had sold over 100,000 copies by 1914. Headmaster of Marlborough and subsequently Dean of Canterbury, he is a somewhat neglected figure in the history of Victorian Christianity. Yet as the Dictionary of National Biography points out, although neither a penetrating nor original thinker, Farrar’s attempts to occupy a mediating position between the evangelical rigour of his upbringing and the liberalism of his mentor F. D. Maurice enabled him ‘to exert a vast popular influence upon the religious feeling and culture of the middle classes for fully forty years’ (DNB, Second Supplement, vol. 2, pp. 9–12). The standard hagiographical Victorian biography is R. Farrar, The Life of Frederick William Farrar (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1904). For a more jaundiced modern appraisal, see B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 274–6. 5. The Christian Observer (October 1874), p. 727. 6. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 110. 7. S. S. Pugh, Christian Manliness. A Book of Examples and Principles for Young Men (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1867), p. 129. 8. T. Hughes, Tracts for Priests and People (London: Macmillan & Co., 1861), p. 18.



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09. Hunt, History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 1, p. 150. 10. For this theme, see J. Codell, ‘The Artist Colonized: Holman Hunt’s “Biohistory”, Masculinity, Nationalism and the English School’, in E. Harding ed., Re-Framing The Pre-Raphaelites; Historical and Theoretical Essays (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 211–29. 11. Recent studies of the Victorian period which emphasise that masculine identities are multiple and complex include J. E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 12. This point has been forcefully argued in M. Roper and J. Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 11–16. 13. W. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (London: T. Cadell & Sons, 2nd edition, 1799), p. 435. 14. Pugh, Christian Manliness, p. 95. 15. F. D. Maurice, Social Morality: Twenty-One Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge (London: Macmillan & Co., 1869), p. 461. 16. T. Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (London: Macmillan & Co., 1879), p. 5. 17. Ibid., p. 143. 18. F. G. Stephens, William Holman Hunt and His Works (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), pp. 26–7. 19. R. Glover, The ‘Light of the World’, or Holman Hunt’s Great Allegorical Picture Translated into Words (London: Wertheim, Macintosh and Hunt, 1862), p. 75. 20. Hunt, History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 1, p. 355. 21. F. W. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1894), p. 289. 22. Macmillan’s Magazine (May 1860), p. 91. 23. Landow, William Holman Hunt, pp. 116–25. 24. N. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 6. 25. M. Pointon, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer: Holman Hunt and the Holy Land’, in M. Pointon ed., Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 22–44. 26. C. Kingsley, David: Four Sermons Preached before the University of Cambridge (London: Macmillan & Co., 1865), p. 61. 27. For Dyce’s part in Victorian neo-medievalism, see D. Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival In Victorian Art (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), pp. 111–35. The connections between his art and his religious beliefs are discussed in M. Pointon, William Dyce 1806–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 61–92. 28. Pugh, Christian Manliness, p. 123. 29. Kingsley, David, pp. 5–6. 30. In a letter to the pre-Raphaelite patron Thomas Combe, Hunt mentioned the great pains which he had taken with the modelling of the head and his anxiety lest the originality of the treatment would bemuse the viewer. See




31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Sean Gill J. Bronkhurst, ‘The Shadow of Death’, in M. Bennett et al., The PreRaphaelites (London: The Tate Gallery, 1984), pp. 221–2. Hunt, History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2, p. 310. For a detailed discussion of this subject see J. Springhall, ‘Building Character in the British Boy: the Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-class Adolescents, 1880–1914’, in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 52–74. A. F. Winnington-Ingram, Christ and His Friends: Six Sermons Preached in West End Churches (London: Gardner, Darton & Co., 1897), p. 5. Winnington-Ingram also shows anxiety about the transgression of clearly defined gender boundaries in any depiction of Christ and of the apostles. For example, he warns against a view of Jesus’ favourite disciple John as being ‘a soft and rather womanish character’, asserting that by contrast ‘The disciple whom JESUS loved was as brave as a lion and as true as steel’, ibid., p. 15. F. W. Farrar, The Life of Christ, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 2nd edition, 1874), vol. 1, p. 82. The Saturday Review, 36 (December 1873), pp. 727–8. The Spectator, 46 (1873), p. 1498. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art, p. 78. Keims’ Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara was published in three volumes in Zurich between 1869 and 1872. Farrar, The Life of Christ, vol. 1, pp. 82–3. The Art Journal (1852), p. 173. T. Barringer, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), pp. 115–16. J. S. Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), pp. 219–21. Reed also notes that this was a contested ideal of masculinity which could be turned on its head by the suggestion that the qualities of character demanded by celibacy were more rather than less manly than those fostered by marriage. This theme is discussed with relation to a number of other Pre-Raphaelite works in Sussman, pp. 121–8. Hunt, History of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2, p. 292. The Athenaeum, 56 (29 November 1873), p. 703. The Athenaeum (21 April 1860), p. 86. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art, pp. 483–7. A. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London; Adam & Charles Black, 3rd edition, 1954), p. 4.



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‘Writing the Male Body’: Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard, 1884 –94 Sue Morgan

Embodiment and the crisis of masculinity In November 1884, The Guardian commented approvingly on the efforts of the Anglican clerical elite to alert public opinion to the full extent of sexual vice and moral corruption and ‘its terrible effects on national welfare’.1 Singled out for particular praise were the debates on male chastity conducted at the second annual conference of the Church of England Purity Society (CEPS) which, the report observed, displayed the ‘wonderfully high level of dignity, good taste … [and] manly reserve … to be expected from such speakers on such a subject’.2 Established under the presidency of Archbishop Benson in 1883 in the wake of the suspension of the notorious Contagious Disease Acts, the CEPS remained the official Anglican agency for the promotion of male sexual purity until well into the twentieth century. An all-male association organized through parochial and diocesan committees, it aimed to ‘stir up the manhood of England’3 by advocating the elimination of the double sexual standard, promoting a chivalrous respect for womanhood and protecting the young from moral contamination. What were outwardly a series of educational measures against vice and obscenity by the CEPS in reality reflected growing ecclesiastical concern over what were perceived to be eroding boundaries of gender and sexual identity. Clerical intervention into the controversial domain of sexual politics was driven by a complex set of factors, not least of which was a nascent understanding of the precarious relationship between masculinity, sexual power and socio-spiritual privilege. Historians have commonly attributed the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity to the rise of an increasingly confident women’s movement with its demands for a life outside marriage, as well as to the 179 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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emergence of an identifiable homosexual culture.4 For clergymen, a steady erosion of professional esteem in the face of unyielding secularization compounded this crisis of gender. The seemingly anarchic sexual mores of the 1880s and 1890s witnessed in numerous divorce scandals and media scares over juvenile prostitution provided an opportune historical moment for the reassertion of a powerful Christian social critique. With it came a measure of recovered political and cultural status for the beleaguered representatives of institutional religion. Anxious to reassert their waning authority over precisely those issues deemed most relevant to religious reflection – marriage, morality and Christian family values – the Anglican hierarchy re-encoded a divinely ordained social order, which enshrined the heterosexual family norm. Central to this moral vision was the theme of male chastity. From the early 1880s, thousands of pamphlets, lectures and sermons on the centrality of sexual continence to the Victorian manly ideal were written and disseminated by clergymen amongst youth groups, the armed services, public schools and philanthropic organizations. According to the Bishop of London, not since the late eighteenth century had there been such an ‘awakening of Christians … to the necessity of greater holiness of life’.5 Membership figures belied the presentation of the movement as a nationwide moral revolution, but the CEPS attracted many of the period’s most talented and socially aware High Churchmen into its ranks. Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, Bishop King of Lincoln and Bishop Wilkinson of Truro were renowned advocates of male purity, as were the architects of the Christian Social Union – Henry Scott Holland, Charles Gore and B. F. Westcott. Several leading Christian pedagogues including Montagu Butler, Rev. Dr E. S. Talbot Edward Thring and the Hon. Edward Lyttleton were also prominent supporters and the presence of such eminent reforming scholarchurchmen meant that the CEPS exerted an ideological influence well beyond its numerical size.6 Historians have conventionally emphasized the medicalization of sexual discourse during this period, specifically the sexological categorization of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ sexualities.7 Religious constructions of gender, however, in this instance specifically that of the disciplined Christian male body, were also of considerable import in late Victorian debates on sexual morality. Within the pages of the CEPS’s monthly paper The Vanguard – a seemingly arid concoction of editorials, essays, reprinted sermons, Church Congress reports and feedback on various purity ventures – emerged a self-conscious, sustained discourse of male sexual purity which attempted to reconcile the demands of the



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Christian faith with a considered appreciation of the shifting moral standards of fin-de-siècle culture. Published first on a monthly basis and then quarterly between July 1884 and December 1894, The Vanguard provides a striking example of ‘writing the male body’.8 Through detailed textual analysis of the paper’s contents, this chapter will argue that bodily purity became emblematic of an enhanced masculine and spiritual status presided over by a priestly elite, and that the male body functioned as a canvas on which the Anglican clergy actively inscribed its own construction of a patriarchal religious and moral order.

The word made flesh: Anglican readings of the body Anglican clerical discussion of the sexual politics of the male body arose out of devotion to that most significant of male forms – the body of Christ. From Coleridge down through F. D. Maurice to the Lux Mundi school, incarnational theology dominated Victorian religious expression. As the supreme manifestation of God’s supernatural activity in relation to the world, the incarnate Christ authenticated and sanctified all secular, material life, elevating the dignity of the human form and the value of human social endeavour. As the Bishop of London declared in an 1886 address to the third anniversary conference of the CEPS: our sinful bodies are made clean by His Body … we are one with God and He with us; in short … human nature is not merely animal, nor merely human, but … Divine, and … the last crowning dignity of our manhood bears this stamp.9 The theology of the incarnation provided the CEPS with a sound doctrinal basis for their affirmative approach to male embodiment. As the Word made flesh, Christ’s physicality contested the innate sinfulness of the human form divinizing the pure male body. Reclaiming the human form as a locus for divine experience meant a perception of the body both in its concrete materiality and as signifier of a wider religionational identity. Throughout the pages of The Vanguard, clerical readings of the male body worked at several discrete levels. As Herbert Sussman has argued, the management of sexual energy and sexual desire was ‘a central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity’.10 In The Vanguard’s discussion of individual male purity, the body functioned primarily as the arena in which this struggle for management and selfcontrol took place. One model of male sexuality, that of a skilful rider mounted on a spirited horse, suggested a conventional reiteration of



Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard

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the need to subordinate the animalistic carnal plane to the higher purposes of a cerebrally defined code of manliness. Despite this example, Anglican readings of bodily chastity were shaped less by punitive intentions to subjugate the flesh than by the desire to revere human corporeality. Thus the body was popularly depicted as a consecrated vessel – ‘frail and of the earth’ – but nevertheless containing ‘the seeds of immortality and the capabilities of resurrection deposited by the Holy Spirit’.11 In a letter to Vanguard readers in August 1886, Bishop Lightfoot emphasized the redemptive qualities of male corporeality and ‘bid them realize the unspeakable sanctity of the human body as the Temple of the Holy Ghost’.12 This striking refutation of dualistic terminology, in which the body was recognized as an integral feature in the development of a fully unified psychosomatic moral and spiritual personality typified the discourse of the Anglican clerical elite throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The elevated status accorded to male bodily purity by CEPS members brought with it an impassioned attack on sexual promiscuity. Men who committed impure acts defiled the sacred status of the body as temple, rendering it no longer an object of God’s grace, but a veritable ‘prisonhouse’ of moral enslavement.13 According to the Rev. C. I. Black, ‘to abuse and dishonour so worshipful a fabric’ through indulgence of the sexual passions was an ‘abominable sacrilege’ and a mockery of the selfless sacrifice of Christ’s own body.14 Exhortations to sexual continence and sermons on how best to avoid the temptations of the flesh appeared regularly in The Vanguard. In a powerful challenge to the sexual double standard, CEPS members rejected determinist arguments which excused the moral shortcomings of men on the grounds of the inevitability of the male sexual imperative. ‘God expects purity from men as well as from women’, declared the Rev. W. A. Lewis at the Wakefield Church Congress, ‘continence … self-restraint – inward mastery not prudential self-indulgence, is the message of the Spirit to modern manhood’.15 Man was no mere animal locked within the limits of his bestial nature, but a self-conscious being endowed with a conscience, the power of reason and a self-directing will. Failure to exercise these attributes contravened the original divine intention, argued chastity reformers, and led to men’s alienation from the kingdom of God. What distinguishes these didactic passages on male sexuality is an explicit use of scientific categories to confirm and authenticate spiritual principles. As Benson argued in his ‘Visitation Charge on Purity’, ‘Christianity teaches … what science verifies and enforces … True religion will go hand in hand with everything that is scientific and



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progressive … To her nothing is secular.’16 Essays by eminent physicians such as Sir T. S. Clouston were reprinted at length in The Vanguard, and there is a sense in which the inclusion of medical scientific essays facilitated churchmen’s own ability to speak out openly on sexual issues, providing an authoritative discourse sufficiently detached from the uncomfortable intimacy of the topic. According to Lucy Bland, of particular significance to advocates of sexual purity was the challenge posed by evolutionary theory to essentialist definitions of human nature. In the preface to a male purity tract entitled The Testimony of Medical Men (1886) the authors declared, ‘human nature is not a “fixed quality”, but something which varies infinitely in men, and which may be lifted, altered and transformed by the influences which are brought to bear upon it’.17 The implications of such a message were revolutionary. If human nature was both malleable and transformable, then all men had the ability to redirect their sexual or bodily instincts, and chastity might confidently be predicted as the consummation of man’s moral, physical and spiritual progress.18 Clerical endorsement of the evolutionary superiority of sexual chastity was frequently articulated in a romantic neo-medievalist vision of heroic Christian knighthood. In 1885, the Dean of Gloucester depicted chastity as a noble crusade to be won by ‘the knightly courage and knightly self-mastery of the modern Arthurs and modern Galahads’.19 As Mark Girouard has pointed out, it was relatively easy to ‘change Sir Galahad from a medieval symbol of virginity to a Victorian symbol of purity’20 and the words of Tennyson’s virgin knight – ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure’ – were adopted as the motto of the CEPS. Chivalry thus proved a powerful semantic tool in terms of both the popularization of male sexual continence and the proselytization of the Christian faith. Adolescence was viewed as a particularly perilous period in the formation of male sexual identity, a sort of moral threshold that might determine a boy’s course as a ‘true man’ or ‘maddened beast’.21 ‘It is this period of man’s life that is most critical,’ wrote Lieut.-Colonel Herbert Everitt, Hon. Secretary of the CEPS. ‘It is in these days of youth that the character is being formed and the foundations laid, upon which the entire life of manhood rests.’22 Fuelled by a concern to regulate juvenile sexuality and educate the young about normative male gender roles, much of moral purity propaganda was directed at adolescent boys. The pedagogical influence of leading purity reformers such as Henry Scott Holland, Montagu Butler and Edward Thring was a crucial determinant of this work, involving them in numerous boys’ clubs, settlement houses and youth organizations with the sole purpose of




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forging model adult Christian citizens. More often than not, as Seth Koven’s work had demonstrated, ‘this task was complicated by personal struggles to make and shape their own personal masculine identities’.23 With anti-masturbation fever at its height during the late Victorian and Edwardian era, many clergymen and purity educators regarded the ‘solitary vice’24 as the pre-eminent male sexual perversion. Butler, then head of Harrow, established a Schoolmasters’ Committee in 1884 to enquire into the extent of schoolboy masturbatory practices. The Vanguard pronounced at length on the horrors of masturbation and its dangerous proximity to homosexual tendencies in a religioscientific discourse, which attributed a range of ailments, including impotence, lunacy, disease and death, to such ‘bestial’ behaviour.25 As John Fout has explained, masturbation ‘symbolised the horror of being sexually out of control’26 – the very antithesis of normative Christian masculinity. Its abuse of the chaste body and provision of a sexual outlet outside of marriage threatened to dilute the essence of Christian maleness and the divinity of the male form.

Marriage and the family As the primary site of male, heterosexual authority, the family was a crucial dynamic in the construction of a hegemonic religious masculinity. Despite vigorous condemnations of extramarital sexual encounters, Anglican purity reformers’ reflections on marriage and the family demonstrated a very different attitude towards the sexual act. Negative doctrines of sexual containment formed only one strand of Victorian religious reflection on marital relations. Although Charles Kingsley remains the most celebrated theorist of marriage as a sphere of sexual delight rather than a mere remedy for concupiscence, we find within the pages of The Vanguard a similarly powerful justification for matrimonial passion. The Divorce Act of 1857 had drastically undermined ecclesiastical jurisdiction over marriage and irrevocably fractured the concept of holy matrimony as an indissoluble union. In The Vanguard, the sacralization of human reproductive abilities and the notion of divine fatherhood were proffered as a counterattack to both of these developments. Throughout the latter half of the century, religious leaders had sought to reaffirm the sacramental significance of marriage as a bulwark against an increasing climate of perceived sexual impropriety. As The Vanguard declared in 1889, ‘the church’s marriage rite has yet to become more popular and more sought after, and made more



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impressively sacred’.27 Against growing public fears over the fallibility of the matrimonial tie, reinforcement of the centrality of the family was a crucial plank in Anglicanism’s demand for a renewed public morality. An 1891 Vanguard editorial described the new divorce courts as a blatant usurpation of divine authority. Marriage was not to be interpreted as a mere human institution subject to human frailty, for it was the very embodiment of God’s incarnate union with His people and the ultimate manifestation of moral purity. ‘God, the father of the holy family of Bethlehem … is also the Creator of every human family’, wrote the Rev. George Body in July 1891. ‘He bids us see in the father, mother and child His own ideal of all created existence, the mirror of His triune essence … Father, Son and Holy Ghost above, father, mother, child on earth.’28 For the writers of The Vanguard, it was the sacramental dignity of holy marriage that constituted the definitive boundary between ‘the solemn responsibility of sex as God’s ministry of human life’ and ‘the deadly disease’29 of lust. Explaining Christian antipathy towards masturbatory and homosexual practices, one clergyman observed, ‘What God condemns is not the gratification itself, but gratification in Godforbidden ways.’30 Every encounter engaged in outside a permanent loving bond between woman and man incurred the displeasure of God. Anglican definitions of male sexuality did not require the purging of passion from the marital bed, however. In accordance with the grave responsibility of procreation, the sexual organs were depicted as the very shrine of the temple of the male body. The moment of sexual union between husband and wife was also sacrosanct, providing humanity’s greatest approximation of the lifegiving powers of the divine: God willed that this gift of life should be transmitted by the union of man and woman. God’s act of giving life is thus directly continued by sexual intercourse.31 The power given to man and woman thus united by the Creator to act as pro-creators of His children is a privilege which should make the whole instinct of man rise against its perversion by lust.32 Central to the sanctification of heterosexual marital sex was the reinforcement of the paternal role as a divine ordinance – ‘To be a father, to originate a new life, to bequeath to posterity a likeness of ourselves, what honour and responsibility can be greater than this?’33 Male headship of the family home, that microcosm of the social and political order, was a key factor in nineteenth-century masculine status.34




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Through interpreting the roles of husband and father in terms of the authoritative, benevolent patriarch – ‘the revelation of God in the pure family35 – the clerical elite divinized temporal fatherhood. Anglican readings of marital sexual relations thus elevated the spiritual significance of fleshly bodies while reinforcing the socio-spiritual power and privilege of the paterfamilias.

The body and the nation Although the aim of Anglican anti-vice campaigns was primarily to target personal moral behavioural standards, male sexuality was never interpreted as a purely private or individual phenomenon. Marriage and the promotion of the heterosexual ideal were frequently depicted as a vehicle for national stability with the restoration of ‘the sanctity of family life’ going ‘hand in hand with England’s greatness’.36 As a Lambeth Conference pronouncement of 1888 suggested, sexual purity was pivotal to national strength: ‘wherever marriage is dishonoured and the sins of the flesh are lightly regarded, the home life will be destroyed, and the nation itself will sooner or later decay and perish.’37 During a period when imperial progress was of increasing public interest, the physical and moral purity of British manhood acquired similar national relevance. One of the most striking themes in The Vanguard’s ten-year publication run was the use of the chaste male body as a signifier for national identity. As heralders of the new moral order, clergymen perceived themselves as uniquely responsible for the nation’s moral and imperial advance. In an address on ‘Social Purity’ given in St Paul’s Parish Room, Southampton, 1885, the Rev. W. H. Lucas declared: Men of England! Are we to allow this stealthy underground foe to sap the foundation of our national life, and bring this great and dear country of ours to ruin? … free yourselves from slavery to sensual vice, the worst and most degrading of all bondage, and the parent of every other form of servitude … join hand in hand to stem that polluting flood of vice which is poisoning the springs of our people’s health, and degrading our national character.38 Heightened fears over racial degeneracy were exploited by the Anglican hierarchy and linked to levels of moral profligacy. A popular illustration of this correlation was the fall of the historic Greco-Roman Empire, attributed by purity writers to an indigenous culture of decadence that



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had sacrificed its manhood and womanhood ‘on the altars of luxury and self-indulgence’.39 Lucas outlined the connection between male sexual purity and national strength using the work of the Roman historian Tacitus who had attributed the power of the German nation ‘to the high moral purity which prevailed amongst them’.40 ‘The young men marry late and so preserve their manhood unexhausted,’ explained Lucas, ‘they are united to maidens of suitable age and the children inherit from both parents a vigorous constitution’.41 Lucas’s point was that even as a heathen, knowing nothing of Christian motives for keeping the body undefiled as the temple of the Holy Ghost, Tacitus yet recognized that when a nation tolerated morally anarchic behaviour, be it divorce, prostitution or adulterous relationships, it risked political endangerment. Britain’s continued cultural and economic supremacy was thus contingent on the superior chivalry and purity of her manhood, for a nation made up of ‘withered stalks of men’42 had no divine vision in the conduct of its national and political affairs. In an unreflective and uncritical discourse of moral and religious imperialism, the CEPS called on its male readership as ‘faithful Christians and patriotic Englishmen’ to ‘uphold England’s greatness by purifying England’s morals’.43 Only the Christianization of the country could assure Britain of its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations and the Church’s fight against sexual vice stood at the very heart of such an enterprise. Once again, Vanguard writers harnessed scientific arguments for sexual continence in order to bear out the veracity of their colonialist constructions of masculinity. Self-restraint was a clear marker of ethnic superiority and civilization. ‘The great races of mankind have been possessed of this power in a high degree,’44 wrote Clouston in August 1889: The best religions of the world have inculcated it as being the most necessary of moral qualities. The ‘taking up of the cross’ without which ‘no man shall inherit the kingdom of heaven’ is the Christian equivalent and precursor of the modern scientific doctrine of the supreme importance of inhibition in organic and mental life.45 Clouston’s scientific ‘gospel of continence’46 was published throughout successive editions of The Vanguard. He exhorted a stringent regulatory control of the male reproductive system, arguing that ‘reproduction should not begin, nor sexual function be exercised, till the developments of body and all its powers is completed … [for] young men need a surplus stock of energy, an abundant “staying power” and a careful




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husbanding of their vital resources.’47 Sexual indulgence represented not only an affront to the temple of the body, but a wasting of lifepowers such as superior fitness, mental agility and upward mobility – all of which were vital to the future of a strong, healthy racial stock. Hence Christians and Jews with their strict observance of the physiological rules of the Mosaic purity code were contrasted favourably with the lowered stamina of the ‘Hindoo [sic] and other Asiatic races’.48

Conclusion Contributors to The Vanguard wrote during a period in which ideologies of imperialism and athleticism had become significant determinants of the manly ideal. Clerical appropriations of male purity as the key to the continued supremacy of the ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’ illustrate the Church’s participation in the propagation of a eugenic, imperialist discourse of masculinity. Yet traditional readings of the shift from the Arnoldian ideal of ‘godliness and good learning’49 to the Carlylean cult of the heroic athletic ‘blood’, now a commonplace in historiographies of nineteenth-century manliness, presuppose an uncritical acceptance of the secularization thesis of Victorian masculinity. CEPS members formed part of a long and well-developed tradition of Christian apologists concerned to commend the faith to those increasingly impressed more by secular codes of physical strength and vigorous gamesmanship. Sexual purity provided the clerical elite with a particularly effective vehicle of proselytization enabling them to tap into public fears of social instability and moral vacuousness. Society had access to many forms of ‘natural help’50 in the pursuit of purity, clergymen argued, such as state criminalization of certain sexual acts or the censorship of obscene art and literature. Athletics and sporting activities similarly provided a ‘rough remedy’51 or temporal aid against the temptations of the flesh. Yet neither legislation nor games alone could make men pure. The unique and invaluable role of the Church, declared Bishop King in July 1886, was ‘to provide guidance towards those supernatural means of grace … provided only by our Lord in His Church’.52 By insisting on the ‘supernatural’ quality of sexual chastity, along with the sacramental status of marriage, the Anglican Church claimed for itself an authoritative role in the prescriptive definition of gender identities and moral standards of respectability. The environmentalist connection between material deprivation and immorality, the mark of so many influential social commentaries in the 1880s, does not feature prominently in the pages of The Vanguard. Sexual morality, or the lack of it, was instead treated as an ontological issue in an articulation of



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masculinity that prioritized ‘deeper, wider care of the whole inner life’53 and related the spiritual acuity of the individual directly to his ability to exercise sexual self-mastery. ‘Where there was purity of heart there was vision of God, direct and complete in proportion to the measure of purity,’ the Bishop of Manchester reminded his local St. George’s Purity Association. Impurity, on the other hand, immediately drove men to concealment. ‘They were ashamed of themselves; they could not bear the light.’54 Thus behavioural codes of conduct, so long regarded as axiomatic to the nineteenth-century manly ideal, constitute something of a derivative consideration in The Vanguard debates on masculinity. Public conduct was simply the external manifestation of the more crucial interior management of sexual desire. As Archbishop Benson explained in his ‘Visitation Charge on Purity’, ‘conduct is but a partial exhibition of life … [whereas] the inner life is the working power.’55 The crusade for sexual purity – the rejection of lust and the embracing of marital passion – was the mark of the true Christian knight. ‘It cannot be said that man can be always rightly judged by his actions, but man is what he thinks, what he desires, and what he loves,’56 declared the Bishop of Marlborough in 1890. In a recent historical overview of studies in nineteenth-century masculinity, John Tosh offers a contrary argument to the claims of this chapter. According to Tosh, didactic representations of Victorian manliness were largely ‘cerebral and bloodless’ in quality, a set of ethical and behavioural principles whose instigation lay primarily in the mind or conscience rather than the body.57 Apart from the work of Kingsley, nineteenth-century discourses of manliness made scant reference to the body and consequently have provided historians with little scope ‘for exploring the meanings given to sexual identity and sexual desire which are fundamental to masculinity’.58 Interestingly, in order to substantiate his claims regarding the non-somatic representation of the Victorian manly ideal, Tosh uses as an example the enjoinment of purity on men and the casting of a veil over sex in marriage. As this chapter has shown, sexual purity or chastity was not necessarily an anti-corporeal discourse, but one that aimed to provide clear parameters for the expression of a potentially pro-sensual interpretation of Christian male sexual identity albeit severely constrained within heterosexual, marital limitations. Most significantly, the concept of purity ironically provided clergymen with a highly respectable platform upon which to legitimately speak out on sexual matters. As John Maynard has wisely argued, ‘sexual discussion is anything but free from religious issues and traces’.59 Interpretations that stigmatize historical forms of western religion as antithetical to sexuality misunderstand their reciprocal




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interdependence, for each ‘draws on the structure, detail or accumulating power of the other to promote its discourse’.60 Viewed through a Foucauldian framework, Victorian discourses of religion and sexuality were highly collaborative, deriving their meaning from contrary but inextricable allegiances. Clerical negations of extramarital sexual activity simply served to spawn an even greater elaboration of religio-sexual dialogue, catalysing the emergence of a regulatory, but nonetheless extremely public Anglican hierarchical discourse of sexual identities. As we have seen, far from reinforcing the ontological division between mind and body, CEPS members rejected much of the traditional dualism of Christian thought and, through the appropriation of incarnational religious expression, advocated a new respect and veneration for human physicality. Late nineteenth-century spiritual discourses on manliness were saturated with metaphors of the body, producing what could be described as a ‘theology of embodiment’. Sexual activity and even erotic desire – which, as Tosh points out, are crucial components of masculinity – were never absent from Anglican discussions of manliness, but central to their very constitution.61 Understood in this way, any distinction drawn between manliness as a public behavioural code of conduct and masculinity as a private, interior set of meanings around sexual desire, identity or self-perception risks artificial polarization. Tosh upholds such a distinction for he rightly believes that the dominance of Victorian manliness as an historiographical tool has blunted the critical edge of scholarship into the complexities of nineteenth-century masculinities. Yet as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, private and public notions of what it meant to be masculine were not always articulated with the same rigidity subsequently attributed to them by historians. In The Vanguard, the ‘writing of the male body’ produced a continuous interpretive shift back and forth across the spheres of intensely private sexual experience and public national endeavour. This suggests an ability on the part of the CEPS to read masculine identity in a plurality of forms – somatic, cerebral and spiritual – that defied the private/public divide. To depict the totality of male nature, Anglican leadership frequently used the Pauline formula of body, soul and spirit. ‘The Christian faith, which is the expression of the Incarnation deals with all life as it deals with the whole man,’ declared the Bishop of Durham at the Hull Church Congress, ‘with body and soul no less than with the spirit … we are one man in Christ.’62 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, against a background of extreme sexual anxiety and moral flux, The Vanguard continued to advocate a construction of masculinity that prioritized bodily chastity as the key



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to an enhanced spiritual and social status. Central to this model was an incarnational theology which in sacralizing the male form effectively endowed an all-male clergy and CEPS membership with a renewed sense of its own divine vocation. In the Church’s quest for greater cultural authority the discourses of spiritual and sexual self-mastery combined to buttress institutional religion against the twin crises of masculinity and secularization.

Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of the archivists at the Church of England Record Centre, Bermondsey, London.

Notes 1. Cited in The Vanguard. The Monthly Paper of the Church of England Purity Society, vol. I, no. V (London: James Sears and Sons, November 1884), p. 24. 2. Ibid., p. 24. 3. The Vanguard, vol. I, no. III (September 1884), p. 9. Although the CEPS was the main purity agency of the Church of England, its work was complemented by the influential nondenominational White Cross Army (WCA), which emerged in the same year. The CEPS aimed for the patronage and support of the wealthier classes in its promotion of male purity, as suggested by its subscription rate of 5 shillings per annum. The five key aims of the CEPS were: (1) purity amongst men; (2) a chivalrous respect for womanhood; (3) protection of the young from contamination; (4) rescue work; (5) a higher level of public opinion. In 1891 an amicable amalgamation took place between the CEPS and the WCA under the joint title of The White Cross League. The League continued its work until 1939, when it was taken over by the Church of England Moral Welfare Council. For details of the phenomenal sales and distribution levels of purity literature, see Sherwin Bailey, ‘The White Cross League’, Moral Welfare (April 1952), pp. 2–13. 4. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1995) and Michael S. Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in Harry Brod ed., The Making of Masculinities (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 121–53. 5. Bishop of London, cited in The Vanguard, vol. III, no. VII ( July 1886), p. 47. 6. According to Henry Scott Holland the expectation had been that the rich would take up the movement for purity as the poor had taken up temperance. The Executive Council minutes for 1893 show that this had not been the case, however, with lack of funding a constant problem for the leadership of the CEPS. The necessarily discreet work of purity renders estimates of CEPS membership highly tenuous, although contemporaries constantly made unfavourable comparisons between the CEPS and the Church of England Temperance Society.




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07. See for example, Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, Longman, 2nd edition 1989). 08. See Donald Hall’s useful introduction ‘Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body’, in D. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3–13. 09. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. V, no. IX (September 1888), p. 72. 10. H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities. Manhood and Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. 11. Rev. C. I. Black, Chastity; or, Love’s Warning to the Young (London: 1887), p. 6. 12. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. III, no. VIII (August 1886), p. 60. 13. At a diocesan conference held on 13 October 1886, Bishop King of Lincoln described those who were enslaved to sexual morality as having ‘to grind out the rest of their lives in the prison-house of their own bodies brought on by those passions which were intended to cast grace on the human body’. The Vanguard, vol. III, no. XI (November 1886), p. 83. 14. Black, Chastity; or, Love’s Warning to the Young, p. 6. 15. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. III, no. XI (November 1886), p. 79. 16. E. W. Benson, ‘Visitation Charge on Purity’, taken from Christ and His Times (London: Macmillan, 1889) cited in The Vanguard, vol. VII, no. I ( January 1890), p. 2. 17. Anon., The Testimony of medical Men (1886), p. 26. See Bland, Banishing the Beast, pp. 48–91 for a helpful discussion of the scientific discourse of physicians like Clouston. 18. See Bland, Banishing the Beast, p. 83. 19. Dean of Gloucester, ‘An Address at Trinity College, Cambridge’, CEPS Papers for Men (London, 1885), p. 20. 20. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 198. 21. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. X (October 1889), p. 77. 22. Ibid., p. 77. 23. Seth Koven, ‘From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture and Social Reform’, in Andrew Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 368. 24. See Lesley Hall, ‘Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850–1950’, in John Fout (ed.), Forbidden History. The State, Society and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 293–315 for a useful overview of masturbation pathology in late Victorian Britain. 25. See, for example, the Bishop of Durham’s address at the third anniversary meeting of the White Cross, cited in The Vanguard, vol. III, no. III (March 1886), p. 18. 26. John Fout, ‘Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity and Homophobia’, in Font (ed.), Forbidden History, p. 284. 27. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. VIII (August 1889), p. 59.



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28. Taken from Rev. Canon George Body’s sermon ‘Is there not a cause?’, cited in The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. VII ( July 1889), p. 23. 29. The Vanguard, vol. X, no. I ( January 1893), p. 36. 30. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. VII ( July 1889), p. 23. 31. The Vanguard, vol. X, no. I ( January 1893), p. 35. 32. The Vanguard, vol. VIII, no. VII ( July 1891), p. 23. 33. Editorial on ‘Husbands’, in The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. III (March 1889), p. 17. 34. See John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), p. 185. 35. The Vanguard, vol. VIII, no. IV (April 1891), p. 42. 36. The Vanguard, vol. I, no. IV (October 1884), p. 14. 37. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. VIII (August 1889), p. 60. 38. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. III, no. II (February 1886), p. 6. 39. The Vanguard, vol. I, no. IV (October 1884), p. 14. 40. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. II (February 1886), p. 5. 41. Ibid., p. 5. 42. Ibid., p. 6. 43. The Vanguard, vol. III, no. II (February 1886), p. 6. 44. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. XIII (August 1889), p. 58. 45. Ibid., p. 58. 46. See Peter Cominos’s discussion of this concept in ‘Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System’, parts I and II, International Review of Social History, 8 (1963), pp. 18– 48 and 216–50. 47. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. IX (September 1889), pp. 65–6. 48. The Vanguard, vol. VI, no. IX (October 1889), p. 74. 49. David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning. Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961). See also Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit. The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) for the classic exposition of this shift. 50. Bishop King, The Vanguard, vol. III, no. VII ( July 1886), p. 47. 51. Ibid., p. 47. 52. Ibid., p. 47. 53. Benson, ‘Visitation Charge on Purity’, cited in The Vanguard, vol. VIII, no. I ( January 1890), p. 1. 54. The Vanguard, vol. III, no. VIII (August 1886), p. 58. 55. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. VII, no. I ( January 1890), p. 1. 56. Ibid., p. 3. 57. Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity?’, p. 182. 58. Ibid., p. 183. 59. John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3. 60. Ibid., p. 7. 61. Tosh provides a hint of this himself when he notes that both Edward Benson and Isaac Holden ‘possessed a strong and guilt-free desire for erotic satisfaction in marriage despite profound religious convictions in each case’. Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity?’, p. 183. 62. Cited in The Vanguard, vol. VIII, no. I ( January 1891), p. 3.




Soul-saving Partnerships and Pacifist Soldiers: the Ideal of Masculinity in the Salvation Army Laura Lauer

Members of the Salvation Army and their nineteenth-century contemporaries were in agreement that the Army and its predecessor, the East London Christian Mission, offered unprecedented opportunities for women. Catherine Booth had defended women’s right to preach and the Army’s regulations enshrined their equal position in all areas of Army government.1 While Catherine justified women’s preaching with elaborate exegesis and careful reasoning, her husband had an altogether more practical attitude to public speaking: We must have improvement and variety. We must have more speakers. Old converts, if their joints are not too stiff; but new converts at any rate. For freshness, for sweetness, and flow of feeling, there is nothing like the speaking of new converts. It goes all over you, and makes you feel all over alike. We must have variety in sex, both male and female. Let the women talk. If they are not good enough to speak inside, at any rate let them speak out. The people quickly run in all directions to hear them; and you rarely hear a woman insulted.2 The public spectacle of women leading, singing and preaching is perhaps the dominant image of the Salvation Army; certainly it is the image Bernard Shaw drew on when creating Major Barbara. The visibility of women in the Army prompted a woman captain to offer this assessment: ‘Especially has our beloved Army raised a platform of usefulness for woman, from the noble example of our now glorified Army Mother, creating in them ambitions and spiritual ideas. Our Training Home has sifted and qualified them for nobler positions than the world could offer, adapting and fitting them for the salvation of the people.’3 194 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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Historians have largely followed this interpretation, arguing that the Army’s theology and evangelistic practice offered women extraordinary opportunities in the context of Victorian churchgoing.4 The question of how the Salvation Army touched the lives of its male converts is often obscured by the heroics of the ‘Hallelujah Lasses’. Salvationists believed in a transformative religious experience and this transformation was to be effected on men as well as women. The Salvation soldiers forged at the Army’s penitent-form would show their mettle in a changed lifestyle revolving around the family and in a demilitarized spiritual warfare, where the victor was strongest in faith, not in arms. Considering that the family has long been the subject of feminist scholars seeking to understand the construction of femininity, the family and especially notions of fatherhood are relatively understudied constituents of masculinity.5 This is especially the case when looking at working-class men – the overwhelming bulk of historical writing concentrates instead on the position of working-class wives as pillars of the household and family, with the father/husband largely an absent ‘provider’ at best, or as a potential source of violence at worst.6 Instead, the study of Victorian masculinity has revolved around the literary representations, the place of militarism and violence as a part of male identity, and the institutions (whether sports clubs or periodicals with a dedicated readership) which inculcated masculine values.7 Most of these studies take the articulation of a particular form of Christian manliness as their subject, but without exploring the implications of these identities in a family setting, assuming that fatherhood was an unchanging role. John Tosh has questioned the sources of authority for the Victorian father, arguing that for much of the period, notions of ‘moral motherhood’ displaced fathers from Puritan ideas about fatherly spiritual authority. Instead, fathers concentrated on a ‘provider’ role and on ensuring the ‘masculine’ development of their sons, through boarding schools or by deliberately remaining emotionally distant from them.8 Tosh suggests, then, that fatherhood is not immune to the vagaries of social change. Very recent work about the family confirms this basic premise. The authors of The Family Story argue that the religious authority normally associated with fathers in the early part of the nineteenth century had, by mid-century, become the province of the mother but, further, that the category of ‘father’ was itself contentious as ‘fathers … were not equally powerful in these processes in terms of class, “race”, or other social inequalities.’9 They contend that fatherhood and familial relationships, even if not experienced identically by Victorian men, ‘were not only central to their constructions of their



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own identities, but reached out beyond and between families and the “public” worlds of work, religion and politics.’10 With the reclamation of the family as a meaningful (if contested) site of authority and identity for men, pioneered by Tosh and Davidoff et al., it is possible to look again at the construction of masculinity in the Salvation Army. One of the ways in which the Salvation Army manifested its sectarian tendencies was in its high moral standards and its demand that its members lead a lifestyle easily recognizable from that of the ordinary man or woman through the wearing of uniform and public professions of faith.11 The Salvation Army aimed to transform all aspects of its members’ lives, including relations between husbands and wives, by creating new men and women, a new kind of marriage, and new ways of expressing masculinity and femininity. Additionally, the Army tried to create a new kind of ‘Christian soldier’, one which appropriated military metaphor but followed a course of non-violence. It is these identities, of a ‘masculine’ domesticity and nonviolent militarism, which this chapter seeks to explore. As the writings and example of William Booth were so important to the movement he co-founded and led for over thirty years, the chapter will conclude with an assessment of William’s own role in the Army – that of the fatherly General, whose authority blended that of the father with that of the military commander.

Men transformed: the domestic nature of Army masculinity The Salvation Army, along with other charitable and self-help organizations of the period, was critical of working-class domestic arrangements, both in terms of the physical space and cleanliness of the household and spousal relations. Dirt and sin were firmly linked in the Army psyche, hence its slum workers brought both the gospel and a scrubbing brush to their posts. And it was uncompromising in its teaching on marriage – adherents living with a member of the opposite sex were encouraged to legitimate the relationship by marriage. Members who were living with a partner other than their spouse for whatever reason were prevailed upon to return to their legal husbands or wives.12 But merely being married wasn’t enough. The Salvation Army sought to revitalize marriage as a spiritual and temporal partnership, far removed from the marriages ‘made in [the] hell’ of the public house which ‘dethrone[d] marriage to the level of cohabitation’.13 As part of the Army’s reaction against worldly practices, both the form and content of marriage took on increased importance. Any building



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would do for the service, whether Army barracks or large metropolitan hall. It was modelled on Quaker principles in the sense that it was a simple service and that the bride and groom generally addressed the congregation.14 At Army weddings the bride and groom (as well as any other Salvationists there) would be wearing uniform and the service was conducted literally under the Army’s flag. Women officers sometimes wore a white or cream sash across their uniform jackets, with a motto sewn in red. At the first wedding associated with the Welsh language corps in North Wales, the bride, Captain Kitty Christmas, wore a sash which bore the legend ‘cysegredig’ (consecrated). Mrs StaffCaptain Evans wore one which urged ‘Cmyri ir Jesus’ (Wales for Jesus).15 Army weddings were designed not only in direct opposition to fashionable church and chapel weddings, but as an event at which souls could be saved. Captain Christmas’s wedding was followed by an open-air meeting, at which one person was converted.16 Army weddings were distinctive not only in presentation but also in the content of the marriage vows. While promising to love, honour and obey, each also swore not to hinder the other’s work for God and the Army. In keeping with the Army’s belief in the equality of women with men, marriage was viewed as a partnership, the purpose of which was the furtherance of the Salvation War. The Deliverer, profiling StaffCaptain Duce, noted: The Staff-Captain is not alone. Has not been alone for three-and-ahalf years. He has an excellent helpmate who specials [undertakes special meetings] with him and helps to brighten cheerless and desolate homes. She has had nearly five years’ experience as an officer in the Field, besides a year in the Rescue Work. The maiden name of Mrs Duce was M. Harwood. She was a soldier of the Durham corps.17 General Booth, in his letters to Salvationists published as Religion for Every Day (1902), encouraged husbands and wives to work together: ‘a woman is in many respects, remarkably able to advise her husband on the bewildering, secular matters with which he is so often called to deal; and, if he will give her the chance, she will show this ability.’18 The intention was to forge a team that would work together in harness for the benefit of the Army’s work, and in so doing rejected conventional patterns of working-class masculinity, religion and leisure. Rosemary Chadwick has shown that for the period 1880–1914 amongst working-class nonconformists in Bradford religious observance was the province of women.19 Pamela Walker has described the segregated




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leisure pursuits of working-class men and women in London – the world of men characterized by drinking and gambling and that of women by piety and family.20 This evidence suggests that in workingclass communities, sin and spirituality were represented in gendered terms, with working-class men estranged from religion by the singlesex associational culture of the workplace and pub. The Salvation Army sought to create a new masculinity (and fashion a new femininity as well, although this lies outside the province of this chapter) by rejecting the hallmarks of male identity – physical strength, all-male spaces – and offering in its place access to spiritual power and the support of the Army organization, an organization of men and women. In place of an authority which had its roots in gender segregation, Salvationist men gained authority as evangelists and possessors of spiritual gifts, in much the same way women enjoyed status in the Army.21 What is often overlooked is that Booth’s ideal of Army masculinity was centred firmly in the home: Booth’s life and writings present a model of Salvationist fatherhood, related to spiritual authority, that was an important as part of Salvationist masculinity. William Booth’s life, a life transformed by conversion and an unshakable faith, was, according to an early biographer, ‘synonymous with the noblest sacrifice and highest ideals in home and spiritual life’.22 Both William and Catherine Booth were believers in child conversion and had definite views on child training – views developed from the experience of raising their own eight children and which reflected their successful marital partnership. Within the Salvation Army, as within the Booth household, authority was vested in both parents, with the father as an integral part of the unit: A good family government must mean, therefore, that there is a head to whom all look up. Nominally that head is the father, but between father and mother there should be such union of spirit, aim, and will, that both shall be felt to be as one. The expressed will of the one will then be taken as that of the other, and the children will know no difference in power and authority between the one and the other. This is the order of God, who puts both parents conjointly over their children.23 Within the Army, then, ‘traditional’, all-male associational culture was rejected in favour of cooperation with women, both within the meeting hall and within the home. William Booth, as a middle-class father (although with slightly lower-class origins), seems to exhibit none of



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the anxiety that Tosh detects in his analysis of mid-Victorian England, where the heyday of ‘moral motherhood’ between the 1830s and 1880s leads to a perceived increased need to ‘teach’ boys about masculinity.24 What Booth is advocating is a moral and spiritual partnership between wife and husband, a mirror of the partnership between men and women evangelists in the Army. The Salvation Army’s transformation of masculine identity did not stop with a redrawing of the boundaries of acceptable male leisure pursuits – it aimed to transform the whole man in the home, in the workplace and on the platform. In the remaking of the home, men were encouraged to support their wives’ evangelistic endeavours and to help relieve them of domestic work, as in the case of Major Aspinall who helped his wife with the weekly washing to allow her to visit converts and sell the War Cry in the afternoons.25 The War Cry counselled: A male married officer and a female married officer have equal duties. For the woman to sink down and say, ‘I can do nothing now!’ and to become only a kind of superior domestic or valet, is wicked. For her husband to simply say, ‘Yes, it can’t be helped; sew my buttons on and fry my steak in brown gravy, and God will bless you, my ducky!’ is, to say the least, not a sufficiently statesmanlike course to grapple with the situation.26 The War Cry advised cold dinners on a Sunday to give couples time to go to evening meetings together and was full of praise for those partnerships who never allowed ‘[one] candle to do duty for two’.27 Nor was a man to be solely a ‘provider’ – he should be fully involved in his children’s development, not merely in their discipline.28 Such a radical view of the marital partnership faltered, however, on the Army’s increasing embourgeoisement. By the end of the nineteenth century, status in the Army derived less from a rejection of society than from success within the Army’s developing career structure (although the latter never completely obliterated the former). Robertson has argued that the Salvation Army gradually realized that the most effective way to propagate its message was by accepting the major political and economic institutions of British society.29 Thus, more radical ideas about the family receded in the face of a patriarchal norm. Further, as the Salvation Army gained in secular prestige – particularly after the launch of the ‘Darkest England’ scheme in 1890 – rank and position within the Army itself became a mark of status available to men.30 Such status was still available to women, but there




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There is a growing conviction among the women of the Army that they do not receive either the courtesy or the recognition they and their work are entitled to from the men Officers and Soldiers. We are put in the background, says a woman-Salvationist. Any post is good enough for us, and any corner of the platform, yet we do the same work and fill the same positions as successfully (and sometimes a good deal more successfully) than the men who crowd us out . … There are special clauses in the ‘Orders and Regulations’ where the men are bidden to remember this and give a woman reverence and care because of her sex and the deference due to rank conferred by The Army. But they seem in danger of forgetting these, and we women must refresh their memories.31 While Salvationist women attempted to assert their egalitarian inheritance, it seems that Salvationist men were doing their duty more on the platform and less in the home. A series of ‘Married Women Warriors’ in the 1894 and 1895 War Cry reveals that in these high-ranking women’s lives, domestic concerns remained paramount and were rarely shared with spouses. (Major Aspinall seems to have been something of an exception to the rule.) Mrs Staff-Captain Bettridge is a fairly typical example: ‘Whilst the Staff-Captain is out, I do my own turn in the kitchen, or sewing (I make my children’s clothes), and then am at liberty to help him with correspondence, etc., etc. I try to enter into all his undertakings, and don’t mind what I do as long as I’m helping in the “War”.’32 Paradoxically, it was the Army’s own system of joint promotions – a system intended to strengthen marital partnerships – that effectively cemented male officers’ authority. In the Salvation Army, when officers of different ranks married (and marriages had to be approved first by Headquarters), the lower-ranking one took the spouse’s higher rank. Field officers would be posted to a joint command and would henceforth be promoted together. There was more of a problem with the staff officers as the Army did not require two people to fill a staff post. Mrs Colonel Hay, the wife of the Army’s Field Secretary (a desk job), had moved to London on his promotion to



was a growing feeling at the end of the nineteenth century that Salvationist women were either being ‘crowded out’ or were lapsing into the domestic drudgery so criticized by the War Cry. The Army’s women’s page addressed this plea to male Salvationists in 1899:

that office in 1894. It was only in 1898 that she secured an appointment of her own, that of Divisional Officer of the London Slum Corps. She filled the intervening four years by being a ‘useful soldier’ and ‘active Visiting Sergeant’, doing some ‘specialling’, as well as raising a family.33 While the system was intended to utilize the talents of both partners, in practice such a system increased a husband’s authority at the expense of his wife’s, who, however high-ranking, might find herself doing soldier’s work in order to fit in with her domestic schedule. The Army still could subvert ideas about masculine reserve and selfmastery through conversion narratives and by reclaiming strong emotion for men. For instance, Colonel James Barker’s ‘heart radiated love so pure that it had about the charm of unconscious childhood’.34 But its revolutionary domestication of men as part of a soul-saving partnership foundered on prevailing ideologies and a command structure which left Salvationist women, rather than men, balancing home and platform. Where the Army was more successful in manipulating an already established identity was in the case of the Salvationist soldier.

‘Men who will not retaliate from principle’: a new kind of soldier The Salvation Army recorded its Foundation Deed in 1878, the year in which the Treaty of Berlin effectively ended the Eastern crisis of 1877–78 with a ‘win’ for Britain. The Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was the hero of the music hall imperialists who stressed the country’s readiness to take on Russia; it was the era of the ‘Jingo’ song.35 It was the age of the Christian soldier and the muscular Christian of Sir Henry Havelock and Charles Kingsley. At first glance, the Salvation Army with its uniforms and military titles might seem like another manifestation of the mid- and late nineteenth century link between a strong and healthy body with an assured and brave Christianity, or indeed, with an imperial enterprise which viewed war as a necessary corollary.36 However, there are significant discontinuities between this muscular ideal and masculinity in the Army as typified by General Booth. His Army may have adopted the nomenclature of these militarist decades, but Army values were at odds with them over the issues of physical strength versus spiritual strength and war and militarism. In 1891, Cambridge-educated Edmund Garrett, a cousin of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, traveled to Eastbourne with the express purpose of defending the Salvation Army from the attacks of the ‘skeletons’, gangs




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who disrupted Army meetings and physically assaulted Army members. Garrett marvelled that members of the Army would not retaliate and his sense of fair play led him to interpose his own body (after donning some protective cricket kit) between the Salvationists and the hostile crowds.37 For Garrett, the apparent unwillingness of Salvationists to defend themselves appealed to his masculine sensibilities: those who could not defend themselves should be defended. Garrett, and indeed many contemporaries, did not understand the Army’s rejection of physical force and retaliation. Why, indeed, when the Army, by its own admission was made up of blackguards, pugilists, dockers and labourers – men who lived by their physical strength? The physical was to be rejected because it diverted men away from God. Violence, rooted in working-class male culture, was the hallmark of an unredeemed soul. By rejecting it, men set themselves apart from their class and declared their intention to live a different lifestyle. Salvationist men were encouraged to draw on their pre-conversion experiences both to convert others and to keep themselves faithful: ‘Men who know the evil of sin, and abominate it with disgust, will give it a wide berth. They will not be lured into trifling with the fire. … This kind of hatred makes good fighters.’38 Nor was physical strength necessary to be an effective soul-winner: ‘God Almighty wants veterans who have been themselves delivered from the power of the foe, and washed in the blood of the Lamb, and who will follow Him whithersoever He leadeth. This is the only medal [sic] out of which God can make spiritual “ironsides,” “invincibles,” “more than conquerors.”’39 Organizationally, the Army was made up of corps of soldiers who worshipped at a barracks, led by a captain who was assisted by a lieutenant. The Army was led by the General, assisted by his Chief-of-Staff (the Booths’ eldest son, Bramwell). Towns were invaded, sinners captured, victories won. The fighting was hard and the Enemy always to be faced. It seems almost inconceivable that for an organization so steeped in military language and in the midst of prosecuting a great salvation war, the Salvation Army rejected the wider implications of prevailing militarist discourse which argued that war was not only necessary, but part of a larger evolutionary process. When, in 1885, war with Russia over the Afghan frontier appeared imminent, William Booth wrote to his soldiers: EVERY TRUE SOLDIER OF THE SALVATION ARMY SHOULD CRY NIGHT AND DAY TO GOD TO AVERT SO DREADFUL A CALAMITY. Let him shut his ears to all the worldly, unscriptural, unchristian



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talk about war being a necessity. It cannot be a necessity before God that tens of thousands of men should be launched into eternity with all manner of revengeful passionate feelings in their souls, and too often, according to the testimony of those that know all about it, with dreadful blasphemies on their lips. Whatever may be the right method of settling human disputes and preventing earthly calamities this cannot be the Divine plan.40

The Army rejected war between nations as contrary to biblical teaching and an affront to God’s plan, which was to save the world, not destroy it. It preached an uncompromising pacifism – war was to be waged against the Devil, not other countries. Power was not to be manifested through physical force, but through spiritual means – hence Salvationists were to pray to avert war. Although unable to travel to visit German Salvationists during the First World War, the London-based War Cry contained articles from its German counterpart, a reminder to all Army members that German and British Salvationists, at least, were not at war with each other.41 Central to the reasons why they could not be at war was that they were already comrades in a larger conflict – the Salvation War – and were brothers and sisters in the Salvation Army, under the fatherly authority of the General.

The fatherhood of General Booth: the paternal government of the Salvation Army William Booth, as exemplar and guide, represented an alternative masculinity, one based on a rejection of ‘traditional’ male pursuits, which encouraged partnership with women and rejected the physical and militarist. He was the ‘father’ of the Salvation Army: he was its progenitor, his children (with one exception) all filled positions of responsibility within the organization, his converts were spiritual children to be enlisted in the war. William could not resist referring to members of the Army as both ‘comrades’ and ‘children’. He often signed his letters ‘your affectionate General’, blurring the dividing line between familial and military authority. After the death of Catherine Booth in 1890, William wrote to the members of the Salvation Army about his personal and their corporate trial. The metaphor of the family was used extensively: Catherine was the ‘Army Mother’, with whom William had enjoyed a community of spirit for forty years. To his soldiers, he




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We are not as other men – we are one family; you call me father, and you do well – I count you my children. The telegrams from near and distant lands, laden with assurances of sympathy and love, and the promise of prayer and faith for me in the ‘Valley of Shadow,’ tell me, had I not known it before, how well your hearts have understood mine, and that the greatness of my loss is in some measure realized and responded to. … And now, my comrades, we have suffered the loss, the beloved of our hearts reaps the gain.42 The Salvation Army, with all its military accoutrements, was envisaged primarily as a family of mother, father and children, all working in harmony with the others. The masculine and feminine elements in the Army were personified by William and Catherine Booth. William, the General, stood at the head of a great Army/family. Catherine, the ‘Army Mother’, was placed in a somewhat unclear relation to the rest of the hierarchy. She never held an Army rank (although her daughters would), nor did she undertake active command in one of the Army’s departments. William was the practical leader, the one at the head of the procession of tambourines and trumpets, the highest authority in the Army. This was much more socially acceptable than for Catherine to undertake the duties of the Generalship. William fitted accepted gendered and, indeed, Protestant, notions of religious authority: he was male and ordained. In the Salvation Army, the obedience due to William as General mingled with the moral supremacy he held as father. John Tosh has described fatherhood as control of one’s house, including the moral training of those within it.43 Another, more expansive definition is offered by Davidoff et al.: Definitions of authority combine the ideas of power or right to enforce obedience with moral or legal supremacy, including the right to command, to give an ultimate decision and the power to influence the conduct and actions of others. Other meanings of authority in terms of knowledge are also resonant in the context of fatherhood, such as the entitlement to be believed and to be an expert. The origins of paternal authority can also be traced in the idea that authority comes from one who originates, begets or gives existence to things: a father, an ancestor, or God as creator.44



wrote to unburden his feelings of loss and soothe theirs:

By such a definition, the power of the father and the power of the general are not dissimilar. General Booth, as leader, theologian and disciplinarian of the Salvation Army, controlled the Army in very much the same way as a father governed his household – obedience was expected and received as part of the divine order. The Army’s structure and position of the General were defended as being ‘in harmony with Divine Law’.45 Obedience to God translated into obedience to the Army. Salvationists were reminded of the duty of ‘perfect obedience’: What is a soldier? Is it not someone ready at a moment’s notice to throw himself into the breach, whatever the danger, in order that the interests of his Sovereign may be advanced? To refuse would be to play the part of a deserter. … My dear comrades, do let us look seriously into this question of obedience. It is the duty of all those who have our Salvation warfare to heart to ask themselves, Am I a soldier in very truth? Can my captain depend upon me at all times and in all places?’46 The price of disobedience was ostracism. There could be no place in the Army for those who deserted their posts. Three of the Booths’ own children left the Army, either over theological disagreements or disputes over command placements. While not erased from Army memory, their activities ceased to be detailed in Army publications. Effectively, they became the members of the family that were not talked about. As disobedient soldiers and wayward children, they had forfeited their place in the Army family because they had challenged their father’s authority. But for faithful sons and soldiers, positions in the worldwide Salvation Army beckoned. From its foundation, the Salvation Army struggled with the problem of authority. Working-class men had exercised their authority in their absence from the house, physical power and an emphasis on their role as provider. The Salvation Army sought to remake men as domesticated beings, reintegrating them into the household as a fitting partner for a woman who had her own spiritual work to do in the world. That it failed to do so is a testament both to the strength of the domestic ideal and the attractiveness of a career in the Army, with its concomitant authority. The Salvation Army was more successful in employing the language of militarism for evangelistic purposes and stripping it of any easy association with actual physical violence, but retaining the language of heroism, self-sacrifice, and obedience. To be obedient to Army commands was to be a good son/soldier, worthy of approval by the




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Notes 1. P. J. Walker, ‘A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence. Catherine Booth and the Ministry of Women in the Salvation Army’, in B. M. Kienzle and P. J. Walker, eds, Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 288–302; R. Sandall, The History of the Salvation Army. Volume 1, 1865–1878 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1947), pp. 179–84. 2. William Booth, ‘How to Improve our Open-air Services’, War Cry, 24 January 1880, p. 2. 3. Captain Boy, ‘For Field Officers’, War Cry, 5 January 1895, p. 6. 4. Walker, ‘A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence’, H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164 –5; B. Wilson, Religious Sects (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 59–60, 64. For a modified view, see L. E. Lauer, ‘Women in British Nonconformity, ca 1880 –1920, with special reference to the Society of Friends, Baptist Union and Salvation Army’, (University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1997), chapter 4. 5. Probably the best-known study of the family and feminine identity is L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (London: Hutchinson, 1987). 6. On working-class marriages, see E. Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain 1900–1950 (London: Macmillan, 1995); C. Chinn, They Worked all Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); P. Ayers and J. Lambertz, ‘Marriage Relations, Money and Domestic Violence in Working-class Liverpool, 1919–1939’, in J. Lewis, ed., Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 7. For literary representations, see J. E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), D. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), N. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: the Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian 7. Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On violence, see Hall, Muscular Christianity and Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, and S. J. D. Green, ‘ “Christian Manliness” and the Nonconformist Tradition in West Yorkshire, c. 1880 –1920’, Northern History, 31 (1995) pp. 267–80, J. A. Mangan, ‘Duty unto Death: English Masculinity and Militarism in the Age of the New Imperialism’, International Journal of the History of Sport 12(2) (1995) pp. 10 –38, J. A. Mangan, ‘ “Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”: the British Middle-class Hero as Moral Messenger’, International Journal of the History of Sport 13(1) (1996), pp. 28– 47. On institutions, see J. Nauright and T. J. L. Chandler, Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity



father/General. William Booth’s appropriation of both identities cemented his authority as the sole head of the Salvation Army and might well have encouraged other Salvationist men to place their faith in the Army’s command structure, rather than in a transformed home life, as the key to masculine identity.

08. (Portland OR and London: Frank Cass, 1996), Boyd Kelly, ‘Exemplars and Ingrates: Imperialism and the Boys’ Story Paper, 1880 –1930’, Historical Research 67 (1963), pp. 143–55. The essays in J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) cover all three categories. 08. J. Tosh, ‘Authority and Nurture in Middle-class Fatherhood: the Case of Early and mid-Victorian England’, Gender and History 8(1) (1996), pp. 48–64. 09. L. Davidoff, M. Doolittle, J. Fink and K. Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999) p. 135. 10. Ibid., pp. 135–6. 11. For an ‘ideal type’ of sectarian behaviour, see B. Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 91–2. 12. The Deliverer, August 1895, p. 23; March 1894, p. 140; January 1894, p. 108. 13. The Deliverer, November 1895, p. 74. 14. As at the marriage of Lieutenant Frances Nicholson to Captain Holden Sampson. The Deliverer, March 1892, p. 159. 15. War Cry, 13 July 1889, p. 3. 16. Ibid. 17. The Deliverer, July 1893, p. 11. 18. W. Booth, Letters to Salvationists on Love, Marriage and Home, being Volume II of Religion for Every Day (Atlanta, GA: Salvation Army Supplies, 1987 [first published 1902]) p. 112. 19. R. Chadwick, ‘Church and People in Bradford and District, 1880 –1914: the Protestant Churches in an Urban Industrial Environment’ (University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1986), pp. 163, 171–3. 20. P. J. Walker, ‘Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: Gender and Popular Culture in the Salvation Army, 1865–1895’, (Rutgers University PhD thesis, 1992), p. 72. See also note 6. 21. P. J. Walker, ‘ “I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me”. Men and masculinity in the Salvation Army 1865–1900’, in M. Roper and J. Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 96, 101. 22. T. F. G. Coates, The Life Story of General Booth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905), p. 13. 23. Training of Children, or, How to make the Children Saints and Soldiers of Jesus Christ. By the General of The Salvation Army (London: Salvation Army Book Stores, 1884), p. 42. Emphasis in original. 24. Tosh, ‘Authority and Nurture’. 25. War Cry, 17 November 1894, p. 13. On the transformed home, see War Cry, 17 January 1880, p. 4; 24 November 1900, p. 9; 20 February 1900, p. 6; 9 April 1904, p. 2; 11 May 1907, p. 8; The Deliverer August 1895 p. 23. 26. War Cry, 23 February 1895, p. 3. 27. War Cry, 25 June 1898, p. 3. 28. War Cry, 5 August 1905, p. 3. 29. R. Robertson, ‘The Salvation Army: the Persistence of Sectarianism’, in B. Wilson, ed., Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 55. 30. Ibid., p. 88. 31. War Cry, 11 November 1899, p. 4.




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32. War Cry, 1 June 1895, p. 3. 33. War Cry, 2 July 1899, p. 11. 34. [M.] Carpenter, Three Great Hearts (London: Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, 1921), pp. 160 –1. 35. M. Diamond, ‘Political Heroes of the Victorian Music Hall’, History Today 40 (1990), p. 34. 36. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, p. 1; Hall, Muscular Christianity, p. 7; Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, p. 3; Mangan, ‘Duty unto Death’. 37. On ‘skeleton armies’, see G. K. Horridge, The Salvation Army. Origins and Early Days: 1865–1900 (Godalming: Ammonite Books, 1993) pp. 101–13; V. Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots, the “Skeleton Army” and Legal Authority in the Provincial Town’, in A. P. Donajgrodzki, ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 38. The General’s Letters 1885 (London: Salvation Army Book Depot, 1886), p. 196. First published in the 22 August 1885 War Cry. 39. Salvation Soldiery. By the General of the Salvation Army (London: Headquarters of The Salvation Army, [1883]), p. 50. 40. The General’s Letters 1885, p. 115. First published in the 18 April 1885 War Cry. Emphasis in original. 41. War Cry, 3 October 1914, p. 8, 14 November 1914, p. 8, 9 January 1915, p. 2, 16 January 1915, p. 8. 42. War Cry, 11 October 1890, p. 1. 43. Tosh, ‘Authority and Nurture’, p. 51. 44. Davidoff et al., The Family Story, p. 136. 45. War Cry, 6 January 1906, p. 3. Henry Rider Haggard reprinted the Army’s ‘Articles of War’ (a declaration to be signed by all members) at the back of Regeneration, as a means of introducing the reader to Army theology and practice. The second paragraph of the ‘Articles’ reads, ‘Believing solemnly that the Salvation Army has been raised up by God, and is sustained and directed by Him, I do here declare my full determination, with God’s help, to be a true Soldier.’ H. Rider Haggard, Regeneration (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1910), p. 257. 46. The Deliverer, September 1894, pp. 41–2.



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‘A Man of God is a Manly Man’: Spurgeon, Luther and ‘Holy Boldness’ Andrew Bradstock

Although Charles Haddon Spurgeon still enjoys hero status in certain quarters today, it is hard to conceive fully the extent of his reputation and influence during his lifetime.1 An established Baptist minister in London while still only a teenager, he preached regularly for nearly 40 years to congregations of several thousand, reaching tens of thousands more throughout the world via printed versions of his sermons. By the time he was 26 the numbers wanting to hear him each Sunday were such that the 6,000-capacity Metropolitan Tabernacle was built for him in Newington Butts, an unfashionable yet populous region south of the Thames, now known more familiarly as ‘The Elephant and Castle’. His printed sermons had a regular weekly readership of 25,000, with those on special topics selling as many as 350,000, and his Sunday messages were cabled every week to New York for inclusion in large-circulation newspapers in the United States. Translated into 40 languages and into Braille, Spurgeon’s sermons were read throughout the world, to the extent that by the time of his death in 1892 more than 50 million copies had been sold worldwide, a figure which has since more than doubled. When his numerous books, pamphlets, tracts and other writings are also taken into account, Timothy George’s claim in the early 1990s that, ‘a century after his death, there are more works in print by Spurgeon than by any other English speaking author, living or dead’ becomes almost believable.2 Among notable contemporaries who admired his preaching and courted his friendship were John Ruskin and William Gladstone, the latter finding in Spurgeon a committed supporter of the Liberal cause. During his final illness prayers were said for him by the Prime Minister, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Chief Rabbi and even the Prince of Wales; and, following his death, some 60,000 people filed past his body as it lay in state, 209 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


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his funeral procession, some two miles in length, bringing over 100,000 people onto the streets of London.3 The reasons for Spurgeon’s popularity in his own time, and decline into relative obscurity since, need not delay us long here, though it is clear from contemporary accounts that one of his singular gifts was an ability to relate to the ordinary woman and man. George Eliot, though finding him ‘common and empty of guiding intelligence’, observed that he had ‘a gift of a fine voice, very flexible and various, admirably clear and fluent in his language’.4 The aristocratic George Greville, who heard the 23-year-old Spurgeon preach to 9,000 people in London in 1857, considered that he had ‘a manner natural, impassioned, and without affectation or extravagance; wonderful fluency and command of language, abounding in illustration, and very often of a familiar kind, but without anything either ridiculous or irreverent.’5 Spurgeon’s ‘common touch’ or ‘naturalness’ undoubtedly owed much to his upbringing in a small agricultural community in Essex, and he turned it into something of a trademark, disdaining high learning and culture, and advocating, in preaching, the language ‘not of the university, but of the universe’. ‘Better far to give the people masses of unprepared truth in the rough, like pieces of meat from a butcher’s block,’ he once said, ‘than ostentatiously and delicately hand them out upon a china dish a delicious slice of nothing at all, decorated with the parsley of poetry, and flavoured with the sauce of affectation’.6 It was for the ‘gentlemen’ who purveyed such vacuous theology that Spurgeon reserved his sharpest invective, for their approach could not have been more different from his own: ‘People come to me for one thing, and it is no use my pretending to give them the opposite as well. I preach to them a Calvinist creed and a Puritan morality. That is what they want and that is what they get.’7 The purpose of the pastors’ training college he founded in London in the 1850s was, he said, to produce ‘men of the people, who feel with them’.8 Spurgeon’s unswerving adherence to a reformed creed not surprisingly came at a price, and by the late 1880s he found himself sadly adrift from most of his colleagues in the Baptist Union and embroiled in what became known popularly as the ‘Down Grade Controversy’. Unhappy at its refusal to draw up a substantial statement of its beliefs and define what it understood as orthodoxy, and concerned that many churches and chapels under its care were watering down key doctrines and becoming lukewarm in the faith, Spurgeon seceded from the Union, casting a shadow over the Baptist denomination which remained for more than a generation. At a time when higher criticism



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and evolutionary theory were beginning to have an impact on religious belief in Britain, Spurgeon took a stand of dogged resistance to any reformulation of the historic Christian faith as he understood it. As early as 1860 he had begun to oppose fellow nonconformists who adopted a non-literal interpretation of the doctrine of eternal punishment for the wicked, or stressed the incarnation rather than the atonement of Christ. When these views began to surface unchallenged within his own denomination he stood, almost alone, in resisting them. The issue, for Spurgeon, was nothing less than a struggle between ‘the truth of God’ and ‘the inventions of men’, and he appealed to ‘all who believe the gospel … [to] … unite against that “modern thought” which is its deadly enemy.’9 It is a matter of record that very few did, Spurgeon’s isolation perhaps being seen at its starkest in April 1888 when he refused to accept a statement of faith which the Assembly of the Baptist Union passed by 2,000 votes to seven – a statement which had, moreover, been seconded by his own brother, James. His stand as a latter-day Mr Valiant-for-Truth undoubtedly took its toll on his health – which was never good – and the strain of the whole ‘Controversy’ may well have precipitated his death at the age of 57, barely four years after that Assembly vote.10 Whatever price Spurgeon paid for his doggedness, he clearly saw standing steadfastly for ‘the truth’ – and doing so alone, if necessary – as a criterion by which both a man’s godliness and his manliness could be measured. In his John Ploughman’s Pictures, for example, a book of homilies subtitled ‘plain talk for plain people’, he extols the virtue of independent thought and obedience to conscience without regard to popular opinion. ‘He is not a free man who is afraid to think for himself,’ he writes, ‘for if his thoughts are in bonds the man is not free. A man of God is a manly man. A true man does what he thinks to be right, whether the pigs grunt or the dogs howl.’11 ‘Men who are well taught, confirmed, experienced, and trained by the Spirit of God,’ he declared in a sermon some years later, are ‘men of faith and firm convictions, men of decision and courage … not men that retract, or shuffle, or evade; but witnesses who are faithful and true, imparting confidence to the feebler sort by their calm defiance of the foe.’12 ‘A man should speak out as God tells him, and care for nobody.’13 These statements are clearly self-referential, as I shall discuss further, though for Spurgeon there was no better exemplar of this mentality than the German reformer Martin Luther, in whose honour he preached two sermons in November 1883, the 400th anniversary of his birth. Spurgeon’s attraction to Luther appears to have stemmed less from a commitment to everything the reformer stood for than from an almost



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fawning admiration for the singleminded and fearless manner in which he held to his beliefs. Despite sharing with Luther a fundamental conviction that God accepts sinners through the atoning death of Christ and not their own good works – ‘the just shall live by faith’, the text which Luther claimed opened for him the gate of heaven, was also for Spurgeon ‘the golden key’ which could ‘set bondaged hearts at liberty’14 – Spurgeon confessed himself to be ‘more a follower of Calvin than of Luther, and much more a follower of Jesus than of either of them … ’.15 The German reformer, Spurgeon was forced to concede, ‘was not always wise in his judgment of what the Bible contains’ and it was not possible to ‘endorse all that he said nor admire all that he did’.16 Yet in so far as Luther held to the doctrine of justification by faith in the face of sustained and powerful opposition, not least from the Bishop of Rome himself, and was even prepared to risk death for his convictions, he was, for Spurgeon, the epitome of the godly man. ‘No child of God should court the world’s approbation. Certainly Luther did not. He pleased God, and that was enough for him.’17 Luther’s preparedness to speak his mind, and utter indifference to criticism, made him, in Spurgeon’s eyes, everything the man of God should be. The references to Luther’s manliness spill out in his 1883 sermons in a flurry of unrestrained approval: ‘My admiration kindles as I think of the hearty openness of the man. I do not wonder that even ungodly Germans revere him, for he is all a German, and all a man.’18 Unlike Melanchthon and others who ‘tread softly’ and measure their words carefully, Luther is ‘a Titan, a giant, a man of splendid mental calibre and strong physique’ who leads from the front and utters ‘a dozen sentences before he has thought whether they are polished or not’.19 The secret of Luther’s ‘holy boldness’ was his faith, ‘a faith that made him risk all’ – including persecution and possible martyrdom – ‘for the truth’.20 This faith ‘delivered [Luther] entirely from the fear of man’: though warned not to go to Worms on account of the dangers he would face, ‘he was there’, Spurgeon notes, ‘playing the man for the gospel and for his God.’21 In sum, Luther ‘was a man upon whose like men’s eyes shall seldom rest, a mighty judge in Israel, a kingly servant of the Lord. We ought often to pray to God to send us men – men of God, men of power’.22 There are, of course, distinct echoes of the ‘muscular Christianity’ associated with his Anglican contemporaries Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes in Spurgeon’s equation of manliness with courage, singleness of mind, and moral and physical strength.23 In his 1874 lecture ‘The Tests of Manliness’, Hughes cites ‘endurance in the face of death’



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as one such ‘test’;24 and for Kingsley, as Donald E. Hall has pointed out, ‘a central, even defining characteristic of muscular Christianity [was] an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself’.25 The less orthodox Christian writer Thomas Carlyle, too, saw manliness primarily in terms of ‘superiority of the will’ and ‘rugged independence’.26 The imperialism and racial superiority associated with Carlyle’s view of masculinity Spurgeon did not endorse in the slightest, however,27 though he was not averse to speaking of Luther’s singleness of purpose in military terms: ‘the faith that was in him filled him with intense life, and he plunged into war with the enemy’; the Bible ‘was his battle-axe and his weapon of war’; when the devil tempted him, ‘the reformer’s grand grip of justification by faith made him readily victorious’. Luther was also ‘lion-like’ in his life, ‘denounc[ing] error as furiously as a lion roars upon his prey’.28 Spurgeon’s passionate struggle for doctrinal orthodoxy within his denomination, which provides something of the context for his sermons on Luther, was also to be understood as a battle against the forces of error, and Spurgeon employs explicitly military language to call men to the defence of the truth. ‘The Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites are upon us just now; war is in all our borders: now, therefore, let each valiant man stand about the King’s chariot, each man with his sword upon his thigh, because of fear in the night.’29 Conversion to Christ was equivalent, for Spurgeon, to conscription into an army, and references to the Lord’s young men as an ‘enlisted battalion’, ‘a phalanx to protect our Israel’, ‘the … army that we need in the church of God’, ‘the militia of the church’, trip off his tongue.30 ‘A man who wishes to be a man, and who desires to be a saved man, had need take up arms against this evil age.’31 However, as he argues in the case of Luther, it is spiritual much more than physical strength that makes a man fit to fight the Lord’s battle. ‘The man who is strong in the flesh is too often for that very reason strongly tempted to sins of the flesh’,32 whereas strength of spirit makes a man strong to endure, patient, uncomplaining, indifferent to public acclaim or criticism, hard-working and fearless. The young man ‘is glad to be in robust health that he may bear much toil in the Lord’s cause; but he is not proud of it, for he remembers that the Lord delighteth not in the strength of the horse, and taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man.’33 In drawing a distinction between physical and moral strength, and subordinating the former to the latter, Spurgeon is again close, in his conception of manliness, to the views of other contemporary




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advocates of ‘Christian manliness’. Despite the impression given by their detractors – who foisted upon them the term ‘muscular Christians’ in the first place and imagined them to be preoccupied with athleticism, exercise and physical prowess – Hughes, Kingsley and others equated manliness with strength in both the bodily and moral realms; and for Spurgeon, too, it is clearly in so far as a man displays strength of spirit that he may truly be called a man: ‘for I reckon that to be endowed with power from on High, and to be strong in faith, giving glory to God, is the truest glory and majesty of our manhood … ’ 34 Consistent with this, Spurgeon frequently and vigorously distanced himself publicly from the ‘actual’ bellicosity, jingoism and imperialist tendencies of many of his contemporaries, often attracting popular censure in the process.35 The only occasion he would juxtapose the words ‘manly’ and ‘war’ was in the context of the fight against doctrinal error.36 In exploring the theme of Luther’s spiritual strength Spurgeon focused a good deal on the text which so dramatically changed the reformer’s life, ‘the just shall live by faith’; ‘justness’, he argued, applies not solely to the ‘outer life’, the sphere of behaviour, but to the inner realm of belief. With, no doubt, his struggles with his own denomination much in his mind, Spurgeon challenged the (apparently) popular notion that beliefs and actions may be separated, that so long as a man’s public behaviour conforms to what is expected of him as a Christian, his private beliefs may take whatever form he chooses. Spurgeon’s deep conviction is that it is as much a man’s ‘inward’ state that determines the extent to which he is truly ‘a man’ as his ‘outer’, and therefore a dualism of action and belief cannot be countenanced. Righteousness is decidedly not only for the ‘outer life’ but ‘concerns the inner parts of a man, the central region of his manhood; and truly just men desire to be made clean in the secret parts, and in the hidden parts would they know wisdom.’ To be truly a man is to yield up to God every part of one’s self, including the mind and the heart: ‘no single part of our manhood is beyond the range of the divine law. Our whole capacity as men lies under the sovereignty of him that created us, and we are as much bound to believe aright as we are bound to act aright.’37 Spurgeon was deeply impressed with the ‘intense activity’ of Luther’s faith, a feature which, like many of his contemporaries, he understood to be an important characteristic of manliness. A leitmotif of Spurgeon’s sermons and writings is a profound loathing of idleness, the most unmanly vice imaginable with the exception, perhaps, of its close neighbour, drunkenness.38 Hard work was integral to Christianity for



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Spurgeon, and it was his wish ‘that all Christians would be industrious, for religion never was destined to make us idle. Jesus was a great worker, and his disciples must not be afraid of hard work.’39 Luther was certainly a true disciple in this respect for, like another of Spurgeon’s heroes, Oliver Cromwell, who trusted in God but kept his powder dry, the reformer did not believe in leaving to God that which he could do himself. Indeed, Luther is the very model of a driven believer, working ‘by pen, by mouth, by hand’ with an energy ‘almost beyond belief’: Luther did ‘works which would have taxed the strength of hundreds of smaller men’.40 Among these smaller men in Spurgeon’s own day were, of course, the loafers and ne’er-do-wells of whom he could not be critical enough, but also those whose religion consisted in little more than ritual and formality and who therefore were not motivated to do anything about changing the world;41 and for Spurgeon the two types were closely linked, for both came from the upper echelons of society. The purveyors of the brand of Christianity he most despised, that which induced nothing but complacency and lethargy in its adherents, were for the most part ‘stilted gentlemen’ who peddled their ‘superior’ religion among the sections of the community more accustomed to the drawing-room than the workshop; and, whilst he had not a whit of patience for any person unwilling to turn in a proper day’s work, his sharpest arrows were reserved for those ‘born with silver spoons in their mouths’ who, ‘like spoons … will scarce stir their own tea unless somebody lends them a hand … our great folks [who] are some of them quite as lazy as they are rich … our squires [who] have nothing to do but to part their hair in the middle’.42 As David Bebbington has observed, Spurgeon drew, with Elizabeth Gaskell, a clear distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘men’, and while Gaskell associated the former with the south of the country and the latter with the north, ‘Spurgeon, though originating in East Anglia rather than the north, was spokesman for a similar provincial protest against the mannered life of the capital.’43 ‘Manliness,’ he once declared, ‘must never be sacrificed to elegances.’44 At first glance Spurgeon’s disdain for ‘gentlemanly religion’ simply reflects a country bumpkin preacher’s impatience with the charmed life-style of those born into a different class from himself, and in part this does explain his attitude. ‘Our working class,’ he once remarked, ‘will never be brought even to consider the truth of Christianity by teachers who are starched and fine.’ ‘Soft speaking for soft heads, and good, plain speech for the hard-handed many.’ ‘We want Luther to tell the truth unmistakably in homely phrases.’45 Yet what stirs him most




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about this affected, essentially external religion is its unmanliness, and here again his views are close to those of other contemporary critics of ritualistic religion, whether Roman or Anglican. For Kingsley and Hughes, as David Newsome has pointed out, the converse of ‘muscular Christianity’ was not immaturity or childishness but effeminacy, something which they saw personified in the behaviour, practices and dress of the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian movement and the Roman Catholicism of their day.46 Kingsley denigrated what he called the ‘element of foppery’ in these movements ‘even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement … I confess myself unable to cope with it, so alluring is it to the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy … ’47 These were sentiments which Spurgeon might well have expressed, since he also saw the religion of these movements as the very antithesis of what constituted true manliness – a ‘namby-pamby sentimentalism, which adores a deity destitute of every masculine virtue.’48 For Spurgeon – and Luther – true religion and undefiled consisted of a full-hearted and practical commitment to an expression of the Christian faith, which is intensely engaged with the issues facing individuals and society, and which has the potential to make a difference to both. Spurgeon also shared Kingsley’s dislike of Tractarianism’s ‘contempt of the world’, its ‘rejection of everyday human society as the proper sphere of Christian activity’, as Norman Vance puts it; it could not have contrasted more with their own conception of Christian manliness, which attempted to combine healthy and energetic activism with a religious faith committed to changing the world. Spurgeon and Kingsley may have diverged substantially in their understanding of Christianity, but both thought it should make a difference in the world.49 Spurgeon makes the point with particular power by contrasting the faith to which Luther was actively committed, a faith which ‘was part and parcel of his common life’, with the decidedly unmanly – indeed, effeminate – religion of the Romanists and Ritualists: the one was earthed in and relevant to the world outside the Church – the home, the shop, the farm – the other ‘a thing of beauty, but not of use … made up for drawing-rooms and religious meetings’ and which ‘ought always to be kept in a glass case’.50 For Spurgeon there could scarcely be anything harder to stomach than the religion offered by sections of the High Church of his day, which consisted in little more than ritual and dressing up,51 and bred indifference and apathy among its upper-class followers. The ‘unmanliness’ of this religion and those who purveyed it could not have contrasted more with the rugged earthiness of the



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sixteenth-century German reformer. Luther’s faith made him both ‘a man among men’ and ‘saved him from priestly affectations’.52 Much of what Spurgeon understood as ‘manliness’ can be gleaned from his negative portrayal of the priestly caste of his own day. Never one to pull his punches, he uses what ammunition he has after slaying the idle, for High Anglicans and Romans and what he mockingly calls their ‘very superior religion’. At times he can be simply offensive – ‘I should not like to be in such a position that I could not pray to God without a petticoat of some particular kind, and some men cannot unless it is of a certain colour one day and a different colour the next’ he remarked in a speech to the Liberation Society in 187753 – and there is much of what James Eli Adams calls the ‘longstanding Protestant demonization of “Priesthood” ’ about his attitude to ritualism.54 But at the root of much of his dislike of the Catholic tradition is its disengaged nature and consequent unmanliness: the true man proves himself by his simple earthiness, his involvement in the ordinary affairs of the world, his ability to communicate simply and naturally to the ordinary man; and thus there could be, for Spurgeon, no justification for a separate, professional priesthood even if Newman did try to claim that asceticism and other-worldly spirituality had been traditionally promoted by the Church.55 Spurgeon’s starting point, as with everything, was scripture, which, he claimed, knows of no distinction between ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’. As Luther himself affirmed – though ‘the doctrine would have been just as true’ had he not – ‘the whole church of God is a company of priests, every believer being a priest unto God.’56 All believers can know the grace and forgiveness of God directly without the intercession of a human mediator, and therefore the role of a distinctive priesthood is rendered redundant. In classic Puritan style Spurgeon argues that ‘if a man lives aright he makes every garment a vestment, every meal a sacrament, and every house a temple’,57 and the claims of any cleric to fulfil a special role in representing God to humanity or humanity to God – and especially to absolve human sin and offer assurance of heaven when God has already done both – the most fraudulent thing imaginable. But, and this is the significant thing, since the so-called mediator is but a fellow human being it is for Spurgeon both degrading and unmanly for any man to humble himself in his presence in order to receive pardon for his sins. ‘Hark ye, my friends,’ he declared in a sermon preached in 1875 entitled ‘The Priest Dispensed With’, ‘have ye no manliness? Does it not seem to you, as it does to me, to be a monstrously degrading thing that you should prostrate yourself before a man like




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yourselves, and believe that he can pronounce the pardon of your sins?’58 There is only one man to whom all honour and obeisance should be given and that is the carpenter of Nazareth who, for Spurgeon, represents perfect manhood. Unlike so-called ‘great conquerors’ such as Alexander and Napoleon, Jesus did not let himself down in private, but overcame temptation and endured agony in isolation, as well as displaying wisdom, power, forbearance and tenderness in his more public appearances. For Spurgeon, ‘it is not only that [Christ’s] pursuits were majestic … that his motives were divine … but it is himself that is so great – I mean his soul, his spirit, the man himself.’59 There ‘never was a more splendid specimen of manhood than the Saviour’, and those who no longer viewed Christ in such terms were essentially rendering Christianity ‘effete’!60 For Spurgeon the ‘manliness’ of the priestly caste is also called into question on account of their celibacy. On one level he sees the requirement to celibacy as further evidence of the priesthood’s elitism and detachment from ordinary life, but, more profoundly, he despises the view that one has to deny or attempt to rise above any aspect of one’s manhood in order to serve God. All men share common passions, he argues, and it is absurd of a certain elite stratum of manhood to try to imply otherwise by denying themselves the pleasures of marriage. Spurgeon, with Kingsley, was on the side of a ‘world which marries and is given in marriage’,61 and found distasteful and laughable – though probably not, as Kingsley may have done, threatening62 – the commitment to celibacy by some Tractarians, or claims such as Newman’s that it was not an ‘unnatural’ but ‘supernatural’ state and even the scriptural pattern for Christian living.63 Spurgeon thus warms to Luther as a family man, a man who, having rejected his priestly and monkish vows, marries and sires children, who no longer lives and moves ‘as if he were a mere cleric, but as a brother to our common humanity.’64 Spurgeon may not have been a model husband himself, his overgenerosity towards the poor and ‘good causes’ not infrequently causing his family to go short: but he understood that the natural, sexual desires of the flesh were divine gifts to be acknowledged and channelled into the service of God rather than denied or subjugated, either in reality or appearance, in an effort to appear different from, or superior to, ‘other folks’. And so it was with Luther: ‘Faith had not taken away his manhood but sanctified it to noblest uses.’65 Kingsley once famously remarked that the Oxford Tracts had ‘struck at the roots’ of the wedded bliss he enjoyed with his wife, Fanny Grenfell, and he undoubtedly saw Catholic teaching on celibacy as a



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threat to the institution of marriage.66 Taking a somewhat different angle on this, reflective perhaps of the Puritan tradition in which he was steeped, Spurgeon argues that married and family life leaves no place for a priesthood such as the Church understands it: the home, where ‘the father of the family … ought to be priest’ is the place for prayer, not the Church, and it is only when family prayer is neglected that a ‘vacancy for a superstitious priesthood’ is created, with all its attendant ‘mischiefs innumerable’.67 An outspoken critic of establishment, Spurgeon saw the biggest threat to the spiritual health of the nation being precisely not any lowering in status of the official Church – as defenders of establishment argued – but the loss of the practice of family prayers which would render prayer-saying exclusively an activity for the priest in his parish church. ‘I like Luther with a wife and children. I like to see him with his family … making music with little Johnny Luther on his knee’:68 Luther’s manliness is defined not just in terms of strength, courage, singlemindedness and so on, but in the tenderness, affection, devotion and care he demonstrates towards his wife and children. Not all exponents of ‘muscular Christianity’ were so ready to acknowledge these virtues as manly, and some were prone even to mistake them for effeminacy,69 but Spurgeon’s view of manhood is broad enough to encompass them. ‘A true father, such as fathers should be, has a tender love for all his little ones,’ he contends in a sermon entitled ‘Fathers in Christ’ preached in 1883.70 He can unselfconsciously use the term ‘nursing-father’, speak of a father’s ‘love-letter’ to his son, and even of a son experiencing ‘the kisses of his father’s love’.71 In part these traits are reflections of the divine nature as exemplified in parables such as the prodigal son, yet there is also a sense in which Spurgeon understands the scripture offering different and equally valid paradigms of manhood. Abraham and Jacob, for example, fit the more conventional models – the former ‘smites kings’ and ‘does such deeds of prowess as become a man’; the latter ‘is active, and energetic, and far-seeing’ – yet there is also Isaac, who ‘is always tame and gentle rather than great and noble’.72 The power of Luther as an example of a ‘manly man’ is that, in him, is found a combination of the two; and in this we see Spurgeon offering a model of manliness which is at once a reflection of that espoused by Hughes and Kingsley and one moderated in part by his own brand of Puritanism. Luther is a ‘Titan’ with strength and physical abilities greater than those of thousands of smaller men, yet Spurgeon plays down the significance of these in the Lord’s work, even to the point of




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seeing them as potential hindrances to effectiveness;73 more important by far is the moral and spiritual strength he finds manifested in Luther. Clergy inspired by Kingsley and Hughes may have encouraged football and boxing in their boys’ clubs to show that Christianity was not ‘feminine’,74 but ministers tutored by Spurgeon were more likely to devote themselves to preaching and church-planting. If Spurgeon shared Kingsley’s dislike of Tractarians on account of their sexuality, their asceticism, their elitism and their tendency to avoid plain speaking in order to conceal their true nature, he was concerned even more with the error of their beliefs, their unbiblical view of the Church, the priesthood and the nature of the gospel. Further, if some had problems with Tractarianism and Romanism on account of its ‘unEnglishness’, for Spurgeon the main issue was their denial of the ‘truth’ and lack of relevance to the lives of ordinary men, and thus his model of manliness is not English at all but German.75 And where many Victorians (and those who have studied them since) failed to see manhood in relation to both the private and public spheres – or, if they did, assumed an inevitable connection between a powerful public persona and a wielding of authority in the home76 – Spurgeon admires Luther as a man who is both a scourge of his opponents in the battle for truth over error, while a man of great meekness and gentleness in his role as paterfamilias. In Luther, Spurgeon found the personification of a vigorous, active, singleminded, courageous defender of the truth, yet one who could also provide, by example, a model for his children of masculinity which is gentle, tender and sensitive. And in this, importantly, he reflected Christ himself, whom Spurgeon can regard as the epitome of the ‘great man’, the most ‘splendid specimen of manhood’, and describe in the lovelanguage of the Song of Solomon as ‘altogether lovely’, one in whom ‘all loveliness meets’, ‘the climax of beauty’ and one who ‘has within himself an unquenchable flame of love … great deeps of love, unexplored and unexplorable’.77 ‘All great movements need the entire self-sacrifice of some man who, careless of consequences, will throw himself upon the spears of the enemy,’ Spurgeon wrote in his early years of ministry. ‘He must be simple-minded, outspoken, bold and fearless of consequences. To him courage must be instead of prudence, and faith instead of policy … Ease, reputation, comfort, he must renounce, and be content so long as he lives to dwell in the world’s camp.’78 Though written nearly 20 years before his sermons on Luther, these words fit exactly his image of the reformer; and, though penned at similar distance from the altercation he was to have with his fellow Baptists, they are also assuredly



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self-referential – for though, perhaps, he had no desire to found a ‘great movement’, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, whatever manly qualities Spurgeon saw in Luther he aspired to produce in himself. For Spurgeon, true manliness is lived, not simply defined: the true man lives out his faith in the world’s camp, relating to real men, working as they do, speaking as they do, not affecting to rise above them or pretend he is not subject to like passions as they are, and not worrying how much his opinions fly in the face of the received wisdom of the day. ‘We must be men ourselves if we ever wish to move men,’ he once remarked to his students. ‘A Christian is no milksop; nay, of all men the Christian is, or should be the most manly.’79

Acknowledgement I would like to thank for their help in various ways with this paper Judy Powles (Librarian at Spurgeon’s College, London); Martin Selman and Ian Randall (Tutors at Spurgeon’s); David Bebbington; Diana Jurd; and the staff of the Evangelical Library, London.

Notes 1. Spurgeon is still well known and widely read in the United States and parts of Eastern Europe; in Britain his influence extends little beyond Baptists – who still hold him in the highest regard – and various groups and individuals who admire his preaching, church-planting skills and holistic approach to mission. 2. Timothy George, ‘Foreword’, in Tim Curnow, Erroll Hulse, David Kingdon and Geoff Thomas, A Marvellous Ministry: How the All-round Ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon Speaks to Us Today (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1993), p. ii. 3. A glimpse of his ‘celebrity’ status in late-Victorian Britain may be gleaned from an 1880 issue of The Boys’ Own Paper which included him in a feature entitled ‘Silhouettes of Celebrities’ alongside eight other figures including Tennyson, Disraeli, Gladstone, Ruskin and Bright. He was lampooned in Punch, and also by Samuel Butler in a poem published in the Spectator in 1878 (reproduced in Donald Davie, A Gathered Church [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978], pp. 89–90). 4. Geoff Thomas, ‘The Preacher’s Progress’, in Curnow et al., A Marvellous Ministry, p. 33. 5. Ibid., pp. 34 –5. 6. David W. Bebbington, ‘Spurgeon and the Common Man’, Baptist Review of Theology, 5: 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 66–7; this chapter offers a number of interesting reflections on Spurgeon’s ‘common touch’. See also Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: 11. From Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900 (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans, comb. edition, 1996), pp. 333– 41, and Patricia Stallings Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A




07. 08.

09. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

Andrew Bradstock Preacher’s Progress (New York & London: Garland, 1982), pp. 192ff; Kruppa’s is probably the best critical biography produced in recent years. Thomas, ‘The Preacher’s Progress’, p. 38. David W. Bebbington, ‘Spurgeon and British Evangelical Theological Education’, in D. G. Hart and R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), p. 219. Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students, published in the 1870s and many times since, also demonstrates his passion to see his college produce ‘manly men’. Sword and Trowel (March 1887), p. 196. This journal was edited by Spurgeon. Spurgeon also became isolated at various times from other associations which he once supported, including the Evangelical Alliance (1864) and the Liberation Society (1891). C. H. Spurgeon, John Ploughman’s Pictures: or More of his Plain Talk for Plain People (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1880), p. 26. Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (hereafter MTP), 29 (1883), pp. 641–2. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 383. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 614. Ibid., p. 636; in fact, the person who came closest to a ‘model’ for Spurgeon (by his own confession) was George Whitefield: see Davies, Worship and Theology in England, p. 335. MTP, 29 (1883), pp. 613, 633. Ibid., p. 633. Ibid., p. 635; the reference to Luther as ‘all a German’ may be Spurgeon’s attempt to contrast his hero with German churchmen of his own day whom he despised for their promotion of higher criticism: see also below, and note 75. Ibid., pp. 623, 635. Ibid., p. 634. Ibid; cf. p. 623. Ibid., p. 613. For a brief reflection on Spurgeon and Kingsley, see Mark T. E. Hopkins, ‘Baptists, Congregationalists and Theological Change: Some late 19thcentury leaders and controversies’, DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 1988), pp. 168–9. David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961), p. 198. Donald E. Hall, ‘Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body’, in Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 7. See Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’ in Roper and Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 17. Spurgeon was profoundly opposed to war, and even more so to slavery and any form of racial discrimination: see n. 35 below, and Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 225ff. MTP, 29 (1883), pp. 623, 634, 214, 620, 622–3. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid., pp. 208, 212, 216, 210; cf. references to ‘crusader[s] besieging the New Jerusalem … [and] … storm[ing] the Celestial City’, in C. H. Spurgeon, Autobiography: 1: The Early Years (Edinburgh & Carlisle, Penn: Banner of



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31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Truth, rev. edn, 1962), p. 263. (Spurgeon’s autobiography was originally compiled by his widow, Susannah, and secretary, Joseph Harrald.) Sermon preached in 1889, cited in David S. Smith, ‘Luther and Spurgeon: Purposeful Preachers’, Concordia Journal ( January 1996), p. 42. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid. On Hughes as advocate of a similar position, see Sean Gill, ‘How Muscular was Victorian Christianity? Thomas Hughes and the Cult of Christian Manliness Reconsidered’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., Gender and Christian Religion: Studies in Church History, 3 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1998), pp. 424 –5. See, e.g. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 337ff, and Tim Curnow, ‘Spurgeon’s Politics’, in Curnow et al., A Marvellous Ministry, especially pp. 143f. See, e.g. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 264. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 616. See, e.g. C. H. Spurgeon, John Ploughman’s Talk (London: Partridge, n.d. [1868]), chapter 1; on attempts by Victorian Salvationists to encourage men to see themselves as more rather than less manly by giving up drink see Pamela J. Walker, ‘ “I Live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me”: Men and Masculinity in the Salvation Army 1865–90’, in Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, pp. 92–112. Spurgeon, John Ploughman’s Talk, p. 26. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 634; cf. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 384. Note his use of terms like ‘the little man in the gown surplice’ and ‘the prim little man’ to describe priests: MTP, 21 (1875), p. 477; Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 198. Spurgeon, John Ploughman’s Talk, pp. 17, 23. Bebbington, ‘Spurgeon and the Common Man’, p. 68. Ibid. Ibid., p. 69; Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 204 –5, 267. Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning, pp. 97, 207; cf. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: the Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 8. See James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Lori Miller’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 2) for useful correctives to the view articulated by, among others, David Hilliard and John Shelton Reed, that ‘muscular Christianity’ and Tractarianism were diametrically opposed. David Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, (Winter 1982), p. 188. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 384. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, pp. 6, 31, 33. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 635. ‘Toy-rags, wax candles, and millinery’ was how he once described Puseyism: Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 266, 385. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 635. C. H. Spurgeon, Speeches at Home and Abroad (Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim Publications, 1974), p. 141. On another occasion he urged ‘so-called priests’ for shame to ‘put away your baby garments and quit yourselves like men’;




54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

Andrew Bradstock Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 385. Unlike some of his more extreme Protestant contemporaries (e.g. John Kensit, cited in Hilliard, ‘Unenglish and Unmanly’, p. 191) he seems never to have gone so far as to imply homosexual tendencies on the part of members of the priesthood, though he did once remark that, although some who preach ‘might almost boast with the Pharisee that they are not as other men are … it would be blasphemy to thank God for it’; Helmut Thielicke, Encounter with Spurgeon (London: Clarke, 1964), p. 137. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 86. Kruppa maintains that Spurgeon remained profoundly anti-Catholic all his life (Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 21, 33Iff), though Hopkins detects in him a ‘catholic streak’ which endeared him to people from other traditions and enabled him to recognize that truth was not confined by denominational barriers (‘Baptists, Congregationalists and Theological Change’, pp. 176–7). There is a moving account of Spurgeon hearing the gospel preached by a ‘Romish’ priest in Brussels (Autobiography, original edition, pp. 364 –5), and he could also praise the ‘apostolic zeal’ of Francis Xavier and the ‘Jesuits of China’; see Lewis A. Drummond, Spurgeon: Prince of Preachers (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1992), p. 469. In 1880 Spurgeon publicly defended the right of the noted atheist Charles Bradlaugh to take his seat in Parliament, a move which prompted Annie Besant to describe his religion as ‘of a manlier order’ than that of Bradlaugh’s attackers; Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 350. Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, p. 31. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 625. Ibid., p. 635. MTP, 21 (1875), p. 470. MTP, 31 (1885), p. 213. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, p. 384; MTP, 31 (1885), p. 215. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, pp. 84, 104. Cf. Adams’ references to Newman’s idea of celibacy being a ‘powerful affront to Kingsley’s hard-won reconciliation with his own sexual drives’; ibid., p. 101, cf. p. 84. Ibid., p. 104; Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, p. 37. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 635. Ibid. See Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, pp. 36–7. MTP, 20 (1874), pp. 506–7. Spurgeon’s reference to the father as ‘priest in his own house’ does not necessarily imply superiority over his wife: in true Puritan fashion Spurgeon recognized that both husband and wife were ‘priests’, ‘joint heirs of grace’ and both were to participate in prayers before the ‘family altar’. Though conservative in his theology, Spurgeon was progressive in many of his views on women and sexual equality. John Tosh has recently noted that the Tractarians’ policy of reintroducing the confessional was seen at the time as threatening the spiritual authority of the head of the household; John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the MiddleClass Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 37. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 635.



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69. See Owen Chadwick’s comment, cited in Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning, p. 209. Interestingly, Newman praised meekness, gentleness and compassion as Christian virtues, sharply distinguishing them from some of those more commonly associated with muscular Christianity, including love of independence; see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 85. 70. MTP, 29 (1883), p. 642. 71. Ibid. MTP, 38 (1892), p. 246; MTP, 29 (1883), p. 162. 72. MTP, 27 (1881), pp. 679–80. 73. Spurgeon himself, as Kruppa notes (Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 387–8), was small in stature, timid and in many other respects not ‘manly’ at all; might this, in part at least, account for his playing down the physical dimension of ‘manliness’? Kruppa’s reflections on the relationship between Spurgeon’s physical attributes and his strong espousal of ‘manliness’ are thought-provoking, though not wholly convincing. 74. See Hugh McLeod, Religion and Irreligion in Victorian England (Bangor: Headstart History, 1993), p. 51. 75. Which does not mean that he distanced himself from the evangelicals of his day who publicly expressed great hostility toward ‘Germany’ as the birthplace of higher criticism: see Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 389ff, and note 18 above. 76. Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, p. 13. 77. James M. Gordon, Evangelical Spirituality from the Wesleys to John Stott (London: SPCK, 1991), p. 162. For similar reflections on Christ by Hughes, see Gill, ‘How Muscular was Victorian Christianity’, pp. 426ff. 78. Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, pp. 175–6. 79. Ibid., p. 384.




Adams, John Eli, 28, 41 n.11, 47, 113 n.3, 217 Adey, Lionel, 26 n.22 Adolescence, 183 Aelred of Rievaulx, St, 4, 85–99 passim Aestheticism, 48, 135, 140–3 Alexander the Great, 218 Allchin, A. M., 51 Alpine writing, 5, 134–48 passim ‘Angel in the House’, 50, 61, 128 Anglicanism/Anglo-Catholicism/High Anglicanism, 3, 27–43 passim, 46, 50, 71, 85, 90, 95, 99 n.35, 101, 106, 112–13, 120, 122, 170, 171, 179–93 passim, 216–17 Anson, Peter, 95–7 Anti-Catholicism, 47, 65, 87, 224 n.54 Anti-Semitism, 154 Anti-vice campaign, 186 Army, 13 Arnold, Matthew, 65, 155 Arnold, Thomas, 30, 121 Art Journal, 173 Ascetic masculine ideal, 48 Aspinall, Major (Salvation Army), 199–200 Atheism, 60 Athenaeum, 174–5 Athleticism, 4, 30, 41 n.15, 188, 214 Auricular confession, 108, 112, 217–18 Austen, Jane, 66 Aylen, Rev W. H., 23 Baden-Powell, Robert, 1 Baptist Union, 210–11 Baptists, 23, 209, 220 Barbara, St, 13 Barker, Col. James (Salvation Army), 201

Baring-Gould, Sabine, 17 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 195 Bebbington, David, 215 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 150, 155 Beer, Gillian, 149 Benedictines, 95 Benson, Archbishop Edward White, 179, 182, 189, 193 n.61 Benson, R. H., 100 Bernard of Clairvaux, 13 Besant, Annie, 224 n.54 Bettridge, Mrs Staff-Capt. (Salvation Army), 200 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 152 Biswas, Robindra Kumar, 132 n.25 Black, Rev C. I., 182 Blackwood, John, 155 Blake, William, 5, 154 Bland, Lucy, 183 Bloxham, J. H., 114 n.33 Body, Rev George, 185 Booth, Bramwell, 202 Booth, Catherine, 194, 198, 202–5 Booth, William, 6, 25 n.3, 194, 196–9, 201–6 Boswell, John, 85, 89 Boy Scouts, 1 Boys’ Brigade, 171 Boys’ clubs, 183 Bradlaugh, Charles, 224 n.54 Brady, Nicholas, 21 Brennan, Timothy, 159 Bristow, Joseph, 132 n.26 Brod, Harry, 8 n.15 Brontë, Charlotte, 4, 16, 58–70 passim Brontë, Emily, 66 Brown, Ford Madox, 173 Brown, Horatio, 117–19, 121, 130 Browning, Robert, 13, 120 Brydon, Dr, 23 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 150 Bunyan, John, 10–12, 14

226 10.1057/9780230294165 - Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, Edited by Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan


Index

Butler, Judith, 40 n.4 Butler, Montagu, 180, 183–4 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 162 n.33 Calvin, Jean; Calvinism, 55 n.13, 210, 212 Carlyle, Aelred, 95–7 Carlyle, Thomas, 120, 149–50, 154, 156, 169, 188, 213 Carmelites, 63, 110 Carpenter, Edward, 118 Carré, Arthur, 122 Carter, Thomas Thellusson, 3, 28, 36, 39 Carthusians, 110 Case, Sue-Ellen, 98 n.33 Celibacy; celibate passion, 3, 13, 45, 48, 63, 97, 100–1, 103–4, 109, 112–13, 174, 178 n.41, 218, 224 n.62 Chadwick, Owen, 42, n.22, 47, 225 n.69 Chadwick, Rosemary, 197 Challoner, Richard, 51 Chastity, 173, 179–80, 182–4, 186, 188–90 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 173 Cheyette, Bryan, 154 Chichester, Bishop of (Ashurst Turner Gilbert), 32–3 Chivalry, 4, 13, 39, 42 n.32, 72–3, 170–1, 179, 183, 187 Christian Endeavour Movement, 24–5 Christian Observer, 165 Christian Social Union, 180 Christmas, Capt Kitty (Salvation Army), 197 Church of England Moral Welfare Council, 191 n.3 Church of England Purity Society, 6, 179–83, 187–8, 190–1, 191 n.3 Cicero, 88 Cistercians, 93, 95, 96, 97, 110 Clifton College, 122 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 5, 116, 120–1, 123–30 Clough, Blanche, 124, 126–7

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Clouston, Sir T. S., 183, 187–8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 138–41, 143–4, 181 Community of St John the Baptist, 36 Connell, Robert W., 5–6 Contagious Diseases Acts, 179 Cornhill Magazine, 124–5 Cottom, Daniel, 160 Cowper, William, 154 Crimean War, 19–21 ‘Crisis of masculinity’, 7, 179 Cromwell, Oliver, 215 Crosby, Christina, 159 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 172 Dakyns, Henry Graham, 122 Dalgairns, John Dobree, 5, 85–99 passim Daly, Mary, 48 Davidoff, Leonore, 165, 196, 204 De La Warr, Lord, 32 Decadent Movement, 105 Deliverer, The, 197 Dickens, Charles, 72, 75, 142, 172 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 98 n.33 Disraeli, Benjamin, 201 Divorce, Divorce Act, 184–5, 187 Domesticity, domestic sphere, 4, 47, 71, 90, 93–5, 196, 199–201, 205 Dominicans, 110 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 105, 111 ‘Down Grade Controversy’, 210–11 Duce (née Howard), Staff-Capt (Salvation Army), 197 Dyce, William, 170 Eagleton, Terry, 67–8 East London Christian Mission, 194 ECUSA (American Episcopal Church), 97 n.2 Effeminacy, 28, 34, 39, 66, 168–9, 216, 219 Eliot, George (Mary Ann/Marian Evans), 5, 149–63 passim, 164, 210 Ellerton, John, 24 Ellis, Havelock, 118 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 128



Index

Index

Empire, British, 19, 24, 157. See also Imperialism Eton College, 174 Evangelical Alliance, 222 n.10 Evangelicalism, 3, 14, 28, 29, 35, 66–7, 120, 154, 165, 225 n.75 Evans, Mrs Staff-Capt (Salvation Army), 197 Everitt, Lt. Col. Herbert, 183 Faber, Frederick William, 3, 45–6, 52–4, 100 Family, 89–90, 180, 184–6, 195–6, 219 Farrar, Frederick William, 164–5, 169, 172–6 Fatherhood, 31, 184–6, 195–6, 198, 203–6, 219, 224 n.67 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 201 Felix, Elisa (‘Rachel’), 60 Femininity, 2, 4, 5, 27, 34, 35, 39, 45, 47, 49, 52, 65, 74, 121, 166–71, 195–6, 198, 220 Fénelon, François, 88–9 Fin-de-siècle culture, 181 First World War (Great War), 12, 25, 203 Fortnightly Review, 127 Foucault, Michel, 1, 119, 131–2, 190 Fout, John, 184 Freud, Sigmund, 120, 123 Froude, Charlotte (Grenfell), 48 Froude, James Anthony, 48 Fusato, Angelo, 130 Garrett, Edmund, 201–2 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 215 Gay male history; gay studies; gay theology, 4, 97 n.2, 100, 118–19 Gentlemen, 4, 80, 160, 210, 215 George, St, 13 George, Timothy, 209 Germany, 203, 212, 220, 222 n.18, 225 n.75 Girouard, Mark, 39, 42 n.32, 183 Gladstone, William Ewart, 209 Gloucester, Dean of, 183 Glover, Rev. Richard, 168–9 Gordon, General Charles George, 13, 16, 24

Gordon, Lyndall, 65–6 Gore, Charles, 180 Gorham, Rev George C., ‘Gorham Case’, 32, 42 n.22 Gough, Lord, 23 Grant, James P., 23 Gray, John, 5, 100–1, 105, 109–12 Gray, Thomas, 138 Greville, George, 210 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 118, 121 Guardian, The, 179 Haggard, H. Rider, 208 n.45 Haight, Gordon, 154 Haile Selassie, Emperor, 111 Hall, Catherine, 165 Hall, Donald E., 213 Halsall, Paul, 97 n.2 Harrow School, 120–1, 125, 184 Havelock, Sir Henry, 13, 19, 22–4, 201 Havergal, Frances Ridley, 18 Hay, Mrs Colonel (Salvation Army), 200–1 Hayter, Alethea, 78 Heber, Bishop Reginald, 15–16, 23 Heimann, Mary, 51 Heroism, 3, 20–1, 78, 134–5, 137, 149, 166, 169, 183, 205 Heterosexuality, 6, 94, 104, 129, 174, 180, 185–6, 189 Hilliard, David, 28, 86, 112–13, 223 n.46 Hinduism, 188 Hoch, Paul, 160, 161 n.3 Holden, Isaac, 193 n.61 Homoerotic desire, 4, 86, 89, 108, 138 Homosexuality; homosexual identity, 4, 39, 45, 85–99 passim, 100–15 passim, 116–33 passim, 180, 184–5, 224 n.53 Homosociality, 120, 137–8, 146 n.23 Honey, J. R. de S., 125 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 100 Hopkins, Mark T. E., 222 n.23, 224 n.54 Houghton, Walter E., 117 How, Bishop William Walsham, 18 Howe, Irving, 151



228

Howe, Julia Ward, 17 Hughes, Thomas, 3, 30, 165–8, 212–14, 216, 219–20, 223 n.34 Hunt, William Holman, 164–78 passim Huxley, Thomas H., 135–7 Hymnody, 3, 10–26 passim, 53 Imperialism, 3, 4, 19, 157–8, 174, 186–8, 201, 213–14. See also British Empire Incarnation; incarnational theology, 112, 181, 190–1 Indian Mutiny, 19 Integrity (movement within ECUSA), 97 n.2 James the Greater, St, 13–14 Jameson, Frederic, 156 Jesuits, 14, 114 n.12, 224 n.54 Jesus Christ, 6, 11, 12, 16, 20, 30, 37, 39, 49–50, 53, 87, 92, 93, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 127, 150, 153, 164–78 passim, 181–2, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 220 John, St., 87, 89 Jowett, Benjamin, 124, 126 Judaism, 150, 153–60, 167, 174, 175, 188 Justin Martyr, 173 Keach, Benjamin, 10 Keble, John, 71 Keim, Theodor, 173 King, Bishop Edward, 180, 188, 192 n.13 King, Ursula, 58, 64 Kingsley, Charles, 3, 30, 35–6, 45–54, 88, 102, 106, 167, 169, 170–1, 174, 184, 189, 201, 212–14, 216, 218, 219–20, 224 n.62 Kingsley, Fanny (Grenfell), 46, 48, 218 Knight, Frances, 2 Koven, Seth, 184 Kruppa, Patricia Stallings, 221–2 n.6, 224 n.54, 225 n.73 Laity, Cassandra, 98 n.33 Lambeth Conference, 1888, 186

229

Landow, George, 169 Lear, Edward, 123 Leavis, F. R., 161 n.1 Leo XIII, Pope, 101, 106 Lesbian studies, 119 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 154 Levine, Herbert J., 161 n.18 Lewis, Reina, 158 Lewis, Rev. W. A., 182 Liberation Society, 217, 222 n.10 Lightfoot, Bishop Joseph Barber, 180, 182, 190 Liguori, St Alphonsus, 51 Linehan, Katherine Bailey, 159 London, Bishop of (Frederick Temple), 180–1 London Slum Corps, 201 Loppé, Gabriel, 142 Lucas, Rev. W. H., 186–7 Luther, Martin, 12, 23, 55 n.13, 211–22 Lux Mundi school, 181 Lyttleton, Hon. Edward, 180 McCormack, Jerusha, 111 McGuire, Brian Patrick, 85, 89 Machismo, 40 Macmillan’s Magazine, 169 Madonna, 64. See also Mary Malory, Sir Thomas, 76, 83 n.29, 170 Manchester, Bishop of, 189 Mangan, J. A., 150 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 28 Marlborough, Bishop of (Alfred Earle), 189 Marriage, marital sexual relations, 94, 102, 123, 126, 174, 178 n.41, 179–80, 184–6, 188–9, 196–7, 218–19 Marsh, Catherine M., 19–21 Marshman, Hannah, 23 Martin, St, 13–14 Martin, Carol A., 162 n.35 Martineau, Harriet, 60, 61 Martyrdom, 3, 12, 15, 16, 20–1, 80 Mary; mariolatry; Marian controversies; Marian devotion; Marian spirituality, 3, 20, 44–57 passim, 175. See also Madonna



Index

Index

Masculine identity, 1, 6, 116, 134, 151, 157, 166 Masturbation, 184–5, 192 n. 24 Maurice, St, 13 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 167, 181 Maynard, John, 60–1, 62, 66–7, 119, 189 Melanchthon, Philip, 212 Methodism, 14, 20 Michelangelo, 175 Militarism, 3, 6, 72, 171, 195–6, 201–3, 205, 213 Millais, J. E., 172 Miller, Jane, 60, 61, 62–3, 64 Millett, Kate, 58–9, 63 Milton, John, 10, 12, 14, 154 Missionaries, 16, 24, 66–7, 79, 103 Moglen, Helene, 63, 66, 68 Monasticism, 5, 13, 85–7, 90, 92–7, 171 Monsell, Harriet, 36 Mosse, George, 45 Mountaineering, 134–48 passim Mumm, Susan, 27 Mummery, Albert Frederick, 135 Munich, Adrienne, 54 Muscular Christianity, 3, 5, 7, 15, 25 n.7, 28, 30, 39–40, 45, 88, 134, 145 n.1, 166, 169, 170, 201, 212–14, 216, 219

Owen, Alex, 5 Oxford Movement, Tractarians, 23, 28–30, 46, 48, 49, 51, 71, 73, 86, 88, 101, 216, 218, 220, 224 n.67

Napoleon Bonaparte, 218 Nationalism, 3, 149–63 passim Neale, John Mason, 3, 27–8, 30, 32–4, 36–40 Newman, Gerald, 159 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 23, 28, 47, 48, 85, 86–7, 100, 102–6, 109, 217, 218, 224 n.62, 225 n.69 Newsome, David, 216 Newton, John, 21 Nicholas, Tsar of Russia, 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilheim, 152–3 Nonconformity, 6, 30, 197

Pacifism, 203 Palmerston, Lord, 121 Park, Mungo, 111–12 Pater, Walter, 95, 105, 120 Patmore, Coventry, 128 Patriotism, 187 Patteson, John Coleridge, 79–80 Paul, St, 11, 12, 13, 15, 24, 190 Pemble, John, 131, n.5 Peterson, M. Jeanne, 41 n.16 Phelan, J. B., 129 Phillpotts, Bishop Henry, 42 n.22 Physical exercise, 29–30 Plato, 122–3 Plumptre, E. H., 16 Plymouth Brethren, 120 Pointon, Marcia, 169 Pope, Alexander, 154 Postmodernism, 7 n.3, 91 Prester John, 112 Pretor, Alfred, 121 Priests, priesthood, 5, 31, 64, 87, 100–15 passim, 217–20, 224 n.53 Prostitution, 129, 180, 187 Protestantism; Protestant identity, 3, 45–6, 63–7, 94, 102, 165, 167, 174–5, 204, 217 Public Schools, 4, 24, 180, 195. See also Clifton College, Eton College, Harrow, Rugby Pugh, Rev. S. S., 165, 167, 169, 170 Punch, 26 n.19 Puritanism, 6, 11, 65, 161 n.3, 195, 210, 217–19, 224 n.67 Purity; moral purity; sexual purity, 179–194 passim Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 3, 28–32, 34–6, 39, 45–6, 49–54 Pusey, Maria, 51–2

Oratorians, 103 Overholser, Renée V., 132 n.14

Quakerism, 2, 197 Queer space, 85, 97



230

Racial degeneracy, 186 Raffalovich, Marc André, 104 Raina, Badri, 151 Redemptorists, 51 Reed, John Shelton, 27, 28, 33, 39, 40, 86, 99 n.35, 223 n.46 Religious doubt; scepticism, 117, 124, 125, 127, 129, 138, 144–5 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 164–5 Restoration Movement, 158 Richard I, King of England, 10 Richards, Jeffrey, 88 Ricketts, Charles, 105 Rimbaud, Arthur, 105, 111 Ritualism, 28–9, 32, 39, 87, 215–16 Robertson, R., 199 Roby, Douglass, 89 Rolfe, Frederick William, 5, 100–1, 105–8, 111, 112 Roman Catholicism, 2, 5, 28–9, 31, 36, 44–53, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 85–7, 90, 94–6, 100–15 passim, 175, 216–17, 220, 224 n.54 Romanticism, 138, 145 Rugby School, 30, 41 n.11, 121, 125, 150 Ruskin, John, 135, 144, 209 St George’s Purity Association, 189 Said, Edward, 157 Salvation Army; Salvationists; Salvationist masculinity, 6, 13, 194–208 passim Same-sex desire, 5, 85–99 passim, 118, 122 Same-sex friendship, 88–9 Sandbach-Dahlstrom, Catherine, 83 n.17 Sanders, Valerie, 80 Saturday Review, 172 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 151 Schweitzer, Albert, 175–6 Scobell, Sr Emily, 27, 32–4 Scobell, Rev John, 27, 32–4 Scott, Joan, 7 n.3 Scott, Sir Walter, 10, 81 Scott Holland, Henry, 180, 183, 191 n.6

231

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 89, 99 n.35, 113 n.3 Sellon, Priscilla Lydia, 51–2 Semmel, Bernard, 155 ‘Separate spheres’, 44 Sewell, Fr. Brocard, 109 Shaffer, E. S., 150 Shand-Tucci, Douglass, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, 194 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 17 Showalter, Elaine, 84 n.43 Sibree, John, 153–4 Simond, Edouard, 138 Smith, George, 61 Society of St Margaret, 27, 30, 33–4, 36–9 Society of Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Trinity, 51 Soldier-saints, 12–14, 18–21 Spectator, The, 172 Sport, 88, 121, 220 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, 6, 209–25 passim Spurgeon, James Archer, 211 Stephen, Leslie, 134, 136–7, 141–2, 144 Stephens, F. G., 168 Stone, S. J., 16 Strauss, David Friedrich, 164 Sussman, Herbert, 12–13, 58, 73, 119–20, 181 Symonds, Catherine (North), 117, 123 Symonds, John Addington, 5, 108, 116–33 passim Symons, A. J. A., 105 Tacitus, 187 Talbot, Edward Stuart, 180 Tamke, Susan S., 24 Tate, Nahum, 21 Taylor, James, 60 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 16, 19, 122, 129, 143, 183 Thirty-Nine Articles, 124 Thring, Edward, 180, 183 Tosh, John, 2, 189–90, 193 n.61, 195–6, 199, 204, 224 n.67 Tractarianism see Oxford Movement



Index

Index

Treaty of Berlin, 201 Trollope, Anthony, 72 Tyndall, John, 5, 134–48 passim Tyrrell, George, 114 n.12 Ultramontanism, 101 Unitarianism, 128, 147 n.26 Vance, Norman, 12, 16, 72, 169, 216 Vanguard, The, 180–90 Vatican, 106 Vaughan, Rev. C. J., 121, 122, 125 Vaughan, Herbert, 53 Verlaine, Paul, 105, 111 Vicars, Captain Hedley, 13, 19–22, 24 Victoria, 24, 53, 54 Victoria Cross, 18–19 Virginity, 48, 53, 55 n.13, 103–4, 183 Walker, Pamela, 197 War, fighting, 3, 10–26 passim, 30, 38–9, 135, 202–3, 213–14 War Cry, 199–200, 203 Waugh, Evelyn, 111 Weeks, Jeffrey, 118–19 Wesley, Charles, 14–15, 18 Wesley, John, 14 West, Richard, 138

Westcott, Brooke Foss, 180 White Cross Army, 191 n.3 Whitefield, George, 222 n.15 Whitman, Walt, 130 Wilberforce, Bishop Samuel, 44 Wilberforce, William, 166 Wilde, Oscar, 104, 105, 111, 114 n.33, 151 Wilkinson, George, 180 Williams, Rev. Frederick S., 22 Williams, W. S., 66 Wilson, H. Schutz, 135, 139 Winnington-Ingram, Bishop A. F., 171 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 65 Wohlfarth, Marc E., 157 Woolf, Virginia, 136 Wordsworth, William, 154 Xavier, St Francis, 224 n.54 Xenophon, 122 Yonge, Charlotte M., 4, 71–84 passim Young Men’s Christian Association, 167 Zimmerman, Bonnie, 163 n.43 Zionism, 153, 155–8 Zwingli, Ulrich, 55 n.13



232

Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture

Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Crime Files)

Constructing Masculinity (Discussion in Contemporary Culture)

Lifelines: Culture, Spirituality, and Family Violence

Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry

Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality (Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality)

Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Spirituality and Ethics in Management

Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria

Class Culture And Suburban Anxieties In The Victorian Era

Conrad and Masculinity

Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto Biography in the Late Victorian Period

Masculinity, Law and Family

Masculinity and Popular Television

Spirituality, ethics, and care

Spirituality and Psychiatry

Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction: Victorian afterimages

Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

Family Ties in Victorian England (Victorian Life and Times)

The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism

Black Masculinity

Sustainability and Spirituality

Islamic Art and Spirituality

Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture

Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Crime Files)

Constructing Masculinity (Discussion in Contemporary Culture)

Lifelines: Culture, Spirituality, and Family Violence

Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry

Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality (Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality)

Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture

Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Spirituality and Ethics in Management

Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria

Class Culture And Suburban Anxieties In The Victorian Era

Conrad and Masculinity

Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto Biography in the Late Victorian Period

Masculinity, Law and Family

Masculinity and Popular Television

Spirituality, ethics, and care

Spirituality and Psychiatry

Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction: Victorian afterimages

Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

Family Ties in Victorian England (Victorian Life and Times)

The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism

Black Masculinity

Sustainability and Spirituality

Islamic Art and Spirituality

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