ABSTRACT
It is essential to begin this study with an attempt to arrive at an understanding of Dickens’s and Trollope’s attitudes toward the complex origins of the cathedral towns which their novels and other writings imaginatively transformed. Both authors draw on actual cathedral towns as the models for the fictional and fictionalized towns appearing in their works, and both consider (with varying degrees of factual precision) the historical and religious implications of these social spaces. The cathedral towns in these novels exist in an uneasy relationship to the past: they constantly bear the historical burden of their medieval Roman Catholicism. Catholicism was widely reviled in Victorian England but, in influential quarters, it simultaneously experienced a romantic revival in the forms of the Oxford Movement and of Victorian medievalism. Cathedrals and cathedral towns fit uncomfortably into this paradox; originally and iconographically, they belonged to the Catholic faith, though for centuries they had been appropriated by the Anglican high-church hierarchy. While the Church of England retained many aspects of Catholic liturgical ritual, the cathedrals were nevertheless significantly cut off from their denominational roots. They retained the forms of Catholicism without retaining the meaning of these forms. As regulated religious structures, cathedrals did not fit neatly into the Pre-Raphaelites’ ideal of the medieval, either-an ideal that tended to focus more on the mystical and the natural or pagan aspects of a fictionalized medieval period than on its Christian faith.
