ABSTRACT
Dickens and Trollope each extend their consideration of contemporary cathedral towns beyond the subject of religious community. While commenting on the social ramifications of cathedral practices, both authors often focus on the aesthetic spaces of the cathedral environment rather than on the strictly doctrinal or spiritual. The aesthetic influence of the cathedrals (and, conversely, cathedrals’ adoption of contemporary aesthetic taste) is highly relevant to cathedrals’ social impact; by illustrating and critiquing the aesthetic work of and in cathedrals, each author considers the complicated issues surrounding artistic employment in cathedral towns. The dichotomy between the pursuit of professions in religious settings and obedience to spiritual vocations for this religious work collapses along aesthetic lines, and the novels allow for the exploration of unique problems posed by artistic labor that is affiliated with the Church of England. In cathedral towns, these problems are magnified (or, at least, cathedral towns’ experience of these problems magnifies them in other areas as well) because most of cathedrals’ aesthetic labor is collective. The Romantic (and, perhaps, novelistic) ideal of the individual artist’s inspiration and success must, of necessity, submit to a common artistic pursuit, and one which is at least partially pre-determined and constrained by the demands of religious doctrine. Dickens’s and Trollope’s artists must work within and around these constraints, with varying degrees of success.
