ABSTRACT

“It would be futile,” writes Richard Altick in The English Common Reader, “even to try to estimate how many copies of religious and moral works of all sorts were distributed in Britain in the nineteenth century.” “Religious literature,” he goes on, “was everywhere.” 1 More than fifty years on, literary critics are finding that there remains much work to do to account for the varieties and uses of religious literature and print. Indeed, today it seems like religion is everywhere in literary studies. This recent interest in religion and literature has, since the new millennium, become known as the “religious turn,” and been energized by the work of long standing journals in the field and special issues in other journals, whose interests typically lie elsewhere. 2 At the same time, scholars in a variety of disciplines have reinvigorated debates about the secular by calling into question its very assumptions. Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), for instance, challenge the commonplace that modernity is defined by the disappearance of religion. Both developments—the religious turn and reassessments of secularization—are particularly welcome in Victorian studies, a field in which an array of new criticism on literature and religion has appeared and continues to do so. 3 New work in the field includes, for instance, books paying attention to nineteenth-century religious poetry, evangelical publishing and popular science, and family bibles. 4 Thanks to such scholarship in Victorian studies, the Age of Doubt (to which that era is still so often referred) is now better seen as one characterized by the proliferation, rather than the decline, of religious discourses.