ABSTRACT
This excerpt, from Thomas Sefton Rivington’s The Story of Luther’s Life, provides an introduction to one of the several Victorian and Edwardian popular lives of Luther designed to project him in heroic light for a British Protestant readership: ‘What a splendid narrative does Luther’s battle for the truth comprise’, the author added. The habit then current in British historical writing of anglicising non-English names – ‘Lewis XIV’ and so on – seemed almost to domesticate Luther’s parents as a respectable British Christian couple, ‘John’ and ‘Margaret’, industrious, religious, plebeian, ‘labouring’, though keen on education and selfimprovement. The couple’s and their growing family’s steady rise in prosperity – Luther senior gradually became ‘somewhat more easy in his circumstances’ – provided an object lesson in the fair returns of hard work, twinned with an upright life: ‘Promises are given to the just man’s labour, and John Luther experienced the reality of them’. First, though, difficulties had to be overcome – those of a peasant background. Luther’s father was ‘of the peasantry of Thuringia’ and encountered poverty in an industrious
early married life, ‘attended with painful privations to honest John and his wife; for they lived some time in great poverty’. In such ways, the family background of the founder of Protestantism, born in November 1483 to the Luther couple in Eisleben in the lands of the counts of Mansfeld, might show pointers towards the prizes in the currency of worldly success held out to reward the virtues of industry which Protestant Christianity was, by the time that Rivington wrote his popular biography, widely thought to offer.1
