ABSTRACT
Unless We Have a rather exact knowledge of sectarian church history – knowledge that few of us have – we shall misread many Victorian novels. I need not expatiate on this because the case has been made, exhaustively, by Valentine Cunningham in his erudite and disconcerting book, Everywhere Spoken Against. I shall briefly consider only one case – that of Bulstrode in George Eliot's Middlemarch, particularly as this portrait is related, or has been related by critics, to George Eliot's own religious upbringing. Born to an Anglican household, she seems to have gone first to an Evangelical school run by a Mrs Wallington, and then to the school of the Misses Franklin, daughters of that Francis Franklin who is reputedly the original of Rufus Lyon, a lamentably sentimentalized character in Felix Holt. This school is described as ‘strongly Calvinistic’, on the grounds that the Misses Franklin were Particular Baptists and so, a modern commentator assures us, ‘we may presume’ that they taught ‘Calvinism in its strictest form’. The error here is at least partly the confounding of the Particular Baptists with the Strict and Particular Baptists, followers of William Gadsby (1773–1844) who led a neo-Calvinist reaction within the Baptist Church against what he called ‘Fullerism’ – that is to say, the middle-of-the-road Calvinism espoused by Robert Hall's contemporary, Andrew Fuller. But in any case the presumption that we are invited to make is unwarranted, for the Particular Baptists ‘except for their insistence on Believers’ Baptism, are doctrinally and liturgically indistinguishable from the Independents (or Congregationalists)’. The expressions ‘General Baptist’ and ‘Particular Baptist’ are in any case misleading, since in the first place the Particulars seem to have outnumbered the Generals at all times through the periods we're concerned with by at least two to one; and second, it was the Arminian General Baptists who in their practices were more ‘radical’ and ‘primitive’. The Particular Baptists seem to have been no less vulnerable than the Independents to Baxterian and other, even deist or Arian, modifications of their Calvinism. These considerations suggest that Particular Baptist attitudes may not have been at all what George Eliot had in mind when creating Nicolas Bulstrode. Of Bulstrode we are told that before he became the effective master of Middlemarch – as banker, businessman and philanthropist – he had belonged to a dissenting church at Highbury; and our commentator assures us: ‘the Church was, significantly, Calvinist’. But in fact the Calvinism of Bulstrode's dissenting background is hardly significant at all, since all of orthodox dissent, except for the General Baptists, claimed to be Calvinist in the mid-nineteenth century as in the mid-eighteenth, and the label could be, and was, pasted on to quite ‘liberal’ doctrines. Moreover, George Eliot herself explicitly warns us not to see in Bulstrode any cautionary example as to one set of doctrines rather than another. ‘This implicit reasoning’, she says in chapter 61, speaking of Bulstrode's casuistry, ‘is essentially no more peculiar to Evangelical belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to Englishmen’. We should do well to take her at her word. This is by no means to deny that George Eliot's sympathies in her fiction could take her beyond the positions she might take up in letters or essays; between her essay on ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming’ and her sympathetic though detached portrait of the Evangelical clergyman Edgar Tryan in ‘Janet's Repentance’, there is a wide gap, and one that does her credit. The point to be made rather is that in our literary and social historians alike the term ‘Calvinistic’ is a catch-all bogey-word, possessing, often enough, no strictly accountable meaning at all.
