ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book explains how biblical typology had such pervasive influence upon Victorian culture. When literary and cultural historians have considered Victorian religion, they have focused narrowly on themes of honest doubt and consequent loss of belief. This focus has been particularly unfortunate since the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century saw an almost astonishing, revival of biblical typology, which left its firm impress upon Victorian literature, and art. Students of Victorian culture have been accustomed to considering Evangelicalism and evolutionary theory as inevitably conflicting with each other that it may come as a shock to discover Patrick Fairbairn, the great Victorian expert on scriptural typology, claiming that the Book of the Earth, like the Bible. Biblical Typology, which thus provided a means of formulating a history of man the species, also offered Victorian autobiographers a means of presenting the histories of individual people.
