ABSTRACT
The religious life of this period was intense and disputatious, and its problematic presence can be felt wherever we look in nineteenth-century literature. From the comic clergyman in Dickens and Trollope, and their more serious counterparts in George Eliot, to the poetry of Tennyson, Arnold, Hopkins, and Clough; from the agnosticism of Hardy and Housman to the religious questing which underlies almost all Victorian autobiography; from the literature of orthodoxy in Newman to the ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ of Carlyle and Charlotte Brontë: the very pervasiveness and variety of religious experience in Victorian literature is a sign of its importance in the culture at large and, from one perspective, of its vitality. Thus T.H.S. Escott looked back from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and declared that ‘the Victorian age is in fact above all others an age of religious revival’. He pointed to the reform of the clergy and organisation in the Church of England, its expansion overseas, the increased membership of all the churches; and he could have mentioned the churches built in the previous sixty years, for this was a heroic age of church building and restoration. 1
