In this compelling volume, Larsen strives to reclaim the Bible as a central text among Victorians, arguing that it “provided an irreplaceable linguistic register not only for novelists and poets, but for the Victorians in general” (4). While literary scholars have thoroughly unpacked the biblical references in nineteenth-century literature, Larsen argues that historians have not given adequate recognition to the Bible's central role in the creation of a common cultural discourse. As a prized family possession and a foundational text in schools, the Bible provided a “scriptural rite of passage to literacy” (2) and provided a common set of metaphors and assumptions across Britain's heterogeneous religious traditions. Even among those who rejected the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible served as a common cultural script. For Victorians, Larsen asserts, “irreligion and biblical illiteracy . . . do not correlate” (3).
Following the approach he took in Crisis of Doubt (Oxford, 2006), Larsen organizes his narrative around key individuals and their religious lives. His interest lies in uncovering their lived experience of faith (and doubt) rather than in chronicling denominational histories or various schools of biblical criticism. Each chapter explores one or two key religious figures, setting them up as representatives of Britain's major traditions of faith and doubt, including E. B. Pusey (Anglo-Catholic), Nicholas Wiseman (Roman Catholic), C. H. Spurgeon (Old Dissent), William Cooke (Methodist New Connexion), T. H. Huxley (agnostic), and Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (atheist). Highlighting women's central role in Victorian religious experience (although avoiding gender as an analytical category), Larsen selects a number of women to represent their traditions: Catherine Booth (Methodist and Holiness), Florence Nightingale (liberal Anglican), Mary Carpenter (Unitarian), and Josephine Butler (evangelical Anglican). Drawing on a wide range of published writings, supplemented by some archival materials, he brings to life the religious struggles and convictions of these individuals, producing a rich composite picture of people deeply preoccupied with the Bible.
As Larsen rightly asserts, this preoccupation has proven difficult for historians to recognize and interpret. For a variety of reasons, even historians of religion have downplayed the full extent of Victorians' biblical obsessions. Eager to represent Unitarians as progressive, for example, scholars have tended to minimize the tradition's biblicist origins, even though Unitarians who recognized scripture as the source of “revealed truth” proved to be “the more important . . . wing” for much of the nineteenth century (139). Similarly, the biographers of E. B. Pusey have neglected his biblical commentaries, despite them being “the most cherished project of his life” (24), most likely because his conservatism proved embarrassing for later Anglo-Catholics. Feminist historians have struggled to understand the evangelical motivations of Josephine Butler, although, tellingly, historians of Methodism seem to have less trouble admitting to the conservative hermeneutics of William Cooke, whose biblical literalism led him to espouse the young earth theory of Bishop Ussher (98).
Stories of heartfelt family devotions are a familiar Victorian trope, but Larsen helps us to consider them with fresh perspective. Raised in a home where morning and evening devotions structured the rituals of family life, Elizabeth Fry went on to make Bible reading the centerpiece of her acclaimed approach to prison reform, and if contemporary accounts can be believed, her regular devotional readings at Newgate reduced hardened criminals “to penitential tears by the power of God's word” (179). A few surprises await those who might assume that atheism or agnosticism inoculated one from biblical literacy. Steeped in biblicism as a child, Annie Besant later condemned the Bible as a “dangerous and despicable book” (79) but readily adopted its cadences and phrasings in her writings and used key passages to support her atheism.
Victorian ways of reading the Bible were as varied as the religious landscape. Wiseman advocated “reading the Bible with the church,” while Pusey believed in “reading it with the church fathers” (151). The Unitarians believed the Bible should be read “without the influence of creeds, councils and church authorities” (151), yet everyone appeared skilled at wielding a proof text. However, an unresolved tension in this volume arises from the difficulty in distinguishing between the use of biblical phraseology and the meanings ascribed to that usage. Because Larsen draws primarily from published commentaries, exegeses, and devotional works, with only scattered coverage of unpublished and private records and still less treatment of audience response, his insight into motivation and reception is necessarily limited.
Larsen's own deep knowledge of the Bible equips him well to identify when and where the authors are mirroring biblical language and ideas. But his impatience with historians who have not recognized or adequately explored biblical references at times results in a combative tone reminiscent of the midcentury Bible critics themselves. Social and cultural historians might respond with a similar impatience. Whether these individuals stand as representatives of “Victorian thought and culture,” as Larsen asserts, is debatable given the fact that all achieved the status of religious (or irreligious) celebrity. Social historians will want more exploration of the social contexts of biblical literacy. As Sarah Williams has shown in Religious Belief and Popular Culture (1999), popular meanings ascribed to the Bible could both reinforce and differ unexpectedly from conventional discourses of mainstream Christianity. Cultural historians might object to his straightforward reading of texts and neglect of wider cultural developments, such as the proliferation of cheap Bibles and consumer culture, highlighted by Sue Zemka in Victorian Testaments (1997). That Larsen avoids wider debates on religious change and secularization during this period results in a book that seems unanchored. What distinguished the Victorian preoccupation with scripture from other historical periods? What trends are evident in ways of reading the Bible over the course of the century? The title, “A People of One Book,” which Larsen invokes repeatedly almost as a proof text, elides what is surely a more complicated picture. As an inherently unstable text, the Bible was many books in one.
