IT IS THE EARLY AFTERNOON of October 7, 1857. Charles Hadden Spurgeon ascends to the pulpit and announces, “there are such things as national judgments, national chastisements for national sins” (1). The topic is the electrifying and as yet unresolved “Mutiny” in India.I place “Mutiny” in quotation marks in my title and throughout my text. My intention is to recall that such a naming of the 1857 rebellion is already an interpretation, and one that has been cogently questioned, notably by the historians Chaudhuri and Stokes, both of whom find their place within my argument. However, I retain this naming in my text as it is, throughout the Victorian era and in the early twentieth century, the most common and recognizable way of referring to the 1857 uprisings in India. The speaker is arguably the most popular preacher of the mid-Victorian period. I do not, however, attach a special importance to Spurgeon's words simply on the basis of his engaging topic and his personal celebrity. Spurgeon is speaking in the Crystal Palace, that signal monument to mid-Victorian England's preeminence among nations; he has before him an assembled crowd of 24,000 listeners. Spurgeon, moreover, is not alone in sermonizing on rebellion in India on this particular day. More or less simultaneously reverend preachers all over the British Isles are weaving their way through the “Mutiny” topic. Queen Victoria, as one learns from the dailies of September 28 (I take my text from the Morning Post), has declared October 7 a national “fast-day”: “We, taking into our most serious consideration the grievous mutiny…in India, command…a Public Day of Fast, Humiliation, and Prayer…so both we and our people may humble ourselves before Almighty God, in order to obtain pardon for our sins” (Victoria 4).

PRIOR TO THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, Europeans had heard of Buddhism, if at all, as an aside in tales of the exotic Orient in which the Buddha figured as a minor Hindu deity or a celestial sun god. Eastern thought had trickled back toward the seats of Western empires for centuries along the same routes used for tea and opium, but serious engagement with that thought only began in the late eighteenth century with translations of the Bhagavadgita, and systematic study of Eastern sacred texts did not begin in France, Germany, and England until around the 1820s.I draw here and throughout on a number of historical studies, in particular Almond, Batchelor, Lopez, and Welbon. As Almond notes, it was only in the first half of the century “that the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.) began to gain currency… and that the term ‘Buddhism’ first made its appearance in English in the scholarly journals which appeared, in part at least, as a consequence of the developing imperial interest of both England and France in the Orient“ (7). The first English study of Buddhism that I have found is Upham (1829). As late as the 1860s, but rapidly at that point, Buddhism “hit” Europe, becoming a wide-spread topic that peaked in London's “Buddhism-steeped Nineties” and then declined after the turn of the century (Caracciolo 30).This claim is supported by the fact that a search of the PCI (Periodicals Content Index) database for articles published with “Buddha” or “Buddhism” in the title reveals this pattern: 3 in the period 1840–50; 0 in 1851–60; 13 in 1861–70; 74 in 1871–80; 148 in 1881–90; 367 in 1891–1900; 287 in 1901–10; and 243 in 1911–20. One indicator of burgeoning British interest was the publication in the last three decades of the century of at least three book-length poems recounting the life of Buddha. In particular, Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Büddhism (1879) became a best-seller in Europe, India, and America and was credited with inspiring conversions to Buddhism, as well as with influencing Rudyard Kipling's creation of the character of the Teshoo Lama in Kim (1901).The other two poems I refer to are Philips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871) and Alexander's Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which was the Newdigate Prize poem at Oxford in 1887. The most famous conversion attributed to reading The Light of Asia was of Charles Bennett, who in 1901 became Ananda Metteyya, the first British Buddhist monk. As Humphreys puts it in The Development of Buddhism in England, Bennett, “like many before him and untold thousands since, found that a new world of spiritual adventure was opened before his eyes” by The Light of Asia (13). On Arnold's influence on Kipling, see Whitlark “Nineteenth-Century ‘Nirvana Talk’.” The initial premise of this essay is that through the latter decades of the century themes and figures drawn in part or whole from Buddhism increasingly made their way into British literary discourse. This appears to be especially true of “sensational” and “romance” novels, a fact significant in itself for understanding how Buddhism filtered into British culture (though full consideration of the relationship between those sub-genres and Eastern thought will have to await another occasion). But to the extent that one can detect such concepts as reincarnation, karma, and nirvana, for instance, in works of literature of the time, they generally are hybridized with Christian, Gnostic, Rosicrucian, alchemical, Greek pantheistic, ancient Egyptian, and other occult figures. This hybridization is another significant aspect of the ways in which Victorians struggled to construct a Buddhism in their own image. Buddhism pervaded late nineteenth-century European thought, though diffusely. It was woven into the complex fabric of discourses concerning empire, the crisis in Christianity (recently exacerbated by Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, among others), and the general perception that spirituality had come under increasing threat in a society dominated by the materialism of the market and the rationality of science.On the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Welbon and Schwab, as well as analysis in Dumoulin.

OF THE GOD that appears in so many of Thomas Hardy's lyrics as so many shapes of one name, of the God that appears to defy common description because each of his many shapes is unique, this may be said: He easily entertains the supposition of his own disappearance. That this peculiar claim so closely echoes one made by Emerson about the disappearance of literature is intentional; in rendering the prospect of divine dissolution, Hardy reveals profound misgivings about the efficacy of poetry as a symbolic means for coming to terms with the painful and toilsome experience of living, and about the continued adequacy of poetic efforts to provide “a frame of acceptance” for suffering humanity (Burke, Attitudes 5)The original reads “Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance” (qtd. in Poirier, Renewal 27).. That this claim probably elicits less surprise and uneasiness than ironic acknowledgement in readers already familiar with Hardy's lyrics, that it rings vaguely true even before they turn back to the poems themselves may indicate how inured these same readers have grown to even the most extravagant instances of Hardy's “unrelieved pessimism.”The phrase “unrelieved pessimism” appears in “The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy” (Blackmur 2). It may derive from Lytton Strachey's 1914 review of Hardy's Satires and Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries: “The desolation is complete. And the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction” (225).

SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes. A faith little known to modern scholars and, perhaps for that reason, one which has not often been recognized for its historical and social importance, Spiritualism became the religion of thousands over the course of the last four decades of the period. In spite of its humble and strange beginnings in 1848–a code of raps developed between a murdered peddler and two young American girls–aristocrats, scholars, and scientists, along with ordinary men and women of all ages, were converted to the belief that death was no barrier to communication. This contact, achieved through the services of mediums, who were sensitive to the sounds and sights of the spirit world, provided many with comfort, peace, and the reassurance of an afterlife in a social and intellectual climate that called those things into doubt.

“[S]INCE CHRIST ASCENDED into Heaven, our electric communication with the Creator has been established, and an ever-flowing current of divine inspiration is turned beneficially in the direction of our Earth….” So writes Heliobas, the sage scientist from the East in Marie Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (247; ch. 14). According to this character's religio-technological treatise on the Creation, God is a “Shape of pure Electric Radiance” and each human soul an electric spark emitted from this wellspring in the heavens (237; ch. 14). Many years after Genesis, human corruption and apathy prompted God to restore electric lines of communication with His wayward humans. For this purpose Christ was sent down to Earth, to establish a connection not unlike that made possible by submarine telegraphy; as Heliobas explains, “this Earth and God's World were like America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid. Now the messages of goodwill flash under the waves, heedless of storms. So also God's Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ” (241; ch. 14). Romance's abundant technological metaphors for Christian worship–prayers imagined as telephone calls and the like (223; ch. 13)–culminate in this daring “Electric Principle of Christianity,” which reinterprets Christ as, in effect, a Word dispatched telegraphically (235; ch. 13).

IN 1864 FRANCES POWER COBBE jumped into the still-churning waters of Essays and Reviews (1860) and Colenso's Pentateuch (1862) with a book that put the case against an infallible Revelation even more frankly than these men had liked or dared. Broken Lights, her main contribution to the mid-Victorian Bible wars, went through at least eight editions and, next to her Duties of Women (1881), was the “most successful” of her books (Life 2: 370). Identifying “Frances Power Cobbe” on the title page as the “Author of an ‘Essay on Intuitive Morals,’ ‘The Pursuits of Women,’ etc.,“ the material object in a stranger's hands left no doubt that here was a work by a woman who had written on likely female subjects. Yet the table of contents, which lays out a schema of Churchmen's positions on the Bible questions of the hour, yields no clue that a feminist advocate wrote this book. Even in perusing its discussions of high theological matters, most readers would not have suspected, as I will argue, that the analyses of these men's positions are colored by Cobbe's distinctive “woman's perspective” (Caine 147), and that public and personal gender issues are being negotiated through its modes of discourse and argument.

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN the image and nature of Christ was a prime site of ideological conflict. As the central figure in the dominant religious tradition, Christ was, perhaps inevitably, redefined and claimed by different social groups attempting to harness his remaining cultural influence. One of the dominant images of Christ, however, one that permeated Victorian Christianity, was distinctly feminized, emphasizing virtues and roles allotted to women according to “separate-spheres” gender ideology and often focusing on his passivity and suffering.

GEORGE ELIOT FELT A WELL-KNOWN ambivalence toward “feminine” writing. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) mocks the “composite order of feminine fatuity” that characterizes her contemporaries' fiction (Writings 296). “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé” (1854) maintains that “[w]ith a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men” (Writings 37). And “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) claims that feminine influence weakens the visual arts: “even those among our painters … who are far above the effeminate feebleness of ‘Keepsake’ style, treat their subjects under the direct influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation” (Writings 261). Given such evidence, it is not surprising that Isobel Armstrong hesitates to include Eliot in an important essay on the mid-Victorian poetess tradition, cautioning that “George Eliot … did not willingly associate herself with the ‘feminine’ tradition” (“Music” 370).

FINALLY PASSED IN 1847, the Ten Hours Bill restricted the number of hours worked by women and children in the factories to ten per day. Its enactment was the result of a lengthy political crusade whose chief parliamentary spokesman had been the Tory M.P., Lord Ashley. A decade later, in his two-volume History of the Factory Movement, Samuel Kydd (or “Alfred”) made a cursory, half-sentence reference to the “useful” contribution made to the campaign by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (295).Tonna's dates are 1790–1846. Appearing as a novel in 1841, Helen Fleetwood was first serialised between September 1839 and March 1841 in the Christian Lady's Magazine (edited by Tonna 1834 to 1846). Written to persuade her female readership of the urgent need for a Ten Hours Bill, the novel depicts the devastating spiritual and physical consequences of factory work on the eponymous heroine and her adopted family. While Kydd acknowledges Tonna's contribution, the brevity of his remark suggests that her status in the Ten Hours Movement was, at most, ancillary. Kydd seems unaware of the articles about the Ten Hours Bill that Tonna wrote in her magazine. Nor does he refer to her work of 1843, “The Forsaken Home,” which portrays the calamitous domestic consequences of the long hours worked by factory women.This is all the more surprising when one considers Kydd's friendship with the Movement's extra-parliamentary leader, Richard Oastler (Driver 518). “The Forsaken Home” is the second of four stories by Tonna, each published as a separate book under the collective title The Wrongs of Woman (1843–44). The stories were published in the following order: “Milliners and Dress-Makers” (1843); “The Forsaken Home” (1843); “The Little Pin-Headers” (1843); “The Lace-Runners” (1844). Although Tonna continues to be critically obscure, recent literary historians have registered the full range of her writing on the Ten Hours Movement.It is important to acknowledge the work of literary historians such as Fryckstedt, Kestner, Kovacevic, Kanner and (in particular) Neff, which first began the process of raising Tonna's critical profile. Nonetheless, they have perpetuated Kydd's perception of her minor role by persistently characterizing her as meekly following where Ashley led. Wanda Fraiken Neff, for example, depicts Tonna as his “faithful” supporter, someone who “reflected his views” (35, 68). Similarly, Joseph Kestner describes her as having merely “accepted Ashley's fervid word” (93).

RECENT ATTEMPTS at a critical recuperation of the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge have largely sidestepped the issue of her work's commitment to a religious perspective. June Sturrock's brief 1995 monograph, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge's Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women, is focused on the way in which Yonge's Tractarian beliefs provided a framework within which a conservative feminist account of an independent social role for women could be articulated, but takes those beliefs themselves as givens. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström's more substantial 1984 study, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge's Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form, whilst noting a relationship between apparent changes in Yonge's religious beliefs and differences in the form of her novels, is characterized by a formalist mode of interpretation which tends to bracket off the question of how Yonge presents religious belief in her novels from any wider context in Victorian religious thought.

WHILE MUCH OF THE CRITICAL DISCUSSION of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847) characterizes the novel as simplistic, conventional, and conservative, it is, in fact, intellectual, controversial, and highly original. In particular, Brontë challenges traditional Christian assumptions as she enters into debates which were seen to be reserved for the clergy alone. One of the novel's challenges to institutional Christianity centers around sermons. The formation of her novel as an exemplary sermon represents her entrance into an exclusively male genre of the time – theological treatises and handbooks on sermon style. As she wrote the novel, no major Christian institution in England allowed women to preach.There are a few minor exceptions. For example, some Primitive Methodist women preached throughout the nineteenth century (Chadwick 379). Women acted as ministers and preachers in the Society of Friends as early as the 1830s if not before (Chadwick 1: 422–23), and, largely because of the efforts of Catherine Booth, the Salvation Army allowed women to be ministers and to preach (Helsinger, Lauterbach, and Veeder 2: 180–83), although this occurred after Brontë's death. There was virtually no support within Christian institutions for women to enter into what John Ruskin, in “Of Queen's Gardens,” called that “one dangerous science for women,” theology (143). Thus, Brontë's decision to publicly state her opinions on preaching contravenes the parameters for a woman established and upheld by Christian institutions of her day.

VICTORIAN CULTURE treated idolatry as a serious and compelling moral problem. For Victorian Protestants, this term meant more than simply the worship of graven images: it became the privileged term for denoting any devotion to a person, thing, or idea that hinders or supplants one's relation to God. It is this more inclusive meaning that especially fascinated the Victorians, and which, in the form of human idolatry, became the focus of so many marriage-plot novels in the period. Since the Reformation, Protestant theologians and writers have emphatically linked idolatry to Roman Catholicism, arguing that its excessive emphasis on external forms of worship obscures God. This connection took on renewed significance in Britain during the early and mid-nineteenth century, an era which witnessed such political milestones as Roman Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the re-establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses in 1850.The events of 1850 around the restoration of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical government in Britain were popularly deemed the “Papal Aggression.” According to historian Paz, “Roman Catholics themselves added fuel to the Protestant fire” by essentially declaring “supreme spiritual authority over the nation and [denying] the validity of Anglican orders” (9). The distinctive anti-Catholicism of Victorian culture reflects a widespread anxiety about the growing influence of Roman Catholicism – an anxiety, I argue at length elsewhere, that took the form of an obsession with idolatry.

IN EMILY BRONTË'S Gondal poem, “How do I love on summer nights” (1842–43), the spirit of Lord Alfred S. gloomily haunts Aspin Castle, shut out from heaven after committing suicide for the love of Queen A.G.A.References to Brontë's works are from Chitham and Roper's edition of her poetry and Nestor's edition of Wuthering Heights. Brontë's central Gondolian figure, A.G.A. dominates every poem in which she appears or is evoked, a ruthless and yet ardent ruler, a powerful rhetorician, the murderer of her newly-born daughter and direct cause of the deaths and exile of her several lovers. Yet for Alfred, A.G.A. is almost divine, inspiring in him a fervent passion from which he cannot escape, even as a ghost. His “angel brow,” the reader is informed, is marked by a “brooding” “shade of deep dispair / As nought devine could ever know,“ intimating the dark depression from which Alfred suffers alone: not even a god could contemplate such misery (ll.37–39). Alfred's despair shifts to delirium once he is within the castle itself, a transition marked by the appearance of a statue of A.G.A. situated in the interior gallery. Now corroded, its form “mouldered all away,” the statue still outshines the other figurines and portraits in the room, and Alfred addresses it as “Sidonia's deity,” a supreme being capable of rousing wild and unruly states of mind.

MY SUBJECT is doubly suspect: polemical religious fiction by Frances Trollope. Victorian Studies has, of course, always stressed the centrality of religion to nineteenth-century culture. Yet, paging through Robert Lee Wolff's magisterial 1977 Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England, what is striking is how little advantage has been taken of his work, how few of the fictions he describes have made their way into critical conversation about the Victorian novel. In 1989 John Sutherland mapped what he called the unexplored “lost continent” of non-canonical Victorian fiction (1). Modernism's lingering legacy has meant, I would argue, that novels of religious controversy by women continue to comprise one of that continent's darkest reaches.For general surveys of nineteenth-century Anglo-American religious fiction, see Franchot, Leavis, Maison, Reynolds, Wolff. More specific studies of individual writers and works are beginning to be done, as suggested by new work presented at the 1998 18th- and 19th-Century Women Writers Conference (e.g., Cronin; Freed; Griffin, “Fathers”; LaMonaca; Melnyk).

IN AN ESSAY SHE ORIGINALLY published in the Examiner and later reissued in the collection A Housewife's Opinions, the Victorian feminist poet Augusta Webster imaginatively fuses two female figures: the medieval cloistered saint and the saintly, cloistered wife of her own age. Her “Saint Opportune” is a parody, the life of a most “unobtrusive saint,” whose name (taken from a street in Poitiers) is “the epitome of her virtues, her charter of beatification” (“Opportune” 203). “In all things always acceptable,” Saint Opportune “was, of course, not a martyr,” because “in her day anybody could have been that, and her grace was an exceptional one” (203–04). Rather, she led “an existence of honourable safety” (204), being a child so trouble-free that her clothes always fitted just right, and “she neither lagged behind her teachers' hopes nor prematurely outshot their skill” (206), “a girl about whom it was remarkable that she never was remarked” (208), eventually becoming medieval version of the Victorian domestic saint: St. Opportune's career as a wife was the perfect accomplishment of the highest auguries of her youth. No matter at what moment of unpunctuality her husband came in bent upon his dinner, whether a quarter of an hour before time or three-quarters of an hour behind, the soup was steaming ready in the tureen, the boiled fish firm and flaky or the fried fish at the evanescent perfect phase of crispness, the joint done to a turn as he liked it, the entrees at their harmonious prime, nothing soddened, nothing hurried, all ready and right with no too much and no too little, according to the variable standard of the tastes of the master of the house. (210) Capping her career of “inspired unobtrusiveness” (208), Saint Opportune withdraws to a convent when her first wrinkle appears (so her husband can be remarried to “a damsel of pleasing aspect who reminded him of her in her fairer days” [211]), only to die soon afterwards so as to oblige her order: She did not live long in the cloister. A neighbouring convent lost a nun of great sanctity, who on her burial began working miracles. St. Opportune's convent, till then the leading one in those parts, was much mortified but saw no remedy. St. Opportune at once died and instantly worked a miracle. What that miracle was this investigator has failed to discover; but it restored the convent to its former supremacy and proved to all after ages the right of St. Opportune to beatification. (212)

ELIZA KEARY (1828–1914) AND HER sister Annie (1825–1879) are two of many Victorian women writers whose works remain largely unexplored by scholars. Although Eliza Keary's poetry has been singled out as containing “unorthodox” rhyme and meter for the time period, a limited amount of criticism has taken Keary's work into consideration (Lustig).See Armstrong's comparison of Eliza Keary's “Christine and Mary” with Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (26–28); Roden discusses the homoerotic and heteronormative aspects of “Christine and Mary.” He also locates Keary in a context of mysticism (“Religious Homoeroticism” 1–14). Her poetry's subject matter is also “unorthodox”: “Christine and Mary: A Correspondence,” the longest poem in Keary's first volume of poetry, Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874), explores religious choices through sensual imagery which might not have had the sympathy, although probably did have the interest, of a mainstream Victorian readership.Analyses of religious and sexual spaces that intersect in Victorian literature have primarily centered on male writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Henry Newman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture discusses these writers as well as Christina Rossetti and Eliza Keary in the context of mystic asceticism and sexuality. See Buckton for a discussion of Newman's autobiography as sexual self-confession; Saville deals with Hopkins's poetry in the context of his religion and his sexuality; Hanson's work addresses Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement within the contexts of Catholicism and homosexuality. An emphasis on the religious aspects of Victorian women's writings can be found in Krueger and Melnyk. See Roden's “‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’” and “The Kiss of the Soul” for more on Christina Rossetti. Keary's poem consists of a set of epistles between Mary, who has recently joined a Roman Catholic convent, and her female friend Christine, who remains outside of the cloister. While women in convents were typically depicted as repressed, unnatural, and unproductive since they chose not to seek marriage and motherhood, Keary's character Mary offers a version of the cloister in which women can express and fulfill their desires and are productive through creative enterprises. Keary's portrayal of the convent forces us to consider the ways in which conventual life during this time afforded some women a positive, creative, and fulfilling alternative to the more socially acceptable, although not necessarily socially- or self-empowering, roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, or spinster.

A PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN exhorts a young Jewish woman to tell her father of her conversion, and reminds her of Matthew 10.37: “He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (Ball 36). A Roman Catholic priest rebukes a young woman who worries that a monastic vocation would be disloyal to her mother, and reminds her too of Matthew 10.37: “I must choose between God and my mother. I could not serve both; and if I made choice of the latter, I would lose my immortal soul, and be damned, quoting the passage, ‘whoever loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy to be my disciple” (O'Gorman 12–13). The same Biblical text – yet each polemicist appropriates it for noticeably different ends. In the first case, the danger lies not in young Thirza's own rejection of her father but his rejection of her; his anti-Christian sentiments have negated in advance her own challenge to his authority. But in the second, Edith O'Gorman faces a church hierarchy that equates familial affection with demonic evil. Whereas the Jewish convert mournfully recognizes that her decision may alienate her parents, the would-be nun must actively repudiate her own family.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1850 a change occurred in the way the Roman Catholic Church in England governed its affairs. Since the Reformation, Catholic priests in England had worked under the authority of four Vicars-Apostolic, who derived their titles from the points of the compass. By 1850, however, that arrangement had become impractical; Irish-Catholic immigrants had been pouring into England attempting to escape the potato famine, and the Pope responded by appointing twelve bishops to such cities as Birmingham and Manchester. In retrospect, this restoration of the Catholic hierarchy appears to be nothing more than a practical measure, which indeed had the effect of giving English Catholics greater independence from Rome, for where the Vicars-Apostolic had answered directly to the Pope, these new bishops were led by an English Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman, who in 1850 became the newly appointed Cardinal of Westminster. From Wiseman's point of view, however, the new hierarchy symbolized much more than a mere practicality: it represented the first step in what he fondly envisioned as the eventual reclamation of England from heresy. Wiseman's inflammatory language sparked a widespread and furious agitation on the part of English Protestants. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy quickly became known as the Papal Aggression, and it was met with a fierce and prolonged outcry. Protesters wrote pamphlets, got up petitions, and even participated in riots and bonfires where the Pope was burned in effigy. The agitation went on for well over a year and involved people from virtually all walks of life.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand Victorian culture without understanding the role of religion in shaping, consolidating, and challenging that culture. In countless ways, religion was integral to Victorian culture: Britain and Ireland had established churches; political and religious questions were often intertwined, as with the Maynooth Controversy and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; religious questions were regularly enacted in public, as when the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy (1850) inspired riots and the hangings in effigy of the pope and the newly-created Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. Victorians regularly sought religious meanings in cataclysmic events; the response to the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) was framed in religious terms, as Britons from the queen on down sought a divine explanation for the uprising. As that response shows, religion – specifically, Protestant Christianity – was an important component of national identity, as Linda Colley has argued in Britons: Forging the Nation.

IN RECENT YEARS, literary critics and historians have become more conscious of how advantageous it can be to bring together scholarly work in religious studies and contemporary theories of gender. While the texts I will evaluate here exhibit greater or lesser degrees of awareness of current theory in its purest form, all share considerable interest in analyzing Victorian religion with respect to questions of sex. From traditional approaches of social history applied to women to specific studies of authors, from collections of critical essays to a book-length edition of the gems of a nineteenth-century sisterhood's archive, the fields of religious studies and gender studies can no longer be separated in critical practice to the degree that they had been in the past. In general, cultural studies approaches have yet to catch up with the rich scholarly possibilities offered by an exploration of Victorian Christianity. For the purpose of this essay, I have not delved deeply into works of postcolonial studies, nor have I focused on book-length inquiries into traditions outside Christianity. To be sure, there is much to investigate in those areas. But for the most part, as of this writing, book-length publications are simply not yet available.Cynthia Scheihberg's important book, Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), was released too late for full inclusion in my essay, but should be recognized as among the significant new work in the field. We are working with a field that is only twenty years old, one that has seen substantial growth and suggested numerous directions for future research.