The 1860s marked a change of attitude toward myth. Formerly dismissed as falsehood, it now became a way to meditate on origins and identity at a time when orthodox religious belief was coming into question and Britons began to think of their colonies as an Empire. Inspired by the linguist Max Müller’s [GK17]theories of Aryan heritage, and his own dislike of John Henry Newman’s Romanism, Charles Kingsley claimed that the British people’s race and culture were Teutonic. Similar ideas about the British character were allegorized in poetry. Focusing on poetic reenvisionings of classical, medieval, and Arthurian stories by Tennyson, Thomas Westwood, and William Morris, this chapter explores how these poems reflected, but also helped to create, a myth of Britishness.

This chapter looks at how Victorians constructed a genealogical relation to antiquity and the Bible, forming both as a cultural, intellectual and spiritual origin for modernity. It shows how philology was the discipline which linked theology and classics as disciplines, and how historiography and archaeology were mobilized to understand the present as the outcome of the past. In particular, it looks at how William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Kingsley, and Henry Montagu Butle, used translation, Homeric studies, historical fiction and cultural history to forge a contentious and contested relation between the biblical and classical pasts and modernity.

Victorian nature writing vacillated between escapist pastoral idealism and hands-on georgic realism. Its narrators were at once labourers and idlers, scientists and aesthetes. The genre’s hybridity allowed it to mediate between mechanistic paradigms of nature and religious beliefs and experiences. Natural environments were constructed as realms of both Darwinian struggle and spiritual revelation. Imagining nature appreciation as a form of self-culture sometimes encouraged a nascent ecological and humanitarian sensibility. However, Victorian nature writing remained generally anthropocentric, centring the human mind. Yet, some authors, particularly later in the period, also framed wild environments and organisms as radically alien and unknowable. These different tendencies were often expressed through rhetoric of strangeness and estrangement, which dovetailed with ambivalences about identity, place and belonging. While authors classified objects, creatures and plants as alternately native or foreign, these categories frequently became blurred or uncertain. Authors also equivocated on where to locate ‘nature’, tracing it through rural, coastal and urban areas, in the great outdoors and human homes. Authors discussed include John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Philip Henry Gosse, Margaret Gatty, Hugh Miller, Eliza Brightwen, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson.

Chapter 2 examines how adaptive appearance could problematise Victorian natural theology through the example of the parson-naturalist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley’s faith was bound up with ideals of truth and sincerity, which he imagined as divine values that God’s creation exemplified and symbolised. Adaptive appearance challenged this textual view of nature, suggesting that nature’s aspects served purely to promote organisms’ survival, often through deceit. It is argued that Kingsley sometimes tried to resolve this contradiction by locating truthfulness in the rise of science instead of in raw, animal nature. In texts such as Glaucus: Wonders of the Shore and his evolutionary fairy tale The Water-Babies, he depicts science as a providential realisation of God’s values. However, Kingsley also sought to preserve vestiges of moral symbolism in nature since this notion underlay both his religious faith and the Church’s authority in knowledge of the natural world. Kingsley’s insistence on nature’s symbolism cohered with his insistence on the spirituality of the body, preserving a link between matter and divinity. This rhetorical strategy would be echoed by other religiously committed commentators who sought to reconcile adaptive appearance with the notion of nature as a divine text.