Goldsmith’s popularity was evident everywhere in the mid-Victorian period. He was held in great affection by many of the most important writers of the period. There were pressing contemporary reasons why references to Goldsmith’s novel can be found everywhere in the fiction of the period. The Vicar of Wakefield had by then come to be understood as a reworking of the Book of Job, and therefore an attempt to address the so-called problem of evil, which, as Jan-Melissa Shramm has persuasively argued, was one of the main intellectual problems addressed by the Victorian novel. Writers of fiction directly tackled the theological questions troubling their readers, particularly after the vexing decade of the 1840s in which the sheer extent of human suffering and natural evil was made clear to British readers through print culture in very powerful ways. This chapter will examines the vogue for the Vicar in the mid-century as a response to a diminishing providential aesthetic and argue that its failure to provide adequate solutions to the problem of evil may have contributed to Goldsmith falling out of favour by the end of the century.

Abandoning the notion that royalists were the custodians of a stable pre-war church, Chapter 8 explores some of the different trends, tensions and developments evident within royalist religious thinking in this decade. After outlining the official royalist position of support for the reforms of 1640-41, the chapter outlines some of the tensions, ranging from those divines keen to support further reforms to those ex-Laudians deploring the concessions already made. Concerns at the threat posed to episcopacy in peace negotiations led to more emphatic defences of the order as being integral to the royalist cause, and a renewed interest in Convocation. The chapter also traces new emphases in royalist thought that transcended some of the divisions between ex-Laudians and their critics, including moral reform and a providentialism which often echoed parliamentarian language. The royalist experience after defeat in the civil war is examined, tracing forms of resistance to new ministers and to the abolition of feasts such as Christmas, but also noting the ways in which royalists embraced compromise, appealing for toleration on the model of pre-war puritanism and also contemplating forms of limited conformity and liturgical adaptation. It concludes by arguing that royalist religion remained ideologically hybrid and contested.

This chapter shows how Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker used historical distance in their responses to Dred Scott. Parker tied the idea of the Constitution as the act of the ratifiers to the right of the people as interpreters. He believed that the founding generation’s expectation of abolition warranted a progressive popular reading. Lincoln insisted that the framers had used caution to word the Constitution in such a way that slavery would disappear from the American past once their descendants abolished the institution. That the Slave Power had obscured that expectation made it even more important to work towards its realization. Douglass also placed emphasis on the framers’ emancipationist expectations. He distinguished original antislavery meaning from obscuring post-founding-era construction and trusted that Americans would notice the distinction and then use the Constitution to usher in a new era of freedom. The slavery debates forced interpreters to confront historical distance, and Parker, Lincoln, and Douglass used it to insist on radically new readings of the Constitution. Historical distance had become an interpretive force in antebellum America.