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An age ‘wandering between two worlds …’
It is commonplace to observe that the patterns of sensibility and sentimentality that characterised Victorian and Edwardian1 society consciously sought to transcend doubt. Informed by attitudes inherited from former generations, such patterns sought re-expression in a busy new age of expanding population, spreading industrialisation, and an increase in urbanisation, mobility, unemployment, and middle-class wealth. Common enough too are descriptions of the period as ‘a second great, and perhaps final, crisis for the Western conscience’ (Davis 2002:102) after the Reformation, and as an age of anguish, of agnostics and ‘honest doubters symptomatically torn between “yes” and “no” - suspended, like the age itself … between belief and disbelief’ (Davis 2002:100; cf. Chadwick 1970:112-150; Helmstadter & Lightman 1990; Symondson 1970). It was, in Matthew Arnold’s words, an age ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead|The other powerless to be born’ (Arnold 1994:71). Similarly, Bertrand Russell (1918) described the mood as:
all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces … concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. (p. 57)
Not only were the Church, Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis and Mill’s liberal utilitarianism responsible, to varying degrees, for the current state of society, but they also continued to shape the response. Although censuses of the period indicate that less than half the population (and less than 10% of the urban poor) regularly attended church services, Victorian Britain still possessed a deeply religious consciousness.2 The concern of this essay is to map in abbreviated form how one particular aspect of that consciousness - namely, the religious notion of holiness - was comprehended and expressed in a variety of ways.
Over a third of the books published between 1836 and 1863 were religious, and religious newspapers and tracts flourished. Not only did middle-class Evangelical preachers talk about ‘duty’ and ‘earnestness’ but so too did agnostics and working-class radicals. While church leaders sought to keep these words grounded in a religious milieu, the mounting influence of utilitarianism equated to a loss of their association with transcendence and a redefining of their meaning along more Benthamesque lines that carefully delineated between particular...