The Little Professor

The death of the triple-decker in literature classrooms (or not)

Back in golden days of yore, when everyone walked ten miles to campus in whiteout conditions (barefoot!), professors assigned a different Victorian novel every week.  And the students (they were real students then, in golden days of yore), smiled gratefully and read.  Every.  Single.  Word.  In fact, they read every single word while walking ten miles to campus in whiteout conditions (barefoot!).

This utopian vision has been provoked by a thread at VICTORIA--see #5, 6, and 7--on students' inability, or sheer unwillingness, to read long novels.  Some contributors have already offered their own skeptical observations, noting that students have resisted long books since, if not the Dawn of Time, then at least most decades in recent memory; indeed, some faculty of my parents' generation (including, come to think of it, my parents) have confessed that while different books often were assigned every week, many students (dare I whisper it?) failed to read them. 

To be somewhat less snarky, I'm going to offer up a depressingly dull observation: confronted with, say, Bleak House or Middlemarch, my undergraduates tend to dig in and read.  I'm sure that they grumble when safely out of earshot--but yet, the reading gets done.  I've never yet had anyone come up with a creative (or merely dishonest) explanation for his or her inability to finish a long novel; if anything, some of the students seem to feel as though they've actually accomplished something by getting through nine hundred pages of Victorian prose.   These undergraduates are surely as TV-, film- and web-oriented as any other undergraduates in the USA; shouldn't they break out in hives when confronted with The Way We Live Now? (Not that I've ever confronted undergraduates with The Way We Live Now, but you get the idea.)  This is not to deny that other people have students who try to wiggle their way out of anything longer than a short-short--merely to note that not all students respond to the Great Visual Age in the same way. 

It's true that I don't expect students to exist solely on a diet of Bleak House-length fiction.  When teaching any Victorian novel-related course, I do my best to vary novels according to length and difficulty.  For example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret--besides being a good example of Victorian sensation fiction--reads so quickly that students have reported finishing it off in a couple of nights; it thus offers a helpful breathing space before, say, Middlemarch.  But the students know perfectly well that they're getting into something that will require anywhere from 150-300 pages of reading per week, and most appear to survive the experience.  This cannot be all that unusual.  (Either that, or I'm just so intimidating that students tremble at the thought of the vengeance I might wreak should they fail to do the reading on time.  Granted, at 5'3'', I'm not really capable of wreaking anything especially drastic, but one never knows.) 

This Week's Acquisitions

(I go to England; I read Victorian anti-Catholic sermons.  I come home; I find Victorian anti-Catholic sermons in my mailbox.)

• G. P. R. James, Darnley; Or the Field of the Cloth of Gold (Richard Bentley, 1836).  "Bentley's Standard Novels" reprint of James' historical novel about Henry VIII and company, set at (obviously) the famous meeting between Henry and Francis I.  The Victorian Web has S. C. Hall's account of James, who, along with W. H. Ainsworth, was one of Scott's most popular literary descendants.
• Catherine Gore, Sketches of English Character, 2 vols. (Nonsuch, 2005).  Reprint of Gore's satirical short stories.  There is a biographical sketch of Gore, a popular silver-fork novelist, at Project Corvey; see also the brief essay on Gore's plays at British Women Playwrights around 1800. 
• Jose Saramago, Seeing (Harcourt, 2006).  Sequel to Blindness. 
• Katharine Weber, Triangle (FSG, 2006). Takes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy as its jumping-off point.
• Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil (Sceptre, 2002). Did the great magician kill Warren G. Harding? The title character is very loosely based on a real magician, Charles J. Carter.
• Elizabeth Arthur, Antarctic Navigation (Bloomsbury, 2004).  A young woman tries to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the South Pole. 
• John Wing et al., "The Candle Not Put Out:" Or an Account of the Tercentenary Commemoration of the Martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, Holden at Thurcaston, in the County of Leicester (Where Latimer Was Born); With a Sermon Preached in the Parish Church, and Speetches Delivered on the Lawn of the Rectory, on the 16th Day of October, 1855 (Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1856).  Sermons, celebratory speeches, etc. 
• George Fyler Townsend, The Church's Appeal to the People of England; Or, a Reply to Mr. O'Connell: A Letter, &c.  (Rivington, 1839).  An anti-Catholic attack on Daniel O'Connell.  Townsend is better (only?) known for his translation of Aesop's Fables. 
• Richard Parkinson, The Moderation of the Church of England, Preached in the Collegiate Church of Christ, in Manchester, on SUNDAY the 27th of APRIL, 1834 (Rivington, 1834).  Sermon on the Thirty-Nine Articles. 

Little Jet-lagged Professor

I'm home.  Hooray!

The various flowers and bushes in the front yard have grown, not died.  Hooray!

My luggage is still in Philadelphia.  (In fact, half the people on the plane arrived to find that their luggage was...lagging behind.) Come to think of it, the last time I had to fly US Airways out of Philly, they also neglected to send my luggage on.  I begin to detect a pattern here. 

The Progress of Morals: Day 9 (and Ultimate)

Number of sermons read: 8 (98 sermons total--just missed the 100-sermon mark)
Date range: 1850-1896
Authors of interest: Francis Close again. 
Running themes: Ritualism; the meaning of "Reformation"; jurisdiction; ceremonial.
Points of interest: Well, this trip certainly blew a hole in my plan to write the essay in chronological format--reasons for disliking Catholicism don't change between the 1820s and the 1890s.  Instead, we have shifts of emphasis depending on the provocation at hand; for example, the Ritualist movement provokes discussions of ceremonial and typology, Leo XIII's "Apostolicæ Curæ" provokes discussions of spiritual jurisdiction, and so forth.  But the basic arguments against the RCC don't alter.  That being said, Dissenters, High Church Anglicans, and Evangelicals all stake out different positions (such as, for example, different positions on why the Reformation was important and what its key principles were).  It's also interesting that the "rhythm" of anti-Catholic sermons doesn't match the rhythm of anti-Catholic fiction and non-sermon propaganda, both of which are still going strong when the sermons themselves taper off.

The Progress of Morals: Day 8 (and Penultimate)

Number of sermons read: 9 + 1 tract (this brings the total to 90)
Date range: 1865-1877
Authors of interest: Francis Close, the Dean of Carlisle.
Running themes: Ritualism, dangers thereof; the confessional; Catholicism/Ritualism = Judaism (or a corrupted version of same); the Mass.
Points of interest: Today mostly saw people fulminating against Ritualism--that is, the emerging Anglo-Catholic movement.  In some ways, even more interesting than the reading was my discovery that anti-Catholic sermons go kaflooey (yes, yes, a technical term, I know) in the 1880s and 1890s; there are still some to be found, but the number drops off very abruptly.  Anti-Catholic novels, meanwhile, are still going strong. 
Other excitement: Thanks to a reader of this blog, I got to take a trek into the British Library stacks--where I saw many books. Very many books.  An overwhelming number of books.  Cool, as we  Yanks like to say.     Clearly, I must come back soon...

Why Protestantism is "older" than the Roman Catholic Church: A brief excursion into some commonplaces of Victorian Protestantism

A commenter below asked, very sensibly, how the Victorians could argue that the Roman Catholic Church was "novel" in comparison to the Church of England.  A quick glance at any handy timeline would, indeed, seem to suggest that Catholicism came first.  There was, however, a very different historical narrative available to our Victorians--one that they had in fact inherited from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [1].  Let's see how my sermonizers explain what appears to be a paradox.

First, everyone posits that there was a "pure" (a favorite keyword) and Apostolic Church--a Church immediately plagued by "corruptions."  The corruptions in question were borrowed from Judaism (in particular, the Levitical rule of law) and the older pagan traditions of Greece and Rome.  By contrast, as F. Close argued in 1835,

...The doctrines which we hold are derived immediately from our Lord himself, or from the writings of his apostles; the peculiar tenets of Romanism, were taught and received after the canon of Scripture was closed, and its writers were deceased; it follows, of necessity, that the faith we profess is the primitive faith, and that most agreeable to the word of God. Our doctrines and discipline are not innovations; they are as old as Christianity itself. Our enlightened ancestors rejected indeed those “traditions of men” which made “the word of God of none effect,” and swept away those superstitions which defaced the venerable structure of the Church; but all that was founding her according to the revealed God remains, even as it was in the apostolic times. We are not “setters forth of strange gods,” we worship “the God of our fathers.” [2]

Notice the word "innovations" here, because it's one of the linchpins of anti-Catholic argument.  Roman Catholic doctrines add on to what the Apostles taught; the Reformers return Christianity to the original apostolic doctrines.  If it isn't in Scripture, it isn't actually Christianity.  In the words of Nugent Wade, "we retained our Catholic standing, and the great Catholic verities, the primitive truths and practices of the Church of CHRIST, as sanctioned by GOD’s Word, we removed those incrustations of deadly error under which they were well-nighed buried..." [3] Again, "removed" and "incrustations": Catholicism covers the original truths.  We are told over and over again that the Reformation is not a "novelty," but a removal, restoration, or return--not a new form of Christianity, in other words, but Christianity as the Apostles would have understood it.  Some authors further held that the Roman Catholic Church they knew only dated back to 1564.

This explains why the Victorians thought that Protestantism was, in fact, older than Roman Catholicism, but what about the Church of England?  Here, the debate rests on St. Augustine's mission to Canterbury in the late sixth century.  (No, not that Augustine; this one.)  Did Augustine bring Christianity to England, or not? High Church (and Catholic) authors argued that Augustine was responsible for converting England; Evangelicals, however, argued that Christianity had already been established--perhaps by St. Paul, perhaps by Joseph of Arimathea.  Granted, things were not in the most Christian of states when Augustine arrived, but that was the fault of the Anglo-Saxons.  In any event, for evangelical authors, Augustine didn't bring Christianity--he brought Roman Catholicism.  Thus, from this point of view, just as Protestantism ("Apostolic Christianity") predates Catholicism, so the Church of England predates the Catholic Church in England. 

[1]  For the relevant background, Anthony Milton is enormously helpful.
[2]  The Rev. F. Close, The Protestant Faith, or “The Way Called Heresy.” Being the Substance of a Sermon... (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1835), 7-8.
[3] The Rev. Nugent Wade, Romish Aggression: The Spirit in Which We Should Resist It.  A Sermon... (London: John Masters, 1850), 7. 

The Progress of Morals: Day 7

Number of sermons read: 9 (under the "ten items per day" regime, ordering something that turns out to be irrelevant can certainly put a crimp in your style)
Date range: 1850-1867
Authors of interest: In addition to yet another appearance by Hugh M'Neile, today saw the arrival of Samuel Wilberforce, best remembered by Victorianists for a famous debate and by fans of Rumpole of the Bailey for inspiring Samuel "Soapy Sam" Ballard's nickname.   
Running themes: Ritualism; "Papal Aggression"; dangers of auricular confession.
Points of interest: Certain anniversaries were clearly "hot spots" for anti-Catholic preaching--for example, the internationally-observed Tercentenary of the Reformation (dates varied according to country), Nov. 5 (Gunpowder Plot), Nov. 17 (Queen Elizabeth's accession).  Today was also the first time I came across a clergyman explaining that the sermon he was delivering in 1859 had first been delivered in 1850.  (He got in trouble, apparently, because he forgot to edit the sermon adequately--a general remark about Romanizing priests in the pulpit was taken as referring to the church's previous incumbent...)

This Week's Acquisitions (UK edition)

• Anne Marsh Caldwell, Two Old Men's Tales (Nonsuch, 2005). Reprint of two Victorian novellas.
• --, The Chronicles of Dartmoor (Nonsuch, 2005). Caldwell's last novel. 
• Ali Smith, The Accidental (Penguin, 2006).  A mysterious woman drops in, shakes up a somewhat discombulated family.
• Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (Phoenix, 2005).  A new(er) biography.
• George Taylor, Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre (Manchester, 1993). Acting styles, Victorian performance theory, etc.
• Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius (NPG, 2003).  One of the Victorian period's most famous photographers.
• Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: Portraits Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (NPG, 2004).  An attempt to rehabilitate Watts' reputation, which faded in the twentieth century. 

The Progress of Morals: Day 6

Number of sermons read: 12
Date range: 1826-1851
Authors of interest: Hugh M'Neile again, along with the High Churchman Charles Gutch.
Running themes: prophecy; the "Papal Aggression"; figurative vs. literal; sacraments; idolatry; true charity vs. false "liberality."
Points of interest: Despite extreme provocation, I refrained from jumping in the nearest time machine to chastize yet more examples of rhetorical modesty. 

Scattered Musings (ongoing UK edition)

• I'm as annoyed by spam as the next person, but there's something vaguely amusing (er, for once) about finding porn spam in one of my "Progress of Morals" entries.  Apparently, not that much progress.
• The Telegraph has a print ad campaign celebrating the prowess of its sportswriters by superimposing their faces onto images of various great writers.  So we've got somebody as Dickens, which makes sense, and somebody else as Shakespeare, which also makes sense, and yet a third somebody as William Pitt the Younger--which doesn't, political affiliations aside. 
• Whenever I take a trip, I amuse myself by checking the real estate ads to see if I could buy a place large enough for my books.  Here, that would be a definite "no"--a 1500 sq. ft. condo, which is just a little bigger than my house, is going for $1,000,000 USD.  London real estate is, if possible, even pricier than NYC real estate.  (Incidentally, I'd like to know how one fits two bedrooms into a 443 sq. ft. apartment.)
• Ashamed as I am to admit it, I really miss US-style sodas.  You know--filled with ice to the top, as opposed to a few measly cubes (by special request!). 
• Cadbury's chocolate bars are ever so much better than Hershey's.  Just saying.