Got readers?

One of the things that interests me about Victorian religious fiction (and other popular religious prose) is that always thorny problem known as "the audience."  As I (foot)note in the introduction to Book Two, it's easy enough to identify which texts were frequently purchased and distributed; once you get past Really Big Sellers like Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, though, it's not so easy to figure out who actually read the texts in question.   Sometimes, it's not altogether clear why a given book became so popular--my favorite example being Grace Aguilar's The Women of Israel, which keeps cropping up as a Sunday School prizebook (and sometimes gets free advertising *), even though the introduction explicitly argues that the book is intended to counteract the effects of Christian didactic works and insists that Jewish women "need not Christianity to teach us our mission..." (Was there context? Were little Protestant girls told not to read the introduction? Did nobody read the introduction?) Aside from my desire to entertain my readers by liveblogging some of the less competent examples of Victorian religious fiction, I keep reading these texts because the available scholarship hasn't yet come to a consensus on what was "major" or "minor" at the time.  What books did everyone read, or at least recognize (in much the same way that most people know something about Left Behind, even if they've never looked into a volume)? Which books were regularly used to proselytize? What about Catholic fiction, which scholars have just barely touched? And so forth.  (One of the nice things about digitization has been that it's much easier to search old memoirs and published correspondence for reference to such things.)

Of course, even those these novels appear to be omnipresent, a substantial contingent of readers disliked them intensely; the "yikes!" response from many secular (and religious, for that matter) twenty-first century readers isn't necessarily anachronistic.  George Eliot famously takes a whack at some of them in "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," but the anti-religious novel position is hardly an elitist one.  Caroline Fry, who admits to reading Father Clement, tells her correspondent that she is impressed by neither the "efficacy" nor the "general tendency" of these works.  A reviewer in the liberal Catholic journal The Rambler puts his or her finger on the central problem: "Stories in which the literary frame-work is prominently subservient to the inculcation of theological doctrine are rarely tolerable, either as stories or as theology."  This last point was a serious issue, precisely because many Christians (of all stripes) criticized the moral tendencies of contemporary fiction and called for Doctrinal Correctness, even as they frequently found themselves concluding that Doctrinal Correctness as such made for bad art.  There's an extremely lively debate to be found in the religious periodicals concerning the nature of religious fiction as literature; it's not as though nobody noticed that Truth without Fiction, and Religion without Disguise was a dreadful novel.  But then again, quite a lot of people thought that Geraldine was a reasonably good novel...

 

*--“But, mamma,” said Belle, “she is a Christian, I know from good authority, and I am prepared to love her because I love the Jewish nation,--of which she is a beautiful representative,--and have loved them ever since I read Grace Aguillar’s [sic] ‘Women of Israel.’”  C. A. O., Into the Light; Or, the Jewess (1867; Boston: Lee and Shepard, n.d.), 256. 

Comments

[CJColucci]

I have nothing but admiration for your willingness to slog through this stuff, and your ability to make questions about it interesting. I'd still like the cocktail party explanation of how you latched onto this topic for your life's work.

[Kaleberg]

I guess there wasn't a New York Times bestseller list back then, let alone an Amazon ranking system.