From The Victorian Experience, an English Literature BA module

1. Religion and Science

2.  Fundamentally a religious age – more so than the
preceding 18th C. Why?
 Fear that Enlightenment scepticism had led to the
French Revolution
 Belief that religion bound a society together:
 “an established religion...is the sanction of moral
obligation; it gives authority to the commandments,
creates a fear of doing wrong, and a sense of
responsibility for doing it....” (J.A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith)

3.  Sermons frequently
published – some
bestsellers
 Bibles available at railway
stations
 Missionary fervor –
David Livingstone 1813-
73, doctor and
missionary, a national
hero. London Missionary
Society

4.  Catholic Emancipation –
1828 & 1829 acts of
parliament removed
restrictions on Catholics in
public office
 Tractarians and Oxford
Movement in the Church
of England: John Henry
Newman, John Keble and
Edward Pusey. regarded
the Church of England as a
branch of the universal
Church led by the Pope

5.  The Methodist movement reached 489,000 by 1850.
 evangelical revivals in Wales and Scotland, and sects
such as the Baptists and Unitarians won mass
adherence in mining and industrial districts across
Britain.
 Nonconformist movements all emphasized a simple
form of religion, dependent on the Bible, without
ritual, and with open-air sermons to attract support.

6.  Survey of Public Worship Sunday 30 March 1851
 Mann commented that “a sadly formidable portion of
the English people are habitual neglecters of the
public ordinances of religion”
 7 Million (out of 18 million population) attended
public worship
 400, 000 Catholic
 3.35 million Anglican
 3.25 million Protestant Dissenting / Nonconformist
(Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Presbyterian,
Unitarian)

7.  David Friedrich Strauss
(1808-1874)
 Das Leben Jesu’or ‘Life of
Jesus’ (1835) (Translated
by the then unknown
‘George Eliot’ in 1846)
 “"the most pestilential
book ever vomited out of
the jaws of hell.” (Lord
Shaftsbury)
 Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-
1872)
 In The Essence of
Christianity’ (1841) he
states: “the secret of
theology is
anthropology”. -man is
not made in God’s image,
but rather, it is the other
way round.

8.  William Paley’s ‘Natural Theology’ (1802)
 Divine wisdom could be discerned in nature which
seemed to offer an independent proof of the existence
of God (the watchmaker)
 Only an intelligent Designer could have created
animals and plants, just as only an intelligent
watchmaker can make a watch:
 ‘The marks of design are too strong to be got over.
Design must have had a designer. That designer must
have been a person. That person is GOD.’

9.  Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ (1830)
undermined the account of the Book of Genesis as it
asserted that the mineralized remains of dead
organisms preserved in the layers of the stratified rock
formations, told of a universe infinitely older than the
one in the Genesis.
 Lyell developed James Hutton’s principle of
‘uniformitarianism’ : that what seem the most stable
elements of the world have changed gradually over
time due to observable phenomena such as volcanic
activity and wind and water erosion.

10.  Robert Chambers ‘Vestiges of the Natural History
Creation’ (1844)
 His argument of the development hypothesis was
mainly drawn from the sciences such as geology,
astronomy and Lamarck’s evolutionary theory
 Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that organic changes were
to be understood as a response to changed
environmental circumstances rather than being fixed
and created by Divine power. E.g. The giraffe:

11. Romantics to VIctorians

12.  Respected zoologist / marine biologist +
fervent Evangelical
 Invented seawater aquarium, popularised
natural science,
 Omphalos (1857)
 Attempts to reconcile Biblical story of
Creation with Charles Lyell’s Principles of
Geology (1830)
 explaining former changes of earth’s surface, by
reference to causes now in operation
 ‘Prochronism’ – since living things had cycle
of reproduction & development, God must
have created them in act of developing
 Son Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) – poet,
author, critic
 Memoir Father and Son (1907) – portrays
father as fundamentalist zealot whose faith
he rejects

13.  1831-1836 Voyage of the Beagle
 1836-38 Development of the main
elements of the theory of evolution
 1859 The Origin of the Species by
Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed.
 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection
in Relation to Sex
 1872 The Expression of Emotions in
Man and Animals

14.  Random variation within populations
 Natural selection in the struggle for existence
 Transmutation of Species
 Common Ancestor(s)
 The Principle of Diversification
 The Tree of Life

15.  “the view, which most naturalists until recently entertained, and
which I formerly entertained – that each species has been
independently created - is erroneous.” Species had not been
made in their final form by God but changed and evolved over
time.
 “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most
exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the
production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is
grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

16.  Darwin’s Bulldog – Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873)
 1860 Oxford Evolution Debate between Huxley and
Wilberforce
 “First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of
the action of the principle of natural selection to MAN himself, as
well as to the animals around him. Now, we must say at once, and
openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with
single expressions in the word of God on that subject of natural
science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in
our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole
representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is
its proper subject-matter. Man's derived supremacy over the earth;
man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-
will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the
incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal
Spirit,—all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading
notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of
God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son assuming to himself his
nature.” Wilberforce, Review of Origin of the Species

17.  George Combe:The
Constitution of Man,
Considered in Relation to
External Objects,
published in 1828,
became a best seller

18.  Mesmerism claimed
miraculous medical cures
could be affected by
manipulating the invisible
flows of ‘animal
magnetism’ that passed
through and between
bodies.
 The Mesmerist would
throw his subject into a
trance, allowing the
passage of energy into the
weaker body of his patient,
as if literally recharging
their battery

19.  George Eliot’s novella, The
Lifted Veil, (1959) - a
central male character
Latimer who has psychic/
clairvoyant powers. He
marries unhappily. When
his wife’s maid dies, a
blood transfusion is able,
briefly, to bring her back
from the dead so that she
can name her murderer.

20.  Spiritualism contested
doctrines of eternal
damnation for a much more
liberal conception of the
afterlife.
 Many men of science were
also converts, most famously
the evolutionary theorist
Alfred Russel Wallace,
 Spiritualism was consistently
figured in terms of new
magical technologies like the
telegraph or telephone.