The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
question remains today of why The Dream of Gerontius was so popular with mainstream Victorian audiences. Our ingrained historicist instincts tell us that this should not have been the case. After all, Newman was the one who made purgatory a subject of national ire in the first place. When Newman first published Tract 90, his suggestion that Anglicans could believe in a non-Catholic version of purgatory stirred considerable controversy that lasted for decades after its publication. To understand the uproar that Newman caused, and subsequently calmed, requires entering into one of the mysteries of religious history in the Victorian period. Historians of religion have ventured their own theories to explain how Newman found an unexpected degree of public reacceptance a generation after the Oxford Movement, but few of these explanations take into account the surprisingly unchanging nature of Newman’s ideas about purgatory, the topic of some of his most popular and unpopular published works. For example, studies of the aftermath of the Oxford Movement tend to fold reconciliation into the rise of modern concepts of liberal tolerance and accounts of the turn toward ritualism in poetry, approaches that smooth over the startling inflexibility of Newman’s ideas about the afterlife over the years and across a major conversion.7 The most common explanation for the poem’s success is that Newman redeemed himself in publishing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua to wide acclaim in 1864, a year before The Dream. Not only did this autobiography help him trump Kingsley’s charges of his being a Catholic in disguise all along, it won him general acceptance and paved the way for the success of his future writing with wider audiences. There is additional evidence that a shift occurred in anti-Catholic sentiment in the early 1860s and that this movement had begun waning by the time Newman published both the Apologia and The Dream.8 These theories partly explain Newman’s reacceptance by the British public in the 1860s, but they do not explain how purgatory became palatable too—and a model of purgatory strongly resembling the one from Tract 90.
Given the outcry that he inspired, it seems impossible that his devotional poem on the subject should be warmly embraced, and not just hotly disputed. And yet, embraced it was. The Dream became one of the best-known and, moreover, best-loved Victorian consolation poems about death. Some scholars place it second to Tennyson’s In Memoriam.9 By 1888, the poem’s twenty-four published editions had made their way into numerous Victorian households. General Gordon carried it with him on his campaign in Egypt prior to his death in Khartoum, and Edward Elgar turned it into a successful choral opera. Poets and professors alike bestowed their stamp of approval. Algernon Charles Swinburne praised its “genuine lyric note,”10 and Francis Hastings Doyle, Oxford Professor of Poetry, devoted a lecture to the poem in which he said it deserved “high commendation.”11 Taking his commendation a step further, he urged the Oxford community to stop being “envenomed” by “the spirit of these religious differences” (123). The pièce de résistance is that no one better gratified Doyle’s wish than Newman’s old nemesis, Kingsley, who wrote in a private letter that he “read the Dream with awe and admiration. However utterly I may differ from the entourage in which Dr. Newman’s present creed surrounds the central idea, I must feel that that central idea is as true as it is noble.”12 These statements came from the same man who had proclaimed Newman “worse than dead to Englishmen” in Fraser’s Magazine a few years earlier.13 Although Kingsley later tempered his praise with poison in a public review of the poem, he still backhandedly admired “the wonderful beauty of its poetry,” thereby initiating a reviewer tradition of separating the poem’s “poetry” from its overt Catholic theology.14
Although it is no longer the critical favorite that it was in the nineteenth century, The Dream of Gerontius remains of vital relevance in illuminating a crucial shift in the Victorian era, a turn toward embracing maturity and gradualism over youthful fervor as a central trope for historical change.15 As a literary work, The Dream went beyond simply garnering praise from unlikely sources; more broadly, it had an unprecedented ability to convert individual consolation into larger public conciliation, successfully redirecting Oxford Movement animosities for public consumption twenty years later. The anger that had brewed over the Tracts for the Times and Newman’s subsequent conversion found a soothing balm in his writing in the 1860s, most especially in his popular and comforting work of death consolation literature, The Dream. Consolation, a quality often presented as the modest legacy of Tractarian devotional poets such as John Keble and Isaac Williams, proved central to Newman’s understated method of framing his writing for an increasingly divided readership in the 1860s.16 This soothing quality, which G. B. Tennyson has identified as the limited accomplishment of Tractarian poetry, has been framed as part of The Dream’s initial success. Yet it is important to recognize that Newman used the form of death consolation poetry in The Dream to accomplish broader goals that resonated beyond individual comfort. His poem moved readers from private solace toward a larger easing of public tensions, and it did so largely by promulgating a gradualist mode of maturation, presenting inconceivably slow development as the means to achieve profound change. This brand of gradualism appealed to those seeking comfort and counsel in facing death but also to men including Doyle who sought to move past the pains of the Oxford Movement toward a reconciliation effected first on literary grounds.
It was ultimately on these literary grounds that Newman would prove most influential in mainstream Victorian culture, for as I show in subsequent chapters, the ideal of a gentler purgatory oriented around maturation, which Newman and other Victorian theologians increasingly espoused, served as a recurring metaphor in novels that capture the gradual, introspective trials of adult life. One example, which offers an introductory insight into the presence of mid-Victorian eschatology in fiction of the period, appears in Villette, a novel published in 1853, well after Newman’s publication of Tract 90. In Villette, Brontë depicts a staunchly Protestant heroine, Lucy Snowe, storm-blown and seeking refuge in Catholic confession as well as in reading a Catholic theological book for “comfort,” a word that she repeats multiple times in discussing her heroine’s wary attraction to Catholicism. As Lucy recounts, the small theological work “possessed its own spell, and bound [her] attention at once. It preached Romanism; it persuaded to conversion. . . . The Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of the heretic’s hell as on account of the comfort, the indulgence, the tenderness holy Church offered.”17 The book sparks an immediate commentary on purgatory as the source of this sense of “tenderness” and “comfort,” for Lucy discusses how “the Catholic who had lost dear friends by death could enjoy the unspeakable solace of praying them out of purgatory” (413). This comforting model is clearly not Dante’s series of painful punishments but instead a uniquely Victorian conception of purgatory shaped by popular discussions of the afterlife midcentury, these discussions having been fostered by Newman and other vocal theologians of the period. And although Lucy treats these “indulgences” with suspicion, immediately bolstering her disavowal of Catholicism, the gradual model of purgatory that religious leaders like Newman advocated exerts a strange undercurrent in this secular novel, emerging at a time when Lucy seeks solace and undergoes strenuous introspection.
To trace the cultural pattern that I identify of purgatorial plotting in secular literary works, I begin by giving the religious-historical context for literary developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how Victorian ideas about the afterlife—many of which were shaped in crucial ways by Newman and the Oxford Movement—pervaded the culture more broadly, appearing not only in theological works but also in fiction. I subsequently chart the reception history of one of Newman’s most curiously popular works, The Dream, showing how Victorians themselves underwent a gradual conversion in their regard for Newman’s writing and eschatology. Placing The Dream in the context of Newman’s theological controversies allows for this new understanding of how eras and movements are themselves conversion stories writ large. Ultimately, if Tract 90 opened a rift in public discourse that resisted closure, artistic representations of purgatory as a maturational state helped purge resentments from previous generations. The popularity of Newman’s vision of the afterlife consequently speaks not only to a Victorian fascination with theorizing development across discourses but also to an emerging sense of historical and artistic consciousness oriented around gradualism and mature deliberation rather than revolutionary fervor.
I.