emma_in_dream

I was spurred to read this by a cracky AU set in the 1860s where John Watson was a cleric and Sherlock Holmes the lord of the manor. Holmes converted Watson to atheism (and homosexuality), leading to much angst as Watson had to break up with his fiancé and leave his profession. Crazy but incredibly enjoyable, it was *All We Ought To Ask* by achray.

Anyway, the author basically took the plot from Mrs Humphrey Ward’s *Robert Elsmere*. I’d heard of Mrs Humphrey Ward, of course. Viriginia Woolf wrote cruel things about her(1) and Nancy Mitford spoke of her books as a staple of her childhood.(2)

I was surprised to discover that there was a famous, Victorian novel about converting to atheism. One thinks in such stereotypes. *Robert Elsmere* was a runaway best seller, earning her 4000 pounds in the first year. This is about the same as a million today and does not include any money from American print runs because there were no trans-Atlantic copyright agreements at the time. It was widely read and discussed. *The Times* called it “a clever attack upon revealed religion”. Gladstone’s own copy contains extensive notations with his rebuttals of the arguments for atheism.

The basic plot is that a young clergyman, Robert, marries Catherine, an austere and puritanical Christian. They first bond over the death bed of a consumptive girl who has given birth to a bastard. He takes up a country living where they do much good for the poor. The squire of the area is a notorious atheist, but Robert finds himself strangely attracted to him and to his arguments. Eventually he is lead astray and begins to doubt the literal reality of the Bible and the literal incarnation of Christ. He comes to see Christ as a historical man who did good.

Riven with self-loathing, he quits his ministry and takes his long-suffering wife and child to a London slum where they do good works for the poor and set up a kind of a fellowship church based on following the teachings of the historical Jesus. Then he dies of what he first thinks is ‘clergyman’s throat’ but is really one of those vague Victorian illnesses – consumption? cancer? something fatal anyway. His good works live on after him.

There are various sub-plots, including one where Catherine’s younger, frivolous sister Rose is attracted to an outright cynic and atheist but realises he is not the right sort even though he does appreciate her violin playing. Most of the novel, though, is a sympathetic exploration of a person’s religious doubts. Catherine is probably presented as superior in that her devotion is unthinking and all-encompassing but she is also puritanical and narrow minded. Robert does at least have the merit of trying to do good even though he falls into the error of over-reliance on reason.

It’s a chunky novel, of the classic three volume Victorian style. Mrs Humphrey Ward continued writing in this style until 1920, though her work gradually went out of favour. Also, she went against the current of the time by becoming increasingly more anti-women’s rights. She helped found the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage Movement, as she thought that women would lose their moral authority if they gained the vote. (Incidentally, I long to psycho-analyse a woman who earned much more money than her husband but who erased her own existence enough to call herself by both his first and last names. Her real name was Mary Augusta Ward, nee Arnold. Also, I find it fascinating that she loved learning but accepted that she could only access the great libraries of Oxford by marrying a don. To live in this state of cognitive dissonance seems to me ito be impressive.)

Her exploration of the conversion to atheism was probably influenced by her father’s conversion to Catholicism in her childhood. Her mother was so enraged by this that she lobbed a brick through the cathedral window on the day of his baptism. Her father, who seemed to be a bit of a wishy washy wobbler, later converted back to Anglicanism which allowed him to take up a chair at Oxford. No doubt discussions of religion were part of her upbringing as she was part of the Arnold clan. Her grandfather was Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby who was prominent in the Broad Church Anglican revival movement(4) and her uncle Matthew Hughes was a notable Victorian poet.

By the way, she lived in Tasmania for five years in her childhood. Australians are usually so good at claiming people as our own who really aren’t – Errol Flynn, Mel Gibson, Phar Lap, the pavlova – but in this instance there is an utter silence.

1, “Mrs Ward is dead; poor Mrs Humphry Ward; and it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all – shovelled into the ground and already forgotten.”
2, Can't find my copy of *Love in a Cold Climate* but I recall Fanny finding the books in the spare bedrooms at Polly's mansion.
3, Yes, there really was such an organisation. My first boyfriend's mother (with whom I had little in common) was a founding member of Women against the Ordination of Women. WAOW.
4, A. C. Benson once observed of Arnold that, "A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion."