Lance Butler claims that Victorian language was too immersed in Christianity for the modern reader to deduce a simple story about "loss of faith" in Victorian culture. At the same time, the forces that gave rise to doubt were sufficiently strong to mean that Victorian language also contained elements that disturbed faith. Thus the poets, novelists, and sages of the period were structuring a discourse that simultaneously relied on religion and undermined it.
Contents: Introduction; Endemic Doubt in Victorian Literature; Dickens, Carlyle and Hell on Earth; The Discourse of Religion among Victorian Doubters; Disbelieving Religiously: the 1870's and the Need for Compromise; "A Christianity in Harmony with our Whole Nature"; Truth's Holy Sepulchre: George Eliot and the Case of Daniel Deranda; A Possible Messiah: Henry Drummond's Analogy of Religion; Failed Violence in Victorian Fiction; "Unless the World is to Perish": Hardy and Christian Discourse.^R