The Regaining of Faith: Reconversions among Popular Radicals in Mid-Victorian England

Abstract

There is a wealth of literature on Victorian religious doubt, and much of it is structured by implicitly defining pure faith in the context of nineteenth-century England as an organized, traditional, orthodox, trinitarian, and supernatural version of Christianity and then herding together people who deviate from this ideal at various points into vague categories such as “unbelief,” “infidelity,” “irreligion,” “honest doubt,” or “freethought.” Members of the numerically impressive group which is thereby constructed are then said to represent a strong trend that is given labels such as “the Victorian crisis of faith,” “the loss of faith,” or “secularization.” Much of this historiography is imbued with a Whig interpretation: these figures are seen as part of an inevitable movement toward the abandonment of religious beliefs by thinking people in the modern age as they progressed toward a more credible worldview. Indeed, the considerable attention that is paid to such people in the literature despite the fact that the Victorian age is often simultaneously declared to have been an extraordinarily religious one seems to be tacitly justified on the grounds that, although these figures may have been out of step with thespiritual confidence of their own generation, they were in step with the march of truth. The rhetoric of “honest doubt” is often tinged with the notion that a full appreciation of the fruits of modern thought and scientific inquiry would almost automatically lead to the abandonment of religious views; it is not just “honest” in the senseof candidly avowed and not derived from unworthy motives, but, rather, it is as if an “honest” examination ofthe facts could lead only to religious doubt. A contention of this study is that these interpretative tendencies have obscured a notable and telling countervailing pattern.