Andrew Sanders

The Argument from Tradition: Hypatia, Fabiola and Callista

‘During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised in the North, who … has contributed by his works … to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth.’1 So wrote the already celebrated incumbent of the University Church of Saint Mary in Oxford, the Rev. J. H. Newman, in 1839, attributing to Sir Walter Scott the creation of a cultural mood favourable to a national religious revival. A year earlier a fellow Tractarian, the Rev. John Keble, had noted much the same thing, though with a slightly more political edge: ‘[Scott’s] rod, like that of a beneficent enchanter, has touched and guarded hundreds, both men and women who would else have been reforming enthusiasts.’2 Scott, both men imply, had made conservatism romantic, inspiring a new respect for the old order and the old faith: the Church, its ceremonial, its symbolism, and even its clergy, could be honoured as elements of an ancient and fruitful tradition. In the years which succeeded Catholic Emancipation and the 1832 Reform Bill, however, progressive change, shocking enough to many, was in the wind, and the established Church seemed too obese and decayed an institution to resist its blast for long. For the Oxford Tractarians the Church’s real hope of survival lay in a new emphasis on its holiness and on its ancientness.

‘Romola’s Waking’: George Eliot’s Historical Novel

No other major Victorian novelist owed so profound and pervasive a debt to Sir Walter Scott as did George Eliot, and few reverenced him as consistently. On New Year’s Day 1860, G. H. Lewes presented her with a set of the Waverley novels inscribed on the fly-leaf of the first volume ‘To Marian Evans Lewes. The best of Novelists, and Wives, These works of her longest-venerated and best-loved Romancist are given by her grateful Husband.’1 Towards the end of her life Lewes was to remark in a letter to Alexander Macmillan that Scott was ‘to her an almost sacred name’. In the year of Middlemarch George Eliot herself described the steady development of her ‘peculiar worship’ to her own worshipper, Alexander Main: I began to read him when I was seven years old, and afterwards when I was grown up and living alone with my Father, I was able to make the evenings cheerful for him … by reading aloud to him Scott’s novels. No other writer would serve as a substitute for Scott, and my life at that time would have been much more difficult without him. It is a personal grief, a heart-wound to me when I hear a depredating or slighting word about Scott.2 This appreciation of the Waverley novels was not simply an extended adolescent sentiment, it was a vital shaping influence on the nature, form and intent of her own fiction.

Last of the English: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake

Charles Kingsley published six full-scale novels in the course of a career in which he managed to combine and confuse the roles of clergyman, poet, essayist, novelist, naturalist, socialist, social reformer, historian and tutor to the Prince of Wales. For each aspect of his life there is an appropriate, if unequal, literary expression. As an antagonistic reviewer of Westward Ho! grudgingly admitted in 1855, Kingsley was one of the most remarkable and voluminous writers of his age with, as he put it, ‘no small infusion of quicksilver’ in his veins.1

Clio's Heroes and Thackeray's Heroes: Henry Esmond and The Virginians

In March 1862 Thackeray moved into the house he had designed and built for himself at Kensington Palace Green on what were still the western fringes of London. Despite its modest classical proportions, and its sedate red brick, the house was striking and original. Like Sir Walter Scott before him, Thackeray regarded his new residence as a symbol of his success, a visible testimony to his status as an artist and a gentleman. Abbotsford had established Scott as a country landowner, as a rich man in his castle, and it had set the fashion for the Scottish baronial style which was to spread across Europe and America in the wake of the Waverley novels. Thackeray’s London house would scarcely remind one of Abbotsford, but its regular and urbane facade was to have, like its designer’s novels, a special impact on a city whose modern buildings tended to be Italianate and stuccoed or virulently Gothic. A particularly virulent Goth, and a co-resident in Kensington, William Burges, was later to write: ‘It has been said and with great truth that the real restorer of mediaeval art was Sir Walter Scott — in the same way, Thackeray, by means of his writing has made Queen Anne’s style popular.’1 Like Scott, the author of Henry Esmond was to find only a transient happiness in his new home, but, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of his favourite century in his favourite suburb, he was able to enjoy the last year of his life as a robust Victorian reflection of a quizzical Augustan man of letters.