A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians

Abstract

When Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, very publicly gifted each school in Britain with a copy of the King James Bible in 2012, there was much rolling of eyes at a classic of gesture politics. Rather than thinking about how to get children to read the King James Version (fully available online), Gove contented himself with putting them vaguely in the vicinity of a copy. It could not have been more of an empty signifier if he had registered the cultural centrality of the King James Version (KJV) by sending all his copies to the stone cross in Meriden claiming to mark the geographical heart of England. Yet as reaction to the Gove initiative – and to some of the 400th anniversary celebrations of the KJV more generally – showed, different kinds of suspicion can attend on this kind of ‘Authorized Version-olatry’ (David Norton's term, quoted in Charles LaPorte's Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, p. 9). In Gove's case of course, it was primarily the suspicion of ego, provoked by the notorious inscription ‘Presented by the Education Secretary’ on each copy, but there can also be the suspicion of nationalism – the KJV standing as representative of, simultaneously, the essence of Christianity and the essence of Britishness, which it conveniently unifies. Above all perhaps there is the suspicion of nostalgia, a weakness for the alluring mirage of simpler times, when one foundational text could bind us all together. This last refuses to quite go away while reading Timothy Larsen's nevertheless very informed monograph A People of One Book. Larsen's project is to show the importance of the Bible as a formative influence and continuing preoccupation within a whole range of Victorian religious groupings, from Anglo-Catholics to Unitarians to Quakers to atheists (the book's chapters are divided into these groupings). In some cases this might not look to be saying much, and indeed in some cases it isn't: I, for one, require little convincing that the Bible was an important influence on Pusey and Wiseman for example, or even that these two men conceived of themselves as more essentially and correctly Biblicist than Protestants who rejoiced in private judgment. Tellingly, at one point, Larsen remarks that ‘although [Methodist writer] William Cooke was primarily a theologian, he had given considerable study and thought to the entire Bible’ (p. 99), as if these two things were mutually exclusive.