Book Review: A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians

Abstract

A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. By Timothy Larsen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-957009-6. Pp. 336. $55.00 In A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, Timothy Larsen continues his interest historical trends, especially regarding women, attempting to set the record straight and fill gaps left by those biographers who ignore the Christianity of their subjects. Larsen has previously published several books on Christianity the Victorian period and the early twentieth century, especially works related to evangelicals and non-conformists. His 1999 book Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics Mid-Victorian England attempts to correct the view that nonconformists were bent on forcing everyone to worship and believe as they did. Larsen does this by studying Congregationalists and Baptists who involved themselves the political arena between 1847 and 1867 and worked for religious equality before the law;' not only for themselves but also for other groups such as Roman Catholics and Jews (1). His interests appear clearly his 2002 Christabel Pankhurst: Fundmentalism and Feminism Coalition, which tells about the militant English Suffragette the first chapter and then attempts to set the record straight by describing her Christian ministry and authorship Canada and the United States for the remainder of the book. Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (2004) also counters unfounded assumptions that Victorian Christians were either a golden age or in crisis and retreat, being routed by doubt, crumbling on all sides against intellectual, social, cultural, and political forces, arguing instead that the field was contested (1-2). Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith Nineteenth-Century England (2006) treats prominent figures the secular movement who overcame their doubt, worked diligently to bring people to Christ, and wrote vigorously to undo the damage they had previously done by their sermonizing to rid people of faith. Typical of Larsen's work, Crisis of Doubt serves as a corrective, as many contemporary scholars writing about Victorian culture have jumped to the conclusion that thinking Victorians only left their childhood faith, taking authors such as George Eliot as representative and ignoring the majority of people who retained their faith or regained it. In 2007 Larsen collaborated with Mark Husbands editing Women, Ministry and the Gospel: Exploring New Paradigms, a superb collection of essays on the controversial issue of leadership roles the church, which the two warring sides called themselves the complementarians and the egalitarians. His own essay on historical evangelical practice points out that were regularly used leadership roles until after the Second World War and discusses the strong social and cultural pressures to restrict the roles of women during the 1950s when men returning from the war wanted to set up ideal domestic spheres (231). In A People of One Book, Larsen again studies Victorian trends, demonstrating that Victorian writers and thinkers read the Bible, whether they considered themselves Christians or not, and argued for its inclusion education even if they did not believe its doctrines. They wrote habitually using biblical phrasing, whether to prove the Bible or disprove it. This eminently informed study starts with Victorian assumptions that one must read, memorize, and study the Bible on a daily basis whether a staunch believer or an atheist. Larsen states his introduction, There are only two kinds of eminent Victorian authors--the kind who have had a whole book written about their use of Scripture and the kind who are ripe for such attention (2). Larsen surveys biblical use by choosing a representative figure from each doctrinal position, pointing out that even atheists focus on the Bible to point out its inconsistencies. …