Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Abstract

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. By Timothy Larsen. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 317.) There was crisis of in nineteenth-century Britain, but there was also crisis of doubt, writes Timothy Larsen in last (and best) chapter of his revisionist account of honest faith in Victorian England (p. 239). Too much emphasis, he claims, has been placed on narrative of the Victorian loss of which more truthfully was no more and no less than a telling counterpoint in an age still dominated by religiosity in general and in particular (p. 1). He rightly complains of what he sees as a strong and deeply ingrained tendency in Victorian to separate religion any positive connection with thought (p. 3, emphasis added). For this, he interestingly blames, in particular, scholars from field of English or literary studies (myself included). According to Larsen, such people, at expense of historical truth, have been all too concerned with secularizing story of crisis of because such story seems to them more exciting, more dramatic, more honest, and, not least of all, more modern-in sense of being more way future was going to go. His main (and rather easy) target is A. N.Wilson, who in God's Funeral all too reactively denounced as dishonest seemingly every leading Victorian intellectual who maintained commitment to orthodox Christianity (p. 245). But real interest, even in Wilson, is when claims of cling on within skepticism distorted by its all-too-dogmatic attempt to disassociate itself genuinely free thinking. As Larsen himself shows, in some of his Victorian examples, result is often belated swing back to religion again. These reconversion narratives are Larsen's subject-matter. But what he does not consider is how far these to-ings and fro-ings are no more than dialectical mechanism of certain stage in history. That is to say: an inadequately conventional gives way to reactively self-congratulatory secularism that in turn breaks down to revert to half re-formed version of original creed. A better point would be not to see crisis of doubt as separate crisis of faith, but to take two as part of same phenomenon. Yet so interested is Larsen in his own revisionist counterposition that he only once makes this simple but vital point:The Victorians themselves frequently discussed and wrote about crisis of faith. …