“If It Teaches, It Teaches Imperceptibly:” Recasting the Secularity of the Victorian Public Sphere

Abstract

Offering an account of Victorian secularisation which does not depend on the definition of the term “religion,” this article draws on a strand of secularisation studies often neglected by Victorian scholars. In particular, it develops two key aspects of philosopher Charles Taylor's work: the concept of social imaginaries, and the association of secularity with a particular kind of time. Emphasising the human‐technological networks through which the notion of a Victorian public sphere was constituted, the article highlights how the function of these networks was premised on a concept of secular time regardless of participants’ conscious or articulated (non)belief. In these particular networks, the notion of immediacy and absolute simultaneity — which both presuppose a concept of secular time — were constituted through the mobilisation of a wide range of mediators, human and nonhuman. Here, the term “secularisation” denotes this process of increasingly investing and embedding secular time on the level of unarticulated assumptions. This allows scholars to recast the question of Victorian secularisation in a manner which avoids the problems associated with defining secularity as an absence of “belief” or “religion.”