Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Kimberly VanEsveld Adams (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner; pp. vii + 210. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020, $79.95, $24.95 ebook. I always thought that in Jane Eyre (1847), the dangerous passion of St. John Rivers is for Rosamond Oliver, the bewitching daughter of a wealthy mill owner. He suppresses his emotions, since he considers her unfit to be a missionary’s wife. But no—the danger [End Page 702] is the “‘hot action’ of India,” or the attractiveness of native women. St. John manfully seeks to resist temptation by pressuring his unloved cousin Jane to become his helpmeet, or, as Jade Winter Werner says, his “prophylactic” (134). In Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Werner explores the development of missionaries’ claims to, and concern with, world citizenship. Charlotte Brontë’s novel provides the most vivid example. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, intermarriage between British missionaries and female converts (preferably from influential native families) was seen as positive, a demonstration of universal human kinship. But misgivings began to emerge by the 1820s: missionaries’ “going native,” the challenge to British superiority of biracial bicultural families, the disapproval of white slaveholders in South Africa, and what came to be seen as the corrupting effect of interracial union. The last is exemplified in Jane Eyre by Mr. Rochester’s brutal descriptions of his marriage to Bertha Mason, a Jamaican-born planter’s daughter. The new policy of British missionary societies was for men to marry before going overseas. St. John’s endogamous proposal to his cousin, Werner argues, shows an extreme effort to avoid contamination. The thesis of Werner’s book is that “cosmopolitanism both fueled and found an unlikely champion in the modern missionary movement” (3). The Dissenting missionaries who are her primary focus were not, as opponents claimed, irrational enthusiasts, ill-educated “pious tinkers” (77), or as Sydney Smith said, “little detachments of maniacs” (qtd. in Werner 3). Nor were they unthinkingly allied with empire, as some scholars contend. The missionaries’ often-repeated claims to be “cosmopolites,” or world citizens, were based, Werner found, on the ongoing interactions between Protestantism and Enlightenment (or Enlightenment-Liberal) beliefs and values, such as a common human nature, individual freedom and tolerance, reason, and the benefits of scientific knowledge and global trade (71). A difficulty with this argument is that the core religious beliefs and practices of the denominations—Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and evangelical Anglicans—are not described. That makes it difficult for the reader to assess when the missionaries’ use of Enlightenment ideas is a matter of Christian morals, as they claimed, or when it is strategy, or appropriation of available terminology. Moreover, some points would have been clarified or strengthened with use of a wider range of materials and more extensive historical evidence. Werner for example shows that during the French Revolution, missionary cosmopolitans who spoke of universal benevolence and the rights of man were accused of republican sympathies, despite their professions to have no political agenda. But Werner’s discussion here might have gone beyond the quarreling periodicals, since there is some basis for the charge of republicanism. Dissenters were prominent not just in missionary societies but also among British working-class radicals and American revolutionaries, particularly those from colonies such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In Britain, Dissenters resented legal restrictions on their religious and civic liberty. Only with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 was their access to political and military office unrestricted (if they were men). Werner centers the four chapters of her book on literary texts because these reveal the tensions within missionary cosmopolitanism, in contrast to the propaganda of the various societies. In her second chapter, “Robert Southey and the Case for Christian Colonialism,” Werner demonstrates the Romantic author’s interest in Dissenting missions. Southey published reviews of societies’ periodicals between 1802 and 1809. But he broke [End Page 703] from the missionaries in considering forceful colonization necessary for the spread of Christianity. In A Tale of Paraguay (1825), Southey’s verse narrative based on the 1784 account...