PROPHECY AND ANTI-POPERY IN VICTORIAN LONDON: JOHN CUMMING RECONSIDERED

Abstract

I. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand Victorian culture without understanding the role of religion in shaping, consolidating, and challenging that culture. In countless ways, religion was integral to Victorian culture: Britain and Ireland had established churches; political and religious questions were often intertwined, as with the Maynooth Controversy and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; religious questions were regularly enacted in public, as when the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy (1850) inspired riots and the hangings in effigy of the pope and the newly-created Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. Victorians regularly sought religious meanings in cataclysmic events; the response to the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) was framed in religious terms, as Britons from the queen on down sought a divine explanation for the uprising. As that response shows, religion ‐ specifically, Protestant Christianity ‐ was an important component of national identity, as Linda Colley has argued in Britons: Forging the Nation. Thus clergymen were exceptionally influential, both as individuals and as a group, in the