The Awakening Conscience: Christian Sentiment, Salvation, and Spectatorship in Mid-Victorian Britain

Karen Burns

doi:10.16995/ntn.769

Abstract

From the 1830s into the mid-1850s, key Victorian art and texts depicted passionate Christian feeling through the trope of ‘awakening’. Visual and written representations dramatized awakening Christians in fervent states of salvation, conversion, and devotion. Feeling had always been central to Christian belief but in the long nineteenth century faith was newly wedded to sensation. From the 1780s onwards, Christian reformers explored sensory psychologies and environmental settings as methods for awakening the conscience of men, women, and children in disciplinary institutions. In the late 1830s a ‘new environmentalism’ appeared in Christian high culture, and art began to be promoted as a medium for releasing religious feelings. Painted and architectural narratives of awakening depicted the artwork as a mediating agent and explored its sensory affects. By connecting sentiment to sensation, Christian culture raised a series of questions about the relations between mind and body, senses and spectatorship, and whether the wellsprings of faith lay in mystery or invigilation. By valuing sensory impressions, intense feeling, and active agency, Christian artworks offered a discomforting model for a public exhibition culture concerned with the comportment of spectators. Drawing on a range of examples from mainland Britain to the colonial penitentiary, and from William Holman Hunt to Augustus Welby Pugin, this article links Christian art to fervent feeling and explores how this fervour was uneasily contained within social and religious limits.

Highlights

In the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), Victorian sage and evangelical John Ruskin interrogated the connection between art and faith but declared that pictorial representation does not have the power to promote belief
Like other sincere evangelicals Ruskin viewed the evangelizing role of art with d istrust, but like other critics, artists, and clergy at mid-century, he was grappling with the form and function of religious painting and architecture.[2]
When Ruskin wrote to The Times in May 1854 to defend William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853) (Fig. 1), on view at the Royal Academy, he did not ignore the painting’s religious agency

Summary

Introduction

In the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), Victorian sage and evangelical John Ruskin interrogated the connection between art and faith but declared that pictorial representation does not have the power to promote belief. This article explores the mid-century ideal of religious awakening to recover Victorian understandings of art and material culture as sensory media for regenerating Christian feeling.

Results

Conclusion