The Paradigmatic Angel in the House: The Virgin Mary and Victorian Anglicans

Abstract

The figure of the Virgin Mary was symbolically charged and highly visible in Victorian England.1 A marker of Roman Catholicism in England since the Henrician schism and the ensuing Protestantization of the Church of England, she became even more controversial in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as members of the Oxford Movement revived and expanded the Marian devotion of the seventeenth-century divines.2 Other Anglicans challenged this revival and accused the Tractarians of leaning towards Rome or even of being secret Roman Catholics. So pronounced was the anxiety aroused by the Virgin Mary that in 1845, the year that John Henry Newman and other prominent Anglicans converted to Roman Catholicism, John Keble, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, was persuaded by friends not to publish a Marian poem, ‘Mother out of sight’, for fear that it might signal a sympathy towards Roman Catholicism.3KeywordsFemale VirginityMaternal RoleFeminine IdealIdeal WomanModel MotherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.