Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity, by Ian Hesketh

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity by Ian Hesketh Mimi Winick (bio) Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity, by Ian Hesketh; pp. xiii + 272. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, $56.00. Ian Hesketh's engaging study, Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity, succeeds in an area where its subject was deemed to have failed: it offers narrative pleasures alongside thorough historical scholarship. Seeley, now best [End Page 511] known as a historian of British empire, first emerged into public life as the anonymous author of the publishing sensation Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ (1865), which presented itself as an inquiry into historical facts about Christ. It argues that the one element of Christianity that transcended history was Christ's "enthusiasm for humanity," and the morals that followed from it (62). As Victorian Jesus argues, "Ecce Homo's Jesus became the Victorian Jesus" (6). Victorian Jesus takes three apparent discontinuities in the life and work of Seeley, and uses them to illuminate significant trends in the history of anonymous publishing, the history of religion, and the history of history. First, the book explores the ways in which Ecce Homo went from being hawked in train stations and the subject of fierce debates in periodicals to a little remembered "commonplace" work (197). Second, it considers the ways in which Seeley went from publishing a religious book deemed dangerous for the seductions of its style to publishing historical and religious works notable for their "dreariness" (185). Third, it connects Seeley's religious writings to his now better known works of so-called scientific history. Across these cases, Victorian Jesus reveals the interconnections among shifting standards in anonymous publishing, theological ideas, and historical inquiry. Victorian Jesus argues that Ecce Homo represented a "turning point in the debate about anonymous publishing" (11). By the 1860s, anonymous authorship in periodicals was understood to exacerbate sectarianism, especially with regard to theology. At the same time, theological writing was "a highly dangerous activity" that could expose authors to charges of career-ending hypocrisy and even heresy (13). Seeley challenged this view, citing the wish to avoid partisanship as his motive for anonymity. He believed anonymity would enable him to avoid signaling a specific theological position, and his strategy worked: within the first year of its publication, the author of Ecce Homo was variously identified as "a High Churchman, a Low Churchman, a Broad Churchman, a Unitarian, a Catholic, a layman or an atheist," and was more specifically thought to be George Eliot, Cardinal Henry Newman, William Gladstone, or Emperor Napoleon III (4). Some readers saw these wide-ranging speculations as evidence of Ecce Homo rising "above parties altogether" (123), while others saw them as evidence that the book was theologically "incoherent" (125). Amid these varied responses, Ecce Homo won the reputation of a "dangerous book" because of its potential to encourage unbelief (the opposite of Seeley's intent) (91). As part of its dramatic history of the reception of Ecce Homo, Victorian Jesus gives a particularly vivid account of the ways in which Macmillan used both the speculation over the book's authorship and the controversy over its theology to stoke sales, even going so far as to use negative press in advertising the book. For some readers, however, warnings about Ecce Homo were overblown: they judged it "a sheep in wolf's clothing" (102). Eventually, the controversies died down. Victorian Jesus argues that the increasingly open secret of Seeley's authorship—though never officially confirmed in print during his lifetime—led to declining interest in the book. While Ecce Homo had been a smash, its sequels were received less enthusiastically. The official sequel, Natural Religion (1882), was published, also anonymously, seventeen years later. Most reviewers found it dispiriting, in both its style and its view of religion. It disappointed those who recalled how Ecce Homo had "swept away" readers with its [End Page 512] enthusiasm (185). In terms of theology, it took a more definite, and, to most reviewers, dull stance. Where Ecce Homo claimed to exclude "theological questions...