Samuel Wilberforce Research Articles

Dissimulation as an Editorial Strategy in the Life of William Wilberforce

In 1838, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce published, in five volumes, The Life of William Wilberforce. Although the subject of some contemporary controversy, this work, containing extensive quotations from his diaries, rapidly established itself as the principal source for subsequent biographical writings about Wilberforce and strongly influenced later interpretations. The production of a complete initial transcription of the diaries by the Wilberforce Diaries Project for the first time enables a systematic comparison between the Life and its principal source. This reveals a systematic attempt by his sons to minimize references to Wilberforce's participation in some aspects of Hanoverian sociability, his use of medication to deal with his worsening health, his close associations with and respect for Nonconformists and his own evangelical commitment and spirituality. As a consequence, the Wilberforce we know from the biography is as much a product of early Victorian myth-making as the Wilberforce of 1759–1833.

‘An Amazing Want of Christianity’: Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman’s Tense Relationship

AbstractThis paper will examine the relationship between Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman. The two priests had a common cause in their wish to see the Church of England rediscover its Catholic identity – which led them to work alongside one another at the beginning of the Oxford Movement – but quickly drifted apart because of their strong divergences on the nature of the Church and the place of Tradition, as well as Samuel Wilberforce’s strong hostility to Rome. The paper also examines the place of Samuel Wilberforce’s young brother in this relationship.

The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

The War That Never Was: Evolution and Christian Theology

Censoring Huxley and Wilberforce: A new source for the meeting that the Athenaeum 'wisely softened down'.

In mid July 1860, the Athenaeum published a summary of the discussions about Charles Darwin's theory that took place at the British Association meeting in Oxford. Its account omitted the famous exchange between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Huxley, the rising man of science. A fuller report of the meeting was published a week later in a local weekly, the Oxford Chronicle, but this has gone unnoticed by historians. The Oxford Chronicle supplies a new version of Wilberforce's question to Huxley, with more material about religious objections to human evolution and the proper role of authority in popular scientific discussions. Excerpts from the Athenaeum and Oxford Chronicle accounts show that they likely had a common ancestor, and other sources corroborate details given only in the Oxford Chronicle. This discovery reveals that the Athenaeum narrative-until now the longest and best known-was censored to remove material that was considered objectionable. The Oxford Chronicle gives us a fuller story of what was said and how the audience reacted to the encounter between Huxley and Wilberforce.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and William Paley’s Natural Theology

Charles Dodgson could well have had Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on his mind when, in 1862, he conceived of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, the prototype of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.1 Samuel Wilberforce, who had spoken against the theory of evolution in the notorious Oxford ‘debate’ of 1860, was the Bishop of Oxford. His diocesan seat, Christ Church Cathedral, was the chapel of the College of Christ Church, of which Dodgson was a Fellow. Furthermore, the father of the real Alice, Henry Liddell, was Dean of Christ Church, and thus directly responsible to Wilberforce. That Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is to some extent a response to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first suggested by William Empson in 1935, and the Darwinian dimension of Wonderland (in the versions of both 1862 and 1865) has been elaborated by several recent critics.2 As Judith Murphy has observed, Alice operates in relation to the diverse and largely animal population of Wonderland as, potentially, both predator and prey. She thus participates in a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival, her unnerving bodily transformations projecting the advantageous adaptations responsible for the evolution of new species.3

A YANKEE AT OXFORD: JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER AT THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AT OXFORD, 30 JUNE 1860.

This paper contributes to the revisionist historiography on the legendary encounter between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley at the 1860 meeting in Oxford of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It discusses the contents of a series of letters written by John William Draper and his family reflecting on his experience at that meeting. The letters have recently been rediscovered and have been neither published nor examined at full length. After a preliminary discussion on the historiography of the Oxford debate, the paper discloses the contents of the letters and then assesses them in the light of other contemporary accounts. The letters offer a nuanced reinterpretation of the event that supports the growing move towards a revisionist account.

America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture , ed. Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher (review)

Reviewed by: America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, ed. Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher Dan Colson (bio) America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, edited by Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. vi + 401 pp. Cloth, $89.95; Paper, $29.95. In his 1860 review of On the Origin of Species, Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce attacked Charles Darwin for applying “the principle of natural [End Page 91] selection to man himself,” arguing that “such a notion is absolutely incompatible [with] the word of God.” More than 150 years later, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker was asked, in London, if he believed in evolution. Walker “punt[ed],” claiming “that’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another.” He later tweeted a clarification: “Both science & my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God.” While Walker’s position diverges from Wilberforce by suggesting that science—including evolutionary theory—is “compatible” with religion, his statements indicate the continuing stakes of Darwin’s ideas: they remain a site of political contestation, as much a cultural force as they are accepted scientific fact. The essays collected in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture trace this profound cultural impact, offering a timely exploration of the United States’ struggle with Darwin’s scientific work. While the book’s subtitle suggest that it comprises essays focused primarily on American literature, the collection actually has far broader resonance, effectively constructing a cultural history of Darwin’s impact on the United States. The volume includes an admirable range, both chronologically and disciplinarily, from the early impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory—on, for example, Herman Melville’s posthumously published poetry—to the present, with essays on recent works by T. C. Boyle and Benjamin Hale. In addition, America’s Darwin includes chapters by scientists (a biologist, an entomologist, a geologist, and an anthropologist) alongside the more expected literary scholars. Doing so allows the text to move beyond the tepid interdisciplinarity that often involves nothing more than humanists speaking to humanists about other fields. America’s Darwin places scientists in conversation with the humanities, producing a genuinely cross-disciplinary project. As we might expect, the volume’s disparate essays do not offer a singular vision of Darwin’s influence; rather, they present a series of detailed examinations of evolutionary theory’s social, scientific, and cultural reverberations. This laudable specificity is heightened by the various authors’ commitment to reading Darwin’s texts. They move past the customary broad strokes, treating Darwin’s work as an archive that must be analyzed in its own linguistic and formal detail before its influence can be traced. This approach—which includes attention to lesser known Darwinian texts, such as The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875)—offers readers a dual benefit: on one hand, the book accomplishes its goal of tracing the effect of Darwinian evolutionary theory on American literature; on the other, it provides useful insight into Darwin as a primary source—as [End Page 92] an author who produced texts that should be read, even by those of us who study literature. America’s Darwin includes fourteen essays, which editors Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher divide into three major threads. The first considers “the influences of Darwin’s theories on broad currents in U.S. spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual life.” The second focuses on the tension between socially progressive movements and those who read in evolutionary theory a regressive or degenerative vision of human development. The third addresses the more concrete fascination with animals and the ways their representation has been inflected by Darwinian theory. Collectively, these threads—and the essays in them—offer not just an impressive variety of approaches, but also suggestive interstices: they gesture toward a cohesive, yet complex narrative of Darwin’s impact, thus inviting further study. Of particular interest for readers of Studies in American Naturalism are the volume’s essays on Frank Norris—“The Loud Echo of a ‘Far Distant Past’: Darwin, Norris, and the Clarity of Anger”—and Jack London: “‘The Power of Choice’: Darwinian Concepts of Animal Mind in Jack London’s Dog...

Draper, Darwin, and the Oxford evolution debate of 1860

Historians of science have written much about the famous exchange over Darwinism in 1860 at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley. The event is one of the most famous in nineteenth-century science. But little has been written about the paper that served as the occasion of that debate. The paper was one presented by John William Draper, a British-born American scientist and physician. A full transcription of Draper's paper is presented here, with a discussion of Draper's earlier writing and lectures on geology, evolution, and the philosophy of history. Together Draper's writings show his early adoption of key principles of the development hypothesis, his willingness to accept the principle of human evolution, and his claims for what he saw as the evolutionary nature of human society.

Origins of Anglo-Catholic Missions: Fr Richard Benson and the Initial Missions of the Society of St John the Evangelist, 1869–1882

This paper investigates the origins of Anglican Anglo-Catholic missions, through the missionary theology and practice of the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Richard Benson, and an exploration of its initial missionary endeavours: the Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869, and two missions in India from 1874. The Indian missions comprised an institutional mission at Bombay and Pune, and a unique ascetic enculturated mission at Indore by Fr Samuel Wilberforce O'Neillssje. It is argued that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions; that his ritualist moderation was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission; and that in overseas missions he had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Benson's approach, more radical than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of envisaging mission's being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions.

Oxford Serialized: Revisiting the Huxley–Wilberforce debate through the periodical press

The debate between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and the scientific naturalist, Thomas Huxley, at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science has come to represent an iconic moment in the history of the relationship between science and religion. This article uses the digitalized databases of nineteenth-century British periodicals to re-examine the reception of the Huxley–Wilberforce debate. By combining methods and insights from digital humanities with the vast literature on the Huxley–Wilberforce debate, and the secondary literature on science and print culture, I show that the narrative of Huxley’s victory over Wilberforce was not the prevalent story told in the press immediately after the event occurred. Rather, this study shows that there is still much to be learned from looking at the ways in which the press influenced nineteenth-century understandings of iconic moments in the history of science, even in cases that have been well examined, such as the Huxley–Wilberforce debate.

Maternal–fetal tolerance and parturition

Journal of Reproductive Immunology 101–102 (2014) 6–17 11 with the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce concerning the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was the liberating force of science versus the authoritarian view of religion that Man was a unique creation of God, and hence distinct and different from all animal species. Sciencewon.As yet, there are still somewhosteadfastly refuse to consider that what has been learned from the study of pregnancy in animals has any relevance towhat happens in human reproduction and its maladies. This has not had an impact on the increasing amounts of grant monies given to the study of animal models of human disease. In this debate, it is first necessary to review the proper use of animal analogmodels of human disease, and to emphasize the fallacy of uncritical extrapolation from animals to humans. Nevertheless, careful consideration of the structure and composition of the feto-maternal interface in mice, rats, and humans indicates rather striking homologies. Indeed, the similarities appear to outweigh the differences, save for minor details. Further, an in-depth consideration of the implications of a currently popular hypothesis concerning the function of humanuterineNK cells at the feto-maternal interface in healthy and disordered pregnancy appears to reveal a major flaw in the proposed mechanism and its importance. Indeed, the existing data support the alternative view that findings in animal models may indeed be quite relevant to human pregnancy problems. The importance of a rigorous scientific approach to the use of both animal and human data is emphasized. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jri.2013.12.015

The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory

DUSTIN D. STEWART The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory L amenting his enjoyment of Walter scott’s heart of Midlothian, William Wilberforce expresses a common enough Evangelical insecu­ rity about secular literature. Wilberforce could hardly put the book down, but upon doing so he couldn’t forbear chiding Scott’s novels for having “so little moral or religious object.” “They remind me,” he grieves, “ofa giant spending his strength in cracking nuts.” The complaint continues with a counterexample: “I would rather go to render up my account at the last day, carrying with me The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, than bearing the load of all these volumes, full as they are of genius.”' Wilberforce commends a work by his friend Hannah More, singling out More’s Salisbury Plain, a Cheap Repository Tract, as a light and enlightening alternative to Scott’s weighty yet worldly corpus. Somewhat bizarrely, given that the reformist is generalizing from what might be Scott’s most forcefully Christian work, his contrast seems to claim for the didactic tract a religious propriety lack­ ing in the novel form. But Wilberforce’s heaven-minded recanonizing re­ lies on the same line drawn by secularization narratives that place earlynineteenth -century writers like More on the wrong side of history, as against authors like Scott who are taken to promulgate a modern secular romanticism. Wilberforce keeps the divide but reverses the sides. Because such lines need new scrutiny,2 I will trace in this essay a few continuities My warm thanks to Samuel Baker, in conversations with whom, principally in the sum­ mer of 2009, this essay found its impetus and took its shape. 1. Quoted in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London: Murray, 1838), 5:254. 2. Vincent P. Pecora explains this concern in Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): “as students of Foucault, we learned how to rethink the Enlightenment’s idea ofprogress, but not necessarily the story SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 591 592 DUSTIN D. STEWART between the two writers sharply separated by Wilberforce. Notwithstand­ ing his suggestion that the novel wastes its work on earthbound nuts, I will consider how both Scott and More rely on a vehicle that nudges literary form toward political theology: the Pauline letter. Saint Paul’s legacy is by no means settled or univocal. Competing un­ derstandings of Paul and of his literary mode arise in the epistolary texts of More and Scott, understandings that, as it happens, also extend to present-day disagreements about the apostle in critical theory. Both earlynineteenth -century writers invoke Paul as they test the possibilities of epistolarity , including its potential for universality. In a Napoleonic context, Paul the letter-writer can stand as the harbinger of a totalizing Christian empire. As he contends throughout the Mediterranean for a nascent but globalizing Judeo-Christiamty, he emblematizes the persuasiveness and the eventual triumph, the relentless translatability, of an initially fringe sect. The apparent appeal of an empire-enabling Paul is the allure of an authen­ tic universality, one that might trump those aspirations to the universal that only export self-absorbed particularity. Seemingly frustrated with the particularist outcomes of identity politics, philosopher Alain Badiou has lately developed and defended such an idea of Paul. My shorthand term for this conception of the apostle, for the stakes of Saint Paul in Badiou, More, and Scott, is mission. The works ofMore and Scott also disclose another version of Paul, however. What I will name remnant, this alternative set of associa­ tions highlights the apostle’s local specificity to explain his worldwide ap­ peal. Such a Paul is a late-comer, an oft-arrested dissident who sits uneasily between the rigorous Judaism with which he once identified and the new covenant, spirit over letter, which he comes to preach. By no means easily securing new standards, his theology sparks controversy and conflict. Situ­ ated in his waywardness, this outlaw apostle writes charged letters to spe­ cific communities about new forms ofembodied practice, and he advocates for the powerless, the residue of Rome.3 Paul’s own broken...

Ian Hesketh. Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate

In Of Apes and Ancestors, Ian Hesketh attempts to de-mythologize the famous Oxford debate between Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, and Charles Darwin’s friends, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. Hooker and Huxley clashed publicly with Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in June of 1860. At issue was the scientific content and general implication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Hesketh argues that this event is best understood as a minor episode in a complex web of personal and professional rivalries between two generations of naturalists. He further argues that Huxley aggressively reinterpreted the actual events of the debate for years afterwards, turning them into a “Galileo moment” for the nineteenth century, a moment in which science bravely stood up to religious authority and refused to back down. While his treatment of the debate and its context is well supported, the connection Hesketh draws between Huxley’s narrative and modern historiography is somewhat tenuous.

Oxford’s Protestant Spy: The Controversial Career of Charles Golightly (review)

Reviewed by: Oxford’s Protestant Spy: The Controversial Career of Charles Golightly John Wolffe Oxford’s Protestant Spy: The Controversial Career of Charles Golightly. By Andrew Atherstone. [Studies in Evangelical History and Thought.] (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster. 2007. Pp. xvi, 333. $36.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-842-27364-7.) Charles Golightly (1807–85) has hitherto been known to scholarship merely as a somewhat shadowy figure in the wings of numerous studies of the nineteenth-century Church of England. In this impressive monograph Andrew Atherstone, for the first time, places Golightly center stage, tracing his career as a stalwart opponent of the Oxford and ritualist movements from the 1830s to the 1870s. [End Page 371] Golightly was an ordained Anglican priest, but inherited private means that meant that, apart from serving a curacy in Kent in the early 1830s, he had no need to obtain regular paid employment. Instead in 1835 he acquired a house in Oxford, where he had been a student, and devoted the remainder of his life to upholding the cause of conservative Protestantism in that university, city, and diocese. Golightly was especially influential at the pivotal period that followed the publication of John Henry Newman’s notorious Tract 90 in 1841, leading up to the subsequent conversions to Roman Catholicism of Newman, William Ward, and others. At later dates, from the 1850s to the 1870s, Golightly campaigned energetically against the advance of ritualism in the Diocese of Oxford, which he believed to be centered on the new theological college founded at Cuddesdon by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. He also vigorously opposed the advance of liberal theological ideas as represented in the 1830s by Renn Dickson Hampden and in the 1850s by Benjamin Jowett. Despite the appearance of this book in the very useful Paternoster series of Studies in Evangelical History and Thought, Atherstone is clear that Golightly, who had Huguenot ancestry and significant affinities to traditional Anglican highchurchmanship, is better classified as a Protestant than as an Evangelical. Indeed, he first came to prominence as a leading promoter of the Martyrs Memorial erected in the center of Oxford in the early 1840s to commemorate the Protestant bishops burned at the stake in the reign of Queen Mary I. The Martyrs Memorial was a product of the widespread anti-Catholicism of the 1830s, initially conceived primarily as a demonstration against Rome rather than the Oxford Tractarians. Golightly’s subsequent campaigns were similarly motivated by his intense suspicion of Rome and his consequent determination to resist perceived Catholic subversion of the Church of England. Golightly’s opponents readily dismissed him as a busybody and a trouble-maker, but he was nevertheless a highly effective agitator. Arguably he acted as a brake on the Catholic movement in Anglicanism; certainly he highlighted and reinforced the internal tensions in the mid-Victorian Church of England. Even at the end of this book, its subject remains something of an enigma, a reportedly “kind” man who destroyed his own friendships and divided his church in the single-minded pursuit of his controversial preoccupations. However, in bringing us as close as we are ever likely to get to a rounded appreciation of Golightly himself, Atherstone has also significantly enhanced understanding of the complex internal dynamics of Victorian Anglicanism, anti-Catholicism, and antiritualism in nineteenth-century England. [End Page 372] John Wolffe The Open University Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

William Paley, Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Darwin and the Natural World: An Anglican Conversation

Soapy Sam and the Devil’s Chaplain: even for an age in which public figures were regularly lampooned, the epithets are evocative. To call the recipients of the epithets, Samuel Wilberforce and Charles Darwin respectively, controversial figures of the nineteenth century is the intellectual equivalent of noting that the sky is blue. Without seemingly trying, both men were involved in controversy. Whether it was the Church of England’s response to Essays and Reviews or the creation of a government policy with regard to vivisection, for various reasons both men were regularly in the national spotlight in the mid-Victorian period.

Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (review)

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life Michael Heyman (bio) Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life. By Richard Foulkes. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Lewis Carroll first attended a professional theater on June 22, 1855, to see a production of Henry VIII. Between that date and his seeing J. M. Barrie's The Little Minister on November 20, 1897, he attended the theater 479 times, seeing 686 productions (138). It is during this period that Carroll's well-documented personal, political, and professional involvement in theater took place, yet most historians of Victorian theater have more or less ignored his experience. While Carroll's prominence as a literary celebrity and, later, a figure of controversy, argues for the significance of his experience, there also may be some good reasons for the critics' omission. Richard Foulkes, in his recent study, navigates through this sometimes perilous course of Carroll's theatrical history. The roughly chronological chapter headings imply that this book is, reflective of the title, a study focused on Lewis Carroll's "quiet life," yet it does not take us long into the first chapter to realize that the agenda is somewhat different. The first few chapters, ostensibly covering his childhood through his time as a student, are only tangentially related to Carroll's life [End Page 392] or his connection to theater. Foulkes gives an account, for instance, of a difference of opinion between Samuel Wilberforce, the Dean of Westminster, and the future Dean of Christ Church, H. G. Liddell, over the propriety of theatrical productions at Westminster. While this debate sheds light on the shifting religious climate as it pertains to theater reception, its connection to Carroll is tenuous at best. In the third chapter, Foulkes brings up the revival of theater at Oxford and the beginning of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (1884). He argues that, while Carroll "appears to have played no part in these developments" (42), because it came partly from his college, he is somehow a "spirit" behind it. Again, the connection is strained; Carroll peeks out from the margins, conspicuous in his absence rather than his presence in the theatrical goings on. But perhaps at this point we give up looking for connections to Carroll and rather explore Foulkes's wealth of detailed knowledge about Victorian theater. Such knowledge comes to the fore, for instance, in his chapter on home entertainments. While the Dodgson family members were enthusiastic practitioners, they are only motes in Foulkes's sweep of information. He includes a good background to the concept of Victorian "leisure" through the opposing views of Bentham and Bulwer Lytton, while interestingly placing Carroll outside of both: that is, Carroll saw theater as providing a "higher" form of pleasure than the game of "push-pin," but he also thought that intellectuals could indeed "indulge generally in frivolous entertainments" (qtd. from Lytton, 70). Foulkes takes us on a merry-go-round of Victorians at play: their sports, parlor games, domestic dramas, toy theaters, magic lantern shows, and play-readings. He includes discussion of Carroll's prologues for amateur productions and compares his involvement to George MacDonald's home entertainments, all of which help to fill out the picture of amateur "theater." Foulkes sets two goals in this study, the first of which is to show Carroll to be a "rich resource of information . . . not limited to the professional theatre" (2). This "resource," however, turns out to be more Foulkes's long, distinguished experience as a historian of Victorian theater and religion. Foulkes does indeed illuminate the world of "home" and professional theater with meticulous research, although the rich backdrop at times dwarfs his central figure. Carroll provides a focal point, but it often need not have been Carroll per se, who, as Foulkes admits, made quite an average theatergoer. This, of course, is his point—that Carroll was not a theater critic but one of the crowd; he is significant mainly in that he is a representation of a "sizeable proportion of the playgoing public" (149). While Foulkes argues well for this assertion, he could have given more space to the significant writing Carroll did do in...

BOOK REVIEW:Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life, by Richard Foulkes

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life Hugues Lebailly (bio) Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life, by Richard Foulkes; pp. xi + 224. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, £45.00, $89.95. As someone who has not only written on Charles Dodgson's lifelong passion for the dramatic and visual arts, but also found Richard Foulkes's 1986 Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage a precious guide in my research of nineteenth-century drama, I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this comprehensive study of the prominent part played by the Victorian stage in Lewis Carroll's life. I anticipated a revaluation of Dodgson and theatre as groundbreaking as Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling's work on Dodgson and photography in Lewis Carroll Photographer (2002), and my expectations have been more than [End Page 127] fulfilled. Foulkes's exceptional scholarship enables him to establish such convincing connections between previously fragmented and superficially acknowledged facts and data that I have learnt even more from this book than I hoped. As in Morton N. Cohen's biography of Lewis Carroll, Foulkes's account of Dodgson's lifelong fascination with anything theatrical combines chronological and thematic approaches. The first two chapters explore its development through his childhood and university years; the remaining seven delve the grounds on which it blossomed in connection with his other interests, friendships, and contemporary moral, religious, and social standards. Chapter 1 tackles the apparently intractable paradox in Dodgson's education: that his passion for puppet shows, toy theatres, and home theatricals may have been condoned, or even encouraged, in the household of a strict Evangelical reverend who endorsed Tertullian's faith in the innate evil of any dramatic activity. Though acknowledging the lasting disagreement on that issue between father and son, Foulkes does not go as far as Cohen in his description of the estrangement it entailed between them. The second chapter highlights the ancient Thespian traditions at both Richmond school and Rugby and stresses Henry George Liddell's enthusiastic involvement in the production of the Westminster plays while headmaster there. As Foulkes argues, that shared passion for the stage could explain why Dean Liddell allowed Dodgson to keep his studentship and residence at Christ Church in spite of his inability to receive the full orders. These orders had been denied by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who regarded as an "absolute disqualification" an entertainment Dodgson found perfectly legitimate and would not renounce, though he refrained from attending the Oxford playhouses until the last decade of his life. A whole chapter is deservedly devoted to the dramatic elements present in the Alice books and their adaptations for the stage. Any Carrollian familiar with Charles C. Lovett's Alice on Stage (1990) could be tempted to skip this section, but Foulkes delves into some new material that makes it well worth reading. This is even more true of Foulkes's in-depth approach to the amateur theatricals Dodgson attended at some of his friends' homes, from charades and tableaux vivants to George MacDonald's reverential adaptation of The Pilgrim's Progress (first performed in 1877). Chapter 6 looks at Dodgson's friendship with the Terry sisters, which lasted more than thirty years and is one of the many instances disproving the widespread assumption that Carroll lost interest in girls when they reached puberty and attended only plays featuring child-actresses. He indeed was able to discern in the nine-year-old Mamilius the seeds of the future Ellen Terry, but far from rejecting her later as a sexually active young woman living in sin, he was eager to meet her when she was seventeen and maintained a close friendship with her and her sisters until his death. Dodgson's defense of the employment of children in theatres and his personal involvement in promoting the career of many young actresses, from Isa Bowman to his cousin Minna Quin, are brilliantly dealt with in the next chapter, as are the numerous and intricate links between his two major hobbies, theatre-going and photography, in the penultimate. The final chapter, which amounts to almost a third of the whole text, analyzes Dodgson's regular...

The Idea of a ‘Missionary Bishop’ in the Spread of the Anglican Communion in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACTIn the 1830s, among those associated with the Tractarian revival in England and also among certain figures in the (then) Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States (PECUSA), the idea of the ‘missionary bishop’ was propagated, which presented the bishop as a pioneer evangelist as the apostles were understood to be in New Testament times and saw the planting of the Church as necessarily including a bishop from the beginning for the ‘full integrity’ of the Church to be present. This view of the bishop as the ‘foundation stone’ was not held by the Evangelicals of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who saw the bishop by contrast as the ‘crown’ or coping stone of the young churches. Two main protagonists were the High Churchman, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and the honorary secretary and missionary strategist, Henry Venn. The party, led by C.F. Mackenzie as Bishop and mounted by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in 1861 to the tribes near Lake Nyassa, was the outworking of this Tractarian ideal.

The Right Honourable The Lord Wilberforce CMG OBE: In Memoriam

RICHARD ORME Wilberforce1 was born in India at Jullundur on 7 March 1907. He died in London on 15 February 2003. His father Samuel was in the Indian Civil Service, originally as an administrator, later as a judge of the High Court in Lahore. His grandfather Reginald Wilberforce, as a young ensign in the 52nd Light Infantry, reached India just in time for the outbreak of the Mutiny in May 1857; he fought in the retaking of Delhi and in the suppression of the Mutiny. Reginald's father was Samuel Wilberforce, the famous and disputatious Bishop of Oxford (later of Winchester). The bishop's father was William Wilberforce, the emancipator. So in Richard's recent ancestry we find administration, the law, arms, intellectual debate, and a passion for freedom. All were to manifest themselves in his own life. He was proud of his ancestry, publishing the letters of his father, and the Mutiny chapter written by his grandfather and anxious to defend the Bishop of Oxford from crude misrepresentation in the Darwin controversy. But undoubtedly the greatest influence was William Wilberforce. Richard studied his life and works and placed him on a pinnacle.

Owen and Huxley: unfinished business

Thomas Henry Huxley's famous put-down of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science signalled a sea-change in British biology. The Darwinian interpretation as championed by Huxley overwhelmed the Coleridgean-Owenite view argued by Wilberforce. In this paper some of the loose ends left over from that encounter are considered. Was the Darwinian victory quite as complete as it has often seemed? Does the Owenite view still have something to commend it?