Victorian Dissent

Protestant Dissent, or Nonconformity, as it became known, was one of the great religious success stories of the Victorian period. As a category, Dissent emerged in the seventeenth century to describe all those who rejected the Act of Uniformity of 1662—namely, the Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the Society of Friends. It would stretch in the eighteenth century to include the Methodists and Unitarians, and in the nineteenth to encompass not only multiple Methodist and Baptist offshoots, but also newcomers like the Latter-Day Saints. Thanks to concerted activism, by the end of the nineteenth century, Dissenters had successfully lobbied to repeal nearly all of the civil disabilities imposed upon them since the Act of Uniformity: no longer were they required to go before an Anglican clergyman for marriage (or burial), or to pay the church rate for the upkeep of Anglican churches, or to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England to attend Oxford or Cambridge (As many historians have pointed out, the ironic outcome of such reforms was that the campaign for disestablishment in England imploded, despite success in Ireland). Nonconformists were prominent in political campaigns for religious toleration, suffrage reform, and unionization; they also became more and more respectable as the century wore on, and became equally prominent as capitalists, philanthropists, and social-purity activists. The latter sometimes became problematic for the former. While Nonconformists were frequently lumped together by their contemporary opponents—and certainly cooperated in multiple campaigns—in practice the category contained highly diverse and sometimes deeply opposed groups. For example, in addition to the well-known struggles between the Calvinist and Arminian branches of Methodism (and other increasingly anti-Calvinist denominations, for that matter), both the Unitarians’ rejection of Christ’s divinity and the Society of Friends’ reliance on the “Inner Light” could strain relations with other churches. The dominant Nonconformist denominations in the United Kingdom were the Congregationalists and the Methodists (Wesleyan Methodists in England, Calvinistic Methodists in Wales). As variously delighted and appalled Victorian commentators discovered, the 1851 Census of Religion showed that the Church of England had lost its claim to being “the” Church of England. Victorian Christians thus found themselves confronting irrefutable evidence of what we now call “denominalization”: even though it held onto its status as the Established Church, the Church of England’s position as representative of national belief and unity looked precarious. But even before the Census, rural Anglican clergymen were well aware of where matters truly stood, as they faced stiff competition from Methodists (especially “cottage” denominations like the Primitive Methodists) and Baptists. Denominational identity strongly inflected how Nonconformists participated in Victorian literary culture, enabled by the proliferation of religious presses, newspapers, and periodicals. Some movements, like the Baptists and the Plymouth Brethren, could be skeptical about imaginative literature; others, like the Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians, played significant roles in shaping national tastes. But even Anglicans like the Brontës were strongly influenced (not always positively) by encounters with Nonconformity, especially the Methodists. To better understand the role of Nonconformity in Victorian literary culture, this bibliography offers a sampling of mostly recent scholarship (from the early 1990s to the present) on both Nonconformity as a religious, social, and political movement, and authors whose work was substantively affected by Nonconformist commitments or influences.