In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Pitt Crawley, Becky Sharp’s first employer, “an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan,” is given a characteristic by his creator that nicely rounds out his unusual character: The baronet has a taste not only for family prayers, but for sermons.
“We will resume yesterday’s discourse, young ladies,” he informs his female household, “and you shall each read a page by turns; so that Miss a—Miss Short may have an opportunity of hearing you”—at which the poor girls begin to spell out “a long dismal sermon delivered at Bethesda Chapel, Liverpool, on behalf of the mission for the Chickasaw Indians. Was it not a charming evening?”
By and large, with few exceptions, 20th-century historians tended to follow Thackeray in regarding sermons as little more than fodder for satire. Sir Robert Ensor might have conceded that, in the Victorian triumph of religion, “the pulpit dominated,” but he does not say how or why. Theodore Hoppen is no more illuminating, simply saying, “Middle-class Victorians loved sermons, the longer the better.” The otherwise fair-minded historian G. M. Young considered the mere hearing of sermons deleterious: After noting how “a young man brought up in a careful home might have heard . . . a thousand sermons,” Young points out that “the form of preachers was canvassed like the form of public entertainers, and the circulation of some Victorian sermons is a thing to fill a modern writer with despair.”
Here was proof of the insatiable appetite of the public for sermons of all kinds. Still, for Young,
To say that a literary genre as supple and capacious as the sermon could only produce a taste for mountebanks like Martin Tupper and Ralph Waldo Emerson was typical of the 20th century’s unwillingness to meet the sermon on its own varied ground. In omitting to pay any attention to the sermons of the most influential homilists of the 19th century, Young was giving a misleading impression of the sermons of the Victorian age, as none of that era’s best preachers, for all their doctrinal differences, went in for anything that could be justly characterized as cant.
To appreciate afresh the wide-ranging field commanded by the sermon at a time when religion was still genuinely respected in the public sphere, even by agnostics and atheists, one needs only to recall the great preachers themselves: John Tulloch, the voice of liberal orthodoxy within the Church of Scotland; Henry Liddon, the heir of Pusey and learned Tractarianism; John Caird, the author of that most Victorian of sermons, “Religion in Common Life,” which he delivered before Queen Victoria at Balmoral in 1857. There was also Thomas Chalmers, first moderator of the Free Church; William Connor Magee, the great advocate for the benefits of the Church of Ireland, on an isle where Presbyterians and Roman Catholics were perpetually at each other’s throats; and Robert William Dale, the passionate evangelical whose sermons on St. Paul and the Trinity redefined what it meant to be evangelical long before Mark Noll began remonstrating with his co-religionists for neglecting the intellectual aspects of faith.
Sermon writers were much more than mere pulpit entertainers: They could set the course for decades of theological inquiry. In the 18th century, Joseph Butler’s pivotal sermon “The Ignorance of Man” (1719) prefigured a theology of devout skepticism to which generations of Anglicans would subscribe, from John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce to Dean Inge and Rowan Williams. Indeed, the great preachers made sermons bestsellers for serious readers right up to the end of the 19th century and beyond. It is high time that historians of religion paid such work the justice it deserves.
Well, that justice is splendidly paid by this Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, a fascinating, well-researched, well-produced volume that is not only a skillful mapping-out of the great influence the sermon enjoyed in a dazzling array of contexts, but a triumph of balanced and imaginative synthesis. The editors have assembled a model collection of essays to which all students of English history, religion, criticism, and fiction will be deeply indebted.
In order to give readers some sense of the impressive scope of this context, the editors have included essays on parish preaching in the Georgian and Victorian eras; sermons of 18th-century evangelicals and of British Catholics; preaching in the churches of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; preaching bearing on Parliament and the court; the anti-Jacobite sermon; sermons in the age of the American and French revolutions; funeral sermons; preaching and the empire; 18th-century mission sermons; preaching and the Gothic Revival; and the sermon and the Victorian novel.
At 688 pages, this volume is neither an unwieldy rag-bag nor a chronological forced march. The editors clearly drew up their thematic patchwork carefully, and the quilt is admirably cohesive. Another winning aspect of the volume is its freedom from the usual academic sins: Not all of the essays are riveting, but it is remarkable how few of them descend into jargon or offer oblations to the gods of political correctness.
Instead, we have Kirstie Blair, in a piece about poet-preachers, quoting the young F. D. Maurice reminding his auditors that “it is not the black garment, nor the precise and empty phrase, which makes men ministers of God: but the communion with that Spirit of God, which was, in all its fullness, upon those mighty poets, Isaiah and Ezekiel; which unrolled its vision over the rocks of Patmos, and is, in larger or smaller measure, the teacher of every bard.” We have Jeffrey Chamberlain quoting from an 18th-century book dissuading young men from going into the priesthood because of the great bother involved in composing sermons: “For here he may by weekly Labour, by plodding, and torturing and racking his Brains, squeeze out something (whether coherent or incoherent, it is no Matter) which with much ado . . . may be lick’d into the Model of a Thing commonly called a ‘Sermon.’ ”
We also have G. M. Ditchfield pointing out how the sermon supplies a reliable key to the age’s true interest in religion.
Melissa Wilkinson makes some good points about the sermons written by Cardinal Manning and other Catholics throughout the 19th century. “One of the major differences in emphasis in these sermons,” she writes, “is that the confrontation was no longer simply Catholic versus Protestant but Catholic and Protestant, still with their disagreements, against atheism.” Unbelief continues to accelerate in our own time, of course—though politeness constrains us from following Manning in characterizing atheism as a “lower abasement of the intellect than was ever reached by the heathen world.”
John Wolfe then has some interesting things to say about the funeral sermon. In 1883, one homilist asked his mourners: “Who could afford to miss the prayers, the counsel, the consolation of the dying, which are never so effectual as when they are breathed in pain, and never so wise and gentle as when they are spoken by one half over the border, almost in sight of the Far Land?” And as late as 1898, a preacher remarked, about William Gladstone’s long-lingering end, that the eyes of the nation should be cast towards Hawarden Castle, “where the old warrior was vanquishing death by submitting to it”—a trope, one feels, that would have given the shudders to Gladstone’s friend Lord Tennyson.
In any case, it is passages like these that make this an altogether delightful volume. Pitt Crawley would approve.
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and His Family.
