The Treatment Of Religion In Four Nineteenth-century Novelists: Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Mrs. Olipant and William Hale White

Caperon, John Philip (1980). The Treatment Of Religion In Four Nineteenth-century Novelists: Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Mrs. Olipant and William Hale White. MPhil thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.0000fcc4

Abstract

This thesis argues that the four novelists named in the title are distinctive among their contemporaries in the way they treat religion - both religious experience and the religious community. The novelists' own experience of religion gives them a particular awareness of the importance of religion in the personal life, and the religious life of their characters is rendered with both inwardness and respect. At the same time, the novelists' own commitments in religion can be seen as artistically important, exercising a decisive effect on the shape of the novels. There is also in these novelists a special interest in the social dimension of religion, and a concern to portray its social world. Also, the novelists are specially aware of change in the religious world, and offer - taken as a "line" of writers - illuminating comment on the process of secularization.

The main argument of this thesis is illustrated in the second to fifth chapters by detailed discussions of the writers' religious backgrounds and of the novels. Mrs. Gaskell's deliberate commitment as a Christian novelist, and the effect of her Unitarianism on her writing, are discussed in relation to Mary Barton, Ruth, North and South and Cousin Phillis. George Eliot's early Evangelicalism and subsequent religious radicalism are seen as central to her early fiction, particularly Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede and Silas Marner. Mrs. Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford are discussed in relation to the author's Christian commitment and sociological awareness; and the novels of William Hale White are seen as documents illustrating the psychological weaknesses of the English Puritan tradition and its inevitable social disintegration.