Front cover image for Essays and reviews : the 1860 text and its reading

Essays and reviews : the 1860 text and its reading

Essays and Reviews is a collection of seven articles that appeared in 1860, sparking a Victorian culture war that lasted for at least a decade. With pieces written by such prominent Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, Baden Powell, and Frederick Temple (later archbishop of Canterbury), the volume engaged the relations between religious faith and current topics of the day in education, the classics, theology, science, history, literature, biblical studies, hermeneutics, philology, politics, and philosophy. Upon publication, the church, the university, the press, the government, and the courts, both ecclesiastical and secular, joined in an intense dispute. The book signaled an intellectual and religious crisis, raised influential issues of free speech, and questioned the authority and control of the Anglican Church in Victorian society. The collection became a best-seller and led to three sensational heresy trials. Although many historians and literary critics have identified Essays and Reviews as a pivotal text of high Victorianism, until now it has been almost inaccessible to modern readers. This first critical edition, edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla, provides extensive annotation to map the various positions on the controversies that the book provoked. The editors place the volume in its complex social context and supply commentary, background materials, composition and publishing history, textual notes, and a broad range of new supporting documents, including material from the trials, manifestos, satires, and contemporary illustrations. Not only does such an annotated critical edition of Essays and Reviews indicate the impact that the volume had on Victorian society; it also sheds light on our own contemporary cultural institutions and controversies
Print Book, English, 2000
University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2000
xxiii, 1057 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9780813918693, 0813918693
42397685
Part I. Reading "An epoch in the history of opinion" :
1. From clerical culture to secularized Anglicanism: positioning Essays and reviews in Victorian social transformation
2. "To inaugurate a new era": the origin and publication of Essays and reviews
3. Reception and response: "the progress of ideas" raises "the dust of theological strife"
4. The essayists, the essays, and their contexts
5. The broad church compromise
Part II. Essays and reviews :
Preface to the twelfth edition [1865]
To the reader
Table of contents :
1. The education of the world / Frederick Temple
2. Bunsen's biblical researches / Rowland Williams
3. On the study of the evidences of Christianity / Baden Powell
4. Séances historiques de Genève: the national church / Henry Bristow Wilson
5. Mosaic cosmogony / Charles Wycliffe Goodwin
6. Tendencies of religious thought in England, 1688-1750 / Mark Patttison
Appendix to Pattison's essay: Bodley MS. Pattison 106
7. On the interpretation of scripture / Benjamin Jowett
Textual notes
Part III. Documentation :
1. Chronology of Essays and reviews
2. Prefaces to the American editions
3. Charges, manifestos, declarations, and testimonials, 1860 to 1870
4. Trials and appeals, 1861to 1864 : "Erroneous, strange, and heretical doctrines" :
A. "That stately march of ecclesiastical litigation" " Williams and Wilson on trial for heresy in the Court of Arches
B. "This great appeal" : before the judicial committee of the Privy Council
C. Jowett's trial in the Chancellor's court at Oxford: an "obscure and obsolete process"
5. Satires by Lewis Carroll and others
6. Essays and reviews and Bishop Colenso's "great scandal"
7. Temple and the Exeter controversy of 1869-70: "A sham ... a scandal and sacrilege"
Appendixes :
A. Publisher's records
B. Outlines of Essays and reviews
C. A finding list of letters and diaries on Essays and reviews
D. A bibliography of responses to Essays and reviews