Theological Visions of Community in Victorian Fantasy Literature

Christine Choi

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Christine Choi

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that George MacDonald’s, Charles Kingsley’s, and

Christina Rossetti’s theological perspectives shape their aesthetic theories and practice of fantasy. More specifically, I demonstrate that their works of fantasy originate in their theological visions of community.

These authors refashion wide-ranging fantastic source materials, creating new forms out of old, to represent their belief in the trans-historical, trans-cultural nature of

Christian communion. In Chapter 1, I argue that MacDonald transforms Arthurian romance and fairy tales into parables of reformation that emphasize the need for continual spiritual reformation in each new generation. Individual and collective spiritual reformation are interrelated in these stories: the protagonists discover their identities to be branches of an old, collective story, thereby mirroring MacDonald’s vision of a sympathetic community of believers that simultaneously promotes unity and the independence of individual members. Continuing with the theme of promoting Christian unity through fantasy, Chapter 2 argues that Kingsley’s work as a fantasist is driven by

his vision of a modern English Church that incorporates heroic aspects from non-

Protestant cultures into the English Victorian Christian’s spiritual heritage. His use of the

fairy tale as a catch-all genre that includes stories of Catholic saints and Greek heroes,

makes him a precursor to mythopoeic fantasy, which syncretizes stories from different

times and cultures. Rossetti’s fantasies are shaped by communal thinking of another sort:

Chapter 3 argues that she uses the otherworldly landscapes of fairy tales and ghost stories

to translate her eschatological vision of the earthly life as a time of preparation for

heaven. She strategically uses different forms of fantasy to represent the experiences of

earthly pilgrims, whom she depicts as heavenly citizens-in-waiting, looking forward to

joining the harmonious community of saints in the afterlife.

It was during the nineteenth century that the habits of adapting diverse fantastic source materials were definitively formed. By contending that it is because of—not in spite of—their religious perspectives that MacDonald, Kingsley, and Rossetti participated in these imaginative acts of adaptation, this project offers a corrective to histories of modern fantasy’s development that obscure the theological origins of Victorian fantasy.

iii

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to have received funding from the Social Science and Humanities

Research Council and the University of Toronto’s Department of English Doctoral

Completion Award for this project.

My heart is overflowing with gratitude as I reflect upon all the people who have helped me with this dissertation over the years. Firstly, I wish to thank my supervisors,

Christine Bolus-Reichert and Mark Knight, for their support over the years. Christine, thank you for introducing me to the world of nineteenth-century romance. Mark, I am profoundly grateful to you for your mentorship, and for teaching me how to bring the religion and literature sides of my life together. I also wish to thank my external examiner, Krista Lysack, and the other members of my defense committee, Cannon

Schmitt and Carol Percy, for providing me with such gracious and helpful feedback on my work. A special thanks goes to Marguerite Perry, Tanuja Persaud, and Sangeeta

Panjwani of the Department of English: I could always count on you to light up my way and point me in the right direction, whatever questions I might have had.

Countless individuals supported me through prayer over the years, especially members of my Young Nak family. But I wish to highlight three women whose intimate prayer support was especially indispensable for the completion of my thesis: Rachel Kim,

Genie Kim, and Melanie East. Thank you for renewing my hope and strength in every dark valley, and for celebrating with me at every bit of good news. I am also truly grateful for those members of my graduate community who showed me that I was not alone. Jenny O’Kell (who “saved my thesis” multiple times), Elisa Tersigni, and Kai

Hainer drew me into the Writing Boot Camp experience that proved to be a game-

changer for me. Deirdre Baker, Joanna Krongold, and Katherine Magyarody of the

Children’s Literature Reading Group, and Amy Coté and Kim Rodda of the Religion and

Literature Reading Group gave me a real home in our Department. Abigail Dennis and

Joel Rodgers re-entered my life at just the right time to help me with the final home

stretch. I thank all of you for lightening my load along the way and for many soul-

nourishing conversations.

Most of all, I am so grateful to my beautiful family. I love you and appreciate you all very much. Umma, you are the spiritual mentor of my heart. Thank you for loving me unconditionally and for being present with me every step of the way throughout this journey. I feel overwhelmed when I think about all that you’ve done for me. Abba, thank you for teaching me the word “metaphor” and for buying me Jane Eyre and Wuthering

Heights when I was far too young to understand any of these things. Juns, you are the best brother in the world and wise beyond your years. Josie, thank you for being such a bright light to us. To the Lyeo clan, thank you for lovingly welcoming me into your family and for supporting me throughout this dissertation-writing process. Thank you for prayerfully and generously cheering me on. I especially want to thank my mother-in-law for constantly energizing me with her encouraging words and delicious food.

And to my incomparable husband Bob: words are insufficient to express my thanks to you—knowing me, that’s saying enough, but I’ll say a bit more (as I always do). Simply, thank you for being you and for all that you do. You make me strong and you keep me safe. I love you so very much.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………….iv

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………..vi

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 1: George MacDonald’s Nonconformist Fantasy Aesthetics: Fantasy as Parables of Reformation ………………………………………………………………..23

Chapter 2: The English Church and Heroic Types in Charles Kingsley’s Mythopoeic Fairy Tales.………………………………………………………………..60

Chapter 3: Becoming Fellow Citizens: Christina Rossetti’s Eschatological Fantasies ………………………………………………………………………...……...103

Coda ……………………………………………………………………………………140

Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………147

Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………160

Introduction

In this dissertation, I argue that George MacDonald’s, Charles Kingsley’s, and

Christina Rossetti’s theological perspectives shape their aesthetic theories and practice of fantasy. More specifically, I claim these authors’ works of fantasy do the work of mediating between past, present, and future Christian believers through theologically inspired visions of community. These authors refashion wide-ranging fantastic source materials, creating new forms out of old, to represent their belief in the trans-historical, trans-cultural nature of Christian communion.

I focus specifically on Victorian genre fantasy, which is comprised of many

different literary forms containing supernatural elements. Genre studies of Victorian

fantasy literature face the challenge of defining a genre that is, like its cousin romance,

“protean,” to borrow Ian Duncan’s term (10). In John Sutherland’s entry on “Fantasy” in

his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction , he notes, “Fantasy as a staple fictional

commodity, for either juvenile or adult readers, first emerges in the Victorian period,

although its origins can be traced back to the Romantic poets (notably Coleridge)” (220).

He then goes on to list a wide range of representative texts, including the Grimms’ fairy

tales, The Arabian Nights, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, Dickens’ Christmas

Carol (which Sutherland describes as “fantastic”), gothic narratives, other “experiments

in fantasy by major and minor British authors,” and proto-science fiction “as practised by

H. G. Wells” (220). From our modern perspective, “fantasy” can serve as an umbrella

term that encompasses works belonging to many sub-genres, and “Victorian fantasy” can

potentially point in many different directions as a term that refers variously to the

Victorians’ engagement with forms of romance, myths and other supernatural narratives

1 2 from different cultures, ghost stories, and the fairy tale. 1 Indeed, as I will discuss further below, I consider the nineteenth century to be a transitional period in the development of fantasy—an age in which the habits of adapting diverse fantastic source materials were definitively formed.

While I find the umbrella term “Victorian fantasy” useful, I do not seek to delineate a sub-genre that can be labelled “Christian fantasy” in the larger body of

Victorian fantasy. I focus instead on how the theological perspectives of faithful

Christian authors shape their fantasy aesthetics. I define “fantasy aesthetics” as the artistic principles governing these authors’ practice of fantasy writing, and the formal strategies that emerge from these principles. By using the term “fantasy aesthetics” here,

I stress that these authors are fantasy writers with specific artistic philosophies and strategies that are predicated on a Christian theological worldview that nourishes their fantasy creations. I distinguish my approach from the more limiting taxonomical one of categorizing these authors’ works under the discrete label of “Christian fantasy.”

However, previous engagements with the term “Christian fantasy” in various arenas will serve to highlight some of the challenges of analyzing the theological roots of fantasy literature. These challenges pivot around the potential problem of representing religious beliefs through the vehicle of fantasy, a literary form that is, as Brian Attebery puts it,

“one degree more fictional than fiction” (21). Cultural historians of the fantasy genre often define “religious” or “Christian” fantasy as being “awkward” or “risky.” For example, Brian Stableford defines “Religious Fantasy” as “an awkward category, because religions embody items of belief that seem obviously fantastic to nonbelievers but are accepted as matters of faith by adherents” (“Religious Fantasy”). As for “Christian

Fantasy,” Stableford’s definition includes a range of early modern literary productions, including Dante’s Divine Comedy , John Milton’s Paradise Lost , and John Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress ; he goes on to say, “Subsequent Christian fantasy, including the

Christian aspects of afterlife fantasy, angelic fantasy, and apocalyptic fantasy, usually has an ironic aspect derived from a slightly uncomfortable awareness of its lack of literal truth” (“Christian Fantasy”). For Attebery, the idea of using fantasies as vehicles for

Christian truths and to mediate our relationship with those truths, is a “risky” endeavour:

“One of the most surprising facts about Christian fantasy is that it exists at all. The decision to write what Tolkien called ‘fairy-stories’ based in Christian myth is a risky one, and the dangers lie on all sides” (70). According to Attebery, these potential

“dangers” include “being accused of trivializing religion—turning profound matters of faith into entertainment” and “getting it wrong—any version of, say, Jacob and the angel other than the exact text of Genesis will include interpolations and interpretations that inevitably collide with some readers’ understanding of the story and its significance”

(70). Colin Manlove provides another possible approach to the topic: in the introduction to his 1992 genre study Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present , Manlove defines his subject matter thus: “By ‘Christian fantasy’ is meant ‘a fiction dealing with the

Christian supernatural, often in an imagined world” (5). He goes on to say that the wide breadth of texts he covers in the book are all in some way grounded in “a Christian context for their actions . . . most of these works seek to persuade us of the supernatural reality of Christ and of heaven: their object is to open our eyes to the larger dimension of divine reality that surrounds us” (7).

Manlove’s definition is not incompatible with the kind of theological work that I

4 will attribute to devout Victorian fantasists, but I find Manlove’s attempt to define the specific contours of a discrete genre labelled “Christian fantasy” to be unnecessarily limiting. My own goal is to restore our sense of the religious and theological perspectives that shaped MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s imagination, as an essential and constructive aspect of their fantasy aesthetics, focusing on the theological work that they do through their nature as fantasy texts rather than categorizing them as “Christian fantasy” according to a specific definition of “the Christian supernatural.” Moreover, I hold that we can accept Attebery’s insights about the fantasy genre as being

“fundamentally playful” (2) while resisting the notion that this “fundamentally playful” nature poses problems for those whose imaginations have been shaped by religious influences. Stableford and Attebery’s discomfort with the representation of religious

ideas through fantastic forms stems from a conception of religion that is not entirely open

to imaginative “risk.” I argue, by contrast, that rather than being a limiting factor, the

religious beliefs of these authors are sources of literary creativity in their use of fantasy

forms. In fact, fantasy is a particularly appropriate vehicle for the religious imagination’s

striving to embody unseen spiritual realities. Attebery might have a point when it comes

to “literalists” for whom “the problem . . . is not that fantasy denies Christian myths but

that it rearranges, reframes, and reinterprets them” (2). But although fantasy is a genre

that presupposes an extra layer of the suspension of disbelief, a reader with a severe

enough “literalist” attitude would surely have a problem with any genre of literature that

purports to be an imaginative vehicle for religious ideas—not just fantasy. Indeed, other

than the severest “literalists,” the Victorian fantasy writers whose work I examine in this

project—and others writing out of a religious framework—would not see “play” as a

5 dangerous quality of writing fantasy. Quite the contrary is true: using fantastic forms of literature provides these authors with an important means of engaging imaginatively with the Scriptures and church doctrines.

Fantasy Literature and the Religious Imagination In my study of devout Victorian fantasy writers, I join the work of a wide range of

scholars who have shown that nineteenth-century religion was an important site of

literary creativity. I argue, moreover, that a more expansive concept of the religious

imagination leads to an account of Victorian fantasy that does not obscure its theological

origins. As Mark Knight and Louise Lee note in the introduction to their volume of

essays Religion, Literature and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (2009), many thinkers

have “register[ed] suspicion about the relationship between (potential) religious

experience and the imagination . . . or else, conversely, that it knows nothing apart from

make-believe’s dominion” (1). As I discussed above, some contemporary accounts of

“religious fantasy” tend to stress the former position, conveying a sense of awkwardness

between the categories of religion and the imaginative playfulness inherent to fantasy

writing. But closer examinations of the relationship between religion, literature, and the

imagination form part of a larger body of scholarship on religion and literature that has

flourished in the last couple of decades. The religious turn in literary studies, as well as in

many other disciplines, has done much to complicate the notion, proceeding from the

secularization narrative, that literary works shaped by the Christian imagination are

limited in their creative freedom. In her discussion of “post-secular studies,” Lori Branch

notes that “this religious turn dates to the mid-1990s in philosophy, though it quickly

became clear that parallel developments were germinating in other fields” (91). Likewise,

Charles LaPorte observes that “the mechanisms and the timing of the traditional secularization narrative have come under intense scrutiny by scholars from a variety of fields: sociology, anthropology, history, religious studies” (277). In the field of Victorian studies specifically, LaPorte notes that one of the results of the religious turn is a recognition that “tak[ing] for granted the eclipse of religion in the modern era” had previously “flattened many distinctive religious features in Victorian literature and culture” (278). Referencing the work of historians of religion, Michael D. Hurley similarly avers that “while the ways of living and thinking associated with ‘modernity’ eroded certain kinds of faith (especially as traditionally practised within established institutions), faith was in far ruder health than had previously been imagined, and that in important respects faith evolved and thrived throughout the century” (4). William

McKelvy summarizes the complex relationship between religion and literature in the long nineteenth century when he says that the period “is not held together by any single assertion about the relationship between religion and literature. Rather, I underscore the significance of their repeated collusion and confrontation” (4).

In particular, bringing Charles Taylor’s oft-cited idea of the “immanent frame” to

bear on my study of fantasy expands our vocabulary for describing the relationship

between religious belief and fantasy. Taylor describes the “immanent frame” as

“constitut[ing] a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’

world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one” (542). Especially helpful for my

purposes here is Taylor’s claim that “the immanent frame is common to all of us in the

modern West” but that “some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some

live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it” (543-44).

It can “slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so” (543). The idea of there being different options of experiencing an immanent world expands our awareness of the different options of producing fantasy literature that uses the supernatural to represent experiences of living in that world. For example, a religiously-inflected

(“open”) fantasy in this shared “immanent frame,” would be different from, say, Simon

During’s account of “secular magic,” which “stakes no serious claim to contact with the supernatural” (1), but rather, focuses on “illusions understood as illusions” (2). Similarly, accounts of fantasy that proceed from a Weberian “disenchantment” are limited in their ability to account for the distinctive ways in which Christian authors experience the world and represent these experiences through the genre of fantasy. 2

A religious imagination that is shaped by an “openness” to the transcendent, to

“something beyond,” can take advantage of the specific nature of fantasy to do various

kinds of theological work, including (but not limited to) representing religious

experiences of living in the world, generating ideal visions of what life on earth could

ideally be like, or engendering in their readers a renewed intellectual or emotional grasp

of biblical concepts and stories that might have grown over-familiar. I follow Trevor Hart

here in his assertion that “certain works of literature may properly function as texts of

theology—texts, that is to say, that engage and wrestle with, and deepen our grasp upon

the realities with which religion (and doctrine in its own distinctive mode) has properly

and inevitably to do” (139). I find Hart’s distinction between the theological “function”

of literary texts and “doctrine in its own distinctive mode” particularly helpful, as it

describes the way in which literary texts by their own special nature can do certain kinds

of theological work that may engage with, but do not function in the same way, as the

“doctrinal mode.” Highlighting, as Hart does, the fact that literary engagements with religious ideas differ from “more systematic theological treatments” (158), expands the possibilities of the kinds of “work” that fantasy literature shaped by the religious imagination can do.

Genre Theory and the Victorians as Transitional Fantasists In designating my study as one of Victorian Christian authors’ works of fantasy , I

am positioning my work as a genre study of Victorian fantasy literature that is comprised

of diverse adaptations of many pre-existing “forms” of fantasy. Here, I am following

Stephen Prickett, who uses “fantasy” as an umbrella term covering all texts using “a

variety of nonrealistic techniques [including] nonsense, dreams, visions, and the creation

of other worlds” ( Victorian Fantasy 3). I find the umbrella term “Victorian fantasy”

useful because it serves my purpose of holding up a wide-angle lens with which to view

the genre. However, my approach to the study of Victorian fantasy is to simultaneously

give ear to the historical and retrospectively meaningful dimensions of my authors’

fantasy practice, shedding light on the theological influences shaping MacDonald,

Kingsley, and Rossetti’s fantasy aesthetics in their own historical moments, while also

considering their contributions to the wider genre of fantasy as it has evolved to the

present day.

Here I am also drawing on broader discussions of “form” that have recently

emerged in light of Caroline Levine’s book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

(2015). I am specifically drawing upon Levine’s useful distinction between “form” and

“genre.” Levine has recently commented in her book Forms that although “for many critics, the terms form and genre are synonymous or near-synonymous,” a distinction can

9 be made between the two:

Genre involves acts of classifying texts. An ensemble of characteristics, including

styles, themes, and marketing conventions, allows both producers and audiences

to group texts into certain kinds. Innovations can alter those expectations: an

experimental epic might invite readers to expand their sense of the genre’s

themes, while the introduction of print extends and transforms a folktale’s

audience. (13)

By contrast, “forms, defined as patternings, shapes, and arrangements, have a different relation to context: they can organize both social and literary objects, and they can remain stable over time” (13). I find this distinction between “form” and “genre” a useful one for analyzing fantasy’s multitudinous strands. Where I differ from Levine is that I take a wider-angle view of fantasy as a genre that encompasses what Levine might consider to constitute their own discrete genres (such as the folktale). Applying a slightly altered version of Levine’s distinction to my study of Victorian fantasy, then, I take the genre of

Victorian fantasy to include a multitude of various forms dealing with the supernatural.

Indeed, the quality of adaptation is one of the key features of the genre of fantasy as I see

it: the genre of fantasy is, by its very nature, comprised of the act of adapting old forms

for new purposes as the genre of fantasy continues to develop with each new generation

of fantasy writers.

Levine’s comments can be put into conversation with the work of scholars who

have examined the inherent challenges of producing genre theories of fantasy and its

cousin romance. Although she does not distinguish between “genre” and “form” as

Levine does, Anna Vaninskaya’s “generic excursus” of the late Victorian romance

10 revival features a similar argument about genre: “A genre is not an abstract entity, but one which manifests itself in concrete works and at specific historical moments: it is, in the end, what contemporaries (and future generations) make of it, and what they make of it alters over time” (58). Taking the example of how individual works of late Victorian romance were co-opted into genealogies of fantasy, Vaninskaya explains,

Considered synchronically, as two unrelated specimens of the late-Victorian

romance scene, texts like She and Lilith may have little in common; in fact,

individually they may bear more formal affinity to a Gothic romance of Bram

Stoker’s than to each other. But viewed diachronically, in terms of their locations

in the networks or sequences of descent, both are firmly conjoined as progenitors

of fantasy, while Dracula stands apart as a seminal text in the tradition of horror

literature. (75)

What appeals to me about Vaninskaya’s approach is that she comes at the analysis of

romance from both ends, balancing out an acknowledgement that what we recognize to

be the genre of fantasy today was in many ways retroactively defined, as well as shedding

light on the ways in which romance was defined in an author’s historical moment. Jamie

Williamson shares Vaninskaya’s concern for studies of fantasy and its antecedent forms

that do not adequately acknowledge the anachronistic assumptions that we bring to bear

on our definitions of the genre. In his discussion of the source materials that were

retroactively gathered into the Ballantyne Adult Fantasy Series canon, Williamson “calls

attention to a common underpinning [of extant studies] whose significance has largely

gone unnoticed: contemporary terms and a contemporary framework are being projected

backward onto work by writers who did not share precisely those terms and framework”

(22).

But while Williamson calls for us to recognize the “retrojected homogeneity”

involved in the formation of this canon (12), he still sees value in the “collective”

treatment of fantasy as a genre comprised of these many “pregenre” works. More

specifically, he claims, “One thing that can be said is that the work characterizing the

core, pregenre canon all draws to a substantial degree on themes and subject matter

ultimately derived from what might be termed nonmodern, or traditional, narrative form:

myth, legend, epic, saga, romance, and fairy-story” (23). Williamson’s “collective”

description applies to both “pregenre” works and the fantasy genre as it continued to

develop in the twentieth century. This description of the genre also resonates with

modern fantasy theorists like Attebery, who states, “Modern fantasy draws on a number

of traditional narrative genres—sacred and secular legends, Märchen, epics, and

ballads—and a wide array of cultural strands, including pre-Christian European, Native

American, indigenous Australian, and Asian religious traditions” (2). It is important to

hold the historical “terms and framework” in balance with the fact that modern readers do

in fact relate to what Williamson refers to as “pregenre” forms in light of the twentieth-

century’s subsequent “coalescence” of the genre (Williamson 1). What Duncan says of

romance can be applied to fantasy as well: “For us, romance must always be romance

revival, meaning not a synchronicity of archetypes across history but an active cultural

work of the discovery and invention of ancestral forms” (7). Brian Attebery makes a

similar claim: “Fantasy’s main claim to cultural importance resides, I believe, in the work

of redefining the relationship between contemporary readers and mythic texts” (4).

From this wide-angle view, the Victorian period takes on the appearance of a

12 pivotal transitional and transformative period in the development of the modern fantasy genre, marked by, as Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James note in their Short History of

Fantasy , “the emergence of distinct strands of a new kind of fantasy, self-conscious in its

homage to Arthurian romance and fairytale, but which was moving beyond the matter of

retelling” (18). This account overlaps with Michael Newton’s description of the Victorian

fairy tale as it developed in the period: “Writers started creating their own fairy stories,

sometimes for children and sometimes also for adults, transforming a form based in the

shared telling of tales into self-conscious, authored literary texts” (ix). He goes on to say,

“The Victorian writers love to refer back to their famous predecessors. Everywhere these

stories contentedly expose the fact that they are indebted to other stories” (xii). In her

study, Caroline Sumpter sheds light on the development of Victorian fairy tales by

focusing on their intertwined history with the contemporary press, asserting, “The variety

of works with fantastic elements circulating in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

periodicals—from the dream narrative and tale of alternative worlds to the oriental tale,

the ‘novel of circulation’, the fable and the satire—reveal that fairy tales were shaped by

a much wider dialogue” (11).

In other words, by framing the contours of the genre in this way—namely, taking

into account what it would become—I am putting different bodies of scholarship into

conversation with each other, including the strategic application of terms from fantasy

genre theory to my analysis of MacDonald, Kingsley, and Rossetti whenever it is helpful

for highlighting their contributions to the genre. In putting these scholarly voices into

conversation with each other, we can establish for ourselves a wider critical vocabulary

and draw upon specific bodies of scholarship when describing specific forms belonging

13 to the larger genre. This method of combining different strands of research, while seemingly idiosyncratic, best serves our modern understandings of the genre as encompassing a wide range of source materials dealing in the supernatural, and as descending genealogically from these combined forms, while still analyzing the historical dimensions of Victorian fantasy. Moreover, my approach to examining the historical dimensions of Christian authors’ fantasy practice has the additional benefit of leaving open a wide space for subsequent studies of the relationship between Victorian religion and fantasy. Subsequent studies of this nature can illuminate a multitude of diverse theological perspectives and theological work related to Victorian works of fantasy—not just the work of generating visions of community that I highlight in my own project.

Approaching the topic from this framework accommodates diverse possibilities for exploring how a Christian worldview can use forms of fantasy that are meaningful both in terms of their theological work, and of their contributions to fantasy literature as a whole.

MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s Contributions to the Genre of Fantasy MacDonald, Kingsley, and Rossetti were devout Christian authors who shared the willingness to playfully adapt a diverse range of source materials with other fantasy writers of the nineteenth century, and their theologically inspired works of fantasy can be situated in the larger context of the genre’s development. Considering the specific theological roots of their fantasy aesthetics does not diminish their applicability, their larger contribution, to the development of the fantasy genre. What I call MacDonald’s

Nonconformist fantasy aesthetics shape his famous essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” in which he says that fairy tales are “new embodiments of old truths” (6). A fairy tale

“cannot help having some meaning,” he writes. “Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another” (7). MacDonald’s defining fantasy as a form that causes people to experience a sense of harmony and yet still receive “different meanings” out of it, originates from his desire to mediate between individual and collective spiritual experiences in his religious context. But by the same token, this perspective leads to a view of fantasy that accommodates different meanings for different readers.

Kingsley’s syncretistic vision of heroism, which gathers hagiography and Greco-

Roman myths together under the common roof of English Victorian Christianity and makes it possible to apply the vocabulary of “mythopoeia” to his fantasy practice, a term which, as Attebery observes, “entered critical discourse about fantasy” through J. R. R.

Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’ debate about the nature of myth (4). I purposely choose to re- situate the term in the Victorian context through my chapter on Kingsley rather than

MacDonald, to whom it is often applied through the critical discussions surrounding the

Inklings and their Victorian influences. Consequently, I expand our understanding of the

Victorian mythopoeic impulse to fuse stories from diverse cultures.

Rossetti’s recognition that different forms of fantasy contain their own formal possibilities places her in the larger narrative of the development of fantasy as a genre that includes many different branches of supernatural tales. Furthermore, my highlighting the role of analogy of translation in Rossetti’s devotional works leads to my claim that the act of adapting pre-existing forms of fantasy can be seen as an act of translation in itself—namely, the act of making a home for narrative forms that may not have been

“Christian” to begin with in the Christian culture.

I see Rossetti’s fantasy practice, as well as MacDonald’s and Kingsley’s, as examples of “translating” fantastical materials in the service of a Christian vision of

Christian community. But if the use of fantastical forms seems “riskier” for these religious purposes than other fictional literary forms—it is also a mode, due to its inherently adaptable and playful nature, that allows for these theologically informed works to be transplanted into a wide variety of cultures as diverse readers come into contact with them.

Visions of Community in MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s Works of Fantasy In my examination of MacDonald, Kingsley, and Rossetti’s works of fantasy, I argue that their adaptations of pre-existing forms of fantasy enable them to do the theological work of externalizing the unseen spiritual realities of the bonds of Christian fellowship that transcend a particular time or culture. But more specifically, I describe the theological work of externalizing individual and collective spiritual transformation, which promotes a vision of community in which the individual and collective body of believers draw closer together in unity through these transformative experiences. I argue that MacDonald’s ideas of ongoing spiritual reformation, Kingsley’s ideas about historical development of the “catholic church,” and Rossetti’s eschatological beliefs about the “communion of saints” all emerge from a reconciliatory idea of Christian community—one that seeks to reconcile people from different denominational backgrounds (MacDonald), different cultures (Kingsley), and present and future time

(Rossetti).

I have been influenced here by Joshua King’s argument in Imagined Spiritual

Communities in Britain’s Age of Print that “a range of nineteenth-century creative authors, clergy, educators, and journalists made commentary on reading, reflecting attention to the act of reading, and attempts to model reading practices central to imagining membership in conflicting versions of a Christian British community” (6). I do not focus on the political dimensions of “imagining spiritual communities” that King highlights, nor do I focus on “the act of reading” per se, but King’s account of how

British Christians of diverse theological backgrounds presented visions of “imagined membership” resonates with my view that much of MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and

Rossetti’s literary activity was motivated by the desire to present visions of Christian unity. In my analysis of MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s visions of community, I discuss the ways in which these visions are shaped by their specific denominational backgrounds, which all shape their conception of Christian unity in different ways. I have also found it useful to consider Karen Dieleman’s concept of “religious imaginaries.”

Although I myself do not focus on “liturgical practice” as Dieleman does, I draw on her argument that religious authors develop a “religious imaginary” based on their specific denominational communities, and that these influences “have a powerful formative effect on how we imagine the world and our place in it and consequently on how we talk or write about it” (6).

I focus on the fantasy works of three religious Victorian authors from different denominational backgrounds, considering their works of fantasy in light of their religious origins by taking seriously the shaping influence of these authors’ “religious imaginaries.” George MacDonald came from a Nonconformist background and later became a member of the Church of England; Charles Kingsley was a Church of England

17 clergyman, and Christina Rossetti was a devout Anglo-Catholic. I discuss works dating from the 1850s (MacDonald’s “Sangreal” and Phantastes , Kingsley’s The Heroes ), the

1860s (Kingsley’s The Water-Babies , Rossetti’s poems from her poetry collections

Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems ), and the

1870s (Rossetti’s short stories “Nick” and “Hero” and MacDonald’s The Princess and the

Goblin ). In the case of MacDonald and Rossetti in particular, these are not the only works of fantasy that can be discussed with reference to my choice of topic, but I chose these particular works because they best highlight the theological work of envisioning the bonds of Christian community. While each of these authors approached the question of community from different theological perspectives, each shaped by their denominational backgrounds, they all shared a concern for Christian unity. Their communal visions emphasized sympathy and love among neighbours in their present day, but also extended to a vision of being spiritually united with their neighbours of past and future.

In each of the chapters, before discussing how their works of fantasy specifically engage with this theological work, I take some time to consider how each of these authors uses forms other than explicitly fantastic ones in order to establish first the distinctive characteristics of their views of Christian community. MacDonald wrote realist fiction, three series of “unspoken sermons,” an anthology of religious lyric, as well as his own poetry. Kingsley wrote poetry, too, but is mostly known for his prose works, including historical fiction, sermons, history lectures, and reviews of other works. Rossetti wrote poetry of various forms, of course, as well as devotional prose, children’s “sing-song” verses, and short stories in prose, of which the longest are the novellas Maude and

Commonplace . Examining this body of non-fantasy works first helps to demonstrate how

18 their visions of community emerge from these authors’ specific theological contexts.

In Chapter 1, I argue that MacDonald’s Nonconformist background shapes his ideas about Christian community in two main areas: his ideas about religious reformation—the need to find new forms for each new age—and his desire to maintain the independence of each individual believer’s spiritual sensibilities, while still being able to participate in collective forms of religious experience. As he put it in his anthology of religious lyric, England’s Antiphon , MacDonald hoped to show how individual expressions of “varied forms of Christianity” (324) could find “sympathy” with the wider body of believers in England. In Adela Cathcart , he looks for sympathy among believers in his vision of “the Church of God; the great cathedral-church of the universe; of which

Church I trust the Church of England is a little Jesus-chapel” (275). Individual and collective spiritual reformation are interrelated in these stories, as the protagonists discover their identities to be branches of an old collective story.

In Chapter 2, I build on the idea of mediating between individual and collective religious experience that I explore in the MacDonald chapter: while Kingsley shares with

MacDonald the common concern of mediating between individual and collective religious experience to promote unity, his vision of a “universal” spirituality is rooted more specifically in his vision of the English Church as a body that could host many different cultures under one roof. I situate Kingsley’s communal vision of the English

Church in his participation in the debates regarding the true “catholic church.” While many scholars have emphasized, and correctly so, the ways in which Kingsley’s theology was somewhat heterodox and seemingly represented a clash of ideas, one way to see harmony among his ideas is to consider his corpus in terms of his unifying interest in

“catholicity” and religious history, interpreted through the metaphor of the body of Christ being progressively built up throughout the ages. Kingsley’s view was that a “common history” shared by all members of society would dismantle warring sects. In his works of fantasy, he tries to establish this “common history” through the spiritual ideal of

“heroism,” envisioning one united English Church where each individual could take in the heroic lessons embodied by heroic sects in each previous age so that the individual would be a microcosm of each of those groups.

In Chapter 3, I argue that Rossetti’s ideas about Christian fellowship are intricately woven with her eschatological vision of earthly life as preparation for the next, which involves devotionally reflecting upon the saints who are already in heaven.

Rossetti stresses the need to live a life characterized by loving God and neighbour on earth, while realizing all the while that heaven, not earth, is the final home. Examining

Rossetti’s use of the analogy of translation in the devotional prose and poems illustrates

Rossetti’s understanding of the experience of living in the tension between two worlds. In the same way that the act of literary translation enables the sharing of an “inheritance” between the people of two different countries, the metaphor of “translating God’s law” can be seen in terms of “sharing an inheritance” as well. In living a loving Christian life, those on earth can share in an inheritance of heavenly culture that is enjoyed by those already in heaven: in getting a glimpse of this heavenly culture through revelation, pilgrims on earth can partially share in that inheritance in advance. At the same time, viewing her eschatological thinking through the perspective of the translation analogy brings out the correlative to making a good home on earth—that earth is not the final home, and that there is still much distance between spiritual and earthly countries.

Having established these authors’ theological perspectives on community, I move on to discuss how MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s fantasy aesthetics originate from these communal perspectives. In the MacDonald chapter, I discuss his use of romance and fairy tale in the service of reformation, transforming these materials into a new form of fantasy that combines these forms. In Phantastes and The Princess and the

Goblin , MacDonald specifically uses the collective associations of romance and fairy tale materials to shape the individual protagonists’ quests as a process of learning how to fit into a collective story. In other words, their individual quests are comprised of the process of realizing their own role in a story told many times, but in many different forms. As I noted above, I attribute this interest in mediating between the individual and the collective to MacDonald’s Nonconformist background: his desire for sympathetic religious unity among diverse Christians is homologous with his desire to write works of fantasy that reflect his vision of a spiritual community in which individuals discover their identity as one branch of an old, collective story.

In the Kingsley chapter, I argue that Kingsley searches for forms to mediate a common heroic history to promote unity, and lands on the fairy tale, which he sees as a trans-historical, trans-cultural form that brings together all the different myths in the world: for him, the catch-all term “fairy tale” includes all the heroic stories of the ages.

He re-casts the hagiography of Catholic saints into a mythopoeic form that gets folded into the category of “Christian fairy tale,” which joins the ranks of the “Greek Fairy

Tales” about Perseus, the Argonauts, and Theseus that he anthologizes for his children. I then argue that the highly intertextual nature of The Water-Babies , which contains allusions to all these different heroic tales, parallels his vision of an English Church that

21 hosts all these heroic types. The form of the fairy tale thus helps him to overcome the problems he encounters in using the historical novel—namely, the problem of the historical implausibility of bringing these non-Protestant heroic types into the fold of the

English Church.

In the Rossetti chapter, I argue that Rossetti specifically delineates between different forms of fantasy—the fairy-tale fable, ghost poems, and an adaptation of

Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty —in order to convey the different aspects of living in the tension between earth and heaven. Using these different forms of fantasy, each with their own distinctive motifs, narrative structures, and atmospheric possibilities, enables

Rossetti to convey slightly different nuances of her eschatological conception of life on earth as preparation for life in heaven. Rossetti’s works of fantasy communicate her sense of living life on earth in light of a larger spiritual reality than the material one that we see daily in front of us. This in-between state simultaneously involves seeking to create heavenly culture on earth below, while living in anticipation of entering a future heavenly realm in which all will be made right. In her fairy-tale fables, “Nick: A Child’s Tale” and

“Hero: A Metamorphosis,” Rossetti shows how people can create an earthly home for that heavenly culture of love, namely, by becoming revelations of love to their fellows.

Rossetti uses the motif of the fairy “gift” as a way of communicating the need for people to devote their earthly lives to becoming “gifts” to their neighbours. But Rossetti uses other types of fantasy to convey different aspects of her eschatological vision: she uses the ghost poems to emphasize the tension of living on earth and not being able to make sense of heavenly revelation. In “The Prince’s Progress,” her “reversal” of Perrault’s

Sleeping Beauty , Rossetti conveys the message that true fulfilment and understanding can

22 only be found beyond the earthly life by taking the heavenly happy ending off the pages of the poem itself: the happy marriage that eludes the Prince and the Princess is superseded by the hint that the Princess finds, through her death, true heavenly communion with Christ.

Chapter 1 George MacDonald’s Nonconformist Fantasy Aesthetics: Fantasy as Parables of Reformation

In this chapter, I argue that George MacDonald’s fantasy aesthetics are shaped by his Nonconformist ecclesiology and his beliefs about the interrelatedness of collective and individual spiritual reformation. MacDonald’s use of fantasy as a vehicle for spiritual truths originates in a theological commitment to the idea that “the life, thoughts, deeds, aims, beliefs of Jesus have to be fresh expounded every age, for all the depth of Eternity lies in them, and they have to be seen into more profoundly every new era of the world’s spiritual history” ( Expression 60). This theological commitment is reflected in his famous

essay “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), in which MacDonald claims that human

beings naturally “delight in calling up new forms,” and that new forms of fantasy in

particular can serve as “new embodiments of old truths” (6). He subsequently addresses

the question of what a fairy tale “means”: “The true fairy tale is, to my mind, very like

the sonata. We all know that a sonata means something . . . But if two or three men sat

down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea

would be the result? . . . We should find it had roused related, if not identical feelings, but

probably not one common thought” (8). These statements convey what MacDonald

valued in the genre of fantasy: its ability to evoke various meanings simultaneously—a

point that he emphasizes when he says that a fairy tale’s “meaning” is not to be gleaned

through straightforward allegory: “A fairy tale is not allegory. There may be allegory in

it, but it is not an allegory” (8). This openness to different interpretations, the prioritizing

of “feeling” over “thought,” and the resistance to associate the “meaning” of a fairy tale

with straightforward allegory are rooted in his desire to emphasize the need for continual

23 24 spiritual reformation in each new generation.

MacDonald’s desire for flexible forms—including literary forms like fantasy—to do this work of “freshly expounding” the Christian faith grows out of a personal spiritual journey that sees him eventually becoming “a member of the Church of England, but car[ing] neither for that or any other denomination as dividing or separating” ( Expression

151). His use of fantasy emerges out of his preoccupation with the immovable

foundations of Christianity, as compared to Christianity’s various formal manifestations

throughout history, and the various forms in which Christianity is practiced among

different individuals. MacDonald’s letters from the late 1840s to the 1860s reveal that he

was wrestling with questions about his religious heritage, the relationship between

independent spirituality and collective forms of belief. His theological development

during this period covers his journey from his fiery Calvinistic background; to going to

the Congregational theological seminary Highbury College; to being rejected by his

church at Arundel; to becoming a member of the Established Church, alongside a

community of kindred and sympathetic religious and literary-minded thinkers. By the

1860s, MacDonald had settled into the opinions and modes of production that

characterized the rest of his career: writing books, speaking at a wide variety of venues,

and beginning to produce his series of “unspoken sermons.”

But while he was still undecided about his calling, he wrote a letter to his father

from London in 1847 about the recent developments in his spiritual life, observing, “It is

difficult often to know in one’s mind what is mere opinion, and what is spirit & life—

fixed, actuating principle” ( Expression 19). Likewise, he expressed frustration with

people who single-mindedly sought refuge in the bulwark of their sectarian positions,

25 rejecting any views that they perceived to be a departure from these official creeds.

Another letter that he wrote to his father in November 1853—just six months after he had left Arundel—in which he responds to an inquiry about why he had not been attending the congregational meetings, provides one of MacDonald’s most eloquent articulations of his conviction that the free study and exercise of Christian truth was hampered by this kind of intolerant spirit. Throughout the letter, MacDonald elaborates on his ideas about the movement of church history and the nature of religious reformation. The ideas that he confidently expresses here reflect his earlier meditations about “mere opinion” as opposed to the “fixed actuating principles” of Christianity; these were convictions about which he had reached personal assurance after his youthful spiritual struggles—they were now refined by his later experiences with the sectarian forms of organized religion in his own time:

But does not all history teach us that the forms in which truth has be[e]n taught,

after being held heartily for a time, have by degrees come to be held merely

traditionally and have died out and other forms arisen. Which new forms have

always been abused at first. There never was Reformation but it came in a way

people did not expect and was cried down and refused by the greater part of the

generation amongst whom it began. There are some in every age who can see the

essential truth through the form, and hold by that, and who are not alarmed at the

change, but others, and they the most by far[,] cannot see this, & think all is

rejected by one who rejects the form of a truth which they count essential, while

he sees that it teaches error as well as truth, and is less fitted for men now than it

was at another period of history & stage of mental development. . . . Does not the

Spirit of God lead men and generations continually on to new truths[?].

(Expression of Character 69)

I quote this lengthy excerpt because it encapsulates a number of key points that have profound implications for MacDonald’s theology as a whole, and for his literary theory and practice as well. Firstly, MacDonald states that the forms, the vehicles that communicate truth, come and go; they are a historical means of communication used for a certain historical context. When these old forms are no longer “fit” to convey the truth, new ones replace them, but these new and unfamiliar forms will initially be rejected.

Secondly, this renewal of forms constitutes “Reformation,” and this movement will be met with protest by the majority of the people. Thirdly, MacDonald contrasts those individuals in an age of reformation who “can see the essential truth through the form”

(and are therefore “not alarmed”) with those individuals who “cannot see this.” These short-sighted ones mistakenly consider one particular form to be constitutive of the whole truth, and that the form itself is the essential element. The ones who can see the essential principle, on the other hand, acknowledge that the form is not uncorrupted by “error” and anticipate that new ones will take their place, bringing with them “new truths.” Thus,

MacDonald’s account of “Reformation” is that of a repeated and progressive process throughout history in which old truths are literally re-formed and new truths are simultaneously illuminated, building on the foundation of past revelations. MacDonald thus proposes that the preservation of religion necessitates “new forms” to continue revealing “new truths,” thereby defining religious reformation as a narrative of productive loss and gain that occurs repeatedly throughout history. It is an account of reformation by degrees, as an accommodation of the needs of the people and conditions

27 of the cultural moment, using forms of truth that are “fitted” to them—“which new forms are always abused at first.” At the same time, however, none of these forms are ever “free from error,” thus making reformation, a giving way of old forms to new, a perpetually necessary part of history. The work of “reformation” is never quite finished, and never quite free of strife due to the fact that there will always be those who value certain

“forms” of belief over the truth embodied by those forms. Crucial to understanding

MacDonald’s sense of religious reformation, then, is the idea that reformation occurs as individuals are able to see past “what is commonly called orthodoxy” and are able to produce new forms to carry the really “essential” truths forward, building on past revelation, while also recognizing that all forms—new and old—“contain truth as well as error.”

In focusing on the relationship between MacDonald’s religious and literary forms, my work comes into conversation with recent debates in Victorian studies about form, much of which centres on discussions about Caroline Levine’s influential proposition to examine the “collision” of socio-political and literary forms in her book, Forms: Whole,

Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). Levine’s attempts to “make a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience” (2) is part of a project to reconcile the various “formalist” and “historicist” practices of twentieth- and twentieth-century literary studies more broadly. She “[wants] to know . . . how both aesthetic and social forms acted in the world, and how they interacted and overlapped with each other” (xi). Engaging with the earlier version of

Levine’s argument in the article “Strategic Formalism,” Kirstie Blair notes that Levine does not consider the intricacies of religious conceptions of “form” (16). Blair’s

28 exemplary study of Victorian religious poetry in Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and

Religion (2012) addresses this gap, while Michael D. Hurley’s recent book Faith in

Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief similarly examines the relationship between poetic form and Christian faith. Hurley describes the “pressing challenge” for poets such as Boethius, Dante, and Milton, and those that follow in their footsteps, as

“one of commensurability: to find or found a style adequate to their subjects” (3).

“Religious poetry asks more of itself than that its form might find continuity with its content,” Hurley writes. “It aims not simply to delineate theological niceties, but to become itself an efficacious mode of theology” (3-4).

In claiming that MacDonald’s use of fantasy was a deliberate choice of theological import, my work bears an affinity with Blair’s and Hurley’s on poetic form. 3

In what follows, I examine the ways in which MacDonald uses fantasy stories as parables of reformation—namely, he adapts existing forms of Arthurian romance and fairy tales to explore the spiritual dynamic of an individual believer relating to a collective body of belief. I begin with an analysis of MacDonald’s ideas regarding the role of literature in effecting religious reformation in his 1864 novel Adela Cathcart . The novel presents a picture of a group of diverse people gathering together both in and out of church, which makes a case for appreciating literary forms, and especially fantasy, as a way of tending to individual spiritual needs, while still maintaining communal experience. In my subsequent close-readings of “The Sangreal” (1863) and Phantastes (1858), and The

Princess and the Goblin (1872), I read MacDonald’s fantasy works as parables of the process of reformation itself, reflecting the role that forms of fantasy have in serving as

“new embodiments of old truths” (“The Fantastic Imagination” 6). More specifically,

MacDonald transforms the inheritance motifs of the romance quest to show that individual and collective spiritual reformation are interrelated, and the protagonists of these stories mirror MacDonald’s vision of a sympathetic community of believers that simultaneously promotes unity and the independence of individual members. The seemingly inconclusive endings of all these serve to emphasize the cyclical, progressive nature of this journey for every individual that might undertake it, suggesting that each individual’s quest reflects, in miniature, the overarching movement of religious reformation as MacDonald defined it. The works by MacDonald that I have chosen for my close-readings feature a thematic pattern involving the restoration of ancestral memory, which leads to the discovery of an individual’s own story—presented as the new

branch of an old story. This narrative is followed by an inconclusive ending emphasizing

that the story is to keep going after the current one is over, after the primary protagonists

have left the stage.

Religion, Literature, and the Fantastic in Adela Cathcart I consider Adela Cathcart to be emblematic of a transitional period in

MacDonald’s thinking about the relationship between religious and literary forms, and in his developing fantasy aesthetic which was to find its culminating expression in “The

Fantastic Imagination.” As he told his friend and mentor A. J. Scott, Adela Cathcart was a novel “[containing] all the things [he had] written (some of which have been published before) embedded in another tale” ( Expression 143). In short, Adela Cathcart comes at a point in MacDonald’s career after his religious ideas had become more “fixed,” to echo his own words ( Expression 18, 19), having been refined through a tumultuous period, and as he was transitioning into a literary career. As such, the novel is unique in that it offers

30 a gathering of the stories MacDonald had written while his literary career gained

momentum.

The novel relates the events of one Christmas season when a group of people in the fictional community of Purleybridge gather together and form a “story-club” where each member is to take turns telling stories. The overarching purpose is to effect a positive change upon the eponymous character’s emotionally and physically weary state.

Her father’s old friend John Smith is instrumental in founding the group to cheer Adela.

The danger is that she will, like her mother “die of a decline” (12). The precise nature of

Adela’s—and it is implied, of her mother’s—illness remains vague, but in her initial description of it to John Smith, she tells him that one day, she simply began to suffer from “an overpowering sense of blackness and misery,” haunted by the thought, “What if this should be the true way of looking at things?” (25). In his diagnosis of Adela, Henry

Armstrong explicitly attributes Adela’s sickness to a “spiritual” cause: “She has evidently a strong mental constitution; and this strong frame, so to speak, has been fed upon slops; and an atrophy is the consequence” (52). His expresses his hope that the story-club will

“furnish a better mental table for her, for the time, and set her foraging in a new direction for the future” (52).

It is notable that this novel was published just four years before MacDonald’s

anthology of religious lyric verse in England’s Antiphon (1868), and the two projects are

similar in their desire to claim a special place for literary texts in mediating between

individual and collective religious experience. In both texts, MacDonald presents literary

forms as offering a space for diverse people to gather together and benefit one another

spiritually—a process that specifically reflects MacDonald’s desire to accommodate

31 diverse individual spiritual experiences, while not overly critiquing established forms of religious practice that occur within the bounds of a religious institution. In England’s

Antiphon , MacDonald turns to the literary form of the religious lyric in order to promote

an inter-denominational, national lineage of belief. He deliberately chooses lyrical poetry

to associate England’s religious history with the history of its “religious feeling,”

bringing together a wide range of poets, from varied denominational backgrounds. In the

preface to this anthology, which begins with “Sacred Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century”

and ends with a reflection on the poems of “Questioning Fervour” in his own time,

MacDonald explains, “My chief aim . . . will show itself to have been the mediating

towards an intelligent and cordial sympathy betwixt my readers and the writers from

whom I have quoted” (vi). MacDonald, then, is not so concerned with bringing all

denominations under one national roof, into the fold of the Establishment. In fact, the

diversity of poets that he includes in his anthology, some of whom did not necessarily

participate in any form of organized religion, underscores his effort to promote “the

necessity both for widest sympathy with the varied forms of Christianity and for

individual choice in regard to communion” (324).

MacDonald thus conceptualizes this spiritual communion as a literary community

that nourishes “sympathy with the varied forms of Christianity”—and in his imagination,

this literary religious community occupies a particular position with respect to the Church

of England. He seeks to “erect, as it were, in this book, a little auricle, or spot of

concentrated hearing,” which will function “like a chapel in the great church of England’s

worship, gathering the sounds of its never-ceasing choir, heart after heart lifting up itself

in the music of speech, heart after heart responding across the ages. Hearing, we worship

32 with them” (2). When MacDonald speaks of his book as a “chapel in the great church of

England’s worship,” the various nuances of the word “chapel” underscore the theme of unity comprised of many different parts throughout history, as the term could alternately mean “an oratory,” “a place of public worship of the established Church, subordinate to, or dependent upon, the church of the parish,” or be “applied to places of Christian worship other than those of the established church of the country,” (“chapel, n.”).

MacDonald’s use of the term resists any specific denominational, or official, allegiance here and elsewhere, while still seeing this literary “chapel” as a constituent part of the

Church of England. Consequently, England’s Antiphon shows that in turning to lyric

verse to re-establish a collective national religious memory stretching back before the

Protestant Reformation in England, he sees literary form as playing a profound role in

mediating a unified, “varied” religious communion that still respects the fixed forms of

organized religion.

A particular episode in Adela Cathcart reveals its special resonance with

MacDonald’s project in England’s Antiphon : following Henry Armstrong’s recitation of

Ludiwig Uhland’s poem The Lost Church , Adela’s uncomprehending aunt inquires what this “lost church” is. Henry’s brother the curate responds with his characteristic idealism,

“No one can tell, but him who finds it, like the poet.”

“But I suppose you at least consider it the Church of England,” returned the lady

with one of her sweetest attempts at a smile.

“God forbid!” exclaimed the clergyman, with a kind of sacred horror.

“Not the Church of England!” cried Mrs. Cathcart, in a tone of horror likewise,

dashed with amazement.

“No, madam—the Church of God; the great cathedral-church of the universe; of

which Church I trust the Church of England is a little Jesus-chapel .” (275, my

emphasis)

At this, Mrs. Cathcart “look[s] set-down and indignant,” while Percy simply “stare[s]”

(275). In this exchange, Mrs. Cathcart represents the narrow-minded religious perspective over which MacDonald expressed dismay in his letter to his father after leaving

Arundel—one that equates Christianity with a particular sectarian position. Moreover, the response of the curate Mr. Armstrong makes him Mrs. Cathcart’s foil in this instance. It is significant that MacDonald uses a curate of the Church of England to call the Church of England a “chapel,” which would resonate with Nonconformist associations: in

MacDonald’s characterization of Mr. Armstrong throughout the novel, we repeatedly see this official representative of the Established Church as one who is able to nimbly and joyfully enter into the literary proceedings of the story-club, displaying an ability to engage imaginatively with discussions of these fictional worlds.

The contrast between Mrs. Cathcart and Mr. Armstrong draws attention to the fact that the characters’ literary sympathies are an index of their ability to grasp spiritual realities, and moreover, to be open to expressions of Christianity that lie beyond fixed bounds of Established doctrine. I am certainly not suggesting that MacDonald’s point here is that one must be appreciative of fairy tales to be a Christian. But this ability to appreciate literary worlds as an index of the character’s ability to appreciate the wider, more individual expressions of Christian belief is not necessarily an intuitive, self-evident link. The fact that MacDonald makes that link in the characterization of individual story- club members is important in light of the various discussions among the characters

34 regarding the stories’ theological effects, which they achieve by serving as parables of religious experience. 4 Indeed, the conversation about the Church of England as but “a little Jesus-chapel ” in “the great cathedral-church of the universe” is precipitated by a

discussion of using The Lost Church poem as a “parable” of searching for an ideal,

universal church. Mrs. Cathcart is disconcerted by Henry’s proclamation that The Lost

Church is a “parable”:

“What do you mean by a parable , Mr. Henry?” interrupted Mrs. Cathcart. “It

sounds rather profane to me.”

“I mean a picture in words, where more is meant than meets the ear.”

“But why call it a parable?”

“Because it is one.”

“Why not speak in plain words then?”

“Because a good parable is plainer than the plainest words.” (272)

Mrs. Cathcart disapproves of Mr. Armstrong’s willingness to use stories of various kinds

as parables for Christian truths. Unable to sympathize with a world other than the one of

her own making, she cannot see beyond herself, her own version of reality. Her inability

to enjoy these fairy tales coincides the fact that she is also the most sectarian and narrow-

minded voice of all the story-club members. Her son, Percy, too, is also unable to enter

into the storytelling festivities. As another member of the story-club who cannot get into

the spirit of its proceedings, Percy, like his mother, shows the correlation between a

character’s spiritual views and attitudes toward literary fictional worlds.

But among the discussions about using parables for spiritual matters, discussions

about fairy tale aesthetics are especially privileged throughout the book as a way of

35 revealing where the characters’ literary and spiritual sympathies lie. Mr. Armstrong, along with John Smith and the Bloomfields enthusiastically discuss questions such as the internal logic of a fairy tale world, or the effect of using a supernatural tale for spiritual effects. By contrast, Mrs. Cathcart is constantly looking for the “moral” of the tales rather than their “reality” (104): she is mystified when John Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong work out “the reality of a fairy tale” (66) while discussing how to make one fairy tale contribution more internally consistent. She is unmoved by Harry Armstrong’s piece,

“The Cruel Painter,” which is inspired by vampire lore, asserting, “I do not see any good in founding a story upon a superstition.” Her objection is, predictably, that “one knows it is false, all the time” (415). Harry responds, however, by insisting, “All that I have related might have taken place; for the story is not founded on the superstition itself, but on the belief of the people of the time in the superstition.” Harry draws upon superstitious belief to create his story’s atmosphere of horror, and he takes advantage of the logic following from the fictional belief to plot out the events of his own story. He explains, “I have merely used this belief to give the general tone to the story, and sometimes the particular occasion for events in it, the vampire being a terrible fact to those times” (415).

The belief about vampires might be objectively “false” to the present audience, but it is

“true” within the internal consistency of the story-world.

In a lecture by F. D. Maurice on Spenser, we can discern why fantasy is a suitable vehicle to thematically convey MacDonald’s belief that supernatural stories could be used as parables to create a sense of spiritual awe, allowing their listeners to see beyond the worlds of their own individual perspectives. Maurice delivered this lecture to an audience at the Working Men’s College around 1864—the same year that Adela Cathcart

36 was published. We can hear in Maurice’s words a kind of response to Mrs. Cathcart’s questioning of the use of “founding a story upon a superstition” when “one knows it is false, all the time” (415). Addressing The Faerie Queene ’s historical context, Maurice

notes that “a multitude of old legends, which had been the delight of the people, had been

swept away by the Reformation. The Bible had been brought into the common tongue of

the people, and had driven out a world of fancies about invisible things to which they had

once paid reverence” (227). He later expands on this idea, demonstrating a possible key

for interpreting these objects of past belief and “reverence” in the present (post-

Reformation) time:

All these different stories were only half believed at any time. Still they connected

themselves with what ought not to be a half belief, with what should be the

strongest of all convictions, the belief that there is an invisible world surrounding

us—the conviction that there is a real and intimate relation between that world

and ourselves. Might it not be possible to preserve that conviction, to connect it

with all the most practical and earnest thoughts of the English gentleman and the

English peasant in the days of Elizabeth, and so to save what was really precious

and venerable in the old superstitions, now that they were doomed, and must

evidently fall off and die? (232-33)

At this point in the lecture, Maurice is referring both to stories about “Elves and Fairies”

that “were preserved in old songs and tales” and to “tales of knightly adventures, of the

Champions of Christendom, who had wonderful and mysterious aids in their battles with

giants and magicians,” indicating that both types of stories fall under the category of “old

superstitions” for him (232). Maurice displays an openness to examining “old

37 superstitions” by drawing out what he considers to be the precious kernel of truth that could be carried forward into the present: “the belief that there is an invisible world surrounding us—the conviction that there is a real and intimate connection between that world and ourselves.”

Maurice’s willingness to use these magical “superstitions” of the past, recuperating them to nourish modern religious spirituality resonates with what

MacDonald would come to articulate as the “liberty” afforded by “the fantastic imagination”: “Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses” (“Fantastic Imagination” 5). Although Maurice is talking about old stories that modern Protestants can no longer “believe” and MacDonald is referring specifically to the freedom to create new imaginary “forms” that do not conform to natural laws, both of them are in agreement about the value of using fantasy as a vehicle for what they consider to be essential spiritual beliefs.

Intergenerational Romances in “The Sangreal” and Phantastes In what follows, I read MacDonald’s little-analyzed Arthurian poem “The

Sangreal” alongside one of his best-known fantasy works, Phantastes , which is widely acknowledged in fantasy studies as an important milestone in the history of modern fantasy. This approach differs from that of many others who analyze Phantastes as a companion piece to Lilith , MacDonald’s last fantasy novel. 5 By analyzing the Arthurian poem side by side with what MacDonald called his “faerie romance” and “a sort of fairy tale for grown people” ( Expression 126), we see how MacDonald plays a key role in shaping the lineage from romance to fantasy. As Richard Mathews notes, modern fantasy

“preserves many of the appealing surfaces and philosophical depths of the romance tradition while creating new structural and thematic dimensions of its own” (472). Of

MacDonald specifically, Mathews says that he “can be said to have fathered the ‘faerie romance’ and fantasies grounded in religious vision” (476). But I argue that this understanding of MacDonald’s “religious” contribution to the romance-fantasy genre is limited without considering how MacDonald’s spiritual heritage specifically shaped his use of romance structures and motifs. By highlighting the process by which an individual questing knight finds his place in a lineage of preceding knights, MacDonald makes these stories into parables of reformation, illustrating the dynamic by which a religious inheritance becomes one’s own.

MacDonald’s Arthurian ballad “The Sangreal,” which carries the curious subtitle

“A Part of the Story Omitted in the Old Romances,” provides an intriguing starting point for examining MacDonald’s use of romance. Although the manuscript was ready in 1859,

MacDonald would not publish it until a few years later in 1863 in the Christian periodical

Good Words . Subsequently, the poem was reprinted in MacDonald’s 1867 collected poetry collection, The Disciple and Other Poems , grouped under the heading “Parables.”

The poem recounts the different stages in Sir Galahad’s successful quest to find the

Sangreal. Each part of the poem is comprised of varying numbers of quatrains, of which the first five trace Galahad’s progression from his “despair of finding the Grail”; to getting a glimpse of it in a dream and misinterpreting the meaning of the vision; to being satisfied enough with this experience to give up the quest for the real Grail; to finally taking up the quest once again and finding it, giving up all else. The final two parts of the poem describe how, upon finding it, he spreads the message among all people that the

Grail is the only source of everlasting life and joy – and when he dies, eager spectators draw around his body, but are dismayed upon finding that the Grail is absent:

When he passed, they reverent sought,

Where his hand lay prest,

For the cup he bare, they thought,

Hidden in his breast.

Hope and haste and eager thrill

Turned to sorrowing wail:

Hid he held it deeper still,

Took with him the Grail. (VII.5-12)

In my reading of the poem as a parable of reformation, “The Sangreal” stages the drama of recovering and discovering the true meaning of something that was in danger of becoming a misinterpreted object of faith. The tale of the Holy Grail, along with all aspects of Arthuriana, was of course quite deeply ingrained in the Victorian imagination and adapted for many different purposes. 6 Within this widespread passion for

medievalism, however, the character of Galahad was especially privileged. Debra

Mancoff observes, “No Arthurian poem enjoyed greater popularity. It quickly became a

favorite work, praised for its realization of an ideal youth, motivated by honor and

dedicated to a life of service and purity” (121). Tennyson’s poem “Sir Galahad” (1842)

was particularly popular, and it is evident that other adaptations of the Grail story like

MacDonald’s still bore comparisons with Tennyson more than a decade later: in a letter

to his faithful patron Lady Noel Byron, MacDonald reveals that the periodical Once-a-

Week had declined to publish his own take on the Grail story, “The Sangreal,” having

40 been “refused on the ground that one of Tennyson’s best poems is Sir Galahad !”

(Expression 132).

Subsequently, when Tennyson’s first four Idylls were published in 1859 (the year

of Macdonald’s letter to Lady Byron about his own Holy Grail poem) the Blackwoods

reviewer lamented Galahad’s near absence from the volume, recalling the earlier “Sir

Galahad” poem, saying,

How gladly would we have heard more of [Galahad]—that knight sans peur

because sans reproche, who is one of the fairest creations of Tennyson’s earlier

muse; whose quest of that Sangreal (from the search for which the valorous

Lancelot was excluded by his sin) has become in our poet’s hands a noble type of

true Christian chivalry—of that work of heaven on earth which only pure hearts

can love, only clean hands can do! (610)

Indeed, Sir Galahad invites interpretations of “true Christian chivalry” in both earthly and

spiritual terms. Victorian readers were riveted by the knight who was counted worthy and

pure enough to obtain the Grail, while it was denied even to his father Launcelot, who

was endowed with every quality celebrated by Arthur’s court. Galahad’s unique status as

a knight whose life echoed Christ’s words—that his disciples be “in the world but not

part of it”—made his story particularly open to religious allegorical readings, and

Victorian readers were more than ready to interpret the nature of his Grail quest in

spiritual terms.

Despite the Victorians’ general enthusiasm for Tennyson’s portrayal of Galahad’s

spiritual purity and devotion in his 1842 version of the poem, his depiction of Galahad’s

quest is not explicitly “religious.” In a letter to the Duke of Argyll in 1859, we glimpse

Tennyson’s wrestling with the religious aspects of the Grail story: “I doubt whether such a subject could be handled in these days, without incurring a charge of irreverence. It would be too much like playing with sacred things. The old writers believed in the

Sangraal” (244). Tennyson finally published “The Holy Grail” with his 1869 Idylls . In

her reading of this poem, Leonée Ormond cites the letter to the Duke of Argyll, arguing

that Tennyson eventually solved a part of his problem with ‘The Holy Grail’ by writing

most of it as a dramatic monologue, told by Sir Percivale, and so shifting the burden of

proof and belief away from the poet himself” (335): “Tennyson was not to be drawn into

arguments . . . about the religious significance of the Grail quest” (Ormond 335).

While for Tennyson, the prospect of delving into the supernatural, potentially

“sacred” aspects of the Holy Grail story were troubling, MacDonald had no qualms about

adapting the material to tell a story of Christian repentance and fulfillment. The main

thrust of the ballad is to convey the overall impression of a man who has met God and

found perfect satisfaction in Him over worldly things. For example, when Galahad

decides to abandon his quest to find the Grail, the edifying and reproving narrator avers,

“Not yet the good knight knew / His own sorest need” (III.27-28). Similarly, as Galahad

grows increasingly weary with life once again, the narrator tells the reader that this weary

state can be attributed to the fact that “for the Best no more he sighed,” and therefore,

“life grew poor, undignified” (IV.13, 15). The most explicit religious reference occurs at

the final stage of Galahad’s personal quest for the Grail—he repents of having ceased the

quest after having a dream in which he personally participates in Jesus’ crucifixion:

Then he dreamed through Jesus’ hand

That he drove a nail—

Woke and cried, “Through every land,

Lord, I seek thy Grail!” (IV.17-20)

Consequently, his weariness is replaced with a transformation into childlike joy and a disregard for worldly pleasures or possessions: after finding the Grail,

Laid his sword where he had found

Boot for every bale,

Stuck his spear into the ground,

Kept alone the Grail. (V.17-20)

Thus, in contrast to Tennyson’s ambiguity about the religious resonances of the Holy

Grail story, MacDonald was more than willing to seize upon its potential to serve as a parable for religious experience, and to explicitly present it as such.

Moreover, the subtitle to the poem, “A Part of the Story Omitted in the Old

Romances,” signals that MacDonald is explicitly foregrounding the poem’s status as a new take on the old story. In his letter to Lady Byron, MacDonald self-consciously explains the relationship between the old material and his “original” version:

All that I know of the legend of the Sangreal is that Sir Galahad sought it and

found it: at least that is all that is non-original in the poem. Both the story, the

mode, and the deeper meaning are original (sic). The meaning of the 3rd part is

that, ceasing to seek the central good in its highest manifestation, he failed to find

the central good in the individual good thing. But finding God in Christ, he found

God in all things – as certainly, though not so fully manifest. ( Expression 132)

The term “original” as MacDonald uses it here describes his own, new contribution to the

Holy Grail “legend.” Beyond the fact that he was differentiating his version from

Tennyson’s, the letter suggests that MacDonald’s re-forming older romance materials for

Christian purposes is shaped by his ideas about religious reformation as an ongoing, intergenerational process. MacDonald’s handling of the Holy Grail story shows that he is self-consciously interrogating the tensions between the “non-original” and the

“original”—by which he means old and new versions of the story respectively—not only in the narrative content of the poem itself, but in his own reflections about what he is doing with this old material.

In the poem, we see this self-consciousness in the fact that the narrative rather

glosses over the subsequent discovery of the Grail. At the point of discovery, the poem

defers to the authority of “Story”:

Where he wandered, seeking sad

Story doth not say

But at length sir Galahad

Found it on a day. (V.9-10)

This embedded self-consciousness about the relationship between his version of the Grail

story and other versions of the tale draws attention away from the discovery of the object

itself, foregrounding the fact that this is a new version of the tale that builds on, but goes

beyond, the old “Story.” The very subtitle of “The Sangreal,” which reads “A Part of the

Story Omitted in the Old Romances” shows that MacDonald is actively creating a new

addition to this story, adding a “deeper meaning,” as he tells Lady Byron, but the word

“omitted” indicates that the “old romances” had in some way neglected to transmit this

part of the tale—that his poem is, therefore, a kind of re-discovery of previously untold

aspects of the quest for the Holy Grail.

MacDonald’s staging of a rediscovery of a “part omitted from the old romances” is reflected in the events of the poem itself. Just as this particular part of the story had been “omitted” from the romance tales and needs to be recovered, the disappearance of the Grail at the end sends Galahad’s disciples off to discover the true meaning of the holy relic. The Grail’s being taken away, hidden from the eyes of those who seek it is a peculiar turn of events, given Galahad’s insistence that the Grail would give them victory over death, that it is “the only prize” and “the only cure” (VI.28, 32, 36). But an audience familiar with and learned in biblical resonances and typologies would have recognized that the Galahad figure is parallel to biblical figures like Enoch and Elijah, who are depicted as being taken up to heaven at the end of their earthly lives rather than experiencing death. They would have seen, too, that Galahad’s declaration that he

“should not die, / Would but go away” (VII.3-4) reflects Christ’s own declaration to his disciples in several of the Gospels that “there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (KJV, Matt. 16.28).

Therefore, in light of the allusion to Galahad’s Christ-like ascension, the ending of the poem suggests that it is now up to the people to seek the true meaning of the Grail without the possession of the material object. The Grail is taken away lest they fall into the trap of idolatry of the material, of worshipping the object instead of the source of good itself. MacDonald’s version of the Holy Grail story relates the individual knight’s pursuit of a material Grail, but the story ends inconclusively with Galahad’s leaving behind a legend rather than a material object. The object of desire remains a ghost of a

Grail for future generations to find and embody in new ways.

MacDonald uses the “old romance” of the Grail to evoke the sense of a spiritual

45 ancestral inheritance that must be recovered, and that this rediscovery constitutes synthesizing old and new experiences. MacDonald does not revere old stories or attribute them with “authenticity” for the sake of their past-ness any more than he does religious forms that have outgrown their ability to move people. His staging of the quest for the

Holy Grail as “a part of the story omitted in the old romances” thus recalls his comments about religious reformation—the sense that no forms are “free of error,” and the quest to carry on the work of reformation continues to the present day, and on into future generations. It is the adventure and burden of each new generation to find new forms for the age, even while acknowledging that they are building on an older tradition.

“The Sangreal” thus serves as a Christian parable that specifically acts as a parable of reformation by representing Galahad’s quest for the Grail as a quest for the

“ideal best,” spurred on by the old stories. That MacDonald sees this romance as a parable in these terms is evident in the penultimate stanza of the poem, where he makes it clear that he is re-imagining the story of Jesus’ disciples as knights who had found the

Holy Grail:

Children rosy in the sun

Ran to hear his tale

How twelve little ones had won

Each of them the Grail. (VI.10)

This stanza seemingly inserts Galahad into a lineage of Grail-seekers that include the disciples of Christ. The poem, then, is a parable about the need for religious reformation in each new generation, conceived as a romance with a line of knights that continually emerge to take up this age-old quest.

Phantastes is characterized by a similar self-consciousness about building on past stories: MacDonald’s Fairy Land is explicitly made in the image of other stories, a place where the hero Anodos exposes himself to stories, remembers old stories and finds them coming true in some way or another, and is transformed as he participates in them.

Indeed, Anodos’ journey begins with the need to rediscover his fairy ancestry, and the text contains allusions to many different fantastic and mythical stories, including

Arthurian quests; fairy tales like “Sleeping Beauty” (37), “The History of Graciosa and

Percinet” (53), “The White Cat” (54), and “Hop-o’-my-Thumb” (55); Greek myths about

Pygmalion (36) and Orpheus (37); and German tales about kobolds (130). Many of these stories contain some incident that parallels Anodos’ own experiences, so that he is able to use them as a guide for action. These old stories, therefore, become a collective mirror of the past and future that shapes his present experiences and decisions.

Anodos undergoes a quest in which he experiences the romance of reading stories and becomes changed by them, ultimately becoming a romancer himself. While scholars have taken note of MacDonald’s multiple allusions to and epigraphs from other stories in

Phantastes , there has been less attention, except in passing, to the fact that Anodos becomes part of a line of exemplary knights that all prefigure one another by mirroring and embodying the end result of their own quests. This line of knighthood includes Sir

Galahad and the “rosty” Sir Percivale, whose story Anodos reads in the cottage just inside the borders of Fairy Land; the “sad knight” to whom Anodos apprentices himself as squire, who is a shadow of Sir Percivale; and Anodos himself. Phantastes even features the character of Galahad, though a less fleshed out version than the one in “The

Sangreal.” Since Phantastes pre-dates “The Sangreal” by several years, the poem serves

47 as a kind of prequel to the story of Sir Galahad that we meet in the fantasy novel. The rather distant Phantastes Galahad has already undergone his own journey as related in the later poem. In Phantastes , it is Percivale, the “sad knight,” and Anodos who must continue to quest for the “ideal best,” following Galahad as the shining ideal. In this version, Galahad mainly serves as a foil and the ideal to which the other knights in Fairy

Land must aspire.

Seeing Anodos’ quest in this way—as an individual in a line of knights, all seeking to learn from others and do some good in Fairy Land—has implications for

Anodos’ struggle with his Shadow. Throughout his quest, Anodos’ most tenacious antagonist is his false idea of himself and the pride that accompanies it, represented by his Shadow. A similarly “evil” version of himself traps Anodos in a tower where “there was literally nothing . . . but my shadow and me” (178). This episode proves to be one of

Anodos’ worst plights. His rescue from this predicament by the singing girl rids him of the Shadow at last, and subsequently, Anodos relates, “Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.” He realizes, “It was not myself, but only my

Shadow, that I had lost” (183). The fact that this episode is then followed shortly after by his becoming Percivale’s squire suggests that the antidote to becoming engrossed in one’s own individual perspective is to learn from others who have gone before them in the journey. At the same time, there is no doubt about the fact that we are following Anodos’ personal, individual quest. When he returns home, Anodos summarizes his adventures by reiterating his revelation: “Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow” (205). The significance of losing his Shadow rather than finding his

48 ideal suggests that his Fairy Land experience enables him to become one who can find a

path rather than one who has found the path per se. Anodos’ story becomes one about

each individual searching for their “ideals” together, but all within the aegis and

landscape, within the bounds of fairy land.

MacDonald uses the motif of the romantic quest for identity to illustrate the fact

that the import of an individual’s life goes beyond the present moment alone. These

heroes can move forward in forging their own destinies only as they become reconnected

with the collective memory of their knightly heritage. In his Arthurian tale “The

Sangreal” and his faerie romance Phantastes , MacDonald thus characterizes his heroes as a synthesis of their collective romance genealogy and their unique personal identities which are formed and tested through their adventures. The discovery of true identity is not only to realize who they are as future individuals, but to also awaken into a deeper knowledge of their past and their relationship to their predecessors. Thus, these stories are romances of restoration, as well as parables of reformation that emphasize the quest for the “ideal best” will continue, long after each individual knight has left the realm of

Faerie.

Individual and Communal Stories in The Princess and the Goblin Like the knights Galahad and Anodos, Princess Irene’s unique individual identity in The Princess and the Goblin is shaped in relation to a collective past that must be rediscovered before she can move forward with her own story. In a chapter entitled, “The

Princess Loses Herself,” Irene’s adventure begins when she discovers that she is her

Great-great grandmother’s namesake. This mysterious ancestral being corrects the little princess’s perception that she is the sole owner of her name, and, in doing so, she re-

49 orients her perception of her family history:

“Do you know my name, child?”

“No, I don’t know it,” answered the princess.

“My name is Irene.”

“That’s my name!’ cried the princess.

“I know that. I let you have mine. I haven’t got your name. You’ve got mine.”

“How can that be?’ asked the princess, bewildered. ‘I’ve always had my name.”

“Your papa, the king, asked me if I had any objection to your having it; and, of

course, I hadn’t. I let you have it with pleasure.”

“It was very kind of you to give me your name—and such a pretty one,” said the

princess.

“Oh, not so very kind!’ said the old lady. “A name is one of those things one can

give away and keep all the same. I have a good many such things.” (13-14)

The old lady thus complicates Irene’s understanding of her identity by expanding her sense of time, showing her that “always” includes a time before her own birth. Irene

“loses” her individual hold on her own name as she interacts with her Great-great grandmother. Although she does not quite understand the kinship that is embodied in this familial title—which is evident in her subsequent explanation to Lootie that she had

“been up a long way to see my very great, huge, old grandmother” (19)—these initial revelations introduce her to the notion that identity is both individual and communal: the woman before her is not only named “Irene,” but she is also her “father’s mother’s father’s mother” (14).

This personal encounter with the Great-great-grandmother adjusts Irene’s

50 memories of the past and her relationships with others on her family tree: she realizes that she is the inheritor of elements from her family history. In being made aware that “Irene” is a family name, Irene sees that her heritage had influenced the beginning of her own life story, even before she had been aware of it. Indeed, the subsequent conversation draws attention to Irene’s lack of memories associated with her ancestor. The Great-great grandmother informs Irene that she had been at the palace for a long time:

“I’ve been here ever since you came yourself.”

“What a long time!” said the princess. “I don’t remember it at all.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“But I never saw you before.”

“No. But you shall see me again.” (14-15)

Aspects of the past, present, and future are all embedded in this exchange. The Great- great grandmother and Irene had both come to this castle a long time ago—she had always been present with her in the same household; currently, the princess does not remember the old woman before her; the Grandmother assures her, however, that she will see her again in the future. Thus, it is by restoring her ancestral memory through this revelation of her origins—namely, finding that she is not the only one who possesses her name—that the possibility for her own future story begins to come into view. For while she has the same name as her Grandmother, the story that we are reading is Irene’s own, as MacDonald makes clear with the title of the preceding chapter with which he opens the story: “Why the Princess Has a Story About Her.” By linking the beginning of the little princess Irene’s own story with this discovery of the ancestral Queen Irene,

MacDonald plays with the romance motif of ancestry and family genealogy in this fairy

51 tale to suggest that the discovery of Irene’s individuality is a mysterious mixture of becoming rooted in one’s origins, and of being able to synthesize that experience with her own future story to come.

From this point on, these connections between past, present, and future are embodied in the grandmother’s gift of the enchanted ball of thread that she had “woven and then spun” on her spinning wheel for Irene. Giving her a “fire-opal” ring to accompany the ball of thread, the Great-great grandmother “[does] something with the two—Irene could not tell what,” and returns the ring to her, but throws the ball into her

“rose fire,” then subsequently picks it up from the fire and places it in her cabinet (117-

18). In response to Irene’s perplexed exclamations, she reveals that she had “fastened the end of [the thread] to the ring” and prompts her to feel for the invisible line—“too fine for you to see it. You can only feel it” (119). “Now listen,” she says, “If ever you find yourself in any danger . . . you must take off your ring and put it under the pillow of your bed. Then you must lay your forefinger, the same that wore the ring, upon the thread, and follow the thread wherever it leads you” (119). She affirms Irene’s assumption that the thread would lead back to her, adding, “But, remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way indeed, and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too” (119). Irene thus remains linked to her Great- great-grandmother by following the thread, which leads her forward into adventure.

In the chapter “Irene’s Clue,” Irene is led by the thread into the mountain to help

Curdie escape from the goblins who are holding him prisoner. Subsequent events reinforce this feature of the magical thread: it not only leads Irene to safety when the battle between the goblins and the king’s men begins in her house, but it also serves as

“the grandmother’s messenger” to Curdie (218) and guides him to the princess in his own cottage, where she is being cared for by his mother. By following the thread, Irene receives her Grandmother’s care in “a roundabout way,” finding comfort in the form of

Curdie’s mother, who, Irene proclaims, “has been so kind to me, just like my own grandmother!” (220).

In fact, Irene is transformed by her grandmother’s influence into a metaphorical

“spinning wheel” herself. The magic thread, “which the spiders had spun far over the seas, which her grandmother had sat in the moonlight and spun again for her, which she had tempered in the rose-fire and tied to her opal ring” (155), is spun again through her obedience to the thread’s guidance, with her ring serving as the equivalent of the bobbin or other comparable part in the device. In other words, the grandmother adds the thread to

Irene herself—she hooks it onto the ring, and Irene becomes the bobbin that spins the yarn into a new story. As a metaphorical spinning wheel, Irene’s “following the thread” while remaining connected to her grandmother becomes symbolic of her embodying the influence of older voices in her family lineage.

It is instructive here to bring Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s concept of “religion as a chain of memory” to bear on the fairy tale, to consider how Irene’s story becomes a parable of religious reformation: Hervieu-Léger argues that a defining characteristic of religion is “theological memory”: “By continually homogenizing the various syntheses of memory already effected in the past, theological memory ensures the unity of religious memory in time and its actualization in the present, elements that are indispensable to the subjective realization of the chain of belief” (126). “Religious memory” is distinctive from other forms of “collective memory” in that the group in question “[defines] itself,

53 objectively and subjectively, as a lineage of belief” (125). Throughout the story, Irene

becomes an individual medium through whom the old thread—already once “woven then

spun” by her grandmother—is spun into new thread through her own story. Thus, Irene

becomes an instrument of truth who mediates between the past and the future.

MacDonald transforms the symbol of the thread in this way to emphasize the way in

which other, older stories become incorporated into and transformed in the forging of

one’s own story, conveying the theme that finding one’s true identity requires an inquiry

into origins.

But, moreover, following the thread also literally acts as the narrative through-line

weaving Irene’s and Curdie’s parts of the story together, emphasizing that Irene and

Curdie’s stories are connected and that they each have their own role to play in building

the narrative. The princess and the miner are constantly telling each other their part of the

story, explaining how they came to be where they are, and the events that transpired

while the other was not present. MacDonald emphasizes the theme of communal

storytelling by presenting multiple variations of the thread motif, making it a

transferrable principle from one part of the narrative to another. The first variation of the

motif is introduced when Curdie devises a plan for travelling more deeply into the dark

mines to investigate what the goblins might be planning without getting lost, by making

use of “a huge ball of fine string, having learned the trick from Hop-o’-my-Thumb,

whose history his mother had often told him” (94). The narrator continues,

Not that Hop-o’-my-Thumb had ever used a ball of string—I should be sorry to be

supposed so far out in my classics—but the principle was the same as that of the

pebbles. The end of this string he fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad

anchor, and then, with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went, set out in the

dark through the natural gangs of the goblins’ territory. (94, my emphasis)

In this way, Curdie’s ball of yarn refers to both nuances of the word “clue” (highlighted by the subsequent chapter heading “Curdie’s Clue”): it is literally a “clew” in the old sense—“a ball of yarn or thread”—as well as a “clue” in its “figurative [application], a fact, circumstance, or principle which, being taken hold of and followed up, leads through a maze, perplexity, difficulty, intricate investigation,” or “with the literal sense obscured: That which points the way, indicates a solution, or puts one on the track of a discovery; a key” (“clue, n.”). Curdie’s mother expands on this thread principle by helping Curdie to rewind the yarn whenever he brings it home in a state of “what seemed most hopeless entanglement”: “He always found his mother had got it right gain. There it was, wound in a most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!”

Curdie says admiringly, “I can’t think how you do it mother,” to which she responds, “I follow the thread . . . just as you do in the mine” (95). MacDonald thus draws attention to the fact that while everyone has their own “threads,” they each influence one another’s individual stories, and become woven into one. This dynamic is especially evident in the fact that the chapter “Irene’s Clue” is a companion chapter to the preceding “Curdie’s

Clue,” which tells of Curdie’s capture by the goblins after “the cobs’ creatures had found his axe, had between them carried it off, and had so led him he knew not where” (132).

The narrative juxtaposes the two “clues” and highlights the contrast between them:

Curdie had used his clue to retrace his steps, only to have the anchor of his pickaxe moved by the cobs; Irene’s clue, on the other hand, always remains safe with her grandmother—and when Curdie himself subsequently feels the grandmother’s thread

55 leading him to the princess later on in the story, MacDonald suggests that their stories have become woven together more tightly, as they are now following the same magical thread.

The narrative steadily builds a string of simile structures based on these variations of the thread motif, transposing it from the fairy tale Hop-o’-my-Thumb, to the goblin mines, to Curdie’s cottage. This movement describes a fairy tale motif come to life, and this movement from old story to new story is even more resonant because the particular motif in question has symbolic ties to other fairy tales and myths, like those famous threads associated with Ariadne and the Fates. Thus, the thread has a broader metafictional function: the act of “following the thread” becomes emblematic of the movement of narrative itself in this fairy tale (as in “spinning a yarn”), which is very conscious of its own status as story, evidenced in chapter titles such as “Why the Princess

has a Story about Her,” “A Short Chapter about Curdie,” “The Last Chapter,” and the

abrupt promise of a sequel in the end.

The thread’s special feature of only leading Irene forward and “vanishing” behind resonates with the final—and very subtle—variation of the thread motif, which appears in the second-last chapter, where the thread is transformed into the strings of a harp: after the princess has been restored to the joyful king, Irene and Curdie’s story is about to pass into the realm of story: “The king’s harper, who always formed a part of his escort, was chanting a ballad which he made as he went on playing on his instrument—about the princess and the goblins, and the prowess of Curdie, when all at once he ceased, with his eyes on one of the doors of the hall” (233). He is interrupted in the composition of this ballad by the appearance of the princess herself, with “her forefinger . . . feeling its way

56 along the invisible thread” (233), prompting them to listen for a mysterious noise: “The king listened, and a great stillness fell upon the company. Each man, seeing that the king listened, listened also, and the harper sat with his harp between his arms, and his fingers silent upon the strings” (233). The image of the harper’s fingers poised on the strings of his harp, with the ballad about the princess’s adventures only partly finished, mirrors the image of following the thread throughout the narrative, waiting to see where it will lead.

MacDonald emphasizes that Irene’s and Curdie’s individual actions inform the adventures that storytellers like the king’s harper will relate in the future. In yet another inconclusive ending, the king’s harper in The Princess and the Goblin resembles Walter

Scott’s minstrel in his Lay of the Last Minstrel , poised as a figure in between the past and the present, but MacDonald’s fairy tale stresses the imminent continuity of the story rather than its passing away into memory only. The harper’s ballad is interrupted, after all, by the flooding of the castle—proof that the story is not yet over—and this flood is directly followed by an abrupt epilogue that ends with, “The rest of the history of The

Princess and Curdie must be kept for another volume” (241).

This promised sequel, The Princess and Curdie , reveals in its final chapter that little Irene eventually becomes “Queen Irene” herself as she marries Curdie and rules

Gwyntystorm with him after her father dies. Curiously, however, the story concludes with the prospect of a broken genealogy, as Irene and Curdie’s story and family line end before the conclusion to the novel that bears both their names. The final lines of this fairy tale relate the fate of Gwyntystorm: since Irene and Curdie do not bear any children,

“when they [die] the people [choose] a king,” whose negligence of the people results in their growing “worse even than the old time,” until the foundations of the city literally

57 collapse due to the king’s insatiable greed to mine for gold (256). Whereas The Princess and the Goblin concludes abruptly with the explicit promise of a sequel, there is no clear sense of a sequel at the end of The Princess and Curdie, thus leaving readers not with a definitive restoration narrative of a king, but rather, the return narrative of an undesirable state of memory loss. Their broken family genealogy therefore symbolizes the ominous failure to discern and carry out the foundations of good government that the royal family had established.

But when we examine the ending of the story in light of its enigmatic opening pages, the return to a state of “wilderness” becomes less ominous, and signals yet another parable of reformation. The story’s concluding with a kind of “silent” return to nature, where the “name of Gwyntystorm” is no longer spoken, mirrors the first chapter of the novel, in which MacDonald describes the “strange and awful” nature of mountains:

In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we

do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not

come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them—and

what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with

admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me, they are

beautiful terrors. (1)

MacDonald is in full Romantic sublime mode here, and, seemingly inexplicably, he spends several pages describing the formidable nature of these mountains, describing them as “the heart of the earth” that has “come rushing up among her children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses.” Only then does he return to a description of the miners who “force their way back” into the mountain: Curdie and his father were one of

58 these: their business was to bring to light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it, and carried it out. Of the many other precious things in their mountain they knew little or nothing” (4).

In light of MacDonald’s notion of a productive cycle of loss and gain wherein old

forms of conveying truth give way to new, progressively illuminating, ones, the

conclusion to this fairy tale, to me, points to a restoration sequel in the form of a promise.

Just as Sir Galahad “took with him the Grail,” leaving behind lamentation, Irene and

Curdie leave behind a broken bloodline and a people divorced from their city’s history,

seemingly with nothing to pass down to the future. The eventual collapse of the city is

followed by “a great silence,” and now, “all around spreads a wilderness of wild deer,

and the very name of Gwyntystorm had ceased from the lips of men” (256). Just as the

narrative opens with the miners who go into the mountain to recover and “bring to light

hidden things,” the ending of the novel hints that this task of recovery is ongoing. Like

those other childless kings, Arthur, and more importantly, Christ, another King Curdie

the miner will return in a new body, leaving readers with an invitation to imagine the new

form in which this restoration may come.

The seemingly inconclusive endings of all the texts discussed above serve to

emphasize the cyclical, progressive nature of this journey for every individual that might

undertake it, suggesting that each individual’s quest reflects, in miniature, the

overarching movement of religious reformation as MacDonald defined it. The works by

MacDonald that I have chosen for my close-readings feature a thematic pattern involving

intergenerational reconciliation through the restoration of ancestral memory, which leads

to the discovery of an individual’s own story—presented as a new branch of an old story.

This narrative is followed by an inconclusive ending that emphasizes the story is to keep going after the current one is over, after the primary protagonists have left the stage.

MacDonald uses romance structures and develops them into parables of both spiritual and literary reformation that illustrate the way in which stories of the past influence and are adapted by a continuing line of storytellers. This dynamic between preservation and adaptation mirrors the way in which the fantasy genre is endlessly, repeatedly adaptable—and the vision of religious renewal that MacDonald conveys through his works: the notion that one’s present identity must be simultaneously oriented toward the past and the future. MacDonald moreover communicates the poignant vision of renewing faith together by telling the same story in multiple variations and from different points of view, everyone’s contributions mirroring, paralleling, contrasting, echoing and influencing one another’s versions; consequently, an individual’s story becomes part of the communal story.

Chapter 2 The English Church and Heroic Types in Charles Kingsley’s Mythopoeic Fairy Tales

In this chapter, I argue that what lies behind Kingsley’s work as a fantasist is his theory of a modern English Church in which the individual citizens’ spiritual development mirrors collective historical development through the ages. I turn to the question of how Kingsley seeks to “imagine” a united and modern “spiritual community”—to echo Joshua King’s term—through his fantasy novel The Water-Babies

(1863), contending that we can re-contextualize Kingsley’s writings in general, and his work as a fantasist in The Water-Babies in particular, by examining his ideas about religious history. 7 Indeed, Kingsley’s conception of religious history, and his search for

suitable literary forms through which to represent that history, are largely a response to

communal divisions in mid-Victorian England and the correlative desire for social unity.

Kingsley’s strong desire for reconciliation among different groups in society

reflects the extent to which his early life and career developed in the midst of the Oxford

Movement, doctrinal debates, and fears of “Papal Aggression.” As many scholars have

shown, this in-fighting among churchmen profoundly shaped Kingsley’s generation. In

an 1846 letter, Kingsley lamented the state of religious discord, asking his friend to

“pardon this jeremiad”: “Nobody trusts nobody. The clergy are split up into innumerable

parties . . . Everyone afraid to speak. Everyone unwilling to listen to his neighbour. . . .

Everybody swears it is not his fault, but the Evangelicals, or the Puseyites, or the Papists,

or the ministry; or everybody, in short, who does not agree with him” ( Letters and

Memories 103-04; vol. 1). But Kingsley’s overall concern with social divisions went

beyond doctrinal debates to include concerns about intergenerational strife, tensions

61 between socio-economic classes, and fractious intellectual disagreements between

“scientific men & the Church of England” (letter to Thomas Huxley, qtd in Klaver 482).

He was very much concerned about the threat of political turmoil due to these conflicts, and he expresses this concern with the full force of his fighting prose in the Preface to the first edition of Yeast: A Problem (1851). In this Preface, Kingsley criticizes members of the older generation for failing to address the problem of young people blindly turning to embrace non-Protestant, even non-Christian, beliefs, without realizing the historical roots of these ideas: “The more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism” (xvi). As for those people belonging to “the mass” who retained their Protestant faith, their excessive quarreling about its “outward” forms were causing them to “[lose] most fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of Christianity” (xvi).

Kingsley developed his ideas about English Protestantism in the modern age within this context. There are, however, some initial challenges to defining Kingsley as a theologian and as a historian. These challenges need to be addressed in order to put his theological ideas about the nature of the Church in conversation with his ideas about the

“use and meaning” of history, to echo the words of his friend and brother-in-law John

Anthony Froude (420). Firstly, despite Kingsley’s close association with “Muscular

Christianity,” it is often difficult to analyze Kingsley’s specific ideas as a religious thinker beyond suggesting that his was a somewhat heterodox theology because, as scholars have noted, there are many potentially conflicting sides to Kingsley’s own religious life. He is often characterized in terms of dichotomies aiming to encapsulate these conflicts, such as “the beast and the monk” (Chitty) and the “apostle of the flesh”

(Klaver). 8 Similarly, Norman Vance avers that the “manliness” and the “Christianity” in his Muscular Christianity were often in “uneasy” tension with each other ( Sinews of the

Spirit 7). In addition to the image of the “paradoxical curate” (Kelly 9), there is an unfortunate impression of Kingsley as being biased, hasty, and careless. This impression is of course bolstered by numerous re-tellings of his famous debate with John Henry

Newman, which was sparked by Kingsley’s review of Froude’s History of England in

Macmillan’s (1863/64). This debate is often used as shorthand to point to Kingsley’s unjust dismissal of Catholicism. Secondly, despite the fact that Kingsley was the Regius

Cambridge Professor of Modern History from 1860 to 1869 and was immensely popular with his students, he was often criticized by other historians. As Simon Goldhill notes,

“he was repeatedly, if usually privately, criticized for not having the right credentials . . .

He had not published any real or respected book of history, rather than historical fiction, yet. Within a few years, an appointment like Kingsley’s would be impossible, rather than one that raised the eyebrows of a few critics” (163-64). Kingsley acquired the mantle of history professor during a time when the discipline of history itself was in a formative state. These factors combine to make it difficult at times to assess Kingsley’s intellectual contributions to Victorian historiography and theology. 9

But while it may be unsurprising that his work is not counted among hallmarks of

Victorian historiography such as those by Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle, I argue that this interest in history is the common thread in Kingsley’s corpus throughout his career, and that it is most illuminating to analyze these ideas in light of his understanding of

Christianity’s development throughout the ages. Kingsley criticized the way “history was political and religious fuel” (Morris 66), being used by different parties to perpetuate a

63 fragmented social state. In his desire to see social cohesiveness and spiritual unity in modern English society, he was attempting to generate a consensus about religious history amongst the different social groups. He believed that instead of using history to support sectarian purposes, history ought to be used as a balm to heal these social divisions. Narratives about historical people and events ought to be deployed as a means of educating present Britons to have “large many-sided views of the past” that developed their sympathy (“On English Literature” 259). For example, in Kingsley’s review of the early volumes of Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art (1849), he addresses the topic of Catholic martyrs by asserting, “To talk philosophically of such matters, one must love them; he must set to work with a Christian sympathy, and a manly admiration for those old spiritual heroes” (202-03). He commends Anna Jameson’s study for this reason—for satisfying the “wish to find some bond of union between themselves and the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed before the Reformation” (191). Thus, if we read his works in light of this consistent interest in finding a unifying history as a means of overcoming social divisions, we can arrive at a more nuanced view of Kingsley’s conception of the Catholic past and other cultures—namely, what he saw as examples of their heroism. Indeed, Kingsley was convinced that heroic aspects of non-Protestant cultures should be incorporated into the modern-day English Christian’s spiritual heritage. He therefore attempts to present a vision of the English Church as the host of all these past forms of spirituality and heroism. 10

My approach here enables us to understand the entire corpus of his works in a cohesive manner, revealing that, while certainly idiosyncratic, The Water-Babies is not entirely unprecedented or disconnected from Kingsley’s other works, nor is it a to be

64 dismissed as a disorganized collection of his many interests. In his early career, Kingsley experimented with historical drama in The Saint’s Tragedy (1848) and the historical novel in Hypatia (1853), but the fantasy text for which he is still best known to contemporary audiences today has not been examined in light of his ideas about history. 11

I read The Water-Babies with the understanding that in the genre of fantasy, Kingsley

found a form that would accommodate his vision for a modern-day English Church that

would host different pieces of religious history. As I will discuss below, Kingsley

considered the “fairy tale” to be a catch-all genre for myths, romances, and folktales of

the past. By bringing this definition to bear on The Water-Babies , I show that the text

hosts multiple allusions to a wide variety of fantastical, mythological texts, which

parallels his vision for the English Church to be host to different pieces of religious

history. The Water-Babies, therefore, is a mythopoeic text that does the ecclesiological work of building up and strengthening the bonds of Britain as spiritual community.

In order to clarify how The Water-Babies does this theological work, I begin by situating Kingsley within contemporary Victorian debates about “catholicity.” These debates were deeply engaged with questions of religious unity within the nation and the social role of the modern English Church. Kingsley’s contribution to these debates is reflected in the aforementioned Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia . I then examine these early works in light of his ideas about the intersections between fairy tales, myths, and history.

Consequently, while fantasy is not the only genre that he used to mediate religious history, The Water-Babies uniquely embodies all the valences of Kingsley’s ideas regarding the movement of history and the nature of the Church.

Kingsley and the “Pieces of Religious History” Kingsley’s criticism of sectarianism in England comes out of mid-Victorian discussions about the “catholicity” of the English Church, and the notion that England had an important role to play in the modern world. F. D. Maurice, who strongly influenced Kingsley, reads history in terms of increasing spiritual unity through the ages in The Kingdom of Christ (revised version of 1842). Maurice articulates his conception of

“a church universal,” saying, “Apprehensions of the different aspects of it, must, if it be a

reality, be found in all the different schemes which express human thought and feeling”

(The Kingdom of Christ xxix-xxx). As Jeremy Morris notes, “To Maurice, the question

whether such a ‘Universal Society’ really existed was one of the most important subjects

of his day. And through it, the whole of human history opened up for inquiry” (69).

Indeed, the work of Morris and other scholars of religion demonstrates that while the

Victorian landscape was certainly characterized by religious sectarianism and doctrinal

debates, it is possible to emphasize this fragmentation too much and obscure the ways in

which the Victorians also attempted to imagine what spiritual unity—“catholicity”—

might look like in the modern age. As Joshua King puts it, the Victorians were engaged

in “imagining membership in conflicting versions of a Christian British community, even

as the state severed its exclusive connections to the Anglican Church” (6). For Kingsley’s

part, he approached the problems of religious sectarianism and communal divisions by

envisioning the modern English Church as a unified national and spiritual community

that would play the important role of hosting a variety of cultures. Specifically, Kingsley

envisioned a Church that could bring together all of the “pieces” of humanity that had

emerged through the history of past civilizations, and would be able to encourage its

members to strive for progressive integration of these various parts.

The central image that captured Kingsley’s imagination in this effort to encourage

Britons to strive for progressive unity is the image of the Church as the “body of Christ.”

This idea of “one body, many parts” derives from St. Paul. The analogy of “one body, many parts” appears in several of his letters, but most famously in 1 Corinthians 12, to

emphasize the ideal of unity among the different “members” of the Church scattered over

the Roman world. 12 This image of the “body of Christ”—one that would have been very

familiar to the Victorians—becomes an integral component of Kingsley’s

conceptualization of religious history. In his hands, this analogy is transformed to reflect

a particular sense of how religious communities evolve throughout time. The idea that the

body of Christ is being built up through the ages, piece by piece, is evident in a letter by

Kingsley from 1848:

Now the Law of the universe is, that spirit shall rule and matter obey, and this law

has two poles; 1st, That spirit shall control, and matter be controlled; 2nd, That

spirit shall will, and matter express that will. . . . In the earlier ages of Christianity

the first pole only was perceived . . .

It was, I think, a part of Christ’s guidance that they did see nothing else; that

their whole energies were directed to preaching the great message, ‘Ye are not

beasts, but immortal souls—not the slaves of flesh and matter, but the lords of

your flesh, servants only of God.’ Till this message had been fully believed, no art

or chivalry was allowed to arise in the Church. . . . Thus Christ, in every age of

the Church, for the sake of enabling our piecemeal and partial minds to bring out

one particular truth, seems to permit of our pushing it into error, by not binding it

with its correlative; e.g., state authority v. ecclesiastical authority, and Free Will v.

Predestination.

In fulness of time God raised up Christian art, chivalry, and woman worship as

witnesses for the other pole, i.e., that spirit had nobler relations to flesh and

matter, and a nobler duty to fulfil with regard to it. As the flesh was not meant

merely to be the slave of the spirit, it was meant to be its symbol—its outward

expression. ( Letters and Memories 150; vol. 1) 13

Here, Kingsley reflects upon the importance of both “poles” of humanity: the “spirit” and the “matter,” musing that “in the earlier ages of Christianity the first pole only was perceived” because that age called for the more pressing message to counteract the “gross sensuality” of the world in which Christianity had emerged. Kingsley goes on to elaborate a series of additional dichotomies that mark the Church’s progressive maturity over time. There are stages in the Church’s history when certain “pieces” of truth are prioritized over others due to Christ’s awareness of humanity’s inability to hold such

“correlatives” in balance. These correlatives cannot be perceived together until certain historical conditions come into place. In Kingsley’s account of religious history, then, each “age of the Church” gives rise to different societies, whose cultures represent only a piece of “truth.” Each of these civilizations contribute “particular truths” that accumulate and serve to mature the body of Christ through the ages. Thus, the maturation of the body of Christ “in the fullness of time”—namely, the revelation and incorporation of more and more of these “truths” through the ages—leads to progressive integration of the

“particular truths” that correlate more with either “spirit” or “matter.” Kingsley thus extends the Pauline analogy to conflate the body of history with the body of Christ.

Moreover, it is important, argues Kingsley, for individual people to grow in

68 knowledge of these past cultures. Students of history must collect all the pieces that have emerged throughout history so that they can gather them together to form a whole, combining the insights of each age. 14 In fact, he commends Charles Bennett’s illustrations for the Longman Pilgrim’s Progress (1860) mostly on the basis of Bennett’s

“increasing our knowledge of types of humanity which are permanent, however partial”

(xviii). Learning about these “types of humanity” is important because overall, Kingsley theorizes that there are certain “types” or aspects of Christian temperaments that emerge during different points in history, and these “types” embody different “pieces” of

Christian truth. As history continues to develop and reveal these “partial types of humanity,” so, too, does the “Universal Society of the Church”—to echo Maurice’s term—continue to grow, as each subsequent “age of the Church” learns from the previous ones. Kingsley’s theory about religious history, then, can be read in terms of the evolution of religious “types” and communities throughout history emerging as many parts of one body. He uses this image of the maturing body as an analogy for the process of historical development, emphasizing the potential for the body to become progressively educated and mature, manifested in increasing unity among its various parts. 15 This process of the body coming together is conflated in Kingsley’s mind with

the process of historical development, conflating the “building up of the body” with the

building up of the body of history.

Kingsley’s ideas about history culminate in a theory about nodes of Christian

activity—spiritual communities that had emerged throughout history and withdrawn from

the rest of society. These small, withdrawn communities become metonymic of the

“piecemeal” state of the Christian body throughout history, right up until the present

69 time: collectively, everyone in each small group embodies the “partial type of humanity”

most important to a given age. And it is the quality embodied in each of these small

groups that contributes the important “piece of truth” to the universal body in subsequent

ages of the Church. Each of these “sects” as he calls them (“The Monk a Civilizer” 215)

had made unique historical contributions to the body of Christ, depending on what was

possible in their own historical, cultural contexts. However, Kingsley sees these small

groups as playing an analogous function by providing a place of refuge for the world-

weary “masses” of society.

In former days, the best solution for the masses was to withdraw to enclaves apart

from the mainstream of society; these withdrawn congregations would become ideal

centres of learning and discipleship, where diverse members of society could find refuge

from the chaos without. In his history lecture “The Monk a Civilizer,” Kingsley explicitly

draws parallels between “sects” as seemingly disparate as the isolated Egyptian

monasteries of early Christianity, the “middle-age monasteries” of Europe, and the

“evangelical sects” of eighteenth-century England (217). He theorizes that the main

historical role played by all of these small, withdrawn religious “sects” had been to

“educate” the masses (“The Monk a Civilizer” 215). The primary form of education that

these small, segregated religious communities facilitated was the “bringing out, in each

man, the sense of individual responsibility . . . whether warrior or cripple, prince or

beggar, that he had an immortal soul, for which each must give like account to God”

(215). However, Kingsley goes on to explain that although each of these groups

developed and contributed to the development of Christianity, they are all ultimately only

partial glimpses of how Christian doctrine could be embodied in society. He identifies all

70 such small groups throughout Christian history as being segregated from the national life, attributing this withdrawal from wider society to the fact the time had not yet come for them to unite for a truly collective devotional life.

Achieving this collective devotional life is the particular contribution that

Kingsley wanted his own Victorian England to make to the body of Christ—and he makes the possibility for the English people to fulfil this calling conditional upon the ability to “have common history” that included the masses.

The history of the masses cannot be written, while they have no history; and none

will they have, as long as they remain a mass; ere their history begins, individuals,

few at first, and more and more numerous as they progress, must rise out of the

mass, and become persons, with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or

less different from their fellows, and thereby leavening and elevating their

fellows, that they too may become persons, and men indeed. Then they will begin

to have a common history, issuing out of each man’s struggle to assert his own

personality and his own convictions. (“The Monk a Civilizer” 209-10)

Kingsley stresses that in the modern age, the masses can start to move out from these isolated centres and be united with a “common history.” This “common history” is what he thinks will distinguish the modern Church of England from these previous small-group centres of Christian devotion: the special contribution of previous ages to the body of

Christ had been restricted to these small groups. But in the modern age, the masses could have “their own history” by evolving from members of an isolated community to “a people” with their own history, a group of “individuals” rather than a “mass” of non- individuals.

What these statements imply is that Kingsley’s antidote to sectarianism is for the masses to have a “common history” in which each member is “leavening and elevating” the others. Kingsley’s choice of the word “leavening and elevating” to describe this mutual support of one’s “fellows” is almost certainly not a coincidence, as it recalls his pointed, effective use of the term “yeast” as the title of his early novel. In the Gospels, moreover, “leaven” has many metaphorical resonances: Jesus uses the term to describe both the “kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 13.33) and the false teachings of the Pharisees of which his disciples must “beware” (Matt. 16.6). This double meaning is important because it demonstrates that when Kingsley refers to the “questions that are now agitating the minds of the rising generation” in the 1851 Preface to Yeast (xv, my

emphasis), the term “yeast” refers simultaneously to the “questions” of young people and

the young people themselves—both of which might be either productive or disruptive for

English society. Thus, these young people and their questions might either lead to

expanding Christ’s teachings on the “kingdom of heaven,” or they can lead to pharisaic,

burdensome ideas that obscure the truths of Christianity. The “rising generation” can

either be a force for spreading the “kingdom of heaven” through the “dough” of modern-

day England, or it can distort the words of life received from the Gospels. Rather than

becoming a “a royal priesthood, a holy nation,” to echo the language of 1 Peter 2.9,

England could very well become a “pharisaic” nation, with all its people interpreting

history for their own narrow ends. In other words, the “masses” could very quickly

become individually segregated “mobs”—rather than a nation of “holy priests” whose

members would “consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works” (Heb.

10.24), England might become a nation of quarrelling “pharisees” whose members would

72 tear it apart.

Forms to Mediate Kingsley’s View of History: Pieces and Masses in The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia illustrate Kingsley’s theory of the historical role played by past religious sects and his fear of sectarianism devolving into mob violence .

These early texts speak of his love of the Classics and his love of Germanic history, respectively, and much of what he admired and criticized about both periods is typified in his portrayal of the world in which these heroic eponymous martyrs, Hypatia and St.

Elizabeth, lived and died. The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia both illuminate his ideas

about the spiritual contributions of the Alexandrian and the medieval churches to the

trans-historical body of Christ. 16 But they also illustrate what he perceived to be the

limitations of those historical communities, particularly through the image of “yeast” that

runs like a leitmotif throughout the texts. This leitmotif foregrounds the consequences of

lacking social integration through the growing social unrest during these periods.

Kingsley identifies the Middle Ages’ contribution to the universal Church’s

development as “the preaching and the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that

society is bound to protect the weak”—“so far the middle age saw: but no further” (“The

Monk a Civilizer” 212). In The Saint’s Tragedy, Elizabeth herself can only do so much in

this social context of medieval Hungary—her intense devotion to the poor is often

criticized by statesmen. Therefore, although she is an exemplary individual in her

religious “sect,” as Count Walter calls it (97), the extent of Elizabeth’s influence is

limited. Nevertheless, she attempts to do her part in helping the poor and the weak. In an

early scene, she tells her nurse that she is increasingly aware of their great need and her

sense of obligation to them: “Oh! I have seen such things! / I shudder still; . . . We sit in a

73 cloud, and sing, like pictured angels, / And say, the world runs smooth—while right below / Welters the black, fermenting heap of life / On which our state is built” (89). In this scene, Kingsley has Elizabeth articulate her growing sense of obligation to the poor in language that echoes his comments about the “yeast” of Victorian Britain. This “black, fermenting heap of life,” if left unchecked, will continue to expand and spread throughout the body of society, affecting all social relations. In the meantime, through conversations between various characters in between Elizabeth’s scenes, Kingsley demonstrates that the

“fermenting” masses are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the state of affairs. The consequences of this discontentment among the poor and overall lack of social integration culminate in a scene where the priest Conrad is mauled by a group of peasants. The text concludes with Kingsley’s stage direction indicating that “the mob close over him” (245): the social unrest that had mostly been conveyed through conversations between various characters throughout the play breaks out into physical violence in the final moments of the play.

As for Hypatia’s time, Kingsley emphasizes that fifth-century Alexandria was the pivotal age when “the Graeco-Eastern mind was still in the middle of its great work,” positioned between the fall of Greece and Rome and the arrival of “the mythic Hengist and Horsa . . . on the shores of Kent,” which would launch the “world-wide life” of the

“English nation” ( Hypatia xvi; vol. 1). He claims that one important feature of this transitional period was the “monastic isolation from family and national duties” which gave the Early Church fathers “leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with a lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practical Northern mind” (xx; vol. 1).

Kingsley thus allows for the possibility that such “monastic activities” at an earlier period

74 of history had produced benefits for the subsequent development of Western Christianity.

In Hypatia, Kingsley draws attention to two schools of thought competing with each other to gain influence over everyone in Alexandria: Greek philosophy, led by

Hypatia, and “the Egyptian Church” led by Cyril. Neither of the representatives of the major schools, however, are able to fuse together the disparate bodies in society: Hypatia cannot bring back the “old gods,” even with the personal sacrifice she makes by agreeing to marry Orestes for political backing. As Kingsley notes in his preface, “The old faith

[of paganism] had lost all hold upon the hearts of the masses” (x; vol. 1). Likewise,

Kingsley’s negative portrayal of Cyril depicts the church patriarch as corrupt and pharisaic. The result of the “internecine struggle” (x; vol. 1) between the warring factions is that both the church and Neoplatonic philosophy degenerate into “chaos” (363; vol. 2).

Kingsley’s narrator is particularly unforgiving in his description of the church, claiming that “it turned its ferocity inward, to prey on its own vitals, and to tear itself in pieces by a voluntary suicide, with mutual anathemas and exclusions, till it ended as a mere chaos of idolatrous sects, persecuting each other for metaphysical propositions” (363; vol. 2).

Greek philosophy faces a similar fate, however; in fact, the narrator applies the epithet of

“Pharisee” to these philosophers, charging them with an “exclusive Pharisaism utterly unable to proclaim any good news for man as man” as they grew more and more abstract and entered the “realms of confusion” (364; vol. 2). By using the term “Pharisaism” here to describe the Greek philosophers, Kingsley’s unfavourable depiction of the “exclusive”

Greek philosophers is firmly paralleled with the Alexandrian Church’s pharisaic priests, thereby emphasizing that neither group holds the solution to unifying the warring social groups of Alexandria.

The underlying threat of the masses finds expression in Hypatia in various scenes

of social disruption. Hypatia and the statesman Orestes discuss how best to engage with

the people through a public “spectacle” that could simultaneously achieve Orestes’ goal

of sealing his power over the city, and Hypatia’s goal of turning the audience’s thoughts

toward the old gods. Their debate reveals Orestes’ belief that the mob is to be controlled

and manipulated—the play should be tailored to their lust for sensation and pure

“spectacle” to play on their basest instincts. Hypatia struggles to accept the discrepancy

between Orestes’ political strategy of “Panem and Circenses” (96; vol. 2) and her own

desire for a play that would stir up reverence for the old Greek gods in the hearts of the

masses. Orestes is not alone in his attempts to control the masses: many scenes

throughout the novel show the mob moving as though they are puppets of the various

powers that be, without rational thinking—a mostly anonymous force that moves at the

whim of the church and the warring factions of the city. It is through the movements of

the masses that Kingsley most pointedly illustrates the “internecine struggle” that he

describes in the preface—and the mob violence eventually culminates in Hypatia’s

violent death. 17

By the end of the novel, the character of Raphael shows the greatest potential for

“rising” above the mass because, as Christine Bolus-Reichert has shown, as a

“cosmopolitan and an eclectic,” Raphael “blends the best features of the doctrines he has encountered in Alexandria within a conciliatory Christianity” (180). However, Kingsley does not ultimately conclude the novel with Raphael, as important a figure as he is.

Rather, in the final pages of the novel, Kingsley turns to describe the monastic community that develops around Philammon, Hypatia’s other student, who returns to the

Thebaid desert after his tumultuous journey to the city. The harmonious life that

Philammon is able to inspire in this monastic community contrasts with the decline of the

“idolatrous sects” of the Alexandrian Church and the parallel fate of Neoplatonist schools after Hypatia’s death. Likewise, the loving brothers of this community stand in stark contrast to the violent, riotous mobs of the city. Through his lyrical descriptions of the brotherly love of this small desert community in the Egyptian Thebaid, Kingsley seems to suggest that in addition to the “cosmopolitan” outlook of Raphael that Bolus-Reichert describes, it is in this isolated enclave, withdrawn from the mainstream of society, that students of history can find another valuable kernel to be carried forward from the

Alexandrian stage of history.

Philammon’s monastic community is one of those historical religious “sects” that served as “leaven” for the ages to come. I see the portrayal of this community life at the end of Hypatia as a literary translation of Kingsley’s views on the “solitaries of the

Thebaid” that he discusses in his historical lectures: these were communities of people who “formed themselves into lauras, ‘lanes’ of huts, convents, under a common abbot or father” (“The Monk a Civilizer” 217). The “lauras” not only provided refuge and contemplation for the world-weary apart from the wicked rest of th e world, but also became places for people of different social stations to work together, shoulder-to- shoulder (“The Monk a Civilizer” 217). Indeed, we are told that “the monastery throve and grew rapidly under [Philammon’s] government”: “As to David in the mountains, so to him, every one who was discontented, and every one who was oppressed, gathered themselves” (369; vol. 2). In Kingsley’s account of past Christianity, these were among the sects that had advanced the history of Christianity, building up the body of Christ. In

77 playing their role in the drama of history, this historical “sect” had contributed to the development of the universal church, serving to “leaven and elevate” their fellows in the present and those to come.

Kingsley’s Turn to the Mythologizing Mode of Hagiography Baron von Bunsen greatly admired Kingsley’s work as a writer of historical fiction in The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia . Bunsen was not alone in his admiration for

Kingsley’s historical fiction: “With Hypatia Kingsley gained a reputation as a historian”

(Klaver 345), and “his books were great favorites of the Queen who had the right to make the [Cambridge] appointment” (Goldhill 163). Moreover, Bunsen’s comments about

Kingsley’s strengths as a writer of historical fiction make him a relevant figure in discussions of the Victorian historical novel genre as a whole—a genre which, as John

Bowen describes, was largely characterized by “the conflict of those two impulses” of

“historicism” and “the search for the transcendent and that which could resist the power of time” (243). Bunsen’s perspective was that it is more effective to use historical subjects to achieve “poetical” and “permanent” representations of humanity; in fact, he thought that Kingsley ought to “continue Shakespeare’s historical plays,” convinced that his friend could “discover in the picture of the historical past, the truly human, the deep, the permanent, and that he [knew] how to represent it” (qtd in Müller xiv). His stance was that “the true poet, the prophet of the present, must bid farewell to the questions of the day, which seem so great because they are so near, but are, in truth, but small and unpoetical” (xiv).

Kingsley’s literary career as a whole, however, attests to his unwillingness to let go of the “questions of the day.” Moreover, the idea of solely looking to “the picture of

78 the historical past for “permanent” human truths was problematic for his view of the relationship between religion and art. In his 1860 preface to The Pilgrim’s Progress , he extrapolates a general principle about this relationship, presenting a correlation between a historical period’s spiritual state and the artistic “forms” in which the people of the period choose to represent their faith:

In every age, intense and true faith expresses itself in the most everyday and the

most modern forms; while in ages of half belief and of dying creeds, the artist and

the public alike try to keep up in their own minds the tradition of a sacredness

which they feel is vanishing away, by thrusting their conceptions back into the

grand mist of past ages, and dressing up the ghosts of their heroes in the guise of

mediæval saints or eastern Jews. (xii)

Here, he roots Bunyan’s use of “the most everyday and the most modern forms” in the fact that Bunyan felt no disjunction between the religious “intensity” of the past and that of his present moment. Bunyan, Kingsley reasoned, was firmly convinced that God was just as present in his time “even as in the time of Luther or Dante” (xi). By contrast, people who feel themselves to be living in “ages of half belief and dying creeds” (xii) nostalgically turn to images of “past ages” rather than “modern” ones to represent religious subjects, due to their dissatisfaction with the present. People living in the midst of a religious decline feel a greater urgency to use past forms that possess an air of the

“reverent” or the “sacred” by virtue of their distance from the present. Therefore, the extent to which a historical period feels itself to be spiritually alive could be seen in the use of “the most everyday and the most modern forms” to represent faith.

On the one hand, the theatrical “spectacle” in Hypatia can be read as a

79 metafictional moment: Hypatia most certainly senses that she is living in an age of spiritual decay—and she puts her hopes in staging a play that would depict the heroism of the old gods. When it comes to his own depiction of this past age of fifth-century

Alexandria, Kingsley’s narrator emphasizes to the Victorian audience that this novel is indeed a depiction of “new foes under an old face—your own likenesses in toga and tunic, instead of coat and bonnet” (377; vol. 2). In other words, this historical novel can act as a mirror—enabling him to act as a “prophet of the present,” to use Bunsen’s term—precisely because “there is nothing new under the sun. The thing which has been, it is that which shall be” ( Hypatia 377; vol. 2). On the other hand, the prospect of the

Victorian age solely producing stories of past religious heroism would betoken a lack of

confidence in the “sacredness” of their present time. For this reason, he would have found

it insufficient to write only historical novels that would “thrust their conceptions back

into the grand mist of past ages.” To prove that the faith of the Victorian age was indeed

as “intense” as the previous ages of faith, Kingsley needed to find a form that would

enable him to depict Victorian faith “in the most everyday and the most modern forms.”

How does Kingsley negotiate this tension between the “permanence” to be found

in historical subjects and the need to emphasize the progressive development of the body

of Christ in the modern age? The clue here is to be found in his choice to convey the final

details of Philammon’s narrative with “an extract from an unpublished fragment of the

Hagiologia Nilotica” (371; vol. 2). The narrator who has been guiding the readers up to

this point distances himself in the end by conveying the closing scenes of Philammon’s

life in a mythologizing mode—in the form of hagiography. He directly quotes from this

hagiographical “extract,” which apparently contains “facts from sacrosanct and most

80 trustworthy mouths” (375; vol. 2). Consequently, other voices begin to crowd into the narrative so that the readers’ knowledge of how Philammon fares in the end is conveyed through fragmented accounts of people who came after him and were touched by his influence. The effect of mediating this epilogue through a multiplicity of voices is that the facts of Philammon’s later life become somewhat diffuse as he himself becomes the stuff of legend. The last image of him is that of a mysterious monk who regenerated his community and disappeared one day. By giving over the narrative to different voices here, Kingsley indicates that what is really important about Philammon’s story is the effect that his life had on those who came after him; this effect is therefore most suitably narrated by those who bear witness to the goodness of his life. Thus, the hagiographical mode becomes a means of establishing Philammon as a heroic saint in the eyes of those who had benefited from his influence.

“That fairy land of legend and miracle”: Mediating Religious History through “Christian” and “Greek” Fairy Tales Kingsley’s narrator draws a direct connection between hagiography and “fairy land” as he brings Philammon’s story to a close: “So be it . . . Philammon, like the rest, went to [his] own place; to the only place where such in such days could find rest; to the desert and the hermit’s cell, and then forward into that fairy land of legend and miracle, wherein all saintly lives were destined to be enveloped for many a century thenceforth ”

(377, my emphasis). This gesture toward the “fairy land of legend and miracle” conflates hagiography and fairy tale as mythologizing modes. In fact, Hypatia ’s conclusion is not a

unique instance of Kingsley’s conflating hagiography with fairy tale. In “The Poetry of

Sacred and Legendary Art” (1849), his review of the art critic Anna Jameson’s work, he

dubs the stories of old Catholic saints “Christian fairy-tales” (205). Although he pauses to

81 consider the “superstitious and fantastic” nature of St. Dorothea’s hagiography, for example, he nevertheless emphasizes the beautiful heroism to be found in this “exquisite story” (209-10). Moreover, in the popular lectures that he gave as Cambridge Regius

Professor of Modern History, Kingsley engages with the “fairy tale” mode of hagiography more than once. For example, in his discussion of Catholic saints like St.

Patrick and St. Bridget, Kingsley acknowledges that the hymns and stories that are associated with these names might not be strictly “historically correct”; however, he stresses the importance of “the broad fact that St. Bridget, or various persons who got, in the lapse of time, massed together under the name of St. Bridget, were eminently good women” (“The Clergy and the Heathen” 183). Kingsley structures the relationship between past and present Christians by asserting that these hagiographies become more meaningful even as they move further away from their historical origins:

It matters little whether these legends were historically correct. Their values lies

in the moral of them. . . . The falsehood would not have been invented unless it

had started in a truth. The high moral character ascribed to them would never

have been dreamed of by persons who had not seen living instances of that

character. Man’s imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines

its own experience. (184) 18

The “value” that Kingsley recovers from these myths of Catholic saints is the heroism that they represent. What Kingsley finds meaningful in stories about figures like

Philammon, St. Bridget, and St. Dorothea is the goodness and heroism they inspire—their ability to unite people in their love and reverence for them. These figures become the means by which a beautiful shared history evolves around them; consequently, the

“moral value” of their lives grows ever more meaningful as more and more people are inspired by them. In focusing on “broad fact” or “moral value” over historical veracity— whether there were in fact multiple people identified by the same name, or whether “such persons ever existed” at all (183-84)—Kingsley draws attention to what is for him the primary effect of using myth as a mediator of history: the accrual of meaning by a community over time. Hagiography and fairy tale uniquely effect this “accrual of meaning” because, as Kingsley says, “man’s imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines its own experience” (184). Both are modes with a powerful adaptive impulse behind them, encouraging subsequent generations of storytellers to personally embrace pre-existing narratives, and to relate them in newly imagined ways.

Hagiography and fairy tales are thus mythologizing modes that share an affinity

for Kingsley, whether he is engaging with such stories for the purposes of delivering a

history lecture or of entertaining his children. His anthology of Greek myths, The Heroes;

or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (1856), is the only text in Kingsley’s corpus other than The Water-Babies that he explicitly labels as “fairy tale.” In the preface to this

anthology, he addresses his children directly, speaking of the permanent value that these

fairy stories have contributed to the world: “The stories are not all true, of course, nor

half of them; you are not simple enough to fancy that; but the meaning of them is true,

and true for ever, and that is—“Do right, and God will help you” (xiii). Just as he does in

his history lectures about Catholic saints, Kingsley asserts that the value of these tales is

not in their historical veracity, but in their accumulated “meaning” to “do right.” He then

goes on to establish a connection between the fairy tales of different times, places, and

cultures, rounding up different mythologies from past civilizations and imposing a sense

83 of unity upon these diverse stories by calling them all “fairy tales.” All nations, he says, have such stories that they had “loved” when “they were young and simple”:

While they were young and simple they loved fairy tales, as you do now. All

nations do so when they are young: our old forefathers did, and called their stories

“Sagas.” I will read you some of them some day—some of the Eddas, and the

Voluspà, and Beowulf, and the noble old Romances. The old Arabs, again, had

their tales, which we now call the “Arabian Nights.” The old Romans had theirs,

and they called them “Fabulæ,” from which our word “fable” comes; but the old

Hellens called theirs “Muthoi,” from which our new word “myth” is taken. (xvi-

xvii)

Fairy tales, then, are simultaneously an “ancient” and “modern” form for Kingsley—a

trans-historical and trans-cultural form that transforms his readers into fellow students

alongside the Greek children of the past. The form of the fairy-tale anthology itself acts

as a roof under which Kingsley gathers three main stories—the myths centred on Perseus,

Jason and the Argonauts, and Theseus. He structures the anthology so that the story of the

Argonauts, a band of brotherly heroes, is nestled in between the stories of two individual

heroes. The fact that the Argonauts’ adventures take up by far the most room in

Kingsley’s anthology highlights the important theme of the brotherly heroism shared by

fellow scholars who have been educated together. Unlike Perseus and Theseus who

embark on individual quests, Jason is surrounded by a group of noble men who

constantly inspire one another and those around them with their great feats. Many of

these heroes had been Jason’s fellow scholars with whom he had spent his childhood on

Mount Pelion, all under the tutelage of the wise centaur Cheiron, and these stories are

84 meant to serve as a mirror of heroic deeds that English children could spiritually emulate and reproduce in their own times. Kingsley thus conveys the sense that all of history is comprised of God’s children: English children are spiritually united with the people of past ages and other nations, as if they were in the company of fellow heroes like Jason and the Argonauts, all reflecting to one another great qualities to which they might aspire.

This admiration for chivalric, athletic, courteous hero types has been associated with the term “muscular Christianity” ever since the Saturday Review used the moniker to describe Kingsley’s gospel as one that “labours to show that the good may be bold, and the bold good” (176). The review was written after The Heroes had come out, but this hero type was evidently already well established in the mind of the public as part of

Kingsley’s persona. As Norman Vance observes, “Self-denying right action, whether consciously Christian or not, could always gain his approval” ( Sinews 129). Indeed,

Vance and others have pointed out that an important aspect of his ideal of “Christian manliness” included the general approval of both Christian and non-Christian figures who “embod[ied] Kingsleyan virtues of rough, unconventional decency, courage, physical sturdiness, and a saving respect for women” (Vance, “Kingsley, Charles”). It certainly is not difficult to see that the Greek heroes in Kingsley’s anthology, who are reminiscent of the Goth heroes in Hypatia , are embodiments of this ideal. But in Vance’s reading of Kingsley, he concludes that this openness to non-Christian heroes had the problematic implication of religious pluralism. The religious pluralism implicit in

Kingsley’s heroic ideal led to a tension between his celebration of heroism in all its forms and his desire to impose a Christian framework on these heroic types, and he was often hard-pressed to find appropriate genres to help him negotiate this tension. According to

Vance, Kingsley tried to avoid suggesting inadvertently that “conversion to Christianity

[was] unimportant and incidental” in the constitution of his heroic ideal by “alternating between the roles of the biographer who follows the fortunes of an individual and the social observer or historian whose interest is in larger patterns”; or by “redress[ing] the balance by switching from historical or epic to biographical narrative, insisting from time to time that Amyas Leigh and Hereward and Tom Thurnall confront the moral inadequacy and godlessness of their lives” ( Sinews 129).

Notably, all of the examples that Vance mentions—Amyas Leigh, Hereward,

Tom Thurnall—are from Kingsley’s historical fiction: Westward Ho!, Hereward the

Wake, and Two Years Ago respectively. But I think that in The Heroes, Kingsley gets around the problem of awkwardly imposing his Protestant-Christian ethic on non-

Protestant-Christian heroes with his sweeping interpretation of the fairy tales’ overall

“meaning” as “do right, and God will help you.” Perseus’, the Argonauts’, and Theseus’ reverence for the Greek gods, and the resulting justice they bring about in the land, becomes an analogue for serving God. Thus, Kingsley’s depiction of the collective heroism in the fairy-tale anthology indicates that this is a genre where he was able to bring together all the heroic virtues that he held dear in one place. The fairy tale, unlike the historical novels featuring pre- or non-Christian heroic figures, does not require that he strain to keep within the limits of historical plausibility. He need not make these otherwise admirable figures into explicitly proto-Protestant heroes, but he is still able to gather them together in one place and glean religious value from their stories. As he says in The Heroes, “whether true or not, their meaning is true.”

Indeed, Kingsley pictures all of these heroes congregating with his own children,

86 thereby highlighting the theme of fellowship among the world’s past and present children—but significantly, he pictures this fellowship in specifically Christian terms. In a bizarre construction of a fantastical Christmas-party scene, he urges,

Come hither, children, at this blessed Christmas time, when all God’s creatures

should rejoice together, and bless Him who redeemed them all. Come and see old

friends of mine, whom I knew long ere you were born. They are come to visit us

at Christmas, out of the world where all live to God; and to tell you some of their

old fairy tales, which they loved when they were young like you. ( The Heroes x-

xi)

In the context of a Christmas party hosted by a Victorian English Christian father telling his children about his “old friends,” Kingsley makes Christmastime the reason for hosting all of these different cultures under one roof, thereby emphasizing the centrality of the

English Christian in bringing them all together. 19 In this framework, the fairy tales of different cultures and religions can all contribute to the moral education of Christian

English children, as if creating a classroom transcending time and space. At the same time, however, Kingsley can still emphasize the overarching importance of Protestant

Christianity as the host of these different images of heroism.

Kingsley and “Mythopoeia” Up to this point, I have been using Kingsley’s engagement with hagiography and

his anthology of “Greek fairy tales” to demonstrate that the fairy tale holds an important

place in his mind as a means of depicting heroic types from non-Protestant or non-

Christian cultures of the past. Kingsley specifically uses the fairy tale as a means of

bridging the cultural gaps between these heroes, incorporating them into a shared,

87 collective history with his audience of Christian English school children. Before moving on to consider how the English Christian child’s perspective can collectively bring these heroic pieces together in my reading of The Water-Babies , I want to consider further how

Kingsley’s fantasy aesthetic reflects his ideal of social unity by putting his method of adapting Greek myths for his children into conversation with accounts of “mythopoeia” in more contemporary fantasy theory.

Here we can recall Kingsley’s comment that “man’s imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines its own experience” (“The Clergy and the Heathen”

184), and, as I discussed above, his notion that using myth as a mediator of history draws upon myth’s power to accrue meaning within a community over time. As he told his friend J. M. Ludlow, Kingsley’s aim for The Heroes was “to translate the children back into a new old world” ( Letters and Memories 354; vol. 1). Viewed in this light, the bleak conclusion to the story of Jason and Medeia in the anthology takes on metafictional implications, as a commentary on the act of adapting stories for the modern age itself:

“‘Medeia’s cauldron’ is a proverb still, by which we mean times of war and change, when the world has become old and feeble, and grows young again through bitter pains”

(The Heroes 150). Kingsley thus uses the fairy tale as a trans-historical, trans-cultural mythologizing mode that mediates past and present stories for subsequent generations of listeners and readers.

This sense of the fairy tale playing a mediating role helps to link Kingsley with subsequent twentieth-century fantasists like J. R. R. Tolkien and the Inklings, and with twenty-first century fantasy theorists like Brian Attebery, through the concept of

“mythopoeia.” As Attebery has noted, “This term entered critical discourse about fantasy

88 when J. R. R. Tolkien used ‘Mythopoeia’ as the title of a poem based on a conversation with C. S. Lewis . . . Tolkien’s view was that the myth-making imagination always tends toward truth, rather than lies; that fantastic stories lead toward a genuine understanding of the conditions of existence” (4). The term “mythopoeia,” then, helps to bridge the gap between Kingsley’s Victorian sense of fairy tale and myth and the subsequent “critical discourse about fantasy.” In Kingsley’s work, we can see the beginnings of Tolkien’s concept of “the Cauldron of Story,” which he describes in his essay, “On Fairy Stories”— a seminal text in the development of modern fantasy. In this essay, Tolkien describes the existence of a metaphorical “Cauldron of Story, waiting for the great figures of Myth and

History, and for the yet nameless He or She, waiting for the moment when they are cast into the simmering stew, one by one or all together, without consideration of rank or precedence” (29-30). I observe remarkable resonances between this metaphor of the

“Cauldron of Story” and Kingsley’s use of the “Medeia’s cauldron” metaphor to describe the transformation of old things into new. As Tolkien goes on, he echoes Kingsley again in a passage where, resisting the notion that the Norse story of Ingeld and Freawaru are

“merely mythical,” Tolkien claims, “History often resembles ‘Myth’, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff” (30). I would argue, then, that Kingsley is a precursor to Tolkien and his contemporaries, not only in his own fantasy work, but also in his early theorizing about how fairy tales from different cultures can all come together to create new stories out of old ones. Indeed, we can see a clear genealogical line from Kingsley’s theoretical contribution to the fantasy genre, to Tolkien’s, to Brian Attebery’s overarching argument in Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2011) that “fantasy’s main claim to cultural importance resides . . . in the work of redefining the

89 relationship between contemporary readers and mythic texts. It shares that work with such enterprises as depth psychology, religion, and popular media” (4).

This mythopoeic capacity of the fantasy genre—its ability to adapt various sources to mediate between past and present stories—leads to many different metaphors to describe the visions of community that the genre opens up. I have pointed to the

“cauldron” metaphor to describe the interrelated nature of fairy tales, myths, and history, as well as fantasy’s ability to bring together and adapt many different source materials. I have also pointed to the metaphor of “hosting an English Christmas party” to describe

Kingsley’s vision for mediating these tales for Victorian children. To reiterate, my reading of The Heroes reveals that one central metaphor we can use to analyze Kingsley as a fantasy writer is the Christmas party hosted by an English clergyman for his children, with heroic attendees from different cultures as embodied in their fairy tales. I would now like to connect these metaphors back to the central analogy of “one body, many parts” with which I began the chapter by discussing how this analogy describing the unity of the universal church fits into Kingsley’s fantasy aesthetics. Indeed, Kingsley’s fantasy aesthetics derive from his ecclesiology—his desire to overcome social divides, and to construct a unified, modern English Christian identity that sees itself as part of a universal catholic church. Moreover, this Christian catholicity was to be a direct outgrowth of the heroic contributions of past civilizations.

The English Church as Host of “Partial Types of Humanity” in The Water-Babies

. . . Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a thorough Naboth’s

vineyard to critics, and architects, and all persons who like meddling with other men’s

business, and spending other men’s money. . . . [Sir John] liked to see how each Sir John,

and Sir Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place, each after

their own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his ancestors’ work than of

disturbing their graves. For now the house looked like a real live house, that had a

history, and had grown and grown as the world grew; and that it was only an upstart

fellow who did not know who his own grandfather was, who would change it for some

spick and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing, which looked as if it had been all

spawned in a night, as mushrooms are. —The Water-Babies ( 52-53)

In The Water-Babies , Kingsley transposes the heroism that he finds in enterprising mythical Greek heroes like Perseus and Jason and the Argonauts into the ordinary everyman pilgrim Tom. In fact, the narrative structure of The Water-Babies is

very similar to Kingsley’s structure in The Heroes, with the story of Jason and the

community of scholar-warriors forming the central and longest portion of the entire

Greek Fairy Tales anthology. Similarly, Tom’s entering the fellowship of the water-

babies on St. Brandan’s fairy isle forms the centre of the book, and this experience on the

island is bookended by Tom’s land-life in the beginning, and his travels to the “Other-

End-of-Nowhere” in the end.

However, despite being global in its geographical scope, Tom’s journey to the

Other-End-of-Nowhere is actually quite an “English” one in the end. As many scholars

have noted, Tom is very obviously a representation of a Victorian chimney sweep in the

realist frame of the story, but even post-transformation, the narrative is filled with explicit

references to Victorian England and contemporary political and intellectual debates. 20

Moreover, Kingsley’s narrator explicitly refers to Tom as a “little English bull-dog”

when describing the tenacity that enables him to persevere on his difficult journey (114).

I want to bring the essential Englishness of Kingsley’s fantasy world to bear on my

analysis of how he conflates the image of the Church as the “body of Christ” with the

91 image of the body of the individual pilgrim, Tom. In my reading of The Water-Babies I

ultimately consider the text in terms of Kingsley’s desire to mythologize contemporary

Victorian Britain, specifically by imagining for his nation the role of being the “host” of

many different “partial types of humanity” of the past and present.

In the final chapter of The Water-Babies , Tom arrives at a very different sort of island from St. Brandan’s fairy isle: the Island of Polupragmosyne where the townspeople “all set on him at once, to show him his way; or rather, to show him that he did not know his way” (207):

“At all events, whichever way you are going, you are going wrong,” cried they all

with one voice—which was the only thing which they ever agreed about; and all

pointed at once to all the thirty-and-two points of the compass, till Tom thought

all the sign-posts in England had got together, and fallen fighting. (207)

This language echoes Kingsley’s remarks in the letter I cited above about sectarianism in

Britain, in which he claims that “everybody swears it is not his fault” ( Letters and

Memories 103-04; vol. 1). Likewise, the people of Polupragmosyne all become squabbling “sign-posts,” unable to really signify and direct visitors to their town in any way; furthermore, as they try to direct him every which way, “one pull[s] him hither, and another poke[s] him thither” (207), raising the spectre of Tom’s body breaking up and being “torn in pieces” by their disagreements. The danger, Kingsley seems to be suggesting, is that Britain will become an island where everyone will degenerate into

“pharisees,” squabbling “signposts” that are in danger of pulling the individual pilgrim apart, here symbolized by Tom’s body. Indeed, the navigational metaphor using the images of “the points of a compass” and “sign-posts in England” subsequently gives way

92 to a metaphor that evokes a sense of potential mob violence as Tom’s water-dog companion takes it upon himself to protect Tom from being “pulled in pieces”:

And whether he would have ever escaped out of the town, it is hard to say, if the

dog had not taken it into his head that they were going to pull his master in pieces,

and tackled them so sharply about the gastrocnemius muscle, that he gave them

some business of their own to think of at last; and while they were rubbing their

bitten calves, Tom and the dog got safe away. (207-08)

Various similarities with The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia can be recalled here: by emphasizing the danger of Tom’s body being “torn in pieces,” this passage echoes the scenes of “mob” violence at the end of The Saint’s Tragedy when Conrad is being

overcome by the angry masses, and more potently, the spectre of violence of Tom’s body

being potentially “torn” apart echoes the scene in which Hypatia is literally ripped limb

from limb by the rabid masses.

If we read Tom’s body as an emblem for the larger body of a unified community,

we can see that what Kingsley considers to be at stake in this sectarian situation is the

tearing apart of the individual pilgrim, and consequently, further fragmenting the social

body of the nation. This reading gains even more support from the fact that the

description of the people of Polupragmosyne echoes the much earlier description of the

“persons who like meddling with other men’s business, and spending other men’s

money” who constantly urge Sir John to renovate his home (52). What we see here, then,

is a parallel between Harthover House as “a real live house, that had a history, and had

grown and grown as the world grew” (53) and Tom the individual pilgrim, the “great

traveller” (210) who had transformed and developed organically through his education on

St. Brandan’s fairy isle.

Indeed, the two islands stand in stark contrast to each other: Polupragmosyne is

described as a place where “everyone knows his neighbour’s business better than his

own,” a place of unfulfilled potential containing “the Pantheon of the Great

Unsuccessful” (206). St. Brandan’s Fairy Isle, however, is an island where the water-

babies congregate as a group to be disciplined and tutored by Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid

and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby to “do the thing they did not like” (229) and to go out

from the Island to fulfill their individual callings, to see the world and to have an all-

pervasive good influence in the lives of those they meet. The purpose of being on the

island, in other words, is not to become insulated and merely comment on their

neighbours’ business, but to play an active role in the water-world. In Tom’s case, he

plays an integral role in the fairies’ process of disciplining his former master Thomas

Grimes—another “Tom,” in fact. The roles are reversed as the child Tom models the

virtues he had learned from the fairies to the cruel master sweep in whose footsteps he

had been in danger of following before falling into the water.

Moreover, the vision of the English Church as an inclusive space is emphasized by the moments leading up to Tom’s transformation into a water-baby. Hearing the ringing of church bells in his head, and, convinced of his need to “be clean,” he goes into the river to wash so that he can gain admittance into church before “the door will be shut, and [he] shall never be able to get in at all.” But “Tom was mistaken,” the narrator tells us,

for in England the church doors are left open all service time, for everybody who

likes to come in, Churchman or Dissenter; ay, even if he were a Turk or a

Heathen; and if any man dared to turn him out, as long as he behaved quietly, the

good old English law would punish that man, as he deserved, for ordering any

peaceable person out of God’s house, which belongs to all alike. (70, my

emphasis)

This curious passage touches upon three important ideas. Firstly, the English Church is conflated with “God’s house” in the language here. Secondly, the English Church/“God’s house” “belongs to all alike,” enabling not only “Churchmen and Dissenters” to enter in—that is, those English Christians who have differing stances on matters of doctrine and worship—but those with different cultural or racial backgrounds (“Turk”) and outside the Christian community (“Heathen”) as well. Finally, the passage also presents the idea that this diverse gathering of people is reinforced by “good old English law,” on the condition that everyone “behave quietly.” When we recall Kingsley’s depiction of

“monasteries” as “refuges” for all members of society in his historical lectures, we can start to identify the similar language that he uses to describe the Church of England that

Tom wants to enter, and the medieval monasteries that were “refuges, whither the weak escaped from the competition of the strong. . . . There they found something like justice, order, pity, help. Even the fool and the coward, when they went to the convent-door, were not turned away” (213). All these “poor” ones could, consequently, “live under equal law” with the “noble” and powerful of the land (213, my emphasis). Here, Kingsley the history lecturer asserts that the Church enabled the “weak” of society to “live under equal law” with those who might otherwise lord it over them. In the Water-Babies passage cited above, Kingsley’s narrator says that the “good old English law” protects people of differing religious and cultural identities from being “turned out.” When we juxtapose the

95 picture of diverse people congregating within an English Church in The Water-Babies

with Kingsley’s explanation of the justice meted out by the medieval church, the similar

language signals that he saw the English Church of his present day playing an analogous

role with medieval monasteries. In both the medieval past and the (for him) Protestant

present, these Christian communities are to be the administrators of justice and

compassion, emphasizing that all are “fellow-citizens” in the Kingdom of God. It was the

Church, therefore, that ensured the “belonging” of all to the collective body.

In light of Kingsley’s conception of the progressive historical development of the

church’s body, we begin to see parallels and transpositions in the language he uses to

describe the Church of England, compared to the language he had used to describe the

medieval church. In his history lectures, Kingsley had suggested that since the church of

the middle ages had “gone no further” in church doctrine than to “protect the weak” and

to awaken in people “the sense of individual responsibility” (“The Monk a Civilizer”

215), the only history they can glean from these ages can be mediated through myths about saints and heroes of old. Now, however, all “individuals” can take up the role of serving and inspiring one another with good deeds. Historically, there had been small groups of Christians seeking refuge from the world; in the Victorian age, Kingsley wants the English Church to be that community which not only unites all sects and other cultures under one household, but one in which each individual member is a heroic exemplar to the others.

Kingsley’s conception of the English Church’s role in terms of being “host” of different cultures of past and present is further evident in the fact that the language he uses in Hypatia to describe Philammon’s first view of the Alexandrian cityscape that so

96 dazzles him is almost identical to the language that Kingsley subsequently uses in The

Water-Babies to describe the architecture of Harthover House. 21 After only having known

the desert hermitage of the Laura all his life, Philammon is inundated with everything

that he sees upon arriving at the great city of Alexandria, “crushed by the multitude of

new objects, stunned by the din around” (91); the “grand panorama” of the city affects

him with its “overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence” (97, 98-99).

Kingsley’s narrator describes “the whole scene” in terms of its eclectic architecture: “The

range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap before or

since, the extraordinary variety of form—the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier

Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there

an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt” (99). In The Water-Babies, however, the multitudinousness of the Alexandrian cityscape is transposed into an image of the English home, including “Pure Doric,” imitations of the “Parthenon,” and “cellars

[that] were copied from the caves of Elephanta,” “and the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth” (52). In addition to these features, Harthover includes elements from Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan, Indian, and Brighton architecture (52). I read Kingsley’s description of the Alexandrian cityscape in his earlier work as a prelude to his description of Harthover in The Water-Babies ; I also read

Harthover as a prelude to the description of “God’s house” which I discussed above. The history of Christianity, then, simultaneously grows larger in its universal (or cosmopolitan) scope, and smaller in the national context for Kingsley. The English

Church, in other words, becomes the local context in which all insights of the historical, universal church from other times and places come to fruition, with all of these “partial

97 types of humanity” coming to roost in an English household that includes all of these

“parts.”

The Water-Babies as Host of Many Parts of Fantasy The idea of “one body, many parts” becomes an aesthetic principle for Kingsley’s writing of fantasy here in The Water-Babies : the narrative is mostly centred on the tale of

a single individual pilgrim, but as a whole, the architecture of the fantasy text contains

elements from many other fantasy tales, all just hovering beneath the surface. Most

scholarly discussions of The Water-Babies identify it as a Christian allegory and

comment on its religious resonances, showing that John Bunyan’s famous allegory was a

literary precedent for Kingsley’s fantasy narrative. In other words, The Pilgrim’s

Progress is one of Kingsley’s essential “taproot texts,” to use John Clute’s helpful term.

Clute uses this term to describe those “traditional stories” that can be called “fantastic”

retrospectively, but were produced prior to the late eighteenth century, which, according

to Clute, was the point at which writers began to “consciously” write fantasy. A “taproot

text,” then, acquires “ heightened significance” as modern fantasy writers draw on them

(emphasis in original). However, Kingsley’s text draws upon a myriad of “taproot texts” and generic traditions—many more than The Pilgrim’s Progress. These include Greco-

Roman myths (namely, the tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus), animal fables (allusions

to Apuleius and Ovid), fantastical travel narratives (particularly Thomas More’s Utopia

and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels ), and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel .

Additional literary models include Spenser’s Faerie Queene (particularly the “House of

Alma” sequence) , and of course, the Bible. Add to this the wealth of wordplay in the

mode of nonsense literature, and Kingsley’s fantasy text begins to look like a veritable

98 compendium of ingredients in a very spacious “cauldron of story,” to use Tolkien’s term.

It is important that while Kingsley’s text gathers together all of these literary types under one roof, the fantasy narrative is ultimately structured through the adventures of Tom, the

Bunyan-esque everyman who escapes the land-world and becomes a water-baby. Just as

The Water-Babies , a single fantasy text, is composed of many different generic “parts,”

the character of Tom, the individual pilgrim who travels the world, brings together all the

experiences and storylines in the fantasy text.

Kingsley’s ideas about the unifying potential of a “common history” mediated

through mythologizing modes, and his understanding of the development of the body of

Christ throughout history are thus interconnected. Kingsley interweaves the story of

Tom’s journey from “This End” to “The Other End” with a series of other storylines for

characters such as Ellie, Grimes, and even Professor Ptthmllnsprts, whose deaths are all

narrated at some point in the realist portions of the text. Indeed, Kingsley could

potentially focus on any one of these individual characters to tell a story of spiritual

discipline and education similar to Tom’s—there is enough material for a “spin-off” for

each of these characters, as it were—but in choosing to focus on Tom, the text structures

our knowledge of these other individuals’ stories through the one individual everyman’s

perspective. This way of structuring the narrative emphasizes Kingsley’s theme of the

need for “a common history” among the masses. His description of a community in

which everyone has their own individual stories of struggle and discipline in his lecture

“The Monk a Civilizer” mirrors the interwoven storylines in The Water-Babies: Tom,

Ellie, Grimes, and the Professor, despite their differences, all share a “common history” of being spiritually disciplined through a providential force that is at work in shaping

99 everyone’s individual lives, here represented through the four fairy figures. Indeed, by the end of Tom’s journey, the fairies reveal that while all of them—the Irish washerwoman, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and Mother

Carey—have different roles to play in Tom and his fellow pilgrims’ journeys, they are, in fact, mysteriously “yet all of them at once” (229).22 This technique of having multiple protagonists with different destinies, but also having them serve as mirrors of each other, is a development, I believe, of what Kingsley began in his historical fiction. Raphael and

Philammon’s stories, for example, represent different aspects of religious history that

Kingsley wanted to incorporate into Christianity, for the purposes of achieving greater wholeness. Similarly, the Catholic saints, the Goth heroes of Hypatia , and the heroes of

Greek mythology all mirror each other in their heroism, and could be incorporated into the education of Victorian Christians for a truly “catholic” sensibility.

In The Water-Babies specifically, the theme of community members educating

one another through individual acts of heroism is conveyed by the fact that Tom and his

fellow pilgrims are all individuals progressing on their own journeys, yet each of these

individual journeys serve to nourish the spiritual development of the others. What is

common to all of their journeys is that they must learn to do “what they did not like”

(175), and their ability to shape the lives of others is contingent on the progress they

make in their individual assignments from the Fairies. Tom’s moral development into one

who can help Grimes in the end is linked to Ellie’s moral development—she is tasked by

Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid with “teach[ing] him to be good, whether [she] likes it or not”

(165). Indeed, Ellie is involved with Tom’s moral education from the very beginning: his

transformation into a water-baby occurs as a result of his getting lost in the chimneys of

100

Harthover House. Tom ends up by Ellie’s bedroom window, and aside from the

“prettiness” and “whiteness” of the room, he is arrested by three main features that he observes there: the pictures hanging on the walls, Ellie herself, and finally, a mirror in which he sees his own reflection. The experience of looking at Ellie and the contrast he notices between them becomes the means by which he learns something of himself; moreover, seeing Ellie gives him something to aspire to, as he begins to wonder if he might not “look much prettier . . . if [he grew] at all like her” (56). The moment where

Tom feels the desire to be washed is quickly followed by the terrible experience of seeing himself in a mirror for the first time:

And looking round, he suddenly saw, standing close to him, a little ugly, black,

ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth. He turned on it angrily.

What did such a little black ape want in that sweet young lady’s room? And

behold, it was himself, reflected in a great mirror, the like of which Tom had

never seen before.

And Tom, for the first time in his life, found out that he was dirty; and burst into

tears with shame and anger. . . . (56)

Tom’s awakening to his own dirtiness culminates in this scene where he mistakes his own reflection for that of someone else, “a little black ape” no less—and subsequently, in a passage with clear Darwinian overtones, Tom is compared to “a small black gorilla fleeing to the forest” as everyone is chases after him, mistaking him for a thief (57).

After extending kindness to Grimes at in the final chapter, however, Tom is reunited with Ellie. They find that they are now “both quite grown up—he into a tall man, and she into a beautiful woman” (228), and, in a variation upon the earlier bedroom

101 scene, the two stand looking at each other: “So he stood and looked at Ellie, and Ellie looked at him; and they liked the employment so much that they stood and looked for seven years more, and neither spoke or stirred” (229). Tom no longer needs to feel ashamed, as “he has won his spurs in the great battle, and become fit to . . . be a man; because he has done the thing he did not like” (229). He can undoubtedly now look at his face in the mirror and not see the face of an ape, but see reflected there a member of the community of water-babies, with whom he shares the common history of being educated by the fairies.

It is Kingsley’s theological vision of the English Church as a community of individuals who have benefited from the lessons of past heroism that informs the text’s mythopoeic syncretism. Kingsley’s vision of the English Church as the host of the admirable “partial types of humanity” that had emerged throughout history is analogous to the way in which The Water-Babies is comprised of many seemingly disparate parts

from heroic and supernatural stories of diverse cultures, all in the service of narrating the

story of Tom’s individual development into “a brave English lad, whose business is to go

out and see all the world” (192). The Water-Babies , Kingsley’s most important contribution to the development of fantasy, thus emerges from the theological context of his ecclesiology, namely his teleological vision of historical development that sees the

English Church as the culminating point of spiritual development. For Kingsley, the fairy tale is a particularly capacious form—one that transcends historical and cultural limits— and for that reason, it serves as a fitting vehicle to present his interpretation of a

“catholic” English Church. The Water-Babies is a mythopoeic fantasy text that

102 demonstrates how the adaptation of supernatural narratives can become constitutive of theological projects that communicate visions of Christian community.

103

Chapter 3 Becoming Fellow Citizens: Christina Rossetti’s Eschatological Fantasies

In this final chapter, I argue that an understanding of Christina Rossetti’s eschatological perspective—namely, her belief that death is not the end, but rather, the beginning of eternal life in another realm—is key to reading her works of fantasy. Like

George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, Rossetti’s works of fantasy emerge from theological resources that have become obscured in our histories of the genre.

Specifically, I argue that Rossetti uses the otherworldly landscapes of fairy tales and ghost stories to translate her eschatological vision of the earthly life as a time of preparation for heaven.

I am building on the scholarship of the last couple of decades that stresses the importance of religion in her work. These studies have demonstrated that her artistic practice was inextricably bound with her religious beliefs. Having complicated the older interpretations of her works that saw religion as an obstacle to her art, these welcome developments in Rossetti studies have continued to expand our knowledge of how these theological resources were a rich source for her literary creativity. 23 One of Rossetti’s

fantasy works that has received much scholarly attention, including studies that draw

attention to its theological resources, is “Goblin Market.” As Jill Rappoport and other

scholars have noted, possible influences on this fairy-tale poem include Anna Eliza

Bray’s A Peep at the Pixies and Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (Rappoport

862-63). The fantastical elements of “Goblin Market” are not incompatible with its

theological investments, but rather, are constructive aspects of the poem that help to

develop its religious themes. The poem especially has Christological and soteriological

104 connotations: in Christian theology, salvation is gained through belief in Christ’s death and resurrection, and these theological investments figure prominently in the way Christ- like Lizzie endures the abuses of the goblin men to save Laura. Moreover, the poem employs Eucharistic language when Lizzie returns home covered in the juices of the goblin fruit, and the miracle of Laura’s recovery after “eating,” “drinking,” and “loving” her sister who has borne these juices to her (471) resembles a resurrection scene.24

However, examining Rossetti’s status as a fantasy writer remains a relatively rare approach to analyzing her work. While studies of Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) and

The Prince’s Progress (1866) poetry collections incidentally discuss her contributions to the genre, there have been few concerted attempts to elaborate on and deepen our understanding of Rossetti’s fantasy aesthetics as a whole. Studies that do focus on her fantasy works often read against the grain of her use of the genre: for example, Barbara

Garlick’s readings of Rossetti’s fairy tales provide some helpful hints about the tension between the “commonplace” and the fantastical worlds in these works, but she ultimately claims that Rossetti perceived fantasy to be “an inadequate medium through which to view the world,” thereby “reveal[ing] her subject to be the problematical and factitious nature of fantasy itself” (148-49). While I see Garlick’s analysis as a very helpful starting point, I see no reason to conclude that Rossetti was ultimately pointing to the

“factitiousness” of the genre. In fact, reading Rossetti’s fantasy works as resisting the

“nature” of the genre itself seems to me not unlike interpreting her conspicuously religious works as resisting their religious “nature” while really promoting some other meaning. 25 In contrast to Garlick, I see Rossetti embracing fantasy to expand the capacities of the form, and to depict more , not less, of reality as she saw it from her

105 religious perspective. In other words, it is because of, not in spite of, the nature of fantasy as a transformative genre, in many senses of the word, that she is able to explore the theme of spiritual transformation so effectively.

The theology of eschatology traditionally refers to “the four last things: death,

judgement, heaven, and hell” (“eschatology, n.”). Rossetti does indeed reflect upon these

topics throughout a wide range of her works, but most explicitly in her commentary on

the book of Revelation, The Face of the Deep (1892). 26 In many ways the culminating

work of her own life, this devotional book contains passages reflecting on the end of the

world, as well as discussions about points of doctrine regarding these “four last things.”

But the impulse for Rossetti in her devotional commentary is very often to use these

glimpses of the future as prompts to reflect upon their broader implications for life on

earth, while waiting for the next world to come. As Trevor Hart explains, “Christian faith

typically begins at the end. It has its provenance in, draws its vital energy from and

patterns its living towards an ultimate future divinely promised and imaginatively

apprehended. Christian faith, we might say, is irreducibly hopeful, and Christian theology

irreducibly eschatological” (209). In bringing the vocabulary of eschatology to bear on

my readings of Rossetti’s fantasies, I am not focusing on how these works reflect

Victorian doctrinal debates about the “last things.” Rather, I am focusing on how this

theology particularly influences her depiction of fantastical transformations that represent

the tension between the earthly life and the afterlife. Rossetti strategically uses different

forms of fantasy to convey this in-between experience of earthly pilgrims, whom she

depicts as heavenly citizens-in-waiting. 27

To perceive the eschatological implications of Rossetti’s works of fantasy, the

106 transformations that occur in these narratives are best understood in terms of the analogy of linguistic translation that recurs throughout her devotional writings. For example, she uses the analogy of literary translation to describe the life of faith in Time Flies: A

Reading Diary (1885), observing that Christians “translate God’s law into the universal tongue of all mankind: all men of all sorts can read them, and in some sort cannot but read them (2). This passage and others I will go on to discuss suggest that “translation” figures prominently in Rossetti’s mind as a metaphor for spiritual life. “To translate” does indeed have religious, indeed specifically eschatological, meanings that are not immediately tied to linguistic translation. For example, the term can refer to the movement of ecclesiastical figures “from one person, place or condition to another,” or to the transportation of “the dead body or remains of a saint” (“translate, v.”). One definition of the term with eschatological associations is “to carry or convey to heaven without death; also, in later use, said of the death of the righteous” (“translate, v.”).

However, the concept of “translation” has a theological register that goes beyond these etymological meanings, and comports with my chapter’s overall emphasis on linguistic translation as an analogy for spiritual transformation. The acts of teaching, hearing, and reading the Bible are central to the Christian religion; consequently, the translation of the

Scriptures into different languages—which often necessitates the physical transportation of these texts and their human translators from place to place—is an important aspect of the history of Christianity. As Jo Carruthers, Mark Knight, and Andrew Tate note, “From its very beginnings, translation of the Bible was undertaken in order to bring the

Scriptures into the access of everyday people” (118). In a theological context,

“translation” can point simultaneously to the transformation of a text from one language

107 or place to another, and to the transformation of human beings from one spiritual state to another. To be more specific, linguistic translation is implicated in the process of spiritual transformation, as it is the means by which the Scriptures are revealed to readers, and as these readers are transformed by and seek to live according to these words, they themselves become figurative “translations” of the Scriptures to other people. 28

This multi-faceted concept of “translation” would have carried significant weight in Rossetti’s imagination. She was a devout and careful reader of Scripture, had an

Anglo-Italian heritage, and grew up in a bilingual family environment. In what follows, I show that examining Rossetti’s thoughts about linguistic translation and her use of this analogy will throw some key aspects of her eschatology into relief. I especially focus on the way in which translation becomes for her a metaphor for mediating the tensions between the present earthly realm and the future heavenly world. I then proceed to my close-readings of her little discussed prose fairy tales, “Nick: A Child’s Tale” (1857) and

“Hero: A Metamorphosis” (1866); her ghost poems “The Hour and the Ghost” (1862),

“The Poor Ghost” (1866), and “The Ghost’s Petition” (1866); and finally, “The Prince’s

Progress” (1866). Each of these groupings embody Rossetti’s ideas about specific aspects

of eschatological transformation experienced by earthly pilgrims as they look forward to

joining the harmonious community of saints in the afterlife.

Understanding Rossetti’s Eschatology through the Analogy of Translation

“All alike must be tried . . . this trial is not in order to confirm man upon the

earth that now is, but to fit him for translation to that new heaven and new earth

wherein shall dwell righteousness.” —Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep

(1892)

108

In a letter to Lucy Madox Brown wishing her joy on her engagement to William

Michael Rossetti, Christina Rossetti wrote, “May love, peace, and happiness, be yours and his together in this world, and together much more in the next; and, when earth is an anteroom to heaven (may it be so, of God’s mercy to us all), earth itself is full of beauty and goodness.” In a letter to William Michael on the same day, she expresses similar sentiments: “If dear Lucy and you are as happy as I would (if I could) make you, earth will be the foretaste and steppingstone to heaven.” Characteristically turning her thoughts to heaven, even as she congratulates others on their upcoming marriage in the present world, Rossetti’s describes earthly life in preparatory terms—as an “anteroom” and as a

“foretaste and steppingstone” to the next. In fact, she announces immediately in the preface to The Face of the Deep that she considers the theme of the Revelation of St.

John to be “patience” (“Prefatory Note”).

One important passage that sounds the key note of this theme of “patience” occurs in Rossetti’s commentary on Revelation 3:10, a verse that speaks of being “patient under trial”:

All alike must be tried: not all alike will meet and pass through the trial. The

qualification for trial is dwelling upon the earth . . . this trial is not in order to

confirm man upon the earth that now is, but to fit him for translation to that new

heaven and new earth wherein shall dwell righteousness . (119, emphasis mine)

Introducing the key analogy of translation here to describe eschatological transformation from here to the afterlife, Rossetti depicts earthly life as a time of “trial,” during which all people are in the process of being prepared for this future renewal. The process of pilgrims becoming increasingly “fit” for the afterlife as they wait to reach the heavenly

109 world is a common theme in Rossetti’s devotional writings as a whole, not least in The

Face of the Deep : at one point, she notes that the opportunity for “repentance unto

progressive amendment” is “God’s gift” (76-77); elsewhere, she describes “each

Christian’s whole life” as “one continuous Advent season” (289).

The eschatological patience of which Rossetti speaks is a hopeful one, and, as

many scholars have noted, this stance of “patience” can be encapsulated by the phrase a

“hope deferred” that appears repeatedly throughout Rossetti’s poetry. Echoing the

Proverb “hope deferred makes the heart sick” (13.12), this phrase occurs in three separate

poems in the collection Goblin Market and other Poems alone, not all of which are in the

“Devotional Poetry” section. “Advent” is a representative poem in this vein: in it, the

speakers, “heart-sick with hope deferred,” seek to model themselves after the wise virgins

of Matthew 25:

One to another hear them speak

The patient virgins wise:

“Surely He is not far to seek”—

“All night we watch and rise.”

“The days are evil looking back,

The coming days are dim;

Yet count we not His promise slack,

But watch and wait for Him.” (17-24)

Indeed, central to Rossetti’s eschatology is the idea of becoming “fellow citizens”

enjoying spiritual unity in heaven. The pilgrims of this world are heavenly citizens-in-

progress, patiently waiting to reach the same destination as the saints who are already

110 there. The content of this revelation, the knowledge of enjoying spiritual unity with the saints, is what gives the pilgrims the hope to continue waiting. Here again, the poem

“Advent” helps us:

There no more parting, no more pain

The distant ones brought near,

The lost so long are found again,

Long lost but longer dear:

Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard,

Nor heart conceived that rest,

With them our good things long deferred,

With Jesus Christ our Best. (33-40)

In Rossetti’s devotional writings, hopeful patience in the time of pilgrimage emerges from an anticipated vision of what will be in the afterlife. But although Rossetti’s eschatology is characterized by “patience” while waiting for the final change, this stance of “hope deferred” is in tension with the need for active charity, expressed in concrete acts of love in response to the revelation. 29 This response to God’s command to love each other is fuelled by the revelation of saints living in perfect harmony in heaven. Thus, during their time on earth, pilgrims are constantly being shaped by and shaping the world according to their faith in what God has revealed of the “new heaven and new earth.” In other words, the motivation for being actively loving while patient is that they see pre- figured in the saints of the other land, calling them home to this higher standard.

As in “Advent,” Rossetti’s verses in the preface to Called to be Saints features an imagined interaction between earthly pilgrims and heavenly saints, represented in the

111 form of a dialogue between the people of one country to another:

This near-at-hand land breeds pain by measure:

That far-away land overflows with treasure

Of heaped-up good pleasure.

......

This land hath for pastime errors and follies:

That land hath unending, unflagging solace

Of full-chanted “Holies.”

Up and away, call the Angels to us;

Come to our home where no foes pursue us,

And no tears bedew us. (1-3, 10-15)

As the poem continues, earth and heaven draw closer together, with the angels urging the

pilgrims, “Come from your famine, your failure, your fighting; / Come to full wrong-

righting” (29-30), encouraging them with the hope of what they will enjoy someday in

“that land.” Thus, Rossetti promotes a vision that resonates with modern theologians’

observations that eschatology is intimately tied to “a theology of hope,” to use Jürgen

Moltmann’s influential term. Moltmann’s emphasis on the important role that hope plays

in motivating and shaping our actions on earth is helpful here: “It constantly provokes

and produces thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to man and the world, in order to

give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in light of the promised future, in order as

far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within

the bounds of possibility” (34-35). For both Rossetti and modern theologians like

Moltmann, an eschatological perspective does not fear to look at the evil and suffering in

112 this world, nor do they accept or attempt to escape from it. Revelation of what will be in the afterlife ought to result in acts that will seek to shape the world in accordance with the anticipated hope. But this is done all the while recognizing that perfection can only be found and completely revealed in heaven. As Trevor Hart puts it, “The hope in which faith is invested is, we might say, finally and decisively a transcendent rather than an

immanent hope” (209).

The analogy of translation is an especially appropriate one for understanding the

tension between these two worlds because it can simultaneously describe the potentially

strange and disorienting experience of being exposed to a revelation from an alien land,

and the ways in which revelation partially understood can still be translated into lovely

forms, accommodated to those still on earth, bringing them some measure of joy.

Rossetti’s awareness of the tensions involved in the work involved in the work of

translation come together in her essay “Dante, An English Classic” (1867) where she offers her ideas about what is required of “the consummate translator”:

To reproduce Dante in all fullness and subtlety of beauty would demand Dante’s

self, and must be abandoned as hopeless: indeed, a question may be raised

whether, as no two things can be absolutely the same as each other, and thus

apparently one must exceed, one fall short, he is not the consummate translator

who sits nearest, yet below not above, his original; invested with all

communicable glory, not shining with independent lustre. . . . (170)

To Rossetti, the “consummate translator” notably demonstrates an attitude of submission, as one who “sits nearest, yet below not above, his original.” Rossetti’s translation theory thus demonstrates a willingness to acknowledge, love, and submit to the “original” other

113 as other, rather than seeking glory for oneself by insisting that they are on equal footing.

The religious resonances are clear in the idea of submitting to and glorifying one that is higher, and communicating Dante’s “glory” is precisely what she feels Charles

Bagot Cayley and other translators had done. Moreover, Rossetti describes translation as doing the work of reconciliation when she says that she and her nineteenth-century

English contemporaries “owe (let us hope, pay) the unburdensome debt of gratitude to more than one admirable translator who has felt that to reanimate the venerable father of modern poetry as a fellow-citizen among sometime aliens is a nobler achievement than to bring before the world a new and lesser man” (170). By making Dante’s work accessible to English readers, Cayley and other translators had in effect made “fellow citizens” of

“sometime aliens.” To the translator’s purpose of “glorifying” another author, Rossetti adds the function of bringing joyful union between two parties once separated, emphasizing this union through the title of the essay itself—“Dante, An English

Classic”—which ostensibly places the Italian Dante in an “English” canon. In other words, Dante is now a literary inheritance that can be shared by the English, as well as by those who had been “born . . . Italian” (169). 30

Tracing the religious resonances in Rossetti’s language here reveals that she

spiritualizes the act of literary translation, which makes translation itself into a metaphor

for the life of faith. Rossetti herself provides the rationale for conflating the concept of

translation with larger religious, metaphorical connotations in her later work Time Flies:

A Reading Diary (1885). The entry of January 2nd in particular reveals what she saw as

some of the extended possibilities for the metaphor of translation:

A certain masterly translator has remarked that whatever may or may not

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constitute a good translation, it cannot consist in turning a good poem into a bad

one.

This suggestive remark opens to investigation a world-wide field. Thus, for

instance, he (or she) cannot be an efficient Christian who exhibits the religion of

love as unlovely.

Christians need a searching self-sifting on this point. They translate God’s law

into the universal tongue of mankind: all men of all sorts can read them, and in

some sort cannot but read them. (2)

The “masterly translator” that she is referring to here is her brother Dante Gabriel.

Whereas in her essay “Dante, An English Classic” Rossetti had provided various metaphors with religious connotations to describe the process of translation, in this later work, she takes translation itself as a metaphor for the life of faith, claiming that the good

Christian is, in effect, a “good translation” of the Christian religion—the “religion of love.” The stakes of being able to receive and translate “God’s law” effectively, then, are high indeed. Rossetti continues,

Stars, like Christians, utter their silent voice to all lands and their speechless

words to the ends of the world. Christians are called to be like stars, luminous,

steadfast, majestic, attractive. (2)

In the same entry, Rossetti aligns Christians’ “exhibiting the religion of love” with

“translating God’s law,” which she then aligns with “uttering their silent voice to all lands and their speechless words to the ends of the world.” This cluster of images conveys the sense that the life of faith involves a form of “attractive” and universally recognizable, trans-cultural communication. Rossetti is describing the way in which

115 fellow Christians are to be revelatory to one another, suggesting that God reveals “his law”—his love, his wisdom, his encouragement, his help—through the lovely actions of fellow Christians. This imagery grows doubly meaningful when read in light of Rossetti’s description of “morning stars” in The Face of the Deep as “aborigines of the celestial country” (516). In this passage, she goes on to contrast these “aborigines” with human beings, “whose citizenship is conferred, not natal” (516). By noting in Time Flies that

Christians are “called to be like stars,” Rossetti suggests that in “translating God’s law” into lovely forms, these translators are being “conferred” heavenly citizenship.

Taken together, these instances of Rossetti’s use of the translation analogy have important theological implications for her work. When applied to her eschatology, the analogy of translation works in various ways to describe the experience of receiving, responding to, and communicating divine revelation. Rossetti’s description of a good literary translation as one that makes “fellow citizens” of “sometime aliens” affirms that the attempt to communicate divine revelation, accommodating it to the language of one’s own country, is a worthy endeavour, one that brings those receiving the translation closer to the country of origin. As she notes in her Dante essay: “Vain as it must be for those to whose ears Dante’s tongue is but an unknown tongue, and his music but an unintelligible musical sound, to hope ever fully to appreciate his master poem, yet the beauty of the best translations goes far towards suggesting the surpassing beauty of their original”

(172). The analogy of translation can also be extended to describe the way in which

Christians, in response to divine revelation, can “translate” the instructions and visions they have received into acts that can be “read” by everyone, thereby producing good translations of the “religion of love” ( Time Flies 2).

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Character Metamorphoses as Eschatological “Translations” in Rossetti’s Fairy Tales Rossetti’s fairy tales are shaped by this eschatological vision of living in between two worlds. In this section, I focus on her short stories “Nick: A Child’s Tale” and “Hero

A Metamorphosis,” two fairy tales in which physical transformations occur in the characters. These are both stories in the tradition of Ovidian metamorphoses set against a rural, pastoral background, but they also evoke the ballad “Tam Lin” in that the protagonists undergo a series of repeated transformations with slight variations each time.

To be more precise, I argue that these stories mirror her view of life as a “probational period” in which “not some influences only, but all influences as they touch us become our trials, tests, temptations” ( Face of the Deep 118-19). Rossetti presents a picture of life on earth as being comprised of a series of trials that lead to the final “translation to that new heaven and new earth” ( Face of the Deep 119). Specifically she uses the motif of the fairy gift to emphasize that the supernatural and human realms are mysteriously intertwined: the characters are shaped by the “influences” of the other world, as their transformations are all initiated by a supernatural fairy gift. The subsequent series of transformations constitute a “probationary period” during which they are tried “over and over again,” and their journeys lead them to simulated death experiences, which eventually bring them back to the familiar scene of home.

Rossetti’s notion of eschatological transformation includes repetitive “trials”—the earthly life of being prepared for future renewal in this repetitive manner. Indeed, the process of pilgrims becoming increasingly “fit” for the afterlife as they wait to reach the heavenly world is a common theme in Rossetti’s devotional writings as a whole. At one point in The Face of the Deep , she notes that the opportunity for “repentance unto

117 progressive amendment” is “God’s gift” (76-77); elsewhere, she describes “each

Christian’s whole life” as “one continuous Advent season” (289). In the fairy tales

“Nick” and “Hero,” the characters’ transformations can thus be conceived in terms of

“repetitive translations” that make the protagonists increasingly loving toward their neighbours, becoming other-centred rather than self-centred. By the end of the stories,

Nick’s and Hero’s relationships with “home” have been transformed, as they no longer view their homes with dissatisfaction, nor are they tempted for gifts that come from elsewhere. Rather, they themselves become “gifts” to their neighbours by “translating” the wisdom received from their trials into acts of love toward others.

“Nick: A Child’s Tale” takes place in a village “not a thousand miles from

Fairyland” (167). The eponymous Nick is a miserly man who lacks no material goods, but he bears ill will toward his neighbours as he is constantly “discontented and envious” upon seeing the good fortune of others, “grumbling and bemoaning himself as if every other man’s riches were his poverty” (168). The day that Nick sees Giles Hodge’s cherries and wishes to be “sparrows to eat them up, or a blight to kill [his] fine trees altogether” proves to be a fateful one:

The words were scarcely uttered when he felt a tap on his shoulder, and looking

round, perceived a little rosy woman, no bigger than a butterfly, who held her tiny

fist clenched in a menacing attitude. She looked scornfully at him, and said: “Now

listen, you churl, you! henceforward you shall straightaway become everything

you wish; only mind, you must remain under one form for at least an hour.” (168-

69)

The fairy’s stipulation that Nick “must remain under one form for at least an hour”

118 echoes the “hour” in Revelation 3:10, which Rossetti reads as a symbol of the length of one’s earthly “trial” ( Face of the Deep 120). As Nick endures one magic “hour” after another (“Nick” 172), the narrative follows his transformation from a flock of sparrows to a dog, a bludgeon, a ravaging fire, and finally, “the rich old man who lived in a handsome house just beyond the turnpike” (176). However, in a mysterious half-waking, half- sleeping state, still in the form of the old man, Nick is robbed and attacked by the man’s own servants, and faces the prospect of being buried, while still conscious, in the old man’s body (178).

The story “Hero: A Metamorphosis” begins with the narrator’s playful call to

“consult the authentic map of Fairyland (recently published by Messrs. Moon, Shine, and

Co.)” and a description of the expansive geographical landscape. The human and fairy realms are separated by “an impassible chain of mountains; which, enriched throughout with mines of gems and metals, presents on Man-side a leaden sameness of hue, but on

Elf-side glitters with diamonds and opals as with ten thousand fire-flies” (183-84). We see the fairy influence on the world of man in the form of “many a waif and stray from

Fairyland” that would occasionally “[wash] ashore amongst them”—beautiful jewels and other treasures that could be sold “to the markets of Outerworld” (184). This steady flow of fairy gifts, transformed into marketable treasures once received by the world of men, is emphasized by the protagonist’s calling Fairyland “Giftland” (187). As in the story

“Nick,” the gift of transformation that Hero receives from the Queen Fairy is conflated with a gift of revelation about her true nature through these physical transformations.

Like Nick, the protagonist Hero enjoys many sources of contentment at home in

her fishing village: she is “the pet of her father, the pride of her neighbours, and the true

119 love of Forss, as sturdy a young fellow as ever cast a net in deep water” (185). But due to a moment of imagined insult, she grows increasingly discontented and wishes “to become the supreme object of admiration” (192). The Queen grants her wish, proclaiming, “In you every man shall find his taste satisfied. In you one shall recognise his ideal of loveliness, another shall bow before the impersonation of dignity” (193). After warning

Hero, “I cannot ennoble the taste of those who look upon you: I can but cause that in you all desire shall be gratified,” the Queen gives her a way out of the potential fate of being forever chained to other people’s desires:

If sometimes you chafe under a trivial homage, if sometimes you are admired

rather for what you have than for what you are, accuse your votaries, —accuse, if

you will, yourself, but accuse not me. In consideration, however, of your utter

inexperience, I and my trusty counsellors have agreed for one year to retain your

body here, whilst in spirit you will become one with the reigning object of

admiration. (193-94)

Consequently, Hero’s body and spirit are separated, and her spirit is transplanted into one shape, then another, as directed by the desires of the people she encounters—she becomes whomever or whatever is the “object of supreme admiration” at any moment.

Having traded the love of her father and betrothed for the admiration of no one in particular, Hero’s successive transformations into an incomparable diamond, a young bride, a successful concert singer, and finally into the seed of an exotic plant all take her further and further away from home, into the “Outerworld” beyond.

Thus, Nick and Hero share profound similarities in the trajectory of their journeys: in the beginning, the protagonists of these stories are not “translations” of any

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“religion of love”; with their wishes magically granted, the fairy gift reveals what they in fact really are: translations of their own self-serving desires. These transformations ultimately bring grief, and in the repetition with variation of these transformations, they mirror the process of being on “trial” “over and over again,” making the interim period till they transform back to their own bodies a period of “probation” from which they emerge with a realization of their folly.

In both stories, this moment of realization is figured as a death scene, and the subsequent restoration to their own bodies and the happy return home is subsequently figured as a resurrection scene. In “Nick,” as the treacherous servants begin to prepare a grave for him, Nick is “delivered” from the “utter horror” of this prospect when this final hour comes to an end, granting him the wish to be none but himself again. He is transformed back into his own body as the men are in the process of burying him: “His wish suddenly found vent in a prolonged unearthly yell. Damp with night dew, pale as death, and shivering from head to foot, he sat bolt upright, with starting, staring eyes and chattering teeth. The murderers, in mortal fear, cast down their tools, plunged deep into a wood hard by, and were never heard of more” (178-79).

What becomes apparent through Nick’s transformations is that this fairy gift is a revelation of his true self, as it causes him to become what he had wished to be countless other times: a “blight” on his neighbours’ lives (168). Nick wreaks havoc on those around him in each of his physical forms. His inability to simply stop wishing to do harm to his neighbours—the irrepressible nature of his bitter desires—emphasizes that he is indeed what he speaks. In the form of the rich man, Nick receives a revelation of what he is on his way to becoming: a tight-fisted man whose passing nobody mourns. In this final form,

121 which had revealed his potential destiny, Nick’s condition can be described in terms that

Rossetti uses in The Face of the Deep : “Dreadful were it simply to be shut up with self in the darkness of a grave-like solitude” (550). In the end, Nick’s character is transformed, silently repaying all of the damage that he had done to his neighbours upon his return, and he is “never again heard to utter a wish” (179). He becomes a gift to his neighbours generating good, not harm, among them.

Similarly, Hero’s wishes to be restored to her own body resembles a death and resurrection sequence. For her, it is the prospect of being turned into a decorative “ruin” in the garden of an old home that prompts her moment of realization: “Hero’s spirit died in the slighted plant. Was it to such taste as this she must condescend? such admiration as this she must court? . . . A passionate longing for the old lost life, the old beloved love, seized her; she grew tremulous, numbed: ‘Ah,’ she thought, ‘this is death!’ (207-08). She is immediately restored to her own body and transported by the fairies back to her father and lover on a raft, “through Fairy-harbour, out into the open sea” (210), thereby floating back to the human realm in the same form as the jewels that wash ashore. Emphasizing the resurrection theme is the fact that her father and Forss initially mistake her for “a corpse, as white as snow” before Hero awakes and asks them for their forgiveness. Just as

Nick becomes a “blight,” Hero becomes a “ruin,” undone by becoming defined by the

“tastes” of everyone but those who love her at home. Her desire for fleeting, un-moored admiration is transformed into a realization of lasting love, and we are left with a picture of Hero as a mother, distributing the fruits of her experience to her children “in after years”: “She would assure them, with a convincing smile, that only home is happy: and when, with flushed cheeks and quickened breath, they followed the story of her brief pre-

122 eminence, she would add, that though admiration seems sweet at first, only love is sweet first, and last, and always” (211).

These trajectories from home to home with multiple transformations in between pre-figure the multiple translations prior to the final translation into the heavenly home.

The surface message to be content in one’s humble circumstances is surely part of these stories’ aims, but as I have demonstrated here, reading these fairy tales with Rossetti’s ideas about translation in mind reveals that the fairy tales are shaped by an important aspect of her eschatological vision: her deep sense of trial as a gift, a medium for individual spiritual transformation that result in “lovely” lives that “can be read by anyone” ( Time Flies 2). It is in this sense that the supernatural gift which effects the trial

initially seems like a curse, but subsequently, becomes a true gift indeed. Moreover, if we

read these stories as resurrection narratives, the happy reinstatement to body and home

conveys that, having gone through trial, the fruits of peace and contentment gained

should be expressed in the context of one’s own circumstances, expressed in loving acts

to one’s neighbours.

“So any literal revelation of heaven would appear to be over spiritual for us”: Reading the Ghost Poems Eschatologically Comparing the fairy tales with the ghost poems demonstrates the tension between this life and the afterlife in Rossetti’s eschatology, a tension which, as I have been arguing, can be understood through her use of the analogy of translation to describe this earthly life as a “probational period” that “fits us for translation to the new heaven and new earth” ( Face of the Deep 119). But while the fairy tales represent the need to make a

good “home” on earth, characterized by active works of love toward one’s neighbour,

Rossetti’s ghost poems emphasize, by contrast, that heaven, not earth, is our final home.

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There are clear generic precedents for Rossetti’s ghost poems, one of which is

Gottfried Augustus Bürger’s ghostly German ballad “Lenore” (1773) about a dead soldier who returns to carry the eponymous Lenore to the grave. This ballad was hugely popular in Britain upon its arrival in 1796—as Simon Parkes tells us, multiple translations into

English were “published within the space of a few months” (175). We know that a young

Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced his own translation of the poem in 1844 (published posthumously by William Michael in 1900). The influence of this and other versions of what Parkes calls “the tale of the Dead Bridegroom Returning” and the related stories of

“the slighted bride seeking post-mortem reparation” (176) are certainly present in

Christina Rossetti’s ghost poems. 31

But Rossetti’s innovative move here is to adapt these generic precedents by

infusing them with biblical images to generate scenes of theological “hauntings” which

emphasize how inconceivable the true nature of the afterlife is from a limited earthly

perspective. These dramatic scenes in which two marriage partners separated by death are

momentarily reunited through the ghostly appearance of the dead partner is particularly

useful for Rossetti, for in the Christian tradition, the image of Christ as “Bridegroom” and

the Church as his “Bride” is a very old one. As Mary Arseneau notes, “the loving union

of the soul with the bridegroom of Christ is an important element of Rossetti’s economy

of images . . . like the harvest, another favourite symbol, the spiritual marriage posits a

crucial connection and continuity between present actions and future rewards” (141).

However, in these ghost poems, Rossetti uses the breakdown in communication between

marriage partners to depict the tension of “knowing Christ on earth” and the yet-not-

fully-known experience of knowing him in heaven.

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It is helpful here to contrast Rossetti’s use of “haunting” for theological purposes with David Morgan’s definition of “haunting” as he sees it emerging from Max Weber’s lament about modernity:

Though freed from the asceticism, intolerance, and dogmatism of Puritan belief,

modern life had become like the idols of old—empty and disenchanted. Haunting

seems to happen where enchantment has been banned or suppressed. The gods are

replaced by ghosts and they disturb us with hollow sounds. Ghosts are not the

things they once were, but nagging forms of memory that refuse to let the past go

away. They are unfinished business, terrifying proof that the past is not yet over.

(5)

While Morgan’s elaboration of the “Weberian thesis” in terms of the “haunting of the past” is certainly compelling, I argue that, when viewed eschatologically, Rossetti’s ghosts are harbingers of the unknown future, not the past. The ghosts in Rossetti’s poems are not “nagging forms of memory that refuse to let the past go away . . . proof that the past is not yet over,” to recall Morgan’s words, but rather, these ghosts are proof that the past is for them very much past. The drama of the “haunting” here, then, is evident in the still-living partners’ inability to understand or to acknowledge the future signified by these ghosts. For example, in “The Poor Ghost,” the unnamed female ghost with “golden hair” (2) returns to her old love in response to his grief, and assures him that he will join her “tomorrow”:

From the other world I come back to you,

My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew.

You know the old whilst I know the new:

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But tomorrow you shall know this too. (5-8)

In this dynamic, it is the living that possesses knowledge of “the old” while the ghost is the one who possesses knowledge of “the new”—but the prospect of having this “new” knowledge revealed to the ghost’s partner is a frightening rather than a welcome prospect. The ghost finds that despite the fact that her old love had previously grieved and longed for her, he now “shrinks” from her in fear, resisting the revelation that he will meet with the same fate. He begs to delay his progress to the grave:

Oh not tomorrow into the dark, I pray;

Oh not tomorrow, too soon to go away:

Here I feel warm and well-content and gay:

Give me another year, another day. (9-12)

In response to her still-living partner’s reluctance to join her, the ghost laments,

Am I so changed in a day and a night

That mine own only loves shrinks from me with fright,

Is fain to turn away to the left or right

And cover up his eyes from the sight? (13-16)

In another poem, “The Ghost’s Petition,” Jane remarks upon her husband’s odd, ghostly appearance in the lines, “O Robin, but you are cold— / Chilled with the night-dew: so lily-white you / Look like a stray lamb from our fold” (31-33). Jane can only compare the ghost’s appearance to something “more within the range of her experience,” to once again recall Rossetti’s words in Time Flies (42). This simile comparing Robin to “a stray

lamb,” in its allusion to the parable of the lost sheep, gives us a double-perspective: in its

original context, this parable is about the “lost” coming to Christ; therefore, by using this

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Scriptural allusion, Rossetti incorporates the hope of resurrection into the poem. Indeed,

Robin assures Jane, “What I do there I must not tell: / But I have plenty: kind wife, content ye: / It is well with us—it is well” (64-66). He goes onto say, “Tender hand hath made our nest; / Our fear is ended, our hope is blended / With present pleasure, and we have rest” (67-69).

Here, Robin’s words read like a response to the husband’s fear of the “new tomorrow” in the other poem, “The Poor Ghost.” Robin’s description of his contented state is specifically a response to Jane’s dismay at their separation. She bemoans,

Is it thus that you keep your word?

O you who used so to shelter me

Warm from the least wind—why, now the east wind

Is warmer than you, whom I quake to see.

O my husband of flesh and blood,

For whom my mother I left, and brother,

And all I had, accounting it good. . . . (54-60)

Her addressing him as “husband of flesh and blood” emphasizes her perception that he is breaking their wedding vows with its echo of Genesis 2: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (24). Her insistence on seeing Robin as one “of flesh and blood” indicates her refusal to take him at his word when he identifies himself as “a shadow”: “Feel not after my clasping hand: / I am but a shadow, come from the meadow / Where many lie, but no tree can stand” (40-

42). Jane will not accept the evidence of Robin’s self-revelation indicating that he has

127 surpassed the world of “flesh-and-blood” vows. In other words, she still interprets

Robin’s identity in earthly terms, refusing to interpret him by the terms of the otherworldly revelation with which she is presented.

Through the difficulties of understanding between revenant and the earth-bound marriage partner of former vows, Rossetti fictionally stages the inability for human beings to comprehend fully the realities of heaven while still on earth. Rossetti thus adapts the idea of “haunting” for her theological purposes, reflecting on what happens when human beings are faced with truly alien spiritual truths, namely the mysteries of our final destination. In her Time Flies entry of February 28, she reflects,

Now just as prismatic hues take no hold of aught on which they fall, but like the

pure light which is their parent are shifting, evanescent, intangible; while dyes

seize on what they come in contact with and affect it permanently: so any literal

revelation of heaven would appear to be over spiritual for us; we need something

grosser, something more familiar and more within the range of our experience.

(41-42, emphasis mine)

Rossetti’s speculation of what it would be like to receive a “literal revelation of heaven” can be applied to a reading of her poems “The Poor Ghost” and “The Ghost’s Petition,” which both feature the transformation of a once recognizable spouse into a ghostly figure.

In these poems, Rossetti uses these encounters with ghosts to emphasize that facing a bare spiritual revelation would be nearly incomprehensible—“over spiritual” for us. In other words, Rossetti’s ghosts are too much of a “literal revelation” from the afterlife to their still-living earthly partners; consequently, these encounters bring further separation rather than reconciliation.

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One distinct translation approach to which Rossetti would have been exposed is her brother William and sister Maria’s emphasis on “literality,” which we can bring to bear on Rossetti’s representation of these ghostly confrontations. William and Maria were both engaged in projects involving literal translations from Italian to English, or English to Italian. Among these were William’s English blank verse translation of Dante’s

Inferno under the title The Hell (1865), and Maria’s exercise book called Exercises in

Idiomatic Italian through literal translation from the English (1867). William opens his preface to The Hell by claiming, “The aim of this translation of Dante may be summed up in one word—Literality” (i). He goes on to elaborate that he had “aimed at unconditional literality in phraseology, and at line-for-line rendering” in his translations from the Italian to the English (iii). For her part, Maria explains in her preface to her book that the purpose of these exercises is to address “the great difficulty in teaching languages”:

“How shall pupils, after going through the grammatical course, be practised in writing, not English in Italian, but Italian itself?” (v). To accomplish this goal, the exercise book provides anecdotes that are “translated into the most literal English of which grammar and sense will admit” so that “their literal re-translation will result in the Italian of the original” (v-vi). Maria justifies this method saying, “I seek to initiate English pupils into the mysteries of an idiom so different from their own by setting it before them in a form whose strangeness makes itself felt at once” (vi). Likewise, William comments that his translation will sound strange to the English ear, due to his choice of strict “literality” to convey the main “substance” of Dante’s original Italian: “Various shortcomings in form, from a literary point of view, are the result. Some readers will probably be disposed to consider that singularity, or even oddity, of phrase is one of my chief shortcomings” (i,

129 iii). To sum up, then: by opting for literal blank verse to convey the “substance” rather than “form” of Dante’s terza rima, William opts to foreground the “primary meaning” at the cost of words that sound lovelier to the English ear, while Maria opts to “initiate

English pupils” into Italian grammar by making it “strange” rather than making it more familiar.

We can apply the language of “literality” in the Time Flies entry above to the ghost poems to highlight the dynamics of receiving a revelation from the supernatural realm, while still in the natural realm. The transformations of these ghosts can be read as

“too literal translations” for the still-living. The translations remain alien and incomprehensible, leading to further separation rather than joyful reunion. In “The Poor

Ghost,” and “The Ghost’s Petition,” the bodies of the ghosts can be seen as literal signs from the afterlife, translated through a revelation from beyond the grave. The ghosts seem to the earthly partner both familiar and “strange,” to echo Maria’s language, as they are translated back to earth, a different reality from their new heavenly reality.

Unlike the other poems, “The Hour and the Ghost” is comprised of a conversation between three voices—the Bride, Bridegroom, and the Ghost. In it, Rossetti continues to explore the theme of being unable to fully understand spiritual revelation, this time by subverting our expectations of the “Bridegroom” and “Ghost” figures in this poem. I gain support for this reading of the poem as a case of mistaken identity by what I see as a crucial biblical intertext for this poem: the story in Matthew 14 that recounts an episode in which Jesus’ disciples are crossing the sea in a boat. In the story, the disciples are being rocked by a powerful wind, when they see Jesus in the distance, walking towards them on the water. Notably, the disciples mistake the figure of Jesus for a ghost:

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And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.

And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying,

It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.

But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not

afraid. (Matt. 14.25-27)

This biblical case of mistaken identity illuminates our reading of “The Hour and the

Ghost,” especially since this story culminates with the disciple Peter’s walking on water

towards Jesus, highlighting the need for faith. As in the other poems, Rossetti uses the

ghost figure to bring about a double-perspective: in this gospel story, Christ is

mistakenly identified as a ghost; while in other parts of Scripture, Christ is famously

described as a the “Bridegroom” of the Church. To the Bride, the Ghost appears to be a

malignant supernatural being, but as this poem progresses, it is the Bridegroom’s

identity that comes under our suspicion, while conversely, the Ghost becomes

increasingly Christ-like.

In fact, the Bridegroom’s words are not consistent with the tone of Rossetti’s other devotional themes. Take, for example, the Bridegroom’s response to the Bride’s fearful complaint that the Ghost has come to take her away: when the Bride says to the

Bridegroom, “O love, love, hold me fast, / He draws me away from thee” (1-2), the

Bridegroom replies, “Lean on me, hide thine eyes: / Only ourselves, earth and skies, / Are present here: be wise” (27-29). Again, later on in the poem, the Bridegroom tells the

Bride to not heed the Ghost in words that start to take on a note of false comfort: “Nay peace, my darling, peace: / Let these dreams and terrors cease: / Who spoke of death or change or aught but ease?” (48-50). By contrast, Rossetti’s devotional writings as a

131 whole continually emphasize the need to see beyond what is in front of us, beyond current “ease”: as I have been discussing, and as many scholars have noted, the biblical passages from Revelation and Proverbs that particularly shaped Rossetti’s eschatological perspective emphasize the need for “patience” and “hope deferred.” In this light, the

Bridegroom’s words become suspect, and as we begin to consider the possibility that the

Bridegroom’s words might be false, the Ghost’s words give us pause and cause us to look again—and the Ghost begins to take on the appearance of the true Bridegroom.

Indeed, although the Bride is terrified by the Ghost’s “call” to “come home” (12-

13), it is the Ghost’s words that begin to sound like something Christ would say to His

“Bride,” the Church:

Lean on me, come away

I will guide and steady:

Come, for I will not stay:

Come, for house and bed are ready.

Ah, sure bed and house,

For better and worse, for life and death:

Goal won with shortened breath:

Come, crown our vows. (30-37)

While the Bridegroom character in the poem urges the Bride, “Lean on me and hide thine eyes,” only considering the “present” reality (27), the Ghost calls the Bride to “lean on him,” and to “come away” to a “sure bed and house,” that will last beyond the present,

“for better and worse, for life and death” (30, 34-35). Moreover, Rossetti incorporates verbal echoes of Matthew 14 into the poem, strengthening the intertextual connection.

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The Bride fears that she “cannot stem the blast, / Nor the cold strong sea” (3-4), while the

Ghost refers to “outcast weather” (61). Most importantly, the Ghost calls the Bride to

“cross the tossing foam” (17), reminding her, “It is my voice that calls / Once thou wast not afraid” (13-14). However, the Bride continues to mistake his identity, displaying an inability to leave the earthly home for the heavenly home when the time comes, prompting the Ghost to lament, “O fair frail sin, / O poor harvest gathered in” (51-52).

Thus, Rossetti’s ghost poems are dramas of a future-oriented haunting, where it is the future rather than the past that causes anxiety. In her essay “Dante, An English

Classic,” Rossetti had described the Commedia as the story of the pilgrim who “can only

be disenthralled from the past and renewed for the future” by opening himself up to “that

world which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man

to conceive” (170). This plot summary serves as a useful counterpoint to the attitudes of

the ghosts in Rossetti’s poems: unlike the pilgrim Dante, who responds to the shade

Virgil with a desire to contemplate further the things of the future, to be free of a

disproportionate hold on the things of this world, we find here that the flesh-and-blood

partners to whom the ghosts appear in Rossetti’s poems are unable to contemplate the

“new” things of tomorrow.

In the same Time Flies entry in which she muses that “any literal revelation of

heaven would appear over spiritual for us,” and thus require “something more familiar

and more within the range of our experience” to receive partial aspects of revelation,

Rossetti concludes,

The heavenly symbol attracts: what will be the heavenly reality?

It was blessed to know Christ on earth: what will it be to know Him not as

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mortal eye hath seen, or mortal ear heard, or mortal heart conceived? (42)

These ghost poems point to the great distance between earthly and heavenly realities. The endings of these poems, which provide no clear resolution to the conflict between ghost and beloved, ends on a point of tension and indecision, thus troubling Rossetti’s readers with the need to form their own response to the unknowable when knowledge is embodied for them in a form that is beyond recognition.

Complicating the Progress in “The Prince’s Progress” As my readings of the fairy tales and the ghost poems demonstrate, Rossetti uses fantasy to convey the theme that one’s identity is formed within the tension between the present and the future. In this final section, I turn to “The Prince’s Progress” to think further about Rossetti’s description of life as a “trial” that is meant “not in order to confirm man upon the earth that now is, but to fit him for translation to that new heaven and new earth” ( Face of the Deep 119). Building on my reading of the ghost poems above, I argue here that the overlay of an eschatological lens reveals multiple interpretations for both the prince’s and princess’s “progress” narratives and their ultimate destinies.

An early version of this poem was published in Macmillan’s in 1863 as “The

Fairy Prince Who Arrived Too Late,” which Rossetti described to Dora Greenwell as her

“reverse of the Sleeping Beauty ,” adding that “except in fairy land such reverses must often occur.” This comment indicates that for “The Prince’s Progress,” Rossetti is using the idea of “fairy land” differently than in her fairy tales “Nick” and “Hero.” In those tales, Rossetti had used the magical fairy land settings with their otherworldly connotations, along with the convention of the happy ending, to depict the spiritual

134 transformations resulting from the “gift” of “trial.” By contrast, for “The Prince’s

Progress,” Rossetti is “reversing” the original happy ending in order to comment on the nature of our lives on earth, where expectations of happiness are often unmet.

The implications of the poem’s ending, in which the prince finds that the princess had died while waiting for him, has garnered considerable scholarly attention.

Scholarship has tended to focus on the implications of this ending either for the poem’s spiritual themes, or for the poem’s representation of gender. Diane D’Amico does both: comparing this princess to the figures of Lizzie from “Goblin Market” and Margaret from

“Maiden-Song”—the two pieces that “frame” this poem in the 1875 collected edition

Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems —D’Amico asserts that “the princess herself must bear some of the responsibility for her story ending not with marriage but death” (88). She compares the “wise virgins” of Matthew 25 and the bride of Song of Songs to the princess’s “lack of progress” (84), leading her to conclude, “This princess does not prove to be either a wise virgin who keeps her lamp lit waiting to greet the bridegroom or the bride of the Song of Songs who so yearns for her lover that she

‘seeks’ him and ‘will not let him go’ (Song of Songs 3:1-4)” (86); therefore, “Rossetti has written not only a reverse Sleeping Beauty but also a reverse Song of Songs” (87). 32

While I find much that is helpful in D’Amico’s reading, it is possible to arrive at an

alternate reading of the princess’s death in the poem: rather than seeing the princess’s

narrative in terms of failure, the eschatological perspective I have been discussing makes

it possible to read the princess’s death as the culmination of another marriage plot

altogether—one that concludes with the transplantation of the princess into a realm

beyond the borders of the poem, thereby mirroring the final “translation to that new

135 heaven and new earth” that follows the trials of the earthly realm.

But the more obvious form of “trial” is represented in the journey of the eponymous prince. At the beginning of the poem, the prince exists in a state of potential to become the bridegroom—to “fit him for translation,” as it were, into the expected role as destined bridegroom to his sleeping bride. In other words, his identity in the poem is defined by his potential—a potential that he does not fulfil. The title of the poem, with its allusion to Bunyan, suggests that the prince’s “trial” consists of the pilgrimage from “his world-end palace” to his betrothed, who is waiting in her “royal palace, till now descried

/ In his dreams alone” (431-32). However, this journey ends not with a scene of joyful reunion with this bride, but the stark reality of her death, with her attendants lamenting that he had not arrived even just a bit sooner: “Then you had known her living face /

Which now you cannot know” (495-96).

The stymied reunion is emphasized and made more poignant by Rossetti’s highlighting the double-function of the veil: whereas at the beginning of the poem, the princess had been his “veiled bride in her maiden bloom” (20), the prince arrives in the end to find her “face covered” in death. The veil face that had once represented imminent joy, now signals the death of not only the anticipated joy of marriage, but of the prince’s hopes for his future as well. The poem thus dramatizes the intensely painful moment where the prince meets the death of the hopes of which he had been so certain, hopes that had been so intricately woven with his own sense of identity. This “reversal” of expectations is the revelation that Rossetti conveys through her “reverse of the Sleeping

Beauty ”—and it is in this sense that “The Prince’s Progress” depicts a “death” of the old

self, and the death of life as the prince knows it.

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The narrative of the prince’s failed journey to become the bridegroom is presented in the reverse by the journey of his wife-to-be: from the opening lines, she is already explicitly identified as “the bride” who “sleepeth, waketh, sleepeth” and “weepeth” (4, 6).

Likewise, the voices urging the prince to start his journey do so by reminding him that

“the bride waits” (16). The prince himself refers to his betrothed as his “veiled bride in her maiden bloom” (20), and near the end of his journey, as he draws closer to his destination, the poem echoes, “He comes, O Bride” (100). However, by the time the

Prince does eventually arrive, but “too late” to wake his “spellbound” bride (20), the poem refers to her as a “princess” for the first time. Her women sing,

Too late for love, too late for joy,

Too late, too late!

You loitered on the road too long,

You trifled at the gate:

The enchanted dove upon her branch

Died without a mate;

The enchanted princess in her tower

Slept, died, behind the grate;

Her heart was starving all this while

You made it wait. (481-90)

The song goes on:

Is she fair now as she lies?

Once she was fair;

Meet queen for any kingly king,

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With gold-dust on her hair. (501-04)

This funereal song now presents the memory of the former Bride in the “fairy tale” terms of “princess” and “queen”—certainly not a coincidence for the meticulous Rossetti.

Therefore, the language of the poem suggests that the prince-turned-failed Bridegroom and Bride-turned-dead princess approach this death scene from opposite ends: the princess was already a “bride” who dwindled into a “princess” as she waited, while the prince did not become the “bridegroom” he was meant to be.

However, the final implications of this conclusion to the bride/princess’s story are complicated in light of the typological resonances of the bride/bridegroom imagery where the bride is symbolic of Christ’s church. The two contrasting destinies are especially evident in the two stanzas revealing that the prince is too late:

Fling the golden portals wide,

The Bridegroom comes to his promised Bride;

Draw the gold-stiff curtains aside,

Let them look on each other’s face,

She in her meekness, he in his pride—

Day wears apace.

Day is over, the day that wore.

What is this that comes thro’ the door,

The face covered, the feet before?

This that coming takes his breath;

This Bride not seen, to be seen no more

Save of Bridegroom Death? (463-74)

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The sequence of these stanzas, appearing one after the other, directly contrasts her would- be destiny had the prince arrived in time, and the destiny she now faces in death. It turns out, then, that the Bride had been courted by two Bridegrooms: the Prince and

“Bridegroom Death.” Therefore, rather than presenting two concurrent “failure” narratives that end with a lack of fulfillment, the poem suggests the alternative possibility that while having been “reversed” into a “princess” on earth, the princess has transformed into a Bride elsewhere.

Taking the princess’s destiny off-page mirrors the final “translation to that new heaven and new earth” that follows the trials of the earthly realm. The poem’s presentation of two journeys in reverse, with the Bride’s journey ending in her meeting with “Bridegroom Death” and the typological resonances generated by the wedding motif combine to remind us that in Rossetti’s religious imagination, death is not the end— rather, it is the beginning of true fulfillment and eternal life. Thus, Rossetti places the ultimate hope of waiting for true fulfilment beyond the pages of the world.

It is in this light that “fairy land” can be seen as an analogue for a space where spiritual marriage will take place—as a place where tragic “reverses” of Sleeping

Beauty ’s original happy ending do not occur. Indeed, my reading of this poem has been animated, in part, by my sense that “fairy land” is the original narrative space from which

Rossetti has plucked the main plot elements for her own poem, transforming the story’s original happy conclusion into the sobering scene of an unfulfilled quest. At the same time, Rossetti’s version of the fairy tale produces the paradoxical effect of rendering “The

Prince’s Progress” a story about the Bride’s finding fulfillment with her true Bridegroom.

Thus, “fairy land” can figure as both the source and destiny for this poem—while it is

139 undoubtedly different from the Sleeping Beauty, the seed of the poem comes from the

same stock, and the Bride’s final destination suggests that Rossetti’s version of the tale

returns, in some measure, to a different kind of “fairy land” by the end.

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Coda

In Theological Visions of Community in Victorian Fantasy Literature , I have argued that George Macdonald’s, Charles Kingsley’s, and Christina Rossetti’s works of fantasy originate in their theological visions of community. These works of fantasy convey their belief in the unseen spiritual reality of the trans-historical, trans-cultural nature of Christian communion. While all of these authors employed different genres throughout their careers, my project has shown that they adapted different forms of fantastic narratives to represent and negotiate the relationship between individual and collective religious experience at a time when, as Joshua King and other religion and literature scholars have pointed out, the Victorians’ conception of being “members” of a spiritual community were expanding beyond the bounds of membership in the national community of the Church of England. These three authors’ conceptions of the relationship between individual and collective spirituality are slightly different due to their various denominational backgrounds, but they all find in the genre of fantasy an effective vehicle for simultaneously representing the immanent and transcendent dimensions of spiritual community.

This project grew out of my dissatisfaction on two fronts as I surveyed discussions about the development of modern fantasy: On the one hand, I noticed that some Christian readers wished to make claims of hermeneutic exclusivity when it came to the meaning of fantasy texts by authors like J. R. R. Tolkien who were professing

Christians themselves; on the other hand, I remarked that modern fantasy theory often gave insufficient attention to the theological resources that had in fact influenced these religious fantasy writers. In the midst of these observations, I also began to realize that

141 there were many fruitful conversations growing rapidly in the area of religion and literature, which revealed that the Victorian religious landscape was more diverse than the secularization thesis had formerly allowed. Consequently, I intuited that there was something much more complicated going on from the trajectory of fantasy written by devout Victorian Christian authors to the conversations about Christianity and fantasy literature that I had been encountering in our own twenty-first century context.

My thesis offers a corrective to histories of modern fantasy’s development that obscure the theological origins of Victorian fantasy, thereby contributing to the study of

Victorian religion and literature, and to fantasy genre studies. To be clear, I am not claiming that every single work of Victorian fantasy that contributed to the development of modern fantasy was conceived by theological ideas. I am claiming, however, that it is crucial to take stock of the Christian theological contexts that did inform the fantastic works of devout Victorians like George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and Christina

Rossetti in their historical moment. Not acknowledging these specific theological influences will lead to a limited perspective of the landscape of Victorian fantasy. More broadly, insufficient attention to the theological resources that have helped to shape the development of fantasy literature will lead to the skewed perception that the religious imagination is incompatible with fantasy practice in general, perpetuating the mistaken idea that if devout religious writers do produce fantasy works, it is mostly in spite of, rather than because of, their religious beliefs that they do so. While the voice of Mrs.

Cathcart protesting against the use of fairy tales to convey Christian truths seems to echo down the ages through the more negative fundamentalist Christian reactions to Harry

Potter in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, my project redresses the

142 disproportionate emphasis on the contentious relationship between the religious and fantastic imaginations in studies of Victorian fantasy in particular, and modern fantasy theory in general.

My thesis specifically demonstrates that works of Victorian fantasy by Christian

authors have theological origins by bringing the religious turn in literary studies to bear

on my study of MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s fantasy texts. While we now

recognize the importance of the religious contexts in which various forms of Victorian

literature emerged, there remains a gap in our understanding of how these religious

contexts shaped works of Victorian fantasy. What Victorian religion and literature

scholars have been demonstrating so persuasively in the last couple of decades—that the

Victorian religious landscape was far more diverse than the secularization thesis had

previously acknowledged, and that religion was an important component in generating

literary creativity—is true of fantasy writing in the period as well. However, the existing

body of scholarship on Victorian fantasy, especially in relation to the period’s

contributions to the development of the fantasy genre as a whole, does not provide

critical frameworks and methodologies that are capacious enough to consider the specific

theological origins of many fantasy texts produced at this time, despite the fact that

Victorian culture was still very much shaped by Christian influences.

In the early stages of this project, I had noted the need for greater historicizing of fantasy overall in order to come to a better understanding of the Victorians’ specific contributions to the genre. In various scholarly engagements with Victorian fairy tales in particular, I had noticed a tendency to bring modern fantasy theory to bear on their definitions of the genre, without necessarily acknowledging that these definitions were

143 already refracted through the lenses of fantasy theory that had been strongly influenced by Tolkien’s seminal essay “On Fairy Stories” in the twentieth century. One of my own early methods was to address the relationship between fantasy and the concept of “re- enchantment,” but I began to realize that my questions about “re-enchantment” did not necessarily fit my authors when I began to historicize their theological backgrounds, which I saw as the basis of their fantasy writing. While enchantment theory is not incompatible with my authors, I felt that to historicize their religious views more precisely, the idea of needing to “re-enchant the world” was an idea that I was projecting backwards from our own current scholarly vocabulary onto Christian Victorian writers who may not have been perceiving modernity in quite the same terms. In other words, I wanted to re-frame the discussion of the relationship between Victorian Christianity and fantasy by starting from the theological beliefs themselves, apart from the vocabulary of

“enchantment.”

Consequently, I settled upon a methodology that integrates the synchronic and diachronic approaches to fantasy genre studies. Taking the synchronic view here means to consider the specific historical religious contexts in which these fantasy works by

Christian writers emerged, which in turn means to take seriously the theological resources that shaped these writers’ fantasy practice. Keeping that historical context in view alongside the diachronic view means to shed light on how those theological resources led to these Christian authors’ contributions to the overall development of the fantasy genre.

My methodology thus attends to the historical theological contexts that informed these authors’ fantasy aesthetics. As I noted in my Introduction, by “fantasy aesthetics” I

144 mean the artistic principles governing these authors’ fantasy practice, and the formal strategies that emerge from these principles. I distinguish my approach from taxonomical ones that focus on carving out a niche for “Christian fantasy,” a term that I find limited in its ability to describe the range of theological ideas represented by the Victorians. The term “Christian” itself needs to be qualified—it is, in fact, most often qualified in studies of fantasy through an anachronistic (and more often than not, a secular) perspective. By choosing instead to examine the relationship between “Christian theology” and “fantasy aesthetics,” my project steers the discussion towards a view of Victorian Christian theology that is more capacious, and draws attention to the differences as well as the similarities between individual Christian authors.

Indeed, my project demonstrates that George MacDonald’s, Charles Kingsley’s, and Christina Rossetti’s fantasy aesthetics can be distinguished from each other.

MacDonald’s fantasy aesthetics see fantasy writing in terms of building immersive worlds with their own internally consistent “laws” (“The Fantastic Imagination” 6). He builds fantasy worlds that explicitly foreground the lineage of fantastic stories of the past, and the intergenerational act of reforming those old stories into new ones. MacDonald’s fantasy aesthetics lead to the formal strategy of structuring his tales as quest narratives serving as parables about finding one’s spiritual identity in the world. Kingsley’s fantasy aesthetics as embodied in The Water-Babies are syncretistic and universalizing, leading to the formal strategy of putting different stories together all in one place, rubbing shoulders with each other, thereby creating a rambunctious, mixed landscape containing allusions to a myriad of cultural traditions. Kingsley’s fantasy aesthetics see the combined body of fairy tales in the world as a collective history of heroism, resulting in a

145 mythopoeic style that combines many pieces from diverse cultures, but all in the service of telling a national story of English heroism. Rossetti’s fantasy aesthetics have a devotional ethos that highlights the mysterious tensions between material and spiritual realities as she saw them. These aesthetics result in fantasy narratives that point to a world beyond the page, emphasizing the otherworldly quality and spiritual implications of human transformation. Her fantasy aesthetics foreground the impossibility of being able to fully translate heavenly truths into earthly settings, leading to the formal strategy of turning to various strands of fantasy to highlight the multifaceted nature of human transformation and spiritual knowledge.

Therefore, my thesis is claiming that Christian theology helped shape the development of fantasy at the historical moment I am writing about. I show that the artistic principles and formal strategies of these Christian Victorian authors’ fantastic imaginations were shaped most immediately by their theological perspectives in their historical moment. The aesthetics that emerged from Victorian theological bases were then taken up by subsequent generations of fantasy writers hailing from a diverse array of spiritual beliefs as the genre of fantasy continued to develop. MacDonald’s idea that fantasy worlds resist strict allegorical meanings while not foreclosing them, which I attribute to his Nonconformist background, becomes an important artistic principle to religious and non-religious fantasy writers alike. Kingsley’s optimistic use of the fairy tale as a literary form that could mingle elements from supernatural tales from diverse cultures to create his own version of English Protestant catholicity is an important predecessor to subsequent discussions of mythopoeia. Rossetti distinguished between and made use of different types of fantasy narratives in order to represent various aspects of

146 eschatological transformation, but thematically, reflections upon the mysterious nature of reality and human transformation characterize the fantasy genre as a whole. More broadly, following modern fantasy theorists, I have also claimed in this thesis that a fundamental attribute of the genre is the self-conscious adaptation of diverse fantastical source materials, thereby making fantasy practice one that is always indebted to its predecessors—a “genealogical affair.” I have demonstrated that the Christian Victorian fantasists in this study played a key role in establishing this habit of adapting such source materials, and that their willingness to play with and adapt a wide range of narratives with supernatural elements was motivated by theological concerns.

To reiterate, attending to Christian theology at this historical moment thus leads to a better understanding of the contributions that religious Victorian authors made to the development of fantasy literature as a whole. The inverse is also true: attending to the fantastical elements in MacDonald’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s bodies of work expands our understanding of the nuances of Victorian theology. Christianity is a religion whose view of the immanent world is shaped by belief in transcendent, unseen, or yet-to-be-seen realities. In this project, I have specifically focused on how the genre of fantasy reveals more about the Victorians’ theological visions of community. Additional studies of how fantasy—a genre that explicitly makes supernatural elements part of narrative plotting and characterization—depicts the interaction between seen and unseen realities, would be a welcome contribution to studies of Victorian religion and fantasy, and to broader studies of religion and literature.

Notes

1. In my estimation, three overlapping bodies of scholarship can form a baseline for the range of the Victorian fantasy genre. These bodies of scholarship include studies that focus specifically on the genre of fantasy itself, such as Stephen Prickett’s book Victorian

Fantasy (1979; revised and expanded in 2005) and the collection of essays edited by Kath

Filmer, The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in the

Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age (1991); those that focus on nineteenth-century romance, many of which overlap with histories of the novel, such as Ian Duncan’s

Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992); and studies of the Victorian fairy tale. The Victorian fairy tale in particular often becomes metonymic of Victorian fantasy overall, making studies of the Victorian fairy tale like

Caroline Sumpter’s book The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (2008) and anthologies

like Michael Newton’s Victorian Fairy Tales (2015) especially helpful resources for

understanding the Victorian fantasy landscape. Another relevant body of scholarship is

comprised of studies examining Victorian children’s fantasy, including analyses of the

changes wrought on the children’s literature landscape by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland. A smaller body of scholarship focuses on various expressions of the Victorian “supernatural”: examples include Alex Owen’s The Place of

Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (2004) and the collection of essays edited by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell, The

Victorian Supernatural (2004) .

2. Charles Taylor engages with Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” by

employing “its antonym [enchantment] to describe a crucial feature of the premodern

147 148 condition. The enchanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” (26). More work can be done in bringing discussions of secular “enchantment” like During’s and Landy’s into conversation with discussions of “enchantment” oriented around religion. Indeed, the term “enchantment” has been appeared in a vast array of different disciplines and critical contexts in the last couple of decades. Despite the diverse contexts in which this term has been used, some similarities emerge: most notably, the term almost invariably has positive connotations, often having to do with ideas about transformation (including “illusion”), novelty or variety, and power. Besides During’s Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic

(2002), examples of those works that discuss “enchantment” through a secular lens

include Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s essay collection, The Re-Enchantment of the

World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (2009), as well as Saler’s more recent As If:

Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012). An example

of enchantment described through a religious perspective is the essay collection edited by

James K. A. Smith entitled After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-

enchantment of the World (2008). The term also appears in works examining the

relationship between art and religion, including Graham Gordon’s The Re-Enchantment

of the World: Art versus Religion (2007) and an essay collection edited by James Elkins

and David Morgan, simply entitled Re-Enchantment (2009), which is a part of

Routledge’s Art Seminar series.

3. I am also contributing to the body of scholarship on MacDonald of the last few

decades that has sought to re-situate his works in larger contexts of Victorian culture to

combat the notion that MacDonald’s main value lies in his being a moral teacher—an

149 impression that many readers have inherited from C. S. Lewis’s primarily highlighting

MacDonald’s role “as a Christian teacher” (xxviii). See John Pennington’s contribution to the essay collection George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs (2008) for a useful discussion of the “difficult rehabilitation” of MacDonald’s reputation overall. Much of this “rehabilitation” work has been carried out by essay collections from Scottish publishers such as The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDonald from Edinburgh

University Press (1990), and Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and

Contemporaries from Scottish Literature International (2013).

4. Parables were an important feature of the Victorian religious and literary landscape.

For a study of the Victorians’ engagement with and adaptation of biblical parables for the realist novel, see Susan E. Colón’s Victorian Parables (2012).

5. The tendency to pair Phantastes with Lilith is exemplified by the decision by

Noonday Press to publish the two novels together in a single volume entitled The

Visionary Novels of George MacDonald in 1954. W. H. Auden wrote an introduction for this edition, in which he asserted that MacDonald’s “greatest gift” was “his dream realism” (vii). For an overview of literary scholarship on Phantastes specifically, see pp.

22-23 of Albert D. Pionke’s article “The Art of Manliness: Ekphrasis and/as Masculinity in George MacDonald’s Phantastes ” (2011). Pionke identifies “three dominant approaches” to reading the novel: studies that use a psychoanalytic lens, those that focus on its intertextuality and generic forebears, and those that highlight the centrality of the fairy palace episode in the novel.

6. The numerous discussions about nineteenth-century medievalism through the years include Alice Chandler’s book A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-

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Century English Literature (1970), Mark Girouard’s book The Return to Camelot:

Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981), John M. Ganim’s chapter “The Myth of

Medieval Romance” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (1996), and Antony H.

Harrison’s “Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism” in Blackwell’s Companion to Victorian

Poetry (2002).

7. By far, the greatest number of scholarly discussions about Kingsley’s work as a fantasist in The Water-Babies focuses on his engagements with Victorian theories of

Darwinian evolution and “recapitulation.” The classic study of the Victorian novel and theories of evolution is Gillian Beer’s book Darwin’s Plots (first published in 1983). Beer notes that “Kingsley, in his images of extinction, of degeneration, and of recapitulation and development, mythologises Darwinian theory with remarkable insight” (128), concluding that he “grasped much of what was fresh in Darwin’s ideas while at the same time retaining a creationist view of experience” (129). For a more recent discussion of the relationship between Kingsley’s Christian beliefs and theories of evolution, see the chapter entitled “Christian Evolution? Charles Kingsley’s ‘Natural Theology of the

Future’” in Jonathan Conlin’s book Evolution and the Victorians (2014).

8. In citing the subtitle to J.M.I. Klaver’s biography of Kingsley here, I do not mean to suggest that he is simplifying Kingsley’s theology—this magisterial biography is one of the most insightful reassessments of Kingsley’s life and theology that I have come across.

I only mean to point out that these epithets highlighting the potential conflict between the

“flesh” and the “spirit” have generally stuck with us in our characterizations of Kingsley.

As I will go on to discuss, while this tension between the material and the immaterial is crucial to point out when discussing Kingsley’s religious conceptions of history, I think

151 that the “conflict” between the two is often overstated to convey a sense of an irresolvable tension. But in fact, as Trevor Hart puts it so well, this “toing and froing between the economies of materiality and immateriality” is an essential part of

Christianity itself (1).

9. For a persuasive argument about the important contribution that the Church of

England made to historical scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see James Kirby’s recent study Historians and the Church of England:

Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920 (2016).

10. To situate Kingsley’s ideas about heroism within a larger Victorian context, we can put him into conversation with Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the

Heroic in History (1841).

11. As I noted above, most studies of The Water-Babies examine the fantasy text in

light of Kingsley’s ideas about Darwinian evolution. Various studies on Kingsley and

theories of evolution also focus on the fantasy novel’s contribution to the field of

children’s literature—it is “the canonical first ‘Golden Age’ fantasy for children,”

according to Ruth Murphy, who notes that Kingsley considered “natural theology and

evolutionary theory [to be] reconcilable” (10). In addition to Murphy’s work, three

examples of helpful analyses in this vein are Tess Cosslettt’s chapter contrasting

Kingsley with Margaret Gatty in her book Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction,

1786-1914 (2006); Jessica Straley’s article “Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and

the Theory of Recapitulation” (2007); and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas’ chapter entitled

“From the Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley’s Nursery

Fairies” in her book Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (2014).

152

12. Other relevant passages include Romans 12, Ephesians 4, and Colossians 3.

13. We may be more familiar with Arnold’s notion of swinging back and forth between two main extremes of human culture, summarized in the terms “Hebraism” and

“Hellenism.” The reconciliation of the “spirit” and “animal” is analogous to Arnold’s framing of human history in terms of dichotomous tendencies between the outer or the inner life.

14. As Christine Bolus-Reichert helpfully explains in her study of nineteenth-century eclecticism, Kingsley demonstrates “a steady appreciation for Greek, Roman, and

Hebrew culture, always taking care to bring forward those elements that would best serve a healthy Christianity” (178).

15. Crucial to this conception of religious history is Kingsley’s sense of divine providence guiding this historical process—the idea that God is always working as a loving father to constantly “educate” human beings. As he says in his preface to The

Roman and the Teuton , Providence works sovereignly in “the dark passages of human life” to effect “the complex education of our race,” much like “when we put the child we love under the surgeon’s knife” (lii). He goes on to say, “At least we may believe so; believe that they have a moral end, though that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or narrow prying into final causes (a trick as fatal to historic research as Bacon said it was to science), we may justify God by faith, where we cannot justify him by experience” (lii- liii).

16. For a representative discussion of this historical novel in the context of contemporary religious debates about the Oxford Movement, see Andrew Sanders’ chapter comparing Hypatia with Nicholas Wiseman’s Fabiola and John Henry

153

Newman’s Callista .

17. One of the ways in which Hypatia resembles historical novels of time is its portrayal of what Brian Hamnett calls “mob horror” in his study of the European nineteenth-century historical novel (117). For his part, Michael Wheeler, who analyzes the mob in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in the context of Catholic and Protestant tensions, observes, “Whereas Carlyle, in The French Revolution (1837), sees the mob as the ‘agent of a necessary historical process’, Dickens sees it as the ‘enemy of progress’” (125).

18. This quotation calls to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion of the imagination in the thirteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria. For a helpful discussion of the influence of both Coleridge and Wordsworth on Victorian religion, see Stephen

Prickett’s Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the

Victorian Church (1976).

19. There is no doubt that Kingsley considered England to be superior to other nations. In the words of his younger contemporary, Andrew Lang, he was “a man with a boy’s heart . . . with a brave, indomitable belief that his own country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the quarrel. He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies, Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good” (155).

Regarding Kingsley’s engagement with the question of Victorian empire more generally, there are a range of sources that provide evidence of his imperialist thinking with racialist components. Thoughtful scholarly engagements with this topic include Prickett’s

“Purging Christianity of its Semitic Origins: Kingsley, Arnold and the Bible” (2000);

Wee’s “Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a

Racially ‘Pure’ Nation” (2006); and Cannon Schmitt’s chapter “Charles Kingsley’s

154

Recollected Empire” in his book Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009).

20. See, for example, Valentine Cunningham’s “Soiled Fairy: The Water-Babies in its

Time” (1985), Jonathan Padley’s “Marginal(ized) Demarcator: (Mis)Reading The Water-

Babies (2009), and Jenny Holt’s “‘A Partisan in Defence of Children’? Kingsley’s The

Water-Babies Re-Contextualized” (2011).

21. Stephen Prickett notes that “Harthover House (its very name perhaps an indication

of the supremacy of Heart and Hearth ) is the essence of Englishness—possibly even a

symbol of England itself” ( Victorian Fantasy 145). In a later work, Prickett references

Harthover House to support his examination of “architecture as a symbol of stability and

order” in the writings of conservative English writers like Hannah More ( Modernity and

the Reinvention of Tradition 79). See pp. 76-81 for this reference to Harthover House in

context.

22. In his reading of this scene, Prickett notes that “punishment itself, in the

Mauricean scheme of things, is only another aspect of love” ( Victorian Fantasy 153).

Accordingly, he reads the fairies’ being “subsumed into the crowning vision of unity” as

Kingsley’s version of “the final canto of Dante’s Pardiso , where in the climax of the

‘high fantasy’ the Godhead is described as three interlocking circles of different colors,

each reflecting the other” (154). Whereas I focus on how The Water-Babies reflects the

theme of “unity” through the relationship between Kingsley’s ideas about history and

ecclesiology, Prickett puts Maurice’s ideal of God as “loving father” (152) in

conversation with the theories of Darwinian evolution (154) to demonstrate that The

Water-Babies illustrates Kingsley’s natural theology, centred on the idea of “kinship”

(153).

155

23. One of the most prominent topics in this body of scholarship is Rossetti’s engagement with the Tractarian doctrine of reserve in her work. In her article “Christina

Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve” (2010), Emma Mason explains, “According to this doctrine, God’s word, as evinced through the scriptures and related exegesis, should be available only to the faithful” (196). G. B. Tennyson’s Victorian Devotional Poetry: The

Tractarian Mode (1981) is the classic study on this topic. Two useful sources outlining

Rossetti’s careful engagement with the Bible are the concordance compiled by Nilda

Jiménez, The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti (1979), and Mary Arseneau and

Jan Marsh’s article “Intertextuality and Intratextuality: The Full Text of Christina

Rossetti’s ‘Harmony on First Corinthians XIII’ Rediscovered” (1995). Full-length book

studies of the relationship between religion and literature in Rossetti’s work include (in

chronological order): Diane D’Amico’s Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time

(1999), Lynda Palazzo’s Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (2002), Mary

Arseneau’s Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics

(2004), Dinah Roe’s Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry

and Prose (2006), and Elizabeth Ludlow’s Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Walking with

the Saints (2014). In addition to these monographs, the following books contain helpful

chapters on Rossetti and various topics of nineteenth-century religion (again, in

chronological order): Cynthia Scheinberg’s Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian

England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (2002), Karen Dieleman’s Religious

Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Browning, Christina

Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (2012), and Joshua King’s Imagined Spiritual

Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (2015).

156

24. Marylu Hill argues that “the both/and nature of Rossetti’s central image of the erotic body as the vehicle for salvation—an image that is at once profoundly spiritual and profoundly erotic—can only be understood through an appreciation of the Anglo-

Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist” (455). Simon Humphries similarly emphasizes the importance of the Eucharist: “The poem’s fairy-tale quirk—that its goblin fruit is both a poison and a cure—is informed, even prompted, by one of the pressing concerns of

Christina Rossetti’s immediate ecclesiastical environment” (“The Uncertainty of Goblin

Market” 394). Many discussions of the poem’s religious contexts are often imbricated with questions of female community: for example, see Rappoport’s contextualizing the poem with respect to “mid-Victorian sisterhoods—Anglican women communities” (855), and Diane D’Amico’s reading of the poem as a “portrayal of female spirituality” that

“depict[s] women as Christ-like saviors” rather than as “angels” (76). The fantasy poem has, of course, been interpreted through a wide variety of other critical approaches. For example, see David F. Morrill’s reading of the poem as an example of vampire literature in his article “‘Twilight is not good for maidens’: Uncle Polidori and the Psychodynamics of Vampirism in Goblin Market ” (1990). More broadly, one especially prominent body of

scholarship focuses on the representation of market exchange in the poem, along with

overlapping questions about economic relations and consumerism. For example, see

Richard Menke’s contribution to the essay collection The Culture of Christina Rossetti:

Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (1999). Also see Albert D. Pionke’s article “The

Spiritual Economy of ‘Goblin Market’” (2012), in which he argues that “the goods being exchanged [in the poem] are not commodity fetishes, but souls” (899).

25. Similar to the way in which Rossetti scholarship prior to the religious turn often

157 suggested that her religious beliefs were in constant friction with her artistic vision,

Garlick seems to suggest that some features of Rossetti’s religious vision—namely, the importance she places on the “commonplace” aspects of life—are in friction with her practice of fantasy. Other engagements with Rossetti’s fantasy works display a similar sense of discomfort when trying to account for her use of the genre. Julia Briggs outlines some of the specific difficulties that Rossetti’s use of fantasy has posed for critics in her discussion of Rossetti’s fantasy children’s book Speaking Likenesses , Briggs’

contribution to The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts

(1999).

26. Extensive discussions of The Face of the Deep are still few in number, but one helpful analysis of this devotional text in relation to the doctrine of reserve can be found in Andrew D. Armond’s article “Limited Knowledge and the Tractarian Doctrine of

Reserve in Christina Rossetti’s The Face of the Deep ” (2010).

27. While I use the theological lens of eschatology to read Rossetti’s works of fantasy specifically, Jerome McGann and Anthony H. Harrison present two approaches to reading her works of poetry more generally that overlap with eschatological concerns:

McGann focuses on how Rossetti was influenced by the “millenarian and Anabaptist doctrine known popularly as ‘Soul Sleep’” (134), while Harrison describes her “art of renunciation.” According to Harrison, a common pattern in Rossetti’s love poems can be described thus: “Renunciation, or at least withdrawal from the active pursuit of love, follows disillusionment; often the speaker craves death, either as an anodyne or as a transposition to an afterlife of absolute Love, in which the beloved is regenerated as an eschatological figure or is replaced by God” ( Christina Rossetti in Context 102).

158

28. The topic of the relationship between theology and linguistic translation can be put into a larger historical context by considering such studies as Jonathan Sheehan’s book

The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (2005). Two examples of scholarly engagements with the topic of translation practices in the nineteenth century are

Meredith Martin’s article “Trans-Victorians: Poetics, Translation, English” (2012), and

Simon Dentith’s chapter “Epic Translation and the National Ballad Metre” in his book

Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2006).

29. For a nuanced discussion of Rossetti’s perception of time in the context of

Victorian devotional culture, see Krista Lysack’s analysis of Time Flies in her article

“The Productions of Time: Keble, Rossetti, and Victorian Devotional Reading” (2013).

30. See Kamilla Denman and Sarah Smith’s article “Christina Rossetti’s Copy of C.

B. Cayley’s Divine Comedy ” (1994) for a detailed account of Rossetti’s annotations on

Cayley’s translation, and what these annotations reveal about her own perspectives on

Dante and other related topics, including points of theology and Italian-to-English translations. For a helpful analysis of how each member of the Rossetti family engaged with and interpreted Dante, see Alison Milbank’s chapter “‘Drawn within the circle’:

Uses of Allegory by the Rossetti Family” in her book Dante and the Victorians (1998).

31. For an extensive analysis of Christina Rossetti’s engagement with texts belonging to the gothic genre, and how this engagement with the gothic relates to her theological perspectives, see Serena Trowbridge’s monograph Christina Rossetti’s Gothic (2013).

32. For a counterpoint to D’Amico’s argument, see Joan Rees’ reading of “The

Prince’s Progress” in her article “Christina Rossetti: Poet” (1984), in which she argues,

“What the poem gives us . . . is a picture of two kinds of spiritual testing, side by side:

159 one test consists of a call to effort and the test is failed; one is a call to suppress normal human yearning and to live and die in hard-won patience” (69). Thus, Rees does not see the poem as an unambiguous critique of the princess’ lack of action. More generally, the difficulties of interpreting the poem is a recurring observation among scholars: for example, Dawn Henwood notes that the poem “challenges our moral sense and our interpretive faculties by confronting us with ambiguous, even disturbing, situations and characters” (84); Simon Humphries avers that the poem is “so full of subtle hints, and so promiscuous in its biblical and literary intertextuality, that it can induce interpretive queasiness” “Who is the Alchemist in Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Prince’s Progress’?”

685).

160

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