Religious Listening and Vocation in the Mid-Victorian Popular Novel

Home , Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Maria Edgeworth

THE CALLING: RELIGIOUS LISTENING AND VOCATION IN THE MID-VICTORIAN POPULAR NOVEL

Ashley J. King

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

Beverly Taylor

Laurie Langbauer

James Thompson

Jeanne Moskal

ii ABSTRACT

Ashley J. King: The Calling: Religious Listening and Vocation in the Mid-Victorian Popular Novel (Under the direction of Beverly Taylor)

“The Calling: Religious Listening and Vocation in the Mid-Victorian Popular Novel” explores how the concept of listening informed the work of Victorian writers as they sought to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of nineteenth-century faith practices. Scholars have long demonstrated how British Protestantism was shaped by vocation — the calling to a particular work during one’s earthly life —from the Reformation period through the early nineteenth century. However, these same critics would subsequently argue that as societal values shifted towards a more secular understanding of professional identity, the Protestant theology of vocation disappeared to the fringes of nineteenth-century culture. Pushing against this narrative, this project draws from new studies in sound theory and post-secularism to argue that the mid-

Victorian period retained a deep indebtedness to the religious underpinnings of vocation. In seeking to re-define professional ethics in an increasingly pluralistic society, female novelists drew on the figure of the ideal minister to examine how professionals practiced ethical conduct in daily life. The chapters on Charlotte M. Yonge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary

Elizabeth Braddon therefore pay attention to how professionals must negotiate their sonic environments, whether tending to the sick, writing, or gathering evidence. In attending to the theological understanding of acoustics, these writers help scholars to reconsider a strictly secular

iii understanding of how professional ethics and the professional ideal developed during the nineteenth century. They also demonstrate the variety of ways religion impressed itself on a culture we have perhaps too facilely perceived as secular.

iv To Patrick, whose good words always encourage my heart (Proverbs 12:25) & to Magnus, whose laughter fills our home with so much joy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Religious Listening ...... 5

The Social Imaginary and Post-Secularism ...... 8

The Professional Ideal...... 10

The Minister ...... 14

Chapter Summaries ...... 22

WORKS CITED ...... 25

CHAPTER 1: THE CALLING TO HEALING: THE FAMILY DOCTOR IN CHARLOTTE M. YONGE’S THE DAISY CHAIN (1856)...... 30

Doctors and Bedside Manner ...... 33

Charlotte M. Yonge ...... 38

The Daisy Chain ...... 43

Typology ...... 43

The Family Doctor as Minister ...... 46

The Victorian Father as Minister and Confessor ...... 53

Vocational Practice before Professional Aspiration ...... 58

WORKS CITED ...... 60

CHAPTER 2: THE CALLING TO WRITING: THE POET IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S AURORA LEIGH (1856) ...... 63

The Poetess in the Literary Marketplace ...... 65

EBB ...... 69

Aurora Leigh ...... 74

The Professional Female Poet ...... 74

Poetry as a Divine Calling ...... 76

Acts of Listening and Speaking Which Undermine the Poet’s Vocation ...... 79

Female Poet as Minister ...... 85

Listening in the New Jerusalem ...... 90

WORKS CITED ...... 95

CHAPTER 3: THE CALLING TO DETECTION: THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’S LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET (1862) ...... 98

Ethics and the Private Investigator ...... 101

Mary Elizabeth Braddon ...... 104

Lady Audley’s Secret...... 110

The Necessity of Converting the Hero ...... 110

Calling and the Private Investigator ...... 112

The Private Investigator as Minister: Listening and Eliciting Confession as Ethical Practice ...... 116

Providence and Religious Listening ...... 123

WORKS CITED ...... 129

vii

INTRODUCTION

The editors of the 1856 publication of The Christian’s Penny Magazine included a story that highlights how central the practice of listening for God’s calling was in Victorian Protestant religious life (193-194).1 “God Calling Children” begins with “little” Ellen Wilson reading how the young Israelite Samuel audibly hears God’s call to become a prophet, specifically to declare how God “will do a thing in Israel, at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle” (193; King James Version 1 Samuel 3: 11). Ellen laments to her “Mamma” that God does not “call children now-a-days just as he did little Samuel,” to which the child’s mother assures her that while “God does not speak in a voice that sounds in the ear…I think if my Ellen would listen with all her heart, she would find that it is still the custom for God to call children” (193).

In the following paragraphs, Ellen’s mother recounts her “many calls from God” by describing

God’s voice with language like “something seemed to whisper,” a “still small voice,”

“something seemed to say,” and “the heavenly voice” (193). Even though the mother’s words suggest that an individual cannot hear God’s calling on the same acoustic register as ordinary sounds, the recipient’s ability to hear and respond to God’s voice was also an embodied experience (194). Therefore, Ellen must “listen attentively,” for “Sometimes he calls with a text of Scripture, sometimes by putting a serious thought into your mind, even admist your play; tonight he calls my little Ellen by the story of our little Samuel” (193, 194). By comparing Ellen

1 Editors published this story under various titles in several evangelical religious magazines and periodicals in the mid-Victorian period, including The Sunday at Home (London), The Dew-Drop: A Monthly Magazine for the Young (London), The Juvenile Missionary Board (Edinburgh), The Christian Treasury (Edinburgh), The Evangelical Repository (Philadelphia), and The German Reformed Messenger (Philadelphia).

to the prophet Samuel, the mother connects her daughter to the ancient narrative of the transcendent God intervening in mundane, ordinary events of human life and to a larger body of believers who have responded to God’s calling on their life. While Ellen ultimately follows the example of little Samuel and submits to God’s voice, this story demonstrates an anxiety about how even children, the embodiment of faithful, humble servanthood according to Jesus Christ, could ignore the call to salvation until it was too late (King James Bible Matthew 18: 2-4).

Ellen’s mother stresses this point when she states that God’s calling becomes “fainter” over time and is eventually drowned out by “the noise and din of earthly care” (193, 194). The central lesson of “God Calling Children” may be how to discern God’s “still small voice” amidst the acoustic distractions of modern life, but this children’s tale also speaks to a central question of

Victorian religion: how do believers live out their calling in daily life?2

My dissertation, “The Calling: Religious Listening and Vocation in The Mid-Victorian

Popular Novel,” explores how the concept of listening informed the work of Victorian novelists from a range of religious backgrounds as they sought to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of nineteenth-century faith practices. Scholars have long demonstrated how vocation— the calling to a work during one’s earthly life — shaped British Protestantism from the Reformation period through the early nineteenth century. Much of the discussion surrounding vocation in the Victorian era has drawn from the work of early sociologist Max Weber. In The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber traced how the shift from

Catholicism to Protestantism in parts of Europe resulted in a move from the inward, i.e.

“monastic cells,” to the outward, i.e. “everyday life” (180). Focusing on the work of reformer

2 As Owen Chadwick argues in his landmark historical overview of the Victorian church, “The most marked character in Victorian religion is the sense of vocation, and this sense carried with it a powerful sense of the sacredness of time and the sin of wasting it” (466).

John Calvin, Weber argued that this new active asceticism began to dominate worldly morality since the devout now saw their labor as “willed by God” (281). As a result, this new Protestant ethic created a socio-economic structure within society, i.e. capitalism, in which Protestants showed their devotion to God not just through vocations in the church but through “restless, continuous, systematic work” in any occupation (171). Just as the understanding of vocation changed during the Reformation period, Victorians were “recasting” this doctrine in response to

“middle-class career professionalism,” which emphasized the need for education, specialization, and professional associations for the oldest three professions (clergy, law, and medicine) as well as several other new professions such as engineering, accounting, and journalism (Mintz 19, 3,

14). Thus, many critics have subsequently argued that as societal values shifted towards a more secular understanding of professional identity, the Protestant theology of vocation disappeared to the fringes of nineteenth-century culture. Pushing against this narrative, I draw from new studies in sound theory and post-secularism to argue that the mid-Victorian period retained a deep indebtedness to the religious underpinnings of vocation.

In this project, I specifically explore how female popular novelists were keen to address this aspect of professional identity and ethics because they recognized that their role in the literary marketplace was to examine and illustrate the lived experience of their growing middle- class readership. John Sutherland’s definition of “popular fiction” is particularly applicable to the mid-Victorian novels of this study:

Insofar as the distinction holds, literary fiction roots itself inextricably in popular fiction: materially, aesthetically, culturally, and economically. The energies of fiction surge up; they rarely trickle down. The novel, a late-arriving literary form, required a massive and literate readership, sophisticated productive and distributive apparatus, large investments of venture capital on one side, and considerable amounts of disposable income on the other. Fiction is, as Ian Watt argued half a century ago, the child born of capitalism and the natural partner of commercialism. (“Popular Fiction”)

Simply put, I define the popular novel as a work of fiction that was commercially successful during the mid-nineteenth century. As I discuss more in my chapter on the Victorian professional writer, for men and women who sought to pursue authorship for its “economic value,” “the

‘good’ novel is simply the novel that yields the most in the marketplace, the ‘successful’ author he or she who most effectively exploits the market” (Mays 11). Kelly J. Mays notes that while the “concern with popularity and profitability might seem mercenary, there was something profoundly democratic about the respect for ordinary readers”—many of whom were middle- class men and women entering the growing field of professions during the mid-Victorian period

(14). Thus, mid-Victorian novelists were important contributors to the cultural debate surrounding the development of professionalism because they were not only members of the developing profession of authorship but also, they often depicted the challenges of bringing ethical standards to old and new professions. Although Mark A. Turner rightly observes that many cultural critics began to increasingly view “the field of popular cultural production [as] a debased one, in which the popular novel as a literary genre was a sign of immoral times,” I examine popular novelists that were concerned with meeting the needs of their pocket books and offering works that addressed moral topics (118).3 In each of the popular novels of my study, I focus on one aspect of a character’s vocational practice that engages with the trope of listening to develop the connection between a calling to a profession and a religious calling. I argue that the centrality of the minister in nineteenth-century life continued to shape the concept of calling in the areas of medicine, authorship, and law. I demonstrate how the mid-Victorian novelists of my

3 As Kevin A. Morrison highlights that there was less of a distinction between popular and serious fiction in the mid- Victorian period as it was not until the 1880s that “increasing literacy and expanding market” intensified this divide (8). Turner observes that by later in the Victorian era, “Great literature…was naturally at odds with highly popular literature and simply could not be produced on regular cycles” (118).

study not only reinterpreted the power of the sermonic voice, but also reimagined listening as central to ethical conduct in non-clerical professions as well.4 More specifically, I trace how the common thread found in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856), Elizabeth Barrett

Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), 5 and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) is confession, which continued to serve a regulatory function even as this practice was increasingly secularized. Ultimately, I argue that these three novels reflect mid-Victorian society’s continued fascination with the moral authority of the clerical voice by extending these oral powers to other figures who sustain a vocational calling within their professional activities: the doctor, the poet, and the private investigator.

Religious Listening

While notable scholars like Walter Ong have argued that listening is a lost art in a modern, secular age, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century Christians believed that they could attune their ears to God’s voice because it was understood as both intimate and transcendent.6 In

4 Dawn Coleman argues that the omnipresence of preaching in nineteenth-century life played a critical role in shaping the American novel (4). More specifically, she argues that novelists drew on the power of religious oratory to give their own novels moral authority (4). See Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel.

5 I discuss Aurora Leigh as a novel because literary scholars have classified it as a “verse novel.” Dino Felluga, for example, has argued that the verse novel allowed poets to “play to the market as best it could by exploring those characteristics that made the novel such a popular success (narrative sequentiality, realistic description, historical referentiality, believable characters, dramatic situations, fully realized dialogism, and, above all, the domestic marriage plot)” (171). Given the subject matter of my dissertation, it makes sense to consider how Elizabeth Barrett Browning was working within the changing demands of the literary marketplace since she saw herself, as I argue later, as a professional poet who was also doing God’s work. For additional readings of Aurora Leigh as a verse novel, see recent scholarly works like Catherine Addison’s A Genealogy of the Verse Novel and Stefanie Markovits’ The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life.

6 Isaac Weiner has noted that the general assumption in the Western philosophical tradition has been that in the “shift from oral to literate and print cultures, the ear was eclipsed by the eye, and sight assumed preeminence as the dominant sense of modernity” (898). Ong’s The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History has been pivotal in contributing to the “eye trumps the ear” argument in the last fifty years, particularly regarding the secularization thesis. According to Ong, “Sound provides reciprocity and communication without collision or friction” (qtd. in Webb 39). When the oral tradition went into decline, the rise of atheism naturally followed because sound, the ideal mode of communication, no longer bound the subject to the transcendent: “Religion has to do somehow with the invisible, and when the earlier oral-aural world, with its concentration on voice and sound finally yields to the more markedly visual world incident to script and print…religion finally must go” (qtd. in Webb 40). As Stephen Webb surmises, “the loss of the oracular voice”

A Practical View of Christianity (1797), Member of Parliament and evangelical Christian

William Wilberforce highlights the importance of religious listening when he warns his audience that “in the tumult and bustle of life” there remains the danger of ignoring “the still small voice which whispers to him ‘the fashion of this world passes away’” (139). To counter “the praises and the censures of men,” Wilberforce instead advises his reader to “Rise on the wings of contemplation…[until] the still small voice of conscience is no longer drowned by the din of this nether world” (170). By emphasizing the individual believer could only recognize God’s voice through daily religious practice, Wilberforce speaks to how “hearing,” listening,” and

“attunement” are defined by sound theorists. Roland Barthes states that “hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act,” whereas Jean-Luc Nancy describes listening as an intentional activity that is “straining towards a possible meaning” (Barthes 245;

Nancy 6). Or, as Ong has asserted, listening needs to be learned (Webb 40). Another key term of my project is “attunement,” which Charles Hirschkind defines as “gradual attuning of the soul through a rigorous disciplinary regime” or, in other words, the need for humans to

“accommodate and respond to [sound and aurality] in the course of constructing a valued form of life” (167-168).7 Yet, central to a theology of vocation is the sense that God’s voice cannot be

means that “our auditory imagination” can no longer “conceive the divine” (33). However, scholars have recently begun to trouble the “simplistic dichotomy between the eye as the quintessential modern sensory organ and hearing as…antimodern” because such an argument discounts, for example, how individuals practice “holy listening” in religious communities today (Erlmann 5; Weiner 899).

7 Leigh Eric Schmidt has demonstrated that religious practice emphasized that the ear had to be disciplined to avoid unwholesome speech such as cursing, gossip, or lewdness to enable worshippers to respond to God’s call on their life (51). Schmidt also argues that church liturgy, such as psalms and hymns, also trained ears to hear the spiritual realm in public as well as private religious worship (64). More specifically, he explores how the “Enlightenment changed the senses” by addressing how new technologies that sought to improve the ear’s hearing capabilities also challenged religious hearing and listening (3). As he argues, Enlightenment thinkers stated that “The divine could not possibly speak or call or intercede in a world of such predictable laws” or, in other words, they were silencing and, at the very least, questioning, the voice of God (6). Even though American Christians through the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries sought to reconcile their belief with rationalism, Schmidt concludes that “struggles of enchantment and disenchantment” are “unresolvable,” but we still must consider “a very specific part of the human body, the ear,” in exploring this secularization project (6).

compared to other sounds, rather “everything sounds different once [the believer has] heard God speak” (Webb 176). In fact, Stephen Webb advocates for a distinctly Christian “supersonic supernaturalism,” “where sound travels on frequencies above the ear’s ordinary audible limit” or, as he terms it, “theo-acoustics” (35). Although Webb acknowledges that other religions have a

“sonic theology,” he does not attempt to write “a supersonic theology of religious sound in general” (35). Within a Christian framework then, the first case of “bad” listening (i.e. original sin) in the Garden of Eden meant that listening has become “an arduous task, whether it is listening to God, to each other, or to our own consciences” (16). In Webb’s reading of theological acoustics, humanity has had an increasingly difficult time listening well and words themselves have become devalued since the Fall. Yet, God’s redemption of humankind even has an acoustic quality: God’s divine voice has a body in Jesus Christ (35-36). Jesus Christ proclaims himself to be the Word of God, thereby conflating the body and religious reflection, i.e.

“inspiration.” Therefore, a definition of religious listening must understand the ear as “far more than a simple entryway for a divine message. Rather, it is the practical and conceptual site where the task of molding the human senses in accord with the demands of a religious tradition is to be carried out; it is where the sensory architectures of distinct forms of religious life are to be built”

(Hirschkind 166). Thus, the human body, through the medium of the fallible ear, regulates religious listening in a specific historical time and place.8 Within this framework then, believers

8 Scholars have begun to pay attention to the ways that Victorians would have understood the world in “fundamentally different ways from people dwelling in another soundscape” (Acoustic World 47). As defined in R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, “soundscape studies” not only seeks to listen to the sounds which form our daily auditory environment but also explores “the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change” (3-4). Given the predominance of the study of music in soundscape theory, it is not surprising that historical musicologists like Steven Banfield and Rachel Cowgill have played a key role in examining how music, musicians, and music theory shaped the Victorian soundscape. More recently nineteenth-century scholars have considered how changing understandings of sound, hearing, and listening played a role in the novel or, more specifically, how the body itself was a contested site of spiritual and material values. In Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, William Cohen examines how Victorian literature embodies not just anxieties about the diseased, material body but also

must regularly practice religious listening to attune their ears to God to hear his calling for their lives.

The Social Imaginary and Post-Secularism

In order to demonstrate how religious listening informs the development of professional ethics, I situate my argument in a larger scholarly debate surrounding the social imaginary and post-secularism.9 Even though the “social imaginary” is a term that has only been defined in the latter half of the twentieth century, the earlier developers of this concept were Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu, who both argued that religion is essentially a symbolic system of beliefs and practices that shape and govern a moral community.10 Charles Taylor is often credited with bringing the concept of the social imaginary to the forefront of scholarly debates in fields such as

concern over new scientific discoveries that challenged “the notion of a soul that transcends the material realm” (1). Cohen then argues that nineteenth-century writers across the theological spectrum grappled with these developments and, as a result, he demonstrates how Victorians were preoccupied with the realization that humans might not encounter the world through their minds or even their souls but ultimately through their senses. John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes has been influential in drawing attention to the ways that the expansion of the sciences and new technology meant that Victorians were “hearing things” in different ways than previous generations; more specifically, he argues that hearing becomes “a response to a physical stimulus and a metaphor for the communication of meaning” in the nineteenth-century novel (6, 7). Published the same year as Picker’s study, Delia da Sousa Correa’s George Eliot, Music, and Victorian Culture extensively examines George Eliot’s “preoccupation with music,” paying attention to the “scientific discourse of her day” as well as the way that “music occupies the pinnacle in a hierarchy valorizing the transcendent, the infinite, and the unknowable” (2, 5, 7). These scholarly works began a larger conversation in Victorian literary studies regarding how ears, not just eyes, play a role in the ways that Victorians constructed their modern lived experience and understood the world around them.

9 Despite the growing field of soundscape studies, there have only been a few studies in Victorian literature on ways that modernity altered a theological understanding of sound. In Victorian Soundscapes, Picker examines Charles Babbage’s The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (1837), which he describes as a natural theologian’s “eccentric pre-Darwinian attempt to reconcile spiritual phenomena with scientific reasoning” (16). While “odd” as Babbage’s theorizing may be to “modern ear,” he surmises that “the atmosphere becomes the repository for voices from all time…and the air acts as a giant scroll or phonograph, permanently recording voices that, he concedes, only God possesses the knowledge to replay” (16). Picker argues that Charles Dickens drew from the idea that voices had transcendent, everlasting qualities in his examination of “the effects and intelligibility of sounds and voices” in Dombey and Son (1846–1848) (17). In her article “Voicing, de-voicing and self-silencing: Charles Kingsley’s stuttering Christian manliness,” Louise Lee assesses how Kingsley’s belief in God’s divine power enabled him to overcome his own “garbled syntax and linguistic glitches” in his parish practice (116). More specifically, she considers Kingsley’s relation to language in works like Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851) by examining how the Christian socialist attempted to create the “perfect utterance” in print (117).

10 See Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and Pierre Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice.

philosophy, sociology, religious studies, and, more recently, literature studies.11 Taylor asserts, there are two problems with the secularization thesis, which argues that as a society modernizes, it also becomes more secular: (1) modernity is never one thing but many “new practices and institutions,” “new ways of living,” and “new forms of malaise,” and (2) not all of these modernities are entirely secular (Social 1). As one of the many examples to demonstrate his argument in A Secular Age, Taylor points to the rise of Deism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an intellectual movement within and outside of the Church of England that accepted the logical precept that there was creator but denied the existence of a supernatural deity that intervened in human history (A Secular Age 302). Even though Deists saw themselves as occupying a state of being (i.e. the “immanent frame”) where the world is shaped by natural law and institutions, Methodists, Pietists, and other Protestant groups inside and outside the Church of England continued to be shaped by their belief that the transcendent God not only intervened in human history but that He did so through his voice (A Secular Age 13-15, 302). Here we see two forms of modernity rather than an entirely secular society. Therefore, the most distinct difference between believers and unbelievers is their understanding of where “[w]e all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape” (A

Secular Age 5). For the believer, the location of “fullness” is outside of oneself, a concept which the believer then enforces through activities like charity, devotion, giving, and prayer (A Secular

Age 5, 8). For the unbeliever, “The power to reach fullness is within” and is located not just in

11 It is important to note that Taylor builds on Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism that the nation is “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign,” which only came to being “beneath the decline of sacred communities” (Communities). Rather than drawing a sense of belonging from Christendom, individuals began to look to the nation for “deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (Communities). Anderson turns this “anthropological” argument to nineteenth-century literature by asserting that technologies like the novel and the newspaper represented “the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (Communities).

“self-sufficient power of reason” but also in the “freedom of the moral agent, immortality, God”

(A Secular Age 9). Taylor’s argument that the “social imaginary” shapes both the modern believer and unbeliever allows us to better understand how aural-centric beliefs continued throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing largely from the Taylor’s work, scholars like Joshua

King, Illana Blumberg, Jasper Cragwall, and Gail Turley Houston caution Victorian scholars away from reductionist readings of the nineteenth century that suggest when a society becomes more modern, religion nearly disappears or moves to the fringes of cultural life.12 As noted by historian Dominic Erdozain, religious life in the nineteenth century was, in fact, not “recessive” but “palpably expansive” (61-62). These critics then explore religion not as dogma or creeds but rather as a practice of faith and a cultural system, which in turn helps us to better understand individual and social formations in the nineteenth century. Like these other critics, I seek to explore how religious practice, more specifically theological acoustics and attunement, continued to influence the evolving conversation surrounding the professional ideal even as the doctrine of vocation was being contested in the mid-Victorian era.

The Professional Ideal

By halfway through the nineteenth century, Victorians were beginning to see the growth of professionalization, which was a movement towards understanding an occupation as not just a means to make money but also as a way for individuals to define their self-worth through their degree of education and specialization as well as their professional associations.13 For two of the

12 See King’s Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print; Blumberg’s Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels; Cragwall’s Lake Methodism: Polite Literature and Popular Religion in England, 1780-1830; and Houston’s Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God.

13 For more on the expansion of professions and the rise of the professional class, see Philippa Levine’s The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886; Harold James Perkin’s The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880; and Maria Malatesta’s Professional Men, Professional Women: The European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today.

oldest professions, law and medicine, professional associations like the Law Society of England and Wales (est. 1825) and the British Medical Association (est. 1832) provided a way to raise the standing of these occupations by setting criteria and safeguarding ethical practice. Indeed,

Tabitha Sparks connects the elevation of the doctor’s social status to the political and professional reform that occurred during the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Public Health

Bill of 1848 and the Medical Act of 1858 (20). Additionally, given that the Victorian public was developing a greater interest in science and technical expertise, it is not surprising the number of teaching hospitals grew from 23 to 52 between 1855 and 1875 in London alone (Sparks 20).

Lawyers also enjoyed a similar rise in respectability due to the need for legal reform in response to the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire (Dolin 158-159). While lawyers did function as one agent of change, the vast growth of the economy and urban populations demanded committed professionals outside of law and medicine. By the late 1870s, both accountants and civil engineers established formal associations, tightened ethical standards, and integrated into the growing middle class (Paris 36-37; Porter 166). Therefore, Victorian writers were certainly aware that economic and social forces played a pivotal role in the rise of professionalism. In defining the nineteenth-century “novel of vocation,” Alan Mintz argues that we can see a movement in Victorian literature to make work “a ‘gospel’ in its own right, replacing Christianity’s claims on man” (1). More specifically, Mintz connects the “classical vocational ethos” found in Protestantism to a new individualistic model of vocation that emphasized “self-realization” and “betterment of society” rather than the “salvation” and “the glory of God” (18). Through the lens of religious pluralism, this spiritualization of work can be read as a sign of Victorian society opening up to greater religious diversity and Christianity constituting only an option among other religions or secular theories of human existence.

Many critics have consequently argued that by the mid-nineteenth century, fewer

Victorians read professional identity within a religious framework due to the rise of professionalism as a way of life. As Thomas Heyck has noted, the predominance of Christianity over intellectual life once hampered specialization in the professions “but of course steadily through the century Christianity lost the power to resist”; in this configuration the professional market and professional identity supersede the monolith of religion (225). At this time Thomas

Carlyle began to preach a new type of gospel through writings like On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (1841) and Past and Present (1843), where he emphasized humanity’s ability through work itself to fill the void left by God’s disappearance from modern life. In The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter E. Houghton argues that this religion of work equated “the full meaning of a life of work…with a life of moral earnestness” (243). At the same time, critics have also noted how work as a secular vocation was troubled as quickly as it was celebrated as a new way of life apart from Protestantism.14 David Meakin argues that writers like

Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Charles Dickens all express concern about the “mechanization” of human relationships that extended even to this new spiritualization of work: “Mechanism is seen not as order, but —paradoxically—as chaos; not as a regulation of nature but as its destruction; not as an aid to life but as an instrument of death” (21). Ruth Danon makes a similar assertion when she observes that Victorians may have believed that work should be “the primary source of self-determination, psychic integration, and happy fulfillment available to a person,” but vocation becomes a myth “in the face of disillusionment” (1, 2). In The Way of the World: The

Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti bluntly surmises that while Victorians were

14 Both Rob Breton and Chris Louttit have questioned the plausibility of one succinct definition of the Gospel of Work because studies of nineteenth-century texts demonstrate that the Gospel of Work means different things to different people (Breton 6; Louttit 5).

once optimistic that “progress” would open the doors for the spiritualization of work and the betterment of society apart from religion, the march of time ultimately reveals that secular vocation is not only not possible in a modern society but also a failure (215). Where then do these readings of the novel of vocation leave us?

To understand the presumed “failure” of the Victorian novel of vocation, I work within scholarship that reconsiders the religious underpinnings of vocation. Bruce Robbins, for example, argues that we cannot read the professional as a secular authority figure or as a “simple substitution of one [religious] authority for another” secular authority (25). Instead, secular vocation is “not an unearned sense of self-importance, not an unquestioned or unaccountable authority, but that part of professional discourse which appeals to (and helps refashion) public values in its effort to justify (and refashion) professional practice” (25). Robbins recognizes that

“the modern concept of vocation has its roots in theology” and that we remain fascinated by the idealized professional because this figure has “a power that allows us to relax in unquestioning, quasi-religious belief” (24, 31). More recently, critics who have focused on the nineteenth- century novel and professional identity have also troubled the secularization thesis. For example, critical texts like G.R. Searle’s Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain have demonstrated that many nineteenth-century Christians not only continued to take their religious calling seriously but also saw their work as having a sanctifying, transforming effect on their lives (25).

Due to these continuing religious and secular influences, the evolving definition of the Victorian professional ideal was ambiguous. Both Jennifer Ruth and Mariaconcetta Costantini highlight how novelists’ critiques of the professional class are more complicated than previously assumed and reflect these writers’ concerns about “the behavioral greyness of emergent social groups”

(Ruth 32; Costantini 17). When considering the professional ideal within a multiple modernities

framework, I rely on Susan E. Colón’s definition: it is “a cluster of ideals, especially including esoteric expertise, specialized training, autonomous work, meritocratic selection and promotion, and public service” (6). Like Robbins, Colón defines the professional not as a secular authority but as a type of specialist (2). And, more importantly, she argues that the literature of the mid-

Victorian period illustrates that “[religious] ideals, even transcendent referents, remained important to the formulation of professionalism into the modern period” (10). For the purposes of my project, I therefore define the professional ideal as a practitioner who not only needed to fulfill secular requirements like education and specialization but also adhered to ethical and moral standards that we might associate with the clerical model.

The Minister

While scholars have debated how the Church of England clergy fit into the professionalization model, Victorians often saw the failures of Anglican clergymen to manage their flocks and even their own conduct as resulting from a move away from a vocational model towards a less than ideal professional model.15 One example of clerical misconduct centered on the Rev. J. Bonwell, incumbent of St. Philip’s Church in Stepney, London. When “The

Mysterious Affair at Stepney” hit the newspaper headlines in the fall of 1859, it was not entirely clear how the Rev. Bonwell was connected to the death of an infant named Philip (The Examiner

1 Oct. 1859).16 However, reporters confirmed the worst in subsequent accounts: not only was the

15 For a reading of how the Church of England clergy fit into a professionalization model, read W.M. Jacob’s The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century: 1680-1840. For a reading that troubles considering the Church of England clergy a “profession” category, read Frances Knight’s The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society.

16 While the child was named “Philip Gorath” (the last name being misspelled, since it was actually “Yorath”) in this newspaper account, he was, in fact, the son of the Rev. Bonwell and Miss Elizabeth Yorath (The Examiner 17 Dec. 1859). The fact that the child was named “Philip” and the Rev. Bonwell was, in fact, the incumbent at St. Philip’s Church only further pointed to the child’s parentage.

Rev. Bonwell the natural father of this child, but “after the death of the infant, whether caused by disease or culpable neglect, he had it buried surreptitiously, in order to avoid exposure” (The

Leader 15 Oct. 1859). 17 Worse still, the Rev. Bonwell was already married even though he had told his lover Miss Elizabeth Yorath, the daughter of a deceased clergyman, and her family that he was a widower (The Examiner 17 Dec. 1859).18 London newspapers’ subsequent analysis of the trial suggested that this scandal was, unfortunately, an indication of a larger problem in the clergy. One newspaper was quick to point out that the Rev. Bonwell was certainly not a good manager because “the parish schools [in Stepney] have been shut up for a long period, owing to want of funds” (The Leader 15 Oct. 1859). The Saturday Review believed the Bonwell scandal was due to the Church of England allowing a “specimen of class” into their ranks, who are

“Without academical education, without manners and habits of a gentleman, promoted to orders on the recommendation either of the cheap or the hasty” (The Saturday Review 24 Dec. 1859).

And in The Examiner, one writer would conclude: “The great fault of our Church is that it is a profession, not a vocation, or that vocation, where it exists, is an accident, not an essential” (The

Examiner 24 Dec. 1859). Although the Ecclesiastical court removed the Rev. Bonwell from his clerical position, this case speaks to the power of aural manipulation. After all, this clergyman preached a sermon on “charity and love” at the same time he was deceiving multiple witnesses

17 Further speaking to professional ethics, the medical attendant at the birth of Philip named Dr. Godfrey would neither admit to any confidence shared regarding the child’s paternity due to “the law of God and the moral law” nor to an acquaintance with the Rev. Bonwell given “the present state of the Church of England” (The Examiner 17 Dec. 1859). In response to this “flippant remark,” the Times claimed that this “testifies to a wide-spread feeling” (qtd. The Saturday Review 24 Dec. 1859). However, a writer for The Saturday Review finds Dr. Godfrey equally culpable as Mr. Bonwell for any crimes: “The Church of England is low indeed, when Dr. Godfrey condescends to cut it” (The Saturday Review 24 Dec. 1859).

18 It is important to note that Miss Yorath’s knowledge of her “fiancé’s” marriage is unclear. At the time of the trial, she had fled the jurisdiction and her whereabouts were ostensibly unknown by her family (The Examiner 17 Dec. 1859). Apparently, Mr. Bonwell himself asserted that she was aware that he was married from the beginning of their affair (The Saturday Review 24 Dec. 1859).

with promises of marriage to Miss Yorath (The Examiner 1 Sept. 1860; The Examiner 17 Dec.

1859). Even as Victorian society recognized the need for professional standards in the clerical class, the Bonwell scandal highlights how many Victorians were concerned that the professionalization of the Anglican clergy led to lax, or non-existent, ethical standards within the

Church of England.

Nineteenth-century novelists participated in the debate surrounding religious vocation and professionalism in the clergy by depicting the minister’s privileged position as the moral voice of a community as well as the keeper of parishioners’ sins. Within nineteenth-century fiction then, dissenting ministers commanded a similar type of auricular authority as reflected in figures like Thurstan Benson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853). Yet, Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley and Charles Kingsley depict dissenting clergymen in a negative light precisely due to how they appropriate the sermonic voice for themselves rather than God. In The Last Man

(1823), Shelley depicts a chaotic, post-apocalyptical world that allows for the flourishing of false religious teachers who seek to capitalize on people’s fears. When the narrator Lionel Verney travels to a plague-ridden Paris, he describes a “sectarian, a self-erected prophet, who, while he attributed all power and rule to God, strove to get the real command of his comrades into his own hands” (Shelley 292). Although Shelley’s narrator notes that religious leaders could be a “power of good,” this figure is particularly dangerous because he is an “imposter” who falsifies enthusiastic behavior, such as prophecy (292). Shelley also suggests that women are particularly susceptible to a minister’s emotionally charged sermons since among his followers numbered many women, “who seemed more eager and resolute than their male companions”; even a “few high-born females, who, panic-struck, and tamed by sorrow, had joined him” (296, 301-302).

Kingsley sets his novel Two Years Ago (1857) during a cholera epidemic in a fictional Cornish

town, where the dissenting ministers contribute to the growing mass hysteria through their animated, emotional sermons. The constitutionally robust, fearless hero and doctor Tom Thurnall tells the Anglo-Catholic curate Frank Headley to speak out against one particularly fanatical dissenting preacher who has “frightened” multiple women “into cholera”; here the sermonic voice has the potential to led the aurally less discerning into spiritual and physical death

(Kingsley 92). Although novelists recognized that the minister’s auricular influence extended to the masses, they also depicted how this effect played out on a smaller scale, i.e. in the drawing rooms of Victorian homes. For example, Anthony Trollope humorously describes how the social-climber Anglican clergyman Mr. Slope in Barchester Towers (1857) seeks to ingratiate himself with the widow Mrs. Bold through repeated addresses and prides himself on reading “the inward feelings of women with whom he conversed” (156). Despite her reservations about the clergyman, Mrs. Bold is so taken in by Mr. Slope’s self-deprecating admiration and oratorical finesse that she can only declare, “I do not know whether he is a good man or a bad man”

(Trollope 157).19 This last literary example of aural manipulation connects to ongoing concerns regarding confession in the 1850s, particularly in the way that Trollope portrays male ministers as being particularly adept at listening to their female parishioners’ confidences. While growing anti-Catholicism began with the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), Victorians became increasingly hostile towards the Roman Catholic church following John Henry Newman’s conversion in 1845 and Pope Pius IX’s reinstitution of Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.

When early Tractarians like John Keble, Edward Pusey, and John Henry Newman advocated for sacraments like confession to be reintroduced into the Church of England, anti-Catholic critics

19 While Barchester Towers pre-dates the Bonwell scandal, one can assume that Trollope was well aware of the clerical scandals of his day. The Examiner newspaper column cited previously makes a small mention of Trollope being promoted to Post Office Surveyor for the Essex district (17 Dec. 1859).

argued that this was particularly dangerous to not only the church but also the Victorian home. 20

Certainly these concerns surrounding confession demonstrate an inherent mistrust of the minister’s function as an intermediary between God and the penitent; these concerns more specifically highlight how “Confessing one’s sins to God through the medium of a human agent in the space of a confessional box threatened Victorian sensibility because it forced one to broadcast sin outside of the family space to a priest portrayed as perversely eager to listen”

(Knight and Mason 97, emphasis mine). Yet, as several critics have argued, female novelists were more inclined to be sympathetic to Roman Catholic religious practice, especially the desire to seek out a sympathetic ear from a clergyman.21 Rather than depicting the listening minister within the framework of anti-Catholicism, female novelists often offered an alternative, more positive reading of confession due in part to the growing religious pluralism of the mid-Victorian era.

In fact, nineteenth-century female novelists frequently depicted the ideal minister as someone who practiced care and sympathy for his parishioners through listening. Although she wrote before the rise of middle-class professionalism, Jane Austen’s portrayal of the Anglican clergy is an important precursor to later Victorian characterizations of the clerical class. Austen

20 In The Entire Absolution of the Penitent (1846), Pusey argued that the sacrament of confession needed to be reintroduced into the rhythm of private religious practice in order to undo “the Church of England’s current state of spiritual despondency” (Knight and Mason 96).

21 For example, Micael M. Clarke has argued that while critics and contemporaries read Charlotte Brontë as anti- Catholic, she offers sympathetic portraits of a Jesuit priest and a practicing Catholic in Villette (1853) (968). Indeed, the heroine Lucy Snowe is prepared to marry a Catholic at the novel’s end and this “mixed marriage” promises to be a happy one (968). Exceedingly isolated in Labassecour, Lucy also demonstrates the appeal of the confessional when she seeks out a Catholic priest’s sympathetic ear as a “refuge against loneliness and isolation” (979). In Masked Atheism: Catholicism And the Secular Victorian Home, Maria Wisdom asserts that female novelists drew from “popular Victorian notions of Roman Catholics to articulate a shared set of anxieties about the increasing secularization of the Victorian domestic space” (3). Drawing from works of female novelists across the theological spectrum, Wisdom demonstrates the ways that these novelists, even the most anti-Catholic among them, were fascinated by Roman Catholic practices like confession (68-94).

offers a vast range of realistic depictions of these clergymen—varying from the awkward, bumbling Mr. Collins to the more pious Edmund Bertram— to demonstrate that regardless of training or personal devotion, these men should at least perform their priestly duty.22 Although

Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814) is destined for the clergy as the second son of an aristocratic household, Austen suggests that it is part of God’s providential design that he also embodies many of the desired qualities of the ideal minister such as “his strong good sense and uprightness of mind, [which] bid most fairly for utility, honour, and happiness to himself and all his connections” (Austen 17). Prior to undergoing ordination, Edmund demonstrates his natural suitability for his future vocation when he finds his “dear little cousin” Fanny Price alone and crying after she has relocated to live with the wealthy Bertrams (Austen 13). Due entirely to

Edmund’s “gentleness” and repeated queries, Fanny confesses that she misses her family. Once her older cousin furnishes Fanny with the supplies to write home, she becomes “more comfortable” at Mansfield Park (Austen 13, 14). As Fanny’s confidant and mentor, Edmund performs a priestly function by “giving her advice, consolation, and encouragement” (Austen

18). Additionally, Edmund takes Fanny’s moral worth seriously—a lesson that the rest of the

Bertram family do not learn until after a series of crises that highlight the heroine’s consistency of character and ultimate suitability for the role of clergyman’s wife.

The eponymous heroine of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is attracted to the curate

Edward Weston because he values his parishioners and ministerial duties over his own position in the church hierarchy. While a more superficially minded acquaintance deems the clergyman

“an insensate, ugly, stupid blockhead,” Agnes refuses to form an opinion of a man’s character

22 For readings of Austen’s clerical figures that highlight how both her familial connection to the clergy and her personal faith influenced her novels, see Laura Mooneyham White’s Jane Austen’s Anglicanism and Michael Giffin’s Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England.

based on his physical appearance alone (AG 61). In fact, Agnes’ positive opinion of the curate is based almost entirely on the auditory: she listens not only to “the earnest simplicity of his manner, and the clearness and force of his [preaching] style” but also to a parishioner’s testimony regarding his teaching of the Gospel (AG 61, 73). With the latter example, Brontë emphasizes how Edward practices the New Testament teaching to be “swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” when he does not dismiss the parishioner’s religious anxieties and instead patiently calms her fears (KJV James 1:19). Thus, both Austen and Anne Brontë present their clergymen’s compassionate, practical ministerial practice—grounded in careful listening— as the ideal.

In Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot also considers the way that the practice of listening informs the clerical vocation through the Methodist lay minister Dinah Morris. While Eliot saw

Jesus Christ and Christianity as carrying symbolic resonance rather than inherent truths for herself, the female novelist does maintain that listening should function as a central ethical standard in religious practice. Throughout the novel, Dinah embodies what Eliot calls

“sympathetic divination”; she overcomes the problems of bad listening and responds well to the community’s spiritual needs (107). Eliot perpetuates the novel’s central moral dilemma concerning the milkmaid Hetty Sorrel’s affair with aristocrat Arthur Donnithorne through characters’ unwillingness to speak. For example, Arthur will not confess the affair to the

Reverend Irwine, and when Hetty becomes pregnant, she cannot vocalize the truth regarding her pregnancy or the subsequent abandonment of her newborn child. When Dinah visits Hetty in prison, the prisoner’s visceral response to the minister’s vocal greeting, “a start such as might have been produced by a feeble electrical shock,” seems to indicate that her aural defenses are beginning to break down (401). As elsewhere in the novel, Dinah pays attention to the necessity

to be still and wait for God’s direction; she is not “overhasty to speak” (402). Though unwilling to speak to anyone else, Hetty is finally able to confess that she abandoned her child in the woods after listening to Dinah’s prayers and recognizing that her own heart is “hard” (404).

Hetty’s prayer becomes mingled with Dinah’s petition that “God will take away the crying and the place in the woods” (408). The old noises associated with the pain and suffering from Hetty’s past then become replaced with hopeful cries sent upward to God. Eliot frames the penitent’s later confession and apology to Adam in similar aural-centered language: “the sound of her voice uttering these penitent words touched a chord which had been less strained [in Adam]” (413).

Thus, Eliot depicts the practice of confession as necessary for righting wrongs and re-forming bonds not just in religious community but also in nineteenth-century society more generally.

Margaret Oliphant works against anti-confession critics when she presents an Anglo-

Catholic clergyman as a model minister in The Perpetual Curate (1864). Drawing from anti-

Tractarian narratives where Anglo-Catholic clergyman seduced virtuous, young women during confession and then lured them away from their homes, Oliphant demonstrates how the curate

Frank Wentworth must overcome assumptions regarding his motives with female parishioners when the attractive Rosa Elsworthy goes missing. Ironically, Frank is linked to Rosa only because he was performing his ministerial duty by accompanying her home one evening: “The tale had been told with variations, which did credit to the ingenuity of Carlingford; and [one] version was that they had walked arm in arm, in the closest conversation, and at an hour which was quite unseemly for such a little person as Rosa to be abroad” (Oliphant 114). Due to the public’s reading of sensational accounts in newspapers and contemporary fiction, Frank’s parishioners choose to read the clergyman’s nighttime walk with Rosa as a piece of sensational news—he must be acting as a lover rather than a protective clergyman. However, Oliphant

stresses that despite the sensationalizing of Frank’s ministry, he is an active and compassionate clergyman who regularly attends to the parish’s poor. After Rosa comes forward to proclaim

Frank’s innocence, the community learns to overcome their prejudices and ultimately pardons the accused curate of any moral crimes. Thus, Oliphant overrides sensational accounts surrounding confession by demonstrating that those who practice this religious rite are not necessarily morally dubious figures. In seeking to re-define professional ethics in an increasingly pluralistic society, female novelists therefore drew on the figure of the ideal minister to examine how professionals practiced ethical conduct in daily life.

Chapter Summaries

As I seek to demonstrate, Charlotte M. Yonge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary

Elizabeth Braddon pay attention to how professionals must negotiate their sonic environments whether tending to the sick, writing, or gathering evidence.

In my first chapter titled “The Calling to Healing: The Family Doctor in Charlotte M.

Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856),” I focus on how Yonge emphasizes the necessity of listening to patients more than conducting physical examinations and therefore rejects the medical profession’s move towards a more clinical definition of medical practice. The novelist instead stresses the importance of a physician’s bedside manner by turning the character Richard May, a family doctor and father to eleven children, into a type of priestly figure who listens and advises his patients on their physical ailments and moral dilemmas. Working within an Anglo-Catholic framework, Yonge portrays the act of confession as necessary for the body as well as the soul; as a ministering professional Dr. May repeatedly listens to his patients’ confessions with compassion. While Yonge’s attention to physical illness in the novel underlines the necessity of the believer’s enduring temporary, earthly physical suffering, she ultimately stresses the importance of the believer’s finding his or her vocation, which has eternal implications. Thus,

Dr. May may attend to his children’s illnesses but his most important work is shaping their understanding of vocation.

The second chapter of this dissertation, “The Calling to Writing: The Poet in Elizabeth

Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856),” argues that Elizabeth Barrett Browning23 depicts the female poet as pursuing a vocation, rather than a profession only, when she listens to God over earthly voices, which often distract a writer from pursuing her calling. While EBB emphasizes the dangers of listening through depicting repeated instances of aural manipulation, she also demonstrates how confession serves a positive function for the poet as an artist and as a woman.

Through Marian’s multiple confessions in the text, Aurora develops a greater understanding of how the female poet should affirm others through speaking love and truth while also listening without judgment. Additionally, it is only after both Aurora and her future husband Romney confess that Jesus Christ has not been their vocational ideal in the past that they are able to properly hear each other for the first time and ultimately reconcile. With the verse novel’s ending, EBB therefore depicts marriage as a complementary, rather than contradictory, calling for this female poet.

My last chapter, “The Calling to Detection: The Private Investigator in Mary Elizabeth

Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862),” situates Robert Audley’s professional practice as undergoing a radical transformation only after his conversion to Christianity. Braddon elaborates this theme by framing Robert’s turn to ethics within the evangelical conversion narrative; Robert simultaneously hears the call to salvation and the call to a vocation. Even though there were no formal credentials for the developing profession of the private investigator in the mid-Victorian period, Robert brings ethical standards to this role by emphasizing that God is directing his

23 I use “EBB” going forward because this abbreviation is applicable to this writer’s birth name of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett as well as her married name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

investigation of Lady Audley. At the same time, Braddon troubles listening as it pertains to the development of professional ethics since Robert often listens with judgment rather than sympathy, not only to Lady Audley’s final confession but also to multiple witnesses’ confessions. Thus, Braddon demonstrates that the private investigator only reflects the ideal minister when he listens with compassion to an individual that, for many mid-Victorians, would have been the embodiment of humanity’s sinful nature: the unrepentant fallen woman like Lady

Audley.

By attending to the theological understanding of acoustics, these writers help us to reconsider a strictly secular understanding of how professional ethics and the professional ideal developed during the nineteenth century. They also demonstrate the variety of ways religion impressed itself on a culture we have perhaps too facilely perceived as secular.

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CHAPTER 1: THE CALLING TO HEALING: THE FAMILY DOCTOR IN CHARLOTTE M. YONGE’S THE DAISY CHAIN (1856)

In 1845, a twenty-one-year-old Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote an account that expressed her distrust of medical practice that appeared to prioritize scientific advancement over care and compassion for patients. When Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie evaluated her cousin Jane, Yonge was highly critical of his prescribed course of treatment (“Sir Benjamin Brodie, Bart”):

…I saw Jane having her face painted with caustic and wondering it did not hurt more. I do suppose that Brodie thought it would be an agreeable and entertaining study and did not like to be disappointed of it … Really it does seem rather awful that even doctors should have had their fingers in her poor little mouth, have not they split it a little bit wider? Though it is Sunday I could not help writing a little of what was overflowing but I will finish tomorrow. (Letters 5 January 1845)

Even though the use of medicinal substances and hands-on evaluation were increasingly common in nineteenth-century medical practice, Yonge believed that Brodie had less than altruistic motives because he seemed to cause more pain and suffering than was necessary.24

Having gained “an enviable reputation” as a surgeon in London, Brodie was one example of a medical practitioner who had distinguished himself in an increasingly competitive professional market through lectures and publications, eventually becoming sergeant-surgeon under King

William IV and Queen Victoria (Brock “Brodie”). Even though Yonge may have recognized that patients would be used as an “agreeable and entertaining study” for the advancement of medicine or for the advancement of a doctor’s career, she clearly resented the way that the female patient’s

24 As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, caustic was a “substance which burns and destroys living tissue when brought in contact with” (“caustic, adj. and n.”). William Buchan, in Domestic Medicine, notes that caustic was generally “used externally as an escharotic” (688). This would suggest that Jane probably had a tumor, abscess, or inflammation.

body cavity was touched and manipulated, akin to a sexual violation, when doctors put their

“fingers in her poor little mouth, have not they split it a little bit wider?” (Letters 5 January

1845). Even though Yonge was a devout Anglo-Catholic, she is so upset by the patient’s treatment that she breaks the Sabbath because she “could not help writing a little what was overflowing” (Letters 5 January 1845).25 Yonge’s letter not only speaks to a general nineteenth- century bias against surgeons but also demonstrates how nineteenth-century medicine was beginning to shift away from a practice that emphasized the doctor’s bedside manner and the patient’s narrative in order to form a diagnosis based on science, to a more clinical approach that altered how doctors interacted with their patients.26 Yonge believed in the sacredness and inherent dignity of the human body, which was seemingly violated when the patient was examined through a clinical lens rather than understood within a spiritual framework that attended to theological acoustics. Even though Brodie was a “committed Christian all his life,” this example shows how the professionalization of medicine could undermine a patient’s trust and, worse for Yonge, work against the Protestant understanding of vocation (Brock “Brodie”).

When Yonge was writing The Daisy Chain; or, Aspirations (1856), doctors were beginning to define themselves within an understanding that professional credibility required

25 Interestingly, Yonge’s account counters one Brodie biographer who argued that, “As a surgeon he was a successful operator, distinguished for coolness and knowledge, a steady hand, and a quick eye; but the prevention of disease was in his opinion of greater significance than operative surgery, and his strength was diagnosis” (Brock “Brodie”). Brodie’s most notable work Pathological and Surgical Observations on the Diseases of the Joints (1818) articulated a more conservative approach to surgery and encouraged surgeons to use amputation as a last resort.

26 For an extended reading of this changing dynamic, see Sally Wilde’s “The Elephants in the Doctor-Patient Relationship: Patients' Clinical Interactions and the Changing Surgical Landscape of the 1890s.” Other sources on the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century include, among many, Roy Porter’s Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine or The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity; Mary Wilson Carpenter’s Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England; British Medicine in an Age of Reform. (ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear); M. Anne Crowther and Marguerite Dupree’s Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution; and Terrie M. Romano’s Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the Culture of Victorian Science.

more intensive scientific education and specialization. However, particularly in the country, a physician was a practitioner who relied on the doctor-patient relationship to form a diagnosis.27

As A.J. Youngson has stated, “Most doctors before 1850, and many as late as 1870 … simply did not observe or think scientifically” (qtd. in Sparks 19). Instead, as Roy Porter has asserted, a doctor’s primary job was to be an astute observer and questioner who relied on “book-learning, experience, memory, judgement and a good bedside manner” (Blood and Guts). Thus, nineteenth-century doctors largely conducted their practice without the benefit of technology:

“[doctors] would feel the pulse, sniff for gangrene, taste urine, listen for breathing irregularities and observe skin and eye colour… Diagnosis was an art of observation and inference” (The

Greatest Benefit to Mankind 256, emphasis mine).28 Working with this traditional understanding of the doctor-patient relationship, Yonge represents the role of the country family doctor as closely akin to that of a minister. She delineates this spiritual calling by focusing on details associating the doctor-patient relationship with the religious tradition of confession—a term that is used no fewer than 41 times in the novel.29 Further deepening the concept of a profession as a calling tantamount to religious calling, Yonge represents the physician enacting fatherhood as though it, too, is a calling with religious dimensions.

27 Tabitha Sparks argues that the “correlation between self-promotion and specialist medicine certainly informs the unsympathetic portrayal of scientifically minded doctors [in nineteenth-century fiction] as men who are driven by the profit motive or the glory of discovery” (20). This trend reaches its culmination when, by the end of the century, the physician becomes “detached from the common feelings of the civilized, feeling person” (20).

28 With the invention of the stethoscope in 1816, medical practitioners did have access to the internal noises of the body, but many formally trained nineteenth-century doctors still did not consider this type of tool as necessary to diagnose a patient’s condition (The Greatest Benefit to Mankind 307).

29 This number includes “confession” and its variant spellings such as “confess,” “confessing,” “confessed,” etc.

Doctors and Bedside Manner

Fiction writers like Yonge drew not just from real-life accounts in their depictions of physicians but on early ethical treatises like Scottish physician John Gregory’s Lectures on the

Duties and Qualifications of a Physician (1772). While Yonge does not explicitly reference

Gregory in her fiction or letters, the primary physician in The Daisy Chain reflects many of the ethical commitments that Gregory articulates in his eighteenth-century conduct-book for doctors.

Simply put, medical historians credit Gregory with defining the medical man of manners, who lived by a gentleman’s code of honor in which sympathy for patients overrode monetary concerns (Maio 184).30 Gregory argued that the practice of medicine was not a science or a trade but an art form in which medical men needed to be attentive, interested practitioners who relied on the five senses to form a diagnosis (Maio 185). Within this physician’s conception of the medical man, good manners were paramount along with other “gentler” virtues like a love of humanity, attentiveness, and a “compassionate and feeling heart” (Gregory 9, 210, 19, 35).

Gregory specifically warned his fellow medical practitioners against violating patients’ trust because “much the characters of individuals, and the credit of families, may sometimes depend on the discretion, secrecy, and honor of a physician” (26). While this physician did not use the term “vocation” in his conduct book, he countered eighteenth-century readers’ possible concerns that the study of medicine leads to “impiety”: “An intimate acquaintance with the works of

Nature raises the mind to the most sublime conceptions of the Supreme Being, and at the same time dilates the heart with the most pleasing views of Providence” (68).31 Essentially, Gregory

30 Elizabeth Gaskell illustrates this type of physician in Wives and Daughters (1864-1866). Robert Gibson, who is a rural surgeon in the late 1820s to early 1830s, embodies gentlemanly conduct while serving members of the lower and upper classes.

31 In “Physic and Physicans.—The Medical Character” (1839), the author would offer a similar articulation of the medical vocation: “Not less amiable in its moral features is the character of the really high-minded physician. Accustomed from early youth to devote himself exclusively to meditating on the sources of human suffering and

articulated a Protestant, compassionate model of healing which lived out Jesus Christ’s command to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (KJV Matthew 22: 39). Thus, he suggested that a doctor’s professional endeavors would only strengthen, rather than undermine, his religious faith.

Even though Gregory was not didactic on the finer points of religion, he worked within the understanding that religion provides a framework for the individual to make sense of the world.

In the case of a physician, “religion...alone can support the soul in the most complicated distresses” of the sickroom (69). Gregory asserted that only an “unfeeling” doctor, even if he is not religious himself, would “deprive expiring nature of its last support” by denying the existence of a “future state,” i.e. eternal life in heaven (69). Furthermore, the physician reminded his audience that a doctor’s calling to provide physical and even religious solace was indeed a serious one and that the physician should denounce “petulance,” “vanity,” and other “bad principles” that were “dangerous to society” in favor of “morality, decency, and good manners”

(70). In these ways, Gregory’s conception of medical ethics paved the way for the idealized portrait of the sage and trusted medical practitioner in nineteenth-century fiction.

To meet Victorian readers’ expectations that medicine should be a moral practice, nineteenth-century fiction writers often presented the metropolitan doctor as a self-sacrificing, virtuous ideal.32 In her novel Mr. Warrenne, the Medical Practitioner: A Novel (1849), Ellen

Wallace underscores this point: “a medical man, who habitually gives his skill and labour to the

devising the means of cure; cut off by the nature of his studies from the petty and degrading strifes which neutralise the moral qualities of worldly men; with a mind elevated by the constant contemplation of the mysterious workings of the Creator…the physician combines within himself all the properties of the highly intellectual and the moral” (476).

32 Such examples of fictional doctors who work within the “characterization of the doctor that melds a charitable, service-oriented drive…and the increased professional respectability he enjoys” are Charles Dickens’s Allan Woodcourt (Bleak House, 1852-1853), Charlotte Bronte’s John Graham Bretton (Villette, 1853), and Anthony Trollope’s Thomas Thorne (Dr. Thorne, 1858) (Sparks 20).

poor, as so many do, without the slightest chance of remuneration, often without even the recompense of thanks, is fulfilling one of the divinest laws of our religion” (qtd. in Milligan

657).33 One such example of this trope can be found in the non-canonical sentimental short story

“The Physician’s Visit” (1847), which paints the hero Dr. Sutheran, once a “cold…austere physician,” as a romantic hero when he falls in love with Helen, the “loving, trusting, innocent” daughter of one of his poor patients (303). Working within the paradigm of Victorian femininity, the anonymous writer describes how Helen now sees the doctor as her knight in shining armor:

“[Dr. Sutheran] had given back her parent from the grave, as far as human means can act under the divine will…and Helen loved him, innocently and gratefully loved him, as the kindest and greatest of human beings” (303). Their courtship, conducted at the patient’s bedside, ends abruptly when Dr. Sutheran must follow through on a previous agreement to work on a possibly deadly philanthropic assignment overseas. Only after Helen seems close to death herself (no doubt, from a broken heart), does Dr. Sutheran return and propose marriage, thus demonstrating that he is a man of honor who loves the penniless Helen. An often-cited example of this trope features the physician Allan Woodcourt reciting the Lord’s Prayer to his dying patient Jo, an orphaned street urchin, in Bleak House (1852-1853). Jo seems to have very little understanding of the prayer’s meaning and dies before he can recite the entire prayer himself. In this way,

Charles Dickens suggests that Jo’s salvation was never going to come through a rote recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Rather, Woodcourt’s brand of compassion, one that blends physical and spiritual comfort, would have benefited the pauper much earlier in his life. The narrator enforces this point: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and

33 Although Barry Milligan has pointedly argued that the “reality [of an almost Christ-like representative of self- sacrifice] was more nuanced” because “medical practitioners depended upon a broad and economically diverse patient base rather than a narrow and well-to do-one” (658).

wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (Dickens 654). Dickens condemns British society’s blindness to human suffering rather than Woodcourt’s attempt at sympathy in the orphan’s final moments. Even though Woodcourt is unable to save this patient’s life, he appears to be an ideal doctor because he consistently displays benevolence and kindness in his medical practice. Within these fictional accounts, writers based a doctor’s professional aptitude not on his possession of rigorous scientific knowledge or even on his ability to prevent patients’ deaths, but on his medical ethics.

Other nineteenth-century fiction writers tried to realistically convey the tension between idealized views that the nineteenth-century doctor was a patient’s “best and dearest friend” and crass realities that he might be an opportunist who used his privileged position for his own monetary gain (Brandt 108).34 Francis Frederick Brandt conveys this truth in his short story “The

Doctor’s Fee” (1845), which focuses on two nineteenth-century types: the “fashionable” Dr.

Pulford and the “pompous,” social-climber Mr. Poppleton, who is hoping to marry his beautiful

34 Victorians’ suspicions of the doctor’s ability to ingratiate himself with his patients through charm and cunning goes back to the eighteenth century. Since success of one’s medical practice depended almost entirely on the personal interactions between doctors and patients, eighteenth-century doctors often relied on dress and manners to ingratiate themselves with their clientele (Maio 184). Unfortunately, this type of self-presentation led to the stereotype that doctors were foppish sycophants who dispensed flattery and needless medicinal remedies to unsuspecting patients. One eighteenth-century satirical cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson shows a corpulent physician, who wears a powdered wig and fashionable attire, visiting a male patient who has all the markers of the morbidly ill: pale skin, resigned face, and weakened frame (Rowlandson). The artist hints that the patient has been on the decline for some time since a half-used bottle of medicine, which clearly has not curbed the inevitable, sits on the table next to him. Rather than address the obvious, the doctor instead states, “My dear sir you look this morning the picture of health. I have [no] doubt at my next visit I shall find you [entirely] cured of all your early infirmitys” (Rowlandson). This cartoon is not too far off from on an anecdote shared in Johnsonian Miscellanies regarding Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who found this type of false bedside manner distasteful. Days before Johnson’s death, an overly-cheerful doctor “in the usual style, hoped that [Johnson] was better; his answer was, ‘No, Sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death’” (398). A book on medical ethics titled The Moral Aspects of Medical Life (1846) suggests that doctors continued feeding this type of false optimism to their patients well into the nineteenth century: “There are, I believe, practitioners who make it a point…never to speak despairingly of a patient; but I cannot regard such a rule of conduct as honest or justifiable, or consistent with one’s Christian duty” (qtd. The Moral Aspects 591). These examples underscore how patients could read their physicians’ “exquisite manners [as] both seductive and deceptive, hiding an egoistic and arrogant businessman,” which, in turn, violated the patients’ trust in their medical provider (Maio 184).

daughter to an aristocrat (108). Mr. Poppleton is not suffering from a physical ailment but has visited the doctor’s practice to “[pour] into [the doctor’s] bosom my sorrows,” and he asks that

Dr. Pulford “never…reveal to any one what I am about to tell you” (108). In the doctor’s office,

Mr. Poppleton shares that the undesirable Captain Buffle is courting his daughter. Now Mr.

Poppleton faces the possibility of having to duel the army officer, who has the “very bad habit of always killing [his] man” (113). Dr. Pulford assures his patient that if he wants to avoid certain death then “you will [need to] place yourself in my hands, I will arrange this matter for you”

(110-111). Having hinted to the relieved Mr. Poppleton that he is indeed suffering from ill health and needs to retreat to the countryside, Dr. Pulford tells Captain Buffle that the wealthy man has less than a year to live due to the killer of many a nineteenth-century fictional hero: consumption

(112). The “cunning physician” then plants the seed into the army officer’s head that he would be better off abstaining from the duel and allowing Mr. Poppleton to “die on his own accord,” thereby gaining an even larger dowry upon his future marriage to Miss Poppleton (113). The reader soon discovers that Dr. Pulford is not as charitable as he appears, because he has orchestrated this whole affair to foil the other suitor and woo Miss Poppleton himself. As one observer remarks, “[Dr. Pulford persuaded] the little ass that he, Poppleton, is consumptive— frightens him out of his senses, and sends him off to Torquay, whither he himself followed at his leisure. There they have been all winter, and now everybody, except the poor papa himself, knows that Dr. Pulford and Virginia Poppleton will quietly walk off to Gretna Green…” (114).

Having eloped with the heiress, Dr. Pulford tells the “furious” father that, “My dear Poppleton, you once asked my advice for an emergency to you most pressing. I saved your life—can you complain if I have chosen MY OWN FEE” (114). While “The Doctor’s Fee” is a satirical story,

Brandt still demonstrates how the nineteenth-century doctor served a type of religious function.

When Mr. Poppleton is initially reluctant to share a confidence with the physician, Dr. Pulford assures him that “The secrets of the confessional are not more sacred to a priest than the revelations of a patient to his medical adviser” (108). However, as one nineteenth-century commentator observed, the “overstocked” medical market in London often meant that doctors like Dr. Pulford balanced medical ethics with the need to build a profitable medical practice or, in some cases, abandoned morality altogether (Winslow 208).

Charlotte M. Yonge

Although Anglo-Catholics believed that suffering was a necessary element of the sanctification process, 35 Charlotte M. Yonge’s family regularly sought to serve those who were hurting, including practicing medicine as a religious calling. Born in 1823, Yonge came of age during the Oxford Movement, which began in 1833 with the Tracts for the Times, a series of publications written by conservative clergymen who were concerned about theological liberalism within the Church of England. More specifically, Yonge was most influenced by two Anglo-

Catholic men: her religious father William Yonge, who oversaw her education at home, and John

Keble, leader of the Oxford Movement and author of The Christian Year (1827) (Letters 30 June

1851). Keble prepared Yonge for confirmation and she later enjoyed an extended stay with the clergyman and his wife at their vicarage, affectionately termed “another home,” in the spring of

1839 (Musings vi). Whether due to the abiding influence of her father or her genuine awe of

35 Anglo-Catholic Edmund Pusey, for example, “regularly endured a hair shirt as well as self- imposed flagellation and fasting routines” (Knight and Mason 96). One critic’s observation that Yonge’s The Monthly Packet contained “tales of a rather fabulous description, and with practices which might have been tolerable in the middle ages, but which should not now be recommended in any way” seems to hint at the periodical’s theological leanings (The English Review). This type of ritualistic suffering did not always sit well with Yonge’s readers. Another critic of her 1865 novel The Clever Woman of the Family quipped that: “Having brought before us one or more fine creatures, she beats them; she binds them; she sticks pins into them; she impales them; she makes them declare it is ‘so comfortable’ to be impaled; she calls upon us to congratulate them; then, in triumph, she bears them out of our sight” (quotd. Wheatley 898). These reviews underline the strong reactions against Anglo-Catholics’ return to Catholic religious practice, specifically the view that Pusey and others were defining justification as based on works rather than faith alone.

Keble’s own literary talents, Yonge would later reflect that “no one, save my own father, had so much to do with my whole cast of mind” (Musings iv).36 Like Keble, Yonge believed that a devoted Anglican’s life exhibited a commitment to prayer, repentance, and good works.

Additionally, Keble articulated a religious practice that centered on a belief that the pursuit of

God was life’s highest aim; to pursue intellectual glory for one’s own sake would only bring disorder and chaos. 37 Thus, Yonge’s own convictions regarding the importance of medical ethics were shaped not just by Keble but also by hearing about and watching how her devout Anglican family regularly practiced medicine as amateurs. While Yonge’s grandfather Duke Yonge (1750-

1823) was a clergyman and her father William Yonge (1795-1854) was a former military officer, the Yonge family also had a family medical practice that went back to the seventeenth century

36 Even after she embarked on her own career as a writer, Yonge regularly sent manuscripts to Keble for further advice and approval. Some critics find Yonge’s deference to male authority troubling, especially when trying to read her work through a feminist lens. Claudia Nelson points out that the “dearth of substantive scholarship” on Yonge would suggest “some inherent difficulty in approaching an author who considered her confirmation at the hands of John Keble the most significant moment of her life” (712). Schaffer argues that reading Yonge as simply a realist author ignores the overarching religious aims of her fiction but only creates more problems for the critic; if we read her as a “pious pedagogue (as she would prefer), we can find nothing to say” (Magnus Bonum 245). Early Yonge scholars, such as Christabel Coleridge and Ethel Romanes, take a more biographical approach by studying the author within her own lived experience. Following in the footsteps of Coleridge and Romanes, Alethea Hayter reads Yonge as an astute social critic whose works offer valuable insight into Victorian domestic life and rejects theoretical approaches as “ignoring the ostensible meaning and creating a more acceptable one” (14). Most recently, Budge has advocated for reading Yonge as a conservative feminist within the wider context of the Tractarian movement, which encouraged women to follow their vocations. Even though Yonge would defer in spiritual matters to her male peers, she fostered the literary aspirations of other middle-class women through “The Gosling Society” (1859-1877), an essay society that often examined religious topics (Mitchell). Terming herself “Mother Goose” and her contributors as “Goslings,” Yonge played a role in shaping the minds of the next generation of women writers and social reformers, including Coleridge, Mrs. Mary Ward (author of Robert Elsemere), and others (Mitchell). While in her view men and women have distinct roles, Yonge’s conservative feminism also encouraged women to pursue their callings by fostering opportunities for further education and creating networks of support for their literary endeavors.

37 While Anglo-Catholics were generally optimistic about their ability to enact social change, Keble was also deeply troubled by his perception that evil permeated all aspects of existence and by the moral direction of modern life. Later in her life, Yonge recalled when Keble called on his mentee to relieve some his melancholy in 1863: “‘Do try,’ he said to me one morning, ‘and put me into better humour with our civilization! we hear so much about it now, and I don't doubt it's a good thing; yet somehow every newspaper I read shakes my faith in it!” then he adduced some instances in which chemistry and other sciences had been turned to a wicked and cruel use, and asked if these were not barbarisms?’” (Musings cxix). As a former Oxford professor, Keble was certainly not anti-intellectual. Yet, for Keble, a life of faith had a distinctive, ordered rhythm that reflected God’s providential control and the divine’s involvement in even the simplest, everyday occurrences.

(Gillie 99). In their biography on Yonge, Margaret Laura Mare and Alicia C. Percival note how

Duke Yonge did not see ministering to the soul and doctoring the human body as being at odds with one another:

Despite the slackness of the times, he was a keen clergyman, without being given to any ‘Methodistic excesses,’ and he filled Cornwood Church by his excellent preaching-so much so, indeed, that he was forced to put up two galleries. As well as being an activemagistrate he was the first to provide a manual of prayers to be used in prisons. He was also true to the family medical tradition, and doctored the whole village gratis; and their verdict on him was, ‘Old Mr Yonge up to Cornwood, he was a real gentleman, and cared no more for the rich than the poor.’ (14)38

Mare and Percival imply that Duke was a perhaps a rarity during this period because he chose a comprehensive approach to clerical practice and parish duties. Certainly, Duke used his medical knowledge to preach the Gospel through physical actions rather than just words. When Yonge’s own parents settled in their country home in Otterbourne, Hampshire, William wrote to his relative James Yonge, a physician in Plymouth, for guidance on how to set up as “an amateur physician” (19). Following James’ instruction, William studied Domestic Medicine and the

Pharmacopoeia to tend to inhabitants of the village, “which in those hard times had scant attention from any regular practitioner, and was left to the mercies of those learned in herbs and simples” (19). While her family attended to individuals’ physical and spiritual needs through the practice of medicine, Yonge wrote about issues that Anglo-Catholics considered necessary for the reformation of the Church of England and society. In this way, Yonge lived out her family’s vocation of medicine by fictionally depicting how God used physical suffering to bring the penitent closer to God.

38 Since eighteenth-century Anglican clergymen often held multiple livings, they did not necessarily live among their congregation(s) and therefore were unable or, in some cases, unwilling to regularly minister to the poor. Movements like Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism grew out of concerns that Anglican clergyman were, by and large, a class of disinterested gentlemen who viewed their position as a profession rather than a serious religious calling that required intentional pastoral care.

Throughout The Daisy Chain, Yonge subtly advocates for the revived Anglo-Catholic practice of confession during times of physical suffering. While not as zealous as some of her contemporaries, Yonge practiced confession as her biographer Coleridge notes, “And here I think, retired as was her own religious life, [Yonge] would wish it be stated that, at rare and regular intervals, she always continued the practice of Sacramental confession, begun under the guidance of Mr. Keble, though she never regarded it as a universal obligation, or would ever have urged it upon young people except under very special circumstances” (Coleridge 233). Like other Anglo-Catholics, Yonge believed that confession was indeed necessary for spiritual growth and the eradication of sin in one’s life. Coleridge hints here that Yonge most likely began this religious practice under Keble during her confirmation; for Edward Pusey, confession would have spared the young penitent “the spiritual agonies of the growing awareness of sin” (Herring).

Anglo-Catholics like Yonge therefore believed confession best served the penitent during two periods of life: childhood and serious illness. In the case of encouraging the practice of confession in the sickroom, two Anglo-Catholic commentators in the 1850s noted that “illness was ‘the time when Christ is peculiarly with the soul’ pleading with it during hours of silence and solitude, and …saw it as ‘isolation for repentance’” (Herring). Ideally, “‘a good Confessor should have the tenderness of a father, the skills of a Physician, and the discrimination of a

Judge” and no one in the parish should die without being in the presence of a priest (Herring).

Under an active, devout clergyman, each parish would operate like a “smoothly-running”

“system” in which “each aspect of parochial work dovetailed harmoniously with all the others”

(Herring). Of course, this was the ideal and suspicions surrounding the practice of confession certainly did not help Anglo-Catholics in universally implementing their ideas regarding church reform. Rather than portraying confessional scenes between a priest and a penitent in The Daisy

Chain, Yonge instead depicted confession playing out in the Victorian household, specifically in the relationship between a father and his children. She therefore tied this non-sacramental form of confession to the revived Anglo-Catholic practice by turning the father, Dr. Richard May, into a priestly figure who embodies spiritual authority as well as physical healing. Just as Keble had done in his poetry, Yonge practiced the Anglo-Catholic Doctrine of Reserve, which emphasized conveying religious truths in a reserved, gentle manner.39 As Susan E. Colón’s, Elizabeth Jay’s, and Gavin Budge’s recent scholarship suggests, Yonge’s fiction operates as a guide to moral life rather than a dictate to her audience; the writer conveys the realities of Victorian daily life and did not impose an irrelevant moral strictly to appease religious readers.40 An early twentieth- century reviewer of Yonge’s work emphasized this point that her “desire to influence is not less obvious than that of her contemporary, [Charles] Kingsley; her influence was not less real than his; and no one who reads her is likely to resent the moralizing, for the moral is always inherent in the whole, and not, as with Miss [Maria] Edgeworth, extraneous and imposed” (The

Edinburgh Review 357). Due to her own upbringing in the village of Otterbourne, Hampshire,

Yonge saw firsthand how the provincial family doctor enjoyed an intimacy with local families

39 Yonge most likely became familiar with this doctrine following her reading of Thoughts in Past Years (1838) by the Rev. Isaac Williams (Letters Dec. 1838/Jan. 1839). Williams, a friend of Keble, was the author of Tract 80 on “Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge” (1838). According to the editors of Yonge’s personal letters, the Doctrine of Reserve consistently held Yonge back from the open discussion of controversial doctrines and practices of the kind which had been commonplace in improving stories for the young, especially of the evangelical school, and which the Tractarians considered irreverent” (Letters 64). Later in life, Yonge reflected on a short exchange with Keble as a young catechumen where he cautioned her against being too enthusiastic regarding church doctrine: “[i]t must have visibly impressed and excited me considerably, for his two warnings, when he gave me my ticket, were,—the one against much talk and discussion of Church matters, especially doctrines, the other against the danger of loving these things for the sake merely of their beauty and poetry—aesthetically he would have said, only that he would have thought the word affected” (Musings v). This passage makes clear that Yonge adopted the Doctrine of Reserve long before she wrote The Daisy Chain.

40 For more on Yonge’s adoption of the Doctrine of Reserve, read Susan E. Colón’s “Realism And Reserve: Charlotte Yonge And Tractarian Aesthetics,” Elisabeth Jay’s “Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics,” and Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel.

after attending their births and deaths for multiple generations— this professional figure certainly rivaled the local clergyman’s role as confidant and advisor.41 In The Daisy Chain, Yonge portrays sickness not only as a physical reality but also as a metaphor for humanity’s inherent sinfulness. Yonge therefore explores how individuals must address their own fallen nature, which often exhibits itself in physical illness, while also seeking to fulfill their own vocation. 42

The Daisy Chain

Typology

Due to Yonge’s characterization of the family physician Richard May in The Daisy

Chain, Victorians would have read the physician as a shadow of the Father God. The novelist best communicates how the Victorian household served as a microcosm of the Body of Christ through her application of typological realism. Following the framework laid out in St. Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, Anglo-Catholics emphasized the importance of the individual believer playing a role in the collective and public church. Thus, the body was a metaphor for the

Christian church where God gifts each member with specific abilities that are necessary for the functioning of the whole. As Newman preached in 1829, “‘the whole multitude, no longer

41 Despite the overcrowding of the medical field, Porter has surmised that if a country family doctor was fortunate enough to build a practice, “[he] achieved respectability as a pillar of provincial society: earnest, upright and public- spirited, sitting on church and charity committees, invited to the mayor’s ball, or captain of the village cricket team” (Greatest Benefit of Mankind 350).

42 Upon the completion of The Daisy Chain, Yonge wrote to the naturalist and illustrator Jemima Blackburn that, “I hope you have your Daisy Chain which I desired to be sent to you… If you have not received it, I will send you one, it is a great big book, and I think you will like Harry and the Doctor, but you will find more sick folk than you approve” (Letters 17 March 1856). Yonge’s observation to her friend that numerous “sick folk” occupy the fictional world of the novel only serves to emphasize how much illness plays a central role in the text. The novelist seems to suspect that Blackburn would have found depictions of bodily suffering at odds with an artist’s aesthetic. At the same time, Yonge also knew that Blackburn was married to a Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, home of one of the best medical schools during the Victorian era, which might explain her reason for sending a fictional account of a family “Doctor” and his eleven children, “Harry” being one of them. The ages of the eleven May children at the beginning of the novel are: Richard (in college at Oxford), Margaret (18), Flora (17), Norman (16), Ethel (15), Harry (12), Mary (10), Tom (age not listed), Blanche (5), Aubrey Spencer (3), Gertrude Margaret (6 weeks old).

viewed as mere individual men, become portions or members of the indivisible Body of Christ

Mystical, so knit together in Him by Divine Grace, that all have what he has, and each has what all have’” (quotd. in Rowell 223).43 Like many Victorians, Yonge practiced typology in her own reading of the Bible and understood Old Testament “types” as anticipating God’s revelation in the New Testament.44 Yet, Yonge’s attention to typological realism still necessitates that Dr.

May undergo a sanctification process to become more like Jesus Christ. By Victorian standards,

Yonge’s fictional doctor is the product of the best available scientific education at Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and additional study in Paris. However, the physician is also prone to a level of carelessness and passion that does not agree with either strict notions of scientific rationality or subdued religious devotion. Yonge also suggests that Dr. May’s inconsistency as a medical practitioner extended to his lack of interest or involvement in the upbringing of his eleven children; he admits that “[a]ll thinking and managing fell to my [wife’s] share, and I had as little care on my hands as one of my own boys” (13, 45). Dr. May’s wife, on the other hand, is portrayed as the ideal mother who possesses not only a “calm sweetness” but also an almost supernatural authority over her numerous offspring: “It was pleasant to see that large family in the hush and reverence of [the mother’s] teaching, the mother's gentle power preventing the outbreaks of restlessness to which even at such times the wild young spirits were liable” (5). Yet,

Mrs. May’s sudden death in a carriage accident is a poignant reminder for Yonge’s readers of the

43 “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ” (KJV, I Corinthian 12:12). Also see a detailed explanation of the ecclesiology of the Oxford Movement, including a fuller articulation of John Henry Newman’s sermons on the Church as the mystical body of Christ in Geoffrey Rowell’s article in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement.

44 For more on the use of typology in Victorian literature, read George P. Landow’s Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought. Both Gavin Budge and Talia Schaffer have also emphasized how Yonge uses specific details from real life to illustrate a general spiritual truth in her fiction; see Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel and Schaffer’s Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

frailty of life and the need to look to God for everlasting security; even the “all-powerful” matriarch is flesh and blood like the rest of us (13). By positioning Mrs. May as the center of domestic and religious life within her family, Yonge sets up the central crisis of The Daisy

Chain: if a household is a microcosm of the Body of Christ, how then does a body recover when one of its members no longer functions? Dr. May echoes this concern following his wife’s death:

“The world has run so light and easy with me hitherto, that you see I don't know how to bear with trouble…I don't know how it is to turn out, but of all the men on earth to be left with eleven children, I should choose myself as the worst” (45). For Yonge, the sanctification process means placing God as the believer’s primary object of worship, which Mrs. May’s last recorded words also emphasize: “the only security is not to think about ourselves at all, and not to fix our mind on any affection on earth. The least share of the Love above is the fullness of all blessing, and if we seek that first, all these things will be added unto us, and are” (18). By framing Mrs. May’s death as a spiritual trial for her husband, Yonge shows how Dr. May learns to “shake off the dross” and becomes “much less impetuous⎯ more consistent⎯ less desultory” (583). Therefore,

Dr. May’s ministrations must extend beyond “sick people” but also to his own children’s physical and moral health. In this way, this doctor works within typological readings of Jesus

Christ, who referred to himself as a “physician” within the Gospels.45 Thus, an increasingly compassionate and loving Dr. May reflects the divine in actively participating in his children’s maturation and spiritual life as a family physician and as a father.

45 In Mark 2:17 and Luke 4:23, Jesus Christ uses the term physician or doctor to denote the ways he acts as a spiritual and physical healer (KJV). As one eighteenth-century father counseled his son: “You are a very wicked and sinful creature…[Just] as a sick patient deplorably wounded prizes the medicine, and the giver of it, which are working his cure, so every man must be sick of sin, and sorely wounded by it, in order to prize the admirable Physician, who is given for the healing of the nations” (qtd. in Erdozain 68).

The Family Doctor as Minister

Within her novel The Daisy Chain, Yonge defines the ideal minister as someone who does not just meet educational or ordination requirements but has a broader understanding of fulfilling one’s Christian duty. Early in the narrative, Yonge demonstrates that the May family’s parish is in spiritual crisis. Rather than being the ideal Anglo-Catholic parish system that operates like a well-oiled machine, Stoneborough parish was under a “bad system of management—ladies' committee, negligent incumbent, insufficient clergy, misappropriated tithes” (138). From the Mays’ perspective, the primary source of these problems is the incumbent

Mr. Ramsden, who “had small means, and was not a high stamp of clergyman, seldom exerting himself, and leaving most of his parish work to the two under masters of the school” (24). Rather than being an agent of spiritual growth and physical comfort, the clergyman in his slothfulness acts as a sickness that infects the market town of Stoneborough and the poor neighboring community of Cocksmoor. Yonge paints Mr. Ramsden’s inattention in stark terms: “[His] health was failing, and his neglect told upon the parish in the dreadful evils reigning unchecked, and engulfing many a child whom more influential teaching might have saved. Mental arithmetic, and the rivers of Africa, had little power to strengthen the soul against temptation” (348). As the author makes clear in her Preface, the novel is chiefly interested in chronicling “those years of early life when the character is chiefly formed” and, therefore, Mr. Ramsden’s disregard of children is perhaps his greatest sin (Preface). Given Yonge’s belief in the significance of childhood in an individual’s spiritual formation, Mr. Ramsden’s “insufficient attention to his

Confirmation candidates” further indicates that he is ill-equipped for his pastoral role (257).

While Dr. May tends to the physical health of Mr. Ramsden, his diagnosis of the clergyman centers more on his failings as spiritual leader, noting that, “The vicar won't stir. He is indolent

enough by nature, and worse with gout” (Part II Chapter XI). Physical sickness here reflects the clergyman’s failure to fulfill his pastoral duty, a point Dr. May reinforces by observing that,

“People in former times had not so high an estimate of pastoral duty” (500). From the doctor’s perspective, Mr. Ramsden was the product of poor “education”: he is unable, not simply unwilling, to apply himself to the education of others (500). In lieu of the incumbent clergyman, or what Yonge terms the “rightful power,” parish members turn to Dr. May. As Flora May remarks, “‘Dr. May is the man most looked up to in this town…we have the prestige of better birth, and better education, as well as of having the chief property in the town, and of being the largest subscribers, added to his personal character’” (377). Her sister Ethel, who feels the lack of a formal spiritual authority more acutely, laments, “‘It is sad to hear the sick people say that

Dr. May is more to them than any parson; it shows that they have so entirely lost the notion of what their clergyman should be’” (376). Even though Yonge was not in favor of working against the Established Church, she recognizes how a doctor could indeed be “more…than any parson” when he attends to individuals’ physical and spiritual needs—thereby embodying Yonge’s definition of ministerial vocation (376). As a country family doctor, Dr. May’s ministrations therefore include being a moral guide and protector to his patients.

Yonge highlights that Dr. May functions as a minister by demonstrating how he works within Gregorian medical ethics, which emphasizes a physician’s compassionate service to his patients. The novelist portrays Dr. May as not ignorant of the economic necessity of taking on lower-class hospital patients and middle-class or upper-class non-hospital patients. However, she repeatedly establishes that he prioritizes ethical behavior and care over concerns regarding his own social standing or wealth.46 In fact, Yonge focuses on Dr. May’s interactions with his non-

46 The May children reference their “Papa” going to the hospital on multiple occasions. Additionally, he knows “half the rest of the country” as a “hospital acquaintance” (212).

hospital patients to highlight how a physician operates as a confidant, friend, and protector rather than a scientist. One such example of how Dr. May works within the former construct is his doctor-patient relationship with “old” Mrs. Robins, who lives a lonely existence, only interrupted by visits from greedy family members who “[squabble] over the spoil before the poor old creature is dead” (12-13). As emphasized by his daughter Margaret’s statement that “She is one of papa's pet patients, because he thinks her desolate and ill-used,” the May children often hear their father describe his patients and his treatment of their cases (12). When the family learn that

Dr. May brought three-year-old Aubrey on this visit, Mrs. May observes, “Poor old woman, it must have been a pleasure to her…it is so seldom she has any change” (12). Although little

Aubrey does not treat Mrs. Robins’ body as a trained physician, the implication here is that he helped the patient’s recovery by lifting her depressed spirits. A good doctor then not only provides medicinal treatment but also facilitates alternative forms of healing by encouraging

“pleasure.” Yonge also implies here that it is never too early to introduce to Aubrey, even though he speaks “in language few could understand,” the importance of finding one’s vocation (12).

Aubrey’s role as “small doctor,” as Dr. May calls him, is juxtaposed against Mrs. Robins’ treatment at the hands of her sons and daughter, which is enough to throw her into an “agitated state, fit to bring on another attack” (12). Disgusted by the Robins family’s “squabbling,” Dr.

May gives “[Mrs. Robins’ daughter] a bit of my mind at last; I could not stand the sight any longer. Madam, said I, you'll have to answer for your mother's death” (13). Although Yonge portrays Dr. May’s passionate defense of Mrs. Robins in a humorous light, he also models the commands in the Old and New Testament to “plead for the widow” and “visit…widows in their affliction” (KJV, Isaiah 1:17, James 1:27). Reflecting Gregorian medical ethics, Dr. May

prioritizes his patients’ emotional and physical well-being over the risk of offending potential patients and hurting the growth of his medical practice.

Another way Dr. May works within Gregorian medical ethics is by being compassionate and honest with his patients while not promising a miraculous recovery from illness. In his first call to the wealthy banker Mr. Rivers, Dr. May focuses on developing a rapport with his patient to properly diagnose him. Norman May, who accompanies his father on this call, is frustrated by the long wait and “opined that Mr. Rivers must be very prosy, or have some abstruse complaint”

(140). After lunch, Norman observes Mr. Rivers asking the physician to join him in the library, leading the son to “[guess] that they had been talking all this time, and had never come to the medical opinion” (143). Yonge instead emphasizes how the doctor-patient relationship develops through oral communication by preventing Norman and the reader from acquiring any details regarding the physical examination. When the patient’s daughter Meta asks the family doctor if

“papa [is] very ill”:

Dr. May answered in his softest, most re-assuring tones: ‘You need not be alarmed about him, I assure you. You must keep him from too much business,’ he added, smiling; ‘make him ride with you, and not let him tire himself, and I am sure you can be his best doctor…You must not expect doctors to be absolute oracles…I will tell you what I told him—I hardly think his will ever be sound health again, but I see no reason why he should not have many years of comfort, and there is no cause for you to disquiet yourself on his account—you have only to be careful of him.’ (145)

In this passage, Dr. May offers a medical opinion, not a clear-cut diagnosis. Although he encourages Meta’s involvement in her father’s treatment through encouraging exercise and rest, he does not promise a cure. As Dr. May shares later with his son Norman, Mr. Rivers suffers from an “organic disease,” a term which would signal to a nineteenth-century reader that the patient has no hope of ever being of “sound health again” (146, 145). Over the course of Dr.

May’s treatment of Mr. Rivers, the physician also diagnoses the banker as suffering from a spiritual malady: he is a too “great admirer of beauty” and an overindulgent father to his

daughter Meta (209). Thus, for Yonge, Dr. May ultimately adheres to Gregorian ethics because he primarily ministers to his patients’ souls rather than to their bodies.

To demonstrate this point, Yonge shows how Dr. May is best situated to “right” the misguided but sincere Meta Rivers, who desires to find a vocation beyond playing lady bountiful in the parish (200). Having grown up with an aesthetically-minded father, Meta has learned that women primarily function as beautiful objects in relation to men. Yet Yonge insists that Meta is not an extension of Mr. Rivers’ vast art collection; rather, a woman fulfills her Christian duty through being useful rather than being an aesthetically-pleasing ornament. When Meta shares with Dr. May and Margaret that her maid Bellairs wishes to be given time off to tend to a sick parent, she expresses an unwillingness to part with her servant. Like her father, Meta places great value on outward appearance, so much so that “Bellairs was like a necessary of life in her estimation” (243). Drawing from his experience as a medical practitioner, Dr. May describes how another maid was not allowed to visit an ill brother, who was left under the care of a parish nurse, “a wretch of a woman” (241). By the time the maid’s mistress allows her servant some leave as a “great favour,” the brother is dead due to the negligence of the parish nurse (241).

From this cautionary tale, Meta learns to view servants as more than “machines of their employer’s convenience” (242). Ultimately, Yonge’s narrator marks this exchange as “a memorable one to little Miss Rivers, opening out to her, as did almost all her meetings with that family, a new scope for thought and for duty” (242). When Mr. Rivers ultimately dies and leaves

Meta 30,000 pounds, she is now prepared for this loss because “She knows the way to the only

Comforter” and has garnered the necessary discernment to manage her own future due to “her dread of self-indulgence, and seeking after work” (471). Even though Mr. Rivers’ dying wish was for Meta to marry Norman, Dr. May does not share this knowledge with the young couple as

to not make them “feel bound in any way” (474). Yonge displays God’s providential design by allowing the couple to come together only after Norman decides to become a missionary and

Meta agrees to “share the work”; she would rather be a “coffee-pot than a China shepherdess”

(597). By choosing utility over beauty, Meta rejects her father’s aestheticism in favor of

Christian vocation. In these ways, Yonge demonstrates how Dr. May’s ministrations extend beyond physical healing to religious instruction.

Yonge further emphasizes Dr. May’s ministerial practice by contrasting his medical ethics to those of the London physician Dr. Matthew Fleet, who understands the doctor-patient relationship as only an economic transaction. Despite the ways Yonge celebrates the benefits of country living over the hustle and bustle of city life, she initially presents Dr. Fleet as a herald of hope: Dr. May pronounces that he has “more faith in [Dr. Fleet] than in any one else” to diagnose the bedridden Margaret (124). However, Yonge quickly upsets the family’s, and her readers’, expectations by instead demonstrating how Dr. Fleet is a false messenger of hope precisely because he lacks ministerial care in his professional practice. A Victorian reader would not have missed the irony that Dr. Fleet enjoys commercial success and a knighthood resulting from his London medical practice, whereas his biblical namesake Matthew had to abandon his lucrative profession as a tax collector to follow Jesus Christ (King James Version Matthew 9:9).

Money and security are not evils in and of themselves in the world of the novel, but

Yonge makes clear that the love of these things is dangerous. The novelist’s decision to give the doctor the surname “Fleet” points not only to his shallow character but also to London’s Fleet

Street, a commercial district that housed the booming journalism industry — which was known for putting aside ethics in favor of profit. For the future politician’s wife and society hostess

Flora, the London physician’s “good-looking and agreeable” appearance and pleasant “manners”

epitomize gentlemanly conduct, whereas Norman and Ethel see him as the antithesis to the religious values that shape their view of medical practice (124, 125). While Dr. Fleet describes his hospital patients in a “cold hard way,” Dr. May sees the hospital as an extension of his house calls, which emphasize care over clinical study (125). Given his father’s example, it is not surprising that Norman notes “indignantly,” “I am sure [Dr. Fleet] thinks poor people nothing but a study, and rich ones nothing but a profit” (125). Furthermore, Dr. Fleet’s rise within his profession has led him systematically to adopt a pandering, deferential attitude where he

“[avoids] discussions” entirely (125). Dr. May once viewed his fellow student as “one of the most warm, open-hearted fellows in the world” but now judges he is “turned into a mere machine, with a moving spring of self-interest!” (128). Dr. Fleet’s devolution from man to machine highlights how medical practice loses its liturgical value when practiced in “the constant change and bewilderment of patients preventing much individual care and interest”

(128). Yonge even implies that Dr. Fleet’s diagnostic powers become blunted due to his mechanized approach to patient care. In fact, Yonge’s only reference to Dr. Fleet’s physical examination of Margaret is blunt and cold: “It was over, and Margaret awaited the judgment”

(127). Margaret’s suitor takes comfort in the “old axiom, that a medical man should not prescribe for his own family” when the London physician states the patient will fully recover, thereby relying on the modern assumption that Dr. Fleet’s cool detachment and specialization as a surgeon make him more qualified to make a diagnosis (301). Yet, Dr. May does not “trust” the other physician’s opinion and holds to his original opinion that Margaret will never recover

(301). Thus, Margaret’s “habit of thinking that papa must know best” becomes a type of self- fulfilling prophecy when she never fully recovers and eventually dies at the end of the narrative

(301). In this way, Yonge portrays Dr. May as the more reliable diagnostician when it comes to

his children’s illnesses. Within The Daisy Chain, it is one’s family, not an “unprejudiced stranger,” who knows one best (301). By depicting doctor-patient relationships as unfeeling and unsuccessful when reduced to a monetary transaction, Yonge also argues that Dr. May’s vocation must first attend to the needs of his family and work within the domestic space.

The Victorian Father as Minister and Confessor

Yonge emphasizes Dr. May’s ministerial role to his children during the physician’s treatment of his son Norman’s extended battle with “nerves” since in nineteenth-century medicine this was regarded as both a moral and physical condition. After Norman witnesses his mother’s lifeless body taken from the wreckage of the carriage accident, he becomes “ghastly pale” with “chattering teeth and deadly faintness” and “nervous trembling that agitated his whole frame” (26). When his sister Ethel tries to caution Norman to “lie still” after he nearly faints, he protests, “Faint—stuff—how horridly stupid!” (27). Yonge suggests that Norman’s belief that

“Nerves…were only fit for fine ladies” and his subsequent denial of his physical deterioration significantly hamper his recovery (115). Rather than enforcing Norman’s gendered reading of nerves, Yonge presents female and male bodies as permeable to outside influences that can exacerbate nerves. As Budge has pointed out, Yonge works within the nineteenth-century medical understanding that patients must exercise self-control and manage their nervous temperaments because a severe case of nerves could be extremely dangerous to one’s health

(257). Yonge’s characters then are ultimately “morally responsible for the state of [their] own health” (Budge 257). In adding a spiritual component to Norman’s inability to recognize the severity of his physical condition, Yonge therefore demonstrates that his pride and ambition, rather than simply weakness of body, are at fault for his deteriorating condition. To further emphasize the way nerves reflects medical and moral concerns regarding the nineteenth-century

human body, Yonge presents Ethel as nurse and spiritual mediator to Norman because she is a female double for Dr. May. Like her father, “heedless” Ethel must learn to channel her nervous excitability into a vocation, which she ultimately does by orchestrating the building of a church for the poor neighboring community of Cocksmoor (1). Instead of dwelling on their mother’s loss, Ethel encourages Norman to rest in God’s eternal plan rather than their temporal pain: “We ought to think of [mamma’s] gain. You can't? Well, I am glad, for no more can I. I can't think of her liking for papa and baby and all of us to be left to ourselves. But that's not right of me, and of course it all comes right where she is; so I always put that out of my head, and think what is to come next in doing, and pleasing papa, and learning” (42). Norman’s increasing apathy sets him apart from the Ethel, who enforces the narrative’s central moral lesson that an individual’s aspirations need to be channeled into spiritual activity (42). Although the other May children dismiss or ignore Norman’s increasingly erratic behavior, Ethel listens to her brother and slowly gathers a list of physical symptoms that point back to the nervous shock he experienced when their mother died. By practicing listening, Ethel is the ideal intermediary to their father when it comes to finally confessing the seriousness of Norman’s condition.

To circumvent nineteenth-century debates surrounding the hearing of confession by

Anglican clergymen, Yonge turns Dr. May into a priestly figure, who doubles as a sympathetic physician and the loving Father God. When Dr. May initially asks Margaret about Norman’s

“health and spirits,” it is Ethel who finds herself struggling with her brother’s secret, “wondering whether she ought to speak, for Margaret did not know half what she did” (107). Ethel’s ability to finally admit to her father that Norman was a witness to the aftermath of the carriage accident plays out like a confessor admitting her sins to a priest, rather than just a trusting patient sharing medical symptoms with a doctor. At one point, Dr. May “[examines] her without apparent

emotion, as if it had been an indifferent patient,” and at another he reprimands her with the comment, “what have you all been thinking about to keep this to yourselves all this time?” (108).

Here Yonge highlights the limits of a non-omniscient physician who must rely on external symptoms and a patient’s case history to make a diagnosis. It is also not difficult to see how

Ethel’s failure to admit the seriousness of Norman’s condition has medical and moral implications. While Ethel was “much relieved by pouring out all she knew,” Dr. May stresses the severity of Norman’s condition, exclaiming that, “I should not wonder if health and nerves were damaged for life!” (109). Norman’s recovery then necessitates the intervention of his father, who can tend to both his spiritual needs and medical complaints. When the physician does evaluate his son, Yonge demonstrates that Norman is both a nervous patient and a penitent in need of a sympathetic ear. On one hand, Yonge fits Norman’s vague medical diagnosis within nineteenth- century understandings of nervous disorders. Even though Dr. May comes to a medical diagnosis by monitoring his son’s pulse and sleep, he is also intent on making Norman recognize that, as a nervous patient, he is incapable of diagnosing or treating himself (109). To a nineteenth-century reader, Dr. May’s diagnosis of “brain fever” and “dreadful excitability of the brain” would have been very serious (109). For example, Yonge’s own father was so concerned over Norman’s failing health that he asked the novelist, “You don’t mean to kill him?” (Coleridge quot. 338).

Since Norman’s life does hang in the balance, Yonge stresses how this nervous patient must submit to the care of his physician just as a penitent must fully confess his need for forgiveness to a priest to receive absolution. Sounding more like the minister than a doctor, Dr. May tells

Norman: “My poor boy…only One can comfort you truly; but you must not turn from me; you must let me do what I can for you, though it is not the same” (110). Unwilling to turn to God for healing, Norman returns to long, arduous hours of study to which his father declares, “Norman,

you are the worst patient I ever had!” (115). Yonge here plays with the variant meanings of

“patient”: Norman must not only learn to be under his father’s care as his patient but also develop the virtue of patience in allowing his body to physically recover from illness. Norman’s recovery begins when he submits to his father’s care and sees his father through new spiritual eyes:

Dr. May was a parent who could not fail to be loved and honoured; but, as a busy man, trusting all at home to his wife, he had only appeared to his children either as a merry playfellow, or as a stern paternal authority, not often in the intermediate light of guiding friend, or gentle guardian; and it affected Norman exceedingly to find himself, a tall schoolboy, watched and soothed with motherly tenderness and affection; with complete comprehension of his feelings, and delicate care of them. His father's solicitude and sympathy were round him day and night…How could his father know exactly what he would like—say the very things he was thinking—see that his depression was not wilful repining—find exactly what best soothed him!...Indeed, the certainty that his father felt the sorrow as acutely as himself, was one reason of his opening to him…Norman knew he could never appreciate what the bereavement was to him—he saw its traces in almost every word and look, and yet perceived that something sustained and consoled him, though not in the way of forgetfulness. (119)

To critics of Anglo-Catholicism, male adherents were feminized ritualists who unnecessarily focused on submission and reserve. Yonge questions these suppositions by showing the ways that male caregivers benefit others when practicing “motherly tenderness and affection.” Women might be naturally predisposed towards certain qualities, but men could develop these same qualities through daily religious practice. Dr. May implies as much when he includes himself in a directive to his children to “learn carefulness and thoughtfulness” in the days following his wife’s death

(40). For Yonge, a sobered Dr. May must also become feminized to fully reflect God’s love for his children.

Yonge further demonstrates how Dr. May is both confessor and father to his children in his relationship with Flora, whose rejection of her father’s insight and values ultimately has dire consequences. From the beginning of the novel, Flora is rooted in the practical, everyday concerns of domestic life rather than spiritual matters. When regarding the youngest member of

the May household, now her “motherless little sister,” Flora’s use of “I” emphasizes her reliance on herself rather God: “I trust we shall do well by her, dear little thing. I see, on an emergency, that I know how to act. I never thought I was capable of being of so much use, thanks to dear, dear mamma's training. I shall manage, I am sure, and so they will all depend on me, and look up to me. How nice it was to hear dear papa say what he did about the comfort of my being able to look after Margaret” (39). In fact, Dr. May begins to view her almost like a guarded patient who never discloses her symptoms to a physician because “highly as he esteemed her, he was a little afraid of her cool prudence; she never seemed to be in any need of him, nor to place any confidence in him…” (387). Ultimately, Yonge condemns Flora’s belief that she never needs to

“come to any one for advice”; she is rejecting not only her father’s counsel but also his spiritual values (389). In choosing an advantageous marriage over remaining in her father’s household,

Flora comforts herself with the knowledge that, “A physician, with eleven children dependent on his practice, to despise an offer from the heir of such a fortune! But that was his customary romance!” (388). As the narrator moralizes, Flora must ultimately learn “what the father was, whom she had held cheaply” and, therefore, repent of her similar rejection of the Father God

(405). Just as her father becomes more like Jesus Christ through suffering, Flora also undergoes a similar spiritual trial to learn the importance of family over public life. To support her husband’s political career, Flora leaves her infant in the care of a well-meaning nursemaid who attempts to sooth the distressed baby girl with an excessive application of opium. Although Flora recognizes that her child’s health is failing, she only contacts her father when it is too late.

Within minutes of his arrival, Dr. May diagnoses the baby as having been accidently poisoned and the child quickly dies. Out of her grief, Flora recognizes that Dr. May is someone that she can trust with her confidences, especially after she nearly dies giving birth to her second child

(644). Like Norman, Flora only begins to recover physically when she rejects the self-sufficiency that has sustained her throughout the narrative: “Her sufferings had been the more bitter because she had not parted with her proud reserve. She had refused council, and denied her confidence to those who could have guided her repentance” (644). Close to the novel’s end, Ethel encourages

Flora to seek out their brother and clergyman Richard for confession. As before, Yonge keeps confession within an individual’s physical and spiritual family. The clergyman becomes a type of double for his father not only because they share the same first name but also because he points others towards heavenly, rather than earthly, aspirations. While representing the authority of the

Church of England, Richard also reflects his father’s domestic values and understanding of vocation. As the text makes clear here and elsewhere, Flora’s reconciliation with her earthly father and God are paramount to her recovery.

Vocational Practice before Professional Aspiration

Lastly, Yonge stresses how professionals should curb their own aspirations in favor of vocational practice by detailing Tom May’s decision to become a doctor. While Tom makes a

“free choice” to enter the profession of medicine and take over Dr. May’s medical practice, he appears to be the antithesis of his compassionate father due to a firm dislike of “horrid sick people” (545). Certainly, Tom bears a stronger resemblance to a physician like Dr. Fleet when he explains how “science is famous work” but continues to emphasize that he “can’t bear sick people” and the thought of having to “[race] about this miserable circuit” (594, 595). In an exchange with Meta, Tom is a type of doubting Thomas who needs to be reassured with tangible proofs that his future profession is not merely an economic transaction but has liturgical value.

When Tom observes that doctors are “paid” to do “good,” Meta offers the novel’s clearest

articulations of a vocation by emphasizing how proximity and knowledge of one’s patients actually allow the family physician to work in a professional and spiritual capacity:

Nothing could ever repay Dr. May…Can any one feel the fee anything but a mere form? Besides, think of the numbers and numbers that he takes nothing from; and oh! to how many he has brought the most real good, when they would have shut their doors against it in any other form! Oh, Tom, I think none of you guess how every one feels about your father. I recollect one poor woman saying, after he had attended her brother, ‘He could not save his body, but, surely, ma'am, I think he was the saving of his soul.’ (595)

Even though Tom’s reluctance to follow in his father’s footsteps is in large part due to the monotony of seeing the same people day in and day out, he has yet to learn what Yonge considers the cornerstone of vocation: “That daily work of homely mercy, hoping for nothing again, was surely the true way of doing service” (212). Certainly, Yonge emphasizes that an ethical, listening doctor does good and important work by attending to a community’s physical and spiritual needs. In fact, Dr. May’s ministerial efforts directly and indirectly serve the Church of England in several ways: (1) a new active, deserving clergyman becomes the “head” of the local Anglican church; (2) inhabitants of Cocksmoor have their own place of worship and young

Richard is their curate; and (3) Norman, with his new wife Meta, are missionaries in New

Zealand. The parish may not be a new Eden but it is on its way to operating like the ideal Anglo-

Catholic system where the domestic space and the community at large foster individuals’ ability to pursue their vocations. Yonge therefore affirms that Dr. May is not only a “body-curer” but also a curer of souls, who ministers to both his patients and his family (427).

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CHAPTER 2: THE CALLING TO WRITING: THE POET IN ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S AURORA LEIGH (1856)

Having grown up in a family with strong ties to evangelicalism, EBB was perhaps an unlikely convert to spiritualism.47 However, the new movement entranced EBB, which she indicated to spiritualist Lady Elgin: “Did I not observe, when I was leaving you, that we were passing out of the sphere of the spirits? No such thing! The buzz of the spiritual world was in my ears in London too, and even here one may listen to it” (BC 7 January 1853). Certainly, as

Marjorie Stone puts it, “A spirit of questioning and religious revisionism in her poetry” never made EBB a “conventional Christian believer” (9). By the 1850s, EBB’s personal faith had shifted from the strict orthodoxy of her upbringing to one where she recognized, according to

Linda M. Lewis, “only Christ’s authority, only his laws, and only his divine example of love”

(107). While EBB’s interest in the “spirit-question” seems to point to the poet moving towards a less Christ-centered theology, she told her friend Isa Blagden that “I certainly would’nt set about building a system of theology out of [the spirits’] oracles—God forbid” (BC 3 March 1853).48

Yet, the foregoing quotation from the 1853 letter to Lady Elgin draws attention to EBB’s description that “The buzz of the spiritual world was in my ears,” just one among numerous references to theo-acoustics in her correspondence (BC 7 January 1853). A decade earlier, EBB

47 As I noted in my Introduction, I use “EBB” rather than the author’s full name for this chapter. In fact, she often signed manuscripts and letters “EBB” and expressed pleasure that this name remained unchanged by her marriage.

48 When discussing EBB as a “poet-preacher,” Karen Dieleman argues that, “It is the narrative and expository impulse that prevails instead…the urge to testify to the Word more than to contemplate the symbol” (36). She points to EBB’s statement that, “No doctrine should be received from spirits, who are always fallible but only from the Word” — “the Word” being both the “infallible teaching of the Scriptures” and Jesus Christ himself (Dieleman 39; BC 8-10 January 1854).

criticized the novelist Jane Austen for being “essentially unpoetical” and, by extension, irreligious because she failed to represent the divine in her fiction: “Jane Austen is one-sided— and her side is the inferior & darkest side. God, Nature, the Soul…what does she say, or suggest of these? what proof does she give of consciousness of these? … In her works we do not discern even ‘the trees’ … much less, the voice of God stirring them” (BC 1 June 1843). As the poet would write later that same year, she believed in feeling religious experience in both body and spirit: “Is it not true that the soul is as actually, as your best seedling geranium? that our hold upon the spiritual world, & the prophesy of a spiritual futurity within us, are as actually, as any impression coming to us by the senses?” (BC 22 July 1843). My examination of the poet in

Aurora Leigh (1856) therefore depends on this foundational premise that EBB was deeply interested in the practice of listening, which she presents as central to not only religious practice but also to a female poet’s ability to develop her own professional identity in the literary marketplace.

Working within the ongoing debate surrounding the nineteenth-century poetess, EBB depicts Aurora as ultimately defining her profession within a religious framework, i.e. as a vocation, that looks to Jesus Christ as the ideal poet. In the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, the poetess drew on the popular notion that the female poet was a spiritual figure, who enforced conservative, domestic values, in order to sell her poetry. Yet, EBB defined herself as a professional writer; she wanted the same freedom as a male poet to explore contemporary, controversial topics through poetry. Just as EBB objected to “being offered up to the public” as a type of literary celebrity, i.e. the poetess, her protagonist resists being defined as a commodity for private or public consumption —both as an artist and a woman (BC 10 July 1856).49 As part

49 At the same time, EBB was aware of the growing cult of celebrity that surrounded nineteenth-century writers. As Linda Shires points out, “While disdaining the publicity and commodification associated with private revelation and

of her vocational journey, EBB emphasizes Aurora’s need to attune her ears to God’s voice even as she must suffer the sheer volume of voices in the material world: other characters’ religious views, Lady Waldemar’s cruel witticisms, literary critics’ demands, and audience’s mixed responses to her poetry. In fact, EBB consistently depicts the dangers of listening to others before God, which she highlights in her repeated use of snake imagery to allude to the serpent’s aural deception in the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, who suffered consequences for their attempt “to be as gods,” the protagonist and her future husband Romney learn the painful spiritual cost and isolation that come with idolizing professional identity or human-made systems

(King James Version, Genesis 3:5). With the verse novel’s ending, EBB underscores the spiritual nature of calling by having both characters simultaneously confess their need for Jesus Christ and their need for each other, thus depicting marriage as another type of religious calling within nineteenth-century life.

The Poetess in the Literary Marketplace

Mid-Victorian reviewers of Aurora Leigh labeled both the real EBB and the fictional

Aurora Leigh as “poetesses,” placing them in a sub-category within the literary profession. By the mid-Victorian period, writers like G.H. Lewes were advocating for the professionalization of writers: “literature should be a profession, not a trade. It should be a profession, just lucrative enough to furnish a decent subsistence to its members, but in no way lucrative enough to tempt speculators” (qtd. in Salmon 12). Even though Lewes’ observation would seem to undercut the spiritual aims of writers, Richard Salmon points out that “the relationship between the Romantic

while refusing to pander to audience expectations, Barrett Browning still used the general public image of her private life, the hegemonic discourse of domesticity, to gain and keep the readership…She did so…because she understood well a readership which prized moral seriousness and distance in an increasing fame culture” (334-335). On EBB and celebrity, see Eric Eisner’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom.”

figure of creative genius and the worldly Victorian professional does not afford a neat historical antinomy” (10). Whereas Lewes emphasizes how professional writers defined themselves in relation to monetary compensation, poets had long drawn on the “idea of a spiritual ministry of the poet” as a response to the “materialism” of the Enlightenment (Salmon 9). In this way,

Victorian poets stressed the importance of “authors to endure, and accrue value, beyond the transient present” (Salmon 6). Consequently, these writers also needed to consider how they were to remain relevant in a historical moment that was mired in problems related to industrialization, poverty, and religious doubt. Although Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh

Clough were debating the appropriate subject matter for poetry in the modern age, the poetess was still restricted by her expected role to write “a little lyric of pathos and sentiment”

(McSweeney ix-x; Tasker 25).50 Female poets also had to work against widespread assumptions that ladies did not work for pay and that their poetry was a feminine “accomplishment” like sketching and piano playing. Thus, male critics, poets, and publishers often perpetuated the idea that the female poet did not need to be ambitious in pursuing serious subject matter or professional success; rather, she should focus her efforts on poetry that expressed women’s feelings and spiritual uplift. Drawing from female precursors like the Sapphic poetess and the medieval woman troubadour, earlier nineteenth-century poetesses therefore often wrote lyric verse that depicted women as suffering subjects “in the wake of betrayal, loss, and rejection”

(Peterson; Cooper 19). Although poet Felicia Hemans wrote before the Victorian period, she had to negotiate her personal desire to produce “more noble and complete work” with the need to

50 While Arnold found the modern period too “unpoetical” for poetry, Clough believed that if poetry were to “gain the ear of multitudes” it needed to deal with “the actual, palpable things with which our every-day life is concerned” (qtd. in McSweeney ix-x). Certainly, critics reacted to EBB’s treatment of modern social problems in Aurora Leigh with the same type of reticence that Arnold expressed. As W.E. Aytoun remarked, “All poetical characters, all poetical situations, must be idealized…poets in all ages [have] shrunk from the task of chronicling contemporaneous deeds,” until “time has done its consecrating office” (416).

support her children (qtd. in Sweet). To earn a living then, Hemans styled herself as the sentimental poetess and, therefore, is still associated with those conventions even though critics have more recently argued that she actually criticizes domestic values (Sweet). As Tricia A.

Lootens has suggested, the nineteenth-century poetess was a type of performance where these female writers “do not pretend to speak even with the voices of ‘women,’ much less individuals.

Rather, they step forth to ‘sing’ as Woman, enacting naturalized art performed as if flowing through them, most often without great effort and at points almost without volition” (Lootens 4).

By putting her own heart on display, the female poetess was therefore associated with “intense personal emotion and feeling rather than will or reason” (Blair 103). Kirstie Blair has demonstrated that “the exploitation of the heart and its status as a commodity was enhanced by its use as a marketing tool, a recurrent image in popular art and artefacts” (116). As one contemporary critic observed, “The domain of poetry is wide; [the poetess’] power over the human heart immense” (Stodart 387). Thus, publishers and female poets enabled a conflation of the female writer’s private life and public art which continued through the mid-Victorian period

(Peterson). Therefore, nineteenth-century female poets did not often engage in the debate surrounding the professionalization of literature, largely because they struggled to define and evaluate their own success in the growing literary marketplace.51

EBB, therefore, would not have necessarily viewed the label “poetess” positively, as it only highlighted the minority status of women writers “with respect to the dominant discourse on the literary profession” (Salmon 174). Certainly, the reviews of Aurora Leigh speak to the reality that while the male poet had already been defined as filling a professional role, the poetess was

51 Only a few years after the publication of Aurora Leigh, the 1861 Census recognized “authorship” as a legitimate profession (Salmon 6).

still considered as filling a domestic role. In the Saturday Review, one reviewer described the verse novel’s characters and narrative as “unreal” but also found that the description of a

“professed poetess” would only be of “professional interest” to other authors (776-778, emphasis mine). Yet the critic did offer one praise to EBB by affirming that “Mrs. Browning may claim at least an equal rank with any poetess who has appeared in England” (Saturday Review 778). The

North British Review balked at any depiction of a female poet, observing that “the development of [Aurora’s] powers as a poetess is elaborately depicted; but as Mrs. Browning is herself almost the only modern example of such development, the story is uninteresting from its very singularity” (454, emphasis mine). Even in George Eliot’s highly complimentary review of

Aurora Leigh in the Westminster Review, the future novelist categorized EBB as a poetess rather than a female poet: “It is difficult to point to a woman of genius who is not either too little feminine, or too exclusively so. But in this, her longest and greatest poem, Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess” (306, emphasis mine).

Yet, as Beverly Taylor has argued, although EBB may have initially worked in the poetess tradition as embodied by earlier nineteenth-century writers like Felicia Hemans and Letitia

Landon, she soon created her own “female poetics of engagement through which she represented women’s perspectives and experiences while entering public debates using language and images reviewers often deplored as unfeminine” (2).52 Given Aurora Leigh’s portrayal, then, of a female poet paving her own way in the literary marketplace, it makes sense that critics and readers identified the verse novel as addressing the Woman Question. Yet, EBB expressed

52 As Taylor argues further, “Whereas [Felicia] Hemans made her political interests conform on the surface to society’s expectations for ladies, EBB over time declined to write what her age understood to be lady’s verse, aggressively revising poetesses’ subjects and perspectives, their tropes, language, and poetic plots, to declare herself a woman poet rather than a poetess” (4).

surprise that others saw the Woman Question as such a prominent issue in her work, telling her sister Arabella that, “The intention of the poem everywhere is to raise the spiritual above the natural; this is carried out in everything,” (BC 4 October 1856). 53 By having Aurora only refer to herself as a “poet” rather than a “poetess” in the verse novel, EBB thus asks her audience to understand the heroine’s professional development as much like her own—as a writer who initially established herself as a poetess by writing on feminine-appropriate subject matter but who wanted to distinguish herself as a female poet by attending to modern concerns and offering social commentary.54 Much like EBB herself, her female protagonist embodies the tension between the Romantic and Victorian models of authorship in the way she seeks spiritual fulfillment as well as necessary monetary payment to support herself.

EBB

Early in her career, EBB declared that writing poetry was a professional practice. To

Richard Hengist Horne, EBB wrote, “I have worked at poetry—it has not been with me reverie, .. but art. As the physician & lawyer work at their several professions, so have I, & so do I, apply to mine—& this I say, only to put by any charge of carelessness which may rise up to the verge of your lips or thoughts” (BC 20 June 1844). By defining herself in relation to the established professions of medicine and law, EBB asks her reader to view the emerging profession of writer

53 In a letter to Julia Martin, EBB wrote, “Did you see in the list of lectures to be delivered by Gerald Massey, (advertised in the Athenæum) one on ‘Aurora Leigh & the woman’s question.’? I did not fancy that this poem would be so identified as it has been, with that question, which was only a collateral object with my intentions in writing” (BC 14 May 1858).

54 In fact, a relatively minor character Lord Howe uses the term “poetess” once, which is the label’s only usage in the entire narrative (V. 833). On the other hand, the term “poet” appears 85 times in Aurora Leigh. When examining this narrative through the lens of professional identity and vocation, then, critics have drawn from the poet’s life and the verse novel itself to demonstrate how EBB was seeking to present the female poet in a different light. As argued by Meg Tasker, Linda Peterson, SueAnn Schatz, and Anne D. Wallace, depictions of work figure so prominently in the verse novel because EBB understood all too well that professional writing involved commitment and practice. In these ways, EBB is tearing down the “iconic” image of the inspired, spontaneous Romantic poetess to reconstruct her own vision of a woman writer (Salmon 209).

as one that demands ethics and hard work. Certainly, as Salmon points out, the female poet presents herself as the embodiment of “middle-class professionalism” (Salmon 191). After all,

EBB had immense respect for “Men & women of letters,” stating that “I would rather be the least among them, than ‘dwell in the courts of princes’” (BC 28 April 1845). As a rising poet in the literary marketplace, she recognized that her proficiency in the craft of writing was still evolving:

“I have written those poems as well as I could—and I hope to write others better. I have not reached my own ideal, — & I cannot expect to have satisfied other people’s expectation” (BC 10

September 1844). Over a decade later, EBB once again emphasized that writing was indeed

“laborious work, (for much hard working, & hard thinking have gone to it)” (BC 29 December

1856). At the same time, she still recognized that “there is a class…unworthy of literature—& I do not mean to deny it. Only I maintain that literature is a noble profession, & that (with all its temptations) a noble man may hold it nobly” (BC 3 September 1844). While EBB does not elaborate what these “temptations” might be, she does give some hint in a later letter to Robert

Browning: “People who write…by profession… shall I say?...never should do it…or what will become of them when most of their strength retires into their head & heart, (as is the case with some of us & may be the case with all) & when they have to write a poem twelve times over”

(BC 17 February 1845). Here EBB seems to allude to the hack writer who “writes to live” or those “who mistake their vocation in poetry” (BC 26 July 1842; 1 March 1846). She would go on to explain to Browning that, “If I were netting a purse I might be thinking of something else & drop my stitches, — or even if I were writing verses to please a popular taste, I might be careless in it. But the pursuit of an Ideal acknowledged by the mind, will draw & concentrate the powers of the mind—and Art, you know, is a jealous god & demands the whole man…or woman” (BC

17 February 1845). For EBB, a “sincere artist” could never be “careless” in pursuing her

profession (BC 17 February 1845). Due to her religious convictions, EBB read professional ethics through the lens of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry. According to her letters, EBB held that

Jesus Christ was both “the High Priest of our profession” and the “Head” of the “universal church” (BC 19 March 1844; 8-10 January 1854). In this way, Jesus Christ bridged any perceived disparity between her professional endeavors and religious faith; he modeled vocation not in his sacrifice alone but also in his “radical model of love” (Lewis 82). Ultimately, this female poet defined herself as a professional who was also doing, as Lewis articulates, “the work of God”

(BC 15 March 1846; Lewis 71).

In fact, EBB believed that critics and readers often placed limits on the scope or nature of a poet’s literary output, thereby undermining the writer’s divine call. Part of these concerns may have stemmed from EBB’s belief that years as an invalid “recluse” limited her poetic practice

(BC 20 March 1845). She would tell Browning, “Why if I live on & yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that I labour under signal disadvantages… that I am, in a manner, as a blind poet?” (BC 20 March 1845). EBB’s own insecurities about this “seclusion” in the sickroom were no doubt compounded by others’ perceptions of her private life —in fact, one acquaintance referred to her as “a religious hermit” (BC 15 March 1846). The poet humorously protested this type of “honour,” as “It is not my vocation to sit on a stone in a cave—I was always too fond of lolling upon sofas or in chairs nearly as large” (BC 15 March 1846).

However, given these fears of being a “blind poet,” it makes sense that EBB would feel particularly susceptible to the words of others, necessitating the need to further develop and train her own spiritual discernment. To Browning, EBB expressed her concern over the sway literary critics could have over even successful poets like the future Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson: “In execution, [Tennyson] is exquisite,—and, in music, a most subtle weigher out to the ear, of fine

airs. That such a poet shd submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics,.. is much as if Babbage were to take my opinion & undo his calculating machine by it” (BC 17 February 1845).

Regarding Aurora Leigh, EBB recognized that the “success” of the verse novel was never a guarantee, perhaps because she wrote “the spiritual philosophy as was never attempted to be done before by a poem” (BC 18 October 1856). Since critics reacted to Aurora Leigh with comparisons to the notoriously immoral seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn “on one side, and ‘the Bible of the age’ on another.!,” EBB admitted that, “It’s a puzzle to me, altogether– I dont know upon what principle the public likes & dislikes poems” (BC 9-10 April 1857; 29

December 1856). To be sure, EBB considered Aurora Leigh a poetic achievement because the verse novel sold well and “I, Ba, never did anything so good,…I mean, never put out so much general power, as in this poem” (BC 18 October 1856). At the same time, EBB would later sum up her dislike of the way that her poetry was valued in economic terms: “What Aurora

Leigh imagines concerning anything, wont be of weight– Booksellers have more faith in their

‘Readers’ than in Auroras, in judging in mss. Better poets, even, have burrs in their locks, even if they have thrown their bonnet (with burr & bee in it) over the border: & booksellers despise burrs & bees & think little of poets” (BC 1 September 1858). Thus, EBB clearly implies that a poet makes a mistake when relying on others’ opinions to guide her poetic practice, essentially drowning out the “music” of “exquisite” poetry.

At the same time, she desired that others listen to her voice and, in turn, she presented herself as an eager, willing listener. Due to her limited physical engagement with the outside world, EBB wrote in 1832 that she often longed for, “one familiar countenance or voice, to look at, or listen to, the kind assurances of those who have been long known & valued, afford me a pleasure the dearest to me, because the most like the pleasures I have lost” (BC 30 August 1832).

Thus, a true friend performs a type of ministry when she simply listens: “I know that dear Lady

Margaret’s kindness will make her listen to whatever I tell her about my own family…” (BC 14

September 1834). As a writer, then, EBB wanted others to take her voice seriously or, in other words, take her as someone worthy of listening to. Therefore, while devoted to Mary Russell

Mitford, EBB expresses some envy of this fellow writer’s auricular influence: “Of course ladies

& gentlemen like to listen to you & hear you abuse the pen & ink people; and the pen & ink people are proud of you justly, & like to listen to you; and so you, who are, for the rest, a great aristocrat & a great radical,—an adorner of literature & a scorner of letters, live on always happily upon the border” (BC 16 September 1844). In fact, the poet would often use the phrase

“now listen” or some variation to demand her reader’s attention, often adding an exclamation point for emphasis.55 For EBB, reading was, indeed, an act of listening, “And how happy I am to listen to you; when you write such kind openhearted letters to me!” (BC 27 February 1845).

As she counseled Browning, a poet therefore had to pay close attention to not make “lines difficult for the reader to read”; after all, “the uncertainty of rhythm throws the reader’s mind off the rail ... & interrupts his progress with you & your influence with him” (BC 21 July 1845).

Although she assured Browning that he need not have too much anxiety over this tendency since

“The world is very deaf & dumb,” she also believed that “The world being blind & deaf & rather stupid, requires a re-iteration of certain uncongenial truths” (BC 1 May 1843). In a letter written to her sister Arabella, EBB expands on what she believed was important for “doing more good” as a poet:

55 For a few examples of this in her letters, see letter number 418, 433, 690, 893, 928, 1016, 1110, 1123, 1207, 1276, 1925, 1948, 2032, 2044, 2075, 2112, 2241, 2407, 2451, 2459, 2542, 2554, 2571, or 2592 as published in The Brownings’ Correspondence: An Online Edition.

The truth is, I want a knowledge of real life. It would be useful to me in my profession, and I have felt my defects in this respect very much indeed. I have read too many books in proportion to other kinds of knowledge. Now I am most greedy of actual sights, sounds, facts, faces. I want to see everything in the world, good & bad, …nothing scarcely is too low or too high for me…These things supply a defect in my experience, and I am convinced that I shall think & write better & stronger for the knowledge of them… (BC 28 April 1852)

As Linda M. Lewis has argued and EBB herself acknowledges in this passage, “learning does not guarantee wisdom” or insight into the daily struggles of ordinary mortals (Lewis 201). Critics like Gail Turley Houston have highlighted how EBB wanted to develop a poetic voice that addressed not just the “nature of God” but also “the ethical duties of humankind” (75). In seeking to fulfill the dual roles of ethical professional and religious poet, the poet sought to magnify her voice by developing more of “a Godward tendency” and looking outside of herself to society at large (BC 3 December 1842). Certainly, as I argue, EBB saw the spiritually discerning female poet as a type of minister, precisely because she is able to “think and feel” for herself “in matters of religion” (BC 8 January 1844).56 EBB attends to the material and spiritual nature of the poet’s role in the mid-Victorian era by depicting the need for Aurora to learn how to speak and write in her own voice through ministering to others — a ministry where the practice of listening is central.

Aurora Leigh

The Professional Female Poet

Aspiring to become a poet, Aurora moves “To London, to the gathering places of souls,/To live [my life] straight out, vocally, in books” but finds herself frustrated by the mundane tasks often assigned to female writers and the lack of creative freedom a “poetess”

56 See Steve Dillon’s “Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing” and Barbara Barrow’s “Gender, Language, and the Politics of Disembodiment in Aurora Leigh” for more on the importance of the poetic voice in this writer’s oeuvre.

enjoys in the literary marketplace (AL II. 1182-1183). Working late yet another night, the audially distracted Aurora orders her maid Susan to go to bed because “Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,/Tease me like gnats,” although she quickly assures the servant that “I am not cross” (AL III. 28-29, 35). Having alluded to Jesus Christ’s prediction that Saint Peter would be crucified upside down to signify “a multiform of death” just a few lines earlier, EBB’s use of the term “cross” here points to the way that the protagonist is vocationally unfulfilled, as if she has “mislaid the keys of heaven and earth” and is “Head downward” on her own “shameful cross” (AL III. 9, 11, 21, 22). The physical decay of the “overtasked and overstrained/And overlived” Aurora mirrors her spiritual emptiness; she even threatens to burn the letters that

Susan delivers “at such an hour” but cannot after she imagines them “saying each,/‘Here’s something that you know not’” (AL III. 39-40, 32, 44-45). Yet, EBB indicates that the female poet would be foolish to seek any knowledge from her critics because the flattering Hammond, the materialistic Belfair, the narrow-minded Stokes, and the humorous Jobson never consider her as an individual (AL III. 66-99). As the protagonist admits years later, “At least I am a poet in being poor” (AL V. 1211). To these critics, Aurora is just another poetess, a mere producer in the literary marketplace working in a profession that even after immense labor offers little guarantee of financial security.

However, rather than use the professional category of “poet” to describe the ways that she previously conformed to the literary marketplace’s expectations for the female poet, Aurora uses the language of religion: “I did some excellent things indifferently,/Some bad things excellently, Both were praised,/The latter loudest. And by such a time/That I myself had set them down as sins/Scarce worth the price of sackcloth…” (AL III. 205-209). Here, the poet draws from the imagery of mourning and repentance found in the Bible—she cannot even afford to buy

“sackcloth” from her ill-gotten gains and, therefore, repent of the “sins” of seeking after fame over listening to God’s voice.57 Even with the challenges of the literary marketplace, EBB asserts that female poets like Aurora should strive for more than the idolatrous love of “lads and maidens” because this type of love does not teach readers “To love what was more worthy than myself” (AL III. 241, 299). In her misguided effort to be “almost popular” and please a naïve

(albeit listening) audience, Aurora was moving away from the calling of the religious poet, equating these early attempts at poetry to “Mere tones, inorganised to any tune” (AL III. 244,

250). Yet, due to the way the Victorian literary marketplace valued prose over poetry, she must also sacrifice energy and time to adapt to the needs of “cyclopaedias, magazines, and weekly papers” and “resolved by prose/To make space to sphere my living verse” (AL III. 310, 308-309).

Even though Aurora presents herself as practicing a vocation, she also never minimizes that even the divinely inspired poet still works at her art. However, it is only after turning away from the attractions of literary fame that the heroine “stood up straight and worked/My veritable work,” much as she earlier suggested can only be done through Jesus Christ’s atoning work, since

“…He can pluck us from that shameful cross/God, set our feet low and our forehead high,/And show us how a man was made to walk!” (AL III. 327-328, 22-24). While the “critics” cry out against her newfound poetic practice, Aurora chooses to define her work through God’s standard, not the world’s (AL III. 337).

Poetry as a Divine Calling

To support this Christological understanding of her vocation, the heroine depicts God, not humankind, as the director of her reading practice when she first hears the calling to become a

57 According to Easton’s Bible Dictionary, “cloth made of black goats' hair, coarse, rough, and thick, used for sacks, and also worn by mourners (Genesis 37:34; 42: 25; 2 Samuel 3:31; Esther 4:1-2; Psalm 30:11; etc.) and penitents (Matthew 11: 21)” (“Sackcloth”).

poet. Recounting her early education, the half-English, half-Italian Aurora remarks how: “…out of books [my father] taught me all the ignorance of men,/And how God laughs in heaven when any man/ Says ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;/ In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt”

(AL I. 189-193). Given that EBB was originally going to give Aurora the surname “Vane,” which would have sounded like “vain” in a reader’s ear, it makes sense that this passage foreshadows one of the protagonist’s future spiritual lessons: humility (BC 20 October 1856).58 By alluding to

Psalms that depict a sovereign God laughing at those who conspire against him, EBB also points to the protagonist’s struggle to define her faith in relation to man-made systems of knowledge.59

Although the Father God figures prominently in her calling, it is important to note that Aurora’s father is resurrected in a sense through the library he leaves behind for his daughter: “I read much. What my father taught before/From many a volume, Love re-emphasised/Upon the self- same pages…/But, after I had read for memory, /I read for hope. The path my father’s foot/Had trod me out” (AL I.710-712, 730-731). Even with the sense that her beloved parent still oversees her education from beyond the grave, the heroine describes the path to spiritual enlightenment as akin to treacherous waters, since she is like the swimmer who, “…lost breath in my soul sometimes/And cried 'God save me if there's any God.'/But even so, God save me; and, being dashed/From error on to error, every turn/Still brought me nearer to the central truth” (AL I. 796-

800) As Gregory Giles has suggested, the verse novel demonstrates how “The text and a person’s character are equally vulnerable to the succession of stories and meanings projected upon them by untrustworthy interpreters” (AL 126). Dismissing John Locke’s idea that the soul was a

“tabula rasa,” Aurora argues: “…Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say,/A

58 As the heroine states at the beginning of Book V, “AURORA LEIGH, be humble…” (V. 1).

59 See Psalm 2, Psalm 37: 13, Psalm 59:8 (King James Version).

palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph/Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's,–/ The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on/Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps/Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,/Some upstroke of an alpha and omega/Expressing the old scripture” (AL

I. 824-832). By inserting the “monk” as a figure who “defiled, erased, and covered” the truth,

EBB invokes a Protestant view of history which asserts that Catholic authority controlled the dissemination of the Bible, thereby regulating how Christians interpreted the Bible for centuries.

Although searching for spiritual truth can be an arduous task, EBB presents God as interceding in the past and the present. She makes clear through Aurora that the poet may, through practice, “discern” a remnant of God’s presence even in an “obscene text.” While EBB does not rely on aural-centric language, she does use rich sensory terms to describe young

Aurora’s discovery of poetry:

…At last, because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets. As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom—thus, my soul, At poetry's divine first finger touch, Let go conventions and sprang up surprised, Convicted of the great eternities Before two worlds. (AL I. 844-854)

Due to this fiery revelation, the protagonist’s “soul” awakens to “poetry’s divine” “touch” — she now believes in the poet’s transcendent power. Speaking to those who argue that poets lack a prophetic voice in the modern era, Aurora asserts that they are “the only truth-tellers, now left to

God, /The only speakers of essential truth” (AL I. 859-860). Drawing from this transforming experience, Aurora insists on her ability to discern God’s voice, even as others seek to define her vocation.

Acts of Listening and Speaking Which Undermine the Poet’s Vocation

Although there is no denying that EBB later draws attention to male-perpetrated acts of sexual violence in Aurora Leigh, she also demonstrates how men like the heroine’s cousin

Romney also violate women by stifling their voices. Early in the narrative, Aurora interprets

Romney’s “godlike nature” extending to their relationship dynamic: “Once, he stood so near/He dropped a sudden hand upon my head/Bent down on woman's work, as soft as rain?/But then I rose and shook it off as fire,/The stranger's touch that took my father's place” (AL I. 553, 543-

547). Thus, the heroine describes Romney’s touch as a fire that burns and erases her father’s memory; this is the complete opposite of the divine fire that lit her poetic powers earlier.

Whereas Aurora’s father encouraged his daughter to seek after love and truth, Romney defines women’s potential vocations as they relate to men: “Women as you are,/Mere women, personal and passionate,/You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives./Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!/We get no Christ from you, and verily/ We shall not get a poet, in my mind” (AL

II. 220-225). Here Romney suggests that women are not worthy of the poetic vocation because they would favor emotions over intellect in their writing. Yet, as Karen Dieleman contends, a female poet can “unite emotional strength with intellectual understanding” (99). At this point, however, Aurora recognizes that marriage to Romney would limit her voice precisely because he has no faith in a woman’s poetic powers (99). For Aurora, there is danger in the words of her suitor because he uses the language of love in his marriage proposal when in fact, “You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,/A wife to help your ends —in her no end!” (AL II. 402-403). In fact, Aurora’s refusal includes a rather strong indictment veiled in Biblical allusion: ‘Why, sir, you are married long ago./You have a wife already whom you love,/Your social theory./Bless you both, I say. /For my part, I am scarcely meek enough/To be the handmaid of a lawful

spouse./Do I look a Hagar, think you?' (AL II. 408-413). The allusion to biblical story of the handmaid Hagar is significant since she only became a second “wife” to the patriarch Abraham to produce a male heir (Genesis 16: 3, King James Version). Although the protagonist highlights how Romney’s love for his social projects overshadows any potential domestic ties, she lodges an even stronger indictment of man-made social systems where women are valued only in their relation to men and prized for their material productivity.

Perhaps speaking to herself as much as to Romney, Aurora cautions women against the seductive power of the word “love” when defined within patriarchal community. Or, in other words, women need to consider that men might have a different understanding of romantic love:

“Whoever says/To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’ /Will get fair answers, if the work and love/Being good themselves, are good for her—the best/She was born for./Women of a softer mood,/Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,/Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,/And catch up with it any kind of work,/Indifferent, so that dear love go with it” (AL

II. 439-447). Certainly, as Lana L. Dalley has pointed out, Aurora’s “initial refusal to marry is predicated on her desire to achieve independence through work and her rejection of the property laws governing marriage” (530). The female poet carries the imagery of the child-bearing vessel

Hagar further when she states that if she were to marry “poor, good Romney”: “I would not dare to call my soul my own,/Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought/And every heart- beat down there in the bill,/Not one found honestly deductible/From any use that pleased him!

He might cut/My body into coins to give away/Among his other paupers; change my sons,/While

I stood dumb” (AL II. 784, 786-793). Lootens has argued that complying with Romney’s version of marriage would be tantamount to slavery— this vision of “disarticulated bodies” serves to highlight the ways that patriarchal social institutions silence women (47). Although Aurora

condemns Romney for his love of social theory, she too resists love for fear that it will overshadow her own vocation, now that she has “changed/My father’s face” for “The heavens and earth” (AL II. 456-457). Therefore, the artist Aurora and the statistician Romney largely speak two different languages and are incapable of listening to each other because they value dissimilar ways of life.

EBB negatively demonstrates that the way Aunt Leigh tries to re-write Aurora’s narrative, inserting “wife” where “poet” should be, is not unlike Romney’s attempt to make his cousin conform to the model of submissive Victorian femininity. Following her father’s death, the heroine presents her subsequent forced separation from Italy in aural terms by stating that she had “ears too full/Of my father’s silence to shriek back a word” to her “moaning” Italian nurse who watched as a ship bound for England carried away her former nursling (AL I. 227-228, 230).

It is important to note that central to her father’s theology is “Love,…love, love!” (AL I. 212), which he speaks over Aurora like a priest’s final benediction (AL I.212). Torn now from her surrogate mother, Aurora clings to her father’s dying words as a type of gospel, which she cannot fully understand: “In my ears, my father’s word/Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells” (AL I.

318-319). The father’s love-based theology offers a sharp contrast to the theology of her Aunt

Leigh, whom Aurora describes as the quintessential charity woman: “The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts/Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,/Because we are of one flesh after all/And need one flannel…” (AL I. 297-299). EBB further aligns Aurora’s aunt with a

Protestantism that emphasizes religious works since this guardian includes “the Tracts against the times” as part of her niece’s educational regimen; no doubt this was a deliberate slip of the

pen to denote her dislike of early Anglo-Catholics’ Tracts for the Times (I.394).60 As Talia

Schaffer has argued, this type of woman’s work was meant to produce a “virtuous domestic manager” but, when evaluated in economic terms, was “worthless” or, as the protagonist quips,

“symbolic” only (45; 57; AL I. 456). Although Schaffer demonstrates how sewing and other types of domestic work developed “industry in women,” EBB also suggests that defining one’s faith by works inflates the egos of the self-righteous like Aunt Leigh (45).

While charitable to her niece, Aurora’s aunt also reflects how, in Kate Flint’s estimation,

“social practices of seeing” are “potentially cruel” (87). For example, Aunt Leigh examines

Aurora’s face with “two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes” that “stabbed it through and through” (AL

I. 326-327). The aunt’s murderous examination demonstrates how this so-called “virtuous” woman rules by hate rather than love with her eyes symbolizing a false type of spiritual vision

(AL I. 288). When Aunt Leigh later learns of the heroine’s rejection of Romney’s marriage proposal, she promises to “…write a word, and counteract this sin” (AL II. 669). In a type of prayer to God, Aurora implores her aunt to listen: “O sweet my father’s sister, hear my word/Before you write yours…O my God, my God!/God meant me good, too, when he hindered me/From saying 'yes' this morning. If you write/A word, it shall be 'no.' I say no, no!” (AL II.

670-671, 676-678). Here, Aunt Leigh’s emphasis on propriety and social conventions ties back to her works-based righteousness. For example, in describing the litany of dry texts that Aunt

Leigh prescribes for her education, the future poet reflects, “I wonder if Brinvillers suffered more/In the water torture” (I. 465-468). By alluding to the infamous case of a woman tortured for plotting to poison her father and brothers, EBB highlights how Aunt Leigh uses education as a

60 In referring to Anglo-Catholicism, EBB used the rather pejorative term “Puseyite”: “What a singular movement is this Puseyite one—this new emeute in the Church of England! If I got as far as Puseyism I wd go the whole way to Rome” (BC 6 December 1841).

form of discipline, further enforcing patriarchal norms. In these ways, Aunt Leigh is so focused on outward, visual appearance that she closes her ears to Aurora, thereby de-valuing her niece’s voice.

EBB further emphasizes the dangers of listening through her repeated use of the snake as a metaphor for the world’s evil, which destabilizes not only Aurora’s pursuit of her vocation but also relationships in the “Universal Church of Christ” (BC 8 January 1844). Like Adam and Eve,

Aurora’s cousin Romney and the poet herself believe others’ lies. Or, worse still, they deceive themselves with a confidence in their own goodness, which Aurora describes as a lie directly from Satan’s mouth: “‘There is none good save God,’ said Jesus Christ./If He once, in the first creation-week,/Called creatures good,-for ever afterward,/The Devil only has done it, and his heirs./The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;/The world's grown dangerous” (AL IV.

481-486). EBB cautions both men and women against the belief that ministry includes the function of savior: Romney will only “take my my wife/directly from the people” rather than let

Marian stay with Aurora before the marriage; Aurora fails “telling Romney plainly, the designs

Of Lady Waldemar”; and even Lady Waldemar believes she saves Marian from a loveless marriage to Romney, which was “Best” for all involved (AL IV. 368-369; IV 474-475; IX: 95).

In each of these cases, EBB highlights how humans fall short of the ideal as displayed by Jesus

Christ. As Sarah A. Brown has articulated, EBB’s engagement with John Milton’s Paradise Lost via her earlier work A Drama of Exile allows us to read Aurora Leigh “not simply within a biblical, but within a specifically Miltonic, context” (724). Yet it is not necessary to have familiarity with the Genesis story or Milton’s epic to recognize that EBB uses the “snake” as a symbol of the “dangerous” elements that seek to undermine the female protagonist from doing

God’s work.

As a child, Aurora finds herself drawn to the portrait of her dead mother, who becomes a type of saint via her father’s grief. Given the ways that EBB “struggles to balance a tone of respect and tolerance for Roman Catholics,” it makes sense that the heroine’s propensity to worship the visual misleads her: “I stared away my childish wits/Upon my mother's picture, (ah, poor child!)” (Wisdom 134; AL I. 174-175). Even though she has not yet developed her sense of spiritual truth from reading and listening for God’s voice, Aurora’s terrifying vision of “A still

Medusa, with mild milky brows/All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes/Whose slime falls fast as sweat will” foreshadows the ways that snakes function in the text later (AL I.157-158).61

For example, Aunt Leigh expresses a “sedate disgust,/As peradventure she had touched a snake,/A dead snake, mind!” with the “[t]oo passionate” Aurora (AL II. 724-726, 722). Yet,

Aurora later turns Aunt Leigh’s (albeit imagined) characterization on its head when she later describes her aunt as the hated snake, whose “looks/Still cleaving to me, like the sucking asp/To

Cleopatra's breast, persistently/Through the intermittent pantings. Being observed,/When observation is not sympathy,/Is just being tortured” (AL II. 863-868). Once again, Aunt Leigh’s unsympathetic looks are, simply put, death; she embodies hate rather than love with both her eyes and mouth since even her words are meant as “An exorcism against the devildom/Which plainly held me” (AL II. 871-872). When London’s poor begin to fill the church on Romney and

Marian’s wedding day, the protagonist describes the “Lame, blind, and worse —sick, sorrowful, and worse” as moving “slowly toward the altar from the street,/As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole/With shuddering involutions, swaying slow/From right to left, and then from left to right, /In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest” (AL IV. 543, 565-569). As much as this mass of

61 Kathleen Renk notes that the portrait also highlights how this allusion to Medusa-like figures that Aurora projects onto the portrait “contrast markedly with [her] burgeoning spiritual vision and her attempt to shatter iconic female images by becoming a thinking, contemplative young woman” (41).

“miserable men” is visually and audially repulsive, Aurora hints that the high society churchgoers delude themselves if they see themselves as superior in the eyes and ears of God:

“And gradually a ripple of women’s talk/Arose and fell and tossed about a spray/Of English s’s, soft as a silent hush” (AL IV. 610-612). The “s’s” mentioned here certainly sound like a snake’s hiss, which harkens back to Aurora’s earlier denunciation of “Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,/And damned the general world for standing up./Now, may the good God pardon all good men!” (AL IV. 504-506). EBB also sarcastically alludes to Potiphar’s “chaste” wife to demonstrate the inherent hypocrisy of so-called “good” people like Lady Waldemar whose

“shrewd perfidious tongue” destroys all it touches, which the author connects to both the mythological Lamia and Lucifer (AL IV. 493, IV. 996, VI. 1102, VII. 153, VII. 170, VII. 300).62

By asking God to pardon “Good Christians,” EBB suggests that humanity’s need for Jesus Christ is extended not just to apparent sinners like the “miserable men” mentioned in this scene but to the middle and upper-class men and women who sit faithfully in church pews every Sunday.

Aurora therefore seeks to use words for speaking goodness and truth, thereby working against the auricular forces of “the Devil.”

Female Poet as Minister

In Aurora Leigh, Lady Waldemar is perhaps the strongest example of a character who asserts her auricular power to define the protagonist’s ministry. Given the ways that the nineteenth-century poetess’ private life was conflated with her public art, it makes sense that one of her readers, Lady Waldemar, understands Aurora as a “Muse”: “You stand outside,/You artist

62 During the wedding scene, one observer remarks how Lady Waldemar had “taken up the girl, and methodised Leigh’s folly” (AL IV. 651-652). The use of “methodised” here seems to have a religious connotation, particularly since Methodists were well-known for their emphasis on auricular religious practice. Given EBB’s mixed treatment of Methodists in her letters, she may have used this term to draw attention to the way that Lady Waldemar deceives others through her voice. Regardless, EBB repeatedly depicts Lady Waldemar as using her cleverness and wit as a tool to hurt others. As Aurora later observes, “How she talked/To pain me! woman’s spite” (V. 1044-1045)

women, of the common sex;/You share not with us, and exceed us so/Perhaps by what you're mulcted in, your hearts/Being starved to make your heads: so run the old /Traditions of you” (AL

III. 363, 406-411). In a similar way, Lady Waldemar tells Romney that she knows Aurora even though they have never met because “truly we all know you by your books” (AL III. 654).

Although the aristocrat is intent on confessing her love for Romney, Aurora insists that personal knowledge must come before any kind of confession: “‘Forbear,’ I cried. ‘If here's no muse, still less is any saint;/Nor even a friend, that Lady Waldemar/Should make confessions’” (AL III.

422-425). While Maria Wisdom has astutely pointed out that Lady Waldemar’s need to articulate her secrets to the “saint” Aurora ties the aristocrat to Roman Catholicism, the poet’s response to this confession is as much a rebuke of the Roman Catholic priesthood as it is a criticism of the poetess’ sanctification in the literary marketplace (139). Another character will later describe

Lady Waldemar as an “eye-trap” since, to quote Glennis Stephenson, “[a]ll her dealings with others are conducted on a sensual level,” but she could easily be labelled an ear-trap as well (AL

V. 854; 100).

It is no mistake that EBB gives this aristocrat the surname of ancient kings, for she does indeed rule over others through her seductive voice.63 Certainly, Aurora describes Lady

Waldemar’s voice as having a charm that stems from an aristocratic woman: “So wary and afeared of hurting you,/By no means that you are not really vile,/But that they would not touch you with their foot/To push you to your place; so self-possessed/Yet gracious and conciliating”

(AL III. 350-356). The aristocrat’s voice betrays how she really understands herself in relation to

Aurora because she never truly believes that this “Muse” had the power to cleanse her sins. This

“strange confession” was only a means to an end for Lady Waldemar, telling the heroine that she

63 Waldemar, or Valdemar, was the name of several Danish kings during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries—it consists of the elements wald- “to rule” and -mar “fame,” i.e. meaning “famous ruler” (“Waldemar”).

“wanted you,/And gain you!” (AL III. 674, 679-680). Just as Lady Waldemar warned Romney from marrying Marian Erle without Aurora’s blessing, she has performed another type of aural trick on the poet herself. Thus, as much as Aurora protests Lady Waldemar’s commodification of her person, she still listens at length to the aristocrat’s confession for “it takes/An effort in [her] presence to speak truth” (AL III. 355-356). This type of listening, however, is not physically or spiritually edifying —Aurora, “Oppressed in my deliverance,” finds it even difficult to draw breath following Lady Waldemar’s departure, which is “like a silent cloud/That leaves the sense of thunder” (AL III.738, 737-736). Yet, the poet displays a strength of character by turning oppression into action, telling herself, “Then live, Aurora” (AL III. 757). She will not, as Lady

Waldemar decrees, “stand outside” the rest of her sex but seeks out Marian Erle, “this daughter of the people” (AL III. 806). The protagonist then becomes a type of minister not simply because she listens to Lady Waldemar’s quasi-confession but because she does not relinquish religious authority to another, instead feeling and thinking for herself.

Unlike Lady Waldemar’s self-motivated confession, Marian’s subsequent testimony to

Aurora changes the listener for the better, thereby demonstrating how women can and should affirm each other through speaking and listening. EBB, in fact, correlates the heroine’s decision to move from her sequestered life in “a chamber up three flights of stairs” to her developing a more distinctive poetic voice (AL III. 158). While the reader never gets explicit details regarding the subject matter of Aurora’s later “long poem,” the female poet does describe it as containing

“the truth which draws/Through all things upward” (AL V. 1213, VII. 760-761). Given EBB’s own desire to work against the poetess mold, we can infer that this female poet draws from this interaction with Marian to paint the “natural things” and connect them to the “spiritual” (AL VII.

763-764).64 Thus, throughout Aurora’s re-telling of Marian’s “story,” the poet wants the reader to “grow passionate” with her —she does not simply re-write the narrative but gives it “fuller utterance” so that the reader would not ignore this depiction of social injustice (AL III. 828, 847,

828). Certainly, the poet emphasizes how society ignored Marian’s cries from the moment she was “cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,” thus “Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone” (AL III. 844, 876). Additionally, Aurora pays attention to the sounds of Marian’s past, including the Sunday school friend whose “pelting glee” turns into a prostitute’s flirtatious laugh or the unloving mother whose screams “hiss” in her ears as she runs away from forced prostitution (AL III. 915, 1071). Thus, the heroine describes these sharp, painful noises of the unjust “social code” as tearing apart Marian’s “soul and flesh” (AL III. 845, 1138). Certainly,

Marian only begins to experience true physical and spiritual healing when “quiet people…/With wonderful low voices and soft steps” now care for her; “The world so marvelous kind, the air so hushed,/And all her wake-time quiet as her sleep” (AL III. 1109-1110, 1128-1129). During

Marian’s stay in the hospital, the young woman learns that silence is a type of ministry for the audially distressed. When describing Marian’s first meeting with Romney, Aurora significantly depicts her cousin as a sympathetic listener who speaks “gently”: “The ministers in church might say the same;/But he, he made the church with what he spoke,/…And when he said ‘poor child,’

I shut my eyes/To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,/As the ointment-box broke on the

Holy feet/To let out the rich medicative nard” (AL III. 1188, 1213-1214, 1220-1223). Indeed,

Romney performs a type of ministry for Marian by not only listening to her narrative but also “to snatch her soul from atheism,/And keep it stainless from her mother’s face/He sent her to a

64 Leslee Thorne-Murphey argues that EBB intentionally leaves aspects of the narrative “vague”: “Indeed, Barrett Browning purposely leaves many of these details obscure, because she is convinced that true poetry inspires beneficent change rather than predetermines what that change will be” (Thorne-Murphy).

famous sempstress-house/Far off in London, there to work and hope” (AL III. 1229-1232). While

Romney denies the poet’s power, he presents his own vocation as playing out in an acoustic register: “While you sing/Your happy pastorals of the meads and trees,/Bethink you that I go to impress and prove/On stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf, /Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself, /And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice, To make it vocal” (AL II.

1200-1206). As much as Romney insists that society needs no mediator, he does articulate a type of vision like Aurora’s own. By drawing a parallel to Romney’s words and Jesus’ ministry (the

“Holy feet” alluded to earlier), Aurora perhaps betrays her own growing awareness that “Dear

Romney, you’re the poet” and that he is more of a kindred spirit after all (AL IV. 376).65

Although Aurora finds herself newly drawn to her cousin, EBB at this point in the narrative still affirms female friendship over heterosexual attraction. After hearing Marian’s story, the protagonist tells Romney that she can “give you thanks/For such a cousin” and when she is “baffled, chaffed” by the socialist’s continued disavowals of the poetic vocation, she

“turned/And kissed poor Marian, out of discontent” (AL IV. 285-286, 347, 345-346). Later, the lonely Aurora answers the call of her native Italy, “For still I have heard thee crying through my life,” not just to re-discover her vocation but to find community since she believes Romney is going to marry Lady Waldemar (AL V. 1194). On her way to Italy, Aurora visits France and observes that the nation is now devoid of God: “And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,/

Erected for the building of a church,/To build instead a brothel or a prison—/May God save

France! (VI. 62-66). Just as Aurora earlier asked God to pardon all “good men,” she prays for a similar spiritual redemption for France, whose citizens value sensual pleasure (the brothel) or

65 Closer to the end of the text, Aurora does see value in different vocations and, therefore, further aligns herself with Romney: “Let us pray/God's grace to keep God's image in repute;/That so, the poet and philanthropist/(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,/Because we both stand face to face with men/Contemplating the people in the rough,/Yet each so follow a vocation, his/And mine” (VI. 197-204).

civil order (the prison) over devotion to God. When Aurora unexpectedly sees the presumably single Marian carrying a child through a crowded Parisian street, she projects her judgment of

France and Victorian societal standards onto the young woman; “she’s not dead,/But only damned” (VI. 365-366). Thus, Aurora initially rejects Marian and her child with “cold” words because she is only prepared to see the finite and seemingly vice-ridden person, the unwed mother (AL VI. 613). Yet, the heroine’s censorious, narrowly moralizing gaze undergoes a change after she listens to Marian’s narrative and learns that the young woman is a victim of rape; thus, words, not sight, ultimately transform the seer. As Aurora exclaimed while reflecting on the “use of vocal life,” “Virtue’s in the word!” (AL VI. 220, 221). While Wisdom has highlighted how Aurora turns Marian into her “household saint,” it is also important to note how the female poet also frames her relationship with this “sweetest sister” as a loving partnership:

“‘…I am journeying south,/And in my Tuscan home I’ll find a niche/And set thee there, my saint, the child, and thee/And burn the lights of love before thy face/And ever at thy sweet looks cross myself/From mixing with the world’s propensities/That so, in gravity and holy calm,/We two may live on toward the truer life’” (143; AL VII. 117, 125-132). Through these words of reconciliation, Aurora creates a new spiritual family—no longer is it just her Italy but becomes henceforth “our Italy” (AL VII. 142). Thus, EBB positively portrays how women should offer safe “refuge” from man’s cruel words and violent actions.

Listening in the New Jerusalem

In the verse novel’s ending, EBB liberates listening from the negative associations of the serpent’s deception in the Garden of Eden by reconciling Aurora and Romney through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. As much as the literary marketplace is an important space for women writers to practice their vocation, EBB also draws attention to the ways that women also

do God’s work in the domestic space—often embodying God’s love in offering a sympathetic ear to others. Following Marian’s failure to arrive for her appointed wedding to Romney, the heroine contrasts her “tune of comfort” in her cousin’s ear to the “fine thought” of literary sages:

“And yet I've been more moved, more raised, I say,/By a simple word . . a broken easy thing,/A three-years infant might say after you,/A look, a sigh, a touch upon the palm,/Which meant less than ‘I love you’… than by all/The full-voiced rhetoric of those master-mouths” (AL IV. 1090,

1100, 1103-1108). By suggesting that these intimate domestic moments (embodied in the

“infant,” “[a] look, a sigh, or a touch”) have more value than the production of the literary marketplace (“those master-mouths”), EBB emphasizes the importance of the non-writer’s ministry. Thus, a woman cannot look for spiritual value in the burgeoning nineteenth-century literary celebrity culture —as Salmon contends, “Aurora Leigh advocates that the female artist is left ‘hungry’ when she seeks fame over love” (182). Or, as Romney articulates, the cost of fame and fortune is too high if one loses the ability to comfort a grieving friend: “‘Your printer's devils have not spoilt your heart:/That's well’” (AL IV. 1111-1112). Although the protagonist does find comfort in this spiritual sisterhood with Marian, she comes to believe that for herself, albeit not for every woman, a life without romantic love will be “intolerable” (AL VII. 1039). She goes on to paint life without Romney as a type of “death,” further observing that, “I've a heart/That's capable of worship, love, and loss” (AL VII. 463, 734-735). In fact, the “self-despised” Aurora offers a rather dismal view of her current life as a single artist: “Books succeed,/And lives fail.

Do I feel so, at last?” (AL VII. 707, 704-705). The poet uses morbid imagery to describe her existence as she wanders the Florence streets “like a restless ghost” since “‘tis disembodiment/

Without the pang” and, while there is freedom when one is not “possessed” by others, this is still figured as another type of death (AL VII. 1161, 1210-1211, 1203). Even after the triumph of her

most recent publication, Aurora begins to articulate a different type of vocation: marriage too is a calling from God that offers a different kind of reward than the praise of critics.

Thus, the heroine comes to believe that she must speak and listen to the divine in a different way. Although Aurora goes to a Catholic Church for the visual spectacle of the worshippers who “knelt and prayed/Toward the altar’s silver glory,” she also imagines the

“utterance from such faces” with desires and words not unlike the Protestant churchgoers during the Church of England wedding scene: one lady “Looked sick for love” and another turned to

“Our Lady for her gossip” (AL VII. 1225-1226, 1258. 1235, 1242). The female poet condemns both parties by association and draws, once again, on snake imagery to describe these as “poor blind souls/That writhe toward heaven along the devil’s trail” (AL VII. 1258-1259). Although

Aurora has repeatedly defined herself by her vocal utterance, she envisions a God who does not rely on words alone to “listen”:

…Then I knelt, And dropped my head upon the pavement too, And prayed, since I was foolish in desire Like other creatures, craving offal-food, That He would stop his ears to what I said, And only listen to the run and beat Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood— And then I lay and spoke not: but He heard in heaven. (AL VII. 1265-1272)

By admitting that she is indeed “helpless” without divine guidance, Aurora repeatedly, since

“many Tuscan evenings passed the same,” affirms God’s sovereignty and power (AL VII. 1273).

In this way EBB argues that while a worshipper’s words may fail to fully articulate her prayers,

God never fails in listening.

Furthermore, EBB ties Romney’s return to Aurora’s father’s final benediction to “love.”

After imagining a “sea-king,” whose salty kiss Aurora feels upon her lips, she hears “In my

ears/The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!” (AL VIII. 60-6). By announcing Romney’s return first in aural terms, EBB connects the “sound of waters” to Aurora’s father’s words that once “[h]ummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells” (AL I. 320). Having come to believe in the value of divine and human love more fully after suffering through this period of loneliness, the female poet no longer listens ignorantly to her father’s final words. Romney, now “ready for confession,” admits to listening to man over God: “stupid, and distracted with the cries/Of tortured prisoners in the polished brass/Of that Phalarian bull, society,/…I heard the cries/Too close: I could not hear the angels lift/A fold of rustling air, nor what they said/To help my pity”

(AL VIII. 467, 387-389, 392-395). Romney’s so-called confession elicits the same from the protagonist, who “answered him;/ ‘I’ve something for your hearing, also. I/Have failed too” (AL

VIII. 469-471). She goes on to state that they were both “wrong” in the garden ten years before:

“I who talked of art,/And you who grieved for all men's griefs . . . what then?/We surely made too small a part for God/In these things” (AL VIII. 552, 553-557). Yet, Marian is the one who ultimately helps the lovers to reconcile so that they may build a life together. Aurora may portray

Marian as “a saint in ecstasy,” but she also resembles the Holy Ghost, whom Jesus Christ describes as “the Comforter…whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (King James

Version, John 14: 26).66 During her articulation of the merits of singleness, Marian refuses, as

Mary Wilson Carpenter has pointed out, to “worship” Romney and instead chooses for herself a life of comforting and serving others (59). With her final words, Marian tells Romney to “wed a noble wife, /And open on each other your great souls—/I need not farther bless you” (AL IX.

66As Ranen Omer has demonstrated, “Barrett Browning strives to repeat the point that Marian has suffered a symbolic death from which she will never recover, so that as she slips eerily out of the narrative she is finally something less substantial than a real woman, more like a holy ghost” (110).

440-442). Thus, she slips out of the narrative with this blessing of comfort, just like the Holy

Ghost. The now sightless Romney only hears Marian but, through listening, the transformed hero realizes he does not need to carry the weight of being this woman’s, or any other woman’s, savior. As he asserts, “Thank God, who made me blind, to make me see!” (AL IX. 830). Aurora

Leigh ends with Aurora describing a new world order where death and sin no longer taint

“churches,” “economies,” and “law” (AL IX. 947). Here, Jesus Christ is the better poet and better philanthropist because only he can “make all new” in the New Jerusalem (AL IX. 949). With this ending, EBB champions multiple forms of vocation by stressing the ways that each man and woman must listen for God’s voice above the collective voice of humankind, which often points the believer away from love and truth.

WORKS CITED

Aytoun, W.E. “From Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1857).” Aurora Leigh, edited by Margaret Reynolds, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 409-22.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. Edited by Margaret Reynolds, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Barrow, Barbara. “Gender, Language, and the Politics of Disembodiment in Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 53, no. 3, 2015, pp. 243-62.

Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: Clarendon Press 2006.

Brown, Sarah A. “Paradise Lost and Aurora Leigh.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 37, no. 4, 1997, pp. 723-40.

Carpenter, Mary Wilson. “Blinding the Hero.” Differences, vol. 17, no. 3, 2006, pp. 52-68.

Cooper, Helen M. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist. University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Dalley, Lana L. “‘The Least ‘Angelical’ Poem in the Language’: Political Economy, Gender, and the Heritage of Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 44, no. 4, 2006, pp. 525-42.

Dieleman, Karen. Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter. Ohio University Press, 2012.

Dillon, Steve. “Barrett Browning's Poetic Vocation: Crying, Singing, Breathing.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 39, no. 4, 2001, pp. 509-32.

Easton, Matthew George. “Entry for Sackcloth,” Easton’s Bible Dictionary, 1897, biblestudytools.com. Accessed 1 January 2019.

Eisner, Eric. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom.” Victorian Review, vol. 33, no. 2, 2007, pp. 85-102.

Eliot, George. “Belles Lettres.” Westminster Review, January 1857, pp. 306-10.

Giles, Gregory. “‘The Mystic Level of all Forms’: Love and Language's Capacity for Meanings in Aurora Leigh.” VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 123-36.

Houston, Gail Turley. Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God. Ohio State University Press, 2013.

Lewis, Linda M. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Spiritual Progress: Face to Face with God. University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Lootens, Tricia A. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Princeton University Press, 2017.

McSweeney, Kerry. Introduction. Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. i-xxxv.

Patmore, Coventry. North British Review, February 1857, pp. 443-62.

Peterson, Linda H. “‘For My Better Self’: Auto/biographies of the Poetess, the Prelude of the Poet Laureate, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh." Poetry Criticism, edited by Michelle Lee, vol. 62, Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/apps/doc/H1420064762/LitRC?u=unc_ma in&sid=LitRC&xid=092d8597. Accessed 15 Nov. 2018. Originally published in Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing, University Press of Virginia, 1999, pp. 109-45.

Omer, Ranen. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Apocalypse: The Unraveling of Poetic Autonomy.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 39, no. 2, 1997, pp. 97-124.

Renk, Kathleen. “Resurrecting the Living Dead: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetic Vision in Aurora Leigh.” Studies in Browning and His Circle, vol. 23, 2000, pp. 40-9.

Salmon, Richard. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Schatz, SueAnn. “Aurora Leigh as Paradigm of Domestic-Professional Fiction.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 1, 2000, pp. 91-117.

Shires, Linda. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Cross-Dwelling and the Reworking of Female Poetic Authority.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 327-43.

Stephenson, Glennis. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love. UMI Research Press, 1989.

Stodart, M.A. “Poetry and the Poetess.” Aurora Leigh, edited by Margaret Reynolds, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 387-91.

Stone, Marjorie. “A Heretic Believer: Victorian Religious Doubt and New Contexts for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Drama of Exile,’ ‘The Virgin Mary’ and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.’” Studies in Browning and His Circle: A Journal of Criticism, History, and Bibliography, vol. 26, 2005, pp. 7-40.

Sweet, Nanora. “Hemans [née Browne], Felicia Dorothea (1793–1835), poet.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 24, 2008. Oxford University Press. Date of access 2 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-12888.

Tasker, Meg. “Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Novel Approach to the Woman Poet.” Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry, edited by Barbara Garlick, Rodopi, 2002, pp. 23-41.

Taylor, Beverly. “EBB among the Nightingales: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans, and Generative Rivalry in the Poetess Tradition.” Women's Writing, 2018, pp. 1-19.

Thorne-Murphy, Leslee. “Prostitute Rescue, Rape, and Poetic Inspiration in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.” Women's Writing, vol. 12, no. 2, 2005, pp. 241-58.

Venables, G. S. Saturday Review, 27 December 1856, pp. 776-78.

Wallace, Anne D. “‘Nor-in-Fading-Silks-Compose”: Sewing, Walking, and Poetic Labor in Aurora Leigh.” ELH-English Literary History, vol. 64, no. 1, 1997, pp. 223-56.

Wisdom, Maria. Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home. Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Brownings’ Correspondence. Wedgestone Press, 2019, https://www.browningscorrespondence.com, Accessed 1 January 2019.

“Waldemar I.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, Paul Lagasse, and Columbia University, Columbia University Press, 8th edition, 2018. Credo Reference, http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/colu mency/waldemar_i/0?institutionId=1724. Accessed 28 Dec. 2018.

CHAPTER 3: THE CALLING TO DETECTION: THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’S LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET (1862)

Over one hundred and fifty years after the height of Lady Audley’s Secret’s popularity, scholars largely classify the novel as innately secular. For example, Patrick Brantlinger acknowledges that “the sensation novel involves both the secularization and the domestication of the apparently higher…mysteries of the Gothic romance” while also insisting that this genre emphasizes material concerns over spiritual ones, with mysteries like Lady Audley’s Secret having “not even a quasi-religious content” (4). By dismissing or minimizing the theological content in Lady Audley’s Secret, however, we overlook why conservative commentators found this novel and sensation fiction in general so threatening to the Protestant religious establishment. Most notably, the Reverend Henry Longueville Mansel’s oft quoted 1863 review describes sensation fiction as novels that preach “to the nerves”; certainly, his analogy demonstrates how this genre was, in fact, understood as a type of unorthodox commentary on religion (qtd. in Woolf 190). In questioning traditional readings of the Bible, unsympathetic depictions of fallen women, and the nature of Christian conversion, Lady Audley’s Secret is subversive not because the novel ignores religion but precisely because it does engage with religious issues. I therefore want to bring attention to the ways that Mary Elizabeth Braddon regularly commented on the religious debates of the mid-Victorian era through her inclusion of

Scripture, typology, and theologically attuned characters throughout her fiction in the 1860s. In

Lady Audley’s Secret specifically, I argue that Braddon explores how professional work remained connected to vocation and religious calling through the character Robert Audley.

Working within criticism that supports a re-examination of sensation fiction in relation to growing religious pluralism, I draw from historian Andrew Tate’s scholarly work to argue that

Braddon understood that Victorian conversion narratives were not reserved to sermons or religious tracts but were “an animating presence in the popular imagination” (3).67 In the decade leading up to the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret, there was a “lack of consensus on how an individual was to find salvation” in different Protestant communities; these “conflicting images of regeneration became a key feature of the literature and art of the period, even in work that was not consciously ‘religious’” (Tate 8). Thus, I contend that Braddon specifically engages with the evangelical conversion narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret by presenting vocation as a type of religious trial, where the newly converted hero turned private investigator must learn to submit to

“Providence.”

Although critics frequently describe Robert Audley as an “amateur detective,” I argue that he reflects ideas of both the amateur and the professional, thereby demonstrating that these distinctions were less clear in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in regards to detective or policing work. Both nineteenth-century periodicals and fictional accounts of private investigators paint a complicated picture of a professional that served a necessary societal role but violated the sanctity of the Victorian domestic space. Thus, writers invariably described private investigators as spies, whose unclean work sullied not only their hands but also their moral characters.

Working against the negative view of the detective in the Victorian press and culture, Braddon

67 More recently, critics such as Michael Diamond and Mark Knight have begun to re-examine sensation fiction in relation to religious movements and biblical hermeneutics (Diamond 117-119; Knight 577-586). Knight has also pointed out that sensation fiction regularly considers issues like “interpretation, judgment, and evidence” which “lends [the genre] to religious reflection without being an exclusively theological subject” (461). Additionally, Pamela K. Gilbert makes the important observation regarding Rhonda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) that the novel works within the “tradition of the religious conversion narrative…Victorian readers, struggling with doubts raised by science and philosophy, as well as religious diversity, would have been alert to [the heroine’s] familiar narrative of unbelief and spiritual crisis” (“Introduction” 17-18).

turns Robert into an agent of divine justice by blending the detective’s pursuit of supervision and disciplinary measures with God’s omnipotence and all-seeing eye of justice. To further the connection between professional ethics and vocational calling, Braddon has the protagonist temporarily embody the role of the private investigator, rather than the lawyer, to seek justice for his friend George Talboys and to expel the evil (i.e. Lady Audley) from Audley Court after his conversion. As the critical work that I later draw from suggests in more detail, Robert must become a private investigator because there is a “ritual nature” to “detective fiction, with the detective as the priest who performs the exorcism” (Brantlinger 21). Braddon therefore presents

Robert as occupying two complementary, rather than antithetical, roles: the rising professional detective and the minister. Within the trappings of the nineteenth-century conversion narrative,

Robert’s work as a private investigator then becomes evidence or, in religious terms, testimony of his regenerated self. At the same time, Braddon questions the evangelical belief that conversion led to an instantaneous “transformation of identity” due not only to Robert’s often reluctant, wayward pursuit of Lady Audley but also to his overpowering attachment to George

(Tate 4). Even in Robert’s relationship with George, Braddon engages with religious tropes since the private investigator adamantly believes that his friend is a Christological type and a martyr to feminine vice. While faith is “evidence of things not seen,” the hero’s search for the truth is muddied by questions of justice and mercy as he tries to collect tangible evidence of Lady

Audley’s guilt, which ultimately culminates in her confession of various sins (King James

Version, Hebrews 11:1). In this way, the hero is a less than ideal minister, who becomes a figure defined by evangelical judgment rather than a compassionate listening. Throughout the narrative then, Braddon frames the hero’s desire to get at the truth and set things right not simply as a legal inquiry but as a calling from God.

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Ethics and the Private Investigator

Better almost that moral delinquencies were altogether undiscovered than that society should be harassed, and mutual confidence and the sanctities of domestic life dislocated by the bare suspicion that our steps are dogged and every action misinterpreted by the hired agency of fellows who actually bring into English life the vile practices which fiction has reserved for the assassins and bravos of romance, or the terrible familiars of the novelist’s Inquisition. —The Examiner, 810

While this 1859 excerpt from The Examiner would appear to favor the hyperbolic only for dramatic effect, this writer articulates a fear shared by numerous mid-Victorians that a new figure in the professional landscape—the private investigator—was dangerous and immoral.

Although this commentator linked private investigators to “the assassins and bravos of romance, or the terrible familiars of the novelist’s Inquisition,” this profession originates out of the detective or police work done by private citizens (The Examiner 810). As Haia Shpayer-Makov has demonstrated in her study of the detective in modern Britain, “private agents” had long worked to catch criminals and collect evidence for some type of monetary remuneration (3).

Before the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, the Bow Street Runners in London acted as the first modern police force but also worked for private citizens (Sims x-xi; Shpayer-Makov 23). Even after the establishment of a police force in London, much of the country had limited or no government-sanctioned oversight in the prevention and detection of crime. Thus, as Shpayer-

Makov notes, “private services filled a vacuum in an underpoliced society, in which it was generally up to individuals to decide whether to take action if a crime was committed” (22).

Despite the need for this type of private enforcement, the very fact that “crime fighters needed to be in close proximity to the underworld” meant that they could also be “susceptible to foul practices” (Shpayer-Makov 29). In fact, the periodical press would often use the designation of “spy” rather than “private investigator” or “private detective,” with one commentator going so far as to write that, “Of all who deserve this degrading appellation, the most thoroughly and

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intensely despicable are those who pursue their victims into the seclusion of domestic life, and the unsuspecting confidence of bed-chamber privacy” (The Train 41, emphasis mine). Within this reading, the male private investigator’s professional practice was everything that is not

“manly and honourable”: “There are proper places for the human eye, ear, and nose; and these places were certainly never designed to include the contiguity of key-holes, or of gimlet-holes through the doors of private sitting-rooms” (The Train 43, 41). This portrayal of the private investigator as an unnatural practitioner who violated the sanctity of domestic life also played out in the periodical coverage of the 1859 divorce suit of Sopwith v. Sopwith. Describing the respondent Mr. Sopwith as “a widower of mature age, of blameless character, and exercising an honorable profession, in which moral rectitude is a matter of the plainest interest…,” the writer draws the reader’s attention to the fact that a surgeon, tasked with saving human lives, is the moral opposite of the unscrupulous private investigator (810).68 The commentator goes on to describe how Mrs. Sopwith employed a detective to procure evidence that her husband had committed adultery: “For many months the practiced skill of the spy is unsuccessful. Failing in his assigned duty, he is superseded by another detective, who, with the aid of the stock apparatus of discarded servants, keyhole peepers, and shadow detectors, supported by the usual props of village gossip and milliners’ scandal, succeeds in manufacturing a case…” (The Examiner 810).

Due to the need to produce incriminating evidence in a court of law, the implication is that the

Mrs. Sopwiths of the world do not care if the evidence is “found or made” (The Examiner 810).

Thus, the private investigator, whose “avowed business is to collect evidence,” is willing to do anything for a profit, even if that means committing perjury or introducing “shadow evidence”

68 From a different article in The Examiner, we learn that Mr. Sopwith is a surgeon (843).

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(The Examiner 810).69 Although moralists wanted to prevent the encroachment of unsavory professional practices in the Victorian home, the growth of this industry signified that there was clearly a demand for private and public forms of policing in mid-nineteenth-century society.

Much to the chagrin of these periodical writers, this “dirty vocation” was here to stay (The

Examiner 810).

Despite these types of strong indictments, mid-Victorian observers of the private investigator still recognized that the “state of society artificial and complex as ours” necessitated

“detectives” and that these professionals were, in fact, “really doing good to our brother men”

(The Examiner 810; Forrester 77).70 Nineteenth-century fiction writers, for example, may have been more inclined to paint sympathetic portraits of new professions precisely because the nineteenth century was a period where authorship was also defining itself in the ever-growing literary marketplace. Additionally, literary professionals probably recognized that private investigators’ involvement in divorce cases contributed to their negative depiction in the press.

Therefore, these writers paint a rather different view of the private investigator, one in which he could also be a diligent, trustworthy professional who sorts out the messy business of crime and mystery in nineteenth-century life.71 While Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were among the

69 After all, as another writer observes regarding this profession, “When a fellow so far overcomes his manhood as to become a spy, how can he be expected to stickle at a downright falsehood?” (The Train 43). However, the fact that there was a general anxiety about “dangerous agents” being everywhere only enforces how “Spying has lately become a regular business” (The Examiner 835).

70 As the fictional private detective Mrs. G— opines. “My trade is a necessary one, but the world holds aloof my order” (quotd. in Sims 31).

71 Although Edgar Allan Poe is often acknowledged as the father of detective fiction with his publication of private detective mysteries in the 1840s, scholars also point to William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams as an earlier incarnation of the detective since the protagonist is “driven by a private grievance and an inner determination to unmask the identity of the criminal” (Shpayer-Makov 229). It is unclear how much of an influence Poe had on writers like Braddon, given that his mysteries did not gain widespread popularity until the 1870s (Shpayer-Makov 232). Yet, British publishers sold the C. Auguste Dupin stories during the 1840s and 1850s, with mid-Victorian writer Andrew Forrester citing Poe in multiple fictional accounts as an author of detective fiction (Sims 31).

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first Victorians to depict amateur and professional detectives in their fiction, lesser known writers like W.S. Hayward and Andrew Forrester also demonstrated ways that these figures provided a necessary service to private individuals seeking justice and truth.72 Certainly, sensation fiction, often filled with the crimes, misdeeds, and secrets of the upper classes, provided a perfect forum for writers to incorporate investigators; in fact, “many of the investigations were conducted by family members or friends, far from a police environment”

(Shpayer-Makov 232). Thus, as Shpayer-Makov posits, the “setting in these works was an imagined society in which respectable citizens policed each other” but, at the same time, also reflected the “lingering traditions of law enforcement in real life” (232, 256). Even though the private investigator would eventually evolve into “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine” Sherlock Holmes, the more fallible mid-Victorian private investigator reveals how

“Informal justice continued to be widely practised” throughout the nineteenth century (qtd. in

Summerscale 282; Shpayer-Makov 257). In fact, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction reflects a belief that the search for truth was both “a mysterious intuitive art and also a scientific mode of discovery”; she often affirms that villains must ultimately face “God’s judgment” rather than the law of men (Beller 62; Beller 57). As I argue, Braddon, then, sought to re-write accusations against real-life private investigators by portraying her fictional detective Robert Audley as deriving his professional ethics from his new-found Christian faith.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Even though Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s unorthodox personal choices have often colored critics’ readings of her oeuvre, she was committed to religious principles like love, sympathy,

72 For examples of Hayward’s and Forrester’s fiction, see The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (ed. Michael Sims).

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and good works. For contemporaries like Henry James, she wrote her fiction “with a woman’s finesse and a strict regard to morality” (qtd. in Beller 88).73 Braddon certainly considered religious teaching when she confessed to her mentor Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton that the writer’s calling seemed to run afoul of the Biblical teaching on serving “two masters”: “I want to be artistic & to please you. I want to be sensational, & to please Mudie’s subscribers. Are these two things possible, or is the stern scriptural dictum not to be got over, ‘Thou canst not serve God &

Mammon.’ Can the sensational be elevated by art, & redeemed from it’s [sic] coarseness”

(Devoted Disciple 14).74 Braddon may have wanted to redefine the sensation genre but, in doing so, she often turned to themes found throughout the New Testament, “a book to be read for ever

& ever,” to explore the complexities of modern religious life (14). As Michael Diamond, Mark

Knight, and Emma Mason have argued, Victorian novelists were aware that their depictions of even the more serious elements of religion fell under the heading of “sensational” due to

73 For example, Braddon’s choice to become a professional actress would have been considered scandalous, if not sinful, by the religious establishment, as it was by her extended family (Carnell 16-17). Even though this type of personal decision worked against Victorian morality, Braddon would later distinguish herself from writers like George Sand, who was “spooney when virtuous and unnecessarily immoral at other times” (qtd. in Wolff 234).

74 Although raised in Protestantism by her mother Fanny, Braddon had many Catholic as well as Protestant relatives (Beller 43). Fanny’s desire to remain in the Church of England and raise her children Protestant (even after her marriage to Braddon’s Catholic father) may have been in part due to her sister Priscilla’s second marriage to a Devonshire clergyman, Mr. Cowland (Evil 44). In her unfinished autobiography Before the Knowledge of Evil, Braddon would reflect fondly on a childhood visit to Devonshire and spoke highly of her maternal uncle Cowland: “He was a man of singular refinement, an exemplar of the apostolic virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and assuredly with him charity was the greatest of the three” (67). As her later writing would reflect, Braddon was an advocate of compassionate religious practice over strict theology. For example, a four-year-old Braddon was drawn to “worship” saints like Francis of Assisi, “who was sympathy incarnate, namely in his love of the brute creation,” under the auspices of her paternal Catholic grandmother (3). Yet, it was her “pious governess” Miss Parrot who first introduced her to the Bible and “taught” the seven-year-old Braddon to “adore the Divine exemplar of St. John’s Gospel” (3). Although a mature Braddon would recall the “dryness” and “drabness” of long church services, she found the narrative of Jesus Christ’s sacrificial love as having a “peculiar power to [her] imagination” (112, 85). Unlike the formal ritualism of Anglicanism, the Gospel seemed to excite a different set of feelings in the young Braddon: “I brooded on the image of the Redeemer, and on the promise that He would come back to earth, and my almost passionate desire was that He would come now, now in this day in which I lived, that we would see Him as in His earthly pilgrimage healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, moving among us as a radiant and splendid form of Divinity in human shape” (85). Even though contemporary critics of sensation fiction argued that the genre worked against the orthodox teachings of the Church of England, Braddon believed in the orthodox tenets of Protestantism regarding Jesus Christ’s divinity and God’s eternal plan for humankind.

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passionate debates surrounding issues such as the inerrancy of Scripture, Anglo-Catholicism, and religious pluralism during the mid-nineteenth century.75 Braddon even admitted in another letter to Bulwer-Lytton that the transcendence of religion often seemed to still leave questions about how to live out one’s faith in the day to day: “There has arisen in my mind of late a kind of infidelity—as to religion, there I cling to the simplest faith, & have no wish to question anything so harmonious & beautiful as Christianity—but as to this lower life, & the trouble we give ourselves in living it” (16). Perhaps she was alluding to her own moral scruples regarding her romantic relationship with publisher John Maxwell, who was not free to marry due to his marriage to a “defunct” woman living out her days in a Dublin asylum (Wolff 103, 105). Even though my reading of Lady Audley’s Secret works against more secular understandings of the novel, I wish to return to what Victorian contemporaries and twentieth-century critics like Robert

Wolff have already asserted: Braddon was deeply interested in the religious debates of her day even though her personal life did not always reflect conservative Protestant values.76

To better contextualize Robert’s calling, it is important to consider Braddon’s engagement with the complexity of religious conversion in the two novels following the

75 See Diamond’s Victorian Sensation, or, The Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain, as well as Knight and Mason’s Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction.

76 While at least one nineteenth-century critic stated that Braddon’s works lacked a clear Christian message and accused her of only writing in a “tabernacle manner” to win over readers, I assert that her desire to engage with religious topics was as sincere as those of contemporaries like Charlotte M. Yonge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (qtd. in Wolff 246). Robert Wolff sums it up best when he observes that Braddon was a “sensible, no-fuss-about-it, Church of England Christian, with distaste for the evangelical Low-Church fervor with which she endowed some of the characters in her novels, and no interest in the ritualistic Catholic practices fashionable among High-Church people” (266). The Maxwell-Braddon household reflected a tolerance towards different religious beliefs that would come to define Victorian England as the nation moved into the twentieth century (246). Like their father, Maxwell’s children from his first marriage were practicing Catholics, and while Braddon was an Anglican, “she was deeply tolerant of ‘the older faith’ and its observances” due, no doubt, to her own Catholic relatives (107). When Braddon’s beloved Protestant mother died, the Catholic stepdaughters “burned candles at the head and foot of the coffin and watched around the clock. [Braddon] could not deny them ‘the privilege of administering to her in the more poetic spirit of the older faith’” (qtd. in Wolff 227). In later life, Braddon regularly attended Anglican services and even met the Archbishop of York in 1906 (Wolff 375).

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publication of Lady Audley’s Secret. The anti-heroine Olivia Marchmont in John Marchmont’s

Legacy (1862-1864) is a clergyman’s daughter who pursues charity work due to “want of worthy employment” (JML 68). Braddon plays with ideas of salvation and vocation when her narrator observes, “If Olivia Marchmont could have gone to America, and entered herself amongst the feminine professors of law or medicine,—if she could have turned field-preacher, like simple

Dinah Morris, or set up a printing-press in Bloomsbury, or even written a novel,—I think she might have been saved” (JML 68). Unable to find a suitable vocation, Olivia settles for a loveless but economically secure marriage. Yet, Braddon makes clear that such a marriage will never satisfy a passionate soul like Olivia. Instead, the anti-heroine ultimately channels her ardent energy into a mission of revenge against the man she always loved. Despite all her machinations,

Olivia ends up no better off than she was at the beginning of the novel: she is once again living with her father and continues to carry out the same type of monotonous charity work. Although

Olivia does demonstrate a “remorse” for her past sins, she is left “not quite right in mind” (JML

248). In this way, Braddon allows for some ambiguity whether Olivia will ever find any form of redemption in philanthropic work. Braddon further problematizes the nature of religious conversion when Isabel Gilbert in The Doctor’s Wife (1864) falls under the influence of a popular evangelical preacher after hearing “one of his awakening sermons” (TDW 283). While the narrator assures the reader that Isabel has now turned to the “One who was worthy of all worship,” she has merely turned from worshipping the aristocratic Roland Landsell to the clergyman Austin Colborne; as one character observes, “She is just the sort of person to fall in love with a popular preacher” (TDW 285, 297). When seeking to live a more devout life, Isabel draws continually from Mr. Colberne’s sermons and is “only too eager to do something,— something that Mr. Colborne himself might approve,—as an atonement for her sin” (TDW 316,

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318). In fact, Braddon frames Isabel’s extramarital entanglement with Roland as a type of false worship rather than being sexual in nature: “Roland Lansdell's wealth and position had never tempted her; it had only dazzled her; it had only seemed a bright and splendid atmosphere radiating from and belonging to the Deity himself” (TDW 357). Given the novel’s preoccupation with different forms of worship, the anti-hero Roland’s dramatic death-bed conversion to

Protestantism enforces the belief that worshipping false gods (in his case, Isabel) is all vanity when death and God’s judgment are the universal fate of humankind. Within the novel, religious conversion and the “chastening influence of sorrow” go hand and hand since it is only after the deaths of Isabel’s husband and Roland that the heroine is “transformed” into a “good and noble woman” (TDW 402-403). Therefore, Braddon does not portray religious conversion as a radical turn to the divine even though both Olivia and Isabel find solace in religious faith and recognize the error of their ways.

Although critics of Lady Audley’s Secret have acknowledged that Robert’s transformation into a respectable lawyer by the novel’s end depends on his investigation and containment of Lady Audley, critics have largely dismissed or minimized how his conversion to

Christianity impacts his detective work.77 As D. A. Miller famously argues in The Novel and the

Police, the detective is a secular agent who embodies a type of “supervision” that allows him to turn the most “trifling detail” into an indication of the criminal’s guilt (18, 27). In his reading of

77 See Pamela K. Gilbert’s Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, Simon Petch’s “Robert Audley’s Profession,” and Mariaconcetta Costantini’s Sensation and Professionalism in the Victorian Novel for readings that examine Robert as a professional figure. Also see Gilbert’s “Madness and civilization: Generic opposition in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret,” Mary S. Cropp’s “A Detective for Us Ordinary Folk?: The Reinscription of the Dupin-Esque Detective in Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret,” and Rachel Heinrich’s “Critical Masculinities in Lady Audley’s Secret” for readings that consider the detective’s masculinity in light of Christian morality.

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clerical detectives in the twentieth-century novel, William David Spencer points out that readings like Miller’s have historically led critics to argue that:

God as orderer and focal point of unity was displaced by secular society, priest displaced by police, and the sacred act of repentance and reconciliation displaced by indictment and punishment. The detective as secular priest now identified the person out of unity, the antisocial criminal, and exacted society's punishment. Criminals were called to pay their debt to society. Social unity was in that way restored. (10)

Spencer’s argument then returns us to what at least one contemporary critic recognized:

Robert’s calling to seek justice for George had ties to the supernatural because “The astuteness of the villain-finder is preternatural. He sees a hand you cannot see, he hears a voice you cannot hear. At length, the final link in the chain of evidence is secure” (qtd. in Heinrich 105). Thus, I draw from William Auden, who argues that a detective must uncover the truth behind a murder to fulfill his role as a moral agent because “Murder is an offense against God and society”

(Auden 149). Even though Lady Audley is guilty of the attempted murders of George Talboys and Robert himself, this private investigator spends most of the novel convinced that his aunt did commit murder. Motivated by this distinct calling to appease God and society, Robert seeks justice for George, reflecting the Protestant and very Victorian desire for “order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change” (quotd. in Paul 9). As argued by Robert S. Paul, a mid- nineteenth-century novelist like Braddon would have recognized that values like justice and truth carried not only temporal but eternal significance for Victorian readers, many of whom still held onto traditional religious values like Providence (20). While critics have been divided over the years regarding Robert’s treatment of Lady Audley, the need to punish the would-be murderess for her sins, rather than her crimes, suggests that Braddon was appealing to the society’s spiritual roots that demanded earthly and divine justice for unrepentant fallen women. According to W.H.

Auden, “Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer…[because the murderer has] demonic

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pride” (152). Within Auden’s reading of detective fiction, Lady Audley has therefore defied God and must receive punishment for her “demonic pride”; she cannot and will not have a future

(152). Braddon’s private investigator must, therefore, work outside the court of law and undergo a moral transformation to resolve the mystery surrounding George’s disappearance as well as ensure that justice is served against Lady Audley.78 Although Braddon validates the necessity of ethics in professional life by tying Robert’s own conversion to his private investigative work, she also troubles religious conversion since the hero fixates on implementing justice rather than extending mercy.

Lady Audley’s Secret

The Necessity of Converting the Hero

To best understand Robert’s transformation from an indolent barrister to a private investigator, I begin my discussion of Lady Audley’s Secret by focusing on Robert’s conversion to Christianity. After Robert’s friend George Talboys goes missing, the protagonist is increasingly haunted, as Braddon indicates in a chapter title, by “Troubled Dreams” (99). Ann

Cvetkovich notes that the narrator’s description of one of Robert’s dreams is framed as a

“horrifying and apocalyptic moment” (62):

Once he was walking in the black shadows of this long avenue, with Lady Audley hanging on his arm, when suddenly they heard a great knocking in the distance, and his uncle’s wife wound her slender arms around him, crying out that it was the day of judgment, and that all wicked secrets must now be told. Looking at her as she shrieked this in his ear, he saw that her face had grown ghastly white, and that her beautiful golden ringlets were changing into serpents, and slowly creeping down her fair neck. (May 1862 65, emphasis mine)

78 Critics have indeed begun to recognize that Braddon does explore several religious issues in Lady Audley’s Secret and, through this engagement, she repeatedly highlights the ways that the supernatural continues to encroach on modern life. See Susan David Bernstein’s Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture, Patrick R. O’Malley’s Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, Elizabeth L. Steere’s “‘I Thought You was an Evil Spirit’: The Hidden Villain of Lady Audley's Secret,” and Emily E. Auger’s “Male Gothic Detection and the Pre-Raphaelite Woman in Lady Audley's Secret.”

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Natalie M. Houston argues that this passage’s intense symbolism may have been too revealing and led Braddon to omit it from subsequent editions (34). While modern readers may be quick to dismiss Robert’s dream as a “troubling” revelation of Lady Audley’s past and future crimes,

Victorian readers would have recognized his vision as a revelation from God in the tradition of prophetic dramas of Biblical figures like Daniel, Ezekiel, and the Apostle John. Here God’s counsel to Robert uses the serpent from the Genesis account of original sin, thereby once again connecting Lady Audley to Eve. He also becomes increasingly introspective and admits to failing in his chosen profession: “[I] have shrunk from those responsibilities and duties, as I have from all the fatigues of this troublesome life. But we are sometimes forced into the very position we have most avoided, and I have found myself lately compelled to think of these things” (123).

Given the religiously charged nature of Robert’s dreams, it is not surprising that his language begins to have an increasingly moral tone, particularly when he speaks of “solemn responsibilities” and “sacred duties” of a barrister (123).

After searching his missing friend’s possessions, the protagonist begins to lament his fruitless efforts to discover the truth behind his friend’s disappearance. His words, “What am I to do?,” become like a type of prayer. The narrator then describes how Robert:

rested his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. The one purpose which had slowly grown up in his careless nature until it had become powerful enough to work a change in that very nature, made him what he had never been before--a Christian; conscious of his own weakness; anxious to keep to the strict line of duty; fearful to swerve from the conscientious discharge of the strange task that had been forced upon him; and reliant on a stronger hand than his own to point the way which he was to go. Perhaps he uttered his first earnest prayer that night…When he raised his head from that long and silent revery, his eyes had a bright, determined glance, and every feature in his face seemed to wear a new expression. ‘Justice to the dead first,’ he said, ‘mercy to the living afterwards.’ (159, emphasis mine)

In recognizing his own “careless” nature, Robert realizes he is guilty of the sin of sloth.

Neither diligent nor enjoying the fruit of his labor, the protagonist sees that he is a sinner in need

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of God’s divine guidance, for he is now “conscious of his own weakness.” The narrator explicitly states here that the hero becomes “a Christian” in this conversion scene. While

“anxious” and “fearful” of this “strange task,” Robert accepts what God has “forced upon him”; a just punishment for, as he later observes, his “purposeless, vacillating life” (361). Here the novel suggests that all human flesh is weak and conversion is necessary because the hero requires this divine support, support that is not susceptible to temptations, longing, desire, etc.

Robert becomes an evangelical, which the language of justice and mercy in this passage highlight, because he looks outside his body for strength and guidance — and to revive his masculinity. Ultimately, these are all bound up together with the novel’s concerns about the frailty of human flesh. Therefore, by converting this ne’er-do well gentleman into a Christian,

Braddon begins her hero on a journey out of his own weaknesses and longings — a journey out of the body’s trappings.

Calling and the Private Investigator

To mature into a hero worthy of his calling as a private investigator, the protagonist must reject the decadent Lady Audley in favor of the wronged George, who becomes a Christological type. Braddon makes clear that prior to Robert’s conversion, he is a materialist who only displays any type of religious devotion after being re-united with his university friend George

Talboys and then his beautiful aunt Lady Audley. Braddon does a play on words by drawing from the rich history of religious expression found in the term “enthusiasm” to describe Robert as “enthusiastic” when he first meets his aunt. He clearly is attracted to her physical charms rather than her moral character: “She's the prettiest little creature you ever saw in your life…Such blue eyes, such ringlets, such a ravishing smile, such a fairy-like bonnet—all of a- tremble with heart's-ease and dewy spangles, shining out of a cloud of gauze” (59). While critics

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have placed a lot of emphasis on Lady Audley’s physical appearance, they have paid less attention to how her voice and words have a seductive power over others. Even Robert later regrets that his dissemination of the truth will prevent Lady Audley’s “…low musical voice

[from] soothing [Sir Audley’s] loneliness, cheering and consoling his declining years” (230). At the same time, Robert fears that his aunt will use this same calming power for the wrong ends because as Lady Audley herself candidly observes, “[Sir Audley] will believe anything that I tell him” (276). Since Lady Audley operates in a moral court throughout the novel, she cannot “bring forward witnesses” to her defense (271). Thus, Lady Audley does indeed become like Eve, who whispered untruths to the first man Adam in the Garden of Eden — or, as Robert fearfully claims, relies on that “hellish power of dissimulation” (271).

Braddon further appeals to Biblical typology by connecting Lady Audley to the Genesis account of original sin when the hero and George later visit Audley Court and sneak into the lady’s chambers, a shrine to wealth and decadence, to gaze at her pre-Raphaelite portrait. During a time of particularly strong anti-Catholic sentiment, the representation of these men gazing at a

“graven image” would have no doubt stirred up images of Catholics worshipping at saints’ shrines within the Protestant imaginary (KJV, Exodus 20:4). Even though Robert is quick to dismiss the supernatural element in modern life since he “believe[s] all ghosts to be the result of damp or dyspepsia,” his viewing of the portrait is laden with typological meaning:

No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets, with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a pre- Raphaelite would have [given] a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait…It was as if you had burned strange-colored fires before my lady's face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before…I suppose the painter had copied quaint mediaeval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (69, 72, emphasis mine)

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As critics have already noted of this passage, Braddon references Pre-Raphaelite discourse in suggesting that this artist has the physiognomic ability to see beyond a subject’s outer façade to her very soul. Just like religious paintings that depict the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the portrait is also evidence of George’s wife’s resurrection as Lady Audley after her supposed death by

“decline,” which seems to denote the Talboys’ former descent into poverty as much as it speaks to her physical health (48). Unlike the disciples of Jesus Christ who proclaim the resurrection of their Savior, George cannot speak after seeing the evidence that his wife is, indeed, alive — the truth does not free his voice but stifles it (73). George then becomes witness to his wife’s lies and bigamy rather than the hope found in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. At this point of the novel, Robert remains torn between two deities, whom he begins to see in two very different lights: Lady Audley, the embodiment of feminine beauty and excess, versus George, the embodiment of masculine virtue.

The hero vacillates between being a reluctant detective and a hardened pursuer of justice without George, who first gave him a sense of calling. Although he is a barrister by profession,

Robert begins to speak seriously about vocation only following George’s depression and subsequent need for support due to his wife Helen’s apparent death: “[George] looked at him with a pitiful, bewildered expression. The big dragoon was as helpless as a baby; and Robert

Audley, the most vacillating and unenergetic of men, found himself called upon to act for another. He rose superior to himself, and equal to the occasion” (42). While George fails in his moral obligation to his wife and child by leaving them for Australia, Robert “rose superior” to the “call” to be both a parent and partner to his friend. Braddon therefore makes clear that this homosocial bond is central to the protagonist’s vocational journey that leads him to dismantle the apparent domestic bliss found at Audley Court. Certainly, Robert continues to pay homage at the

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altar of Lady Audley’s beauty, but he is “compelled” to reconsider his previous indolence and failed vocation due to the loss of George, “a friend…whom I loved very dearly” (143). When

Lady Audley accuses Robert of hating her, he admits “since I have lost [George] I fear that my feelings toward other people are strangely embittered” (143). However, Robert’s inclination towards “tranquil resignation” needs to be rechanneled into the more active role of detective

(214). He cannot be like the hermits of old who live “amid some forest loneliness” because, as the narrator observes, this is a “negative virtue” (214). For example, Robert’s willingness to

“give up all” in order to discover the “mystery” behind George’s disappearance is tantamount to a disciple’s devotion to his religious teacher or the Roman Catholic monk’s vow of poverty

(163). Through Robert’s conversion narrative, Braddon normalizes the hero’s attraction to

George and makes the lost friend a stand-in for the Son of God: George was the victim of his wife’s treachery as Jesus Christ was a sacrifice for others’ sins. 79 Thus, like a “good” detective,

Robert is “patient” but he cannot remain slothful in his calling to discover the truth: “Whatever the mystery may be, it grows darker and thicker at every step; but I try in vain to draw back or to stop short upon the road, for a stronger hand than my own is pointing the way to my lost friend's unknown grave” (144, 169). Therefore, Braddon slowly begins to trace Robert’s own development from a man little concerned with earthly judgment, exemplified in his neglect of his law practice, to a man driven to impose heavenly judgment on his aunt.

79 If the earlier transformation of George into a Christian martyr was not enough, Braddon further ties him to the Biblical narrative through the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Even though Braddon never explicitly describes George as a “prodigal son,” Victorian readers would still have recognized this character as fitting within this biblical type. However, Braddon re-writes this parable by turning George’s father Harcourt Talboys into the complete antithesis of the loving, forgiving father found in Luke 15:11-32 (KJV). As Braddon has made clear throughout her novel, fathers like Harcourt Talboys, Captain Maldon, and even Sir Michael Audley are often mere imitations of this ideal father. Thus, Braddon challenges the notion that fathers within a patriarchal culture are infallible and, by extension, asks Victorian readers to reconsider their understanding of who is the “right” party in dysfunctional father-son relationships.

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The Private Investigator as Minister: Listening and Eliciting Confession as Ethical Practice

Reading the world through the ears of the newly converted, Robert’s modus operandi is then to rely on his own “inductive reasoning” and interpret others’ moral character, which raises tensions between divine law and earthly law (127). In fact, the protagonist’s treatment of

George’s father-in-law Captain Maldon speaks to potential problems that arise when humans become agents of God, particularly when uncovering others’ “secrets” (169). After Robert informs Captain Maldon of his suspicions surrounding George’s disappearance, the old man, speaking from “trembling lips,” states that the barrister has “no right” to “terrify a man” (173).

Captain Maldon goes on to state that even an officer of the law who is arresting a thief or a murderer “Gives him warning, sir, fair warning, that he may say nothing which shall commit himself--or--or--other people. The--the--law, sir, has that amount of mercy for a--a--suspected criminal” (173). By using the term “mercy,” the captain reminds Robert that the law is rooted in

Christian ethics by giving “fair warning” to even the worst of criminals. This poignant reminder, combined with Captain Maldon’s “hopeless and pitying face,” moves Robert to compassion; he wishes that he “might have spared [Captain Maldon]” (173). While the omniscient God of the

Bible is privy to all of mankind’s secrets, the private investigator finds that a better demonstration of mercy might be to leave some secrets uncovered—not far off from the periodical writers who felt private investigators should not pry too deeply into others’ privacy. In his defense, Robert tells the captain that, “A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on.

I wish to take no base advantage of you, less than of all other people; but I must go on; I must go on” (174). Braddon once again highlights how a human hand has been displaced by God’s hand—human flesh by divine agency. Even though Robert regrets how “pitiless” he has become, he ultimately justifies his actions by declaring the hope that “God have mercy upon us all” (174,

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177). By subtly pointing to God’s mercy as displayed in the Gospel and the promise of eternal life, Robert tells the poor and downtrodden Captain Maldon that the only true hope for mercy may be in the next life, not in this one. Ultimately, the captain submits to Robert’s proclamation of divine law and states that, “Mr. Audley is the best judge” (178). Given his unwillingness to extend mercy to the captain in this life, Braddon seems to suggest that Robert is a dim shadow of

God’s perfect justice.

Additionally, the protagonist relies on his powers of moral evaluation as much as he does on collecting circumstantial evidence in building a case against Lady Audley. For example,

Robert interprets the “silent and self-contained” Phoebe Marks as “a woman who could keep a secret,” whereas the nervous behavior of Mrs. Plowson suggests to him that this “woman has no unimportant share” of Captain Maldon’s “secrets” (135, 136, 169). As Braddon would have been aware, traditional modes of “interpretation” were being increasingly troubled in religious debates, particularly in relation to Biblical hermeneutics. Even though Robert makes inferences regarding witnesses’ moral character to further his investigation, Braddon also asks the reader to not take these readings on face value; after all, just as mid-Victorians were beginning to consider the Bible in different ways, this investigator’s interpretation is not the sole voice of truth. This is particularly important to keep in mind in relation to Robert’s reading of Lady Audley. Prior to his conversion, the hero notices not his aunt’s character but her physicality. He notes Lady

Audley’s “pretty” “little” features such as her hands and her mouth; she is an infantilized embodiment of Victorian female beauty when described as a “childish, helpless, babyfied little creature” (141). Lady Audley even encourages this view of herself by referring to herself as a

“poor little woman” (123). However, after his spiritual awakening, Robert’s language takes a markedly different tone. She is now a “designing and infamous woman,” “poor unhappy little

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golden-haired sinner,” “actress,” “arch trickster,” “all-accomplished deceiver,” “Artful woman,”

“bold woman,” “wicked woman,” and “foolish woman” (237, 250, 254, 266). When Robert uncovers the depths of Lady Audley’s crimes, he also describes her as a “poor, wretched creature,” whom, he further insinuates, only God can help now (269).80 Thus, Robert’s continued struggle between the demands of justice and mercy are indicative of the fact that this Christian hero is slow to respond to the “battle” that God has called him to fight.

Therefore, Braddon introduces another divine agent in Clara, George’s sister and female double, because the protagonist needs a force outside himself to urge him on his spiritual quest.

While Robert does not make a direct comparison between the two women, the morally strong

Clara is the antithesis of the decadent Lady Audley. By describing Clara as wearing a dress that is “puritan in its grey simplicity” and possessing a “resolution [that] was the fruit of no transient womanish enthusiasm which would give way under the iron hand of difficulty,” Braddon ties

George’s sister instead to earlier conservative forms of Protestantism as well the enthusiastic displays of worship found in early evangelical movements like Methodism (201). Like Robert,

Clara is adrift without her brother, stating that “I have no one but my brother. All the love that my heart can hold has been centered upon him” (201). Not only is Clara “so like the friend whom Robert had loved and lost,” but she seems to be more among the dead than the living since even her hand “was colder than marble” (203, 202). Furthermore, Braddon paints George’s sister as operating as a living specter and a reminder of the private investigator’s promise to God.

80 In being unable to “conquer the restless demon” within, Lady Audley becomes increasingly depicted as “unnatural” and sinful (308, 309). When describing how “wretched” Lady Audley has become as she faces ruin at the hands of her nephew, Braddon as narrator states, “I should be preaching a very stale sermon, and harping upon a very familiar moral, if I were to seize this opportunity of declaiming against art and beauty” (292). While the novel celebrates Robert Audley’s professional ascent at the end of the novel, Lady Audley’s use of her beauty to better herself through the marriage market is one step “into the broad highroad of sin” (294). As the narrative makes even clearer later, Lady Audley’s temporal worldview overshadows all else— she would rather die than face “the intervening shame and misery of any earthly judgment” (333).

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Thus, Clara encourages his brother’s friend to “hope for nothing but revenge” (203). In a type of prayer, with her hands clasped and a look into the sky, she exclaims, “Oh, my God…lead me to the murderer of my brother, and let mine be the hand to avenge his untimely death" (201). Here

Clara employs evangelical rhetoric to spur the detective further on his quest for circumstantial evidence. She becomes, in many ways, a type of female prophet who “has found a voice” and

“[urges] him on towards his fate” (200). Clara’s theology demands that God avenge her wronged brother and she, through Robert Audley, must be the one to strike the lethal blow. When the private investigator’s courage falters, Clara’s presence, embodied in her “brown eyes,” forces him to “submit” and “do what she tells me patiently and faithfully” (208). As critics have noted, the barrister fully admits that he dislikes “petticoat government,” but what is interesting is that he defies Victorian morality in stating that women are not the “weaker sex”; they are, in his opinion,

“the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can” (208). Robert’s misogynistic diatribe allows for equality of the sexes while also arguing that there is danger in women’s voices since they have the power to drown out all other noise, perhaps even the voice of God. After all, it is Clara’s “earnest appeal ringing in his ear” that once again urges him on his quest for truth when he is ready to “withdraw from the investigation” (225). When Robert later meets Clara, whose embodiment of religious values is highlighted by their meeting in the sacred space of a church, he once again is reminded that, “[a] hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward on the dark road that leads to my lost friend’s unknown grave” (255). Regardless of whether this “hand” is Clara’s or God’s, Robert once again articulates to the reader that he has been called to a vocation that is in many ways

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helpless to see through without divine intervention. He is chagrined to realize that Clara “reads my pitiful, vacillating soul, and plucks the thoughts out of my heart with the magic of her solemn brown eyes. How unequal the fight must be between us, and how can I ever hope to conquer against the strength of her beauty and her wisdom?” (256). Clara’s touch sends a “shivering thrill through his frame,” thereby conflating erotic and religious sensation in the text (257). To appease

Clara and to be worthy of her love, the novel makes clear, Robert must be reborn as a man of

God and a man of action.

When the private investigator does act, he insists that Lady Audley must atone for her sins, rather than merely receive punishment for her crimes.81 During his final confrontation of

Lady Audley, Robert states:

After last night's deed of horror, there is no crime you could commit, however vast and unnatural, which could make me wonder. Henceforth you must seem to me no longer a woman, a guilty woman with a heart which in its worst wickedness has yet some latent power to suffer and feel; I look upon you henceforth as the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle…Unless you will confess what you are and who you are in the presence of [Sir Audley whom] you have deceived so long, and accept from him and from me such mercy as we may be inclined to extend to you…I will bring upon you the just and awful punishment of your crime. (340, emphasis mine)

81 In his role as divine agent, Robert must exorcise the demon, not through prayer, but with the diagnosis of a medical practitioner. Robert recognizes that "physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century” and that “The revelation made by the patient to the physician is…as sacred as the confession of a penitent to his priest” (LAS 367). Interestingly, the reader never does witness this private scene of “confession” between Dr. Mosgrave and Lady Audley. When Dr. Mosgrave later speaks to Robert, he peppers his language with contradictory and ambiguous terms regarding Lady Audley’s madness: “There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime. It would be a dementia in its worst phase, perhaps; acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!” (372). Dr. Mosgrave’s unclear language is another example of how Braddon closely aligns Victorian medical and religious discourses. For example, Lady Audley is “not mad…but has the cunning of madness.” There is a “hereditary taint in her blood” but the use of the term “taint” almost suggests a type of moral erosion or decay. Worst of all, however, is that she is “dangerous.” While not labeled explicitly as a sinner, Lady Audley’s “secrets,” a term used multiple times in the text to indicate “sin,” must be kept from the light of day. The doctor ultimately does not offer a medical diagnosis but a moral reading of her character. As an “honest man,” Dr. Mosgrave seems to elevate protecting the moral health of the patriarchal community rather than the mental or spiritual health of his patient.

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Lady Audley’s “unnatural,” “wicked” crimes are rooted in her heart—she is a “demonic incarnation of some evil principle” that he will exorcise from Audley Court. Braddon makes clear that Lady Audley confesses not out of religious duty but because she is tired of struggling against Robert’s relentless pursuit of justice, which once again questions how this divine agent is succeeding in resolving the tensions between justice and mercy. Within religious periodicals of the mid-Victorian era, writers painted the confessions of the truly penitent as a charged emotional experience, but Lady Audley’s “voice was never broken by a tear” (346). While we can read “confession” within a legal and religious context, Robert’s desire that his aunt seek mercy from her husband is in line with biblical teachings regarding confession and repentance.

As much as Sir Audley worshipped his wife, Braddon unsentimentally depicts the after effects of idolatry.82 Unable even to look at the “creature whom he had cherished,” the baronet turns his back on his wife and leaves her to God’s judgment because “I now pray that God may pity her this night” (352). The term “creature” carries deep biblical meaning because, as the writer of

Romans observes, one of the sins of mankind has been to worship and serve “the creature more than the Creator” (KJV, Romans 1:25). Once adored like a goddess, Lady Audley has now fallen

82 While the narrator frames Sir Michael Audley’s love for Lucy as a type of madness, it could also be read as a religious devotee worshipping at the idol of transcendent beauty: “He could no more resist the tender fascination of those soft and melting blue eyes; the graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth of showering flaxen curls; the low music of that gentle voice; the perfect harmony which pervaded every charm, and made all doubly charming in this woman; than he could resist his destiny! Destiny! Why, she was his destiny! He had never loved before” (LAS 12). When Sir Audley proposes to Lucy, he even uses religious language to “solemnly” explain the sacredness of the marriage vows, “I scarcely think there is a greater sin, Lucy…than that of a woman who marries a man she does not love. You are so precious to me, my beloved, that deeply as my heart is set on this, and bitter as the mere thought of disappointment is to me, I would not have you commit such a sin for any happiness of mine” (15). When Lucy literally falls at Sir Audley’s feet and begs that he understand their marriage as an economic transaction rather than a spiritual union rooted in “truth and love,” the poor governess demonstrates that she actually worships at the altar of money and social position (15). While Sir Audley spoke of lofty spiritual truths, he settles for the material by agreeing to a marriage “bargain” with Lucy (17). From this moment, Braddon hints that this is a doomed marriage because both Sir Audley and Lucy have sinned against each other by agreeing to a union predicated on finances.

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from grace— this is highlighted by the fact she has now been reduced to mere creaturedom and left completely in Robert’s power.

Therefore, this “beautiful devil” (as a European doctor calls her) must become a good

Protestant but must be sequestered from the world like a Catholic nun (383). In addressing the doctor of the European asylum where his aunt is to spend the remainder of her days, Robert asks that, “arrangements [be made] with some kind and benevolent Protestant clergyman, through whom spiritual advice and consolation might be secured for the invalid lady; who had especial need…of such advantages” (382). Victorian Protestants were often critical of the more sensual religious practice of Catholicism and argued that these types of rituals distracted from authentic forms of Christian worship. In Robert’s insistence on Protestant, not Catholic, spiritual counsel,

Braddon highlights Lady Audley’s propensity towards the sins of “Vanity, Selfishness, and

Ambition” and suggests that Catholic religious practice would only feed her sinful nature (294).

In his final spiritual advice to his aunt, Robert states:

You will lead a quiet and peaceful life, my lady; such a life as many a good and holy woman in this Catholic country freely takes upon herself, and happily endures until the end. Surely, it is a small atonement which I ask you to render for your sins, a light penance which I call upon you to perform. Live here and repent; nobody will assail you, nobody will torment you. I only say to you, repent! (384, emphasis mine)

As this passage emphasizes, the space that should be a medical facility is a theological one: it is a nunnery, a space of Catholic redemption, penance, and atonement, rather than a space of physical healing. By wanting to keep his aunt “quiet,” Robert is harkening back to his earlier stated opinion that women should be given “freedom of opinion, variety of occupation” as long as they are “quiet” (208). However, by infusing his speech with words like “good and holy,”

“atonement,” “penance,” and “repent,” the barrister is removing his words from conversations surrounding the Victorian “New Woman” to the appropriate role of penitent (Protestant) woman.

In some ways, he is rearticulating the Apostle Paul’s decree that women should be kept silent in

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the church because “it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience” (KJV, I Corinthians 14: 34). Thus, Lady Audley is forced to undergo a penance for sins but also, due to the dictates of Victorian morality, can never interact with civilized society again. Instead of repenting, Lady Audley makes clear that she “cannot” (384). She does not come to recognize her need for God but, as the narrator observes, only “hated herself and her beauty”

(384). Her refusal to repent suggests that Lady Audley sees herself as a misdiagnosed medical case that has fallen into the hands of a theological adjudicator. Just as Braddon has questioned throughout the novel, Lady Audley troubles Robert’s conception of “mercy” since she knows that the detective seeks to protect Sir Audley more than ensure that the needs of justice and mercy are met in this case (387). However, Braddon does not allow Lady Audley’s madness, whether feigned or actual, to excuse her immoral behavior. Like Robert himself, many mid-

Victorians would have believed that a “beautiful devil” like Lady Audley was subject to an earthly and, eventually, a heavenly tribunal for her crimes.

Providence and Religious Listening

In addition to recognizing God as the final judge of humankind, Robert’s theology also emphasizes the assurance of Providence, i.e. the divine’s care and protection over humankind.

Certainly, mid-Victorian readers would have recognized Robert and George’s unexpected meeting on the busy streets of London at the beginning of the novel as evidence of God’s

Providence. As noted earlier, the private investigator’s calling subverts legal courts to do “my duty to my missing friend, and to that brave and generous man who has pledged his faith to a worthless woman” (250). He relies then on the language of “Heaven knows” to mitigate his role as Lady Audley’s persecutor: “Heaven knows I have no wish to punish. Heaven knows I was never born to be the avenger of guilt or the persecutor of the guilty. I only wish to do my duty”

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(250-251, emphasis mine). During Robert’s final warning to his aunt, he uses this same turn of phrase to explain why the needs of justice must outweigh any form of mercy for the unrepentant

Lady Audley:

‘You tell me that you are nervous, and that all the medicines your doctor can prescribe are only so much physic that might as well be thrown to the dogs. Let me be the physician to strike to the root of your malady, Lady Audley. Heaven knows that I wish to be merciful—that I would spare you as far as it is in my power to spare you in doing justice to others—but justice must be done. Shall I tell you why you are nervous in this house, my lady?’ ‘If you can,’ she answered, with a little laugh. ‘Because for you this house is haunted.’ ‘Haunted?’ ‘Yes, haunted by the ghost of George Talboys.’ (263, emphasis mine)

The hero’s reading of Lady Audley’s nerves is rooted in religion, not medicine. For him, only the

Great Physician can diagnose and cure her malady since she suffers not from a physiological condition but from the guilt over her sins against George and others. Just as George’s “ghost” haunts Audley Court, Robert describes God as the omniscient judge who sees past Lady

Audley’s façade of innocence. Although Robert claims that it is by the “right of circumstantial evidence” that he makes these accusations, his moral rhetoric only grows stronger when he tells

Lady Audley that she has been “foolish” for “forgetting” that “there is a Providence above the pitiful speculators, and that wicked secrets are never permitted to remain long hidden” (267,

266). In this statement, Robert makes clear that Lady Audley’s sin is that she has not only denied the existence of God but also his role as her divine judge.

As an agent of God, the detective continues to offer her “mercy,” rather than the threat of criminal prosecution, even after she “refuse[s] to run away and repent of [her] wickedness in some foreign place” (276, emphasis mine). Later, Robert credits God, “a most providential circumstance,” for his escaping death in the fire set by Lady Audley, thereby affirming the divine spared his life to follow through on his calling (339). Believing that “George must lie at peace in his unknown grave” to spare Sir Michael Audley further anguish over his wife’s sins, Robert

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believes George’s specter haunts him, a belief that manifests in his unwillingness to see his calling through to the end (391). As God’s agent on earth, he has failed by not seeing to it that

George is given religious rites and properly buried in a churchyard. While the private investigator once dismissed the supernatural, he has completely transformed to a man nearly scared to death by the “panic” of failing God and his supposedly dead friend (398). However, he initially returned to the village Audley only to appease Clara, who requested that he visit the deathbed of the alcoholic and abusive Luke Marks. Braddon makes a point to undercut sentimental, religious renderings of deathbed scenes that were common in Victorian novels when the narrator observes:

The landlord of the Castle Inn had undergone no moral transformation by his death-bed sufferings, fierce and rapid as they had been. Perhaps some faint glimmer of a light that had been far off from his life now struggled feebly through the black obscurities of ignorance that darkened his soul. Perhaps a half angry, half sullen penitence urged him to make some rugged effort to atone for a life that had been selfish and drunken and wicked. (404)

Playing with Biblical allusion, Braddon makes this dying man, whose namesake comes from the writer of the Gospel of Luke, the one who reveals the gospel truth to Robert: George is not dead but very much alive. Braddon then describes how “Robert Audley uttered a wild cry, and fell down upon his knees by the side of the sick man's bed. ‘My God!’ he ejaculated, ‘I thank Thee for Thy wondrous mercies. George Talboys is alive!’” (412, emphasis mine). Here, Braddon plays with different meanings of the term “ejaculate,” which could be defined as a sexual act and a prayerful utterance, thereby equating Robert’s response with both religious and sexual ecstasy

(“ejaculate”). Once again, the Christian hero sees Luke’s deathbed confession and George’s resurrection as “God’s hand” orchestrating events in everyday life (422).

While the ending of the novel affirms God’s Providential plan, Braddon also questions the authenticity of aural revelations from the divine. Following his resurrection, George becomes

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a type of household god, where he can be an object of worship for his devoted sister and Robert, now his brother-in-law. Thus, despite his maturation in the novel, Robert needs a woman like

Clara and a man like George to direct “his purposeless life” and encourage him to not waste his

“talents,” a term alluding, no doubt, to Jesus Christ’s Parable of the Talents (427; KJV, Matthew

25: 14-30, Luke 19: 12-27). Now that Robert has fulfilled his calling to reveal the truth regarding

George’s disappearance, he establishes himself as a “rising man upon the home circuit by this time, and has distinguished himself in the great breach of promise case of Hobbs v. Nobbs”

(435). Having adopted Protestant religious values and the necessary work ethic needed to succeed in a professional role, Robert appears to no longer be haunted by the supernatural but is shown to be working towards material success. In the naming of Robert’s legal case, Braddon asks her reader to recall when the private investigator had earlier referred to an ongoing court case with the very similar name of “Hoggs vs. Boggs” (227). Even though the novel celebrates the hero’s professional success, Braddon also suggests that all court cases are the same and thus somewhat undercuts his achievements as a legal practitioner. Yet, the novel’s ending ultimately paints the picture of domestic bliss, where characters are rewarded in this life, not just the next, for enduring life’s hardships: Sir Audley “has survived the trouble of his life, and battled with it as a Christian should,” his daughter Alicia Audley is set to make an advantageous marriage, and

Robert, Clara, George, along with the future heir of Audley Court, live “happy” together (435,

436). Due to the moral conventions of detective fiction, Lady Audley cannot live long in exile but dies of “maladie de langueur,” i.e. listlessness (436). Unlike Sir Audley, George, and even

Robert, Lady Audley is once again presented as unrepentant because she does not battle life’s troubles and submit to God’s plan of sanctification for her life. Braddon further enforces this point by quoting from Psalm 37:25, which emphasizes that God does not forsake the righteous,

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and leaves the reader with the narrator’s final benediction that it is only right that “good people

[are] all happy and at peace” (KJV). Yet, Braddon troubles Robert’s calling from God even though she repeatedly affirmed the moral nature of his earlier vocation as a private investigator.

After all, did Robert clearly hear from God if George was, in fact, alive the entire time?

Although Braddon enforces the belief that God does ultimately intervene and oversee the course of human events, she both draws from and puts into doubt aural-centric, sensational evangelical conversion narratives that permeated popular Victorian culture.

Throughout “The Calling: Religious Listening and Vocation in The Mid-Victorian

Popular Novel,” I have explored how female popular novelists depicted religious vocation’s continuing role in the development of professional ethics and the professional ideal. Due to the demands of the literary marketplace, Charlotte Yonge, EBB, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon recognized that the novel was the primary means to tell morally complex stories that would engage and entertain their readers with ethical dilemmas. However, women writers of popular fiction did not limit themselves to the doctor, the writer, and the private investigator as figures that could reflect qualities found in the ideal minister. Some further examples that are certainly worthy of study in this project include: the governess in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); the factory owner in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-55); and the soldier in Ouida’s

Under Two Flags (1867). In later nineteenth-century works, Margaret Oliphant’s treatment of female bankers in Hester (1883) and Rhoda Broughton’s portrayal of male academics in Belinda

(1883) demonstrate the increasing professional opportunities available to women, while not negating the fact that many professional fields remained largely closed to women until the following century. Even with the limited scope of this study, I hope that it contributes to scholars’ further understanding of how female novelists shaped nineteenth-century religious

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debate through their wide-ranging representation of professionals’ daily lived experiences. These women writers not only play an integral role in forming popular discourse, but they also complicate our reading of the Victorian era as primarily secular. As the three novels here considered in detail demonstrate, earlier nineteenth-century understanding of the significance of the clerical role and of listening, both to God’s call and to the confessional utterances of other people, contributed significantly to mid-Victorian definitions of professional standards—and to the role of the popular novel in shaping them.

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