The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920 ENGLISH ASSOCIATION STUDIES, 3 JENNIFER STEVENS The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920 LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION First published in 2010 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2010 Jennifer Stevens The right of Jennifer Stevens to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-470-4 cased Typeset by XL Publishing Services, Tiverton Printed and bound by the MPG Books Group Contents Acknowledgements vii Author’s Note viii Introduction 1 1 The Victorians and the Bible 9 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus 34 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus 84 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde 139 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde’s Oral Tales 183 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore 217 7 George Moore’s Life of Jesus 247 Conclusion 282 Bibliography 291 Index 304 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Warwick Gould for his expert guidance and unfailing support for this project. I must also acknowledge a special debt to my friend, Pamela Bickley, whose example and encouragement have proved invaluable over the years. Thanks are also due to Alison Clark for her specialist advice and tactful correction, and to Kenneth Wolfe for his unbounded enthu- siasm (and extended book loans). I wish to express my gratitude to the English Association for including this study in its Monograph Series and to Liverpool University Press for being the most courteous, effi- cient, and supportive of publishers. I would also like to thank the staff of both the British Library and the National Library of Ireland for their patience and good humour. My final debt of thanks is to my husband, David, and our children, Patrick and Louisa, for making me tea and making me laugh. Author’s Note This study deals with a wide range of works and, for the sake of clarity, in-text citation has only been used for those discussed at length. Abbreviations are given in the footnotes after the first citation and from then on in brackets after quotations. For texts that feature more briefly, page references are provided in the footnotes. Quota- tions from the Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version. Translations of French titles and quotations are my own, unless otherwise stated. While I have endeavoured to be as accurate as possible, there are instances where retaining the spirit of the original has taken precedence over the letter. To avoid stylistic awkwardness, I have used the terms ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ interchangeably throughout, while acknowledging the important theological distinction between them. Introduction Jesus of Nazareth […] a symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus For centuries now countless visual and literary artists have felt compelled to represent the figure of Jesus ‘anew’ for their own age. The first decade of the new millennium has already produced numerous re-imaginings of the New Testament narratives from all areas of the creative arts. The Gospels have been recreated by airport novelists such as Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, as well as by literary authors such as C. K. Stead and Jim Crace. On stage, the figure of Christ has been portrayed by writers as well established as Edwin Morgan and by absolute newcomers such as Kate Betts, whose play, On the Third Day, won first prize in a reality TV show for aspiring dramatists. Film and television have been equally busy bringing Jesus to a wide and varied audience. In the last few years, those with a taste for the controversial and possessed of a strong stomach for violence could take in Mel Gibson’s highly successful film The Passion of the Christ, while those of a more traditionalist inclination could enjoy the BBC’s rather more sedate drama The Passion, which ran nightly on British television through Holy Week in 2008. Such examples provide the merest snapshot of the many modern versions of the story of Jesus available to today’s readers and audiences, all produced in a period that has seen declining church attendance, waning religious instruc- tion in schools and, as some would have it, the rise of fundamentalist atheism. For many of today’s generation, a reading or viewing of a biblical adaptation is likely to be their first encounter with the Scriptures. 2 the historical jesus and the literary imagination Indeed, they may well be more able to recite the Beatitudes according to Monty Python’s Brian, or to outline the creation story as depicted in Robert Crumb’s cartoon version of Genesis, than to recall their originals. Nowadays, then, the newly updated version of the Bible is dominant by dint of coming first, just as images of Hamlet contem- plating suicide in television adverts or political cartoons are likely to come before any direct encounter their audience might have with the soliloquy on page or stage. The former Poet Laureate and self- confessed unbeliever Andrew Motion has recently expressed grave concerns about the Bible’s reversal of fortunes and the consequences for today’s English students. How, he wonders, can readers with little or no acquaintance with biblical texts ever hope to understand, let alone appreciate, ‘a whole raft of literary work, from John Milton to T. S. Eliot’.1 It is indeed an important question, especially for univer- sity English departments, yet it is also an entirely rhetorical one. There has undoubtedly been a profound shift in the public’s relationship with the Scriptures in the last fifty years or so, and no course in Bible studies, delivered in any sector of the education system, is likely to reverse it. While the generations that feature in this study called on literature to supplement, revivify or even replace the all-too-familiar Scriptures, the present one seeks out the Bible to enable it to make sense of canonical works of literature. What was once the master narrative has become for many no more than a work of reference. This was certainly not the case for the writers featured in this study, all of whom had in common a secure knowledge of the Bible, regardless of their own religious convictions and personal perspectives on the Scriptures. For the Victorians and the Edwardians, biblical fiction was an adaptation of an entirely familiar text encountered through the everyday discourse of home, school, church and community. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence’s statement, ‘I was brought up on the Bible, and seem to have it in my bones’, articulates a state of being shared by most writers and readers of his own and earlier generations.2 Why biblical fiction should continue to flourish at a time when the source text itself is so little known is thanks in part to the strength of its foundations. The mid-nineteenth century saw the beginning of what is now a deeply engrained habit of fictionalizing the Scriptures in both Europe and the United States. In the sixty or so years covered by this study, the story of Jesus would be told in a variety of radical, often highly inventive, modes of imaginative writing, providing templates for later New Testament novels and drama. However, the significance introduction 3 of these early works has often gone unacknowledged in modern studies of Gospel transformations, with more recent works winning unwarranted praise for originality. Such a state of affairs is hardly surprising, given that so many of the Victorian and Edwardian fictions are out of print and only accessible in research libraries, or in quite expensive reprint editions such as those offered by Kessinger Publishing. Yet the effort of acquiring them is richly repaid. A survey of British biblical fiction that begins as far back as the 1860s, rather than the more usual starting point of the 1930s or 1940s, provides an invaluable insight into the changing attitudes towards Christianity and its texts from the early days of agnosticism. Moreover, it under- lines how from the outset the genre pushed against the boundaries of acceptability, a characteristic that continues to hold true, even in a climate that is, from a Euro-American perspective at least, predomi- nantly secular. The profound changes in moral outlook, especially in respect to sexuality, that emerged from the early 1960s onwards helped bring about the relaxation of censorship and blasphemy laws, affording today’s writers of New Testament fictions a freedom undreamt of by their forebears. All the same, it is rare to find them employing a narrative viewpoint, theological theory or structuring agent that has not already been tried out – albeit in a rather more cautious manner – a century or more earlier. Today’s Christian conspiracy page-turner, Gospel science fiction, newly discovered evangel or multiple-perspectival novel about the life of Jesus all have their late-nineteenth or early twentieth-century ancestors. The Victorians and Edwardians produced a wealth of imaginative writing founded on the Gospel narratives, far too plentiful to be adequately covered in one study. Such an embarrassment of riches has necessitated a rigorous, at times quirky, process of selection which has imposed a shape and order on what is, in reality, a highly amorphous topic.