University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2019 Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth- Century Fiction Rachel Elizabeth Cason University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cason, Rachel Elizabeth, "Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1560. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1560 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. VICAR VICTORIA: WRITING THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Mississippi Rachel Elizabeth Cason May 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Elizabeth Cason All rights reserved ABSTRACT Vicar Victoria: Writing the Church of England in Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how the organizing force of the Anglican Church and the figure of the Anglican clergyman were used to interrogate social, legal, and historical developments in nineteenth-century fiction. The project outlines how authors reacted to events such as Pluralism reform, the opening of training schools for clergy, and the Oxford Movement. There was a growing importance of institutions (including new physical buildings and Anglican reform movements). Further, the clergy, pushed by the increased expectation to modernize and professionalize, became a specialist career, with raised training and performance requirements. As a result of these internal changes, we find the Anglican Church establishment in a state of flux across the nineteenth century: working to adapt itself to a new normal where Anglicanism as the dominant organizing force in people's lives could no longer be taken for granted.