Abstract
Historians of religion, in focusing on the ‘Big Picture’, often neglect the distinctive religious climates of specific decades. Yet short-term changes do much to shape ways of thinking, especially perhaps those of young adults. Few decades so obviously demand such detailed treatment as the 1890s – or here ‘the long 1890s’, from 1885 to 1901. Frances Knight skilfully and sympathetically draws together the diverse and contradictory aspects of England’s (in practice mainly London’s) religious fin de siècle. This was also the decade when the statistics of churchgoing unambiguously went into long-term decline. Historians have therefore focused especially on the symptoms and causes of secularization, or on newer movements such as Spiritualism, Theosophy or the ‘Religion of Socialism’. But the anti-puritanism that fuelled the movement out of the churches was also driving Christian reformers. Knight convincingly argues that this was a time of wide-ranging Christian reconstruction. She looks in detail at Christian Utopianism, at the ‘New Journalism’ of W. T. Stead and the Social Purity movement. But her main theme is the relationship between theology and aesthetics. This, she suggests, has been seen as a concern of the later twentieth century, but it was very much a live issue in the later nineteenth century. New paths were being opened up both by professed aesthetes and by religious professionals. Two recurrent themes are the attractions of Catholicism, whether Anglo- or Roman, for the writers and artists of this period, and the prominence of homoerotic themes in the work of many of these converts. Rejecting the frequent claim that they were searching for dogmatic certainty in an age of Doubt, she shows that it was more often the aesthetics than the doctrine which attracted them to Catholicism. As well as the inevitable Oscar Wilde and such relatively widely known authors as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Knight rediscovers the place of more obscure figures in the interconnecting subcultures of Catholic religion, decadent art and literature and unconventional sexuality. There were also clergymen at many other points in the religious spectrum who were pleading for an alliance between Christianity and the arts. She especially highlights the roles of the Congregationalist theologian, P. T. Forsyth, who wrote ‘Banish imagination from your religion, and art will be forced to invent a religion of its own’; the Broad Church Samuel Barnett, founder of the Whitechapel Art Gallery; and the High Church Stewart Headlam, who formed the Church and Stage Guild.
The emphasis in this book is more on the ‘what’ than the ‘why’ of the 1890s. From the 1970s to the 1990s many local studies tried to uncover the links between social change and religious change in that period. Knight offers a broader understanding of religious change, but the strength of these earlier studies lay in their attempt to place religion in context. Her context is principally that of the history of ideas rather than social history. But she might go further in placing her own intensive study of one very eventful decade within a framework of longer-term change.