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Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

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Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

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BELIEVING IN NOVELS:
EVANGELICAL NARRATIVES AND
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE

by

Trisha Tucker

i
Acknowledgements

I could not be more pleased to have the chance to thank publicly the many people
who helped make this project possible. First and foremost, I must express my utmost
gratitude to my extraordinarily supportive dissertation committee: Jim Kincaid, Meg
Russett, Emily Anderson, and Diane Winston. Ever insightful, collegial, communicative,
and kind, you met each of my ideas with unfailing generosity and never ceased
challenging me to make my arguments stronger and clearer. To Jim, who has mastered
the art of making others feel brighter (in every sense of the word) when they walk out of
his office than they felt walking in, I owe particular thanks. I could not have asked for a
better chair and mentor. To my entire committee: I hope I will someday have the chance
to inspire young scholars the way you have inspired me.
I am grateful to have found in the USC English Department a cohort of supremely
bright and supportive graduate students. None were more vital to my scholarly progress
and general well-being than Jessica Bremmer and Erika Wenstrom, whom I thank for
being the loveliest of friends.
The tremendously generous, remarkably wise Michelle Wilson deserves special
mention. I never would have begun this project—let alone finished it—without your
example. Thank you for being my very merry companion on this long and winding
journey.
To my brilliant and benevolent Writing Program colleagues, John Holland and
Jack Blum, I offer my sincerest thanks. I never could have powered through this

ii
seemingly endless project without your many words of encouragement and the ample
practical help you provided at every turn.
My wonderful family deserves special mention for their unshakable confidence in
me and the heartfelt celebrations with which they greeted the news of my successful
defense.
A generous research grant from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church as
well as summer and advanced year fellowships from USC helped make this work
possible. I must also extend my gratitude to everyone involved with the Dickens Universe
and the Dickens Project Winter Conference, as my interactions with that strange and
wonderful community of scholars influenced the development of this project in a host of
ways.
And finally, it is with a full heart that I thank my best friend, my husband, and my
partner in all things, Rick. Thank you for your unfailing patience and generosity during
my long years of graduate study and for so faithfully providing sanity, enthusiasm, and
optimism when mine was lacking. I love you more than I can say, and I could not have
done this without you.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Introduction 1

Chapter One:
Suffering, Submission, and Subjectivity in Barbara Hofland’s Patience 36

Chapter Two:
Modeling the Modern Protagonist in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and
Emma Jane Worboise’s Thornycroft Hall 77

Chapter Three:
Rethinking Reform in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood 124

Chapter Four:
Rebuilding Community in Maria Louisa Charlesworth’s
Ministering Children Novels 161

Bibliography 210

1
Introduction

In November 2006, Oxford University Press released a new volume entitled
Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Written by British scholars
Mark Knight and Emma Mason, this work was billed by its publisher as the “first
introduction to religion in the long-nineteenth century for a non-theological, literary-
based readership.” That such an introductory text could be the first of its kind despite
appearing more than a century after the period it studies hints at the pervasive power of
the secularization thesis, which convinced generations of scholars that religious
literature—like religion itself—had rather outlived its usefulness by the nineteenth
century. The publishing of Knight and Mason’s text was just one sign among many in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that the secularization thesis was losing its
grip on the scholarly imagination, and that literary critics and historians were once again
taking up religion as a worthy subject for exploration and inquiry. In their introduction to
Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, Knight and Mason engage explicitly with
the secularization thesis and its effects, noting that they are specifically writing to modern
readers who would “tend to isolate religious questions from other apparently non-
spiritual or material discourses” (3). “To insist on rigid boundaries between the sacred
and secular, as many thinkers have done from the eighteenth century onwards,” they say,
“is to demarcate religious space in a narrow and misleading manner”—a demarcation,
they remind us, that would have been utterly unfamiliar to the average nineteenth-century
Briton (3). Their text, then, actively seeks to interrogate the modern tendency to
marginalize religious concerns by exposing the ways in which nineteenth-century

2
literature and culture were intimately bound up with religion generally, and Christianity
more specifically.
To cover the “diversity of perspectives among nineteenth-century writers who
engaged with Christianity,” Knight and Mason explain that they have “chosen to
exemplify a number of specific religious ideas in relation to select literary texts” (9).
Their close readings of these texts are divided into six chapters spanning what the authors
have identified as the major religious movements of nineteenth-century Britain: Dissent,
Unitarianism, the Oxford Movement, Evangelicalism, Secularization, and Catholicism
and Mysticism. As one might expect, each chapter uses literature produced by
practitioners of the religious movement in question—from poetry by Blake and Hopkins
to novels by Dickens and Gissing—along with outsiders’ responses to that movement to
analyze and contextualize a variety of nineteenth-century religious experiences. Each
chapter, that is, except one: in “Evangelicalism: Brontë to Eliot,” Knight and Mason
explore “the complex (dis)engagement of Evangelicalism with its surrounding culture,
with reference to mid-century novels such as Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The
Moonstone, and Bleak House” (12). In other words, while writer-practitioners like
Gaskell, Rossetti, and Hardy make meaningful appearances in the chapters on
Unitarianism, the Oxford Movement, and Secularization, respectively, the authors don’t
analyze—or even mention—a single literary work by a practicing Evangelical in their
long chapter on Evangelicalism. Instead, Knight and Mason choose to study
Evangelicalism exclusively through the works of non-Evangelical writers like Brontë,
Eliot, Dickens, and Collins—all of whom might have been exposed to Evangelical
teachings at some point, but none of whom wrote Evangelical novels: that is, novels that

3
don’t just depict Evangelical characters, whether satirically or sympathetically, but
attempt to embody an Evangelical world view.
1
The very scholars for whom Knight and
Mason are writing—that is, scholars new to the field of religion and literature—are likely
to take from their study the impression that nineteenth-century Britain failed to produce a
single noteworthy Evangelical novel.
But, of course, it did. There were scores of Evangelical novelists writing in
Romantic- and Victorian-era Britain, and some of their works were much more widely
read at the time of their publication—and for decades afterward—than were many
contemporaneous novels we now consider canonical. The most significant of these
writers were often women: authors including Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary
Brunton, Mary Martha Sherwood, Barbara Hofland, Catherine Sinclair, Charlotte
Elizabeth Tonna, Maria Louisa Charlesworth, Emma Jane Worboise, and Hesba Stretton
wrote novels that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, were widely reviewed and read
on both sides of the Atlantic, and were translated into multiple languages. Yet, despite
their extensive readership, these names—unlike those of Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, and
Eliot—don’t figure into the vast majority of twentieth-century scholarship that seeks to
reconstruct the attitudes and ideologies of the previous century’s populace based on what
that populace read. Nor do Evangelical novels inform the most influential critical studies
of the novel’s use of plot, character, and narrative technique. You won’t encounter a
single Evangelical text in seminal “rise of the novel” narratives by Georg Lukács, Ian

1
I do not mean to imply that Dickens, Eliot, and the other writers Knight and Mason
include have nothing worthwhile to contribute to a discussion of nineteenth-century
Evangelicalism; rather, I would suggest that their novels might best be considered in
conjunction with narratives written by practitioners of the faith being depicted.

4
Watt, George Levine, Lennard J. Davis, Nancy Armstrong, or even revisionists such as
Elaine Showalter.
2
And you are similarly unlikely to come across a single Evangelical
narrative on an assigned reading list at any academic level. Since it is widely agreed that
Evangelicalism was an important cultural force in nineteenth-century Britain, one might
suspect that Evangelical novels have something worthwhile to teach us.
3
Unfortunately,
longstanding trends in literary criticism have ensured that the most famous Evangelical
characters from nineteenth-century British literature are Mr. Brocklehurst, Nicholas
Bulstrode, Obadiah Slope, Mrs. Jellyby, and Mr. Chadband, rather than any Evangelical
characters created by actual Evangelicals—a tendency that Knight and Mason’s recent
work regrettably continues. While some critics have, indeed, made important
contributions to our knowledge about Evangelical novels—most notably Elisabeth Jay,

2
It would be a mistake to accuse these critics of willfully ignoring or excluding
Evangelical novels; after all, these novels had fallen out of favor (and, in almost all cases,
out of print) long before these critical works were undertaken. Evangelical novels’ near-
total disappearance from scholarly discourse can likely be traced back to aesthetic
standards put in place by the Modernists who, in their attacks on all things Victorian,
saved particular vitriol for earnest, didactic fiction. But even if we can trace the neglect of
Evangelical novels back to the Modernists, we are still faced with the question of why
later critics, who resuscitated everyone from Dickens to Gaskell to Margaret Oliphant
(despite the fact that a number of their texts were also out of print), didn’t make the same
concerted effort to recuperate Evangelical novels. Re-inserting these novels into the
matrix of nineteenth-century fiction not only calls into question some critical conclusions
about the nineteenth-century novel’s primary ideological investments, thematic
preoccupations, and formal characteristics; it also invites us to question why post-
Modernist critics seem not to have had the same access to a sympathetic reading of these
texts as they did many equally obscure Victorian novels.

3
Among the many texts that acknowledge the influence of Evangelical ideas and mores
on religious, political, economic, gender, class, and racial ideologies of the era are
seminal works of cultural history by G. Kitson Clark, Richard Altick, and G. M. Young.

5
Christine Krueger, Samuel Pickering, M. Nancy Cutt, and Mitzi Myers—this genre
remains confined to the margins of literary scholarship.
I’ve chosen to begin my study with a discussion of Knight and Mason’s text
because it strikes me as a powerful indication of the continuing invisibility of Evangelical
fiction in mainstream literary criticism. That even these writers, who actively seek to
reunite the fields of literary and religious studies, could almost totally ignore Evangelical
literary production is, I believe, worthy of notice and investigation.
4
Why, when the
scholarly backlash against the secularization thesis is picking up enough steam to produce
a text like Knight and Mason’s in the first place, do some forms of religious literature
enjoy newfound validation while others remain noteworthy largely for their continued
absence?
5

To answer that question, we might begin by looking at how scholars have defined
the novel form and ask why that definition has, to date, made it so difficult for them to
accommodate Evangelical novels into their formulations. Scholars of the novel disagree
on many things; one need look no further than the sheer volume of criticism they produce
in an attempt to define the form to see that this is true. But over the last century or so
they’ve tended to agree on three basic premises: (1) the novel as a literary form is above

4
I say “almost totally ignore” because Knight and Mason do briefly discuss Hannah
More’s tracts and her single, best-selling novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, in their first
chapter on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Dissent.

5
In his review of Knight and Mason’s text, William R. McKelvy points out that the
authors’ troubling designation of Tractarians as the most “literary” theologians belies an
“unexamined adherence to an ideology of literature, the belief that some writing self-
evidently falls into a literary category” (326). As McKelvy also notes, it is Evangelicals
who suffer most under this ideology, which “makes Evangelicalism into literature’s
antithesis” (326).

6
all concerned with presenting a convincing report of human experience—which, in the
realist novel at least, is accomplished by depicting the “everyday” life of “everyday”
people; (2) the novel is an inherently modern form that rose to prominence when and how
it did because it was uniquely able to both reflect and shape modern consciousness; and
(3) the novel is a necessarily secular form.
6
All three of these premises are clearly
interrelated: if the modern human experience is assumed to be a secular one (as it
explicitly was for most of the twentieth century), then the art form that attempts to depict
that experience must reflect that same secularization. Literary theorists working in the
wake of Lukács’s pronouncement that “the novel is an epic of the world without God”
have studied novels as cultural instruments that helped readers make sense of a new,
godless world and their place in it. The nineteenth century, with its great political, social,
and scientific upheavals, has been identified as a key period in the evolution of modern
secular consciousness, and the literary genre that rose to prominence at this time—the
realist novel—has been studied as a significant contributor to and reflection of this
evolution. Thus, in The Realistic Imagination, Levine claims that “realism itself is
intimately and authoritatively connected to the modern position”—a position he goes on
to define as dismissive of the “transcendent reality” and “metaphysical sanction”

6
For much of the history of novel criticism, the terms “novel” and “realism” have been
used interchangeably. I seek here to present a few key properties that critics have largely
agreed define “the (realist) novel” and/or “the nineteenth-century novel” so that I can
illustrate how Evangelical novels alternately align with and problematize this definition.
Engaging with and challenging the prevailing definition of realism is, as I hope these next
few paragraphs will show, one of my dissertation’s major goals.

7
represented by religious belief (3, 11).
7
He claims that “the realistic impulse is most
precisely located in the historical context of a secularizing movement directed against the
falsehoods of earlier imaginations of reality” (11). Though it’s unclear whether it is
Levine himself or the historical actors he is discussing who have deemed religious
transcendence a “falsehood,” what is clear is that Levine, like Lukács, Watt, and J. Hillis
Miller before him, and Elizabeth Ermarth, Harry Shaw, and Susanna Lee after him,
defines both modernity and modernity’s quintessential literary production—the realist
novel—as unamenable to a sacred world view.
Given this familiar critical positioning, is it any wonder that many literary
scholars have had trouble accommodating the simple historical fact that there were large
numbers of deeply religious people living in nineteenth-century Britain who saw
themselves as inhabiting a world replete with spiritual meaning? For the scholar who
subscribes to the secularization hypothesis, what is to be done with the fact that these
populations not only existed, but were also often highly literary, churning out huge
numbers of texts, including pamphlets and tracts, sermons, spiritual autobiographies,
devotionals and conduct manuals, hymns, poems, and, yes, realist novels—or, at least,

7
Here, I should note that “modern” and “modernity” are, themselves, certainly not
uncontested terms. As Webb Keane puts it, “There is no consensus in the human sciences
about how we might best define ‘modernity,’ or even whether there is such a thing at all.
But this much, I think, is indisputable: vast numbers of people around the world think
there is such a thing” (159). I am less interested in positing my own definition than in
analyzing some of the commonly accepted definitions that have effectively disqualified
Evangelical texts and adherents from being considered an integral part of “modernity.”
As Keane notes, when scholars ask questions about who or what counts as modern, “they
are usually not taking modernity as a neutral description of the world, surveyed from afar
and with indifference. Modernity is commonly situated within a normative, and often a
desire-saturated, view of history” (160).

8
long prose fiction narratives whose form and content might make them look like realist
novels if it weren’t for their decidedly non-secular worldview?
One option, of course, is to ignore these rather inconvenient realities, which many
critics have done. Alternatively, some critics grant religious narratives a place in a
separate genre, such as allegory, that seems more amenable to their religious worldview.
Critics such as Sheldon Sacks, Northrop Frye, and Elizabeth Ermarth have taken pains to
stress that, by studying realism, they are not validating it over other forms and genres. In
fact, Ermarth claims that when we create “realisms of various types, such as allegorical
realism,” in an attempt to allow for a wider variety of conventions within realism, what
we’re actually doing is implicitly—and falsely—endorsing realism as “the property of all
great art”—and this, Ermarth implies, does a disservice to other kinds of literature whose
concerns and techniques are actually categorically different from those of realist novels
(xiii, italics original). To Ermarth, Sacks, and others concerned with realism and novels,
non-realist works of prose fiction are no better or worse than realist novels, but they’re
irreducibly different, and they should be content to inhabit their own category.
To be sure, Ermarth is correct when she says that “realistic fiction is not the only
kind” and that “the difference between one kind of convention and others is no neutral
matter” (xiii). But it’s also clear that, in the modern critical imagination, not all genres are
created equal.
8
As far as I know, no critic has claimed that religious allegories or

8
Even Sacks, who argues for the validity of works called “apologues” that are different
than—but not inferior to—novels (or “actions” as he also calls them), ends up
functionally ghettoizing this newly named form. Though he defines the concept of the
apologue in Fiction and the Shape of Belief, he goes on to devote the majority of his text
to an analysis of novels, which he ends up validating as more difficult to write and more

9
picaresque narratives or operettas have a privileged relationship to modernity, but just
such a relationship between realist novels and modernity forms the accepted premise of
countless scholarly studies.
9
A critical tradition stretching from Lukács and Watt to
Levine and Ermarth has posited the realist novel as a form uniquely linked to modern
times and thus representing a radical break with the past. Countless critics have thus
allied the ability to define that form with the ability to understand crucial things about
modern subjectivity and civilization. The loftiness of these stakes is one of the reasons I
worry that, by ignoring or sidelining deeply religious novels, we’ve created an
incomplete picture of modernity itself. And as the example of Knight and Mason’s recent
text attests, the decline of the secularization thesis in general is no guarantee that
Evangelical novels and practitioners will ever gain a seat at this particular critical table.
Unlike the critics mentioned above, I am not interested in evaluating or
classifying Evangelical narratives for the sake of creating new—and supposedly more
accurate—systems of evaluation and classification. Instead, I’d like to work within
current debates about what constitutes a “novel” and what qualifies as “realism” in order
to examine how Evangelical fictions can meaningfully challenge and contribute to such
definitions. It seems to me that creating a separate designation for Evangelical fictions
based on their differences from canonical novels misses the point. Evangelical texts do

difficult (and therefore, it seems, rewarding) to analyze. In our novel-obsessed critical
culture, “separate” from the novel is most definitely not “equal” to the novel.

9
Even though the realist novel demonstrates significant continuity with earlier narrative
forms (such as picaresques and romances), critics tend to stress the novel’s breaks with
the past while simultaneously stressing other forms and genres’ connections with the past
in order to justify the novel’s privileged relationship to modernity.

10
demonstrate important ideological differences from many of their canonical counterparts,
but in their own time—before terms like “realist novel” had been coined—they occupied
a cultural space similar to that of the novels of Richardson, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and
Gaskell. Because they were read by many of the same readers, reviewed in the same
periodicals, carried by the same libraries, and included in the same debates about the
possibilities and pitfalls of the novel form, it makes sense to think of sacred and secular
novels as part of the same landscape of nineteenth-century narratives. Certainly,
contemporary readers did not feel that novels and religion were antithetical to each other.
As Elisabeth Jay points out, “Even reviews which deplored the specific treatment
accorded to religion in various novels rarely questioned that, rightly understood, religion
was native to the novel’s sphere, unless, of course, they altogether condemned the
fictional mode” (2).
10

What a novel was, what it should look like, and what it should do were much-
debated topics in the nineteenth century, and Evangelical fictions were an important part
of that debate. I believe that the prevalence and popularity of these works then and the
relative lack of interest in and scholarship on these works today reveals important
differences between past and present literary and cultural paradigms—differences that
need to be highlighted, because noticing them can shed light on modern critical

10
Intriguingly, critics including Samuel Pickering and Karen Swallow Prior have
contended that Evangelical novels were largely responsible for the rise in respectability
of both the novel and novel reading in the nineteenth century. See, for example, Prior’s
argument that “any study of the preeminent literary genre of the nineteenth century must
include an examination of the role the evangelical movement and its literature played in
the transformation of the novel from the entertaining but inconsequential romance into
the medium that best expressed the anxieties and aspirations of the individual soul” (204).

11
constructs and commitments that we otherwise might not (want to) see. The literary
trajectories we’ve embraced and the narratives of generic development and dominance
we’ve created eliminate from view a whole range of nineteenth-century fiction—fiction
that was enthusiastically produced and consumed by nineteenth-century readers and
writers. Attempting to reinsert these texts into the matrix of nineteenth-century narratives
gives us a different sense of the development of—and challenges to—the novel form that
we’ve come to regard as the standard.
11

Literary scholarship of the last forty years or so has shown us that, as critical
movements that value previously unvalued literatures—such as resolutely popular or
“unliterary” texts, or texts written by women or people of color—come to the fore, they
provide compelling reasons to reevaluate the heretofore-disparaged qualities of these
texts. Such excavations widen our literary horizons, painting more complete pictures of
the past and of the vast possibilities of literary creation. This in turn challenges our

11
G. Kitson Clark provides a thoughtful—though incomplete—answer to the question of
why many literary historians might be unwilling to consider Evangelical novels
legitimate participants in and shapers of the nineteenth-century literary landscape.
Lamenting his colleagues’ reluctance to fully explore the importance of Evangelicalism
to Victorian England, Clark writes, “[Historians] are inclined to assume that certain
things are important in certain centuries, and when they occur in the wrong centuries they
are at liberty to leave them out or play them down because they want to talk about other
things. Thus by the tradition of the writing of history religion is important in the
seventeenth century, but in the nineteenth century interest should concentrate on
democracy, nationalism, industrial development and the social question.” Unfortunately,
these biases can lead to “a reluctance to discuss things which were not only obviously
important to a great many people in their own right but as obviously very important in
their influence on the history of the country” (23). What Clark does not address, however,
and what my project will make a primary point of inquiry, is why historians make such
assumptions and what’s at stake in such (mis)readings and (mis)representations of
the past.

12
assumptions about canonical texts and historical periods, about what makes for good or
effective literature, and about what people of the past read and why.
My dissertation is essentially one such project of literary excavation and
reevaluation. More specifically, it joins a recent critical genealogy of texts that assert, as
does J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels, that averting our eyes from “bad” literature (or
embarrassing or awkward elements in otherwise “good” literature) hampers our ability to
understand the books we read and the cultures that produced them. I see my dissertation
as following in the footsteps of Hunter’s book, as well as Robyn Warhol’s study of direct
address narration in Gendered Interventions, and Brigid Lowe’s revival of ethical
criticism of the nineteenth-century novel in Victorian Fiction and the Insights of
Sympathy. Hunter, Warhol, and Lowe have admirably proven that a refusal to avert one’s
eyes from the literary traits that make us, as modern readers, uncomfortable, results in a
more complete understanding of historical literary texts, the cultures that produced them,
and the people who read them. Furthermore, these scholars make compelling arguments
that the thematic and formal elements that embarrass, disgust, or otherwise repel modern
critics can teach us a lot about our own, often-unacknowledged, prejudices and blind
spots.
That critics have found much in Evangelical literature to be embarrassing,
disgusting, or repellent is clear, as is their apparent disbelief that readers willing sought
out and read—let alone enjoyed—books that can strike our ears as shrill, unsophisticated,
and annoying in their preachy certainties. To cite just a few examples: about Hannah
More—possibly the most-influential Evangelical author of the nineteenth century—John
McLeish opines: “She wrote a number of ‘best-sellers’ which nowadays confront us with

13
the problem of understanding how such unimaginative, unoriginal, unliterary, and naïve
compilations could be consumed with such evident enjoyment by the reading public”
(125). Margaret Maison is perhaps even more forceful in her critique, asserting:
[I]n reading the many Evangelical novels of the [nineteenth century], one
is struck by their trashy nature and the worst elements of Victorian
Evangelicalism that seem to come to the fore—excesses of emotional gush
and sentimentality, the introduction of the cheaply sensational and the
luridly spectacular, a certain narrowness and negativity, a lack of good
taste, self-control and discipline. (91)
If these and myriad others like them are accurate descriptions of the novels Evangelicals
produced, it’s no wonder that both the texts and their authors have fallen into obscurity.
Of course, a reader attuned to the types of ingrained biases that resulted in
“feminine” writing being considered self-evidently inferior to “masculine” writing for
generations, thus keeping nearly all textual production by women on the periphery of the
literary canon until the late twentieth century, might find McLeish and Maison’s
comments a bit discomfiting. Women wrote the majority of the nineteenth century’s best-
selling Evangelical novels, and while there is certainly evidence that men read and even
relished them, their predominant audience was presumably female. With this historical
context in mind and our knowledge of literary criticism’s longstanding masculinist
tendencies, critical derision of Evangelical texts’ “excesses of emotional gush and
sentimentality,” negative comments about their supposed naïveté, and ridicule of their
“lack of good taste, self-control and discipline” might give us pause. How much of the
critical neglect of these texts and the bafflement expressed about the literary taste of their

14
writers and readers, we might ask, is based on an unexamined coding of them as
troublingly feminine?
12

Such a coding would be nothing new when it comes to the Evangelical movement,
which has long been considered an “emotional” religion—a faith of the heart rather than
the head. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Evangelical adherents were
criticized by non-Evangelicals for being overly passionate, for valuing an internal
emotionalism that led to external manifestations such as ranting, tears, fainting, and fits.
13

Thus, at the time of its own ascendance, Evangelicalism was derided by outsiders for

12
It is certainly fair to ask why, if Dickens and Gaskell have also been coded by critics
(even nineteenth-century critics) as too “feminine,” they—unlike the Evangelical
novelists discussed in these pages—have been recuperated by modern scholars. Robyn
Warhol provides one possible answer, pointing out that some critics treat Gaskell’s
“feminine” narrative strategies such as direct address as unfortunate habits she grew out
of as she “matured” as an artist. Similarly, Mary Lenard has argued that critics tend to
consider Dickens’s later novels to be better—i.e., more mature and less sentimental—
than his earlier ones; Leavis’s study of Dickens, for example, does not discuss any of
Dickens’s novels before Dombey and Son. (Also, Dickens might just have been too
popular, then and now, to ignore.) It is additionally worth noting that critics have used
Evangelical writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna specifically as foils for “better”
sentimental writers, including Dickens and Gaskell. Louis Cazamian contrasts Mary
Barton’s “truthful realism” and “convincing, individual” characters with the “mediocre
literary quality” of Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (231, 240); Joseph Kestner says that
Gaskell, “unlike…Tonna…refrains from indictments, avoiding the artificiality caused by
overwriting” (117); and Monica Fryckstedt argues that “Mrs. Gaskell’s greater
artistry…places her in a category beyond her many predecessors,” explicitly including
Tonna in this group (Lenard 118).

13
Although historical evidence suggests that the extreme bodily manifestations many
outsiders used to caricature the Evangelical experience were relatively rare, there is
ample documentation of such manifestations in the early days of the Methodist revival.
Wesley himself recorded instances of “fainting, trances, bodily convolutions, and
visions,” and reported that some listeners at his sermons “rejoiced, cried out, prayed,
roared, confessed, declared or spoke in a strange language” (Grant 452). Such
outpourings were derisively termed “enthusiasm” by Evangelicalism’s critics
(Grant 451).

15
being a religion that prized emotion over reason and the heart and body over the mind.
While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of the movement rarely used language
that overtly characterized it as a “womanish” or emasculating religion, their critiques
were nonetheless directed quite pointedly at the traits that modern scholars might say
were coded as “feminine.”
For the past hundred years or so, scholars have continued the trend of linking
Evangelicalism to “feminine” values and, implicitly or explicitly, disparaging those
values.
14
As Elisabeth Jay explains, “Evangelicalism, whose intellectual content had
never formed its strongest appeal,” has been characterized by intellectual historians as “a
petrified body of reactionary opinion that constituted a drag upon the wheels of
intellectual and social progress” (6). Robert Altick—presumably among the critics Jay is
referring to—declares that nineteenth-century Evangelicals displayed an “unintellectual
temper” and rejected “reason and the analytical habit” in favor of “simplistic truths”
(Victorian People 190). Paul Sangster sounds a similar note, asserting that Evangelicals
were convinced that “nothing except religion mattered”—a conviction that “sprang, not
from reason, which might well have persuaded them otherwise, but from their emotions”
(18). Here, Sangster is implicitly validating a certain kind of reason: the kind that refuses
to let religious conviction and religious proscriptions be the primary shapers of one’s

14
To be sure, critics have also made no bones about the troublingly “masculine” side of
Evangelicalism and Evangelical literature. As Christine Krueger explains, many critics
have assumed that the Evangelical movement, informed as it was by the “phallocentric,
logocentric texts of scripture and religious discourse[,] necessarily preach[ed]
reconciliation with patriarchy” (4). The novels of the Evangelical movement have, in
turn, been criticized for simply reproducing patriarchal power schemes and consciously
or unconsciously working hand-in-hand with dominant political and economic interests to
keep women, children, and the poor in their place. Such critiques feature heavily in the
following chapters.

16
existence—a kind of reason recognizable, one to could say, to a twentieth-century scholar
tied to the premises of the secularization thesis. But one could certainly challenge
Sangster’s assertion by pointing out that, if an Evangelical is convinced that her ten or
thirty or eighty years on earth are to be followed by unimaginable millions of years in the
afterlife, and that valuing religion on earth is the key to ensuring her happiness in that
long afterlife, then it seems eminently reasonable to value religion at the expense of other
concerns.
What I think Sangster is really getting at here is the idea that religion itself is
unreasonable—that men and women who live in modern times and yet subscribe to the
supposedly “pre-modern” notion that religion is to be valued above all else are
unreasonable. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences insisted for many
decades, after all, that religion faced an inevitable decline in the nineteenth century as
mankind became more and more skeptical of a divinely ordered and controlled universe.
Sandwiched in between the rational advances of the Enlightenment and the paradigm-
shattering work of Darwin, Evangelicalism was purportedly the last gasp of religion as a
dominant force in Western culture, politics, and the popular imagination before the
inevitable march of secular modernism. Much twentieth-century scholarship tacitly
endorses as “moderns” the nineteenth-century men—and, occasionally, women—who
were on the forefront of scientific, political, and philosophical change. On the other hand,
Evangelicals of either sex who continued to believe in the presence, rather than the
absence, of God, and to insist on the reality of spiritual truths, have been painted as
anachronistic—outdated men and women participating in what J. Hillis Miller calls a
“belated [attempt] to stop the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the sea of faith”

17
(7). Miller’s word “belated” is key here: it tells us that the faith of deeply religious
nineteenth-century Evangelicals appeared after the appropriate or expected time, too late
to be effective or useful. The secularization hypothesis casts writers and readers of
Evangelical novels—and, in fact, all practicing Evangelicals—as “unmodern,” as
holdovers from another time. They and their experiences are not an integral part of
modernity; rather, modernity marches on in spite of them.
Webb Keane has convincingly reframed the secularization thesis as a “moral
narrative of modernity” in which
progress is not only a matter of technological mastery, economic
organization, scientific knowledge, bureaucratic rationalization,
democracy or totalitarianism, or environmental disaster. It is a story about
human emancipation and self-mastery, centering on the transformation of
the human subject. If, in the past, humans were in thrall to illegitimate
rulers such as kings, rigid traditions such as those given in scriptures, and
unreal fetishes such as their religious rituals and relics, as they become
modern they realize the true character of human agency. According to this
moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a host of
false beliefs and fetishisms that undermine freedom. Conversely, those
people who seem to persist in displacing their own agency onto such rules,
traditions, or fetishes (including sacred texts) are out of the step with the
times. They are morally and politically troubling anachronisms, pre-
moderns or anti-moderns. (160)

18
It is important that we acknowledge that neither the secularization thesis nor the moral
narrative of modernity Keane delineates is gender-neutral. The troubling “pre-moderns or
anti-moderns” Keane discusses have complexly and contradictorily been coded as both
too “masculine” (that is, tied to outdated patriarchal texts and traditions) and—crucially
for my project—too “feminine” (emotional, illogical, and naive). Nineteenth-century
Evangelicals are by no means the only religious population to be coded this way, but they
make for an illuminating case study. McLeish’s perplexity over readers’ apparent
enjoyment of Evangelical novels, like many critics’ conviction that such “trashy,”
“saccharine,” and “unliterary” works could only have been popular due to a kind of
cultural brainwashing, clarifies for us the consequences of the ways in which the
Evangelical movement and its novels have been (mis)understood: that is, we are
confronted with the utter foreignness of the men, women, and children who could have
read these novels and found something of value in the education, entertainment, and/or
spiritual guidance they provided.
It is my argument that we cannot get past our own feelings of bafflement,
frustration, and even annoyance at these works and their legions of readers in order to
reach a more accurate understanding of the nineteenth-century literary landscape until we
acknowledge and analyze the alien dimensions of the Evangelical literary project.
Catherine Belsey has made the thought-provoking claim that “the experience of reading a
realist text is ultimately reassuring, however harrowing the events of the story, because
the world evoked in the fiction, its patterns of cause and effect, of social relationships and
moral values, largely confirm the patterns of the world we seem to know” (Critical
Practice 47). If she is correct, are critics’ unsettled—even antagonistic—responses to

19
Evangelical texts any wonder, given those texts’ refusal to reflect and reconfirm most
critics’ experiences of the world?
The Evangelical novels presented here, with their foreign value systems and alien
assumptions, can be deeply disconcerting for modern scholars, and the following chapters
will demonstrate how attempts to fit these novels back into “reassuring” patterns of
realist fiction conditioned by liberal humanist values have resulted in important
misreadings of these authors’ literary project. In the coming chapters I attempt to
illuminate the kinds of readings that are made possible when we strive to resist the pull of
Keane’s “moral narrative of modernity.” It is my argument that Evangelical novels
provide an alternative to traditional conceptions of the nineteenth-century novel and its
primary ideological investments, and that ignoring or marginalizing Evangelical novels
because of their formal and thematic deviations from nineteenth-century norms or their
embarrassing aesthetic “shortcomings” only reinforces an untenably teleological view of
literary history.
While the following chapters will focus primarily on the important ideological
and epistemological differences between Evangelical and liberal humanist world views
(and the novels that express those world views), acknowledging their shared concerns is
vital, as it helps illuminate the complexity of what religious writers were doing in the
nineteenth century. Despite their reputation as merely conservative, anachronistic literary
productions, Evangelical novels grappled with many of the same upheavals as their
canonical counterparts; they, too, were interested in helping readers make sense of the
modern world and their place in it. Evangelical writers weren’t, as many critics have
claimed, merely reproducing older forms, inserting typological characters into stock

20
religious plots, or pointing beyond earthly reality to eternal truths. Instead, they were
driven by the same fundamental concern as their more secular counterparts: that is, the
desire to understand and represent the “real” at a specific moment in time.
15

In The Rise of the Novel, Watt declared that “earthly reality is not the main object
of the [Christian] writer,” and that such a writer instead “hopes to make us see through
[his characters] a larger and unseen reality beyond time and place” (80). A number of
more recent critics have used Watt’s maxim to explain why religious fictions in general,
and Evangelical fictions in particular, are not to be considered in the same category as
classic realist works. While I agree that Evangelical novels are interested in pointing their
readers to certain phenomena that lie beyond material reality, I would like to suggest that
many of the best canonical novels do precisely the same thing. Doesn’t a writer like Eliot,
with her insistence on a communal web of existence that exceeds empirical knowledge,
also try to expand what we could consider our “earthly reality”? Doesn't any writer who
encourages us to see hidden systems of things (be they social, economic, psychological,

15
I would contest, then, Stanley Fish’s claim that
a Christian plot, in the sense that there is one, is haphazard, random in its order,
heedless of visible cause and effect, episodic, inconclusive, consisting of events
that are both reversible and interchangeable. This is more, however, than an
incompatibility of aesthetics; for the logic of narrative of sequential causality, is
the logic of human freedom and choice: the freedom to take a step that is
determining and the choice to be a character in an action that is either fortunate or
unfortunate. Within a Christian framework, however, the plot is fortunate by
divine fiat, and one reaches a point not because he chooses, but because he has
been chosen, that is, redeemed. (qtd. in Ermarth 11-12)
Fish may or may not accurately describe the prototypical “Christian plot” at one point in
history, but Christianity is not static or monolithic and neither are its literary works.
Evangelical novels of the nineteenth century reflect ancient Christian values, but they
also engage with the material and cultural realities of the world in which they’re set—the
modern world in which they were both written and read.

21
or spiritual) use the material world to “make us see…a larger and unseen reality”? Such
writers are trying to help readers make sense of truths that may be intangible and abstract
but that are still “real” (to the writer, at least). George Eliot and Charlotte Elizabeth
Tonna would agree that the texture of daily life—the realities of time and place and small
daily actions—is important in and of itself, but they would also agree that daily life
carries with it a larger meaning beyond itself. The fact that the presence of religious
transcendence in a text has, for many critics, disqualified that text from the category
“novel,” while other forms of transcendence haven’t had the same effect, should give us
pause. For too long, critics have dismissed religious novels as “unrealistic” and “un-
modern” because they do not reflect a worldview that matches our own. This project
seeks to show how getting past our own discomfort with these deeply unfamiliar novels
can reveal the alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and living they presented to
nineteenth-century readers.
When I speak of getting past “our” discomfort with Evangelical novels, I use the
first person advisedly. Robert Orsi, whose stimulating work on contemporary American
religious practices has greatly impacted my own thinking about the most productive and
authentic ways to engage with the religious beliefs of others, has talked about the “moral
and intellectual imperative…[of] studying and thinking about despised religious idioms,
practices that make us uncomfortable, unhappy, [or] frightened.” He has stressed that our
job is “not just to study them[,] but to bring ourselves into close proximity to them, and
not to resolve the discomfort they occasion by imposing a normative grid” (7). I do not
share the religious orientations depicted in the Evangelical novels I analyze over the
following chapters, nor do I necessarily endorse their attendant social and political

22
implications. In fact, following in Orsi’s footsteps, I have largely chosen to focus my
study on textual moments that make me “uncomfortable, unhappy, [or] frightened”—
moments when the authors make choices that I have trouble understanding, or moments I
am tempted to say I understand perfectly but of which I completely disapprove. I have
also tried to single out moments that have apparently made other critics uncomfortable or
unhappy and sought to understand why. I have attempted not to force any of these
difficult moments into an acceptable academic “normative grid,” but instead to explore
what they might have meant to the nineteenth-century writers and readers of these novels.
Because I am a member of the twenty-first-century secular academic
community—and because my responses to these novels are much more likely to mirror
those of my fellow critics than to chime with those of religious readers and writers from
150-plus years ago—I have taken the somewhat unusual step of describing my own
reactions to difficult portions of the Evangelical novels I have chosen to study. Orsi
reminds us that religious discomfort is often “transmuted into moral criticism through a
posture of pragmatic superiority” (201), and I am certainly not above a tendency to such
posturing. I do not want to pretend I am immune to the strangeness of these novels, to
their ability to confound and provoke non-Evangelical readers. I hope the chronicling of
my own visceral responses to these novels, when such chronicling appears, will be taken
as more than merely a stylistic tic. It is, instead, an attempt to remain aware of myself and
my reactions as a reader—to make those reactions visible and explicit rather than veiling

23
them as if they were beyond investigation, as if it were possible for me to occupy a
neutral position in relation to these—in some ways, inherently foreign—texts.
16

Because, in the end, their foreignness cannot be avoided. Orsi may feel
comfortable declaring that “no one any longer holds the secularization thesis to be
universally true” because “there has been too much evidence to the contrary for the idea
to stand that over the last two centuries religious belief and commitment have been
slowly but inexorably disappearing from the modern world” (10); but the assumptions
and prejudices that led to the rise of the secularization thesis in the first place still
underlie much historical and literary scholarship. If it is no longer acceptable to state that
religion has no real place in modern times, it is still common practice to judge historical
religious beliefs and practices by contemporary secular standards and find them wanting.
The challenge for scholars today, Orsi reminds us, “is not to find new others...but to get
beyond ‘otherizing’ as [a] basic move” (198). Given the fact that Evangelical belief still
plays an important role in the lives of millions of people—particularly in the United
States, where scholars all too often continue to seem baffled by the beliefs and cultural
productions of the deeply religious—it makes sense to ask how, in an age of supposedly
increasing doubt and skepticism, these populations retained their faith. How did they
respond to social, economic, political, and cultural changes that actively challenged that
faith? In what ways did they influence their times, and in what ways did their times
influence them? If we no longer assume the inevitable failure and disappearance of the

16
In Between Heaven and Earth, Orsi takes care to share his own religious history and
reflect upon how that history might shape his interactions with the religious populations
whom he studies—a critical move he claims is generally avoided in the discipline of
religious studies (14). My own attempt to situate myself and my reactions to the
Evangelical texts I study is inspired by his example.

24
way of life depicted here—if we refuse to take for granted the ultimate invalidity of faith
presumed by the secularization thesis—then it makes sense to re-read these novels with
an eye toward the genuine alternatives they might have offered their readers. We
certainly needn’t agree with the convictions on display in these texts, but for the sake of
our own understanding of both the historical and contemporary moment we should
attempt to comprehend the fundamental properties of these novels and at least begin to
unravel what they meant to the people who wrote and read them.
To do that, we will have to come to terms with the fact that these Evangelical
narratives demonstrate an investment in a very different kind of subjectivity than we are
used to seeing in nineteenth-century novels. One of the reasons the novel has been
identified as a distinctively modern form is its depiction—and, some have argued,
creation—of a thoroughly modern kind of subjectivity. For close to a century, critics have
stressed that, in the novelistic world, the individual is all-important; deprived of the
master narrative and sanction of religion, the individual subject carries value within him-
or herself (Lee 26). Informed by the rising tenets of liberal humanism and capitalism, this
new subject, Catherine Belsey tells us, “is the free, unconstrained author of meaning and
action, the origin of history” (Tragedy 8). Classic realism “roughly coincides
chronologically with the epoch of industrial capitalism” and emphasizes the ideology of
industrial capitalism: that is, “the value of individual freedom, freedom of conscience and,
of course, consumer choice in the multiplicity of its forms” (Belsey, Critical Practice 56).
Unlike his or her pre-modern counterpart, the modern subject has been defined as
autonomous, unified, and bounded.

25
Such a conception of the individual subject will naturally affect relationships
between subjects whenever they come together for political, economic, or social purposes.
Brigid Lowe tells us that the new “freedom of choice” ideology manifested itself not just
in the worker’s choice of where and for how much to sell his or her labor, or in the
bourgeois subject’s choice of consumer goods, but also in domestic relationships. The
nuclear family—that centerpiece of the modern heart and home—“is in the nineteenth
century polemically connected with an ideal of an independent and completely self-
determining human subject, that subject’s right and responsibility over himself and his
property, and that subject’s power of free choice [of a mate]: an ideal derived from the
contract model” (161).
But if, as Watt, Lowe, and Germain Greer have argued, the new individualism
strengthens the relationship between freely chosen mates, it simultaneously erodes the
ties between other members of the family. According to Watt, “Economic
individualism…tended to weaken the ties between parents and children: and its spread
was associated with the development of a new kind of family system [the “elementary” or
“conjugal” family unit] which has since become the standard one in most modern
societies” (138). “[O]n marriage,” he continues, “the couple immediately sets up as a new
family, wholly separate from their own parents and often far away from them;
…extended kinship ties in general, to grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc., have
no compelling significance; and once set up, the conjugal family typically becomes an
autonomous unit in economic as well as social affairs” (139).
17
This new family unit is

17
Watt acknowledges Locke’s importance as a theorist of this new family dynamic,
writing: “[Locke’s] political and economic theory led him to regard the family as

26
thus accompanied by social, economic, and geographic assumptions and effects—and
these, critics tell us, are reflected in the novels of the day. Even when they were written
by men who claimed a traditional, paternalistic view of family, Watt says, novels tend to
assert the individual’s freedom from family ties (141).
Such is the configuration of knowledge, subjectivity, and human relationships that
critics for the past six-plus decades have uncovered in nineteenth-century novels.
18

Novels, they say, emphasize humans as the makers of meaning and the centers of the
universe. Novels implicitly or explicitly stress the importance of individual rights and
freedoms—particularly the freedom of choice. And novels assume that individuals are (or
ideally should be) independent from the undue influence of outside forces, be they human,
political, or spiritual.
Disputing whether or not canonical novels actually do endorse the vision of
subjectivity described above is much less interesting to me than is the fact that critics
have largely agreed that this is what canonical novels do, and that this agreement has led
to the valuing of some novels as “of their time” and the sidelining of others, such as
Evangelical novels, as not of their time, not representative, and therefore not of wide

primarily a secular and contractual institution existing for the rational function of looking
after children until they could do so for themselves. Once they could do so, he believed,
‘the bonds of subjection’ should ‘drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free
disposal’” (141).

18
While critics don’t always state these criteria outright, they become assumptions that
inform most studies of the novel. They tell us what texts to look at and which to ignore,
what textual evidence is significant and what is not, and which interpretations of that
evidence are valid.

27
interest or relevance.
19
When nineteenth-century literary historians have decided that the
subject being addressed by (and, some have argued, created by) the novel is an
independent and “completely self-determining human subject” with “right[s] and
responsibilit[ies] over himself and over his property,” what can they do with Evangelical
novelists who insist that man is anything but self-determining, and that self-ownership is
merely an illusion that draws us away from God? Canonical Victorian novels may, as
some critics claim, endorse self-actualization as the highest goal of life and expound the
philosophy that “becoming what you essentially are necessitates keeping yourself
disentangled from and untainted by other people” (Lowe 163). But Evangelical novels
reject any such quest for an “essential self.” Our essential selves are not unique but are all
the same, they preach; we are all sinners destined for eternal damnation, and the proper
quest every man and woman must undertake is the quest to become what we essentially
are not—that is, more like Christ. According to Evangelical texts, we can only do this by
maintaining our “entanglements” with others—particularly our parents (whose

19
Nineteenth-century British culture was complex and multifarious, not monolithic, and
Evangelical novels provide a valuable window into some of the differences in belief and
practice that existed at the time. Of course, other nineteenth-century individuals and
groups, including the anarchist movement and philosophers such as Feuerbach,
Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, imagined alternatives to so-called modern epistemologies
as well. Evangelicals were not alone in arguing that material reality and the “individual
self” were illusions and imagining instead the possibility of corporate or cooperative
selves and transcendent realities that could not be bound by the limits of empirical
knowledge. Even Marx, who was undeniably hostile to organized religion, shared with
Evangelicals a skepticism about the individual freedoms so celebrated by bourgeois
liberalism. Nineteenth-century Evangelical novels thus shared certain epistemological
and ideological values with adherents of a wide range of philosophical and political
movements and might even have found readers among members of these disparate
circles.

28
expectations we are not encouraged to rebel against) and siblings, but also our ministers,
neighbors, and friends.
The proper role and precise limitations of human agency are particularly fraught
questions for Evangelicals, and I have at times found their novels’ complex and
contradictory depictions of agency challenging both to understand and to discuss. In her
work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodists, Phyllis Mack has identified the
Methodist conception of agency as the phenomenon that most fundamentally troubles
modern secular scholars. She writes, “I think that the otherness we need to confront [in
these populations] has less to do with dogmatism (which flourishes in many secular
settings) than with the religious person’s conception of agency” (9). She continues:
Most liberal, secular thinkers define agency as the free exercise of self-
willed behavior: the capacity to know and do what one wants. The
implication is that those who are motivated by religious ardor or who live
under the influence of a religious institution or discipline have no agency
or limited agency, whereas secular society, which locates religious
authority and practice outside the spheres of politics and the marketplace,
allows for domains of free, autonomous behavior. Indeed, for the vast
majority of intellectuals who view modernity as synonymous with
secularization, religion is perceived chiefly as a form of self-
estrangement. (9)
As existing scholarship on Evangelical novels makes abundantly clear, this religious
“self-estrangement” is viewed with anything but neutrality by most critics. Keane
reminds us that the moral narrative of modernity insists “that one ought to become a

29
modern subject, [and] that to do otherwise is an ethical failing” (161, italics original). As
the coming chapters will show, this prescriptive attitude informs many modern critical
engagements with Evangelical texts, and I believe it has blinded us to the complicated
workings of those texts.
In the following chapters, I hope to demonstrate that nineteenth-century
Evangelicals occupied a complex and contradictory position within the moral narrative of
modernity Keane delineates. In some ways, Evangelicals seem neatly positioned as
“moderns” in this scheme of human liberation and self-mastery; in fact, Keane uses
Evangelical missionary work, which sought to “free” other peoples (such as native
populations in Africa and India) from bondage to illegitimate religious rulers, rigid
religious traditions, and unreal fetishes, as one of his primary examples.
20
Back at home,
Evangelicalism also promised believers a kind of mastery over themselves and their life
circumstances. Through faith and prayer, Evangelical adherents could cast off the
shackles of undesirable feelings such as envy and despair, and even physical pain.
21
But
while Evangelicalism promised its believers a certain kind of freedom, secular critics

20
It is perhaps worth remembering that, from an Evangelical perspective, European
Catholics were just as “unfree” as native peoples, subjugated as they were to the Pope,
various saints, and ineffectual icons. Nineteenth-century British Evangelicals’ antipathy
for Catholicism has been well-documented by modern scholars.

21
Interestingly, Mack has argued that Methodists’ attempts to understand and modify
their emotions—including their unconscious impulses—was not a “precursor of or a
reaction to modernity,” as some scholars have alleged, but was instead “part of the
process of modernization itself.” She contends that “Methodist writings thus do more
than increase our knowledge of and sympathy for popular religious experience; they call
into question the traditional narrative of modernity in which religion is viewed as an
interesting but anachronistic phenomenon that is essentially marginal to the main
story” (18).

30
have classified Evangelical believers as just as in thrall to unreal forces as Evangelicals
themselves would have seen a Roman Catholic or African tribesman.
My project seeks to elucidate Evangelicals’ complicated relationship to narratives
of modernity—both theirs and ours—by tracing their complex negotiations with ancient
and Enlightenment values, with the modern and the eternal. The novels I study in the
following chapters are an integral part of these negotiations; in their novels, Evangelicals
work through and represent their values to themselves and to the outside world. In my
readings, I attempt not to over-simplify the choices, beliefs, and paradoxes they
sometimes faced in favor of a neat narrative of difference from (or similarity to) more
canonical novels. To do so would mischaracterize these historical actors and their texts,
and would bring us no closer to a better understanding of these novels or a century’s
worth of critical reactions to them.
While I’m not particularly interested in trying to recuperate Evangelical novels as
radical or liberating texts for their readers and writers, I also don’t see the value in
accepting the conventional wisdom that would tell us that this fiction is by definition
repressive. I can’t recreate the precise reading or writing experiences of the people who
produced and consumed these texts in such great numbers, but I have attempted to resist
the impulse to ignore or condescend to them. By questioning the assumptions that have
made these texts all but invisible to modern critics, I have tried to raise possibilities about
how and why these novels were written and read and make suggestions about what might
account for their widespread and long-lasting popularity. Decidedly non-secular, critical
of the celebration or even the existence of independent individuals, insistent upon radical
human-to-human and human-to-divine intersubjectivity—the Evangelical novel provided

31
its readers with alternative ways to interpret life and its events, ways that differed from
those presented by many now-canonical nineteenth-century novels.
Of course, we can’t look at any of the novels in this study as perfect or complete
representatives of Evangelical belief or even of Evangelical fiction.
22
The individual
religious beliefs and practices of the authors I have chosen varied, as did their
deployment of narrative techniques and their engagement with the novel form. But I have
attempted to identify “family resemblances” (to use Wittgenstein’s formulation)—key
resonances between these novels that seem to present challenges to prevalent nineteenth-
century attitudes and expectations about individual subjectivity, agency, knowledge,
character, family, and more. These authors differ as Christians and as novelists, but
examining overlapping similarities between their works opens up to us intriguing

22
Given the current state of scholarship in the field, I should acknowledge that
“Evangelical fiction” is anything but a self-evident term. Scores of authors and texts have
been misidentified as Evangelical (or its close corollary, Methodist) over the years. I
believe that such mistakes are most commonly caused by confusion about what,
precisely, separated Evangelical Anglicans and Dissenters from non-Evangelical
Anglicans and Dissenters; thus, for some past and present critics it has been easier to
label a disparate set of religious novels “Evangelical” than to tease out the doctrinal
differences between those novels. Furthermore, because so many prominent nineteenth-
century writers—including the Brontës and George Eliot—were raised under the
influence of Evangelicalism but switched religious affiliations as they aged, while other
(though, admittedly, fewer) writers converted to Evangelicalism as adults, it can be hard
to identify “Evangelical” novelists and novels by relying primarily on biographical
details. To avoid the confusion and careless nomenclature described above, my project
identifies as “Evangelical” only those novels that strive to communicate to their readers
what David Bebbington identifies as the four distinguishing principles of Evangelicalism:
conversionism, activism, biblicalism, and crucicentrism (3). Thus, an author’s personal
religious affiliation—be it with the Methodist, Anglican Evangelical, Independent,
Baptist, or Presbyterian Dissenting church—is far less important to me than the religious
doctrine she presents in her text.

32
possibilities regarding how a large group of nineteenth-century men and women
experienced life and viewed the world in which they lived.
No one is more aware than I of the many historical and cultural avenues this
project leaves unexplored. My readers may object that these avenues might have been
more fully explored had I devoted less space to the close reading of primary texts. But
these close readings are an integral part of my project. Too much previous scholarship
has either ignored or hand-waved at these texts without truly investigating what these
novels say and how they say it. It seems to me that the foundation of a broad range of
critical inquiry into a novel or set of novels is a thorough familiarity with their most
fundamental components: that is, their plot, characters, narrative voice, and broad
ideological commitments. Therefore, I have paid close attention to those elements here.
There is certainly more work that can and should be done on these authors and their
novels, the vast majority of which I haven’t had the time to explore. I hope that the novel
excerpts I have included in the coming chapters, the claims I have made about the
insights and oversights of previous scholarship on the genre, and the possibilities I have
raised about the importance of these texts as alternatives to the ideological, ontological,
and epistemological assumptions present in many canonical texts of the period, will pique
my readers’ interest and lead to more in-depth studies of these works and the people who
wrote and read them.
Have I, at times, been a bit too willing to entertain the propositions on display in
these novels? Have I shown a bit too much credulity, or failed to show sufficient
skepticism? Quite possibly. If I have sometimes erred on the side of an over-generosity
toward these texts and their authors, it is because critics have typically shown them so

33
little generosity at all.
23
When one considers the oppressions and injustices that have been
perpetrated in the name of Evangelical Christianity, it is not difficult to understand the
critical wariness that surrounds these texts—the general scholarly reluctance to give them
and their authors the benefit of the doubt. I am not saying that I have always judged
correctly, but, when faced with a choice between cynicism and generosity, I have quite
consciously—and often against my own training and instincts—tried to choose the latter.

Project Outline
This project is driven by a set of interrelated questions about how Evangelical
fiction depicted and helped readers interpret everyday life. What does everyday life look
like to a believer? How does Evangelical faith affect one’s conception of self? How does
it shape one’s relationships? And—crucially—how does faith interact with other values
and cultural scripts that influence a believer’s life?
Evangelicalism has often been characterized as a comforting, stabilizing force in
the lives of its adherents. For instance, M. Nancy Cutt has written that, in the upheaval-
filled late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Evangelicalism “clarified for many
the confusion of the times, assuring them that insoluble contemporary problems mattered
less than the welfare of the individual soul”; it offered its adherents “the comforting
stability of absolute religious conviction in a period of shifting values” (23). That
Evangelicalism could provide a kind of touchstone for believers during times of personal,
communal, or even national upheaval is no doubt true, and the novels I study depict the

23
Again, I would be remiss not to except Elisabeth Jay, Christine Krueger, Samuel
Pickering, M. Nancy Cutt, and Mitzi Myers from this generalization.

34
many psychological and emotional comforts of sincere religious belief. But these novels
also make abundantly clear that the life of the believer was riven with tensions. As
Phyllis Mack points out, Evangelicalism “offered the religious seeker not a set of dogmas
or a display of religious hegemony, but a series of conundrums”; every believer, she
continues, “[struggled] to decipher and interpret the meaning of her own pain, her own
emotions and appetites, her own dreams, in light of these varied and often contradictory
discourses” (26-27).
24
While Evangelical doctrine has often been characterized as a set of
stark black-and-white dualities (God/Satan, heaven/hell, saved/unsaved, good/evil), lived
Evangelicalism had to accommodate infinite shades of grey. And because novels, unlike
older forms such as parables, tried to depict life as it was actually lived, Evangelical
novels had to find a way to deal with these shades of grey.
The novels I discuss in the following chapters present to modern readers examples
of the cultural narratives that, perhaps more than sermons and biblical texts, helped
nineteenth-century believers work through the conundrums of religious belief and
practice.
25
These novels have by and large been studied—when they have been studied at
all—as applications or illustrations of strict religious and moral codes. I would argue that
such studies overlook a crucially important component of the character of these texts, and
thus, of their function for readers. These narratives do not just passively communicate
established religious beliefs; instead, they are a mode of exploring and working out those

24
Mack is specifically discussing Methodist Evangelicals, but, as the following chapters
will make clear, her points are equally applicable to non-Methodist Evangelicals.

25
Knight and Mason remind us of the central role extra-scriptural texts played in most
Britons’ religious lives, writing, “For the majority of people in the nineteenth century, the
doctrinal intricacies of the Church were experienced through texts that were unlikely to
appear in a course of formal theology: hymns, tracts, poetry, and fiction” (7).

35
beliefs in the complex circumstances of life. When reading these texts, it is important to
remember that “religious idioms are neither sufficient nor discrete. They interact with
other competing, alternative, or complementary configurations of experience that are
available outside the religious world” (Orsi 169). Such interactions—and the anxieties
they can produce for individuals and communities of believers—are of significant interest
to the writers discussed in the following pages.

36
Chapter One:
Suffering, Submission, and Subjectivity in Barbara Hofland’s Patience

Of all the Evangelical novelists discussed in these pages, Barbara Hofland seems
the most conscious of religion’s tendency to manifest itself as a “series of conundrums”
in the life of the believer. Her 1824 novel Patience positively thrums with tension,
reminding us that, far from being a monolithic religion of hard-and-fast dogma,
Evangelicalism was constantly being negotiated on the ground by believers struggling to
enact sincere religious beliefs in complex circumstances. But the richness of Hofland’s
literary project has previously been overlooked by critics, who see in her work
stereotypes of submissive femininity and an expected shoring up of bourgeois values. In
this chapter, I argue that Patience tweaks the “angel of the house” trope in important
ways by de-gendering the virtues of sacrifice and submissiveness. What’s more, the novel
uses its domestic setting to stage an unexpected and substantive investigation into the
validity of foundational liberal humanist values. In Patience, the legitimacy of the
contract model of relationships, the desirability of individual rights, and the very
existence of unitary, autonomous subjects are all subject to vigorous debate.
While nearly forgotten today, Barbara Hofland (1770-1844) was an extremely
popular and prolific author 200 years ago, publishing over sixty novels for children and
adults during the first four decades of the nineteenth century (Butts, Mistress 56-95).
Most of these novels went through multiple printings in Britain and the United States,
and reviews of her work appeared in periodicals including the British Critic, Critical
Review, Gentleman’s Magazine, Lady’s Monthly Magazine, and Monthly Review. Many

37
of her novels continued into new editions long after her death; Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co.
published a thirty-volume collection of her works entitled “The Hofland Library” in the
early 1850s, while Nelson and Sons was still publishing Hofland’s novels in 1881 (Butts,
Mistress 96). Hofland’s best-selling works (and the titles one is most likely to run across
in modern literary criticism—though running across any work by Hofland is not very
likely at all) include The Son of a Genius (1812), Ellen, the Teacher (1814), and The
Young Crusoe (1829). She also wrote a series of popular “virtue novels” for young adults
in the 1820s; titles in this series included Integrity (1823), Moderation (1825), Reflection
(1826), Self-Denial (1827), and Patience (1824), the subject of this chapter.
1

Patience tells the story of Dora Hemingford, a devoutly Christian young woman
from a well-off mercantile family. Early in the novel, Dora enters into what ends up
being an ill-fated marriage with her father’s young business partner, Everton Stancliffe.
Though sometimes well meaning, the non-Christian Stancliffe is powerless against his
own base desires and has so weak a character that he is constantly being led into bad
conduct by others. Most of the novel is devoted to cataloging Dora’s endurance of
Stancliffe’s various misdeeds during their seven-year marriage, a lengthy list which
includes having an affair with a married family friend; running off to London with his
mistress when Dora is days away from delivering their first child; impoverishing himself
and his family through his chronic gambling; displaying utter indifference to Dora’s
frequent ill health and to the early death of their only child; beating Dora’s beloved

1
According to Butts, Patience went through five editions to 1838 and was still being
advertised as part of The Hofland Library in the 1850s (Mistress 75). Upon its
publication, Patience was positively reviewed in La Belle Assemblée and the Literary
Chronicle and Weekly Review.

38
brother nearly to death in an unjustified fit of rage; and finally deserting Dora by
absconding to Ireland with a young country lass whom he has seduced. Despite his
frequent ill-treatment of her, however, and over the objections of her closest friends, Dora
remains a loving and faithful wife, and the novel seems to reward her titular “patience”
by granting Stancliffe the deathbed conversion for which Dora has long worked and
prayed.
There is, as far as I have been able to uncover, no modern critical discourse on
Patience. In fact, as Jackie C. Horne notes, “Hofland has received surprisingly little
critical attention for an author who was second only to Walter Scott in the number of
novels she published during the period 1800-1829” (65). Stephen C. Behrendt theorizes
that Hofland’s status as an Evangelical writer whose most popular books were written for
young readers has resulted in her double marginalization by literary critics:
[T]he suspicion with which much of modern literary, social, intellectual,
and cultural theory (and its discourse and practices) regards religious
fundamentalism has frequently led scholarship to shy away from the
seemingly formulaic popular writing of prolific and once widely read
authors such as Hofland, especially when their works are ostensibly
directed towards children. Even while children’s literature has, in recent
decades, become the subject of increasingly sensitive and sophisticated
literary and cultural scholarly study, Hofland’s name has remained
unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated specialists. (Behrendt 484)
2

2
Of course, even many the “dedicated specialists” whom Behrendt cites, including F. J.
Harvey Darton, Mary V. Jackson, Patricia Demers, Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., and M.

39
Dennis Butts, who has published more extensively on Hofland’s life and writing than any
other modern critic, would no doubt be surprised by my inclusion of Hofland in a study
of Evangelical novelists who challenge common conceptions of nineteenth-century ways
of being, knowing, and writing. According to Butts, much of Hofland’s commercial
success can be attributed to the fact that her writing so neatly embodied the mainstream
and deeply conventional ideologies of nineteenth-century British culture. He writes:
[O]ne of the reasons why her books were so popular, sometimes going
into a dozen editions, is that many readers recognized the picture of life
they presented. For Mrs. Hofland is in many ways an extremely orthodox
and representative woman of the period, lower middle class, a moderate
member of the Church of England (neither a Dissenter nor an Evangelical),
liberal in her sympathies but not particularly radical. She is a firm believer
in marriage and conventional family life. (“The Role of Women
Writers” 143)
3

Nancy Cutt, mention only Hofland’s name and a few of her titles in their lists of early
children’s authors instead of paying extended attention to any of her works. Only Horne,
Susan Naramore Maher, Anne Frey, Dennis Butts, and Behrendt himself have sought to
unravel the formal and thematic mysteries of Hofland’s texts. Each necessarily deals with
a tiny portion of this prolific author’s output: Behrendt concentrates on Hofland’s
“widow” novels (three novels written between 1809 and 1814 with widowed mothers as
their protagonists), while Horne and Maher primarily focus on Hofland’s popular
robinsonade, The Young Crusoe. Butts and Frey have principally studied Hofland’s
career and her treatment of women’s work in her novels. The vast majority of Hofland’s
sixty-six novels remains unread and uncommented upon.

3
Despite Butts’s assertion to the contrary, most scholars who write about Hofland
identify her as an Evangelical and her writing as Evangelical fiction. Though her work
displays some variances from the common pattern of Evangelical fiction, this chapter
argues that a novel like Patience shares significant ideological and epistemological

40
Throughout his scholarship, Butts insists upon the reasonable, practical, and—above
all—predictable nature of Hofland’s depictions of religious belief, family formations, and
gender roles.
Religion, Butts claims, operates in Hofland’s fictions more as a comfortable
system of morals than a set of intense spiritual beliefs or practices. While her books
“assume a background of Christian faith,” Butts insists that that faith is consistent with
the beliefs of “a moderate liberal member of the Church of England, untroubled by doubt,
confident of Christ’s salvation, and striving to practice the teaching of the New
Testament, with an emphasis on love, honesty, truthfulness and prudence” (Mistress 27-
28). When it comes to families and women’s roles within them, Hofland “generally
accepts the principle of wifely submission,” and her stories “reflect many of the
characteristics of the Modern Family that had appeared in much of middle-class England
by the beginning of the nineteenth century” (Mistress 30, 28). Despite her “sensitive
regard for husbands and wives as troubled human beings”—a regard that, according to
Butts, makes Hofland “almost a very good writer”—“the insights are never sustained
dramatically for very long” and the reader is left with the feeling that Hofland is
committed to traditional ideals of marriage and gender relations (Mistress 29-30). In
other words, if Hofland is at all valuable to the modern reader, it is because she so
perfectly encapsulates everything we’ve come to expect from early-to-mid nineteenth-
century fiction: her novels reflect common assumptions about the roles of women and
men, about families, virtue, and the place of religion.

commitments with other, more orthodox Evangelical fiction, and should be considered a
member of that genre.

41
It is certainly true that, compared to novels like Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood or
Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family, the religion on display in
Patience appears “moderate” and “liberal.” Patience does not preach incessantly about
the total depravity of mankind or explicitly insist upon humanity’s utter inability to do
good without the help of God. Depicting as it does the domestic trials and tribulations of
an upper-middle-class wife and mother, it also does not take up controversial economic
and social issues such as class inequality or factory reform, as Tonna’s novel does. Butts
declares that Hofland’s “virtue novels” (Integrity, Moderation, Self-Denial, etc.) have
straightforward aims: their titles “suggest the moral themes which the stories aim to
articulate” (“Finding and Sustaining” 115). Patience, then, is part of the author’s overall
literary project to advance a “liberal and broadly ethical interpretation of Christianity”
(Mistress 35). Reading these novels, Butts looks for and finds evidence of the liberal
bourgeois ideologies and epistemologies that twentieth-century critics have said are
typical of nineteenth-century novels.
4
Certainly, such values seem to be present in
Patience. The put-upon wife plot, whose broad outlines I laid out above, could easily be
interpreted as one designed to inculcate in its young female readers predictable ideas

4
As Butts puts is,
[A]lthough Mrs. Hofland followed her own line on Religion, Education and
Work, she did so with moderation, and within broad areas of agreement with her
contemporaries. Her liberal and broadly ethical interpretation of Christianity, her
relaxed attitudes about the upbringing of children, and her probably unconscious
advocacy of more fulfilling work for women, even her own blend of eighteenth-
century tract style with nineteenth-century realism, give her an individuality
which helps to disturb our stereotyped view of the literature of the time, but it
would be wrong to think of her as genuinely radical. (Mistress 35, italics mine)
My point is that Butts and others have a too-constrained definition of “radical”; they
look only for evidence of ideology that we would consider revolutionary for the time—
e.g., equal rights for women—but don’t necessarily notice other kinds of thought that
differ radically from our own.

42
about family and gender roles, using Christianity primarily to justify its ethic of female
self-sacrifice. Hofland’s heroine, after all, believes “the great duty of woman to consist in
the practice of forbearance, meekness, and humble endurance,” and this belief guides her
actions throughout the novel (59). For the modern (feminist, secular) critic, reading
Patience is simultaneously discomfiting and reassuring: while its religiously sanctioned
rhetoric of female subjugation is disturbing, it also feels familiar. Patience is a novel we
know how to read; it appears to fit easily into the well-worn paths of conservative,
didactic nineteenth-century fiction. As such, it poses no real conundrums other than to
make us wonder why in the world contemporary readers would have chosen to spend
time with Dora when they might have engaged with the far livelier Eliza Bennet or
Emma Woodhouse instead.
And yet, from its first pages, Patience presents a much more robust challenge to
traditional gender roles and family structures than Butts—or any other critic—has yet
acknowledged. According to Butts, religion in Hofland’s novels is eminently reasonable
and practical, but in Patience Christian principles are invoked to support—indeed, to
make possible—beliefs and actions that are considered completely unreasonable and
impractical by characters within the novel who embrace “modern” views on the
individual and family. These challenges stem from deep doubts about the legitimacy of
foundational liberal humanist values, and those doubts rest upon Evangelical convictions.
What’s more, Patience uses the home and family—particularly the institution of
marriage—to engage in complex negotiations with competing discourses about modern
subjectivity. While it is deeply ambivalent about traditional gender roles and ideal family
formations, at the bottom of Patience’s extended meditation on marriage and family life

43
is a prioritization of relational duties and responsibilities over individual rights and
freedoms. It is vital that we recognize the novel’s deep discomfort with liberal humanist
values, because assuming Hofland’s agreement with those values virtually ensures that
we read Patience as merely another endorsement of women’s domestic subjugation. Far
from simply confirming what we think we know about nineteenth-century attitudes
toward gender, family, and subjectivity, Hofland’s novel can illuminate the challenges
that Evangelical writers faced in bringing modern discourses about individual rights into
dialogue with eternal discourses of submission and atonement, and the alternate avenues
of inquiry and action they opened up for their readers.

Patience is the chronicle of a single, terrible marriage, at whose center is an
endlessly harassed wife. Because Dora is the protagonist of the tale, Patience is largely a
narrative of reactions. Over and over again, Dora must decide how to respond to her
husband’s thoughtless or outright cruel deeds; over and over again, she seems to become
an embodiment of the self-sacrificing, submissive wife sanctioned by so much
nineteenth-century conduct literature. As a modern, feminist reader, I find Dora very
problematic. Her reactions to her husband’s misconduct run counter to everything I
believe—not just about gender equality and the necessity of parity in marriage, but about
justice, self-respect, and even the value of reason itself. Even more troubling than Dora’s
relationship to her husband, I find, is her relationship to herself; after all, her faithfulness
to Stancliffe is only made possible by her repeated attempts to deny, disown, or “pray
away” her own mental, physical, and emotional reactions to his perfidy. Dora embraces a

44
form of self-denial that has far more radical underpinnings than the belief that woman’s
primary function, by biological or religious edict, is to support man. This is no superficial
moral tale that seeks, through Dora’s impossibly virtuous example, to teach young
women the value of patience, in marriage or out of it; despite Butts’s insinuation, this
novel is not encompassed by its title. The value of patience may be on its mind, but
Dora’s patience is only made possible—and, in fact, is only justified—by Evangelical
principles fundamentally at odds with liberal humanist values. And those principles are
not presented to the reader as a static set of morals, commandments, or good and bad
examples (as we might expect from a didactic novel), but rather as a “series of
conundrums.”
Dora’s most frequent and pressing conundrum is judging how best to respond to
her husband’s distressing behavior. Her marriage results in trials large and small, in
hardships moral, emotional, and physical. When Stancliffe stays out all night with
questionable companions, when he refuses to provide Dora with any spending money
while squandering her inheritance at the gaming tables, when he verbally and physically
abuses her delicate younger brother, when he wants to invest large quantities of money in
a questionable financial scheme to please his mistress, when he demands that a very ill
Dora travel long distances to obtain funds from her guardian—all of these events require
a reaction on Dora’s part, even if that reaction is submissive silence. Hofland posits that
many diverse factors contribute to Dora’s submissiveness and loyalty to Stancliffe,
including social expectations, her love for him, and her gender.
5
But the novel most

5
The first two factors are nicely summarized in one passage, which states that Dora “felt
impelled by all her received notions of a wife’s allegiance, and all the remains of

45
frequently links submission to Christianity, and in the process transforms submission and
self-sacrifice into active, de-gendered pursuits.
Throughout the novel, Dora’s submissive behavior is guided by the Evangelical
principles she has imbibed from her adopted mother, Mrs. Aylmer. From Mrs. Aylmer,
Dora learned about the “‘higher, purer, gospel-planted patience’” that supersedes regular
human patience stemming from a “sweet temper.” The latter falls far short of the former,
which is the “‘patience of a Christian,—the submissive resignation of a humble soul,
which receives sorrow, injustice, and offence, as the chastisements of a heavenly Father’”
(3). This interpretive framework, which reads life’s most unpleasant events as sanctioned
by God for his divine purposes, makes possible Dora’s endurance of her husband’s
frequent unjust and unkind behavior, which she interprets as “‘purifiers’” sent by God
“‘as preparatives for another state of being’” (187). Working from this interpretive
scheme, Dora “submit[s] to the injustices of man, as a chastisement permitted by God”
(109-110) and willingly “[bends] to that heavenly Father who saw it good to afflict her”
(223). No matter the circumstances in which she finds herself, her constant goal is to
“‘have patience…[and] take the apostle’s advice to “labor and not faint,’ and never to be
‘wearied in well doing’” (97). According to the Evangelical interpretive scheme,

lingering love to the only man who had ever awakened that feeling in her bosom, to hide
his faults, extenuate his foibles, and preserve, or restore him, in the good opinion of her
friends” (162, italics mine). The idea that Dora’s submissiveness is an inherently
feminine trait shows up a few times, as when an apparently ill and remorseful Stancliffe
greets Dora in so “uncomplaining and gentle” a manner that, despite the fact that he
recently abandoned her for his mistress, “Dora, like most of her sex on similar occasions,
was soon relieved from the new and distressing sensations of anger towards him, which
had so lately harrassed her” (260, italics mine).

46
Stancliffe is God’s instrument, and thus, in submitting to Stancliffe, Dora is not
ultimately a woman submitting to a man but a creation submitting to its Creator.
And yet, Patience makes clear that such submission is not unproblematic—that
biblical credos like those above aren’t simply commandments to be followed but
interpretive lenses that inform (but do not control) the believer’s understanding of what
are inevitably complex and contradictory circumstances. Such religious lenses are apt to
conflict with alternate interpretive lenses deployed by both the believer and those around
her, bringing to a head the “dialectical friction” (as David Hempton calls it) that animates
religious life (Mack 26). In their attempts to comprehend Evangelicalism’s appeal to
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century populations, historians and literary critics have often
focused on the reassuring nature of religious belief rather than its challenges and
conundrums. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, for example, have posited that
Evangelicalism’s popularity with the British middle class during this time was partially
due to the “personal comfort and security [it provided] in an unstable and unsafe world”
(77). “Religious belief provided meaning and explanation” to people facing financial or
physical disasters such as bankruptcy and death, they say, and, in addition, it “gave
confidence as to how to behave, how to know what was right and wrong” (77). Such
claims seem reasonable, and Evangelical novels do indeed confirm that religious belief
could be a comforting force in the lives of believers. But what such characterizations
occlude is the fact that religious beliefs were mobilized alongside sometimes-conflicting
beliefs, desires, habits, feelings, and cultural scripts. And, of course, religious doctrines
themselves could be deeply contradictory. Patience illuminates the fact that “belief in
things eternal” was just as likely to provoke anxiety—fears of falling short of God’s

47
expectations, apprehension about how to accommodate conflicting personal desires and
social expectations—as to “[give] succor” (Davidoff and Hall 77). Dora’s fidelity to
Stancliffe is based on a very specific Evangelical interpretive scheme, and Patience sheds
light on the extent to which that scheme differs from modern, secular ones, while also
exploring the sometimes-traumatic consequences of those differing ideologies butting up
against one another.
It is when Dora’s two most trusted advisors try to convince her to sever her
relationship with Stancliffe that the true ideological stakes of Dora’s fidelity become
most clear. The scene in question, which is the crux of the novel, occurs about two-thirds
of the way through the text, soon after Stancliffe absconds to Ireland with his second
mistress, Alice. A month after his disappearance, Dora receives a letter from a stranger,
informing her that her husband has been seriously—though not mortally—wounded in a
duel. The letter goes on to state that Stancliffe is in considerable physical, emotional, and
economic distress, and that he desires Dora to “come to his assistance, bringing with her
a sum of money adequate to the case” (226). Dora receives this missive while in the
presence of two of her closest friends: Mr. Blackwell, the trustee of her recently inherited
estate, and Mrs. Aylmer, the woman who raised her and loves her like a daughter. The
latter, who has until now endorsed—even insisted on—Dora’s use of an Evangelical
framework to interpret the trials of her marriage to Stancliffe, here makes a surprising
move; in this scene, Mrs. Aylmer joins Mr. Blackwell in attempting to shift Dora’s
epistemological scheme from one that acknowledges trials as mercies sent by a loving
God to which the believer must submit unquestioningly, to one that utilizes secular laws
and standards of justice to interpret such trials and judge the correct course of action. In

48
this scene, Mrs. Aylmer and Mr. Blackwell converse with Dora about her options and
obligations regarding her relationship with Stancliffe. Due to the present obscurity of
Hofland’s novels and the fact that my readers are most likely unfamiliar with Patience, I
have transcribed a large portion of this vital exchange. The quotation below is long but, I
trust, useful for making sense of the analysis that follows.
“His conduct in this elopement,” [said] Mr. Blackwell, “gives you
a happy opportunity legally to emancipate yourself from worse than
Egyptian bondage, and I come as your guardian to take you under my
protection, and to prosecute your claims, which I can in fact do better than
your own father, of whose concurrence we can have no possible doubt, but
whose situation as Stancliffe's partner might have embarrassed him.”
“Part from him for ever—divorce him—make myself his
prosecutor—expose him—ruin him?— oh! never, never, never.”
The wild agony with which Dora uttered these words alarmed her
friends, and Mrs. Aylmer, who had heard all in silence, approaching her,
said, “Do not terrify yourself in this manner, Dora, you shall do none of
these things, but you will leave for ever a wicked man who is unworthy of
you, and with whom you have suffered more than is necessary to advert
to:—he has in fact divorced you, he has abandoned you, deserted you.”
Dora wept in agony.
[Mrs. Aylmer continued:] “But God has not deserted you, he gives
you a mother who has never forsaken you; and with a bleeding anxious

49
heart has long watched over you, though at a distance—and a friend, who
will be more than your father has ever been.”
“I know all your goodness—I know, too, that I love you, my more
than mother, better than any human being:—but my husband is in great
distress, he desires to see me, he is doubtless afflicted and repentant—I
cannot refuse to comfort and aid him.”
“He suffers justly—let him drink of the cup he has dealt so freely;”
said Mr. Blackwell.
“Ah!” exclaimed Dora, “but if we were all so dealt by, what would
become of us? Our blessed Lord came down to call sinners to repentance;
to die, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God;—ought not I,
then, as his disciple, to bear a little longer with the man to whom I have
promised obedience, and who now invites me to perform my duty?—
ought I not to forgive even seventy times seven offences, if there is hope
that I may save him, as there is now?”
“Dora,” said Mr. Blackwell in a firm but mild voice, “your motives
are as pure as your conduct is without fault, but your judgment is wrong—
you have adopted ideas neither scripture nor reason justify; for though
they call for the rational submission and proper obedience of a wife to her
husband, it is under the idea that his power is exercised in wisdom and
love—if a man acts as if devoid of either, he compels the woman to
become her own guardian, and exercise her own judgment, upon those
points which concern her happiness. Such has long been your case, and I

50
am fully persuaded, that had Stancliffe been married to a high spirited
woman, who would have conceded his rights, yet have asserted her own,
he never would have played the fool as he has done—your self-denying
economy made him extravagant and avaricious,— your abilities and
exertions plunged him in indolence, and from that very circumstance he
became a gambler, because, though idle, his mind was active—his violent
temper increased from your submission, and he played the tiger because a
lamb was always near him;— naturally selfish, and having no principle of
religious self-controul from within, he certainly required some coercive
operation from without, which (since the death of his father, and in the
absence of yours) you should have endeavoured to supply, as many
women do.”
“Ah!” cried Mrs. Aylmer, “what could a girl so young, so timid,
and so affectionate exact?”
“Not that, madam, which your sex are too apt to seek, power, but
justice—the right to be treated with the kindness due to a faithful wife, the
consideration and respect claimed by a gentlewoman. When these are not
accorded, what is a wife but a servant without wages? a slave, whose
bondage death or infamy alone can loosen? …[H]ow can I help
concluding that [Dora] has ‘loved not wisely, but too well?’ and that
suffering martyrdom with the patience of a saint, is not the way to reform
a sinner.”

51
“You are right, sir,” said Dora, slowly, as under the influence of
full conviction, “perfectly right—poor Stancliffe's mind, ruined by
excessive indulgence in childhood, and the unhappy liberty given to his
youth by a residence abroad, required a very different helpmate to what I
have been. Alas! I have injured whilst I sought to bless him—God forbid
that I should forsake him now he is sunk in the abyss where my weakness
and blindness have helped to plunge him—oh! no.”
As Dora spoke, she rose from the sofa, assuming a strength she
was far from feeling, and indicating by the action as well as by her words,
her intention of going to Stancliffe. As nothing could be farther from Mr.
Blackwell's intention than to increase the bias of her mind this way, he
now began strongly to descant on the faults of Stancliffe towards her and
others, and insist on the folly, madness, indelicacy, and even wickedness,
of again, by such an action, re-uniting herself to a bad man, and thus
giving sanction to his profligacy. A conclusion made by Mrs. Aylmer in
language equally strong, and more persuasive, as she added,
“Surely, Dora, you will not so disgrace the education I gave you,
nor so wound the heart of her who loves you as a mother, as to
countenance adultery by your presence!—to share your husband with a
wanton.”
Dora started—her pallid cheeks became crimson, and she covered
them with her trembling hands, whilst her bosom heaved with thick-

52
coming sobs.—Mrs. Aylmer, pierced to the heart with grief and
compassion, added,
“I see you will not leave me, Dora, you will return to the friend of
your youth—the pious, happy path, in which your early days were passed.”
“Oh! no, no, do not tempt me—he is my husband, and with all his
faults I know he will not expose me to the evil you fear—he is too proud
so to degrade the woman who bears his name—he may not love me, but
surely he cannot despise me.”
Dora wept long and bitterly, but she persisted in her determination,
repeatedly observing “that Mr. Blackwell had judged rightly, he had
opened her eyes to the deficiency of her own conduct, which had been
prejudicial to the vacillating mind of one so impatient of restraint, and
injured by indulgence, she therefore owed him reparation for the past, as
well as compassion in his present distress.”
The very word “reparation,” as applied by her, could not be
endured by those friends who knew that her husband never had, never
could deserve her; and deeply as they felt for her present distress both
became seriously angry… (229-236, all italics original)
It is tempting to read this exchange as one that reveals to us exactly what we
expected to find: that is, Dora emerging as a model of Christian patience and
endurance—a woman who considers her husband’s needs before her own, who refuses to
let a word of criticism or complaint cross her lips, and who never gives up on her
husband or ceases to care for him, even though both she and the reader have long since

53
realized that he is a inveterate scoundrel. Dora displays a set of virtues we no doubt
expect from a Christian woman in a Christian novel; after all, Christianity has long been
characterized as a religion that supports gender inequality—in part by mandating wives’
submission to their husbands. In trying to persuade Dora to leave Stancliffe, Mrs. Aylmer
and Mr. Blackwell press upon her the dictates of law, reason, and self-interest—dictates
that read to me (and, I would venture to guess, almost any modern reader) as common
sense. But Dora, responding with arguments that seem nearly pathological in their
selflessness, refuses to admit the soundness of their case; at the conclusion of their
conversation, she packs her bags and immediately heads to Ireland, her status as a
paragon of self-effacing feminine virtue intact.
It is indeed tempting to read the scene in this way, but it’d be a shame to do so.
This passage is anything but simple and straightforward; instead, it is one of Phyllis
Mack’s “conundrums,” one of David Hempton’s moments of “dialectical friction.” Here
we see the novel’s two most devout characters—Dora and her spiritual mentor, Mrs.
Aylmer—on opposite sides of a highly fraught battle for Dora’s future. What, we might
ask, is Hofland doing with this scene, in which two deeply Evangelical women who
dearly love and respect each other find that their heartfelt beliefs lead them to startlingly
different interpretations of a difficult moral dilemma? Their points of view are clearly
irreconcilable, and yet each just as clearly believes she has right—even divine sanction—
on her side. If this is indeed meant to be a plain didactic tale about the value of Christian
patience, why don’t these two admirable Evangelical characters agree about what that

54
patience looks like? What could possibly cause their conflict, and why, even at the end of
the novel, is it never resolved?
6

To answer these questions, we might begin by examining the assumptions and
values upon which Dora’s advisors base their assertions, in order to discover what Dora’s
resistance to those assertions can teach us about alternative nineteenth-century
Evangelical ideologies and epistemologies. Mr. Blackwell begins by asserting that British
law allows for the dissolution of marriages in which one party has acted as Stancliffe has;
Dora should consider herself unfettered, he insists, because the law has granted her the
right to do so. He goes on to declare Dora’s position within her marriage “worse than
Egyptian bondage,” and as he invites her to let him “take [her] under [his] protection” so
that he can liberate her from the bonds that tie her to Stancliffe, he is drawing a clear
parallel between himself and Moses, who liberated the Israelites from the Egyptians. In
addition to its call back to the book of Exodus, this invocation of slavery would likely
have reminded contemporary readers that the unequal yoking of humans that
characterizes the master-slave relationship is a barbaric and outmoded model of

6
Stancliffe’s deathbed conversion would seem the ultimate sanction of Dora’s decision
not to give up on her husband despite her mentors’ urging that she do so, but the novel
refuses to clarify whether or not Stancliffe actually attains the salvation for which Dora
has so faithfully worked and prayed. As death closes in, Stancliffe cries out, “‘Dora!
Frank! where are you? pray for me.… A little time—a little longer time, my mind is clear
again; now I see it all—and I want, I pray—a little more time,’” whereupon his
“immortal spirit fled to its eternal audit” (294). That his death follows immediately upon
his plea for more time renders it unclear whether Stancliffe has had enough preparation to
ensure a happy ending to that audit. The ambiguity of his eternal state is reinforced on the
following page, when we are told that “Dora took hope to her heart as to the eternal
concerns of her husband, (a hope which, whatever might be their own opinions, [her
friends] desired her to possess)” (295). Clearly, there are lingering doubts about
Stancliffe’s salvation (and thus the fulfillment of Dora’s hopes) in the minds of some
characters and the narrator, and likely in the minds of readers as well.

55
association—one banned on English soil by English law—an idea that is echoed later in
the conversation when Mr. Blackwell opines that a wife whose “rights” to
“kindness…consideration and respect” are denied is no better than “a slave.” The issue of
rights is key to Mr. Blackwell’s arguments. Many of his assertions are based on the
underlying (and unexamined) assumptions that (a) individuals have rights, and (b) a
proper respect for those rights must be displayed by both parties in any relationship. He
insists that Dora’s marriage could have been a happy one if Dora had only “conceded
[her husband’s] rights” yet “asserted her own.” In other words, the fact that Dora has not
insisted upon her own rights as an autonomous individual is just as much to blame for the
failure of her marriage as her husband’s disregard for those rights.
The arguments of both Mr. Blackwell and Mrs. Aylmer also rely heavily on the
idea that husbands and wives must “deserve” each other. Mrs. Aylmer insists that Dora
“leave for ever a wicked man who is unworthy of [her],” while both she and Mr.
Blackwell find it intolerable that Dora should consider traveling to Ireland to comfort a
husband who “never had, never could deserve her.” Such claims are clearly founded on
the contract model of human relationships—a model “polemically connected with an
ideal of an independent and completely self-determining human subject, that subject’s
right and responsibility over himself and his property, and that subject’s power of free
choice” (Lowe 161). As Brigid Lowe reminds us, “The post-industrial ‘nuclear’ family is
not so much a living arrangement as a highly distinctive ideological configuration.… The
core and essence of the nuclear family is embodied in a couple who have freely chosen
each other, and who are each the reward of the other’s merit. The love match is a

56
confirmation of the individual’s power of free choice”
7

(160, 164, italics original). Of
course, the logical extension of this ideological formulation is that the individual is also
free to make a new choice if the first doesn’t work out as planned. Thus, once Stancliffe
has proven that he is decidedly not the reward of Dora’s merits, Dora’s friends insist that
she is free—even morally obligated—to leave him. Only by leaving him can she affirm
her status as a modern individual; by not leaving him, she is refusing to acknowledge the
logic of the contract as the model for and legitimator of her relationship. By not leaving
him, she is refusing to see herself as an “independent and completely self-determining
human subject.” Her friends’ resentment at the end of the quoted section (when, “deeply
as they felt for her present state of distress[,] both became seriously angry”) can be read
as a sign of their discomfort with such a refusal and the fundamentally different values
that must underlie it. Their discomfort is a reminder, Webb Keane might say, that people
like Dora are “morally and politically troubling” (162). “Non-moderns,” after all, pose
the continual threat that they will pull us back from our modern achievements (163).
Of course, the dictate that husbands and wives must deserve each other is only an
extension of the principle that all individuals earn certain outcomes based on their
actions—a principle that is the foundation of another of Mr. Blackwell’s prized values:
justice. It is only just, he claims, that a faithful wife be treated with kindness,
consideration, and respect because, as his speech implies, she has earned such an

7
As Lowe explains, according to the ideological underpinnings of the modern family,
“Family relations that are biological [and thus obligatory] cannot be given equal prestige
with the chosen bond” between a husband and wife (166). As I will demonstrate
throughout this project, Evangelical novels frequently contest such a value scheme,
affording parent/child and sibling relationships an importance that is equal to or greater
than that between lovers/spouses.

57
outcome through her own conduct. By this same token, Stancliffe does not deserve
Dora’s aid in Ireland because at present “he suffers justly,” a reference to both the many
people he has hurt in the course of his own selfish pursuits and the fact that he himself
has caused his present distress by having foolishly challenged another man to a duel. On
the other hand, Dora’s behavior has earned her the right to be happy, and her friends’
conviction that severing her relationship with Stancliffe will result in more (deserved)
happiness for Dora than she would experience if she remained with him helps them
justify their insistence that she leave him. Mr. Blackwell contends that a wife’s duty to
her husband only extends so long as he exercises his power benevolently; when that
ceases to be the case, she must “exercise her own judgment, upon those points which
concern her happiness.” Blackwell’s wording—a wife with an unkind husband is
“compel[led]” to seek her own happiness—gives the pursuit of individual happiness the
urgency of a moral obligation. Mrs. Aylmer, in her turn, invites Dora to leave Stancliffe
behind and return to the “happy path” of their former life together. That her advisors
would advance these arguments reveals their underlying assumptions that (a) happiness is
a basic human right, and (b) those who “deserve” to be happy but refuse to take the path
that would make them so act outside the bounds of reason—perhaps even outside the
bounds of a common modern humanity.
In fact, the incontestable merit of human reason constitutes the final pillar of Mr.
Blackwell and Mrs. Aylmer’s argument. Both are adamant that Dora let reason govern
her decisions regarding her relationship with Stancliffe. Mr. Blackwell maintains that
Dora’s “judgment is wrong” when she insists on going beyond the boundaries of
“rational submission” to Stancliffe, while both friends insist that the only reasonable

58
result Dora can expect from showing compassion to Stancliffe now would be the
continuation of his appalling behavior. They assert that, if she acts the way she always
has, she will get the same results she has always gotten: that is, Stancliffe will continue to
take advantage of—and, in fact, morally deteriorate because of—Dora’s selflessness. Mrs.
Aylmer and Mr. Blackwell certainly have logic on their side. If Dora is, indeed, partially
responsible for encouraging Stancliffe’s faults through her own uncomplaining
submission to them (a proposition which Dora clearly accepts), then her going to him
now makes no sense. How can she reasonably expect that repeating the same forgiving,
self-sacrificing behavior that has just been blamed for Stancliffe’s downfall will result
this time not in his further moral decline but instead in his salvation? Rationally, she
cannot.
In thus looking at Mr. Aylmer and Mr. Blackwell’s arguments to Dora, we can
see the following themes emerging. Dora’s friends believe, above all, in the sanctity of
the individual and the individual’s rights, which include the right to avail herself of
protections she is afforded under the law, the right to exercise her reason, the right to
have her own conduct met by just reward or punishment, the right to pursue her own
happiness, and the right both to enter into equitable relationships and leave those
relationships that prove themselves inequitable. The many rights of the individual are
supported by law, reason, and, perhaps most powerfully, self-interest. Despite the fact
that Dora rejects them all, we see the effect that such arguments have on her, as they
cause her to weep with “wild agony” and to tremble and heave with “thick-coming sobs”
as she considers how she can possibly reconcile her beloved friends’ ideological
commitments with her own. Dora, as she herself admits, is tempted by her friends’ claims.

59
And yet, as her responses make clear, Dora ultimately doesn’t see herself as an
independent or self-determining individual. Instead, she operates from an assumption that
relationships entail duties and obligations that override the rights of the individuals who
comprise those relationships; further, she believes that Christ, the ultimate giver of
undeserved grace, is the role model Christians are obligated to emulate.
Dora refuses to participate in the discourses of law and reason her friends invoke;
instead, she calls upon Christian discourses of pity, undeserved forgiveness, irrational
submission, and uncompensated self-sacrifice. As Christ took pity on the unredeemed, so
does Dora; as Christ sacrificed himself for those that did not deserve him, so, Dora insists,
will she. Mrs. Aylmer and Mr. Blackwell argue that Dora’s individual rights and
freedoms are sanctioned—even mandated—by reason and protected by the laws of the
state. These claims, however, have no meaning for Dora. Meaning for her inheres in an
economy of relational responsibilities, not individual rights. Thus, while Dennis Butts is
correct in his proclamation that “there is no question of any young girl, wife, or mother in
[Hofland’s] books asking for anything like women's rights!”, he also quite misses the
point (“The Role of Women Writers” 143). British law and public opinion might say that
Dora has the “right” to freedom, but she does not see such freedom as a prize worth
winning; instead, she embraces the burden of relational obligation—not because she is
bound to do so as a woman, but because the Evangelical values that animate her life give
such a choice meaning.
As Dora points out, Christ “came down to call sinners to repentance; to die, the
just for the unjust”; in other words, Christ came to atone for mankind’s sins before
mankind deserved him. There was nothing reasonable or rational about such a choice—

60
no evidence that it was likely to be met with success, no argument to be made that
mankind deserved Christ’s love and self-sacrifice. Similarly, Dora believes she must go
to Stancliffe when he is at his very worst, sunk in the depths of his sins. It’s not a choice
Dora feels obliged to make because of her sex; it’s a duty she embraces as a Christian—
an act of grace dictated by Christ himself.
8
If it flies in the face of logic and defies the
underlying principles of the contract model of human relationships, it embodies the
doctrine of “seventy times seven”—an ethic of forgiveness and compassion so broad it
cannot be comprehended by an ideological system that values the sanctity of individual
rights above all else.

Dora is the only participant in this conversation who does not
operate from the assumption that her happiness should be a—perhaps the—primary
motive guiding her decision-making process; in fact, she seems to reject even her
supposed right to happiness, along with the presumed desirability of the “freedom” to
exercise her own judgment unencumbered by outside influence. Looked at this way, it
becomes clear that Dora is being guided by a radically different value system than are her
friends, who embrace ideals that we most often called “modern.” Throughout this pivotal
conversation, Hofland contrasts Dora’s vision of a social self with her friends’ vision of
an individual(ized) self, and in the process illuminates the tension between these two very
different world views, which co-existed in a variety of contexts in nineteenth-century
Britain.

8
This is presaged in an earlier scene when Dora’s father, apprised of his son-in-law’s
financial and sexual misconduct, begins to inveigh against him, and Dora interrupts,
“‘Father!…do not curse him! are we not all liable to error? have we not all need of mercy
and forgiveness?’” (169).

61
If critics have overlooked Hofland’s investigation of the tensions that result when
contrasting ideological commitments play out in the realm of identity and relationship
formation, it may be because the author chose to embody her Evangelical values in the
character of a put-upon wife. Harassed but worthy “angels of the house” are legion in
nineteenth-century fiction (particularly didactic fiction), a fact that makes it quite easy for
us to mistakenly interpret Dora as just another subjugated woman. This picture of
victimized but virtuous femininity is, it seems, one we’ve come across in countless
conduct manuals, tracts, and novels, of both the religious and secular varieties. But to
read Hofland and her Evangelical values correctly, we must notice that, even as the
author exalts what have traditionally been thought of as feminine virtues, she works to
de-gender those virtues; in Patience, male and female characters alike are encouraged to
be humble, submissive, and self-sacrificing. Moreover, although Dora’s devotion to
Stancliffe might seem to validate the critical commonplace that the conjugal pairing was
the most significant family formation in the nineteenth century, Hofland actually presents
filial and sibling relationships as viable alternatives and/or indispensable supplements to
matrimony. Hofland’s emphasis on the sympathy, love, loyalty, and support that exist
between children and parents and brothers and sisters invites us to set aside the well-worn
critical lenses of power and sexuality through which we often read nineteenth-century
marriages and think about families—and women’s roles within them—in new ways.
While Dora’s prioritization of relational obligations over individual rights in the
passage above may represent Patience’s most striking challenge to “modern” values, she
is not the only character to exhibit a significant and consistent commitment to Christian
self-abnegation. Frank, Dora’s much-loved younger brother and Patience’s male paragon

62
of virtue, is also described as possessing “a humble spirit” and being “accustomed to
submission” (215, 214). His remarkable “gentleness and goodness” help sustain Dora
through her difficult marriage to Stancliffe (215). Significantly, Frank is the only
character who supports Dora’s decision to go to Ireland when Stancliffe sends for her,
thus endorsing Dora’s radical refusal of “modern” rights-based values. Frank’s parallel to
the self-sacrificing Dora is made even clearer when one considers that he bestows his
blessing upon Dora’s trip to Ireland as he is lying near death—a condition directly
attributable to Stancliffe, who beat him savagely in an unprovoked and unjustified fit of
rage immediately before he fled to Ireland with his mistress. Though Frank ultimately
ends up recovering from his wounds, he cheerfully sends Dora on her mission of mercy
to Stancliffe despite the fact that doing so may rob him of the comfort of his sister’s
presence at his deathbed.
The de-gendered Christian love Frank and Dora embody offers us a new way to
read what has often been classified as an inherently feminine form of submission and
self-sacrifice. F.K. Prochaska posits that, “in their reading of the New Testament[,]
women sought and discovered a Christ who was sympathetic to their condition…. The
Christ they found…represented a God who was wholly love, who ‘so loved the world He
gave his only begotten Son.’ To women, Christ was, above all, a martyr to love” (15).
Hofland creates both female and male characters who, in their imitation of Christ, are
martyrs to love in the way Prochaska describes.
Late in the novel, Stancliffe himself must become convinced that the virtues
embodied by his wife are not gendered at all, but are required of all true Christians. Beset
by a fatal illness right when he finally becomes convinced of his own moral failings,

63
Stancliffe is troubled by the fact that physical weakness now prevents him from taking
the actions necessary to “[prove] his humility, faith, and virtuous intentions”—in other
words, to prove the conversion that he insists he has undergone. Dora soothes him by
assuring him “‘that submission to this infliction was in itself no little proof of obedience
in a mind so subject to all extremes;’” further, she informs him that “‘patience included a
self-subjugation, which required the aid of many Christian virtues, and in his state,
humble endurance, and cheerful acquiescence, was required in lieu of more active virtues”
(287-288). Thus, patience—the virtue of the novel’s title—along with a whole host of
other “feminine” virtues (obedience, submission, self-subjugation, humble endurance,
and cheerful acquiescence), are revealed by the end of the narrative to be the keys to
salvation for both men and women.
Within the context of Dora’s advice to Stancliffe and her earlier conversation with
Mrs. Aylmer and Mr. Blackwell, we can recognize that the Evangelically-mandated
submission Dora both advocates and practices is an active choice that is only achieved by
constant struggle. What’s more, efficacious prayer—the very kind of supernatural force
that neither modernity nor the novel is supposed to be able to accommodate—is what
makes Dora’s submission possible. In Patience, prayer both illuminates and alleviates
mankind’s limitations: that is, it is usually when she has reached the threshold of what her
human heart and mind are capable of that Dora turns to prayer, and her prayers are
repeatedly shown to be effectual in “giving tranquility to her wounded spirits, and
renewing in her the resolution to attend with patience and persevering vigilance to the
present and eternal welfare of her husband” (260). In fact, Dora is sometimes surprised
by the extent of the change that God can effect on her heart, as when he replaces the

64
horror and resentment she feels at Stancliffe’s near murder of her brother with pity and
tenderness. Upon witnessing Stancliffe savagely beating Frank, Dora is shot through with
severe pangs of “anger” and “agony” (211, 212); days into her attendance at her brother’s
sickbed, she continues to be agitated by “new and terrible emotions” toward Stancliffe
(215). Following much suffering and, significantly, prayer, Dora goes to Stancliffe’s
room; beholding the distress he feels about his own violent behavior, her own feelings are
radically changed. “[T]he heart of Dora was penetrated with the sincerest pity,” Hofland
tells us, “and she was even astonished at the tenderness she was still sensible of towards
him” (218). Here, as elsewhere in the novel, God enables Dora to transcend her innate
human weakness—what non-Evangelicals would no doubt call her normal and natural
human reactions—so that she might respond to Stancliffe as a Christian rather than a
mere human woman. When Stancliffe deserts her very soon thereafter, Dora is similarly
enabled to move beyond her own initial reaction to his perfidy. Upon hearing that
Stancliffe has fled to Ireland with a woman he is passing off as his spouse, Hofland
informs us that Dora, “whilst she felt as a woman and wife, bent also to that heavenly
Father who saw it good to afflict her, and her ‘tribulation yet worked patience’” (223).
The fact that prayer is credited with causing alterations to Dora’s heart and mind
(as the passages above indicate) is likely foreign enough for a modern secular reader. But
what’s far more startling is the realization of how rarely Dora prays for God’s help in
changing her circumstances (by making Stancliffe a kinder husband, say, or helping
relieve the couple’s financial troubles), and how often she prays instead that God will
change her: that he will alter her feelings of anger, jealousy, indignation, and
disappointment in her husband—and this despite the fact that she is entirely justified in

65
feeling all of these things.
9
The fact that Dora has evidence of Stancliffe’s misdeeds is not
important to her; that her heart, her physical senses, and her reason all tell her “‘she had
been deceived in her estimate of Stancliffe’s character, that her views of happiness were
blighted, her affections misplaced, as well as trampled upon’” is ultimately insignificant
(150). What matters to Dora is that her thoughts and feelings not interfere with her ability
to act according to the foundational values she explained in her above-quoted
conversation with Mr. Blackwell and Mrs. Aylmer. As Mack reminds us,
Methodists and others defined agency not as the freedom to do what one
wants but as the freedom to want and to do what is right. Since “what is
right” was determined both by absolute truth or God and by individual
conscience, agency implied obedience and ethical responsibility as well as
the freedom to make choices and act on them. And since doing what is
right inevitably means subduing at least some of one’s own habits, desires,
and impulses, agency implied self-negation as well as self-expression. The
goal of the individual’s religious discipline was to shape her personal
desires and narrow self-interest until they became identical with God’s
desire, with absolute goodness. The sanctified Christian wants what God

9
To provide just a few examples: After Stancliffe commands her to travel a long distance
to obtain money from her estate’s executor despite her ill health, Dora is filled with
thoughts about her husband’s unworthiness. She resolutely treats these thoughts as
“intruders” and “struggle[s] against them, pray[s] against them,” and finally “succeed[s]
in dispossessing them…” (150-151). Later, after joining Stancliffe in Ireland and
discovering how poorly he has treated the innocent girl for whom he had abandoned her,
Dora retreats to her bedroom where “she knelt down, and in earnest prayer besought
Almighty aid in quelling the deep indignation, the repelling contempt, which had arisen
in her breast, and which incessantly urged her to quit for ever the presence of a man
whom she should henceforth behold with loathing…” (260).

66
wants; she is God’s agent in the world. For many modern observers, this
definition of agency must seem to convey the ultimate in self-alienation: a
lack of self-worth, the internalization of (often oppressive) social norms,
and an absence of personal authority alongside an assumption of personal
guilt. As Methodists (and others) understood it, submission to God and the
religious community enhanced personal integrity and public credibility.
By affirming her own nullity, the effacement of her personal will, the
individual felt her superficial desire for self-gratification overcome by her
deeper love of God and of universal truth. (9-10)
As the novels I am studying make clear and Mack’s repeated “and others” confirms, non-
Methodist Evangelicals operated under similar assumptions about the nature of human
freedom and agency. “Self-empowerment” as we might conceive of it—that is, a sense of
one’s authority to claim one’s rights and control one’s life—was, for them, neither
possible nor desirable; instead, as Dora’s behavior makes clear, the Evangelical was
required to seek through fervent prayer the assistance of God to accomplish what human
will cannot sanction on its own: that is, the ability to disown the natural thoughts and
feelings of the self in order to conform to God’s will.
Countless critics since Marx have condemned religious belief like Dora’s as a
pernicious form of self-estrangement.
10
Such critiques, however, are based on a set of
assumptions that Evangelicals do not share: namely, that an autonomous self exists, and

10
As Keane again reminds us, the modern subject is commonly presumed to be marked
by “rationality and an aspiration to authenticity, manifested in sincere and transparent
forms of self-expression” (160). Dora’s continual attempts to sublimate or transform
(rather than express) her “authentic” thoughts and feelings mark her as a troublingly “un-
modern” subject.

67
that attempting to subdue or negate that self places one in a false or undesirable state.
Dora’s prayers represent neither pathological alienation from a “true” or “whole” self nor
a familiar nineteenth-century ethic of self-improvement and self-control; rather, they
represent a fundamental rejection of the idea that an autonomous “true self”—if such a
thing even exists—is worth protecting. Her prayers, in other words, are underpinned by a
belief that no subject can or should be complete and self-determining. For the Evangelical,
being self-determining and independent means being separated from divine direction and
intervention—an undesirable and inherently un-free position occupied by the novel’s
non-Christian characters, including Stancliffe and his first mistress, Mrs. Masterman,
who are described as “slave[s] to passions it was the great and distressing business of
[their] live[s] to indulge and to conceal” (78). As Talal Asad succinctly puts it, “[To the
believing Protestant] the unredeemed human condition is lack of freedom” (34).
For much of the last century, upon encountering an ethic of religious submission
like Dora’s in fiction or life writing, a typical scholarly move would be to analyze the
extent to which it “empowers” or “disempowers” the believer(s) in question, using
current social, economic, and political values as our measuring sticks. We might claim,
for example, that by embracing an Evangelical interpretive scheme, Dora is able to find
comfort and meaning in a situation in which she is otherwise comfortless and powerless;
such is the move Davidoff and Hall make in the Family Fortunes passage above.
Alternately, like Marx or E. P. Thompson, we might claim that Dora’s religion is
complicit in the wider cultural subjugation of women—that if women did not have such
false religious “empowerment” to turn to, they might have demanded “real” solutions to
the hardships they faced.

68
The problem with either of these assertions is not that they’re necessarily
incorrect, but rather that they obscure from view a range of other ways we could consider
religious experiences like Dora’s. Such histories frame religious belief and practice
primarily in economic and political terms, ignoring the spiritual and emotional facets of
the religious experience. According to Mack, in much twentieth-century scholarship
words like sacrifice, redemption, conversion, repentance, or ecstasy are
not understood in terms of their stated meaning or their meaning for the
historical actor, but as pointers to other, more profound meanings: poverty,
social marginality, sexual desire, the desire for power—terms that have
come to define both the core elements of human nature and the categories
of modern social science. (9-10)
Because it is far too easy to substitute our own concerns for those of the people whom we
are studying, we need to be careful how we talk about the religious experiences portrayed
in fiction like Patience. As a secular feminist reader, I want Dora to feel empowered by
her faith to leave the ne'er-do-well Stancliffe. Instead, her faith repeatedly allows her to
retain compassion for him, to attempt to “win” her husband from perdition over and over
again through her example of “forbearance, submission, and godly sincerity” (188).
Empowerment clearly looks different to Dora than it does to us. We, like Mr. Blackwell,
might regard anger, pride, and indignation as natural and even righteous responses to the
situation Dora finds herself in; if nothing else, they would seem to be useful spurs to
change. But the novel dwells on religion’s power to soften Dora’s heart, to relieve her
feelings of anger, and to replace her indignation with patience, love, and pity. These
responses, Hofland hints, are supernatural in origin.

69
At the conclusion of the novel, Hofland tells us that “Christian patience alone had
sustained [Dora]” through “many a gloomy hour” and “many a day of sorrow” (296).
Yet, while Christian patience does, indeed, sustain Dora through her abundant marital
trials, it most assuredly does not do it “alone” as this final passage claims. In fact,
Hofland repeatedly presents Dora’s non-conjugal relationships as indispensable to her
endurance of life’s many miseries; if, as the narrator asserts, faith helps Dora
“overcometh the world,” so, too, do her loving relationships with her brother and adopted
mother. Given the frequency with which critics have cited the conjugal family unit and its
attendant ideologies as integral to modern conceptions of self and society (and, of course,
to modern literature), we might expect a nineteenth-century writer like Hofland to
endorse companionate marriage as the most meaningful of human relationships.
11
And
yet Patience insistently exposes the limitations of conjugal relationships and presents
alternative sources of love, companionship, and support in the form of sibling and filial
bonds. The relationships between Dora and Frank, and Dora and Mrs. Aylmer, reinforce
the novel’s message that human existence is deeply and inherently relational, and that
duty and dependence are more valuable than independence, free choice, and individual
rights—a message that is echoed in other Hofland “virtue” novels including the
fascinating Decision (1824). By presenting alternatives to the conjugal family unit,
Hofland calls into question not just the primacy of this most “modern” of family
formations but also the gender ideologies that are frequently called upon to legitimate it.

11
If we were to ignore the ideology of relational responsibilities that underlies her
insistence on staying with Stancliffe, Dora’s refusal to break up the novel’s central
nuclear family could be read as fulfilling that expectation.

70
As an ideological formation, the nuclear family has been credited with widespread
influence. Its focus on freely chosen partners who marry for love and set up homes at a
(physical and emotional) distance from their families of origin has been said to reinforce
a distinctly modern individualist ethic. This family formation could be said to posit a
world of individuals constituted primarily by desire; after all, two individuals united by
desire need not be constrained by their wider communities or by their class, race, or
family background (though their desires may, of course, be conditioned by those
forces)—but to act on that desire they must be supported by a society that values and
protects their right of individuals to exercise free choice. In contrast to this, the implicit
ideology of “pre-modern” family ties stresses “the individual subject’s inescapable
reliance on, attachment to, and responsibility towards the beings around it” (Lowe 161).
Here, the paradigmatic relationship is not that between a husband and wife—two freely
chosen partners who are “each the reward of the other’s merit”—but the mother and child,
a relationship of “unchosen emotional bonds, gratuitous self-sacrificing affection, and
non-demeaning dependence” (Lowe 161). This is the ethic that underlies Dora’s
relationships with both Mrs. Aylmer and Frank. We see it in action when Mrs. Aylmer is
moved to adopt the well-off but neglected Dora after encountering her as a child (8). We
see it again when Frank resists Dora’s urging to protect his fragile health by moving out
of the home he shares with his sister and her volatile husband; to her exhortations, Frank
responds that he is “resolved rather to die with her, than to leave her” (206). Dora, Mrs.
Aylmer, and Frank all accept that they bear a duty toward and responsibility for the
beings around them, and the lifelong bonds they forge are presented as a model of ideal
human relations. What is even more striking, this is also the ethic that Dora imports into

71
her marriage to Stancliffe. According to Hofland, human lives only have meaning when
they are supporting, submitting to, or helping one another. Her Evangelical characters—
both male and female—do not seek fulfillment through work, consumption, social
ambition, or any other kind of personal achievement. Instead, they find their purpose by
relinquishing their supposed right to freedom and individual happiness and accepting the
joys of duty, submission, and responsibility for another’s wellbeing; in Patience, the
subject who correctly understands his or her place in the world turns not inward, but
outward.
That Hofland’s Evangelical male characters embrace relational responsibilities as
willingly as do her female characters runs counter to the expectations of much twentieth-
century literary and historical scholarship. For example, in Family Fortunes, Davidoff
and Hall claim that, during the nineteenth century, men—even Evangelical men—
unlike women….had to be careful that they did not become too attached to
the home, for although “the preservation of a tender love for home and its
occupants, has proved in some cases the last tie to virtue, and a last
preservation from ruin,” yet too much affection for home would promote
feebleness of character and dependence, characteristics that could never
associated with manliness. (113)
While the authors’ assessment no doubt applies to many nineteenth-century populations
and literatures, the novels of Hofland and all of the other Evangelical writers in this study
provide us with a view of alternative attitudes toward “manliness” and “dependence”
during this period, inviting us to rethink the ways in which we’ve gendered nineteenth-
century family formations.

72
I’ve already addressed how the character of Frank Hemingford participates in
Patience’s de-gendering of an ethic of submission and self-abnegation, which Hofland
sees as vital for Christians of both sexes. But Frank plays an equally significant role in
the novel’s promotion of lifelong extra-conjugal family ties for both men and women.
Frank makes his home with Dora both before and after her marriage and devotes his life
to his sister’s happiness and wellbeing. His greatest desire is to “assist her on whom he
was continually thinking, and for whom he could consent to anything” (266). Dora is
equally devoted to Frank and acknowledges him as an integral part of her marriage; that
is, Dora is aware that it is from Frank that she derives the joy and comfort a woman
“should” be able to receive from her husband, but that she does not and cannot attain
from Stancliffe. Retuning to England from Ireland with her straying, ailing husband after
he has gambled away their home and all their money, Dora is “well aware that the sight
of [Frank], and the occasional enjoyment of his company, would be her best solace in the
sad change to which she was now subjected” (266). At the height of Dora’s troubles,
Hofland writes:
[N]ever had [Dora] felt so much the want of a friend to whom she might
look for consolation and assistance, and to whom she could open her heart
in perfect confidence as to its feelings, without adverting personally to her
situation. With Frank alone could she enjoy this—with him, she could
reason, or pray, or weep; and, young as he was, so thoroughly could he
enter into her thoughts, and participate in her wishes, and so deeply was
his mind imbued with devout feeling and religious knowledge, that he

73
might be said to perform to her the patriarch’s office, and support the
enfeebled hands stretched out to beg for mercy on another. (275-276)
To Dora, Frank is both brother and friend, husband and father. Close communion with
him, combined with frequent prayer and reflection, helps make possible Dora’s
endurance of her marital trials and her super-human forgiveness of Stancliffe. While this
novel delves deeply and repeatedly into the heartaches and suffering occasioned by an ill-
considered marriage, making it read more like a cautionary tale than a celebration of that
blessed institution, its attention to the relationship between Dora and Frank marks
Patience as a veritable paean to “the sweetness of fraternal ties” (18).
Frank devotes his life to a woman who is not his spouse—a woman he has not
freely chosen in a symbolic assertion of freewill and independence. He could be seen as
sacrificing his happiness and freedom—indeed, as forfeiting the best years of his life—to
care for a needy relative. Yet Frank celebrates rather than bemoans the interdependence
of his relationship with Dora, rejoicing in the felicity that each member of the pairing is
able to offer the other. In thus honoring the ties between brothers and sisters, and in
making clear that those ties can and should endure far into adulthood, Hofland presents a
male character who (in direct contrast to what we as modern readers might expect)
derives strength and purpose from his attachment to the home and its inhabitants.
This attachment, while perhaps surprising in a nineteenth-century man, was
positively required from a woman of the same period. As Davidoff and Hall put it, it was
commonly believed that “a woman’s salvation lay in her responsibilities as a mother,
wife, daughter or sister” (114). Certainly, Hofland’s novel stresses these responsibilities
(though, as we have seen, it also stress the responsibilities of men to their families and the

74
rewards that attend those responsibilities). But Hofland’s novel also challenges us to read
families and women’s roles within them differently than we have in the past. Davidoff
and Hall assert that nineteenth-century women “needed to be contained within families,
whether their family of origin, their family of marriage, or the family of the church. Lack
of attachment to a family would mean that women were exposed to being ‘surplus,’ with
no meaning to their lives, and with the additional dangers of uncontained sexuality” (114).
This is a decidedly secular, twentieth-century way of reading both families and women’s
places within them. Davidoff and Hall imply that, in order to contain the danger that
“surplus” (read: independent) women represented to the social order, women were either
brainwashed or coerced into believing that their lives held no meaning if detached from
the family unit. Safely “contained” within families, women’s energies could presumably
be harnessed and used to the advantage of those whose lives extended outside the bounds
of family life: namely, men. It is easy to see how Evangelical novels can be read as
supporting Davidoff and Hall’s assertions. After all, in Patience, a “surplus” woman (the
widowed Mrs. Aylmer) voluntarily renounces her erstwhile independence in order to care
for a needy orphan. If she had not already internalized the gendered ideology Davidoff
and Hall identify for us, why would this woman choose to re-tether herself to the
responsibilities of home and family when both the means and opportunity of escaping
those bonds was in her grasp? A modern secular critical lens can assist us in diagnosing
the gendered power structures that prop up seemingly natural family formations; what it
cannot do is help us understand what families meant to the nineteenth-century women
who inhabited them. An interpretive scheme that sees families primarily as containers for
dangerous energies—particularly sexual energies—has trouble helping us identify the

75
other discourses that a novel like Patience uses families (and women’s roles within them)
to invoke.
While Dora’s marriage is a constant source of anxiety and humiliation, her
adopted mother, Mrs. Aylmer—like her younger brother Frank—provides her with a
consistent source of love and comfort. Dora is described as “not less the darling daughter,
than the beloved friend, of her protectress” (11). Mrs. Aylmer, who never remarries after
her husband and young daughter die a mere two years into her marriage, becomes Dora’s
“beloved maternal friend”—a description that calls to mind Helen Fleetwood’s
characterization of the relationship between Helen and the widow Green (a dynamic that
will be discussed at greater length in Chapter Three) (22). As a newlywed who is just
beginning to become acquainted with her husband’s many shortcoming, Dora quickly
concludes that only by holding tight to the bonds she shares with her brother and adopted
mother can she face the challenges ahead. She looks to Mrs. Aylmer’s “presence, her
support, [and] her advice…as the greatest of all earthly blessings, for she felt the want of
a friend, sometimes of a protector, since the heart on which she sought to lean, refused or
eluded the burthen” (75). Years into her marriage, Mrs. Aylmer is still referred to as
Dora’s “best friend” (186). Later, Hofland explicitly highlights the power and importance
of women’s non-conjugal family ties, refusing to endorse the idea that such relationships
can or should be usurped or replaced by matrimony. “[A]s [Dora] was pressed to [Mrs.
Aylmer’s] maternal bosom, she felt that there is a tie of the heart which as it grew with
our growth, may last till our decay, and console us in some measure for those which,
though sweeter and stronger, are too often rent asunder by vice, or worn out by
indifference” (224).
⁠ After Stancliffe’s desertion and disgrace, we are told that “the sight

76
of [Dora’s] beloved maternal friend, her more than mother, was a cordial to Dora’s heart”
(268). Though she disagrees with Dora’s decision to stand by her husband, Mrs. Aylmer
refuses to abandon her. As Stancliffe is dying, he implores Mrs. Aylmer to “‘take [Dora]
again to your heart—your home—restore her—comfort her—do not lose sight of her
again,’” which Mrs. Aylmer promises to do “with solemn earnestness” (293). While Dora
has a potential suitor waiting in the wings (the noble Mr. Sydenham), the novel ends with
the young widow preparing to return to her “beloved maternal friend.” It is clear that it is
Dora’s adopted mother, not another husband, who can and should “restore [and] comfort”
our heroine.
Patience represents Evangelicalism as a dynamic process—a constant
renunciation of self, a repeated reaffirming of one’s dependence on God and
responsibility to others. Perhaps nineteenth-century Evangelicals didn’t read a novel like
Patience to imbibe a simple moral, but to see the complex choices of their lives worked
out on the page—to see how Evangelical values overlapped with, butted up against,
supported, and conflicted with other popular values of the day. Hofland presents a battle
between reason and faith, between discourses of individual rights and relational duties.
Patience teaches us that far too often we have oversimplified the meaning of Evangelical
beliefs and practices in the lives of the faithful. This has led, in turn, to an
oversimplification of our readings of their fiction. In looking for simple and static morals,
or in trying to figure out where Evangelical writers come down on our own list of pet
concerns (where they stand on the rights of historically oppressed peoples such as women,
for example), we have failed to notice their concerns and strategies when they differ from
ours.

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Chapter Two:
Modeling the Modern Protagonist in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and
Emma Jane Worboise’s Thornycroft Hall

In the previous chapter, we explored how Barbara Hofland’s Patience staged a
protracted debate between its protagonist and her beloved mentors that illuminated
differences between Evangelical and liberal humanist values. In this chapter, we will
deepen our exploration of those differences by comparing two related texts: Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emma Jane Worboise’s Thornycroft Hall. I will argue that
Worboise engages in a pointed and purposeful revision of Brontë’s protagonist, plot, and
narrative voice in order to challenge the individualist ethics that underpin Jane Eyre and
dispute its depiction of narration as an inherently competitive act. Thornycroft Hall seeks
to revise not just Jane Eyre’s scathing portrayal of Mr. Brocklehurst and his Clergy
Daughters’ School, as critics have previously alleged, but also its insistence on the
sanctity of the individual self and its legitimation of the individual’s quest for fulfillment
through autonomy. Worboise, in other words, recasts not just Jane Eyre’s characters and
tone, but its ideological foundations and modal structures.
While contemporary reviews indicate that Jane Eyre was considered an
unconventional—even scandalous—heroine when she appeared on the scene in 1847, the
last half-century has witnessed her canonization as the very model of a modern novel
protagonist.
1
Socially and economically mobile, restless and ambitious, unencumbered by

1
For evidence of Jane’s apparent unconventionality see, for example, reviews in the
Spectator, Quarterly Review, and Christian Remembrancer.

78
kith or kin for almost the entirety of the novel, and ever wary of those who would seek to
influence or control her, Jane presents herself as that most modern of entities: an isolated,
largely self-determining individual. Of course, the very fact that Jane is allowed to
“present” herself at all—that an impoverished governess as likely to express anger and
desire as piety and diffidence is granted the right to narrate her own story—is a sign of
Jane Eyre’s innovation.

Moreover, the social and psychological landscapes through
which Jane moves have been identified as thoroughly modern in nature; as Ronald
Thomas explains, Jane Eyre
conceives of and represents the self in essentially economic terms…. Over
the course of the narrative, Jane increasingly comes to think of the dreams
and desires of her “inner self” as entities in a marketplace over which she
struggles to gain entrepreneurial control. This thinking not only reflects
the dominant economic realities of Jane’s life; it also anticipates the
bourgeois model of the psyche which will be formalized by Freud at the
end of the century. (50-51)
If critics generally agree, then, that Jane Eyre is a quintessentially modern text
(always excepting its troubling gothic episodes, of course)—and they agree, as I
discussed in my Introduction, that Evangelicalism and its fiction are fundamentally un-
modern in nature—what might they make of an Evangelical novel that sets out to rewrite
Jane Eyre?
⁠ This question is not merely hypothetical, for such a novel exists. In 1864,
prolific Evangelical writer Emma Jane Worboise released Thornycroft Hall: Its Owners
and Heirs, a novel containing many obvious parallels to Jane Eyre and more than one
explicit reference to that popular work. In Elisabeth Jay’s classic 1979 study Religion of

79
the Heart (which contains what is still the most extensive critical treatment of
Thornycroft Hall to date), Jay suggests that economic factors may have motivated such
allusions. According to Jay, Worboise was a consummate businesswoman who
sometimes chose her titles and her subject matter to “capitalize upon the success of others
[in a way] that, in one less spiritually minded, might be described as sharp practice. The
choice of a name familiar to novel-readers might well encourage the prospective
purchaser to select her novel in preference to the welter of fiction emerging from the
religious press at the same time” (244). Along with their titles, Worboise was equally
willing to appropriate “successful themes, incidents, and characters” of other popular
novelists (245). Certainly, the title Thornycroft Hall seems a clear allusion to Brontë’s
Thornfield Hall, and some readers have argued that Worboise’s narrator, the orphaned
Ellen, is meant to call to mind Brontë’s saintly Helen. The broad strokes of the novels’
plots are also nearly identical—at least through the first half of Thornycroft Hall, in
which Ellen endures years of persecution at the hands of her unkind aunt and cousins
only to be sent to a strict charity school for clergymen’s daughters after she lashes out
with one surprising fit of temper.
From here, however, the novels diverge, and the fact that Thornycroft mirrors
Jane Eyre only through the school section has led most critics to believe that Worboise’s
main purpose in writing her text was to rescue the Reverend William Carus Wilson from
Brontë’s scathing portrayal of him as the hated Brocklehurst. Both Brontë and Worboise
attended Carus Wilson’s Clergy Daughters’ School, but they clearly left with vastly

80
different impressions of the school and its supervisor.
2
Few things in Victorian literature
are quite as indelible as Jane’s misery at Lowood; from its unhealthy prospect and
insufficient food to its unkind instructors and hypocritical headmaster, the school’s many
shortcomings are fervently catalogued by Brontë’s indignant young heroine. In
Thornycroft Hall, Worboise works to correct what she sees as Jane Eyre’s
misrepresentations of both the institution and its headmaster. “I will take the liberty of
giving some true particulars respecting the institution of which I had become a pupil,”
Worboise’s heroine pointedly declares upon arriving at school (138, italics original).
“[A]s you all know, Casterton is the ‘Lowood’ of that most powerful and world-
renowned novel, ‘Jane Eyre’…[but] it was no ‘Do-the-Girls-Hall,’ as some people have
asserted” (137-138). She goes on to defend the quality of Casterton’s food, clothing, and
instruction, insisting, for example, that “no one was in danger of starvation in my time”
(139) and that teachers “were kind, though strict, and perfectly impartial” (143). But her
most passionate defense is saved for Carus Wilson. While “among so large a number [as
the school’s pupils], there was always a disaffected party, who sneered at the founder and
his arrangements…the many loved, revered, and blessed their friend and benefactor, the
Rev. William Carus Wilson” whose “works of love and mercy were manifold” (140). To
prove this point, Worboise catalogues a number of Carus Wilson’s kindnesses to his
orphaned students, such as taking them on picnics, sharing roses and gooseberries out of
his private garden, and paying the tuition of four particularly impoverished sisters.

2
The fact that Worboise attended the school nearly twenty years after Brontë left it, in
the period of improved management Brontë describes after the great typhus epidemic, is
likely one cause of the two writers’ different feelings about the school.

81
This section, with its point-by-point rebuttal of Brontë’s depiction of Carus
Wilson and the Clergy Daughters’ School, is, a number of critics believe, the raison
d'etre of Worboise’s novel. Elisabeth Jay calls Thornycroft Hall a “literary apologia for
[Worboise’s] old school” (246), while Ruth Blackburn hypothesizes that “the
resemblance of ‘Ward’ to ‘Reed’ and ‘Thornycroft’ to ‘Thornfield’ must have been
intended to excite the reader’s curiosity and lead him through the story to a fresh account
of the [Casterton] school” (354). Because Worboise’s novel has traditionally been framed
in these terms, it is occasionally referenced in Jane Eyre scholarship as a historical
curiosity, but it rarely appears elsewhere. When Jay called Thornycroft Hall “an
evangelical answer to Jane Eyre,” hinting that some kind of cultural or literary value
might inhere in Worboise’s text, one reviewer responded with outright derision. Writing
in The Review of English Studies, Daniel Karlin scoffed, “[In] conferring on Mrs.
Worboise’s dismal confection, Thornycroft Hall, the dignity of ‘An Evangelical Answer
to Jane Eyre,’ Mrs. Jay disfigures her assertion that a study of Anglican Evangelicalism
has anything of value to contribute to interpretative criticism of the Victorian novel”
(480). While praising other parts of Jay’s text, Karlin claimed that its Jane
Eyre/Thornycroft Hall section was nothing more than a “profitless comparison between a
very good and a very bad book” (480).
Despite Karlin’s skepticism, I believe that Worboise’s “dismal confection” can
indeed contribute to interpretive criticism of the Victorian novel—and, what’s more, that
even the most generous critics, such as Jay, have missed the true scope of Worboise’s
literary and cultural project. There is far more at stake in Worboise’s rewriting of Jane
Eyre than a vindication of William Carus Wilson or a stripping of what Mary Armstrong

82
calls “transgressive desires” from Brontë’s text (129). Thornycroft Hall paints a striking
alternative to Brontë’s “modern” heroine and her “modern” world in which, Terry
Eagleton tells us, “almost all human relationships are power-struggles,” and the most
fundamental relationships are defined in terms of “dominance and submission” (30).
Unlike Jane, whose extreme “self-possession” suggests “a nurturing and hoarding of the
self” (Eagleton 24), Worboise’s Ellen must learn to let go of her initial investment in her
individual identity. She must learn to conform to associative and cohesive models, to
disown her innate character traits, and to accept that the self—far from being nurtured
and hoarded—must be submitted to and radically rewritten by God. She must also come
to see life stories as cooperative creations and accept that hers only has worth and
meaning in relation to others’. Certainly, power struggles like those described by
Eagleton exist in Thornycroft Hall, and characters must, at times, resist others’
illegitimate attempts to dominate them.
3
But there is ample evidence that Worboise is
trying to imagine different kinds of relationships in her answer to Jane Eyre—
relationships in which gaining or maintaining control over another (or even over oneself)
is not a primary goal. Whereas for Brontë’s heroine, “the self is all one has” (Eagleton
24), Worboise’s protagonist must learn to surrender herself and the process of her
fashioning—along with any pride in or attachment to her “natural” attributes—to God.
When studied alongside Brontë’s seminal Victorian narrative, Worboise’s novel helps us
tease out configurations of human subjectivity and attitudes toward dependence, debt,
and equality that rest uneasily alongside the values we expect to see in modern fiction.

3
See, for example, when Marshall Cleaton must resist Mrs. Chippendale’s attempts to
influence his religious affiliation.

83

Emma Jane Worboise published her first novel, Alice Cunningham, in 1846 when
she was 21 years old; during the next 40 years, until her death in 1887, she produced
some 50 domestic novels—nearly all of which went into multiple editions.
4
She also
wrote a popular biography of Thomas Arnold, produced a collection of hymns, and spent
decades contributing to the Christian World newspaper and editing the Christian World
Magazine and Family Visitor (Harrison). Her popularity was substantial and long lasting
enough that her publisher, James Clarke & Co, brought out a 41-volume complete edition
of her fiction from 1882-1891 (“Emma Jane Worboise”). Nearly two decades after her
death, in 1903, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record advertised “A New and
Handsomely Bound Cheap Edition of the Popular Novels of Emma Jane Worboise”;
Thornycroft Hall was listed among the 12 volumes then ready (539).
5
Late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century accounts indicate that Worboise’s works were very popular
in circulating libraries as well. According to an 1892 volume of The Literary World, a
visitor to Edinburgh’s Free Library had recently “looked down the list of works on loan,

4
Exact publication records for Thornycroft Hall are difficult to come by, but its eighth
edition was advertised in 1876. Moreover, in January 2013 a website for bookseller Jane
Firman advertised a copy of Thornycroft Hall from “[188-]” that was labeled “26th
thousand.” Given the fact that multiple editions were printed after the 1880s, it is fair to
assume that publication numbers eventually far outstripped this count. Any assessment of
the novel’s reach must also include the apparent popularity of Worboise’s novels at
public libraries, which is attested to by both the Literary World and Ernest Baker
accounts below.

5
Stating, “This Cheap Edition, issued only in October, last has had a remarkable sale,”
this advertisement also quotes a number of periodicals, including the British Weekly, Sun,
and Methodist Recorder, celebrating the “renewed life” of Mrs. Worboise’s “excellent
stories.”

84
and noticed that every copy of each of Mrs. Worboise’s books was in use” (82).
6
And
Ernest Baker’s 1907 survey of British public libraries reported that, even 20 years after
her death, the 21 libraries in his study stocked 1,617 volumes by Worboise (an average of
77 per library). Worboise was found to be the third most popular author in these libraries,
behind Mary Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood. Her 1,617 volumes dwarfed by more than
1,000 volumes the number of works stocked by authors including James, Conrad,
Meredith, and Balzac (most of whom, it must be acknowledged, were far less prolific
writers than she). It is safe to say that the productive Worboise was quite popular in her
own time and that her popularity continued to endure for several decades after her death.
7

Today, however, it is difficult to find a single person, even amongst specialists in
Victorian literature, who has read a Worboise narrative. Of her 50 or so novels, only a
few have received mention in works of modern literary criticism. Due to its similarity
to—and explicit invocation of—Jane Eyre, Thornycroft Hall is the Worboise text one is
most likely to come across today. Because even it is no doubt unfamiliar to most of my
readers, however, and because an understanding of its plot and characters is necessary for
any valuable comparison between it and Jane Eyre, I will include a somewhat-detailed
plot synopsis here.

6
We might note here that The Literary World was published by James Clarke & Co,
which was also Worboise’s publisher.

7
Worboise also enjoyed a solid critical reception amongst her contemporaries. Take, for
example, this 1873 review of her novels Husbands and Wives and Canonbury Holt in the
British Quarterly Review: “We have frequently had the satisfaction of commending the
novels which come from the prolific pen of Mrs. Worboise; and as each new one arrives
we are inclined to welcome it by repeating our former words of praise and gratification.
Her works always display the same ease of style, fecundity of thought, and
appropriateness of words” (564).

85
Thornycroft Hall is narrated by Ellen Threlkeld, the orphaned daughter of a
clergyman. Unlike Jane Eyre, Ellen lives with her father until age 10, but upon his death
at the beginning of the novel she is sent, like Jane, to live with her much wealthier
relatives. The Ward household consists of an Uncle and Aunt Ward (the latter of whom
rules the household in a very Aunt Reed-like way) and their three daughters: Maria,
Arabella, and Julia. Mrs. Ward and Maria are often as domineering and cruel as Mrs.
Reed and her offspring, and Ellen’s years in the Ward home are largely unhappy ones.
The key difference between Jane and Ellen’s families is that Ellen possesses two kind (if
ineffectual) friends: her Uncle Ward and youngest cousin Julia. Ellen also enjoys the
generosity of Maria’s betrothed, Marshall Cleaton, and his mother Mrs. Cleaton, who are
devout Christians. The fact that Worboise gives Ellen allies in her family home is a
crucial point, the importance of which I will explore below.
After years of psychological and even physical persecution, Ellen—like Jane—
lashes out with a sudden and surprising fit of temper, after which she is sent away to be
tamed and trained at a strict charity school for clergymen’s daughters. Ellen, like Jane,
spends several years at the school, but here the trajectories of the novels diverge.
Whereas Jane bridles at the strict discipline and austerity of the Clergy Daughters’ School,
Ellen reacts positively to that institution. When her schooling is finally completed, Ellen
does not set out on her own to make her way in the world as a governess, but rather
returns home to Thornycroft Hall to attend to her dying uncle. Before he expires, he
secures Ellen’s promise that she will always stay close to her cousin Julia and be her
friend. This promise causes Ellen to remain at Thornycroft for many years after her
uncle’s death despite the ongoing unkindness of her eldest cousin, Maria. Marshall

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eventually ends his betrothal to the spoiled Maria and becomes secretly engaged to Ellen,
of whom he has been fond since she was a small child. The beautiful and loving Julia
falls for and marries a charming cad, who promptly abandons her on their honeymoon.
Ellen postpones her own wedding to travel to Italy where the pregnant Julia lies dying,
and she is instrumental in both Julia’s spiritual salvation and her reconciliation with her
mother just before her death. After burying both her cousin and her newborn niece, Ellen
returns home to marry Marshall, who has finished his studies and become a dissenting
minister. Maria marries a man as obstreperous as she is and becomes estranged from the
rest of her family. Over time, Mrs. Ward and Ellen reconcile, and Ellen becomes her
aunt’s chief friend and companion, eventually leading her to Christ. At the end of the
novel, Mrs. Ward, Ellen, and Marshall are living a happy, prosperous, and devout life
with the couple’s six children.
When comparing two related novels such as Jane Eyre and Thornycroft Hall, one
cannot, of course, assume that every change the latter author brings to the former’s text is
indicative of an important ideological quarrel; there are all kinds of differences between
Brontë’s and Worboise’s novels, and not all of them are significant. However, I believe
that critics, committed as they are to the idea that Worboise’s engagement with Brontë’s
text largely ends after her heroine’s sojourn at the Clergy Daughters’ School, have failed
to address many important resonances between the two novels.
8
Though the novels’ plots

8
Jay does cast her eye to the post-Casterton chapters of Thornycroft Hall and briefly
relates how Worboise “carefully reworks characters and situations so that she can present
an effective answer to the moral problems Jane encounters” (250). This includes having
Ellen marry a St. John Rivers figure “in the person of the Revd. Marshall Cleaton” and
using Julia’s disastrous marriage to a playboy to “make clear the fate Jane Eyre should

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diverge once their protagonists reach adulthood, I believe the entirety of the texts, when
closely compared, reveal a pattern of continued engagement and conscious rewriting on
Worboise’s part. This pattern discloses Worboise’s commitment to Evangelical
configurations of human subjectivity and narrative that differ radically from Brontë’s.
Worboise’s revisionary efforts begin with her novel’s title. Jay writes:
The title of [Worboise’s] novel, Thornycroft Hall: Its Owners and Heirs,
is, as it were, a declaration of intent. In its adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s
Thornfield Hall and the way that it is used as the name for the equivalent
of Gateshead Hall rather than the Rochester residence Mrs. Worboise
indicates the extent of the liberties she will take in reinterpreting her
source material. (246)
Jay is no doubt correct, but I believe that Worboise’s title is indicative of more than
merely a cavalier attitude toward her source material. It is the first indication that this
novel, unlike Jane Eyre, will not focus solely on the life of a solitary individual. By
putting the family home front and center—a home in which Ellen continues to live
despite many incentives to leave in order to keep her promise to care for her youngest
cousin, Julia—Thornycroft Hall asserts that its primary interest lies in people as relational
groups rather than individuals, and in the forces that hold people together rather than
those that pull them apart.
Worboise’s title is just the first indication that she, unlike Brontë, is not interested
in depicting a solitary, largely self-determining protagonist. Jane Eyre, as any reader

have anticipated in agreeing to marry the strong and healthy Rochester in the days before
he had worked out his expiation” (251).

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knows, exhibits a deeply ingrained sense of her own isolation. In fact, it is striking how
many times Jane asserts the following sentiments in only slightly different guises: “I have
no friends” (100); “[I am] quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection”
(108); “I have no kindred” (287); “Not a tie holds me to human society” (262); “I have no
relative but the universal mother, Nature” (363); “[I am] absolutely without home and
friends” (387); “Not a tie links me to any living thing” (387). I know I am not the only
reader to initially take Jane at her word, only to wonder later how—or why—she finds
herself so friendless. Indeed, reviewer Elizabeth Rigby registered her doubts on this point
in 1848:
[Jane] flees from Mr. Rochester, and has not a being to turn to. Why was
this?… Jane had lived [at school] for eight years with 110 girls and fifteen
teachers. Why had she formed no friendships among them? Other orphans
have left the same and similar institutions, furnished with friends for life,
and puzzled with homes to choose from. How comes it that Jane had
acquired neither? (173)
School friends (of whom Jane seems to have none after Helen) are the just the beginning
of the possible resources Jane might have drawn on in her times of trouble. She also
could have called on her surviving Reed cousins, her newly discovered Uncle Eyre, her
former mentor Miss Temple (now Mrs. Nasmyth), and even Bessie, the Reed family’s
servant who showed Jane marked kindness when they reconnected before Mrs. Reed’s
death. In another novel, to another heroine, any one of these might be considered
“friends,” “ties,” or “relatives,” but to Jane they register only as blank spaces, as absences
that confirm her solitude. Is this predominantly a comment on Jane herself or on the

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world in which she lives? Is Jane’s isolation due to a peculiarity in herself, or is it a
statement about the individual’s fundamental isolation in the modern world—a world in
which traditional communal and family ties are unreliable if not completely nonexistent?
Rigby herself supplies one possible answer to these questions when she declares
that Jane’s “very unnatural and very unjust” sense of isolation is deployed by Brontë to
increase the book’s drama and make its heroine more impressive in her self-sufficiency.
“[I]t suited the author’s end to represent the heroine as utterly destitute of the common
means of assistance, in order to exhibit both her trials and her powers of self-support—
the whole book rests on this assumption,” Rigby claims (173). And, in fact, we can see
that Jane’s conviction that she is utterly alone in the world does lead her to greater
feelings of self-reliance and self-respect. When she returns to Gateshead to visit her dying
aunt, Jane finds herself musing on the loneliness she felt as a child when she left the
“hostile roof” of the Reed family home to take up residency at Lowood. Approaching
Gateshead after many years’ absence, Jane writes, “The same hostile roof now again rose
before me: my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an aching heart. I still felt as a
wanderer on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own
powers, and less withering dread of oppression” (256, italics mine). Jane has clearly
changed in the nine years since she last saw Gateshead; she feels herself to be more
confident and competent, and she is quick to indicate that these improvements cannot be
attributed to greater social integration or support (“my prospects were doubtful yet,” “I
still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth”). Rather, she has tackled life on her own
and done so successfully (securing and navigating her surprisingly complex post at

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Thornfield, as she puts it, “quite alone” (108)), a state of affairs that both draws on and
feeds her confidence in her own internal capabilities.
Later, when Jane famously wonders whether or not she should surrender to her
feelings for Rochester despite her discovery of his still-living wife, she again draws on
what Rigby would call “her powers of self-support.” When Rochester seeks her
acquiescence to his desire by reminding Jane of her position as a social outcast (“[Y]ou
have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me,”
he tells her (356)), Jane responds by asserting her independence from such socially
constructed moral frameworks and establishing self-love and self-respect as the
fundamental bases for moral human action. Though she initially seems to accept
Rochester’s value scheme, asking herself “‘Who in the world cares for you? or who will
be injured by what you do?’”, she quickly formulates the “indomitable” reply, “‘I care for
myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will
respect myself’” (356, italics original). Here, Jane contrasts two strikingly different world
views: on the one side is a communally based value system in which one’s worth is
determined by one’s situatedness within a social network and the morality of one’s
actions is determined by their effects upon others (“Who in the world cares for you?”;
“who will be injured by what you do?”). On the other side is a value system in which the
individual has innate worth, and one’s self-respect is inversely tied to one’s stature and
security within a social network (“The more solitary, the more friendless, the more
unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”). Jane situates herself firmly in the
latter camp. Though she has no clear place in the first framework, her solitude and
isolation do not leave her morally adrift; instead, they are revealed as necessary

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components of her growth and development. A lack of support from family and friends
causes her to lean ever more firmly on herself, and it is this faith in the self and its worth
that enables Jane to make difficult moral decisions.
Jane embraces a largely isolated individualism throughout the novel,
characterizing such a conception of self as simultaneously inevitable and empowering.
According to Terry Eagleton, Jane’s attitude is not unusual in Brontë’s work. “At the
centre of all Charlotte’s novels is a figure who either lacks or deliberately cuts the bonds
of kinship,” Eagleton writes. “This leaves the self a free, blank, ‘pre-social’ atom: free to
be injured and exploited, but free also to progress, to move through the class-structure,
choose and forge relationships, strenuously utilise its talents in scorn of autocracy or
paternalism” (26). Because she is located in a “pre-social” framework, Jane is responsible
to and for no one but herself and expects no one to be responsible for her; in this universe,
the individual is truly the author of her fate. (As Rigby disapprovingly puts it: “It is by
her own talents, virtues, and courage that she is made to attain the summit of human
happiness, and, as far as Jane Eyre’s own statement is concerned, no one would think that
she owed anything either to God above or to man below” (173)). Thus, one might say that
Jane Eyre envisions a world in which life stories are singly—not communally—authored.
The individual is the only source of truth about herself, and she must fiercely defend her
authority when confronted by those who would seek share in or challenge it. This finally
leads to the interrelated ideas that identity is singly—not collectively—built, and that the
practice of assembling and interpreting the narrative of one’s life is a solitary and
competitive—not cooperative and collaborative—practice.

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Thornycroft Hall, on the other hand, depicts individuals’ lives, identities, and
narratives as inherently interwoven. Formally, of course, Worboise’s novel takes a shape
similar to Brontë’s: it is narrated by its heroine, and the majority of the novel follows the
events of her life. But Worboise provides much implicit and explicit evidence that
individuals are not to be considered as solitary units in her text. Some of these cues are
subtle but significant, as when the narrating Ellen tells her reader early on, “The
chronicles of Thornycroft Hall were for the most part prosy and uninteresting.… But such
events as really influenced the fate of my cousins and myself I will briefly relate” (38,
italics mine). Here, Ellen reveals an important organizing principle of the book we are
about to read: though it is a first-person, autobiographical-style tale (like Jane Eyre), the
lives of others—in this case, of the heroine’s extended family—are considered integral to
the story the novel has to tell. As Elisabeth Jay explains, “Mrs. Worboise never becomes
so involved with her main character as to lose interest in the spiritual state of the other
major characters” (259). Why does this sustained narrative interest matter? Because
ultimately it is a profound rewriting of Jane Eyre’s insistence that the individual is the
fundamental center of the world and the most important unit of experience. Thornycroft
Hall imagines ways of coming to the truth about oneself and one’s life by seeing oneself
always in relation to others. In this rewriting of Jane Eyre, Worboise tries to envision
both identity and narrative differently than does Brontë—as less competitive and more
collaborative. Thornycroft Hall is organized not around a protagonist’s quest for
independence but instead around the continued efforts of multiple characters to give up
the illusions of individuality and independence and accept the help and guidance of
beings both human and divine. Whereas Jane’s mission throughout Jane Eyre is, as

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Ronald Thomas puts it, to “[win] psychological and economic independence from all her
‘masters’” (49), a task which necessitates her “[insistence] on being the only source of
truth about herself” (55), Worboise’s heroine must learn to embrace the influence and
narrative input of others and, in turn, to offer her own influence and input to them.
To learn these important lessons, Ellen must be educated out of her initial Jane
Eyre-like tendency toward both physical and psychical isolation. When in distress, Jane
most often retreats to her room to engage in solitary contemplation; when she emerges
from that private space, her next step is often the decisive severing of ties with those
around her. This is the pattern she follows, for example, when Miss Temple leaves the
Clergy Daughters’ School: after spending the day in solitude in her own room, Jane
decides to seek out “a new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new
circumstances” (100). Similarly, after discovering that Rochester is already married and
thus that her own longed-for marriage is impossible, Jane retreats to her bedroom and
“fasten[s] the bolt that none might intrude” while she decides what to do (330). What she
decides to do, of course, is leave, alone (again). Jane’s repeated seeking of private
physical space is part and parcel of her psychical isolation. When faced with challenges,
Jane keeps her own counsel, confiding in no one and seeking no one’s advice. She is an
independent agent with only her own desires and moral convictions to guide her.
Ellen acts in a similar way at first. During her protracted struggle at Casterton to
understand what salvation is and how she can attain it, her first instinct is to isolate
herself from her schoolmates and teachers:
And so, without breathing my care into the ear of any mortal creature, I
struggled on, sometimes hoping, sometimes fearing, sometimes weeping,

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to think of the sentence of banishment those gracious lips might
pronounce against me at the last great day. I would have written to
Marshall, but our letters were all left open to inspection, and I shrank from
any confidence in those around me. Once or twice I was asked what had
come over me, for I cared not at all for our old, pleasant recreations; and
even my well-beloved studies had lost their charm. Companions and
governesses both marked the change, but little was said about it, and I kept
my own counsel, and was silent.… It was one Sunday afternoon in the
month of September; we came home from church, and walked for some
time in the garden, and my heart was bowed down with its weight of
inexpressible wretchedness. I went into the house miserable and forlorn,
wishing it were bed-time, that I might be alone with my sorrow. (178-179,
italics mine)
Ellen, like Jane, initially desires isolation in her time of trouble; but, as both she and the
reader will soon learn, it is interaction with others that results in spiritual growth and
ultimately leads to her longed-for salvation. Though she must engage in personal
reflection, the company and influence of others is an indispensable part of her journey to
a mature understanding of herself and her place in the world. No one finds spiritual truth
on her own in this novel, as Helen apparently does in Jane Eyre (“‘I hold another creed;
which no one ever taught me,’” she tells Jane (69)). Instead, individual salvation and the
personal growth and development that accompany it require a distinctly cooperative
effort.

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It is not until Ellen abandons her attempted isolationism and rejoins her
community that the breakthrough she has been waiting for occurs. At teatime on the very
day she has spent “wishing…[she] might be alone with [her] sorrow,” Ellen reluctantly
joins a communal gathering at which her schoolmates share hymns and poetry with each
other. Two girls recite a hymn whose every verse ends with the refrain, “O Lord God, I
come, just as I am.” Their recitation has a profound effect on Ellen. “[I]n one moment the
light, as it were, flashed upon me from heaven. I wondered at my blindness, my insensate
stupidity. I looked, and all was clear. There was no longer any wall of partition between
me and Christ” (179-180). Thornycroft Hall carefully paints a portrait of salvation as
dependent upon a mixture of personal reflection and interaction with/input from others.
Ellen’s own salvation is the product of early groundwork laid by her father, much
encouragement from Mrs. Cleaton, repeated direction from Marshall Cleaton, solitary
soul-searching, and finally the hymn sung by her schoolmates.
The communal effort required for salvation is further demonstrated when Ellen
later plays an indispensable role in Julia’s conversion. As her dying cousin laments that
she may not attain salvation before she expires, Ellen relates the tale of her own struggle
in order to guide Julia through her doubts:
I told her something of my own experience, how long I had sought
to build up a righteousness of my own, how I had tried to do something to
attain to some fancied standard, to make myself worthy of Christ’s regard,
till that ever blessed Sabbath evening when I heard those words—
“Just as I am, without one plea,
“But that Thy blood was shed for me,

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“And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
“O Lamb of God, I come.”
“Just say that hymn all through,” [Julia] said, faintly. “If I ever
come at all, it must be ‘just as I am,’ weak, defiled, ungrateful, and
miserable.” (389, italics original)
Here, Worboise shows how the influence of Ellen’s hymn-sharing schoolmates—like that
of the hymn-writer herself, Charlotte Elliott—grows and multiplies, surfacing even at
Julia’s deathbed, many years later and a thousand miles away.
9
Moreover, the novel
makes clear that Ellen’s painful struggle to attain salvation has lasting value as an
example that others can follow.
In these scenes as elsewhere in the novel, Worboise highlights the fact that her
protagonist’s experiences don’t just shape her; instead, because she sees her life as
enmeshed with the lives of those around her, Ellen’s experiences—particularly her
painful experiences—become a means by which to strengthen her bonds with others.
Whereas Jane Eyre’s suffering most often seems a necessary component of her own
personal growth (as when her misery leads her to assert her worth to Mrs. Reed or declare
the value of her feelings to a seemingly insensitive Mr. Rochester), in Thornycroft Hall
the formation and/or revelation of individual character is less important than the ability to
use personal suffering to see the connections between the self and others. This helps
explain the significance of an otherwise strange episode in Worboise’s novel, in which
Ellen’s cousin Arabella plays a very complicated and malicious trick on her, using gossip

9
Various biographical works note that Charlotte Elliott wrote this well-known hymn after
years of painful uncertainty about her own spiritual state, which creates a lovely
resonance with the experiences of multiple characters in Worboise’s novel.

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and planted newspaper items to convince Ellen that her fiancé Marshall has forsaken her
and married another woman. Elisabeth Jay claims this incident is Worboise’s “attempt at
creating a dramatic, but less shocking parallel to the scene where Jane discovers that
Rochester is already married,” and invoking that memorable scene may indeed have been
part of Worboise’s intention (250). But this odd episode also resurfaces later, in a context
that reinforces Worboise’s use of individual suffering to fortify human bonds in the
novel’s always-relational universe. In the midst of Ellen’s long journey to Italy, where
she will meet with and comfort her abandoned cousin Julia, our protagonist ruminates on
Arabella’s cruel trick, thinking:
I felt glad, then, that for those few weeks I had known the unutterable
agony of a love betrayed and deceived; that I knew what it was to mourn
over an idol shattered, defaced, and crumbled into common clay. Thank
God, my sorrow was a mere delusion!.… But the misery, while it lasted,
was real enough—quite as real as though Marshall had actually wedded
that mythical Emily…. So I knew, what otherwise I never could have
known, somewhat of the intensity of the sorrow that was my poor Julia’s;
something of the horrible void, the hopeless, inexplicable anguish that first
overwhelms any one who finds that he has trusted and loved and honoured
what never was worthy of faith or affection or reverence. (373)
In this passage, an until-now meaningless period of suffering in Ellen’s life gains
significance and value through its ability to strengthen her sympathetic bond to Julia.
This different way of conceiving of one’s life narrative—as intrinsically,
inescapably tied up with others’ life stories—also explains the duty Ellen (and perhaps

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Worboise) feels to defend William Carus Wilson from the attacks leveled at him in Jane
Eyre. After admitting a few of his defects and countering these with multiple stories of
his kindness to the school’s residents, Ellen writes:
Now all this has little to do with my own story, but I write it as a duty.
Great misapprehensions have prevailed respecting this excellent man, his
motives, his ways, and the institution which he founded, and over which
he reigned, in former years, with undisputed sway.… The institution was
certainly not perfect in all points; but then I, for one, do not believe in
perfection in establishments of this kind, any more than I believe in
perfection in churches. What I have written here is simple truth, an
unvarnished narrative of facts. And again I say, I have written it as a duty,
which I cannot, and do not, wish to evade. (142, italics original)
This a curious passage, not least because later in the novel both Mrs. Ward and Ellen
herself credit Ellen’s time at Casterton with the fact that she turned out more pious, kind,
and respectful than her cousins, who were raised at home. Thus, we might think Ellen’s
insistence here that her tales of Carus Wilson’s management of the school have “little to
do with [her] own story” a bit odd. But I believe that Ellen’s decision not to talk about
that long-lasting influence on herself here, and instead to insistently cite her duty to set
the story of William Carus Wilson right, is significant in and of itself. Her repeated
emphasis on duty attests to her belief that her life—and, just as importantly, the way that
she narrates her life—must be influenced by her duty to others, a sentiment quite foreign
to Jane Eyre’s individualist ideology. The Clergy Daughters’ School section reinforces

99
the idea that Ellen is not a solitary unit, and that her story must be told in conjunction
with the story of others.
10

In order to fully embrace this relational point of view, however, and become
genuinely embedded within her family and community, Ellen must learn to turn away
from a tendency toward Jane Eyre-like self-regard. Although Ellen initially responds
enthusiastically to her dying uncle’s request that she “‘always be Julia’s friend,’”
(exclaiming “‘Always, always, dear uncle; she shall stand first with me’” (193)), she
quickly finds herself questioning the wisdom of her promise when Julia makes clear what
such a commitment entails: “‘[Promise] that you will never leave me till some one with a
stronger claim comes to take you from me; that you will not let any insolence of Maria’s,
any tyranny of mamma’s, so act upon your pride—I ought to say upon your self-
respect—as to force you to go away in that self-dependent spirit which I am sure is
natural to you.’” Ellen responds, “‘Julia, you ask a great deal more than you think; it may
be impossible for me to remain with you without forfeiting my own self-respect. There
are times when self-dependence and self-guidance become duties’” (221).
But after Ellen thinks more about their mutual love for each other and her promise
to her departed uncle, she finally makes the commitment that will guide much of her
future life:

10
Compare this to Jane Eyre’s depiction of the formulation of individual identity, human
relationships, and narrative itself as competitive endeavors. As Ronald Thomas explains,
In each of the settings where her story takes her, Jane is confronted with a
narrative competitor who attempts to take her story from her. In every case those
narrators seek to silence Jane and assign her a passive role in the story of her life,
subordinating her to their own designs, absorbing her in narratives in which she
serves their ends.… Jane’s resistance to these narrative competitors and her
reversal of their financial advantage constitute the hidden plot of Jane Eyre. (52)

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[I] promised that no act of my own should henceforth sever our paths or
our interests. It seemed to me that it was my duty to promise; stronger ties
than those which bound me to her I had none, and at that moment it
seemed impossible that any such should intervene. My promise might
subject me to much that was unpleasant and even painful; but on that
account it was not to be refused.… So I promised; and though my promise
involved me in many troubles and perplexities, I never regretted it; and
now I am thankful, very thankful, that I thus pledged myself, at her
request. (221-222)
As this scene makes clear, Ellen must turn away from a thoroughly Jane Eyre-like
commitment to “self-respect,” “self-dependence,” and “self-guidance” in order to
embrace a commitment to another that supersedes her perceived duty to herself. When
she declares, “[S]tronger ties than those which bound me to her I had none,” Ellen means
that she has no living relative or friend closer to her than Julia; but, crucially, she also
means that the ties which bind her to her own self-interest are not as strong as those that
tie her to her cousin. Thus, she willingly sacrifices her comfort, her desires, and her pride
to continue to live by Julia’s side. Ellen’s is not an easy, one-time-only choice, but a
commitment to Julia she must continually make and remake through many hardships and
against her own desires for comfort and independence.
11
Crucially, her backward-looking

11
Ellen at times demonstrates a restlessness and desire for independence reminiscent of
Jane’s, but she never follows through on these feelings because of her promise to care for
Julia. The following quotations, taken from a span of years in her early adult life after her
return home from Casterton, are representative of her ongoing struggle:
I was beginning to feel that life at Thornycroft Hall was once more
unendurable; and, but for Julia, and but for my promise, I should have written to

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narration validates her decision to privilege relational bonds over self-interest to her
readers.
In Thornycroft Hall, as in Patience before it, such a turn away from individualist
concerns and toward an obligation to others is not mere altruism or Christian do-
gooderism. Rather, it is part of a fundamental reordering of the individual’s physical,
spiritual, and emotional universe. Over the course of the novel, this reordering takes a
heroine with a Jane Eyre-like sense of pride, indignation, and self-sufficiency and teaches
her a set of interrelated truths: that her sense of herself as a discreet, sovereign individual
is an illusion; that maturation—not to mention salvation—requires a disenchantment with,
and disowning of, this illusory self; that an appropriate life quest is not one of self-
fulfillment but self-annihilation; and that one does not reach one’s potential alone, but
with the active input of others.
Thornycroft Hall renders the value and necessity of communal responsibility
explicit in a way that Jane Eyre never does. Jane certainly cares for other individuals over
the course of the novel, and she occasionally worries about the effect her actions will
have on them (as when she contemplates the possibility that Rochester will commit some
desperate action after she flees from Thornfield). But Brontë by and large depicts Jane as

the lady-superintendent of Casterton to beg her to find me a situation as junior
teacher in the establishment. O! what a haven of rest and peace seemed to me now
that far-away and beloved Casterton! (227-228)
Maria would have had me turned adrift long ago, and but for my promise
to Julia I should certainly have asserted myself and sought another home, wherein
she held no rule or authority. (267)
We were frequently at issue as it was; and again and again I felt that, but
for my promise to Julia, nothing would keep me under the same roof which
sheltered Maria and her mother…. I had no friend but Julia, and for her sake I
bore the long misery of those dull interminable years. (281)

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an individual seeking to retain her autonomy from other individuals, while Worboise
thematizes the necessary interconnectedness of individuals’ physical and spiritual lives.
In fact, Ellen directly credits her own moral development to a dawning appreciation for
this interconnectedness. Struck by the adult Ellen’s obvious moral superiority to her own
daughters, Aunt Ward asks what the Clergy Daughters’ School did to “tame” the wild girl
she had been, to which Ellen responds,
“[At school] I was soon made to perceive that I, as one of a large
association, was in some sort held responsible for the well-being of the
whole. The power of influence was strongly impressed on us all; it was
carefully shown to us that we could not do evil and hurt ourselves alone;
and the privilege of setting a good example was one to which we were all
incited to aspire.” (353)
This “privilege of setting a good example” is not merely empty rhetoric. In Thornycroft
Hall, one can only attain salvation—and with it, a true and mature knowledge of oneself
and the world—by following the good examples of others. Those examples might be
provided by the people within one’s circle or by scripture, poems, or hymns. As we have
already seen, Ellen’s encounter with the “just as I am” hymn plays an invaluable role in
her salvation (and, years later, in Julia’s as well). By conforming themselves to the model
that the hymn provides and taking the words of the hymn’s speaker as their own, both
Ellen and Julia are finally able to obtain a clear sense of God’s abiding love for them
despite their utter unworthiness.
There are significant ideological implications to envisioning oneself and one’s life
as Ellen and Julia eventually do—that is, as conformable to a series of models. Turning to

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models in this way implies that identity is interactive and mutable, and that one’s own
“natural” or “innate” traits are less desirable or valuable than those of the idealized,
reproducible model. This is not an easy lesson for Worboise’s characters to learn. Months
before Ellen discovers the hymn that changes her life, Marshall begins to instruct her on
the necessity of patterning herself on models. When Ellen asks Marshall what she must
do to become a Christian, Marshall replies, “‘Only make David’s prayer yours:—“Create
in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Only put yourself in
God’s hands, saying, “Lord, here I am, sin-defiled and lost, take me as I am, just as I am;
take away all that is displeasing in Thy sight, and give me a heart to love and serve Thee
faithfully to my life’s end.”’” (174-175). While Marshall’s counsel makes salvation
sound easy and natural (Ellen must “only” adhere to the script Marshall is giving her),
Ellen cannot put his advice immediately into practice. In fact, Ellen spends months
attempting to “make David’s prayer [her own]” and coming to terms with the need to ask
the Lord to strip away her most fundamental characteristics and re-form her to his
pleasure. That Ellen must struggle mightily to embrace this new conception of herself and
her place in the universe is just one sign of many that these Evangelical beliefs contradict
prevalent individualist ideologies. Despite the difficulty it entails, however, Worboise’s
characters must learn to mold themselves to literary and human exemplars, and, in the
process, reject any vision of themselves as isolated or self-determining individuals.
Jane Eyre, on the other hand, highly values Jane’s innate character traits and
portrays any concerted attempt to reform those traits—by Jane or by others—as both
ineffectual and undesirable. Whereas Ellen must learn to take advice from the godly
people in her life and model herself on righteous exemplars, Jane’s story, Rachel

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Brownstein tells us, “is about her refusals to make herself what others would have her be”
(156). Jane is engaged in a novel-long quest to find a space in which she can finally be
herself, free of the threat of relatives or friends—such as Mrs. Reed, St. John, Rochester,
and even Helen—who would attempt to change her.
12
The novel’s endorsement of
individuality shows up at least as far back as the Lowood section, in which Jane registers
her disapproval of the school’s attempts to homogenize the appearance and conduct of its
students—particularly Brocklehurst’s infamous denunciation of a schoolmate’s naturally
curling hair. Readers have understandably remembered this scene as an indictment of
Evangelical cant and hypocrisy: Brocklehurst’s insistence that a girl’s hair should
conform to “grace” rather than “nature” seems the silliest kind of biblical misreading,
while his exhortation about the necessity of mortifying the flesh is interrupted by the
arrival of his own daughters, who are ornamented with “elaborately curled” hair (76).
However, this scene tells us as much about Jane as it does about Brocklehurst. The fact
that the young Jane finds this scene particularly noteworthy hints at an ideological bent
that will appear repeatedly throughout the novel: to Jane, individual character is as
unbending, as unchangeable, as one’s physical features. Thus, Brocklehurst’s true sin in
this scene, like the real weakness underlying Lowood’s educational philosophy, is a
belief that “we are not to conform to nature [but] be the children of Grace” (75). Jane’s
(and, I would argue, Brontë’s) profound respect for the individual—her conviction that a
person’s character traits are as permanent as the color of her eyes or the texture of her

12
Helen tells the young Jane to “‘read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says,
and how he acts—make his word your rule, and his conduct your example’” (69), but the
only other character we see do this explicitly is St. John, and his following of a biblical
example is troubling. ‘“My Master was long-suffering: so will I be,’” St John says during
his dogged pursuit of Jane (465).

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hair, and thus deserving of a kind of deference—is not shared by Evangelicals either
inside or outside the text.
When Jane does try to conform to the examples of others, Jane Eyre asserts that
this conformity is temporary at best—that the individual’s innate characteristics will
outlast and overpower any attempts to override them. Nowhere is this made clearer than
when Jane casts off Miss Temple’s years’-long influence in the period of an afternoon.
For nearly a decade, Miss Temple has instructed Jane at the Clergy Daughters’ School,
acting as “mother, governess, and latterly, companion” to her (98). In this capacity, Miss
Temple has had a profound effect on the young Jane. “I had imbibed from her something
of her nature and much of her habits: more harmonious thoughts: what seemed better
regulated feelings had become the inmates of my mind,” Jane explains. “I had given in
allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of others,
usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character” (98). If the
language of “seemed,” “believed,” and “appeared” were not enough to undercut the
authenticity of these changes to Jane’s character, the fact that it takes only half a day after
her mentor’s departure for Jane to “[undergo] a transforming process” in which her mind
“put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple” makes it clear that the novel is hardly
endorsing Jane’s modeling of herself on another woman (98). The implicit assertion here
is that Jane is who she is, and that the influence of others (such as Miss Temple) on her is
at best temporary and contingent.
Just as telling as the short-lived nature of Jane’s conversion at the Clergy
Daughters’ School is Brontë’s decision not to narrate it. The process of transformation by
which Jane becomes (at least temporarily) like Miss Temple is completely omitted from

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the novel; in fact, the narration picks up again the day she casts off Miss Temple’s
influence and becomes old, restless Jane again. This ellipsis is particularly noteworthy
because, at the start of the same chapter, the narrating Jane explicitly links what she
chooses to narrate with what she claims will be of interest (as she puts it, “I am only
bound to invoke memory when I know her responses will possess some degree of
interest; therefore I pass a space of eight years almost in silence” (97). It is unclear
precisely whose “interest”—the reader’s or that of her narrating self—Jane is referring to).
Here, Brontë is communicating explicit and implicit judgments about what makes for
good fiction, as the eight years that Jane chooses not to narrate are the years in which she
is acting contrary to her nature. Jane’s nearly decade-long relationship with Miss Temple,
which is characterized by her conformity to Miss Temple as a model, is deemed
unworthy of the readers’ attention and of Jane’s energies a narrator. But the moment Miss
Temple disappears—the moment Jane is “left in [her] natural element” and “[begins] to
feel the stirring of old emotion”—the narration resumes again (98).
The theme of transformation and its discontents is revisited in greater detail when
St. John sets about on a lengthy campaign to mold Jane into an ideal missionary’s wife.
The novel again depicts as futile any attempt to alter Jane’s innate character traits, but
Brontë suggests with this second attempt that such efforts are as painful as they are
pointless. About St. John’s efforts, Jane writes,
[I] daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and
more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my
tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for
which I had no natural vocation. He wanted to train me to an elevation I

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could never reach; it racked me hourly to aspire to the standard he uplifted.
The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his
correct and classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the sea-
blue tint and solemn lustre of his own. (444)
Jane asserts in the this passage that character is as unbending and unchangeable as the
shape of one’s face or the color of one’s eyes. Selfhood inheres in one’s faculties, tastes,
and talents, all of which this passage characterizes as “natural” and “original” rather than
acquired, learned, or adopted (whether by choice or by force). No matter how much Jane
may wish to change—to become the person St. John (and, because Jane wishes to please
him, she) wants her to be—she ultimately believes that it is “impossible” to override who
she “naturally” is.
This vision of identity is paradoxically both more and less supple than the one on
display in Thornycroft Hall. Worboise’s novel depicts identity as mutable and
communally created. Her characters are not beholden to nature; in fact, her exemplary
characters must discover that the original bent of their tastes and faculties is merely an
obstacle to be overcome on their path to maturity. Thornycroft Hall, like many
nineteenth-century Evangelical novels, stipulates that each believer must strive to fit
herself into a template of ideal Christian character and behavior. This understanding of
identity requires the individual to give up any investment in her supposed uniqueness.
When the individual’s “natural” proclivities prevent her from fitting the template, she
must pray that God take those proclivities away—that he alter her nature so that she may

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be more like the ideal.
13
Taken to its logical extreme, this schema diagnoses those traits
that mark an individual as distinctive as the very traits that separate her from God.
According to Worboise, the luckiest and happiest we could possibly be would be to have
God take away everything inherent in us—every feeling, reaction, and thought;
everything that modern psychology might say makes us us—and replace it with traits
natural to Christ’s character. Thus, from her earliest days Ellen is taught to devalue
herself. Her training begins after an instance of childhood waywardness, when her
minister father tells her,
“My little daughter always means to be quite good; she thinks now she
will never be naughty again, but she must learn not to trust herself; she
must pray, to her heavenly Father, for Christ’s sake, to change her evil
heart, and to make her humble, meek, mild, and unselfish. She must ask
Him to take away her passionate temper, and to give her the ornament of a
meek and quiet spirit.” (98, italics original)
From her early youth, Ellen is taught that she must ask God to change her, to take away
her natural temperament and bestow upon her a new, wholly unfamiliar and unnatural
one.
This message appears again later, when Marshall urges Ellen to make the biblical
David her role model. When Ellen asks him how to become a Christian, saying “‘I have
meant so many times to be a Christian…and always I have failed—it seems such hard

13
We have already seen how this plays out in Patience, with Dora’s frequent attempts to
“pray away” thoughts, feelings, and desires that she feels will impede her imitation of
Christ.

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work,’” Marshall answers: “‘Only make David’s prayer yours:—“Create in me a clean
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Only put yourself in God’s hands,
saying, “Lord, here I am, sin-defiled and lost, take me as I am, just as I am; take away all
that is displeasing in Thy sight, and give me a heart to love and serve Thee faithfully to
my life’s end.”’” (174-175). Ellen’s focus on the “hard work” of becoming a Christian is
gently corrected by Marshall, who stresses that her true duty lies in asking God to remake
her in his image. Of course, it is equally—though less explicitly—Ellen’s duty to trust the
older, wiser Christians who, in passages such as these, are teaching her important lessons
about the true nature of identity and the intersection between selfhood and salvation. An
essential part of the maturation process Worboise depicts is learning to be receptive to the
insights and experiences of others, even—or perhaps especially—when they run counter
to one’s own instincts. In Thornycroft Hall, Ellen must learn to participate in a recursive
process whereby the individual looks to others’ experiences—particularly their struggles
for salvation—to guide her own journey toward maturation, and then in turn shares her
experiences with those who are at an earlier stage on the developmental path. This
spiraling pattern of salvation suggests that individual narratives are all connected and that
individual experiences are reproducible and transferrable.
Brontë’s heroine, on the other hand, must learn an entirely different set of lessons.
While the passage about St. John’s attempts to change her makes clear that Jane believes
her innate character traits have inherent worth (hence her aversion to “disowning” or
“stifling” them), it also demonstrates that she is as yet unable to champion those traits to
her cousin as she should. Protecting her sense of self from those who would seek to
challenge it is perhaps the most vital lesson Jane must learn on her path to true maturity.

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One facet of that lesson is the necessity of regarding warily those who offer themselves
and their experiences as examples for her to follow, as St. John does. Despite their many
and obvious differences, Jane’s clerical cousin both implicitly and explicitly presents
himself as a suitable model for her to imitate. In an attempt to overcome Jane’s objections
to becoming a missionary’s wife, St. John invokes his own fears and shortcomings,
implying that what has helped him face them will help her as well:
“[Y]ou say right that you are not fit for the work. Who is fit for it? Or who,
that ever was truly called, believed himself worthy of the summons? I, for
instance, am but dust and ashes. With St. Paul, I acknowledge myself the
chiefest of sinners; but I do not suffer this sense of my personal vileness to
daunt me. I know my Leader: that He is just as well as mighty; and while
He has chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great task, He will, from
the boundless stores of His providence, supply the inadequacy of the
means to the end. Think like me, Jane—trust like me.” (448, italics mine)
In Thornycroft Hall, such a speech would be used to successfully turn the novel’s heroine
away from self-regard and self-trust toward a life patterned on worthy Christian models,
but in Jane Eyre it signifies something quite different: namely, an interpersonal struggle
for dominance. Jane’s narration frames her conversation with St. John in terms of
“opposition” and “conquest” (448), ultimately characterizing his assertion of his authority
to speak “‘direct[ly] from God’” (447) and to “‘claim’” Jane “‘for [his] sovereign’s
service’” (448) as misguided—even blasphemous. Midway through their conversation,
Jane has a revelation: “I saw his fallibilities; I comprehended them.… I sat at the feet of a
man, erring as I.… I felt his imperfection, and took courage. I was with an equal—one

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with whom I might argue—one whom, if I saw good, I might resist” (452). In this
passage, Jane learns not to put her trust in others, but instead to lean ever more fully on
her own understanding. She refuses St. John’s urging to see her own life as a continuation
of those Christian lives that came before hers (St. Paul’s) or that intersect with hers (St.
John’s), and instead ever more strenuously objects to ideologies that would make her
“abandon half [her]self” or restrict her “naturally unenslaved feelings” (450, 453).
Ultimately, Brontë refuses to validate the authority of an older, wiser Christian to guide
Jane against her own inclinations.
Above all, and quite unlike Worboise’s characters, Jane must learn never to trust
others at the expense of trusting herself. Both Jane and the reader should recognize that St.
John is a poor model for Jane when he proves himself unwilling—or unable—to see Jane
clearly for who she is, as when describes her character thus:
“In the tractability with which, at my wish, you forsook a study in which
you were interested, and adopted another because it interested me; in the
untiring assiduity with which you have since persevered in it—in the
unflagging energy and unshaken temper with which you have met its
difficulties—I acknowledge the complement of the qualities I seek. Jane,
you are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous;
very gentle, and very heroic: cease to mistrust yourself—I can trust you
unreservedly.” (449)
St. John’s language is telling: he “acknowledge[s] the complement of the qualities [he]
seek[s]”; what he clearly does not “acknowledge” are Jane’s many characteristics that
mark her as a poor match for him—and that equally mark him as a poor model for her.

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It’s hard to imagine that the reader, who has seen Jane in moments of passion, anger, and
despair that hardly square with St. John’s one-dimensional portrait of her, would not side
with Jane’s ultimate rejection of St. John as a model and guide.
Jane’s fraught relationship with St. John reiterates a persistent anxiety about the
fragility of identity that runs throughout the novel. In Jane Eyre, the self is
simultaneously and paradoxically both vulnerable and impervious to change. Although
some passages, such as those discussed above, indicate that attempts to alter the
individual’s identity or character are ultimately futile, others suggest that the self is ever
in danger of being transformed by others, and therefore must be carefully guarded. This
paradox becomes most apparent in the period leading up to Jane’s wedding to Rochester.
Jane frequently expresses a fear that she will become someone new after she marries—a
fear that is heightened when she considers the new name her marriage will bestow upon
her. When her fiancé declares that she is “‘soon to be Jane Rochester,’” Jane is
discomfited. “‘You blushed, and now you are white, Jane: what is that for?’” Rochester
asks. “‘Because you gave me a new name—Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange,’”
Jane replies (290). On the night before her wedding, she refers to “Jane Rochester” as “a
person whom as yet I knew not,” further exclaiming, “Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist:
she would not be born till tomorrow…” (308). Such assertions imply that the new name
she will assume upon her marriage will be part of a radical break with her past and
present self.
But her name is not the only thing up for grabs during Jane’s engagement. Her
appearance, too, is a site of contestation between her and Rochester, and is equally tied to
her shifting sense of self. Jane objects to Rochester’s attempts to dress her in satins and

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lace, claiming that, in donning such apparel, she will become a stranger to him: “‘[Y]ou
won’t know me, sir; and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer, but an ape in a
harlequin’s jacket—a jay in borrowed plumes’” (291, italics mine). And yet, when
Rochester soon thereafter calls Jane his angel, she replies: “I am not an angel…and I will
not be one till I die: I will be myself” (292, italics mine). These lines simultaneously and
paradoxically point to a sense of identity as unchanging and as in constant danger of
radical alteration. While her first lines betray a fear that new trappings—name, clothing,
jewelry—will actually make her into a different person, unrecognizable to both herself
and Rochester, the subtext of Jane’s last comment is “I have always been and will
continue to be plain Jane, the governess. Even though my life circumstances are changing,
I myself am not becoming someone new.”
Jane’s discomfort with Rochester’s eagerness to rewrite her name, appearance,
and way of living (which he betrays by looking forward to the day when her name will
change to his, by changing her appearance through his gifts of fine clothes and jewels,
and by insisting that she give up her work as a governess) marks her as a bold new kind
of heroine. As a poor woman, Jane knows that her economic status and gender doom her
to an existence rife with instability—one that is contingent upon the whims of wealthy
relatives, employers, or spouses—yet she asserts her privilege to “be herself” in the face
of those whose economic status and gender make them more powerful than she. Those
whose wealth (Mrs. Reed, Brocklehurst, Rochester) and sex (Brocklehurst, Rochester, St.
John) “outrank” hers try throughout the novel to tell her who she is and how she should
live—a persistent intervention which Jane continually resists. But underlying Jane’s
resistance to their attempts to own her, define her, or rewrite her is not just an awakened

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class or gender consciousness, but also a highly specific conception of selfhood and a
commitment to the sanctity of the individual. Self-knowledge, self-governance, and self-
fulfillment are Jane’s goals and, the novel seems to say, the right and responsibility of
every individual, regardless of class or gender.
Critics have largely embraced the individualist cosmology that underlies Jane’s
“pilgrimage toward selfhood” (Gilbert and Gubar 367); scads of books and articles have
sought to identify the various social, psychological, and economic obstacles that lie on
Jane’s path to a “life of wholeness” and trace how she does (or doesn’t) ultimately
overcome them (Gilbert and Gubar 366). As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar put it, the
ever-increasing ease with which Jane breaks free from those who would “imprison” her
and restrict or alter her organic sense of self is a “measure of how far she has traveled in
her pilgrimage toward maturity” (366). “Selfhood” and “maturity,” according to critics
ranging from Gilbert and Gubar to Sally Shuttleworth and Ronald Thomas, require Jane
to “[waken] to her own self, her own needs” and “[draw] [her] powers from within
[her]self” (Gilbert and Gubar 368). As Shuttleworth puts it, “From the opening
paragraphs of the novel, where a defiant note of self-assertion is quickly introduced, it
becomes clear that the narrator of Jane Eyre is a figure involved in the process of self-
legitimation” (111). Much critical inquiry into the novel demonstrates a marked
investment in both Eyre’s and Brontë’s projects of “self-legitimation”—in their journeys
toward a kind of independent, authentic selfhood.
14
This critical investment is significant

14
In fact, Jane Eyre has come to be seen as a key figure in the history of female
authorship and the rise of feminism more broadly. In the introduction to Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Casebook, Elsie B. Michie writes:

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because it reflects not just properties of the novel itself but also critics’ own suppositions
about the ideal shape of human experience. Jane Eyre is a uniquely valued and valuable
figure in literary studies, modeling for twentieth-century readers a myriad of
quintessentially modern attitudes—none more important than a fundamental conviction
that the individual’s chief investment must be in herself.
Despite her small size, her lack of beauty, her lack of wealth, her youth, and her
dependent profession, Jane insists that she is important—that her thoughts, feelings, and
desires have value. So, too, do her natural inclinations—the bent of her character—which
others are constantly trying to re-shape throughout the novel. Clinging to herself,
insisting on her own importance in the face of the myriad social forces that would insist
upon her insignificance comes across as an admirable act of bravery and defiance. It also
ties in remarkably well with modern axioms about the innate worth of every individual
and the comparatively recent refrain that every person is unique and valuable.
15
Such
egalitarian notions seem quite praiseworthy, especially as they have substituted for the
now-passé but once-widely-held beliefs that would grant such value only to wealthy
white males. Still, though, Worboise would take issue with Jane’s stubborn assertions—
not because Jane is poor or young or female, but because she is a human being. While
Jane Eyre depicts the self as something to be hoarded, defended, and treasured, Worboise

With the rise of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, Jane Eyre came to be seen
as the paradigmatic story of a woman’s attempt to fight back against patriarchal
oppression…. For this generation of scholars [including Gilbert and Gubar,
Adrienne Rich, Elaine Showalter, and more], it was as if Jane Eyre provided a key
to the struggles not just of the Brontës but of other nineteenth-century women
writers—Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. (15)

15
Of course, despite its supposedly universal applicability, this refrain is not (and has not
been) applied equally across different cultural, class, racial, and even age boundaries.

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insists that true maturity requires one to acknowledge the individualized self as limited
and undesirable. Thornycroft Hall makes clear that Jane is operating under a delusion:
she has failed to recognize that the self is a burden that should be jettisoned, not clung to.
She has failed to acknowledge that self-consistency—being “true to oneself”—is neither
a virtue nor a necessity. Worboise sees sameness and conformity, not uniqueness, as the
ultimate goal of every individual. The Evangelical longs not just to act but to be acted
upon, not to shape herself but to be shaped by God.
While Thornycroft Hall confidently challenges Brontë’s individualist cosmology,
its characters’ drawn-out struggles to attain a correct understanding of themselves and
their place in the world—an understanding that is directly linked to the attaining of
salvation—demonstrate that the self-devaluation required of them does not come readily.
These periods of struggle also make clear that Thornycroft Hall, like Patience before it, is
not content to promote the good behavior of its readers through self-policing and docility.
Much of the history of scholarship on Evangelical literature assumes that these novels,
with their often-exemplary heroines, are meant to be mere conduct manuals for young
women. But novels by Hofland, Worboise, Tonna, and other Evangelicals make clear that
good, docile behavior is worthless if it is not accompanied by a radical new way of seeing
oneself and the world. The young Ellen, for example, must learn that moral behavior
which is motivated by pride in oneself and one’s reputation is not just insufficient but
dangerous in its tendency to increase one’s feelings of self-respect and self-sufficiency.
When Marshall asks Ellen, before her conversion experience at Casterton, if she can call
herself a true Christian, she finds she cannot. “The tears rose in my eyes, and my heart
misgave me. I had cultivated truth, and meekness, and diligence, as virtues of so much

117
merit, not as Christian graces. I was conscientious, because my pride, my self-respect,
bade me eschew the thing that was evil.… I shook my head sadly, not looking up as I did
so” (174). At this point in the novel Ellen seems to be a model girl; she has always been
truthful and loving, and her time at Casterton has taught her to be obedient as well. In fact,
she acts in nearly every way like an exemplary Christian, so readers might be surprised
by Ellen’s admission to Marshall that she cannot, in fact, call herself a Christian.
Thornycroft Hall makes clear that her “truth, meekness, diligence” and conscientiousness
have thus far only been the products of her own self-regard, and that accepting her own
worthlessness and helplessness is the most important step on her path to true maturity.
The groundwork for this message was laid in one of the novel’s earlier scenes,
shortly after Marshall and Ellen first met but before her exile to the Clergy Daughters’
School. This passage makes clear the extent to which Worboise’s Evangelical values
clash with those of her day (and, it should be noted, our own). Addressing the ten-year-
old Ellen, Marshall begins:
“Never be afraid of doing that which is right and honourable. You
must cultivate moral courage. Do you know what that is?”
I thought a little, then I said, “Yes, it is the courage that makes us
do right things, when they are very difficult and very painful.”
“Just so,” he replied—
“‘To live by law,
‘Acting the law we live by, without fear;
‘And, because right is right, to fellow right.’

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“But you will hardly understand that; and I am sure no one ever
followed right simply for right’s sake, of his own unaided strength. You
must pray, Ellen, that God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, will enable you to
resist temptation, to overcome evil with good. You cannot do it of yourself,
my child, neither can I; but strength may be had for the asking—there is
the comfort.” (87-88)
Worboise, while quoting and clearly honoring a passage from Tennyson’s “Œnone,” also
reframes it in an important way. She pointedly omits the lines that come immediately
before this selection (“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,/ These three alone
lead life to sovereign power./ Yet not for power, (power of herself/ Would come uncall’d
for) but to live by law,…”) because the idea that self-reverence would lead to a life of
sovereign power is anathema to the message of Worboise’s novel. Self-knowledge has
been characterized as the most fundamental knowledge an individual can possess by
everyone from the ancient Greeks (with their aphorism “know thyself”) to modern-day
self-help gurus.
16
Tennyson’s poem implies that self-knowledge and self-respect are the
foundations of true goodness. But in Worboise’s cosmology, self-reverence is a sin and
sovereign power over oneself and one’s life belongs only to God. Worboise seems to

16
In fact, since the nineteenth century, psychology and self-help writers have turned
frequently to these lines by Tennyson, which have recently appeared in texts with such
suggestive titles as Discover the Power Within You and Strong and Fearless: The Quest
for Personal Power, among many others.

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appreciate the sentiment in Tennyson’s lines, but she edits and amends them to say that
we cannot fulfill the ideal they represent without God’s help.
17

But relying on divine aid in this way not only requires an acceptance of one’s own
insignificance and impotence; it also requires that one take part in a relationship that is
utterly outside the logic of modern capitalism. Characters in Thornycroft Hall must learn
to accept, even celebrate, their eternal debt to God. Their position in this gift economy
initially makes Ellen—and, later, Julia—uncomfortable. Both women feel they have to
earn their salvation; they cannot quite believe that God could offer them such a gift for
free. But neither woman can be saved until she accepts her utter powerlessness—until she
accepts that her salvation is not, in the end, based on any qualities inherent in her (who
she is, what she has done or will do), but instead on God’s unearned kindness. Marshall
describes salvation to the young Ellen thus: “‘The door is open for you to enter in; that is,
if you knock, it will be opened without fail. The overflowing cup is ready to be put into
your hand, if you will stretch it forth; eternal life is offered you, will you reject it?’” (174).
This plan of salvation could not be easier, and yet Ellen’s long struggle to come to terms
with it suggests how fundamental a change must occur in her understanding of herself
and her place in the world in order to accept eternal life that is offered in this way. Her
protracted struggle is not due, as one might expect, to the necessity of self-perfection—to
the time it would take to eradicate all sin and error from her life. Rather, it represents the
extraordinary difficulty of accepting her place in a gift economy that contradicts the

17
The passage above, like many others in the text, makes clear that Ellen is not being
counseled on her weakness because she is female; rather, Marshall acknowledges that
both women and men are powerless to do good without God’s help.

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fundamental logic of the nineteenth-century world in which she lives.
18
Again, it is the
“just as I am” hymn that finally shows Ellen the way to accepting this strange new
reality:
[A]cross my wearied mind flashed the thought, why should I not go—“just
as I am?” Why should I struggle any longer? Why should I want to “rid
my soul of one dark blot,” when He, “whose blood can cleanse each spot,”
says, “Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will
give you rest”? Was I not weary and heavy laden? Was I not tossed about
“with many a conflict, many a doubt”? O then, why not respond to the
gracious invitation, and cry, from the inmost depths of my soul, “O Lamb
of God, I come”? And in one moment the light, as it were, flashed upon
me from heaven. I wondered at my blindness, my insensate stupidity. I
looked, and all was clear. (179-180, italics original)
Julia’s conversion requires a similarly protracted struggle. As she lays dying, she
tells Ellen, “‘I thought, if ever I knew that I was dying, it would be so very easy to turn to
God—so simple a thing to become a Christian, and dismiss one’s fears at once and for
ever. But ah! no, it is difficult—very difficult!’” (386). Thornycroft Hall combines a
message of the simple plan of readily available salvation, which waits only to be accepted,
with depictions of the difficulty of actual conversion, or the acceptance of that gift. Its

18
Here we see echoes of the ideological debate that played out in Patience when Dora
sought to follow in Christ’s footsteps by bestowing upon Stancliffe mercy and love he
had not earned, while her friends insisted she dole out the harsh treatment “justice”
demanded. And, of course, Ellen and Julia’s struggles to understand and attain salvation
are reminiscent of the “conundrums” Dora must work through in Patience, in that both
novels are presumably offering patterns for readers to follow in their own struggles with
the anxieties and contradictions of lived religious experiences.

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characters’ tendency to over-complicate the simple scheme of salvation would seem to
indicate that something about it is fundamentally counter-intuitive to their ideological
presuppositions. It is very difficult for Ellen and Julia to accept that they are powerless to
do anything but accept or reject God’s offer—to come to terms with the fact that they
cannot earn salvation, that they must owe for eternity, that self-perfection (or self-
redemption) is not possible, and that struggle is not always the right path to virtue.
Julia can’t at first let go of the idea that her thoughts and actions matter—that they
should affect her ability to attain salvation. Participating in Thornycroft Hall’s recursive
process of growth and development, Ellen uses biblical examples and her own
experiences to help guide Julia through the difficult release of these deeply ingrained
values:
“It is quite simple, dearest. Just take the mercy, the pardon that is
offered; you have nothing to give in return. Christ asks nothing, it is a free
pardon, an unpurchased mercy; you can have it without money and
without price. Like the Israelites of old, who were bidden to look to the
brazen serpent; you have only to look to Christ and live for evermore.”
“It seems so small a thing, to look—to take.”
“The greatest thing in the world, if you look in faith believing that
the sight of the Sacrifice can take all your sins away.…”
And then I told her something of my own experience, how long I
had sought to build up a righteousness of my own, how I had tried to do
something to attain to some fancied standard, to make myself worthy of

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Christ’s regard, till that ever blessed Sabbath evening when I heard those
words—
“Just as I am, without one plea,
“But that Thy blood was shed for me,
“And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
“O Lamb of God, I come.”
“Just say that hymn all through,” she said, faintly. “If I ever come
at all, it must be ‘just as I am,’ weak, defiled, ungrateful, and miserable.”
(388-389, italics original)
The value system on display here echoes that Dora advocates in Patience, in which
humans do not earn treatment based on their actions but instead are treated with an
unearned—and un-earnable—grace. Modern political and economic theories do not apply
in recognizable ways to the Evangelical’s relationship to God; in fact, a clinging to the
values that undergird those theories is the primary obstacle standing in the way of
salvation for both Ellen and Julia.
Thornycroft Hall depicts the acceptance—even celebration—of debt and
dependence as necessary conditions of true freedom. During her journey toward salvation,
Julia must first come to realize her eternal debt to God, and then she must learn to look
upon that debt not as a burden but as a blessing. As Ellen tells her, “‘[W]e must be
content “to owe” throughout eternity; but it is sweet to owe all to One whom we love
with undivided heart’” (390). For Brontë’s protagonist, on the other hand, feelings of debt
and dependence are accompanied by a persistent sense of anxiety and shame. As Harold
Bloom puts it, “Jane Eyre cannot countenance a sense of being in any way inferior to

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anyone whatsoever” (2). Ronald Thomas concurs, stating, “Whether she is describing her
material or her moral disposition, Jane consistently represents her life as a series
of…debts and payments, for which she makes the terms” (49).
While Jane never may never learn the Evangelical lesson that it is “sweet to owe,”
there are hints at the end of the narrative that Brontë might be attempting to revise the
novel’s previous anxieties about dependence. When Jane happily takes her place
alongside the crippled Rochester, she relates that “there was a pleasure in my services [to
Rochester], most full, most exquisite, even though sad—because he claimed these
services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he
knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so fondly, that to
yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes” (500). At the very end of her
narrative, Brontë may be proposing the existence of a certain ethic of care that escapes or
modifies Jane’s earlier concerns about who has the most power in each of her
relationships. Perhaps Rochester is able to do what Jane never is—that is, accept
dependence without finding it humiliating. If so, then the Evangelical value system that
Brontë has spent most of the novel rebelling against may play a role in bringing her
lovers together, and she and Worboise might see eye to eye on one fundamental doctrine
despite their many differences.

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Chapter Three:
Rethinking Reform in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood

So far we have examined how Evangelical narratives contest common ideas about
subjectivity, gender roles, and family formations within the milieu of middle-class
domesticity. The final two chapters of this dissertation ask what happens when the
Evangelical subject and her attendant concerns are transported into literary genres that
deal more explicitly with contemporary economic and social issues. What happens, we
will ask, when the Evangelical author’s reform project expands to encompass not just a
protagonist’s sense of self and her role in her domestic community, but such pressing
social concerns as poverty and economic exploitation? How do writers who value
suffering and advocate submission simultaneously agitate for things like factory reform?
And how do we as readers and critics respond when the Evangelical values expressed in
fiction challenge our expectations about novelistic plots and characters?
We will begin our exploration with an early and influential “condition of England”
narrative: Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood. First serialized in the Christian
Lady’s Magazine from 1839–1840 and published as a single-volume novel in 1841,
Helen Fleetwood follows the fortunes of the pious Green family who live a humble but
happy life in the English countryside before they are tricked into moving to an industrial
town to work in the textile mills. The novel details the moral and material degradation the
Greens face at every turn after arriving in the city and chronicles their attempts to meet
each new misery with Christian faith and perseverance.

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In its attempt to shine a light on the horrific living and working conditions of the
urban poor, Tonna’s novel predates similar work by Dickens, Disraeli, Kingsley, and
Gaskell. According to Donald Lewis, Tonna, who published under the name Charlotte
Elizabeth, “was undoubtedly one of the most influential popular religious writers of the
nineteenth century” (54). Helen Fleetwood was widely read in its day and new editions
were still being advertised as late as 1872. The novel’s enduring impact on literary and
culture memory is attested to by an 1871 Spectator article, which proclaims, “Some thirty
years ago everyone was reading ‘Charlotte Elizabeth’s’ Helen Fleetwood, a book which
had a success of the same kind as that obtained by Uncle Tom's Cabin…. Who that read
that tale—and few who are now in middle life will have failed to do so—does not
remember the harrowing picture that it gives of life in the ‘factory town?’” (“The Silent
Partner” 711). The novel eventually fell out of fashion, however, and was almost wholly
neglected by literary critics for over 100 years. Ivanka Kovacević and S. Barbara Kanner
are generally credited with renewing scholarly interest in Tonna with their 1970 article
“Blue Book Into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna.”
The authors praise Tonna as an important social historian who pioneered a genre later
taken up by other (better known) British novelists (153). “She was the only author of her
generation to write a novel wholly about the lives, at home and at work, of factory
operatives and the first to introduce a working-class heroine into an English novel,” they
write (153). Moreover, in her employment of “official reports and inquiries as the factual
basis for her stories [she] was the first of the social-problem fiction writers to translate
the recorded testimony of witnesses in parliamentary blue books into dialogue for her
novels” (164).

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Kovacević and Kanner introduced Tonna to a new generation of literary critics,
and since the publication of their oft-cited article, critical interest in Helen Fleetwood has
been growing steadily; much of this interest can no doubt be attributed to an increase in
scholarly attention to the lives of women, children, and the working class in the
nineteenth-century, as well as a desire to recover forgotten women novelists. But if
Kovacević and Kanner brought Tonna to the attention of late-twentieth-century scholars
who might otherwise never have heard of her, they may also be responsible for the
somewhat patronizing tone and narrow scope of many later studies. To make their case,
they stressed the importance of the social content of Tonna’s work while simultaneously
insisting that we need not take her seriously as a novelist. “There can be no denial,” they
assure us, “that much of the dust which lies on Mrs. Tonna’s ‘Complete Works’ is there
because its removal is unmerited. The literary value of her writing is too mediocre to call
for defense. However, the purpose here is to show that she deserves to be better known to
the literary historian through her special contributions as a social polemicist” (158). To
rehabilitate Tonna’s writings, Kovacević and Kanner emphasized their importance as
historical documents that embody notable social and political content, and summarily
dismissed the idea that they have anything to teach us about (or any pleasure to give us
as) literary fiction.
And so it has continued in later scholarship. In her 1974 study of minor
nineteenth-century women novelists, Vineta Colby proclaimed confidently, “As a novel,
[Helen Fleetwood] has no merit whatever beyond its good intentions and the graphic
pictures it offers of life in the wretched slums of factory towns” (175). Seven years later,
Monica Fryckstedt offered the following lament: “[T]o the detriment of her

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fiction…[Tonna] always placed message before medium. Deficient in characterization
and plot, devoid of humour and love intrigues, cast in the language of the religious tract,
Charlotte Elizabeth’s fiction suffers from one basic flaw—her fanaticism” (102). In her
1988 study of Victorian social fiction, Rosemarie Bodenheimer admitted that Helen
Fleetwood is “good at exposing specific failures in the administration of the 1833 Factory
Act,” but she insisted that “Tonna’s novel is really a religious tract” (133). Patrick
Brantlinger was similarly loath to label Helen Fleetwood a novel. In The Spirit of Reform,
Brantlinger called Fleetwood “a piece of social hysteria written by a rabid fan of Lord
Ashley’s,” adding that “judged as a tract, it is a masterpiece, though judged as a novel, it
is a wretched production because of the artistic naïveté and the religious fanaticism that
make it a good tract” (56, 57). With all these disclaimers and expressions of thinly-veiled
distaste, and with critics’ use of words like “fanaticism” and “hysteria” pathologizing
Tonna’s religious and social views, is it any wonder that Helen Fleetwood—unlike Mary
Barton or North and South, Hard Times or Oliver Twist—is little known and rarely
studied by scholars not working on a history of the industrial novel? That Helen
Fleetwood does not inform broader studies of nineteenth-century realist novels as
“condition of England” novels by Dickens and Gaskell often do is no surprise when
influential critics such as Bodenheimer and Brantlinger refuse to call it a novel at all.
It is not my aim to convince anyone that the above-mentioned critics are wrong in
their estimation of Helen Fleetwood’s literary merit. Rather, I would like to tease out the
properties of Helen Fleetwood that have resulted in critics’ reluctance to treat this as a
“real” novel and the misreadings that their discomfort with the novel has provoked.
There’s nothing wrong with valuing the text’s status as a unique historical or sociological

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document—the first literary work to incorporate blue book testimony, the first to be set
exclusively among a family of factory workers. Helen Fleetwood was, indeed, an
important piece of social polemic, and valuable studies have been conducted on the way
it mobilized middle class women to participate in factory reform through both their
volunteer efforts and their influence on the voting habits of their fathers, husbands, sons,
and brothers.
1
But in perusing the past four decades’ worth of critical commentary on
Helen Fleetwood it has become increasingly clear to me that critics’ consistent focus on
the two most obvious didactic purposes of the novel—that is, promoting Evangelicalism
and advocating factory reform—has allowed them to ignore the majority of the text,
resulting in glaring misreadings of many of the novel’s most important ideological
stances. Huge swaths of the novel have remained unexamined and unremarked upon, as
critical interest has tended to swirl around the same two or three themes and four or five
scenes. There’s nothing wrong with examining the novel’s attitudes towards women and
the working class (two preferred critical points of inquiry), but focusing on them
exclusively erases from view a whole slew of other possibilities.
What if we asked different questions, or at least allowed categories other than
gender and class to affect our answers to the questions we’ve already been asking? Bryan
Rasmussen points out that most studies of Tonna actually sideline her religious beliefs;
critics, he says, generally treat her religion as an unfortunate blot on her efforts at social
reform. He writes:

1
In addition to Kovacević and Kanner’s article, see, for example, Ella Dzelzainis’s
“Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Pre-Millenarianism, and the Formation of Gender Ideology
in the Ten Hours Campaign” and Kathryn Gleadle’s “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and the
Mobilization of Tory Women in Early Victorian England.”

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[Tonna is] a figure whose radical religion has been regarded as a
regrettable impediment to her otherwise admirable reformist politics.
Citing in particular her workman-like fictionalizations of proto-
sociological British parliamentary inquiries into factory and labor
conditions, critics have detailed Tonna’s participation in early Victorian
culture almost exclusively through her subordinate relationship to the
emerging social sciences. Sidelining Tonna’s spirituality, however, misses
the complexity of the relationship between her religion and her social and
cultural inquiry. (160)
In most treatments of Tonna’s work, such as those I’ve cited above, the author’s religious
convictions are raised briefly and in a few predictable ways. Her Evangelicalism is
frequently brought up to support conservative readings of her treatment of gender, class,
and the process of industrialization. And, of course, as the quotations above begin to
illustrate, her religious beliefs are used to explain the aesthetic shortcomings of her work
or to dismiss her and her views altogether. Few critics (Catherine Gallagher and Christine
Krueger are notable exceptions) entertain the possibility that Tonna’s Evangelicalism
might do more than prescribe a predictable stance on the most important issues of the
day—that it might, instead, radically affect her take on the way human knowledge and
subjectivity are to be understood and depicted in fiction.
When we allow ourselves to take Helen Fleetwood seriously as a novel rather
than labeling it a simple piece of religious or political propaganda meant to transform
readers into Evangelicals or factory reformers, a whole world of possible readings opens
up to us. Tonna, like her more canonical counterparts, deploys complex rhetorical

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strategies and narrative devices to explore widely relevant questions about the nature of
reality and human relationships, the powers and limitations of the mind, and the most and
least commendable ways to construct and live a life. There’s no denying that Helen
Fleetwood is riven by both ideological and epistemological contradictions: parts of
Tonna’s text seem to support liberal humanist configurations of knowledge and
subjectivity, while other parts are clearly resistant to those Enlightenment-derived
principles that we claim have shaped both modernity and the novel. Perhaps these traits
cannot be reconciled—but neither can they be easily brushed aside. They are evidence of
struggle—the struggle to adapt Evangelical epistemologies to the novel form, to modern
material circumstances and epistemological formulations. In some ways Evangelical
novels like Tonna’s are quite radical; in others, very conservative. But as a whole they
challenge us to redefine modern subjectivity and to rethink our assumptions about how
that subjectivity is both depicted in and created by the novel. If we admit the ambiguous
and ambivalent pieces of evidence we cannot help but see when we allow ourselves to
take Evangelical novels like Tonna’s seriously as novels, we can begin to trace how such
texts challenge our narratives about what nineteenth-century novels look like, how they
operate, and what they seek to accomplish.
I will argue that most twentieth-century criticism of Helen Fleetwood
demonstrates a failure to understand and contend with the Evangelical literary project,
which consists of a complex negotiation of the spiritual and material, the timeless and
timely. Nineteenth-century Evangelicals embraced certain epistemological and
ontological propositions that critics have failed to include in their histories of the period.
This failure is conditioned by a century’s worth of criticism that has defined the novel as

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inherently secular, as a vehicle for liberal humanist principles and bourgeois values.
When confronted with literary works that challenge this definition, critics have frequently
marginalized those works or, alternatively, sought to recuperate them by minimizing the
importance of the variances that separate such works from prevailing schools of thought.
This chapter will explore how critics have employed both tactics in their discussions of
Helen Fleetwood. It will also explore what the scholarly imagination has lost in
considering Helen Fleetwood and other popular Evangelical novels so narrowly and
infrequently. The Evangelical population—like its literature—is important to understand
in and of itself (as a historical force if nothing else), but it is also important as a
representative of the kinds of people and literatures modern literary criticism has trouble
dealing with. Like the other Evangelical novels I study in this dissertation, Helen
Fleetwood offers us a chance to rethink what we know about nineteenth-century novels
and the experience of life those novels both reflected and helped to shape.
Tonna’s novel poses significant challenges to readers habituated to canonical
nineteenth-century literature. In terms of story and setting, Helen Fleetwood appears to
resemble Mary Barton without the latter novel’s romance plot or happy ending. Tonna’s
text begins when the good but impoverished Green family—consisting of a widow, her
four orphaned grandchildren (Richard, James, Mary, and Willy, who range in age from
eight to seventeen), and an adopted orphan (the Helen of the title, who is sixteen at the
start of the novel)—are tricked by an unscrupulous parish official into leaving their home
in the country and moving to the industrial city of M. (a thinly veiled Manchester) to
obtain work in the factories. Only Richard, the eldest, who has secured work as a
groundskeeper to the local squire, remains behind in the country. Upon arrival, the

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Greens are shocked at the squalor they encounter and ill treatment they receive, but they
do not have the means to return to the country. Over the course of about a year and a half,
the family unravels; barely able to make ends meet, they are forced into worse and worse
living conditions. Mary and Helen are regularly harassed and beaten at the mill—a
situation the widow is unable to remedy despite repeated efforts to do so. What is worse,
the Greens’ religious convictions and close family bonds also begin to fray. When they
arrive in the city, all of the Greens are deeply devout Evangelicals. Very quickly,
however, Mary becomes impudent and unruly and Willy takes to drink. James and Helen,
still good Christians, are slowly expiring from consumption. Despite the widow’s best
efforts to keep the family together and in tolerable health and happiness, James and Helen
die. At the end of the novel, the widow, Mary, and Willy have been transported back to
the country. Willy obtains a job working with his elder brother, but Mary is hired out as a
lowly servant and the widow must enter the dreaded workhouse. Looking at its plot alone,
Helen Fleetwood appears to be a straightforward tale of domestic tragedy occasioned by
the social ills of industrialization.
However, Helen Fleetwood’s Evangelical commitments make the experience of
reading this text fundamentally different from that of Marty Barton and other canonical
industrial novels. In her seminal study, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction,
Catherine Gallagher provides compelling analysis of the tensions that arise when Tonna’s
commitment to the Evangelical doctrines of free will and a providentially designed
universe butt up against her equally intense commitment to factory reform. The former
demands that suffering like Helen’s be viewed as a providentially ordered sanctification,
while the latter requires that the lives of urban workers be portrayed as governed by the

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laws of environmental and economic determinism. Gallagher sensitively explores how
Tonna adapts the traditional concerns and strategies of Hannah More’s religious tracts to
an urban, industrial setting and delineates the inevitable paradoxes that appear in Tonna’s
text when the author’s religious convictions come into unavoidable conflict with her
thoroughly modern and materialist reform project.
2
But despite her nuanced analysis of
why Tonna must split her novel into providential and antiprovidential characters and
spaces in order to accommodate both her religious convictions and her reform project,
Gallagher proves surprisingly tone-deaf when it comes to analyzing the novel’s treatment
of gender. When faced with Helen Fleetwood’s deeply disorienting stance on the
conditions under which human agency is possible or desirable—a stance which is
informed by Tonna’s contradictory views on the trustworthiness of the senses and human
reason—Gallagher tries to substitute a traditionally gendered reading of active and
passive characters for Tonna’s Evangelically informed epistemological doubts. Where
Tonna seeks to challenge man’s status as the ultimate maker of meaning by casting doubt
on the ability of human minds and senses to interpret phenomena correctly, Gallagher
sees merely a predictable reification of gender difference.

2
Gallagher writes:
Tonna’s novel includes some providential explanations, but she, unlike [Hannah]
More, cannot apply them to all events, for the industrial town of M. does not fit
into a providential scheme. M.’s social fabric clearly is not of God’s weaving: the
town is a place where submission to the social system means spiritual suicide for
most working-class characters.… M.’s dynamic is actually antiprovidential:
obedience to parents and masters leads children into temptation, not into grace.
Because it is impossible to explain M. in providential terms, the narrator
introduces the completely different, indeed antithetical, causal scheme of
economic and social determinism to account for the factory town’s existence. (42)

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The problem begins with Gallagher’s conviction that a novel filled with
characters divided between a providentially ordered universe and an economically and
environmentally determined one can’t really be called a novel at all, no matter its other
novelistic qualities. She makes this conviction clear when she identifies Richard Green as
“the hero of Helen Fleetwood”—the character whose “active, conventionally novelistic
freedom…makes Helen Fleetwood a novel” (47, 48). Reading Richard as a typical novel
hero—a character who is sanctioned to take action within the text—helps Gallagher make
sense of the novel’s otherwise bewildering attitude toward human agency. Helen
Fleetwood is a reform novel, after all; it dwells at great length and with a fair amount of
detail on the terrible suffering of mill workers in an attempt, it seems, to encourage
reform efforts in the real world. One might think that, by definition, a reform novel like
Helen Fleetwood must subscribe to the view that suffering is undesirable and that it can
be effectively observed, its cause diagnosed, and its negative effects eradicated. Such a
novel would seem to require a certain faith in the human mind and senses, in human
reason and action. And yet Tonna’s novel is filled with characters who disavow faith in
the senses’ ability to correctly perceive and the mind’s ability to correctly interpret
material phenomena. Her Evangelical characters must counter-intuitively read their
suffering as blessings from a caring Lord. They must read the pain of mangled limbs and
empty stomachs, the despair of grinding poverty and constant injustice, against the
dictates of both their physical senses and their reason.
The most famous example of this phenomena involves Sarah Wright, a relative of
the Greens who has been hideously deformed and mortally sickened by her work at the
mill. When asked by the widow if she knows “‘who has afflicted [her] thus,’” Sarah

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answers quite literally, attributing her injuries partly to the machine and partly to the
overlooker who abused her when she got too tired to work. The Greens quickly correct
her. “‘It was God,’” they say, “‘who…has ordered these afflictions for you’” (84). “‘I
don’t believe it was,’” Sarah answers swiftly. ‘“Helen Fleetwood told me God is very
good and I don’t think he would order me to be hurt in this way.’” The widow replies,
‘“My dear child, God’s mercies often come to us in a very strange shape; and I trust you
will yet find that even these hurts were ordered by his great goodness for your everlasting
benefit’” (84). The novel teaches us that, to be saved (which she eventually is), Sarah
must learn to replace her “thinking” with the widow’s “trusting”; she must replace her
impulse to credit what her eyes have seen and her body has felt, along with what her
mind has understood kindness to mean, with a readiness to interpret events against
physical evidence and the sanction of reason.
Rather than classifying suffering as an unavoidable evil—or, in the spirit of
Enlightenment progress, something that can and should be eradicated for the good of
humanity—Evangelicals must acknowledge the value of pain. In an age of science and
reason, it is counter-intuitive to look for the positive outcomes of bodily and mental
suffering rather than to focus one’s attention on the amelioration of that suffering. But,
like Patience, Helen Fleetwood repeatedly insists that afflictions are gifts sent by a loving
God to his precious children. Tricked into leaving her comfortable home for unfamiliar,
unappealing M., and newly aware that she has condemned not just herself but her beloved
grandchildren to a life of grinding poverty, the widow Green, the narrator tells us,
was now to learn the value of an humbling dispensation; and in the pain
inflected by it, she first discovered how needful it was. There are

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corruptions in every human heart, hidden even from the knowledge of its
possessor, until particular circumstances are so ordered as to bring them
forth to his view. “Cleanse thou me from secret faults” is the aspiration of
many a Christian who little thinks what a startling process will commence
in answer to his prayer. (39-40)
Thus, the widow, like Sarah in the passage quoted above, must learn to interpret pain as
valuable, as a sign—however presently obscured—of God’s love and her own eventual
improvement.
Later in the novel even the deeply devout Helen, who is near-angelic in her
submission to life’s trials, must re-learn the importance of disowning normal human
reactions to bodily suffering and mental torment in order to arrive at the appropriate
Christian interpretation of such phenomena. James explains to a visiting Richard that
Helen’s extremely poor health has resulted in
“fits of low spirits that she used at first to think was the hiding of God’s
face from her, and that thought made it worse; but in the midst of one of
these sad seasons…the preacher showed how the failing of bodily health
would cause the mind to droop and be dark; and how, though the sunshine
of gladness might be withdrawn, the bright soft moonlight of quiet faith,
and sure trust in Him who cannot deny himself, would lead the traveller on
in the safe right path, till the sun rose again, either through the return of
health and cheerfulness, or in the bright morning of the resurrection. Helen
told me all; and laughed and cried, and said, ‘How could I ever
doubt!’” (231)

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Helen’s joy is restored when she learns to trust that her thoughts and feelings are less
important—even less authentic—than God’s promises, even though the latter cannot be
proven by any empirical evidence and must be taken on faith.
Evangelicals must submit to the injustices and indignities they encounter in the
mills because, as the widow reminds Mary,
“[T]he choice of what we are to be and to suffer is not in our own hands. It
becomes us all, at all times, to submit humbly to whatever God sees fit to
lay on us; and to help our companions to do the same.… [W]e may not
reason about it, since we have been given a positive command, ‘Submit
yourselves one to another.’ ‘Be clothed with humility.’ ‘Resist not evil.’
There are many more such passages in the Bible.” (87)
Thus, any faith in mankind’s ability to use physical senses and reason to observe,
understand, and solve problems—the very faith that would seem to authorize Tonna’s
extra-textual reform project—is repeatedly undermined within the text. While critics have
noted that Evangelical calls for social or political reform are often blunted by the Bible’s
injunction to submit humbly to those in positions of power (power which is, after all,
presumably sanctioned by God), they have not noticed the ways in which reform efforts
are also affected by Evangelical distrust of reason and the evidence of the senses.
Gallagher thinks Richard provides her a way around this epistemological
quagmire. Because the novel’s two main characters—Helen and the widow—preach this
kind of counter-intuitive submission most insistently, and because they happen to be
women, Gallagher concludes that such submission is required of women only. Because,
in the last third of the novel, Richard swoops into town and tries to save Helen from a

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slow and painful death in the factories, Gallagher decides that he is the novel’s hero—its
“principle of active, conventionally novelistic freedom.” The other characters may act in
ways that are unfathomable to modern readers, but Richard, Gallagher claims, is easily
recognizable. And if Tonna can create and endorse a typical novel hero (even if his
“attempts to find justice inside the mills are doomed to failure by the book’s political
purpose” according to Gallagher), then Helen Fleetwood just might be a novel after all
(48). Gallagher writes:
Helen Fleetwood is a free soul who chooses submission. Richard Green,
on the other hand, represents the free will actively combating evil in the
world. The novel presents these two modes of freedom as feminine and
masculine, respectively. Helen does her feminine duty by meekly and
silently enduring both debilitating work and persecution. Richard Green’s
duty, on the other hand, is to do everything in his power to protect
Helen. (47)
Out of the deeply disorienting epistemologies on display in Tonna’s novel, Gallagher
creates a comfortable tale of stereotypical gender roles: a man charges to the rescue of the
helpless woman he loves. She ties up her otherwise astute analysis of the novel—her
accommodation of its paradoxes and ambiguities—with a neat bow of gender difference.
Helen Fleetwood may contain complicated and contradictory messages about the ways in
which spiritual, human, and material forces shape one’s experience of the world, but
Tonna’s conception of gender difference, Gallagher declares, is straightforward and
thoroughly conventional.

139
It is true that Richard storms into town and acts, in many ways, like a typical
novel hero. But Gallagher’s claim that the novel divides activity and passivity down
gender lines is unpersuasive. To make her claim, Gallagher must completely ignore two
compelling pieces of evidence that contradict it: the fact that a woman (the widow) has
spent the first half of the novel “do[ing] everything in [her] power to protect Helen,” and
the fact that Richard’s “heroism” is not endorsed by the novel. His attempts to be a
traditionally novelistic hero fail not just because of the novel’s political purpose, as
Gallagher claims, but also because the very hero he’s trying to be—the self-confident,
independent, ambitious conqueror—is characterized by the novel as misguided, if not
downright foolish.
A passage that appears soon after Richard’s arrival in M. initially seems to
support Gallagher’s claims about his role in the novel. More than a year after his family
was tricked into moving to M., Richard travels to the city, where he is dismayed to find
the Greens in dire financial and moral straits. Despite his grandmother’s best efforts, she
and her grandchildren are living in one dark and unwholesome room, they barely have
enough food to eat, Helen and James are seriously ill, and Willy and Mary are exhibiting
troublingly unchristian behavior. They do seem in desperate need of a rescuer. Until this
point in the novel, Richard has always thought of his grandmother as the head of the
Green household. When, in an early scene back in the countryside, a parish official asked
Richard if he might one day be master of the Green family cottage, Richard swiftly
asserted his grandmother’s rightful status as lifelong leader of the home and the family.
“[C]oloring deeply with emotion,” Richard replies: “‘Granny will be mistress of [the
cottage] as long as she lives, and I live’” (21).

140
Just over a year later, however, after observing the squalor and spiritual peril of
his family in their new urban environment, Richard upends—in his own head, at least—
the family structure that has been guiding his thoughts and behavior throughout the
course of the novel.
A change [came] over Richard’s feelings that appeared to re-cast his
whole character in a different mould. Its latent energy had rarely been
roused into any strong manifestation; he had shown himself the docile,
industrious boy, the steady, honest, independent youth, but always quiet
and retiring, looking up to others, particularly to his aged relative, for
guidance and encouragement; he now saw his situation and duties in a new
light, and at once, almost unconsciously, assumed the headship of the
family, feeling his respectability bound up in the them, no less than his
happiness, and resolved to place them in a different position, both with
regard to the world and to each other. How to effect it he had not inquired:
but rescue them he would from the low station to which they seemed to
have fallen; Mary must be subdued, Willy reclaimed, and the happy
harmony of former days re-established. (233)
Thus, with the “dream of coming conquest [lending] additional height to [his] well-grown
person,” Richard confidently sallies forth to accomplish his first heroic task (233). This is
surely, as Gallagher claims, the stirring portrait of an awakening novelistic hero—one
who is determined to take action to right wrongs and defend the honor and promote the
happiness of his family (and, not incidentally, himself). But Gallagher does not examine
closely enough how the novel characterizes Richard’s subsequent actions. The quotation

141
above represents just the first in a series of confident declarations Richard makes to
himself and others about what must be done to save his family—declarations that the
novel repeatedly exposes as ignorant and ineffectual. For example, when informed that
children who complain about their inhuman working conditions are often turned out of
the mills to starve, Richard declares, “‘I only wish they may turn out Mary and Helen.’”
He is quickly rebuked by the much more experienced mill worker with whom he is
talking: “‘You had better wish no such thing; work is rather slack now; and depend upon
it they would be kept out of employment for a long while…’” (241). When warned that
his pet project—transferring Helen to a better mill—will not be accomplished easily, he
cries “‘Pho! What care I for difficulties?… You lazy manufacturers are so used to see the
machinery do your work for you, that you can’t judge of us field laborers, who carry all
before us by mere strength and perseverance.’” Again, a seasoned mill worker must
correct Richard’s misconceptions about the nature of factory work: “‘You have odd
notions of machinery, my fine fellow, if you think it does our work for us. It only makes
us work’” (261).
While on his self-imposed mission to find a better situation for Helen, he makes a
series of ill-advised statements based on an over-estimation of his own ability to judge
what is essentially a foreign situation. Because he lacks a basic understanding of the lives
of mill workers and the ways in which factories are run, Richard is exposed as a
thoroughly inept hero. Walking with Hudson, a kind mill supervisor, across a field in
mid-afternoon on the way to inspect a new and supposedly better mill for Helen, Richard
declares, “‘Let the mill be what it may, the situation is enough to determine me [to move
Helen here]. Why the very breath one draws here is like new life after that horrid town.’

142
‘“Yes,’” his friend cautions, ‘“at this hour and under such a sky, I confess it is: but we
must not forget that the millwork lasts from before sunrise till after sunset, most part of
the year; and as the ground lies low, unwholesome mists will rise early and late. The
situation is not considered so healthy as you might suppose; at least for those who cannot
enjoy the sunshine’” (264). Upon arriving at the mill, Hudson shows Richard that the
machinery in this mill is boxed off—an important safety precaution, as ‘“when left
exposed, very dreadful injury is inflicted, and often instant death to the poor children who
are caught in passing.’” Appalled, Richard declares, “‘[N]othing should bribe me to let
Mary or Willy even go near such works.’” Hudson quickly corrects Richard, informing
him that “‘Mary must pass it many times in a day’” in her current place of employment
(266). After a thorough tour of the mill and all the positions Helen might take there,
Richard indignantly announces that this is no place for Helen after all. ‘“No,’” he
proclaims, “‘she shall go back to the country, and weed in the fields, or feed the farmer’s
pigs—anything but such a life as this.’” His distressed companion feels unable to “tell the
irritated youth how very much worse in every respect was the place [Helen] at present
labored in, compared with that which they had visited” (272).
Time and again, Richard’s leadership of the family, no matter how well
intentioned, is shown to be almost laughable in its wrong-headedness. Richard clearly
feels that he possesses enough independent power and ability to act effectively in the
world, but the novel does not endorse this belief. Instead, Richard’s self-important
proclamations are repeatedly shown to be ill informed, the product of ignorance and
overconfidence. Richard’s attempt to be a “novelistic hero” fails, therefore, not only in
order to underscore Tonna’s call for widespread factory reform, but also because that

143
kind of hero has no place in Tonna’s world. Untempered by the properly patient and
submissive spirit, content to rely on his own active spirit and judgment rather than God’s
guidance, letting his sex fool him into thinking he is the head of a household situated in
circumstances which are completely foreign to him—all of these typically novelistic
traits are to be condemned rather than condoned in Tonna’s novel. Soon after his arrival
in M., Richard dreams that Helen and Mary are being threatened by a stormy sea and
feels that he “must fly to snatch them from danger” (225). Such a task might be one the
typical novel hero could accomplish, but Richard cannot. Instead, we are continually
reminded how little power, authority, or knowledge he has, despite his supposed role as
protector of the womenfolk.
After Richard has spent a while trying to exercise some “active, conventionally
novelistic freedom,” Helen must lead him back to the correct path. She gently rebukes
Richard for his attempts to control the family’s situation by sheer force of will. When
Richard tells Helen of his plan to remove her to a new mill or to take her back home,
Helen tells him either move would only hasten her demise. He then insists that she seek
out medical care, to which Helen responds, “‘Richard, what’s the use of it all? Man’s
words can neither shorten nor lengthen my days. We must look to him who is all
powerful, and pray that he will give us grace to receive at his hand both good and evil’”
(287). Helen reminds Richard—and the reader—that humans must actively, willingly
submit to God’s plans and actions.
3
After this, Richard admits, “‘I thought myself a bit

3
In fact, Helen’s schooling of Richard echoes Dora’s similar attempts to convince a
dying Stancliffe of the importance of humble endurance and cheerful acquiescence in the
face of life’s trials (which are, after all, sent by God for the benefit of his children). Both
Richard and Stancliffe insist that their duty as men lies in heroic efforts, leading Helen

144
better than others about me; but since I came here I have found out such wicked,
rebellious, impatient, angry passions in my heart, that I hardly believe myself so good as
a heathen’” (289). Referring to this scene, Constance Harsh points out that “while the
town of M. brings out new strengths in Helen, it only brings out [the worst] in Richard”
(104). Harsh thinks this is a purposeful strategy on Tonna’s part—that by “putting female
protagonists in positions of authority” and discrediting “a benevolent masculine
protectorate” such as Richard wants to provide, Tonna is “call[ing] into question the
conventional assumption that women [have] no role to play in public life” (103). In direct
opposition to Gallagher, Harsh argues that it is Helen, not Richard, who “is the great
active and positive force in the novel,” because her good example, constant kindness, and
submissiveness eventually wins converts to true Christianity from among the factory
workers (91).
Helen’s submissive kind of heroism does act as a corrective to Richard’s active,
more conventionally “novelistic” one, but she is not the only female hero in Helen
Fleetwood. In fact, when Gallagher asserts that there is “an active, masculine counterpart
to Helen in this novel, and it is his role to try to do God’s will by changing the world”
(47), she is ignoring not only the novel’s negative characterization of Richard’s attempted
heroism, but also the fact that, for much of the narrative, the widow Green is the is the
text’s most active agent. The widow is even more exhaustive in her attempts to “do God’s
will by changing the world” than Richard is, as she uses every social, religious, and legal
avenue available to her to alter the working conditions in the mills. When she becomes

and Dora to chastise them with a gentle reminder that true Christianity is demonstrated in
self-subjugation and submission to life’s injustices; in fact, Helen and Dora reveal that
these latter efforts involve heroic actions and attitudes of a different kind.

145
aware of the harassment and abuse that Helen and, to a lesser extent, Mary are
experiencing in the mills, the widow seeks help from a long list of authorities, including
the factory agent, two of the factory owners, the town minister, and the mill
inspector/magistrate. Richard even notices and admires his grandmother’s active attempts
to protect her young charges; upon arriving in M. and discovering that the Greens have
brought a suit against a factory overseer who unjustly beat Mary, Richard, we are told,
“wondered at, while he admired, his grandmother’s resolution, in seeking public redress
for an injury inflicted on the helpless orphan committed to her” (193). Only by
disregarding the widow’s repeated efforts to change the hearts and minds of the powers in
M. can Gallagher claim that Richard is the lone active agent in the novel, and that Tonna
thus genders activity as masculine and passivity as feminine.
In fact, one might even say that, between these two active characters, only the
widow truly tries to “change the world,” because she attempts to reform the factory
system whereas Richard merely tries to save his family. Richard’s chief goal is to “rescue
[his family]…from the low station to which they seemed to have fallen”; to do this, he
must “subdue” Mary, “reclaim” Willy, and, as we have already seen, salvage Helen’s
health by removing her to a better environment. The widow, on the other hand, tries to
change the hearts and minds of the men who own and run the mill, which has the
potential to result in the better treatment of all their workers. For example, when the
widow meets with the factory agent, she says her intention is to “‘tell [him] of things that
[she is] sure [he] cannot be aware of, or they would not be suffered to exist’” (130).
Though the wellbeing of her family is her primary concern, her conversation with the
agent touches on the cruelty of the mills at large, which “‘force from [their] poor little

146
laborers the full measure of toil’” and ‘“terrify them into submission’” (120). During her
visit to the second of the two mill owners (the second “Mr. Z.”), the widow asks him to
ensure that “virtue [be] protected, and industry encouraged, instead of the reverse” within
his mills (138). Thus, while the unfair persecution of Helen is her main concern, the
widow tries to open the eyes of the factory agent and owners to broader evils within the
mill in order to create systemic change rather than improvements that will favor her
family only.
If the widow is even more committed than Richard to trying to do God’s will in
changing the world, why does Gallagher fail to mention her? Why doesn’t Gallagher
recognize the widow as being a “novelistic” character who participates in a kind of
heroism? One possible reason is that, because the widow is a maternal figure acting on
behalf of her adopted children, her actions don’t look like what we expect from novel
heroes, who most often pursue self-fulfillment, social or economic advancement, or
conjugal love. After all, these latter motives largely underlie Richard’s attempts to save
his family, and Gallagher has no trouble perceiving them.
4
The widow is also a far
humbler actor than Richard; he relies wholly on his own judgment and expects to “carry
all before [him] by mere strength and perseverance” (261), while the widow frequently
seeks the assistance of God before taking action; when she is laughed at and repulsed by
the powerful men whose hearts she seeks to change, these “rebuffs painful to the flesh”
work to “[drive her] closer to her Almighty refuge” (135). The fact is that Richard’s kind

4
Because he “feel[s] his respectability bound up in the them, no less than his happiness,”
Richard’s attempt to raise his family up in the world can be attributed at least partly to his
own desire to advance socially and economically, and he makes no secret of the fact that
he wants to save Helen so he can marry her (and thus fulfill a romantic ambition) (233,
italics mine).

147
of heroism is easier for an experienced novel reader to recognize and classify than is the
widow’s. Faced with Helen Fleetwood’s somewhat disorienting distinction between
appropriate and inappropriate forms of agency, Gallagher substitutes in a tidily gendered
reading of activity and passivity. By paying attention to the textual evidence that critics
must ignore or misinterpret in order to make the epistemologies on display in Helen
Fleetwood fit into expected patterns, we can uncover the critical constructs and
ideological commitments—the beliefs about literature and modern existence—that
authorize (and perhaps even necessitate) such misreadings.
Gallagher is not alone in her attempt to superimpose neat binary differences on
the novel’s complex depictions of subjectivity and agency. Susan Zlotnick’s Women,
Writing, and the Industrial Revolution complicates Gallagher’s formula by reading the
novel through the dual lenses of class and gender difference; Zlotnick argues that, while
Tonna depicts working-class women and children as lacking agency (and thus having
neither the ability nor the responsibility to better themselves or their situations), she
endows middle- and upper-class women, and all men, with agency. In Helen Fleetwood,
men of all classes bear the responsibility for the horrific living and working conditions of
the poor, Zlotnick claims, but they are shown to be unable to remedy those conditions.
Instead, middle-class women are posited as the only force that can successfully reform
urban society (141-143). Zlotnick makes this latter claim despite the fact that there are no
middle-class women reformers in the novel; in fact, the only middle-class woman who
appears in its pages at all is the kindly daughter of one of the mill owners, and she shows
up for just two pages, in which she is shown to be powerless to help the widow Green
despite her best intentions.

148
To support her claim, then, Zlotnick must perform some mental gymnastics. She
begins by taking a tack similar to Constance Harsh—that is, she argues that Helen is the
most powerful character in the novel. “Helen Fleetwood [is] an exception to the rule that
women lack agency” according to Zlotnick, but she goes on to claim that this is only
because Tonna imbues Helen with the power and moral responsibility of “middle-class
femininity.” Helen’s “ambiguous class status” allows her to “take up the bourgeois
woman’s mission” and act as a “‘light that may conduct [the other workers] into ways of
holiness and peace’” (142). In other words, despite her admittedly “humble origins,”
Helen is a middle-class woman in disguise—“a stand-in for the novel’s ideal reader”—
who has been transplanted into the mills to prove that only an intervention by middle-
class women can defeat the social determinism of the factories (142-143). Zlotnick
supports this somewhat tortured claim with the narrator’s description of Helen and her
tragic demise in the mill. “As ‘the very beau ideal of an English village maiden’ and a
‘modest, right-minded female’ who is mortally wounded by the immorality of the mill,
Helen embodies middle-class femininity despite her humble origins,” Zlotnick says (142).
(Apparently, Zlotnick believes that a “real” working-class girl could not be described as
modest and right-minded or be so wounded from a sustained encounter with cruelty and
immorality.) Furthermore, we can tell Helen possesses middle-class female agency
because she “‘turn[s] preacher’” to the “‘savages’ in the mill,” which is evidently
something only a middle class woman would or could do (142).
Just as Richard’s actions in M. at first seem to support Gallagher’s claims about
the novel’s gendering of agency, so, too, does Zlotnick initially appear to have textual
support for her claims about class. It is true that Helen stands out from the other working-

149
class women in the novel. She is unusually sensitive and modest, and as far as we can tell
she is the only person working to set a good example in the mill. (She also becomes a
Sunday school teacher, and thus quite literally preaches to the poor.) But before creating
a complicated theory about a bourgeois philanthropist disguised as a working class
woman and transplanted into working class environs, perhaps we ought to ask to what
force or circumstance Tonna attributes Helen’s difference from her fellow workers. When
we do take the time to ask that question, the answer is clear: Helen is presented as the
only faithful Christian in her mill. She attributes any knowledge she has to God, “the
Giver of all wisdom,” and any power she has to do good to “‘the help and strength of the
Lord’” (41, 47). Even her ability to humbly submit to her tormentors in the mill (and thus
“preach” to them by her good example) comes from “the strength of the Lord” (88). The
narrator reinforces this discourse, attributing Mary’s moral backsliding in the mill to the
fact that the younger girl “wanted the wisdom and strength that Helen derived from on
high” (89). And James, who has never had to enter the mills because of his consumption
and thus has had no trouble retaining his faith, explains Helen’s difference from other
mill workers thus: “‘[I]f it was not for Helen I should say that the mills are made of
pitch—that nobody could touch them and not be defiled; but you never saw such a
creature as Helen. She seem to me…to be sent just to show us that there is no situation
where the grace of God is not sufficient for his children, if they do but seek it always’”
(230). The novel clearly attributes Helen’s modesty, her right-mindedness, her difference
from other working-class girls (including her own adopted sister), and her ability to
preach to her fellow mill workers, to God working through her. Helen can still be read as
a model for Tonna’s middle-class readers, but it is not because she is a stand-in for a

150
middle-class woman; rather, it is because she is a stand-in for any Christian reader with a
tender and faithful heart.
Thus it becomes clear that Zlotnick has substituted a working-class/middle-class
dichotomy for Tonna’s own Christian/non-Christian dichotomy. This is more than a
simple refusal on Zlotnick’s part to engage with Tonna’s vocabulary; indeed, Zlotnick is
unwilling (or perhaps unable) to engage with a fundamental ideology that informs a great
deal of Tonna’s text. If Zlotnick were to engage with Tonna’s ideological formulation,
she would have to acknowledge that, in this novel, the power to be good and do good
comes from God rather than gender or class status. God and Satan are active agents in
Helen Fleetwood; the former is credited with aiding those who actively seek him, while
the latter is credited with “blinding people” and leading them to hell like captives (168,
119). This might feel discomfiting and alien to a modern critic who insists that novels
portray free and active subjects who are the exclusive makers of meaning in their lives.
Perhaps that is why Gallagher and Zlotnick recast Tonna’s fiction in the familiar
language of class and gender difference. Unfortunately, this recasting causes Gallagher
and Zlotnick to lose sight of what differentiates a novel like Tonna’s from other novels of
the period; it prevents them from teasing out how Tonna’s Evangelical commitments
transform the way she sees and represents the world, the problems of M., and possible
solutions to those problems.
Far from reinforcing gender and class differences, as Gallagher and Zlotnick both
claim, Tonna’s novel actually undermines such differences, as it indicates that values and
behaviors are not inherently tied to any specific gender or class. Members of both
genders and all classes are shown to be respectable, capable, and kind, just as both

151
genders and all classes have members who are sinful, selfish, and cruel.
5
But critics who
refuse to engage with Tonna’s radically alternative understandings of subjectivity,
knowledge, and human relationships have misread many of her most important
ideological commitments as supporting conservative class and gender ideologies. Such is
the case with what may be the most-discussed passage in the book. Said passage occurs
after the widow learns that newly passed legislation requiring all working-class children
to attend school for a certain number of hours each day is being undermined by
unscrupulous factory owners who want to squeeze every drop of labor out of their child
workers. Because the city’s schools are too crowded and poorly run and the ordinance is
too weakly enforced, it is the rare child indeed who obtains any actual education. This
combination of circumstances explains why Katy, the young Irish girl Mary befriends in
the mill, has attended school for over a year without ever having learned her alphabet.
After she becomes aware of this disheartening situation, the widow dreams of a how it
might be remedied.
Compelled by a legal enactment to allow their poor little laborers a scanty
portion of the day for the purposes of education, what a noble field was
opened to the mill-owners for supplying an antidote to the worst evils of
their system. She thought of Amelia Z. [the mill owner’s daughter] and
imagined her, with others like her, devoting two hours of their vacant
morning to the sweet and sacred task of superintending the instruction of

5
The former group includes the widow, Helen, James, Mr. Barlow (the country minister)
the country doctor, and Hudson, while the latter includes the two Mr. Z.’s (the mill
owners) and their agent, and Phoebe and Charles Wright (the Greens’ working-class
cousins).

152
their young servants in religious and useful knowledge; shaming vice,
overawing insolence, encouraging modesty, industry and cleanliness, by
the mere force of their frequent presence and occasional admonitions. A
clean, airy room, regular arrangements, a few minutes allowed for
thoroughly cleansing their soiled skin and brushing their clothes, with easy,
but distinct tasks assigned, and suitable rewards for such as excelled—all
under the personal direction of the employer’s family: oh, what a
refreshment to body and mind would this have secured to the poor little
toil-worn creatures! By what a tie of respectful affection, and consequent
diligence and integrity in his service, would it have bound them to their
master! (174-175)
It is not hard to understand why critical interest would coalesce around this scene.
Here, critics say, is where Tonna betrays the inherent paternalism of her Evangelical
convictions. Despite her sympathy for the working class and the fact that she puts them
front and center in their own story instead of reporting their trials and tribulations through
the eyes of a middle-class protagonist, as many of her canonical counterparts do, this is
where Tonna betrays the fact that her true loyalties lie with the middle class. Here is
where we see that Tonna believes the members of the working class need to be controlled,
educated, and policed by the middle class so that they might become loyal, obedient
workers.
Zlotnick is not the only critic to offer this interpretation, but her response to the
passage is perhaps the most forceful. According to Zlotnick,

153
[Tonna] proposes the formation of a moral constabulary made up of
middle-class women who would then police the mill workers by [quotes
the full schooling passage above]. Less a pound of cure than an ounce of
prevention, the “frequent presence” of middle-class women serves a
prophylactic purpose by interrupting the intimate links between production
and reproduction in the mills. Tonna here engages in a familiar Victorian
confusion. She conflates the moral filth of the factories (the vice and
insolence) with their physical dirt (soiled skin and clothes) and then
imagines middle-class women as capable of combating both. Tonna offers
the only conceivable solution to a crisis framed in sexual terms: a
battalion of women working to loosen the factory from the web of sex,
dirt, and contagion entangling it. By dousing the tainted atmosphere of the
factories with a liberal amount of religion and a large quantity of soap, the
middle-class woman will put the workplace in order. To complement the
factory’s presence in the home, Tonna wants the home to reform the
factory by turning it into a home, with the middle-class woman, now
imagined in a supervisory capacity, managing the factory workers in much
the same way as she manages her domestic space and servants. (162-163,
italics mine)
Here, again, we see Zlotnick substituting her own concerns for Tonna’s. The assertion
that Tonna conceives of or depicts factory work as “a crisis framed in sexual terms” is
particularly startling. The closest Tonna gets to discussing any connection between

154
sexuality and the mill is when Richard tours the factory to which he is considering
removing Helen. During the workers’ tea break, he watches as they consume food
abundantly mixed with flue; but this appeared a less evil in Richard’s eye
than the mixing of young people of different sexes, and the sort of
conversation that seemed to be passing among them. Many, indeed,
appeared to think of nothing but the luxury of a short rest on the floor for
their weary bodies; but evidently there was a great deal going on, in an
under tone, that would not have borne publishing. (268)
No doubt sexual immorality was a major concern for factory reformers, but Helen
Fleetwood’s single passage on the topic is far outweighed by its frequent and forceful
condemnations of the ways in which urban living and working conditions are destroying
the bodies of the poor and the souls of the rich and poor alike.
6
Despite Zlotnick’s
assertion to the contrary, Tonna does not “conflate” moral filth with physical dirt;
throughout the novel, her narrator and characters carefully point to the ways in which
cramped and overheated working conditions, long hours of labor, and poor nutrition can
lead to moral degradation by rendering workers too tired and dull to engage in
worthwhile activities.
7

6
What’s more, the very fact that concerns about possible sexual impropriety are
registered by the less-than-trustworthy Richard should give us pause, as—as we have
already seen—his observations and judgments have been shown to be wildly off-base a
number of times already.

7
In just one of many such passages, the narrator laments the frequency with which a
factory child “loses all desire of wholesome diet, and craves the exciting draught that
shall lend a transient stimulus to the frame unstrung by toil; and chilled by sudden
transition from the heated pandemonium of the mill to the raw keen air of night, the poor

155
But the most striking feature of Zlotnick’s description of the widow’s imagined
school is her transformation of the relationship between the working and middle
classes—and, by extension, Tonna and the people she is writing about—from a warm and
cooperative one to a wholly adversarial one. There is not a hint of kindness or sympathy
in the Zlotnick’s interpretation of the scene; the prevailing attitude of her hypothetical
middle-class reformers toward the poor is disgust. The militaristic language Zlotnick uses
(which I have italicized above) could not be farther from Tonna’s own. Zlotnick, it seems,
can only characterize the relationship between the classes in terms of combat, and class
combat is precisely what Tonna is trying to overcome by stressing—both here and
throughout the novel—that mutual respect can be built and benefit can be obtained
through frequent contact between the classes. Tonna’s critics move insistently toward
oppositional interpretations rather than corporate or cooperative interpretations of this
scene. The former aren’t wrong, per se, but they arise out of certain familiar paradigms
that may limit our reading of a text like Helen Fleetwood more than we care to
acknowledge.
Zlotnick fears that Tonna is endorsing the enforcement of bourgeois values
(cleanliness, diligence, and obedience) onto the working class in order to create more
submissive, loyal workers. But if we read this scene in light of Tonna’s wider vision of
ideal human relationships, the widow’s imagined schoolroom becomes a setting for
mutual effort and mutual benefit; if the workers are likely to exhibit “diligence and
integrity in [their masters’ service]” as a consequence of their schooling, the factory

little victim who reels from exhaustion as it enters the gin-shop, reels thence a
drunkard” (127).

156
owners’ daughters are expected to first exhibit similar diligence and integrity in their
running of the school. In decrying this scene, Zlotnick and her fellow critics have failed
to note that “a tie of respectful affection”—the hoped-for result of the widow’s imaginary
school—accurately describes Tonna’s ideal human connection, which is embodied in
Helen’s relationship with the widow. Zlotnick is correct when she says that Tonna wants
“the home to reform the factory”; in fact, Tonna wants to reform the entire city of M. by
extending the best feelings that exist amongst family members outward into the economic
sphere. To an ethic of instrumental reason and capitalistic competition Tonna contrasts an
ethic of communal care and affection. Tonna’s “real answer to the factory question” is
not a “constabulary” of middle-class women as Zlotnick claims, but rather a wholesale
change to the way human beings conceive of their relationships with one another.
Critics have traditionally seen Tonna’s interest in domesticity and family
dynamics as an active avoidance of the wider problems of industrial labor exposed by her
text. In her study of nineteenth-century portrayals of child cruelty, for example, Monica
Flegel accuses Helen Fleetwood of “transform[ing] a political and social issue—the
condition of labor in factories—into a domestic problem, in which the destruction of
affective family relationships is depicted as the true tragedy of child labor” (7). Similarly,
Zlotnick argues that, rather than dramatizing “the class struggles at the heart of the
industrial revolution” the way her more canonical counterparts Gaskell and Brontë do,
Tonna “deploy[s] the domestic ideology to elude the intractable problems of class
conflict and exploitation that [her analysis] inevitably raise[s]” (164, italics original).
Both Flegel and Zlotnick seem to have trouble imagining how Tonna’s
deployment of domesticity could itself be a political move, but I would argue that’s

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precisely what it is. When critics characterize a concern with the domestic and an
engagement with politics as being at odds, they are replicating the nineteenth-century
ideologies that allowed women to be powerful only as long as their influence was
confined to the home. But the ethic of care that Tonna tries to promote in the social and
economic spheres comes from Tonna’s understanding of family—an understanding that
is radically different than the “modern” one discussed in my Introduction. Neither
Tonna’s ideal family nor her ideal society embraces the idea of individual rights and
freedoms as benefits, or sees independence and self-fulfillment as the ultimate goal for its
members. Instead, both family and society are concerned with strengthening the bonds
between people—extending ties of knowledge and sympathy between individuals no
matter their gender or social class. In contrast to the modern conjugal family unit, which
“is in the nineteenth century polemically connected with an ideal of an independent and
completely self-determining human subject,” Tonna champions an idea of family that
“stress[es] the individual subject’s inescapable reliance on, attachment to, and
responsibility towards the beings around it. The paradigmatic relation of [this kind of
family] is the mother and child—not a relation of equal independence but of unchosen
emotional bonds, gratuitous self-sacrificing affection, and non-demeaning dependence”
(Lowe 161). In such a formulation, “family bonds are expected to last, siblings to cling to
each other, children define themselves in relation to family, and the family circle is
potentially ever-expanding, and the very stuff of society” (Lowe 187).
8
Tonna’s

8
Although Helen Fleetwood abounds with orphans—those nineteenth-century figures
whom Nina Auerbach has called representative of the “dispossessed, detached self”—
Tonna uses adoption as a kind of metaphor for the idea of the ever-expanding family that
overflows the bounds of the home and encompasses the public sphere as well.

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normative scheme of family is one in which all members value cooperation and
communalism rather than independence and competition. Bonds of affection and
dependence are bi-directional and non-demeaning, and the relationships between men
and women are highly egalitarian.
That said, neither family nor society in the novel is completely free of hierarchies.
The widow occupies a position of authority within her family and that position—unlike
Richard’s, as I argue above—is supported by the text. Still, Tonna’s frequent
characterization of the widow as a “maternal friend” (112) and “parental friend” (292) to
those in her care provides a clue to the novelist’s beliefs about the proper relationship
between those who occupy a position of power or authority (such as masters) and those
who do not (such as workers): “friend” implies a give and take, a mutual respect and
fondness, and—importantly—a choice to love, not just a duty to provide on one hand and
obey on the other. Dorice Elliot has identified these same dynamics as being present in
Helen Fleetwood’s depiction of idyllic pastoral scenes, in which Tonna “emphasizes that
the interests of the squire and the laborers are bound up with each other” and “insists on
the value of face-to-face contacts between employer and employee, interactions in which
workers and masters treat each other with respect” (103). Other critics have characterized
Tonna’s depiction of an idealized rurality as a kind of retreat from the unpleasant urban
realities of the rest of the book, but Elliot locates in such scenes a foundational argument
of Tonna’s text. In these scenes, Elliot says, Tonna contends that
property owners should acknowledge and not disown a tie between
themselves and the workers that goes beyond the cash nexus and that
involves the whole family—on both sides. Thus, the idyllic rural scenes in

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Helen Fleetwood should not be read merely as nostalgia for an idealized
past but as a specific—and God-ordained—program for the industrial
present and future. (103)
Tonna desires to expand her ideal familial ethic of care to the wider world rather
than accept the view that the domestic sphere and its values are (or should be) separate
from the public economic sphere. Her politicization of human relationships undermines
Flegel and others’ claims that Helen Fleetwood’s focus on family and domesticity is a
retreat from political and economic critique. In fact, I believe that it is a critique so
radical that critics have trouble recognizing it as such. The breakdown of the family unit
that occurs in M. is not just unfortunate or unchristian; it’s a sign that individualism,
selfishness, and competition are invading the family when in fact the ethic of mutual care
and respect should be expanding outward from the family to transform the economic and
political spheres. By applying a familial ethic of care to the wider social arena, Tonna
attempts to solve the problem of the various classes in M. refusing to take responsibility
for their weakest members. As Gallagher points out, “[I]n M. no one considers himself
responsible for the physical or spiritual health of the poor: the hierarchy of Providence
has collapsed and been replaced by a hierarchy of greed” (42). Tonna wants everyone to
be responsible for one another, like the members of her ideal family. Individuals should
not view themselves, their ambitions, and their actions in isolation, but instead always
envision themselves as part of a community wherein everyone is responsible for the good
of his or her neighbor. Tonna explicitly condemns the dominant ideology that endorses
each person “pursuing his own interest, amid great competition” (187). She decries the
effects that result when “men [herd] together in pursuit of selfish ends until all the finer

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touches [of character] are worn away, and ‘every one for himself’ becomes the heartless
maxim” (186). As an alternative to and remedy for this state of affairs, she attempts to
depict and endorse a radically different formulation of human relationships. She, like her
benevolent middle-class character Mr. H., laments the fact that “‘two classes, hitherto
bound together by mutual interests and mutual respect, are daily becoming more opposed
the one to the other’” (291). She seeks to convince others that they are incorrect to
believe “the personal interests of master and laborer to be things not only irreconcilable,
but diametrically opposed one to another.” She tries to prove that they are, instead,
“identical” (281).

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Chapter Four:
Rebuilding Community in Maria Louisa Charlesworth’s
Ministering Children Novels

Two Evangelical children’s novels form the subject of my final chapter—
Ministering Children (1854) and A Sequel to Ministering Children (1867), both by Maria
Louisa Charlesworth. Like Helen Fleetwood, the Ministering Children novels seek to
bridge class divisions by demonstrating the inherent interconnectedness of the interests of
the rich and poor; even more importantly, Charlesworth, like Tonna, stresses the
responsibility each community member holds for his or her fellows—a responsibility that
is underlain by a widely-applied familial ethic of care. Perhaps because the economic
situation in Britain seemed less dire in 1854 than it had when Tonna was writing 15 years
earlier, Charlesworth is able to paint a more hopeful picture of class relations and
communal coherence than was her predecessor. While Tonna posed a way for charity that
embodied familial values to overcome class indifference and antagonism, her novel can’t
quite envision the success of such a scheme. Instead, Helen Fleetwood depicts the tragic
failure of the communal coherence Tonna advocates. Charlesworth, on the other hand, is
able to imagine a spectacularly successful ethic of inter-class care in her Ministering
Children novels; in the process, she also presents the most fundamental—even radical—
critique of the assumptions underlying capitalism that we’ve yet seen.
The daughter of an Evangelical minister, Charlesworth (1819-1880) was not a
particularly prolific writer; she produced 20 works of religious fiction and non-fiction in
her lifetime, most of which were intended for a juvenile audience (Boase). Ministering

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Children was by far her most popular production, having sold 276,000 copies by 1895—
fifteen years after the author’s death (Altick, “Nineteenth-Century” 204). M. Nancy Cutt
tells us that the novel was “widely reprinted on the Continent and in America; was issued
piece-meal as short tracts for Sunday Schools; and was last printed about 1924” (65).
Ministering Children and A Sequel to Ministering Children follow a large cast of
characters from across the social spectrum as they interact within a shared provincial
setting over a period of roughly twenty years. Though it would be hard to identify a
single protagonist or even group of protagonists, the first novel does divide its time most
frequently between three groups: the wealthy family of Squire Clifford (particularly his
young son Herbert), the middle-class family of Farmer Smith (particularly siblings
William and Rose), and the poor family of Widow Jones (particularly her son Jem and
granddaughter Mercy). There is also a set of characters who live in the nearby market
town who regularly pop in and out of the narrative; most notable among them is Jane
Mansfield, the daughter of a middle-class shopkeeper, and a poor girl named Patience,
who has been abandoned by her father. The overall plot seems largely incidental; the
novels focus instead on the daily lives of each set of characters and the charitable
activities undertaken by children in these various groups. Charlesworth is clearly most
interested in tracing the bonds that feelings of sympathy and acts of charity can create
between rich and poor, parents and children, and employers and employees. Like many of
its more canonical counterparts from the period, Ministering Children is set in the recent
past, and it depicts charitable methods that were common in pre-industrialized England.
Community members visit each other in their homes, dispensing moral advice along with
small items (warm socks, coals, coffee) to respectful, grateful recipients. Charlesworth’s

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characters chop firewood for the elderly, knit socks for children with chilblained feet,
teach illiterate cottagers to read, and provide comfort and companionship to the sick, poor,
and outcast of all ages.
The author’s preface to Ministering Children makes clear that Charlesworth
conceives of charity as a highly personalized transaction with far-reaching consequences
for both giver and receiver.
It must be allowed by all, that the present is a day of increased exertion in
behalf of those who are in need; but much care is necessary that the
temporal aid extended may prove, not a moral injury, but a moral benefit,
to both the receiver and communicator of that aid. May it not be worthy of
consideration, whether the most generally effective way to ensure this
moral benefit on both sides, would not be the early calling forth and
training the sympathies of children by personal intercourse with want and
sorrow, while as yet those sympathies flow spontaneously. Let the truth be
borne in mind, that the influence of the giver far exceeds that of the gift on
the receiver of it; and it must sure then be admitted, that in all aid rendered
to others, the calling into exercise the best feelings of the heart, in both the
giver and receiver, is the most important object to be kept in view. To this
end it is necessary that the talent of money be not suffered to assume any
undue supremacy in the service of benevolence. Let children be trained,
and taught, and led aright, and they will not be slow to learn that they
possess a personal influence every where; that the first principles of
Divine Truth acquired by them, are a means of communicating to other

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present comfort and eternal happiness; and that the heart of Love is the
only spring that can effectually govern and direct the hand of
Charity. (v-vi)
In this preface, Charlesworth introduces the idea that charity is not something owed to the
poor, but rather is an exercise of natural sympathies that—when done properly—results
in benefits for both giver and receiver. The consequences of charitable actions are, she
repeatedly declares, not only—or even primarily—material, but instead comprise
emotional, intellectual, and spiritual effects. Charlesworth does not characterize charity
as a duty; she does not talk about the gratitude owed to the giver from the receiver; she
does not attempt to distinguish between “worthy” and “unworthy” recipients of charity.
Instead, she repeatedly privileges the feelings that stand to shape and be shaped by
charitable relationships. “The sympathies,” “the heart of Love,” and “the best feelings of
the heart” both guide charitable efforts and benefit from them.
While Charlesworth is highly preoccupied with training the sympathies of her
readers, modern critics have been a good deal less than sympathetic to her novelistic
efforts. The few who have written about Ministering Children tend to speak with one
voice in condemning it as retrograde and its vision of charity as out of touch with
Victorian social reality. Even Cutt, whose analysis is perhaps the most generous,
describes Charlesworth as “devoutly and narrowly religious, far closer in spirit to the
early Evangelicals than to the Victorians.” What’s more, Cutt adds,
She did not qualify her stand in later years, showing little recognition of
the changing Victorian world. Firmly rooted in the past, serenely
convinced of the absolute rightness of Church and State, Miss

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Charlesworth presented in her works an ideal rural community closer to
Goldsmith’s Auburn than to the English village of her day. (53)
Penny Brown agrees, commenting that Charlesworth depicts and advocates
the old-style theory of individual philanthropy (visiting the poor and sick,
reading to the illiterate and distributing food and clothing) which had, for
centuries, been carried out in rural areas but which, by the time
Charlesworth was writing, had already engendered considerable debate
and disillusionment about its effectiveness in the face of escalating
hardship and the unprecedented destitution in urban areas. (51)
Both Cutt and Brown are willing to make allowances for the fact that Ministering
Children was written for a juvenile audience, and therefore “evil is limited to that which
can be cured by sincere Christian effort initiated by children. . . . Thus the village has no
alehouse with its attendant problems; there is no mention of rick-burning by resentful,
half-starved labourers; no squalid labour gangs; no illegitimate children; no village idiot.
All these would be beyond the scope of children’s effort for good” (Cutt 67, italics
original). Brown echoes, “The misfortunes and social ills depicted are, significantly, such
as children, with a little help from adults, might realistically be able to remedy—a
cottager child has chilblained feet, a poor widow no fire or a broken door, an old man a
leaky roof” (52).
1
Both posit that Charlesworth’s decision to limit conflict in her novel to
problems children were able to solve likely helped account for her popularity with young

1
Cutt opines that “Miss Charlesworth gives her picture spiritual harmony at the expense
of realism,” but she also reminds us that “realism is a tricky problem in books for
children—even today” (67).

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readers, with Cutt noting, “It is not easy to write books for children in which the young
generate their own power to do things. . . . [This] book was glittering to the childish ego”
(69, 71). In her analysis of Ministering Children and similar texts, Leslee Thorne-Murphy
agrees:
Why would the average child be attracted to these pious, moralizing
stories? The most likely answer is that the narratives offer children
fantasies of power. Children provide clothing, food, and sometimes even
shelter to those who would be ill (or even dead) without them. Children
read to illiterate adults. Children’s pennies buy life-altering supplies for
their poorer neighbours. Children, in short, take on the roles of adults
through their charity work, and they make a real difference in the world
around them. This is no mean motivation. . . . (271)
But critics also characterize Charlesworth’s child-centric depictions of poverty
and charity as morally troubling. Here’s Brown:
[S]uch a focus on details makes the attitude towards the actual overall
situation of the poor seem trivialised and often unbearably condescending
to the modern reader. The real implications of hunger and hardship are
obscured by sentiment and a facile assumption and magnification of the
long-term value of such “good works.” Thus a pair of laboriously knitted
stockings, a handful of strawberries laid by a child’s hand on the coverlet
of a dying woman’s bed or a barrow of logs are seen to transform,
apparently, the lives of the needy as they bless the ministering children
and cheerfully accept their lot. (52)

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Gillian Avery is likewise troubled that, in Charlesworth’s novel, “charity, it seems,
consists in fitful small gestures, not in long-term policy such as higher wages. The issue
is simple. The Poor (always spoken of thus) exist to be succoured, the rich to be thanked”
(90).
As Avery’s comment suggests, the novel’s presentation of an outdated and
therefore ineffective scheme of “good works” charity is perhaps the least of its sins. Far
worse, according to many critics, is its depiction of downright detestable class relations.
Cutt proclaims that “modern readers (adults mostly, for modern children are unlikely to
see it) find [Ministering Children] offensive; probably only The Fairchild Family, with
which it has something in common, has harder things said of it” (66). Avery pointedly
calls Ministering Children the “most unacceptable of all tract books, with its suggestion
that God has created a world where the poor exist to train the consciences and charitable
instincts of those better off, the latter being rewarded with an emotional thrill after every
kind action” (90). This last assertion is an oft-repeated one in critical discussions of
Ministering Children. Robert Lee Wolff devotes only one sentence to the novel in his
Gains and Losses, and it alleges that “the benevolent rich ‘ministering’ children
experience a thrill of self-approval every time they give a poor family coal, warm clothes,
or blankets” (241). Even the moderate Brown agrees that the novel’s presentation of class
relations is highly problematic: “The lessons of patience, hope and trust in God, taught by
the privileged as they spend a few hours talking about heaven to the poor, strike us as
patronsing and arrogant. Moreover, the charitable acts themselves occasionally seem to
be unpleasantly self-regarding…almost [seeming] to imply that God has created the poor

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to give the [charitable] rich a warm thrill of self-righteousness” (52). Of Charlesworth
and her contemporaries, Avery adds,
We could hardly expect the gentlewomen who were responsible for the
domestic tales of the early and mid-Victorian era to be in favour of radical
change in the social system of the day. But they were more than
conservative. The great majority of them held almost feudal notions, and
regarded with abhorrence the notion of anybody stepping out of his station.
In their books the poor are eternally grateful for the crumbs that drop from
the rich man’s table, there is little or not mention of social unrest, and
socialism is equated with atheism. (193)
Clearly, Charlesworth’s novels offend in a host of ways: they trivialize the plight
of the poor by touting the efficacy of an outdated, paternalistic scheme of haphazard
personal charity; they neglect to depict or encourage the burgeoning social and political
consciousness of the working class; they hint that charitable activities are worth engaging
in because they are gratifying to the middle- and upper-class ego; they promote quietism
on the part of the poor and reify rigid class structures; and they overvalue the spiritual at
the expense of the material. Not only do these novels fail to train child readers to see the
real problems that underlie poverty or the real solutions that could address those
problems, they provide fodder for childish egos and insidiously promote conservative and
class-bound views of the world. We might gather from the assortment of critical
responses above that, other than confirming that Evangelicals were horribly out of step
with the times, the Ministering Children novels have little of value to offer us. In the
history of both “condition of England” literature and children’s literature, they may be

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thought of as a mere footnote, a throwback to the likes of turn-of-the-century Evangelical
writers Hannah More and Mary Martha Sherwood, a bump in the road on the way to
more progressive social novels and better children’s literature.
Perhaps such responses to Charlesworth and her novels are the only ones that
have been possible, given the formulaic and predictable way historians and literary critics
have traditionally talked about nineteenth-century philanthropy. Martin Gorsky, who has
traced a thorough historiography of voluntarism, asserts that most studies of philanthropy
produced over the past 125 years fall squarely into one of two camps: the first—a
“Whig/Liberal tradition” popular in narratives of British social policy through the
1950s—rests upon the assumption that “the advance of state agency was an inexorable
and desirable aspect of modernisation” (1). The second, which rose to prominence in the
1960s and 1970s, advances “a model of nineteenth-century society premised upon class
conflict” (6). This model “[draws] on social and anthropological theory to explain the
motives of voluntary giving” and links voluntary charity to the rising middle-class’s
attempts to “assert ‘group identity and authority’” (Gorsky 3-4). Summarizing the
tendencies of narratives that adhere to this latter model, Gorsky writes, “As the
organising concept of social control gained favour in histories of policing and the
suppression of popular leisure, so interpretation of philanthropy stressed its role as an
instrument of class authority” (4). While this narrative paints any charity provided by
middle- or upper-class agents as suspect, the most intense suspicion is reserved for aid
provided by Evangelical individuals or organizations. To this point, Gorsky cites Phillip
McCann’s work on education, which “argued that where literacy was delivered through

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charity and Sunday Schools it tended to sustain the status quo, particularly if laced with
heavy doses of evangelical religion” (4).
Historians and sociologists are undoubtedly justified in their refusal to take the
causes and consequences of charity at face value, and their research has raised
provocative questions about how and why individuals and societies conceive of and
participate in philanthropic efforts as they do. And yet, even as we acknowledge the value
of this work, we might wonder what studies so steeped in suspicion and animated by an
interest in class conflict and exploitation might be missing—or misunderstanding—in
their readings of the past. These theories can feel as stifling as they are stimulating, given
that they seem unable to find a legitimate function for such fundamental human concerns
as sympathy, solidarity, generosity, and kindness. Certainly, seeing as more than one
hundred years of historical narratives on the topic have classified the personal, voluntary,
and—not incidentally—religious charity championed by Charlesworth as either a mere
stepping stone to the far preferable modern welfare state or a coercive tool of social
control, it is not surprising that literary critics have had a hard time seeing much of value
in Ministering Children.
However, in recent years, a crop of historians have begun rethinking the
narratives described above by questioning both the inevitability and desirability of state-
run welfare systems and positing policing as just one possible motive of (religious)
(middle-class) charitable endeavors. Studies by N. McCord, Brian Harrison, and F.K.
Prochaska have “open[ed] the way for interpretations of philanthropy as a manifestation
of social consensus” rather than social control by “emphasising shared values cutting
across class” (Gorsky 8). McCord has “dismissed the idea that the gift was inevitably

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laden with other concerns, and proffered a nominalist reading where philanthropy was
just what it claimed to be—an opened hearted generosity” (Gorsky 8-9). Prochaska, for
his part, “acknowledges the use of philanthropy by the middle class to justify inequalities
and elicit loyalty,” but he sets this against “the larger success of voluntarism in providing
a forum for the working class to join ‘together with the higher classes in a common
cause’” (Gorsky 9).
As they seek to reevaluate attitudes and actions that have been discounted by
previous accounts of philanthropy, historians have also been working to shed light on the
plethora of charitable activities that have long proven difficult to trace. Prochaska
explains:
In any study of organized, public charity the contribution of working-class
women is likely to be underplayed, for so much of the philanthropy of the
poor to the poor was informal. Indeed, such a study will also understate
the extent of even middle-class charity, since such a great deal of the time
and energy expended on good works by better-off women was
accomplished informally within the family or around the neighborhood.
Propping up family institutions and the local community were intimately
associated with a woman’s role, whatever her class. The philanthropy of
working-class women was typically casual: dropping in on friends in
distress, providing Sunday dinners for deprived children, giving free
lodging or a reduction in the rent to hard-up neighbours or tenants, finding
employment for friends and relatives, taking in the washing or cooking for
families under the strain of illness, or simply dropping a coin in a hat

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passed around in a pub to support someone who might have lost a purse or
been transported to Australia. Such activities were part of the day-to-day,
unadministered lives of the poor; for the historian they rarely leave a trace
behind. (42)
The casual, hard-to-track philanthropy Prochaska describes is cataloged in great detail in
novels like Ministering Children and its sequel. Evangelical novelists are among those
who imagine and record the charitable activities of those who are unlikely to make it into
the history books. In doing so, they provide their readers—both contemporary and
modern—with valuable models of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that alternately
reflect and contest prominent social and economic theories of the day, as well as
anecdotal but crucial historical material.
What’s more, there is evidence that Evangelical novels like Charlesworth’s had
discernable effects on readers’ charitable attitudes and actions. Proclaiming that “we
should not underestimate the influence of fictional visitors on nineteenth-century women,”
Prochaska writes that the “‘constitutionally charitable’ Lady Belfield in [Hannah More’s
wildly popular novel] Coelebs in Search of a Wife made visiting the ‘rage’ according to
Lucy Akin” (118). The same can be said nearly five decades later, it seems, for
Ministering Children. J. S. Bratton describes Ministering Children as having “a curious
intensity, which Charlotte Yonge unhesitatingly rejected as unreal and impractical,” but
he goes on to acknowledge that “despite such condemnation, and the laughter and parody
which it has also provoked, it had imaginative power for the idealistic child” (158). One
such idealistic child was the young Robert Louis Stevenson; according to his biographers,
“as a little boy with curls and a velvet tunic, [Stevenson] read ‘Ministering Children,’ and

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yearned to be a ministering child” (Lang 5).
2
Similarly, novelist and journalist Leonora
Eyles (1889–1960) recalled in her 1953 autobiography that she read Ministering
Children as a girl and “made the rather nauseating children in it my example” (quoted in
Davin 72-73). Critics have used Eyles’s recollection as evidence that novels such as
Charlesworth’s “did not necessarily produce converts as the writers hoped, even if some
child readers went through phases of emulation” (Davin 73). Rather than assuming the
novel’s failure, however, I would contend that such an example points to its success in
reaching child readers and attracting them to an Evangelical scheme of piety and charity.
As a backward-looking adult, Eyles might call Charlesworth’s characters “nauseating,”
but as a child—a child who was still reading Ministering Children, it might be noted,
more than four decades after its original publication—she was clearly attracted to and
interested in emulating those same characters.
What these examples show us is that fiction such as Charlesworth’s rightfully
belongs in the history of nineteenth-century philanthropy, and that a study such as this

2
According to biographer A.H. Japp, Stevenson’s attempts to act out those yearnings
didn’t always go as planned:
As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh, Mr Stevenson read a book called
MINISTERING CHILDREN. I have a faint recollection of this work concerning a
small Lord and Lady Bountiful. Children, we know, like to “play at” the events
and characters they have read about, and the boy wanted to play at being a
ministering child. He “scanned his whole horizon” for somebody to play with,
and thought he had found his playmate. From the window he observed street boys
(in Scots “keelies”) enjoying themselves. But one child was out of the sports, a
little lame fellow, the son of a baker. Here was a chance! After some misgivings
Louis hardened his heart, put on his cap, walked out—a refined little figure—
approached the object of his sympathy, and said, “Will you let me play with
you?” “Go to hell!” said the democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson
against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile disposition was, it
seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be misconstrued. (121)

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one can help illuminate philanthropic attitudes and actions that have proven more
difficult to track than their economic counterparts. The feelings engendered on both sides
of the charitable relationship by the kind of charity Charlesworth extols cannot be
measured and quantified. Leaving little to no historical record, they are hard if not
impossible to study by state agencies or scholars of sociology and economics. That
historians have shown a preference for investigating economic philanthropy for so long
makes sense given the realities of a limited historical record. But we might consider
whether this preference is also at least partially predicated on the prejudices of modern
capitalism and socialism, which determine worth (of a manufactured item, an hour of
labor, or perhaps even a person’s ideological commitments) in dollars and cents. If so,
then studying novels like Ministering Children can remind us of alternatives to these
modern models that we might otherwise take for granted.
Of course, the very models we might be tempted to take for granted now were
themselves being developed, tested, touted, and disputed when Charlesworth was writing.
The mid-Victorian era was a time of heated debates about the kinds of economic and
social values that were most likely to result in not only economic but also moral benefits
for individuals, communities, and the nation. G.R. Searle reminds us that, even between
the years 1830-1870, when “‘individualism,’ laissez-faire, and free enterprise capitalism
were supposedly at their apogee…. the practical application of market values proved
capable of arousing disquiet, controversy, and genuine perplexity” (vi-vii). The ideas of
Thomas Malthus, in particular, had disrupted longstanding tenets of moral and economic
thought. Citing A.M.C. Waterman, Ilana Blumberg explains that by “placing scarcity at
the center of his economic paradigm—the apparently inescapable fact that population

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would increase geometrically while food supplies could increase only arithmetically—
Malthus at a stroke divided the discipline of theology from the science of political
economy, darkening any hope for an economic order based on benevolence and
harmonized interests” (14). But if Malthus proposed a “vision of a world where
competition for scarce, finite resources characterized social relations,” classical political
economists found a way to make such a vision seem tolerable—even desirable—by
proclaiming that “it was competition rather than a model of Christian benevolence that
[would best] serve the social good” (Blumberg 15). The conviction that scarcity is
inevitable and competition results in the most good for the most people forms the very
foundation of modern capitalism.
To be sure, not everyone embraced the claims of political economists, which
seemed to leave little room for traditional Christian ideals such as kindness, sympathy,
and charity. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used their poetry to
expose the suffering and humanity of the poor men and women whom utilitarian theorists
tended to treat as generalized statistics rather than flesh-and-blood members of an
interconnected community (Fulford 363). Many other high-profile writers and thinkers,
including Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, attacked the utilitarian
model and were highly skeptical of the idea that competition and acquisitive
individualism would lead to social as well as individual goods. As James Caufield
explains, because utilitarianism “presumes that society is composed of rational egoists
who can recognize and pursue their own self-interest,” it was difficult for many
Victorians to see how or why a rational agent “should rationally sacrifice her personal
happiness for the sake of general happiness” (22). These were pressing issues in the

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nineteenth century, particularly during the years leading up to and immediately following
the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Those who wanted to ameliorate
the suffering caused by poverty faced challenges on many sides. On the one hand,
Malthusian philosophy characterized a certain degree of poverty as inevitable—even
beneficial; as Richard Altick explains, “The blunt fact was that a considerable part of the
human race was doomed to a life of sickness and starvation leading to early death, for
this, like war, was necessary to narrow the gap between ravenous mouths and food in a
state of eternal scarcity” (Victorian People 120). Dickens lampoons the callousness of
this mindset in A Christmas Carol: when Ebenezer Scrooge is told that many of the
needy would rather die than enter the workhouse, he replies “‘If they would rather
die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population’” (16).
But the cold science of utilitarianism was not the only widely circulating
philosophy that could be invoked to support uncharitable attitudes. It is important to
understand the ways in which divine law had previously been invoked to argue against
the efficacy of charity in order to comprehend the intervention Charlesworth is making in
her Ministering Children novels. Christian doctrine, with its insistence that those who
suffered must do so at God’s pleasure (whether for their own eventual good, as
punishment for sin, or so they might serve as examples to others), could also be cited as a
reason to think twice about providing relief to the poor. Some historians have gone so far
as to allege that Evangelical doctrines supplied a useful defense against any claims that
the better off might be obligated to provide aid for the needy. According to Altick,
Evangelicalism provided a rationale which was especially valuable as it
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the unfortunate and destitute. To those who questioned whether
Malthusianism and the stony philosophy of the new Poor Law were
precisely in harmony with Christian charity, Evangelicalism replied that
work, with its associated exercise of self-denial, was the universally
available solution for personal distress. (Victorian People 171)
Add to Altick’s assertions the fact that Christians and non-Christians alike characterized
material deprivation as a useful spur to self-improvement, and the result was a great deal
of soul-searching amongst Victorians regarding the best ways to help the poor.
As my analysis below will show, Ministering Children locates itself at the center
of nineteenth-century debates about charity, and in the process it provides a powerful
rebuttal to Altick’s characterization of the supposedly easy support Evangelicals and
Evangelicalism showed for Malthusianism and the new Poor Law. Charlesworth’s novel
expresses strong anti-utilitarian sentiments and a marked suspicion of both the underlying
principles and the effects of the new Poor Law, which radically challenged centuries-old
traditions of British philanthropy that were based on class integration and
interdependence. Far from refusing to engage with Victorian social reality as critics have
contended, Charlesworth—like Dickens—uses her fiction to grapple with the same vexed
questions that preoccupied the most important philosophers, economists, and politicians
of her age. The ideas of these prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers were
helping to reshape Victorian society in fundamental ways, and those transformations
often led to discomfiting results. Searle tells us that “educated mid-Victorians sought
enlightenment as they faced the conflicting claims of conscience and self-interest,
religion and political economy,” but “when they turned to the revered ‘canonical’ texts,

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whether sacred (like the New Testament) or ‘secular’ (like The Wealth of Nations), they
seldom found the clear and unequivocal guidance which they craved” (x). Novelists
including Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and—yes—Charlesworth provided guidance to
those anxious readers through their fictional texts, allowing their Victorian audience to
think through various responses to the social dilemmas of their day. While their readers
might or might not have engaged the works of prominent political and economic theorists
such as Smith, Bentham, Malthus, and Mill directly, they certainly encountered the fruit
of their ideas in the schoolroom, drawing room, and chapel. With Ministering Children,
Charlesworth both explicitly and implicitly claims a place for Evangelical ideals in the
most important debates of the time. These debates—which I’ve only begun to summarize
above—sought to define not just economic policy but human nature and the possibilities
of human society. At stake were questions about what, precisely, the average British
citizen owed to himself, his neighbors, and even the countrymen he would never meet.
Also in play were questions about how to lead a moral life, the most worthy uses of one’s
time and money, and the relative values of personal and collective happiness.
Ministering Children deliberately pulls the discussion about charity away from
statistics related to population, production, and scarcity, and insists on the moral and
spiritual component—the human dimension—of philanthropic relationships. To any
influential voices or texts that would portray charitable activity as a transaction rather
than a relationship, Charlesworth’s novel had the potential to act as a corrective. Its
failure to advocate economic reforms that would lead to higher wages for workers or a
classless social structure has offended modern readers. But Charlesworth presents a
vision of charity that in many ways resists traditional class structures. Ministering

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Children repeatedly insists that the poor and the rich alike require the benevolence of
both God and their fellow man. She depicts characters from across the social spectrum as
individuals—and parts of a community—who have complex spiritual, material, and
emotional needs, and thus she insists that neither need nor benevolence can be accurately
calculated in dollars and cents.
Without denying that Ministering Children can be read as old fashioned,
conservative, and paternalistic—in other words, exactly as critics have said it can—I
would like to propose an alternative way of looking at this novel that may help us better
understand the stance Charlesworth and many of her Evangelical kin were taking on the
pressing economic and social issues of their day. To certain fundamental assumptions of
capitalist consumer culture Charlesworth proposed alternatives that rested upon utopian
counter-assumptions. It is these counter-assumptions and their Evangelical context that
we must explore in order to move beyond a view of Ministering Children as merely
backward-looking and “saccharine” (Dusinberre xvii). When we focus on that which
seems familiar about Charlesworth’s vision of charity we are likely to overlook that
which is powerful in its very strangeness. Ministering Children is a radically hopeful
book—and in many ways a radically empowering one, if we are willing to look at
definitions of hope and empowerment that may differ quite drastically from those
commonplace in our own time. Charlesworth’s charitable scheme relies on sympathy and
a kind of goodheartedness that may look very similar, at times, to Dickens’s own. But her
insertion of Evangelical beliefs and values into this familiar system allows her to create a
vision that is both more optimistic and more comprehensive than the one on display in
novels like Oliver Twist and Hard Times. Ministering Children envisions not just random

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acts of charity but an expanding and dynamic community bound together by widespread
sympathy and ample love. Charlesworth contends that the selfish and competitive
elements of human nature (and thus human society) can be overcome; that suffering,
while unavoidable, can be made both meaningful and valuable; that class divisions can
effectively be bridged; that every person, no matter how old or young, or rich or poor, has
the power to play an important role in his or her community; and that, ultimately, we may
inhabit a world of abundance rather than scarcity. These are the ideas that Charlesworth
would place into circulation alongside those of the utilitarians and Malthusians—and
even the goodhearted novelists who express a longing for (but seem unable quite to
believe in) sustained human kindness and generosity. I hope this chapter will help us
more clearly see the aspirations that Evangelicals like Charlesworth had for their
communities and the appeal that those aspirations held for masses of contemporary
readers.

While “charity” and “philanthropy” are used almost interchangeably today,
Martin Gorksy reminds us that “the Bible established the word [charity] as a moral
sentiment, love, in the sense of mutual caring, though the feeling was initially
distinguished from the act: ‘though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor…and have not
charity, it profiteth me nothing’ (Corinthians xiii)” (13-14). That the Bible distinguishes
acts of charity from feelings of charity, and furthermore indicates that charitable acts are
meaningless without the attendant moral sentiment, is vital for Charlesworth’s project in
Ministering Children. What’s more, this famous verse from Corinthians is explicitly

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concerned with the effects of charity on the giver—hence the implicit undesirability of
bestowing “all my goods to feed the poor” only to find out that, without charity, “it
profiteth me nothing.” This biblical vision of charity, in which kind actions are based on
mutual caring, resulting in benefits for both the giver and receiver, is precisely the kind of
charity that Charlesworth advocates in her novel. Such a vision of charitable endeavors
does not necessarily resonate, however, with modern narratives of middle-class Victorian
philanthropy. For example, Peter Saunders claims that “the Victorian middle class had a
strong commitment to charity and philanthropy which was underpinned by values
emphasizing the ‘social duty’ owed to those less fortunate” (93). Ministering Children is
commonly misread as subscribing to such a vision of social duty, with Wolff, for
example, calling the novel “perhaps the most celebrated” of the “body of
stories…designed to teach richer children their duties to the poor” (240). Despite these
readings, however, Charlesworth’s novel focuses far more on inter-class benefit and
dependence than on any “duty” owed to the poor by those better off. In fact, throughout
Ministering Children, Charlesworth carefully distinguishes between acts of charity that
are accompanied by moral sentiment and those that are not, and she gently reprimands
characters who understand charity only as a necessary “duty” to the poor so that both
they and the reader may be educated as to the true nature of Christian charitableness.
Such a reprimand occurs when Mrs. Brame, former nurse to the wealthy,
charitable Lady Gertrude, is asked by her erstwhile mistress to show charity to a
miserable child named Patience who lives in her apartment building. Though Nurse
Brame feels no innate concern for Patience, she does wish to please her Lady, and so she
attempts “to come to a conclusion in her own mind as to what amount of kindness would

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be sufficient” to fulfill her Lady’s request (201). Such calculations indicate Nurse
Brame’s failure to understand that true charity is motivated by feelings of love and
compassion, and that there is no amount of kindness that could ever be identified as
“sufficient” in the way Nurse Brame is thinking. The narrator immediately explains this
very point, saying “[Nurse Brame] knew not CHARITY’S indwelling influence, which,
far from consisting in this or that act, is the very atmosphere in which the spirit that
possesses it, lives and moves and has its being!” (201).
Shortly thereafter, Charlesworth reinforces this point through the example of an
old clergyman who wonders why the poor in his village react far differently to the kind
visitations of the squire’s young daughter than they do to his own. He notices that Miss
Clifford has won the genuine affections of the villagers, and, as he thinks that “it would
be pleasant to be kind to those who showed so much feeling, such warm return of
gratitude,” he decides to go forth on some charitable home visitations (230). “He went
through the village street, calling at every house, leaving his gifts of money, and saying a
few words to all, but he returned dissatisfied: he had met no smile of welcome, seen no
tear-dimmed eye grow bright; heard no blessing. What made the difference? Why had he
no power, and she…so young in years…had so much?” (230). The narrator tells us that
the clergyman could not see the difference between his visits and those of Miss Clifford,
and thus could not understand their dissimilar results, but she proceeds to share the
distinction with us. “He had gone in his own name, his words were of Earth, his gifts the
dole of the richer to the poorer; his object was to please, and to win affection and
gratitude to himself” she says, while Miss Clifford

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had gone to none but in the Name of Jesus; her words breathed to all the
love and truth of Heaven: her gifts were the expression of her thoughtful
sympathy—warm with compassion’s tenderness, and bright with the glad
power of administering aid; such was her way of giving that her gift ever
elevated, instead of seeming to degrade or lower the receiver; her highest
object was not to win feeling toward herself, but to win the whole heart
and life of those she visited to her Saviour and their Saviour, that they
might be happy in Him, and He glorified in them…. But the aged
clergyman knew not that the difference between his Earthly kindness and
her Heavenly love, was wide as the east is from the west. (230-231)
Nurse Brame and the country clergyman, like many of the novel’s characters (and
presumably its readers as well), must be educated about the meaning and operation of
true charity, which is never conceived of as a duty or burden, never carried out in a “one-
and-done” transaction, and never pursued in order to satisfy the giver’s ego.
To combat mistaken notions like those above, Ministering Children makes clear
that the association between charitable giver and recipient is not meant to be temporary or
merely utilitarian; instead, as Charlesworth asserts time and again, true charity should
form the basis of powerful relationships that are both long-lasting and reciprocal. The
author was certainly not alone in conceiving of charity this way; Tocqueville and others
also believed that “private charity should be the primary source of poor relief,” largely
because “dependence on private charity creates moral ties between rich and poor”
(Vaughan 129). As Tonna did before her, Charlesworth invokes loving familial
relationships as models for the desired moral ties between the rich and poor, a move

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which problematizes any effort to define such ties—or the charity that leads to them—as
mere window dressing in a power struggle between the classes.
Charlesworth makes this familial analogy early in the first novel when Jane
Mansfield asks her mother how they can help their poorer neighbors if those neighbors do
not tell them what they need. Her mother replies, “‘We must ask God to teach us to know
the wants of the poor. And if we really wish to help and comfort them, God will put it
into our hearts to supply the wants He knows they have’” (23). When Jane questions
further, her mother reveals that, while God will sometimes guide her regarding how best
to help the poor, it is also Jane’s job to use her powers of observation to figure out how to
aid those in need. Her mother points to her relationship with Jane as an example: “‘[D]o
you not often find out what I want without my having to tell you?’” she asks her
daughter. “‘Yes, mamma, because I live with you,’” Jane responds. “‘I am afraid I might
get many little girls, and grownup people also, to live with me, and they would not find
out the things I often want, without my asking, as you do. Is it only because you live with
me?’” “‘O, no, mamma,’” Jane replies, “‘it is because I love you as well!’” “‘Yes, dear
Jane, this is the secret: you love me, and therefore you find out my wishes and wants as
far as your power permits; and if you love God, you will quickly learn how to serve him,
according to His holy will; and if you love the poor, you will be sure to find out their
wants and how to comfort them’” (23-24).
Mrs. Mansfield’s explanation to her daughter is richly layered. True charity, it
seems, arises from a combination of circumstances. God enlightens the heart of she who
wishes to do good for others, but the would-be philanthropist must also “live with” and
“love” those whom she would help. Mrs. Mansfield’s invocation of herself and her needs

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as a parallel for the poor and their needs is particularly powerful. Jane and her mother
share a warm and loving relationship, one unmarked by condescension or objectification
on either side. Although Jane feels gratified when she helps and pleases her mother (as
she also does when she helps and pleases the poor), she is not depicted as being overly
invested in the thrill of being able to dispense or withhold her aid. Such a distinction is
important because this is the very scene Penny Brown has criticized for depicting charity
as “unpleasantly self-regarding.” It’s true that, upon hearing her mother’s explanation,
Jane feels “lost in the thrilling awe of one who felt herself to have been chosen and taught
of God to supply the wants she had not known” (23), a line which Brown laments “seems
almost to imply that God has created the poor to give the rich a warm thrill of self-
righteousness” (52). However, if we read with a generous awareness of the Evangelical
valuation of the world and the general backlash against utilitarianism and Malthusianism,
we might understand this passage differently. What Mrs. Mansfield’s invocation of
familial bonds does, in conjunction with the many illustrative examples in the novel, is
remind the reader that charitable thoughts and actions should be conceived of in the
biblical sense, as underpinned by mutual love and caring; what’s more, her analysis of
Jane’s kindness to her (rather than her kindness to Jane) reminds the reader that charity
can be bestowed in every direction: from children to parents and parents to children, from
poor to rich and rich to poor.
In Ministering Children, charitable efforts not only result from love, but they also
inculcate and strengthen the bonds of love between parties. This only occurs, however,
when such efforts are not forced or coerced—an important question during the Victorian
era, when many felt that obligatory relief in the form of government-administered

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programs funded through mandatory taxes were the most efficient way to aid those in
need. As Jane’s mother tells her bluntly, “‘[N]o one should work unwillingly for the
poor’” (19). Early in the novel, Jane engages in a “self-chosen service of love” for a poor
girl named Mercy—a girl whom she has never met, but who, she has heard, has painfully
chillblained feet. Jane’s “service of love” blossoms into real feelings of love for Mercy;
after a day spent learning to mend stockings for poor girl, the narrator tells us that “Jane
went to her pillow full of thoughts of her little unknown friend. Already she loved the
orphan her hand was helping to clothe” (19-20). Though her kindnesses to Mercy are
small, they require extended personal effort on her part (both to mend the stockings and
to save one penny each week for a year, which she has also promised to do), and
Charlesworth stresses the significant moral effects these efforts have on young Jane. Her
commitment to helping Mercy awakens “the deeper echoes of [her] heart’s responsive
sympathy” (18); this “was the first labor of her hands for the poor and needy” and “the
occasion had, for the first time, touched the deep chord of human sympathy within her
heart, and the vibration was long and full” (21).
The power of charitable feelings and actions to inculcate genuine love and thus
lead to enduring relationships between individuals is illustrated throughout the novel, but
no example is longer-lasting or more striking than the relationship that develops between
Herbert Clifford, the young son of the local squire, and Willy, a poor, elderly man living
near the squire’s estate. When Herbert happens upon Willy as the latter is struggling to
make useable firewood out of a massive tree trunk, he impulsively promises to send the
old man some coals and tumbles the log into a ditch. Unfortunately, when Herbert gets
home and tells the story to his father, the squire reminds him that he has already

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squandered his allowance for the month and so he cannot fulfill his promise. Despite
Herbert’s pleas, his father refuses to loan him the money, telling him, “‘If you can render
no aid to the needy without your purse, then you put your money before your powers of
heart, and mind, and body; and this is a base substitution, and proves that, for your own
sake, you have need, indeed, to be separated from your purse for a time’” (70-71). It may
seem hard-hearted to make Herbert learn such a lesson on the back of an impoverished
old man, and it is difficult not to feel chagrined when Herbert’s mother attempts to
comfort him by saying, “‘Perhaps it is to lead you back to prayer, dear Herbert, that you
have been suffered to fall into this difficulty’’ (73). It is old Willy, we might want to
exclaim, who has fallen into true difficulty, robbed as he has now been of both his
firewood and his promised coals.
But Herbert himself realizes his deep obligation to Willy, and as put-upon as he
feels thanks to his father’s unwillingness to assist him, he finds his thoughts returning
over and over to “that shivering old man and his wasted log in the ditch” (75). Herbert,
we are told, “was learning a deeper lesson, in which his books of human learning could
not aid him,” and when he goes to sleep that night he dreams of old Willy asleep in his
cold, dark cottage (75). An angel stands over the old man’s bed, and when Herbert asks
him if he cannot protect Willy from the cold, the angel demurs, asserting, “[T]hat work of
love is yours’” (80). Accordingly, Herbert sets out bright and early the next day to ask
“honest Jem” Smith, a local shepherd-lad, to help him turn the log into useable firewood
for Willy. Jem is happy to oblige, and in fact berates himself for not having thought to
provide firewood for Willy on his own. Together the wealthy boy and the poor young

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man create a large stack of kindling for the old man, and after delivering it to him, a
jubilant Herbert returns home.
This is not an uncomplicated sequence of events, and as modern, class-conscious
readers there is certainly much with which we might, if we like, take issue. First, there is
the aforementioned tendency of Herbert’s parents, if not the narrator herself, to frame the
entire situation as a pitiable one for Herbert, rather than Willy. Willy’s poverty and
suffering are, it seems, so taken for granted that the real narrative interest lies in Herbert’s
learning a much-needed lesson about financial responsibility. What’s more, when Herbert
finally does solve his problem it is by asking for and receiving help from a poor laborer.
As he explains to his mother, he has chosen to go to Jem for assistance because “‘he is
the only person I could ask to do a kindness for me now that I have no money to pay
them. I think everyone else would expect me to pay them, but I didn’t think that he
would’” (78). Jem, who is a paragon of virtue throughout both Ministering Children
novels, immediately agrees to help Herbert, and he commits a fair amount of
(uncompensated) time and energy to chopping wood for the young squire before he goes
off to begin his regular daily labors. Finally, of course, we have the fact that at the end of
this entire sequence old Willy has a pile of firewood and not much else—that is, he will
be warmed for a number of days thanks to Herbert and Jem’s efforts, but that is all. All of
this might be read as bearing out critics’ assertions that Ministering Children promotes an
outdated form of charity that only reinforces class inequalities.
But there is another way to interpret this set of scenes, particularly if one
considers them in the context of the rest of the novel. This pivotal sequence lays the
groundwork for a set of thematics vital to Charlesworth’s project in both Ministering

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Children and its sequel. First, it continues the point introduced in the discussion between
Jane and her mother by showing how charity flows both ways between the rich and poor,
the powerful and the seemingly powerless. Herbert occupies a privileged position in his
community, but the novel shows that he is genuinely helpless in this situation and utterly
dependent upon Jem’s kindness, superior strength, and skill. After the two boys meet up
to tackle the seemingly indestructible stump, we are presented with the following
vignette: “There stood the poor boy [Jem], with hatchet over his shoulder, and bill-hook
in his hand, surveying the log from above—his was the strength to aid, his the skill to
devise how, his the willing mind; and there stood Herbert by his side in helpless
dependence, with eyes of hope and fear now fixed on Jem—then on the log below” (84).
In Charlesworth’s novels, individuals rarely engage in charitable works alone. Even the
young squire must enlist of the help of others to do the work he wishes to do, and the
middle and poorer classes also tend to work cooperatively. Thus, charity not only
strengthens the bonds between the giver and receiver, but also creates lasting bonds
between the many people who work together to see a charitable project through to its
conclusion. These bonds span differences in class and gender, as we shall see in greater
detail below. For now, we should notice that Herbert’s attempt to be charitable toward
Willy ends up giving Jem a chance to display a spirit of genuine charity toward both
Willy and Herbert, and in the process deep bonds are forged between all three of them.
3

3
Herbert is linked forever to Jem thanks to their first cooperative foray into charity. “‘I
am sure I love that good fellow, and I think he loves me,’” Herbert proclaims at one point,
and, indeed, their love for each other develops and endures over the course of the two
novels (185).

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What’s more, Herbert’s efforts to help Willy in his time of need—however poorly
planned they initially were—result in a deep, lifelong friendship between the boy and the
old man. Again, this is the opposite of a single-transaction model of charity. As it did
before with Jane and Mercy, one kind act on behalf of another changes Herbert’s heart
and forever links the young squire and the old man. Herbert does not blithely forget about
Willy after delivering his pile of firewood. Instead, we are told that “he kept watch over
old Willy, and, as the days went on, he began to think what next must be done to keep a
fire in old Willy’s hearth? One thing alone was certain, and that was, that he could not let
old Willy be cold, though no log now lay in the ditch” (108). This continued commitment
is a consequence of the initial effort Herbert puts into helping Willy. That one personal
interaction links their fates forever, as “Hebert felt his own comfort was bound up with
the comfort of that feeble old man, who had already been warmed by the labor of his
hands” (108-109). Even as the seasons advance, we are told that Herbert often “tread the
path between his own fair mansion and old Willy’s lonely dwelling—the younger and the
elder heart fast linked in pure affection’s blessed bond” (140).
We certainly might object to the fact that Herbert’s affection for Willy does not
open his eyes to the inherent injustice of their unequal social positions. Charlesworth
herself never seems to question the social structure that allows the squire and his family
to live in luxury while cottagers on his estate require the charitable efforts of their
neighbors in order to enjoy a fire in their grate or warm socks on their feet. That some
members of a community have much while others are incapable of meeting their most
basic needs without help does not appear to strike Charlesworth as an unjust state of
affairs—a fact which critics have long identified as characteristic of devout Christian

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fiction. When analyzing Evangelical responses to social inequity, critics usually note that
believers who challenge the established social order tread perilously close to blasphemy,
as the existing social order has presumably been ordained by God. Gillian Avery pushes
this argument even further, claiming that Evangelical children’s fiction of the Victorian
period not only “tell[s] children that it [is] their religious duty to accept their social
station,” but also justifies God’s ordination that “some should be rich and some should be
poor…by making those of high rank altogether superior [in their talents and virtues]”
(192).
While Avery no doubt accurately describes some children’s fiction of the period,
Ministering Children provides a striking counter-example to her claims. It is true that
Charlesworth does not protest the class inequalities that fill her novels; instead—and as
we might expect—she intimates throughout her texts that each person’s station is, indeed,
ordained by God. But she never advances through example or argument the idea that
inequalities in society are justified by the superiority of the rich over the poor. It is
inarguable that the squire and his family have greater economic resources than the farmer
and the tradesman—and that they, in turn, have more than the laboring and non-laboring
poor. But Charlesworth takes care to acknowledge that economic resources, while vital,
are just one set of resources among many. In the community she depicts, there are also
differences of physical skill, practical knowledge, and spiritual faith, and want and plenty
in these areas are not divided down class lines. As those with plenty share with those
who lack—whether that lack be of economic resources, spiritual truth, or the skill to turn
a massive tree into useable firewood—bonds are built across social, economic, and
gender boundaries. We may object to the fact that Charlesworth refuses to critique the

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class structure she depicts, but we should also notice that she depicts economic difference
as just one kind of difference among many, and that all inequalities have the potential to
unite, rather than divide, the individuals and communities that populate her fiction.
There are many examples of the poor ministering to the middle- and upper-classes
in the text—examples that bear out the point that charity flows in all directions—but none
is more touching than the following, in which Herbert acknowledges the special power
old Willy has to provide him emotional and spiritual solace. Returning from a particularly
dispiriting deathbed conversation with Willy’s former landlord, who, it seems, has died a
non-believer, we are told that “Herbert felt as if he wanted to see the old man [Willy], to
hear him speak, to hear him tell of Heaven and his own bright hope, to dispel the gloom
that had gathered round his spirit. Herbert went to old Willy, not now to give, but to
receive” (260). While their relationship began with Herbert’s clumsy attempts to minister
to Willy, it is clear that it has developed into one of mutual care in which charity in the
biblical sense is fully embodied.
Herbert’s continuing efforts to help Willy bring poor and rich neighbors together
in common charitable endeavors, which creates an ever-expanding community built on
dynamic—almost contagious—love. Shortly after Herbert’s first successful attempt to
chop up old Willy’s stump, the gamekeeper’s children pitch in help him cut more
firewood. As the gamekeeper watches them work, the reader is presented with the
following tableau:
[T]here stood the tall gamekeeper with one hand upon the stack [of wood]
he had stooped to help his children to rear, with a smile upon his pleasant
face in which many feelings were mingled—the consciousness of effort

193
for the needy, of labor whose only recompense was love, and not the least,
perhaps, a sense, a welcome sense, of one work upon earth, and that the
noblest, in which his own young boys stood side by side with their young
master…. And the boys looked on in silence, with faces of delight—
admitted in that moment to a partnership of heartfelt interest for the poor
and needy (110).
As the children load up the cart with wood for Willy, they are “associated in one work
with the young Squire—and that the work of love and mercy” (111). This could, of
course, be read as ambitious and grasping: the gamekeeper and his children could be
participating in charitable endeavors as a way to get close to the master, to please him
and put themselves in his favor. But that spirit is not at all present in Charlesworth’s
depiction. Instead, this scene exposes important commonalities between boys from
widely different social backgrounds and illustrates the bonds that are forged through the
joint expenditure of love, sympathy, and labor for the needy. This is echoed in a later
scene, when Herbert and Jem work together to put a tarp over old Willy’s leaky roof—a
work which could not be accomplished without the help of Farmer Smith’s family. That
night the narrator ruminates, “Sweet was the slumbering of the ministering boys that
night—within the Hall, the farm-house, and the cottage; and sweet the link between
them!” (138).
The novels contain many more instances in which charitable work reinforces the
bonds between those who cooperate to accomplish it. Jem, the provider of charity to both
Herbert and old Willy, becomes, in turn, the recipient of charity when Rose Smith, the
farmer’s young daughter, works to fix up the tumbledown cottage that he shares with his

194
cousin Mercy and his widowed mother. Rose’s charitable efforts require the help of her
brother William and both her parents—all of whose bonds with each other are
strengthened in the process. As Rose and William watch Jem walk away with a bucket
full of firewood they helped procure for his family, “Rose…slipped her hand into her
brother’s. William felt this silent expression of the new-formed link between them; he
had met his little sister in her heart’s young sympathy, she felt she could turn to and
depend on his aid, and it seemed to her he stood the nearest to her in the new world of
feeling and effort her trembling steps had entered” (46). Herbert’s charitable efforts
likewise reinforce his bonds with his home and family. When Herbert learns that his
father has bought old Willy’s cottage so that they might fix it up and let the old man live
there rent free, the narrator exclaims, “O! how strong the bond of love and reverence with
which his father’s act had bound him! His father had met him in his heart’s first gushing
sympathy with sorrow, met him and filled his hand with a gift, the priceless worth of
which the child was prepared to estimate” (149-150).
All of these examples drive home Charlesworth’s point that charity is meant to be
a communal undertaking that builds long-term, deeply personal relationships and an ever-
expanding, vibrant community. When charitable activities are moved out of the realm of
the local and personal and are instead mandated and administered by the state, both
givers and receivers are deprived of the chance to strengthen their bonds with the
community, to create an associative and dynamic way of living, and to reap important
moral and spiritual growth. Many in Victorian England objected to the way that recent
changes to longstanding philanthropic traditions were transforming relationships between
the classes. According to Cutt, the 1834 new Poor Law “destroyed much of the

195
traditional concept of charity, [and] also deepened the rift between rich and poor.
Dissociated from voluntary giving in a religious context, charity as organized in 1834
became for the well-to-do an unpleasant matter of rising tax rates and for the poor, in Dr.
Arnold’s words, ‘economy by terror’” (99). The establishment of workhouses and
abolishment of most “outdoor” relief for the poor was perhaps the most infamous
provision of the new Poor Law.
4
Because the workhouse provides aid for the needy by
physically removing them from their neighbors, Charlesworth is understandably skeptical
of it. When Nurse Brame finds out that Patience, the poor girl whom her former mistress
has asked her to look in on, has been abandoned by her father and is about to be
transported to the workhouse, she is displeased. Nurse Brame “thought the work-house
next in disgrace to prison itself,” we are told; however, as the narrator pointedly declares,
“Brame did not consider where the disgrace of the work-house lay—whether with those
who could do nothing to support themselves, or whether, not rather with those who
suffered the young and helpless, or the old and feeble, to be carried off and nourished by
the forced contributions of others” (201). Nurse Brame may not have considered “where
the disgrace of the work-house lay,” but Charlesworth clearly has, and it is plainly not
with those who cannot support themselves. It is difficult to fit the workhouse into a
scheme of charity that believes sustained relationships can nourish all parties involved

4
No novelist—perhaps no person, full stop—was as influential in communicating the
horrors of the workhouse as was Dickens in Oliver Twist. Charlesworth is concerned less
with the traumas experienced by those inside the workhouse than she is with the negative
effects such a turn toward “indoor relief” had on English society by separating the needy
from the beneficent.

196
and act as a force for social cohesion.
5
Charlesworth would likely agree with Gertrude
Himmelfarb, who writes that “[Government] relief, being impersonal and legal, destroys
any sense of morality. The donor (the tax-payer) resents his involuntary contribution, and
the recipient feels no gratitude for what he gets as a matter of right, which, in any case, he
feels to be insufficient” (29).
Following its ruminations on the workhouse, Ministering Children provides a
potent example of the kinds of benefits that personal, voluntary charity can provide and
state-administered relief cannot, thus bringing the shortcomings of the latter form of aid
into even higher relief. Young Jane Mansfield has befriended an illiterate old woman who
lives in a rough, secluded cottage some distance from town. After visiting her a few times
and sharing the Christian message, Jane notices that the old woman is badly in need of
new clothes. She and her mother make a plan to supply her with garments ranging from
aprons and caps to shawls and bonnets. “Jane’s pence were now saved up by her eager,
joyful hand of love, for her own old woman,” we are told, and after all the work has been
done and the garments gathered she sets out for the cottage with her bounty,
“overflowing with gladness” (296). Upon Jane’s arrival, “tears started to the eyes of the

5
I say difficult rather than impossible because Charlesworth ends up expressing some
optimism about the workhouse’s potential to aid the poor. Despite Nurse Brame’s efforts
to get Patience a service position with a family, the young girl is eventually forced to
enter the dreaded workhouse. However, the novel demonstrates that true charity can exist
even here, amongst society’s outcasts. The institution to which Patience is sent to run by
a kindly woman, and under her care the girl becomes healthy and strong and begins to
teach the other children in the house. “So it was that poor Patience, who seemed at school
as if she could not learn, and would never remember anything, was the first perhaps of all
the children there…to become a ministering child to others” (208). Thus, the reader is
shown that the reciprocal community of care and personal influence can exist even in the
workhouse, to which society’s lowest are relegated.

197
poor old woman—tears of love and grateful feeling” (269). While the woman had not
formerly been a churchgoer, Jane soon sees her at church, clad in her new attire.
Charlesworth writes: “The hand of love had clothed her, the voice of love had warmed
and cheered her; there were tones that make the heart’s music now on earth for her, and
led by those she went to hear of the love that these bore witness to—the love that passeth
knowledge!” (296-297). What a far cry charity in this scene is from an “unpleasant matter”
for the rich and an “economy by terror” for the poor. Here as elsewhere, Charlesworth
depicts charity as an endeavor in which joy and love in one heart call forth the same
emotions in another heart, creating ties between the two and genuinely enriching both
lives.
Are these scenes sentimental—even “saccharine,” as Juliet Dusinberre might say?
Could we object that the form of charity they depict must recur regularly in order to be
effective—that is, that charity like Jane’s will never result in independence from charity
for its recipients? Certainly, on both counts. Yet “independence” from charity is that last
thing Charlesworth would encourage; in fact, it is likely the last thing she would think
desirable or even possible. Elsewhere in the novel, Charlesworth uses her wealthiest
characters to teach her readers that no one is independent of the need for charity. When
Herbert’s father asks his son what he thinks charity is, Herbert answers
“[I]t’s doing for the poor.” “Very true, my boy; only remember, there is no
one on earth so rich as not to need this heaven-born charity!” “What do
you mean, papa? you don’t want charity!” “Yes, dear Herbert, I do; and so
do you. To be poor in money, is but one point of poverty; just as to be rich
in money, is but one point of riches.” “What then are you poor in, papa?”

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“I am so poor, that there is no one I have any intercourse with who may
not make me richer.” “What do you mean, papa?” “I mean that my earthly
comfort depends more upon that spirit of love or charity, in those with
whom I am associated, than upon any thing else, and this is true of all.
One of the chief reasons of the happiness of heaven is, that there every
thought and feeling, every word and action, is governed by CHARITY!
And the nearer you come to the practice of this spirit of love on earth, the
nearer you come to the spirit of heaven. . . . [W]hatever most proves your
thoughtful interest in others, and care for them, is the best and brightest
exercise in charity.” (173-174)
Squire Clifford defines charity as the basis of a classless communalism marked by
emotional and spiritual interdependence. We can certainly object that it is easy for
someone who has all his material needs taken care of to define charity in this way, and
point out that dwelling on the emotional and spiritual needs that the rich and poor share
may distract the squire from his responsibility to take action to address his neighbors’
economic needs as well. But if we read another way, we might notice that—despite
critics’ claims to the contrary—Charlesworth is far less interested in protecting existing
class structures than in drawing our attention to the ways in which the ties built up
through the agency of love and sharing can make class irrelevant. By reminding readers
of the weaknesses and neediness we all share, and likewise of the power of every
individual, no matter how lowly, to enact a bit of heaven on earth by behaving in a “spirit
of love or charity” toward his or her neighbors, Charlesworth is promoting a radical sense
of interclass association. Her ideas can certainly be dismissed as top-down, old-fashioned,

199
and paternalistic, but such a dismissal may reveal less about Charlesworth’s
commitments than our own belief that class strife and competition are inevitable facts of
social life.
And yet all of this is not to say that Charlesworth herself feels no anxiety about
the efficacy of her scheme of private charity. In addition to her demonstrated
ambivalence about the ability of the workhouse to aid the poor, she occasionally
acknowledges the fact that even the most dedicated and caring Christian can overlook
some of her neighbors’ sufferings, thus leaving them unassuaged. The first instance in
which a suffering child comes into contact with a ministering Christian who fails to
notice the distress she could relieve occurs at the very beginning of the novel: Miss
Wilson, a kind woman who runs the town school, fails to notice that Patience is poorly
taken care of because the little girl always looks neat and her expression is invariably dull
and sullen. “Miss Wilson, the lady at the school, thought [Patience] did not care about
any thing; she had never been to see her in her home, she thought it was no use to go and
see a child who seemed not to care for any thing; so she did not know the sorrows of the
little girl, and therefore she did not try to comfort her” (12). Miss Wilson’s failure can
teach child readers an important lesson about looking below the surface of things and,
especially, the necessity of visiting people in their homes to learn of their wants and
needs. Charlesworth’s narrator drives this point home in the same scene, saying, “When
we see a child dressed neat and warm in her school dress, we often think she is well taken
care of; but it is not always so; and sometimes the little school girl or boy is much more
hungry and faint, than the child who begs his food in the streets. We cannot tell how it

200
really is with poor children, or poor men and women, unless we visit them in their homes”
(11).
In addition to teaching the child reader an important lesson about how best to
practice charity, however, this episode—like a later one in which Miss Clifford
(Herbert’s older sister and the most revered ministering child in the text) fails to notice
Mercy’s chilblains despite visiting her in her home—shows Charlesworth’s awareness
that even faithful Christians are limited in the suffering they can notice and therefore
redress. This awareness is usually implicit, but in one scene Charlesworth muses
explicitly upon the difficult questions that must accompany the kind of charity she
advocates. About midway through A Sequel to Ministering Children, Nurse Brame, who
has by now become a true Christian and therefore an exhibitor of genuine charity,
encounters a poor man on the road whose arm is in a sling. After speaking with him about
his life for a short while, she feels moved to give him a gold sovereign; as she and the
children are riding away they see him kneel down on the frozen ground to thank God. We
are told that “a tear rose to Mrs. Brame’s eye, and a flush to her cheek, as she said, ‘Poor
man! he was in trouble, and I helped him a little.’” The narrator goes on to muse,
How many there are we meet unobserved, whom if we knew, we should
discover in them much to win our interest and regard; but as was written
once of old, so it might almost be said now, our eyes are holden that we
should not know them. Is this because we are unready for them? Or it may
be that some one else is appointed to minister to those whose necessity lies
hid from us. (A Sequel 219)

201
This passage demonstrates Charlesworth’s recognition of the fact that the personal
charity her novel advocates can seem haphazard and inefficient. It also illuminates the
real misgivings Evangelicals must have felt at times about the sufficiency of even their
best efforts to show a “spirit of love or charity” to those around them. But if they reveal
some disquiet, the narrator’s questions also point to the solution to that disquiet; that is,
they hint that any suffering that is overlooked for now will not be overlooked forever. If
“we are unready for them” now, surely we—or “some one else…appointed to minister to
those whose necessity lies hid from us”—will be ready for them later.
We should also note that any anxieties that the author or reader might feel about
the efficacy of personalized charity can be largely offset by Evangelicalism’s anti-
utilitarian valuing of suffering. Ministering Children asserts that suffering is valuable for
a host of reasons. First, it is valuable because “‘griefs are the chastening of [the] heavenly
Father’s love’” and a sign of his presence (A Sequel 355). “‘[I]f any bear that yoke [of
suffering] it is proof that he is walking beside them, enabling them to lean on the help of
his heavenly grace. And is that not far better and far happier than the easiest path without
him?’” one character asks another in the Sequel (355). It may strike secular readers as
counterintuitive, but Charlesworth’s characters repeatedly assert that the very fact that
humans can endure existence in this veil of tears is a sign of God’s love and kindness, for
only his love and kindness could make such endurance possible.
Of course, the novel frequently reminds us that God is not the only available
source of support in times of trouble. Just as our suffering gives God an opportunity to
bear us up with his love and kindness, so we can also help bear up others. Ministering
Children shows us that enduring suffering leads one to feel sympathy for others who

202
suffer, and thus suffering is capable of bridging distances caused by social and economic
difference. When Lady Gertrude first encounters young Patience, for example, she
immediately senses the girl’s deep unhappiness. While Miss Wilson and the other adults
around Patience have only noted how neat and tidy she looks, Lady Gertrude, who is
herself an orphan, senses instinctively that Patience lacks the love and guidance of a
parent. When Lady Gertrude visits Patience in her flat, we are told that “one glance round
the apartment was sufficient to show that no mother’s care, no mother’s presence was
known there; and a rush of almost sisterly feeling passed through the heart of the
motherless child of rank and fortune, as she looked on the motherless child of want and
sorrow” (196-197). Lady Gertrude’s personal experience with suffering enables an
almost supernatural vision that allows her to see Patience’s suffering as no one else has.
When Lady Gertrude acknowledges what she senses (saying simply, “‘Dear little girl,
you are not happy!’”), and Patience realizes that she is being seen—really seen—for
perhaps the first time in her life, she sheds “warm tears [that begin to melt] the child’s
young heart so early frozen” (197). Lady Gertrude’s kindness plants a seed of hope inside
young Patience that is repeatedly referred to throughout the Ministering Children novels.
Because Lady Gertrude’s kindness can be traced back to her own suffering, we can say
that this scene and others like it, in which shared suffering bridges otherwise
insurmountable-seeming gaps between individuals, are clear indicators of suffering’s
community-building properties.
Charlesworth and her Evangelical peers also value suffering because it facilitates
spiritual growth. In A Sequel to Ministering Children, we are introduced to a new set of
characters who dwell in the same town as Jane Mansfield, Patience, and Nurse Brame.

203
Among these characters are a blind basket maker and his young daughter Sue, and a kind
widow named Garson and her children. These friends are all poor and have endured
many hardships, but they are also all deeply religious. When the blind man takes his
daughter on their yearly pilgrimage through the countryside to sell their baskets, the
widow and her children watch them depart.
[Garson] felt their helplessness, but it woke no misgiving within her. She
had learned that lesson, which only experience can teach,—that our
weakness is our strength; when, knowing that we are unable to do
anything as of ourselves, we lean only on the help of God’s heavenly
grace, and find his strength is made perfect in weakness. The widow had
found it so when all hope was gone, save in him who, by his spirit, has
taught us to say, “Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him who is the
health of my countenance, and my God.” (A Sequel 122)
Suffering brings with it feelings of weakness and helplessness, which even the most
faithful Christian would admit are inherently unpleasant sensations. And yet, as Squire
Clifford previously attested, an acknowledgment of the common weakness of all mankind
is vital for true charity. This passage makes clear that such an acknowledgement is also
the foundation of true religion, as the more complete our weakness is, the more perfect
God’s strength is; and the more hopeless our situation is, the more necessary our faith in
God’s mercy and power is. Anyone who believes these assertions cannot feel excessively
anxious about personal charity being too slow to relieve suffering, as delayed relief may
be precisely what leads to a spiritual breakthrough like Garson’s.

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While the anxieties that accompany Charlesworth’s scheme of personal charity
might be calmed by Evangelicalism’s anti-utilitarian valuing of suffering, the scheme
itself would not be possible without a rejection of Malthus’s insistence that resources are
fixed and scarce, and that grasping self-concern is the inevitable human response to such
scarcity. Malthus explains in his seminal Essay on the Principle of Population that “the
spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling
breath of want. The hateful passions that had vanished [in times of plenty] reappear. The
mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer and more exalted emotions of the
soul. The temptations to evil are too strong for human nature to resist” (61). Such a
conviction in the weakness and essential selfishness of humankind underlies Malthus’s
harsh policies toward the poor.
Charlesworth challenges the Malthusian model on two fronts, calling into
question both the inevitability of fixed, scarce resources and the “mighty law of self-
preservation.” Throughout Ministering Children and its sequel, Charlesworth gestures
intriguingly toward counter-scarcity models of existence that can support cooperative,
rather than competitive, models of human relations. The abundance made possible by
Christian faith is what makes true charity, with its focus on mutual benefits to giver and
receiver, achievable. Throughout the novels, Charlesworth depicts scenes in which her
characters’ charitable efforts are aided by a seemingly supernatural supply of energy. The
first example occurs when Jem helps Herbert chop wood for old Willy. After what seems
like hours of effort, during which time Jem has with “stroke after stroke, stroke after
stroke” separated large logs from the massive stump, Herbert tries to get him to stop
working so that he can devote his strength to his regular labors (86-87).

205
“Now Jem, you have given me one of the best gifts, I declare, that I ever
had in my life, and you must not be kept here any longer. If I could but
find old Willy’s hatchet, I would try at it myself before I go back.” “Well,
sir, as for that, my time is my own; master won’t be against an hour or so
either way.” “No, Jem, but it’s the strength that it costs you, and you must
not spend all you have upon me.” “Well, sir, I won’t go against your word,
but as for strength, I’m only getting it up by these few strokes; there’s no
fear in being the weaker for a stroke for them that can’t strike for
themselves.” (87, italics mine)
Jem does not elaborate further, but his comments hint that charitable work is carried out
in an anti-rationalist economy. He claims, after all, that expending energy “for them that
can’t strike for themselves” augments, rather than depletes, one’s storehouse of physical
strength.
Another scene a short while later similarly implies that energy that is expended on
behalf of others comes from an inexhaustible supply and builds its own reservoir. Here,
the gamekeeper’s young sons help Herbert unload a huge pile of firewood at old Willy’s
home: “Backward and forward went the boys, laden with the old man’s wood—who
could tire in such a labor!—while with a smile of peace the old man watched them at
their work” (111, italics mine). This is labor, the narrator tells us, “in which the heart
eased the hand” (111-112).
As a contrast to these boys’ efforts and the economy of abundance in which they
exist, we can look, as usual, to pre-conversion Nurse Brame. As we have already seen,
Nurse Brame’s early charitable efforts are not guided by “CHARITY’S indwelling

206
influence”; any attempts at philanthropy on her part are thus hampered by her
unexamined assumption that the world is a place marked by scarcity—that there is not
enough to go around and therefore individuals must jealously guard their resources. It is
this assumption that resulted in Nurse Brame’s earlier attempt to ascertain “what amount
of kindness would be sufficient” to fulfill her promise to Lady Gertrude regarding
Patience. The idea of needing to determine mere “sufficiency” as it relates to charity
would never have occurred to someone like Jem, who inhabits an environment
characterized by abundance. When Mrs. Brame discovers shortly after her introduction to
Patience that the girl has been abandoned by her father and is going to be shipped off to
the workhouse, she has a sudden thought: “Why might not that warm and comfortable
room [that she inhabited] become the child’s home? Nurse Brame might feed the worse
than orphan and yet have enough for herself—and she knew this; the child was clothed at
school, and rent of the room, firing and candle, would have cost no more” (202). And yet,
even though Nurse Brame determines that she could accommodate Patience without
suffering a decrease in her own resources or a drop in her own quality of life, she cannot
commit to doing it. “All this passed before the mind of old nurse Brame,” we are told,
“but the motive that influenced her thoughts was one of earthly limitation, not of
Heaven’s boundless charity; therefore it came short of such an attainment, and she only
replied, ‘Well, I would not be the one to send a child off to the WORKHOUSE!’” (202).
Nurse Brame’s early charitable efforts are not inspired by the appropriate moral
sentiment; instead, they are driven—as she is herself—by a sense of lack rather than
abundance, and the results are far from optimal.
6

6
We might notice that the abundance that comes from God in Charlesworth’s text is

207
These examples of physical and material abundance (or their lack, in the case of
Nurse Brame) are supported by spiritual examples throughout the novels. The “sweet
secret of giving” is “also the secret of increase,” and “the soul that watereth others shall
be watered itself,” Charlesworth writes in the Sequel (311). Tracing how one poor child
who was ministered to by two wealthy children has himself “become a ministering
child…in [his] once dreary home,” the narrator explains, “It is in this way light kindles
light: you may obtain many a bright flame from one without lessening its own shining”
(A Sequel 376). Near the very end of the Sequel, Charlesworth mediates on what has
made the charity of those two wealthy children, Charley and Edith, possible, and her
explanation neatly explains the Evangelical answer to the problem of scarcity.
The rill of heavenly charity that flowed through their young hearts had its
rise in the eternal hills, therefore it flowed freshly with ever new supplies,
and deepened its channel and widened its bed: for Charley and Edith, both
in heart and mind, had a freer expansion and power than children whose
central point is Self. If we grow weary in labors of love, it is because we
are carrying them on with our natural powers alone, not supplied from that
better life whose measure is infinite. This better life, even on earth, has no
meridian from which it declines; its day is eternal, and brightens
forever. (412)
Overall, Charlesworth is able to present a more consistently optimistic view of humanity
than many more canonical anti-Benthamite novelists (Dickens most prominently)

echoed in nature, where pruning, using, and harvesting can lead—not to nothing—but to
bounty.

208
because her Evangelicalism allows her to see human beings as capable of overcoming the
drives of self-interest and competitiveness for more than just random acts of charity and
moments of kindness. As she explains of Nurse Brame’s transformation from a selfish
old woman to a kind and charitable one, “So quickly may the greatest changes be
wrought when the hidden agency is that of omnipotent love” (A Sequel 78).
Charlesworth’s confidence in God’s ability to shape human nature is a guiding light and
driving ethics throughout the Ministering Children novels.
Read in the context of nineteenth-century economic and social debates, Ministering
Children and its sequel represent a fundamental rejection of the idea that scarcity, self-
interest, and competition are inevitable facts of human nature and human society. While
Malthus and his disciples advanced the notion that the world was “a fearsome place in
which vice, misery and inequality are as inevitable and incomprehensible as is the power
of God which created them,” Charlesworth revives Coleridge’s earlier attempts to “write
liberation rather than repression as the awesome and inevitable law of nature and of God”
(Fulford 356, 361). Is the optimistic vision presented by Charlesworth likely to bring
about the caring, interconnected society she so clearly longs for? Is it likely to help
readers shape their lives into more devout configurations in which painful circumstances
such as disease, privation, and death are imbued with deep spiritual and emotional
significance, as they so often are for the characters in these novels? It’s hard to say. The
effect these novels had in the lives of individuals and communities is hard to determine,
particularly at this distance. But if we are correct to view Charlesworth’s efforts with a
fair deal of skepticism, we would also do well to remember the words of Sally Mitchell,
who said the following about women’s novels of the 1860s that have been critiqued—or

209
more often, utterly forgotten—because of their perceived philosophical and aesthetic
shortcomings: “The women’s novel…is a means of mediating reality. What the critic
calls ‘looking at the world through rose-colored glasses’ may also be called creating the
world you would like to see exist” (45). Charlesworth’s vision may strike us as
unrealistically utopian, but its popularity with readers indicates that her particular way of
“mediating reality” struck a chord with her contemporaries, and hints at a widespread
hunger for interconnectedness and community amongst mid-nineteenth-century Britons.

210
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Creator Tucker, Trisha (author)

Core Title Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/24/2014

Defense Date 05/12/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bronte,Charlesworth,christianity,Evangelicalism,Faith,Fiction,Hofland,nineteenth century,OAI-PMH Harvest,realism,rise of the novel,secularization,subject,subjectivity,Tonna,victorian,Worboise

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Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), Anderson, Emily Hodgson (committee member), Russett, Margaret (committee member), Winston, Diane H. (committee member)

Creator Email ttucker@dornsife.usc.edu

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