Apportioning the Devotional Day

Chronometres ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198836162.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 160-190

Author(s):

Krista Lysack

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

In Memoriam ◽

Devotional Reading ◽

Reading Textbooks

This chapter pursues the systematic dailiness of devotional reading in the form of daily-reading “textbooks,” which came on the market toward the end of the nineteenth century, not all of them explicitly religious. Textbooks extracted and re-arranged for diurnal re-reading of the works of well-regarded writers of the century. These included Alfred Tennyson, whose In Memoriam, famous for its theme of protracted mourning but also for its reputation to console the bereaved, was re-published in excerpted form as Day to Day With Tennyson and many other similar titles. With its assumption of daily and apportioned reading the textbook aligns, furthermore, with Victorian reading systems and with discourses of time-thrift. In other words, late-Victorian devotion was often less about inculcating theological content than it was about materializing reading as non-narrative, modular portions and returning the reader regularly to a sense of time as a series of renewable moments.

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Afterword

Chronometres ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198836162.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 191-196

Author(s):

Krista Lysack

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Devotional Poetry ◽

Gift Books ◽

Reading Materials ◽

The Subject ◽

The Masses ◽

Devotional Reading ◽

Cheap Print

If we imagine that a Victorian common reader of devotion has accumulated all the devotional books and print that have been the subject of this study we might see, gathered together on a table or shelf, a jumble of things: devotional poetry, family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals, gift books, and daily textbooks. Reading meant for the masses lies alongside serious works, cheap print mingles with expensive gift volumes. Broad Church, Tractarian, and Nonconformist doctrine sit together in easy company. In considering the range of what counted as devotional reading materials for Victorians, I have endeavoured to think beyond generic categories and denominational affiliations. The companionability of these items, their miscellany and assortment, reminds us that they were objects that were handled and re-read by their owners. And even when they were not being read, they remained as materials on display and as available to the next reader who might come along. This was the case with Monica Madden’s only occasionally- (and possibly never-) read copy of Keble in Chapter One. The profusion of religious publishing in the nineteenth century meant that devotional observance could also be a leisurely and a consumerist pursuit. But Elaine Freedgood (2013), who has pointed out how “things … still do not get taken seriously” in literary criticism,...

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The Spiritual Home of W. E. Gladstone: Anne Gladstone’s Bible

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400001820 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 50 ◽

pp. 343-353

Author(s):

David Bebbington

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Secondary Literature ◽

The Bible ◽

Alternative Sources ◽

Devotional Reading

‘Popery is the religion of Cathedrals’, wrote J.W. Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow in his novel The Velvet Cushion (1815), ‘– Protestantism of houses’. It is a commonplace in the secondary literature that the household was the citadel of the evangelical version of Protestantism in nineteenth-century England. ‘Evangelicalism’, according to a representative comment by Ian Bradley, ‘was above all else the religion of the home.’ The head of the household conducting family prayers was the embodiment of the evangelical spirit. It is not the purpose of this essay to question that received image, but it does suggest that a clearer picture of the religious atmosphere of the evangelical home can be obtained from sources other than the manuals published for the paterfamilias to read to the assembled household. The books of family prayers tell us what was prescribed; but alternative sources show us what was practised. Spiritual journals, reflective meditations and candid correspondence can often be more revealing. Nowhere, however, is the kernel of household piety more evident than in the Bibles that some zealous believers annotated for their own benefit. The study of the Bible, as Edward Bickersteth, a leading evangelical divine, put it in his book A Scripture Help (1816), was ‘a great and important duty’. When members of evangelical families retired to the privacy of their own rooms, they might spend time in devotional reading of the Scriptures and leave a record of their reflections in the margins. Such Bibles, one of which is to be examined here, are treasuries of authentic domestic spirituality. They show something of the heartbeat of evangelical religion.

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‘The dead man touched me from the past’:1 Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Wordsworth

Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474436878.003.0004 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 80-120

Author(s):

Jayne Thomas

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Science And Religion ◽

The Past ◽

In Memoriam ◽

The Dead ◽

Public Voice ◽

Dead Man ◽

Century Science

This chapter examines Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson was open about the difficulties he sustained in writing the poem, and this chapter argues that the Wordsworthian borrowings in the poem help the later poet to work toward finding a form of consolation, however tenuous this consolation subsequently proves to be, and therefore to make his accommodations with his faith, with the claims of nineteenth-century science and religion, but also with the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam, the direct subject of the poem. It also examines how the Wordsworthian language in In Memoriam helps Tennyson both to stabilise his ‘public’ voice and to develop the pastoral elements of elegy. The borrowings from Wordsworth form a chamber of echoes that Tennyson harnesses, reworks, reconfigures, replays in a different context and in a different time. At times the later poet is unable fully to transfigure and rework Wordsworth’s language, but is constrained, limited, inhibited by it, and these effects make themselves manifest in the poem too.

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Israel Zangwill, or ‘The Jewish Dickens’: Representing Minority Communities in Novel and Newspaper

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474474344.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 124-166

Author(s):

Jessica R. Valdez

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Jewish Community ◽

English Language ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Daniel Deronda ◽

Form And Function ◽

Israel Zangwill ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

A Minor ◽

And Function

This chapter examines how the newspaper participates in novelistic depictions of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewishness, with a focus on Israel Zangwill’s 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). The dominant nineteenth-century Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, sought to accommodate its readers and to represent a unified Jewish community to the larger national public; however, Jewish print culture more broadly was politically, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Acknowledging the centrality of newspapers to the Jewish community Zangwill dramatises the limitations of newspaper form and function to the cultivation of a broader affective attachment. In Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill contrasts the representative potential of novelistic realism with the English-language Orthodox newspaper, The Flag of Judah, which only imperfectly fosters an Anglo-Jewish community. The newspaper’s regularity and routinised labor dull its editor’s sense of time and weakens his affective attachment to other members of his community. In contrast, novelistic realism enables Zangwill to convey the complex feelings that the Jewish ghetto elicits in the protagonist and novelist Esther Ansell. The newspaper looks like a form conducive to affective connections only when it is repurposed by readers and made to work more like a novel. This chapter also argues that Israel Zangwill reworks Eliot’s novelistic approaches to community in Children of the Ghetto. Whereas Daniel Deronda concludes with Deronda’s yearning towards Palestine and a nation for his people, Children of the Ghetto valorises the idea of the Jewish ghetto as a place of nostalgia, a setting that fosters affective attachment based not in anonymous communal imaginings but in lived and material proximity. Zangwill’s novel dramatises the difficulties in creating a minor community within a larger national community, and the extent to which form matters in how that community is envisioned.

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Op. 131 and the Rise of Attentive Listening

Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190059200.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 103-120

Author(s):

Nancy November

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

String Quartet ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Concert Hall ◽

Musical Works ◽

Agents Of Change ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

Audience Behavior ◽

Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung

This chapter begins with a discussion of Mark Andre’s ensemble work riss 2 (2014) as an alternative window on the modern-day reception of Op. 131—the two works can similarly disrupt our ontological understanding of musical works in terms of structure, sound transformations, and especially sense of time. I then step back to consider the larger context in which Op. 131 was originally heard, setting it within an emerging ideology of “serious listening” in Vienna in the early nineteenth century. I consider the early nineteenth century as an era in which the seeds for silent listening were sown, by key agents of change, who tried to adjust audience behavior at string quartet concerts—influential figures such as Schuppanzigh, Beethoven, and reviewers for the Wiener Theater-Zeitung and Viennese Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the 1810s and ’20s. Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet can be understood as a work that took part in this move to instill silent and serious listening. However, the climate in Vienna was not was not such that Beethoven (and Schuppanzigh) could enjoy much success with this particular listening project. The “romantic listener” does not represent a nineteenth-century norm, and was certainly not the norm in Beethoven’s Vienna. But the compelling ideology of listening and associated habits that started to develop there—especially reverent silence—continue to influence powerfully our concert hall behaviors today.

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‘From scarped cliff and quarried stone a thousand types gone’

10.1093/oso/9780198824527.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Chris Jones

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Detailed Examination ◽

Anglo Saxon ◽

Common Opinion ◽

The Common ◽

In Memoriam ◽

Battle Of Brunanburh ◽

First Time

Tennyson’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is reassessed in order to disprove the common opinion that he had only rudimentary knowledge of the language, and relied mainly on his son’s prose translation of The Battle of Brunanburh in order to make a poetic version of that text. Detailed examination of manuscript evidence proves that Tennyson applied himself to serious and sustained study of Anglo-Saxon, and this chapter identifies for the first time texts, including dictionaries, that he used to teach himself Anglo-Saxon. It is argued that Tennyson’s poetry exhibits traits of both phases of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism that Fossil Poetry identifies. The chapter closes by reading the Anglo-Saxonist etymological layer of several poems by Tennyson, including In Memoriam.

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