Lone Voices?

This chapter asks if Draper and White were indeed the sole originators of the conflict thesis, or whether there were others before and/or alongside them. Journeying from the French Revolution through to late Victorian England, key players are identified and discussed. These include Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, the X Club, and many more influential characters who spoke on or wrote about the relationship between science and religion. The conclusion is that Draper and White were far from alone: many other highly significant public figures had argued that there was an inherent conflict between theology and the scientific method in one way or another. The chapter then teases why it might be that Draper and White are so forcefully put forward in the literature as being the lone progenitors of the idea.

Christian Colonialism and Capitalism

The nineteenth century tells the story of Christian success in England and America. Victorian England set a model of patriarchal family virtue rooted in “biblical Christianity.” God rewarded it with industrial development and capitalist expansion in its colonial ventures. The Industrial Revolution advances these curricula’s crucial economic argument: economic success reveals God’s favor. England’s virtues also allowed it to avoid the political tumult that beset the European continent. England and the United States enjoyed religious revivals, and missionaries spread Christianity throughout the world. Colonialism opened the world to missionary evangelization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The capitalist success of the United States reveals it as the beneficiary of Divine Providence. Nineteenth-century evangelicals not only asserted these claims but also saw Christian hegemony as a realistic aspiration.

Коды «мужского» и «не-мужского» в художественном мире Morpho Eugenia А.С. Байетт

Morpho Eugenia is the first part of the postmodernist novel Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt. The male world is represented here in abundance by numerous names of famous naturalists, philosophers and poets of the XVII-XVIII centuries and of Victorian England, as well as by the male characters of the novel. It is pointed out that the concepts of “masculine” and “non-masculine” in the novel presuppose double reading, namely, the traditional (Victorian) and posttraditional one (neo-Victorian). In the neo-Victorian interpretation, most of the male characters in the novel are devoid of traditional masculine qualities (honor and dignity, commitment to the cause, inner strength), they bear a stigma of vice (incest), while the “male organization” features of the central female character, non-typical for a Victorian woman (talent, efficiency, perseverance, energy, self-reliance), contribute to the formation of an integral harmonious world of men and women as friends, lovers, like-minded people.

The Archetypes of Holmesian World: A Study of Sherlock (BBC) and Elementary (CBS) as Appropriations of Archetypes

The idea of Sherlock Holmes or what I am calling Holmesness has evolved with each of Holmes’s onscreen representations and with it has evolved his Victorian England. My paper argues that Holmes has become an emblem of victory of good over evil, thriving in his ecosystem comprised of other characters, incidents and Holmes’s Victorian England; and Holmes can only be successfully represented along with his ecosystem. To support this, I will analyse two recent television adaptations of Sherlock Holmes – Sherlock by BBC and Elementary by CBS and highlight how these series have successfully adapted Holmes and his ecosystem emblematically—not as narrative laments, but as archetypes. The chosen adaptations have not only appropriated Holmes in contemporary time, but also have appropriated his world as well.

Scandal in Somers town: conspiracism and Catholic schools in early Victorian England

The middle years of the nineteenth century are notable in the history of Catholicism in England for the development of the ‘papal aggression’ crisis. Catholic emancipation had been met with suspicion by Protestant groups and this suspicion grew into violent antipathy with the publication by Nicholas Wiseman of ‘Ex Porta Flaminia.’ At the same time that this crisis was emerging, Catholic charitable organizations were also attempting to garner support from the state for the building of Catholic schools. With a boom in the poor, urban population, fuelled by the arrival of Irish refugees, this assistance was urgently required. In the midst of this a small school in the heart of London became the focus of a cause célèbre. The belief that this school had been funded by lucre, defrauded from dying and vulnerable members of the Somers Town community by simonist priests, provided the source of a widespread conspiracy theory. The result of this conspiracy theory was a lawsuit, brought in 1851 by the relatives of a deceased benefactor of the school, against the newly enthroned Cardinal Wiseman. Metairie vs. Wiseman became one of the most celebrated and cited cases of the early Victorian era.

The (Afro) Future of Henry Box Brown

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

Community and Controversy: Jews, Anglicans, and Biblical Criticism in Mid-Victorian England

Mid-nineteenth-century Victorian England was roiled by public controversies regarding the legitimacy of biblical criticism, largely fueled by Anglicans and the Church of England establishment. Jews were well aware of these public controversies and even spoke out in a forthright manner. At this very juncture there was also a rather remarkable Jewish scholar, Marcus Kalisch, who began to advance critical notions in his commentary to the Pentateuch, ultimately coming to conclusions not altogether different from the leading critical scholars in Germany. This article explores the way in which Anglo-Jews first avoided, and then finally confronted, Kalisch's work, and what that said about communal sensitivities and self-consciousness.