Afterword

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,...

The Christian Year and the Consolations of Synchronized Time

This chapter shows how the material arrangements and the chronometrics of Keble’s bestselling devotional volume are parallel features. The consolations of The Christian Year were such that they calibrated readers not only to the long time of the liturgical year but also synchronized them to clock time. While many contemporary readers lauded The Christian Year for its soothing properties, its long Victorian print afterlife is indicative of how devotion was being redefined as that century went on as a set of reading practices premised upon distraction and divided time. The eventual work of The Christian Year, in other words, was to console its readers according to a new realization of the replicable, interval time of modernity.

Arranging Daily Gifts of Devotion

This chapter begins by examining some of the ways that Victorian readers inscribed, marked, and altered devotional books. Some kept albums, scrapbooks, and commonplace books in order to pluck and transplant, as it were, verse from original sources to their own blank books, while others annotated the pages of existing books or wrote lengthy dedications. Even as readers were engaged in their own tactile interactions with devotional texts, the religious publishing marketplace was emulating these material reading practices as though they were a form of domestic handicraft, as in Frances Ridley Havergal’s Four-Fold Counsel tetralogy, a series of botanically inspired devotional gift books. Another of Havergal’s popular gift book sets, known as the Royal Series, is instructive, moreover, of how the material organization of devotional books could make a gift-time of daily reading.

Family Prayers

This chapter takes up the Victorian fashion for family prayers and a host of devotional manuals—guides that were widely referred to as “forms”—whose purpose was to instrumentalize this practice for families as a regular, household routine. Although family prayers could do the work of maintaining normative gender and class boundaries in the increasingly time-scheduled middle-class home, the recommendation of these books to conduct devotions with efficiency betrays an anxiety over the disruptive prospect of the household audience’s boredom. Along with these manuals, novelistic treatments of family prayers show that domestic devotions were equally an everyday duration in which daydream and reverie might offer household members a provisional reprieve from the labours of attention that family prayers demanded.

Christina Rossetti’s Chronometrical Eternal

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a miscellany of daily reading that combines lyric poetry and prose meditations. In Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Rossetti embraces the apparent synchronizations of liturgical and clock time that Keble’s volume implies. Among the time signatures that Rossetti tries on, in addition to the more familiar ones of liturgical time, are ones shaped through the possibilities of the quotidian. Time Flies playfully reveals how heterotopic or “eternal” time is produced through a material relation with the book as diurnal reading/writing object.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the argument that what distinguished Victorian devotional literature was not a set of generic conventions but the experience of time, that is to say the form and feel of devotion’s reading durations. After identifying Victorian chronometrical print as a unique variety of devotional literature, the introduction goes on to explore the multi-scalar nature of the Victorian period with particular attention to industrial clock time and “empty time.” After discussing reading as a peculiarly temporal everyday practice, it goes on to note the affective nature of durational reading. By focusing on the operations of measured and felt time, the introduction makes a case for Victorian devotion as the uniquely material and affective observance of incremental time. After a brief discussion of the book’s relevance to recent critiques of the secularization thesis and to recent scholarship on the religious turn, the introduction closes with a brief summary of each of the book’s six chapters and with some speculations about the temporal affinities between conceptions of eternity and the quotidian.

Sunday Reading

This chapter takes up the feel of the Victorian Sunday and its reputation for unrelenting lassitude and inertia. Sunday reading was, however, one means to address this temporal void, provided the reading materials were deemed acceptable. A list of suitable books for that day is frequently detailed in memoirs concerning the devout Evangelical upbringings of their authors. In the context of Victorian Sabbatarian debates, this chapter looks on the affects of Sunday boredom as an instance of stalled, long time before turning to a solution of sorts: Sunday-reading periodicals that, as the case of the weekly Evangelical periodical The Sunday at Home illustrates, offered a diversionary reprieve that could multiply readers’ experience of time, and even render the feeling of eternal waiting as more welcome moments of leisure. This kind of reading shows us how what we might think of as devotional contemplation was being re-temporalized as diversion.

Apportioning the Devotional Day

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.