'On God and godlike men we build our trust': Canonization, collective memory, and the Victorian quest for origins (Arthur Hallam, John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Tennyson).

摘要

Drawing from sermons, pamphlets, periodicals, and literary works this dissertation situates Victorian representations of sainthood within a much larger cultural debate over England's place in history. I contend that the saint, by virtue of being always both of the past and of the present, provided a site at which Anglicans of all party affiliations attempted to create cultural memories to respond to a perceived rupture in a continuous narrative of history occasioned by Catholic Emancipation and by the repeals of the Test and Corporations Acts.; Chapter One considers the late-Romantic response to continental Catholicism, arguing that travelers' accounts of "saint worship" present the saints as figures around which multiple narratives of history can be constructed, thus setting the stage for later discussions of sainthood in Victorian culture. Chapter Two traces John Henry Newman's response to Roman Catholic ideas about sainthood from his own travel to Rome through his theological writings of the 1830s to his eventual conversion following his work on The Lives of the English Saints. Chapter Three explores the writings of Charles Kingsley as one Broad Church response to the hierarchical vision of history presented by the Oxford Movement. Kingsley's constant revision of the saints' lives in works such as The Saint's Tragedy, Yeast, and Alton Locke suggests the power of the saint as a rhetorical device for reorganizing historical narratives, in Kingsley's case to justify the project of social justice that he and others embraced. Chapter Four argues that in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson appropriates the form of the saint, stripping it of its specifically religious content to perform canonize Arthur Hallam as an icon of civic virtue. My conclusion extends the argument of chapter four, arguing that both popular and literary accounts of the death of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington acknowledge the failure of religious discourse to sustain an overarching narrative of English history. Often explicitly recognizing this failure, these accounts present Wellington in hagiographic language that repairs the rupture in history created by Catholic Emancipation by creating of Wellington a saint in service of civic duty rather than of religious purity.