Apologia pro vita sua
My last "This Week's Acquisitions" entry prompted an understandable query about my habit of buying not just Victorian religious fiction, but also tracts and "diatribes." As Our Girl in Chicago observes, this is the kind of writing one tends to file under "competent"--on a good day, that is. So why do I have a lifetime supply of religious tracts, none of which appear to be fulfilling their intended rhetorical function?
Well. There's the pragmatic reason: if I don't buy 'em, I have to get on a plane to see 'em. Rochester does have a divinity school with a decent library (recently sold to the U of R), so I can get some things locally; otherwise, though, I have to get myself to the Union Theological Seminary or a similar locale. Many of these tracts are ephemeral, which means that they're often near-impossible to see via ILL. The same goes for a number of the novels, especially cheap fiction published by the RTS, SPCK, John F. Shaw, and similar publishers. Most of these books are "rare" but not "in demand,"* which means that I can purchase them without going bankrupt--even if I can't get them via ILL.
I suspect, however, that I'm not answering the real question: why on earth am I reading these books? Surely I'd much rather be reading Dickens and Eliot? (Er, yes.) Or, as a bemused friend once inquired, "Why do you do these things to yourself?" It's easy enough to give a narrative answer. Phase One of my interest, as an undergraduate, was more personal than intellectual: Jews were relatively rare on the ground at UC Irvine--in fact, several students told me that I was the first Jew they'd ever met!--but born-again Christians were common. Thus, there was a certain degree of self-defense going on. That being said, Phase One abated quite rapidly once I relocated to the University of Chicago. Phase Two kicked in while I was writing my doctoral dissertation, when it became clear that popular women's history often interfaced with Protestant theology in all sorts of interesting ways. Unlike Cardinal Newman, however, I don't think that there's an organic relationship between these two phases: the "personal" phase of my interest was too local, for lack of a better word, to survive my literal and figurative transplantation to another environment. The second time I became interested in religious issues, however, it was because I'd realized that I was far more intrigued by literary history than literary deconstruction, and there's no escaping the role of religious conflict in the shaping of nineteenth-century literary history. (I should add that religious conflicts shape literary form as well as literary conflict.) I tend to write about the various "Catholic Questions" because the Victorians themselves were so obsessed with Roman Catholicism, and Victorian anti-Catholic texts still have a foothold in some contemporary fundamentalist quarters.
In the end, though, I think that it's not always possible to say, "I'm interested in such-and-such for the following reason." Something clicks for me when I work with these texts, just as something clicks when I read nineteenth-century fiction (a taste for which I cannot, in fact, offer a rational explanation--it simply pleases me). I read and write about these texts to help me understand how Victorian literature works, and, I hope, to help others do the same. Why else?
*--I confess to avoiding eBay sellers who advertise a book's "rarity," as though that was automatically going to guarantee a higher price.