Brief, scattered thoughts about writing about Victorian religion and literature, preparatory to revising an introduction
(The following thoughts are not yet refined and, obviously, lack footnotes. However, they will ultimately explain why Book Two looks like it does, and so the polemical overtones are deliberate. I'm responding to specific comments on/questions about my work--particularly questions about why so few canonical authors put in an appearance.)
1. Our (current) canon of Victorian fiction is secularized. By which I do not mean that it is secular, but that it consists of works that can be analyzed with little or no systematic reference to religion--even when those works contain significant, overt religious content (e.g., Jane Eyre). In fact, given that canonical Victorian novels are complex, sophisticated, and sometimes ambiguous works that lend themselves easily to close reading, the modern critic can often find evidence that the novel is "subverting" or otherwise undermining orthodox religious values (see, again, Jane Eyre). Moreover, none of the "name" Victorian novelists--second- and third-rank figures included--followed a strict evangelical line, and many of them were "nominal," skeptical, agnostic, non-dogmatic, unconventional, or simply uninterested in controversy. (The Anglo-Catholic Charlotte Yonge is a rare example of a "name" whose work really cannot be interpreted outside its religious framework--or, at least, not without a heck of a lot of effort.) By the same token, there are now no "name" Roman Catholic novelists at all--barring the brief forays into fiction of Manning and Newman--although a few, like Lady Georgiana Fullerton, were mainstream successes.
2. Writing about religion in canonical texts frequently (although certainly not always) means teasing out subtle allusions, figures, and narrative patterns; pointing out an author's critical, revisionist, or contrarian take on contemporary religious questions; or analyzing the sociocultural role of religion in the author's work (e.g., Trollope and his clergymen).
3. There are incredibly broad swathes of nineteenth-century religious history about which our recognizable (not even canonical) authors had little or nothing to say. Moreover, the reader who focuses primarily on these novelists may not even know that these issues exist. (An obvious example is the Ritualist controversy, which consumed an entire forest's worth of trees and led to multiple riots, several prominent prosecutions, and government intervention. Given how little time it receives from the recognizable Victorian novelists, you'd think it was just a minor kerfuffle. If you noticed it at all.)
4. At a certain point, confining oneself to recognizable (again, not just canonical) novelists means that your work replicates the gaps in theirs. "Historicizing" such authors may well result in the discovery that, again, the author simply was not interested in issue X. (Or, worse still, the absence of explicit references to X may lead to the assumption that X didn't exist, wasn't discussed, or wasn't an issue.)
5. Once that point is reached, it becomes necessary to study explicitly religious novelists, writing for explicitly religious purposes, who openly engage with and contribute to the ferment of Victorian religious debate.
6. To that end, these novelists creatively appropriated and transformed several popular genres--the Gothic, the historical novel, the domestic novel, even the sensation novel--in ways that bear further study, even apart from their religious interest.
7. In the study of Victorian literature and religion, these authors are not context. They are the text.