LP in the British Library, Day #5
I'm now packing up to head to Liverpool, where I'm conferencing until Friday (and staying in an actual hotel). Then very briefly back to London (where I will also be staying in an actual hotel) before I decamp for ROC on Sunday.
After ten days in a dorm, I think I deserve a hotel. With an actual shower. I'm just saying.
Anyway, the main event:
The Waning Church. I love to evangelize for the importance of reading religious fiction. I really do. But there are times when a novel is so terrible that it forces me to reevaluate not just my research program--maybe I should have specialized in Dickens instead--but also my entire career. It is my solemn belief that this novel ("novel") was written specifically to torment some earnest academic reader 180-odd years down the road. "Bwahahaha," the author chucked gleefully to herself (himself?), "I am going to inflict hours of suffering, worse than the worst toothache, on some benighted fool idiotic enough to read this book."
Um. Ahem.
In case you haven't already guessed, The Waning Church is a "novel" with no immediately obvious redeeming features. OK, it may have a single redeeming feature: it's in part a satire of Edward Irving's ministry and those worshippers who began speaking in tongues. When the novel remembers that that's what it's doing, it's of some historical interest. Unfortunately, the novel rarely remembers what it's doing. In fact, it rarely remembers that it has a plot: we spend the first half with a censorious Christian gent named Moncton, between lectures on the dangers of excessive "charity," and then we spend the entirely disconnected second half with the Daniel and Herbert families, who exhibit various modern virtues and vices. How the novel gets from part I to part II is one of those mysteries that cannot be resolved by reason. In any event, apart from the mockery of Irving (and the plot's total incoherence), the novel is notable primarily for endless lectures on things like Antinomianism; I was amused, though, by virtuous Aunt Fanny's argument that it's no use saving for the future when you can be charitable in the present--God will provide--as I somehow don't think that jibes with modern messages about economic responsibility.
What I'm saying is that unless you're interested in Edward Irving, you can, you know, skip this.
[Amelia Bristow], Miriam and Rosette: Or, The Twin Sisters. A Jewish Narrative of the Eighteenth Century. Bristow wrote several Jewish conversion narratives. Usually, their titles have something to do with their contents, but that's really not the case here: the eponymous sisters are minor characters, and the primary emphasis falls on brothers Elnathan and Josiah and their severely disabled sister, Eliphalette. Elnathan's and Josiah's Christian friend Henry gives them a NT, which converts both boys; however, Josiah is successfully deconverted by rabbinical pressure (an unusual plot twist in this kind of novel), while Elnathan is excommunicated and declared dead (a usual plot twist--although it's expected, so more of a "plot straight"?). After some sneaking about, though, Elnathan manages to pass his NT on to Eliphalette, and she also converts, but without ever speaking of it. (Secret Bible reading = another common trope.) Amazingly, neither Miriam nor Rosette converts, and neither does anyone else. Instead, the novel racks up an astonishing number of catastrophes in the last few pages: Lewis, a guy hopelessly in love with Eliphalette, slowly loses his mind because of unrequited love; Eliphalette suddenly keels over; and Eliphalette's nurse Leovina (responsible for the disability in the first place) goes insane, attacks Rosette, and then tosses herself off the nearest parapet. Of course, Elnathan also dies, but he gets an (offstage) good Christian death. If you're interested in conversion novels, this one is interesting for the near-total absence of effective conversions. It also features an attack on the blood libel, which is unusual for 1837 (there had been a recent outbreak, but the Damascus Affair three years later was what made the blood libel a more serious topic of discussion for Victorian evangelicals).