Multifarious matters
I'm currently reading a somewhat inept religious novel called Truth without Fiction, and Religion without Disguise (1837), which may at some point burst out into an attack on the Oxford Movement. (The protagonists are students at Oxford.) I admit that even such a hardened individual as myself quails at a 500+ page novel with characters named "Mr. Kindly" and "John Martyr" (good heavens!), but one soldiers on. In any event, it seems that this novel was perhaps a little bit much for even its more devout readers. Here's The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle:
As the work contains sixty-two chapters, occupying five hundred and nine pages, we cannot give even any tolerable account of the multifarious matters it exhibits to our view. Here we have the heroes of the tale, Mortimer and Clinton, Oxford acquaintances, interviews, parties, discussions, rural scenery, walks, visits, excursions, friends, intimacies, correspondence, attachments, separations, departure from college, tutorship, curacy, pastoral visits, tricks of lawyers, remarkable conversions, and death-bed scenes, &c. Charles Mortimer must surely have been a very handsome youth, of most engaging manners, and enthusiastic in his descriptions of the ladies of his acquaintance, most of whom appear to have been prodigies of beauty and piety too. Poetic quotations also seem to make a conspicuous part of many chapters, the profusion of which might have been spared with advantage to the narrative. (71)
It would appear that I am not the only person in recent memory to attempt to scale the figurative cliffs of this novel's overwrought flights of pious fancy--with the same reaction, no less. (This sort of research can be a lonely business, you understand.) To give you an idea of what I'm up against, here's the first direct quotation from One of Our Heroes. Bear in mind that the entire novel is written this way:
"These arching branches," said Charles, "no doubt suggested their ideas to the first architects of churches. In such verdant temples as this our first parents worshipped, the Patriarchs in such sacred groves no doubt conversed with God, and offered up the sacrifice of prayer and praise; in such temples the ancient Christians worshipped, and the persecuted Waldenses found a sanctuary in their retired forests. I never walk through a wood but it inspires me with serious reflections and disposes me to acts of devotion." (4)
On a more serious note, the EM's gentle chiding offers a useful reminder that those Victorians who wanted to Christianize the novel were nevertheless extremely divided about what constituted a successful example of the form...no less so than their equivalents today. In this case, the novel's moral tendencies may be unexceptionable, but the reviewer is nevertheless quite clear: the book flunks as a competent work of fiction. It's not as though nobody noticed at the time that these novels were frequently less than high quality. From a literary-historical point of view, the tension between religious-novel-as-utilitarian-work (i.e., Historical Tales for Young Protestants, used to proselytize) and religious-novel-as-novel poses some interesting problems when you think about how such novels enter into "high" (or, at least, higher) literary discourses. For example, Father John Barham in Trollope's The Way We Live Now (which I just finished rereading) appears to have strolled in from a controversial novel, which produces much of his comic effect: he acts as though he's in a controversial novel, a genre in which characters always find some way of bringing religion on the table, but Roger Carbury sits firmly in a realist anatomy of manners--in which Father John's behavior is simply rude, and ultimately gets him ejected from the premises. There's satirical contact between Trollope's literary universe and that of the controversial novel, but it's contact all the same; we're expected to recognize that the rules of the game don't quite match here.