A few months before Carlyle’s doubt-drenched Sartor Resartus began circulating in England, John Henry Newman was wandering the streets of Leonforte, a small town in Sicily, berating himself for his “utter hollowness.”1 Carlyle’s eccentric narrator had given a resounding “yea” to the universe, in hopes of combating his own relentless doubt. Newman—then a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford—had returned to Sicily alone to clarify exactly what he believed.
For both Victorians, doubt turned out to be more than a serious preoccupation; it brought to a head concerns about the Anglican Church that Newman would pursue literally and figuratively to Rome. At the same time, Carlyle, and Anne and Branwell Brontë, the focus of this chapter, would develop full-blown meditations on the nature of faith and unbelief. All harboring doubt, they found different ways to represent and work through it. Their spiritual crises and solutions are—like the story of Victorian doubt itself—inseparable from the broader cultural and religious crises that roiled Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
By June 1833, somewhat tired of his own company and deliriously imagining that he’d been “given over” to the devil as a test, Newman was “aching to get home” from his travels around southern Italy.2 Already weak from typhoid fever, an illness he viewed as punishment for his earlier wavering, he harangued himself for his want of faith and lack of “self denial.”3 Not surprisingly, with all that pressure added to the debilitating effects of illness, Newman’s inability to find transportation home proved too much. “I sat down on my bed,” he wrote, “and began to sob violently.”4 “I kept asking almost impatiently why God so fought against me.”5
The Oxford tutor who played a major role in trying to reorient England’s church toward Rome—indeed, the man the Vatican is now considering for sainthood6—had sailed from Falmouth the previous December with Hurrell Froude, his closest friend, and Froude’s father.7 (Froude senior will appear again in the next chapter, when he disinherits his youngest son, James Anthony, for writing The Nemesis of Faith.) Once in Italy, Newman wrote a letter home calling Rome “the most wonderful place in the world,” though he viewed its church as “polytheistic, degrading, idolatrous.”8 Twelve years later, having changed his mind, he set off a firestorm in England by converting to Roman Catholicism.
Eventually, in Sicily, the right ship turned up, and Newman boarded “an orange boat, bound for Marseilles.”9 But when the wind died in the Straits of Bonifacio (the small patch of sea between Corsica and Sardinia), a thick fog fell, giving Newman the impression that the boat was lost, even stranded. In his faith or impatience, thinking he was sent another test, he sat down to compose “Lead, Kindly Light,” an allegory about overcoming doubt that would soon become the Victorians’ favorite hymn. He signed it, appropriately, “at sea.”
“Lead, kindly Light,” the first stanza exhorts,
amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.10
By turning doubt into a metaphor, Newman transformed the orange boat into a beacon of hope. In other respects, “Lead, Kindly Light” makes doubt manageable by allowing it to seem predictable. Like those before him, including Bunyan, Newman helped to turn doubt into an ordeal designed to test the believer, to make him or her try harder, and even to relish doing so. In Newman’s case, the result was stronger faith following conversion to Catholicism. For Anne Brontë, by contrast, the effect was a persistent “tinge of religious melancholy.”11 That’s partly because the Evangelical tradition in which she worshipped viewed faith as “God-given” and thus as something that God could and did take away. The very presence of doubt was to such Christians a sign that God had rejected the worshipper and thus a calamitous judgment that the mortal wasn’t sufficiently worthy to enter heaven.
Newman’s path to Rome was of course very much his own, and fashioned at a time when many were leaving the Anglican Church in large numbers, either troubled by its internal rifts or unable to continue believing in its Articles of Religion (on which more soon). Even so, the central role that he played in England’s Oxford Movement—combined with his later conversion to Catholicism (1845)—meant that he worked through some of the thorniest theological problems of the age: baptismal regeneration, unconditional election, reprobation, vicarious atonement, and final perseverance.
Here, too, dissent became entangled with doubt, indicating the latter’s complex shading among skeptics and denominations. In his strong objections to “the school of Calvin,” for example, Newman voiced skeptical positions to which unbelievers and freethinkers were similarly prone.12 As he explained, using hyperbole to convey his thoughts on the crisis into which Calvinism had helped to throw the Established Church, “There are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism.”13
Put this way, Newman’s intense suffering by the Mediterranean starts to bear an uncanny resemblance to that of doubters such as Arthur Hugh Clough, poet and friend to Thomas and Matthew Arnold, who after much soul-searching decided to give up his tutorship at Oriel College because it required him to teach the Thirty-Nine Articles.14 In hindsight, the dovetailing of religiously motivated doubt with that of skeptics and freethinkers is not only apt, as Newman made clear, but also helpful in underscoring why and how agnosticism arose from within a religious context.15
“I have a very large amount of objection or rather repugnance to sign” them from the heart, Clough wrote to friend J. P. Gell about the articles. The necessary oath was to him “a bondage, and a very heavy one, and one that may cramp and cripple one for life.”16 The author of “The Latest Decalogue” and other doubt-filled poems wrote further to Gell one year later, “If I begin to think about God, there [arise] a thousand questions, and whether the 39 Articles answer them at all or whether I should not answer them in the most diametrically opposite purport is a matter of great doubt.”17
The Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles had been established in 1563 as the cornerstone of its doctrine—indeed, as a means of cementing the Reformation and break with the Roman Church. They range from the opening article, whose second clause had become increasingly contentious (“There is but one living and true God … the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible”) to number 20, on ecclesiastical authority (“The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith”). Article 33 concerns the policy of how to “excommunicate Persons, how they are to be avoided”: “That person which by open denunciation of the Church is rightly cut off from the unity of the Church, and excommunicated, ought to be taken of the whole multitude of the faithful, as an Heathen and Publican, until he be openly reconciled by penance.”18 One gets a sense, at least, of how difficult it was for many scholars to swear to uphold such articles as a matter of belief and English law.
That the crisis affected Clough and Newman differently is beyond dispute, yet each of them—and many others of their generation—felt that they had come to a fork: beliefs had to be tested, to see if faith would endure. Both, accordingly, leaned heavily though differently on doubt. Newman’s decision thereafter was to embrace doctrine more fervently through another branch of Christianity. But many others, finding that path impossible or undesirable, instead discovered that their beliefs faltered because of weakened attraction to the Church. After following their consciences to doubt, many then transitioned to various forms of secularism. Susan Budd notes that “the conversion to atheism usually followed two distinct phases: the conversion from Christianity to unbelief or uncertainty, … and the move from unbelief to positive commitment to secularism.”19 Experiencing chiefly the first phase, Clough and Carlyle put their impressive minds and energies to the advancement of nonreligious ideas. In doing so, they helped to transform the nation’s culture.
The number of Victorian treatises and novels that they and other writers composed on religious doubt alone easily reaches one hundred.20 Some of them treat doubt elliptically, as a subject too difficult to voice directly, but implying a feared loss of social order.21 When one considers the sheer number of works and articles on the subject, including only the period’s major poetic statements on doubt—from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) and Thomas Hardy’s “God’s Funeral” (c. 1908)—one starts to glimpse the haunting, often agonizing importance of the subject for the culture at large. Even in Hardy’s supposed elegy for the deity, a “man-projected Figure,” the speaker cannot stop imagining what men and women will create instead to worship.22
Although Newman parted theological company with many of his contemporaries, his importance to them remained. As his beliefs inched ever closer to Rome, he made it easier for Victorian skeptics to join him in examining what was least attractive about Anglicanism.
Despite the obvious provocations of early Victorian geology and biology, the theological wrangles that unfolded in 1830s Oxford began as separate phenomena. The more immediate threats to the Established Church were rifts over doctrine, driven in part by religiously inflected doubt, as well as by the religious enthusiasm and zealotry that Methodism and Evangelicalism had been encouraging for more than a century.
Throughout the 1730s and beyond, Methodists were perceived in Britain as a growing threat. They were persecuted accordingly, partly because, in refusing to abide by Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles, Methodist preachers gave unlicensed sermons to lay audiences, often in nonreligious settings such as fields and schoolrooms. In England, early Methodism (initially a pejorative term) helped to stoke what was later called the First Great Awakening of religious enthusiasm that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving the country’s religious landscape permanently altered.
One reason emerged for the fervor in both countries: Methodism, like Calvinism, appealed directly to a strong sense of personal guilt over the death of Christ, which both denominations saw as the path to salvation. Where Anglicanism stressed ritual and ceremony, with an array of theological teachings about the Trinity, Methodism in particular pared away that structure. It stressed the fundamental importance—and simplicity—of a personal rapport with Christ, though it dwelled on other emphases, too, such as the importance of conversion and of practical piety, meaning social activism at home and missionary zeal abroad.
“In their war against the flesh,” one scholar writes about Methodists, “every aspect of corruption served to heighten the end they had in view: to disgust their followers with this life and speed them into the next.”23 That’s putting it strongly, but both Methodism and Calvinism aimed at inducing constant reminders of humanity’s propensity to sin, in accusations that could easily border on fanaticism. As Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster of Lowood School, explains in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic, “I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of this world: my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh, to teach them to clothe themselves with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel; and each of the young persons before us [with naturally curly hair] has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity itself might have woven: these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the time wasted.”24 Recoiling from such Calvinism, Brontë turns Brocklehurst—a “black marble clergyman” whose “grim face” resembles “a carved mask”—into a hypocrite who parades his daughters before his impoverished, orphaned students.25 He does so, amazingly, with his daughters clothed in silk dresses, enjoying long flowing locks, without any awkwardness about the double standard. Toward the end of the novel, moreover, St. John Rivers, an aspiring Calvinist missionary whose “marble-seeming features … [are] expressive of a repressed fervour,” proposes marriage to Jane Eyre on condition that they both move to India to evangelize. “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife,” he tells her. When Jane agrees to the work but not the marriage, Rivers is almost instantly scornful: “Tremble lest in that case you should be numbered with those who have denied the faith, and are worse than infidels!”26
Brontë’s portrayal of Calvinism is clearly extreme, but its rhetoric of mortifying the flesh appealed to those who wanted stark distinctions between virtue and sin, as well as clear mandates on what to reject and despise. Its fire-and-brimstone edicts left worshippers in no doubt about who would be saved and who apparently would not. It wasn’t a joyous outlook, nor was it kind to congregations. In general, Evangelicalism gave worshippers a constant terror of judgment, which took hold rapidly in remoter Anglican parishes, especially those without priests. Thereafter, sermons were designed less to communicate love and acceptance than to stir trepidation about burning pits of fire. The demand for repentance, atonement, and regeneration was harsh, but it gave followers black-and-white rules that could be reassuring in the certainty they described.
One of the best passages detailing Newman’s despair over such theology is the moment in his autobiography when he sums up what pulled him in the “opposite” direction, toward Hurrell Froude and Roman Catholicism. Newman had flirted briefly with Calvinism in his teens, following an even earlier diet of freethinkers such as Hume, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine. In his admiration for Froude, however, one detects the rationale for a larger intellectual movement, like the one that he and other Tractarians would soon cultivate:
He professed openly his admiration of the Church of Rome, and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the maxim, “The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants”; and he gloried in accepting Tradition as a main instrument of religious teaching. He had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity; and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great Pattern. He delighted in thinking of the Saints; he had a vivid appreciation of the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights; and he was more than inclined to believe a large amount of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and middle ages. He embraced the principle of penance and mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully drawn to the Medieval Church, but not to the Primitive.27
All those factors, however, as readily propelled people from the Church as toward it. To Newman’s assertions about the miraculous, for instance, one could as easily echo William Nicholson’s question, quoted in chapter 1: Why would so much “miraculous interference” occur predominantly “in the early and middle ages,” leaving “so few” signs of it “in latter times?”28 Indeed, that Newman’s younger brother, Francis, transitioned fairly quickly from Calvinism to deism to religious doubt—more or less as Hurrell’s brother Anthony would—makes clear that the very elements of faith that John Henry upheld as attractive were, for many others, sources of controversy, even deep consternation.29 Widespread anger over Newman’s final tract, about the terms and limits of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, was, after all, a key reason he decided to leave the Oxford Movement, and with it the Anglican Church.30
In each of the above clauses about Hurrell Froude, however, Newman lists an equal-and-opposite reaction to Calvinism, which rejected hierarchies, iconography, miracles, and just about everything else that it saw as detracting from Christ, conversion, and scripture. Newman had not yet joined the Roman Church, over which he still had serious doctrinal concerns, but the Oxford Movement, he makes clear, sprang from a deep desire to restore to Anglicanism aspects of the English church that the Reformation had rejected as “Popery.” What he advocated, quite bluntly, was “a second Reformation:—a better reformation, for it would be a return not to the sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth.”31
The Reverend John Keble, then chair of poetry at Oxford, had helped to form the Oxford Movement when he preached his famous Assize sermon, “National Apostasy,” in July 1833. Contesting the idea that interest in the pre-Reformation church meant that one was seeing “omens and tokens of an Apostate Mind in a nation,” Keble urged his congregation to embrace that interest and the momentum it was gathering.32
As Newman would, Keble argued that Britain was right to revive its “Apostolical Church.” He called on followers to “uphold [and] restore” that pre-Reformation tradition by asking them to weigh two startling questions: “What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ? And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?”33 Confident that the “good Christian” and “true Churchman” would find “the winning side” and that victory would be “complete, universal, eternal,” Keble went on to become a leading light of the Tractarians. He did not, however, follow Newman into the Roman Catholic Church.34
Rather less sanguine, by contrast, the devout Anglican John Constable painted Salisbury Cathedral—founded in 1220 and representative to him of the plight of the Church as a whole—as racked by storms but still yet weathering them.
Constable had already painted Salisbury Cathedral before, in a work commissioned by John Fisher, then bishop of Salisbury. That earlier painting, from 1825, presents the cathedral as flooded by sunlight and surrounded by blue sky. But in his even more symbolic 1831 rendition (see illustration), the swollen river mires the progress of a horse and cart, while a grave marker joltingly reminds of death. The painting seems bogged down with challenges, impediments, and endings. Nevertheless, Constable’s ash tree is meant to symbolize life, and the cathedral spire—mirroring its insistent vertical line—points urgently, resiliently, to a gap in the skies promising reprieve. Constable completes the scene with a rainbow almost encircling the cathedral, as if he wanted to shield it from the lowering skies. These, his symbolism makes unavoidable, are the same threatening clouds that menace Oxford just a few dozen miles northeast.35
Painting a rainbow above Salisbury Cathedral epitomized Constable’s anxiety at the time, including about the movement that Keble, Newman, and their colleague Edward Pusey were promoting, but putting an end to all the wrangling in 1830s Oxford proved to be far more difficult. While Thomas Arnold (Matthew’s father and headmaster of the elite Rugby School) publicly rebuked the Tractarians, as they had become known, as “Oxford Malignants,” privately he went further, castigating them as “idolaters.” In words that soon reached Newman, he wrote to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, a former pupil, “I do not call them bad men, nor would I deny their many good qualities; … but fanaticism is idolatry, and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creature of his own devices.”36
Figure 6. John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, oil on canvas, 1831. © National Gallery, London.
As the number of doctrinal issues facing the Church grew, however, the idea that fanaticism and factionalism were problems stemming largely from the Tractarians became harder to maintain. Two decades later, pamphlets would circulate in London with such titles as Reasons for Feeling Secure in the Church of England. That pamphlet was written by the Reverend Edward Monro, vicar of Harrow in Middlesex. Though couched as a defense of the Established Church, it is noticeably anti-Catholic in its none too-subtle attempts at stopping more worshippers from leaving the Anglican Church. The article is subtitled, “A Letter to a Friend, in Answer to Doubts Expressed in Reference to the Claims of the Church of Rome,” and it insists on its opening page: “A clear line must be drawn with regard to the claims of the Roman Communion upon us. We can no longer go on playing with Romanism, or live on the borders of her encampments, while we are members of the Communion of the Church of England.”37
With the Church of England increasingly embattled and distracted by the surrounding “encampments” of doubters, Catholics, and nonconformists, the scientific debates sketched in the previous chapter gained momentum. Not only did they encounter less resistance, but they also helped to make a strong case for liberalism, reason, and free thought. Yet as Mill conceded in his treatise On Liberty (1859), “the marvels of modern science, literature, and philosophy” weren’t sufficient to end “the odium theologicum” —or “theological hatred”—that in his view was driving and dividing the devout. On the contrary, “a battlefield” had erupted over Christian doctrines, whereby enthusiasts found it “serviceable to pelt adversaries with” them. “It is understood,” Mill added bitingly, that such doctrines “are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think laudable.”38
Geology and natural history were not, then, the sole or even the initial reason why scholars left the Church. As David DeLaura explains, extending Mill’s point about doctrinal disputes, “The dominant factor” in that departure “was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what [many] had been taught to view as essential Christianity—especially a set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment.”39 “Only after this alienation was fixed,” he concludes, did public doubters such as Francis Newman, James Anthony Froude, and George Eliot “show serious interest in the Higher Criticism (as support for attacking offensive orthodox teachings) and evolution (as indicating away of life more in harmony with the meliorist ethic of the age).”40
Further evidence of recoil from Calvinism came from four writers living some distance from the controversies swirling in Oxford. As renowned for their Romantic literature as they are for wandering the moors of their father’s parish in Yorkshire, Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell Brontë had much to say about religious faith and doubt.
“What shall I do … if there be no God above, / To hear and bless me when I pray?”41 One of Anne Brontë’s best poems, “The Doubter’s Prayer,” raises but cannot answer this startling question. That Brontë asked it at all—and published it for others to see—was not only meaningful but bold and courageous. She was just twenty-three at the time, the daughter of an Irish-Anglican curate. Six years later, still attending church but torn by doubt about religious doctrine, she died of advanced incurable tuberculosis.
Brontë’s doubt surfaced largely in response to Calvinist principles, which haunt her poems and novels as sources of real contention. Yet the pressing question in “The Doubter’s Prayer” (1843)—what to do if God does not exist—goes to the heart of an even greater dilemma over faith and proof that preoccupied her throughout her short life.
Anne Brontë is less well known than her sisters, Emily and Charlotte, but she has been called “the bravest of the Brontës”—not without reason. Not only did she daringly portray “vice with a frankness from which even a Thackeray shrank,” writes biographer Winifred Gérin, “and claim… for women equal legal rights totally denied them at the time, but she penetrated into the very mysteries of religious dogma and proclaimed beliefs which even ten years later were to shock Victorian society.”42
An asthmatic child, Anne “remain[ed] a prey all her life to the dread doctrines of ‘Election’ and ‘Reprobation,’” Gérin reports. These probably came to her filtered through her strictly Methodist aunt, who co-parented after their mother died of cancer in her late thirties. It was her aunt who burdened Anne with a “crushing sense of sin from which it took her all her life to extricate herself.”43 “She lived … under a sense of the daily imminence of death and, something that her aunt made more dreadful still than death, the imminence of Judgment.” So while Anne “revolted against the doctrine of damnation as applied to others,… of her own salvation she remained sadly long in doubt.”44
Figure 7. Patrick Branwell Brontë, portrait of Anne Brontë, poet and novelist (detail of fig. 8). © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Brontë’s poem conveys deep understanding of that uncertainty; it also draws attention to each associated emotion. The poem describes the almost visceral agony of failing to feel the presence of God. Whereas in earlier chapters we saw doubt represented chiefly as an idea or argument, in Brontë’s lyric we are shown the panic of vanishing belief. “To the Protestant,” Marianne Thormahlen explains, “especially one who grew up in an Evangelical home, faith is God-given.”45 One can pray for it, but God must also hear—and be willing to bestow—such faith to those asking to receive it.
Anne’s difficulty, Gérin adds, “was beyond conventional remedy. It was the truth she wanted; help, not a palliative. The future creator of Helen Huntingdon could not be put off with ready-made replies. She would inquire for herself.”46 In doing so, however, Anne’s theological questions seem to have unleashed a nagging fear that belief in God may be a “vain delusion.”47
One point cannot be overstated. “The Doubter’s Prayer” is not a cold, dispassionate exercise; it is full of torment. “If e’er thine ear in mercy bent … / To save lost sinners such as me,” Anne’s speaker cries, “Then hear me now,… O give me—give me Faith! ”48 As her voice rises in despair, appealing to God to “drive these cruel doubts away,” she seems almost beside herself at the thought of losing her beliefs. Yet the one element that seems as if it could anchor faith—proof of God’s existence—remains elusive, requiring still more of what she lacks: religious trust. The thought that God might not exist is terrifying to her. Yet the more the poem tries to stanch that doubt, the more it accents an almost insoluble predicament: its very prayer is aimed at a being who, the speaker allows, may not really be there.
Although some critics view “The Doubter’s Prayer” as an expression of Anne’s religious despair, others claim as plausibly that she may have ventriloquized the published doubts of her brother, Branwell, or blended them with her own.49 Either way, her poem posits a hypothesis that, for many at the time, would have bordered on heresy:
If I believe that Jesus died,
And, waking, rose to reign above;
Then surely sorrow, sin and pride,
Must yield to peace and hope and love. (lines 41–44)
Ordinarily, the “then” in this stanza would answer the “if” that precedes it. But the “if” clause is so unsettling in what it suggests, that “peace and hope and love” cannot stay its designated conclusion. The argument slips; and peace, hope, and love are unable to do their intended work. The poem ends with the fear of unbelief still ringing, like the hum of a struck bell. The conditional clause, “If I believe that Jesus … rose,” still resonates at the final line, leaving the poet and her audience uncertain as to what comes next.
That Brontë’s father was an Anglican curate adds a layer of intrigue to her “Doubter’s Prayer.” Educated at Cambridge and well versed in theological debates, the Reverend Patrick Brontë made the Church his life. As his daughters and son would, he rejected what he called the “appalling doctrines of personal Election and Reprobation” that oriented Calvinism.50 He opted instead for a blend of Wesleyan Methodism and Evangelicalism that made education a priority, for his daughters as well as for his son. He also formed ties to the Clapham Sect, a group of progressive reformers (including William Wilberforce) that fought for the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation, and penal reform.
Like her father, Anne “was a very sincere and practical Christian,” Charlotte explained a year after her younger sister died of pulmonary tuberculosis, but “hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature.” According to Charlotte, still writing under her male pseudonym “Currer,” the dejection stemmed from “a tinge of religious melancholy” that “communicated a sad shade to her brief, blameless life.”51 Although much else in Charlotte’s biographical essay on Anne and Emily has struck critics as exaggerated (partly because Charlotte cultivated a myth that her sisters were guileless and naive), the phrase “religious melancholy” captures Anne’s wrestle with not only Calvinism, but also the Evangelical Christianity that she practiced until her final, illness-ridden days.52 In her 1912 biography of Anne and her sisters, May Sinclair was blunter still: “What her soul suffered from was religious doubt.”53
Among her siblings, Anne was not alone in her concerns about theological doctrines and practices. Her sisters, too, wrote often about them. In novels like Jane Eyre and Villette (1853), Charlotte presented complex, sometimes jarring perspectives on different forms of Christianity—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Catholic—largely to offset a personalized form of faith from its generally unappealing Church representatives. As a result, at least one review denounced Jane Eyre as “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition.” In its “murmuring against the comforts of the rich,” the Quarterly Review warned, the novelist was “murmuring against God’s appointment.” Nor was the novel’s “proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man” to be appreciated, for of these apparently “we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence.”54
“Conventionality is not morality,” Brontë firmly responded in the novel’s second edition, and “self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.”55 Nevertheless, or perhaps because of such reviews, her historical novel Shirley (1849) went on to air (before overruling) the atheism of its male protagonist, Robert Moore. During a heightened row with her meddling uncle over future husbands and their faiths (or lack thereof), the title character, Shirley Keeldar, also boldly tells her uncle:
Your thoughts are not my thoughts, your aims are not my aims, your gods are not my gods. We do not view things in the same light…. As to your small maxims, your narrow rules, your little prejudices, aversions, dogmas, bundle them off: Mr. Sympson—go, offer them a sacrifice to the deity you worship; I’ll none of them: I wash my hands of the lot. I walk by another creed, light, faith, and hope, than you.56
The argument reads like a long-deferred row that has gathered steam for want of airing. When Mr. Sympson responds incredulously, “Another creed! I believe she is an infidel,” Shirley tries to clarify: “An infidel to your religion, an atheist to your god.” But the word “atheist” makes him apoplectic; Brontë gave his italicized repetition of it three exclamation points.
In, moreover, Brontë’s last complete novel, Villette, the protagonist Lucy Snowe calls her complex musings on life and belief a “heretic narrative” from “an unworthy heretic.” She uses the term as a noun or adjective on four other occasions, in part for ironizing elements of the Catholic Church before falling in love, as an avowed Protestant, with an ardent Catholic.57
Emily, meanwhile, set her own pantheistic faith against “the thousand creeds / That move men’s hearts.” These she went on to dismiss, in one poem, as
Vain …
unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity.58
The alliteration in “worthless … withered weeds” almost chokes the life out of such creeds. To Emily, moreover, the creeds actually “waken doubt” in those already predisposed to believe and thus seem almost hostile to Christianity rather than, as intended, a means of defining and nurturing it.
With Branwell Brontë creating unbelieving and doubting characters such as Alexander Percy, who voice much the same philosophy as his own, the Brontë siblings didn’t shy away from religious controversy. They embraced and even courted it, writing powerful indictments of ecclesiastical practice that joined the ranks of criticism from dissenters and skeptics concerned about the future of England’s Established Church.
A startling paradox seems to surround Anne Brontë’s fiction and her life: her quiet, almost withdrawn personality clashes with her writing, which can be bold, even unflinching in its depiction of rage and violence. Critics condemned her second novel in particular for being “extravagant,” “unnecessarily coarse,” and conveying “a morbid love of… the brutal.”59 Like her sisters, she adopted a male pseudonym, Acton Bell, but that doesn’t begin to explain the energies unleashed in her second novel.
The very qualities that make The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) so bracing to analyze today were at the time a “stumbling-block [for] most readers,” making the work “utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls.”60 These, ironically, were the very readers Anne wanted to forewarn about the risks of an ill-considered marriage. “I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths,” she explained in a follow-up preface, “than much soft nonsense.” Obviously trying to hide her annoyance at hostile critics, she demurred: “When we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain that it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear.”61
Most reviewers, unfortunately, were impervious to her appeals. An anonymous critic in Fraser’s Magazine chastised the work’s “foul and accursed under-currents,” including the novel’s perspective on religious doubt, which is more complex and incisive than such blanket condemnation implies. For one thing, the village vicar, the Reverend Michael Mill-ward, is shown as judging his parishioners too quickly and harshly. One observer calls him “a man of fixed principles [and] strong prejudices …, intolerant of dissent in any shape, acting under a firm conviction that his opinions were always right, and whoever differed from them must be either most deplorably ignorant, or wilfully blind” (WH, 19). The judgment is technically by Brontë’s first narrator, Gilbert Markham, who with a male friend shares a quasi-humorous perspective on religious zeal; but it doesn’t differ greatly from concerns about pious rigidity that Brontë described elsewhere, especially in her letters and in such poems as “A Word to the ‘Elect.’”
What may have irked the Fraser’s reviewer most is that the style of Christianity that Brontë admired—a joyous, nonjudgmental kind—finds few adherents in her novels. In Agnes Grey (1847), the first novel, what makes a preacher effective is a recurring concern. Does attractiveness mix poorly with piety, the novel asks, and so blend religious and marital adoration? In Wildfell Hall, by contrast, religious guides are unreliable, and the drama of physical attraction is limited mostly to the heroine’s future husband, Arthur Huntingdon. The novel details his sordid, largely unrepentant collapse as a hedonist and serial adulterer who treats his wife and child atrociously. Indeed, when the novel opens, and Markham struggles to make sense of Helen Huntingdon to his friend, she is trying to pass herself off as a widow—one, we later learn, who has escaped the clutches of an abusive husband.
Biographical details play a complicated role here. Anne appears to have drawn on scenes she witnessed at Thorp Green Hall, Yorkshire, where she and Branwell worked as tutors. Yet much of the depiction of Arthur seems also to have been shaped by Branwell, especially in his final, profligate years, when—addicted to alcohol and laudanum—he ran up big debts, created havoc in the vicarage at Haworth, and led his sisters, father, and then himself to the brink of despair. And though “the precise circumstances of Branwell’s disgrace have [long] been a matter of controversy among Brontë scholars,” as biographer Edward Chitham puts it, it is still “legitimate to ask where Anne found her material for Wildfell Hall.”62
Whatever the sources of her inspiration, Anne seems to have wanted to rewrite—even to de-Romanticize—the forms of violence that saturate her sister’s Wuthering Heights, a novel she echoes in both her title, Wildfell Hall, and the names of her characters.63 Yet just as Heathcliff’s godless charisma seems almost designed to prevent readers from simply dismissing him in Emily’s novel, in an odd twist Arthur Huntingdon is given some of the best lines of Wildfell Hall, including about belief and doubt. “What is God—I cannot see him or hear Him?” he asks and observes, moments before dying. “God is only an idea,” he states “contemptuously”; “it’s all a fable” (WH, 446, 441).
Arthur’s confident atheism quickly turns to panic, however, about the risk of premature unbelief. To his insistence that “it’s all a fable,” Helen immediately responds: “Are you sure, Arthur? Are you quite sure? Because if there is any doubt, and if you should find yourself mistaken after all, when it is too late to turn—” (WH, 441). She, at least, seems certain what awaits him, in contrast to the speakers of many of Brontë’s poems, who don’t always know. “The sufferer was fast approaching dissolution,” Helen observes dispassionately, almost impersonally about her husband, “dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony or tears could save him” (444). Helen isn’t necessarily right. She is revealing both her concerns and her beliefs, which sometimes come across as starchly pious, even prim. Indeed, her language about Arthur’s demise—in Calvinist rhetoric—is language Brontë elsewhere rejected as judgmental, uninviting, and borderline cruel.
In “A Word to the Calvinists,” which she published in Poems and later retitled “A Word to the ‘Elect,’” Anne Brontë added ironic quotation marks to “Elect” and sardonic emphasis to a set of accusations that already seem fierce: “You may rejoice to think yourselves secure,” her speaker almost sneers in the opening line,
But is it sweet to look around and view
Thousands excluded from that happiness,
Which they deserve at least as much as you,
Their faults not greater nor their virtues less?
And wherefore should you love your God the more
Because to you alone his smiles are given,
Because He chose to pass the many o’er,
And only bring the favoured few to Heaven?64
The poem tackles the Calvinist doctrine of “unconditional election,” whereby a small minority—predestined—is guaranteed a place in heaven.65 One reason for the doctrine’s controversy: it upended the Protestant argument that entrance to heaven is based on a life of faith and good works. Instead, Calvinism created something of an advanced quota for heaven. An elect were guaranteed salvation almost no matter what they did on earth.
In Wildfell Hall, concern about “election” is beside the point. Arthur is so intransigent, he is hoist with his own petard. His reasonable skepticism —“What is God …? God is only an idea —tips into churlishness about even suggestions of last-minute atonement: “Where’s the use of a probationary existence,” he opines, “if a man may spend it as he pleases, just contrary to God’s decrees, and then go to Heaven with the best—if the vilest sinner may win the reward of the holiest saint, by merely saying, ‘I repent’?” (WH, 445).
A reasonable point, to be sure, but since it is difficult to imagine a person voicing the quibble moments before death, Brontë’s second novel in effect turns her protagonists into puppets just when their religious doubt becomes most interesting. The emotion of doubt reverts to something like a line from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. As the reviewer for Fraser’s observed, justly, “One is inclined sometimes to suspect that they are caricatures.”66
In looking to stage a debate about the merits of religious doubt, albeit through the novel’s back door, Brontë in effect backs off too quickly—sooner than in her poetry—and opts for stilted words befitting neither character nor context. The dying man, a reviled hedonist who previously had called God an idea, is given half a page to modify his earliest expression of doubt before his wife explains, with more revelation than she perhaps knows: “I do not wish to be set down as an infidel” (WH, 395).
In a novel about marital injustice, it is only fitting that Arthur review his past behavior. But he is allowed neither insight nor maturity; he simply reverts to his former monstrousness, begging—apparently in earnest—for his wife to join him in perdition, to make his case for redemption at the gates of hell: “Helen, you must save me!… I wish to God I could take you with me now!… you should plead for me” (WH, 441, 446).67
Given the heat that Brontë had already taken for her novel’s “foul and accursed under-currents,” it is clear why she would want to avoid any hint that she is on the side of an “infidel.”68 In effect, though, she kills two birds with one stone, allowing atheism and agnosticism—already made inseparable from Arthur’s hedonism and amorality—to be all but eliminated by his death. Paradoxically, doubt in the novel is not so easily suppressed. Even before Arthur falls sick, Helen asks herself: “Have I no faith in God?” (WH, 368). The novel implicitly answers that with her later caveat, to her diary: “if I could only have faith and fortitude to compose my thoughts” (395).
Although religious doubt haunts Brontë’s second novel, her poems tend to take it more seriously, in part by painstakingly capturing, in the first person, the emotion tied to vanishing faith. In “A Prayer,” for example, despite the speaker’s claim to have a “trembling soul that would fain be Thine,” she chides her “feeble faith” with existential anxiety about what could happen to her without it: “O, do not leave me desolate!”69 Similar concern agitates “Despondency.” Indeed, the speaker’s acknowledgment that “Faith itself is wavering now” slips between a question and an exclamation: “O how shall I arise!”70
The poet also found the conditional tense and subjunctive voice conducive to her expressions of doubt. In “To Cowper,” for instance, her eulogy to the Romantic poet and writer of hymns alights rapidly on his “dark despair” and “wilder woe,” as if the religious doubt that “crushed and tortured” him might almost eclipse her own. Despite insisting that such uncertainties “are gone” from her, the poem undercuts that message with a striking conditional: “if God is love / And answers fervent prayer.”71 Other poems by her are strewn with subjunctives, including these halting qualifiers: “If thy hand conducts me,” “If but thy strength be mine,” and “if I hold thee fast.”72
In a self-divided, almost self-accusative way, Brontë’s use of the subjunctive weakened her attempts at ringing assertions of faith. A voice of doubt insisted on being heard, no matter what the occasion. The subjunctive adds ambivalence in her hymnal confessionals, often precisely when they’re trying to settle theological conundrums. But while her sensitive hymns record the emotion of lost faith and the heartbreaking difficulty of doubt, they pale in drama beside her brother’s franker atheism, which he seems to have reached at an even younger age.
The habit of ignoring or dismissing Branwell is now so firmly rooted in Brontë scholarship that it has become self-perpetuating. That May Sinclair could in 1912 publish a study entitled simply The Three Brontës is a telling sign of occlusion that probably dates to Charlotte’s efforts to scrub her difficult brother from the literary and artistic record. Her letters about him are angry and reproachful, attesting to “the emptiness of his whole existence.”73 It didn’t help that Branwell literally painted himself out of his best portrait, a now-famous rendition of his sisters.
In 1912, when six autographed fragments of the children’s early work came up for auction, Esther Alice Chadwick (a collector of oral history from Haworth) sniffed about the peculiarity of two of Branwell’s works commanding a high price. He “has been discarded,” she wrote, “and considered unfit to be associated with his sisters, either as an author or a brother.”74 Biographies of him also capture a flavor of this judgment, from Daphne du Maurier’s Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1961) to Joan Rees’ Profligate Son (1986) and to Mary Butterfield and R. J. Duckett’s Brother in the Shadow (1988).75 Du Maurier presents Branwell as almost schizophrenic in belief and behavior:
The two sides of Branwell’s nature stood in balance. The one affectionate, ardent, devoted to his family and above all his father, hoping—for their sake as well as for his own—that either by writing or by painting he would prove so successful that not only they but the whole world would come to recognize his talent; the other diffident, mocking, skeptical, doubting as much in his own powers as in a Power above, and sometimes so fearful of the black abyss of Eternity that the only way to quieten apprehension would seem to be a plunge into vice and folly.76
Figure 8. Patrick Branwell Brontë, The Brontë Sisters (Anne Brontë; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë [Mrs. A. B. Nicholls]), oil on canvas, c. 1834. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Two substantial editions of his poetry attest to a prodigious output, quite a lot of it focused on unbelief and religious doubt. Indeed, Branwell was not only fiercely precocious but also a man who peaked very early, perhaps even burning out before his twenties. By the age of eleven or twelve, he had written several prose pieces, including a six-page History of the Rebellion of My Fellows, and named himself editor and publisher of Branwell’s Blackwoods Magazine. He brought out at least four issues of the magazine, and perhaps as many as seven. Additionally, he wrote a “two-volume travel book, at least thirty-four poems or verse fragments (including an attempt at Latin verse), a verse drama” approximately thirteen hundred lines long, and fourteen poems in collaboration with Charlotte.
Figure 9. Self-portrait of Patrick Branwell Brontë, poet, painter, and tutor, 1840. © The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Editor Victor Neufeldt describes Branwell’s output during these years as “a kind of volcanic eruption with all the sense of undisciplined exuberance the image suggests.”77 The description is especially apt in light of the quandary it raised a few years later, when serious decisions about what path and profession Branwell should pursue bore down on him with intense pressure. Despite his having tried poetry, painting, tutoring, and bookkeeping, Branwell somehow couldn’t stick to any of them.
From this historical distance, with often scant evidence to go on, it is impossible to know whether Branwell’s abuse of laudanum and alcohol caused his depression and downfall or was an effect of it. We can say that it put an end to his literary and artistic talent, which “withered and died like a sprig of bright shamrock perishing among the heather.”78 Less poetically, biographer Winifred Gérin describes his temperament as “histrionic,” which captures the drama with which he lived out his last declining moments.79
In “The Doubter’s Hymn” (1835), drafted eight years before his sister wrote her “Doubter’s Prayer,” one of Branwell’s characters, a rogue philosopher called Alexander Percy, meditates on life, belief, and mortality. He imitates Lord Byron and surely Hamlet in thinking through several outsized metaphysical questions:
What is Eternity?
Is Death the sleep?—Is Heaven the Dream?
Life the reality?80
The penultimate question is a significant one, obviously difficult to answer but still needing to be asked, especially with the ambiguity surrounding that capital “D” in “Dream.” “The Doubter’s Hymn” begins with more declarative authority:
Life is a passing sleep,
Its deeds a troubled dream,
And death the dread awakening
To daylight’s dawning beam.81
Branwell was eighteen when he wrote that (he died of tuberculosis, exacerbated by alcohol and opium abuse, at age thirty-one). Yet even though his style and philosophy were clearly derivative, it is worth asking why he titled the poem a “hymn”—indeed, to what or to whom it aspired to be hymnlike, given its stated doubts. The poem does not appeal for their removal, as Anne Brontë’s would. Nor does it ask for—or seem particularly to want—stronger faith. In that sense it lacks the wrenching anguish of his sister’s prayer, though it is bolder about intellectual doubt. The poem sounds a note of serious skepticism toward its end, as interest rather than despair:
With ‘wildered gaze to see
The aspect of those morning skies,
Where will that waking be?82
Notably, Branwell’s question takes no comfort in classical or Christian models of the hereafter. The speaker seems genuinely undecided and, it must be said, willing to let that uncertainty stand as a question mark over everything presumed known about the afterlife, including whether indeed there is one.
When Percy’s second wife, Mary, dies from consumption in the poem, Branwell is careful to make Percy’s former doubts harden into atheism. “He felt certain,” we are told, in a manuscript du Maurier recovered decades later, “that under any circumstances they must part forever.”83 Later alone, after Mary has died, the sentiment becomes even more emphatic: “While … the past is sliding into nothing, [I] know… that I shall Never, Never See Thee More.”84
In the summer of 1834, Branwell traveled to Leeds to see an exhibition sponsored by the Northern Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. It was there that he found a prototype for Alexander Percy. The sculpture that transfixed him was a large bust of Satan, modeled after the scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost known as Satan’s Address to the Sun. At that point, in book 4 of the poem, Milton oscillates between condemnation and sympathy for Satan, to ensure that we feel a strong tug of interest in the fallen angel’s intelligence and earlier partnership with God.
The bust had been sculpted by Joseph Leyland, a talented twenty-three-year-old from Halifax, just fifteen miles from Haworth, whom Branwell later befriended and tried to emulate.85 Leyland had certainly caught the tension in Milton’s depiction of Satan. A reviewer for the Morning Chronicle noted that “the characteristic marks” of the sculpture were “a scornful lip, distended nostrils, and a forehead more remarkable for breadth than prominence, indicative of great mental capacity, bereft of moral principle.” The reviewer added, “Mr. Leyland has made his Satan a being, not fearful merely, but of that Satanic beauty which is so true to the conception of Milton.”86 Branwell’s adoption of Leyland’s sculpture as his model for Alexander Percy suggests that he, too, wanted to portray doubt and atheism on a grand scale. (Leyland’s sculpture does not appear to have survived. Unfortunately, many of his works were either lost or destroyed.)
Four years later, still powerfully indebted to Byron and his now-celebrated Romantic atheism, Branwell returned—less melodramatically this time—to the subject of unbelief in “Harriet II” (1838).87 The poem is named after Harriet O’Connor, a character in the Angrian tales who leaves her husband for Percy. He in turn abandons her, an act that not only dashes her romantic hopes but also shatters her religious beliefs:
I have lost—long lost—my trust in Thee!
I cannot hope that Thou wilt hear
The unrepentant sinner’s prayer!
So, whither must my spirit flee
For succour through Eternity?88
Belief in God as contingent on love on earth is a strongly Romantic tenet, differing considerably from Anne Brontë’s and John Henry Newman’s more tightly scripted doubts about Calvinist doctrine. Although both found themselves leaning heavily on doubt, their different uses of it highlight a growing diversity of perspectives on it. Religious doubt would soon be characterized as an opportunity, a psychology, and even a creative endeavor. Nonetheless, Anne Brontë reminded readers of doubt’s more volatile emotions. In doing so, she gave voice to a fearful anguish that God had abandoned the world, leaving the Victorians at the mercy of an uncertain destiny.
