Between science and religion: The reaction to scientific naturalism in late Victorian England

From its ornamental and often bookish exterior to its use as an exegetical tool for understanding the Book of Nature, the 18th-century microscope was socialized as an instrument of letters as well as of science. This essay proposes a reading of the microscope as a literary artifact by examining its bindings, its texts and its illustrations. While the instrument promised to extend human sense perception and to give its user access to invisible worlds, it simultaneously threatened to alter received views concerning both aesthetics and social hierarchy. Nevertheless, the destabilizing effects of the microscopic message entered polite society cloaked in a veil of familiarity in the binding of a good book. The nostalgia-encrusted instrument absorbed the shock of the new.     

Calamus in Bolton: Spirituality and Homosexual Desire in Late Victorian England

In 1885 a small group of men began to meet regularly in Bolton, England, to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman. They thought that Whitman's writings could provide the basis of a new religion, as well as offering spiritual guidance for the people in an age of mass politics. Intense friendships developed between some of the group as well as an interest in the nature of homosexuality. In order to explain their own quasi‐homosexual attachments, they created a new understanding of spiritual love and of an alternate self. These ideas influenced and were influenced by the work of Edward Carpenter.     

A Usable Past: History and the Politics of National Identity in Late Victorian England

For the past two decades, issues of English national identity have provided a fertile field for historical investigation. In the late Victorian era, the development of professional standards of scholarship within the academy gave a new dimension to historical debates. The bitter quarrels about appropriate research techniques from the 1860s to the 1890s, among James Anthony Froude, Edward Freeman and John Horace Round, acted as a proxy for the vision of national identity that each historian espoused. After 1870, the development of a national narrative focused on constitutional history as its primary vehicle. The battle over historical reconstruction represented a surrogate for divergent views about political values and national identity. What sometimes seemed frivolous scholarly skirmishes, therefore, had a much greater political importance. As a result, the long feud had greater importance than the eccentric personalities of the participants appeared to indicate. For Froude, the Tudor age of discovery and religious reformation represented the best of English character. For Freeman, a strong Gladstonian Liberal, consensus and continuity over many centuries defined English history best. John Horace Round, a Conservative stalwart, thought that Freeman had slanted his historical conclusions to validate his Liberal politics and reinterpreted the Norman conquest to express his own political beliefs. Thus the quibbles about shield walls and other issues provided a terrain for the real cause of antagonism: different views of national identity that history furnished. Each historian constructed a usable past in order to justify contemporary discussions of national identity.     

维多利亚晚期英国宗教的世俗化

在维多利亚晚期,英国宗教一方面呈现出“信仰危机”,经常去教堂做礼拜的信徒日渐减少,教堂冷清;另一方面,宗教教派十分活跃,广泛地参与现世的社会活动。这些现象的出现源于英国宗教的历史传统及其社会的深刻变革。