Christian Ethics and the Victorian Novel: The Child as a Christ Figure in Oliver Twist, Silas Marner, and The Master-Christian

• Thesis title in Czech: Křesťanská etika a viktoriánský román: Dítě jako postava Krista v Oliveru Twistovi, Silasi Marnerovi a The Master-Christian
• Thesis title in English: Christian Ethics and the Victorian Novel: The Child as a Christ Figure in Oliver Twist, Silas Marner, and The Master-Christian
• Key words: viktoriánství / Oliver Twist / Silas Marner / The
• English key words: Victorianism / Oliver Twist / Silas Marner/ The Ma
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2022/2023
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 23.01.2023
• Date of assignment: 23.01.2023
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 26.01.2023
• Date and time of defence: 06.09.2023 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 09.08.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 06.09.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

As the first steam locomotive was built in the 1840s and the first rubber inflatable tyres were invented in 1845, one has to surmise that the Victorian era was an age of progress and movement forward, which inevitably led to a significant reconceptualization of various discourses. After Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) or Darwin’s theory of evolution sparked an interest among the Victorians, religion and its dogmata were increasingly contested. And yet, the chief objective of this thesis is to rectify the common misassumption that religion was defeated and left “bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain” (Thomas H. Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 1870) by the infallible hand of science. Instead, religious thinking underwent reconceptualization in various areas such as Christian evidences, theodicy, or the exegesis of the Bible, and therefore never completely faded away from the public and private spheres of Victorian society.
In his Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche criticised the English intellectuals who too readily renounced their faith in God while believing “all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” Nietzsche explicitly names George Eliot, who in a letter to her father in 1842 states that the Old and New Testaments are mere “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction” and that she considers “the system of doctrines built on the facts of his life […] to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness”. However, Eliot’s letter also demonstrates that she cannot entirely renounce her faith, which is tightly tied to her morality as she invokes the central figure of Christianity, Jesus Christ “I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself”. Paradoxically, not only did the figure of Jesus Christ remain present in the lives of the Victorians, but his life became a subject of such popularity that in 1906 the theologian Albert Schweitzer could only remark upon the sheer impossibility to grasp all the Lives of Jesus written in the 19^th century: “It would take a whole book simply to list them, a claim not to be dismissed as mere hyperbole” (Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906). One of the questions we must inevitably ask ourselves is why there was such interest in the life of Jesus in the era of scientific discoveries and theories which refuted the teachings of Christianity.
In this thesis, I will follow up on the recent trends in Victorian studies which examine the figure of Jesus Christ in literature.[1] In particular, I will focus on the representation of Jesus Christ as a child character in three Victorian novels: Oliver in Charles Dickens’s eponymous Oliver Twist (1838), Eppie in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), and Manuel in Marie
[1]For example, The Figure of Christ in Long Nineteenth Century (2020), God and Charles Dickens (2012), Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities (2016), or The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination. 1860-1920 (2010).
Corelli’s The Master-Christian (1900). I will demonstrate that the three characters exert their innocence to transform and reform the individuals and communities, who face an epistemological void inflicted by science, growing urbanisation, and the rigidity of social and religious institutions. While Dickens’s Oliver Twist does not seem to confront religion explicitly (such as The Life of Our Lord (1846-1849) does), the novel does reflect Dickens’s ideal of Christianity which “meant imitating Jesus and following his teaching” (Gary Colledge, Dickens, Christianity, and “The Life of Our Lord”, 2009). Oliver as a Christ-figure promises to extricate humankind from the tentacles of modernity represented by the criminal underground of London and corrupted social institutions. In a similar way to Dickens’s treatment of the Christ-figure, Eppie in Silas Marner represents a secularised Christ, who saves Silas from his parsimony and reclusion in the rural community of Raveloe and accentuates the Wordsworthian ideology of “elementary feelings” of rural life. In contrast to Oliver and Eppie, Manuel in The Master-Christian represents explicitly the second coming of Jesus Christ who must suffer for the seeming exhaustion of late-nineteenth-century modernity in which an individual faces a bottomless epistemological deep as contemporary scientific theories disrupt one’s religious beliefs and religious institutions seem to be beyond the means of repair. I have chosen these three novels written at different stages of the Victorian era to trace the recurrent figure of Jesus Christ in a comparative fashion and to illustrate how Christian ethics underlies the ideology of the Victorian novel. More generally, this thesis will examine only a small part of the complex system of religious belief in the Victorian era, which is not only not annihilated but undergoes a significant transformation to address and resolve concerns of the time.

References

Seznam odborné literatury:
Corelli, Marie. The Master-Christian. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1900
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003.


The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Elizabeth Ludlow. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Andrianova, Anastassiya. “‘Fear Them Which Kill the Soul’: Marie Corelli’s Manifesto against Positivist Education.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 124 (2013). https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.is.cuni.cz/ps/i.do?p=GLS&u=karlova&id=GALE|A366460036&v=2.1&it=r.
Arnold, Matthew. “Literature and Dogma”. Critics of the Bible, 1724–1873. Edited by J. Drury. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 152-192). doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597596.010.
Butterworth, Robert. Dickens, Religion and Society. London: Palgrave, 2017.
College, Gary L. God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author. Ada: Brazos Press, 2012.
De la L. Oulton, Carolyn W. Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
DeCoux, Jessica. “Marie Corelli, Wormwood, and the Diversity of Decadence”. Cahiers Victoriens & Édouardiens 74 (2011): 89-106. https://journals.openedition.org/cve/1337.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Prometheus Books, 1989.
Galvan, Jill. “Christians, Infidels, and Women’s Channeling in the Writings of Marie Corelli”. Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2003): 83-97. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.is.cuni.cz/stable/25058615?sid=primo.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. London: Yale University Press, 1963.
Huxley, Thomas Henry. “The Origin of Species”. Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. Project Gutenberg, 2005. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16729/16729-h/16729-h.htm.
Jay, Elisabeth. Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain. London: Macmillan Edition, 1986.
Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the British Novel 1875-1914. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.
Kuehn, Julia. “‘Eulogiseth Marie’: A Critic’s Review of Recent Corelli Scholarship.” Literature Compass 9, no. 8 (2012): 570-587. https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.cuni.cz/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2012.00904.x.
Niebuhr, Richard H. Christ and Culture. New York. Harper and Row, 1975.
Paris, Bernard J. “George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity.” ELH 29, no. 4 (1962): 418-43. doi:10.2307/2871945.
Sicher, Efraim. “Imagining ‘the Jew’: Dickens’ Romantic Heritage”. British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature. Ed. Sheila A. Spector. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 139-55.
Smith, Erin A. ““What Would Jesus Do?”: The Social Gospel and the Literary Marketplace.” Book History 10 (2007): 193-221. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227404.
Stevens, Jennifer. The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination. 1860-1920. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Stone, Harry. “Dickens and the Jews”. Victorian Studies 2, no. 3 (March 1959): 223–253.
Svaglic, Martin J. “Religion in the Novels of George Eliot.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 53, no. 2 (1954): 145-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27713660.
Swann, Brian. “Silas Marner and the New Mythus.” Criticism 18, no. 2 (1976): 101-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23100082.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007.
Walker Heady, Emily. Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities. London: Routledge, 2016.