This blog series maps the contours of the ways in which the Victorians ‘created’ Romanticism. A term coined by the Victorians, ‘Romanticism’ as a movement and philosophy, and the ‘Romantic’ as an aesthetic and period were formulated and reconfigured as the nineteenth century progressed. In this post, I’m going to dig into the ways that Christians and Christian communities appropriated Romantic authors and their works. For Victorian audiences, some Romantics needed drastic repackaging while others were revered, holding prophet-like status amongst certain intellectual circles. From William Wordsworth to Percy Bysshe Shelley, each author went through Christian scrutiny and where possible, they were brought in line with Christian ideology and dogma.

The first part will look at Romantic influences on John Ruskin; although his work with Wordsworth is well-trodden ground in Romantic and Victorian studies, Ruskin’s negotiations is worth mapping out due to his prolific and pervasive influence in and after the Victorian period. The second moves on to the Oxford Movement, specifically considering the influence of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on authors and theologians like John Henry Newman. The third and final part illuminates the methods employed to rewrite Shelley’s atheism in ways that will have no doubt horrified the Romantic poet.

The Romantics and Ruskin, Mentors and Student

Ruskin drew extensively on a wealth of religious, ecological, and imaginative material from Wordsworth and Coleridge and was “one of the first aesthetic philosophers in England to theorize ‘romanticism’” (Daley 2001: 6). However, he also relied on the medieval aestheticism of Walter Scott in his coining of the term ‘medievalism’ and the autobiographical methodologies of Lord Byron. Wordsworth would re-emerge in Ruskin’s writing throughout his life. As Jonathan Bate stresses, “it was Wordsworth that taught Ruskin” about the environment and how to perceive the “enervating and environmentally destructive dimensions of modernity” (Bate 1991: 83; 2020: 488). Ruskin’s Romanticism would go on to inspire his readers, amongst them the first- and second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. His dictum “go to nature […] rejecting nothing […] and rejoicing always in truth” sounds like it was lifted directly from a Wordsworth poem like ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798) from which I will partially quote (Ruskin 1894: 182-3):

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Ruskin followed Wordsworth’s spirituality closely, frequently speaking out against the damaging impact of the Industrial Revolution and how the “something far more deeply interfused” that “rolls through all things” was rapidly and dangerously disappearing from modern life. Not just a spokesman, Ruskin’s own art contained many meditations on the rhythms and kaleidoscopic personalities of the British environment. As Shona Beaumont and Madeleine Emerald Thiele reflect,

Ruskin helped shape the cultural landscape of Britain by challenging society’s moral assumptions and questioning its responsibilities […] He was often preacherly, visionary and sage-like in his conceptualisation of the world around him: particularly in his observations of the damage being done to the natural world through industrialisation.

(Beaumont and Thiele 2023: 5-6).

Imbuing his social and ecological work with a Christian moral imperative lifted from Wordsworth, Ruskin sought nationwide change in how humanity was desecrating its sacred symbiosis with the environment that Wordsworth had originally celebrated. For Ruskin, then, Wordsworth and the Romantics “lift[ed] the veil from the hidden beauty of the world” (to appropriate Shelley) and taught him the value of the natural and that “art reveals God – especially when it observes nature” (Shelley 2003: 681; Freeman 2024: 318).

Catholic Romanticisms

The Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement, originated in Oxford in the 1830s – note its proximity to the Romantic period here, it overlaps with the lives of most of the Romantic authors. The key Tractarians included John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, and they all drew on elements Romantic poetics such as aesthetics, theology, and theme.

Here I’m just going to focus on Newman and how he built on the “Romantic theological tradition of Wordsworth and Coleridge [and others] with sensitivity, skill, and brilliant reasoning” (Prickett 1976: 208). For Newman, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Robert Southey appeared to have touched on “something deeper and truer” in their verse and prose, bearing witness to what Newman called “the cause of Catholic truth” (1873: 267). The medieval vein in their work was one aspect of this “Catholic truth” for, as J.W. Mackail noted “the Oxford movement spread over England, and deepened or replaced the superficial mediævalism brought into fashion by Scott”, enriching it and the Gothic with what Newman perceived to be its pre-Reformation Catholic foundation (1899: 10). Another was the Romantics tapping into the ineffable, enigmatic, undefinable, incomprehensible nature of the invisible world that existed, according to Newman, in congruence with the physical: “we are then in a world of spirits, as well as in a world of sense, and we hold communion with it, and take part in it, though we are not conscious of doing so” (1908: 205).

This is where the threads begin to spin. Recall Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ with its speculation on our spiritual affiliation with the world around us. Coleridge’s most famous solo poetical project, Sibylline Leaves (1817), also added an epigraph from Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692) to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ which distilled the supernatural dimensions of the poem:

I can easily believe, that there are more Invisible than Visible Beings in the Universe; [and that there are more Orders of Angels in the Heavens, than variety of Fishes in the Sea;] but who will declare to us the Family of all these, and acquaint us with the Agreements, Differences, and peculiar Talents which are to be found among them? It is true, human Wit has always desired Knowledge of these Things, thought it has never yet attained it.

(Coleridge 2001: 371)

And finally, after so much Wordsworth and Coleridge, what about Blake? Well Newman’s Catholic longing for communion with the “invisible” world further acts as a recurring transformational thought experiment along the lines of one of Blake’s most famous verses:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

(Blake 2008: 490, ll. 1-4)

Newman’s theorising of the “invisible” world was not solely in tune with Wordsworth’s legacy, but that of Coleridge and Blake as well. Newman found in the Romantics the roots of many of his core beliefs, revering their poetry as prophetic and revelatory. It was was the Romantics that helped to waken Newman to the “Catholic truth” that he sought after.

Christening / Converting / Redeeming Shelley

This is perhaps the strangest of the three examples of Christian appropriations of Romantic authors and their works explored in this post. It is reliant on the fascinating research of Tom Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism (2017). In the chapter ‘Converting Shelley’ Mole examines how Clara Balfour, George Gilfillan, Richard Armstrong, and Stopford Brooke managed with surprising ease to “rehabilitate Shelley as a poet that Christians could not only tolerate […] but actively endorse and value” (2017: 109). This extraordinary tradition used sermons, literary essays, and lectures as vehicles to “recruit” Shelley to “preach the gospel” (ibid. 91). According to Mole, Brooke “blamed [Shelley’s] early biography for his unfortunate atheism” and speculated that “he would have outgrown it if he had lived” (ibid. 105-6). Shelley’s atheism was not side lined, it was radically appropriated to benefit Christian ideologies.

This Victorian Christian reception tradition convinced its authors and public that while Shelley’s atheism was the result of his poor upbringing and juvenile rebelliousness, his poetry was “fundamentally Christian in spirit” and his “message was pure and holy”, making him an “honorary Christian and a prophet” (ibid. 110-3). Although on first reading this may appear a bizarre occurrence, a few decontextualised phrases from Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry can start to illuminate why this tradition found its roots in the Romantic famous for being kicked out of the University of Oxford for writing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism (1811):

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination’: and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. (675)

Poets […] draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. (677)

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar (681)

Whether Christian or not, many Victorians appropriated and rewrote the lives of the Romantics, picking those lines that spoke most deeply to their Christian ideologies. Wordsworth and Coleridge had long, foundational legacies in the Victorian period, but Blake, Shelley, Scott, and many other Romantic authors were also picked apart for what they could say to a modern Christian audience.

Bibliography

Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge).

— 2020. Radical Wordsworth (London: William Collins).

Beaumont, Sheona and Thiele, Madeleine Emerald. 2023. ‘Introduction’ in John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination, ed. by Sheona Beaumont and Madeleine Emerald Thiele (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1-48.

Blake, William 2008. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2001. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Poetical Works I Poems (Reading Text): Part I, ed. by J.C.C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Daley, Kenneth. 2001. The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (Athens: Ohio University Press).

Freeman, Austin M.. 2024. ‘‘The Backs of Trees’: Tolkien, the British Theological Romantics, & the Fantastic Imagination’ in The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Will Sherwood and Julian Eilmann (Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers), pp. 313-340.

Mackail, J. W. 1899. The Life of William Morris: Volume I (London: Longmans, Green and Co).

Mole, Tom. 2017. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Newman, John Henry. 1873. Essays Critical and Historical: Volume 1 (London: Basil Montagu Pickering).

1908. Apologia pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions (London: Longmans: Green, and Co.).

Prickett, Stephen. 1976. Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Ruskin, John. 1894. Modern Painters: Volume the Second of Truth and Theoretical Faculties (Boston: Estes and Lauriat).

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2003. The Major Works including poetry, prose, and drama, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Wordsworth, William. 1798. ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798