Chapter 10 - Clergymen in the Brontë novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Clergy and churches appear a great deal in Victorian fiction and careful reading can establish an ambiguity in the usual authorial attitude towards them. The clergy are either like Mr Chadband from Bleak House, in which case their badness shows at once what is wrong and implies a remedy for it: Chadband should be replaced by a good minister who will be genuinely concerned for the plight of such as Jo the crossing-sweeper; or they are good in the way that Mr Hale in North and South or the eponymous Robert Elsmere are good, in which case they lose their faith. Treatment of the clergy is either totally secular, as in Trollope, or it is accompanied by a sense of strain. Churches tend to be either decaying or out of place or in some other way wrong.
While this is a factually erroneous statement geared to supporting the author's argument – the fiction of George Eliot and the Brontës alone easily supplies half a dozen charitable and consistently devout clergymen, and even the less admirable ones do not readily fit into either of Butler's categories –, it establishes an important point: there are a great many unappealing and/or unsuccessful churchmen in Victorian fiction.
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- Information
- The Brontës and Religion , pp. 173 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999