The Novel and the Parish

My project takes seriously the common, but frequently overlooked charge that the English novel is parochial—that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “all those good novels” are “without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman.” Restoring “parochialism” to its root sense, I show why the parish itself—a Christian community over which a parson presided for life—became the novel’s primary topos in the nineteenth century and provided its model of temporal experience. Reading the nineteenth century as a moment when the parish disappeared as Britain’s longstanding center of social, political and religious life, I ask why the secularization of national life nonetheless spurred so many novelists to widely embrace the parish’s modes of representation, devotion and authority. Situating the novel within a dense archive of parish gazettes, sermons, tracts and workhouse records, I chart the novel’s response to the retreat of Anglican pastoral authority not as an attempt to restore it but rather to provide the grounds for faith’s active exercise in the face of spiritual and interpretive uncertainty. My project shows how authors reconfigured reading as a form of pastoral work—a close, laborious, yet seemingly unproductive attention to everyday life—that suffused earthly life with latent meaning, and rendered such meaning a function of parochial residence: neither immediately legible through outward reference nor as the extrinsic dispensation of providence, but rather as willfully, if uncertainly, generated by dwelling within the bounds of the text./nI explore how religious institutional practices reorient Victorian reading by highlighting the nineteenth century as a moment when narrative becomes structured by pastoral residence—the ongoing presence of the parson in the novel and the parish. At the center of my project is the recovery of the plot of parish tenure, which begins with the clergyman’s arrival in a small country parish and ends with his leave-taking or death. My chapters trace how this plot originates in the genre of the parish novel and reverberates throughout the works of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Humphry Ward, and college novelists. These writers turned the parson’s labor of sustained attention into forms of duration and narrative time. I unearth the surprisingly static figures of pastoral life that come to organize reading: liturgical observance, by which time passes but does not progress; the ritual of “beating the parish bounds,” a cyclical walk that reinforces one’s residence; the modest labor of a “living.” Whereas the parson poses a curiously unnarratable figure in earlier novels such as The Vicar of Wakefield and Mansfield Park, mid-century novelists take up tenure as a narrative function, troubling modernity’s overtly teleological energies by converting the fugitive meaning of plot into the felt experience of form. “Life was not a task,” writes George Eliot in Adam Bede, “but a sinecure.” Far from an aesthetic shortcoming, the novel’s parochialism signaled literature’s new invitation to “dwell.” However, pastoral work’s peculiarly unproductive quality also rendered it an inelegant fit in our literary history. So finally, I show how Victorian writers simultaneously drew on pastoral experience and provided the terms for its narrative disqualification. By century’s end, “parochialism” emerged as a small-minded, but pervasive, cultural sensibility through the novel’s contradictory acknowledgment of the parish’s obsolescence and an abiding attachment to it. My project at once offers a history of the ecclesiastical and religious practices that have come to inform our reading and rethinks secularization not as religion’s retreat from the world so much as its reorientation within reading itself.

Advisor: Tamarkin, Elisa