CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGChurch, was indeed the apostolic Church of Christianity - High Church
Anglicans faced a crisis when one of their leaders, John Henry Newman,
converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. 11 At the opposite end stood the
Low Church, often linked to the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth
century, and where, as John Wolffe discusses, there was "a divergence
between Evangelicals who remained loyal to the Church of England and
those who ultimately moved into Methodism." 12 A third Anglican group in
this period was the Broad Church, which Wolffe claims was "difficult to
categorize or identify," 13 since it was unified around a belief in the
importance of the comprehensive national identity of the Church, drawing
on a number of intellectual movements of the day. Occupying the middle
ground between the High and Low Church, Broad Churchmen sought to
maintain Anglicanism as an intellectual, liberal, and vital source of national
unity.
Within these diverse Victorian movements, poetry was essentially linked
to religion. This intrinsic connection between poetic and religious concerns
comes into focus when we see how many influential Victorian clerics were
also literary critics. John Keble, one of the central theologians of the
Oxford Movement, was also Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1832 to
- In lectures that combined both literary theory and theology, Keble
argued that Christian belief has a "handmaid" in poetry: an essential
theological tool to help bring Anglicans closer to God and the Church. 14
Significantly, Keble's own book of poetry, The Christian Year (1827),
perhaps the single most popular book of verses of the age, is a series of
poems organized around the daily Anglican liturgical cycle; it was clearly
intended to encourage Anglican devotional practice. 15 Given the immense
popularity of The Christian Year (379,000 copies were sold until the
copyright expired in 1873), 16 it is perhaps ironic that Keble's poetry is
rarely ever considered nowadays on syllabi devoted to Victorian literature.
By contrast, the essays of Matthew Arnold are often seen as dominant in
Victorian studies today, in part because of the powerful influence that his
criticism exerted on the development of English studies, a discipline that, in
its early stages, followed Arnold's lead in seeking to explain new kinds of
relationship between religious and literary realms. Whereas Keble claimed
that poetry might induce Christians to deeper acts of devotion, Arnold
suggested - perhaps most clearly at the start of his essay "The Study of
Poetry" (1888) - that the "strongest part of our religion to-day is its
unconscious poetry," 17 a statement indicating that poetry might become
the best replacement for religion in an increasingly secular age. Repre-
senting a Broad Church position in widely debated works like Culture and
Anarchy (1869), Arnold asserted that the cultivation of the intellect was a
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