Jesus in the Victorian Novel: Reimagining Christ

The ubiquity of Christ is not just a theological principle; it’s also a fact of Victorian culture. Jessica Ann Hughes has brilliantly taken on this alpha and omega of all themes, and traced it insightfully across some of the period’s influential works of fiction. Jesus in the Victorian Novel is Victorian Studies at its very best.

Author of:   A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians

A thought-provoking book that continues the important project of revaluing theology’s significance for Victorian fiction. […] Readers who have engaged with contemporary work in narrative theology may be intrigued by its conclusions about storytelling and community.

Read the book review in Modern Philology

Jesus in the Victorian Novel is a slim book that covers a wide range of material, and offers a convincing argument: the discovery of the historical Jesus made him a powerfully evocative realist novel character, even representative of the genre itself. ‘Who was Jesus?’ became as much a question about the identity of the reader, who was invited to read in the character a ‘solution to individual and social longings for coherence’ (p. 173). As such, the book will be a valuable read for scholars of the novel as well as of nineteenth-century theology and religion.

Read the book review in British Association of Victorian Studies Newsletter, Issue 22.3

Mainstream Victorian realists reimagined Jesus not to debunk the Christian story, as Jessica Hughes shows, nor to secularize it, but rather to relocate it within a decidedly modern sensibility. Such is the premise of this spectacular, beautifully argued book. Along the way, too, we encounter much additional intrigue: German higher criticism, the period’s tensions between theology and science, rival atonement theories, and-perhaps most interesting of all-the question of how best to represent God in fiction. Some works are especially easy to recommend. This is one of them.

Author of:  Biblical Sterne: Rhetoric and Religion in the Shandyverse

The 19th century witnessed consequential challenges to traditional understandings of Christian doctrine not only in the form of new scientific theories about the origins of life and the antiquity of the earth, but also in emerging trends in biblical scholarship that radically reoriented understanding of the historical Jesus and his life. Jessica Hughes, in this highly sensitive and accessible study, expertly traces how a group of Victorian writers responded to these seismic developments with a series of novel representations that reimagine Jesus in their own contemporary context as a real and embodied character to whom readers might respond in a diversity of ways. Popular readers and specialists alike will find equal reward in her deep and illuminating analysis of these experimental “literary theologies” and in her careful articulation of the broader historical, intellectual, and theological movements that inflected their formal commitments.

In this insightful and thought-provoking study Jessica Hughes shows how a select group of leading Victorian novelists, well versed in science, biblical scholarship and Christian theologies, created new ways to “imagine” and represent Jesus to their reading public. The focus of this well written work is the varied way these writers broke from traditional Christologies and pieties to portray Jesus as a real character, interacting with humans in the modern world. This reimagination provided an alternative way for many in the era to reflect on the purpose and meaning of Christ’s life. Hughes’s conclusions are supported by exhaustive research that is manifest in an impressive bibliography and a thorough knowledge of the novelists she discusses.