Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement

The Tractarian Social Vision

Lesa Scholl

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350237414
• eBook ISBN: 9781350120747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the influence of the Oxford Movement on key British poets of the nineteenth-century, this book charts their ruminations on the nature of hunger, poverty and economic injustice. Exploring the works of Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lesa Scholl examines the extent to which these poets – not all of whom were Anglo-Catholics themselves – engaged with the Tractarian social vision when grappling with issues of poverty and economic injustice in and beyond their poetic works. By engaging with economic and cultural history, as well as the sensorial materiality of poetry, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement challenges the assumption that High-Church politics were essentially conservative and removed from the social crises of the Victorian period.

1

Economizing emotion and moderating hunger

Nothing is our own: we hold our pleasures

Just a little while, ere they are fled:

One by one life robs us of our treasures;

Nothing is our own except our Dead.

– Adelaide Anne Procter, ‘Our Dead’ (1859), 1–4¹

Writing in the centenary year of John Keble’s Assize Sermon, traditionally used to mark the beginning of the Oxford Movement, Ruth Kenyon observes the little appreciated significance of the social landscape of nineteenth-century Britain on the development of Tractarianism:

it would have been a strange thing if men of the intellectual brilliance of Keble, Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude, living … in an England undergoing political throes which gave birth to the Reform Bill of 1832, the Poor Law Act of 1834, the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the Bristol Riots of 1831, the agricultural labourers’ revolt of the same year, and the industrial horrors disclosed in the campaign for the great Factory Act of 1833, should have noticed none of these things, or noticed them only to dislike the reforming zeal associated with political Liberalism.

She thus argues that ‘Tractarianism was no calm academic excogitation of a theory of the Church from a city dreaming of spires. It was a reaction to the whole situation, and a reaction which, in the phrase of Newman no less than Froude, was to be “fierce”.’² Indeed, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, John Keble addressed the question as to why one would give up serving as a church minister in ‘such political times’ when ‘with what zealous industry unprincipled men are doing their evil work; with what mischievous eagerness they seek out country seclusions, so that there is no cottage, however sequestered or remote, which they have not filled with scandalous and profane pamphlets, to serve as fuel for their seditions’, stating,

even had I the ability which one who speaks with authority from this chair ought to have, I would certainly never shrink from my task on the plea that at a time of national peril it ill becomes us to betake ourselves to the study of poetry; nay, I believe that, on the one hand, nothing is more effective than these studies in bracing citizens to all virtues; and, on the other, nothing is more helpful to the studies themselves than the sight of a true patriot quitting himself self-sacrificingly, strenuously and unweariedly in the service of the State in its hour of need. And, no doubt, I shall find some opportunity later of showing how closely intertwined are the functions of noble poetry and good citizenship.³

Good citizenship for the Tractarians meant countering what Isobel Armstrong has referred to as ‘a crisis of individualism’, in which ‘spiritual individualism becomes a form of the economic individualism’ that plagued ‘“busy” England’.⁴ There was a visible need, from the perspective of the Tractarians, to intervene in this concern:

Strictly speaking, the Christian Church, as being a visible society, is necessarily a political power or party … since there is a popular misconception, that Christians, and especially the Clergy, as such, have no concern in temporal affairs … In truth, the Church was framed for the express purpose of interfering, or, (as irreligious men will say,) meddling with the world.⁵

The Tractarians felt the trauma of a nation in crisis keenly; indeed, the social conservativism that has been attributed to the movement can be read as a pacifist response to that trauma, seeking calm in the face of a nation that had not only seen riots throughout its own communities, but had also been the ventricle for millions of refugees fleeing war-torn, famine-worn nations from Continental Europe as well as Ireland. The affective nature of poetry was seen as key to creating empathy towards the community, as opposed to the ‘isolation [that] becomes the counterpart of the pursuit of private gain’,⁶ while evoking perspective on the temporality of the world, and the consequent valuing of earthly wealth, as Procter’s statement ‘Nothing is our own’ suggests.

For the Tractarians, a return to the form and order of poetry – indeed, the discipline of poetry – was an aesthetic means to find calm, as well as to connect, not just to a literary and intellectual heritage, but to a cultural heritage that enacted stability. Keble was conscious of the seeming hypocrisy in his departure from active pastoral ministry; however, at Oxford he would be teaching those intending to go into the ministry, and therefore he would be able to impart to them the values (which would become known as Tractarian) of poetry and form in theological understanding. For Keble, as for many of the Tractarians, poetry and religion were inherently linked. Keble’s inaugural lecture articulates the criticism that is still levelled at the Tractarians: that they did not address key concerns of poverty and social inequalities. Stephen Prickett, for example, has continued the accusation of Tractarians as parochial and not using their seeming social power to petition for reform:

this is not to say that many of the Tractarians were not personally philanthropic, but rather that in many cases their vision of social reform tended to stop at personal philanthropy. For men whose minds were so quick to think ecclesiastically on a national scale, it is noticeable that their social thought was usually parochial.⁷

However, while Prickett, among others,⁸ condemns this vision as conservative, he fails to give full credence to the widespread disaffection the Tractarians felt towards the social institutions that had failed to solve the hunger and inequality that still plagued Britain. They held, as Simon Skinner succinctly states, ‘the distinct conviction that social ills were, ultimately, unamenable to purely legislative remedies’.⁹ The New Poor Law, the workhouse and the Reform Bill in practice did little to alleviate immediate suffering; indeed, they could be seen to increase it, while at the same time psychologically distancing people from poverty. The unionizing of parish relief, for instance, introduced by the New Poor Law, meant that individual parishes were no longer held directly responsible for relieving distress in their own community. Poor relief was thus bureaucratized, centralized and sanitized, making suffering and starvation more palatable and acceptable by distancing the direct offense of poverty from the local community’s reach. Furthermore, as much as the extension of suffrage in 1832 was a progressive move, the violence leading to this reform can be too easily ignored when looking through the distancing lens of history: a violence to which the Tractarians felt all too proximate.

Rather than merely writing from a distance about political and economic theory, many of the leading Tractarians were working in communities, ministering to individuals whose lives were impacted by unrest and trying to inspire their congregations to care directly for the suffering in their parishes. Skinner cites B. M. G. Reardon’s observation that Tractarianism was ‘a revival of practical religion’ and argues, importantly, that ‘historians of Tractarianism … have dwelt on the theological and the abstract at the expense of the pastoral and immediate’.¹⁰ Edward Pusey’s sermon of 1875, cited by both Prickett and S. C. Carpenter, speaks satirically of communities abdicating their personal responsibility to the poor:

‘True, Lord, I denied myself nothing for thee; the times were changed, and I could not but change with them. I ate and drank, for thou too didst eat and drink with the publicans and sinners. I did not give to the poor, but I paid what I was compelled to the poor-rate, of the height of which I complained. I did not take in little children in thy name, but they were provided for. They were sent, severed indeed from father and mother, to the poorhouse, to be taught or no about thee, as might be. I did not feed thee when hungry. Political economy forbade it; but I increased the labour market with the manufacture of my luxuries.’¹¹

While Prickett is dissatisfied with the fact that Pusey addresses himself to a congregation rather than to parliament in his call for reform, I argue instead that the Tractarians made a deliberate choice of audience in this regard, seeing the local community both as the key solution to social inequality and therefore unrest, and also as the audience most likely to respond because of its proximity to the concern. Pusey, like his counterparts, recognized the ease with which individuals could distance themselves from being concerned for the poor: if one paid their taxes, it was no longer their responsibility; it was up to the government or the Poor Law unions to solve the ills. The Tractarian vision is not only spiritual – as evidenced in Pusey’s satirical mimicry of Christ’s words – but economic and political: true social reform is more effective if activated at the grass roots level, implemented by individuals, based on personal conviction. Faceless institutions are not capable of empathetic connection, yet it is through this kind of affective response that social change can most powerfully and lastingly be instituted. The affective nature of poetry was identified by the Tractarians as a key literary and cultural form that could break through the rationalized hardness of political economic theory and challenge individuals to care for the poor dwelling in proximity to them, taking in the stranger as well as the neighbour.

It is understandable that in the face of poverty, which governments and no amount of public aid are able to temper, distancing oneself from the problem and laying blame on institutions becomes an appealing option. The horror of not being able to intervene effectively has a paralysing effect. Doing nothing becomes a viable option. In On Touching (2000), Derrida describes a similar kind of response when he describes Jean-Luc Nancy being ‘paralyzed by emotion’ when encountering Freud’s representation of Psyche’s death: ‘he starts off, then begins again, more than once, compulsively, always beginning by freezing’.¹² Psyche’s death is powerful in the context of my study, given that Psyche represents the human soul, or human feeling, and thus this moment is the death of empathy. Nancy’s response, in Derrida’s words, mirrors the unanswerable question of poverty in nineteenth-century Britain, wrapped up in multiple ways by Derrida’s simple question, ‘[h];ow to touch upon the untouchable?’¹³ The impossibility of touching – of being able to impact hunger and poverty in a broad sense – psychologically leads to a failure to have any kind of impact on hunger in a local area. It is this latter failure that the Tractarians sought to rectify, focusing not so much on the impossible distance between the present and the dream of equality but on the transient moment and what can be achieved in it. The Tractarians were preoccupied with mortality – with the transience of individual human existence; yet rather than concluding that time is too short for one to do anything, they held the conviction that because time is so short, one must do something now.

The poets I address were concerned with questions of how to respond with human feeling to the overwhelming problem of poverty, given that the established social institutions were seemingly powerless to impact its extent and, indeed, seemed to make it worse. Within the context of an overwhelming number of deaths as a result of poverty, not only with high infant mortality but also young men and women continuing to die from both starvation and illnesses associated with malnourishment, there was also the fear of becoming poor, alongside feelings of guilt for having and desiring worldly goods in the face of others’ lack. Capitalism encouraged the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Containing hunger and doctrines of reserve
• 1 Economizing emotion and moderating hunger
• 2 Looking outward: The moment of lyrical connection
• 3 Embracing the community as one people
• 4 Social action demonstrated
• Conclusion: ‘Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived’: Responding to the fragmentation of poetry, community and the senses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page