IN RUDYARD KIPLING'SKim (1901), the hero's education as colonial spy entails learning how to map the natural and constructed features of the Indian landscape. On one of his first missions, Kim surreptitiously measures the “mysterious city of Bikanir” and, with the “help of his little Survey paint-box,” produces a diagram of the “wild, walled city” (218). Among other duties, he apparently serves as a subaltern agent of the Survey of India, an actual department established in 1878 to coordinate a number of cartographic projects already under way. The British effort to chart the interior of its colony had begun a century before, however. In 1767, the East India Company created the post of Surveyor General of Bengal. The Company continued to map India until ceding power to the crown in 1858, after which the government carried the project forward until independence. The impulse to survey India refused to die along with the political institutions that gave it life. It found a new mode of expression in the Raj revival films of the 1980s. In films such as The Far Pavilions (1984), the camera sweeps panoramically over snow-capped peaks, golden plains, and “wild, walled” cities, nostalgically re-capturing the majestic terrain ceded in 1947.

WHILE MUCH OF THE CRITICAL DISCUSSION of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847) characterizes the novel as simplistic, conventional, and conservative, it is, in fact, intellectual, controversial, and highly original. In particular, Brontë challenges traditional Christian assumptions as she enters into debates which were seen to be reserved for the clergy alone. One of the novel's challenges to institutional Christianity centers around sermons. The formation of her novel as an exemplary sermon represents her entrance into an exclusively male genre of the time – theological treatises and handbooks on sermon style. As she wrote the novel, no major Christian institution in England allowed women to preach.There are a few minor exceptions. For example, some Primitive Methodist women preached throughout the nineteenth century (Chadwick 379). Women acted as ministers and preachers in the Society of Friends as early as the 1830s if not before (Chadwick 1: 422–23), and, largely because of the efforts of Catherine Booth, the Salvation Army allowed women to be ministers and to preach (Helsinger, Lauterbach, and Veeder 2: 180–83), although this occurred after Brontë's death. There was virtually no support within Christian institutions for women to enter into what John Ruskin, in “Of Queen's Gardens,” called that “one dangerous science for women,” theology (143). Thus, Brontë's decision to publicly state her opinions on preaching contravenes the parameters for a woman established and upheld by Christian institutions of her day.

VICTORIAN CULTURE treated idolatry as a serious and compelling moral problem. For Victorian Protestants, this term meant more than simply the worship of graven images: it became the privileged term for denoting any devotion to a person, thing, or idea that hinders or supplants one's relation to God. It is this more inclusive meaning that especially fascinated the Victorians, and which, in the form of human idolatry, became the focus of so many marriage-plot novels in the period. Since the Reformation, Protestant theologians and writers have emphatically linked idolatry to Roman Catholicism, arguing that its excessive emphasis on external forms of worship obscures God. This connection took on renewed significance in Britain during the early and mid-nineteenth century, an era which witnessed such political milestones as Roman Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the re-establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses in 1850.The events of 1850 around the restoration of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical government in Britain were popularly deemed the “Papal Aggression.” According to historian Paz, “Roman Catholics themselves added fuel to the Protestant fire” by essentially declaring “supreme spiritual authority over the nation and [denying] the validity of Anglican orders” (9). The distinctive anti-Catholicism of Victorian culture reflects a widespread anxiety about the growing influence of Roman Catholicism – an anxiety, I argue at length elsewhere, that took the form of an obsession with idolatry.

FOR OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARSVictorian Literature and Culture, and its predecessor, Browning Institute Studies, has presented annually an annotated bibliography of works on the Brownings. With the change of name in the early 90s came a change in focus. Then, with increased access to journals by technological means, the need for an annotated bibliography on individuals has seemed less necessary than it once did. The final bibliography appeared in volume 29.2 (2001) of VLC and included materials published through 1998.

IN EMILY BRONTË'S Gondal poem, “How do I love on summer nights” (1842–43), the spirit of Lord Alfred S. gloomily haunts Aspin Castle, shut out from heaven after committing suicide for the love of Queen A.G.A.References to Brontë's works are from Chitham and Roper's edition of her poetry and Nestor's edition of Wuthering Heights. Brontë's central Gondolian figure, A.G.A. dominates every poem in which she appears or is evoked, a ruthless and yet ardent ruler, a powerful rhetorician, the murderer of her newly-born daughter and direct cause of the deaths and exile of her several lovers. Yet for Alfred, A.G.A. is almost divine, inspiring in him a fervent passion from which he cannot escape, even as a ghost. His “angel brow,” the reader is informed, is marked by a “brooding” “shade of deep dispair / As nought devine could ever know,“ intimating the dark depression from which Alfred suffers alone: not even a god could contemplate such misery (ll.37–39). Alfred's despair shifts to delirium once he is within the castle itself, a transition marked by the appearance of a statue of A.G.A. situated in the interior gallery. Now corroded, its form “mouldered all away,” the statue still outshines the other figurines and portraits in the room, and Alfred addresses it as “Sidonia's deity,” a supreme being capable of rousing wild and unruly states of mind.

MY SUBJECT is doubly suspect: polemical religious fiction by Frances Trollope. Victorian Studies has, of course, always stressed the centrality of religion to nineteenth-century culture. Yet, paging through Robert Lee Wolff's magisterial 1977 Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England, what is striking is how little advantage has been taken of his work, how few of the fictions he describes have made their way into critical conversation about the Victorian novel. In 1989 John Sutherland mapped what he called the unexplored “lost continent” of non-canonical Victorian fiction (1). Modernism's lingering legacy has meant, I would argue, that novels of religious controversy by women continue to comprise one of that continent's darkest reaches.For general surveys of nineteenth-century Anglo-American religious fiction, see Franchot, Leavis, Maison, Reynolds, Wolff. More specific studies of individual writers and works are beginning to be done, as suggested by new work presented at the 1998 18th- and 19th-Century Women Writers Conference (e.g., Cronin; Freed; Griffin, “Fathers”; LaMonaca; Melnyk).

IN AN ESSAY SHE ORIGINALLY published in the Examiner and later reissued in the collection A Housewife's Opinions, the Victorian feminist poet Augusta Webster imaginatively fuses two female figures: the medieval cloistered saint and the saintly, cloistered wife of her own age. Her “Saint Opportune” is a parody, the life of a most “unobtrusive saint,” whose name (taken from a street in Poitiers) is “the epitome of her virtues, her charter of beatification” (“Opportune” 203). “In all things always acceptable,” Saint Opportune “was, of course, not a martyr,” because “in her day anybody could have been that, and her grace was an exceptional one” (203–04). Rather, she led “an existence of honourable safety” (204), being a child so trouble-free that her clothes always fitted just right, and “she neither lagged behind her teachers' hopes nor prematurely outshot their skill” (206), “a girl about whom it was remarkable that she never was remarked” (208), eventually becoming medieval version of the Victorian domestic saint: St. Opportune's career as a wife was the perfect accomplishment of the highest auguries of her youth. No matter at what moment of unpunctuality her husband came in bent upon his dinner, whether a quarter of an hour before time or three-quarters of an hour behind, the soup was steaming ready in the tureen, the boiled fish firm and flaky or the fried fish at the evanescent perfect phase of crispness, the joint done to a turn as he liked it, the entrees at their harmonious prime, nothing soddened, nothing hurried, all ready and right with no too much and no too little, according to the variable standard of the tastes of the master of the house. (210) Capping her career of “inspired unobtrusiveness” (208), Saint Opportune withdraws to a convent when her first wrinkle appears (so her husband can be remarried to “a damsel of pleasing aspect who reminded him of her in her fairer days” [211]), only to die soon afterwards so as to oblige her order: She did not live long in the cloister. A neighbouring convent lost a nun of great sanctity, who on her burial began working miracles. St. Opportune's convent, till then the leading one in those parts, was much mortified but saw no remedy. St. Opportune at once died and instantly worked a miracle. What that miracle was this investigator has failed to discover; but it restored the convent to its former supremacy and proved to all after ages the right of St. Opportune to beatification. (212)

ELIZA KEARY (1828–1914) AND HER sister Annie (1825–1879) are two of many Victorian women writers whose works remain largely unexplored by scholars. Although Eliza Keary's poetry has been singled out as containing “unorthodox” rhyme and meter for the time period, a limited amount of criticism has taken Keary's work into consideration (Lustig).See Armstrong's comparison of Eliza Keary's “Christine and Mary” with Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (26–28); Roden discusses the homoerotic and heteronormative aspects of “Christine and Mary.” He also locates Keary in a context of mysticism (“Religious Homoeroticism” 1–14). Her poetry's subject matter is also “unorthodox”: “Christine and Mary: A Correspondence,” the longest poem in Keary's first volume of poetry, Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874), explores religious choices through sensual imagery which might not have had the sympathy, although probably did have the interest, of a mainstream Victorian readership.Analyses of religious and sexual spaces that intersect in Victorian literature have primarily centered on male writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Henry Newman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture discusses these writers as well as Christina Rossetti and Eliza Keary in the context of mystic asceticism and sexuality. See Buckton for a discussion of Newman's autobiography as sexual self-confession; Saville deals with Hopkins's poetry in the context of his religion and his sexuality; Hanson's work addresses Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement within the contexts of Catholicism and homosexuality. An emphasis on the religious aspects of Victorian women's writings can be found in Krueger and Melnyk. See Roden's “‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’” and “The Kiss of the Soul” for more on Christina Rossetti. Keary's poem consists of a set of epistles between Mary, who has recently joined a Roman Catholic convent, and her female friend Christine, who remains outside of the cloister. While women in convents were typically depicted as repressed, unnatural, and unproductive since they chose not to seek marriage and motherhood, Keary's character Mary offers a version of the cloister in which women can express and fulfill their desires and are productive through creative enterprises. Keary's portrayal of the convent forces us to consider the ways in which conventual life during this time afforded some women a positive, creative, and fulfilling alternative to the more socially acceptable, although not necessarily socially- or self-empowering, roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, or spinster.

A PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN exhorts a young Jewish woman to tell her father of her conversion, and reminds her of Matthew 10.37: “He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (Ball 36). A Roman Catholic priest rebukes a young woman who worries that a monastic vocation would be disloyal to her mother, and reminds her too of Matthew 10.37: “I must choose between God and my mother. I could not serve both; and if I made choice of the latter, I would lose my immortal soul, and be damned, quoting the passage, ‘whoever loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy to be my disciple” (O'Gorman 12–13). The same Biblical text – yet each polemicist appropriates it for noticeably different ends. In the first case, the danger lies not in young Thirza's own rejection of her father but his rejection of her; his anti-Christian sentiments have negated in advance her own challenge to his authority. But in the second, Edith O'Gorman faces a church hierarchy that equates familial affection with demonic evil. Whereas the Jewish convert mournfully recognizes that her decision may alienate her parents, the would-be nun must actively repudiate her own family.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1850 a change occurred in the way the Roman Catholic Church in England governed its affairs. Since the Reformation, Catholic priests in England had worked under the authority of four Vicars-Apostolic, who derived their titles from the points of the compass. By 1850, however, that arrangement had become impractical; Irish-Catholic immigrants had been pouring into England attempting to escape the potato famine, and the Pope responded by appointing twelve bishops to such cities as Birmingham and Manchester. In retrospect, this restoration of the Catholic hierarchy appears to be nothing more than a practical measure, which indeed had the effect of giving English Catholics greater independence from Rome, for where the Vicars-Apostolic had answered directly to the Pope, these new bishops were led by an English Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman, who in 1850 became the newly appointed Cardinal of Westminster. From Wiseman's point of view, however, the new hierarchy symbolized much more than a mere practicality: it represented the first step in what he fondly envisioned as the eventual reclamation of England from heresy. Wiseman's inflammatory language sparked a widespread and furious agitation on the part of English Protestants. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy quickly became known as the Papal Aggression, and it was met with a fierce and prolonged outcry. Protesters wrote pamphlets, got up petitions, and even participated in riots and bonfires where the Pope was burned in effigy. The agitation went on for well over a year and involved people from virtually all walks of life.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand Victorian culture without understanding the role of religion in shaping, consolidating, and challenging that culture. In countless ways, religion was integral to Victorian culture: Britain and Ireland had established churches; political and religious questions were often intertwined, as with the Maynooth Controversy and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; religious questions were regularly enacted in public, as when the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy (1850) inspired riots and the hangings in effigy of the pope and the newly-created Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. Victorians regularly sought religious meanings in cataclysmic events; the response to the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) was framed in religious terms, as Britons from the queen on down sought a divine explanation for the uprising. As that response shows, religion – specifically, Protestant Christianity – was an important component of national identity, as Linda Colley has argued in Britons: Forging the Nation.

IN RECENT YEARS, literary critics and historians have become more conscious of how advantageous it can be to bring together scholarly work in religious studies and contemporary theories of gender. While the texts I will evaluate here exhibit greater or lesser degrees of awareness of current theory in its purest form, all share considerable interest in analyzing Victorian religion with respect to questions of sex. From traditional approaches of social history applied to women to specific studies of authors, from collections of critical essays to a book-length edition of the gems of a nineteenth-century sisterhood's archive, the fields of religious studies and gender studies can no longer be separated in critical practice to the degree that they had been in the past. In general, cultural studies approaches have yet to catch up with the rich scholarly possibilities offered by an exploration of Victorian Christianity. For the purpose of this essay, I have not delved deeply into works of postcolonial studies, nor have I focused on book-length inquiries into traditions outside Christianity. To be sure, there is much to investigate in those areas. But for the most part, as of this writing, book-length publications are simply not yet available.Cynthia Scheihberg's important book, Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), was released too late for full inclusion in my essay, but should be recognized as among the significant new work in the field. We are working with a field that is only twenty years old, one that has seen substantial growth and suggested numerous directions for future research.