Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle

'Frances Knight has provided a substantial and original contribution to the now very extensive literature on Victorian Christianity. This fine and illuminating study underlines the importance of the fin de siecle as a pivotal era in Christian thought and cultural life in England. In many surprising ways, it illustrates the extent to which this period has been misconstrued and misrepresented as characterised by a "crisis of faith". Instead, Professor Knight draws attention to the underlying religious dynamism of the age, and its many (often unlikely) exemplars. This excellent book adds a new dimension to our understanding of faith in the late Victorian period.' - Michael Snape, Reader in Religion, War and Society, University of Birmingham; 'Too often Christianity is neglected as a potent element in all aspects of nineteenth-century British life, including the phenomenon of the fin de siecle. Frances Knight has opened up original and thought-provoking perspectives on the uncharted territory of the cultural cross-fertilisation of late nineteenth-century English Christianity with the social and aesthetic ideas of the fin de siecle, especially in London. She depicts within a Christian landscape the ideas (associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and their acolytes) of degeneracy, decadence, exhaustion and new creativity, as the creative minds of the epoch looked back to the worn-out ideas of the old century, and at the same time excitedly forward to the new one, experimenting the while with changing forms of art and literature. Christian writers and activists too looked backwards and forwards and experienced the period with a queasy sense of both optimism and pessimism; but here narratives of regeneration and renaissance were more strongly articulated than images of degeneration and decline. This lucid and penetrating study shows the Churches engaging enthusiastically with the aesthetic movement and with other aspects of the fin de siecle: new religious movements, feminism, social purity, the 'new journalism' and utopianism. Dr Knight convincingly argues that they nurtured ideas that would in time transform twentieth-century society.' - William Jacob, Visiting Research Fellow, King's College London, and former Archdeacon of Charing Cross and Rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, author of Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century and The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840; 'The fin de siecle, or the close of the nineteenth century, is widely perceived as a time of decadence, sexual experimentation, night shadows, erotic fantasies, art for art's sake, West End vice, spiritualism, and theosophy. The fin de siecle was also, as Frances Knight demonstrates in this remarkable book, a time when English Churches grew increasingly concerned about their waning social influence, and struggled to define new forms of home mission and cultural engagement. As she shows, some Christians looked for renewal through aesthetics and the "redemptive power of art", while some decadent artists and poets embraced Christianity, especially Catholicism, in their search for truth or stability. Knight's beautifully written book captures the rich complexity of this strange decade, with its singular mixture of pessimism and optimism, and its fascinating collection of gifted eccentrics - Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, John ("Dorian") Gray, Katherine Bradley, Edith Cooper, "General" William Booth, W. T. Stead, Charles Gore, Mabel White, and Percy Dearmer. She skilfully weaves their varied stories into an absorbing account of Christian responses to the fin de siecle. For her, the cultural expressions of the fin de siecle were not so much responses to a dying Christian civilisation, as efforts to reshape Christian language and imagery for a new but uncertain era.' - Stewart J Brown, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Edinburgh