Overview

Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.

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9780198837725

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Reviews

Bennett's book stands as a crisply written tribute to that confidence, with much to teach anyone interested in Victorian liberalism. * Michael Ledger-Lomas, Journal of Ecclesiastical History * Bennett's book undoubtedly succeeds in reclaiming a large swath of largely forgotten intellectual history. He has put in immense reading of ponderous tomes ... The book is no dry catalogue, for each of the authors is assessed within a persuasive framework of interpretation. All of them are located in the intellectual currents of their times with nuanced care. * D. W. Bebbington, Journal of Modern History * This is an impressively wide-ranging study, which gives much food for thought. * W.M. Jacob, King's College, Church History and Religious Culture *

This is an impressively wide-ranging study, which gives much food for thought. * W.M. Jacob, King's College, Church History and Religious Culture *

Author Information

Joshua Bennett read for undergraduate and graduate degrees in History at Christ Church, University of Oxford, from 2007 to 2015, where his Master's and doctoral work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. After holding a Scouloudi Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and a lectureship at St John's College, Oxford, he became a Junior Research Fellow in History at Christ Church in 2016.

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