The Quest for a Novelistic Jesus: Literary Relationships with Jesus in Victorian Realism

Scholars frequently discuss the impact of religion and skepticism on Victorian literature. But scholarship on the matrix of beliefs, texts, practices and communities that comprise “religion” frequently ignores the central figure of the Christian faith: Jesus. Despite a few studies of Jesus in historical fiction regarding his role as a canvas onto which Victorian culture projected its own ideals, fears, and expectations, no one has seriously considered Jesus—and Victorian characters depicted in terms of Jesus’ life— within successful realist novels by respected novelists. Furthermore, no one has accounted for his rise in popularity during the nineteenth-century, his sudden appearance in novels just before mid-century, or the ways in which he serves to highlight the social and psychological functions—and limitations— of the realist novel.

This dissertation examines the theologically-embedded narratives that shift the nineteenth-century British public’s attention to the life of the historical Jesus, leading to portrayals of Jesus, and Jesus-imitators, in the novel. It then examines some experimental structures novelists use to foster literary relationships between Jesus, other characters, and readers that contribute to altering Jesus’ characterization, while demonstrating that

the Victorian Jesus can only be understood by looking at characters who sometimes bear a different name. Charles Dickens turns to idealization in The Life of Our Lord to foster a love of Jesus in his children. Charles Kingsley uses narrative annexes to restructure identity around Jesus in Alton Locke. George Eliot unleashes a Jesus-consciousness into rural England through Adam Bede. Mary Augusta Ward and Eliza Lynn Linton test the possibility of imitating Jesus in the real world through Robert Elsmere and Joshua Davidson. Each of these novelistic representations of Jesus emphasize the socially connective work of realism but challenge the practices of mimesis; in each imitation does not create knowledge of Jesus but other novelistic habits and forms, like sympathy and marriage, do. As such, the aesthetic limits of mimesis clash with the widespread progressive insistence that imitating Christ is the essence of a sustainable Christianity, a clash that ultimately calls into question Jesus’ viability in the late-Victorian world.