Scholarship on post-Reformation England has long agreed that the Reformation reconfigured and relocated sacred spaces, marking some off as holy (e.g., churches) while secularizing others (e.g., abbeys repurposed as personal property). Keith Hanley’s Sacred Geographies in Victorian Literature, however, only partially participates in this line of inquiry. For while Hanley certainly takes an interest in how Victorian authors represented, produced, and moved through sacred space—cathedrals, holy wells, the Holy Land itself—he is far more intrigued by pilgrimage as a figure for subjective transformations (sometimes accompanied by actual journeys, sometimes entirely imaginative). In other words, despite Hanley’s track record as a specialist in nineteenth-century tourism, readers should not approach this book in search of something like Allan Chapman’s recent The Victorians and the Holy Land (2025) or Lester Vogel’s To See a Promised Land (1993). What Hanley offers instead is variants on the quest for a spiritual ‘homeland’ (p. 16), as articulated through what he sees as substantively different Protestant and Catholic itineraries.
Hanley’s choice of authors is rather quirkier when it comes to Protestants than to Catholics. Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, and John Ruskin are not mainstream Protestant thinkers by any stretch of the theological imagination (and the mature Eliot does not qualify as Christian at all). As Hanley concedes in his discussion of Carlyle, Carlyle’s various figures for ‘exodus’ are, at base, an ‘attempt to free himself from the old bonds of Judeo-Christianity, despite its offering him an irreplaceable aspirational paradigm’ (p. 41). By contrast, Hanley’s Catholics—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alice Meynell, John Henry Newman, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thompson—are, if politically varied, strongly aligned theologically with the Church, whether as cradle Catholics or converts (the conclusion notes Newman’s recent canonization). Perhaps unintentionally, then, Hanley presses his thumb down on the Catholic side of the scale. Still, his choices illuminate two common pilgrimage pathways, to the Holy Land and to Rome, that leant themselves to figurative appropriation; not surprisingly, while many of his chosen authors made it to Rome, only Disraeli managed to get to Jerusalem. All of them, however, are journeying to find ‘home’, whether by ‘figuratively narrat[ing] the biblical vision of travelling to a long-sought homeland’ or by ‘recuperate[ing] communion with the Church of Rome’ (p. 16).
These geographies map partly onto actual maps and physical phenomena, partly onto psychological landscapes. Hanley’s readings are loosely obliged to Lacanian psychoanalysis, ‘suggestively rather than reductively’ (p. 17), although he lays it on lightly; by contrast, his Wordsworth and the English Literary Pilgrimage in the Nineteenth Century: Refashioning the Nation’s Sacred Imaginary (2025), published by Bloomsbury at almost exactly the same time as this volume and developing a number of the same themes, is far more explicit in its Lacanian allegiances. In any event, ‘sacred geographies’ are ‘fashioned from the metonymic use of real place-names and their associations, especially Jerusalem and Rome; the material geography of natural ecologies; and the human geography of cultures and societies’ (p. 17). The authors under discussion render these features through ‘biblical intertextuality or poetic form as ritual and confession’ (p. 17)—the pressures and possibilities of form itself becoming more evident as Hanley moves towards discussing Catholics. Or, in the case of Ruskin, Protestants deeply attracted to Catholic aesthetics.
Hanley’s Protestants or ex-Protestants, while not agreeing on much, seek figurative Holy Lands in order to reconstruct their own national and global political landscapes. The argument builds from Carlyle’s state of permanently alienated ‘exodus’, never actually managing to reconstitute his homeland after his ‘deracination from his birthplace’ (p. 33), to Benjamin Disraeli’s and George Eliot’s ruminations on how Jewish and British identities might intersect as part of a larger imperial project in the Middle East. Unlike the perpetually unhoused Carlyle, projecting politically extremist fantasies of total control that would manage modern chaos, Ruskin found his artistic home in a doubled artistic Holy Land. On the one hand, there was the personal, expansive ‘Holy Land’ that was ‘made up of particular sacred sites that aesthetic representation could imaginatively authenticate’ (p. 59); on the other, representations of the Holy Land itself when properly executed, ‘either conveying the natural theology inherent in the natural world or depicting the symbolic typology in the Bible, though those kinds of representation might merge or intersect’ (p. 70). The viewer unable to voyage to the Holy Land (or other sacred sites) herself might nevertheless be able to contemplate the divine through properly-ordered painting, and in perceiving it there, learn how to find traces of God in the world around her. (As Hanley notes, Ruskin’s commitment to strict representational fidelity sometimes ran aground on his calls for typology, and vice-versa.) While Ruskin’s aesthetics certainly had political import, the chapter on Ruskin is a kind of way-station between Carlyle (increasingly grouchy about capitalism’s fracturing of all social relations) and Disraeli and Eliot (more concretely invested in imperialist and nationalist possibilities). As a mature political strategist, Hanley observes, Disraeli was not interested in the religion-empire nexus much at all, but his early novel Tancred (1847) is effectively an early brief for the much-vexed concept of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition, and one that along the way opens up prospects for new British imperial vistas (p. 94). Notably, however, Tancred’s project remains just that—projected out into an indeterminate future—and the same is true of Eliot’s visions for Jewish ‘separatist recognition’ (p. 102), which would serve as a blueprint not for British colonial expansion, but a world of equal nation-states.
Strikingly, then, only Ruskin—the most sympathetic to Catholicism, at least in terms of what it offered art, of Hanley’s examples—reaches anything that looks like ‘home’; Hanley’s other Protestants are either permanently alienated or envisioning future homelands, but not arriving there. With the notable exception of Francis Thompson, ‘[i]n every sense a homeless poet’ (p. 150), Hanley’s Catholics are far more successful in their journeys to Rome, both literal—as in Newman’s preoccupation with the mechanics of travel—and figurative. Newman provides the form, as it were, for the book’s second half. Drawing on Newman’s theory of development, Hanley finds a system of layered equivalences between his theology, his understanding of the purpose of education, and his own autobiographical trajectory: his ‘sense of personal destiny corresponded to his conception of providence’, (p. 124) while his prose style offers ‘a kind of fullness of speech that can then represent the whole history of his search for self-expression’ (p. 124). Ultimately, the progress towards ‘real assent’ was identical to ‘Rome as Newman’s ultimate destination, once it has been individually confirmed by faith’ (p. 127). Here is a striking contrast to Hanley’s vision of Carlyle’s inability to find his own grammar within which his life could be ordered. Newman is able to theorize his own home and, in so doing, arrives.
The chapter on Catholic poetry feels the most tangential to the argument—some of its intentions only become clear in the book’s concluding paragraphs—even though the readings themselves are engaging. Notably, while the Protestants of the first half do not appear to be much in dialogue with each other, Hanley’s focus here is on Alice Meynell, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thompson insofar as they were engaged with Newman, and he dubs them ‘developmentalists’: ‘rather than directing their Catholic imagination to theological closure, they widened their religious adherence in the field of secular literature by extending the representation of its personal and social implications for their living experience’ (p. 149). (Also unlike the Protestants of the first half, these poets are all connected to each other: Meynell and her husband were Thompson’s patrons, Thompson and Patmore were friends, and Patmore was in love with Meynell.) Thompson, who for a considerable time was literally homeless, is in some respects the book’s inverted Carlyle: he translated his real-life struggles with addiction and poverty, which marked him with a great sense of his own sinfulness, into poetic affirmations of the ‘home’ to be found only in Christ (p. 153). Hanley has a bit more trouble connecting Patmore and his explorations of how spirituality and the erotic interact to his overarching theme, but he picks up again with Meynell, whose developmentalism emerged in her embrace of the productive and spiritual powers of ‘silence’ (p. 170).
Hanley ends with the Victorian era’s most belatedly famous Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, another poet with connections to Newman. Like Thompson and Carlyle, Hopkins is both literally and figuratively alienated from various homes, a ‘serial outsider’ (p. 195); in his case, this manifests partly in his interests in both English nationalism and imperialism, the former linked to his own move to Ireland. As a poet, Hopkins emerges as an interesting case of a figure who, while he ‘wrote from his time and place’, also wrote ‘from beyond his time and place’ (p. 211): his literary contributions are simultaneously rooted ‘at the end of a century when Christian civilisation was under threat politically and economically from the challenges of modernity’ (p. 211) and pointed beyond that moment to innovations that could be appropriated by the Modernists. In that sense, Hopkins found a posthumous home in the English poetic tradition.
Despite my occasional qualms about the argument’s stretchiness, this book should provoke some thoughtful discussion about how Protestants and Catholics charted both national and international futures through their respective theological lenses. I would have liked to have seen some rather more orthodox Protestants, or even less unorthodox ones, in the book’s first half. Readers intrigued by the argument should go on to Wordsworth and the English Literary Pilgrimage in the Nineteenth Century, which unpacks the concept of sacred geography in much closer detail. Overall, a thoughtful contribution in particular to the renaissance of Victorian Catholic literary studies.
