The Victorian “Family Bible,” found in innumerable nineteenth-century households, was a distinctly English publication. English law limited the publication of the authorized (or King James version) of scriptures to those firms that had been granted a royal license. To circumvent this restriction, many publishers produced Bibles with the text supplemented with commentaries. These annotated scriptures, frequently issued in parts, were marketed as “Family Bibles.” The heyday of the English Family Bible was from the late eighteenth century to the 1880s. In Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, Mary Wilson Carpenter examines these Bibles, as well as three other types of commercial religious publications—Dissenting commentaries, Family Bible Dictionaries, and popular apocalyptic literature. Her book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is concerned with the Family Bible as an object of religious consumer culture, which helped to define and reinforce middle-class values and national identity. Part 2 uses popular commentaries and apocalyptic writings as tools to understanding the religious debates of the nineteenth century, which “inform the language and structure of literary texts” (l49).

In part 1, “The Authorized Version in the Marketplace,” Carpenter notes that the period of the greatest popularity of Family Bibles coincided with the domestic ideology of the Victorian woman as “the Angel in the House.” It was also during this time that middle-class Victorian women became consumers in a marketplace that included a large religious marketing industry. Originally marketed in patriarchal terms to appeal to the heads of households, Family Bibles were redesigned to appeal to female consumers. The commentaries included homilies on domestic virtues. Illustrations of female biblical heroines were prominent; Judith was the most common, though her image conveyed mixed messages, according to Carpenter. Flowers and cherubic children provided suitably domestic motifs, and the power of the family was stressed by the addition of genealogical tables to be filled in by the owner. The design and message of the Family Bibles sustained domestic values, and the religious industry flourished with the aid of female consumers, a process that added to the dimension of the Angel in the House the role of “Material Angel.”

In the early nineteenth century new concerns surfaced about the dangers latent in family Bible reading. Commentators worried that the text of the authorized version was unintelligible to a general audience or of such an indelicate nature as to be offensive to the modesty of women and children. To protect the innocent and uninformed, editors began to separate biblical passages that might offend or befuddle and to mark them off from the body of the text to signify they were unfit for family reading. Carpenter points out that although these efforts were contemporary with Thomas Bowdler, the Family Bibles were not “bowdlerized.” The passages remained, but clearly distinguished. The presumption was that the full text of what she terms “disciplinary bibles” should be suitable only for closeted reading by adult males. Carpenter offers the rather unconvincing hypothesis that some men discovered in their closeted reading of biblical transgressions that they were homosexuals. “In the nineteenth-century Family Bible the technology of the closet functioned to produce the closeted ‘English’ homosexual male” (38). More convincing is her discussion of the editorial decision to eliminate from family reading passages described as “subjects pertaining to the Jews.” The linking of topics relating to Jews with inappropriate sexual texts suggests “that the pathologization of sexuality was intimately linked with the production of a sense of national and imperial identity” (37). The Jews, and by extension, all other subject and colonial peoples, were perceived as non-British. They were exotic, sensational, and alien—the Oriental “other.”

By the 1880s, Family Bibles declined in popularity. Carpenter attributes these declining sales in part to changing definitions of womanhood; as women's opportunities broadened, the Victorian “Angel” was yielding to a different construction, “the New Woman.” Fittingly, in 1890, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a team of female scholars produced the first version of scriptures edited by women, The Woman's Bible.

There is much in part 1 of Carpenter's book that is new and insightful in treating sources that have been largely ignored. Readers unfamiliar with feminist linguistic and literary theory will find part 2, “Consuming the Authorized Version,” to be tough going. She uses forgotten Dissenting commentaries and apocalyptic writings in an attempt to frame the religious issues that she sees as critical to understanding issues of sexuality and gender in well-known Victorian literary texts: Charlotte Brontë's Villette and Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. She argues that each of these texts is informed by a religious issue that had been defined in male terms. For Villette, the defining subtextual issue is taboos concerning menstruation, for Daniel Deronda it is the male rite of passage of circumcision, and for Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, women and the apocalypse. Influenced by Dissenting commentators who constantly drew attention to the possibilities of multiple meanings within biblical texts, the female writers subverted male authorities and turn male-defined views of female taboos and weakness into woman-defined sources of empowerment. Readers uncomfortable with Freudian criticism will not be reassured by the emphasis on “phallic signification” or by discussions of the rainbow as a phallic symbol, however ingenious these readings may be. Perhaps they should take comfort in Carpenter's reminder that all texts, even authorized ones, are susceptible to errors in translation and suggestive of multiple meanings, and by the sure knowledge that even the most controversial of interpretations will eventually be regarded as outdated.