In “Characteristics” (1831) Thomas Carlyle asserts not only that “Literature is but a branch of Religion,” but also that “it is the only branch that still shows any greenness.” This assertion has been reasonably well explored by literary historians, but rarely with the learning and subtle judgment shown in The English Cult of Literature. William McKelvy's “major thesis” is that “literature assumes a religious vocation in modern Britain in concert with the creation of a reading nation during a period featuring an increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession” (4). McKelvy thus yokes the Romantic vatic bard with the burgeoning field of book/reading history and then adds a sophisticated understanding of British political history as it affects religious toleration and the established church. The result is a study that, while it occasionally seems to wander, always returns to enrich in original ways our thinking on the relationship of literature to religion during this period and to persuasively argue that segregating the two is bad literary history.

Chapter 1, “Orthodox Narratives of Literary Sacralization,” probes the assumption that the rise of literature (and the reading nation) is propelled by the fall of religion, which McKelvy names the “declinist” account. He makes a case for the aptness, with regard to a study of this nature, of the century 1774–1880, and deflates gently the “historiographic myths” that rising print culture is inherently anticlerical and that the eighteenth century was, with regard to earnest religion, a “Sleepy Century before the Dawn” (26–27). The most provocative point here may be about periodization: “an implicit teleology of democritization has done much to sustain the independence of the ‘Lit Crit’ disciplines of Romanticism and Victorian Studies and their agreement to use the early 1830s to partition the century,” whereas attending to the “primary political story” of a “mainly religious route to secularization” makes nonsense of that bifurcation (32). Following this opening, McKelvy takes us into the sleepy century to ground his study in clerical authors (Lowth, Warton, and Percy) whose stimulation of the ballad revival and declaration of the poetic nature of the Old Testament helped shape the development of “English Literature” (5).

Percy's Reliques then becomes a starting point for a scrutiny of the first novelist who becomes required, or canonical, reading: Sir Walter Scott. McKelvy's third chapter examines Scott's early career as editor, ballad collector, and poet. At the heart of this chapter is Scott's ubiquity; his texts are read to give support to antithetical positions, Tractarian to Marxist. McKelvy shows via an illuminating reading of The Lay of the Last Minstrel why this is so. Scott's poem fuses “vocationally ambitious poetry to the musical mutterings of monks” (106), and the generation of the 1820s, whether secularizers or Tractarians, finds in Scott's apprehensions of history a ground for its antithetical views. The two figures that McKelvy next examines, John Keble and Thomas Babington Macaulay, are linked in complicated ways with Scott and, in an unusually keen insight, through their “relationship to parody” (127). This chapter, “Common Things Hallowed: Keble and Macaulay,” gives us rich readings of culturally central texts (The Christian Year and The Lays of Ancient Rome) that are too seldom read profitably, and rarely in conjunction with each other. McKelvy's precise grasp of the cultural moment of the 1820s and 1830s tosses up insights such as the notion that The Christian Year is “the age's best-selling antihistoricist annual” (153, referring to the fad for annual “keepsake” type books).

If Keble and Macaulay are infrequently linked together, the same cannot be said for McKelvy's pairing at the start of chapter 5: Gladstone and Disraeli. In 1870 both politicians published books: Disraeli published Lothair and Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. It is the debate about Homer that is most germane, and McKelvy adroitly places Gladstone's Homeric interests, usually seen as a cranky footnote to the political career, within the “debates about the origin and interpretation of ancient texts” (182)—the much discussed “Higher Criticism” of the Bible. After a survey of Gladstone's movement from Tractarian defender of Anglo-Catholicism to liberal politician, McKelvy shows how Gladstone's Homeric studies dovetail with the continued erosion of the state's religious identity. He follows up by proposing “a new understanding of the pseudo-ecclesiastical career of George Eliot,” in part how the hero of Daniel Deronda “lives out Gladstone's real vocational trial in reverse,” rejecting politics and becoming by adoption “an alien priest” (220).

Except for Daniel Deronda, The English Cult of Literature tackles a series of titles that may never, at this date, waddle onto a syllabus in the form of a Penguin Classic, although all scholars of this period will have heard of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Christian Year, and Lays of Ancient Rome. Close readings of these “familiar unfamiliars”—rather than works overtly concerned with the religious crisis such as Browning's “Christmas Eve”—open up in combination with political, cultural, and biographical learning the ways in which literature and religion intertwine. In his conclusion McKelvy speculates briefly about the connection between a spate of anthologies of religious texts in the 1870s (e.g., Müller's Sacred Books of the East) and the beginnings of the end, with the rise of electronic communication, of the dominion of the printing press. This may be speculative and disputable; what is neither, however, is the achievement of this book in moving us away from our hoary truisms about the way literature supplanted religion in the course of the nineteenth century.