1. Practical Anglicanism

“The typical Englishman regards religion as something intensely practical,” writes Bishop Ward. “It is a life to be lived in the world.”Footnote ² Such a view is typical of the nineteenth century, during which Anglicanism emerged, in Paul Avis's words, as “a practical, not a speculative order, one attuned to pastoral care, rather than to maintaining a hierarchical and authoritarian structure of doctrine and discipline.”Footnote ³ “Anglican theology,” Michael Ramsey adds in The Gospel and the Catholic Church, “is a method, a use and a direction.”Footnote ⁴ Anglicanism long had a vexed identity as a religion constituted by its national, earthly community, but what coalesced in the nineteenth century was a new, invigorated focus on religion's method and matter: in Martin Jay's words, the “details of quotidian existence in the family or pious community rather than on the fidelity to doctrinal teachings or the rituals of the church.”Footnote ⁵ It is difficult to know what sharpened Anglicanism's practical sensibility, though we might speculate: Tractarian revivals and the work of John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Richard Froude percolated out from the universities in the 1840s and renewed the establishment's focus on preaching and parish work; government efforts to combat absenteeism and to fund benefices, or “livings,” via the Queen Anne's Bounty during the 1820s and 1830s made visible England's shortage of resident parsons; Britain's lively sectarian culture, animated by roving Methodists and rational Unitarians, led a crop of writers to shore up Anglican identity against dissent. By framing Anglicanism as an institution of social praxis, a church, in Charles Marriott's words, of “true living character” rather than “cut and dried dogmas,” writers conveniently distinguished it from Catholicism, with which it shared sacraments, doctrine, and a sense of episcopacy.Footnote ⁶

A religious culture defined by its praxis also sees the management and governance of earthly life as worthwhile. Where Anglicanism's new humanist and practical sensibility found its anchor—where, indeed, it was embodied—was in the figure of the parson. Unlike the deans, bishops, and archdeacons higher up in the church, the parson (otherwise vicar, rector, incumbent, and, occasionally, curate) held a single parish. His work of residing there and ministering to its inhabitants took on new significance as the site where spiritual practice met lived experience. Alongside the traditional notion of the parson as the representative of God and Church—a notion of him as a somewhat static model for religious conduct—emerged the idea of the parson as a formal agent whose constant presence within the parish provided the grounds for faith's active exercise. Writers such as Coleridge invested the parson with new importance as one who could simply be “with his parishioners and among them,” as “a neighbor and a family man” or, in John Wood Warter's formulation, one “who goes faithfully in and out among his people.”Footnote ⁷ And tenure, the act of dwelling in the parish over time, and often a long time, was the conduit through which religion would work.

Pastoral labor shed its haloed reputation, becoming a manageable practice, something concrete and custodial—akin to housekeeping. When we look at the archive of lay literature that correspondingly flourished with practical Anglicanism, we see a shift in focus from doctrine toward matters of everyday life. Parson handbooks such as Monro's Parochial Work (1850) and Spooner's Parson and People (1865) attempted to standardize the smallest details of Anglican work. Cyril Pocknee's Parson's Handbook (1899) prescribes everything from the purchasing of curtains and chancel furniture to the choice of flowers for the altar—liberally allowing blossoms other than white ones to be displayed on Easter Sunday. Parish histories, which numbered in the dozens during the eighteenth century, were written by the hundreds during the nineteenth century, as clergymen documented the placement of yew trees in churchyards and their annual perambulations of the parish bounds, where little boys would be tossed into streams to better remember them. So popular were parish histories that they spawned handbooks for writing them like Cox's How to Write the History of a Parish (1879). Writers made religion into an earthly matter, and the parson's life into literature.

And vividly: readers hungered for the matter of their parsons’ breakfasts, troubles, and noonday habits. We find a vast appetite for the decor of vicars’ living rooms and their Sunday conversations with churchgoers in short stories like Lear's Tales of a London Parish (1851), poetry like Our Parish, and Other Poems (1856), colloquies like Paget's The Parish and the Priest (1858), and clergymen's memoirs such as A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith (1858). As William McKelvy suggests in so many words, “the ideal parish priest became a professional version of the genteel Protestant father, a virile figure capable of presiding over a festal board and retiring to a drawing room where his daughters would display accomplishments on the piano.”Footnote ⁸ A welter of pastoral literature pictured the parson making his rounds, marrying parishioners, rebuilding churches, and otherwise engrossed in daily parish work—less a spiritual figure than an individual embedded within the fabric of earthly society.

While nineteenth-century literature offers us, as Charlotte Brontë might say, “an abundant shower of curates,” where the parson's labor took its most vivid, condensed, and palpable form was the novel.Footnote ⁹ Between 1850 and 1870, we find a flowering of narratives centered on the parson's tenure. Works such as Shelton's The Rector of St Bardolph's (1853), MacDonald's The Seaboard Parish (1868), Thompson's The Rectory of Moreland (1860), Kendale's The Vicar of Lyssel (1860), Warter's The Seaboard and Down; or, My Parish in the South (1860), The Curate of Sadbrooke (1865, anon.), Paull's My Parish and What Happened in It (1872), and Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel (1863) and The Perpetual Curate (1864) share a basic plot: they universally begin with the arrival of a newly minted parson of Oxbridge persuasion in a small parish and end with his departure, whether by leave-taking or by death. Their pages, in other words, span tenures. Their transformation of tenure into a period of reading, as we'll see, redefines the religious value of the novel: from a literature that moralizes to one that formalizes. It also offers us insight into how Anglicanism's practical aims were honed through literature—how the novel became a site where reading and religious praxis overlap.

2. Pastoral Presence

Tenure structures the parish novel in two ways, and the first is almost immediately legible. Though the exact moment eludes us, at some point between the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, clergymen came to develop a presence. They acquired particularity, quirks, circumstances, and interior lives—what we might call hallmarks of character. Consider the difference, for example, between Oliver Goldsmith's Primrose from The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and George Eliot's Farebrother from Middlemarch (1872). In the first, the vicar is a moral exemplar and spiritual figurehead; in the second, he is an endearing minor character with two spinster sisters and a weakness for cards. What divides the parish novel from its forerunners, from works like Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote, is a focus on the parson's human presence: from his posture, to the rustle of his cassock, to the timbre of his voice carrying down the nave. Earlier novelists were keen to avoid representing pastoral labor—or, at least, didn't find parsons themselves interesting—because they perceived the value of the novel to rest primarily in its delivery of religious or moral content. Novels offered providential narratives in which clerical figures functioned as moral exemplars; eighteenth-century novels thus tend to abstract the parson's work or render it irrelevant. Making the vicar's life an “all-compelling example” of true moral sensibility requires Goldsmith to send his pastoral labors “offstage,” suggests Lori Branch; “the actual inclusion of the repetition of the sermons or, more crucially, any of the Vicar's private devotions or the family's daily reading from the Book of Common Prayer, would bog the plot of the novel down unbearably.”Footnote ¹⁰

“The novel form literally does not have time,” writes Branch, “to represent the repetitive praxis” of pastoral labor.Footnote ¹¹ In the earlier novels that struggle to find pastoral labor as narratively fungible, parsons more often occupy subordinate roles as minor characters. In Graves's The Spiritual Quixote (1773), the local vicar Mr. Powell serves as an “example” of “industry and sobriety in the parish” if only as the foil to the protagonist Geoffrey Wildgoose, whose flirtation with Methodism sends him rambling across England (473). If, as Misty Anderson has suggested, the wandering Methodist preacher conveniently channels the roving energy of the picaresque, then the resident Anglican parson epitomizes the status quo.Footnote ¹² While heroes rove, clergymen dwell. The parson's minorness is, in fact, the butt of an Austenian joke in Mansfield Park. Mary Crawford, desiring a suitor of more “influence and importance in society” than the humble parson who remains out of view, makes Edmund Bertram's shortcomings, above all, a matter of visibility: not only does “one scarcely [see] a clergyman out of his pulpit,” she complains, but he is “so seldom seen” at all.Footnote ¹³

Parish novels, by contrast, dwell. They detail everything from his terse words with the local workingmen to his hurried step on parish rounds; they evince a fascination with his conduct of the litany and his surplice on an Easter Sunday. The parson's close, embodied presence, in fact, nearly eclipses the overtly moral or religious thrust of the narrative. The “novelty” and “restrained” power of Oliphant's Perpetual Curate compels “intense interest by all the eyes and ears of the congregation.”Footnote ¹⁴ Ditchfield's Parish Clerk appeases a profounder appetite for the humanizing minutiae of church, describing closely the turn of a hand over a lectern, the quaver of a voice midsermon, or the parson's stumble over the chancel step. Parishioners are universally transfixed by Sunday details: how the clerk and curate stand “together in the little vestry, going through all the usual preliminaries,” the movement of a dog whipper up and down the aisles, or the suggestive gazes emanating toward the marriageable curate from “under a close bonnet.”Footnote ¹⁵ Oliphant's poor, handsome Wentworth, “instead of merely being the Curate of St. Roque's, had become a most captivating enigma, and had made church-going itself half as good as play.”Footnote ¹⁶

The difference between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth is, we might say, a difference of pastoral character and of the aims of reading. On one hand, the parish novel's integration of the parson into the fabric of everyday life reflects the new, lateral relations the parson comes to occupy relative to his flock; the parson is no longer solely an elevated moral interlocutor between the parish and God but one whose value lies in his capacity to solicit attention and sustain devotion from Sunday to Sunday. On the other hand, the parish novel renders pastoral presence part of its own literary aims and procedures. Its descriptive density signals a shift in readerly engagement, from one that seeks religious truths or foregrounds the dangers of other denominations, to one in which the experience of encountering the parson comes to represent an end in itself. The intensified presence of the parson not only replicates tenure's lineaments but also formalizes it as a process of the novel. Its reorientation is thus a structural one.

The parson's physical presence had long been a cornerstone of Anglican thought, which invested his body with a human and godly authority—godly, in fact, because human. The echo between the parson's name and spiritual function is semantically preserved in Blackstone's legal commentaries. As a persona ecclesiae, the parson provides the embodied scaffolding for the “invisible body” of the Church; he “personates.”Footnote ¹⁷ “Whenever we behold a parson of the establishment, we shall always think of the Holy Ghost with which he is impregnated.”Footnote ¹⁸ A parson's work resides not solely in the delivery of doctrine but also in the feeling of God that his presence enables: “The parish clergyman,” writes Trollope in Clergymen of the Church of England, “is designated as the palpable and visible personage of the church of his parish, making by his presence an intelligible reality which, without him would be but an invisible idea.”Footnote ¹⁹ Trollope's sketch of “the parson of the parish” with his “unquestioned ease over a ruddy fire,” “whiff of old crusted port,” and requisite “mild opposition to the bishop” offers a technical and imaginative specificity, one that plays to a culture of religious investment that has been, from the outset, remarkably concrete.Footnote ²⁰

But this preoccupation with pastoral presence became more pronounced in the nineteenth century as tenure became a public problem for the Church. Absenteeism and pluralism (the holding of multiple livings by a single clergyman) were pervasive, and England struggled to place a parson in each parish. The problem was well documented in reports from the Residence Act of 1803 and John Wade's Black Book. Diocesan returns from 1829 “showed less than 42 percent of Anglican incumbents lived in their parishes” while the 1851 census revealed a thousand clergy (over half) as nonbeneficed.Footnote ²¹ Brenda Colloms describes a parson living equidistant from churches in three parishes, conducting morning, noon, and evening services at different ones every Sunday. Although such initiatives as the Queen Anne's Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commission, and Church Pastoral Aid Society—of which Patrick Brontë was the first beneficiary—sought to fund underpaid curacies, by 1872, as Keith Snell observes, only 40 percent of all parishes had resident clergy.Footnote ²²

The disappearance of pastoral presence thus came to be seen as a problem representative of Anglicanism writ large; an indicator of the retreating footprint of the Church in a world where it could no longer be taken for granted. More fundamentally, then, the parish novel's manifestation of the parson reflects Anglicanism's adaptation to religion's changed ecology. The parson could communicate and compel, and mediate and instantiate, in domains where Anglicanism jostled for ground, quite literally, among other denominations and forces in an ostensibly secularizing world. The affective ties that develop through his repeated appearance before his parish animate his sermons such that “they hang upon his lips as they cannot hang upon the pages of his book.”Footnote ²³ His particularity grounds his authority. As Brenda Colloms remarks of a parish that sends a minor curate to attend a contagious sickbed in place of a beloved vicar, “a village usually had a pretty clear idea of the value of its minister” even if its bishop did not.Footnote ²⁴

“Nothing that is anonymous will preach,” insists Newman, “nothing that is dead and gone.”Footnote ²⁵ For Newman, as for numerous other Anglican writers, pastoral presence gives heft and force to inanimate knowledge; the parson's “words, manner, voice, and action” mediate his meaning where dry words cannot: “The same things said by one man are not the same as when said by another. The same things when read are not the same as when they are preached” (425). Anglicanism's preoccupation with embodied presence and pastoral delivery is palpable not just in these Tractarian remarks, or in the widespread reinvigoration of lay labor from the 1850s through the 1870s, or in the ascendant cult of college preaching, which turned Sunday sermons at St. Mary's into celebrity events attended by hundreds, but as an unexpected counterpoint to the wide availability of printed sermons. Sermons circulated amply in print and flooded the literary marketplace. An 1827 editorial in the Monthly Review declared sermons, along with novels, the most widely published forms of literature.Footnote ²⁶ Robert Ellison and Desmond Bowen note that “sermon-tasting,” the reading of anthologized sermons by famous preachers, became common practice around the Victorian hearth; popular preachers, notes one Victorian, “appear again through the press almost before they have left the pulpit.”Footnote ²⁷ If the published sermon broke religious content from its source, set it free to be repeated, reassembled, and consumed on convenient readerly time, then the parish novel restored its medium and lived context—and the act of will inherent in attending to the parson at all.

The parson's presence in these novels, thickly described, thus poses the more fundamental question of attention as a choice, a question that echoes the parson's capacity to solicit devotion as the elective exercise of one's attention rather than as a given belief. The parson plays a hermeneutic role for his flock, as an “expounder and dispenser” of scripture rather than as a spiritual figurehead for Newman. Because the Bible “does not intrude itself on the notice of men,” the “Church in its Ministers forces religion on the attention of the world, it seeks, it speaks, it exhorts, detects, explains, comforts.”Footnote ²⁸ Pocknee's Parson's Handbook echoes this function in the parson's physical direction of the congregation during service. The parson elicits certain postures from the congregation—“taught to stand at the Eucharist” and “at the Collect,” at the saying of “Gloria in excelsis,” then kneeling at the liturgy—as a way of guiding their attention with “almost mechanical repetition and uniformity.”Footnote ²⁹

In other words, if Anglican thinkers increasingly conceived of religious praxis as the willful direction of attention, then the parish novel sought to elicit this very attention in its readers. It unfolds an immanent logic; attention, these novels seem to say, is devotion. Acts of beholding—and the vicissitudes of distraction—are foregrounded in Shelton's depiction of Sunday service as a place where “the fashions were to be shown forth, the sight gratified, and the ear tickled.”Footnote ³⁰ Solemn, liturgical niceties coexist with smaller dramas: how a parishioner's voice cracks and “she is requested not to sing in the choir,” or how “an enterprising grocer, being clerk of the parish,” callously uses the register pages for “wrapping up his grocery commodities,” or how Hewlett's Parish Clerk catches a parishioner “cracking a nut or a joke” and delivers him a cut “loud enough to wake all the congregation.”Footnote ³¹

“I am not always so attentive,” Austen's Henry Crawford concedes, “as I ought to be,” to all of liturgy's “redundancies and repetitions.”Footnote ³² The expanded ecology of attention that defines the parish novel—one which acknowledges a lack of faith or lapse in attention as both the challenge of and motivation for pastoral presence—signals the genre's broader realignment of religious and literary aims. If earlier writers perceived the religious value of the novel to be necessarily evangelical—presenting a closed narrative confirming religious truths or a sense of providence, as Thomas Vargish suggests, or else, as Branch argues, leaving the explicit liturgical matter of religion out for the sake of secular or readerly interest—then a more liberalized ethos that takes religious difference as its premise emerges in the parish novel.Footnote ³³ The imperfection of England's religious life was all the more reason for Anglicanism's desire to claim its attention; Anglicanism was one faith of many in a world that no longer assumed its dominance.

Such an ethos might go toward explaining the variegated denominational backgrounds of the parish novelists that I have named, for not all of them were strict Anglicans. Margaret Oliphant grew up in a Presbyterian household and went through numerous turns of faith before finally reconciling, in her later years, to the “eclecticism” of Anglicanism; George MacDonald trained as a Congregational minister, though he declined, to his parish's frustration, to pinpoint his sectarian fidelities precisely.Footnote ³⁴ While quite a few parish novelists, such as Robert Evans, were well-known Anglican writers and ministers, a significant number of these authors also inhabited multiple spheres of belief and led lives through which their personal belief could be defined and redefined. Parish novelists engaged with Anglicanism as a willful choice rather than a given cosmology; if faith was taken on assumption in these earlier models, then doubt was a precondition of the parish novel. Earlier novelists who hewed more closely to the strictly religious or secular commitments of their work, by contrast, came from relatively untroubled Anglican backgrounds. Austen was born in her father's rectory and never strayed far from it; Graves's life took a classically Anglican trajectory, from his Sunday school upbringing, to his matriculation at Oxford and a series of curacies, and finally, in his later years, to his assumption of a rectory near Bath where he ultimately died. The homogeneity of their Anglicanism paradoxically presumes a stronger separation between their religious and literary projects; The Vicar of Wakefield is squarely a providential, religious tale, and Mansfield Park appositely renders the clergyman and his labor as “nothing” to garner our notice.Footnote ³⁵

That denomination might be a matter of will or personal election, forged from a life of devotion and intentional exercise, rather than inherited and assumed, is reflected not just in nineteenth-century Anglicanism's impulse to make itself present to its readers but also often in the imperfection of that presence. In Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate, Frank Wentworth's sermon is marred with struggle. For all his admiration of Easter Sunday's trappings, the communion table, oaken cross, and bunches of lilies, the curate of St. Roque's wonders about the “non-importance of his lily-wreath and surplices” in the face of martyrdom.Footnote ³⁶ His revelation, as he gazes on his flock and into the “iron-grey” eyes of his aunt Lenora, is not of resurrection but of faith's effort—the same effort that is registered in the parish novel's second defining feature: its sense of time.

3. Temporal Life

If the genre of the parish novel sought to reproduce tenure's immediacy, materializing pastoral presence for its readers, then it also sought to reproduce tenure's temporal experience, aligning the novel's beginnings and endings with the parson's arrivals and departures, and echoing tenure's correspondence between a “living” and life. In the nineteenth century especially, the parson's tenure was most compellingly felt as a span of time: as a period of residence and sustained ministration in a single parish across years and decades. This notion is at the heart of Anglican labor, so much so that a Norfolk parson, for instance, delights at being granted residence in his birthplace: “I was born at Edgefield on December 20th, 1850, in the same room in which I now sleep, and in which I expect to die. A record, surely!”Footnote ³⁷

A lengthy residence, more than in the eighteenth century, lurched into the fore as a precondition for good pastoral labor. Since a parson's influence worked incrementally, analogies to other professional realms often turn, in these novels, on values of sustained application; writers invoke realms in which time itself would yield success, since “the effect of earnest ministerial labour is often imperceptible in parishes as on individuals, for a long time.”Footnote ³⁸ In Paget's colloquy, the priest is the military “tactician, with a long sight,” who must approach his parish with “a great deal of strategy” or the doctor who must above all be a paradigm of patience: “as certain medicines have a tendency to accumulate in the human system, apparently inert, and then, after a while, begin to exert some tremendous influence on the patient, so in the parochial system, a long course of medical applications which has appeared to be powerless, may suddenly show itself, as having been really adapted to produce the effect desired.”Footnote ³⁹

Such a temporal orientation is also clear in their titles, which point more fully to a span of time rather than the labor performed in it: Wray's Four Years of Pastoral Work or Tweddell's Fourteen Years in a London Parish. Time is foregrounded in the seasonal matter of parish life, which counts out the weeks and months of a parson's service. Routines such as spring fairs, Sunday schools, rogation days, and evening services not only fill their pages—at best, Eliot wryly observes, “the Sunday morning service was the most exciting event of the week”—but also function as indicators of the years and seasons that pass under a parson's care.Footnote ⁴⁰ The novel shares a preoccupation with marking time with the broader archive of lay Anglican literature: clergymen diaries highlight the diurnal cycles of visiting and sermonizing, parish histories revolve around the passing tenures of each clergyman and his earthly life, and liturgical time—the passing of Advent, Christmas, and Lent—is situated within seasonal, ordinary time as the parish becomes more prominent as an agricultural and seasonal unit, as E. P. Thompson describes in Customs in Common.

But perhaps the most compelling expression of time's value to pastoral labor is the parish novel's formalization of it. As much as these novels foreground the rhythms of pastoral life and embed them within a broader, earthly time, they also invite readers to experience the novel as a period of pastoral time. How they do so, however, can be difficult to discern, for they manifest their temporality as a narrative lack, a distinct absence of focus and forward movement from chapter to chapter.

Parish novels, admittedly, do not do much. They offer small, often disconnected episodes of the sort that occupy a parson's time: clergymen face “petty trickery” and gossiping congregants (or, in Shelton's chapters, “a little trouble in the Church choir”); the good Reverend Chalmers struggles with some cows: “he was unable to make satisfactory progress with his sermon one whole forenoon, because some tricky and overreaching farmer in his neighborhood drove two calves into the field of his glebe.”Footnote ⁴¹ Oliphant's Carlingford parish “has no particular interest.”Footnote ⁴² The genre's formal principle is enacted in miniature in Boyd's Recreations of a Country Parson, which skips from incident to incident:

The plot of tenure is, in short, not much of one. The lack of dramatic interest that unites this genre makes the period of reading felt as a period: time to be marked and filled from the novel's beginning to its end, from the parson's advent to his departure. In contrast to religious narratives that condense and eliminate quotidian time in the service of plot (perhaps, as Branch argues, The Vicar of Wakefield’s elision of stultifying devotional practice), time here is made palpable by the slowness of its passage. What the plot of tenure allows readers to experience, in other words, that explicitly spiritual literature does not is the sustained, sometimes uncertain effort of pastoral application: its lulls and prosaic doings, its dead ends and tedium. The kind of reading the parish novel solicits from the reader is a labored attention, whose power rests in its exertion over an aggregate rather than its focus on a climax or a unified line. This incremental narrative pressure is, as Robert Evans suggests in the preface to The Rectory of Valehead, the culmination of the novel's “multitude of minute and irregular incidents” that “make their impression rather by their accumulation and unceasing action, than by their importance.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The parish novel not only represents pastoral tenure, then, but takes it as a narrative function, converting the fugitive logic of plot into the felt experience of form. Its impulse to periodize Anglican life and make its time felt to readers is an impulse shared by others of the nineteenth century. The Anglican preoccupation with time is a phenomenon well documented by scholars such as Krysta Lysack, Joshua King, and Deidre Lynch. These scholars have suggested that Anglican literature aims to create certain temporal patterns for readers: in the devotional rhythms of Christina Rossetti's poetry; in The Christian Year’s desire to “align private reading with the ecclesiastical calendar and Prayer Book”; in the synchrony of “pages and pendulums” in John Clare's annual ritual of “reading The Vicar of Wakefield through every winter.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Kirstie Blair's Form and Faith proposes that faith is marked out in meter: Victorian poetry assumes steady and regular rhythms when speaking of faith, while doubt's meters are irregular and imbalanced. The “fixed, structured, and repetitive” nature of Anglican devotion is carried out by poets as varied as Tennyson, Keble, and Wordsworth; Tractarians sought form as a means “to regulate emotion and to calm it, to induce a steady state of quiet belief,” a bulwark against the nineteenth century's more turbulent upheavals of faith.Footnote ⁴⁶

For Blair and others, reading cultivates devotion by extending liturgical structures and ritual formalism into the domain of everyday life. Form itself thus becomes charged with denominational significance: for the Tractarians, repetition puts the reader in touch with an unchanged eternity, while as Lori Branch observes, “ritual and repetition figure not just as superstitious, but as boring, authoritarian, and out of date” to an emerging culture of free prayer that advocates enthusiasm and spontaneity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Both Blair's and Branch's accounts, however, proceed on the shared assumption that literature attempts to replicate its structures of time in its readers; formalized time contains in it a logic of obedience that makes it apt for the ethos of a highly ritualized Tractarianism and, conversely, free prayer's attempts to break from it.

The parish novel operates on a different assumption: that literature's forms of time need not be isomorphic with its religious work. Unlike the literature that Blair and Lysack describe, which aims to sync readers and liturgical calendars, the parish novel aims to produce a response against, rather than a harmony with, the text's formal procedures. If comfort and regularity are the feelings that Anglican poetry cultivates, soothing and channeling religious sentiment, then uncertainty and imperfection are the dominant affective notes of pastoral time. We watch as parsons face rebellious parishioners and sectarian strife. Parsons are “beset” by their parishioners; for Shelton, “small, barbed arrows of contumely” and “casual stings they know not whence, bruises and blunt blows,” and “the crushing foot of vulgarity or pride” must be borne with “utter silence, not … loud complaint.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The effects of such “worrying care” are marked only by “the somewhat sunken, sallow cheek, or deep furrows on the brow” of the parson (189). Rather than offering the revelation of God's presence, the parish novel coaches readers in God's empirical absence—an absence no less fundamental to the exercise of faith than the affirmation of spiritual truths.

The parish novel thus reverses the relationship between religion and literary form in the models of reading that undergird The Book of Common Prayer or Keble's Christian Year, a relation characterized, above all, by ease. Literature in these models takes up ritual time or otherwise offers an accompaniment to it; reading expresses an already given closeness to God. The parish novel, by contrast, places the emphasis on the gap between unknowing and certainty that defines faith. Its hermeneutic difficulty—the challenge of discerning religious meaning across a period in which everyday life merely transpires—elicits a striving toward God that is dependent on an uncertain relationship to God. Parish life contains no easy revelation. In Parish and the Priest, Fisherford parish contains “no controversies and party-strifes; no squabbles about gown or surplice; no Church-rate contests; no fat farmer making himself a lay pope; no church in ruins.”Footnote ⁴⁹ What replaces a model of reading that easily yields religious meaning is a model of reading as immanent praxis—one in which sustained attention generates its own proof of faith.

Such a turn away from explicit religious meaning toward its seeming disappearance is also a pivot from an obedient devotional reader to a laboring one. Parish novelists not only analogize the reader's work of sustained attention—and the difficulty inherent in it—with the vigilance that pastoral labor demands, but they also turn such labor into its own end. The poor rector of St Asaph's suffers for weeks “under a cloud from the tittle-tattle of his tittle-tattling little parish” (222), while Spooner's parson seeks refuge from his “perpetual stream” of annoyances.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet “you are interested in all these little matters,” reminds Boyd's parson narrator, “not because you have grown a gossiping, little-minded man, but because you know it is fit and right and good for you to be interested in such things.”Footnote ⁵¹ Their notion that labors of attention are themselves acts of faith brings forth an ethic of incremental religious exercise latent in writings such as Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, which conceptualizes the value of habitual, daily attention in the form of an “aphorism every morning for their occasional meditation,” or John Sheppard's The Suppliant, which withholds a receptivity to the divine until “you have willfully taken it up yourself.”Footnote ⁵² For these writers, the limited capacity to know one's relation to God at once places the impetus of religious exercise on the believer and restores the agency at root in belief. In order “to exercise a vivid, apprehensive faith,” Sheppard recommends “a rigorous reservation of a certain and fixed period, in each day, for religious exercises” such as François Fénelon's “little intervals,” “to maintain in your heart a habit of religion.”Footnote ⁵³ “How practicable and important it is,” he writes, “to habituate ourselves to interpose mental devotion.”Footnote ⁵⁴

To think of reading not as a practice that leads to faith—as it might in overtly religious literature—but rather as a practice that proves and, in fact, produces it paradoxically acknowledges the reader's limited agency while restoring that agency to him. It is because we do not know God that we must strive to meet him; pastoral labor implies an asymptotic relation to God. Though more pronounced in the nineteenth century, this devotional posture stretches back to earlier Anglican works. As David Marno has argued, John Donne's Holy Sonnets prompts a receptivity that acknowledges the “limited agency” in grace; attending to a poem reinforces the “absence, a hollow spot” on which grace depends and repeatedly creates.Footnote ⁵⁵ Donne's sonnets are animated by “striving as part of the kairotic goal of poetry” that implies a “telos of Christian life as religious practice; it is a goal towards which devotion strives.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The notion that sustained attention can produce faith restores the value of pastoral tenure as a life spent in service of God. Parish novelists would, at times, make this same point; the ontological case for Anglican tenure exists alongside the case for the novel. In Oliphant's Perpetual Curate, the Anglican clergyman Frank Wentworth pleads with his brother, the Catholic Gerald, not to leave the Church of England. Gerald loves the purity of doctrine and certainty of belief that Catholicism avails: “My dear Frank, I want a Church which is not a human institution.”Footnote ⁵⁷ But Frank launches a convincing counterargument: in pursuit of “a perfect Church, a symmetrical system of doctrine,” he argues, “you lose the use of your existence!” Frank's argument for Anglicanism is equally an argument for the experience of Oliphant's novel. A perfect doctrine obviates the need for a life lived through it. It obviates the doubt, the priestly hassle, the troublesome parishioners—and the novel that exists to describe it.

If the parish novel refuses to gratify certain narrative appetites, inviting us instead to merely dwell with its parsons, then this refusal points us to a broader idea: that Anglicanism, unlike other denominations, is not premised on narrative ends. Often religious narratives see earthly life as the reflection of spiritual status and in doing so curiously evacuate both characters and readers of their own spiritual agency. The Scottish antinomianism of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for example, accounts for the curious anarchic flattening of narrative after the murder: when one sees oneself as elect (even if one is damned), one's subsequent actions can have no impact. Robinson Crusoe’s bookkeeping Protestantism is validated by Crusoe's ultimate providential delivery from the island—though he has little direct hand in his own escape. But Anglicanism, I suggest, has a custodial, rather than terminal, narrative form, which simultaneously defines itself against foregone teleologies of salvation and restores agency to the reading, devotional subject. As the archive—parson handbooks, devotional manuals, and clergymen biographies—that proliferates elsewhere in the nineteenth century makes clear, devotion takes the form of sustained, daily habit, whose ends inhere in practice itself.

If other religious narratives moralize, then parish novels formalize; they do not see themselves as teleologically urgent and seek instead to position the reader as an agent within (rather than as a student of) the novel. Like the parson's tenure, these novels work as opportunities for the exercise of faith rather than vehicles by which meaning could be unearthed. But the ateleological form that allowed parish novels to best capture the shape and experience of Anglican faith would also prove to be the genre's greatest shortcoming. Parish novelists would acknowledge this explicitly as they contrast teleological forms of heroism and romance with their own work. Boyd's parson, “writing amid daily work and worry, of daily work and worry, and of the little things by which daily work and worry are intensified and relieved,” is not “the writer of fiction” who is the “absolute monarch” “rapt away into heroic times and distant scenes, and into romantic tracts of feeling.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In Shelton's novel, the “mutual relations which spring up between a pastor and his people” entail “an unartistic form” of various incidents “in the rambling order in which they have occurred” (335).

We no longer read parish novels as a genre, whether because we've lost sight of its organizing principles or whether, because it eludes the narrative rubrics that contemporary novel criticism favors (action, romance, récit), we have assimilated it into other descriptive genres such as the sketch or travelogue. But the parish novel and the plot of tenure register in authors' and publishers’ accounts of the marketplace and in the work of more recognized writers. Trollope, for example, sought to satisfy his publisher's taste for “an English Tale, on English life, with a clerical flavor” with a “morsel” of “a biography of an English clergyman.”Footnote ⁵⁹ His Chronicles of Barsetshire enact permutations of the tenure plot: The Warden opens on the tenure of Septimus Harding and ends with his leave-taking, while the advent of another parson, Arabin, inaugurates a tenure subplot. The Last Chronicle concludes with the end of two tenures: Crawley's resignation of his post and the death of the much-loved Harding. Were we to cast a wider literary view, we might see that what replaced the parish novel was, for instance, the genre of parson detective fiction—G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown series, C. C. Benison's Father Christmas, or James Runcie's Grantchester mysteries—which restores the novel's teleological drive by turning the parson's social know-how toward sleuthing.

Above all, perhaps, major novelists were keen to distinguish their own work against the parish novel, with its cloistered perspective and leisurely approach to plot, for if the genre's intended response was religious edification, then the response it often received was varieties of boredom. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley opens on three curates from three adjacent parishes at dinner, debating “not on politics, nor on philosophy, nor on literature—these topics were now, as ever, totally without interest for them—not even on theology, practical or doctrinal, but on minute points of ecclesiastical discipline, frivolities which seemed empty as bubbles to all save themselves.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Brontë punctures the tranquility of their repast with the entrance of Mr. Helstone, who bears more urgent news about dissent and machine breaking and reprimands the three leisured curates for their frivolity—implicitly distinguishing her novel, with its interests in industrial reform, from the more quotidian parish genre. Eliot, though a sometimes fond reader of parson biography, would also point to the genre's capacity to bore. The mismatch between an accelerated readerly drive and pastoral time is evident, for instance, in the impatient Mrs. Linnet of “Janet's Repentance,” who takes up “the biography of a celebrated preacher” but confines “her perusal to the purely secular portions” in order to “make rapid progress through a large number of volumes.” “Wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation,” writes Eliot, “she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns such as ‘small-pox,’ ‘pony,’ or ‘boots and shoes’ at once arrested her.”Footnote ⁶¹ Linnet's error is twofold: not only does she mistakenly parse the spiritual from the “secular,” but she also eliminates the novel's temporal work for the sake of “rapid progress.”

Though Eliot rejected the aesthetic parameters of the parish novel and sought to define her own fiction against it, her work nonetheless bears traces of the genre in how it values its parsons. Her peculiarly lovable parsons index not a broader, atmospheric humanism, I argue, but rather a more precise sense of the affection that accrues over pastoral tenure—the notion that time itself endears. Eliot, like the parish novelists, embraces a model of pastoral kinship based on lateral relationships between parson and flock. So, in conclusion, I trace the persistent figures of pastoral tenure—their close, parochial ambit, their “preachiness”—at the heart of Eliot's early fiction.

4. Endearments

The plot of tenure echoes throughout Eliot's fiction. “Janet's Repentance” begins with the arrival of the evangelical Reverend Tryan to the chapel of ease in Paddiford Common; the story ends with his death and subsequent secession by Mr. Walsh. Lingering on his gravestone's words—“two years officiating curate at the Paddiford Chapel-of-Ease, in this parish”—Eliot punctuates the story's conclusion with an awareness of the length of his residence.Footnote ⁶² “Amos Barton” likewise ends on the reverend's departure for a parish in a distant manufacturing town, leaving behind “general regret among parishioners” and a new vicar, Mr. Carpe.Footnote ⁶³ We forget how closely Eliot's sketches hew to clerical tenure as a plot, taking its cues for natural beginnings and endings, producing a harmonious coincidence between a “living” and a life. Echoes of the parish plot extend into her later work. While Reverend Irwine is Adam Bede’s resident clergyman, the novel might also be read as a tale of settlement that brings the roving Methodist preacher Dinah from a state of vagrancy to one of residence, enacting her marriage to Adam alongside her ultimate settlement within the parish of Hayslope.

Eliot's novels do not seek to exercise her readers’ attentions the way parish novels do; they are more explicitly plotted. But her fiction replicates the conditions of tenure—its periodization, its diminutive ambit—to cultivate ties between her parsons and her readers in ways similar to those between parsons and parishioners. Her clerical sketches, in short, are parochial. Taking as its setting parish bounds, her fiction invites her readers, like her parishioners, to dwell there for the span of her narrative. Scenes of Clerical Life, for example, transpires fully within Milby and Shepperton parishes. Adam Bede largely confines her characters to Hayslope parish and treats its boundaries as an imagined limit of sympathy. When characters—such as the ill-fated Hetty—do venture beyond parish bounds, it is with the dread of falling under another parish's jurisdiction: “To Hetty the ‘parish’ was next to the prison in obloquy.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Her parish, Milby, is the limit where parochial sympathy runs out and systemic, national welfare begins. The novel's parochialism is best expressed by Mrs. Poyner: “I should be loath to leave th’ old place, and the parish where I was bred and born, and Father afore me. We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and niver thrive again” (315).

More than simply adopting the conventions of tenure, however, Eliot's fiction foregrounds the activity of the pastoral labor—the clergyman's sustained, daily intercourse with the parish—as producing the parson's value for his flock, over any intrinsic moral quality he possesses. After all, her parsons are prone to fault: her clergymen are disposed toward stinginess, mild forgetfulness, a tendency to ramble, a lack of talent with interior decorating. Poor Amos Barton cannot spell: “It was very much the same sort of letter as most clergymen would have written under the same circumstances, except that instead of per ambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote pre ambulate, and instead of ‘if haply,’ ‘if happily,’ the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy. Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Our encounters with Eliot's parsons often depend on the recognition of a humanizing flaw, a flaw that will ultimately endear him to us over time: his fallibility, we might say, generates his peculiar worth. Like the protagonists of the parish novel, Reverend Amos Barton is not particularly talented at preaching; he has “neither that flexible imagination, nor that adroit tongue” to “convey religious truth within reach of the Fodge and Fitchett mind.”Footnote ⁶⁶ His words “[turn] on unleavened bread.” It is Amos Barton's embodied, very human presence at the lectern, rather, that captures Mrs. Hackit's affection. “When he preaches about meekness, he gives himself a slap in the face,” she observes. “He's like me—he's got a temper of his own.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The effect of Barton's services also lie in their incremental workings, week after week. Where her parsons fall short in eloquence, they succeed out of persistence. “‘We've had a very good sermon this morning,’ was the frequent remark, after hearing one of the old yellow series, heard with all the more satisfaction because it had been heard for the twentieth time; for to minds on the Shepperton level it is repetition, not novelty, that produces the strongest effect; and phrases, like tunes, are a long time making themselves at home in the brain.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The parson's shortcomings, especially his bumbling sermons, allow us to see another value: his capacity to hold these characters’ attention again and again, so that his work may take hold over “a long time.” Anglicanism, for Eliot's parishioners, works better as a formal practice rather than a learned content. This argument lurks in moments when the physical habit of Anglican ritual overtakes comprehension, such as in Mrs. Poyner's command of the catechism—despite her unlearnedness—or the image of Adam Bede hunched over his Bible on Sundays, “lips moved in semi-articulation.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The metaphor Eliot uses for parishioners’ improbable love for Reverend Crewe's parsimony best captures the incremental, time-bound quality of the pastoral relationship: “This was a good old-fashioned characteristic in a parson who had been part of Milby life for half a century: it was like the dents and disfigurements in an old family tankard, which no one would like to part with for a smart new piece of plate fresh from Birmingham.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This metaphor associates pastoral affection with the passage of time in the “dents and disfigurements” that accrue with age. The longevity of the tankard's possession, likened to the parson's tenure, is marked out in its flaws. The parson has been in Milby “for half a century,” which no “new” piece can rival. If both parson and tankard—like the “smart new piece of plate”—are treated as marketable objects, vulnerable to exchange and replacement, then here Eliot finds the limit where their value as belongings overtakes their value as commodities. Nothing is so special or cherished about the parson beside the fact that he is theirs. Likewise, the happiest pastoral relationships of Adam Bede are, as Rector Irwine acknowledges, a matter of lengthy residence: “the relation between us as clergyman and parishioners came of age two years ago, for it is three-and-twenty years since I first came among you, and I see some tall, fine-looking young men here, as well as some blooming young women, that were far from looking as pleasantly at me when I christened them, as I am happy to see them looking now.”Footnote ⁷¹ Only over the protracted spans of his life, “three-and-twenty years,” can the parson's value be grasped—can he be made “dear”—and often only to his parish.

Eliot's fiction does not so much reinforce the parson's intrinsic value so much as reorient her readers into the particular terms by which his value might be understood. The work of fiction not only accrues affection to the parson over the course of his tenure but also closes the gap between an abstracted, lofty view of him and a more sympathetic, pedestrian view. To understand Reverend Tryan, we must adopt his parochial ambit: “Any one looking at him with the bird's-eye glance of a critic might perhaps say that he had made the mistake of identifying Christianity with a too narrow doctrinal system; that he saw God's work too exclusively in antagonism to the world,” runs her critique. “But I am not poised at that lofty height. I am on the level and in the press with him, as he struggles his way along the stony road, through the crowd of unloving fellow-men.”Footnote ⁷² Going literally step for step with the humble curate “along the stony road,” where theological pedants do not, Eliot's narrator takes the parson's casual circuits throughout the parish as a figure for her own movement. Parish visiting—weekly rounds to dole supplies to the outdoor poor, to visit schools, to care for the invalid, and to take tea with the parish ladies—was the local parson's livelihood. His ability to traverse a small community by foot, to pass innocuously in and out of domestic and public spaces while remaining fully embedded within the parish, was increasingly valued by the Church (he could reach where bishops and deans had no place)—and by Eliot. Her narrator adopts a strikingly similar form of movement. We find her narrator in the clergyman's habitus, describing the unremarkable interiors of Hayslope church, watching the parish clerk intone beautifully in the choir, or gazing up the nave from the discomfort of Milby's pews. But her narrator also traverses into parishioners’ living rooms, parlors, and workplaces with an observational, rather than primarily narrative, intent. Her narrators’ arrivals are, crucially, moments that realize their embodied presence. Rather than an invisible omniscience that naturalizes the passage from scene to scene, Eliot's narrator pauses in thresholds and between households to highlight his movement as movement: “Let me take you into that dining-room, and show you the Rev. Adolphus Irwine, Rector of Broxton… . We will enter very softly, and stand still in the open doorway”; “So we may leave Cross Farm without waiting till Mrs Hackit, resolutely donning her clogs and wrappings, renders it incumbent on Mr Pilgrim also to fulfil his frequent threat of going”; “I will show you the roomy work-shop of Mr Jonathan Burge,” her narrator announces at the start of Adam Bede.Footnote ⁷³ These deictic moments evoke a parson on his rounds, his neighborly carriage, and his momentary presence among parishioners.

Embodied, pedantic, famously preachy, and, in Jesse Rosenthal's words, given to “harangues”:Footnote ⁷⁴ critics have amply observed such qualities in Eliot's narrator, yet none have located them in the cassocked figures so central to her early work. What I have suggested is that the parson is more than a convenient figure on which to hang a story; his labor also structures Eliot's fiction. If her narrator “lingers with a certain fondness” over “top-booted parsons,” then Eliot also depends on the conventions of his work—his time of residence, pedestrian perspective, and close, embodied radius—as affective protocols for her own fiction.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like the parish novelists, Eliot's belief in the virtue of pastoral labor manifests as a set of procedures and practices, a formal activity, rather than firmly held tenets: it is, above all, a mode of reading.

5. Parochialism

By the 1870s, “parochialism” commanded a reinvigorated life as a term of insult, a term that signified a blinkered, narrowed perspective as much as a distinctly English habit of mind. West Enders stood accused of “London parochialism” for electing a pandering MP over the more cosmopolitan John Stuart Mill, while Neville Chamberlain's protectionist stance on empire earned him the charge of “narrow parochialism.”Footnote ⁷⁶ “Parochialism” is rife in Victorian vocabulary as a habit of mind in critiques of Toryism (“the conservative mind is intensely parochial”), Gladstone (“the Prince of Parochialists”), and radicals alike (“the petty parochialism which the modern school of Radicals seems bent on introducing”).Footnote ⁷⁷ An editorial in Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine celebrates the habits of “The Parochial Mind,” while another in the National Review caricatures the “narrow-minded” and “Vulgar Parochialist.”Footnote ⁷⁸ It was, as Joshua Toulmin-Smith puts it, a widely shared tendency of British politicians to “sneer at Parish Vestries and to hold what they are pleased to call ‘parish squabbles’ as beneath them.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The OED dates the term's first, figurative usage to Emerson's 1856 English Traits ; the newness of its coinage is reflected in The Morning Post’s observance of “the petty parochialism—if, indeed, it be not libel upon our parishes to use the term in such a connection.”Footnote ⁸⁰

How did an ecclesiastical institution become a figure for a broader habit of mind? Where this essay has led, and where it might lead still, is to the novel's role in the latent connection between the two. The novel's reputation for a certain parochialism—a reputation we commonly take for granted—might be traced back to the labors of attention that Anglican authors once conceived for it. Not only did the novel bring this new figurative sense into modern consciousness, but, more importantly, its diegetic power in fact depended on its ability to parochialize—to engross its readers in everyday life within bounds. Novelists themselves participate in this semantic trajectory, associating the parish not with its ecclesiastical duty but with the scale and importance of life it occupies, carrying the term closer to its modern profile. We see this especially in Trollope's fiction, where the term opens up from its ecclesiastical meanings in his earlier works—“parochial duty,” “parochial clergy” in Barchester Towers (1857)—toward a more generalized sense of diminution and inconsequence in later ones: “a little parochial nothing,” “a parochial quarrel,” “parochial quiescence” in The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870); a sire's “parochial solitude” in Doctor Wortle's School (1881).

A close, sustained, if seemingly unproductive attention once formed the grounds for Anglican practice. What remained of it passed into a diffuse cultural sensibility and into the novel itself. If, in Virginia Woolf's words, “all those good novels” are “without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman,”Footnote ⁸¹ then this essay both suggests the novel's unacknowledged debt to its respectable clergymen and the extent to which its power dwelt in increasingly cloistered worlds.