Syllabus Overview

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How did religious minorities navigate their role as “other” in Christian-majority Britain? Orientated by this question, this final-year (upper-division) undergraduate syllabus focuses on how identity and belief are expressed in texts written by individuals associated with minoritized communities in Victorian Britain, including secular groups that rejected religion. While not diminishing or ignoring the importance of extending the geographic scope of Victorian Studies and situating religion in a global context marked by colonialism and the dynamics of empire, this syllabus focuses on the flourishing of belief communities within Britain itself.

The course content highlights the religious diversity of a society that is often assumed by undergraduates to be predominantly white, Christian, and relatively homogenous. Furthermore, it responds to Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie’s call to “widen” studies of the nineteenth century by rejecting notions of “contact, encounter, and exchange” to prioritize texts that complicate and resist colonialist power structures from within (3).

Designed for a research-intensive university in the U.K. with a large intake of first-generation and ethnic minority students, the course prioritizes how non-Christian beliefs fed into religious, scientific, social, and political discourses within Victorian Britain. This focus facilitates the study of non-canonical writers that undergraduates are otherwise unlikely to encounter during their degree. Primary texts are written by authors who identified as Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Theosophist, spiritualist, atheist, and otherwise, with the intention of centering the voices of minoritized individuals rather than viewing religious beliefs and practices from an outsider’s perspective. Some were born into those faiths, such as Israel Zangwill and Sarojini Naidu; some converted, such as W. H. Abdullah Quilliam and Constance Naden; others were central to the shaping of the spiritual systems with which they identified, such as Helena Blavatsky and Anna Mary Howitt.

While these writers are set as “primary” reading through which to consider each faith, secondary reading and introductory material place these selections in a historical context to make clear that no single text or individual is representative of an entire group. Periodicals are used to highlight the plurality of each tradition and place writers in dialogue with diverse other voices within and beyond Britain, and a midterm assignment emphasizes the role that periodicals played in growing and sustaining these communities.

David Nash persuasively argues that “religious and moral 'seeking,’” “[i]deological openness and change,” and “an avoidance of prearranged ideological patterns” were intrinsic to Victorian culture: “quests and journeys were for some a way of life” (82). This syllabus helps students think critically about intellectual and spiritual journeys — and in doing so address unexamined preconceptions about Victorian Britain as monocultural and largely reactionary — through novels, poems, short stories, life writing, and other texts. We consider how individual writers characterize their relationship with the Christian majority and what they perceive their place to be within Victorian society. We are prompted to interrogate how we can know what people believe, reflecting upon whether someone’s belief necessarily aligns with their identity or their behaviors. Through the lens of “religious and moral ’seeking,’” we also consider Victorians’ attempts to answer epistemological questions such as “how do we know things?” and the role that both literature and religion can play in answering these queries.

Primary reading facilitates discussions about the inherently intersectional nature of identity, enabling students to reflect on how religion, class, gender, race, nationality, and other markers of difference are entangled, both informing and complicating feelings of faith and belonging. While many of the primary texts were written by white British people, the syllabus nonetheless centers otherwise minoritized voices “to enlarge, and complicate, our cultural assumptions” (Nowell Smith and Williams 213) and to enable students to undertake “a decolonial delinking from the hegemony of Western thought,” shaped by Christian epistemology (Mignolo 324). The dynamic intersections of religion and race are integrated across the course, coming into particularly sharp relief when considering how the racialization of Jews is negotiated in Zangwill’s social satires and the implications of Arthur Symons’s orientalization of Naidu in his introduction to The Golden Threshold (1905).

The framing of this syllabus also chimes with concerns raised in a recent teaching forum on religion: while few critics today use outmoded scholarly commonplaces like the “crisis of faith” or “the age of doubt” in academic publications, “the old secularisation narrative still maintains an almost gravitational pull in the teaching of Romantic and Victorian Literature” (McQueen 353). By emphasizing the ways that conversations about religion proliferated and diversified rather than diminished in Britain across the nineteenth century, this course helps students to develop a more nuanced view of its role in shaping what they and scholars perceive to be Western modernity.

The first week introduces approaches to thinking about the surprisingly slippery term “religion” and how we can study it through the lens of Victorian literature. Religion is not an essential or self-evident category. As Talal Asad emphasizes, religion is socially integrated and not a “transhistorical,” “transcultural,” or “autonomous essence” (28). Acknowledging that modern definitions of religion originated primarily as a way of wielding colonial power over indigenous populations clarifies religion’s position as a central pillar of “imperial-colonial designs celebrating a universal idea of the human model” that decolonial work seeks to resist (Mignolo 314).

Building upon Joseph Blankholm’s short essay “One Good Way to Understand Religion is to Break It Apart,” we discuss how the social sciences seek to understand religion in terms of attitudes, beliefs, and practices. I have found that students, especially those who identify as religious, often wish to challenge these frameworks, viewing them as an attempt to quantify something that might be better understood in terms of feeling. This observation opens out into a collective task: mind mapping the range of feelings students associate with religion. As Richa Dwor has observed “many religions in Britain shared a converging reliance on the language of feeling” during the nineteenth century (2). Discussing religion in these terms identifies points of connection and shared experience across time periods and diverse traditions.

We also discuss Christian pluralism via Horace Mann’s Census of Great Britain, 1851: Religious Worship in England and Wales, which enumerated more than thirty-five Christian denominations alongside the Church of England and fueled a moral panic about the urban working classes’ low church attendance. The census invites reflection upon the very idea of quantifying belief and challenges assumptions that students might have about the Christian majority being a monolithic entity.

Throughout the syllabus there is a focus on “connectivity” rather than “comparativism” between distinct religious traditions (see Werner and Winick), the lens of identity and belief enabling a more holistic consideration of how faith shapes lived experience. The second week builds on these points of connection by framing discussion in terms of religious seeking. The primary reading consists of three short pieces of autobiographical writing: an extract from Francis William Newman’s Phases of Faith (1850), Marie Corelli’s prologue to A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), and Annie Besant’s pamphlet Why I Became a Theosophist (1889). While each writer’s spiritual and intellectual journey had very different start and end points, each text articulates a personal journey away from and toward different forms of faith. This is an accessible way into discussing what Charles Taylor means when he identifies the nineteenth century as the pivotal period during which Western society changed from one “in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others” (3).

These texts also prime students for conversations about conversion, which resurface in later weeks including those focused on the growth of an Islamic convert community in Liverpool, short stories in which Jewish characters grapple with the push and pull of Anglicization, and narratives tracing the development of secular identities. In the latter case, William Winwood Reade’s The Outcast (1875), which would usually be labelled a “crisis of faith” novel, is profitably recontextualized through Gauri Viswanathan’s description of conversion as an experience that “meshes two worlds, two cultures, and two religions, only to unravel their various strands and cast upon each strand the estranged light of unfamiliarity. Viewed thus, conversion is primarily an interpretive act, an index of material and social conflicts.” (4).

Fostering a learning environment predicated on respect for all faiths and none while simultaneously encouraging open-minded discussions is paramount to the inclusive student-centered pedagogy underpinning the syllabus. In the classroom, we discuss how there are many different kinds of expertise, and I emphasize that their contributions to the course will rely on a mixture of these. Building upon established decolonial pedagogical practices, I encourage students to draw from and share knowledge arising from their lived experiences alongside academic and independent study (see Higgins and Lenette). I also remind them that their critical thinking and research skills enable them to seek out answers to questions that arise when encountering unfamiliar material.

As a white person from a non-religious household whose research expertise is centered around secular, scientific, and esoteric beliefs, I situate myself as part of a reciprocal classroom dynamic within which I will not have the answer to every question posed. The perspectives of students who are practicing Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews, or who were brought up within these traditions, immeasurably enrich discussions about how religious beliefs and practices are described in Victorian texts.

All primary texts are available in open-access digital formats to ensure that material is accessible to all students. The only exception is the National Reformer, which is used for the session about researching faith in Victorian periodicals. I use my own scans of the undigitized journal in which James “B. V.” Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” was first published, as this aligns with my research interests. However, an alternative would be to use digitized issues of The Islamic Worldor The Crescent in which Quilliam and Ameenah (Emily) Lincoln’s poetry first appeared. The midterm assignment is a show-and-tell research exercise for which students read digitized nineteenth-century periodicals published by Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Spiritualist, Occult, Theosophical, Christian Socialist, Secular, and Positivist groups. These journals prioritized writing by adherents to each belief system and provided a platform for individuals whose presence destabilized white Christian authority within British society. By browsing these documents to find an article that catches their eye (rather than keyword searching), students gain insights into the heterogeneity of faith communities.

Across the semester, students are introduced to at least seven distinct worldviews, many of which will be unfamiliar to them. While a lot of new material is introduced each week, students rise to the challenge and are keen to learn about the historical experiences of different religious groups and to discuss the specifics of the primary texts and their authors.

I have delivered this syllabus twice in its current form, comprising ten weekly two-hour seminars, each of which included a short introductory lecture to provide context, small group activities, and class discussion. (During the final week the seminar is replaced by a one-to-one meeting to support the independent research project underpinning the second assignment.) However, student feedback shows that the module would benefit from more contact hours so that introductory, theoretical, and contextual material could be delivered in an additional one-hour lecture each week. Furthermore, this syllabus could be extended to a course of double the credit length that explores Christian orthodoxy and heterodoxy through the lens of intersectional identities and religious seeking by ranging across state religion and dissent, evangelicalism, and missionary groups.

Muslim students have been the largest demographic group within my classes, and their responses to this module are particularly illuminating. Most, if not all, were previously unaware of the pre-twentieth-century history of Islam in Britain and many chose to delve further into the complexities of Quilliam’s syncretic convert community (see Gilham and Geaves) for their independent research assignment, a 3,000-word essay. Their responsiveness to a curriculum that centers the experience of religious minorities indicates the importance of widening Victorian Studies curricula to more accurately reflect the diverse identities and beliefs permeating both Victorian society and the contemporary university.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the students who have chosen to take this module at Queen Mary University of London. I am lucky to have had such engaged and engaging people in my seminars. Thanks too to my brilliant colleagues who supported and encouraged the module’s development. It has been a privilege to learn from you all.

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Banerjee, Sukanya, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie. “Introduction: Widening the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 49, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1—26.

Blankholm, Joseph. “One Good Way to Understand Religion Is to Break It Apart.” Psyche, 22 Aug. 2022.

Dwor, Richa. “Introduction.” Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society, vol. 3, Religious Feeling, edited by Richa Dwor, Routledge, 2020, pp. 1—8.

Gilham, Jamie, and Ron Geaves, editors. Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Higgins, Maree, and Caroline Lenette, editors. Disrupting the Academy with Lived Experience-Led Knowledge. Policy Press, 2024.

McQueen, Joseph. “Teaching 19th-Century Literature Beyond the Secularisation Thesis: Introduction to the Special Forum.” Literature and Theology, vol. 36, no. 4, 2022, pp. 353—58.

Mann, Horace. Census of Great Britain, 1851: Religious Worship in England and Wales. Routledge, 1854.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity.” American Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 312—31.

Nash, David. “Reassessing the ’Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 2011, pp. 65—82.

Nowell Smith, David, and Nonia Williams. “Decolonizing English Studies: Editorial.” English: Journal of the English Association, vol. 70, no. 3, 2021, pp. 211—17.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Werner, Winter Jade, and Mimi Winick. “How to See Global Religion: Comparativism, Connectivity, and the Undisciplining of Victorian Literary Studies.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, 2022, pp. 499—520.

The Nineteenth-Century Religious Other Series

While religion remains a central topic in the field of Victorian Studies, scholars continue to prioritize Christian perspectives. This cluster of syllabi provides resources that expand engagement beyond Christianity, highlighting texts by and about those considered religious "others" in the nineteenth century. Through frameworks from Postcolonial and Religious Studies, the cluster decenters white Christian metropolitan Britishness by amplifying the voices of those who have been often overlooked due to racial and religious biases. At their best, religions cultivate attitudes of care, and in teasing out the multifaceted Victorian religious perspectives with which students may not be familiar, these syllabi seek to broaden religious tolerance, awareness, and appreciation.

Developer Biography

Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She primarily works on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and their periodicals but has a wider interest in literary responses to esoteric spiritualities, intellectual history, and science. She is the author of Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet (2019) and co-editor (with Naomi Hetherington) of Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs (2020). Her research has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Media History, Victorian Periodicals Review, and elsewhere.