SOURCE: "Prigs, Pews and Penitents: Early Tractarian Fiction," in The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel, Sheed & Ward, 1961, pp. 11-30.

In the following essay, Maison surveys the Anglican novels of the Victorian period, with particular consideration of Tractarian fiction.

If England escaped the horrors of a revolution in the Victorian age her National Church did not. The history of the Church of England during this time is a stirring record of warfare, struggle, persecution, agonized secession and fiercest conflict, differences of religious belief causing hostilities not merely confined to verbal clashes, lawsuits and imprisonments but extending to the level of actual physical fighting. Witness the state of St. Barnabas' Church, Pimlico, in 1851:

During the whole of that memorable year it was held only as a beleaguered city is held by armed men against the violence of enemies who battered the doors, shouted through the windows, hissed in...