19 (Dec 2016)
The Awakening Conscience: Christian Sentiment, Salvation, and Spectatorship in Mid-Victorian Britain
Abstract
From the 1830s into the mid-1850s, key Victorian art and texts depicted passionate Christian feeling through the trope of ‘awakening’. Visual and written representations dramatized awakening Christians in fervent states of salvation, conversion, and devotion. Feeling had always been central to Christian belief but in the long nineteenth century faith was newly wedded to sensation. From the 1780s onwards, Christian reformers explored sensory psychologies and environmental settings as methods for awakening the conscience of men, women, and children in disciplinary institutions. In the late 1830s a ‘new environmentalism’ appeared in Christian high culture, and art began to be promoted as a medium for releasing religious feelings. Painted and architectural narratives of awakening depicted the artwork as a mediating agent and explored its sensory affects. By connecting sentiment to sensation, Christian culture raised a series of questions about the relations between mind and body, senses and spectatorship, and whether the wellsprings of faith lay in mystery or invigilation. By valuing sensory impressions, intense feeling, and active agency, Christian artworks offered a discomforting model for a public exhibition culture concerned with the comportment of spectators. Drawing on a range of examples from mainland Britain to the colonial penitentiary, and from William Holman Hunt to Augustus Welby Pugin, this article links Christian art to fervent feeling and explores how this fervour was uneasily contained within social and religious limits.
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