Epilogue

Summary

When an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to interest and possess the mind, it is said to have life … It will … introduce itself into the framework and details of social life, changing public opinion and supporting or undermining the foundations of established order … since its province is the busy scene of human life, it cannot develop at all except either by destroying, or modifying and incorporating with itself, existing modes of thinking and acting …

— John Henry Newman, Essay on the development of Christian doctrine

In his influential book, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, the Yale historian, Frank M. Turner, quotes this passage from Newman's Essay on the development of Christian doctrine in order to critique academic trends in the twentieth century. Turner's view that a suspicious dislike of religion has shaped the research agendas of twentieth-century Anglo-American historians is persuasive. For him, the academy has promoted a skewed narrative of Victorian Britain that legitimizes present-day personal and institutional values. The myth of nineteenth-century ‘progress’ from a religious to a secular orientation is, he argues, rooted in the very principles endorsed by the twentieth-century university as its philosophical raison d'être: ‘liberalism, secularism, rational science … and other progressive, non-religious outlooks’. New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period. In particular, they draw attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular viewpoints and activities, and the important ‘role of ideas that are not wholly of the critical, rationalist, scientific, progressive mode’.