Chapter 6 focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s late long novels Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1866). Our accounts of English provincial realism occasionally short-circuit these fictions because of Gaskell’s sometimes subtle and sometimes overt presentation of Christian theology; this chapter claims them within the genre of realism by focusing on their formal commonality with other realist novels and reverent natural history: the reverence for minute details and for the commonplace subject. Like natural history, Gaskell’s novels focus on, and show reverence for, the quotidian world and event; the chapter argues that behind the observation and rendering of the details of everyday reality there is reverence, and that the form of the novel (its “reverent form”) demonstrates a persistent religiosity. The chapter connects Gaskell to Charles Kingsley and explores her Unitarianism as illuminative of the presentation of the Quakerism and the overt natural theological references in Sylvia’s Lovers.

The Introduction theorizes the relationship between natural history, the theology of nature, and the novel of English provincial realism. The chapter theorizes the idea of “reverent empiricism,” a term that describes the way in which observation and description in a strain of English natural history (from Gilbert White to Philip Henry Gosse) blended scientific observation with religious reverence. Providing an overarching account of how natural-theologically informed natural histories share with the novel of English provincial realism “reverent form,” this alters our understanding of the Victorian novel as increasingly secular and demonstrates that the theological heritage persists far longer than we sometimes think. The introduction lays out the idea that the twin reverence for minute details and for the commonplace in popular natural histories finds its cognate expression in literary realism, which likewise focuses on the commonplace thing and event. The Introduction lays out a historical and formalist argument that is specific to the English context, and demonstrates the connections between natural history, the theology of nature, and English literary realism.