Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology

Book excerpt: Death, judgement, heaven and hell - the four last things of Christian eschatology - have long been the subject of anxious speculation and fierce controversy, and never more so in the modern era than in Victorian Britain. In this major illustrated study, Michael Wheeler, a literary critic and cultural historian of the period, looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond. Wheeler's extensive analyses of each of the four last things and their part in nineteenth-century thought draw on a wide range of literary and theological writings from 1830 to 1890. He goes on to offer revisionary readings of four central literary texts, contrasting the broadly liberal theology of Tennyson's In Memoriam and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend with the Catholic authority invoked in Newman's The Dream of Gerontius and Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland. These writings are shown to reopen key theoretical questions which will stimulate fresh debate about the nature of religious experience, belief and language in the nineteenth century.