Victorian Reverts

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
by Timothy Larsen
Oxford University Press, 2006
(317 pages, $110.00, hardcover)

reviewed by Harold K. Bush

The Victorian era in England featured growing religious doubts, increased secularization, and the large-scale abandonment of faith by the majority of the educated cultural elites. Attacks on Christianity came on several fronts: the widespread impact of Darwinian theories of evolution; the popularization of the German higher criticism of the Bible; the growing interest in theories of the unconscious and human psychology; rapid advances in astronomical knowledge; and the meteoric rise of interest in comparative religions.

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Harold K. Bush teaches English at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age, will appear in the fall of 2006.

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