Novel Ideas
Barton Swaim on the Fictional Value of “Things That Never Existed”
There is a long and venerable tradition among Evangelical Christians of viewing the genre of fiction with apprehension and mistrust. The idea that there is something vaguely unsound or improper about the reading and writing of tales that aren’t true is an old one, dating back at least to the seventeenth-century Puritans. The Puritans, as every undergraduate English major knows, shut down the playhouses because (among other reasons) dramatic productions are fabrications.
Over the succeeding generations, those suspicions waned but didn’t die. Defoe went to great lengths in the preface to Robinson Crusoe to deny that his story was “an invention imposed on the world”; he admitted the story was “allegorical” but insisted that it was also “historical.” Defoe knew that a great number of readers would not have read his book if they thought it was fiction, which of course it was.
An Idle Pastime
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Protestants of a conservative disposition were still expressing their misgivings about novel reading. Zachary Macaulay, the father of Thomas Babington Macaulay and a member of the “Clapham sect” of Evangelicals, allowed his children to read novels—but only at night. Reading novels in the daytime, he said, was like “drinking drams in the morning.”
And since novels weren’t true or educational in the way other kinds of books were, novel reading was widely associated with idleness. “The great object of habitual readers of novels is to kill time,” wrote Thomas M’Crie in 1817—M’Crie was an erudite Presbyterian minister—“and they are not very scrupulous as to the means which they employ to rid themselves of this troublesome companion.”
But the underlying reason M’Crie and many others couldn’t reconcile themselves to the legitimacy of fiction was the old one: It wasn’t true. (Indeed M’Crie’s quip came in a hostile review of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, a historical novel the reviewer thought to be reckless with the historical record.)
George Eliot, in one of her early letters—written when she was a 19-year-old Evangelical Christian named Marian Evans—expressed deep aversion to the whole idea of fiction. “As to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of fictions I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by that of history.” This remarkable letter (it comes to about 2,000 words) is a sustained attack on novel reading as detrimental to both moral and intellectual development. “For my part,” she concludes, “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?”
Dislike of Christian Truth
I was pleased to discover recently that this venerable tradition lives on—and I use the word “venerable” without irony. Banner of Truth, a small Evangelical press based in Scotland, has recently published an engaging little book by Iain Murray, The Undercover Revolution: How Fiction Changed Britain. Murray is a highly competent scholar and the author of many books on Christian subjects, among them an excellent biography of Jonathan Edwards and a history of “revivalism” in America.
In 1870, more works were published in Britain on religious subjects than on any other. By 1886, fiction was at the top of the list. Murray contends that this transformation had to do with more than simply tastes in genres. The writers of fiction who rose to prominence during these years
Barton Swaim works as a speechwriter and is the author of Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere (Bucknell, 2009). He is a member of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, a church of the Associate Reformed Synod.
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