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’. As Newman suggests, ideas have interest and value to the analyst of the past because they have seized the imagination of men and women, whatever might be their truth or falsehood.

The same points could be made about the contemporary academic approach to Victorian literary culture. Until the late 1960s, critics generally argued that religious expression in literature followed a similar secularizing trajectory. The mapping of texts and authors on a faith–doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more ‘enlightened’, non-spiritual understanding of the world.