times in discussing her heroine’s wary attraction to Catholicism. As Lucy recounts, the small theological work “possessed its own spell, and bound [her] attention at once. It preached Romanism; it persuaded to conversion. . . . The Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of the heretic’s hell as on account of the comfort, the indulgence, the tenderness holy Church offered.”17 The book sparks an immediate commentary on purgatory as the source of this sense of “tenderness” and “comfort,” for Lucy discusses how “the Catholic who had lost dear friends by death could enjoy the unspeakable solace of praying them out of purgatory” (413). This comforting model is clearly not Dante’s series of painful punishments but instead a uniquely Victorian conception of purgatory shaped by popular discussions of the afterlife midcentury, these discussions having been fostered by Newman and other vocal theologians of the period. And although Lucy treats these “indulgences” with suspicion, immediately bolstering her disavowal of Catholicism, the gradual model of purgatory that religious leaders like Newman advocated exerts a strange undercurrent in this secular novel, emerging at a time when Lucy seeks solace and undergoes strenuous introspection.
To trace the cultural pattern that I identify of purgatorial plotting in secular literary works, I begin by giving the religious-historical context for literary developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how Victorian ideas about the afterlife—many of which were shaped in crucial ways by Newman and the Oxford Movement—pervaded the culture more broadly, appearing not only in theological works but also in fiction. I subsequently chart the reception history of one of Newman’s most curiously popular works, The Dream, showing how Victorians themselves underwent a gradual conversion in their regard for Newman’s writing and eschatology. Placing The Dream in the context of Newman’s theological controversies allows for this new understanding of how eras and movements are themselves conversion stories writ large. Ultimately, if Tract 90 opened a rift in public discourse that resisted closure, artistic representations of purgatory as a maturational state helped purge resentments from previous generations. The popularity of Newman’s vision of the afterlife consequently speaks not only to a Victorian fascination with theorizing development across discourses but also to an emerging sense of historical and artistic consciousness oriented around gradualism and mature deliberation rather than revolutionary fervor.
I. The Victorian Reinvention of Purgatory: Newman, Aristotle, and Eschatology
If Lucy Snowe in Villette comes to consider purgatory a source of consolation, it is largely because of the dramatic changes that this realm of the afterlife underwent in the wake of the Oxford Movement. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, purgatory became the center of a national controversy over defining the ideological boundaries of the Church of England. Far from resembling Dante’s vision of arduous ascent, in this new model spiritual bildung became the central process. In the Purgatorio, shades are depicted climbing Mount Purgatory, facing challenges on each terrace that are conveyed as physical torments, including starving, burning, and carrying heavy stones on one’s back.18 Newman espoused a dramatically different view in suggesting, as both an Anglican and a Catholic, that this punitive model of Judgment need not be the case. As he asserted in one of his Anglican sermons, “A great part of the Christian world, as is well known, believes that after this life the souls of Christians ordinarily go into a prison called Purgatory, where they are kept in fire or other torment, till, their sins being burned away, they are at length fitted for that glorious kingdom into which nothing defiled can enter. Now, if there were any good reason for this belief, we should certainly have a very sad and depressing prospect before us.”19 Instead, Newman presented purgatory as a kinder “Intermediate State,”20 characterized as “a time of maturing that fruit of grace, but partly formed . . . in this life,—a school-time of contemplation” during which “the sins of youth are turned to account by the profitable penance of manhood.”21 Introspection and learning, not punitive duress, came to characterize his ideal of purgation in the afterlife. In reconceiving the afterlife to be gentler, Newman was at the forefront in redefining Judgment in two crucial ways: first, as a state of existence rather than a place with tiers, echelons, and geographical features as found in Dante’s Mount Purgatory, and second, as a time centering on individual maturation, not the trial by fire, as a model of spiritually productive eventfulness.22
This story of the reinvention of purgatory in the Victorian era is one that unsettles familiar accounts of the trajectory of orthodox belief in the period. Despite the Victorian and modernist eras often being framed in terms of the decline of popular religion and a larger crisis of faith, the Victorians revived a long tradition of belief in purgatory. Historian Jacques Le Goff charts the entrance of the word purgatorium into the English lexicon in the twelfth century through the first stages of acceptance of this belief. Examining the history of Judgment four centuries later, Stephen Greenblatt gives an account of the “afterlife” of purgatory in post-Reformation England, finding literary evidence of the continued presence of Catholic eschatology in the figure of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.23 Yet in more recent times, purgatory could be found hovering long after the ghost of Hamlet’s father first strode, or floated, offstage. Amid industrial expansion and the rise of liberalism, certain pre-Reformation beliefs once again found their way into mainstream British thought in the Victorian era. Beginning with the Oxford Movement, there was a resurgence of popular belief in the concept of purgatory.24
This controversy can be said to have begun in Oxford in 1833 when a group called the Tractarians began publishing pamphlets, several of which advocated that Anglicans return to primitive church doctrines. One such doctrine, the belief in a progressive realm of Judgment, became a central point of discussion with the publication of the movement’s most provocative document in 1841, Tract 90, written by Newman. In the wake of the Catholic Emancipation and during a time of renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, Newman’s suggestion that all Anglicans, and not just Catholics, might espouse belief in a progressive state of Judgment was taken as a profession of Romanism, a charge only confirmed for many critics retrospectively by his conversion in 1845.25 What Newman was trying to achieve in Tract 90, however, was not proselytizing on behalf of Catholics. Instead, he used the tract to draw a distinction between the “Romish” purgatory, which he defines ominously as “the conflagration of the world,” and a gentler alternative he presents as potentially appealing to his readers: “Another doctrine, purgatorian, but not Romish, is that said to be maintained by the Greeks at Florence, in which the cleansing, though a punishment was but a poena damni, not a poena sensûs; not a positive sensible infliction, much less the torment of fire, but the absence of God’s presence. And another purgatory is that in which the cleansing is but a progressive sanctification, and has no pain at all.”26 The idea of the poena damni, which Newman characterizes as the pain of being deprived of God’s presence as opposed to sensible pain such as Dante’s penitents undergo in the Purgatorio, became integral to Newman’s model of Judgment. At first, this milder vision of purgatory met great resistance, provoking outrage on a national level, but it also increasingly became an identifiable part of popular religion in the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.
Despite the initial controversy surrounding Newman’s eschatology, his concept of purgatory appealed to Victorians who, in their fervor for development, fused Newman’s ideas about the afterlife with emerging scientific concepts of gradualism, such as evolution. As one Victorian theologian wrote in a sermon on the subject,
“Evolution,” it has been pointedly said, “is in the air. It is the category of the age; a partus temporis; a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison.” Evolution and Christianity have at last become partners, and although there is still some insecurity in this new alliance, yet every day, almost, seems to give to it a character and likelihood of greater permanence. Therefore it is only in agreement with the new method in the conception of things, and more especially of the essence of things, viz., life, that we pursue our inquiry about the Intermediate State in the direction of such development. For, apart from other considerations, if there be such a law of growth belonging to all life as we know it now,
