Perceptions of Providence: Doing one’s duty in Victorian England

Abstract

Intellectual history responds to that most difficult question—‘What were they thinking?’ Intellectual historians often view the moral thinking of Victorians through a political lens, focussing on moral norms that were broadly accepted, or contested, rather than the moral thinking of particular Victorians as individuals—with their own assumptions, sensibilities and beliefs. In this thesis, I interrogate the work of nine individual Victorians to recover their moralities, and discover how they decided what is the right, and what is the wrong, thing to do. My selected protagonists contributed variously to Victorian intellectual life—George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, as novelists; Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, as participants in the public discussion of Christian belief; and William Whewell, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hill Green, as moral philosophers. I make comparisons between my protagonists’ moralities, but it is not my aim to generalise from them and, by a process of extrapolation, define a ‘Victorian’ morality. Rather, my aim is to understand the reasoning underpinning the individual moralities of these particular Victorians. My strategy has been to take a deep dive into my protagonists’ works—including their treatises, lectures, sermons, essays, novels, letters and diaries—to recover their moral beliefs, sometimes communicated explicitly but often implicitly, and to weave them together into webs of belief. My thesis focuses on two key themes—conceptions of providence and conceptions of duty. My initial aim was to simply explore the moralities of my protagonists but, as I read their works, it became apparent to me that, for the most part, conceptions of providence and duty are central to their moral beliefs. I have found that, while the practical duties they acknowledge are very similar, the conceptions of providence that inform their moralities are both diverse and contested. Further, I have identified tensions in their various webs of belief—some inherent in their conceptions of providence and some in the relationship between their conceptions of providence and their moralities. It seems to me that these synchronic tensions indicate likely drivers of diachronic change in moral thinking, warranting further study outside the scope of this thesis.