[In the following excerpt, Culp considers the relationship between the artistic and the ideological in Robert Elsmere.]

Two recent studies of the Victorian religious upheaval have drawn considerable attention to Robert Elsmere—published in 1888 by Mary Augusta Ward, the niece of Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of Rugby's Thomas Arnold. Neither of them, however, fully treats the issue of closure and ideological crisis in the novel. In Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England Robert Lee Wolff rightly recognizes that Mrs. Ward's book, with its emphasis on philanthropy as a cure for the unbelief caused by biblical criticism and skepticism toward Christian evidences, was, far more than frequently discussed texts like George Eliot's Middlemarch or Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, "the great classic novel of Victorian doubt." And in Victorian Heretic: Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Robert Elsmere," William S. Peterson has definitively established the chronology of...