Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars has sought out new ways of conceptualizing literature in terms of global systems. Victorianists, despite their field's monarchial nomenclature, have experimented with several such approaches. Some have mapped out 19th‐century transatlantic literary relations; others have explored the global media infrastructure constructed by Victorian imperialism; still others have traced the cross‐period resonances of Victorian literary forms and aesthetic constructs. Such approaches promise not only to enlarge the field's geographical scope but also to allow for creative forms of presentism that can expand the field's purchase beyond the terms of the New Historicism.

O n may 11, 1923, arthur Conan Doyle and his family stepped off a train in Salt Lake City, utah. Doyle was on a global tour to promote the gospel of spiritualism; that evening at the mormon tabernacle, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, he captivated an audience of five thousand with a presentation on "Recent Psychic Evidence" and a slideshow of spirit photography (Homer). Doyle's listeners had turned out in part because of a longstanding mormon interest in spiritualism, but also to hear what Doyle might have to say concerning a certain novel that he had published nearly four decades earlier: A Study in Scarlet (1888), which had portrayed mormon utah as an oppressive, antimodern theocracy that trapped its members within a secretive web of surveillance. Doyle was aware of the discomfort created by his visit-certain elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had openly denounced him-and at a lunch the following day he reportedly expressed gratitude for the warmth of his welcome and admitted that, in hindsight, A Study had been "rather sensational and overcoloured" (Doyle, Our Second American Adventure 87). 1 nevertheless, Doyle refused to apologize for the novel, arguing that it had been based upon the best information available to him at the time.Indeed, Doyle's sensationalistic portrait of the mormons had drawn upon what was already an extensive body of commentary in the AbstrAct: this paper explores the Victorian fascination with mormonism from the 1830s through the end of the century. By reading a range of journalism, novels, and travel writing, I argue that what intrigued Victorian writers about Joseph Smith's followers was not simply their practice of plural marriage but also the way that they seemed to be experimenting with religion's role in modernity. While early accounts often portrayed the mormons as atavists seeking to revive Iron age institutions, later writers like William Hepworth Dixon and arthur Conan Doyle came to see mormonism as a striking hybrid of the ancient and the modern-one that ultimately reflected back upon the hybridity of English civilization itself and its settler colonies around the globe.

This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reworking of religion into an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.

This essay uses the overlapping cases of Victorian comparative religion and the Victorian Jesus novel to explore the vexed function of comparative types in nineteenth-century writing. Where Victorian comparative religion, with its concept of the generic founder type, had a surprisingly hard time validating the lives of particular individuals, evangelical Jesus novels were able to make use of historical realism in a way that standard portraits of the novel as a secularizing genre seldom anticipate.

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