A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century.(Book review)

A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Robert H. Ellison; pp. xiv + 571. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, 142.00 [pounds sterling], $247.00.

Attending to sermons is a promising way forward for Victorian studies. Among both historians and literary scholars there is a growing renewal of appreciation for and interest in how profoundly religion shaped nineteenth-century Britain. Literary scholars such as Mark Knight and Emma Mason have begun to demonstrate what can be done when studies of Victorian fiction move beyond the trope of "hypocritical and untrustworthy Low-Church clergymen" (314)--as Tamara S. Wagner puts it in her essay in this collection--to explore with sympathy religious genres and voices.

Robert H. Ellison is at the center of a new interest in the Victorian sermon and A New History of the Sermon is an important contribution to this endeavor. But the worst thing about the book, besides perhaps its outrageous price point, is its deceptive title. This volume certainly does not aim at the comprehensiveness and proportionality of either a textbook or a work of reference, the fact that it is titled like the …