Providence and Love: Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot, and Ruskin.

Providence and Love: Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot, and Ruskin, by John Beer; pp. viii+335. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, [pounds sterling]45.00, $85.00.

Known for his many fine books on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Beer in Providence and Love casts his net over a wider range of time and authors. By "Providence" he means the supernatural guidance that gives a shape to human affairs; while "love" in the nineteenth century, as Beer shows, was a way of giving shape to life even when the existence of God was doubted.

Taking off from eighteenth-century literature where Providence "was taken for granted as a motif in fiction" (Robinson Crusoe "sometimes questions its workings, hut never its existence") (1-2), Beer moves on to the more complex case of the nineteenth century where the word hangs on through habits of speech, but with varying degrees of belief in its validity. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), the word "is assigned to the less reflective characters" (13), while George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-72) parodies …