‘The Perilous Depth of Doubt’: Dante, Plumptre and Victorian Faith

Abstract

Robin Gilmour, in his recent book on The Victorian Period, suggests that we remove the concept of doubt from the discussion of nineteenth-century religion: ‘William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)’, he says, ‘is a much better title for a study of Victorian religion than that old music-hall turn, Faith and Doubt’ (Gilmour (1993), p. 94). It is easy to sympathize with this point of view: Doubt seems to create its opposite, Faith, encouraging people to think of a pre-Victorian world of certainty and devotion. Nevertheless, Doubt is woven into the Victorians’ image of their own spiritual condition. They often thought of themselves as doubters and as doubters who became agnostics, once that word had been coined in 1869. The period’s sense of itself as one of religious doubt runs alongside its extraordinary interest in Dante. This paper discusses the role Dante played in an atmosphere of doubt, what requirements his poem was asked to fulfill, and what effect those requirements had on his translation in the period. To set up this discussion, however, I will have to venture a few generalizations about the nature of Victorian spirituality.