Mark Rutherford and the Plight of the Dissenting Aesthete

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 17; p. 20
• Main Author: Cunningham, Valentine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2013
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Comprising a set, or scenario, of Bible appropriations assisted, of course, by narrative tropes lifted - and naturally, I'd say - from the secular, worldly stuff, the customary products of Art's Vanity Fair, officially spumed by converted Bunyan as the once enjoyed fictions of his pre-conversion days, anti-biblical reading matter, piously rejected as 'beastly Romances' (ballads, 'Bevis of Southampton', and so forth), but plainly the source and motor of great dramatic set pieces in the Progress, things like Giant Despair, his terrible wife, and their castle for imprisoning wandering Pilgrims.2 As for Defoe, he insisted that Robinson Crusoe was 1 a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it' ? 5 A slanted Puritan appropriation of Scripture happily endorsed by bourgeois London trader Defoe (and quite opposite to the provincial tinker Bunyan's Biblicized economics), on the regular and excellent Protestant grounds that Bible reading saves, is only saving, when you appropriate it keenly. Father and Son tells that wonderfully revealing story of little Edmund Gosse reading pages from a Gothic novel all about female abduction by robber-baron types that he discovered lining a trunk in his parents' attic (trunkmakers regularly used bought-in redundant printers' sheets to line their boxes) and, taking them as read, being terrified for the safety of his mother, who used to go out alone distributing her religious tracts on London omnibuses.9 No notion of fiction: the awful deprivation of being cut off from worldly writing because the evangelical tradition's pietism thought it all lies. Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity was translated by Hale White's great admiree the onetime Protestant evangelical George Eliot (Theresa of the Autobiography), encountered by Hale White when he was down and almost out, on the run from Dissenting orthodoxy, and troublingly mixed up at 42,The Strand with John Chapman, editor of The Westminster Review and one of the fathers of British godlessness.