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In the 1840s Gladstone reached a Tractarian position, trying to attend the eucharist weekly, adopting fasting, and joining a lay confraternity. He took an interest in ecclesiastical decoration, church music, and late mediaeval art. The 14th-century Florentine poet Dante captured his allegiance too. In his household Gladstone preached regular sermons that reveal his developing theological stance. He urged a Catholic doctrine of the church and deprecated Evangelicalism, downplaying its characteristic stress on the atonement. Instead he placed emphasis on the eucharist as the place where the soul is nourished and on the incarnation as the fundamental Christian doctrine. He was swayed in this direction by the early fathers, the Caroline divines, and leading figures associated with the Oxford Movement —Newman, Pusey, Manning, and Robert Wilberforce.

This chapter discusses how Tractarianism revived debates over formal worship, assessing the ways in which the Oxford Movement leaders, notably Newman, Keble, and Faber, saw form as a means of containing and channelling religious emotion. It assesses Keble’s widely disseminated poetic theories, particularly as displayed in his lectures as Oxford Professor or Poetry, in this light, and includes a detailed reading in the final section of the chapter of his deployment of form in The Christian Year.

E. B. Pusey was so strongly identified with the Tractarian movement that it was often referred to as ‘Puseyism’ and he became the unrivalled leader of Anglo-Catholicism. Although low church Protestants in the Victorian age often asserted that Anglo-Catholics did not have a strong commitment to the authority and centrality of Scripture, this assumption is not borne out by a study of Pusey's life and thought. This chapter recovers Pusey as a Bible man. In particular, it explores the nature and impact of his biblical commentaries. Pusey himself saw commenting on Holy Scripture as at the core of his life's work and Christian ministry.

In 1832, John Henry Newman together with his friend William Froude, planned to “systematise a poetry department” for the British Magazine the intention of which would be to highlight certain truths: moral, ecclesiastical, and religious, simply and forcibly, with greater freedom and clarity than had been the case hitherto. Newman subsequently wrote the firstTracts for the Timeson the doctrine of the Apostolic succession. It would be later referred to as Tractarian. Newman was against “putting forth Tracts as a Society”. He was opposed to a formal organisation, arguing that it would be inconsistent to form one without episcopal sanction and thus required a compromise. He stated further that Tracts issued from a formal association would be “weighed and carefully corrected”, but “coming from an individual mind” will surely make an impression.

Becket was widely commemorated in nineteenth-century England: Gladstone, Dickens, Freeman, Dean Stanley, Trollope, Scott, Tennyson, even Daniel O’Connell, were not only acquainted with Becket's story but made significant contributions to the debate over his legacy. His lives and letters formed the object of a massive editorial enterprise. The sites associated with his life and martyrdom, particularly Canterbury Cathedral, became significant stopping off points on the Victorian tourist trail. Large numbers of new churches, both Anglican and Catholic, were dedicated to his memory. The depiction of his life and martyrdom became an iconic image. This chapter thus surveys an enormous and underexplored subject, ranging over Becket’s status as a touchstone for High Anglican or Catholic sympathies; Hurrell Froude’s rediscovery of Becket and its place in the ideas of the Oxford Movement; the degree to which the editorial work on Becket's legacy was crucial to the emergence of scholarly standards in the presentation of medieval texts and to the rediscovery of English historical sources still lurking in continental libraries; how the fallout from Newman's mmove to Rome continued to colour popular approaches to Becket; his acceptance as a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic saint; and the ways in which all of this was reflected in popular literature.

This chapter examines the formative relation between church architecture and religious poetry, particularly Tractarian poetry, in the 1830s and 1840s. It considers works from very different theological perspectives, including Isaac Williams' ‘The Cathedral’ and John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, and argues that the ‘central space’ for religious feeling represented by church architecture and poetry played a major role in the shaping of belief. The chapter also looks at Coventry Patmore's writings which address the question of ‘the reconciliation of life and law’ in gothic.

This chapter shows how the material arrangements and the chronometrics of Keble’s bestselling devotional volume are parallel features. The consolations of The Christian Year were such that they calibrated readers not only to the long time of the liturgical year but also synchronized them to clock time. While many contemporary readers lauded The Christian Year for its soothing properties, its long Victorian print afterlife is indicative of how devotion was being redefined as that century went on as a set of reading practices premised upon distraction and divided time. The eventual work of The Christian Year, in other words, was to console its readers according to a new realization of the replicable, interval time of modernity.

This chapter looks at the University’s role as a seminary for the clergy of the Church of England. It begins by examining the struggle to protestantize the University after the accession of Elizabeth, looks at the division between the Calvinists and the Arminians/Laudians in the early Stuart era, then explores the political and theological character of the University in the long eighteenth century, and its rejection of Methodism. The chapter closes with a study of the new divisions that opened up in Oxford after 1830 with the Tractarian movement, which captured the hearts and minds of the young dons and spawned rival camps of theological rationalists, evangelicals, and high-church ritualists.

This chapter explores Rossetti’s radical reading of creation in her earliest poetry as an interconnected body held together by grace in relation to Tractarianism. It discusses her membership of the Christ Church, Albany Street community, and the renewed Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism, she discovered there through figures such as Edward Bouverie Pusey and William Dodsworth. It shows how her vision of a revealed and interconnected cosmos originates in Tractarianism’s promotion of a universal Catholicism founded on a unity of all things as well as its commitment to religious education for women. The chapter also focuses on Rossetti’s engagement with premillennialism and patristics, and introduces her fascination with the Second Advent and the end of time. Rossetti thought that Christ would not return, however, to an internally atomized creation. In response, she followed the Tractarian emphasis on communion and grace to envision a companionable fellowship of divine, human, and nonhuman.

If the facts are arranged in a logical space, it must have a quasi-geometric structure. This chapter axiomatizes that quasi-geometry. Tractarian geometry has two kinds of geometric structures: quality spaces and hypersurfaces. The axioms use two primitive quasi-geometric notions, one for each kind of structure. Results are proven about the resulting geometry, culminating in the Predicational Determination Theorem, which says that any fact can be uniquely located by a single quality space and a sequence of hypersurfaces.

This chapter considers the legacy of the Romantic rethinking of prayer, with a particular focus on the Victorian period which immediately follows. The inflections of prayer explored by all the poets discussed in this study—from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical—are shown to have Victorian afterlives, ranging from James Martineau and Barbauld to Swinburne and Keats. An even wider legacy interlinking the poetic with the theological is apparent in the Tractarian revival and the richness of Victorian devotional verse. Looking forward to the barer and more uncertain prayerful poetry of the twentieth century and beyond, the chapter asserts the pivotal importance of Romantic prayer.