This study examines the unique cultural space of Victorian
cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles
Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use
the cathedral town's enclosure, and its overt connections between
sacred and secular, present and past, as an ideal locus from which
to critique Victorian religious attitudes, aesthetic anxieties,
business practices, and even immigration. By displacing these
issues from the metropolis, these social authors defamiliarize
them, raising what might have been considered strictly urban
problems to the level of national crises.
By situating contemporary debates in cathedral towns, Dickens
and Trollope complicate the restrictive dichotomy between urban and
rural space often drawn by contemporary critics and Victorian
fiction writers alike.
In this book, Bridgham focuses on the appearance of three such
key concerns appearing in the cathedral towns of each writer:
religious fragmentation, the social value of artistic labor, and
the Gothic revival. Dickens and Trollope reject Romantic nostalgia
by concentrating on the ancient, yet vital (as opposed to ruined)
edifices of the cathedrals, and by demonstrating ways in which
modern sensibilities, politics, and comforts supersede the values
of the cloister. In this sense, their cathedral towns are not
idealized escapes; rather, they reflect the societies of which they
are a part.
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