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This book traces the rise and fall of the evangelical movement, the powerhouse of Victorian religion, via its preoccupation with pleasure. Victorian evangelicalism demonstrated an ability to excite the affections but also a corresponding suspicion of worldly pleasures. Suspicion developed into hostility, and a movement premised on freedom became coercive and alienating. The crisis of Victorian religion began.
It is generally held that the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and sport solved the problem, 'justifying God to the people' through cricket, cycling and football. This book argues otherwise - that the problem of pleasure was inflamed by the ecclesiastical remedy. The problem of overdrawn boundaries between church and world gave way to a new and subtle confusion of gospel and culture. Historians have praised the mood of engagement but the costs were profound. In fact, sport became the perfect vehicle for that humanistic, 'unmystical' morality that defines the secularity of the twentieth century. Secularisation did not wait for the Dionysian rebellions of the 1960s: it emerged - almost a hundred years earlier - in the Victorian transformation of religion into ethics. Central to the process was the problem of pleasure.
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations and Note on Conventions viii
Introduction 1
1 'Born Free and Everywhere in Chains': Evangelicalism and the Problem of Pleasure 41
2 Romanticism with Boots On: The Virtues of Sport 85
3 Renegotiating the Secular: The Coming of Recreation to the Mid-Victorian Religious World 113
4 'We Are All Cyclists Now' : Applying the Pleasure Principle 154
5 Sport and the Secularisation of Late-Victorian Youth Ministry 199
6 Contesting the Sacred: The Late-Victorian Church and the 'Gospel of Amusement' 230
Conclusion 271
Bibliography 283
Index 295
Overview
This book traces the rise and fall of the evangelical movement, the powerhouse of Victorian religion, via its preoccupation with pleasure. Victorian evangelicalism demonstrated an ability to excite the affections but also a corresponding suspicion of worldly pleasures. Suspicion developed into hostility, and a movement premised on freedom became coercive and alienating. The crisis of Victorian religion began.
It is generally held that the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and ...