Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature provides a welcome new perspective into the complexity of Victorian cosmopolitan engagements and their ongoing relevance to theories of global citizenship today. Werner does not argue that nineteenth-century missionary work represents some lost ideal of cosmopolitanism: her aim rather is to illustrate how much the fraught history of this ideal was “mediated by religion” (5), particularly in the first quarter of the nineteenth century when “cosmopolite” and related terms had fallen out of public favor. Werner delves deep into the vast print archive of missionary writing, and indeed one added feature of the book is how well it serves as a short introduction to this subfield of religious study. Her main focus, however, is literature, as the book’s title indicates: if missionary writing itself tended to preach to the choir with a highly idealistic form of “world church” cosmopolitanism, literary texts featuring missionary work did more to critically assess such efforts on the ground amid a variety of different social, familial, and political contexts. Werner offers some exciting new readings of missionary characters already well-known to Victorianists, including St. John Rivers of Jane Eyre (1848), while also featuring other texts now largely neglected but highly influential in their day, such as Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), revised and republished as Luxima (1859) following the India Uprising.Werner’s introduction tackles head-on the sorts of critical reservations many readers will likely hold toward religious forms of cosmopolitanism, including the most obvious: how could any enterprise motivated by the conversion of a subject people to a Westernized version of what was understood to be the only “true faith” be part of any conversation about cosmopolitanism? Beyond oversimplifying “missionaries’ complicated and often ambivalent reactions to cultural alterity” (17), Werner demonstrates, such reservations forget that by coupling Christianity with notions of universalistic global “progress,” mission work was no different than other nascent Victorian cosmopolitanisms with roots in the Enlightenment. Werner’s argument does not absolve missionary work of complicity in imperialism, but it does help to broaden the “oddly monolithic understanding of cosmopolitanism’s genealogy” (21) that casts it as something that could develop only in opposition to religious discourse. The introduction overall engages closely and productively with previous work in the field of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism by theorists and literary scholars including Bruce Robbins, Amanda Anderson, and Tanya Agathocleous.The book’s first chapter illustrates the shifting cultural and political capital of cosmopolitanism from the eighteenth century to the time of the Great Exhibition and Bleak House (1852–53). Initially signifying a mostly intellectual and aesthetic openness toward different cultures, one with firm antecedents in classical Greece, cosmopolitanism began to take on a more political guise late in the eighteenth century, notably in Immanuel Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784). Kant’s essay was hardly a call to revolution, but European conservatives including Edmund Burke successfully linked it along with almost any favorable gesture toward world citizenship with the worst excesses of the French Revolution—something only a Byron would openly own. It is here in many ways that Werner’s story begins, for as she argues, this prepolitical Enlightenment cosmopolitanism did not so much disappear as go underground, remaining a staple of missionary writing and Dissenter ideology in ways that gradually reclaimed public favor. An Enlightenment humanism that celebrated the individual, universal capacity for reason and personal transformation formed an important intellectual foundation for missionary work. If the Christian message was one that could resonate across barriers of culture and language, then, as missionary John Williams wrote in 1837, it was the duty of every Christian to “be familiar with the condition, and changes, and prospects, of every people, . . . The Christian is the only true cosmopolite” (qtd. in Werner 1).More interested in winning over individual hearts and minds, missionary work further posed no threat to British political or commercial objectives overseas, and if anything supported efforts to overrule more “tyrannical” local forms of governance that interfered with the free exercise of conscience. This seamless bonding of Christian cosmopolitan progress with British imperial and economic self-interest reached its high-water mark with the Great Exhibition. And for Dickens, Werner argues, this new rendition of the global “Brotherhood of Humanity” had become a dangerous distraction from more homegrown quasi-missionary efforts embodied in characters such as Esther Summerson and Allan Woodcourt in Bleak House. At the same time, the novel drew on the same Burkean playbook that cast the self-proclaimed cosmopolite, in the form of the missionary projector Mrs. Jellyby and the debilitated Romantic Harold Skimpole, as being neglectful of duty toward family and country.Robert Southey forms the focus of the book’s next chapter, not so much for his own cosmopolitan sentiments as for the crucial role he played in the rehabilitation of the public image of missionaries in the early nineteenth century. Southey’s reviews and journalism amplified a rhetorical shift already under way in missionary writing away from the kind of evangelical enthusiasm that had prompted the Edinburgh Review in 1807 to compare the Baptist Missionary Society to “little detachments of maniacs” (qtd. in Werner 2). Mission advocates instead would promote a “rational and moderate Christianity” (82) that would attract stronger public support and investment. When Werner turns to analysis of Southey’s own works, a more disturbing and firmly imperialistic agenda emerges. A Tale of Paraguay (1825) excuses native deaths due to diseases imported by European missionaries as the necessary trade-off for progress and admission to a higher spiritual order. In Sir Thomas More: Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), best known to most Victorianists as the target of Thomas Babington Macualay’s withering review deploring its nostalgia for feudal England, Southey’s global imagination takes another unusual turn. Southey quotes none other than Kant himself in support of the same crusading British imperialism on display in his poetry. But as Werner reveals, where Kant’s ideal “held out individual ‘freedom’ as the means and end of cosmopolitan society, in Southey’s hands [it] became justification for the most atrocious iniquities of British colonialism” (108). Thinking back to Dickens, one begins to see why Bleak House targets the cosmopolitan Skimpole with such singular intensity: precisely because “cosmopolitan” had become an empty signifier that could just as easily be summoned in defense of American slavery, which Skimpole attempts at one point, as put on display at the Great Exhibition.Werner’s analysis of St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre brings new understanding not just to his insistence that he marry before leaving England but also to why a near “kin” such as Jane was the only suitable choice. In the early decades of the century, faith in a “universal kinship” that united all of God’s people took missionary cosmopolitanism to perhaps its most radical gesture, as missionary directors “not only permitted but encouraged missionaries to interracial marriage” (112). It was not long, however, before public scandals involving missionaries abandoning their call and “going native” upon marriage began to turn the tide strongly against such practice, although the real scandal, as Werner points out, was that such marriages may have worked all too well, undermining the racial hierarchies upon which imperialism depended (131). By the 1820s, missionary societies began to discourage interracial marriage as one of many “temptations” to be avoided in the field, promoting instead the benefits of arriving overseas with a dedicated wife who would allow the missionary to focus more squarely on the work of evangelism. It is precisely this kind of ideological double standard that St. John embodies: content enough to sacrifice the happiness of his near kin Jane, for whom he holds no real romantic attachment, to promote the more abstract cosmopolitan Christian aim of bringing his brothers and sisters overseas into the family of Christ. In this respect, St. John’s proposal forms an important counterpoint to the novel’s apparent discomfort with the interracial overtones of Rochester’s first marriage. By uniting Jane with Rochester, Brontë crafts an “intermediate space” that defines marriage as the union of spiritual and intellectual near “kins.” At the other end of the spectrum, the “utter racial sameness represented by St. John’s proposal” (135) embodies a sterile, inward-looking understanding of kinship that contradicts his own religious ideals.The 1857 India Uprising, as Werner next discusses, hardened British perceptions of cultural and racial divisions between East and West, challenging commitment to the Christian humanism that motivated much missionary work up until then. More positively, it forced missionaries to reevaluate the corollary assumption that indigenous language, history, and religious traditions were mere inconveniences easily overcome by the universal appeal of Westernized Christianity. While this change in perception did not happen quickly or evenly across the rest of the century, it did point the way toward the “new cosmopolitanism” of our own historical moment, one that stresses conversation across cultural borders rather than a specious universalism. It was in this spirit, Werner argues, that Owenson revised and republished her earlier, highly successful novel The Missionary, a historical romance set in seventeenth-century India. Werner illustrates that Owenson did much more than simply trim the novel’s length and change the title to the name of the woman the Portuguese missionary Hilarion converts and falls in love with, Luxima, as some critics have charged, instead introducing a whole new ideological angle to the book: a rare instance, as it were, of history changing literally on the page. Whereas in the original novel Luxima devotes herself quickly and passionately to Hilarion, in the revised novel, her character and motives become more difficult to decipher, “veiled, inscrutable, and emotionally subdued” (166). Owenson keeps the final dramatic scene where Luxima throws herself into the fire as Hilarion is burned at the stake for heresy, but where the original novel frames the act as one of pure, full devotion to her Western lover, in the revision she is guided more by the impulses of her native religion (166). More subtle changes also point to Owenson’s wish to grant greater cultural autonomy to Luxima: the 1859 replacement of “soul” with “spirit” throughout her dialogue, Werner argues, gestures more toward her Hindu beliefs, which she does not so much abandon as endeavor to retranslate following her encounter with the missionary (164).The shift evident in Owenson’s novels toward a “recognition of the irreducibility of cultural plurality” (141) was paralleled in missionary work itself by greater reliance on native pastors, Werner suggests, and a recognition by many missionaries that “what had seemed universal truths were but culturally specific values” (162). The book’s conclusion or “coda” takes us ahead to 1910, where much of the language surrounding the World Missionary Conference of that year in Edinburgh picks up on these same trends. Promoters of missionary work of course did not abandon the idea that Christianity offered a universal moral and religious outlook they felt compelled to share with the rest of the world. Readers may be more surprised, however, to see how much missionaries grappled with the colonial overtones of their work, striving earnestly toward “a universal Christianity freed from Western culture” and assumptions (175). On the one hundredth anniversary of the conference in 2010, missionary leaders again gathered in Edinburgh, embracing a “glocal” Christianity that Werner argues captures the cosmopolitan spirit of much contemporary mission work, an effort that “resembles—far more than it departs from—the ‘secular’ cosmopolitanisms of today” (178). This is a fair enough claim, and deftly argued, although the book’s final pages do pass rather quickly over a good deal of intervening history, making it harder to connect this thread back to the Victorian period. In this respect, the conclusion might also have benefitted from a stronger effort to trace the Victorian literary legacy as evidenced in subsequent portrayals of missionary work. On balance, however, Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature is in many ways a model of postsecular literary and cultural studies, illustrating how to bring literature into productive conversation with sermons and other forms of religious writing, a massive and still largely understudied dimension of nineteenth-century print culture

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