The Awakening Conscience: Christian Sentiment, Salvation, and Spectatorship in Mid-Victorian Britain

Abstract

From the 1830s into the mid-1850s, key Victorian art and texts depicted passionate Christian feeling through the trope of ‘awakening’. Visual and written representations dramatized awakening Christians in fervent states of salvation, conversion, and devotion. Feeling had always been central to Christian belief but in the long nineteenth century faith was newly wedded to sensation. From the 1780s onwards, Christian reformers explored sensory psychologies and environmental settings as methods for awakening the conscience of men, women, and children in disciplinary institutions. In the late 1830s a ‘new environmentalism’ appeared in Christian high culture, and art began to be promoted as a medi..