The Victorian Religious Tract

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Measuring by what has survived, we call the nineteenth century the age of the novel; but if we counted instad what was produced, the Victorians might look more like the people of the tract. One historian calculates that in the first seven years of its existence the Religious Tract Society (foundedby an interdenominational group of Evangelicals in 1799) had distributed two million titles; between 1840 and 1849 that number went up to twenty-three million. — Leah Price, How to do things with books in Victorian Britain

The History of Protestant Religious Tracts and Societies for their Dissemination

• Introduction — Occasion and Character of the The Tract Movement (1894)
• History of Initial [Pre-Victorian] Tract Enterprises (1894)
• Tract Societies (1894)
• Rhetoric and Structure (needed)

Political and Social Commentary

• Gender Matters
• Religious Tracts and Gender
• Class and Society
• “Be good, Dear Child. . . or else”: Religious Tracts for Children of the Working Classes
• Writers of Religious Tracts and Victorian Novelists
• Thackeray on Religious Tracts
• The Great Exhibition of 1851
• "The World's Great Assembly (author unknown)

Individual Authors

• Bishop John Charles Ryle (Evangelical)
  • discussion
  • individual tracts: "The Cross"
  • individual tracts: "Are You an Heir?"
• John Keble (High Church)
  • discussion
  • individual tracts: Tract 60
• Hannah More (Evangelical)
  • discussion
  • individual tracts
• John Henry Newman (High Church; later Roman Catholic)
  • discussion
  • Tract 1, 1833 (text)
  • Tract 90 (discussion)
• Isaac Williams (High Church; later Roman Catholic)

Relations to Victorian Literature

• George Eliot's Amos Barton
• D. G. Rossetti's "The Burden of Nineveh"

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Last modified 1 May 2013