This paper explores the religious component of national identity among travellers from Victorian Britain who toured the British Isles and/or the Continent. During Queen Victoria's reign, railways enabled increasing numbers of Britons to tour more parts of Britain than ever before. Furthermore, travel outside Britain was no longer confined to aristocrats. Middle-class people travelled as well, particularly to the Continent. They composed journals about their sojourns, some of which were published, but most of which still remain in handwritten form gathering dust in local and national archives. These journals are full of details about local folks' eating habits, sense of humor and religious practices, as well as speculation on the implications of these and other details for the national groups being observed. But such discussions also prompted travellers to compare and to comment on their own habits and attitudes, which resulted in their drawing conclusions about their national identity. What do the published and unpublished journals by ordinary middle-class men and women tell us about Victorian Britons' religious identity?
In answering this question, I aim to determine whether Linda Colley's very persuasively argued thesis regarding religion and national identity is valid for the Victorian period. In her well-known book Britons: Forging the Nation, Colley argued that a shared Protestantism was one of the key factors that allowed a British national identity to emerge between the Act of Union in 1707 and 1837. After 1707 the British saw themselves, says Colley, as a chosen people blessed for their Protestantism and superior in every way to Continental Europeans, especially to the Catholic French with whom they were at war for much of the eighteenth century. The recurrent wars with France helped to fuel anti-Catholicism in Britain and to fix Protestantism at the center of a fledgling feeling of Britishness.
In this study, I examine travel journals by M.F. Tupper, Hugh Miller, Matilda Betham-Edwards, Jemima Morrell, Francis Trench, Charles Dickens, Nona Bellairs, John Marsh, Anna Mary Howitt, F.W. Faber, and Agnes Emily Twining. The journals confirm the centrality of religion to national identity throughout Victoria's reign. But as I argue in this paper, they also suggest that the religious dimension of identity was too complex to be explained adequately by Colley's Protestant versus Catholic model which treats the two religions as monolithic. In travel journals, multiple Protestantisms and national identities emerge.
Not surprisingly, Protestant travellers from different parts of Britain emphasized a shared Protestantism when they were travelling in Catholic areas of Europe. But in Protestant European countries or when touring around Britain itself, they tended to stress the divisions and tensions within Protestantism. In these contexts, they identified with their particular brand of English or Scots Protestantism--never with a British, or Britain-wide, Protestantism. Travellers' journals thus help us to understand that Protestantism was as much a divisive as a unifying force among people from Victorian Britain. In other words, they suggest that context is key to understanding how religion contributes to people's collective identity and that a single model of the religious component of national identity obscures as much as it reveals.
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