The Congregational Magazine Formerly The London Christian Instructor

Baptist Noel (1798-1873) has been described by the American Evangelical Anglican historian Grayson Carter as a towering figure in nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, but he has been written out of its story because he was a saintly rebel who counted a good conscience more valuable than a good standing. This ultimately led him to abandon his glittering Anglican career and aristocratic family to become a Baptist minister. A Rebel Saint is a comprehensive study of Noel's life, work and thought, correcting the neglect of his remarkable Anglican and Baptist ministries and his many years of prominence in Evangelical life. Philip Hill ably illustrates his influence on issues including the Irvingite controversy, the opposition to the Tractarian movement, and Evangelical ecumenism, and explains his centrality in the establishment of the Evangelical Alliance and the London City Mission. Scholars of Evangelical history will greatly value this account of a pivotal figure, while all will be inspired by his story of sacrifice of fame and fortune for the sake of obeying religious conscience.

Studies in Evangelical History & Thought

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron’s notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen “from Kentish town to Pisa.” From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in order to supply his countrymen with a text that he could then rewrite and confute. After the initial controversy, readers began to regard Cain not merely as revolutionary propaganda but as a fictional portrait of common youthful experience: a sequence of aspiration, discontent, uncertainty, confusion, misunderstood isolation, fear, frustration, anger, and finally a rash, inevitable, but futile revolt that led to a future of hopeless regret. Truman Guy Steffan here presents a text, arrived at by collation of the first and several later editions with the original manuscript (presently in the Stark Collection of the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin). The first eight essays, which comprise Part I, cover a number of literary topics: Byron’s defense of his purposes in Cain and the relevance of his dramatic theory to the poem; the characterization that is an ideological confrontation, a revelation of personal conflict, as well as a rendering of individuals who have an existence independent of the author; the principles that controlled Byron’s absorption and expansion of biblical materials; the integration of the imagery with the dramatic substance; the incongruities of the language; the metrical heterodoxy; and a description of the manuscript and of Byron’s insertions. Part II contains the text of Cain, accompanied by notes on the variants, the manuscript cancellations and additions, certain linguistic details, and the scansion of some unusual verses. Then follow annotations on allusions, sources, and analogues, and on a few passages of the play that have elicited unusual conflict over interpretation. Part III provides a history of Cain criticism, from the opinions of Byron’s social and literary circle and of the major periodicals and pamphlets to the more complicated contribution of the twentieth century. This important work stands not only as a valuable addition to Byron scholarship but also as an illuminating record of the changing critical and cultural attitudes from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. Steffan has done a remarkable job in bringing together and synthesizing an enormous body of material.