It hardly seems to bear remarking that sentimental literature of the American nineteenth century is steeped in Christian piety. As anyone acquainted with this female-centered literary aesthetic well knows, sentimental novels and poems routinely depict religious faith as a balm to the restless spirit and a beneficent influence on unruly behavior. Countless sentimental texts contain scenes of devout prayer, ardent hymn singing, and religious instruction. Heart-rending deathbed scenes and leave-takings are softened by promises of reunion in the afterlife, and Bibles and hymnals serve as the premier tokens of affection or goodwill.

To readers today, sentimental piety may seem colorless...

Our understanding of the sectarian contours of sentimental literature derives primarily from Ann Douglas’s foundational study,The Feminization of American Culture(1977), in which she analyzed sentimentalism within the context of Calvinism, a focus that left sentimentalism by contrast seeming lax and doctrinally vague. According to Douglas, Calvinism was both destroyed and succeeded by sentimentalism, which institutionalized a loose, “anti-intellectual” lay religion that replaced theology and scholarly rigor with feeling and domesticity, a transition exemplified by her claim that the minister was replaced by the housewife as the national arbiter of morality.¹ Douglas’s conception of the religious character of sentimental...

Few features of nineteenth-century women’s literature seem as foreign and outdated today as the omnipresence of hymns. In countless literary works, hymns are quoted, sung, and contemplated. Hymns in these texts are rivaled in influence only by the Bible and are potent catalysts of religious experience, sparking conversion in the unbeliever and offering reassurance to the faithful during times of trouble. In the literary world of the American mid-century, the singing of a hymn could bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened unbeliever. During Ellen Montgomery’s cheerless trip to live with her Aunt Fortune in Susan Warner’s...

Throughout the nineteenth century, it was a widely held belief that the millennium was imminent. Established denominations and new religious movements alike shared the belief that the divine kingdom would soon be established on Earth, and religious leaders as diverse as Lyman Abbott, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, Alexander Campbell, Lorenzo Dow, Dwight L. Moody, John Humphrey Noyes, and Joseph Smith all maintained that the religious fulfillment of human history was impending.¹ The evangelism of the American Home Missionary Society, one of the era’s leading Protestant organizations, was openly motivated by the desire to prepare humankind for the impending millennium,...

In 1872, a bimonthly women’s periodical began publication in Salt Lake City, Utah. In its mission statement,Woman’s Exponentannounced its twofold ambition both to promote the “diffusion of knowledge” among its Mormon readers and to correct the poor public image of Mormon women, who are “grossly misrepresented through the press by active enemies who permit no opportunity to pass of maligning and slandering them.”¹ In response to these alleged misrepresentations,Woman’s Exponentpresented itself as a venue by which Mormon women may “represent [them]selves” and in so doing keep up with current events and receive information on subjects ranging...

Christian science was among the most controversial and alluring new sects of the American nineteenth century, and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, was by extension among the most provocative public figures of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, her vexed reputation enduring well after her death in 1910. As the author ofScience and Health with Key to the Scriptures(first published in 1875 but reissued in revised form numerous times) and the leader of Christian Science, Eddy became an international celebrity and the object of both veneration and condemnation. Her followers exalted her as a divinely inspired prophet...