The Victorian era is a period marked by change, energy, and a crisis of faith. As newly emerging industry and science clashed with historically entrenched religious institutions and morals, so too did these forces mobilized themselves in the lives of the period’s writers. Emblematic of this crisis of faith are two authors, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold. Raised in dynamically opposed traditions they arrive ultimately in the same place philosophically, a kind of heady synergy between utilitarianism and a form of religious aesthetic which is more emotion than faith.

            Both of these literary masters labored under the invasive force of overbearing fathers who endeavored to shape their sons according to their own beliefs and both ultimately rebelled if with indifferent success. The influence of Mill’s father is near infamous and the rigorous education in the classics and the tenets of utilitarianism that he prescribed are often blamed for his nervous breakdown at 20: “He [John Stuart Mill] began as a disciple of the Utilitarian theories of his father and of Jeremy Bentham but became gradually dissatisfied with the narrowness of their conception of human motives” (1043). Indeed that very breakdown seems to have informed his disillusionment with his father’s ideals and utilitarianism’s inability to articulate emotions and emotional motivations beyond mere hedonism. Matthew Arnold went through a similar process if from the opposing direction. The son of a leading clergy man “Matthew, was directly exposed to the powerful force of the father’s mind and character. The son’s attitude toward this force was a mixture of attraction and repulsion” (1350). This attitude would come to dominate Arnold’s writing, especially his poetry, in the years to come.

            Arnold’s crisis of faith is the more classic version of the era in that he was brought up under the ethics of the “Broad Church” but ultimately found religion a poor answer to the questions posed by science and industry. In the famous lines from “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” he writes about “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born…” (85-86). The old dead world of traditional religion and a new world where science and morality would not be dynamically opposed but which he could not quite form. This is truly the crisis of faith not of one man but of the Victorian era. Yet the most popular competing answer, utilitarianism, was equally flawed as Mill discovered. Writing in his Autobiography about his nervous breakdown, he says, “All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for” (1071). This brilliantly uncovers the two major flaws of utilitarianism: firstly, that its ethos of reform would be never-ending and that as such there could be no true goal, which stemmed logically from its second and more fundamental flaw, that utilitarianism had either no or at least an inadequate view of human happiness.