In this comprehensive study interrelating religious thought, history, and the topical literature of the Victorian period, Royal W. Rhodes examines more than 130 religious (and some nonreligious) novels by major and minor writers set in early Christian centuries. These Early Church novels were employed by churchly writers of the Victorian period to treat contemporary religious questions under the disguise of antiquity and are thus important sources for the study of Church history. As various parties within the Anglican Church, Dissenters, and Roman Catholics exploited this subgenre of...