Measuring by what has survived, we call the nineteenth century the age of the novel; but if we counted instead what was produced, the Victorians might look more like the people of the tract. One historian calculates that in the first seven years of its existence the Religious Tract Society (foundedby an interdenominational group of Evangelicals in 1799) had distributed two million titles; between 1840 and 1849 that number went up to twenty-three million. . . . Tracts are to the mid-Victorian novel what romance was to its predecessors: the inscribed genre against which it defines itself. ]— Leah Price, How to do things with books in Victorian Britain
The History of Protestant Religious Tracts and Societies for their Dissemination
- Introduction — Occasion and Character of the The Tract Movement (1894)
- History of Initial [Pre-Victorian] Tract Enterprises (1894)
- Tract Societies (1894)
- Rhetoric and Structure (needed)
Political and Social Commentary
- Gender Matters
- Class and Society
- Writers of Religious Tracts and Victorian Novelists
- Thackeray on Religious Tracts
- The Great Exhibition of 1851
- "The World's Great Assembly (author unknown)
Individual Authors
- John Charles Ryle (Evangelical)
- individual tracts: "The Cross"
- individual tracts: "Are You an Heir?"
- John Keble (High Church)
- individual tracts: Tract 60
- Hannah More (Evangelical)
- John Henry Newman (High Church; later Roman Catholic)
- Isaac Williams (High Church)
Relations to Victorian Literature
- Tract 80, “On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge” 1833 (text)
- George Eliot's Amos Barton
- D. G. Rossetti's "The Burden of Nineveh"
Last modified 14 May 2014