'Robert Elsmere' Summary

The novel was the subject of a famous review by William Ewart Gladstone in which he criticized the novel's advocacy of the "dissociation of the moral judgment from a special series of religious formulae." In a more jocular manner, Oscar Wilde in his essay "The Decay of Lying" famously quipped that Robert Elsmere was "simply Arnold's Literature and Dogma with the literature left out."

The novel was a runaway best-seller, but it might have suffered the same fate as other Victorian era novels dealing with crises of faith had it not been for Ward's sensitive treatment of the subject. It was revolutionary in the nineteenth century when readers were acutely sensitive to anything they saw as blasphemy, and the presence of Jesus Christ in any but serious scholarly and devotional books was taboo. Then Lew Wallace included him in his novel Ben-Hur less than a decade before Ward published Robert Elsmere. This broke new ground but it was successful only because Wallace portrayed him as the Saviour. Had Wallace followed his original purpose to portray Jesus as a mere man, he might have undergone the attacks that were then launched at Ward.

Robert Elsmere generated enormous interest from intellectuals and agnostics who saw it as a liberating tool for liberating times and from those of faith who saw it as another step in the advancement of apostasy or heathenism. As with many other best-sellers, though, it was repeatedly copied and sales of the unauthorized editions matched or surpassed those of the authorized.