God's Funeral

A N Wilson

Editions

Review

Taking Thomas Hardy’s poem God’s Funeral as his primary text, Wilson sets out in this book to explain why, by the end of the nineteenth century, Christianity had been abandoned by so many writers, intellectuals and artists; a period which also saw a rise in what would now be called fundamentalist religion. Thus we see Darwin and Thomas Huxley pitted against ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford; The Bishop of Wakefield burning Jude The Obscure pbk £2.50hbk £9.99;  Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot and many more. It is a brilliant work of intellectual history, but it also burns with a sense of what having faith might mean to people. Wilson brings tremendous urgency to a subject that might seem dry. His writing is entertaining and energetic, and he makes his readers feel the significance of his subject. - review by John de Falbe