The Productions of Time: Keble, Rossetti, and Victorian Devotional Reading

Abstract

year, could be adapted readily to the little spare time afforded a busy shop worker. in t heir enthusiasm for the supposedly comforting prop- erties of The Christian Year , the sisters seem to echo Keble's own aspira - tions as stated in the advertisement of his volume: that it would ensure a soothing tendency (vii) in an age when excitement of every kind is AbstrAct: While many nineteenth-century readers lauded John Keble's bestselling The Christian Year (1827) for its soothing properties, its Victorian print afterlife suggests how devotion was being redefined as the century went on: as a set of reading practices premised upon distraction and divided time. in deed, as a scene from ge orge gi ssing's The Odd Women (1893) illustrates, the chronotopes of Keble's liturgical time and of modernity's industrial time, while distinct, were coming to resemble one another for many readers of weekly and daily devotional books. in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), one of Keble's most innovative interpolators, Christina ro ssetti, embraces this apparent synchronization, playfully revealing how eternal time is produced through a material relation with the devotional book as diurnal reading object.