Manifest Virtue

Margaret Malamud (New Mexico State University)

Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ was published in 1880 and has never been out of print.  By 1884 it was leading Harper’s best-seller list, and it soon replaced Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the number one seller of the nineteenth century.  Why was the novel so popular?  My paper argues that Wallace’s novel provided a metaphorical narrative from the Roman world of the New Testament for articulating and assuaging the anxieties of America’s Protestant middle classes in an era of a growing fissure between science and religion, tumultuous social and economic change, and political unrest. 

Lew Wallace spent years researching the period.  He studied geography, read Roman historians, Gibbon, and every secondary source and archaeological report he could get his hands on, relying especially on William Smith’s 1848 Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities.  As a result, the novel is stuffed with details of everyday life in the Roman empire of the first century—how to drive a chariot, ride a camel, row a Roman trireme—it provided a vivid description of the manners and customs of the peoples of the multicultural eastern Mediterranean. Darwin’s theory of evolution had opened the Bible and its teachings to question.  Many felt the need to identify and document sites mentioned in the Bible.  Wallace’s meticulous descriptions of the details of everyday life, the terrain, and places mentioned in the Bible gave Jesus and biblical events a reassuring historicity. 

The popularity of Ben-Hur coincided with a period of great political and social unrest in the United States. 7/8 of the nation’s wealth was in the hands of 1/8 of the population and class conflict was simmering.  Strikes and urban unrest were widespread.  For the bulk of the readership of Ben-Hur, the disruptive and radical behavior of the working classes was unappealing and threatening.  They were not in opposition to capitalism.  They hoped to acquire wealth.  Indeed, the sanctity of wealth was championed by church leaders, public figures, and educators and “rags to riches” stories like Horatio Alger’s Strive and Succeed presented businessmen as models of virtue.

Ben Hur initially wants Jesus to be the leader of a political movement that would overthrow the Romans.  His political dream was that the kingdom of Christ would establish an empire of the Jews.  He learns, however, that Jesus’ message is about spiritual rather than political transformation.  He lays down his arms and becomes a Christian philanthropist rather than the leader of a political movement against Rome.  At the end of the novel Ben Hur was as rich as any nineteenth-century robber baron.  Lew Wallace’s message for Americans was that wealth and power are good when they are allied with Christianity.  The myriad social and economic problems besetting the nation, he suggests, should be met with an infusion of religious enthusiasm.  Radical political change is rejected.  Spiritual evolution rather than revolution is the way forward. The novel also, I conclude, implicitly accommodates empire.  Just as Christianity superseded the Caesars, so might a religiously devout America supersede pagan imperial Rome.