Christ in the everyday nineteenth-century experience: examining a collection of daily prayers and a painting of Jesus by Celia Jarvis

John Keble and William Holman Hunt produced work at the bookends of a century renowned for its scientific and industrial progress. Both men, professing a personal faith, sought to make sense of the presence of Christ and the significance of His death and resurrection in an era of fast spreading doubt. In this article, I shall discuss John Keble’s poem ‘Easter Eve’ from The Christian Year, Thoughts in Verse (1825) and William Holman Hunt’s painting The Shadow Of Death (1873). I argue that Hunt’s desire for visual precision and Keble’s ritualistic approach to prayer propel their shared belief that Christ was still relevant in the 19th century and could be encountered even within the monotony of daily living.