[2] Inspired by the religious crises of early Victorian clergymen such as her father Tom Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and James Anthony Froude (particularly as expressed in the last's novel The Nemesis of Faith), it is about an Oxford clergyman who begins to doubt the doctrines of the Anglican Church after encountering the writings of German rationalists like Schelling and David Strauss.

[3][4] Instead of succumbing to atheism or Roman Catholicism, however, Elsmere takes up a "constructive liberalism" (which Ward received from Thomas Hill Green)[5] stressing social work amongst the poor and uneducated.

Ward was inspired to write Robert Elsmere after hearing a sermon by John Wordsworth in which he argued that religious unsettlement, such as that experienced in England throughout the nineteenth century, leads to sin; Ward decided to respond by creating a sympathetic, loosely fictionalized account of the people involved in this unsettlement at the present, including her friends Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and her uncle Matthew Arnold.

Upon deciding that, with some modification, an effective drama could be constructed upon the motive found in it, I so notified those managers, and at the same time wrote at length to the author requesting her permission to make sure of the material, and offering therefore a liberal royalty."

He also assured her that he strongly wished to break down barriers of unreasonable prejudice opposed to works dealing with religious belief, "for those who consider the stage as a mere place of amusement and buffoonery are as hopelessly narrow and bigoted as the people who still hold it to be an agency of the devil."

We shall then be treated to a burst of horrified indignation against the theater from the righteous people who have been partakers in literary theft by buying and reading these unauthorized and un-paid-for publications.

"[18] Another problem, Gillette declared, was that "the literary state of affairs between England and America – at least so far as dramatic work is concerned – is not one of peaceful trade; it is nearer to absolute warfare.

"Most middle class men of the late nineteenth century did not see life either in social or economic or in modern psychological terms," Catherine Marks explained.