The Little Professor

The Hebrew's Daughter

We haven't had any religious poetry in a while, so let's turn to W. Henry Ludlow's The Hebrew's Daughter, A Fragment of a Jewish Tradition, in Five Cantos (comp. 1852; pub. 1854).  This appears to have been Ludlow's only foray into the world of any sort of verse--that he was willing to put before the public, at least.  As the poem's title suggests, it participates in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of "fragment" verse, poems whose purportedly mangled forms echoed the contemporary fascination with ruins; certainly, ruin, in both its figurative and literal sense, turns out to be the poem's order of the day.  Ludlow tries some cautious experiments with rhyme and meter, writing primarily in iambic tetrameter couplets but sometimes veering from trimeter to pentameter (especially in the big storm scene) or breaking out into triplets, quatrains, and envelope rhymes.  Not surprisingly, the poem's formal technique is not thrilling.  But for those interested in Jewish subjects in Victorian poetry, this poem is interesting for two reasons: its reworking of the Shylock mythos and its subversion of the by-then conventional Jewish conversion narrative. 

First, the plot.  Elam has a daughter, Zillah, for whom he seeks a possible guardian after the death of her mother.  The mother in question was a secret Christian convert who tutored Zillah in the basics, and so, Zillah "was led more faith to place,/On Christian oaths, than do her race" (10).  This turns out to be a problem when Elam temporarily decamps.  Alas, Elam had refused a loan to a supposed Christian, Hun; in revenge, Hun seduces Zillah (words only, no action), then locks her up in prison until one of his followers finally decides that this is really not quite the thing.  Elam, who returns to find himself sans child, threatens Hun with a scary magic spell, then takes off for the Holy Land.  Zillah also takes off for the Holy Land.  And so does Hun, who is, dare we say, not feeling so great about himself.  Due to divine intervention beyond our control, Zillah and Hun are shipwrecked; Hun, continuing to not feel so great, rescues Zillah (who, understandably, runs away very fast once she sees his face).  After much stereotypical wandering and lamenting, Zillah finds her father on the brink of death, obtains his forgiveness, and--after he repents of cursing Hun--watches him die in peace.  Then...she goes insane, leaving us with Hun sadly watching over her, hoping "to see once more arise/The light of reason in her eyes!" (59)

As this plot outline suggests, Ludlow begins by using Shylock to structure his plot: Elam, who embodies the Law, is the money-lending father; Zillah, who embodies Love, is his Christian-tending daughter; Hun is the Christian in need of cash.  The legalistic Jewish father and the emotional Jewish daughter are par for the course in fictions about the Jews.  Most often, the former symbolically gives way to the latter, with the tyrannically masculine Law superseded by the rule of feminized Love.  In that sense, the Shylock plot and the conversion plot are always bound up in each other.  Ludlow further emphasizes that link with another familiar figure from conversion narratives, the secret Christian convert: the deceased mother (in the Shylock plot, she generally is) had "taught her, ere she died/The creed of Jesus crucified," with the proviso "not to let her Father see/Her to the Saviour bend the knee" (10).  Zillah thus exists in an ambiguous space, Jewish in public but Christian in private; further ambiguity arises from that allusion to "her Father," which immediately refers to Elam but, more problematically, also suggests God the Father, whose Son she does not openly avow.   As a result, the symbolic transition from Judaism to Christianity, from paternal Law to maternal Love, stumbles badly.    This deliberate narrative botch gets only worse once we consider Hun, about whom "nothing certain was there known" (9), and who enacts the Shylockian conversion romance only to lock Zillah up in a Gothic tower. Neither secretly-Christian mother nor nominally-Christian lover can conduct Zillah to Christian community.

Instead, Zillah's chunk of the plot takes her back to the father's Law.  Meeting him once again, she confesses her sins at his request, and is forgiven for her "disobedience" (52).  Yet here the abortive conversion plot rears its head again, for Zillah finds no rest in this paternal forgiveness.  Although Elam is allowed a "good death" once he retracts his curse against Hun, Zillah's agony over her sin leads to fantasize that all of nature condemns her as his "murderess" (55), and all that is left of her is "reason's wreck" (55).  What are we to make of this? Zillah's mental collapse resonates tellingly with the state of Judaism in the rest of the poem, and it is here that we see how the poem's fragmentary form embodies its attitude to post-Christian Jews.  Like so many others, Ludlow relies heavily on the complaint as the dominant mode of Jewish utterance: Elam, for example, sadly asks why Jerusalem's "children roam/In foreign lands as if they hated home?/Why did our God forsake our chosen land,/And let his temple fall by heathen band?" (48)  Similarly, the insane Zillah bursts out into a hymn that, even as it promises that the Jews shall one day be restored, nevertheless sobs along with "Judah's daughter's ever weeping" (58).  Even before the tragedy plays out, Zillah and Elam are already part of the band of Jews who "wander far,/Nor have they now a guiding star" (5), and this vision of eternal exile and dislocation recurs in Ludlow's repeated descriptions of both Zillah and Elam as physically and/or mentally "wandering."  As wanderers without guidance or goal, both Zillah and Elam seem eternally condemned to life without a fully-developed narrative arc.  Zillah's strange in-between state as disobedient Jew but not-quite Christian further underlines the incompleteness in which these characters live; it is no accident that their apparently cyclical return to the Holy Land is merely yet another reminder that they have been displaced, with no right to enter Jerusalem.  In that sense, Zillah's return to her father and the Law he represents is equally fragmented: she can neither re-enter her first spiritual "home" nor transition to the Christian community putatively associated with her mother.  Well before 1890s psychological theory, Ludlow makes "madness" the understandable outcome of such a shattered, "wandering" existence [1].

Despite the poem's title, Zillah winds up exiled from the conversion plot.  It is Hun, the villain, who dedicates his life to protecting the mad Zillah as what appears to be self-imposed penance.  And it is Hun who is on the receiving end of the poem's finger-wagging moral: "I pity all whose mental strife/Was such as gall'd Hun's later life;/Remorse of those who late repent,/Is heaviest of punishment" (59).  Yes, says the reader, but isn't he rather better off than Zillah? Elam, the staunch Jew who finally repents, is saved from pain at the last moment; Hun, the professed Christian turned real Christian, repents and spends the remainder of his life undergoing what we are to assume is divinely-ordained agony; Zillah, who abandoned her faith and tried to return, is left to a suffering she cannot possibly interpret.  The Christian may get the poem's last word, but "bad" Christians who abuse their faith also, by extension, bear the weight of the poem's moral condemnation. 

[1] On which see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 145-46.

 

The History of a Bible

The History of a Bible is a tract with an odd provenance.  Like most American Tract Society publications, it appeared anonymously.  However, the ATS itself appeared to be under the impression that it was written by J. W. Cunningham, well-known in England for another religious it-narrative, The Velvet Cushion.(Incidentally, somebody ought to do a joint edition of that and the response to it.) While the tract is sometimes cataloged with Cunningham as author, there doesn't seem to be any actual proof for this ascription; given that the tract appears to have been pretty successful, it appears decidedly odd that nobody on the other side of the pond mentions it as part of Cunningham's oeuvre.  So, hmm.  To make matters more complicated, the tract also exists in multiple versions.  In this 1820 printing, for example, the narrative ends after the Bible's dissolute second owner, George, departs this earth in a state of proper repentance; my own copy, part of an omnibus reprinting that dates from approximately 1848, sees the Bible continuing to live out its life in the kind of domesticity it lacked with its first two bachelor owners. 

Unlike the Bible it-narratives I've discussed here before, the Bible narrates The History of a Bible.  The Bible thus speaks as an organic "I," a unified "self" guaranteed by the authority of divine inspiration; there are no Biblical books here, just a Book.   And this Book appropriates a number of roles to itself: "close prisoner" in the bookshop and, later, William's library (3), would-be "companion" (3), and, most importantly, evangelist.   It is the ultimate text in the library, preceded in William's textual pilgrim's progress by Oriental tales, Don Quixote, The Man of Feeling, and historians--the latter of whom speak not as their titles, but as their authors (Hume, Robertson, Rollins).  The implied progress of William's reading suggests the possibility that fiction might be a gateway drug to more serious texts, but that once the reader finally encounters the Bible, no other text is worthy of attention.   In a way, the Bible is the object of William's and, later, George's romantic yearnings, desired yet regarded with shame, famous yet treated as a dangerous secret.  The two men repeatedly hide and ignore the poor thing, only to always return.  But although Leah Price argues that "it-narratives anthropomorphize the book at its moments of greatest vulnerability," this Bible undergoes little in the way of figurative mutilation or torment, aside from its occasional imprisonments.¹ Instead, it becomes most powerfully "human" at the moment of reading--so powerful, in fact, that it swamps the human subject altogether.  "My first salutation struck William" (5), the Bible informs us, swapping its own verbal address for William's act of reading (and implying near-physical shock into the bargain).  Their encounter is a "conversation" (5), and yet it is one in which the balance of power is being constantly negotiated.  The Bible may repeatedly "speak," erasing William's own role as the reader, but it is William who can quite literally "clos[e] my mouth" (5-6) or "allo[w] me to talk" (6).  The figurative violence of the Bible's "salutation" returns upon itself in the reader's domineering response, finally climaxing in a fight of sorts over the Law: William rejects it, the Bible warns him of damnation, and the result is a "sick and feverish" fit (7).  This is a classic moment in conversion narratives, the moment of terror in which the not-yet-believer finds himself convicted of sin, but yet without hope of salvation.  But it is also represented in terms of a conversation in which William actively participates, talking back to the Bible instead of merely being lectured.   In Price's turn of phrase, "the virtuous" recognize the Book's "subjectivity" (125), yet such recognition occurs in the context of rejection as well as assent.   George, too, will have a similar moment on his deathbed, when he finally opens himself up to the Bible's charges.   Debates over free will thus emerge in these moments of decision-making: do I read or not? Do I listen or not? Do I resist or not?

One of the odder things about this tract, though, is the way in which it erases its own circulation.  "I was sent for" (12), the Bible says, when it moves from the deceased William to George; "I became the inmate of a respectable family" (16-17), it goes on, as it makes its transit from George to the unnamed married couple.  Scenes of sale and gifting are usually played up, not down, in Bible it-narratives.  Here, the Bible simply moves, or is moved.  The sole exception is when George "made a present of me to some poor native" (15), resulting in a problematic missionary moment: the native (a slave?) cannot read the language.  In this mockery of evangelization, the Word goes forth to someone who cannot hear it.  Other slaves are luckier in their grasp of English, and enjoy the kind of conversational relationship with the Book that William and, eventually, George will have.  But in effect, these encounters suggest that human evangelical efforts are less relevant than the direct encounter with the Bible's own "good news" (16).  Like the conversational relationship between the bachelor sinner and his Bible, this account of good works amongst slaves suggests that although language may be difficult, its content, paradoxically enough, is not--the self-interpreting Bible once again made manifest.  Nobody needs to analyze this Book; one merely listens and responds to its edifying conversation, and Christianity is sure to follow.  (One can hear nineteenth-century High Churchmen grumbling somewhere, far off in the distance.)  

The Bible's "reward," as it were, is its final migration to the unnamed nuclear family, where it finds itself installed in a position of new domestic authority.  In the family, the Bible simultaneously remains dependent (it is "permitted to speak," "brought out" [17]) and authoritative ("I addressed, "commanded," "told," "bade" [17-18]).  The family subjects itself, in a sense, to its most potent object.  Unlike the bachelor associations of William and George, where religion appears to spread rather hesitantly through random male companions and oppressed "natives," the family provides the Bible with an opportunity to develop a sort of program.  Moreover, the family turns out to be a miniaturized version of the colony as a whole, Christianizing the colony through force of example.  Within the family, the Bible turns out to have yet another role--that of surrogate parent.   Companion, evangelist, parent, yet potentially always a prisoner once again, the Bible turns out to be both spiritual magician, converting those who cross its path, and weak, passive object, awaiting the reader who will release its force. 

¹  Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012), 128. 

Sister Agatha: Or, "The New Catholic Teaching"

Of the many, many controversial novels I've discussed at this blog, the vast majority have involved Protestants and Catholics squaring off against each other, with occasional voyages into Jews and [insert Christian here] doing likewise.  William Henry Pinnock's Sister Agatha: Or,  "The New Catholic Teaching" (1876) is an interesting variant on the usual theme.  Not because the novel itself is remarkably well-executed, or because it has something to say that might come as a shock to the average reader (of this blog, at least), but because the controversy involved is really two modes of High Churchmanship squaring off against each other.  Instead of the relatively wide gap between, say, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, we have here two different claims to Catholicity and apostolicity, launched by someone who clearly fears that it is impossible to tell the difference between High Churchmanship (old style), Anglo-Catholicism (new style), and, of course, Roman Catholicism. 

Even though the novel's conflicts are set within the Church of England, the story itself takes place in France after the Commune.  At first glance, it's an odd choice of setting, underlined by the total lack of "fit" between the English characters and their environment: even though Mr. Stanhope, who carries part of the brief for traditional High Church positions, is a longtime resident, much of the novel's actual dialogue about France consists of complaints about the bureaucracy, the manners, and, of course, the Catholicism.  But this unease actually underlines the novel's point about the Church of England, which is that is a national institution in need of protection against incursions by the Catholic Other.  Even the title character is convinced that post-Communard France is intellectually, morally, and culturally degenerate, reduced to "'selfish brusquerie'" in the wake of calls for egalitarianism (107).  The novel's English are an enclave of Anglican good sense in a sea of French Catholic bad culture, bad ritual, bad theology, and bad art.  Railways treat passengers like "'beeves in a cattle truck'" (106), while the churches sport--or used to sport--statues of the Virgin Mary "with hideous features in jaundiced wax" and "eyes affected by strabismus" (53).  Pinnock paints France as somehow irredeemably ugly, despite all its associations (good food, good wine, good clothes...); it is what England could turn into, were the Catholic Church to take over.

In order to ward off this unfortunate event, the novel quickly devolves into its real purpose, which is to act as a manual for countering both Anglo- and Roman Catholic claims.   On the one hand, the novel supports Anglican sisterhoods; Mr. Perilyan, the Anglican clergyman who spouts most of the theological monologues, even has "'two daughters in two distinct Sisterhoods'" (164).  On the other hand, the book turns somersaults to distinguish the good Sisterhoods from the dangerous ones, those under the sway of the "'wide eirenic principle of Catholic union, charity, and large-heartedness'" (198).  Pinnock diagnoses a kind of slippery-slope problem in post-Puseyite theology, in which the Eirenicon's anti-Marian arguments have apparently vanished under the rolling rock of "Romanizing" sympathies.  Mr. Perilyan and the Stanhopes repeatedly accuse the sisterhood that Agatha is joining of being "'nothing less than a nursery of Roman Catholicism, under the guise of a Church of England sisterhood'" (137), warning readers in no uncertain terms that the "Anglo-Catholic" position actually constitutes a deceptive performance within the borders of Anglicanism.  All of the novel's tub-thumping is thus devoted to charting the precise boundaries separating Catholicity from Roman Catholicism, with a strong emphasis on eucharistic and sacramental doctrine.  (Sister Agatha's own High Churchmanship comes out most strongly in its attack on the right of private judgment.) 

The reason that nobody picks up on the distinctions, the novel argues, is lousy theological education.  In fact, our title character may qualify as one of the most inept fictional controversialists I've seen in some time.  No doubt the character's gender has something to do with it: she's unequipped with any of the languages she might need to study the relevant works.  But it gets worse, as they say.  Early on, she informs Mr. Stanhope that "'I must not venture upon argument: it is forbidden ground: and I dare not doubt the necessity of obedience to the injunctions of my spiritual superior'" (27), thereby wearisomely invoking every stereotype of intellectual self-abasement known to the reader of anti-Catholic polemic.  By no argument, of course, Agatha simply means no argument with her Mother Superior and confessor; she's perfectly happy to argue with Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Perilyan.  However, her contributions to the faux dialogues almost always fall into the forms of "But surely X did Y?" or "I heard somewhere that X."  Thus, on the question of whether or not Paul fasted before taking the Eucharist, she queries, "'But did not St. Paul in one of his journeys [...] adopt this very rule of fasting?'" (77)   One paragraph down, on the same topic, she does the same thing: "'But some ancient authority, I think, refers to this usage as prevailing immediately after the times of the Apostles'" (77).  And later, she tells Mr. Perilyan that she is "'almost certain'" that such fasting was practiced in the early Church (83).  Often relegated to one-sentence objections that are either heavily qualified or phrased as questions, Agatha consistently undermines both her voice and her authority to speak; she quite clearly has not mastered the "new Catholicity" (let alone the old one) that she wishes to preach to Stanhope and Co.  By the end of the novel, the new Catholicity has manifested itself as primarily an echoing theological void.

But the ending also does something unusual for a controversial novel: it declines to divert our heroine from her path.  When last we see her, she is off to "dissolve dear and loving family ties," preparatory to joining the convent she has been describing all along.  I've discussed paradoxically anti-controversialist controversial novels here before; this one too suggests the sheer uselessness of arguing theology with someone whose mind has already fixed on another position.   Despite the almost comically one-sided nature of the faux dialogues, Agatha's religious emptiness has not been filled by any solid Anglican knowledge.  It seems that force-feeding wandering Ritualists with a nourishing diet of old-fashioned High Churchmanship is not, after all, the way to go; those who have already proceeded well down the path to Roman Catholicism, the novel implies, probably cannot be reclaimed.   Only young women and men who have not yet fallen prey to stereotypically predatory priests in Anglican clothing can be saved from their fate...

Gothic repetition (so to speak)

My Gothic course is nearing the end of The Monk (sex! blasphemy! murder! in-- wait, we haven't quite figured that last out yet).  However, given that Book Two remains on my mind (and, with any luck, will soon get off it), I was struck by Lewis' references to the Bible in II.4.  The narrator begins by warning parents that the Bible, far from teaching virtue, "can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast"; in fact, it "but too frequently inculcates the first rudiments of vice," thanks to its erotic explicitness.  (Although the narrator is not explicit about the explicitness in question, it's possible that he has the Song of Songs in mind.)  Although Lewis appears to be going for gratuitous shock value here, there are some ironic conjunctions here--ironic, given the novel's roisterous anti-Catholicism--with anti-Protestant polemic, which sometimes represented women's Bible-reading in a similarly dangerous light.  (The Catholic novel Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829), aka one of the nineteenth century's very worst novels, takes exactly this line.) 

In any event, good mama Elvira determines that "Antonia should not read it, till She was of an age to feel its beauties, and profit by its morality: The second, that it should be copied out with her own hand, and all improper passages either altered or omitted."  What strikes me here is not the Bible bowdlerization, although that's certainly of interest, but the way in which this moment dovetails with Walter Scott's The Monastery (1820): Lady Avenel originally intended that her daughter Mary Avenel would be "so far advanced in age" that she could understand the Bible before Lady Avenel would begin teaching her about it (as it happens, Lady Avenel dies before that can happen), and the Bible that Mary inherits from her mother is heavily annotated and interleaved with her comments.  Indeed, what really grabs Mary's attention is a Biblical commonplace book in her mother's writing, containing "those affecting texts to which the heart has recourse in affliction, and which assure us at once of the sympathy and protection afforded to the children of the promise" (III.5).  In Lewis, the Bible is a dangerous text, a trigger for the worst forms of sexual desire; innocent (virginal) youth must encounter it through the protective haze of the mother's virtue.  (Much as the married Dorothea Brooke can read Smollett, it appears that the married, and hence sexually enlightened, woman can read the Bible.)  Reading the Bible becomes, in a way, the act of reading the mother's mind. 

For Scott, however, what is at stake is not sexuality, but theology, and the mother excerpts instead of censors.  Scott's Bible troubles the intellect rather than inconvenient body parts.  By the same token, part of the charm of the commonplace book is that it "com[es] from a hand so dear," just as Elvira uses "her own hand."    But Scott dwells far more intensely on the materiality of that hand's work--the book overstuffed with notes, extra pages, and MSS--than Lewis does.  In both cases, the mother's authority trumps that of any other, but in Scott, Lady Avenel's interventions are intended to draw her daughter into a sense of Scriptural and theological tradition (after all, Mary still inherits a complete and unexpurgated Bible).  Lewis' mother, by contrast, actively "feminizes" the Bible.  Not, as it happens, that it will save her daughter from the Monk's machinations...

 

The Adventures of a Martyr's Bible

Much of what I write about involves popular religious fiction playing around with tropes and genres borrowed from high(er) literary culture, so it was genuinely interesting to uncover George Firth's The Adventures of a Martyr's Bible (1898)--an episodic Decadent novel that reworks the Bible it-narrative to explore problems in late-Victorian sexuality as well as religious doubt.  Contemporary reviews were mixed but intrigued; the novelist, however, appears to have done nothing else in this line.  Although the plot construction (or lack thereof) makes the novel a bit of a farrago, it is held together by its attempt to answer one of the questions plaguing nineteenth-century British Christians: after violent, state-sponsored religious persecution (as opposed to ongoing prejudice and/or discrimination) disappears in the UK, what can martyrdom possibly mean for modern Christians?  Certainly, it was possible to think about martyrdom in the imperial context--there was a decent-sized audience for narratives of missionary martyrs--but what about at home or on the Continent?  The novel's attempt to work through this problem, though, features a series of astonishingly Unfortunate Events involving murder (attempted, real), thwarted sexual desire (very explicit--no coding here), suicide, collusion, and overt misogyny.   Imagine Oscar Wilde writing for the Religious Tract Society, and you've got the general idea. 

Our narrator, Heathcote, who is somewhat ambiguously reliable, is a dilettantish philosopher in his mid-20s whose ancestor was burnt at the stake during the Reformation.  The ancestor in question, John Adam Heathcote, passed on his Bible shortly before his death, with a somewhat gnomic injunction: "'Let him take it in his hands'" (1).   This act, John Adam's descendants believe, invested the Bible with a mystical "influence" (2) that exerts its force on those who touch it: as Heathcote tells his friend the local clergyman, "'We believe that whoever touches it cannot do anything but right, according to his own best conscience, however else he may be tempted to act at the time'" (127).  The Bible is an enchanted object--even, perhaps, the repository of John Adam's essence, that which motivated him to martyrdom.  But even though John Adam died for the stereotypical Protestant reasons (private judgment, sola scriptura, etc.), his Bible's mystical power resides in its materiality.   Heathcote quite cheerfully admits to the charge that this is a form of "idolatry" (3, 174).   Virtually no-one reads this Bible; it exerts its power through physical contact, a kind of laying-on of hands.  Thus, even though the Bible circulates through the novel in much the same way as it would in a traditional Bible it-narrative, handed from one person to the next, its influence has nothing to do with its textuality, and it does not directly generate any recognizably Christian conversions.  A Bible it-narrative normally emphasizes the irresistible force of reading, of encountering God's Word and being abruptly awakened to a conviction of sin.   Reading the Bible ultimately integrates the sinner and convert into the body of the Church.  Here, though, the magic Bible does something far more violent, and even, in some ways, strangely sinister: it renders the user's actions perfectly congruent with his or her conscience, and in prompting absolutely righteous action, it often wrecks and blasts everything around it. 

And this is the problem of modern martyrdom.   In cleaving perfectly and absolutely to their consciences, the Bible's holders risk not official persecution, but social, psychic, and even physical destruction of the most shattering sort.  In the first section, our narrator and his brother Harold both fall in flaming lust with their gorgeous cousin Juliet, who literally brings death to the household in the form of an infected shawl that kills their mother and, as a result, their father.  During a late-night confrontation with Juliet, who sits ensconced in a symbolic halo of "knives and swords and daggers,"  Heathcote finds himself unable to "look straight or long at her," lest he "should have done some mad thing not of my own will" (43).   Both the intensity and the sexual terror of this moment will repeat itself through the stories that follow; characters exist on the brink of an uncontrollable desire nearly always figured in fire-and-brimstone terms.  Their only hope lies in the touch of the Bible, which forces their conscience to regroup itself against the pull of lust.  In this case, the Bible moves Heathcote to think that although her beauty might move men to sacrifice themselves "like martyrs" (46), in reality, the sheer glory of her embodiment would "turn all men to do evil to her" (45); the chaotic force of male sexual desire will rebound brutally against the object of its passion.  This insight does not save Heathcote from his passion for Juliet, but it does lead him to try for her salvation--in a discussion that, once again, involves martyrdom.  "But is anything certain enough to be a martyr about now?" Juliet wonders (47), soon revealing that she has been attracted to Roman Catholicism (thanks to a priest who, predictably, was in love/lust with her).   But while the novel is basically Protestant in orientation, and  is not especially kind to Catholicism, doctrine is not its primary focus.

Instead, Heathcote diverts our attention from theology to something else, an absolute devotion to a felt truth:

"No one is wrong who is burned. If we all sprang from dust that came alive, as the world cooled and made mistakes as it came alive, even then, since that dust in us has been divine enough to die for its mistakes, it is enough God for me. I worship it. But if that is not the whole story, there was spirit, and I worship that. It comes to the same in the end. You see, don't you? The main thing is to get burned somehow or other, or at least to believe in it."  (52)

Heathcote's solution to the problem of modern martyrdom is effectively post-sectarian.  Rejecting questions of doctrinal correctness and pseudo-martyrdom (debates over the latter of which were still going strong in the Victorian period), he instead advocates the passion for martyrdom per se, the willingness to utterly abandon the self and its petty desires in the face of the call of righteousness.  This total immolation of the self, whether literal or figurative, constitutes true moral greatness.  In this context, the technical "rightness" of "wrongness" of a martyr's acts, when considered from an institutional point of view, no longer signify.  At the same time, the rhetoric  of "burning" itself reminds us that to risk martyrdom is to risk unspeakable suffering and, of course, the limit point of all suffering: death itself.  If the  modern martyr may not die literally, s/he may do so figuratively.  And the fires may not always be easily contained.

Heathcote's willingness to martyr himself--in this case, by giving Juliet to his brother--brings no tangible reward.  Instead, Juliet tries to murder him, and his brother helps.   This sets the pattern for the rest of the narrative, in which there is no this-worldly reward for righteousness.  But it also establishes one of the novel's less pleasant strategies, which is to link female sexuality (and desire more generally) with death, chaos, and all-around general mayhem.  In the narratives that follow, we have an older woman healing Heathcote after the murder attempt, only to be rejected by him once she makes her desire clear; a prostitute blackmailing a saintly (but loathed) clergyman, then dying after he figuratively martyrs himself by offering her marriage; an increasingly insane elderly woman, also in love with (and rejected by) the clergyman; and a fashion plate married to a drunkard who commits suicide when her stepson tricks her into thinking that her husband has drowned (as a righteous act, this does seem rather counterproductive).   This is entirely woman as the temptress, potential agent of man's damnation--or, as Heathcote's brother Harold later says of Juliet, "'she was Eve, and apple, and snake all in one'" (355).  Pointedly, the only fully positive representation of a woman in the novel is Gwendolen, or "Bouncey," the prepubescent sister of one of Heathcote's friends (who is still treated as a sex object in the making, in a manner guaranteed to induce squick).  Juliet, who strings the novel together (albeit mostly offstage), never manages to grasp the concept of "burning," but eventually abandons Harold for first another man (there's a quite matter-of-fact divorce) who locks her up in his castle (!) and, ultimately, for a convent, racing away from death instead of toward it. By contrast, Mrs. Emslie, the woman whom Heathcote rejects, marries Juliet's paramour, but is motivated by the Bible to liberate Juliet from her Gothic imprisonment.    Her "burning," that is, lies in her willingness to put aside any potential sexual jealousy in order to save her husband's mistress from his brutal ministrations; it appears that the only way for a woman to catch a break in this narrative is to immolate herself in the fires of the danger she herself poses.

 

Cyril Westward

I've been buried under Book Two, but allow me to surface to talk about the hitherto elusive Cyril Westward: A Story of a Grave Decision (1899).  This was the sole novelistic effort (which was probably all to the good) of Anglican clergyman Henry Patrick Russell, who converted to Catholicism in 1896 (followed thereafter by his wife).¹  The novel received reasonably good reviews, although critics did gently advert to the total lack of anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to a plot.  It made enough of a splash that it went through at least a second edition, and probably counts as the most successful late-Victorian Catholic controversial novel--bearing in mind that, by the late 1890s, straightforwardly controversial fiction was losing its mainstream market lustre; certainly, Cyril Westward had far less of an impact than mid-century novels like Geraldine and Loss and Gain, which arguably had said it all before.  

Cyril Westward represents what we could call the self-confident mode in Catholic controversial literature.  As a genre, the controversial novel (as opposed to controversial fictions more generally) started on the Protestant side of the equation, and Catholic responses from the 1820s to the 1840s were often rather beholden to Protestant strategies, especially Biblical prooftexting.  By contrast, like many later Catholic controversial novels, Cyril Westward features almost no quotations from the Bible at all, except for a rerun of St. Augustine's famous Tolle, lege.  Instead, it focuses on ecclesiastical history ("'With regard to the Third Canon of the Second General Council at Constantinople...'" [118]), nearly always to demonstrate that the Pope is, indeed, the Supreme Head of the Church.   In turning to history, Catholic controversialists insisted that the evidentiary record charted only the decline and fall of Anglicanism from its Catholic original.  History reveals Catholicism's sameness and Anglicanism's difference: "Do these champions for the historic continuity of the Church of England, he thought, really imagine that their religion very much resembles the religion that the endowments were given to perpetuate?" (20)   Protestants who obsess over the late "definition" of doctrines, as the Catholic priest Father Fairfield remarks, mistake clarification for novelty (85).   This question of continuity and papal authority had become newly topical, thanks to Leo XIII's Apostolicae Curae (1896), which concluded that Anglican orders were invalid; much of the novel in fact revolves around clerical angst about this.  In other words, Cyril Westward seizes  on the papal bull to force Anglicans to face the problem of a united visible church with a single head. 

As far as the novel is concerned, disunity is the name of the Protestant game.  The "wonderful comprehensiveness of the English Church" (48) turns out to be a sign of its endemic fragmentation; in encouraging, or at least tolerating, widely-varied opinions on matters of grave theological import (baptism, the Eucharist, eternal punishment), the CofE constantly bodies forth the absence that lies at its center.  "The only people who seem to know what authority and obedience mean," sighs Cyril's cousin (and would-be love interest) Amy, "seem to be the Roman Catholics" (77).  This causes all the more angst for Cyril because he is slated to take orders and succeed his uncle to the family living. The novel consists of Cyril and various other symbolically-named characters (Seking, Broadway, Bubbler, Gaudful...) discoursing at considerable length about theology, hermeneutics, and the like.  (Cyril's last name appears to derive from his arguments against the Eastern Church as a viable alternative to Catholicism; when he converts, he heads West, not East.)  Notably, although even the Broad Church Mr. Broadway points out that there must be a "present interpreter, teacher, guide" (46) for Biblical interpretation, disallowing both sola scriptura and attempts to harken back to a mythical "Primitve Church" (46), there's little in the way of such interpretation going on.  Nor is there very much in the way of Catholic dogma, liturgy, and the like; we hear little about transubstantiation (although respect for the Eucharist crops up repeatedly), the Virgin Mary, or the necessity of confession, although all of these topics wander through.  Instead, as the title indicates, the novel is about characters seeking to make a decision. They want to rest, as the novel repeatedly puts it, and they cannot rest anywhere except where there is a power at work that transcends the anarchism of local and individual desires.    

By focusing on the quest for reasons to convert, Cyril Westward offers one more hint at its debt to John Henry Newman, whose ghost hovers over the narrative, and whose letters are treated as almost sacred documents.  Besides citing Newman's theological work repeatedly, Cyril Westward borrows Loss and Gain's satirical take on what it represents as Anglo-Catholicism's rag-bag nature (Gaudful has "the Latin Missal bound up with part of our Book of Common Prayer" [61]) and religious antiquarianism in general, along with the onslaught of clegy with comical names.  (Newman, however, had a rather better sense of humor.  Make that a sense of humor.  Russell's is...dubious.)     Where the novel departs from Loss and Gain is in its more extensive discussion of religious aesthetics, something which Newman effectively brackets (his hero finds peace in a church that looks like a brick warehouse, basically).  Anglo-Catholic aesthetics come in for particular critique; studying an Anglican church got up to look like its Catholic counterpart, the characters fault their inability to feel "a sense of awe" (73).  Anglicans, in other words, have no sense of the true beauty of holiness; their churches are fundamentally bric-a-brac. 

Ultimately, however, reasons matter less than the gift of grace, a point the novel makes with the deathbed conversion of Cyril's scapegrace cousin Robert.  (Robert does find ample time to speechify before his death, despite being in agonizing pain.)  Robert admits to his sister that "I have taken so much of my time to come to a decision" (226), invoking the novel's main theme, but the narrator reminds us later that this was through the "Divine Compassion" (228).  Given that Robert has spent most of the novel snarking, therefore supplying what little entertainment the book deigns to provide, it's exasperating to find him killed off instead of Cyril.  But the point is clear: "'Who'd have thought of his outstripping us?'" says Cyril's friend and would-be fellow Catholic Probyn.  "'Happy Robert! Verily God's ways are wonderful!'" (231)  Even though the novel is loaded with angsty seeking after truth, it is Robert, who has spent the shortest amount of time seeking, who joyously gives up himself to God.  By contrast, Cyril and Mr. Seking, who feel weighted with temporal concerns--Seking, in particular, will lose his living and his livelihood, potentially shipwrecking his family--have, in a sense, used their ongoing theological debates as a means of evading grace.  After all, it turns out that the grave decision is precisely one that cannot be made by the self alone...

 

¹ See W. Gordon Gorman, Converts to Rome: A Biographical List of the More Notable Converts to the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom during the Last Sixty Years (London: Sands and Co., 1910), 240-41.

The Story of a Red Velvet Bible and Richard Blake and His Little Green Bible

Although nineteenth-century Christian it-narratives included missionary boxes and cushions among their protagonists, adventurous Bibles were a popular subject, from Sarah Wilkinson's Adventures of a Bible (1821) onward.  In the 1860s, the prolific children's novelist Matilda Horsburgh wrote two such narratives, The Story of a Red Velvet Bible (1865[?]) and its conveniently color-coded sequel, Richard Blake and His Little Green Bible (1868), which exemplify some of the most common strategies in these evangelical texts.

Given the target audience, both novels emphasize the child's agency in adult conversions, although without endorsing the kind of full-blown preachiness one finds in something like Charlotte Elizabeth's Judah's Lion (whose angelic child has the aggravating habit of addressing the Jewish protagonist as "Mr. Jew").  This agency resides not in going door-to-door as youthful evangelists, but rather in reading their Bibles, exemplifying Christian virtues in their day-to-day lives, and, when called on, celebrating and explicating prooftexts for less enlightened readers.  Notably, we never see either child receiving formal instruction from a clergyman or parent (although Richard grows up in a Christian household); solid Protestant beliefs (especially those about Christ's Passion) derive transparently from attentive reading of the text, no catechism required.  Although Horsburgh usually avoids any sort of confessional polemic, we get a remarkably eye-popping moment in Richard Blake, which informs us that a young servant girl with an Catholic upbringing has no idea who this Jesus fellow is (RB 32).  (Even for garden-variety Victorian Catholic-bashing, that's a bit extreme.) 

Although the novels trace different social worlds, they are structured the same way.  The red Bible goes to an upper-class girl, who resides in a sadly worldly family with a non-wicked, but definitely class-conscious, stepmother; the green Bible to a working-class boy on his way to be apprenticed in the big city.  (We see the green Bible sold at the beginning of the first novel.)  The girl, Amelia Delany, discovers real (as opposed to nominal) Christianity by reading the Bible; her devotion to the Bible in turn inspires her little half-brother, her governess, the poor woman whom she visits, and even her mother, although her father "might have been saved, but he would not" (TS 93).  Richard Blake, who is already a boring paragon of devotion at the beginning of his novel, similarly brings various random people into contact with his Bible, but with more emphasis on the urban working (and non-working) poor; as in the first novel, there are two holdouts, one of whom dies having "'spurned the gift'"  (RB 81).  In both cases, the failure is figured in terms of 2 Corinthians 2:16: "To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?"  For the child protagonists, the Bible speaks only life, in part because it is initially received as a source of innocent pleasure (RB 26) that, in turn, prepares for the transformative moment of conversion in which Bible reading flips around: the Bible reads the child, forcing her to consider "[w]hat sort of spirit had she?" (28).  These transformative readings occur virtually at random--here, Amelia opens the Bible and finds that it lands on Romans 8:11 (28)--and are a much-Protestantized version of the sortes sanctorum (divination by Bible verses), still popular in the nineteenth century.  No longer does the random Bible verse foretell the future; instead, it shocks the reader into plumbing the depths of her soul.  Or, to put it differently, it shocks the reader into discovering that she has a soul.  The vulnerable child is far more open to being reborn into both salvation and Protestant subjectivity than are the adults, who must undergo considerable pain and suffering before they can humble themselves before the Bible's message.  In a way, the adults have to learn how to unread, stripping themselves of their accumulated ideologies about worldly living before they can truly hear the Word. 

Like other Bible it-narratives, however, both the Red Velvet Bible and the Little Green Bible have a problem on their way to being read: their profitable place in the bookselling and publishing industries.  Aileen Douglas' seminal article on eighteenth-century it-narratives argues that they "exploit and strengthen an emerging consumer culture," and tracks how such narratives both savage and salvage the new social relationships that emerge from a society based on increasingly free trade--trade that encompasses not just a nation, but an empire.¹  Bibles were certainly a mainstay of Victorian religious publishing, circulating in crushing quantities; the British and Foreign Bible Society alone managed to distribute over 27 million copies in fifty years.²   But both Horsburgh's novels and the other Bible it-narratives I've read so far do their best to remove the Bible as fast as they can from commercial exchange, even though they may otherwise offer John Halifax-esque praise of the hardworking young man who makes good (as is the case with Richard Blake).  After the initial purchase of the red and green Bibles, they circulate entirely through gift exchange, accidental or chance reading, bedside storytelling, and loans.    The sale of the green Bible certainly suggests that it challenges the normal rules of profit-making: the seller, who "was noted for never giving a book, or, indeed, any article, a penny under its real price," is inspired by a chance text from the red Bible to knock down the price from half-a-crown to two shillings (RB 7).  But as the narratives unfold, we see that there is no congruence between the Bible's monetary price and its actual worth, which emerges only when a reader engages with the Word.    Even though the Bible's materiality is crucial to these narratives, they try to erase the scene of purchase--the Bible's moment of "profane" value, as it were--as soon as possible.    In some Bible it-narratives, there is no moment of purchase at all: the Bible is simply gifted from one person to the next, or handed down as an heirloom.  The exchange value is, after all, not truly quantifiable.  This is something I intend to work out in more detail over the next few months.    

¹ Aileen Douglas,   "Britannia's Rule and the It-Narrator," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6.1 (1993): 68. 

² Michael Leger-Lomas, "Mass Markets: Religion," The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830-1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 329. 

The Perils of Pauline Using Pirated American Editions of British Fiction

US scholars who work on British religious fiction face a number of logistical problems, but there's one problem in particular that causes considerable anxiety: relying on US editions of things.  On the one hand, the Americans stole reprinted British religious fiction with considerable abandon, so there's a lot of it available to hand (and, in some cases, it may be impossible to find the relevant British text anywhere in the JK); on the other hand, the American publisher may have hacked, whacked, or otherwise revised the text without deigning to explain what's been altered.  And, of course, since religious fiction is very much a niche field (although of late, the niche seems to be expanding), there are very few detailed attempts to track transatlantic changes. 

As it happens, thanks to the joint efforts of eBay and GoogleBooks, I have an example to hand.  The text in question was authored by Charles Benjamin Tayler (sometimes Charles B. Tayler or C. B. Tayler), an Anglican clergyman with strong tolerationist beliefs when it came to Protestant denominations and equally strong prejudices when it came to Roman Catholics.  Tayler was a fairly industrious novelist, and quite a few of his works made it across the pond.  They did not, however, always make it there quite intact.  Such was the fate of The Child of the Church of England.  A Book for Children (1834), which Tayler revised as Arthur and His Mother; Or, the Child of the Church of England.  A Book for Children  (1852).   The first edition was reprinted in the USA by 1843 as The Child of the Church, but maintained Tayler's explicitly Anglican preface; I've not yet identified when the second edition put in its appearance.  Unfortunately, there are no digitized versions of the UK first edition (which is only owned by the British Library, it seems), but the 1843 US edition ends on a rather glum note with a chapter entitled "Arthur in Sin and in Disgrace," in which poor little Arthur, who had been shooting "hating and hateful thoughts" (89) in his brother's direction, is led to discover that he has been violating commandment #6.  The novel concludes with Mama explaining that he must first apologize, then spend some time in meditation and prayer.   Arthur thus never quite makes it to the point of full repentance in the narrative.  This may accurately represent the UK original; after all, the second edition is "enlarged." 

Perhaps Tayler decided that little kids might find the original ending a little depressing (being accused of murder, even in the heart, could do that to you), or perhaps he thought that there were too many Romanists on the loose--more likely the latter.  In any event, the revised version contains two more chapters, one on Dissenters (OK) and one on Roman Catholics (not OK, although good little Christians aren't supposed to be mean to individual Catholics).  Instead of ending on Arthur meditating on his sins, it now ends with Arthur receiving a very special present: his very own Bible, "plainly but handsomely bound in dark Morocco leather, with small silver clasps," embossed in gilt (133).  Although the novel spends much time showing us how Arthur's mother teaches him to read and interpret the Bible, this moment, in which the gift Bible replaces the Catholic (or Tractarian?) gift book sent to him by his aunt, symbolically marks his entry into the invisible church of Christ.  However, the novel's emphasis on man's total depravity remains unaltered.  

What happens in the American reprint of the second UK edition? First, it suddenly becomes anonymous, even though Tayler's other works had cropped up in the USA with his name attached.  Second, it loses three of its eight engravings.  Third, it gets some new chapter titles: "The Soul" becomes "A Talk about the Soul," "The Church" turns into "About the Church of Christ," and "The Chastening of the Lord" is now "The Death of the Baby."  (Talk about avoiding euphemisms.)  Fourth, and more seriously for the academic reader, the chapter on Dissenters vanishes entirely, although the Church of Rome stays put.  Fifth, the publisher reworks the text in spots to make it more accessible to US Protestant children, although the target audience appears to be Methodists.  Throughout, "clergymen" turn into "ministers."  Arthur's definition of a church--"an old building of grey stone" (US 68)--has obvious problems in the US context, so instead it's "a large building of stone, brick, or wood,"¹ without any spot for the clerk.  The tone of the chastening/deceased infant chapter changes slightly, as the UK version includes a bar between the end of the mother's discourse and her suggestion that they leave the room (hinting that the two contemplate the dead child in silence for some time), while the US version has her immediately indicating that they should leave, followed by "[a]nd the mother and the boy walked slowly out of the chamber of death" (US 78)--found nowhere in the original.   Some other alterations turn Anglican rites into their Methodist counterparts.   For example, here's Baby's baptism in the UK edition:

"Not only," said Arthur's mother, "is this dear little Baby brought every day to God in our prayers, in the prayers of your father, and myself, and in the prayers of Edward, and Lucy, and in your prayers, but all the Church of Christ, and more especially our own Church of England are daily praying for him, for he has been admitted into the number of those who are called the people of God, and Christians after Christ by baptism. You remember, Arthur, when we went to Church with Baby, and the Clergyman prayed, and we all prayed; and then his Godfathers and his Godmothers promised, in his name, that he would 'forsake sin; that is, have nothing to do with any kind of sin, that he would believe God's word, and obey God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of his life.'" (UK 43)

The US edition erases "and more especially our own Church of England," along with the godfathers and godmothers ("we" make the promise instead) (US 38).  By the same token, Arthur's trek to church with mom becomes a visit to "the old meeting-house" (US 85), moves the baptismal font from the entry to "inside the rails of the altar" (conceding in a footnote that one is not likely to find such a thing in a Methodist church...) (US 86), eliminates the chancel, has the Commandments painted directly on the wall instead of on wood, and axes Mom's Book of Common Prayer.  (Other references to the Book of Common Prayer become "the hymn book" instead [e.g., US 31]).   Even though the changes seem minor (aside, that is, from the completely missing chapter...), they totally transform the text's original Anglican affiliation--which is exactly the sort of change of which we need to be wary. 

¹ Arthur and His Mother; or, the Story of a Child that Belonged to the Church.  A Book for Christian Children (New York: Carlton and Lanahan, n.d.), 57-58.              

Nightshade

The Irish newspaperman and lawyer William Johnston (1829 - 1902) is primarily remembered today as an MP and influential member of the Orange Institution.   For reasons that Nightshade (1857) makes abundantly clear, he does not generally rank among the more artistically-gifted of the nineteenth century's politician-authors.  The Saturday Review lived up to its nickname of "The Saturday Revilers" in its assessment of the book, which concludes, rather tartly, that "[w]e can only express a sincere hope that no other M.A. in the country could be found to put his name to such a production as Nightshade--else we should be inclined to think that the Universities are much in need of reform."  In any event, if the book does not glimmer, let alone twinkle or scintillate, it still illustrates some polemical tendencies of anti-Catholicism during the 1850s, the high-water mark of the Victorian "anti-Popery" agenda.

Like many other anti-Catholic agitators of his era, Johnston sees Jesuits not only under every tree, but also every politician, shop, and, in all likelihood, chamber pot.  (At least he spares us that bizarre phenomenon, the "female Jesuit."  Of course, it's about the only thing he does spare us.) The setting is in the late 1840s, around the time of the Risorgimento, and shortly after the first wave of Tractarian conversions to Roman Catholicism.  The novel details the sad fortunes of orphaned English twins Anna and Emily, who find themselves under the mysterious guardianship of their uncle, Aubrey de Vere.  Alas, de Vere is really--gasp--an Italian Jesuit named Ricci, who has absconded with the identity (but not the credit cards) of the twins' real uncle Aubrey, who died insane after falling in love with Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci.  (This, at least, has the merit of some originality.)  As is par for the course, de Vere plans to expropriate the twins' inheritance for the good of the Church while dooming them to lives in dark, dank convents.  (It's never exactly clear how he figures out that de Vere would be a good target, but this presumably falls under "don't think too hard about the plot.")   However, the twins are championed by the thoroughly muscular Christian Charles Annandale, a hardcore Protestant who falls in love with Anna after saving her from an ignominous death by drowning.  At various points, he also rescues a man shot by Ribbonist assassins, fights against the French when they invade Italy, and breaks into a convent.  (He's properly impressed by the Orange Order, to boot.) He is, in other words, the very model of a modern Protestant manly man.  Annandale gets valuable backup from both the mildly comical pair of Mr. Anderson (elderly clergyman) and John Connell (elderly lawyer), and shares his star billing with the young, handsome Lord Oxenborough, who comes to embody Johnston's vision of the ideal Protestant aristocrat.  (For some reason, we also get to meet Benjamin Disraeli, who walks on at a dinner hosted by Oxenborough.) In contrast to the fine and upstanding young Protestant gentlemen, we have Anglo-Catholic Oxford tutor Mr. Tractate (subtlety is not, perhaps, Johnston's strong suit) and his convert, Arthur Wilmington, both of whom seek to suborn the Church of England from within.   By the end of the novel, Ricci has been thwarted and stabbed to death, but not before he manages to ensure Emily's doom ("'What a pity she won't die!'"..."'Those English girls are very hard to kill'" [272]) by imprisonment in an aforementioned dark, dank convent.  Still, Charles marries Anna and they live Protestantly ever after, while Emily enjoys an evangelical good death and goes off to Heaven, accompanied by her favorite swallows.

As Albert Pionke has noted, Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric frequently casts the Jesuits as an "undetectable Catholic secret society" [1].  In Johnston's novel, Jesuits form a counter-cultural, subversive network of omnipresent spies: "'They penetrate every place, profess all varieties of politics, adopt every shade of religious opinion, in order to pervert all politics and all religion to the abominable end of bringing about the destruction of free thought, the annihilation of free action, and the complete subjugation of the world to Rome, as represented by their order'" (32-33).  Chameleonic and theologically imperialist, Jesuits colonize all modes of thought, and thus cannot simply be detected by means of some political or religious acid test; the good evangelical next door might be a Jesuit as much as the more "obvious" Tractarian.  The narrative thus prescribes a hermeneutic of Protestant suspicion.  But, inasmuch as Jesuits--who, in practice, appear to be indistinguishable from any random Catholic pulled off the street--thrive by their discursive mastery, their ability to appropriate any and all forms of thought for their own ends, they cannot be admitted to dialogue.  At the same time, given that the novel's Protestant dialogues with Catholics or Catholic sympathizers quickly result in shamefaced embarrassment or silence on the Catholic side, such terrifying mock-normalcy turns out, in practice, to be ridiculously vulnerable to Protestant attack.  (Catholics are scary until real Protestants arrive on the scene.)  The prime solution to the danger Catholics pose is a strong anti-tolerationism.  Annandale very quickly arrives at an uncompromising position: insofar as "these Irish Roman Catholics worshipped murder, or, at least, the murder of a heretic" (53), only uprooting the religion altogether will suffice.  He thus has no brief with the "Liberal Protestant" landowner, Mr. White, whom the novel derides as a self-satisfied exemplar of Victorian PC.  "'This won't do now, Mr. Annandale,'" White informs him over dinner; "'bigotry is exploded; charity predominates; we must deal in a liberal spirit with our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen'" (322).  Like many other anti-Catholic polemicists, Johnston attacks advocates of toleration for their impulse to historicize, to represent the modern age as an irenic moment of interdenominational cooperation that has superseded earlier eras of religious oppression and violence.  For Johnston, such calls for "charity" simply wink at Catholic crimes (killing people, immuring nuns, the usual...); Catholicism/Jesuitism is entirely incompatible with any nation built on (or, in the case of Italy, building itself on) a strong tradition of civil liberties. Johnston's modern England, far from being a securely Protestant haven, is in fact teetering over a Roman Catholic abyss, but may be rescued by a return to staunch Biblical principles.

Although Johnston was Irish, the novel tends to be insistently English (although chunks are set in Ireland).  The novel offers up a standard geography of UK religious differences: Scotland is the most resolutely anti-Catholic, Ireland has been destroyed by Catholicism, and England currently exists in some sort of weird via media.  (Wales doesn't appear to exist.)    England thus emerges as both battleground and potential standard-bearer.  On the Continent, the Risorgimento demonstrates the possibilities of large-scale anti-Catholic organization, in a rather persistent Protestant misreading of what was at stake in Italian nationalism [2].  The organized warfare in Italy repeats itself in Ireland and England in the Ribbonist assassinations and Annandale's assault on a convent (probably intended to echo the destruction of the Charlestown Convent in 1834).   In effect, the novel offers "Protestant" and "Catholic" models of violence: Catholics kill people secretly (and manipulate the legal system to get themselves declared innocent), whereas Protestants, who have apparently all played rugby at public school, bravely jump into battle on the side of beleaguered nationalists and, well, invade convents.  "[F]ifty stalwart men" (309) crash the London convent where poor Emily is being held, doing no damage but definitely being cast as upright English liberators.  Johnston contrasts the Abbess, "mingling maledictions and Ave Marias, and talking of the Law of England," with the "brave, honest Englishmen," who cheer in "triumphant" and "joyous" tones (310-11).  By the end of the novel, Catholicism is feminine, incapable of forthright self-defense, and, as the Abbess' improperly jumbled language suggests, profanely confused; Protestantism is masculine, active, and openly expressive.  (Such gendering is itself conventional, and the fantasy of convent invasion occasionally crops up elsewhere in anti-Catholic literature.) 

The Abbess' lie that Emily is not in the convent is yet one more example of the novel's insistence that a Catholic talking is a Catholic lying.  To make this argument, Johnston conflates two separate concepts: reserve and equivocation.  The Tractarians were exceptionally interested in the practice of reserve, an imitation of God's care not to "overwhelm" seekers with truths they could not handle; ideally, "[b]earing testimony to God's truth is a Christian duty, but it should be done only in so far as it would leave all persons who hear that testimony the better for it" [3].  Equivocation, which by the nineteenth century formed part of any Jesuit stereotype, is a casuistical way of thinking about those few circumstances when lying might be necessary (preventing someone's death, for example), and how it might be done--usually through a process known as mental reservation [4].   However, many Protestants understood equivocation (frequently folded into reserve, as here) to justify lying under any and all circumstances, failed to register the debates within Catholicism about the subject, and denounced it and Catholics accordingly.    (Like many other polemicists, Johnston seizes on the canonization of Alphonsus Liguori as proof that Catholics advocate lying [5].)  Thus, when Annandale comments on Arthur Wilmington's growing "reserve" (66), he inadvertently puns on Wilmington's theological practice.  Similarly, in a parody of reserve, Wilmington's Catholic friend Prynne tells him that he already is Catholic (but an Anglican priest) only after Wilmington converts: "'Yes, Wilmington; I can impart this information to you, now; you and I will be fellow-workers in the Church's cause, though we seem to be in the enemy's camp'" (255).  As a result, the novel preempts all Catholic speech whatsoever by insisting that by definition, no Catholic arguments in their own favor can be true--and, indeed, that any arguments that sound like they might be pro-Catholic must already be tainted. 

[1] Albert D. Pionke, Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 61.    More generally, see Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 

[2] For a discussion of how Italian exiles encouraged such a reading, see Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 132-34, 203-7; and for Anglo-American Protestant arguments in support of the Risorgimento, C. T. McIntire, England against the Papacy, 1858-1861 (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 224.

[3] James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 118, 120.  See also Pionke, esp. 64-68. 

[4] For an overview, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 

[5] On anti-Liguorianism among Protestants, see J. L. Altholz, "Truth and Equivocation: Liguori's Moral Theology and Newman's Apologia," Church History 44.1 (1975): 73-84.

Woo-hoo!

Hooray! Somebody finally digitized William Johnston's Nightshade (1858)! And it looks positively terrible! I mean, just look at the front cover.  You know where this one is going. 

(Perhaps this means there's hope for Cyril Westward.)

(Also, I'm probably the one person in this country...no, make that the Continent...er, possibly the world...or even the galaxy...thrilled that Nightshade has put in an appearance.)