Back to research-related reading. Ellmer Castle (first ed. 1827) was part of the early wave of Father Clement knockoffs, as this review indirectly acknowledges. Like Father Clement, Ellmer Castle sticks "Roman Catholic" in its subtitle--not the polemically obvious "Romanism" or "Popery"--in order to muddy the waters a bit for the audience. Moreover, like the Catholics in Father Clement, the Ellmer family has one daughter willing to convert and another, represented as a chilly "bigot," who staunchly sticks to her Catholic guns; the two novels also sort-of share an inheritance plot (although Ellmer Castle drops that thread fairly quickly). Most importantly, the novels share their argumentative structure: Catholic Layman states an objection, Protestant counters it with reference to the Bible (or, occasionally, ecclesiastical history), Catholic says "oh." Unlike the eponymous Father Clement, though, the two Catholic priests in Ellmer Castle fail to see the Protestant light; they are both too uneducated (theologically and otherwise) to counter the Protestants, and thus resort to storming off in a huff whenever matters don't go their way. (These false/stacked dialogues aren't restricted to Protestant novels, I should point out--Catholic novelists take an identical approach, just in the opposite direction.)
This novel does have a couple of interesting features, however. First, while the first evangelist we meet in the novel is brother Henry, he himself converted under the direction of an Anglican clergyman, Neville, and Neville supplies the voice of interpretive authority in the inset narrative addressed to Henry's sister Elizabeth. Unlike Father Clement, an explicitly Presbyterian novel, and many of the imitators that followed it, Ellmer Castle takes what could be called an "establishment" view of conversion: while the novel follows the mainstream Protestant line on the right of private judgement, sola scriptura, etc., it still grants the Anglican clergyman an implicitly higher pedagogical authority when it comes to exegesis. Henry needs Neville's assistance (and personal model) to read the Bible properly, and can later spread the good news to others because he has learned to interpret the text from the right source. Other novels in this evangelical tradition tend to celebrate lay authority with greater enthusiasm. Second, the novel is set in Ireland, and partly addresses itself to converting the Irish peasantry, which suggests that the author saw him- or herself contributing to the so-called "Second Reformation" agenda (the date is certainly right).
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