A Protestant Converted to Catholicity by Her Bible and Prayer-Book

Back to actual Victorians.  Fanny Maria Pittar's A Protestant Converted to Catholicity by Her Bible and Prayer-Book (c. 1846-47) was a popular nineteenth-century conversion narrative, reprinted fairly regularly on both sides of the Atlantic and (in translation) on the Continent until 1911.  As the preface to the 1904 edition explains, the narrative details events that took place in the early 1840s, ending in 1842 with her stepfather's/father-in-law¹ refusing either to accept her back into the household and or to allow her contact with her own children (xii).  (Eventually, she would up absconding with the children to France.²)  The major Protestant magazines appear to have pretty much ignored the book entirely, although it did spark one furious and spluttering review--complete with sexual innuendo--from The Bristol Protestant. 

Structurally, the book is a real mess: Mrs. Pittar was apparently unable to decide whether she was straightforwardly expounding Catholic theology, exhorting Protestants to convert, or narrating her own conversion.  It's possible, of course, to do all of these things at the same time, but in practice, we have a lot of the straightforward expounding, climaxing with the exhorting, accompanied by only intermittent narrating. (There are also  some rather odd moments that apparently went unmentioned for several decades, like the time she accuses Henry VIII of executing Anne of Cleves [117].) Nevertheless, what's interesting about the book is its marketing technique, as it were.  As Brownson's Quarterly Review pointed out, the book "bears a false title": "[...] all the Bible and prayer-book had to do with her conversion was simply, that, after her eyes were opened to Catholic truth by other means, she was able to perceive it in the Bible, and some vestiges of it in the Book of Common Prayer."  Although the reviewer's objection is accurate, it misses the book's rhetorical strategy.  Near the end, Mrs. Pittar tells her readers that

My Bible is now a treasure beyond all price, and that respect I blindly rendered it as a Protestant, I can now consistently and with the homage of the head as well as the heart offer it. It led me to Catholicity; and to the Catholic Church alone am I or any one indebted for it ; for as a Catholic only can I render it the honour due to it. To me it is henceforth infallible, because I have it through an infallible interpretation. (186)

The book's very title had already announced its (to a Protestant) shocking conclusion: that "searching the Scriptures," along with the Book of Common Prayer, would yield not the "obvious" conclusion--namely, that Protestantism was the way to go--but that the Scriptures themselves adequately demonstrated that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true church.  That is, sola scriptura, far from returning the reader to a primitive faith that looks suspiciously like modern Protestantism, instead converts the anxious inquirer to Catholicism.  The book's self-advertisement suggests that Protestant methods, taken to their logical extreme, necessarily lead to Catholic conclusions about Bibical "interpretation."  As the Brownson's reviewer rightly points out, however, Pittar actually cannot make Catholic sense of the Bible until other Catholics map out the right way of approaching it--the interpretive framework precedes the act of reading, as opposed to the act of reading leading to the interpretive framework.  

Nevertheless, Mrs. Pittar's polemical overstatement lines up with contemporary Catholic conversion novels, especially in her turn to prooftexts.  By downplaying the role of Catholic instruction while emphasizing her apparently private encounter with the Scriptures, Mrs. Pittar deliberately duplicates Protestant conversion narratives, fictional and otherwise, in which the Bible alone effects the reader's conversion.  As it happens, in the 1904 edition, Protestant Converted offers about forty straight pages of prooftexts (intermingled with explication), all intended to demonstrate that the Bible supports every position that Protestants deny.  (Needless to say, this is before Mrs. Pittar tackles the Book of Common Prayer.)  Under the circumstances, the narrative hints strongly, Protestants can only refrain from conversion by either extreme denial or willful misreading.   

¹ Mrs. Pittar married her stepbrother.  

² This author appears to have a date wrong somewhere, since Mrs. Pittar's son Joseph is said to have been born in 1856--even though Mrs. Pittar's only husband had died over a decade earlier...