My readers were no doubt waiting with bated breath to hear whether or not Daniel Parsons' Stumpingford (1854), newly rediscovered (in somebody's attic, presumably), would revolutionize our understanding of nineteenth-century British religious fiction--Catholic fiction, in particular. And the answer is...
Er, no.
I suspect there wasn't a lot of suspense on that score.
Stumpingford satirizes the Protestant Alliance (founded in 1851) and the more general environment of anti-Catholic panic that followed the so-called "Papal Aggression" in the early 1850s. Like E. C. Agnew's earlier Geraldine, Stumpingford parodies anti-Catholic public meetings, as well as Protestant home missions and--not so light-heartedly--anti-Catholic mobs. Parsons shares with Protestant controversialists the position that religious belief is the base that enables and explains all other behaviors, so it is no surprise that, given that the Catholic Mr. Preston describes Protestantism as "in itself [...] an umitigated evil" (98), it turns out that Protestant Stumpingford is entirely corrupt. Elections come with a general helping of bribes, residents over-imbibe on a general basis, the clergy are mostly lazy and un(der)educated, and women in the Burial Club hasten their children's deaths in order to get a payout. (This last talking point reflects contemporary debates about Burial Clubs; Parsons reprints a newspaper article in an appendix on the topic.) Moreover, the town is populated by every known Protestant denomination under the sun, a surplus of churches that is one of the novel's significant targets. Yet in the midst of all the Protestantism, there is the new Catholic church, "built from the designs of a great master" (7) (Pugin, perhaps?), that simultaneously represents historical continuity and religious resurgence. Significantly, the Prestons are a recusant family, both sides having persisted "with unchanged faith" (64) during the persecutions, and as is often the case in Victorian Catholic fiction, their house is pierced with the secret spaces (priests' holes, concealed chapels) that symbolically testify to Catholic persistence in times of violence. (Catholicism, that is, is always there.) But while the new Catholic church attests to growing Catholic self-confidence in the nineteenth century, as they literally exit the concealed chapel for the public place of worship, it also proves to be a lightning rod for renewed assault; for Parsons, newfound toleration for Catholics in the public sphere is fragile at best.
The novel's real protagonist turns out to be a lapsed Catholic, a working-class man named William Exton who clearly has radical tendencies. Indeed, the book could just as well have been called The Conversion of William Exton. Parsons' cautionary tale about how Protestant influence inevitably transformed the orphaned Exton into a free-thinker is the mirror image of Protestant claims about Catholic influences: Parsons insists that Protestantism's ever-subdividing nature naturally leads to atheism because multiple denominations make it impossible to put forward any authorized truth claims, whereas a Protestant would argue, contrariwise, that Catholicism's unified hierarchy naturally leads to atheism because its limitations on individual inquiry make it impossible to put forward any authorized truth claims. (As far as Parsons is concerned, "Protestant Alliance" is an oxymoron, as none of his various Protestant characters actually agree with each other, or even like each other all that much.) In any event, the novel's sub-subtitle refers to the two key questions raised at the Protestant Alliance meeting. First, do miracles still happen? Second, as Exton himself asks, "'How do you prove [...] that Jonah was ever in the whale's body?'" (35) Although the novel doesn't do much with the miracles, for some reason (despite it being, you know, in the sub-subtitle), the story of Jonah raises questions about Biblical authority, canonicity, and transmission, which (predictably enough) the Protestants all prove themselves unable to answer. Poor Exton soon becomes the target of various evangelizing activities, none of which take, especially since both he and Mr. Preston make quick hash of everyone else's arguments. In terms of narrative form, this is actually the novel's most substantive point, and one that directly engages with evangelical conversion plots: instead of being converted by a) arguments or b) private reading, Exton returns to Catholicism by c) attending Mass. Nobody argues anybody out of their beliefs; religious transformation only occurs by experiencing communal worship. In that sense, the novel is both controversial (in that it lays out a number of talking points about apostolic succession, Church authority, and so forth) and anti-controversial (in that it disclaims the sufficiency of such talking-points to get anything accomplished).
Like many Catholic novels, Stumpingford resists poetic justice. Bad people live happily ever after, while good people, well, die. After the Protestant mob nearly destroys the Catholic church and murders both Exton (about which more in a moment) and a policeman, nothing actually happens to them: the mob's leader evades justice entirely (indeed, he winds up testifying to the virtue of all the other Protestant accused) and the Protestants are, by and large, let off with a slap on the wrist, while the Catholics who fought against them wind up prosecuted instead. The town hits the reset button and returns to normal--that is, to its usual state of corruption. Exton's death is, in fact, the plot's greatest moment of triumph, a modern martyrdom. As the mob tears down the crucifix and the statue of Mary--reenacting Reformation iconoclasm, in other words--Exton enters the church in order to save the Sacrament. After successfully grabbing the ciborium from the ringleader, Exton manages to give it to the priest and then briefly "fell on his knees" (148), a spontaneous act of reverence that signals his full return to faith before he is abruptly trampled during a sudden melee. This death, the novel explains, is full of divine significance: "Exton's guardian angel would not let him leave the church, where he had nobly risked his life for his Divine Master, without completing the sacrifice. And so he received a wound, which was to him like the wound of St. Ignatius, a salutevole colpa, a health-giving stroke, and sealed his conversion with his blood" (151). Exton's shattered body both suggests his own crucifixion and joins him to Ignatius Loyola (who gave up his soldiering for religion after being severely wounded in battle): in Exton's case, the destruction of his body signals not a turn to monasticism, but rather the reenactment of Christ's sacrifice in his own death. Although Exton's death has no effect on the Protestants, he is posthumously enshrined in the local Catholic community, and the Catholic books from his childhood (not to mention his pet canaries) incorporated into the Preston house library, perpetuating his memory within the tradition maintained by the recusants. The ultimate effect of the novel is fairly pessimistic: Exton is reintegrated with the Catholic community in death, but otherwise erased, and there's little or no prospect of the Catholics experiencing anything more than the most superficial toleration in the future. Later Victorian Catholic novels will assume rather different possibilities for social engagement.
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