2 - Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister

Summary

The popular demand is for the prodigious, the enormous, the abominable, the diabolical, the impossible. It must be shown that all priests are monsters of hypocrisy, that all nunneries are dens of infamy, that all Bishops are the embodied plenitude of savageness and perfidy.

— John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics

I almost wish we were Papists, and had a convent to put her in to-morrow.

— Wilkie Collins, No Name

Of monks and nuns with morbid cravings,

With visions and ecstatic ravings …

—Eugene Lee Hamilton

In her memoirs of an Evangelical childhood, the Victorian poet, Eliza Keary, recalled a youthful fascination with stories about sinister Catholic convents. Both Eliza and her sister succumbed to the delicious frissons of ‘nun mania’ after reading Mrs Sherwood's novel, The Nun (1833). Sherwood's narrative makes much of the Catholic cloister as an institution that oppresses both the vulnerable (innocent girls) and the assertive (those with independent religious views). A sub-plot, for example, features Sister Agnes, who, obstinately Protestant in her religious tendencies, had ‘been hidden away in a cell underground, that she might not contaminate the sisterhood’. Deeply moved by this portrayal of Catholic violence to a defenceless creature, the Keary girls became convinced that some frightened novice was imprisoned in a subterranean passage under their house. They spread panic and terror among their school-friends, such that one poor girl ran home ‘almost raving about a nun, and a dungeon, and the priest’.