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John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Kevin L. Morris
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Extract

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , October 1996 , pp. 190 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1996

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References

Notes

1 Although Walter, L. Arnstein—in his Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (University of Missouri Press, London, 1982), pp. 212–213 Google Scholar—adverts to the political element in anti-Catholicism, he settles for supposing that it was essentially a Protestant/Catholic conflict, its roots in the eighteenth-century evangelical revival and the Anglo-Catholic movement. As will be seen, politics and psychology were more important than he allows, and such revivals were only the occasions, not the causes, of anti-Catholicism.

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66 This essay first appeared in Formightly Review vol. XXVIII o.s., XXII n.s. (Nov., Dec. 1877); repr. Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology 2nd ed. (Smith, Elder, 1903).

67 An Agnostic's Apology, pp. 239–41.

68 Kingsley, ‘Women and Polities’, p. 4.

69 Op. cit., 3rd ed. (1866) vol. I, ch.II, pp. 187–8.

70 Ibidem, vol. I, p. 436.

71 Op. cit., (1866) vol. I, pp. 157, 177–9.

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84 History of England, ch. I.

85 The Nemesis of Faith, pp. 158–9.

86 1848 Intoduction to Poems.

87 God and the Bible (Complete Prose Works ed.), pp. 389–90.

88 C.K. (1901) vol. II, pp. Ill, 200; vol, I, 204.

89 Ibidem (1877) vol. I, p. 253. In the 1850s the Catholic J. S. Northcote commented on the increasingly pragmatic line of Protestant dialectic: the idea that Protestantism works better for society than Catholicism: ‘A Glance at the Morality and Religion of England’, Rambler vol. XII (1853), pp. 201–2.Google Scholar

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95 Op. cit., ch.II.

96 Op. cit., ch. XCIX.

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98 Lavengro (Everyman, 1909), pp. 2–3.

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101 John Inglesant vol. II, p. 387.

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108 Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman vol. Ill, p. 90.

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111 Digby Mores Catholici, vol. II (1832), p. 47.

112 Digby The Broad Stone of Honour (Rivington, 1823), p. lii.

113 (Hutchinson, 1911) by ‘Lucas Malet’ (Mrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison) pp. 34, 376–7.