Abstract
This chapter examines how journalistic and literary reactions to the prominent separation of converts Pierce and Cornelia Connelly used marital breakup as a metaphor for the threat Catholic conversion posed to the English nation. Elizabeth Shipton Harris, a convert disappointed with Catholicism, fictionalized one such depiction of a broken marriage in From Oxford to Rome, an 1847 tale of the tragic disappointment suffered by Catholic converts that provided a launching point for John Henry Newman’s pro-conversion novel, Loss and Gain. I argue that Newman co-opted Harris’ connection of conversion and homelessness in order to claim that the transnational home and cosmopolitan identity found in Catholicism were superior to a narrow conception of English identity centered on the Anglican Church.
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Notes
- 1.
Newman’s emphasis on the universality of Catholicism somewhat parallels the “complex dialectic of detachment and engagement” that Amanda Anderson sees at work in writers like John Stuart Mill (17).
- 2.
The references to St. Francis de Sales and Madame de Chantal may indicate the influence of Michelet’s Priests, Women, and Families, translated into English and published by Longmans in 1845.
- 3.
Since Overdale’s clerical convert is named Eustace Aylmer—reminiscent of Harris’ Eustace A.—we can reasonably assume that Worboise was influenced by From Oxford to Rome.
- 4.
According to letters printed The Church and State Gazette, Harris’ retraction was published in multiple newspapers, including The Guardian and The Tablet as well as The Church and State Gazette (“Mr. Oakeley, The Pervert” 573). The retraction also appeared in The Dublin Review (Harris “Letter”).
- 5.
Galloway’s own theory is that Harris had had an unrequited crush on Oakeley, which fueled the anxiety about husbands and wives (225).
- 6.
Cornelia Connelly , unlike the fictional Margaret F., who wasted away in the cloister, appears to have done quite well in religious life. The order she founded expanded, and her work was so successful that in the twentieth century she was proposed for beatification. A number of books have been published about her work as an educator and founder of a religious order. As a result, however, most of the material available today on the Connelly case is written from a decidedly pro-Cornelia, hagiographical stance. (For an insightful analysis of the ways in which Cornelia’s story has been retold for different rhetorical purposes over the course of the twentieth century, see Judith Lancaster’s Cornelia Connelly and Her Interpreters, which uses the Connelly biographies as a case study in hagiography.) D.G. Paz’s The Priesthoods and Apostasies of Pierce Connelly is the only significant work to attempt to take up the Connelly story with an emphasis on Pierce’s life and work rather than Cornelia’s.
- 7.
In fact, Pierce explicitly denied that he had suggested the couple’s private vow of chastity, saying that “precisely the reverse is true. Mr. Connelly having long absolutely refused to accede to the desire [of taking a vow of chastity] artificially got up in his wife, and in spite even of visions and divine revelations supposed to have been vouchsafed to her” (Domestic Emancipation From Roman Rule 12). However, in Pierce’s writings, all deceptive claims coming from Cornelia’s legal defense are attributed not to her but to “the priests who now have Mrs. Connelly in charge” (14), a move which protects Cornelia’s character by denying her agency, while also tapping into anti-Catholic rhetoric that depicted priests as coming between a man and his wife.
- 8.
The court rejected this defense on the grounds that all it was recommending was that Cornelia cohabit with Pierce, not that she have sex with him. Apparently, for him to compel her to resume sexual relations would constitute cruelty, given her vow of celibacy, but it was not cruel for him to demand that she live with him.
- 9.
See James Eli Adams’ discussion of an ascetic ideal of masculinity which “cannot be sustained within domesticity , since the ideal is incomplete with ease” (10). In Dandies and Desert Saints, Adams reads Tractarian asceticism as part of a larger attempt to construct a new ascetic and intellectual form of masculinity to replace the vanished traditional model.
- 10.
To be more precise, the early newspaper accounts seem to pin the blame on “Rome ” or the Roman Catholic Church , but in later works like The Case of the Rev. Pierce Connelly (1853) and Domestic Emancipation from Roman Rule in England (1853) Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman is singled out for blame. As the Papal Aggression Crisis developed, the case became an example not only of the general anti-domestic nature of the Roman Catholic Church , but also of the audacity of the newly reinstated English Catholic hierarchy that Wiseman headed.
- 11.
In Trevor, the positions are reversed, but here Mrs. Arden (whose name is surely telling) converts only because she had originally failed in seeking domestic happiness. Because she married a man whom she did not love, she was open to the possibility of a sort of spiritual adultery with Rev. Malinsey, which culminated in her flight to the convent . Though a woman is at fault in this novel, feminine domesticity is still the antidote to Roman Catholicism and all ends well once Mrs. Arden goes back to her housework and her husband.
- 12.
Granted, the Greek Catholic Church had little impact in the English-speaking world (Paz Priesthoods and Apostasies 104–105), but it may be significant that popular Victorian depictions of Catholicism do not even indicate an awareness that not all priests in communion with Rome were required to be celibacy.
- 13.
Baker’s claim that Newman “seems to pull up his conversion-story at certain intervals, as if to say, ‘Now I must stop the argument and describe the scenery or let the characters drink another cup of tea’” unfortunately seems justified (63). There is rather a lot of tea-drinking-punctuated debate in the novel. Newman is at least original enough to insert a discussion about the morality of tea-drinking into one such scene, which might be taken as an example of a lighter sort of satire that his earlier critics seem not to have appreciated, though Ian Ker has more recently drawn well-deserved attention to Newman’s satirical gifts.
- 14.
Charles is clearly “coming out ” to Carlton here, and it is tempting to see this as a nineteenth-century identification of asexuality. However, we would do well not to conflate religious celibacy with asexuality, though the two may be related.
- 15.
In Hypatia (1853), Kingsley would challenge the Tractarians by exploring asceticism and the institution of monasticism at their source: the Early Church.
- 16.
Although the male converts are placed in an Italian monastery , which is explicitly opposed to the English Church, the national situation with regard to Margaret and Augusta is not so clear-cut. Their convent is in Ireland , and when Margaret leaves the convent , she stays with friends in Scotland , not England . She is visited by an Anglican minister, not a Presbyterian one, and the novel endorses the Anglican Church but condemns the “ultra-Protestantism” of Presbyterian churches. Still, Protestant Scotland appears to be safer and more familiar territory than Catholic Ireland.
- 17.
Viswanathan sees additional implications in the connection to childhood, claiming that “Newman’s romantic individualism links the child with true belief; hence conversion to Catholicism is virtually the recovery of a lost childhood” (64). This would support the connection I see between conversion and a return to a sense of home or belonging.
- 18.
Here I have to disagree with Trevor Lipscombe’s suggestion that, in contrast to Reding, Willis “is the seed that springs up rapidly when first planted, but withers when the sun comes out to scorch it” (xxiii). Lipscombe is right to suggest that Willis’ sadness at the end of the novel is a result of his rushing too quickly into conversion, but Willis’ interactions with Bateman suggest that he has been seasoned or matured rather than withered by that suffering.
- 19.
Viswanathan sees a related project being carried out in A Grammar of Assent, which allows Newman to “posit Catholicism as a transreligious, transnational force. From this transnational perspective, Newman is able also to critique the very concept of the nation state, even as he simultaneously recovers a Catholicism of the popular masses that is truly national” (48). Viswanathan further argues, “Far from being separatist or sectarian, this view of Catholicism appears to Newman to perfect the idea of the English nation.”
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Traver, T.H. (2019). Losing a Family, Gaining a Church. In: Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel . Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31347-0_3
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