Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about nineteenth-century anti-Catholic discourses and how Charlotte Brontë portrayed Roman Catholicism in her novels. Research for this book involved the reading of a great many anti-Catholic texts written during and around the middle of the nineteenth century in order to place Brontë’s depiction of Catholicism within the framework of Victorian social ideologies. It is not a book about religion and although such works as Marianne Thormahlen, The Brontës and Religion (1999) have been consulted they have not been engaged with as they are not relevant to my argument which revolves around the use of anti-Catholic imagery determined by the cultural context of the day. Anti-Catholicism, although part of the English cultural inheritance from the time of the Reformation, was especially prominent in the nineteenth century for historical reasons and much anti-Papist propaganda that was prevalent in the eighteenth century² re-emerged in a slightly different form at this time. In this book, publications are approached in terms of gender-relations, patriotism, strategies of power and control and how they emerge from the narratives of anti-Catholic, Victorian literature and the novels of Charlotte Brontë.

I am going to inquire why it is, that, in this intelligent nation and in this rational nineteenth century, we Catholics are so despised and hated by our own countrymen, with whom we have lived all our lives, that they are prompt to believe any story, however extravagant, that is told to our disadvantage; as if beyond a doubt, we were, every one of us, either brutishly deluded or preternaturally hypocritical, and they themselves, on the contrary, were in comparison of us absolute specimens of sagacity, wisdom, uprightness, manly virtue, and enlightened Christianity. I am not inquiring why they are not Catholics themselves, but why they are so angry with those who are.

Newman, Lectures, p. 1¹