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
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Notes
John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Recent Position of Catholics in England Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory (London: Burns and Lambert, 1851), p. 1.
D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 51.
Statistics taken from: Derek Holmes More Roman than Rome and Gloria McAdam, My Dear Sister: An Analysis of Nineteenth-century Documents Concerning the Founding of a Women’s Religious Congregation (Bradford: University of Bradford, PhD Thesis, 1994).
Robert Klaus, The Pope the Protestants and the Irish (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 281.
Dawson Massy, Dark Deeds of the Papacy Contrasted with the Bright Lights of the Gospel, also the Jesuits Unmasked and Popery Unchangeable (London: Seeleys, 1851), p. 155.
Henry Drummond MP, To the People of England on The Invasion (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1859).
For example, Ambrosio in M.G. Lewis, The Monk, 1786.
D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 61.
Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, Convents or Nunneries. A Lecture in Reply to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Seeleys, 1852), pp. 14, 24.
Catherine Sinclair, Modern Superstition (London: Simpkin and Marshall & Co., 1847), pp. 4–5.
Lisa Wang, Uses of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters (London: Birkbeck College, PhD Thesis, 1998), pp. 17,146.
Rosemary Clark Beattie, ‘Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and the Structure of Villette’, ELH 5 (1986): p. 821.
S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 414.
Robert Bernard Martin, The Accents of Persuasion: Charlotte Brontë’s Novels (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 148.
Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background, Romance and Reality (Basingstoke Hants: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. 49–55.
Irene Taylor, Holy Ghosts the Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 246–7.
Patricia Duncker, Writing on the Wall (London: Pandora Press, 2002), p. 34.
Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë. A Passionate Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 226.
Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë, the Self Conceived (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976), p. 218.
For fuller comment on the love between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emmanuel, see Robert Colby, ‘Villette and the Life of the Mind’, in Fiction With a Purpose (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 417.
Annette Schreiber, ‘The Myth in Charlotte Brontë’ [sic] Literature and Psychology xvii (1968): p. 66.
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© 2005 Diana Peschier
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Peschier, D. (2005). Introduction. In: Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505025_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505025_1
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