Book Review: The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain's Roman Catholic Revival

Abstract

By Michael E. Schiefelbein. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-86554-720-3. Pp. 202. $39.95. It is hot a secret that fear and loathing of Roman Catholic Church (the whore of Babylon) was an integral part of cultural landscape of nineteenth-century England. The enduring hatred for began in reigns of Edward and Elizabeth. Instead of working itself out over time, fear and loathing grew in intensity, reaching a high point in nineteenth century. The Emancipation Act of 1829 was a mockery of meaning of term. Popular sentiment strongly opposed it, fostered in large part by increase of Irish immigration--`how near to savages Popish Irish are' (4). The formal restoration of Catholic hierarchy in 1850 unleashed kind of fury and passion among both educated and uneducated that one finds today in Ireland, dismembered Yugoslavia, and Jewish/Arab guerre a outrance. At least six formal societies were dedicated to making public what they took to be terrible faults of Papists and their church. As its presence grew, attacks upon it became more bitter. The number of novels concerned with alleged evils of Roman increased enormously. There were so many about Jesuits alone that a new subgenre came into being--the anti-Jesuit novel, some of the most angry novels written (8). Michael E. Schiefelbein's book explores anti-Catholic sentiments in some major and minor novelists of nineteenth century in Britain: Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley, Frances Trollope, and Charles Kingsley. The topic has been studied, of course, by many scholars--D. J. Paz, Frank H. Wallis, Edmund R. Norman, Alan D. Gilbert, Walter E Houghton, and others. Schiefelbein's book makes a contribution by examining what he calls a conflicted response in novels under discussion. He finds evidence for asserting that novelists were mixed in their attitudes toward Catholicism, being attracted to a person like Dante, a place like Florence, a kind bishop, some great paintings, natural theology, and so on. It is upon this point that his argument is feeble. For example, Scott's attraction to Catholic hymns is supposed to balance such anti-Catholic remarks as `I hold Popery to be such a mean and depriving superstition that I am not clear I could have round myself liberal enough for voting repeal of [anti-Catholic laws] as they existed before 1780' (15). His son-in-law opined that no one disapproved more of Romanism than Sir Walter. This was a problem for Scott because he had to confront every time he used Middle Ages as his setting. How did he solve this problem? In his fictional narratives he used secrecy, superstition, and sensuous pleasures in a way not offensive to his Protestant conscience while directly condemning and Catholic practices in commentary. Mary Shelley rejected Christianity tout a fait, especially Catholicism. Italy would have been a kind of paradise if power[-]hungry popes did not force peasants to bow their heads to them instead of to God. The Catholic hierarchy dehumanized faithful and their faith in reason, condemning them to unenlightened thought. The peasants were superstitious and clergy cruel and corrupt (58). Her novel Valperga is set in her beloved medieval Italy where her perfectly decent characters survive abuses imposed on them. There is even a kindly bishop in novel who tries to cure Beatrice's spiritual distress caused by her too-active imagination. Euthenasia, true heroine of novel, achieves piety and nobility characteristic of the harmonization of faith and reason (66). Shelley seems to have believed in a god or god-figure throughout her life, a god of light and beauty that Schiefelbein thinks she inherited from a combination of her father and Dante, latter's Paradiso being the sublimest achievement of Catholicism (82). …