British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 by Michael Tomko

Abstract

Michael Tomko. British Romanticism and the Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xii+224. $80. past several years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars housed in English and literature departments in the relationship between religion, especially Judaism and Catholicism, and British national culture of the nineteenth century. Michael Ragussis's Figures of Conversion: Jewish Question and English National Identity (1995), Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), Mark Canuel's Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830 (2002), and Michael Wheeler's Old Enemies: and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006) have represented some of the most searching and influential of this happily growing field, offering not only readings of specific works, authors, or historical figures but also providing models and opening up critical space for further investigations. Michael Tomko's excellent British Romanticism and the Question is certainly a significant addition to that shelf, locating itself in the tradition of those earlier works, all of which it engages, and forging its own path. British Romanticism and the Question posits that the debates over the Catholic Question, in terms of national politics and in terms of individual relationships between groups of writers, shaped the worldview and the literature of the Romantic era to a much greater degree than we have generally supposed. Focusing on the five decades of alternating movements toward and away from the legislative granting of increased rights to subjects of Britain and Ireland culminating in the 1829 passage of Emancipation, the book traces the tropes of those debates in the parliamentary records, the articulations of historiographical principles, the personal correspondence and memoirs, and the literature of the age. Like most of the critics he addresses, Tomko is less interested in the construction of personal identity (let alone notions of deviance or abjection that have frequently grounded analyses of minority religious cultures) than in the way that Catholicism functioned as a political category; neither Freud nor Foucault appears in the extensive (and generally very well-chosen) bibliography, but Stephen Greenblatt does. This is a book that implicitly argues (rightly, I believe) that we need to start thinking about nineteenth-century religious experience not as a question of transgression but rather as one of the everyday. In his own words, Tomko offers an account of the cultural and literary history of the conflict over the Question in the Romantic period; of the ways in which it forced a disturbing, self-conscious re-examination of the foundations of British national identity at a contentious time of political upheaval in France and Ireland; and of its central role in how the viewed themselves and of how we now view the romantics (2). He points out that not only were some of the most canonical Romantics lined up explicitly on one side or the other on the question of Emancipation--Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge against it and Hazlitt, Hunt, Keats, Byron and Shelley (at least initially) for it--but that they communicated and argued with each other publicly and privately about it. While the specific issue of enfranchisement might seem narrow, Tomko argues that it influenced Romantic-era approaches to a wide expanse of political, historiographical, and ultimately literary questions: The 1820s debate was a cathection of issues ranging from nation-building, the formation of imperial identity, genre and literary politics, the narration of history, Irish-British relations, the limits of the public sphere, the abolition movement, women's rights, the campaign for parliamentary reform and the role of religion in public life (3). …