British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. By Michael Tomko.

Abstract

Michael Tomko’s recent work offers a fresh perspective on British Romanticism by situating it in relation to an important, if overlooked, context: the anxieties concerning Catholic Emancipation. Following an introductory chapter that frames the debate over the Catholic Question, writings by Elizabeth Inchbald, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Walter Scott are examined in relation to the debate. What emerges from such considerations is a new and provocative account of the literature and culture of Romantic Britain. After a brief introduction, Tomko constructs a history of the key figures and crucial moments in the debate that led up to the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Bill. Representative of such moments is his reading of a passage from Wolf Tone’s An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, where the plight of Catholics is linked with that of slaves and Jews through an allusion to Shakespeare. Such braidings of the political, the religious, and the literary demonstrate the interdisciplinary scope of the study and show Tomko at his interpretive best. An instance of this can be seen in his quotation of a Tone allusion to the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth. Unpacking the passage, Tomko grafts the Shakespearean scene onto 1790s Ireland by observing that the reference ‘conjures up images of justified rebellion against the guilty tyranny of a mad king’, noting that such conjuring formed ‘hardly an innocent gesture in the reign of the afflicted George III’ (p. 25). Here, the yoking together of radical politics with conservative religion and canonical literature reveals the imaginative strains involved in broaching the subject. To his credit, however, Tomko moves easily from one discipline to another, creating a dynamic context within which each figure struggles to resolve competing interests. Such struggles can be observed later in the chapter, when Byron’s attitude to the Catholic Question is considered. While for conservatives, Catholicism simply could not be folded into the national character, for reformers like Byron the issue highlighted a troubling paradox. Supportive in Parliament, yet dismissive in his poetry, Byron’s ambivalence over Catholic Emancipation is indicative of the larger frustrations suffered by liberals. While on the one hand, removing the impediments to Catholics marked an important step in a larger liberal reform program aimed at relieving oppression, on the other hand, relaxing control over the members of a church that was understood to be the source of historical oppression seemed to undermine the entire enterprise of reform. As Tomko demonstrates, this dilemma and the various responses to it would continue to trouble early 19th-century Britain, haunting politicians and writers alike.