Rescuing the Scarlet Woman: The Promotion of Catholicism in English Literature, 1829–1850

Abstract

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.