Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. Stuart Andrews.British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Michael Tomko.

Abstract

Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvii + 250 $85.00 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xii + 224 $84.00 Catholic was a persistent and usually passionate debate about relieving Roman Catholics of civil disabilities that had been imposed on them by Penal Laws of 17th century, a debate that intensified between anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and Catholic Emancipation act of 1829--the years of Romantic period in literature. The public policy issue was complicated by deep-rooted prejudice against Romish superstition with a history going back to Mary Tudor's persecution of Protestants and series of popish plots, real or imagined, that followed. A more serious complication was problem of Ireland. Following rebellions of 1798, an Act of Union dissolved Dublin parliament, raising question of how five million Irish Catholics could be admitted to full participation in political life of a united kingdom. The dispute thus involved a legal and cultural struggle over religious difference, historical grievances, and very definition of Britishness. Michael Tomko's British Romanticism and Catholic Question and Stuart Andrews' Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion, two books under consideration, make case that Catholic Question played a more central role in culture of Romantic period than previous literary historians have noticed. Tomko addresses impact of controversy on imaginative literature while Andrews provides a vivid clarification of issues at heart of conflict and passions that drove one writer's lifelong obsession with threat he thought Roman Catholicism posed to Britain's survival as a Protestant nation. After he became Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey wrote little verse, devoting his creative energies to historical and argumentative prose. He was a conscientious and energetic historian, as his biographies of Wesley and Nelson still demonstrate, but prose that Andrews examines here mainly concerned dispute on Catholic Question, in which he was a committed partisan. In a series of books, articles, and reviews, debate became primary concern of his life as an author. He engaged in acrimonious public quarrels with two able and prominent defenders of Catholic rights, John Milner and Charles Butler. In his Book of (1824) Southey's admiration of of England necessitated invidious comparisons with the errors, corruptions and crimes of pernicious Romish Church (as he almost always called it). Milner's Strictures on Poet Laureate's Book of (1824), responded in kind to what he thought was a tissue of vituperation and fanaticism, whose author raves through history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating common source of Christianity, in order to court heads of present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it (121). Butler's Book of Roman Catholic (1825) similarly argued that Southey's book was calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord (119). Southey responded to his critics in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), with still more rancorous attacks on idolatrous and superstitious of Rome, and in a later publication wrote, Throughout papal Christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates understanding (184). In various writings he ridiculed transubstantiation, indulgences, belief in purgatory, veneration of Mary and saints, and authority of Pope. He thought that auricular confession by absolving sin encouraged more of it; he found priestly celibacy repugnant; and he entertained gothic visions of innocent girls being shut up convents, forced to practice idolatry, denied meat on Fridays, and encouraged to indulge in self-flagellation. …