Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, by Teresa Huffman Traver

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel by Teresa Huffman Traver J. Russell Perkin (bio) Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, by Teresa Huffman Traver; pp. viii + 133. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $59.99, $44.99 ebook. In Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, an excellent monograph in the Palgrave Pivot series, Teresa Huffman Traver discusses Catholicity, defined as an appeal to a religious universal "that could transcend not just denominational barriers, but also national ones." She argues that both Catholic and Protestant Victorian novelists "used Catholicity as a way of articulating a religious form of cosmopolitanism" (2). The literary analysis is organized with reference to three mid-Victorian religious contexts: post-1845 Tractarianism, the Papal Aggression crisis, and the rise of ritualism. Catholicity is considered in relation to domesticity and ideas of Englishness, and the result is a study that illuminates the authors on whom Traver focuses, while also generating insights that could be applied to many other texts. The range of reference in Traver's study is commendable, moving from canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) through novels that are mainly important in the history of Victorian religious controversy, such as John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain (1848) or Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (1864), and including some extremely obscure Tractarian, Catholic, and anti-Catholic novels. The length limit of the Palgrave Pivot series (25,000–50,000 words) means that Traver remains very tightly focused on the main argument, and I sometimes found myself wishing for more discussion of the relationship between Catholicity and other forms of Victorian cosmopolitanism. For example, the contrast in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) between the cosmopolitan and heartless Stanhope family, who spend most of their time on the Italian shores of lake Como, and the quintessentially English Septimus Harding is determined by a variety of factors, some of them religious, but others social and cultural. However, perhaps this just suggests that Traver has opened up a rich vein for further exploration. A topic arising in several chapters is the effect of religious conversion on romantic relationships, especially the difficulties involved in mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. This theme is first addressed in chapter 2 where, by reading Villette in the [End Page 349] context of Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), lady Georgiana Fullerton's Grantley Manor (1847), and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), Traver finds an effective new lens through which to discuss Brontë's novel. Two chapters focus on the ways in which domestic affection and the desire for a home can find themselves opposed to religious conviction, sometimes compelling the believer to seek a new home, perhaps as a member of a celibate religious community. In what is probably the strongest part of the book, Traver reads Elizabeth Shipton Harris's From Oxford to Rome (1847) and Newman's much better-known reply to it, Loss and Gain, alongside documentation of the long and complicated legal saga of Pierce and Cornelia Connelly, a married couple who converted to Roman Catholicism and consecrated themselves to religious life, after which the husband sought to reassert his conjugal rights, leading to a dispute over the competing jurisdictions of English law and Catholic canon law. The events of the Connelly case began in the mid-1830s and extended into the 1850s. In her discussion of Loss and Gain, Traver argues that Newman reverses the cause-and-effect relationship generally seen between conversion and celibacy, presenting the latter as a cause of conversion and portraying Roman Catholicism as a cosmopolitan religious ideal. Because of his canonization in 2019, interest in Newman as a thinker is strong, but Loss and Gain, which was once required reading for Victorian scholars, has dropped out of sight in literary studies. By means of an approach that is both carefully historicist and attentive to the novel's relationship to generic models, and especially to Harris's From Oxford to Rome, Traver indicates a way to reignite literary interest in Newman's neglected text. The question of the effect of conversion to Roman Catholicism on marriage...