Catholic Question Research Articles

From the Editor’s Gable

From the Editor’s Gable

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dialogue with Felicia Hemans

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dialogue with Felicia Hemans Harriet Kramer Linkin (bio) Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asaph in Wales (1874–1877), where he not only completed the studies that resulted in his ordination but also began to write poetry again, after a silence that commenced in 1868, when he determined to dedicate himself to the priesthood.1 On the fourth day of his arrival at St Bueno's, he "passed Mrs. Hemans' house,"2 an event he recorded in his journal and mentioned the next day in a letter to his mother: "I walked to St. Asaph and passed the place where Mrs. Hemans lived and wrote and saw her monument in the Cathedral."3 Although Felicia Hemans was born in Liverpool (1793) and died in Dublin (1835), she passed most of her life in Wales (1800–1828). Akin to Hopkins, who wrote to his mother, "I have always looked on myself as half Welsh" (Correspondence, 1: 237), Hemans identified herself as a "naturalised Welshwoman."4 While critics like Catherine Brennan and Elizabeth Edwards rightly interrogate the nature of Hemans's nationalist enthusiasm for Wales, equivocally expressed in her Selection of Welsh Melodies and numerous lyrics situated in or about Wales,5 Jane Aaron notes that her contemporary Welsh audience hailed her as a "poet for Wales."6 Hopkins may not have read her poetry there, but he certainly knew it: in addition to the familiarity most schoolchildren had with "Casabianca," his mother owned four volumes of her poetry,7 she influenced the style of his father's poetry,8 and Hopkins notably categorized her as a member of the sentimental school of poetry in an 1881 letter to Richard Watson Dixon (Correspondence, 1: 505–506).9 Hopkins rarely referred to any female authors in his letters or journals, much less female poets, beyond his well-documented admiration for Christina Rossetti and his often-disparaging attention to Katherine Tynan.10 Indeed his position on masculinist power and poetic ability—that "masterly execution . . . is a kind of male gift and especially marks off men from women"11—made him an infamous target of feminist critique in the 1970s and 1980s.12 None of the extant Hopkins scholarship examines Hemans's poetry in relation to his,13 but, surprisingly, several of the eleven major poems Hopkins wrote at St. Bueno's invoke Hemans, beginning with the poem that broke his long silence. [End Page 325] In "The Wreck of the Deutschland," Hopkins's figuration of the tall nun who, like "a lioness arose breasting the babble, / A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told"14 clearly echoes Hemans's description of the avenging mother Maimuna in "The Indian City" (from Records of Woman), whose Muslim son is killed for bathing in a sacred Hindu pool: And what deep change, what work of power,Was wrought on her secret soul that hour?How rose the lonely one?—She roseLike a prophetess from dark repose! (ll. 121–124) As intriguingly, "The Wreck" also appears to engage in conversation with the conversion scenes in Hemans's "The Forest Sanctuary," the poem she considered "her best"15 and one that speaks to what she named in 1826 as "the great subject of national debate—the Catholic question."16 Fifty years later, that question continued to be a crucial one for Hopkins, as he too "lived and wrote" where Hemans composed "Casabianca," "The Forest Sanctuary," and "The Indian City," poems that provide hitherto-unexplored intertexts for "The Wreck." While this essay focuses on the ways those three poems intersect with "The Wreck," it also takes up additional affiliations that link Hopkins's "Spring" with Hemans's "Come Away!," his "In the Valley of the Elwy" with her "A Farewell to Wales," and his "The Windhover" with her "Joan of Arc." Both Hopkins and Hemans found Wales inspiring, composing poems about the Vale of Clwyd, St. Winefride's Well, and other local sites. Both coincidentally died in Dublin, after completing sonnets that conveyed their very different senses of spiritual ease at those points in their lives, Hopkins's "Terrible Sonnets" counterpointing Hemans...

Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions: The Catholic Question. By Willie Gin. New York: Routledge, 2017. 224p. $155.00 cloth.

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THE ANGLICAN-CATHOLIC RELATIONS IN THE ASSESSMENT OF POLITICAL PERSONALITIES OF THE UNITED KINGDOM IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE XIX CENTURY

The article addresses the issue of how leading leaders of the liberal and conservative British party assessed the problem of interaction between the Anglican and Catholic churches in the nineteenth century. The main emphasis is on the social and political results of the emancipation of in English society, in the representations of Protestant or skeptical politicians or thinkers. The problem of religion in England has been an important element of social and political life since the sixteenth century. One of the most pressing aspects of this issue was the problem of relations between the Anglican and Catholic churches. After the Reformation from above, the Anglican State Church became a unique phenomenon, which testified to the strong national trends in society. The Catholic question was not a common problem in English life, playing not only a purely dynastic or religious role, but also having political and geopolitical significance. The situation has changed dramatically since the beginning of the nineteenth century because of the act of unity with Ireland raised questions about the status of Irish in the UK government. Also, an opposition to the Anglican Church, such as Tractarianism or the Oxford movement, has developed in England as well. As the article states, that against the background of the general social tensions and economic crises that took place between 1815 and 1840, the government was forced to seek compromise. Among these compromises was the improvement of conditions for Catholics. In 1829, a parliamentary document called the Act on the Freedom of Catholics allowed to participate in elections and to be elected to Parliament and to confer on them other civil rights. From that moment on, the Irish were given the opportunity to take part in the political life of the United Kingdom, the action that politicized the question. In the article the classical conservative and liberal view of the problem is compared. The author states that the conservatives and liberals had a similar attitude to the development of Anglicanism and the growing role of Catholicism. The problems of the internal reform of Anglicanism, foreign influence, the destruction of traditions and the institutionalization of the Catholic Church created a significant problem, to which public thought responded fervently and actively. The author emphasizes that, in contrast, Anglicanism was perceived as a national cultural heritage uniting the British people.

Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions: The Catholic Question. By Willie Gin. New York: Routledge, 2017. vi+223pp. $149.95 cloth

Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions: The Catholic Question. By Willie Gin. New York: Routledge, 2017. vi+223pp. $149.95 cloth

John Chetwode Eustace, Radical Catholicism, and the Travel Guidebook: The Classical Tour (1813) and Its Legacy

John Chetwode Eustace, Radical Catholicism, and the Travel Guidebook: The Classical Tour (1813) and Its Legacy Alexandra Milsom (bio) Halfway through Charles dickens’s little dorrit, which was serialized between 1855 and 1857, there is a striking reference to “Mr. Eustace”: a writer, one would assume from the tone of this lengthy novel, whose reputation had been wholly discredited by midcentury. Immediately after Mr. Dorrit’s sudden accession to wealth and subsequent release from the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, his family embarks on a Grand Tour of the Continent. Mr. Dorrit has hired the well-named Mrs. General both to guide his family through the Continent in an aristocratic fashion and train his daughters Fanny and Amy (“Little”) Dorrit in the manners and habits of the prosperous classes to which they now belong. Mrs. General, in turn, looks to “Mr. Eustace” for information about the most significant tourist sites. According to the novel, she is representative of all tourists in her devotion to “Mr. Eustace”: “The whole body of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr. Eustace and his attendants, to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that sacred priesthood.”1 On this view, Dickens’s narrator suggests that “Mr. Eustace” is an authority whose words sanctify the ways in which Mrs. General directs the Dorrit family to think about the art and architecture that they witness abroad. The religious imagery of Dickens’s grotesque metaphor does not solely criticize the slavish devotion of uneducated tourists to their priestly guide. [End Page 219] John Chetwode Eustace (1762–1815), depicted in Little Dorrit as a cultish idol, was in fact an Irish priest who championed the cause of Catholic Emancipation. His most famous volume—usually called the Classical Tour (1813)—was reprinted many times through the first half of the century and, in its prescriptive route and didactic tidbits of cultural and historical information, one can recognize the origins of the modern tourist guidebook.2 Dickens’s modern reader, however, needs at least one extensive footnote to appreciate the political, and even anti-Catholic, implication of criticizing Eustace’s widely circulated volume. Embedded alongside its information about sites along the Grand Tour, Eustace’s Classical Tour presented a radical and extensive case for tolerance of Roman Catholics in Britain during a time of particularly heightened debate on the issue. Michael Tomko’s important study on the influence of Catholic politics upon British Romanticism reminds us that the so-called “Catholic question” “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 it played a “central role in how the romantics viewed themselves and of how we now view the romantics.”3 Although the title of Eustace’s book promises its reader information about a “Classical Tour”—referencing the traditional route that would be the capstone of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s Oxbridge education—the book’s detailed guidance of the Roman Catholic sites of Northern and Southern Italy recentered the tour upon the cultural practices of Italy’s contemporary inhabitants in the midst of this important era of religious self-scrutiny.4 In partial consequence of Eustace’s volume and the timing of its publication in the years that saw the birth of mass-tourism, the Victorian traveler’s voyage to Italy became a tour of the artwork and architecture of the medieval and Renaissance periods. All British guidebooks would follow Eustace’s lead in explaining the treasures of Roman Catholic Italy to a largely Protestant readership. [End Page 220] Dickens’s novel alerts us to the historical context that brought about this marked shift in British Continental tourism from classical to Catholic sites. Little Dorrit was published in the 1850s, but its action noticeably takes place in the 1820s (“[t]hirty years ago” are its opening words).5 During this particular decade, tourists from Britain were able to travel abroad for the first time in a whole generation, though not without considerable risk.6 Eustace’s original title points (misleadingly) to the book’s classical...

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Review by Mary Ann Rooks

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Review by Mary Ann Rooks

A turbulent year: Lord Anglesey’s first viceroyalty and the politics of Catholic emancipation, 1828

The first viceroyalty of Henry Paget, marquess of Anglesey (1768–1854), lasted for less than a year (February 1828–January 1829), but it was a pivotal point in Anglo-Irish politics as the campaign for Catholic emancipation approached its climax. Throughout 1828, the prime minister, the duke of Wellington, at whose side Anglesey had fought at Waterloo, was faced with the increasing necessity to solve the Catholic question and to persuade George IV, who was implacably opposed, of the exigency of the measure.While there has been much in-depth analysis of the period, particularly from the perspectives of Daniel O’Connell, Wellington, and Robert Peel, the home secretary, there has been little exploration of the way in which Anglesey, the lord lieutenant, handled the volatile situation in Ireland, particularly following the Clare by-election and the tumultuous phase that preceded the granting of emancipation in February 1829. Nor has he been credited with the part he played in progressing the cause of Catholic emancipation. Inexperienced in political manoeuvring, and feeling ignored by his London counterparts, Anglesey soon lost the confidence of Wellington, and like his predecessor, William Wentworth, 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, he was ultimately recalled.In this article, Anglesey’s viceroyalty during the period leading up to the granting of Catholic emancipation is explored using correspondence between himself, Wellington and Peel. It is argued that while his intentions towards Ireland were honourable, his tactics were sometimes faulty, which resulted in misunderstandings, resentment and frustration on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The Catholic Question, Print Media, and John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier (1783)

John O’Keeffe’s play The Poor Soldier (1783) should be read against the backdrop of Irish Catholic loyalist productions in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period when Irish Catholic leaders began organizing to press for greater political, religious, and economic rights. To recover this political subtext, this article reconstructs a media landscape that encompasses Irish, as well as English print productions, street performances, and military displays. I focus attention, in particular, on the debate in the press and print media during the period of the American Revolutionary War when the British army began accepting Irish Catholic recruits. O’Keeffe intervened in this debate through his dramatic representation of Patrick, the poor soldier; this Irish Catholic war veteran’s story is this playwright’s attempt to answer the character question behind the broader Catholic question.

Medievalism in The Excursion

Wordsworth's comparison of Excursion to AntiChapel of a gothic sets up an implicit contrast between contemporary Anglican values in 1814, and medieval, Catholic, or pre-Reformation past. He continues analogy by explaining that his minor Pieces. . .when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by Reader to have such connection with main Work as may give them claim to be likened to little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses, ordinarily included in those Edifices (1814 viii-ix; Cornell ed. 38) (1) His ideal or attentive readers included Bishop of London and Anglican clergy whose high commendations he cited in a letter to his brother Christopher (MY II 171). These readers would have noted Catholic allusions: Cells and Oratories were part of Catholic churches where monks and nuns had prayed for others' souls while for Anglicans, an oratory was simply a domestic chapel. Similarly, a Recluse would have been a celibate member of an enclosed monastic order. In a poem that was to help reclaim and renovate war-weary world of 1814, Wordsworth's simile reveals contradictions between Catholic or pre-Reformation past and contemporary Anglican culture as a source of ethical value. Medievalism was only defined as a style and state of mind in Victorian period, when Ruskin divided Western history into a trinity of ages that represented not only historical moments but also cultural perspectives, namely, classicism, medievalism, and modernism (Ruskin 153): indeed, when Wordsworth wrote Excursion word medieval was yet to enter English language. (2) Examples of medievalism nevertheless appear as soon as thinkers and artists detected difference and distance between themselves and Middle Ages. Medievalism is adoption of style and / or values of Middle Ages, usually prompted by a need to find a critical distance from present. Unlike Antiquarianism, where pastness is primary source of value, medievalism looks for value by contrasting style, ethics, and society of past with present. For Wordsworth and many of his contemporaries, problem with Middle Ages was domination of Roman Catholic Church. Histories of England, even David Hume's version which is largely unsympathetic towards religion, claimed that, after Norman Conquest, William I depressed English identity (I 248), allowing his archbishop Lanfranc to promote the interests of papacy (I 226). Yet perhaps values could still be found in Middle Ages, and each of four speakers in Excursion represents a slightly different interpretation of such values. Wanderer is associated with minstrel tradition, while Solitary's retreat from world connects him with recluse or Hermit. Pastor creates a more chivalric view of Middle Ages, especially his narrative of Sir Alfred Irthing. Finally, Poet's medievalism is less distinct, but he is attracted to ideas of tradition and nationhood. In combination, these perspectives contribute to a uniquely Wordsworthian, Reformed medievalism. full expression of Wordsworth's medievalism is Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), a sonnet sequence on history of English Church begun around December, 1820, after a walk with Sir George Beaumont through different parts of his Estate, with a view to fix upon Site of a New Church which he intended to erect (Jackson 137). The Catholic Question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in same course; and it struck me, that certain points in Ecclesiastical History of our Country might advantageously be presented to view in Verse (Jackson 135). Wordsworth's sonnets and his notes to Ecclesiastical Sketches reveal a new, or rather re-formed, narrative about history of English Church, which Robert Southey was also developing in Book of Church (1824). …

The Long Rupture, 1870–1970: the Darker Side of Franco-Irish Relations

Traditional and historic relations between France and Ireland have been the object of numerous fine studies at historic, cultural, and literary levels. They have also been much celebrated. However, the darker side of Franco-Irish relations has received far less attention. The present article aims to act as a corrective and shows that between 1870 and 1970, relations between the two countries were rather distant, strained on occasion even, and that much depended on the political and strategic evolution in Europe and as well on the Catholic question. The scope of the article ranges from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 until Ireland's negotiations to enter the European Communities (EC) in 1970.

The Standing of New Subjects: Grenada and the Protestant Constitution after the Treaty of Paris (1763)

In November 1767, Jean-Baptiste Domonchy, a French Catholic on the British island of Grenada, sparked an imperial crisis when he attempted to stand for election to the island's assembly. The incorporation of French Catholic subjects into the British Empire after the Treaty of Paris (1763) posed major challenges to prevailing notions of the empire and constitution. At a time when many Britons understood the Protestant faith to be fundamental to the stability of the British state and empire, the large populations of Catholics in the new territories necessitated a reappraisal of exclusionist policies. In demanding, and ultimately gaining, the right to hold office in Grenada's political and legal bodies, the crown's new Catholic subjects generated a crisis that played a crucial role in the formulation of a new model of empire. Utilising the print debate surrounding the decision to allow Catholic subjects to hold public office in Grenada, this article examines contemporary attitudes to toleration within an imperial context and defines the wider implications of the crisis. Whatever their view, contemporaries agreed that Grenada stood at the centre of a broader imperial and constitutional debate. In an increasingly heterogeneous empire where the formation of loyal and stable colonies was a fundamental goal of the British state, the case for a more flexible ideal of empire and the constitution gained traction in the dispute over Grenada. The centrality of the Catholic question to the foundations of the British state makes Grenada a critical test case in the contemporary debates over the nature of the British Empire after 1763.

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

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. …

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

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.

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. xi + 224, £52.50, ISBN: 978-0-230-27951-3.

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. xi + 224, £52.50, ISBN: 978-0-230-27951-3. - Volume 31 Issue 1

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity 1778–1829 by Michael Tomko, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2011, pp. vii + 224, £50

New BlackfriarsVolume 93, Issue 1043 p. 125-126 Reviews BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE CATHOLIC QUESTION: RELIGION, HISTORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 1778–1829 by Michael Tomko ZOE LEHMANN IMFELD, ZOE LEHMANN IMFELDSearch for more papers by this author ZOE LEHMANN IMFELD, ZOE LEHMANN IMFELDSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 December 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01462_6.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume93, Issue1043January 2012Pages 125-126 RelatedInformation

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

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). …

'The Church and its Spire': John McGahern and the Catholic Question (review)

'The Church and its Spire': John McGahern and the Catholic Question (review)

A political history of the House of Lords, 1811-1846: from the Regency to Corn Law repeal

Contents Introduction 1. A King, a Prince, and Civil and Religious Liberty 2. The Regency Crisis 3. The Catholic Question 4. The Ways Begin to Part 5. The Parting of the Ways 6. Peterloo and Queen Caroline 7.Efforts at Emancipation, 1819-1825 8. Questionable Theories and Practical Politics in the 1820s 9. Lansdowne and Canning 10. The Constitutional Revolution Begins, 1828-1829 11. Reform 12. Resurgence 13. Cooperation and Confrontation 14. The Municipal Corporations Act 15. Irish Questions 16. Discontented Conservatives 17. The Jamaican Constitution and the Education Controversy 18. Wellington, Peel, and the Triumph of the Conservatives 19. A New Corn Law and Lord Ashley's Mines Bill 20. Religious Conflicts Begin, 1843 21. The Dissenters Chapels Act, the Factory Act, and the Welsh Bishops Bill 22. The Maynooth Grant, 1845 23. Corn Law Repeal, 1845-46 Conclusion Abbreviations in notes Notes Index

Superstition, the National Imaginary, and Religious Politics in Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sketches"

Enthusiasm, individualistic energy derived from radical Protestantism, has become a central critical category for reconsidering what Robert Ryan has termed romantic religious politics, or way that Romantic theological diction enacted a creative and effective engagement contemporary religious crisis with far-reaching consequences political order (5). Jon Mee reads Wordsworth as harnessing power of enthusiasm to vitalize his prophetic and poetic vision while also regulating against what he viewed as its religious and political excesses (214-56). Yet enthusiasm only represented part of British post-reformation religious identity, which organized itself around Anglican ideal of via media, or middle way between dangerous extremes of radical enthusiasm and superstition. For instance, David Hume's 1741 essay On Superstition and Enthusiasm denounces way a superstitious imagination engenders threats from lifeless things and then seeks relief ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices (4). While Hume saw little redeeming this primitive and papal power, superstition often remained seductive, especially amid enthusiastic revolutionary upheavals. In American context, architectural historian John Davis has traced development of what he labels Catholic envy, a guilty facination with a Other's mysterious, embodied, communal aesthetic. A similar ambivalence over superstition structures Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), which expresses both Wordsworth's anxiety over social threat of Emancipation and his attraction to remains of Britain's past. Begun 1820 and published 1822, Ecclesiastical Sketches addresses Question through a historical narrative about church property and national landscape. During these years, Wordsworth worried about rumors newspapers about the Ministers giving up Question--to conciliate new Friends (MY 2: 566), saw Roman concession as one of three great domestic questions along with liberty of press and Parliamentary reform (LY 1: 97), and feared that British Catholics were striving in co-operation with other Dissenters and Infidels to overthrow Protestant Establishment (LY 1: 58). In prefatory advertisement, Wordsworth claims that sonnet series derived from a December 1820 walk to view site for a new church being built by Wordsworth's patron Lord Lowther, a vehement parliamentary opponent of Emancipation. The sonnets were to be a private memorial of their feelings that were in harmony with cherishing influences of scene that led them to look back upon past events with wonder and gratitude, and on future with hope (137). Wordsworth contrasts this image of equipoise with unsettling influence of Catholic Question, which was agitated Parliament about that time (137). Regina Hewitt notes that this connection is not straightforward, that sonnets praising Catholicism outnumber attacks. This ambiguity, however, should lead one to ask how, rather than if, Ecclesiastical Sketches, is engaged with Question. Wordsworth's ostensibly positive approach to Catholicism attempted to bring British imagined community back to political, aesthetic, and spiritual middle way of 1688 Glorious Revolution. By rearticulating a threatened sense of national identity while signaling dangers of allowing Catholics back into British civil society, Ecclesiastical Sketches intervenes very issues of national and religious history that Wordsworth saw as political and social stakes of Question. A focus on events treated individual sonnets gives impression that Ecclesiastical Sketches is a mere chronology, a history textbook. Yet, this interpretation obscures strong presence of what Hayden White called deep structure of emplotment historiographies of nineteenth-century Europe (2, 7). …