Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature

Conservatism, Liberalism, and the Emergence of Secular Culture

Devon Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317061809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians' handling of the saints and the saints' lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.

Chapter 1
Foreign Saints

Mother of Arts! as once of arms; thy hand

Was then our guardian, and is still our guide;

Parent of our Religion! whom the wide

Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven!1

Renewed opportunities for travel to Italy in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars brought English travelers face to face with continental Roman Catholicism, with its saints, its perceived superstitions, and its foreignness.2 Even as they experienced Roman Catholicism as something quite different and un-English, travelers acknowledged, however grudgingly, a connection between that Catholicism and their own sense of English identity. Like Byron in the epigraph above, they were forced to confront Catholicism both as foreign and as an integral part of their own past. English travelers, like their American counterparts, displayed in their writing a sense of confident superiority in their Protestant identity; at the same time, what Jenny Franchot calls the “overwhelming force of the visual encounter with classical and papal Rome” called into question that superiority.3 A significant component of that visual encounter was the vast storehouse of Roman Catholic saints represented in the visual arts. In many respects, the encounter with foreign saints in Italy captured in microcosm the English experience of Italy as a deeply contradictory place that needed to be framed, bracketed, and produced in a way that facilitated the easy absorption into English identity of all that was palatable about Italy while still keeping at bay what seemed threatening.

Both in specifically religious terms and at a broader level, travel to Italy was fraught with contradictions. Ostensibly, travelers undertook the journey to Italy with an acquisitive purpose—to gain that which was “valuably different.”4 While travelers did expend some energy absorbing contemporary Italian culture, they spent a far greater amount of their time acquiring memories of a cultural past that they wished to claim as their own. Whether they focused their attention on ancient Rome or on the Italian Renaissance, the primary way of tapping into the past, of which they saw England as the logical extension, was through the material object. Paintings, architecture, ruins—all could serve as mnemonic objects that made present a past of which the traveler had no direct sensory experience; furthermore, these objects allowed travelers to claim as their own memories that fell outside the realm of English experience.

In this respect, travel to Italy follows a similar pattern to the one that Nigel Leask identifies in travel to non-European locations. Drawing from the work of Bruno Latour, Leask argues that for the English to be familiar with a distant culture depended on the traveler’s ability to render experiences “mobile, stable (so that they can be moved back and forth without decay or distortion resulting from decontextualization), and combinable … [Material] objects such as rocks, birds, plants, and artefacts can be directly extracted from their contexts, preserved (stabilized), dispatched (mobilized), and combined in European museums, libraries, and universities.”5 The late Romantic and early Victorian traveler frequently presented travel to Italy in similar terms, hoping to use the written narrative itself as the vehicle for that mobilization. Marguerite Blessington, for instance, makes the acquisition of Italian artifacts the primary purpose of travel; she travels with the goal of “viewing other countries, and the treasures they contain, with the pleasant vista in prospective of returning to one’s native land with a memory stored with agreeable images and recollections.”6 Here Blessington suggests that it is the traveler herself who carries home the experience of Italy, yet the fact that her claim appears in a written travelogue suggests the power of the written text to translate that experience for public consumption.

Working at odds with this acquisitive impulse, however, was the traveler’s need to distance himself or herself from aspects of Italian culture and history that might be deemed unpalatable or dangerous by the English reading public. Chief among these dangers was Roman Catholicism. Long the bugbear of English Protestants, Roman Catholicism achieved an elevated status as a threat to English identity as a result of the rising awareness of the political necessity of granting civil rights to Roman Catholics in England that culminated in 1829 with the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill. The intense anti-Catholicism of many travel narratives reflects the fear that pervaded segments of the English population in the 1820s and 1830s—a fear that Roman Catholicism threatened a carefully constructed narrative of England as a rational, Protestant nation. As their contemporaries debated the Catholic question at home in the periodicals and in Parliament, travelers to Italy used the travel narratives that recorded their own direct experience of Roman Catholicism to add their voices to the conversation. William Rae Wilson, for instance, whose Records of a Route through France and Italy; with Sketches of Catholicism appeared six years after the passage of the Emancipation Act, opens his volume with these words:

If the concessions [the Roman Catholic Church] has obtained, produce no gratitude, further concessions will only stimulate it to open hostility. It is enough to have the company of a muzzled hyaena; remove that muzzle,—it is already almost gnawed through,—and the consequences may easily be predicted.7

Wilson sees his travel volume as part of an ongoing conversation about the rights of Roman Catholics in England. The virulent anti-Catholicism of his book reflects his hope that what he perceives as the devastating effects of Catholic Emancipation might still be reined in. Thus, in direct response to political questions being debated at home, Wilson works to distance himself from the Catholicism that he encountered in Italy. Although not all narratives deal this openly with the politics of Catholic Emancipation, the subject nevertheless runs as a subtext through numerous volumes produced in the late Romantic and early Victorian periods.8

Italy, then, was at once thrilling and chilling, and the memories and experiences acquired there could, as Franchot notes, be used to “offset the losses resulting from the disruptive forces … back home.”9 The metaphor that Byron uses in the epigraph to this chapter, when separated from its context as a call for Europe to rise up and liberate Italy, suggests why this was so. Byron figures Italy as England’s mother. As Italy’s child, England was due an inheritance, and the English accordingly sought out the cultural artifacts that awaited them in Italy. At the same time, as Italy’s child, England bore a genetic imprint. In some respects, the English embraced this sense that they were Italy’s progeny. As we will see, especially in terms of cultural achievement it was convenient to see England as the logical development of what Italy had begun. In other respects, especially in terms of religion, to be Italy’s child terrified the English, for it called into question a carefully constructed narrative of Protestantism as a radical break from Roman Catholicism that had structured English identity for three hundred years. Especially in this sense, the English traveler’s journey to Italy became an encounter abroad with the forces that, depending on one’s perspective, either threatened an easy belief in English Protestant thought or ushered in a new era of liberalism that sanctioned multiple ways of believing. Most travelers held the former position. While there were certainly some who embraced Roman Catholicism as a viable way of believing in the 1830s and 1840s, far more used the travel narrative to defuse what they perceived as a threat to a coherent English identity, and like many of their contemporaries, they sought to show that Catholicism was, as Maria LaMonaca has put it, “dangerously foreign and un-English.”10

While a few writers like William Rae Wilson openly acknowledged that they wrote in response to political events in England, many more approached questions like Catholic Emancipation indirectly.11 Perhaps even more so than their non-traveling contemporaries, travelers focused their attention on the saints as a distinctive feature of Roman Catholicism that helped them to articulate differences that conserved a narrative of English Protestantism. This was inevitable. The Renaissance art that travelers hoped to acquire in Italy featured the saints prominently. Churches that they visited bore the names of the saints. Popular culture in Italy made the saints a significant part of celebrations and holidays. Everywhere travelers went, they found themselves immersed in a land that they perceived as being filled with “superstition,” a catch-all word that included what they believed was saint worship, Mariolatry, and even worship of the Pope.

Accounts of travelers’ encounters with Roman Catholic “superstition” are ubiquitous. They surface in the most popular narratives of the time, those like Blessington’s, Lady Morgan’s, and Joseph Forsyth’s, that went through numerous editions and that were standard fare both for travelers and for those hoping to experience Italy vicariously through the written text. Such accounts also feature prominently in travel narratives by writers like Selina Martin, William Rae Wilson, and Catharine Taylor—volumes printed only in single editions that never achieved a wide readership. My purpose in this chapter is to show that anxieties over the Roman Catholic saints were pervasive in travel writing about Italy during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods, that these anxieties were expressed in consistent ways that quickly became a part of the genre’s conventions, and that these conventions reflect a way of thinking about sainthood and Catholicism that extends into other areas of Victorian culture. Accordingly, this chapter covers those writers who were widely acknowledged as significant at the time, while supplementing those accounts with lesser-known travel writers whose works illustrate similar ideas and principles but who often express those ideas in particularly evocative ways. Finally, especially in its closing pages, this chapter considers two writers—Anna Brownell Jameson and John Henry Newman—who are not immediately thought of as “travel writers” but whose work nevertheless illustrates how thought processes developed in travel writing spill over into other areas of discourse in sometimes unexpected ways.

Entrance into Italy, whether by way of the Mediterranean or the overland passage through the Alps, signified the beginning of a confrontation on foreign soil with the Roman Catholic saints that in their material form as art objects seemed a rightful inheritance to the English traveler, but that as a prominent part of Roman Catholic thought seemed to threaten the conditions of belief that structured a narrative of England as a Protestant nation.12 Catharine Taylor, a traveler to Italy in the late 1830s, makes this point clearly in her Letters from Italy to a Younger Sister. Her party descends the Alps into Italy on November 1. In the entry for that day, Taylor writes:

Here we are sitting with open windows, and without a fire, on the first of November. It is All Saints’ Day, the streets are alive with people dressed in their gayest attire, the houses are hung with flowers, and the churches strewn with evergreens. All speaks of Italy and Catholicism.13

Taylor’s description here seems innocent enough until we consider the express purpose of her book. In the preface, she writes that she composes letters to her younger sister with the goal of “lamenting and deprecating the errors and superstitions … of the Roman Catholic Church.”14 Thus like so many other travelers, Taylor demonstrates a mixed response to the destination to which she has traveled. In the text itself, the celebration of the saints is part of the picturesque quality of the village, and it is exposure to this sort of scene that is the object of her travel. These same celebrations, however, form part of the “errors and superstitions” that made Roman Catholicism seem both foreign and dangerous. In this respect, her account illustrates how travel narratives of the first half of the century, because they confront the saints directly on foreign soil, provide a particularly powerful register both of the cultural anxieties surrounding Roman Catholicism as an alternate way of believing and of the ways that narrative could be used to defuse that threat.15

Defining Travel

The sense that Italy was simultaneously a place to be feared and a site of England’s origins highlights one of the difficulties that travelers faced: the question of how the journey to Italy could be shaped into a meaningful travel experience. Contemporary theorists prove helpful in defining travel in ways that shed light on the nineteenth-century experience. Travel, by any account, requires motion. Yet movement from one geographic location to another does not necessarily rise to the level of travel. Moreover, despite perhaps an intuitive sense that travel involves significant distance, recent critical accounts suggest that distance really has very little to do with whether any given journey constitutes travel. Michael Cronin’s analysis of Rosita Boland’s Sea Legs illustrates the difficulty of defining travel purely in terms of quantifiable movement. In Sea Legs, Boland recalls her encounter with an elderly woman on Sherkin Island off the coast of Ireland who claims that she has not traveled past the local church in years. Cronin observes that this elderly woman’s comment “uncovers the infinite possibility of travel in the finite space of an island.”16 His analysis make...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Foreign Saints
• 2 Catholic Saints
• 3 Protestant Saints
• 4 Civic Saints
• Conclusion: Wellington
• Bibliography
• Index