In 1880, a priest took the pulpit in St Francis Xavier's Roman Catholic church in Liverpool, looked carefully at the congregation, extended his hand theatrically, and proclaimed three times in a voice rising in sonority: ‘To hell with the Jesuits.’ Aft er a measured pause to ensure maximum impact on the startled parishioners, he continued in a voice of quiet resignation: ‘Such is the cry today.’ This sensational moment can still strike a modern reader, as it electrified Father Tom Burke's listeners, through its shocking juxtaposition of the sacrilegious and the familiar. Like so many nineteenth-century representations of Catholicism, this episode has an uncanny resonance; it disconcerts precisely because it relocates a pervasive social attitude in an unfamiliar space. For his audience, Burke's teasing performance dramatized Catholic identity in Victorian society at large. Whatever the law, adherents of the Church of Rome stood culturally apart, treated as marginal, alien and sinister. And to make this point, Burke drew on a cultural commonplace: the demonization of the Jesuit as the archetype of Catholic strangeness and wickedness.

This chapter explores the meanings associated with lurid portrayals of the Jesuit order – the Society of Jesus – in nineteenth-century elite and popular culture. In Victorian history writing, religious tracts and fiction, lurid representations of the Jesuit have a significance that exceeds denominational sensational invasions differentiation. They show the complex cultural politics at work in the religious discourse of the day. Throughout the nineteenth century, both polemical writing and popular narratives employ the treacherous Jesuit to examine the formation and meaning of nationhood and inscribe a distinctively British model of social conduct. However, when the stock Jesuit villain is read through the discourse of sensationalism discussed in the Introduction, the character emerges as a repository of conflicting feelings about the nation's collective self-image.