Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
- 2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
- 3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
- 4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect
- 5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque
- Epilogue
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
- 2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
- 3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
- 4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect
- 5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque
- Epilogue
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
What is this alien on British soil?
— R. W. Overbury, The JesuitsWhere is the Jesuit do you say? yea, where is he not? They multiply as maggots in May …
— R. J. M'Ghee, The Poor Gentleman of Liége‘Jesuitism on the brain’ is a phenomenon not unknown both in our political and religious world … [a] psychological condition in itself.
— John Tulloch, ‘The Order of Jesuits’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.’ After 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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature , pp. 28 - 76Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007