Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T08:20:06.791Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Magnifying Martyrdom: Annie Bonus's Beatrice and the Victorian Vision of the Early Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Extract

Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus in September 1846, died at a young enough age to qualify for one of the most lovingly detailed of all nineteenth-century biographies. It appeared in January 1896, within eight years of her death. Its author, Edward Maitland, was in fact a prolific writer in several fields; but he never came closer than here to having an ideal subject to set before his Victorian readers. For not only had the culture of the nineteenth century already tended (with instruments as diverse as the national census and the personal diary) to reaffirm absolutely Samuel Johnson's famous axiom that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' but Anna Kingsford had had one of those lives, peculiarly interesting to the Victorians, which the process of narration inevitably turns into histories of this or that set of religious opinions. She herself, in her final months of life, perceived as much; and it accordingly became ‘necessary’—or so she ventured to suggest—‘that I should not die without some sort of Apologia’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 3, edited by Bate, W. J. and Strauss, Albrecht B. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1969), p. 320.Google Scholar

2 Anna Kingsford, 2, p. 327.

3 Anna Kingsford, 1, p. 14.

4 Anna Kingsford, 2, pp. 124 and 187.

5 Anna Kingsford, 2, pp. 376 and 379–99.

6 See Butler's Lives of the Saints, edited, revised, and supplemented by Herbert Thurston, S. J., and Attwater, Donald, 4 vols. (Burns & Oates, 1956), 3, p. 206.Google Scholar

7 Bonus, A., Beatrice: A Tale of the Early Christians (Joseph Masters, 1863), p. 3.Google Scholar All subsequent references are to this, the only edition of Beatrice which ever appeared.

8 Quoted by Forward, Charles W. in his Fifty Years of Food Reform: A History of the Vegetarian Movement in England (The Ideal Publishing Union, London, and The Vegetarian Society, Manchester, 1898), p. 123.Google Scholar

9 Anna Kingsford, 1, pp. 12–13 and 2, p. 58–9.

10 ‘Symphorian, A Story of the Second Century’, in Rosamunda, pp. 329–46.

11 Anna Kingsford, 1, p. 44.

12 Rosamunda, p. 115.

13 Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet, 2 vols. (Chapman & Hall, 1850), 2, p. 111.Google Scholar

14 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 2 vols. (Chapman & Hall, 1848), 2, p. 198.Google Scholar

15 An excellent colour reproduction appears in Rose, Andrea, The Pre-Raphaelhes (Phaidon Press, 1981; original 1977), pp. 54–5.Google Scholar

16 Kingsley, Charles, Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face, 2 vols. (John W. Parker & Son, 1853), 1, p. 164.Google Scholar

17 Hart Milman, Henry, The History of Christianity, from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism inthe Roman Empire, new and revised edition, 3 vols. (John Murray, 1863), 2, p. 204.Google Scholar

18 Fabiola, p. 140.

19 Rosamunda, p. 5.

20 Fabiola, pp. 68–74 and 249.

21 Fabiola, pp. 372–6.

22 Fabiola, pp. 17–18.

23 Henry Newman, John, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century (Burns & Oates, 1881), p. 326.Google Scholar

24 Fabiola, p. x.

25 Fabiola, pp. 217–18, 267, and 362.

26 Anna Kingsford, 2, pp. 124 and 152. Kingsford's ‘integration of cultural schisms’, carried here to its logical extreme, is considered as a specifically feminist enterprise by Basham, Diana in The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (Macmillan, 1992), pp. 6772.CrossRefGoogle Scholar