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Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan: Priest and Novelist*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012
Footnotes
*
This essay is dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased W. R. Ward, FBA, President of the Ecclesiastical History Society forty years ago, in 1970, when I became a member.
References
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42 Sheehan left incomplete Tristram Lloyd: The Romance of a Journalist, about an embittered young man brought to better spirits by faith. His anger at the plight of the poor is contrasted with the rage of an anti-Semitic Russian revolutionary who marries and then murders Lloyd’s sister. The work was finished by his literary executor Henry Gaffney OP (Dublin, 1928). Sheehan also wrote stories for children (Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 99), and a melodrama, ‘Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise’: A Drama of Modern Life (London, 1904), for the benefit of a convalescent home for sick children, about three girls whose future is foretold as a wife, a nurse and a nun. It was not performed. The sensationalist plot involves a malicious suitor, the bankruptcy of the father of one girl by the father of another, and the death of one girl. I have not studied Sheehan’s poetry.
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80 Ibid. 345.
81 Ibid. 242.
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83 Ibid. 237.
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