British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829

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British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 Michael Tomko Villanova University

10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

© Michael Tomko 2011

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27951–3

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tomko, Michael, 1975– British romanticism and the Catholic question : religion, history, and national identity, 1778–1829 / by Michael Tomko. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–27951–3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 3. Catholics in literature. 4. Nationalism in literature. 5. Religion and literature— Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Religion and literature— Great Britain—History—18th century. 7. Catholic emancipation. 8. Catholics—Great Britain—History. 9. Anti-Catholicism—Great Britain— History. 10. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR468.C3T66 2011 820.9'38282—dc22 2010034576 10

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For Helena ‘For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen…’

10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: The Spirits of the Age

1

1 The Purgatorial Politics of the Catholic Question

14

2 History, Sympathy and Sectarianism in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story

52

3 Wordsworth and Superstition

87

4 Shelley’s Conflicted Campaign for Catholic Emancipation

119

5 Scott’s Ivanhoe and the Saxon Question

148

Conclusion: ‘The Anxious Hour’ – England in 1829

182

Notes

197

Bibliography

204

Index

220

vii

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Contents

Figure 1: James Gillray, Disciples Catching the Mantle: The Spirit of Darkness Overshadowing the Priests of Baal. 1808. Reproduced from The Works of James Gillray (1851), plate 351. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library

33

Figure 2: The Abbey ruins and town of Bury St Edmunds. Reproduced from Edward King, ‘Remarks on the Abbey Church of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk’, Archaeologia (1786), 315. Courtesy of the Rhys Carpenter Library at Bryn Mawr College

58

Figure 3: James Gillray, Wife and No Wife—or—A Trip to the Continent. 1788. Reproduced from The Works of James Gillray (1851), plate 32. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library

71

Figure 4: Eliza O’Neill as Juliet. Reproduced from Frances Gerard, Some Fair Hibernians (1897), 243. Courtesy of Villanova University Library Special Collections

135

Figure 5: J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829). © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

187

viii

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List of Figures

This book began with an interest in the anti-Catholic rhetoric marshalled against Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writing and subsequently grew to encompass many more years, people and places in the romantic period. Such expanse has also characterized the project’s role in my own life. I have benefited from such good counsel over its years that I cannot adequately pay tribute to all the people and places that have shaped its progress. From Indiana to Trafalgar Square, however, no one person has helped more than Greg Kucich, who surveyed many of these pages with a ‘busie, curious eye’. His intellectual acumen, unflagging generosity and natural cheerfulness have been a model to me and many others. Likewise, I am grateful to Margaret Doody, Luke Gibbons and Kevin Hart for their valuable insights as well as to members of ICR, INCS and NASSR who have commented on aspects of the project. My research was supported by fellowships at two interdisciplinary venues: the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame and the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. I would like to thank the other fellows as well as the directors, Rev. Robert Sullivan and Wendy Steiner, for their conversations. During a valuable works-in-progress session, my colleagues in Villanova’s Humanities department helped refine my thinking on Shelley. I have been fortunate to be surrounded by such intellectual breadth and energy. I am particularly grateful for the guidance of my department chairs, Kevin Hughes and Thomas W. Smith, and for the support of Evan Radcliffe, chair of English. Villanova University also provided a Summer Research Fellowship that aided in the completion of the manuscript. I would like to thank the staff of Oxford’s Boldleian Library Upper Reading Room, Patti Ogden of the Kresge Law library, Michael Foight of Villanova’s Special Collections, Marianne Hansen of Bryn Mawr College’s Canaday Library, Del Ramers of Bryn Mawr College’s Rhys Carpenter Library, and John Pollack and Elizabeth Otte of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. My editors at Palgrave, Paula Kennedy, Benjamin Doyle and Jon Lloyd, have been exemplary, and the comments of my anonymous readers have improved the work extensively. I would like to thank Marilyn Gaull and The Wordsworth Circle for permission to reprint material from my article, ‘Superstition, the National Imaginary, and Religious Politics ix

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

in Wordworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches’ 34(1–2) (Winter 2007/Spring 2008): 16–19. The image of J.M.W. Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829) appears with permission of the National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Finally, my wife Helena has been an indefatigable reader and enthusiastic interlocutor. For her love and support, this book is dedicated to her.

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x

C&S

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State

CPD

Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates

EOT

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times

HPD

Parliamentary Debates

HSW

Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt

JWS

Journal of Sir Walter Scott

LPBS

Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley

LWS

Letters of Sir Walter Scott

LY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth – The Late Years

MY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth – The Middle Years

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PHE

Parliamentary History of England

RNT

Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland

xi

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List of Abbreviations

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The debate over granting full civil rights to Irish and British Catholics, often referred to as the ‘Catholic Question’, had gripped British politics since the 1770s by the time Leigh Hunt added his own baffled indignation in an 1808 Examiner article: If posterity were to judge the present times by their general character, they would be somewhat amazed at our late rejection of the Catholic Petition. The age is more generally refined than any preceding era in modern history, knowledge is every where diffused, continental superstition is daily decreasing, and men are more inclined to judge of each other not by what they think but by what they do. (HSW 1: 61) Hunt voiced this exasperation over two decades before the 1829 passage of Catholic Emancipation, which finally allowed Irish and British Catholics to sit in Parliament. Testifying to its centrality and contradictions, Hunt’s remarks reveal the tensions between history and reform that the Catholic Question generated. On the one hand, the Reformation was often viewed as the expulsion of the supposedly ‘foreign’ creed of Roman Catholicism, or what Hunt calls ‘continental superstition’. This allowed England to enter a civil, commercial modernity and to distance itself forever from its ‘Dark Age’.1 Such anti-Catholicism, according to Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992), was ‘rooted ... in the way that Britons chose to remember and interpret their own past’ and formed the basis for the construction of British national identity during the romantic period (19). Writers, politicians and clerics retold this version of national and religious history to advance agendas in the Catholic Emancipation debate. Yet, on the other hand, this was a troubled turn to the past within what James Chandler has called 1

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Introduction: The Spirits of the Age

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

the romantic ‘historical epistemology’, the knowledge structure by which the romantics conceived of themselves as living within a distinct epoch with a uniquely progressive character (England in 1819 138). As Chandler illustrates, in the Scottish Enlightenment models of stadial history and civil society that underwrote this ‘spirit of the age’ discourse, a modern nation’s pre-modern, pre-commercial past was an alien culture, virtually ‘a foreign country’, with ‘different manners, different moeurs, different norms’ (England in 1819 108).2 An enlightened, progressive policy of universal toleration of conscience, or in Hunt’s words judging individuals ‘not by what they think but by what they do’, would require Britain to repeal sectarian strictures and give Catholics a place in the nation. Catholic Emancipation seemed to sanction, even demand, an invasion from the ‘foreign country’ of Britain’s dark, Catholic past. The Catholic Emancipation debate thus elicited problematic contradictions within the political, religious and cultural discourse of the romantic age in England. These parallel what Jarlath Killeen has called the ‘myth of the modern’ in eighteenth-century Ireland: The Reformation predicated the definition of the medieval past as Catholic, and the Catholic Church contributed to this understanding in its rejection of the modern in favour of the purity of the ancient. In such a model, however, the past (Catholicism) must be continually and repeatedly rejected for the present (Protestantism) to fully realize itself. Modernity was completed in one moment of time, but had to be continually re-enacted. (18–19) While Catholic Emancipation promised to end this perpetual reenactment of modernity’s self-defining rejection of a Catholic past, the debate preceding 1829 recalled persisting cultural memories of violence and oppression. This book gives an account of the cultural and literary history of the conflict over the Catholic Question in the romantic period; of the ways in which it forced a disturbing, self-conscious reexamination of the foundations of British national identity at a contentious time of political upheaval in France and Ireland; and of its central role in how the romantics viewed themselves and of how we now view the romantics. In short, it examines how the Catholic Question contributed to framing and fracturing the romantic ‘spirit of the age’.

The Catholic Question in romantic history While Catholic Emancipation has often fallen between the purview of Victorian and romantic studies, J.C.D. Clark has argued in English Society, 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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1688–1832 (2000) that its prolonged political challenge to the role of the Established Church was even more prominent than parliamentary reform throughout the romantic period. In Clark’s view, the eventual passage of Catholic Emancipation and the 1828 Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts precipitated the decline of the English ancien régime and constituted a social revolution caché. As a central issue in 1820s national politics, the campaign for Catholic Emancipation entailed the formation and suppression of Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Association with its populist ‘monster meetings’, caused major crises and reshufflings in the government ministries of 1825 and 1827, dominated the General Election of 1826, divided the anti-Catholic Ultra-Tories from other conservatives who pragmatically supported the ‘liberal’ legislation, and set the stage for the Reform Bill of 1832.3 These political events were intertwined with a larger cultural conflict about the Catholic Question involving religion, national history and the meaning of British national identity: the Lake poet and laureate Robert Southey published a vigorous historical attack on Catholicism and dissent that defended the Anglican alliance of church and state in the Book of the Church (1825); William Wordsworth saw his Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) as a poetic complement to Southey’s treatment of the Catholic Question; the English Catholic lawyer and man of letters Charles Butler started an extended controversy by answering Southey with his Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825); the radical journalist William Cobbett denounced the modern state’s neglect of the poor in contrast to a medieval golden age of communal Catholicism in The History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824–7); and Coleridge sought to salvage the spirit of the national church in his philosophical meditation On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829).4 The 1820s debate was a cathection of issues ranging from nation-building, the formation of imperial identity, genre and literary politics, the narration of history, Irish-British relations, the limits of the public sphere, the abolition movement, women’s rights, the campaign for parliamentary reform and the role of religion in public life. This, however, is far from the entire story, as these multifaceted issues were deeply rooted in the broader conflict over the Catholic Question from the beginning of the romantic period in Britain. This book focuses on these influential but largely overlooked earlier conflicts in order to investigate what perplexed Hunt and what formed the revolution described by Clark. As the eighteenth century progressed, Britain struggled with the pragmatic need to incorporate potentially subversive Irish and British Catholics who were relegated to second-class status by the penal laws. Yet such integration had to come without compromising 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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Introduction 3

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

a British national character and constitution defined by Protestantism, or more specifically by the Anglican alliance between church and state with its dominant ideology of the via media, or middle way, between the extremes of superstitious Catholicism and enthusiastic Dissent. Rather than being an isolated ecclesiastical issue, the Catholic Question was interwoven with the major events of the romantic period: the 1778 Catholic Relief Act sparked the 1780 Gordon Riots; French Catholic émigrés in the early 1790s complicated the English response to the French Revolution; the 1798 Irish Rebellion involved Catholic rights; and an unfulfilled promise to pass Catholic Emancipation undermined the 1800 Act of Union and caused the 1801 fall of Pitt’s government. Converging with other major issues, Catholic Emancipation became linked rhetorically and politically with the emancipation of African slaves and the debate over Jewish Emancipation, and mobilized women in campaigns for and against Catholic relief. It was a lightning rod amid tempestuous political events, as the Prince Regent’s 1812 political betrayal of his former Whig associates pivoted on the Catholic Question, Catholics were feared as a fifth column in the fight against Napoleon, and ‘religious liberty’ was one of the cries heard during the 1819 Peterloo Massacre. The Catholic Question also appears at the nexus of romantic literature and politics, especially in the divide between the ‘two generations’ of romantic poets. On his way to Dublin to inspire but also enlighten what he saw as the persecuted and benighted Irish Catholics, Percy Bysshe Shelley paid a visit to Southey in Keswick in 1811. Their heated disagreement over the Catholic Question would colour both of their subsequent intellectual developments. When John Keats came to visit Wordsworth in the Lake District in 1818, he was doubly disappointed. Not only was the bard out, he was out stumping for Lord Lowther’s anti-Catholic candidate in the upcoming General Election. In 1813 Leigh Hunt was imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent in an article about the royal ‘apostasy’ on Catholic Emancipation, and in 1812 Byron spoke to the House of Lords in favour of Catholic Relief. Coleridge claimed to have read the papers for news on the Catholic Question daily for 30 years, a concern that spilled over into works such as The Statesman’s Manual (1816). These drew the critical ire of William Hazlitt for their abandonment of Coleridge’s formerly liberal religious and political positions.5 Consistent with Anne Mellor’s depiction of women’s involvement within public sphere politics in Mothers of the Nation (2000), women writers ranging from Charlotte Smith in The Emigrants (1793) to Felicia Hemans in The Forest Sanctuary (1825) intervened in the nationwide controversy over the Catholic Question.

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Introduction 5

By touching upon the most turbulent elements of British history and national identity, the debate over the Catholic Question exceeded its immediate context within religious politics to engage many of the fundamental divisions – along religious, ethnic, regional and political lines – in what Colley has called ‘the forging of the British nation’ (1). Yet the Catholic Question has been largely elided from our understanding of romantic-era culture.6 M.H. Abrams begins his assessment of the ‘spirit of the age’ in Natural Supernaturalism (1971) with a quotation from Shelley that gestures towards the Catholic Question’s campaign for ‘religious liberty’: ‘The literature of England,’ Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry, ‘has arisen as it were from a new birth.’ ‘We live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty,’ and these men have in common ‘the spirit of the age.’ (11) Overlooking Shelley’s historical reference linking the Reformation to contemporary religious politics, Abrams reads the major male romantic poets as transcending a political world defined only by the French Revolution and articulating an immanent spirituality that salvages, privatizes and secularizes the vestiges of a receding Protestant tradition stemming from the vatic Milton. Within Abrams’s explicitly Hegelian account of history and implicitly Kantian interpretation of religion, there is no room for political issues such as Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts or for communal connections within Catholic, nonconformist or Dissenting circles, the latter of which, according to Daniel E. White, ‘impelled the genesis of Romanticism’ (1). While the initial phase of new historicism in romantic studies following Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) may have critiqued the political evasions in romantic literature, it too did not account for the widespread involvement of romantic writers in public politics and public religion. In his The Romantic Reformation (1997), Robert Ryan redressed this trend by arguing that instead of ‘lamenting Romanticism as a political retreat, then, one may more usefully see it as a creative and effective engagement in the contemporary religious crisis, an engagement that was perceived as having far-reaching consequences in the political order’ (5). Seeing the romantics as ‘active participants in the public religious life of their times’ (Ryan 8) has facilitated the critical

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The Catholic Question in romantic studies

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

recovery of religious women writers such as Anna Barbauld, whose verse and thought have received what may be their most sustained treatment in Colin Jager’s The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), Jon Mee’s Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (2003) and White’s Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2006). These works have also challenged the definitions of the literary, arguing for culturally significant cross-fertilization between religious poetry, devotional tracts and political pamphlets. In addition, the studies by White and Mee of the Dissenting and enthusiastic traditions within Protestantism have shown the need to go beyond the secularization narrative’s generalized discussion of religion and literature to investigate particular religious communities and discourses – with all their denominational, historical and devotional nuances. How might adding the Catholic Question’s struggle for ‘religious liberty’ continue to reshape this expanding interdisciplinary investigation? Despite the importance of the Catholic Emancipation debate, the cultural role of Catholicism in Britain during the romantic period has not received the same level of attention as other denominations. Important essays by Alan Bewell, Tim Fulford and Jane Stabler have cast new light on formative nationalistic constructions of Catholicism on the continent and in the Empire, but the anxieties surrounding the Catholic Question were closer to home. Coleridge articulated a common fear of Catholics in Britain and Ireland as an ‘imperium in imperio’ (C&S 149), while the English Catholic Butler subtly attempted to redirect that fear towards sympathy in labelling Catholics a ‘nation within a nation’ (Butler A Letter to a Nobleman 10). Legislatively admitting Catholics into full citizenship in the Union seemed the only way to pacify a proximate threat, but ending the internal exile of Catholics threatened to undermine the British national identity that formed the basis of what Ina Ferris has called ‘the awkward space of Union’ (RNT 1). Such cultural negotiations of assimilation, integration, expulsion and resistance not only parallel those in the Scottish and Irish contexts, but also operate directly within those contexts. Drawing on studies of these clashes and contradictions within the nation-building process, I trace not only the ways that anti-Catholics, supporters of Catholic Emancipation and even Catholics themselves advocate, oppose and regulate Catholic entry into British civil society, but also the moments in which aesthetic form reveals anxiety about the possibility of the project of the Union, the stability of national identity and the continuity of the historical narrative that built them.7

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This particular focus is also needed because the integration of Catholics into national culture proved ambivalent, with lasting effects for British culture. Mark Canuel’s Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (2002) treats the Catholic Emancipation debate as part of romantic writers’ movement beyond specific religious beliefs in order to imagine and foster a revised social order valuing tolerance of multiple religious beliefs. Canuel sheds important light on the increasing significance of culture in organizing the position of religion at a time when sectarian legislation was being repealed. Yet sustained attention to the Catholic Question reveals, I argue, a more uneven cultural model emerging at the end of the romantic era. In Canuel’s closing chapter on ‘The Inquisitorial Stage’, he identifies dramatizations of the Inquisition, including The Cenci, as representing the feared consequences of intolerance in society. He rightly captures the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as the culminating success of a Dissenting discourse that sought liberalizing reform and increased tolerance through accusing the Anglican Church of playing the ‘papal tyrant’ towards fellow Protestants. However, with a genealogy stretching back to John Foxe’s graphic Reformation-era Book of Martyrs (1563), the image of the fanatical Inquisitor and the auto-da-fé also arrives laden with a history in England of demonizing the very Catholics who would be the objects of toleration in the 1820s.8 Paradoxically, even as the image of the Inquisition could prompt a more tolerant set of laws, such discourse could also promote an intolerant culture of fear and distrust towards a religious minority. As Michael Wheeler has documented in The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006), such persistent anxieties about religious difference would erupt in the anti-Catholicism of the 1851 Papal Aggression Crisis and the Murphy Riots of the 1860s. In this light, 1829 can be seen as a cultural rearticulation of the specific beliefs and values of the 1688 Revolution rather than a transcendence of them. Complementing Mee’s study of enthusiasm, my tracing of romantic-era anxieties about Catholicism illustrates the continuing importance of the British Establishment’s claim to represent a via media settled at the 1688 Revolution. Mee argues in Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (2003) that, far from being a stereotypical explosion of wild, revolutionary energy and free imagination, much romantic literature seeks to harness yet also curb enthusiasm’s rapturous transport and its political ramifications. In addition to revolutionary enthusiasm, however, Catholicism, or ‘superstition’, was also seen as a great threat, and romantic-period writers within the debate on the Catholic Question attempted to ‘regulate’ the return of Catholics to British civil

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Introduction 7

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

society by representing them as a vestigial remnant from an obsolete or primitive stage of history. This narrative of the nation’s religious past and revisions of it, as Chandler has argued, involved the ‘intellectual, political, and even moral stakes of Romantic historiographical operations across a range of representative literary forms’ (139). Wielding the persuasiveness of historical truth and necessity, the cultural model of a via media for national culture was powerful enough to operate at the level of assumption and flexible enough to adapt to religious, racial or regional categories.9 The regulation of ‘superstitious’ Catholics operated primarily through what Julia M. Wright has called ‘forms of history’ (‘ “The Same Dull Round” ’ 239) and, I argue, helped structure the wideranging and complex models of toleration, citizenship and nationalism that Wright investigates in Ireland, India, and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Literature (2007). To analyse these issues is to examine Britain’s nineteenth-century attempt to resolve what Martha Nussbaum has recently termed a ‘clash within’ in her study of religious conflict between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority in contemporary India. Challenging Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ model, Nussbaum argues that the prospects of twenty-first-century democracy hinge upon the ability of nations to live with religious difference while avoiding sectarian violence or legislative subjugation. For Nussbaum, the social confrontation over religious pluralism also operates at the level of individual ethical subjectivity to involve the ‘moral imagination’ in an ‘internal clash’ that ‘in many ways lies behind and propels the cultural clash’ (The Clash Within 48, 15). In romantic-era Britain, history – especially the stadial models of history that identify progress with the rise of nationalism – figures as a chief ethical battleground in this social and internal struggle between ‘democratic mutuality and anxious domination’ (Nussbaum The Clash Within x).10 The achievements as well as the shortfalls of the social transformations involved in Catholic Emancipation can shed light on the historical roots of contemporary challenges involving religious difference and the plight of religious minorities, especially in areas such as India that have been shaped by the sectarian policies of the British Empire.11 For example, in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), Gauri Viswanathan seems to echo Hunt in pressing the need to question the relationship of religion and nation: If the conferral of citizenship rights on religious minorities has never been more urgently debated nor its realization more infuriatingly elusive than it is today, a great deal of the difficulty centers on

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the incompatibility of two opposing goals. How are minority religious groups to be brought into the modern nation and protection extended to their claims to certain rights and privileges guaranteed to all members of that nation, without at the same time effacing either their unique religious differences or the content of their religious beliefs? (xi) To explore the postcolonial exclusions and limitations imposed on religious communities, Viswanathan examines the ways in which the conversion of John Henry Newman and others within the Oxford Movement tested the parameters of British national identity. Such connections were already being made in the period. In the words of one parliamentarian, the Catholic Question involved ‘the interests and happiness of the whole British empire’ (CPD 4: 823). Henry Grattan, the Irish champion of Catholic Emancipation, argued that confessional strictures imposed ‘on the empire two opposite principles of action, the free system for England, and the proscriptive principle for the rest’ (CPD 4: 932). Against fears that Catholic Emancipation would subvert the principles of the 1688 Revolution, Grattan argues for bringing civil and religious liberty to the world: Then will your revolution be completed, not overthrown; then will you extend the principles of your empire on those of your constitution, and have secured an uniformity of action by creating an identity of interest; thus will you have simplified the imperial and constitutional motions to the one and the same principle of action, moving you in your home and in your imperial orbit, informing the body of your laws, and vivifying the mass of your empire. (CPD 4: 933) According to Grattan’s orrery model, as go the Catholics within Britain, so goes the British Empire. On the one hand, if Britain cannot reconcile the problems of religious difference to create a common interest and identity, the troubles will extend throughout the colonial project. On the other hand, a just domestic policy will yield a viable British Empire in which the animating principles of 1688 radiate through an ‘imperial orbit’ to unite the colonies. While Grattan rhetorically invokes Newtonian physics, he still looks back to history and the Glorious Revolution’s via media that was at the heart of romantic-period debate over nation, empire and Catholic Emancipation. While my focus on the role of religious politics in British collective memory and national identity contributes to a neglected area of

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Introduction 9

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

scholarship on Catholic Emancipation, it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate the ‘Catholic Question’ from the ‘Irish Question’. The two terms often functioned synonymously, but the interchange was both collaborative and contentious. For instance, the English Catholic bishop John Milner represented the Irish Church in government negotiations, but his agenda often conflicted with other English Catholic lay and clerical leaders. While the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act applied to Catholics throughout the UK, George IV unsuccessfully tried to limit its effect to Ireland (Machin 160–1). The Catholic Question’s uneasy mix of nationality, ethnicity and religious difference all contributed to this complicated and volatile aspect of public culture in the romantic period. I thus seek to complement scholarly treatments of the role of the Catholic Question in the romantic period that have originated from within Irish Studies and investigations of the gothic such as those by Killeen and Luke Gibbons. In Gaelic Gothic (2004), Gibbons argues that, in trying to tame rebarbative elements such as Catholicism, the gothic in Ireland follows through with ‘the cultural work of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–91, expunging the traces not only of feudalism but also its archaic Catholic remnants from the social order’ (10). Gibbons’s work itself builds on scholarship linking Irish and English religious issues within a gothic register and much more work, such as Cannon Schmitt’s foundational Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (1997), remains to be done in this area. One resource for this investigation has been Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), which argues that the spectral return of Hamlet’s vengeful father from purgatory, whose entrance was believed to be in Ireland’s Lough Derg, represents the memory of a Catholic community repressed at the emergence of the English nation. In the romantic period, Southey’s medievalist ballad ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’ (1798) treats this inheritance of ideology and imagery. This example illustrates the focus of this book’s argument: the ways in which the issues of Catholicism, history and national identity often associated with the gothic and Irish writing also informed romantic texts that have been inaccurately insulated from the Catholic Question. To restore this significant issue to the romantic era’s chronology, Chapter 1 provides a literary and historical examination of the Catholic Question’s persistent role in the culture wars of the romantic period. Bringing together the analysis of the deep engagement of romantic writers in contemporary cultural politics by Jeffrey N. Cox and others into dialogue with scholarly treatments of national identity formation around the Act of Union by Colley, Ferris and Katie Trumpener, this

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chapter follows the influence of the Catholic Question from the 1780 Gordon Riots through to the Peterloo Massacre. In this analysis, I identify recurring images and discourses from Britain’s religious past that disrupted the historical construction of national identity that was to guide the nation through an age of political and social upheaval, and guarantee the prominence of the Empire in the future. Having established these salient sets of events and discourses, I offer four case studies of major literary figures embodying the main positions on Catholic Emancipation. First, from her unique position as a marginalized English Catholic, a supporter of the French Revolution and an innovative woman writer on the cutting edge of romantic drama, Elizabeth Inchbald crafted a proto-national tale in her 1791 A Simple Story that explores the difficulty of union across religious and historical divides. The erratically heartwarming and heartrending tale of marriage and separation between Dorriforth and Miss Milner over two generations exposes the difficulty of reconciling sectarian histories. Following a presentation of new research on Inchbald’s English Catholic identity, Chapter 2 argues that Inchbald presciently rejects the national tale’s marriage plot in Part I of A Simple Story. However, by dramatizing the misunderstanding and violence perpetuated by cultural segregation and religious partition, Inchbald also offers a tentative model of gendered sympathy and radical forgiveness that seeks to promote dialogue and proximity as means of reconciliation. If Inchbald’s literary interpretation of religious strife attempts to highlight and negotiate the memorial markers of religious difference, Wordsworth sublimates the wounds in the British historical narrative at geographical sites where potentially disruptive counter-memories could arise, specifically those ruined abbeys or holy wells that were part of Catholic Emancipation’s public discourse and that Pierre Nora labels ‘les lieux de memoire’, or places of memory. Taking Essays on Epitaphs as a theoretical guide in Chapter 3, I argue that Wordsworth, a conservative opponent of Catholic Emancipation, articulates an aesthetic vision of the via media as a stabilizing force between the two extremes Inchbald embodied: the enthusiastic excess of the French Revolution and the superstitious regression threatened by Catholic Emancipation. While Wordsworth’s management of history creates a powerful sense of settlement for the nation, the cracks in his poetry and prose also reveal recalcitrant memories that are more difficult to contain. While his political platform puts him at odds with Shelley, an active supporter of the Catholic cause, the anxieties over Catholicism converge in their writings. While Shelley begins his career with the type of openness to

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Introduction 11

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

difference that Inchbald displays, his vexed campaign to rally the Irish for Catholic Emancipation and universal reform hardened his own approach to the possibilities of resolving historical difference. Chapter 4 shows that such frustrations returned while Shelley wrote The Cenci in 1819, when he found himself deliberating on Britain’s political woes in exile among Italian Catholics in Rome. With the Irish Amelia Curran painting his family’s portrait and the Irish actress Eliza O’Neill cast in his mind as Beatrice, Shelley crafted what I argue is a drama about the lingering issues surrounding Catholic Emancipation, placing The Cenci among other contemporary Irish dramas. The result of Shelley’s embittered ambivalence towards Ireland and Catholicism, however, is a tense abjection of history and a repudiation of difference. One might expect Walter Scott’s often roseate medievalism to remedy this foreclosure of sympathy. Scott was, after all, one of the conservative Tories whose defection from the Wordsworthian hardline position allowed Catholic Emancipation to pass under the otherwise reactionary Wellington administration. Chapter 5 argues, however, that around 1819 Scott turned from Scottish to English religious history, redeploying his largely successful development of what Katie Trumpener has called ‘the Anglo-Celtic model of literary nationalism’ (xiii). Scott’s Ivanhoe constructs a nuanced regulation of the Catholic religious minority that contains potentially disruptive versions of ‘superstition’ within the aesthetic. Extreme ‘recusant’ positions are exiled while a curbed, moderate character enacts a national marriage or union. While eligibility for citizenship seems to be extended, the performative requirements for joining the nation become more prescriptive and limiting. Scott’s novel, however, also created possibilities for creative revisions of religious and national identities among readers that exceeded the limitations of Scott’s own conclusions. This captures what I believe to be the important dual nature of romantic writing on the Catholic Question. On the one hand, Scott, Wordsworth and Shelley offer powerful models that regulate the place of a religious minority within the modern public sphere. While they are differently inflected, their projects transfer the burden of quelling sectarian energies from the legal to the cultural world. Whether by erasure or obsolescence, they all also overcome difference by eliminating difference. On the other hand, there are alternative histories from this formational moment in national and imperial development. Inchbald’s vision represents the most compelling reimagining of community in a way that is vibrantly, but not naively, multiconfessional. The book concludes by focusing on these divergent possibilities in the wake of Catholic Emancipation, whose passage was represented as

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a crucial historical pivot that culminated the romantic period and transitioned into Victorian culture. Specifically, reactions to the Catholic Emancipation Act conceived of 1829 as a turning point between stages in the nation’s history. Introducing unfamiliar works and re-reading familiar texts by Southey, Coleridge and Newman, I explore how the anxieties and hopes surrounding the Catholic Question were revised into new forms that would persist into later intersections of religion with domestic and imperial politics.

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Introduction 13

The Purgatorial Politics of the Catholic Question

An anonymous political poem, ‘On the Spirit of the Times We Live In’, which appeared in an 1825 issue of one of several English Catholic journals founded to promote Catholic Emancipation, wryly restates Leigh Hunt’s claims for the romantic age: The nineteenth century is termed By all (with few exceptions,) An age of wonderful insight, Of clarified perceptions. (241) The poem calls attention to those without a voice in national culture by recasting the period’s claim of increased refinement and decreasing prejudice as partisan praise merely ‘termed’ by a governing ‘all’. As Britain attempted to unify as a modern nation-state around the time of the 1800 Act of Union, the Catholic Question inconveniently recalled those ‘few exceptions’. Different views of Britain’s religious history could not simply be contained within parenthesis as these persistent pasts complicated the creation of the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’.1 Ina Ferris has argued that the Union’s legislative synthesis was ‘awkward’ not only in its unwieldy nomenclature, but also in its yoking together of differing cultures under an unequal distribution of power and wealth (RNT 1). While numerous factors contributed to this troubling imbalance, penal restrictions on Catholics played a major role. Before the Union, there was an attempt to dismiss the threat of Catholicism to the modern nation as a mere ghost, but the Act itself realized the fears of many by marrying an archaic Catholicism into the modern nation, thus challenging Britain’s religious and national sense of communal memory. The subsequent push to complete the Union 14

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by granting Catholics full civil rights through the passage of Catholic Emancipation both brought down government ministries and galvanized important literary interventions. This chapter provides the first overarching historical account of how the Catholic Emancipation debate troubled the sense of British national identity in the romantic era and became a battleground in what Jeffrey N. Cox has called the period’s ‘culture wars’ (13). Just as the national tale addresses ‘questions of cultural distinctiveness, national policy, and political separatism’ through literary form (Trumpener 132), so too has ‘form and figure’ (Mahoney 11) played a central role in criticism of romantic cultural politics. Accordingly, the Catholic Question generated an intense cultural clash that involved the signs and symbols associated with the nation’s historical and religious identity. Therefore, in addition to tracing the involution of the Catholic Question in pressing contemporary events, this chapter follows the seminal cultural studies of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams by offering a discursive analysis of the images, tropes, themes and symbols that became sites for suturing or exposing the seams in national identity and that formed conflicted structures of feeling across different disciplines, outlets and genres, both popular and political.2 This treatment of form does not look to evade the political and ideological but rather seeks, as Fredric Jameson has written, to locate these works within ‘a Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in conflict’ (13). These conflicts over the Catholic Question emerged well before the 1823 formation of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association. Focusing on the first Catholic Relief Act that led to the 1780 Gordon Riots, the ambivalent reaction to the Catholic émigrés fleeing the French Revolution, and the upheaval over the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the first section (1778–1800) brings parliamentary speeches and pamphleteering polemics into dialogue with poetry and prose by writers such as Wolfe Tone and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Within this discussion, I identify recurrent discursive structures that inform both debates on Catholic Emancipation and romantic literary forms, including the failed attempt to supersede a haunting sectarian past and the linking of the Catholic Question to multiple issues, including the plight of slaves and Jews. In the wake of the 1800 Act of Union, the second section (1800–7) shifts to the meeting of the Catholic Question with the marital rhetoric that accompanied the inclusion of predominantly Catholic Ireland in the UK. It examines the political ambivalence of the Act as it registers in the odd meeting of the hymeneal and funereal in the marriage plot of Sydney Owenson’s national tale The Wild Irish Girl (1806). The third

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British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

section (1807–15) charts the intensified cultural conflict over the Catholic Question after the dual disappointment of the 1807 fall of the Ministry of All Talents and the 1812 apostasy of the Prince Regent. Within the cultural and historical discourse surrounding the Catholic Question, the ruins of abbeys and monasteries from across the English countryside were a surprisingly potent political symbol. An examination of their role in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) reveals the ambivalence and frustration of liberal supporters of Catholic Emancipation in the years before Waterloo and, in its cosmopolitan concerns for multiple groups suffering persecution, counters Coleridge’s increasingly insular 1814 defence of Britishness in The Courier. The final section (1815–22) contests Linda Colley’s claim that after Napoleon’s fall the anxieties associated with the Catholic Question dissipated and argues instead that fears about Catholicism more directly focused on defending the nation from internal disruption, especially around the time of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre. It examines Coleridge’s construction of a limiting model of national culture in his ‘Apologetic Preface’ to ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ (1817) and the partisan reception of the Catholic historian John Lingard’s attempts to find common, neutral ground in national history in his magisterial History of England (1819). The overarching narrative of the chapter not only identifies recurrent images and discourses – the conflation of different religious and ethnic groups, the rhetoric of marital unions, the deaths of past generations and haunting sectarianism, the nation’s ruins as redolent reminders of the past, and historical narratives of national culture – that will inform the analysis of individual writers in subsequent chapters, it also argues for the intensification of cultural battles over toleration and exclusion that accompanied the attempt to repeal sectarian legislation against Catholics and Dissenters. While the romantics participated in the Catholic Question debate at every stage, they intervened in this revision of the role of religious difference in British national culture in ways not yet fully appreciated and with implications that are broadly unconsidered. Their treatment of the Catholic Question’s underlying issues in aesthetic form represent significant attempts, variously illuminating or disheartening, to understand the parenthetical places within the ‘spirit of the times’.

Riots, revolution and rebellion: 1778–1800 In 1778 the first Catholic Relief Act attempted to make a small step towards toleration and the repeal of the penal laws. Represented as the product of an enlightened age, this legislative effort promised to unify

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Britain around the state, commerce and national ideals of liberty while unburdening England of a divisive past. The recurrent political threat posed by Catholicism since Henry VIII’s break with Rome had formed the backbone of English national history: the reign of the Catholic ‘Bloody’ Mary, Queen Elizabeth’s execution of her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots, Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the 1666 Great Fire of London that was blamed on papists, Titus Oates’s ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant William and Mary, and the subsequent Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 to restore the Catholic Stuarts. These political events bred the social oppression of the sectarian penal laws, a series of multifarious legislative acts designed to eliminate the Catholic community in Britain. The accumulation of the penal laws through various reigns defies easy summary. They were selectively enforced, but they included a martyr-making death penalty for priests like Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion, trips to Tyburn or the Tower for those who harboured them, the outlawing of Catholic worship and churches, a ban on Catholics receiving an education either at home or abroad, exclusion from the professions of law and public office, double taxation, strictures on property ownership and living area (this forced a young Alexander Pope to relocate farther from Westminster), inheritance guidelines that favoured Protestant relatives and voting restrictions.3 After the 1688 Revolution, the Test and Corporation Acts were reinforced. By requiring anyone holding civic office to take the Oath of Supremacy and the Oath of Allegiance, denounce transubstantiation and the Pope, and receive the sacrament within an Anglican Church, they deprived both Catholics and Dissenters of basic civil rights. While the penal laws led to resilience among Irish Catholics, they were largely efficacious in England, reducing the Catholic population to remnants near Catholic manor houses and London foreign embassies, while a larger enclave remained only in Lancashire. Bishop Richard Challoner, the influential leader of the English Catholic Church in the middle of the eighteenth century, summarized the marginal position of his community: ‘The general Prejudice of the People, the penal Laws, the Authority of the Magistrate, the Interest of the Clergy, the Eloquence of the Pulpit, the Learning of the Universities, the Favour of Men in Power, the Influence of Education; in a Word, all temporal Considerations of Honour, Profit and Pleasure are visibly on the Protestant Side’ (iv).4 The conditions of English Catholics were, however, undergoing structural changes in the eighteenth century. The penal laws remained, as did sectarian resentment, but the harsher measures were rarely employed.

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British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

For instance, an Irish Catholic priest, J.B. Maloney, was sentenced to life in prison for saying Mass in 1767, the same year the House of Lords anxiously commissioned a census to track the ‘growth of Papism’.5 Lord Mansfield, however, best known for his decision that outlawed slavery in Britain, commuted Maloney’s sentence. Jacobites were disappointed in the lack of English Catholic enthusiasm for the Stuart uprisings of 1715 and 1745. In 1765 the Catholic hierarchy officially disavowed the Jacobite cause, which had unofficially lost support much earlier. Catholics in England were becoming increasingly Irish-born, working class and urban. Under Challoner, Catholics adopted an unobtrusive spirituality and cultural existence, commonly referred to as ‘Garden of the Soul’ Catholicism after the title of his popular devotional guide. Though often represented as a somnambulant, secluded period in English Catholicism between an Elizabethan age of martyrs and the Victorian revival, Catholicism in England during the eighteenth century was growing steadily. John Bossy estimates that the Catholic population in England and Wales grew to 80,000 in 1767 and an estimated 19,000 in Scotland in 1763, with an additional 6,000 Scottish Catholics enrolled in the British military.6 More urgently, the Catholic population in Ireland was estimated to be at least three million (Bossy 182–94; Anson 158n). While millions of discontented Irish Catholics threatened an uprising and Spanish and French Catholics were imperial rivals, anxiety over English popery seemed unwarranted in an age when George III entertained Catholic families at Windsor Castle and the evangelical poet William Cowper enjoyed the patronage of the English Catholic Throckmorton family. Given the prospect both of pacifying the Irish and of recruiting more Catholic troops into an over-extended army, the removal of the penal laws seemed like a logical piece of statecraft. With many benefits and no remaining internal political threats, Catholic relief should have passed quickly and comprehensively. To that end, the 1778 Catholic Relief Act (18 Geo. III c. 60) removed penalties against priests, allowed the teaching of Catholicism to Catholics (though Catholic schools were still prohibited) and eased inheritance strictures on property. Despite its limited concessions, the Act signalled a shift. It promised to inaugurate a project of parliamentary reform that would last throughout the romantic period. With support from both the Rockingham Whigs and the North administration, the parliamentary debates articulated an ecumenical consensus. Before 1800 this bipartisan support persisted, as Burke and Pitt represented influential, pragmatic pro-Catholic conservative voices. They did not see the Catholic Question as part of a reformist agenda and even viewed Catholic relief

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as a means of forestalling broader parliamentary reform, while Charles Fox and other Whigs came to view it as a necessary first step in breaking the alliance between church and state. In his support of the 1778 Relief Act, Fox quickly broadened the scope and stakes of the legislation, declaring ‘against the repeal of the Bill, and against every thing that tended to bridle the liberty of the conscience’ (PHE 21: 706). For him, relieving Catholics was a means of secularizing the state, shaking the Establishment and introducing universal toleration for all nonconformists. Unlike later measures, the First Relief Act met with no opposition from George III, who, before the ill-fated 1785 clandestine marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert, was welldisposed to his Catholic subjects (Aveling 256). With the institution of praying for the Royal Family at Catholic Mass in 1778, English Catholics anticipated a fundamentally new moment in their civic lives. Yet the ghosts of sectarian history would not be dispelled so quickly. Nationalist opposition to the Relief Act rose in the Gordon Riots to defend Britain against what was seen as the return of papal tyranny. At the behest of Lord George Gordon’s Protestant Association, approximately 60,000 people gathered in Westminster on 2 June 1780 to urge Parliament to repeal the 1778 Relief Act. This mobilization followed anti-Catholic violence in Edinburgh that delayed an attempt to pass a similar act in Scotland.7 The Appeal from the Protestant Association (1779) invoked the ‘Protestant blood that has been shed by Papists, both at home and abroad’ and recalled the historical flashpoints of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the 1641 Ulster conflict, the abdication of James II and the Jacobite uprisings. The text attacked the Act for undermining the basis of Britishness or taking the ‘axe to the root’ of constitution and parliament, putting the ‘sacred rights’ of Britons at risk (5). When Parliament refused to defend British ‘liberties and lives’ by repealing the Relief Act, a week of rioting ensued in which Catholic chapels, homes of Catholics, properties owned by pro-Catholics including Burke, the embassies of Catholic countries and any establishments believed to be connected to Catholics were attacked and sometimes burnt. Challoner had to flee the city, hastening his death later that year. Crowds hassled and humiliated members of parliament, lords and bishops. After the rioters freed prisoners from Newgate and other jails, a military troop of 10,000 exerted lethal force to stop a similar liberation of the national bank. The historian John Stevenson stresses that the 1780 upheaval in London anticipated, but also exceeded in scale, later events such as the Peterloo Massacre. With almost 300 people killed and many more injured, Samuel Johnson was not alone in calling it a ‘time

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British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

of terrour’ and ‘universal panick’ (Boswell 429, 430). Similar riots threatened to erupt throughout the country, with Frances Burney bearing witness to the ‘horrid scenes’ in Bath of a Catholic chapel in flames and her friend Hester Thrale (later Piozzi) threatened as a crypto-Catholic (Journals 164). In a 1780 speech, Burke represented the nationwide ‘no popery’ bigotry as a ‘ghost’ that arose out of the ‘trouble and confusion’ of Britain’s religious history to move secretively and shamefully in ‘a free country’ and haunt ‘an enlightened age’ (‘Speech’ 143–4, 156). Contemporaries and historians have attempted to assign one single meaning or cause to the disturbance, but the collection of anxieties surrounding the riots captures the challenge that even the spectre of Catholicism presented to British national identity. The brazen sectarian displays led Burney to ask ‘Who is going to turn Papist? Who, indeed, is thinking in an alarming way of any Religion? This pious mob, and Lord George Gordon excepted!’ (Journals 163). However, Colin Haydon has shown in Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (1993) that a tradition of anti-Catholic discourse, embedded high and low in British culture and society, was a major factor in the riots. Rage against Catholics also channelled uneasiness over the state of international affairs in which Britain was prosecuting a war with Protestant America. Robert Kent Donovan has argued that rioters were reacting against what was seen as the 1778 Relief Act’s ‘hidden agenda’ – the recruitment of Irish and Scottish Catholic soldiers to fight the American colonists with whom Dissenters and Scottish Presbyterians sympathized (84). In relation to class conflict, the riots have also been celebrated or vilified as the first major modern expression of populist discontent.8 In romantic and Victorian historical novels, the Gordon Riots symbolized the problems of plebian revolt. In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Charles Dickens used the Gordon Riot ‘mob’ to convey trepidation about 1840s Chartist unrest. In Harrington, Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 novel about the Riots, the cries of ‘No popery! – no papists! – no French!’ and ‘No Jews, no wooden shoes!’ were depicted as the product of an unreformed system of education that bred anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic prejudice in the nursery (285). Burke’s 1790 image of the French revolutionaries as a ‘swinish multitude’ misguided by ‘literary caballers’ and ‘theological politicians’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France (173, 93) was structured by his Miltonic vision of the 1780 rioters as a ‘bigoted multitude’ enflamed by ‘obscure clubs’ and ‘conspirators … of little importance’ diabolically raised ‘to a degree of evil eminence’ (‘Speech’ 161, 151, 143–4). In light of these cultural politics, the French Revolution would intensify rather than displace the need to resolve the Catholic Question

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as a domestic issue. Though the Revolution has often been viewed as an exceptional res novae that launched modernity, various groups in England initially saw it as a repetition of their own histories. Although there were English Catholic Jacobins such as Alexander Geddes and Elizabeth Inchbald, the majority of English Catholics saw the Revolution re-enacting the worst abuses of the English Reformation. For Charles Butler, it was not only another Reformation, but a vulgar one with ‘sansculottic exhibitions, equally ridiculous and disgusting, of the Goddess of Reason, and the un-catholicizing of the calendar’ (Reminiscences 211). For Dissenters, it overthrew popery and deposed an obsolete ancien régime. In his speech A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), the Unitarian intellectual Richard Price interpreted the French Revolution’s escape from the ‘dominion of priests’ and ‘superstition and error’ as continuous with England’s 1688 Revolution, which had freed an England ‘groaning under the infamy and misery of popery and slavery’ (49–50, 32). The discourses of apocalypticism and millenarianism, which also influenced romantic-era writers, often revolved around the role of the Catholic Church in France. As Morton Paley has argued, the Book of Revelation was frequently used as an interpretive framework to explain the momentous events of the day. In a pamphlet titled The Signs of the Times, the Baptist minister James Bicheno would contend that, even amid the increased violence of 1793, the Revolution should still be welcomed as ‘a fatal stroke to the papal usurpations, and the reign of despotism’ (adv). Consistent with his advocacy of Irish Catholic relief, Burke would not allow cries of ‘no popery’ to excuse what he saw as the violation of law, order and custom in the French Revolution. Incensed by Price, Burke sought in the Reflections to generate horror and mobilize opposition to the Revolution by portraying the revolutionaries as ‘hunting down to destruction’ the French clergy, who were not a ‘horrible composition of superstition, ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny’ but ‘men of honour’ who were ‘liberal and open … with the hearts of gentlemen … neither insolent nor servile’ (249–51). Burke’s Reflections has come to be read as an urtext of British nationalism. Yet his defence of French Catholicism and his attack on the democratic innovations of the Jacobins and their English nonconforming sympathizers also demonstrate the divides in the national narrative of religious history. Burke’s argument hinges on his reading of the 1688 Revolution not as a democratic election of a monarch, but as an exceptional defence of ‘hereditary descent qualified with protestantism’ (106). However, the Catholic Question and the operation of the penal laws in Ireland also led Burke to

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skew bitterly other foundational events in British national history with no such anti-papist qualification, vilifying the way Henry VIII was able to ‘rob the abbies, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the ecclesiastics’ (217). As Luke Gibbons has argued in Burke and Ireland (2003), the ‘political turbulence’ and ‘unresolved anxieties’ from Burke’s own ‘Catholic background, raised in the shadow of the Penal Laws’ left him ‘a man deeply divided against himself, a very fusion of opposites yoked together’ (xii, xi). That division reveals itself through the historical cracks running through Burke’s Reflections and encapsulates the way that the Catholic Question complicated and combined sometimes contradictory positions on nation, religion and history. The French Revolution hastened another round of legislation in order to contain potential Catholic collaboration with a growing French threat. Parliament passed the 1791 Catholic Relief Act (31 Geo. III, c. 32), which rescinded nearly all of the penal laws for English Catholics, with similar legislation following for Irish and Scottish Catholics in 1792 and 1793 respectively. By legalizing Catholic worship, education and membership in professions, the second Relief Act removed many of the most significant strictures against Catholics in Britain. While this round of legislation did not induce an immediate apoplexy comparable to the Gordon Riots, a wide-ranging anxiety about the return of Catholicism manifested itself in other ways. The Act banned Catholic clergy from wearing religious attire in public. Catholic churches could not have steeples or bells (31 Geo. III c. 32.6.9). Catholics could teach, but they faced penalties for taking the child of a Protestant father as a student (31 Geo. III c. 32.15). In addition, the Act banned the establishment of any religious orders deemed ‘superstitious or unlawful’ (31 Geo. III c. 32.17). These attempts to sequester Catholic symbols from view paled in comparison to the political limbo of Irish, Scottish and English Catholics, who were now part of the Union but as second-class subjects. No Catholic could sit in Parliament, and English Catholics could not vote. While the Act closed the debate on the penal code, its incomplete, anxious integration shifted the terms of the debate towards what would be known as ‘Catholic Emancipation’, the admission of Catholics to Parliament and full participation in civil society. This continuing, unsettled religious dynamic can be traced in the 1793 conflict over the French émigrés. War between France and Britain loomed after the September Massacres, a riot lasting from 2 to 7 September 1792, in which crowds brutally killed upwards of 2,000 jailed royalist sympathizers in Paris. In the wake of this bloodshed, waves of Catholic

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emigrants (including many English Catholics studying or living abroad) poured from the shores of France into a seemingly sympathetic Britain. Focusing on the sufferings of the French Catholic clergy, relief committees were formed, inns were opened and funds were raised for their support. Yet while British charity to these Catholic refugees was unprecedented, it was also charged with anxiety for the English Establishment. A monitory compassion for those ‘without a country’ pervades Hannah More’s Address in Behalf of the French Emigrant Clergy (1793), in which she calls on Britons to ‘reflect on the uncertainties of war, and the revolution of human affairs’ (275). More’s advocacy, however, came with a derisive assessment of Catholicism as an obsolete religion that she and her Clapham sect could reform. She makes it clear that her solicitation was ‘not for their Popery, but their poverty’, and generosity will ‘show them the purity of our religion, by the beneficence of our action’ (276). More also asserts that the émigré clergy are only the obsolete ‘rubbish of Popery’ without a viable existence in England’s ‘present century’ (281, 285). More’s commiseration with the émigrés becomes part of her justification for launching a preemptive cultural war to defend the values of the homeland ‘in defence of our king, our constitution, our religion, our laws, and consequently our liberty’ (297). Whether in the incomplete toleration of the 1791 Relief Act or the conflicted sympathy towards the Catholic émigrés, the anxieties raised by Catholicism shaped cultural politics in the decade leading up to the 1798 United Irish Rebellion. Catholic Emancipation and governmental reform were the interrelated demands of the United Irishmen, the group formed in 1791 with inspiration from the French Revolution. The United Irishmen sought, in the words of its leader Wolfe Tone, to abolish ‘the odious distinction of Protestant and Presbyterian, and Catholic’ and blend them together ‘under the common and sacred title of Irishman’ (26). This ambitious cultural project promised to redefine both English and Irish national culture. Tone’s influential pamphlet An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791) locates Ireland’s contemporary political problems within long-standing discourses about religious minorities in order to unravel the ‘us’ that More and others were mobilizing against the French threat. Tone argues that anti-Catholicism properly belongs to ‘the dark ages of superstition’ not ‘the days of illumination, at the close of the eighteenth century’. In a trope that would be repeated throughout the period, he compares the condition of Catholics under British rule to slaves and Jews (22, 28–29). His intervention invokes abolitionist rhetoric and

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On what chapter of the Rights of Man, do we ground our title to liberty, in the moment that we are riveting the fetters of the wretched Roman Catholics of Ireland. Shall they not say to us, ‘Are we not men, as ye are, stamped with the image of our Maker, walking erect, beholding the same light, breathing the same air as Protestants: Hath not a Catholic hands; hath not a Catholic eyes, dimensions, organs, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Protestant is?’ (28) Finding solidarity between slaves and Catholics seeking emancipation, the first part of the appeal echoes the popular abolitionist image of a kneeling slave asking ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’.9 In addition, the text also references the Mansfield decision of 1772, in which it was declared that England’s ‘air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in it’. The second half draws on the plight of the Jewish ‘nation within a nation’, alluding to Shylock’s questioning: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warmed and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? (The Merchant of Venice 3.1.59–64) Tone thus concentrates diverse sufferings into his call for Catholic Emancipation and calls for an exorcism of the ghosts of national history: Let us, for God’s sake, shake off the old woman, the tales of our nurses, the terrors of our grandams from our hearts; let us put away childish fears, look our situation in the face like men; let us speak to this ghastly spectre of our distempered imagination, the genius of Irish Catholicity! We shall find it vanish away like other phantoms of the brain, distempered by fear: ‘HENCE, horrible shadow; unreal mock’ry, hence!’ (17) If intended to dissolve sectarian illusions and promote reconciliation rather than revenge, Tone’s allusion to Macbeth’s vision of the murdered Banquo is ambivalent (Macbeth 3.4.105–6). Although no one but

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rereads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to find a humanized image of a religious community suffering persecution:

the delusional Macbeth sees the avenging spirit, the need to redress the injustice of Banquo’s assassination and Macbeth’s usurpation is not illusory. The reference also conjures up images of justified rebellion against the guilty tyranny of a mad king, hardly an innocent gesture in the reign of the afflicted George III. Nor was this spectral threat a hollow one. Tone and the Irish would aid in an unsuccessful 1796 French naval invasion that ran afoul of the weather.10 The possible collaboration of Irish insurgency with French invaders remained a terrible prospect for Pitt’s government. The government’s draconian reactions to the revolutionary movements became a subject for the young Lake Poets. When news reached Westminster in 1797 that the United Irishmen were mobilizing an army either to lead a revolution or to enable the French Revolutionaries to invade, the government crackdown was severe. Coleridge’s 1797 poem ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ links Pitt’s bloody suppression of the rebels in Ireland with the devastation that followed the 1793 Catholic counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendée, a conflict that was intensified and prolonged by British support. The ghoulish voice of ‘fire’ describes the atrocities that would precipitate the Irish rebellion: Sisters! I from Ireland came! Hedge and corn-fields all on flame, I triumphed o’er the setting sun! And all the while the work was done, On as I strode with my huge strides, I flung back my head and I held my sides, It was so rare a piece of fun To see the sweltered cattle run With uncouth gallop through the night, Scared by the red and noisy light! By the light of his blazing cot Was many a naked Rebel shot: The house-stream met the flame and hissed, While crash! Fell in the roof, I wist, On some of those old bed-rid nurses, That deal in discontent and curses. (443) The hellish, apocalyptic vision of ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, which leaps from the ‘bones and skulls’ on a ‘desolated Tract in la Vendée’ to Irish ‘Huts and corn-fields all on flame’, identifies a common thread of repressive violence stemming, in part, from the British government’s

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inability to resolve the Catholic Question. ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ conjures the turmoil associated with the end of the world and the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation 6:1–8, which Coleridge conflates with Pitt’s persecutions and Macbeth. The figures who whirl between conflict in France to suppression in Ireland echo the malevolent travels of the three witches who ‘hand in hand,/Posters of the sea and land,/Thus do go about’ (Macbeth 1.3.32–4). The reference is to the scene prior to the ‘Weird Sisters’ prophetically hailing Macbeth as the Thane of Cawdor and the future king – an encounter that precipitates treachery, regicide, usurpation and rebellion within the British Isles. By relating these horrific scenes of slaughter, Coleridge’s poem draws on national culture to build a transnational sense of revolutionary interconnection and capture the cyclical logic of retributive violence that would dominate the 1798 Rebellion. Uprisings began as early as January 1798, but the main thrust of the Rebellion came in Wexford at the end of May and would continue throughout Ireland in the summer. Massacres on both sides followed. In August a detachment of French ships, now under Napoleon, joined the uprising. They were defeated, the uprising was put down and Tone was found dead in his cell an hour before his scheduled execution. With brutal and bloody actions from both the rebels and the soldiers that resulted in approximately 30,000 deaths and the destruction of many towns, the Catholic Question was caught up in the fears surrounding the 1798 Rebellion.11 While the Rebellion necessitated the 1800 Act of Union in order to bring the Irish under national government, opponents of Catholic Emancipation pointed to the horrors of the Rebellion to make the case that Catholics were not capable of participating in civil society. The two decades prior to the Act of Union did not step beyond the internecine conflicts that fractured British national identity. Interwoven with the broader political issues brought on by the French Revolution, discourse on the Catholic Question updated and reissued Reformation-era anxieties. It offered the image of Jacobins and Catholics, who represented extreme but hitherto opposite fears of radical enthusiasm and tyrannous superstition conspiring against the pillars of Britishness. In the late eighteenth century, Britain’s cultural conflict over the place of Catholicism was an integral part of the romantic inheritance that relief legislation had failed to resolve. One such ambivalence appears in Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, which dramatizes the sufferings of the damned ghost of Pitt, who was, ironically, the individual who pushed hardest to pass Catholic Emancipation before the turn of the century. In order to

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preserve domestic peace, Pitt promised to deliver Catholic relief following the Act of Union. Yet Coleridge’s myth-making casts all the ills of the 1790s at the feet of Pitt, seemingly taking delight in damning him to the flames of Hell that will ‘Cling to him everlastingly’. The ghost of Pitt thus walks in an afterlife that is not so otherworldly after all, but that instead illustrates the state of contemporary religious politics as Dantean, with cyclical whirls of embittered flame and recrimination rather than the settled forgetfulness of Elysium. This may not seem like an auspicious climate for a wedding, but the discourse over the Catholic Question moved towards the trope of the irenic national marriage as the Act of Union promised not only to unite Ireland to England but also to join Britain to its alien past.

Catholic Emancipation and the consummation of the Union: 1800–7 In 1801 the Catholic Question did what Napoleon, the English reformers and the English Jacobins could not: it brought down Pitt’s government. After recalling the pro-Catholic Emancipation Lord Fitzwilliam as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1795, George III rejected further Catholic relief as a violation of his Coronation Oath to protect the Protestant foundation of the British state. Pitt, in the name of prudence, attempted to overcome George III’s scruples by threatening to resign over the king’s opposition to Catholic Emancipation. Even at a time of war, with an invasion by Napoleon looming, the king remained intransigent and forced Pitt out. Pitt stepped down on principle, but his moral commitment to the issue was not enduring. He returned to power in 1804 assuring George III that he would not promote further Catholic relief. This turn of events spelled the end of the Burkean and Pittite conservative support of Catholic Emancipation and the end of further bipartisan relief acts, with the result, as James J. Sack writes, ‘of making antiCatholicism the defining characteristic of the British Right’ (230). For the British left, this transformative reversal was a betrayal that sharpened the liberal pro-Catholic stance. For Foxite Whigs, the refusal to pass Catholic Emancipation came to stand for bigotry, mismanagement of empire, the corruption of the ‘legitimate’ church and state alliance, the inadequacy of an unreformed parliament and indifference to the sufferings of the Irish poor. Yet proponents and opponents of Catholic Emancipation both had to face the new reality that millions in Ireland were now a disenfranchised religious community. Not only was this disaffection within the nation, but

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Irish Catholics were also the foot soldiers of empire. Britain depended on Catholics in the imperial army to push forward the colonial project and push back Napoleon. The question of Irish Catholic loyalty, however, caused great anxiety. In addition to the 1798 Rebellion, Robert Emmet’s short-lived 1803 uprising raised the threat of further violence.12 To further complicate matters, the French took Rome in 1798, the Vatican signed a concordat with the ‘usurper’ in 1801 and Pope Pius VII played a visible though humiliating role in Napoleon’s 1804 coronation. These events triggered a series of questions: would Catholics blindly follow the political orders of a pope, even if he were a puppet of France and Napoleon? Would allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament be giving the enemy a vote? The situation delayed any consideration of legislative relief until 1805, when Fox and Grenville brought forth a petition on behalf of Irish Catholics. This effort was opposed, ironically enough, by Pitt. Fox had argued that the passage of the Act of Union came with the understanding not that ‘catholic emancipation would be the effect of the union, but that the union was a pledge of catholic emancipation’ (CPD 4: 1045). The multivalent term ‘pledge’ captures the stakes of Fox’s argument. He asserts that not only was a promise made but that the Union was the tangible assurance of Catholic Emancipation. In addition to the common meaning of ‘assurance’, the word had a strong bridal connotation as in ‘pledging one’s troth’ (OED). Playing on marital rhetoric, Fox implies that a union had been enacted but that the pledge of the wedding vow had been betrayed by the government. In other words, by disavowing Catholic Emancipation, the ‘pre-marital’ Act of Union made Ireland a mistress, not a legal wife, through a dishonourable political conquest. Ina Ferris, Mary Jean Corbett and Katie Trumpener have discussed the ways in which such discourses about the union provided the political allegory for the national tale’s marriage plot between characters representative of England, Ireland or Scotland.13 The Catholic Question contributed to the national tale’s tendency to narrate the need to make a union that had ostensibly already taken place in 1800. Published in 1806, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl was the first novel to designate itself a ‘national tale’ and intervened at what seemed like a turning point in the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Pitt died on 23 January 1806, taking the government that had overwhelmingly and acrimoniously rejected the 1805 Irish Catholic petition with him. The succeeding government of Fox, Grenville and Sidmouth united leaders from across the political spectrum in the ‘Ministry of All Talents’. In the face of the Peninsular Wars with Napoleon, the Ministry proposed to

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strengthen the Empire and nation, not through force of arms or preserving the constitution from a Catholic influence, but through reform. Within this milieu, The Wild Irish Girl articulates and promotes the hope that a new national understanding might emerge from the resolution of the Catholic Question and the Act of Union. The novel paints a respectable, though otiose, picture of Ireland’s rich, ancient cultural history and its prolonged degradation at the hands of the English. Owenson follows the listless English aristocrat Horatio M. on a journey to the west of Ireland, where he meets the picturesque but antiquated Prince of Inismore, his captivating daughter Glorvina and their Catholic chaplain Father John. The complicated plotline involves both Horatio and his father courting Glorvina under an assumed identity in order to circumvent the Prince’s ancestral grudge against Horatio’s house. Despite difficulties of history and deception, The Wild Irish Girl culminates in a reconciliatory marital union between Horatio and Glorvina: Take then to thy bosom her whom heaven seems to have chosen as the intimate associate of thy soul, and whom national and hereditary prejudice would in vain withhold from thee.—In this the dearest, most sacred, and most lasting of all human ties, let the names of Inismore and M—be inseparably blended, and the distinctions of English and Irish, of protestant and catholic, for ever buried. And, while you look forward with hope to this family alliance being prophetically typical of a national unity of interests and affections between those who may be factiously severe, but who are naturally allied, lend your own individual efforts towards the consummation of an event so devoutly to be wished by every liberal mind. (250) Owenson’s narrative itself invites the reader to celebrate a marriage in sentimental, religious and humanistic rhapsody that allegorically brings about a ‘national unity’. Sectarianism gives way to this new family alliance for the common good. Owenson’s fiction demonstrates continuity between the discourses in Parliament and in literature. Her language approximates Grattan’s optimistic articulation of the new national order from an 1805 speech supporting Catholic Emancipation: The catholic no longer your inferior, nor you inferior to every one, save only the catholic; both must be free, and both must fight – the enemy and not one another. Thus the sects of religion, renouncing, the one all foreign connection, and the other all domestic proscription,

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Despite the similar sublimation of sectarian identities to national unity, there is a major difference between Grattan’s and Owenson’s versions of the reformed nation. Grattan’s militaristic vision issues forth in empire, aligns itself against Napoleon and takes the unified ‘phalanx’ as its governing metaphor. Owenson, by contrast, attempts to bring domestic values of affection, compassion and sympathy to the Catholic Question in order to resolve its factionalism through marriage, not a military formation. Yet even Owenson’s privileging of the affections and sympathy remains haunted by problems of history that trouble the novel’s conclusion. Just as the legislative completion of the Union was deferred in 1805, The Wild Irish Girl ends before the promised wedding of Horatio and Glorvina takes place. This is one of many ways that the form of The Wild Irish Girl registers the difficulty of blending a ‘papist’ past with the modern nation. Furthermore, neither one of the paramours nor the narrator gives this concluding speech. The speaker is Horatio’s father, the English Earl, who assumes all patriarchal power from the deceased Prince of Inismore. The Earl both dictates political and romantic union and directs the reformation of a ‘them’ – the Irish peasantry: ‘Shew them you do not distrust them, and they will not betray you; give them reason to believe you feel an interest in their welfare, and they will endeavour to promote your’s even at the risk of their own lives’ (250). Not only has an imbalanced power relationship been assumed, the Earl’s parting advice also details the best way to spread English hegemony. The epistolary novel, in which dialogic exchange was moving towards equal reunion, splits under the Earl’s commanding voice and concludes in uncertainty. The strange resolution of The Wild Irish Girl is as much about the transition in power that comes from killing off the Prince as it is about the union of the two islands. To facilitate progress, the Prince must die as an obsolete relic from an outmoded stage of development. The heavyhanded repetition of the word ‘last’ in the description of his death leaves no doubt that the Prince faces extinction as the last of his race: Religion claimed his last sense of duty, nature his last impulse of feeling; he fixed his last gaze on the face of his daughter; he raised

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shall form a strong country; and thus the two islands, renouncing all national prejudices, shall form a strong empire, a phalanx in the west, to check, perhaps ultimately to confound, the ambition of the enemy. (CPD 4: 939)

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These funereal allegories compete with the hymeneal political allegories even in the Earl’s reconciling speech. There is a subtle reference to the graveyard in his description of ‘the distinctions of English and Irish, of protestant and catholic, for ever buried’. The morbid undertone becomes more explicit and strange in an allusion to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. The language of the Earl’s description of the marriage as ‘the consummation of an event so devoutly to be wished by every liberal mind’ recalls Hamlet’s hope for death as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished’ (3.3.62–3) The consummation of the marriage alone cannot end the violence and conflict. Rather, the peaceful union of Britain also depends upon the consummating death, the passing into oblivion, of Glorvina’s Irish Catholic father. The conclusion interweaves eros between Glorvina and Horatio with thanatos for the Prince of Inismore. In the breathless finale, in which Horatio seeks the displaced Glorvina, Horatio finds the mouldering Inismore castle empty and draws an unexpected conclusion: ‘The good old prince was no more!—or his daughter was married! In either case it was probable the family had deserted the ruins of Inismore’ (235). Horatio posits two paths out of the ruins of history into modernity: marriage or death. This ‘either/or’ turns into a ‘both/and’, as death and marriage become figuratively linked. Father John performs the Catholic sacraments of last rites and matrimony in the final pages. Owenson continues this link at the level of diction in describing how ‘the priest began to celebrate the marriage rites; but the first words had not died on his lips when a figure, pale and ghastly, rushed forward’ (239). There is also ambiguity when Owenson depicts the expiring Prince looking at the pre-nuptial reunion of Horatio and Glorvina: ‘The prince, aghast, gazed on the hapless pair; thus seemingly entwined in the embrace of death’ (239). The description is muddled by the unclear antecedent for the phrase ‘seemingly entwined in the embrace of death’, which could refer to the pale and overwrought lovers. It could also modify the Prince who is in the process of dying and is thus within the ‘embrace of death’. ‘Aghast’ may refer on one level to the Prince’s mental shock, but ‘aghast’ carries an etymological residue of ‘ghost’, suggesting the historical father is becoming increasingly spectral (OED). The ambiguity of the syntax conflates the progressive marriage of the nations with the death of the obsolete Prince.

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himself with a dying effort to receive her last kiss: she fell on his bosom, their arms interlaced. In this attitude he expired. (241, emphasis added)

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

How then does The Wild Irish Girl address the issues associated with the Catholic Question and the troubled religious dimension of the Union? There would seem to be two proposed ‘solutions’ – the national marriage and the death of the anti-modern Prince – that would resolve the impasse over Catholic Emancipation and obviate Ireland’s entry into modern Britain. It would also seem, however, that both of these possibilities collapse. The mandated culmination of the marriage plot is deferred, uncertain and inequitable. This narrative structure suggests that a national courtship that does not fully acknowledge and work through psychological scars and developmental inequalities cannot address the deep rifts and rooted resentments in national identity. The ‘death’ plot enacts a similar deferral. It gets rid of difference by eliminating the character whose wounded hostility towards the dominant culture was most intense. This resolution admits an inability to forgive and risks underestimating the power of inherited bitterness. Rather than providing a definitive model for concluding the social strife surrounding the Catholic Emancipation debate, Owenson highlights the structures of thought that made it so difficult. If she does not profess a way out of these troubles, she does recognize entrenched modes of thinking and their limitations. While the novel may not resolve the difficulties of religious difference, it does begin to negotiate problems and possibilities accompanying the desire for reconciliation across the divisions of history.

The Catholic Question and the culture wars: 1807–15 By taking up both the end of the slave trade and the Catholic Question, the ‘Ministry of All Talents’ had promised two forms of emancipation. The slave trade was banned in 1807, an event that had long been advocated by Wilberforce. Yet while national ideals of liberty and religious exceptionalism drove the anti-slavery campaign, no such clear appeal to national identity promoted Catholic Emancipation. After Fox died in September 1806, Grenville lacked the charisma and Sidmouth the commitment to pass any forms of Catholic relief. The minor reforms to military chaplaincies presented in Parliament in March 1807 were rejected by George III, prompting the ministry to resign. James Gillray transformed this political turmoil into a national eschatology as a demonized Fox cowers in hellish exile across the English Channel along with the ‘Broadbottom’ coalition of the ‘All Talents’. They are lampooned as a rabble of papists and republicans retreating with the ‘Catholic Petition’ into France. Meanwhile, on the cliffs of Dover, Pitt’s apotheosis sanctifies Spencer Perceval’s succeeding ministry, which would persecute

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Figure 1 James Gillray, Disciples Catching the Mantle: The Spirit of Darkness Overshadowing the Priests of Baal. 1808.

political and religious dissent and oppose further reform (see Figure 1). In the October 1808 issue of The Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith felt the need to counter the prevalent view among supporters of Catholic Emancipation that: though the argument is given up, and the justice of the Catholic cause admitted, it seems to be generally conceived, that their case, at present, is utterly hopeless; and that, to advocate it any longer,

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Within a decade of the 1798 Rebellion and Emmet’s uprising, Smith registers the mounting fear that legislative stagnation will canalize the desperation of the oppressed into retribution rather than political reform. Both advocacy and irritation continued their competition for ‘public opinion’; cultural debates intensified while legislative action stalled. Grattan brought motions forward in the House of Commons in May 1810 and May 1811, but they were soundly defeated. His efforts were made more difficult by a division among Catholics over whether to accept a proposed security that would grant the crown a ‘veto’ over the appointment of Catholic bishops. With Perceval’s stringent no-popery policies, George III’s scruples and internal divisions among Catholics and pro-Catholic politicians, supporters of Catholic Emancipation could only wait for a change in the tide caused by a change in monarchs. The Prince of Wales had been a friend to the Whigs and to liberal causes, including Catholic Emancipation. His succession to the throne, it was hoped, would bring the opposition into power, resolve the gridlock over Catholic Emancipation and settle Britain’s place in international politics. In 1812, however, when the Prince assumed the regency, proCatholics would be greatly disappointed. The reversal of the Prince Regent’s position on the Catholic Question was captured in two different toasts. On 15 May 1811, an increasingly conservative Coleridge, writing in The Courier, ruefully quotes an account from The Dublin Evening Post of a Catholic Dinner in honour of the ‘friends of toleration’: The King—Drank in silence The Prince Regent, the Friend of Ireland and of Toleration; three time three—Drank with enthusiasm, and amid peals of applause. (EOT 2: 148) Coleridge was disgusted with Ireland’s disaffection for George III and the Irish hopes in the liberal-leaning Prince of Wales. However, in the Examiner of 22 March 1812, Leigh Hunt relates a very different reception for the newly Tory Regent at a St Patrick’s Day Dinner: When the cloth was removed, Non nobis Domine was sung, after which the Marquis of LANSDOWN, premising that the Meeting was assembled for purposes of charity rather than of party or political feeling, gave the Health of the King, which was drunk with enthusiastic 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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will only irritate the oppressed, without producing any change of opinion in those by whose influence and authority that oppression is continued. (77)

The Purgatorial Politics of the Catholic Question 35

The Regent’s withdrawal of support for Catholic Emancipation and his retention of a ministry opposed to it seemed to render vain Hunt’s own repeated efforts to break the reactionary hold on government. Hunt added his own disappointment and disapproval to the Irish catcalls against the Regent, once the great hope for liberals.14 As Cox and Greg Kucich have remarked, ‘1812 was a watershed year for the state of England and the fate of The Examiner, fraught with change and dislocation, great hopes and grim outlooks on the future’ (HSW 1: 203). After he lampooned the Regent as a ‘corpulent gentleman of fifty’ and an unprincipled hypocrite, Hunt received a sentence of two years’ imprisonment for libel (HSW 1: 221). Denouncing the Regent as an apostate, the ‘Hunt Circle’ would blast Wordsworth (appointed Collector of Stamps in 1813 by the anti-Catholic Lord Lonsdale), Coleridge (a contributor to the ministerial papers) and Southey (made laureate in 1813) as fallen heroes who left the cause of liberty for personal advancement. Catholic Emancipation was one of the pivotal issues in this remarkable year that conditioned the political and literary relationship of first- and secondgeneration romantic writers. As the central issue in the Regent’s confounding of his former Whig political confidantes, it would also figure prominently in what Charles Mahoney has identified as the ‘apostasy’ trope in romantic literary politics. The Catholic Question and the Regent’s reversal were deeply interwoven with the Napoleonic threat in the years 1812–15. Catholic Emancipation was a major factor in how Britain viewed Napoleon and vice versa. Napoleon’s threat revived all the late-1790s fears of a French invasion aided by a fifth column of disgruntled Catholics in Britain and Ireland. On the one hand, the liberal response was to attempt to secure allegiance from British Catholics by extending civil rights and parliamentary participation to them, thus making Britain’s cause their cause. As part of a radical attack on the Establishment, Byron used his seat in the House of Lords to defy the Liverpool administration, which had preserved an anti-Catholic Emancipation stance following Perceval’s assassination in May 1812. In his second and final speech to the Lords, Byron expressed this position in rousing rhetoric: There is no measure more repugnant to the designs and feelings of Buonoparte than Catholic Emancipation; no line of conduct more 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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and rapturous applause. This was followed by God save the King, and then the Noble Marquis gave ‘The Health of the Prince Regent,’ which was drunk with partial applause and loud and reiterated hisses. (HSW 1: 217)

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On the other hand, the Napoleonic threat also seemed the greatest incentive to conserve a defensive bulwark of Britishness. The Prince Regent would not risk a change to a pro-Catholic ministry and neither would Wordsworth, who praised Liverpool’s ministry in an 1813 letter to Francis Wrangham: I very much prefer the course of their Policy to that of the Opposition, especially on two points most near my heart,—resistance of Buonaparte by force of arms, and their adherence to the principles of the British constitution in withholding Political Power from the Roman Catholics. (MY 2: 108) A major effort to pass Catholic Emancipation in 1815 following Napoleon’s escape from Elba failed in the Commons on 17 May and in the Lords on 8 June, just 10 days before the decisive Battle of Waterloo. In her account of the forging of Britishness, Linda Colley sees Waterloo as a turning point that rendered British anti-Catholicism redundant. After the Napoleonic fears passed, Colley asks, ‘How was Britishness to be defined now that it could no longer rely so absolutely on a sense of beleaguered Protestantism and on regular conflict with the Other in the shape of Catholic France?’ (322). The fall of Napoleon would thus usher in a new dawn in national culture by evacuating the foreign Catholic threat against which Britons both united and defined themselves. There is ambivalence, however, even in Colley’s description of this emphatic turning point (321). On the one hand, during the subsequent campaign for Catholic Emancipation, she posits the ‘shrinking’ importance of ‘religious zeal and intolerance’ for Britons (329). On the other hand, she also documents the unprecedented cultural resistance and massive popular petition campaigns that vehemently expressed ‘a native tradition of resistance to Catholicism which stretched back for centuries’ (330). She ultimately bases her conclusion about Waterloo on the subsequent lack of violent protest in the 1820s on the scale of the Gordon Riots (332). Yet this does not necessarily indicate a diminution of anti-Catholicism or the dissolution of the historical models that fired such uprisings. The persistence and indeed the intensification of the Catholic Emancipation debate after Waterloo would suggest two

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propitious to his projects than that which has been pursued, is pursuing, and, I fear, will be pursued towards Ireland. What is England without Ireland, and what is Ireland without Catholics? It is on the basis of your tyranny that Napoleon hopes to build his own. (42–3)

modifications of Colley’s narrative. First, in founding Britishness on opposition to French Catholicism, Colley underestimates the animus against Irish Catholicism, the ‘timeless’ national sense of historically inherited anti-Catholicism and, as Luke Gibbons has remarked, the way ‘empire begins at home’ (Gaelic Gothic 11). Second, there was a more nuanced cultural transformation that began prior to 1815 and extended beyond it. The romantic period produced alternative forms of cultural containment for the perceived Catholic threat to national identity that mitigated the effect of repealing sectarian legislation and structured how British society regulated ‘superstition’ more broadly. This transformation is perhaps more significant than sporadic violence because it could shape the position not only of religious communities in Britain but also of analogous ‘primitive’ religions and cultures in the British Empire. In his 1812 parliamentary speech, Byron recognizes the rootedness and reach of British anti-Catholicism by constructing a cosmopolitan model of history that links the suffering of British Catholics to that of other groups. While the slave trade and Catholic Emancipation were often associated, Byron, with characteristic irony, claims to ‘pity the Catholic peasantry for not having the good fortune to be born black’ (34). The comparisons do not end there, however, as he also links Catholic and Jewish plights: It was said by somebody in a former debate ... if the Catholics are emancipated, why not the Jews? If this sentiment was dictated by compassion for the Jews, it might deserve attention, but as a sneer against the Catholic, what is it but the language of Shylock transferred from his daughter’s marriage to Catholic Emancipation: ‘Would any of the tribe of Barabbas/Should have it rather than a Christian.’ (39) Rather than finding development or progress in history, Byron focuses on the historical oppression of minorities, whether they are Catholic, Jewish or African. He can thus reverse an imperial paradigm, arguing that British anti-Catholic propaganda is so bigoted and savage that it would be better to send the Irish ‘to those islands in the South Seas, where they might humanely learn to become cannibals; it would be less disgusting that they were brought up to devour the dead, than persecute the living’ (37). He is also quick, however, to attack Mediterranean Catholics for their oppressive acts, criticizing Britain’s support of the intolerant and autocratic ‘Popish allies’ in Spain and Portugal. What emerges in Byron’s speech is support of the Catholic cause as part of a

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much larger structural problematic in world history and politics – the abuse of vulnerable groups through the blunt and cruel operation of corrupt power. As in the romantic culture wars at large, this structural approach to the Catholic Question and history did not remain isolated in the ‘political’ genre of Byron’s parliamentary speeches, but fundamentally shaped the literary form of this period, most notably the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Written in 1809–11 and published in March 1812, Childe Harold contains the same type of elaborate, detailed historical, political and antiquarian footnotes as The Wild Irish Girl. In Byron’s notes on the Greeks under the Ottoman Empire, he explicitly draws parallels with the Catholic Question. He groups the sufferings of the Greeks with the ‘Catholics of Ireland and the Jews throughout the world’ and ‘such other cudgelled and heterodox people’ (201). However, he doubts that they can hope for the type of political reform by which the ‘English have at last compassionated their Negroes, and under a less bigoted government may probably one day release their Catholic brethren’ (202). His prose playfully slips between the Greeks and Catholics as minority groups with august but ruined pasts that suffer under a despotic modern empire: The Greeks also—a kind of Eastern Irish papists—have a college of their own at Maynooth—no, at Haivali; where the heterodox receive much the same kind of countenance from the Ottoman as the Catholic college from the English legislature. Who shall then affirm that the Turks are ignorant bigots, when they thus evince the exact proportion of Christian charity which is tolerated in the most prosperous and orthodox of all possible kingdoms? But, though they allow all this, they will not suffer the Greeks to participate in their privileges: no, let them fight their battles, and pay their haratch (taxes), be drubbed in this world, and damned in the next. And shall we then emancipate our Irish Helots? Mahomet forbid! We should then be bad Musselmans, and worse Christians; at present we unite the best of both—jesuitical faith, and something not much inferior to Turkish toleration. (211) Byron corrects himself, seemingly mid-breath, for confounding the recently founded Irish Catholic seminary at Maynooth with a Greek establishment at Havaili. The Irish and the Greeks share a common identity that is both national and religious (either as ‘Irish Helots’ or ‘Eastern Irish papists’) and common penal conditions, such as the denial

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of political participation, inordinate taxation and dangerous service in the imperial army. This ideal is a major theme of the poem – Byron’s scepticism of all systems of power and his sympathy for all those, across creed and nationality, who suffer from governmental oppression. Yet in the poetry, there is also ambivalence over nation, history and Catholicism. On the one hand, Byron’s poetic efforts to ‘emancipate the Greeks’ would seem to be a rallying cry readily transferable to Catholic Emancipation (202). In a rousing call to arms that could not only sanction the Greek revolution, but also reprise the 1798 Irish Rebellion, Byron proclaims, ‘Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not/Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 2.76.720–1). Southey, in an infamous 1828 Quarterly Review article attacking Catholic Emancipation, alleges that O’Connell proclaimed these very lines to whip up the Catholic Association into a demagogic fervour (Thomas 117; Southey ‘Roman Catholic Question’ 542). Significantly, Byron’s exhortation to seize liberty in the present gathers power from its appeal to the past. In a drumming anaphora, he sutures a continuous, heroic tradition for the Greek resistance: When riseth Lacedemon’s hardihood, When Thebes Epaminondas rears again, When Athens’ children are with hearts endued, When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men, Then may’st thou be restored; but not till then. A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust: and when Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate, Recal its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate? (2.84.792–800) In a gesture that mirrors what Juan L. Sanchez has called the ‘power and sincerity’ of Byron’s appeal to a ‘forgotten tradition’ in Childe Harold’s treatment of Spain, here Greece’s historic tradition must be summoned and ‘restored’ so that ancient liberty can invade the present (457). The closing alexandrine’s interrogative mode signals the uncertain prospects for recalling and renovating a glorious, resistant past for a ‘shatter’d’ Greek culture. The resources for the return, however, consist in cultural memories – the very woundedness and ruin of Greek culture. No resource for this revival is more potent than the landscape’s ruins, and Byron seeks to unleash the power of their recalcitrant memories. Greek architectural ruins remain vocal, and their very persistence is subversive testimony. Byron breaks from topological description into

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Yet to the remnants of thy splendour past Shall pilgrims, pensive, but unwearied, throng; Let such approach this consecrated land, And pass in peace along the magic waste: But spare its relics—let no busy hand Deface the scenes, already how defac’d! Not for such purpose were these altars plac’d: Revere the remnant nations once rever’d: So may our country’s name be undisgrac’d, So may’st thou prosper where thy youth was rear’d, By every honest joy of love and life endear’d! (2.91.855–63) The notes make this critique of Lord Elgin’s plan to transport the Parthenon’s marbles to Britain explicit. Elgin’s removal of the sacred ‘relics’ into a foreign museum would undercut the Greeks’ chief means of resistance – their living memory of a free past. The text thus constructs a revolutionary discourse around the ruins of history. Byron’s political appeal to ruins paralleled ongoing English Catholic efforts to create a historical discourse to advance Catholic Emancipation. For instance, The Catholic Magazine and Review, founded in 1813, announced itself as a vehicle ‘of important information relative to the great cause of Catholic Emancipation, and the unlimited exercise of universal Theo-Political Rights’ (x). The journal published accounts of political debates and reviews alongside poetry that centred on religious, political and historic topics.15 For instance, a satirical poem found the image of the Prince Regent’s carriage running into a post on the way to the House of Commons an apt symbol for his apostasy: ‘Some thought the disaster, and so will my readers,/The natural result of employing BAD LEADERS!’ (52). Another poem, titled the ‘Miseries of Heresy’, attempts to do for the ruined ‘temples’ of a Catholic past what Byron does for the Parthenon: Of that pure church despoil’d in Henry’s reign, For union fam’d, sad monuments remain; Amid whose crumbling ruins spread around, How sad, how desolate, is Albion found! (Walsh 108)

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reverence, gasping, ‘Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted, holy ground’ (2.88.828). With religious diction, his adoration intensifies before the Parthenon, as does the possibility that the haunting spirit of the past might return:

This poem exemplifies the persistent emphasis in the Catholic press on reclaiming a Catholic stake in national identity through antiquarian and historical projects that focus on Britain’s monastic and church ruins. By linking the Catholic claims to the suffering of other persecuted minorities and by engaging in a discourse about ruins that was part of Catholic campaigns, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage could have been a poem about Catholic Emancipation. Why is it not? The Catholic Question remains sublimated in the footnotes, ostensibly never penetrating the poetic text. How do we account for this split between text and paratext? The answer lies in the pressures that religious and national history exerted on narratives treating Catholicism in Britain. The historical fissures in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage go much deeper than the notational apparatus and pervade the first two cantos, registering Byron’s ambivalence on the Catholic Question. These historical pressures operate on a uniquely personal level for Byron. He may have been a radical proponent of Catholic Emancipation, but his wealth and title ultimately derived from Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. In A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in England and Ireland (1824–6), a polemically populist pro-Catholic history of the Reformation as the overthrowing of a charitable church by an avaricious gentry, William Cobbett listed Byron’s Newstead Abbey among the despoiled monastic institutions that enriched the aristocracy at the expense of the poor: In Nottingham. At Newstead. An Augustine Priory, built by Henry II. In the year 1170; yearly revenue 219l. 18s. 81/2d., now worth 4,398l. 14s. 2d.; granted, 32 Henry VIII., to Sir John Byron. For Cobbett, Byron was complicit in the aristocratic ‘Old Corruption’ ransacking the ‘Old Religion’. On a broader and more significant level, the division within Childe Harold speaks to a fundamentally split perspective in Byron’s politics and worldview. Liberals like Byron supported Catholic Emancipation as a political cause but had no social, historical or cultural regard for Catholicism or Catholics. G.I.T. Machin discusses this double-edged position in The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820–1830 (1964): The radicals upheld religious liberty on principle, but their support for Catholic emancipation was hardly more than lukewarm. Unbelieving utilitarians were naturally antipathetic to the Catholic creed … the

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In keeping with this view, Byron’s antipathy towards Catholicism as another oppressive structure of power develops in the text and notes. The Catholicism of Portugal and Spain appears in a dark light as ‘frugal monks’ from the monastery of ‘Our Lady of Punishment’ boastfully tell legends of persecuting ‘impious men’. In the South, rustic crosses arise not from devotion but as ‘memorials frail of murderous wrath’ (20.256–8, 20.255n, 21.264). Even the ‘Turks’, against whom Byron would later fight in Greece, fare better than Mediterranean papists: The Ottomans, with all their defects, are not a people to be despised. Equal, at least, to the Spaniards, they are superior to the Portuguese. If it be difficult to pronounce what they are, we can at least say what they are not: they are not treacherous, they are not cowardly, they do not burn heretics, they are not assassins, nor has an enemy advanced to their capital. They are faithful to their sultan till he becomes unfit to govern, and devout to their God without an inquisition. (210) The image of the ruthless, vindictive Mediterranean Catholic informs Byron’s statement in an 1814 addition to the preface that wards off a revival of medieval Catholicism: ‘I fear a little investigation will teach us not to regret these monstrous mummeries of the middle ages’ (6). Byron could passionately argue for Catholic Emancipation as a reform issue that would subvert the entrenched religious and political Establishment, and he could also sympathize with the plight of downtrodden Irish Catholics. At the same time, however, he was sceptical about the compatibility of those very Catholics with modern civil society. Would they not bring with them the medieval menaces of the Inquisition? Would not their ‘return’ threaten a renewed cycle of oppression and persecution? Thus already exiled from his own campaign, Byron gets caught in the logic of Britishness. His most readily available cause is tainted with his own distaste for the Catholic past. The hopelessness, scepticism and formal ambivalence of Childe Harold convey the political frustrations of Byron in 1812 as he fights for Catholic Emancipation with self-conscious futility – a feeling dominating Harold’s world. Greece – redolent with a classical, not Catholic lineage and exotically outside the confines of British identity – provided a better venue than

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radicals were interested in religious liberty only as an aid to their obsessive demand for political reform; and they were alienated when the Irish Catholics sometimes gave up supporting parliamentary reform in an effort to conciliate the tories. (8)

Dublin or Lancashire for a romantic revolution untroubled by the ambiguities of British history. That Coleridge, tarred by Byron and the Hunt Circle with the charge of religious and political apostasy, developed a similar discursive conflation among varying groups is another irony of the Catholic Emancipation debate. Not only had Coleridge abandoned the Jacobinism and politicized Unitarianism from what Nicholas Roe has termed his ‘radical years’, but he also drew attacks for reversing his position on the Catholic Question. In 1814 he contributed six fiery articles to The Courier on the Catholic Question under the pseudonym of an ‘Irish Protestant’. The essays, typically part of a larger unrealized project, hyperbolically reacted to the moderate criticism of government policy in Ireland by William Fletcher, a judge in Wexford, site of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Like the speech by Richard Price that instigated the overflowing of Burke’s antiJacobin bile, Coleridge’s reflections magnified Fletcher’s comments as signs and symbols of resurgent Jacobinism in the Catholic Emancipation campaign that would destroy the moral and spiritual fabric of the nation. Coleridge’s depiction of the threat of ‘Catholic Jacobinism’ resurrects, for the Napoleonic Wars, the anxieties over United Irishmen becoming French allies. Within Coleridge’s tirade, all that is Irish can be aligned with a more primitive stage of society – what Coleridge labels ‘the bewildering influences of Irish superstition, and the barbarism and the virulence of Irish clanship’ (EOT 2: 405). Coleridge writes so vehemently on the Catholic Question because he sees the possibility of this premodern savagery monstrously taking on new modern forms. The political alliance of superstitious Catholics and irreligious radicals like Hunt embodied his doctrine of ‘extremes meet’ – seemingly opposite ends of the political, cultural and social spectrum coming together to undermine the via media of the Anglican Church and the British constitution.16 This dark vision structures Coleridge’s views on religious politics and British history in high-pitched and limber prose of probing paranoia. Coleridge figures the combination of Catholicism and Jacobinism as a ‘ “multitudinous” Idol’ in the shape of Briareus and a serpent regenerating from a ‘dissevered spine’ that can unleash the ‘old venom’ and speak with ‘voices, supprest indeed and low, yet to be recognized by an attentive ear, as the same foretokening hiss’ (EOT 2: 388, 389). Coleridge divined the dangerous charms of compromise and conciliation emanating from ‘supprest’ groups and warned of the militant intentions of this ‘reforming’ proteus: These are its shapes and dresses when the spirit of Jacobinism travels incognito, and in which it prepares and announces its approaching

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public entry! Behold it in that, its next, and boldest metamorphosis, like the Kehama of our laurel-honouring laureate, one and the same, yet many and multiform and dividuous, assaulting with combined attack all the gates and portals of law and usage, in all the blazonry of open war! (EOT 2: 384) The reference to Southey’s The Curse of Kehama not only aligns Coleridge with Southey but also signals his divergence from Byron’s model of Orientalism. Whereas Byron equated the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Coleridge conflates the despotism and superstition of Catholicism with the Oriental Kehama. As Tim Fulford has argued, this model informed the work of both Coleridge and Southey from the turn of the century. Fulford writes that Coleridge ‘depicted the Irish and the Hindus as peoples whose enthrallment to superstitious and idolatrous religion resembled that of the Maltese and Sicilian peasantry’ (‘Catholicism and Polytheism’ 233). In his 1817 Lay Sermons, Coleridge piles together the superstition of papists, Muslims and Hindus as ‘amulets, bead-rolls, periapts, fetisches, and the like pedlary, on pilgrimages to Loretto, Mecca, or the temple of Jaggernaut, arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture on the other, followed by a motley group of friars, pardoners, faquirs, gamesters, flagellants, mountebanks, and harlots’ (64–5). He also puts an opposite interpretation on Byron’s comparison of Jews and Irish Catholics by denigrating Charles Butler and other contemporary Catholic writers as ‘Romish Rabbis’ (Marginalia 3: 459). While Byron’s amalgamation views the powers of the Anglican Establishment as a form of ‘Turkish’ tyranny, Coleridge lumps together the Pope, the Turk and all those outsiders in contact with the Empire as potential enemies that form a monstrous threat to British civilization. For Coleridge, the sheer madness of Catholic Emancipation was its invitation of this ‘Dragon’, this ‘miscreated shape’, into the heart of the nation’s government (EOT 2: 389). While Byron and Coleridge construct two distinct competing models that link the Catholic Question with Orientalist and colonial discourses, the shared intensity and scope of their writing indicate that the issue stretches beyond the French defeat at Waterloo.

The Catholic Question through Waterloo and Peterloo: 1815–22 The diminution of the Napoleonic threat did not solve the Catholic Question, which lasted throughout the 1820s. Proposed bills failed in 1816, 1817 and 1819 with Napoleon safely on St Helena and Pope Pius

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free in Rome. In an 1817 parliamentary speech, Joseph Yorke argued that circumstances had changed from 1813 when Britain was at war with almost all of Europe and the Pope was ‘a close prisoner’ to Napoleon. Yorke also states that ‘our great enemy was overthrown … never to rise again; a most glorious and salutary peace had been concluded for all Europe, and the pope was now sui juris; his holiness was now residing quietly at the Vatican’ (HPD 36: 340–1). Nevertheless, Yorke could still not vote for Catholic Emancipation based on the perceived danger of Irish Catholicism. All attempts to find some legislative formula that would lead to an acceptable compromise failed. In light of the gridlock in officialdom, however, attempts to foster unofficial cultural transformations were dynamic. If legislation could not overcome sectarianism, a new formulation of national culture that was inclusive but also still British might be able to enact the domestic unity that the Act of Union did not. If successful, such an effort would potentially render the passage of Catholic Emancipation unnecessary or at least anti-climactic. These vituperative conflicts superseded Waterloo, drove Coleridge’s efforts to redefine the cultural parameters of national identity and eliminated any neutral ground for exploring the nation’s past, including John Lingard’s objective model of historiography. Catholic Emancipation continued to induce anxieties in Coleridge, leading to his attempt to contain these threats through a defensive ideal of the intellectual and creative life of the nation. As we have seen, Coleridge’s vocal change in political position drew charges of ‘apostasy’ from reformist opponents. As incriminating evidence of this shift, his 1797 poem ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ resurfaced in 1816, like Southey’s Wat Tyler. While the older Coleridge blasted Judge Fletcher in The Courier for transferring the ‘whole blame of disquiet or rebellion from a country to its governors’ (378), the Examiner defended the young, radical Coleridge for doing just that to Pitt, reprinting ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ in November 1816. The Hunt brothers even included a note to clarify that the spirit of the unnamed damned politician was indeed Pitt. The poem also appeared, without Coleridge’s consent, in 1817, accompanying The Apostate Bard, an anonymous satirical poem attacking Southey. The most remarkable aspect of this exchange, however, is Coleridge’s response. While preparing the Biographia Literaria and the Sybilline Leaves, Coleridge decided not only to include ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’ in his most significant collection of poetry, but also to buffer it with a long, nervous ‘Apologetic preface’. To reconcile his two political selves in this preface, Coleridge sketches a theory of the poetic imagination that exemplifies aspects of what

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Jerome McGann has called the ‘romantic ideology’ – the claims of the romantics to transcend historical and political context through the aesthetic. Coleridge gives an account of a literary soiree in which Scott praised and recited ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, offending most and embarrassing Coleridge. Rather than remaining silent, Coleridge claims to have launched an extemporaneous disquisition on religion, politics and poetry that constitutes the first half of the preface. To excuse himself, he argues that the act of poetic creation is necessarily divorced from reality, especially political and personal reality. He asserts that the poem was part of a creative rapture and was not congruous with any political activism: That the writer must have been some man of warm feelings and active fancy; that he had painted to himself the circumstances that accompany war in so many vivid and fantastic forms, as proved that neither the images nor the feelings were the result of observation, or in any way derived from realities. I should judge, that they were the product of his own seething imagination, and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable exultation which is experienced in all energetic exertion of intellectual power; that in the same mood he had generalized the causes of the war, and then personified the abstract and christened it by the name which he been [sic] accustomed to hear most often associated with its management and measures. (433) In other words, the imaginative power removes experience from the limits of reality and displaces history into abstracted poetic forms. Offering a comparison from literary history, Coleridge distances himself from the French Revolution and separates Dante from the Florentine civil war. According to the 1817 preface, the young Lake Poet had not actually meant to cast fire and brimstone on Pitt in 1797, just as it was not the Guelph poet’s ‘serious wish’ that his sectarian enemies ‘should actually suffer the fantastic and horrible punishments, to which he has sentenced them in his Hell and Purgatory’ (432). The 1817 Coleridge also claims that his 1797 poetic exposé on British suppression in the Vendée and Wexford ‘was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers’ (433). He goes on to make a distinction that encapsulates McGann’s critique of the apolitical posture of romanticism by demanding that readers always enquire as to whether a ‘representation’ is ‘worded historically, or only hypothetically’ (436). Not only did this articulation of hypothetical, not historical romantic ideology emerge in the conflict over the Catholic Question, but Coleridge

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also uses his model in the second half of the preface to craft a national tradition that sutures political battles among religious groups into one continuous British cultural identity. He sets himself a difficult test case from the religious politics of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars. Citing the royalist, high-church Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor and the Puritan, republican Milton, Coleridge gives extravagant examples of each writer gleefully envisioning ‘traitors’ and ‘rebels’ (and possibly each other) grotesquely suffering under God’s eternal wrath. He approaches both works, however, as the ‘poetic’ or ‘hypothetic’ operation of an abstracting imagination. By thus dismissing their actual historical positions, Coleridge yokes the ornery pair under a common ethical and spiritual social ideal that anticipates his 1829 formulation of national culture in On the Constitution of the Church and State: Differing, then, so widely, and almost contrariantly, wherein did these great men agree? Wherein did they resemble each other? In Genius, in Learning, in unfeigned Piety, in blameless Purity of Life, and in benevolent aspirations and purposes for the moral and temporal improvement of their fellow-creatures! (439) Coleridge adds toleration to this transcendent national culture that he sees as distinctly Anglican and British, claiming that he not only knows ‘the Church-Establishment to be tolerant’, but also sees ‘in it the greatest, if not the sole safe bulwark of Toleration’ (440). Preserving this rampart of national culture from the intolerant influence of papism thus becomes another ground for opposing legislation for tolerating Catholics. Anti-Catholic rhetoric animates Coleridge’s somewhat airy definition of British identity. However strong their mutual antipathy, Milton and Taylor are united in their opposition to ‘that guarded gentleness, to that sighing reluctance, with which the holy Brethren of the Inquisition deliver over a condemned heretic’ (439). He ridicules ‘vulgar superstitions’ despite those ‘who deem it profaneness and irreverence to call an ape an ape, if it but wear a monk’s cowl on its head’ (434). Within this short preface, Coleridge makes two dramatic ideological manoeuvres to defend his own ‘apostasy’ over the Catholic Question. First, he formulates a definition of the poetic imagination that evades history and, second, he forges a unified, seamless national identity transcending religious conflicts in British history. Those wearing the ‘monk’s cowl’, however, also had an interest in revising national culture and history. The Catholic priest and historian John Lingard produced in his History of England (1819) the first English

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example of the scientific historiographic method later associated with the Germans. Subsequently dubbed the English Ranke, Lingard relied on primary source material and redressed historical assumptions that kept Catholics from participating in civil society.17 In the 1817 debates on the Catholic Question in the House of Lords, Herbert Marsh, the Anglican bishop of Llandaff, gave a speech indicative of the type of cultural structures that the Establishment used to stave off pro-Catholic pressures. He argued that in Britain, ‘where religion and politics are so blended’, it is impossible to abstract legislative matters from religious history and theological beliefs (HPD 36: 617). Given the papists’ record of errors and allegiance to the foreign power of the Vatican, Catholics failed to meet what he termed the ‘proper standard’ for participating in British government, namely ‘civil capacity and civil worth’ (HPD 36: 615–17). Lingard’s work represents an attempt to prove the civility of Catholics through an ‘objective’ national history. Started as early as 1811, Lingard’s History of England had the ambitious goal of replacing the histories of sceptical writers such as Hume or Gibbons with an account that treats both Protestants and Catholics fairly. Method was the key to his claim of impartiality. In Lingard’s The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (1806), he attempted to remove history from ‘religious polemics’ (iii). For him, religion should not generate distorted sectarian narratives, but should rather guarantee intellectual honesty. He calls it his ‘religious duty’ to consult original documents (iv). As part of his effort in The History of England not to ‘write a romance in the place of a history’, he again uses theological diction, highlighting that his research was ‘religiously confined’ to primary sources (iii, v). His methodological motto – ‘Who would draw from the troubled stream, when he may drink at the fountain head?’ – echoes biblical, not scientific language (iv). This shift of the role of religion from advancing the perspective of a particular Church or community to guaranteeing a sincere pursuit of truth encapsulates Lingard’s strategy for making history a place for potential reintegration rather than sectarian division. As a result, his work is directed not at his co-religionists but at the ‘patronage of the public’ (iii). If Coleridge had synthesized an imagined tradition to serve as a ‘bulwark’ of Britishness to keep others out, Lingard attempts to construct a new rational reading public that would allow others in. With his objective method, Lingard hoped to neutralize the histories of hatred that denied the ‘civil worth’ of Catholics and to demonstrate that even a Catholic priest could possess a ‘civil capacity’. However, Lingard’s historiographic appeal to an impartial public sphere was itself a work divided by the political contest over history

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and shows a consciousness of a history of suffering. Lingard’s claim that ‘History is little more than a record of the miseries inflicted on the many by the passions of the few’ demonstrates a sense of woundedness and empathy for historical suffering (1: 45). This should not be divorced from his claim that his approach ‘preserved him from imbibing the prejudices, or copying the mistakes, of others’ about ‘some of the most important occurrences in our history’ (v). His appeal to original sources derived not so much from scientific rigour as from a need to overleap skewed secondary accounts in order to recover an untold, marginalized past. It is a testimony to the prominence of religious politics in romantic-period Britain that the first florescence of the German model of professional history not only emerged from an attempt to go beyond ideologically charged sectarian histories, but also remained marked by those histories. Lingard’s version of national history entered the 1819 maelstrom of cultural politics that enveloped the reform movement and its opponents. Following E.P. Thompson, James Chandler observes that, in 1819, England had not been closer to revolution since the 1640s (20). Parliament’s failure to pass Catholic Emancipation, which was part of the programme for radical reform, was a key stimulus to the revolutionary stirrings. The ‘remonstrance’ issued by Manchester radicals at their January meeting, a prelude of sorts to Peterloo, criticized the Hanoverian dynasty for failing to secure and maintain ‘the blessings of civil and religious freedom’ (quoted in Read 215). Banners carried at Peterloo called for ‘universal civil and religious liberty’, encompassing both the cause of Catholics and Dissenters. The radical journal The Gorgon railed against the feckless moderation of the Whigs for sometimes backing down from Catholic Emancipation (356, 27 March 1819). The Editors of The Gorgon were nonetheless deeply divided about Catholicism, blasting the ‘Established Church’ as ‘still infected with all the grossness and absurdity of the Catholic faith’, including the ‘cannibal doctrine’ of transubstantiation (300, 6 February 1819). Catholics were also divided about their role in the reform movement, officially drawing back from radicalism following Peterloo. This caveat did not preclude popular Catholic discontent though. Donald Read argues that ‘the Radicals with their tempting programme of Catholic Emancipation, and even more with their remedies for distress gained a large volume of support among the poverty-stricken Irish handloom weavers of Manchester’ (204). Indeed in 1819, the Radical movement was emerging from industrialized and Catholic Lancashire, where Lingard was writing his history.

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The reception of Lingard’s ‘impartial’ History of England shows that history could not afford any neutral political ground on the Catholic Question during the romantic-era culture wars. Writing in the proEmancipation Edinburgh Review, John Allen noted that Lingard’s work ‘deservedly placed him among the most eminent of our English historians’, but qualified his praise because Lingard was ‘a decided partisan of the Church of Rome’ (1, 6). However, a lack of pro-Catholic partisanship or theological reflection disappointed the English Catholic Bishop John Milner, who tried to have the volumes condemned in Rome for failing to express the beauty and glory of Catholic history. Conversely, when the non-Catholic Cobbett used Lingard’s work as a major source text for A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, he intensified the latent resistance beneath Lingard’s conciliatory tone to write a passionately pro-Catholic, anti-Establishment history of medieval England.18 The most telling responses came from the conservative, antiCatholic journals. In The Quarterly Review, Henry Hart Milman found that the ‘general tendency of the whole narrative’ was the ‘disparagement of the Protestant religion of this country’ (5). In particular, he was suspicious of Lingard’s scientific method, claiming ‘the overstrained pretension to candour excites distrust’ (6). In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, George Croly19 called Lingard a ‘wretched advocate’ of ‘sanguinary and godless superstition’ whose ‘style is still that of the cloister, monotonous, creeping, and cold’ (313). As ‘a thorough Papist’, his work is ‘venomous with the most sanctified appearance of impartiality’ and ‘hostile to all the national feelings of religious liberty’ (313). Croly expands his attack on Lingard to address the high stakes of this historiographic debate over Catholic Emancipation as beginning with the law but extending to the cultural realm. Catholic Emancipation went to the heart of national identity and national culture: We look upon the general Roman Catholic question in a much higher light than that of a mere parliamentary topic. The enemies of the British constitution see in it a great ground on which they may fix their batteries; and the friends of that constitution cannot be too vigorous and vigilant in meeting the attack, whether open or secret, whether hurried on by the rash and infuriate violence of faction, or silently conducted by the subtler artifices of fraudulent intrigue, and written falsehood. (315) For Croly, the ‘Roman Catholic question’ was no ‘mere parliamentary topic’. There is perhaps no clearer statement of the way in which

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the debate over the Catholic Question became part of the romantic period’s cultural wars. The transformations proposed as part of Catholic Emancipation brought with them a broad array of issues that could either repulse or invigorate. Culture and constitution were intimately linked. As Blackwood’s indicates, conflicts ranged from parliamentary debates to the violence of faction to the contests of fiction. The year 1819 marked a transitional point in the formation of these models. The threat from Napoleon and Jacobinism had both come and gone without resolution of the Catholic Question. The 1819 parliamentary debate over the Catholic Question revealed what seemed to be an insuperable gridlock between the House of Commons, who were very close to passing some form of Catholic Emancipation, and the House of Lords, who were trenchantly against it. In 1820, the Prince Regent became King George IV without a change in the Coronation Oath that had prompted George III’s scrupulous rejection of Catholic Emancipation. An 1820 effort to petition the new king fizzled out during the distraction of the Queen Caroline affair. As Machin argues, the issue would increasingly become a pawn in a power struggle over the prerogatives of the aristocracy versus the liberalizing aspirations of the Commons. This opposition became more stringent in the tense atmosphere following Peterloo. In addition, Henry Grattan, a leading proponent of Emancipation, died in June 1820. Further legislative efforts spearheaded by Francis Burdett in 1821 and 1822 went nowhere. Throughout the 1820s, the conflict between cultural pressure and parliamentary standstill would intensify, especially with O’Connell’s mobilization of the Irish Catholic Association in 1823. These conflicts, however, had roots in the romantic-period treatment of the Catholic Question stretching back at least to 1778. Issues of national identity, religious history and national culture raised by the political spectre of Catholicism fundamentally transformed romantic-period culture and literature across a range of genres. Parliamentary reform, the national Union, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Empire, abolition, the treatment of religious minorities, the view of the Irish, Orientalism – all of these affected or were affected by the Catholic Question.

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History, Sympathy and Sectarianism in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story

The memory of the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald has survived for many only in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), in which the Bertram children’s staging of her adaptation of Kotzuebue’s Lovers’ Vows causes scandal.1 In 1908 Lytton Strachey lamented in the preface to Inchbald’s 1791 novel A Simple Story that ‘what we should most like to know of Mrs. Inchbald’s life has vanished beyond recovery’ (vii). Recent critical work on romantic-period drama and women’s writing, however, has countered this supposed disappearance by reinstating Inchbald among the era’s most significant writers, engaging personalities and prolific contributors to the theatre. As a playwright, she penned at least 21 plays, which enjoyed great success on the stage.2 Comparable to Anna Barbauld’s 50-volume British Novelists (1810), Inchbald’s 25-volume Remarks for the British Theatre (1806–9) was an important landmark in women’s literary criticism.3 With the recent reissue of her 1790s novels A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796), the publication of her journals and diaries, and Annibel Jenkins’s I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (2003), Inchbald has made a striking reappearance in romantic studies.4 With this recuperation has come a critical reassessment of Inchbald’s writing, largely focused on gender and politics. Early evaluations of her life and work tended to emphasize the limitations she faced and often fell victim to. Katherine Rogers sees Inchbald as a woman writer of ‘unfulfilled potential’ who could only partially ‘brave’ resistance to conventional gender roles (‘Inhibitions’ 77, 71). While in The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (1976) Gary Kelly captures Inchbald’s revolutionary aesthetics and commitments, he also argues that her ‘religiosity’ accompanied a later ‘route of retreat’ from politics that ‘escaped through the romance of sympathy’ (112). A Simple Story has become an 52

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important, though still conflicted locus for revisiting these readings of Inchbald’s life, work and thought. Susan Allen Ford, Terry Castle, George Haggerty, Jo Alyson Parker, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Candace Ward have examined how the novel tests the boundaries of female freedom with varying degrees of daring and success. Eleanor Ty and Ian Balfour have further developed Kelly’s seminal work on Inchbald’s engagement with revolutionary discourses. These critical endeavours have all been enhanced by the insights of Emily Hodgson Anderson, Hye-Soo Lee and Nora Nachumi, who have traced the cross-fertilization of the novel’s style and form with romantic-period dramaturgical language and practice. Yet, despite the recent emphasis on the influence of particularized religious contexts on romantic-era culture, this rich emerging picture of A Simple Story’s social engagement, aesthetic complexity and psychological depth has not included a much-needed revised account of Inchbald’s ‘religiosity’, specifically her English Catholic identity. While Barbara Judson gestures towards Robert Ryan’s The Romantic Reformation (1997) in her article ‘The Psychology of Satan: Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story’, her reading of Dorriforth and Miss Milner’s relationship as an allegorical rewriting of Paradise Lost with a ‘covert critique of Christianity’ rehearses what she herself calls a ‘familiar romantic agenda’ that fits the novel into the generalized secularization narrative of Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (600, 605).5 However, with reference to Inchbald’s harrowing historical tragedy The Massacre (1793), I have argued that Inchbald’s English Catholic identity helped foster a vision strikingly unfamiliar and humane in its dramatic investigation of violence, misunderstanding and sympathy among religious communities. Inchbald’s multilayered perspective also enabled her to write fiction that, as Hunt later said of her novels, sounded ‘in the ears of the prosperous the great modern note of Justice to All’ (The Old Court Suburb 180). Described in the first part of this chapter, Inchbald’s experience as an English Catholic can help the reverberating political and religious significance of A Simple Story to be heard again. By intervening with her version of a feminist politics of sympathy in the discord surrounding the Catholic Question from the late 1770s into the 1790s, Inchbald’s novel reveals the deeply rooted divisions between Protestant and Catholic that informed Britishness in a portrayal paralleling the national tale’s negotiation of individual love and communal identity within a fractured national culture. Set among the marginal English Catholic community, A Simple Story follows the relationship of a Catholic priest named Dorriforth with his Protestant ward Miss Milner. Part I of the novel, which Inchbald

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completed in 1779 between the first Catholic Relief Act and the Gordon Riots, portrays the seemingly happy marriage of this unlikely couple and the communities they allegorically represent. Dorriforth begins the novel as a Catholic priest unobtrusively living in London when a dying friend, the Catholic Mr Milner, selects him as guardian for his Protestant and coquettish daughter. Despite Dorriforth’s vows of celibacy and the disapproval of Sandford (an ex-Jesuit priest and Dorriforth’s spiritual advisor), the protagonists develop an attraction based on their mutually ameliorating effect. Dorriforth provides a moral compass for Miss Milner, whose vivacity often passes from frivolity to cruelty. Miss Milner’s enthusiasm in turn emancipates Dorriforth from his emotional suppression, an unstable containment that otherwise leads from cold command or defensive withdrawal into brooding seclusion. Her sympathy also softens his moral stringency and leads him to forgive his nephew Rushbrooke, whose mother’s indiscretions had brought forth Dorriforth’s resentment. These promising signs change, however, after the Vatican laicizes Dorriforth in a theologically dubious and historically improbable turn of events so that he can become Lord Elmwood, heir to a prominent Catholic peerage. After a tumultuous engagement involving masquerades and cross-dressing, the new Lord Elmwood is about to break with the mercurial Miss Milner to seek a Catholic wife in Italy. Realizing the two will not be happy apart, the previously antagonistic Sandford suddenly marries them in an impromptu ceremony. Ominously, Part I concludes with Lord Elmwood using a mourning ring as the wedding band. The narrative not only offers an insight into a fraught historical moment but also anticipates elements of later national tales by Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Porter. While the term ‘national tale’ emerged with Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl in 1806, Katie Trumpener has shown that there was a literary tradition of marriage plots that allegorically represented the strained relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland reaching back at least to the 1707 Scottish Act of Union. Inchbald’s connections with the prominent women writers who formed the genre, including Owenson, Edgeworth and Madame de Stael, suggest her own investment in its concerns and strategies.6 While most national tales originated from Scotland or Ireland, Inchbald’s English Catholic identity shapes the novel’s travel narrative, which in the national tale often features a representative of the ‘central’ culture journeying to an exotic peripheral site under the tutelage of a ‘native guide’. Although A Simple Story remains within England, it features an internal journey to the Catholic manor house, long the domain of

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Gothic novels and sectarian histories. In 1791 The Gentleman’s Magazine seemed surprised not to read the typically sensational account of a tyrannical papist and found Inchbald’s representation of a civilized ‘Roman Catholic lord’ to be ‘perfectly new’ (255). Just as the national tale attempts to transform national perception of a ‘foreign’ culture, Inchbald seems to offer a refreshing possibility within fiction of seeing marginal English Catholics in a new light. Like the reader, Miss Milner undergoes what Ferris calls a ‘disorientation’ that alters the ‘center of both personal and national being’ (RNT 12) so that she and Dorriforth can unite as allegorical representatives from ‘disparate cultural worlds’ (Trumpener 141). Part II, finished in the year of the 1791 Catholic Relief Act, portrays the dissolution of this union and the difficulties caused in the ensuing generation. The marriage collapses under the pressures of national identity, gender inequality and empire. Inchbald rushes the reader 17 years forward to the deathbed of Miss Milner after her adulterous affair with Lord Frederick Lawnly. The main characters have crumbled as a result of latent, unreformed flaws that were subtly suggested in Part I. After Miss Milner’s demise, Lord Elmwood hardens into a tyrant. The unusual 17-year gap in the story and the continuation of the same tensions in the next generation foreground the role of history within the novel’s structure. A new protagonist, Matilda, who is the daughter of Miss Milner and Elmwood, bears the burden of that history as a physical trace of her mother. More than any other character, she must face the moral chaos that has been unleashed after the failure of the national marriage. Elmwood banishes Matilda by segregating her to certain rooms of his estate. The novel then focuses on this divided society as Matilda, Miss Woodley and Sandford live in separate, uneasy proximity to Elmwood and Rushbrooke, who develops an unreciprocated infatuation for Matilda. In the conclusion, only the threatened rape of Matilda by a libertine blade rouses Elmwood to his paternal duty and removes the barriers between the characters. This conclusion, however, is troubled and open-ended as a prospective union in this next generation between Matilda and Rushbrooke remains uncertain. By deconstructing the allegorical marriage plot as a model for national reconciliation, this aesthetically complex text about religious difference also anticipates what Ferris describes as the ‘undoing’ of the Irish national tale in the late 1820s (RNT 149–54). Inchbald seems to suggest that preemptive ‘acts of union’, be they literary or legislative, attempt to evade deep-rooted historical antagonisms. Inchbald instead makes the characters and the reader of A Simple Story confront the

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hatreds of history and work towards an inclusive community that does not efface marginal communities or suppress historical wounds. Rather than the marriage, partition becomes the organizing principle of the work. In addressing the resulting configurations of sectarianism, fundamentalism and segregation, A Simple Story, with its aesthetic fissures and multigenerational conflicts, not only voices the need for combining biblical forgiveness and gendered sympathy to break cycles of historical resentment and violence, but also acknowledges the trauma, instability and difficulty involved in reconciliation across fraught historical and religious borders.

Inchbald and English Catholicism A more detailed account of Inchbald’s own religious history can shed light on the novel’s portrayal of English Catholicism.7 Elizabeth Inchbald, née Simpson, was raised in a middle-class Catholic farming family near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, an area that did not experience, to a significant degree, either the urbanization or influx of Irish immigration that structurally transformed the English Catholic community in the latter half of the eighteenth century.8 For Catholics, Suffolk provided a fairly irenic, rural life of good relations with the community and toleration of their religious identity, which was expressed quietly and discretely. The Simpsons attended Mass at the private chapel of the Gages, a prominent local Catholic family (Jenkins 108), and her first confessor was Fr. John Gage, S.J., who, according to Edgeworth, provided the model for the Jesuit priest Sandford in A Simple Story (Bettlenger 62; Sigl ‘The Elizabeth Inchbald Papers’ 223). The historian Edward Norman cites Suffolk life and the experience of the Gage family in particular as exemplary of the de facto peace available to Catholics despite remaining de jure discrimination: Catholics and Protestants in general coexisted easily enough together … the Gage family in Suffolk managed, despite all the paraphernalia of the law and the disapproval of opinion, to exist comfortably in the rural society around them. (51) As a close friend of the Gages, Inchbald would have shared in such a ‘comfortable coexistence’ that rose above sectarian conflict. Yet even amid this relative sense of social serenity, reminders of English Catholicism’s historical difference remained. The ancestors of the Gages included the Reformation-era martyr Fr. George Gage (Bettlenger 62).

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Another ancestor, Robert Gage, had been implicated in and was later executed for his part in Babington’s conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth I on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots (Gillow 2: 364). While Norman relies upon John Gage Rokewood’s The History and Antiquities of Hengrave in Suffolk (1822) for his conclusions about the relative peace of Catholic life in Suffolk, this work’s notes also document a history of martyrdom, apostasy and persecution (234n; 248–9n). Such history was part of the unofficial education among Catholics, who were not yet legally allowed to have their own schools. As one of the Gage children, Rokewood became a leading Catholic antiquarian of the period, documenting and preserving the past for the English Catholic community.9 James Boaden, Inchbald’s first biographer, writes that she was particularly interested in history in her youth, wrote a chronicle of British history and acted as Reformation-era characters, most notably Anne Boleyn in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1: 43). The landscape of Suffolk also provided reminders of English Catholic history as the ruins of the Bury St Edmunds Abbey became a national symbol of England’s medieval past. The Benedictine Abbey had been one of the largest in Europe before the Reformation and its monks included the late-medieval poet John Lydgate. Its impressive ruins recalled the 1536–40 Dissolution of the Monasteries and the effacing of the symbols of the so-called Old Religion. A 1768 guide to Bury St Edmunds evokes the Abbey as a lost city whose fragments interpenetrate the current town (see Figure 2). The guide highlights the monastery’s dedication to ‘relieving the Poor’ and links the despoiling of the Abbey to the injustices of the rich: In both Churches were formerly great Numbers of brass Inscriptions and Effigies, which were scandalously torn off, and sold in 1644, for private Lucre by the Churchwardens … These Churches at the Dissolution of the Abbey could not escape the Plunder of the great Men who were in Authority under that godly Prince King Edward the VI. For they swept from the Altars of them about 480£ worth of Plate, & c. a great Part of which one Mr. Cay sacrilegiously perverted to his own Use; the fatal Effects of which Spoil, his Family and Descendents, are said to have had the sad Experience of; so that for a long Time there was scarce any necessary Plate in either Church. (A Description 42–3) This ‘past versus present’ debate about the Abbey intensified later in the nineteenth century through Rokewood’s publication of Chronica

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Figure 2 The Abbey ruins and town of Bury St Edmunds.

Jocelini de Brakelonda (1840), a twelfth-century chronicle about monastic life at Bury St Edmunds described by Thomas Carlyle as ‘an extremely foreign Book’ by ‘a natural-born Englishman’ (44). Translated in 1844 as Monastic and Social Life in the Twelfth Century, the text provided Carlyle’s scathing social critique Past and Present (1843) with a vision of medieval England to shame Victorian industrialism. Inchbald would not have escaped the implications of this divided history, even amid the eighteenth century’s general tolerance of Catholics. The celebration of Mass at the Gage estate remained illegal until the passage of the Relief Act of 1791, which allowed the ceremony only in private chapels with no more than five people. The Relief Act of 1778 removed the death penalty, but not the stigma, for Catholic priests and bishops. In 1767 the Archbishop of Canterbury, with vague fears of the ‘growth of Papism’, ordered that a record of all Catholics in England be presented to the House of Lords and the king. Inchbald thus appears in the 1767 records of papists along with the rest of her family: ‘Parish: Stanningfield, SUFF (32 Papists); Widow, farmer, age 45, resident 36 years; 1 son age 18; 4 daughters age 23, 15, 10, 8’ (128). The number 15 represents the young Inchbald, an unnamed, faceless piece of data in the archive. Most English Catholics willingly cooperated in the collection of

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the information, but the bureaucratic cataloguing of nameless members of a suspect religious minority nonetheless marked Inchbald and the 512 ‘papists’ in Suffolk as different from the nation at large. Why has this complex and extensive cultural background of Inchbald’s experience as a member of a religious minority dropped from considerations of her writing? Rediscovering Inchbald’s voice as an English Catholic woman writer entails reading against the grain of James Boaden’s Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833), which portrays her as a female sidekick to J.P. Kemble and sublimates her Catholic background. An admirer of Kemble, Boaden built his reputation on dramatic adaptations of gothic novels, bringing Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) to the stage as Aurelio and Miranda (1799) and The Italian Monk (1799).10 His memoir has helped foster an assumption that Inchbald’s Jacobin politics and literary accomplishments were incompatible with her religious background.11 His picture of an essentialized Catholic ‘mind’ opposed to natural philosophy, literature and revolutionary thought has proved influential. Presenting an ‘either/or’ between Catholicism and Godwinian ‘freethinking’, Boaden writes of her intellectual development in the 1780s and 1790s: ‘The Catholic, however, does not appear to have sensibly mixed in her present pursuits; and on the whole her mind was acquiring, not so much a Protestant, as a free or philosophical character’ (1: 159). Boaden’s account, however, is inconsistent with the actual lived religion of the romantic period and even his own account of Inchbald’s life. She began A Simple Story in 1777, while in a travelling theatre company that moved mainly between Manchester and Liverpool. This Lancashire region had long been the enclave of the largest English Catholic recusant community. In 1778, the year of the First Relief Act, not only was the area beginning its commercial explosion through shipping and manufacturing, but it was also experiencing growth in its Catholic population, both Irish and English.12 In this atmosphere, Inchbald, fellow Catholic Kemble and his Protestant sister, the actress Sarah Siddons, were gathered as a circle of friends and dramatists looking ahead to careers of national renown. Inchbald was exchanging letters on spiritual matters with her Paris friend Friar Jerningham, attending Mass regularly and reading the Mass in French with Kemble at other times (Boaden 1: 74–84, 91–5). Later, in 1814, the period of her most zealous religious devotion – when she was leading what Boaden calls an ‘undiversified routine’ of ‘Mass, her Bible, the Popish Divines’ (2: 201) – Inchbald nevertheless laments the fall of Napoleon (the last living symbol of revolutionary ideals for many

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‘The wheel was come full circle,’ and the throne and power of Napoleon had departed from him. This our heroine so little expected, that she was literally sunken and dejected as at some public calamity. The rejoicings of her country were bitter to her; and, from her windows, she could not well avoid seeing, on the 12th of June, the Sovereigns of Russia and Prussia, with their suites, enjoying the Sunday ride of Hyde Park, and a very absurd review of troops there on the 20th; as if kings and conquerors could not move about, in peace itself, without military evolutions. (2: 199–200) Dovetailing radical politics with Catholicism, Inchbald’s vehemence penetrates even Boaden’s condescension and nationalism, revealing a discontent with the conglomeration of power that would in 1815 use religion to justify their return to power under the ‘Holy Alliance’. Inchbald thus embodies a revolutionary commitment to progress with a heightened awareness of the ways that the persistent resentment involving the victims of history can cloud any vision for the future.

‘Fairer promises of her reform’: sympathy and the national marriage Given the complex issues facing Inchbald, it is not surprising that she turned to a form resembling the national tale. One of the main reasons that the national tale was – and remains – an intriguing genre is its promising model of social healing and reconciliation. Trumpener argues that Owenson and Maturin ‘imagine a union able to widen the worldview and the historical understanding of both partners equally’ (137). Mary Jean Corbett argues that the ‘cross-cultural contact’ enacted in the Irish national tale and its descendants leads ‘not only to reforming the Irish, but to transforming the cultural conception of Englishness as well’ (5). This seems to apply to A Simple Story. The opposing, incomplete, but complementary characters Miss Milner and Dorriforth, representing English Protestants and Catholics respectively, need each other both personally and politically. Their love story is not that simple, however, and the marriage plot complicates rather than resolves their misunderstandings. This section analyses the incipient positive, mutual ‘education’ between the two main characters, but argues that it proceeds from the ordinary social rituals of everyday life in which proximity and exchange have an inherently

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English radicals) and the subsequent triumph of the old monarchies in the Quadruple Alliance:

humanizing effect. Inchbald writes with a dramatist’s sense of significant scenes of interpersonal encounter that facilitate characters’ conversions. The main characters’ preoccupation with power, however, compromises the opportunities for such dramatic, transformative dialogue. While Miss Milner is the novel’s most captivating personality, the personal transformations of Dorriforth are subtle and crucial. Caroline Breashears has argued that critics have neglected the significance of Dorriforth’s character, which is torn between competing definitions of masculinity. However, his difficulties run deeper and are complicated considerably by his marginalized religious identity. ‘Dorriforth’ is the first word of the book, whose first paragraph is dedicated to an uneasy explication of this ill-at-ease member of a religious minority: Dorriforth, bred at St. Omer’s in all the scholastic rigour of that college, was by education, and the solemn vows of his order, a Roman Catholic priest—but nicely discriminating between the philosophical and the superstitious part of that character, and adopting the former only, he possessed qualities not unworthy the first professors of Christianity—every virtue which it was his vocation to preach, it was his care to practise; nor was he in the class of those of the religious, who, by secluding themselves from the world, fly the merit they might have in reforming mankind. He refused to shelter himself from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister, but sought for, and found that shelter in the centre of London, where he dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. (3) At the level of prose style, the tangled syntax of the first sentence bluntly presents his name passively modified by socially constitutive markers. This representative identity has been yoked, somewhat awkwardly, to an accommodating avoidance of extremes. Inchbald offers a characteristic but then quickly adds that Dorriforth does not embody its immoderate, feared form. He has a priestly otherworldliness, but that otherworldliness is acceptably ‘philosophical’, not ‘superstitious’. This modification by moderation continues throughout the paragraph. He preaches virtue, but not to the extreme of hypocrisy; he has the qualities of primitive Christianity, but the double negative ‘not unworthy’ shields him from being an enthusiast like Price or Priestley; he does not practise monkish escapism within a ‘cloister’, preferring benevolent activity in metropolitan London. However, he does not become a secular activist like an Abbé Sieyès but seeks a spiritual ‘shelter’ amid the world; yet that ‘shelter’ cannot be superstitiously identified with a specific place as he

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‘dwelt’ in his own ‘prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance’, which are the moderate moral virtues, not the transcendent theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. If the reader expected the protagonist priest to be a gothic ‘papist’, Inchbald immediately breaks that stereotype. Instead, he is a nervous, vulnerable figure tentatively hovering on the margins of modernity, unsure of how to see himself in the world and how the world sees him. Yet why does Inchbald begin her novel with this unstable character and why should the reader take any interest in him? It quickly becomes apparent that if Dorriforth could find a way to enter society, he would contribute profound thought and deep feeling to English culture. In the absence of that entry, however, the emotional deficiencies of the moderate male Dorriforth are also apparent. Despite his noble bearing, there is something sad, austere, antiquated and even wooden about Dorriforth. Withdrawn from society, he and his actions are severed from his emotional life. A man of potentially great emotional depth, his underdeveloped sensibility remains disconnected from his public life. In Inchbald’s introduction to Dorriforth’s appearance, she emphasizes the split between his banal actions and his reserve of emotion: But that the reader may be interested in what Dorriforth says and does, it is necessary to give some description of his person and manners. His figure was tall and elegant, but his face, except a pair of dark bright eyes, a set of white teeth, and a graceful fall in his clerical curls of dark brown hair, had not one feature to excite such admiration—he possessed notwithstanding such a gleam of sensibility diffused over each, that many people mistook his face for handsome, and all were more or less attracted by it—in a word, the charm that is here meant to be described is a countenance—on his countenance you beheld the feelings of his heart—saw all its inmost workings—the quick pulses that bear with hope and fear, or the placid ones that were stationary with patient resignation. On this countenance his thoughts were pictured, and as his mind was enriched with every virtue that could make it valuable, so was his honest face adorned with every emblem of those virtues—and they not only gave a luster to his aspect, but added a harmonious sound to all he uttered; it was persuasive, it was perfect eloquence, whilst in his looks you beheld his thoughts moving with his lips, and ever coinciding with what he said. (8–9) Inchbald’s contradictory playfulness in this passage challenges the status quo of Dorriforth’s moderate pose. He seems tall, dark and handsome,

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except for (the narrator claims) a face lacking admirable features. Inchbald then lists all the attractive elements of that bland face – his eyes, his smile and his hair. Dorriforth’s ‘sensibility’ makes its way to the surface of this face, but only as a ‘gleam’ and a ‘luster’ that is suggestively ‘pictured’ on his ‘countenance’. Dorriforth seems to have a wellspring of vibrancy, but this sensibility is hidden, albeit partially. The sense of the prose signals this latent vigour. Thought leaps after thought, almost by power of association, in a maze of clauses. Inchbald seems to be teasing the staid Dorriforth, just as Miss Milner will later do, trying to elicit his sensibility and move him into society. If Dorriforth can be led out of his ambivalence, ‘educated’ in its etymological sense, then the reader and Miss Milner will delight in fully knowing a vibrant, vigorous and valued new member of the community. Representative of the broader social standing of English Catholics, Dorriforth’s character is also crucial because the opposite of an educational ‘drawing out’ is further withdrawal. This is problematic in the book’s opening and dangerous in its progression. For instance, Dorriforth’s reactions to the various initial reports of Miss Milner’s character demonstrate his repressed emotional life. He feels but then retreats into symptomatic sighing that is here flaccid but that will later become terrifying. His overreaction to hearing of Miss Milner’s fashionable lifestyle is withering self-seclusion: ‘Dorriforth started.—“For the first time of my life,” cried he with a manly sorrow, “I wish I had never known her father” ’ (10). He repeats this pattern of hiding emotion that brings on sequestered egotism. On hearing of her beauty, he resigns himself, ‘“But if her mind is defective” exclaimed Dorriforth with a sigh’ (10). This pattern of internal, subjective withdrawal registers at another symbolic level – Dorriforth never seems to go outside. The resulting psychological and social claustrophobia will leave him, at best, hermetically sealed within his solitary soul. At worst, the result will be an impenetrable, edgy resentment impervious to communication or compassion. Miss Milner’s engaging vivacity and mollifying sympathy provide a needed counterbalancing force. She promises to ‘educate’ Dorriforth by drawing out his suppressed sensibility and conveying the power of compassion to overcome the wounds of the past. Miss Milner immediately diagnoses his problem, noting that his ‘actions’ seem ‘to contradict’ his ‘looks’ (16). She not only understands his stunted emotional life and marginal social position but also appreciates, imagines and even desires the man he could become. It is the vivacious and gregarious Miss Milner who will transform the secluded resignation of Dorriforth and unleash his potential to lead a fully human life.

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Inchbald suggests that this emotional efflorescence is not simply in the interest of connubial happiness. Rather, it is tied to what is perhaps the most significant, recurring theme of the book – the need for female compassion to overcome hardened, patriarchal resistance to forgiving the inherited debts of history. Mrs Hillgrave’s ‘good report’ on Miss Milner’s character foreshadows this fructifying virtue and ties it to her overall influence on the small but divided community of English Catholics. In order to save a poor family from suffering, Miss Milner’s generous sensibility had circumvented the austerity of her father who ruthlessly pursued the indebted: ‘My husband, at the commencement of his distresses,’ replied Mrs. Hillgrave, ‘owed a sum of money to her father, and from repeated provocations, Mr. Milner was determined to seize upon all our effects— his daughter, however, procured us time in order to discharge the debt; and when she found that time was insufficient, and her father no longer to be dissuaded from his intention, she secretly sold some of her most valuable ornaments to satisfy his demand and screen us from its consequences.’ (11–12) Miss Milner’s secret benevolence temporarily mollifies her father’s hardheartedness. Her self-sacrifice saves the troubled family from the cruel demands of Mr Milner, whose character seems jarringly divided between the kind friend of Dorriforth and the oppressive persecutor of the Hillgraves. Miss Milner will also have such a softening, reconciling effect on Dorriforth, and a sympathetic daughter recalling a hardened father to mercy will be even more significant in Part II. This sympathetic, reconciling kindness – not only as an aspect of Miss Millner’s character but also as an alternative ethic for all parties – informs the novel’s underlying structure of paralleled events. Miss Milner’s compassion is at the centre of many of these ordinary exchanges that transform the characters, reorder the relationships among the small community in the novel and shape the plot. For instance, the seemingly ‘little incident’ and ‘common-place civility’ of Miss Milner offering medicine to relieve the headache of Sandford, her adversary in Part I, is a pivotal and ‘remarkable’ response to sectarian bitterness and misunderstanding: This was but a common-place civility, such as is paid by one enemy to another every day; but the manner was the material part—the unaffected concern, the attention, the good will, she demonstrated

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in this little incident, was that which was remarkable; and which immediately took from Lord Elmwood the displeasure to which he had been just before excited, or rather transformed it into a degree of admiration. Even Sandford was not insensible to her behaviour, and in return, when he left the room, ‘wished her a good night.’ To her and to Miss Woodley, who had not been witness of the preceding conversation, what she had done appeared of no merit, but to the mind of Lord Elmwood it had much; and upon the departure of Sandford he began to be unusually cheerful. He first reproached the ladies for not offering him a place in their box at the opera. (107) This unremembered act of kindness is not instrumental or calculated. The simple gesture, focused on the suffering of one individual, overcomes the animosity of Sandford and the reserve of Dorriforth (Lord Elmwood).13 It even generates, though temporarily, a ‘sensibility unexpected’ that makes him think of going out on the town and draws him closer to Miss Milner (107). Yet, while Miss Milner has the important task of educating Dorriforth in the lessons of sympathy and forgiveness, she is inconsistent in her practice of this ethic. She is both a victim – an orphan who is constantly bullied by Sandford – and a victimizer – a socialite who indulges an unthinking and harmful will to power associated with her Establishment upbringing and social position. Her ethic of sympathy is often forgotten in favour of her own whims, regardless of their effect on others. While Miss Milner’s energy and wit continue to make her an attractive character cut in the mould of a Shakespearean female protagonist, Inchbald’s harsh exposure of her potentially vicious faults qualifies her status as an ideal heroine: From her infancy she had been indulged in all her wishes to the extreme of folly, and habitually started at the unpleasant voice of control—she was beautiful, she had been too frequently told the high value of that beauty, and thought those moments passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest—she had besides a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injury or neglect—she had acquired the dangerous character of a wit; but to which she had not real pretensions, although the most discerning critic, hearing her converse, might fall into this mistake.—Her replies had all the effect of repartee, not because she possessed those qualities which can properly be called wit, but that what she said was spoken with an

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energy, an instantaneous and powerful perception of what she said, joined with a real or well-counterfeited simplicity, a quick turn of the eye, and an arch smile of the countenance. Her words were but the words of others, and, like those of others, put into common sentences; but the delivery made them pass for wit, as grace in an ill proportioned figure, will often make it pass for symmetry. (15) Miss Milner possesses powerful feeling, energy and perception, but they are not informed by reflection or judgment. A potential for violence – Inchbald uses the word ‘conquest’ – lies in her ‘dangerous’ wit. A hint of the ‘danger’ of her enthusiastic wit comes early in the novel in a scene reminiscent of Emma’s harsh words to Miss Bates on Box Hill in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). At the accidental mention of religious persecution, Miss Milner ‘laughed with a liberty so uncontrolled’ at the elderly, comic busybody Mrs Horton’s ‘pious’ crossing of herself (17). Her acerbic laughter creates a rift that Miss Woodley can only partially remedy. In such moments, Miss Milner seems nothing more than the ‘well-counterfeited’ simulacrum of a woman that Wollstonecraft derided in Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1792). In fact, in a review of A Simple Story, Wollstonecraft complained of Miss Milner’s shallowness. In her attempt to read Inchbald’s novel as a didactic tale about the consequences of poor female education, Wollstonecraft argued that the author should not have given a flawed cautionary figure like Miss Milner any redeeming virtues of sympathy or forgiveness: It were to be wished, in fact, in order to insinuate a useful moral into thoughtless unprincipled minds, that the faults of the vain, giddy miss Milner had not been softened, or rather gracefully withdrawn from notice by the glare of such splendid, yet salacious virtues, as flow from sensibility. (370) Miss Milner is ultimately a mixed character who is ‘vain’ and ‘giddy’ in Wollstonecraft’s estimate and among ‘the gay, the proud, the haughty’ in Inchbald’s (33). She needs Dorriforth to ‘instruct without tyrannizing’, just as he needs her to soften his ‘obstinacy’ and ‘grave sternness’ (33, 35). The marriage plot would bring together two marginal, complementary characters into a relationship, not formed through subordination or seduction, but forged through a more egalitarian impulse recognizing shared imperfections. The union in A Simple Story thus initially promises to be widely beneficial, as Dorriforth’s humility and reflection will soften the sharp individualism and pernicious vanity Miss Milner has

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imbibed from the Establishment, while Miss Milner’s compassion will counter Dorriforth’s deflating withdrawal from the public sphere. Their first argument over Miss Milner’s desire to attend a ball contrary to Dorriforth’s wishes highlights this positive trajectory. While the issue initially brings out the worst in each character, their dialogue develops into a partial transformation. This transformation emerges from the conversation, even when fraught, that takes place within their small community. The two characters had reached a kind of negotiated détente in which Dorriforth, resisting his typical will to command, showed ‘unusual reserve’ and ‘more than usual gentleness’ that helped Miss Milner control her propensity towards ‘volatile thought’ (23). When this peace is tested by Dorriforth forbidding her to attend the ball amid her schedule of ‘incessant company’ (27), the ensuing conflict is resolved not by the budding erotic connection of the two – Dorriforth’s trembling penetration of Miss Milner’s thoughts only exacerbates the matter (25) – but rather by the ordinary interchange between the two. They first discuss the issue when Dorriforth meets Miss Milner ‘accidentally upon the stair case’, a recurrent symbol in the novel of a liminal space that enables personal encounters (27). The fate of the characters hangs in the balance as Dorriforth commands her not to attend, storms into seclusion and veils his emotions behind a book (29). Miss Milner is ‘irresolute’ between ‘defiance’ and ‘submissive’ compliance (29). Perhaps the most troubling development is the way the ‘aukwardness of the silence’ descends upon the once dynamic interaction of the group (28). The prose of Part I had been bristling with the energy of the drama, specifically with the repartee of a comedic dialogue. The following exchange between Sandford and Miss Milner about Lord Frederick’s approach is representative of the pace and tone of Part I: ‘No madam, if it depended upon my permission, you should not know.’ ‘Not any thing, sir, I dare say; you would keep me in utter ignorance.’ ‘I would.’ ‘From a self-interested motive, Mr. Sandford—that I might have a greater respect for you.’ Some of the persons present laughed—Mrs. Horton coughed—Miss Woodley blushed—Lord Elmwood sneered—Dorriforth frowned— and Miss Fenton looked just as she did before. (49) The text could easily be a playscript with dialogue followed by stage directions. The narrator barely needs to intervene for fear of intruding

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upon the immediate interchange. Attraction, education and transformation all rely on maintaining and deepening this proximity and dialogue. Community formation seems to rely less upon borders or ideology than it does on repeated opportunities for a cast of characters to improvise together, to learn each other’s performative tendencies and to adjust their behaviour accordingly. The nascent community is not unlike the small ecumenical circle that Inchbald, Kemble and Siddons formed. The highly dramatic reconciliation over the contested ball thus takes place when the ‘first cups of tea were scarcely poured out’ (31). Within this gestational communal framework of continuing conversation and increased understanding, Miss Milner relents and cancels her outing. The immediate effect, however, is on Dorriforth, who realizes ‘he had treated her with too much severity’ (32). He allows her to attend the ball, although he still could not ‘ask her pardon’ because ‘he did not know how’ (32). Nevertheless, this partial transformation promotes another act of reconciliation. In the next chapter, Miss Milner intervenes on behalf of Rushbrooke, Dorriforth’s spurned nephew. Patterned after her advocacy for the Hillgraves, her attempt to introduce ‘affection’ into Dorriforth’s ‘benevolence’ is initially unsuccessful but ultimately fruitful, as Dorriforth eventually reconciles with Rushbrooke (35). With great economy and concentration, Inchbald captures the mutual transformation that results from their dialogic exchange. A poignant encounter shows Miss Milner’s dangerous pride to be diminished and Dorriforth’s dictatorial austerity mollified: When she arrived at the study door, she opened it with a trepidation she could hardly account for, and entered to Dorriforth the altered woman she has been represented. His heart had taken the most decided part against her, and his face assumed the most severe aspect of reproach, when her appearance gave an instantaneous change to his whole mind, and countenance. She halted, as if she feared to approach—he hesitated, as if he knew not how to speak.—Instead of the warmth with which he was prepared to begin, his voice involuntarily softened, and without knowing what he said, he began, ‘My dear Miss Milner’— (50) In response to Miss Milner’s bodily presence and proximity, Dorriforth’s ‘softening’ proceeds almost mysteriously. His voice changes ‘involuntarily’ and the simple phrase of ‘My dear Miss Milner’ encapsulates his emerging compassion. Such renovating moments for characters and

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the communities they represent require closeness of dialogue, personal encounter and sympathy. In light of these themes, the hasty national marriage imposed from outside seems particularly incoherent. Previously opposed to the match, Sandford surprisingly intervenes and, like Horatio’s father in The Wild Irish Girl, makes the vows for the couple: ‘But though old, and a priest, I can submit to think I have been in an error; and I now firmly believe, it is for the welfare of you both, to become man and wife.—My lord, take this woman’s marriage vows; you can ask no fairer promises of her reform; she can give you none half so sacred, half so binding; and I see by her looks she will mean to keep them.—And my dear,’ continued he, addressing himself to her, ‘act but under the dominion of those vows, to a husband of sense and virtue, like him, and you will be all that I, himself, or even heaven can desire.—Now then, Lord Elmwood, this moment give her up for ever; or this moment constrain her by such ties from offending you, she shall not dare to violate.’ (191) This seems to be a revolution of inclusion that promises ‘reform’, the key word that bridges the personal and the parliamentary. At first glance, this appears to be the type of national reunion the national tale narrates and reiterates: the marriage of these two complementary characters – one moralizing and the other revitalizing, one from a marginal religious minority and one from the Establishment. The marriage should realize a regenerative British Union. Of course, it does not. While in The Wild Irish Girl the status of the unconsummated marriage remains open, Inchbald reveals the inadequacies of this harried union, contracted by fiat from an outside character to avoid a split that would send the two characters into foreign or fashionable hands. Why is this national marriage so inadequate? By disregarding the elements of process and proximity that had been enabling reconciliation, this union instead tries to overleap divisions instantly with an irrational hope for improvement and peace. This registers even in the form of the vows. The banter is gone, replaced with Sandford’s directorial ordering that even denies Miss Milner the opportunity to consent. The onus for reform falls on Miss Milner alone as she is placed under further constraint and ‘dominion’. Dorriforth’s inadequacies and the need for mutual reform have been forgotten. Before the wedding, in the distance of his own isolated anxiety, Dorriforth had imagined the ‘horror of domestic wrangles—a family without subordination—a house

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without economy—in a word, a wife without discretion’ (142). A power struggle, in which one partner must dominate, seems inevitable, especially since neither party seems to have given up a potentially harmful need for control. This inequality, along with the insularity of the ceremony’s setting, are two of several elements that disturb the reconciliatory moment. At the political level, fair promises of reform did not materialize either. The first Relief Act of 1778 was followed by the Gordon Riots and the delay of further Catholic relief. Within this context, the failed interreligious marriage took on particular symbolic importance in the 1780s. In 1785 the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert momentarily seemed to welcome a Catholic back into English society. The legal nullification of the clandestine wedding, however, conveyed to Catholics their tenuous place in Great Britain and hardened the previously sympathetic George III to the Catholic cause.14 The cartoonist James Gillray’s satiric depiction of the wedding in Wife and No Wife—or—A Trip to the Continent (1788) is embroidered with anti-Catholicism and conveys the unlikelihood of a successful national marriage of Catholic and Protestant. Burke is the presiding Jesuit priest and Fox and other political leaders act as complicit witnesses (see Figure 3). Even though Mrs Fitzherbert was English and the wedding took place within national borders, Gillray depicts it as a gothic ‘Trip to the Continent’, thereby alienating Catholics as foreign from national culture. This union seemed as ill-fated in the political world as it did in the pages of A Simple Story. Ultimately, Inchbald’s novel responds to the social and political issues surrounding the Catholic Question in the 1780s and 1790s by revealing Britain’s deep historical rifts. The failure of the national marriage in A Simple Story gestures towards the inadequate wrestling with history in the marriage plot and its accompanying programme of cultural and religious reconciliation under a legislative enactment of the British Union. With its thematic reiteration of the need to forgive debts passed down through generations, A Simple Story questions the marriage plot’s need for forgetfulness, suggesting that unresolved debts, memories, wounds and resentments have the potential to fester and intensify in subsequent generations. In Part II, the structure of the novel fractures, the distance between characters increases, the united household splits into sectarian camps, mutual transformation changes to mutual resentment, softened benevolence hardens into patriarchal fundamentalism, and proximate dialogue yields to withdrawn misunderstanding. Nevertheless, Inchbald continues to seek an alternative form of community.

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Figure 3 James Gillray, Wife and No Wife—or—A Trip to the Continent. 1788.

‘Peculiar unity’: partition and sympathy Part II traces the fallout and fragments of the failed marriage plot. In Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (1997), Seamus Deane has argued that such ruptures in national tales derive from ‘rhetorics of subjugation, oppression, and degradation’ overcoming ‘rhetorics of healing, annealing, recovery, compromise, balance’ (21). In this strangely split novel, the two main characters suffer from such a clash of divergent discourses. Miss Milner betrays her husband and is ‘no longer beautiful—no longer beloved—tremble while you read it!—no longer—virtuous’ (194). Dorriforth is also a cause for trembling: ‘Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant. The compassionate, the feeling, the just Lord Elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and injustice’ (194–5). The male protagonist has ruptured internally and thereafter remains divided between the potentially lovable Dorriforth and the unapproachable Elmwood. While in Part I Dorriforth had been willing to be killed to avoid a duel with Lord Frederick, in Part II Lord Elmwood challenges

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and butchers Miss Milner’s lover, who ‘was left upon the spot where they met, so maimed, and defaced with scars, as never again to endanger the honour of a husband’ (198). The transitory national marriage has only yielded misunderstanding, violence and deformed subjects. The result is a historical recurrence in the succeeding generation of unhealed divisions, sectarian suspicions and wounded resentment. Reviewers nervously attempted to work out a basis for thematically unifying the radical fracturing of the novel’s form. The Critical Review could only reach for what it called ‘peculiar unity’ around the principal characters (207). Though the European Magazine saw it as a ‘perfect whole’, it also pointed to improbabilities, gaps and hastily composed incidents (197). The Monthly Magazine reviewer pointed to Dorriforth’s life as the simple or single story providing a ‘unity of design’, but still called the break between parts abrupt and tarnished by a so-called ‘Irishism’ – a slur for a grammatical slip that brings together linguistic and national politics (436–7). These early reviewers struggled to impose a governing theme, focus or ideal that could unite the two parts of the novel. Facing the same difficulties, current critical examinations of the novel often discuss one part or the other, focusing on the plight of either Miss Milner or Matilda. I would like to suggest, however, that the novel’s split structure is integral to its meaning. A Simple Story ultimately represents a ‘peculiar disunity’ in its form that points to the problems of political and religious unity in the nation and attempts to address such trenchant divisions. The odd, dark turn of Inchbald’s novel, with the national marriage as an unstable middle rather than a culminating conclusion, thus highlights the harrowing effect of past wounds. Trumpener writes that national tales differ from historical novels in their ‘attention to the long-term effects of historical trauma, the deliberate or amnesiac repression of historical memory, and the neurotic mechanisms developed to contain its explosiveness’ (151). A Simple Story does not seek finally to contain the pressures of ‘historical trauma’ and ‘historical memory’ through a marriage plot. The conclusion of the novel follows a different, perhaps unique, aesthetic and political path. Although marked by misunderstanding, bitterness and distance, Part II articulates a hope, however contingent, of national reconciliation based on gradually encountering and working through a history of hatred. The problematic embroilment of Britishness in the imperial project imposes a problematic distance in the text that interrupts the potentially edifying and transformational proximity of Part I. Lord Elmwood’s trip to his West Indies estate to save it from ‘the depredation of his

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steward’ and his delayed return due to ‘a severe and dangerous illness’ precipitate the collapse of his marriage (196). In the 1780s, Elmwood’s West Indies estate, like Mr Bertram’s in Mansfield Park, would have been a slave plantation.15 Abolition writing and writing on colonialism often expressed anxieties over empire in these very terms of moral ‘depredation’ and illness.16 In A Simple Story, the distance introduced by empire prevents the proximate mutual exchange that had been the real hope of the novel and instead produces domestic disruption and domination. Elmwood’s decision to privilege his estate over his marriage, leaving Miss Milner with an unfulfilled erotic need, highlights the power imbalance between the two. Distance denies her Dorriforth’s steadying influence and removes him from her benign sympathy. The subsequent evacuation of Elmwood’s emotional life as a spiritual father and his reactionary ‘hardening’ into a patriarchal father are as damaging as Miss Milner’s infidelity. On the one hand, Miss Milner repents first and remorsefully returns, attempting to suture the wounds in the small community. On the other hand, the split in the novel also splits the gentle Dorriforth away from the harsh Elmwood, with severe implications for his broken psyche and all those around him. Elmwood projects his internal division into a division within his estate, producing what Valerie Henitiuk has called the novel’s ‘borderlines both real and metaphorical’ (41). After the pressures of nation and empire break the national marriage, its fragments produce a narrative form demarcated by partition between camps that mirrors the inherited divisiveness of religious politics in British history. Inchbald’s novel thus affords a valuable reflection from within British literature on the psychological and social ramifications of cultural and religious cantonization. Though Elmwood’s partition is designed to avoid social conflict and to insulate himself from further emotional trauma, his division of the estate deepens cultural difference and increases cross-border tension, resulting in the emergence of sectarianism and fundamentalism. Inchbald’s narrative, however, seeks to overcome this fracturing of society and to promote transhistorical and transcultural sympathy. The second half of A Simple Story calls attention to wounds and divisions not to incite further violence or revenge but to provide the possibility for a fuller reconciliation. The narrative focus shifts to moments of crossborder cultural encounters when the distance of partition breaks down and a dramatic choice between responding with resentment or sympathy must be made. Inchbald thus attempts to annunciate the possibility of community across historical and political divides, a community that

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recognizes a history of mutual woundedness and resists the effacement of religious or cultural difference. Elmwood’s daughter, Matilda, becomes a living reminder of the wounds he has inflicted and received. As an embodied female image of Miss Milner, Matilda repeats the suffering of her mother under the resentment of her father and re-presents the way of sympathy – the ethical response to history that Elmwood has rejected. In response to Miss Milner’s last wishes, Elmwood agrees to acknowledge and protect his daughter, but only within her allotted territory and on condition that the borders between them be impermeable. Elmwood resolves: I will, while she avoids my sight, or the giving me any remembrance of her.—But, if, whether by design or accident, I ever see or hear from her; that moment my compliance to her mother’s supplication ceases, and I abandon her once more. (213) The phrase ‘remembrance of her’ is ambiguous, referring either to Miss Milner or Matilda. This ambiguity reflects the broader conflation between the present community and the wounded history that underwrites the division of the community. Even within her allotted territory, Matilda is ‘exiled, a wanderer, and an orphan’ (290). Matilda’s fear of Elmwood indicates that she, as the weaker party, inordinately suffers mentally and physically. Threats of border crossings strike fear in Matilda: When this [Lord Elmwood’s approach] was told to Matilda she started, and looked just as her mother at her age often times had done, when, in spite of her love, she was conscious she had offended him, and was terrified at his approach. Sandford observing this, put out his hand, and taking hers shook it kindly; and bade her (but it was not in a cheerful tone) ‘be not afraid.’ This gave her no confidence; and she began, before his lordship’s arrival, to seclude herself in those apartments which were allotted for her during the time of his stay; and in the timorous expectation of his coming, her appetite declined and she lost all her colour. (222) The biblical allusion in Sandford’s failed attempt to offer solace in the words ‘be not afraid’ reveals the challenges confronting the characters. Christ frequently uses the short, assuring phrase with immediate efficacy (Mark 16:6; Luke 24:36). The most notable instance occurs after the crucifixion when the apostles, fearfully gathered together as

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a persecuted sect, are greeted by the resurrected Christ who suddenly appears in their midst (Matthew 28:10). Sandford’s ineffectual gesture, however, is a failed evangelicum in which even he cannot have faith. There is no good news here. As an alienated sect, Matilda and her companions must remain hidden and terrified in their upper room, while Lord Elmwood, no longer acting like a priest representing the pacific Christ, stalks the estate with a combination of imperial authority and fundamentalist vigour. Part of the unique vantage of A Simple Story derives from its portrayal of how sectarian and fundamentalist cultural positions arise from isolated silence, cross-border tensions and unremitting pressures of memory. Sectarianism in the novel results from segmented groups grappling with separation, distance and misunderstanding, and voicing resentment against other marginal groups. It arises most strongly among Matilda and her supporters. Matilda is not simply a paragon, nor is she a vacuous exemplar of feminine virtue. Rather, in a complicated position, she attempts to negotiate the burden of history and the often contentious influences of both her father and mother within her own person. Her outpouring of sympathy to the wounds of both her mother and father links her with the sympathetic advocacy of Miss Milner. The condition of the estate, however, distorts Matilda’s practice of sympathy. Matilda, Sandford and Miss Woodley all lash out at the innocent if naive Rushbrooke, who himself feels ‘sympathetic tenderness’ to Matilda (250). Rushbrooke’s desires, however, aggravate social interactions. For enjoying the tenuous favour of Elmwood, Sandford labels Rushbrooke a ‘usurper’ and a ‘parasite’ (232). The unflaggingly benevolent Miss Woodley, described as having ‘boundless charity and good will’, nonetheless ‘limits’ them with respect to Rushbrooke (231). Inchbald portrays their imaginations that demonize the young man. Matilda is not exempt from this. When she hears that Rushbrooke is suffering from an illness, she reacts bitterly: ‘“I detest Mr. Rushbrook,”—said Matilda, with her eyes flashing indignation’ (242). The imagery evokes Elmwood, described by Sandford as one whose ‘eyes flash lightning’ (223). Matilda’s look of ‘most cutting reproach and haughty resentment’ also pairs her with Miss Woodley’s description of Elmwood as ‘haughty, impatient, imperious, and more than ever, implacable’ (258, 230). The partitioned estate produces this bitter resentment and these invidious constructions. Through the transformation of Elmwood, the novel also shows how the pressures of partition produce a form of fundamentalism. Ernest Gellner describes fundamentalism as a cultural position, associated with religion, that ‘is to be upheld firmly in its full and literal form, free of

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compromise, softening, re-interpretation or diminution’ (2). Removal from the public sphere should also be added to Gellner’s definition. For Elmwood, the traumas associated with empire and nation precipitate his rejection of all meaningful social intercourse. His ‘injunction’ against remembering Miss Milner or mentioning Matilda originates from a warped form of Christian meekness that becomes unquestionable, secretive and violent: In a greater degree than most people he practiced this doctrine; and as soon as the first shock he received from Lady Elmwood’s conduct was abated, an entire calmness and resignation ensued; but still of that sensible and feeling kind, which could never force him to forget the happiness he had lost; and it was this sensibility, which urged him to fly from its more keen recollection as much as possible—this he alledged as the reason he would never suffer Lady Elmwood, or even her child, to be named in his hearing. But this injunction (which all his friends, and even the servants in the house who attended his person, had received) was, by many people, suspected, rather to proceed from his resentment, than his tenderness; nor did he himself deny, that resentment mingled with his prudence; for prudence he called it not to remind himself of happiness he could never taste again, and of ingratitude that might impel him to hatred; and prudence he called it, not to form another attachment near to his heart; more especially so near as a parent’s, which might a second time expose him to all the torments of ingratitude, from one whom he affectionately loved. (201–2) This labyrinthine passage repeats, hovers around and returns to one single point – Elmwood’s banishment of traumatic memory. Moving through his list of lost virtues, this passage unravels any remaining elements of the kind but cloistered Dorriforth described in the book’s opening paragraph. The shattered self is a vulnerable vacuum. Socially and psychically on the margins, he defensively hardens his own troubled psyche to protect against the disruptive and threatening effects of memory and the risks of future love. Left with only his powers of resentment, he fearfully makes a hardline choice and withdraws from others. His motives and emotions can only be an object of speculation and never a subject for dialogue. Stylistically, the departure of dialogue and the dominance of silence accompany the rise of the fundamentalist position. The enforced separation of the partition shuts off cultural contact as Inchbald’s narrative

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shifts from comedic repartee to distance and silence. Denise Osland has argued that Inchbald’s authorial reserve leaves the interiority of characters ‘beyond the reach of consciousness’ (82), but this psychological inscrutability emerges and deepens in the course of the novel, especially with regard to Elmwood. In Part I, for instance, Dorriforth shielded himself from the vulnerability of dialogue by turning to the remoteness of letter writing. The letter’s authorial distance appears more frequently in Part II. The characters have become so estranged that Elmwood learns of Miss Milner’s death in the newspaper – the printed, not the spoken or even handwritten word. No discussion or dialogue follows, as the narrator, whose minimal role was generally confined to the equivalent of stage directions in Part I, must probe for what Elmwood’s actions really mean: Lord Elmwood had so much feeling upon reading this, as to lay down the paper, and not take it up again for several minutes—nor did he taste his chocolate during this interval, but leaned his elbow on the table on the table and rested his head upon his hand.—He then rose up—walked two or three times across the room—sat down again—took up the paper—and read as usual.—Nor let the vociferous mourner, or the perpetual weeper, here complain of his want of sensibility—but let them remember Lord Elmwood was a man—a man of understanding—of courage—of fortitude—with all, a man of the nicest feelings—and who shall say, but that at the time he leaned his head upon his hand, and rose to walk away the sense of what he felt, he might not feel as much as Lady Elmwood did in her last moments. (204–5) Under the ‘law’ in Elmwood’s world, no one can ask why he performs the series of actions that the narrator lists (read, leaned, rose up, walked, sat, took up, read again, leaned again, walked away). What is the meaning of his untasted chocolate? No one, except the reader, can question, and Elmwood’s determined self-distancing elicits the narrator’s self-consciousness about her own speculations in this passage. This unusual style fits the silence that predominates on the Elmwood estate. Elmwood fears exposing any vestige of ‘sensibility’ and ‘feelings’ to dialogue. His masculine hardening (‘man’ is repeated three times in this passage) against his ‘nicer feelings’ leaves only inscrutable outward signs. The narrator qualifies her descriptions with ‘who shall say’. The inconclusive use of the conditional tense (‘he might not feel’) to direct the reader to consider what may be happening is a recurrent technique in the novel’s ambiguous second half.17

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The enforced silence even affects those capable of dialogue. While celebrations of Rushbrooke’s birthday continue in another part of the house, the remnant of friends surrounding Matilda in her designated quarters remark upon the unobserved passing of her birthday. The conversation constantly lapses into pauses, silent passages of time and pained failures of speech: ‘My birth day was last week,’ replied Matilda; but not a word beside. In their retired apartments, the day passed away not only soberly, but almost silently; for to speak upon any subject that did not engage their thoughts had been difficult, and to speak upon the only one that did, had been afflictive. Just as they were sitting down to dinner their bell gently rung, and in walked Sandford. ‘Why are not you among the revelers, Mr. Sandford?’ cried Miss Woodley, with an ironical sneer—(the first her features ever wore)— ‘Pray, were not you invited to dine with the company?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Sandford; ‘but my head ached; and so I had rather come and take a bit with you.’ Matilda, as if she had beheld his heart as he spoke, clung round his neck and sobbed on his bosom: he put her peevishly away, crying, ‘Nonsense, nonsense—eat your dinner.’ But he did not eat himself. (235–6) A level of sympathy flows and works surreptitiously in this realm where the word is carefully patrolled. But for these outsiders in their designated apartments, speech itself has become ‘afflictive’. Sandford must conform to the strictures on language as his own silence and untasted dinner parallel the actions and untasted drink of Elmwood. This dinner also recalls the tea among Miss Milner, Sandford and Elmwood that led to their reconciliation in Part I. Here, however, resentment builds against Rushbrooke. If proximity and exchange enabled social reconciliation in Part I, this distant, damaged dialogue suggests real despair. Yet, ultimately, this is not a novel without hope. Even in this passage, a bond among sufferers strives against a censored history. At the centre of this passage, the detail of Sandford’s headache concisely but poignantly recalls the lost influence of Miss Milner’s reconciling sympathy. Despite Miss Milner’s death, her alternative ethic of sympathy, which combines theological forgiveness and female sensibility, plays an even greater role in Part II. Her deathbed letter is a form of women’s writing that works against Elmwood’s imposed distance. Miss Milner

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‘The unfortunate child in the scripture (a lesson I have studied) his complaint, has made this wish cling so fast to my heart, that without the distant hope of its being fulfilled, death would have more terrors than my weak mind could support. “I will go to my father; how many servants live in my father’s house, and are fed with plenty, while I starve in a foreign land?”’ (211, original emphasis) The parable pleads against Elmwood’s rejection of his religious sensibility and appeals to the mercy, compassion and forgiveness of Dorriforth. Despite the book’s religious setting, the parable of the prodigal son with its theme of radical forgiveness provides the only explicit theological message. Inchbald’s novel connects the rise of Elmwood’s dangerous form of fundamentalism not to a religious position but to the abandonment of religious sentiment. The abandonment of his spiritual life accompanies his hardening into a ‘manhood’ without emotional vulnerability. He rebukes Sandford and rejects the softening effects, or reforms, that Sandford’s instruction in religious mercy and mystery had on his ‘temper’: ‘Do not, Sandford, and we may still be friends.—But I am not to be controlled as formerly; my temper is changed of late; changed to what I was originally; till your scholastic and religious rules reformed it. You may remember, how trouble-some it was, to conquer my stubborn disposition in my youth; then, indeed, you did; but in my manhood you will find the task more difficult.’ (214–15) The evacuation of Dorriforth’s feminine and religious sentiment has left him a secular, hyper-masculine Establishment aristocrat – a prodigal patriarch. The spectre of the gentleman ‘Lord Elmwood’ has completely subsumed the priestly ‘Rev. Dorriforth’ so that he can only discuss ‘horse, hay, farming, and politics’ (225). Once claustrophobically confined, he now seems to be always off to the hunt. Thus, Elmwood does not ultimately fit the parameters of Gellner’s sketch of fundamentalism as religious ‘superstition’ (Gellner 92–3). His split existence jarringly combines fragments of a secular antimodernism and distorted religious

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re-articulates the theme of reconciling sympathy to overcome the patterns of historical debt and resentment across generations. In the centrepiece of her letter, she retells the biblical parable of the prodigal son in order to restore Elmwood to his benevolent former self:

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principles. Yet this errant unforgiving figure is not demonized as modernity’s unrecoverable Other. Inchbald’s novel does not exile or kill him off. Rather, sympathy works through the conditions of partition to restore the fundamentalist to society and to overcome the embittered distance of sectarianism. Inchbald’s revision of the prodigal son pattern to announce a gendered form of sympathy across generations radiates throughout the whole of the work. Miss Milner tries to reclaim a ‘prodigal father’, not a prodigal son, and to educate him in how sympathy for sufferers can better redress the wounds of history. Steadfastly adhering to forgiveness and love, the ‘child’ in all the patterns of historical resentment – from Rushbrooke to Mrs Hillgrave to Matilda – was not at fault. Rather, the father has separated himself from the mercy and forgiveness that could restore the familial community and the historical break between generations. The parable thus criticizes the law of the father. The suffering child’s alienation in a ‘foreign land’ also highlights how Elmwood has gone from being an alien persecuted by those in power to using his power to persecute other aliens. In the revised parable, Inchbald narrates the return of the prodigal father, a return that will ‘unman’ Elmwood into the sympathetic, feminized Dorriforth who can forgive and love. Hardened into patriarchal abuse, the prodigal father must be ‘educated’ once again in the softening virtues of Miss Milner in order to break the cultural logic of partition, nation and empire. In this way, A Simple Story attempts to be a unique bildungsroman, a novel that educates the reader in the development of historical sympathy across borders and historical divides to counter the hardening effects of sectarianism and fundamentalism. This educational purpose can help make sense of the cryptic, moralizing address that abruptly closes the novel and has left readers dissatisfied from Wollstonecraft onwards: He [the reader] beheld the pernicious effects of an improper education in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner—On the opposite side, then, what will not be hoped from that school of prudence—though of adversity—in which Matilda was bred? And Mr. Milner, Matilda’s grandfather, had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family—as Matilda’s father once meant to do—so he had bestowed upon his daughter A PROPER EDUCATION. (337–8) Inchbald’s gangly wording does not easily fit a moral about the faulty educational opportunities available for eighteenth-century women. Yet,

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if the novel is about an education in sympathy both for history’s victims and its victimizers, the message comes into clearer focus. Such sympathy can be learned through compassion for another’s adverse experience. The appeal across generations from Mr Milner down to Matilda takes up the theme of historic resentment and forgiveness of debts. Furthermore, since the message of sympathy across borders is primarily advocated by the women characters, the conclusion is not about the education of women but about women educating. Miss Milner and Matilda are the educators in the novel for Dorriforth/Elmwood. Because of her aristocratic insensibility, Miss Milner, with her dangerous, unthinking wit, only partially articulated sympathy. Matilda, more sensible to the sufferings of others after having suffered herself, emerges as the work’s true heroine. Her enduring love and forgiveness restore the prodigal father, break down the borders of partition and facilitate a new form of community. How does this come about? Eschewing a problematic marriage plot, Inchbald structures Part II around the gaps in the estate’s divisions and around contingent chance encounters. The plot hinges on the responses made in these dramatic moments of contact. Sympathy, often through memory, constantly breaks through Elmwood’s political and social barriers to disrupt the partition’s goal of displacing and silencing history. Matilda first cringes at the portrait of Lord Elmwood – one of the many ‘relics’ in the Elmwood House. However, she learns to ‘sigh and weep’, imagining in her own person the reconciliation of her estranged mother and father (220). She approaches the prodigal father’s chair with ‘filial piety’ and surveys his possessions with ‘filial delight’ (245). She refuses to return her persecutor’s resentment with hatred. Elmwood’s response to memorial artefacts represents an opposing stance. A servant, Edwards, inadvertently mentions that Miss Milner had enjoyed one of the estate’s walks. Elmwood banishes him and his family, leaving behind a scarred domestic landscape: Edwards was obliged to submit; and before the next day at noon, his pleasant house by the side of the park, his garden, and his orchard, which he had occupied above twenty years, were cleared of their old inhabitants, and all his wretched family. (271–2) With the narrator dwelling on the details of the wasted home, the stark scene of exile and disrupted communal life conveys the further violence and loss in the partitioned estate. The most potent and determinative encounters occur when characters, who formerly only imagined the lives of those across borders, unexpectedly meet. The three most prominent examples are Rushbrooke

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and Matilda’s meeting in one of Matilda’s ‘outer rooms’ (237–8); the accidental meeting of Sandford, Miss Woodley and Matilda with Rushbrooke along one of the estate’s paths (265–7); and the encounter of Lord Elmwood with Matilda on the stairs (273–5). Each takes place in some form of liminal space that broaches borders (outer room, pathway, stairwell). They create the possibility of revision in the overdetermined world of heavily regulated divisions, controlled words and structured events. The first two encounters reach across sectarian borders, demystifying and humanizing the opposing group. The transformation is gradual and the progress seems almost negligible. After their first meeting, Miss Woodley begins to re-evaluate Rushbrooke’s positive qualities, Matilda rejoices to hear of his recovery from a near-fatal illness and Sandford almost does not regret the nephew’s recovery (256–7). At the centre of Part II, the encounter between Matilda and Lord Elmwood on the staircase is even more crucial in re-establishing community. Mirroring Dorriforth and Miss Milner’s discussion of the ball on the stairs in Part I, the passage portrays the frightened and fainting Matilda’s appeal for help that leads to an intimate, physical moment of contact. In this poignant moment, Elmwood’s undercurrent of sympathy involuntarily arises as he faces his daughter’s suffering, the memory of her mother and his own vulnerability: At length, trying to escape the snare into which he had been led, he was going to leave her on the spot where she fell, when her eyes opened and she uttered, ‘Save me.’—Her voice unmanned him.—His long-restrained tears now burst forth—and seeing her relapsing into the swoon again, he cried out eagerly to recall her.—Her name did not however come to his recollection—nor any name but this—‘Miss Milner—Dear Miss Milner.’ (274) Elmwood’s adherence to principle and domination temporarily dissolves. His steadfast resistance to emotion and memory also dissolves, seemingly without his volition. Overpowering his embittered projection of the meeting as a ‘snare’, the proximate, embodied, living ‘voice’ of Elmwood’s daughter ‘unmans’ him. For a moment, the stern patriarch gives way to the merciful pastor. Almost beyond his will, Elmwood abrogates his own law and speaks against the silence and distance he has imposed on his estate by uttering ‘Dear Miss Milner’. More specifically, he repeats his previous involuntary uttering of ‘My dear Miss Milner’ from Part I, when his beautiful ward’s mere appearance taught him a lesson in mollifying sympathy (50).

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This is a tenuous moment, however, and the recovery is fragile. Along with the evocative allusion to ‘Miss Milner’, his embittered memories also return. Inchbald’s precision is remarkable, as her prose probes the ambiguous meaning of ‘recall’ – here meaning both Elmwood’s returning Matilda to consciousness but also his remembering of her and her mother. His inability to ‘name’ his daughter demonstrates his incapacity to think outside his own wounded history with Miss Milner. Even after being touched by his daughter’s ‘voice’, he cannot address her as a person with present needs, loves and responsibilities, but only as a figure of historical typology – ‘Miss Milner’. Elmwood faces the choice of opening himself to further ‘unmanning’ or of following the patriarchal rejection of mercy to return to the secure distance of partition. He chooses the way of the prodigal father as he ‘commands’ that the partition be re-established in language reminiscent of his earlier awkward authoritarianism in barring Miss Milner’s attendance of the ball. In separating father and daughter through a further act of ‘violence’ (274), Elmwood then distances himself not only by evicting Matilda from Elmwood House but also by doing so through a servant’s letter, the detached, disembodied mode of communication he had deployed at the end of Part I. While this may seem tragic, the resonance of this encounter on the staircase is more complex. Despite an immediate failure to heal history’s wounds, the power of this recollection of ‘Dear Miss Milner’ continues to work in the novel. Even though Lord Elmwood chooses hardening and distance after meeting Matilda, the alternative ethic of ‘unmanning’ sympathy, symbolized in Miss Milner’s gracious relief of Sandford’s headache from Part I, haunts him. As Elmwood flees from the emotional intensity of encounter, he dismisses Rushbrooke’s enquiries about his distraction: ‘I have the head-ache a little,’ answered he;—Then taking off his hat, brushed the powder from it, and as he put it on again, fetched a most heavy sigh; which no sooner had escaped him, than, to drown its sound, he said briskly, ‘And so you tell me you have had good sport to-day?’ (281) In this carefully patterned novel of recurrent symbols, Miss Milner’s sympathetic response to Sandford’s headache breaks through Elmwood’s wilful suppression of memory. Readers gain some insight into his immured psyche in the form of a sigh, which involuntarily ‘escaped’. Again, memory seems to be working against his repression. His only recourse is to ‘drown’ it forcefully with a brusque comment about the hunt.

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Miss Milner’s haunting presence and alternative ethic, however, will not be easily suppressed, as forgiveness and sympathy eventually transform Elmwood. At the end of the novel, Elmwood again faces the results of his choices and reunites with the endangered Matilda. Yet, consistent with Inchbald’s portrayal of the fundamentalist’s withdrawn subjectivity, the reader never understands exactly why Elmwood returns to society. After the abduction of Matilda, Sandford asks him if he will prove himself a ‘father’. Inchbald writes, ‘Lord Elmwood only answered, “Yes,” and left the room’ (324). The prodigal father’s reasoning and feelings remain hidden. Even when he is reconciled with Matilda and embraces her as a ‘father’ (328), the narrator can only speculate on what passes in his heart: ‘These were the happiest moments she had ever known— perhaps the happiest he had ever known’ (329). The strange qualification of ‘perhaps’ indicates how inscrutable Elmwood remains. For readers accustomed to unmitigated access to deep subjectivities in modern novels, this can be a puzzling, frustrating moment. Enabling the erring authoritarian to open his enclosed self to society is, however, an educational goal of Inchbald’s plot. Paradoxically, he has entered modernity by returning to his old self, under the merciful tutelage of Sandford and the sympathetic influence of Miss Milner. In yet another structural parallel, he refuses the abductor’s demand for a duel, thus affirming Dorriforth’s pastoral sparing of Lord Frederick in the novel’s first duel and repudiating Elmwood’s patriarchal violence in its second. Although sympathy overcomes partition, the inexplicability of Elmwood’s actions is one of the many ways that the novel resists the forms of cultural and narrative closure of other marriage plots. Does Elmwood realize that he passed from victim to victimizer in assuming his patriarchal, aristocratic position when a fellow aristocrat abducts Matilda? Or does he see his history with Lord Frederick and Miss Milner repeating itself? Or is it the shock of extreme violence that finally weakens his hardened resistance to sympathy and brings him back into the community? If Elmwood’s ‘conversion’ was sudden and remains unexplained, must the reader remain sceptical about the stability and depth of his education in sympathy? Will he remain a benevolent member of the community or will he re-establish partitions? Elmwood does threaten to banish Rushbrooke following his profession of love for Matilda. Shades of Dorriforth and Miss Milner’s union seem to threaten a continued cycle of partition in the next generation as the ‘trembling’ and emotionally immature Rushbrooke forces his enthusiastic love on an oblivious Matilda, who hears the proposal as if it were a ‘stroke of death’ (337). The narrator hides the outcome of Rushbrooke’s marriage proposal in

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the conditional tense: ‘Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, could sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise— and if he supposes that it did not, he has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness’ (337). This formal openness and indeterminacy stress the theme of gradual, contingent reconciliation across national and religious borders. The characters will clearly need to continue working through the wounds of history and to continue choosing sympathy over resentment. Part II of A Simple Story could easily have ended with a second marriage plot that rectified the mistakes of the first generation (Milner/Dorriforth) in the second generation (Matilda/Rushbrooke). The result would be a reformed or rehabilitated union. But what would the costs of that union have been? Would it have meant banishing or even killing off Elmwood as the obtrusive, obsolescent father figure? Would it have meant forgetting the wounding of Miss Milner, whose suffering could have preserved bitterness or left the community in perpetual mourning? The novel’s hybrid structure that sutures together the marriage plot and its fragments foregoes these solutions. The novel’s ‘peculiar disunity’ refuses to erase the memory of Miss Milner, which is recalled on the final page. It also recalls Elmwood into a community that is poised, albeit shakily, to enter modernity. Regardless of the persistent struggles with history in the open-ended conclusion, this revised, open community with a remembrance and awareness of mutual woundedness does represent an alternative path. Just as Matilda can be described as ‘exiled, a wanderer, and an orphan’, the gathered community at the end of the novel also fits into these categories. Elmwood is a widower who has no hopes of passing on the title for which he sacrificed his priesthood; Sandford is an ‘orphaned’ priest after the Jesuits have been dissolved; Miss Woodley has lost her parental figure, Mrs Horton; and Rushbrooke is an orphan whose parents died in disgrace. Inchbald binds together a community of émigrés and sufferers united by the wounds of history, not by nationalist ideology. The community may be imperfect and oddly shaped, just like the aesthetic form of A Simple Story, but it represents a striking form of social formation and a more radical form of toleration that incorporates difference into a common territory without effacing memories of the past. A Simple Story thus engages with the most difficult problems of the Catholic Question surrounding nation, religion and history. The novel creates a collective, but not by excluding religious difference or silencing the memory of wounds and suffering. Inchbald pushes the limits of literary, generic convention, yielding a split, hybrid novel whose ‘disunity’

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nonetheless provides a unique education in transhistorical unity across generations. Her vision for national identity does not celebrate the 1791 Relief Act as a better version of the 1778 Relief Act that resolves the problems of the Union. Instead, she foresees the way in which the Act of Union would not be an instant, legislative solution to the problems of national and religious difference. She seems to suggest a social model that supersedes borders, sectarianism and fundamentalism by confronting and working through bitter memories of mutual historical wounding. The result is a community not based on conforming to Britishness but on a gathering of sufferers united by sympathy and respect for difference. Amid sectarian hardening of positions on the Catholic Question, Irish unrest and the French Revolution, Inchbald calls for a community of neighbouring sects, diverse with distinct identities and histories but united by practising common kindness.

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3

It is an oddity of literary history that the prefatory verses to Wordsworth’s The Excursion that announce The Recluse – itself a unrealized project of philosophic poetry – became the key text in M.H. Abrams’s interpretation of romanticism’s ‘spirit of the age’ as a unified and unifying intellectual movement centred on the transcendent imagination of the autonomous self (Natural Supernaturalism 19–32) The prospectus’s triumphant blank verse proclaims that Wordsworth’s vatic poem ‘On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life’ will go beyond Milton’s Paradise Lost by exploring the poet’s deep subjectivity through what Frank McConnell termed the ‘confessional imagination’ (McConnell 4–5). Yet amid its emphasis on interiority or, in Duncan Wu’s formulation, Wordsworth’s ‘inner life’ (Wu viii), the prospectus also poses a significant question about external landscape and history: Paradise, and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? (‘The Excursion, Preface’ l.47–51) This passage invokes a renewal of Britain that is geographical (‘Fortunate Fields’), albeit mythical (‘groves Elysian’). A national ‘Paradise lost’ is to be regained as part of Wordsworth’s bardic vocation, but the verse asks how this recovery of historical glory will occur. Will it be through a return of ‘departed things’ from the past or through a ‘mere fiction’, a newly invented tradition? The rhetorical question about the historical status of ‘Paradise’ remains unanswered, overridden by Wordsworth’s claim that a peaceable union between man and nature ‘shall find’ these 87

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paradisiacal landscapes as the ‘simple produce of the common day’ (l.54–5). Wordsworth even draws the local circumstances of ‘when and where, and how he lived’ into his national eschatology (l.98). Boldly envisioned, this project is meant to be efficacious in the contemporary world, not merely the individual expression or escapist transcendentalism that has been praised by Abrams and critiqued by New Historicism.1 With an urgent need to rediscover Britain’s sacred topography in 1814, a significant aspect of the poet’s stated imaginative task is to regenerate the national landscape and thereby renew the national community. Wordsworth criticism examining the import of The Recluse and his later writings has recognized, however, this social and political engagement, especially in The Excursion, the sweeping project’s most substantial published piece. According to Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth constantly turns The Recluse, though with frustration, to the difficulties of ‘society and history’ present in ‘Human Life’ (Johnston xiv). Alison Hickey’s book-length study of The Excursion argues for the complex and ambivalent ‘imaginative exploits’ that the work undertakes on ‘behalf of a social or collective entity—community, nation, empire’ (15–16).2 Kurt Fosso has identified how much of Wordsworth’s creative energies were directed towards recovering some sort of positive form of community out of the chaotic 1790s as he and his ‘turbulent, reform-minded’ age ‘yearned for alternative possibilities of social cohesion’ (2). While Johnston has made the case for The Recluse as the ‘secular successor to Milton’s theodicies’ (xii), the scholarship of Mark Canuel, Colin Jager and Robert Ryan has shown that the full scope and tenor of Wordsworth’s social vision remains illegible, especially in the oft-maligned Excursion, without an accompanying understanding of his nuanced treatment of religion and belief. Rather than anodyne nationalism and cowering religious orthodoxy, Ryan reads Wordsworth as offering a liberalized religious system ‘broad enough and flexible enough to accommodate a community of independent, imaginative religious thinkers’ that enables a ‘community of common concern’ (116). Extending Ryan’s emphasis on ‘accommodation’ (162, 163), Canuel sees Wordsworth’s effort to provide ‘a kind of community’ for ‘The Solitary’, the suffering central character in The Excursion, as central to his ‘poetic reconstitution of religious establishment’ that would approximate nature’s ‘more inclusive and expansive contours’ (171, 163, 175). Yet, even though a year before the publication of The Excursion Wordsworth was reserving his ‘most determined hostility’ towards ‘those who see no danger to the constitution in introducing Papists into Parliament’ (MY 2: 108), the troubling role

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of the Catholic Question in Wordsworth’s social and religious vision has been largely elided from these reconsiderations. During the years in which Wordsworth was composing much of The Excursion (c. 1809–13) and well beyond that period, his poetic project was invested in the political discourse about landscape, ruins and religious history surrounding the Catholic Question. The image of the local Anglican church provides the central source of pathos in Wordsworth’s 1809 argument against Catholic Emancipation in a letter to his friend Francis Wrangham, an Anglican minister and proponent of Catholic relief: with the Methodists on one side and the Catholics on the other, what is to become of the poor Church and people of England, to both of which I am most tenderly attached, and to the former, not the less on account of the pretty little spire of Brompton Parish Church, under which you and I were made happy men, by the gift from providence of two excellent wives. (MY 1: 313) This letter positions the established church with its alliance of church and state as occupying an embattled middle position between the subversive extremes of ‘superstitious’ Catholics and ‘enthusiastic’ Methodists. More significantly, the diminutive, localized English church building – the ‘pretty little spire of Brompton Parish Church’ – symbolizes all that is good about Britishness and becomes a site for building up the nation out of religion, friendships and good marital unions. In 1812 Wordsworth’s acceptance of the post of ‘distributor of stamps’ from his new patron Lord Lowther ‘marked him’, according to Hunt in The Feast of the Poets (1814), as the ‘property’ of a ‘government’ that was militaristic abroad and resistant to reform at home (HSW 5: 68). In 1813, with Napoleon’s threat coming to a head and the government tightening domestic control, Wordsworth viewed defeating Napoleon and Catholic Emancipation as ‘two points most near my heart’ (MY 2: 108). Even after the defeat of the ‘usurper’ at Waterloo, Wordsworth was still anxious about radicals, reformers and Catholic Emancipation threatening the nation from within. In 1817 he missed a visit from Keats while campaigning across the Lake District to prevent the election of the opposition leader Henry Brougham, the lawyer for the Hunt brothers and a strong supporter of Catholic relief. Wordsworth’s antipathy to reform and Catholic Emancipation intensified from the time of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre to the 1823 formation of O’Connell’s Irish Association, which he demonized as ‘dangerous to the tranquility, if not to the existence of the State’ (LY 1: 310). During

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these years, Wordsworth saw ‘Roman Catholic concession’ as one of ‘three great domestic questions’ along with ‘liberty of the press’ and ‘Parliamentary reform’ (LY 1: 97) and feared that British Catholics were striving ‘in co-operation with other Dissenters and Infidels’ to ‘overthrow’ the ‘Protestant Establishment’ (LY 1: 58). By 1829, with the Reform Bill on the horizon, Wordsworth declared that Catholic Emancipation would disrupt the balanced constitutional, religious and cultural settlement achieved in the Glorious Revolution and would serve as ‘a counterrevolutionary measure’ to all ‘things enacted and confirmed in 1688’ (LY 2: 52). This chapter argues that Wordsworth’s connection of the Catholic Question to the Glorious Revolution’s establishment of the via media between enthusiasm and superstition provides the model for restoring national culture in The Excursion and Wordsworth’s later religious literature, as well as the rationale for imposing newly articulated limitations and exclusions within a romantic-era cultural settlement comparable to 1688. I do not seek simply to re-establish a conservative reading of late Wordsworth against the more recent readings of his more progressive tolerance and openness. Indeed, my argument affirms Canuel’s and Ryan’s sense that Wordsworth’s later poetry seeks to supplant religious institutions or sectarian legislation in organizing the terms of religious belief and toleration. But I will show that Wordsworth’s communal vision is less than ‘infinitely capacious’ (Canuel 163), relying on the more traditional theological structure of the via media and recasting its religious limits of Britishness in cultural terms. The Excursion regulates against the Scylla and Charybdis of romanticperiod religious politics – namely the ‘enthusiasm’ unleashed by the French Revolution and the domestic threat of ‘superstition’ posed by Catholic Emancipation. In Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (2003), Jon Mee reads Wordsworth as attempting to preserve British culture and society from the extreme force of uncontrolled ‘enthusiasm’, the antinomian, religious energy at the heart of political revolutions from England’s seventeenth-century Civil War to the French Revolution. This, however, is only half the story. To restore Britain to the balance of the via media, Wordsworth also harnesses the positive aspects of superstition. Why would a return to superstition’s primitive, unpolished ages or Catholicism’s antiquated spirituality be desirable for Wordsworth? As in the prospectus to The Recluse, superstition can go out of the self and into history, recuperate elements from a primitive past that can be more than ‘departed things’, and serve the needs of the present by providing what revolutionary enthusiasm cannot – a basis

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for community and society. Nevertheless, David Hume had warned in his essay on religion, ‘Enthusiasm and Superstition’ (1741), that superstition could always bring ‘corruptions of true religion’, specifically the mechanical ritualism and spiritual tyranny associated with Catholicism (3). Yet even Hume, who generally saw enthusiasm as the lesser evil of the two, distinguished between superstition directed by an unacceptable, papal priesthood of ‘pretenders to power and dominion’ and an acceptable version in which respectable ‘clergymen’ are dedicated ‘to the care of sacred matters’ and ‘public devotions’ with ‘decency and order’ (5n). Likewise, Wordsworth differentiates between a regulated superstition whose transubstantiation of objects into divinity emerges not from a Catholic priesthood but from those who recognize the social interconnectedness of human life and nature, a ‘prophetic bestowal of sacred meaning upon objects initially devoid of it’, which Simon Jarvis has suggestively termed Wordsworthian ‘idolatry’ (4). If the ‘corruptions’ of Catholicism could be regulated and kept at a distance, then what Hume negatively called superstition’s ‘ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices’ could be recuperated as a set of communal rituals, common beliefs and, crucially, a unifying sense of place (4). Within the romantic period, resources for contemporary social renewal from earlier civilizations – whether Druidic, pagan, medieval or even Catholic – were tapped by various writers for often divergent political and social purposes. For Wordsworth, an accreted and stabilizing legacy of ancient British vitality was preserved in the landscape and in what the historian Pierre Nora terms ‘les lieux de memoire’, or ‘places of memory’, which are topographical protrusions of history conveying reminders of the past. These sites very often bore traces of Britain’s Catholic and ‘superstitious’ past. Fosso points to the general fascination in the period with ruins of Catholic abbeys that ‘signified both the promise and the loss of community to an age in which order and collectivity were so desired’ and how Wordsworth joined in ‘exploring the attractions and repulsions of a Catholic past’s different sense of order and interconnectedness’ (14–15). Superstition could turn to the ‘attractions’ of past ages or to a ‘creed outworn’, as does the 1807 sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’, in an attempt to regain positive forms of social interconnection. Accordingly, Wordsworth even describes the structure of The Recluse as a ‘body of a gothic Church’ (‘The Excursion, Preface’38). The first section of this chapter thus argues that Book IV of The Excursion enacts a recuperation of superstition that represents an important and hitherto largely neglected aspect of Wordsworth’s religious, historiographic and topographic imagination. Yet while superstition seemed to

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be an attractive antidote to the ‘enthusiastic’ ills of the age, Wordsworth himself feared that Catholic Emancipation’s proposed re-admission of a papal extreme into British civil society would undermine rather than renew national identity. He later articulated his nightmarish fear of Catholic Emancipation as Parliament turning itself into Cerberus, the mythical guardian of Hell, ‘a canine monster with two heads, which, instead of keeping watch and ward, will be snarling at and bent on devouring each other’ (LY 2: 39). To avoid such a monstrous division in the nation, any recuperation of superstition thus also had to excise or at least contain the ‘repulsions’ of a superstitious Catholic past. The Excursion does so briefly by a regulatory appeal to national sentiment and a sense of national history, which is more extensively developed in Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs and Ecclesiastical Sketches. The attempts in these texts to distinguish Wordsworth’s backward glance from its feared papist counterpart from the Catholic Emancipation campaign are treated in the second and third sections of this chapter respectively. This political struggle to recuperate superstition while containing Catholic ‘corruptions’ informs Wordsworth’s later aesthetic as one in which extremes are held in balance, opposing forces are rendered tranquil and potentially disruptive memories are composed into peaceful contemplation.

The Excursion and the school of superstition Keats’s enthusiasm for The Excursion as one of the ‘three things to rejoice at’ in the romantic age (Letters 1: 203) cuts across our current critical relegation of a work that was not only Wordsworth’s most prominent public poem but that was also formally designed, as Roydon Slaick has argued, to be the epic for his age. Herbert Tucker has taken up this generic designation in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (2008) by examining The Excursion’s attempts to redress post-revolutionary despair in war-weary Britain and ‘to link, if not transform, that fund of boundless sorrow to a hope capable of sustaining not only individual lives but the life of the community, we might even say even culture itself’ (185). Yet this attempt to restore the sense of community in British society reaches what Tucker calls an ‘epic impasse’, in which, at a deep structural and ideological level, The Excursion is an ‘epic at odds with and even in spite of itself, a transcendental vision broken to mundane harness for its own good’ (181, 178). In this section I will argue that this brokenness is a necessary ambivalence that forms a studied part of the work’s composition and plays an integral role in Wordsworth’s effort to

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rebalance the nation. Wordsworth offers superstition as a unifying religious and poetic remedy to the despairing character referred to as ‘the Solitary’, whose hopes for peace and progress were dashed by the havoc resulting from the extremes of enthusiasm in the French Revolution, and to Britain, which in 1814 was confronting Napoleon, the divisions over parliamentary reform, the Prince Regent’s ‘apostasy’ and the Catholic Question. Since Keats and Hunt found liberating delight in The Excursion’s description of the imagination eliciting deities from nature, critics have seen such passages in Book IV as Wordsworth’s slipping ‘almost unaware’ into ‘radical mythmaking’ (Johnston 272). Yet, as Jeffrey N. Cox and Nicholas Roe have shown, the response of the Hunt Circle was a subversive Cockney appropriation of ‘the central poem in their Wordsworth canon’ (Cox Poetry and Politics 106; Roe John Keats 76–7). While Wordsworth may have left the ‘way open’ (Roe John Keats 77) for this radical misprision, he had carefully foregrounded these passages in the structurally pivotal Book IV, a formal placement that seems inconsistent with undiscerning carelessness. Further, the power of superstition is not only a topic of discussion among the characters but also forms Book IV’s key poetic trope in the thrice-repeated image of the ‘animated’ or ‘kindling eye’, which represents superstition’s ability to tie the characters to nature, God and each other. This poetic crafting also suggests that Wordsworth was not veering ‘off the track of traditional theology’ (Johnston 276), but was consciously recommending ‘superstition’ in support of it. So, in addition to fostering Keats’s enthusiasm for revolutionary mythopoeia, this actually left Wordsworth open to charges of potentially restoring a regressive and oppressive Catholicism.3 Book IV is the crucial turning point for The Excursion as a whole and for the Solitary, an apathetic misanthrope who has undergone a ‘loss of confidence in social Man’ after the failure of the ‘unexpected transports of our Age’ (4.262, 263). Wordsworth represents this symbolically in the Solitary’s discarded copy of Candide, now mouldering with damp in a ruined child’s playhouse. When Voltaire’s revolution failed, the poem suggests, his atheistic and immature ideology provided the Solitary with only a shaky structure for his soul. Conflating the psychological, philosophical and architectural, Wordsworth describes the book and the place as a ‘Retreat within retreat, a sheltering-place/Within how deep a shelter!’ (2.469–70). Following the Solitary’s unrealistically unbounded sense of hope, symbolized in the swollen pages, he is dropping inwardly down through an equally limitless despair. In an effort to save the Solitary from his wavering ideals, the Wanderer, a philosophic pedlar who has endured the age with admirable equipoise, counsels

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that both ‘extremes’ were ‘equally remote/From Truth and Reason’ (4.269–70). Dominated by philosophical discussions and austere action, the plot of Book IV is, at first glance, very thin. Three of the main characters – the poet/narrator, the Wanderer and the Solitary – walk through the Scottish highlands talking about nature and religion in relation to the Solitary’s despondency. Yet the stakes of this peripatetic poetry are high. The challenge is to recover the Solitary by restoring his sense of social, political and theological balance. Book IV takes a significant step towards rescuing him, and the nation, from enthusiastic disappointment through the sagacious Wanderer’s exaltation of the regenerating powers of superstition. The title of Book IV, ‘Despondency Corrected’, thus encapsulates the generic and thematic core of The Excursion as a national epic: the healing of Britain’s spiritual malaise following the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and the Catholic Question.4 Stuart Curran has described the almost impossible dilemma of would-be epic poets in the romantic era. On the one hand, the epic had to respond to the ‘historical urgency’ of political events at a national level. On the other hand, the most recent British epic hero, Jesus of Paradise Regained, had moved the epic’s struggles from external conflicts regarding ‘warfare, past and future history, the high achievements of human culture’ into individual psychodrama in which the epic task ‘is simply to define the god within’ (Poetic Form 159, 174). In a search for precedents for such contradictory pulls between the ‘exploit of the mind’ and the exigencies of the nation, Ryan has suggested The Book of Job, with its spiritual discussions of social misfortune, as a generic model for The Excursion (104). While The Excursion, with its anguished protagonist in prolonged discussion, formally resembles both Job and Paradise Regained, the telos of Wordsworth’s narrative definitively breaks from their struggles for individual, spiritual conviction. In those narratives, the protagonist must fight to end dialogue with the other speakers. Jesus and Job must reject false consolations and silence their comforters in order to gain spiritual freedom and restore their internal spiritual vocation. The hard task of The Excursion differs sharply from this internalized quest, emphasizing communal reconciliation. The Solitary must keep talking in order to overcome his misanthropic despair and must keep listening to his interlocutors in order to find communion with nature and community within human life. Differing from prophetic recalcitrance, this theme of loquacious spiritual and social therapy ultimately must mitigate Tucker’s ultimate classification of The Excursion as ‘an epic of the egotistical sublime’ (189). In short, The Excursion’s plot hinges on whether

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the Solitary, suffering in isolation, can recover sociability, rejoin the conversation of culture and, perhaps above all, settle in a place where a restored community can refound itself. In Book IV the diagnosis to counteract the Solitary’s disillusioned enthusiasm and to correct his despondency is the annealing interaction with nature enabled by superstition, represented by the synecdoche of the ‘animated’ or ‘kindling eye’, whose positive power is far different from the ‘sensual’ and ‘despotic’ eye critiqued in The Prelude (1805 11.168–73). As the poet, the Wanderer and the Solitary walk through a Scottish valley discussing the pitfalls of ‘morbid solitude’, the Solitary grows rapturous about the primitive peoples who made the landscape ‘More multitudinous every moment’ by calling ‘out Shapes/And Phantoms from the crags and solid earth’ (4.530, 522–3). This conversation will heal the Solitary and provide a spiritual basis for social renewal. The passage begins with the poignant line: ‘The Solitary lifted toward the hills/An animated eye’ (4.505–6). Wordsworth vacillated between the adjectives ‘animated’, presumably meaning an eye endowed with or endowing an anima or soul, and the revision to ‘kindling’, which better fits the flame motif in the poem. The diction is difficult because Wordsworth is attempting to articulate a complicated conception of the imagination’s interaction with nature that draws on but also goes beyond the passage’s allusion to the beginning of Psalm 121: I will lift up my eyes to the hills— From whence comes my help? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth. (Psalms 121:1–2) This is a psalm of healing, in which the troubled psalmist discovers ‘help’ or salvation by looking up to nature (‘the hills’) and discovering eternal comfort, not only for himself but also for the nation of Israel. Yet Wordsworth cuts the second half of the chiasmus about the Lord, instead valuing the look to nature itself as the source of ‘help’. This salvific look that will console the Solitary and preserve Britain is an imagination formed by superstition and symbolized by the ‘kindling eye’. Through this symbol, superstition becomes the key element in correcting despondency. Thus, rather than upbraiding the Solitary’s unorthodox affinity for savage imaginings of ghosts, gods and monsters in nature, the Wanderer encourages his ‘idolatry’. Such visions are not nostalgic but rather are a necessary ingredient for any contemporary vital society. Otherwise, the Wanderer warns, one will be stuck in

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solipsism: ‘You dwell alone;/You walk, you live, you speculate alone’ (4.557–8). For the disaffected individual, superstition not only brings communion with nature but also connection with others who would share in those visions. The ‘lonely herdsman’ of ‘pagan Greece’ is the best known of the Wanderer’s examples because it inspired Keats’s ‘Hymn to Pan’ in Endymion (1818). At first glance, Keats’s poem seems to be the opposite of a socializing force. Endymion can be read as a prime example of the lone romantic genius retreating into nature to commingle his ditties with deities. Yet, even for Keats, Greek mythography provided an important social bond with other members of the Hunt Circle.5 This communal element is present in Wordsworth’s original as well. Other travellers share in the swain’s consecration of shared places to commonly revered gods. All of the Wanderer’s examples depict the superstitious imagination of peoples or nations: the Greeks, Chaldeans, Persians and Babylonians. The Wanderer, preferring even exploded ‘traditional sympathies’, would rather grow frightened of owls and magpies than to continue where ‘soul is dead, and feeling hath no place’ (4.611, 618). For the materialistic and hopeless Solitary, the Wanderer recommends: If unreligious, let him be at once, Among ten thousand Innocents, enrolled A Pupil in the many-chambered school, Where Superstition weaves her airy dreams. (4.604–7) Against the modernizing spirit of the age, Wordsworth’s sage advises that the Solitary be socialized in the school of superstition. Just as A Simple Story unexpectedly turns into a novel about educating society in sympathy, The Excursion presents a way of re-learning the power of place and sacred landscapes. The gods, imagined out of a common geography, become the basis for a shared imagined community. This initial appeal to the ‘animated’ or ‘kindling eye’ also provides a biblical foundation for a vision of superstition cultivating national coherence. As the discussion moves forward, the Wanderer assigns the genesis of the Jewish people to the type of imaginative ‘idolatry’ he has been recommending to the Solitary. Wordsworth speculates on the nature of life in prelapsarian Paradise, elevating the revelatory experience of the unfallen Jewish people above that of other nations: Upon the breast of new-created earth Man walked; and when and wheresoe’er he moved,

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Alone or mated, Solitude was not. He heard, upon the wind, the articulate Voice Of God; and Angels to his sight appeared, Crowning the glorious hills of Paradise; Or through the groves gliding like morning mist Enkindled by the sun. (4.627–34) This scene of mists transfigured by a preternatural light rising above hilltops and moving through groves recurs here. In the prelapsarian earth, the human ‘kindling eye’ meets the divine in nature as angels appear in the ‘enkindled’ mist above the hill line. After Paradise was lost and when ‘[f]ell Human-kind’, God withdraws from everyday communication. Yet humanity still has the ‘kindling eye’, the animating power of the superstitious imagination (4.643). This faculty still operates among the Persian, Chaldeans and Greeks from whom God has departed, but the searching faithful eye of the Jewish people more effectively, if only intermittently, finds the now ‘shapeless Power’ of ‘Jehovah’ (4.647–51). This remaining power, this spiritual consolation, allays ‘destitution’ and enables sacral encounters that constituted the Jewish nation – ‘Solitude was not’ (4.646). The import of these lines for The Excursion cannot be underestimated. In order to regain both Paradise and social interconnection and to avoid fragmentation and despair, Britons must be guided by this vatic ‘kindling eye’, a way of seeing the world that addresses modern problems with a distinctly pre-modern power. The drama of this epic poem depends on whether and how this ancient vision can be regained as the characters walk amid the mountains and pleasant pastures of The Excursion. Following further dialogue, the Wanderer returns to the trope of superstitious vision, attempting in this second case to revive this primitive faculty in the Solitary by arguing that it is a force that could still illuminate the landscape, heal wounds and reconstitute the nation. In a powerful speech to show the ‘kindling eye’ is no mere atavism, the Wanderer claims its powers remain available amid the hills of Scotland. The Wanderer reprises Genesis, revisiting in the present the earlier prelapsarian passage in which angels, sunrises and morning mists mingled: As the ample Moon, In the deep stillness of a summer even Rising behind a thick and lofty Grove, Burns like an unconsuming fire of light, In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides

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Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea with her own incorporated, by power Capacious and serene. Like power abides In Man’s celestial Spirit; Virtue thus Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire, From the incumbrances of mortal life, From error, disappointment,—nay from guilt; And sometimes, so relenting Justice wills, From palpable oppressions of Despair. (4.1059–74) These lines repeat the scene of natural light enkindling misty groves from the earlier passage, in which the Hebrews viewed the newly created earth in the same manner. Both the moon that ‘burns’ and the analogous spiritual faculty that ‘abides’ in humanity are, crucially, in the present tense. The trees that burn without being consumed by the ‘fire of light’ is a daring allusion to the ‘burning bush’ in which Jehovah first appeared to Moses, an instantiation of God’s presence like that in the Ark previously described (Exodus 3:1–5). This high claim for the imagination’s rendering divine presence immanent in the landscape also draws on diction tinged with Catholic sacramental theology as the moonlight ‘turns’ the landscape into another ‘substance’ and is ‘incorporated’ into creation. In contrast to the Wordsworth of the internalizing, secularizing imagination, Book IV of The Excursion evinces another aspect of his poetic sensibility that sends the imagination into nature with incarnational force. The restorative effects can be seen not only within the passage but also in the dramatic reactions of the characters within the poem’s narrative. The fire emanating from the moonlight is far from wild, described in the surprisingly irenic terms ‘Capacious and serene’. It has the power to illuminate and revive without disturbance or destruction. The mood moves towards tranquility. The same process occurs through the power of ‘Man’s celestial Spirit’, whose ubiquitous flame is not a raging but rather ‘a calm, a beautiful, and silent fire’. The commas and extra indefinite article even slow down the pace of the line to capture, aurally, the sense of the unexpectedly peaceful adjectives. The unbalanced extremes of disappointment and error, as well as the nation’s guilt and despair, all undergo transformation in this powerful but pacifying flame. Even justice becomes ‘relenting’, a word etymologically associated with softening (OED). This tranquil restoration allows the Wanderer and the disaffected

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Solitary to form a social connection through a sympathetic bond. The narrator says that the Solitary ‘was touched/With manifest emotion’ (4.1075–6), but defensively rejects this ‘softening’ with an embittered comment about the narrowness of religion. However, an opening for the Solitary has been made by this encounter with nature. The poet describes how the Wanderer, rather than retaliating, offers only further sympathy for the Solitary’s pain, despair and ‘manifold degrees of guilt and shame’ (4.1104). He notes how seeing the Solitary’s ‘Eye,/Even like an Altar lit by fire from Heaven,/Kindle before us’ is a mark of his progress towards ‘restoration’ (4.1113–15, 1106). Through their conversational exchange and common wonderment before a British landscape transformed by the imagination, the two have come together to form an incipient community. The Solitary has been brought into the conversation of culture, out of his isolation and disappointed enthusiasm. The Solitary more fully responds in the third and final instance of superstition’s ‘kindling eye’, a description of the ‘hills’ by the poem’s narrator at the end of Book IV that transfigures the actual British landscape through which the characters are walking. The poet-narrator once again repeats the trope of the sun enflaming the landscape and meeting the gaze of those looking to the hills for salvation. Yet, this time, it is not a theoretical description or an outline of past religious history; rather, it is the illumination of familiar surroundings in the present day, so that Paradise can be regained in 1814 Britain. As in the previous two paradisal interactions with nature, the Sun disappears below the enkindled hills and sends out a burst of radiant pomp and circumstance like the angels ‘crowning the glorious hills of paradise’: The Sun, before his place of rest were reached, Had yet to travel far, but unto us, To us who stood low in that hollow Dell, He had become invisible,—a pomp Leaving behind of yellow radiance spread Over the mountain sides, in contrast bold With ample shadows, seemingly no less Than those resplendent lights his rich bequest, A dispensation of his evening power. (4.1293–301) This is not an argument, nor is it a postulation. They have found the very scene that was the vision promised by superstition. It has become the reality in which the characters live, move and have their being. As they find this blazing presence in the landscape, there is nevertheless a

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pervasive aesthetic of calm. It represents an artistic effort to bring the nation back into balance. The radiant sun and the ‘ample shadows’ coexist in ‘contrast bold’, with neither extreme dominant so that a balanced union is forged. The verse conveys a sense of composition, of potential divisions brought under serenity. Ultimately, this transformation seen and experienced by all the characters represents ‘despondency corrected’, the goal of Book IV and The Excursion as a whole. The superstitious imagination has restored a sense of equipoise, rescuing the enthusiast from the extremes of despair. This natural transformation also prepares the way for the reformed group to settle in a communal abode. Eschewing the ‘solitary way’ of Adam and Eve, the fellow travellers meet others and retire into a ‘small Cottage in the lonely Dell’ (4.1313). This comfortable cottage, peopled by a united group, symbolically reverses the ‘ruined cottage’ of Margaret’s broken family that opened The Excursion. A restoration of community in a dwelling within a sanctified British landscape has taken place. The group can hear the ‘sound/Of far-off torrents’ (4.1323), but these troubled waters are somehow ‘charming’ – a reaction in opposition to that of the discomforting waters heard from the Gondo Village in Book VI of The Prelude (1805 6.576–80). The superstitious imagination has not only restored the social world but has enabled ‘sleep and soft forgetfulness’, a relenting oblivion that buries the nation’s troubled past. They will then proceed in Book V to the Pastor’s dwelling and church, both portrayed as being in harmony with the natural and national transformation that has occurred. Book IV forms and locates the community that will wrestle with the social problems occupying the remainder of the five books of The Excursion. The epic’s dramatic resolution of the Solitary’s reintegration amid a renewed national landscape has provided a resource and a model for the nation as a whole. Five more books follow, but the ensuing dialogue is in many ways an extended denouement of details. More than the matters discussed, the act of continued talking is the key to correcting despondency and the goal of this spiritual epic. Securing sacred space has secured this therapeutic conversation. Ryan has highlighted the tolerance within this reformed social group as one of the chief examples of the romantic project of liberalizing British society through the liberalization of British religious values. He reads the dialogic formation of this community, which remains openended and inconclusive, as representing the next Wordsworthian stage of the ‘reformation’ that expresses his interest ‘in purifying or redefining England’s national religion’ (7). For Ryan, the ‘Pastor’s congenial parsonage’ becomes a locus for establishing ‘social harmony or equanimity’

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among a fragmented nation and ‘an emblem of a religious community presided over by the clergy but making room for eccentrics and heretics and even for radical skeptics’ (115). Yet, amid this tendency towards accommodation, broadness and flexibility, Ryan notes this inclusiveness could extend to ‘Catholics and Dissenters if they lay aside their specific doctrinal rigidities’ (116). This ‘if’, however, represents a major qualification that touches upon the two major issues in romantic religious politics: the movement to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts against Dissenters and Catholic Emancipation. Since doctrinal issues surrounding conformity to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the disavowal of transubstantiation were the legislative vehicles of limiting participation in civil society and government, laying aside doctrinal disputes was a political and cultural issue, not merely an issue of scruples. For communities constituted by their confessional nonconformity, laying aside their ‘extreme’ doctrines meant dissolving their unique identities into Britishness. This settlement, both with its possibilities for community and its newly drawn exclusions, is part of the larger structural transformation surrounding the Catholic Question in which the demarcation of difference as a means of establishing national identity passed from legislation to culture. Wordsworth’s reformed group, broad as it is, maintains historically defined parameters that approximate 1688’s reaffirmation of the via media. Like those in Parliament who saw the settlement of 1688 threatened by Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Wordsworth’s settled parsonage community of 1814 maintains this balance by excluding those disruptive nonconformist versions of national history. One cannot imagine Inchbald’s Lord Elmwood or Owenson’s Prince of Inismore taking part in the cottagers’ dialogue or even knocking at the door. Yet if superstition reunites this community, how can the Wanderer’s transformative version of it be distinguished from primitive or papal superstition? In the words of Hume, superstition provokes a combination of ‘fear, sorrow, and a depression of spirits’ that ‘renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery’ (5, 8). It is not simply coincidence that Mary Shelley called The Excursion the work of a ‘slave’ (Journals 15) and Percy Shelley in the satiric ‘Peter Bell III’ ridiculed Wordsworth’s obeisance to the ‘White Obi’ (6.552). While the preface to The Excursion attempts to tame the spirit of the Methodist field preacher or the French revolutionary of the tennis courts by bringing them inside the structure of the ‘gothic church’, this re-habitation of a church ruin could easily be criticized as a craven and coercive return to the papal past. Hazlitt

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Whether, as it is, this most original performance may not rather remain like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel that it would be presumptuous in us to determine. (522) Hazlitt turns the ‘gothic church’ and the philosophic poem it symbolizes into an image of an Establishment that has ceased to serve liberty and the nation. He implies that in betraying his revolutionary enthusiasm, Wordsworth has merely invented a nationalist, Anglican version of papist superstition. There is, however, a cultural logic in Wordsworth’s work that anticipates such objections and attempts to delineate between what Fosso has called the ‘attractive’ and ‘repulsive’ forms of superstition. Book IV preemptively raises these concerns, and Wordsworth’s answer is to regulate superstition in much the same way as many writers in the romantic period regulated enthusiasm. Ultimately, the ‘return’ of superstition or Catholicism is a primitivism without teeth. In an exchange that allows the poem to display its moderation, the Solitary provocatively asks the Wanderer how his lauding of superstition would sound to their forebears, the Scottish Presbyterians whose iconoclasm emitted a ‘flame of zeal’ that destroyed ‘Shrine, Altar, Image, and the massy Piles/That harboured them’ in ‘deadly scorn of superstitious rites’ (4.894–6, 899). He first describes a powerful, even compelling image of Catholic idolatry imposed upon the British landscape, which he then undermines sarcastically as a ‘blessed restoration’: How, think you, would they tolerate this scheme Of fine propensities? that tends, if urged Far as it might be urged, to sow afresh The weeds of Romish Phantasy, in vain Uprooted; would re-consecrate our Wells To good Saint Fillan and to fair Saint Anne; And from long banishment recal Saint Giles, To watch again with tutelary love O’er stately Edinborough throned on crags. A blessed restoration to behold The Patron, on the shoulders of his Priests,

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picked up on this ambiguity in his incisive review in the Examiner, which laments Wordsworth’s falling off from his earlier revolutionary writing:

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The Solitary points out that the Wanderer’s appeal to superstition logically leads to bringing forth noxious ‘weeds of Romish Phantasy’. Such Catholic imaginings would reverse the Reformation and repopulate modern Scotland’s geography with saintly idols, revive the priesthood with its pageants and mummeries, and reclaim holy wells and other church property. Wordsworth would himself later express his anxiety that Catholic Emancipation would allow Catholics to seek reparations for ‘the revenues of the Protestant Church, her Cathedrals, her Churches that once belonged to the Romanists, and where in imagination their worship has never ceased to be celebrated’ (LY 2: 39–40, original emphasis). The Solitary’s description of Catholicism’s ‘return’ to the landscape was dreaded by Catholic Emancipation’s opponents like Wordsworth. To prevent this repulsive version of superstition, the Wanderer introduces two arguments about national history and the nation’s sense of moral sincerity that would ensure against ‘Romish Phantasy’. First, the Solitary’s frightful vision of a papal Scotland leads the Wanderer to wax historical, turning back his ‘thoughts/Upon our brave Progenitors, who rose/Against Idolatry with warlike mind’ (4.915–17). This is an argument from national history, if indeed it can be called an argument. It is more an appeal to a common sense of history that has produced a common theological and cultural outlook that, in the context of nineteenthcentury natural theology, Colin Jager calls the ‘largely unarticulated predispositions, habits and attitudes that live below the threshold of reason’ (11–12). The Wanderer does not explain how this answers the objection, but rather implies that papist ‘vain observances’ are simply not part of the national character as evinced in national history (4.918). Next, the Wanderer argues for a ‘moral sense’ held both by devout puritans and good pagans that exposes the difference between the proper superstitious imagination and its papal abuse (4.934). Within this context, the ‘moral sense’ consists primarily of sincerity that does not allow ritualistic ceremony to displace true sentiment. The Puritan Scots are praised for having hearts full of ‘joy, and gratitude, and fear, and love’ and ‘fervent lips’ (4.926–7). This sincerity allows them to see through the overly corporeal and external mummery of the imagined Catholic revival as ‘vain observances’. Linked to this sincerity is an intimation of immortality or ‘hopes that overstepped the Grave’ (4.936). Working at the level of cultural assumptions about national character,

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Once more parading through her crowded streets; Now simply guarded by the sober Powers Of Science, and Philosophy, and Sense! (4.901–14)

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

these two national ‘senses’ of history and moral sincerity would keep out the papal extreme and maintain Wordsworth’s composition of national identity. Wordsworth’s literary articulation of these two senses cannot be divorced from the political context of forging Britishness anew amid the Napoleonic Wars, the Act of Union and the Catholic Question. They provided the necessary regulation of superstition to prevent Wordsworth’s revitalization of the national landscape from following a path of corruption. Catholic Emancipation, however, had the potential to undermine both national senses. Wordsworth viewed Catholic Emancipation as the re-admission into civil society of not only disenfranchised Catholics but also their narrative of history. By removing the national legal sanction against Catholic ceremonies, Catholic Emancipation would make it harder to distinguish between superstitious and sincere social observances. If Catholic Emancipation were to remove the de jure distinction between papal hypocrisy and acts motivated by a true, underlying ‘spiritual presence’, was there a de facto way to judge sincerity at the level of form or of culture? If not, the project of rebuilding the nation’s social cohesion around a restored landscape would always run the risk of deteriorating into its papal extreme. Wordsworth addresses these concerns in the 1810 Essays on Epitaphs, the first of which appeared as a long note to Book V of The Excursion.

The constitutional sense in Essays on Epitaphs The vision in the Excursion of renewing the national landscape accords with Wordsworth’s outline in the Essays on Epitaphs of what Fosso calls a ‘spiritual community’, a phrase borrowed from Wordsworth’s 1809 tract on the Convention of Cintra (5). In addition, however, Wordsworth attempts to provide an account of the national moral and historical sense to which the Wanderer briefly appeals as a defence against the unwanted form of revived superstition threatened by Catholic Emancipation. Before being appended to The Excursion, the first essay ran in an 1810 edition of Coleridge’s The Friend, a journal founded to elucidate ‘Principles in all things; in Literature, in the Fine Arts, in Morals, in Legislation, in Religion’ (2: 13). Also written in February 1810 but not finally published until 1876, the final two essays had been scheduled for the irregular journal’s April 1812 edition, a month after Hunt’s attack on the Prince Regent for abandoning his liberal stance on the Catholic Question.6 Emerging from the cultural milieu in which first the Perceval and then Liverpool administrations were clamping down on reform efforts in the name of

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As in these registers the name is mostly associated with others of the same family, this is a prolonged companionship, however shadowy: even a Tomb like this is a shrine to which the fancies of a scattered family may repair in pilgrimage; the thoughts of the individuals, without any communication with each other, must oftentimes meet here.—Such a frail memorial then is not without its tendency to keep families together; it feeds also local attachment, which is the tap-root of the tree of Patriotism. (Essays on Epitaphs 93) The country churchyard gathers a ‘scattered’ people, uniting individuals to families, families to localities, and localities to the nation. The characteristics of this union, however, share many of the qualifying characteristics of The Excursion’s re-articulation of the via media. Essays on Epitaphs balances between extremes including universal and individual, uncontrolled grief and evacuated frigidity, bland poetic diction and flashy verbiage. As in Book IV of The Excursion, achieving the proper balance will ground the nation in its own landscape and produce a new stabilizing sense of tranquility and settlement in social, political and aesthetic registers. Superstition is again critical to this recovery of community, but here Wordsworth’s deep sense of communion with the dead risks recalling the despised Catholic ‘superstition’ of purgatory. Fosso discusses how the etymological sense of ‘superstition’ as ‘standing above’ recurs in Wordsworth’s corpus as a trope of gathered mourners standing above a grave (4). Indeed, the ‘superstitious’ image of a sincere mourner ‘by the side of the grave’ of the departed features prominently in Essays on Epitaphs (58). Yet Wordsworth seems to desire more than simply a memorial or recollection of the dead when he writes of the graveyard as the ‘visible centre of a community of the living and the dead’ (56). Stephen Greenblatt has argued in Hamlet in Purgatory that the pre-Reformation conception of purgatory ‘forged’ a ‘link between the living and the dead, or rather, it enabled the dead to be not completely dead’ (17). It came to symbolize all that was superstitious, primitive and corrupt about the Catholic past in the post-Reformation imaginary. However, Wordsworth’s ‘shadowy’ and ‘prolonged companionship’ with the dead in Essays on Epitaphs seems, at the very least, to long for something like medieval

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securing the nation against Napoleon, Wordsworth’s essays articulate a Britishness that overshadows the crises of the age by extending into the past and into the very soil. His diction consecrates the rural graveyard as a ‘shrine’ capable of restoring social cohesion to a fragmented age:

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Catholicism’s connection across the grave that was ‘not simply a relationship constituted by memory’ (Greenblatt Hamlet in Purgatory 19). For while prayers and masses to aid souls in purgatory were susceptible to abuse and commodification, they nevertheless ‘encoded the sense of a larger bond … linking the living with the souls of countless previous generations’ (Greenblatt 16). Wordsworth seems to seek just such a transmortal bond that, Greenblatt argues, was ‘decisively broken’ at the Reformation (40). Do the Essays on Epitaphs, in the name of community, present another ‘Romish Phantasy’ – here an approximation to the Catholic sense of purgatory – that threatens to undermine the Protestant character of Britishness? One of Wordsworth’s source texts for the Essays runs this risk. Amid the early modern erasure of purgatory, John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) sought to preserve pre-Reformation epitaphs from the neglect and depredations of the new order. He writes that his intention to collect ‘memorials of the deceased’ grew from: knowing withall how barbarously within these his Maiesty’s Dominions, they [Monuments of the dead] are (to the shame of our time) broken downe, and utterly almost all ruinated, their brasen Inscriptions erazed, torne away, and pilfered; by which inhumane, deformidable act, the honourable memory of many vertuous and noble persons deceased, is extinguished … grieving at this unsufferable injury, offered as well to the living, as the dead … (Epistle) Against the tide of the progressive national historical narrative, both Weever and Wordsworth show an affinity with pre-Reformation models of a spiritual community. As another odd chapter in the ‘afterlife’ of purgatory (Greenblatt Hamlet in Purgatory 3), Wordsworth’s proposed ‘pilgrimage’ to shrines of the dead seems to recall this vanquished Catholic ‘superstition’. Wordsworth, however, attempts to steer Britain’s ‘spiritual community’ between the revolutionary materialist claim that ‘Death is eternal sleep’ and Catholic communion with the dead through prayer, relics and the Mass. As in The Excursion, Wordsworth seems well aware of the potential papist pitfalls in Essays on Epitaphs and disciplines elements suggestive of a Catholic extreme. This regulation often operates at the level of form. Wordsworth explicitly summons but then nervously dismisses the full threat of a returning ghost from an unwanted purgatorial past in his discussion of the use of epitaphic first-person narrative. There is a spectral quality to his discussion of ‘why epitaphs so often

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personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tomb-stone’ (60). The poetic ghost of the ‘departed Mortal’ momentarily returns, like Hamlet’s father, to admonish, measure and judge the living. According to Wordsworth, this haunting re-presentation is the epitaph’s most powerful mode of forging an imagined community across the boundary of the tomb: By this tender fiction, the survivors bind themselves to a sedater sorrow, and employ the intervention of the imagination in order that the reason may speak her own language earlier than she would otherwise have been enabled to do. This shadowy interposition also harmoniously unites the two worlds of the living and the dead by their appropriate affections. (60) Despite Wordsworth’s attraction to the ability of the returning dead to unite worlds, he censors this mode of epitaphic narrative for taking superstition too far. Specifically, he describes the theological ‘groundwork’ of this spectral technique, namely purgatory, as a ‘fiction’, though a ‘tender’ one (61). By sweeping away the ‘shadowy interposition’ as a ‘fiction’, he participates in the cultural discourse of denouncing purgatory as an elaborate, fabricated system of poetic counterfeit, or ‘poet’s fable’ (Greenblatt 35). As he did with the Solitary’s threatening depiction of a Scottish landscape turned papist, Wordsworth presents the Catholic ‘extreme’ of superstition only to distinguish it from his own disciplined and regulated version of positive ‘sincere’ superstition conveyed in the third-person narrative of the mourner. However, while it first seems that Wordsworth’s distinction between healthy and corrupt superstition will be at the level of form, this proves inadequate to determine the true spirit of an epitaph. He promises to ‘establish a criterion of sincerity’ that can be applied through textual criticism to find the underlying spirit of an epitaph. How does he get from the external, written text to uncover what the author was truly thinking and feeling? His answer is convoluted: And indeed, where the internal evidence proves that the Writer was moved, in other words where this charm of sincerity lurks in the language of a Tombstone and secretly pervades it, there are no errors in style or manner for which it will not be, in some degree, a recompence; but without habits of reflection a test of this inward simplicity cannot be come at: and, as I have said, I am now writing with a hope to assist the well-disposed to attain it. (70)

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It should first be noted that Wordsworth’s criterion cannot be reduced to a call for a plain style or the removal of poetic diction in the manner of the ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’. ‘Style or manner’ is not sufficient for indicating sincerity. Rather, Wordsworth argues that the writer’s spirit is both present and absent, alive and dead, in the text but hidden. In short, the epitaph is haunted. While this passage begins with forensic ‘evidence’, it immediately shifts to the shadowy and spectral with the necromantic phrase ‘a charm of sincerity lurks in the language’. ‘Lurks’ suggests that the author’s emotional life is lying in wait within the engraved words. In this mysterious possession, the writer’s spiritual presence also ‘secretly pervades’ the language, somehow running through it like a stream. Yet, significantly, this is a secret saturation that cannot be easily detected or measured through outward appearance. Nor is this a chance phrase, as throughout the essays Wordsworth references an ‘under current of sincerity’ (Essays on Epitaphs 75, 82). The identification of a hidden ghost or spirit half-revealed in the text, however, has not resolved Wordsworth’s attempt to distinguish between sincere and papal superstition. In fact, one could easily label this haunted text an icon or a saint’s relic, both of which represent material objects where the living and the dead can meet. Its ‘inbetween’ status also qualifies interpretations of Wordsworth’s claims that language should be an ‘incarnation of the thought’. Epitaphs are not full embodiments of the author’s spirit or presence – such a clear, vivid sacrament would not need critical inquiry. As Karen Mills-Court has noted, Wordsworth’s ‘incarnation’ only provides a ‘ghostly sense of presence’ (175). The problem remains of discerning the sincerity of these authorial half-ghosts, and the appeal to form is inconclusive. How then does Wordsworth test these spirits? To answer this question, this paragraph moves away from its initial promise to deliver a criterion of sincerity using evidence from within the epitaph to a reliance on the response of the ‘well-disposed’ reader (Essays on Epitaphs 70). Ultimately, the readers’ inherent moral sense alone can judge the sincerity of an epitaphic relic. Wordsworth relies upon readers’ ‘habits of reflection’ informed by a historically based sense of national identity as the final criteria for determining both sincerity and Britishness. ‘Habit’ is a key term in Essays on Epitaphs. It is the means by which, through repeated action in a particular place, national and cultural ideals sink deep within the subject. Alluding to Gray’s churchyard elegy, Wordsworth refers to how the ‘habitual and constitutional piety of the rude Forefathers of the hamlet is seated in their natures’ (69). In the essay ‘Racial Memory and Literary History’, Greenblatt has discussed

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the connotation of ‘constitutional’ in the romantic period as a cultural ideal inscribed into both the body and the national form of government (‘Racial Memory and Literary History’ 50–1). This usage sheds light on Wordsworth’s reliance on the ‘habitual and constitutional’ reflections of his British readers to act as a ‘second nature’ that can distinguish between sincere superstition and its papal counter-spirit. Rhetorically, he can thus rely on this ‘constitutional sense’ in his imagined British reader to provide obvious answers to tough critical questions. He twice quotes a passage and then coercively asks the reader, ‘but who can doubt that the Writer was transported to the height of the occasion?’ and ‘who does not here feel a superior truth and sanctity, which is not dependent upon this circumstance, but merely the result of the expression and the connection of the thoughts?’ (71, 86). There are not obvious answers to these queries, but there is an obvious response expected. Any readers who do not feel as suggested, it is implied, will find themselves outside civil society. Emanating from the earth, from local customs, from the alliance of church and state, from the Glorious Revolution, an internalized national sense enables British readers to respond as Wordsworth demands. Epitaphs can thus be read as a spiritual historiography that records the development and corruption of this national sense of sincerity. The examples Wordsworth discusses are not historically or politically innocent. He praises the real emotion underlying the baroque formalism and extravagant mythological analogies in the royalist Marquis of Montrose’s reverent verses on the death of Charles I. Remarkably, he finds the monody imbued with the same spirit as Milton’s verse: The whole is instinct with spirit, and every word has its separate life; like the Chariot of the Messiah, and the wheels of that Chariot, as they appeared to the imagination of Milton aided by that of the Prophet Ezekiel. It had power to move of itself but was conveyed by Cherubs. As with stars their bodies all And wings were set with eyes, with eyes the wheels Of Beryl, and careering fires between. (71)7 It would be difficult to find a more divisive historical example. At the time of the 1649 execution of Charles I, Montrose was the leading proponent of the Stuart cause in Scotland. Milton, on the other hand, as a parliamentary partisan in the Civil Wars, justified ‘king killing’ in the 1649 works The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes.

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Yet in these polar opposites Wordsworth claims to have found some underlying commonality of national spirit amid one of the most contentious political and religious events in British history. Further, the execution of Charles I was an open historical wound that reverberated into Wordsworth’s own time as a historical precedent for the French guillotining of Louis XVI in 1793. Like Coleridge’s reunion of the ideological opponents Milton and Jeremy Taylor in the 1817 preface to ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, Wordsworth appeals to the operation of this national sense within a unified national culture to overcome not only historical divisions but also contemporary conflict. Although the Lake Poets’ versions of national culture were capacious enough to reconcile bitter Civil War opponents, Wordsworth’s probing for insincere superstition in other epitaphs reveals the limits of his imagined community. The foil to Montrose’s epitaph for Charles I is an epitaph in St Paul’s Church mourning Sir Philip Sidney. Wordsworth gives no discussion of the epitaph’s style or language, but rejects it as a ‘servile translation from a French Epitaph’ (72). Specifically, it is an adaptation of an epitaph by Joachim du Bellay, the Renaissance ‘Pléaide’ poet. Translation per se is not the issue since Wordsworth argues that the sincere ‘fundamental thoughts’ underlying the hyperbolic poetic diction of a 1673 epitaph from Westmoreland can be appreciated when ‘translated into a natural style’ (73). Sidney’s epitaph is problematic because its ‘fundamental thoughts’, its underlying national sense, is French. A foreign ghost haunts Sidney’s relics, a semi-presence rendered more troubling by the fact that Sidney’s death came when England was under threat from two Catholic powers. He died in October 1586 fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands in the same week as the treason trial of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s half-French cousin and Catholic rival to the throne. Through the epitaph, a foreign, Catholic presence has infiltrated the memory of a national hero within St Paul’s itself. Here again, rather than an external criterion for sincerity, Wordsworth relies upon the national sense embedded, constitutionally, in his readers to detect this espionage. He admits that the ‘hyperbole’ of Montrose and of the ‘French Writer’ are virtually identical, but claims that an ‘afflicted Soul’ abides in the epitaph for Charles I, while the French epitaph speaks from the ‘head as opposed to heart’ (72). Yet it is difficult to see how Wordsworth discerns this. He asserts that there ‘can be no need to analyse’ the superiority, only claiming, with subtle coercion, that ‘the difference will flash upon the Reader at once’ (72). This involuntary ‘flash’ of recognition emerges from deep within the constitutional framework of readers. The national sense of sincerity operates to detect

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foreign influences dwelling within the national imaginary and corrupting the memory inherent in the national landscape. It is what the Wanderer summons to debunk the ‘blessed restoration’ of Catholic superstition in Scotland. This constitutional sense, however, was threatened, like the actual constitution in Wordsworth’s view, not just from abroad but also from a Catholic presence within Britain. National culture hinged on expelling Pope and Dryden, the two English poets identifiable with papism. Wordsworth speaks of Pope as having ‘corrupted the judgment of the Nation through all ranks of society’ and having, along with Dryden, ‘tainted’ nearly every epitaph with ‘the artifices which have overrun our writings in metre’ (75, 84). Pope’s followers are ‘bewitched’ and ‘seduced’; his thoughts ‘entangled’ in ‘vicious expression’ that goes to an ‘excess’; his constitutional moral sense without a ‘true impulse’; and his epitaphs vain ceremonials rendered ‘coldly and unfeelingly’ (75, 77). As veterans of the cultural wars involving literature and religion after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, Pope and Dryden were left with ‘no clear insight into the internal constitution of virtue’ and ‘an obtuse moral sensibility and a consequent want of knowledge’ (81, 80). Language, corrupted by the insincere superstition of Dryden and Pope, will work ‘unremittingly and noiselessly’ as a subtly subversive fifth column, an enemy nation within the nation, a ‘counter-spirit’ attacking the British ‘habitual and constitutional’ internal sense. Wordsworth attributes tumultuous, rebellious violence to this extreme, unbalancing anti-British force, namely the power ‘to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve’ (85). His diction envisions the superstitious corruption of language reproducing the disunifying social upheaval of the French Terror or the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Their unsettling influence is opposed to the glorious mental revolution Wordsworth advocates: ‘In the mind of the truly great and good every thing that is of importance is at peace with itself; all is stillness, sweetness, and stable grandeur’ (80). Harmony and ‘stable grandeur’ return to the tranquility and settlement that pervade both The Excursion and Essays on Epitaphs. Wordsworth stands for ‘energy, stillness, grandeur, tenderness’ – opposites balanced against each other, extremes held in check (85). Essays on Epitaphs mounts a defence of the moral sense that is, according to the Wanderer in The Excursion, one of the powers written into the ‘constitution’ of Britons that will protect the nation and its landscape from a revival of papal superstition. From Wordsworth’s parochial discussion of epitaphic form, there emerges a holistic defence of the British imagined community. Essays on Epitaphs looks to protect

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and purify a national moral sense in order to treat the social crises and fragmentation of the period. Wordsworth tries to exorcise, at the level of culture, the corrupting and disrupting ‘extreme’ spirits from the past and from abroad, spirits that Catholic Emancipation seemed to welcome back into the national landscape.

Regulating superstition in Ecclesiastical Sketches The model of superstition reviving national culture, which Wordsworth outlined in Essays on Epitaphs and The Excursion, continues and develops in another of his prominent public poems, the 1822 Ecclesiastical Sketches. If Essays on Epitaphs provides the ‘constitutional’ sense that would preclude an attractive form of superstition from corrupting into a ‘repulsive’ Catholic extreme, Ecclesiastical Sketches reinforces a sense of national history that naturally moves towards the British model of the via media in religion and culture, contrary to the aims of Catholic Emancipation. At the outset of the turbulent 1820s, Wordsworth was troubled by rumours in the newspapers about ‘the Ministers giving up the Catholic Question—to conciliate new Friends’ (MY 2: 566). While the threat from Napoleon had passed, he saw the nation as being at great risk, deeply divided over parliamentary reform and the Peterloo Massacre. Against this troubled backdrop, he again turns to the combination of an English church, a natural setting, and a sense of historical continuity to anchor the nation. Begun in 1820 and published in 1822, Ecclesiastical Sketches explicitly seeks to address the Catholic Question through a historical narrative about church property and the national landscape. In the prefatory ‘advertisement’ to Ecclesiastical Sketches, Wordsworth claims that the sonnet series derived from a December 1820 walk to view the site for a new church being built by Lord Lowther, Wordsworth’s patron and a parliamentary opponent of Catholic Emancipation. The sonnets were to be a ‘private memorial’ of their ‘feelings’ that were ‘in harmony with the cherishing influences of the scene’ that led them to ‘look back upon past events with wonder and gratitude, and on the future with hope’ (137). Wordsworth contrasts the balance and settlement that comforts these two leaders in British politics and poetics with the unsettling influence, or agitation, emerging from the debate over Catholic Emancipation: The Catholic Question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in the same course; and it struck me that certain points in the Ecclesiastical History of our Country might

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He links his work with a ‘concise History of the Church in England’ by Southey, whose vocal and public opposition to Catholic Emancipation would elicit the equally vocal and public satirical ire of Byron in the 1822 The Vision of Judgment (137).8 The advertisement signals that Wordsworth, by taking up the divisive controversy over the Catholic Question, will be performing a ‘cherishing’ suture of the divisions in national history and attempting to establish a cultural settlement amid the political agitation of the age. Despite Wordsworth’s avowed political investment, critics have downplayed the role of the Catholic Question in Ecclesiastical Sketches, but for contradictory reasons.9 On the one hand, in an argument that would later be taken up by Ryan (116–17), Regina Hewitt investigates the religious politics of Ecclesiastical Sketches but redirects attention from the Catholic Question to the Church Building Act of 1818. Within this context, she reads the sonnets as advocating a reformist, though not politically unproblematic campaign to transform the Anglican church into a socially responsible institution. Citing Anne Rylestone, Hewitt notes that there are more sonnets that seem to praise elements of Catholicism than sonnets attacking popery. On the other hand, Canuel distances Ecclesiastical Sketches from the Catholic Question because of its negative portrayal of Catholicism. Although, according to Canuel, Wordsworth is ‘clearly depicting Catholicism as a source of danger to national unity’ (199), it is one among many religious targets among proliferating sects and dissenters. These opposing views of Catholicism in the poem may seem like a paradox, but the varying depictions follow the logic of the via media, which Ecclesiastical Sketches explicitly celebrates. The sonnet ‘Congratulation’ invokes the ‘great Deliverer’s sail’ of William III, claims a continuity between 1688 and 1818, and praises the current government that receives and redirects the ‘holy River of History’ by ‘balancing herself between Licence and slavish order’ (3.18.13–14). In an age unsettled by ‘Licence’ or revolutionary enthusiasm, the nation requires a balancing recuperation of superstition, necessarily accompanied with warnings against the ‘slavish order’ of Catholicism. This ideological ambivalence informs the ambivalent structure of Ecclesiastical Sketches, a complex pastiche of individual sonnets and overarching narrative generically akin to something like a lyric historical novel. ‘Mutability’ and ‘Old Abbeys’, the two sonnets preceding ‘Congratulation’ in the culminating third section of the sonnet series, capture the torque between superstitious

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advantageously be presented to view in verse. Accordingly I took up the subject, and what I now offer to the Reader, was the result. (137)

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recovery and the pull of progress that characterized Wordsworth’s continued engagement with the Catholic Question in Ecclesiastical Sketches.10 These two sonnets treat the issues of historical identity, church property and national landscape that Wordsworth saw defining the political and social stakes of the Catholic Question. Wordsworth viewed churches as a grounding centre within the national landscape that could act as a ‘counterbalancing property’ to the extremes of the age (LY 2: 64). In a letter to the Anglican minister William Jackson, he regards churches as ‘essentially the Property of the people’ that made ‘palpable the Principle which alone can give moral right to any species of property viz: that it is holden not for the good of the Possessor merely but for the benefit of the Community’ (LY 2: 64). As tangible substantiation of communal principles, church buildings provided social coherence, rendered ‘important public services’ and united Britons in an age of class, sectarian and party fragmentation (LY 2: 64). Wordsworth’s adamancy, as well as his anxiety over Catholic Emancipation, emerged from an understanding of these ‘places of memory’ as the embodiment of the national community and as the place where the social, the individual and the eternal converged. In Wordsworth’s view, Catholic Emancipation would not only unbalance the 1688 settlement but could also sanction the repossession of church property, the very axis of the nation, by Catholics who ‘look to the Recovery of it’ (LY 1: 679). Wordsworth did not think Southey’s extreme anti-Catholic articles in the Quarterly Review were vocal enough about church property (LY 1: 687). He twice repeats an anecdote fearing such a ‘recovery’ in letters to the Bishop of London (LY 2: 39) and to Lowther: ‘What would satisfy you?’ said not long ago a gentleman to a very clever R[oman]. C[atholic]. lady, whose husband by the bye is an Agent of the present Duke of Norfolk. ‘That Church’ replied she, pointing to a large parish Church in Sheffield where the conversation took place—This, at the bottom of their hearts, is the feeling of them all. (LY 1: 311) Wordsworth labelled this alternative history ‘the strongest argument in my mind against concession’ (LY 1: 679) because it would overturn ‘300 years experience of the superiority of one faith over the other’ demonstrated historically ‘in Arts, in Morals, and in general prosperity’ (LY 1: 359). Churches and cathedrals were thus, for Wordsworth, a bulwark of national identity and were at the centre of a symbolic struggle with profound effects for British culture.

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To support the nation, Wordsworth turns again to the edifying and solidifying potential of superstition. In the review ‘Wordsworth’s Sonnets and Memorials’, the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine recognized and praised this cultural power to recover pacifying elements from the past in Ecclesiastical Sketches: He flings a beam of light on some transaction dark in antiquity, and it rises up for a moment before us—he raises the coffin-lid in some vault, and we behold the still face of one formerly great or wise on earth—he rebuilds, as with a magic wand, the holy edifice that for centuries has lain in ruins—monks and nuns walk once more in open sun-light, and all the fading or faded pageantries of faith re-appear and vanish in melancholy and sublime mutation. (177) Wordsworth’s muse is usually not thought of in these historical terms, but here we see her summoning an illuminating image of the past like a ghost with ‘a magic wand’, This could easily have described the work of the great wizard Walter Scott as ‘monks and nuns’ walk through England again. The age of superstition has seemingly returned. Yet, as the Solitary asked in The Excursion, what prevents this vision from sanctioning not a revitalization of Britain but a revival of popery? In Ecclesiastical Sketches the operation of time and history itself prevents such a ‘return’. The sonnets ‘Mutability’ and ‘Old Abbeys’ recuperate but also regulate superstition. There is a laboured sense that repressed history will not, indeed cannot, return. ‘Mutability’ argues that a pervasive ‘dissolution’ is a natural process that allows for the progressive development of an inward sense of unfailing ‘Truth’ despite ‘outward forms’ that ‘melt like frosty rime’. In a politically laden image within the context of the Catholic Question discourse on ruins, such forms ‘drop like the tower sublime/Of yesterday’ (3.16.7–11) that did ‘wear/Its crown of weeds’. In its critique of toppling spiritual tyranny, it bears a surprising structural resemblance to the fall of political tyranny under its own weight in Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’. Furthermore, this image alludes to the humbled personification of the abbeys at the end of ‘The Dissolution of the Monasteries’ in which Glastonbury Abbey and ‘her high pomp’ cannot ‘refuse/To stoop her head before these desperate shocks’ (2.4.11–13). The closing lines of ‘Mutability’ assure that an abject past will not be resurrected but will remain a lovely anachronism enclosed within the dissolving, obliviating process of historical change, crumbling with the ‘unimaginable touch of Time’ (3.16.13–14).

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The sonnet ‘Old Abbeys’ confirms this settlement and assures the nation that contemplating ruins and the nation’s history will provide stability without sanctioning any papist recovery. The structure of time and history in ‘Mutability’ allows Wordsworth to look to ruins for a fructifying sense of aesthetic and historical settlement: Monastic Domes! Following my downward way, Untouched by due regret I marked your fall! Now, ruin, beauty, ancient stillness, all Dispose to judgments as we lay On our past selves in life’s declining day: For as, by discipline of Time made wise, We learn to tolerate the infirmities And faults of others, gently as he may Towards our own mild Instructor deals, Teaching us to forget them or forgive. Perversely curious, then, for hidden ill Why should we break Time’s charitable seals? Once ye were holy, ye are holy still; Your spirit freely let me drink and live! (3.7.1–14) In this sonnet, history has been closed under ‘Time’s charitable seals’ and regulated by the ‘discipline of Time’. Monastic ruins, far from offering an actual return from history, embody a sense of national history’s irreversible advance. An aesthetic sense of balance and tranquility – described here as ‘ruin, beauty, ancient stillness’ – composes and freezes the testimony of this place of memory. Seen earlier in The Excursion and Essays on Epitaphs, this containment ensures that Catholicism itself will not return, even as Wordsworth looks to recover Catholic elements from national history. Amid the domestic upheaval following 1819, this historical sense allows for the type of unifying superstition that the Wanderer prescribed for a fragmented Britain. Since potentially troubling cultural pasts have been rendered irrelevant through the process of forgiveness or forgetfulness, the positive aspects of the ruins can be redeemed and redeployed. The old abbeys and new churches can thus become places where Britons can drink from the ‘holy River’ of history or, as the poet exclaims: ‘Your spirit freely let me drink and live!’ Like the cottage in The Excursion, this place of memory can now be a fountainhead to revitalize the national community. How successful was Wordsworth’s recuperation of superstition? On the one hand, I would make the same claims for these works that Mee

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makes for Wordsworth’s taught regulation of enthusiasm or the ‘disciplined nature of Wordsworth’s visionary gleam’ (216). There is the same sense of tension, of potentially violent or explosive forces held in check, especially in those scenes that freeze a topographical tranquility and still the pressures of opposing histories. There is a patterned control and continual self-consciousness of the need to balance forces carefully. In his approach to superstition or places fraught with wounded memory, Wordsworth seems aware of the vulnerability of his texts and works to negotiate potential disruptions. This results in a constant ambivalence that invokes history, but then draws back, that delves into superstition, but then relents. While there are gaps and displacements in Wordsworth’s ‘superstitious’ texts, he guards against the cracks, splits and ruptures that the Catholic Question’s ideological strains often prompted. On the other hand, even those sympathetic to Wordsworth’s political and cultural stance questioned whether he was finally able to resolve the issues of romantic-era religious politics through his aesthetic recasting of a national via media. In this period, The Excursion met with a mixed reception, a discomfort about Wordsworth’s most prominent public poem that continues today. In addition, Wordsworth did not publish the second and third Essays on Epitaphs during his lifetime. Even the conservative High Anglican periodical The British Critic criticized Ecclesiastical Sketches for failing to embody its structure as ‘a succession in topographical or historical order, of fragments of poetry, which, though treating respectively of separate incidents, should yet be intimately connected together, and in fact form but one poem in the whole’ (196). The British Critic concluded that Wordsworth could not forge a unity out of the immense diversity of national history. This formal criticism betokens an even more devastating critique of his project to articulate an underlying sense of national unity emergent from history and a moral sense that could revitalize a fragmented and scattered nation. Ultimately, the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill exerted an undeniable pressure on Wordsworth’s tranquilizing, settling aesthetic. We have seen the importance for Wordsworth of the irenic ruin in which conflicting pasts are buried under a composing and often oblivious contemplation. In September 1829, several months after the legislation passed, he unsuccessfully attempts to articulate again such a vision of a pacified ruin of history in a letter written from Ireland to Dorothy: This morning I walked out before six at Manor Hamilton—it is seated among hills and Rocks of Limestone—The Sun though not above the horizon had filled the East with purple and gold—One mountain

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opposite of Majestic size was steeped in deep purple, so were the battlements and towers of a Ruined castle at one end of the small town— the Ruin is one of the finest we have seen in Ireland—the stream was visible in the valley, blue smoke ascending from the thatched cottages, and in different parts of the valley forming itself into horizontal lines resembling vapours, and on the sides of the hills also, all was quiet and beautiful, glowing light and deep shadow—yet not two months ago two persons were killed here and 15 wounded in a fray, between the Protestants and Catholics, because an old Woman sang in the streets a Ballad which one of the Parties did not like.—About the same time six people were killed in another quarrel in a village not far from which we passed—so that it is truly deplorable to reflect upon the hatred which exists between the two parties—Of this I will tell you much when we meet. (LY 2: 146–7) The passage is characteristic of Wordsworth’s topographical engagement to suppress, contain and control disruptive historical forces. At the centre of this vista are the ‘battlements and towers of a Ruined castle’. As he does so often, Wordsworth contains this ruin within an aesthetic vision of histories reconciled, of wounded pasts made quiet, of landscapes tranquilized. As in The Excursion, he composes the valley scene as if it were a painting, resolving the contesting opposites of ‘glowing light and deep shadow’ into a pacified calm in which all was ‘quiet and beautiful’. Yet his attempt to forge this peace meets a multivalent memorial landscape. In 1829 Ireland, history resists his efforts at repression as the memory of a violent outbreak over a ‘Ballad’, itself an oral cultural memory of sectarian hatred, breaks through his imagination. While the aesthetic ‘solution’ to the Catholic Question was irresistible for Wordsworth – as his promise to ‘tell … much’ suggests – it was also perpetually troubled.

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Shelley’s Conflicted Campaign for Catholic Emancipation

While Wordsworth turned to Britain’s past as a recoverable resource, Shelley, in his 1821 ‘Defence of Poetry’, amalgamates history with all that is regressive: the corporeal, the local, the specific and the traditional. The rejection of the past, however, presents a problem for this radical proponent of Catholic Emancipation, which itself promised to recall the banished historical ‘papist’ back into modern civil society – a seemingly regressive goal. Unlike Wordsworth or Inchbald, Shelley launches a stadial historical framework to describe the interdependent development of poetry and civilization. He does not answer Thomas Love Peacock’s argument for the historical obsolescence of poetry in ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ by heralding the contemporary return of a primitive poetic genius, as does Blake. Instead, he recounts the countercultural emergence of the poetic capacity in the classical age, the so-called Dark Ages of the ‘Christian and Chivalric systems’ and the Reformation. The poet in each stage of this progressive history leaps forward beyond the confines of his contemporary setting. This is particularly pronounced in Dante’s relationship to Catholicism and Milton’s to Christianity. Thus, Shelley describes each generation of poets as a ‘new birth’ of the type that has occurred within the ‘literature of England’ (‘Defence of Poetry’ 535). Poets are deemed to belong to ‘all time’, to respond to an ‘indestructible order’ that is outside of history and to participate within the ‘great poem’ that transcends all cultures (516, 512, 522). Those caught up in historical wounds or associated with the particularities of their age will remain trapped in their own stage of history. They will suffer the relegation Peacock describes, while poets like Shelley become productive and fertile – to them belongs the future. Shelley’s stadial history may be in defence of poetry, but it also launches a strong offensive against the type of cultural embeddedness and localism 119

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that repulsed him. It does offer a history, but it is a form of historiography averse to those elements commonly associated with the historical. This limning historicism produces several Manichean bifurcations (body vs. spirit, local vs. universal, body vs. dress), but Shelley stresses an idiosyncratic distinction between story and poem. The essay vouchsafes poetry but exiles story. The stakes of this division, at least within Shelley’s framework, are high. One form will be included in the republic of letters and the other will remain beyond the pale: A Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry, and forever developes new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. (515) This is not a compromising passage and it is easy to see that story and history are abjectly conflated. (Hi)story accrues all the characteristics that have become obstructive to modernity in Shelley’s thought: partiality, particularity, temporality and cultural specificity. The domain of association – holding together memories and communities in the ‘bond’ of ‘time, place, circumstance, cause and effect’ – is dismissed absolutely. Without these five elements, it is hard to see how anyone or anything can remain bound to lived experience or associated with a particular place or people. Transcending such ephemeral limitations is the sine qua non of participating in universal progress. This is a hard lesson for those shaped by their communal memories and for those whose cultural framework is different than the ‘all other minds’ envisioned by Shelley. A land of memory or a people of particularity – in short,

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a place like Ireland – becomes the place where distorted poetry becomes monstrous history. This hardening against history, I argue, arose in part from Shelley’s conflicted intellectual, personal and creative struggle with the Catholic Question, which not only impelled his youthful campaign to Ireland but also reverberated throughout the rest of his career. The 19-year-old Shelley’s 1812 trip to Dublin to speak alongside Daniel O’Connell in favour of Catholic Emancipation was his most prominent intervention in public politics, yet only recently has it received the critical consideration it deserves. Paul Foot has noted that this trip by the young, idealistic poet has been ‘routinely patronized by Shelley’s many biographers’ and ‘almost unanimously written off as the passing spasms of a young fanatic’ (Preface 9). As romantic studies recover a more politically astute and engaged Shelley, Paul O’Brien’s Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (2002) has resituated the depth of Shelley’s investment in this excursion.1 O’Brien argues that the situation of Irish Catholics seemed to contain the revolutionary spark needed to transform and illumine the world: ‘Shelley came to Ireland in 1812 because he believed that the general crisis affecting British society found its most militant expression in Ireland and in particular in the struggle for Catholic emancipation’ (102). While the frustrating Irish campaign, in the words of Richard Holmes, provided Shelley with his ‘most intensive period of practical political education’, this chapter argues that the event transformed his thinking on politics, culture and religion, and that the Catholic Question particularly influenced The Cenci (1819). What were those lessons for Shelley and what might they tell us about him as a political thinker, poet and activist? Rather than an opening for considering romantic-era conflict and the crossover between politics and poetry, his tossing of pamphlets out of his window to the oppressed of Dublin has generally been taken as the actions of Matthew Arnold’s ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’ (237).2 The ‘ineffectual’ aspect of Arnold’s description has been challenged by Foot, whose Red Shelley (1980) restores the ‘political ideas’ and socialist legacy of the ‘restless agitator’ (12–13), and by Michael Scrivener, whose Radical Shelley (1982) offers an account of his lifelong intervention in Godwinian ‘cultural politics’ (7). While Scrivener’s examination of Shelley’s thought ‘in the historical context of both English politics and nineteenth-century radical thought’ (xii) and P.M.S. Dawson’s portrait of a Shelley ‘engaged responsibly and intelligently with the issues of his day’ (9) in The Unacknowledged Legislator (1980) have grounded the angel, they do less to rescue him from Arnold’s

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evocative displacement of him into a placeless ‘void’. For Hugh Roberts in Shelley and the Chaos of History (1997), the critical response to Arnold’s ‘ineffectual’ Shelley must maintain this abstraction rather than bind him geographically or chronologically: ‘Our reflex assumption that a “political” reading of the text must be broadly historicist in fact drastically reduces the possible political effect of literature’ (1). Yet James Chandler has argued in England in 1819 (1998) that such a historicist mode of thought that maps the progress of social history and meditates on the role of individual agency within that framework is an inherent, albeit ‘difficult’, aspect of Shelley’s philosophy and writing (489–90). A reconsideration of the Catholic Question can thus help to rescue him from the ‘void’ not only by re-establishing his historical and political engagement with places such as Ireland and Italy, but also by recovering the development of his own historicism. These issues of place and history can be traced from his early poetry and prose, in which historical association figures prominently, to his mature vision in The Cenci, which becomes a drama of disassociation. In this genealogy, the recalcitrance of the Catholic Question helps turn Shelley against history and generates the withdrawal from history seen in the ‘Defence of Poetry’. Developing a thematic continuity first suggestively noted by Stuart Sperry (129–30), I argue that Shelley’s 1812 frustrations in Ireland resurface for him in Italy in 1819. As a result, The Cenci shares the concerns of London-based Irish drama that, according to Diego Saglia, approaches ‘Irish issues through an international prism’ (257). Moreover, as Claire Connolly has argued of such works, Shelley’s play likewise ‘filters and processes contemporary debates’ about Catholic Emancipation through dramatic form to explore ‘political, cultural, [and] psychic’ forms of ‘religious hatred and intolerance’ (‘Theater and Nation’ 187). Trapped in a cycle of violence, Beatrice re-enacts the struggles of Irish Catholics who cannot, in Shelley’s view, rid themselves of the wounds of their past to participate in modernity. As part of the Catholic Question’s larger structural transformation in which religious difference becomes regulated by sociocultural norms rather than sectarian legislation, Inchbald pointed to proximate negotiation of difference, while Wordsworth attempted aesthetically to sublimate historical and religious difference. Shelley, however, narrates a political tragedy. At the literary level, this is the tragedy of Beatrice, who cannot escape the suffocating mores of her social framework and dies from this inability to disassociate. At a personal level, it is Shelley’s own frustrating failure to realize his ambitious activism. At the broadest level, the tragedy is that Shelley accompanies his strong advocacy for the victims of oppression

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with a clear, even aggressive programme for correctively transforming those he would liberate.

Ireland figured influentially in Shelley’s early life and thought, as its poor social conditions and historical oppression seemed to present an opportunity for organizing new social configurations that provided new political hopes. Even before his expulsion from Oxford, Shelley drew attention for supporting the Irish radical Peter Finnerty (Dawson 38). His subsequent wanderings with Harriet and Hogg led him to Keswick in December 1811 and into conversation about the Catholic Question with Southey, the apostate bard himself. In light of their later contention, there is surprising respect shown in Shelley’s letters for Southey as ‘an advocate of liberty and equality’, even though he was also ‘now an advocate for existing establishments’. Shelley resolves this paradox by explaining that Southey did not feel his revolutionary principles could be realized ‘in this age’ because of three political obstructions: ‘Southey hates the Irish, he speaks against Catholic Emancipation, & Parliamentary reform’ (LPBS 1: 212). As their conversations continued into January 1812 and the topic of Catholic Emancipation recurred, Shelley more stridently denounced Southey’s servility and ‘prostitution of talents’, planned a hasty trip to Dublin and composed the Address to the Irish People, Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists and the Declaration of Rights. Shelley circulated the first of these writings throughout Dublin and delivered it on 28 February in Dublin’s Fishamble Theatre to the Aggregate Meeting of the Catholics of Ireland. Upon Shelley’s premature return from Ireland in April, the latter two were examined and confiscated by customs officials. Shelley put many of the remaining copies into bottles which he set afloat in the faith that nature would distribute what the press and government resisted. These actions show how Catholic Emancipation gave the itinerant young rebel a focus for his mental energies. There is also another role for his trip to Ireland that is less obvious but equally important. If, as Shelley’s letters suggest, Southey had to curtail his republican instincts due to Catholic Emancipation and the concomitant issue of parliamentary reform, then addressing the Irish situation would potentially allow Southey to live and write as a republican once again. Given their subsequent clashes and Southey’s acceptance of the laureateship in 1813, this potential for conversion may seem risible retrospectively. Yet the possibility of redemption represents an important, if relatively neglected aspect of

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what Charles Mahoney has called the ‘volatile, circumlocutious figure of the apostate’ (16). In 1812 there was hope for an alternative history in which resolving the Catholic Question would redeem the lost Lake Poet, who could then become that which he had ceased to be. Shelley’s writings from this early period also embody a hopeful effort to engender a progressive renewal within the troubled history of British and Irish religious politics. His early poem ‘The Irishman’s Song’ (1809) demonstrates a keen awareness of the specific tropes involving memory, ruins and revolution that constituted political discourse on the Catholic Question. Like Byron’s lines on the ruins of the Parthenon written to fuel Greek anti-imperial patriotism, Shelley’s work testifies to the power of the past. The ballad gives voice to the suffering Irish Catholic, who appeals to the ruins of history both as a sign of degradation and a resource for future resistance:3 See! The wide wasting ruin extends all around, Our ancestors’ dwellings lie sunk on the ground, Our foes ride in triumph throughout our domains, And our mightiest heroes lie stretched on the plains. (5–8) This vision of ruins is neither stagnant nor nostalgic. Shelley’s Irishman catches wind of a ‘return’ emanating from these wrecks that will stir up a revolution. The initial ‘See!’ – a controlled optic beckoning that presents a contained pictorial survey of past woe – shifts in the final stanza to an ‘Ah!’ – an optative reaction to a change that seems to be happening in the landscape: Ah! Where are the heroes! Triumphant in death, Convulsed they recline on the blood sprinkled heath, Or the yelling ghosts ride on the blast that sweeps by, And ‘my countrymen! vengeance!’ incessantly cry. (13–16) Shelley captures the sense of a gathering threat from a ‘return’ of the historically downtrodden, the ghosts of Britain’s wounded colonial past haunting the present. Yet the mode of this passage is indeterminate. ‘Where are the heroes!’ should be, like the passage as a whole, interrogative. As a question turned into an exclamation, this seems to be a moment of recognition in which the Irishman becomes aware of the revolutionary possibilities of his own song. Yet, because those ghosts and heroes have not yet arrived, this realization is not accompanied by a realized rebellion. The song thus invites speculation about its political

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implications. Is it meant to be overheard by the British as a warning of the growing Irish Catholic threat – ‘my countrymen! vengeance!’ – that should spur Catholic Emancipation and further reform? Or is it meant to be heard by the Irish themselves so that they seek leaders who will give form and direction to the spectres’ cries? The closing stanza’s ambivalence over the relationship between particular histories of suffering and the cause of universal reform was unresolved, but had not yet become problematic for Shelley. Before his trip to Ireland he was optimistic about his ability to manage the ‘yelling ghosts’ from ‘The Irishman’s Song’. Prior to embarking for Dublin from Keswick, he predicts his return to a domain transformed by his enlightened vision so that a haunting history can dwell with liberty: I shall try to domesticate in some antique feudal castle whose mouldering turrets are fit emblems of decaying inequality and oppression, which the ivy shall wave its green banners above like Liberty and flourish upon the edifice that essayed to crush its root. As to the ghosts I shall welcome them, although Harriet protests against my invoking them, but they would tell tales of old, and it would add to the picturesqueness of the scenery to see their thin forms flitting through the vaulted charnels. (LPBS 1: 238–9) These phantoms are not returning bloodthirsty heroes but Elysian ghosts whose personal memories have become pacific and picturesque in Shelley’s new world. If Catholic Emancipation evoked spectres from Britain’s Catholic past, Shelley here envisions a way to tame these historical ghosts. Their ‘tales of old’, unlike the ballad that disrupted Wordsworth’s composition of the Irish countryside, only adorn this utopia. Liberty and nature reign over the oppressive structures of history. In Dublin, however, such hopes eroded quickly and latent difficulties were exposed and exacerbated when Shelley was both the victim of historical sectarian resentments and the perpetuator of them. Recounting the Irish history of maltreatment at the hands of the English colonial power was a key plank in Shelley’s platform for political redress. As in ‘The Irishman’s Song’, Shelley saw the possibility of reform emerging from a subversive, anti-imperial historiography. In March 1812 he was collaborating in the publication of what would become the Compendium of the History of Ireland, eventually published in 1814 by John Lawless, an Irish activist who, like so many of Shelley’s Dublin associates, had ties to the United Irishmen uprising of 1798 (LPBS 1: 280). This effort was not, as Shelley’s letter to Catherine Nugent makes clear, simply in

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It is a matter of doubt with me whether any bookseller will dare to put his name to it. This will be no obstacle. I shall print proposals for publishing by subscription; & if you c[oul]d send us any names you would much benefit the Cause. (LPBS 1: 322) Though it would seem like this effort at gathering subscriptions for re-presenting Irish historical ills would only be preaching to the choir, Shelley held that changing the ideas of the few would reverberate into social change for the many. Even after his trip, his own circle showed evidence of such a mental revolution in transnational sympathy. In a letter to Nugent from August 1812 reacting to W.J. MacNeven and T.A. Emmet’s 1807 Pieces of Irish History,4 Harriet relays Shelley’s view that all readers, be they ‘Irish or English’ or from anywhere in the ‘world’, should read how the Irish have ‘suffered martyrdom’: Your friend & our friend Bessy has been reading (Pieces of Irish History) and is so much enraged with the characters there mentioned, that nothing will satisfy her desire of revenge but the printing & publishing of them ... There must be many still smarting under the wounds they have seen their brave companions suffer & all from this hated country of mine. Good God were I an Irish man or woman how I should hate the English. (LPBS 1: 321) Elizabeth Hitchener (‘Bessy’), Nugent and Harriet seem to provide models of historical empathy that mediate conflict and promote reform. They demonstrate a recognition of past wounds leading, in the later words of the ‘Defence of Poetry’, to a ‘going out of our own nature’ to understand another’s experience (517). From a political standpoint, such sympathy could be elicited across the channel and across religious divides, and have the potential to promote governmental change. Yet if Harriet’s words capture Shelley’s hopes, Hitchener’s ‘enraged’ reading also represents a growing concern for him. These tales of suffering fuel a ‘desire for revenge’ in Hitchener and a ‘hate’ in Harriet. Indeed, William Godwin feared Shelley was fostering similar desires for violent retribution in Dublin that would summon memories of past martyrs only to repeat past violence. Fearing violent insurrection, Godwin remonstrated with Shelley: ‘Do you not here exhort persons … to take

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the interests of presenting a chronicle, but rather sought to intervene by voicing a wounded colonial history that would further his political agenda:

the redress of grievances into their own hands? ... They will rise up like Cadmus’s seed of dragon’s teeth, and their first act will be to destroy each other’ (quoted in LPBS 1: 269n6). To warn against civil war, Godwin uses the mythological typology of the Sparti, the numerous race of warriors who instantaneously grew from the teeth sown by Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. Cadmus winnowed down this martial population by causing an internal dispute among them. The subsequent battle killed all but five hardened survivors who would become the city’s founding patriarchs. Yet, paralleling the spectral warriors in ‘The Irishman’s Song’, the ghosts of the vanquished Sparti were believed to haunt the fields surrounding Thebes and were even summoned in war against the city.5 Through this allusion, Godwin was suggesting that the well-intentioned Shelley would nevertheless continue only to sow seeds of soldiering, propagating a cycle of retribution that promised to be perpetual, like the agricultural seasons. This view would not bring the cross-religious cooperation of the United Irishmen but the fire, famine and slaughter that Coleridge had described in 1798 Ireland. If such histories had the potential to result in either progressive sympathy or regressive violence, could the effects of history be managed? Could those historical bonds of ‘time, place, circumstance, cause and effect’ that had defined the Irish colonial experience beneficially lead them to ‘associate’ among themselves as the first step towards a global movement of liberatory reform or would they only bring a violent past into the internecine conflicts of the present? These fears frame Shelley’s Proposals for an Association, which urges an audience of enlightened elites to form a peaceful network of rational liberty. This plan, which Shelley regarded as Godwinian, would not rouse the superstitious and dangerous ‘Canaille’ (LPBS 1: 66) and more closely mirrors the proposal for a cosmopolitan ‘methodical society’ that Shelley had proposed in his first correspondence with Hunt (LPBS 1: 54). It is a mark of his ambivalence, however, that Shelley nevertheless does attempt to reach the populace in his An Address to the Irish People, a speech and pamphlet intended to lead Irish Catholics into a popular campaign for Catholic Emancipation. In its postscript he announced that he had selected Ireland ‘as a theatre, the widest and fairest, for the operations of the determined friend of religious and political freedom’ (37). Nevertheless, the incipient tensions between past and future as well as particular and universal emerge here as well. Shelley avows that he is not so much interested in ‘Catholic emancipation’ as ‘universal emancipation’. He views Ireland as ‘the isle on whose green shores I have desired to see the standard of liberty erected, a flag of fire, a beacon at which the world shall light the torch of Freedom!’ (13). Yet an unexpected

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That all steps, however good and salutary which may be taken, all reforms consistent with the English constitution that may be effectuated, can only be subordinate and prepatory to the great and lasting one which shall bring about the peace, the harmony, and the happiness of Ireland, England, Europe, the World. (29–30) Why does Shelley qualify his call for reform with the interpolated clause that appeals to the strictures of the ‘English constitution’? The equivocation recurs throughout the speech as he looks forward to the ‘great and important events’ of emancipating Irish Catholics and restoring Irish liberty, but only ‘so far as they are compatible with the English Constitution’ (25). In Shelley’s progression of ‘steps’ from ‘Ireland’ to the ‘World’, an English sense of history and religion intervenes. In addition, a disjunction between liberating Irish Catholics and criticizing them occurs at the very beginning of Shelley’s speech and deepens throughout. In an apparently generous gesture that promised to debunk Protestant prejudice, Shelley must have raised the hopes of the Catholic audience members: ‘The Protestants say there was a time when the Roman Catholics burnt and murdered people of different sentiments, and that their religious tenets are now as they were then’ (11). Disappointment, anger or simple confusion must have ensued when he added: ‘This is all very true’ (11). A historical account of Catholicism’s ills then follows in which he derides the audience with the Great Schism, the Inquisition and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Catholic priests, many of whom were involved in organizing the campaign for Emancipation, came under particular fire: ‘The Monks and Priests of old were very bad men; take care no such abuse your confidence again’ (13). In his letters, Shelley openly expressed his dislike of the ‘Galilean’ (LPBS 1: 66) and confessed that he ‘secretly intended’ his Address to ‘shake Catholicism at its basis’ (LPBS 1: 239). Interestingly, Harriet Westbrook applies a similar phrase to her fears that Shelley’s courtship ‘should shake’ her Christian beliefs (LPBS 1: 274). The Address itself is at times unabashedly explicit in its message to his Catholic audience: ‘Reform Yourselves’ (25). The condescension and residual sectarianism in this terminology encapsulate Shelley’s ambivalent approach to the Irish. Shelley’s predictably lukewarm reception in Ireland ultimately hardened his positions on Irish cultural and religious identity and on political appeals to history. He remembered ‘the hisses with which they greeted

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equivocation intervenes in his speech between the reforms needed for Ireland and the rehabilitation of the world:

me when I spoke of religion’ and claimed to identify an elevated ‘spirit of Bigotry’ (LPBS 1: 275, 272). As a place for catalysing his revolutionary vision for ‘universal emancipation’, Dublin had proved itself to be ‘the most difficult of all’ (LPBS 1: 271). Lamenting the ‘retrogressive’ state of Irish society, he left confused over how to combine his hopes for universal future progress with Ireland’s deeply embedded, divisive histories (LPBS 1: 267). His images of the Irish express disgust at any social formation larger than an intimate circle, describing the obtuse ‘Irish mob’ as ‘one mass of animated filth’ (LPBS 1: 267–8). The emergent position moves away from the possibilities of historical redress explored in his earlier ballad. To associate with Shelley, the historically oppressed also had to disassociate themselves from their particular grievances and Irish identity. While rhetorically the Address rehearses inspiring, euphoric optimism about the possibility, even the inevitability, of such transcendent disassociation, Godwin’s fears about hatred and revenge remain a potent subtext. Just as Thebes could not overcome its founding violence, there remained the possibility that Irish conflicts would repeat the cyclic strife of war and carnage. Irish Catholic religion, culture and sense of injustice emerge as insuperable obstacles to reform. From Wales, where Shelley had planned to be in retirement within his happily haunted, mouldering palace of Liberty, he writes to Thomas Hookham that he needed to understand those ‘yelling ghosts’ of history: I am determined to apply myself to a study that is hateful & disgusting to my very soul, but which is above all studies necessary for him who would be listened to as a mender of antiquated abuses.—I mean that record of crimes & miseries—History. (LPBS 1: 340) The recommendation for this course of study came from Godwin, who saw history as the ‘means of becoming acquainted with whatever of noble, useful, generous, and admirable, human nature is capable of designing and performing’ (quoted in LPBS 1: 340n3). Yet the contrast between their two views of history (Godwin’s exemplarity vs. Shelley’s criminal log) shows the deep effects of the entrenched Irish troubles on Shelley. History must still be studied, but it must not be recalled or redressed. It must now be overcome.

From Dublin to Rome and back again Why and how did Shelley’s encounter with Ireland and Catholicism resonate in his later work? The August 1819 Peterloo Massacre has tended

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to overshadow Shelley’s annus mirabilis as, in Stuart Curran’s words, the ‘events of the moment’ that ‘strongly moved’ the poet (Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis xiv). The image of a slashing cavalry officer at St Peter’s field dominates both the cover montage of Michael Scrivener’s Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819–1820 (2001) and the dust jacket of James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1998). Earl Wasserman notes Shelley’s own application of a quote from The Cenci to post-Peterloo England in a September 1819 letter to Ollier (95n). Yet in the spring of 1819, when Shelley returned to Rome and did his seminal work on The Cenci, it was the unresolved Catholic Question that preoccupied Parliament. In January, when the Prince Regent blithely opened the 1819 session of Parliament commending the state of domestic tranquility and prosperity without mention of Catholic relief, the opposition predicted that only ‘mischief’ could come from a silence that neither placated Emancipation’s opponents nor fulfilled the ‘hope that in the nineteenth century, that intolerant spirit by which those who professed a religion different from that of the established Church were excluded from an equal participation of civil rights might safely and finally be extinguished’ (HPD 39: 54). On 4 March, the day before Shelley entered Rome, Lord Nugent eloquently defended a petition on behalf of British Catholics in the House of Commons. A similar petition would follow in the House of Lords on 22 March. Yet for the Catholic Question and for the play, May 1819 was the crucial month. During this time, Shelley conceptualized his tragedy, Henry Grattan brought forth a motion for Catholic relief in the House of Commons on 3 May and the Lords debated the Catholic Question on 5, 17 and 25 May. The parliamentary deliberations from May 1819 not only show continuity with Shelley’s ambivalent thinking about the Catholic Question but also articulate many of the same critical issues regarding history and retribution that emerge in The Cenci. Echoes of Shelley’s voice can be heard in the utterances of both supporters and opponents of Catholic Emancipation. Lord Nugent’s call for ‘universal toleration and freedom’ and the Whigs’ desire to end persecution against those whose religious opinions differed from the Establishment resonated with Shelley’s own views. Along with Grattan’s repeated emphasis that Catholic Emancipation was necessary to establish a model for civil rights rather than tyranny throughout the Empire, these sentiments fit with Shelley’s vision of global reform commencing within the British Isles. Yet strands of the conservative argument also sound like Shelley’s fears about admitting Catholics fully into the Union. The anxious characterization of Ireland still possessing ‘too much asperity’ and ‘too much bigotry on

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both sides’ mirrors Shelley’s own embittered comments (HPD 40: 404). More substantially, opponents of Emancipation, such as the Irish lawyer John Leslie Foster, considered Catholicism a political religion with an undeniable will to power manifested in its unbreakable ‘connexion between the Roman Catholic clergy and the executive government’ (HPD 40: 61). His attack on the priesthood resembles Shelley’s words from the Irish address: There never existed in any county a body of men who had so extensive an influence over the heads, the hearts, and ... the hands, of the population, as the Roman Catholic clergy possessed in Dublin. (HPD 40: 61) The tension within Shelley’s own stance was, in many ways, the tension within the nation between a progressive impulse towards liberalization and anxieties over a supposedly regressive Catholic threat. Typical of Catholic Emancipation’s historical discourses, the May 1819 debates constantly reference the Elizabethan period. While all sides agreed on the sixteenth-century necessity of instituting the penal laws when foreign Catholic powers threatened the Protestant succession, disagreement came over whether those religious wars had come to an end. If so, the penal laws were vestigial and merely propagated resentment. In asking the question ‘Is it in human nature that exclusion should not produce party, that jealousy should not produce irritation?’ (HPD 40: 56), John Wilson Croker sought to distil sectarian recriminations by removing the anachronistic persecution of religious difference. According to the logic of this position, the penal laws were artificially sustaining old conflicts and breathing life into new forms of national strife. Conversely, the Duke of Wellington, with characteristically blunt pragmatism, asserted that the ‘whole of the question’ turned on old wounds that remained open (HPD 40: 446). Wellington argued that religious change at the time of the Reformation and the 1688 Revolution ‘had been established in Ireland at the point of the sword, and by means of confiscations’, leading to Irish Catholics deriving from the ‘remembrance’ of such events ‘the idea of unmerited and mutual suffering’ (HPD 40: 447). For Wellington, wounded communal memories propagated an unbreakable cycle of retribution. Penal legislation was needed to secure Britain against these vengeful memories of past wrongs. The sword was still needed because it was too well remembered. Shelley and those in the Hunt Circle were well aware of these discourses surrounding the Catholic Question. While Shelley’s letters from

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this period provide a wealth of beautiful loco-descriptive passages about Italian landscape and art, they also constantly demand political news from Britain (LPBS 2: 70, 75). The Examiner, whose weekly delivery to Italy Shelley had arranged (LPBS 2: 18), focused on Catholic Emancipation on 5 May 1819. Therein, Hunt, to whom The Cenci was dedicated, laid out the underlying ideological issues that would emerge in the parliamentary debates (HSW 2: 182–5). The central problem, Hunt argues, is a ‘shallow-headed’ ministry that has become intransigent in its ignorance (HSW 2: 183). He singles out Wellington, with his ‘straightforward soldiership’, as one of those ‘Anti-Catholic alarmists’ who put outmoded prejudice ahead of redressing the ‘long-injured and most foolishly treated feelings of Ireland’ (HSW 2: 183, 184). Hunt was no particular friend of the Roman Catholic Church, but he felt historical fears about its power were obsolete when modern printing presses were ‘grinding their iron teeth against superstition almost all over the world’ (HSW 2: 184). The alternative to reform for Hunt was vengeance. He writes that Catholic Emancipation’s most vehement opponents are those most guiltily conscious of the ‘ill-treatment of Ireland’ because the ‘most implacable haters are those who have done the greatest injuries’ (HSW 2: 185). Above all, however, Hunt recognizes the central role of psychology and culture in the issue. In Hunt’s phrasing, besides ‘general politics, there are politics which may be called personal’ (HSW 2: 185), and it was only through personal transformations at the mental level that he saw any way of breaking the deadlock over Irish suffering and Catholic Emancipation. For Shelley, May 1819 also featured personal associations that pointed back to Ireland and his own previous difficulties with the Catholic Question. In Shelley’s Italian Experience (1991), Alan Weinberg reminds critics that The Cenci not only treats universal themes of ‘general significance’ but also becomes bound up with Shelley’s thinking about ‘Italian history, Renaissance ethics, Catholicism and the Italian character’ (72). Yet Jane Stabler has argued that liberal writers inevitably experienced ‘the South’ in relation to cultural and political events in Britain. Accordingly, journeying to another Catholic country not only provoked Shelley’s thinking about religion and culture but also evoked his campaign for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. He expressed contempt, in terms seemingly borrowed from his 1812 descriptions of Ireland, for the amalgamated rubbish of Italian Catholics whom he dismissed for ‘moral degradation’ (LPBS 2: 94) and condemned as the ‘deformity & degradation of humanity’ (LPBS 2: 60). In the same letter written to Hunt in

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There are two Italies; one composed of the green earth & transparent sea and the mighty ruins of antient times, and aerial mountains, & the warm & radiant atmosphere which is interfused through all things. The other consists of the Italians of the present day, their works & ways. The one is the most sublime & lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other the most degraded disgusting & odious. (LPBS 2: 67) Once in Rome, he wished he could view the city wiped clean of all its ‘filthy modern inhabitants’ (LPBS 2: 69). As in the Irishman’s ballad, it is also haunted as a ‘city as it were of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die’ (LPBS 2: 59). Even his praise was touched by a denigrating stadial view that backhandedly extolled Roman women for a kind of naive childishness that made them ‘gentle savages’ amid ‘complete Savages’ (LPBS 2: 92–3, 63). As in Ireland, he felt alone and isolated as a progressive freethinker victimized by the prejudices and suspicions of the masses. During Easter week, he had secret thoughts of extinguishing Catholicism in Rome just as he had hoped to shake Catholicism out of Irish Catholics: After all, Rome is eternal & were all that is extinguished, that which has been, the ruins & the sculptures would remain, & Raphael & Guido be alone regretted of all that Xtianity had suffered to spring forth from its dark & pernicious Chaos. (LPBS 2: 93) The preservation of Guido Reni alongside Raphael is significant, as the ideas for Shelley’s new drama coalesced in late 1819 around La Cenci, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci attributed to the Baroque Italian painter. Shelley’s encounter with Guido’s Beatrice coincided with Claire Clairmont spotting the familiar face of Amelia Curran in Rome on 23 April. The Irish painter was the daughter of John Philpot Curran, the Anglo-Irish lawyer who supported Catholic Emancipation, defended United Irishmen implicated in the 1798 Rebellion and championed Peter Finnerty’s case. As a long-standing friend of Godwin and the posthumous dedicatee of Mandeville (1817), he was Shelley’s most important contact during the 1812 Dublin expedition. May 1819, the month in which Shelley devoted his creative energies to The Cenci, was marked

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which he stews over conversations with Southey regarding the Catholic Question, Shelley demeans the Italian Catholic population:

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by the ubiquity of Amelia Curran. On 5 May, Clairmont sat for her portrait, and Curran would work continually on portraits of Mary, Percy and William during sittings throughout May. On 6 May, the Shelley retinue moved next door to Curran’s residence at Via Sistina 64, which also, according to Miranda Seymour, harboured an enclave of Irish artists (230). This period of intimate contact with the Irish portraitist was interwoven with the conception of The Cenci. The Shelley circle discussed issues of ‘jealousy’ raised by The Cenci’s Renaissance source text with Curran and hung a copy of the Beatrice portrait in the Via Sistina while she painted (Holmes 513, 516). Shelley would later consult her about having La Cenci engraved for the published version of The Cenci and commissioned her to produce an oil copy (LPBS 2: 107; Shelley and his Circle 832). In addition, Shelley’s envisioning of Eliza O’Neill as Beatrice brought Ireland closer to Italy. The Irish actress was no mere afterthought, but rather represented a dramaturgical selection that guided the play’s composition and the formation of Beatrice’s character.6 She made her serendipitous but sensational debut filling in for an ailing lead actress in an 1811 Dublin production of Romeo and Juliet. In the following three years, encompassing Shelley’s time in Ireland, she moved from obscurity to become the most celebrated star of the Dublin stage (Simpson and Braun 265–7). O’Neill made her London debut in 1814 as Juliet and played a range of roles until she abruptly retired from acting in 1819 to marry William Wrixom Becher, an Irish Member of Parliament.7 Reportedly, Shelley was deeply affected by her performance as the victimized but vengeful Bianca in the 1818 Covent Garden production of Henry Hart Milman’s Fazio, another play about revenge and jealousy in an Italian setting. For her passionate histrionics, O’Neill was often viewed as the successor to, and even the rival of, Sarah Siddons as the period’s preeminent tragic actress. When O’Neill stepped into the centre of romantic theatrical culture, her peripheral Irish identity informed the reception of her performances. Her first London appearance emphasized the exotic Irishness of the new Juliet by advertising the debut of ‘Miss O’NEILL, (Of the Theatre Royal, Dublin)’ (quoted in Donohue 166). The image of the Irish beauty in an Italian setting endured, as illustrated in the ‘Celtic’ pallor and curls of O’Neill as Shakespeare’s tragic Italian paramour reproduced in Frances Gerard’s 1897 Some Fair Hibernians (see Figure 4). One contemporary critic praised her ‘native elegance’ and J.P. Kemble described finding ‘a very pretty girl here, with a small touch of the brogue on her tongue’ (quoted in Mathews and Hutton 292, 290). Connolly has

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Figure 4 Eliza O’Neill as Juliet.

argued that O’Neill’s presence could inflect a role with the ‘wild Irish girl’, thus enabling a play such as Richard Lalor Sheil’s Evadne (1819) to register the sufferings of Ireland. O’Neill’s recurring performances in the works of Sheil, himself an Irish dramatist and lawyer who later founded the Catholic Association with O’Connell, linked plays such as Evadne with Ireland and the Catholic Question (Saglia 252, 266–7). Such associations were not lost on the Hunt Circle. Hunt cites O’Neill’s ‘primitive expressions of feeling’ (Dramatic Criticism 88). Julie Carlson has critiqued the sexism informing Hazlitt’s reaction to her emotional physicality (‘Impositions of Form’ 168–70), but those gender anxieties were compounded by responses to her native energies and, in Wellington’s terms, excessive mourning of past wounds. Hazlitt praises her ‘extreme natural sensibility’ and describes her acting as ‘pure nature’ (A View of the English Stage 5: 258, 310). He censures her, however, for losing

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Her eyeballs rolled in her head: her words rattled in her throat. This was carrying reality too far. The sufferings of the body are no longer proper for dramatic exhibition when they become objects of painful attention in themselves, and are not merely indications of the moral sense within. (Art and Dramatic Criticism 18: 285–6) While Hazlitt’s distaste for O’Neill’s rapturous keening and the way she became ‘absorbed in her sufferings’ (18: 196) subtly encoded the reaction of many English reformers to the plight of the Irish, Hester Thrale (now Piozzi) did not mince words in an 1819 letter: ‘Of Miss O’Neill the Pearl of her Profession I know Nothing but that she is a Roman Catholic’ (Tearle 130). Even Shelley’s Spanish source material drew him back to Ireland. Hugh Roberts has discussed not only the influence of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El Purgatorio de San Patricio (1628), a play about evil and conversion set in Ireland, but also the incorporation into The Cenci of Calderón’s description of the legendary entrance to Purgatory in Lough Derg, Ireland (‘Mere Poetry and Strange Flesh’ 347–8, 350–2; The Cenci 3.1.243–65). As we have seen, this locale was, according to Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), at the centre of a persistent symbolic struggle over religious identity in the British Isles. The contested Irish landscape in The Cenci, the Irish Catholic O’Neill cast as Beatrice, the presence of the Irish painter Curran and Shelley’s alienation from a foreign Catholic populace all suggest that Ireland and what Connolly labels ‘a set of anxieties concerning the admission of Catholics to public life’ were on Shelley’s mind while crafting The Cenci in May 1819 (187). Shelley’s play is his deepest and darkest engagement with his own contradictory stance of advocacy mixed with stadial repulsion regarding Ireland. While Tim Morton correctly observes that the ‘bonds between Cenci and the Church of Rome encode the links between injustice and violence against the body in the family and in society’ (191–2), these bonds of religious and communal convention also tie down Beatrice into a local culture of internecine conflict. Her inability to transcend those delimiting links, to rise above those particular and corporeal ties in what Morton argues is an anti-incarnational and anti-sacramental play (191), and to emerge unbound in an ecstasy of progressive, universal revolution dramatizes a record of ‘crimes & miseries’ that Shelley saw as the tragic insuperability of Irish Catholic history.

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control and allowing an unregulated, extreme display of despair to go beyond the pale of acceptability:

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Shelley’s anti-Christian theology has been central to critical readings of The Cenci, beginning with Wasserman’s identification of the Count with God (87–9) and Stuart Curran’s discussion of the play’s godless universe (Shelley’s Cenci 134–41). Monica Brzezinski Potkay’s more recent elaboration of Shelley’s subversive model of the Trinity, however, has suggestively explored the political implications of his heterodoxy (63). Mark Canuel’s reading of The Cenci in Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (2002) has gone farthest in shifting critical discussion of The Cenci to an intervention in such public discourses about religion and politics instead of an ‘autonomous investigation of the aesthetic, philosophical, or linguistic concerns specific to the work’ (249). Yet Canuel’s focus on the passage of intolerant power from a confessional inquisition to its secular successor has not adequately addressed the Catholic Question or the tragic transformation of Beatrice. Roger Blood, James D. Wilson and Robert Whitman have identified the fraught interpretation of her moral responsibility as the central critical problem of the play, which Sperry further views as key to establishing the ethical and political engagement of The Cenci.8 Shelley himself has set the terms of this debate by describing how Beatrice, in reacting to patriarchal incest with patricidal violence, becomes the play’s tragic hero: Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. (142) To convince the reader, however, Shelley’s adverb ‘undoubtedly’ has to work hard. That Beatrice should have or even could have used violent incest as an opportunity for enlightened self-edification and then sought Cenci’s conversion seems, at worst, callow chauvinism or, at best, naive idealism. In his study of the play, Curran warns that critical detective work searching for Beatrice’s hamartia will find only red herrings in what is ultimately a hopelessly absurd, deterministic universe (Shelley’s Cenci 37). Yet tying Beatrice’s dilemma – how to respond to a history of hatred and abuse – to Shelley’s thinking about the Catholic Question can bring this conflicted piece into clearer focus, both formally and politically.

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The Cenci and the Catholic Question

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Beatrice did not use Cenci’s final violation of the domestic union to free herself from the fabric of her Italian locality, just as the Irish did not use the penal laws’ degradation to launch a mental and cultural ‘universal emancipation’. In this light, Beatrice’s tragic flaw, akin to the engulfing ‘moral degradation’ of the Italian Catholics around Shelley (LPBS 2: 94), is that she did not escape from this net of intrigue and retaliation, despite her initial power to do so and the opportunity that the Count’s abuse paradoxically provided. The critique of Beatrice, despite her suffering and victimization, is the same critique of Irish Catholics in the 1812 Address to the Irish People – ‘Reform Yourselves’; rise above the cycle of violence and history of hatred; separate yourself from the tribal need for revenge among your underdeveloped society; get beyond your cultural limits and transcend your wounded history. This political critique of the Irish as victims of history mirrors the play’s psychological dynamic in which, according to Jerrold Hogle, the ‘logic’ of domination and power that Beatrice ‘assaults’ becomes ‘so thoroughly her own’ (160). In Hogle’s interpretation of Shelley’s oeuvre, history ultimately turns on whether the individual human psyche embraces its liberation or abjectly submits itself to a tyrannical power of its own making, thus rendering Beatrice ‘not completely free of responsibility’ (154). One significant aspect of Hogle’s framework is that, despite the seemingly insuperable social forces weighted against Beatrice that Curran and other critics have emphasized, responsibility implies alternative possibilities, at least from Shelley’s perspective. Indeed, Donna Richardson has argued that ‘if individual historical figures have no way of transcending the conceptual limitations of their era’, then the whole Shelleyan project of envisioning future social transformation is untenable (219). Even Hogle, however, does not fully articulate the way that ‘transference’ could have produced anything like revolutionary transcendence in this tragedy. Yet The Cenci is achingly close to bursting into commedia in terms of its Huntian ‘politics which may be called personal’. The play’s conflation of poetics, psychology and politics recaptures the transformative possibilities and reforming power in Beatrice’s ethical, anatomizing gaze, which lifts individuals out of self and circumstances, and can thereby interrupt the cyclic repetition of ‘jealousy’, ‘irritation’ and reliance on the ‘point of the sword’, whether in Italy or Ireland. Beatrice’s momentarily hopeful but ultimately tragic speech following the rape is the pivotal dramatic moment when her psyche hangs in the balance between becoming one of the ‘implacable haters’ or engendering universal emancipation. In this politically charged moment, an entrenched parochialism prevents the play from becoming a ‘theater, fairest and widest’

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for reform. Instead, Shelley’s hopes in and disappointment with Ireland inflect The Cenci and reveal Beatrice’s and his own frustrated attempts to redirect history. Shelley argues in the preface that the barbaric religion of Catholic Italy is ‘interwoven with the whole fabric of life’, echoing his personal observation on the way in which Italy’s ‘religion is more interwoven with, and is less extraneous to, the system of ordinary life’ (LPBS 2: 219). Amid crimes that are communal collusions, The Cenci unfurls a plot in which the oppressive Count Cenci divides and persecutes his family with society’s passive consent. The alteration of Cenci from the atheist of the source text to a practising Catholic does more than reinforce Shelley’s disdain for Christianity. It makes the Count’s sins the sins of his community rather than the sins of an outsider against that community. Shelley opens with Cardinal Camillo and Cenci bartering over a murder cover-up that has been sanctioned by a commercial exchange of forgiveness in the Pope’s interest. Although Camillo, the aristocrat’s former tutor, stands in the same relationship as Sanford to Lord Elmwood, the Cardinal has definitively abandoned his sacred role. As a result, Camillo’s invitation to ‘Talk with me, Count’ is not an offer of sacramental confession but the feckless chatter of a crony (1.1.48). All of Rome and, by extension, all of the Roman Catholic world collaborate as the entire guest list – ‘my friends and Kinsmen.../Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church’ (1.3.1–2) – observes Cenci’s celebration of his sons’ deaths on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. In a world bereft of innocence, Giacomo, the Count’s victimized son deciding whether to make his father a victim, articulates the symbol of its unceasing internecine battle – ‘we are left, as scorpions ringed with fire,/What should we do but strike ourselves to death?’ (2.2.70–1). Even the unnamed murder victim was a conspirator who unsuccessfully blackmailed the Count (1.1.21–5). In short, this is a population formed from the dragon seeds of Cadmus that has propagated a culture around those ‘crimes and miseries’ that Shelley came to associate with history and with sectarian bigotry in Ireland. Like Matilda in A Simple Story, Beatrice seems to offer an alternative ethic in this conflicted world. As one who can read Cenci’s visage and anticipate his plots, Beatrice is no mere cipher of conventional goodness like her stepmother Lucretia. The staging of a tableau vivant of Lucretia, Beatrice and Bernardo implied in Shelley’s lines represents the most powerful counter-ethic to Rome (2.1.103–4). In the shadow of Cenci’s threats, the three are not united by blood or by conspiratorial plotting but by a common history of suffering. Shelley seems to be borrowing a dramaturgical technique deployed by Joanna Baillie of ‘freezing stage

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action in tableau displays of communal sympathies’ in order to highlight the ‘pathos of domestic history’ within the larger contestation over ‘class, empire, and nation’ in romantic historiography (Kucich ‘Joanna Baillie’ 109, 115, 110). In The Cenci, this community of the Count’s victims is forged by a sympathy similar to that prompted by the reading of Irish history by Hitchens, Nugent and Harriet Shelley. Initially Beatrice possesses a unique capability of altering other characters’ insidious plans and thus of fostering the potential realization of this alternative community within Rome. Her encounter with the hypocritical, lascivious Orsino demonstrates this power. Orsino is a crucial character because he is, in the words of Jeffrey N. Cox, a ‘kind of Cenciin-training’ (‘The Dramatist’ 69), although one who still has the freedom to choose another path. This nascent tyrant has also become an unlikely source of the play’s moral gloss in diagnosing the Cenci family’s tendency towards a disheartening ‘self-anatomy’ (2.2.110), which has influenced readings of The Cenci since Earl Wasserman connected this introspective gaze to a destructively scrupulous ‘self contempt’ (Wasserman 108–16; Cox ‘The Dramatist’ 69–70). Yet even if his comments about the Cenci in Act 2 echo Shelley’s own prefatory caveats against ‘casuistry’, the plotting Orsino cannot be relied upon for ethical judgments about the other characters’ inner lives. He reveals more about the play’s moral dynamic when he is diverted, against his will, from his Cenci-like trajectory. The second scene of the play, juxtaposed against the Count’s conversation with the Cardinal, puts Beatrice into dialogue with Orsino. While Orsino’s soliloquy unveils his manipulation of Beatrice’s petition, a symbol of the appropriation of sympathy so prevalent in this play, he also reveals Beatrice’s ability to affect him: Yet I fear Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze, Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts. (1.2.83–7) This passage testifies to the effect of Beatrice’s ‘anatomizing’ gaze. While Young-Ok An has characterized this ‘monstrously’ disruptive power of her gaze as ‘petrifying’ (53), it actually seems more ethical and transformative. It prompts an incomplete conversion, like that of Lord Elmwood during his chance encounter with Matilda on the stairs, that almost recalls Orsino to his purer love of Beatrice. He eventually hardens himself, but this soliloquy represents a confessional moment of tension and possibility. Curran has argued that since this is a lyric tragedy, it 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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must be read poetically to understand the meaning of its action and the psychology of its characters (Shelley’s Cenci 270). Within this framework, the influence of Beatrice’s alternative ethic prompts a preternatural selfexamination whose poetics read like an ecstatic, out-of-body experience. Orsino rises out of himself in order to look at himself, to view his naked body and his uncovered thoughts ‘anatomized nerve by nerve’, similar to seeing one’s self laid out on the surgeon’s table in an operating theatre. Far from murdering to self-dissect, however, this odd transcendent emancipation from the body and disassociation from the swirl of fractious local events presents a positive trajectory towards potential redemption. Shelley poetically dramatizes an awakening moral imagination that leads ‘out of our own nature’ and offers at least some hope, even for Orsino, amid Rome’s mercenary status quo. This repeated trope of Beatrice’s challenging gaze also suggests that the play entertains the possibility of her likewise transforming the Count and realizing the preface’s need to ‘convert the injurer’ (The Cenci 142). On the one hand, the Count’s extreme, even hyperbolic dedication to evil seems to foreclose this development. Shelley’s addition of virtues to the protagonist of Prometheus Unbound (1819) makes Prometheus a more angelic version of Milton’s Satan. The multiplication of vices in The Cenci seems to make the Count absolutely demonic, an archangel completely ruined. Like Satan and Lord Elmwood, he is ‘hardened’, self-consciously dedicated to vindictive violence that rejects any call to mercy (1.1.93–4). Unlike Orsino, he seems impervious to Beatrice’s attempts ‘to soften him’ (1.3.116). On the other hand, although Shelley gives no equivalent to Part I of A Simple Story that explains the reasons for his malevolent acts, there are brief glimpses into his psyche. The most significant comes in his heated denunciation of Beatrice as the ‘loathed image of thy cursed mother’ (2.1.121). Just as Matilda’s appearance recalled Miss Milner, Beatrice here becomes an object of historical typology. While we know nothing of this mother – neither the cause of her death nor that of Cenci’s resentment – this bitter memory qualifies Wasserman’s reading of the metaphysical inexplicability and inevitability of the Count as an ‘uncaused cause’ with ‘unmotivated’ hatred for his children (87). As in Elmwood’s exile of Matilda, the Count focuses his memorial wrath on his children, and particularly Beatrice, whom he desires to violate and to throw into ‘darkness’ for embodying this repressed history (2.1.181). The dramatic moments in the first two acts of the play thus revolve around whether Beatrice’s alternative vision can touch and transform this hardened father. At the banquet, Beatrice deploys the gaze that had anatomized Orsino, asking ‘Dare no one look on me?’ (1.3.132). 10.1057/9780230300453 - British Romanticism and the Catholic Question, Michael Tomko

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No one can face her, except Cenci, as Beatrice’s protest – ‘Frown not on me’ – makes clear (1.3.151). She addresses him directly, calling him to penitence and to join the gathered sufferers who ‘will kneel around, and fervently/Pray’ (1.3.158–9). Adept at cold command, Cenci barks at the guests, but when he stands alone with Beatrice, he has a moment of crisis and confusion that mirrors Orsino’s. He cries out, ‘My brain is swimming round;/Give me a bowl of wine!’ (1.3.164–5). The moment is brief and its effect is transitory, but the language is crucial. With his brain whirling, there is an initial dislocation from himself. This represents the beginning of the same ecstatic process that Orsino followed and momentarily presents the possibility of converting the injurer. It is short-lived because Cenci’s drinking of wine – the material element of the black sacrament that he initially claimed not to need – returns him to his active self and predetermined dominance. Yet the next appearance of Beatrice in Act 2 again threatens to throw him off-course. In an aside, he has a pang of conscience and a moment of self-examination: ’Tis an awful thing To touch such mischief as I now conceive: So men sit shivering on the dewy bank, And try the chill stream with their feet; (2.1.124–7) This is a metaphorical rather than a metaphysical passage, but the articulation involves looking upon himself as that hesitant figure on the bank. Again, the move towards self-transcendence fails as Cenci assures himself, unconvincingly, of further sensual delight and recommits to casting Beatrice into darkness. According to the logic of the play’s underlying moral struggle, the issue is not whether Beatrice can escape incestuous violence but rather whether she conforms to, rather than transcends, Rome’s ideological limits in reacting to this ultimate abuse of power. Beatrice does fail, of course, but critics have variously pointed to her use of religious language or hypocritical actions as the moment of her fall.9 I would suggest, however, that the speech directly following the off-stage act of incest (3.1.6–32) enacts a pivotal psychomachia within the larger play, during which Beatrice nearly liberates herself completely from her remaining ties to her Italian Catholic society with its ideology of historically mandated reciprocal violence. As did Orsino and the Count, Beatrice begins a move towards transcendence, an ecstatic disassociation from her local sphere and corporeal self. She too fails to complete the disassociation and thus cannot continue down the path towards ‘universal emancipation’

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that might have enabled her view of compassion and love to spread, perhaps to her family, to Orsino and maybe even to Cenci himself. Poetics direct dramatic action and indicate psychological dynamism. Her words are determinative not only for the play but also for Shelley’s approach to the Catholic Question and histories that prompt further hatred. Reeling from physical violation, Beatrice begins her speech with a dramatic image of being blinded by her own dishevelled hair: How comes this hair undone? Its wandering strings must be what blind me so, And yet I tied it fast.—O, horrible! On the one hand, her confused question is a disarming confession of victimization, of bewildered innocence unable to understand its own despoliation. The verse form is marked by this sense of woundedness as a string of monosyllabic words slow the lines, as if to keep Beatrice down in this place. It ends with an apostrophe – ‘O, horrible!’ – in which Beatrice looks up towards some hierarchically raised figure (seemingly a recollection of the Count) that testifies to her own oppressed state. The syntactical pause demanded by the interpolated comma in the middle of a beat that would otherwise be an easy elision (O, horr-) registers her abjection. On the other hand, this image also presents a way out, the opportunity to become unbound and untied from the repressive and regressive society whose codes of conduct, both social and sexual, had previously woven Beatrice tight. In short, this final depraved act of abuse – symbolized by the quickened pace of the Miltonic, liberating ‘wandering strings’ – could enable the enlightened transformation that Shelley saw as necessary for the Irish Catholic entry into modernity. This represents the potential for Beatrice’s progressive, poetic leap beyond history and cyclic vengeance. The following section of the speech enacts, with confusion and tragically without ultimate success, this move towards transcendence in which the self nearly breaks from that binding social system. The slow monosyllables give way to polysyllabic speed, a pace that is also built by the alliterative wind of successive ‘w’s and the change from artificially broken beats to sliding syllables (-less … whilst … Slide): The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls Spin round! I see a woman weeping there, And standing calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels …

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While this quickened passage is a moment of reeling, it is also a moment of rising. It recalls the near-conversions of self-separation and ascent from Orsino’s anatomized self and Cenci’s shivering self. Beatrice here begins to move beyond her own limits and does not appeal upwards to any male force. From the initial self-blinding of the opening lines, this passage moves into one of self-insight with the verb ‘I see’. She seems to verge on realizing not the tragic anagnorisis that Blood finds lacking in the play, but rather a self-knowledge that transcends her particular circumstances and culture (382). The object of this sight is her old self, left behind and below in its former social context of corruption and retribution. The old world begins to slip away as Beatrice’s new self ‘giddily’ breaks free from its ensnaring fabric. One can even catch a hint of the cosmic, orgasmic revelry of the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound.10 There is a sense of painful confusion in this passage like that of Cenci’s ‘swimming’ brain, but it is precisely the type of dislocation one would expect from someone whose previous, parochial beliefs have been ‘shaken’ (like either the Irish Catholics or Harriet Westbrook) and who is entering a brave new world. Yet one would also predict that the emergent, enlightened psyche, like that of Prometheus, would be unshakeable in any future encounter with the merely physical threats and tyrannical trampling of the Count. Beatrice, however, cannot complete this transformation. The binding of what Shelley had called bigotry proves too resilient. Like those in Dublin unwilling to follow Shelley’s path to liberty, Beatrice falls back into the clogs of Italian Catholic society. This fall sets her on course to imitate Cenci in killing him and to suffer retributive execution from the society that misshaped her. Poetic form marks this lapse in the abject apostrophe to a patriarchal figure, the return of the lugubrious monosyllables, syntactically interrupted beats and thickly repetitive plosives. These poetic elements oppress the reader along with Beatrice: My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps A changing, black, contaminating mist About me … ’tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves

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She succumbs to an old self that dwells uncomfortably in an oppressively physical world blackened by her own projected resentment and shame. After the moment of liberating, Gnostic, spiritual ascent, Beatrice crawls back into the flesh. The speech culminates with an image of death-inlife, as Beatrice’s own ‘putrefying limbs’ constrain her soul that cannot ‘burst forth’ into the ‘wandering air’. This phrase alludes to the unbinding of the ‘wandering strings’, but the revolutionary possibility has been lost. This loss registers most strongly in the diction associated with her soul not being able to ‘burst forth’ from its local context. Although appealing to the same verb, this failed ascent stands in contrast to the rebellious ‘glorious Phantom’ who does ‘burst’ successfully out of the graveyard of English political corruption in ‘England in 1819’.11 Unlike that couplet, which explodes into a re-imagined future for England and the world, Beatrice’s opportunity for transformation gets ‘sepulchered’ beneath the broken beats of a pile of apostrophes – ‘O, world! O, life! O, day! O, misery!’ – that recall the initial ‘O, horrible!’. The movement between these two very different types of passages (the quickened spiritual ascent beyond social mores vs. the fall into deadening corporeal traditionalism) exemplifies the ambivalence and dividedness of Shelley’s approach to reform and the Catholic Question. Beatrice’s inability to transcend her wounded history and to soar above her victimized self may evoke sympathy, but her failure determines the plot’s outcome. Since Beatrice could not achieve moral elevation, the cycle of violence that has characterized the parochial infighting of Catholic Italy will continue, inevitably dragging down both Beatrice and the Count with it. Unable to undergo a psychic revolution, Beatrice did not become, in the words of the ‘Defence of Poetry’, a ‘new birth’, a poetic consciousness whose foresight and elevation could engender a new age and society. Instead, she sinks back into the realm of association and the historical bonds of ‘time, place, circumstance, cause and effect’. As a result, at the deepest level, the final two acts are hi(story) not poetry. The real tragedy is not the death of the Count or even that of Beatrice, but rather, because of the loss of Beatrice’s enlightening soul and gaze, the historical stagnancy of Counter-Reformation Italy and Catholic Ireland. For the Count, brief moments of wavering conscience will not develop into a conversion. After the rape, when he appears at the beginning of Act 4, Cenci is not assured of triumph or pleasure. He has not yet

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My flesh to a pollution, poisoning The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of my life! My God!

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won. The amplification of his rhetoric and volume mask what is an underlying insecurity and vulnerability. The incest has not granted him any satisfaction and he has to persuade himself of future pleasure. He worries about the future because, he believes, Beatrice’s ‘stubborn will’ remains (4.1.10). He thus still fears her as an intact historical image of her mother. There is something frantic in his redundant threats to ‘drag’ her around (4.1.6–7, 30, 80) and something feckless in his anaphoric curses (4.1.91–3). The psychological logic parallels the poetic logic. If one imprecation or threat is ineffective, what could reiteration deliver? In addition, if the initial rape cannot leave Beatrice in ‘despair, blaspheming’, how could its repetition have any more power than Cenci’s impotent rhetoric? In this scene, he runs out of energy and begins to think about ‘Conscience’ (4.1.175–80). There is, however, no longer any moral challenge to anatomize the unhinged Cenci. Unknown to him, Beatrice has already become to ‘her own conscious self/All she appears to others’ (4.1.87–8). The play invites counterfactual speculation as to what may have happened if the furious but unravelling character of the Count, whose unstable asseverations would have been exuberantly rendered by Edmund Kean, met the gaze of a Beatrice, played by O’Neill, who had transcended abuse rather than been absorbed in her sufferings. What kind of ‘new birth’ might there have been? What revolution in Rome? What ‘universal emancipation’ from Dublin? For Beatrice, her worst punishment is that she becomes her oppressor, seizing the dagger and justifying her violence with the name of God. Her moral gaze is now used to intimidate witnesses. As Cenci had done in the first scene, she colludes with Cardinal Camillo to gain exoneration and claims immunity behind her ‘ancient house, and stainless fame’ (5.2.146). While she had earlier attempted to ‘soften’ Cenci’s heart, she urges Giacomo to ‘make thine hard’ (3.1.390). He does so, launching into gothic soliloquies like those of his father. Orsino, whose conscience once hung in the balance, gives himself over to a life of false countenance. The plot literally goes nowhere, as it leaves the Castle of Petrella only to return to Rome where it started. There, the Pope self-interestedly maintains the status quo as at the start of the play. Beatrice is left to suffer the consequences of the cycles of vengeance and continual remembrance of the point of the sword. In her comforting of Lucretia she seems to return to her sympathetic, communal ideal, but her soothing song is a resentful plaint against Orsino. She feels herself still oppressed by her ‘father’s spirit’ (5.4.60), but then proclaims herself ‘ever holy and unstained’ (5.4.149). She settles down from this wild psychic ride into a stoic resolve that concludes with the delicate, poignant moment in which she and

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Lucretia bind up each other’s hair, seemingly recalling the earlier tableau vivant. Yet while this appears to recapture an alternative ethic of sympathy, or ‘feminine response to patriarchal violence’ as Cox has argued (‘The Dramatist’ 70), it remains symbolically equivocal. When she asks her stepmother to ‘bind up this hair’ (5.4.160), the request reverses the potential liberation from the Italian social fabric symbolically represented by her ‘undone’ hair with its ‘wandering strings’ (3.1.6). In other words, even though this is a compelling exchange within a repressed female community, Beatrice remains bound within her larger unredeemed social system, unable to escape or transcend. The conclusion of this last gesture is thus also deeply ambivalent, like Shelley’s response to Reni’s portrait purportedly depicting this moment in the prison and like his fraught political push for Catholic Emancipation. While the beginning of Act 3 represents the determinative psychomachia in which Beatrice’s revolutionary emancipation tragically fails, her speech remains unclear about the cause of her capitulation. The Cenci dramatizes, without ultimately diagnosing, what Hogle has called the psyche’s ‘willfully’ turning from ‘transfigurative and revolutionary tendencies’ towards ‘systems of belief that can rapidly confine and tyrannically control its best aspirations’ (155, 88–9). Just as free will in Milton’s theodicy describes a necessary condition for evil but not its ultimate cause, so too must there be a further explanation as to why the ‘free operation’ (Hogle 88) of Beatrice’s mind descends into abjection rather than ascends to emancipation.12 There have been compelling attempts by critics to provide the unstated, prevenient cause for Beatrice’s truncated self-liberation, including Hogle’s emphasis on the pervasive influence of ‘Catholicism’ in her ‘culture’, Curran’s indictment of her Christianity, Cox’s description of her ‘historically limited view of her world’, and Sperry’s and Wasserman’s discussions of her confining traditional morality.13 Viewing The Cenci in relation to the Catholic Question may help explain this collocation of possible causes, because these represent the very issues that frustrated Shelley’s campaign in Ireland. Unlike the ‘casuistry’ generally involved in considering a particular tragic character, identifying a single hamartia in a complex social condition is a harder task. Shelley announced in the dedication of The Cenci to Hunt that the play was a treatment of ‘sad reality’ (140), but for those readings linking the play to the French Revolution, this has remained a somewhat abstract reality he had not ‘lived through’ (Wasserman 95). In light of Shelley’s own ambivalent interventions in the Catholic Emancipation debate, The Cenci can be seen as Shelley’s honest confrontation with a reality that was not only ‘sad’, but was also as difficult as his own experience in Dublin.

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At first glance, Sir Walter Scott’s treatment of the Catholic Question resembled Wordsworth’s – both opposed the measure from a Tory standpoint, both saw Catholicism as incompatible with national identity, both feared potential chaos from an Irish insurrection and both saw aesthetic representations of national history and topography as central to the controversy. Yet, while Wordsworth and Southey steadfastly opposed Catholic Emancipation, Scott was among the Tories who switched positions. In 1829 Scott counselled J.G. Lockhart, then editor of the conservative Quarterly Review, not to publish Southey’s ‘purple article’ against Catholic Emancipation, which he argued would only enflame national prejudice and risk ‘public disturbance’ (LWS 11: 24–6). Scott thus parted company with Southey’s uncompromising opposition to Catholic Emancipation, a position he would label ‘Toryissimus’ (JWS 475). Amid the petitions on the Catholic Question inundating Parliament in 1829, Prime Minister Robert Peel singled out Scott’s signature in support of the Bill: ‘Your name was of the utmost value, and had more weight than any other single name. The mention of it, as attached to the Edinburgh petition, was received with loud cheers’ (Peel 100). This Tory migration, which also included Coleridge, enabled the Bill’s passage and broke a legislative deadlock that had persisted since 1791. Yet, even accounting for Daniel O’Connell’s pivotal 1828 election in County Clare, how could a group of staunch British nationalists – led by Peel, who represented anti-Catholic Oxford and the Duke of Wellington, whom Hunt grouped with the ‘Anti-Catholic alarmists’ (HSW 2: 183) – pass legislation that was widely viewed as undermining the national character? Despite his affinity for the Middle Ages, Scott’s support for Catholic Emancipation – like that of Wellington and Peel – cannot be attributed 148

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to any crypto-Catholicism. Even in 1829, Scott derided ‘popery’ as a ‘mean and depriving superstition’ that should have been ‘smothered’ prior to 1780 with an unrelenting enforcement of the penal laws (JWS 525–6). Lockhart recorded, in language paralleling Shelley’s distaste for Italian Catholicism, Scott’s regret that the penal laws had been slightly mollified, for if they had ‘been kept in vigour for another half century … Popery would have been all but extinguished in Ireland’ (Lockhart 6: 71). Scott held this viewpoint from early in his literary career. In a December 1807 letter to Southey, he claimed not to be ‘a bigot in religious matters, nor a friend to persecution’, but equated Catholic Emancipation with giving a ‘gentleman … with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket’ a ‘seat next to the fire’ (LWS 1: 400). The anxieties embodied in Scott’s historical allusion to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot found poetic expression in Marmion (1808), which was conceived on 6 November 1806, a day after the anti-Catholic celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day. During this time, Scott worried about his future patronage following Pitt’s death, became preoccupied with replacing the ‘All Talents’ ministry and cancelled his subscription to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review for its support of Catholic Emancipation.1 Despite its Scottish setting, the narrative interest of the medieval ballad focuses on which English noble from the court of Henry VIII, Marmion or DeWilton, will marry Clare, a former English nun. Rather than a conflict across Hadrian’s Wall, Marmion’s marriage plot focuses on an ongoing struggle within England for the nation’s future. At a time of national disunity over Catholic Emancipation, Scott recalls that the Reformation emphatically and irreversibly awarded the hand of Clare to DeWilton’s proto-Protestant character, not to the doomed and despicable Marmion who represents all that is horrific about a primitive, papal past.2 In an April 1808 critique of Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, who viewed Catholic Emancipation as the next step on Britain’s progressive historical path towards liberty, recognized that religious politics were at stake in Scott’s meditation on the ‘birth of the nation’ (Lincoln 31).3 Jeffrey’s countervailing view of history, theology and politics coloured his ironic condemnation of Scott’s ‘heresy’ from the ‘catholic poetical church’ (Review of Marmion 50) – the language implying that Marmion was itself regressively recalling a spirit of sectarian persecution. If Scott’s formulation of religious difference and national identity had never altered from that of Marmion, then a gulf would have remained fixed between him and Jeffrey into the 1820s. His anxiety for Ireland,

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I therefore have adhered to a very large body both of Tories & Whigs who petition for the bill. I dare say it will be inferior in numbers to the Protestant petition which will engage all the bigots of both sexes who are afraid of the cry of popery which in this country is being afraid of a dead man and in Ireland provoking a doubtful contest with a living and most irrational living giant. (LWS 11: 149) Scott realized that the penal laws were no longer a realistic option for getting ‘the old Lady of Babylon’s mouth stopd’ (JWS 526), but he still feared the ‘irrational living giant’ of Irish Catholicism. This required finding a way to incorporate disruptive Catholics into the Union, but as an unthreatening ‘dead man’. Could there be a cultural means of doing so and could national history provide a model for a way of assimilating Catholics into a form of British identity? If so, such a refigured response to the Catholic Question would likely provide a consensus between left and right, since liberals like Byron and Shelley, as we have seen, shared Scott’s and Southey’s anxieties about Catholicism. Such a model seems to emerge with Ivanhoe’s 1819 depiction of medieval sectarianism. Instead of addressing the Catholic Question by simply eliminating Catholics, Ivanhoe offers a way of regulating their entry into civil society. An emerging consensus about this approach can be seen in Jeffrey’s review of Ivanhoe in the January 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review. Reversing his attack on Scott’s poem Marmion, Jeffrey wholeheartedly praises the author of the medieval novel Ivanhoe as the Shakespeare of the modern ‘age’ and the founder of a ‘new school of invention’ whose genius has overshadowed and transformed all of English literature (1). How can we account for this fresh take by Jeffrey, who praises Ivanhoe’s presentation of ‘surprising adventures and extraordinary situations, the startling effect of exaggerated sentiments, and the strong contrast of exaggerated figures’ (8)? Through such extremes that determine the fate and citizenship of the novel’s representative characters, Scott incorporates outsider groups while delineating the sensibility required for cultural and political participation in the modern nationstate. This approach to religious difference, national identity and historical progress approximates that of Jeffrey. With England in an uproar over the Peterloo Massacre and demands for parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation, Jeffrey compares the formerly criticized author’s achievement in ‘variety, vivacity, magical felicity, and living

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however, eventually led him by 1829 to assent to Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review’s position on Catholic Emancipation:

presentment of character’ to the ‘miracles’ of Shakespeare, ‘the Mighty Dramatist’ (1). Jeffrey’s review thus makes the implicit claim that Scott’s canon possesses the same constitutional weight for Regency Britain as the Bard’s did for Elizabethan England. This high estimate of Scott’s import has been echoed in the recent critical reassessment of his work’s influence in Britain and abroad. In The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (1991), Ina Ferris has shown that Scott established the historical novel as a respectable genre and an international sensation by imparting a masculine authority to the national tale’s allegorical characters representing Ireland, Scotland and England, and by repackaging its treatment of colonial abuses, uneven development and rapacious policies. But Katie Trumpener has argued that Scott’s historical novels sublimated these conflicts and provided a cultural narrative that made Britain a viable ‘internal empire’ (xiii). Ian Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow (2007), which recaptures Scott’s dominance in a literary Edinburgh whose ‘forms, discourses, and institutions’ largely shaped nineteenth-century ‘imperial British culture’ (xi), has offered the most important qualification of Trumpener’s model. According to Duncan, subsequent criticism has too often cast Scott as the ‘master ideologue of internal colonialism’ rather than as a writer, albeit a ‘counterrevolutionary’ one, wrestling with the ‘ideological problematic’ presented by a variegated nation with competing visions of the past (97, 98). The result has been a closure of the ‘formal and political potentialities’ offered by Scott’s fiction and a ‘critical tendency to make Waverley stand for Scott’s work as a whole’ (98, 100). This chapter extends these investigations of Scott’s engagement with history and national identity to religious politics, taking heed of Duncan’s caveat about losing Scott’s complexity and his writing’s possibilities. The first section both traces his attempts to come to terms with religious difference and social fragmentation in Ivanhoe and attends to how the treatment of these divisive issues departs from what Duncan calls Waverley’s ‘loss and salvage’ model, which domesticates threatening primitivism within a tamed modern aesthetic (71–2). Such recuperation plays only a minor role in Scott’s resolution of the Norman-Saxon conflict, but what Paul Gilroy in Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) has termed reconciliatory ‘conviviality’ – or living sociably together despite difference – features significantly in both Waverley and Ivanhoe. The second section examines the success of conviviality in Waverley and its degeneration before bitter sectarian memories and ensuing vengeance in Ivanhoe. The final section then turns to Scott’s resolution of NormanSaxon division and the exile of the Jewess Rebecca. Here, I argue, Scott

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delineates new cultural parameters for citizenship in which toleration remains contingent on outsider religious communities relinquishing their own sense of collective memory. This interpretation qualifies the readings of critics who have seen a tendency to promote tolerance in Scott’s writing. Mark Canuel has described Scott’s general interest in depicting how characters negotiate and articulate their religious views in relation to Britain’s institutional structures that have historically organized society’s beliefs (157–9). Deborah Epstein Nord has gone further in arguing that Scott, in representing Britain’s transnational Romany community in Guy Mannering (1815), envisioned a model for incorporating the ‘internal other’ in a way that was ‘inclusive and reformist’ (39). Andrew Lincoln finds that Ivanhoe in particular ‘retrieves the possibility of a more tolerant, and perhaps less militaristic, national history, a possibility lost in the past, but still perhaps open in the future’ (78). Michael Ragussis argues that, despite its Shakespearean stereotypes, the medieval novel rewrites English history as ‘Anglo-Jewish history’ (93). Further, just as Nord shows that the fate of the Romany and Jewish people were intertwined within Britain, Ragussis and Michael Wheeler have discussed the ways that, through the concomitant controversies over Jewish and Catholic Emancipation, Jews and Catholics were discursively linked in debates on the Protestant foundation of English national identity (Ragussis 130–6; Wheeler 31–3). Thus, I show that Scott develops in Ivanhoe a model for accommodating difference in which sectarian parties can be reconciled under a national union, a model that can apply to a range of ‘internal others’, or what Arjun Appadurai has recently termed ‘substantive minorities’ (63–5). Yet, despite its ostensibly broad vision, I argue that the novel demands that characters from ‘extreme’ religious positions reform their identity in keeping with Britishness, namely by conforming to a cultural via media or what Gyorgy Lukács identified as Scott’s proclivity for the ‘middle way’ (32–3). This containment of difference is unlike Inchbald’s formation of a new community that respects identity while negotiating a way out of histories of hatred through dialogue and proximity. Instead, taking the place of sectarian legislation, Scott’s historiographic fiction helps to enact a cultural transformation that attempts to resolve problems associated with religious difference by dissolving the historical basis of difference.

Ivanhoe and the ‘condition of the English nation’ In depicting a land that cannot form itself into a nation across its ethnic, religious and geographic faultlines, Ivanhoe tacks back and forth

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between issues surrounding the aftermath of the Norman Conquest in 1193 and the domestic unrest of England in 1819. Scott himself invites this turn outside the aesthetic bounds of the work by opening the seventh chapter with a broad political and economic survey of English society: ‘The condition of the English nation was at this time sufficiently miserable’ (65). This interjection is only a recapitulation, however, of the social problems outlined at the very outset of the novel: Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat. (16)4 Scott pinpoints the inability to create a nation, or ‘blend’ a union, out of divisive histories as a central concern. In Ivanhoe the ‘condition of England’ is fragmentation. Arising out of this tribalism are memories of oppression across multiple generations that threaten to turn into calls for vengeance – a problem of memory and forgiveness much like the crises in Inchbald’s A Simple Story. Further, this call for retaliation threatens to boil over into civil war or revolution, described by Scott as ‘civil commotion’ and ‘national convulsions’ that seem ‘impending’ (66, 16). Given this scope, recent criticism has shown why the politically engaged Edinburgh Review would feature Jeffrey’s review of Ivanhoe as its lead article at a time when Britain seemed to be breaking up from within. John Morillo and Wade Newhouse have focused on the political valency of Scott’s comparison of the Templestowe crowd to a ‘mob of radical reformers’; Gary Dyer has examined his treatment of violence and injustice in contemporary gender issues; Chris Vanden Bossche has explored the intersection of linguistic and economic power in the work; Judith Wilt has looked at its transformation of national identity; and Chris Worth has argued that it forges not only a twelfth-century ‘Englishness’ but also a nineteenth-century Britishness suitable for imperial expansion. These readings have borne out Dyer’s claim that Ivanhoe is a literary text embodying what Fredric Jameson has called literature’s ideological ‘function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable, social contradictions’ (Dyer 384–5; Jameson 79). Yet among these newly contextualized accounts of Ivanhoe, none have tied it to the ‘contradictions’ surrounding the Catholic Question, despite the novel’s treatment of national identity, medievalism and religion.

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The composition and reception of Ivanhoe reveal Scott wrestling with the discourses of ruins, national borders and alternative histories that informed the Catholic Emancipation debate. In arguing that an ‘effort to portray the condition of England’ after Peterloo ‘structures’ Ivanhoe, James Chandler rightly notes that Scott finished work on Ivanhoe in the weeks after the Massacre and was publicly defending the government’s actions soon after (84, 11). While the influence of the Peterloo Massacre is undeniable and inflamed Hazlitt’s response to the novel (Duncan 30), an exclusive emphasis on Scott’s reaction to the events in August in Manchester can obscure the range of issues that were troubling Scott when he began the novel at the start of June 1819, most notably questions about historical and religious identity. While writing Ivanhoe, Scott also began work on a ‘story on the dissolution of the Monasteries’ set in ‘old English times’ that would become The Monastery, a historical novel published in March 1820 depicting the clash of Catholic and Reformation doctrines and parties in Elizabethan Scotland.5 The novel swelled until the material on the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots became a separate novel published as The Abbot (1820). The Monastery’s prefaces reveal an anxious fascination with Catholicism’s architectural ruins, specifically the ‘ruined aisles’ of Melrose Abbey near Scott’s home (19). The first preface, a letter supposedly written to the ‘author of Waverley’ from Captain Clutterbuck, relates the mysterious appearance of a gentlemanly ‘stranger’ in an ‘iron-grey suit’ with a face ‘worn as much by toil and sorrow as age’ (10–11). He is later revealed as a Benedictine monk from an exiled Scottish order dissolved during the French Revolution. After discovering the mouldering relic of a human heart in Melrose’s ruins, the émigré gives Clutterbuck the manuscript memoirs that would become The Monastery and The Abbot. This preface seems to give a realistic, compelling narrative of a suffering Catholic refugee who has recrossed a national border and brought a contrapuntal sense of history with him. The papist ‘dead man’ seems not only to have arisen but also to have rewritten British history in novelistic form. Yet the second preface, a reply to Clutterbuck, throws the story of the disinherited monk into doubt, assigning the manuscript’s origins to utopia and comparing its author to the counterfeiting Rowley and Ossian. What does this strange authorial masquerade signal? Written under erasure, the very existence of this Benedictine as a fiction within a fiction is neither confirmed nor denied. Scott’s prefaces give insight into how fascinated but vexed his approach to the nation’s religious history had become. The model or resource the past offered could only be carefully broached with a keen editorial awareness of the power of remembering and forgetting.

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Within Ivanhoe itself, the volatility of religion and memory exert pressure on the narrative through two major symbols: religious ruins and the Crusades. Ruins of history, which cause social problems in the present, recur throughout the novel. As Vanden Bossche has noted, the seemingly extraneous opening conversation about the servile ‘brass ring’ around the swineherd Gurth’s neck introduces themes of linguistic difference, national divisions and economic thralldom that feature prominently in the text. Additionally, however, sacerdotal ruins of a past civilization dominate this glen in the Don Valley of South Yorkshire where the encounter occurs: A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places, probably by the zeal of some convert to Christianity, and lay, some prostrate near their former site, and others on the side of the hill. (17–18) Immediately, Scott embeds the national conflict between the Normans and Saxons within a geography marked by religious history. For much of the opening chapter, Gurth sits upon ‘one of the fallen Druidical monuments’ (19). The rude stones, possibly a place of sacrificial violence, evoke a civilization whose age in history has passed, but passed violently in a contentious clash of religions. The symbolic remains of ‘Druidical superstition’ resonate throughout the book as the more recent historical event of the final Crusade, a failed religious war to capture Palestine, has left England in a state of ruin and division. The Crusades form a thread of harsh memory that is never far from anyone’s thoughts. The wounds of this history haunt the eponymous hero Ivanhoe who, in disguise as a palmer, gives a detached but wrenching third-person account of the effects of the conflict on his own body: ‘He was darker,’ said the Palmer, ‘and thinner, than when he came from Cyprus in the train of Coeur de Lion, and care seemed to sit heavy on his brow; but I approached not his presence, because he is unknown to me.’ (56) Ivanhoe describes himself as a scarred veteran – sad, worn and wan. Perhaps most interesting, however, is an effect generated from his

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incognito state, namely talking about his old self as an entirely other, unknown self. He seems divided from his past like one of the shades in the Elysian Fields. This central character’s psychological division betokens the larger social conflict in the nation reconstructing itself from the historical ruins of a religious war. The Norman Prince John describes the remnant of Richard’s knights that are returning from the Crusades and attempting to re-enter civil society: ‘If Richard indeed comes back, it must be alone,—unfollowed— unfriended. The bones of his gallant army have whitened the sands of Palestine. The few of his followers who have returned, have straggled hither like this Wilfred of Ivanhoe, beggared and broken men.’ (134) This stark account of utter desolation and brokenness is, of course, coloured by John’s self-interest. Yet this bias is itself an inescapable aspect of the factionalism resulting from the unsuccessful international conflict that Cedric denounces as an unjust campaign ‘rushed into excess and blood-guiltiness’ and justified as ‘an accomplishment of the will of God’ (39). This wounded history of ‘discord’ precipitates and provides the language for almost all of the conflicts in the novel – between Cedric the stalwart Saxon and his son Ivanhoe who went off with the Norman Richard (39); between Cedric and the Normans (49–50); between the ruling monarchy and the people of England; between the Normans and the yeoman (28); between the Muslim slaves who are living reminders of this war and the imprisoned Jews whom they torture (182–3); and even between factions within the Norman camp (172). The widespread fracturing of the nation that has come on the heels of the destructive history of the Crusades is crucial to the problem Ivanhoe addresses and the solutions it offers. It is not simply a narrative about getting Richard back on the throne, a restoration of a legitimate monarchal regime analogous to the return of royal families after the fall of the ‘usurper’ Napoleon. Such a Tory story, we can assume, would have only agitated Jeffrey. Rather, Scott attempts to deal with the problem of internal social division within a nation split into warring factions verging on civil war. This issue is akin to the difficulties facing England in 1819 as a split country made turbulent by the civil strife and disparate demands of religious dissenters, Catholics in Ireland and England, and radical reformers. Rather than restoring an old order, Scott is interested in how something new can be forged that will unite these conflicted remnants of the nation in order to usher in the next stage, or stadial advance.6

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In other words, just as Christianity replaced the now ruined ‘Druidical superstition’, what would supplant the ruin of England after the disastrous Crusades? The struggle in the novel is to discover a national culture that will suture these divisions without either warfare or the internal revolution feared from Cedric’s Saxons. Ivanhoe looks towards a cultural structure capable of uniting both the Saxons and Normans of England in 1193 and the religious, political and regional divisions of England in 1819. Scott’s depiction of the conflicting social groups reflects the prominence of religion in the romantic-era political landscape highlighted by J.C.D. Clark and the importance of opposing narratives of national history. Suffering from historical disenfranchisement analogous to that of nineteenth-century Catholics in Britain, the Saxons continually threaten to disrupt the formation of any new, unifying sense of national identity. Scott even makes the anachronistic slip of calling the Saxon-born Ivanhoe a ‘Catholic’, a category of religious identity that would have made little sense before the Reformation but that sent a clear signal to Scott’s romantic-period readers (235). The Saxons are also described as ‘superstitious’, the pejorative religious term long used for Catholicism (154). More telling is the depiction of the Saxons in terms framed by the history of Catholic recusants suffering under the penal code within Britain: The whole race of Saxon princes and nobles had been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions; nor were the numbers great who possessed land in the country of their fathers, even as proprietors of the second, or of yet inferior classes. The royal policy had long been to weaken, by every means, legal or illegal, the strength of a part of the population which was justly considered as nourishing the most inveterate antipathy to their victors. All the monarchs of the Norman race had shown the most marked predilection for their Norman subjects; the laws of the chase, and many others, equally unknown to the milder and more free spirit of the Saxon constitution, had been fixed upon the necks of the subjugated inhabitants, to add weight, as it were, to the feudal chains with which they were loaded. (16) Like the Irish and English Catholic communities, the Saxons were feared as a fifth column and a threatening nation within the nation. Moreover, an equivalent of the penal code was driving the Saxons to marginality, if not extinction. Symbolized by a metal collar, the penal code – or

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what one Saxon peasant refers to as ‘penal consequences’ and Prior Aymer as the ‘vae victis, or severities imposed upon the vanquished’ – lingers in the background of the action as a reminder of historical difference, repression and resentment (324, 30). Like Catholics in Britain, Saxons could not bear swords under a law intended to humiliate and disarm (265). In addition, the Saxon peasantry were a ‘class’ whom the Normans ‘esteemed dangerous to entrust with edge-tools’, an anxiety recalling the fear of the pikes yielded by the Irish Catholic peasantry in the 1798 Rebellion (19). Indeed, the narrator reveals that Cedric was plotting ways to restore the Saxons, or ‘native English’, by joining in ‘civil convulsions’ (156), the type of internal rebellion that was feared from Catholics. Also like British and Irish Catholics, the Saxons constitute both their community and their resistance to the current regime through inherited memories and rituals. Since the Saxons are a people of memory, communal suffering animates Cedric’s denunciation of Ivanhoe as a disobedient son who ‘relinquishes the manners and customs of his fathers’ (128). Yet while the novel evokes sympathy for this outsider group, there is also an implied critique of their particularized identity that results from a collective memory of suffering. An ‘Englishness’ abides among the Saxons, but the teleology of Scott’s narrative is not a restoration of native Saxon liberty. One of the novel’s social tasks is rescuing Englishness from Saxon exclusivity and parochialism. All Saxon appeals to what should be a transnational, transcendent communion of saints are bound by ethnicity and geography. Cedric and other Saxons constantly invoke St Dunstan, the Northumberland holy man (21, 57, 101, 102, 140–2, 211–12). At one point, Gurth’s litany of sanctified Saxonry elicits the narrator’s parenthetical chiding: ‘By St Edmund, St Dunstan, St Withold, St Edward the Confessor, and every other Saxon saint in the calendar, (for Cedric never swore by any that was not of Saxon lineage, and all his household had the same limited devotion,) I will never forgive him.’ (156) Friar Tuck, the quondam cleric who is semper a faithful Saxon, also knows the limits of his litany: ‘Let him roar here if he dares,’ said the friar; ‘a touch of my cord will make him roar as loud as the tongs of St Dunstan himself did. I never feared man, and I as little fear the devil and his imps—Saint Dunstan, Saint Dubric, Saint Winibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Swibert, Saint

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The locality of Saxon devotion suggests not only parochialism but also primitivism and lapses under duress into Norse beliefs in Odin and Thor (214, 219). Perhaps more important than these retrograde cultural appeals, however, is the fact that both Gurth’s and Tuck’s Saxon oaths fuel resentment, defiance and calls for revenge. As Cedric consistently equates Saxonness and Englishness (49, 81), Saxon memories defy reconciliation and block progress towards some more inclusive form of national identity. Scott’s weaving of the plight of the English Jews into the NormanSaxon binary further illustrates his concern for integrating ‘internal others’ within the nation. In light of the discursive link between Jewish Emancipation and Catholic Emancipation, Isaac, Rebecca and the other Jewish characters present another aspect of Scott’s approach to social problems involving substantive minorities. As Ragussis has argued, the Jews share in the marginalization of the Saxons (97). They too feel the brunt of the Norman yoke as a persecuted minority (61). At the tournament of Ashby, Prince John groups them with the Saxons and mockingly assigns them both to subordination: ‘Saxon churls!—out upon them!—let them sit close, and make room for my prince of usurers and his lovely daughter. I’ll make the hinds know they must share the high places of the synagogue with those whom the synagogue properly belongs to.’ (72–3) The Jews and the Saxons are also linked by the identity category of the ‘disinherited’. Ivanhoe fights under the disguise of the ‘Disinherited Knight’ and Robin Hood defends the Saxon swineherd Gurth from his band of Saxon outlaws for being ‘poor and disinherited as we are’ (103, 105). Isaac also claims this appellation for the ‘disinherited and wandering’ Jewish people who ‘smile tamely’ but would ‘revenge bravely’ (97). In addition, Isaac’s oaths are bound up with his own religious particularity as he invokes ‘the protection of all the patriarchs of the Old Testament successively against the sons of Ishmael’ (160). As in the statements by Tuck and Gurth, Scott represents memories of disinheritance as tied to a latent desire for revenge. Within the structural logic of the novel, the Jews offer another example of an oppressed minority, who nonetheless, as in the sectarianism within A Simple Story, do not find common cause with other oppressed groups and do not blend into a new union.

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Willick, not forgetting Saint Thomas a Kent, and my own poor merits to speed, I defy every devil of them, come cut and long tail.’ (152)

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

How does Scott approach these social contradictions? He does suggest that they have been resolved through his recurring comparative movement between a chaotic past and a civilized present. Speaking on behalf of a modern ‘us’ of British readers, an authorial voice constantly interrupts the narrative, puncturing and suspending the reader’s investment in the past world. The description of Ashby Castle is illustrative: Prince John held his high festival in the Castle of Ashby. This was not the same building of which the stately ruins still interest the traveller, and which was erected at a later period by the Lord Hastings, High Chamberlain of England, one of the first victims of the tyranny of Richard the Third, and yet better known as one of Shakespeare’s characters than by his historical fame. (125) Through these ‘stately ruins’, Scott evokes a past of conflict that subtly links the usurping Norman Prince John to England’s other notorious, usurping villain and monarch, Richard III. This divisive, troubled period is contrasted with the peaceful civility afforded to the contemporary law-abiding citizen, tourist or theatre-goer (and perhaps by extension the reader), who can enjoy contemplating this ‘place of memory’ or the Shakespearean play in a calmer age. This type of moment invites the reader to reflect on how Britain passed from primitive havoc following the Crusades to refined modern civility. Scott’s historical shifts and conflations also invite the reader to consider what social, cultural and political forces – be they revolutionary, radical or religious – could pitch Britain back into that harrowing state. Was Catholic Emancipation causing a regression in history that would prove destructive or could it be contained? Ivanhoe’s preface, a dedicatory epistle from ‘Laurence Templeton’ to ‘Dr. Dryasdust’, seems to suggest that for the social and religious divisions in 1819, medieval England and Jacobite Scotland offer parallel responses to this question. According to Templeton, a recollection of medieval history would be as discomforting to the average English reader as a trip to the ‘primitive society existing in the Highlands of Scotland’: But the same worthy person, when placed in his own snug parlor, and surrounded by all the comforts of an Englishman’s fire-side, is not half so much disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself; that the shattered tower, which now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him up at his own door without any form of trial; that the hinds, by

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In the remainder of the preface, Scott further insists on the separation of modern England from both the Scottish Highlands and medieval England. He compares his historical fiction to that of MacPherson; Ivanhoe’s setting to Highland Scotland; and medieval society to the ‘simple’ and patriarchal’ state of ‘Mohawks and Iroquois’ (6).7 Scott’s task of resuscitating corpses from the ‘recent field of battle’ of Culloden in Waverley, he claims, was less difficult than recovering England’s papist ‘dead man’, which can supposedly only be found in ‘dry, sapless, mouldering and disjointed bones, such as those which filled the valley of Jehoshaphat’ (7). In the preface to the 1830 edition of Ivanhoe, Scott even explains why the ‘author of the Scottish Novels ... should be desirous to make an experiment on a subject purely English’ (Ivanhoe 1996 5). Subsequently, there are moments when Waverley’s ‘loss and salvage’ model operates within Ivanhoe. The populist energies of Robin Hood are bound within a ballad collection ‘found in those black-letter garlands, once sold at the low and easy rate of one halfpenny’ (368). The fate of the ‘rash and romantic monarch’ Richard Coeur-de-Lion is to ‘adorn a tale’ (401), mirroring the use of a portrait to frame and preserve but limit the rebellious spirit of Fergus MacIvor in Waverley. Yet these examples of aestheticization and commodification do not resolve the broader social divisions arising out of the Crusades in medieval England by forging a new national identity, blending Norman and Saxon, or incorporating the English Jews. The next section argues that, ultimately, Ivanhoe does stray from the model of Waverley. This departure, however, centres on Scott’s transformation of the national tale’s marriage plot and on his abandonment of ‘convivial culture’, which Gilroy sees as ordinary social interactions and the ‘banality of intermixture’ that foster living ‘peacefully with difference’ (145, 150).

The failure of conviviality Unlike a parliamentary speech or political pamphlet, Ivanhoe is a complex artistic work that treats the social divisions in the nation through aesthetic form. Its omniscient narrator allows for a distinguishing characteristic of Ivanhoe – the multiplication of separate storylines and subplots that was, according to Jeffrey, ‘perplexing to vulgar makers of

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whom his little pet-farm is managed, would have, a few centuries ago, been his slaves; and that the complete influence of feudal tyranny once extended over the neighbouring village, where the attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the manor. (7–8)

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

abstracts’ (Review of Ivanhoe 27). The narrator oversees numerous, disparate strands that follow individual characters or sets of characters. This diffusion of segmented storylines mirrors the fractious social dynamic within the novel and within Scott’s own time. The plots of the various groups evolve independently and separately with the lynchpin character of Ivanhoe connected in some way to all of them. Unlike Castle Rackrent or The Wild Irish Girl, the reader is taken suddenly to different locations and into the conversations of different parties. At a transition akin to the crossroads confronted by the travelling characters in the first chapter, the narrator pauses to reflect on his own method: The occasion of this interruption we can only explain by resuming the adventures of another set of our characters; for, like old Ariosto, we do not pique ourselves upon continuing uniformly to keep company with any one personage of our drama. (152) The author shares his delight in magisterially juggling the divergent narratives. This also creates part of the romantic exuberance that made the novel such a sensation and earned Scott the reputation of the ‘Grand Wizard’ for his ability to bring together, almost magically, the diffuse ‘adventures’. Significantly for the political and social concerns of the novel, the multiple narratives create suspense and an interest in how the disparate stories and disparate factions will be reconciled. It also provides a sharp contrast with the almost claustrophobic focus and psychological intensity of A Simple Story or The Cenci. Scott’s formal problem of uniting fragmented narratives embodies the social problem of uniting fragmented groups. Meetings and intersections – some overdetermined and expected, others surprising and exploratory – abound in the novel. The split narratives and their collisions lead the reader to ask about social interconnections and create a drama in which the resolution of conflict among social groups is not only central thematically but also constituent of the novel’s aesthetic form. ‘Unity’ is not just an artistic ideal, but rather represents one of several contingent outcomes for the characters, the narratives and the nation. A peculiar disunity threatens as further conflict, sectarianism and rupture remain possibilities. Scott pursues this social resolution through the marriage plot and the narrative nexus of place. The marriage plot is a formal feature of the national tale, so finding a proposed union between representative characters in Ivanhoe is not surprising. What is remarkable is the proliferation of possible matches, the cultural stakes entailed in each different union

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and the lack of a clearly desirable Norman-Saxon courtship. Prince John had first proposed marrying off Rowena to one of his barons, De Bracy, as a way to ‘amend her blood by wedding her to a Norman’ (119). Violence and power inequality, however, vitiate this potential relationship. Cedric, on the other hand, dreams of restoring the Saxon dynasty by wedding Rowena to the Saxon noble Athelstane, a union blocked by Rowena’s diffidence at ‘the Unready’s’ gastronomic impotence. As a representative character, Athelstane is only an instrument, and a rather flaccid one, for Cedric’s planned internal rebellion (109, 157). Du BoisGuilbert offers to make Rebecca his permanent mistress during his exotic exploits, military and otherwise (197–9). This match does not occur, nor do Rebecca and Ivanhoe ever consummate their attraction (234–5). The only union that does occur within the narrative is between Rowena and Ivanhoe, an affair of the heart between two Saxons (157). The other way of bringing together sets of characters and nations within nations involves providing a nexus for the disparate storylines that in turn provides the opportunity for conviviality. In Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry (1994), Paul J. deGategno divides the novel into three sections based on places of narrative convergence: the Saxon banquet at Rotherwood, the imprisonment at Torquilstone and the concluding tournament at Templestowe. This structure also frames the plot’s progress towards forming a uniting Englishness out of the novel’s factions. As the adventures careen and converge, these places almost seem unable to hold the characters with their conflicting desires and agendas. Like the stairwell in the Elmwood estate, these meeting places are potential turning points in which social interaction can veer towards reconciliation or discord. The banquet at the Saxon Hall of Rotherwood provides the first instance. Within Scott’s writing, partisan difference often yields to a new convivial culture at such events, most famously in the reconciling feast at the end of Waverley. Following the decisive and bloody Battle of Culloden, the main characters return to the destroyed Jacobite estate of the rebellious but chastened Baron of Bradwardine to find it restored through the generosity of the Hanoverian Colonel Talbot. A feast ensues, during which the tribal and historical symbols that had been so divisive become a jovial part of the evening’s banter. This culminates with an outpouring of wine and ‘punch’, including a toast made with the recovered ‘cup of Saint Duthac, the Blessed Bear of Bradwardine’ (361). In his Life of Scott, Lockhart renders a very similar sanguine scene from Scott’s trip to Ireland. William and Mary have replaced MacIvor; magnums of whisky and poteen have supplanted the Bear of Bradwardine, but the resolution of the Catholic and Irish

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At one county gentleman’s table where we dined, though two grand full-length daubs of William and Mary adorned the walls of the room, there was a mixed company—about as many Catholics as Protestants, all apparently on cordial terms, and pledging each other lustily in bumpers of capital claret. About an hour after dinner, however, punch was called for; tumblers and jugs of hot water appeared, and with them two magnums of whisky—the one bearing on its label KING’S, the other QUEEN’S. We did not at first understand these inscriptions; but it was explained, sotto voce, that the King’s had paid the duty, the Queen’s was of contraband origin; and, in the choice of the liquors, we detected a new shibboleth of party. The jolly Protestants to a man stuck to the King’s bottle—the equally radiant Papists paid their duty to the Queen’s. (6: 69–70) The very open wounds and ongoing conflicts of the 1820s are resolved into a ‘new shibboleth of party’ that merely concerns the alcohol of choice and does not undermine the ‘cordial terms’. The perils of memory and the conflicts of sectarianism are forgotten – or at least distilled into entertaining, innocuous rituals. Because of potent memories and unforgotten wounds, however, the 1819 feast at Rotherwood results in deepened division rather than reconciliation. At first, there is some promise that conviviality can overcome sectarianism, as Cedric announces: ‘Norman or Saxon, the hospitality of Rotherwood must not be impeached’ (38). Yet the hospitality fails to issue into any sort of ease because collective memory remains rebarbative. The penal code intrudes through discussion of the forest laws, which resulted in the maiming of Cedric’s dog (42). At the mention of the curfew, Cedric exclaims, ‘Take the curfew-bell, and the tyrannical bastard by whom it was devised, and the heartless slave who names it with a Saxon tongue to a Saxon ear!’ (36). Religious difference also elicits starkly divided responses. The disguised Ivanhoe produces a ‘portion of the true cross, brought from the monastery of Mount Carmel’ (51). Revealing the latent divisions in the room, a communal prayer goes up ‘in which all devoutly joined, excepting the Jew, the Mahomedans, and the Templar’ (51). This is a long list of exceptions. Conflicts arise not only from religious difference and indifference but also from Cedric’s parochial Saxonism that swears only by ‘the rood of Bromholme’, a local Norfolk shrine where a relic of the Cross was venerated (52, 522n). Cedric’s inability to go beyond his own

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Question follows the same convivial model as Waverley’s post-Culloden Scotland:

cultural constraints is symbolically represented by his ‘vow never to step more than three steps from the dais of his own hall to meet any one who shares not the blood of Saxon royalty’ (38). This tribalism is answered by Norman corruption as the Templar leers at Rowena, unwilling to check the ‘immediate impulse of his own wishes’ (43). As a result, the passing of the cup, which enabled a détente in Scott’s Dublin and Scotland, only precipitates open conflict. In calling for the cupbearer, Cedric wallows in memorial misery, lamenting that ‘our deeds are lost in those of another race—our language—our very name is hastening to decay, and none mourns for it save one solitary old man’ (49). As the ‘grace-cup’ is passed, the Crusades – the emblematic reminder of sectarian violence – become the topic of dispute. The various parties again diverge, exiting the hall without cheer or toasting, far removed from Lockhart’s innocuous ‘new shibboleth of party’. Although the Saxons lay claim to true English identity and an expansive hospitality, it becomes clear that the Saxon Hall of Rotherwood is not a big enough estate for the nation. Linked in Ivanhoe’s Janus-faced narrative with contemporary recusant Catholics, the Saxon model of memory and nation only propagates further division. Out of this nexus, the storylines with their conflicting characters fray, symbolically rendered in the representative characters leaving ‘by separate doors’ (53). Nor can the Normans offer broader hospitality. When the characters converge again at the Norman tournament banquet, the result is much the same. The Normans treat the Saxons with condescending jests and attribute ‘gluttony and drunkenness to the vanquished Saxons, as vices peculiar to their inferior strain’ (127). Memory exacerbates the division as a boastful mention of the Battle of Hastings leads Cedric to decry against Prince John, ‘who should, in his own hall, and while his own wine-cup passed, have treated an unoffending guest as your highness has this day beheld me used’ (130). Throughout, the events of 1819 impinge on the narrative. Though the novel precedes George IV’s 1821 trip to Ireland, the digressive mention of the ‘fatal consequences to the English domination in Ireland’ from an insulting Norman visit to Irish chieftains provides an unmistakable contemporary resonance (126). At the banquet, violations of hospitality and neighbourliness result in the Crusades again becoming a topic of conflict as Cedric toasts the absent Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The result is a divided response, unlike the amicable quaffing of the King’s and Queen’s liquor: There were many who, with a more generous feeling, exclaimed, ‘Long live King Richard! and may he be speedily restored to us!’ And

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It may be impossible to know if Scott had in mind the articles by Hunt and Coleridge on the Prince Regent’s apostasy over Catholic Emancipation, but these politicized toasts reveal a similarly divided ‘condition of England’.8 Conflicting memories and continued oppression again result in a fragmented aesthetic structure, as the parties begin ‘breaking up’ and ‘fast dispersing’ (170). The diverging storylines demonstrate that ‘Norman courtesy’ is no better than parochial appeals to ‘Saxon blood’ in providing an overarching identity (169). The following nexus, Torquilstone, exemplifies the problems with partition, though Scott resolves them differently from Inchbald or Shelley. Partition results from the Norman imposition of oppressive power. Echoing Scott’s early beliefs about the penal laws, De Bracy sees kidnapping the Saxons as a scheme through which ‘the work of the Conquest should be completed’ (136). Once the waylaid Saxons are taken to Torquilstone, they are sectioned off into cells, a situation making concrete the broader social situation of the novel. The language of enforced separation establishes the real horror of Torquilstone as a claustrophobic gathering place, like the Elmwood estate or Cenci’s Castle of Petrella, in which many isolated parties suffer on their own behind thick walls: their guards gave him [Athelstane] and Cedric to understand that they were to be imprisoned in a chamber apart from Rowena ... The Lady Rowena was next separated from her train, and conducted ... to a distant apartment. The same alarming distinction was conferred on Rebecca ... the old Jew was forcibly dragged off in a different direction from the other prisoners. The domestics ... were confined in another part of the castle. (174) The very architecture of Torquilstone, one estate divided starkly into two incongruous structures, mirrors such division. Split like England into two distinct and diffident races, Torquilstone consists of an ‘abandoned’ Saxon hall where the ‘saxon chiefs were confined’ adjacent to a ‘new and noble hall’ designed to announce the superiority of Norman civilization (174–5).

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some few, among whom were Front-de-Boeuf and the Templar, in sullen disdain suffered their goblets to stand untasted before them. But no man ventured directly to gainsay a pledge filled to the health of the reigning monarch. (131)

Further, the wounds of history haunt this partitioned structure. Cedric’s apartment leads him to reflect ‘upon the past and of the present’ (175). This historical dialectic seems to emerge from the stones of the building, especially for the Saxons. Cedric laments, ‘I cannot look on that stained lattice without its awakening other reflections than those which concern the passing moment, or its privations’ (176). For the violated Ulrica, every inch is marked by the Norman massacre of the Saxons as she looks on ‘these halls, stained with the noble and pure blood of my father and my brethren’ (217). Indeed, from Ulrica’s perspective, the hall itself seems to be embedded with memorial wounds: ‘Such are the secrets these vaults conceal!—rend asunder, ye accursed arches’ (218). Adding vengeance to memory, she calls on the roof to ‘bury in your fall all who are conscious of the hideous mystery!’ (218). These walls seem to bear witness to that history as Ulrica demands that ‘each stone of this vaulted roof find a tongue’ to curse Front-de-Boeuf (257). These memories, built into the partitioned structure of Torquilstone, also reflect Scott’s writing. Reacting to these memorial vestiges, Cedric borrows the metaphor of the revitalized dead body that Scott had used to describe his own task as a novelist: ‘these traces form such a resemblance as arises from the grave of the dead, when a fiend has animated the lifeless corpse’ (218). Additionally, the description of Torquilstone contains one of the narrator’s characteristic movements between the medieval and romantic period as he notes its resemblance to ‘those refectories and chapter houses which may be still seen in the most ancient parts of our most ancient monasteries’ (174). What are the implications of this narrative nexus at a partitioned structure imbrued with memory? The name ‘Torquilstone’ itself suggests that partition and memories of resentment will breed a cycle of violence and vengeance. At one level, the word ‘Torquil’ derives from the name for the Norse god Thor, who is associated with thunder and war. Memories of religious wars persist in Torquilstone as the enslaved ‘Saracens’ are stark reminders of the Crusades. They are both products and propagators of the cruelty in Palestine, torturing the imprisoned Isaac (182–3). At another level, ‘torquil’ relates etymologically to a ‘torque’ or ‘torc’, which is, according to the OED, a ‘collar, necklace, bracelet or similar ornament’ that was worn by the ‘ancient Gauls and Britons’. Such an iron band worn around the neck has functioned in the novel to denote the master-slave relationship of Gurth and of the Saxons under the penal code. Within the walls of Torquilstone, this relationship is further torqued – twisted and warped – in a cycle of vengeance and

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oppression, rebellion and suppression between the enslaved Saxons and the corrupt Normans. In a monstrous parody of the marriage plot, the union of the Saxon Ulrica and Norman Front-de-Boeuf embodies this bitter master-slave relationship. As a daughter who still bears on her ‘foul and faded face some traces of Torquil’s features’ (218), Ulrica represents Saxon sufferings in her scarred psyche and flesh. She cries out, ‘I am now a slave, miserable and degraded—the sport of my masters’ passion while I had yet beauty—the subject of their contempt, scorn, and hatred, when it has passed away’ (216). Her calls for vengeance also represent the sharp edge of Saxon collective memory. Front-de-Boeuf is a parricide, who is guilty of marring the traditions not of only others but also his own. Scott’s depiction of his death is an allusive tour-de-force that links the baron with all of the prominent ‘usurpers’ in Shakespeare. His anxiety over dying ‘unshriven and unhouseled’ echoes the words of the ghost of Hamlet’s father who died ‘unhouseled, unappoint’d, unannealed’ at the hands of the incestuous fratricide Claudius (254; Hamlet 2.2). Like Macbeth, he blames the murder of his father figure on the instigation of his lover – ‘my temptress, the foul provoker, the more foul rewarder of the deed’ (256) – and dies fighting, abandoned and alone, in his usurped castle. The repeated incantation of the otherworldly voice of his collaborator Ulrica urges him to despair: ‘In peace thou shalt NOT die,’ repeated the voice; ‘even in death shalt thou think on thy murders—on the groans which this castle has echoed—on the blood that is ingrained in its walls!’ (255) This preternatural scene re-enacts the dream sequences in which Richard III’s dead victims return, telling him to ‘despair and die’ (5.2). Front-de-Boeuf even quotes the necromantic scene from Henry VI Part 2 in which the rebellious Bolingbrook is told by a spirit ‘Let him shun castles’ – sound advice for the baron whose castle is about to collapse (258; 1.4.40). If the torture and segregation of Torquilstone is a horrid version of the restored conviviality at the end of A Simple Story, the union between Ulrica and Front-de-Boeuf is a nightmarish revision of the concluding marriage in The Wild Irish Girl. Identity politics and memory remain locked in a vicious, almost demonic embrace that perpetuates violence rather than ‘mixing’ or reconciling the nation. Cedric realizes this when condemning Ulrica for having ‘lived to unite thyself with the vile tyrant who murdered thy nearest and dearest’ (217). Yet within Torquilstone,

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in a segregated nation where memories are still open wounds, this troubled relationship is the only type of union possible. The progeny of Ulrica and Front-de-Boeuf is not peace, not a nation, but vengeance. Ulrica recalls her life among the Normans, biding her opportunity like a fifth column: ‘I also have had my hours of vengeance. I have fomented the quarrels of our foes, heated drunken revelry into murderous broil— I have seen their blood flow—I have heard their dying groans!’ (218). Ulrica’s psyche, ‘burning with remembrance of injuries and with hopes of vengeance’, is projected onto Torquilstone itself as it implodes under the fires set loose by her resentment (241). The collapse of the indelibly and unforgettably bloodstained Torquilstone triggers a chain of events that culminates with further retributive violence as the Saxon ‘besiegers pursued the defenders of the castle from chamber to chamber, and satiated in their blood the vengeance which had long animated them against the soldiers of the tyrant Front-de-Boeuf’ (266). The kidnapping by the disguised Normans, the taunts of Robin Hood’s merry siegers, and the series of ruses and tricks held out hope for a comic resolution until the apparent death of Athelstane. Ending in insurrection and what Robin Hood calls a ‘great deed of vengeance’ (271), this episode concludes as a national warning.

A ‘less interesting’ union How does Scott resolve the bitter memories, the segregated social divisions and the desire for vengeance into a comedic ending? Out of the burning ruins of history, the plotlines and characters once again diverge with no hopes for cultural coherence in sight. Understanding how the next nexus at Templestowe forges some form of unity for the novel and the nation requires the convergence of three strands within Scott criticism: accounts of Scott’s transformation of the national tale’s marriage plot by Trumpener and Ferris; the significance of what John P. Farrell has described as the ‘moderate’ and Alexander Welsh as the ‘passive’ hero in the Waverley novels (Farrell 83–6; Welsh 21–39); and finally the focus in Jewish studies on Ivanhoe’s treatment of religious difference and national identity. Farrell has argued that Scott’s novels do not defend a stale version of Englishness, but instead envision a ‘crucially altered conservatism’ with ‘an image of community as telos’ and a portrait of the ‘tolerance necessary to cohesive social life’ (80–2). Likewise, Ragussis sees Ivanhoe overturning a ‘conventional model of national identity’ based on ‘racial homogeneity’ in favour of a ‘countermodel’ of ‘racial intermixture’ that could offer the ‘broadest basis of cultural

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diversity’ within national identity (125–6). My argument parallels that of Ragussis in many ways, not the least of which is his recognition of the shared plight of the minority communities of Jews, Saxons and Scott’s own contemporary Scots (97). The extent of Scott’s transformation of national identity must be qualified, however. Although Ivanhoe moves away from a racial model and disavows prosecution of religious difference, what Judith Page has termed ‘imperfect sympathies’ for ‘racial, religious, or ethnic Others’ still inform Scott’s text, especially in Rebecca’s ultimate exclusion (Page 3). Ivanhoe does not resolve issues of troubled memory and national difference either through a marriage plot or conviviality. Instead, it demands a performed cultural version of the moderating via media that overrides conflicting identities, allowing for apparent tolerance while simultaneously undercutting historical narratives that constitute other alternative communities. In keeping with the framework of the national tale, the marriage plot at first seems to offer some form of hope in Ivanhoe. In abandoning the possibility of ‘living together’ after Torquilstone, the novels shifts focus to the marriage of Rowena and Ivanhoe as a national union capable of incorporating recalcitrant groups: But besides this domestic attendance, these distinguished nuptials were celebrated by the attendance of the high-born Normans, as well as Saxons, joined with the universal jubilee of the lower orders, that marked the marriage of two individuals as a type of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have been so completely mingled, that the distinction has become wholly invisible. Cedric lived to see this union approximate toward its completion; for as the two nations mixed in society and formed intermarriages with each other, the Normans abated their scorn, and the Saxons were refined from their rusticity. But it was not until the reign of Edward the Third that the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London, and that the hostile distinction of Norman and Saxon seems entirely to have disappeared. (398) This blithe prose belies what is a complex conclusion, both socially and aesthetically. This passage claims to resolve the social problem defined at the beginning of the novel as the need to ‘blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons’ and to ‘unite ... two hostile races’ (16) in the marriage of Rowena and Ivanhoe as a ‘pledge’ of broader social unity. Yet, unlike Fox’s description of Catholic Emancipation as the unfulfilled ‘pledge’ of the Act of Union, Scott’s match ostensibly

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redeems its promise, leading to a loss of ethnic ‘distinction’ and future peace. With this national marriage’s subsequent incorporation of disaffected groups, this ‘condition of England’ novel seems to quell potential rebellion. As such, it is not difficult to see why Jeffrey appreciated the conciliatory ideology and aesthetics of Ivanhoe’s resolution. Yet while Scott’s development may seem a more progressive approach to the social division within England than Marmion, the gaps in his narrative shed light on an underlying, coercive reconstruction of national identity. In A Simple Story Inchbald recognizes and faces the deep divisions caused by sectarianism. The shock of prospective violence chastens Lord Elmwood out of his resentful will to power and allows Matilda to annunciate a sympathetic, radical forgiveness over and above the wounds of history. Inchbald recognizes the need for continued dialogue, interaction and proximity to work through, contingently, a hardened history of hatred. Her vision of national reconciliation respects difference and disparate memories, and envisions a community and a communal space in which groups can coexist without further retributive violence. A cursory glance at Scott’s passage describing the national marriage of Rowena and Ivanhoe signals a different approach to reassembling the nation. His language of blending, mixing and losing distinction implicitly suggests a departure from what Gilroy terms the ‘hard work’ of ‘conviviality’ – negotiating differences and dialoging about conflicting communal memories (8). Rather, the solution to the problem of social difference is to dissolve difference between groups. His response to the tensions caused by wounded memories is not Inchbald’s radical forgiveness, but radical forgetfulness. Ivanhoe thus offers what Paul Ricoeur has called an ‘education of memory’ that foregrounds the use of ‘forgetting’ as a potent aspect ‘in the construction of plots, in the elaboration of narratives concerning personal identity or collective identity’ (9). The plot Scott builds out of the fragments of the past leads to a synthesized national identity that forges a regulated, middling Britishness that enacts exile against what are seen as ‘extremes’ within the nation. Lincoln has recognized the way Scott sets ‘his moderate characters apart from the spiritual imperatives and social duties that once determined individual identity, and by confronting them with “fanatical” characters still defined and driven by such duties, Scott gives dramatic form to the condition of modernity’ (13). Yet, given Ivanhoe’s inheritance of the national tale’s social reach, the experiences of individual characters have implications for the communities they represent. The work’s definition of ‘fanatical’ and the fate of those so defined do not

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just reflect the ‘condition’ of modernity but also represent Scott’s attempt to constitute modern Englishness in the age of Jewish and Catholic Emancipation. The contours and limitations of Scott’s shaping of national identity appear in the national marriage. The novel eschews the multiple hymeneal celebrations of Twelfth Night or As You Like It to focus on Rowena and Ivanhoe, lending even greater significance to this union as the narrow door to England’s future. Differing from marriages among representative characters from national tales, this union does not cross ethnic or national divides. How does Scott attribute such mollifying, nation-building influence to a marriage between two Saxons? Their competitive advantage is not racial but cultural. The novel’s single marriage is celebrated because both characters are capable of performing a new national identity, one that follows a via media and regulates against the extremes associated with groups outside the national pale, even though their origins lie within such a group. The ability to perform this identity of the moderate, middle way distinguishes those characters who can move beyond the over-determined identities and oppressive histories of Torquilstone. The groups within Ivanhoe are divided within themselves between such moderate and extreme characters. On the one hand, extreme characters maintain the character and identity of their groups without compromise and propagate the ‘conflicts of opposing fanaticisms’ and ‘politics of polarization’ that, Farrell has argued, Scott feared (72). These include Cedric the Saxon; Prince John and Brian du Bois-Guilbert among the Normans; and Isaac the ‘Shylock-ian’ Jew. On the other hand, there are also mediating moderates within each group that recall the categories of the ‘passive hero’ and ‘blonde’ heroine that Welsh has described in the Waverley novels. The former exercises the ‘public and accepted morality of rational self-restraint’ and the latter is correspondingly mild and restrained in physicality and personality (Welsh 25, 50). This, however, is an instance in which Duncan’s warning about reading Scott’s novels systematically should be heeded. In Ivanhoe the moderates also possess other important characteristics, most significantly the ability to cross cultural boundaries and seek a new national synthesis. In addition, Welsh’s contrast between Rowena as the blonde and Rebecca as the dark, brunette heroine also obscures the similarity and interconnection between the two. In returning the gold zecchins to Gurth, Rebecca not only moves between the Saxons and the Jews but also breaks from Isaac’s stereotypical ‘avarice’ that prevents ‘generosity’ beyond his racial limits (99).9 Her moderation of extremes not only extends to the

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characteristics associated with the Jews in the novel but also to her control over her extreme passions. For Rebecca, persecution and degradation engendered not the desire for revenge but a resolved self-control that was ‘tamed and brought down to a pitch of sounder judgment’ (195). In addition to these characteristics, Rebecca is also a healer. This skill brings her into direct and close contact with members of other groups, but it also has a broader symbolic and social significance. As she tells her father Isaac, ‘we may not indeed mix with them in banquet and in jollity; but in wounds and in misery, the Gentile becometh the Jew’s brother’ (231). In actual wounds as well as a historical sense of woundedness, Rebecca argues, minority groups can find common cause and sympathy. Her healing powers thus have the capacity for individual restoration as well as communal reconciliation, and this elicits the condemnation of the Chief Templar bent on purification (307). As the Saxon and Jewish communities parallel each other in so many ways, so too do Rebecca and Rowena. Rowena also tames any extreme passions, especially for revenge. She exhibits a similarly subdued subjectivity uncharacteristic of the fiery Saxons. Her dignity amid trials even elicits sympathy from the rapacious De Bracy: ‘I am not a man to be moved by a woman’s lament for her lover, but this same Lady Rowena suppressed her sorrow with such dignity of manner, that it could only be discovered by her folded hands, and her tearless eye, which trembled as it remained fixed on the lifeless form before her.’ (119) Rowena’s subjectivity was a product of her ‘disposition’ that was naturally ‘mild, timid, and gentle’ after being ‘tempered, and, as it were, hardened’ into ‘courage and self-confidence’ by her experience as a disinherited Saxon (190–1). Because of their shared moderation, Rowena and Rebecca are themselves able to meet and cooperate across ethnic divides. While religious oaths tend towards cantonization in Ivanhoe, Rebecca’s appeal to Rowena during the trip through the dangerous woods evokes spiritual commonality and female compassion: Then rising, and throwing back her veil, she [Rebecca] implored her [Rowena] in the great name of the God whom they both worshipped, and by that revelation of the Law in which they both believed, that she would have compassion upon them, and suffer them to go forward under their safeguard. (160)10

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As Rebecca draws back her veil in a symbolic gesture of openness, Rowena is moved by the face-to-face encounter and helps the imperilled Jews. She invites ‘Rebecca to ride by her side’, a repudiation of John’s earlier belittling order to ‘let them [Saxons and Jews] sit close’ (161, 72). Yet, while Rebecca’s healing and compassion have a universalizing quality, there are limits to Rowena’s sympathetic charity. Her response – ‘Jews though they be, we cannot as Christians leave them in this extremity’ – retains a level of subordination and alienation even in reaching across boundaries (161). Rebecca’s appeal to Rowena is not only for herself but also for the hidden, wounded Ivanhoe, whose body, soul and inheritance are at stake in the novel. He is capable of following different paths, either joining with the ‘extreme’ causes in the novel or allying himself with a moderate new order that promises less glorious peace and stability. His negotiation of these ideological positions and his choices among conflicting ethnic groups will determine the path of the novel and the nation. At the beginning of the novel, Ivanhoe shows the characteristics both of a mediator and of an extreme character. As a mediator, he is a Saxon who is disinherited for riding to the Crusades alongside the Norman Richard. In addition to breaking down the barriers between the ‘two races’, he also shows signs of control over his extreme emotions like Rowena and Rebecca, iconically represented in the way he ‘instantly reduced his fiery steed from a state of violent motion and high excitation to the stillness of an equestrian statue’ (88). Yet Ivanhoe’s self-regulation is unsettled throughout most of the novel. He shows the imbalanced characteristics associated with the extreme edges of Richard’s behaviour, indulging in knight-errantry for the sake of adventure and embracing even the bloodiest aspects of the chivalric code. His own impassioned desire for conflict – what Rebecca calls an ‘impatient yearning after action’ – threatens to undo him (248). Rebecca attempts to chasten his desire to join Richard in battle by asking, ‘How couldst thou hope to inflict wounds on others, ere that be healed which thou thyself hast received?’ (249). Without regard to Rebecca’s defence of ‘domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness’, Ivanhoe’s impulse to retaliation – to ‘inflict wounds on others’ – bursts out in a feral defence of the ‘lance’ and ‘sword’ of chivalry: ‘The love of battle is the food upon which we live—the dust of the mellay is the breath of our nostrils!’ (249). Combining the worst of extremes of both groups, Ivanhoe affirms his respect for violent Norman chivalry with a Saxon oath by the ‘soul of Hereward!’ (249). Despite his anodyne personality, Ivanhoe is thus at the centre of the novel’s concerns for reaching a new form of national unity as he moves between the ethnic groups and ideological positions.

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While Rowena maintained a self-regulated, moderating persona that was disrupted but not lost in Torquilstone, Ivanhoe had to learn the way to the proper form of national identity. By the end of the novel, his character has changed. He counsels Richard against chivalry, adventure and self-indulgent knight-errantry. Ivanhoe’s justification for such newfound responsibility and moderation lies in a political vision filled with domestic turmoil: ‘“But your kingdom, my lord,” said Ivanhoe, “your kingdom is threatened with dissolution and civil war—your subjects menaced by every species of evil”’ (364). Ivanhoe’s transformation into the dour counsellor whom Richard describes as giving ‘grave advice’ and brandishing the ‘sad gravity of his brow’ is important not only for him as a character but also for the nation as a whole if it is to avoid political chaos in the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. This gravity – an adherence to a middle way that is not superstitious or enthusiastic – defines the limits and preconditions of citizenship and participation in Scott’s national union, regardless of ethnic or religious identity. The marriage of the moderates Rowena and Ivanhoe forges a new national identity that seems to be Scott’s answer to the social problems threatened in part by the Catholic Question – ‘dissolution and civil war’. This marriage can even withstand returning ghosts from wounded histories. The reappearance of Athelstane at his own wake threatens their union. Athelstane, descended from Edward the Confessor, literally embodies Saxon glory for Cedric. A match with Rowena, scion of Alfred the Great, represented Cedric’s only hope for the restoration of a Saxon order. The resurrected Athelstane is first described as a haunting presence, like Hamlet’s father: It seemed as if Cedric’s words had raised a spectre; for, scarce had he uttered them ere the door flew open, and Athelstane, arrayed in the garments of the grave, stood before them, pale, hagard, and like something arisen from the dead. (376) Not only does this ‘spectre’ recall the Saxon history of suffering and hopes for reclaiming England, it also provides a reminder of the bitterness of the recent conflict between the Normans and the Saxons as Richard exclaims ‘I thought ... your skull was cloven through the teeth’ (377). Athelstane’s apparition harks back to his supposed death at Torquilstone, a moment in which the fatuous character’s violent fall had traumatically punctured a narrative striving for a humorous conclusion. Wamba the jester had recounted how Bois-Guilbert’s sword ‘descending on his head, levelled him with the earth’ (268). Scott’s original

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manuscript, as Ian Duncan’s edition of Ivanhoe points out, was bloodier and more closely tied with the Saxon legacy of resistance, as the sword ‘descending on his [Athelstane’s] head, fairly cleft it in twain. Thus died Athelstane of Coningsburgh and with him a train of ambitious hopes and lofty pretensions ill assorted to the indolent mind in which they had taken deep root’ (563n). Yet Scott’s parody of this return from the past defuses the potential volatility of wounded memories troubling the national settlement. The insatiable Athelstane’s comic interruption of his own funeral is reminiscent of the resurrection of Sir Kit at his wake in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (473). Scott transforms a monody, replete with primitive, recalcitrant plaints for Athelstane and for the Saxon people, into, according to Wamba, a ridiculous cock and bull story (397). This culminates with Athelstane, the ‘resuscitated sprout of Saxon royalty’, abandoning his community’s aspirations in favour of the life of a bourgeois ‘country franklin’ that Scott compares to the ‘country squires of our own day’ (397, 380, 397). By ridiculously disarming the potential ghostly representative of wounded memory, Scott fulfils the 1790s parliamentary argument that it is ‘absurd to talk of dreading danger from popery’ (PHE 28: 1266). If the words ‘Remember me’ from the tragedy of Hamlet disturbed Elizabethan England, Athelstane’s choice of middleclass comfort in the comedy of Ivanhoe could reassure Britain after the repeal of the Elizabethan penal laws. Transferring the voice of Saxon collective identity and memory from the distraught Ulrica to the ludicrous Athelstane is just one of several disciplining procedures surrounding the irenic marriage plot. The implicit ridicule of Saxon memory deflates Cedric’s plans, carrying with it significant political consequences. This nation within a nation will not rise into a ‘civil war’ with the failure of the ‘absolute union among the Saxons, by the marriage of Rowena and Athelstane’ (396). Yet when Scott claims that ‘Cedric’s aversion to the Norman race of kings was also much undermined’, it is difficult to believe that Cedric can relinquish rebellion because of the fecklessness of Athelstane or the glad-handedness of the Norman Richard. Indeed, both these modes of regulation – the ridiculing of Saxon collective memory through Athelstane and the mollifying of Cedric’s resistance – are authorial sleights of hand, formally inconsistent plotlines and character developments. These forced aesthetic manoeuvres reveal the inadequacies and the ideological pressures that accompany Scott’s forging of the nation. If Athelstane’s funeral had proceeded normally, would it have pushed the national marriage outside of the narrative, as in The Wild Irish Girl? If Cedric had not relented so easily, would he have joined the threatening Saxon elders, ‘a band of ancient

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worshippers of Woden, recalled to life to mourn over the decay of their national glory’ (371)? The narrative implies that no reconciliation or place in the new national synthesis is available to this superstitious group, oddly described as having returned from the dead. The new union must still have its exclusions, which here focus on continued adherence to alternative pasts. These limits complicate Scott’s vision of Saxon and Norman ‘blending’. Rather than a national marriage that reconciles social difference, the union between Rowena and Ivanhoe prescribes a model of national identity – that of the self-regulated middling character who relinquishes alternative collective memories. Despite acting as a mediating, moderate figure throughout the novel, Rebecca refuses to sacrifice her own historical identity and thus cannot find a place in the national community formed at the novel’s end. At a time of national disunity, Scott emphatically and irreversibly awards Ivanhoe with the hand of Rowena, not Rebecca. Welsh struggles to reconcile Rebecca’s fate with the other Waverley novels, which generally reward such virtuous characters with prosperous marriages (53–4, 113). He ultimately argues that Scott censures her passion for Ivanhoe, but there is little evidence from the text to support this contention. Rather, these difficulties point to Rebecca’s crucial but difficult place, according to Ragussis, at the ‘international crossroads of one of the most pressing political questions of the day, the relation between national identity and alien populations, between the native and the foreign’ (90). Seeing Rebecca as caught up in this discourse reveals more clearly the conditions for joining the new national order. Rebecca still articulates a mediating sympathy that crosses factions in her valediction to Rowena: ‘May He, who made both Jew and Christian, shower down on you his choicest blessings!’ (401). Yet, crucially, she will not go a further step and subject her own community’s particular memories and cultural practices to the type of regulation and transformation for which the new union calls. She declares that, ‘I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell’ (400). This statement is decisive. She understands the theological and historical nature of her Jewishness as constitutive of her community’s identity – no mere ‘garment’. Given Rebecca’s sympathy with the mediating figures in the novel, it would be difficult to categorize this reasonable defence of her religious identity as ‘extreme’ or ‘fanatical’. She is still restrained, as only an ‘involuntary tremor’ reveals her emotion (401). Nevertheless, her resistance to evacuating her community’s identity and cultural history does not comply with the racial and cultural blending that will constitute an English national

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community without room for those who would cling to particular collective identities, be they Jewish or Saxon. Her statement itself alludes to Cedric’s earlier denunciation of Ivanhoe for relinquishing ‘the manners and customs of his fathers’ (128). One cannot both become English in Scott’s terms and remain Jewish in Rebecca’s terms. Her attempt to live out an identity that is capable of communicating across boundaries of cultural groups without abandoning her robust sense of particular communal identity results in her exile. While the novel laments her unwillingness to relinquish the faith of her fathers, such a capitulation – like Cedric’s – is integral to Scott’s version of national culture. This reading modifies Ragussis’s interpretation of this passage as Scott’s critique of a tradition of British tolerance that is contingent on conversion. For Ragussis, Scott himself is criticizing Rebecca’s exile and, by so doing, exposes a ‘construction of English national identity’ that is ‘racially pure’ or forgetful of ‘a history of persecution and subsequent guilt’ (93, 126).11 While I agree with Ragussis that Rebecca here ‘represents the religious and racial question that England cannot solve’ (113), her insistence on maintaining particularity places the onus for her exile on Rebecca, thus making Scott complicit with, rather than critical of, the cultural limits for tolerating religious difference emerging in the late romantic period. That Scott implies Rebecca’s obstinacy is signalled in the way that this encounter differs in kind rather than in degree from the previous attempts at forced conversion in the novel (Ragussis 113). This meeting begins with Rowena removing her bridal veil to enable a face-to-face dialogue. By recalling Rebecca’s unveiling at their earlier meeting that ends with the two sitting side by side, this scene promises a similar reconciliation. This tone of openness continues even in Rowena’s offer of hospitality: ‘O remain with us—the counsel of holy men will wean you from your unhappy law, and I will be a sister to you’ (401). Rowena does not literally demand conversion to Christianity as a condition to ‘remain with us’ but, rather, she wants to weaken Rebecca from her attachments to Jewish ‘law’. This may seem like a negligible difference, but it implies that if Rebecca were to ‘wean’ herself from her particularized sense of history and law, it is possible that she could have remained within England and perhaps maintained her Jewishness in some form. Scott could envision such a resolution. Guy Mannering (1815) grants the Roma people within Britain, as Nord has argued, a ‘transcended but not erased’ cultural identity (42). Yet Rebecca declines Rowena’s ostensibly generous invitation because she cannot accept that a distinct identity can be maintained if the underlying historical and theological commitments are abandoned.

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This rubric can better be seen when locating Rebecca’s defiance alongside Scott’s own model of national identity and religious difference that allowed for Catholic Emancipation despite his continued repugnance towards Catholicism. For Scott, rather than legitimizing subversive nations within the nation, repealing confessional legislation could potentially incorporate religious groups into a national ethos. Such an approach can be seen in his 1825 letter to William Laidlaw, in which he sees the ‘Catholic Bill’ as an implicit means to transform Irish culture into one in which different parties cease to exist and communal identities adapt to a form compatible with national progress: I mean they [the upper class] would do this tacitly and gradually. The lower class will probably continue for a longtime bigoted Papists; but education becoming general, it is to be supposed that popery, in its violent tenets, will decline even amongst them. By the way, education is already far more general than in England. I saw in the same village four hundred Catholic children attending school, and about two hundred Protestants attending another. The peculiar doctrines of neither church were permitted to be taught; and there Protestants amongst the Papist children, and Papists among the Protestant. (LWS 9: 201) There is a deep structural congruity between this 1825 blending of Protestants and papists and Ivanhoe’s blending of Normans and Saxons. The socialization in this Irish village and the novel’s ‘education of memory’ come with a condition that the ‘peculiar doctrines of neither church were permitted to be taught’. Rowena’s offer to Rebecca can thus be seen as a model for the type of non-sectarian re-education that will be demanded of ‘internal others’. Rebecca, however, has recognized that a simple conversion to Christianity is not the real threat here, but rather a conversion to a Britishness that would require redefining the very terms of her Jewishness. Although Rebecca shows the limits of cultural inclusion in the national community, Scott’s depiction is not without ambivalence. Within his writing there is a strand of abiding attraction to the position that Rebecca represents and to a national community that could include her. Indeed, this final encounter of Rowena and Rebecca seems to suggest, however subtly, an alternative to the limited national union between Ivanhoe and Rowena. Scott even uses marital language to describe the event, as Rebecca enters the bridal chamber and asks of her, almost ceremonially: ‘The bridal-veil hangs over thy face; raise it, and let me see the features of which fame speaks so highly’ (399). The raising of the

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She took it off accordingly, and, partly from the consciousness of beauty, partly from bashfulness, she blushed so intensely, that cheek, brow, neck, and bosom, were suffused with crimson. Rebecca blushed also, but it was a momentary feeling; and, mastered by higher emotions, past slowly from her features like the crimson cloud, which changes colour when the sun sinks beneath the horizon. (400) It is difficult to say exactly what this ‘momentary feeling’ is. It is ‘intensely’ felt, reaching a robust extreme. It seems to arise from the body itself in involuntary blushes that emerge in the ‘cheek, brow, neck, and bosom’. It takes place between the two women who have stood with sympathy and compassion against the violence and retribution within Ivanhoe. It offers an alternative path for memory as Rebecca says that this moment and Rowena’s irreducible face – her ‘countenance’ – will ‘long dwell in my remembrance’. Against the attenuated national union among moderate Saxons that dominates the narrative and ‘addresses’ the social problem, it encompasses another way of reconciling difference, overcoming division and crossing boundaries among cultural groups. In short, this seems to be a union resembling what Anne Mellor has called the ‘embodied cosmopolitanism’ informing the work of many women writers in the romantic period (‘Embodied Cosmopolitanism’ 297–8). However intriguing this exchange might be, it is temporary and it is ultimately ‘mastered’, regulated into a stoic acceptance of the new national order. Nevertheless, it represents a powerful and latent vision. Such potent alternatives did not escape the readers of Ivanhoe. Jeffrey called Rebecca the ‘only lovely being in the story’ and the ‘goddess of the work before us’ (53, 32). DeGategno has detailed the many nineteenthcentury musical and theatrical adaptations of Ivanhoe that tended to focus on Rebecca, including Thomas Dibdin’s Ivanhoe; or the Jew’s Daughter (1820) and George Soane’s The Hebrew (1820). Elizabeth Fay argues that between 1831 and 1835, the English Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar rewrote Ivanhoe in Vale of Cedars; or The Martyr (1850) in order to critique Scott’s ‘exclusionary strategies’ (‘Grace Aguilar’ 217). The most sustained recuperation of Rebecca is William Makepeace Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena (1849), even though the satire makes a convert out of Rebecca before she marries a widowed Ivanhoe. In Ivanhoe’s 1830 edition, Scott felt the need to defend his decision not to render poetic justice to Rebecca in giving the hand of Ivanhoe to ‘the less interesting

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bridal veil suggests some sort of wedding ceremony, which proceeds as the two women exchange meaningful glances:

Rowena’ (12). The wide range of appropriations, reinterpretations and harnessing of possibilities among readers of Ivanhoe, as well as the contradictions and alternatives within the text itself, complicate its intervention in debates about the nation’s ‘internal others’. On the one hand, Scott’s medieval ‘national tale’ seems to delineate the cultural conditions for British citizenship and reinstate a non-legislative model of the via media. On the other hand, among its readers, its aesthetic complexities also opened up possibilities for alternative social orders that exceed such limitations. Such cultural negotiations, contests and contradictions typified engagements with Catholic Emancipation, especially in interpretations of its passage in 1829.

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The year 1829, in which the Catholic Emancipation Act was finally passed, marked a culmination, but not a cessation, of the political and cultural struggles over national history, religious difference and Britishness. The campaign for the measure had been protracted and tumultuous. In Ireland the ‘monster meetings’ of Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Association provided motivating pressure after 1823. In England divisions in the government over Catholic Emancipation in 1825 led Lord Liverpool to threaten to resign, which would have led to the Catholic Question bringing down another ministry. Catholic Emancipation dominated national politics in the General Election of 1826 and complicated the attempts of Eldon, Canning and Goderich to form ministries in 1827–8. When the Duke of Wellington, with Peel as his Prime Minister, finally came to power, he was greeted with an expansive campaign of petitioning for and against the Catholic Question, a popular mobilization unprecedented in scale (Colley 329–33; Machin 131–56). O’Connell’s 1828 election for a seat in County Clare finally forced the Tory leaders to either defy their anti-Catholic wing or risk civil war in Ireland. Catholic Emancipation’s passage, though without the type of rioting that accompanied the 1778 Relief Act, proved disruptive. In March 1829 the national hero Wellington fought a duel to defend himself against charges of betraying the Establishment (Machin 175), and Parliament simultaneously ushered through an Act disenfranchising most of the Irish Catholics whom the measure sought to relieve. Widely seen as a turning point in national history, Catholic Emancipation made the year 1829 into a sign of contradiction over the legal and cultural definitions of what Britain was and who Britons were. These contradictions appear both in contemporary and current interpretations of the significance of 1829. Catholic Emancipation, accompanied 182

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Conclusion: ‘The Anxious Hour’ – England in 1829

by the 1828 Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, proscribed official religious discrimination within Britain’s government. For English Catholics, it marked the end of their exiled status within the nation and of the ‘recusant’ period.1 Nicholas Wiseman, later the Archbishop of Westminster, hailed its passage as ‘the birth-hour of great and enduring events’ (396). To its liberal supporters, Catholic Emancipation was a triumph of liberty and enlightenment over the antiquated powers of religious tribalism. According to Mark Canuel, the progress of a ‘spirit of toleration’, which had started in 1688, culminated in 1829 and achieved nothing less than a ‘new and controversial way of imagining the lineaments of British government’ (12). For Whigs, reformers and radicals, such broader implications were an even greater cause of celebration. According to J.C.D. Clark, the passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 prepared the way for parliamentary reform to deliver the ‘death blow’ to the old order (553). For Clark, the ‘social form’ of the English Establishment – supported legally by the Protestant constitution and religiously by the confessional state – was ‘dismantled in a transformative crisis’ precipitated by Catholic Emancipation (19). In his account, the debate over Catholic Emancipation contributed to ‘the gradual erosion of a social, religious and political hegemony’ throughout the romantic period and its passage inaugurated the regime’s ‘final and sudden collapse’ (548). According to G.I.T. Machin, opponents of Catholic Emancipation felt this disconcerting historical shift. ‘The world seems altered in every way’, observed one in May 1829, ‘it seems that seasons, People, & principles, are so altered that I can hardly believe that I am still in poor old England.’ Another lamented that ‘England’s downfall began in 1829’ (quoted in Machin 180, 193). Clark argues that those who saw 1829–32 as issuing forth a ‘new era’ were correctly identifying a ‘fundamental discontinuity in principles and values’ and a moment in which a ‘particular description of a social nexus had been unseated from its intellectual and constitutional hegemony’ (554, 545, 564). Yet while Clark emphasizes the areas of ‘law and religion’ in his narration of collapse, I have been tracing the ways that literature and culture increasingly delineated British national identity and civil society. While the dominant ‘social form’ lost its official position of privilege, anxieties about religious difference took on new, unofficial but no less potent cultural forms after 1829. In Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (1992), D.G. Paz argues that ‘fear and loathing of Roman Catholicism was a major part of the nineteenth-century cultural context’ and found expression everywhere from ‘mass meetings and demonstrations, petitions campaigns, and the distribution of printed

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propaganda’ to ‘bonfires, revels, and riots’ (1, 23, 225–65). Patrick O’Malley has linked the ‘eruption of a traumatic past into the present’ within the Victorian Gothic to anxieties over Catholicism’s threat to ‘Britain’s sectarian purity as well as its sexual values’ (12, 3). The undercurrent of anti-Catholicism even appears in the text of the Catholic Emancipation Act itself (Statutes 10 Geo. 4, ch. 7). The Act mandated an oath requiring Catholics to disavow secret plots of treason, loyalty to pretenders to the throne, the deposing power of the Pope, allegiance to foreign powers, claims on pre-Reformation property and all attempts to weaken the ‘Protestant Religion or Protestant Government in the United Kingdom’ (s. 2). An undesirable Catholic presence was to be kept outside national borders as Jesuits were banned and all religious orders were prohibited from accepting new vocations. Any offending individual would ‘be banished from the United Kingdom for the Term of his natural Life’ (s. 29, 34). Catholics were still prohibited from taking a degree from the national universities and most prestigious schools (s. 26). Nor could Catholic bishops lay claim to any title that involved English territorial names, for example, the Bishop of London or the Dean of Westminster. No Catholic could wear religious dress or perform a religious ceremony ‘save within the usual Places of Worship of the Roman Catholic Religion, or in private Houses’ (s. 26). The text of the Catholic Emancipation Act itself thus points to the broader social conflicts that would persist into the Victorian period and that had framed the debate since the 1770s. The year 1829 intensified the contrasts in Hunt’s assessment of the legislation that both ‘progressively’ advanced tolerance and ‘regressively’ recalled Catholics into civil society. It was thus a moment of crisis and ambivalence in what James Chandler has called the romantic era’s ‘emergent historicism’ that emphasized ‘a periodical coding of relationships among unevenly developing national narratives and temporalities’ (100). According to this historiographic logic, a nation’s ‘state’ could be located along a chronological arc of development and then compared with other nations to assess their relative degree of ‘temporal’ progress, for instance, ‘modern’ England versus ‘savage’ Ireland (127–8). Yet the conflicting interpretations of Catholic Emancipation rendered England’s ‘state’ difficult to chart. After 1829, where (or, better yet, when) did ‘poor old England’ stand? With the return of popery, had it returned to its own Dark Ages and regressed to a superstitious state comparable to Spain? Or had it set forth, at the vanguard of nations, into a future of enlightened toleration and liberty? Was this arrival in modernity like that of secularized France, for good or ill? And which way was national history

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now tending – progressive advance or regressive decline? Out of this hermeneutic crisis, the theme of ‘England in 1829’ became the subject matter for historically minded artists attempting to get to grips with what many perceived as a new but uncertain era. Similar in structure and purpose to the multiple meditations on the theme of ‘England in 1819’, literary reports on ‘England in 1829’ assessed the state of ‘civil and religious liberty’ and demonstrated the resilience of religion in national public discourse. These reflections engaged the contested discourses that linked Britishness to the Catholic Question: superstition vs. enlightenment, savagery vs. civil society, primitivism vs. progress, and bigotry vs. toleration. These categories increasingly informed cultural models for dissent in Victorian domestic politics and for colonial encounters with other peoples who could be regulated, subordinated and contained as the superstitious or primitive subjects of British imperial history. Many of these literary works were explicit in their attempt to interpret the meaning of the moment for England. The poet, lawyer and journalist Edward William Cox (1807–49) attempted to sing the ‘master spirit of the age’ in 1829: A Poem (1829), a versified, book-length annual review of the year’s events (42).2 Cox’s digressive poetic dialogue shifts between the conversational and the visionary as it celebrates the passage of Catholic Emancipation as a long-awaited triumph of modernity, liberty and enlightenment over antiquated forces that had stalled the progress of civilization. In Cox’s poem, the ‘anxious hour’, in which Westminster announces the passage of Catholic Emancipation, takes on metaphysical significance as a turning point in history. The proclamation of a ‘new domain’ transforms the national landscape ‘from hill to hill,—/From vale to vale’ (45). His vision of ‘liberty’ is colonial, as Parliament, at the centre of history, speaks to ‘the world without’ with imperious sway (45). Just as abolitionist treatments of the emancipation of the slaves exulted in the nation’s removal of a self-engendered ‘hideous stain’, so too does the legislative emancipation of Catholics become for Cox a point of national pride and evidence of the superiority of British civilization.3 As the source of a ‘brilliant spot upon the dark red page/That bears the awful record of the age’, the glorified Wellington is by ‘fame enroll’d the founder of the free’ (47). One of Cox’s fictitious interlocutors, when asked his opinion of Catholic Emancipation as ‘the important question of the day’, begins his response ‘long, long it hath been/My hope this glorious triumph to have seen’ (64). His tone of relieved long-suffering echoes Richard Price’s use of Simeon’s Biblical thanksgiving for living to see the advent

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of Christ – ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’ (Luke 2:29–31). With an eye cast backwards at the 1688 Glorious Revolution, Price’s A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) had provoked Burke’s ire by using this prophetic Scripture to greet a turning point in history – the French Revolution (49). In 1829, with a similar historical self-consciousness, Cox outlines another revolution: But now I hail it in another light— As the first skirmish in the fearful fight That right with might, and knowledge with the power Of bigotry are waging. That great hour Which gave the death-blow to the pride of those Who are their own and Britain’s direst foes; Show’d the first step to that improvement vast, That surely must and will be made at last. Knowledge, his royal scepter in his hand, Is marching stately over all the land. (65) In Cox’s historiographic imagination, the national triumph turns a corner in a stadial progression, moving from the age of ‘bigotry’ to that of ‘knowledge’, which is militaristically ‘marching stately all over the land’. Although he claims that 1829 represented a ‘bloodless triumph’ and ‘glorious triumph’ paralleling 1688, his rhetoric demonizes a Miltonic ‘Ignoble crew’ that has left a ‘monstrous stain on England’s history’ (51–2). In millennial rhetoric, he figures their reign of darkness as ‘Bigotry’s’ veil, which is ‘rent’ by a rising sun: The veil is rent, the clouds dissolve, the rays Of the low sun upon the proud heights blaze, And, intertwining there, at once unfold The mingled tints of purple, gray, and gold. (50) This sunrise, with its transformation of the land stretching as far its rays extend, symbolically claims ‘1829’ and Britain’s passage of Catholic Emancipation as a new dawn in world history. As the leader in the age of knowledge, British liberty and culture will emanate beyond its own borders and illuminate a darkened world. This combination of monstrosity, historical progress and national expansion also characterizes J.M.W. Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), an epic painting that similarly strove to capture the 1829 ‘spirit

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of the age’. The relevance of this painting to Catholic Emancipation derives from a long-standing allegorical link among writers from Spenser to Joyce between Ireland and the island of Polyphemus, the Homeric Cyclops. In a discussion of this politicized representation, Luke Gibbons has examined the self-portrait of the Irish Catholic painter James Barry alongside his patron Edmund Burke on the isle of the legendary monster. Gibbons argues that this setting conveys Barry’s wrestling with an imposed colonial image of a savage ‘Irish past, and the backwardness of a Gaelic, Catholic pre-modern culture’ (‘ “Into the Cyclops Eye” ’ 36). Operating within this allegorical economy, Turner’s painting celebrates the escape of Ulysses – a figure of knowledge, craftiness and Enlightenment – from the cave of Polyphemus. Consistent with Turner’s Whig leanings, the painting captures the British sense of leaving behind all the tribal conflicts involved in sectarian disputes.4 An enlightened Britain triumphs over the embroilments that had accompanied the Catholic Question since the 1770s. In leaving behind the murky cave of Irishness, Catholicism and sectarianism, a new era seems to dawn on the world (see Figure 5). The advance comes with a glorious sunset with ‘mingled tints of purple, gray, and gold’, to borrow a phrase from Cox. Amid this garish display, however, there is subtle symbolism

Figure 5 J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829).

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that registers the role of literature and culture. The galloping steeds of Apollo are faintly outlined in the glowing clouds. Authoritatively but discretely, the god of poetry ushers in this new day and reigns over this new order. Turner’s version of ‘England in 1829’ posits a turn in history, a stadial advance, as the monstrous politics of the past yield to a world transfigured by British reason and culture. As Ulysses casts a backwards glance to deride the blinded giant whom he has just wounded, his ship appears to be headed beyond the frame of the painting and into the future. Turner captures the expansive spirit that persists in Tennyson’s older Ulysses, who remains determined to ‘seek a newer world’ and to ‘sail beyond the sunset’ (619). Like British ships setting sail at the beginning of the Victorian period, Ulysses’s vessel seems to go into a world ready for a civilizing, imperial project. Overcoming Britain’s own religious strife promises to inform cultural negotiations and conflicts over primitivism and savagery beyond the Catholic Question chronologically and geographically. As part of a broader argument about the foundational influence of postcolonial approaches to Ireland in British culture, Gibbons identifies the abjection of Polyphemus as conveying the way many ‘key discourses later elaborated to anathematize native American, African, Indian or Australian cultures were framed by initial, and persistent, colonial anxieties about Gaelic, Catholic, and, eventually, Celtic otherness’ (‘ “Into the Cyclops Eye” ’ 44). Julia M. Wright has also argued that the ‘parallel’ treatments of ‘religious difference’ in India and Britain were the ‘product of the same dominant ideology which shaped British policy at home and abroad’ (Ireland, India, and Nationalism 88). Through the amalgamating power of the discursive category of superstition, such conflations were, in part, an extension of domestic romantic-era religious politics into the imperial project. Yet while the year 1829 was represented as an important turning point, such progressive narratives cannot be taken entirely at face value. Domestic turmoil and anxiety about disruptive groups within the nation persisted, if not intensified. On one level, there is a simple political explanation for this. Catholic Emancipation did not solve Ireland’s ills. If anything, the prolonged campaign and delayed passage of the Bill only sharpened the Irish sense of discontent and drew attention to the iniquities in the British-Irish relationship. The Disenfranchisement Act made any sense of grievance more acute. Anxiety over such domestic turmoil impinges on Turner’s work. Even though Ulysses boastfully displays a banner of the Trojan horse and belligerently taunts Polyphemus, this incident does not end well for the Greeks in Homer’s Odyssey. After

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‘Let not Ulysses breathe his native air, Laertes’ son, of Ithaca the fair. If to review his country be his fate, Be it thro’ toils and suff’rings, long and late, His lost companions let him first deplore; Some vessel, not his own, transport him o’er; And when at home from foreign suff’rings freed, More near and deep, domestick woes succeed!’ (9.621–8) The curse of the Cyclops, a postcolonial backlash, follows on from the moment depicted in Turner’s scene. The curse proved efficacious as Ulysses’s men died at sea and he returned a lone survivor to a house divided, his goods, wife and son besieged by competing suitors. Likewise, ‘domestick woes’ were to be found in the British homeland. Coleridge, who finally supported Catholic Emancipation, and Southey, who steadfastly did not, were anxious about the new status of Catholicism. They were sceptical that the Irish could be pacified. In On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), Coleridge laments the degradation of political wisdom that led to Catholic Emancipation. In his assessment of the state of Parliament, Polyphemus appears again: State policy, a Cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of the head! ... Mean time, the true historical feeling, the immortal life of an historical Nation, generation linked to generation by faith, freedom, heraldry, and ancestral fame, languishing, and giving place to the superstitions of wealth, and newspaper reputation. (C&S 66–7) In this tirade, Britain itself has been taken over by a hybridic monster that combines the pre-modern Cyclops spliced with the hyper-modern world of news and new money. The old enemy of superstition has been transmuted into new ‘superstitions’, as ‘extremes meet’ under the enthusiastic guises of commercialism and print culture.5 As a result, the glorious sense of inherited history and custom that once shaped its identity has been lost. Anxiety about superstition finds new outlets within British society, shaping and perhaps distorting how Coleridge saw the social challenges of the nineteenth century. Such concern for the British nation in the wake of Catholic Emancipation comes to a head in Southey’s Sir Thomas More: Or Colloquies on the Progress

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tossing a chunk of mountain at the ship, Polyphemus calls on his father Neptune to curse the sailors:

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

of Society (1829), a social and spiritual survey of ‘England in 1829’ whose form embodies many of the romantic period’s struggles over religious politics. Written throughout the 1820s and published after the passage of Catholic Emancipation, Southey’s work is a companion piece to his Essays, Moral and Political (1832). Sir Thomas More warns of the peril to the British nation if papists are admitted to the body politic and the quickening alliance of church and state is broken. For Southey, ‘England in 1829’ marks a moment when Britain imprudently evacuates its spiritual, traditional and moral resources in the face of the onrushing problems of modernity, including the growth of population among the urban and working poor, the ills of industrialization, speculative global financing and international warfare. The dialogic form, however, sets the ‘colloquies’ apart from Southey’s periodical polemics, making it a revealing exploration of his own psychological development as symbolic of what he saw as the divided spirit of the age. Taking place in Keswick, the work begins with ‘Montesinos’ (representing Southey himself) greeting a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the ghost of Thomas More, which itself is allusively connected to the ghost of Hamlet’s father.6 Their further dialogues in Southey’s house or various parts of the Lake District provide the work’s substance. Thomas Macaulay’s caustic 1830 article in the Edinburgh Review offered a summary: ‘The rest of the book consists of conversation between Mr. Southey and the spirit about trade, currency, Catholic Emancipation, periodical literature, female nunneries, butchers, snuff, book-stalls, and a hundred other subjects’ (338). The real subject, however, lies in the competing historical models used to interpret this myriad of detail – either Montesinos’s progressive historiography or More’s regressive narrative of decay and deterioration. While similar to The Excursion’s informed dialogue about current events within the stabilizing solace provided by the national landscape, Southey’s haunted dialogue also constitutes an attempt to reconcile past and future within his own self. While the biographical details link Montesinos to Southey, the Colloquies also identify the hardened, Counter-Reformational More with the dispirited, counter-revolutionary Southey. In proposing that they compare their experiences in ‘the age of the Reformation, and in this age of revolutions’, More remarks to Montesinos that ‘notwithstanding some dispathies between us ... there are certain points of sympathy and resemblance which bring us into contact, and enable us at once to understand each other’ (1: 19, 18). Both Southey and More had overly enthusiastic social schemes in their youth (Pantisocratic and Utopian respectively), but were disappointed

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We have both speculated in the joys and freedom of our youth upon the possible improvement of society; and both in like manner have lived to dread with reason the effects of that restless spirit which ... insults heaven and disturbs earth. (1: 19) More’s extreme pessimism represents a temptation for the older Southey who also faced a debilitating despair in his 1829 anxiety over the disastrous success of the ‘leveling’ allegiance of ‘Popery and Dissent’. With Southey’s spirit identified with both Montesinos and More, Sir Thomas More emerges as a dialogic psychomachia between Southey’s divided selves, in which his attempt to reform the extremes in his own personality takes on national significance. As the ghost of More scans contemporary events without a glimmer of hope, despair seems insuperable. More looks at the historical development of England and sees only decline, at the state of ‘England in 1829’ and predicts violent apocalypse, and at the state of culture and grieves over widespread degradation. Through More, Southey gives voice to his own reactionary side that saw 1829 as evacuating all that had constituted Britishness. He sees a dire ‘contest between Impiety and Religion’ and a renewed ‘struggle between Popery and Protestantism’ (2: 413–14). Domestic unrest is ubiquitous and will erupt ‘nowhere with more violence than in Ireland’ (2: 415). He diagnoses rampant ills connected with the ‘growth of your manufacturing system’ and a ‘great and increasing population’ (2: 415). There seems to be no redress available to Britain after the romantic period: On what do you rely for security against these dangers? On public opinion? You might as well calculate upon the constancy of wind and weather in this uncertain climate. On the progress of knowledge? It is such knowledge as serves only to facilitate delusion. On the laws? The law which should be like a sword in a strong hand, is weak as a bulrush if it be feebly administered in time of danger. On the people? They are divided. On the Parliament? Every faction will be fully and formidably represented there. On the government? It suffers itself to be insulted and defied at home, and abroad it has shown itself incapable of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with its allies, so far as it has been divested of power by the usurpation of the press. (2: 416)

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by the ‘restless’ and even reckless spirits of revolution in their ages. A despondent More intones:

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More leaves little room for consolation. The passage of Catholic Emancipation and the prospective push for reform made this bleak vision a pitfall for Southey. The psychodrama of Sir Thomas More therefore consists in Montesinos articulating national hope despite the recent political and religious changes. Against the dire warning of violent apocalypse, Montesinos argues for a continued possibility of a millennium beginning in 1829 in which Britain will lead a one-thousand year rule of the saints. Like Cox and Turner, he too looks to the horizon. Though he sees ‘clouds and darkness’, he still harbours hope for ‘perpetual peace’, a baptized version of the Kantian cosmopolitan ideal (2: 425). Surveying the economy and culture of English history, he sees evidence of progress even in moments of turmoil. ‘Providence’ will not abandon England at such a time. The rescuing of good from evil can even be seen in the ‘humanizing effects of Literature’ despite the ‘pernicious designs’ of certain, unnamed reprobate authors. This message of hope amid strife is the key to Southey’s interpretation of ‘England in 1829’. By dividing the aspects of his personality that Shelley had seen in Keswick, Southey attempts to regulate his own drive to extremes. Tinged with the darkness of his superstitious religion, More only sees the past, present and future as an abyss. Yet More’s elegy cannot predominate. It is balanced by the optimism of Montesinos whose enthusiasm, tempered by Southey’s age and More’s realism, never runs to the radicalism that captivated the young, revolutionary Southey. The open-ended work represents an ongoing struggle to find a restated romantic via media. All these versions of ‘England in 1829’ not only offer a vision of nation, empire and progress, but also contain underlying anxieties that would erupt throughout the Victorian period. These include the riots in the street and in high cultural spheres over the 1850 restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy widely known as the ‘Papal Aggression’; the 1860s violence in Northern England over the anti-Catholic and antiIrish lectures of William Murphy; the antimodern return to a purified Catholic (but not Roman Catholic) church in the Oxford Movement; the aesthetic neomedievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites; or the efflorescence of the English Catholic revival among writers such as Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell and G.M. Hopkins.7 As Michael Wheeler writes in The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006), the cultural role of Catholics in Britain raised ‘visceral anxieties concerning the Other’ and exposed ‘paradoxes and contradictions that lay on both sides of the divide between the old enemies’ (295). Yet while I have been calling attention to containment and

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regulation, literary treatments of the Catholic Question also opened up possibilities for imaginative social revision. In his writing on the literary and religious politics surrounding enthusiasm, Jon Mee closes his study with a glance towards the potential of ‘enthusiastic readers who understand the poetry to offer a more open realm of possibilities’ (296). There is a parallel power in the romantic period’s treatment of superstition that could point the way to alternative forms of collective identities. John Henry Newman, one of the leaders of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, was one of the keenest and most articulate interpreters of such latent possibilities within romantic religion. On the one hand, Newman opposed Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s, viewing the issue as a matter of national history and a slippery slope to further Romanist inroads.8 On the other hand, he attributed the Oxford Movement’s depth of theological thought and sacramental appreciation of beauty to a broader cultural movement spearheaded by the British romantic writers: In truth there is at this moment a great progress of the religious mind of our Church to something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century ... The poets and philosophers of the age have borne witness to it for many years. Those great names in our literature, Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, though in different ways and with essential differences one from another, and perhaps from any Church system, still all bear witness to it. (Via Media 372) In an 1839 British Critic article titled ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, Newman also claimed that the Lake Poets and Scott conveyed, perhaps unwittingly, a sense of ‘something deeper and truer’ as part of the ‘spirit afloat’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There he specifies that they had all ‘borne witness to’ something Newman called ‘the cause of Catholic truth’ (268). Coleridge had ‘instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept’ (268). Scott had come, like John the Baptist, ‘to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth’ and to reawaken interest in the Middle Ages (267). Wordsworth and Southey had ‘addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings’ and thus ‘carried forward their readers’ towards the same spirit of the age (268). Newman’s own defence of ‘Catholic truth’ salvaged desirable ‘superstitious’ elements from what he saw as its corrupted abuse among papists. Within the context of the Catholic Question, Newman’s 1830s theological theorization of the via media to revive the national character

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appears as a culmination rather than an appropriation of this strand of romantic religious and political writing that sought ‘something deeper and more attractive’ from the past, imagination and nature (267). These romantic ideals, however, also led Newman to become a Roman Catholic, thus abrogating the via media for an ‘extreme’ position beyond the national pale. In Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), in which Newman recounts his conversion to a suspicious English readership, he returns to the 1839 British Critic article. Here the search for ‘something deeper and truer’ among the Lake Poets and Scott acts as an engine that drives Newman towards Rome (98–105). For Newman, these romantic writers were a Trojan horse in English national culture. His revision of romantic religion has implications at two levels. First, it delineates an alternative construction of subjectivity that he presents as a ‘great revolution of the mind’ (Newman 96). Second, it makes an opening for a critique of national historiographies. As a Roman Catholic convert, Newman was both an insider and outsider in the Establishment. He strenuously voices this perspective in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, a series of 1850 lectures given in Birmingham amid the upheaval over ‘Papal Aggression’. In his dissection of the way culture works to support power, Newman is an unlikely forebear of contemporary critics concerned with ideology and cultural regulation. He rails against England’s diffuse system of prejudice – pervasive and hegemonic – that is spread through high and low culture, commerce, government and romantic writing: Verse and prose, grave and gay, the scientific and the practical, history and fable, all is animated spontaneously, or imperiously subdued, by the spirit of Henry and Elizabeth. I say, ‘imperiously subdued,’ because the Tradition of Protestantism is strong enough, not only to recommend, but to force its reception on each successive generation of authors. It compels when it cannot persuade. There is Alexander Pope, a Catholic, and who would discover it from the run of his poems? There is Samuel Johnson, born a Protestant, yearning for the Catholic Church, and bursting out into fitful defences of portions of her doctrine and discipline, yet professing to the last that very Protestantism which could neither command his affections, nor cure his infirmities. And, in our own time, there was Walter Scott, ashamed of his own Catholic tendencies and cowering before the jealous frown of the tyrant Tradition. There was Wordsworth, obliged to do penance for Catholic sonnets by anti-Catholic complements to them. (71–2)

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Newman lingers over the phrase ‘imperiously subdued’, which unfolds into a critique of cultural disciplining that has gone on within England from the Reformation to the time of Scott and Wordsworth. By choosing the adverb ‘imperiously’, Newman suggests that this coercive historical ‘Tradition of Protestantism’ continues to operate in the British Empire during the Victorian period. Guari Viswanathan has turned to Newman as one who pried loose the coercive and limiting thinking of British nationalism. In her study of the way religious conversion destabilizes the logic of imperialism, she praises Newman for developing a ‘critical epistemology’ that links him ‘with the attempt of modern (poststructuralist) criticism to interrogate the premises binding individuals to communities of interpretation, ranging from small, local institutions to large, abstract entities like the nation’ (44–5). She outlines the way his move towards something like a dissenting cosmopolitanism leads him ‘to posit Catholicism as a transreligious, transnational force’ that can ‘critique the very concept of the nation state’ (48). She qualifies this reading of Newman, however, arguing that his stance ‘turns out to be a universalism that works regressively’ in its attempt to reintroduce a Catholic identity that ‘cannot effectively disentangle itself from structures of authority’ (48). Her use of the term ‘regressively’, though, betrays a reliance on the type of stadial historiographies of social progress that were at the centre of romantic debates over the Catholic Question and national identity. While for Viswanathan, Newman’s critique of imperial power stumbles because of its nostalgic return to a religious form of identity incompatible with modernity, I would argue that it allows for what Partha Chatterjee in The Nation and its Fragments (1993) has called ‘alternative histories’ that contain ‘in their trajectories and rhythms the possibility of a different imagining of nationhood’ (114). Within the discursive conflicts and the historical particularities of the Catholic Question debate, Newman’s ‘regression’ to a religious identity from England’s past generates what can be called a ‘critical historiography’. For instance, in his famous ‘Second Spring’ sermon, he articulates a vision of the ‘dead’ returning, a possibility that confounds progressive, teleological historiographies that justified the British imperial project: This is so well understood by men of the day, that with them progress is idolized as another name for good. The past never returns—it is never good;—if we are to escape existing ills, it must be by going forward. The past is out of date; the past is dead. As well may the dead live to us, well may the dead profit us, as the past return. This,

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then, is the cause of this national transport, this national cry, which encompasses us. The past has returned, the dead lives. Thrones are overturned, and are never restored; States live and die, and then are matter only for history. Babylon was great, and Tyre, and Egypt, and Nineve, and shall never be great again. The English Church was, and the English Church was not, and the English Church is once again. This is the portent, worthy of a cry. It is the coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world, such as that which yearly takes place in the physical. (168–9, original emphasis) Newman attempts to convey an alternative historical vision in which supposedly ‘primitive’ or obsolete groups can inhabit modernity not as ghosts or aestheticized heroes of balladry, but as vital human communities. Newman’s revivalist aesthetic is not the only form that such a critical historiography can take, but it represents a powerful nineteenthcentury rethinking of Britain’s models of history, nation and religion. The passage of Catholic Emancipation was a Janus-faced moment. The attempts to define or reimagine ‘England in 1829’ were interventions that culminated and continued the romantic period’s ‘cultural wars’. From the upheaval in the 1770s over the first Relief Act that Burke called the ‘first faint sketch of toleration’ (‘Speech’ 154) to the ‘anxious hour’ of Catholic Emancipation’s passage in 1829, the Catholic Question was not only a central issue in domestic politics but also intersected with an array of national and global issues. Inevitably and repeatedly, the Catholic Question raised spectres from the nation’s past and caused a prolonged crisis and conflict over what it meant to be British. Aesthetics and politics met in their historical narratives that variously sutured divisions in the national character, called attention to violence wrought in the name of religious difference or promoted agendas for social transformation. Romantic-period literature was a nexus for these potent cultural models of historical progress vs. cultural obsolescence; regulation vs. imaginative revision; and the via media vs. superstition and enthusiasm. The Catholic Question should be viewed not only as crucial to the complex religious and cultural politics in the romantic period but also as foundational to shaping the parameters of civil society, national memory and religious difference in nineteenth-century Britain and beyond.

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Introduction: The Spirits of the Age 1. Within the romantic period, there were also notable positive appropriations of medievalism, including those by Hunt in ‘The Story of Rimini’. For a critical discussion, see Duff; Fay Romantic Medievalism; and Simmons Reversing the Conquest. 2. In following Chandler’s foregrounding of Scottish thought, I do not imply that other models of history are not significant. For a summary of the various models (cyclic, feminist, sceptical, etc.) that contested for the meaning of history, see Kucich ‘Eternity’ 18–25 and Karen O’Brien 1–20. For an overarching study of romanticism and history, see Bann. 3. For criticism on the campaign for parliamentary reform in the romantic period, see Cox Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School; Scrivener Poetry and Reform; and Worrall Radical Culture. On history and ‘radical reform’, see the collection edited by Morton and Smith that traces ‘revolutionary’ continuities from 1650 to 1830. 4. For historical accounts of the political and cultural campaigns for Catholic Emancipation, see Machin’s political history of the 1820s, Bernard Ward’s comprehensive accounts of Catholic politics and culture in The Dawn of the Catholic Revival and The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, Gwynn’s concise, often lionizing The Struggle for Catholic Emancipation, Hughes’s narrative of Catholic and English political and cultural development spanning from 1688, and Colmer’s succinct sketch in C&S xxxv–lvii. 5. For these biographical accounts, see Paul O’Brien 49–50; Gill William Wordsworth: A Life 329; HSW 1: 215; C&S 6–7; and Eisler 322–4, 346–9. See Hazlitt’s contrast of Coleridge’s radical preaching in 1798 with the 1816 Lay Sermons in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, originally published in the Examiner: ‘That sermon, like this, Sermon, was upon peace and war; upon church and state—not their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another’ (128). 6. To date, the only romantic literary criticism on Catholic Emancipation as a discrete issue have been the articles by Bostrom and Bennett and the unpublished dissertation on the political thought of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and DeQuincey by George Thomas. 7. For romanticism and ‘internal colonialism’ in Scotland, see Trumpener xiii. For the legacy of romantic historicism in Ireland, see Lloyd 1–3, 19–25, 42–3 and Gibbons Transformations 134–6, 152–9. 8. For cultural histories of anti-Catholicism in England, see Shell, Haydon and Wolffe. 9. For a discussion of Burke’s and Hume’s articulation of the via media between the ‘Catholic-Protestant duo of superstition and enthusiasm’ and its afterlife more generally in the ‘respective careers of liberty in France and in England 197

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Notes

Notes

during the Enlightenment, the Revolution, and for long after’, see Deane Strange Country 6–8. For my discussion of Hume’s seminal essay on enthusiasm and superstition, see p. 91. 10. For a critique of nationalistic histories of progress in India, see Chakrabarty and Chatterjee. For a survey of this ‘subaltern’ turn in historiography, see Prakash. For a survey of the revision of English Reformation history that parallels this movement in many ways, see Aberth and Randolph. 11. For similar cross-cultural studies of religion, see Fulford ‘Catholicism and Polytheism’ and ‘Heroic Voyagers and Superstitious Natives’, van der Veer, and van der Veer and Lehmann. For studies of national identity and religion across the European context in the nineteenth century, see Liedtke and Wendehorst’s study of ‘emancipation’ of religious minorities and Mews.

Chapter 1: The Purgatorial Politics of the Catholic Question 1. Scholarship on the Act of Union and the periods preceding and following it has been divided and contested. For judicious surveys of approaches to Irish historiography, see Jackson 2–5 and Killeen 10–13. On the one hand, recent arguments by S.J. Connolly and Leighton among others have highlighted an Irish social structure with an ancien régime and a pattern of everyday life comparable to other European nations. On the other hand, Smyth and Whelan have emphasized the exceptionally violent trauma that structures the political events and writing in Ireland’s experience as a British colony. For a concise formulation of the colonial approach in Irish cultural studies, see Deane’s introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature 6–19. 2. I follow Hendler in revisiting Williams’s term ‘structure of feeling’ and emphasizing the formative, multiple and contradictory elements that link art, lived consciousness and political discourse which Williams would also later describe as ‘structure of experience’ (10–11). 3. For a summary, see Butler Historical Account and Willington. 4. For a broad historical discussion of Challoner and the English Catholic community in the eighteenth century, see Duffy. 5. For an account of this procedure, see the preface of Volume 2 of Worrall Returns of Papists. 6. Numbers alone underestimate the extent of English Catholic culture which, as Shell has argued, took on a culturally ‘diasporic’ character following the Reformation through a network of continental institutions including the English Catholic College in Douai, France. For the extensive English Catholic presence on the Continent from the Reformation until the mid-1790s, see Guilday. 7. As the penal laws predated the 1707 Union, separate legislation was needed to rescind them. For accounts of the Scottish conflict over the Catholic Question from 1777 to 1780, see Anson 178–81 and Walsh 521–6. For a treatment of changes in Scottish Catholicism throughout the romantic period, see Johnson. 8. For the standard interpretation of the Gordon Riots as an attack on the gentry and the Establishment in a carnivalesque clamour for ‘social justice’, see Rudé 268–92. For a critique of the Gordon Riot ‘mob’, see Hibbert.

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9. For a discussion of Catholic engagement with abolitionist discourse, see Tomko ‘Abolition, National Identity, and Religion’. 10. For an account of Tone’s life and his involvement with Catholic Emancipation and the 1798 Rebellion, see Elliott. 11. My account of the 1798 Rebellion draws mainly on Pakenham’s The Year of Liberty and Whelan’s Fellowship of Freedom. For an overview of various perspectives on the 1798 Rebellion and its legacy, see Bartlett et al. 12. For the influence of Emmet’s rising on romantic literature, see Webb. 13. For further discussion of the symbolic marriage involved in the Act of Union debates, see Robinson; C. Connolly ‘Writing the Union’; and Dougherty. 14. For the role of the Regent’s position within conservative politics, see Sack 228–9. 15. For the sudden growth and proliferation of English Catholic journals, see Fletcher. 16. Coleridge’s numerous uses of this ‘adage of inexhaustible exemplification’ (C&S 96) include the first entry in his Aids to Reflection (1825). For an influential example of the discourse, see Lavington’s The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared (1754), which reappeared frequently as a pamphlet and in an 1833 edition by Richard Polwhele. 17. For Lingard as the ‘English Ranke’, see Shea. 18. For Cobbett’s use and transformation of Lingard, see Bruns. 19. For Croly’s influence, see Wheeler 139–52.

Chapter 2: History, Sympathy and Sectarianism in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story 1. For the relationship between Austen and Inchbald, see Byrne ‘A Simple Story’ and Osland 98–101. 2. For a re-evaluation of her plays as complex literary works, see the contributions of Jane Moody and Julie Carlson to Burroughs’s Women in British Romantic Theatre (2000). On empire and Inchbald’s plays in particular, see O’Quinn; Bolton; and Green. 3. Inchbald also compiled Collection of Farces (1809) and The Modern Theatre (1811). For Inchbald as a critic, see Mellor ‘A Criticism’; Rogers ‘Britain’s First Woman Drama Critic’; Macheski; Sigl ‘Prince Hoare’s Artist’; and Marvin Carlson. 4. Estimates of the ‘return’ of Inchbald should also include the recent editions of her work, including A Simple Story (Penguin, 1996; OUP, 1967, 1988, 1998; Dodo, 2007), Nature and Art (Pickering & Chatto, 1997; Broadview, 2005; Echo, 2006), and her Selected Comedies (University Press of America, 1987). 5. For an argument countervailing Judson’s claims that Inchbald’s ‘Puritan impulse’ (601) emerges within a period that had ‘emptied religion of superstition’ (604), see Wilcox on Inchbald’s ‘investment in Catholic belief, imagery, and narrative’ (314). 6. For Edgeworth’s claim that she ‘never read any novel that affected me so strongly’ as A Simple Story, see Boaden 2: 152. For Inchbald’s correspondence with Owenson, see Owenson Lady Morgan’s Memoirs 253. For the ‘many encomiums’ Madame de Staël lavished on A Simple Story, see Boaden 2: 190–1.

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7. For Inchbald’s Catholicism, see the chapter titled ‘Mrs. Inchbald’s Religion’ in McKee’s 1935 dissertation and Tomko ‘Remembering Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre’. For criticism of Jenkins’s neglect of Inchbald’s Catholicism, see Byrne ‘Written by Venus’ 40. 8. For accounts of these social transformations in English Catholicism, see Bossy 295–322; Norman 57–82; and Aveling 253–83. 9. For an account of Gage’s life and writings, see Gillow 5: 440–1. 10. See Boaden’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. For criticism of Boaden’s treatment of Inchbald’s Catholic identity, see McKee 103–21. 11. For further discussion of this division, see McKee 104. 12. See Hilton 60–75 and Bossy 424–7. 13. For the symbolic repetition of the ‘head-ache’ and Miss Milner’s sympathetic response that disable Sandford’s hostility, see Inchbald A Simple Story 114–15. 14. See Aveling 256–7 and Munson. 15. For the seminal discussion of slavery and empire in Mansfield Park, see Said 80–97. 16. For disease and imperial anxiety, see Bewell Romanticism and Colonial Disease 12–13. For imperialism and anxiety over moral degradation, see Felicity Nussbaum 7–14. 17. For further examples of Elmwood’s inscrutability to public and emotional life, see his reaction to Miss Milner’s death – ‘his lordship’s susceptibility on the occasion was not suspected by any one’ (204–5); the lack of ‘kind notice of her ladyship, that appeared like love’ in his encounter with Matilda on the stairs despite the depth of feeling conveyed to the reader (282); the narrator’s unanswerable questions about the public’s confusion over Elmwood’s leaving Elmwood House that asks ‘who could penetrate whether it was the effect of the lenity, or the severity, he had dealt towards his child?’ (284); and Rushbrooke’s speculation that ‘There is something which we cannot yet define that Lord Elmwood struggles with’ (312).

Chapter 3: Wordsworth and Superstition 1. For Wordsworth’s expressionism, see Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp 21–3, 95–9. For New Historicist critiques, see Levinson; and Chandler Wordsworth’s Second Nature. 2. For the communal aspect of Wordsworth’s writing, see Sharp Turner; and Hewitt The Possibilities of Society. 3. The Anglo-Catholic Frederick Faber’s admiration for Wordsworth’s poetry speaks to its affinity with Catholicism. Wordsworth’s abrupt ending of their friendship when Faber converted to Roman Catholicism also speaks to Wordsworth’s anti-Catholic anxieties. For this relationship, see Gill ‘Wordsworth and “Catholic Truth”’. 4. For recent discussions of the connections between form and politics in The Excursion, see Bushell 85–116 and Hickey 131–65. 5. For ‘Cockney Classicism’ among Keats, Hunt and Shelley, see Cox Poetry and Politics 146–86. 6. For a full account of the textual history of Essays on Epitaphs, see Wordsworth Prose Works 2: 45.

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7. See Ezekiel 1:16–21 and Milton 6.754–6. 8. The work would become Southey’s Book of the Church (1824). In an appeal to the Archangel Michael and St Peter, Byron’s Satan lays claim to the king’s soul based on his trenchant opposition to Catholic Emancipation: ‘Cold/ Must be your souls, if you have not abhorr’d/The foe to Catholic participation/In all the licence of a Christian nation’ (48.381–4). 9. Easterlin reads the sequence as akin to a traditional ‘conversion narrative’ (130) expressing Wordsworth’s desire to escape the overly troubling philosophical insights of his early works and, in proto-Victorian fashion, ‘to reform the self in accord with institutional imperatives’ (150). While Rylestone calls attention to the way the ‘history of the nation is inseparable from the spiritual history of its people’, her book pursues the largely apolitical ‘dynamic interaction’ between individual and community that constitutes Wordsworth’s struggle with Christian identity. 10. For a more detailed discussion of the politics and structure of Ecclesiastical Sketches, see Tomko ‘Superstition, the National Imaginary, and Religious Politics in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches’.

Chapter 4: Shelley’s Conflicted Campaign for Catholic Emancipation 1. For a survey of Shelley’s politics, see Scrivener Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry, 1819–1820. The Catholic Question has not been highlighted in recent ‘Cockney School’ criticism, but for accounts of its significance for the Hunt Circle, see HSW 1: 61, 1: 215 and 2: 182. For other treatments that take Shelley’s trip to Ireland seriously but do not further explore the implications for his intellectual development, see Dawson 134–65 and RNT 9–10. 2. This characterization partially derives from Harriet Westbrook’s account of the distribution of An Address to the Irish People: ‘We throw them out of window and give them to me that we pass in the streets; for myself I am ready to die of laughter when it is done and Percy looks so grave’ (LPBS 1: 265). For a contrasting view of Shelley’s use of public houses and other informal networks to imitate the distribution of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and to link channels of dissent, see Holmes 119–20. 3. For Byron’s politicized evocation of ruins, see pp. 39–41. For the Irish ballad’s disruption of Wordsworth’s view of the Irish countryside, see pp. 117–18. 4. For more on Lawless’s Compendium of the History of Ireland and MacNeven and Emmet’s Pieces of Irish History, see Dawson 141, 155. 5. For the myth of Cadmus, see Bulfinch 87–9. For a survey of the classical sources describing the Sparti, including their haunting of Thebes, see the ‘Spartoi’ entry in the online Theoi Project’s Guide to Greek mythology. 6. See LPBS 2: 102 for Percy Bysshe’s claim that Beatrice ‘is precisely fitted’ for O’Neill and ‘might even seem to have been written for her’. See also Mary Shelley’s editorial notes to the Cenci recording that O’Neill was ‘often in his thoughts’ while writing (284). 7. For O’Neill’s roles and an assessment of her career, see Genest 7–8; and Mathews and Hutton 285–96.

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8. See Blood 356; Wilson 80; Whitman 249–53; and Sperry 130–1. 9. For Beatrice’s use of her father’s religious language, see Hogle 155. For critical concerns about Beatrice’s ‘acting’, see Harrison 188. 10. The phrasing resembles Panthea’s description of her ecstasy: ‘I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,/A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,/Out of the stream of sound’ (4.503–5). 11. Lines 13–14. For Chandler’s discussion of the sonnet, see 23–31. 12. For the receding first cause of evil in Milton’s theodicy, see Nuttall 86–100. 13. See Hogle 155; Curran Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis 135; Cox, ‘The Dramatist’ 71; Sperry 135; and Wasserman 99.

Chapter 5: Scott’s Ivanhoe and the Saxon Question 1. For biographical details surrounding Marmion’s composition, see Sutherland 109–11, 120–7. For my earlier discussion of the rise and fall of the ‘All Talents’, see pp. 32–4 and for Scott’s distraction from poetry by ‘election bustle’, see LWS 1: 366. For the Edinburgh Review’s stance on Catholic Emancipation, see Clive 72–5. For Scott’s break with the journal, see Lockhart 2: 155–6. 2. For the extensive influence of Marmion and its depiction of medieval chivalry in the nineteenth century, see Simmons ‘Finishing off Romantic Chivalry’ 165. For a broader discussion of Marmion’s connection with the political context of 1805–9, see David Hewitt 52. In arguing for the political ramifications of Scott’s ballads, Michael Gamer emphasizes that the horror of Marmion does not derive from Catholicism but from a social order in which ‘no voice of dissent is possible’ (191). Gamer’s analysis of Scott’s concern with internal politics, however, could actually be strengthened by recognizing the discursive link between Scott’s anti-Catholic images of secret trials in oppressive abbeys and the intolerant imperium in imperio that Catholic Emancipation threatened to allow. 3. For Jeffrey’s position on the Catholic Question, see his October 1807 Edinburgh Review article ‘Pamphlets on the Catholic Question’ 116. 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Ivanhoe are from the 1998 Edinburgh University Press edition. 5. For the ‘imbrication’ of the composition of Ivanhoe and The Monastery, see Fielding 362–3; for Scott’s ‘interspersed’ work on them, see Tulloch 412. 6. For Scott’s attempts to realign the ‘theoretical and philosophical’ basis of British conservatism to focus on ‘long-term domestic policy issues about internal dissent’, see Morillo and Newhouse 268. 7. For the Scottish Enlightenment’s sense of interconnected ‘political and religious menace’ between Catholics, Native Americans, and Highlanders, see Chandler 135. 8. For these toasts, see pp. 34–5. 9. For the persistent stereotypes and ambivalence in Scott’s portrait of Isaac’s Jewishness, see pp. 12–13. 10. For a similar appeal, see Rebecca’s seeking the ‘blessing of the Great Father who made both Jew and Gentile’ for the injured Ivanhoe (237). 11. For a reading indebted to Ragusssis that views Ivanhoe as ‘philo-Semitic’, see Schor 116. For a counter-argument seeing the representation of the

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Conclusion: ‘The Anxious Hour’ – England in 1829 1. For a sense of the importance of this date to English Catholics, see the works published to commemorate its centenary: Gwynn’s A Hundred Years of Catholic Emancipation (1929) and Bourne’s Catholic Emancipation: 1829–1929 (1929). 2. In this genre, see also Walden Fitz-John’s 1829: or the Present Times (1829), a poetic advocacy for the industrial poor that links economic reform to Catholic Emancipation: ‘Let Britons, with th’unshakl’d Roman, see/This golden charter—Commerce, be thou free!’ (14). 3. For this type of globalized ‘missionary ideology’, see Thomas Romanticism and Slave Narratives 65 and Tomko ‘Abolition Poetry, National Identity, and Religion’ 27–8. 4. For Turner’s political and social views, see Boll, Butlin and Herrman 44, 231–2. 5. For the association of print culture with enthusiasm, see Mee 58–63. 6. Montesinos quotes Shakespeare for guidance on how to respond to a visitation: ‘Why, sir, to so substantial a ghost, and of such respectable appearance, I might, perhaps, have courage enough to say with Hamlet, “Tho com’st in such a questionable shape,/That I will speak to thee!”’ (1: 12; 1.4.43). The allusions continue as More identifies himself as a ‘stranger from a distant country’, referencing both the words of the famous soliloquy describing the ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns’ and Hamlet’s approach to his father’s spirit saying ‘as a stranger give it welcome’ (1: 3; 3.1.78–9; 1.5.165). Montesinos defends his own moderate superstition against the reductive sceptical materialism of modern Horatios as a ‘persuasion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy’ (1: 5; 1.5.166–7). 7. For the overlapping path of anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish reaction in Victorian Britain, see Klaus; for the English Catholic literary revival, see Ker; for the interaction of liberalism and Catholicism, see Altholz; for the continuities and discrepancies in Victorian anti-Catholicism, see Wolffe; and for an account of the cultural battles surrounding Papal Aggression, see Wheeler 1–48. 8. For Newman’s involvement in the Catholic Emancipation debate, see Gilley 72–5 and the following letter to his sister: ‘In my mind he is no wise man who attempts, without a knowledge of history, to talk about it ... At the same time I must express my belief that nothing will satisfy the Roman Catholics. If this be granted, unquestionably they will ask more’ (142). Newman later records in the Apologia that he felt an ‘unspeakable aversion’ to O’Connell and the push for Catholic Emancipation (121–2).

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‘Orientalized’ Rebecca as part of Ivanhoe’s complicity in a ‘cultural formation of Englishness occurring at the expense of Jewish identity’, see Fay ‘Grace Aguilar’ 217.

Archival and reference material Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. 20 vols. London: R. Bagshaw, 1804–12. Gillow, Joseph. A Literary and Biographical History, or Bibliographical Dictionary, of the English Catholics, from the Breach with Rome, in 1534, to the Present Time. 5 vols. London: Burns, 1885–1902. King James Bible. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds). OUP, 2004. Online edn, Lawrence Goldman (ed). January 2010. http://www. oxforddnb.com. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn, 1989. OED Online. OUP. http://dictionary. oed.com. The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time. 20 vols. London: Hansard, 1812–20. Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. 23 vols. London: Hansard, 1806–20. Statutes at Large. Worrall, E.S. (ed.). Returns of Papists 1767. 2 vols. Southampton: Catholic Record Society, 1989.

Primary works Allen, John. Review of Lingard’s History of England. Edinburgh Review 42.83 (April 1825): 1–31. An Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain Concerning the Probable Tendency of the Late Act of Parliament in Favour of the Papists. London, 1779. Arnold, Matthew. ‘Byron’. English Literature and Irish Politics. R.H. Super (ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973, pp. 217–37. Bicheno, J. The Signs of the Times: or the Overthrow of the Papal Tyranny in France, the Prelude of Destruction to Popery and Despotism; but of Peace to Mankind. London, 1793. Boaden, James. Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald. 2 vols. London, 1833. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Conor Cruise O’Brien (ed.). London: Penguin, 1986. ——. ‘Speech at Bristol, Previous to the Election, 1780’. The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke. Vol. 2. London, 1855, pp. 127–70. Burney, Frances. Journals and Letters. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (eds). London: Penguin, 2001. Butler, Charles. The Book of the Roman Catholic Church. London, 1825.

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abolition, see anti-slavery Abrams, M.H., 5, 53, 87, 88, 202 Act of Union, 4, 27–9, 45, 104, 170, 198, 199 passage of, 26–7, 86 symbolism, 27 anti-Catholicism, 6, 19–21, 23, 37, 41–3, 47, 49, 58–9, 128, 131, 133, 149, 191, 197 and foreignness, 1, 23, 70–1, 110–11 and regulation, 6, 7–8, 91, 102–4, 107–12, 150, 175–9, 192–3 in Victorian period, 7, 13, 183–5, 192–3, 200, 203 anti-slavery, 4, 23–4, 32, 37–8, 73, 185, 188, 199 apostasy, 4, 16, 34–5, 43, 45, 47, 93, 101–2, 123–4, 166 Arnold, Matthew, 121–2 Austen, Jane, 52, 66, 73, 199, 200 Baillie, Joanna, 139–40 Barbauld, Anna, 6 Barry, James, 187 Bible Exodus, 98 Ezekiel, 201 Genesis, 96–8 Gospels, 74–5, 79–80, 185–6 Job, Book of, 94 Psalms, Book of, 95, 99 Revelation, Book of, 21, 26 Burke, Edmund, 18–19, 20, 21–2, 27, 43, 70, 186, 187, 196, 197 Burney, Frances, 20 Bury St Edmunds, 57–8 Butler, Charles, 3, 6, 21, 44, 198 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 4, 35–6, 41–3, 44, 150 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 16, 38–41, 124

Roman Catholic claims speech, 4, 35–8 Vision of Judgment, 113 Calderón, Pedro, 136 Canuel, Mark, 7, 88, 90, 113, 137, 152, 183 Carlyle, Thomas, 58 Catholic Emancipation, 4, 22, 28–32, 50–1, 101, 184 passage of, 12–13, 117, 148, 182–96 Catholic Question in 1820s, 3, 51, 148, 164, 182, 193, 203 and changes in government, 4, 27, 32–4, 182 defined, 1–2 in romantic period, 2–4, 14–16, 26–7, 32–4 and romantic studies, 5–8, 51 Catholic Relief Acts of 1778, 4, 16–19, 54, 58, 59, 70, 86, 182 of 1791, 22–3, 55, 58, 86 Challoner, Richard (Bishop), 17–18, 19 Chandler, James, 1–2, 8, 49, 122, 130, 154, 202 church architecture, 89, 91, 101–2, 114–17 Civil War, 47, 90, 109–10 Clark, J.C.D., 2–3, 157, 183 Cobbett, William, 3, 41, 50, 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4, 13, 166, 193–4, 197, 199 On the Constitution of Church and State, 3, 6, 47, 189 The Courier, 34–5, 43–4 ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter: A War Eclogue, with an Apologetic Preface’, 25–7, 45–7, 110, 127 The Friend, 104 220

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Index

Colley, Linda, 1, 5, 10, 36–7, 182 community, 68, 85–6, 90–2, 96, 100–1, 105–7, 114, 139–40, 147, 152, 171, 177–81, 196, 200 constitution, 108–12, 128 conviviality, 151, 161, 163–6, 170, 171 Cox, Edward William, 185–6 Cox, Jeffrey N., 10, 15, 35, 93, 140, 147 Crusades, 155–7, 160–1, 165, 167, 174 culture wars, 10–11, 15–16, 153, 196 Curran, Amelia, 12, 133–4 Curran, Stuart, 94, 130, 137, 138, 140–1, 147, 202 Dante, 27, 46, 119 Deane, Seamus, 71, 198 Dickens, Charles, 20 Dissenters, 3, 4, 5–7, 16, 17, 20, 21, 33, 49, 90, 101, 113, 154, 156, 191, 202 drama, romantic-era, 52, 53, 67, 122, 139–40 Dryden, John, 111 Duncan, Ian, 151, 154, 172, 176 Edgeworth, Maria, 20, 54, 162, 176, 199 émigrés, 4, 21–3, 154 Elizabeth I, 17, 57, 154 Emmet, Robert, 28, 34, 199 empire, 8–9, 13, 28, 37, 72–3, 124–6, 130, 151, 161, 185–6, 188, 194–6, 214, 202, 203 enthusiasm, 4, 7, 26, 89–92, 192, 196, 203 Ferris, Ina, 6, 10, 14, 55, 151, 169, 201 Fitzherbert, Maria (Mrs), 19, 70 form, literary, 15, 72, 76–7, 84–5, 106–8, 142–5, 161–3, 176, 187–8, 190, 192, 196 Fox, Charles, 19, 27–9, 32, 70, 170 French Revolution, 4, 5, 20–2, 25, 43–4, 46, 93–4, 106, 110, 111, 186, 190–1 fundamentalism, 56, 70, 73, 75–7, 79–80, 84, 86

Geddes, Alexander, 21 Gellner, Ernest, 75–6, 79 George III, 18, 19, 25, 27, 32, 34, 51, 70 George IV, see Prince Regent ghosts, 20, 24, 31, 106–8, 112, 124–5, 129, 133, 175, 177, 190–2, 196, 203 Gibbons, Luke, 10, 22, 37, 187–8, 197 Gillray, James, 32–3, 70–1 Gilroy, Paul, 151, 161, 171 Glorious Revolution, see Revolution of 1688 Godwin, William, 59, 121, 126–7, 129, 133 Gordon Riots, 4, 11, 15, 18–20, 22, 36, 54, 70, 198 gothic, 10, 55, 59, 62, 70, 91, 101–2, 146, 184, 202 Grattan, Henry, 9, 29–30, 34, 51, 130 Greenblatt, Stephen, 10, 105–6, 107, 108–9, 136 Gunpowder Plot, 17, 149 Hazlitt, William, 4, 101–2, 135–6, 197 Hemans, Felicia, 4 history models of, 1–2, 8, 37–9, 47–9, 85–6, 109–10, 112–16, 119–21, 125–7, 128–9, 140, 156–7, 160, 184–5, 186, 190–2, 194–6, 197 national history, 17, 19, 22, 56–7, 103–4, 128, 131, 154, 163–4, 194–5 see also Civil War; Crusades; Elizabeth I; Gunpowder Plot; Reformation; Revolution of 1688 Hogle, Jerrold, 138, 147, 202 Homer, 188–9 Hume, David, 48, 91, 197–98 Hunt, Leigh, 1–2, 3, 4, 34–5, 45, 53, 89, 93, 104, 127, 131–2, 135, 138, 148, 166, 184, 201 idolatry, 102–4 imperialism, see empire Inchbald, Elizabeth, 11, 12, 21, 119, 122, 152, 166 English Catholic identity, 56–60

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Index

Inchbald, Elizabeth – continued The Massacre, 53 in romantic studies, 52–3, 199 A Simple Story, 53–5, 59, 60–86, 96, 101, 139, 153, 162, 166, 168, 171 Irish Question, 9–10, 23–7, 27–32, 38–9, 117–18, 122–3, 123–9, 136, 138, 150, 163–4, 165, 179, 187–8, 191 Irish Rebellion (1798), 4, 15, 23–6, 28, 34, 39, 43, 111, 125, 127, 133, 158, 199 Jager, Colin, 6, 88, 103 Jameson, Fredric, 15, 153 Jeffrey, Francis, 149–51, 156, 161–2, 171 Jews, 23–4, 37–8, 44, 96–7, 159, 164, 172–3, 177–81, 202–3 Jewish Emancipation, 4, 159, 172 Johnson, Samuel, 19–20, 194 Keats, John, 4, 89, 92–3, 96 Kemble, John Philip, 59, 68, 134 Killeen, Jarlath, 2, 10 Kucich, Greg, 35, 140, 197 Lingard, John, 45, 199 History of England, 47–50 Macauley, Thomas, 190 Mahoney, Charles, 15, 35, 124 marriage plot, 28–32, 54–6, 69–70, 71–2, 85, 161, 162–3, 168, 169–72, 175–7, 179–80, 199 Mary, Queen of Scots, 17, 57, 110, 154 McGann, Jerome, 5, 46 Mee, Jon, 6, 7, 90, 116–17, 193, 203 Mellor, Anne, 4, 180 medievalism, 41–2, 57–8, 105–6, 115, 148–51, 193, 197 memory, 9, 10, 14, 40, 72, 74, 76, 81–2, 131, 141, 146, 158, 165, 176–8 millennium, 21, 186, 192 Milner, John, 10, 50 Milton, John, 5, 20, 47, 53, 87, 88, 94–5, 109–10, 119, 143, 147, 186, 201, 202

Ministry of All Talents, 28–9, 32–3, 149 monasticism, 42, 47, 57–8, 59, 115, 128, 154 More, Hannah, 23 Morgan, Lady, see Owenson, Sydney Napoleon, 4, 28, 30, 35–7, 44–5, 59–60, 89, 93, 104, 105, 156 national culture, 7–8, 14, 16, 23, 26–7, 36, 45–7, 50–1, 53, 70, 90, 110–11, 114, 157, 177–8, 194–5, 196 national identity Britishness, 16, 19, 26, 36, 37–8, 42, 48, 53, 72–3, 86, 89, 90, 101, 104–8, 152–3, 171, 179, 182, 185, 191–2 images, discourses, and symbols of, 11 models of, 3–4, 6, 15–16, 150–1, 152–3, 158–9, 165–6, 175–6, 177–81, 185–6, 188–9 see also constitution; ghosts; history; national culture; national landscape; national tale; religious minorities national landscape, 10, 31, 40–1, 57–8, 99–104, 112–16, 114, 155, 160, 166–7, 190 national tale, 28–32, 54–5, 60–1, 71–2, 151, 161, 169–70, 181 Newman, John Henry, 9, 13, 193–6, 203 Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 194 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, 194–5 ‘Second Spring’, 195 Nora, Pierre, 11, 91 Nussbaum, Martha, 8 O’Connell, Daniel, 3, 15, 39, 51, 89, 121, 135, 148, 182, 203 O’Neill, Eliza, 12, 134–6, 146, 201 orientalism, 42, 43–44, 51 Owenson, Sydney, 15, 60, 199 The Wild Irish Girl, 15, 28–32, 38, 54, 69, 101, 162, 168, 176

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Ragussis, Michael, 152, 159, 169–70, 177–8 reconciliation, 9, 11, 24–5, 29–32, 55–6, 60–1, 64, 68–9, 72–3, 78–9, 84–5, 94–5, 100–1, 109–10, 118, 152–3, 159, 162–6, 168–9, 170–2, 176–7, 179–80, 190–1 Reformation, 5, 7, 17, 40–1, 56–7, 103, 119, 131, 149, 154, 176, 190, 194 Reform Bill, 3, 90 reform movement, 3, 18–19, 69, 93, 112, 125, 130, 145, 156, 197 religious minorities, 7, 8–9, 24, 130, 152, 158–9, 164, 169–70, 173, 176–81, 198 Reni, Guido, 133–4 repeal movement, see Test and Corporation Acts Revolution of 1688, 7–8, 9, 10, 17, 21, 90, 101, 109, 111–12, 113–14, 131, 163–4, 186 Ricoeur, Paul, 171 Roe, Nicholas, 43, 93

ruins, 12, 31, 39–41, 57–8, 91, 101–2, 115–16, 117–18, 124–5, 154, 155–6, 167 Ryan, Robert, 5–6, 53, 88, 90, 94, 100–1, 113 sacraments, 98, 108, 136, 139, 142 saints, 103, 108 Sanchez, Juan L., 39 Scotland, 2, 6, 12, 18, 19, 20, 22, 28, 54, 94–5, 97, 102–3, 107, 109, 111, 149, 151, 154, 160–1, 163–5, 170 Scott, Walter, 12, 46, 115, 193–5 The Abbot, 154 on the Catholic Question, 148–50, 179 Guy Mannering, 152, 178 Ivanhoe, 150–2, 152–81 Marmion, 149–50, 171, 202 The Monastery, 154 religion and national identity, 151–2, 154, 169, 179 Waverley, 151, 161 sectarianism, 12, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81–2, 101, 128, 139, 149, 157–9, 168–9, 171, 172–4, 187 secularization, 5–6 Shakespeare, William, 24–6, 65, 150–1, 168, 172, 203 Hamlet, 10, 31, 105–6, 107, 168, 175, 190, 203 Henry VI Part 2, 168 Macbeth, 24–6, 168 The Merchant of Venice, 24 Richard III, 168 Romeo and Juliet, 134 Shelley, Mary, 101 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 4, 5, 11–12, 150, 192 An Address to the Irish People, 123, 127–9, 138 on the Catholic Question, 121, 123–4, 127–8, 130–1, 137, 145, 147 The Cenci, 12, 121, 122, 130, 132, 133–4, 136, 137–47, 162, 166 ‘Defence of Poetry’, 119–20, 126, 141, 145 ‘England in 1819’, 115, 145, 185

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parliamentary debates, 28–32, 35–8, 45, 130–2, 150, 176 partition, 11, 56, 73–8, 80–5, 166–9 Peel, Robert, 148, 182 penal laws, 3, 14, 16–18, 21–2, 38–9, 58, 131, 138, 149, 150, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 176, 198 periodicals Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 50 British Critic, 117, 193–4 Edinburgh Review, 33, 50, 149–51, 190, 202 English Catholic, 14, 40–1, 199 Examiner, 1, 34–5, 45, 102, 132, 197 radical, 49 Peterloo Massacre, 4, 11, 16, 19, 49, 51, 89, 112, 129–30, 150, 154 Pitt, William, 4, 18–19, 26–7, 28, 45–6 Pius VII (Pope), 28, 44–5 Pope, Alexander, 111, 189, 194 purgatory, 10, 46, 105–7, 136 Price, Richard, 21, 43, 61, 185–6 Prince Regent, 4, 10, 34–5, 51, 104, 130, 199

Index

Shelley, Percy Bysshe – continued and Ireland, 121, 123–4, 125–9, 144–7 ‘Irishman’s Song’, 124–5, 127 and Italy, 130, 132–6, 139, 144–7, 149 ‘Peter Bell III’, 101 Prometheus Unbound, 141, 144, 202 Proposals for an Association, 123, 127 religion and politics, 121–2 Sidney, Sir Philip, 110 slavery, see anti-slavery Smith, Charlotte, 4 Southey, Robert, 4, 13, 35, 39, 44, 45, 123–4, 133, 148, 150, 189, 192 Book of the Church, 3, 113, 201 Sir Thomas More: Or Colloquies on the Progress of Society, 189–92 ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’, 10 spirit of the age, 2, 5, 14, 16, 87, 96, 185, 190, 193 superstition, 4, 7–8, 26, 43, 61, 89–92, 93–104, 105, 107–8, 113–14, 116–17, 157, 177, 188, 189, 192–3, 196, 198, 199 sympathy, 6, 11, 30, 39, 52, 53, 54, 56, 64–9, 73–5, 78–85, 96, 99, 126–7, 139–41, 146–7, 158, 171, 172–4, 177, 180 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 188 Test and Corporation Acts, 3, 5, 7, 17, 101, 183 theatre, see drama, romantic-era Thrale (Piozzi), Hester, 20, 136 toleration, 1–2, 7–8, 16, 19, 34, 38, 47, 58, 85–6, 90, 130, 137, 152, 178, 183–5, 196 Tone, Wolfe, 23–5, 26, 199 Trumpener, Katie, 10, 12, 15, 28, 60, 72, 151, 169, 197 Tucker, Herbert, 92, 94 Turner, J.M.W., 186–9

United Irishmen, 23–6, 43, 125, 127, 133 via media, 3–4, 7–8, 9, 12, 43, 89–92, 100–1, 105, 111–12, 112–18, 152, 170, 172–5, 177, 181, 192, 193–5, 196, 197, 199 vengeance, 24–6, 33–4, 73, 125–7, 129, 131–2, 134, 137–9, 143, 144, 146, 153, 159, 167–9, 173, 180 violence, 2, 8, 11, 19, 21, 25–6, 28, 37, 50–1, 53, 56, 66, 71–2, 73, 81, 83–4, 111, 122, 124–5, 126–7, 129, 137–8, 142–3, 144–7, 155, 163, 165, 167–9, 171, 180, 191–2, 196 Viswanathan, Guari, 8–9, 195 Waterloo, 16, 36–7, 44–5, 89 Wellington, Duke of, 12, 131–2, 135, 148, 182, 185 Wheeler, Michael, 7, 152, 192 White, Daniel E., 5 Williams, Raymond, 15, 198 Wiseman, Nicholas, 183 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 66, 80 Wordsworth, William, 4, 11, 35, 36, 193–5 on the Catholic Question, 88–90, 92, 103, 112–13, 114, 148 The Convention of Cintra, 104 Ecclesiastical Sketches, 3, 112–17 Essays on Epitaphs, 104–12, 117 The Excursion, 88–90, 92–104, 115, 116, 117, 118, 190 ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, 108 Prelude, 95, 100 ‘Prospectus to The Recluse’, 87 The Recluse, 87–9 religion and national identity, 87–92 Wright, Julia M., 8, 188

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