Boredom and weariness
Research frequently involves large, unpalatable doses of boredom, exhaustion, and sheer exasperation. No matter how exciting the topic or how invested the scholar, there's no escaping long hours of pulling source after source out of the stacks, reading books that drive you to fantasize about taking extreme measures, and straining one's eyesight while studying tracts printed in four-point fonts. Under such circumstances, blogs prove extremely useful--because, even though you inflicted those anti-Catholic poems from the Bulwark on yourself, you can at least lament your scholarly foolishness to an audience of (one hopes) reasonably sympathetic souls.
Obviously, the boredom factor looms much larger when you're studying works that are not "good" according to even the loosest application of the most liberal aesthetic principles. (At best, as is the case with Newman's Loss and Gain, they may be good things of their kind--in this case, Catholic conversion fiction. Given the choice between Newman-as-novelist and, say, Thackeray, though, Newman loses. Come to think of it, given the choice between Newman-as-novelist and Margaret Oliphant or Mrs. Humphry Ward, Newman loses.) In days of yore, by which I mean the 1980s and earlier, critics working on less-than-good fiction rarely tried to "rescue" it. Here's James Cahalan on mid-19th c. Irish historical fiction: "If the foregoing sentence has conveyed by its deliberate long-windedness any of the sheer exhaustion of trying to read most of these novels, then it has succeeded in its other task, for it is true that many of them are, in Thomas Flanagan's phrase, best lost in 'a merciful oblivion.'"1 Or Margaret Maison on Elizabeth Agnew:
However thickly coated with the jam of "romance", the pill of theology in this type of novel is usually too unwieldy to swallow. Miss Agnew liked to turn her heroes into priests and her heroines into nuns, but her propaganda for the religious life was far too feeble and unconvincing to combat the strong and scandalous tradition of "wicked Jesuit" and "nunnery-tale" books in England at that time.2
Having slogged my way through Geraldine, I can certainly sympathize with Maison's assessment of Agnew's gifts (or "gifts," rather).
From a literary-historical POV, though, such virtuoso displays of sheer ennui can get in the way of thinking about the novels and their actual significance (if any). While many of the novels Cahalan listed in his long, long sentence have vanished into the ether--if only to be resurrected on GoogleBooks--and Agnew's publications after Geraldine were not a huge success (to put it mildly), Geraldine itself sold quite well in the UK and the USA, was translated into French and German, and remained in print from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century. Not as big of a success as Loss and Gain, by any means, but Geraldine is right up there--which means that literary historians dismiss it at their peril, even if everyone else is free to ignore it.
And yet, I've discovered that even tedious novels sometimes "animate" when you start working through their narrative strategies, theological principles, and the like. It is, after all, possible to undo one's boredom by situating the novel in its own historical "story." In a sense, the novels take on new life when they become characters in a scholarly plot...
[1] James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1983), 68.
[2] Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 149.