British Library, Day Twenty-One

We have Protestants! We have Catholics! We have people complaining about Catholic Emancipation debates! (Also, we have only two parts of a serialized novel, which is really annoying.)

• Mary Maher, Her Father's Trust: A Catholic Story (Burns & Oates, 1900).  A Catholic novel (er, yes) about the dangers of sending one's children to Protestant universities.  Judge O'Hara, a proud (sin!) man and graduate of Trinity, sends his son Charlie there as well, despite Mrs. O'Hara's protests.  Moreover, he also encourages his intellectual daughter Rose in her pride (sin!).  As a reward for the Judge's behavior, Charlie is paralyzed and then dies.  Moreover, the Judge himself turns out to be a gambler (sin!), a habit he picked up at Trinity, and destroys the family fortunes.  Then, of course, he also dies.  In the meantime, the angelic Eileen has to give up her engagement to keep her mother and brother (while he's still alive) going.   Eventually, of course, Eileen gets her beloved (after he's widowed and has a kid), and her sister repents.  BODY COUNT: Six.  
• Convent Life; Or, Should Protestant Children Be Educated in Roman Catholic Schools? A Story (Evangelical Knowledge Society, 1876).  Answer: no.  Sort of a flip of the novel above.  Several families send their Protestant children to a convent school, which is never a good idea.  Despite various promises, the girls are all cajoled into Catholicism, with a couple of the girls converting.   The usual run of prooftexts abound.  Also, there's a sexy priest. Finally, all the parents see the error of their ways, and the girls are (mostly) reclaimed.  The girl who remains Catholic dies in misery, as one does in Protestant fiction.  BODY COUNT: Four.
• Amy Mary Grange, A Modern Galahad (Catholic Truth Society, 1895).  Anglo-Catholic Edmund Franklyn begins to feel there is something missing, as Anglicans generally do in Catholic novels.  Eventually, he converts, which makes various people grumpy.  Meanwhile, his sister Aldyth, a devout Ritualist, is allowed to marry her nominally Christian beloved Gilbert in order to stave off the danger of her becoming (gulp) Catholic.  Of course, like all nominal Christians, Gilbert turns out to be a gambler who ultimately commits suicide, although not before he becomes a Catholic on his deathbed.  Meanwhile, various other people convert, including an Anglican clergyman who, at the end of the novel, hopes to marry Aldyth one day.  The novel regularly contrasts the Christian chivalric ideal ("Galahad") to a more erotic romantic one (a wild "cavalier").  BODY COUNT: One.
• The Sandy-Row Convert: A Tale of the Belfast Revival (George Phillips & Sons, n.d.).  The incomplete novel (somewhat mind-bogglingly, the first part ends mid-sentence, and the sentence picks up in the next).  Young Flora Verner (Protestant) is engaged to Edward Conway (Catholic), which does not bode well.  To make matters even more tense, Flora converts at a revival meeting (yay!), while Edward turns out to be a Ribbonman (uh-oh).  And...that's all she wrote, or at least, all she archived.  BODY COUNT: Presumably, but not yet.
• Calamities of the Catholic Question: A Story of the Times (Thomas Hookham, 1829).  Satirical story about the social effects of debating Catholic Emancipation.  A young man, who finds politics boring, is saddled with an ardently pro-Emancipation father.  The son goes off to court his cousin Margaret, but matters go cock-a-hoop when he discovers that her father is ardently anti-Emancipation and that Margaret herself is Catholic.  Her father disavows both of them.  Returning home, he discovers that his own father won't allow him to marry a Catholic, because he's actually anti-Catholic (the point of Emancipation is to get them to assimilate to Protestantism).  When Dad dies suddenly because of an Emancipation debate, the son sees his chance, only to discover that Margaret is now a nun.  BODY COUNT: One.