Invented difficulties, transatlantic version
Hindsight sometimes creates as well as reveals conceptual difficulties. Sometimes, there are reasonable but bathetic (or even comical) explanations for otherwise bizarre phenomena, like the enthusiasm of various Sunday school prizegivers* for Grace Aguilar's Women of Israel. Here's a biography collection explicitly devoted to the proposition that you don't need to be Christian to be a moral person--being Jewish is just fine, thanks. Victorian reviewers, like the one in the Athenaeum, thought that it was a nice book, but objectionable on the grounds of its excessive Jewishness. (Critics thought that Aguilar's advocacy was somewhat close-minded.**) Why, then, was the book not only given away in Sunday schools, but also explicitly recommended for girls in at least one American conversion novel***? Someone on the VICTORIA list suggested that there was at least one possible explanation: nobody actually read the book. That, I must say, sounds like a depressingly plausible solution to what otherwise looks like an insoluble difficulty.
The role of American--both US and Canadian--anti-Catholic texts in British anti-Catholic thinking presents a slightly different problem. G. F. A. Best argued many decades ago that anti-Catholic literature really needs to be understood as an Anglo-American phenomenon, and it looks like Susan M. Griffin has tried to understand it in that light (although the Choice review suggests that she doesn't really take a historicist approach****). As I think I've mentioned here before, the most popular ex-Catholic texts all came from North America, including The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent, Edith O'Gorman's Convent Life Unveiled (scroll down for an indignant letter), Josephine Bunkley's Testimony of an Escaped Novice, The Convent Horror: The Story of Barbara Ubryk, Margaret L. Shepherd's My Life in the Convent, and Charles Chiniquy's Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. These texts normally focus less on theology than on what the bestselling polemicist R. P. Blakeney called Catholicism "in its social aspect," especially when it comes to family, authority relationships, and sexuality.
While British and American writers tend to agree on what interests them, local variations aside--e.g., British writers complain about Catholic governesses, American writers complain about Catholic attempts to undermine public education--the rhetorical differences strike the modern reader as a problem. Or are they? Put simply, while writers on both sides of the Atlantic emphasize the fate of Catholic bodies, male and female, American writers approach the sadistic in their loving accounts of extreme torture and physical mutilation, whereas the British normally take refuge in evasive language or representations of psychological trauma. This holds true in both fictional and "factual" (factional?) anti-Catholic texts. There are certainly some outliers in British fiction, like Anna Eliza Bray's anti-Emancipation novel The Protestant (torture, sexual depravity), Catherine Sinclair's Beatrice (extreme asceticism), and William Sewell's Hawkstone (villain eaten alive by rats). Nevertheless, few British writers are so blunt as Chiniquy, who starts things off with a bang by giving us a poignant account of a priest who castrates himself, then describes how the confessional sexualizes young children. (Chiniquy returns to this latter theme at far greater length in The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional.) Similarly, Maria Monk, which has sometimes been classified as a kind of Protestant pornography, involves lengthy and detailed descriptions of all sorts of inventive physical punishments, as does Convent Life Unveiled. British writers usually prefer to leave the physical details to the imagination, sometimes--as in the case of Deborah Alcock or E. S. Holt--pointedly cutting away from any distressing scenes; often, the reader gets the after-effects of torture, not the torture itself. Sex, too, largely stays off the radar, although there are certainly portentious hints about women feeling unhappy in confessional situations (e.g., Emma Worboise's Overdale and Ruth Elliott's Undeceived).
From a historical point of view, then, it's interesting that the British apparently preferred to import the most explicit forms of anti-Catholic literature. It's not as though they didn't have any homegrown examples--the numerous nineteenth-century abridgements of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, anyone?--but it seems as though the British liked to leave new versions of this sort of thing to the Americans. Did the rhetorical differences trouble anyone, though? Here's where the "invented problem" comes in. Given that the British quite happily turned Maria Monk into a bestseller (something about which John Henry Newman understandably complained), it would seem that American sensationalism was perfectly acceptable for popular consumption. Or was it? Because these texts were rarely reviewed in mainstream literary or political journals, it's difficult to track reception history in that fashion; what I need to do is read more newspapers, dedicated religious journals, and so on. I do know that the Bulwark quite enthusiastically endorsed Father Chiniquy.
*--My own copy was a first prize for attendance at a Presbyterian Sunday school in 1888.
**--See this review in the New Englander and Yale Review; while the journal is American rather than English, the reviewer's response is typical. For an interesting contrast, see this Jewish reviewer, who gently objects to Aguilar's take on women's equality...
***--“But, mamma,” said Belle, “she is a Christian, I know from good authority, and I am prepared to love her because I love the Jewish nation,--of which she is a beautiful representative,--and have loved them ever since I read Grace Aguillar’s [sic] ‘Women of Israel.’”
“Oh, yes!” cried several young girls, who had been standing in a group in one corner of the long parlor, winding skeins of cotton; “how nice it will be to look at her and think of Miriam, Esther, and Ruth!” C. A. O., Into the Light; Or, the Jewess (Boston: Lee and Shepard, n.d. [1867]), 256.
****--No, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm about to ILL a copy.