Irrational/rational
Apropos of Dr. Cumming, I made a quip at Butterflies and Wheels about my "irrational" interest in Victorian anti-Catholicism. Well, irrational in the sense that any prolonged immersion in nineteenth-century anti-Catholic rhetoric is liable to leave one feeling as though one has spent several hours being hit over the head with a remarkably heavy Victorian family Bible. It's not as though either Cumming or R. P. Blakeney (who, thank goodness, tends toward the concise) have much to recommend them in terms of aesthetic achievement. Nor, for that matter, do their counterparts on the fictional side, with the occasional exceptions--Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens, for example. This is not the sort of material you study if you're trying to maximize the pleasure principle.
Why study it, then? I first got interested in the subject as I was finishing up my dissertation, when I realized that the Victorians spent an awful lot of time accusing Roman Catholicism of being anti-marriage and anti-family. Given what I was writing about (narratives of women's history), this seemed like something I'd have to address further down the road. Once I started doing serious research in nineteenth-century religious writing, both fictional and non- , I became further intrigued by the historical battlefields on which writers tended to conduct their religious warfare--and, thus, my interest in religion promptly dovetailed with my interest in the historical novel. Catholics are everywhere in Victorian religious fiction, even when they aren't actually "there" as characters; while we're now mostly sensitive to representations of Jewish otherness, Catholic otherness was considerably more threatening. While Protestants often argued that Judaism and Catholicism were, to all intents and purposes, the "same" religion, with sometimes comical results, at least Jews weren't out to convert anyone--and, of course, there was no handy Jewish equivalent to Queen Mary I. Some Jews, like Grace Aguilar, sought to distance themselves from Roman Catholicism by rhetorically affiliating themselves with evangelical Protestantism; some Roman Catholics, as Andrea Ebel Brozyna has shown, promptly turned anti-Catholic rhetoric back against the Protestants. But all of them interpreted their ongoing battles in terms of ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and (of course) providential history.
One of the great difficulties in working with controversial rhetoric is that it's so difficult to localize it. While the Victorians certainly produced boatloads of their own propaganda materials, they also borrowed much of their anti-Catholicism from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources (something I call "vulgar Foxeism" in a forthcoming article...). Twentieth- and twenty-first century anti-Catholicism, meanwhile, cheerfully recycles many of the Victorian texts, including the escaped nun narratives and a number of the significant polemicists (e.g., Charles Chiniquy). Try googling around for Edith O'Gorman, Rebecca Reed, Maria Monk, Barbara Ubryk, or Josephine Bunkley, and see where you wind up. In many instances, the rhetoric doesn't change, but the circumstances that elicit it do. For example, I've jokingly subdivided the trials and travails of Victorian anti-Catholic campaigning like this:
1) The Catholics are coming! (late 1820s to 1829)
2) The Catholics have arrived! (post-1829 to the 1840s)
3) The Catholics are trying to take over! (1850s to mid-1870s or so)
4) Why am I the only person worrying about the Catholics? (1870s to the end of the century)
My increasingly old friend, Emily Sarah Holt, falls into category four; writing in the wake of Catholic legislative advances and growing evangelical weariness, she represents herself as the staunch representative of a persecuted Protestant orthodoxy. She's a reactionary, in other words, but she also sees herself giving voice to what could be called "cultural" anti-Catholicism, which persisted long after political anti-Catholicism had turned out to be a dud. And, significantly, the venue for her anti-Catholicism is her history of Great Britain, which extends over about forty novels--her point being that Britain had never been "Catholic," even when it was Catholic.