Joe Baker; Or, the One Church

Joe Baker; Or, the One Church appeared anonymously in 1853 under the auspices of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul; the author was Mrs. Gertrude Parsons, a convert who wrote several other didactic Catholic novels.  At least one Protestant thought the book was part of a conspiracy to get Catholic literature into the hands of the poor, although the liberal Catholic magazine The Rambler seemed to be under the impression that elite artisans and middle-class Protestants were the real target.  The novel itself is told in the first person by Joe, whose story anticipates John Halifax, Gentleman in a number of ways: the orphaned Joe begins as a child laborer in a bakery before eventually taking over the business himself; the increasingly successful Joe seeks to marry the amazing Fanny Cowper, who turns him down because she could never marry a non-Catholic.  Joe makes what at first seems like a bad marriage to Ellen, whose family gives new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," but he and his wife turn out to work well together, and the business prospers.  Fanny, meanwhile, marries a farmer, the rather heavy-handedly named Fairfield.  Inspired by Fanny, Joe keeps thinking that he ought to convert to Catholicism, but somehow never gets around to it.  As his cashbox grows heavier, Joe insists on training his daughter to become a true gentlewoman, while secretly hoping that she will become Catholic herself.  This being a religious novel, however, things have to go spectacularly wrong, and so they do: the Fairfields lose their farm in a fire, although not before Joe heroically saves one of their children from the flames; and, to no reader's great surprise, Joe's daughter dies of a patented Mysterious Victorian Illness, but not before the Fairfields convert her.  Joe and Ellen, convinced by their witness, finally convert. 

This novel deploys the usual tropes associated with all conversion fictions, whether Protestant or Catholic.  Joe's education, such as it is, leaves him ignorant of all religion; the only religious language he knows "was from the language of cursing and swearing, with which I was perfectly familiar" (4).  Nevertheless, what religion he does encounter leaves him cold.  In particular, he is annoyed by facile Protestant assertions about "grace" (6), and cannot help noting that Protestants never find anything to "agree upon as being true" (8).  (While 19th-c. Catholic novelists make disagreements between denominations into proof that Protestantism cannot be true, Protestants do the same thing by playing the various Councils, etc. against each other.)  Needless to say, Joe doesn't feel much of anything in church.  Of course, when the working-class Catholic Fairfield makes an appearance, he easily makes doctrinal mincemeat out of poor Mr. Knight, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman, despite the latter's far superior education (which, apparently, did not include any tips about conducting an argument).  But given his name, it's not surprising that Mr. Knight eventually converts, thanks to the Catholic Penny Catechism he confiscates from Joe. 

And here is where the novel does something out of the ordinary: this is a Catholic conversion novel conspicuously lacking in priests.  All of the evangelism is lay evangelism.  Frequently, Catholic conversion novels represent lay evangelism as the first step towards conversion, but the final step involves an intense process of study under priestly guidance.  While this strategy obviously represents the centrality of the priest to Catholic spiritual life, it is also a deliberate riposte to evangelical conversion novels, which both grant center stage to lay evangelists and tend to deny that the convert needs to know anything besides the Bible.  Here, though, Mrs. Parsons invites both working-class and middle-class Protestants to contemplate the possibility that the example set by Joe's social equals might be sufficient to ensure his conversion; in fact, the novel incorporates some snarking on anti-Catholic propaganda near the end, as Joe discovers that his daughter's story has been transformed (in a game of Victorian anti-Catholic telephone) into yet another example of an evil priest's influence.  Quite pointedly, too, the elite Anglo-Catholic priest winds up converted by a publication aimed at the working class.