"Liberality,--A Sketch" (Part I)

[One of the frustrations of any scholarly project: the amount of material you wind up deleting from it. What follows was originally part of Book Two, but wound up being too much of a distraction from the chapter's main point. I've added some notes and hyperlinks, and clarified a few points lost without the original context. The second half of the excerpt will be in the next post.]

We can see the Protestant historical argument against pro-Catholic toleration at work in a two-part short story that began running in the staunchly anti-Catholic Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine in July 1829--just two months after the Catholic Emancipation Act passed. One of the first (if hardly the best) fictional reactions to Catholic Emancipation, “Liberality,--A Sketch” describes the act's after-effects from two points of view. The first is that of the new Protestant curate, known as Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Mortimer depending on what page we’re reading, and the second of the local landlord, Mr. Egerton. In the first half, the narrative lays out Mr. Montgomery’s/Mortimer’s Protestant critique of Catholic toleration; in the second, it proves that the curate is right and Mr. Egerton wrong about the effects of pro-Catholic sentiment. Taken as a whole, the story charts the dangers of what we now call “framing”: at this post-Emancipation moment in time, the “liberals” have successfully defined themselves as the representatives of enlightened modernity, allowing Catholics an equal place in the public sphere while denouncing all opposition thereto as antiquated, not to mention potentially threatening, prejudice. As the title announces, such sentiment derives from “liberality,” and the story immediately yokes liberality to both commercialism and the Gothic: the town, after all, is called “Moneyrogue,” an aesthetically-pleasing but spiritually-deadened “market town,” governed by the principle of exchange, and it is “grievously afflicted by a spirit—a spirit! Yes, by a spirit of liberality."¹ (By "liberality," the author means something close to John Henry Newman's definition of early Victorian liberalism, the "anti-dogmatic principle."²) The first paragraph begins by associating this problematically-named town with taste (the lovely church, the picturesque location), modernity (a fine local doctor), and benevolence (the resident landlord), but sprouting in the midst is the architectural monstrosity of the Roman Catholic chapel, “most enormous and overgrown” (37), which spoils both the view and the religious feeling of the area. But the ironically Gothic “spirit” haunting the town does not, in fact, reside in the Church; it resides in the entire town. In fact, this “spirit” has other unusual qualities, for it is not the uneasy remnant of some unsettled past, but an artifact of contemporary and living culture. Nor does the spirit unsettle those under its sway. Quite the contrary:

¹ “Liberality, A Sketch,” The Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine 9 (July 1829): 37.

² For an extensive discussion of this and other meanings of "liberal," "liberality," and "liberalism" in Victorian religious discourse, see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 245-72.