Marketing

I spent a few hours today working with a Victorian religious novel (what else?) that had a very odd title: The Converts; A Tale of the Nineteenth Century: Or, Romanism and Protestantism Brought to Bear in Their True Light against One Another.  "What's so odd about that?" inquires the puzzled reader.  "It sounds like a standard-issue anti-Catholic novel."  Ah, but it was published by a Catholic press, Keating & Brown!  As a general rule, Catholic publishers don't sell books with anti-Catholic keywords like "Romanism" in the title.  So, what gives?

To understand what the publisher was doing, it helps to know that anti-Catholic fiction was sometimes published with innocuous, ambiguous subtitles like "A Roman Catholic Tale" or "A Roman Catholic Story."  The most notorious instance of this is Grace Kennedy's Father Clement (1823), which to this day is still occasionally marketed as a Catholic text.  The Converts, which is probably an indirect response to Father Clement, simply inverts the strategy: it passes itself off as a "Protestant" novel, only to deliver a fictionalized manual on the major doctrines and practices of the Catholic faith.