Poverty, and the Baronet's Family: A Catholic Story

Back to Victorian Catholic fiction! Poverty, and the Baronet's Family (1846), in some respects, a rather odd bird: the author, convert Henry Digby Beste (1768-1836), left it incomplete at the time of his death, and the preface makes it clear that chunks of it have been "altered and condensed," with a "half-dozen pages" added at various points (which ones are not specified) and some of Digby's other writings swapped in where the editor (his son?) felt it appropriate.  It's therefore impossible to know how much DIgby Beste is to praise or blame for the result.  

Our hero is an Irish Catholic, Bryan O'Meara, whose family was reduced to penury after the Battle of the Boyne.  Once prominent landowners, they are now impoverished peasants.  At the novel's beginning, Bryan's parents (infant Bryan in tow) make an ill-advised trek to England in order to find work; his father rescues Charles Foxglove, young son of the titular Baronet, from drowning, only to die himself as a result.  Touched, the skeptic Sir Cecil Foxglove arranges for Mrs. O'Meara to receive a pension and for Bryan to receive an education suited to his status, but instead Bryan receives a gentleman's education thanks to the efforts of Abbe Piron (an emigrant, thanks to the French Revolution) and Mr. Harrison (an English Catholic convert).  Some years later, a now thoroughly genteel Bryan falls in love with Sir Cecil's daughter Arabella--which, given their differences in religion and, more importantly, social class, everyone agrees is a Bad Thing.  Although Arabella remedies the former problem by eventually converting, the latter obstacle is not removed until, thanks to a series of Fortunate or Unfortunate Events, Bryan is restored to his Irish property and installed as an upcoming leader in Irish Catholic politics.  They marry and live happily ever after, while Abbe Piron enjoys a good death at the altar.

At one point, Digby Beste describes the novel as an "Irish tale" (208), but Poverty actually critiques the most common tropes of the national tale.  It thus joins a series of novels from Mary Grace Susan Crumpe's Geraldine of Desmond (1829) to Emily Lawless' With Essex in Ireland (1890) that subvert the national tale's assumptions about the right resolution to Anglo-Irish conflict.  The most famous example of the national tale, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) features an English man traveling through Ireland, where he encounters an Irish woman (of the title) who becomes his guide to her nation's culture; after she eradicates his prejudices, they eventually marry, thereby symbolically uniting both nations and religions (he's a Protestant).  Note the gendering, which is typical (English/Protestant = male, Irish/Catholic = female).  Poverty, however, reverses the travel vector and its implications.  The O'Mearas are not upper-class, leisured English tourists, whatever their origins, but Irish manual laborers, and their journey to England is entirely pragmatic.  Mrs. O'Meara is not Anglicized in the slightest, aside from acquiring a liking for tea.  Bryan's personal journey across class boundaries--"accustomed as he had been to the lowest, yet feeling himself equal to the highest condition" (95)--makes him a problematic figure: he's Irish, but has no accent; he's genteel, but of low birth; he's Catholic, but financially supported in large part by a Protestant.  Moreover, while he does not at all disdain the prospect of an interfaith marriage, Arabella's conversion short-circuits any potential symbolism in that respect  (and occurs independently of her desire to marry Bryan).  

The Bryan-Arabella marriage plot, far from neatly symbolizing the union (or Union) of Ireland and England, instead celebrates Irish empowerment.  Bryan's return to Ireland turns out to be a trial of his ability to embrace poverty of his own free will, as a form of spiritual discipline that will prepare him for political leadership.  Thus, when he apprentices himself to a farmer, he initially tries to hide when about to be spotted by "a gentleman's carriage," only to ruefully realize his own "folly" (235): he descends to his immediate origins, the better to rise to his true position as holder of an estate and title.  Just as importantly, his cyclical journey requires him to join a secret revolutionary society, where he swears to be "true to the cause of Ireland" (250).  Here we see the politics of his English and Continental education in play: Bryan must choose his nation of birth over his nation(s) of development in order to fully root his identity, but his travels out of Ireland grant him the intellectual sophistication necessary to dominate potentially dangerous poor Irishmen.  The novel advocates a qualified revolutionary position, but only when "the whole pack shall be in full cry all over Ireland" (286), as Bryan puts it--it has no time for guerrilla warfare.  In other words, this is not a novel that tends towards harmonious visions of an Ireland eternally yoked to its English neighbor, even if it also has no time for radical cells.  ("I approve of none but open and generous warfare," Bryan warns another conspirator threatening to kill him [305].)  At the same time, when an English officer is killed by a mob, Bryan reprimands them, but also conceals their involvement in the plot--again, opting for identifying with Irish grievances over any potential English allegiances.  Given that the English landowner who held Bryan's property (illegally, thanks to a will concealed in a tomb for several generations) was also kidnapped with the officer but hands over the property in gratitude for saving his life, Bryan is certainly rewarded for his moral choices.  His marriage to Arabella at the very end and their return to the Irish estate, along with the English convert Mr. Harrison (whose animadversions against the English recusant community seem suspiciously autobiographical), occurs to the tune of Arabella's full-blown critique of her self-centered, quarreling parents and similarly self-centered brother.  The marriage is another reward, but it's a reward that highlights the superficiality of the English aristocracy.  Having learned what he can from the English, Bryan can now put that education to the use of independence.  If anything, the novel celebrates not the union of England and Ireland, but the conscious choice to identify with Ireland as the true haven of Catholicism in the Isles: it's no accident that all the major Catholic characters insist on trekking to Ireland in the end, coming to rest in a community represented as organically unified in its Catholic nature.