The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780-1880

By Diane Long Hoeveler

The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an ‘other’ against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The ‘Gothic ideology’ is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783161935

Diane Long Hoeveler

Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she has taught since 1987. She is author of Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (2010), which won the Allan Lloyd Smith memorial award from the International Gothic Association; Gothic Feminism (1998); and Romantic Androgyny (1990).

Book preview

THE GOTHIC IDEOLOGY

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

The Gothic Ideology

Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction 1780–1880

Diane Long Hoeveler

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Diane Long Hoeveler 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–1–7831–6048–8

e-ISBN: 978-1-78316-193-5

The right of Diane Long Hoeveler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Illustration from M. G. Lewis, The Monk (1859).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Ideology: Interlocking Discourse Networks

2 The Construction of the Gothic Nun: Fantasies and the Religious Imaginary

3 The Spectre of Theocracy: Mysterious Monks and ‘Priestcraft’

4 The Foreign Threat: Inquisitions, Autos-da-Fé and Bloody Tribunals

5 Ruined Abbeys: Justifying Stolen Property and the Crusade against Superstition

Epilogue: The Penny Dreadful and the (Almost) Last Gasp of the Gothic Ideology

Notes

Bibliography

Appendix: Anti-Catholic/Gothic Titles

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Figure 1.1: Gissey de Bordelet, Histoire du Père Jean Baptiste Girard Jésuite, et de la Delle Marie-Catherine Cadière, divisee en 32 planches

Figure 2.1: Chapbook version of Eliza, or the Unhappy Nun

Figure 2.2: Frontispiece to The Nun; or, Memoirs of Angelique; An Interesting Tale

Figure 2.3: Frontispiece to The Legends of a Nunnery

Figure 3.1: Frontispiece to Father Innocent

Figure 4.1: Frontispiece to Brompton Revelations

Figure 4.2: Climactic scene from G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Bronze Statue, or The Virgin’s Kiss

Figure E.1: Mysteries of a London Convent

Figure E.2: Poster advertising the production of Le Diable au Couvent by Eugène Hugot

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing a book is often a lonely and haphazard journey, frequently full of potholes and dead ends. The composition of this book, however, was a pleasure, filled with charming vistas, intriguing interludes, and challenging but exhilarating jaunts into new territory. It is my pleasure here to thank the people who made this trip so enjoyable: Marquette University’s Committee on Research awarded me a three-year Way-Klingler Humanities Fellowship to travel to archives and libraries in America and Europe in order to gather the primary texts used here, and for that support I am immensely grateful. In Paris I was hosted by Pascale Sardin at the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, and I would like to thank the audience there for asking me such probing questions during my visit; in Germany I was hosted by Norbert Besch, the man with a treasure trove of Gothic arcana at his fingertips; and in Toulouse I was hosted by Maurice Lévy, the late great French Gothicist who allowed me to digitize his French Gothic collection before it was shipped to the University of Virginia in 2012. In England, I was hosted by Chloe Chard and twice by Nora and Keith Crook, and I will always be grateful for their hospitality and kindness to me.

The scholarly Gothic/Romantic community has embraced my work and made me feel particularly supported. Special thanks go to Robert Miles, David Punter, Anne Williams, Steve Bruhm, Bill Hughes, Andrew Smith, Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik, Dale Townshend, Angela Wright and Tina Morin. Colleagues who have read my work or have always been generous with their time are Stephen Behrendt, Marshall Brown, Fred Burwick, Benjamin Colbert, David Collings, Jeff Cass, Jeff Cox, Gary Dyer, Nancy Goslee, Jonathan Gross, Nicholas Halmi, Regina Hewitt, Jeff Kahan, Gary Kelly, John Mahoney, Victoria Nelson, Richard Sha, Douglas Thomson, Jack Voller and Judith Wilt. I am particularly grateful to David Salter and Marie Léger-St-Jean for reading drafts of this work at an early stage and offering helpful advice and encouragement. Several sections of this book were originally presented at conferences held by the British Association of Romantic Studies, the International Gothic Association, the International Conference on Romanticism, the Humanities Center at DePaul University, and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.

Scholars and librarians who have helped me track down images and references and have gone above and beyond in answering my frequent queries are John Adcock, Elizabeth James, Louis James, Andrea Lloyd, Michael Ferber, Michael Gavin, Justin Gilbert, Steve Holland, Denis Paz, Elizabeth Denlinger, Patrick Scott, John Selby, Nancy F. Sweet and Stephen Karian. My research assistants at Marquette – Brian Kenna, Abby Vande Walle, Camilia Cenek and Robin Graham – did the hard work of converting digital material to Word files for my use. Rose Fortier transferred most of the chapbooks discussed in this book to the online site, ‘The Gothic Archive’. I am immensely grateful for her technical savvy. Joan Sommer at Marquette University’s office of interlibrary loan handled more requests than I am sure she cares to remember, and I would like to thank the librarians and curators who were extraordinarily patient when I was such a persistent presence at a variety of libraries: the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Sadleir–Black collection at the University of Virginia Library, the Pforzheimer Collection, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliotèque-Nationale-Richelieu and Tolbiac, and the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra-Paris.

I am also indebted to the editors of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment and European Romantic Review for permission to republish materials originally printed in different versions in those venues. At the University of Wales Press, I would like to acknowledge the skilful editorial work of Sarah Lewis and Sian Chapman. Thanks also to Andrew Davidson and Claire Rose at Prepress Projects. I am also immensely grateful to Professor Jerry Hogle of the University of Arizona, who served as the press’s external reader and provided astute and very helpful critiques during the publication process. At Marquette, I am grateful for the support of my dean, Fr Philip Rossi, SJ. And, as always, it is a pleasure to thank my beloved and loving family, David, John and Emily Hoeveler.

Introduction

Falsis terroribus Implet [Torture my breast with fictions]

Epistles (Horace, 1749: II. 398)

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

What Is a Nation? (Renan, 1990: 12)

The cover of this book, an illustration from Purkess’s 1848 penny dreadful adaptation of Matthew Lewis’s vehemently anti-Catholic novel The Monk (1796), depicts very clearly the hysterical energy that was brought to the issue of religion in what was supposedly a progressive era.¹ Representing the climactic moment in the text when the Franciscan monk Ambrosio seizes his sister Antonia by the hair just after raping her in the catacombs beneath his Madrid monastery, the illustration spoke to the general public’s pervasive fears about the presence of an increasing number of Catholic clergy in a Britain that was by this time thoroughly invested in a form of nationalistic Protestantism. This scene of a sadistic monk raping, torturing and murdering a young innocent woman (and in this case, unbeknownst to him, his long-lost sister) was continually reprinted in the penny press throughout the century, while depictions of The Monk’s perverse and violent attacks on his mother and sister were persistently popular tropes in Gothic texts, so frequently repeated that one marvels at how the populace could not have been quickly sated with their depiction. However, quickly sated they do not seem to have been. Variations on this representation have continued to appear in hundreds of literary texts for over 200 years, seemingly in direct contradiction to claims recently made by Franco Moretti (2009). Using more than 7,000 novels from several different countries published over a 160-year period, Moretti asserts that genres coalesce in fairly regular patterns, and that they shift, absorbing some features of the earlier and most popular genres, about every 25 years (2005: 20–2). Relying on the theories of Karl Mannheim, he claims that this phenomenon occurs because of the changing tastes of readers, or, as Mannheim asserts, as generations change, genres change (Moretti, 2005: 21). However, Moretti clearly would like to fine-tune this theory, stating that ‘some kind of generational mechanism seems the best way to account for the regularity of the novelistic cycle – but generation is itself a very questionable concept. Clearly, we must do better’ (2005: 22). I would concur, because generations of readers have continued to be intrigued and entertained by tales of evil or persecuted nuns, lecherous monks, dank torture chambers, haunted ruined abbeys and wily Jesuits.² The question is: why?

There has always been a good deal of controversy about the presence of religion and religious tropes in Anglo-American and European Gothic textualities. On one hand, critics such as M. M. Tarr, Irene Bostrom, Maurice Lévy, Victor Sage and Susan Griffin have claimed that the Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower-class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788. On the other hand, Maria Purves has recently claimed that, by focusing only on a ‘handful of works’ (2009: 208) that do not represent the full range of Gothic writing, literary historians have failed to recognize the

Burkean counter-revolutionary discourse in the 1790s [which] made possible a favourable opinion of Catholicism as a strategically important part of England’s heritage within the context of pro-Catholic sympathy in the form of the incremental Catholic Relief legislation of the late eighteenth century and England’s national support of the French clergy. (2009: 204)

In this position she is following the lead of Warren Hunting Smith (1970: 22) and David Mathew, who argued in 1936 that ‘the French Revolution was of great benefit to Catholicism in England by bringing back the schools and colleges, so long established abroad, to English soil’ (1948: 162). However, the fact of the Gordon Riots of 1780, which left close to 300 dead in London, and the anxious reaction to the 1800 Irish Act of Union make it patently obvious that there was strong if not hysterical sentiment among the lower and middling classes against any attempt to loosen the restrictions on Catholic emancipation every step of the way.³

The most current iteration of this critical controversy, however, simply repeats a very similar one conducted some seventy years ago between Joyce Tompkins and Montague Summers. In my Gothic Riffs (2010a) I stated that the stark differences in opinions on this issue might be resolved by recognizing that an ‘either/or’ explanation will not suffice, but that in fact a ‘both/and’ method is the more accurate way of accounting for the bifurcated ideological agendas that can be found in the hundreds of Gothic texts that were published during the 1780–1880 period. As I argued there, Gothic literature can best be understood as part of the Western secularization process, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is cultural work that reveals the drive towards secularization on the part of the elites and middle classes throughout Europe, from roughly 1780 to 1880.⁴ However, in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an ‘other’ against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. In Gothic literature, a reactionary, demonized and feudal Catholicism is created in order to stand in opposition to the modern Protestant individual, who then alternately combats and flirts with this uncanny double in a series of cultural productions that we recognize as Gothic novels. Although one can certainly point to a few exceptions to the demonization of Catholicism in the general culture, such as the Catholic convert and architect A. W. Pugin’s influential book Contrasts (1836), a work that attempted to present the life of pre-Reformation England as suffused with beauty and spirituality, such an example represents a decidedly minority opinion, not to mention an elitist one. Catholic nostalgia or the representation of an aestheticized Catholicism that can be detected in the works of the early Pre-Raphaelites or Pugin led to an anti-industrial ethos that merged very directly in the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris. Such a position is clearly at odds with a secularizing agenda and was possible only in communities that had the resources to separate themselves from the masses of ordinary workers.

The Gothic chapbooks and popular media that developed to feed the interests and needs of a growing class of barely literate people were another matter altogether. These productions and adaptations are not the leather-bound, hand-tooled Gothic ‘luxury commodities’ produced for an elite class that Emma Clery discusses (1995: ch. 6), but instead are cheaply produced and covered in heavy blue paper, almost disposable after a few readings. Their ideologies are also not ones that the elite would have endorsed. Instead, the chapbooks are steeped in a much earlier attitude towards gender, politics, religion and morality, or what has been defined somewhat contentiously as the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ ethos (see Berlin et al., 1998; Garrard, 2003; 2006; 2011). Indeed, the world-view depicted in the Gothic chapbooks was an anachronism even in its own time, and, given this, they offer us a unique perspective on a lingering pre-modern consciousness, entranced with visions of a chivalric, medieval-inflected England doing battle with the forces of Spain, France and a persistently Catholic ‘other’ within their own midst.⁵ The lower-class Gothic imaginary has remained consistently familiar, with an intense fear of a secularized devil-figure who has, since the sixteenth century, gone by the name of Abbess, Inquisitor or Monk. When the supernatural died its long and slow death in full public view, the lower-class imaginary sought to keep the demonic and the divine alive in all of their magnificent power. They created discourses that placed demonic nuns and mysterious monks in landscapes that were charged with the fallen grandeur of the Catholic Church: ruined abbeys, secret tribunals and crumbling cathedrals. When the dust settled, the Protestant individual emerged, a bit worse for the wear but willing (it would seem) to face the daunting challenges and mixed opportunities that literacy, democracy and liberalism presented.

Although there has been a lively debate over whether the Gothic is an ideology or should be understood as an aesthetic,⁶ there is no denying the fact that hundreds of Gothic novels present what I have identified as a ‘Gothic ideology’: an intense religious anxiety caused by the aftershocks of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the dy-nastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany and France and played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe from the mid-eighteenth century through 1880 and largely intended for the lower and ‘middling’ classes of readership.⁷ A veritable flood of texts arose from these shocks and much of it has come to be characterized as Gothic, both in its subject matter (a focus on perverse or frustrated nuns, deceptive priests, dark and dank torture chambers of the Inquisition, and ruined abbeys) and in its literary techniques (‘type-scenes’,⁸ aporia, analepsis, paranoia and intense suspense, multiple and overlapping narratives and characters, abrupt dénouements, doubled and flat characters, propagandizing via moralizing, and a privileging of melodramatic morality). Given the consistency of the genre as a transnational manifestation, it is impossible not to discuss as well a variety of French or German works that either were the source texts for British works or were almost immediately translated into English and wildly popular in their exploration of these same topics.

It has been noted that Catholicism has been situated in the cross-hairs of the Enlightenment project since the era’s origins, however one may choose to date that event (the period of the Reformation, the writings of Hobbes, Locke and Mandeville, or the works of Voltaire and Diderot). Horkheimer and Adorno have observed on this issue:

The particular mythology which the Western Enlightenment, even in the form of Calvinism, had to get rid of was the Catholic doctrine of the ordo [order, rules] and the popular pagan religion which still flourished under it. The goal of bourgeois philosophy was to liberate men from all this. But the liberation went further than its humane progenitors had conceived. The unleashed market economy was both the actual form of reason and the power which destroyed reason. The Romantic reactionaries only expressed what the bourgeois themselves experienced: that in their world freedom tended toward organized anarchy. The Catholic counterrevolution proved itself right as against the Enlightenment, just as the Enlightenment had shown itself to be right in regard to Catholicism. (1944: 90)

Horkheimer and Adorno fix their sights on an analysis of the writings of Sade and, in particular, his porno-Gothic novel Juliette (1797–1801), which they read as a sustained attack on Catholicism, Pope Pius VI and the convent system, all of them condemned in the name of ‘reason’. However, in fact, the Gothic is engaged in a larger de-sacralizing process that in many ways owes its linguistic and thematic origins to even earlier Reformation, anti-monastic, libertine and Enlightenment projects.

I will argue here that the anti-Catholic tropes and type-scenes that emerge in so many Gothic texts actually can trace their origins to two Reformation Ur-texts: the Compendium compertorum (1536), a report which enabled King Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries and appropriate their lands for his own use, and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, later titled The Book of Martyrs. Foxe’s text was published four times during his lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583), each time reprinting in more detail the Henrician charges of clerical ‘incontinence’, thereby disseminating the Reformation’s agenda in a book that became so prominent that eventually it was placed next to the Bible in every church in England. Foxe’s text represented the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain as blood-thirsty and vampiric, whereas the Henrician report detailed the sexual vices, particularly sodomy and fornication, supposedly practised by monks and nuns in 111 monasteries and convents in the kingdom (Logan, 2002: 219). Legends about finding niches in which pregnant nuns were buried alive began to proliferate, as did the oft-repeated tale of digging up hundreds of baby skeletons in the nuns’ graveyards. Both of these vignettes seem to originate in an exaggerated retelling of the findings in the Henrician report. What I am contending is that the charges made against Catholic clergy in these two seminal works then made their way into hundreds of Calvinist and Protestant pamphlets published over the next century, John White’s The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (1643) being only one example of the many of this sort. In addition to these British Reformation sources, the Gothic discourse network is also clearly indebted to the French tradition that includes anti-clerical, propagandistic or philosophical works such as Jean Baptiste de Boyer Argens’s Thérèse Philosophe (1748), Diderot’s The Nun (1759; published 1796; English translation 1797), and Voltaire’s La Voix du sage et du peuple (1750).

The primary question that interests me here is straight-forward: why does Catholicism assume such a prominent role in Gothic texts intended for the lower and middling classes, functioning as something of a master trope in hundreds of titles published in Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Canada? One possible clue is provided by David Vincent, who has noted that the culture of the ‘Common People’ was immune to the transforming power of print: ‘superstitious beliefs and practices "consecrated to the Fancies of Men, by a Usage from Time immemorial, though erazed by public Authority from the written Word, were committed as a venerable Deposit to the keeping of oral Tradition" ’ (Vincent, 1989: 6, quoting Brand, 1777: xiii). The Gothic chapbook and novel retold very old oral narratives that had passed into the category of the folkloric, and the print versions of these tales relied on shocking and grotesque imagery and representations because they were seeking to recreate the original oral character of most of these tales. Rome continued to function as the chief enemy of the Whig establishment because it had been such a convenient and widely recognized target since the Reformation period. Using the new print technologies, supplemented with older oral and visual traditions, a political, religious and social agenda took form in what we can recognize now as the Gothic ideology. This system of beliefs relied for its message on a few formal literary transformations and semantic proliferations (what I have identified as type-scenes), as well as vivid and shocking frontispieces to draw in a lower-class readership.

But why would the Whig establishment want to fan the flames of anti-Catholicism at precisely this time? The historical context, which I will discuss in Chapter 1, was complex and involved justifying the Hanoverian claims to the throne and blocking the passage of a variety of reform bills that would give Catholics the right to own property, serve in the military and attend university. In fact, the Gothic originated in rehearsing tales of usurpation, false identities and contested wills, all of which could be read as political and religious allegories for the evolving state of Great Britain in a post-Stuart era. Attempting to read politics into literature, however, recalls Antonio Gramsci’s critique of ‘cultural hegemony’, with its notion that ‘above’ should be understood as the ‘dominant’ class and ‘below’ should be read as the dominated or ‘subordinate’ classes (2007: 291). There is no doubt that it is perilous to try to claim that dominated groups before 1789 had a ‘political consciousness’ or that the government had a role in shaping popular culture at the expense of other historical agents (P. Burke, 2009: 9–10), but the case of Gothic ideology may provide one means of examining how popular culture was complicit in advancing the interests of the Whig ascendancy in Britain.

When John Henry Newman attempted to describe the nature of British anti-Catholicism, he resorted to listing a variety of largely lower-class reading materials, claiming that the tradition could best be understood as a cultural practice based on

nursery stories, school stories, public-house stories, club-house stories, drawing-room stories, platform stories, pulpit stories; – a tradition of newspapers, magazines, reviews, pamphlets, romances, novels, poems, and light literature of all kinds, literature of the day; – a tradition of selections from the English classics, bits of poetry, passages of history, sermons, chance essays, extracts from books of travel, anonymous anecdotes, lectures on prophecy, statements and arguments of polemical writers. (1913: 88)

Although he made this observation in 1851, the same statement could have been made 50 years earlier, because certainly a central component of the tradition of anti-Catholicism by the beginning of the nineteenth century would have been the popularity and prominence of the Gothic chapbook and novel. By recognizing this fact we are forced to observe that fictional works appear to imaginatively inhabit a historical milieu that is considerably different from (and earlier than) the one in which they were actually produced.

The history of Catholicism in England is obviously beyond the scope of this book;⁹ and many studies have been written on anti-Catholicism as it manifests itself in the literary texts published during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, France, Germany and America.¹⁰ Instead, I am interested in exploring how and why British Gothic novels and chapbooks seized so persistently on the tropes of Catholicism, employing them to convey to their readership the continued threats posed by this religion, constructed as a dangerous atavistic presence and practice. Just as Darrin McMahon investigated what he called a lost ‘Grub Street’ literature published in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to uncover a ‘low Counter-Enlightenment’ that attacked the philosophes in the name of conservative religious beliefs (2002: 11–12), so does there seem to be a very similar phenomenon occurring in England during the same period.¹¹ The Gothic chapbook and novel, with their almost medieval world-view, served an analogous function in Enlightenment England, cautioning the lower classes against the liberal policies of the Church of England and waging something of a propaganda war against the passage of a number of bills that eventually gave Catholics emancipation in 1829. By examining these works and the historical context in which they were published, I also intend this book to be read as an extension of my Gothic Riffs (2010a).

In that book I used the theories of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) in order to interrogate how the Gothic functioned as a site for what he labels ‘ambivalent secularization’, or the ability to hold several competing and contradictory spiritual attitudes at the same time. Bear with me: I do not intend to rehearse the entire argument or the evidence I produced in that book here. Instead, I want to examine one aspect of the Gothic imaginary that emerged very clearly as I was working on Gothic Riffs: namely, the Gothic’s very real and persistent investment in anti-Catholic concerns and its oft-expressed hysterical religious/political paranoia. True, I noted in the earlier work that the Gothic aesthetic appeared to be both Catholic and anti-Catholic (at the same contradictory time), and I stand by that assertion. However, it is necessary to recognize that Gothic is a complex and unstable discourse system because it is the product of so many discursive and transnational texts. Such an origin accounts, I think, for the ideologically contradictory positions it takes on all issues, sometimes appearing conservative and sometimes liberal (hence the theoretical and critical confusions that can be seen so frequently in the secondary criticism).

It is possible, therefore, to detect strains of what appear to be pro-Catholic sentiments now and then in the texts. True, there are sometimes beautiful nuns singing mournful tunes in a ruined cloister or a kindly monk attempting to help a young couple escape the machinations of an evil abbot. And the consumption of these tropes may have provided an elite reading audience a certain amount of ‘pleasure’, which, according to Clery, constituted a crucial aspect of what she calls the construction of ‘aestheticized Catholicism’ in Radcliffe’s novels (2008: xvii–xviii). However, it is my contention that these tropes were actually employed, not to suggest an increased attitude of tolerance in response to the eradication of Catholicism by the French Revolution, but to portray the threat and continuing lure of Catholicism as a political institution, and the vigilant need to escape its seductive siren song. Readers will miss the larger ideological agenda of these novels if they focus in isolation on a stray type-scene here or there. In fact, the representation of Gothic nuns or monks is highly indebted to French anti-clerical, pornographic and libertine literature, as well as to the earlier British Reformation texts, and cannot be understood apart from its origins in these politically invested and contentious discourse networks.

As I looked at more and more non-canonical Gothic texts, I became convinced that there was a lower-class manifestation of the Gothic that was deeply anti-Catholic and clearly propagandistic, produced most immediately with an eye towards blocking or stalling the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill. I intend here to examine those works and also to place them alongside some of the canonical Gothic works, such as Godwin’s St. Leon and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, in order to understand how what I am calling the ‘Gothic ideology’ evolved and flourished as a widely disseminated discourse network. Indeed, the ideology can be detected even today in the wildly popular novels of Dan Brown (Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code being the two most obvious examples) or recent high-gloss television series such as Da Vinci’s Demons, The Borgias or American Horror Story: Asylum. As the anti-Catholicism of many of the most well-known Gothic novels such as The Monk and The Italian has been discussed in full in many venues, I intend here to look at those works only briefly and instead focus on the lesser-known Gothic chapbooks and non-canonical novels that have received only passing notice or puzzled and contradictory explication in the field. The chapbooks in particular have not been understood because, if they are read in isolation, they appear almost nonsensical, hysterical, truncated, clumsy and oddly fashioned.¹² When one places them in their fullest possible historical and textual contexts, however, they actually seem to be speaking to each other, answering each other, elaborating on a familiar trope and exploring the same ideological issues. By bringing these lost works into dialogue with each other I hope to shed light on a broader canvas, to suggest that this literary culture was more widely committed to exploring religious anxieties than has previously been understood and that they used Gothic as a multivalent and contradictory discourse system for this purpose.

But now I am forced to make a confession: I love to scour old libraries for forgotten tomes as much as I fancy wandering around old cathedrals and, in particular, ruined abbeys. At the end of five years of digging, I owned hundreds of digital copies of rare Gothic chapbooks and novels that I had ferreted out of every rare book library I could locate and plunder.¹³ When I read the description of Sir Thomas Phillipps’s manic book collecting in Munby, I am afraid I recognized all too clearly a similar streak in myself (without the same financial resources, of course). Just like some latter-day Sir Thomas Phillipps, I was determined to own a digital copy of every anti-Catholic Gothic work ever published, and I am afraid I may have achieved that goal.¹⁴ I confess this now because the book I have written could not possibly discuss all of the works that I found. Indeed, I suspect that it would take at least ten more books to discuss adequately all of these materials, so a method had to be devised to solve this problem, this over-abundance of research and compulsive gathering of primary materials.

Each of the chapters that follows focuses on only a handful of representative titles available to illustrate the theme of the chapter, and, to be honest, many of these titles are extremely redundant, using in some cases the very same situations and almost identical representations, with even phrases and dialogues repeated virtually verbatim. In order to assist others with conducting further reading or research on these topics, I have provided an Appendix at the end of the book that lists the other English-language works, the rarest of which I have placed in a digital archive. In short, the additional titles that I could have included in each chapter work towards proving my larger point: that the sheer number of anti-Catholic chapbooks and novels suggests that the ideology was widespread and pop-ular, and that whole publishing houses (such Tegg, Hughes, or Vernor and Hood) were committed to promulgating the Gothic as a species of covert religious writing, propagandizing and quasi-pamphleteering.

My thesis, then, is that the Gothic ideology relied on a remediation of texts and became almost self-generating as an early species of print technology. With the invention of the Stanhope iron printing press in 1798, the mechanization of printing accelerated exponentially and a veritable flood of texts appeared, causing Wordsworth in the 1800/1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads to complain about ‘this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ (1802: 2). The Gothic ideology not only fed this thirst, but aimed to quench it as well. The Gothic relied on transnational and well-known discourse networks that had promulgated antiCatholic attitudes since the time of the Reformation. I use the term ‘discourse’ with Catherine Gallagher’s definition in mind: discourse is both ‘what is said’ on a particular subject as well as the ‘largely unstated rules that govern what can and cannot be said’ (1985: xiii–xiv). Gothic found itself saying that nuns were whores and monks were rapists, while it implied less than subtly even more shocking and grotesque crimes and practices. It functioned as a form of fictional mystification, characterized by extreme religious ambivalence and an alternating demonization of and flirtation with the Catholic clergy, their practices and their properties. This deeply conflicted stance towards the Catholic as ‘other’ became the dominant ideological position taken by a large number of British Gothic works in what is known as the Enlightenment period. Strange as it may seem, this literary culture could not resist haunting itself with the spectre of a clergy that it had successfully driven out of the country more than 200 years earlier. The British Protestant imaginary wandered around ruined cloisters that it had destroyed, haunted as well as haunting itself in hundreds of Gothic texts.

1

Anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Ideology: Interlocking Discourse Networks

Écrasez l’infâme.

Voltaire

The philosophes attacked religion as a symptom in hysteria, a device of political management, a mark of illiteracy, or a state in historical development.

The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Gay, 1995: 149)

The Gothic as political/religious porno-propaganda

Gothic fiction has frequently been seen as originating in a Catholic closet, specifically the buried Roman Catholic heritage of Horace Walpole, author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and descendant of a martyred Jesuit (McWhir, 1989: 37). When Walpole claimed in the Preface to the first edition of his anonymously published novel that the work was a translation of a sixteenth-century Italian book written by an Italian priest, ‘Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto’, and ‘found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’ (Walpole 1998: 5), he was very strategically situating the work in a controversial and contested religious, geographical and historical locus: England’s Tudor period, during which time the ultimate proto-libertine Henry VIII declared himself head of the newly minted Church of England, dismantled Catholic Church properties, and did his best to divest whatever vestiges were left of England’s alliance with a European universalist religious tradition (caveat: Lancashire, parts of Yorkshire, and Norfolk, particularly Walsingham, have remained Catholic strongholds, as they do even today).¹ Despite the best efforts of the King and his daughter Elizabeth I, however, the British Protestant imaginary seems to have been ambivalent about forgetting this site of (contested) origins in its Catholic past, bathed as it was in copious quantities of blood and passion on both sides of the issue.² Or perhaps because of the very profusion of blood spilled, this historical event became transmuted into the sort of ‘story’ that Stuart Hall defines as a ‘communicative event’ (2006: 164), a tale so powerful that it demanded an extensive textual legacy – or at least a twice-told tale, as we can see