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  • “All the World have heard of the Devil and the Pope”:Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Mogul Tale and English Catholic Satire
  • Michael Tomko (bio)

In 1885, Father Peter Haythornthwaite took exception to the Dublin Review’s recent account of the Catholic influence on English literature. In redacting the review’s newly constructed Catholic canon or “roll of Catholic writers,” the literary cleric questioned why “Elizabeth Inchbald, a woman of original genius, striking character and a devout Catholic,” had not received her “well deserved commemoration.” 1 Not only was Inchbald (1753-1821) a successful actress and one of the most consistently successful playwrights of the late eighteenth century, she was also famed for two novels: her novel of manners, A Simple Story (1791), and her Jacobin novel, Nature and Art (1796). Renowned for her quick wit, popularity, and beauty, she was personally and politically associated with the revolutionary writers Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin. 2 More recently, Inchbald’s genius and character have led Paula Backscheider to label her “one of the best-known citizens of London in the 1790’s” and have given her a prominent place in the recovery of the Romantic era’s women writers by critics such as Betsy Bolton, Jane Moody, and Daniel O’Quinn. 3 In spite of all this recent attention, her identity as a “devout Catholic” is as obscured and poorly incorporated into our current understanding of her biography and her place in literary history as it was in 1885.

Inchbald, née Simpson, grew up in a Suffolk Catholic middle-class family with strong ties to the local Catholic gentry as well as to the Duke of Norfolk, and she ended her life with a reputation for devotion and charity work. 4 However, her career ambitions, quicksilver pen, and radical politics have seemed incongruous with a Catholic worldview, resulting in critics either apportioning the influence of her Catholicism to her youth and old age or eliding it entirely. 5 Such a depiction of her is inaccurate, for even during the period of her greatest preoccupation with performances and politics, she remained part of the Catholic community and took up its rituals when returning home. She made note of missing prayers in her journal and received counsel on reconciling her profession with her spiritual life from figures such as Edinburgh’s Bishop George Hay, the most prominent Scottish Catholic prelate of the eighteenth century, and Alexander [End Page 117] Geddes, the controversial Catholic priest, poet, and Biblical translator. 6 In other words, she was persistently and deeply marked by her Catholic identity, which itself can only be understood more fully within the cultural complexities of the “age of Challoner.” Taking its name from the long-serving and influential Bishop Richard Challoner, this designation refers to eighteenth-century English Catholicism’s reserved spirituality and quiet consolidation of its early modern legacy. 7 There would thus seem to be a conflict between Inchbald’s “genius” and “character” that brought her fame and success at the forefront of the late eighteenth-century cultural world and her “devotion” formed in a Catholic religious community that dealt with its legal and social relegation with prudent reticence. This apparent paradox presents itself in the unlikely context of her debut work, The Mogul Tale; or, the Descent of the Balloon (1784), a rollicking farce that combines quick-witted dialogue, Orientalism, the spectacular stage effects of a hot air balloon, and ostensibly anti-Catholic rhetoric. 8

Despite or perhaps because of The Mogul Tale’s dramatic celerity, it is not easy to summarize this two-act farce, whose performance during the summer of 1784 at London’s Haymarket Theatre was celebrated by the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser as “almost impossible to see … without being pleased,” praised by the Public Advertiser for yielding “such crowded houses and repeated marks of approbation on every repetition” because of its “novelty of situation, sprightly dialogue, and happy jeu d’esprits,” and, more recently, deemed a “classic” by Inchbald’s biographer Annibel Jenkins. 9 The plot takes off when a hot air balloon comes down on stage piloted by a licentious and scheming doctor, a quack who has misled and bribed his two terrified passengers...

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