The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (review)

In the preface Michael Wheeler describes himself as a "Modern Catholic" member of the Church of England. I assume by that he means that he is a liberal Anglo-Catholic, and certainly this book reveals a detached observer whose sympathies, however, lie more with Papists than Protestants.

The book begins with the so-called "Papal Aggression" of 1850, when Pio Nono restored the Catholic hierarchy to England and Wales, a chapter delightfully illustrated by the contemporary cartoons in Punch. The next chapter deals with Catholic and Protestant treatments of the early Church, including discussion of three historical novels. This is followed in turn by a similar chapter on the writing of English Reformation history. Chapter 4 looks at nineteenth-century responses to the Gordon riots and the Jacobite rebellion of the eighteenth century. The next three chapters discuss attitudes to Catholic Emancipation, Newman's conversion, and the Gorham case. The last three chapters deal with the impact of Catholicism on English culture following Emancipation. Chapter 8 considers the role of women in the context of representations of the Virgin Mary and of convents and nuns. Chapter 9 looks at the reaction to the First Vatican Council and papal infallibility. And the last chapter examines the Decadents, several of whom converted to Rome.

Wheeler is a professor of English, but this book reveals also an impressive knowledge of the history and theology of the period. Pointing out that just as Darwin was searching for the origin of species, so too Catholic and Protestant theologians sought to prove that the origins of their religion lay in early Christianity. And just as Darwin emphasised the importance of the "patient accumulation of facts," so too the very first paragraph of Newman's own counterpart to the Origin of Species, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, contains no less than half-a-dozen references to "facts."

The whole story of Protestant-Catholic relations was not all one of unremitting hostility. John Lingard's ground-breaking History of England, a model of fairness and moderation, was turned down by two Catholic publishers and accepted by a Protestant one; significantly, it was used as his main source by the Protestant historical novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth, who preached toleration. The religiously detached Macaulay could write, "There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church." Even Kingsley, with his pathological hatred of Catholicism, allows us to glimpse in his fiction what Wheeler calls that "mixture of conscious repulsion and unconscious attraction that characterized the response of many Victorian Protestants to Roman Catholicism." Dickens showed sympathy for persecuted Catholics but not for their religion. Ruskin agreed with Cobbett's pro-Catholic view of the Reformation, adding that Catholic historians were better informed than Protestant ones and fairer. Cobbett's idealized picture of pre-Reformation Catholic England "was to have a profound influence upon Victorian medievalism."

In this learned and wide-ranging study, I noticed only one serious mistake. Newman was not, like Ruskin, "brought up as an Evangelical" (p. 57). On the contrary, his experience was significantly different: like George Eliot, he was brought up as an "ordinary" member of the Church of England, before undergoing an Evangelically influenced conversion at the age of fifteen.