Confession as Cultural Form: The Plymouth Inquiry

The first result, on the part of a penitent, is a deadness of heart to all but the Confessor's or Director's influence. Then succeeds a sneering morbid religionism, coincident with a too consistent disregard and scorn of household duties and domestic obligations....Meanwhile, the confessing Priest is assiduous in probing every thought of his luckless confessees...until the hour arrives when confessor and confessee should apostatise to Rome.

(13–14)

—Joseph H. Harris, Auricular Confession: Not the Rule of the Church of England

In 1852 a public inquiry was held at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth to examine alleged improprieties in the practice of private confession in the Church of England. Representatives from the laity as well as the press attended, and three young girls read statements describing their ordeals in the confessional. Overseeing the proceedings was Henry Phillpotts, the bishop of Exeter, who advocated for the confessing priest in question. Writing as "Presbyter Anglicanus," Joseph Harris addressed his pamphlet Auricular Confession (1852)to Phillpotts, using the text to voice his opposition to the practice of confession. Harris's text exemplifies a widespread belief that confession threatened the stability of the domestic ideal through the unique access it provided to the private thoughts of individuals. Although particularly well- publicized, the Plymouth Inquiry was only one of a series of similar incidents tied to the controversy surrounding private confession throughout the nineteenth century. While the ritual of private confession is normally associated with Roman Catholicism, it was introduced in the Church of England in the 1840s by members of the Oxford Movement, including Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble, and John Henry Newman.¹ Confession numbered among the spiritual, devotional, and theological innovations of these Tractarians, who sought to reinvigorate the practices of the Church in a religious climate that had been intensified by Evangelicalism. During a period of radical reform by the State and within the context of repeated calls for disestablishment, confession might also have constituted an attempt by the Church to reassert its waning authority.

In the heated debates over private confession, clergy and concerned laypeople produced countless treatises and public letters. Published by well-known houses such as Murray, Rivington, and Hatchard, many of these bound letters and tracts went through multiple editions and circulated widely. Confession provoked extreme opposition, primarily because of its association with excessive clerical authority. As can be seen in Harris's tract, the tone of the debates is nearly hysterical. The very mention of the word "confession" could provoke a range of responses: anti-Irish and anti-Catholic fervor; intense nationalism; anxiety over the production of sexual knowledge; and fear for the stability of the domestic sphere.² The power of this term to consolidate such a wide range of concerns suggests that it was not merely working descriptively to point to an agreed-upon referent, but often also functioned performatively as a point of consolidation for a number of social anxieties. Confession was at times misidentified as the cause of these anxieties when in fact it worked to secure a location where these anxieties could be articulated and maintained.³

Private confession was considered a threat to the family because of the power it gave the male confessor over the (usually female) confessee, thus usurping the authority of the father. Susan David Bernstein's detailed analysis of the gendered dynamics of confession shows that anti-Catholic propaganda constructed the priest as a threat to the English patriarch because of his ability to gain access to an intimacy normally contained within the domestic sphere. Finding in the confessional a reproduction of the heterosexual power relations at work in society at large, Bernstein contends that the tracts about confession themselves "inadvertently yield a glimpse of a pernicious domination, one based on patriarchal privilege, that structure[d] the Victorian family" (42). The exact nature of the threat posed by the Anglo- Catholic cleric is complicated, however, by his common characterization...