The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 by Geremy Carnes (review)

"You began Catholic, that is to say you began with a system of values in stark opposition to reality." So said H. G. Wells in a letter to James Joyce, as he declined to support what became Finnegans Wake. Had I read this sentence before reading Mr. Carnes's book, I would have taken it simply as a gratuitous bigoted remark, but now I see it as an excellent example of how the Catholic appeared to and was represented by a secular humanist in the first half of the twentieth century. The heart of this book comprises five contextual readings of works by three Catholic writers (Dryden [eventually], Pope, and Inchbald) and two Protestant writers (Defoe and Richardson), all preceded by a well-written introduction that is essential for Mr. Carnes's thesis.

Often scholarly introductions are perfunctory summaries of the specific arguments to follow. Not so here. Instead, Mr. Carnes lays out a detailed picture of how the Catholic was viewed and represented in England from 1685, when John Gother's The Papist Misrepresented and Represented "attempted to rehabilitate the image of English Catholics in the eyes of their Protestant countrymen," to 1791 and the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act. The middle of the twentieth century produced valuable studies of the Christian themes of some of the writers covered here, but studies based on close readings within the context of religious beliefs, studies written in opposition to the previous views of primarily secular critics. Mr. Carnes, on the other hand, however, works in the realm of social history, and in this sense the following is true: "As limited as investigations of religion in eighteenth-century literature have been, scholarship that attempts to place literature in the context of ongoing debates about Catholicism and the Catholic community has been even rarer."

Dryden's Don Sebastian was first performed in 1690 and published the following year. I have never seen it and only read it for the first time recently, but I find compelling Mr. Carnes's approach, treating it as a closet drama comparable to Milton's Samson Agonistes. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution "the English Catholic community was in as precarious a position as it had ever been." The new poet laureate Thomas Shadwell celebrated the arrival of William of Orange as a savior who had dispelled James's Catholic court members, "Monsters of Roman and Hybernian Race, / [Who had] With Phangs and Claws infect[ed] the wasted place." A poet on a tightrope, Dryden in places submits to the prejudices of his (largely) Protestant audience while "fostering cohesion within the Catholic community [by] the privileging of obscurity and privacy, particularly in matters of religion," most conspicuously in having Sebastian's wedding ceremony, with its sacramental Catholic nature, occur offstage.

When Mr. Carnes turns to Pope, he treats his 1717 works, Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady as, "a pair of original poems that, for at least the next century, would rank among his most popular." His approach via social history allows him to circumvent unresolved issues about the particular nature of Pope's religious beliefs: when Pope wrote, "I am not a Papist. … I am a Catholick, in the strictest sense of the word," he "demonstrated a willingness to criticize the history and practices of his religion," but that was not his intent in these poems. Rather than personal, the poems are social. As Pope wrote these poems, his community was struggling "with a divisive political scheme for reaching a peace with the Hanoverian government: the Catholic oath project." Widely known is Pope's writing Rape of the Lock to heal a quarrel between two Catholic families; in the two poems considered here, Pope's attention is on the broader Catholic community, whose situation forces him to abandon "'good Humour' for lamentation and tragedy." Almost all of Mr. Carnes's...