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Charles Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism

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Charles Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism CHARLES DICKENS: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND CATHOLICISM MARK ANDREW ESLICK PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2011 Abstract This thesis explores the role of anti-Catholicism and Catholicism in the life and work of Charles Dickens. A critical consensus has emerged that Dickens was vehemently anti-Catholic. Yet a ‘curious dream’ he had of his beloved dead sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, in which her spirit appears to him in the guise of the Madonna, suggests that his overt anti-Catholicism masks a profoundly complex relationship to the ‘Church of Rome’. Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism therefore re- evaluates the anti-Catholic sentiments in the author’s novels, journalism, and letters by contextualizing them in relation to key events of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival such as the 1850 Papal Aggression. I argue that Dickens often employs anti- Catholicism not simply as a religious prejudice, but as a mode of discourse through which he disrupts, displaces, or reinforces a range of secular anxieties. Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism also uncovers and explores the often cryptic moments in Dickens’s writing when Catholic motifs are invoked that suggest a strange ‘attraction of repulsion’ to Roman Catholicism. Catholicism seems to offer him a rich source of imaginative and narrative possibilities. Reading Dickens’s fiction through the lens of Catholicism can therefore reveal a much more ambivalent relationship to the religion than his apparent beliefs as well as unearthing new ways of thinking about his work. Table of Contents Page List of Illustrations iii Acknowledgements iv Declaration v Note on Editions vi CHAPTER 1 Dickens and the Anti-Catholic Tradition 1 CHAPTER 2 Anti-Catholic Anxieties 27 i ‘The Five Sisters of York 28 ii Barnaby Rudge 39 iii ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’ 50 iv A Child’s History of England 60 v Bleak House 71 CHAPTER 3 Purgatory: A Christmas Carol 81 CHAPTER 4 Architecture: Pictures from Italy 106 CHAPTER 5 Mariolatry: David Copperfield 133 CONCLUSION 159 ABBREVIATIONS 164 BIBLIOGRAPHY 165 List of Illustrations Plate Page Figure 1 Hablot K. Browne. ‘The Five Sisters of York’ from 31 Nicholas Nickleby [1839] (London: Penguin, 2003). Figure 2 Hablot K. Browne. ‘The Secretary’s Watch’ from 45 Barnaby Rudge [1841] (London: Penguin, 2003). Figure 3 John Everett Millais. Christ in the House of His Parents 50 (‘The Carpenter’s Shop’) 1849, Oil on Canvas, Tate Britain, London. Figure 4 John Leech. Untitled illustration from A Christmas 93 Carol [1843] (London: Penguin, 2003). Figure 5 John Leech. ‘The Last of the Spirits’ from A Christmas 103 Carol [1843] (London: Penguin, 2003). Figure 6 George Cattermole. ‘Nell Among the Tombs’ from The 113 Old Curiosity Shop [1840-1] (London: Penguin, 2000). Figure 7 George Cattermole. ‘Nell Dead’ from The Old Curiosity 113 Shop [1840-1] (London: Penguin, 2000). Figure 8 Hablot K. Browne. ‘My child-wife’s old companion’ 140 from David Copperfield [1850] (London: Penguin, 2004). Figure 9 Hablot K. Browne. ‘Uriah persists in hovering near us’ 141 from David Copperfield [1850] (London: Penguin, 2004). Figure 10 Hablot K. Browne. ‘A stranger calls to see me’ from 141 David Copperfield [1850] (London: Penguin, 2004). Figure 11 Hablot K. Browne. ‘The Emigrants’ from David 147 Copperfield [1850] (London: Penguin, 2004). Figure 12 Hablot K. Browne. ‘Our Pew at Church’ from David 155 Copperfield. Courtesy of Liszt Collection. iii Acknowledgements My greatest thanks go to John Bowen, a wise, generous, and unfailingly supportive supervisor. Without his words of wisdom and constructive criticism I could not have undertaken or completed this project. I could not have asked for a more knowledgeable or interested supervisor, and I am extremely grateful for his guidance over the past years. Many other people have offered me their help and support during my doctoral studies. I would like to thank Malcolm Andrews for convincing me to explore the subject of Dickens and Catholicism in the first place, Trev Broughton who kindly read and commented on early drafts of Chapters 2, 3, and 4, and Jane Moody and Jonathan Brockbank for their constant encouragement. Long-suffering friends and colleagues have provided assistance of a more personal kind. For their encouragement and advice I am particularly grateful to Matthew Beacham, Laura Blackmore, Lynsey Cullen, Ed Dowie, Jenny Fosten, Calum Greer, Kate Harper, Dan Horsfall, Greg Irwin, Jen Lucey, Val Milton, Lucy Pell-Walpole, Richard Rhodes, Gerry Reynolds, Andrew Suggitt, Beth Watts, and Claire Wood. A special mention, however, must go to Samik Datta, John and Nicola Eslick, and Emily Saldanha, whose help and advice carried me through to the end of this project. Above all, I would like to thank, Ann Eslick, my mother, for her enduring love and support This project would not have been possible without the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), who funded my doctoral studies. iv Declaration I hereby declare that this submission is entirely my own work except where due acknowledgement is given. v Note on Editions I have used the Penguin Classics editions of Dickens’s novels for their availability and ease of reference, but I have consulted with the Oxford Clarendon editions where available. vi Chapter 1 Dickens and the Anti-Catholic Tradition On a September night in 1844, Charles Dickens awoke from his sleep in the Palace Peschiere in Genoa with tears streaming down his face. A letter from the author to his friend John Forster explains the cause of this strange event: Let me tell you of a curious dream I had ... and of the fragments of reality I can collect, which helped to make it up … I was visited by a Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I recognised the voice. Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it “Dear.” At this, I thought it recoiled; and I felt immediately, that not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have addressed it so familiarly. “Forgive me!” I said. “We poor living creatures are only able to express ourselves by looks and words. I have used the word most natural to our affections; and you know my heart.” It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me - which I knew spiritually, for, as I have said, I didn’t perceive its emotions by its face - that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, “Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!” “Form a wish,” it said. I thought, reasoning with myself: “If I form a selfish wish, it will vanish.” So I hastily discarded such hopes and anxieties of my own as came into my mind, and said, “Mrs. Hogarth is surrounded with great distresses” - observe, I never thought of saying “your mother” as to a mortal creature - “will you extricate her?” “Yes.” “And her extrication is to be a certainty to me, that this has really happened?” “Yes.” “But answer me one other question!” I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave me. “What is the True religion?” As it paused a moment without replying, I said - Good God, in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away! - “You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? - or,” I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, “perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?” “For you,” said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; “for you, it is the best!”1 1 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), 122-4. 1 Dickens’s celestial vision of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died in his arms on the 7th of May 1837, has been the subject of much critical attention.2 A striking feature of his dream of Mary, however, has remained largely unexplored: its religious significance. Writing in The Life of Charles Dickens, Forster is one of the few to have focused upon this aspect of Dickens’s dream, noting that it ‘strengthens other evidences, of which there are many in his life, of his not having escaped those trying regions of reflection which most men of thought and all men of genius have at some time to pass through’.3 Forster’s claim that the author was undergoing an internal religious conflict at the time is supported by Dickens’s doubts in the dream of a belief he consistently expressed throughout his lifetime: namely, that to ‘try to do good’4 is the true meaning of Christianity. The dreaming Dickens asking the apparition whether ‘the Form of religion does not so greatly matter’,5 and his entreaty as to ‘What is the True religion?’,6 certainly suggests a search for spiritual certainty in formal religion. Intriguingly, though, he asks the spirit of Mary if ‘the Roman Catholic is the best?’7 But the spirit’s reply that ‘for you, it is the best’8 is anathema to the orthodox teachings of the Catholic Church as it implies Catholicism may not be the best religion for everyone.
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