Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T19:22:07.795Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

John Wolffe
John Wolffe*
Affiliation:
Open University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 48: The Church and Literature , 2012 , pp. 308 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 [Smith, J. F.], The Jesuit, 3 vols (London, 1832), 2: 164.Google Scholar

2 It was also entirely fictional, as the Jesuits had been dissolved in 1773, and were not restored in Spain until 1815 and in Portugal until 1829.

3 See, e.g., Wolffe, John, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paz, D. G., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid- Victorian England (Stanford, CA, 1992)Google Scholar; Griffin, Susan M., Anti-Catholicism and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar; Wheeler, Michael, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth Century English Culture(Cambridge, 2006).Google Scholar

4 Cubitt, Geoffrey, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Healy, Róisin, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston, MA, 2003), 4 Google Scholar; Verhoeven, Timothy, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2010), 103–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Principally of the BL catalogue, <http://www.catalogue.bl.uk>, and the Internet Archive, <http://www.archive.org>.

6 Cubitt, , Jesuit Myth, 121 Google Scholar; BL catalogue. ‘Helen Dhu’, the named author of Stanhope Burleigh, was almost certainly a pseudonym.

7 Anon, ., Father Oswald: A Genuine Catholic Story (London, 1842).Google Scholar

8 Ibid. 9; Wolff, R. L., Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York, 1977), 34–8.Google Scholar

9 Sandford, M. Bourchier, The Romance of a Jesuit Mission (New York, 1897).Google Scholar

10 Anon, ., Bride of Ramcuttah (London, 1860).Google Scholar

11 Ibid. 51–2.

12 Wolff, , Gains and Losses Google Scholar; Griffin, , Anti-Catholicism Google Scholar; Wheeler, , Old Enemies.Google Scholar

13 The Jesuits’ Memorial for the Intended Reformation of England, under their first Popish Prince (London, 1825)Google Scholar; ODNB, s.nn ‘Persons [Parsons], Robert (1546–1610)’, ‘Gee, Edward (bap. 1657 d.1730)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/21474>, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10498>, accessed 22 February 2011.

14 See, in this volume, Haydon, Colin, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Obscene Literature: The Case of Mrs. Mary Catharine Cadiere and its Context’, 202–18.Google Scholar

15 Leone, Jacopo, The Jesuit Conspiracy: The Secret Plan of the Order (London, 1848), 14–28.Google Scholar

16 [Luke, Jemima], The Female Jesuit; or The Spy in the Family (London, 1851)Google Scholar; Peschier, Diana, Nineteenth Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Brontë (Basingstoke, 2002), 48–50.Google Scholar

17 Anon, , A Glimpse of the Great Secret Society, 3rd edn (London, 1872), xiv–xvi.Google Scholar

18 [Sewell, William], Hawkstone: A Tale of and for England in 184_, 4th American edn, 2 vols (New York, 1848), v.Google Scholar

19 Johnston, William, Nightshade, new edn (London, 1858)Google Scholar, Preface.

20 Baker, William and Clarke, William W., eds, The Letters of Wilkie Collins, 2: 1866–1889 (Basingstoke, 1999), 435.Google Scholar

21 D’Israeli, Isaac, Despotism, 2 vols (London, 1811).Google Scholar

22 Kingsley, Charles, Westward Ho!, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1855).Google Scholar

23 The BL copy of the 1857 first edn has been destroyed, so references are to the 1858 edn.

24 Collins, Wilkie, The Black Robe, 3 vols (London, 1881).Google Scholar

25 For background on the authors, see, respectively, Ogden, James, Isaac Disraeli (Oxford, 1969)Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Smith. John Frederick (1806–1890)’, online edn, <http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37982>, accessed 22 February 2011; Chitty, Susan, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London, 1973)Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Johnston, William (1829–1902)’, online edn, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/34214>, accessed 22 February 2011; Peters, Catherine, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991).Google Scholar

26 His real life namesake Pedro de Ribadeneira (1526–1611) was a leading early Jesuit and biographer of Ignatius Loyola: The Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Pedro de Ribadeneira’, online edn, <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13029a.htm>, accessed 8 July 2010.

27 D’Israeli, , Despotism, 1: 21.Google Scholar

28 Ibid. 2: 289–301.

29 Ibid. 2: 306–10.

30 Critical Review ser. 3, 24 (1811), 31–42 Google ScholarPubMed, quoted by Ogden, , D’Israeli, 69.Google Scholar

31 D’Israeli, , Despotism, 2: 462–3.Google Scholar

32 Ibid. 1: 180–1.

33 Disraeli, Isaac, Curiosities of Literature with a View of the Life and Writings of the Author by his Son, 3 vols (London, 1849), 1 Google Scholar: lv. Note that at some point both father and son dropped the apostrophe from their surname.

34 Smith, , The Jesuit, 1: 63–4.Google Scholar

35 Kingsley, , Westward Ho!, 3: 34.Google Scholar

36 Kingsley, F., ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, 2 vols (London, 1877), 1: 429–30.Google Scholar

37 Pace Wheeler, , Old Enemies, 105–10.Google Scholar

38 Kingsley, , Westward Ho!, 2: 182.Google Scholar

39 Sutherland, P., ‘The Role of Evangelicalism in the Formation of Nineteenth-Century Ulster Protestant Cultural Identity (1859–1885)’ (Ph.D. thesis, Open University, 2010), 29–109.Google Scholar

40 Collins, , Nightshade, 258.Google Scholar

41 Thackeray, W. M., The History of Henry Esmond, Esq, 3 vols (London, 1852), 3: 320.Google Scholar

42 Cf.Peschier, , Anti-Catholic Discourses, 153–8.Google Scholar

43 Saturday Review, 18 July 1857, 66–7.Google Scholar

44 The Athenaeum, 13 June 1857, 757–8.Google Scholar

45 Gentleman’s Magazine 102 (1832), 239 Google Scholar; The Athenaeum, 7 April 1832, 220.Google Scholar

46 London, BL, MS Add. 54911, fols 31–2: Kingsley to Macmillan, 1 June 1854; BL catalogue.

47 Baker, and Clarke, , eds, Letters of Wilkie Collins, 431–2, 437.Google Scholar

48 For example The Woman of Babylon (London, 1906)Google Scholar and The Jesuit (London, 1911)Google ScholarPubMed. See also, in this volume, Wellings, Martin, ‘“Pulp Methodism” revisited: The Literature and Significance of Silas and Joseph Hocking’, 361–72.Google Scholar

49 Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (London, 2003).Google Scholar

50 Forsyth, Frederick, The Afghan (London, 2007).Google Scholar

51 Cf.Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Basingstoke, 1987), 25–8, 82–7.Google Scholar

52 Scott, J. Luther, The Jesuit Premier (Leamington, 1881)Google Scholar. The pamphlet had reached its seventh edition by the time of Gladstone’s retirement in 1894.