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Making Catholic Spaces: Women, Decor, and Devotion in the English Catholic Church, 1840-1900*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Susan O’Brien
Susan O’Brien*
Affiliation:
Anglia Polytechnic, Cambridge
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Abstract

Nanda took in her surroundings… At the end of the corridor stood a statue of Our Lord in white robes wearing a red, thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order. The bent head with its pale brown hair and beard was girlish and gentle; the brass halo had been polished till it winked and reflected each flicker of the little glass lamp that burned on the pedestal… At the end of the passage hung a large oil painting of Our Lord, showing his five wounds … Between the lines [of desks] stood a statue of Our Lady, supported on each side by angels with folded wings and flying girdles. Nanda thought it was a privilege to be near so holy company. Her desk was empty but for a small picture of the Sacred Heart gummed inside the lid. … ‘I never thought there were so many holy pictures in the world,’ she thought to herself. Every room she had entered since she had arrived at the Convent of the Five Wounds had had its picture or statue.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 28: The Church and the Arts , 1992 , pp. 449 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful for the financial support given to me by the Nuffield Foundation and for the help so willingly given by the archivists of the religious congregations whose archives have been used in this essay.

References

1 White, Antonia, Frost in May, Virago Press edn (London, 1983), pp. 15–23.Google Scholar

2 For a general survey see Holmes, J. Derek, More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978).Google Scholar

3 Connolly, Gerard, ‘The transubstantiation of myth: towards a new popular history of nineteenth-century Catholicism in England’, JEH, 35 (1984), pp. 78–104.Google Scholar

4 For an analysis of the general shift away from neo-classicism towards the Gothic in the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian, as well as the Established Church, see Davies, H., Worship and Theology in England: from Newman to Martineau, 1850–1000 (London, 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See, for example, Holmes, More Roman than Rome and Schiefen, Richard J., Nicholas Wiseman and the Transformation of English Catholicism (Shepherdstown, W. Va., 1984). On Ireland, which in turn had an impact on English Catholicism, see the seminal work of Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75’, AHR, 78 (1972), pp. 625–52.Google Scholar

6 Such a comparison of the pre-1850 and post-1850 English Church is one of the main under pinnings of John Bossy’s The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London, 1975).

7 See, for example, Norman, E., The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), pp. 234–43.Google Scholar

8 For a different view or emphasis see ibid.

9 For example, Franciscan Father Gomair Peeters wrote in 1874 of the changes he had made to the Franciscan church in Glasgow, ‘Our chapel was so wretched and miserable looking that I could not stand it any longer, and I took it into my head to change, to alter, to renew nearly everything, to make it at least a little more becoming place for our Lord… Every one here is highly delighted with the change and improvement, it looks a little like heaven; no one thought that it was possible to make it so nice and beautiful, and I am sure it will inspire a little more devotion, help the people to pray better and carry off their hearts towards heaven’: Letters of Father Gomair Peeters, O.S.F., to Alice Ingham, privately printed by the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Saint Joseph as The Preparation Period 1870-1880 (np, 1983), pp. 42-3 [hereafter FMSJ Letters]. One of the clearest statements from a parishioner about the achievement of the hoped for effect is from an American source, Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana, 1986), p. 124. As Taves makes clear, there are good grounds for seeing the transformation of Catholicism in England and the USA as parallel phenomena. See also Gilley, S., ‘Vulgar piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850–1860’, in Swift, R. and Gilley, S., eds, The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), pp. 255–66.Google Scholar

10 See, for example, Anson, Peter F., Fashions in Church Furnishings 1840-1940 (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Clarke, Basil F., Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century. A Study of the Gothic Revival in England, repr. (London, 1069)Google Scholar.

11 For example, Gilley, ‘Brampton Oratory’; Taves, ‘Household of Faith’; Gilley, Sheridan, ‘Heretic London, Holy Poverty and the Irish poor, 1830-1870’, Downside Review, 89 (1971), pp. 64–89 Google Scholar; ‘The Catholic Faith of the Irish Slums: London, 184.0-70’, in Dyos, H.J. and Wolff, M., eds, The Victorian City: Images and Reality (London, 1973), 2, pp. 8 37–53 Google Scholar; and ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the nineteenth-century Irish Diaspora’, JEH, 35, 2 (1984), pp. 188-207.

12 Chadwick, O., The Victorian Church (London, 1970), 2, p. 310.Google Scholar

13 Ibid.

14 For a general survey and a bibliography, see Schor, N., Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 1987). An example, relevant to this discussion, of the connections made between the ‘feminine’ and the ‘decadent’ is to be found throughout E. A. Roulin, OSS., Vestments and Vesture: a Manual of Liturgical Art (London, 1931).Google Scholar

15 The literature on ‘separate spheres’ discourse and ideology is considerable. For a recent survey and critique of the literature see, Linda Kerber, ‘Separate spheres, female worlds and a woman’s place: the rhetoric of women’s history’, AHR, 75 (1988), pp. 9-39.

16 Life of Mother Margaret Hallahan, Mary (London, 1869), p. 200.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 73. An example of the communal side of Catholic interior decorating is given in the correspondence between the Franciscan Father Gomair Peeters and Alice Ingham. Gomair writes of his redecoration and furnishing of the church in Glasgow, FMSJ Letters 30G/A, p. 43: ‘How shall I pay for all that? Providence will assist me; the children of Mary have promised me to pay and collect for our Blessed Lady’s altar; diose who are called Patrick pay for St Patrick’s altar; the brothers and sisters of the third order have promised me to pay for what is more particularly referring to our dear Lord, the Tabernacle, Lamp etc etc; one lady of Manchester has sent me all the silk, satin etc for the throne, veils, linings of the tabernacle, besides a big box of splendid flowers, and so I hope to get through it.’

18 Clarke, A. M., Life of the Hon. Mrs Edward Petre (London, 1899), pp. 100–1.Google Scholar

19 Life of Mother Margaret Hallahan, Mary (London, 1869), p. 200.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 158.

21 See The Life of Connelly, Cornelia, 1809-1879 by a member of the Society (London, 1922), pp. 356–07.Google Scholar

22 Life of Cornelia Connelly, p. 197, and Mayfield, Archives of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus [hereafter SHCJ], D60, MS Sacristy Journal, St Leonards, 1862-1888, 4.

23 Life of the Petre, Hon. Mrs Edward, p. 137; Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, p. 83; SHCJ Archives, D60 MS Sacristy Journals; FCJ Archives MS Annals; Williams, Margaret, The Society of the Sacred Heart (London, 1978), p. 54; Taves, Household of Faith, pp. 99–100; and Morris, John, S.J., ed., The Life of Mother Henrietta Kerr (Roehampton, 1892), p. 283.Google Scholar

24 Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, p. 190; Broadstairs, Kent, Archives of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, MS typescript House History of Paisley and of Middlesborough; Life of the Hon. Edward Petre, p. 186 for Notre Dame in Plymouth.

25 Life of the Hon. Mrs Edward Petre, p. 186.

26 SHCJ Archives, D60, MS Sacristy Journal, St Leonards, 2, p. 50.

27 SHCJ Archives, MS Sacristy Journal, St Leonards, 3, p. 123.

28 Life of the Hon. Mrs Edward Petre, p. 133; Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, p. 77.

29 FCJ Archives, MS Annals 1886, Salford, Box 27, p. 34.

30 Life of Cornelia Connelly, p. 200; Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, p. 189.

31 FCJ Archives, typed House History of Lark Hill.

32 FCJ Archives, typed House History of Middlesborough.

33 SHCJ Archives, D60, MS Sacristy Journal, St Leonards, 4.

34 For example, Father Gomair Peeters writing to Alice Ingham of Rochdale, FMSJ Letters, 30 G/A, p. 53: ‘To give up dressing the altar, has been an awful temptation: oh no! dear Alice, never give up that glorious work, I say… let it be your greatest joy and glory and happiness, and when dressing and cleaning the altar with true love and devotion, remember that our dear Lord is dressing your heart and cleaning it from its daily imperfections.’

35 Laura Perre, as Sister Mary of St Francis ND, records as exceptional that Canon Drinkwater, parish priest of Battersea where Notre Dame had a convent, ‘… would never yield to a sacristan the honour of decorating the altar’: Life of Hon. Mrs Edward Petre, p. 192.

36 FCJ Archives, typed MS House History Holt Hill (written c.1930).

37 For example, see records of the Children of Mary of the Religious Society of the Sacred Heart, first established during the 1850s. MSS held at the Society’s Archive, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton.

38 A thorough analysis of the gendered language used by experts in liturgical art is well beyond the scope of this essay. However, it is worth noting the connections made between ‘poor taste’ and feminine work throughout Dom Roulin’s manual, Fashions in Church Furnishings. See, for example, pp. 18, 33, 37, and 225. Roulin’s position is that of a reformer bent on discriminating between the good, the bad, and the downright ugly in liturgical art. It is implicit and explicit in his writing that women (as amateurs) have been responsible for much liturgical art in the previous generations.