Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England.

MacKay, Lynn

In this book, D.G. Paz explores the reasons "ordinary people" in mid-Victorian England had for becoming anti-Catholics. He argues that anti-Catholicism was a complicated phenomenon that served a number of social, political, and theological purposes for particular groups and localities. Paz also denies that Roman Catholics were passive victims, pointing out that their theological and political militance provoked a Protestant reaction. In making this case, Paz distinguishes anti-Catholicism from anti-Irish sentiment, and he does so by studying the former in its local and regional manifestations.

Paz takes the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in September 1850 as his methodological starting point since this move generated a number of petitions and memorials from outraged Protestants. In an innovative move, Paz links the names from these documents to the social, economic, and religious evidence of the 1851 census. Thus, he is able to identify with commendable precision who the anti-Catholics were. Paz fleshes out his statistical analysis of this material with literary evidence contained in contemporary newspapers, journals, and manuscript sources. He also places the petition signatories in their social and geographic contexts, and he examines groups and areas that departed from the norm. Finally, Paz attempts to analyze the circumstances of various forms of collective behaviour to which anti Catholicism gave rise.

Paz begins to make his case by exploring the organized forms of anti-Catholicism: the public meetings, the petitions and the voluntary societies of this agitation. He then considers the cultural images of Catholics and of the Irish which were being perpetuated in the fiction, poetry and art and in non-fiction writing of the day. He concludes that the relationship between anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment was complex, and that the two could not simply be equated. Paz next considers Roman Catholicism itself, which he says was renewed and vigorous in England by the 1840s. Catholics were, in short, well able to defend themselves when controversy erupted in 1850.

Protestants, however, mere unable to mount a unified campaign against the resurgent Roman Catholicism. Paz discusses the problems the Church of England faced, especially with the rise of Anglo-Catholicism. Unable, on the one hand, to overcome Nonconformist antipathy to its establishment, the Church of England also had to cope with fears that the Tractarians were surreptitiously ushering Roman Catholicism into its midst. Paz also shows that the Nonconformists were rent by internal division. As the Church of England renewed itself and as economic change began to eliminate the skilled artisans and yeoman farmers who were the mainstay of Nonconformity, anti-Catholicism was embraced in an unsuccessful attempt to deflect and resolve internal tensions and competition.

Paz then turns to the attempts by anti-Catholics to make their cause a political issue. He shows how the mostly Anglican Tories were able in certain localities to harness the issue to help defeat the Liberals, who were usually supported by the Nonconformists. Thus, local secular considerations played a role in this religious issue. In his penultimate chapter, Paz explores the popular violence associated with anti-Catholicism, which he says usually took one of two forms. Communal riots - between English and Irish working-class opponents - were fairly rare, while the second kind of disturbance, the antipolice riot could be provoked either by the English or the Irish or by heavyhanded police action. The police, and not the other religious group were the target of anger in this kind of riot. Paz downplays ideology as a component of the forms of popular violence he discusses, claiming instead that 'the significance of drink, of competition for the sexual favours of women, and of dislike of the police have been underrated as explanations for early Victorian popular disturbances" (p. 265). While not entirely denying their existence, Paz concludes that radical political motives in the period before 1870 have been overrated.

In his last chapter, Paz explores the social and gender composition of organized anti-Catholicism. He says anti-Catholic societies weren't very successful in attracting the working class. Nor did women play a large role in this organized agitation. Paz finds that the proponents of organized anti-Catholicism tended to be from the respectable orders of society.

This book contains material that is innovative and fascinating, and it wul be of great use to anyone trying to grapple with the abiding anti-catholicism of the period. Nevertheless, in a book purportedly about "popular" anti-Catholicism, an inordinate amount of time is spent examining the phenomenon amongst the upper classes. Indeed, based on the portrait offered here, it is difficult to see working class anti-Catholics as little more than a feckless population driven to rather pointless violence by drink, sexual passion, and an instinctive antipathy to the police. This book has much to offer, but it is not a history of the anti-Catholicism of "ordinary people" in mid-victorian England if the term is understood to include the working class.