John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.