Victorians and the Virgin Mary

Religion and gender in England, 1830–85

Carol Engelhardt-Herringer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719095641
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797155
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This interdisciplinary study of competing representations of the Virgin Mary examines how anxieties about religious and gender identities intersected to create public controversies that, whilst ostensibly about theology and liturgy, were also attempts to define the role and nature of women. Drawing on a variety of sources, this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape, both retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated, and calling for a reassessment of the Protestant attitude to the feminine ideal.

This book will be useful to advanced students and scholars in a variety of disciplines including history, religious studies, Victorian studies, women's history and gender studies.

1

Religion, gender, and the Virgin Mary

The mother not ‘out of sight’

In 1844, John Keble, an Anglican priest and popular poet, was dismayed to find that some of his friends objected to his including a poem about the Virgin Mary, ‘Mother out of sight’, in his second volume of poems, Lyra innocentium. Although Keble defended his poem as being in accordance with both Scripture and ‘the doctrinal decisions of the Whole Church’,¹ his friends feared that its invocation of the Virgin Mary was evidence that, in the words of one, he ‘had advanced considerably in his religious opinions’² – in other words, that he was in danger of converting to Roman Catholicism. Even years later, this friend continued to insist that the poem, which was not finally published until 1868, ‘might have been harmful originally’.³

Several years later, another Anglican’s invocation of the Virgin Mary became the topic of a more public debate. In 1849, Priscilla Lydia Sellon, foundress of the Anglican Society of Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Trinity, in Devonport, was forced to reply to anonymous charges published in the Devonport telegraph that, in part because of the presence of ‘a picture of the Virgin Mary in a gilt frame on the altar’ in the chapel of the Sisters’ orphanage in Devonport,⁴ she and the other sisters were deviating from Anglican practices and leading the children in their care away from the Church of England.⁵ In addition to displaying this ‘highly Popish print’,⁶ the sisters were accused of having special devotions to the Virgin Mary and even of being secret Roman Catholics. Sellon herself was alleged to have kept a rosary under her pillow.⁷

In the public inquiry of the charges, convened by Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, Sellon, like Keble, invoked the authority of both Scripture and Anglican teaching in support of the print:

I placed in the oratory, to please the little ones, a print from a picture, which I suppose, may be found in countless drawing rooms in England. But because it represents the Holy Child Jesus in the arms of his mother, it is made a matter of accusation against me. Why did not these cross-questioners ask these unhappy girls straightforwardly, whether they were taught anything which the Bible and the Church of England do not teach, or whether they ever heard any words or conversation to that tendency?⁸

Although Sellon was more willing than Keble to acknowledge that the mere invocation of the Virgin Mary was sufficient to generate controversy, several years later she again insisted that the print was an innocent one that ‘any person might have in their drawing rooms’.⁹ While her attempt to define the print as a marker of bourgeois aesthetics was doomed by its being located in the chapel of her orphanage, she nevertheless rejected any accusations of Marian devotion: ‘There are not any prayers addressed to the Blessed Virgin in our services … I am quite certain that no sister has devotions to the Virgin Mary.’¹⁰

Keble’s and Sellon’s experiences were not unusual: a wide range of Victorian sources, both public and private, testifies to the fact that the reactions of Keble’s friends and Sellon’s foes were typical. The Virgin Mary was a controversial figure in Victorian England, especially between about 1830 and 1885. In sermons, religious tracts, political debates, public lectures, theological treatises, periodicals, and novels, Protestants denounced the Virgin Mary as an interfering mother and a pagan goddess who testified to the links between ancient and modern Rome. Catholics just as energetically rose to defend the Virgin Mary as a loving mother, of all Christians as well as of Jesus, and charged that those who thought otherwise willfully ignored divine truth. The same lines of argument were continued privately, in diaries, personal correspondence, and (no doubt) private conversations. The violence was not always rhetorical: in 1851 Daniel O’Keefe, chaplain of the Benedictine Convent at Hammersmith, complained in a letter to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, of hearing that effigies of the Virgin Mary and other saints had been carried in procession and ‘burned on Blackheath in the presence … of 10,000 spectators’,¹¹ and in 1867 the anti-Catholic lectures of William Murphy on topics such as ‘Purgatory, the Scapular, and the Blessed Virgin Mary coming down from Heaven to release souls out of Purgatory’ inspired riots both inside and outside the lecture halls in which he spoke.¹²

Keble’s and Sellon’s experiences reveal the multiple, overlapping reasons why the Virgin Mary became a contested figure in Victorian England. Religious causes were, at first glance, paramount: beginning in the 1830s, the growth in the number and prominence of Roman Catholics caused public invocations of the Virgin Mary to become more common. The development, within the Church of England, of the Tractarian and ritualist movements, both of which sought to revive the Church of England’s Catholic identity, also encouraged more frequent public references to the Virgin Mary. These two types of Catholicism helped cause a backlash of anti-Catholicism, one aspect of which was a greater willingness to appropriate the Virgin Mary as a symbol of a dangerous and foreign religion. Religious tensions were not, however, the only reason why the Virgin Mary became a controversial figure. Sellon herself hinted at another reason when she attributed the uproar to the age and composition of the figures in the print: ‘because it represents the Holy Child Jesus in the arms of his mother, it is made a matter of accusation against me’. In a culture intent on distinguishing the genders, discussions about the Virgin Mary, especially in her role as the mother of Jesus, were a way for Victorians to articulate what characteristics were essentially feminine and which were reserved for the masculine.

Those who engaged in constructing competing images of the Virgin Mary included famous Victorians such as John Henry Newman, William Ewart Gladstone, Henry Edward Manning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot. Others were once well known but now are barely remembered, including John Cumming, the Presbyterian minister at the Crown Court Church of Scotland in London, famous then as an end-times’ prophet with a large congregation but now largely remembered as the subject of George Eliot’s diatribe in ‘Evangelical teaching: Dr. Cumming’; Catherine Sinclair, a popular anti-Catholic novelist; and Thomas Thelluson Carter, a leading Tractarian and founder of an Anglican sisterhood. Still others were obscure even then: they were rural clergymen, pamphlet authors who hid behind initials and pseudonyms, and anonymous contributors to religious periodicals.

As Sally Cunneen and Jaroslav Pelikan have shown in their surveys of Marian images throughout Christian history, representations were never either fixed or monolithic.¹³ Although they are determined somewhat by the biblical evidence and tradition, how people imagine the Virgin Mary changes as the cultural context changes. The early church defined her as the Theotokos, or God-bearer, in order to combat heterodoxy by defining Jesus as both fully human and fully divine, while the medievals addressed her with the courtly ‘Lady’ that reflected chivalric traditions and aspirations. In recent years the rise of feminism has affected representations of the Virgin Mary: feminist theologians have emphasised her maternity, not so much to elevate her motherhood as to argue that, as the person who first made the body of Jesus, Mary provides a justification for female priests, while the intense Marian devotion of the late John Paul II may be the result of his conservative views on sexuality and women.¹⁴ In the Victorian era, the competing images of the Virgin Mary allowed Christians to define their religious identities and to establish the essential characteristics of the masculine and the feminine. These discussions were also a way for Victorian Christians to defend a conservative approach to the Bible against new theological developments such as Higher Criticism, Protestant Idealism, and Catholic Modernism. All who contributed to the Marian discussions interpreted Scripture in the traditional way: because they believed that Scripture represented God’s word, they were concerned only with how to translate and interpret it. Thus they could enter lengthy discussions about, for example, the significance of the crucifed Jesus assigning Mary to John’s care. This is not surprising for, as Peter Hinchliff notes: ‘A great many people continued to behave, until well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as if biblical scholarship was almost entirely a matter of knowing the contents of the Scriptures and the theological meaning which, over the centuries of Christian tradition, had come to be associated with certain books and passages.’¹⁵

Although Marian representations were shaped by two key debates in Victorian England – those over religion and gender norms – scholars have paid little attention to these evolving and competing representations as sources of information about Victorian culture. Studies of Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism have not considered them as a way of investigating either devotional practices or how English Catholics shaped their religious and national identities. Mary Heimann’s excellent revisionist work Catholic devotion in Victorian England¹⁶ gives little attention to the role of Marian devotion in shaping a Roman Catholic identity, even though the Rosary was one of the most popular devotions of the period. In this she follows the precedent set by earlier historians of English Roman Catholicism, including John Bossy, Edward Norman, and Joseph P. Chinnici. Major studies of anti-Roman Catholicism, such as Denis Paz’s Popular anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian England and Walter Arnstein’s Protestant versus Catholic in mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the nuns pay somewhat more attention to the Marian component of anti-Roman Catholicism, but they do not examine in detail how anti-Catholics used the Virgin Mary to draw a contrast between biblical Christianity and pagan corruptions, between (as they saw it) stalwart, rational, British Protestantism and a weak, effeminate, continental Catholicism. John Wolffe’s The Protestant crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860¹⁷ contains only a brief reference to the Virgin Mary. Keble and Sellon were only two of the Anglicans who sought a greater recognition of the Virgin Mary in the Church of England, yet neither the role of such Anglicans nor their motivations have been studied in recent works such as Nigel Yates’s Anglican ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910¹⁸ or John Shelton Reed’s Glorious battle: the cultural politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism.¹⁹ The first exception to this general trend was John Singleton’s article ‘The Virgin Mary and religious conflict in Victorian Britain’²⁰ which examines the polemical uses of Marian devotion by Roman Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and Protestants. More recently, I have examined primarily Anglican responses to the Virgin Mary.²¹ This book expands on those articles by considering dissenting and Roman Catholic representations and so offers a more comprehensive and culturally situated analysis of Victorian representations of the Virgin Mary.

This scant scholarly interest is in sharp contrast to the significant work that has been done on the role of the Virgin Mary in Catholic cultures. Robert A. Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, David Blackbourn’s Marpingen: apparitions of the Virgin Mary in nineteenth-century Germany, Sandra Zimdars-Swartz’s Encountering Mary: from LaSalette to Medjugorge are among the most significant works that have analysed the different ways in which men and women reacted to the Virgin Mary, and in particular how associating themselves with the Virgin Mary could allow women and girls access to the public sphere, for example through participating in festivals or by claiming to have witnessed Marian apparitions. Perhaps the traditional association of the Virgin Mary with Roman Catholicism has led scholars to assume that there was little to say about her in a predominantly Protestant culture. However, the Victorian debates refute this assumption: where Catholics are a small minority, the Marian images they promote have heightened polemical uses, while Anglican and dissenting rejections of the Virgin Mary described by Catholics reveal that negative representations of the Virgin Mary could be as theologically based and as useful in constructing an identity as were the positive images employed by Catholics.

Catholics and Protestants

Prior to the Henrician Schism, Marian devotion was an integral part of English Roman Catholicism. The Rosary was a popular devotion, Marian shrines and festivals abounded, and Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII, followed the practice of well-born women to wear a girdle, supposedly the Virgin Mary’s, during pregnancy. While the sixteenth-century reformers sought to reduce the attention paid to Jesus’ mother, they were not hostile to her, especially in comparison to their Victorian successors. They praised her as a model of faith; they wanted merely to lower her status, not denounce her. Their condemnation of Marian shrines and relics differed more in degree than in kind from the critiques of their Roman Catholic contemporaries like Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. As England slowly became a (predominantly) Protestant nation during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), Marian imagery was appropriated to describe the Queen. Scholars disagree about the extent to which the Virgin Mary continued to be invoked or whether Marian icongraphy was subsumed by descriptions of Elizabeth I.²² However, their agreeme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Religion, gender, and the Virgin Mary
• 2 The Catholic Virgin Mary
• 3 The Protestant Virgin Mary
• 4 Sex, sin, and salvation: the debate over the Immaculate Conception
• 5 The Virgin Mary and the formation of Victorian masculinities
• Bibliography
• Index