Abstract
Recent critics have emphasized the centrality of the discourse of religion and politics in the Victorian era and, following Linda Colley’s Britons, the importance of the Protestant providential narrative—that God directs his nation, and protects it from its enemies—in forming England’s national identity.1 In linking theology with politics, nineteenth-century English Protestants saw evidence of God’s continuing present-day support for the Protestant constitution, which earlier had been responsible for the historic defeats of Roman Catholicism—the rout of the Spanish Armada, the defusing of the Gunpowder Plot—and which now contributed to the period’s well-documented anti-Catholic feelings. This essay focuses on the providential poetry of Algernon Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins within the context of Victorian England’s religious politics.
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David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter Bingham Hinchcliff, God and History: Aspects ofBritish Theology, 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Hinchcliff, God and History, 18. Gauri Viswanathan argues that “conversion is arguably one of the most unsettling political events in the life of a society,” its rejection of national definitions posing a “radical threat,” as in the case of John Henry Newman, whose conversion to Catholicism she sees as “an expression of political resistance to English secular nationalism” (Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief [New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998], xi, 16, xvii). Newman brought Hopkins into the Church, and political resistance could have been a factor in Hopkins’s conversion as well.
Josef L. Altholz, “The Vatican Decrees Controversy, 1874–1875,” Catholic Historical Review 57 (1971–72): 596; D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (California: Stanford University Press, 1992), 49–70. Controversy over the “elaborate ritual and vestments adopted in some anglo catholic or high church parishes [which] were associated with Rome and regarded by some as an insult to the Protestantism of the nation” culminated in the 1874 Parliamentary debate between Gladstone and Disraeli and the passage of the Public Worship Regulation Bill, a defeat for the High Church party (“Ritualism: Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” Religion in Victorian Britain, ed. Gerald Parson, vol. 3. [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988], 301).
See Walter L. Arnstein, “The Murphy Riots: A Victorian Dilemma,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 51–71.
For the effects of Roman Catholic religious politics within the context of English anti-Catholicism, see Altholz, “Vatican”; Arnstein’s “Murphy,” and Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982); G. F. A. Best, “Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain,” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson (New York: Barnes, 1967), 115–42; Matthias Buschkühl, Great Britain and the Holy See, 1746–1870 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1982), 126–70; Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 221–35; E. R. Norman, “Introduction,” in Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: Barnes, 1968), 13–104; Paz, Anti-Catholicism; and Dermot Quinn, Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850–1900 (California: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Politics were also frequently the subject of Swinburne’s private letters to friends. He limited his political participation to the written word, declining a Reform League request in 1868 to stand for Parliament (Rikky Rooksby, A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life [Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997], 165).
The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), no. 175, lines 11–12; Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 155–58; Gerald Roberts, “ ‘England’s Fame’s Fond Lover’—the Toryism of Gerard Manly [sic] Hopkins,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 69 (1980): 129–36.
Qtd. in Gerald C. Monsman, “Pater, Hopkins, and Fichte’s Ideal Student,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 368.
Martin E. Geldart [Nitram Tradleg], A Son of Belial: Autobiographical Sketches, 1882 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990), 167–68. For Hopkins’s Oxford career, see Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Geldart, Son of Belial; Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (New York: Putnam’s, 1991), 23–170; Gerald C. Monsman, “Old Mortality at Oxford,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 359–89, and “Pater”; Renée Value Overholser, Hopkins’s Conversions: The Case of A. C. Swinburne (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1996); Alison G. Sulloway, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 9–63; Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3–161; Tom Zaniello, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 11–59. For Swinburne, see Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928); Rooksby, Swinburne, 45–63. Lafourcade, reunesse 2:218–20, reprints Swinburne’s essay attacking Ultramontanism, “Church Imperialism,” originally published in 1858 in the Old Mortality organ, Undergraduate Papers.
Hopkins’s references to Swinburne are guarded, cast most often as discussions of style rather than substance. Perhaps disingenuously in the context of the present essay, Hopkins writes that Swinburne’s poetry is “a perpetual functioning of genius without truth, feeling, or any adequate matter to be at function on” (The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 304.
The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 135–36.
Hopkins made clear his belief in the efficacy of poetry in promoting political ends in a congratulatory letter to Coventry Patmore in 1886: Patmore’s poems “are a good deed done for the Catholic Church and another for England, for the British Empire” (Further Letters, 366).
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 236–64; Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Woman Clothed with the Sun”; “The Great Exception, Immaculately Conceived,” in Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 177–200.
Barbara Corrado Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century,” in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 181.
Pope, “Immaculate,” 190. The Virgin’s main nineteenth-century appearances in France occurred at La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), and Pontmain (1871). See Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 2 (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 83–118; Pelikan, “The Woman.”
Graef, Mary, 97; John Kent, “A Renovation of Images: Nineteenth-Century Protestant ‘Lives of Jesus’ and Roman Catholic Alleged Appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” in The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion, ed. David Jasper and T. R. Wright (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 38; Pope, “Immaculate,” 188.
John Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious Conflict in Victorian Britain,” JEH 43 (1992), 34.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 43–46.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Collected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1905), 4:287.
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 266–68.
Jerome Bump, “Hopkins’ Imagery and Medievalist Poetics,” Victorian Poetry 15 (1977): 108–09.
G. H. Joyce, “The Church,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908, on-line edition, 1999, August 6, 1999, 18, 27, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03744a.htm.
Ibid., 22–23.
Henry Edward Manning, “Archbishop Manning on the Temporal Power,” The Temporal Power of the Pope in Its Political Aspect. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, ed. E. R. Norman, 1866 (New York: Barnes, 1968), 189.
Quinn, Patronage, 5. The movement had begun earlier. In 1838, for example, a Crusade of Prayer was launched among both foreign and British Catholics for the conversion of England (Sheridan Gilley, “Roman Catholicism,” Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. D. G. Paz [Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995], 46–47). Beginning about 1845 individual conversions resulted in “a considerable influx of educated men and women into the Roman Catholic Church,” among them “450 Anglican clergy” and “over seventy peers and peereses” (Gilley, “Roman Catholicism,” 45).
Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian Men of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 414–32.
William Gladstone, “The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation,” in Newman and Gladstone: The Vatican Decrees, ed. Alvan S. Ryan (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 46, 48.
Qtd. in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 442.
“Jesuits,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed.
Zaniello, Hopkins, 86; Journals, 262. Hopkins remarks, “Many good answers appeared and were read in the refectory,” including a “dignified” reply by Dr. Manning, which was however one of “the least interesting.” Gladstone had attacked directly Manning’s statements on Temporal Power. Dr. Newman’s reply, A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on the Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation, “we read in recreation.” Newman argued that Gladstone had been “misled in his interpretation of the ecclesiastical acts of 1870 by judging the wording by the rules of ordinary language,” which lacked the precision of theological language (qtd. in Norman, Anti-Catholicism, 101). Earlier, Hopkins had listed “some events from the end of ’69,” including the opening of the Vatican Council, “Definition of the Infallibility,” and details of the capture of Rome, and quoted the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs on “The obligation of not attacking the frontiers” of the Papal States ( Journals, 202–03).
Evangelical Protestant millenarians of the dominant “continuous historical” school read the Apocalypse of St. John as parallel to and signifying Western history from the birth of Christ until the end of time (Mary Wilson Carpenter, “George Eliot and the School of the Prophets,” George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986], 3–4), and identified papal Rome with St. John’s Antichrist, the “reign of the beast.” In contrast, the “futurists “ associated with Roman Catholicism and, specifically, with the Jesuits, “interpreted Antichrist as a power to appear in the future rather than as the pope” (Carpenter, George Eloit, 8, 22). Sulloway comments, “As a young man at Oxford, Hopkins himself was almost deafened by the prophetic cacophony. . . . The nineteenth-century Jesuits’ predictions of doom for heretical England were as vehement as the Tractarians’ or the Fundamentalist Dissenters’” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, 169). All groups would have read the revolutions supported by Swinburne as engines of divine retribution and signals that the end-times were coming.
Sean Street, The Wreck of the Deutschland (London: Souvenir Press, 1992), 11–34.
Germany figured prominently in England’s national narrative. The development of Anglo-Saxon concepts of freedom was traced back to the German primeval forests (Hinchcliff, God and History, 14), and Bismarck was seen “as the defender both of Protestantism and of national liberty against a subversive church seeking to establish political and spiritual despotism. The affinity between the England of ‘civil and religious liberty,’ the Italy of the Risorgimento, and the Germany of the Kulturkampf was fixed in the public mind” (Altholz, “Vatican,” 595). Frequent parallels were drawn between Gladstone and Bismarck, with approval by much of the English Protestant press, with understandable disapproval by the pope (Norman, “Introduction,” 97). Nixon suggests a British source for Bismarck’s nation-building: “Carlyle’s adulation of Prussia and inflation of its greatness in Frederick the Great (1858–65; and translated into German) must have inspired Bismarck’s German unification wars (1860–62) to forge the new German Republic (1871), declaring himself its first Chancellor” (Jude V. Nixon, “ ‘Return Alphias’: The Forster/Carlyle Unpublished Letters and Re-tailoring the Sage,” Carlyle Studies Annual 18 [1998], 116). I am indebted to Jude V. Nixon for this and other insights.
Elisabeth W. Schneider, The Dragon in the Gate: Studies in the Poetry of G. M. Hopkins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 84.
“Time’s Andromeda” is “normally identified with the church on earth,” Perseus with Christ (Poetical, 414, n. 4). The Perseus figure “evokes also St. George protecting his distressed Britannia” (Paul Mariani, A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970], 154) from the “wilder beast from the West” (line 7), which W. H. Gardner identifies as representing the forces of “rationalism, Darwinism, [and] the new paganism of Swinburne and Whitman” (qtd. in Mariani, Commentary, 152). Mariani adds to the list of “wilder” forces “utilitarianism, liberalism, Irish nationalism, Gladstone, and the general weakening of moral fiber among his own countrymen, [which] were constant sources of worry in Hopkins’ letters” (152–53). In a later article Mariani identifies the “lewd” beast with “the complex demon of sexual anarchy,” specifically the homosexuality associated with Whitman and Swinburne (“The New Aestheticism: A Reading of ‘Andromeda,’ ” A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984], 121).
Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 240–43. Margot K. Louis reads Songs Before Sunrise as Swinburne’s earliest attempts to answer the questions, “What symbolic system can adequately present the People, their suffering and their self-regeneration” and “replace the Christian myth of sacrifice and redemption? Above all, what can replace that mode of religious parody which has hitherto been central to Swinburne’s art?” (Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990], 98). Swinburne’s new method involves, in part, the development of a secular political typology, which reinterprets the Christian model, making, for example, “England, Italy, Garibaldi, or the people take the place of Christ” (George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought [Boston: Routledge, 1980], 154). For Rooksby, the volume constitutes “Swinburne’s republican book of common prayer” (Swinburne, 184).
Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:37.
Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry, 1922 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 684; Schneider, Dragon, 80. “To Victor Hugo” (Poems, 1:144–50) celebrates the French poet’s self-exile, contrasting his move toward freedom favorably with Christ’s slave-like death. “Blessed Among Women: To the Signora Cairoli” (Poems, 2:56–63) memorializes two of the Cairoli sons who died fighting with Mazzini against papal forces at Rome in 1867 (Arrigo Solmi, The Making of Modern Italy [Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970], 126); through Marian language their birth is equated with the birth of Christ, their mother with the Virgin. “Ode on the Insurrection in Candia” (200–08) mourns, through the figure of Freedom, the deaths of heroes who died for Greece during an uprising in 1867.
Hopkins is renowned for the use of etymological word play, but Swinburne “works” a word in much the same way, that is, by “manipulating its different meanings, teasing it for complex suggestions and nuances” (McGann, Beauty, 249). Other critics have found scattered verbal and stylistic reminiscences, as well as more fundamental similarities. For a range of critical opinion on similarities and differences between the poets, see Isobel Armstrong, “Swinburne: Agonistic Republican”; “Hopkins: Agonistic Reactionary,” in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, ed. Isobel Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1993), 402–39; William E. Buckler, “The Poetry of Swinburne: An Essay in Critical Reenforcement,” in The Victorian Imagination: Essays in Aesthetic Exploration, ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 227–59; Bump, “Hopkins’ Imagen,”; Mariani, “New Aestheticism”; Thaïs Morgan, “Violence, Creativity, and the Feminine: Poetics and Gender Politics in Swinburne and Hopkins,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 84–107; Overholser, Hopkins’s Conversions; John Rosenberg, ed. “Introduction,” Swinburne: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Random, 1968), vi–ix; Schneider, Dragon, 48–62; Robert C. Schweik, “Swinburne, Hopkins, and the Roots of Modernism,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 11 (1979): 157–72.
Father O. R. Vassall-Phillips, who served with Hopkins as a priest at St. Aloysius, Oxford, wrote: “It used to be said of [Hopkins] that he expressed surprise at not being allowed to keep by him Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads whilst he was in the novitiate at Manresa” (After Fifty Years [New York: Benziger Brothers, 1928], 81). The story suggests that Hopkins intended to reply to Swinburne’s poetry from the outset of his religious career.
Armstrong stresses the complexity of the question: it “means not only what did she mean or intend, to what was she referring, but what is the meaning of the nun’s cry, how does she mean?” (“Swinburne,” 435). MacKenzie summarizes the widely divergent opinion on the nature and meaning of the nun’s vision (Poetical, 343–44). See also Hilda Hollis, “Advice Not Taken: Attacking Hopkins’ Dragon Through Stanza Sixteen,” Victorian Poetry 36 (1998): 47–57. The nun’s cry echoes Christ’s announcement in Revelation 22.7, “Behold, I come quickly.” Jacques Derrida uses Revelation’s repetition of the word “come” as exemplary of the indeterminacy of apocalyptic language: “ ‘Come’ . . . addresses without message, without destination, without sender or decidable addressee, without last judgment, without any other eschatology than the tone of the ‘Come’ ” (“On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 167).
David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 68.
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Overholser, R.V. (2004). “Our King Back, Oh, Upon English Souls!”: Swinburne, Hopkins, and the Politics of Religion. In: Nixon, J.V. (eds) Victorian Religious Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980892_6
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