“let not religion be named between us”

No eighteenth-century author’s reputation for literary innovation has suffered more from scholars’ dismissal of her Catholicism than Elizabeth Inchbald’s. The erasure of her Catholic identity began soon after her death with the publication of James Boaden’s Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833). Boaden’s biography paints its subject as an unenthusiastic Catholic during most of her adult life, citing her spotty participation in Catholic services, her occasional attendance at Protestant churches, and the doubts she expressed about revealed religion. When he describes Inchbald and her husband as “Roman Catholics, who professed the religion of their fathers, without much examination, or very scrupulous adherence to the discipline of their church,” he simultaneously works to diminish and excuse her unfortunate religious identity.^[1] Although some scholars have challenged Boaden’s interpretation of the evidence he presents for his claims about Inchbald’s religious life, the progress of two centuries has done little to revise perceptions of her religious identity.^[2] Annibel Jenkins, author of the most thorough Inchbald biography written to date, has little more to say about Inchbald’s Catholicism than Boaden has. Inchbald was a regular participant in Catholic mass in her youth, and she was quite devout in her old age, but for about thirty years in between (a period corresponding almost exactly with that of her writing career), Jenkins considers Inchbald’s religious life negligible.^[3]

Michael Tomko has commented that Boaden’s biography reveals his belief in “an essentialized Catholic ‘mind’ opposed to natural philosophy, literature, and revolutionary thought,” from which he must free Inchbald in order to make sense of her literary achievements and political views.^[4] Such belief in the incompatibility of eighteenth-century Catholicism and revolutionary thought continues to shape commentary on the ideological valences of Inchbald’s writings. We can see its influence, for instance, in the work of Gary Kelly, who in 1976 identified A Simple Story (1791) as the prototype of the Jacobin novel.^[5] While many of his remarks about the novel’s innovations helped to raise Inchbald’s modern critical reputation, his assumption that she could not have written something so ideologically daring while still in the fold of her church leads him to read A Simple Story as an attack on Catholicism.^[6] In recent years, most scholars have at least acknowledged that the novel is sympathetic to its Catholic characters, but whereas a substantial body of excellent scholarship has established Inchbald as an important early feminist and political radical, little scholarship has sought to highlight her Catholicism.^[7] An assumption of incompatibility seems to linger over these aspects of Inchbald’s identity.

No doubt during the height of her success, Inchbald’s life was more worldly than spiritual, but worldliness is not apostasy. While Inchbald scholars must not discount the possibility that she spent a portion of her life as a discreet apostate, they must also approach her work with the awareness that she never openly renounced Catholicism, that she was known to the public as a Catholic, and that she maintained good relations with Catholic family, friends, and clergy all over Britain. Whatever she believed privately, she remained publicly and personally committed to her stigmatized and penalized religious community. Indeed, she prayed for it. Boaden records the following prayer among her papers: “Almighty God! look down upon thy erring creature. Pity my darkness and my imperfections, and direct me to the truth! Make me humble under the difficulties which adhere to my faith, and patient under the perplexities which accompany its practice.” Boaden, writing after Catholic emancipation had freed Catholics from the legal burdens under which they had labored for centuries, presents the prayer as evidence that Inchbald’s personal faith was in doubt, that her personal practice of it was weak (and Jenkins echoes his remarks).^[8] The first sentences of this prayer, however, are common enough expressions of contrition and fallibility. As for the last sentence, any Catholic living in eighteenth-century England might pray for the humility to bear with “the difficulties which adhere to [her] faith” and the “perplexities which accompany its practice.” Where Boaden sees a cry uttered from out of the dark night of the soul, I see a prayer for strength in the face of human weakness and state oppression.

That oppression leads us to my key point about Inchbald’s Catholicism: there was no incompatibility between her religious identity and her radicalism. The late eighteenth-century English Catholic community campaigned for emancipation using arguments founded in Enlightenment concepts of liberty and rights, and some members of the community were very radical indeed. Far from inhibiting her ability to write her daring novel, Inchbald’s Catholicism must be credited with much of what is most surprising and new about A Simple Story.

As a woman and a Catholic, Inchbald lived at the intersection of two stigmatized social identities.^[9] The failure to properly acknowledge this fact has prevented scholars from giving her due credit for one of her greatest contributions to English literature. Scholars recognize A Simple Story as an important milestone in a tradition of women’s novels stretching back more than a century prior to its publication, but the novel’s most significant innovation was to expand the boundaries of that tradition, inaugurating a more generalized form of minority literature.^[10] Inchbald proved the power of the novel form to strip any minority group of its aura of alienness and to convey its experiences sympathetically (the very power that Richardson sensed and feared in it). In claiming value for English Catholics’ experiences alongside those of women, Inchbald made the novel a home for minorities, a place to engage in self-representation and self-definition.^[11] Prior to Inchbald, there were novelists who belonged to disenfranchised groups, and even some (like Jane Barker and Daniel Defoe) who occasionally offered realistic portrayals of people who belonged to such groups. These earlier writers, however, did not make the representation of minorities as worthy of acceptance and equality a central concern of their novels; indeed, it would not have occurred to them to do so as they did not accept the legitimacy of religious pluralism any more than those in the Anglican majority did. By the final decades of the century, many English Catholics had accepted the reality of religious pluralism.^[12] Inchbald was the first novelist to explore this reality from a minority perspective, and in doing so, she has a strong claim to having written the first novel recognizable as minority literature.

A Simple Story was formed from two different novel manuscripts composed over the course of fourteen years. The first manuscript, comprising the first two volumes of the published novel, was written from 1777 to 1780; the second, comprising the third and fourth volumes, in the late 1780s. Beginning in 1789, they were combined into a single work, which was published in 1791.^[13] The last two volumes of the work do not dwell on the characters’ religious identities, but they are central to the plot of the first two volumes. These volumes tell of the romance between the virtuous but austere priest Dorriforth and the young and fashionable Protestant Miss Milner. When her Catholic father dies, Miss Milner becomes Dorriforth’s ward. She lives with him and his Catholic household, which includes Dorriforth’s Jesuit friend and mentor, Sandford; their shrewish, ignorant housekeeper, Mrs. Horton; and Mrs. Horton’s kind, old-maid niece, Miss Woodley. Miss Milner and Dorriforth fall in love, although on Dorriforth’s part that love is not consciously acknowledged until after he inherits the title of Lord Elmwood and is freed from his holy vows. Their relationship is strained from the very beginning, however, by Dorriforth’s attempts to control Miss Milner’s behavior and Miss Milner’s mockery of Dorriforth’s religion. A permanent rupture between them is only prevented at the last minute by Sandford, who overcomes his own prejudices against Miss Milner and marries them. From the introduction of Dorriforth as a priest in the first paragraph to the legal complications surrounding the Catholic wedding ceremony that takes place in the final pages, Inchbald never allows the Catholic identity of her hero to slip into the background in the first two volumes of her novel.

The originality of Inchbald’s achievement did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries. As one enthusiastic early reviewer of A Simple Story observes, “Her principal character, the Roman Catholic lord, is perfectly new.”^[14] We have not encountered a character like Dorriforth thus far in this study. Unlike the figures that stood in for English Catholics in the works of Dryden and Pope, Dorriforth’s status as an English Catholic priest is not defused through national or temporal displacement. He is not an object for mockery or scorn like the English Catholics who appear in many of Defoe’s works (although Miss Milner attempts to make him one). He is not subtly infantilized like Richardson’s Italians. Realistic and sympathetic, he appears openly as an English Catholic in near-contemporary England. He is the most fully developed instance of the Papist Represented in a major eighteenth-century literary work.

Yet only a handful of modern literary critics have approached A Simple Story with an explicit focus on its Catholic interest. Tomko has read the novel as a prototype of the “national tales” that would soon be popular among Irish authors like Maria Edgeworth, depicting the difficulties of bridging the deep divide between Protestants and Catholics; Bridget Keegan has reconsidered the novel’s much-discussed moral about giving women a proper education in light of its portrayal of Jesuits, the religious order that helped give English Catholics the education denied them by the penal laws; and Kaley Kramer has argued for A Simple Story’s status as an English Catholic novel by focusing on the novel’s depiction and performance of equivocation.^[15] Most other critics, however, pass quickly over the Catholic content of the text, if they address it at all. Jane Spencer typifies this dismissiveness when she writes in her introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of A Simple Story, “The Catholic interest in the novel is important mainly because it adds the shocking hint of sacrilege to the heroine’s desire: that desire and its prohibition are Inchbald’s main concerns.”^[16] Anna Lott’s introduction to the more recent Broadview edition of the novel happily offers a more balanced view of its conflicts. She provides a good primer on post-Reformation Catholic history and acknowledges both “Inchbald’s personal discomfort with intolerance towards Catholicism” and “her uneasiness with the constrictions inherent in the religion itself.” Still, Lott’s treatment of the novel’s concern for Catholic suffering is brief and rather abstract, while her commentary on the oppression of the heroine by Catholic priests is demonstrated with careful attention to the text.^[17] Inchbald’s innovations in the representation of Catholics are swept aside in favor of her innovations in the representation of women.

Miss Milner may be the eighteenth-century English novel’s most fascinating heroine, in large part because she is not presented as an ideal woman. Yet scholars often seem reluctant to acknowledge just how far from ideal she is. Miss Milner violates Richardsonian politeness by laughing at and ridiculing Dorriforth and other Catholic characters while invoking anti-Catholic stereotypes and leveling tired accusations against their religion and its adherents. Whether or not her hurtful words are meant sincerely, Miss Milner speaks like a bigot. Nevertheless, many scholars attempt to excuse her. For instance, Jo Alyson Parker argues that “although we cannot applaud the despotic power that Miss Milner wields, we can appreciate it as a gesture of resistance, one that can only take shape by perversely mirroring the structures of a society wherein the guardians themselves may often reign as despots.”^[18] Parker’s assessment is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves out an acknowledgment that Miss Milner has a claim to a kind of authority that Dorriforth does not. Despite being subject to the weaknesses of a woman in a patriarchal society, the Protestant Miss Milner can still operate the unofficial social mechanisms that marginalized and humiliated Catholics. Her ridicule reminds the Catholic characters of their social inferiority, and it undermines their efforts to be viewed as respectable English people by their neighbors.

The first half of A Simple Story does not tell the story of a marginalized figure constrained by social and legal conventions that deny her full personhood; it tells the story of two such figures. The clash between Dorriforth and Miss Milner is a clash between petty tyrants who both struggle for power within their household, knowing that the laws of their kingdom allow them virtually none outside of that household. The view of Miss Milner as a heroine victimized by domineering men must be supplemented by a consideration of Inchbald’s satirical treatment of Miss Milner’s own persecution of Dorriforth—a persecution that she performs primarily through the use of an anti-Catholic discourse that attacked Catholics by feminizing them. Gender difference and religious difference were co-constitutive in the eighteenth century, and to appreciate the full complexity of Inchbald’s exploration of the nature of despotic cultural power in her world, we must look at these dimensions of difference simultaneously.^[19]

Like the other texts examined in this study, I place A Simple Story within the context of eighteenth-century Catholic history. The period during which the two parts of the novel were conceived, written, revised, and combined corresponds with the period of the campaign for Catholic emancipation’s two great eighteenth-century successes and its most terrifying setback: the 1778 and 1791 relief bills and the 1780 Gordon Riots. Inchbald’s project to portray English Catholics sympathetically and realistically (a project shared by her characters, who attempt to project a public image of rationality and virtuousness) should be understood as developing out of this campaign, its liberal ideals, and its conservative betrayals. Unfortunately, Dorriforth’s effort to shed any likeness to the (highly feminized) popular representations of Catholics creates an environment hostile to women, with Miss Milner as its primary victim. The first two volumes develop the escalating conflict between these victims of patriarchal and Protestant hegemonies, a conflict that is not resolved but underlined by the marriage that takes place at the novel’s midpoint. After juxtaposing the plights of women and Catholics in the first two volumes, the latter volumes (in which the fallen Miss Milner’s daughter suffers together with her Catholic friends in Gothic abjection under the now-tyrannical Lord Elmwood’s rule) point us toward the utopian possibility that the disenfranchisement of Catholics and women might serve to unite them. Although these latter volumes are often perceived as disengaged from Catholic concerns, they in fact represent the further development of Inchbald’s radical politics—a politics that is not separate from her Catholic identity, but a product of it.

A Simple Story and the Campaign for
Catholic Emancipation

Inchbald’s decision to write her original and potentially controversial novel reflects the cautious optimism of the English Catholic community in the period in which the first two volumes were originally drafted (1777–1780). In the decades after the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Catholics had mostly lived quietly and with at least a token effort at obscurity, and in return they had only rarely been subject to flagrant acts of violence. By the 1770s, this stretch of relative peace, coupled with clear signs that the upper classes were beginning to view the old anti-Catholic laws as a national disgrace, emboldened the community.^[20] New chapels were erected in Bath, Bristol, and Edinburgh, evidencing Catholic confidence that their security no longer depended upon their invisibility.^[21] Their hopes were raised even further by the Quebec Act of 1774, which allowed for the practice of Catholicism in Britain’s recently acquired North American territory. For the first time, Britain had altered its laws to permit the open practice of Catholicism in one of its domains.^[22] Catholic leaders petitioned for relief, and Papists Acts were passed for England and Ireland in 1778. While these acts did not make the practice of Catholicism legal, they did repeal some of the cruelest laws against the clergy and allowed Catholics to buy and inherit land (or, in Ireland, to lease land for 999 years).^[23] The campaign for emancipation had won its first victories.

Inchbald would have observed and discussed these signs of a hopeful future for English Catholics with her broadening circle of Catholic acquaintances throughout Britain and beyond. Having run away from her family’s farm and begun her career in theater, Inchbald began to form friendships with many of the Catholics she encountered in her travels. After a childhood spent in a Suffolk parish of thirty-two Catholics, Inchbald obtained her first steady job as an actress in Scotland in 1772. She became a member of an urban Catholic community in Edinburgh and met Catholics in cities all over Scotland when doing itinerant performances.^[24] During her years in Scotland, she attended Catholic services regularly.^[25] At this time, the Scottish Catholic Church wore a relatively politically liberal face. Bishop George Hay, coadjutor of the church in the Lowlands (and, by 1778, its vicar apostolic), was a political moderate who spoke the language of liberalism in the defense of Catholic relief.^[26] We know Inchbald met and corresponded with him.^[27] The church’s other important liberal members included the cousin priests John and Alexander Geddes. It is unlikely that Inchbald met either of them at this time, but due to the small size of Catholic society, she probably knew of them and their work.^[28] John Geddes wrote articles against slavery and favorable to republicanism and became good friends with some of the most significant figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. The more radical Alexander will be discussed further below. While we can only speculate on Inchbald’s political development at this time, being a part of a Catholic community whose leaders had “fulsomely embraced the cant of enlightened liberality” and “the rhetoric of toleration” must have had an effect on her own progress toward radical politics.^[29]

From Scotland she traveled to Paris. Inchbald seems to have enjoyed seeing the city’s churches and convents, exploring, for the first time, a society in which Catholicism was practiced openly. Pro-American spirit was running high in France in 1776, which would have further endeared the country to her if she had already begun to form her radical political opinions.^[30] Returning to England, she and her husband joined a troupe in Lancashire, one of the few counties in England with a high percentage of Catholic inhabitants. She developed friendships with some of the Catholic families in the area that lasted for many years.

A few months after arriving in Lancashire and roughly half a year after returning from France, Inchbald began to write a novel about a lone Protestant woman in a Catholic household—England’s sectarian hierarchy turned upside-down. Her choice of subject must be credited in part to her recent experiences with thriving Catholic communities in Scotland, France, and England, and to the small concessions Catholics had won from the government. Change was in the air, and Inchbald could not have been insensible to it. Even if her biographers are correct that she started to question the tenets of her faith at roughly this time, theological doubts would hardly make her uninterested in the earthly prospects suddenly open to the religious community of which she remained a member (and for many years yet, a semi-regular practitioner).

The next few years delivered a sharp check to this sanguinity. Although quite limited in their scope, the relief acts of 1778 sparked an intense backlash that dashed any hopes that the legalization of Catholic worship might be imminent. By late 1778, protests in the wake of English and Irish relief had turned violent. Riots in Scotland in 1779 caused plans for relief for Scottish Catholics—and thus, for many of Inchbald’s personal friends—to be entirely abandoned.^[31] Under the auspices of Lord George Gordon’s Protestant Association, the opposition movement continued to gain steam over the course of the next year and a half, as Inchbald revised and attempted to publish her novel. In June of 1780, the Gordon Riots ravaged Catholic homes and chapels in London just as Inchbald was considering moving there to try her luck on the London stage. Protests and riots broke out in other locales as well. Bath Catholics saw their new chapel burnt, while Bristol Catholics dismantled theirs to avoid a similar fate.^[32] Theater business called Inchbald back to Edinburgh for the summer, where she would have encountered friends terrorized in the violence of 1779. The Catholic chapel, erected so recently in a time of optimism, and more recently burned to the ground, had not been rebuilt. Bishop Hay had to offer services in an upper floor of his house.^[33] In the fall, she finally did make the move to London, where she would have found the city visibly marred by the devastation wrought in the recent violence against her coreligionists.

Further dampening hopes for tolerance was the poorly kept secret that the Quebec Act had passed for the purpose of arming Canadian Catholics against the misbehaving American colonies. The 1778 Papists Act was also intended to encourage the enlistment of more Catholic troops for use against the American rebels (and to prevent Catholics from immigrating to the rebellious colonies, lured by Congress’s promises of land and freedom of worship). The ferocity of the Gordon Riots was due in part to the discovery of this secret agreement between the English government and Catholic leaders.^[34] Passage of Catholic relief was thus primarily the result of an imperial, anti-American agenda. Inchbald’s enthusiasm for the campaign for Catholic emancipation would have been tempered by the knowledge that protests had ended the prospect of further relief for the immediate future and that Catholic gains in 1778 came at the expense of the American colonists’ struggle for liberty. These discouragements, along with the violence of the Gordon Riots, may well have been the reason she decided to set her novel aside for a decade.

In taking up the pen in the first place, however, Inchbald certainly displayed the spirit of the age. She also displayed her savvy in the approach she adopted to her contentious subject. Despite being written during the campaign for the first Catholic relief act, the novel never directly comments upon the project of relief, nor the precariousness of the community’s fortunes under the burden of the penal laws. The nearest it comes to making such an allusion occurs when, upon Dorriforth’s assumption of the title of Lord Elmwood, a minor Catholic character remarks with confidence that the pope will release him from his priestly vows:

By 1778, the Catholic gentry had been reduced to only eight peers, nineteen baronets, and about one hundred and fifty gentlemen of property. The Catholic community was growing less dependent on men of rank, and legal devices helped them to keep property in Catholic hands even when Catholic families went extinct, but to lose an earldom would still be a serious blow.^[36] Fleetmond speaks of what this earldom means for Catholics’ “honour,” but for the Catholics living on the Elmwood estates, maintaining a Catholic succession may be a matter of economic survival. Furthermore, often the only place where rural Catholics could safely celebrate mass was in the private chapel of a Catholic manor house (as Inchbald’s family did at Coldham Hall during her childhood in Suffolk).^[37] Even as Inchbald daringly portrays Catholic society in her novel, her delicacy in this passage demonstrates the extent to which the community’s prospects continued to rest upon convincing Protestants of their loyalty. The great fear of the English government was that the pope could absolve Catholics of their vows of loyalty to the English monarch. Fleetmond presents the pope’s intervention as an obligation “incumbent on him” rather than as a choice, and insists that the dispensation of a priest’s vows to the church is an internal church matter. Inchbald does all she can to draw attention away from the fact that her plot hinges upon Rome’s interest in engineering a continued succession of English Catholic earls.

Inchbald’s avoidance of direct commentary on the penal laws is one reason many critics have assumed that she (or at least her novel) is not very interested in the Catholic community’s struggle for emancipation. However, we must remember that the criticism of unjust power in her works rarely takes the form of a direct confrontation with her society’s official systems of power. Daniel O’Quinn has observed this fact with regard to her criticism of the government in her plays The Mogul Tale (1784) and Such Things Are (1787). He writes that Inchbald’s “gesture toward democracy . . . does not take place at the formal level of governance but rather at the level of its guiding principle—that is, the manners and morals of the subjects governed.”^[38] Her decision to focus her satire on manners and morals rather than politics and legislation may be attributed in part to her consciousness of the kinds of criticism the public was willing to accept from a woman’s pen. However, it must also be observed that it was at the level of manners and morals that Catholics most suffered on a day-to-day basis. Alexandra Walsham has noted that in the anti-Catholic discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “laughter and mockery rather than fear became the predominant notes.”^[39] In the 1770s, Catholic clergy continued to be charged with crimes by overzealous Protestant informers, and Catholics of property spent their lives navigating a legal minefield, but property-less lay Catholics like Inchbald would rarely find themselves facing criminal or civil penalties on account of their religion. What they did face was daily insult and humiliation. (Recall Inchbald’s prayer: “Make me humble under the difficulties which adhere to my faith.”) Reflecting back on the early years of the reign of George III, the Catholic lawyer Charles Butler commented that the Catholics of that time “were subject to great vexation and contumely. No person, who was not alive in those times, can imagine the depression and humiliation under which the general body of roman-catholics then laboured. . . . They cannot picture to themselves the harsh, the contemptuous, and the distressing expressions, which, at that time, a catholic daily heard, even from persons of humanity and good breeding.”^[40] Interestingly, his chief example of such contempt almost reads like a passage from A Simple Story: “At a court ball, a roman-catholic young lady of very high rank, distinguished by character, by beauty, and even by the misfortunes of her family, was treated with marked slight by the lord chamberlain. ‘It is very hard,’ she exclaimed, ‘to be so treated;—after all, I was invited:’—and burst into tears.”^[41] The historian Michael Mullett thinks that this story of a young lady’s spoiled night at a ball undercuts Butler’s claims about the degree of Catholic suffering in this period, but such an assertion places too great an importance on codified forms of persecution.^[42] Discriminatory institutions and economic disadvantages may not wound so often or so deeply as a sneer, a laugh, or a dropped hint. These are the forms of persecution that Inchbald explores in A Simple Story. Her novel exposes how contemptuous social behaviors, fueled by culturally pervasive misrepresentations of Catholics, reminded her coreligionists on a daily basis of their inferior, disenfranchised status. While her community’s leaders were campaigning for relief from legislated oppression, Inchbald wrote a novel that argued for relief from these less official but more insidious mechanisms of oppression.

(Un)sensational Catholics

As the Gordon Riots proved, laws were easier to change than prejudices. The Papist Misrepresented might no longer hold sway in the imaginations of some of the better educated and more cosmopolitan members of the English upper classes, but for the bulk of the English population, deeply negative perceptions of Catholics remained the norm. Frances Dolan has suggested that Catholics’ “awareness of a division between who they were and how they were perceived” was “a double consciousness that arguably is central to what it meant to be Catholic in post-Reformation England.”^[43] A Simple Story leaves no doubt that it was central to Inchbald’s own experience of her Catholicity. Indeed, what is perhaps most “Catholic” about A Simple Story is the degree to which the characters of the novel concern themselves with setting popular perceptions of themselves at defiance. Sadly, this hyperawareness of others’ perceptions of them is partly responsible for much of the tragedy they experience.

Two of the strategies Inchbald adopts in A Simple Story to challenge readers’ expectations about Catholic figures are suggested by Terry Castle’s sole significant remark on Catholicism in her touchstone reading of the novel.^[44] While discussing the contrast between Dorriforth’s “placid household” and Miss Milner’s uninhibited sensibility, Castle comments parenthetically that the novel’s “Catholic element is unusual, but Inchbald gives even this a distinctly unsensational cast.”^[45] Castle has little interest in this “Catholic element,” and this remark functions as a dismissal of it. Yet her observation suggests how the novel’s portrayal of the principal Catholic characters (Dorriforth, Sandford, and Miss Woodley), like its portrayal of Miss Milner, challenges reader expectations. First, the fact that the only thing about Catholicism’s portrayal in the novel Castle considered worth mentioning is its “unsensational cast” highlights how unusual that unsensational cast is. Catholic characters were commonly quite sensational—villainous or buffoonish, or, at the very least, passionate like Richardson’s della Porrettas. Inchbald’s Catholic characters are singularly realistic and grounded, even dull at times. Second, Castle’s reference to the placidity of Dorriforth’s household suggests another meaning of sensational, one that indicates that the household is actively engaged in creating a particular public image for itself. Eighteenth-century novels of sentiment or sensibility were sensational literature; that is to say, they were intended to affect the sensations of their readers. They had heroes and heroines who were likewise possessed of a powerful susceptibility to sensation. While such sensibility was generally perceived as a sign of intrinsic goodness, by the late eighteenth century the association of such quickness of feeling with femininity (in contrast to masculine reason) had led to its depreciation.^[46] The discouragement of sensibility in Dorriforth’s household marks it as a masculine, patriarchal environment. This gendering of the Catholic household has powerful consequences, both for the Catholic characters’ efforts to resist anti-Catholic stigmas and for their relationship with the highly sensible Miss Milner.

Significantly, the first of these strategies, which challenges common literary representations of Catholics, is not dissimilar to Inchbald’s strategy for challenging gender expectations through her portrayal of Miss Milner. Following her comment on the novel’s “unsensational” Catholicism, Castle notes that the Catholic household cannot understand Miss Milner because she does not match the literary versions of young women they are familiar with from novels of sentiment:

Not only is Dorriforth unable to understand Miss Milner, but he is also unable to understand his own sexual desire for her. He can only interpret women and emotions according to literary paradigms. But Miss Milner, too, seems surprised to find Dorriforth unlike the Catholic figures she is familiar with from her reading. During her first breakfast in Dorriforth’s house, Dorriforth tells her that he had not expected her to look so much like her father. She responds, “Nor did I, Mr. Dorriforth, expect to find you any thing like what you are” (16). She goes on to say that she expected him to be old and plain, but her initial comment suggests that Dorriforth defies a number of her preconceptions about Catholic priests. If Dorriforth’s conception of her is based upon representations of young women he has gleaned from the pages of novels of sensibility, her expectations of him have likewise been conditioned by her reading. Even as she comes to know him better, her interactions with him remain colored by the very sensational (and mostly negative) depictions of Catholics with which she is familiar.

The novel’s Protestant characters invoke such negative stereotypes of Catholics when insulting them. When Lord Frederick Lawnly, a bigoted Protestant libertine, accuses Dorriforth of preaching “the monastic precepts of hypocrisy” (61), he invokes the figure, common in English literature, of the hypocritical or politically motivated monk. But Dorriforth’s “monasticism” consists entirely of an austerity that, while arguably unhealthy, is hardly hypocritical. Lord Frederick’s insult does his own character more injury than Dorriforth’s. Earlier in the novel, Lord Frederick quotes a line from Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, suggesting that Dorriforth and Miss Milner’s relationship resembles the love affair described in that poem. The “sarcastic sneer” with which he makes this comparison indicates that he is thinking less of the futile love between cloistered nun and monk described in the poem than of the sexual affair that preceded it (22). Indeed, part of the popular appeal of Pope’s poem no doubt lay in its relationship to pornographic works that cashed in on Protestant interest in tales of lascivious priests and nuns. Dorriforth, however, simply ignores this insult, his indifference indicating that he is free from even the thought of sexual impropriety. (The Protestant Miss Milner, on the other hand, is more disturbed by it, suggesting that she, like many English Protestants, is sexually excited by the idea of Catholic celibacy and its violation.)

Even the narrator is guilty of playing with the readers’ sensational expectations. Sandford, a Jesuitical priest, is introduced as a man possessed “of wisdom to direct the conduct of men more powerful, but less ingenious than himself” (39). Inchbald’s decision to make Sandford a former Jesuit can only be seen as deliberately provocative. As Keegan has observed, the Jesuits were the most hated and feared Catholic order in England until their suppression in 1773.^[48] Sandford’s description plays on readers’ prior literary encounters with manipulative Jesuits engaged in schemes to accrue wealth or power. But again, quite unsensationally, Sandford soon demonstrates that he is only interested in directing his friends’ moral conduct (however intrusive and arrogant his methods might be).

Whereas Miss Milner is a novelty for defying the boundaries usually set for a sentimental heroine, much of the novelty of Inchbald’s Catholic characters proceeds from their playing the roles of characters from sentimental novels. With an educated and attractive Catholic priest for a hero and a virtuous and pious Catholic woman, Miss Woodley, as the Protestant heroine’s confidant, the novel forces its readers to admire people who happen to be Catholic, as they would admire similar figures in other novels. This must have been a disorienting—perhaps reorienting—experience for many readers. Even when Inchbald plays with anti-Catholic stereotypes in the self-righteous Sandford and the ignorant Mrs. Horton, the stereotypes do not make the characters alien, but familiar, associating them with self-righteous and ignorant Protestant characters from other sentimental works. Sandford has more in common with Clarissa’s pedantic clergyman, Elias Brand, and Mrs. Horton with Sir Charles Grandison’s bigoted and rustic Aunt Nell, than either of them has with the Gothic characters of The Castle of Otranto.

That said, the Catholic characters do not always play their sentimental roles any better than Miss Milner does, and here we must consider the second way in which the novel’s Catholics are “unsensational.” Dorriforth in particular resists his role as a sentimental hero—as a man of feeling—despite the fact that he is naturally suited for the part. The narrator tells us that his features, though plain, “possessed such a gleam of sensibility diffused over each, that many people mistook his face for handsome,” and that “on his countenance you beheld the feelings of his heart—saw all its inmost workings—the quick pulses that beat with hope and fear, or the placid ones that were stationary with patient resignation” (8). Yet throughout the first half of the novel (and even more so in the second half) he strives to display only those “placid” feelings, to impose a more somber cast on his features than his actual sensations warrant. In other words, he strives to hide his sensibility. His body often betrays his feelings (Inchbald’s subtlety in portraying body language suggests both the futility and folly of attempting to deny one’s true sensations), but he rarely fails to make an effort to subdue them.^[49] Sometimes he carries this self-repression to a frightening degree, as when he disowns a beloved sister and her son because she married against the family’s interests. Dorriforth’s case is extreme, but most of the other Catholic characters appear to make a similar effort at self-repression. Sandford tries to maintain a grave façade, although his irritability often renders his attempts at aloofness unsuccessful. Miss Woodley is readier to acknowledge her sensations and to display sympathy for others, but she is still notably tame and dispassionate. And Miss Fenton, the perfect young Catholic woman whom Sandford promotes as a match for Dorriforth, is a caricature of insensibility (one that Inchbald employs to brilliant comic effect).

Due to the association of sensibility with femininity, the efforts of the principal Catholic characters to repress their sensibility hints at the misogyny that underlies their worldview. This misogyny, and the patriarchal tyranny it inspires in Dorriforth and Sandford, have been treated with great insight by other scholars, Castle among them, so I will not directly examine them here. I must observe, however, that most scholars have understood the priests’ misogyny and patriarchalism as symptoms of their male-dominated culture and religion and of their repressed sexuality. This understanding overlooks a critical element of Inchbald’s insight into anti-Catholic constructions of Catholic identity. There is more driving Dorriforth’s and Sandford’s unfeeling treatment of Miss Milner than their fundamental distrust of women and sexuality. The misogyny of the Catholic household should also be understood as a reaction against the anti-Catholic rhetoric that humiliated Catholics by gendering them as feminine.

In a study of anti-Catholic discourse, Dolan observes, “In constructions of Catholicism, gender is the most fully developed and consistently, if unevenly, deployed system for remarking difference.” In the Protestant imagination, Catholics “were persistently linked to women” and represented “as feminine.”^[50] This rhetorical feminization of Catholics was reinforced by the more concrete effects of the penal laws. As we observed in chapter 2, these laws emasculated Catholic men, denying them many of the rights denied to women: the right to own property, to bear arms, to vote, to work in certain professions, or to serve in the military or government. Indeed, Arthur F. Marotti argues that sexism and anti-Catholicism were co-constitutive, or were at least constructed on the same foundations: “Protestant iconoclasm and misogyny shared a basic set of assumptions about the senses, about the place of the body in religious practice, and about the seductive dangers of the feminine. Woman and Catholicism were both feared as intrinsically idolatrous, superstitious, and carnal, if not also physically disgusting.”^[51] Dolan and Marotti make these observations in studies of early modern discourse, but their remarks hold true for the eighteenth century. English misogynistic discourse was not simply anti-woman; it was also anti-Catholic.

Dorriforth’s double consciousness—his awareness that his patriarchal position in the Catholic Church actually feminizes him in the Protestant imagination—spurs him to erase any appearance of feminine sensibility from his personality. The placidity of his household is its attempt to present a respectable, which is to say, a masculine, example of Catholic gentility and religiosity. Dorriforth’s interest in being a positive representative for his religion is suggested in the first sentence of the novel, where the narrator notes his care to “discriminat[e] between the philosophical and the superstitious part” of the priestly character and to adopt only the former. Rather than “shelter himself from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister,” he travels to “the centre of London, where he dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance” (3). There he serves as a living rebuttal to anyone who might believe that Catholic clergy must be superstitious and incapable of practicing the manly virtues of the ancient Greeks. The household’s concern for appearances explains why Mr. Sandford and Dorriforth consider Miss Milner “so dangerous a person” that she must be “given into other hands” as quickly as possible (42). Miss Milner is dangerous because her behavior is so sensational (by every meaning of that word). She threatens to ruin the carefully constructed, carefully maintained example of insensible reason and rigid masculine virtue that Dorriforth has cultivated in his household. By making a spectacle of that household, she undermines his efforts to set his society’s popular representations of Catholics at defiance.^[52]

Unfortunately, in their attempt to masculinize their household, they effectively create an environment hostile to the culture of sensibility’s model of femininity. To appear so consistently rational, they must devalue the already devalued place of women as the sensible half of humankind. The household’s efforts to provide London with a positive representation of Catholicism ends in an embrace of misogyny. And as Marotti’s comments about the relationship between misogyny and anti-Catholicism indicate, in an English context, misogyny has anti-Catholic implications. On some level, Dorriforth and Sandford’s misogyny must also be an expression of hatred for themselves, a hatred for those aspects of their identities as Catholic priests that their immersion in English culture forces them to associate with the feminine, and to therefore despise. Their self-repression of their “feminine” sensibilities is a form of self-violence, one that leads to catastrophic consequences in the second half of the novel. A Simple Story suggests that for an English Catholic, misogyny is self-destructive.

Of course, Miss Milner remains the most direct victim of their misogyny. Yet she is hardly a blameless one. She regularly invokes the very anti-Catholic stereotypes that Dorriforth and Sandford wish to resist, and she seems to recognize how their hatred of those stereotypes is wrapped up in their misogyny. When Dorriforth calls her and Miss Woodley into a room with him and Sandford and tells Miss Milner that he wishes to interview her in front of a member of her sex, she turns to Sandford and asks if he is “that person of her own sex” who will observe them. Sandford replies “very angrily” at her making light of serious circumstances (55). Irritable as he is, Sandford is never so quickly brought to a display of anger by Miss Milner as he is here. She has touched a sore spot in suggesting that the Jesuit priest is more woman than man. Indeed, Inchbald has stacked the deck against her Catholic priests by tying them to the Jesuits, the Catholic religious order most strongly associated with deviant sexualities in the Protestant imagination.^[53] Miss Milner’s cultural indoctrination with regard to Catholic femininity may suggest why, during her courtship with Dorriforth, she believes she can take “the proud priest, the austere guardian,” and transform him into “the veriest slave of love” (138). She thinks Dorriforth’s passion for her will overwhelm his reason and render him obedient to her every whim. To prove it, she repeatedly goads him into emotional displays that make him ashamed of himself while proving her power over him. In essence, she seeks to subdue Dorriforth by feminizing him. Some might call this treatment of Dorriforth just deserts, yet Miss Milner’s readiness to equate femininity with subjection works against her own interests. If Dorriforth’s misogyny is, ultimately, anti-Catholic, Miss Milner’s anti-Catholic bigotry is, ultimately, anti-feminist, and thus equally self-destructive.

Anti-Catholic Laughter

As we turn to a closer examination of Miss Milner’s jokes about Dorriforth’s religion, I must acknowledge that the novel tends to elicit more sympathy for the heroine than the hero, even before the catastrophe in the latter half of the novel. Dorriforth’s sex and age grant him far more authority than Miss Milner’s Protestantism grants her, making Miss Milner the weaker party. It is only an unlikely combination of circumstances—Dorriforth’s passionate love for Miss Milner and the vow he made to her father to live with her without discussing religion with her—that allows her the opportunity to challenge his authority by insulting his religion. This stalemate was always contingent upon Dorriforth’s continuing love and his faithfulness to that vow. As the crisis near the close of the second volume demonstrates, once Dorriforth determines to break his promise, the illusion of Miss Milner’s power vanishes. None of this, however, absolves Miss Milner from the bigotry of her attacks, nor the novel’s readers from turning a blind eye to it. In the early pages of the novel, Inchbald takes pains to establish sympathy for her hero before turning the novel over to her heroine. The first three chapters are narrated largely from the point of view of Dorriforth, who expresses his fears that he is unprepared to govern a young woman (fears, we soon learn, he was wise to have). Even as the focus shifts to Miss Milner in the fourth chapter, the narrator warns us of her heroine’s faulty character and beguiling speech:

In spite of the warning, most readers (certainly this one) are taken in by that delivery. Only by looking closely at her words do we see that she resists patriarchal domination by recourse to common anti-Catholic jokes (“but the words of others”). Only by looking closely at the pain her words cause to the people around her do we get a sense of just how “ill proportioned” Miss Milner’s personality is.

Miss Milner, we are later told, has a “happy turn for ridicule, in want of other weapons” (41). This weapon proves to be a powerful one, allowing her to maintain her identity in a household that wishes to radically change her. Catherine Craft-Fairchild writes that Miss Milner’s laughter “becomes her woman’s weapon against oppression,” which she directs at “[a]ny form of masculine constraint or animosity.”^[54] However, if Miss Milner aims at patriarchy, the devastating power of her jokes produces a great deal of collateral damage. Catholics, themselves an oppressed minority, absorb most of it. And in some cases, Miss Milner’s laughter is certainly not helping a feminist cause. This is apparent when her jealousy leads her to make a joke at the expense of Dorriforth’s first fiancée, the insensible Miss Fenton—notably not one of Miss Milner’s patriarchal oppressors. Upset by this attack on his favorite, Sandford warns Miss Milner, “jests are very pernicious things, when delivered with a malignant sneer.—I have known a jest destroy a lady’s reputation—I have known a jest give one person a distaste for another—I have known a jest break off a marriage” (124). Jokes, Sandford implies, are particularly harmful to women. In ridiculing Miss Fenton, Miss Milner attacks not just a woman, but a Catholic as well—and thus a person even more marginalized than herself. This last fact is given concrete demonstration when Miss Fenton is quietly disposed of to a convent after her existence becomes an inconvenience to Miss Milner and Dorriforth. The mutual weaknesses of women and Catholics are never clearer in A Simple Story than when jokes highlight and enforce the power relations that order English society.

The idea that jokes are instruments of power is not a modern one. The eighteenth century’s most widely accepted theory of laughter held that it was a form of triumph, that the telling of a joke created victors and victims. Most eighteenth-century philosophers believed that “the external source of laughter is located, commonly, in ugliness or deformity of body or soul,” and they ascribe the pleasure a person derives from it to maliciousness, a feeling of superiority, or the comfort of knowing oneself to be safe from sharing that deformity.^[55] This triumphalist understanding of laughter is quite apparent even in so-called polite literature, which usually justifies ridicule by asserting its corrective function on society. Inchbald’s stage comedies relied, in part, on such corrective humor, and so too does A Simple Story. But as Sandford’s warning suggests, humor can be destructive as well as corrective, and Miss Milner seems little interested in performing corrective work with her jokes. What she intends is to demonstrate her contempt for others, and, by humiliating them, to deny their superiority and establish her own. She bases her superiority on the fact that she, unlike the rest of the household, is a member of the state’s established church.^[56] As a woman, Miss Milner is mostly excluded from the public domains of law and property in which penal legislation operated, but she is perfectly capable of deploying bigoted jokes to remind her Catholic friends of their social inferiority. Indeed, she may even be following conduct book advice in doing so. In The New Family Instructor, Defoe recommends laughter as the most effective weapon against Catholicism. That text insists “[t]hat the best Way, . . . to fight the Papists, was to laugh at them, to expose them to the Ridicule of the World.”^[57] It is a sign of the precarious condition of English Catholics that a young, frivolous woman can place her own guardian in contempt merely by repeating old jokes. These jokes provide Inchbald with a means of exposing the power relations between Protestants and Catholics—as well as between men and women.

In fairness to Miss Milner, she discovers the power of her laughter innocently when she unthinkingly makes a bigoted joke during her first breakfast in her new home in the Catholic household (the same breakfast at which she notes that Dorriforth is not “any thing” like what she expected him to be). Miss Milner and Dorriforth, with Mrs. Horton and Miss Woodley present, engage in a playful conversation in which they exchange compliments on each other’s attractiveness. In response to Dorriforth’s teasing question as to whether she really believes that she is not beautiful, Miss Milner jokes, “I should from my own opinion believe so, but in some respects I am like you Roman Catholics; I don’t believe from my own understanding, but from what other people tell me.” The playful mood breaks instantly. Dorriforth attempts to put a stop to such talk once and for all. “[M]y dear Miss Milner,” he says, “we will talk upon some other topic, and never resume this again—we differ in opinion, I dare say, on one subject only, and this difference I hope will never extend itself to any other.—Therefore, let not religion be named between us; for as I have resolved never to persecute you, in pity be grateful, and do not persecute me.” Miss Milner is astonished that “any thing so lightly said, should be so seriously received.” Things might still have ended well enough, but Mrs. Horton “made the sign of the cross upon her forehead to prevent the infectious taint of heretical opinions.” Miss Milner cannot help but laugh at this superstitious action. Her laughter drives both Mrs. Horton and Dorriforth from the room (16–17).

Miss Milner clearly thinks that her joke is harmless, that it is just another piece of half-flirtatious banter. She is shocked to discover how sensitive Dorriforth is to even a playful expression of contempt for his religion. Mockery is one of the few things that Dorriforth finds so intolerable that his stoicism fails in the face of it. The intensity of his reaction and his labeling the joke a persecution suggest that he has had a great deal of experience with such jokes and understands that they are inherently about establishing power, regardless of how “lightly” they are uttered. In condemning the joke, Dorriforth defends the prerogatives he considers his due as a man and a guardian. At the same time, Miss Milner’s unthinking bigotry exposes her own sense of prerogative. Whatever indulgences Miss Milner may believe are allowed to beauty, it is hard to imagine that, if she were an English Catholic and at breakfast with her new Protestant family for the first time, she would make a joke at the expense of their religion. But as a Protestant, she makes an unconscious assumption that she may mock Catholicism without consequence, and even that Catholics will find her mockery as witty as she does. Ironically, Miss Milner’s joking assertion that she lacks good judgment is confirmed by the thoughtlessness with which she utters this rude joke.

As the novel proceeds, laughter increasingly becomes for Miss Milner an almost undisguised tool for humiliating her Catholic friends and elevating herself. When she and the rest of the household attend a dinner at the castle of Dorriforth’s cousin, Lord Elmwood, a well-timed joke gains her a particularly impressive triumph. Sandford’s assiduities to a detested suitor of Miss Milner’s provoke her to announce, in front of the other guests, that Lord Frederick will soon visit the neighborhood. The revelation that she is privy to a man’s plans—especially a man of Lord Frederick’s libertine ways and bigoted behavior—shocks her Catholic friends. Sandford insists that if it were up to him, Miss Milner would have no knowledge of the visit. Miss Milner charges that if he could, Sandford would keep her ignorant of everything. “I would,” Sandford answers. “From a self-interested motive, Mr. Sandford,” Miss Milner responds, “—that I might have a greater respect for you.” Miss Milner’s attempt at wit recycles the old charge against the Catholic clergy that they keep their flock in superstitious ignorance so that they will be treated with greater veneration for their learning. The response of the assembly is telling: “Some of the persons present laughed—Mrs. Horton coughed—Miss Woodley blushed—Lord Elmwood sneered—Dorriforth frowned—and Miss Fenton, looked just as she did before” (48–49). The Catholic characters (save for the comically insensible Miss Fenton) respond with embarrassment or anger, but the laughter of some of the listeners gives Miss Milner her victory. Here, as a guest in a Catholic peer’s house, in the neighborhood that she shares with him, Miss Milner’s unoriginal jest reminds all the Catholics present of the contempt in which most of English society holds their religion, to the appreciative laughter of some of their (presumably Protestant) friends and neighbors.

Despite continually reminding the rest of the household of the inferiority of their religion, it is unlikely that Miss Milner’s bigotry is based in religious conviction or strong conscious prejudices. Her own father, whom she loved, was a Catholic, and her schooling, although technically Protestant, was not very religious. Her jokes attack her Catholic friends for sins or qualities she associates with the practice of Catholicism, such as Mrs. Horton’s superstition or Sandford’s priestly self-importance, but she does not often target actual tenets of the Catholic religion.^[58] Furthermore, her admiration for Dorriforth soon induces her to admire his religion as well. The narrator writes of Miss Milner that “the more she respected her guardian’s understanding, the less she called in question his religious tenets—in esteeming him, she esteemed all his notions; and among the rest, even venerated those of his religion” (73). This revelation has received surprisingly little comment from critics. I know of no other place in eighteenth-century English fiction where a Protestant woman’s veneration of Catholic tenets is described as a positive development in her character, as it seems to be here.^[59] Miss Milner’s unconscious prejudices fall away as she gets to know what Catholics really believe and how they really behave. Yet this development does not put a stop to her anti-Catholic ridicule. Bigotry, for Miss Milner, is less about theological dispute than about exploiting her cultural privilege.

Although frequently upset by Miss Milner’s continued attacks, Dorriforth manages to respond to her with a level of restraint. Only once, as a result of the repeated insults of Lord Frederick, does his wounded pride get the better of his self-control. Lord Frederick takes advantage of Dorriforth’s “ecclesiastical situation” to treat him “with a levity” on multiple occasions (58), including an encounter the narrator does not describe but that leaves Dorriforth visibly troubled all day. (Notably, when Dorriforth informs Miss Milner of Lord Frederick’s treatment of him, she declares with warmth that she will see Lord Frederick no more. Her friends’ humiliation is only acceptable if she is the one humiliating them.) The conflict between the two men reaches its breaking point when Lord Frederick further demonstrates his scorn for Dorriforth’s authority by disregarding his and Miss Milner’s attempts to make him desist pursuing her. When Lord Frederick fears that he will be denied access to Miss Milner forever, he begs her “[n]ot to desert him, in compliance to the monastic precepts of hypocrisy.” Then, in complete contempt of her on-looking guardian, he devours her hand in passionate kisses. Dorriforth strikes Lord Frederick and pulls his ward away (61). Readings of the novel often point to this moment as a sign of Dorriforth’s unconscious desire for Miss Milner and jealousy of Lord Frederick, but Dorriforth has other reasons to despise him. The kisses are immediately preceded by an attack on Catholic monasticism, and Lord Frederick has a history of ridiculing Dorriforth’s religion. Lord Frederick believes that, because of Dorriforth’s status as a Catholic and a priest, he has free rein to treat this fellow gentleman and neighbor as the butt of jokes and to disregard his authority over his ward, even before his very eyes. Their altercation leads to a duel, the romantic nature of which distracts us from the interfaith violence that it represents. The cause of the duel—Lord Frederick’s contempt and the blow it provoked—would not have existed had Lord Frederick perceived Dorriforth as the social equal that he is. Catholic humiliation almost turns deadly when scorn escalates into violence.

This continual humiliation nearly puts an end to Miss Milner and Dorriforth’s romance. After Dorriforth becomes the new Lord Elmwood and engages himself to marry Miss Milner, the two lovers, rather than finally making peace, only intensify their attempts to subjugate each other. The final crisis begins to develop when Lord Elmwood imperiously commands Miss Milner not to attend a masquerade, an entertainment that he considers licentious. Miss Milner has no intention of obeying what she considers to be an unjust command, and she immediately retaliates. The narrator explicitly notes Miss Milner’s development of a strategy after Lord Elmwood issues his command: “[S]he first thought of attacking him with upbraidings; then she thought of soothing him; and at last of laughing at him.—This was the least supportable of all, and yet this she ventured upon” (152). As is apparent in the subsequent conversation, she determines that the best way to show her contempt for his authority is to invoke stereotypes of Catholics more defamatory than any she has yet given voice to:

Miss Milner’s joke, as she sees it, is in her insistence that these pornographic representations of Catholics tell her more about how Catholics think and behave than does her observation of the words and behavior of the real Catholics sitting right in front of her. The writings of bigots are to be credited over actual personal experience. The Catholics do not get the joke—or rather, they get it all too well, as they have undoubtedly had much experience with Protestants who truly do believe the representations of Catholics in “books about nuns, and their confessors.”

This joke, like Miss Milner’s first joke (that she is similar to a Catholic because she believes what people tell her) and her joke at the former Lord Elmwood’s house (that Sandford would keep her ignorant so that she would have greater respect for him), is about the slavish submission of personal judgment to external authority. In the first two, Catholics are the ignorant people who trust to the judgment of others. (Miss Milner is, of course, disingenuous when she says that she does not judge herself to be beautiful.) But in this last joke, she denies her own experiences with her Catholic friends in favor of the insulting caricatures of other authorities. She willingly becomes the slavish devotee to spurious beliefs. Miss Milner’s joke thus rebounds upon the Protestant culture that spawned it, exposing that culture’s bigotry and willful ignorance. Inchbald’s effort to work through the problem of Catholic representation results in the implication that anti-Catholic discourse is itself a kind of “popish” superstition that Protestants accept in spite of the evidence of their senses.^[60]

If the critique of anti-Catholic discourse suggested by Miss Milner’s final anti-Catholic joke is subtle, the self-destructive nature of the joke is quite clear on a personal level. Sandford had warned her that a joke could destroy a lady’s reputation, give a person a distaste for another, or break off a marriage. This joke leads to all of these effects—on the joke teller. Furthermore, it is significant that both of the Catholics in the room—Miss Woodley, the old maid, and Lord Elmwood, the former priest—are as virginal as Miss Milner. Miss Milner’s last and most offensive anti-Catholic attack is also the worst accusation that could be leveled at a woman: that of sexual impropriety. Now, as the moment of rupture between this Protestant woman and Catholic man nears, two oppressive forms of English cultural authority—the patriarchal and the Protestant—reveal how nearly aligned their strategies of dehumanization truly are. Throughout the novel, Miss Milner has suffered under constraints designed to guard her sexual purity, constraints that reveal patriarchy’s distrust of women’s sexuality. She has struggled to prove to Lord Elmwood that her spiritedness is not a sign of wantonness, that she is fully capable of governing her sexuality herself. By making her bigoted joke, Miss Milner does not simply countenance and perpetuate the slanders that fuel the continued ostracization of Lord Elmwood and Miss Woodley from their rightful status in society. She also makes herself complicit in the very sort of cultural despotism that Sandford and Lord Elmwood participate in when they treat her beauty and sexuality as a threat. Miss Milner’s anti-Catholic jesting has an anti-feminist punch line.

Marriage, Patriarchy, and Bigotry

Neither hero nor heroine recognizes that the methods each adopts to humble the other has a detrimental effect on his or her own interests. Each continues to display a stubborn pride and a fear of subjugation. After her disastrous night at the masquerade, Miss Woodley begs Miss Milner to attempt a reconciliation, but Miss Milner answers “[t]hat after what had passed between her and Lord Elmwood, he must be the first to make a concession, before she herself would condescend to be reconciled” (166). Lord Elmwood, meanwhile, lets many days pass without making a decision, an indication that he awaits a concession from her. Sandford, who near the end of the second volume finally begins to overcome his own prejudices against Miss Milner, faults both of them for their refusal to speak to each other. “I don’t see why one is not as much to be blamed, in that respect, as the other” (185), he declares with characteristic crossness. Nevertheless, both Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood let several opportunities to reconcile pass, with their foremost feeling on these occasions being a resolute pride. Their simultaneously implacable and vulnerable personalities lead to the ruin of their relationship and their lives—an outcome that seems inevitable even in the blissful moment of their marriage.

Sandford abruptly weds the couple just before their final separation is to take place. Thanks to the solemnity with which he performs the marriage rites, “the idea of jest, or even of lightness, was far from the mind of every one present” (192). Miss Milner, in other words, was in no mind to mock the alien ceremony. Caught by surprise in a moment of intense emotion, the hero and heroine forget to struggle with each other for dominance, to their mutual joy and relief. Yet the inequalities in their relationship are prominently displayed in the ceremony itself, suggesting the inescapable tensions of sexual and religious difference that will be a constant presence in their married lives. Sandford convinces Lord Elmwood to marry Miss Milner by demanding that he either give her up forever, “or this moment constrain her by such ties from offending you, she shall not dare to violate.” He thus places an expectation of reform on Miss Milner, whereas Lord Elmwood asks her to “bear with all [his] infirmities” in marriage (191). Miss Milner is to be constrained and reformed by her vows, but an expectation of altered behavior is not imposed upon Lord Elmwood. If Miss Milner is allowed the triumph of not having to apologize for her past behavior, she is still placed in the position of modifying her future behavior to suit the desires of her husband, whose property she is to become. Yet Miss Milner does not speak in this scene. She does not constrain herself by even so much as a private vow of reform. Nor is she constrained by any legal vow of marriage. Catholic marriage ceremonies were not recognized under English law. As soon as the ceremony ends, Sandford reminds the newlyweds (and the reader) of this more-than-technicality: “‘But still, my lord,’ cried Sandford, ‘you are only married by your own church and conscience, not by your wife’s; or by the law of the land; and let me advise you not to defer that marriage long, lest in the time you disagree, and she yet refuse to become your legal spouse’” (192). Miss Milner, Sandford points out, can legally still choose to leave Lord Elmwood in spite of the recently concluded Catholic ceremony. Yet Lord Elmwood is forever bound to her, by conscience and religion. As a Catholic, he accepts Sandford’s marriage ceremony as a holy sacrament. The future of his line and title, for which he dispensed his vocational vows, is now entirely in the trust of Miss Milner, who has made no vows of obedience to him that bind her by law or by her religion. Despite Sandford’s talk of constraining Miss Milner, this ceremony has constrained no one but Lord Elmwood. Once again, English law denies Lord Elmwood his masculine right of property by preventing him from taking immediate possession of his wife. Even as Miss Milner prepares to enter a contract that is inherently patriarchal, one which will subordinate her to her husband and effectively deny her legal personhood, Inchbald points out that Lord Elmwood is also not in full control of his destiny, that in England, a valid marriage is not only inherently patriarchal but inherently Protestant.

The first half of A Simple Story concludes with Miss Milner’s ominous discovery that the ring with which Lord Elmwood weds her is a mourning ring. The disaster threatened by this omen is realized in the opening chapters of the third volume. Lord Elmwood and Miss Milner (now Lady Elmwood) have a daughter, Matilda, and for a time their marriage is happy. Then Lord Elmwood goes to the West Indies for three years to oversee his plantation. His excuses for the continued delay of his return inspire “suspicion and resentment” in Lady Elmwood. Her pride wounded, she has an affair with the Duke of Avon (formerly Lord Frederick). Lord Elmwood returns, and Lady Elmwood flees their home. Lord Elmwood sends Matilda after her, and vows never to see either of them again. The narrator summarizes these events before rejoining the narrative seventeen years after the wedding ceremony, as Lady Elmwood dies a sad, lonely death in exile, attended only by Matilda, Miss Woodley, and Sandford (who has grown somewhat gentler, if no less irritable, in his old age).

The narrator admits that she is passing over the details of the failure of Lord and Lady Elmwood’s marriage, claiming that they would not give the reader much enjoyment. Her silence leaves us with few solid details about the thoughts and feelings of the formerly happy couple as their union dissolves. What, exactly, does Lady Elmwood suspect Lord Elmwood of doing while abroad that drives her into another man’s arms? We are not told, but perhaps she fears that he has finally found his perfect woman on his plantation: a slave woman. Such a suspicion would offer some excuse for the outrageous cruelty of her response. In having an affair with Lord Frederick, Lady Elmwood does not merely take Lord Elmwood’s most hated romantic rival and near-assassin into her bed; she also quite literally embraces Protestant bigotry. In transforming Lord Elmwood into a cuckold, she emasculates him once again—and this time the emasculation is permanent. In Lord Elmwood’s eyes, the loss of her sexual fidelity is “a barrier never to be removed” (197).

Lady Elmwood’s infidelity and, particularly, her choice of partner explain the severity of her punishment (death) in the novel’s moral universe. However, Lord Elmwood’s response to his emasculation is, characteristically, an extreme overreaction. He transforms from “the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth” into “a hard-hearted tyrant,” “an example of implacable rigour and injustice” (194–95). Acting a hyper-masculine, utterly insensible (“unsensational”) part, he banishes even his innocent daughter from his house. The rapidity with which Lady Elmwood and Lord Elmwood resume their cruel behaviors when their marriage turns sour, and the exorbitant lengths to which they take those behaviors, suggests that neither character had ever truly overcome their authoritarian impulses. Their relationship is not destroyed by religious division or by gender division, but by a struggle of wills that exploits those divisions for unjust appropriations of power. They both want liberty and autonomy, but they seek them through destructive means, each attempting to deny liberty and autonomy to the other.

Relief, Revolution, and the Gothic

After Lady Elmwood’s death, the second half of the novel continues with the story of Matilda’s efforts to be acknowledged by her father, who permits her back into his home but refuses to see or even speak of her. As the conflict between Catholic and female identity does not govern the narrative here as it does in the first half, and as the characters here do not suffer from negative Catholic representations, the latter half of the novel is of less interest to this study. Yet the sudden absence of two of the major concerns of the first half of the novel needs to be accounted for, especially in light of Lord Elmwood’s portrayal as an almost Gothic villain, a transformation that threatens to undermine Inchbald’s efforts to recuperate the image of English Catholics.^[61]

Scholars often note the Gothic qualities of the second part of A Simple Story.^[62] The sense of isolation and misery of those living at Elmwood Castle and the haunting memory of Lady Elmwood are felt throughout these volumes. Given the text’s feminist concerns, we can understand Inchbald’s decision to adopt the Gothic mode. Writing of Inchbald’s use of the Gothic, Amy Garnai notes that the mode’s “amplification of the terms in which female subjugation is enacted” makes it conducive to the portrayal of the ways in which power and desire “reinforce patriarchal control,” a clear objective of the novel.^[63] But Inchbald’s use of the Gothic is much harder to square with her concerns about Catholic representation. An exploration of how and why the Gothic mode transformed the representation of Catholics is outside the scope of this study, but the anti-Catholic character of most Gothic fiction is well-known.^[64] Why would Inchbald transform her complex hero-priest into a Gothic stereotype? True, she softens Sandford’s character somewhat in compensation, and Lord Elmwood defies his stereotype by the novel’s end. But for most of the second part of the novel, we are confronted with a gloomy tyrant whom we know to be an ex-priest.

As in the case of our analysis of the contents of the first two volumes of A Simple Story, the Gothic elements of the latter volumes must be understood within the context of transformations that had taken place in the English Catholic community. When Inchbald was writing the novel that became the second half of A Simple Story (likely 1789–1790), the community’s lay leaders were working hard toward obtaining legal toleration of Catholic worship. Their success in 1791 can be attributed in great part to the wave of conservatism provoked by the French Revolution, which was given its most memorable expression in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). As in 1778, Parliament was motivated less out of tolerationist principles than out of a sense of self-preservation. Disturbed by the radicalism and anarchy it saw brewing across the channel, the English sought to shore up a traditional hierarchy and social order. With the Stuart dynasty ended and radicals in France persecuting the Catholic Church, Parliament could now look upon Catholics as defenders of that order.^[65] Many Catholics, especially among the clergy, were quick to embrace this conservative reaction and, unsurprisingly, to support war with France. According to Mark Goldie, Inchbald’s former friend Bishop Hay was an “instant enthusiast” of Burke’s Reflections, and John Geddes praised it as well. Hay would soon exchange his liberal rhetoric for loyalist polemic, decrying the “delusions of the rights of man, equality, and license.”^[66] Insofar as Catholic toleration resulted from this anti-France, anti-rights conservatism, Catholics had once again made their gains at the expense of others’ freedom.

Under such circumstances, it would have been a trial to be at once a supporter of radical politics and a Catholic (and it was while revising A Simple Story that Inchbald’s association with William Godwin’s radical circle began). Yet a trial should not be mistaken for an impossibility. The Enlightenment ideals that influenced political radicals remained a powerful force within the Catholic community, and the achievement of toleration must be attributed to these ideals as well. In the aftermath of the Gordon Riots, Joseph Berington began a new phase in the campaign for emancipation with the publication of The State and Behaviour of English Catholics, from the Reformation to the Year 1780. The appearance of the essay, which strongly evinces Berington’s Whiggish perspective on English history, made visible the ascendancy of the Cisalpines among the Catholic elite. Developing out of a combination of French Gallicanism, English Whiggery, and the intellectual traditions of the English Catholic community itself, Cisalpinism held a very skeptical view of the authority of the pope, embraced Lockean theories of government and Enlightenment concepts, and “accepted the reality of a pluralistic society.”^[67]

The most radical of the Cisalpines was John Geddes’s cousin, Alexander Geddes. Associating with Protestants resulted in Geddes being exiled from Scotland, and he arrived in London in 1781, not long after Inchbald. There he obtained the patronage of the most influential Catholic in England, Baron Robert Petre (grandson to the baron of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock), who chaired the committee of Catholic gentlemen that masterminded the campaigns behind both the 1778 and 1791 relief acts, and who would later form the committee known as the Cisalpine Club to pursue complete emancipation.^[68] Geddes served as spokesman for these committees and helped to assure the Protestant government in 1791 that Catholics could be trusted to keep faith with the English government if the penal laws were relaxed. He defended the early draft of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which termed Catholics “Protesting Catholic Dissenters,” apparently seeking to make common cause with Protestant Dissenting communities. In the 1790s, he strongly supported the French Revolution, condemning the war with France as a war against liberty, rights, and the poor. He enjoyed the company of female intellectuals and writers, and counted among his friends Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Hays, and Anne Plumptre.^[69] Between his fondness for such women, his association with the Godwin circle of radicals, and Inchbald’s friendship with Lord and Lady Petre, Inchbald must have become personally acquainted with this radical London priest who believed in the French Revolution.^[70] Geddes’s radicalism and Cisalpinism’s rising influence within her community would have lent legitimacy to her own increasingly radical views. Indeed, Inchbald may have come to political radicalism in the 1790s through the Cisalpinism that agitated her religious community in the 1780s.

According to Boaden, Inchbald had the idea of combining her two novels on July 25, 1789. This would place the conception of the novel as it exists today one month after the publication of a new Catholic oath of allegiance on June 26. The new oath, devised as part of what would become the 1791 Roman Catholic Relief Act, triggered months of arguments and recriminations within the Catholic community, which nearly scuttled the bill as the oath controversy of the 1710s had done.^[71] More conservative Catholics felt the oath was too dismissive of papal authority, while Cisalpines insisted it went no further than earlier oaths accepted by the community. After much amendment to the oath but little actual progress toward reconciliation, an Anglican bishop in the House of Lords recommended throwing out this new oath and substituting the oath from the 1778 relief act in its place. This appeased both factions, the bill passed, and Catholic worship was legalized in England.^[72] As all of this feuding between conservative and liberal Catholics played out, and as conservative forces in the government began to turn the Catholic campaign for emancipation into a means of furthering an anti-radical agenda, Inchbald was busy on revisions to her new, combined novel, which united the characters of the good priest of her earlier manuscript with the autocratic lord of her later manuscript. These complex and arguably self-subverting revisions, I suggest, should be understood as a response to this complex moment of Catholic in-fighting, contradiction, and betrayal.

This is not to say, however, that we should read the second part of the novel as abandoning the Catholic concerns of the first part. Rather, it subsumes them into a broader spectrum of radical concerns. The second half of the novel no longer structures itself around the dual (and dueling) concerns of female and Catholic oppression; Lord Elmwood is no longer humiliated for his Catholicism, and Matilda seeks not autonomy, but parental recognition. Yet Inchbald has not ceased to be interested in her sex’s struggles, nor has she turned her back on her Catholic friends and family. Rather, she shows even more clearly than in the first half of the novel that these two groups share a common cause. Whereas the first half portrays women and Catholics victimizing each other, the second half conflates their struggles; indeed, it conflates the struggles of all marginalized, disenfranchised people, whether women, Catholics, or the impoverished, and treats them as common victims of authoritarian government. The victims of Lord Elmwood’s tyranny (Matilda, Miss Woodley, and Sandford) are just such marginalized people, and they suffer together. Like Pope before her, Inchbald draws upon her Catholic experiences of alienation, disenfranchisement, and injustice, and adds to them her experiences as a woman and a former indigent. The Gothic mode is particularly effective at working through experiences of domination and abjection, and few major eighteenth-century authors had more such experiences to work through than Inchbald had.

Inchbald’s experience of Catholic abjection is most evident in the bargain that Matilda, Miss Woodley, and Sandford strike with Lord Elmwood. They must reside in apartments in “some retired part” of the house (215), forming a tiny, isolated community that lives in fear of his authority, which he can exercise against them at his pleasure. Lord Elmwood will cast them all out should they violate the laws he sets them, leaving them without resources or protection (for Sandford, like many Catholic priests, appears to be in state of dependency upon this nobleman). And what are Lord Elmwood’s laws? Matilda will be suffered to live in his house for only so long as everyone pretends that she is not there. She may demonstrate her loyalty and obedience to him only by feigning nonexistence. Lord Elmwood and Sandford may talk around her existence so far as is necessary to see that she is taken care of, but they must never talk about her. Such were the conditions that Richardson offered to Catholics in Sir Charles Grandison, and which, until the 1770s, they generally accepted. For Matilda, these conditions are a new cruelty; for Sandford and Miss Woodley, they resemble the relationship they have had with their government and society for their entire lives. Then again, perhaps these conditions are not new to Matilda. Inchbald leaves the religious identity of Matilda deliberately ambiguous. Most readers over the years have assumed that Matilda was raised a Protestant like her mother, according to the usual agreement of dividing the religious education of children by sex, as in Sir Charles Grandison. But Sandford is the only religious figure in Matilda’s life that we ever see, and Lady Elmwood may have decided to raise her daughter as a Catholic to endear her to her estranged father. In denying the reader clarity on this point, Inchbald further blurs the distinctions between Catholic and female oppression.

The Gothic qualities of Matilda’s life cast a shadow over the latter volumes of the novel that is not often found in those pages containing her mother’s luminous presence. Yet in spite of (or perhaps because of) the upheavals, contradictions, and betrayals in the campaign for Catholic emancipation and the political turmoil in France and England, these volumes are, in one respect, more utopian than the first half of the story. For Matilda and her friends, religious and sexual differences are not divisive. She and her friends are united in a shared experience of pain that renders those divisions irrelevant. The latter half of A Simple Story lacks the fiery confrontation between feminism and Catholicism of the first half because these things are no longer in conflict. Matilda, Sandford, and Miss Woodley band together in their own little community and bear up as well as they can under their common fate as powerless Catholics and women.

The conflation of the disenfranchisement of Catholics and women in Matilda’s circle supports my suggestion that Inchbald’s radicalism owes as much to her experiences as a Catholic as to her experiences as a woman. Religion’s role in the development of feminist thought is a topic of increasing interest to feminist studies. Scholars of eighteenth-century feminism like Sarah Apetrei and Barbara Taylor have demonstrated that religion is not simply “the handmaid (or manservant) of patriarchal dominance” that earlier criticism often assumed it to be.^[73] According to Apetrei, “[r]ather than acting as a foil to, or even as an inadvertent platform for, new ideas about women, religion was potentially seminal to the whole intellectual and psychological process of conceiving a feminist critique.”^[74] Writing of Inchbald’s contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, Taylor claims that religion played a central role in the development of her thought, and that “it is impossible to understand her political hopes, including her hopes for women, outside a theistic framework.”^[75] Apetrei and Taylor primarily examine how early feminist thought was influenced by theology and spirituality, and Inchbald’s feminism merits an examination of its theological and spiritual underpinnings. That has not been the goal of this chapter, which has instead highlighted connections between the social and legal conditions of women and Catholics—connections that were not lost on other feminists of Inchbald’s era. Wollstonecraft herself recognized that women and disenfranchised religious groups shared similar experiences of oppression. While Wollstonecraft’s works betray anti-Catholic prejudices, her respect for certain Dissenting groups and her own unorthodox religious beliefs placed her on the outside of mainstream religion as well.^[76] Near the conclusion of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she draws a connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of Dissenting Protestants in England:

Much of this passage could be used to describe Miss Milner or Dorriforth. Both Wollstonecraft and Inchbald perceived that the oppression of religious groups feminized them because much of what was perceived as feminine in women was likewise the result of oppression. And if women and religious minorities faced a common enemy, they might be able to make common cause. Miss Milner and Dorriforth each seem to perceive their autonomy as mutually exclusive with that of the other, but the unity displayed by Matilda, Sandford, and Miss Woodley in the face of their oppressor suggests that they, and perhaps Inchbald, saw the emancipatory goals of all disenfranchised people as interdependent.

Admirers of Miss Milner will not find it surprising that on at least one occasion, Inchbald expressed a desire to be able to vote.^[78] We must remember, however, that Inchbald’s sex was not the only obstacle preventing her from engaging in public affairs. Even if women (and non–property owners) had miraculously been granted suffrage during Inchbald’s lifetime, English Catholics remained disenfranchised until 1829. Furthermore, Inchbald’s intellectual involvement with the Catholic emancipation movement must have preceded her dreams of female emancipation. From words dropped by family and friends, Inchbald would have begun absorbing the arguments for Catholic emancipation from a very young age. Only later could she have gained the perspective necessary to question her society’s pervasive patriarchal assumptions and to begin to ponder the possibility of female emancipation. Inchbald scholarship has treated her Catholicism as an obstacle to her radical and feminist political views, but it might be the case that, in late eighteenth-century England, the idea of women’s suffrage and independence was more easily imaginable for a Catholic woman than it would have been for a Protestant woman. Perhaps it was seeing the old barriers constraining her Catholic identity slowly crumbling under the pressure of modernity’s new ideologies that inspired Inchbald to imagine the fall of the even older barriers constraining her female identity. Inchbald’s feminist consciousness may have developed not in spite of, but out of her Catholic consciousness.

What is certain is that English culture dehumanized Inchbald as both a woman and a Catholic and that she resisted this dehumanization through a daring act of minority representation. As a Jacobin novel, a feminist critique, and one of the earliest instances of minority literature, A Simple Story must be counted among the most radical and important literary works of the eighteenth century. Only an English Catholic could have written it.

Notes

James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald: Including Her Familiar Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Persons of Her Time (London, 1833), 1:32.

William McKee points out that Inchbald’s church attendance, although not regular, continues throughout most of her life, that Boaden himself seems to admit this by the end of the memoir, and that her occasional expressions of doubt are hardly proof of a rejection of her faith. Edward Tangye Lean notes that Inchbald’s support for the French Revolution was complicated by her concern at the treatment of Catholics in France and Napoleon’s aggressive relations with the papacy. See McKee, “Elizabeth Inchbald, Novelist” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1935), 103–30, esp. 103–21; and Lean, The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection, 1760–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 57–58.

Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 9, 32, 494. Details of Inchbald’s life are taken from this biography unless otherwise noted. Inchbald scholars should also consult Ben P. Robertson’s Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013) as a supplement to Jenkins’s biography.

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History, and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59.

Gary Kelly argues that A Simple Story influenced later Jacobin novelists by offering them “a model of psychological self-examination on which they could pattern their own studies of the influence of society and its institutions on the development of individual character.” The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 64.

Kelly’s reading of the text as hostile to Catholicism leads him into some very dubious claims. With regard to Dorriforth, for instance, he writes, “The very education of a priest, Mrs. Inchbald implies, renders him unfit to communicate God’s mercy to his spiritual wards” (ibid., 91). This assertion fails to account for Sandford, who demonstrates himself to be a fit guide for his wards in the latter half of the novel.

Sarah Apetrei discusses the ideological and methodological issues at stake in applying the term “feminist” to eighteenth-century women in Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30–32. Like Apetrei, I believe there is value in using the term to refer to women like Inchbald who critiqued the notion that sexual inequality was a natural phenomenon.

Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, 1:77–78; and Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 33.

Tomko also observes Inchbald’s “double effacement” as a woman and a Catholic. “The Catholic Question in British Romantic Literature: National Identity, History, and Religious Politics, 1778–1829” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005), 51–52.

10.

Although not a numerically smaller group than men, social scientists consider women a minority due to their history of discrimination by a dominant group.

11.

Frank David Kievitt was the first scholar to observe Inchbald’s precedence in the history of minority literature, but his remarks have unfortunately attracted little attention from subsequent scholars. See “Attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in the Later Eighteenth-Century English Novel” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1975), 290.

12.

Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1980), 106.

13.

For the novel’s composition history, see Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 32, 52, 60, 273–75. Some scholars question this account of the novel’s history (derived from Boaden’s biography), suggesting that the whole novel was written in the late 1780s. See Anna Lott, introduction to A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2007), 23–27. Boaden, however, who had access to many of Inchbald’s papers and diaries that are lost to us, notes the exact date on which Inchbald decided to combine her two novels into one (Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, 1:264). This specificity inclines me to believe he had a solid foundation for his assertions about the novel’s history.

14.

Unsigned review of A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald, Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1791, 255.

15.

See Tomko, British Romanticism, chap. 2; Bridget Keegan, “‘Bred a Jesuit’: A Simple Story and Late Eighteenth-Century Catholic Culture,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2008): 687–706; and Kaley Kramer, “Rethinking Surrender: Elizabeth Inchbald and the ‘Catholic Novel,’” in British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Teresa Barnard (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 87–105. Tomko’s reading is immensely valuable for its clear analysis of the novel’s concerns with Catholic oppression. However, its reading strays too deeply into allegory, and his claims for the thematic unity of A Simple Story are dubious given its origins in two unconnected novels. Another scholar who takes Inchbald’s religiosity seriously is Lance Wilcox, although his argument about the role of idolatry in the novel focuses on a more generically Christian interest than a specifically Catholic one. See “Idols and Idolators in A Simple Story,” Age of Johnson 17 (2006): 297–316.

16.

Jane Spencer, introduction to A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vii.

17.

Lott, introduction to A Simple Story, 27–31.

18.

Jo Alyson Parker, “Complicating A Simple Story: Inchbald’s Two Versions of Female Power,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 261. See also Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 306–7. Conversely, critics tend to vilify the Jesuit priest, Sandford, more than he deserves. Jenkins’s analysis of the novel offers particularly egregious examples of both these tendencies; she whitewashes Miss Milner’s faults while describing Sandford as behaving like “an imp of Satan” (I’ll Tell You What, 291).

19.

Dimension of difference or dimension of inequality is “the term used to denote systems of inequality” in intersectional analyses, “such as heterosexism and ageism.” Patrick R. Grzanka, “Introduction: Intersectional Objectivity,” in Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader, ed. Patrick R. Grzanka (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), xv. Although this chapter does not perform an intersectional analysis of how gender and religious difference co-constructed one another in the eighteenth century, it does identify Inchbald’s own insights into their co-construction.

20.

For details on the growing tolerance for Catholicism among the elite, see Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), chap. 5. Haydon discusses several legal situations in which English authorities went out of their way to avoid applying penalties to Catholics who were clearly guilty of violating the penal laws (ibid., 172–74). The most famous of these cases is that of the middle-aged widow, Ann Fenwick. Fenwick’s Protestant brother-in-law seized her property on the death of her husband. This provoked the outrage of her neighbors, so he agreed to pay her an annuity and some of her debts, but never made good on the promise. In 1772, Lord Camden raised the indignation of Parliament with the story of this abused gentlewoman, and a private bill was passed to force the brother-in-law to pay her. See B. C. Foley, Some People of the Penal Times (Chiefly 1688–1791): Aspects of a Unique Social and Religious Phenomenon (1688–1791): A Brief Account of Some English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Confessors, 2nd ed. (Lancaster, UK: Cathedral Bookshop, 1991), 25–37; and Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 174.

21.

Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 147–48; and Foley, Some People, 92.

22.

The act was not uncontroversial. Many Englishmen were scandalized or outraged at what they perceived as the subversion of the Protestant constitution. On his way to Westminster to give the bill his assent, George III was met with cries of “Remember Charles I” and “Remember James II” from the crowds (Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 192–96). Even some MPs feared the act would threaten “all the safe-guards and barriers against the return of Popery and of Popish influence” in Britain. William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England: From the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London, 1806), 18:1404. (Citations to this work are by volume and column number.) It should be noted that forms of Catholic toleration “as far as the laws of Great Britain permit” had existed in parts of the empire throughout the eighteenth century as a result of treaty stipulations. See Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, “Incorporating the King’s New Subjects: Accommodation and Anti-Catholicism in the British Empire, 1763–1815,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 206–13.

23.

For the major effects of England’s 1778 Papists Act, see Cobbett, Parliamentary History, 19:1137–40. Brad A. Jones has discussed how and why the more moderate Irish Papists Act differed from the English act. See “‘In Favour of Popery’: Patriotism, Protestantism, and the Gordon Riots in the Revolutionary British Atlantic,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 85.

24.

An attempt by the government to count all of the Catholics in England in 1767 found thirty-two in Inchbald’s parish (of which her immediate family accounted for six) and only 512 in all of Suffolk (Tomko, British Romanticism, 58–59).

25.

According to Jenkins, the large Catholic population in Scotland made it easy to attend worship (I’ll Tell You What, 23).

26.

See Mark Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 1 (1991): 43–44.

27.

See McKee, “Elizabeth Inchbald, Novelist,” 106; and Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 70.

28.

John Geddes was in Spain during Inchbald’s first stay in Scotland. However, they almost certainly would have met during her return in 1780. Alexander Geddes’s parish was fifty miles from Aberdeen, far from the Edinburgh and Glasgow theaters. For details on the Geddes cousins’ lives and work, see Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment”; and Mark Goldie, “Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment,” Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (2010): 61–86.

29.

Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” 36.

30.

See Lean, Napoleonists, 48–49; and Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 28–29.

31.

See Robert Kent Donovan, “The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778,” Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (1985): 95–97.

32.

Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 147–48.

33.

See Foley, Some People, 92; and Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 59–60, 69–70. Jenkins quotes a harrowing passage from James Boswell’s journals about seeing Bishop Hay’s house in flames.

34.

See Donovan, “Military Origins”; Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” 36; Jones, “In Favour of Popery,” 85–90; and Foley, Some People, 89.

35.

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 101 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text).

36.

See Foley, Some People, 109; and J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976), 279.

37.

Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 9.

38.

Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 161.

39.

Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 317.

40.

Charles Butler, Historical Memoirs of the English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics, Since the Reformation, 3rd ed. (London, 1822), 3:277.

41.

Ibid., 3:277–78.

42.

Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 145. Haydon has observed that this kind of low-key harassment was probably the most common difficulty Catholics suffered in the Georgian period (Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 15).

43.

Frances E. Dolan, “Afterword: English, Women, Writing, Catholicism,” in “Eighteenth-Century Women and English Catholicism,” ed. Anna Battigelli and Laura M. Stevens, special issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 31, no. 1/2 (2012): 238.

44.

Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 290–330.

45.

Ibid., 301.

46.

For the classic account of the complicated history of the gendering of sensation and sensibility in the eighteenth century, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

47.

Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 301.

48.

As Keegan writes, “[T]he Jesuits aroused suspicion—and notoriety—first because of their supposed access to privileged places of power, second because of the order’s internal power structure, and third because the Jesuits’ rigorous intellectual training reputedly made them skilled casuists. The popular stereotype of the intellectually devious, politically shady, and ambitious Jesuit manipulating the aristocracy certainly had strong currency in early modern England” (“Late Eighteenth-Century Catholic Culture,” 694–95).

49.

For a deeper reading of how the novel’s equivocal language of gesture relates to its English Catholic context, see Kramer, “Rethinking Surrender.”

50.

Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 6, 8.

51.

Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 37.

52.

For a reading of the performance of masculinity in the novel and Dorriforth’s fear of emasculation, see Michelle O’Connell, “Miss Milner’s Return from the Crypt: Mourning in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 4 (2012): 567–80.

53.

See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 20.

54.

Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 82.

55.

Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 43–67 (quotation on 46).

56.

Tomko similarly observes that Miss Milner “indulges an unthinking and harmful will to power associated with her Establishment upbringing and social position” (“Catholic Question,” 77–78).

57.

Daniel Defoe, The New Family Instructor; in Familiar Discourses Between a Father and His Children, on the Most Essential Points of the Christian Religion (London, 1727), 15.

58.

Religious tenets do not completely escape her attacks, however. Her first joke about Catholics believing what others tell them makes fun of the tenet that grants the clergy authority to interpret scripture for the laity.

59.

Roxana is attracted to Catholic practices, but she never grants them her conscious approbation.

60.

In his book, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Frank Felsenstein similarly notes how eighteenth-century Englishmen willingly ignored the evidence of their senses with respect to their prejudices against Jews (49–50). Felsenstein’s book should be of interest to anyone working on eighteenth-century religious minorities.

61.

Tomko, too, notes that in the second part of the novel, Lord Elmwood “becomes dominated by the Gothic, Catholic stereotype [. . .] that part I labored to avoid” (“Catholic Question,” 90).

62.

The Gothic nature of the latter volumes of A Simple Story has been commented upon extensively. To cite only those critics who appear elsewhere in this chapter, Spencer calls the second part “reminiscent of the Gothic novels so popular in Inchbald’s time” (introduction to A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald, xix); Keegan notes that the last two volumes “draw on Gothic conventions” (“Late Eighteenth-Century Catholic Culture,” 690); and Amy Garnai writes, “While I do not mean to claim that A Simple Story should be perceived as a Gothic novel, elements of that genre are central to Matilda’s story and its ongoing portrayal of the distribution of power and helplessness.” Revolutionary Imaginings of the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 128.

63.

Garnai, Revolutionary Imaginings, 128.

64.

Well known, but not well studied. Victor Sage is one of the few scholars who has given due attention to the complexities of the early Gothic vis-à-vis Catholicism. He dates the “first stage” of the Gothic novel from the 1770s to 1829, defining it by the campaign for Catholic emancipation. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 28–29. More recently, the Gothic’s relationship to pro- or anti-Catholic attitudes has been investigated in Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); and Diane Long Hoeveler, The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014).

65.

See J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282–84, 417–18.

66.

Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” 58.

67.

Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, 94, 36–37, 106 (quotation on 106). “Cisalpine” literally means “this side of the alps.” The term was adopted in opposition to the “transalpine” doctrines of the papal court, which insisted that the pope’s temporal powers extended “across the alps” to all of Christendom. Although the Cisalpine ascendency began in the 1770s, those who shared this school of thought would not generally be known as Cisalpines until the founding of the Cisalpine Club by Lord Petre in 1792.

68.

See Goldie, “Alexander Geddes,” 63, 66; and Foley, Some People, 105–18.

69.

See Goldie, “Alexander Geddes,” 72, 76, 83, 84. Geddes’s radicalism also extended to theology. He helped to introduce German Higher Criticism to Britain, and he wrote a (unfinished) translation of the Bible into modern English which was grounded in that unorthodox school of biblical criticism (ibid., 66–69).

70.

Inchbald became friends with Lord and Lady Petre in 1794. Also, her good friend Amelia Alderson dined with Geddes on at least one occasion (Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, 324, 363).

71.

See ibid., 273; and Joan Connell, The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1850: A Study in Internal Politics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 64–67.

72.

See Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, 45–47; and Connell, Roman Catholic Church, 59–73.

73.

Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion, 28.

74.

Ibid., 29. Apetrei’s book studies the religious context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century feminists like the devout Church of England communicant, Mary Astell, and female members of radical Dissenting religions.

75.

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–4. For Taylor’s study of the religious context of Mary Wollstonecraft’s late eighteenth-century feminism, see ibid., 95–142.

76.

Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, claimed that his deceased wife’s religion was the product of her own thought and diverged considerably from that of any religious institution. However, Wollstonecraft appreciated the cerebral theology of the Rational Dissenters (later known as the Unitarians). See ibid., 95–96, 103.

77.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd, Marilyn Butler, and Emma Rees-Mogg, electronic ed. (Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 2004; first published as a print edition in 1989 by Pickering & Chatto), 5:265–66.

78.

Boaden quotes from a letter of Inchbald’s, dated to 1806, in which she says that she would vote for Sheridan in the next election if she could (Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, 2:89).

“let not religion be named between us”

A Simple Story and the Campaign for Catholic Emancipation

(Un)sensational Catholics

Anti-Catholic Laughter

Marriage, Patriarchy, and Bigotry

Relief, Revolution, and the Gothic

Notes

“let not religion be named
between us”

A Simple Story and the Campaign for
Catholic Emancipation