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Dickens and the Roman Catholic Church
Despite the diverse and sometimes measured ways in which he commented over time, Charles Dickens's opinions and conclusions concerning the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuits or Society of Jesus have struck biographers and literary scholars as strongly negative or clearly hostile. Humphry House claimed, 'In nothing was Dickens so much of an elementary John Bull as in his hatred of Roman Catholicism' (128). Dennis Wälder refers to Dickens's 'powerful antipathies toward the characteristic features of the Catholic religion' (92-93). A virtual dictionary of quotations might be compiled of Dickens's referenced strictures. The phrase 'that curse upon the world', as Dickens put it in a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts in 1851 , conveys one of Dickens's most sweeping critiques of the Roman Catholic Church's impact on society and governments (Letters, VI 466). The Church's history of exacting control and enforcing orthodoxy, epitomised for Dickens in the cruelties of the Inquisition, its temporal as well as spiritual power, its efforts to oppose advances in scientific knowledge, its ban on development in the Papal States of that symbol of progress the railroad, its perceived rituals of droning chants and unintelligible rites evoked Dickens's censure (Pictures from Italy, 274-79, 367-70, 382-84). In a letter to John Forster in 1846 Dickens admitted 'believing the dissemination of Catholicity to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world' (Letters, IV 639). Widely labelled 'the Papal Aggression', Pius DCs Bull establishing Catholic dioceses in England in 1850 provoked Dickens's satiric description of the 'Bulls of Rome' as 'an insolent, audacious, oppressive, intolerable race' (Household Words, 23 November 1850).
Yet while stating in the preface to Barnaby Rudge (1841) that he has 'no sympathy with the Romish Church', Dickens nonetheless warns against Protestant extremism, not only dramatising as 'begotten of intolerance and persecution' the 1780 riots originally directed against Roman Catholics, but through the character of Geoffrey Haredale also defending Catholics' rights to equal civil status. Among the 'lessons' of Barnaby Rudge is the response of Haredale, a Roman Catholic, to Lord George Gordon, 'chief instigator of the Protestant or "No Popery" riots' (xx): '"We have much in common- many things-all that the Almighty gave us", said Haredale: "and common...