T H E S H A M R O C K A N D T H E C R O S S Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism E I L E E N P. S U L L I V A N University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
I N T R O D U C T I O N This book is a study of the popular fiction written by and for Irish Catho - lic immigrants to the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Catholics have always relied on stories, which reach the hearts as well as minds of believers, to explain important truths and to illustrate religious and moral life, as shown in the parables of the Gospels and in the exempla or examples that characterized the sermons of medieval preachers. 1 In resorting to popular novels in the nineteenth century, Catholics were simply continuing that tradition. In England, Cardinals Newman and Wiseman wrote popular novels in these years to reach an audience that might not consult their scholarly works. In America, where Catholic writers began publishing novels in the 1820s, popular fiction became increasingly important as the Catholic population grew rapidly but the official infrastructure of priests, parishes, and schools remained largely undeveloped. Between 1840 and 1870, the number of American Catholics increased from about one million to more than six million, mainly because of Irish immigration. In the ten years after 1845 alone, the Irish doubled the American Catholic population. At the same time, there were only about five hundred priests throughout the country in 1840; the number increased to just over two thousand in 1860 and, indicating the need, approached five thousand by 1875. 2 1
2 The Shamrock and the Cross Irish American writers began to dominate Catholic fiction in 1850, helping to fill the gap caused by the church s weak infrastructure. They directed their fiction to Irish immigrants and their children, clearly assuming that a significant portion of the immigrant population was literate in En - glish and that in the words of Orestes Brownson, a leading Catholic literary critic and novelist of the time they demanded a literature that addressed their national tastes and peculiarities. 3 When I began my research a decade ago, I was interested in the popular fiction as a source of information about the experience of Irish immigrants in the years immediately following the great famine. I hoped that the novels would serve as an archive for a study of the values and social circumstances of people who had so few opportunities to speak for themselves. The Irish American authors who wrote the novels were a professional elite, of course, but they sought readers among the large numbers of more typical immigrants. I assumed that to interest those readers and make it possible for them to engage with the novels, the authors would create characters whose lives mirrored those of the immigrants and their children in important respects. This assumption proved correct in many ways. The novels describe the immigrants reasons for leaving their Irish homes; their experiences securing employment in America; and their attitudes toward gender roles. Yet, over the course of my research, it became clear that the Irish American writers were part of a tradition of American Catholic rather than American Irish popular literature. They used their novels to persuade readers to see themselves as Irish Catholics, a group that linked religion and ethnicity, gave a particular meaning to both aspects of the identity, and emphasized the boundaries that distinguished them from the rest of American society. The novels are best seen as a public record of a conscious effort to define an identity and make it attractive to readers. 4 To illustrate the role of fiction in shaping Irish Catholic identity, I examined the seven most important Irish Catholic novelists who wrote between 1850 and 1873, focusing on their novels dealing with immigrant life in the United States. 5 (See the selected bibliography for a list of the authors and their novels.) Of the seven novelists, six were men; the one woman, Mary Anne (Madden) Sadlier, was the most prolific and popular. Three of the men John Roddan, John Boyce, and Hugh Quigley were
Introduction 3 priests who attended seminaries in Boston, Ireland, and Rome. The others, Charles James Cannon, Peter McCorry, and John McElgun, as well as Sadlier, were professional writers and journalists. Sadlier was married to James Sadlier of the publishing firm. Five of the writers were Irish immigrants, and two, Roddan and Cannon, were the American-born sons of immigrants. All lived in Boston or New York City except for Quigley, who served in parishes in upstate New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The Irish American novelists were generally well known in their time. They wrote novels located in Ireland as well as America, and their works were regularly serialized and reviewed in Catholic publications. 6 Roddan edited The Boston Pilot; Sadlier was one of the editors of the New York Tablet. Sadlier also wrote nonfiction and devotional works, translating some from the French. She received the Laetare medal from the University of Notre Dame in recognition of her contribution to the Catholic community. Cannon and Boyce wrote or adapted plays that were produced on the New York stage. When one of Boyce s novels was produced as a play in New York and London, it starred Tyrone Power and Barney Wil liams, leading popular actors of the day. 7 Both Boyce and Cannon also lectured frequently in Boston and New York on a variety of historical and literary subjects. 8 When Boyce appeared at the Catholic Institute of Worces ter, Massachusetts, he received a full and respectable attendance, according to the New York Times. 9 The firms that published the Irish Americans were commercial enterprises, owned by Irish American men, who advertised themselves as Catho lic publishers and did most of their business with the Church. These firms provided the publishing and distribution systems for writers whose fiction could be described as Catholic. The publishing houses were not officially part of the Church, but they saw themselves as producing works faithful to Catholic teaching. Patrick Donahue, long-time publisher of The Pilot and another recipient of the Laetare medal announced in 1847 that he was opening a book publishing house to furnish readers with Catholic books of every style and variety. 10 In addition to books, the houses published missals, devotional pamphlets, and Catholic news - papers, including some that served as the official press of a diocese. The publishers made every effort to reach a wide audience. They regarded novels as among the most salable items, pricing them among their
4 The Shamrock and the Cross least expensive products. They also advertised the novels widely in Catho - lic and Irish American publications. Evidence of sales, printings, translations, and newspaper serials suggests that they had some success. Some of the novels sold thousands of copies, were published in Europe as well as America, and were translated into French or German. Others went through several editions or were reprinted until the end of the century. 11 Mid-nineteenth-century Irish immigrants did not arrive in America with a ready-made sense of their identity. As Michael Carroll has argued in his American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination, the traditional popular Ca - tholicism of holy wells, patterns, and rounding rituals had long been in decline in Ireland, and the devotional revolution in religious practice had not yet taken hold. 12 The immigrants came in small families or as young single adults, largely uneducated about their religion and relatively lax in its practice. Their loyalty to Catholicism in the New World was by no means automatic, according to Kerby A. Miller in Emigrants and Exiles. 13 The Church at the time had good reason to fear that in the competitive religious environment of America, the immigrants would drift away from religion or join a Protestant denomination. In 1836, Bishop John England of Charleston wrote that if there had been no loss, there would be five millions of Catholics in the United States; instead there were less than one million and a quarter. In 1873, Bishop John L. Spalding of Peoria concluded that despite its considerable efforts, the Church in America had from its first days in the country lost in numbers far more than we have gained. 14 The immigrants also could have defined themselves in national or political, rather than religious, terms as Americans, members of the Democratic Party, or Irish nationalists. The authors wrote their fiction to persuade the immigrants to reject these options and to see themselves as Irish Catholic, an identity they presented as the most advantageous, in this life as well as the next. 15 And, indeed, the immigrants did become Irish Catholic in America during these formative mid-century decades. According to Timothy Meagher, the Church was a ram-shackle organization in the 1840s in most cities but slowly managed not only to develop regulations and construct buildings but also to encourage changes in lay attitudes, knowledge, and devotion that would transform the institution by 1875. 16 Given the influ ence of the Irish in church institutions, moreover, the type of Catholicism favored by the Irish became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness and activity until well into the next century. 17
Introduction 5 To forge a sense of peoplehood in their readers, the novelists told stories that gave the immigrants a history, interpreted their present circumstances, and shaped their hopes and expectations for the future. Through their characters and their own interjections, the authors described life in Ireland, defined what it meant to be Irish, and explained why good men and women, married and single, emigrated. They portrayed America s anti-irish and anti-catholic hostility as well as the country s guarantees of religious liberty. The authors also addressed the future, evaluating the immigrants chances to succeed economically and to become loyal, patriotic Americans while at the same time building the institutions that would reflect and preserve their separate culture and society. In explaining and illustrating what it meant to be Irish Catholic in America, the novelists advanced positions on important issues that continue to provoke debate among scholars. As the characters in the stories confronted difficult conditions in Ireland and struggled to establish an economic foothold in America, they exhibited active initiative or passive endurance and expressed attitudes toward capitalist economic systems and values. As the authors described the appearance, perspectives, and actions of the immigrants, they constructed vivid portraits of race, gender, and class for their readers. The descriptions of the exemplary Catholic woman reflected the lives of poor working-class people, and provided the first alternative in fiction to the reigning domestic ideal of womanhood. The novelists also described, and responded to, American anti-catholicism, suggesting the role that prejudice played in fostering Irish Catholic group identity. The novelists defined faithful religious practice and took on the controversies of the time about the nature and extent of authority in the Church and, by analogy, in the family and society. They also discussed America s political values especially religious liberty and separation of church and state and the political issues of the day, including slavery and the reform movements for abolition and women s rights. In serving these purposes for their immigrant readers, the Irish Americans differed in important ways from the American Catholic novelists who preceded them. Their novels suggest the many ways in which the Irish transformed the popular culture of their church, just as they transformed its membership and institutions. The chapters that follow consider, first, the origins of Catholic fiction in America, and then, the Irish American novels, which taught the
6 The Shamrock and the Cross immigrants how to live, survive, and prosper as Irish Catholics in their new country. In these chapters I take up the challenge posed by Jay P. Dolan, who argues in his 2008 study The Irish Americans that by the end of the nineteenth century, Catholicism, more than any other factor, had come to define the Irish immigrants and their descendants. How the Church was able to gain such a prominent place in the Irish community, he concludes, is a remarkable chapter in the history of Irish America. 18 I argue that the Catholic popular fiction of the time suggests some of the reasons why the Church was able to gain its prominent place.