Victorian Roman Catholicism

This chapter surveys the condition of Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics in Victorian England. Special emphasis is placed on significant historical, political, aesthetic, and devotional elements of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and how these elements influenced Gerard Manley Hopkins’s life and writing. In particular, the chapter considers how Hopkins’s sacramental vision, cultivated during and following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, profoundly shaped his poetry at the levels of form, feeling, and vision. This chapter therefore examines Roman Catholicism as a transformative vision of everyday life and living, the arts, and vocation for not only Hopkins but also his contemporaries who endured, and subtly resisted if not helped to redress, the social prejudices and legal exclusions endured by Roman Catholics throughout the Victorian period.