This book is about an imaginary landscape: a sensationalized ‘geography’ of Roman Catholicism constructed and widely circulated in Victorian culture. This is a contentious space. It is the site of Protestant defensive battles and Catholic countercultural skirmishes over denominational authority in a society outwardly aligned with Christian principles but increasingly reliant on science and material evidence to validate ‘truth’. This terrain of extremes is characterized by linguistic extravagances and plots of crime and violence, of persecution and intrigue. Its signposts are images of confinement, torture and deviance. It is a world peopled by victims and oppressors, law-givers and rebels. Many Janus-faced creatures are found there, too – the brave who are also sinister, the respectable who harbour malign and secret intent. Embedded in discursive and non-discursive practices of all kinds – lectures, sermons, essays and journalism, prayers and hymns, travel journals, private correspondence and public declamations, canonical literary works and the penny pulps, cartoons and art reviews, architectural styles and liturgical rites, laws and parliamentary debates – the territory of Catholic sensationalism can be glimpsed in both the secular and religious domains that constitute nineteenth-century social experience. This book models the field, mapping its recurrent images, character types, narratives and aesthetic modes and demonstrating its persistence in imaginative writing throughout the Victorian period. As a distinctive literary practice, the sensationalizing of Catholicism both expresses and helps to shape perspectives on social reality.