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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased W. R. Ward, FBA, President of the Ecclesiastical History Society forty years ago, in 1970, when I became a member.
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9 There is a good standard biography using original material by Sheehan’s American friend and patron Fr Herman J. Heuser, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile. The Story of an Irish Parish Priest as told chiefly by himself in Books, Personal Memoirs and Letters (London, 1918). The centenary edition of Sheehan’s works was published in 1952, as was Michael P. Linehan, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile (Dublin, 1952).
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16 Candy, Priestly Fictions, esp. 21–93; on the reception of Sheehan’s works, ibid. 129–54.
17 Fleischmann, Ruth, Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852–1913 (Basingstoke, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Her work, though very critical, seems to me the best in its field, and its bibliography is the most complete that I have seen about Sheehan.
18 Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 39.
19 Cited in Fleischmann, Catholic Nationalism, 20–1. However Sheehan, in Under the Cedars & the Stars (Dublin, 1940; first publ. 1903), 33, states: ‘In our own colleges, there can be no great change from the rigid, logical method, because such method is preparatory and fundamental’.
20 All are discussed in Sheehan, Under the Cedars.
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25 Ibid. 223.
26 Chesterton, G. K., ‘The Variety of Essays’ [review of Sheehan, P. A., Early Essays and Lectures (London, 1906)]Google Scholar, Daily News, 31 October 1906; I owe this reference to Dr Julia Stapleton. See Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 88–95.
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32 Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 237. This correspondence has been published: Burton, David H., ed., The Letters of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Canon Sheehan (Washington, DC, 1976)Google Scholar.
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42 Sheehan left incomplete Tristram Lloyd: The Romance of a Journalist, about an embittered young man brought to better spirits by faith. His anger at the plight of the poor is contrasted with the rage of an anti-Semitic Russian revolutionary who marries and then murders Lloyd’s sister. The work was finished by his literary executor Henry Gaffney OP (Dublin, 1928). Sheehan also wrote stories for children (Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 99), and a melodrama, ‘Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise’: A Drama of Modern Life (London, 1904), for the benefit of a convalescent home for sick children, about three girls whose future is foretold as a wife, a nurse and a nun. It was not performed. The sensationalist plot involves a malicious suitor, the bankruptcy of the father of one girl by the father of another, and the death of one girl. I have not studied Sheehan’s poetry.
43 For the full critical bibliography of his fictional works, see Loeber, Rolf and Loeber, Magda, A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin, 2006), 1185–9 Google Scholar.
44 On being realistic and sensational: ‘A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree’: Trollope, Autobiography, 204.
45 Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse.
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51 Ibid. 155.
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53 Foster, R. F., Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), 32.Google Scholar There is a good Jew, Levi, in Tristram Lloyd, and some favourable comparison with Jews, but these may be the work of Sheehan’s continuator, Fr Gaffney.
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59 Ibid. 86–135.
60 Ibid. 136–67; the outcome is a little unclear.
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68 Ibid. 191.
69 Candy, , Priestly Fictions, 34.Google Scholar Hogan disliked Sheehan’s fear of the pagan classics.
70 Sheehan, , Lisheen, 4.Google Scholar
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72 Ibid. 288. This was Sheehan’s view: ‘I never could understand that mediaeval idea of the worthlessness and contemptibility of the body … it seems almost a denial of that ineffable mystery [of the Incarnation] to speak of the body as a “sewer of filth’”: Under the Cedars, 90–1. ‘It seems incredible …’, he wrote, ‘that the ordinary people … do not know … how their bodies are constructed’: Heuser, Canon Sheehan, 336.
73 Though their high point was between the World Wars; see Hartigan, Maurice, ‘The Religious Life of the Catholic Laity of Dublin, 1920–40’, in Kelly, James and Keogh, Dáire, eds, History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), 331–48.Google Scholar
74 The name Sheehan uses elsewhere for a royalist: Geoffrey Austin: Student (Dublin, 1895), 10.
75 Sheehan, The Intellectuals, v.
76 Ibid. 2.
77 Ibid. 8.
78 Ibid. 109.
79 Ibid. 8.
80 Ibid. 345.
81 Ibid. 242.
82 Ibid. 238.
83 Ibid. 237.
84 Ibid. 355.
85 Ibid. 225.
86 Ibid. 254.
87 Ibid. 377.
88 Sheehan, , Dr Gray, 234.Google Scholar
89 Sheehan, P. A., The Graves at Kilmorna: A Story of ’67 (London, 1915), 337.Google Scholar
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91 Ibid. 338.
92 Brooke, Rupert, ‘Peace’, Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (London, 1930), 144.Google Scholar
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