Michael Wheeler's study of Catholic and (largely) Anglican rivalries is a deeply interesting, varied, and scholarly book; though, despite the title's promise of a century of coverage, its treatment of its subject is most sophisticated and assured in dealing with the controversy surrounding the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850. The sense of Protestant fear and paranoia is very neatly dealt with in the opening chapter, which reveals that Punch (perhaps the most notoriously anti-Catholic and anti-Irish of all the periodicals) even suggested that Wiseman's elevation to the cardinalate was a prelude to a Stuart restoration. The political cartoons of the time form an excellent backdrop.

Chapter 2 deals with the controversy over the origin of churches and combines this with a good discussion of “early church” fiction in the period, including Newman's Callista. Chapter 3 addresses the controversy over the Reformation, including (perhaps surprisingly, as one would hardly think of him as a religious controversialist) the novels of William Harrison Ainsworth. Wheeler argues that by adopting an unequivocally Protestant stance, Ainsworth is able to present a more inclusive picture of Catholicism, but Ainsworth's deep interest in the Stuarts and Jacobitism (as well as the northern Catholic insurgency of 1536, which opens The Lancashire Witches) surely indicates that something slightly more complex is going on. The discussion, in short, might have been improved by a more comprehensive knowledge of Ainsworth's fiction and also an acknowledgment that, as a Lancashire novelist, he came from a recusant county whose distinctiveness he liked to exhibit in his fiction.

The discussion of Protestant paranoia over the confessional in chapter 3 is also well done and illustrates the enormously alienizing rhetoric of the Reformed tradition toward Catholicism. The treatment of Jacobite rhetoric in chapter 4, however, although it makes few mistakes, is hampered by a lack of detailed knowledge of the intricate research background to the questions being addressed. Jane Austen's History of England is mentioned, for example (114), but neither her links with a Jacobite family on her mother's side nor her Jacobitical country politics manifest in the treatment of the Sotherton oaks in Mansfield Park and elsewhere. Wheeler also does not track the Nonjurors as they straggled through the nineteenth century, the last allegedly dying in 1875. Neo-Jacobitism in the late nineteenth century, discussed in work by both Ian Fletcher and me, would also have amplified the argument, and the discussion of the fin-de-siècle with which the book closes is likewise short on detailed reading in what is a very complex research area. In discussing Lionel Johnson's “Dark Angel,” for example, Wheeler does not take account of the dominant reading of the last two lines: that far from being “at the heart of Catholic teaching” (286), they are a paraphrase of Plotinus: since the poet calls himself “Divine,” the closing lines can hardly be orthodox. The examination of explicitly Catholic fiction and of phenomena such as nuns and monasticism is very good, however, as is the discussion of Villette, which in many respects is the major novel of the restored hierarchy, a role too seldom granted to it.

In light of the fact that many towns and guilds who petitioned for the abolition of slavery also petitioned against Catholic emancipation, Wheeler's evidence for the association of Catholicism with slavery/enslavement is interesting. In Ireland and in Scotland, the position of Catholics had been likened to that of black slaves in the eighteenth century, and the similar needs of both groups had formed a significant part of United Irish rhetoric in the 1790s, but it is clear that, as far as British Protestantism was concerned, Catholicism was the “slave-master” (11), not the slave, and that, thus, emancipation for the latter carried no positive implications for the former.

Wheeler's book, then, is suggestive and detailed. It is a significant piece of scholarship as regards the controversy over the 1850 restoration of the hierarchy, and I could have wished that treatment to be extended diachronically to the Scottish restoration of 1878 or synchronically to include a greater range of the popular culture of the 1850 controversy. Wheeler's extension of his argument backward to Jacobitism and forward to the 1890s gives the book's subtitle some justification but at the cost of weakening the quality of the coverage. A shorter span (say 1840–60) would have given it more focus and made it a better book.