Who's Afraid of the Church?Hank Morgan is. So was
MT, at least to the extent of trying to minimize the
anti-religious thrust of Connecticut Yankee while
promoting the novel. "Please don't let on that there are
any slurs at the Church," he wrote Sylvester Baxter, who
was reviewing the novel for the
Boston Herald. "I want to catch the reader
unawares, and modify his views if I can." But Beard's
drawings attack English Catholicism very visibly, using
many of the anti-papist stereotypes that had been part of
Protestant American culture since the 17th century. For
example, although the text only contains one scene of
ecclesiastics drinking, the illustrations regularly link
the priesthood to alcohol. It's also unlikely that MT
imagined the "old Abbot" at the Valley of Holiness meeting
Hank in a dungeon, but Beard does -- so that he can
reinforce the link he makes repeatedly as well between the
Church and torture. In his illustration of one of the
explosions at the end, the caption "High Church" makes
another kind of link, again without much direct textual
support, between sixth century Catholicism and the
established Anglican Church of modern England. Without
better evidence than anyone has found so far, it's hard to
know whether these drawings offended or pleased more
readers. MT's novel appeared in 1889, near the height of
19th century America's second great wave of anti-Catholic sentiment.
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