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.

1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION
1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION
1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION
1889 CONNECTICUT YANKEE ILLUSTRATION


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