English anti-Catholicism has long served as an important line of research in the study of English Catholicism. Historians from E. R. Norman to D. G. Paz have examined its mid-Victorian variant; while studies of more localised cases, such as those which occurred in the city of Liverpool, have added to our understanding of it at national level. Particular episodes too have been treated at book length, for example Walter Arnstein’s study of C. N. Newdegate’s fixation on nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982).

Building on a Durham PhD, Jonathan Bush focuses on the northeast of England. This is reasonable enough: between 1847 and 1874, the Catholic population of Co. Durham and Newcastle surged from some 23,000 to more than 86,000. Nearly 95% were Irish. But his title, or at least his subtitle, is misleading. ‘Anglo-Irish conflict’ is almost wholly absent until page 128, as are the Irish themselves, and both are central only to the final chapter. The focus is on the prejudiced, not the papists. Bush leads his reader on a tour of the well-known landmarks of mid-Victorian bigotry: Maynooth, the papal aggression, anxieties about Tractarianism, imprisoned nuns, the Italian question, Roman obscurantism, and so on.

The first chapter retells the story without adding much beyond some northeastern examples. Bush’s method is consistent: a brief introduction, relying a bit too heavily on an older or glancing historiography, followed by a detailed account of events in the northeast, drawn largely from local newspapers. This is not unreasonable, and Bush certainly establishes his central claim that R. J. Cooter was incorrect in asserting a peculiar religious tolerance in the region. Anti-Catholic (and anti-Tractarian) feeling was as strong there as elsewhere. But proving that the northeast of England was much like the rest of England can become a bit wearing over some 230 pages of closely written, narrow-margined text.

That is not to say that there is not much of interest here. The detailed account of Alessandro Gavazzi’s lecture tours (pp. 114-119), for example, or the success of the Catholic-Conservative political alliance in an 1861 by-election in normally Liberal Tynemouth are both illuminating. The tensions and shifting alliances between Anglicans and Dissenters, who responded in different ways in different parts of the region to different manifestations of anti-Catholic feeling, are well treated. Some of the newspapers quoted had a particularly good turn of phrase, even by the very high standards of the era: the Shields Gazette’s description of Puseyites being ‘startled from their medieval dream by the bellow of a real Vatican bull’ (p. 38) is particularly choice. The (unindexed) cheering of Mazzini by Tyneside Protestants is suggestive, and should have been linked to relatively recent scholarship on the Italian patriot, just as the discussion of Garibaldi would have been enhanced by knowledge of Lucy Riall’s work. Instead this is very much local history, and will be of interest largely to those concerned with the politics and religion of the northeast, or to those seeking easy examples of regional anti-popery. There is nothing wrong with this, but local studies are most useful when properly embedded in a wider context. This is just about achieved at the level of England, but not beyond. Nor has Bush been well-served by his publisher. The book is marred by careless editing, which leaves intact such baffling phrase as ‘The political campaign against the Maynooth Grant was evidence of the way in which Catholic concessions to the “Protestant Constitution” could cause a sustained anti-Catholic backlash’ (p. 71), or the criticism of another scholar, who was writing about Manchester, for not noticing similar events in ‘other Tyneside towns’ (p. 76). There are numerous repetitions. Beyond correcting Cooter, it adds little to our understanding of mid-Victorian religion or religious prejudice. “Papists” and Prejudice is a worthy and interesting, but not particularly revealing, example of high quality local history.