ABSTRACT
The portrayal of Catholicism as the explicit threat to the British nation and identity started to lose its popularity in the 1860s. Gradually, in the following decades, the ardent anti-Catholicism began to be perceived as the province of the uneducated and bigoted. Various Protestant associations were forced to close down or to merge with one another. The fact that the plots and motifs from anti-Catholic novels were being assimilated into the sensation novel, and became parts of the narratives which often had no identifiably Catholic characters, could be interpreted as the beginning of the long process in which Catholicism was losing its otherness, its foreignness to English culture. The Victorian age is the era whose anti-Catholicism, was also slowly receding, at least from what could be called the elite discourse. As Kristeva says, "[a]bjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse".
