Ecclesiastical Armageddon: The Church of Ireland and Catholicism in Hyacinth by George A. Birmingham

Abstract

Though favorably compared to the work of Bernard Shaw and George Moore when first published in 1906, Hyacinth by George A. Birmingham, like all of that prolific writer’s fiction, has since been eclipsed by the literature of these and other writers from the period. Consequently, the novel has received very little scholarly attention, despite its noteworthy presentation of and apparent attempt to influence the ecclesial dynamics obtaining in Edwardian Ireland. Hyacinth is primarily concerned with the careful symbolic sequencing of a number of episodes from Irish ecclesiastical history, which in their ordered entirety within the text depict, over the course of half a century, the gradual disengagement, diminution, and political isolation of the Church of Ireland during the time frame of the novel. Beginning in the 1850s during the latter phase of the Second Reformation—a movement which historically evinced an aggressive crusading capacity within Anglicanism as that campaign was effectively an act