Those Crazy, Dangerous Catholics

In Victorian literature, papists were a constant threat:

Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran's lively study considers a wide range of key authors including Charlotte Bront Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.

The usual minority-phobias.