Spouse, you are extremely perceptive. I hope you realize that God has given you immense gifts of insight, and he gave them to you so that you would not be fooled by anyone teaching the faith falsely.
But Henry James is not Victorian, he's American, of the early 20th century. He was my favorite writer along with Balzac when I was an aspiring writer. Though James is not Catholic, his best books do have a certain morality, are strongly against adultery ( Golden Bowl ), divorce ( What Maisie Knew ), feminism ( The Bostonians ) and secret-society anarchy ( Princess Cassamassima ), for what that's worth. Let's say they follow the natural law! Unfortunately The Portrait of a Lady does have feminist undertones, and James had the bad habit of portraying Americans as innocents abroad who are devoured by a decadent Europeans, which gives some of his works an anti-Catholic scent, like Daisy Miller.
As for Thomas Hardy, he is a great writer if by "great" we mean powerful and inspired. But it is probably the devil who inspired him -- as with Shakespeare. ( The Tempest is so overtly Satanic and Kabbalistic that I can't believe people still claim Shakespeare was a secret Catholic ). There is an element of Satanism and deep evil in the work of Hardy, too, especially Jude the Obscure. That book is about a humble Catholic man ruined by the love of a woman. The book ends with him dying in bed while a Catholic Mass is held outside his apartment window, and his dying words are the inverse of the Mass -- he is praying for his soul to be extinguished. The book is extremely shocking and nihilistic but that tends to be overlooked now because it just seems "classic."
All that you are saying is true about the Victorian era, and that is why the only novel that really shows the surreal underlying monstrosity of that time is Alice in Wonderland. It is obvious in the new movie version, though I don't watch movies, that the Red Queen is patterned on Henry VIII's even more vicious daughter, Jєω-lover, narcissistic psychopath and mass murderer of Catholics, Elizabeth Tudor. Her entire reign literally replaced angels with demons -- the priests were chased off and starved and her "consorts," male prostitutes if they actually did sleep with the "Virgin Queen," were given the power. She created a realm of enchanters, magicians, perverts, and heretics. I doubt anyone as totally insane as this has ever ruled a nation before, and that is why she keeps recurring in art.
Red QueenThe reason why the movie is coming out now is a sort of occult boast. Elizabeth is really the queen of America, the spiritual queen -- America is the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon, another toadying slave of Elizabeth. America is her ʝʊdɛօ-Protestant "wonderland" come to life.
In the Victorian era, all of this was subconsciously known and hidden behind a veener of polite manners. The cast of characters of Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar who is opiated and is like some druggy poet-oracle -- perhaps based on Shelley or Byron -- the Jabberwock, the Mad Hatter -- who is Satan -- all represent a rogues' gallery who show the real chaos of the time.