Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle: The Culture of English Religion in a Decadent Age 9780755626380, 9781780768915

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For Helen McLoughlin

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first introduction to the term fin de sie`cle came in the sixth form, when someone who was preparing for the Oxbridge entrance exam told me about a question from a past paper that she had been struggling with: ‘What is meant by fin de sie`cle?’ I’ve occasionally wondered what sort of answer whoever it was that set this paper was expecting, and what in fact they received. Since then, I’ve had a recurring nagging sense that this curious moment in European history was something I ought to know the meaning of. Perhaps this is the real reason why I felt impelled to take on this book. But it also grew from the belief that religious history shouldn’t continue to ignore this big cultural movement: one which was both highly significant for those at the time, and later as an interpretative device for scholars. The project also arose from a desire to study something fairly narrowly focussed in time, but broadly conceived in scope. As such, it has required getting to grips with a range of (for me) new historical figures, contemporary scholars, texts, ideas and approaches. I am aware that there are risks with this, but I am persuaded by Walter Pater’s observation (see the epigraph that follows this section) on the importance of trying to bring ‘other modes of thought and feeling’ into dialogue, in this case the ideas of the decadent-aesthetic movement which Pater nurtured, with the narrative of late nineteenth-century, London-centred Christianity. I trust that at least some aspects of this approach have been fruitful, and that the scholars who work in the areas into which I have recently tiptoed will be tolerant of the inevitable shortcomings.

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This book was my ‘new project’ when I moved to a new post at the University of Nottingham in 2009. As such, it has taken shape very gradually, alongside a range of other activities and events. The university has been a good environment in which to work on it, and I am grateful for the support of the two Heads of Department with whom I’ve worked at Nottingham, Karen Kilby and Simon Oliver, for the assistance of the staff in the Hallward Library, and to the university for granting me a semester of research leave in 2011, and again in 2015. My friend and colleague Tom O’Loughlin has been his usual helpful self, reading some early drafts, making suggestions, and perhaps above all, providing an increasing sense of urgency that the project needed to be finished. Needless to say, he wrote several books in the time it took me to write this one. Another friend, Bill Jacob, kindly read the first draft during his Easter holiday, and gave invaluable advice on restructuring and suggestions for rectifying omissions. I know that omissions still remain, and I am of course entirely responsible for these. Other friends, particularly Angela Brown, Keith Francis, Helen McLoughlin, Margaret Turnham and Paula Yates, have offered kindly and thoughtful support at various stages, sometimes by asking about the book’s progress, sometimes by tactfully not asking about it. Sara Slinn went well beyond the call of duty in helping me with teaching preparation, which allowed me to make the most of the summer of 2014, as the book entered its final stages. This book is dedicated to the most long-standing member of my social circle, Helen McLoughlin. Helen came with me in search of John Gray and Andre´ Raffalovich in Edinburgh; her capacity to be interested in dead Roman Catholic aesthetes was truly impressive. I hope that she will enjoy reading what follows.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness of men’s minds constantly tend to oppose to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1872) The supreme vice is shallowness. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)

INTRODUCTION WHY STUDY CHRISTIANITY AND THE FIN DE SIE` CLE?

For over a hundred years, it has been commonplace to see late nineteenth-century culture as shaped by forces peculiar to its turn-of-the-century condition: on the one hand, feelings of exhaustion and decay as the century ended, and on the other a sense of newness and freedom as the new century was anticipated. The term coined to describe this, the condition of ‘fin de sie`cle’, was used across Europe: it became current in English after it was used by Oscar Wilde in 1891, and by 1913 it was being adopted by historians who were beginning to write about the period.1 This book explores the relationship between English Christianity in its late nineteenth-century form and the phenomenon of the fin de sie`cle as it was expressed in London at that time. One of the major arguments is that there was a hitherto insufficiently scrutinised relationship between the aesthetic and social ideas that were the essence of much fin de sie`cle thinking, and of the forms of Christianity that were particular to this period. Whereas the Christian tradition, or at least parts of it, had maintained a centuries-long sense of the value of the aesthetic as a support to faith, by the 1890s, aestheticism’s leading exponents, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, were proposing a different idea – faith, and the person of Christ, as a form of aesthetic truth. Christians responded to this with varying levels of sympathy. Meanwhile, the prevailing religious culture was producing a heavily aestheticised form of

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Christianity, which expressed itself in numerous liturgical, architectural, artistic and social projects. In order to approach the topic from two different angles, via aestheticism and via religion, the book is written in two parts. This is a strategy to give a greater sense of clarity and order to this multifaceted topic; it is not meant to imply a neat division between ‘culture’ on the one hand and ‘faith’ on the other; indeed, culture and faith were so closely identified at this period that it is often difficult to distinguish them. In London, the aesthetic movement and the Christian churches existed cheek-by-jowl; there was both cross-fertilisation and conflict. Part I begins by introducing some of the most significant dimensions and characteristics of the fin de sie`cle in its English context, and the second chapter focuses on the aesthetic-decadent strand which became prominent as the French concept of la De´cadence became anglicised. Although – as is evident from the second part of the book – the fin de sie`cle encompasses far more than aestheticism, this initial narrowing of focus permits the exploration of particular ideas about culture and religion as they were manifested within a fairly closely defined group of individuals. These are the people who were associated with, or reacted against, London’s literary and artistic world in the ‘decadent nineties’. In Chapter 3, I examine the religious culture associated with this group, its legacy in the twentieth century, and also some of the Protestant reaction against it. For particular investigation I select one of the less well-known figures, the Nonconformist aesthete, Richard Le Gallienne. My desire to explore the phenomenon of Roman Catholic conversion among the aesthetic set inevitably led me to the intriguing quartet of John Gray, Andre´ Raffalovich, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Most of the people discussed in Part I could be described as the acolytes of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. I have discussed Pater and Wilde themselves whenever it seemed necessary to do so, but have tried to prevent them from taking over, on the grounds that there is already a considerable literature about them.2 The second part of the book looks in more detail at the Christian world of fin de sie`cle London, and also at some of the wider social questions associated with this particular period. It begins in

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Chapter 6 with an overview of the particular priorities of the churches at this point, their general attitudes, leadership and what was being discovered from the intensive sociological investigations of religion which were being undertaken at this period. This is followed in Chapter 7 by a more detailed exploration of what was at stake in discussions concerning prostitution and sexuality. Particular consideration is given to how prominent religious figures borrowed specifically from the categories of the fin de sie`cle, for example by mining the ideas associated with the ‘New Journalism’ and the ‘New Woman’. Chapter 8 considers the strand of Christian utopian thinking that was very much in evidence as the century turned, with a particular focus on partly or wholly theologically inspired projects which actually materialised as new ways of managing the poor and planning new communities. The final chapter returns once again to aesthetics, but from the perspective of prominent Christians as they wrote and thought about art, culture and worship. What emerges is an insight into a small-scale, London-oriented society, in which the ritual and culture of Christianity sometimes permeated the aesthetic movement, and the devotees of the aesthetic movement often revealed a fascination with Christianity. On the one hand, there were Christian thinkers who were beginning to explore more fully the aesthetic dimension of faith, often as part of a process of renewing their theology and of endeavouring to develop a new means of communicating with people of differing religious sensibilities. On the other, there were the cultural avant-garde, who were pioneering and experimenting with changing forms of art and literature, and sometimes with radically controversial ideas. Both groups continued to pick their way through a heavily Christian landscape. The book argues that the ‘long 1890s’ was a decisive decade in which various sections of Christian opinion, both on the progressive and on the more conservative wings of the faith, began to express views which both challenged older understandings of what Christian behaviour and priorities should be and set the tone for attitudes which would become commonplace in the twentieth century. Everything from theatre-going, to recycling, to the creation of schemes to assist the long-term unemployed, to the prevention of child prostitution were now

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on the churches’ agenda. Anglicans like Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Stewart Headlam and Percy Dearmer fed off the energy created by aestheticism and in particular the Arts and Crafts movement, and found themselves readily attuned to the classic fin de sie`cle expressions of energy and regeneration. Taking an even longer view of the legacy of this period, it can be argued that even Pater and Wilde would be ultimately rehabilitated among the ranks of the theologically respectable. By the later portion of the twentieth century, the once highly controversial ideas of Walter Pater on subjectivity and the appreciation of beauty had become not simply central cultural assumptions, but had entered the theological mainstream. As the twentieth century progressed, even Oscar Wilde, the most notorious figure in 1890s London, became gradually seen as a writer of theological insight.3 Many of those who have written and are currently writing about the fin de sie`cle wisely restrict themselves to very specific aspects of it, and to articles or book chapters, rather than full-length studies. I am conscious that there is a great deal more that could have been included in a book with this title if time and space had permitted: more discussion of the decadent Catholic convert Lionel Johnson, for example, and of those religious movements which were becoming extremely influential on the late nineteenth-century scene: particularly Spiritualism, Theosophy and other forms of esoteric belief. I have restricted myself to those branches of Christianity which were regarded as ‘mainstream’ – Protestantism in its various forms, and Roman Catholicism. (Although that is not to suggest that all the beliefs held by those discussed could be regarded as ‘mainstream’; believing that your dog is part of the Trinity – even if this is interpreted as a metaphor for the dynamic relations of love within the Godhead – has never remotely been part of Catholic belief, but this did not deter Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper in seeing their canine trinity as a milestone on their road to Roman Catholic conversion.) ‘Christianity’ in this book is not really seen as a doctrinal category, but rather as the religious culture created by those who were members of the major Christian denominations in London in the late nineteenth century. The Christianity which they espoused was therefore sometimes Catholic and sometimes evangelical, sometimes progressive or conservative, or a mixture of these

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positions, and it was expressed with varying degrees of commitment and fervour. Christianity, of course, was no more monolithic than society itself. Agnosticism also provides an important context for understanding the fin de sie`cle, and one could equally have written a new full-length study focussing on individuals such as H.G. Wells, George Gissing and Henry Maudsley. But this is a project I am leaving for somebody else. One final caveat: unlike the majority of those who enter this field, I am not a literary critic. My professional background is religious history, which means that I tend to notice the religious landscape, and also the absence of discussion of that landscape, before I notice the literary tropes. It was indeed the lack of much sustained discussion of the religious landscape in the increasingly voluminous and interdisciplinary literature on the fin de sie`cle that was a major factor prompting the writing of this book. The one significant exception to this is Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism, which provides a detailed analysis of the fascination, and particularly the erotic fascination, which Catholicism held for a variety of late nineteenth-century French and English decadent or symbolist writers.4 Some more broadly focussed literary studies also provide useful insights – particularly Hilary Fraser’s foundational study Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature, on which I have drawn quite heavily, and the chapter on ‘Catholicism and Mysticism: Huysmans to Chesterton’ in Mark Knight and Emma Mason’s general survey Nineteenth-century Religion and Literature. Both these works have the merit of taking seriously the theological presuppositions made by the writers discussed.5 Charles Taylor, in his much-discussed volume A Secular Age, very briefly noticed that the mood of the fin de sie`cle was both an attack on moralism and materialism, and that the aesthetic culture which it promoted formed an ethical category, which had implications for religion.6 But apart from several other very fleeting references, there has been little sustained investigation of the topic. Earlier work on the English fin de sie`cle tended to focus on it purely as a literary, cultural or artistic movement, and religion did not emerge as a theme to any great extent.7 More recent volumes, including the readers and essay collections in which the fin de sie`cle is presented as the linking explanatory concept, while still giving great attention to literary and artistic matters, have been broader in

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scope, but still have had relatively little to say about religion.8 Discussion tends to be confined to passing references linking decadence with Roman Catholicism, to W.T. Stead’s exposure of the trade in procuring virgins (his Maiden Tribute campaign was a high point in the moral purity movement of the 1880s) and to William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (ghost-written by Stead), with the latter two both being treated, reasonably enough, as episodes in the exposure of the seamy side of London life. Although Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst devote a section of their reader to psychical research (again with generous reference to the ubiquitous Stead, who by the 1890s was combining his Congregationalism with an enthusiastic endorsement of Spiritualism) and Mike Jay and Michael Neve have chapters on atheism and Spiritualism, none of the books considers Christianity as an explicit theme. Nor does Gail Marshall’s Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle, although it explicitly seeks to place aestheticism within broader political, scientific, cultural and intellectual contexts.9 For recent scholars, the dating of the fin de sie`cle – the term simply means ‘end of century’ – tends to extend from about 1885 to 1901,10 and this book generally adopts that dating, making it chiefly a study of the ‘long’ 1890s. Its full compass, however, stretches from the publication of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) to the conversions of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (1907). The twentieth century began on 1 January 1901,11 and the death of the Queen, just three weeks into the new century on 22 January, marked the formal ending of the Victorian age. Her death further underlined the real sense of British society in a state of transition as it moved into an uncertain new world.12 But although the Victorian age lasted officially until 1901, it has been long recognised that much of the mindset of the Victorian period had been questioned or cast aside in the previous two decades.13 New ideas had emerged, some of which seemed to be strikingly controversial. In the twentieth century some of these ideas would become familiar and in Britain largely accepted (e.g. women’s rights) while others would ultimately be dismissed as dangerous and bizarre (e.g. eugenics) or as naively utopian (e.g. land reform). Writing this book was also prompted by an interest in this process of endings and new beginnings, in

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people’s perception of how change happens, and in significant moments when ideas which were to have a lasting impact on Christianity in the twentieth century emerged out of the passing of the Victorian world. To focus mainly on just 16 years, 1885 to 1901, is a relatively brief timescale by the standards of modern religious history. Yet the distinctiveness of the ‘long’ 1890s was being established almost as soon as the era had drawn to a close, and it has never really been seriously challenged, although it sometimes becomes obscured in works which cover a longer timespan. As early as 1913, Holbrook Jackson, one of the period’s earliest historians, was describing the 1890s (in which he also included the late 1880s and the early 1900s) as the ‘decade [that] singled itself out [. . .] having already become a distinctive epoch in the minds of those who concern themselves with art and ideas’.14 Other historians of the fin de sie`cle have inevitably viewed it as a decisive period of transition. Yet it is not an epoch which has hitherto found much interest among historians of British Christianity. A small investigation of the time spans covered in a sample of works published in recent years by historians of modern British Christianity shows that on average they favoured adopting a time frame of 75 years.15 Until the publication of Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s16 relatively little attention had been given to the religious life of single decades.17 The distinctiveness of decades, if it exists, has tended to be masked within the longer sweep of history. Our understanding of the past is of course determined by how we choose to divide it up, as well as by the questions we ask and the themes we seek to explore. Moreover, dividing time in longer chunks than ‘long’ decades undoubtedly has many advantages. It allows a series of well-defined periods to be tackled: the Age of Reform; the mid-nineteenth century up until the outbreak of the First World War; or the late Victorian years up until the Second World War. A wealth of significant ecclesiastical and political landmarks provides shape and coherence by furnishing appropriate starting and finishing points. These preferences also tell us something about the length of time that scholars working in this period feel comfortably able to handle and interpret, and their perception of the timescale that is needed in order to draw out interesting examples of change and development. But there is

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merit too in the intensive concentration on the shorter timescale. Although it would be misleading to suggest that the specifics of the 1890s have been entirely neglected by historians of religion – connections between faith communities, class and politics,18 and the development of the social gospel19 have all been carefully documented – it is hoped that in this book, concentration on a shorter time frame will permit a level of focus, and of comment on cultural cross-fertilisation, that is usually less easy to achieve within a longer period.

CHAPTER 1 DIMENSIONS OF THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN IDEA For over a century, a large scholarly industry has been devoted to establishing the distinctiveness of the nineteenth century’s closing years. At a relatively early stage in the development of the historiography, there emerged the idea that the end of the nineteenth century had been a unique turning point, a particularly intensified moment of crisis and ending.1 But the polyvalent concept of the fin de sie`cle – a term which was applied to the cultural developments in a number of European and North American cities – was not self-evident or straightforwardly defined. The fin de sie`cle was simultaneously metaphor, motif and historical entity. The metaphor was about exhaustion and death. Indeed, it is a metaphorical, and also curiously anthropomorphic, way of thinking to classify a period of time, whether a century, a decade or a year, as new, when the digits are low – or old, when the digits are high – and then to make an imaginative leap that low digits indicate youth, freshness and optimism, and high digits suggest death and decay. But, no matter how anthropomorphic and curious, to do this seems to be deeply rooted in the human psyche.2 The notion that centuries, decades and years have their own organic life, making them ‘young’ or ‘old’ is irrational, but often persuasive.3 There is also a tendency for such notions to become self-fulfilling, as we slip easily into speaking of Victorianism being ‘worn out’ and ‘exhausted’ in the

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1890s. The feeling was reinforced by the longevity of some of Europe’s remaining hereditary rulers – not only Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne since 1837, but also Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary since 1848. People developed a natural expectation that as these monarchs died, the new century would see a different sort of European leadership in power. The fin de sie`cle metaphor spawned a cluster of enduring motifs, which constantly recur in discussions of the period. Some of these, such as decadence, and a perceived sense of moral decay, reinforce a sense of exhaustion and ending. Others, such as the prominent development of a self-conscious avant-garde, suggest newness, creativity and the freshness of a coming age. All of these moods and movements are part of the package which is understood to indicate the fin de sie`cle. It is a term which has become largely associated with the closing of the nineteenth century, but not exclusively so. Hillel Schwartz, in his history of the fin de sie`cle from the 990s, identifies what he terms ‘the first, primitive, European fin de sie`cle’ in the 1290s,4 and he uses the diagnostic tools which were perfected when discussing the 1890s to ‘read back’ into the medieval world. The sense grows that the 1890s was the ‘real’ fin de sie`cle: the ends of earlier centuries, together with the 1990s, tend to be defined and discussed according to the extent to which they conformed, or failed to conform, to the late nineteenth-century prototype. There is a need to at least try to navigate carefully between the metaphor of the fin de sie`cle as a century in old age, the powerful motifs which developed from that, and the attempt to recover and analyse the history of the late nineteenth century. Cultural event and fin de sie`cle metaphor sometimes became blurred, even in the minds of those who were living at the time. Max Nordau’s influential treatise Degeneration (Die Entartung, 1893, English translation, 1895) can be seen as a prime example of this blurring, by making a series of assumptions about the connections between ‘degenerate’ ideas and physical human decay. Indeed, Nordau claimed that a physician who had studied nervous and mental illnesses would recognise ‘at a glance’ the tendencies towards degeneracy and hysteria, ‘in the fin de sie`cle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and “decadent” works’.5

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His sweeping judgement is interesting, particularly in the light of his observations at the beginning of the book about the ‘extreme silliness’ of the notion that a century goes through the phases of youth, middle age and old age, arriving at ‘mournful senility’ in its final decade, before expiring at the age of one hundred.6 More illuminating, perhaps, is Nordau’s understanding of one of the ideas underlying the term fin de sie`cle. ‘It means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force.’7 This can certainly be applied in the English context, although arguably it lasted well into the twentieth century: traditional modes of conduct could sometimes be ignored, but rarely escaped from entirely. The amorphous nature of the concept offers an author a degree of flexibility in the way in which the term is deployed. The account of the fin de sie`cle offered here tends to emphasise the twin polarities of pessimism and optimism, exhaustion and fresh creativity, and the tensions created by looking simultaneously forwards and backwards. Schwartz coins a word for this, ‘janiform’, in allusion to the two faces of the Roman god Janus, who presided over beginnings – including of course each new year in the month of January – by looking simultaneously forwards and backwards. Depictions and evocations of Janus were frequent at the fin de sie`cle.8 It is difficult to escape the sense that although change is always continuous and fragmented, the end of the nineteenth century saw change, both actual and a sense of change, writ large. It witnessed an intensified clash between older and newer ways of thinking, of older ideas seen as worn out, or simply wrong, and newer ones born, tested, adopted or modified. The mixing of optimism and pessimism created volatility. The fixation with decay as the century decayed, again both literally and metaphorically, together with the craving for sensation and excitement, emerged repeatedly.9 The Congregationalist theologian P.T. Forsyth seems to have been noticing this when he diagnosed an ‘undertone of sadness’ and ‘soul-weariness’, despite the ‘endless outward jubilation’.10 In the late 1960s, Austin Clarke likened the 1890s to ‘a crowded railway junction with trains arriving and departing from various platforms’.11 It is an appealing image, but while it emphasises the totality of the change, and the number of simultaneous, but

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independent movements which were in transit, it implies an orderliness in the transition from old to new which is misleading. The late Victorians did not change trains like orderly long-distance commuters. A better image is to see them at the shoreline of a sometimes nauseously choppy sea, whipped up, or quietened, as external forces changed. The strong destabilising intellectual currents included feminism and anxieties about sexuality and reproduction. Socialism was another powerful current, as were ever present imperial ambitions and traumas. There were also big waves created by rapidly changing perspectives on psychology and human behaviour, and by new religious and esoteric movements, like Spiritualism and Theosophy. One powerful creation of the period, both as a motif and as a reality, was fin de sie`cle woman, or the ‘New Woman’ as she was known from 1894. In various incarnations, she features frequently in this study because she embodies so many of the challenges to Victorianism, and is the immediate ancestor of the ‘modern woman’ of the twentieth century. Indeed, in marked contrast to many of their male counterparts, many of the New Women of the fin de sie`cle lived long into the twentieth century. But at the turn of the century, they seemed to embody ambiguity, ‘janiform’ figures looking both forwards and backwards, one foot in the modern world, and one in the Victorian age. The idea of a thoroughly gendered understanding of male and female ‘separate spheres’ (as originally outlined by Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall) has now been challenged, but it is harder to contest the notion that many middle-class mid-Victorian women had become anchored by the expectation that they should remain in a domestic and economically dependent setting.12 By the 1890s, evangelical Christianity, although somewhat less in the ascendant than it had been a few decades earlier, was still, in all its Anglican and Nonconformist shades, a major component of middle-class culture, and its expectations had not yet disappeared. But the world was changing. Some women (and also some men) were becoming increasingly less satisfied with women’s disenfranchised, dependent status. Educational and professional opportunities, although still extremely limited, were beginning to open up new possibilities for the determined, clever and well connected. Larger numbers of middle-class women became

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economically active, and they tended to become vocal about having to pay income tax and rates whilst being denied political representation. It was the beginning of what would later be termed first-wave feminism (the second wave began in the 1970s). The ‘New Woman’ was set to embody a classic fin de sie`cle clash between older ideas and fresh ones, moral outrage and shocking newness, determined argument and agonised uncertainty. The term itself was used at the time to denote women who took up new activities, such as cycling or archery, and those who entered the professions or who promoted new ideas about the nature and role of women. It was also applied to the new type of fiction which dealt with the intimate lives of women, and to the authors of such literature, who were frequently, although not universally, seen as the embodiment of new womanhood themselves.13 Women at the fin de sie`cle were suddenly much more publicly articulate than had been the case hitherto. This is seen both in terms of their participation in public speaking in its various forms, and in the explosion of women’s writing. Partly in response to a lack of other professional opportunities, many educated women turned to journalism and other forms of literary work.14 Journalism itself was a rapidly expanding profession, as the advent of mass literacy stimulated demand for reading matter of all sorts. The first half of the 1890s saw a particular explosion in New Woman fiction, in what has been described as one of the most remarkable features of English fin de sie`cle culture.15 A whole variety of views were expressed by both sexes about the role of women, from the startlingly progressive to the extraordinarily misogynistic. The pages of journals like the progressive Westminster Review were filled with women writing about marriage, divorce and economic independence. The pages of The Yellow Book, the leading fin de sie`cle journal, contained a high proportion of female contributors – around one third. Attitudes to sexuality which had been rarely, if ever, spoken of could now be more openly expressed. Olive Schriener’s works, although popular with the public, attracted particular censure in some quarters, because of her biting critique of Christianity and of the Victorian woman’s role, and because of her own unconventional lifestyle, as a political activist and feminist. ‘One of the most intensely painful books we ever read’ wrote a reviewer in The Church Quarterly Review, in

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relation to her influential novel of 1883, The Story of an African Farm.16 But if Schreiner seemed unconventional, Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, the aunt and niece lovers who published poetry under the name of Michael Field, seemed even more so. They began their successful writing career as Michael Field in 1884, although after their identity as two women was revealed in 1889, their work was shunned in some circles. Both converted to Roman Catholicism in 1907, as late participants in a trend which, as we shall see, was relatively common among the decadent writers of the fin de sie`cle. This rapid change in the outlook of some women of the middle and upper classes created large amounts of anxiety among the population as a whole, both male and female. From these fears emerged the New Woman as a literary motif – unfeminine, unmaternal, undomesticated, overeducated, overbearing and either oversexed or ‘unsexed’ – she was meant to be both an unattractive caricature and a solemn warning. She was depicted in Albert Morrow’s poster to advertise Sydney Grundy’s satirical play of 1894, The New Woman, in which she was portrayed as a somewhat dishevelled, solitary young woman, her glasses balanced on her nose, surrounded by a chaos of papers and pamphlets, a cigarette prominently discarded in the foreground. In a frame on the wall is a key, possibly a reference to George Egerton’s bestselling collection of feminist short stories, Keynotes, published in the previous year.17 But the symbolism of the key is uncomplicated: she is dreaming of her own home and a life independent of male control. The reality of women’s lives was, of course, very different from the fantasies of the misogynist writers who created the hostile motif of the imagined New Woman. A large gulf existed between the literary construct and the reality of the 1890s feminist, who was often chiefly concerned with constitutional rights and the possibilities for economic independence, but was equally likely to champion motherhood and social purity campaigns.18 Women, including Christian women of the 1890s, obviously had a variety of different aspirations, some of which reflect the influence of New Woman thinking. Some, such as the artist and writer Mabel Dearmer, maintained an unwavering commitment to an artistic career, but sought out (and secured) a marriage based on

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partnership and equality, to an Anglican clergyman. Others, such as the journalist Jane T. Stoddart, the archetype of the Nonconformist New Woman, found the freedom to live independently and pursue her many interests, and a fulfilling career, in London society. She became assistant editor of the leading Nonconformist newspaper the British Weekly, in 1890, and later had a very substantial literary career – she lived until 1944. Still others, like Ellice Hopkins, the Anglican social purity campaigner, mixed feminism and a rigorous expectation of a single standard of chastity for both sexes with a positive evaluation of the body and of sexuality in marriage, views which derived in part from her incarnational theology. Meanwhile, Mary Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward), author of the most successful Christian socialist faith-and-doubt novel of the fin de sie`cle, Robert Elsmere (1888), became a sort of anti-feminist. She could not bring herself to believe in female suffrage, even in the limited terms in which it was often presented in the 1890s, of votes only for single women and widows, and she became somewhat notorious among her friends when she became the leader of the Women’s AntiSuffrage Association in 1908. These were some of the varied matriarchs who created the world in which early twentieth-century women found their place. And as Sally Ledger points out, it is striking that many of these women, although ‘a transgressive sociocultural force’, were actually quite heavily invested in aspects of the existing order – ‘complicit with residual elements of the dominant Victorian ideologies concerning gender roles, sexuality, “race”, empire and social class’.19 The ‘New Woman’ was herself a janiform figure, looking forwards and backwards.

THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY, POPULAR CULTURE AND EMPIRE Besides first-wave feminism, many other significant currents were pouring into the unquiet sea that was the fin de sie`cle. This was the era of mass production and new technology, of organised sport and rapid scientific advance, particularly in physics, which underwent its own brisk revolution around 1895.20 There had been ‘such manifestations of scientific marvels as no other short period can point to’,21 as E.F. Benson put it, looking back at the 1890s from 1930. Transportation was improving fast, and so was

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the generation of electrical energy. The rapid technological changes of the period, coupled with changing consumer demands, prompted some new anxieties among Christian bodies. One change was the rapid expansion of working-class gambling, which had been newly identified as a problem from the late 1880s – and then elevated to the status of a leading national sin – once mechanisms were in place, such as bookmakers and the electric telegraph, to allow ordinary people to have a ‘flutter’. It seemed that here was a new technology giving assistance to an old vice. Previously, gambling had been largely a pursuit of the wealthy upper class, but now it was within the reach of all. For Nonconformists it was seen as particularly problematic when pursued by prominent Liberal politicians who were expected to act as role models, and notably by Lord Rosebery, whose horse won the Derby in 1894, and again in 1895.22 In 1890, it was still the custom for Parliament to adjourn for the whole of Derby Day. The Westminster Review drew an unfavourable contrast with the mere two hours for which it adjourned on Ascension Day, but noted with satisfaction that support for the Derby Day holiday was falling.23 By the 1890s, a strict anti-gambling stance was one of the hallmarks of the Nonconformist conscience – the name given to the package of religious and political views which characterised Nonconformist thought in the 1890s – although this was less widely shared in other Christian constituencies. In 1890, the Nonconformist-led National Anti-Gambling League was founded, and was organised in a way similar to the leading Nonconformist anti-drink association, the United Kingdom Alliance. It was the first time that an anti-gambling association had been formed since the Society for the Suppression of Vice had specifically pledged itself to repress gambling in 1802.24 In its new-century issue, the British Weekly significantly chose what it saw as the ‘cancers’ of gambling and drinking as the topics to denounce in its leading article. ‘We drink more and gamble more than any people in the world, and drink more and gamble more every year of our life.’25 This was unlikely to have been true, but in a moment of uncharacteristically pessimistic conservatism, it struck the Weekly as more alarming than either rising materialism or imperialist anxiety, and as the most urgent alarm to sound at the dawn of the new century.

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The beginning of the seven-day news media gave Christians another cause for anxiety. This brought the threat that newspaper workers would be expected to work a seven-day week. It was an issue taken up by the Free Church Council, and it received much coverage in the British Weekly, which took up the cudgels in the ‘seven-day newspaper fight’. It did not do so on the basis of narrowly sabbatarian arguments, but on the grounds of the dangers of relentless work to health, in an industry with a higher than average death rate. Sunday working was presented as a secondary issue, although it conceded that even on a newspaper which only expected its employees to engage in six-day working, a man might get his day off on Tuesday, and that was altogether less satisfactory than a day off on Sunday.26 David Bebbington has noted that sabbatarian feeling seemed less intense in the closing years of the nineteenth century, but it revived markedly in the first decade of the twentieth.27 This would seem to be borne out in the tone adopted in the British Weekly. As well as the panics that Nonconformists had over gambling and newspaper production, larger political and imperial anxieties were also often at the forefront of the British Weekly’s concern. Following the founding of the Fabian Society in 1883, socialism and related progressive theories began to make an impact on at least some sections of the middle classes. This caused many to question what had previously been conventional assumptions, for example that poverty and inequality were inevitable, and indeed divinely ordained. Social activism in many forms, together with utopian visions for new types of communities, began to appear under various guises. Anxieties about the place of Britain in the world surfaced more dramatically than hitherto, as the enormous British Empire began to exhibit signs of instability, and as Germany and the United States overtook Britain economically, creating a major dent in the confidence of the nation. The British Empire began to be seen as a burden as well as a blessing, although it was generally assumed that it would remain intact for the duration of the twentieth century.28 The South African War (the Boer War, 1899 –1902) became a focal point for doubts about Britain’s military competence, and for anxieties in general, as losses mounted and the war dragged on. It was the dominant public event at the turn of the century.

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Christians saw it as particularly reprehensible that Britain should enter the new century on a war-time footing. The British Weekly lamented that the nineteenth century had both started and ended with Britain at war. ‘The Power which had fought Napoleon was being humiliated by a few thousand Boer peasants.’29 The prevailing fin de sie`cle metaphors of exhaustion, death and new birth not only suited the war mentality, but could also of course be worked out in theological terms: the new century was seen as the moment which should have signalled national repentance and rededication to the belief that ‘God has given us [the British] a great work to do in the world.’30 The non-occurrence of this was seen as a sign of conspicuous failure. This was still very much the age of the big world map, with the British Empire signalled very prominently in red or pink, and English values seen as commodities for unproblematic global export. But the challenges to this were already becoming apparent. Even the early nineteenth-century concept of the British Isles as a single political unit was undermined as Ireland pressed for home rule, which became one of the most important issues of the period. The Boer War provided shocking daily reminders of the human cost of Britain’s colonial ambitions; it had resulted in 11,000 dead and 61,000 injured (some of whom died) by the turn of the twentieth century – a period of just 14 months.31 By 1900, Britain had become so unpopular in continental Europe as a result of the war that Queen Victoria was advised to switch her regular summer holiday destination from the French Riviera to Dublin, where she spent three weeks.32 She had been inspired to visit the city by accounts of Irish troops relieving Ladysmith, but it rather powerfully symbolised the retreat of the crown into the British Isles in the final months of her reign. If the politics of Empire and nation were becoming ever more complicated, so too was people’s understanding of themselves. What made people the way they were? Was it, as Christians had traditionally imagined, an innate predisposition to sinfulness resulting from the fallen state of humanity, or something else? Psychological motivations, neuroses, repressed drives and desires were beginning to be acknowledged. Recognisably modern views about the self, and the primacy of self-fulfilment, began to be expressed. People were beginning to view themselves, and each

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other, in altered terms, and the role of environmental factors in determining behaviour began to be treated with much greater seriousness. Henry Nevinson, looking back at his life in 1897 from the vantage point of 1923, noted that ‘the Subconscious Self, that grisly monster [was] then beginning to emerge into daylight, like a long-forgotten madman emerging from his dungeon’.33 The elements of gothic horror in his reference are suggestive of the unsettling nature of early psychological awareness. In Vienna, Freud would coin the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in 1896. Psychology in Britain developed too, particularly under the influence of James Sully, who studied children, and published a work on dreams in 1893 that was later taken up by Freud. For much of the 1890s, however, British psychology remained preoccupied with the treatment of hysteria (later to re-emerge as the concept of trauma) and the ‘feeble minded’. It became entangled with eugenics, as did the New Woman question. Hysterics, the feeble minded and the New Woman should all be discouraged from breeding, a view which became increasingly vehement as the problems of recruiting fit soldiery for the Boer War highlighted the already poor physical state of many working-class males.

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: THE THEMES OF ‘DEGENERATION’ AND ‘REBIRTH’ There are, then, a variety of interesting and fruitful themes with which a study of Christianity and the fin de sie`cle could engage. It is a naturally interdisciplinary topic, in which themes often overlap and personalities sometimes crop up in a variety of different contexts. Prominent are ideas which relate to the themes of social and moral degeneration: we have already briefly noted the anxieties about the passing of time, about social liberation movements, about political and military volatility and the rapidly changing technology. When considering the key themes of the fin de sie`cle, there has been a tendency for scholars to dwell on the ‘degeneration’ which so troubled Max Nordau, on the excess and world-weary knowingness associated with decadence, and on its relatively sudden destruction, which was largely brought about by the trial and disgrace of Oscar Wilde in 1895. But, as various critics have pointed out, ‘degeneration was rarely invoked without its

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twin concept of “regeneration”, these are the terms in which the period articulated to itself that experience of ambivalence’.34 Even Oscar Wilde, as he sat in Reading Gaol scribbling his searing rebuke to Lord Alfred Douglas, found that he wanted to stress that everything in the world had meaning; suffering had meaning, but love as exemplified in the suffering of Christ had greater meaning.35 For Richard Le Gallienne, the author of an early popular history of the period in which he had himself been an important player, the era was primarily one of rebirth: Fin de sie`cle was the label [. . .] but as one looks back, it is plain that here was not so much the ending of a century as the beginning of a new one. Those last ten years of the nineteenth century properly belong to the twentieth century, and, far from being ‘decadent’ except in certain limited manifestations, they were years of an immense and multifarious renaissance.36 The point is an interesting one, for there was certainly a strongly renewing and sometimes utopian element in Christian fin de sie`cle thinking, of striving for a better world, and of consciously leaving behind the negative aspects of the past.37 It was another dimension of the oldness and newness metaphor, and probably a consequence of the Christian predisposition to see death overcome by new life. Fin de sie`cle Christians, a term that is used here to denote those who seemed most consciously to embrace something of the spirit of the age, tended to dwell more on regeneration and renaissance than on degeneration and decadence. Although by no means relentlessly optimistic – indeed sometimes much troubled by events – their approach to life became sometimes noticeably more world-affirming as the years passed. It was characteristic of the fin de sie`cle Christian to express strongly positive feelings about the goodness of humanly created things: art, literature, the theatre, well-designed objects. The incarnation – the belief in a God who became a human being and lived in a world of humanly created things, and who, according to the portrayal of the Pre-Raphaelite Millais, learned a craft skill38 – was at the forefront of their theological thoughts, and Charles

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Gore, probably the most popular English theologian of the age, was partly responsible for putting it there. Gore was truly popular, in that his sermons and annual lectures at Westminster Abbey attracted vast crowds in the mid-1890s, and were printed verbatim in both the Nonconformist British Weekly and the Anglican Church Times.39 His apparent approval by Free Church audiences suggests that he was seen to have transcended narrowness in the Catholic Anglicanism which he inhabited, and had succeeded in his objective of opening up the Tractarian heritage of which he was an heir to make it much more inclusive and socially engaged. It also suggests an ecumenical open-mindedness among the readers of the British Weekly, and a lack of anxiety about Gore’s kenotic Christology (the view that Jesus’ knowledge had been limited by the constraints of his humanity during his incarnation on earth). This had been something which had caused controversy when Gore had advanced it in Lux Mundi, the muchdiscussed book which he had edited in 1889, and again in his Bampton Lectures of 1891.40 More will be said about this later. Gore was also the most significant early theological influence on Percy Dearmer, who became the pre-eminent advocate of the arts and aesthetics within the Church of England (he is discussed in Chapter 9). If Gore is a pre-eminent example of Anglo-Catholic Christianity at the fin de sie`cle, then the Congregationalist Peter Taylor Forsyth showed himself – in his earlier work produced during this period – to be very much a Protestant fin de sie`cle thinker, influenced by his belief in the need for the imagination to be freed to contemplate Christianity through a serious engagement with modern art (which for him was the PreRaphaelites). Chapter 9 analyses his major early work, Religion in Recent Art, in which these ideas were explored. Although much of Forsyth’s theology is suffused with optimism for the future, he also catches the anxiety which runs through fin de sie`cle Christianity, as it ran through so much of society as a whole. This passage, in which he discusses the weariness which he sees in the faces of Burne-Jones’s female subjects, gives a fuller flavour: And so we have the nineteenth century weariness, amounting in cases to despair, pessimism, nihilism, and

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reckless revolt. It is this weariness that we have just shadowed on these lovely faces of Burne Jones’s [sic ]. It is pagan beauty suffused with modern, nay recent melancholy. It is the very loveliness of the soul’s lassitude, the fine wistfulness which marks a time when the old creeds are dead and the new ones are not of age; when the general faith is no more uncritical and strong, but anxious or paralysed amid the success of science and unexampled wealth. We feel more than we did, and we believe less. We are more busy, but perhaps we achieve less [. . .] Our excess of passion is subdued to a tear of melancholy or a sigh of regret, and we dare hardly pray to feel, lest we should only have to weep at our inability to weep.41 Forsyth’s sense of feeling more, while believing less, and of the old creeds dead and the new ones not of age, is part of what this book is seeking to explore. Rather than being a crisis of faith as conventionally understood, it seems to have been more of a shift in the religious landscape; a desire to be inspired in different ways by different things, and to break away from the established religious categories of the Victorian era.

THE FIN DE SIE`CLE IN LONDON, AND OTHER PLACES It was noted at the beginning of this chapter that the term fin de sie`cle was applied to the cultural developments in a number of European and North American cities, and it is therefore a somewhat geographically specific concept. Whereas the 1890s (obviously) happened everywhere that followed the Christian calendar, it can be argued that the English fin de sie`cle occurred rather specifically in London. As we consider the relationship between the fin de sie`cle and London, we are again confronted with the need to navigate metaphor, motif and reality – geographical as well as historical. The ideas characteristic of the fin de sie`cle were generated most noticeably in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Vienna, as well as in London. The chief influences came from France. Holbrook Jackson noted in his early study that ‘the English decadents always remained spiritual foreigners in our midst; they were not a product of England but of cosmopolitan

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London’.42 The overwhelming nature of the French influence caused some tensions, as we shall see in the next chapter. It was clear that in order to flourish, this cultural movement required an urban setting, with publishers, booksellers, theatres, galleries, clubs, good transport links, and most importantly, opportunities for social interaction and the development of loose cultural groupings. Its ‘outputs’ – articles, poems, art works, plays, short stories – were nurtured in an environment of endless small-scale sociability. The contributors to The Yellow Book tended to meet informally in each other’s houses,43 and the members of the Rhymers’ Club gathered regularly at ‘The Cheshire Cheese’ pub in Fleet Street. Ernest Dowson, and other poets, writers and actors, met almost nightly in ‘The Cock’ in Shaftesbury Avenue, ‘The Crown’ in Charing Cross Road, at the Empire and Alhambra music halls, and at the Cafe´ Royal.44 It is tempting to romanticise all this seemingly spontaneous creativity, and Alison Hennegan offers a useful corrective when she reminds us that aestheticism, decadence, the construction of the New Woman and the fin de sie`cle itself were all ‘commercially sound propositions for publishers and authors during the nineties’.45 This was equally true of the ‘New Journalism’, another London-based innovation, pioneered by W.T. Stead in the mid-1880s, which by the end of the century was beginning to make an impact on larger sections of the press, becoming the clearly identified parent of the modern newspaper industry. It trod an awkward path between moral crusading and prurient titillation, and became increasingly interested in gossip and celebrity. The emergence of the Daily Mail, in 1896, was one of its results. All these developments were easily facilitated in the commercial heart of London, and the city was also the most congenial environment for people who wanted to be free to be unconventional, or simply to be observed only at moments of their own choosing. Thus the English fin de sie`cle was firmly focussed on London, just as its continental counterparts were based in other European capital cities.46 London also functioned as a major motif in nineteenth-century literature, and not simply in that produced in its final decade. Dickens did more than any other author to create an enduring, fictionalised version of Britain’s Victorian capital. As the century wore on, it is very striking how much was written about London, or

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is set in London. ‘For this is London, this is life!’, wrote Richard Le Gallienne (a Liverpudlian with Celtic roots) in his poem of 1895, ‘A Ballad of London’: the statement provided a pithy summary of the prevailing attitude. The opening stanza summarises the nocturnal nature of the city: Ah, London! London! our delight, Great flower that opens but at night, Great city of the Midnight Sun, Whose day begins when day is done.47 Although superficially a celebration of London nightlife, the poet also alludes to the hidden ‘world of weeping trodden things’, and more dramatically, concludes with the thought that London will, in time, be reduced to a desert. There was a particular explosion of London literature in the 1890s. As R.K.R. Thornton pointed out, the popularity of the subject is demonstrated by W.E. Henley’s London Types (1898) and London Voluntaries (1893), Laurence Binyon’s two series of London Lyrics (1896 and 1899), Ernest Rhys’s A London Rose (1894), John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) and Arthur Symons’s London Nights (1895) to name only those books whose titles indicate their interests.48 Even Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novella The Heart of Darkness (1899), although ostensibly about the Belgian Congo, is told in the form of a story recounted to shipmates on a fog-bound yacht in the Thames. The atmosphere of the capital seems all-pervasive at this period. As Le Gallienne noted in 1926, for the writers and poets of the period there was ‘quite a cult of London and its varied life, from costers to courtesans’.49 For the large number of social investigators and reformers who turned their attention to late nineteenth-century London, including Andrew Mearns, W.T. Stead, James Greenwood, Charles Booth and William Booth, it all too frequently became a metaphor for darkness, bitterness and moral corruption. It was a vibrant world city, but one fraught with danger from which deliverance was seen to be necessary.

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The practical reality was that most of the major actors in the cultural and artistic fin de sie`cle were in residence in London, and so also were the leaders of the English Churches, and many Christian initiatives and societies were founded or run from there, a fact which cannot be ignored when considering the focus for a history of religion in the 1890s. In 1890, Archbishop Benson, General Booth, Hugh Price Hughes, Cardinal Manning and Charles Spurgeon were all living in the capital. It was still possible for artists, writers, theologians and scholars to live cheek-by-jowl, in central districts like Bloomsbury.50 The opportunities and problems posed by the capital were as much a preoccupation of church people as they were of the literati. All this poses the question of what, if anything, did the fin de sie`cle mean outside London? In other parts of England, it is not easy to be sure. The literary scholars and cultural historians for whom it is a key explanatory concept tend to be more interested in the texts themselves than in the towns or cities as the settings in which they were composed. The importance of London is everywhere acknowledged, but little thought seems to have been given to the interactions of the fin de sie`cle with other parts of England, beyond the growing popularity of its material culture: William Morris wallpapers, Liberty prints, sunflower tiles and blue china. In Ireland, and to a lesser extent in Scotland and Wales, the fin de sie`cle overlaps and shades into the Celtic literary revival. In his early study of the fin de sie`cle, Holbrook Jackson devoted a chapter to ‘The Discovery of the Celt’. It was mainly about W.B. Yeats, but it served to create the idea that the English fin de sie`cle and the Celtic revival were somehow linked.51 For Jackson, the Celtic sensibility in the fin de sie`cle seemed to mean Celtic authors rediscovering and skilfully retelling their national folktales, and it was not clear how this related to what was happening in London. In fact, Yeats, like Oscar Wilde, another Irishman, spent much of the 1890s as part of the London literary scene. Jackson’s treatment of Scotland was far more cursory, and he briefly cited the work of Patrick Geddes, who founded a journal, the Evergreen, which produced only four numbers, and Fiona MacLeod, who published novels (and was in fact a man, William Sharp). He might have mentioned Charles Rennie Macintosh and the Glasgow school, but Macintosh was out of favour at the time

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that Jackson was writing. Of Wales he had even less to say, beyond noting ‘a decided quickening of social consciousness among the Celts, which expressed itself in ardent political activities of a Radical tendency’.52 He pointed out the young Lloyd George, who (with Tom Ellis) had been the Welsh political star of the 1890s. In London, the Irish literary renaissance was focussed in the activities of the Irish Literary Club, in Southwark, and the Rhymers’ Club, which held regular meetings in the period from 1890 to 1894, either at ‘The Cheshire Cheese’, or occasionally in private houses. When at ‘The Cheshire Cheese’, a meal was followed by retirement to an upstairs room where verses were read and criticised. Beckson suggests that the Club was initially founded primarily to help various Irish writers and other Celts overcome their sense of loneliness and isolation in London, and to prevent them feeling jealous of one another. The Celtic identification, which tended to be claimed even by those members who appeared to be Londoners (like Ernest Dowson), was a means of allowing the group to signal their divorce from traditional, high Victorian, English poetry.53 When the Rhymers’ Club organised itself to produce an anthology of its members’ poetry, The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892), London emerged once again as a major poetic theme in the work of at least four of the contributors. One of the group, Arthur Symons, had written that the ‘test of poetry which professes to be modern’ was ‘its capacity for dealing with London’.54 It was an interesting test. In modern scholarship, just occasionally, the term fin de sie`cle is consciously applied to other parts of Britain. When it is, it tends to take on a different meaning from that commonly conveyed in the voluminous London-focussed literature. Of course, a term which simply means ‘end of century’ can be legitimately invested with other meanings. Kenneth O. Morgan’s essay, ‘Tom Ellis versus Lloyd George: The Fractured Consciousness of Fin-de-Sie`cle Wales’, returned to the perspective of Holbrook Jackson and defined the Welsh fin de sie`cle as seen through the eyes of Tom Ellis, for whom it mainly meant unfulfilled nationalist yearning.55 There was literary and artistic energy in 1890s Wales (of the type unnoticed by Jackson), but its priorities were also higher education and the development of Welsh intermediate schools. The context was provided by Wales’s spectacular industrial and commercial

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expansion. Morgan argued plausibly that Ellis and Lloyd George were ‘key exhibits of Welsh national politics and self-awareness in the fin-de-sie`cle period’.56 Ellis was the ‘respectable aesthete’ and committed Calvinistic Methodist who in Oxford and London was influenced by Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Arnold Toynbee: Lloyd George, on the other hand, was neither an aesthete nor an intellectual, and ‘emphatically no Puritan’. Once in London, the youthful Welsh parliamentarians found that politically they had much in common, and became drawn into the prevailing culture: ‘Ellis took his younger Caernarfon colleague on a tour of the more colourful London cafe´s, and there were theatre excursions as well, with suitable female company. Ellis was a bachelor; Lloyd George’s wife chose to remain moored in Cricieth.’57 Even these two staunch North Walians seemed only fully able to articulate their fin de sie`cle consciousness when they were away from home, and in the bright and beckoning world of London. This chapter has suggested that understanding the concept of the fin de sie`cle requires careful consideration of the interplay between metaphor, powerful contemporary motifs and partially recoverable historical reality. While there are almost as many interpretations of the fin de sie`cle as there have been interpreters, a fruitful approach, and the one adopted here, is to read it as a period in which many people found themselves looking simultaneously forwards and backwards, believing in the possibility of regeneration and rebirth, as well as the reality of degeneration and decadence. The prevailing culture emerged from a complex mix of rapid social and technological change, an explosion of new ideas about gender and human nature, and an unsettling domestic and international political climate. The geographical dimensions of the fin de sie`cle have also been considered, with the argument made for the centrality of London, both as the physical location for writers, artists, theologians and church leaders, and as a powerful metaphor. A little has been said about the preoccupations of church people at the fin de sie`cle. These will be examined further in Part II. Before this, we shall investigate some of the ways in which the aesthetic movement connected to the religious context within which it was located.

CHAPTER 2 AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE AT THE FIN DE SIE` CLE

For most people with an interest in the fin de sie`cle, the aesthetic movement is its most immediately appreciated aspect. Indeed, some of the rhythms and crises associated with the aesthetic movement – particularly the decadence of the early 1890s, the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and the death of Aubrey Beardsley in 1898 – provide a shape and structure for understanding the English fin de sie`cle as a whole. Furthermore, as a movement that was partly concerned with the creation of objects, its material culture lived on. The ideas of the aesthetic movement – expressed perhaps most simply as the assertion of the importance of art and beauty in thought and material culture – lay behind the production of both one-off works of art, and art and decoration for the mass market, such as the many sunflower relief tiles which still adorn the exteriors of thousands of turn-of-the-century houses in towns and cities across Britain. The characteristic emblems and objects associated with aesthetic taste – sunflowers, lilies, peacock feathers, blue and white china, Japanese-styled furniture, ‘rational’ (in other words more comfortable) dress – remain centrally identified with this particular epoch of the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce some of the central ideas and events of English aestheticism and its early 1890s off-shoot, the decadent movement, and to provide a preliminary analysis of the challenge which the decadent strand of aestheticism as it was developed by Walter Pater appeared to

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pose to the Christian (and Victorian) assumption of an ethical dimension in art.

THE ORIGINS OF ENGLISH AESTHETICISM The English aesthetic movement which preceded the fin de sie`cle had had its roots in London in the 1860s. Its proponents were interested in new approaches to art and design, and the desire to explore and celebrate elegance, sensuousness and beauty, with an intensity which often bordered on ‘religious’ fervour. Central to their concerns was the quest for beauty in art, and naturalistic definitions of the beautiful. Its protagonists initially clustered into two loose groupings: the Pre-Raphaelite circle around Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Tudor House in Chelsea, which included Rossetti’s brother William Michael, the poet A.C. Swinburne, and the artists James Whistler, William Morris and Edward BurneJones; and second, in Holland Park, the painters Frederic Leighton and G.F. Watts. As well as a devotion to painting, these people were concerned with domestic interiors, and in encouraging what they saw as the cultivation of good taste and individuality in the home. They were part of a reaction against the consumption of mass-produced household objects which they perceived as unworthy, vulgar and ugly. In poetry, their priorities were to explore beauty, desire, loss and related themes with far greater explicitness than had hitherto been acceptable. In the climate of late Victorian Britain, this was controversial, and the controversy could not always be lightly shrugged off, even by those who are now remembered as the most bohemian of bohemians. In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s longawaited Poems were published to starkly mixed reviews (his friends were enthusiastic, but other reviewers were not) and the sting of the criticism was a factor contributing to his breakdown, which came two years later. Swinburne’s poetry had also been subject to swingeing criticism and he was castigated as morally degenerate. The most vociferous critic of the ‘fleshly poets’ was Robert Buchanan, who was not a puritanical Christian, but an antireligious socialist (although his attitude to Christianity may have softened later in life).1 The opprobrium heaped on the poets seems to have tarred with the same brush the painters with whom they

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associated. British society developed a new anxiety, or at least recharged an old one, about the moral effects of the production of art and literature that ostentatiously eschewed a moral basis. This overt refusal to allow art and literature to be put to a moral purpose was to be one of the staple ingredients in the clashes between the late Victorian and the fin de sie`cle worlds.

AESTHETICISM AND CHRISTIANITY Meanwhile, a distinctively Christian approach to aestheticism was developing steadily during the nineteenth century. In the middle of the century, the youthful John Ruskin drew attention to it, in part by educating his readers to think of the beauty of nature in spiritual terms. Ruskin both affirmed the value of the aesthetic, and gave approval and sanction to some of the styles which were being deployed as artistic vehicles for religious expression, such as gothic revival architecture and the paintings of the early preRaphaelites.2 In later life, his faith in beauty as a route to God waned, and he became more interested in politics and social reform, in a manner which influenced the Arts and Crafts socialism of the type espoused by William Morris. As we shall see, people were attracted by the provision of good quality, aesthetically pleasing objects and designs which had been made without the exploitation of labour, and for which Morris’s workshop became famous. Hilary Fraser, who is a thoughtful commentator on the relationship between nineteenth-century Christianity and the aesthetic, has argued that a proliferation of religio-aesthetic theories designed to reconcile the claims of Christianity and beauty, and morality and art was one of the most characteristic and prominent features of Victorian thought. She cogently makes the case for this being an entirely traditional and predictable feature of the religious thought of the period, deriving from the fact that religion and art share an endeavour to express nonmaterial truths through a common language of myth and symbol. They are also closely and practically entwined, the result of centuries of religious patronage of the arts, and of the poetic language, symbols and structures fundamental to liturgy and worship, and indeed to some theology.3 Fraser’s study provides a

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useful corrective to the impression given in some of the general studies of theological aesthetics, which imply that the topic was little thought of before the twentieth century. For example, in her 2004 study Gesa Thiessen argued that although there had long been an awareness that theologians had written on themes relating to aesthetics, it was only in the last 20 years of the twentieth century that the field of theological aesthetics, including the dialogue between theology and the arts, had become a major focus in theology.4 This may be true of theologians; literary scholars were making connections earlier. Almost half of Thiessen’s 400-page diachronic study is devoted to the twentieth century, and only six pages to nineteenth-century England, with brief extracts from Coleridge, Newman and Ruskin. Although Thiessen’s approach is usefully wide-ranging, it and similar large-scale surveys risk squeezing out what was in fact a significant commentary on the aesthetic in pre-twentieth-century theology. Fraser argues that the distinctive, and progressively evolving, nineteenth-century preoccupation with fusing Christianity, the poetic and the aesthetic can be clearly seen in the work of John Henry Newman, John Keble, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and that from the 1830s to the 1890s there was a full-circle movement from the Oxford Tractarians’ exploration of the aesthetic dimensions of historical Christianity to Pater and Wilde espousing a religion of art, still with a focus on Christ, but a Christ remodelled as a form of artistic truth.5 It was quite a distance from the positions of Newman and Keble. Although both theologians, influenced as they were by Coleridge and Wordsworth, believed that poetry was essential for satisfying religious needs, both also insisted on the primacy of religion over art – the fine arts were religion’s handmaidens – and they were fearful that beauty might become a substitute for faith.6 Newman and Keble also considered that the morality of the poet and his poetry were indelibly linked: poetry had to be founded on correct moral perception, as Newman put it: ‘We do not hesitate to say, that poetry is ultimately founded on correct moral perception; that where there is no sound principle in exercise there will be no poetry; and that [. . .] in proportion to the standard of a writer’s moral character will his compositions vary in poetic excellence.’7

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WALTER PATER It was precisely this type of opinion that Walter Pater reacted against. Pater was well known within the late nineteenth-century academic world for his writing on art and literature, and on classical, philosophical and historical topics. His lush prose – which has to be experienced in order to be appreciated – was seen as heralding a new cult of devotion to aesthetics and to beauty for its own sake. With Oscar Wilde, he became the high priest of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic movement in England. He was also a promoter of a distinctive form of heavily aestheticised Christianity, and, somewhat unwittingly, and even rather reluctantly, became the leading intellect who created the climate that made late nineteenth-century English aestheticism flourish. In 1873, he published a collection of essays entitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. It was Pater’s first book: he was in his mid-thirties, and a little known don at Brasenose College Oxford. The sober title belied the arch playfulness of both the contents and the approach. Pater departed from the conventional notion that history writing should be based on the objective pursuit of accurate facts, coherently organised in order to explain the past. Instead, he chose a radically different technique, resulting in a book that appeared to be about one thing, but was in fact about something quite other. The Renaissance is peppered with misattributions and misquotations. It is a series of art historical essays that became a platform for describing indirectly a lifestyle freed from Victorian conventionalities, especially those surrounding the body; it was an invitation to Victorian readers to engage in a form of cultural rebirth – to enact their own renaissance.8 The book established Pater as a very important conduit between the earlier generation of aesthetes – he admired Rossetti and Swinburne in particular – and the final generation of the 1890s – almost all of whom greatly admired him, promoted his central ideas and were largely responsible for his posthumous reputation. Pater died in 1894. In the preface to The Renaissance, he launched his manifesto for subjectivity and pleasure. He was critical of abstract discussions of beauty, which did little to help people enjoy art or poetry, or to

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exercise discrimination. Instead, the aesthetic critic needed to test art by its capacity to give pleasure: What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in a life or in a book to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do [. . .] The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind [. . .] The function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the sources of that impression are, and under what conditions it is experienced.9 It was, however, the book’s conclusion which proved to be the most controversial part of the work, in which Pater argued for the passionate appreciation of the transient: Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How may we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life [. . .] For our one chance lies in expanding that interval [of life], in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and

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sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion – that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for the moments’ sake.10 It was the phrase about burning ‘always with this hard, gem-like flame’ that most captivated the imaginations of his readers, often repeated and beckoning them into the decadent world of the 1890s. It has since become the slogan most frequently associated with Pater. It was all too much for Christian Oxford, which was still in the process of unravelling its centuries-long formal connection with the Church of England, and still expected a degree of orthodoxy in its teachers. It was not just the book’s conclusion, with its message that the highest ideal in life was striving to find pleasure in the present, but the homoerotic elements, which celebrated, among other things, the male appreciation of male beauty, and advocated an ‘affinity with Hellenism’ which was not merely intended to be intellectual.11 There was concern in Oxford about Pater because of his potential to influence young men – it was the same sort of anxiety which had afflicted John Henry Newman at Oxford in the late 1830s and 1840s, and F.D. Maurice at King’s College London in the 1850s. Mary Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward) who was newly married to another Brasenose don and a friend of Pater’s, recalled many years later ‘the strange and poignant’ sense in the book, its ‘entire aloofness’ from Oxford’s Christian tradition, with its glorification of aesthetic pleasure, and of ‘“passion” in the intellectual sense – as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation’.12 In 1875, the Bishop of Oxford, John Mackarness, who had supported the removal of religious tests at Oxford, but who lamented the lack of faith which he now perceived in the university, attacked Pater in his Charge to the clergy of the diocese. In particular, he condemned the view that the purpose of life was the maximisation of pleasure, and, suggesting that such opinions were not limited to Pater, regretted

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that ‘too many of the younger students go miserably astray’ from the lack of teachers to guide them: They dispose of religion, natural or revealed, with the airy phrase they have borrowed from the latest sceptical Review [. . .] The practical result of this education is a selfishness of character far from attractive. Learners in the school of unbelief have been taught that it is folly to disturb themselves for the sake of others: they have lost all motive for serious action: self-restraint and self-sacrifice are discovered to be ‘mere moral babble’; it is, at best, an amiable weakness to do good.13 Although the Charge contains an explicit attack on Pater, and he was undoubtedly its major target, Mackarness also hints strongly at a wider malaise in 1870s Oxford. Pater’s Brasenose colleague, and former pupil, the Latinist and future Bishop of Salisbury, John Wordsworth, offered his own more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger reflections, in a private letter to Pater just a fortnight after the book’s publication in March 1873. Wordsworth had clearly been less bothered when the book’s conclusion was first published as an anonymous essay with no link to Pater and Brasenose. He began by complimenting Pater on the beauty of style and ‘felicity of thought’ in the book (a fact which was noted by many reviewers) – but he expressed his complete divergence from its conclusion, that ‘the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment’.14 Acknowledging Pater’s right – in post-University Tests Act Oxford – to teach and write as he pleased, he reiterated the point about harm to young students, and warned him that he might now feel obliged to oppose him publicly. He concluded by requesting that Pater forgo his share of divinity examining within the College, a hangover from the recent past when all fellows had been in Anglican orders, and therefore all had been seen as equally qualified to conduct examinations in divinity. Pater’s reply has not survived. However, he was far from impervious to the controversy surrounding his conclusion to The Renaissance and when the second edition was published in 1877, the conclusion was omitted (although he felt confident enough to reinstate it, in a slightly revised form, in editions from 1888).

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He was, it seems, also concerned about his effect on young minds. He had come under considerable pressure from the University authorities, and particularly from Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, after suspicions were raised about a liaison with a Balliol undergraduate, in 1874. The conclusion to The Renaissance can be read as expressing the blueprint for the decadent movement, but some of his other writings suggest rather different ideas about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics: in the end, he conceded that art could have a moral effect.15 Following the furore about The Renaissance, and in order to make more explicit his position on the relationship between religion and aesthetics, Pater published in 1885 his only novel, Marius the Epicurean. Set in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, it chronicles the life of Marius as he investigates current philosophies. He becomes strongly attracted to Christianity, but dies suddenly before he can take the step of conversion. Pater intended the book to signal that he did envisage aestheticism as fully compatible with Christianity – and having offered this statement of his position on the matter, he felt confident about restoring the conclusion to The Renaissance.16 Later, however, Pater became still more disturbed by the turn of the decadent movement, using a review of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray to propose his view that ‘The true Epicureanism seeks the harmonious development of the whole being. To be bent on losing the moral sense [. . .] is to lose or lower the organism, to become less complex, to sink in the scale of being.’17 Pater was evidently disturbed that some of his followers had become discontented with the hedonism of purely intellectual pleasures. Back in 1873, many reviewers had found much to praise in Pater’s The Renaissance. An interesting observation identifying aestheticism as a new religious movement came from John Morley, the journalist who was to mentor W.T. Stead in his early days at the Pall Mall Gazette, but who is most remembered as the biographer of Gladstone. Morley was a non-Christian freethinker, but like many of his generation, he was extremely well informed about Christianity, which had shaped his youth. Morley gave Pater’s The Renaissance a lengthy review in the Fortnightly Review, of which he was editor. He commended the work for its freshness and style, and for the quality of its insights. But it was his

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suggestion that the aesthetic movement was ‘one more wave of the great current of reactionary force which the Oxford Movement first released’ which is particularly interesting here. He saw Pater as the latest in a line of apostles which had started in Oxford with J.H. Newman and W.G. Ward. At this early date (April 1873) he was arguing – amusingly, but perspicaciously – that the aesthetic lifestyle was already functioning as a form of religion: There is an orthodoxy in wall-papers, and you may commit the unpardonable sin in discordant window-curtains. Members of the sect are as solicitous about the right in tables and the correct in legs of chairs, as members of another sect are careful about the cut of chasuble or dalmatica. Bric-abrac rises to the level of religions, and the whirligig of time is bringing us back to fetishism and the worship of little domestic gods, not seldom bleak and uncouth.18 But Morley was not as dismissive of these developments as the quotation might suggest. Just as there were silly and fussy ritualists, so there were silly and fussy aesthetes, but Newman, Ward and Pater all represented the deeper side of their movements. What Morley termed the ‘more recent pagan movement’ was infinitely less powerful than the Oxford Movement had been, not least because it could only appeal to ‘persons with some culture’, but he saw it as stemming from the same protests: against mechanical and graceless formalism, against narrow creeds, against a lack of beauty and harmony in daily living. Morley judged the aesthetic movement to be devoid of theology: that was truer in the 1870s than it would be in the 1890s. The controversy that swirled around Pater, from Christian and non-Christian sources alike, was an indication of the extent of the startling newness of his thoughts, and the manner in which they were articulated in the 1870s. Reading Pater today, it is apparent that many of his ideas – on the appreciation of beauty and pleasure, the enjoyment of landscape and painting, the subjectivity of art and the importance of the individual response to it, and indeed the virtue of being alive to the moment – have not just become central cultural assumptions, but have entered the theological mainstream. As John W. de Gruchy noted in a

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textbook on modern theology, the visual arts ‘enhance life by providing pleasure, a major purpose of the arts, but more especially they can help us to see in fresh and often startling ways what would otherwise be hidden from sight. In such ways they help define and renew our humanity.’19 Pater would not have disagreed. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the movement of Christian theology towards these positions was given significant impetus when P.T. Forsyth discussed the Pre-Raphaelites in 1889, and Percy Dearmer plunged himself into the aesthetics of the fin de sie`cle a few years later. The affinity which Oscar Wilde had for Paterian ideas was a factor which contributed to maintaining their currency, although Pater would have been influential without the interest shown by Wilde. Wilde read The Renaissance in his first term at Oxford (Michaelmas 1874) but did not meet Pater until his third year, after which a friendship blossomed. Wilde repeatedly designated The Renaissance as his ‘golden book’, and could recite the conclusion by heart.20 As he approached the end of his life, he looked back upon it as ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life’.21 He was undoubtedly enormously attracted by Pater’s fusion of the Christian and classical traditions, and by the sense that Christianity grew from Greek roots.22 As he expressed it in De Profundis, ‘it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek Chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass’.23 Wilde was, ironically, just the kind of young man that Pater had been thinking of protecting when he acquiesced in the suppression of the conclusion to The Renaissance in the years between 1877 and 1888. W.B. Yeats remembered Wilde praising the book in the late 1880s, saying, ‘I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence; the last trump should have sounded the moment it was written.’24

FRENCH INFLUENCES English aestheticism was heavily influenced by European, and particularly French, art and literature, a trend which remained constant throughout the fin de sie`cle period. Indeed, it was the absorption of French influences by British and Irish writers that

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created the London literary movement associated with the fin de sie`cle.25 It could be argued that the reason they eulogised London so intensely was because the people who were influencing them were doing the same to Paris. The enthusiasm of writers of the 1890s to assimilate so much cultural foreignness was at the root of a large part of the tension with the pre-existing English literary establishment: it seemed to be a foreign movement transplanted into English soil. But it was not just the ‘foreignness’ of French writers that made them suspect – it was their subject matter too, as Balzac, Gautier, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verlaine and Huysmans ventured into writing about hitherto unexamined areas of sexuality and culture, and from a perspective that seemed severely at variance with conventional Victorian morality. There was a great deal of interchange between London and Paris. For the artists of the first generation of the aesthetic movement, visits to continental art galleries had been instructive. Rossetti had visited the galleries of Paris and Brussels with Holman Hunt, when they were young men in 1849, and in the company of his brother he visited the International Exhibition in Brussels in 1863. Whistler (an American) had studied in Paris for four years, made regular return visits and had his work exhibited there. For the writers and artists of the later fin de sie`cle period, trips to Paris to meet the thinkers they admired became an accepted part of life. Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde, Havelock Ellis, Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons all paid their respects to Mallarme´, visiting his Parisian flat in the period from 1880 to the mid-1890s.26 Symons and Ellis also met Huysmans and Maeterlinck, and by the mid-1890s, Symons had established himself as the principal interpreter of the French writers in England.27 Andre´ Raffalovich was brought up in Paris, and probably regarded French as his first language. Ernest Dowson spent most of his childhood in France and Italy, and was fluent in French by the age of 15.28 John Gray struck up a close friendship with Felix Fe´ne´on, who was a leading critic of the symbolist and impressionist movements in literary Paris, and he too became a significant literary mediator between France and England.29 Symons, Dowson and Gray were all prolific translators of French literature. At the same time, a number of French writers, including Verlaine and Mallarme´, chose to spend significant amounts of time in England.

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In 1835, The´ophile Gautier had uttered what would become his famous dictum, ‘l’art pour l’art’, ‘art for art’s sake’. He meant that art was what it was, to be judged for itself, and not used as a vehicle for a religious truth, a moral message or an improving tale. It was the central idea for Swinburne and Pater, and one of Pater’s purposes in writing about the Renaissance had been to urge that its continental spirit be discovered in nineteenth-century Britain. Swinburne had been heavily influenced by Baudelaire,30 and Pater, who had suppressed references to Baudelaire in his earlier work, finally acknowledged the effect the French poet had had on himself. Much of his later work was devoted to exploring French influences on English writing. Meanwhile, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s ` Rebours (1884) – so shockingly different groundbreaking novel, A from contemporary literature, with its theme of a single character, a bored, bisexual aesthete, who closeted himself away to engage in a series of ever more bizarre activities – was particularly powerful for the English writers of the 1890s. It was ‘the breviary of the Decadence’, according to Arthur Symons, and G.A. Cevasco notes the interesting choice of a Catholic liturgical word. It was, Symons was implying, part of the inauguration of decadence as a form of ` Rebours are seen in the descriptive religion.31 Clear influences of A passages in Oscar Wilde’s Salome´ and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde spoke and wrote French with almost native fluency, and chose that language in which to write his play, Salome´, which is the ultimate decadent exploration of the story of the beheading of John the Baptist (Matthew 14.6–12 and Mark 6.21–29).32 The play, in turn, has been declared to be the only truly English symbolist work of the 1890s.33 The French symbolists, led by Mallarme´ and Verlaine, suggested that the true subject matter of poetry should be the world as expressed through the poet’s own moods, emotions and intuitions. They gave rise to groups of cafe´-based writers, meeting to talk and to discuss their work, and to explore the oftenrepeated themes of world-weariness and decay which they believed to be both literally and metaphorically assailing the dying century. The general climate of ennui and langeur to which this gave rise led to a desire to awaken their senses through un esprit de´cadent, manifested in the seeking of sensation, excitement and novelty.34 Gradually decadence merged into symbolism, and symbolism proved more durable.

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The French fin de sie`cle contained a large number of artists and thinkers whose work is still celebrated, and several significant movements such as symbolism, naturalism and impressionism. Its English counterpart tended to be heavily derivative. The poetry of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons can be seen to have been based on French forms, and its biggest characters, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, were strongly influenced by the French language and France – and both died there. John Gray’s early decadent verse was heavily reliant on French influences and translations, and his Catholic poetry of the later 1890s reveals such a large variety of European influences that one concludes that he had not yet found his own Catholic voice. The decadent writing and art of the 1890s is in marked contrast with the broader and older aesthetic movement, which was based in part on a reappraisal of English medievalism, and the desire to recapture some of its imagined qualities in the light of late Victorian industrial mass production. But considering the traditional hostility to France, the extent of the openness to French influences in the late nineteenth century is particularly interesting. A further contributory factor to this was the ‘open door’ policy and political tolerance which Britain maintained towards foreign settlers, which lasted until the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. As well as visiting Frenchmen, London also welcomed a select number of American intellectuals, and growing numbers of European political exiles, anarchists and traders. From the 1880s, there was also the rapidly expanding Jewish community, concentrated in the East End. All these influences made London a truly cosmopolitan city.

THE DECADENT PHASE OF AESTHETICISM By the early 1890s, aestheticism had become fragmented, and decadence briefly emerged as its most prominent and controversial leading edge. The aestheticism of the earlier period had been gently running out of steam. Rossetti was dead and Swinburne, who was really the first English decadent, and also a bridging figure to the earlier aesthetic movement, was living in seclusion in Putney. Watts, Leighton and Burne-Jones, although still active, were all coming to the end of their lives – all enjoyed international

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reputations and were fabulously wealthy – lionised by society as the leading artists of their day. William Morris, having become diverted by socialism in the 1880s, was writing highly coloured fiction, while presiding over the Kelmscott Press and Morris and Co. He was consolidating his long-lasting reputation as Britain’s leading interior decorator, but was in failing health – he died in 1896. Pater died in 1894, leaving a somewhat bereft group of disciples, who were younger, and a lot more anarchic, than those who identified with the Arts and Crafts tradition. Oscar Wilde was 36 in 1890, and already well established. But many of those who would become his associates were much younger: Alfred Douglas was 20, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Oldmeadow were all 23, Richard Le Gallienne and John Gray were 24, Arthur Symons and W.B. Yeats were 25, while Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm were still both only 18. When la De´cadence crossed the Channel, it lost its accent, its definite article and (usually) its capital letter.35 In French, the word was repeatedly used by Nietzsche to describe Christianity as the epitome of all that was weak, archaic and irrational in modern civilisation.36 In English usage, the word signalled the heavy sense of ending that goes with an epoch burned out and almost over, a supercharged feeling of moral exhaustion. It has proved somewhat more problematic for modern scholars to agree on a definition. On the one hand, Ellis Hanson suggests that the word decadence ‘is wonderfully suggestive of the fin de sie`cle fascination with cultural degeneration, the persistent and highly influential myth that religion, sexuality, art, even language itself, had fallen at last into an inevitable decay’.37 But John R. Reed laments that the term has become ‘a blunt tool for probing a whole culture or an artistic milieu’, and that it remains a slippery term, even when narrowly confined to discussions of literature.38 Jad Adams, in contrast, boldly provides a checklist for diagnosing decadence in English writers (or perhaps more accurately, those writing in English). It consists of a love of the artificial for its own sake, an obsession with death, decay and blighted love, a dedication to art, a predilection for ‘exotic religion’, a love of classical literature, a French perspective, greater sexual licence than was common place, a search for inspiration in cities, particularly London, a passion for drugs, including alcohol, and a tendency to self-neglect.

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He suggests that although many of the decadent writers and artists of the 1890s displayed around half of these characteristics, probably only Arthur Symons came close to having all of them.39 Adams’s summary provides a helpful focus; whatever the issues surrounding its definition, decadence has undoubtedly become a very prominent narrative in the cultural history of this period. The English fin de sie`cle itself may be divided into its decadent and post-decadent phases, with the Oscar Wilde trial, in 1895, marking the boundary between the two. In France, where the Wilde trial was without impact, the decadent movement continued as a prominent cultural influence. During its brief English flowering, decadent fiction continued to explore the same themes as earlier writing, such as the tedium or entrapment of marriage, the difficulties inherent in love affairs conducted across social boundaries, the obsession with youth and physical beauty and the disdain for everything associated with the ageing process. These were all subjects that could equally be found in Jane Austen, and in any number of Victorian novelists, but they were pushed much further in decadent fiction, often with a subtle transposition of traditional vices into decadent virtues. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 –1), which is the preeminent example of an English decadent fin de sie`cle novel, contains a vivid depiction of all these themes, combined with homoeroticism and a small cast of characters who had become obsessed with their worship of pleasure, beauty and luxury. Although it can be easily read as a moral cautionary tale, W.H. Smith refused to stock the book on the grounds that it was ‘filthy’, and it promptly became the most famous novel of its day. The work is important for other reasons, not least because it selfconsciously contributes to the process of identifying and defining in English the term ‘fin de sie`cle’ at a relatively early date at the beginning of the 1890s, self-consciously nailing the term in 1890, before the final decade of the century had even occurred. Lord Henry Wotton, the novel’s most morally ambiguous character, supposedly based on Walter Pater himself, uses the term fin de sie`cle in an exchange which culminates in Dorian Gray’s petulant protest that ‘Life is a great disappointment’.40 Attacked for the book’s lack of morals, Wilde famously wrote in the preface to the revised edition of 1891: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an

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immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ Artists, he asserted, should have no ethical sympathies. ‘An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.’41 The Picture of Dorian Gray was therefore a significant part of the manifesto of decadent aestheticism, with its strongly stated theme that art exists only for itself, entirely independently of moral considerations, and its richly worked passages describing the objects in Dorian’s house, and his collections of jewels, musical instruments, perfumes, tapestries and vestments. There was much in the content of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Victorian public to find troubling, particularly the moral descent of the formerly pristine Dorian, egged on by Lord Henry’s subtle epigramic asides: the highest duty is to oneself; fidelity is a confession of failure; philanthropy is merely an unpleasant distraction for the religiously frightened; and so on. The reading public, schooled in the belief that art and literature should be improving, or at least anchored in a moral framework, were, not surprisingly, troubled. Wilde’s declaration that art should be free from ethical constraints set the tone for the period (although he and Pater had been making the point regularly for the previous 20 years). Artists, illustrators and sculptors experimented with new styles and techniques, and sometimes depicted subject matter which the late nineteenth century considered daring or unshowable, such as prostitutes, overt sexuality or urban low-life, although, as we shall see in Chapter 7, all these topics were becoming more openly discussed from about 1885. The most significant artist of the English decadence was Aubrey Beardsley, a precocious but consumptive youth who died at the age of 25 in 1898. The reputation established in his remarkable, short career was built on his productivity, extraordinary imagination and the captivating qualities of his new style – he produced bold, strongly contrasting black and white images. These were made using metal process blocks on to which an image was transferred photographically, rather than the traditional wood process blocks. The new technique allowed much finer, sweeping lines to be transmitted to the page. As well as undertaking illustrating commissions, Beardsley was the founding joint editor of The Yellow Book, in which writers and artists were intended to have equal influence,

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with the art appearing as a free-standing contribution, rather than merely being illustrative of the words. The Yellow Book, which between 1894 and 1897 produced 13 issues, tends to be seen as the signature publication of the English fin de sie`cle.42 Beardsley’s striking covers – black printed on a yellow cloth binding – gave the early issues of The Yellow Book a powerful aesthetic appeal, which set it apart from other periodicals, as did the semi-glossy paper, which was adopted from the third number. The Yellow Book was intended to be beautiful as a piece of book production, thus justifying its high cover price of five shillings. It was published simultaneously in London and Berlin, and read in many European capitals. Its admirers included Diaghilev, Picasso and William Faulkner.43 It was intended to enhance one’s de´cor by adding a vibrant block of yellow to the shelves, and it publicised itself by attracting admiring examination. Beardsley was sacked after public pressure on the publisher John Lane, when it was wrongly assumed that the publication had been Wilde’s reading matter at the time of his arrest for gross indecency in 1895; Wilde had been seen reading a yellow book, but it was not The Yellow Book. The Beardsley style continued in the publication, even after he had departed. The cover images remained in striking black and yellow, but were less skilfully designed. The quality of the art changed too, with some of it verging on the sentimental. In a reversal of the anticipated trend, it seemed that Victorianism was gaining the upper hand on modernism in some of the work in the journal’s final numbers. Beardsley went on to be involved in another newly founded and even shorter lived publication, The Savoy (1896 –7), which was more daring in what it published, and certainly more truly decadent. Beardsley’s style was to confuse the viewer by encasing disturbing images in a wrapping which could appear quaint. His pictures had the power to be immediately captivating, with their strong swooping lines, finely decorative details and intriguing use of blank space. At first glance, but only at first glance, they might seem innocuous enough – a typical picture might be a beautiful woman portrayed with fairies or satyrs against an elegantly decorated background. Closer inspection, however, tended to reveal that beautiful women were in some manner corrupted, fairy creatures were leering and deformed, and other human subjects

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were almost universally sly, ugly, old – and by implication denatured. Beardsley could seldom resist hiding semi-disguised sexual symbolism in his skilfully drawn backgrounds. Indeed, John Lane complained that he had to look at Beardsley’s work upside down to ensure that the sexual references were expurgated. It is apparent, however, that he did not always do this very successfully.44 There was a teasing perversity in Beardsley’s work, with traditional symbols reversed: lilies became stylised emblems of corruption, roses signalled carnality, peacock feathers suggested evil vanity.45 As Alan Crawford notes, ‘Beardsley had discovered, long before Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst, that there is a kind of art which consists in shocking the public.’46 Stephen Calloway points out that Beardsley’s early covers for The Yellow Book, together with his illustrations for Wilde’s play Salome´, both of 1894, ‘gave the public a precise visual image of what had previously been a nebulous idea of decadence’.47 The images were powerful, not least because they appeared to represent moral corruption in visual form. Beardsley’s work became, and remains, the easy visual reference point for the age. Almost every recent book that has been published on the 1890s contains his pictures, and the images of the giant phalluses and weird goblins tend to linger in the mind when the analyses of the decadent verse have faded.48 The more explicit material was not publicly printed at the time, but there was enough of Beardsley’s work in the public domain for J.A. Spender, in the Westminster Gazette, to call for ‘a short act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal’.49 This hinted at the build up of stormy condemnation which would gather over the decadent movement by the middle to the decade. Some of Beardsley’s viewers chose to remain oblivious to the darker and more troubling aspects of his art.50 Beardsley converted to Roman Catholicism a year before his death, and in the final weeks of his life, he wrote to his publisher, Leonard Smithers, urging that he destroy all his ‘obscene drawings’, a request which Smithers ignored, due to his awareness of their high commercial value. Knowing that some of Beardsley’s art was extremely controversial, and that the man himself was popularly regarded as completely depraved – the ‘Fra Angelico of Satanism’ as Roger

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Fry would later call him – his Catholic friends made strenuous attempts to present him as a sweet and pious youth. Almost immediately after his death, John Gray published an obituary in French in La Revue Blanche which was uncompromising in its tone: ‘This was a man who never hesitated: for all his delicate appearance and awkward gestures, he had the stamp of a great man. All that he was, all that he did, was good.’51 Gray was at pains to emphasise his holy death, a theme that was also taken up by his early biographer, friend and fellow convert Robert Ross, who emphasised the resignation and fortitude with which he bore his ill-health, his energy for work and boyish simplicity of manner. On the subject of his conversion, he was rather defensive: The sincerity of his religious convictions have been affirmed by those who were with him constantly [this would have been his mother and sister, who had also converted]; and as I have suggested before, the flippancy and careless nature of his conversation was superficial: he was always strict in his religious observances. Among his intimate friends through life were clergymen and priests who have paid tribute to the reality and sincerity of his belief.52 For Ross, the response to those ‘who profess to find many terrible meanings in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings’ was to assert that he was wrongly charged with being a symbolist. Ross claimed that the ‘cabala of the symbolists’ was entirely foreign to him, and that critics instead should search for literary meanings in his pictures.53 Gray also insisted that there should be no ‘idiotic decipherings of his symbols’, and that his ‘fauns dressed in lace’ and ‘hideous women’ should not be ‘explained’, but seen as a form of mockery without malice.54 Both Gray and Ross were contributors to what now seems a rather bizarre attempt to insist on the intended innocence of Beardsley’s provocative art. More significant, though, is what this suggests about their struggle to accept the self-parody and artifice that was at the heart of Beardsley’s work. Quite how many people would have identified themselves with the London literary decadent fin de sie`cle is difficult to say. It never intended, of course, to become mainstream; that would

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have undermined its sense of subversion. Forty-four writers and illustrators were originally promised as contributors to The Yellow Book, the first issue of which was so popular that it ran to four printings. Over the course of its 13 issues, a total of 106 artists and 138 writers appeared in its pages (although by no means would all of them have identified with the movement) and the journal sold consistently well.55 But, as with people queuing for rationed copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, it is difficult to know how many people purchased it from curiosity, or in the expectation or hope of being scandalised, rather than because they wanted to support and identify with the publication. It can be argued that as well as becoming a particular embodiment of the mood of the early 1890s, the decadents were engaged in the characteristic janiform forwards-and-backwards glance. They looked backwards to Pater, Swinburne and Verlaine, and forwards to surrealism and modernism.

THE COLLAPSE OF DECADENCE London society was rocked by the events of 1895. The shock of Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment lasted until well after the end of the century. At first, in the wake of Wilde’s arrest, art and reality became confused. Public anger boiled over when a crowd gathered to throw stones at the offices of Bodley Head, in Vigo Street. Bodley Head was the publisher of The Yellow Book and it was this incident which resulted in Beardsley’s dismissal.56 In fact, Wilde never contributed to the periodical; Beardsley disliked him, and there had been a fear that his dominant personality might overwhelm the enterprise in its infancy. Wilde’s trials were picketed, and he suffered an enormous loss of reputation, was bankrupted and died in Paris in 1900. Following his imprisonment, the relatively close-knit group of London’s decadent writers and artists began to disintegrate. Some moved to France, and several died within a relatively short time. By 1905, Aubrey Beardsley, Hubert Crackanthrope, Ernest Dowson, Henry Harland, Lionel Johnson and J.A. Symonds were all dead. Several of those who were still alive were producing little significant work after the turn of the century, and they tended to be forever associated with the 1890s. They included Richard Le Gallienne, Lord Alfred

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Douglas, John Gray, Andre´ Raffalovich and Arthur Symons. Only W.B. Yeats, who lived until 1939, emerged as the decadent movement’s big survivor and success story; he became one of the major creators of modernist literature in English. He also had a major hand in shaping the historical recollection of the decadent nineties, characterising the poets as the ‘tragic generation’. It is a phrase which appears intended to diminish their significance, but it may have been prompted by his reflections on the life of Arthur Symons, with whom he had collaborated closely in the 1890s. In 1895 Symons had a further 50 years of life ahead of him, but almost 40 of these were spent in the grip of mental illness. Symons, who had been at the heart of London’s literary world, particularly felt the blast when the decadent bomb exploded. In 1895, he had become the founding editor of The Savoy, the short-lived journal with a distinctly decadent-symbolist intention which aimed at taking up where The Yellow Book had left off. He had had the misfortune to publish a volume of poetry, London Nights, which was partly a celebration of his sexual encounters with prostitutes, just at the time of the Wilde trial. The Pall Mall Gazette’s review began with the words, ‘Mr Arthur Symons is a dirty-minded man, and his mind is reflected in the puddle of his bad verses’,57 and it did not get any kinder. Here the circular argument of the anti-decadents was forcibly made: the author led an immoral life, and therefore his verse was bad, and his verse could only be bad, because he led an immoral life. The review was published in September 1895, just four months after Wilde had been sent to prison. The volume, of course, had been prepared for publication in the pre-trial world, when decadent London was still in full swing. But even without its sudden collapse, Symons’s perspective on anonymous paid-for sex (‘I lay on the stranger’s bed, / And clasped the stranger-woman I had hired’)58 seemed a world away from D.G. Rossetti’s reflections on ‘Jenny’ (‘Lazy laughing languid Jenny / Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea’), whom he had described in the 1860s. The ‘stranger-woman’ was a very potent symbol of decadent London, but she could not be comfortably accommodated in the late nineteenth-century literary canon. Symons, who was untypical of a decadent poet by not converting to Catholicism, caused further offence with

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another of his poems about sex with a prostitute, which he entitled ‘Stella Maris’, ‘Star of the Sea’, one of the traditional titles of the Virgin Mary.59 Symons attributed his own mental instability – he had severe mental breakdowns in 1908 from which he never really recovered – to the fact that, as the son of a Methodist minister, the family had had to move every three years. He said that he had never known the sense of security and connection that comes from having a proper home, and had ‘no early memories of one sky or soil’.60 By his late teens, he had lost faith in God and Christianity. Symons lived until 1945 but faded into years of obscurity, unable due to his mental problems to write anything new or coherent, although he inspired a rather mawkish poem from John Betjeman, ‘On Seeing an Old Poet in the Cafe´ Royal’ (1940). Wilde and Beardsley in contrast, of whom it could be said that they were killed by the pressures of the fin de sie`cle, both had very significant after-lives, which continue to the present day. During their lifetimes, both men, with an unerringly modern sense for publicity, had marketed themselves as commodities, in a manner which went far beyond simply promoting their work. Wilde had begun inventing himself in his youth, standing out with his humour and banter, and adopting flamboyant dress while still at school in Portora.61 Before his success as a playwright, he had originally become famous in London just for being himself, a sociable conversationalist. In 1881, Punch published a series of cartoons by George du Maurier, which caricatured aesthetic types and made Wilde clearly identifiable. Others might have trembled at the repeated parody, but Wilde, aware of the value of the publicity, made a point of always greeting du Maurier graciously.62 In the view of Dennis Denisoff, Wilde himself ‘was one of the most important aestheticist and decadent artefacts of his era, performing its shift from the productivist ethos that characterised the industrial revolution to a consumptionist one in which the display of taste and ownership became a key marker of identity’.63 Certainly Wilde possessed, in the earlier part of his career, an extraordinary ability to control and manipulate his image, and to promote himself, in the manner of a modern celebrity, like a branded product. Denisoff also notes that after the public outcry over the first version of Dorian Gray, which was serialised in 1890, Wilde toned down the homoerotic elements and introduced a

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heterosexual subplot when he reworked it for the 1891 novel version, thus consciously taking part in the ‘cultural machinery that was nurturing a less daring form of decadence for the masses’.64 This was almost the literary equivalent of the massproduced sunflower tiles and blue china of the 1890s. There is little doubt that the extraordinary publicity which Wilde attracted, both in his lifetime and to an even greater degree afterwards, has been a significant factor in keeping the fin de sie`cle towards the front of the modern imagination. According to Alison Hennegan, of the writers born in the British Isles, only Shakespeare has been more written about.65 As the mid-twentieth-century campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality began to get underway, Wilde was emphasised as its most high-profile victim. Two films about the Wilde trials, both released in 1960, marked the beginning of the decade in which he became what he remains: a very significant gay icon, and an endlessly fascinating example of a brilliant intellect and personality damaged by a mixture of hubris, prejudice and self-destruction. Interest in him was also maintained through regular revivals of his plays, and was boosted further as a result of Brian Gilbert’s critically acclaimed film Wilde, which was released in 1997 and starred Stephen Fry in the title role. The film was extremely faithful to Richard Ellmann’s scholarly and detailed biography. Beardsley also was very careful to control his image, paying great attention to his dress, and to the places in which he wished to be seen. He marketed himself as an artist of a particular type, despite the challenges posed by his increasingly poor health. He too achieved a significant revival in his fortunes in the 1960s, with a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966. Reproductions and pastiches of his artwork proved popular from the 1960s onwards. His work inspired or influenced a number of album covers, from the Beatles’ Revolver album in 1966, to the present day, and the amount of Internet discussion of his work, or that inspired and derived from his influence, shows the extent of his continued popular following.

CHAPTER 3 DECADENCE, PROTESTANTISM AND RITUALISM

WILDE, PATER AND CHRIST By now it should be evident that the decadent turn in aestheticism had significant implications for the relationship between aestheticism and faith. Wilde’s ambivalence was expressed to his friend Bertha Lathbury in 1890, when he told her that he was looking ‘forward to the time when aesthetics will take the place of ethics, when the sense of beauty will be the law of life: it will never be so, and so I look forward to it’.1 Although Wilde would never deny the primacy of aesthetics and beauty, during the course of the next ten years his views on ethics and the ‘law of life’ shifted. The shift is reflected in his two major late works, De Profundis,2 written in prison in 1897 but not published in full until 1962, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in the period immediately after his release from prison, and published in 1898. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was Wilde’s last major work, and therefore his final statement on the nature of religion. It has been described by Guy Willoughby as the ‘most well-read and least understood long poem of the fin de sie`cle’, but as he makes clear, it is the poem’s sequence of Christian references that gives it thematic and structural coherence.3 The poem is about a condemned murderer who meets his fate with a mysterious equanimity; abandoned by the religious and secular authorities, his fellow inmates helplessly observe every horrifying detail of the man’s last days. They have a mounting sense of their own sinfulness, and a feeling that the murderer could have been

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their collective selves, because ‘all men kill the thing they love’. Yet they sense that the condemned man’s death somehow expiates their own sins. The poem’s conclusion is that ‘Christ came down to save’ the executed man, and will ultimately call him forth from his quick-lime grave in Reading gaol. The poem is saturated with the imagery of the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ. Writing De Profundis in his prison cell a few months earlier had given Wilde the opportunity for further religious reflection, both in the form of a meditation on a Christ who was not limited by the narrow mindedness of the nineteenth-century churches,4 and as part of a personal healing process. The work is therefore a complex piece of self-examination and self-justification, which allows him to explode with the vast anger that he felt towards Lord Alfred Douglas, while at the same time attempting to work towards a Christ-like act of forgiveness of the man whom he blamed for his predicament. As Wilde puts it, And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness in your heart, but to pluck it out of mine [. . .] I cannot allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined a man like me [. . .] I must take the burden from you and put it on my own shoulders.5 There are some parallels between De Profundis and Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, in which Newman, fired up by his rage at the accusations levelled against him by Charles Kingsley, engaged in a similar process of biographical self-explanation.6 Kingsley and Douglas can both be seen as the unlikely insects caught in the amber of these two major literary-religious texts. A difference, however, is that there is so much more of Douglas in Wilde’s text than there is of Kingsley in Newman’s. Although it is the religious sections of De Profundis that are most frequently cited, they occupy only about a quarter of the 80-page work. Much of the rest of it is Wilde’s rage about Douglas: his selfish behaviour, the expensive dinners he constantly demanded, the precious gifts he pawned. A man’s fury at his former lover is the major theme that emerges from De Profundis, but it is Wilde’s love for Douglas, rather than his hate, which emerges even more strongly.7

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That said, Wilde’s experience in prison had evidently rekindled his interest in Jesus as both poet and poetic expression, the ‘man of Sorrow and Beauty’. In a sentence which perfectly combined his thoughts about Christ with the priority of the Paterian ideal, he wrote of Christ as the ‘true precursor of the romantic movement in life [. . .] the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist, an intense and flamelike imagination’.8 Arguably these ‘Jesus’ portions of De Profundis place Wilde in the same ‘Lives of Jesus’ tradition that was such a strong feature of theological writing in the second half of the nineteenth century.9 In this literary genre, Jesus became whomever the writer wanted him to be: humane rationalist, social reformer, apocalyptic prophet, mystical preacher or muscular hero. For Wilde, he was something different again, the Man of Sorrows with a poetic soul, who gave poetically beautiful responses to the lepers, cripples and outcast women that he encountered, as well as to the rich and the pleasure-seeking. Thus for Wilde, Christ became a poetic work; the one who reconciled within himself the ethical concerns of Judaism and the aesthetic concerns of the Hellenistic world, creating in himself ‘a potent symbol of a future ideal culture’.10 It was pointed out by Hilary Fraser that Pater and Wilde, particularly in the works which deal more directly with religious topics, Marius the Epicurean and De Profundis, took a different route that was the ‘exact converse’ of the ‘moralised’ Romanticism of John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, which was also far removed from the aesthetics-as-the-handmaid-of-faith position that had characterised Newman and Keble. For Pater and Wilde, it was, as we have seen, more important that religion, whether focussed on Christ as the beautiful and poetic, or as manifested in contemporary Catholicism (Roman for Wilde; Anglican for Pater), contributed to their overall sense of the spiritual dimension to art. As was characteristic, Wilde went further than Pater. As he put it when writing in prison, I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist, and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before Sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in The Soul of Man [Under Socialism ] that he who

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would lead a Christian life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song.11 Wilde’s assertion that a Christian must be ‘entirely and absolutely himself’ and not by implication in denial about some fundamental part of himself, was indeed a theme which he had developed in his earlier work, and it was one which would be much taken up by Christians who felt marginalised from the views of the Churches in the twentieth century and beyond. Wilde was pleased by this evidence of his consistency over the six-year period between writing The Soul of Man and De Profundis, but in reality consistency was not a central issue for either man. Neither Pater nor Wilde had to concern themselves with whether their religious theories appeared to be reconcilable with officially approved ecclesiastical positions, which made their perspectives obviously different from those who had written about religion and aesthetics from within an ecclesiastical context.12 Nor were they interested in nailing down once-and-for-all certainties. Both men viewed the self, and therefore the religious identity that was part of the self, as in a state of flux, ‘not a substantial entity to be once and for all comprehended and mastered’.13 Wilde concluded his reflections on Christ with the observation that ‘He is just like a work of art himself. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence, one becomes something.’14 It was a perspective that would, like his views on self-acceptance, have many resonances in the future. Both Pater and Wilde were powerful intellects whose minds had been shaped by their study of the classical world, art, history, theology and literature. But what did their minor acolytes do with their ideas? How were they interpreted by less finely calibrated minds in less subtle prose? The rest of this chapter considers the reactions of a few of those who were, at least at certain points, selfconsciously followers of Pater and Wilde. This allows us to consider the ways in which some of their ideas worked themselves out into a more messy reality, when they mingled with other ideas which floated through late nineteenth-century English religion.

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RICHARD LE GALLIENNE’S DEFENCE OF CHRISTIANITY Richard Le Gallienne was 17 when Wilde visited Birkenhead to give a lecture on ‘Personal Impressions of America and Her People’ in December 1883. It was a typically Wildean performance – part of what he described as his mission of ‘civilising the provinces’. The large, captivating, charismatic and strikingly dressed Irishman spoke without notes about art, dress and education, and said relatively little on the advertised topic.15 Le Gallienne, who sat in the audience with his father, was ‘enraptured’ and knew from that moment that he wanted to be a ‘literary man’, and not, as had been intended, an accountant. The episode provides an interesting cameo of Wilde’s ability to gain instant converts. By the end of the decade the Liverpudlian youth had moved to London, become a book reviewer and was on very friendly terms with Wilde. They exchanged poems endorsed with affectionate endearments; when Le Gallienne published a book, Wilde responded with a note which said, ‘I hope the laurels are not too thick across your brow for me to kiss your eyelids’.16 By the early 1890s, Le Gallienne was becoming known as a minor poet, literary editor, journalist and foundermember of both the Rhymers’ Club and The Yellow Book circle. By the middle of decade, however, he had begun to develop a critique of what he saw as the corrosive French influences on the London literary and art scene. He used a review to express exasperation at some characteristically decadent attitudes: to notice only the picturesque effects of a beggar’s rags, as Gautier, the colour-scheme of a tippler’s nose, like M. Huysmans, to consider one’s mother merely prismatically, like Mr Whistler – these are examples of the decadent attitude. At bottom, Decadence is merely limited thinking, often insane thinking.17 Le Gallienne, it seemed, had had enough of surface and artifice. This came three years after his publication of a curious, but apparently briefly popular, defence of Protestant Christianity. Both actions resulted in his turning his back on the group with which he had been previously closely associated.

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Le Gallienne’s status as a ‘defender’ of Christianity rested on his short work – more a long essay than a book – entitled The Religion of a Literary Man, published in 1893. The book came about accidentally, as a result of his writing a hostile review of Robert Buchanan’s poem ‘The Wandering Jew: A Christmas Carol’, and Buchanan retaliating by writing to the newspaper in which the review appeared, the Daily Chronicle, stating the position that his human and not divine Christ had been ‘patient, long-suffering, ever-misunderstood, eternally-condemned, and outcast’ in the nineteenth century.18 Le Gallienne then countered with his view, that rather than being outcast, Christ was working more powerfully in the present than ever before in history: Indeed, so far from His being a weary phantom waiting for the call to rest, it has seemed to me that during the last few years He has for the first time truly risen again, released from the trammelling grave-clothes of ecclesiastical superstition [. . .] the true Christ, ‘the Christ that is to be’ walks London today as strong to help and heal as ever he walked the streets of Jerusalem. He concluded with a powerful rhetorical flourish: ‘But the question is not of phantoms, but of facts. To put it plainly – is Christianity played out or not? Not mere Romanism, or Anglicanism, but essential Christianity. Will Mr Buchanan tell us?’19 Buchanan put forward his answers, and Le Gallienne responded again, as did over 2,000 readers of the Daily Chronicle, who sent in letters by the sack. The paper was filled with the topic for the next month, and it spilled out into other newspapers, and into pulpits. Le Gallienne’s assertion of faith in the Christ who walked the streets of London would no doubt have met with the approval of Wilde. But it is interesting, in view of the fact that he was in revolt against the firmly maintained Baptist views and lifestyle of his father, and had hitherto presented himself as an agnostic. He had boldly and unexpectedly expressed his faith in print. Then, under pressure from the newspaper to explain more about his vision of ‘essential Christianity’, and to respond to the question of ‘whether Christianity was really so obsolete to-day as

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its opponents glibly assume’,20 he had to defend his position. The result was The Religion of a Literary Man. The Times had announced some months in advance that Le Gallienne would ‘treat his subject from a reverential, but entirely untheological standpoint’.21 When the book appeared, it was clear that, as he readily admitted, he had no interest in traditional theological categories. He was scathing about doctrine, the church and organised worship, but he wanted to retain Christianity, or what he termed the spiritual sense, which he voiced in Christian language, because he saw the alternative as narrow-minded, unimaginative materialism. He claimed to be equally horrified by the churchman, trying to demonstrate truths from his Bible, as he was by the scientist, trying to demonstrate truths with his ‘hermetically sealed tube containing protoplasm’.22 The interest of The Religion of a Literary Man lies mainly in what it reveals about the assumptions made about Christianity by a man of Le Gallienne’s background, and how he thought it might be adapted for the world which he inhabited. Showing an assimilation of liberal Protestantism of the type associated with Adolf Harnack that was perhaps largely unconscious, Le Gallienne appealed for Christ’s teachings to be stripped of the accretions accumulated over the centuries in order that the kernel of his simple moral precepts could be brought to bear.23 The topics which he selected reveal the way in which at least some of the traditional themes of British Protestantism, picked up from his childhood Sundays in Liverpool’s Baptist chapels, had implanted themselves in his mind. He began with biblical inspiration – no longer a problem because it was recognised that what mattered was the inspiration of the human soul, not the inspiration of one book.24 For the same reason, he saw no need to worry about the recent discovery of early Christian documents – he might have been thinking of texts like the Didache, rediscovered in 1873. Similarly with miracles: once people had worried about the authenticity of particular miracles, but now it was seen that the world itself is ‘one glorious unfathomable miracle’.25 Sin, which had been a constant theme in his childhood, could, he concluded, have beneficial elements. Many acts once deemed essentially sinful were now only relatively so: but to judge how one should act was a matter of fine balance, as:

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Unduly ‘refined’, idealistic, anaemic persons, for example, are all the better for a dip in good gross earth [. . .] for the lower nature needs nutriment just as much as the higher, and it is no less misleading to treat man as all angel, than it is to treat him as all beast [. . .] Each man must judge for himself.26 In a later section, he offered the view that sin was the result of diseased human functions, and more often than not brought its own punishment.27 From sin, Le Gallienne turned to the question of suffering, interpreting pain in characteristically Victorian fashion as a physical manifestation which could lead to the cultivation of virtues: thus rheumatism could lead to patience and forbearance.28 Le Gallienne proceeded to dispose of free will – he saw life as governed by chance and illusion, and humanity not at its centre – and eternal life, which with a postmodernist flourish, he made optional: ‘Those who want to believe in a future life can do so [. . .] Even if it be an illusion, illusion, as we have said, is one of life’s methods. My wish is to insist that, whichever theory be true, it does not really much matter.’29 Many of Le Gallienne’s questions were those of traditional Protestant Christianity, and his answers veered from the Victorian to the postmodern. Having offered a critique of what he understood to be Christianity’s traditional assumptions in the first part of his book, in the second he set out to defend it, and to offer his version of ‘essential Christianity’. He denied that it was even on the wane, using the characteristically late nineteenth-century argument that widespread philanthropic interest, and adherence to Christ’s gospel for the poor, was evidence that this was not so – a reference back to the position that he had taken in the Daily Chronicle. He interpreted this as a sign that the ‘merely ecclesiastical incrustations of Christ’s teaching were certainly being cast away’.30 He defended the reality of religious conversion, singling out the Salvation Army as evidence of the spirituality and religious sincerity which could be found in ordinary individuals.31 For Le Gallienne, interpreting the world through the lens of a pared-down, teachings-of-Jesus Christianity, which blossomed out of people rather than being imposed upon them, was the key to a faith for the future. Central to bringing this about was the cultivation of five religious senses: wonder, beauty, pity, humour and gratitude.

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In his discussion of the second of these, beauty, he launched into an extended digression on the corrupting power of decadence, which developed remarks he had made in the previous year in a preface to his English Poems. That work, as its title suggested, had been intended as a shot across the bows of those in the London literary set who were obsessed by all things French. He feared that the ‘English nightingale’ was being silenced by French influences, and he was uneasy about the work of Whistler and Huysmans, in particular.32 He expressed the view that beauty was degraded in decadent art, and signalled his break from the movement. The Religion of a Literary Man was heavily criticised by reviewers in both the secular and the ecclesiastical press.33 The criticisms may be grouped under the headings of the author’s pretentiousness, his lack of understanding of theology and his lack of interest in conventional morality. Some astutely condemned the vanity and self-publicity in Le Gallienne’s title: ‘From title to tail the book is a shameless puff of its author. He sticks up his sign, “Richard Le Gallienne, Literary Man”, just as one might write up “Thomas Tomkins, Haberdasher”.’34 The production of the book, printed on handmade paper with exquisite typography (its status as a fin de sie`cle object was not in doubt) and able to stretch to 119 pages only with the use of wide margins and the printing of around 250 words to the page, also attracted derision. It looked like a ‘washed-out missal’ according to the National Observer, and the ‘tight-lacing into medieval form of a book that carries the name of Herbert Spencer or Darwin on almost every page is [an] [. . .] outrage in literary decency’.35 Other reviewers lamented Le Gallienne’s seeming incapacity for logical thought, his blundering and fumbling, and his falling back upon subjectivity and intuition. ‘He settles the most obscure questions of metaphysics and psychology with a finality worthy of the youngest candidate for a pass in philosophy [. . .] it is probably the sunniest book on religion ever published’, wrote the reviewer in The Star,36 a criticism which must have been particularly wounding as this was the paper in which Le Gallienne had his own weekly book-review column. It was only the Liverpool Football Echo that was able to take Le Gallienne’s theology seriously37 – a fact which tells more about the extraordinarily broad reviewing policies of regional sports

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journals in the 1890s, than anything else. The Church Times dismissed it scathingly: ‘We are unable to find any “religion”, and we do not understand “the Literary Man”.’38 Nor were Le Gallienne’s literary friends impressed. The Roman Catholic Lionel Johnson wrote inside his own copy, ‘Sancte Thomas Aquinas, per orationes tuas in ecclesiam Christi trahe scriptorum amicum meam’39 (O holy Thomas Aquinas, through your prayers draw my writer friend into the church of Christ). Arthur Symons, meanwhile, was so incensed by the attack on decadence that he was prompted to write ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893) as a defence of the movement. Symons later retitled the work and extended it to book-length, so that it became The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900). This came to be seen as the definitive account, and also as Symons’s major work. Despite the universally poor reviews which The Religion of a Literary Man attracted, it brought Le Gallienne the widespread fame which he craved, and perhaps more surprisingly, many invitations to preach and lecture in churches.40 He was, in fact, lecturing in Liverpool on the night of the launch of The Yellow Book, and so had to miss the party.41 This suggests that there was on the part of those who invited him to their churches a strong desire to find a genuine ‘literary man’ and aesthete who was willing to speak positively about Christianity. The invitations to address religious audiences, mainly and perhaps exclusively in Nonconformist venues, continued for some years, and culminated in the publication of a pamphlet with another excruciating title, If I Were God: A Conversation (1897), which appeared to indicate his winsome longing for a simple faith, now lost. He was touring the provinces, lecturing in chapels on topics such as ‘The Nonconformist Conscience’ simultaneously with his late nights at the Cafe´ Royal, in company with Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, W.B. Yeats and the rest. He urged his Nonconformist audiences to go to the theatre, to appreciate beauty and to be less ignorant of the world, much as Wilde had done on his provincial lecture tours a decade earlier. Le Gallienne seems to have been acting out his own fin de sie`cle struggle between his childhood Nonconformity and some form of ‘essential Christianity’, to which he tried to turn his literary talents but which ultimately he lacked the theological resources to create,

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or the will to sustain. He never really progressed from the belief that he was making a significant theological advance simply by challenging the highly regulated behaviour and beliefs of his Baptist childhood. As his biographers put it, ‘the nag and whisper of the Nonconformist conscience had him by the coat-tails to the end’.42 It could be imagined that he might have settled fairly comfortably into membership of one of the more progressive Congregational churches, but it was not to be. His interest in religion appeared to wane as the century waned. There was a certain irony in that Le Gallienne, who had begun his critique of the decadent movement by wanting to reject the French influences in English poetry and art, ended up spending the last 17 years of his life in France, and was buried in the cemetery at Menton in 1947, just a short distance away from the grave of Aubrey Beardsley.

DECADENCE AND RITUALISM If Le Gallienne represented an attempt to mix elements of 1890s aestheticism and Protestantism, John Francis Bloxam was part of an attempt to mix it up with Anglican ritualism. Bloxam might have been entirely forgotten had he not become entangled with the trials of Oscar Wilde. He represents a convenient starting point for surveying the highly problematic literary pederastic tradition which continued to express itself within a segment of the ritualist wing of the Church of England intermittently during the twentieth century. But Bloxam is important for another reason. He expresses an early moment in the articulation of an explicit homosexual clerical identity that advocated sexual activity rather than sublimation. He was part of the contemporary attempt to express something of the pressures of being ‘different’ in a ‘conventional’ world in the immediate pre-Wilde trial era – a short window of time in which such things were possible, before the attempt had to be abandoned until later in the twentieth century. His short story ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ was published in an Oxford student magazine that he was editing, The Chameleon, in 1894. It was a contribution to what would become a proliferation of pederastic priest-and-acolyte narratives in England between about 1880 and 1930, and it was typical of the genre, combining a

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variety of decadent elements.43 The story therefore becomes evidence for part of Ellis Hanson’s argument for the close linkage between decadence and Catholicism in both its Anglican and Roman forms. Karl Beckson sees it as a type derivative from nineteenth-century French pornography.44 For Frederick S. Roden, it is a major step in the direction of articulating the biological innateness of sexual orientation, and a remarkably open account of clerical sexuality in a period of hiddenness and repression.45 For modern readers, the problem is that as with all of these priest-and-acolyte stories and poems, the unpalatability of the pederastic elements shuts down their usefulness as sources, even though they do provide promising material for elucidating the contemporary understanding between religion and decadent sexuality.46 The Platonic model of the relationship between the erastes (older man) who desires the eromenos (male youth), which provided the context and justification for the men who engaged in these relationships, has now fallen deeply, and one suspects permanently, out of favour. For men of the fin de sie`cle generation, however, abuses of power and status in relationships, whether with their own sex or with women, were seen as having little importance. Bloxam’s story was discussed in the first trial involving Oscar Wilde, the criminal libel suit he brought against the Marquess of Queensberry, which was the result of Queensberry accusing him of ‘posing Somdomite’ (sic).47 Wilde was cross-examined about it by Queensberry’s barrister, Edward Carson. It is difficult to know whether Bloxam mainly intended his story to provoke a reaction of shock, whether he was sincerely offering it as an artistic insight into the dilemmas of pederastic sexuality or whether he was merely penning a hasty production, in order to produce sufficient material for the new magazine; perhaps he was acting from a mixture of these motives. The story concerns a young Anglican curate who falls in love with his acolyte, leading to an increase in his holiness and pastoral effectiveness. He is caught in a compromising situation by his rector, and then proposes a joint suicide with the boy. This takes the form of a mass ‘for their departing souls’ in which the curate adds poison to the sacrament wine. They drink the poison from the chalice with all the aplomb associated with advanced Anglo-

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Catholic ritual, and die in each other’s arms on the steps of the altar, and in the hope that they will be forever together in heaven.48 For a modern reader, the features of the story which are most disturbing are the explicit elements of paedophilia; although the acolyte is meant to be 14, he is repeatedly described as a tiny, blond, curly-haired child. The poisoned chalice seems merely ridiculous, as the story is too poorly written to make it seem religiously offensive. Wilde thought it was poorly written too, although he also thought it had ‘interesting qualities, and is at moments poisonous, which is something’.49 An alternative reading might suggest that its most interesting feature is the reflections the curate makes on his earlier life, when he tells the rector of his unhappy childhood on the night of his discovery.50 He is, in the decadent genre, self-justifying, melodramatic, pious, ashamed and lascivious by turns. His message is that he ‘was always different from other boys’, his whole early life was ‘stained and polluted with the taint of sin’ and when he needed to choose a career, he chose the church, because ‘the whole aesthetic tendency of my soul was intensely attracted by the wonderful mysteries of Christianity, the artistic beauty of our services’. Life since ordination had been a constant struggle, ‘the old cravings for excitement, and, above all, the weary, incessant thirst for perfect love’. This is the narrator’s attempt to explain and defend a particular type of orientation, in the face of the rector’s observation that marriage would have ‘saved’ the curate. On the contrary, says the curate, ‘For me, with my nature, to have married would have been sinful: it would have been a crime, a gross immorality and my conscience would have revolted.’ The story made its appearance at the Queensberry libel trial because Bloxam had shown the work to Wilde when Wilde was visiting Oxford, and, it was asserted, Wilde had encouraged him to publish it.51 Published next to it in the same (in fact, it was the only) issue of Bloxam’s magazine was Lord Alfred Douglas’s ‘Two Loves’ poem, with its famous final line, ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’ and Wilde’s ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, which began, ‘The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.’ Under cross-examination from Edward Carson, Wilde was asked if he found ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ story immoral.

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Maintaining the tone of airy flippancy which he had assumed at the beginning of the court proceeding, he replied that ‘It was worse. It was badly written.’ The answer indicated both Wilde’s irrepressible tendency towards witticism, and his desire to use the court as a platform for establishing the decadent agenda for the moral agnosticism of literature. His refusal to condemn the moral stance of ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ was linked by Carson to the refusal of the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray to express conventional moral opinions. To his interlocutors, the words which Wilde had put into the mouths of his fictional creations Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton were seen as having the same significance as words uttered by Wilde himself.52 The newspaper reports of his cross-examination show him maintaining the same position that he had stated in the preface to Dorian Gray. He repeated that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; all that mattered was the quality of the writing.53 Wilde’s later reflections, in De Profundis, suggested that he bitterly regretted ever having agreed to write for Bloxam, whom he described as a friend of Douglas’s of whom he had known nothing. ‘But I go to prison, all the same, for your friend’s undergraduate magazine.’54 Bloxam left Oxford in 1895, and after a stint at Ely Theological College was ordained in the diocese of Southwark in 1897. He worked in various Anglo-Catholic parishes in London. After chaplaincy service in the First World War, for which he was twice decorated for gallantry, he became vicar of the ritualist parish of St Saviour’s Hoxton, where he remained until his death in 1928.55 Bloxam was appointed by the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram,56 but it is unclear whether WinningtonIngram knew of Bloxam’s youthful literary efforts and his association with Wilde and Douglas. Seth Koven assumes not, but given the intense publicity that surrounded the Wilde trials, it seems unlikely that he can have been ignorant of this.57 Perhaps he chose to be forgetful of it, or was willing to forgive it as a youthful indiscretion. After his death, a former clerical colleague wrote to the Church Times in praise of Bloxam’s ‘pastoral genius’, gift for work among the young, and ‘passionate love of beauty’. He was, according to this correspondent, remarkable for his powers to both win and bestow affection.58

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Unfortunately, tantalisingly little is known of how the Church of England viewed this clergyman who had been such an outspoken and early defender of fixed sexual orientations and same-sex relationships. Bloxam was, in fact, one among a number of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Anglican clergy with pederastic sensibilities, and literary inclinations. Roden argues that for these men, poetry appears to have been a means of sublimation, an outlet for expressing their longings for sacristans, choir boys or the ‘street arabs’, who were the objects of their welfare work. They found it relatively easy to idealise their ‘platonic’ boy-love as part of the culture which Christianity had lost, but should be encouraged to rediscover. Religious discourse was adopted in this literature as a safe cover for homoeroticism; furthermore, writing in the homophobic aftermath of the Wilde trials, these clergy were perhaps consciously seeking to re-sanctify their sexual desires. For these reasons, their poetry seems to have been seen as ‘acceptable’ and found publishers and favourable reviewers, whereas Bloxam’s advocacy of actual physical relations between men and boys continued to be seen as ‘shocking’.59 The most extensive clerical purveyor of homoerotic (and misogynistic) verse was probably Edwin Bradford, vicar of Nordelph in Norfolk, who published a dozen volumes of poetry and stories with a focus on the loveliness of boys and youths, and the purity and virtue of male –male love. Bradford was rediscovered in the 1980s, when some of his verse was republished by the Gay Men’s Press. Typical of his style were lines such as these, from his poem ‘The Call’: Eros is up and away, away! Eros is up and away! The son of Urania born of the sea, The lover of lads and liberty. Strong, self-controlled, erect and free, He is marching along today! He is calling aloud to the men, the men! He is calling aloud to the men – ‘Turn away from the wench, with her powder and paint, And follow the Boy, who is fair as a saint.’60

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Other clerical authors of a similar ilk included Ellsworth Cottam and the extremely prolific Montague Summers,61 who appears to have concentrated on a literary career, and done little in the Church of England beyond a first curacy. David Hilliard has analysed the ways in which the AngloCatholic world of the early decades of the twentieth century which Bloxam and Bradford inhabited provided a congenial, indeed in some respects the most congenial, environment for men to express homosexual orientation and desires.62 Indeed, in the years up until the relaxation of legal discrimination in 1967, when gay-friendly pubs and clubs were both difficult to find and subject to police harassment, Anglo-Catholic churches could provide a visible support network, not just in England, but scattered through other parts of the Anglican world, including the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia.63 There were powerful undercurrents between the aesthetic dimensions of Catholicism and homosexuality, and they kept resurfacing, despite the official attempts of the Churches to maintain a chorus of disapproval. There was also, as John Shelton Reed has noted, ‘a good deal of overlap and more or less continuous exchange between the circles of advanced AngloCatholicism and the secular avant-garde’, with Walter Pater and the men who followed him floating in and out of the ritualist orbit.64 Reed suggests that the Mass scene in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean was based on the ceremonial at George Nugee’s St Austin’s priory in South London, and that the portrait of Marius himself was based on one of the other clergy there, Richard Jackson, known as ‘Brother a` Becket’.65 The association between ritualism and decadence was not lost on contemporary satirists. In 1894, G.S. Street wrote The Autobiography of a Boy in which the central character was described as ‘a severe ritualist’ in his first year at Oxford, an ‘anarchist and atheist’ in his second year and as ‘wearily indifferent to all things’ in his third year at the university.66 Ritualism was portrayed as a passing phase en route to the adoption of the truly decadent persona, and also as the butt of a pointed joke.

PROTESTANT REACTION There was, needless to say, a reaction against the decadentritualist-homosexual position that went far deeper than casual

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humour. The anti-decadent strand within European thought had been most obviously expressed by Nordau’s Degeneration, and within England it was well exemplified in literary culture by the journalist and poet W.E. Henley, ‘the most ardent of the antiDecadents’.67 In the 1890s, Henley edited the National Observer and then the New Review. In these journals, he quite consciously cultivated and published the articles of the younger writers who were hostile to or ambivalent about the decadent set, including J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Alice Meynell, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Yet the circumstances of Henley’s early life were not hugely dissimilar to those whom he most wanted to attack; it was no doubt these points of similarity that added to his sense of intolerance. He had had a difficult and impoverished early life, and also a large amount of ill-health. Like some of the other writers of the fin de sie`cle, he had come to London in his youth to live by his wits as a literary man. He had a particular loathing for Oscar Wilde, and a dislike of effeminacy in any form. As Alison Hennegan puts it, he ‘made a full-time job of his blustering masculinity’.68 Many of the writers he supported became leading figures in the early twentieth century, a distinctively different generation who saw themselves as ‘full blooded grapplers with reality, not seekers after elusive beauty’.69 Within Protestant Christianity, there had long been a strong anti-ritualist, counter-decadent strand that was expressed by a form of muscular Protestantism that rejoiced in producing rowing blues and parish football teams, and particularly as the century drew to a close, Protestant propaganda and occasional fisticuffs. Walter Walsh’s bestseller The Secret History of the Oxford Movement was a production of the late 1890s. His historical approach meant that the explicitly decadent strand within the Anglo-Catholicism of his day largely escaped his scrutiny, although he directed his fire at what he saw as the false aestheticism of liturgical innovators. He subjected to withering condemnation a guide to Holy Week ceremonies produced by the Society of St Osmund, a forerunner of the Alcuin Club.70 Nor did Walsh seem concerned about homosexuality or paedophilia among ritualist clergy; his focus was entirely upon saving ‘English ladies’ from the clutches of ritualist priests, and he does not seem to have thought about altar boys. He was silent about Benjamin (Aelred) Carlyle’s revival of the

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Benedictine order within the Church of England, which was beginning from 1896. No doubt if he had known that these monks, after their move to Caldey Island in 1906, would have the stories which Frederick Rolfe had originally published in The Yellow Book read to them at recreation, and would adapt the Roman rite in order to accommodate ‘embraces, ceremonial and non-ceremonial’, he would have been sufficiently scandalised to have written a chapter about them, too.71 Meanwhile, John Kensit, who had founded the Protestant Truth Society in 1889, published anti-Catholic literature, and organised public protests against ritualism, disrupting Anglo-Catholic services on a regular basis from 1897. He continued to do this until he was struck by an iron file during a sectarian riot in Liverpool in 1902, and died of his injuries.72 In Parliament, the anti-ritualist cause found enthusiastic support from Sir William Harcourt, who was leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons from 1893 to 1899. Rather than being an extreme evangelical like Kensit, Harcourt’s aim was to preserve the traditional Protestant culture of the Church of England.73 By the 1890s, it was evident that Anglo-Catholic Ritualism had become the most divisive and controversial religious culture in England.74 Indeed, it has been suggested that ‘the fin de sie`cle Protestant reaction to the Oxford Movement [. . .] was every bit as fierce but more varied than the initial response’.75 This was about far more than a concern that it led to effeminacy and/or homosexuality, although these had long been fears. It was a more complicated brew of anxieties about clerical power and unruliness, and shifts within both the theological and the political make-up of the supposedly Protestant-established church. Those anti-Ritualists with an interest in reading would have noted with alarm the sheer volume of pro-Oxford Movement publications which appeared in the 1890s, including J.W. Burgon’s Lives of Twelve Good Men and R.W. Church’s The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–45 (both 1891), H.P. Liddon’s Life of Pusey (1893–8) and J.H. Overton’s The Anglican Revival (1897).76 It was a period which saw high levels of conflict at both ends of the Protestant–Ritualist spectrum.

CHAPTER 4 ‘DAMNABLE AESTHETICISM’ AND CATHOLIC CONVERSION AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

THE CONVERSION PHENOMENON Most of the people who converted to Roman Catholicism in England in the 1890s (and for many years thereafter) did so because they wanted to marry Roman Catholics. These are not the people who will be considered here, interesting though it would be to reconstruct some of their stories. The focus of this and the next chapter is upon the literary and artistic people of the fin de sie`cle who converted to Roman Catholicism. Although Anglo-Catholic ceremonial was fully developed by the 1890s, and much of Nonconformity was open and welcoming to artistic endeavours of various sorts, it was Roman Catholicism that proved the most popular vehicle for aesthetes who developed a taste for religion. Thus the ‘conversion phenomenon’ becomes the most significant marker for understanding the religious culture of the fin de sie`cle. Ellis Hanson suggests that the ‘perpetually deferred religious conversion [. . .] precariously positioned between two worlds and partaking of each, is an important aspect of the decadent experience of religious faith’.1 Lionel Johnson expressed this dilemma from the inside in an article of 1891: We kneel at some hour, not too early for our convenience, repeating that solemn Latin, drinking in those Gregorian

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tones, with plenty of modern French sonnets in memory, should the sermon be dull. But to join the Church! Ah no! better to dally with the enchanting mysteries, to pass from our dreams of delirium to our dreams of sanctity with no coarse facts to jar upon us. And so these refined persons cherish a double ‘passion’: the sentiment of repentant yearning and the sentiment of rebellious sin.2 But there was a strain of ironic self-mockery in these words, for no sooner had the article been published than Johnson himself converted. Despite the undoubted attractions of dallying with the ‘enchanted mysteries’ and avoiding the ‘coarse facts’, quite a number of others associated with the decadent nineties also took the plunge. Indeed, some of them dedicated themselves singlemindedly to their new faith for many years. No other literary group has produced so many converts. They included Aubrey Beardsley, Katharine Bradley, Edith Cooper, Lord Alfred Douglas, Ernest Dowson, John Gray (who became a priest), Henry and Aline Harland, Lionel Johnson, Andre´ Raffalovich, Robert Ross and Oscar Wilde. Yet, although Catholic conversion is one of the most obviously distinctive features of the later phase of the aesthetic movement, it is one which, until relatively recently, has attracted surprisingly little analysis. Originally at least, this was due to a type of antiCatholic prejudice: the implicit assumption seems to have been that because Catholicism was a natural extension of the decadent lifestyle, it did not need to be treated as a serious religious choice. Among the first generation of early twentieth-century commentators on the fin de sie`cle, that is to say those who had lived through it and were writing about it from the distance of the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a tendency to emphasise Catholicism as one of the ‘dark arts’ that had been fashionable in the 1890s. At the forefront of this was W.B. Yeats, who, as the most spectacularly successful of the original decadent set, famously described his contemporaries as ‘the tragic generation’. In his introduction to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892 – 1935 he described turning Catholic as ‘a tradition’, and offered the delicious comment that in 1900 ‘everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody

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went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten’.3 Richard Le Gallienne, in his reminiscences of the 1890s written in 1926, dwelt on the curiosity of Lionel Johnson introducing him to absinthe, a drink then considered to suggest ‘diabolism and nameless iniquity [. . .] in a room paradoxically monkish in its scholarly austerity, with a beautiful monstrance on the mantelpiece and a silver crucifix on the wall’.4 He could have noted, perhaps, that, like Catholicism, the consumption of absinthe had become another highly ritualised activity, and that its transformative potency was believed to be second to none. Meanwhile, Max Beerbohm’s cleverly crafted short story of 1912, ‘Enoch Soames’, mixed real events of the 1890s with the fictional evocation of the eponymous decadent poet, who became addicted to absinthe, wrote nonsense, spoke pretentious French in London (although from Preston) and declared himself to be a Catholic Diabolist. But Soames’s Catholicism is barely sketched in the story. The theological interest lies in Beerbohm’s depiction of the Devil, who appears as a flashy, over-dressed, vulgar man, spotted from time to time in the streets of Paris, or in the domino room at the Cafe´ Royal. The Devil carries Soames off to an eternity in hell, after granting him his wish to travel forwards in time to 3 June 1997, in order to spend an afternoon in the reading room of the British Museum. Soames desired to gratify his craving for fame and posthumous reputation by inspecting all the entries of himself that he imagined would be in the library catalogue, but instead all he discovered was that he was believed to be the literary creation of Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm appears in the story as himself, vainly trying to save Soames from his fate by arranging his cutlery in the sign of the cross, and reminding the Devil that Soames is a ‘Catholic Diabolist’. But Soames has sold his soul, and Beerbohm’s interventions are in vain. He disappears with the Devil, and into a state of being remembered as a purely fictional character.5 These examples from Beerbohm and Yeats encouraged the idea that Catholicism was, or had been, an exotic refuge for the mentally unstable. Le Gallienne, on the other hand, was willing to illustrate the sincerity of Ernest Dowson’s religious convictions: he was ‘solicitous for the spiritual safety of his friends and anxious that they should find refuge where he himself had found it’.6 After his

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conversion, Dowson, despite his extremely chaotic lifestyle, appears to have become and remained a frequent Mass attender.7 Among some of that generation of late twentieth-century scholars who had been schooled in the idea that religion had become irrelevant the moment that Darwin published The Origin of Species, there seemed to be a sense of bafflement at the continuing evidence of a colourful Christian landscape in fin de sie`cle London, and of the late-aesthetic tendency towards faith, piety and Catholicism. There is a contradiction between the assumption that underlies some studies, which is that by the 1890s intellectuals had abandoned religious faith, and the evidence, which is that at least some of them were finding it in a new form. Karl Beckson, for example, simply assumed that by the 1890s religion had been undermined by science, but that Roman Catholicism provided a stable alternative both to Darwin’s worldview and to liberal Christianity. He declares that the paradox of rebellious Decadent writers rejecting the stifling Victorian world of bourgeois morality and the liberal theology of the Church of England in order to embrace the binding dogmas of Roman Catholicism can be explained, in part, by the crisis over faith that had intensified with Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and by the consequent need for ancient, universal authority.8 There is much to unpick in this sentence, not least his assumptions about the Church of England, but he fails to recognise that Catholics were also trying to come to terms with science, biblical criticism and other developments. During the 1890s, members of the fledgling Catholic Modernist movement (as it would later be known) were beginning to search for ways of reconciling faith and modern thought. Some of the converts, including John Gray, Andre´ Raffalovich, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, were interested in the ideas of the leading modernist thinkers, such as ¨ gel, Tyrrell and Loisy. Bradley raged to John Gray against von Hu Pius X’s formal condemnation of modernism in 1907,9 and Raffalovich maintained an extensive correspondence with Tyrrell, and offered him financial support (which he declined) although he was not directly sympathetic to his theological

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position.10 Beckson’s assumption that the attraction of Catholicism was that it offered a form of unchanging, universal stability is far too simple. It was almost certainly not the doctrinal aspects of Catholicism that aesthetic converts found most attractive. Ellis Hanson provides the most detailed discussion of why the Roman Catholic Church at this period proved attractive to homosexuals, and his work has been taken further in the British context by Frederick S. Roden.11 Central to Hanson’s argument is the view that the Catholic Church was, and had long been, a decadent institution, exhibiting the characteristics which appealed most to the decadent imagination. These included excessive and archaic splendour, vast history, complex symbolism and the claim to perform and sanction miracles. This internalised decadence, he argues, combined with the paradoxes at the heart of the institution to make it fascinating for the decadent mindset – its ability to be simultaneously modern and medieval; ascetic yet sumptuous; spiritual yet sensual; chaste yet erotic; homophobic yet homoerotic; suspicious of aestheticism yet an elaborate work of art – all added to its appeal.12 Hanson’s point is that given the nature of the Church itself, it was completely possible to be both Catholic and decadent. He is strongly dismissive of the assumptions of Beckson and other critics that decadent writers were in a state of intellectual and emotional transition, giving up their earlier positions once they became Roman Catholics, as if decadence were the disease and Catholicism the antidote. A true appreciation of the nature of late nineteenth-century Catholicism should, Hanson maintains, lead one to conclude that as Catholicism was pre-eminently an expression of decadence, it was therefore the natural resting place for members of the decadent literary world. Nor was it simply the aesthetics of Catholic worship (which was usually plainer than the AngloCatholic Ritualism of the period), or the culture of the homosocial Church, which brought this about. Decadent writers and artists were drawn to the more dramatic of the popular saints, such as the ´ vila, the tormented Antony of Egypt and the ecstatic Teresa of A beautiful Sebastian, run through with arrows. Ernest Dowson developed a devotion to St Wilgefortis, who miraculously grew a beard in order to repel her unwanted intended husband, and was

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crucified by her furious father.13 Biblical characters, particularly biblical women, such as Eve, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and above all Salome, were also seen as a source of fascination or inspiration.14 The intense drama of the passion of Christ, acted out in Holy Week ceremonies on the Continent (not in England) and depicted in devotions such as the Stations of the Cross, was a further cause for decadent attraction and revulsion. The perpetually present, almost-naked body of Christ was a source of endless fascination, as the devotional and the homoerotic imperceptibly shaded into each other. Nor were the late aesthetes any different from others in history, when they created a Christ who was partly a vision of themselves. This tendency is particularly noticeable in Wilde’s De Profundis, in which Christ emerges as artist and man of suffering, the two aspects which Wilde at that point saw most clearly within himself. Furthermore, the Roman Church in the 1890s had been publicly adopting a style of medievalism that was part of its revival of Thomism. This involved a comprehensive emphasis on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas that was intended to ensure that the Church remained in a position ‘before the corruption’ of modernity. Several decades earlier, the Roman Catholic religion had been recommended and sanctioned by several of those who had been the original creators of the culture of fin de sie`cle decadence. Walter Pater’s relationship with organised Christianity was complicated, and it changed over the decades. In the early 1860s he had considered Anglican ordination, but his school and university friend John Rainer McQueen was so scandalised at this possibility that he wrote to the Bishop of London (A.C. Tait) to protest that Pater was unsuitable. By the 1890s, however, Pater was a practising Anglo-Catholic: he experienced an intensification of religious faith in the final years of his life, and became intimate with the dandified chaplain of Brasenose, F.W. Bussell, with whom he dined, walked and attended religious services.15 Pater’s writings placed the Roman Catholic option before the aesthetes, but he did not take that route himself. One example is in a revealing description of the conversion of the German eighteenth-century aesthete Winckelmann, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the book which, as we have seen, became one of the foundational texts of the English

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decadent movement. After suggesting that Winckelmann’s conversion was primarily motivated by his desire to pursue scholarship in Rome, and that he did not relinquish his earlier Voltairean beliefs, Pater noted, On the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been the ennui of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty.16 Here was an uncomplicated proposition: Roman Catholicism was a more aesthetically satisfying form of religion, whereas Protestantism in its various forms cut one off from the roots of beauty. This was a polemic, but its influence was powerful. The trend towards recommending Catholicism by means of the personal example of conversion (or re-conversion) was also strong among the decadent movement’s French creators, with Paul Verlaine (converted 1873 – 4) and Karl-Joris Huysmans (converted 1892) – who were both hugely influential on the London decadents – being the most notable. In late nineteenth-century England – and despite almost half a century of relatively peaceful Protestant –Catholic relationships – Roman Catholicism still had something of the added piquancy of being a foreign form of religion, the one which undermined the deeply rooted English obsession with maintaining the Protestant establishment. With its international constituency, and large numbers of impoverished Irish, it side-stepped bourgeois assumptions about class and kin. Particularly welcome from the decadent perspective was the Church’s insistence that there was virtue in being unmarried: this was powerfully attractive to those who felt suffocated by the Victorian cult of the family, and by the pressures towards an unwanted domesticity. Within the decadent mindset, sex that could lead to babies was seen as a dangerous limitation on the desired sense of self-sufficiency. For some, it became a thing to be avoided.17 Even for those who were heterosexually inclined, like Ernest Dowson, women were a constant problem. Dowson

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liked very little girls, young female prostitutes, and those located in lower positions on the social scale. He was terrified by women who might be regarded as his equal. The teenaged waitress to whom he devoted himself for most of the nineties, Adelaide Foltinowicz, ultimately despaired of the poet and married someone else.18 But part of the problem was that Adelaide had grown up, and had become undesirable in Dowson’s eyes. Shortly after leaving Oxford, Dowson had lamented in a letter to a friend that the world was a ‘bankrupt concern’ because, among other things, ‘the little girls grow up, and become those very objectionable animals, women’.19 Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Criminal Law Amendment Act had just made under-age sex and male homosexual acts illegal, the fin de sie`cle saw an idealisation of homosexuality and of paedophilia – whether as actual practice or as theoretical possibility – and the Roman Church provided a context and a cover for both, as well as for repressed, sublimated or spiritualised sexuality. Hanson claims that ‘all the great works of decadent literature are conversion narratives’, and in support he cites a variety of texts by ` Rebours, En Route and La`-Bas, Pater’s Paul Verlaine, Huysmans’s A Marius the Epicurean and Dorian Gray’s contemplated conversion during his attendance at Mass.20 There was, of course, a significant difference between a decadent writer or artist being temperamentally drawn to the symbolic, ritual, mystical or bizarre elements in Catholicism, and being willing to take the step of actual conversion in the real world. Did the act of conversion signal a change of content in the author’s output? Dowson’s conversion occurred in 1891, after which he wrote some respectful and sensitive poems about priests and nuns, and on central Christian themes of forgiveness, prayer and the peace to be found at Mass. He also wrote about love, innocence and, particularly powerfully, death. Because of the complicated form of John Gray’s conversion, it is difficult to date precisely the point at which he became a ‘Catholic writer’. His work always deployed a mixture of sacred and secular themes, and although he violently rejected his earliest decadent work, he continued to explore decadent themes in his writing up until his death, which was 44 years after his reception in the Church. Gray went through a number of phases, in which he at first suppressed and then reinvented not simply his literary voice,

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but his whole identity. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper also set out on a largely new, but not noticeably less decadent, direction in their literary life after their conversion. They certainly maintained an ambivalent nostalgia for both the good and the bad in the late nineteenth-century literary world and its ‘damnable aestheticism’, as Bradley put it in a letter to John Gray, around the time of her conversion in 1907.21 The rest of this chapter explores these themes further through an investigation of the conversion and Catholic life of John Gray. The next chapter considers how the urge to convert expressed itself in the lives of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper.

JOHN GRAY’S CONVERSION: MORE CATHOLIC, MORE DECADENT The conversion of John Gray, and as we shall see later those of Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, provides an interesting test for Hanson’s theory about the ease with which one could be both Catholic and decadent. For all three, but particularly for Gray, the Catholic phase of their lives is relatively well documented. All were exotic and singular, rather than ‘types’, but this does not make them less interesting. By the time of Bradley and Cooper’s conversions, in 1907, Gray was well established in Edinburgh as ‘Father Gray’, installed as the parish priest at the just-opened St Peter’s, Morningside. Gray had been among the earlier wave of converts in fin de sie`cle literary London, his reception having taken place on 14 February 1890 at SS Anselm and Cecilia, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in London. Gray’s life falls into a number of seemingly separate episodes. His biographer Jerusha Hull McCormack suggests that what he created was in effect a series of masks which he used for the purposes of concealment and reinvention. This view of Gray is attested by his contemporaries. His friend Peter Anson commented, ‘When conversing with him one had the feeling he was wearing a mask. At moments the mask was raised very slightly; but I can honestly say that never once in the fifteen years that I continued to meet him was the mask removed.’22 Gray did not, in modern parlance, exactly ‘move on’ from each episode in his remarkable life; he was troubled by his past, yet he was not prepared to let it go, seemingly afflicted

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with a sense of grief from which there appeared to be no recovery. The difficulties that he experienced recalling his earlier life were seen when he was asked by the Provincial of the Dominicans to write an account of the nineties; he found it impossible, and eventually had to ask to be let off.23 But nor did he wish his place in the history of the nineties to be completely erased. Although he destroyed letters which might have been incriminating, he left a significant archive of papers and letters to the Dominicans,24 presumably in the expectation that it would be worked over by scholars. In his Edinburgh presbytery, he kept his books from the period to hand, but with their spines facing inwards. ‘Like so many naughty children they stood there – with their faces to the wall.’25 If a visitor picked up one of these books, it would be gently lifted from his hands, and silently replaced.26 The books appear to have drawn attention to themselves by their odd method of storage, but although Gray did not want people to read them, he did not want to dispose of them either. Gray’s personal reinventions began early in life. His childhood had been spent in notably less favourable circumstances than that of many of his fellow nineties writers. He was the son of a carpenter and wheelwright, born in Bethnal Green in 1866, and apparently he retained the trace of a cockney accent, despite adopting a form of speech which was described much later as ‘MayfairMorningside’.27 At 16, he escaped from his apprenticeship as a metal turner by passing an entrance exam for the civil service. He worked as a clerk for the next 16 years, while making strenuous attempts to make up for his lack of formal education, and cultivating his poetic and literary interests. By the late 1880s, these had brought him into the orbits of both literary London and Paris. Gray’s attraction to Roman Catholicism appears to have been sealed while on holiday in Brittany in 1889, when he attended Mass in a small chapel with half a dozen peasant women. His friend Edwin Essex, OP, recounted Gray’s own account of the incident. It was an untidy, neglected place, and the priest an unshaven figure at the altar, slovenly, and in a hurry. Vividly and slowly, as if savouring afresh each tiny detail, Canon Gray reconstructed the scene, without a hint of criticism, leaning

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forward in his chair, hands on knees, and, in his grave eyes, a look of brooding wonder even after many years. ‘Yes, Father’, he said, with a slow turn of his head in my direction, ‘it was then that it came to me. I said to myself, ‘John Gray, here is the real thing.’28 This was the elderly priest engaging in a very rare moment of reminiscence about his youth, and it is perhaps not surprising that he should have made the recollecting of an obscure Mass in rural France as the turning point in his personal reconstruction of his spiritual journey. But there seems little reason to doubt the significance of his trip to Brittany. It prompted Gray’s formal reception, in the following February. This was followed by what he came to regard as a period of lapse, which coincided with his ‘Dorian’ period: ‘a course of sin compared with which my previous life was innocence’, as he put it in 1899.29 It is difficult to reconstruct much about his early experience of Catholicism, beyond acknowledging that it seems to fit with Hanson’s model of the decadent who intensely and paradoxically desires both religiosity and the thrill of the forbidden, and is seeking a code against which he can rebel more clearly. About a year after his conversion he met Oscar Wilde, in late 1888 or early 1889. Gray was sufficiently influenced by Wilde to adopt some of his mannerisms and style of dress. Wilde was much taken with the beautiful aspiring poet, and Gray became, in the words of Ellmann, ‘his principal young man until well into 1892’,30 when he was displaced by Lord Alfred Douglas. The use of his surname as the surname for Dorian Gray was possibly ‘a form of courtship’,31 a flattery to which Gray readily responded, signing himself ‘Dorian’ in at least one surviving letter to Wilde.32 The choice of the Greek name ‘Dorian’ discretely signalled to initiated readers that the character was meant to be homosexual, and this was reinforced by Lord Henry Wotton alluding to him as ‘a young Adonis’ and ‘a Narcissus’.33 John Gray’s youthful good looks further reinforced the idea that he was the incarnation of the ‘young man of extraordinary personal beauty’ around whom Wilde’s story was constructed, and it naturally made him the object of fascination; everywhere he went in literary London, people pointed him out as the ‘real’ Dorian. For Gray, the

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attraction of this state of affairs proved remarkably short-lived. He had become the victim of a curious form of identity theft; he ceased to be John Gray, civil servant and aspiring poet and translator, and became for a while the living embodiment of a fictional Wildean creation, the symbol of ageless male beauty and corrupted youth. Jerusha McCormack makes the perceptive point that much of Gray’s painful sense of self-betrayal had to do with his conscious exploitation of Wilde’s attraction towards himself. It was Wilde who literally made his name, introducing him to a social circle which would otherwise have been out of his reach, and encouraging him in his poetry writing. He gave him the polish and confidence which he might otherwise have gained at public school and university.34 But what Gray could gain from this relationship – public recognition, a book contract, the opportunity to recite his poetry to Walter Pater and the Princess of Monaco, endless dinners at the Cafe´ Royal – became outweighed by the disadvantages of being assumed to be Wilde’s lover. The risks intensified as Wilde’s increasingly public relationship with Alfred Douglas became more widely known. Whatever else Gray wanted, he was very anxious not to be bracketed with Douglas as one of Wilde’s ‘boys’. It is impossible to know whether the relationship between Wilde and Gray was physically sexual – Ellmann thinks so, McCormack and Hanson reserve judgement.35 What is more significant is the relatively short period in which Gray felt at ease with his close association with Wilde. As early as February 1892, Gray took legal action against The Star for suggesting that he was the ‘original Dorian of the same name’.36 By the autumn of that year, he had suffered from physical illness and was showing signs of severe mental distress, which culminated in a breakdown in November that coincided with the death of his estranged father. He wrote to his friend Pierre Louy¨s: ‘I am very unhappy. Some days ago I almost decided to leave England, to withdraw my poems, in order to become a French citizen, never again to speak a word of English [. . .] I have lost my father. I am well pleased with the loss.’37 Presumably he was also suffering a crisis in relation to Wilde, Douglas and his own social origins. He had been displaced in Wilde’s affections by an even more beautiful youth, who was from the social and educational elite from which Gray was firmly excluded. But Gray would certainly not have been prepared to think

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of himself as part of the ‘rough youth’ in whom Wilde also liked to indulge. Upper- and middle-class men in 1890s London tended to have strong views about the social class from which they sought their male lovers – often favouring significantly younger men from the working class, such as telegraph boys, clerks and stable hands.38 It was a confusing world for a highly intelligent, upwardly mobile and self-educated homosexual from the working class. Gray’s mental turmoil was compounded by the fact that his first volume of poetry, Silverpoints, was already in the press. Its publication in the following March reflected the artificial mindset of a poet – the synthetic creation Dorian – whom John Gray now wanted to wish out of existence. Silverpoints was hailed by the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘“le plus de´cadent des de´cadents” the newest epitome of “the new”’. It was predictable that the press would excite themselves about the first volume of poetry from decadent ‘Dorian’, but the Pall Mall reviewer also offered shrewd commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of Gray’s poetic style, urging him to leave his ‘hothouse’ and become more earthed as a London poet: ‘we recommend Mr Gray to stand for an hour a day at Charing-cross and to write poems about what he sees there; for whenever he touches actualities [. . .] his eye for form and colour leads him to very happy inspirations’.39 But everything about the little volume played strongly to artificiality, the surface and the cult of personality. It was not just its contents – a selection of Gray’s own poems, together with his loose translations of Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarme´ – but also its status as a ‘milestone’ in the aesthetics of book design that secured its reputation. The book had the proportions of a large, upended cheque book or a slim-line diary, bound in vellum or green cloth, and stamped in gold with a pattern of wavy lattice work, with identical front and back covers. It was designed by Charles Ricketts, who was one of the period’s most gifted young artistdesigners. Ricketts designed the inside too, which consisted of poems delicately printed in tiny italic type, on high-quality handmade paper with generous margins.40 It was, according to Jerusha McCormack, ‘a radically “insincere” kind of poetry’,41 an amalgam of borrowed styles and a fixation with superficial, outward appearances. According to Ian Fletcher, the poems represent Gray’s vision of ‘Baudelaire’s therapeutic descent into

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hell [. . .] Silverpoints is Gray’s counterpart to the exasperated feast of the senses presented in Beardsley’s unexpurgated Under the Hill’.42 Both form and content established it immediately as a preeminent decadent artefact. Within a few years, Gray had become so disturbed by it that he resolved to buy up all the copies that he could find – ‘immobilising’ them, as he termed it, confiscating them from the public gaze. It is easy to surmise that the unhappy, physically weakened and mentally troubled Gray might have been heading for the same kind of absinthe-fuelled early death which came to a number of his contemporaries, and he did apparently think of suicide, which would have sealed the resemblance between himself and the fictional Dorian. He was saved when Arthur Symons introduced him to Andre´ Raffalovich in the Autumn of 1892. Raffalovich rescued him emotionally and financially, and became his life partner. Henceforward, they organised their lives around each other, and for many years saw each other daily. They died within a few months of each other in 1934.43 It was Raffalovich who insisted that Gray make a complete break from Wilde, the man who had initially put up the money to finance Silverpoints.44 From the spring of 1893, therefore, Gray began to fashion a very significant shift in his decadent persona. It became heavily refocussed in his religious poetry, which gave him a context for expressing with a new intensity sensuality and desire. His Spiritual Poems (1896) were partly shaped by what would become his life-long devotion to the Spanish mystical poet and saint, John of the Cross, an interest that he shared with Raffalovich. This extract, from a poem about St John of the Cross, ‘They say, in other days’, is typical: He met the Lover of the Dark Night’s tryst; Saint John was folded in the hands of Christ. He lay upon their wounds and wept the whole Of longing that was in his holy soul. Those molten hands were silent. Later in the poem, John has somehow moved inside the wounds to enter into Christ’s body (in a sort of reversal of the process in which Christ’s body enters the believer in the Eucharist):

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And John was locked within the riven Side. The Wound said: ‘Sleep, beloved, and be calm; I, in thy flesh, made wounds upon thee balm. My torrent poured for thee; thou art my son; I ached for this dear hour, my darling one. Thou wert a proper vessel for the Wine I gave thee to dispense, thou son of mine. Now would my love for ever close upon Thee; but thy house is greater; pass thou on.’ And John was cradled in the Sacred Heart, Than which no mansion is more glorious. O friar of sweet counsel, where thou art, John of the Cross, my patron, pray for us.45 The poem demonstrates Gray’s perfect blending of Catholic devotional ideas of the counter-Reformation type with carnal, corporeal homoeroticism. A decade later Gray told Edith Cooper that for him ecstasy was found in the poems of St John of the Cross – and in cigarettes.46 He told Katharine Bradley that the Spanish mystic had ‘made a hole in the covering which I had woven about myself to hide me from God’.47 Frederick S. Roden concludes his analysis of the Spiritual Poems by arguing that Gray’s work was groundbreaking because he was the first to recognise the similarities between the devotional traditions of the high middle ages and the counter-Reformation and ‘emergent identities based on sexual deviance’.48 He used his pre-existing decadent homosexual poetics and mixed it with these potent strands of Catholic spirituality to express a new form of religious poetry for the 1890s. Interestingly, the immediate reactions of his friends to this style of poetry were of confusion and surprise. At first, even his Catholic friends, like Ernest Dowson, were not sure whether this was yet another pose. On receiving his Blue Calendar collection in December 1895, Dowson wrote a note of thanks to Gray, and praised it rather ambiguously for its ‘Moyen-Age-fin-de sie`cle’ flavour. Some seven months later, after receiving Gray’s Spiritual Poems, he confided to Arthur Symons that he couldn’t determine whether Gray’s ‘mysticism’ was ‘sincere or merely a pose – but I begin to think the former’.49

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The other elements in this spiritual shift seem to have been the conversion of Raffalovich, in 1896, and the conversion and death of Aubrey Beardsley, in 1897 and 1898. Gray’s much younger sister Beatrice, who became a nun, claimed that he had been influenced towards the priesthood by the regular sight of ‘a very long and silent crocodile of clerics in cotta and birettas’ on their way to pontifical High Mass in the cathedral at Regensburg, where she was at school.50 If so, then he seems to have been attracted by visualising himself in an ordered, male and relatively anonymous world. There was also a strong sense of self-preservation in John Gray; he was clearly not going to become a syphilitic alcoholic, and dead by the end of the century, like so many of his former companions. Raffalovich had become closely connected with Aubrey Beardsley from the time that Beardsley lost his post as art editor of The Yellow Book, and Gray knew him through this connection. Both men regarded Beardsley as a genius, a view which never wavered, and which they became very anxious to defend after his death. As Beardsley’s health deteriorated, his religious situation seemed to his Catholic friends to become more urgent; Raffalovich arranged for a priest whom he thought Beardsley would get on with to visit him.51 His reception occurred in Bournemouth on 31 March 1897. It was in the month that Beardsley admitted for the first time that he was dying, but almost exactly a year before he did so. He spent the whole of his remaining year in France, where his health appeared to be improving, chatting to visiting friends and local priests, and, according to Alan Crawford, reading ‘Catholic devotional literature and erotica by turns’.52 Beardsley died and was buried in Menton, but a Requiem Mass was held at the Jesuit church in Farm Street, presumably at Raffalovich’s instigation, as this was the church which Raffalovich attended. When news of Beardsley’s death reached Gray, it seems to have sealed the sense of his own re-conversion. Of the two most significant figures in the decadent movement, Wilde had been destroyed by his prison sentence, and Beardsley was now dead. Others, like Dowson, were sick and destitute – he would live only another two years. If ever there was a moment for full-scale reinvention, it was in 1898, the year Gray decided to go to seminary. Some of Gray’s prose writing from the period deals with the theme of conversion, in particular his curious short story ‘Light’,

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which was published in 1897.53 The story concerns the wife of a smith, a housewife and Bible Christian chapel attender, in some unidentified late nineteenth-century suburb. She has an intense experience of ‘new birth’ at a Nonconformist evening service: ‘A ray fell from distant heaven. Alighting in her, it exploded her soul into radiant, conscious being.’ Sometime later, after a period of spiritual ecstasy, she is told in a dream to visit a certain bookshop, and on doing so (it turns out to be next to the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square) she alights on the book which he saw in the dream. The volume bears a close resemblance to Gray’s own Spiritual Poems, which, as we have seen, expressed Gray’s newly empowered decadent voice married to the continental mystical tradition. On reading the words in the book (which she knows is the forbidden popery) the woman in the story is initially appalled (not least because she has spent the exorbitant sum of ten shillings and sixpence buying it). This is until she comes across the lines of the thirteenth-century Italian Franciscan poet, Jacopone da Todi,54 on the theme of being consumed with the flames of divine love. In the following days, she experiences an everheightened level of religious intensity: ‘the phrases of the great Italian song filled her with terrible bliss, ecstatic terror’. At last the woman, overwhelmed by the presence of her divine Lover, falls into an ecstatic state, and promptly dies. The description of the dramatic and emotional elements of this conversion story would not have been out of place in the evangelical literature of the period (and earlier). But the story is curious as a Catholic narrative. There is no mention of priests or sacraments, the process of conversion begins with an experience in a Nonconformist chapel, and is consummated by reading Gray’s own translation of a mystical Franciscan poet.55 The story puts one in mind of Mary Heimann’s observations about the closeness between some evangelical and some Roman Catholic assumptions about conversion at this period, expressed within a shared climate of religious intensity.56

CANON GRAY OF EDINBURGH Gray preserved his letters to Raffalovich from 1898, and they pick up at the point where he left for the continent to begin his studies

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for the priesthood at the Scots College in Rome. Gray was ordained as a priest in December 1901, after completing a shortened course of study on account of his ‘late vocation’. And that, it might have been assumed, was that; his re-conversion was sealed with ordination, and a life of service in the diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh beckoned. Gray’s decision to move to Scotland, rather than, as would have been the usual expectation, return to London, seemed to indicate the desire for another decisive break with the past (although it is worth noting that his father was Scottish). It would, however, be too simple to conclude that Gray swapped something which he had come to realise was ‘artificial’ for something that he saw as ‘real’. As Hanson noted, Gray showed a subtle ability to integrate his decadent style, his homosexuality and his earlier literary interests into his clerical life.57 Gray began to blend a sense of extreme privacy with kindness and sociability. In his writing, he drew on a variety of influences, both decadent and modernist. Artificiality, as noted in Chapter 2, was one element in the decadent persona. It is evident from the eyewitness accounts of his friends that Gray never lost the sense of artificiality in his manner. Indeed, it seems to have become more pronounced as the years went on. Anson remarked that his face became ever more like Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa, ‘older than the rocks among which he sits; like the vampire he has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave’.58 It seems that Gray took refuge within a highly formalised Catholic persona, and yet it also appears that underneath it, Gray had a strong kindly and practical streak. He had an aptitude for designing, making and mending things, which was very likely a consequence of his having been an apprentice metal turner. ‘Last night I said a Hail Mary and invented a switch for electric light’, he wrote to Raffalovich from Rome on 21 May 1900.59 His diary for 1903, when he was curate in the very deprived Cowgate area of central Edinburgh, reveals that he was regularly buying tools – the likelihood is that this was in order to do odd jobs, as he gained a reputation for mending things for parishioners.60 Another means by which Gray incorporated his past into his present was with his carefully recorded Mass intentions. In 1907 and 1908, for example, he said Masses for the souls of Verlaine, Huysmans and Beardsley. He also remembered Swinburne (who was still alive), Arthur Symons (who was in a lunatic asylum)

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and Michael Field (with whom he was much occupied, and who he always treated in his diary as if they were a single individual). His default position, however, was to say Masses for Andre´ Raffalovich and for Florence Gribbell, Raffalovich’s long-time friend, who presided over his domestic arrangements.61 The connecting thread between Gray’s decadent past and his clerical present was his relationship with Raffalovich. Their correspondence reveals that it was full of affection and gentle humour, but over the years it became transmuted into a type of exquisite formality that their friends found ‘a constant source of wonder’. Edwin Essex, OP, noted that Never for a moment did they appear to relax into the free and easy communication of old friends. Whenever they met, as they did almost daily, it was as though they had been parted for months. The sight of them greeting each other, with what looked like a detached, impersonal interest, was a thing to marvel at.62 Anson too commented on the public formality of their relationship in their Edinburgh years, ‘so aloof and detached [. . .] Had a complete stranger been present, his impression would have been that these two men were hardly more than acquaintances.’63 It seems that this was more than just a ‘front’ put on when they appeared in public together. In a rare moment of self-disclosure, Gray told Essex that he knew people thought he was cold and unduly reserved – but it was a form of self-defence: ‘If I were to relax for a single moment, only God knows what might happen to me.’64 Constant emotional repression – for which the only release mechanism seems to have been writing religious poetry – appears to have been the price Gray paid for his earlier association with Wilde, in a world in which there was enormous hostility to open displays of (male) homosexuality. One of Raffalovich’s major publications had been 300 pages on the subject of how homosexuals should conduct themselves, Uranisme et Unisexualite´: E´tude sur Diffe´rentes Manifestations de l’Instinct Sexuel (Paris, 1896).65 It was written in French and published in France in order to avoid the risk of prosecution in Britain. His major thesis was that homosexuality was an

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orientation with which some people were born, and that this should be met with tolerant understanding, not prejudice. But he went on to argue that only the ‘inferior’ type gave into the instinct. The ‘superior’ type eschewed sexual activity in favour of artistic activities and intellectual and spiritual friendships. His views would have found ready sympathy within the Catholic Church, to which he had converted (nominally from Judaism) in the same year that Uranisme et Unisexualite´ was published. Indeed, Frederick S. Roden argues that Raffalovich’s views on homosexuality were almost indistinguishable from those being expressed by the Roman Catholic Church in the USA in 2000; he suggests that a Catholic theology of homosexuality began to emerge through Raffalovich, following the articulation of homosexuality as an identity.66 Raffalovich was particularly condemning of homosexual activity, and of the ‘corruption of youth’ which he attacked in his publication L’Affair Oscar Wilde in the previous year. In the light of his own ‘rescue’ of Gray from Wilde’s influence, and subsequent devotion to him, this was quite explicable. Roden, who provides a detailed and sympathetic discussion of Raffalovich’s views on homosexuality, and his significance as a hitherto neglected figure, points out that as a foreign Jew associated with homosexual scandal (he had fled abroad during the Wilde trials) it would have been unrealistic to expect him to go further than he did.67 It seems that Raffalovich and Gray were attempting to provide a model for Christian homosexual relationships as they believed they should be: religiously orientated, highly committed, long-term, celibate manifestations of an orientation that was just beginning to be publicly recognised, but for which there was little public sympathy. Hanson, who is unsympathetic to Raffalovich, suggests that Gray’s acceptance of Raffalovich’s advocacy of celibacy was a sign that his own attitude to sex ‘was tinged with fin de sie`cle ennui’.68 Certainly, he does not seem to have found the acceptance of clerical celibacy a difficult matter, and he threw himself into the types of cultural and social activities that Raffalovich recommended. After Raffalovich and Florence Gribbell moved to Edinburgh in 1905, he and Gray lived about half a mile from each other, and over several decades the three of them demonstrated to Edinburgh society what a

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cultured, inclusive, internationally orientated and highly sociable Catholicism could look like. Raffalovich entertained on an extensive scale people of all types at his home in Whitehouse Terrace, and established a salon somewhat reminiscent of the one that his mother had had in Paris; Miss Gribbell was hostess, and ensured that food and service were always impeccable. Raffalovich, like Gray, was a Dominican tertiary, and the theological tone of both his home and of the nearby St Peter’s church was set by the constant flow of Dominican preachers, who came up from England to join them every Sunday. There was also a professional group of singers at St Peter’s – again paid for by Raffalovich – and no religious tests were applied to the musicians.69 Raffalovich himself spent a great deal of time on his personal and public devotions, and evidently regarded the cultivation of his spiritual life, which was partly manifested in his constant hospitality, as of the utmost importance. When he entered the Scots College, Gray had told his friend Pierre Louy¨s that he would never write again. This turned out to be far from the case. In his early years in Edinburgh, he edited the Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley and wrote verse to be performed by the children of his parish for tableaux vivants. Then he stopped: from 1908, when he sent a Christmas poem to ‘the Michael Fields’, he wrote nothing until 1921, when he embarked on a final burst of productivity, which lasted until his death.70 The 13-year silence seems to have been caused by a combination of the sheer difficulty of finding time to write in a busy parish and a sense that to do so would elicit disapproval from his ecclesiastical superiors, in the aftermath of the formal condemnation of Modernism by Pius X in 1907. The sermon that was preached at his funeral seems to hint at the discouragement that had been given to his writing: ‘The Poet gave way to the Priest [. . .] it is the songs and poems he did not sing that gave him his real, his royal, his priestly greatness [. . .] We are not then remembering John Gray as a poet, but as a priest dedicated to the highest love.’71 Gray had also needed to rediscover his own mature poetic voice, both in order to move away from the homoerotic intensity which had characterised his religious verse in the nineties, and to respond to the rapidly changing literary styles of the 1920s. When he put pen to paper again, he was 55 years old, very well established on the Scottish Catholic scene, and he may well have

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been significantly less concerned about the reactions of the ecclesiastical authorities. He was also in touch with several of the leading literary figures of the period, including John Masefield, Roger Fry and Laurence Housman. A further motivation for his return to productivity seems to have been the founding of the Dominican journal Blackfriars in 1920. Clearly the fledgling monthly would only survive if it received a steady supply of articles, and Gray found that it provided the perfect platform for his work. Furthermore, he found that supporting a Dominican literary enterprise was a natural priority. He published a total of 36 items – poems and articles – in Blackfriars between 1921 and 1934, during which time he established himself as a major figure in twentieth-century Scottish literature.72 His work included both readily accessible devotional material and experimental fiction and prose. In the former category were poems such as Mane Nobiscum Domine (1927) based on the Emmaus story in Luke 24.29–31: Stay with us, Lord, the day is travelled far; we meet thee at its close. Lord, at our humble table sit and share, and be, our sweet repose. Pledge of our hospitality, the bread is broken by thy hands; our quaking love, our most confiding dread beholds and understands. Food of our souls enlightens and updries our darkness and our tears; the breaker and the broken to our eyes is all, and disappears.73 An example of his experimental, playful modernist style – although perhaps still with some decadent influences – can be seen in Dialogue (1928), which was inspired by the recent publication of the final volume of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (now the Oxford English Dictionary) which traced the meanings of words by means of numerous historical quotations. ‘Orange’ is the word which his speakers explore. For this work, Gray played with spelling and language,

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and also adopted the French convention of dashes to indicate changes of speaker, rather than inverted commas, in the manner that would later be favoured by James Joyce. The work begins, Have a norange. 2 Mon premier est un me´tal pre´cieux; Mon second est un habitant des cieux; Mon tout est un fruit de´licieux. 2 Yes; there’s truth in that, and scarcely exaggeration. (John, fetch the N.E.D., article “orange.”) It’s too great, really; too round, too golden, too juicy, too Brangwyn,74 too coster’s barrow, too abundant. 2 Augustine consecrated it in an able image. 2 Looking at it as segments compact in the cortex. We think of it as a bag of juice; a potable lawn-tennis ball. (What’s it say, John?) 2 “Orange, orange, narancia, arancia, naranza, naranaja, laranja; medieval Greek, nerantzion.” 2 Push on. 2 “The fruit of a tree (see sense 2) a large, globose, manycelled berry (Hesperidium) with sub-acid juicy pulp, inclosed in a tough rind, externally of bright reddish yellow colour.” 2 Thattledoo.75 As Patrick Reilly has noted, Gray’s writings show an interesting blend of continuity and innovation. It was, apparently, only copyright difficulties that stopped W.B. Yeats from including Gray in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.76 Gray gave freest reign to his desire to experiment in his extraordinary final work, Park: A Fantastic Story, which was initially serialised in four issues of Blackfriars.77 The work, at 128 pages in the first printing, is too long for a short story and too short for a novel. It is a bizarre fantasy with science fiction elements, including invented language and strange shifts in time and space. Mungo Park, a 59-year-old priest and seminary professor who in physical and psychological description is clearly based on Gray himself, goes out for a walk near Oxford, falls down and finds himself somehow transported into another world. He is held

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hostage by the Wapami, a race of black Roman Catholic priests who are in charge of Ia, the country that used to be England. The English language has died out, and he converses with his priestly captors in Latin, until he learns their language. He discovers that they live a primitive pastoral existence, in a deeply flawed, authoritarian utopia/dystopia. Below ground lives a rodent-like race of white men, in a state of moral degeneration. After a great deal of mutual suspicion, the Wapami finally accept that Park, the only white man above ground apart it seems from the bishop, is himself a priest, and they accept him into their society. But it is clear that Park has lost his true self, and remains in a state of resignation, unhappiness and enigmatic puzzlement. Attending Mass and having a daily bath are his only consolations, perhaps because they are the only things directly transferable from his previous experience. Then, just as abruptly, Park awakens on the Oxford Road near Burford, having had some sort of collapse, or perhaps a dream. Park is a profoundly alienating tale, brimming with psychological and cultural markers and contemporary literary references, but it defies easy analysis.78 Gray’s own explanation, in a letter to Edmund Blunden, was that it was ‘the man stumbling in his dream upon the chance of vengeance & the free expression of repressed ambitions, yet dogged all the time by the obstacles of his waking life’.79 The work was almost completely ignored until it was reprinted in the 1960s, at a time of renewed interest in Gray. Hanson is surely correct when he suggests that the story’s theme of ‘submission towards the religious sublime’, coupled with its almost obsessive interest in the ritual and ornamentation of the Catholic Church, indicates that Gray never lost his characteristic decadent preoccupations.80 That said, the work also shows the influence that writers such as H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster had had on him, and the style is often reminiscent of terse modernism.81 It reveals Gray in all his complexity, and as a man who had travelled far since the 1890s, while at the same time retaining elements of his decadent self.

CHAPTER 5 ‘HERETIC BLOOD’ AND CATHOLIC CONVERSION

KATHARINE BRADLEY AND EDITH COOPER: MORE PAGAN, MORE CATHOLIC We have seen that for John Gray, the multiple processes of conversion – from prote´ge´ of Oscar Wilde, to religious poet, to Catholic priest, and finally to modernist writer, were complex and multi-layered. This was equally true for his friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, ‘the Michael Fields’. They were the aunt and niece partnership who had been writing since the late 1880s as Michael Field, and assumed that identity in private and among friends – Bradley was known as ‘Michael’ and Cooper as ‘Henry’. The two women and their poetry and plays are now the subject of much scholarly interest, particularly in respect of their lesbian sexuality, their feminism, their use of classical subjects and increasingly their Catholicism. Continuing with the themes that were explored in the last chapter, the focus of this chapter is on the conversions of these two women, which occurred at the outer limit of the long fin de sie`cle, in 1907. An important source for this is their own account of events as they took place, which they recorded in their diary entries. The conversions of both women, although particularly Bradley’s, were nurtured by John Gray. Indeed, between 1906 and 1914 Gray became closely associated with both women; they became, after Raffalovich, a second connecting thread between his decadent past and clerical present. It was natural that both as poets and as women of unconventional

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lifestyle, Bradley and Cooper should turn to Gray, with whom they had several friends in common, and whose poetry they admired. As Emma Donoghue put it, ‘With his discreetly homoerotic side, he was the perfect bridge between two pagan lesbians and an institution they had been raised to loathe: the Roman Catholic Church.’1 Although Gray and Field had admired each other’s work in the early nineties, they had never met, which is slightly curious in view of the number of mutual friends they had in common. Gray is likely to have been the author of one of the few positive reviews of Michael Field’s first openly lesbian work, Long Ago (1889), which he described as ‘one of the most exquisite lyrical productions of the latter half of the nineteenth century’.2 Gray was finally introduced to Katharine Bradley by the artist Charles Ricketts in January 1906, and in September of that year, both women travelled to Edinburgh to see him.3 From this point they both began to explore actively the possibility of conversion to Rome, although they could not accept much of Catholic orthodoxy or Catholic culture. Their most noted departure from theological orthodoxy was the status they gave their recently deceased dog, Whym Chow. They promoted him to the status of both their guardian angel and the third person and male principle in their personal trinity, their ‘living Flame of Love’, a term which, as Frederick S. Roden notes, may have been inspired by the language of John of the Cross.4 In order to understand this, the role of the dog in their pre-Catholic ‘pagan’ period has to be appreciated; they had declared themselves officially pagan in 1897, although it is not entirely clear that they saw this as totally precluding their earlier faith positions, which had been Anglicanism and rationalism.5 In their pagan phase the dog was their ‘Bacchic cub’, whose place was to sit like a little lion at the foot of the Bacchic altar they had set up in the garden of their home in Reigate; this became an altar to Dionysus when they moved to Richmond. Rather than simply being a canine companion, they perceived him as being an intercessory deity in animal form, a view from which they never seem to have wavered. Both Bradley and Cooper were classical scholars and heavily immersed in classical texts; the plays that they wrote were brimming with reference to pagan deities, and their pagan worship

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had been a natural development from that interest. Camille Cauti has explored further the extent to which they incorporated their classical paganism into their Catholic faith.6 Meanwhile, Marion Thain remarks that their earlier poetry repeatedly used pagan trinities in celebration of Bacchus, in order to symbolise the women’s love for each other.7 She suggests that the trinitarian transmutation into the Christian ‘Trinity of Love’ may have been aided by a late nineteenth-century interest in Augustine. His De trinitate was translated in 1887, and it emphasised the internal structure of the Trinity as love, lover and beloved. Bradley and Cooper’s interest in this understanding, and their application of it to themselves, may also have helped the women to ease anxieties about the too-close, incestuous nature of their relationship. It seems that the Father and Son imagery within the Trinity could be readily transposed for aunt and niece, together with the imagery of lover and beloved. On this analogy, the spirit of their deceased dog acted as the Holy Spirit, their Flame of Love, and the whole became a ‘defensive gesture’ as they sought to accommodate themselves to the Catholic Church, and to de-sexualise their relationship.8 Roden also provides a sympathetic discussion of the Christian theological meaning that they ascribed to their dog: ‘Bradley and Cooper’s “canine Catholicism” is an aspect of their devotion that makes them unusual, but hardly worthy of the ridicule that this potentially absurd faith might elicit.’9 He suggests that it allowed the women to downplay the physicality of a male saviour (something which, as we have seen, was highly important for mystic and homosexual Catholic poets) and to avoid ‘the standard heteroerotic trope of bridal mysticism’; rather than being brides of Christ, they were able to present themselves to God as mothers and joint lovers of the animal.10 The fact that the dog had died before they converted to Catholicism simply enhanced his spiritual potency. It seemed immensely significant to the women that Whym Chow became very ill on the day that Bradley met John Gray. After several days of nursing the dog, she concluded that his condition was hopeless, and decided to end his life herself, which seems curious in view of the fact that a vet was available, and that as an anti-vivisectionist she was noted for her opposition to animal cruelty. Her action meant that for the rest of her life she bore the

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sense of having sacrificed the creature she loved most, her own ‘son’. ‘I was nearly 5 hours seeking to quench that too sturdy life’, she recalled later in a letter to Gray; finally she went to the vet. This evidently highly traumatic incident is glossed after the event in directly religious terms: the dog was offered in sacrifice, the sacrifice was accepted, the dog became her intercessor and ‘we three Henry & Whymmie & Michael were accepted – to reflect as in a dark pond – the Blessed Trinity – ’.11 She recalled that after the dog’s life had been finally ended by the vet, she ‘came home & took down the candles from the altar to the Trinity – & was left – oh – a very brief while – without God’. The dog was then buried ‘at the foot of the altar of Dionysos in the garden – we were able to pray – & to ask God to accept that sacrifice’. She concluded, ‘There is deeply, heretic blood in me – and I pray [. . .] that I may be cleansed to receive thy mysteries.’12 At this point the women had both pagan and Christian altars in their home, and were thinking within a fusion of both religious cultures. The idea of sacrifice was a crucial linking concept. The death of Whym Chow was a sacrifice to God, and so too was Christ’s sacrifice as enacted in the Roman Mass. Mary Sturgeon, the earliest biographer of Michael Field, reported that Edith Cooper made the decision to convert after reading the Missal, and exclaiming, ‘This is sacrifice: from this moment I am a Catholic.’13 The notion that the dog became their spirit guide also seems to connect with contemporary Spiritualist ideas. It would be interesting to know what Gray made of Bradley’s letter. What we do know is that he always answered her letters promptly, and that over the rest of her life, a further seven years, they developed a very close friendship. As Jerusha McCormack puts it, ‘none of his parishioners would have guessed that their cool, aloof Father Gray had embarked on a final, great intimacy’.14 The women wrote a joint diary between 1888 and 1914, which runs to 29 volumes. The diary entries for the early part of 1907 reveal more about how the women visualised their transition from paganism to Catholicism via the mediation of Whym Chow, and also evidence in support of the idea that their Roman conversion drew them closer to, rather than away from, the world of literary decadence. When they write about their experience of attending an Epiphany service, both use ‘jewel’ language which is heavily reminiscent of the style of Pater, Huysmans and Wilde, but also

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appropriate for the Three Kings and their gifts. Bradley wrote, ‘Behold, it is the Feast of the Epiphany and the Wise Men at their Wisest. King Caspar but this is a wonderful gift – not a thing, a living creature, a flower that has to open, [but] a jewel that will emit more light’.15 Cooper wrote, Such a time Epiphany – the very jewel-secret of the Feast striking out [. . .] An austere young priest chiselled in mind as a bit of chalk-down in form – with sweet eyes safe away from the world, preached the Event – the starting of the Wise Men in what seemed the foolishness of faith – the Discipline of the journey, the Star guiding and leading them; the sureness at arrival, the star set over the attained goal [. . .] He spoke of what they beheld – the Mother and Child – Catholics are condemned for adoring. The Nativity was the Incarnation for the World – the Epiphany for us, and to Converts (he said with a deeper accent of voice) ‘Epiphany must be time of great joy’ because they too had been guided by a star. Truer than he knew the saying! Though we are Bacchic wanderers into this world of the highest and most perfect symbols where the chalice is of salvation. We have been led there by the Star of our lives and a star ‘in Oriente’ our Whym Chow, the light of our hearts, our spirits, our religion our imaginations – Whym Chow, our Eastern Joy!16 Edith Cooper found the Church that she was preparing to join, and its clergy, both exotic and exasperating. She described a French Dominican whom she encountered conducting a retreat at the Star of the Sea convent in Rottingdean as ‘in spotless hood, [his] rhetorical voice is trained as elaborately as his sacerdotal gestures. The face is a work of discipline. The English of his vernacular prayers reminds one of a “curly green”. Our mother-tongue rolls its edges into a fantastic heap.’17 She was equally enchanted by a ‘deliciously pagan’ ceremony at the convent in honour of the feast of St Joseph (in which she clearly saw herself as an observer, rather than a participant). ‘They sang round St Joseph and squirted him with water.’ She was intrigued too by the assembled gathering of whiteclad Dominicans and black-veiled nuns, and wondered if ‘the strange lightening stroke of sex moved unseen through these

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neighbours’.18 Often, however, the diary reveals the frustration and annoyance of both aunt and niece with the clergy, and their expectations. They were annoyed by arriving too early for Benediction at their church in Richmond, and by doing so Encounter a tiresome discourse on Examination of Conscience – an exercise as sterilising to us as Baccanites of the Holy Grail, as to play finger exercises or to begin Latin with Conjugations instead of Virgil [. . .] no religion results from such trivialities as no music or poetry could be attained, save from beginning with the great powers themselves [. . .]19 Also vexing was John Gray’s gift of a volume of prayers collected by Francis Gasquet, who was Abbot-President of the English Benedictine Congregation: The action is unfortunate [. . .] We don’t want prayers of private devotion, we who are of the universal ritual of wheat & grape [. . .] It is difficult even for Father Gray to understand we have been trained in Latin & had the widest and most exacting discipline in the philosophic thought of the ages.20 It is clear from their letters and diaries that Gray had a deeper involvement with the conversion of Bradley than with that of Cooper. It is an interesting feature of the relationship between these two women, who had for years worked with a single textual identity and engaged in every activity together, ‘in what seems a perfect orgy of togetherness’,21 that at this crucial moment in their lives they sought the ministrations of different priests. Bradley relied initially on Gray, and then on the Dominican Vincent McNabb. Cooper sought advice for the whole of her Catholic life from the priest named in the diary as ‘Fr Goscannon’, who was the curate of their parish, St Elizabeth’s Richmond.22 It is possible that conversion was part of a bid on the part of Edith Cooper to establish a slightly more separate and independent identity. According to Virginia Blain, religious meditation not only provided her with ‘a place of solitude’ within the relationship, but adopting the new faith also gave her a context for giving up the sexual relationship with her aunt, which she was finding

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increasingly problematic and guilt-ridden.23 Although both women had been engaged in preparing to join the Catholic Church in the closing months of 1906, to the very great shock of Bradley, on 19 April 1907 Cooper decided to take the step independently, and was received quite suddenly, it appears without Bradley’s knowledge. Her already fragile mental state was thrown into crisis. When told the news she exclaimed, ‘But this is terrible! I too shall have to become a Catholic!’24 She wrote to Gray, ‘it cost much for us – who are one poet – thus to break in twain’.25 It was therefore with a sense of urgency and suspense that the women set off for Edinburgh in late April 1907. Bradley announced in the diary, ‘I will not quit Edinburgh save a member of the Catholic Church!’26 In Edinburgh, their lives revolved around Bradley’s daily instruction with Gray, and their joint attendance at Mass at St Peter’s, Falcon Avenue, which had only just opened. Alone in their hotel room for hours on end, Cooper wrote detailed accounts in the diary. She was struck by the significance of four (or was it three?) of the literary figures of the nineties, all gathered around the altar of the brand new church in suburban Edinburgh: At Low Mass, the Celebrant, the author of Silverpoints: in one row Michael Field & Raffalovich, who thought he was writing to a boy of his own age when he wrote to the author of Callirrhoe¨ [Michael Field’s first book] more than 20 years ago. Think of it! And all of us before a Roman Altar in adoration.27 On Sunday after Mass, they were invited to dine with Raffalovich and Miss Gribbell, where they broke the ice by talking about the garden and had ‘a good dinner’. The conventional formalities of the gentlemen withdrawing after the meal were observed, and Edith later wrote, When the men come back to the Drawing room Father Gray soon leaves to teach the Catechism. He holds my hand as St Peter his Key. I am a received Catholic. And Andre´ by me begins to talk of the animate[?] Catholicism of Pater, – how Marius is read by a French Dominican Father as a book of Devotion every year. Quite simply as people speak of a

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change of government we talk of the change of our former [?] Paganism into Catholicism. Raffalovich spoke too very strikingly of sin – the great path to God, but when it has brought us to God, we must remember it stops or it would lead us away, away from God.28 This passage lends some substance to the view that Cooper viewed her conversion as a means of separating from Bradley. At this point, she is ‘a received Catholic’ with a strong sense of being as ‘special’ as the key of St Peter; Bradley is still in the ‘lost’ realm of the pagan. She must have known, of course, that it would not be long before her ‘Beloved’ would follow her. On the following day she told Gray that she was ‘longing for Michael to join me and now I am going to pray for it’; perhaps the loss of equilibrium in their relationship was too much for her to bear. Raffalovich’s comments are interesting too, both his desire to venerate Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a religious text, and his comments about the ‘usefulness’ of sin, coupled with the idea that in God it comes to a dead end. Both seem wholly characteristic of Raffalovich’s approach to faith. It is evident that they all enjoyed sharing anecdotes about the venerated Pater; Gray relieved the tension when instructing Bradley by ordering ‘buttered toast [as he] would order for a man’ and telling her that the ‘Miss Paters had to leave their old house, because Walter had been laid out on the Dining Table.’ This ghoulish little story (which does not appear to have been strictly true, although it is possible, as he did die on the staircase) was relayed to Cooper, who commented, ‘My gorge rises at this added horror to dear Pater & horrid death.’29 Bradley and Cooper recognised in Pater someone who, like themselves, had been fascinated by the way in which the classical and pagan could shade into the Christian and Catholic. It can be argued that their conversion, and its aftermath, represents one of the concluding episodes in the aesthetic-decadent movement for which he had been largely responsible. It is evident that in the last days of April, and the early days of May 1907, Gray, who was busy with his still partially constructed church, and with establishing a new parish, devoted himself very much to the spiritual needs of Katharine Bradley. On Monday 29 April, Cooper records that

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After Low Mass Fr Gray sends his server to bring Michael into the Sacristy. Kneeling on, I hear the wasp-hiss of his voice (so it sounds afar – wasps at apples) and the bumble-bee sonority of Michael’s. They came as through walls and swish and boom about the High Altar. Every now and then a server or the priest’s servant opens the door and I catch the blue and purple of Michael’s hat and scarf against a black of ‘soutane’. She speaks the saddest convictions of her self-questionings in the ear of choir-boys, or carpenters, Fr Gray standing before her biretta in hand. She is to go to him for Instruction at 4. He says ‘Go home and have a little lunch and a smoke, and then begin again.’ He is anxious.30 Writing to Gray before the visit, Bradley had told him that she could not manage self-examination: ‘I dare not chafe and wrong my nature by introspection. I dare not look over the years of pardoned sin – wiped out of God and force them again to burn scarlet.’31 It seems that she resolved the issue by cultivating a sense of abject submission; on Ash Wednesday, she had written in the diary, ‘Christ rides down to die for me. I lie beneath the hoof of his ass – the dust of my mortality is all His new love changed’.32 This attitude fits closely with Hanson’s evocation of the submissive gesture in the decadent approach to Catholicism. It became coupled with what appears to be an overtly simplistic approach to her new faith. In a lettercard sent to Gray on 6 June 1907, she wrote, ‘I read my penny catechism. I rejoice in it more and more.’ She then repeated some of its clauses, like a child in a catechism class, as if to affirm her obedience to its simplicity.33 Both Cooper and Gray found this strategy surprising. Cooper wrote in the diary on 30 April, ‘Fr Gray is astonished to find Michael submissive to the Church’s authority [. . .] I am astonished she is docile as I never could be’.34 Despite bursts of enthusiasm when recording her devotion at Mass, Cooper herself seems to have felt depressed and uncertain for much of her time in Edinburgh. One particularly forlorn entry reads, Quite alone and having received no welcome from the Faithful [. . .] I sit for hours while Michael is out, hating the

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unnatural life that begins with each daily[?] Strain to go to Low Mass and consigns me to nothing but the Holy Roman Church – and no lay duties, or no plastic work, nothing but regret from creative hours that no longer come and for secret adoration of the one mystery the one Church has for her pearl of great price.35 She made her second communion while in Edinburgh, but found it marred by nervousness, faintness, hunger and intense thirst, ‘feeling in flesh like a dug up body’.36 At this early point after her own reception, she wrote on several occasions of experiencing ‘satanic lures’ and of feeling that she was imprisoned. The women paid a visit to the Poor Clares in Edinburgh, and were told of one nun who had had to leave because she found the life so restricting, and was like a ‘poor chained tiger’, according to the abbess. Cooper exclaimed in the diary, ‘Dear chained tiger! I felt she was my sister!’37 But she also experienced moments of spiritual intensity and peace. In early May she wrote, ‘This sweet day brings my love and me very close – the deep secret of our bond is of SS Monica and Augustine at Ostia.’ Significantly, the reference is to the mother– son relationship of Augustine and Monica, and their vision at Ostia, in which they have an intimate spiritual conversation and a vision of eternity shortly before Monica’s death.38

‘OUR LIFE MUST BE A PALIMPSEST’: BRADLEY AND COOPER POST-CONVERSION Bradley was baptised shortly before Ascension Day, 1907, and unsurprisingly took the name Michael. Although they were in many respects an unusual couple, Marion Thain notes that Bradley and Cooper were actually quite typical of a certain type of convert of this period, being educated, articulate, fairly wealthy and well connected.39 As women, their relationship was less vulnerable to public scrutiny, and not subject to legal censure.40 Their Catholic phase, from 1907 until their deaths in 1913 and 1914, lasted for only about a quarter of their writing career. Post-conversion, they wrote poetry which explored Christian themes, but which emphasised their continuing love for each other (and for Whym Chow) and subtly maintained their pagan preoccupations. They

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became interested in the task of ‘writing over’ their earlier life, subsuming it into their new Catholic narrative rather than erasing it or denouncing it. The poem ‘Palimpsest’, written at the time of their conversion, is concerned with this process: The rest Of our life must be a palimpsest – The old writing written there the best. [. . .] Let us write it over, O my lover, For the far Time to discover41 With an uncanny sense of reality imitating art, a few years after the publication of the collection in which this poem appears, Wild Honey from Various Thyme, Bradley and Cooper made a literal palimpsest out of the book, in order to present it to the Prior of Holy Cross (this was Vincent McNabb, OP). In his presentation copy, the most explicitly pagan poems have either been crossed out or replaced with new Christian poems, written in manuscript and pasted over the top.42 Bradley and Cooper clearly wanted to offer their work to a new Catholic audience, but in a re-edited and expurgated form. Indeed, Bradley told Gray that ‘Now the Church has welcomed the Honeybook [. . .] it seems to me every Catholic I meet loves it.’43 Thain provides a detailed exploration of the way in which Bradley and Cooper retain some of the central symbols and images that were crucial to their pagan poetry, ‘writing them over’ in order to invest them with Christian meaning. Such symbols include the bee, which featured significantly in their Wild Honey collection, and which appears again in a post-conversion poem, ‘The Bee’, in which the insect is honoured as the maker of fine wax for lightgiving church candles.44 The poem recalls the words of the Exultet (an Easter hymn), in which the bee is celebrated for its pure fine wax. It is possible that Bradley and Cooper may also have been familiar with Clement of Alexandria’s reference to a theologian gathering nectar in the manner of a honey bee, and with the bee as a symbol of virginity. In another bee poem, which is also a hymn phrase, ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ (published in the Poems of Adoration

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collection), an analogy is made between the lush image of a bee penetrating deep into a rose and the penetrating gaze of the eyes of the believer on the wounds of Christ, ‘feeding’ on them in the manner of the bee on the rose. Again, this poem appears inspired by the liturgy, the title ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ (Fill with the higher grace) taken from the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus (which is concerned with the Holy Spirit, and seemingly not directly relevant to the poetic subject matter). Yet, as Thain points out, the Catholic liturgical references are skilfully balanced by the use of decadent language – the redness of the rose (an erotic image) coupled with the redness of the blood – in a manner reminiscent of Pater’s ‘hard, gem-like flame’ in his conclusion to The Renaissance. This is seen in the second stanza: Give me finer potency of gift! For Thy Holy Wounds I would attain, As a bee the feeding loveliness Of the sanguine roses. I would lift Flashes of such faith that I may drain From each Gem the wells of Blood that press! She also suggests that this style of writing shows the influence of Gray’s Spiritual Poems, which in translations such as Paulus Gerhardt’s ‘St Bernard. To the Stabbed Side of Jesus’ had featured an ‘unflinching fetishisation’ of Christ’s wounds, in the homoerotic, decadent style. This, as we saw in the previous chapter, was also a feature of his poem on St John of the Cross in that collection. Thain reads ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ as an example of the two women taking on a male decadent homoerotic trope, and making it their own.45 Thus, far from becoming marginalised from their fin de sie`cle past, they become ever more truly decadent, acknowledging the polyvalent influences in their past, while celebrating and exploring the new vocabulary given them by Catholicism. A further intriguing feature of their conversion is that for the first time since they began writing together as Michael Field in the 1880s, they began to write more separately. Their new faith seemed to strengthen their identities as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and to weaken their dual identity as Michael Field. In their post-conversion work,

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Poems of Adoration was mainly written by Cooper, while Mystic Trees was mainly written by Bradley, although both appeared under the Michael Field name. Both volumes deal with some of the conventional subjects of Catholic devotion – and the Virgin Mary in particular – but as both Ruth Vanita and Frederick S. Roden have shown, the subjects are treated from a distinctively lesbian standpoint – it is Mary who is sometimes eroticised, and Christ who becomes transmuted into a female figure.46 Another volume, Whym Chow: Flame of Love, was the work of Bradley, written in 1906 when they were on the point of conversion, although not published until after Cooper’s death in 1914. It presents the dog as the symbol of perfect love: spiritual, mediatorial, divine and yet material.47 Poem V encapsulates how the canine trinity had functioned, and provides an apologia for it: I did not love him for myself alone: I loved him that he loved my dearest love. O God, no blasphemy It is to feel we loved in trinity, To tell Thee that I loved him as Thy Dove Is loved, and is Thy own.48 It was clear that Bradley and Cooper had become Catholics very much on their own terms, and that they were confident that the vast devotional and theological tradition to which they now had access would satisfy them emotionally, spiritually and poetically. They continued to write steadily, and they remained completely uninhibited about expressing on paper the intensity of their desires. They devoted the rather brief remaining chapter of their lives to a deep exploration of their Catholic faith. Like other female Catholic convert writers of this period, they tended to rely heavily on the guidance of priests.49 Bradley cultivated relationships with a number of clergy, particularly the Dominican Vincent McNabb,50 who became her confessor. She seemed to crave clerical approval, and was always anxious for visits and blessings upon their home. She maintained a very extensive correspondence with Gray; they clearly had a deep sense of mutual understanding. Sometimes they wrote to each other poet to poet, and about mutual friends from the nineties. She could be gently supportive,

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in a bid to encourage him back to literary productivity: ‘I will forgive anything, if you will return and be a poet.’51 There were, however, many occasions of strain and misunderstanding, created in part by the physical distance between them, and in part by Bradley’s neediness and tendency to treat every religious issue as a spiritual emergency. Within their religious relationship she seems to have allowed herself to become partially infantilised, hurling her difficulties at him, and demanding ever more help. Her voice veered between that of the wayward (or submissive?) little girl promising good behaviour (‘I will be a good Michael when Abbot Ford calls’)52 and that of the furious adult. She frequently raged at him, usually on account of what she perceived as his insufficient or enigmatic replies.53 Gray, one suspects, must have sighed at the sight of the arrival of yet another letter in her large and loopy handwriting, while simultaneously recognising that this was a relationship second only in significance to that which he had with Raffalovich.54 Cooper wrote to Gray much less, and relied very heavily on the local priest, ‘Fr Goscannon’, whom Bradley despised. She did, however, write to Gray when she received her cancer diagnosis in February 1911, in a letter which blends the tragedy of the situation with the conventional Catholic piety of the period: I am too tired to write much – the shock has been heavy to the much-battered nerves – the agony of a doom that reft Michael and me apart, who have lived a bone-of-bone, a flesh-of-flesh life. This is just to ask you in your charity to join in a Novena in my Intention that begins on Monday. When the specialist was silent I knew the worst, I gripped the little crucifix hidden in my hand. [She goes on explain how she is putting her faith for a cure in violet leaves and Lourdes water.] Your child in the Holy Wounds, Henry.55 Cooper died in December 1913. She was nursed by Bradley, and never knew that Bradley herself was growing steadily weaker following her own cancer diagnosis. Bradley died in September 1914, while dressing to go to Mass. At this point Bradley and Cooper, and the minor poet Michael Field, might have been quietly forgotten, at least until the interest

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in women’s writing and gay sources swept through academia in the late twentieth century. But in the years after their death, the two priests to whom they had been closest, Gray and McNabb, tried to keep their memory alive by honouring their relationship, creativity and theological influence, in publications of 1927 and 1930. Gray did this by offering a particularly pertinent volume in memory of them, in the form of his translation of the prayers of the thirteenth-century saints Gertrude and Mechtilde, published as O Beata Trinitas in 1927. He observed that these female saints – noted for their ecstatic religious visions unmediated by priestly influence – had a 15-year age difference (more or less the same as Bradley and Cooper) and that their two voices ‘cannot be distinguished without minute attention to the text’.56 McNabb’s endorsement came in the form of his introduction to Michael Field’s posthumous collection The Wattlefold (1930). He referred to them as ‘two of the most accomplished minds and souls of the time’, and reverently noted the loving nature of their relationship, and the atmosphere of their home, to which he had been a frequent visitor.57 Thus, rather than being marginalised as batty eccentrics, sexual deviants or heretics, in the interwar years they gained a gentle imprimatur, recommended as Catholic women with a distinctive voice which deserved to be heard more widely.

DECADENCE AND CONVERSION AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE MOMENT The time-limited nature of the decadent period, concentrated as it was in the late 1880s and 1890s and spilling out into the first few years of the twentieth century, meant that the potential for it to be a major stimulus for conversion – or indeed for anything else – was inevitably relatively short lived. It is revealing that when Patrick Allitt discusses famous male converts of the early twentieth century, decadence is not mentioned at all. These men, according to Allitt, converted because they saw Catholicism as the ‘last remaining lifeboat for the citizens of a foundering world’. They also saw the Church as possessing an unassailable form of truth, as well as being life-affirming.58 Hanson makes a similar point when he discusses the converts of the modernist literary movement of the early twentieth century, with their ‘high seriousness’ and

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earnest, doctrinal approach.59 Gray, Cooper, Bradley, Beardsley, Raffalovich, Dowson and the other decadent converts could know nothing of the troubles and crises which a few decades later would act as religious motivations to a younger generation. Nor were they particularly troubled by theological questions. Gray was the only one among this group to have received formal theological training, but it has been suggested that he lacked confidence in preaching, and that this was why he always invited Dominicans to preach on Sunday morning.60 None of the decadent converts shows much evidence of Beckson’s theory that conversion was a bid to embrace ‘binding dogma’ and ‘ancient universal authority’; that appears truer of the converts of the next generation. Those of the fin de sie`cle period were most definitely not, in the words of Holly Laird, ‘surrendering to convention’, but riding one of the final waves of the late nineteenth-century avant-garde.61 The recorded snippets of conversations from around the Raffalovich dining table reveal the extent to which this group felt simultaneously liberated, affirmed, nourished, purified and stimulated by their adopted faith. The conclusion has to be that the motivations of the people discussed in this and the previous chapter were rarely straightforward. Gray went through two phases of conversion, the first his formal reception in February 1890, and the second from early 1893, when he made a conscious turn to religion as he sought to recover from his relationship with Oscar Wilde. Wilde, of course, had also had a long-standing interest in conversion to Rome: he appears to have been closest to doing something about it in April 1878, when he sought out Fr Henry Sebastian Bowden, a priest at the Brompton Oratory. He made an appointment for a further conversation and possible reception a few days later, but when the day came, he sent a package containing a bunch of lilies, but did not appear himself. His reception was ultimately deferred, until he was semi-conscious and a few hours from death in November 1900. It was arranged for him by his friend (another convert) Robert Ross, who located an English-speaking Passionist priest, Cuthbert Dunne, on the grounds that several weeks earlier Wilde had stated his intention to be received ‘before long’.62 Wilde had indeed spent his years of continental exile in a state of increasing obsession with Roman Catholicism, spending his money on

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tickets for papal audiences, while simultaneously declaring that he was not a Catholic, ‘simply a violent Papist’.63 We can never know what sort of Catholic Wilde would have been, if he had converted at an earlier point. He constitutes the prime example of what Hanson describes as the aesthetic conversion ‘perpetually deferred’; the Janus-like individual who is looking both ways, forwards to the Church as the place of aesthetic fulfilment and final rest, and backwards to the complexity of past and present. In contrast, the converts discussed in this and the previous chapter did not defer their conversions. Dowson converted in September 1891, partly under the influence of his friend Lionel Johnson who had done the same thing in June, and probably partly because he thought it would ease his romantic path with Adelaide Foltinowicz, a 13-year-old Polish Catholic. Beardsley took action a year before his death, which, due to his poor health, he had long anticipated; it seems reasonable to suggest that he saw it as a preparation strategy. The exact circumstances surrounding Raffalovich’s conversion are slightly mysterious. In Gray’s own account, written immediately after his friend’s death, it is presented as having occurred very suddenly, and ‘no one can disclose how this came about’. He claimed that Florence Gribbell had been the key influence; she was received sometime in the mid-1890s, when they were living in South Audley Street, London. Raffalovich had at first been unhappy about Gribbell’s action, and there had been a ‘ghastly row’, but he had observed that it did not injure her health, and seemed to suit her.64 The influence of Miss Gribbell in his decision seems entirely plausible, as she held the role of best female friend and surrogate mother to him. Personal contact with the Jesuits in Farm Street, which intersects South Audley Street, seems the most likely explanation for Florence Gribbell’s conversion; this was the church in which Raffalovich was also received. The deeper reasons for Raffalovich’s conversion are not difficult to fathom, however. Homosexual, desiring to be celibate, while at the same time desiring to write about homosexuality and to be seen as an ‘expert’ on it, Raffalovich was also Jewish, deeply cultured and wanted (at this point) to live in London. Given all these circumstances, in the year after the Wilde trials, conversion to Roman Catholicism made perfect sense.65

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For Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper the decision to convert grew from the sense of their shifting paganism coupled with the crisis over the death of their dog – which they felt just as acutely as many people would have experienced the loss of a child. Theirs seems the strangest passage into Catholicism, although the fact that it can be closely reconstructed by means of their private letters and diaries, as well as in their poetry, means that we simply know more about it, and have fuller opportunity to observe the strangeness, than is the case with the others discussed here. There is little doubt, however, that their lives as Catholics gave them much they found deeply satisfying – new rituals, friends and intellectual landscapes, as well as, crucially, a new audience for their work. It also seemed to promise that their love would be everlasting, and that (together with Whym Chow) they would be reunited in heaven, something which became ever more urgent in the face of their rapidly declining health after 1911. They gained great pleasure from their admission as Dominican tertiaries in 1912, which allowed them both to wear rings: ‘the two gold rings & the lovely spousals [. . .] Brides of the Heavenly Bridegroom together.’66 It was another example of the way in which the Catholic tradition could be flexibly reinterpreted to accommodate their own special relationship. All of those discussed here found strategies for incorporating their earlier, ‘decadent’ selves into their Catholic selves. Bradley and Cooper’s presentation of the literal palimpsest of Wild Honey from Various Thyme to Vincent McNabb, OP, was perhaps the most evocative example. For Gray and Raffalovich, it was achieved partly through their shared ardour for the mystical spiritual writers of the most ‘extreme’ type, and particularly John of the Cross, which gave them an intense focus on the physicality of the wounded body of Christ. Raffalovich, as a figure well known for his generosity and sociability in the London cultural scene of the nineties, found it easy to transfer these qualities into his life in Edinburgh, and his hospitality and philanthropy became a form of religious vocation, blending easily with his attendance at daily Mass and his regular periods of meditation. He was very well read in devotional works, but his house was also strewn with French and German novels, and he kept up with the continental literary reviews. He displayed almost every edition of Huysmans’s works

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that had ever been printed, and had a shelf devoted to medical and psychological treatises on homosexuality (mainly in German).67 It seems that Raffalovich simply became a Catholic version of his former self, without the need to resort to the elaborate concealment and mask-wearing that became ingrained into the character of John Gray. Gray kept his ‘decadent’ books, but turned them to face the wall. Both men, of course, long outlived the fin de sie`cle, and had to make some adaptations to the twentieth century. It was noted, however, that Raffalovich’s home retained much of the atmosphere of a vanished era.68 Gray, by contrast, in his compact, newly built presbytery, was perhaps more able to embrace the modern world. As a busy cleric, there was a limited extent to which he could afford to live in the past. He also had an active civic role, as a founder of Edinburgh Zoo and within Scottish religious broadcasting. He seemed keen to incorporate modernist elements when he began to write again in the 1920s. There were poems that referred to motor cars and motorists,69 and there was experimental punctuation, spelling and presentation in ‘Dialogue’ and Park. During his late flowering as a prolific writer in the 1920s and early 1930s, his circle extended to include many of the literary figures of the day. Those who read The Times obituary of Canon John Gray of Edinburgh on 19 June 1934 might not have guessed that this man was the reputed model for Oscar Wilde’s Dorian. But that apart, the newspaper provided a well rounded account of his life, alluding to his early life, his ‘verse of real distinction’ and his literary collaborations with ‘his bosom friend the late Mr Andre´ Raffalovitch’ (sic), as well as his more recent literary and civic activities. The obituarist acknowledged the Whitehouse Terrace salon as the joint creation of Gray, Raffalovich and Miss Gribbell: ‘at their hospitable table one could always find the most interesting people’.70 The obituary was a remarkably unmasked account of some of the elements and influences which had created this most intriguing of individuals. With his death, a significant element within the Catholic-decadent strand of the fin de sie`cle came finally to an end.

CHAPTER 6 LONDON CHRISTIANITY AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

RELIGIOUS CULTURE AND THE FIN DE SIE`CLE SENSIBILITY In the second part of this book, the emphasis shifts away from the religiosity of those who were part of the decadent age, and towards an examination of the steady hum of religion in Britain’s capital city. However, as one of the arguments is about the interrelatedness of the religious cultures and people in late nineteenthcentury London, we will find that quite a few of the people encountered in the first part will reappear. London’s church people were naturally influenced by some of the broader aspects of the fin de sie`cle’s agenda, including new ideas about women, new styles of journalism, new attitudes to poverty and social issues, and new ideas about the significance of the theatre and art. Not surprisingly, different denominations exhibited the influence of the fin de sie`cle in different ways. This chapter illustrates something of the range of religious activity and opinion in London in the 1890s, and argues for the existence of a confident and active Christian landscape in Britain’s capital city. As we have seen in the previous chapters, Roman Catholicism proved most compelling to aesthetes in search of religious conversion. It prepared for them by making its London showpiece, the Brompton Oratory, rich with aesthetic attractions. Consecrated in 1884, it was the largest Catholic church until the opening

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of Westminster Cathedral in 1903. Built in the style of the Italian Renaissance with an impressive dome, the Oratory boasted a wider nave than either St Paul’s Cathedral, or Westminster Abbey. It was guaranteed to give anyone who entered the sense of having been immediately transported from the roaring London street to somewhere cool and tranquil in Italy. Indeed, some of its richly crafted fittings were direct copies of Italian pieces, and others were transported and re-erected originals. The building was clearly intended to be a magnet for converts. Henry Sebastian Bowden’s Guide to the Oratory, first published in 1892, assumed no prior knowledge of Roman Catholicism, and carefully explained the nature and meaning of all the ceremonies that were performed in the church, as well as describing the exotic wood inlays, marbles and semi-precious stones and metals used in its fittings and furnishings.1 The building and its Oratorian priests proved to be captivating. The decadent poet Ernest Dowson became a Catholic there in September 1891 and Oscar Wilde almost had in the earlier church on the site in 1878. The Church of England, as it embarked (at least in some parishes) on the high noon of Anglo-Catholic ritualism, was reluctant to be outdone by the sumptuousness of the Oratory. It also opened some stunning new churches, for example the enormous Holy Trinity, Sloane Square (1888 –90) – its nave was also wider than that of St Paul’s – and it was richly designed in the Arts and Crafts style by J.D. Sedding. All of the Nonconformist denominations, or the Free Churches, as they were increasingly thinking of themselves, wanted to ensure that they had a prominent London showpiece. The Baptists had been developing Westbourne Park Chapel and Institute as the centre of their religious and civic activity since the late 1870s. The Salvation Army had taken over an old ice rink, in order to create Regent Hall as their flagship in Oxford Street in 1882. The Wesleyan Methodists were still lacking in grand buildings in the capital city, and turned their attention towards planning a landmark to commemorate the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1898, led by Hugh Price Hughes, they set up their Twentieth Century Fund, which was simultaneously intended to commemorate the centenary of John Wesley’s death and to set Methodism on course for a great forward push into the twentieth century. The Fund aimed to collect one million guineas from one

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million Methodists, with the interesting caveat that no one could donate more than one guinea; it was a bold statement about the equality of believers. The Fund had more than achieved this objective by 1904, when a quarter of a million pounds was set aside for building the enormous domed structure in the Viennese baroque style which became Methodist Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey.2 The Hall was always intended to be multifunctional, and never simply a worshipping space: conferences and artistic, cultural and political events were at the heart of its activities. For the Nonconformist community, the British Weekly, with its subtitle A Journal of Social and Christian Progress, was at the forefront of bringing new modes of thinking to a huge Christian constituency. It began publication in 1886, at a penny an issue, under the editorship of the redoubtable William Robertson Nicoll, who remained a dominating figure in Nonconformist intellectual life until the early twentieth century, in recognition of which he was knighted in 1909. Of equal importance in sustaining the success of the British Weekly was Jane Thompson Stoddart, who worked as assistant editor on the paper from 1890 until 1937, and often took entire responsibility for it during Nicoll’s frequent bouts of illness. Often writing under the byline of ‘Lorna’, she also became the paper’s chief interviewer, at a time when interviews were beginning to become a prominent feature of British weeklies; this was one of the manifestations of the ‘New Journalism’, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, was pioneered by W.T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette. Stoddart’s strong Liberal imperialist politics and sympathies with Christian socialism are clearly evident in the newspaper throughout the 1890s, and they had an effect on shaping Nonconformist thinking.3 In the 1890s, the British Weekly consisted of a mixture of commentary on current events, news items and reports relating to the churches, ‘Current Chat’, which was an up-market gossip column, book reviews, interviews, devotional items, fiction, domestic advice and other items covering a wide range of topics which were thought to be of interest to readers. The printing of small news items from individual churches and about particular ministers tended to create the sense of the British Free Churches as one big, Protestant family in which everyone might know each

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other. Another regular feature in the paper was entitled ‘Doing up the House’, which contained very precise advice about wallpapers, fabrics and colours, new decorating trends and practical suggestions in response to readers’ enquiries. In the ‘Woman’s World’ column, Stoddart liked to feature ‘aspirational’ stories about New Women. This, for example, was about the classical scholar Jane Harrison: Miss Jane Harrison, who has just received the degree of LLD from the University of Aberdeen, is an enthusiastic skater and bicyclist. She is tall and dark, and physically, as well as mentally, conveys an impression of power. Miss Harrison has a pretty flat in London, and her rooms are rich in archaeological treasures. She has spent some time in Athens this spring, busily engaged in explorations.4 ‘Lorna’ went on to note the details of Harrison’s career, as an early student at Newnham College Cambridge, as a researcher at the British Museum and as a popular public lecturer. She unblushingly emphasised Harrison as a role model: ‘Miss Harrison is a model to scholarly women [. . .] and can talk of a new fashion as intelligently as the mythography of an ancient piece of pottery.’ (Indeed, what woman would not aspire to the glamorous and independent lifestyle of Jane Harrison?) In the same column, Stoddart praised Amelia Arnold (an active women’s suffrage campaigner and the wife of the Chairman of the London County Council) as a ‘fluent and ready speaker’ who lived in ‘one of the most artistic’ houses in West London. She then noted that two more fluent public speakers, the temperance campaigners Lady Henry Somerset and Mrs Emma Jane Parker (wife of Joseph Parker of the City Temple), had abandoned the practice of wearing bonnets when speaking in public.5 Jane T. Stoddart’s writings often seemed to have a clear feminist consciousness-raising agenda, and in particular to be reporting the new and fashionable practices in London, in the hope that they might be adopted further afield. The socially progressive tone of the British Weekly is a striking feature throughout the 1890s; from 1899 it even carried regular and prominent advertising for sanitary towels. The contrast with the Church Times, which was in some respects the antithesis of a fin

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de sie`cle newspaper, could not be more striking. It did not engage with ‘vulgar’ new forms of journalism, such as interviews or ‘chat’, and its typographical format remained austere. The Church of England’s high-church weekly spent the decade backing a number of lost or losing causes, including Welsh Church Defence (the unsuccessful campaign to prevent the disestablishment of the Welsh Church), reunion with Rome (which took a blow when Rome issued Apostolicae curae in 1896, condemning the validity of Anglican orders), Anglo-Catholic piety (which it insisted was becoming popular throughout Britain) and hostility to feminism. On the question of the ‘New Woman’, it remained on the opposite side of the fence to the British Weekly, describing her, in the manner of the anti-feminist writers alluded to in the first chapter, as ‘our old friend the Blue-stocking, badly darned, and rather out at heel’ and, when featured in the fiction of the day, as ‘a lop-sided woman [who] runs her poor little sentimental head against the stone walls of nature’s laws’.6 The two major weekly Christian newspapers thus perfectly reflect the wide range of opinion that could be found on the woman question in late nineteenth-century Britain. The Scottish Presbyterian and Congregationalist backgrounds which had formed William Robertson Nicoll and Jane T. Stoddart also proved a particularly fertile environment for producing a number of laymen and ministers who were at the forefront of promoting Christian fin de sie`cle modes of thinking, particularly in relation to social questions. They included the veteran Birmingham Congregationalist R.W. Dale, and A.M. Fairbairn and J.B. Paton, who were both Congregationalist college principals. Fairbairn urged the ethical nature of the Kingdom of God as a more biblically compelling concept than the traditional notion of the ‘church’. Paton had an energetic commitment to working-class education, and an extraordinarily ecumenical and internationalist vision for social reform.7 Other significant Congregationalists included Andrew Mearns, the author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which was the catalyst for social action at the beginning of the fin de sie`cle period; W.T. Stead the newspaper editor, the theologian P.T. Forsyth and Ebenezer Howard, the father of the Garden City movement. The Salvation Army, founded in 1878, was in certain respects a Christian denomination well attuned to some of the elements of

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the fin de sie`cle, although not of course sharing its preference for high aesthetic worship. The Salvation Army was based on much older revivalist principles, but with its language and ceremonial borrowed from contemporary imperialism, it could not have been created in the form that it was either earlier or later. It courted vulgarity, although arguably not in the self-conscious manner of the leading lights of the decadent age. Its commitment to equal roles for women prefigured the New Woman of the 1890s, although equality had been an objective of its founding mother, Catherine Booth, since the 1850s.8 The uniform which Salvation Army women adopted from 1880 – plain dark dress, jacket edged with braid and black straw bonnet – was similar to the style of dress adopted by the ‘advanced’ women of the period, who preferred blouses, plain skirts and jackets on the basis that they were far more practical and less constricting than contemporary fashions. The uniform also conveyed an air of authority and professionalism, which had a transforming effect on the women who wore it, who were almost exclusively from the working class.9 The Salvation Army was strongly indebted to the Holiness Movement: indeed it was the most striking outcome of the Holiness Movement in Britain. It was Holiness theology which made the Salvation Army indifferent to gender, and also to educational and social background. The only thing that mattered was that a person had experienced ‘Salvation’. Other new Christian groups also found the sense of a climate that was partly decaying and partly renewing conducive. William Kay has argued that the ‘borderline zone between fading romanticism and modernism was beneficial to the first Pentecostal believers’ and that the place for emotion that found expression in the fin de sie`cle aesthetics of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater also gave early Pentecostal leaders the social space and personal freedom that they needed in order to flourish.10 This is an interesting acknowledgement of how a change brought about by one cultural trend could influence a religious movement which might have been considered totally alien to it. Kay’s analysis is consistent with David Bebbington’s interpretation of the Holiness Movement as marking a decisive break with the mid-Victorian spirit of self-help that had been encapsulated

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and popularised in the writings of Samuel Smiles. Rather than striving for self-reliance and persevering with life’s daily struggles, Holiness teachers had, from the 1870s, been teaching their adherents to let go of struggle and rest in God. They had also been urging them to seek the state described as entire sanctification, and to adopt a more limited doctrine of sin: only willed disobedience could be seen as sin, although the idea had to be made palatable to Calvinists by the insistence that sin was repressed, rather than removed.11 For Bebbington, the Holiness Movement was about the conscious rejection of simplistic notions of progress and economic growth, whose veneration had led to the sacrifice of the aesthetic and the humane. He argues that the movement bears all the hallmarks of Romanticism and that it is no surprise that from 1875 many of its adherents flocked to Keswick – for their annual convention on ‘practical holiness’ – in the English Lake district, where they were able to commune with the rugged beauty of nature and be inspired by the Lakeland poets. ‘It was as though Wordsworthian pantheism had become an additional article of the Evangelical creed.’12 Thus the Holiness Movement became an important escape route from the harsh reality of the late Victorian urban world. It also represented a decisive introversion of the evangelical subculture.13

STEWART HEADLAM AND CHARLES GORE Stewart Headlam was not typical of the London Anglican clergy of the 1890s, and nor was Charles Gore, so it is important not to regard either man as representative of the clergy as a whole. Headlam was at the forefront of the Christian aesthetic movement, and also a prominent Christian Socialist, which was a common combination of commitments. He was the leading light of both the Church and Stage Guild (founded 1879) and the Guild of St Matthew (founded 1877), which campaigned on social questions with a more radical edge than some other similar organisations, such as the Christian Social Union (founded in 1889). Headlam swam defiantly against the cultural tide by being fanatically antiteetotal – he caused uproar among the clergy in Newcastle by addressing a group of workingmen on the ‘sin caused by wasting good liquor’14 – but his particular priority was to attempt to

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re-educate Christians about the theatre and ballet.15 The founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, noted that ‘as a Scotsman and a Nonconformist, I remember well the shock it gave me that the leading member of the Guild divided his attention fairly evenly between socialism and the ballet’.16 Headlam’s dogged defence of theatre-going and theatre people proved personally very costly, and he was removed from his parish in Bethnal Green in 1878, following Bishop Jackson’s disapproval of his having delivered a lecture on theatres and music halls, in which he praised theatrical entertainment as ‘pure and beautiful’.17 Headlam, who was only 30 at this point, never again held a post in the Church of England. He had, however, sufficient private means to continue to be active at the heart of the Christian aesthetic movement, and to finance his various projects including his newspaper, the Church Reformer, which promoted socialism and kept up a constant pressure on clergy who were thought to be putting their own interests above those of their parishioners. Free from the constraints of being a licensed priest (although Bishop Creighton unexpectedly licensed him in 1898), Headlam was undeterred by ecclesiastical censure. Instead, he told bishops exactly what he thought, and was little concerned for the consequences for him personally.18 Headlam was interested both in the theatre and dance as art forms, and in actors and dancers as people who often suffered prejudice and needed support. He confronted the centuries-old prejudice which Christians had had against theatrical entertainment. In the summer of 1885, he took a delegation of dancers, stage people and like-minded clergy to Fulham Palace to find out exactly what it was that Bishop Temple objected to in the ballet: it turned out to be the costumes, and particularly the flesh-coloured tights, which the bishop felt would prove too arousing for the audience. Headlam’s attempts to move the bishop’s thinking away from the female body and on to dance as an art of motion seem to have been unsuccessful. Some years later, however, he concluded that the fact that Bishop Temple had actually met some dancers at the meeting, and told one of them that he was sure she was ‘a good woman’, might have done something to erode his prejudices. Logically, he felt that the bishop should have condemned her and her profession to her face.19 The prejudices against the theatre that

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were widely held in late Victorian society remained strong and difficult to shift. Headlam’s position in advocating the goodness of something which seemed so self-evidently immoral appeared incomprehensible to many. H.P. Liddon, canon of St Paul’s cathedral and leader of the more conservative wing of the AngloCatholic movement after Pusey’s death, was a prominent clerical opponent of Headlam. Liddon maintained that priests and religious laymen should not attend even the best theatres, and that ‘a dancing priest becomes invested with grotesque associations of which, unfortunately, he cannot rid himself, in the pulpit, or before the Altar’.20 To promote the opposite view, Headlam’s Church and Stage Guild sought to make friends with actors and artists, and to lessen the sense of disapproval from the church. It was always a small organisation: in 1880, after 12 months of existence, it had recruited 470 members, of whom 172 were theatrical members and 91 were clergy.21 John Ruskin and George Bernard Shaw were supporters, as was Ernest Dowson.22 Some potential ‘church’ members were, however, put off by the fact that the Guild was mainly a social rather than a mission organisation. It held dances and get-togethers, and expected its membership to ‘chum up’ to dancers, rather than convert them. Meanwhile, some of the most distinguished actors of the day were deterred because Headlam seemed intent on recruiting dancers and music-hall performers, whom they judged to be inferior.23 The Church and Stage Guild was very much the product of the social and cultural concerns of one segment of late nineteenth-century London. Victor Plarr described its January parties, which always took place in Headlam’s drawing room, as ‘a brilliant and picturesque episode in the crowded artistic life of the early nineties’.24 It faded out in the early years of the twentieth century, according to Headlam’s notes to his biographer, because by then prejudices against the theatre had waned, and friendly relations between clergy and stage people had been established.25 To this extent, then, it marks a fin de sie`cle period of transition between the high Victorian disapproval of Bishop Temple and Canon Liddon, and the fairly rapid acceptance by Christians of the theatre in the early twentieth century. Headlam’s other significant role in the narrative of the fin de sie`cle, and the action for which he is best remembered, is as the

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man who stood bail for Oscar Wilde, and met him and took him to his home on his release from prison two years later. Headlam did not know Wilde particularly well, but his financial independence allowed him to put up half of the bail money – £1,225 – when closer friends were unable to come up with the cash. Headlam quite frequently stood bail to get people out of prison – drunks, open-air speakers and socialists of various types – so his action in relation to Wilde was not without precedent.26 He seems to have acted from a sense that the vast publicity around the case meant that Wilde was being prejudged, but he was well aware of the notoriety that his decision would bring, and he hesitated before finally deciding.27 He escorted Wilde to and from the court during the six days of his trial, and, on 19 May 1897, met him in the early morning on his release from prison, and looked after him at his house at 31 Upper Bedford Place, before Wilde sailed for Dieppe that evening. Wilde’s original plan on release from prison had been to make a six-month retreat with the Jesuits at Farm Street, and from Headlam’s house he sent a note to Farm Street, instructing the messenger to wait for a reply. But the message came back that they could not accept him on the spur of the moment, and that at least a year’s deliberation would be necessary. He was reported to have sobbed bitterly.28 The decision meant that Wilde’s conversion to Rome was yet further delayed, and he embarked immediately on his exile in France.29 Headlam’s courage in assisting Wilde, who had been abandoned by most of his friends and destroyed by the press in the manner of modern celebrity, was considerable. It was typical of his willingness to sacrifice his own reputation in order to support people whom society despised; in 1880, he had been equally controversial when he sent a message of support to the atheist Charles Bradlaugh, when Bradlaugh was briefly imprisoned for defying the House of Commons. Not all members of the Guild of St Matthew shared Headlam’s support for Wilde, and some were horrified by it – membership dropped significantly after 1895.30 But Headlam was what George Bernard Shaw described as ‘a type of clergy peculiar to the latter half of the nineteenth century [. . .] in revolt against the conventional idea of a parson [. . .] they wanted to affirm the joyousness and freedom and catholicity of the Church at every turn’.31 To this end, Headlam could often be guaranteed to do what late Victorian society least expected.

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The most prominent theological influence shaping Headlam, Gore and a large number of other Anglicans of their generation (and indeed some of those who were involved in the Holiness movement)32 was F.D. Maurice. He had been dead since 1872, but was no less significant among those who, as he had, rejected the doctrine of eternal damnation and wished to assert the loving fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Headlam retained a sense of lifelong gratitude to Maurice, whose lectures he had attended at Cambridge, for emancipating him from belief in the popular notion of hell.33 The Maurician influences on his core beliefs – that all were in Christ, that the incarnation unified all things, that there was no distinction between sacred and secular because all work for humanity was God’s work, and all human experience conveyed divine truth – are clearly discernible. But Headlam’s unvarnished socialism, and his enthusiasm for the redistribution of wealth and land reform, went much further than Maurice would have done. Percy Dearmer, a generation younger than Headlam, was also a Maurician, and had acquired his Maurician sympathies from Charles Gore. For Gore and the Lux Mundi circle, incorporating Maurician perspectives had been crucial to the development of their incarnational view of Christianity. Thus F.D. Maurice is the theological influence who hovers most frequently over the Anglican and Protestant theology of the fin de sie`cle. Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, the volume of essays which Gore edited, and which was much reprinted throughout the 1890s, was among the most important theological works of the period. In the view of Paul Avis, its acceptance of biblical criticism, evolution and a Hegelian philosophical outlook injected new dynamism and fresh creativity into English theology, and the agenda it set of asking questions about God’s relationship with the world continued to be influential for the whole of the twentieth century.34 It was the result of a collaborative project, and one of the three innovations brought about by the small group of Anglican clergy that Gore led – the other two being the Christian Social Union (1889) and the Community of the Resurrection (1892). The group, known as the ‘Holy Party’, had developed a strong sense of commitment to each other and to a shared theological enterprise, and a sense of

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freedom arising from their belief that Christianity was a religion focussed on a person rather than on a book. The implications of their incarnational theology fed directly into their commitment to democracy (usually including women’s suffrage) and social justice, and several members, such as Henry Scott Holland and W.J.H. Campion, were at the forefront of church-sponsored work among the poor. Securely rooted in their Christology, they took it for granted that there was value to be found in evolutionary theory, science, socialism and even in other faiths; it is completely characteristic of this strand of Christianity at the fin de sie`cle that it had no qualms about reaching into areas into which it would not have ventured so readily in the high Victorian years. As Gore wrote in the Preface to Lux Mundi, the real development of theology is [. . .] the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age [. . .] shewing again and again her power of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life.35 Some of the older generation of Anglo-Catholics, particularly G.A. Denison and H.P. Liddon, were horrified at what they saw as Gore’s capitulation to liberalism and rationalism and ‘the enthronement of the individual reason as an absolutely competent and final judge of Biblical questions’.36 This they saw reflected in Gore’s views on the limited nature of Jesus’ knowledge and on the allegorical nature of parts of the Old Testament. As the Principal of Pusey House, Gore was expected to uphold the values of the man in whose memory the House had been named, the founding father of the Oxford Movement E.B. Pusey, who had sternly resisted such ideas.37 It became apparent, however, that the older, more conservative Anglo-Catholics had had their day. In the words of Liddon, Lux Mundi became ‘a proclamation of revolt against the spirit and principles of Dr Pusey and Mr Keble’.38 But later it became a sort of manifesto for a new form of liberal Catholic tradition within Anglicanism, although one which was, fundamentally, still fairly conservative.39 Indeed, Gore, who lived until 1932, became steadily less in touch with, and more appalled by,

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the theological avant-garde. But in terms of the 1890s, here was a theological fin de sie`cle tussle being acted out, and one in which, as was the case across so many other areas of life and thought, there was a resetting of the agenda in readiness for the twentieth century. So significant and enduring was Lux Mundi seen to have been that one hundred years after the book was first published, many of the leading figures in late twentieth-century Anglican theology contributed to publications to mark its centenary.40 As a canon of Westminster in the second half of the 1890s, Gore became a much-respected establishment figure, while retaining his radical sympathies: he was passionately committed to socialism (in its late nineteenth-century form), fair trade, votes for women (in Church and State) and was an ardent critic of British concentration camps in South Africa. He was desperately concerned about the plight of Armenian Christians who were being massacred in Turkey, and shared a platform with John Clifford, the leading Baptist preacher of the 1890s, at Clifford’s Westbourne Park chapel to denounce the Armenian atrocities and urge the British government to action. This in itself prompted another revealing moment of ecclesiastical recalibration, when Gore was urged not to participate in the meeting by Richard West, the vicar of the parish in which Westbourne Park chapel was located. He saw Gore’s presence as an intrusion into his parish, which indeed it was, according to church law. Matters were made more sensitive because of Clifford’s trenchant anti-Church of England views: he wanted disestablishment, and was strongly opposed to church schools.41 But for Gore, the important issue was galvanising support for persecuted Christians abroad, not worrying about English interdenominational disputes, which, although he might not have fully appreciated this in 1896, had only a few more years to run in their most acute form. Gore was, in any event, indifferent on the issue of Anglican establishment, which was an extremely unusual position for a senior Anglican at this date. His pragmatic response was that the Baptist chapel was simply the most convenient building, and that the meeting was political, not religious. Gore had no qualms about giving his full backing to the Nonconformist conscience, and afterwards remarked reasonably, ‘I never heard that Dicky West’s flock dissolved in consequence of my visit.’42

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ECUMENISM AND ITS CHALLENGES The unity with which Christians of divergent theological views denounced issues such as the Armenian atrocities was entirely typical of the period. The major Protestant denominations were united by a sense of the need to cooperate on social and on some political questions, and there are numerous examples of church people from previously estranged traditions feeling their way into friendship at this period, often by attending each other’s meetings. Unsurprisingly, this new cooperation occurred first among Nonconformists, and was a driving force behind the establishment of the Free Church Congress in 1892, and the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches in 1896.43 Anglicans and Free church people also began to build networks. In January 1896, the Evangelical Free Churches of South London, which included Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists, gathered to greet and welcome E.S. Talbot, the new Bishop of Rochester. They told him that although they recognised the ‘diversity of judgement’ which existed on the questions which separated them, they were ‘prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with you in the maintenance of the great principles of purity, righteousness and temperance which are held in common by all Christians’.44 In October 1899, a deputation led by the Bishop of Bristol, George Forrest Browne, and consisting additionally of a Baptist, a Wesleyan, a Presbyterian and ‘other members of the Bristol Free Church Council’, attended the Autumn Assembly of the Congregational Union. Bishop Browne declared his pleasure at meeting the chairman of the Assembly, who was ‘another Cambridge man’. He said that at Cambridge (where Browne had spent most of his career) they had learnt how to find friends among those from whom they differed, and to respect opinions honestly held.45 It was an interesting comment on how the post-reform University of Cambridge had been a catalyst in increasing ecumenical understanding. The Church Times protested at Bishop Browne’s participation in the Congregational Congress, but church leaders were getting increasingly impervious to such criticism. Anglican non-participation in such events was increasingly confined only to Anglo-Catholics, who continued to maintain the position that Nonconformists were sinful schismatics.

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In the previous year, the Dean of Canterbury, F.W. Farrar, had presided at a meeting at which Mrs Bramwell Booth spoke on the work of the Salvation Army. He said that he had been sometimes subjected to ‘vituperation’ for his participation at such meetings, but in such matters he only consulted his conscience.46 All this produced a form of proto-ecumenism which was a significant and sometimes neglected forerunner to the developments of the twentieth century. The Congregationalist J.B. Paton advocated Johann Hinrich Wichern’s concept of the Inner Mission (an approach to tackling domestic social problems that had become influential in Protestant Germany), believing that ‘it supplied a platform broad enough for all Christians of whatever denomination to work in united effort’.47 Union on the basis of doctrine or on uniformity of ecclesiastical government was clearly impossible, yet face to face with the sick child, or the homeless outcast of the streets, all Christians were at one with another in their impulse to help and heal and at one in the motive and spirit of their action. In practical, redemptive work, therefore, lay the formula of unity [. . .] In the theology of the heart there were no heretics.48 The benign steamroller of late nineteenth-century Christian activism certainly smoothed out many a doctrinal bump. The sense of unity between denominations was reinforced in the late nineteenth-century religious press, particularly the leading Nonconformist paper, the British Weekly. It was natural, of course, that the British Weekly, as a pan-Protestant paper, should adopt a pacific tone, looking for the good in all religious bodies, and endeavouring to report all Protestant bodies fairly, but it is apparent that its goodwill stretched as far as Roman Catholics. Religious freedom for Catholics was considered to be an important principle to defend, and Catholics were only likely to be criticised if they were seen to be advocating oppressive political strategies, as when the Duke of Norfolk told the pope that it was his ‘prayer and hope’ that the twentieth century would witness the restoration of the papacy’s temporal independence. It was considered that this had been an insult to Italy, one of the few European powers still extending friendly relations to Britain during the Boer War.49 Only

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the Anglican Ritualists were distrusted by the British Weekly, because they were seen as disingenuous. Much of the tension in late nineteenth-century English Christianity centred around Ritualism, and its endless parochial disputes about the manner in which worship was conducted, and the polemical and sometimes violent ultra-Protestant backlash, led by John Kensit.50 But away from that, interdenominational relations were often noticeably friendly. There was, however, one large fly which landed in the ecumenical ointment. This was the papal announcement of the condemnation of Anglican orders, in 1896. In 1890, Charles Lindley Wood, Viscount Halifax, took a holiday in Madeira.51 There he met a Roman Catholic priest, Abbe´ Fernand Portal. Halifax, as President of the English Church Union, was the lay leader of Anglo-Catholicism, and had long advocated the corporate reunion of the Church of England with Rome. Portal was relatively unaware of the position of the Anglican Church, but saw this as a cause which should be championed. The two formed a strong friendship, and set about forwarding the cause within their churches. The pope seemed to view the matter sympathetically, and in April 1895 issued an Apostolic Letter to the English People.52 The Letter endorsed the sense of the English as a people with a special destiny, and congratulated them on their recent attention to solving social questions. Above all, Pope Leo urged their return to the Catholic Church: ‘We turn to you all in England, to whatever community or institution you may belong, desiring to recall you to this holy unity.’ It was of course an invitation that implied the wholesale abandonment of the existing English denominations, and which did not suggest that any negotiation or compromises with Anglicanism were envisaged. It was a position that was clear to The Times leader writer, who suggested that Leo’s letter had been based on his own ignorance of the British situation, and misinformation that he had received about the religious condition of Britain from senior English Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics such as Lord Halifax, who had unrealistically implied that there existed a rosy apprehension of Catholicism among the English people. Any reunion between the churches, The Times declared, would not be possible without a clear indication that Rome was prepared to

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modify its position on matters like the granting of indulgences, the invocation of the saints and clerical celibacy. It concluded that ‘reunion with Rome is at present a mere dream; and Leo XIII has done his best to make this perfectly plain’.53 By the spring of 1895 the secular press had already appeared to grasp that there would be no compromises, and no alteration in Rome’s traditional stance on its ‘separated brethren’, but the Anglo-Catholic Church Times continued reporting the story in a tone of excited optimism. Although it conceded that the pope’s letter ‘makes no proposals [. . .] it does something far better than any mere attempt to open negotiations [. . .] it lifts the whole question of reunion onto a higher level, it places it in an atmosphere outside all human passion and prejudice’.54 In the event, there were to be no negotiations. A papal commission to consider Anglican orders was set up early in 1896, but its members made little progress, remaining divided down the middle and fixed in the positions which they held at their first meeting. In July, the commission’s divided findings were put to a meeting of the cardinals, who were unanimously against the validity of Anglican orders. Leo was effectively bound to follow the lead of the cardinals, and Apostolicae curae, issued on 13 September, was the result.55 The document declared that because there were defects in the form and intention in the ordinal authorised during the reign of Edward VI, all subsequent ordinations carried out in the Church of England had been invalid. The apostolic letter bore the slightly embarrassed tone of an author trying to explain why it was being written at all. It claimed rather lamely that although the matter had already been definitely settled, it had been examined again for the sake of showing consideration and charity to men of good will.56 For England’s Anglo-Catholics, Apostolicae curae came as a shocking and apparently unexpected act of betrayal. The columns of the Church Times, which had earlier been so enthusiastic about the prospects for reunion, suddenly bristled with condemnations of what was dubbed ‘the Italian mission’, a term that was clearly designed to reassert the sense of the Church of England as the only legitimate ecclesiastical institution in the country. There was a frenzy of name-calling, with Cardinal Vaughan accused of wirepulling, un-Englishness and of ‘amusing himself with counterfeit

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heraldic emblems and airing the red soutane’.57 In an interesting outburst of suppressed Protestantism which seemed highly anachronistic for the 1890s, Catholics in general were condemned for the extent to which they had assimilated into English society: Roman Catholics have been admitted to share in the privileges of English citizenship, and it must be allowed that they have made the best of their opportunity. They no longer shrink from observation and enquiry; on the whole, they rather invite it. They throw open their churches with public rejoicings and the sound of trumpets. Their Jesuits are no longer seen in disguise. They openly perambulate the streets of Brompton in pairs, with downcast eyes and clad in the best broadcloth. Their bishops are more Episcopal, if possible, than the rulers of the English Church, and their cardinals, by virtue of princely rank and handsome vesture, go far to eclipse the modest dignity of the Archiepiscopal purple in the salons of society.58 It was a revealing opinion in a newspaper which had long given the impression of being more Roman than Rome. As the jilted partner in Catholic reunion, it seemed that the Anglo-Catholic constituency unexpectedly discovered reserves of visceral antiCatholicism lurking inside itself. The greatest condemnation was reserved for any Anglican priests who, unsettled by the papal pronouncement, might feel tempted by the papal offer; it used the word ‘perversion’ as a synonym for conversion, in what was a linguistic throw back of 50 years. There is no doubt that the papal condemnation of Anglican orders created within Anglo-Catholicism a major crisis in the otherwise positive ecumenical climate of the 1890s. But it seems to have been a crisis for Anglicans only. In the British Weekly it passed without comment, which is surprising in view of the paper’s usual tendency to report both Roman Catholic and Anglican news stories.

LONDON’S INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS At the beginning of the 1890s, there were still alive in London several religious leaders who can truly be said to have had major

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international reputations which lasted long after their deaths: they were the Roman Catholic Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, General William Booth of the Salvation Army and the Baptist Charles Spurgeon. Manning enjoyed friendly relations and a great deal of mutual admiration with the Booths – both William and his son Bramwell. But Spurgeon’s distrust of Catholics meant that he had no relationship with Manning. In 1890, Manning and Spurgeon were both at the end of their lives – both would die within a few weeks of each other in 1892. Booth lived until 1912. Although the deaths of Manning and Spurgeon symbolised moments of significant ending in the Victorian religious age, there remained other major religious leaders. They included Booth as already noted; the Baptist John Clifford and the Methodist Hugh Price Hughes; Manning’s replacement, Herbert Vaughan and Richard Lacy, the unjustly forgotten Catholic bishop of Middlesbrough; and the Anglican bishops Edward White Benson (Canterbury), Frederick Temple (London, then Canterbury), Brooke Foss Westcott (Durham), Edward King (Lincoln), John Wordsworth (Salisbury), Randall Davidson (Rochester, then Winchester), E.S. Talbot (Rochester), together with such powerful personalities as F. W. Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster and then Dean of Canterbury, and Charles Gore, in Oxford, and then at Westminster Abbey. Indeed, it can be argued that this was the last great age of religious leadership, a particularly vigorous final flowering of dominating and energetic personalities and powerful intellects, before the arrival of the altogether paler and less well-remembered ecclesiastical hierarchies of the twentieth century. Manning, Spurgeon and Booth were unforgettable players on the global stage, and many of the others noted above were significant national figures. A cartoon of 1886, entitled ‘“To oblige Benson”: The Lambeth Garden Party as it might be’, depicted Archbishop Benson with Cardinal Newman on his arm, while Cardinal Manning and Spurgeon sit in the shrubbery chatting over a cup of tea. In the foreground, General Booth sits on top of a euphonium, reading a copy of the War Cry.59 In Archbishop’s House, Westminster, resided Cardinal Manning, now very elderly and frail. He had been the most significant English Roman Catholic of the nineteenth century; the other potential candidate for this accolade, John Henry Newman,

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although obviously important in his lifetime, became more so as his memory was rekindled in the mid- and late twentieth century. Archbishop of Westminster for almost 27 years, Manning had zealously championed a variety of Catholic and social causes, in particular the infallibility of the pope, Catholic schools and the welfare of Catholic children in workhouses and reformatories. Like so many of his generation, he was also a persistent advocate of total abstinence from alcohol, which won him many friends from across the denominational spectrum. Personally charming and intellectually able, he had very clear views on a great variety of issues, and no hesitation about expressing them powerfully, no matter how unpopular they might be. Thus he had held out for certain positions which began to look increasingly indefensible, such as the ban on Catholics attending the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.60 Since the late 1880s he had been expecting death at any moment, and spent much time pondering his life and contemplating his end as he ‘slowed into the terminus’,61 an apt metaphor from the pen of a late Victorian Londoner. It was Manning’s commitment on the drink question, coupled with the constancy of his engagement with social questions, his reputation for offering practical assistance to callers at the door and, above all, his decisive intervention in breaking the deadlock in the London dock strike of 1889 (which had been one of the defining episodes in late nineteenth-century industrial relations) that provided the bedrock for the esteem and affection which was apparent from ordinary Londoners at his funeral.62 They had filed past his body as it lay in state at Archbishop’s House in January 1892 for a full three days, and to keep the crowd moving, no one had been permitted to stop or kneel. The funeral procession itself, after the 60 carriages of clergy, and 40 private carriages conveying various dignitaries, contained delegations bearing the flags and banners of the United Kingdom Alliance (the leading and largely Nonconformist temperance organisation), the Trades Unions of London, the Dockers’ Societies, the Amalgamated Society of Stevedores, the Federation of Trades and Labour Unions, the Independent Order of Good Templars and the Universal Mercy Band Movement. The route of the funeral procession from the Brompton Oratory to the Catholic cemetery at Kensal Green was lined with people for a total of four miles, even though it was a

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densely foggy January day.63 Twenty-seven years earlier, the funeral of Manning’s predecessor, Cardinal Wiseman, had attracted much interest and crowds, but seemingly more as a spectacle, rather than as a participatory event.64 Manning’s funeral amounted to an affectionate and respectful send off from a city in which the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant were becoming less polarised: or so it had seemed, before the pope issued Apostolicae curae four and a half years later. Had he lived, Manning’s reputation might well have suffered damage in the fall out from the apostolic letter, which fell heavily upon his successor, Herbert Vaughan. But had he lived, and as a shrewd political insider in Rome, he might have deployed his considerable skills to prevent the apostolic letter from being issued in the first place. Another huge funeral of the period was that of Charles Spurgeon, which took place at the Metropolitan Tabernacle and at Norwood Cemetery precisely three weeks after Manning had been buried at Kensal Green. The Times noted that ‘The multitude [lining the funeral route] was considerably greater than that which did honour to Cardinal Manning last month.’ 65 Indeed, Spurgeon’s funeral ceremonies stretched over almost a week, with the body arriving in London from Menton, in the south of France, on the Monday, and being finally laid to rest on the Thursday. An estimated 60,000 to 70,000 people had viewed the coffin as it lay in state at the Tabernacle on the Tuesday, and the following day, about 20,000 had attended what were in effect three successive memorial services. The preacher at Thursday’s funeral, Dr Pierson, likened Spurgeon’s death to the falling of a giant cedar of Lebanon, and could think of no ecclesiastical event so momentous since the death of John Wesley just over 100 years earlier in 1791.66 Physically, as well as theologically, it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast between the portly, cigar-loving Baptist preacher and the apparently austere Roman cardinal. But both had a horror of state interference in ecclesiastical matters, and they shared the same priorities for founding orphanages and schools. Manning’s international reputation rested to a large extent on the diplomacy he had shown as the leader of the infallibilist cause at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Spurgeon’s rested on his preaching abilities, and the popularity of his sermons in printed

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form. A total of 2,241 sermons were published, and he sold approximately 56 million copies of his sermons during his 40-year preaching career; they were translated into almost 40 languages.67 For decades he was established as one of the foremost tourist attractions in London, and as early as 1854, just as his career at the New Park Street Chapel, Southwark was beginning to take off, Spurgeon was using the term ‘celebrity’ to describe himself.68 It is a term that was only just beginning to be used at this date, and it is one that seems more readily applied to Oscar Wilde from the 1880s.69 Spurgeon’s sermons were premeditated, but extempore. He was part of the unlearned, oral, ‘spiritual’ preaching tradition. Stenographers were always on hand to record his words, and to begin the process which rushed them into print within a few days of delivery. In printed form, they usually came out at between 18 and 22 pages. Spurgeon liked to deploy fresh and striking illustrations, often borrowed from the street or the retail trade. He signposted his sermons with clear transitional phrases, and tended to conclude with an admonition. Critics accused him of marketing himself like an entertainer.70 Spurgeon’s cultural sensibilities were complex, however. Although, as Peter Morden has shown, he was strongly shaped by Puritanism, this was also tinged with a streak of Romanticism.71 He had an unlikely friendship with the art critic John Ruskin, yet his hostility to the theatre knew no bounds. He was outraged when Joseph Parker, minister of the City Temple, ‘sanctioned’ Nonconformist ministers’ theatregoing, and attended a performance himself.72 He must have thoroughly disapproved of Headlam’s Church and Stage Guild. But although he was a conservative evangelical of a particularly narrow type, Spurgeon seems to have been able to enter into the aesthetic tastes of his age with a gusto which sometimes surprises modern observers. At Westwood, his house on a nine-acre estate in Norwood, South London, the elaborate silver-plated door furniture in his study reflected both Arts and Crafts elegance and florid Romanticism – one finger plate depicts a bare-breasted, winged figure strewing flowers over a cherub with a flaming torch.73 It shows that late nineteenthcentury Nonconformists did not always live up to a Puritan stereotype, but could enjoy, if circumstances permitted, the best in contemporary taste and craft. This little detail of Spurgeon’s

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domestic life provides a fin de sie`cle aesthetic counterpoint to the usual picture of him blustering his disapproval in the wake of the theologically liberalising tendencies among certain late nineteenth-century Baptists. In 1890, General William Booth, the third of the religious leaders who may be said to have gained an international reputation at the end of the nineteenth century, was living just north of London in Hadley Wood. More austere than Spurgeon, he forbade his followers alcohol or tobacco, and he himself lived on toast, steamed vegetables and rice pudding.74 From October of that year, he was mourning the loss of his wife and co-founder of the Salvation Army, Catherine, who had died painfully from cancer. But the occasion of Catherine’s funeral had also provided the opportunity for large amounts of ritual display, clearly intended to emphasise the global character of the movement, the equality of men and women within the organisation, the prominence of the Booth family within its hierarchy and the pre-eminence of its military structures. It took place over two days, with an evening service at Olympia, attended by an estimated 20,000 people, and a funeral cortege passing through London, from the Embankment to the cemetery at Abney Park, Stoke Newington. A curious feature of the service at Olympia was the absence of an officiating minister, and instead, numbered flags were raised and lowered on the platform, to direct the actions of the congregation.75 Thick fog the next day plunged the processional march into chaos, undermining much of what had clearly been intended as an impressive display of military precision. Fifteen battalions of Salvationists slowly wound their way through the gloom, and the service at the graveside, for which further elaborate ceremonies had been devised, had to be curtailed as darkness descended in the mid-October evening. Catherine Booth’s was among the first of the huge funerals for religious dignitaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even by the standards of time, it was extraordinary. Among many of its unique features, The Times commented on ‘the impression of a travesty of a military funeral, [as] the deceased lady’s bonnet and uniform jacket’ lay on top of her flag-draped coffin.76 Catherine’s death marked the close to the first chapter of the Army’s history. The year 1890 also saw the publication of William Booth’s famous book, which became one of the seminal texts of the age, In

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Darkest England and the Way Out. The book was largely written by his collaborator, W.T. Stead, and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8. It coincided with the beginning of the Army’s organised social services, triggering the gradual switch in the public mind from its being a rough revivalist operation which attracted outbursts of violence, to a respected social work agency. The Booths’ Salvation Army had grown at enormous speed, from 127 evangelists and 700 voluntary workers when it emerged out of its predecessor organisation, the Christian Mission, in 1878, to 2,260 officers running 1,006 corps in the United Kingdom by 1886.77 It kept on growing, and spreading into Europe, South Africa, India, the United States and Canada, initially under the leadership of the Booth children, of whom six, with their spouses, held major leadership roles. By the 1890s, the dynastic nature of the leadership, and conflict between and concerning the role of the children, was placing the movement under strain. William Booth had become the most autocratic and personally powerful leader of any Protestant denomination in nineteenth-century Britain. Although he remained General until his death in 1912, in the 1890s he handed much power over to his eldest son, Bramwell, who had many of the autocratic traits of his father, untempered by his father’s more forgiving and sensitive nature. The capacity for intensely rapid growth, and its ability to draw attention to itself with its uniforms, flags, bands and military terminology, contributed much to the Army’s significance. Support and publicity came from some unexpected quarters, including from the controversial South African feminist Olive Schreiner, who expressed the view that although Roman Catholicism was the most glorious form of dead Christianity, the ‘only form of Christianity which is a living force today [1891] is the Salvation Army’.78 In reality, it punched above its weight, and only a small proportion of people ever became involved with it. In London, 0.72 per cent of the population attended its services in 1886, and 0.49 per cent in 1902.79 Richard Mudie-Smith, in his survey of The Religious Life of London, pointed to the ‘extraordinary weakness of the Salvation Army [. . .] wretchedly inadequate [. . .] after all these years of unremitting work’.80 But it may be, as Hugh McLeod has suggested, that the Army did better outside London.81 Another contributor to Mudie-Smith’s survey, Charles T. Bateman,

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commented perceptively that by the turn of the century, the Salvation Army had settled down into the ordinary religious life of the nation, and had lost the intensity of its early days: To-day it is not penalised by the authorities on account of its street processions. A Salvation lass in her poke bonnet is no longer an object of ridicule and abuse. A red jersey with its ‘blood and fire’ motto causes no more comment than an archdeacon’s gaiters.82 As the Army moved on from its revivalist-martyrdom phase to being another early twentieth-century evangelical institution, it was perhaps losing something of the identity which had given it a unique place in the landscape of late nineteenth-century religion.

SURVEYING LONDON RELIGION One of the particular features of the religious life of London at the end of the nineteenth century was that it was being more heavily investigated by sociologists than at any time before or since. Charles Booth began his 15-year investigation into the Life and Labour of the People of London in 1886, and the complete work ran to 17 volumes, seven of which were about religion, and were based on the observations made by himself and his team in the years 1886 –1903. Clergy of all denominations were interviewed, and their observations about the lives of the Londoners with whom they had contact provide what are often sympathetic and shrewd commentaries on the role of the churches in the life of the capital. Booth also wrote pages of description of day-to-day religious life in London, detailing the types of people that the different churches attracted, and the activities in which they engaged. His accounts emphasise (entirely plausibly) the socially stratified nature of late nineteenth-century religious communities, with each appealing to a very particular constituency. He also stressed the extent to which every church or chapel attempted to tackle the ‘general problems of poverty and spiritual destitution presented by this or that district, through provident clubs, penny banks, temperance societies, boys’ gymnasia, girls’ sewing classes, mothers’ meetings’,83 in a way which emphasised that practical poor relief

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had become as routine as hymn singing for most congregations. Indeed, unlike some other investigators of the period, Booth’s aim was not to calculate church attendance, but to describe religious impact, and the extent to which people responded to it. It was the social impact of religion as an ordinary lived experience, rather than its spiritual impact, that Booth found most engrossing.84 Earlier in the project, his collaborator Beatrice Potter provided a sparkling chapter on London’s Jewish community, which appeared in the first volume. Booth’s own remarks on the working-class Londoners he surveyed provide the contours for understanding the late nineteenth-century secularised lifestyle, as well as the social impact of religion. Accounts of men who on Sunday ‘lie abed all the morning, mend rabbit hutches and pigeon lofts in the afternoon, and go for a walk in the evening’, and of others who get up at nine or ten, and are seen ‘sitting at breakfast half dressed, or lounging in the window reading Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper’ as their women embark on preparing the family’s major weekly ritual, the Sunday dinner, provide a glimpse of a world that might otherwise have been lost.85 It was significant that his coinvestigator Beatrice Webb (ne´e Potter) was to become one of the four founders of the London School of Economics, in 1895. This was an institution founded on the assumption that studying the causes of poverty and inequality was the first step in a radical improvement of society. The motto which the LSE later adopted, rerum cognoscere causas (know the causes of things), and its industrious beaver emblem could have also summed up the activities of the first generation of sociologists of religion. The reaction of the churches to the Booth survey is also interesting. The Anglicans were urged to read it, together with Rowntree on poverty and Sidney Webb on socialism, but Nonconformists seemed less impressed that Booth had done full justice to their efforts.86 One Anglican organisation, the Parochial Mission Women’s Association (founded in 1860), arranged a meeting with Charles Booth in order to ensure that he understood their significance, after they were left out of Life and Labour.87 Compared with the gargantuan scale of the Booth survey, Richard Mudie-Smith’s 500-page study The Religious Life of London (1904) looks almost slight in comparison, but it too is a work of

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major significance. Continuing in the social-science mode, MudieSmith’s objective was to provide what he envisaged as the first ‘scientific’ attempt to discover the number of worshippers in London and Greater London. He dismissed earlier attempts, the 1851 Religious Census and the survey commissioned by the British Weekly in 1886, on the grounds that the data from 1851 was flawed because it was provided by the churches themselves, and that from 1886 had been gathered on just one Sunday, took no account of services held before 11 in the morning and did not distinguish between men and women, or adults and children.88 MudieSmith’s own survey, which was conducted on behalf of his newspaper, the Daily News, took place on virtually every Sunday during an 11-month period in 1902 – 3, and it therefore provides an invaluable insight into the prevailing religious culture of turnof-the-century London. His major conclusion was simple: that the power of preaching was undiminished, and that a man who combined the ability to preach with a large heart and a small salary would never fail to draw a crowd.89 Furthermore, he believed that religious revival would be assured if the city’s preachers – the senior Anglican clerics and Nonconformists like John Clifford and R.J. Campbell – would go and preach in the parks in the open air. According to Mudie-Smith, the gospel we preach must cover the whole of man’s life [. . .] the revival of the twentieth century we shall owe to the discovery of the worth of the entire man and the responsibilities of the community. Our forefathers were content with a Heaven after death; we demand a Heaven here.90 It was a message that suggested the strong influence of F.D. Maurice, and of Christian socialism of the type espoused by the Christian Social Union. It also chimes with a trend identified by Hugh McLeod in the group of late nineteenth-century Londoners that he termed ‘unitarians’ (meaning that they were closer to Unitarianism than to secularism or ‘orthodox’ Christianity). Such people, according to McLeod, advocated the Sermon on the Mount, the brotherhood of man and ‘heaven on earth, the product

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of science, reason and comradeship, to be the ultimate form of human existence’.91 Although Booth’s investigators had provided plenty of observational comment about the different lives of men and women, Mudie-Smith was the first researcher to make a systematic investigation of the different church attendance patterns of the sexes, and also to distinguish between the presence of adults and children. His observations about the different services favoured by men and women led him to conclude that men favoured preaching services, whereas women favoured worship in its entirety.92 His data was presented in the form of graphs and tables of statistics, but the bulk of the book is taken up with individual essays on the religious problems and opportunities of various parts of London, and on missionary strategies which were believed to be effective. The authors were ordained and lay people who were involved in London church work of various types, and the overall effect was more didactic and mission-oriented than was the case with the Booth team, whose observations had a greater sociological detachment (although this did not stop Booth from expressing approval or disapproval of the methods of various denominations). Mudie-Smith claimed that his study provided interpretation, which Booth’s tended to lack in any systematic manner. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mudie-Smith’s contributors often provided their own commentary – sometimes positive, sometimes less so – on Booth’s recent work, which was the backdrop to their own. Of particular interest is Jane T. Stoddart’s chapter, which compared the findings of the Daily News census with that conducted by her own paper, the British Weekly, in 1886. The chapter provides an intriguing insight into the way in which the churches in inner London had changed in the fin de sie`cle years. It reveals an overall fall in church attendance – a drop of 150,000 church attendances in the context of an increase in population of 500,000. The Church of England was the most severely affected by this. Comparison between the two censuses suggested that the Nonconformists had experienced a drop of only 6,000 during the 17-year period, from 369,000 to 363,000, whereas Church of England attendances had diminished from 535,000 to 396,000, a dip of 139,000. This meant that in the Church of England, there

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were only three worshippers in 1902 –3 for every four who had been present in 1886.93 McLeod has estimated that the proportion of individual churchgoers in the London population was 19 per cent in 1902 –3, although there were very significant differences between boroughs.94 Stoddart provided tables which permitted detailed comparisons to be made between the attendance figures in individual churches of the major denominations. They revealed that the Anglican decline had been uniform across rich, middle-class and poor districts, and was neither confined to ritualistic nor evangelical parishes. Evidently perplexed by the scale of the decline which the census had uncovered, she did not offer much explanation for it, besides the ‘development of the weekend habit’, which seemed to be particularly affecting wealthy boroughs where residents were presumably either engaging in leisure activities on Sundays or leaving the city altogether. Nor, unfortunately, did she make a comparison with Roman Catholicism, which almost certainly would have shown a picture of growth between 1886 and 1902 –3. But among the denominations that she did consider, the Church of England, the Baptists, the Congregationalists and the Wesleyan Methodists, it was the Baptists who were ‘the one really growing body in the metropolis’.95 Although the death of Spurgeon had decimated numbers at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, from 10,589 in 1886 to 3,625 in 1902–3, it was evident that the denomination as a whole had developed resilience within the wider picture of church decline. The figures at John Clifford’s Westbourne Park chapel were little changed over the 17 years. As Anglican and Wesleyan congregations in the vicinity had dropped off, the Baptist chapel had now attained the status as the most crowded place of worship in the borough of Paddington. The biggest congregation in London in 1902–3, was, however, drawn not to a Baptist congregation, but to the Congregational City Temple, where over 7,000 people turned out to hear R.J. Campbell.96 The paradox of Reginald John Campbell’s theological development highlights a number of interesting aspects of Christianity at the fin de sie`cle, and beyond. Looking at the raw figures for attendance at his sermons when he arrived at the City Temple in May 1903, it might seem that he had inherited the mantle of Spurgeon. Like Spurgeon, Campbell’s sermons – usually three a

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week – were immediately published, and read in both Britain and America. Like Spurgeon, Campbell had become the preaching attraction of the metropolis. But the message in Campbell’s preaching could not have been more different. Whereas Spurgeon had concentrated on a simple message of repentance, conversion and hell-fire, Campbell seldom made use of these evangelical staples, rarely referring to conversion, or to the blood of Christ.97 Campbell was engaged in the ambitious exploration of large vistas of thought: Christian, philosophical and some derived from other religions.98 His denominational pedigree was almost as varied as his theological influences. Brought up as the son of an Ulster Presbyterian who had become a United Methodist minister, Campbell had become an Anglican while a young schoolmaster at an Anglican school in Cheshire.99 This was before his arrival at Christ Church Oxford, where he entered in 1892 in order to read for a history degree (having previously studied at University College, Nottingham). At Christ Church, he was influenced by Francis Paget and Charles Gore, and other members of the Lux Mundi circle, and moved in a distinctively high-church direction. Indeed, looking back from 1916, he attributed to the Lux Mundi school ‘everything fresh and earnest in theological study and spiritual life’.100 But just when it seemed that he was formally en route for ordination as an Anglican, he announced that he was joining the Congregational Church. Campbell was ordained as a Congregational minister in July 1895, just a few weeks after completing his history degree, and without any of the training which would have been expected at this date.101 Despite his changes of denomination, Campbell’s loyalty to, and admiration for, Charles Gore remained undiminished. Although he read other Anglican and Catholic writers, as well as French and German Protestants, he remained heavily influenced by Gore’s incarnational theology, becoming particularly interested in the theme of Jesus’ innocence from, rather than ignorance of, sin. He compared the leading Congregational minister R.F. Horton to Gore, and indeed it appears that there was a striking physical resemblance between the two bearded and beaky ecclesiastics. Campbell’s re-conversion to high-church Anglicanism in 1915 makes more sense if it is assumed that he never really abandoned his

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earlier faith position, and had converted to Congregationalism without sufficient thought. His memoirs, written in the year after his re-conversion in part to explain to both Nonconformists and to Anglicans his curious path, tend to emphasise the extent to which he was really always an Anglican under the surface of his Nonconformist clothing, but their objectivity on the matter is of course a matter of some uncertainty. Campbell was certainly an enthusiastic Liberal imperialist (going to South Africa to observe the Boer War at first-hand) and he had fashionably complicated views on temperance – although a teetotaller himself, he advocated that compensation be paid to licensees if their licences to sell alcohol were withdrawn.102 Suffice it to say that in the period up to 1907, when his advocacy of ‘New Theology’ caused his orthodoxy to be questioned – Campbell looked to all the world like a leading figure in London Nonconformity, and always precisely in tune with his times. As an Anglican he lived more quietly, however, and died in 1956. Several conclusions emerge from this chapter on Christianity in London at the fin de sie`cle. The first is the general sense of confidence, which is particularly evident among Nonconformists of various stripes and Roman Catholics. Nonconformist church attendance appeared to be holding up at a time when Anglican church attendance was declining, and nationally Nonconformists were at the peak of their social, political and cultural influence. They were even still capable of producing a major new denomination that saw itself as perfectly adjusted to the times, in the form of the Salvation Army. Most of the old animosities against the established church, which in earlier decades had led Dissenters and Nonconformists into an almost constant position of protest, had gone. There had been tensions between the moderate and progressive elements in the London School Board from 1891 (although not strictly along denominational lines) and the Anglican biases within the 1902 Education Act would stir up old animosities, but education controversies represented a curious throwback to an earlier age. Now the overwhelming sense was one of freedom: the National Free Church Congress and the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches, both founded in the 1890s, providing a new and important forums for the Free Churches’ voices to be heard.

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Second, as we have seen, relationships between Nonconformists and Anglicans were often close in the 1890s, both in terms of social contacts and theological influences. This is seen in the general influence of the legacy of F.D. Maurice on many Anglicans and Nonconformists, and in the specific example of Gore’s influence on Campbell. Generally, the movement in theological thought was towards the more liberal, although it is risky to generalise, and obvious exceptions would have included the Salvation Army and Roman Catholicism. In this respect, London was probably different from other parts of the country. Hugh McLeod suggests that hell-fire preaching passed away in London sooner, citing a Hampstead man who returned from a holiday in Scotland in 1886, only to be astonished to hear a sermon on hell in London. I was certainly not prepared to hear the doctrine of everlasting punishment so glibly laid down in the heart of liberal London. Had this view been expressed in the northern land from which I had just returned, I should have regarded it as the legitimate result of the parson’s upbringing.103 This rather reinforces the view that London was developing its own religious culture, subtly different from what was happening elsewhere. It remained true that people continued to think very denominationally – a trend that would not diminish until well into the twentieth century – but the frequency with which they wanted to peer over their denominational fences was undoubtedly increasing. Actions which were still possible at the beginning of our period, such as the decision of the congregation of the University of Oxford in 1883 to rescind the convocation’s permission for the Congregationalist layman R.F. Horton to examine a paper entitled ‘The rudiments of faith and religion’, would have seemed much less likely in 1900. But not all the seedlings in the ecumenical garden were thriving: in 1896, Anglicans woke up to the fact that Roman Catholics did not do ecumenism in the way that the Free Churches did, and that the Roman Church was a fundamentally different, non-negotiating entity. This, as we have seen, caused a little outburst of visceral antiCatholicism among some Anglo-Catholics.

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Finally, the extent to which church people had been influenced by social concerns, sometimes including socialism in its Fabian manifestation, is strongly apparent in the 1890s. The imperative to campaign for social justice became almost an eleventh commandment, acknowledged by all denominations, even when their stance on socialism differed. Social questions were of far more importance than either theology or ecumenism to the churches of fin de sie`cle London, and it is to these that we turn next.

CHAPTER 7 CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL PURITY AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

THE PROSTITUTION QUESTION Christian social activity, increasingly designated as the ‘social gospel’ from the mid-1880s,1 left an ever deeper imprint on the churches in the late nineteenth century. Social activism and campaigning became as central to the life of congregations and parishes as the provision of worship, weddings and funerals. Richard Mudie-Smith’s survey The Religious Life of London divided London into districts, and offered detailed comment on the socioeconomic circumstances of the inhabitants, and the help that was offered to those in each category. This varied from ‘bread, clothing, boots, vegetable soup, grocery tickets, monetary assistance’ to the ‘forlorn multitude’ of Southwark and Bermondsey to ‘asylums for the aged, and [. . .] instruction to the young’ in prosperous Hampstead, where it was asserted that the ‘poor are too well looked after’ by the churches.2 There is plentiful evidence, particularly from the Charles Booth survey and from newspapers, to attest to the impressive range of social services provided by the London churches.3 A major issue in Mudie-Smith’s study was the persistence of prostitution. The advocates of the social gospel also regarded this as one of their gravest challenges, despite the varied efforts that had been made to control it in the previous 20 years. In terms of the contexts provided by the fin de sie`cle, this may be partly

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explained by the intense anxieties about sexuality which the period witnessed. As Richard A. Kaye has put it, Many of the iconic figures of the period – the New Woman, the Bachelor-Dandy, the Decadent, the Femme Fatale – have assumed an enduring aura of risk, danger and transgression in erotic matters. Such fin de sie`cle ‘myths’ as Salome, Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reveal a cultural landscape given over to terrifying metaphors of sexuality. Degeneration, vampirism, syphilis, hysteria, these would seem to be the metaphors by which many lateVictorians thought about sexuality and the erotic self.4 It is not surprising, then, that this was the period which saw an unprecedented campaign for social purity, which was a euphemism for sexual restraint and the annihilation of vice. The fascination with the sex industry, which was fully investigated and documented by middle-class men who claimed to be primarily motivated by a Christian agenda, was a recurrent theme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on social and religious questions. According to Arthur Sherwell, who contributed to The Religious Life of London, ‘West London is really the outstanding challenge to civilisation and religion’, the ‘moral disaster’ of prostitution being the reason. In this district, he reported, it was conducted both on the streets, and in blocks of flats in the classier parts of the West End and Fulham. Very different from the courtesans of Westminster and Chelsea were the prostitutes in the area around St Pancras, whose lives were evoked in Walter Warren’s chapter on north London: Here dirty men’s dirtier wives keep low lodgings and maintain a dirty state of chronic intoxication; here the dirty streets are full of dirty and anaemic children; here, though rents are high, rooms are rarely vacant; here fresh air never enters and pure winds never blow, the flowers refuse to bloom; here all things degrade and die – only the evil that men do lives on, and little babes are blessed with early death; here souls go to hell and no one cares.5

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The pessimistic lyricism of the extract gives substance to Judith Walkowitz’s claim that in nineteenth-century Britain, prostitution became a metaphor for the moral pollution of society itself.6 This chapter explores how Christian concerns about prostitution became entwined with the mindset and publishing practices of fin de sie`cle London, and how the social purity movement which emerged established connections with late nineteenthcentury feminism. Much of the effort of purity campaigners centred on securing the passage and then the enforcement of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which was intended to raise the age of female consent and to regulate the sex industry. But if prostitution became synonymous with moral pollution, its ‘opposite’, social purity, was far from becoming a metaphor for social stability. In fact, it involved an unsettling and straining of gender and class relations, often combined with various forms of repression. The account of Christian engagement with prostitution as seen through the lens of the fin de sie`cle provides a point of access into the creation and content of a Christian social culture that was distinctively ‘janiform’, looking simultaneously forwards and backwards, nervous and optimistic by turns. It was simultaneously disgusted and titillated by its discoveries, appearing to relish the publication of articles about the sex industry in mainstream publications, while also wanting to maintain a heavily censorious tone. There was of course nothing new about Christian-inspired efforts to take a view on prostitution. Rough behaviour of all types had long been seen as in need of reform, and organised efforts had been going on for at least 200 years; the efforts simply reached a particular crescendo in the 1880s and 1890s, and took on a somewhat different character. Societies for the Reformation of Manners had come into existence in London and elsewhere, particularly in the southern and midland towns of England, as long ago as the 1690s. In the 1780s, the evangelical Anglican William Wilberforce announced that his twin missions were to abolish the slave trade and to reform manners, and the Proclamation Society had been founded under his initiative. This society – its full title was ‘The Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ – consisted of an inclusive body of laymen and clergy, with a mission to

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circulate tracts, improve behaviour and encourage Sunday observance.7 Under this initiative, there began what was to be for the next hundred years a continuous history of church people forming societies to suppress vice and enforce moral vigilance, with the fortunes of particular organisations waxing and waning in different decades.8 In 1802, for example, the Proclamation Society became supplemented and then superseded by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which campaigned against nude bathing, gambling, blasphemy and the sale of obscene publications.9 It was not until the 1850s that prostitution began to be suppressed in some parts of London, in consequence of the pressures brought to bear by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.10 Some years after that, the controversial Contagious Diseases Acts were passed (between 1864 and 1869), with the intention that they would reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the armed forces by subjecting women within 15 miles of garrison towns who were thought to be prostitutes to compulsory examinations, sometimes on a fortnightly basis.11 This attempt to regularise prostitution by treating it pragmatically as a medical rather than a moral problem outraged Christian opinion, and particularly Christian feminist opinion. Josephine Butler, and her fellow campaigners, were annoyed both by the double standard of demanding that women submit to humiliating intimate examinations while no attempt was made to modify male behaviour, and by the lack of support available to prostitutes who might want to leave their occupation. Furthermore, the Acts had the effect of isolating prostitutes, by publicising their status as ‘fallen women’ and marking them officially as social outcasts; previously they had often been informally tolerated as ‘lewd women’ who engaged in prostitution among perhaps a number of other money-making schemes. The Contagious Diseases Acts contributed significantly to heightening fears about the sex trade, and to ratcheting up the narrative about the ‘rising tide of moral pollution’. By the 1880s, prostitution – an issue that had been moving steadily up the moral reform agenda since the mid-1870s – finally attained a position where it became something of a national

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obsession, regularly discussed in even the politest church circles. The climate which made this possible was partly created by the publication of Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and by W.T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette articles on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1885), both of which will be considered shortly. The ecclesiastical interest which they aroused was in marked contrast with the situation in 1872, when Josephine Butler’s husband George, an Anglican clergyman, had been repeatedly howled down while attempting to give a paper on the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act at the Nottingham Church Congress.12 In a similar vein, the Congregational Union had forbidden discussion of the subject when ladies were present, throughout the 1870s.13 But from 1885 there was a transition, in which three of the classic manifestations of the fin de sie`cle – anxiety about sexuality, ‘New Journalism’ and the ‘New Woman’ – all become linked. The repeal activity surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts, which was successfully achieved in 1886, provided a significant spark in igniting the ‘first wave’ feminism which was to be a major feature of the 1890s. A major contributor to this was Frances McFall, who had been heavily influenced by Josephine Butler and the repeal campaign. Writing as Sarah Grand, she produced the first of the ‘New Woman’ novels in 1893. The Heavenly Twins launched a direct onslaught against male promiscuity and the supposed desirability of feminine innocence, by tackling the highly controversial theme of syphilis, and the way in which it was spread to wives and unborn children by promiscuous husbands. Grand, who had been married to an army surgeon, described the effects of the disease in unsparing clinical detail. Meanwhile, even if Sarah Grand’s writings were banned from their homes, the women who engaged in ‘rescue’ work learned and spoke of sexual matters about which they might otherwise have remained entirely ignorant, and also of the economic circumstances which led working-class women to have paid-for sex with more economically independent men. Middle-class women became bolder, and more critical of male behaviour. For many it was the first opportunity to become involved in, and to some extent to feminise, politics and the public sphere.

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W.T. STEAD AND THE ‘NEW JOURNALISM’ The ‘New Journalism’, developed to a large extent by W.T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette from 1880, represented a revolution in Britain’s newspaper industry. Up until that point, newspapers consisted of dense columns of small print, the text unbroken with subheadings, and headlines used in a manner which made them almost unobtrusive. Articles were unsigned, and reporting styles were restrained. Verbatim reports of speeches, court cases and public events were the staple of many newspaper columns. Reporting was meant to be factual and unadorned by authorial comment. Feature articles and interviews, both with bystanders and with public figures, were unknown. Illustrative material was strictly limited. Newspapers informed, and were intended to lead opinion in a dignified manner, but they were not intended to entertain, or strongly stimulate the emotions and sympathies of their readers. In the hands of Stead, however, journalism became what it has remained – a medium for entertainment and information, and, on occasions, a powerful tool for public campaigning. On taking over the editorship he produced a 30-page document for his staff, ‘The Gospel according to the Pall Mall Gazette’, which outlined his editorial priorities: ‘The Development of the Individual’, ‘The Independence of Woman’ and ‘The Establishment of a United States of Europe’. Believing that newspapers were ‘the only Bible that millions read’, he wanted to ensure that his paper provided edification as well as entertainment, moral uplift as well as titillation.14 He also wanted to expand the readership to encompass a broader range of society, and in order to this, he needed to make it more appealing. He made typographical changes to make it easier to read, breaking up long articles with subheadings and introducing arresting headlines. He provided maps, diagrams and other illustrations, in order to make stories clearer. He revolutionised the content, by introducing features, and most controversially, by inviting public figures to be interviewed. In 1884, early interviewees included General Gordon, Archbishop Benson, Charles Spurgeon, Emile Zola, the American economic theorist Henry George and the head of the Pears Soap Company. The interviews were attacked as ‘decadent’, because

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they seemed to degrade and threaten the dignified tone expected of Britain’s press.15 In 1887, Matthew Arnold, apparently in an attempt to deflate Stead’s fame, used the term ‘New Journalism’ to describe his activities. Arnold praised the ‘New Journalism’ for its ‘ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy [and] generous instincts’, but he criticised it for being ‘feather-brained’ and prone to unexamined assertion. He linked it to the mindset of ‘the new voters’ in Britain’s newly extended electorate, implying that they too were feather-brained and unreliable.16 Arnold’s views were laced with his upper-class, Anglican and metropolitan prejudices, but he correctly saw ‘New Journalism’ as taking Britain into new territory; it would be further developed in new publications like Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, launched in 1896.17 The Mail established the journalistic style that would produce the British tabloid press, focussing on celebrity gossip, lengthy expose´s and moral campaigns, sensational stories that were intended to provoke a powerful reaction in readers, attention-grabbing headlines and powerful editorial comment. For Stead, however, the New Journalism was, as Stewart J. Brown has shown, also a religious mission.18 The journalist, Stead insisted, was both a ‘missionary and apostle’, and it was the vocation of the newspaper editor to present to the conscience of humankind ‘the cries, the protests, the complaints of men who suffer wrong’.19 Much influenced by the American poet and journalist James Russell Lowell, who had used journalism to campaign against slavery, Stead regarded his newspaper as his pulpit, and his readers as his congregation. He also had an almost theological vision of the power of public opinion, believing that when people despaired of its ability to respond to injustices, it was as if ‘they sullenly confessed that God was dead’.20 Stead had arrived at the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880. He had previously been editor of the Northern Echo, committing the newspaper to wholehearted support of radical liberalism and to the work of the embryonic Salvation Army. Although described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘newspaper editor and spiritualist’, in the 1880s, his religious beliefs still reflected the emotionally and culturally rich world of the Northern Congregationalism in which he had been nurtured.21 The son of a

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Congregational minister, Stead had moved from Calvinism to become a ferocious supporter of the Nonconformist conscience22 and the social gospel. Like others of his generation, he was able to embrace an uncomplicated ecumenism. He was devoted both to the Salvation Army and to Roman Catholicism, and was attracted to the organisations because of their global outreach – ‘the only two organisations which operate directly and simultaneously in all the continents and among all the nations’, he claimed in 1891.23 He wrote an early, hagiographical biography of General Booth, and was also in close contact with Cardinal Manning, whom he consulted on religious matters and regarded as the most helpful person he had met since the death of his father.24 He visited Rome in 1889, in the hope of persuading Pope Leo XIII to relocate the Vatican to London, ‘the mother city of the new world’, to fund his new newspaper and to provide reassurance that he viewed journalists as doing God’s work.25 Needless to say, Stead was unsuccessful on all counts, and his rebuff in Rome seems to have put him off Catholicism for good. Stead’s views had extended to embrace Spiritualism, Theosophy and a belief that he could found a new, highly inclusive, Church of the Future, although he always maintained membership of the Wimbledon Congregational Church, and appears to have attended there on a weekly basis. Stewart J. Brown suggests that Stead’s campaign for the Church of the Future, or Civic Church, as he termed it from 1891, was ‘a serious effort to make the historic Christian Church once again a powerful force for social cohesion and improvement’. It was evident, however, that despite initial public support, it would be doomed to failure; it lacked a theology, and was not supported by any church leader except John Clifford.26 Stead spent the last decade of his life actively engaged on behalf of the world peace movement, and he was an unrelenting opponent of the Boer War. It was while he was on his way to America to speak at the Great Men and Religions conference in New York that he drowned in the Titanic disaster, in April 1912. It was, however, as a crusading journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s that Stead reached the height of his influence and fame. His first major foray into Christian social crusading came when he picked up Andrew Mearns’s pamphlet about the London slums, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and publicised it in the

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newspaper. Indeed, Raymond Schults suggests that if a date were singled out for the inception of ‘New Journalism’, it would be 16 October, 1883, the day on which Stead began to give publicity to Mearns’s work.27 Not that Mearns needed to rely entirely on Stead. He had already gained publicity for his cause before the intervention of Stead, and he shared much of Stead’s instinctive understanding of the power of explicit description. Writing about the conditions endured by London’s ‘submerged tenth’ – the poorest 10 per cent of the population – was hardly new, but Mearns’s work, published anonymously and undertaken with the assistance of another Congregational minister, W.C. Preston, had an impact partly because he did not simply describe the external features of poverty, disease and urban decay, but dwelt upon their moral consequences, endeavouring to bring the people about whom he wrote to life. It was, at this date, still relatively unusual for a Nonconformist minister to be writing about slums and housing reform, and this also added to the work’s impact, particularly in church circles.28 Despite his evident sympathy for the plight of those about whom he wrote, Mearns utilised the language of the ‘rising tide’ and the ‘terrible flood’ to describe them, a trait which he shared with other writers of a similar vein, including Stead, William Booth and the contributors to the Mudie-Smith survey, which primed middle-class readers with anxieties about being drowned or engulfed.29 Although it should hardly have surprised readers to learn that gross over-crowding and extreme poverty could lead to dehumanising behaviour, it was the explicit nature of Mearns’s revelations which lodged them so firmly in the late Victorian consciousness. He stated that Incest is common; and no form of vice or sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention [. . .] The vilest practices are looked upon with the most matter-of-fact indifference. The lowest parts of London are the sink into which the filthy and abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow.30 Later, under cross-examination from Cardinal Manning (who was one of two clerical members on the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes), Mearns had to admit that he

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could not actually prove that incest was taking place on the scale he implied. He conceded that incest was encountered ‘frequently’, but not ‘very frequently’.31 It seemed that Mearns was already caught up in the new literary culture, which permitted journalistic licence in the interests of securing a reader response. Mearns’s pamphlet had an enormous immediate impact, and Stead’s sensational summary of it, coupled with the large amount of additional coverage he gave it, in the form of leader columns, letters and articles excerpted from other periodicals, generated further continuous publicity over the autumn and into the winter of 1883. Other papers joined in, thus producing a newspaper crusade against bad housing, and a debate about whether demanding that Parliament should intervene on bad housing amounted to socialism.32 Clergy of all denominations began to write about, and discuss, slum conditions,33 starting the trend which would last for several decades. As well as its immediate impact, Mearns’s work as publicised by Stead set off a chain of events which had long-term significance.34 One was the setting up of the Royal Commission on Housing, the membership of which included the Prince of Wales. This event, in February 1884, was judged by the Pall Mall Gazette to mark the successful conclusion of its crusade, and its publication of ‘Bitter Cry’ material tailed off at this point. In its turn, the Royal Commission was responsible for legislation which empowered the London County Council to build working-class housing and engage in slum clearance schemes. This resulted in the gradual abandonment of laissez-faire approaches to the provision of workers’ housing. Although it would be wrong to imply that there was any sudden dramatic improvement, the state had at least acknowledged that it could not simply ignore the problems of the slums.35 Indeed, Mearns’s Bitter Cry continues to be cited as an important milestone in almost every discussion of the late Victorian awakening of a sense of anxiety and compassion about the plight of the very poor. The author’s ability to combine conciseness with carefully observed detail makes it a compelling read, even today. Following the success of the Bitter Cry campaign, Stead’s next journalist crusade was the one for which he became most famous, and notorious. For weeks on end in the summer of 1885, he used the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette to publicise London’s child sex

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industry, and in particular the market in young virgins. He called this the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, the maidens being sacrificed nightly in London, the modern Babylon, in an image which combined Old Testament allusion and Greek myth – the myth of Hellas, in which seven youths and seven maidens were offered in tribute by Athens to Crete once in nine years, and were devoured by a minotaur – half man, half bull. Rather than simply publicising the work of another researcher, as he had done with Mearns, on this occasion Stead launched his own investigation, the Pall Mall Gazette’s ‘Secret Commission’, and wrote it up in a manner that was so salacious that there were riots outside the newspaper’s offices. This was sensation journalism taken to a new level, but with the avowed intention of bringing about moral and social reform. While he was supported in the campaign by many high-profile religious figures, including Cardinal Manning, the Booths, Archbishop Benson and Josephine Butler, he was condemned by a large section of public opinion, and by some Nonconformists, for peddling ‘filth’. As an investigative journalist, Stead’s methods were significantly flawed. He had thought it sufficient to obtain the blessing of a number of churchmen before embarking on his four-week exploration of the ‘London inferno’, but he had not thought much about the legal, moral or practical aspects of his plan. The result was that he ended up having to serve two months of a three-month prison sentence for child abduction. Rather typically, he rapidly published an upbeat account of his prison experience. He celebrated his imprisonment as a time of martyrdom and atonement; seeing it as a joyful period of mystical insight, in which he believed he was granted a vision to inspire his future work, which would bring about a form of collectivist salvation in England.36 The spell behind bars certainly gave him more publicity, and also further ammunition to those who had been appalled by his articles, who were inclined to think that they had all been based on fabrications. The articles themselves described his adventures in enormous detail, including his successful attempt to order five virgins, of whom two were delivered to him on a Saturday evening outside Madame Tussaud’s.37 He described how he accompanied the girls he was purchasing to the doctors to have their virginity certified,

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and created dramatic tension by almost naming ‘the London Minotaur’, a retired doctor who had, over the years, allegedly paid up to £5,000 for 2,000 virgins.38 Stead had an unerring ability to manipulate all the most provocative aspects of his narrative, shocking his readers and then shocking them some more, for example by declaring that the daughters of doctors and clergymen might be purchasable for £300, whereas a working-class virgin cost just £5. Like Mearns, Stead had the ability to write in a way which lodged powerful images in the reader’s imagination, but his tone was so much more salacious than Mearns’s that it almost comes as a surprise to read that he did not go ahead with the seductions. He provided such a range of information about what was possible that it is difficult not to conclude that his articles must have stimulated the market for young girls. Having explored the London sex industry, he turned his attention to the import of foreign girls into London, and the export of British girls abroad, the so-called ‘white slave trade’, a topic about which there had previously been considerable publicity.39 He pretended that he wanted to dispose of a mistress in a Brussels brothel before his impending marriage: ‘It was at first a new sensation for me to sit smoking and drinking with men fresh from gaol in the “snug” of a gin palace, and asking as to the precise cost of disposing of girls in foreign brothels.’40 The excitement he felt during his investigation, and the confusion he experienced in separating his roles as sexual adventurer, journalist, actor and moral crusader, become apparent in this, and in several other passages. There was a curious naı¨vete´ about the whole episode, which he displayed on many similar occasions.41 The most controversial and confused part of Stead’s investigation was, however, his plan, arranged in collaboration with Bramwell Booth, the chief-of-staff of the Salvation Army, to pose as a client and purchase a young girl, in order to demonstrate the principle that this could be easily done. This led him to obtain a 13 year old, Eliza Armstrong, who appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘Lily’. She was purchased from Rebecca Jarrett, a recent convert to the Salvation Army and a former brothel keeper, who assured Stead that her mother wanted to sell her into prostitution. After her virginity was certified, Eliza was taken to a brothel, given chloroform and put to bed. Stead, who was a teetotal non-smoker,

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had tried to act the part of a seducer by partaking in champagne and cigars, and admitted later in court that he was soon in a state of ‘intense excitement’.42 He appears to have tiptoed into the bedroom, and tiptoed out again, after which the terrified Eliza was taken to have her virginity certified a second time. After this, she was shipped off to start a new life with the Salvation Army in France. Stead might have got away with this, had not Eliza’s parents reported her missing, which led to newspapers that were hostile to the Pall Mall Gazette taking up the case against Stead. This resulted in a sequence of events culminating in the trial of Stead and his various accomplices, the imprisonment of all of them except Bramwell Booth, and a public outcry against Stead, the Salvation Army and the Pall Mall Gazette.43 The involvement of the Salvation Army, who appear to have been as blind as Stead to the legal consequences of their actions, was another manifestation of the curious union of New Journalism and social purity campaigning. The incident also seems to highlight an emerging power struggle between the ageing General and Bramwell, his eldest son and heir apparent, with Catherine Booth making regular interventions in support of her son from the sidelines.44 Bramwell Booth wanted to take the Salvation Army into purity and vigilance work, and was a tireless supporter of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill – he wanted the age of consent raised to 18. William Booth was concerned that all this might prove a distraction from the Army’s primary purpose of saving souls. Both Bramwell Booth and Stead appear to have been using each other to promote their own causes. Booth needed Stead to create publicity for his campaign to get the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed, and Stead needed Booth in order to stage his child purchase sequence, for which the cooperation of Rebecca Jarrett was necessary.45 Stead’s relationship with the Salvation Army is an intriguing one. At one point he seems to have thought of joining the organisation, although he would have been highly untypical of converts of the period. Some popular histories of the Army have presented him as an uncomplicated, morally outraged man of action,46 and the decision to display his prison uniform in the Army’s Heritage Centre47 invites a portrayal of him as a heroic martyr, and the most high-profile person to suffer when the Army

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was in the early persecution phase of its history. Most historians, however, have followed the account in Harold Begbie’s early twentieth-century history, which draws on surviving correspondence to suggest that William Booth saw Stead as a problematic figure, and viewed involvement with him as inherently risky for the Salvation Army.48 It appears that William Booth both distrusted the style of his journalism and was unsympathetic to his theological position, as ‘one who shilly-shallied with the great decision of Christian life’49 – in other words, Stead declined to be saved, according to the Salvation Army’s definition. Booth was, however, willing to sanction the use of Salvation Army headquarters for the sale of the Pall Mall Gazette after W.H. Smith and other news vendors refused to stock it on the grounds that it was an obscene publication, but he pointedly stayed away from the rally Stead organised in Hyde Park on 22 August 1885, to launch the new National Vigilance Campaign. Cardinal Manning also declined to appear. Stead was very disappointed by the absences of both of his high-profile religious mentors.50 Stead’s journalistic revolution – and the man himself – were certainly ambivalent. On the one hand, he was, as Stewart J. Brown asserts, ‘one of Britain’s best known public intellectuals of the late Victorian period’.51 Frequently discussed by scholars with a primary interest in the fin de sie`cle, it is unsurprising that his ‘Maiden Tribute’ text has been included in several of the recent anthologies.52 His own beliefs demonstrated powerful adaptation to reflect the changes in the religious thought and practice of the world in which he lived. Perhaps more than many of his contemporaries, Stead was able to synthesise within himself almost every contemporary nuance in thought and religion. But equally, he could sometimes appear imprisoned by the prevailing attitudes of his day, in a manner which has led to him being described as a ‘Latter day Puritan’.53 He adopted uncritically the language and categories of the purity debate as it had been framed by others, dividing girls into the pure and innocent and the seduced and ruined, and showing remarkably little interest in what happened to the latter category. The focus of his articles was, as the titles imply, specifically on the ‘maiden tribute’ – recording the circumstances of virgins at the moment of their loss of virginity.

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In doing this, Stead is likely to have been fuelling a new anxiety about childhood and sexuality, which was, in the view of Judith Walkowitz, symptomatic of the general cultural paranoia overtaking late nineteenth-century Britain. Indeed, he seems to bear some of the hallmarks of the modern anti-paedophile vigilante. By focussing on the juvenile and class aspects of prostitution, Stead ignored the fact that the type of activity he described, namely the procurement of very young virgins by wealthy old rakes, was relatively unusual.54 Walkowitz’s study suggests that most girls entered prostitution at around the age of 16, by having paid-for sex with men of their own social class. She argues that most went into prostitution for economic reasons, not because they were the helpless victims of scheming seducers. But Stead’s purpose was to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16; in order to make his case, he needed to focus on legal sex involving girls aged between 13 and 15. (He was sufficiently pragmatic to believe that raising the age of consent above 16 would unfairly put prostitutes in their late teens out of business, without offering them compensation – an attitude which led to his being criticised in some purity circles.) 55 Articles about typical prostitutes – women in their late teens, twenties or older – often diseased, alcoholic or supplementing very low wages with episodes of street walking – would not have sold newspapers. Stead’s ‘New Journalism’, religious in motivation though it may have been, was equally about sales, and it was inevitably this aspect which came to the foreground, long after the concept of newspaper editors occupying a ‘pulpit’ had been consigned to historical curiosity. Certainly, Stead rejoiced in the fact that ‘all London is ringing [. . .] with the streets all vocal with the cries of newsboys vending the Pall Mall Gazette’s revelations’.56 Indeed, what better sound could greet the ears of a late nineteenthcentury newspaper man?

THE CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT (1885) The passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, on 14 August 1885, and the final repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, in 1886, were major victories for social purity campaigners, and for Stead in particular. They seemed to indicate the extent to which

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coordinated Christian opinion, particularly when combined with the power of the newspaper industry, could influence social policy. The concept of legislation that would push forward a Christian agenda was naturally very pleasing to the Nonconformist conscience.57 Those within the purity movement who had adopted various positions during the preceding campaigns were, albeit briefly, united. Getting the Bill through Parliament had been no easy feat, as it had been debated several times between 1882 and 1885 and then abandoned, partly as a result of disagreement about what the age of female consent should be. Sixteen was finally settled on, as a compromise between those who wished it to return to the traditional age of 12 (it had been raised to 13 in 1875) and those who thought it should be as high as 21 (it has already been noted that Bramwell Booth wanted to see it set at 18). As Deborah Gorham points out, this debate in the 1880s was conducted using an older understanding of what constituted developmental landmarks, and it would rapidly look outdated. There was no discussion of what would soon be seen as highly relevant factors, such as the age of puberty or the pace of young women’s psychological development. By the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, the arguments on which the Criminal Law Amendment Act had rested would begin to be questioned as psychologists explored the distinct developmental stage that became known as adolescence, and the focus shifted to the individual and the speed of her maturity.58 But attempts in the early twentieth century to raise the age of consent above 16 did not meet with success. In the debates of the early 1880s, the model still in use was the status of the individual in relation to other groups in society. From the traditionalists’ point of view, a working-class girl of 12 was expected to earn her own living, and was therefore grown up. She had a low status in relation to the rest of society (particularly male middle-class society) and therefore whether she remained a virgin or not was of little concern. For traditionalists, sexual exploitation and prostitution were seen as being as inevitable as poverty and the class system itself. The purity reformers’ arguments were more complicated. They used both the radical argument that young working-class girls had as much right to consideration as other members of society, and the conservative argument that all young

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women were in need of ‘protection’ because they were too weak and stupid to make decisions for themselves. What they advocated was a close form of surveillance, in which even women in their early twenties were expected to submit to the moral guardianship of older and more powerful members of society. Both radical and reactionary attitudes are therefore woven into the fabric of the purity campaigns. The vigilance campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s constitute an example of the way in which the final phases of the high Victorian age, frequently characterised by repressiveness and control exercised through rigid definitions of honour, purity and shame, begin to mix with newer attitudes of female equality, and the attempted application of the same standards to men and women of all classes. Ambivalence and ambiguity run through the whole movement. It is not surprising then that the Criminal Law Amendment Act also powerfully embodies many of the tensions and contradictions that epitomise late nineteenth-century attitudes to sexuality, gender, class and age. In addition to raising the age of consent for girls, attempts were made to clamp down on the activities of those procuring girls and women to become prostitutes, whether at home or abroad. Attempts were also made to shut down brothels, by making it far easier to prosecute brothel owners and brothel keepers.59 The main effect of this was to displace the sex industry away from brothels and into other premises and onto the streets; indeed, Arthur Sherwell’s account, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, of the West London sex industry taking place on the street and in blocks of flats indicates that this was a rapid development in the post-brothel era.60 It also had a negative impact on women. Prostitutes who had lived and worked together in brothels in relative safety were often forced to take up residence with violent men – pimps, or ‘bullies’ in the contemporary terminology, who offered them the ‘cover’ of respectable domesticity. Meanwhile, other women found it difficult to rent properties from landlords, as landlords became obsessed that their houses might be turned into brothels, making them liable to prosecution.61 Also contained within the Act was the notorious amendment put forward by the Liberal MP Henry Du Pre´ Labouchere, which criminalised homosexual relations between men, and which would remain on the statute book until 1967. This brought within

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the scope of the law all homosexual activity between men, whereas previously it had only been sodomy that was illegal (potentially punished by the death penalty until 1861). It was this piece of legislation that resulted in the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, in 1895, with the implementation of the maximum sentence permitted by the Act, of two years’ hard labour. Labouchere’s sponsorship of this clause of the Act seems paradoxical in view of the fact that he was a noted libertarian with an unconventional lifestyle. But he was strongly hostile to homosexuality, and stated that his introduction of the amendment had been the result of being sent a pamphlet on male prostitution – by W.T. Stead.62 In the immediate aftermath of the passing of the Act, Stead was hailed by supporters as the hero who had brought it about, and he embarked on a triumphant tour of the north of England to whip up support for a national network of vigilance associations which it was proposed would police the new Act and ensure compliance in their localities. But he soon found himself under fire from within the purity campaign, both from those who considered that his journalistic style had lowered public morals, and from those who questioned whether his use of Eliza Armstrong had been justified. Feminists who had campaigned for years against the Contagious Diseases Acts, on the grounds that enforced medical examinations humiliated women, were particularly horrified that Eliza Armstrong should have been subjected to these procedures, and to a chloroform-fumed night in a brothel, simply in order to generate a newspaper story. Stead’s arrest threw the movement into some disarray, but the news of his imprisonment proved once more to be unifying. In the end, the purity movement seems to have forgiven Stead for his impetuous and irresponsible conduct towards Eliza – perhaps indicative of the prevailing view that a working-class girl was better off in the care of the Salvation Army. Cardinal Manning, various Anglican prelates, some Nonconformist ministers and most feminist groups offered the imprisoned Stead warm support, although Bishop Lightfoot accused him of ‘inconceivably bad taste and lack of judgement’ and there was division among the ranks of the Nonconformists, with the prominent Congregationalist Guinness Rogers and the Baptist Union Council being particularly hostile. Indeed, the Baptist Union Council refused to rejoice at the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.63 But for most of the

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Nonconformist community, the belief that legislation was a sound way to promote moral purposes and improve the character of the nation had been growing since the previous decade, and it represented a significant theological departure. Hitherto, it had been believed that the gospel alone could reform people’s lives. ‘Nonconformists had normally contended that coercion could induce only an appearance of moral behaviour, and so was worse than useless.’64 The debate about the extent to which it was within the remit of Parliament to try to improve the nation’s morals was to be a contentious topic for some churchmen and politicians of the fin de sie`cle period,65 but for Nonconformists, the traditionally very strict boundaries between politics and religion appeared to be dissolving.

SOCIAL PURITY: FROM DOMINANCE TO FRAGMENTATION After the excitement surrounding the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act had begun to fade, there was a restructuring within the purity movement. The years immediately preceding the Act had seen the foundation of several purity organisations which campaigned for the promotion of chastity among both men and women, the application of equal standards to men and women, the protection of females from male exploitation and the exposure of public figures whose private conduct was believed to be at odds with their public standing. Each had a distinctive ecclesiastical identity, a popular mass membership and usually a distinct gender bias. A leading organisation was the male-led, and clerically and professionally dominated Central Vigilance Committee for the Repression of Immorality, which campaigned against brothels in a manner which, as M.J.D. Roberts notes, would have been readily understood by the Reformation of Manners Societies in the 1690s.66 There were also the Church of England Purity Society and the White Cross Army, aimed at working men and also Anglican – the two organisations merged into one in 1891. The Gospel Purity Association completed this important quartet – it was a Nonconformist association fronted by a Salvation Army officer, which also aimed at working men, and contained a women’s union.67

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The arrival on the scene of the umbrella National Vigilance Association, ‘for the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of criminal vice and public immorality’, launched by Stead in August 1885, was intended to provide a carefully blended and ecumenical body to take the campaign forward, as the permanent new face of the social purity movement, in its postCriminal Law Amendment Act phase. It was presided over by G.W.E. Russell, the radical Liberal politician and evangelical (and devotee of F.D. Maurice), who had been a founder of the Church of England Purity Society, and it included H.W. Webb-Peploe, the Anglican clerical founder of the Central Vigilance Committee, and a leading Anglican figure in the Holiness Movement, as well as a couple of bishops. There was a very powerful contingent of Nonconformists: Percy Bunting, his wife Mary and Hugh Price Hughes from Wesleyan Methodism; Andrew Mearns and W.T. Stead from Congregationalism, John Clifford from the Baptists, Bramwell Booth from the Salvation Army, as well as Cardinal Manning. It also threw aside earlier gender segregation, accepting women, including Josephine Butler, Ellice Hopkins and Millicent Fawcett, who had previously represented the Ladies’ National Association and the Ladies’ Association for the Care of Friendless Girls, as well as the White Cross Army. It therefore managed to weave in the ladies’ organisations, and those aimed at workingclass males. In an attempt at class as well as gender inclusivity, an evangelical print worker and trade union official, W.A. Coote, was employed as a salaried co-secretary, as a counterbalance to the other co-secretary, who was a barrister, and able to serve the Association without financial reward.68 The launch of the NVA was stage-managed by Stead as a national act of rededication. To symbolise the repossession of modern Babylon, supporters marched on Charing Cross from ten different directions and then proceeded to Hyde Park for a mass rally. There was an estimated attendance of a quarter of a million people. But if the NVA believed that it was taking the action that would stamp out the sex trade, it was badly mistaken. In the years after 1885, there was to be no ‘moral millennium’, in the manner that some had prophesied, and prostitutes often proved heavily disinclined to leave their way of life.69 Although the NVA had some success in organising locally based campaigns against

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brothels, when it fielded candidates in the elections of December 1885 and June 1886, they made little impression; it was evidently not going to break through as a major political movement. Nor was such a diverse coalition able to speak with one voice. The senior matriarch of the movement, Josephine Butler, became severely critical of the ‘repressionist’ elements that wanted to use the clauses of the Criminal Law Amendment Act to close down brothels and infringe civil liberties in what she saw as the fanatical promotion of social purity; finally, she resigned from it in disgust.70 In the decade from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s, moral crusades proved increasingly difficult to organise and harder to steer to victory.71 An example of this came in October 1894, when the Congregationalist social purity and women’s suffrage campaigner Laura Ormiston Chant launched a campaign against the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, on the grounds that entertainment was provided by scantily clad women, and that prostitutes solicited in the Promenade that was attached to the theatre. She was initially successful in getting changes made to the Empire’s licence before it could be renewed, but the changes proved to be very short-lived, and the theatre had no difficulty renewing its licence successfully on the previous terms in the following year. More significantly, her campaign met with little support from public opinion, including feminist opinion as voiced by Josephine Butler. The satirical magazine Punch quickly dubbed her as Mrs Prowlina Pry.72 Outraged correspondents to the Daily Telegraph described Chant as a dangerous example of the New Woman.73 She also managed to enrage Stewart Headlam, the zealous Anglican defender of music halls and music hall employees. He published several articles on ‘The Moral Mission of the Music Hall’, in of all places, the Pall Mall Gazette;74 it was no longer under the editorship of Stead. It was evidently Headlam, and not Laura Chant, who was interpreting the broader mood of society accurately, by appreciating that the music hall was not simply going to go away if it were disapproved of or campaigned against. A more positive reading of Chant’s activities, and the one offered by Lucy Bland, suggests that as well as trying to rid the streets of the ‘evil’ and ‘unrepentant’ prostitutes, she was also trying to make the streets safer for women, so that they could enter into public

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spaces without fear of attack or accusations of non-respectability. It appears that after 1885, women of all types were more prone to being both harassed by men, and stopped by the police; a policeman stopped the feminist activist and writer Olive Schreiner, because she was out walking with a male friend without hat or gloves. Purity women with an agenda for ‘reclaiming the streets’ believed that in order for the streets to be safe, they needed to be cleared of prostitutes, men looking for prostitutes, and alcohol.75 This fusion of purity campaigning and Christian feminism is well exemplified in Ellice Hopkins, the Anglican founder of the White Cross Army, and a leading purity activist and author. Hopkins’s reputation has been rehabilitated by Sue Morgan, who has explored the way in which her religious beliefs and views on women combined to produce what Morgan terms ‘purity feminism’.76 Rather than being the embodiment of religiously motivated, repressive sexual prurience, and the author of a ‘general assault on traditional lower-class sexual mores’77 as she was portrayed by an earlier generation of feminist scholars, Morgan presents her as a well-educated liberal Catholic Anglican, drawing on a different theological paradigm from many of her evangelical co-workers in the purity movement. Her upbringing in Cambridge as the daughter of Peterhouse geologist and mathematician William Hopkins meant that she had an intelligent understanding of modern science, and readily absorbed an evolutionary view of human nature – she believed that men could evolve to a higher state of moral purity, through a fusion of moral, physical and spiritual progress.78 Her evolutionary view cohered naturally with her incarnational theology, as it did for many Anglicans of her generation, when she expressed belief in a God who had entered the universe in human form at a particular point in humanity’s progress. She displayed a strong sense of the beauty of nature, and of the contemplation of nature as a means for seeing God in the world. Ultimately, her belief was that the moral and social purification of society was necessary in order to establish God’s kingdom on earth; she held to a corporate view of social purification, rather than an individualist concept of personal salvation.79 From this theology she drew out a high view of the body and sexuality. It was markedly different from that of some of the older

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generation of evangelicals, who saw the body as a symbol of human depravity, and believed that sexual knowledge should be suppressed. It was different again from that of some of her fellow high Anglicans, who thought that asceticism was the appropriate response to the body – a position which seems to have led them to much harsher treatment of ‘rescued’ prostitutes than Hopkins – who favoured kindlier regimes in rescue homes. Ellice Hopkins rejected both hedonism and asceticism, which she saw as the prevailing but wrong-headed responses of the day. Instead, she believed that the body should be accepted, and then left to its own unconscious activity, ‘left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet’ until it was time for marriage.80 Its functions should be regarded as ‘sacramental’, not ‘low and shameful’.81 This in itself represented a significant shift in Christian thought. In stark contrast with the evangelicals and ascetics who wanted to curb information about sexual matters, she believed that knowledge would empower women to understand their bodies, and would also help to protect them from unwanted male attention, by making them less naı¨ve. She urged mothers to ensure that their daughters were not sent out ‘like ignorant sheep into a world of wolves’ but were educated in ‘robust virtue’ rather than left in a state of ‘helpless innocence’.82 She also wanted young boys to be educated about sex, and to understand that ‘there is nothing foul or unclean in what has been ordained by God’.83 Essentially, she offered mothers a script to use with their sons, which would allow them to deliver a clear scientific account of reproduction based on the evolutionary paradigm in the tone of a confident biology teacher. But she also lapsed into her characteristic sentimental lyricism as she warmed to the supreme importance of her central theme: ‘Pure as the pure gold in the cup of the lily is life and birth to the boy who loves his mother and has been taught from her lips.’84 Her last two books, The Power of Womanhood (1899) and The Story of Life: For the Use of Mothers of Boys (1902) were both banned from circulating libraries, because of their explicit treatment of reproduction and the origins of life. Purity campaigners concerned themselves with the whole gamut of intimate relations between the sexes, not simply prostitution. This led Hopkins to write about marriage, although she herself remained unmarried. Indeed, Morgan argues that

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Hopkins’s positive views on sex anticipate those of both the early twentieth-century birth control campaigner Marie Stopes and the Christian feminist Maude Royden. Although both Stopes and Royden were able to express themselves more explicitly, Hopkins in the 1880s and 1890s had already made a significant, if subtle, contribution in shifting the understanding of female sexuality by making Christian discussion of sexual pleasure more acceptable.85 Hopkins’s belief in the need for candour in sexual matters clearly extended to her mission to educate the Anglican hierarchy about her campaign, and Morgan persuasively argues that it was this more than anything else which had the effect of ‘converting’ the Church of England to the purity movement, and away from the attitudes of hostility which had been displayed towards Josephine Butler’s husband George just a few years earlier. One of her methods was to visit dioceses and speak first to diocesan and suffragan bishops, archdeacons and other senior clerics. The effect of her notable oratorical powers and clear, often explicit message, coupled with her frail appearance as a small, pale and nervous-seeming woman, seems to have been capable of evoking strong responses in the assembled clerics, reducing the senior clergy of the Lichfield diocese to tears in 1880.86 Second, she kept up a large and constant correspondence with the archbishops and their wives, and was particularly close to Bishop Lightfoot of Durham. Her third strategy was to remain fully informed of possible changes to the legal framework concerning prostitution and related matters, and to send briefing papers and case studies to the bishops in order to help them to prepare for the public debates from which she herself was often excluded. There were, however, aspects of Hopkins’s purity campaigning which have given substance to the view the she had an overly interventionist approach to dealing with prostitutes. Her Industrial Schools Amendment Act (1880) provided for the compulsory removal of the children of prostitutes and their relocation in industrial training schools or homes. It attracted fierce criticism from rights campaigners, who believed that it threatened the civil liberties and maternal rights of prostitutes, and amounted to the kidnapping of children.87 Although Morgan acknowledges that the more repressive aspects of purity feminism should not be

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minimised, she offers the insight that when they proposed such intrusive measures, Hopkins and her supporters were thinking in terms of a collective good to society which overrode the rights of the individual. As such, Hopkins was in tune with theologians such as B.F. Westcott, who in reacting against ‘the tyrannical individualism’ of much Christian thought, had urged that people think instead at the level of families and nations.88 Barbara Caine suggests that the fact that so many Victorian feminists gave their support to the repressive aspects of the policies of the National Vigilance Association, despite the fact that the liberalism of the age was generally hostile to government interference, is an indication that mainstream feminist opinion at this point was shaped by the belief that women needed to be protected from men, and that stricter sexual standards would benefit women.89 By the 1890s, however, the social purity movement had splintered into a number of directions. On the one hand, secular feminists were becoming increasingly confident about publicising the most distressing hypocrisies which resulted from the double standard, and the impact which they could have on middle-class wives. This was seen when Sarah Grand published her hard-hitting purity novel, The Heavenly Twins. The scenario of the wife infected with syphilis was all too familiar, and yet had previously been in the realms of the unmentionable; it was often the case that women who had contracted syphilis had no idea what was wrong with them, or why their children kept dying. W.T. Stead was anxious to lunch with Sarah Grand, and to re-review the novel in terms that were more favourable than those originally adopted by the staff reviewer of the Review of Reviews (Stead’s current paper), who appears to have been shocked by the content. But by 1893, Stead’s interests had turned strongly to Spiritualism, and he was apparently more interested in the possibilities for engaging in supernatural communication with Grand than he was in soliciting her purity views.90 Meanwhile, other purity campaigners were increasingly beset by anxieties about gender and rescue work, as it began to be seen as inherently destabilising of relations between the sexes. The balance shifted from purity and rescue work as something in which men engaged, or at least organised, to something which was mainly part of the woman’s sphere. By the 1890s, the National

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Union of Women Workers’ Rescue Work Conference was expressing the view that rescue work should be exclusively and ‘distinctly women’s work’,91 partly for reasons of seemliness and modesty, but also because of concerns that the ‘over-excited and wrongly directed natures’ of former prostitutes might respond with rather too much enthusiasm to the ‘kindly interest’ of a male purity worker. The implication was clearly that ‘impure’ women, however ‘rescued’ they had been, might continue to pose a moral danger to men. Furthermore, the new knowledge which purity work brought to women was widely seen as inherently risky. Susan Mumm has made the point that nuns, as women who would not marry, were regarded as the most suitable to work with exprostitutes. It was feared that married women, or those who might marry in the future, would lose their respect for men once they knew about the scale of female sexual exploitation, and view men with disgust as a result. By 1900, of the approximately 80 Anglican sisterhoods in existence, about 50 worked with prostitutes in penitentiaries.92 The splintering within the purity movement intensified as the New Women writers of the fin de sie`cle and the Christian feminists generally failed to make alliances. The Christian feminists found it difficult to contemplate domestic arrangements outside marriage, and regarded New Women as selfish and dangerous; although Sarah Grand herself was an advocate of marriage, others, such as Mona Caird and Olive Schreiner, were unconventional and critical of patriarchy. The veteran Christian feminist, Josephine Butler, claimed that the very mention of the ‘New Woman’ was enough to make her lose her temper, and she was equally disparaging about the new class of ‘graceless’ university-educated women.93 Millicent Fawcett, who had also been a senior figure in the National Vigilance Association, launched a tirade against Grant Allen’s controversial novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), which concerned a Cambridge-educated woman who had favoured cohabitation and illegitimacy instead of marriage. Fawcett had absolutely no patience with the novel’s contention that marriage equated to a form of slavery.94 Equally, the non-Christian feminists could make little sense of talk about the sacramental nature of marriage, and were unsympathetic to arguments for the defence of marriage which rested on its being the best form of economic security for

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women – a view expounded by Ellice Hopkins. Hopkins, however, was more able to bridge the gap than were the others, for she was an outspoken advocate of the idea that women should develop an identity and occupation separate from their married one, and in this she was in complete agreement with wider fin de sie`cle feminist opinion.95 Her concern for women of all life stages and marital statuses also helped to ensure the continuing relevance of her thought in the late nineteenth century; it chimed with the shift in thinking among the secular ‘New Woman’ feminists of the 1890s, who were becoming less interested in prostitutes and more interested in the safety of women in marriage, and the rights of wives to resist the demands of their husbands.96 The social purity movement in its late nineteenth-century phase had been a curious spin-off from a simple and successful campaign to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16. It had become highly ambiguous; radical when it demanded the end of the ‘double standard’, which implied the same standard for men and women, and for those of different social classes, but repressive with its constant demand for ‘vigilance’, which meant the surveillance of the behaviour of one section of society by the rest. It had required volunteers to enter into the realm of the forbidden, to experience the frisson of temptation (something in which Stead excelled) and to encounter those who were most easy to label as ‘fallen’ and ‘lost’, who would then be further classified on a spectrum from ‘soiled doves’ to ‘hardened sinners’. All of them were clearly in a different theological category from the ‘humble poor’, with whom the middle classes had long engaged in the standard philanthropic activities of dispensing bread, soup and grocery tickets. For the male purity activist, the expectations were quite different from those of his female counterpart. He had to test his will-power and resistance to the temptations of the flesh. Hopkins addressed the theme in many of the talks that she gave to men in the 1880s. She made use of her scientific interests to present an evolutionary theory of British man as having evolved to a point of resistance to sexual temptation, thereby demonstrating his fitness to rule. In this context, it becomes possible to appreciate why the gender of the purity activist was to become such a contentious issue. Only after these issues had been addressed did the focus switch to the

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soteriological drama of attempting to persuade prostitutes, brothel keepers and their clients to renounce their lifestyles and embark on a process of repentance and rehabilitation, which would, the purity activists believed, slowly but surely lead to a steady reduction in the amount of sin in the world, and a steady increase in the amount of order. A belief that they were increasing the level of order in society would have been reward enough for most Christians at the fin de sie`cle, but the work may have brought them other more personal benefits; perhaps a cathartic sense of gratitude for their own circumstances, and an appreciation of the order and seemliness in their own domestic lives. It was ironic, then, that for Stead, purity activism became a destabilising obsession; the more he plunged into the red light districts of London and other cities, and the more he engaged in heavily flirtatious activities with his female office staff, the more loudly he condemned marital infidelity. For Hopkins it was a matter of an entirely different order. Rooted in a theological tradition very different from Steadian Puritanism, hers was a faith based in Maurician incarnationalism, and on the power of practical action and education, rather than on the constant stoking of public outrage. Hopkins became the more consistent face of the moral purity movement, and one of the few figures who might have been respected by the secular feminists had she not retired from public life due to ill health in 1888. Hopkins saw the sex industry as a whole as a moral outrage, and refused to be sidetracked by an obsessive interest in the initiation of the young into the ‘modern Babylon’.

CHAPTER 8 CHRISTIAN UTOPIANISM AT THE FIN DE SIE` CLE: BUILDING THE NEW JERUSALEM

It was the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb who, looking back from 1926, was to make much of the fact that poverty had been ‘rediscovered’ in the 1880s, and that throughout the eighties and nineties controversies had raged about the meaning of poverty as it affected ‘the masses’1 – which was itself a newly emerging term. By the 1880s, there certainly seemed to be the beginning of a more critical awareness of the powerfully depersonalising forces which had shaped both the perception and the management of the poor. Webb noted that in the privileged world of her youth in the 1870s, ‘labour’ had been seen as an abstraction, not relating to human beings, but merely as a necessary commodity, like a plentiful water supply.2 Those who were unable to manage for themselves, who had slipped from the category of ‘labour’ to the ‘indigent poor’, were seen in even more abstract and anonymous terms. If they entered workhouses they were subjected to a regime of complete, identity-robbing uniformity. The workhouse governors tried to demonstrate their mastery over poverty, and the chaos that was associated with it, by making the poor dress identically and, when posing for the camera, to sit in neat, gender-segregated rows.3 It was as if the problem of people who had fallen out of the usual patterns of family life could somehow be tackled by the imposition of depersonalising uniformity.

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Housing, building and planning began to gain increasing attention from many quarters. In 1885, the Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes had drawn attention to the failure to regulate housing, and the inadequate provision which had led large numbers of the London poor into dire living conditions. From the 1880s, a closer connection began to be made between the environment in which people lived and what happened to them in their lives: the link between poor housing and overcrowding, and further problems such as alcoholism, prostitution and incest, began to be more explicitly acknowledged. It began to dawn more forcibly on clergy of various denominations and theological traditions that there was limited point in preaching about the need for personal reformation, as Christians traditionally had, if the environment was inherently corrupting. Coupled with this was a more open recognition of circumstances which had always been the case (for example that bed-sharing could lead to sex) and a greater frankness in discussing the explicit details of actual situations, as we have seen with Andrew Mearns, and the whole narrative of social purity. The national raising of consciousness about the individual sufferings of overcrowded urban dwellers prompted a range of efforts, from a variety of motives. There was a new interest in experiencing poverty at first-hand, the ‘slumming’ phenomenon that Seth Koven has investigated. In an exploration that differs markedly from earlier discussions of the question, which have tended to interpret late nineteenth-century middle-class attention to the poor as arising either from purely philanthropic motives, or from a desire to keep them under control, Koven pays close attention to a pattern of complex and sometimes apparently contradictory motives displayed by members of the middle class who wanted to live in or visit the slums. He argues that these could include a sense of atonement for personal good fortune; the desire to be free of rigid social boundaries and conventions and to experiment with alternative lifestyles; the desire to promote crossclass brotherly love; and the sheer thrill of encountering ‘dark spaces’ and ‘dirty inhabitants’ in the London metropolis.4 Most of these motives would have applied equally to the social purity campaigners considered in the previous chapter. One of the practical

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experiments which emerged as part of the slumming phenomenon was the religiously inspired settlement house movement, in which young people from the middle and upper classes would live alongside the poor for defined periods. Also germinating at this period were various other ideas which would result in experiments in community living, some of which came to fruition in the early twentieth century. As Dennis Hardy notes in his study of English utopian communities, A distinctive genre of community experiments in the early twentieth century, driven by a common belief that the Kingdom of God was to be found on Earth, within the individual in true cooperation with others, had its origins in the 1890s [. . .] From this fin de sie`cle experience of theory and practice evolved a number of communities that made their own distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition in the twentieth century.5 These included the Salvation Army’s Land and Industrial Colony in Hadleigh in Essex and the garden city at Letchworth in Hertfordshire. Anxieties about urban squalor clearly heightened the mindset which Callum Brown has defined as the ‘myth of the unholy city’, the creation of which stretches back into the late eighteenth century, when it found expression in sentiments such as William Cowper’s observation that ‘God made the country, and man made the town’.6 According to Brown, the ‘heathen city became an official discourse of the British state’, and the person who had been most influential in bringing this about was the leading Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Chalmers, who never really seemed to have recovered from the shock of moving from rural Fife to central Glasgow in 1815. By the 1880s, there was general agreement that it was London, rather than any other British metropolis, that had ‘reached its nadir as the city of moral nightmare’. As we have already seen, the publications of that decade, including Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, Stead’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette and then in 1890, William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out, coupled with the surveys undertaken by Charles Booth and by the British Weekly, all contributed to the enduring

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image of London as an ‘impenetrable continent of social danger’.7 Moreover, the statistics spoke more powerfully than the metaphors: in the decade from 1871 to 1881, the population of Greater London rose by nearly 900,000.8 For Brown, the creation of the ‘myth of the unholy city’ is an important component in the creation of the narrative which, wrongly in his view, saw secularisation as soaring away by the late nineteenth century. But identifying a timescale for secularisation is not the purpose of this chapter. Rather, it is to explore further the Christian critique of the city in the late nineteenth century, and the ways in which the schemes of William Booth, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett and Ebenezer Howard proposed various utopian solutions to this most severe of fin de sie`cle anxieties. In identifying the paradise that had been lost, and making proposals for how it might be regained, these activists were not only engaging in the classic utopian gesture, they were also immersing themselves in the pessimism and optimism which is so crucial for understanding the age.

WILLIAM BOOTH’S SCHEMES: NEW JOURNALISM IN THE SERVICE OF THE SALVATION ARMY It was suggested in Chapter 6 that the publication of William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) triggered a gradual switch in the public mind from the perception of the Salvation Army as a rough revivalist operation which attracted outbursts of violence, to a respected social work agency and evangelical denomination. There has been a tendency for In Darkest England to be given a quasi-canonical status by Salvationists themselves; perhaps this is not surprising, in view of the fact that it was the only significant publication to issue from the pen of their founder.9 Furthermore, the Salvation Army became distinguishable from other Free Churches partly because of its early implementation of some of the schemes outlined in In Darkest England, particularly its controversial night shelters, its family tracing service and its enthusiasm to receive state funding for some of its social projects, including its unsuccessful scheme for the compulsory detention of vagrants.10 The text itself is lengthy and repetitive. It is almost 300 pages plus six appendices, written as a string of short sections, studded with case histories and

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statistics. It blends reports of social work in progress with proposals for eliminating poverty by means of a seemingly endless series of ambitious Salvation Army schemes. Although it was always acknowledged that W.T. Stead was a collaborator in writing the book, the question arises of the extent to which it should really be viewed as Stead’s own publication. In 1890 Stead was more than willing to help with the project; he had recently borrowed £10,000 from Booth, and he continued to rely on the Salvation Army to shield him from further legal proceedings in the Eliza Armstrong case.11 Although Booth obviously approved its contents, and wanted to present the work as almost entirely his own, it seems that Booth, and Commissioner Frank Smith, fed him ideas and statistics, and the text was Stead’s.12 Stead claimed that ‘General Booth hardly wrote a line’ and that the whole was dictated by Stead to his secretaries, while Booth was preoccupied with his wife, who was dying of cancer.13 Stead’s characteristic style and concerns can be discerned throughout the work. The first part, ‘The Darkness’, reprises much of his Pall Mall Gazette articles on prostitution, and also borrows heavily from Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which Stead had done so much to popularise in his newspaper.14 The technique of presenting interviews with the homeless and the out-of-work was pure Stead, and created a much richer narrative than simply relying on a bare recital of statistics, or on a second-hand account of the lives of the poor observed, although the book also drew heavily on both of these sources. The no-nonsense, anti-theoretical tone which has become seen as the authentic voice of William Booth is much in evidence in In Darkest England. This should perhaps be seen as a tribute to Stead’s professional abilities as a ghostwriter. The author tried to distance his plans from those contemporary theorists whom he despised, economists like Henry George, who pressed for larger economic changes such as a single land tax and banking reform. Booth’s hostility to socialism made him inimical to these things; he presented himself as a practical man who had no time for theories. Instead, he wanted to be the champion of ‘John Jones, a stout stalwart labourer in rags, who has not had one square meal for a month’.15 His book is full of numbers, costs and projections, and keeps returning to examples of poverty- or vice-stricken individuals.

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Despite the protestations against utopian projects, the proposals in the book’s second part, ‘The Deliverance’, blended the practical with the intensely idealistic. The best-known parts are the chapters which describe Booth’s scheme for the three colonies, in the city, the farm and overseas. The plan was to create selfsustaining communities, ‘each being a kind of co-operative society, or patriarchal family, governed and disciplined on the principles which have proved so effective in the Salvation Army’.16 He described the ‘Salvation Ship’ which would plough to and forth between England, and either South Africa or Australia, transporting Salvationist colonists southwards and colony-produced goods northwards, while engaging in evangelism in the ports en route. After conjuring up his vision of foreign ports teeming with the saved, the author moved immediately to describing the cleaning and nursing work that was already going on in the slums. The book is characterised by this to-and-fro mixture of proposal and actuality, as the reader is switched at dizzying speed from a scheme that already existed in reality to one that was simply in the mind of the author. No element was too small to escape the author’s imaginative powers; in the chapter on providing opportunities for the London poor to visit the seaside, even the detail of a seafront museum with ‘a panorama and a stuffed whale’ was imagined and related.17 In this way, the Steadian-Boothian utopia was imagined as being realisable as much at Southend-onSea as in the exotic foreign ports of the southern hemisphere. At the heart of the book was Booth’s plan for cooperatives, but his concept of cooperative working was rather different from what was usually envisaged by the term. There was no shared ownership or collective decision-making.18 Strict obedience to military-style discipline, with authority resting in the hands of the officer Salvationists, was what Booth understood by a cooperative. His first priority was to find employment for the destitute in the city (the city colony), and then, for those who had shown themselves amenable to hard work and discipline, the priority was their dispatch to the farm colony. Meanwhile, the surplus who could not be accommodated would be sent to the country to become small holders. Like most of the other social theorists of this generation, Booth embraced the rural panacea of ‘fresh air [. . .] and exercise under the green trees and blue sky’ as the antidote to the ‘human ant,

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crawling on the granite pavement of the great urban ants’ nest’.19 He advocated the reverse of the race from the country to the city, under the slogans of ‘to the Garden!’ and ‘to the Country!’20 The vision of farm colonists living a frugal life in teetotal communities, where they would be expected to manufacture everything that they required from bricks to glass houses, to display unquestioning obedience to Salvation Army officers and to work without wages, might have been expected to fail rapidly. In fact, the scheme, which began on 3000 acres of land overlooking the Thames Estuary at Hadleigh in Essex in 1891, proved to be ultimately successful, although unsurprisingly in the short term it was dogged with difficulties, and could have easily failed in its first few years.21 It had attracted 250 colonists within a few months, a figure which had doubled by 1905. In 1906, Booth launched a second scheme in Boxted in Essex, for small holders to work five-acre plots, with poultry and a pig.22 Stead had interpreted his brief as being to present the work of the Salvation Army as a social work organisation, rather than a religious denomination, and it is striking how secular a tone he adopted. It could be argued that Stead was therefore indirectly responsible for the misconception of the Salvation Army as purely a Christian social work organisation. Although not entirely lacking in religious sentiment, In Darkest England is a book primarily about employment and community building. It also takes the form of an extended appeal for funds, for like the Wesleyan Methodists’ Twentieth Century Fund a few years later, Booth also wanted to raise a million pounds from his supporters in a short timescale. It is surprising, perhaps, that no member of the Booth family thought to graft a slightly more evangelical tone into the work when it was in the proof stage. Nor did they challenge the often-repeated vision of humanity as ‘sludge’ and ‘dregs’, which suggests an author who was more journalist than theologian. The third part of the colony programme, the shipping of people to a new life in the overseas colony, also bore the clear imprint of Stead, and his enthusiasm to unite the English-speaking people throughout the world into a ‘community of interest and of nationality’.23 The Salvation Ship was envisaged as ‘the unmooring of a little piece of England, and towing it across the sea to find a safe anchorage in a sunnier clime’.24 Modern readers in broad sympathy with the

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Salvation Army’s agenda might commend the book for its farsighted commitment to social work, credit unions, recycling and sustainability, but buried in its pages are also some distinctly less palatable elements, for example a scheme for forcibly incarcerating ‘moral lunatics’ – essentially vagrants – and preventing them from reproducing.25 The whole work is suffused with an unshakable sense of English superiority which marks it out as the product of the high imperial age. For the benefit of readers who found the entire 300 pages a little too rambling or daunting, the book contained a striking fold-out, full-colour litho print in the inside cover, headed ‘Work for All: Salvation Army Social Campaign’. A note at the bottom explained that ‘The Chart is intended to give a birdseye-view of the Scheme described in this book, and the results expected from its realization.’ Elizabeth Tilly has analysed the picture in terms of its political and artistic content. At a political level, she notes that the statistics displayed wrapped around the columns of the left and right of the picture highlighted the scandal of government nonintervention in the social welfare of Britain. As industrial art, the picture is most reminiscent of a trade union banner, but it also seems to owe something to the mid-Victorian depictions of urban and industrial life, such as Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work and William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal. She correctly notes that the religious message in the picture is quite muted.26 In the foreground of the picture, Salvationists pull drowning people out of a churning sea of starvation, unemployment and drunkenness. As the eye moves upwards, the people are depicted as settled in 35 different shelters, schemes and employment projects, under the heading ‘The City Colony’. Higher still, the green landscape of ‘The Farm Colony’ stretches into the distance. Yet further in the distance at the top of the picture, the sun rises over ‘The Colony across the Sea’. Presiding over the whole is on the left, a baker and on the right, a laundress, symbolising food and work for both men and women. The message is clearly that the way out of ‘Darkest England’ is literally by steam and sail to British colonies and ‘foreign lands’. Although this depiction of a fresh start for the poor through training and foreign colonisation can rightly be seen as heavily shaped by prevailing secular influences, it can also be seen as indicative of the Salvation Army’s rejection of conventional Christian iconography and

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symbolism. As Tilly remarks, the lithograph was a perfect example of a rapidly developing use of illustration in the New Journalism which Stead had pioneered. It also demonstrated another of Stead’s convictions: the importance of the ‘reunification’ and global domination of all English-speaking peoples.27 The picture also provides an excellent visual summary of the strong anti-urbanism which unquestionably runs through the book as a whole.28

SAMUEL BARNETT AND SETTLEMENTS: BROTHERHOOD IN THE CITY In 1886, the Anglican clergyman Samuel Barnett had made a proposal to establish training farms in the country in order to rehabilitate able-bodied men, in the hope that one day they would be offered tenancies to work the land.29 But the utopian scheme for which he is remembered, the East London settlement Toynbee Hall, was the opposite of a proposal for the usual direction of escape from city to country. Instead, like the many other settlement houses which sprang up from the late 1880s, it was intent on promoting a social utopia conceived as a revolution in cross-class fraternal relationships and cross-cultural education. Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta had long been influenced by F.D. Maurice. Indeed, during their freezing honeymoon in the February of 1873, they had frequently retreated to their hotel room in order to read aloud from, among other learned works, Maurice’s lectures on the Johannine Epistles.30 Some years later, the catalogue at one of their Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions, explaining a portrait of Maurice to those for whom he presumably looked much like any other clergyman, described him as ‘One of the World’s great teachers. A righteous man, who loved God and Truth above all things [. . .] stern to all forms of wrong and oppression.’31 It can be seen that Maurice became the informal patron saint of their work in Whitechapel. Another powerful influence had been Andrew Mearns’s Bitter Cry. This had helped to shape Samuel Barnett’s belief that the ‘worst evil’ of poverty would be destroyed if university men would share their lives and thoughts with the poor by residing with them; physical proximity would lead to friendship, and the breaking down of ancient barriers, and education would have a

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transformative effect.32 This evolved into the schemes through which young men recently graduated from the universities – and increasingly also young women – went to the East End of London and other cities, to experience life at first-hand, but to do so by living together in small-scale communities. For the men at least, it was a natural extension of the communal experience they had already had at school and college; it marked the introduction of all-male communities into places in which they had previously been absent. The university settlement phenomenon attracted a great deal of interest, and it also played an important part in the fusion of the aesthetic and the social reform strands of fin de sie`cle thought. It is not surprising, then, that a whole cast of characters who appear in this book also cropped up in the dining halls and club rooms of the two earliest institutions, the non-denominational Toynbee Hall and the Anglo-Catholic parallel venture Oxford House (both dating from 1884), and in the 21 other settlements that had opened in London by 1898.33 F. Herbert Stead, the brother of W.T. Stead, was the warden of the Congregationalist Browning Hall, and we may imagine that W.T. was a visitor there. Percy Dearmer visited Toynbee Hall in 1892 and found it a ‘most luxurious place’.34 Charles Gore took a particularly keen interest in Oxford House, and was the theological and spiritual mentor of James Adderley, its second principal.35 Indeed, the culture of Oxford House was formed from a mixture of Lux Mundi incarnational theology and Anglo-Catholic ceremonial.36 Henry Nevinson, the journalist and early historian of the fin de sie`cle, visited the House and wrote an acerbic account of the oddly priggish Oxford youths and the fourth principal (Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram) whom he found there.37 But as a longstanding supporter of the Toynbee Hall settlement, Nevinson had other loyalties. He lived ‘close to the Hall for two years, among bugs, fleas, old clothes, slippery cods’ heads and other garbage, and contributed for many years longer such assistance as my knowledge of Greek, German and military drill allowed’.38 Nevinson also provided a detailed account of a lecture on Wordsworth delivered at Toynbee Hall by Walter Pater in November 1890. A ‘vast crowd’ turned up to hear him read with his eyes shut from a paper he had already published, ‘never faltering [. . .] through all the mazes of his

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style’. At the end, applause was subdued, and Pater ‘vanished at once, probably with a sense of failure’.39 Samuel and Henrietta Barnett were unlikely to have been naturally sympathetic to Pater’s view of aesthetics – their natural allies were Ruskin and William Morris, so their invitation to the crown prince of the decadent movement underlines the breadth of their sympathies. Other notable speakers at Toynbee Hall included Beatrice Potter (Webb), Frederic Harrison, Richard Le Gallienne, Charles Booth, Leslie Stephen, Edward Carpenter, Grant Allen, George Bernard Shaw and Mary Ward (Mrs Humphrey Ward).40 Oscar Wilde offered to speak on the topic of Irish Art (with magic lantern slides) but it does not appear that he actually did so.41 As the founders of the famed Whitechapel Picture Exhibition, the Barnetts naturally sought close connections with all of the artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Crane lent pictures,42 as did Holman Hunt and Hubert Herkomer. G.F. Watts, Frederic Leighton and Herkomer opened their studios for visits from the Toynbee Hall Pupil Teachers’ Association.43 When the Barnetts took 81 members of the Toynbee Travellers’ Club on an 18-day trip to Switzerland and Italy in 1888, as an ‘experiment in co-operative travelling’, the party was accompanied by an unlikely pairing of guest lecturers: the Italian art specialist and New Woman Vernon Lee, and the Dean of Windsor and future Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson.44 Henry Scott Holland, the founder of the Christian Social Union in 1889, was an early and prominent supporter of both Toynbee Hall45 and Oxford House, which was more congenial to his AngloCatholic sensibilities. After Barnett and Winnington Ingram, Scott Holland was one of the most influential Anglican personalities in shaping attitudes and expectations in the early settlement movement. He saw the settlements at least in part as an Anglican antidote to the Salvation Army, and he used a fundraising speech at the Mansion House in support of Oxford House’s building appeal to poke fun at In Darkest England, in a humorous pastiche of the Steadian style. The pressing social problem of the age was, he told his audience, not the East End, but the ‘surplus’ of educated gentlemen, ‘accumulating in congested districts, and swarming together in shoals’ around Piccadilly. Indeed, the poor fellows

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were so unemployed and useless, so prone to throwing whole legs of mutton into the waste-paper basket, and so evidently in need of ‘General’ Booth’s matrimonial bureau, that they were in danger of becoming ‘submerged’. The audience clearly enjoyed this comic inversion of the submerged tenth, and the mockery of the Salvation Army’s proposed food collection services and marriage bureau.46 Scott Holland suggested that what was needed were ‘labour refuges or shelters for congested gentlemen established at the East End’, from which they could, once improved in moral tone, be ‘safely transferred to labour farms, which are sometimes called country seats or country livings’. Or they could return to the West End, in order to ‘dissipate many false impressions [. . .] strange stories of pigmies and cannibals, and Socialists drinking the blood of Capitalists’.47 After this sustained attempt to mock and deflate the utopian vision of Booth, he adopted a more serious tone as he offered his critique of urban living and proposed his own alternative: the problem of social breakdown came from the unnaturalness and artificiality of people of different social statuses living in different districts, and people never mixing with those outside their own narrow sphere of employment. Scott Holland argued that it was time to stop thinking in the dehumanising language of ‘the masses’ and ‘the classes’, and instead to think of educated gentlemen and working men as inseparable – the gentlemen like the buttons on a coat to fasten it, or the corks attached to a net to float it. The gentlemen would venture into the East End not as monks (although evidently as worshipping Anglicans) but ‘with all their delicious quaintnesses and pretty ways and clothes’.48 It was with this intriguingly feminised image of West London gentlemen – men who were both decorous and decorative – and with an appeal for funds for Oxford House – that Scott Holland chose to end his speech. Scott Holland also unwittingly provided what has become a fairly frequently cited piece of evidence for the excitement which the sinful city could hold for the young clergyman. As a young don visiting from Oxford in the 1870s, he had written, I did enjoy my glimpse of rough London thoroughly – that thrilling sight of the black and brutal streets reeling with drunkards and ringing with foul words, and filthy with

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degradation – and the little sudden blaze of light and colour and warmth in the crowded shed, with its music and its flowers and its intense earnest faces – and its sense of sturdy, stirring work, quick and eager, and unceasing – God alive in it all.49 Scott Holland was famed for his sense of happiness and ability to enjoy everything – ‘I never met a more joyful person’, remarked Nevinson – so perhaps his reaction to the East End should be viewed in that context.50 But it was certainly more than just a youthful curiosity, as working to relieve poverty became his life’s work. Both Oxford House and Toynbee Hall were envisaged as residential ‘colonies’ for male university graduates, and, pre-dating William Booth’s usage by some years, there was much employment of the Darkest London/Darkest Africa language, to play on the interests, fears and pockets of potential supporters.51 There was also repeated use of the biblical imagery from the Jacob and Esau story. This was deployed in a number of ways. One was the division of the boys and young men of the East End into ‘Jacobs’ and ‘Esaus’. The Jacobs were the quiet boys, who might be contemplating church membership; the Esaus were the ‘jolly but lawless’ characters who had never been near a church, but who might join a boys’ club, if it didn’t appear to be churchy.52 A second more complex exegesis was that the rough and hairy East End Esau had lost his birthright and his father’s blessing to his twin brother, the quiet, smooth and university-educated Jacob, and that it should be restored to him through the wrestling of his devious twin.53 The reconciliation of Jacob and Esau, depicted with tears, kisses and embraces, was seen as the intended climax of the healing of the relationship between men of different classes, and the point that was hammered home was that no matter how different Jacob and Esau might be in appearance and life experience, they were fundamentally brothers. The male settlement movement was seemingly propelled by this complicated mixture of F.D. Maurice-inspired brotherliness, middle-class guilt and the desire to seek the forgiveness of the wronged brother. For some, there was the undoubted thrill of being in close proximity to working-class men and boys, and a seemingly literal desire to

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extend the hand of brotherhood, and participate in the kisses and embraces of Genesis 33.4. The whole concept was also overlaid with imperialistic notions of taming savagery in the darkest places, and although the social work and the theology were very different from that of William Booth, the wider cultural framework was the same. Koven’s central argument is that the settlement movement gave men the space to experiment with different forms of masculinity, and with identities, whether homosexual or celibate, that had not gained much acceptance in Victorian society. This allowed them to become, at least to some extent, the analogues of the New Woman of the same generation; they became the New Man in the slums.54 A utopia based on introducing same-sex, celibate communities of members of the social and educational elite into deprived urban areas seemed like a modern form of monasticism, although Samuel Barnett was at pains to avoid the term. In the period that Barnett was Warden of Toynbee Hall, from 1884 to 1906, the residents included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, Jews, Quakers and agnostics, so it is easy to see why he was anxious to avoid specifically Catholic religious language.55 Furthermore, as all of the other London settlements had clear Christian denominational commitments, Toynbee became the natural refuge for settlers with agnostic, secular, Jewish or freethinking sympathies. Nor would monasticism have fitted with Barnett’s own theological commitments. He was, wrote Nevinson, ‘a broad churchman’, one who believed that ‘the Church had sufficient spiritual power left in her for change and life’, but was impatient with those who wanted to cling onto the institutions or symbols of the past. He also had no time for literal interpretations of Christian doctrines.56 Barnett also stood back from that element within the aesthetic movement that emphasised what Nevinson dismissively described as the ‘handicrafts and maypoles’ promoted by William Morris. If it is right to see Barnett as a utopian thinker, he was not one who wanted to conjure up a ‘merrie England’ of an imagined feudal past. ‘He was a Futurist, always looking forward, letting the dead bury their dead, and leaving past and existing beauty and institutions to preserve themselves only if they were animated by

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a living spirit.’57 This may explain some of the tension which existed between Barnett and C.R. Ashbee, the founder of the Guild and School of Handicraft, which originally opened its premises next to Toynbee Hall, where Ashbee, a trainee architect, was in residence. Ashbee, who was evidently one of the most energetic and gifted of the early settlers, was also responsible for much of the Arts and Crafts-style pseudo-Oxbridge de´cor at the Hall. He went on to become a major figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, laying particular emphasis on cultivating the workshop experience of the men who worked for him.58 Koven suggests that the falling out was due to Ashbee’s discovery that ‘Barnett’s conception of fraternal love was entirely sexless’, and on discovering this, he angrily condemned Barnett as a ‘eunuch in spirit and heart’.59 Barnett, meanwhile, was wary of those like Ashbee who were overtly seeking what he would have termed ‘unnatural fraternity’. The aestheticism promoted at Toynbee Hall was of the highminded Ruskinian type. It was not the Paterian celebration of the male body, or the veneration of art, beauty and emotion for the sake of themselves and immediate pleasure. For the Barnetts, both Samuel and Henrietta, art was most definitely located in the moral landscape, as we shall see in Chapter 9. It was axiomatic for the Barnetts that a settlement was not a mission station. Settlers had come to settle; to learn as much as to teach, and to receive as much as to give.60 As one early resident put it, ‘What do we do at Toynbee? I should say that we see life under varying conditions and new aspects, and attempt to partake in the life we see. We learn much; we unlearn more.’61 The idea was taken up in the chapter on ‘The Settlement Ideal’ that Whitwell Wilson wrote for Mudie-Smith’s Religious Life of London. ‘A university settlement is a place where one goes, not to teach, still less to enrich the poor, but to sit at their feet and return, having seen life whole.’62 The ideal was for men and women to gain an intimate understanding of the problems facing the poor, and then to use their knowledge and influence to bring about improvements in laws, social conditions and administration.63 There was also an expectation that the settlers would share the fruits harvested from their own education, by providing classes for the East Enders. Certainly, this led to a great deal of teaching being transmitted from the graduates to the East Enders.

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Economics, Latin, Greek and English literature were among the subjects offered from the outset. Henrietta Barnett listed 134 different subjects on which Toynbee Hall offered classes in the years before 1906; the main areas covered were literature and languages, art, crafts and music, nursing and health and science. There was also a range of clubs, which focussed on basic literacy and numeracy, and societies, which aimed to foster shared interests, and often to get their members out into the countryside. General education, support and excursions were arranged for boys and girls training as pupil teachers, designed to raise their aspirations, and increase their sense of teaching as the most noble of vocations. P. Lyttleton Gell, the chairman of the Toynbee Council, read More’s Utopia with the boys in the Pupil Teachers Association, and although the boys’ motivation had initially been that it would help them pass their examination, they found that it ‘pleased them very much by its anticipation of modern problems of education and politics’.64 University extension lectures were hosted in Whitechapel, and students were entered for exams. Beyond a one shilling registration charge, students fixed their own fees. 65 In 1893, Canon Barnett sparked controversy by beginning lectures in history and science on Sunday morning. His ever practical riposte was that ‘for real study men needed brains untired by a long day’s work’.66 Barnett’s dream was to establish a University of East London, with Toynbee Hall transformed into a tutors’ residence, and other houses in the neighbourhood serving as accommodation for students, who would be able to support themselves through work while they studied.67 He saw education as quite simply the route to social transformation. Other settlements, meanwhile, reflected the different theological, social and aesthetic concerns of their founders and residents. At Oxford House, ‘first and foremost [was] the belief in Christianity as the true starting point of all civilizing effort, and secondly the recognition of the power and efficiency of community work under religious sanctions’.68 Hugh McLeod’s research on the early days of Oxford House unearthed one of its earliest annual reports diagnosing the ‘problem’ of the East End as people having lost touch with the duties and privileges of citizenship; there was an urgent sense that the ‘duties’ of thrift and prudence could only be

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taught by men who understood the laws of economics for themselves.69 But the vehicles for these lessons on thrift and prudence were the same type of men’s and boys’ clubs that existed at Toynbee Hall. Lectures, debates, drama and concerts were, together with various insurance and savings schemes, the staple activities of these clubs.70 It was, officially at least, a straightforwardly paternal model of the higher social echelons setting an example and teaching the poor about how they should conduct their lives along more middle-class lines, even if for many of the young graduate participants, the motives and emotions were more complicated. Yet along side this, there was from an early date an insistence on education as a two-way process between educator and educated, and a public critique of the paternalist model expressed in at least some of the more widely disseminated accounts of the settlements. Thus in the Mudie-Smith survey, Whitwell Wilson wrote ‘people ask “whether the poor have been improved”. They do not appreciate the reply that for the first time in the recent history of London the poor are respected and understood.’71 The sense remains that the settlement movement did go further than many other contemporary social initiatives in challenging some forms of paternalism.

EBENEZER HOWARD: THE MARRIAGE OF TOWN AND COUNTRY Ebenezer Howard was a man of a very different theological stripe from both William Booth and Samuel Barnett. He was more of a late nineteenth-century embodiment of the English dissenting tradition of the Levellers and the Diggers; according to his biographer, ‘his was a brave, if not heroic, attempt to adapt the ideology of radical Protestant dissent, which he had absorbed in the chapel communities of his youth, to an urban-industrial society’.72 An autodidact, Howard evolved his own particular perspective on town planning as a result of his careful consideration of a variety of early modern and contemporary religious and political sources – including Tom Paine, William Blake, Thomas Spence (an eighteenth-century radical utopian), the American Transcendentalists, Edward Bellamy (an American utopian), Andrew Mearns, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley,

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Henry George and Herbert Spencer. Born in London, a city he deeply loved, the son of a confectioner in 1850, Howard earned his living as a clerk and shorthand writer. He worked for a short time in the late 1860s as personal secretary to Joseph Parker of the Poultry Chapel, Cheapside. Parker was on his way to becoming London’s most popular Congregationalist preacher, and his influence on Howard, although brief, seems to have been profound.73 Howard’s views on how people should live took shape gradually, and he was working on his book, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, for most of the 1890s – it was published in 1898, and then republished in a revised, less radical form as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902. By 1902 Howard was already in the hands of the Garden City Association, the group who would ultimately bring some of his ideas to life when they created a new town at Letchworth that was intended primarily to be a commercial success by attracting light industry – it was rather far from what Howard had originally intended. The new title was chosen to seem less threatening – the dangerous sounding words ‘Real Reform’ were dropped, and the feel-good term ‘Garden Cities’ was added to evoke a sense of leafy tranquillity. A completely inappropriate cover illustration of a medieval princess holding a miniature city in the palm of one hand and a stem of lilies in the other was supplied by Walter Crane. Howard was not pleased by the change of title, for he was at heart a radical thinker who wanted to build a new social order; and, although he admired William Morris, he was not in general sympathy with neomedievalism, so the medieval princess was quite out of place.74 Howard’s original work had been the result of the distillation of years of careful reading, listening and thinking, his reflections on life in London, and his travels in America; like W.T. Stead some years later, he was to be much influenced by time spent in Chicago. The book was a blueprint for a whole new way of constructing society, the classic of fin de sie`cle town planning, with its desire to look forwards and propose new solutions for every aspect of social, community and business interaction. In the twentieth century Howard’s garden city was often interpreted as low-density housing in leafy suburbia, but in its original conception it was much more radical than that – it was

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cooperation and social harmony based on common landownership, but it was also a complete alternative to what he saw as the false path of socialism and trade unionism based on class struggle.75 Faced with the reality of rural de-population as ever more late nineteenth-century people flocked to the cities, Howard’s key theme was that the ‘marriage’ of town and country would achieve the most perfect environment for living and working. In the words of some recent commentators on Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, ‘Howard develops the extraordinary sexual metaphor of the marriage of town and country in a kind of holy sacrament.’76 For Howard, this seems to have been self-evident, rather than extraordinary. Howard was deeply aware of both the problems and the opportunities associated with rural and urban living, but believed that neither experience was complete in itself: As man and woman by their varied gifts and faculties supplement each other, so should town and country. The town is the symbol of society – of mutual help and friendly co-operation, of fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, of wide relations between man and man – of broad, expanding sympathies – of science, art, culture, religion. And the country! The country is the symbol of God’s love and care for man. All that we are, and all that we have comes from it. Our bodies are formed of it; to it they return [. . .] Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation.77 At the heart of Howard’s vision was this belief in the perfectibility of town and country when brought into union through the creation of garden cities in which there would be both ample space for healthy living and conveniently located employment and recreational facilities. It was an intriguing blend of town planning and theology. As a Congregationalist, Howard attended the Stoke Newington church of C. Fleming Williams, one of London’s most progressive ministers, and this church was the location for Howard’s first public speech after the publication of Tomorrow; ‘a large and enthusiastic audience’ listened to him speak on ‘An Ideal City

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Made Practicable’.78 The precise nature of Howard’s religious beliefs do require some further investigation – Howard seems to have departed from conventional Nonconformist orthodoxy while still relatively young, and then returned to Christian faith in a renewed form after some type of personal crisis. The evidence for this is filtered through the anxieties of his extremely pious first wife Lizzie, who seems to have spent a great deal of time worrying about the state of his soul.79 Like so many of his generation, Howard also became captivated by Spiritualism – he lectured on the subject at the Holborn Literary and Debating Society in 1879, and at the Zetetical Society in 1880.80 He also made regular attempts to contact Lizzie, after she died in 1904, and towards the end of his life comforted himself with the thoughts both that he would soon be reunited with her, and also that he would return to earth in a new body – reincarnated fresh for further work to promote his garden city ideal.81 In the notes intended for his biographer that he dictated to his son in the fortnight before he died, he said, ‘I want it brought out in my life that my absolute belief in a future life was one of those influences which made me dare to do anything for the cause I had at heart.’82 Ebenezer Howard would have remained simply an obscure figure in the thought world of the fin de sie`cle had not some of his ideas been enthusiastically adopted as the basis for early twentiethcentury town planning – first at Letchworth, and then Welwyn, both in Hertfordshire – and then across other parts of the developed world – Canberra, for example, was based on Howard’s ideas when it was built from scratch as a capital city for Australia from 1909. His ideas were also strongly taken up in the Soviet Union. In more cautious environments like Britain, the attraction of Howard’s ideas came from the fact that they seemed both new and ground breaking and at the same time reassuringly familiar; the garden city was not unlike a traditional market town, human in scale and economically productive, but with the country close by.83 It was David Bebbington who suggested that ‘The garden city tradition, with its long term influence over government new towns policy and town and country planning worldwide, is the greatest single fruit of the schemes of Nonconformists at the turn of the twentieth century for remedying the problems of industrial

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Britain.’84 Bebbington’s observation also hints at the wider involvement of Nonconformists in the garden city movement: the board of the Garden City Association which brought Letchworth and Welwyn into existence included the major Nonconformist businessmen George Cadbury, William Hesketh Lever and Joseph Rowntree, as well as Nonconformist ministers and members of Parliament. Howard had intended his garden cities to be conceptually different from the workers’ model villages of the turn of the century – Cadbury’s Bournville, primarily for chocolate workers on the outskirts of Birmingham, which was under construction from 1896, and Lever’s sumptuous creation Port Sunlight, for his soap workers, under construction from 1888. Howard’s diagrams were for a circular town, about three-quarters of a mile from centre to circumference, with public gardens, civic amenities and a park at the centre, ringed by a circular crystal palace ideal for a covered market and other activities in inclement weather, and a grand avenue, with schools, playgrounds and churches, ringing the town at the midpoint between centre and outskirts. Housing was also to be built in concentric rings, and the whole was traversed by six boulevards, dividing the town into six wards, and connecting the centre outwards to the industrial areas on the outskirts and to a circular railway, which would run around the perimeter of the whole town. On a modern map of Letchworth, and to a lesser extent one of Welwyn, it is still possible to make out the influence of the circular plan in the development of both towns. The centre of Letchworth is Broadway Gardens, with central amenities clustered around, and the Broadway, stretching out to the north and south, are clearly based on the boulevards. Welwyn’s central Parkway, which was an extensive, landscaped one-way system long before such urban traffic management systems became the norm, is further from Howard’s ideal, partly of course because his plans gave no thought to the needs of motor traffic. The most unique features of his scheme, the complete commitment to concentric planning and the circular crystal palace and railway, were never remotely realisable. At Letchworth, the railway had already been built, and the only decision the planners faced was whether to position the town so that the station was on its edge or in the centre. They opted for the latter, with the result that the town was

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bisected into more and less favourable sections, with the resulting problem that much of the working-class housing was ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’. Although the architects, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, did work originally from Howard’s diagrams, as more and more of his ideas for the garden city were jettisoned, Howard had to adjust to what he termed the ‘descent’ of his ideas into reality. He seems to have been realistic enough to know that there was an inevitability about this, but also optimistic enough to believe that every new garden city offered the opportunity for the further refinement of his ideal. He concluded that Letchworth had become a ‘small, poky experiment’, but naively believed that in Welwyn, which was built in the 1920s, everything would be put right. In fact, Welwyn was even further from his ideal than Letchworth.85 In pre-war Letchworth, the real possibility existed that its ‘pioneering’ first generation of residents would actively seek to throw off the conventions of life as it was lived elsewhere. Early residents were hoping for a life that would be sociable and joyful, and largely free from class distinctions. Almost all were Liberals or socialists and the majority were Free Church people, together with some secularists. There was a secular church, the Alpha Union, and an attempt to bury Nonconformist differences by holding a ‘United Religious Meeting’. The centrally located Letchworth Free Church was originally intended to be free of denominational affiliation, although it eventually became a member of the Congregational Union. There was a much higher than average preponderance of oddly dressed, sandal-wearing vegetarians, who attracted the curiosity of journalists.86 When W.H. Gaunt was appointed estate manager in 1906, he was quick to label such people as ‘subversive’,87 an early indication of the tensions in the little town. Early visitors to Letchworth included Edward Carpenter, the homosexual rights campaigner who certainly had some disciples there, and Lenin, who appears to have found the experience useful for informing his thoughts about town planning in his own country. The garden city ethos also had a strong appeal to Christians, including the Scottish Presbyterian minister A.S. Matheson, who produced his own book in praise of garden cities, City of Man, in 1910. Matheson acknowledged his debt to Howard, and devoted a

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whole chapter to praising the garden city as ‘a picturesque ideal representing two innate and cognate instincts, or tendencies of human nature – the love of Nature and the love of social intercourse, the craving for solitude, and the craving for society’.88 Garden cities, he believed, offered the greatest potential for uniting all the competing human instincts. Rather more farfetched was his comparison of the garden city with the New Jerusalem described in Revelation 21: ‘Let us notice how the Garden City ideal possesses some of the features which belong to the ideal city of God described at the end of the Apocalypse.’89 It would take the most highly imaginative reading of Revelation 21 and 22 to find any points of similarity between the New Jerusalem ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ and Letchworth; the text in Revelation contains no hints about the union of city and country. Another, more comprehensible theological motif that Matheson reached for was the reinstatement of a prelapsarian Eden: ‘Man is meant to live amid the fair and happy aspects of creation, adding to the fertility and sweetness of the garden, so that it may spread out into the waste, and make it bloom and blossom as the rose.’90 His clinching argument, however, was that it was fundamental for the continued prosperity of Britain for families to enjoy the proximity of the city from the sanctuary of leafy suburbia: ‘It may be thought a dream of Utopia to hope for the benefits of town and country in one to any large extent, but they must be secured if we as a nation are to continue in the line of our past traditions.’91

‘UTOPIA GOES TO SMASH’: PRAGMATISM AND EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNITIES ‘Utopia goes to smash’ was the evocative phrase that Booth (or was it Stead?) coined to describe what happens when experimental communities fail. They fail, it was stated in In Darkest England, because they attempt to govern themselves by means of a system of presumed equality and majority vote.92 Booth, of course, never had any time for this form of collective decision-making, and as he looked at the progress of some of his cherished schemes in the mid1890s, he must have wondered if it was really going to be possible for the Salvation Army to end poverty and bring about a new social

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order. There was the threat of smallpox at the Blackfriars Road night shelter, and it had been described as a ‘dangerous hotbed of infection’ by the Southwark medical officer of health. The market had collapsed for the Salvation Army’s safety matches, which, because they were manufactured without the toxic yellow phosphorus, were intended to be one of the centrepieces of the city colony, providing safe work for match girls. The matches had become so expensive that it was said that even Salvationists would not buy them. Meanwhile, at the Hadleigh Farm Colony, the colonists were suffering from poor weather, poor leadership and a collapse in farm prices.93 By the middle of the decade, many of the grandiose schemes that had been announced with such fanfare in 1891 were running into difficulties both large and small. The social programme would continue, and it would in time become the bestknown feature of the Salvation Army’s work, but it would not be, by any definition, utopia. In 1896, when Oxford House in Bethnal Green had been in existence for 12 years, and was at its point of maximum expansion, with its social schemes attracting support and praise from many quarters, it was estimated that only about 1 in 80 of the men in the parish of St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, attended either church or chapel. Drink and ‘the solid mass of paganism’ were blamed for this disappointing statistic. But the settlers were undeterred. ‘Much still to be done’, they noted briskly in their annual report.94 What it emphasises is that this, the most overtly religious of the various schemes which have been considered in this chapter, was only very marginally about religion-as-churchgoing. The Stead– Booth schemes barely mention churchgoing and neither does Henrietta Barnett in her account of the work at Toynbee Hall. The Toynbee philosophy was primarily social transformation through education; God revealed himself by knowledge. There was an evident demand for classes in both Latin and electricity – the desire for the key to unlock centuries of scholarship was balanced by the desire for knowledge of the remarkable and invisible force which was changing the world. The concept of the garden city, meanwhile, had started off as a quasi-mystical path to complete social transformation, but was rapidly annexed to mean little more than low-density housing with lawns and shrubs. It was inevitable that Welwyn, just 20 miles

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north of London, where Howard died in poverty in 1928, would develop mainly as a middle-class commuter town. Howard had managed to remain optimistic about Welwyn; he saved his ire for the arrival of the ‘garden suburb’, which he saw as a total corruption of his original intention. While garden cities were intended to be self-contained in industry and corporate life, garden suburbs were mere dormitories, where workers lived in isolation from their employment; even worse, garden suburbs encouraged the further growth of already overgrown cities.95 It was ironic, then, that the founder of the first garden suburb was Henrietta Barnett, who purchased 80 acres of Hampstead Heath in 1903, and that the architect was none other than Raymond Unwin, who left Letchworth in order to work on this new project. Henrietta Barnett had become increasingly critical of the artificiality of Toynbee Hall, with its transient and all-male population. She wanted to try a more domestic experiment as a means of healing social divisions. People of different ages, classes, income levels, levels of fitness and marital status would live side by side and share together in civic, educational and religious activities. As a widow she moved there herself, although she admitted that she found her solitary life in Hampstead Garden Suburb rather lonely after the companionship of the East End. Although all of the schemes described in this chapter survived well into the twentieth century, and many are still in existence today, it is clear that all had to make significant compromises as they moved from the experimental optimism of the fin de sie`cle to the pragmatic realities of the new century.

CHAPTER 9 CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES ON ART AT THE FIN DE SIE` CLE: GALLERIES, PAINTING AND LITURGY

In late nineteenth-century Britain, the boundaries between art and religion often melted away. It became increasingly common for Christian thinkers to advocate what they saw as the redemptive qualities of art, and to act on these impulses by organising art exhibitions and galleries, lectures and picture loan schemes. The final theme to be considered in this book is the way in which Christians made use of art in the age of aestheticism. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of some of the galleries (particularly the one in Whitechapel) that were opened as part of the fin de sie`cle project to bring high culture to working people. The galleries were one of the lasting legacies from this period. The chapter then considers the contrasting approaches of two churchmen to the Pre-Raphaelite painters whose works were so popular in the late nineteenth century: the Congregationalist P.T. Forsyth (1848 –1921) and the Anglican F.W. Farrar (1831 –1903). Finally, the chapter explores the early work of the liturgist and aesthete Percy Dearmer (1867 – 1936), arguing that, together with his first wife Mabel, he represents a prime example of a Christian thinker and activist who sought to expand the horizons of Christianity by adopting aesthetic considerations as a central concern, and by turning them to the service of theology. Some of

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Dearmer’s ideas flourished in the twentieth century and gave birth to further innovations; others perished and sank without trace. Although both Forsyth and Dearmer are well known for their contributions to theology and church life in the early years of the twentieth century, they have been less appreciated for their contribution to the developing strand of English theological aesthetics in the late nineteenth century.1

THE PUBLIC PROVISION OF ART GALLERIES Among the many notable features of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett’s activities at St Jude’s, Whitechapel, one of the most interesting was the inauguration of the annual Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions, which developed into the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Their exhibitions, which began in 1881, were held each Easter during the 1880s and 1890s. They involved the annual collection and display of around 300 works of contemporary art, including paintings by G.F. Watts, Holman Hunt, D.G. Rossetti, Frederic Leighton, J.E. Millais, Edward Burne Jones, Hubert Herkomer and others. They attracted huge numbers of East Enders and other visitors to view the best of British art for free. The Barnetts, who have been aptly described by Seth Koven as ‘the most notable and controversial promoters of aesthetic philanthropy in the metropolis’,2 regarded the picture exhibitions as amongst the most significant of their many activities. This was because they believed art to be a language which communicated with far greater effectiveness than the word-based medium of traditional theology. The intention was to educate working people in the ‘art of seeing’, and to capitalise on the fact that viewing art, unlike university extension classes, did not require working people to master high levels of attainment in reading and writing.3 The Barnetts took a synaesthetic approach by asserting that ‘when men’s minds are full of beautiful thoughts, their souls are more ready to worship’ and that ‘the best pictures helped the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak’.4 Indeed, Samuel Barnett informed John Jackson, Bishop of London, that he believed that ‘pictures in the present day take the place of [biblical] parables’.5 He believed that art possessed its own superior powers of communication, and in a letter to his brother admitted that ‘I cannot make up my mind whether [Art] needs the spoken word or not.’6

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The decision to place an increasingly large emphasis on the ‘explanation’ of the paintings suggests that he had concluded that words, both spoken and written, were indeed needed. Lectures were provided by Canon Barnett himself, a carefully edited penny catalogue was produced for each exhibition, and ‘watchers’ were installed as a continuous presence in the gallery. Their task was not simply to ensure the safety of the valuable artworks, but to be on hand to provide their own commentaries on the paintings, thus acting as both guardians and interpreters.7 Observers noted that one in three visitors purchased the catalogue, and that it was carefully scrutinised.8 But despite all this didactic intent, Henrietta Barnett also emphasised the extent to which the East Enders themselves were encouraged to express their thoughts and reactions, and even, in the early years, to vote for their favourite picture. Narrative paintings always headed the poll, and landscapes were the least popular.9 Barnett’s decision to open the Picture Exhibition on Sundays led to an onslaught of outraged Christian opinion, as could have been predicted. Representatives of the Lord’s Day Observance Society picketed the exhibition, threatening all who entered with divine retribution10 – an episode which serves to show the extent to which belief in threats of everlasting damnation had ceased to have much effect by the 1880s. Bishop Jackson was appealed to by the sabbatarian lobby, but he declined to intervene. Nine years later, in 1892, Archbishop Benson gave his blessing to Sunday opening by inaugurating that year’s exhibition himself, on a Sunday afternoon.11 That was also the year in which attendances peaked, with 73,271 visitors trouping through the rooms of St Jude’s parish school. Part of the success was attributable to the authorities at Toynbee Hall deliberately trying to create an environment in which visitors could relax. Laughing and talking were not discouraged, and there was none of the expectation of reverential silence which attended visits to the National Gallery or the British Museum. The fact that there was no admission charge encouraged locals to pop back for repeat visits, or to come in for a quiet rest.12 The controversy with the Lord’s Day Observance Society gave Barnett the opportunity to explain his view that ‘a picture was as good as a sermon’, and to argue that, with his ‘opinion of the high use of pictures, it would have been wrong for me to hide them on

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Sunday, the day specially set apart for rest and meditation’.13 Barnett, as was seen in the previous chapter, was a man who looked firmly towards the future. He hoped that in the twentieth century, a new form of art would develop ‘to express the new beliefs and hopes of the age’.14 In effect, he wanted art to push deep into the spheres of theology and sacramentalism. Part of his hope for this was the foundation of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which opened as the new century dawned, in March 1901. This made permanent the work which the Barnetts and their helpers had undertaken on an annual basis over the previous 20 years. Its first director, Charles Aitken, stayed for a decade, only moving when he became director of the Tate Gallery in 1911. During his directorship at Whitechapel there was a significant shift in policy, from simply gathering and displaying the paintings of well-known artists, to mounting special exhibitions on particular themes. These included the work of local artists, and in a remarkably early example of cultural sensitivity to its location in the heart of the Jewish East End, one gallery at Whitechapel was devoted to Jewish life and art. The lecture programme continued, and there was also a scheme for lending high-quality reproductions to poor people.15 The Whitechapel Art Gallery continues to operate from within its original building on an extended site, and it prides itself on having been consistently at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde for over 100 years. There were differences, and similarities, between the Whitechapel Gallery and the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight on the Wirral, and the Manchester Art Museum. The main point of similarity was in the founders’ intention to bring the very best art to working people, in the belief that regular exposure to art had its own didactic and spiritually uplifting quality. The main difference was that the Lady Lever Art Gallery was built to house the private collection of the multi-millionaire soap manufacturer William Hesketh Lever, who was first and foremost a collector. His unlimited finances allowed him to amass an eclectic collection in excess of 20,000 items, and to show it to the public for free in a purpose-built building. Lever, who was a Congregationalist, collected also for reasons of business investment, and in order to participate in the prevailing culture of ostentatious display as a marker of wealth.16 At the same time, it was important to him that his Gallery was in the centre of Port Sunlight village, and within a

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short distance of the soap works, so that it would be a place of regular resort for his workers. There was also a nationalist dimension: like the Barnetts, who argued that the art they selected captured the best qualities of being British,17 Lever wanted his gallery to showcase British art. As he put it in his speech at the Gallery opening in 1922, he wanted ‘to show that English art throughout the centuries has not been second to the art of any nation in the world’.18 In fact, much that he bought came from elsewhere, and he purchased whatever attracted him from a network of dealers, including classical sculpture, ceramics, furniture, textiles and ethnographic objects, but the Gallery became best known for its outstanding collection of PreRaphaelite paintings. The Manchester Art Museum, founded by Thomas Coglan Horsfall in 1877, was an earlier project than both the Whitechapel and the Lady Lever, but as it developed, it became close in ethos to Whitechapel and to Toynbee Hall. Like the Barnetts, who were his close friends, Horsfall believed in the redemptive power of art, and his thinking was heavily influenced by John Ruskin. In 1886, the Manchester Art Museum moved to Ancoats Hall in the impoverished East End of Manchester, where it developed a range of cultural activities and evening classes. In 1896, the Museum began to work closely with the Manchester University Settlement, and the two institutions formally amalgamated in 1901. There was much emphasis on bringing schoolchildren to the Art Museum during school hours, and Horsfall himself financed a scheme to loan reproductions of pictures to schools – 45 sets of 12 pictures were circulated. The Museum and the Settlement separated again in 1918, and the Museum finally closed in 1953, with most of its collections being transferred to the Manchester Art Gallery.19 Horsfall, who was an Anglican layman, served as president of the Settlement for over 20 years.20 The Ancoats Brotherhood was another important feature of the work in Manchester. The Brotherhood was founded by Charles Rowley in 1878, for the purpose of bringing art and literature to working people. By the mid-1880s it was operating university extension-style lecture courses, as well as one-off lectures, sometimes to huge audiences of up to 900 men on Sunday afternoons. Indeed, on Sunday 16 April 1893, the Brotherhood were treated to Richard Le Gallienne, lecturing on The Religion of a

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Literary Man.21 Six years earlier, they had had a series of lectures to coincide with the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1887. The lecturer was a 40-year-old local Congregationalist minister from nearby Cheetham Hill, Peter Taylor Forsyth.

P.T. FORSYTH AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES Forsyth wrote up the lectures, and published them as his first major book, entitled Religion in Recent Art. He would later be regarded as among the most influential theologians in the early twentiethcentury English-speaking world. At this point, however, he was a relatively unknown minister, now in Clarendon Park, Leicester. The main theological influences that had shaped him were the German liberal Protestants, and F.D. Maurice. The choice of ‘recent art’ meant the Pre-Raphaelites: Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Watts, Holman Hunt and, on a rather different tangent, Richard Wagner. In turning his lectures into a book, Forsyth was deftly moving from the more working-class audience for whom they were originally intended, to the cultivated middle-class church members who expected the pastor to be able to discuss art intelligently, both at the dinner table and from the pulpit. As Clyde Binfield has noted, ‘in each of his pastorates, Forsyth encountered church members who were educated in art and architecture, especially their technicalities’.22 Holbrook Jackson, when he referred to ‘strange, pale youths with abundant hair’ who emerged from the ‘staidest of Nonconformist circles’ vowing to live ‘passionately in scarlet moments’, could perhaps have been thinking of the young men who would have found Religion in Recent Art compelling.23 Binfield points out that many Dissenters were employed as what might be called ‘mental art-workers’: compositors, typesetters, printers, lithographers, engravers, journalists, newspapermen, booksellers, publishers, arts-and-craftsmen, ‘cultural mediators and popularizers in word, music and picture’.24 Even so, Forsyth knew that he would be taking many of his readers into unfamiliar territory, and that he would be challenging many of their assumptions: about art, allegory, nudity, the Bible, the travails of late nineteenth-century culture and about Protestant Christianity. The book reveals Forsyth’s status as a theologian of the age, grappling with some of the central themes of the fin de sie`cle – including the need for freedom for the

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imagination, world-weariness, anxiety and pessimism, hope for the future, the role of women, and, most obviously, the importance of religion engaging with art without being fearful or moralising. Although Forsyth’s own theological position changed, some of the ideas contained in Religion in Recent Art had a relevance that would endure into the twentieth century: indeed, Jeremy Begbie suggests that Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was ‘probably the only other major Protestant theologian of modern times to be so bold in his attempt to voice the existential and theological significance of contemporary art’.25 Forsyth’s method was to devote a chapter of around 50 pages to each of his first three subjects – Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts – with two chapters, and a total of around 100 pages each – to his final subjects, Holman Hunt and Wagner. This permitted him to explore his terrain relatively slowly, and within his chapters he wrote shorter sections in which he discussed particular paintings, or theological or social questions. The central contention was that, for the sake of both parties, the estrangement between art and religion should be overcome. They are clearly aligned, and, ideally at least, mutually interdependent: Art and religion pursue the like great methods in different kinds. The principle of art is the incarnation of God’s eternal beauty; the principle of religion is the incarnation of God’s eternal human heart. Neither can do the other’s work, yet their work is complementary, and I wish the divorce between them were more nearly healed. I wish the artists felt more of the need which art can fill; I wish the religious felt more of the need that art alone can fill. I wish the Christian ideal might more speedily rise to its function for the imagination; I wish the artistic imagination would more readily respond to the inspiration of the Christian spirit.26 The necessity for primacy to be given to the role of imagination in religion was one of Forsyth’s central ideas in this book: ‘the large culture of the imagination won from Art may be of essential use in defending us from the dangers of Religion in our national type of mind’.27 The deficit of imagination left people with the ‘hard, inelastic, and unsympathetic order of mind’ which led to them

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being tormented with religious difficulties. He reiterated the point at the beginning of his chapter on Rossetti: Religion had ‘lost in that aspect and function of it which is kindred to the imagination. It has become harsh, strident, and unlovely, something to be stoutly asserted, blindly defended, and tenaciously held, rather than absolutely trusted, winsomely worshipped, nobly evidenced, and beautifully beloved.’28 For Protestants, one of the biggest dangers was in making the Bible into an idol, and falling into ‘dull and dismal literalism’. When the imagination was ‘injured or dethroned’ from its central place in religion by this occurrence, a number of consequences followed, including the growth of extreme scepticism about scripture history. But, states Forsyth, ‘you may drive the imagination out at the door but it will always re-enter by the window’.29 The phrase seems consciously to invoke Jowett’s famous aphorism in Essays and Reviews, ‘Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door.’30 Jowett was making a plea for an open and truthful appraisal of biblical texts. Forsyth was saying that this process should not be allowed to reduce the Bible ‘to a mere theological history’ at the expense of imagination. ‘Banish imagination from your religion, and art will be forced to invent a religion of its own, to the loss of many souls, and the peril of many more.’31 But Protestants should not just blame the aesthetes or the academic de-mythologisers: they should blame their own tradition, for allowing the whole Bible to be reduced to a ‘dumb wooden idol’.32 Forsyth was consistently harsh on the approaches to the Bible manifested by many from within his own tradition. He was also relentless in making the case that a freed imagination is central to the well-being of Christianity. Imagination is not the same as faith, but faith is impossible without imagination. Forsyth’s purpose was not simply to disparage the Protestant status quo, however. He had an optimism borne out of his theological belief in the redemption of creation, and from his fine sense of being finely tuned to the positive, as well as to the melancholic, strands within the spirit of the age. He believed that religion and art would be reconciled, in order to renew Protestant Christianity: ‘The time is coming, I am sure, when the Christ that is to be shall fascinate the imagination as it was enthralled by the mediaeval Christ, and inspire a piety purer, because lovelier, than the one-sided purity of Puritanism.’33

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Forsyth’s approach to discussing religious themes in the work of Pre-Raphaelite artists was allusive rather than direct. When discussing Rossetti, whose work he associated with sadness, he adopted the strategy of using paintings of women, rather than depictions of religious subjects: ‘I confine myself only to such [pictures] as are religious in their spirit and bearing. I avoid landscape [. . .] I avoid also, for the most part, pictures dealing with expressly religious themes. It is not in these that we best get the religion of the age’s art.’34 He went on to discuss at length Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel. He characterised Burne-Jones as the great painter of mythic imagination and beauty. Again he used the faces of women in the paintings Green Summer and Chant d’Amour, to make his point about ‘the grace of sanctities intangible and inviolate’.35 ‘These women, of course, have not been to Girton, but they have been touched wittingly or unwittingly, by the spirit of the age and the riddle of the earth.’36 When he does finally turn to a painting on a religious subject, Burne-Jones’s The Morning of the Resurrection, it is once again the faces depicted that most hold his interest.37 If Burne-Jones was for Forsyth the great painter of mythic subjects, G.F. Watts (with whom he corresponded as he prepared his book) was the great modern painter of allegory. He discussed Watts’s painting Psyche, urging his readers not to be offended by Psyche’s complete nakedness, but to consider instead her tears and the broken lamp at her feet. Psyche, who by looking upon the face of her lover Cupid caused him to flee, functioned, Forsyth claimed, as an allegory for ‘the soul of our time [. . .] with its ignorant knowledge [. . .] its sense of irretrievable loss amid all its outward beauty’.38 Forsyth similarly teased out the contemporary meanings of another of Watts’s allegorical figures, Hope. She sits on top of a globe, but with bandaged eyes and stooping posture, framed by her almost broken lyre. He read this painting as about the soul who has gained the world, but lost joy, and is immersed in scepticism and pain. The ‘hope’ is very fragile, represented by the one unbroken string of the lyre, and by a light which shines on the figure, but which her bandaged eyes cannot see.39 Hope may be fragile and tenuous, according to Forsyth, but it is still hope. It was Watts’s painting Love and Death (1885 –7), in which the vast figure of Death advances on the puny and immature Cupid, that Forsyth

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saw as being particularly apposite for the age: ‘No picture of Mr Watts’s makes me feel more than this that he is a great religious painter, and his Art the art of the deep prophetic soul dreaming of things to come.’40 It was only really with Holman Hunt, whom Forsyth regarded as the supreme Pre-Raphaelite painter, that he discussed paintings on directly religious subjects, with lengthy analyses of The Scapegoat, The Shadow of Death and The Triumph of the Innocents. He regarded Holman Hunt as ‘the best that has yet been done by Protestant Christianity in the way of Art’.41 Forsyth was, as we have seen, excoriating about his Congregationalist constituency and its anti-theological temper: ‘men of large business faculty, energy and conception [who] almost angrily and contemptuously resent it if their preacher asks of them scope for anything on a corresponding scale in matters of the soul’.42 Later he pushed the point further still: ‘True catholicity is an essential condition of great Christian art, and the sects are its ruin. Nonconformity suspects art, and, as a consequence, Nonconformity can barely hold its own in an age when art is reentering Social life.’43 The ever broadminded British Weekly did not take Forsyth’s condemnatory tone amiss, and responded favourably to the work of the then virtually unknown ‘Mr Forsyth’: ‘This is an extremely able, thoughtful and suggestive book, one which will bear repeated perusal and reward it.’ After making some rather disconnected observations about the treatment of Rossetti and Watts, the reviewer concluded, ‘We have not been able to understand Mr Forsyth’s theology. The work is very notable and promising; it shows careful study, genuine insight; above all a beautiful and pure enthusiasm.’44 This was an interesting admission that his theological ideas were too avant-garde to be generally intelligible in 1889, but the book itself gave the sense of being genuinely important and impressive.

F.W. FARRAR AND ART DEPICTING CHRIST Another, but very different, late nineteenth-century churchman with an interest in pre-Raphaelite painting was the liberal Anglican F.W. Farrar, who was a former pupil of F.D. Maurice, and a canon of Westminster until 1895, when he became Dean of Canterbury.45 Farrar published William Holman Hunt: His Life and Work,

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co-authored with the Roman Catholic poet Alice Meynell, in 1893; it was a large format, lavishly illustrated although slender volume in the ‘Art Annual’ series. The book consisted of chapters by Meynell on the artistic life of Hunt, and on his ‘Home and Studio’ – the latter pointing out his elegant style of life, somewhat in the genre of a Country Life article from the mid-twentieth century. There was also a more substantial chapter by Farrar on ‘the Principal Pictures’. If Meynell’s tone was celebratory of Hunt’s taste and talent, Farrar’s objective was to inform the reader about the circumstances in which the works had been painted, and to draw out the moral lessons of the pictures, in a manner that was far less subtle than that of Forsyth, and also in direct opposition to the ‘art for art’s sake’ manifesto of the aesthetic movement – Farrar’s approach to art was essentially the antithesis of that of Pater. Although Farrar admitted that he was unqualified as an art critic, his stated aim was ‘simply to point to qualities and meanings which are not beyond the reach of any intelligent student’.46 This, indeed, was what he did, and it can be argued that Hunt’s paintings, with his depictions of lost sheep, biblical scenes, The Scapegoat and his most famous work – The Light of the World – readily lent themselves to Christian allegorical interpretations. In fact, Farrar was doing little more than re-presenting Hunt’s works from the 1850s to a new audience in the 1890s. He particularly loved the realism and detail of Hunt’s paintings of Christ in Palestine – works such as The Shadow of Death and Christ and the Two Marys – which seemed directly in sympathy with Farrar’s own Life of Christ (1874). This was a work of cautious scholarship, which in the wake of the sceptical lives of Christ by Strauss and Renan, aimed to reassure readers by providing copious descriptions of the Palestinian setting, a land which Farrar had visited.47 He had a practical motive, too, in wishing to maintain Hunt’s profile among a late nineteenth-century audience. This was seen when he urged his readers to consider whether they could purchase the painting May Day on Magdalen Tower, which was then languishing unsold in Hunt’s studio. He assured his readers that the painting was both free of ‘namby-pamby aestheticism’ and would make a sound investment.48 As it is now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, William Hesketh Lever must have been persuaded on both counts.

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Farrar followed up his study of Hunt with a much more substantial work, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art, in 1894. In this 500-page volume, most attention was given to the artists of the Italian Renaissance and Northern Europe. The method, which was to write a short descriptive section on the artistic depiction of each incident in the life of Christ, gave the book something of an encyclopaedic quality. Again, Farrar makes it clear that he writes not as an art critic, but as someone who, as a result of much continental travel, has had the opportunity to examine much European art at first-hand. Furthermore, he had become convinced of the value of his giving lectures, in order to make ‘our National Gallery a source of pleasure and advantage to boys and youths of the working classes, who had previously looked on some of our richest possessions with [a] listless and unintelligent gaze’.49 But Farrar’s motivation went further than simply wanting to provide recreation and education for working-class youths. He purposefully reversed the ‘art for art’s sake’ dictum with his judgments that ‘Every noble picture has great lessons of its own to teach’ and ‘Art cannot deceive.’50 This was a direct importing of the Ruskinian view that a nation should be judged by the quality of its artistic productions, and that art, unlike literature, can contain no hypocrisy, unless it is the work of unworthy men. Farrar’s very considerable knowledge of European painting and sculpture, and his inclusion of such modern scholarly devices as a bibliography and footnotes, was, however, marred by his display of ancient prejudices. Spanish Renaissance art was more or less entirely condemned, on the grounds that the ‘Spanish painters were the bondslaves of the Romish Church, and their art was tainted into pestilence by the horrible blight of the Inquisition.’51 This approach makes the work an example of a ‘janiform’ work of scholarship that looks both forwards (to modern scholarly techniques) and backwards (to blanket prejudices against entire nations, based on religious bigotry). Essentially then, and in a manner very different from Forsyth, Farrar’s tone – in this and also in his other writings – was that of a moralising Protestant. He saw the purpose of religious art as being to make the stories in the Gospels clearer, and he had no time for what he perceived as departures from authenticity.52 He followed his hero Ruskin by declaring that perfection was reached in the depiction of Christ in

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Le Beau Dieu d’Amiens, a sculpture on the west front of Amiens cathedral by an unknown artist of the thirteenth-century gothic. For Farrar, it was the lack of ‘artificial sentimentality’ and ‘morbid superstition’ that was particularly attractive.

THE DEARMERS, ART AND THE AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP In 1899, a 32-year-old London curate named Percy Dearmer published The Parson’s Handbook. It was to be his most important publication, running to 12 editions until 1931, and continuing to be widely read thereafter. It was published at first by Grant Richards, a youthful avant-garde publisher who had worked with W.T. Stead, and with Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley on The Savoy, and who was beginning to make a name publishing George Bernard Shaw and A.E. Housman. From 1907, publication of The Parson’s Handbook shifted to Oxford University Press, which is probably indicative of the shift which it had made by this point into the ecclesiastical mainstream.53 The book was indeed very influential in shaping the worship and ethos of the Church of England in the first half of the twentieth century, and beyond. Dearmer’s purpose in The Parson’s Handbook was to define and to advocate correct ‘English use’ in liturgy, based on careful historical investigation and application of the general principles adopted in the late medieval English church, and in particular the liturgical practices in operation in 1549. A moderate Anglo-Catholic himself at this point, he wanted to wean Anglo-Catholic clergy away from the pastiche Roman customs, made-up ritual and bad taste that he saw proliferating among them, and from any form of ceremonial which lacked a clear theological and historical basis. Instead, he sought to promote an English form of Catholicism, rich in ceremonial and using beauty to convey religious meaning, but containing no deviation from the words of the Book of Common Prayer. Beauty was at the heart of what Dearmer was striving for in worship. The liturgical arrangement and fittings of the church should be in harmony with his conception of the aesthetic, which was heavily derived from the Arts and Crafts movement. He had strong and uncompromising views about ‘taste’, and about what was right and wrong in liturgical matters. He was partly responsible

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for creating the peculiarly Anglican species of the early twentiethcentury, the ‘Prayer Book Catholic’. By the middle of the twentieth century, Dearmer’s liturgical views had reached far into the liberal Catholic, central and even some of the evangelical wings of the Church of England. His views on other religious matters had broadened considerably, and during his lifetime he attracted some hostility. His views on church furnishings and ceremonial are still of interest, particularly because of the historical justification he provides for every innovation. However, his influence has lessened in an ecclesiastical world in which the use of the Book of Common Prayer has declined sharply, and in which, post-Vatican II, Anglican and Roman Catholic worship have become more closely aligned. In his fin de sie`cle period, and indeed later, Dearmer expressed his opinions forcefully about the need for the church to come to terms with the artistic world. In a tone similar to Forsyth, he stated that it was hopeless to expect artists to take religion seriously, when the clergy failed to take art seriously: It is not now science, but art that is out of touch with religion [. . .] The clergy have worked on purely commercial lines; they are mostly even now content with decoration that is the ridicule of competent artists, or is ignored by them as not being even amusing; and the Church has almost entirely failed to call to her service the great artists and craftsmen of which the last generation produced so large a number. Her place as patroness of the arts has been taken by the merchants of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.54 This last comment was presumably aimed at Lever and Horsfall among others, and at George and Richard Tangye, the benefactors of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Dearmer had another reason for disliking mass-produced church furnishings; they were frequently produced by sweated labour. Here his aesthetic sense united with his sense of social justice and his theological sensibility: It has been pointed out that a modern preacher often stands in a sweated pulpit, wearing a sweated surplice over a suit of clothes that were not produced under fair

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conditions, and holding a sweated book in one hand, with the other he points to the machine-made cross at the jerrybuilt altar, and appeals to the sacred principles of mutual sacrifice and love.55 Dearmer believed that because the Church of England permitted a certain amount of doctrinal latitude, it needed to be very strict about ceremonial.56 In common with other high church Anglicans, he clearly hoped that ceremonial uniformity could hold the Church together, although the evidence for this being likely looked slim in the 1890s. The Parson’s Handbook gave precise instructions for what was and was not permissible, and for the adoption of an English use that was true to the Book of Common Prayer and the Ornaments Rubric of 1549, employing good taste, appropriate materials and the professional advice of artists and architects at all possible points. The Parson’s Handbook in its various editions introduced large numbers of clergy and lay people to the application of aesthetic ideals in worship. Important though The Parson’s Handbook was, Dearmer’s bigger legacy is the contribution he made to early twentieth-century church music. He believed that musicians, like other artists, needed to be taken seriously by the church, and that if the beauty of worship was to be enhanced, there needed to be a major improvement in the quality of congregational singing. Working with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Martin Shaw, he edited The English Hymnal (1906) – long regarded as the musicians’ hymn book – The English Carol Book (1913), Songs of Praise (1925) and the Oxford Book of Carols (1928). The English Hymnal was a particularly complicated undertaking which would not have been brought to fruition without Dearmer’s tireless efforts. In the preface, he stressed that it was not ‘a party-book’, and expressed the hope that Christian song would allow worshippers to forget their quarrels and limitations, transporting them to ‘the higher ground where the soul is content to affirm and to adore’.57 But the book rapidly caused controversy, ostensibly because of the inclusion of a few hymns which introduced ‘direct invocation’ of saints into public worship.58 The Church hierarchy felt affronted by the direct onslaught of Dearmer and his musician friends on the hymn book to which Victorian Anglicans had been

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wedded, Hymns Ancient and Modern, and which had been revised at various dates since its first publication in 1861, and most recently in 1904.59 Dearmer detested Hymns Ancient and Modern, not only for what he perceived as its musical and poetical failings, but also because of some of its underlying theology, in hymns which stressed individual salvation, or which showed little interest in the plight of others.60 The publication of The English Hymnal was the moment when in Anglican hymnody, the Victorian world gave way to the twentieth century. Dearmer, never tolerant of what he perceived as the limitations of bishops, was outraged by the hostility directed towards it; it may have been from this point that he was sidelined from the anticipated ecclesiastical advancement within the Church of England. As vicar of St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, from 1900 to 1915, Dearmer was able to put in practice the ideas which he had expressed in The Parson’s Handbook and the music of The English Hymnal. In the words of one observer, he transformed into a ‘shrine of beauty’ an ugly red-brick church, and ‘relieved the banality of the prim suburban neighbourhood’.61 Martin Shaw, who had himself been a prominent figure in London’s fin de sie`cle music scene, arrived to direct the music in 1908. Shaw and Dearmer concentrated on plainsong, chant and the pure, clear sound of early sacred song. Shaw had a particular horror of sentimental Victorian church music, comparing the popular hymns of John Stainer, Joseph Barnby and J.B. Dykes to overripe bananas.62 In an ecclesiastical world that still expected to hear the large oratorios of Handel, Mendelssohn and Stainer, the music at St Mary’s must have seemed austere and surprising. Shaw commented that Dearmer ‘was the only parson who never broke down over music, I never caught him out’. This is the more remarkable because according to Dearmer’s second wife, he was not particularly musical. He must have relied on his highly developed artistic sense in order to make musical judgements.63 How then had Dearmer achieved his powerful amalgamation of liturgy and the aesthetics of the fin de sie`cle? His theological formation was unremarkable for a man of his time, and it involved some of the people and influences discussed earlier in this book. He had imbibed Christian Socialism at Oxford, and deep-rooted social concern was a major component in his thought, together

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with his aesthetic sense and his Christian faith. Social thought fed strongly into his beliefs about worship, as we have already seen. As an undergraduate in the late 1880s, Dearmer had been impressed by Ruskin and William Morris. He rapidly developed aesthetic tastes, decorating his rooms with Morris tapestries and Burne-Jones engravings, and purchasing William de Morgan jars. He adopted loud checks, bright blue shirts, and flowing Libertyprint ties.64 His father, who died when Dearmer was ten, had been an artist, and he may have both inherited his father’s talents and consciously wanted to honour his memory by developing his interest in the art world. Having gone up to Oxford with the thought of becoming an architect, Dearmer began to think of ordination. Theological influences were principally Charles Gore, and members of his Lux Mundi circle, including F.E. Paget and Thomas Banks Strong. From a distance, Dearmer admired Stewart Headlam, founder of the Guild of St Matthew and the Church and Stage Guild, and Henry Scott Holland, at Christ Church and then Canon of St Paul’s: he would get to know both of them well once he moved to London. (Dearmer was also much impressed with the interior de´cor of Headlam’s home, which was done by A.H. Mackmurdo – he declared that Headlam was one of the first clergymen to take a live interest in art in its modern manifestations.65) Dearmer became secretary of the Oxford branch of the Guild of St Matthew in 1889, and was also active in the Oxford branch of the Christian Social Union, which was founded in February 1890. He did relief work in Poplar during the London dock strike of 1889, seeing extreme poverty at first-hand for the first time. He became a close friend of James Adderley of the Oxford House Settlement, who combined socialism and Anglo-Catholicism with a strong interest in the theatre. It was at this point that Dearmer began to make a clear link between the need for beauty in worship and socialism. Beauty in worship was not a ‘frill’; it mattered immensely, and needed to be shared. Worship was a means through which this sharing of beauty could take place. Beautiful and dignified services had to be linked to social justice. He saw them as having little value otherwise, and he would have rejected the decadent notion that it was beauty that was being worshiped as an end in itself. He saw beauty as the indispensable route to God.

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After completing his degree in modern history, and at Gore’s invitation, Dearmer took up residence at Pusey House in October 1890, for what seems to have been a rather informal preparation for holy orders. Gore told him, Do your own work and use the house as best you can to prepare for orders. There are no specified rules you will be under, but we breakfast early at 8.0 and expect the household to be in at Compline (9.45) except when there is a special reason (such as a Club or meeting) to the contrary. As to office, Communion, reading etc., every resident in the house is expected to aim at some definite rule, though the rule will be very various according to people’s needs, and instincts.66 While at Pusey House, Dearmer’s art education continued with a month in Florence, in company with Gore, and two other residents of the House. While Gore wrote his Bampton lectures on the incarnation,67 Dearmer engaged in a close study of Florentine painting, and read J.A. Symonds, Pater and Ruskin.68 Following the conclusion of his year at Pusey House, he spent the summer of 1891 travelling in France, Switzerland and Italy.69 By the time he returned to London to work with Scott Holland on the establishment of the Christian Social Union in London, he had developed a detailed appreciation of European art, architecture and liturgical practice. A letter to Charles Gore deprecating respectability indicates how Dearmer was catching, and Christianising, the mood of the early nineties: I think that because my religion includes so much that it includes all my devotion, and somehow makes a consistent faith that all tends the same way – something clear and understood and believed in [. . .] Soon we shall have left respectability, and ‘the one vice which Christ most earnestly denounced – insipidity’, far behind us.70 For Dearmer, Christianity and worldliness seemed to perfect each other. The world was beautiful, but unsatisfactory. Christianity, with its central tenet of the spiritual informing the material, alone seemed to provide sanity and simplicity. It was a position clearly

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influenced by Gore’s theology. Dearmer remained close to Gore throughout the 1890s, but was bitterly hurt when, in 1906 as Bishop of Birmingham, Gore privately banned the use of The English Hymnal in his diocese.71 Dearmer was ordained in December 1891 by Randall Davidson, Bishop of Rochester, for St Anne’s, South Lambeth, an impoverished parish with a high proportion of gas workers. Prior to the ordination, Davidson had advised the candidates to read Fabian Essays, Progress and Poverty, by the American economist Henry George and Marx’s Das Kapital:72 it was an interesting insight into the extent to which left-wing politics had reached the heart of Anglican establishment at this period. According to Donald Gray, Davidson disliked the young Dearmer, distrusting his interest in colour, ceremony and aesthetics. For this reason, Davidson, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 until 1928, did nothing to assist Dearmer’s career.73 Shortly before his ordination, Dearmer fell in love with an art student, Mabel White. Mabel was 19, and therefore legally a minor. Both sets of parents were strongly opposed to a marriage. But the course of events shows just how Mabel and Percy differed from other young couples who found themselves similarly placed. A Victorian curate would have waited, possibly for years, for his prospects to improve, and for parental objection to dissipate. His fiance´e would have resigned herself to years of waiting, or looked elsewhere. But as the truly fin de sie`cle couple that they were to become, Mabel was not so passive, nor was Percy so patient. Mabel applied to the court to have herself made a Ward in Chancery. Charles Gore became chief negotiator with Dearmer’s mother, and with Mabel’s legal representative, who finally allowed the marriage, on the grounds that Percy seemed ‘a sensible young man’, while warning Mabel that ‘money would be tight’.74 They set up an aesthetic home in the tiny curate’s house, as far as finance would allow. Money was spent on William Morris chintzes and wallpapers, with lamps and tea things from the leading Arts and Crafts designer W.A.S. Benson. Visitors commented on the de´cor, but noted the almost total lack of furniture: they sat on packing crates. It was not the only time that the Dearmers’ de´cor left visitors sufficiently impressed to record what they saw on paper: the artist and architect Peter Anson noted that their vicarage in Primrose Hill was decorated in the latest Arts

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and Crafts fashion, and that the drawing room had cream wall paper with nine tall rose trees blossoming on it, there were curtains of natural glazed holland, rose coloured chintzes and a grass-green carpet.75 Percy Dearmer’s dress also attracted attention. Although recently ordained, he did not wear the universal clerical attire of the period, which was clerical collar or white shirt and white tie. Instead he continued with his bright shirts and decorative ties.76 As the true aesthete that he was, dress was always important to him. His refusal to wear the Church’s uniform just a few months after ordination shows the extent of his independence of mind, and his desire to identify with the wider world. Around 1908, once he had established his ideas on dress and ceremonial at Primrose Hill, he adopted cassock and gown as his usual outdoor dress, abandoning coat and trousers at this period. Sometimes he also wore a square, snug-fitting ‘Latimer’ cap which he believed to be the strictly historically correct head gear for an Anglo-Catholic priest. He was annoyed when this hat was assumed to be a biretta.77 Mabel’s concept of the role of a curate’s wife was also somewhat different from the norm in the 1890s. She was a New Woman first and foremost; she defined herself as an artist, and kept working at her drawing, successfully experimenting with the poster form and with book illustration. She also gave lectures and readings, and seems to have been economically and artistically active throughout their marriage, little deterred by the arrival of two babies. Indeed, according to her close friend Stephen Gwynn, her work brought in considerable sums of money.78 Encouraged by Gwynn, by the turn of the century she was moving from art to writing, producing a large number of novels, children’s stories and plays. In the first decade of the twentieth century, she also became much involved with the staging of plays, many of which had religious themes. She founded the Morality Play Society, but the Lord Chamberlain’s ban on the treatment of religious themes on the stage led to her coming up against the same legal obstacle which had prevented Wilde’s Salome´ being staged in London in 1892. The fact that venues which staged her plays were threatened with prosecution became something of a cause ce´le`bre, and according to Gwynn, was damaging to her.79 In one of her novels, The Difficult Way (1905), she explores the dilemmas of a young clergyman’s wife, pitched from an art-school world to a London parish, with its expectations of sewing circles

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and domestic orderliness. Although the novel is a work of fiction, rather than an account of the Dearmer marriage, the setting in South London in a house next to a meat extract factory and a steam laundry was clearly directly drawn form their time in South Lambeth. But the heroine of the novel, Nan Pilgrim, seems altogether a less liberated and more uncertain woman than her creator. Mabel seemed to know exactly who she was, according to Gwynn, ‘wild with the sheer desire of living – grasping at life with both hands’.80 Like many liberated women of the 1890s, she was a keen cyclist. In 1896 the Dearmers left their small children behind, and cycled form London to Beverley, in Yorkshire. In 1899, they cycled vast distances round Normandy, so that Percy could do research for a book. Mabel had developed an impressive social circle by the mid1890s. Through Richard Le Gallienne, who had been an Oxford contemporary of Dearmer’s, she began to make friends with a number of contributors to The Yellow Book, and with others on the cutting edge of avant-garde London life. Mabel contributed several designs and drawings for The Yellow Book, and for the issue of April 1896 she designed the front cover, in the style of Beardsley.81 Her aesthetic friends included Henry Harland, the literary editor of The Yellow Book, and his wife Aline; the writer, artist and women’s suffrage campaigner Laurence Housman; Netta Syrett, novelist and playwright, who at this date was teaching in the same school as Aubrey’s sister, Mabel Beardsley, and became part of The Yellow Book circle through the connection with her; Evelyn Sharp, also a writer, and the sister of Cecil Sharp, the folk song and folk dance expert; and Stephen Gwynn, a Dubliner at this point recently arrived in London, who was beginning to write and become involved in the emerging Irish literary revival. It is notable how many in this circle became very prominent campaigners for women’s suffrage, and conversation among them in the nineties must have taken a distinctly feminist turn. Percy Dearmer himself was always a keen advocate of women’s equality in the church. Several of this circle, particularly Syrett, Sharp and Gwynn, remained friends, and sometimes also holiday companions, of the Dearmers up until the First World War. It was entirely typical of the equality that characterised the Dearmers’ marriage that they went off to the First World War together, having each made the

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decision to go independently – Percy as chaplain to the British in Serbia, and Mabel as a hospital orderly there.82 She died of enteric fever in July 1915, less than three months after their arrival. We have seen that Percy Dearmer’s theological aesthetics developed in the 1890s from a fusion of Arts and Crafts influences, a commitment to liturgical research, to English, as opposed to imitated Roman Catholicism, and to social justice. His belief was that when good taste, top quality workmanship, sound scholarship and an accurate understanding of the past practice of the English Church were combined, they would produce a form of worship which would be deeply aesthetically satisfying, while still being fully in accordance with the canons and rubrics of the Church of England. This he believed would draw people of all classes into the church. He was pained by the many examples of muddled liturgical practice and vulgarity, which he believed to be alienating artists, writers, musicians and other ‘brain-workers’. Dearmer admitted that his views had been formed by spending ‘much of his life among those who earn their living by writing and drawing’,83 by which he must have meant Mabel and her circle, and perhaps he was also remembering his father. However, views that he was able to promote without hindrance in the avant-garde ecclesiastical world of the 1890s proved less acceptable to the church in the early twentieth century. After years transforming the liturgy and music at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, he had hoped that a deanery might be forthcoming, or a major London church such as St Martin-in-the-Fields, which would have allowed him a larger and more influential liturgical test bed. But he was distrusted by members of the ecclesiastical establishment, who seemed to have suspected that his loyalties were to art first, and to the church second. As already noted, he was sidelined after the publication of The English Hymnal. Having resigned from Primrose Hill in order to do war work, he could get no church employment on his return to England after the First World War. Indeed, it was not until 1931, just five years before his death and with health already failing, that Dearmer was finally nominated to an ecclesiastical appointment, a canonry at Westminster Abbey, under the new Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald. In the absence of church work, he became professor of ecclesiastical art at King’s College London, initially on a five-year

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appointment and an honorarium of just £100 a year: from 1924 the post was combined with being the College’s lecturer in classical and medieval art,84 and this presumably produced an appropriate salary. He continued to insist that the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of religion were one and the same: ‘The aesthetic aspect is a spiritual aspect, just as the moral is a spiritual aspect; and it is only our brutal materialism that makes us think of the word aesthetic as if it were unworthy to be mentioned alongside of moral or other religious interests.’85 But it was not a message that interwar Britain seemed interested in hearing. As he grew older, Dearmer’s interests broadened considerably beyond the aesthetic and the political, important though they remained. From having been, together with his bohemian first wife, a true child of the fin de sie`cle in the 1890s and early 1900s, after the First World War he became a fully fledged Anglican modernist. His earlier support for women’s suffrage mutated into support for women’s ordination, and for birth control, a topic about which he preached passionately (and with a trenchant denunciation of the Roman Catholic position) from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.86 Dearmer’s close collaboration with Maude Royden, the leading campaigner for the ordination of women in the Church of England, also made him the object of great suspicion in some quarters. He became interested in Spiritualism, telepathy and spiritual healing,87 and he championed what were then seen as avant-garde views on the Eucharist: that it was the gathering and the sharing that were significant, not the pre-communion fasting, which he condemned.88 His theological aesthetics were developed more fully in his works of 1919 and 1924, and his chair in ecclesiastical art allowed him to filter and arrange his eclectic interests through the prism of the visual. Among his contemporaries within the Church of England, Dearmer was notable as a priest who on some occasions did put artistic concerns above ecclesiastical ones – as when he chose the agnostic, but massively talented, Vaughan Williams as his musical collaborator. At the heart of Dearmer’s theological aesthetics was his unerring ability to identify the leading edge of the artistic culture of his day, and to treat it with the utmost seriousness.

CONCLUSION CHRISTIANITY AND THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

We have seen that the English fin de sie`cle was born out of a volatile mixture of optimism and pessimism and was fuelled by anxieties about moral and social exhaustion and decline, counterbalanced by energy and optimism. This complex mixing of circumstances, and the rapidly manufactured metaphors concerning the ending of the age, contributed to a dynamic relationship between aestheticism, decadence and Christianity. There was also a significant shift within English religion itself, as Christians became increasingly convinced of the redemptive powers of the arts. How then may these processes be summarised? As in earlier ages, Christian culture proved to be a particularly rich and malleable vehicle, which nurtured the articulation of a range of ideas and emotions in the decadent age. This book has explored an ‘arc of decadence’ spanning the period from Pater’s Renaissance to Bradley and Cooper’s conversion, a period of 35 years. As part of this process, Christian traditions were stretched, expanded and remoulded, but not to the point of breaking or irrelevance; they remained crucial resources for many people. Indeed, the step of conversion to Roman Catholicism, whether actually enacted, or endlessly contemplated, became the most significant marker for understanding the religious culture of the decadent strand within the fin de sie`cle. This is seen in the lives of many of those central to the decadent movement, and is reflected in their writings – much of what they wrote took the form of

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conversion narratives, as Hanson has noted. For Pater, Bradley and Cooper, Catholic Christianity acted as an expansion and fulfilment of a religiosity which they had first experienced in their studies of Greek classicism. Meanwhile, the intense corporeality of the devotional works of mystical writers such as John of the Cross provided direct inspiration for poets like John Gray and the post-conversion Michael Field. Indeed, it has been argued by Roden that Gray’s poetic work was groundbreaking precisely because it used medieval Christian and Counter-Reformation literature to evoke same-sex desire, rather than relying, as had happened previously, on the traditions of ancient Greece.1 Although there had been a tentative attempt to turn decadence into a form of religion, in England it never really materialised. This was because its senior spokesmen, Pater and Wilde, drew back from the step, and turned instead to an altered Christian vocabulary in which Christ was seen as a form of remodelled artistic truth; an icon who influenced those who came within his presence, rather than a teacher of religious truths. Furthermore, the combination of decadent culture fortified with Roman Catholicism proved much more alluring than decadence on its own. Perhaps decadence as a religious form on its own could only ever really have appealed to someone like the former Methodist Arthur Symons, who is judged by Jad Adams to have embodied more of the characteristics of the movement than anyone else, and who appears to have had no Roman leanings. Decadence was firmly repudiated as a religion by Richard Le Gallienne, who was one of the few to make an attempt, albeit a shaky one, to address directly the question of its relationship with Protestantism. More successful in the longer term was the abandonment of notions about the value of art being tied to the moral status of the artist. It was left to the ageing Anglican Canon F.W. Farrar to hold out for the position that an art work was only as good as the ethical values of the artist. He maintained that ‘a picture becomes feeble or positively repellent, the moment that the pencil is touched by the hands of usurpation, of weakness, of sensuality, or of pride’.2 But it is worth noting that these comments were made in 1894, the year in which the decadent movement was at its apex, and he was clearly in a mood of reaction. The Barnetts

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would probably have shrunk from expressing their views as bluntly as Farrar, but they too believed that art should be located in a moral landscape, and so indeed did P.T. Forsyth, although the moral landscape he saw in the late 1880s was somewhat different from that of many of his fellow Congregationalists. As Forsyth put it, ‘Banish imagination from your religion, and art will be forced to invent a religion of its own.’3 This was a sentiment which Percy Dearmer would have endorsed, as he drew deeply from Arts and Crafts aestheticism, the influence of his wife’s Yellow Book friends and the ethos of the Christian Social Union. We have seen that two of the major personalities of the fin de sie`cle, W.T. Stead and Oscar Wilde, both made heavy use of the language and symbolism of Christianity, particularly in moments of crisis. Their contrasting prison experiences are especially revealing. Stead felt himself to be a moral martyr during his relatively brief imprisonment for child abduction, and was rejuvenated rather than damaged by the experience. Inevitably, he spent his incarceration creating more propaganda; indeed, the title he chose for the pamphlet he published, My First Imprisonment, implied that he fully expected his prisoner-martyr status to be repeated at some point in the future. In sharp contrast, Wilde was destroyed by his two years’ of hard labour, and plumbed the depths of despair. Both men wrote quasi-religious works while they were behind bars, turning naturally to the language and concepts of Christianity. But while Stead’s were rapidly dismissed as the selfjustification of a foolish man, Wilde’s were seen as having lasting significance, and De Profundis became one of his most widely cited prose works. Rather than being a period of ‘crisis of faith’, we can see that the English fin de sie`cle was a time when Christian faith became a means for intellectual and cultural integration. For many of the people who have appeared in this study, the narratives of regeneration and renaissance tended to be more strongly articulated than the more commonly cited imagery of degeneration and decline. There is, however, a clear sense of what has been termed the ‘janiform’ tendency; people at the meeting points of the Victorian and the modern age looking simultaneously forwards and backwards, and experiencing the period with a queasy sense of both optimism and pessimism.

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The Free Churches at the fin de sie`cle were at the peak of their social, cultural and political influence, and the energy within evangelical Christianity was even capable of producing a new denomination that saw itself as perfectly in tune with the times, the Salvation Army. The period had a noticeably ecumenical tone. Christians who had previously regarded each other as members of different tribes began to look at each other more favourably, and to regroup over political issues, such as the plight of Armenian Christians massacred in Turkey. Positive relationships between the different Protestant denominations were most easy to achieve, and this was the beginning of the period when national Free Church bodies began to come into existence. The pan-Protestant British Weekly did much to foster the sense of the Free Churches as one big family. The ending of the Anglican monopoly at Oxford and Cambridge gradually led to the greater mixing of students of different religious backgrounds, and eventually this also proved a catalyst for improved denominational relations among church leaders. Relationships between Anglicans and Roman Catholics might have moved towards a position of respectful acceptance, had it not been for Apostolicae curae in 1896, which set back the cause of Anglican–Roman Catholic relations by at least 50 years. There was one theologian who influenced more of the people who appear in this study than anyone else, and that was F.D. Maurice. He helped to shape the attitudes of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Charles Gore, Percy Dearmer, P.T. Forsyth, Ellice Hopkins, the Holiness preachers, Stewart Headlam, F.W. Farrar, Richard Mudie-Smith and G.W.E. Russell. When the Christian Social Union opened the first mixed settlement house in 1898, it was wholly appropriate that they should call it the Maurice Hostel. Indeed, the whole ethos of the settlement house movement can be seen as the living expression of Maurice’s belief that all men were brothers, even if they looked and sounded different. Settlements, with their ambition to reconcile the ‘East End Esaus’ with their lost twins, the ‘smooth, well-educated Jacobs’, continued to have influence long into the twentieth century. This was partly because many of the young people who spent time in the settlements remained faithful to the ideas that they had internalised during their residence. Indeed, some former settlement residents took their ideas into the political, public service or academic worlds.

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These included William Beveridge, who had been sub-warden of Toynbee Hall towards the end of the Barnett era, R.H. Tawney, who had lived there for three years at the same period as Beveridge (teaching adult education classes and acting as secretary to the Children’s Country Holiday Fund) and Clement Attlee, who became a secretary at Toynbee Hall in 1909. Meanwhile, the teachings of the Christian Social Union as expounded by Scott Holland, Gore and Dearmer in the 1890s fed directly into the Christian social movements of the early twentieth century. These included the Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) in 1924, and William Temple’s numerous projects which culminated in his blueprint for post-war Britain, Christianity and Social Order, published in 1942. Within the religious culture of fin de sie`cle London, social questions were of greater significance than either theology or ecumenism, and we have looked particularly at social purity activism and community planning. In respect of the former, it has been argued that the anxieties which arose from the publicity surrounding both new issues (the ‘decadent’ bachelors and the ‘sexually adventurous’ feminists) and old problems (prostitutes and syphilitic husbands) energised the late nineteenth-century social purity campaigns. This was seen in their emphasis on sexual restraint for both men and women, and their ambition to produce a gradual reduction of the amount of ‘sin’ in the world, and the gradual increase in the amount of ‘order’. The social purity coalition brought together many seemingly odd bedfellows, with elements of the wider social and religious culture being used to serve particular ends: New Journalism, feminism, the Salvation Army, evangelical Nonconformity and evangelical Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism and Cardinal Manning – all were able to make alliances – even if only temporarily. Ellice Hopkins provides a particularly intriguing example of how radical and repressive elements could become mixed together in one individual. Her non-ascetical perspectives on the goodness of the body emerged from a fusion of incarnational and evolutionary thought, and she was in certain respects anticipating the thought of the twentiethcentury feminists Maude Royden and Marie Stopes. Yet she had fierce views on the compulsory removal of the children of prostitutes, and denied that the mothers had rights. Although

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Ellice Hopkins was in many respects an example of a Christian ‘New Woman’, she failed to make alliances with the secular feminists. The social purity movement provides a particularly revealing lens which magnifies many of the anxieties and ambiguities of the fin de sie`cle, as various self-appointed social investigators launched into ever more lurid expose´s of the sex industry. Whatever else it was, social purity was a cause that could garner mass popular appeal, as seen when a quarter of a million people rallied in Hyde Park on 22 August 1885, to launch the new National Vigilance movement. The curious alliance between the Salvationist Booths and the creator of New Journalism W.T. Stead, first seen in their ill-planned child abduction episode, was seen again when Stead was chosen to ghostwrite what would become William Booth’s famous book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. This was New Journalism masquerading as a work of social theology. Indeed, the moral darkness of the city, Callum Brown’s ‘impenetrable continent of social danger’, is one of the most powerful images which broods with equal intensity over the religious and the secular thinkers of the English fin de sie`cle. One of the religiously inspired responses to this was community planning, sometimes resulting in the execution of projects which sprang from deep wells of utopianism. The Salvation Army’s Hadleigh Colony was one such, and so was Letchworth, originally known as First Garden City. In the twentieth century, garden cities came to mean low-density housing in grassy suburbia, but Ebenezer Howard’s original vision had been quite different. He had wanted to build towns in concentric circles, practical for pedestrians, but also symbolic of cooperation and social harmony. He wanted common landownership, and saw this as a complete alternative to the false paths of socialism and trade unionism. There were also utopian strands within the complicated impulses of the settlement movement. In the context of this study, however, the settlement movement is particularly important for the way in which it so effectively fused the aesthetic and the social reform strands of fin de sie`cle thought. The fin de sie`cle was its own unique age. Although it has been argued that some aspects of it have had long-term significance, much of its spirit evaporated in the years after 1901. Whereas many of the people encountered in the first part of the book lived

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and died in the decadent age (the obvious exceptions being Gray and Raffalovich), many of those who appeared in the second half lived on well into the twentieth century, and developed in ways which were different from what might have been anticipated. In the 1890s, Charles Gore had exercised an influence on Anglicans second only to Maurice, and had been responsible for editing the late nineteenth-century’s theological bestseller, Lux Mundi. He had gained appreciative audiences both at Westminster Abbey and among the readers of the Church Times and the British Weekly. But he rapidly revealed that he was not in fact the liberal that he had appeared to be at first. Reinterpretation of the Old Testament was one thing, but he hesitated to touch the New Testament. After he became a bishop in 1902, he dismayed many of the modernist and liberal clergy, and some of the younger Anglo-Catholics, with his uncompromising views on doctrine, church government and sexuality. He also objected to the work of one of his former pupils, Percy Dearmer’s English Hymnal. Dearmer was particularly distressed by this, and he himself moved in the opposite direction, quietly dropping his Anglo-Catholicism in favour of thoroughgoing Anglican modernism. P.T. Forsyth moved the other way. He began to doubt the adequacy of the German liberal Protestantism he had at first embraced, and adopted views which anticipated those of the Swiss Protestants Karl Barth and Emil Brunner; essentially, he came to believe that liberal theology dealt inadequately with the reality of human sinfulness. Forsyth was particularly appalled by the spectacle of his fellow minister R.J. Campbell, as Campbell switched back and forth, from Anglicanism, to Congregationalism, to ‘New Theology’ and then to high church Anglicanism once again. Forsyth’s theology was partly shaped in reaction to Campbell. Meanwhile, Headlam’s Church and Stage Guild ceased to be needed, as ancient Christian prejudices against theatres and actors rapidly evaporated. As we have seen, Headlam and Dearmer both did much to establish the importance of ‘the arts’ on the Anglican agenda, and within the Free Church world, P.T. Forsyth had done the same. Although his Religion in Recent Art had been only rather cautiously welcomed by the British Weekly in 1889, just over a decade later, the paper was actively stimulating, and catering for, the change in mood. With much fanfare, it

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launched the ‘British Weekly Gallery of Modern Masters: A National Gallery for Every Home’. This offered readers the chance to purchase photogravures of the ‘twelve greatest paintings by British artists’, framed and sold individually for a guinea each, or for eight pounds for the set.4 A quarter of the selection was by Pre-Raphaelite artists, who were by now established as firm favourites among Christian audiences, and particularly celebrated for being both English and artistically talented. Art galleries, exhibitions and picture loan schemes, frequently inspired by Christian philanthropy, became an important element in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury British life. Walter Pater, on the other hand, had appeared to be a man whose reputation had died with the century in which he had lived. In 1930, he was attacked by T.S. Eliot for having failed to influence ‘a single first-rate mind of a later generation’5 and he remained out of fashion for most of the twentieth century. But his fortunes were revived from the 1970s, at first by a number of biographical works and then by some serious literary studies, and he became important as people became interested in gender theory.6 It was also increasingly evident that what Eliot had dismissed as ‘esthetic religion’ had in fact put down deep roots in English Christianity, and in Anglican circles this was stimulated in part by the wide dissemination of the ideas of Percy Dearmer. Where else did this tradition go? One individual who was very significant in conveying the ideas and culture of the fin de sie`cle into the twentieth century was the poet and campaigner John Betjeman (1906 –84). As a schoolboy, he had engaged in correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas (then in his early fifties), and as an undergraduate in Oscar Wilde’s old college, he had longed for ‘decadence’; Betjeman was highly attracted to AngloCatholicism, and was confirmed at Pusey House.7 Much in his entirely twentieth-century life seemed to link him to the earlier period. He was a founder of the Victorian Society, and wrote the introduction to Martin Secker’s The Eighteen-Nineties: A Period Anthology in Prose and Verse, as well as poetry of his own that was inspired by the 1890s. The theme of conversion to Rome also figured prominently; not his own, but that of his wife Penelope, who took the step in 1948. Betjeman was devastated, and

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although they remained married, it was effectively the end of their relationship. For the rest of his life, he found solace with another ‘serious’ Anglican – Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. She was, coincidentally, a relative of Charles Gore, and, influenced by the social gospel, had been a social worker in the East End from her late teens.8 In an age which had entirely lost sight of the value of Victorian architecture, Betjeman became an ardent campaigner for saving buildings at risk of demolition, including Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, the Euston Arch and, most famously, the St Pancras hotel and station. He appealed for them on the grounds of their beauty and aesthetic importance. By the 1960s, a combination of his frequent television appearances and accessible poetry had made him one of the best-known personalities in English culture. For the literary scholar Hilary Fraser, writing in the 1980s, the link between religion and aesthetics in the Victorian period (and before) seemed self-evident; the church and the arts had been closely and practically entwined for centuries. Nevertheless, it took most of the twentieth century for ‘aesthetics’ to establish itself in British theological circles as a theological category; an article on ‘Aesthetics and Theology’ only appeared in the SCM New Dictionary of Christian Theology in 1983.9 When it finally arrived, much of the interest in theological aesthetics came from an entirely different source, the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 – 88). He was very different from the individuals identified by Fraser, or those discussed in this book. The theological aesthetics of Pater, Wilde, Gray, Raffalovich, Bradley, Cooper, Gore, Forsyth, Headlam and Dearmer are part of a different conversation. All of the above have been discussed in different ways as individuals, but they have not hitherto been seen as part of a group with a shared (albeit sometimes loosely shared) theological context, grounded in the particular circumstances of the fin de sie`cle.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: WHY STUDY CHRISTIANITY AND THE FIN DE SIE`CLE? 1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London, 1891), reproduced in Merlin Holland, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003) p. 130; Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913). 2. See, for example, Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 183– 228; Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (London and Toronto, 1993); Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, 2006) p. 195. Fraser’s work has been influential, and I have used it as a foundation for my own understanding of Pater and Wilde. Willoughby provides a book-length study specifically on the topic of Wilde’s understanding of Christ. 3. See Willoughby, Art and Christhood for a discussion of theological themes in all of Wilde’s works. 4. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). 5. Fraser, Beauty and Belief; Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-century Religion and Literature pp. 189– 216. 6. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2007) pp. 399– 401. 7. The classic early study was Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties. Later general studies exploring mainly literary and cultural themes include Ian Fletcher (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s (London, 1979); Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle (Princeton, 1986); John Stokes, In the Nineties (Hemel Hempstead, 1989); John Stokes (ed.), Fin de Sie`cle/Fin du Globe:

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1992); Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York and London, 1992); Simon Houfe, Fin de Sie`cle: The Illustrators of the Nineties (London, 1992); Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Sie`cle (London, 1993); Shearer West, Fin de Sie`cle (London, 1993); Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 1995); Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 1996); Tracey Hill, Decadence and Danger: Writing, History and the Fin de Sie`cle (Bath, 1997); Julie Lokis-Adkins, Deadly Desires: A Psychoanalytic Study of Female Sexual Perversion and Widowhood in Fin de Sie`cle Women’s Writing (London, 2013); Tim Youngs, Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Sie`cle (Liverpool, 2013). See, for example, Mikula´ˇs Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Sie`cle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, 1990); Mike Jay and Michael Neve (eds), 1900: A Fin de Sie`cle Reader (London, 1990); Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Sie`cle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880 – 1900 (Oxford, 2000); Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) and Talia Schaffer (ed.), Literature and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle (New York, 2007). Marshall (ed.), Cambridge Companion p. 5. See, for example, the chronology provided in Marshall (ed.), Cambridge Companion pp. xv – xvii. This is in marked contrast to the general assumption that the twenty-first century began on 1 January 2000. There were a few who considered that the new century should have been celebrated a year earlier on 1 January 1900. For example, E.J. Reed, in a letter to The Times on 1 January 1900 p. 11, argued that the crucial matter was the changing of the numbers in dates and records, although his was very much a minority opinion. For the death of Queen Victoria, see John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000) pp. 221– 42. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780 –1950 (London, 1958) p. 165. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties p. 14. This conclusion was reached on the basis of studying the time frames covered in 15 studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious history written by David Bebbington, Kenneth Brown, Stewart J. Brown, Arthur Burns, Matthew Cragoe, Brian Heeney, Robert Lee, Ian Machin, Hugh McLeod, Sarah Williams, John Wolffe, and Nigel Yates. None of these scholars opted for exactly 75 years, however; this is simply the mathematical average. Their preferred date ranges extended from 130 to 31 years.

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16. Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007). 17. More recently, Nigel Yates’s posthumously published Love Now, Pay Later? Sex and Religion in the Fifties and Sixties (London, 2010), which, as the title makes clear, takes a 20-year time span. 18. Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877 – 1914: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian Britain (Princeton, 1968); Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974); Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976); David W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870 – 1914 (London, 1982); J.N. Morris, Religion and Urban Change: 1840– 1914 (Woodbridge, 1992). 19. Politics and the social gospel were unsurprisingly frequently linked – see the titles above. See also David M. Thompson, ‘The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c.1750 – c.1950 (Oxford, 1990).

CHAPTER 1

DIMENSIONS OF THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

1. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913); Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London and New York, 1926). 2. Although the Victorians were not as obsessed with this as others had been earlier and later. If they had been, there would have been a stronger mood in favour of marking the new century in 1900. 3. Alison Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles: Aspects of Literature and Life in Fin de Sie`cle England’, in Mikula´ˇs Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Sie`cle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, 1990) p. 188. 4. Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Sie`cle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York, 1990) p. 55. 5. Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895) (1968 edition, ed. Howard Fertig, New York) p. 15. 6. Nordau, Degeneration p. 1. 7. Nordau, Degeneration p. 5. 8. Schwartz, Century’s End pp. vii, 47, 176, passim. 9. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles’ p. 173. 10. P.T. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art: Being Expository Lectures on Rossetti, Burne Jones, Watts, Holman Hunt and Wagner (Manchester and London, 1889) p. 123. 11. Austin Clarke, The Celtic Twilight and the Nineties (Dublin, 1969) p. 9. 12. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780 – 1850 (London, 1987,

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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revised edition, 2002). See also Frances Knight, ‘“Male and Female He Created Them”: Men, Women and the Question of Gender’, in John Wolffe (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain Volume V: Culture and Empire (Manchester, 1997). For a more recent critique, see Sarah C. Williams, ‘Is There a Bible in the House? Gender, Religion and Family Culture’, in Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de Vries (eds), Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800 – 1940 (London and New York, 2010) p. 15. Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford, 1992) pp. 253 – 4. Not all of the authors of New Woman fiction were female, however. Grant Allen was the author of The Woman Who Did (1895). Alexis Easley has explored the way in which W.T. Stead’s monthly magazine, The Review of Reviews, which he founded in 1890, became a particularly powerful vehicle both for articles about influential women, and for articles by feminist writers, to the extent that it became very much a feminist journal. Alexis Easley, ‘W.T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews’, in Laurel Brake et al. (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London, 2012) pp. 37 – 58. W. Sydney Robinson also notes the almost exclusively female staff at the Review of Reviews and Stead’s strenuous attempts to develop the talents of women journalists. W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist (London, 2012) pp. 197 – 202. Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and Feminist Fictions’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) p. 167. Church Quarterly Review 89 (October 1889 – January 1890) p. 349. George Egerton was the pseudonym for the prominent New Woman writer, Mary Chavelita Dunne. Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 1995) p. 32. Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’ p. 41. Erwin N. Hiebert, ‘The Transformation of Physics’, in Teich and Porter, Fin de Sie`cle pp. 235– 53. E.F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow (London, 1930) p. 331. David W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870 – 1914 (London, 1982) pp. 51 –3. Westminster Review 134 (July 1890). M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England 1787 –1886 (Cambridge, 2004) p. 280. British Weekly (3 January 1901) p. 318.

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26. British Weekly, passim in 1899, and for example the issues of 4 and 11 May 1899. 27. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience p. 58. 28. The Times (1 January 1901). The leader writer of ‘The twentieth century has dawned upon us’ asserted that England would end the twentieth century as ‘one united and imperial people’. 29. British Weekly (3 January 1901) p. 318. 30. British Weekly (3 January 1901) pp. 317– 18. 31. British Weekly (3 January 1901) p. 318. 32. Michael Nelson, Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera (London, 2007) pp. 147 – 9. 33. Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London, 1923) p. 146. 34. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Sie`cle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880 – 1900 (Oxford, 2000) p. xxii. 35. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897), reproduced in Merlin Holland (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (5th edition, London, 2003) pp. 1018, 1025ff. 36. Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s pp. 102– 3. 37. For Jay and Neve, however, this emphasis on regeneration had a dark side: the quest for a bright future required ruthlessly weeding out those judged to be unfit, or degenerate. See Mike Jay and Michael Neve (eds), 1900: A Fin de Sie`cle Reader (London, 1990) pp. xv – xvii. 38. John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents (“The Carpenter’s Shop”) 1849 –50. 39. The British Weekly (27 February 1896) p. 311 reported that for his series of Lent addresses on the historical trustworthiness of the Book of Acts, ‘the crowd overflowed, and the best seats were taken two hours early’. 40. Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891 (London, 1891) pp. 154 – 62. By no means did all Nonconformists welcome the shift to incarnational theology. See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989) p. 15, in which he cites the 1892 ‘Annual Address to the Methodist Societies’, in which the author warned of the dangers he perceived in emphasising the incarnation at the expense of the atonement. 41. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art pp. 77 – 8. 42. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties p. 58. 43. Stephen Gwynn (ed.), Letters from a Field Hospital by Mabel Dearmer, with a Memoir of the Author by Stephen Gwynn (London, 1915) pp. 7 – 8. 44. Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, 2000) pp. 44, 80. 45. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles’ p. 193.

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46. G.A. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets: Ernest Dowson, John Gray and Lionel Johnson: An Annotated Biography (New York, 1990) pp. 4– 5. 47. Richard Le Gallienne, ‘A Ballad of London’ (1895). 48. R.K.R. Thornton (ed.), Poetry of the Nineties (Harmondsworth, 1970) p. 58. The point is cited by John Lucas in ‘Hopkins and Symons: Two Views of the City’, in John Stokes (ed.), Fin de Sie`cle/ Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1992) p. 61. 49. Le Gallienne, Romantic ’90s p. 154. 50. Proximity to the British Museum was a major attraction for writers and thinkers of all sorts. In the 1890s, the Roman Catholic historian Francis (later Cardinal) Gasquet and Edmund Bishop, the first modern historian of liturgy in English, lived at addresses in Harpur Street and Great Ormond Street for this reason. Percy Dearmer spent much of 1897 in the British Museum researching The Parson’s Handbook. He was accused of founding ‘British Museum religion’ as a result. Nan Dearmer, The Life of Percy Dearmer by His Wife (London, 1940) p. 103. Ernest Dowson worked on his translations there, and Ernest Rhys described it as the ‘rendez-vous of scribes’. Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine p. 155. 51. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties pp. 147 – 56. 52. Ibid. p. 151. 53. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York and London, 1992) pp. 75 – 7. 54. Ibid. p. 85. 55. Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Tom Ellis versus Lloyd George: The Fractured Consciousness of Fin-de-Sie`cle Wales’, in Geraint H. Jenkins and Beverley J. Smith (eds), Politics and Society in Wales 1840 – 1922: Essays in Honour of Ieuan Gwynedd Jones (Cardiff, 1988) pp. 93 – 112. 56. Ibid. p. 95. 57. Ibid. p. 103.

CHAPTER 2

AESTHETICISM AND DECADENCE AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

1. J.P. Phelan, ‘Buchanan, Robert Williams (1841 – 1901)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 2. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1843). 3. Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 1 – 2. 4. Gesa E. Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (London, 2004) p. 1. 5. Fraser, Beauty and Belief pp. 222 – 8.

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6. Ibid. pp. 18 – 32. 7. J.H. Newman, ‘Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in Essays and Sketches, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (3 vols, London, 1948) vol. I p. 74. Cited in Fraser, Beauty and Belief pp. 20 – 1. 8. Rachel Tuekolsky, ‘Walter Pater’s Renaissance (1873) and the British Aesthetic Movement’, ,http://www.branchcollective.org.. 9. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1st edition, 1873 (5th edition, 1901, reprinted, London, 1910) pp. viii– ix. 10. Ibid. pp. 236, 238. 11. Ibid. pp. 191 – 3. 12. Mary Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London, 1918) p. 120. Cited in R.M. Seiler (ed.), Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (London, 1980) p. 19. 13. John Fielder Mackarness, A Charge Delivered to the Diocese of Oxford (Oxford, 1875) pp. 13 – 16, cited in Seiler (ed.), Pater pp. 94 – 6. 14. John Wordsworth to Pater, 17 March 1873, reproduced in W.E. Watson, Life of Bishop John Wordsworth (London, 1915) pp. 89 – 91, cited in Seiler, Pater pp. 61 – 2. 15. Fraser, Beauty and Belief pp. 201– 3. 16. Ibid. p. 198. 17. Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Bookman 1 (November 1891) pp. 59–60. Cited in G.A. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets, Ernest Dowson, John Gray and Lionel Johnson (New York and London, 1990) p. 10. 18. John Morley, ‘Mr Pater’s Essays’, Fortnightly Review (April 1873) pp. xix, 469– 77, cited in Seiler, Pater pp. 63 – 71. 19. John W. de Gruchy, ‘Theology and the Visual Arts’, in David F. Ford and Rachel Muers (eds), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 3rd edition (Oxford, 2005) p. 706. 20. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987) pp. 46, 81. 21. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897) reproduced in Merlin Holland (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003) p. 1022. 22. Fraser, Beauty and Belief pp. 188, 205 – 6. 23. Wilde, De Profundis p. 1029. 24. W.B. Yeats, Autobiography (New York, 1965) pp. 87 – 8, cited in Ellmann, Wilde p. 284. 25. This is explored in detail in Matthew Sturgis, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (London, 1995) especially pp. 7 – 112. 26. Alison Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles: Aspects of Literature and Life in Fin-de-Sie`cle England’, in Mikula´ˇs Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Sie`cle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, 1990) p. 174.

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27. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, with an introduction by Richard Ellmann (New York, 1958) p. x. 28. Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, 2000) p. 4. 29. Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy, Priest (Hanover and London, 1991) pp. 26 – 30. 30. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets pp. 7 – 8. 31. Ibid. p. 1. Cevasco was citing A. Symons, Figures of Several Centuries (New York, 1916) p. 294. 32. See Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (London and Toronto, 1993) pp. 77 – 87 for a discussion of the way in which the religious themes work in Salome´. 33. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York and London, 1992) p. 52. 34. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles’ pp. 173– 4. 35. Beckson, however, retains the use of the capital letter in order ‘to suggest an aesthetic vision rather than a moral, social or artistic decline’. London in the 1890s p. 32. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (New York, 1964) p. 222, cited in Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) p. 8. 37. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism p. 2. 38. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, Oh., 1985) pp. 7 – 8. 39. Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine pp. 35 – 6. 40. ‘“Fin de sie`cle”, murmured Lord Henry. “Fin du globe”, answered his hostess. “I wish it were fin du globe”, said Dorian with a sigh. “Life is a great disappointment.”’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, reproduced in Holland (ed.), Complete Works of Wilde p. 130. 41. Wilde, Picture p. 17. 42. Dennis Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 41 – 51; Matthew Sturgis, ‘Contributors to the Yellow Book (act. 1894 –1897)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 43. Matthew Sturgis, introduction to Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (originally 1909, reprint London, 2011) p. xvi. 44. Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’ p. 43. For more on this, see Chris Snodgrass, ‘Decadent Parodies: Aubrey Beardsley’s Caricature of Meaning’, in John Stokes (ed.), Fin de Sie`cle/Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1992) pp. 178– 209. 45. Read, Decadent Style pp. 64 – 5. 46. Alan Crawford, ‘Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872 – 1898)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

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47. Stephen Calloway, ‘“Tired Hedonists”: The Decadence of the Aesthetic Movement’, in Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (eds), The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860 – 1900 (London, 2011) p. 235. 48. See for example the ‘Lysistrata’ series of illustrations, reproduced in Beckson, London in the 1890s pp. 150 – 1. The illustrations were intended to be a comment on the phenomenon of the New Woman. 49. Calloway, ‘Tired Hedonists’ p. 235. 50. Simon Houfe, Fin de Sie`cle: The Illustrators of the Nineties (London, 1992) p. 78. Houfe suggests that the brooding presence of so many predatory female figures, of eunuch-like dwarves and androgynous characters in so much of Beardsley’s work points to his unstable sexual background and lifelong domination by his mother and sister. 51. John Gray, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, La Revue Blanche 16 (1898) pp. 68– 70. Translated by Alan Anderson as ‘Aubrey Beardsley: An Obituary Memoir’ (Edinburgh, 1980). Reprinted in Jerusha Hull McCormack, The Selected Prose of John Gray (Greensboro, 1992) pp. 125–8. 52. Ross, Beardsley p. 26. 53. Ibid. pp. 34 – 5. 54. Gray, ‘Beardsley’ p. 127. 55. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets pp. 14 – 16. 56. Sturgis, ‘Contributors to the Yellow Book’. 57. Pall Mall Gazette 2 September 1895. Cited in Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 66. 58. Arthur Symons, ‘To One in Alienation’ published in London Nights (1895). 59. ‘Stella Maris’ was published in the first number of the Yellow Book (April 1894) and with some revisions in London Nights (1895). 60. Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures (London, 1905) p. 4. 61. Ellmann, Wilde p. 22. 62. Ibid. p. 130. 63. Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’ p. 39. 64. Ibid. p. 40. 65. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles’ p. 209.

CHAPTER 3

DECADENCE, PROTESTANTISM AND RITUALISM

1. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, 2000) p. 437. 2. The title alludes to Psalm 130, ‘Out of the depths, I cry to you O Lord’.

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3. Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (London and Toronto, 1993) p. 120. 4. Wilde complained that people had tried to make Christ into ‘an ordinary Philanthropist, like the dreadful philanthropists of the nineteenth century, or ranked him as an Altruist, with the unscientific and sentimental’. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897) reproduced in Merlin Holland (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003) p. 1030. 5. Wilde, De Profundis p. 1017. 6. Thinking about this parallel was prompted by reading Willoughby, Art and Christhood p. 118. 7. Ellmann described it as ‘one of the greatest, and the longest [love letters] ever written’. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987) p. 484. 8. Wilde, De Profundis p. 1027. 9. For the British manifestation of this Europe-wide theological and literary phenomenon, see Daniel L. Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (San Antonio, 1982). Pals does not discuss Wilde, however. 10. Willoughby, Art and Christhood pp. 108 – 9. 11. Wilde, De Profundis p. 1027. 12. Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 196, 226. See also Willoughby, Art and Christhood. His chapter on Jesus in The Soul of Man Under Socialism is particularly relevant here. 13. Fraser, Beauty and Belief p. 228. 14. Wilde, De Profundis p. 1037. 15. Richard Whittington-Egan, and Geoffrey Smerdon, The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne (London, 1960) pp. 44 – 6; Ellmann, Wilde p. 232. 16. Ellmann, Wilde p. 267. 17. Richard Le Gallienne, Retrospective Reviews (London, 1896) pp. 24 – 5. Cited in G.A. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets: Ernest Dowson, John Gray and Lionel Johnson: An Annotated Biography (New York, 1990) p. 11. 18. Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy, p. 208, citing the Daily Chronicle (12 January 1893). 19. Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy, p. 209, citing the Daily Chronicle (13 January 1893). 20. Richard Le Gallienne, The Religion of a Literary Man (London and New York, 1893) p. v. 21. The Times (11 March 1893) p. 12. 22. Le Gallienne, Religion p. 2. 23. Ibid. pp. 62 – 73. 24. Ibid. p. 12. 25. Ibid. p. 12.

NOTES 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

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Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 44. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 54. Ibid. p. 59. Ibid. p. 86. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York, 1992) pp. 58 – 60. They are summarised in Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy pp. 216 –20. The National Observer (2 December 1893), cited in WhittingtonEgan and Smerdon, Golden Boy p. 218. Cited in Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy p. 218. The Star, cited in Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy p. 217. Liverpool Football Echo (25 November 1893), cited in WhittingtonEgan and Smerdon, Golden Boy p. 217. Church Times (4 May 1894) p. 483. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London and New York, 1926) p. 144. Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy pp. 222, 249 – 51. This was 16 April 1894. Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, 2000) p. 87. Whittington-Egan and Smerdon, Golden Boy p. 14. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) p. 297. Beckson, London in the 1890s pp. 189 – 90. Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke, 2002) pp. 241– 7, 260. Roden, Same-Sex Desire p. 252. Ellmann, Wilde p. 412. ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ appeared in The Chameleon December 1894, and can now be found on the website of Fordham University’s Internet History Source Book project, accessed 27 August 2012. Letter to Ada Leverson, December 1894, in Holland and HartDavis (eds), Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde p. 625. A further alternative reading is provided by Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 298– 311, who emphasises its originality, influence and structural strengths, but sees it as fatally marred by its attempt to combine a love story with didacticism. Hanson also sets the story in the broader context of similar literature. Roden’s equally detailed reading is more similar to my own – he also sees the main interest in being in Bloxam’s account of the curate’s sexual orientation as having been long fixed, and of his sexual

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51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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PAGES 66 – 71

relationship having made him a better priest. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 244 – 7. Ellmann, Wilde pp. 403– 4; Wilde gave a rather different account in De Profundis, where he stated that he knew nothing of Bloxam, and had contributed to the magazine simply to please Douglas. Wilde, De Profundis p. 996. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles: Aspects of Literature and Life in Fin-de-Sie`cle England’, in Mikula´ˇs Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Sie`cle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, 1990) p. 187. The Standard (4 April 1895) p. 6. Wilde, De Profundis p. 996. J.Z. Eglinton, ‘The Later Career of John Francis Bloxam’, The International Journal of Greek Love 1.2 (1966) pp. 40 –2. Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 1927. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton and Oxford, 2004) pp. 262– 3. David Hilliard, ‘“UnEnglish and Unmanly”: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies 25.2 (1982) p. 198, citing Church Times, 27 April 1928. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 233 – 41, 252. Edwin Bradford, ‘The Call’, first published in The New Chivalry and Other Poems (1918); reprinted in Paul Webb (ed.), To Boys Unknown: Poems by Rev E.E. Bradford (London, 1988). Timothy d’Arch Smith, Montague Summers: A Bibliography (Wellingborough, 1964, 1983). Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly’ pp. 200– 10. Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly’ p. 209. John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (London, 1998) p. 218. Reed, Glorious Battle p. 61, nn. 13 – 14. The Mass scene is in chapter 23 of Pater, Marius. See also Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 202 for an excerpt of a homoerotic poem that Jackson wrote for Pater as a birthday present. The Autobiography of a Boy, cited in Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 63. Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 62. Hennegan, ‘Personalities and Principles’ p. 194. Cevasco, Three Decadent Poets p. 11. Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement (London, 1897) pp. 244– 9. The Alcuin Club was founded in 1897 to promote the study of liturgy. Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly’ pp. 193 – 4. Hilliard cites Peter Anson’s biography of Aelred Carlyle, Abbot Extraordinary (1958), which was based in part on his own experiences as a monk at Caldey between 1910 and 1913.

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72. Martin Wellings, ‘The First Protestant Martyr of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Significance of John Kensit (1853 – 1902)’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies: Studies in Church History 30 (Oxford, 1993) pp. 347– 88. 73. Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830 – 1910 (Oxford, 1999) pp. 316– 24. 74. Yates, Anglican Ritualism pp. 213 –332. 75. Bethany Tanis, ‘Diverging Paths: Fin de Sie`cle Britishness and the Oxford Movement’, Anglican and Episcopal History 77.3 (2008) p. 296. 76. See also Martin Wellings, ‘The Oxford Movement in Latenineteenth-century Retrospect: R.W. Church, J.H. Rigg, and Walter Walsh’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), The Church Retrospective: Studies in Church History 33 (Woodbridge, 1997) pp. 501 – 15. Wellings points out that Walsh became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society on the strength of The Secret History of the Oxford Movement.

CHAPTER 4 ‘DAMNABLE AESTHETICISM’ AND CATHOLIC CONVERSION AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE 1. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) p. 182. 2. Lionel Johnson, ‘The Cultured Faun’, Anti-Jacobin, 14 March 1891 pp. 156– 7, cited in Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (Hanover and London, 1991) p. 35. 3. W.B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892 – 1935 (Oxford, 1936) pp. x –xi. 4. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London and New York, 1926) pp. 142 –3. It is more likely that it was a reliquary than a monstrance on the mantelpiece – perhaps Le Gallienne would not have known the difference. 5. Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’, in Seven Men and Two Others (London, 1950) pp. 3– 51. (written in 1912 and first published in 1919). 6. Le Gallienne, Romantic ’90s p. 143. 7. Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, 2000) p. 59. 8. Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York and London, 1992) p. 49. 9. See the letter from Katharine Bradley to John Gray of 5 November 1907, printed in McCormack, Gray p. 211. 10. Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray 1866 – 1934 (Padstow, 1983) pp. 110 – 12.

248

NOTES

TO

PAGES 76 – 83

11. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism; Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke, 2002). 12. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 6 –7. 13. Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine p. 146. 14. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 6– 7. On Salome, see Charles Bernheimer, ‘Visions of Salome’, in idem, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Sie`cle in Europe (Baltimore and London, 2002) pp. 104 – 38. Bernheimer describes Salome as the ‘favorite femme fatale of the fin de sie`cle’. 15. Laurel Brake, ‘Pater, Walter Horatio, (1839 – 1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 16. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1st edition, 1873 (5th edition, 1901, reprinted, London, 1910) p. 187. 17. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism p. 75. 18. Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine pp. 14 – 15, 28 –9, 141– 2. 19. Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine p. 15. 20. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 10 – 11. 21. Bradley’s letters are almost never dated. National Library of Scotland (NLS) 372/17 Bradley to Gray. 22. Peter F. Anson, ‘Random Reminiscences of John Gray and Andre´ Raffalovich’, in Brocard Sewell (ed.), Two Friends: John Gray and Andre´ Raffalovich (London, 1963) p. 135. 23. Edwin Essex, ‘The Canon in Residence’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends pp. 153– 4. 24. McCormack, Gray p. 2. 25. Essex, ‘Canon in Residence’ p. 155. 26. McCormack, Gray p. 219, citing a conversation that she had in 1970 with Fr Anthony Ross. 27. Sewell, In the Dorian Mode p. 100. 28. Essex, ‘Canon in Residence’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends p. 158. 29. National Library of Scotland Gray and Raffalovich mss 372/2. Gray to Raffalovich 10 February 1899. 30. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987) p. 290. 31. Ibid. 32. McCormack, Gray p. 49. The letter was postmarked 9 January 1891. 33. Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 208. 34. McCormack, Gray p. 50. 35. Ellmann, Wilde p. 291; McCormack, Gray p. 50; Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism p. 312. 36. McCormack, Gray pp. 82 – 3. 37. Gray to Louy¨s, 24 November 1892, cited in McCormack, Gray pp. 96 – 7. Her chapter ‘“Dorian” Gray, 1891 – 1892’ pp. 53 – 102 gives a detailed account of the events of Gray’s life in this period.

NOTES 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

TO

PAGES 84 – 88

249

Beckson, London in the 1890s p. 194. Pall Mall Gazette 56, 4 May 1893 p. 3. McCormack, Gray p. 110. McCormack, Gray p. 120. She provides an extensive discussion of Silverpoints, pp. 103 – 45. Ian Fletcher, ‘The Poetry of John Gray’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends p. 56. Brocard Sewell’s Two Friends: John Gray and Andre´ Raffalovich (London, 1963) is an edited collection of essays contributed by people who knew them, and provides some insight into them and their relationship. The first contract, dated 17 June 1892, was drawn up between Wilde and the publishers Bodley Head. In it Wilde agreed to meet the costs of publication. This was evidently abandoned, and in a second contract, dated 4 January, it was stipulated that the publishers would cover the production costs themselves, with a 20 per cent royalty for Gray. McCormack, Gray p. 112. Cited in Roden, Same-Sex Desire p. 176. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f.92. McCormack, Gray p. 169. Roden, Same-Sex Desire p. 179. Cited in McCormack, Gray p. 173. Mary Raphael Gray, OSB, ‘A Sister’s Reminiscences’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends p. 102. Gray’s youngest three siblings converted to Catholicism in 1893, at the same time as their mother. Gray was godfather to his two youngest sisters, Sally and Beatrice, and arranged for their education in Bavaria. McCormack, Gray pp. 173 – 81. See also Matthew Sturgis, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (London, 1995) pp. 282– 6 for another account of Raffalovich’s involvement in Beardsley’s conversion. Alan Crawford, ‘Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872 – 1898)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). The story is reprinted in Jerusha Hull McCormack (ed.), The Selected Prose of John Gray (Greensboro, 1992). At this time Jacopone was credited with being the author of the Stabat Mater – the hymn focussed on the sorrows of Mary, which was a fixed and prominent element in the both the popular devotions of Holy Week, and the Stations of the Cross. Roden’s literary-critical reading of the story is that the woman is clearly a feminisation of Gray himself, and that it should be read as an account of his own seduction by Christ through the works of Jacopone. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 170 – 3. Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995) pp. 144 – 50.

250 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

NOTES

TO

PAGES 89 – 94

Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 311 – 29. Anson, ‘Random Reminiscences’ p. 136. Sewell, In the Dorian Mode p. 93. NLS Gray and Raffalovich mss 372/46. Sewell, In the Dorian Mode p. 99 refers to Gray mending fuses and broken sewing machines in St Patrick’s parish. NLS 372/50 and 372/51 Gray’s diaries for 1907 and 1908. Essex, ‘Canon in Residence’ pp. 155 – 6. Anson, ‘Random Reminiscences’ pp. 139– 40. Essex, ‘Canon in Residence’ p. 160. Beckson provides a discussion of the meaning of the term ‘Uranian’ at this period. London in the 1890s pp. 186– 212. Raffalovich’s views on the nature of homosexuality were broadly similar to those expressed by Havelock Ellis and J.A. Symonds, in the book which became Sexual Inversion. This was first published in German in 1896, and then in English in 1897. The bookseller was duly prosecuted in 1898, and thereafter Ellis published in the USA. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 182 – 3. Roden, Same-Sex Desire p. 183. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 321 – 2. Anthony Ross, ‘The Development of the Scottish Catholic Community 1878 – 1978’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Modern Scottish Catholicism 1878 – 1978 (Glasgow, 1979) p. 47. For a discussion of Gray’s later works, see McCormack, Gray pp. 225 – 53. Bernard Delany, OP, ‘Sermon preached at the Mass of Requiem for Canon John Gray, in the presence of the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends p. 175. Delany, in his capacity as editor of Blackfriars, had published much of Gray’s later output, so his words should not be seen as implying his personal disapproval of Gray’s literary career. Patrick Reilly, ‘Catholics and Scottish Literature, 1878 – 1978’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Modern Scottish Catholicism 1878 – 1978 (Glasgow, 1979) pp. 195 – 7. Blackfriars (8 May 1927) p. 280. Reprinted in John Gray, Poems (London, 1931) p. 36. A reference to the artist Sir Frank Brangwyn, known for the richness of his colour. Brangwyn designed a huge altar piece for St Peter’s, Falcon Avenue. Blackfriars (9 May 1928) pp. 304 – 8. Reprinted in McCormack, Selected Prose pp. 170– 5. Reilly, ‘Catholics and Scottish Literature’ p. 196. Blackfriars 12 – 13, from November 1931 to April 1932. It was then produced as a small print run at Gray’s own expense, from the

NOTES

78. 79. 80. 81.

TO

PAGES 94 – 99

251

press of Rene´ Hague and Eric Gill. It was subsequently reprinted in 1966 and 1984. See McCormack, Gray pp. 241–53; Sewell, Dorian Mode pp. 164–76. John Gray, Park: A Fantastic Story, ed. Philip Healy (Manchester, 1984) p. 120. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism pp. 311 – 12. Gray, Park pp. 118 –19.

CHAPTER 5

‘HERETIC BLOOD’ AND CATHOLIC CONVERSION

1. Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field (Bath, 1998) p. 123. 2. The Academy (8 June 1889) pp. 388 – 9. Cited in Virginia Blain, ‘“Michael Field, the Two-headed Nightingale”: Lesbian Text as Palimpsest’, Women’s History Review 5.2 (1996) pp. 239 –57. 3. Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (Hanover and London, 1991) pp. 208 – 9. 4. Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke, 2002) p. 200. 5. Katharine Bradley told Havelock Ellis, ‘I am Christian, pagan, pantheist and other things the name of which I do not know.’ Donoghue, Michael Field p. 46. Edith Cooper, on the other hand, claimed around the time of her conversion to Rome that she had ‘always disowned the Church of my childhood [the Church of England] because it was destitute of the real centre of all true religion – an altar with its present Deity – and because the Dead had no portion in its services and there was no universality in its rites’. T. and D.C. Sturge Moore (eds), Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field (London, 1933) p. 272. This does, however, sound rather like a convert making a case for her new faith, while diminishing the significance of her past. 6. Camille Cauti, ‘Michael Field’s Pagan Catholicism’, in Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (eds), Michael Field and Their World (High Wycombe, 2007) pp. 181 – 9. 7. Marion Thain, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) p. 186. 8. Thain, ‘Michael Field’ pp. 190 – 2. 9. Roden, Same-Sex Desire p. 194. 10. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 194 – 7. 11. National Library of Scotland (NLS) Gray and Raffalovich mss 372/17/9 Bradley to Gray n.d. Emma Donoghue notes that the women went through the same process of immediately reinterpreting a significant death in explicitly religious terms when Edith’s father James Cooper died in an Alpine climbing accident in 1897. Donoghue, Michael Field p. 122.

252 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

NOTES

TO

PAGES 99 – 103

NLS Gray and Raffalovich mss 372/17/9 Bradley to Gray n.d. Mary Sturgeon, Michael Field (London, 1922) p. 53. McCormack, Gray p. 206. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 3. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 4. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 7. The Order of St Martha had arrived in Rottingdean from the Dordogne in 1903, and the sisters were presumably still mainly speaking French in 1907. The chapel at the Star of the Sea convent functioned as the centre for Catholic worship in the area until the parish church of Our Lady of Lourdes was built in 1957. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 12. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 5. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 35. Blain, ‘Michael Field’ p. 242. The identity of this priest is a little mystifying. According to the Catholic Directory, there was no priest called Goscannon in Great Britain in the years between 1906 and 1914. In a letter to Gray in early 1907, Bradley stated that ‘Goscannon is only a name for the curate-seminarist Henry asked to come – and as it is a safe disguise – let us keep it.’ The use of nicknames was of course habitual to both women. It seems likely that ‘Goscannon’ was Fr Gerald Fitzgibbon, who was curate of St Elizabeth’s Richmond from the time of their conversion until 1913. Whoever he was, ‘Goscannon’ appears to have had a French-Irish background, and accompanied the women for a holiday in Boulogne in 1910. There he offended worshippers in the cathedral by only consecrating three wafers at what was clearly intended as a private Mass for himself and the women. He told the other people who had gathered at the altar to go elsewhere, much to the satisfaction of Edith Cooper. See the comments made by Edith in the diary, and reproduced in Sturge Moore (eds), Works and Days pp. 293 – 300. Blain, ‘Michael Field’ p. 251. Blain explains that Cooper became particularly anxious about this after the death of her father in 1897. Because he was not a blood relative of Bradley, his existence was symbolically interpreted as freeing their relationship from incest. Edith’s mother, of course, was Katharine’s sister. Sturge Moore (eds), Works and Days p. 271. NLS 372/17 Bradley to Gray. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 86. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 87. Raffalovich’s letter to Michael Field, 16 November 1884, is now at BL Add Mss 45851 f. 72. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 87.

NOTES

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PAGES 103 – 108

253

29. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 91. Pater’s sister Clara was a classical scholar who had been resident tutor at Somerville College Oxford. She resigned a month before her brother’s death, which occurred in their Oxford home in July 1894. She then moved to Kensington, due to various dissatisfactions with her life in Oxford. See Laurel Brake, ‘Pater, Clara Ann (bap. 1841 – 1910)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). For Pater’s death, see Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (London, 1978) p. 204. 30. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 90. 31. NLS 372/ 17/11 Bradley to Gray, dated Easter Eve [1907]. 32. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 41. 33. NLS 372/18/8. The lettercard has a clear postmark. 34. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 91. 35. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 93. 36. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 91 37. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 100. 38. BL Add Mss 46796 Michael Field diaries f. 96; Augustine, Confessions IX.x (23 – 6). 39. Thain, ‘Michael Field’ p. 7. 40. Bradley and Cooper always slept in the same bed, whether at home or in hotels. Gray and Raffalovich lived in separate, although very closely located houses, and although they usually went on holiday together, opted to stay in different hotels. 41. The poem appears in the collection Wild Honey from Various Thyme (London, 1908) p. 180, and is cited here in the abbreviated form reproduced in Thain, ‘Michael Field’ p. 158. 42. Thain, ‘Michael Field’ pp. 171– 2. 43. Bradley to Gray (NLS Dep 372 no 18), cited by Thain, ‘Michael Field’ p. 172. 44. Thain, ‘Michael Field’ pp. 174– 8. 45. Marion Thain, ‘Poetry’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 231 – 2. See also Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 212 – 13. 46. Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York, 1996) pp. 133 – 5; Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 204 – 15. 47. Thain, ‘Michael Field’ pp. 188 – 97; Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 200 –4. 48. The poem is cited here in the form reproduced in Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 200 – 1. 49. Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca and London, 1997) p. 128. 50. McNabb was one of the most prominent Dominicans of the English Province. He was a utopian who believed that Catholic

254

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

NOTES

TO

PAGES 108 – 114

families should ‘go back to the land’ and live in self-sufficient, unmechanised communities. He became associated with Distributism in the 1920s. See Angela Cunningham, ‘McNabb, Joseph [name in religion Vincent McNabb] (1868 – 1943)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). NLS 372/17/12 Bradley to Gray. NLS/372/18/6 Bradley to Gray. This was Hugh Edmund Ford, OSB, Abbot of Ealing Priory. McCormack, Gray pp. 210– 14. There are four files of letters from Bradley to Gray in the National Library of Scotland. Gray’s letters to her are in New York Public Library and Princeton. NLS 372/16/2 Cooper to Gray February 1911. John Gray, The True Prayers of St Gertrude and St Mechtilde (original title, O Beata Trinitas) (London, 1936, first published 1927) p. 2; Frederick S. Roden, ‘Michael Field and the Challenges of Writing a Lesbian Catholicism’, in Stetz and Wilson (eds), Michael Field p. 158. Emily C. Fortey, The Wattlefold: Unpublished Poems by Michael Field (Oxford, 1930) p. v. Allitt, Catholic Converts pp. 162 – 4. His sample includes Basil Maturin, Bertram Windle, R.H. Benson, G.K. Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, Arnold Lunn, Shane Leslie, Christopher Dawson, Theodore Maynard, Christopher Hollis, C.C. Martindale, Ronald Knox and Eric Gill. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism p. 366. Sewell, Dorian Mode p. 163. Holly Laird, ‘Michael Field as “the Author of Borgia”’, in Stetz and Wilson (eds), Michael Field p. 33. Ellmann, Wilde pp. 32, 51 – 2, 90 – 1, 548 –9. See Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, 2000) pp. 1223 –4 for Cuthbert Dunne’s account of Wilde’s reception. Roden, Same-Sex Desire pp. 153 – 5. John Gray, ‘Andre´ Raffalovich’, Blackfriars 15 (June 1934) p. 405. Roden also makes this point very perceptively: ‘If the Wilde trials criminalised an Irish playwright, how much worse would a Russian-French Jew fare?’ (Same-Sex Desire pp. 181, 188 – 9). Donoghue, Michael Field p. 135. Peter Anson, ‘Random Reminiscences’, in Brocard Sewell (ed.), Two Friends: John Gray and Andre´ Raffalovich (London, 1963) p. 138. Anson, ‘Random Reminiscences’ pp. 137 – 8; Margaret Sackville, ‘At Whitehouse Terrace’, in Sewell (ed.), Two Friends pp. 142– 7; W.H. Shewring, ‘Two Friends John Gray: Andre´ Raffalovich’, Blackfriars 15 (September 1934) pp. 622– 5.

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PAGES 114 – 124

255

69. For example in The Long Road (Oxford,1926) p. 251, and ‘Odiham’, Blackfriars 12 (May 1931) pp. 321– 3. 70. The Times (19 June 1934) p. 16.

CHAPTER 6

LONDON CHRISTIANITY AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

1. Henry Sebastian Bowden, Guide to the Oratory South Kensington with Explanations and Plates (London, 1912). 2. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes: Founder of a New Methodism, Conscience of a New Nonconformity (Cardiff, 1999) p. 309. 3. H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Stoddart, Jane Thompson (1863 – 1944)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 4. British Weekly (4 April 1895) p. 385. 5. British Weekly (4 April 1895) p. 385. 6. Church Times, 19 April 1895 p. 441. 7. For Dale, Fairbairn and Paton on the social gospel, see David M. Thompson, ‘The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c.1750 – c.1950 Studies in Church History Subsidia 7 (Oxford, 1990) pp. 260– 79. 8. Pamela J. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001) pp. 17–34. 9. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down pp. 116 – 17. 10. William K. Kay, ‘Modernity and the Arrival of Pentecostalism in Britain’, in PentecoStudies 9.2 (2010) p. 69. I am grateful to Professor Kay for drawing my attention to his argument. 11. David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989) pp. 165 – 8; David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Leicester, 2005) pp. 194 – 7. 12. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain p. 168. 13. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain p. 180. 14. F.G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London, 1926) p. 82. 15. Bettany, Headlam pp. 28, 65 – 9. 16. Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877 – 1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, 1968) p. 146. 17. Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge, 1987) p. 109. 18. For example in The Church Reformer, March 1888 p. 54, he referred to the ‘tyranny’ of Bishop Temple of London, and to his ‘notorious’ rudeness. 19. Bettany, Headlam pp. 65 – 9.

256

NOTES

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PAGES 125 – 130

20. Ibid. pp. 103, 107. 21. Ibid. p. 100. 22. Ibid. pp. 102, 104; Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, 2000) pp. 50, 75. 23. Bettany, Headlam p. 101. 24. Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888 –1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London, 1914) p. 69. 25. Bettany, Headlam p. 108. 26. Ibid. pp. 138 – 9. 27. Bettany, Headlam pp. 129 – 31; Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987) p. 438. 28. Wilde should not have been surprised though, because the Jesuit method is to be deliberative, not to act on the spur of the moment. 29. Bettany, Headlam pp. 131 –2; Ellmann, Wilde pp. 445, 495 –6. 30. Jones, Christian Socialist Revival p. 129. 31. Bettany, Headlam p. 125. 32. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain p. 171. 33. Bettany, Headlam pp. 19 – 25. 34. Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing, 1988) p. 63. 35. Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (4th edition, London, 1890) p. ix. 36. G.L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (London, 1935) p. 104. 37. The outcry occasioned by Lux Mundi, and the tensions which resulted with Liddon in particular, are documented in Prestige, Gore pp. 97 – 136. 38. Prestige, Gore p. 105. 39. For an informative account of Lux Mundi, and the reactions to it, see Jane Garnett, ‘Lux Mundi essayists (act. 1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 40. Anglican scholars who felt a sufficient sense of continuity with the Lux Mundi tradition to write for the centenary volumes included Paul Avis, John Barton, David Brown, Tim Gorringe, Daniel Hardy, Brian Hebblethwaite, Peter Hinchliff, Andrew Louth, Alister McGrath, Robert Morgan, John Muddiman, Lesslie Newbigin, David Nicholls, Geoffrey Rowell, Stephen Sykes, Keith Ward, Maurice Wiles, Rowan Williams and Trevor Williams. The volumes in question were Robert Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol, 1989) and Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London, 1989). 41. Prestige, Gore pp. 163 – 5. 42. Prestige, Gore p. 165. 43. Thompson, ‘Nonconformist Social Gospel’ p. 276. 44. British Weekly (30 January 1896) p. 252.

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PAGES 130 – 138

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45. British Weekly (26 October 1899) p. 28. 46. British Weekly (17 November 1898) p. 86. 47. John Lewis Paton, John Brown Paton: A Biography (London, 1914) p. 187. 48. Ibid. p. 188. 49. British Weekly (3 January 1901) p. 318. 50. Martin Wellings, ‘The First Protestant Martyr of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Significance of John Kensit (1853 – 1902)’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies: Studies in Church History 30 (Oxford, 1993) pp. 347– 88. 51. See also Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830 – 1910 (Oxford, 1999) pp. 300 – 3. 52. The text was published in The Times on 20 April 1895. 53. The Times (22 April 1895). 54. The Church Times (26 April 1895) p. 465. 55. William R. Franklin (ed.), Anglican Orders: Essays on the Centenary of Apostolicae Curae 1896 – 1996 (London, 1996) pp. 8 –13. 56. Apostolicae curae 1896. SPCK English translation, paragraph 6. 57. The Church Times (2 October 1896) p. 319. 58. The Church Times (25 September 1896) p. 292. Letter from Revd Robert Haynes Care, a Lincolnshire rector. 59. LPL (Lambeth Palace Library) Benson 176 (Press Cuttings vol. I) f. 206. On the same page an account from the Observer of the actual garden party of 1886 is preserved, which reveals that it was not in fact an ecumenical occasion. 60. V.A. McClelland provides a full account of Manning’s views on higher education in V.A. McClelland, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence 1865 – 1892 (London, 1962) pp. 87 –128. See also James Pereiro, Cardinal Manning: From Anglican Archdeacon to Council Father at Vatican I (Leominster, 2008) pp. 236 – 40, 244– 5. 61. E.S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning Archbishop of Westminster (2 vols) (London, 1896) vol. II, pp. 797 – 801. 62. The Times (22 January 1892) p. 6. 63. Ibid. 64. The Times (24 February 1865) p. 5. 65. The Times (12 February 1892) p. 5. 66. Ibid. p. 5. 67. Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-century Britain (Selinsgrove and London, 1998) pp. 47, 59. 68. Ibid. p. 58. 69. On 9 October 1880, the Boy’s Own Paper published a page of ‘Silhouettes of Celebrities’, which featured Spurgeon in the central position. Other famous silhouettes included Ruskin, Gladstone, Disraeli and Tennyson, but Spurgeon was the only churchman.

258

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

NOTES

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PAGES 138 – 145

The image is reproduced in Peter J. Morden, Communion with Christ and His People: The Spirituality of C.H. Spurgeon (Oxford, 2010) between pp. 164 – 5. Ellison, Victorian Pulpit pp. 59 – 64. Morden, Spurgeon. Ibid. pp. 37 – 9. The door furniture is now in use in one of the staff offices at Spurgeon’s College, London. I am grateful to the Academic Dean, Dr Pieter Lalleman, for showing it to me and noting that it seemed to him a strange choice of finger plate for a Puritan preacher. Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army (London, 1999) p. 433. The Times (14 October 1890) p. 4. The Times (15 October 1890) p. 12. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down pp. 60, 70. W.T. Stead, General Booth: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1891) p. 85. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down p. 70. Richard Mudie-Smith, The Religious Life of London (London, 1904) p. 25. See also p. 206, although it was apparent that some individual corps which would continue to flourish in the twentieth century were already doing so, for example Chalk Farm in North London, p. 143. Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974) pp. 60, 89. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life p. 315. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Third Series, Religious Influences (London, 1902) vol. I pp. 119 – 23. Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered (London and Rio Grande, 1993) p. 170. Albert Fried and Richard M. Elman, (eds). Charles Booth’s London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His ‘Life and Labour of the People in London’ (London, 1969) p. 180. O’Day and Englander, Booth’s Inquiry p. 197; Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II, 2nd edition (London, 1972) p. 176. Sarah Flew, ‘Philanthropy and Secularisation: The Funding of Anglican Religious Voluntary Organisations in London, 1856 – 1914’ (Open University PhD thesis, 2013) pp. 89 –90. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life pp. 1– 2. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 13. McLeod, Class and Religion p. 63. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life p. 9. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life p. 281.

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PAGES 145 – 153

259

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

McLeod, Class and Religion p. 25. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life p. 288. Ibid. pp. 290 – 2. R.J. Campbell, A Spiritual Pilgrimage (New York, 1916) p. 82. Ibid. pp. 85 – 117. Ibid. pp. 26 – 9. Ibid. p. 45. Keith Robbins, ‘The Spiritual Pilgrimage of R.J. Campbell’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993) pp. 135– 7. 102. Ibid. pp. 138– 42. 103. McLeod, Class and Religion p. 226. Citing a letter published in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 18 September 1886.

CHAPTER 7

CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL PURITY AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

1. For the origins of the term ‘social gospel’ see David M. Thompson, ‘The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c.1750 – c.1950 Studies in Church History Subsidia 7 (Oxford, 1990) pp. 258– 60. The term gradually came into use among both Nonconformists and Anglicans from the mid-1880s. 2. Richard Mudie-Smith, The Religious Life of London (London, 1904) pp. 184, 191. 3. John Clifford’s Westbourne Park chapel in Paddington provided a particularly comprehensive example. 4. Richard A. Kaye, ‘Sexual Identity at the Fin de Sie`cle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007) p. 53. 5. Mudie-Smith, Religious Life pp. 93 – 4, 141. 6. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980). 7. W.M. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680 – 1840 (Oxford, 2007) p. 19. 8. M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787 – 1886 (Cambridge, 2004) pp. 24 – 58. 9. John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Nottingham, 2006) pp. 169 – 70. 10. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society pp. 41 – 2. 11. Ibid. pp. 67 – 147.

260

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PAGES 154 – 157

12. Sue Morgan, A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the Politics of Gender in the Late-Victorian Church (Bristol, 1999) pp. 73 –4. 13. David Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870 – 1914 (London, 1982) p. 39. 14. W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist (London, 2012) pp. 53 – 4. 15. Raymond L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1972) pp. 61 – 5, 83 – 4. 16. Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, May 1887 pp. 638–9. Although Arnold’s article has traditionally been seen as a defining moment in the history of journalism when the ‘New Journalism’ was first named and denounced, more recently Tony Nicholson has suggested that it was in fact Stead himself who promoted the term. Not only did he use the term ‘New Journalism’ in an article which predated Arnold’s by one year, but after the publication of Arnold’s article, Stead set about tracking down and republishing all the press comment, to ensure that it gained currency. This technique of republishing other press comment in order to serve his own agenda was central to Stead’s journalistic method. See Tony Nicholson, ‘The Provincial Stead’, in Laurel Brake et al. (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London, 2012) pp. 16–17. 17. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle p. 3. 18. Stewart J. Brown, ‘W.T. Stead, the “New Journalism” and the “New Church” in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight and John Morgan-Guy (eds), Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century (Farnham, 2013) pp. 213 – 32. 19. Brown, ‘Stead’ p. 220, citing W.T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review 50 (November 1886) p. 670. 20. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’ p. 670. 21. For more on the significance of Stead’s northern Nonconformist background, see Nicholson, ‘The Provincial Stead’ pp. 7– 21. 22. In addition to his crusade to raise the age of consent, Stead’s campaigns against the Bulgarian Turkish atrocities, the adulterous politicians Sir Charles Dilke and C.S. Parnell, and in favour of Free Church cooperation in the service of humanity, mark out his central association with the Nonconformist conscience. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience pp. 45, 63, 100, 115. 23. W.T. Stead, General Booth: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1891) p. 91. 24. Brown, ‘Stead’ p. 221, citing W.T. Stead, Character Sketches (London, 1891) p. 145. 25. Robinson, Muckraker pp. 161– 4.

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PAGES 157 – 161

261

26. Stewart J. Brown, ‘W.T. Stead and the Civic Church, 1886 – 95: The Vision Behind If Christ Came to Chicago!’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66, 2 pp. 320–39 (April, 2015). I am grateful to Professor Brown for allowing me to read his article prior to publication. 27. Schults, Crusader in Babylon p. 49. 28. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (Leicester, 1970) p. 15. 29. The point has been made by Dennis Hardy in Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900 – 1945 (London, 2000) p. 59. See also Mearns, Bitter Cry p. 56, and William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890) pp. 63, 73. 30. Mearns, Bitter Cry pp. 12 – 13. 31. Ibid. p. 17. 32. Ibid. pp. 81 – 8. 33. Ibid. p. 21. 34. For Stead’s Bitter Cry campaign, see Schults, Crusader in Babylon pp. 49 – 61. 35. Mearns, Bitter Cry pp. 34 – 5. 36. W.T. Stead, My First Imprisonment (London, 1886); Schults, Crusader in Babylon pp. 184 – 5. See also Harold Begbie, Life of William Booth: The Founder of the Salvation Army, 2 vols (London, 1920) vol. II pp. 54 – 6, in which he reprints a letter that Stead sent to Bramwell Booth from Holloway Prison on 13 December 1885. 37. W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (the Report of the Pall Mall Gazette’s Secret Commission)’, London 1885 pp. 8 – 9. The most detailed analysis of the articles is provided by Judith Walkowitz in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992) pp. 81 – 134. 38. There has long been scepticism about the existence of this person. Other investigators of prostitution had not heard of him. See Robinson, Muckraker p. 89. The image of the Minotaur in this context is discussed in Tim Youngs, Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Sie`cle (Liverpool, 2013) pp. 64 – 7. 39. Deborah Gorham, ‘“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 21.3 (1978) pp. 357 – 60, and M.J.D. Roberts, The Making of English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England 1787 – 1886 (Cambridge, 2004) pp. 252 – 3. 40. Stead, ‘Maiden Tribute’ p. 15. 41. A classic example of this was in his bestselling book If Christ Came to Chicago! (1893), which contained a pull-out map detailing the exact location of every brothel in the Levee district of the city.

262

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

NOTES

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PAGES 161 – 167

Robinson, Muckraker p. 222. Once again, Stead seemed to be catering directly for the needs of sex tourists. Schults, Crusader in Babylon p. 180. Ibid. pp. 175 – 85. This impression is gained from the correspondence between William and Catherine Booth published in Begbie, Booth vol. II pp. 47 – 54. For Jarrett, see Pamela Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001) pp. 163 – 74. Most notably Richard Collier, The General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army (London, 1965) pp. 123 – 44, who enlivens his account with invented dialogue. Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army (London, 1999) p. 323. The uniform was still on display in 2014. See Hattersley, Blood and Fire pp. 310 – 24; Roger J. Green, The Life and Ministry of William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army (Nashville, 2005) pp. 153 – 4. Begbie, Booth vol. II p. 42. Schults, Crusader in Babylon p. 173. Brown, ‘Stead’ p. 213. Talia Schaffer (ed.), Literature and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle (New York, 2007) and Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Sie`cle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880 – 1900 (Oxford, 2000). Ledger and Luckhurst also include an extract from The Bitter Cry of Outcast London and from William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out. Raymond Schults uses this term several times in his study of Stead, and it also features in Frederic Whyte’s early biography, The Life of W.T. Stead, 2 vols (London, 1925). Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society pp. 246 – 50. Schults, Crusader in Babylon p. 161. Stead, ‘Maiden Tribute’ p. 14. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience p. 11. Gorham, ‘Maiden Tribute’ pp. 369– 70. For a detailed account of this, and the politics which lay behind it, see Roberts, Making of English Morals pp. 263 – 72. Mudie-Smith, London p. 94. Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885 – 1914 (London, 1995) p. 101. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edition (London, 1989) pp. 99 – 103. Joseph O. Baylen, ‘Stead, William Thomas (1849 – 1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); J.B. Lightfoot to

NOTES

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

TO

PAGES 167 – 174

263

Percy Bunting, 7 September 1885, cited in Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin, 1977) p. 133; Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience p. 44. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience p. 13. Frances Knight, ‘Recreation or Renunciation? Episcopal Interventions in the Drink Question in the 1890s’, in Brown, Knight and Morgan-Guy (eds), Religion, Identity and Conflict pp. 157 – 73. Roberts, Making of English Morals p. 255. Roberts, Making of English Morals pp. 250 – 63. Roberts, Making of English Morals p. 270. Bland, Banishing the Beast pp. 103– 4. Ibid. pp. 99 – 101; Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford, 1992) pp. 190 – 3. Roberts, Making of English Morals p. 270. Philippa Levine, ‘Chant, Laura Ormiston (1848 – 1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Bland, Banishing the Beast p. 115. F.G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London, 1926) p. 108. Bland, Banishing the Beast pp. 118– 20. Morgan, Passion for Purity; Sue Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity: The Religio-feminist Theory of Ellice Hopkins’, Women’s History Review 9.1 (2000). This was the judgement of Judith Walkowitz. See Walkowitz, Prostitution pp. 236 – 43. Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ p. 16. Morgan, Passion for Purity pp. 52 – 9. Ellice Hopkins, The Story of Life: For the Use of Mothers of Boys (London and Newcastle, 1902) p. 67. Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ p. 17; Morgan, Passion for Purity pp. 79 – 80. Ellice Hopkins, On the Early Training of Boys and Girls: An Appeal to Working Women (London, 1882) p. 48, cited in Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ p. 26. Hopkins, Story of Life p. 9. Hopkins, Story of Life p. 64. Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ pp. 26 – 7; Sue Morgan, ‘“The Word Made Flesh”: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures’, in Sue Morgan and Jacqueline de Vries (eds), Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800 – 1940 (London, 2010) pp. 162– 7. Morgan, Passion for Purity pp. 75 – 6. Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ pp. 19 – 20. B.F. Westcott, Christus Consummator (1890) pp. 120 – 1, cited in Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity’ p. 21. Caine, Victorian Feminists p. 191. Robinson, Muckraker p. 211.

264

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PAGES 175 – 181

91. Mrs Goodenough, speaking at the NUWW Conference, cited by Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860 – 1914 (London and New York, 2000) p. 27. 92. Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers (London, 1999) p. 100. 93. Caine, Victorian Feminists pp. 251– 2. 94. Ibid. pp. 255 – 6. 95. Morgan, Passion for Purity p. 142. 96. Caine, Victorian Feminists pp. 257– 8.

CHAPTER 8 CHRISTIAN UTOPIANISM AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE: BUILDING THE NEW JERUSALEM 1. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926) pp. 173– 4. Although it is Webb that is frequently quoted, others made the same point, including Henrietta Barnett in her biography of her husband, in 1918. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends, 2 vols (London, 1918) vol. I pp. 309 – 10. 2. Webb, My Apprenticeship p. 174. 3. Group photographs of workhouse inmates tend to portray them sitting in neat rows, eyes away from the camera. 4. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton and Oxford, 2007) pp. 1 –22. Koven is particularly critical of Gareth Stedman Jones’s contention that, with regard to middle-class attitudes to the London poor, ‘the more predominant feeling was not guilt but fear’. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971) p. 285. 5. Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900 – 1945 (London, 2000) p. 172. 6. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800 – 2000, 2nd edition (London, 2009) p. 19. The expression is repeated in William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890) p. 255. 7. Brown, Death of Christian Britain pp. 25 – 6. 8. London County Council, London Statistics, XXXIX, p. 27, cited in Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (Leicester, 1970) p. 38. 9. Apart from his Orders and Regulations for Field Officers, his other publications tended to be collections of his letters, addresses and songs and, taken individually, they were quite ephemeral. 10. For the origins of the Family Tracing Service, see the chapter on ‘The Enquiry Office for Lost People’, in Booth, In Darkest England pp. 194 – 200. The night shelters became controversial not just because of the extremely fervent evangelism that was directed at inmates, but because of poor standards of hygiene. See Victor

NOTES

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

TO

PAGES 181 – 186

265

Bailey, ‘“In Darkest England and the Way Out”: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 1885 – 1910’, International Review of Social History (1984) p. 161. On the desire to receive public money for the detention of vagrants, and Beatrice Webb’s view on the undesirability of contracting this work out to a religious organisation, see Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ p. 167. W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist (London, 2012) pp. 174 – 5. Glenn Horridge emphasises the role of Frank Smith in supplying ideas for In Darkest England. Smith broke with William Booth shortly after the book’s publication, and later became a Labour MP. Glenn K. Horridge, The Salvation Army Origins and Early Days: 1865 – 1900 (Godalming, 1993) pp. 146, 149 – 50. For more on Smith, see Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ pp. 133 – 71, especially pp. 146 – 8. Elizabeth Tilley, ‘Christianity, Journalism and Popular Print: W.T. Stead and the Salvation Army’, in Laurel Brake et al. (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London, 2012) pp. 60 – 1. Booth, In Darkest England, see particularly pp. 46 – 56. Booth, In Darkest England p. 79. Ibid. p. 91. Ibid. p. 239. Ibid. pp. 229 – 32. Ibid. pp. 62 – 3. Ibid. pp. 92, 124 –34. Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ p. 160. Hardy, Utopian England pp. 25 – 9. After going through various changes in the twentieth century, the Salvation Army Land and Industrial Colony at Hadleigh still exists as Hadleigh Farm, and is a Salvation Army project committed to sustainability and training for people with special educational needs. Booth, In Darkest England p. 143. Ibid. p. 152. Ibid. pp. 204– 6; the Salvation Army tried to pursue this scheme until 1908. Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ p. 167. Tilley, ‘Stead and the Salvation Army’ pp. 69 – 71. Ibid. pp. 71 – 2. See also Robinson, Muckraker pp. 159 – 63. Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ p. 151. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II pp. 246 – 7. Ibid. vol. I p. 72. This would have been F.D. Maurice, The Epistles of St John: A Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 1857). For more on the influence of Maurice on Barnett, see Koven, Slumming pp. 231 – 6.

266

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PAGES 186 – 190

31. Seth Koven, ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing’, in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London, 1995) p. 33. 32. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. I pp. 307 – 8. 33. Will Reason’s University and Social Settlements (London, 1898) was a relatively early attempt to provide information about the extent and nature of the settlement movement. In London, he identified 12 settlements run by men and 11 run by women, with one, Maurice Hostel, newly founded by the Christian Social Union, which was intended to be mixed. In cities outside London, Reason recorded the existence of 11 settlement communities. 34. Koven, Slumming p. 244, citing Nan Dearmer’s biography of her husband, p. 54. 35. Geoffrey Rowell, The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism (Oxford, 1983) p. 239. 36. Koven, Slumming p. 251. 37. Koven, Slumming pp. 261– 2. Nevinson’s original account is in his diary, held at the Bodleian Library, ms. Eng.misc.e610/12, 11 February 1893. 38. Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London, 1923) p. 78. 39. Nevinson, Changes and Chances p. 84. 40. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. I pp. 370– 1, 366; Nevinson, Changes and Chances pp. 81 – 7 provides details of others associated with the early years of Toynbee Hall who are not mentioned by Henrietta Barnett. 41. Wilde to Henrietta Barnett, unknown day in November 1889. See Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, 2000) p. 415. 42. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II p. 71. 43. Ibid. vol. I p. 346. 44. Ibid. vol. I p. 360. 45. Ibid. vol. I p. 308. 46. The printed report helpfully indicates when the audience laughed and applauded, and these references seem to have been much enjoyed. Report of Henry Scott Holland’s speech in support of an appeal for the building fund, on Wednesday, 21 January 1891. Reprinted in Anon, The Oxford House in Bethnal Green 1884 – 1948 (London, 1948) pp. 23 – 6. 47. Anon, Oxford House p. 24. 48. Ibid. p. 26. 49. The quotation comes from S. Paget, Henry Scott Holland (London, 1921) p. 88, and is cited in Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974) and Koven, Slumming. 50. Nevinson, Changes and Chances pp. 45 – 7.

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PAGES 190 – 197

267

51. Koven, Slumming p. 237. The often apparently unconscious linking of settlement life with the ‘darkest’ parts of the world proved to be extremely long-lasting. The school I attended in the early 1980s supported two charitable projects, the Peckham Settlement and a Christian mission in Borneo. Borneo and Peckham tended to fuse into one great pool of darkness and deprivation in the minds of at least some of the pupils, although Peckham was only 29 miles away. 52. Reason, Settlements pp. 76, 79. Reason was quoting directly from Winnington Ingram, who had used this Jacob and Esau analogy when writing about boys’ clubs. 53. Koven, Slumming pp. 228 – 9, 280; Genesis 25 – 27, 32. 54. Koven, Slumming pp. 228 – 81. 55. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. I p. 315. 56. Nevinson, Changes and Chances pp. 89 – 90. 57. Ibid. p. 89. 58. Alan Crawford, ‘Ashbee, Charles Robert (1863 – 1942)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 59. Koven, Slumming p. 265. 60. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. I p. 312. 61. Ibid. p. 322, citing a resident writing for the 1886 Annual Report on the work at Toynbee Hall. 62. Philip Whitwell Wilson, ‘The Settlement Ideal’, in Richard MudieSmith, The Religious Life of London (London, 1904) p. 297. 63. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. I p. 313. 64. Ibid. vol. I p. 342. 65. Ibid. vol. I pp. 327– 35, 342 – 54, 256 – 65. 66. Ibid. vol. I p. 337. 67. Ibid. vol. I pp. 339– 40. 68. Anon, Oxford House p. 12, citing the Oxford House Report of 1892. 69. McLeod, Class and Religion p. 110. 70. Anon, Oxford House pp. 14 – 17. 71. Wilson, ‘Settlement Ideal’ p. 298. 72. Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (Basingstoke, 1988) p. 184. 73. Ibid. pp. 3 – 4. 74. Ibid. pp. 79 – 81. 75. Ibid. pp. 58 – 67. 76. Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (originally 1898), original edition and commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward (London, 2003) p. 29. 77. Howard, To-morrow pp. 9– 10 (italics in original). 78. Beevers, Garden City Utopia p. 68, citing the Stoke Newington and Islington Recorder, 9 December 1898. 79. Beevers, Garden City Utopia pp. 89 – 90.

268

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PAGES 197 – 206

80. Hertfordshire County Record Office Ebenezer Howard papers DE/HO/F27/3 biographical notes dictated to A.C. Howard by Sir Ebenezer Howard, 11 April 1928. 81. Beevers, Garden City Utopia pp. 14 – 16, 123 – 4, 181. 82. HCRO DE/HO/F27/3 biographical notes dictated to A.C. Howard by Sir Ebenezer Howard, 11 April 1928. 83. Hardy, Utopian England p. 55. 84. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience p. 57. 85. Beevers, Garden City Utopia pp. 100 – 4, 132, 158 – 84. 86. Hardy, Utopian England pp. 74 – 5. 87. Beevers, Garden City Utopia pp. 117 – 21, 126. 88. A. Scott Matheson, City of Man (London, 1910) p. 141. 89. Ibid. p. 161. 90. Ibid. p. 142. 91. Ibid. p. 148. 92. Booth, In Darkest England p. 232. 93. Bailey, ‘Darkest England’ pp. 160 – 1. 94. Anon, Oxford House p. 34. 95. Beevers, Garden City Utopia pp. 133 – 4.

CHAPTER 9 CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES ON ART AT THE FIN DE SIE`CLE: GALLERIES, PAINTING AND LITURGY 1. Although a paragraph is devoted to Forsyth by John W. de Gruchy in his chapter on ‘Theology and the Visual Arts’, in David F. Ford and Rachel Muers (eds), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 3rd edition (Oxford, 2005) p. 709. 2. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton and Oxford, 2007) p. 237. 3. Seth Koven, ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing’, in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London, 1994) pp. 22 – 48. 4. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends, 2 vols (London, 1918) vol. II pp. 168, 157. 5. Barnett to Bishop Jackson, 3 April 1882 (Fulham papers), cited in Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions’ p. 34. 6. Samuel Barnett writing to his brother Francis in 1884. Cited in Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II p. 154. 7. Ibid. vol. II pp. 154 – 65. 8. Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions’ p. 36. 9. Ibid. p. 36. 10. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II p. 152. 11. Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions’ p. 35. 12. Ibid. pp. 36 – 7.

NOTES 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

TO

PAGES 206 – 211

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Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II p. 152. Barnett, Canon Barnett vol. II p. 157. Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions’ p. 43. Brian Lewis, ‘So Clean’: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester, 2008) pp. 38 – 45. Koven, ‘Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions’ p. 28. Lewis, So Clean p. 45. Stuart Eagles, ‘Thomas Coglan Horsfall, and Manchester Art Museum and University Settlement’ (2009), The encyclopaedia of informal education, ,www.infed.org/settlements/manchester_art_museum_ and_university_settlement.htm., accessed 13 February 2015. Stuart Eagles, ‘Horsfall, Thomas Coglan (1841 – 1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Richard Whittington-Egan and Geoffrey Smerdon, The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne (London, 1960) p. 222. Clyde Binfield, ‘P.T. Forsyth as Congregational Minister’, in Trevor Hart (ed.), Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth (Edinburgh, 1995) p. 174. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913; Harvester edition, Hassocks, 1976) p. 34. Clyde Binfield, ‘The Image and the Word: A Chapel Dimension’, in Martin O’Kane (ed.), Imaging the Bible: An Introduction to Biblical Art (London, 2008) p. 105. Jeremy Begbie, ‘The Ambivalent Rainbow: Forsyth, Art and Creation’, in Hart (ed.), Justice p. 204. Peter Taylor Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art: Being Expository Lectures on Rossetti, Burne Jones, Watts, Holman Hunt and Wagner (Manchester and London, 1889) p. 105. Ibid. p. ix. Ibid. p. 11. Ibid. p. 60. Benjamin Jowett, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Frederick Temple et al., Essays and Reviews (London, 1860) p. 373 A few pages later, Forsyth alludes to another of Jowett’s aphorisms, when he states that ‘It is a wise principle and a great one, to treat Scripture like any other book.’ Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art p. 68. Ibid. p. 61. Ibid. p. 61. Ibid. p. 106. Ibid. p. 13. Ibid. pp. 71, 90. Ibid. p. 75. Ibid. pp. 101 – 4.

270 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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PAGES 211 – 220

Ibid. pp. 129 – 30. Ibid. pp. 133 – 7. Ibid. p. 140. Ibid. p. 171. Ibid. pp. 118 – 19. Ibid. pp. 164 – 5. British Weekly (1 March 1889), Review of P.T. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art p. 284. Farrar was also a celebrated preacher. When Great Thoughts magazine organised a competition in which their readers voted for ‘the greatest living preacher’, Farrar was listed at number three, behind Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Joseph Parker (Liddon was fourth, and Manning appeared in ninth place). Great Thoughts, 24 September 1887. F.W. Farrar and A.C. Meynell, William Holman Hunt: His Life and Work (London, 1893) p. 5. Norman Vance, ‘Farrar, Frederic William (1831 – 1903)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Farrar and Meynell, Hunt p. 24. F.W. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art (London, 1894) pp. v –vi. Farrar, Life of Christ pp. 479, vi. Farrar, Life of Christ p. 483. See, for example, his criticism of depictions of Christ’s circumcision occurring in the Temple, p. 261, or of the depiction of improbable species of fish in Raphael’s cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes, p. 317. Donald Gray, Percy Dearmer: A Parson’s Pilgrimage (Norwich, 2000) p. 37. Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook (London, 1899) p. 4. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 6. Anon, but Dearmer, Preface to the 1906 edition of The English Hymnal (London, 1906 and later editions). Nan Dearmer, The Life of Percy Dearmer by His Wife (London, 1940) pp. 178 – 85. Gray, Dearmer pp. 62 – 3. Gray, Dearmer p. 62. D.L. Murray, cited in Dearmer, Dearmer p. 137. Jason Tomes, ‘Shaw, Martin Edward Fallas (1875 – 1958)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Dearmer, Dearmer p. 165. Ibid. pp. 32 – 3. F.G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London, 1926) p. 128. Gore to Dearmer, n.d., cited in Dearmer, Dearmer pp. 40 – 1.

NOTES

TO

PAGES 220 – 227

271

67. Published as Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891 (London, 1891). 68. He also filled two small notebooks with his observations and activities in Florence, written in minute writing. Lambeth Palace Library Dearmer Mss 4901 and 4902. 69. Dearmer, Dearmer pp. 47 – 62. 70. Dearmer to Gore, October 1891 cited in Dearmer, Dearmer p. 74. 71. Ibid. pp. 182 – 3. 72. Ibid. p. 78. 73. Gray, Dearmer pp. 26 – 7. Gray cites Harold Anson, Looking Forward (London, 1938) as his source, but unfortunately Gray’s book does not have references. Anson’s book, equally unfortunately, lacks an index, but as he was a close friend of Dearmer, the perception is quite plausible. 74. Dearmer, Dearmer p. 84. 75. Gray, Dearmer pp. 72 – 3, citing Peter Anson, Fashions in Church Furnishings 1840 – 1940 2nd edition (London, 1965). 76. Dearmer, Dearmer pp. 86 – 7. 77. Ibid. pp. 139, 152. Sometimes boys would shout ‘no popery’ after him. Dearmer would stop them and inform them that he was wearing the same costume in which Latimer went to the stake. 78. Stephen Gwynn, Letters from a Field Hospital by Mabel Dearmer, with a Memoir of the Author by Stephen Gwynn (London, 1915) p. 9. 79. Ibid. pp. 24 – 6. 80. Ibid. p. 12. 81. The Yellow Book 9 (April 1896). The front cover depicts a butterfly (possibly a Whistler reference?) with the body of a child, and (again reminiscent of Beardsley) what appears to be a large phallus. Mabel Dearmer also supplied the title page for the same issue, and had work published in The Yellow Book 12. 82. Gwynn Letters pp. 1– 4 provides an interesting account of the reasons behind Mabel’s decision to go to Serbia. 83. Dearmer, Parson’s Handbook p. 4. 84. Dearmer, Dearmer pp. 222 – 39. 85. Percy Dearmer, The Art of Public Worship (London, 1919) pp. 20 – 1. 86. Gray, Dearmer pp. 178 – 81. 87. Georgina Byrne, Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850 – 1939 (Woodbridge, 2010) pp. 157 –60. 88. Gray, Dearmer pp. 146 – 9.

CONCLUSION:

CHRISTIANITY AND THE FIN DE SIE`CLE

1. Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke, 2002) p. 179.

272

NOTES

TO

PAGES 227 – 234

2. F.W. Farrar, The Life of Christ as Represented in Art (London, 1894) p. 482. 3. Peter Taylor Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art: Being Expository Lectures on Rossetti, Burne Jones, Watts, Holman Hunt and Wagner (Manchester and London, 1889) p. 61. 4. British Weekly (14 March 1901). 5. T.S. Eliot, ‘Arnold and Pater’, The Bookman 72.1 (1930) p. 7. 6. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (eds), Pater in the 1990s (Greensboro, 1991). 7. A.N. Wilson, Betjeman (London, 2006) pp. 44 – 8, 56 – 7. 8. Wilson, Betjeman p. 192. 9. John W. Dixon, ‘Aesthetics and Theology’, in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds), A New Dictionary of Christian Theology (London, 1983) pp. 6– 8. There was no similar entry when the first edition of the Dictionary of Christian Theology was published in 1969.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPTS British Library: ‘Michael Field’. Hertfordshire County Record Office: Ebenezer Howard. Lambeth Palace Library: Samuel Barnett; Edward White Benson; Percy Dearmer. National Library of Scotland: John Gray; Andre´ Raffalovich.

CONTEMPORARY JOURNALS Blackfriars British Weekly Church Quarterly Review Church Reformer Church Times Pall Mall Gazette Savoy Standard Tablet Times Westminster Review Yellow Book

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———, ‘Contributors to the Yellow Book (act. 1894 – 1897)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Symons, Arthur, London Nights (London, 1895). ———, Spiritual Adventures (London, 1905). ———, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, with an introduction by Richard Ellmann (New York, 1958). Tanis, Bethany, ‘Diverging Paths: Fin de Sie`cle Britishness and the Oxford Movement’, Anglican and Episcopal History 77.3 (2008). Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2007). Teich, Mikula´ˇs and Porter, Roy (eds), Fin de Sie`cle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, 1990). Temple, Frederick et al., Essays and Reviews (London, 1860). Thain, Marion, ‘“Damnable Aestheticism” and the Turn to Rome: John Gray, Michael Field and the Poetics of Conversion’, in J. Bristow (ed.), Fin-de-Sie`cle Poem: English Literary Culture in the 1890s (Athens, OH, 2005). ———, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007). ———, ‘Poetry’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 2007). Thiessen, Gesa E., Theological Aesthetics (London, 2004). Thompson, David M., ‘The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England’, in K. Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c.1750 – 1950 (Oxford, 1990). Thornton, R.K.R. (ed.), Poetry of the Nineties (Harmondsworth, 1970). Tilley, Elizabeth, ‘Christianity, Journalism and Popular Print: W.T. Stead and the Salvation Army’, in L. Brake et al. (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London, 2012). Tuekolsky, Rachel, ‘Walter Pater’s Renaissance (1873) and the British Aesthetic Movement’, ,http://www.branchcollective.org.. Vanita, Ruth, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York, 1996). Wainwright, Geoffrey (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London, 1989). Walker, Pamela J., Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001). Walkowitz, Judith R., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980). ———, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (London, 1992). Walsh, Walter, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement (London, 1897). Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926). Webb, Paul (ed.), To Boys Unknown: Poems by Rev E.E. Bradford (London, 1988). Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edition (London, 1989). Wellings, Martin, ‘The First Protestant Martyr of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Significance of John Kensit (1853 – 1902)’, in

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INDEX

Adams, Jad, 44 –5, 227 Adderley, James, 187, 219 aesthetic emblems, 27, 30, 48 aestheticism (see also Christian aestheticism), 1, 3 –4, 23, 25, 30–53, 73, 78, 80, 117–18, 138, 187, 191, 213, 218– 22, 225–34 agnosticism, 5, 191, 225 Aitken, Charles, 206 Alcuin Club, 70, 246 Alhambra Theatre, 25, 88 Aliens Act (1905), 43 Allen, Grant, 175, 188, 238 The Woman Who Did 175 Allitt, Patrick, 110 America, 19, 146, 195 Ancoats Brotherhood, 207 Anglican modernism, 225, 232 Anglican orders, validity of, 132– 4 Anglicans, see Church of England Anglo-Catholic ritualism, 64, 69, 71–2, 76, 118, 121, 132, 187, 215, 230, 233 Anson, Peter, 80, 89 –90, 221 Antony of Egypt, 76 Apostolicae curae, 121, 133–4, 137, 229 Armenian Christians, massacre of, 129– 30, 229 Armstrong, Eliza, 161–2, 167, 182 Arnold, Amelia, 120 Arnold, Matthew, 29, 33, 56, 156, 260 art, 22–4, 30–2, 41–3, 46–9, 53, 62, 117, 185–6, 188, 192, 203–25, 233

Arts and Crafts movement, 4, 32, 44, 118, 138, 192, 215, 221–2, 224, 228 Ascension Day, 18 Ashbee, C.R., 192 atheism, 6 Attlee, Clement, 230 Augustine of Hippo, 98, 105 Avis, Paul, 127 ballet, 124 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 234 Balzac, Honore´ de, 41 Baptist Union Council, 167 Baptists, 118, 130, 137–9, 145 Barnby, Joseph, 218 Barnett, Henrietta, 4, 181, 186–8, 193, 201–2, 204–5, 207, 227, 229, 264 Barnett, Samuel, 4, 181, 186–8, 191–4, 204–7, 227, 229 Barrie, J.M., 70 Barth, Karl, 232 Bateman, Charles T., 140–1 Baudelaire, Charles, 42, 84 Beardsley, Aubrey, 30, 41, 43–4, 46–50, 52–3, 63–4, 73, 85, 87, 89, 111–12, 188, 215, 223, 243, 249 Under the Hill, 85 Beardsley, Mabel, 49, 223, 243 Le Beau Dieu d’Amiens, 215 Bebbington, David, 19, 122–3, 197–8 Beckson, Karl, 28, 65, 75–6, 111 Beerbohm, Max, 44, 63, 74

INDEX Begbie, Harold, 163 Begbie, Jeremy, 209 Bellamy, Edward, 194 Benedictine Order (Anglican), 71 Benediction, 101 Benson, E.F., writer, 17 Benson, E.W., Archbishop of Canterbury, 27, 135, 155, 160, 205 Benson, W.A.S., 221 Berlin, 24, 47 Bermondsey, 150 Bethnal Green, 81, 124 Bethnal Green, St Matthew, 201 Betjeman, John, 52, 233–4 Betjeman, Penelope, 233–4 Beveridge, William, 230 Bible, parts of Genesis 25 –33, 190–1 Psalm 130, 243 Matthew 14.6–12, 42 Mark 6.21– 29, 42 Luke 24.29– 31, 93 Revelation 21 –2, 200 Binfield, Clyde, 208 Binyon, Laurence, 26 Birkenhead, 58 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 216 birth control, 225 Bishop, Edmund, 240 Blackfriars, 93– 4, 250 Blain, Virginia, 101 Blake, William, 194 Bland, Lucy, 170–1 Bloxham, John Francis, 64–9 ‘Priest and the Acolyte’, 64 –7, 245 Blunden, Edmund, 95 Bodley Head, 50, 249 Boer War, 19 –21, 147, 157 Book of Common Prayer, 215–17 Booth, Bramwell, 135, 140, 160–2, 165, 169, 231 Booth, Catherine, 122, 139, 160, 162, 182, 231 Booth, Charles, 26, 141–2, 144, 150, 180, 188 Life and Labour of the People of London, 141–2 Booth, Florence (Mrs Bramwell Booth), 131

285

Booth, William, 6, 26 –7, 135, 139– 40, 157–8, 160, 162–3, 181–6, 190–1, 194, 200, 231 In Darkest England and the Way Out, 139–40, 180–6, 188–9, 200, 231 Bournemouth, 87 Bournville, 198 Bowden, Henry Sebastian, 111, 118 Boxted, Essex, 184 Bradford, Edwin, 68 –9 Bradlaugh, Charles, 126 Bradley, Katharine, 2, 4, 6, 16, 73, 75, 80, 86, 96–113, 226–7, 234 Brangwyn, Frank, 250 Brasenose College, Oxford, 34, 37, 77 Brittany, 81 –2 British Empire, 17, 19– 20, 239 British Museum, 74, 120, 205, 240 British Weekly, 17– 20, 23, 119–21, 131–2, 134, 143–5, 180, 212, 229, 232 Brompton Oratory, 111, 117– 18, 134, 136 Brown, Callum, 180–1, 231 Brown, Stewart J., 156–7, 163 Browne, George Forrest, 130 Browning Hall, 187 Brunner, Emil, 232 Brussels, 24, 161 Buchanan, Robert, 31, 59 Bunting, Mary, 169 Bunting, Percy, 169 Burgon, J.W., Lives of Twelve Good Men, 71 Burne-Jones, Edward, 31, 43, 204, 219 Chant d’Amour, 211 Green Summer, 211 The Morning of the Resurrection, 211 Bussell, F.W., 77 Butler, George, 154, 173 Butler, Josephine, 153–4, 160, 169–70, 175 Cadbury, George, 198 Cafe´ Royal, 25, 52, 63, 74, 83 Caine, Barbara, 174 Caird, Mona, 175 Caldey Island, Pembrokeshire, 70 Calloway, Stephen, 48 Cambridge, 127, 130, 136, 171, 229

286

VICTORIAN CHRISTIANITY AT

Campbell, Reginald John, 143, 145–8, 232 Campion, W.J.H., 128 Canberra, 197 Carlyle, Benjamin (Aelred), 70 Carpenter, Edward, 188, 199 Carson, Edward, 65 –6 Cauti, Camille, 98 Cavendish, Elizabeth, 234 celibacy, 91, 112, 133, 191 Census of Religious Worship (1851), 143 Central Vigilance Committee for the Repression of Immorality, 168 Cevasco, G.A., 42 Chalmers, Thomas, 180 Chant, Laura Ormiston, 170 Charing Cross, 84, 169 Chelsea, 151 Cheshire Cheese public house, 25, 28 Chicago, 195, 261 Christ, 1, 22, 33, 54 –7, 59–61, 77, 85–6, 107–8, 113, 210, 212–15, 220, 227, 244, 249 Christ Church, Oxford, 219 Christian aestheticism, 123–6, 203–25 Christian socialism, 123, 143, 218–19 Christian Social Union, 123, 127, 143, 188, 219– 20, 228–30, 266 Church, R.W., Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 71 Church and Stage Guild, 123– 125, 138, 219, 232 church attendance, 143–5, 201 church music, 217–18 Church of England, 36, 118, 121, 132– 4, 142, 144–5, 147– 8, 173, 191, 215– 25, 230 Church of England Purity Society, 168– 9 Church Quarterly Review, 15 Church Reformer, 124 Church Times, 23, 63, 67, 120–1, 130, 133– 4, 232 City Temple, 138, 145 Clarke, Austin, 13 Clement of Alexandria, 106 Clifford, John, 129, 135, 143, 145, 157, 169 Coleridge, S.T., 33

THE

FIN

DE

SIE`CLE

Community of the Resurrection, 127 Conference on Politics, Economic and Citizenship (COPEC), 230 Congregational Union, 130, 154, 199 Congregationalism, 6, 121, 130, 145–8, 156–8, 167, 170, 187, 195–6, 203, 206, 212, 228 Conrad, Joseph, 26 Contagious Diseases Acts (1864 & 1869), 153, 167 repeal of, 154, 164–8 conversion, 16, 48 –9, 72 –88, 96–114, 226–7, 254 Cooper, Edith, 2, 4, 6, 16, 73, 75, 80, 86, 96 –113, 226–7, 234 Cottam, Ellsworth, 69 Counter-Reformation Catholic devotion, 86, 227 Cowper, William, 180 Crackanthrope, Hubert, 50 Crane, Walter, 188, 195 Crawford, Alan, 48, 87 Creighton, Mandell, 124 Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), 79, 152, 162, 164– 70 Daily Chronicle, 59, 61 Daily Mail, 25, 156 Daily News, 143–5 Daily Telegraph, 170 Dale, R.W., 121 Darwin, Charles, 62, 75, 194 Origin of Species, 75 Davidoff, Leonora, 14 Davidson, John, 26 Davidson, Randall, 135, 188, 221 Dearmer, Mabel, 16–17, 203, 221–4, 271 The Difficult Way 222–3 Dearmer, Nan, 218 Dearmer, Percy, 4, 23, 40, 127, 187, 203–4, 215–25, 228–30, 232, 234, 240 The Parson’s Handbook 215–18, 240 decadence, 2, 6, 12, 21, 25, 29 –30, 36, 38, 42 –53, 58, 62, 65 –7, 72– 80, 85, 87, 89, 95, 99, 104, 107, 113–14, 151, 155, 188, 219, 226–7, 242 reaction against, 70– 1

INDEX degeneration, 12–13, 21, 29, 44, 70, 151, 228 Denisoff, Dennis, 52 Denison, G.A., 128 Derby Day, 18 Diaghilev, Sergei, 47 Dickens, Charles, 25 Didache, 60 drink, 18, 123, 136, 151, 171, 179, 185, 201, 263 dock strike, 136, 219 Dominicans (Order of Preachers), 81, 92–3, 100–2, 111, 113 Donoghue, Emma, 97 Dorian Gray, 82– 5, 151 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 22, 44, 51, 55, 66–7, 73, 82 –3, 233 Dowson, Ernest, 25, 28, 41, 43–4, 50, 73–6, 78– 9, 86 –7, 111–12, 118, 125, 240 Dracula, 151 Dublin, 20 Du Maurier, George, 52 Dunne, Cuthbert, 111 Dykes, J.B., 218 East End (of London), 186–94, 202, 204– 6, 234 ecumenism, 130–4, 147–9, 157, 229 Edinburgh, 80, 89 –91, 97, 102–5, 113 Edinburgh Zoo, 114 Education Act, 1902, 147 Egerton, George (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne), Keynotes, 16 Eliot, T.S., 233 Ellis, Havelock, 41, 250 Ellis, Tom, 28–9 Ellmann, Richard, 53, 82 –3 Ely Theological College, 67 Empire Theatre, 25, 170 English Carol Book, 217 English Church Union, 132 English Hymnal, 217–18, 221, 224, 232 ‘Enoch Soames’, 74 epiphany, 99– 100 Essex, Edwin, OP, 81, 90 Eucharist (Anglican), 225 eugenics, 6, 21 Euston Arch, 234

287

Evangelical Christianity, 14, 88, 123, 138, 172, 181, 216, 229–30 Eve, 77 Fabianism, 19, 149, 178, 221 Fairbairn, A.M., 121 Farm Street Jesuit church, 87, 112, 126, 256 Farrar, F.W., 131, 135, 203, 212–15, 227–9, 270 Life of Christ, 213 Life of Christ as Represented in Art, 214–15 William Holman Hunt: His Life and Work, 212–13 Faulkner, William, 47 Fawcett, Millicent, 169, 175 feminism (see also ‘New Woman’) 14– 17, 96, 120, 152–4, 167, 174–7, 223, 230–1 Fe´ne´on, Felix, 41 Field, Michael (pseudonym – see also Bradley, Katharine; Cooper, Edith), 16, 90, 92, 96 –113, 227 ‘Imple Superna Gratia’, 106–7 Long Ago, 97 Mystic Trees, 108 ‘Palimpsest’, 106 Poems of Adoration, 106– 7, 108 ‘The Bee’, 106 The Whattlefold, 110 Whym Chow: Flame of Love, 108 Wild Honey from Various Thyme, 106, 113 fin de sie`cle as a metaphor, 11 –14, 17, 20 –2, 24, 29, 42, 226 dating of, 6–8, 236 historiography of, 4 –8, 11 –14, 51, 73 –4, 81, 163, 235–6 in England, 2, 30, 45– 7, 226–34 in Europe, 1, 24 –5, 40 in France, 40–5 in Ireland, 27 –8 in London, 1, 2, 24 –9, 49, 75, 80 –4, 152, 181, 230 in Scotland, 27 –8 in Wales, 27 –9 First Vatican Council, 137

288

VICTORIAN CHRISTIANITY AT

Flaubert, Gustave, 41 Fleming Williams, C., 196 Fletcher, Ian, 84 –5 Florence, 220 Foltinowicz, Adelaide, 79, 112 Ford, Hugh Edmund, OSB, 109, 254 Forster, E.M., 95 Forsyth, Peter Taylor, 13, 23 –4, 40, 121, 203– 4, 207–14, 216, 228–9, 232, 234, 269 Religion in Recent Art, 23 –4, 207– 12, 232 Fortnightly Review 38 France, 24 –5, 40 –3 126, 162, 220 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 12 Fraser, Hilary, 5, 32–3, 56, 234 Free Church Congress, 130, 147 Free Church Council, 19 Free Churches, (see also Nonconformity), 118–19, 147–8, 181, 199, 229, 232 French Riviera, 20 Freud, Sigmund, 21 Fry, Roger, 48 –9, 93 Fry, Stephen, 53 Fulham, 151 gambling, 18, 153 garden cities, 195–200, 201–2 Garden City Association, 195, 198 garden suburbs, 202 Gasquet, Francis, 101, 240 Gautier, The´ophile, 41–2, 58 Gay Men’s Press, 68 Geddes, Patrick, 27 George, Henry, 155, 182, 195, 221 Progress and Poverty, 221 Germany, 19 Gertrude and Mechtilde (medieval saints), 110 Gilbert, Brian, 53 Gissing, George, 5 Gordon, Charles, 164 Gore, Charles, 23, 123, 127–9, 135, 146, 148, 187, 219– 21, 229–30, 232, 234, 239 Gorham, Deborah, 165 ‘Goscannon, Fr’ (probable pseudonym for Gerald Fitzgibbon), 101, 109, 252

THE

FIN

DE

SIE`CLE

Gospel Purity Association, 168 Gosse, Edmund, 41 Grahame, Kenneth, 70 Grand, Sarah (pseudonym of Frances McFall), 154, 174–5 The Heavenly Twins, 154, 174 Gray, Beatrice, 87, 249 Gray, Donald, 221 Gray, John, 2, 41, 43– 4, 49, 51, 73, 75, 79 –104, 108–12, 114, 227, 232, 234 Blue Calendar, 86 Dialogue, 93 Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, 92 ‘Light’, 87 –8 Mane Nobiscum Domine, 93 O Beata Trinitas, 110 Park: A Fantastic Story, 94– 5, 250 Silverpoints, 84 –5, 102, 249 Spiritual Poems, 85 –6, 88, 107 Greenwood, James, 26 Gribbell, Florence, 90 –2, 102, 112, 114 Gruchy, John W. de, 39 –40 Grundy, Sydney, 16 Guild and School of Handicraft, 192 Guild of St Matthew, 123, 126, 219 Gwynn, Stephen, 222–3 Hadleigh, Essex, 180, 184, 201, 265 Hadley Wood, 139 Halifax, Viscount (Charles Lindley Wood), 132 Hall, Catherine, 14 Hampstead, 148, 150 Hampstead Garden Suburb, 202 Hanson, Ellis, 5, 44, 65, 72, 76, 79–80, 82– 3, 89, 91, 95, 110, 112, 227 Harcourt, William, 71 Hardie, Keir, 124 Hardy, Dennis, 180 Harland, Aline, 73, 223 Harland, Henry, 50, 73, 223 Harnack, Adolf, 60 Harrison, Frederic, 188 Harrison, Jane, 120 Headlam, Stewart, 4, 123–7, 170, 219, 229, 232, 234 Heimann, Mary, 88 hell, 127, 148, 151, 205 Henley, W.E., 26, 70

INDEX Hennegan, Alison, 25, 53, 70 Herkomer, Hubert, 188, 204 Hilliard, David, 69 Hirst, Damien, 48 Holiness Movement, 122–3, 127, 169, 229 Holman Hunt, William, 41, 188, 204, 208– 13 Christ and the Two Marys, 213 May Day on Magdalen Tower, 213 The Light of the World, 213 The Scapegoat, 212– 13 The Shadow of Death, 212–13 The Triumph of the Innocents, 212 Holst, Gustav, 217 Holy Week ceremonies, 70, 77, 249 homoeroticism, 36, 45, 68, 77, 86, 97, 107 homosexuality, 53, 69 –70, 76, 79, 84, 90–91, 112–13, 191 Hopkins, Ellice, 17, 169, 171–7, 229– 31 The Power of Womanhood, 172 The Story of Life, 172 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 33 Hopkins, William, 171 Horsfall, Thomas Coglan, 207, 216 Horton, R.F., 146, 148 housing (see also town planning), 158– 9, 179 Housman, A.E., 215 Housman, Laurence, 93, 223 Howard, Ebenezer, 121, 181, 194–9, 202, 231 Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 195 Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, 195–6 Howard, Lizzie, 197 Hoxton, St Saviour, 67 ¨ gel, Friedrich von, 75 Hu Hughes, Hugh Price, 27, 118, 135, 169 Huxley, Thomas, 194 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 41 –2, 58, 62, 78–9, 89, 99, 113 ` Rebours, 42, 79 A En Route, 79 La`-Bas, 79 Hymns Ancient and Modern, 218 Hyde Park, 163, 169, 231 hysteria, 21, 151

289

impressionism, 43 incarnational theology, 17, 22, 127–8, 146, 171, 177, 187, 209, 220, 230, 239 incest, 158–9, 179, 252 Industrial Schools Amendment Act, 1880, 173 Ireland, 20 Irish literary revival, 27 –8, 223 Italy, 188, 214, 220 Jacob and Esau, 190–1, 229, 267 Jacopone da Todi, 88, 249 Jackson, Holbrook, 7, 24, 27 –8, 208 Jackson, John, 124, 204–5 Jackson, Richard (Brother a` Becket), 69 ‘janiformity’, 13 –14, 17, 50, 112, 152, 214, 228 Jarrett, Rebecca, 161–2 Jay, Mike, 6 Jekyll and Hyde, 151 Jewish community, 142, 191, 206 John of the Cross, 85 –6, 97, 107, 113, 227 John the Baptist, 42 Johnson, Lionel, 4, 43–4, 50, 63, 72– 4, 112 Joseph (feast of St), 100 Jowett, Benjamin, 38, 210, 269 Joyce, James, 94 Kay, William K., 122 Kaye, Richard A., 151 Keble, John, 33, 56, 128 kenotic Christology, 23, 128 Kensal Green, 136–7 Kensit, John, 71, 132 Keswick, 123 King, Edward, 135 Kingdom of God, 121, 171, 180 King’s College London, 224–5 Kingsley, Charles, 55 Kipling, Rudyard, 70 Knight, Mark, 5 Koven, Seth, 67, 179, 191– 2, 204 Labouchere, Henry Du Pre´, 166–7 Lacy, Richard, 135 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 50

290

VICTORIAN CHRISTIANITY AT

Ladies’ Association for the Care of Friendless Girls, 169 Ladies’ National Association, 169 Lady Lever Art Gallery, 206–7, 213 Laird, Holly, 111 Lambeth, South, St Anne, 221 land reform, 6, 127, 182 Lane, John, 47 –8 Lathbury, Bertha, 54 Ledger, Sally, 6, 17 Lee, Vernon, 188 Le Gallienne, Richard 2, 22, 26, 44, 50, 58–64, 74, 188, 207, 223, 227 If I Were God: A Conversation, 63 Religion of a Literary Man, 59–63, 207 Leighton, Frederic, 31, 43, 188, 204 Lenin, Vladimir, 199 Leo XIII, 132–3, 157 lesbianism, 96, 108 Letchworth Garden City, Herts, 180, 195, 197– 9, 202, 231 Lever, William Hesketh, 198, 206, 213, 216 Liberty prints, 27, 219 Lichfield, 173 Liddon, H.P. 71, 125, 128, 270 Life of Pusey, 71 Lightfoot, J.B., 167, 173 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, SS Anselm and Cecilia, 80 liturgy, 215–25 Liverpool, 63, 71 Liverpool Football Echo, 62 ‘Lives of Jesus’, 56 Lloyd George, David, 28–9 Loisy, Alfred, 75 London, 2– 4, 24 –7, 40 –4, 47, 51, 58–9, 84, 113, 117–19, 134–49, 150– 2, 157–8, 160, 164, 177, 179– 81, 195, 220 literature about, 25 –6, 28, 51 London School Board, 147 London School of Economics, 142 Lord’s Day Observance Society, 205 Louy¨s, Pierre, 83, 92 Lowell, James Russell, 156 Luckhurst, Roger, 6 Lux Mundi, 23, 127–9, 146, 187, 219, 232, 256 Lyttleton Gell, P., 193

THE

FIN

DE

SIE`CLE

McCormack, Jerusha Hull, 80, 83 –4, 99 MacDonald, Ramsay, 224 Macintosh, Charles Rennie, 27 –8 Mackarness, John, 36 –7 Mackmurdo, A.H., 219 MacLeod, Fiona (pseudonym of William Sharp), 27 McLeod, Hugh, 7, 140, 143, 145, 148, 193 McNabb, Vincent, OP, 101, 106, 108, 110, 113, 253–4 McQueen, John Rainer, 77 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 41 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 41 –2, 84 Manchester Art Gallery, 207 Manchester Art Museum, 206–7 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 208 Manchester University Settlement, 207 Manning, Henry Edward, 27, 135–7, 157–8, 160, 163, 167, 169, 230, 270 Marshall, Gail, 6 Marx, Karl, Das Kapital, 221 Mary Magdalene, 77 Masefield, John, 93 Mason, Emma, 5 Mass (R.C.), 89, 102, 104–5, 113, 252 Matheson, A.S., City of Man, 199– 200 Maudsley, Henry, 5 Maurice, F.D., 36, 127, 143, 148, 169, 186, 191, 208, 212, 229, 232 Maupassant, Guy de, 41 Mearns, Andrew, 26, 121, 158–9, 161, 169, 179, 194 Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 121, 154, 157–9, 180, 182, 186 Menton, France, 64, 87, 137 Methodism (see also Wesleyan Methodism), 130 Methodist Central Hall, 119 Metropolitan Tabernacle, 137, 145 Meynell, Alice, 70, 213 William Holman Hunt: His Life and Work, 212–13 Millais, John Everett, 22, 204 modernism, 47, 50 –1, 89, 93, 95, 110, 114, 122, 228 Monica, mother of Augustine, 105 Morality Play Society, 222

INDEX Morden, Peter, 138 Morgan, Kenneth O., 28 Morgan, Sue, 171–3 Morgan, William de, 219 Morley, John, 38 Morningside, St Peter, 80, 92, 102 Morris, William, 27, 31– 2, 44, 188, 191, 195, 219, 221 Morrow, Albert, 16 Mudie-Smith, Richard, 140, 142–4, 150, 158, 229 The Religious Life of London, 140, 142–4, 150–1, 192, 194 Mumm, Susan, 175 Napoleon, 20 National Anti-Gambling League, 18 National Council of Evangelical Free Churches, 130, 147 National Gallery, 205, 214 National Observer, 62, 70 National Vigilance Association, 163, 169, 174– 5, 231 naturalism, 43 Neve, Michael, 6 Nevinson, Henry, 21, 187, 190–1 ‘New Journalism’, 3, 25, 117, 119, 154– 64, 181–6, 230–1, 260 Newman, John Henry, 33, 36, 39, 55–6, 135–6 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 55 Newnham College, Cambridge, 120 New Review, 70 ‘New Woman’, 3, 14 –17, 21, 25, 117, 120– 2, 151, 154, 170, 175–6, 188, 191, 222– 4, 243 newspaper industry, 19, 25, 155– 65 Nicoll, William Robertson, 119, 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44 ‘Nonconformist conscience’, 18 –19, 63–4, 129, 157, 165, 260 Nonconformity (see also Free Churches), 72, 88, 118–19, 130, 138, 142, 144– 5, 147– 8, 158, 160, 167– 8, 191, 197, 208, 212, 230 Nottingham, University College, 146 Nordau, Max, 12 –13, 21, 70 Nordelph, Norfolk, 68 Norfolk, Fifteenth Duke of, 131

291

Normandy, 223 Norwood, 138 Nugee, George, 69 Oldmeadow, Ernest, 44 Olympia, 139 Overton, J.H., Anglican Revival, 71 Oxford, 36 –8, 40, 136, 148, 189, 218–20, 229 Oxford Book of Carols, 217 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892– 1935, 73, 94 Oxford House in Bethnal Green, 187–91, 193–4, 201, 219 Oxford Movement, 39, 71 Oxford University Press, 215 Paddington, 145 paedophilia, 65– 70, 79, 159–62, 164 pagan classicism, 36 –8, 56, 97– 9, 103, 105–6, 113, 227, 251 Paget, Francis, 146, 219 Paine, Thomas, 194 Pall Mall Gazette, 38, 51, 84, 119, 154–64, 170, 180, 182 Paris, 24, 40 –3, 50, 74, 81, 92 Parker, Barry, 199 Parker, Emma Jane, 120 Parker, Joseph, 120, 138, 195, 270 Parochial Mission Women’s Association, 142 Pater, Clara, 253 Pater, Walter 1– 2, 4, 6, 30, 33 –40, 42, 44– 6, 50, 56–7, 69, 77 –8, 83, 89, 99, 102– 3, 107, 122, 187–8, 192, 213, 220, 226–7, 233–4 Marius the Epicurean, 38, 56, 69, 79, 102–3 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 34 –40, 77– 8, 107, 226 Paton, J.B., 121, 131 Pentecostalism, 122 physics, 17 Picasso, Pablo, 47 Piccadilly, 188 Pius X, 75, 92 Plarr, Victor, 125 Poor Clares, 105 Portal, Fernand, 132 Port Sunlight, 198, 206, 213

292

VICTORIAN CHRISTIANITY AT

poverty, 19, 117, 141–2, 158–9, 165, 178– 86, 192, 200–1 preaching, 137–8, 143–6, 270 Pre-Raphaelites, 22 –3, 31 –2, 40, 207– 13, 233 Presbyterians, 130 Primrose Hill, St Mary, 218, 221–2, 224 Prince of Wales, 159 Proclamation Society, 152–3 prostitution, 3, 46, 51 –2, 79, 150–4, 159– 67, 169, 170–3, 177, 179, 182 Protestant Truth Society, 71 Protestantism, 4, 23, 58 –64, 70–1, 78, 119, 130–1, 134, 194, 208– 12, 227 psychology, 14, 20 –1, 165 Punch, 52, 170 Pusey, E.B., 128 Pusey House, 128, 220, 233 Quakers, 191 Queensberry, Ninth Marquess of, 65, 66 Raffalovich, Andre´, 2, 41, 51, 73, 75, 85, 87 –92, 96, 102–3, 109, 111– 14, 232, 234, 249–50 L’Affair Oscar Wilde, 91 Uranisme et Unisexualite´: E´tude sur Diffe´rentes Manifestations de l’Instinct Sexuel, 90 –1 Reading Gaol, 22, 54 –5 rebirth/regeneration, 21 –24, 29, 228, 239 recycling, 3, 185 Reed, John R., 44 Reed, John Shelton, 69 Regensburg, 87 Regent Hall, Oxford Street, 118 Reigate, 97 Reilly, Patrick, 94 Renan, Ernest, 213 Review of Reviews, 174, 238 Rhymers’ Club, 25, 28, 58 Rhys, Ernest, 26, 240 Richards, Grant, 215 Richmond, 97 Richmond, St Elizabeth, 101

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Ricketts, Charles, 84, 97 Roberts, M.J.D., 168 Roden, Frederick S., 65, 68, 76, 86, 91, 97– 8, 108, 227 Rogers, Guinness, 167 Rolfe, Frederick, 71 Roman Catholic Modernist movement, 75, 92 Roman Catholicism, 4–6, 87, 97 –8, 107, 110, 117–18, 131–4, 140, 145, 147–8, 157, 191, 216, 227 conversion to, 16, 48 –9, 72–88, 96 –114, 226–7, 254 Rome (see also Scots College, Rome), 157 Rosebery, Fifth Earl of, 18 Ross, Robert, 49, 73, 111 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 31, 34, 41, 43, 51, 204, 208– 12 Blessed Damozel, 211 Rossetti, William Michael, 31, 41 Rottingdean, Sussex, 100, 252 Rowley, Charles, 207 Rowntree, Joseph, 198 Royal Commission on Housing, 158–9, 179 Royden, Maude, 173, 225, 230 Ruskin, John, 29, 32– 3, 56, 125, 138, 188, 192, 207, 214, 219–20 Russell, G.W.E., 169, 229 Salome (biblical character), 77, 151, 248 Salvation Army, 61, 118, 121–2, 131, 139–41, 147–8, 156–7, 161–3, 167, 181–6, 188–9, 200–1, 229–30 Land and Industrial Colony, 180, 184, 231, 265 Savoy, 47, 51, 215 Schriener, Olive, 15, 140, 171, 175 Story of an African Farm, 16 Schultz, Raymond, 158 Schwartz, Hillel, 12 –13 Scotland, 148 Scottish Presbyterianism, 121, 180, 199 Scots College, Rome, 89, 92 Scott Holland, Henry, 128, 188–90, 219–20, 230, 266 Sebastian (Roman martyr), 76 Secker, Martin, The Eighteen-Nineties, 233

INDEX Sedding, J.D., 118 Serbia, 224 settlement house movement, 180, 186– 94, 229, 231, 266 sex industry, 151–2, 159–64, 166, 169, 177, 261 sexuality, 3, 14–15, 17, 41– 2, 46, 79, 151, 154, 164, 166, 171, 173 Sharp, Cecil, 223 Sharp, Evelyn, 223 Shaw, George Bernard, 70, 125–6, 188, 215 Shaw, Martin, 217–18 Sherwell, Arthur, 151, 166 Sloane Square, Holy Trinity, 118, 234 slumming, 179 social gospel, 8, 149–50, 157, 216–17, 219, 224, 234, 237, 259 socialism, 14, 19, 44, 127, 129, 149, 159, 182, 199, 219, 231 social purity, 16 –17, 150–77, 179, 230 Society for the Suppression of Vice, 18, 153 Society of St Osmund, 70 sociology of religion, 141–4 Somerset, Lady Henry, 120 Songs of Praise, 217 Southend-on-Sea, Essex, 183 Southwark, 67, 150, 201 Soviet Union, 197 Smiles, Samuel, 123 Smith, Frank, 182, 265 Smithers, Leonard, 48 Spain, 214 Spence, Thomas, 194 Spencer, Herbert, 62, 195 Spender, J.A., 48 Spiritualism, 4, 6, 14, 99, 156–7, 174, 197, 225 Spurgeon, Charles, 27, 135, 137–9, 145– 6, 155, 257–8, 270 St Pancras, 151, 234 St Paul’s Cathedral, 118, 125 Stainer, John, 218 Star, 62, 83 Stead, F. Herbert, 187 Stead, W.T., 6, 25 –6, 38, 119, 121, 140, 155– 64, 167, 169, 174, 176, 180, 182– 7, 195, 228, 231, 260

293

‘The Maiden Tribute in Modern Babylon’, 154, 160–4 My First Imprisonment, 228 Stephen, Leslie, 188 Stoddart, Jane T. 17, 119–21, 144– 5 Stoke Newington, 139, 196 Stopes, Marie, 173, 230 Strauss, D.F., 213 Street, G.S., Autobiography of a Boy, 69 Strong, Thomas Banks, 219 Sturgeon, Mary, 99 Sully, James, 21 Summers, Montague, 69 surrealism, 50 Swinburne, Algernon, 31, 34, 42–3, 50, 89 Switzerland, 188, 220 symbolism, 42 –3, 49, 63 Symonds, J.A., 50, 220, 250 Symons, Arthur, 26, 41 –5, 51 –2, 63, 85– 6, 89, 215, 227 syphilis, 151, 154, 174 Syrett, Netta, 223 Tait, A.C., 77 Talbot, E.S., 130, 135 Tangye, George and Richard, 216 Tate Gallery, 206 Tawney, R.H., 230 Taylor, Charles, 5 technology, 17–19 Temple, Frederick, 124–5, 135, 255 Temple, William, 230 Christianity and Social Order, 230 ´ vila, 76 Teresa of A Thain, Marion, 98, 105–7 theatre, 3, 22, 29, 63, 117, 138, 219 theological aesthetics, 33, 39–40, 56, 203– 4, 206, 209–12, 218–25, 234 Theosophy, 4, 14, 157 Thiessen, Gesa, 33 Thomism, 77 Thornton, R.K.R., 26 Tillich, Paul, 209 Tilly, Elizabeth, 185– 6 Times, 60, 114, 132, 137, 139 Titanic disaster, 157 town planning, 194–200, 230–31 Toynbee, Arnold, 29

294

VICTORIAN CHRISTIANITY AT

Toynbee Hall, 186–94, 201–2, 205– 7, 230 Twentieth Century Fund, 118– 19, 184 Tyrrell, George, 75 United Kingdom Alliance, 18, 136 Unwin, Raymond, 199, 202 utopianism, 3, 19, 22, 178–81, 183– 94, 200, 231 vampirism, 151 Vanita, Ruth, 108 Vaughan, Herbert, 133–5, 137 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 217, 225 Verlaine, Paul, 41–2, 50, 78 –9, 84, 89 Victoria, 6, 12, 20 Victoria and Albert Museum, 53 Victorianism, 11 –14, 24, 28, 31, 34, 47, 78, 166, 228 Victorian Society, the, 233 Vienna, 21, 24 Virgin Mary, 52, 77, 108, 249 virginity, 160–3, 165 Wagner, Richard, 208– 9 Wales, 28 –9 Walkowitz, Judith, 152, 164 Walsh, Walter, 70, 247 Secret History of the Oxford Movement, 70 Ward, Mary (Mrs Humphrey Ward), 17, 36, 188 Robert Elsmere, 17 Ward, W.G., 39 Warhol, Andy, 48 Warren, Walter, 151 Watts, G. F., 31, 43, 188, 204, 208–12 Hope, 211 Love and Death, 211 Psyche, 211 Webb, Beatrice (ne´e Potter), 142, 178, 188, 265 Webb, Sidney, 142 Webb-Peploe, H.W., 169 Wells, H.G., 5, 70, 95 Welwyn Garden City, Herts, 197–9, 201– 2 Wesley, John, 118, 137 Wesleyan Methodism (see also Methodism), 118–19, 145, 184

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West, Richard, 129 West End (of London), 151, 189 Westbourne Park Chapel and Institute, 118, 129, 145, 259 Westcott, B.F., 135, 174 Westminster, 151 Westminster Abbey, 23, 118– 19, 129, 224–5, 232 Westminster Cathedral, 118 Westminster Gazette, 48 Westminster Review, 15, 18 Whistler, James, 41, 58, 62, 271 W.H. Smith (bookseller), 45, 163 White Cross Army, 168–9, 171 Whitechapel Art Gallery, 203– 7 Whitechapel Picture Exhibition, 186, 188, 204–5 Whym Chow, 97–100, 105, 108, 113 Wichern, Johann Hinrich, 131 Wilberforce, William, 152 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 2, 4, 21 –2, 27, 30, 33– 34, 40, 42 –7, 50, 52– 8, 63 –7, 70, 73, 77, 82 –3, 85, 87, 90, 96, 99, 111–12, 118, 122, 126, 138, 188, 227–8, 233–4 Ballad of Reading Gaol, 54 –5 De Profundis, 40, 54 –7, 67, 77, 228 Picture of Dorian Gray, 38, 45 –6, 52 –3, 67, 79 Salome´, 42, 48, 222, 242 Soul of Man Under Socialism, 56 –7 Wilgefortis (medieval saint), 76 Willoughby, Guy, 54, Wilson, Whitwell, 192, 194 Winckelmann, J.J., 77–8 Winnington-Ingram, Arthur Foley, 67, 187 Wiseman, Nicholas, 137 Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association, 17 women’s rights, 6, 15, 129, 223–5 women’s writing, 15–17, 110 Wordsworth, John, 37, 135 Wordsworth, William, 33, 123, 187 workhouses, 178, 264 Yeats, W.B., 27, 40, 44, 51, 63, 73 –4, 94 Yellow Book, 15, 25, 46 –8, 50–1, 58, 63, 71, 87, 223, 271 Zola, E´mile, 41, 164