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A Victorian Curate

 | 
David Yeandle

2. Clergymen Made Scarce

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  • 1 On long probationary curacies, see Nicholls, ‘Social Expectations’, passim, esp. p. 147.
  • 2 There are a few references to the work in the wider press, e.g., Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 April (...)

1Hunt’s career as a curate was wearisome; indeed, it was not until 1878, some twenty-three years after his first curacy, at the age of fifty-one,1 that he secured, through the good offices of Dean Stanley, a permanent living as Vicar of St Bartholomew’s Church, Otford, near Sevenoaks, Kent, a village of approximately 1,200 inhabitants. Biographical details for this undervalued and largely forgotten clergyman would be almost non-existent if Hunt had not published a booklet in 1864/5, entitled Clergymen Made Scarce, a somewhat disgruntled and dejected account of his career to date, written at Swallow, near Caistor, in the Wolds of Lincolnshire.2 The booklet, the second edition of which (1867) enjoyed some degree of circulation, purports to be an open letter to the Bishop of London, penned after an incident that led to Hunt’s dismissal as curate from St Botolph’s, Aldgate. The second edition includes a Postscript in smaller type (pp. 26–48), dealing with Hunt’s experiences in St Ives, Huntingdonshire. The Postscript is nearly 4,000 words longer than the first (main) part of Clergymen Made Scarce.

  • 3 On the annotations, see fn. 1, p. 110, below
  • 4 Cf. Hunt’s lecture on St Augustine, Cambridge Independent Press, 30 March 1867, p. 6, reprinted in (...)

2The autobiographical account makes interesting reading. It contains allusions to personages and places that are referred to by pseudonyms or anonymously. Although some of these might be identifiable by a modern reader, others are obscure. Fortunately, there exists in the Norris Museum Library, St Ives, a rare copy of the booklet, with manuscript annotations by Mrs Eliza Hunt.3 Although not all of the spellings are accurate, they provide a most useful key to the persons and places mentioned, sometimes disparagingly, in the text. The booklet caused a degree of controversy in St Ives.4

3Hunt’s booklet is not without humour, often of a down-to-earth nature. Even on the title page, he displays his scathing wit and keen intellect, with erudite epigraphs, which he modifies with mockingly ironic variations. His better-educated readers would have understood his ulterior motive, that of illuminating and criticizing privilege, preferment, prejudice, and folly in the Victorian Church.

  • 5Clergymen Made Scarce’, Punch, 17 December 1864, p. 251. A previous article about the inquest on t (...)
  • 6 Punch, 17 December 1864, p. 251 [cited in the Appendix, pp. 186f., below.].

4The first epigraph, a modified popular saying, is a quotation from the satirical magazine Punch, which had published an article with the same title as Hunt’s booklet viz. ‘Clergymen Made Scarce’.5 Which came first is unclear. The epigraph alludes satirically, and largely in Hunt’s favour, to his predicament at losing the curacy at St Botolph’s, Aldgate: ‘Make the greatest fool in the family a parson, that is, if he will let you.’ The circumstances of this loss will be examined in Chapter 7. The main thrust is that none but a fool would enter upon the career of a parson, if his family had ‘not got a good fat living for him to step into as soon as he is ordained’.6 As we have seen, this was very far from being the case with Hunt.

  • 7 Cf. Hart, The Curate’s Lot, p. 130.

5Continuing in similar vein, Hunt’s second epigraph ironizes the motto of the City of Edinburgh inter alia. The motto, a shortened version of Psalm 127, v. 1 (nisi Dominus frustra) is deliberately misinterpreted by means of a ‘Scotch translation’, i.e. an ironically blunt and distorted rendering, to mean that a man without resources and social connections need not apply for a post in the Church of England: ‘Unless ye be a lord’s son, ye need’na come here.’7

  • 8 The original is translated ‘If nature fails, then indignation generates verse, doing the best it ca (...)

6The third and final epigraph is a modified quotation from Juvenal’s First Satire (ll. 79f.), substituting Ecclesia for natura: ‘si Ecclesia negat, facit indignatio versum Qualemcunque potest.’ The likely sense is ‘if the Church denies (or fails), indignation creates a verse as best it can.’8

  • 9 Cf. ‘Tait, Archibald Campbell (1811–1882), Archbishop of Canterbury’, Oxford Dictionary of National (...)

7 Whether the addressee of this open letter, Archibald Campbell Tait, Bishop of London (1856–1868, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1868–1882)9 ever read its contents we do not know, but he certainly encountered Hunt, including by negative report, in his large diocese. Some occasions are documented below. Indeed, Hunt may have had special reasons for choosing Tait as the addressee. Apart from his being Hunt’s ordinary, with liberal sympathies and a penchant for evangelism and innovation, Tait was, like Hunt, a Scotsman, who, like Hunt, had grown up in the Presbyterian tradition. Like Hunt, he rejected Calvinism. Like Hunt, he was interested in education beyond the confines of the ancient English universities, with their arcane practices, which he had experienced first-hand while a tutor at Balliol. What more suitable recipient of this letter could there possibly have been? What better figure of authority was there to ensure that the wrongs done to an able, intellectual clergyman would not be repeated? Who better to bring reform to the corrupt nineteenth-century Church?

8Hunt’s booklet, then, provides a penetrating insight at parish level into the social foibles, corruption, and turmoil in the Church of England during Victorian times. It highlights curates’ often poor employment prospects, their insecurity of tenure, their lowly status and poor remuneration, their subservience to incumbents, their struggles in gaining preferment on merit in the context of the sale of ecclesiastical livings. Clashes with incumbents on account of differences of theology and churchmanship abound. These details are seen in the context of social class, ethnic origins, and education.

  • 10 See Stephen J. Harrison, ‘Apuleius Writer and Orator, b. c. 125 CE’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia o (...)
  • 11 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 3.
  • 12 Ibid.
  • 13 Ibid.

9Hunt begins by addressing his ‘Letter’ to the Bishop of London, setting out his learning initially by means of an allusion to the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius (born c. 125 AD).10 He flatters the Bishop by referring to the Golden Ass and mentioning the name of its author, deferentially adding ‘as your lordship knows’.11 At first, there is no obvious connection with the Church when he states in the context of the Golden Ass: ‘He [Apuleius] wished to show that wisdom might sometimes exist even under an asinine exterior, and that there might be observing eyes where people did not expect to find them.’12 The ‘asinine exterior’ soon reveals itself as belonging to the Church of England. The obscured wisdom would seem to be the preserve of figures like Hunt and Bishop Tait. The somewhat cryptic reference to himself as the ‘Golden Curate‘,13 which, he suggests, ‘would seem self-laudatory if not egotistical’, were he not to ‘keep in check the spirit which has suggested the comparison’, turns out to be far from self-laudatory at the end of the main part of the ‘Letter’:

  • 14 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 26.

In the beginning I likened myself to the priest of Isis, but I checked the comparison. I again check it in the end. Apuleius wrote a fable, I have written the truth. Apuleius was at last delivered from his asshood; my curate-hood remains.14

  • 15 ‘Grey, dear Friend, is all theory, | But green is the golden tree of life’; ‘Grau, theurer Freund, (...)
  • 16 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 3. For a general overview of a curate’s position in society in the ninete (...)

10Having displayed his classical erudition, Hunt next refers to theology and philosophy, with references to St Augustine and Rousseau. A quotation from Goethe’s Faust, albeit in English translation, extolling the value of experience over theory,15 provides the final literary allusion and display of learning before Hunt launches upon his real topic. And although he notes ‘Curates are men who rarely speak for themselves’, he feels under a ‘divine impulse’ to speak out.16

11In this mood of emboldened militancy and divine justification for his cause, Hunt begins to recount to his bishop his life’s story and philosophy.

Notas

1 On long probationary curacies, see Nicholls, ‘Social Expectations’, passim, esp. p. 147.

2 There are a few references to the work in the wider press, e.g., Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 April 1865, p. 27; Cambridge Independent Press, 30 March 1867, p. 6.

3 On the annotations, see fn. 1, p. 110, below

4 Cf. Hunt’s lecture on St Augustine, Cambridge Independent Press, 30 March 1867, p. 6, reprinted in the Appendix, p. 196.

5Clergymen Made Scarce’, Punch, 17 December 1864, p. 251. A previous article about the inquest on the ‘anatomy scandal’ had already been published in Punch on 26 November 1865, p. 215.

6 Punch, 17 December 1864, p. 251 [cited in the Appendix, pp. 186f., below.].

7 Cf. Hart, The Curate’s Lot, p. 130.

8 The original is translated ‘If nature fails, then indignation generates verse, doing the best it can’. See Juvenal: The Satires, ed. William Barr, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 5.

9 Cf. ‘Tait, Archibald Campbell (1811–1882), Archbishop of Canterbury’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26917

10 See Stephen J. Harrison, ‘Apuleius Writer and Orator, b. c. 125 CE’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.628

11 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 3.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 26.

15 ‘Grey, dear Friend, is all theory, | But green is the golden tree of life’; ‘Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie | und grün des Lebens goldner Baum’, Mephistopheles, Faust I, 2038f.

16 Clergymen Made Scarce, p. 3. For a general overview of a curate’s position in society in the nineteenth century, see Hart, The Curate’s Lot, pp. 127–173.

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