I’ve been slowly reading J. Wallace Knight’s The Ritualist, a novel published in 1900 about St. Peter’s, Eastern Hill, and it's just passed by my house! The State Library (of course!) has the only copy around. It’s a dusey. It tells the dramatic story of the arrival in Melbourne of two heroic Anglo-Catholic priests from England. One, Wulfred Langton, winds up dead a few weeks after introducing candles, vestments and incense, and it looks like foul play. Wolsey Roland Ken, his young assistant finds on Langton’s desk a letter describing having been abducted and threatened by three men dressed as Inquisitors a short while before. They point out that while they have donned the attire of Inquisitors they could be Catholic, or Puritans, or atheists. He’ll never know, nor need he, but if he doesn’t recant his ritualistic ways something worse might happen to him.Dashe, the Anglican bishop of Melbourn but a Puritan, refuses to do the funeral, so it falls to the recently arrived Wolsey Ken, who says the city’s first requiem mass, confounding the crowd of gawkers. Turns out that Langton’s innovations have made him well-known, and a large crowd has gathered to follow the funeral procession up Lygon Street (!) and past the University to the cemetery. But along the way the sky turns a livid black and a terrific thunderstorm breaks out, and the Puritans declare it the anger of God. By the time Langton is laid in his grave the crowd has turned into a mob, cursing the dead man and flinging dirt into his grave as the rain-sodden choir runs in confusion, tripping over their vestments.
Fearing for the ornaments of the church, Wolsey rushes back. His cab arrives, the horse nearly dead, just in time to meet a mob which proceeds to trash the place, tearing pictures from the walls and throwing prayerbooks and hassocks around while someone plays saucy songs on the organ. Ken valiantly defends the sanctuary with a broken broom and an acerbic wit, but while he knocks one thug down is held back when a big man comes in with a sledgehammer and proceeds to pulverize the marble altar. At the end of part II, Wolsey Ken collapses, perhaps hit on the head by one of the rowdies, in the middle of his looted and pillaged church.It’s clear to the novel’s narrator that Anglo-Catholicism is the way of the future. The mad fervor of its opponents is a sure sign that they - Papists, Puritans and modernists alike - know that they will lose out when the Church is triumphantly reunited by Anglo-Catholicism, brought back to where it was before the great schism of Eastern and Western Chrsitianity and the Reformation. I expect the rest of the novel to show the arrival of the Kingdom in Melbourne.
Three things about The Ritualist are particularly interesting. For one, it’s a ripping good yarn! For another, it is full of poetry. Langton and Ken and the various people they meet – even people in the mob! – are endlessly quoting snatches of poetry to each other: they live in a world humming with the language and imagery of English poetry (including the King James Bible) – a nice image of late nineteenth century Anglican theology of culture. And – but - third, none of this ever happened! Protestant clergy fulminated and the bishops of Melbourne raised arched eyebrows at the ritualistic innovations of the Anglo-Catholic churches in Melbourne, and a cross went missing once, but that was about it. The first Anglo-Catholics in England half a century years before encountered some trouble like that described in the novel (but no murders), but nothing of the sort happened in Australia.
Did J. Wallace Knight create this foundation myth to articulate the countercultural excitement of the Anglo-Catholic movement in Melbourne? Or was it because Melbourne in fact didn’t provide enough resistance (or interest!) for the English narratives, carefully crafted to align the Anglo-Catholics with the heroes and martyrs of the church, to ring true and catalyze world-historic change?
A more pertinent question: Can I say that the funeral procession of Wulfred Langton must have passed right in front of our house on Lygon Street? Part of me thinks: why not? Would it feel any more real if it had actually happened? I'm used to sharing streets with characters from fiction and film. Paris was crawling with them!
I remember a few years ago I was in Echigo Yuzawa, the hot-spring heart of the Niigata Snow Country (in Japan) about which Yasunari Kawabata wrote the great novel of that name. There they had a walking-trail where you could see spots important in the novel. At least one hot spring promised that you could soak in the very same water where the novel’s pretty courtesan had soaked. Why not?
The postcard, from 1908, and the amazingly early photo of St. Peter's
from a few decades earlier (Lygon St. and the cemetery would be
off in the distance to the left) are from the SLV collection.
from a few decades earlier (Lygon St. and the cemetery would be
off in the distance to the left) are from the SLV collection.
