The Vicar of St. Margaret's

When I first started working seriously on religious fiction, other Victorianists told me that they were startled by how many anti-Catholic novelists I was finding at the end of the nineteenth century--surely the Victorians were over anti-Catholicism by then, what with Emancipation and all decades earlier? And I couldn't find anybody who had even heard of anti-Ritualism within the Church of England.  At the end of the nineteenth century, the Religious Tract Society did its darndest to keep both attitudes going strong, whether by developing new book series (e.g., the extremely anti-Catholic "For Faith and Freedom" novels) or setting prize themes.  M. G. Murray's The Vicar of St. Margaret's (c. 1899/1900) is an example of the latter strategy; both it and Margaret Cunningham's Until the Day Declare It (which I haven't been able to see yet) won the RTS' competition for novels about "the evils of sacerdotalism." Like the many other anti-Ritualist novels that preceded it, The Vicar of St. Margaret's dwells on the combined dangers of the confessional, sisterhoods, and clerical deception.

Christopher Brownlow (a name intended to remind us of Oliver Twist?) returns from abroad to deal with his widowed sister's family: while she lies on the verge of death, tended by an Anglican Sister of Mercy (much to Christopher's dismay), Imogen and Cecily attend services at the very Anglo-Catholic church.  Imogen, it turns out, has fallen under the spell of Father Adair, a Ritualist priest; worse still, he is Imogen's confessor.  Her recourse to the confessional enrages her beau, Maurice, who later tells Christopher that "'[h]e has had the impudence to question Imogen about her feelings towards me--in the confessional, too! where the poor child thinks she is bound to answer; and then he takes upon himself to warn her against  me, and tries to persuade her that I am a temptation of the devil!'" (51)  Christopher ejects the Sister of Mercy and bans Imogen from further dealings with Father Adair, but this has an unexpected result: she runs away from home, apparently with Father Adair.  The plot then turns into one long chase scene, as Christopher and Company try to run down the two escapees--who, as it turns out, are not together.  Father Adair, we discover, has actually decamped for the Roman Catholic Church (along with some of the Sisters of Mercy).  Imogen, meanwhile, has been hiding out in a sisterhood in Edinburgh, but her kind feelings for the sisters take a dark turn once she discovers, thanks to Maurice, that they have been stealing her letters.  (Anti-Catholic and anti-Ritualist novels frequently feature characters who hijack the post.)  She returns home too late to see her mother on her deathbed--clearly a providential rebuke--but, thanks to a long sojourn in Europe, her uncle Christopher's advice, and some friendly clerical guidance, she winds up firmly ensconced in the "just medium" (121) of the Church of England.  Maurice comes back, Imogen agrees to marry him, and everyone lives happily (and Protestantly) ever after. 

Arguably, the most interesting thing about this novel is the title character--because he's almost entirely absent from the text.  We see him briefly at a service, a man with a "striking face," "eyes [that] were dark and piercing," and an aura of "strength and energy" (20); Christopher, watching Father Adair "almost prostrat[e] himself in front of the altar," first concludes "that this was an intentionally theatrical display," but then tells himself that "[i]f he really believed that there were anything worthy of adoration present upon the altar, was he not right in worshipping it?" (20)  And...that's it for Father Adair's physical presence.  Maurice grumbles about him, his curates worship him, and everybody chases after him, but we never see him again.  But, in a sense, Father Adair was never "there" in the first place, for he had already "gone over" to the RCC well before he formally converted.  The novel thus posits a void where the Anglican clergyman ought to be.  Never present as a Protestant, Father Adair turns out to be less important as a character than he is as a corrupting influence; we know his presence only through his deadly moral effects on Imogen and the Sisters.  As Imogen's confessor, Father Adair controls her subjectivity, her entire world-view.  Her proximity to him inexorably taints her mind, especially insofar as her mind dwells on her beloved Maurice.  In this standard-issue rendering of the confessional's effects, the priest's intellect takes over that of his penitents--an invasion of the spirit snatchers, if you will--so that he need not be present to dominate every aspect of their domestic lives.  Moreover, Father Adair eroticizes his relationship with Imogen by forcing her to reflect on Maurice: the priest not only competes with Maurice for Imogen's attentions, but also injects himself into the relationship by dictating her responses.  In that sense, he plays the woman's part along with the man's.  Not coincidentally, Tom Lestrange, a curate who ultimately converts back to evangelicalism, is a manly man whose "huge form" sits rather oddly with the "black petticoats" (18).  Real men, it's clear, always turn out to be firmly Protestant. 

Otherwise, the novel resolutely hits the usual high points in anti-Ritualist argument.  Ritualism inevitably leads to Roman Catholicism; Ritualists are liars; Ritualists don't understand the Prayer Book, the Bible, Protestant theology, or even their own theology (Tom is rather embarrassing on this score); Ritualists abandon their own minds to follow their priestly leaders; Ritualists are selfish.  One suspects that this book won a prize not because of its originality, but because it so staunchly followed the party line.