By Kari Aakre

Clergymen feature as frequent stock characters in Victorian literature. From George Eliot’s Casaubon to W. S. Gilbert’s “Rival Curates” or Oscar Wilde’s Dr. Chasuble, Victorian clerics often assume comic or villainous roles. Victorian detective fiction uses the cleric to alternately obfuscate identities through disguise or augment the moral standing of other characters. Throughout the period, authors became more audacious in satirizing the dichotomy between genuine religious piety and hypocrisy. “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” “Drawn Daggers,” and “The Ghost of Fountain Lane” from Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective typify fin de siècle portrayals of the clergy by exposing religious pretense and defending the few proponents of genuine devotion.

            Critiques of Victorian clerics shifted throughout the century from light satire to scathing critiques, correlating with the professionalization of the clergy. At the beginning of the century, wealthy families saw the church as “a respectable occupation for a younger son,” resulting in the ordination of many clergymen who could not be “expected to be devout.”[1] Thus, the church was rife with the vices of “nepotism, absenteeism, [and] neglect of duties.”[2] In the 1830s and ’40s, Punch cartoonist Douglas Jerrold disparaged the Catholics, Ritualists, and Exeter Hall evangelicals, “interpret[ing] ostentatious and unusual forms of religious visual culture as disguise.”[3] The burgeoning professionalization of the clergy, reflected in Francis Davenant’s What Shall My Son Be? (1870), magnified the “need for a spiritual calling in the clergy.”[4] Professionalization emphasized vocation and moral standards. By the fin de siècle, Victorian society expected clergymen to be devout professionals; any hypocrites were subject to censure. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Scandal in Bohemia,” for example, portrayed the clergy as duplicitous abettors of detectives. Holmes donned the attire and affect “of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman”; however, Irene Adler quickly detected his inauthenticity.[5] Similarly, in Loveday Brooke Pirkis features clerical characters who appropriate credentials and lack expertise. The female detective scrutinizes the appearance of clerics, searching for disguises. Readers were accustomed to such critiques of clerical figures yet were seeking genuine expressions of faith. Pirkis encourages her readers to remain skeptical of the appearances, motivations, and emotions evinced by the clergy to protect the authenticity of their own faith.

In “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” Henry Emmett appropriates clerical garb, preying on people’s trust of the clergy to execute his crime. However, Loveday Brooke quickly perceives his duplicity and assumes a neutral stance towards the real rector. To appear authentic, Emmett steals items from a clergyman’s bag that lend him the ethos of a learned and tidy cleric: “a book of sermons, a copy of the works of Virgil, a facsimile of Magna Charta, with translations, a pair of black kid gloves, a brush and comb.”[6] The suicide note found with the bag, on the other hand, reflects a common stereotype of the clergy: that they are upper-class gentlemen who fall to the “damnable sin of gambling” and thus become hypocrites (e.g., Fred Vincy and Camden Farebrother in George Eliot’s Middlemarch). As detective, Brooke sees through the “ludicrousness of the diction” in Emmett’s note, suspecting that his “high falutin sentences” were inspired by penny readings,[7] which were “intended to be pathetic [and] ended in being comic.”[8] Even the rector is unable to see through Emmett’s disguise. When Emmett appears at the door on Christmas eve, pretending to be a curate to gain entry to the house, the rector is skeptical; “however, [when] he saw how disappointed the poor young fellow looked—I believe he shed a tear or two—his heart softened.”[9] While Pirkis may be disparaging the clergy’s over-reliance upon emotion as evidence of true faith, she is concurrently reinforcing the idea that clergy should be trusting and empathetic. In this tale of disguises and mistaken identities, the authentic clergymen emerge as kind yet deluded characters.

            Pirkis’s “Drawn Daggers” evinces a similar equivocality about the clerical profession. Mr. Dyer describes Rev. Anthony Hawke as “a clergyman of the Church of England . . . [who] gave up his living some twenty years ago when he married a wealthy lady.”[10] As a clerical figure, he is benign, boasting an “infantine expression,” “urbane” manners, and “the impression of being an easy-going, happy-tempered man.”[11] Having given up his living and his authority over his own finances by marrying a wealthy woman, Hawke exemplifies the stereotype of the kind yet insincere clergyman. His only self-identified flaw is excessive dedication to his wife’s service: “He corrected himself with a little attempt at self-assertion . . . ‘I do not mean to imply that I am not master in my own house.’”[12] Hawke’s financial and romantic priorities trump his spiritual calling. When he is deceived by his own family, he responds practically, rather than ethically, rejoicing in the “narrow escape my nephew, Jack, has had!”[13] Hawke’s portrayal of the Anglican clergy highlights Pirkis’s belief that the clerical profession should be a vocation rather than a nepotistic reward.

            In “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” Loveday Brooke satirizes ministerial duty. The initial crime is the robbery of “a cheque, the property of the Rev. Charles Turner, Vicar of East Downes.”[14] Concurrently, the Freer family, whom Brooke interviewed about a ghost sighting, boasted that they sold more boots to Methodists because “whereas the Wesleyan minister is always on the tramp among his people, the clergyman generally contrives in the country to keep a horse, or else turns student, and shuts himself up in his study.”[15] While Brooke seems to question the emotional faith of these Wesleyans, she also praises their entrepreneurship. Pirkis also decries the hypocrisy of Anglican clergymen who avoid serving their congregants. Subsequently, Inspector Clampe tells Brooke a religio-political joke: “Tell that to the Church Defence Society in Wales.”[16] Around 1890, Parliament held debates over the question of Welsh church disestablishment.[17] The Church Defense Society proposed to combat these efforts by “producing leaflets, lectures, and publications to promote the history, established position in society, and endowments of the Church,”[18] thus hindering missional efforts. Pirkis satirizes the futility of church schisms and their leaders, who detract from the church’s mission.

            The tale’s conclusion encourages skepticism among lay people by vilifying demagogue clerics who exploit their parishioners. Loveday Brooke’s extensive knowledge of religious sects enables her to identify the Freers as “millenarians, who have attached a religious significance . . . to the name of Napoleon by embodying the evil Apollyon.”[19] To Brooke, the Freers belong to a dangerous cult posing as a Wesleyan congregation in order to protect their freedoms. Of the three arrested in the case, one is a disgraced minister, another is a church elder, and yet another is a cult victim. The disgraced minister, Roger Steele, had already been “dismissed from his [Wesleyan] charge . . . because his teaching had been held to be unsound”; however, seeking autonomy, many defrocked clergy served a different congregation. Likewise, the elder, John Rogers, joins Steele’s mission to defraud people by preaching the end of the world and seeking subscriptions.[20] Charisma blinds their followers to their chicanery. Brooke attributes the “diary of distorted Scriptural phraseology—wild eulogies on the beloved pastor, and [the] morbid ecstatics” of Maria Lisle, the cult victim, to “a diseased brain,”[21] thereby casting the blame on church leaders who lead their flocks astray. Brooke attributes the ghost sighting to a similar phenomenon: “believing is seeing.”[22] She becomes a doubting Thomas by subverting the traditional meaning of “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:24–29). Considering that clerics in “small rural communities” were associated with “sincerity and value,”[23] Steele, as a Brighton minister, is immediately suspect in the minds of Victorian readers. Pirkis neither demystifies the urban biases of her readers through her portrayal of Steele nor defends him by attiring him in the “drab clothing” of an honest, Wesleyan minister.[24] “The Ghost” is Pirkis’s most poignant critique of religiosity, implying that lay people must test their beliefs and place their trust in rational, institutional expressions of religion. 

            Pirkis’s fin de siècle detective Loveday Brooke detects religious hypocrisy among the clergy while maintaining respect for religious experience. The rational and intuitive Brooke scrutinizes clerical clothing, finances, actions, and personalities. While some characters embody Victorian trust in the clergy, others reveal increasing distrust of both idle and mercenary ministers. Pirkis’s apt critiques of Victorian religiosity highlight the need for professional and spiritual reform.

 “A Young Clergyman Presented Himself,” Ludgate Monthly 4 (November 1892): 412. 

Notes

[1] Oliver Lovesey, “The Clerical Character in the Victorian Novel: George Eliot’s Adam Bede,”

Newsletter of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 13, no. 2 (1987): 4.

[2] Ibid., 5.

[3] Dominic Janes, “The Role of Visual Appearance in ‘Punch’s’ Early Victorian Satires on Religion,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 79. 

[4] Joseph H. O’Mealy, “Scenes of Professional Life: Mrs. Oliphant and the New Victorian

Clergyman,” Studies in the Novel 23, no. 2 (1991): 254.

[5] Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: George Newnes, 1892).

[6] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, ed. Michelle Slung (New York: Dover, 2020), 7.

[7] Ibid., 25.

[8] Ibid., 26.

[9] Ibid., 29.

[10] Ibid., 124.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 128.

[13] Ibid., 151.

[14] Ibid., 153.

[15] Ibid., 161.

[16] Ibid.

[17] The Bishop of St. Asaph, A Handbook on Welsh Church Defence (Denbigh: C. Cotton, 1894), http://anglicanhistory.org/wales/edwards_defence1894/. 

[18] “Church Defence Institution,” Archives Hub, accessed December 18, 2023, https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk.

[19] Pirkis, Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 176.

[20] Ibid., 177.

[21] Ibid., 178.

[22] Ibid., 180.

[23] Kristina Lynn Hochwender, “Country Clergymen: National and Religious Mediations in the 

Victorian Clerical Novel” (dissertation, Washington University, 2002), 19.

[24] Janes, “The Role of Visual Appearance,” 79.