Afterword

When I received the communication about this special issue of Victorian Poetry from Kirstie Blair and Emma Mason, I was not exactly dumbfounded, but I was certainly greatly surprised. They told me that the publication of this collection of essays on Tractarian poetry was "timed to celebrate twenty-five years since [my] pivotal monograph on the subject was published." For the greater part of those twenty-five years I had been convinced that my study had sunk without a trace. Certainly the annual doleful statements from the Harvard Press informing me that sales were too low to justify sending the miniscule amount gained in royalties and thus it would be carried over to the next year (and the year beyond) had not led me to believe that there was much call for any kind of public acknowledgment of the existence of my Victorian Devotional Poetry. Of course I did not share my surprise with editors Blair and Mason lest it deter them from proceeding with the project.

A month after that first contact with these gracious editors I made a trip to Australia, my first but I hope not my last. I like to think I did not suffer from the all too widespread stereotype, among many Poms and even more among Americans, of what Australia would be like (all sports and kangaroos and excessive matey beer drinking), but I never expected to encounter any trace of interest in Tractarian poetics. But I was wrong. Early on in my stay a longtime friend, an Anglican priest who had after many years in America and Europe recently returned to his place of origin, Melbourne, held a dinner party to introduce me to some of his friends. He told me that one of them was especially keen to meet me because he knew of my work on Victorian devotional poetry. That surprised me as much as the communication from Blair and Mason. Even more astonishing, this gentleman came to the dinner party armed with his own copy of an especially handsomely illustrated edition of The Christian Year. I assumed that he was a priest in mufti, for who else in the antipodes would have a copy of so obscure a book and one of the grandly illustrated ones at that? Again I was wrong. (It seems to be a habit with me.) The gentleman is editor and founder of an elegant Australian magazine titled Coast and Country. His name is Christopher Akehurst and the illustrations here were kindly provided by him from his copy of the Keble volume and expertly photographed by Graeme Robbins and prepared for reproduction by Mark Brewster.

It would seem, then, that Victorian Devotional Poetry and Tractarian poetics are not solely the obscure hobby of a lone academic but that there is, if not an army, certainly a kind of coeducational confraternity of learned and sophisticated readers, academic and otherwise, who know and treasure the very considerable body of poetry that the Tractarians and their epigones have left for us. I should also note here that any country that has two Butterfield cathedrals—St. Paul's, Melbourne and St. Peter's, Adelaide—very well ought to be home to a chapter of admirers of Keble and Company. When one considers that at the time of the construction of these splendid churches Australia as a Western country was not even one hundred years old, it should also dispel the notion that all the early settlers of that country were convicts, as another popular notion has it. The idea that all those renegades and miscreants transported to Australia carried with them their copies of The Christian Year and hopes for a Tractarian cathedral or two is clearly untenable. For one thing, many or even most of the convicts were Irish and but semi-literate; if they carried any kind of pious reading matter, it would more likely have been a missal. So there must early on have been substantial numbers of middle- and upper-class Anglican English who made their way Down Under and...