We first need to understand the event's genesis and design. The English Church Pageant was the brainchild of Walter Marshall FSA (1859–1921), a Cambridge-educated antiquarian and archaeologist who was then (1907) vicar of St Patrick's, Hove, Sussex. He taught medieval church architecture in Oxford Extension lectures and was also a musician, with a particular interest in liturgical chant. In May 1908 Marshall proposed a pageant on a local Brighton football pitch to include scenes from the nation's ecclesiastical history, from the early British church up to the nineteenth century.5 The scheme was developed under the guidance of Frank Lascelles – who had been responsible for the 1907 Oxford pageant and would become one of the most prolific pageant-masters of the age – although the pageant was eventually produced by Hugh Moss after Lascelles withdrew at the last minute. Its Executive Committee included M. R. James and Bishop George Forrest Browne of Bristol, but the most active members were William Henry St John Hope, Charles Reed Peers, Edward Earle Dorling, Clement Oswald Skilbeck and Percy Dearmer, with Arthur Croxton serving as literary secretary.6 Both English Anglican archbishops, Randall Davidson and Cosmo Gordon Lang (like his predecessor, William Maclagan), served as patrons, and subcommittees were established to handle music, art, archaeology, history and costumes. In November 1908 Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram of London in effect took over the initiative, announcing that the pageant would now be staged in an elaborated version during the following June at his episcopal residence, Fulham Palace.7 Modest sums might be raised for Church causes, but organisers insisted that the primary purpose was educational. This was just as well: after the pageant closed an embarrassed Winnington-Ingram publicly acknowledged that, though 'brilliantly successful as a spectacle', the event had been a financial failure. In consequence, the bishop negotiated a fee for the 1910 Army Pageant to reuse the pageant ground and its 6,500-capacity roofed grandstand (Fig. 3.1), built from more than 400 tons of wood and 45,000 ft2 of corrugated iron. Costing £7,000 as it did, the grandstand partly explains the financial problems (it was optimistically advertised for sale in the pageant handbook).8

The grandstand reflected the pageant's scale. It was of such length that the main performances were staged in two parts. Members of the Executive Committee each 'devised'9 scenes performed by different localities within the London diocese. Part One, starting at 3 p.m., covered the period up to the fourteenth century:

**Figure 3.1** The grandstand for the English Church Pageant. From *English Church Pageant Handbook* (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1909), 54. Author's collection.

*The Prelude: The Founders of the Church* (Saints George, Alban, Ninian, David, Patrick, Germans [*sic* Germanus], Ia) *–* written by Dearmer

Part Two, commencing at 8 p.m., took the story down to the eighteenth century:

Marshall had originally envisaged 2,000 performers, but in the event 4,000 participated, all processing for a torchlit finale of Cecil B. DeMille proportions. *The Times* enthusiastically reported that 'the great host … marched in a compact body stretching right across the ground, the glittering many-coloured mass brilliantly lit up by the tongues of fire which each of them carried'. The spectacle must have provided as enduring a memory for spectators as another gigantic vision in the Epilogue, that of a defiantly moustachioed G. K. Chesterton appearing as Dr Johnson. Less universally admired was the music, in which those on the pageant ground were assisted by a large choir and brass band. The impressive music advisory committee – Hugh Allen, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Barclay Squire10 – opted for (dubiously) 'authentic' modal chants for the earlier scenes, which *The Times* judged 'apt to become tedious except to the ear of the purist', unlike the more palatable harmonies of later episodes. More popular was audience participation in communal hymn-singing, culminating in a rendition of the Nicene Creed to John Merbecke's then-familiar setting of 1550.11

Inclement weather throughout the run (1909 saw the wettest June for the best part of a century) caused problems, while insufficient rehearsal under Moss meant that the earlier scenes dragged at first (the first night did not end until 11.30 p.m.). One scene, the murder of Thomas Becket, proved so inadequate that it was cut.12 Those who returned for later shows, however, saw a transformational improvement. Overall, press and spectators judged the pageant to be a success.

The English Church Pageant clearly reflects the contemporary fad for pageantry; indeed, it had close genealogical relationships both with earlier pageants such as the Chelsea Pageant of 1908, and those that followed, such as the Army Pageant. But the contemporary *ecclesiastical* context also matters. For the performances represented the leading part of a wider, co-ordinated intervention in discussion of the place of the Church of England in national life which had three other important components.

First there was the considerable press coverage, which owed much to the organisers' efforts to keep the pageant in the news from the outset. The original Brighton scheme received notice not only in the southeast and publications with a national reach, but across Britain in regional newspapers. Before the pageant was staged, interest focused on the practical preparations, the developing programme and casting calls. There was also, however, frequent discussion of the aims and argument of the pageant as articulated by its Executive Committee. Even the practical

**Figure 3.2** *English Church Pageant Handbook* (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1909), showing a primary source included to accompany the staging of the coronation procession of Edward VI and a live sketch by the owner from 19 June 1909. Author's collection.

arrangements could make a point about the Church's relation to national life, as in discussion of the ethical sourcing of some 6,000 costumes from 'societies and other bodies whose object is the provision of work at fair wages to those who may otherwise be unemployed'.13 Once the pageant opened, coverage of its content, audience reaction and associated comment and protest provided further opportunities to spread its message, with detailed accounts of the performances often being accompanied by illustrations, as in the *Illustrated London News* and the *Review of Reviews*, or the mass circulation *Daily Mirror* and *Daily Express*. 14

Second, and most obvious, were satellite publications. Many pageants had related books, but the English Church Pageant came with an unusually large portfolio. First, there was a 60-page *English Church Pageant Handbook*, priced at 6d. and accommodating extensive advertising, both secular and ecclesiastical. This was in effect the programme, but was also issued weeks in advance as an advertisement and a recruiting tool for volunteers. It offered illustrated summaries of the scenes and the pageant's rationale, background articles on the preparations, endorsements from the Church authorities and suggestions for further reading. Those with deeper pockets, however, could splash out on a larger, 'sumptuous and admirably printed'15 volume, confusingly bearing the same title but referred to as the *Book of the English Church Pageant*, priced at 2s. 6d. and running to 150 pages. Here the material from the *Handbook* was enhanced with more illustrations, cast lists and full texts of the scenes, along with the music used. In addition, key sources used in the preparation of the pageant were reproduced in full, such as the English Coronation Order employed in 1066 and William Laud's speech from the scaffold (Figs 3.2 and 3.4). This more elaborate volume could serve as both a *vade mecum* for the event and a lasting resource for the church-history enthusiast – a dual function apparent from a battered copy in the author's possession, in which 'on the spot' pencil sketches from the grandstand on the night of 19 June 1909 are accompanied by unrelated cuttings on church history, pasted in by an owner in the 1930s.

Another loose insert in this copy advertised a third publication: a flyer for Percy Dearmer's *Everyman's History of the English Church* (Fig. 3.3). Some 50,000 copies of Dearmer's book were printed to coincide with the pageant, being sold at Mowbray's pageant-ground stall. Lavishly illustrated (with some of its 100 pictures provided by the Pageant Committee), this 150-page volume priced at 1s. offered a 'clear, interesting and accurate' account of the history of English Christianity – backed up, as in the *Handbook*, by recommendations for further reading.16 Finally, in 1910, there appeared the Rev. John Francis Kendall's *Short History of the Church of England*, a 200-page work published by Adam & Charles Black at 7s. 6d. This was accurately summarised by the *Dublin Daily Express* as portraying '[t]he work of the Church of England in moulding and deepening the national character' through its 'influence … upon the people of England' and 'only … touch[ing] … on the inner growth of its complicated organisation in so far as is necessary to explain changes in its outward influence'.17 This volume also claimed to be the first book to publish colour photographs, those taken by Elliott and Fry at the pageant. Photography also served the pageant dissemination strategy through the extensive Rotary series of postcards of scenes and characters from the pageant. The steady stream of unused copies now available to purchase suggests that many of these found their way into collections rather than being used for communication.18

Finally, there were satellite events. Some were missionary or liturgical. Winnington-Ingram preached on the pageant to a packed opening communion service on 10 June at St Etheldreda's, Fulham.19 On Sunday 13 June the Bishop of London's Evangelical Council organised a mission service on the pageant ground reportedly attended by 15,000–20,000 people; among them were territorial servicemen, the Boys' Brigade, the mayor and council of Fulham and, representing the royal family, Marie-Louise of Schleswig-Holstein.20 A week later the Archbishop of Canterbury himself presided at a pageant-ground mass meeting organised by the Church of England Central Board of Missions. During this event some 8,000 attenders heard Archbishop Davidson describe the pageant as 'the best possible speech on the missionary cause', showing as it did how the nation had over time been fitted to witness God's cause, armed by 'the lessons of the past'.21

Other events were educational, directly supporting the didactic work of the pageant. Thus, in the weeks before the pageant Albert E. N. Simms, vicar of Grayshott in Surrey, delivered a series of five London University extension lectures on 'Turning Points in English History as Illustrated in the English Church Pageant' at Church House in Westminster;22 in Croydon, that deanery's staging of the presentation of the Authorised Version to King James was re-enacted a few days after the pageant.23 Later in the year the high-church historian and biographer Albert Clifton Kelway delivered an 'official' English Church Pageant lecture which his local newspaper reported as booked for 'various towns in Essex',24 and late in 1910 magic lantern shows, featuring up to 70 slides depicting the pageant, were being staged at a variety of places and for various causes. A report of Mary Caroline Gorham's presentation of this material, as a prelude to slides of contemporary social church work in

**Figure 3.3** Flyer for Percy Dearmer, *Everyman's History of the English Church* (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1909), advertising its sale on the pageant ground. Author's collection.

November 1910 on behalf of Duxhurst Farm Colony for Inebriate Women in Surrey, described the evening as exciting great interest in its opportunity to view a 'vivid rendering of scenes of English Church history', especially as portrayed by 'so many well-known clergy and laymen from different parishes in London'.25

Although details of the contents and emphases varied, all these initiatives aligned with the aims and themes of the pageant – just as they did with its approach to spreading its message. It has already been suggested that these aims and themes were shaped by wider agendas than the requirements of pageantry, or of a general intention of promoting the Church. Rather, they addressed specifics of the situation of the Edwardian Church of England.

It is important to note that this situation was not one of crisis requiring urgent and unambiguous intervention on the Church's behalf. Indeed, a striking feature of the pageant, whose coverage of English Church history terminated at a safely pre-Tractarian moment in the eighteenth century, was that only one scene had immediate, pointed political relevance – and here it was as much a matter of casting as of content, and of its genesis. Initial plans included a scene of 'The foundation of the Cathedral Church of New Sarum' (1220). In February 1909, however, the Executive Committee claimed both to reflect its own instincts and a 'generally expressed desire', backed by Bishop John Owen of St David's, in substituting for the Salisbury scene a representation of the 'Alleluia' victory/battle of 429/30 ad. Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes, in the wake of seeing off the Pelagian heresy, were shown leading unarmed Christian Celts to bloodless victory over a Pict and Saxon army through co-ordinated shouts of 'Alleluia'.26

It is hard to see the substitution of this scene, whose dubious historical credentials offered a painful contrast to the overall tenor of the pageant, as other than a pointed gesture towards the contemporary threat of Welsh disestablishment. Its significance was underlined by the choice of performers: members of the Welsh Church resident in London, who also furnished the choral forces for the closing 'Alleluias' and *Gloria Patri.* The scene was delivered in the Welsh language, with the pageant handbook providing a parallel translation for those defeated by this effort to achieve a 'real Kymric flavour'.27 This feature, otherwise calculated to make the scene inaccessible to the bulk of the audience – '[i]n good modern Welsh, as I suppose, an ancient Briton spoke his fears of the savage Sassanach', recorded the *Church Times* reviewer – served to emphasise the authentic Welsh credentials of the established Church in Wales. No parallel effort was made to stage other medieval scenes in Latin, for example, though that language would at least have been familiar to a significant proportion of the audience.28

Pageant organisers desired the whole pageant to be genuinely educational. Along with commentators they repeatedly emphasised the potential of the pageant, and indeed pageantry more generally, as a pedagogic tool. Percy Dearmer wrote of the originator of the pageant, Walter Marshall, that '[i]n pageantry, reverently produced, he saw a vehicle of enormous power in educating through the eye and mind the people of the Country in the history of their Church'. Dearmer added that, in several respects, pageantry was more potent than print: '[w]e have lost the old quiet musing traditions; we live in an age of ignorant men who just can read that which had better not have been written'.29 An editorial in *The Times* acknowledged that, although it was easy to poke fun, the pageant represented a resurrection of the medieval mode of combining amusement and instruction, and that, in contrast to most modern art forms, neither participation nor appreciation required specialised professional training, thus giving it an educational reach denied more sober productions.30

One person's education is another person's indoctrination. At first glance the Executive Committee's composition seems instructive here. Beyond Marshall, it was almost exclusively the preserve of lay and clerical high churchmen sharing an interest in liturgy and worship. Percy Dearmer, the maverick Primrose Hill parson responsible for *The English Hymnal* and *The Parson's Handbook*, wrote four scenes and an overall commentary for the *Pageant Handbook*. The other scenes were the work of the architect and archaeologist Charles Reed Peers, the heraldic writer E. E. Dorling, the artist Clement O. Skilbeck (who had published collections of continental altarpieces) and William St John Hope (1854–1919),31 assistant secretary at the Society of Antiquaries from 1885 to 1910 and a powerful figure in antiquarian circles. Alongside Dearmer and Skilbeck, St John Hope was closely involved in the Alcuin Club founded in 1897 to promote the study of ceremonial – indeed his *English Altars* of 1899 was its first publication. Clerical costumes were supplied by a preferred high-church source of contemporary vestments, the St Dunstan's Society.

Lurking among the cast of thousands were also many well-known high-church figures, such as the Christian Socialist and member of Stewart Headlam's Church and Stage Guild J. G. Adderley. He had employed Dearmer as his assistant in Mayfair, and the pageant gave a perfect outlet to his theatrical inclinations (he appeared as St David in the Prelude, then again later as Bishop Luithard). There might thus appear grounds for characterising the pageant as a partisan, Ritualist attempt to 'invent' a 'tradition'32 that would shift understandings of the Church of England in their direction – at a time when the legacy of the Oxford Movement was the subject of much debate within and outside the established church.33

This was certainly how some Protestant observers interpreted the pageant. John Alfred Kensit, who had succeeded his 'martyred' father as secretary of the Protestant Truth Society, was stirred into arranging a 'Protestant Pageant Campaign' during its first week. Four contingents of the anti-Catholic 'Wickliffe preachers' his father had established descended on Fulham for 100 open-air meetings. In these they protested that 'some of the principal events of the Reformation' had been omitted from the programme and that the whole enterprise amounted to a 'glorification of vestments'. Winnington-Ingram was heckled on his arrival at the opening communion service, having earlier received a telegram from Kensit insisting that he distance himself from 'popish idolatry' and 'the mass'. A 'martyr commemoration' demonstration on the middle Saturday on Eelbrook Common, about a mile from the pageant ground, was preceded by a Protestant procession from Hammersmith with 'bands, banners, Orangemen, Boys Brigade and models of the rack, the iron maiden, the stake with chains and firewood and representations of other tortures' – thereby giving the lie to Dearmer's rather unconvincing excuse for the omission of scenes from Foxe's *Book of Martyrs*, namely that burning at the stake could not easily be dramatically represented; he had, in any case, not shirked from including Laud's beheading. Disorder ensued, and the police had to intervene.34

Related criticism could take less strident form. The *Review of Reviews*, edited by W. T. Stead, the scion of a Congregationalist manse, summarised the pageant as 'a first-class funeral of Protestantism', its contents a 'travesty of history'. He argued that

To make Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation, into a mere lay figure in a brawl in church was significant of a determination which found its ultimate expression in the scenes depicting the despoiling of the convents and the 'martyrdom' (Heaven save the mark!) of Archbishop Laud.35

A letter to the New York *Churchman* by the American Episcopalian minister Randolph Harrison McKim was later picked up by the British press. McKim suggested that any revival of the pageant should place more emphasis on the British church's strength before Augustine imported Roman influences, and present more evidence – the Marian martyrs, Cranmer's Bible, the Elizabethan settlement – 'of the great religious revolution called the Reformation'. In the pageant McKim believed that '[t]he continuity of organization of the Church of England with the pre-Reformation Church was emphasized at the expense of that great breach of continuity in doctrine and ritual which took place in the sixteenth century'. The American quoted the evangelical dean of Canterbury, Henry Wace, who opined that

The Pageant … at Fulham afforded lamentable illustration of the completely subordinate position which the Reformation now occupies in the minds of the Churchmen by whom it was organized.

He named the *Morning Post* and the *Graphic* as fellow critics.36 Such issues may also have lain behind Lascelles' resignation from the project, as he explained it subsequently to the organisers of the Bath Pageant:

They might be High Church or Low Church, but they were all members of the Church of England and it did not seem right to him … that different branches of the Church should not be represented on [the] Executive Committee. … That was the fundamental difference that existed.

However, his statement also hinted at issues of artistic control.37

Closer inspection nevertheless cautions against interpreting the pageant as a crude exercise in Anglo-Catholic propaganda. First, although cherishing ritual, the churchmen involved were generally concerned at the time to distance themselves from 'Ritualists' with a capital 'R' who sought to introduce Roman rites into the Church of England. Dearmer's aim was to recover a genuine English usage that was both superior to Roman forms and compatible with Anglican regulations; this was also the thrust of the Alcuin Club, formed 'to promote the study of the history and use of the Book of Common Prayer'.38 Secondly, whatever their own allegiances, the organisers were determined that the pageant itself should be irenic and non-sectarian. It was this that secured them the backing not only of Winnington-Ingram (who could, depending on one's perspective, be regarded as either sufficiently Anglo-Catholic or sufficiently clueless39 to have been immune to concern about Protestant reaction), but also of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a range of other bishops and dignitaries. And to counterbalance Protestant complaints about the programme, there were others, not necessarily high churchmen, who judged the pageant a judicious selection of historical events – even as some Anglo-Catholics found a number of scenes too 'Protestant', notably the expulsion of the secular canons from Winchester by Dunstan.40

Dearmer was precise about the educational effect that he personally sought from the pageant. So much is clear from his explanation of the pageant logo created for the *Book* and *Handbook* by the artist-designer George Edward Kruger (Fig. 3.4), which in 3D also appeared in the finale:

[St George's] left hand is on the tiller, and he is looking backwards, for a sign that while the Church goes onwards ever she can look back across the centuries to a glorious past.

The rearward gaze mattered, because Dearmer believed that serious 'Church History … is hardly a factor in our present-day Civilization at all'. Instead, the public knew only 'false generalizations and crude prejudices'. The pageant was to be an 'ally to all who care to know and spread the truth about the historic Church of this country'; it would serve both to 'allay hatreds and prejudices, and [to] evoke loyalties'. Pageants, Dearmer felt, could

only work in broad lines, but they can cut deep on those lines. They can stir the imagination. They can popularize the historic sense. They can point the way to future knowledge, and create the desire for it. … They can give proportion, balance, breadth. In a word they can educate.41

The English Church Pageant would seek to achieve its educational mission by correcting myth through scholarship. To a twenty-first-century eye, the role of antiquarians in the production can seem only too appropriate to the amateurish 'men-in-tights' aspects of pageantry. But this would be to ignore the intimate connections between late nineteenth-century

**Figure 3.4** Front cover, *English Church Pageant Handbook* (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1909), designed by George E. Kruger. Author's collection.

antiquarians and emergent academic history, especially in the Anglican context. Men such as Hope, Peers and Dorling were all stalwarts of the *Victoria County History*, for example. Dearmer indeed was quite clear that the emergence of the pageant as a viable didactic vehicle was dependent on the late nineteenth-century emergence of history as 'a genuine science'.42 For him, in one sense, the presiding deities of the pageant were not theatrical men such as Lascelles and Moss. Rather they were writers such as John Richard Green and John Henry Overton, who were making serious history accessible to a wider public and whose works featured in the annotated reading lists provided in the *Book* and *Handbook*, alongside the scholars and editors publishing the original archival sources referenced or transcribed there. This was most apparent in the *Book of the English Church Pageant*, where the sources were reproduced to authenticate the action, not least its settings. Thus the opening scene featured a reconstruction of the Romano-British church recently excavated by St John Hope himself at Silchester, the conjectural plan of which was reproduced in the *Book* beneath a photograph of the excavation. Also featured was the Latin text of the edict of the emperors Constantine and Licinus, accompanied by a translation by the Camden professor of Ancient History at Oxford, Francis Haverfield (Figs. 3.2 and 3.5).43

How then best to characterise the pageant's historical argument? Initially, it is important to note that the spectacle was entitled not *The*

**Figure 3.5** Rotary Photo postcard: Scene 1. The Publication of the Edict of Constantine, 313. The building recreates the Romano-British church excavated at Silchester in the 1890s by William St John Hope. Author's collection.

*Church of England Pageant,* but the *English Church Pageant.* The single most important message, reinforced through several devices, was of the inspiring and seamless continuity of Christian witness provided by the national Church, both pre- and post-Reformation. This was presented in a variety of ways. First, scenes did not, *pace* the title of Simms's associated lecture series, represent 'turning points' in English church history. The whole point was rather that they did not. Thus, as the critics noted, the Reformation was under-represented (no fires of Smithfield, for example); but then neither was the Synod of Whitby depicted, nor even the Restoration of Charles II – an unambiguously positive 'turning point' from the high-church perspective that some accused the pageant of adopting. Second, where scripts dramatised controversies, the text and commentaries went out of their way to avoid clear clashes between right and wrong. In the script for Part 1, Scene 6, for example, Dunstan was presented as facing an almost impossible choice between the English 'secular' model of monasticism and the Benedictine rule, rather than implementing what could be perceived as insensitive Romanising practices or purging corruption (although as actually staged a focus on abandoned families did shift the argument in a 'Protestant' direction).44 Archbishop Laud was, as befitted one of Dearmer's heroes, presented as a martyr for decent worship in Part 2, Scene 8. However, he was also convicted of a temperament that destined him for the scaffold: according to the *Book*, 'he strode with a heavy foot over convictions that did not tally with his own', and was ultimately 'the victim, not less, perhaps, of his own austere and lofty character than of the triumphant malice of his enemies'.45 Both Thomas Becket and Henry II had something to be said for them: 'there was right on both sides in that titanic struggle … Henry … was right in not letting the clergy slip outside the national system; on the other hand Thomas was right to resist the royal dictatorship in the name of the Church'.46 The inclusive aim of seeking the best in different traditions was also apparent in the presentation of eighteenth-century Methodism in wholly positive terms, and the care taken to differentiate the seventeenthcentury schismatic Puritans presented as harassing Laud from 'honest dissenters' seeking toleration outside the Church.

Third, the pageant stressed continuity above all in terms of the intricate and inextricable entanglement of the Church in the development of the wider English polity; indeed, several scenes had more claim to attention as part of national constitutional history than of that of the Church. There was little Christian militarism save for St George's clanking armour; in fact the military's main contribution was the striking fact that, until the scene was axed, three of the four actors responsible for portraying Becket's murderers were Major Christopher DSO, Major Finlayson and Lieutenant Bushell.47 Instead, no fewer than three royal ceremonials were included with the sole purpose of demonstrating how the Church could appropriately handle such occasions.

At the same time this monarchical emphasis was counterbalanced by the finale of Act 1, the miracle play and pilgrimage for which the Christian Socialist Dearmer's commentary emphasised the guilds' status as medieval trade unions.48 More generally, there was a Whiggish interpretation of the Church's role as godmother of English liberties, stressing its progressive tendency from Langton's role in Magna Carta to the abolition of slavery, a key emphasis in the finale. If these approaches to history might be expected, less so was the presentation of Becket, not as a 'high church' champion of clerical privilege, but as a man 'whose heroic … stand against the strong and terrible King laid the foundations for the free and united England that was to emerge'.49

This bigger national story was, of course, not new. This was rather the point. It is important for our broader understanding of the cultural work of pageants to recognise that this pageant at least was not an attempt to 'invent' a 'tradition' for the hegemonic purpose of manipulating the people with scant regard to historical accuracy.50 Instead it was an attempt to employ historical scholarship to anchor the Church more firmly within an *existing*, widely diffused, indeed popular understanding of the national story, toning down its more dramatic polarisations and conflicts and nudging it in certain directions to enable the Church to take what the organisers believed to be its true place in an inclusive rather than divisive vision. The processes at work here, and the relations between 'popular(ising)' and professional/academic history that they imply, accord closely with those explored in Martha Vandrei's examination of Queen Boudica's place in British history-writing (though perhaps with an even more self-conscious dimension) rather than with the more simplistic suggestions of falsification, appropriation or distortion found in some earlier discussions of popular historical forms of the Romantic era and after.51

Why was this message seen as pertinent in 1909, and to whom did the pageant Executive Committee want to deliver it? One strength of the pageant, and of the variegated publishing programme that accompanied it, was that it offered a point of access to the arguments it sought to promote across a wide social spectrum. On the one hand, the pageant was a big enough event to attract 'movers and shakers' – bishops, royalty, Lloyd George, the London mayors and corporations. The professional middling classes also mattered: prices for the performances originally scheduled ran from 3s. to 21s. for one part and 5s. to 35s. for both. An indication of the organisers' rather elevated conception of the 'public' is given by plaintive demands that fashionable hats should not be allowed to spoil the view from the cheaper seats, and their declaration that the 'ignorance' of that public concerning Church history could be laid at the doors of the English public schools, whose alumni were probably one target of the university extension lectures.52 Nevertheless it also mattered to both organisers and supporters that the pageant was accessible to a much wider constituency – hence the addition of the extra shows specifically targeted at poorer London parishioners, the conscious inclusion of the unemployed among the mass of performers and the delight of one observer in discovering slum children among the dancers.53

The target audience of the pageant project broadly considered was thus 'the people' as understood in terms of the 'nation', rather than a particular section of it. Why did 'the people' need this message? As I have argued elsewhere,54 in the early nineteenth century the chief defence of the established position of the Church of England advanced by churchmen was the utilitarian/Burkean value of the Church as a guarantor of the social order and providential fortune of the state. This was a lesson that a reviving Toryism and a liberally-inflected Whiggism both took from the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s and the French Wars – one that was well-suited to the prevailing norms of reformist political argument in the early Victorian era.

As the political context changed, so did discursive practice. From the 1830s onwards, the legal and practical aspects of establishment came under sustained attack from a newly confident Dissenting community whose numerical strength came by mid-century to match that of Anglicanism. From this point on the Anglican leadership found itself required to abandon exposed political positions in what had become a denominationally pluralistic polity. In this context, to the state, establishment could seem a source of dissension and fragility rather than a source of stability and strength, making the old, state-focused utilitarianism harder to deploy in its defence.

Instead, the later nineteenth century saw Anglican apologists defend the established church as an emanation, guarantor and incarnation of national character and destiny, neatly encapsulated in Archdeacon William Emery's coinage in the Church Congress of 1885, 'the grand old national church of England'.55 Rather than high theories of church and state (although it had important synergies with the Coleridgean and sub-Hegelian strands of Idealism associated with broad churchmen, and in particular T. H. Green), this language operated first and foremost in more everyday contexts. One key site was the antiquarian and guidebook literature which accompanied the rise of the parish church as heritage site. Its prevalence here was in part an inadvertent consequence of the much more polemical project of the Ecclesiologists – the Anglo-Catholic architectural movement promoting Gothic as the 'true' expression of Christian theology, which generated new knowledge and appreciation of the history of English church architecture.56 This tradition, moreover, also lent itself to the theatrical: as the *Review of Reviews* noted in discussing the English Church Pageant, 'Protestantism … does not lend itself so well to pageantry as does Catholicism'.57

This approach was well adapted to the needs of the Church both externally and internally. Associating the Church with a patchily authoritarian state rather than the nation could no longer rally a politically variegated Anglican clergy, let alone the laity. In contrast, the rhetoric of national identity could accommodate not only liberal Anglicans who had pioneered it in the 1830s, but also low churchmen seeking to emphasise the Church's Protestantism, or high churchmen truffle-hunting increasingly improbably-named Cornish saints from the annals of the early English church.58 It also sought to tie the Church into a popular understanding of English history from which it could be regarded as inseparable and which, at least in a party political sense, could be regarded as apolitical, or at least offering something to everyone. The various pageant projects – performance, commentary and offshoots – offer almost the definitive version of this narrative as it could be constructed from the Catholic wing of the Church. The latter's interest in history was here married to a more Protestant emphasis on liberty, and fused to a high Whiggish historical narrative refocused on the key conservative institution of the established church, which consequently sat easily with post-1867 Tory populism.59

Seeking alignment with the broad outlines of a national historical narrative might seem a failure of nerve for an institution such as the Church, which could be understood as being required to offer a witness against conventional wisdom. It should nevertheless be recognised that this was a bold move for an institution so imbricated with the state. Late Victorian Dissenters believed that it would not be long before the connection of church and state would be severed, and that a Free Church offered the ecclesiastical model best attuned to the Protestant liberty that defined the British polity. Their fears for that polity were only increased by the simultaneous revival in English Roman Catholic fortunes, as that Church claimed a new legitimacy for its adherents as citizens – most obviously asserted in the statement architecture of the new Westminster Cathedral (built 1895–1903). In this context, for Anglicanism to assert an organic relationship with the English nation made it easier for the voluntaryist Protestant and 'English' Catholic to justify intervention in the internal matters of the Church of England (as in anti-Ritualist agitation) in ways that otherwise seemed to contradict voluntaryist logic or the Catholic claim to be newly at ease in a pluralist nation. They could do so on the grounds that either the Protestant or the inclusive character of the national community which the Church of England now claimed to embody was in jeopardy through the Church's claim to an organic relation with the polity.

We earlier noted the interdenominational Kensitite Protestant protests against the pageant, and within a couple of years there was talk of a revisionist 'Free Church' pageant. But we should also note that the pageant provoked equally strong Roman Catholic reactions. Hostile reviews in the *Tablet* mocked the pageant's inadequacies of ritual, music and dress, and the 'Popeless continuity theory' it embodied. In April 1909 Monsignor Henry James Grosch (1860–1923), the Roman Catholic rector of St John's, Duncan Terrace, Islington, announced lectures on 'Pageants and their Purpose'; 'Half the truth worse than \_\_\_\_\_\_'; 'Collapse or Continuity'; 'England and the Popes'; 'Suggestions for another Scene'. A correspondent to the *Tablet* called for yet another ecclesiastical pageant, but this time a Catholic one,

showing the true historical narrative of the Catholic Church from St. Augustine to the present day, showing the vicissitudes which the Church has gone through since the so-called 'Reformation' and then the gradual dawn of day culminating with the Catholic Emancipation Bill &c &c.60

Adopting a historicised rhetoric of the 'nation' thus created opportunities for opponents of both the Church of England and the pageant itself. Nonetheless it had important long-term and beneficial consequences for the future cultural authority of the institution in the new kind of national life made possible by democratisation, the rise of the mass media and the increasing speed of communications – and decisively accelerated in the early twentieth century by the psychological and social demands of total war. All these developments encouraged forms of cultural expression emphasising inclusiveness, collective national identity and a rootedness in national tradition. The fuzzy rhetoric of the 'grand old national church of England' would speak clearly to Baldwin's Britain and beyond. It would underpin a hegemonic place in the politico-religious culture for the Church of England until the end of the twentieth century, in which it could position itself as curating the religious expression of national identity even when that took a multidenominational, or even multireligious, form.61

In recent years, understandings of the timing and dynamics of British secularisation have changed dramatically. The focus of attention has shifted from the socio-economic developments of the nineteenth century to a range of social and cultural drivers operating in the twentieth, with many key developments occurring in the 1960s. In recent accounts of the institutional Church of England's contribution to English national life in the post-war era, written against the backdrop of this wider historiography, the role of the Church as 'curator' of major events in national life – not least of those with connections to the monarchy (for example, the death of Princess Diana) – has been a significant theme.62 The Church's claim to this position in what was unquestionably in many other respects a secularising society still rested to a significant degree on assumptions derived from the argument for which, in an extended version, the English Church Pageant provided an early proving ground.

#### Notes

*English Church Pageant*. Both are referenced below: to avoid confusion, the volume cited in this paragraph appears hereafter as *Book ECP*, with *Handbook ECP* referring to the second volume. Details of the initial membership of the Executive Committee are confused, with *The Times* list not matching that in the *Book ECP.*

#### Bibliography

### 4 The Pomp of Obliteration: G. K. Chesterton and the Edwardian Pageant Revival

Michael Shallcross

In 1904 the journalist, poet and critic G. K. Chesterton published his first novel, *The Napoleon of Notting Hill*, to immediate critical and commercial success. This satirical fantasia, set 80 years in the future, concerns an uprising of the citizens of the London borough of Notting Hill, led by Adam Wayne – the titular Napoleon figure – in protest against a plan to bulldoze a public square to make way for a major arterial road. Wayne's revolt is accompanied by an upsurge of pageantry, resulting from a prior decree by the king of England – a whimsical ironist named Auberon Quin – that all Londoners must adopt brightly coloured uniforms to advertise the borough to which they belong. Quin's absurdist plan to reinstate 'the full richness of … medieval garments', along with 'symbolic head-gears', banners and coats of arms, is inspired by a facetiously expressed wish to go down in 'history as the man who saved from extinction a few old English customs'.1 As Chesterton's friend E. C. Bentley noted when reviewing the novel for the *Bystander*, Chesterton's own intent was entirely earnest: his construction of a dazzling fictional 'pageant of blue and green, of red, gold, and purple' in the streets of London was conceived to reawaken 'the sentiment of local patriotism' in the reader.2

In a curious case of life imitating art, a year after the novel's publication Chesterton's textual Napoleon accrued a real-life counterpart – in the form of the civic-minded impresario Louis Napoleon Parker, whose organisation of the Sherborne pageant, held from 12 to 15 June 1905, effectively inaugurated the Edwardian pageant revival. The philosophy underpinning Parker's movement, with its emphasis upon a spectacular resistance to the utilitarian demands of commercial modernity, closely mirrors that of Chesterton's novel. As Parker explained, the 'properly conducted pageant' should be 'designed to kill' the 'modernising spirit', which 'destroys all loveliness and has no loveliness of its own to put in its place'.3 Equally Parker's mission to establish a new form of 'historical folkplay' grounded in populist aesthetics and designed to blur the boundaries between everyday life and dramatic spectacle might have been conceived expressly to command Chesterton's artistic sympathies.4 Chesterton's earliest journalistic success had been founded upon articles in praise of popular culture, such as 'A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls'.5 His subsequent rise to the status of literary celebrity had been substantially fostered by his habit of practising in real life what he preached in print, wandering the streets of London dressed as a brigand, flourishing a swordstick at astonished passers-by.

Accordingly Chesterton was among the first cultural critics to recognise the significance of Parker's movement; he engaged with the revival first as a commentator and spectator, and subsequently as a participant. In this chapter I explore the progress of Chesterton's engagement, focusing particularly upon the commercial and ideological tensions that increasingly infiltrated the movement in the period leading up to the English Church Pageant of 1909. Chesterton participated in this event, an experience he later documented in 'The Mystery of a Pageant', a semifictionalised account published in the *Daily News*. 6 I argue that the sense of psychological disquiet that suffuses 'The Mystery of a Pageant' is revelatory not only of the deeper emotional investments that had first drawn Chesterton to the concept of pageantry, but also the gradual erosion of Parker's idealistic precepts as the Edwardian era progressed. I end by discussing Chesterton's later embrace of a smaller-scale, do-it-yourself approach to the staging of pageantry in the interwar years, a development conceived to restore the ethos of principled amateurism that had first drawn him to the form.

#### Ceremonial rejoicing vs jerry-built jubilees

Jed Esty's influential account of early twentieth-century writers' engagements with pageantry turns upon an interpretation of Parker's movement as essentially jingoistic: the 'Parkerian pageant' was founded upon a 'hackneyed nationalism' and 'rote patriotism', which presupposed 'a particular relationship between regional myth and colonial ambition'.7 In consequence, the 'riches of English tradition [became] both the motivation for and the exported good of imperialism', while English heritage was conceived 'to play an inspirational role for both centrifugal, colonial action and centripetal, nostalgic memory'.8

The contemporary reader, familiar with this critical narrative, might be surprised to discover that Chesterton's initial embrace of the pageant revival was inspired by his *anti*-imperialist politics. In addition to his paeans to popular culture, Chesterton's first journalistic renown had been built on opposition to the Second Boer War (1899–1902). This stance placed him at odds with a media consensus largely characterised by unreflective jingoism, but accorded with the position of his employer, the 'pro-Boer' Liberal periodical, the *Speaker*. He later described the war as '[p]erhaps the catastrophic event' of his life: '[t]here I saw something which seemed to me to be the meanest kind of financial grab'.9 Thirtyfour years after the conflict's end, the sense of outrage resounds with undiminished force in his *Autobiography* (1936): 'I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before'.10

As Anna Vaninskaya notes, the plot of *The Napoleon of Notting Hill* was designed to lead the reader to the conclusion that patriotism and imperialism were incompatible: 'patriotism is condemned' in the novel 'as soon as it turns aggressive and grasping, as soon as it turns into imperialism'.11 Chesterton articulated his views on the matter in more direct terms at the height of the Boer conflict, distinguishing genuine patriotism from the 'rote' variety later discussed by Esty: 'this recent movement in England, which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to [me] to have none of the marks of patriotism'.12 Instead, a strange 'decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two' has caused 'the current lust of territory' to become 'confounded with the ancient love of country'.13 Chesterton goes on to posit the source of, and potential solution to, this malaise:

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land … The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English nationalism [arises from] the condition of not knowing our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history of universal thought and sentiment … in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any [nation]. But all this vast heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a heresy.14

A later article on 'Patriotism and Play-acting' develops the argument further.15 Whereas militaristic competition is a trait universal to humanity, and therefore essentially 'anti-national', Chesterton argues that the 'things that are really patriotic' are only those 'which are really local and home grown', such as 'art and literature'.16 Consequently, rather than celebrating imperial escapades, the English 'ought to have been jingo about the English drama … The evil of modern England is that she has historic flags but no historic theatre'.17 Parker's inaugural Sherborne pageant took place just two months later.

Although Parker shared Chesterton's disdain for the sort of patriotism 'that got up and struck the stranger across the forehead', his view of the relationship between patriotism and empire was less strictly bifurcating than that of Chesterton. His Dover pageant, for example, concluded with a sentimental maternalisation of the imperial landing stage, surrounded by Dover's 'colonial "daughter-cities"'.18 Nonetheless, Parker's prescription for the ideal pageant echoed Chesterton's emphasis upon 'the right kind of patriotism', the symbols of which are all domestically focused – 'love of hearth; love of town; love of country; love of England' – and he stressed that this philosophy must find pragmatic expression in the event's modes of production: 'every article of whatever kind used in the performance must be invented, designed, and made in the town; out of material purchased from local purveyors'.19

Parker's provincialist ethos can be interpreted partially as a critical response to other, transnational forms of patriotic celebration that had gained traction in recent years – forms against which Chesterton had also raised his voice. The year 1904 saw not only the publication of *The Napoleon of Notting Hill*, but also the importation of 'Empire Day' from Canada to the UK. Chesterton responded by decrying the 'movement in favour of Imperial pageantry' in a contemporaneous article in the *Daily News*. 20 He returned to the point four years later in 'Empire Day and England' in the *Illustrated London News*. In this article Chesterton argued that such events merely illustrated the emptiness of officially sanctioned festivity; he complained of 'jerry-built jubilees', established 'with entire solemnity' by the recently established League of the Empire and propped up by the propagandising of 'the Daily Jingo', as he contemptuously rebranded the *Daily Mail*. 21 For Chesterton, such events could never achieve true popular appeal because their ostentatious grandstanding contravened two crucial national characteristics, namely 'the English shyness and the English humour'.22

Chesterton was equally dismissive of more spontaneous expressions of nationalist enthusiasm. One example of these was Mafeking Night, which occurred on 18 May 1900 when press reports of a pyrrhic victory over the Boers inspired the public to take to the streets in celebration. Once again Chesterton punctured this mood of public and press consensus, later arguing that the event had left nothing but a cultural hangover in its wake: '[o]n Mafeking Night, celebrating a small but picturesque success against the Boers, nearly everybody in London came out waving little flags. Nearly everybody in London is now heartily ashamed of it'.23 This sense of alienation from his fellow citizens placed Chesterton in a disconcerting position. A self-avowed populist who considered it 'painful to notice that at the present time mobs are not properly admired', he applauded the capacity of the collective public body to 'melt' the proud individual 'in a monstrous furnace' of festivity. Yet Chesterton was equally conscious of the power of the press to mould the mass mood for good or ill, and was anxious to establish an alternative, cogent, ethical standpoint to justify his own contribution to public discourse.24 The true demagogue, he argued, is not 'one who pleases the populace, but one who leads it'. His later essay, 'An Apology for Buffoons', explains the methods through which he attempted to smuggle such demagoguery into the public consciousness:

I myself, who am a very minor buffoon … do regularly and as a matter of business make a multitude of bad jokes. I do it for reasons connected with the duties of demagogy.25

Chesterton's use of buffoonery to convey ethical instruction is epitomised by his writing on imperialism, which consistently deploys bathetically materialistic analogies to expose rhetorical sophistry. An example arises in 'A Defence of Patriotism', in which the empire's geographic extremities are reconceived as 'its fists and its boots' – an image that associates brute oppression with the furthest reaches of an imperial body politic divested of an integral 'head and heart'.26 A similarly corporeal image arises in his later polemical tract, *What's Wrong with the World* (1910), in which he observes: 'that an Empire whose heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should still be proud of his legs'.27 In this way Chesterton manipulates what Alexander Pope termed 'the very bathos of the human Body' in order to parody the sentimental pseudo-sublimity of an empire upon which 'the sun never sets'.28

Chesterton's mastery of this form of comic counterargument was nurtured by his journalistic position at the *Speaker*. Following its takeover in 1899 by an insubordinate gang of Oxford graduates assembled by J. L. Hammond, the periodical's editorial tone continually 'parodied and ridiculed the language and demolished the moral and intellectual pretentions of empire'.29 In his autobiography, Chesterton reports an incident at the height of the Boer War in which he and Hilaire Belloc – a fellow contributor to the *Speaker* and the dedicatee of *The Napoleon of Notting Hill* – put this spirit of pedagogic opposition into direct practice. Finding themselves in the midst of a 'Jingo mob', the pair initiated a game of 'patriotic parody', deliberately antagonising the crowd and effectively inciting a riot:

I remember waiting with a Pro-Boer friend in the midst of a Jingo mob outside the celebrated Queens Hall Meeting which ended in a free fight. My friend and I adopted a method of patriotic parody or *reductio ad absurdum*. We first proposed three cheers for Chamberlain, then three cheers for Rhodes, and then by degrees for more and more dubious and demi-naturalised patriots. We actually did get an innocent cheer for Beit … But when it came to our impulsive appeal to the universal popularity of Albu, the irony of our intention was discovered; and the fight began.30

While Chesterton takes evident delight in reporting this incident, in which adversarial satire delivers an acerbic corrective to unreflective nationalism, he remained acutely conscious of the risk of the public body devolving into acrimonious division. Accordingly, he possessed a countervailing, reconciliatory urge to establish more constructive forms of 'patriotic parody'.

The pageant revival offered the perfect outlet for this urge. Rather than fostering a national sense of self through opposition to a foreign people, Parker sought to construct a shared sense of cultural identity via collective impersonation of local historical figures and re-enactment of local historical events. Esty reports that this emphasis upon communal endeavour came to be viewed as a potential handmaiden of 'interclass harmony', especially since Parker's emollient brand of 'English civic nationalism' seemed 'likely to promote and express just enough collective spirit to bind citizens together but not to trip over into the frightening power of fascist mob fever'.31 Pageantry thus seemed to offer 'a quasimystical act of collective social healing … spectacle as communal ritual', as Ayako Yoshino puts it, and therefore suggested a means of bridging the 'chasm' that Chesterton considered to have lately 'opened in the community of beliefs and social traditions'.32

Parker's model also accords with Johan Huizinga's segregation of pageantry from sport, as distinct forms of game-playing: 'a pageant … [may] be altogether lacking in antithesis'.33 This absence of competition is emphasised in Chesterton's view of the correct application of play, as articulated in implicitly anti-imperial terms in a two-part article on 'Some Urgent Reforms: Playgrounds for Adults', published in the *Speaker* on 16 and 30 November 1901: '[g]ames as ordinarily understood do not constitute play, they constitute sport. In a game, as the adult understands a game, the essential is competition, and the aim victory'.34

Conversely, Chesterton finds the communal ethos of children's play to resemble the origins of the dramatic spectacle:

The theatre was originally what children's play is, a festival, a strictly ceremonial rejoicing. Children merely reproduce the theatre in a more human, direct, and powerful manner, by being themselves both the spectators and the actors.35

This last phrase finds an echo in Deborah Sugg Ryan's account of the Edwardian pageant. Here she acknowledges how an intensified sense of 'interaction between performers and audience' caused boundaries to become 'blurred between the spectators and the spectated', the audience's sense of quasi-participation engendering an atmosphere of heightened collective self-consciousness.36 Ryan's terms correspond closely to Mikhail Bakhtin's famous exposition of the medieval carnival, in which 'the basic carnival nucleus of [medieval festive] culture' represents

life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play … Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators.37

Elsewhere Bakhtin explicitly links carnival to pageantry, describing the former as a 'ritualistic' mode of 'syncretic pageantry'.38 The re-emergence of this ancient festive conflation of theatricality and 'real life' within Edwardian pageantry is illustrated both by the frequently 1:1 scale of the events – Parker's pageants incorporated a 'huge casts of actors, averaging five thousand people' – and the tendency for the performance to go on long after the official close of play: participants 'often wore their costumes in their everyday jobs and for weeks after the pageant ended'.39

This dissolution of conceptual boundaries was encouraged by the air of wider temporal disruption that these events engendered. Esty notes that the view of Edwardian pageantry as a form of 'modern folk ritual' arose partially from 'its technical demand for collective or choral voices, and its tight unity of place coupled with an almost magical dilation of historical time'.40 A pageant organiser from Rochester described the temporal dilation that seemed to grip the town itself in 1931 during preparations for the event:

We were discovering that it was an exciting thing to live in our city … Once again the city was becoming Saxon, medieval, Dickensian: there was only a thin veneer of modernism disguising it.41

This palimpsestic premise recalls Chesterton's exposition of the value of the pantomime 'transformation scene', in which 'the front scene is still there, but the back scene begins to glow through it'.42 Pantomime is the subject of another of Chesterton's 'Defence' essays, 'A Defence of Farce'. This piece anticipates the report of the Rochester pageant organiser by espousing a juxtaposition of prosaic reality and fantastical art as a means of revealing the exciting possibilities of the city: 'it must be an actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into the air without his touching them' in order to produce the sense of an 'elvish invasion of civilization, [an] abrupt entrance of Puck into Pimlico'.43

As these imaginative correspondences suggest, the affinity of Parker's vision with that of Chesterton was not only social and cultural, but also aesthetic. Most significantly, the fabulous dimensions of Parker's version of pageantry appealed to Chesterton's love of what Bakhtin terms the 'folk grotesque' – an amalgamative, 'serio-comical' form, which functions as the aesthetic *métier* of carnival.44 Parker decreed that the ideal pageant should include 'every form of drama: tragedy, comedy, even farce. It is based on authentic history, but it welcomes folk-lore', and consequently, '[t]here may also be grotesques, hobby-horses, etc.'.45 In situating this cornucopia as the necessary backdrop for his 'great Festival of Brotherhood', Parker mirrored Chesterton's visionary celebration of carnival in *G. F. Watts* (1904) – another text that immediately predates the beginning of the pageant revival.46 Here Chesterton invokes a carnivalesque nonsense-vision to illustrate his theological belief in what he terms elsewhere the 'vast metaphysical democracy of things':

There is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in the glorious Carnival of theology.47

Four years later, this premise was given fictional life in the pageant of creation that concludes his novel, *The Man Who Was Thursday* (1908), in which [a] vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume. There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon.48

The surreal utopianism of the novel's conclusion has its origins in Chesterton's youthful embrace of a vision of comradeship influenced by Walt Whitman, whom he later described as 'the greatest man of the nineteenth century'.49 It also closely anticipates Chesterton's later, more quotidian involvement in pageantry. In June 1908, just four months after the publication of *The Man Who Was Thursday*, Chesterton attended Harry Irvine's Chelsea Historical Pageant. While the typical Edwardian pageant may not have been quite as uproariously nonsensical as Chesterton's vision of metaphysical carnival, Paul Readman notes that 'May Day revels' were a frequent theme, and Irvine took up Parker's prescribed merger of 'authentic history [and] folk-lore' with gusto.50 The photographs that have survived of the Chelsea pageant reveal a spectacle of decidedly carnivalesque dimensions, incorporating Mr Punch travelling in a carriage and a gargantuan effigy of Orgoglio from Edmund Spenser's *The Faerie Queene* (1590), paraded during a 'children's masque' section (Figs 4.1 and 4.2).51

**Figure 4.1** Mr Punch and his retinue at the Chelsea Historical Pageant. Mr Punch is the small figure seated at the front of the carriage, whip in hand. Reproduced with permission of Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries.

**Figure 4.2** Orgoglio at the Chelsea Historical Pageant. Reproduced with permission of Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries.

Such images hark back to the 'wicker-work carnival giants' that Peter L. Caracciolo identifies as a medieval 'feature of the north French fête des fols'. They also offer a striking counterpart to Chesterton's later account of the ancient tradition of mummery as a form of community 'ritual' in which the performers enact a 'pomp of obliteration and anonymity' within the collective historical body, 'making Man something other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things'.52 For Chesterton, the costumery of the mummers' play produces 'a profound paradox: the concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the person … [in] a rite [that] seeks to be at once invisible and conspicuous'.53 It is little surprise that Chesterton was swept up by the Edwardian pageant's realisation of this premise via an audacious fusion of the amateur, the folkloric and the mass participatory, all wrapped up in a spectacle designed authentically to sublimate the patriotic impulse. As Chesterton later recalled, 'these shows and pageants meant immeasurably much to me, and profoundly affected my emotions'.54

Nonetheless, the gigantesque scale of Irvine's Chelsea pageant also hints at the commercial pressures that began to impinge upon the pageant phenomenon as its popularity grew, producing a dissonance with Parker's idealistic view that 'a pageant must never be undertaken with a view to making money'.55 By 1907, talk of 'pageant mania' and 'pageantitis' permeated the media, with Chesterton himself describing the phenomenon as having become 'fashionable' around this time.56 The emergence of the 'pageant as consumable product', as Yoshino puts it, is illustrated by the increasing ubiquity of commemorative souvenirs at such events – often taking the form of wares presented as authentic to the locality and sold to 'wealthy people with money to spend, many of whom had travelled from other areas'.57 Accordingly, the tension between official and popular forms of festivity that Chesterton had identified as a design flaw of Empire Day began to exert a comparable stress upon Parker's model.

This change was reflected in the social organisation of both the performers and the spectators, which became increasingly segregated along class lines. Although Parker had declared 'that aristocrats should play serfs and vice versa', increasingly the 'most prominent parts were bagged by local elites' while the seating was segregated by cost.58 Shortly after the Chelsea Historical Pageant, Chesterton alluded to this issue in an article on 'Local Pride and Pageants', positing two alterations that he felt would improve such events: 'first, cheaper prices; and second, a healthy atmosphere of popular derision'.59

Chesterton's article anticipates Yoshino's critique of the 'packaging of the locality for consumption by the visitor' by highlighting the increasingly tenuous connection between the popular history of the specific pageant location and the universally recognisable historical figures chosen to populate the show.60 For Chesterton, rather than celebrating the fact that a famous person once passed through the area, 'a local pageant ought to be a festival of real local patriotism … concerned with the real pride of real people in their town'.61 He alights upon the impoverished district of Pimlico – the same locale to which he had turned in his celebration of pantomime – to develop the point:

Suppose they have a pageant in Pimlico – I hope they will. Then let Pimlico lift up in its pride anything that it is really proud of, if it be only the parish pump or the public-house sign … its best donkey, its blackest chimney-sweep, or even its member of Parliament.62

As the pageant revival came to be appropriated by the cultural mainstream, Parker's domestically oriented vision of patriotism also began to be adulterated, with events catering instead to more imperially propagandist impulses. This was especially true of the work of Frank Lascelles, who co-ordinated the celebration of the opening of the Union Parliament of South Africa in 1909, thus finding renown as the 'man who staged the empire'.63 As Ryan notes, although Lascelles worked broadly within the same pageant framework, he was 'no imitator of Parker' – in addition to their ideological differences, Lascelles' aesthetic approach took Irvine's taste for spectacle a stage further, largely hollowing out narrative in favour of dramatic visual effects.64 In the same year as the opening of the Union Parliament, Lascelles was invited to act as pageant-master at the English Church Pageant (see chapter 3), held at Fulham Palace on 10–24 June – an event that also saw Chesterton participating for the first time in a major pageant.

In view of Chesterton's conception of the Boer War as 'the meanest kind of financial grab', he would have found Lascelles' propagandising activities in South Africa especially uncongenial. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the English Church Pageant should have crystallised the increasing tension between his idealistic hopes for the pageant revival and the corrupting influence of commercial modernity upon the movement. Moreover, in view of Chesterton's deeply held religious beliefs, the theological context of the event would have heightened his discomfort over the element of superficiality that he increasingly associated with his public celebrity. These stresses were also exacerbated by more intimate psychological anxieties. As he later explained of the effect produced by the pantomime 'transformation scene', although it engendered 'the delightful sensation of being in two places at once', a certain disquiet was instilled by 'the unreason and the vertigo of the vision'.65 Thus, the pageants' magical dilation of time, along with the identity-confounding implications of melting into a costumed mob, merged with the heady 'emotions' that Chesterton had invested in the movement to produce a somewhat combustible mental state. Perhaps most strikingly, these manifold tensions came to be embodied literally in the form of the public figure whom Chesterton had been called upon to impersonate at the English Church Pageant: Samuel Johnson.

#### 'The Mystery of a Pageant'

On 19 June 1909 Chesterton devoted his weekly column in the *Daily News* to an account of the English Church Pageant, entitled 'The Mystery of a Pageant'. This curious hybrid text negotiates a winding path between his preferred fictional and non-fictional forms – the mystery story and the journalistic essay – while combining burlesque buffoonery with more literal forms of travesty, the etymology of which is 'dressed in disguise'.66 Most notably, the article juggles an audacious array of physical and textual parodies of Samuel Johnson.

As with Chesterton's burlesque methods of debunking imperialist rhetoric, Johnson often exploited the juxtaposition of 'official verbal machinery' and 'colloquial phrases' for the satirical purpose of 'confronting high ideas with "inelegant applications" to common life'.67 Chesterton's narrative begins in a similar spirit of burlesque satire, inspired by his discovery that the man immediately preceding him in the pageant is impersonating Bishop George Berkeley, the Enlightenment philosopher who espoused an extreme form of immaterialism. Although Chesterton acknowledged Berkeley to have been a 'great' figure, he considered his philosophy to have been founded on the precept that 'everything is relative to a reality that is not there'.68 For Chesterton, this was an example of the 'thought that stops thought' insofar as it encouraged solipsism, thus closing off the possibility of dialogue.69 Accordingly, he proposes brutally to acquaint Berkeley with the objective existence of others. Taking inspiration from Johnson's famous dismissal of the Bishop's antimaterialism – in which he violently kicked a large stone, before responding to the credulous Boswell, 'I refute it thus!' – Chesterton goes one step further. Musing upon the burlesque possibilities of Berkeley's taste for 'bottomless fancies', he observes

[h]ow picturesque and perfect it would be if I moved across the ground in the symbolic attitude of kicking Bishop Berkeley! How complete an allegorical group; the great transcendentalist walking with his head among the stars, but behind him the avenging realist *pede claudo*, with uplifted foot.70

In this way Johnson becomes the admired antecedent with whom Chesterton rides into battle against a philosophy with which he is unsympathetic and which he perceives to be paradigmatically modern; the intimacy of his identification with Johnson is heightened by the act of physical impersonation, which seems to meld the two personalities into one. The seasoned reader of Chesterton's pedagogic journalism therefore presumes that the ensuing article will be a playful satire, expanding upon the merits of Johnson's bluff, no-nonsense materialism and the contrary dangers of Berkeley's extreme Idealism. However, much as the conventional mystery story is built upon the confounding of expectation, 'The Mystery of a Pageant' soon pulls the rug from beneath the reader's feet, progressing by increments to a more ambiguous, disorientating mode of structural self-parody, while the confusion caused by the pageant's dressing-up game increasingly pollutes the satirical premise.

This air of disorientation first emerges when Chesterton becomes lost in the dark on the first night of the pageant. The experience causes his identification with Johnson to progress from a rational philosophical opposition to Berkeley to a more intimate, irrational affinity with Johnson's fears of personal isolation: 'I began almost to feel like my prototype, and to share his horror of solitude'.71 This acknowledgement of psychological affinity is accompanied by bodily self-deprecation, via a vivid rendition of corporeal abjection:

I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson. Seeing that Dr. Johnson was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all over gravy, snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest man in London, I mention this *identification* as a fact and not as a vaunt (emphasis added).72

Later, Chesterton conceives his personality to be a presence quite as unwelcome as his physical form, when his pedantic insistence that the event should adhere literally to historical fact begins to grate on the nerves of the pageant's organisers. Soon after, he commits a burlesque pratfall in the dark, 'tumbl[ing] over tent ropes' – a mishap in which the inanimate world turns the practical joke of kicking the unwitting Berkeley back upon the complacent satirist.73 This final indignity causes Chesterton to hypothesise the reader's thoroughgoing contempt: 'I am (you will say) naturally obtuse, cowardly, and mentally deficient'.74

At this moment of utmost authorial abjection an apparent knight in shining armour emerges in the shape of 'Paley' – a figure who 'used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity', as Chesterton explains.75 This is a reference to William Paley, the eighteenth-century theologian who sought to challenge the early stirrings of scepticism in the Enlightenment age by advancing the concept of intelligent design. A correspondence therefore emerges with the conclusion of *The Man Who Was Thursday*, in which the beneficent actions of the quasi-religious parental figure of Sunday direct the disorientated protagonist, Gabriel Syme, to the beginnings of Christianity – in the literal form of page one of the Bible – by engineering his participation in a pageant of creation. Similarly, the man playing Paley guides Chesterton away from confusion and isolation into an illuminated realm of companionship: 'we came out into the glare of gaslight and laughing men in masquerade'.76 Once having returned to the revellers, who subsequently 'fooled as one does at a fancy-dress ball' throughout the night, Chesterton's re-attainment of mental balance is reflected in a renewed capacity for self-deprecating humour: 'I could easily laugh at myself'.77

A pedagogic account of the value of pageantry seems to emerge, as the temporal double vision that underpins this scene of costumed camaraderie causes the dogmatic barriers separating individuals to break down. Chesterton discovers that unlike his 'prototype' Johnson, he has more in common with the man playing Berkeley than the representative of Edmund Burke. Accordingly the tone of the piece progresses from the oppositional satire of his violent response to Berkeley towards a more balanced position encouraged by the identity confusion ingrained within the pageant format, which sets up a fugitive between-space of ideological amnesty.

However, when Chesterton's attention turns to the morning after the night before, the tone of the piece drifts away from this edifying spectacle into a more disturbingly nonsensical realm. Most curiously, the locus of disorientation turns out to be the figure of Paley. While the features of Chesterton's other 'old friends' remain 'fixed and familiar', Paley proceeds to 'swell and shrink' – a reversal of the progress of *The Man Who Was Thursday*, in which a gradual physical stabilisation takes hold of the previously protean supporting characters once the protagonist's mental equilibrium is re-established.78 Indeed, despite the initial resemblance of Paley to Sunday, the article turns out to be structured upon a wholesale inversion of the novel's movement from chaos to order; it devolves instead from utopian carnival to ever-greater cognitive disarray, as the identity of the person playing Paley continues to alter inexplicably with each passing day:

It certainly seemed odd that this one particular cleric should be so varying and elusive. It was singular that Paley, alone among men, should … alter like a phantom, while all else remained solid.79

As with Syme's initial inability confidently to assess Sunday's true character in *Thursday*, this mutability eventually causes Chesterton's grasp of interpretive frameworks to collapse: '[d]id these perpetual changes prove the popularity or the unpopularity of Paley?'80 Again the reader remains alert, since this kind of rhetorical play in Chesterton's journalism usually prefigures the arrival of a neat inversion through which reason will be conjured from disarray – a prospect apparently held out by the allegorical teaser that Chesterton's mental confusion was beginning to mirror that 'of the modern world … in which all natural explanations have broken down and no supernatural explanation has been established' to replace them.81 However, not only does such an explanation fail to materialise, but Paley is also made to dematerialise more radically:

I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery; and that for two reasons. First, the story is so true that I have had to put a lie into it. Every word of this narrative is veracious, except the one word Paley. And second, because I have got to go into the next room and dress up as Dr. Johnson.82

With that, the article abruptly concludes.

Whereas the mystery of *The Man Who Was Thursday* is dispersed by the consecutive erasure of a series of misapprehensions, here the central plank of the narrative is finally revealed to have been illusory, leaving us with an entirely unexplained mystery. This tale with 'the dark qualities of a detective story … that Sherlock Holmes himself could hardly unravel' ends on an aporetic note of non-resolution, 'which has never been explained and which still lays its finger on my nerve'.83 While this premise establishes a superficial similarity to Sunday's propounding of unexplained textual riddles in *The Man Who Was Thursday*, once more the article establishes an effect contrary to that of the novel. Whereas Sunday's insoluble riddles operate as the paper trail that entices Syme onward towards his participation in the utopian pageant of creation, the riddle that Chesterton implants within this real-life Church Pageant renders the event dystopian and its chronicler untrustworthy. He confesses that he has been misleading the reader throughout as to the signifier of the individual who initially guided him to safety, whose identity has subsequently been subjected to various forms of erasure: 'I had been mystically moved by the man's presence; I was moved more by his absence'.84

Thus the 'pomp of obliteration' that Chesterton identified as a merit of mummery is rehearsed here in a rather more alarming sense. The verb *obliterare* derives from *littera* – a 'letter, something written' – so that its reverse connotes something 'struck out, erased'.85 Paley, it seems, has been erased both from the narrative and from the event due to the contemporary unpopularity of his views. Earlier in the text Chesterton bumps into an old school friend, who confesses 'I don't know who [Paley] was' – to which Chesterton replies gloomily, 'nor does any one'.86

If Paley is a dead letter in the modern world, this is a category into which Malcolm Muggeridge also assigned Chesterton: 'a displaced person, a letter delivered at the wrong address'.87 This element of dislocation helps to explain the uncanny quality of Chesterton's narrative. Freud's famous term, *unheimlich*, refers to 'what is not at home'.88 Likewise, Chesterton's disorientated journey across the pageant ground radiates a sense of misplacement. This is compounded by the temporal doubleexposure effect of the event itself, which threatens not to produce the reassuring sense of material superabundance that Chesterton associated with the folk grotesque, but instead to cast the time-traveller adrift, in a correspondence with the 'bottomless fancies' of Berkeley, or his account elsewhere of the modern 'sceptic' whose mind 'sinks through floor after floor of a bottomless universe'.89

The motif of physical dual identity that underpins pageant performance serves only to compound the disarray. In 'The Mummers', Chesterton alludes obliquely to the importance that physical disguise held for him as a psychologically stabilising conceit: 'merry-makers … adopt their costume to heighten and exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it, primarily speaking, in another identity'.90 However, in this instance Chesterton's choice of disguise entails an imaginative conjunction with a figure possessed of a disruptive *internal* dual identity comparable to his own. While Chesterton considered Johnson to have been 'a splendidly sane man who knew he was a little mad', Jorge Luis Borges argued that Chesterton succeeded in maintaining his sanity only by forcibly 'restrain[ing] … something in the makeup of his personality [that] leaned toward the nightmarish'.91 'The Mystery of a Pageant' is a rare textual instance of Chesterton voluntarily slackening these restraints, and the pretext for doing so is the uncanny communion with Johnson that he experienced on the pageant ground.92

The grotesque underpinning of pageantry is a further contributing factor to the destabilising drive of Chesterton's narrative. As Philip Thomson notes, 'the satirist who uses the grotesque as a tool … must be careful', since the intended 'didactic point … may be obscured for the reader by the nonplussing, disorientating and generally overwhelming effect of the grotesque'.93 As we have seen, if 'The Mystery of a Pageant' possesses a satirical message, it would seem to centre upon the organisers' failure to include Paley in a celebration of famous church figures. Such a lacuna illustrates the modern world's ignorance of his value(s) and results in the air of ontological chaos that suffuses the text. However, this moral is muddied by Chesterton's deliberate disorientation of the reader with the final twist in the tale. In this he confesses to implanting 'a lie' at the heart of the narrative, without going on to elaborate why he has done so. Despite his determined efforts to extricate himself from the disarray of his historical moment, this tension between the urge to offer satirical instruction and a contrary taste for grotesque complication situates Chesterton as a collaborator in, as much as a disperser of, the chaos of modernity.

This temperamental duality is played out in 'The Mystery of a Pageant' through a dextrous pastiche of Johnson's differing modes of literary expression. If Chesterton's conventional essay style is indebted to the witty moralising of Johnson's work in the *Idler* and the *Rambler*, his quasi-fictional approach in 'The Mystery of a Pageant' opens up a correspondence with the more equivocal traits of Johnson's creative work – most notably the famous ending of *The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia* (1759), '[t]he conclusion, in which nothing is concluded'.94 While attending lectures on modern literature at University College London in 1893, Chesterton had dwelt upon Johnson's phrase in his notes before adding, with implicit disapproval, 'very 19c n'est pas?' – by which he meant very much like the prevailing currents of modern philosophy.95

Despite Chesterton's implicit disapproval, 'The Mystery of a Pageant' concludes in precisely the same inconclusive manner. Towards the end of the narrative, he wonders why 'the giddy Paley [was] unfaithful among the faithful found' – a phrase that parodically inverts Milton's account of the seraph Abdiel in *Paradise Lost* (1667), who was 'faithful found / Among the faithless'. In this way the author gestures once more to *Rasselas*, which has been interpreted as a parody of *Paradise Lost*. 96 By embracing the inconclusive spirit of *Rasselas*, the author takes the opportunity to try on a rhetorical change of clothes, temporarily discarding the pedagogic guise in which he usually conducted his essays and thus establishing a means of avoiding unconscious self-parody.

As this sophisticated strategy suggests, a countervailing performance of self-possession offsets the article's experimentation with identity confusion – not only in the form of Chesterton's projection of awareness of the buffoonish figure he cuts, but also the playful deviation that he injects into the potentially mechanistic output of journalistic articles concerned with dispersing ontological and/or epistemological confusion. In this sense his final act of imitative repetition – 'I have got to go into the next room and dress up as Dr. Johnson' – could be interpreted in cyclical terms, as a return to the premise with which the essay began. Having enjoyed his interregnum of play, or the 'irresponsibility of a work of the imagination', as he would later describe *Rasselas* itself, Chesterton finally reclaims the reassuring status of Johnsonian moralist, returning to the fray to brutalise Berkeleyans once more.97

Indeed, as though anxious that his initial account of the event might have been too inscrutable, he followed up 'The Mystery of a Pageant' with a further journalistic dispatch, published in the *Illustrated London News* a fortnight later, in which the moral to be drawn from the English Church Pageant is set forth with scrupulous sobriety. If the first article highlights the psychological tensions that Chesterton experienced as an ontological feature of modernity, the follow-up article, 'Modern and Ancient Pageants', concerns itself with the more prosaic stresses exerted upon the event by the commercial structures of modernity.98

In one sense, the event had realised the hopes that Chesterton had first entertained for the pageant movement, while also according with the precepts of his body double. Johnson's view that '[m]en may differ from each other in many religious opinions, and yet all may retain the essentials of Christianity' accords with the inclusive ethos of the pageant, as explained by Arthur Burns in chapter 3: 'the organisers were determined that the Pageant itself should be irenic and non-sectarian'.99 Similarly, the 'power of the Pageant … as a pedagogic tool' was demonstrated by the series of university extension lectures given by Rev. Albert E. N. Simms to accompany the event. Burns reports the response of *The Times* to the pageant in terms reminiscent of Chesterton's practice of ethical buffoonery: it represented 'a resurrection of the medieval mode of combining amusement and instruction'.100 Chesterton makes a similar point in 'Modern and Ancient Pageants':

Things like the Church Pageant may do something towards snubbing this silly and derisive view of the past. Hitherto the young stockbroker, when he wanted to make a fool of himself, dressed up as Cardinal Wolsey. It may now begin to dawn on him that he ought rather to make a wise man of himself before attempting the impersonation.101

However, the English Church Pageant also encapsulated the increasingly elaborate and commercially demanding nature of such events as they became more popular: 11,000 performers were involved in the pageant, which ended by making a substantial financial loss. With the incremental commercialisation of the revival there had emerged an accompanying 'cult of celebrity and personality of the pageant master'; the organisers of the Church Pageant must consequently have been thrilled to secure the services of the celebrated Frank Lascelles, even if their most famous participant would have been rather more disquieted by the choice.102 When Lascelles dropped out at the eleventh hour (due to a disagreement over creative control), the organisers could at least console themselves that their main celebrity performer – Chesterton – was still on hand to boost the ticket sales required to recoup expenses such as the extravagant £7,000 grandstand.

Other means of remuneration included a luxury version of the handbook, sold to the more well-heeled spectators for 2s. 6d.; even the standard 6d. edition offered up copious advertising space, resulting in

**Figure 4.3** Advertisement for Colman's mustard in *English Church Pageant Handbook* (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1909). Author's collection.

some rather absurdist non sequiturs. The précis of the episode in which Chesterton performed, for example, is juxtaposed with an instruction to the reader that '[n]o dinner is altogether complete no matter what the menu unless the "cruet" includes Colman's Mustard' (Fig. 4.3).

Five years earlier, in *The Napoleon of Notting Hill*, Chesterton had used an advertisement for Colman's Mustard for rather more subversive purposes. The visiting President of Nicaragua, whose culture is under imperial threat, demonstrates that he respects the principles of pageantry rather more than his British hosts: he slices a mustard yellow segment from a Colman's billboard in front of a crowd of spectators before pinning it to his chest to produce an improvised rendition of his national costume. Mustard also makes an appearance in Chesterton's article on 'Modern and Ancient Pageants' in a glancing reference that emerges within a discussion of the value of stately ceremonial garb: 'the yellow robes' of a Chinese emperor 'might remind [one] of Dash's Mustard'.103 This freeassociative cross-reference proceeds directly from Chesterton's observation that '[t]he only objection to the excellent series of Pageants that has adorned England of late is that they are too expensive' – a complaint that arises within a broader exposition of the 'baseness of modernity', as illustrated by the vacuity of advertising culture: 'the only real vulgarity of advertisements … [is] that [the colours] are much too good for the meaningless work they serve'.104 The pageant handbook had perhaps hit a sore spot.

Accordingly 'Modern and Ancient Pageants' hinges upon an anxiety over meaning that again evokes existential unease:

A thing is insignificant when we do not know what it signifies … modern life, with its vastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth, is, in the exact sense, insignificant. Nobody knows what we mean; we do not know ourselves.105

While this immersive 'we' might imply a fugitive self-criticism on the part of the celebrity pageant participant, the article quickly draws the spotlight away from any confusion infecting the arena of performance. It focuses instead upon the author's reciprocal spectatorship of the audience, whose literally irrelevant contemporary costumes are 'divorced from all reason'.106 The collective pronoun thus shifts its orientation, now being used to reinstate Chesterton's detachment from the malaise: the article concludes, in lofty pedagogic fashion, that '[w]e have to teach' the public an alternative philosophy.107

In his earlier article on 'Local Pride and Pageants', Chesterton had developed a comparable argument about the dangers of insignificance, complaining that the absence of historical figures authentically connected to the locality resulted in pageants that ceased to be 'intelligible'.108 To this end, he wonders why the resolutely modern figures of Thomas Carlyle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Whistler are nowhere to be found in the Chelsea Historical Pageant, since pageants 'ought never to consist of mere dead history; but, as far as possible, of living traditions'.109 He then cites Johnson as a figure who might be used to establish a genuine conjunction of celebrity to place: 'there was always something of Fleet Street about Dr. Johnson, there is still a great deal of Dr. Johnson about Fleet Street'.110

Chesterton's appearance in the English Church Pageant fulfils his prescription for an injection of relative modernity into the format. His performance formed part of a wider restaging of the 'much-despised' eighteenth century, as the pageant handbook has it – a step that contravened Parker's generic diktat that no scene should depict an historical era closer to the present day than the mid-seventeenth century.111

Likewise, a sense of living history was conveyed by the segment's anti-slavery theme (Wilberforce also makes an appearance in this section), which Chesterton might have appreciated as an implied sideways glance at the imperialist impulses of the now-departed Lascelles. However, in the broader context of the pageant's thematic purpose, if Chesterton the man had been delivered to the wrong time, Chesterton the actor has been sent to the wrong place. There may still have been a 'great deal of Dr. Johnson about Fleet Street' in the Edwardian era, but Johnson's relevance to a history of the English Church is far less intuitive. His inclusion among a series of 'immortal laymen', in the handbook's phrase, seems inspired more by the organisers' desire to guarantee Chesterton's participation by satisfying his sense of personal identification with Johnson than by a clear sense of meaningful connection to the purpose of the pageant itself.112

As this conceptual tension suggests, Chesterton's embrace of the pageant format as a means of propelling himself beyond the confines of a modernity from which he felt alienated foundered precisely because his presence was required while Paley's was not. The event's commercial basis caused it to have more use for a recognisable celebrity dressed as a famous layperson than an anonymous performer dressed as a relatively obscure clergyman.

Simultaneously, this dynamic propelled Chesterton beyond the reach of the populace with whom he insistently identified; although he boasts in 'Modern and Ancient Pageants' that 'I myself got in with the rabble [at] the Church Pageant', he remains cordoned off from the crowd by his celebrity status.113 With these contexts in mind, an uneasy sense of implication in the degradation of once meaningful rituals can be read between the lines of both 'The Mystery of a Pageant' and 'Modern and Ancient Pageants'. The choice of *Rasselas* as a textual palimpsest for 'The Mystery of a Pageant' again proves more than adventitious: Chesterton later characterised the novel as 'an ironic tale of … disillusionments'.114 He never participated in a pageant on this scale again.

#### Conclusion

Despite Chesterton's withdrawal from the mainstream of the pageant craze at the end of the Edwardian era, his experiences on the pageant ground continued to bear creative fruit. 'The Mystery of a Pageant' formed a decisive point of intersection between Chesterton's two most significant incursions into the mystery genre, emerging a year after *The Man Who Was Thursday* and a year before the first *Father Brown* stories. Whereas the journalistic article radically disrupts the utopian conceit of the conclusion to *Thursday*, Chesterton later re-inscribed a sense of order in the person of his priest-detective, whom Walter Raubicheck has discussed as a between-time figure who might have walked straight out of a pageant-play into modern society: he is 'an Aquinas transferred from thirteenth-century France and Italy to twentieth-century England, alienated from the spirit of his time'.115

Father Brown might equally be read as a fictional surrogate for Paley, the moral guide hitherto absent from the modern age. In 'The Mystery of a Pageant', the paranoid, irrational explanations that Chesterton claims to have entertained to account for Paley's evanescent persona – that 'no human being could support being Paley for one night and live till morning' or that there might exist 'some ancient vendetta against Paley [pursued by] some secret society of Deists' – are just the kind of fevered, conspiratorial interpretations of prosaic phenomena that Brown delights in debunking throughout the series.116 Insofar as Chesterton's detective narratives depict this deductive process as a product of the grand lineage of Christian reason to which the English Church Pageant had also drawn attention, his fictional priest might be understood partially as a creative attempt to resolve his ambivalence over the event itself, by recovering its central pedagogic premise and articulating it to a mass readership.

Similarly, Chesterton's identification with Johnson was to find later creative expression in *The Judgement of Dr Johnson* (1927). This play for the professional stage draws upon the ethical lessons that Chesterton derived from the tenets of the pageant-play, while evincing a new degree of critical distance from his subject: the 'judgement' of the title remains equivocally poised between endorsement and evaluation. Meanwhile, the production proffers a remedy for Chesterton's complaint that Britain 'has historic flags but no historic theatre' by dedicating itself to an historical re-enactment of Johnson's time and by incorporating a critique of rote nationalism within the plot. In one scene we discover a flag placed derisively 'among the coloured handkerchiefs' of the female protagonist's household; a stage direction later requires a giant flag to be raised over the stage just as we are told that the boys around her 'never grow up'.117

While pursuing these fictional means of parsing the lessons of the pageant revival in the post-Edwardian period, Chesterton found a more prosaic method of extracting meaning from the phenomenon in later years by focusing his participatory efforts upon the small-scale, low-budget village pageants that increasingly sprang up in the interwar years, corroborating his dictum that 'England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs'.118 Although Chesterton occasionally dusted down his impersonation of Johnson at such events, perhaps the exemplary instance of his involvement in this new mode of provincial pageantry was a 'pageant of Nursery Rhymes' that took place in his adopted home of Beaconsfield in 1920.119 A far cry from the pomp of the English Church Pageant, the proceeds from this modest parade were donated to a charitable cause – the upkeep of a local convalescent home – rather than being redirected into attempts to recover the costs of a spectacular production.120

Chesterton's participation in the pageant took three forms. He manned the tobacco stall, paraded in the costume of Old King Cole and produced a makeshift handbook for the event in the form of a series of textual parodies of the Cole nursery rhyme, in the style of a range of modern poets including Robert Browning, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. Of these the parody of Whitman, his youthful hero, is perhaps the most successful, its playful hints of exhaustion at the poet's prolixity finally inspiring a punning expression of departure:

I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations, Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever; They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment; I myself am a complete orchestra. So long.121

Elsewhere the skit alludes to the accoutrements required by the spectator of commercial pageantry, for which the 'clairvoyant' poet of the common man has no purpose: '[n]eeding no telescope, lorgnette, fieldglass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez', the visionary versifier 'pierc[es] two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed', before exclaiming 'I perceive that you drink. (I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)'122 With this celebration of transtemporal, communal camaraderie, Chesterton captures the generous spirit of 'strictly ceremonial rejoicing' that had first drawn him to the pageant revival. While Lascelles went on to parade his grandiose vision of empire upon the world stage, presiding over the 15,000-strong Pageant of Empire at Wembley in 1924, Chesterton had recovered something of the original significance of pageantry in a quiet provincial backwater, in which 'the English shyness and the English humour' enjoyed a final, modest victory.

#### Notes

#### Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. *Rabelais and His World*, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 2006. *Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics*, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

Barnhart, Robert K., ed. 2011. *Chambers Dictionary of Etymology*. London: Chambers Harrap.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1973. *Other Inquisitions: 1937–1952*, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. London: Souvenir Press.

Caracciolo, Peter L. 1990. '"Carnivals of Mass-Murder": The Frazerian Origins of Wyndham Lewis's *The Childermass*', in *Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence*, edited by Robert G. Fraser and Carol Pert. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 207–31.

Ryan, Deborah Sugg. 1999. '"The Man Who Staged the Empire": Remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower 1875–2000', in *Material Memories: Design and Evocation*, edited by Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley. Oxford: Berg, 159–79.

Ryan, Deborah Sugg. 2010. 'Spectacle, the Public, and the Crowd: Exhibitions and Pageants in 1908', in *The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901–1910*, edited by Morna O'Neill and Michael Hatt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 43–71.

Stapleton, Julia, ed. 2012. *G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913*. 8 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto.

Svenaeus, Fredrik. 1999. 'Freud's Philosophy of the Uncanny', *Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review* 22: 239–54.

Thomson, Philip. 1972. *The Grotesque*. London: Methuen.

### 5 Historical Pageants, Citizenship and the Performance of Women's History before Second-Wave Feminism

Zoë Thomas

The craze for historical pageants began after a 1905 pageant in the small town of Sherborne, Dorset, when pageant-master Louis Napoleon Parker recruited 800 local people for a performance watched by 30,000.1 Before the First World War pageants regularly took place in small southern towns. They usually consisted of a chronological series of distinct episodes that began with the Roman occupation of Britain, depicted Queen Elizabeth I and a romanticised 'Merrie England', and ended before the eighteenth century. During the interwar period, however, historical pageants gained increasing popularity in industrial towns and cities and were used to commemorate industries, organisations and social movements; scenes from the nineteenth century now abounded.2 Pageants had by this time become a distinct, popular way for people to research, perform and enjoy history (alongside an opportunity to socialise). The crowds these attracted – regularly in the thousands – provide convincing evidence of continued popular interest in history. In the face of such public enthusiasm for these spectacles, it is widely acknowledged that they cannot simply be seen as 'top-down' efforts by upper-middle-class instigators to impose culture on the uneducated masses.3

Yet scholarly assessments have not usually considered women's central involvement in historical pageantry in twentieth-century Britain (though see chapter 6 in this volume).4 Mainstream pageants customarily had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of female participants, mostly taking non-speaking parts.5 The interwar period saw a democratisation of their roles: before 1914 women rarely held committee roles and were often relegated to dress-making parties, but after the First World War many became more centrally involved. In 1934 a journalist in the *Observer* suggested women were particularly invested in the craze because they 'sewed, they secretaried, they embroidered, they rehearsed, they committeed, they carpentered, they made chariots out of boxes and swans out of motor-cars, they worked twenty hours a day'.6 Small numbers of women even carved out prestigious roles as 'pageant-masters' [*sic*], for example Mary Kelly, Gwen Lally and Beatrice Maybury.7 It is essential to draw attention to the gendered nature of historical pageantry, since it was clearly rooted in female participation and nourished by women's creativity and practical endeavours.

Female contributions came to the fore within a distinct subset of historical pageants organised by women's groups. There is evidence of at least 200 such pageants in the interwar years, with a particular surge in the 1930s by organisations including the Women's Institute, the Townswomen's Guilds, the National Spinsters' Association, women's church groups and a number of university colleges.8 Mark Freeman has emphasised that when communities decided to stage historical pageants 'there needed to be some sense of a "usable" past, one which could be brought into the service of the present in some way'.9 For women's associations this 'usable' past was often not a general history of the locality. Women instead used pageants to conjure up an inspirational imagined community of women banded together in common aim, united in a collective wish to educate the public – and one another – about the contributions women had made to local, national and international history. The women they chose to dress up as for these performances – from Florence Nightingale to Boudica, through to the 'ordinary' woman – provided people with female role models and inspirational figures who had been active in shaping public life through their bravery, creativity and intelligence. Many of these pageants took place in England, but there were also performances in Belfast and Aberdeen. Participants varied in age, class and marital status, although organisers tended to be middle-class. When compared with mainstream pageants, these female-dominated performances provided greater opportunity for women to articulate their understanding of history, heritage, 'progress' and the ways in which the past had shaped the modern world.10 As such, these performances form the backbone of this research.

This chapter argues that historical pageants reveal the importance of women's groups – which often had no formal connections to each other – in creating, and sustaining, a national web of women's history-telling before second-wave feminism. Such a structure functioned as a powerful alternative to prevailing male-centred narratives. Prior to the professionalisation of women's history in the 1970s, when feminists advanced the study of women within the academy, thousands of people had already been invested in women's history since the interwar years. During this era women's history was regularly excluded from scholarly and popular discourse – including books, school textbooks, paintings and sculptures in national galleries and commissioned monuments – that claimed to tell the story of Britain's past.

Women employed numerous strategies to resist and revise such narratives. Historians such as Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck documented the economic and social roles of women in past societies in their scholarly work.11 Suffrage campaigners published autobiographies in an attempt to insert women's political contributions into historical narratives, and battled to get portraits of key figures onto the walls of national galleries.12 But mainstream women's groups played arguably the most vital role in nurturing women's historical and visual imaginations. Historical pageants provided a particularly compelling way to construct popular 'usable' pasts which cemented group cohesion, and enabled these groups visually to depict the history and interests peculiar to each organisation – from institutional histories and women's historic religious, political and professional roles to the importance of international 'sisterhood'. These performances were part of an active roster of leisure activities – including amateur dramatics, music-making and handiwork exhibitions – arranged by women's groups. All were committed to the belief that a shared community culture was crucial for a democratic society and that female involvement should be central.

Crucially, historical pageants provided a non-controversial format through which women's groups could use visual spectacle to legitimate the pursuits of modern women in national life and to encourage a more expansive, feminised public sphere.13 By stressing women's significance throughout history, such groups actively promoted the public role that women – both married and single – should play as newly enfranchised citizens. There has been much focus on female responses to suffrage in the national political arena. However, this chapter seeks to gain insight into how women – who probably did not consciously define themselves as feminists – engaged with debates about women's responsibilities in their local neighbourhoods.14 This research captures the engagement of women who may have considered such ideas only momentarily, but who chose voluntarily, at least for one day, to participate in an exploration of women's history. Admittedly some of these historical pageants were undoubtedly conservative and overtly patriotic. Yet women's interwar culture cannot be properly understood, as Alison Light has suggested, 'unless we admit that feminist work must deal with the conservative as well as the radical imagination'.15

An exception to the historiographical neglect of women's pageantry concerns events staged earlier, at the height of the suffrage campaign. The most famous of these was 'A Pageant of Great Women', a 1909 play that toured across the country before the First World War. It featured approximately 50 suffrage supporters dressed up as 'great' historical women to showcase 'the physical, intellectual, creative and ethical strengths of women'.16 Scholars have rightly seen in these openly polemical performances attempts to shape the political and social discourse around women in society.17 However, interest has mirrored the traditional tactic taken by early feminist historians of twentieth-century Britain – interdisciplinary scholars have focused on suffrage pageants and then leap-frogged to evaluate drama performances during second-wave feminism in the 1970s – which consequentially perpetuates the idea that the interwar period was one of feminist retrenchment.18 While recent scholarship has taken important steps to correct this misperception, historical pageants – and the continued use of visual spectacle for social and political needs – are only just beginning to form part of this critical recovery work.19

After partial emancipation for women due to the Representation of the People Act in 1918, a divergence in women's priorities did lead to a move away from openly radical feminism in favour of a variety of movements aimed at ameliorating social conditions and promoting new roles for women couched within the language of citizenship. The flourishing of women's associational historical pageants, however, reveals widespread interest in exploring the meaning of women's history in communities across the country. These performances functioned as a conduit of social change that facilitated a productive cross-pollination of ideas about the importance of female involvement in national life.

#### Women, politics and historical pageantry

After the initial burst of suffrage pageants, and a spate of female-led processions in London celebrating women's war work during the First World War, pageants organised by women's associations took place with regularity throughout the years between the wars.20 These historical pageants were regularly praised in the press; they were also brought to life by Virginia Woolf in her 1941 novel *Between the Acts*. 21 The performances varied in size and use of space, taking place in less traditional venues such as church halls, girls' schools and forest glens.  Instead, events were set up by independent women's groups that sought to bring together a cross-section of society. In contrast to traditional civic pageants, explicit links to the local community were often tenuous or non-existent and female figures were summoned from across history. Women's groups were united, however, in their wish to educate and inspire the public about the contributions women had historically made. As Mary Kelly noted in her manual *How to Make a Pageant* in 1936, one of the main concepts of pageantry was 'to praise famous men'. Women's groups consciously sought to move away from this approach and to reclaim instead the histories of women.22

Unlike interwar organisations with roots in the militant suffrage movement (such as the Women's Freedom League), which required commitment to the cause and a clearly articulated feminist view about absolute equality, most women's associational pageants hoped to appeal to a broad spectrum and encouraged women from all classes and political beliefs to be involved. Although this would have been complicated by existing hierarchies of friendships and embedded class structures, it was an approach that evidently appealed to large numbers of women. Mrs Godwin King, of the Women's Institute, felt in 1931 that although many hobbies such as knitting, handicrafts and gardening gave local women 'relief without much thought', drama provided 'an entirely different kind of relief' because:

Just for a time they were acting somebody else's life, and they had to get inside that somebody's mind. They were seeing life from somebody else's point of view. It had been said that man was the only being who knew how to laugh. They must not forget that. They must not be serious all the time … They might entirely disagree with some of the things in a play, but it made them think … The old-fashioned idea that acting was merely 'dressing up and showing off' was explored … They must all make their own properties and clothes … and to remember that there was no class distinction either in the Institutes or in the acting[.]23

Historical pageants and drama were seen to provide numerous positive societal benefits: to disrupt class hierarchies and escape rigid gender roles, to provide opportunities for women to contribute imaginatively to community life and to explore more fully experiences and histories of others.

Nevertheless, anxieties about being designated as 'too political' were debated when staging historical pageants. Constance Smedley's hugely popular – but little studied – 'Pageant of Progress', produced in the Cotswolds with 1,300 performers in 1911, is emblematic of this. Smedley herself was comfortably middle-class. She greatly enjoyed the idyllic conditions of the countryside – which she described as providing an 'almost feudal peace' – but she was also deeply concerned about the realities of village life, with its poor housing conditions, sanitation and wages. Smedley decided to stage an historical pageant, among other local work, to engage members of her local community. In an attempt to make the performance more relevant to their interests she staged the scenes 'as they affected the people's progress', but such an approach was considered by the local elites to 'teem with political propaganda'. As Smedley recalled in her memoirs,

in spite of the introduction of Kings, Bishops, and Lords and helpers and wise counsellors throughout and the restoration of the Monarchy as a commendable act, it was regarded as socialistic.24

Despite such hostility, Smedley persisted with her approach:

At a time of great depression and unrest we felt some positive constructive note should be struck: such a lot of people were uncovering the hideous conditions round us. We did not want to cover them up: nor on the other hand did we wish to show the people in a sentimental light, and prejudices and narrowness were not glossed over, but we did feel a Pageant on which so much time would be spent and in which many hundreds would participate, should draw people together and unite them in hopeful and broad-minded views and deeds and aspirations.25

The ability of historical pageants to impact on local class relations and inspire the community is difficult to assess due to the lack of surviving evidence from working-class participants and observers. Nevertheless, the continued cross-class voluntary involvement of people throughout the interwar years shows that pageants were spaces where boundaries between women were explored. Clearly, for some, these spaces provided a productive venue at which to attempt to rework social hierarchies, alongside having feminist, creative, social and leisure values.26

The central role these events played in the community in the interwar era is suggested from their regular depiction, often on the front page, of local newspapers – and also through the efforts of different women to save programmes and ephemera and donate them to the Women's Library in London. Autobiographical writing complements this picture. In a short autobiography Gladys K. Arnold explained that, as a young girl in 1909, she had seen an historical pageant in York and 'for the first time became aware that history was real and living'. After asking for money from her father to attend another pageant in Mancroft, Norwich, in 1912, Arnold found the evening such a 'revelation' that she went again the very next night. She derived particular enjoyment from seeing people she knew take part, such as 'Miss Offord, a well-known Norwich artist, and her sister Mrs George. They were always striking to look at, but in Elizabethan ruffs and farthingales they were quite beautiful'. Arnold's youthful interest in historical pageants led to her becoming immersed in the theatrical world over the next few decades.27

#### Women's organisations and interwar historical pageants

The pageants of the Women's Institute were the most frequent, largescale events and most representative of this outpouring of community culture. Maggie Andrews has redefined the Women's Institute, which arrived in Britain in 1915 (having originated in Canada in the 1890s), from what had previously been perceived as a rather traditional, conservative institution into a quietly feminist organisation that provided an 'alternative cultural space, a form of female-run counter-culture' for women within local branches across the country.28 Members showed great dedication to staging pageants and, as they were influenced by the wishes of those in the locality, events varied in their scope. Some had all-female pageant committees, others male pageant-masters and organisers; some told histories explicitly about women, while others depicted general histories of the area. Pageants provided opportunities for women of all ages to be involved, playing male and female roles (Fig. 5.1). Many of them encouraged participation on an impressive scale: one Women's Institute pageant at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1926 had over 1,000 actors, including fathers and children, while a Lincolnshire pageant at Bayons Manor in Tealby was said to have had over 3,500 spectators.29

The Girls' Friendly Society also staged many large-scale pageants, although these were far more moralistic in approach, with much emphasis on purity, caring, feminine roles, united sisterhood and religious role models. The society, which had begun in the 1870s, reached its peak by 1914 when it boasted 81,374 'candidates'. Central to its structure was the supposed maternalistic relationship between upper-class members, Anglican associates and working-girl members who were supposed to be unmarried and of 'virtuous character'.30 From 1925 the society began to stage a

**Figure 5.1** Women's Institute 'Outdoor Pageant', location unknown, 1927. Women's Library, LSE, 5FWI/I/1/3/4/1/023 Women's Institute Pageants.

pageant entitled 'The Quest', originally produced for a pageant on 4 July of that year at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The words were provided by the celebrated pageant-master Louis Napoleon Parker, and the event was devised and produced by Henry Millar. He subsequently also organised 'The Gift', a pageant performed by the Christian Mothers' Union in 1926.31

'The Quest' proved so popular that it went on to be staged in Sydney, Australia.32 Its premise was a conversation between a young girl and an old woman about the 'crisis that comes in many women's lives when a choice arises between two ways – the easy and pleasant that leads to degradation, or the toilsome and dull that leads to true happiness'.33 In 'The Quest', the girl was shown the bravery and hard work of famous pioneering women (see chapter 6), through scenes dedicated to prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) and 'Poor Women', St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31) and attendants, and St Hilda of Whitby (*c*.614–680) and nuns. After these women had paraded across the stage, the young girl declared that these women 'are dead! Their deeds are half forgotten' – to which the old woman replied, '[n]ot so! They sowed the seed: you reap the fruit'. At this point representatives of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England arrived to tell the girl – and the audience – that one could not be 'Alone in England!' The hard work of these past female pioneers who had 'ploughed the wilderness and sowed the seed' had 'made the desert blossom like a garden … And ye armed us with self-confidence, And hope and faith and courage'.34 The old woman pointed out the 'harvest' of this work as Girls' Friendly Society members marched confidently across the stage alongside female clerks, students, domestic servants, doctors, 'land girls', 'chauffeuses', 'factory girls', 'business girls' and more. Then the girl was 'awakened'; she realised the contribution that women had made – and could make – to national life. She also came to appreciate that she was part of an international sisterhood, a point reinforced by the arrival of female banner bearers representing countries ranging from New Zealand to Switzerland.

 The pageant was infused with clear religious, moralistic and nationalistic elements, yet still possessed a progressive streak. It created a new space for young girls to discover that women had actively participated in past societies, as well as promoting the acceptability, for all classes of women, of pursuing work and relationships. Moreover, it is worth noting that the audiences of women's associations and magazines were not passive absorbers of culture.35 Women could knit and chat their way through supposedly 'improving' sessions at the Women's Institute, but the protean nature of these spaces meant that they still provided opportunities for pleasure, learning and creativity.36 Historical pageants did not just operate as cultural hegemony. Rather they provoked an assortment of interpretations and reactions from those who participated in and watched them.

Women's interwar organisations often staged pageants to draw attention to specific causes about which members felt strongly. Such performances enabled them to project their views onto a watchful audience; they were also likely to attract press interest. A useful illustrative example here is the International Council of Women, one of the best-known international female associations. The Council worked across national boundaries to advocate women's equality and staged an expertly marketed pageant in 1929 to remind members of its history since its formation in 1888.37 The pageant, staged by William Henry, took place at the Wharncliffe Rooms in central London, as part of the Council's International Women's Festival, which celebrated the first Council meeting in London for 30 years. There were over 1,000 attendees, representatives from 40 countries and a speech from the newly-elected Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald.

The pageant itself comprised a series of chronological scenes, beginning with the depiction of the Council of 1888 as a child; it bore a star of hope on its forehead alongside representatives of the founders of the organisation. The second scene depicted the London conference of 1899. It included a succession of girls and women in the costumes of their respective nations bearing tributes of their work and national produce; they stood next to figures such as 'Public Opinion with her eyes bandaged' and a group of people 'representing the laws relating to women and an equal moral standard for men and women'. The next scene was titled 'The fight for the suffrage'; an Aberdeen newspaper told readers that it had included 'a jolly representative of the activities of the old-time suffragettes'.38 After this there was a procession of the Red Cross Society, and representatives of 'Child Welfare, Education, Trades and the Arts'. Internationally recognised female figures who had worked across public life in the nineteenth century were portrayed, among them the queen consort of Romania, Carmen Sylva, French writer George Sand, British Quaker prison reformer and philanthropist Elizabeth Fry and prominent suffrage supporters such as the French feminist Isabelle Bogelot. The *Manchester Guardian* whimsically noted that representatives of women graduates in caps and gowns brought 'reminiscent smiles to the lips of some of the educational pioneers who looked on'.39 The final scene was a triumphant portrayal of the Council in present day, now 'in full-grown power and dignity'. It was led by its president of 30 years, Lady Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, alongside Council executives who all assembled on the stage. They included French writer Avril de Sainte-Croix, the Danish campaigner Fröken Forchhammer – who had fought against the sexual trafficking of women and children – and Maria Gordon, the Scottish geologist and palaeontologist. Reportedly, men and women stood up on their chairs as they were so eager to see this final scene.40

The pageant functioned as an influential visual reminder of the extensive activities of women in the fight for political and social equality. The *New York Times* heralded the pageant as having told the story 'of feminine progress' while the *Manchester Guardian* commented that it was 'a spectacle not to be lightly regarded either by those who know the past or by those who view with anxiety the effect of the preponderance of voting in women's hands'.41 The newspaper praised the extensive use of symbolism – a decision felt to be very effective, as although it

may be misinterpreted in detail … in broad principles it conveys the truth in a way far beyond the power of speech, which can be understood only by those who know the language of the speaker.42