A Jubilee Scandal

Canon Fleming
(Vanity Fair)

The anticipation for Queen Victoria's 50th Jubilee, being celebrated in June of 1887, would have seemed familiar to us. The stores were filled with Jubilee flags, brooches, soaps, plates, and framed photographs of Her Majesty for the mantel. For the more devout subjects, one of her favorite chaplains, the Rev. Canon James Fleming, published a small reprint of two recent sermons at St. Michael's, Chester Square, the posh London church where he had been vicar for many years. 

There was a belief in the book world that no one ever reads published sermons. Not in this case as Canon Fleming was soon publicly accused of gross plagiarism. An embarrassing pamphlet made the rounds: "The Stolen Sermon, or Canon Fleming's Theft." Side by side comparisons made it plain that Fleming had copied directly from a sermon given by the American evangelist T Dewitt Talmage of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Talmage was a Presbyterian, and. a religious celebrity in America known for his "dramatic physical theatrics." During a London visit in 1877, huge crowds came to hear (and see) him preach in Hyde Park and elsewhere. Talmage even met Rev Fleming at that time and found him to be a "most agreeable" gentleman. 

Rev T Dewitt Talmage
(1832-1902)

Ten years later, in Brooklyn, when informed that the gentleman Canon had almost certainly stolen his sermons, Talmadge was quite gracious. Such a "friendly, genial, glorious man" wouldn't be capable of the charge made against him. In London, Fleming confessed that he had read Talmage's sermon in a published collection, Fifty Sermons (now to be found on line at forgottenbooks.com). It obviously made a great impact on him and he copied it out. When referring back to those notes, the canon believed he unconsciously presumed it to be his own work. Critics called the explanation of "unconscious cerebration" worse than the crime. The Pall Mall Gazette asserted that "no apology" could explain the "word for word, sentence for sentence, striking thought for striking thought" theft of another man's sermon. A New York paper said the matter raises "an uncomfortable doubt as to the English canon's moral condition." 

Fleming survived the kerfuffle, for he was "altogether a good fellow" and a royal favorite. But, the scandal was recalled at his death in 1908. "He will not be comfortable when he sees Talmage coming his way across the Elysian fields."

She Absolutely Refused To Live With Me

 

Sion College Library*

William Henry Milman was born in 1825. He grew up in cathedral surroundings. His father was one of the great Victorian Deans of St Paul’s. William went to Oxford to study for the clergy but seems to have been more noted as a champion oarsman. It was also at university that Milman first evidenced his “wide yet discerning appreciation for books.” 

Ordained in the 1850’s, and benefiting from his father’s patronage, he was given the ancient church of St. Augustine & St. Faith on Watling Street in the City. But his greatest service to the church came as chief librarian for Sion College, overseeing a collection of 70,000 clerical books. Milman spent many years cataloging the books, developing his own system. He also prevailed upon the church to relocate the library from its inconvenient and inaccessible location in London Wall to a "more central position nearer to the West End.” 

The move to the Embankment was underway when, on 13 December 1884, Rev. Milman was married. Now a Minor Canon at St. Paul’s, Milman was 59 on his wedding day. His bride was just 23. Margaret Julia Campbell was a daughter of Sir George Campbell. After several years as an administrator in the Raj, Campbell returned to London, was elected to the House of Commons, and soon known as a great bore, offering “dismal orations on every possible subject.” The Campbells were South Kensington neighbours of the longtime bachelor bookman. Their wedding at St. Jude’s drew a “large and fashionable congregation” and the father of the bride gave a wedding breakfast for 800 people in Southwell Gardens. The curious couple left for a Paris honeymoon: Canon Milman in clerical black, his young wife sporting a red tam-o-shanter bonnet.

Only a few months later, a brief comment appeared in the weekly Truth: "The marriage of a well-known London clergyman which excited a good deal of interest in some sections of 'Society' last winter, has not proved a success, for incompatibility of temper has led to such very strained relations, that the lady has returned to her father's house."

The Milmans never lived together again. He returned quietly to the thousands of volumes to be sorted at the new Sion Library. “Mrs. Milman” made a stir in the “Spirit World” claiming she and her sister had “Coincidental Hallucinations” of seeing their mother writing letters in the library when the lady was actually upstairs in her bedroom all the time. This inexplicable event excited great interest in the Psychical Research journals. 

So it went for many years. "Unhappy couples were expected to put up with it, quietly arranging their lives to live apart if necessary." (Frances Osborne, The Bolter). But, in 1896, eleven years after they separated, the Canon received a letter from his wife. "The only straightforward and honorable course is to let you know that I have formed an attachment to one that has become everything to me. I am anxious to avoid all unnecessary publicity in the affair." The canon filed for divorce; he admitted his wife “who was of a very peculiar tone of mind,” declared that she could not live with him under any circumstances. Incompatibility alone was not enough. The usual private enquiry agent was employed to watch the movements of Mrs. Milman and a young solicitor named Murray (his actual name was Edward Sieveking.) They were discovered living as husband and wife at a hotel in Dover and in the Rue de Louvre in Paris. Mrs. Milman, of course, made no effort to defend her adulterous conduct. The divorce was granted and within months she and Sieveking were married.

Canon Milman died in 1908, to be remembered as a zealous and highly qualified librarian, a most amiable and good-natured man, who amply deserved the recognition of his brethren. There was no mention of his brief marriage. The temptation is to compare him to Edward Casuabon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, that dry bookman who rejected “the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.”

How the Vicar Came and Went, a collection of clerical scandals, is now available at Amazon.

Illustration: MonumentofFame.org