The Strange Life and Death of Dunedin’s James Grant
Part One of the story of J.G.S. Grant in early Dunedin.
Previously: A Burden Almost Too Grievous to be Borne and Making Shipwreck of Their Virtue.
In these posts, I tell of two of my ancestors who, in 1861, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand. My Irish great-great-grandmother Maria Dillon landed in January, just a few months before the gold rush that would utterly transform Dunedin and the province of Otago. My great-grandfather, the Scotsman Archie Sligo, was among the flood of hopeful diggers who disembarked in October of that year.
I wanted to learn more about the forces that propelled them from their homelands, what attracted them to their new country, what happened here shortly before they arrived, and what they encountered as they set about making new lives for themselves. These posts reveal part of their stories.
Here, I report on James Grant’s arrival in Dunedin, his spoken and written assaults on the town’s establishment luminaries, the debate about free speech, his run-ins with the law, horsewhipping, and his role as court jester.
One of the most intriguing and confronting individuals in 1860s and 1870s Dunedin was the Scotsman J.G.S. Grant (c. 1833-1902). He had graduated from Edinburgh and St. Andrew’s universities and migrated to Melbourne in his early 20s.
As reported in an earlier post, by the mid-1850s, around seven years after its founding, Dunedin’s decision-makers were worried about the town’s puny population growth, so they sent a delegation to Melbourne to recruit new migrants (preferably Scottish Presbyterians). They wanted people with practical skills, of course, in agriculture and industry. Yet the hope lingered that Dunedin could be true to its originators’ dream and shine as an exemplar of spiritual enlightenment, a beacon of godliness for the entire world.
The town’s Scottish founders knew education was critical to attaining its lustrous future. Scotland had long prided itself on its achievements in literacy and learning for young people. Decision-makers were proud of how widespread literacy and economic progress, much superior to many other parts of Europe, had resulted from its network of parish and other schools.[1]
James Grant was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th and early 19th centuries. His alma maters of Edinburgh and St. Andrew’s, along with the other three Scottish universities of Glasgow, King’s College and Marischal College, had become renowned centres of intellectual inquiry, drawing bright and ambitious students from many European countries. Their curricula emphasised empirical knowledge along with subjects such as philosophy and political economy.
In Melbourne, Grant was signed up, and based on his understanding, he was promised the rectorship of the soon-to-be-established Otago Boys’ High School. Straightaway, he could see himself as central to the town’s aspirations. He could become pivotal in transmuting the successes of the Scottish Enlightenment into this new colony, though fully informed by a powerful ethical emphasis.
Back home in Scotland, Grant, among many others, had been well aware of what the Free Church Presbyterians in Dunedin were trying to achieve with their bold vision of creating a pristine and sanctified sanctuary in the Antipodes. Much interest was focused on whether the colony could triumph in its attempts to mark itself as something special in the world.
Grant saw that education was the key. The colony’s initiators were aging, and to attain its goals, the town would have to cultivate a generation of leaders who embodied the founders’ practical and religious aspirations. In his mind, with himself as its rector and inspirational mentor, the new boys’ high school could assure the continuity of the practical and spiritual dream first enunciated by Captain Cargill and Reverend Burns, whom we’ve met in previous posts.
However, no such position appeared upon his arrival in Otago, and Grant considered himself to have been lied to. Deeply disillusioned, he immediately became a trenchant and bitter denigrator of all officialdom and institutions in the province.
Dunedin from Bell Hill. Photographer unknown, 1863. Te Papa Collections O.001619.
Then, we must set the scene for James Grant in Aotearoa. The historian Miles Fairburn sought to clarify the dimensions of the emerging Pākehā society during the Victorian era. He suggested that “[r]emarkably little is known about the details of New Zealand’s Victorian heritage”. He did acknowledge that one key element within that culture, as it was coming into existence, was respect for thought leaders who came mainly from the UK and other European countries. Among them were Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle.[2]
Alongside this, though, Fairburn argued that the colonial European culture was essentially focused on what would work in a practical sense as the society evolved. The passion for generating a new social order and a better Britain, as many hoped, included fostering voluntary organisations in the towns and cities as creators of collective benefit.
In addition, the colony acknowledged the importance of respectability and social responsibility, deemed what was suitable work and behaviour for men and women, honoured the number-eight-wire and give-it-a-go mentality, and celebrated practical rather than theorised knowledge, along with “getting on” in life, self-sufficiency, and self-improvement.
These were typical Victorian values, but James Grant was contemptuous of what he described as merely utilitarian. He fully understood the original vision of what Dunedin could still become, a hallowed place where moral philosophy was ascendant and righteous spiritual values guided every element in society’s functioning.
Princes Street, Dunedin. Photographer William Meluish, Burton Brothers, 1863. Princes Street
Grant had extraordinary self-confidence and an exceptional memory for the metaphysical and literary texts he had read. He put his learning to work by publishing a series of weekly journals. In them, he attempted to keep alive the vision of the Scottish Enlightenment as it might be translated to the new colony and as shaped by what he regarded as the purest philosophical achievements that his society had inherited from the ancient Greeks.
In his journals, he also measured the performance of anyone who rose to prominence. He soon built a reputation as a trenchant and acerbic critic of the town’s institutions and its foremost individuals, virtually none of whom lived up to his expectations.
Trying to take an overview of his output, one bemused journalist in the Auckland Weekly News reported how “the Hocken Library has a volume entitled Saturday Review – J.G.S. Grant, 1864-1871. And in it is “concentrated in its 700 odd pages, more vitriolic abuse and denunciation than I have ever read in comparable space elsewhere”.
Among Mr Grant’s views were that Dr Cargill, co-founder of the Dunedin settlement, was “in politics, a novice; in religion, a bigot; in learning, a tabular rasa; in his dealings in life, selfish, deceitful, vindictive, and tyrannical”.
The Otago Police Force was “over-numerous, overpaid, overdressed, incompetently officered, and generally inefficient”. Not just that, but in addition, they were “over-ridden with snotty snobs, infinitely inferior in education, birth and manners to the most humble member of the real working force”. Of the local Provincial Council: “In the … Council there is hardly a single gentleman, and certainly none with the slightest pretension to the slenderest share of a common school education”.[3]
The Southern End of the Town Belt shows Southern Cemetery, Dunedin, 1860s. Dunedin City Council Archives. Southern Cemetery
Even before his Saturday Review commenced publication, Mr Grant achieved notoriety late in 1863 as the first person prosecuted for criminal libel in New Zealand. A twenty-six-year-old Julius Vogel had launched Aotearoa’s first daily newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, in 1861, but immediately Grant had him in his sights, referring to Vogel’s paper as “the Jew’s Harp”.
Vogel sued him for this and other insults, so Grant gained the dubious distinction of becoming the colony’s first person to be locked up awaiting trial for libel. However, he did not have funds to post bail and likewise lacked friends to do so for him. He found himself interned for two months until his court appearance. As Grant put it, he suffered “the indignity and torture of two months incarceration in a felon’s cell”, but on eventually coming to trial, a jury acquitted him.
Julius Vogel, circa 1865. Photographer unknown. Julius Vogel
What are the Limits to Free Speech?
At the time, people were wrestling with the issue of what could reasonably be said out loud in public. This, of course, remains ardently contested to the present. Are there any limits to permissible speech, or should it be restrained? If circumscribed, under what circumstances?
It’s probably been accepted forever that to shout fire! in a crowded theatre isn’t protected by free speech. But what about defamation, making false statements that harm others’ reputations? Grant excelled in this but usually got away with it. For example, he’d commonly refer to provincial council members as swine and cattle. This statement was self-evidently false, so his defence was that no one could believe such a claim in any literal sense. Hence, it was seen as legitimately part of the cut and thrust of political discourse.
Yet people asked, if Aotearoa was really to be a better Britain, wouldn’t its members need to demonstrate more civilised, honourable and courteous behaviour in their everyday lives to realise harmonious social order? But how does social order match against individuals’ rights to express themselves by saying whatever they want (within reason)?
You could say that James Grant resembled today’s Sam Kriss You might also think of him as a more erudite, scurrilous, and libellous precursor to the following century’s Christchurch Wizard.
Wizard of Christchurch. Photographer Helmut Pfau, 2007. Wizard
Grant claimed the role of public intellectual, happy to be seen as an iconoclastic polymath who was unafraid to needle it mattered not whom, to post his prose into new forms of orbit, and to challenge any and all of Dunedin’s leading citizens.
Occasionally, Grant did attract high-level support from those who argued that the colony had to be careful not to impose unnecessary limits on free speech. These included the Wairarapa Standard’s editor and Hon. Henry Scotland, a Taranaki member of the Legislative Council, then the parliament’s upper house.[4]
Grant became a lightning rod for free speech debates at the time. Controversy sought him out so that it was in the form of his various weekly publications that the Otago colony tested its thinking about what could or could not be stated in public.
Many Dunedin Scots had seen more than enough back home of entrenched privilege and were leery of anything similar emerging in Aotearoa. All would have known or known of families that had suffered from the Scottish lairds’ betrayal of their historic responsibilities to their clanspeople.
No one needed to look back too far to recall the land clearances, Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal, eviction of the Gaels. Memories were still raw of ancient villages now lying empty. Since the Battle of Culloden in the mid-eighteenth century, people had been forced from their traditional homelands, tipped into precarious, minimally paid industrial labour within city slums or forced to emigrate.
House ruin, Boreraig clearance village. Photograph by A’ chachaileith, 2007. Boreraig
The ruined house is in Boreraig, a centuries-old township lying in a fertile glen, cleared in 1853 by Lord MacDonald to make way for sheep.
Citizens were acknowledging the importance of an egalitarian society. As part of this, they were trying to decide how much right the everyday person had to speak their mind, even when their views outraged the establishment’s worthies.
Goad to the Wise and Challenge to the Virtuous
In addition, Mr Grant served as a species of court jester, an entertainer in an era when the community felt hungry for public diversion, but he also gave insightful social commentary and critique. Grant was an easy target for cartoonists, being a short individual with a large head, inclined to obesity, described by some as “a mischievous little barrel”, and uncaring that his clothes were ill-fitting, such as with his trouser cuffs dragging along the ground.[5]
Historically, in Mediaeval and Renaissance times, the jester was there to amuse and divert, but they had an acknowledged formidable influence in the sovereign’s court. The noble elite accepted that the so-called fool had a role in using humour to provide commentary on current issues and politics. The clown stated things that others would fear to say. They furnished a mirror in which the mighty could recognise themselves and, in this way, publicly tweak the consciences of the privileged. If adverse news had to be delivered, the jester had a certain immunity that others didn’t share and so could convey bad tidings, usually without the risk of having their head chopped off.
They might also contribute to the cultural life of society by reciting works from famous authors and renowned playwrights. Grant’s ability to quote historical facts and celebrated thinkers reinforced his audience’s sense that they inherited a distinguished cultural tradition.
The Court Jester by John Watson Nicol, 1895. Court Jester
The jester figure appears in many cultures worldwide, but in the West they can be traced back to comic figures in ancient Roman courts. Then Panurge, a character who turns up in François Rabelais’ novels, exemplifies the public buffoon: “Irreverent, libertine, self-indulgent, witty, clever, roguish, he is the fool as court jester, the fool as companion, the fool as goad to the wise and challenge to the virtuous, the fool as critic of the world.”[6]
Desiderius Erasmus wrote in the early sixteenth century, “We have all seen how an appropriate and well-timed joke can sometimes influence even grim tyrants … The most violent tyrants put up with their clowns and fools, though these often made them the butt of open insults”.[7]
In other words, for centuries, it had been a given that even the richest and most powerful needed from time to time to submit to mocking rebuke from their social subordinates.
The role of jester even seems to have persisted into the nineteenth century in Scotland, in the form of Shemus Anderson, who served at Murthly Castle, Perthshire. Then, the late Queen Mother’s family, the Bowes-Lyons, was the “last Scottish family to maintain a full-time jester”.[8]
Wedding of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Prince Albert, 1923. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon Wedding
A modern equivalent might be a standup comedian who likewise entertains but similarly conveys truths that are uncomfortable to hear.
Entrance to Murthly Castle. Photographer Russel Wills, 2005. Murthly Castle
Yet Grant seemed never to grasp the difference between jester and community leader. You might enjoy and appreciate the jester, but public office demands different qualities.
James Grant was lyrical about the landscape, and the reader senses he liked the scenery better than its inhabitants. At Port Chalmers: “A goodly mercantile fleet in the harbor: three full-rigged ships of about 1000 tons each; four barques about 500 tons each; and two steamers, besides the harbor and coastal ones. Bay like a sea of glass. Surrounding hills robed in wood, with cultivated oases and cottages interspersed, form a rich and varied landscape”.[9] [He used American spellings such as labor and harbor, and in that period, distinctions between American and British spellings seemed less firm.]
Dunedin from Little Paisley, 1849. Artist Edward Immyns Abbot. Hocken Library.
Horsewhipping
Unlike the present, one aspect of public behaviour was an individual’s generally tolerated right to respond with physical force if insulted. Generations before, duelling with pistol or sword had been acceptable but, by the 1860s, was both illegal and socially inadmissible. However, few condemned an individual who, when their honour had been impugned, would confront then physically assault someone who had tried to shame them publicly.
What was commonly known as horsewhipping did not necessarily involve either a horse or a whip. Horsewhipping could refer to an individual receiving a public beating administered with a walking stick or any other hard object readily to hand.
If anyone in Dunedin were to be horsewhipped, James Grant was a likely candidate. Unsurprisingly, given how often he continually tested free speech’s limits, he was assaulted publicly on several occasions.
In his Saturday Review of 24 September 1864, Grant published a lurid and sensationalist article written by one Mr A.G. McCombe called ‘The School for Scandal’ implicating an unnamed clergyman in the town and his wife, who were claimed to be pumping out a constant stream of malicious slander, rumour and scandal about other prominent individuals. It didn’t take much detective work to figure out that the couple had to be the Rev Mr Johnstone, vicar of St Paul’s Church, and his wife.
Friends of that family predictably took direct action against both McCombe and Grant. A well-known barrister, Mr Gibson K. Turton, administered a horsewhipping for McCombe in Princes St., the beating so violent that the victim was “nearly driven through the plate-glass windows of Bullen’s shop at the Rattray St. corner”.[10]
Princes Street, Dunedin. Burton Brothers, 1862. Te Papa Collections (O.000858/02)
The thrashing was followed by Mr R.B. Martin, a churchwarden, no less, from St Paul’s, forcibly ejecting McCombe from the Princess Theatre opera a couple of nights later. Grant was also at the opera on the same evening but found himself ambushed by two individuals, one of whom, in his words, “fell upon us. With one hand, he seized the tie round our neck, and almost strangled us … with the other, he struck us in the most deadly part of the ear”. At the same time, another unknown assailant whacked Grant from behind on the other ear.
McCombe took his doughty churchwarden adversary to court, claiming £1000 damages. However, the Supreme Court jury was unimpressed, confirming Mr Martin’s guilt but awarding McCombe just one farthing.[11]
Undeterred, Mr Grant continued to believe that anyone who had achieved respectability in the town was fair game. Alexander Logan was a brother-in-law of Robert Stout, the Attorney-General, and hence was among the colony’s aristocracy. As a member of a privileged minority, Logan was a favoured target, and so Grant published some deeply scandalous and offensive material about the Logan-Stout family, to which Alexander Logan reacted predictably.[12]
Mr Grant was not one to suffer his tribulations readily and so responded to the humiliation of being beaten in public by taking Logan to court. The magistrate opined that if it were his duty to dispense justice, he would dismiss the case, but since he had to administer the law, he fined Mr Logan one shilling and costs. Then, as now, let’s say there’s a sliding scale between law and justice, which courts try to negotiate.[13]
Public Speaking
James Grant evades any ready attempt at categorisation, but he was a community gadfly, an out-of-control slanderer and libeller, a tester of acceptable limits, publicity seeker, court jester, town conscience, free spirit, and probably an object of envy. He embodied a more collective time when people enjoyed hearing their language spoken or read aloud.
The 1860s had different communication characteristics compared to the present. On the one hand, citizens acclaimed highly literate authors, but it was also a more oral era. Many adults possessed minimal functional literacy, having had little or sometimes no education as children. Hence, it was a given that anyone wanting their attention, such as politicians seeking votes, could not rely on printed materials. They needed sufficient oratorical skills to meet the crowd’s expectations and thus connect with people of diverse abilities.
Grant was well-known as a raconteur and rhetorician:
This address, one of many in Dunedin’s Octagon, occurred on Sunday, 28 August 1866, early in the Delphic Oracle’s lifespan between 1866 and 1870. The title of his presentation was alluring – who could resist “political villanies (sic), commercial rogueries, and clerical immoralities”?
However, his serial publications had been draining his finances, with editorial and printing costs outstripping the small revenue they generated. Grant dreamed that his frequent public speeches might encourage his listeners to contribute. But while the townsfolk found his periodicals as provocative and entertaining as his speeches, they seldom wanted to pay for them.
We note that in the 1860s and 1870s in Presbyterian Dunedin, a public presentation on Sunday had an aura of being slightly morally dubious. Anything resembling physical or intellectual labour was frowned upon on the Lord’s Day (except for church ministers, of course). Hence, Grant’s public transgression might have been enticing enough to tempt both support and opposition. And Grant’s claim to deliver “a public sermon” was also no doubt intended to ruffle some pious feathers.
The strictest among those who took literally the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy, i.e., inactive, took direct action to block activities they considered immoral. A case in point in 1876 was a group in New Plymouth led by the Reverend F.W. Isitt that attempted to confront and shame people taking the train on Sunday. For them, “all who go by rail on Sunday are infidels” – woe betide all who travel by train on the Lord’s Day. Yet such perspectives never attracted popular support given what has already been referred to as a secular, non-ideological character that was building in the colony.
Charles Dickens, by Ernest Edwards, circa 1866. State Library of NSW. Charles Dickens
At the time, a vast public market existed for celebrities to address community gatherings. For example, Charles Dickens was renowned both in the UK and the USA as a raconteur, and he wrote his novels intending to have them read aloud. Dickens was exceptional in his literate abilities, but he also knew how to tailor his material to appeal to those with lesser literacy. Many crowd-pleasing writers like Shakespeare had the same ability, and Grant sought to emulate their success.
In the era before radio, television or the internet, parents read texts aloud to their children, including educational, religious works such as the Bible or fiction in novels, serialised short stories, or poetry. Parents and other authority figures in society felt apprehensive when young children or adolescents read alone, expressing worries if they lacked oversight on what their offspring were encountering, not unlike present-day anxieties about unconstrained use of social media. Reading had a moral intent, was often practised collectively, and was closely aligned to recitation, being more public and collaborative than private and individualised.
Dunedin. Photographer William Meluish, 1862. Te Papa Collections, 0.001571.
Grant reported on his numerous public addresses:
5 February 1869: “Attended Rev Mr Martin’s lecture on Sabbath observance in Oddfellows’ Hall. At the close, turned the popular tide in his favour, and got up a collection, 2 pounds eleven shillings and ninepence, to defray his expenses”.
8 February 1869: “Fair and calm. Addressed a mass meeting of the electors at 6:30 pm on the Octagon, spoke for 2 ½ hours”.[14]
15 February 1869: “Addressed for two hours a mass meeting on the Octagon, from 6:30 pm, till 8:30 pm. Dealt merciless blows at provincialism, place hunters, pensioners, and corruption”.[15]
Octagon, Dunedin. Photographer William Melhuish, 1862. Te Papa Collections. Octagon
19 February 1869: “Elysian weather. Addressed, for over 2 hours, a mass meeting in the Octagon – Death and damnation to Provincialism the burthen of my theme. The people hung in breathless silence upon my utterances. The quasi-papers silent as the grave. Immense cheering at the close of the review of the past two years”.[16]
23 February 1869: “Hot and dusty. Evening mild. Addressed a mass meeting on the Octagon, the topic being New Zealand Evils and the Remedy. Made scathing revelations”.[17]
1 March 1869: “Addressed a mass meeting on the Octagon for two hours. This is my sixth speech to the electors on the subject of the vacant seat in our Parliament. Fired hot into the citadels of Provincialism”.[18]
If Grant’s successive estimates of his rhetorical efforts to the crowd lasting for at least two hours are correct, one has to esteem both his magniloquence and his listeners’ endurance. Yet he wondered why people who evidently enjoyed attending his many public speeches in the Octagon and perhaps later congratulated him failed to favour him on his many bids at public office. He raged: “Hypocritical sympathisers, with honey on their lips, and gall in their heart, I can detect from the hue of their countenances”.[19]
Nor did they help him pay his bills: “The people are so ignorant, and so selfish, that they would rather live in darkness, and die in delirium, and leave their money to strangers, than aid in the slightest degree to help me in the noble cause of Truth”.[20]
How did people not see his fine qualities? “My pen has dragged down many bellowing, blustering poltroons … But I have led such a life of stern integrity that my worst enemies could not point out a moral flaw in my character”.[21]
The tagline Grant employed for his Saturday Review publication was Aut Caesar Aut Nullus (Either a Caesar or a nobody), and he seems to have believed it quite implicitly. He often claimed that the entire provincial bureaucracy should be let go, and he, with a few clerks, would quite satisfactorily run the show, the clerks to follow his dictates. He constantly wondered why the rest of the world had failed to understand his intelligence and capability.
However, aside from those who despised him most, many citizens enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Grant. Riveted by his writings, they were appalled at the prospect of what he might say next but quite unable to tear themselves away from his fascinating vitriol.
Dunedin. Artist James Richmond, 1866. Te Papa Collections. Dunedin
Religion
While the vast majority of Pākehā considered themselves Christians, at least in a cultural sense, and aligned to varying extents with one or other of the creeds from the old country, there was no official state religion. As a previous post in this series reported, the prospect of anointing Anglicanism as the state’s formalised faith had been rejected in February 1840 when the Treaty of Waitangi was being written.
High-ranking religious clergy had status as senior community members, but given what was in some ways an ideological absence in the new colony, the influence of their faith locally was not as strong as they might have enjoyed back in the UK. Leading ministers were quite prepared to convey their perspectives on religion or morality but seldom saw themselves at the forefront of shaping a spiritual direction for the colony.
There were some exceptions, such as in the 1880s when the Reverend Rutherford Waddell, an Irish Presbyterian minister, successfully mobilised Dunedin public opinion against the iniquities of industrial sweatshops. His work will be reported further in this series’ Sin of Cheapness post.
In the 1860s, a robust public dispute still existed between those who took the Bible’s explanation of a seven-day creation of the world to be literally correct and those who said that research support for the evolutionary descent of humankind over millennia had become too strong to ignore. However, in Aotearoa, little engrained fundamentalist opposition existed to theories of biological evolution. Hence, Charles Darwin’s and other scientists’ arguments “met with less resistance in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world.”[22]
Castigating the Churchmen
Yet Dunedin may have been more open to religious influence than other parts of Aotearoa. As earlier posts in this series have discussed, in 1848, it was founded as a spiritual haven where Free Church Presbyterians might escape what they thought to be the debauched and morally perilous Scottish cities. However, by the early 1860s, when Grant was making a name for himself in the town, the digger influx of all faiths and none had much enlarged the town’s culture.
High Street, Dunedin. Photographer William Melhuish, 1862. Te Papa Collections, 0.001627.
James Grant had a strong sense of religion’s philosophical importance and was passionately interested in it. He would have agreed with the philosopher Francis Bacon’s position that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion”.[23]
Francis Bacon, Filósofo. Artist RaphaelMoreno0601, 2018. Francis Bacon
However, Grant had little respect for any claims to unearned status held by anyone (other than himself, his detractors said), such as clerics of any creed or prominent personages.
Comprehending religion’s significance in society, and unusually for the times, Grant attended a different church every Sunday. The minister taking the service might not have rejoiced at his appearance among the worshippers.
Wrote Grant: “That reverend piece of pomposity, the Pastor of the First Church of Otago … is evidently labouring under a theological nightmare … some men, notwithstanding their self-importance, when holding forth the terrors of the Pit over their sheep – are themselves so insignificant that we cannot conceive of the Deity taking any trouble either with their salvation or damnation”.[24]
First Church, Dunedin. Photographers Muir & Moodie, 1900-1903. Te Papa Collections, PS.001854.
Sometimes, he managed to insult both the vicar and the congregation in the same sentence: “Donald McDonald, Presbyterian pastor of Emerald Hill, delivered a rambling lecture on the New Hebrides Mission, in Knox Church. He is a bulky piece of materialism. One may judge of the flock from the pastor’s vulgarity of soul and poverty of intellect. Donald and vulgarity are convertible terms”.[25]
Rev Dr Stuart, First Minister of Knox Church. Photograph by the author.
Similarly:
Began to study the Epistle to the Philippians, a revised Greek text, with introduction, notes, and dissertations, by Dr Lightfoot, Professor of Divinity, Cambridge. Notwithstanding the myriads of commentaries on the Scriptures, the learned are not yet agreed as to the true reading and meaning of certain passages. How melancholy, therefore, must the ignorant despotism of the vulgar, lay and clerical, appear to the earnest scholar, critic, and philosopher.[26]
Ministers in the town were sufficiently enraged by his spoken and written assaults to burn his publications, including his Delphic Oracle and Saturday Review. Congregations heard them thunder from the pulpit that anyone plummeting into perversion’s pit by reading Grant’s hostile diatribes would imperil their souls.
But Grant ranted better than most:
Clerical loafers, that pander to their depraved habits, burn sometimes the Review – fatten on the Public prey – and by means of begging sermons, soirees, and tea-meetings, and superstitious means generally, can always raise their ill-gotten stipends … The parson again, burns the Review, because its truths do not forward his pernicious superstition; and because it enlightens the souls of men whom he labours to degrade and deprave. He burns the book to influence his sheep not to buy it. But God knows the innermost parts of the breasts of men. Therefore, fear God.[27]
Grant didn’t lambaste the ministers because they espoused religion. Instead, he went after them because, in his view, they had forsaken what should have been their unworldliness and now embodied far too much the tedious and reductive errors of secular society. Hence, they did not (in his opinion) live their religion in the ways that he thought they should.
“Why talk of true religion?” he asked.
There is no such thing here. God is not in all the thoughts of our managers and teachers of churches. There is as much religion, and perhaps more honesty – certainly less hypocrisy – about the managers of theatres and concert halls, than there are in our churches, of which some are beginning to chant and caricature the Psalms; just as a low comedian might drawl out an obscene, immoral, and calumnious song. In the eye of Heaven, the one is more blasphemous than the other. The tendency of both is decidedly low and wicked, both in estimation of man and God. But to burlesque the sacred vessel of Humanity, is less sinful than to insult High Heaven with the blasphemous immoralities of opinion, and the questionable juggleries and gamblings of Bazaars.[28]
He had more status than his many opponents allowed. Among the most prominent of the town’s citizens, Grant was sufficiently well-regarded to speak at, for example, the 1871 leave-taking for the town’s much-loved Marist priest, the Frenchman Rev Delphin Moreau. At that farewell, Grant made a series of warm and complimentary remarks, illustrating his respect for Moreau’s life, which had been one of unassuming service during more than a decade in Otago.[29]
Fr Delphin Moreau, SM. Source PSC 26.19, Marist Archives Wellington.
In 1862, Moreau served as marriage celebrant for my great-great-grandparents, Maria Dillon and Patrick Ford and we meet him again in another post in this series.
Following Moreau’s farewell, Grant had a letter in the Otago Daily Times:
Sir, I am glad to see a letter in your paper by a Catholic urging his co-religionists to give some public expression of their esteem for their late Pastor. On this question, I think both Catholic and Protestant might gracefully combine in one fraternal bond of love and fellowship of mind, forgetting their sectarian crotchets, and hastening to do honour to a really excellent man, now about to leave us, and thus openly show to the outside world that moral worth, irrespective of creed, should be valued for its own sake. I seldom indulge in praise, but I must say that I have often, mentally, likened the good Father Moreau to the pious Fénelon.[30] I hope you will allow me to say so on the present occasion, and thus help to urge others to do something to testify their cordial approbation of his truly exemplary deportment for a period of ten years in Dunedin. J.G.S. Grant.[31]
As Grant conceded, it was most unusual for him to commend anyone, and by 1876, he was still rendering his enemies apoplectic. Yet they gave as well as they got, accusing him of having published an account of the colony in which:
He painted New Zealand in entirely false colours. He invented the most monstrous calumnies about its soil, climate, institutions, and people. Nay, he even went further, and cast a foul aspersion upon the chastity of a large and respectable portion of its women. Naturally such conduct as this elicited a storm of indignant condemnation from one end of the colony to the other, and Grant will be held up to public execration as being a vile and malicious slanderer. It is impossible to have any sympathy or pity for a man such as Grant. Unless he is insane, it is impossible that he could be unaware that the statements he published about the colony were false. There is no reason for doubting his sanity, and therefore the conclusion is obvious that he is a man who, for the sake of notoriety and gratifying a naturally malignant disposition, would publish anything, however unfounded, malicious, and untruthful. For some twelve years back he has prostituted his pen to the basest uses, and lived by the sale of his published slanders. This man Grant has his prototypes in some of the lowest pamphleteers and libellers of the seventeenth century; but, fortunately in these modern days, such productions as his only excite disgust.[32]
The Otago Daily Times published many letters from Mr Grant, one of which was on slander. In it, he referred to King George III, Demosthenes and his oration, saying, among other things, that “we all ought to discountenance and frown down tattlers, talebearers, and slanderers of every description” and “Dunedin, as it advances in religious ribaldry, is also progressing in calumny”. In the following note, the ODT editor observed, “We publish this letter because we consider Mr Grant an eminent authority on the subject of slander”.[33]
According to the West Coast Times, Mr Grant gave a masterclass on how not to apply for a job when he wrote to the Otago University Council asking to be appointed to the Chair of Rhetoric and Polite Literature. He concluded his application: “I have now to ask you to put fresh blood into the shrivelled veins of your now moribund institution”.[34]
Previously, he had not encouraged the university to have warm feelings towards him at the point when it had decided on its first three professorial appointments:
The Council of the Otago University has fixed upon having, as I predicted, only three Professorial Mountebanks, at a salary of £600 and fees for each. 1. Mental and Moral Philosophy, to include Political Economy. 2. Classics, including Greek, Latin and English Language and Literature. 3. Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. All they can do will be very harmless. Otago’s University of three Professors is emphatically a political burlesque. But what could be expected of such a council of vulgarity?[35]
In addition, on at least one occasion, he was thrown down a staircase at the university for persistent attempts to interrupt a speech by its chancellor, Dr Stuart.[36]
Ebbing from Collective Memory
Despite his prominence at the time, today Grant is little represented in the historical record, receding from local recall in a kind of cultural erasure. Partly, this is because some who wrote the town’s chronicles aligned themselves with the establishment figures he relentlessly derided. A case in point is Robert Gilkison’s Early Days in Dunedin, published in 1938, though somewhat more sympathetic was R.M. Burdon in his New Zealand Notables, Series Two, 1945.
Wharf Street, from Rattray Street, circa 1912. Dunedin City Council Archives. Wharf Street
Grant had married Frances Jane Richardson in 1862, but she left him without warning in 1875, for which departure Grant blamed a conspiracy by his adversaries. Frances arrived back in the town 12 months later in a state of severe mental disorder and no longer recognised him. Until her death three years thereafter, she remained in what then was called a lunatic asylum.[37]
Grant mellowed, and so did the town. To survive, he had to sell his several hundreds of scholarly books, and as his assets dwindled, he no longer published his weekly journals. Still pacing the streets, he earned a precarious subsistence income by onselling pamphlets from various societies and religious groups. By February 1902, he had fallen sick and was confined to bed in a boarding house, worried he could not pay overdue rent to his landlady.
He had had a dream that, in its own secular way, echoed the original Scottish Free Church Presbyterian founders’ vision. They foresaw an unsullied sanctuary, a beacon glowing from a God-fearing, hilled city of light, a hallowed haven of rectitude and righteousness, far-flung from the world’s wickedness.
For Grant, likewise, Dunedin might ascend as a noble place where “public taste could be educated, vice would die away, and virtue would again walk the earth in divine beauty”.[38]
Even James Grant’s old enemies conceded that he had been an extraordinary character and, in his inimitable style, had enhanced the town. Prompted by the First Church’s Dr Gibb, public subscriptions were called for, and before he died, funds were collected to pay his debts.
In the following post in this series, I look more closely at Grant’s writing and attempt to discover how well (if at all) artificial intelligence can cope with envisioning his complex and multifaceted prose.
Coming up:
Part Two of the James Grant Story: Can 21st-Century AI Visualise 19th-Century Prose?
The Irish Spiritual Empire, a Cycle of Sectarian Epilepsy, and a Certain Fat Old German Woman.
Better at the Language Than Those Who Owned It and Equally Determined to be Both Themselves and to Conform, Fit In.
I Found It a Matter of No Small Difficulty to Collect the Bills Due by Females Who Have Been Assisted to the Colony.
Her Skirt Would Stand up Straight By Itself and Have to be Thawed Out.
His Wife Burst into Tears, Saying She Had Already Mortgaged Their Home so She Could Pay for Her Own Dredge Speculations.
An Irresistible Feeling of Solitude Overcame Me. There Was No Sound: Just a Depressing Silence.
Norman Conceded in His Mind that the Boomerang Would Crash Home Before He Could Snatch Out His Revolver.
The Sin of Cheapness: There Are Very Great Evils in Connection with the Dressmaking And Millinery Establishments.
The Poll Tax: One of the Most Mean, Most Paltry, and Most Scurvy Little Measures Ever Introduced.
Holy Wells: We are Order and Disorder.
After Some Debate, They Decided That Killing the Priest Would Probably Bring Bad Luck.
God is Good and the Devil’s Not Bad Either, Thank God.
Notes
[1] Anderson, Education and the State.
[2] Fairburn, ‘Is there a good case’ p. 164.
[3] Dunedin’s Embittered Critic. Auckland Weekly News, 29 June 1955; Goulter, Sons of France, pp. 154-5.
[4] “Mr Scotland and his friend Grant,” Taranaki Herald, XXIV, 28 June 1876, p. 6.
[5] Burdon, p. 185.
[6] Fooling Around the World: The History of the Jester (uchicago.edu)
[7] Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly Fooling Around the World: The History of the Jester (uchicago.edu)
[8] Fooling Around the World: The History of the Jester (uchicago.edu)
[9] Delphic Oracle, 4 June 1869, p. 71.
[10] Gilkinson p. 56.
[11] Gilkinson p. 57.
[12] Evening Post, 24 April 1878, p. 2.
[13] Southland Times, 4 May 1878 p. 2.
[14] Delphic Oracle, 5 February 1869, p. 42.
[15] Delphic Oracle, 15 February 1869, p. 44.
[16] Delphic Oracle, 19 February 1869, p. 45.
[17] Delphic Oracle, 23 February 1869, p. 45.
[18] Delphic Oracle, 1 March 1869, p. 45.
[19] Delphic Oracle, 30 May 1869, p. 70.
[20] Delphic Oracle, 11 June 1869, p. 85.
[21] Delphic Oracle, 30 May 1869, p. 70.
[22] Fairburn, ‘Is there a good case’ p. 164.
[23] Essays of Francis Bacon: XVI, Of Atheism.
[24] Delphic Oracle, no. IV, p. 73.
[25] Delphic Oracle, 16 February 1869, p. 44.
[26] Delphic Oracle, 28 March 1869, p. 56.
[27] Delphic Oracle, 11 June 1869, p. 85.
[28] Delphic Oracle no. XII, p. 223.
[29] Goulter, Sons of France, p. 155.
[30] François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, Archbishop of Cambray (1651-1715): Pious reflections for every day of the month.
[31] Goulter, Sons of France, p. 150.
[32] Evening Post, 10 June 1876, reprinted in the Taranaki Herald of 28 June 1876.
[33] Otago Daily Times, 8 September 1879, p. 3.
[34] West Coast Times, 23 March 1880.
[35] Delphic Oracle, 11 November 1869, p. 99.
[36] Gilkison, p. 58.
[37] Gibbons, 1990.
[38] Gibbons, 1990.
References
Anderson, R. D. (1983). “Education and the State in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.” The Economic History Review, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 518–34. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2597238.
Burdon, R.M. (1945) New Zealand notables, series two. Caxton Press.
Essays of Francis Bacon: XVI, Of Atheism. Essays of Francis Bacon
Fairburn, M. (2006). ‘Is there a good case for New Zealand exceptionalism?’ In Disputed histories: Imagining New Zealand’s pasts. T. Ballantyne & B. Moloughney (Eds.). Otago University Press, pp. 143-167.
Gibbons, P.J. (1990). ‘Grant, James Gordon Stuart’. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. James Grant
Gilkinson, Robert (1938). Early days in Dunedin. Whitcombe & Tombs.
Goulter, M.C. (1957). Sons of France: A forgotten influence on New Zealand history. Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs.