An Ecclesiastic Affair – the ebook

This page links to the pdf ebook entitled “An Ecclesiastical Affair”, which sets out to tell the story of a series of events that shook the small Black Country parish of Pensnett in 1870. They concern the affair, if that is not putting it to strongly, between the Church of England incumbent of the parish, Rev. Charles Atherton, and a pupil teacher at the church school, Agnes Bowdler, that resulted in a clergy discipline trial, a series of libelous pamphlets and flyers that circulated in the village, and a nationally reported libel trial. It is in turn sordid, sweet and comic, with quite a large cast of characters from the church and the village. It is a story that has many resonances with modern day concerns – issues with relationships where one of the parties (usually the man) is in a position of power in regard to the other (usually the woman); institutional amnesia of disturbing events and some might say the hypocrisy of the established church; scandals that disrupt communities; and the use of legal intervention to silence dissent. All of these, and no doubt more, readers will bring to their consideration of the events that are described. But in the ebook, we make few comments in this regard, and try to tell the story as it unfolded in as clear a way as possible.

I have told this story before in Part 4 of Kingswinford Manor and Parish and in a series of articles in the Blackcountryman, but the ebook gathers together all the material into one document, including full transcripts of the anonymous pamphlets and letters that led to the libel trial, and a significant amount of new material. The latter are included because a puzzle still remain as to who actually wrote the offending documents, and the interested reader might be able to glean more from these transcripts than I have managed. But, regardless of their authorship, these documents are quite entertaining in their own right.

But the story deserves a better telling. If any would be novelists are reading this, I believe the ebook gives a framework for an imaginative retelling on a more creative format. If anyone ever tries this, I would love to see the result.