The Priest and the Acolyte: With an Introductory Protest by Stuart Mason

By John Francis Bloxam

The short story of a tragic love between a priest and an acolyte.

John Francis Bloxam (1873–1928) was an English Uranian (the Uranians were a small and clandestine group of male homosexual poets who published works between 1858, when William Johnson Cory published Ionica, and 1930. Although most of them were English, they had counterparts in the United States and France author and churchman).
Bloxam was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford when his story, "The Priest and the Acolyte", appeared in the sole issue of The Chameleon: a Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances, a periodical which he also served as editor.
The story details the love affair of a young Anglican priest and his lover. The affair, when discovered, triggers a suicide pact of both priest and boy. A poem, A Summer Hour, also with pederastic themes, appeared in The Artist. The contents of The Chameleon, which also included Lord Alfred Douglas's notorious poem Two Loves, would be used against Oscar Wilde in his trial.
Bloxam was a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, and became a priest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Passerino
• Release date: Sep 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9788834189726

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John Francis Bloxam

The Priest and the Acolyte

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Table of contents

An Introductory Protest by Stuart Mason

Part one

Part two

An Introductory Protest by Stuart Mason

So many copies of The Priest and the Acolyte have been sold by unscrupulous publishers and booksellers under the implication that it is the work of Oscar Wilde that it has been thought good to issue this edition with the object of putting an end, once and for all, to the possibility of purchasers being misled as to the authorship.

The story was originally published in The Chameleon, the first and only number of which appeared in December, 1894. The author of the story was an undergraduate at Oxford, an insufficiently birched schoolboy, as he has recently been described, and he alone was responsible for the contents of the magazine which he edited. At the time of the trial of Lord Queensberry for libel a few months later it was attempted to show that Oscar Wilde not only approved of the theme of the story, but that he was actually a party to the publication of it, on the grounds that he sent to the editor a number of aphorisms under the title of Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.

The simplest way of showing what Oscar Wilde really thought of the story is to quote what he said when examined in Court on the subject.

John Sholto Douglas, Eighth Marquis of Queensberry, was arrested on a warrant on March 1, 1895, on a charge of uttering a criminal libel against Oscar Wilde. On the following morning he was brought up before Mr. Newton at Marlborough Street Police Court, and after some formal evidence had been taken was remanded on bail for a week, and on the second hearing was formally committed to take his trial at the Central Criminal Court a few weeks later.

The trial began at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, April 3, before