1990: Preface to the Centenary Annotated Edition of “The Collected Curiosities of the Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks‑on‑Ponds”
with the Surviving Preface by His Great‑Niece, Euphemia Mallard By Fenella Vorpel
There are some artefacts that refuse extinction. They exist, like certain ancestors, not by virtue of merit or endurance, but through an unrelenting sense of their own importance. The Collected Curiosities of the Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, first published in 1904, is one such ghost in the family machine. The book itself—a catalogue of sermons so florid they shimmer with disbelief—would be merely another ecclesiastical eccentricity were it not for its preface, written by the author’s great‑niece, Euphemia Mallard.
Euphemia’s preface has long eclipsed the sermons it was meant to introduce. Its survival is accidental: most original copies were lost in a fire in Oxfordshire around 1926, when the Mallard estate, quite literally, went up in moral smoke. The preface, however, had been reprinted separately, pressed into pamphlets, and passed hand-to-hand through generations of family women as one might circulate a charm or a secret. In my own childhood—Sydney, the 1950s—it occupied pride of place on my grandmother’s writing desk, between a chipped porcelain duck and the Book of Foibles. The duck has since disappeared; the Book endured, well-read; and the preface persisted as a kind of intellectual heirloom, equal parts theology, gossip, and subversion.
To understand its odd authority, one must know something of both its author and her subject. Lord John Mallard (1781–1848), the first and last Bishop of Ducks‑on‑Ponds—a diocese as bucolic as its name implies—was less a theologian than an aesthete operating under the cover of religion. His sermons, collected posthumously and edited by his descendants, are described accurately by Critics Quarterly of 1905 as “the indiscretions of an over‑educated conscience.” They are discursive, sensual, and vaguely heretical, preoccupied with the relationship between beauty and sin—particularly the varieties of affection the Church refused to name decently. He preached “On the Gender of Angels,” “The Theological Uses of Vanity,” and, most notoriously, “The Moral Symmetry of the Androgynous Soul.”
Even by eighteenth‑century standards he was unorthodox; by ours, he would be radical. To read him now, amid contemporary arguments about gender, sexuality, and faith, is to encounter something we have barely advanced beyond—a world where desire disguises itself as decorum, and theology serves as embroidery for repression. His delight in contradiction lent a peculiar symmetry to his life: he was brilliant and ridiculous, devout and delighted by blasphemy, compassionate yet intolerant of boredom. There are traces of what he did not say as well—his sermon “On Brotherhoods Celestial and Otherwise” is as close to confession as any bishop dared approach in the pulpit.
It was left to his great‑niece, Euphemia, to tidy—or rather, untidy—his reputation. In her 1904 preface she performs the perfect act of female editing: she acknowledges his absurdities, exploits his charm, and redeems his sins by wit. Euphemia had already begun to make her name in fiction, though history remembers her chiefly for its abrupt ending. Murdered in Sydney in 1934 by a companion who later declared that “the lady made too many explanations,” she has become one of our city’s persistent myths. Her death turned her preface into a relic; her irony, bound to the family name, became a prophecy of female candour punished.
But beyond tragedy lies an astonishing intelligence. Her writing is not an act of domestic piety but of intellectual disruption. In the opening paragraph, she announces her intention to “reconsider the goods left behind.” She refers less to the Bishop’s papers than to the patriarchal theology they embodied. She treated his vanity and voluptuous religiosity as data in an ongoing crime scene—the historical investigation of male authority. What makes the text enduring, and still pedagogically useful in my lectures, is her refusal to resolve ambivalence into certainty. For Euphemia, faith was a system of aesthetic gestures masking fear. For her uncle, love of God was indistinguishable from self-admiration. Between them, they display two modes of devotion: that of the man who mistakes pleasure for virtue, and that of the woman who refuses to mistake either for truth.
That this preface came to be read—indeed, recited—at Mallard family gatherings in place of Scripture readings suggests how thoroughly it colonised the family imagination. It functioned as both commentary and confession, a private catechism for women who had long practiced reverence without conviction. My aunt used to claim that the Bishop’s book was the only family text she trusted; it was, she said, “honest about deceit.”
In teaching this piece today, I ask my students to consider not only its theology, but its tone—the combination of affection and irony that made Euphemia’s style so dangerous. Her voice is unlike the Reverend’s sonorous certainties; hers is the afterlife of faith, sharpened by disbelief. The intersection of her style and her uncle’s reveals a dialogue still instructive in modern discourse on gender within the Church. Both lived within systems that expected silence from them—one as priest, the other as woman—and both turned that silence into performance.
It remains no coincidence, I think, that her preface reads now as a feminist document, decades before the term was fashionable. She took familial inheritance—a trunk of sermons—and dismantled it, using irony as scalpel. Her respect for her ancestor is consistently undermined by her precision: she calls him “not an atheist, merely inconsistent,” a phrase that could describe all of Christianity’s fathers when viewed by their daughters.
The family has, ever since, responded with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. Some now quote her as they once quoted Scripture. Others attribute to her death the tone of heresy, as if she were murdered by metaphor. For me, however, the enduring importance of The Collected Curiosities is not in its tragedy, nor in its ecclesiastical curios, but in its intellectual daring. It taught me—and teaches still—that belief is a form of authorship, that gender and power cannot be disentangled from theology, and that every family canon, sacred or secular, awaits its defiant editor.
Thus in republishing the text and its celebrated preface, I offer no sanctification, merely reinstatement. The Bishop’s sermons, in their ornate irrelevance, and Euphemia’s preface, in its lucid heresy, together trace one genealogy of self-awareness—a family’s long conversation between submission and wit. If God does not enter the dialogue, it is because He has rarely improved one.
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