1924: Journal of Dramatic Philology
In the following brief note it is proposed to examine certain peculiarities of dialogue and address in a recently rediscovered one‑act comedy by Felix Marchant, commonly entitled The Vicar’s Reverent Tour (c. 1880). The piece, though slight in construction, appears to offer an instructive example of what may, for convenience, be termed “double discourse”: that is, a sustained pattern of utterance in which the apparent addressee and the effective addressee do not coincide.
I. Surface Action and Ostensible Addressee
On the surface level, the play presents itself as a conventional Victorian ecclesiastical trifle. A vicar of æsthetic disposition conducts an elderly patroness, Lady Prudence Bartleby, and her husband, Sir Anthony Bartleby, through the restored fabric of a parish church on a bitter winter’s day. The ostensible subject is an architectural tour: fittings, arches, stalls, organ loft and so forth. The ostensible addressee of the vicar’s explanations, corrections and apologies is the lady patroness, whose purse and prudery alike must be placated.
The language directed explicitly to Lady Prudence is solicitous, deferential and couched in the euphemistic idiom demanded by late‑Victorian decorum. Words such as “leg”, “seat”, or “pipes” are repeatedly deferred or displaced; the lady insists upon circumlocutions like “under‑carriage” or “sitting‑apparatus”, and professes horror at any hint of “handling”, “grasp”, “curvature”, and related terms. At this level, the play may be enjoyed as an amiable satire upon the verbal contortions imposed by a certain strain of English respectability.
II. The Emergence of Double Address
Closer inspection, however, reveals that much of the vicar’s language is carefully angled away from Lady Prudence and oriented instead toward Sir Anthony. The playwright effects this not by changing the grammatical addressee, but by exploiting the difference in sensibility between the characters. The vicar appears to speak “through” the lady and “across” her to her husband; the wife is the pretext, the husband the point.
Three devices are especially noteworthy:
* Directional Glances and Asides. Stage directions frequently note that a seemingly general remark is accompanied by a look or tone directed specifically at Sir Anthony. Thus, praise of “curvature” or “support” in the church fabric is visually reassigned, onstage, to the male observer.
* Shared Wit. Sir Anthony alone responds with amused comprehension to certain phrases. Where Lady Prudence hears only impropriety or abstraction, Sir Anthony replies in kind, extending the metaphor. A miniature duet of understanding develops between the two men, beneath the level of the wife’s outrage.
* Selective Offence. The vocabulary that distresses Lady Prudence is precisely that which seems to attract Sir Anthony’s interest. What repels one character signals invitation to the other. Offence functions as cover.
In this way, Marchant constructs an unusually clear example of “double address”: a single line of dialogue carries two distinct messages—one overtly to the lady, another covertly to the gentleman—and the comedy depends upon the disjunction.
III. Euphemism as Code
The play’s most striking feature is its dense network of euphemisms, a feature easily dismissed as simple parody of Victorian modesty. Yet when seen in relation to the pattern of double address, these euphemisms assume the character of a code.
Terms associated with architectural description (“arches”, “supports”, “fittings”, “stops”, “pipes”, “loft”, “height”, “warmth”, etc.) are repeatedly employed in contexts where their technical meaning is obvious, but their secondary, bodily resonance is impossible to ignore. What is more, such terms are often elaborated beyond functional necessity, then rapidly curtailed when Lady Prudence protests, only to be resumed sotto voce with Sir Anthony.
The vicar’s hyper‑scrupulous avoidance of certain plain words, combined with his equally persistent invocation of suggestive substitutes, produces a language in which suppression is itself a sign. That which cannot be named directly must be circled, intensified and embellished. The excess of euphemism becomes, paradoxically, more explicit than the plain term would have been. In this sense, prudery is not merely mocked but utilised as an instrument of signalling.
IV. The Organ and the Vestry: Sites of Indirection
Two loci in the church assume particular importance: the organ loft and the vestry. Both are, in Victorian theatre, conventional spaces for concealment; Marchant exploits this tradition with unusual precision.
The organ, whose “pipes”, “stops” and “capacity” are praised with almost lyrical fervour, is repeatedly described as an instrument that responds most richly under certain conditions (“after dark”, “when handled by two”, “when practised upon in private”). Lady Prudence insists that such talk remain strictly functional; the vicar and Sir Anthony, however, respond to these phrases as if they were invitations. The entire discussion of organ‑practice becomes a sustained metaphor for a later, unspoken encounter, scheduled under the cover of “evening service.”
The vestry, meanwhile, is identified as the only warm space in the building, containing folded vestments that can be “unfolded” and examined “privately”. Lady Prudence refuses to enter it with an unaccompanied man. The implication is that such a space, though associated with clerical duty, is also a recognised site of informal intimacy. The geographical arrangement of the church thus maps, symbolically, the gradient from public decorum (nave) to semi‑public ambiguity (choir, loft) to private assignation (vestry).
V. Wit as Protective Colouration
Marchant’s method, here as elsewhere, is to subordinate plot to dialogue: the piece is “about” language in the same way that many contemporary society comedies are about manners. Yet in this instance, wit is not merely ornamental; it functions as protective colouration for socially hazardous implications.
The vicar’s speech is incessantly witty, aphoristic, and elaborately turned. This elaboration serves at least three purposes:
* It offers plausible deniability: any individual phrase can be defended as a harmless joke about architecture, liturgy, or English prudery.
* It exhausts the listener’s attention: Lady Prudence is overwhelmed by the flow of paradox and thus misses the specific points at which the men’s understanding converges.
* It provides pleasure for the sympathetic auditor (Sir Anthony, and by extension a certain kind of audience), who recognises that wit is being used as a vehicle for something more than mere cleverness.
The “hidden code”, then, is less a fixed cipher than a style of speaking in which excess, artifice and circumlocution signal mutual recognition between those capable of reading them.
VI. Audience and Reception
It would be anachronistic to claim that all spectators in 1880 would have decoded these signals in the same manner as a modern reader trained in psychological or social analysis. Yet it is reasonable to suppose that certain viewers—particularly those acquainted with metropolitan drawing‑room wit and its circumspect treatment of forbidden subjects—would have perceived more than an innocent ecclesiastical frolic.
The play thus appears to operate on three simultaneous levels:
* As a harmless satire on prudish patronesses and æsthetic clergy (for the broad audience).
* As a sophisticated exercise in linguistic inversion and innuendo (for lovers of paradox and verbal play).
* As an encrypted representation of non‑normative male desire and collusion (for those positioned, by experience or inclination, to recognise it).
In this last respect, The Vicar’s Reverent Tour may be seen as participating in a broader late‑Victorian practice whereby certain forms of theatrical wit provided a socially acceptable medium for the indirect expression of otherwise inexpressible relations.
VII. Conclusion
The significance of Marchant’s minor comedy lies not in its modest plot, but in its exemplary use of double address, euphemism and stylistic excess as vehicles for coded meaning. What appears, at first, to be a mere jeu d’esprit concerning architecture and etiquette reveals itself, upon inspection, to be a carefully engineered “two‑layer” discourse.
For the modern theatre historian, the play thus provides a valuable document of the ways in which language, gesture and spatial arrangement could be orchestrated to accommodate divergent readings—permitting one section of an audience to enjoy a reassuring moral fable, while another, more alert to nuance, perceives an entirely different drama unfolding in the interstices of speech.
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