1886-02-04 to the Editor of the Court and Society Review

Printed letter signed, Court and Society Review Supplement (4 February 1886, page 6), 620 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

Dear Sir,

To complete the correspondence which you propose reprinting from the Tablet and Weekly Register, I send you these few lines: — To Charles Russell, Q.C., M.P., and Canon Wenham who, on behalf of the Rev. Mother, write to declare that I was not present on Prize Day at the Convent of the Holy Child, I answer that I was not there on Prize Day, but I was there on the Feast Day of Corpus Christi, which is nearly the same thing, and my description of what I did not see was derived partly from what the nun who showed me over the convent told me, partly from diaries and letters I was afterwards lucky enough to obtain. That I should be forced to write this seems to me extremely unfortunate. I do not question that it may interest your readers, and that it has already afforded food for excitement to the subscribers to the Tablet and Weekly Register is more than probable; but with the journalistic success of the polemic I am not concerned — to me at least it is neither productive of honour, pleasure, nor profit, and I can only think now of the infinite amount of pain that has been inflicted upon those admirable and holy ladies of the Convent of the Holy Child, Hastings. Yes, a great deal of pain has been inflicted on these ladies; not by me, nor by Charles Russell, nor by Cannon Wenham, but by that anonymous creature who conceals his identity under the signature of "An Amazed Parent.”

The ordinary Anonymous has to conceal his handwriting, but this is done for the anonymous writer to the newspaper, and all that he has to do is to be careful not to betray his identity by a too intimate knowledge of extraneous matters. Now the most hasty reader must see that the ’’Amazed Parent” must have a personal acquaintance with me (that a stranger should know how the verses I wrote when a boy were received by the press, is, to say the least, unlikely);and in the very next sentence he reveals that he is a journalist of some sort or kind. If he were not he would not know who reviews the books in the Spectator; and that he knows who wrote the review of A Modern Lover, is as apparent as anything can well be. From this, what conclusion is forced upon us? This, that some penny-liner attached to the staff of the Tablet and the Weekly Register — papers that live by fomenting religious discussion — was told off to write the letter that appeared over the signature ”An Amazed Parent," just as the Times employed one of its underlings to write the letter signed "A British Matron," which produced, with one exception, the most odious flood of rancid fancy that ever polluted the English home.

It becomes, therefore, nearly certain that my name was dragged through the slime of religious canting for no more worthy purpose than to sell the Tablet and Weekly Register. The world has long known that the morals of journalists are regulated by the sale of their papers; but it had yet to learn that two journals, whose business is the dissemination of religious information, should, for the sake of creating a little conventual excitement, descend so far as to publish a letter which, on the face of it, is not a genuine one, and which gave grievous pain to their supporters the ladies of the Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonards.

I am, yours truly,

GEORGE MOORE