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S.R.Crockett, beyond the ‘Stickit Minister.’
Introduction
A thumbnail sketch of Samuel Rutherford Crockett might go thus: Born, the illegitimate son
of a dairymaid, raised by radical Cameronian grandparents, died in the arms (allegedly) of a
Catholic Priest. And in between, condemned to be defined by the role of religion in his
writing. This is a wholly inadequate picture. I shall try to do better.
Was he stickit?
Crockett’s first, hugely successful collection of sketches and short stories was titled ‘The
Stickit Minister and other Common Men.’
The word ‘Stickit’ refers to someone
professionally ‘stuck’ in a position – for example in Crockett’s time a minister who could not
progress up the career ladder to get a parish of his own. Crockett tends to refer to men who
become ‘stickit’ through no fault of their own, but rather, through their own virtue of selfsacrifice. Where a parish could be ‘bought’; if the money was instead used, for example, to
fund a brother’s medical career, a minister could become stickit, like Crockett’s character
Robert Fraser.
The ministry was a profession and Crockett entered it as such. He wanted to make his mother
proud, and more importantly, provide for a wife and start a family. The itinerant life of a
travelling tutor/come journalist somehow didn’t have the same appeal to the Manchester Mill
Owner whose daughter Crockett wooed and won.
But Crockett spent less than a decade in the ministry – while he wrote professionally for
some thirty years – and he left it in favour of full time professional writing as soon as it was
financially viable. Ironically it was the religious press that gave him the means of escape.
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Crockett held both ministers and the communities they lived in to account through his fiction.
Some of the early stories do end in what might seem to us today a somewhat cloying homily
that God is wiser and/or more charitable than man. But these stories stem from the days
when Crockett was writing for religious publications such as The Christian Leader, and it
would be folly to bite the hand that feeds. Within the constraints of his publishers he is quite
outspoken not just about society as a whole but the ministry in particular. We have drunken
ministers, ministers who bully and are bullied by their parishioners, good men gone bad and
bad men on the make.
Ministers are not, after all, God. An early novel
‘The Lilac
Sunbonnet’ offers a similarly satiric interpretation of ‘auld lichts’ religion to J.M.Barrie’s
‘The Little Minister.’ We may have lost sight of the fact, but Crockett’s contemporaries were
aware that he and Barrie were criticising not condoning.
Religious Observance?
Crockett’s published work is riven through with religion but his fiction is not determined or
defined by it any more than the man himself was. It is used primarily as a mirror, reflecting
the prejudices of society. From the Covenanting novels to the 19th century ‘rural domestic’
tales and from the European historical adventure stories to the sensationalist popular fictions
of his later years, religion is just part of the colour of the community, and only occasionally
does it become central as a ‘theme.’
The ‘Killing Times’ is an example. Crockett’s ‘take’ on the Covenanters is different from
those of other writers – he is partisan because he is ‘of’ Covenanting stock himself.
Cameronianism bred them tough. Crockett’s Cameronian grandparents thought nothing of
taking a twenty mile round trip to the nearest Cameronian Kirk, passing any number of other
churches on the way. The Cameronians took up arms in the Covenanting cause and their
heroes are Richard Cameron, Peden the Prophet and John Macmillan. Crockett writes
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fictionally about all three men. Cameronianism is fundamentally a fighting religion. Crockett
considered it a badge of honour as a child when quizzed at school ‘can ye fecht’ and he
stepped up and proved that he could. It was a trait he never lost.
Crockett’s native Galloway is steeped in Covenanting history. He wrote five novels set in
‘The Killing Times.’ ‘The Men of the Moss Hags’ (1895) its sequel ‘Lochinvar’ (1897) and
The Cherry Ribband (first serialised as Peden the Prophet) (1905) all offer good examples of
how Crockett embeds religion into his historical action. These are of the ‘style’ of
Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’
and Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’.
They offer a different
perspective from either Walter Scott or John Buchan’s forays into the subject [as described
by Benjamin already]. ‘Lochinvar’ is much more Musketeers than ministers. And ‘Silver
Sand,’ prequel to the more famous ‘The Raiders’, shows Covenanting in all its fighting glory
and horror. In The Cherry Ribband Peden the Prophet is little more than a minor character in
the story which originally bore his name.
Most famously, covenanting is central to ‘Men of the Moss Hags’ where cousins Will and
Wat Gordon (one Whig, one Jacobite) offer us a picture of a divided Scotland. But here
religion is often little more than a foil for politics. Even in ‘The Standard Bearer,’ perhaps
Crockett’s
most obviously ‘religious’ story; being a fictionalised life of the great
Cameronian preacher John Macmillan; religion is still seen as just part of the wider fabric of
society.
Crockett covers the full range of religious persuasions. In the medieval setting of ‘The Black
Douglas’ French Catholics are portrayed as evil, personified in the character of Gilles de Retz
(later used by Tolkien as template for his character Sauron).
Crockett’s guid Scots
Presbyterian characters are generally suspicious of Catholicism. However this does not
reflect Crockett’s own view. He is simply holding up a mirror to religion in society. How can
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we tell? Because he gives Presbyterians exactly the same treatment. For example setting up
Sunday Schools might be seen as a noble Presbyterian ambition, but Crockett illustrates the
shortcomings both of the aim and the actuality. Like his characters, as a Cameronian child he
learned to know right from wrong less from the Shorter Catechism and more pragmatically at
the back of his grandfather’s woodshed. Presbyterianism (and its small mindedness) is
explored many times from the early stories in ‘The Stickit Minister’ through the likes of ‘Cleg
Kelly’ and ‘Kid McGhie’ to the late novel ‘Sandy’s Love’ (1913).
Far from being ‘Stickit’ in any respect, Crockett was a well travelled man spending a lot of
his life abroad. He sets a number of novels in Europe as well as a few further afield and he
introduces a range of exotic religious characters in his fiction. There are followers of
Sikhism, Buddhism, Mohammedism and even, in Little ‘Anna Mark,’ Voodoism. Closer to
home in what we might think of as the ‘domestic’ and ‘sensational’ novels of the early 20th
century; in ‘Love in Pernickety Town,’ Spiritual Evangelism is put under the same scrutiny
as Catholicism is in the medieval stories. Crockett uses character to explore and expose
religion. But these are character creations – not Crockett’s own personal beliefs. In the nonfiction ‘The Adventurer in Spain’ – 1903) he writes: ‘It matters far less WHAT a man
believes than HOW he believes.’
I suggest that religion was but one of the colours on his artists palette, but before moving on
I’d like to point towards what I call the Unholy Trinity of Crockett’s fiction. These are novels
in which religious symbolism is to the fore. ‘Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills’ (1894) is a Gothic
style novella where we find a madman rampaging naked over the Galloway hills. It is steeped
in the symbolism of the white mountain hare and the French popinjay – make of it what you
will – it is disturbing and yet compelling - like something from William Blake or Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.
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More sober is ‘The Banner of Blue’ (1903) Nominally its subject matter is ‘The Disruption’
of 1843. It can be read as a simple love story, with plenty of plot twists to keep the action
going. More importantly it can be read as an analogy for the state of Scotland in the mid-19th
century. It offers an interesting commentary on a divided nation – and the connection
between politics and religion. It shows a mature Crockett, working on a number of levels to
please the widest range of readers.
Perhaps strangest of all is the posthumously published ‘The White Pope.’ (1920). This is to
sci-fi what Mad Sir Uchtred is to Gothic. It is unclear whether it was finished at the time of
Crockett’s death, though it was started (perhaps abandoned) more than a year before. He
wrote to a friend that ‘only you will get it’ so he was himself aware of its bizarreness. It can
be read as a sick man’s exploration of ‘Revelations’. In all three novels the religious
symbolism is deeper than I can fathom – but I am sure there are academics out there who
could see things I cannot.
3. Strength of Character.
Crockett’s characters really bring his stories alive. He offers an interesting narrative device,
intentional, sophisticated and well executed in that he deliberately foregrounds the ‘ordinary’,
placing the ‘big’ or ‘famous’ characters of history and hierarchy in the background (some
might say where they belong). He writes great rural characters, especially those drawn from
life. From Anton Macmillian in ‘The Banner of Blue,’ to Saunders McQhuirr in the
Drumqhuat novels, many of Crockett’s ‘ordinary’ characters are based on real people, and
often partially on himself. They are born from realism and subject to honest scrutiny.
His female characters are no slouches either. They are generally feisty and usually smarter
than their male counterparts. Most of all, if you know ordinary, rural folk, they are characters
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you can believe in. They are not drawn with rose tinted spectacles. Drunken dominies and
dishonest ministers abound and the plight of women, especially, at the hands of unscrupulous
landed gentry is evident. The bourgeoisie do not escape unscathed either as we see in ‘Kid
McGhie’. Crockett is a writer of class. The working class. Royalty and privilege of all
persuasions come under the cosh in his fiction. The Hanoverian Princes in The Moss
Troopers are shown to be smugglers and press-gangers and the Presbyterian Kirk Session in
The Standard Bearer are shown to be the complete antithesis of men of religious principle.
Crockett writes strong characters who are often required to show strength of character. They
are real, but perhaps not recognisable to the aristocracy or the upwardly mobile aspirational
urban dweller. It’s a matter of perspective. You have to appreciate the position Crockett is
writing from to understand his work.
4.Scots Romance.
If Crockett has a religious ‘message’ consistently across his work I suppose it would be: God
is love and we see him best in nature. God is Love. Nature is God. Love is Natural. It’s a
kind of loose syllogism which best describes Crockett’s attitude as expressed in his writing.
Obviously it’s not a neat dialectic but it has a sort of Romantic profundity to it.
Determined to make the point that he did not write ‘novels of purpose’, instead Crockett
preferred to see himself (as I do) as a Romance writer. For me, in a vital way Crockett is to
prose what Burns is to poetry. The Scottish Romance tradition in prose from Walter Scott
through Hogg and Stevenson places, I suggest, Crockett as perhaps the last great proponent of
Scots Romance writing– at least pre First World War. Crockett died in April 1914, so cannot
be expected to reflect the massive changes of the Great War in his fiction, as later Scots
writers from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn to Grassic Gibbon and Robin Jenkins did.
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One of the key, timeless features of Crockett’s writing, and I contend perhaps his greatest
strength, is his facility of natural description. He can match and outperform any other ‘great’
writer in this respect. If you cannot appreciate Crockett for any other reason, reading him for
his natural description is more than enough reward. But there is much more.
4. Scots Humour.
Crockett adds something singular to his Scots Romance. And this is what might be termed a
particular take on ‘Scots humour.’ He uses the humour of the March dyke in preference to
that of the literary salon, as is seen clearly in novels as diverse as ‘The Loves of Miss Anne,’
‘The Moss Troopers’ and ‘Lads’ Love.’ He writes, it is true, of the ‘rural idyll.’ But we need
to unpack what that actually means. I suggest a rural idyll may only exist in the mind of a
nostalgic urban dweller. Certainly when Crockett uses the word– both in the title of his short
story collection ‘Love Idylls’ and in various other short stories – we have to understand that
‘Scots humour’ is at play.
Scots humour is as vital a key to an understanding of Crockett’s work as irony is to Jane
Austen, or symbolism to George MacDonald. If I suggest that Crockett’s writing is not of the
same class as Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson or John Buchan, I am indulging in an
example of ‘Scots humour’ of which I think he would be proud. If you don’t ‘get’ that, you
probably won’t ‘get’ Crockett.
The capital of community.
It is through Scots Humour we are introduced to Crockett’s other great strength – his
description of the working classes – specifically the rural working class. Their life is far from
idyllic. Crockett shows that a good community is the basis of a good life but he rarely finds it
in his fiction outwith the immediate family (and sometimes not even then.) He explores two
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familiar Burnsian ideas throughout his fiction - and with Crockett the two go hand in hand.
They are: ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’ and ‘to see oursel’s as others see us.’ Crockett does not
idealise the community or nature, nor does he show them as a panacea for all ills. He is a
Romantic realist. He knows the devastating power of nature. He understands the fragility of
community. But he suggests that both are more positive elements to our life than political or
religious or economic hierarchy.
Crockett’s urban fiction shows similar ‘realism’. ‘Kid McGhie’ opens with a desperate
suicidal father begging his son to let him shoot them both. The novel proceeds to explore
three ‘religious’ stereotypes through three characters, as a way of reflecting on Scottish
society. It very clearly a novel exploring social hierarchy. ‘Cleg Kelly’ opens with the
shocking statement ‘God is dead.’ Middle class do-gooders, and especially the purveyors of
religious ‘tracts’ are subject throughout the novel to Cleg and Crockett’s Scots humour.
Crockett repeatedly shows that community, the bedrock of Scottish society, is threatened by
hierarchical power be that political or religious or economic. From the smuggling novels ‘The
Moss Troopers’ and ‘The Smugglers’ through to the exploration of emergent capitalism in
the form of the joint stock company Incubus in ‘Vida: Iron Lord of Kirktown’ (1908)
Crockett explores and exposes the concept of ‘limited liability’ across a range of meanings.
‘Vida’ itself stemmed from a story Crockett wrote following the Mauricewood Pit Disaster of
1889 when he was minister of Penicuik. His response to the event, both in life and in his
writing gives clear indication that a life in the ministry was not going to be for him. Creating
an elder called Hector McKill, as he did in 1894, is surely Dickensian enough a sign.
Crockett is as damning of Calvinism as he is of Capitalism in ‘Vida’. Had he stayed in the
kirk and written out his frustrations at the hypocrisy he found, he might indeed have been a
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‘stickit’ minister, but he jumped ship at the first opportunity and supported himself through
his pen for the rest of his life.
7. Once a Cameronian?
Crockett was born of Cameronian stock and it may well be that he is the last of the
Cameronians, in that throughout his fictional writing he proudly carries the traits of the
fighting religion. His causes are to expose the hypocrisy of hierarchy – and to show that
man’s chief end is not the Shorter Catechism but an appreciation of value of community and
an acceptance of man’s place in nature.
In exploitation of his talents Crockett started with an advantage. A native of rural Galloway
with a love for and keen observation of the natural world around him, unlike (perhaps unique
among) other writers of the time, he was truly ‘of’ the rural working class. And despite
becoming the epitome of a successful Edwardian, he never forgot his roots, in his life or in
his fiction. Crockett is, above all, an honest writer. He knows the difference between a lie
and a ‘lee’. (I have been most successful when I have ‘lee’d of lairge -Intro. And lie/lee in
Kit Kennedy)
He also illustrates that the late 19th century was not a ‘Dark Ages’ of Scottish fiction, but
rather, the last dying throes of a particular line of Romanticism – one which places
community before capital. Like the characters he writes about, Crockett was not on the
winning side of history, but with the clarity of hindsight I suggest it is about time to free
Crockett from the confines of ‘Stickit Minister,’ and set him in context among the ‘greats’ of
Scottish literary history if not of Scots literature.
I could say much more. Crockett is a master of history, adventure and romance in
fiction and I hope that the scratching the surface of his work encourages you to go
and explore all three for yourselves.