Vicars at Loggerheads with Their Bishops over Ballet Girls

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 10 pages

One of the very few documents in the library written first in Russian, for a Russian readership, and translated back into English by Boris de Zirkoff. It appeared in Novoye Vremya of St Petersburg in February 1888 as part of her Chinese Shadows series of London dispatches, and it is journalism — a foreign correspondent's letter about English religious life, written for people who found it exotic.

The occasion is a quarrel between Anglican vicars and their own bishops over ballet girls. The Reverends Haweis and Headlam had turned their pulpits into oratorical tribunes on the Athenian model in defence of feminine beauty in general and of dancers in particular, and the question she reports them putting is a sharp one: is it possible that God would have created woman's body so that it would be sinful to look at it? The second half turns to a revivalist she describes as a general-mesmerist in Christian garb — a fat old man, healthy as a bull, who began life as a boy in a slaughterhouse and continued as a butcher's clerk — and to the claim she makes about his movement, that the Salvation Army is a political organisation under the mask of religious striving.

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