Sir Percival; A Story of the Past and of the Present was written by J.H. Shorthouse. Shorthouse (1834-1903) was a British chemist and author. His fame during the nineteenth century was primarily for the historical romance John Inglesant: A Romance (1881).

Sir Percival is a love triangle, set in the future of 1920. The principals are Constance Lisle, the story's narrator and a good woman of a proper family background, Percival Massareen, a friend of Constance's family, and Virginia Clare, the bad girl niece of a duke who is friends with Constance's parents. Sir Percival begins with Constance, so that the reader learns about her situation and personality first. She is clever, gentle, kind, religious, and sad, in her late twenties and still unmarried. She is likable and appealing, and the reader will regret that Shorthouse did not treat her better. Percival enters Constance’s life as a guest of her parents, staying for a few months at their house. He is initially awkward around her, socially and emotionally, but they gradually become friends, and Constance begins to fall in love with him, almost without being aware of it. Then Virginia arrives, and Percival is instantly smitten with her. Constance immediately sees this, and graciously steps aside, allowing the two to fall in love and acting as a friend to them both. The pair have a short period of happiness together before an epidemic sweeps across England and kills Virginia. Percival is heartbroken but eventually recovers. He later proposes to Constance, but she turns him down, seeing that he still loves and will always love Virginia. He goes to Africa and dies there, winning the Victoria's Cross in the process, which he sends to Constance in a love letter before he dies.

Virginia Clare is a beautiful, outspoken agnostic who describes herself as a "petroleuse" and says, "I am the sworn enemy of everything that is old. That I detest the social system which is the curse of civilization. That I wish to subvert and destroy it all."¹ She is, in her own words, a "Socialist," though by today's definitions she is a communist. She is contemptuous of Christianity and religion and looks down on believers with amused condescension.

When Sir Percival is mentioned it is usually grouped with other novels about anarchists. But despite Virginia Clare's beliefs Sir Percival is a novel about religion rather than anarchy. Shorthouse wrote about religious matters: John Inglesant is about the contemporary conflicts within the High Church, and Sir Percival can be read as a religious response to anarchism. Virginia Clare is something of a satire of the New Woman, being naive and stridently doctrinaire in her beliefs. Compared to Constance, Virginia is as unlikable, and neither she nor her beliefs are portrayed as credible. Too, in Percival's family there is a story of his grandfather having been spoken to by God during an epidemic; the implication is that the plague which kills Virginia is just like the epidemic in the family story and therefore divinely caused. Finally, although Constance is saddened at having sacrificed her love for Percival for his relationship with Virginia, she is comforted by her own faith. It is the latter which makes Sir Percival a sad novel. The reader is meant to be reassured by Constance's faith, and see her decision as a noble one, but Constance is a likable character, much better than Percival deserves, and modern readers will probably see her decision as an unfortunate and regrettable one.

The title of the novel, with its allusion to the Arthurian legend of Sir Percival, the original hero in the Grail Quest before being supplanted by Galahad, is no coincidence:

Joseph Henry Shorthouse's novel, Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and of the Present (1886), is one of the few specifically Arthurian nineteenth-century novels and the latest significant nineteenth-century fictional reworking of the grail aspect of the Arthurian legends. In common with other grail texts discussed in this chapter, it interweaves text from Le Morte d'Arthur in its narrative; the hero, Sir Percival, is a 'knight of Christ'; characters are warrior-pilgrims battling with earthly life, and the structuring theme is the quest for 'spiritual truth' and purity. Yet Sir Percival is, to a greater extent, an appropriation of the legend of the quest for the grail which relates to contemporary society, particularly to debate concerning alternative ways of structuring society according to religious values. It engages with the discourse of modern heroism whilst questioning the Victorian ethic of service and the place of philanthropic schemes within a modern, industrial society. In a culture where boundaries between classes were being renegotiated the metaphor of the quest was useful in articulating both the aims of social reformers and the development of the self-made hero or heroine.²

Print: J.H. Shorthouse, Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and of the Present. Los Angeles, CA: Hardpress Publishing, 2013.

¹ J.H. Shorthouse, Sir Percival: A Story of the Past and of the Present (London: Macmillan, 1902), 150.

² Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 63-64.