Peccavi is a novel written by English author Ernest William Hornug, and published in 1900 when the latter was 34 years of age. The book came after many successful literary works including short stories, novels, journalistic work, and non-fiction.
Ever since his early years, Hornug had suffered the misfortune of a poor health and a frail constitution. For this reason, he was sent by his family, at the age of 17, to Australia, where he was expected to stay for a couple of years with the hope of benefitting from its weather. His biographer Mark Valentine wrote that Hornug seemed to regard this period as, “one of the most satisfying of his life”. Accordingly, the years spent in the clement nature and pleasant Australian scenery found their way to his literary productions. Peccavi, for one, takes after the rural life he had seen while working in remote Australian sheep stations, and depicts the pastoral lives of contented people, who were satisfied with their agrarian countryside just as he was contented with the years he had spent under similar circumstances.
The book is also an attack on the moral hypocrisy of 19th century England. Its central character, Robert Carlton, denounces, through his acts, the double standards of the late Victorian era. Hornug’s interest in these social evils is not surprising, for he was a close friend of Oscar Wilde, who wrote on similar issues and themes. The friendship of the two authors was a strong one. Hornug, for one, had named his son after his friend, and drew from him the inspiration for Raffles, who is one of the most brilliant literary productions, which came to life in 1898 through his novel In The Chains of Crime.
Peccavi draws as well from the Victorian tradition of the fallen clergyman. It is an intriguing work, which searches the remotest nooks of human psychology in the quest of a plausible explanation of guilt and criminal behavior. During his literary career, Hornug had experienced an increasing interest in criminality. On the one hand, his work as a journalist coincided with the period of Jack the Ripper. On the other, his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a celebrated mystery and detective fiction writer. Critic Alison Cox explained how Hornug had a, “growing fascination with the motivation behind criminal behavior and a deliberate sympathy for the criminal hero as a victim of events,” which shows through the plot of Peccavi, and the unavoidable sympathy nurtured by the reader towards the fallen parson of Long Stow.
On the whole, Peccavi is undeniably one of the best literary works written during the Victorian period. It combines the era’s moral degeneracy with the author’s interest in criminality in a brilliant study of human psychology.
