Ida Wombwell, the seventeenyearold revivalist

'Missioner Ida Wombwell, the seventeenyearold revivalist, said concerning the coincident of interfizzing with grenadines and other respectable and disgusted peersons using the park: That perpendicular person is a brut! But a magnificent brut!' 60.22

This passage, written in November 1923, comes from the Plebiscite section, where members of the public are asked their opinion of the guilt or innocence of HCE. Most of the people questioned are taken from a real newspaper plebiscite, published in the Daily Sketch, on the guilt of Frederick Bywaters, condemned to hang for murder.  But Ida Wombwell isn't in that article.

 

The sentence is based on this note that Joyce wrote in September-November 1923. 

'Ida Wombwell / 17yr girl revivalist' VI.B.11.

I've just discovered that, in the early 1920s, there was a real Ida Wombwell - a teenage Methodist preacher from Nottingham. I've been on her trail through the pages of The Primitive Methodist Leader.  

 

 

This article is from 17 April 1924.

Here's another article from the same paper, dated 13 November 1924. She is called a 'girl preacher' and a 'missioner' (missionary).

A few years later, she was touring Australia, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald of 24 May 1929.

 

There we leave Ida, on her missionary tour of every state in Australia. She would surely have been astonished to learn that she became a character in Finnegans Wake!

 

I looked her up on ancestry.co.uk and found this.

 

 

The articles in the Primitive Methodist Leader are too late to have been used by Joyce, who wrote about Ida in 1923. Now someone (with the patience of Vincent Deane) needs to track down the specific newspaper article where Joyce found her.  I suspect it was published in 1922, when she was 17 years old. 

Ida must be a relation of 'the market missioners Hayden Wombwell' 529.01

Joyce was amused by religious revivalists, like J Alexander Dowie who appears in Ulysses. 

 

'Come on, you winefizzling ginsizzling booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed four flushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that's yanked to glory most half this planet from 'Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he's on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God.'

 

He had a record of Amy Semple Macpherson preaching which he played Morley Callaghan:

''Do you think Mr and Mrs Callaghan would like to hear the record?' he asked his wife. 'What record?' asked McAlmon, blinking suspiciously...Mrs Joyce was regarding my wife and me very gravely. 'Yes,' she said. 'I think it might interest them.'
'What record?' McAlmon repeated uneasily.
Mrs Joyce rose, got a record out of a cabinet and put it on the machine. After a moment my wife

and I looked at each other in astonishment. Aimee Semple McPherson was preaching a sermon! At that time, everyone in Europe and America had heard of Mrs McPherson, the attractive, seductive blonde evangelist from California. But why should Joyce be interested in the woman evangelist?
   The evangelist had an extraordinary voice, warm, low, throaty and imploring. But what was she asking for? As we listened, my wife and I exchanging glances, we became aware that the Joyces were watching us intently, while Mrs McPherson's voice rose and fell. The voice, in a tone of ecstatic abandonment, took on an ancient familiar rhythm. It became like a woman's urgent love moan as she begged. 'Come, come on to me, And I will give you rest...and I will give you rest...Come, come...' My wife, her eyebrows raised, caught my glance, then we averted our eyes, as if afraid that the Joyces would know what we were thinking. But Joyce, who had been watching us intently, had caught our glance. It was enough. He brightened and chuckled. Then Mrs Joyce, who had also kept her eyes on us, burst out laughing herself. Nothing had to be explained. Grinning mischievously, in enormous satisfaction with his small success, Joyce poured us another drink.'

 

That Summer in Paris 

 

Aimee, whose mother worked for the Salvation Army, is in Finnegans Wake:

 

'the aimees of servation' 351.33

This must be the record!