The Odd Women by George Gissing

In 2012, George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street made my Best-of-the-Year list, so in 2013 it was time to pick up The Odd Women, and after reading this remarkable novel which I can’t praise enough,  I can easily say that George Gissing has become a new favourite author. Published in 1893, in late Victorian England, The Odd Women examines ‘The Woman Question’–the shifting roles of women in a world of social change, and given the topic, it should come as no surprise that the novel concentrates on the lives of several women who make various choices–some traditional and some courageously non-traditional. Under examination is the societal expectation that women will marry and move from their father’s economic cloak of care to suitable husbands who can take over that role. But what happens if there is no husband–by fate or by choice? What happens to these Odd Women (and there’s a double meaning here) who remain single?

So many odd women–no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives.

The novel opens in 1872 with the family of a widowed Dr. Madden who has six daughters ranging from 19 to 5 years of age. Although Dr. Madden isn’t an affluent man, he has tried to ensure that his daughters receive an adequate education–a decision he sees as “the next best thing to saving money,” and the assumption is that, if for some reason he can’t support his daughters or they don’t marry, then they will be able to seek genteel employment as teachers, companions or governesses. As the novel continues and leaps forward to 1887, we see just how this ‘genteel’ employment decimates the Madden girls.

The Madden girls are middle class with a marginal education, so when they are forced to seek employment, they are not skilled enough to seek positions with the upper classes. Instead, Alice and Virginia Madden find themselves accepting live-in positions with people barely above their own social sphere, and these are jobs in which they are overworked and sometimes receive ‘board and care’ and no wages whatsoever. Humiliations pile on to humiliations, and years later,  in 1887, Alice and then Virginia, the latter who becomes an alcoholic, drift to a bleak London boarding house where they share a room. All their hopes and concerns rest on their youngest sibling, Monica, the beauty of the family, her health under threat, who works 6 exhausting days a week, typically 18 hours a day, as an underfed and overworked shop girl.

Enter Rhoda Nunn, a very determined young feminist “with zeal for womanhood militant,” who works at a business school which trains “young girls to work in offices,” owned by philanthropist, Miss Barfoot. Rhoda knew the Madden girls years earlier, and when she runs into them again in London, she’s shocked by what’s become of them, and she is determined to help the sisters rise out of their economic quagmire. Monica withdraws from the exhaustive, exploitive work as a shop girl and is enrolled at the school, but she’s courted by a much older, dour bachelor, Edmund  Widdowson who loves her with an unhealthy, possessive fixation.

While the novel opens with the Madden family, Rhoda Nunn is at the novel’s centre. Rhoda, an extremely attractive and self-possessed young woman, is determined not to marry and believes that she needs to set an example to the school’s female pupils. Rhoda is more far radical in her attitudes towards men and marriage than Miss Barfoot, and some of their differences float to the surface after a former pupil, a Miss Royston, a young woman who ran off with a married man and was subsequently abandoned, writes to Miss Barfoot for assistance. Rhoda harshly and coldly insists that Miss Royston not be allowed to return to continue her abandoned studies whereas Miss Barfoot has pity for their former pupil:

“Personal feeling is misleading you,” Rhoda pursued. “Miss Royston had a certain cleverness, I grant; but do you think I didn’t know that she would never become what you hoped? All her spare time was given to novel-reading. If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea we should have a chance of reforming women. The girl’s nature was corrupted by sentimentality, like that of all but every woman who is intelligent enough to read what is called the best fiction, but not intelligent enough to understand its vice. Love–love–love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won’t represent the actual world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not one in every ten thousand, I am convinced. Not one married pair in ten thousand have felt for each other as two or three couples do in every novel. There is the sexual instinct, of course but that is quite a different thing; the novelists don’t dare talk about that. “

Rhoda’s hard-line position comes under assault after she meets Miss Barfoot’s relative Everard Barfoot, a man of the world who is attracted to Rhoda and sets out to test her defiant declaration to abstain from any relationships with men. Barfoot has a bad reputation when it comes to women. Is that bad reputation deserved? Gissing is very clever about this aspect of this brilliant novel; he first introduces Barfoot as a bit of a cad, and then Barfoot later explains away what happened. But then later still, Barfoot gives his side of the story to his male friend, Mickelthwaite, and there’s something rather chilling about Barfoot’s cold delivery. Then there’s Barfoot’s relationship with Rhoda–at times he’s genuinely intrigued by Rhoda’s radical feminism, but his cold, calculated seduction of Rhoda suggests that she represents a challenge more than anything else.

Marriage and male-female relationships are under scrutiny in the novel, and so Monica and Widdowson’s miserable, disastrous marriage becomes the perfect late Victorian example of just how wedlock corrupts both partners. Monica realizes too late that she’s trapped in a suffocating marriage. This was a marriage that was supposed to free her from degrading servitude, but Monica discovers there’s a terrible price to pay. The very traditional Widdowson assumes the patriarchal role, and he seems genuinely confused when Monica refuses to obey him. For her part, Monica is unable to grasp her husband’s frustration. Monica has spent time with feminists and thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to sally forth in London alone; her husband, however, contends that he’s there to ‘protect’ his wife, and that basically translates to not letting her out of his sight. Unfortunately, Widdowson’s efforts to control his wife do not stop there; he also demands that she read certain approved books, and he sees her refusal to bend as “rebellion.” Widdowson somehow always misses the point. He suspects the wrong people of being a bad influence and he sees a threat in the wrong man. But there’s fault in Monica’s view too. She married for security and material ease but discovers that’s no enough. Where’s the love and the romance? Clearly Monica is not ready emotionally or mentally to keep the bargain she made, and Gissing hints at Monica’s frame of mind through her selection of reading material.

Similarly there’s an element in Barfoot’s relationship with Rhoda that demands a type of submission–a bending of her will to his seductive powers. So much for male-female relationships. Miss Barfoot, not so radical as Rhoda, has a sliver of romance in her heart, and she accepts that marriage, for most women, is inevitable and perhaps a better choice than the life of a spinster. Miss Barfoot’s goal is to train ‘genteel’ (middle-class) young women for careers that offer a reasonable alternative to virtual shop or domestic slavery, but for those who opt for marriage, Gissing gives examples which show that wedlock is a corrupting institution that forces a destructive, forced and unnatural relationship. Gissing lands on the idea, however, that marriage is a questionable state for all parties involved with no one sex more of a victim than the other. Mr Barfoot, whose own brother is a victim of his wife’s capricious whims, also holds his friend Poppleton up as another example of a victim of an impossible marriage. Poor Poppleton now resides in a lunatic asylum  as a result of years spent under the same roof as his humourless, dragon of a wife. Then there’s Mr. Orchard “worn to skin and bones” who fled his wife when he became suicidal. Miss Barfoot, Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn discuss these relationships one evening:

“Why will men marry fools?”

Barfoot was startled. He looked down in his plate smiling.

“A most sensible question,” said the hostess, with a laugh. ”Why, indeed?”

“But a difficult one to answer,” remarked Everard , with his restrained smile. “Possibly, Miss Nunn, narrow social opportunity has something to do with it. They must marry some one, and in the case of most men choice is seriously restricted.”

“I should have thought,” replied Rhoda, elevating her eyebrows, “that to live alone was the less of two evils.”

Gissing seems to say that marriage, Victorian-era marriage at least, is an institution fraught with peril and difficulties–perhaps as Rhoda says, an institution best avoided, and it does not appear that one sex is to blame here. Marriage may claim its victims in The Odd Women, but Gissing offers us Micklethwaite and his middle-aged bride as a sort of consolation. After a seventeen-year engagement, Mickelthwaite can finally afford to marry (and blissfully so), and with this note of optimism, shrouded with bitter economic reality, Gissing’s novel lands firmly not against the vagaries of men or the narrow-mindedness of impossible wives, but on criticism of Victorian society and morality.

The Odd Women is also available FREE for the kindle.

John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope

“Most of us would have to blush if the worst of our actions were brought out before us in a court of law.”

Time for another Trollope, and I selected one of the author’s Overseas Novels. John Caldigate is noteworthy for two reasons: part of the novel takes place in Australia and another large section concerns a criminal case involving postal stamps. Indeed the unsung hero of the story is Bagwax, a humble yet obsessive and conscientious postal office clerk. There’s a lot of Trollope in this novel–after all, he was a post office clerk who rose, eventually, within the post office ranks, and Trollope and his wife traveled to Australia, the first time in 1871 to visit their son Frederic who had become a sheep farmer in New South Wales.

The novel concerns a young man, John Caldigate, the only son and heir of a country squire who is set to inherit his father’s Cambridgeshire estate, Folking and an income of 3,000 pounds a year.  Unfortunately, while at Cambridge, John developed some bad habits and fell foul of money lenders. When the novel begins, John ‘cashes’ out his inheritance, pays off his debts and intends to sail to Australia to make his fortune in the gold mines. John’s father, so disappointed in his son, has mortgaged the estate and given his son his inheritance in advance. With a breach between them, John’s father contemplates making his nephew his heir instead.

Very early on, the novel establishes that when it comes to women, John has a problem. Before he sails to Australia with his best friend, Dick Shand, the son of the local doctor, John has managed to somehow become engaged to one girl and left another with the impression that some sort of ‘understanding’ exists between them. But these two girls have no idea that John has also set eyes on Hester Bolton, the daughter of the local banker, and carries her image in his head when he sails for New South Wales. Ok, that makes three women, but then on board the ship, aptly named The Goldfinder, both Dick and John are attracted to a somewhat mysterious young woman who calls herself, Mrs. Euphemia Smith. Mr. Smith is conspicuously absent and it’s rumoured that he was “a ne’er-do well” who “drank himself to death within a year of the marriage.” Mrs. Smith dresses very poorly, and yet would seem to be a lady:

The woman was so constantly alone! And then, though she was ill-dressed, untidy, almost unkempt on occasions, still, through it all, there was something attractive about her. There was a brightness in her eye, and a courage about her mouth, which had made him think that, in spite of her appearance, she would be worth his attention–just for the voyage.

Dick and John, eager to begin their lives as Australian miners, are second class passengers on the ship, and yet when they mingle with the others, they fail to blend. They’ve outfitted themselves in what they think are the clothes that miners wear, and consequently they look more as though they are in costume  than anything else. With many months spent on board ship sailing to Australia, John’s relationship with Euphemia grows–in spite of the fact that passengers, Dick Shand and even the captain warn him that he is making a fool of himself.

They were about a week from their port when the captain,–Captain Munday,–was induced to take the matters into his own hands. It is hardly too much to say that he was pressed to do so by the united efforts of the first-class passengers. It was dreadful to think that this unfortunate young man should go on shore merely to become the prey of such a woman as that.

John sees the general disapproval of his relationship with Euphemia Smith as snobbery, and that is certainly part of it, but there are depths to Mrs. Smith that are unfathomable, and young John Caldigate, an innocent with a number of scrapes to his credit, cannot see the warning signs. Part of Euphemia’s attraction is that she is worldly and therefore much more interesting when compared to the other young women John has known. At one point Euphemia Smith makes the following speech:

If you had made a false step, got into debt and ran away, or mistaken another man’s wife for your own, or disappeared altogether under a cloud for a while, you could retrieve your honour, and, sinking at twenty-five or thirty, could come up from out of the waters at thirty-five as capable of enjoyment and almost as fresh as ever. But a woman does not bear submersion. She is draggled ever afterwards. She must hide everything by a life of lies, or she will get no admittance anywhere. The man is rather the better liked because he has sown his wild oats broadly.

As in Can You Forgive Her? and The Claverings, Trollope examines the issue of choosing a marital partner–a crucial matter in Victorian England. What’s so interesting in this novel is that John is a young man whose prospects change. At first he’s the only son set to inherit a respectable estate and income. Then he abandons his home, sells out his inheritance, and sets out for Australia to make his fortune. When he returns, he returns as a success. His past is his past. But is that entirely true?

Trollope relishes enriching the plot with scenes of rigid religious intolerance seen mainly through the single-minded Mrs. Bolton, a very taxing woman, and the self-satisfied, slimy clergyman of Plum-cum-Pippin, Mr. Smirkie–a man who lives up to his name. As the novel develops, Trollope also gets on his soap box and delivers a couple of lectures about the efficiency of the much-under-valued civil servant which is accompanied by the general benevolence of government seen through a subset of characters at the London post-office: Mr. Curlydown and the indefatigable Mr. Bagwax.  It’s through these characters that Trollope slips in a criticism of Dickens: a “popular novelist” who “endeavored to impress” the ‘”public” “that the normal government clerk is quite indifferent to his work.” John Caldigate doesn’t rank as one of my favourite Trollope novels. It waxes on too long at the end, but it was enjoyable and a change of pace for this author. The novel’s deeply intriguing undercurrent, and one that isn’t addressed directly in the novel is the question: Does what occurs in the wilds of distant Australia have any bearing on English law? After all: “it was a wild kind of life up there.”

East Lynne: Why it works (not just for Victorians)

May contain spoilers:

East Lynne, published in 1861, was circulated By Mudie’s and sold 500,000 copies, and in the introduction to my copy, written by Stevie Davies, we’re told “sales of her novels totalled over two and a half million” by 1900. Phenomenal. Was Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen) the Jackie Collins of her day? She must have shocked and titillated her audience, and I can’t help but envision the prudish stereotypes of Victorians reading East Lynne on the sly. Perhaps their copies were even disguised with plain brown wrappers…

As a Victorian Sensation novel,  East Lynne, manages to explore Victorian morality through the machinations of her characters. There’s a debate whether Victorian Sensation novels were a reflection of the morality of their times or a subversive examination of morality. In the case of East Lynne, I’d argue the latter, and I’ll explain my argument later in the post.

I’m currently back to reading Trollope, and when I read Trollope, for its sensibilities and subtleties, I know I am reading a Victorian novel. Not so with East Lynne. There were times when if I didn’t know better, I’d think someone penned this as a faux Victorian. And why is that you ask? Well it’s how people behave. People do bad things in Trollope (thinking of George Vavasour in Can You Forgive Her?) but they still act as we expect Victorians to–even the bad ones. But the characters in East Lynne get down and dirty at times and seem surprisingly modern. At one point, for example, Afy Hallijohn argues with her half-sister, Joyce about exactly what happened the night of their father’s murder. Joyce asks Afy if she lived with Richard Hare, the accused murderer:

Living with Richard Hare! why, I’d rather go live with a red indian who goes about tattooed, and keeps sixteen wives.

But that’s just one example. The characters in East Lynne seem a little freer in their behaviour. At another point in the novel, two women of ‘noble’ birth exchange words, and the incident ends with one woman slapping the other in the face.

Another character who seems to have left that Victorian restraint behind is Cornelia Carlyle, the much-older spinster sister of our hero Archibald Carlyle. Cornelia is more a mother to Archibald than a sister–given the difference in their ages, that’s understandable, but what’s not acceptable is the way Cornelia (Corny) bosses everyone about, and pokes her nose in where she’s not welcome. There are many instances where Corny earns the title fishwife for her constant nagging, bitching, and complaining dominance, and at one point she decides to move into her brother’s home, and dismiss his servants. In essence, Corny takes over, saying that if her sister-in-law doesn’t like it, “she can lump it.” 

And this brings me to why East Lynne works so well.  At one point towards the end of the novel, Mrs Henry Wood makes an appearance through her narrative voice which interjects an opinion as she defends the indefensible:

Human passions and tempers were brought with us into this world, and they can only leave us when we bid it farewell to enter upon immortality in the next.

A couple of passages are directed to “our moralist” and while Mrs Woods agrees that the behaviour of the heroine is reprehensible, she also demands a little understanding for this troubled character who, after all, suffers tremendously by the time the novel concludes. East Lynne works because no one’s hands are clean: Afy is vain and superficial, Mr Carlyle is blind to the politics within his own home, the Late Earl Mount Severn was a spendthrift and a wastrel (where did that 60,000 pounds a year go?), Cornelia Carlyle is impossibly domineering, Justice Hare is inflexible, Otway Bethel can be bought for 50 quid, Richard Hare was lured by a woman’s beauty, Barbara Hare could afford to be a bit more generous, and Isabel Vane is gullible. Mrs Woods takes a tremendous chance when she makes Isabel Vane her heroine, as after all, she’s a woman who commits the ultimate sins, but she shows us that Isabel doesn’t commit these acts in a vacuum. She wasn’t the only one at fault here, so we can see how she was led to her mistakes. Yes, we also see her punished, and punished most horribly in these pages. In a modern novel this might not happen, but here Isabel sins, she reaps the consequences, and we forgive her. By setting Isabel in the midst of characters who helped paved the way for her moral disaster, Mrs. Woods sets up a subversive plot. We can’t simply condemn and forget Isabel. We can’t wipe our hands of her.

While Mrs Henry Wood may take the path of sin and consequence, and that may be seem as a form of convention, I don’t think East Lynne is that simple. By the end of the novel, everyone has something to regret and feel sorry about. Everyone has a certain culpability in the events that take place. Some, it’s true, like Afy simply move on, unscathed to the next phase, but some characters will be forever haunted, not just by what they did, but also by what they failed to do.

But back to the introduction. Stevie Davies argues that Ellen Wood’s use of the name Mrs Henry Wood “gives a valuable initial clue to her literary stance.” Further she argues that to write as Mrs Henry Wood is ”to say to the reading world that one is a safe, harmless, respectable, god-fearing, middle-class Englishwoman, probably endowed with children. It is to advertise one’s novel as safe moral reading for the family circle.” “Such a pseudonym” argues Davies “declares the author’s active and militant conservative bias.”

Anyway, a wonderful novel, loads of fun and highly recommended.

East Lynne by Mrs. Henry Wood

‘Rely upon it, sorrow of some nature comes sooner or later to all. In the brightest lot on earth dark days must be mixed. Not that there is a doubt but that it falls unequally. Some as you observe, seem born to it, for it clings to them all their days: others are more favoured. As we reckon favour: perhaps this great amount of trouble is no more than is necessary to take us to heaven. You know the saying, “Adversity hardens the heart, or opens it to Paradise.” It may be, that our hearts are so hard, that the long-continued life’s trouble is necessary to soften them.’

That’s a heavy moralising quote from the Victorian Sensation novel, East Lynne, but I hope its tone doesn’t deter any potential readers from reading the book as the moralising is one of the delights of the genre. My copy stood neglected on a shelf for more years than I care to think about, and this in spite of the fact that it had been recommended more than once.

East Lynne, published in 1861, a phenomenal best seller in its day, was the very first Victorian Sensation novel–this was a genre that exploded between the years 1860-1880 with its roots, not too surprisingly,  in the Gothic and Romantic traditions. The Victorian Sensation novel capitalised on the dangers to be found in domestic life, and typical plot twists included adultery, murder, bigamy, kidnapping, forgery and fake identities. Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel, East Lynne, as a perfect example of a Victorian Sensation novel includes, murder, seduction, adultery and fake identities. Of course, you can’t have this sort of action without a great deal of emotion and melodrama and a damsel in danger, so the pages are stuffed full of jealousy, rivalry, deaths and disease. Add to this a plot that is burdened with coincidence and happenstance. I lost count of the number of times characters just happened to be in the right place at the right time or how someone just happened to eavesdrop on a vital conversation as he or she hid on the other side of a convenient barrier.

So all those things said, Victorian Sensation novels are sometimes underappreciated. Naturally the popular trend for Victorian Sensation novels played into Victorian morality, so if literary characters do bad things, then bad things happen as a consequence–as well as those extremely painful just desserts. East Lynne includes people who make mistakes, and people who have horrible character flaws, but the novel also boasts a truly nasty, malevolent character in Francis Levinson. My tatty Everyman edition includes an introduction by Stevie Davies, and it’s an intro not to be missed, but in case you have a kindle, the book is also available FREE.

Now for the plot:

East Lynne, which in my edition runs to 640 pages, is the tale of a fallen woman–a woman who impulsively leaves her husband, her children, her home and society, and if that’s not enough, the novel’s sub-plot concerns an unsolved murder. These two story threads may seem disconnected, but Mrs. Henry Wood manages to deftly, brilliantly and seamlessly sew these two elements together, and the novel’s strength is definitely in its clever plot structure.

While the novel includes a fair number of characters, the main players are introduced quickly. The story opens with Earl Mount Severn, a man who at age 49, looks a great deal older, and seems to be pushing 90

A noted character had been the Earl of Mount Severn. Not that he had been a renowned politician, or a great general, or an eminent statesman, or even an active member of the Upper House: not for any of these had the Earl’s name been in the mouths of men. But for the most reckless among the reckless, for the spendthrifts among spendthrifts, for the gamester above all gamesters.

Earl Mount Severn, a spendthrift heavily in debt sells his country estate, East Lynne, to lawyer Archibald Carlyle. The transaction is conducted entirely in secret so that Mount Severn’s debtors don’t hunt him down for payment of unpaid bills. Mr. Carlyle, the novel’s hero, currently lives in a house in West Lynne with his indomitable sister (pushy, in other words), Cornelia Carlyle, and he fancies making East Lynne his estate.

The Earl’s daughter, Isabel Vane, a rather innocent young girl, has no idea that her father is in dire straits for money. Neither has she any idea that she is virtually penniless. When Lord Mount Severn dies unexpectedly, and with such a life of dissipation, we knew he couldn’t last long, Isabel Vane is left without a shilling to her name and is cast on to the mercy of relatives who don’t know what to do with her.

The other major plot thread involves a murder that occurred at West Lynne a few years before. Local wench Aphrodite Hallijohn (Afy) to her friends, fancies herself a ‘lady’ and plays fast and loose with a number of lovers including Richard Hare, the son of the local Justice and the mysterious man known as “Thorn.” One evening, Afy is visited by both Richard and Thorn, and as a result of the visit, her father is murdered. Richard is blamed for the crime, and he goes into hiding–much to the distress of his invalid mother and devoted sister, Barbara.

When East Lynne begins, Richard Hare has been a fugitive from justice for over 18 months, and everyone, except his mother and sister believe that he is guilty. While the taint of the scandal remains in the air of this small, bucolic town, Justice Hare publicly disavows his son, and although no one is convicted of the murder of Hallijohn, the locals accept that Richard Hare committed the crime. Even though the murder is in the past and solved to everyone’s satisfaction (with the exception of the women in the Hare family), the crime continues to cast a shadow over the characters and over the plot. Relevant questions about the crime and the identity of the murderer continued to be raised throughout the novel. It’s as though the murder nags away at the story and there’s the sense that no one will rest until the murderer is caught and ‘justice served.’

Part II coming next: Why East Lynne Works (and not just for the Victorians).

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

It was time for another Anthony Trollope, and while I can’t explain why I decided to read The Claverings, this selection, as it turns out, is a good companion novel for the recently read Can You Forgive Her? While Can You Forgive Her? concerns a woman who vacillates back and forth between two suitors, The Claverings is the tale of a young man who can’t choose between two women.

The novel begins by landing us into the action as the very beautiful Julia Brabazon drops, finally, forever and rather cruelly, the love of her youth, Harry Clavering in favour of an advantageous match with the very wealthy and much older, “debauched” Lord Ongar, a repulsive man who wears an “elaborately dressed jet black wig.” Harry accuses Julia of being a “jilt,” and while she doesn’t deny that, she attempts to mollify Harry’s accusations with arguments of practicality. Trollope gives us some wonderful numbers to play with here (I’ve been obsessed with the cost of living in the 19th century since reading George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street). We learn that Julia has 200 pounds a year to live on but owes 600. Lord Ongar lives on “perhaps” 60,000 a year. Harry Clavering’s father, Reverend Clavering earns 800 pounds a year, but that income is “nearly doubled” by his wife’s fortune.  On that income and with a curate to do most of his work, Reverend Clavering hinges on Country Gentleman status. In fact, he used to be a “hunting parson” until Bishop Proudie “lectured” him about the appropriateness of the activity. Now Reverend Clavering reads poetry and novels to the exclusion of everything else. 

Harry doesn’t want a career in the church despite his father’s encouragement and obvious easy lifestyle. Instead he plans to make his own way in the world and after Julia dumps him, Harry goes to Stratton to become an apprentice civil engineer living at the home of the Burtons. There he falls in love with the last daughter of the house (all the other daughters have also married previous apprentices), Miss Florence Burton. Now Florence isn’t as majestically beautiful as Julia, but she is the better person. Harry has the niggling feeling that somehow he’s been hooked by the Burton family into falling in love with their daughter. Of course, part of this feeling can be explained by the fact that Harry has simply followed in the footsteps of all the previous apprentices who lived at the Burton home. This repeated pattern of behaviour suggests that Harry isn’t particularly unique, and then again, the Burtons are a step down in the social stratosphere.

Harry, eager to wed, presses for an early marriage, and Florence opposes him on this issue. She argues that they should wait until Harry’s career is well established as she thinks that Harry would not cope well with poverty. The issue of money again rears its head–Florence will have a 100 pounds a year from her father, and Harry will earn 150 pounds annually in his new profession. He thinks this is plenty to live on, but Florence disagrees. The subject of sex also lurks under the surface of this pressure, and the disagreement over the issue of whether they should wait to marry quickly or delay the wedding day leads to the first rift between the engaged couple. Also around this time, the now widowed Julia Ongar returns to England under a cloud of scandal….

Harry Clavering, engaged to Florence Burton, finds himself championing Lady Julia Ongar, and he becomes a frequent visitor to her London home. Confused and bewitched, he no longer understands his own heart. Harry isn’t much of a hero as he’s young, plastic and weak.

Since the title of the novel is The Claverings, naturally the plot concerns other family members apart from Harry. Harry has two sisters, Mary and Fanny. While Mary marries Reverend Fielding, an appropriate match, in a minor aside Fanny is courted with persistence by the very serious and impoverished curate Mr. Saul–a man who earns a mere 70 pounds a year. Of course all these doings focus on the parsonage, but there’s another branch of the family at the ‘great house’ – Now to look at the family tree: Reverend Henry Clavering is the uncle of  Sir Hugh Clavering of Clavering Park. Baronet Sir Hugh is married to Hermione née Brabazon, the older sister of Julia Brabazon, and we learn that they live on 7,000-8,000 a year. In spite of the close relationship between the families at the parsonage and at Clavering Park, there’s no love lost between the two sets of relations. Henry Clavering considers it his duty to remain on good terms with those who live at Clavering Park but he really can’t stand Sir Hugh. One scene in the novel includes an uncomfortable evening at Clavering with a very unpleasant Sir Hugh who acts rudely and does not bother to hide his boredom.

In this novel, Trollope addresses the restrictions placed on the decisions women face. Underneath all the talk of love and marriage lurks the idea of the lack of choices for women. Early in the novel, Julia tells Harry:

If you could only know how infinitely I should prefer your lot to mine! Oh, Harry, I envy you! I do envy you! You have got the ball at your feet, and the world before you, and can win everything for yourself.

and

You can choose, as I say; but I have had no choice,- no choice but to be married well, or to go out like a snuff of a candle. I don’t like the snuff of a candle, and therefore, I am going to be married well.  

While men may choose their careers, for women, their careers are marriage, and Trollope boldly addresses this reality. He tells us that Julia, who chooses to become a Countess was “mercenary” but adds, with generosity:

Were not all men and women mercenary upon whom devolved the necessity of earning their bread?

Of course we see where these ambitious marriages lead. Julia’s sister Hermione loves her husband, mean-spirited Hugh Clavering rather as an abused dog loves its human. Hermione is so desperate for love and attention that she opens herself up to scorn and derision from her heartless, mean-spirited spouse. Julia lives to regret her marriage and realises that she sold herself for worldly gain and made a very bad bargain in the process.

Bad characters always seem to be a great deal more fun to read about than good characters, and that is certainly true in The Claverings. Sir Hugh is a curious character–not a monster by any means, but there are important emotional components missing. He treats his wife appallingly, but then he’s not much better with anyone else in his circle. He barely tolerates his brother, Archie, loathes his uncle, and seems to dislike society on principle.

The Claverings is called One of the “three faultless” Trollope novels, but I’m not sure why that is. While I enjoyed the novel immensely (it is, after all, Trollope), I was never entirely convinced of Julia’s feelings for Harry Clavering. However, that niggling argument aside, some of the novel’s second tier characters are unforgettable. When Julia returns from Florence, she brings along the sneaky, opportunistic ”Franco-Pole” Sophie Gordeloup, who may or may not be a Russian spy. Madame Gordeloup’s brother, Count Pateroff, one of Lord Ongar’s friends, is in hot pursuit of Julia as he regards her as his prize. Count Pateroff and his peculiar sister seem to be beings from another planet, and they are treated as such by the other characters in the novel who are at a loss to know quite how to deal with this pair. At one point Julia tells Harry to seek out the Count, and in spite of knowing the Count’s address, Harry can’t track his quarry down for weeks. When they finally meet for dinner, the topic of conversation (the digestion and the refusal to discuss the consumption of horsemeat in a “besieged city,“) is steered firmly by the worldly, savvy Count much to Harry’s frustration.

While the Count sees the widowed Julia as his rightful property, that sort of fortune floating around gets attention, and Sir Hugh Clavering, who has no time for his sister-in-law Julia since scandal attached to her name, decides that she’s the perfect match for his brother, Archie. Archie consults his friend Captain Boodle on the matter of exactly how to lay siege to the beautiful wealthy widow, and the scenes between Archie and Boodle are hilarious. Boodle, incidentally is mentioned in a minor aside in the Vicar of Bullhampton. While Boodle’s extremely funny strategy for laying siege to the wealthy widow includes the advice to treat her like a horse, this section of the novel really takes off when Sophie Gordeloup becomes involved in the intrigue. Throughout the novel, Sophie behaves appallingly, and yet no one seems to know quite how to stop her. She’s rude, pushy, grasping, and duplicitous–in essence, she’s in a class of her own. Archie thinks she’s insane while Captain Boodle can’t help but admire her.

Sophie certainly makes short work of all the men who sniff around the widow. Here she is in a scene at Julia Ongar’s home after getting rid of Captain Archie Clavering:

“He was come for one admirer,” said Sophie, as soon as the door was closed.

“An admirer of whom?”

“Not of me; oh no; I was not in danger at all.”

“Of me? Captain Clavering! Sophie, you get your head full of the strangest nonsense.”

“Ah; very well. You see. What will you give me if I am right? Will you bet? Why had he got on his new gloves, and had his head all smelling with stuff from de hairdresser? Does he come always perfumed like that? Does he wear shiny little boots to walk about in de morning, and make an eye always? Perhaps yes.”

“I never saw his boots or his eyes.”

“But I see them. I see many things. He come to have Ongere Park for his own. I tell you, yes. Ten thousand will come to have Ongere Park. Why not? To have Ongere Park and all de money a man will make himself smell a great deal.”

“You think much more about all that than is necessary.”

“Do I , my dear? Very well. There are three already. There is Edouard [Count Pateroff], and there is this Clavering who goes with his nose in the air, and who thinks himself a clever fellow because he learned his lesson at school and did not get himself whipped. He will be whipped yet some day,-perhaps.”

It’s through this scene that we see that the secret to the limited success of the Count and his sister Sophie Gordeloup, two people who expect to make their fortunes in England is to be found in the fact that they bend the boundaries of polite behaviour. Julia is clearly sending a message to Sophie that she considers it impolite to discuss the subject, but Sophie simply doesn’t care.

Anyway, another wonderful Trollope novel. A word on my copy. I read the Dover issue with original illustrations and a foreword by Normal Donaldson. The Claverings was originally published in serial form in 16 parts in The Cornhill Magazine 1866-1867.

The Triple-Decker in Gissing’s New Grub Street

As an owner of a kindle, when I’ve downloaded copies of free Victorian novels from Amazon, I’ve noticed that several books are divided into three volumes. I’ve wondered about this–it’s a bit of a nuisance and makes the argument for opting instead for the 99c or 1.99 collected works in one file version. But while I’ve wondered about the three-volume division, I hadn’t made that much of it, and instead filed it away as a curiosity.

But then I read Bernard Bergonzi’s introduction of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street and discovered that the 3-volume novel or three-decker as it was called seems to have been the bane of many a writer’s existence in late Victorian England. While never “totally dominant” circulating libraries “found this kind of book a profitable commodity.” Apparently, the price of 31s 6d “remained stable for a remarkably long time,” and while there were plenty of other novels in one or two volumes, they were not popular with libraries.The intro also brings up serialization saying that a writer like Dickens “could reach a wide audience through serialization in monthly parts.”

Nevertheless, for several decades the three-decker was pre-eminent, and the circulating libraries maintained pressure on publishers to ensure that most novels came out in that form (since subscribers could only take out one volume at a time, a reader who wanted all three volumes at once had to take out three subscriptions). Publishers in turn put pressure on their authors by offering much higher payment for the three-decker than for novels in one or two volumes.”

So with all this pressure, couldn’t a writer produce 3 volumes at sixty pages each? No the guidelines were quite strict. No cheating allowed: “each volume had to consist of about three hundred pages, with something over twenty lines to the page.” There’s an example given of some poor author who was instructed that a novel “consisted of 920 pages with twenty-one and a half lines on each page and nine and a half words in a line.” What is this, the literary version of Iambic pentameter?

And this brings me back to Edwin Reardon who tries to write the best-seller three-volume book with his wife, Amy tapping her foot and sighing with frustration in the background.Here’s Milvain on the subject of the three-volume system.

A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelist. One might design an allegorical cartoon for a comic literary paper.

Here’s Reardon’s response:

“For anyone in my position,” said Reardon, “how is it possible to abandon the three volumes? It is a question of payment. An author of moderate repute may live on a yearly three-volume novel–I mean the man who is obliged to sell his book out and out, and who gets from one to two hundred pounds for it. But he would have to produce four one-volume novels to obtain the same income; and I doubt whether he could get so many published within the twelve months. And here comes in the benefit of the libraries; from the commercial point of view the libraries are indispensable. Do you suppose the public would support the present number of novelists if each book had to be purchased? A sudden change to that system would throw three-fourths of the novelists out of work.

Let’s face it; Victorian England or the 21st century, a writer’s life can’t be an easy one. There are no guarantees of sale or success, no pension, no paid holidays, and then we readers can be a fickle bunch. Do writers relate to Reardon fretting over a three-volume novel he hates in order to feed his family and make his wife proud? Is the life of a writer any easier today, over 120 years later? The future of libraries seems questionable, and the publishing industry seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift since e-publishing gained ground. I’d like to think that e-publishing has given authors a little more power over their careers. What do you think?

The Cost of Living in Gissing’s New Grub Street

The subject of a man’s ‘worth’ comes up frequently in the novels of Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, “five minutes after his entrance ” into a dance,  it’s a matter of public knowledge that Mr. Darcy has “ten thousand a year,”–a veritable Rothschild compared to Bingley, who according to the rapacious Mrs. Bennet has “four or five thousand a year” and is considered an amazing ‘catch.‘  Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and what of Gissing’s world of  late Victorian England, 1891?

In New Grub Street, one of the main themes is the dilemma literary men face when they wish to marry. At the beginning of their careers, they are extremely poor, and if they are lucky, that may change. George Gissing certainly understood exactly what the lack of money could do to you. Gissing was the son of a pharmacist who attended Owens College on a scholarship. He fell in love with a young prostitute and stole money from other students with the aim of keeping his lover off the streets. He was caught, sent to trial and sentenced to gaol. After his release, with support from friends, he travelled to America and for a while worked for an American newspaper and even did a stint as a travelling salesman. These experiences find their way into the pages of New Grub Street through the character of Whelpdale. Gissing later married the prostitute. They lived together but finally separated. Gissing supported her until her alcohol-related death some years later.

In Gissing’s novel, according to the ambitious Jasper Milvain a writer should, in optimum circumstances, marry an heiress, but that’s best case scenario. He sees that other writers marry working class women who accept living in a freezing garret on a diet of bread and dripping.  Jasper has the goal of earning, in ten years time, “my thousand a year,” and meanwhile his widowed mother lives with her two daughters on an annuity of two hundred and forty pounds. The two daughters, Maud and Dora had received “an intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material conditions of their life,”  and because their mother supported Jasper’s life in London to the tune of 120 pounds–half of her annuity– the year previously, they work to supplement their income. During the last year, Jasper earned 1/5 of his living, 30 pounds, himself, and that brings his total cost of living to 150 pounds for the year. Due to supporting Jasper in London, the women in the Milvain household suffer deprivations and do not mingle in society as they cannot afford it.  Maud works occasionally as a music teacher, and Dora is employed as a “visiting governess” with a local family. Are they destined to become old maids?

So let’s look at some of the numbers: When Edwin Reardon was single, he inherited 200 pounds, moved to London and lived for almost 4 years off of the money using “painful economy.” That’s 50 pounds a year. He lived in a garret with rent at 3/6 a week and spent about 1 shilling a day on food. After his inheritance ran out, and still trying to make a living as a novelist, Reardon was lucky enough to land a job as a clerk at a hospital for a pound a week.

He held this position for three years, and during that time important things happened. When he recovered from his state of semi-starvation, and was living in comfort (a pound a week is a very large sum if you previously had to live on ten shillings), Reardon found that the impulse to literary production awoke in him more strongly than ever. He generally got home from the hospital about six o’clock, and the evening was his own. In this leisure time he wrote a novel in two volumes; one publisher refused it, but a second offered to bring it out on the terms of half profits to the author. The book appeared, and was well spoken of in one or two papers; but profits there were none to divide. In the third year of his clerkship he wrote a novel in three volumes; for this his publishers gave him twenty-five pounds, with again a promise of half the profits after deduction of the sum advanced. Again there was no pecuniary success. He had just got to work upon a third book, when his grandfather at Derby died and left him four hundred pounds.

Reardon takes the second inheritance, lives off of it and publishes a third book for which he is paid fifty pounds. He is now an author of modest reputation. He meets Amy Yule, a young woman of good family and fueled by the expectations of his literary career, they marry.  She foolishly imagines that writing a novel is an easy thing and sees the next novel being sold for 300 pounds with royalties in the range of another 200-300.

Poor Edwin Reardon who’s frantically writing himself into a mental and physical breakdown lives with his wife Amy and their child in a flat, eight flights up, in which “gentlefolk” live, and their flat is composed of a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen (which doubles and triples as a dining room and a parlour). The rent of 50 pounds a year is paid on the quarter. Impractical Amy makes economies but still bemoans the family’s inability to go on holiday. She’s disappointed and cold about Edwin’s failure when he finally sells his novel for 75 pounds; after all at this rate writing and selling a novel a year is going to pay the rent with not enough to live on left over.

One character lands a job that pays 150 pounds a year, housing included, so a life of relative worry-free existence is anticipated. We are told at one point that Marian Yule is expected to be able to earn only 50 pounds a year through her writing, and yet we know that a pound a week is poverty for these “gentlefolk” or “gentry” as the Russians would say. A position on the literary magazine Chit Chat pays 250 pounds a year, and the character who gets the job sees the pay as a “glorious competence.” Clearly, somewhere between 150-250 pounds income a year, life begins to look a lot rosier.

Then there’s the matter of inheritance. One person inherits 5,000 pounds and another 10,000. Numbers are bandied about, but it seems that 4% interest is the going rate, so the person who inherits 10,000 will have 400 pounds a year to live on, while the person who inherits 5,000 will have about 200 pounds a year. The wealthier woman lands into the heiress category while the one with the lesser inheritance is seen as a tolerable match.

Then there’s Mrs Edmund Yule, Amy’s mother:

Like the majority of London people, she occupied a house of which the rent absurdly exceeded the due proportion of her income, a pleasant foible turned to good account by London landlords. Whereas she might have lived with a good deal of modest comfort, her existence was a perpetual effort to conceal the squalid background of what was meant for the eyes of her friends and neighbours. She kept only two servants, who were so ill paid and so relentlessly overworked that it was seldom they remained with her for more than three months. In dealings with other people whom she perforce employed she was often guilty of incredible meanness; as, for instance, when she obliged her half-starved dressmaker to purchase material for her, and then postponed payment alike for that and for the work itself to the last possible moment. This was not heartlessness in the strict sense of the word; the woman not only knew her behaviour was shameful, she was in truth ashamed of it and sorry for her victims. But life is a battle. She must either crush or be crushed. With sufficient means, she would have defrauded no one, and would have behaved generously to many; with barely enough for her needs, she set her face and defied her feelings, inasmuch as she believed there was no choice.

With a mother such as Mrs. Edmund Yule, it’s easy to see why Amy has difficulties understanding why she and Edmund Reardon can’t afford a holiday. What’s so interesting here is we see the financially challenged Milvains pooling their resources in solidarity whereas Mrs. Edmund Yule and her children pull apart, and when Amy goes to her mother for help, the knives are drawn against Edmund.

Next up: the triple decker.

New Grub Street by George Gissing

“A year after I have published my last book, I shall be practically forgotten; ten years later, I shall be as absolutely forgotten as one of those novelists of the early part of this century, whose names one doesn’t even recognise. What fatuous posing!”

George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, published in 1891, is essentially the story of two young men, Jasper Milvain and George Reardon who take vastly different approaches to their literary careers. George Orwell was a great admirer of George Gissing and called New Grub Street, one of the few Gissing novels still in print,  Gissing’s masterpiece. Orwell defined New Grub Street as a “protest against the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability.” Orwell argues that Gissing showed the “horrors” of late Victorian London for those who teetered on the fringes of ‘good’ society.

The grime, the stupidity, the ugliness, the sex-starvation, the furtive debauchery, the vulgarity, the bad manners, the censoriousness — these things were unnecessary, since the puritanism of which they were a relic no longer upheld the structure of society. People who might, without becoming less efficient, have been reasonably happy chose instead to be miserable, inventing senseless taboos with which to terrify themselves. Money was a nuisance not merely because without it you starved; what was more important was that unless you had quite a lot of it — £300 a year, say — society would not allow you to live gracefully or even peacefully. Women were a nuisance because even more than men they were the believers in taboos, still enslaved to respectability even when they had offended against it. Money and women were therefore the two instruments through which society avenged itself on the courageous and the intelligent.

That marvellous quote from Orwell should give you a good idea about the book–this is a serious, sometimes depressing critique of late Victorian society–a society in which talent is crushed by need, deprivation, and the desire to keep up ‘appearances.’

 In New Grub Street, writing has been reduced to a commodity, and this is exemplified by the two main male characters, Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon. We are introduced first to Jasper, an intense, vital young man who lives in London but is visiting his mother and two sisters, Maud and Dora in the town of Wattleborough. Jasper is busy making connections in the London literary world, and in order to keep up appearances and maintain the necessary social contacts, he siphons off money from his widowed mother’s tiny annuity. Anything given to Jasper necessitates sacrifices on the part of his mother and sisters. While his sisters despair of Jasper ever earning a living, for his part, he sees the money as an investment in all their futures.

The novel opens with a scene over the Milvain breakfast table and Jasper regaling his country sisters with the insider’s view of the London literary world. He holds up his friend, Edwin Reardon, a writer who’s managed to publish a few excellent novels that have sunk without a trace, as a prime example of how not to do things and predicts that “he is just the kind of fellow to end by poisoning or shooting himself.”

Jasper lacks the talent to write novels, but if he could he admits that he ”would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies.”  Instead his aim is to become a figure in the literary world through one of London’s influential literary review magazines that are effectively the gatekeepers of fame and fortune for writers, so his time is spent in London cultivating the right people and making the connections that will pay off for his future career.

While New Grub Street is ostensibly about the rise and fall of the two main characters, Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon set against the backdrop of the London literary world, in true Victorian fashion, the novel includes a host of other characters and various sub-plots-all of which are connected to the literary world in one form or another. We are introduced to the various branches of the Yule family: John Yule, in poor health who has a sizeable estate and has nothing to do with his brothers or their families, writer Alfred Yule and his daughter, Marian, and the widow and two children of the youngest brother Edmund Yule. Although John Yule does not make an appearance in these pages, his estate and the promise of possible inheritance for his relatives is a sizeable concern and plays a tremendous role in the drama that unfolds.

One of the most interesting aspects of this hugely enjoyable novel is the depiction of working life for the various characters. Edwin Reardon, after scoring a few modest publication successes and selling a novel for 100 pounds has made the mistake of marrying a girl of good family, Amy Yule, the daughter of the late Edmund Yule. Amy has certain expectations, and these expectations have resulted in the Reardons living beyond their means. Jasper predicts disaster and says that Edwin should have married “either a work-girl or an heiress.”   Indeed, as the book develops, just who a writer should marry becomes one of the book’s major themes. If a writer marries a lower class woman, then it’s likely that he will have a wife that accepts living in poverty, while a wife from a middle-class or an upper class background will have expectations that her husband will not be able to provide. This is most certainly the case with the Reardons. Amy cannot cope with poverty and rather than make stringent economies, she pushes her husband to write a novel as speedily as possible, and heavily influenced by Milvain, she agrees that “art  must be practised as a trade.” Meanwhile, Edwin, who would rather be writing obscure scholarly articles, is having difficulty writing a three-volume novel (a popular format of the day) he hopes will sell but it’s a work that he despises. Amy has no sympathy whatsoever, and she sees his inability to write a bestseller as a character flaw, a weakness:

But don’t you feel it’s rather unmanly, this state of things? You say you love me, and I try to believe it. But whilst you are saying so, you let me get nearer and nearer to miserable, hateful poverty. What is to become of me–of us? Shall you sit here day after day until our last shilling is spent?

With the rent due and the money running out, Amy becomes more and more frustrated while Reardon becomes less and less capable of completing his novel. The introduction to my edition, written by Bernard Bergonzi, makes the point that the situation between Reardon and his wife Amy reflects Gissing’s beliefs and experiences with marriage, the writing life and poverty, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that the theme of just who writers can marry pops up repeatedly in the novel. Gissing shows that there’s no easy answer, and the men who marry ‘beneath’ them live to regret it and make their wives pay for their discontent–Alfred Rule, for example, married a shop girl  who was willing to share the garret he lived in, and he treats her little better than an unpaid servant. One chapter begins with the discussion of the marital states of a number of writers  and how the lowly social positions of these spouses have supposedly ruined any chance for success in the literary world. Then again, couldn’t a poor marriage and an inability to move in prominent social circles also act as a smokescreen for a writer of mediocre talent?

Of the acquaintances Yule had retained from his earlier years several were in the well-defined category of men with unpresentable wives. There was Hinks, for instance, whom, though in anger he spoke of him as a bore, Alfred held in some genuine regard.  Hinks made perhaps a hundred a year out of a kind of writing which only certain publishers can get rid of, and of this income he spent about a third on books. His wife was the daughter of a laundress, in whose house he had lodged thirty years ago, when new to London but already long-acquainted with hunger; they lived in complete harmony, but Mrs Hinks, who was four years the elder, still spoke the laundress tongue, unmitigated and unmitigable.

Hinks is just one of the writers in Alfred Yule’s circle of friends. There’s also Christopherson who “worked casually at irresponsible journalism.” Mrs Christopherson is the daughter of a butcher and “disagreeable stories were whispered” about her past. The writers in Yule’s circle do not include their wives in their literary evenings.

These men were capable of better things than they had done or would ever do; in each case their failure to fulfil youthful promise was largely explained by the unpresentable wife. They should have waited; they might have married a social equal at something between fifty and sixty.

Jasper Milvain would agree–a literary man needs a wife who can hold her own in soirées and it’s even better if she can pay for them! Amongst these married men who regret their alliances there are also a number of desperate bachelors–including Whelpdale who proposes to every woman he meets and the immortal, tragic Biffen (no wonder Orwell loved this novel) who longs for the sort of wife that Edwin Reardon has but can’t afford to keep.

The introduction makes the point that while New Grub Street criticises late Victorian society, it offers no solutions. Jasper Milvain is not as great a scoundrel as Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, but there’s a link there, nonetheless. He states early in this 500 page plus novel : “ All my plans and efforts will have money in view–all. I shan’t allow anything to come in the way of my material advancement.” Jasper’s pledge is sorely tested when he finds himself attracted to Marian Yule, a very sincere and talented young woman who works as a ghost writer for her father.

In  spite of the fact that New Grub Street is a critique of late Victorian society, some of the book is surprisingly prescient. Good novels sink and rubbishy ones get rave reviews in all the right literary magazines in the London Circle Jerk of Critical Praise. As the very intelligent and principled Marian observes:

When  already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market

New Grub Street is available FREE for the kindle.

Part II: Running the numbers and the triple-decker book ….

The Vicar of Bullhampton by Anthony Trollope

At just over 500 pages Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton is a vast, multi-plot Victorian novel in which a lot of things happen. While there’s a brutal murder, and a subsequent hunt for the murderers takes place, for the most part the action revolves around the flawed decisions–some petty and others of a much larger scale–that are made by various characters. As the title suggests, the main character is the vicar of Bullhampton, Frank Fenwick. His role in the novel isn’t at first immediately apparent, for when the novel begins, the story appears to centre on the courtship of Mrs. Fenwick’s friend and house guest, Mary Lowther, by another very close and dear friend of the Fenwicks, Harry Gilmore. Mr Gilmore is in hot pursuit of Mary, but in return, she’s not that keen to marry Mr. Gilmore. She doesn’t love Gilmore, and she has this notion that she wants to marry a man she loves. Unfortunately, there’s no small amount of pressure from the Fenwicks–particularly Mrs. Fenwick who argues that if Mary marries Gilmore, love will follow. Since Mary is practically penniless and Mr Gilmore is the affluent owner of the handsome nearby estate, Hampton Privets, Mary’s refusal to accept Gilmore is rather interestingly interpreted as an act of perversity rather than evidence of integrity.

Another sub-plot concerns the Miller Brattle and his large family originally of “some twelve or fourteen children,” and now with “six still living.” Two of Brattle’s children have gone astray–Carry Brattle, the family beauty has fallen into prostitution while Sam Brattle hangs out with a disreputable crowd and comes and goes at the mill. Miller Brattle, a man who tends to brood over and nurse his grievances, blames the vicar for Sam’s lack of discipline. Miller Brattle isn’t a bad man, but he judges everyone by his own standards of morality and behaviour: 

He was a man with an unlimited love of justice; but the justice which he loved best was justice to himself. He brooded over injuries done to him, -injuries real or fancied,–till he taught himself to wish that all who hurt him might be crucified for the hurt they did him. If any prayer came from him, it was a prayer that his own heart might be hardened that when vengeance came in his way he might take it without stint against the trespasser of the moment. And yet he was not a cruel man. He would almost despise himself, because when the moment for vengeance did come, he would abstain from vengeance. He would dismiss a disobedient servant with curses which would make one’s hair stand on end, and would hope within his heart of hearts that before the end of the next week the man with his wife and children might be in the poorhouse. When the end of the next week came, he would send the wife meat, and would give the children bread, and would despise himself for doing so. In matters of religion, he was an old Pagan, going to no place of worship, saying no prayer, believing in no creed,–with some vague idea that a superior power would bring him right at last, if he worked hard, robbed no one, fed his wife and children, and paid his way. To pay his way was the pride of his heart; to be paid on his way was its joy.

When the novel begins, Harry Gilmore’s proposal to Mary is a month old, and she still cannot give her answer. The Fenwicks are of one mind on the matter

Both she and her husband were painfully anxious that Harry might succeed. Fenwick had loved the man dearly for many years, and Janet Fenwick had loved him since she had known him as her husband’s friend. They both felt that he was showing more of manhood than they had expected of him in the persistency of his love, and that he deserved his reward. And they both believed also that for Mary herself it would be a prosperous and a happy marriage. And then where is the married woman who does not wish that the maiden friend who comes to stay with her should find a husband in her house? The parson and his wife were altogether of one mind in this matter, and thought that Mary Lowther ought to be made to give herself to Harry Gilmore.

A large part of the novel concerns Mary’s dilemma: should she or shouldn’t she marry a man she doesn’t love?

Another major sub-plot concerns a feud that erupts between the Marquis of Trowbridge and the Vicar over the matter of Sam’s involvement in the murder that takes place in Bullhampton. The Vicar, a man of staunch principles, but possessing scant diplomacy at times, offends the Marquis by speaking to him as an equal. As a result, the horribly offended Marquis, nearly apoplectic over the vicar’s insolence, uses the local dissenters led by Mr. Puddleham to exact his petty revenge against his arch-enemy, the well-meaning vicar of Bullhampton. Meanwhile the poor vicar is kept busy trying to ‘save’ both Carry and Sam Brattle and getting very little help from the rest of the Brattle family.

In some ways The Vicar of Bullhampton is a great companion novel to Can You Forgive Her? In that novel, the first of the Palliser series, Alice Vavasour is engaged to the eminently respectable Mr Grey, but she breaks the engagement only to become re-engaged to her disreputable cousin, George Vavasour.  Alice is unaware that she’s rather smoothly manipulated into this position by her best friend, George’s sister, Kate. And in The Vicar of Bullhampton, we see pressure delicately applied with steely determination by Janet Fenwick, Mr Gilmore and by Mary’s aunt. Indeed by the end of the novel, Mr Gilmore’s determination to wed Mary borders on the unhealthy. Is this obsession or simply a man who wants something that, for once, he can’t get? That’s for the reader to decide.

The other major female character in The Vicar of Bullhampton is Carry Brattle–the former family favourite who once turned to prostitution becomes the family pariah. She’s not as fully developed as Mary Lowther, and she remains more of a “type,” and that “type” is the fallen woman–or as Trollope calls her in the preface “a castaway.” While Trollope makes it clear that Carry has made bad choices which had a cumulative result, he shows that Carry’s hard-hearted, self-righteous relatives are largely a smug, unpleasant lot, and through this theme posits the argument that heartlessness and a lack of forgiveness are greater sins than a sexual indiscretion that led to abandonment and a life of prostitution. In The Vicar of Bullhampton Trollope exposes the folly of human behaviour, and through the Marquis of Trowbridge’s feud with the vicar we see class snobbery, while through the extended Brattle family, we see moral snobbery. Both forms of snobbery lead to the notion of superiority and a lack of accountability, and through his characters Trollope argues that we are not perfect and that none of us are above accountability to our fellow-man.

The Vicar of Bullhampton is simply a delightful novel. Yes, there are a couple of true villains here, but for the most part Trollope has created flawed human beings who act as they think best, and sometimes they learn to revise those decisions whether they want to or not. The vicar of Bullhampton must learn to forgive his enemy in spite of the fact that his deepest and most insulting grievances are not addressed, and the inflexible Miller Brattle battles an internal struggle over conflicting moral beliefs. Trollope’s impeccable presentation of these events ensures a lasting fondness for his all-too human characters.

Jury selection in Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton

I’ll post a review of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Vicar of Bullhampton this month, but ever since I finished this marvellous novel, I’ve found myself thinking about a passage that concerns jury selection. A murder takes place early in the novel, and here towards the end of our story, jury selection begins. I was rather surprised by this passage:

At that moment the court was occupied in deciding whether a certain tradesman, living at Devizes, should or should not be on the jury. The man himself objected that, being a butcher, he was, by reason of the second nature acquired in his business, too cruel, and too bloody-minded to be entrusted with an affair of life and death. To a proposition in itself so reasonable no direct answer was made; but it was argued with great power on behalf of the crown, which seemed to think at the time that the whole case depended on getting this one particular man into the jury box, that the recalcitrant juryman was not in truth a butcher, that he was only a dealer in meat, and that though the stain of blood descended the cruelty did not.

I found this small aside, set within a 500 page plus novel, fascinating. The man’s objections were not dismissed out of hand–rather his livelihood was defined as ‘not to be cruel’ since he just sold the meat and was not a butcher after all.

In Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle, the workers in an abattoir are desensitized to violence, and as a consequence rapes, murders and brawls occur. Strange to connect Trollope and Sinclair together, but the connection is there–even in just a small aside.