Wives and Daughters

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  In the context of the larger narrative strain about Roger Hamley’s success as a scientific explorer, the conversation takes on the coloring of a social commentary. Roger stands for the emergence of a new class of the scientific intelligentsia, one shift among the more widespread power shifts in nineteenth-century British society, as rank loses its status as the dominant wielder of power. Ultimately, what Gaskell is querying in this exchange is the question of whether differences among classes of people are natural or are constructions—a philosophical issue that has significant bearing on the “social ecology” she is sketching in her novel. In a larger sense, the question of whether people can be “taxonomized” in the same way that “strange animals” can be provides an uncomfortable, if unresolved, backdrop to the novel, one that because of the presence of Africa in the novel (and persistent concerns throughout the nineteenth century with race) encompasses race as well as class. Racial theory in the 1860s figured black Africans as so different from European whites that there was speculation they were of a different species. In this light, the fact that Africa primarily appears in Wives and Daughters as a proving ground for Roger Hamley (the epitome of the vital Englishman) suggests the way in which the novel participates in, rather than simply reflects, cultural values about race and nation. And yet the fact that the novel points in its concluding moments toward a kind of hybridity for the future generations is fascinating: The recognized heir of the Hamley estate is part English and part French, the son of landed gentry and a common servant. In this provisional way Wives and Daughters perhaps suggests that (an albeit limited concept of) hybridity, as a social as well as a scientific concept, is England’s future and perhaps best hope.

  In a novel as long and as minute in the detailing of everyday life as Wives and Daughters is, it is perhaps niggling to turn our attention to what is not in the novel. And yet what is absent in a novel that calls itself an “every-day story” is itself fascinating, so by way of closing let us consider what Gaskell excludes from the everyday First, there is a decided absence of the depiction of labor in the novel, made all the more glaring because of the number of references to work. So, for instance, Dr. Gibson is often said to be away from home to attend to a patient, but the narrative never follows him to a bedside. Likewise, although we hear a great deal about the “draining works” that Squire Hamley has had to postpone for lack of funds, the reader is never privy to the details of the project even when the work begins again. Indeed, the one laborer (Old Silas) who speaks in the novel is on his deathbed. In a novel about the “everyday,” the lack not only of details but of scenes of labor seems a significant omission and makes the reader question its purport. Although Gaskell is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in not representing the everyday details of work, another way of understanding the omission is through the lens of the novel’s title, which avows that its subject is the feminine sphere: Perhaps Gaskell wishes to shine light on the work of wives and daughters, and so highlights the private sphere by deliberately avoiding the details of the masculine public sphere of work. Indeed, the very best moments in the novel in which men play a part are scenes of leisure, especially (as the Cornhill editor draws our attention to) the scene of tobacco smoking at the end of chapter 2 3 . Here the conversational rhythms of speech and the import of this masculine ritual are memorably drawn.

  The second notable absence in Wives and Daughters is the absence of institutional religion. None of the characters are ever shown attending church on a Sunday, and there is no clergyman among the otherwise large stock of Hollingford characters. When Dr. and Mrs. Gibson are married, the clergyman is implied but not mentioned in the scene; only Old Silas on his deathbed mentions a clergyman who has been to see him—“ ‘Parson’s been here; but I did na tell him. He’s all for the earl’s folk, and he’d not ha’ heeded. It’s the earl as put him into his church, I reckon’ ” (p. 334)—but otherwise clergymen do not enter into the narrative. The absence of the establishment church (the Church of England) in the portrayal seems pointed, for the ritual of churchgoing would have been a mainstay of country life. Uglow suggests that Gaskell’s faith was “so integral to her life that she rarely writes about it”—but this does not quite account for the choice, which would have been contrary to her narrative purpose, to eliminate this everyday feature from the scene (Uglow, p. 451). Gaskell, who was raised as a Unitarian and chose to marry a Unitarian minister, belonged to what was considered a dissenting sect—that is, a sect that had separated from the national church (the Church of England) over doctrinal differences. Unitarianism was an open religion that only asked of its members that they believe in the one God and the divine mission of Jesus. Unitarians debated the nature of Jesus, the notion of original sin, and—most importandy—the doctrine of atonement. That is, Jesus was considered a teacher and a moral example, rather than a divine entity. This was, as might be expected, controversial, with many believers denying that Unitarians were Christians, for their beliefs, including their emphasis on reason and freedom of thought, seemed to fly in the face of the primacy of faith (Uglow, pp. 5-7). This account of the faith to which Gaskell adhered (although necessarily abridged) might give us a biographical answer to the absence of organized religion in Wives and Daughters: The Church of England held no sway in Gaskell’s life, and so it would have little sway in her novel. However, religion might be located in another place in the novel. Rather than in the parish church, to which the narrative does not go, the impetus of religion is felt in the presentation of Molly’s character. The way in which Molly examines her actions and feelings as an individual in light of deeply felt moral principles might be understood as inspired by Unitarian principles and values; hence the absence of religion in the novel is perhaps better understood as an absence of the Established Church.

  Perhaps most niggling of all is the complaint that the novel is missing a conclusion, a complaint the reader will nevertheless feel when coming to the end of Wives and Daughters. Elizabeth Gaskell died before she was able to lend her pen to the ending, and while readers can have no doubt of the content of the ending, it is missed nonetheless. The novel ends thus on an odd and unintended note, but one that, owing to the author’s sudden death, takes on added significance. The novel’s last words belong to Mrs. Gibson:“You might have allowed me to beg for a new gown for you, Molly, when you knew how much I admired that figured silk at Brown’s the other day. And now, of course, I can’t be so selfish as to get it for myself, and you to have nothing.You should learn to understand the wishes of other people. Still, on the whole, you are a dear, sweet girl, and I only wish—well, I know what I wish; only dear papa does not like it to be talked about. And now cover me up close, and let me go to sleep, and dream about my dear Cynthia and my new shawl!” (pp. 643-644).

  The unintentional humor behind the ever-self-centered philosophy of Mrs. Gibson is heightened here, now that the reader knows that Molly will soon be securely kept from daily exposure to it. That which “dear papa” does not “talk about” is the future that Molly is then contemplating, and that the reader, denied the author’s vision, must necessarily contemplate as well. The urge to fill in the blanks, so to speak, is a general impulse of the reader, and one that Frederick Greenwood explicitly understood when he wrote his “Concluding Remarks: by the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine.” The impulse is one that its filmic adaptors felt as well. The BBC film, otherwise quite true to the narrative, concludes on a note that is extra-textual: Molly stands in breeches, and looks out over a sublime African vista with Roger Hamley at her side. Whether one wishes to applaud or scold the costume designer for the breeches and the director for the interpretation behind the final scene, the reader of Wives and Daughters will understand the impulse and, more to the point, celebrate the delights of a novel that wanted to be nothing more, and perhaps nothing less, than “an every-day story.”

  Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City and is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vern
acular in the English Novel (Oxford University Press, 2003) as well as articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. King received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1998. She also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Dawn of a Gala Day

  To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room—a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o‘clock struck, when she wakened of herself ‘as sure as clockwork,’ and left the household very little peace afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was, the room was full of sunny warmth and light.

  On the drawers opposite to the little white dimity bed in which Molly Gibson lay, was a primitive kind of bonnet-stand on which was hung a bonnet, carefully covered over from any chance of dust with a large cotton handkerchief; of so heavy and serviceable a texture that if the thing underneath it had been a flimsy fabric of gauze and lace and flowers, it would have been altogether ‘scomfished’ a (again to quote from Betty’s vocabulary). But the bonnet was made of solid straw, and its only trimming was a plain white ribbon put over the crown, and forming the strings. Still, there was a neat little quillingb inside, every plait of which Molly knew, for had she not made it herself the evening before, with infinite pains? and was there not a little blue bow in this quilling, the very first bit of such finery Molly had ever had the prospect of wearing?

  Six o’clock now! the pleasant, brisk ringing of the church bells told that; calling every one to their daily work, as they had done for hundreds of years. Up jumped Molly, and ran with her bare little feet across the room, and lifted off the handkerchief and saw once again the bonnet—the pledge of the gay bright day to come. Then to the window, and after some tugging she opened the casement, and let in the sweet morning air. The dew was already off the flowers in the garden below, but still rising from the long hay-grass in the meadows directly beyond. At one side lay the little town of Hollingford,1 into a street of which Mr. Gibson’s front door opened; and delicate columns and little puffs of smoke were already beginning to rise from many a cottage chimney, where some housewife was already up and preparing breakfast for the breadwinner of the family.

  Molly Gibson saw all this, but all she thought about it was, ‘Oh! it will be a fine day! I was afraid it never, never would come; or that, if it ever came, it would be a rainy day!’ Five-and-forty years ago,2 children’s pleasures in a country town were very simple, and Molly had lived for twelve long years without the occurrence of any event so great as that which was now impending. Poor child! it is true that she had lost her mother, which was a jar to the whole tenour of her life; but that was hardly an event in the sense referred to; and besides, she had been too young to be conscious of it at the time. The pleasure she was looking forward to to-day was her first share in a kind of annual festival in Hollingford.

  The little straggling town faded away into country on one side, close to the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady Cumnor: ‘the earl’ and ‘the countess,’c as they were always called by the inhabitants of the town; where a very pretty amount of feudal feeling still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways, droll enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance at the time. It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, 3 but a good deal of liberal talk took place occasionally between two or three of the more enlightened freeholders living in Hollingford; and there was a great Whig family in the county who, from time to time, came forward and contested the election with the rival Tory family of Cumnor.4 One would have thought that the above-mentioned liberal-talking inhabitants of Hollingford would have, at least, admitted the possibility of their voting for the Hely-Harrison who represented their own opinions. But no such thing. ‘The earl’ was lord of the manor, and owner of much of the land on which Hollingford was built; he and his household were fed, and doctored, and, to a certain measure, clothed by the good people of the town; their fathers’ grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son of Cumnor Towers, and following in the ancestral track, every man-jack in the place gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of such chimeras as political opinion.

  This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great landowners over humbler neighbours in those days before railways,d and it was well for a place where the powerful family, who thus overshadowed it, were of so respectable a character as the Cumnors. They expected to be submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of the townspeople was accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and they would have stood still in amazement, and with a horrid memory of the French sansculottese who were the bugbears of their youth, had any inhabitant of Hollingford ventured to set his will or opinions in opposition to those of the earl. But, yielded all that obeisance, they did a good deal for the town and were generally condescending, and often thoughtful and kind, in their treatment of their vassals. Lord Cumnor was a forbearing landlord; putting his steward a little on one side sometimes, and taking the reins into his own hands now and then, much to the annoyance of the agent, who was, in fact, too rich and independent to care greatly for preserving a post where his decisions might any day be overturned by my lord’s taking a fancy to go ‘pottering’ (as the agent irreverently expressed it in the sanctuary of his own home), which, being interpreted, meant that occasionally the earl asked his own questions of his own tenants, and used his own eyes and ears in the management of the smaller details of his property. But his tenants liked my lord all the better for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a little time for gossip, which he contrived to combine with the failing of personal intervention between the old land-steward and the tenantry. But, then, the countess made up by her unapproachable dignity for this weakness of the earl’s. Once a year she was condescending. She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should call ‘industrial,’5 where girls are taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;—white caps, white tippets, check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtsies, and ‘please, ma’ams,’ being de rigueur.

  Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable part of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the Hollingford ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid as visitors during the many months that she and her daughters were away. And the various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to the call of their liege lady, and gave her their service as required; and along with it, a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration. ‘How good of the countess! So like the dear countess—always thinking of others!’ and so on; while it was always supposed that no strangers had seen Hollingford properly, unless they had been taken to the countess’s school, and been duly impressed by the neat little pupils, and the still neater needle-work there to be inspected. In return, there was a day of honour set apart every summer, when, with much gracious and stately hospitality, Lady Cumnor and her daughters received all the school visitors at the Towers, the great family mansion standing in aristocratic seclusion in the centre of the large park, of which one of the lodges was close to the little town. The order of this annual festivity was this. About ten o‘clock one of the Towers’ carriages rolled through the lodge, and drove to different houses, wherein dwelt a woman to be honoured; picking them up by ones or twos, till the loaded carriage dro
ve back again through the ready portals, bowled along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited its covey of smartly-dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading to the ponderous doors of Cumnor Towers. Back again to the town; another picking up of womankind in their best clothes, and another return, and so on till the whole party were assembled either in the house or in the really beautiful gardens. After the proper amount of exhibition on the one part, and admiration on the other, had been done, there was a collation for the visitors and some more display and admiration of the treasures inside the house. Towards four o’clock coffee was brought round, and this was a signal of the approaching carriage that was to take them back to their own homes; whither they returned with the happy consciousness of a well-spent day, but with some fatigue at the long-continued exertion of behaving their best, and talking on stilts for so many hours. Nor were Lady Cumnor and her daughters free from something of the same self-approbation, and something, too, of the same fatigue; the fatigue that always follows on conscious efforts to behave as will best please the society you are in.

  For the first time in her life, Molly Gibson was to be included among the guests at the Towers. She was much too young to be a visitor at the school, so it was not on that account that she was to go; but it had so happened that one day when Lord Cumnor was on a ‘pottering’ expedition, he had met Mr. Gibson, the doctor of the neighbourhood, coming out of the farm-house my lord was entering; and having some small question to ask the surgeon (Lord Cumnor seldom passed any one of his acquaintance without asking a question of some sort—not always attending to the answer; it was his mode of conversation), he accompanied Mr. Gibson to the out-building, to a ring in the wall of which the surgeon’s horse was fastened. Molly was there too, sitting square and quiet on her rough little pony, waiting for her father. Her grave eyes opened large and wide at the close neighbourhood and evident advance of ‘the earl’; for to her little imagination the grey-haired, red-faced, somewhat clumsy man, was a cross between an archangel and a king.