Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Another popular consolation was that God wanted to turn the child into an angel before its innocence could be sullied; Coleridge was keen on the idea, and wrote some epitaphs celebrating it. In this argument it becomes better for a child to die than to live. And in fact Dickens used it in David Copperfield when he made David say it would have been better for Little Em’ly to fall into the sea and drown as a child rather than grow up to be seduced by Steerforth.

  More acceptably, in real life Dickens welcomed the death of his severely handicapped nephew; the boy’s mother was already dead, and Dickens did not mind saying what he felt – that the boy was better dead too – with a frankness a twentieth-century writer would be less likely to display even in a private letter. Lerner mentions neither of these episodes, but he does suggest that it is uncertain whether Dickens himself believed in Heaven, and points to the ambivalence in the description of Paul Dombey’s last moments, when Dickens writes of ‘the old, old fashion – Death!’, and goes on, ‘Oh thank GOD, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!’ Lerner, who is agnostic but not irreverent towards Christian faith, comments,

  The reason for the enormous emotional impact this had on contemporaries may be its ambivalence about Christianity. It does not actually profess belief in immortality: by calling it, so lovingly, a ‘fashion’, the writing offers it as a beneficent invention, a doctrine devised to help us bear the pain of death… And so the angels of young children could be seen as a human invention, a way we have taught ourselves to speak of dead children, and all the finer for that. What weakens the theology strengthens the consolation.

  Lerner looks at all sides of the question, citing a robust twentieth-century Christian rebuttal of the notion that a mother can be fully comforted by the idea that her child has become an angel, from C. S. Lewis, who pointed out that even if it was good for the child, it was no good to her as a mother. ‘The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.’

  Neither Paul Dombey nor Little Nell had a mother to grieve for them, of course. They also pass effortlessly from life, and this is one of the reasons Dickens has been accused of sentimentality. Not only is he luxuriating in pathos, and encouraging his readers to join him in an enjoyable wallow; he is also denying the reality of illness and pain, as Flaubert and Dostoevsky did not in their accounts of children’s deaths.

  Paul Dombey’s death was a replay of the death of Little Nell, and Nell’s death was, we know from Dickens himself, associated with the death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth four years before: ‘Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story,’ he wrote to Forster. Dickens made Nell a child, no more than fourteen when she died, while Mary was nearly seventeen, old enough to be married; his interest in child brides and the age at which a small girl might be found erotically stimulating, as Quilp finds Nell, comes into play here. Lerner does not share the view of the American critic James Kincaid that Paul Dombey and Nell are both ‘pedophile pin-ups’, but he suggests that Dickens used a process of ‘idealizing desexualization’ on the many infantile women or nearly nubile little girls who appear in his work, not only Nell, but Amy Dorrit, Rose Maylie, Dora Spenlow, Little Em’ly, Florence Dombey and many more. It is certainly striking that Florence is already being imagined as a bride at the age of twelve; and that Little Dorrit looks like a child, and that Arthur Clennam takes her in his arms ‘as though she had been his daughter’. The Lolita tendency in Dickens is pervasive, and not always related to early death. While Mary Hogarth may be partly responsible, it could also relate to his interest in girl prostitutes.

  Lerner’s excursions around the literature of child death are well conducted, and his comments good. I cannot, however, let him get away with saying that children figure ‘as little more than a nuisance’ in Jane Austen’s work. It is true that she told her niece that, in fiction, ‘one does not care for girls until they are grown up’; but you have only to turn to The Watsons to find the most perceptive and affectionate portrait of a ten-year-old boy you could wish for. The Austen family falls, in any case, outside Lerner’s territory, in that they were notably successful child rearers, and all eight of their offspring made it into adult life. The fact that Jane, the genius of the family, was the first to die is one of Fate’s ironies; but she was too old to be rememered as an angel, and no one has ever presumed to speak of her in those terms.

  The Times Literary Supplement, 1998

  Tame Animals

  The Gentleman s Daughter: Women s Lives in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery

  A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter edited by Joanna Martin

  Amanda Vickery teaches history in London, but, as she tells us on the first page of The Gentleman’s Daughter, she grew up in Preston, and the archives which formed the basis first for her Ph.D. and now for this book are held in the north. In the record offices of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria she has found a gold mine in the realm of women’s history: letters and pocket-book diaries kept by the daughters, wives and mothers of gentlemen of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, allowing us to hear their voices as they experience courtship, marriage, motherhood and widowing, and to enjoy direct accounts of their domestic and social preoccupations. Material of this kind is precious, and she is to be congratulated on her discoveries, and on her careful handling and publication of the material.

  Her chapters are thematic, covering marriage, children, servants, shopping, social life within the home and outside it; and she orders and tabulates her material strictly. Certain characters nevertheless burst out of these categories to dominate the narrative with the force of their personalities. One is Elizabeth Parker (‘Parky’ to her friends, 1726-81), a lesser landowner’s daughter whose letters and diaries chart most of her life, starting with a seven-year wooing by a cousin of whom her father disapproved. Her lover tried every line of attack, urging her to clandestine night-time meetings, and won her in the end by the old ruse of telling her he was preparing to marry someone else. At this she persuaded her father to relent, and they were married. But she was soon left a widow with small sons to bring up alone; and after another seven years she eloped – to Gretna Green – with a young man eighteen years her junior. This marriage was a disaster for both parties. She was dropped by her most important living male relative, her brother. There were no children, her husband soon came to resent and indeed hate her, and he took to drink. Although she struggled to keep her dignity, she sank in the social scale as he wasted their money, roistering in the kitchen with tenants and servants (sometimes it sounds almost like Wuthering Heights). Meanwhile her brother improved his status, marrying a baronet’s daughter. His son went into Parliament; Elizabeth’s sons became tradesmen. All this is documented in her own hand, with records of her hiring and management of servants, her dinners and tea parties, her snobberies and wounded feelings, her husband’s blows and curses; as well as a surprising touch, her successful marketing of an anti-rabies medicine developed by her first husband, which she sold all over the north of England at one shilling a bottle until her death. (It was presumably never put to the test on an actual case of rabies.)

  Elizabeth’s jolly cousin Bessy is another striking character. She lodged in London with her brother until she was nearly forty, when she married a fifty-year-old bachelor schoolmaster. The marriage was deeply satisfying to both, and they paraded their satisfaction in their cosy domestic arrangements in letters to relations, Bessy proclaiming she was ‘not ashamed of my passion’ for her ‘lord and master’. In spite of her age, there were four babies, and she breastfed them all. In fact little Betsy was shod before she was weaned, and ‘My Littel Boy has not for this three week been from my Bed or lap half hour at a time. For to my shame (Tho’ ha
ppy it was for him) I still suckel him.’ This was in the 1760s, about the same time Jane Austen’s mother was weaning her infants briskly at two or three months and sending them to be reared in the village. The decision to breastfeed or not seems to have been much more an individual choice than a matter of fashion. Bessy was by no means tied down by her maternal and domestic duties; she went out as much as she pleased to enjoy the pleasures of London life, ‘frolicking’ to the theatre or gawping at the royal family. And her good-humoured husband respected her taste for gadding: ‘came the Coach to the Door and away whisked Madam to the Assembly as usual’.

  Then there is the heiress Anne Wilmer, also from the middle of the eighteenth century, who condescended to give her hand to a rich mercer’s son, William Gossip, manager of the York Assembly Rooms. He was clever and charming, and theirs was another demonstratively affectionate marriage. They hated to be separated and wrote to tell one another so, often invoking the marriage bed: ‘I wish I had my poor Dear in his own bed with me. I think you would be beter [sic]’, etc. A rich, handsome and happy couple, they built a mansion on their large estate in Wharfedale in addition to their solid town house in York, and he became a JP and deputy lieutenant for the West Riding. Only the fates of their eleven children were disappointing. Most died young, and the heir outraged them by marrying down, a secret match, the daughter of a poor Halifax mantua-maker. He was disinherited. One son studied medicine, others were apprenticed to hosiers or went into the army.

  The women figuring in these records were not aristocrats. They came from middle-class families, genteel, proper and prosperous for the most part; some married landowners, some professional men, some tradesmen. And their children took divergent paths, as we have seen. One thing that emerges strongly from Vickery’s account is the high degree of mobility of late Georgian life, as men and women moved themselves up or tumbled down the social snakes and ladders board. This certainly tallies with observations of the Hampshire families amongst whom Jane Austen lived made in my own work.

  What is very clear is just how individual and unpredictable each life and each family was, and how they refuse to conform to the generalizations of historians. Part of the purpose of Vickery’s book is indeed to attack the theses of academic historians who have constructed a narrative of ‘decline and fall’ in the status of Englishwomen, following some notional golden age in which they are said to have been powerful working members of society. This golden age has been variously set from the Middle Ages to the years immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution; but whether or whenever it was, there is pretty general agreement that the nineteenth century was a nadir for women in which their lives were ‘drained of economic purpose and public responsibility’.

  Vickery’s thesis is that women in the Georgian period – which extended through the first third of the nineteenth century – were in truth more confident and more autonomous than is ‘usually allowed’. She suggests that the Victorian women who fought for the right to education, suffrage and professional training were seeking ‘to extend yet further the gains made by their Georgian predecessors’. She supports this by claiming that Georgian women enjoyed responsibility and a significant amount of economic power in the domestic sphere; had considerable freedom in choosing their husbands; participated in the expanding social world of the Assembly Room, public gardens, music meetings and theatres; and in charitable and reforming groups such as the anti-slavery movement.

  Whether these activities were really the forerunners of the feminist activities of the nineteenth century is open to argument. For one thing, the later-nineteenth-century struggles were fired by bitterness against the status quo, and taken up by middle-class women who specifically felt they lacked autonomy over their lives. The bitterness certainly had its roots earlier. Leaving aside Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle, there is the experience of the Lancastrian Ellen Weeton (1776-1844?), whom Vickery actually includes in her book. For Weeton there was little enough autonomy, shortage of money forcing her into governessing, and a tyrannical husband taking her child from her and reducing her to the point of starvation. Vickery concedes that Weeton suffered almost dehumanizing ill-treatment, but does not quote or even refer to her private writing about the situation of her sex. For instance, Weeton recalled as a child hearing her father express the wish that all his children should be boys, not because he did not love girls as well, but ‘unless a father can provide independent fortunes for his daughters, they must either be made mop squeezers, or mantua makers, whereas sons can easily make their way in the world’. This thoughtful sea captain was killed young fighting the Americans, and his clever daughter had to become, not a mop squeezer it’s true, but a governess; and when she married, her husband turned out to be a brute. She expressed the view that the sexes were equal, and that society would be better organized were they treated equally. Thus in 1809 she wrote to her lawyer brother,

  Why are not females permitted to study physic, divinity, astronomy, &c, with their attendants, chemistry, botany, logic, mathematics, &c. To be sure the mere study is not prohibited, but the practise is in a great measure. Who would employ a female physician? who would listen to a female divine, except to ridicule? I could myself almost laugh at the idea.

  The crucial point here is poverty. Weeton, like Wollstonecraft, was bred to be a lady but then found herself thrown on a world which offered no decent alternative to marriage. Before them, Richardson had meditated (in Sir Charles Grandison) on the difficult situation of unsupported ladies, and whether Protestant nunneries might be a partial solution to their problems; an idea Sheridan also took up. But even rich and married ladies expressed their discontents at times. In the (unpublished) letters and diaries of Eliza Chute, wife of a Hampshire M; P at the end of the eighteenth century, there are clear expressions of dissatisfaction with the position of wives:

  Mr Chute… seems to think it strange that I should absent myself from him for four & twenty hours when he is at home, tho’ it appears in the natural order of things that he should quit me for business or pleasure, such is the difference between husbands & wives. The latter are sort of tame animals, whom the men always expect to find at home ready to receive them: the former are lords of the creation free to go where they please.

  There are other cases that support Vickery’s view of course. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), married in her early teens to an uncongenial and errant husband who became bankrupt, displayed extraordinary energy and was able to maintain herself and her many children entirely by her pen, becoming a successful poet and novelist. Was she a model to nineteenth-century women writers? You think at once of a later Charlotte (Brontë, 1816-55), admonished by Robert Southey to give up the idea of becoming a writer and stick to her needle and domestic duties. Fanny Burney wrote for money and kept what she earned in the 1790s, when she was married; William Gaskell in the 1850s pocketed his wife’s earnings as the cheques arrived. And it was in 1848 that Geraldine Jewsbury wrote The Half Sisters, her impassioned attack on the way in which English ladies were infantilized by their upbringing. Mary Shelley, struggling to make a living by her pen, wrote in 1843 that she abhorred and shrank from ‘a public life for women’.

  Vickery points to many ladies amongst her sample who felt satisfaction at their own position in life, and it is true that a polite husband, a sufficient income, obedient servants and access to some company and amusements did appear to meet the needs of most who enjoyed these blessings. But one message that emerges from her material is the very great difficulty of making general statements about the behaviour of genteel women or their view of their own position, either in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century. Consider that Jane Austen’s paternal aunt Philadelphia, an orphan, travelled to India alone in the 1750s to get herself a husband, but a generation later Jane’s careful parents did not dream of letting her travel across the southern counties of England without an escort. Does this represent a general shift in attitude, or was it rather that Mrs Austen decreed what her daughters might do fro
m the traditions of the family in which she had grown up?

  It seems likely that traditions running through the female line are responsible for many such features in the life of a family; but because they were not formalized or written down, but simply passed on verbally from mother to daughter, and taken for granted, it is impossible to be certain about them. So it is for childbirth practices, the feeding and weaning of babies, ideas about contraception and sex, all very poorly documented. Sets of family letters are precious in these areas, and Vickery’s book is full of fine details and discoveries. There is an especially good chapter on women’s dealings with their servants, how they thought of them, how they were hired, how some were petted and indulged until they seemed almost friends; and how many ran away or made trouble. We are given the feeling of life as it was lived by her ladies, as they express their status through furniture and china, make careful note of food prices, take pleasure in discussing new fashions, grumble about an ungrateful maid or an inconsiderate man who smokes over the table, or lets off his gun in the next room; or the joy of having a small daughter, ‘all over so fat and soft’. Again and again their words surprise and charm. The eighteenth was of course the great century of increasing female literacy, in which the women of England discovered they could not only enjoy reading novels and poems but write them too.

  After this rich brew, Agnes Porter’s journals and letters in A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen are weak tea. Although she was a well-read and intelligent woman, there is something desolating about the resignation that breathes from her writing, resignation to the meagreness of every aspect of her life, emotional, financial and spiritual. A clergyman’s daughter, Edinburgh-born in 1745, she was devoted governess to two generations of the family of the Earl of Ilchester. Sydney Smith, meeting her when she was in her fifties and he in his twenties, described her as ‘I daresay a very respectable woman… but I confess in my eyes she is a very ordinary article.’ And so she seems from her diaries, in which her pupils are always dear or darling, and her employers almost always charming. There are tea parties, card parties, sermons, a lot of indifferent weather and some disappointing men friends. But, as her editor points out, she established herself as a professional woman rather than as a mere drudge, and she did manage to organize her finances successfully enough to avoid destitution, the common lot of governesses too old to work on. She gave notice when she was displeased, and she chose to move about when she was not working in the mansions of the aristocracy, settling in towns as various as Yarmouth and Swindon. She enjoyed travel, and there are some lively accounts of cross-country coach journeys, unescorted, in which she strikes up conversation with grocers and glovers with views on female accomplishments. There are also visits to the London theatre, and to see the massed charity children, and other treats. Joanna Martin has done a fine and patient job in transcribing, editing and annotating the journals and letters, and filled in the background in a long introductory essay; you end by thinking Miss Porter has been more fortunate in her editor than she ever was in life.