“Lily Wilson fell in love with Signor Righi, the guardsman.” The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer. No human figure in the Browning letters, save the principals, more excites our curiosity and baffles it. Her Christian name was Lily, her surname Wilson. That is all we know of her birth and upbringing. Whether she was the daughter of a farmer in the neighbourhood of Hope End, and became favourably known to the Barrett cook by the decency of her demeanour and the cleanliness of her apron, so much so that when she came up to the great house on some errand, Mrs. Barrett made an excuse to come into the room just then and thought so well of her that she appointed her to be Miss Elizabeth’s maid; or whether she was a Cockney; or whether she was from Scotland — it is impossible to say. At any rate she was in service with Miss Barrett in the year 1846. She was “an expensive servant” — her wages were £16 a year. Since she spoke almost as seldom as Flush, the outlines of her character are little known; and since Miss Barrett never wrote a poem about her, her appearance is far less familiar than his. Yet it is clear from indications in the letters that she was in the beginning one of those demure, almost inhumanly correct British maids who were at that time the glory of the British basement. It is obvious that Wilson was a stickler for rights and ceremonies. Wilson undoubtedly revered “the room”; Wilson would have been the first to insist that under servants must eat their pudding in one place, upper servants in another. All this is implicit in the remark she made when she beat Flush with her hand “because it is right.” Such respect for convention, it need hardly be said, breeds extreme horror of any breach of it; so that when Wilson was confronted with the lower orders in Manning Street she was far more alarmed, and far more certain that the dog-stealers were murderers, than Miss Barrett was. At the same time the heroic way in which she overcame her terror and went with Miss Barrett in the cab shows how deeply the other convention of loyalty to her mistress was ingrained in her. Where Miss Barrett went, Wilson must go too. This principle was triumphantly demonstrated by her conduct at the time of the elopement. Miss Barrett had been doubtful of Wilson’s courage; but her doubts were unfounded. “Wilson,” she wrote — and these were the last words she ever wrote to Mr. Browning as Miss Barrett— “has been perfect to me. And I . . . calling her ‘timid’ and afraid of her timidity! I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.” It is worth, parenthetically, dwelling for a second on the extreme precariousness of a servant’s life. If Wilson had not gone with Miss Barrett, she would have been, as Miss Barrett knew, “turned into the street before sunset,” with only a few shillings, presumably, saved from her sixteen pounds a year. And what then would have been her fate? Since English fiction in the ‘forties scarcely deals with the lives of ladies’ maids, and biography had not then cast its searchlight so low, the question must remain a question. But Wilson took the plunge. She declared that she would “go anywhere in the world with me.” She left the basement, the room, the whole of that world of Wimpole Street, which to Wilson meant all civilisation, all right thinking and decent living, for the wild debauchery and irreligion of a foreign land. Nothing is more curious than to observe the conflict that took place in Italy between Wilson’s English gentility and her natural passions. She derided the Italian Court; she was shocked by Italian pictures. But, though “she was struck back by the indecency of the Venus,” Wilson, greatly to her credit, seems to have bethought her that women are naked when they take their clothes off. Even I myself, she may have thought, am naked for two or three seconds daily. And so “She thinks she shall try again, and the troublesome modesty may subside, who knows?” That it did subside rapidly is plain. Soon she not merely approved of Italy; she had fallen in love with Signor Righi of the Grand Ducal bodyguard— “all highly respectable and moral men, and some six feet high” — was wearing an engagement ring; was dismissing a London suitor; and was learning to speak Italian. Then the clouds descend again; when they lift they show us Wilson deserted— “the faithless Righi had backed out of his engagement to Wilson.” Suspicion attaches to his brother, a wholesale haberdasher at Prato. When Righi resigned from the Ducal bodyguard, he became, on his brother’s advice, a retail haberdasher at Prato. Whether his position required a knowledge of haberdashery in his wife, whether one of the girls of Prato could supply it, it is certain that he did not write to Wilson as often as he should have done. But what conduct it was on the part of this highly respectable and moral man that led Mrs. Browning to exclaim in 1850, “[Wilson] is over it completely, which does the greatest credit to her good sense and rectitude of character. How could she continue to love such a man?” — why Righi had shrunk to “such a man” in so short a time, it is impossible to say. Deserted by Righi, Wilson became more and more attached to the Browning family. She discharged not only the duties of a lady’s maid, but cooked knead cakes, made dresses, and became a devoted nurse to Penini, the baby; so that in time the baby himself exalted her to the rank of the family, where she justly belonged, and refused to call her anything but Lily. In 1855 Wilson married Romagnoli, the Brownings’ manservant, “a good tender-hearted man”; and for some time the two kept house for the Brownings. But in 1859 Robert Browning “accepted office as Landor’s guardian,” an office of great delicacy and responsibility, for Landor’s habits were difficult; “of restraint he has not a grain,” Mrs. Browning wrote, “and of suspiciousness many grains.” In these circumstances Wilson was appointed “his duenna” with a salary of twenty-two pounds a year “besides what is left of his rations.” Later her wages were increased to thirty pounds, for to act as duenna to “an old lion” who has “the impulses of a tiger,” throws his plate out of the window or dashes it on the ground if he dislikes his dinner, and suspects servants of opening desks, entailed, as Mrs. Browning observed, “certain risks, and I for one would rather not meet them.” But to Wilson, who had known Mr. Barrett and the spirits, a few plates more or less flying out of the window or dashed upon the floor was a matter of little consequence — such risks were all in the day’s work.
That day, so far as it is still visible to us, was certainly a strange one. Whether it began or not in some remote English village, it ended in Venice in the Palazzo Rezzonico. There at least she was still living in the year 1897, a widow, in the house of the little boy whom she had nursed and loved — Mr. Barrett Browning. A very strange day it had been, she may have thought, as she sat in the red Venetian sunset, an old woman, dreaming. Her friends, married to farm hands, still stumbled up the English lanes to fetch a pint of beer. And she had eloped with Miss Barrett to Italy; she had seen all kinds of queer things — revolutions, guardsmen, spirits; Mr. Landor throwing his plate out of the window. Then Mrs. Browning had died — there can have been no lack of thoughts in Wilson’s old head as she sat at the window of the Palazzo Rezzonico in the evening. But nothing can be more vain than to pretend that we can guess what they were, for she was typical of the great army of her kind — the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history. “A more honest, true and affectionate heart than Wilson’s cannot be found” — her mistress’s words may serve her for epitaph.
“he was scourged by fleas.” It appears that Italy was famous for its fleas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they served to break down conventions that were otherwise insurmountable. For example, when Nathaniel Hawthorne went to tea with Miss Bremer in Rome (1858), “we spoke of fleas — insects that, in Rome, come home to everybody’s business and bosom, and are so common and inevitable, that no delicacy is felt about alluding to the sufferings they inflict. Poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while turning out our tea. . . .”
“Nero had leapt from a top window.” Nero (c. 1849-60) was, according to Carlyle, “A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white — a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training.” Material for a life of him abounds, but this is not t
he occasion to make use of it. It is enough to say that he was stolen; that he brought Carlyle a cheque to buy a horse with tied round his neck; that “twice or thrice I flung him into the sea [at Aberdour], which he didn’t at all like”; that in 1850 he sprang from the library window, and, clearing the area spikes, fell “plash” on to the pavement. “It was after breakfast,” Mrs. Carlyle says, “and he had been standing at the open window, watching the birds. . . . Lying in my bed, I heard thro’ the deal partition Elizabeth scream: Oh God! oh Nero! and rush downstairs like a strong wind out at the street door . . . then I sprang to meet her in my night-shift. . . . Mr. C. came down from his bedroom with his chin all over soap and asked, ‘Has anything happened to Nero?’— ‘Oh, sir, he must have broken all his legs, he leapt out at your window!’— ‘God bless me!’ said Mr. C. and returned to finish his shaving.” No bones were broken, however, and he survived, to be run over by a butcher’s cart, and to die at last from the effects of the accident on 1st February, 1860. He is buried at the top of the garden at Cheyne Row under a small stone tablet.
Whether he wished to kill himself, or whether, as Mrs. Carlyle insinuates, he was merely jumping after birds, might be the occasion for an extremely interesting treatise on canine psychology. Some hold that Byron’s dog went mad in sympathy with Byron; others that Nero was driven to desperate melancholy by associating with Mr. Carlyle. The whole question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian, together with the influence upon dogs of the poetry and philosophy of their masters, deserves a fuller discussion than can here be given it. For the present, Nero’s motives must remain obscure.
“Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought himself invisible.” Mrs. Huth Jackson in A Victorian Childhood says, “Lord Arthur Russell told me, many years later, that when a small boy he was taken to Knebworth by his mother. Next morning he was in the big hall having breakfast when a strange-looking old gentleman in a shabby dressing-gown came in and walked slowly round the table staring at each of the guests in turn. He heard his mother’s neighbour whisper to her, ‘Do not take any notice, he thinks he is invisible’. It was Lord Lytton himself” (p-18).
“he was now dead”. It is certain that Flush died; but the date and manner of his death are unknown. The only reference consists in the statement that “Flush lived to a good old age and is buried in the vaults of Casa Guidi”. Mrs. Browning was buried in the English Cemetery at Florence, Robert Browning in Westminster Abbey. Flush still lies, therefore, beneath the house in which, once upon a time, the Brownings lived.
THE END
THE YEARS
The author’s last novel to be published during her lifetime, The Years was published in 1937 and once again the first edition featured an illustration by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell. The original idea for the work was a series of essays about the economic and social condition of women, which would be interspersed with fictional extracts exploring the themes of Woolf’s essays. However, she quickly changed her mind and decided against the essay form and began to write a work of only fiction.
The text spans thirty years of the history of the Pargiter family from the 1880’s until the 1930’s. The work is divided into sections headed by certain years, for example the novel progresses from 1880 to 1891, then 1907, 1908 and 1910. These irregular time intervals continue until the final part headed ‘Present Day’ which denotes the 1930’s, the decade in which Woolf was writing. The opening section introduces Colonel Abel Partiger, who visits his mistress before returning home to his chronically ill wife and his family. Mrs Partiger’s children have complex feelings towards her and when she dies shortly afterwards, it is met by differing responses and emotions from her children. Woolf traces the fortunes of the family members through the years by offering snapshots of daily encounters or interactions between them.
While the novelist concentrates on the small and quotidian aspects of the family’s life, it is set against references to historical events and movements. The reader learns that Rose, the youngest daughter, becomes fiercely dedicated to women’s rights and the suffrage cause, which is revealed through references to her imprisonment, while a bombing raid and disagreements about military service and the death of Charles offer stark reminders of the First World War. Once again Woolf addresses and explores the concept of time — a central theme that dominates many of her works.
The first edition
CONTENTS
1880
1891
1907
1908
1910
1911
1913
1914
1917
1918
PRESENT DAY
Woolf, 1940
1880
It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, of business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching, — so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say, to post a letter, or at a club window in Piccadilly. The stream of landaus, victorias and hansom cabs was incessant; for the season was beginning. In the quieter streets musicians doled out their frail and for the most part melancholy pipe of sound, which was echoed, or parodied, here in the trees of Hyde Park, here in St. James’s by the twitter of sparrows and the sudden outbursts of the amorous but intermittent thrush. The pigeons in the squares shuffled in the tree tops, letting fall a twig or two, and crooned over and over again the lullaby that was always interrupted. The gates at the Marble Arch and Apsley House were blocked in the afternoon by ladies in many-coloured dresses wearing bustles, and by gentlemen in frock coats carrying canes, wearing carnations. Here came the Princess, and as she passed hats were lifted. In the basements of the long avenues of the residential quarters servant girls in cap and apron prepared tea. Deviously ascending from the basement the silver teapot was placed on the table, and virgins and spinsters with hands that had staunched the sores of Bermondsey and Hoxton carefully measured out one, two, three, four spoonfuls of tea. When the sun went down a million little gaslights, shaped like the eyes in peacocks’ feathers, opened in their glass cages, but nevertheless broad stretches of darkness were left on the pavement. The mixed light of the lamps and the setting sun was reflected equally in the placid waters of the Round Pond and the Serpentine. Diners-out, trotting over the Bridge in hansom cabs, looked for a moment at the charming vista. At length the moon rose and its polished coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with serenity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference. Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.
Colonel Abel Pargiter was sitting after luncheon in his club talking. Since his companions in the leather armchairs were men of his own type, men who had been soldiers, civil servants, men who had now retired, they were reviving with old jokes and stories now their past in India, Africa, Egypt, and then, by a natural transition, they turned to the present. It was a question of some appointment, of some possible appointment.
Suddenly the youngest and the sprucest of the three leant forward. Yesterday he had lunched with . . . Here the voice of the speaker fell. The others bent towards him; with a brief wave of his hand Colonel Abel dismissed the servant who was removing the coffee cups. The three baldish and greyish heads remained close together for a few minutes. Then Colonel Abel threw himself back in his chair. The curious gleam which had come into all their eyes when Major Elkin began his story had faded completely from Colonel Pargiter’s face. He sat stari
ng ahead of him with bright blue eyes that seemed a little screwed up, as if the glare of the East were still in them; and puckered at the corners as if the dust were still in them. Some thought had struck him that made what the others were saying of no interest to him; indeed, it was disagreeable to him. He rose and looked out of the window down into Piccadilly. Holding his cigar suspended he looked down on the tops of omnibuses, hansom cabs, victorias, vans and landaus. He was out of it all, his attitude seemed to say; he had no longer any finger in that pie. Gloom settled on his red handsome face as he stood gazing. Suddenly a thought struck him. He had a question to ask; he turned to ask it; but his friends were gone. The little group had broken up. Elkins was already hurrying through the door; Brand had moved off to talk to another man. Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment. Even the ladies in their victorias and broughams were trotting down Piccadilly on some errand or other. People were coming back to London; they were settling in for the season. But for him there would be no season; for him there was nothing to do. His wife was dying; but she did not die. She was better today; would be worse tomorrow; a new nurse was coming; and so it went on. He picked up a paper and turned over the pages. He looked at a picture of the west front of Cologne Cathedral. He tossed the paper back into its place among the other papers. One of these days — that was his euphemism for the time when his wife was dead — he would give up London, he thought, and live in the country. But then there was the house; then there were the children; and there was also . . . his face changed; it became less discontented; but also a little furtive and uneasy.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 203
