Julia Pardoe. Mrs. Trollope. Harriet Martineau
Somewhere between the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, the modern novel was born. The romances of the twenties are, for the most part, old-fashioned in tone, and speak of an earlier age; but in the thirties, the modern novel, with its exact reproduction of places, customs, and speech, and strong local flavour, was full-grown. Dickens, under the name of Boz, was contributing his sketches to The Old Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle. Thackeray was beginning to contribute articles to Fraser's Magazine, established in 1830. Annuals and monthlies sprang up in the night, and paid large sums for long and short stories. The thirst for them was unquenchable. Many women were supporting themselves by writing tales which did not live beyond the year of their publication. Mrs. Marsh was writing stories of fashionable life varied by historical romances. Mrs. Crowe wrote stories of fashionable life varied by supernatural romances and tales of adventure. In The Story of Lilly Dawson, published in 1847, the heroine was captured and brought up by smugglers, and the gradual development of her character was traced; thus giving to the story a psychological interest. Lady Blessington earned two thousand pounds a year for twenty years by novels and short stories of fashionable life. Lady Blessington had a European reputation as a court beauty and a brilliant and witty conversationalist. This with the coronet must have helped to sell her books. They do not contain even a sentence that holds the attention. A friend said of her, "Her genius lay in her tongue; her pen paralysed it." More enduring work in fiction was done by Julia Pardoe, Mrs. Trollope, and Harriet Martineau.
The novels of Julia Pardoe, like those of Mrs. Bray, owe their value, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the comparatively unknown places to which she introduces her readers. She accompanied her father, Major Pardoe, to Constantinople, where they were entertained by natives of high position, to whom they had letters of introduction, and Miss Pardoe was the guest of their wives in the harem. Her knowledge of the mode of life and habits of thought of Turkish women is considered second only to that of Mary Wortley Montagu.
The material for her story The Romance of the Harem was obtained during her visits to these Turkish ladies. In this she has caught the languid, heavily perfumed atmosphere of the Orient. Besides the main plot, stories of adventure and love are related which beguiled the slowly passing hours of the inmates of the seraglio. Some of them might have been told by Schehezerhade, if she had wished to add to her entertainment of The Thousand and One Nights.
After Miss Pardoe's return to England, she wrote a series of fashionable novels, inferior to many of those of Mrs. Gore, and better than the best of those by Lady Blessington. Confessions of a Pretty Woman, The Jealous Wife, and The Rival Beauties were the most popular of these, although they have long since been forgotten.
In 1849, Miss Pardoe published a collection of stories under the title Flies in Amber. The title, she explains in the preface, was suggested by a belief of the Orientals that amber comes from the sea, and attracts about it all insects, which find in it both a prison and a posthumous existence. Some of the stories of this collection were gathered in her travels. An Adventure in Bithynia, The Magyar and the Moslem, or an Hungarian Legend, and the Yèrè-Batan-Seraï, which means Swallowed-up Palace, the great subterranean ruin of Constantinople, have the interest which always attaches to tales gathered by travellers in unfrequented places.
Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of the more famous author Anthony Trollope, like Miss Pardoe, found material for stories in unfamiliar places. Mrs. Trollope had the nature of the pioneer. With her family, she sought our western lands of the Mississippi Valley, where the virgin forest had resounded to the axe of the first settler but a short time before. She wrote the first book of any note describing the manners of the Americans; the first strong novel calling attention to the evils of slavery in our Southern States; and the first one describing graphically the white slavery in the cotton-mills of Lancashire; and she is, perhaps, the only writer who began a long literary career at the age of fifty-two.
On the fourth of November, 1827, Mrs. Trollope with her three children sailed from London, and, after about seven weeks on the sea, arrived on Christmas Day at the mouth of the Mississippi. After a brief visit in New Orleans, this party of English travellers sailed up the river to Memphis, where, remote from the comforts of civilisation, they abode for a time under the direction of Mrs. Wright, an English lecturer who had come to America for the avowed purpose of proving the perfect equality of the black and white races. But Mrs. Trollope and her family soon tired of life in the wilderness, and sought Cincinnati, at that time a small city of wooden houses, not over thirty years of age. After two years' residence in Cincinnati, she went by stage to Baltimore, visited Philadelphia and New York, and returned to England, after a sojourn of three and a half years in this country.
During her residence in the United States, she made copious notes of what she saw and heard. These she published the year after her return to England, under the title Domestic Manners of the Americans. At once the pens of all the critics were let loose upon the author. Her American critics declared that she knew nothing about them or their country; and their English friends refused to believe that the people of America had such shocking bad manners.
Mrs. Trollope reported truthfully what she saw and heard. But a frontier city is made up of people gathered from the four corners of the earth: each family is a law unto itself; so that the speeches Mrs. Trollope carefully set down, and the customs she depicted, were often peculiarities of individuals rather than of a community. But she has left a vivid picture of American life in the twenties, less exaggerated than the picture Charles Dickens gave of it in the forties. Mrs. Trollope's attitude is no more hostile than his, but he is more entertaining. He held us up to ridicule and laughed at us; she seriously pointed out our errors in the hope that we might amend. She is slightly inconsistent at times, for, while asserting the equality of whites and blacks, she as bitterly resented the equality of white master and white servant. Her purpose in writing this book was to warn her own countrymen of the evils which must follow a government of the many.
Although she never takes the broad view, but always the narrow and partial one, her book gives a good picture of the everyday life and habits of thought of the next generation to that which had fought and won the American Revolution. The white heat of republican fervour, so obnoxious to a European, welded the nation together as one people, and filled their hearts with a religious reverence for the constitution. She meant them as a reproach, but we read these words with pride: "I never heard from anyone a single disparaging word against their government."
Mrs. Trollope has been described by her friends as a refined woman of charming personality. But as soon as she began to write, she donned her armour and proclaimed her hostility either to her hero or to the larger part of the characters of the book. This method is dangerous to art. Even the genius of Thackeray is lessened by his lack of sympathy.
In 1833 Mrs. Trollope published her first novel, The Refugee in America. It is the story of an English lord who has fled to America to escape English justice. He and his friends have settled in Rochester, New York. It was written for the sole purpose of describing the manners of the people of our Eastern cities. The author's attitude toward them is well illustrated by a conversation between Caroline, the young English girl, and her American protégée, Emily. After a dinner in Washington, Caroline exclaims to her friend:
"'Oh, my own Emily, you must not live and die where such things be.'
"Emily sighed as she answered, 'I am born to it, Miss Gordon.'
"'But hardly bred to it. We have caught you young, and we have spoiled you for ever as an American lady.'"
Three years later Mrs. Trollope published her strongest novel, The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw. This is a powerful picture of early life on the Mississippi; it was the first novel since Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko which called attention to the evils of African slavery. It is marred, however, by want of sympathy with the community she is describing. Mr. Jonathan Whitlaw Senior has "squat in the bush," an expression to which Mrs. Trollope objects, but which brings to mind at once the log cabin in the forest clearing, and the muscular, uncouth pioneer. Jonathan furnishes firewood to the Mississippi steamers, and by this means gains sufficient wealth to carry out his life's ambition: to set up a store in Natchez, and to own "niggers." But the life of a pioneer has made Jonathan as cunning as a fox. This cunning his son Jonathan, the hero of the story, has inherited to the full. As a slave-owner he is as grasping and cruel as Legree, whom Mrs. Stowe immortalised some years later. His character, though drawn with strength and vigour, is inconsistent. He is a miser, yet he is a gambler and a spendthrift, qualities not often found together. He is not a true representative of the son of a pioneer. Clio Whitlaw, the aunt of the hero, belongs more truly to her environment. One suspects the English family at Cincinnati had received neighbourly kindnesses from women like her. With her physical strength and great courage she is kind and neighbourly to all who need her help. The sad story of Edward Bligh, the young Kentuckian who preached the gospel to the slaves, the victim of lynch law, a word dreaded even then, is as thrilling as parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Besides Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, Mrs. Trollope created two other characters that will cause her name to live as long as those of William Harrison Ainsworth or G. P. R. James. The coarse scheming widow Barnaby is the heroine of three novels, Widow Barnaby, The Widow Married, and The Widow Wedded, or the Barnabys in America. In the last book Mrs. Trollope somewhat humorously pays off her scores against her American critics, who had dubbed her a cockney, unfamiliar with good society in either England or America. The Widow Barnaby, who has come to New Orleans with her husband after his little gambling ways have made residence in London unpleasant, decides to earn some money by writing a book on America. She describes the Americans, not as they are, but as they think they are. She listens to all their boasts about themselves and country, and puts it faithfully in her book. Of course they like it and she becomes the literary lion of America.
Anthony Trollope, in his book An Autobiography, said of his mother's books on America: "Her volumes were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin." She is also given the credit of having improved the manners of American society. Whenever a "gentleman" at his club put his feet on the table, or indulged in any liberty of which she would not have approved, others cried, "Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!"
The Vicar of Wrexhill, the scene of which is laid in England, is an attack on the evangelical clergy in the Episcopal Church. The vicar is no truer to the great body of evangelical preachers than Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is true to the great body of slave-owners. There is the same exaggeration to prove a theory. Evangelical preaching is harmful, is the theorem, and a man is selected to prove it who in any walk of life would be a hypocrite and libertine. The book has many interesting situations. The vicar's proposal to the rich widow, one of his parishioners, is clever: "Let me henceforth be as the shield and buckler that shall guard thee; so that thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day." And he promises, if she will marry him, to lead her "sinful children into the life everlasting." No other book has shown, as this does, the powerful effect upon sensitive natures of this kind of preaching. One feels that the followers of the Reverend Vicar were under the influence of hypnotic suggestion, and that their awakening from this spell was like the awakening from a trance.
Mrs. Trollope was actuated by humanitarian motives. This was not as usual then as since Dickens popularised the humanitarian novel. Only three years after he wrote Sketches by Boz, Mrs. Trollope wrote The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the story of a boy employed in the mills of Lancashire. Negro slavery in the South, even as Mrs. Trollope saw it, was a happy state of existence compared with child slavery in the mills of Ashleigh and Deep Valley, Lancashire, where the children were driven to work by the lash in the morning, and were crippled by the "Billy roller," the name of the stick by which they were beaten for inattention to their work during the day. If the truth of these horrors were not attested by other writers of this time, one would doubt the possibility of their existence in the same land and at the same time in which Wordsworth was writing of the beauties of his own childhood, where the river Derwent mingled its murmurs with his nurse's song.
Mrs. Trollope assailed injustice with a powerful pen. Woman's moral nature is truer and more sensitive than man's. Even if her sympathies cloud her judgment, it is better than that her judgment should reason away her sympathies. Neither has woman in her philanthropy contented herself with broad principles which would help all and therefore reach none. The dusky slave in the cotton-fields, the pale-faced child in the cotton-mills, have alike touched the hearts of women, who by their pens have been able to awaken the conscience of a nation. The horror of child labour wrung from Mrs. Browning the heart-felt poem, The Cry of the Children. The four strong novels proclaiming the tyranny of the whites over the blacks, Oronooko, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Hour and the Man, were written by women.
The name of Harriet Martineau was a familiar one in every household during the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. Like Mrs. Trollope she was a woman of fearless honesty. But Harriet Martineau was never the raconteur, she was first the educator. She wrote story after story to teach lessons in political and social science. Her method of work, as set forth in her autobiography, was peculiar, and the result is not uninteresting. In her Political Economy Tales, she selected certain principles which she wished to set forth, and embodied each principle in a character. The operations of these principles furnished the plot of the story. Besides the illustrations of the principles by the characters, the laws were discussed in conversation, and thus the lesson was taught. In the story Brooke and Brooke Farm, she made use of an expression which Ruskin almost paraphrased: "The whole nation, the whole world, is obliged to him who makes corn grow where it never grew before; and yet more to him who makes two ears ripen where only one ripened before." In the tale A Manchester Strike, factory life and the problems that face the working men are set forth, the aim being to show that work and wages depend upon the great laws of supply and demand.
Miss Martineau wrote two novels. Deerbrook, in 1839, was modelled on Our Village. The village doctor, Mr. Hope, is the central figure. Firm in his convictions, he loses the favour of the leading families, and through their influence he is deprived of his practice. A fever, however, sweeps over the place and his former enemies beg, not in vain, for his skilful services. A double love story runs through the book. Mrs. Rowland, a scheming woman, is the most cleverly drawn of the characters, and was evidently suggested by some of Miss Edgeworth's fashionable ladies.
Harriet Martineau also visited America, but some years later than Mrs. Trollope, when the slavery agitation was at its height. As she had written upon the evils of slavery before she left England, she was invited to attend a meeting of the Abolitionists in Boston. She accepted this invitation, and expressed there her abhorrence of slavery. After this she received letters from some of the citizens of the pro-slavery States, threatening her life if she entered their domain. This naturally threw her entirely with the Abolition party, and she wrote many articles to help their cause.
Miss Martineau's second novel, The Hour and the Man, grew out of her sympathy and belief in the coloured race. Toussaint de L'Ouverture, the devoted slave, soldier, liberator, and martyr, is the hero. Every scene in which this wonderful black figures is vividly written. Many of the minor incidents are but slightly sketched, and many of the minor characters elude the reader's grasp. How far this book is a truthful portrayal of the negro cannot be judged until the "race problem" is surveyed with unprejudiced eyes. Then and not until then will its place in literature be assigned. She gives the same characterisation of this hero of St. Domingo as does Wendell Phillips in his wonderful speech of which the following is the peroration:
"But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocian for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilisation, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."
The Hour and the Man was published in 1840, and was warmly received by the Abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, after reading it, wrote the following sonnet to the author:
England! I grant that thou dost justly boast
Of splendid geniuses beyond compare;
Men great and gallant,—women good and fair,—
Skilled in all arts, and filling every post
Of learning, science, fame,—a mighty host!
Poets divine, and benefactors rare,—
Statesmen,—philosophers,—and they who dare
Boldly to explore heaven's vast and boundless coast,
To one alone I dedicate this rhyme,
Whose virtues with a starry lustre glow,
Whose heart is large, whose spirit is sublime,
The friend of liberty, of wrong the Foe:
Long be inscribed upon the roll of time
The name, the worth, the works of Harriet Martineau.
Miss Martineau wrote on a variety of subjects, and generally held a view contrary to the accepted one. She wrote upon mesmerism, positivism, atheism, which she professed, and after each book warriors armed with pens sprang up to assail the author. But she had many friends, even among those who were most bitter against her doctrines. One wrote of her, "There is the fine, honest, solid, North-country element in her." R. Brimley Johnson in English Prose, edited by Craik in 1896, said of her writings:
"Her gift to literature was for her own generation. She is the exponent of the infant century in many branches of thought:—its eager and sanguine philanthropy, its awakening interest in history and science, its rigid and prosaic philosophy. But her genuine humanity and real moral earnestness give a value to her more personal utterances, which do not lose their charm with the lapse of time."
Harriet Martineau's name and personality will be remembered in history after her books have been forgotten.