Woman's Work in English Fiction, from the Restoration to the Mid-Victorian Period

by Clara Helen Whitmore

Desmond was published in 1792, when the feeling against France was very bitter in England. The plot, as it meanders slowly through three volumes, is constantly interrupted by political discussions. The author's clearly expressed preference for a republican government, and her criticism of English law, met with bitter disapproval. One of the characters pronounces a panegyric upon the greater prosperity and happiness that has come to the French soldiers, farmers, and peasants, since they came to believe that they were sharers in their own labours, and the hero of the book, writing from France to a friend in England, says: "I lament still more the disposition which too many Englishmen show to join in this unjust and infamous crusade, against the holy standard of freedom; and I blush for my country." In the same book, the author censures the penal laws of England, by which robbery to the amount of forty shillings is punishable with death; and criticises the delay of the courts in dealing justice.

This criticism is expressed tamely, barely more than suggested, when compared with the vigorous attacks which Dickens made in the next century on English law and the slow action of justice in the famous "Circumlocution Office." Dickens wrote with such vigour that he brought about a reform. A modern reader finds Desmond earnest and sincere, but tame to the point of dulness. It seems strange how the Tory party could see in this book a menace to the British constitution. But a writer in the Monthly Review for December, 1792, advocated her cause. "She is very justly of opinion," he writes, "that the great events that are passing in the world are no less interesting to women than to men, and that, in her solicitude to discharge the domestic duties, a woman ought not to forget that, in common with her father and husband, her brothers and sons, she is a citizen."

The publication of The Old Manor House in the following year won back for her many of the friends that she had lost by Desmond. But in this work also the same love of liberty, the same indifference to social distinctions, occur. The hero of The Old Manor House joins the English army, and is sent to fight against the Americans; in the many reflections upon this conflict, the author shows that her sympathies are with the colonists. The father of the hero had married a young woman who had nothing to recommend her but "beauty, simplicity, and goodness." The hero himself falls in love with and marries a girl beneath him in rank, but he does not seem to feel that he has done a generous thing, nor does the heroine show any gratitude for this honour. Each seems unconscious that their difference in rank should be a bar to their union, provided they do not offend old Mrs. Rayland, the owner of the manor. A great change had come over the novel since Pamela was overpowered with gratitude to her profligate master, Mr. B, for condescending to make her his wife.

The revolutionary principles of Mrs. Smith's novels were soon forgotten, but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in English fiction. Her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined, quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom Evelina and Cecilia seem but school-girls. Her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank, but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners, and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her had reached. A contemporary said of Emmeline, "All is graceful, and pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful and chaste." This might be said of all the women she has created. Old Mrs. Rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, The Old Manor House, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as a member of the Rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the high-born lady. We smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect. Scott said of her, "Old Mrs. Rayland is without a peer."

Mrs. Smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of rural scenery. Nature had for a long time been banished from the arts. Wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote:

"Excepting The Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination."

Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. In Ethelinda there are beautiful descriptions of the English Lakes, part of the scene being laid at Grasmere; Celestina is in the romantic Provence; Desmond in Normandy; and in The Old Manor House we have the soft landscape of the south of England.

In The Old Manor House she thus describes one of the paths that led from the gate of the park to Rayland Hall:

"The other path, which in winter or in wet seasons was inconvenient, wound down a declivity, where furze and fern were shaded by a few old hawthorns and self-sown firs: out of the hill several streams were filtered, which, uniting at its foot, formed a large and clear pond of near twenty acres, fed by several imperceptible currents from other eminences which sheltered that side of the park; and the bason between the hills and the higher parts of it being thus filled, the water found its way over a stony boundary, where it was passable by a foot bridge unless in time of floods; and from thence fell into a lower part of the ground, where it formed a considerable river; and, winding among willows and poplars for near a mile, again spread into a still larger lake, on the edge of which was a mill, and opposite, without the park paling, wild heaths, where the ground was sandy, broken, and irregular, still however marked by plantations made in it by the Rayland family."

Every feature of the landscape is brought distinctly before the eye. Such descriptions are not unusual now, but they were first used by Charlotte Smith.