"While admitting woman to be a divinity, he chooses to conceal his idol in the Holy of Holies of domestic life. Duly to enjoy the society of Mrs. Bull, he chooses a smoking tureen, and cod's head and shoulders to intervene between them, and their olive branches to be around their table.... For John adores woman in the singular, and hates her in the plural; John loves, but does not like. Woman is the object of his passion, rarely of his regard. There is nothing in the gaiety of heart or sprightliness of intellect of the weaker sex which he considers an addition to society. To him women are an interruption to business and pleasure."
Mrs. Gore could also unveil hypocrisy. In her novel Preferment, or My Uncle the Earl, she thus describes a worthy ornament of the church:
"The Dean of Darbington glided along his golden railroad—'mild as moonbeams'—soft as a swansdown muff—insinuating as a silken eared spaniel. His conciliating arguments were whispered in a tone suitable to the sick chamber of a nervous hypochondriac, and his strain of argument resembled its potations of thin, weak, well-sweetened barley water. While Dr. Macnab succeeded with his congregation by kicking and bullying them along the path of grace, Dr. Nicewig held out his finger with a coaxing air and gentle chirrup, like a bird-fancier decoying a canary."
A critic in the Westminster Review in 1831 thus writes of her:
"Mrs. Gore has a perfectly feminine knowledge of all the weaknesses and absurdities of an ordinary man of fashion, following the routine of London life in the season. She unmasks his selfishness with admirable acuteness; she exposes his unromantic egotism, with delightful sauciness. Her portraits of women are also executed with great spirit; but not with the same truth. In transferring men to her canvas, she has relied upon the faculty of observation, usually fine and vigilant in a woman; but when portraying her own sex, the authoress has perhaps looked within; and the study of the internal operations of the human machine is a far more complex affair, and requires far more extensive experience, and also different faculties, from those necessary to acquire a perfect knowledge of the appearances on the surface of humanity."
Notwithstanding Mrs. Gore touches so lightly on the surface of life, certain definite sociological and moral principles underlie her work. She is as democratic as Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Mitford, or even William Godwin. She asserts again and again that men of inferior birth with the same opportunities of education may be as intellectual and refined as the sons of a "hundred earls." Those members of the aristocracy who fail to recognise the true worth of intelligent men of plebeian origin are made very ridiculous. In her novel Pin Money, published in 1831, how very funny is Lady Derenzy's speech when she learns that a soap manufacturer is being fêted in fashionable society! Lady Derenzy, by the way, is the social law-giver to her little coterie:
"It is now some years," said she, "since the independence of America, and the influence exerted in this country by the return of a large body of enlightened men, habituated to the demoralising spectacle of an equalisation of rank, was supposed to exert a pernicious influence on the minds of the secondary and inferior classes of Great Britain. At that critical moment I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Lord Derenzy took my advice, and the country was saved.
"Again, when the assemblage of the States General of France,—the fatal tocsin of the revolution,—spread consternation and horror throughout the higher ranks of every European country, and the very name of the guillotine operated like a spell on the British peerage, I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Again Lord Derenzy took my advice, and again the country was saved."
Mrs. Gore has so cleverly mingled the so-called self-made men and men of inherited rank in her books that one cannot distinguish between them. In The Soldier of Lyons, one of her early novels, which furnished Bulwer with the plot of his play The Lady of Lyons, the hero, a peasant by birth and a soldier of the Republic, enters into a marriage contract with the widow of a French marquis, in order to save her from the guillotine. This lady of high rank learns to respect her husband, and becomes the suitor for his love. In The Heir of Selwood, a former field marshal of Napoleon, a peasant, devotes his energies to improving the condition of the poor on the estate he had won by his services to his country, and at his death his tenants erected a column to his memory, bearing the inscription: "Most dear to God, to the king, and to the people."
Mrs. Gore constantly asserts that the only distinctions between men are based upon character and ability. She says of one of her characters, a poet: