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: