The room was full of scent, partly from the flowers outside, and partly from the great jars of pot-pourri inside. The choice of odours was what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a keen susceptibility of smell. We never named musk in her presence, her antipathy to it was so well understood through the household; her opinion on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived from an animal could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any person of good family, where, of course, the delicate perception of the senses had been cultivated for generations. She would instance the way in which sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs who have shown keen scent; and how such gifts descend for generations amongst animals, who cannot be supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies about them. Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court. No more were bergamot or southernwood, although vegetable in their nature. She considered these two latter as betraying a vulgar taste in the person who chose to gather or wear them. She was sorry to notice sprigs of them in the button-hole of any young man in whom she took an interest, either because he was engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came out of church on a Sunday afternoon. She was afraid that he liked coarse pleasures; and I am not sure if she did not think that his preference for these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a probability that he would take to drinking. But she distinguished between vulgar and common. Violets, pinks, and sweetbriar were common enough; roses and mignonette, for those who had gardens, honeysuckle for those who walked along the bowery lanes; but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity of taste; the queen upon her throne might be glad to smell at a nosegay of the flowers. A beaupot (as we call it) of pinks and roses freshly gathered was placed every morning that they were in bloom on my lady’s own particular table. For lasting vegetable odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodruff to any extract whatever. Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said, and of homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to her of a bundle of lavender. Sweet-woodruff, again, grew in wild, woodland places, where the soil was fine and the air delicate; the poor children used to go and gather it for her up in the woods on the higher lands; and for this service she always rewarded them with bright new pennies, of which my lord, her son, used to send her down a bagful fresh from the Mint in London every February.
Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She said it reminded her of the city and of merchants’ wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its perfume. And lilies of the valley somehow fell under the same condemnation. They were most graceful and elegant to look at (my lady was quite candid about this), flower, leaf, and colour—everything was refined about them but the smell. That was too strong. But the great hereditary faculty on which my lady piqued herself, and with reason, for I never met with any person who possessed it, was the power she had of perceiving the delicious odour arising from a bed of strawberries in the late autumn, when the leaves were all fading and dying. Bacon’s Essays was one of the few books that lay about in my lady’s room; and, if you took it up and opened it carelessly, it was sure to fall apart at his “Essay on Gardens.” “Listen,” her ladyship would say, “to what that great philosopher and statesman says. ‘Next to that’—he is speaking of violets, my dear—‘is the musk-rose—of which you will remember the great bush at the corner of the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that is the old musk-rose, Shakespeare’s musk-rose, which is dying out through the kingdom now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: ‘Then the strawberry leaves, dying with a most cordial excellent smell.’ Now the Hanburys can always smell this excellent cordial odour, and very delicious and refreshing it is. You see, in Lord Bacon’s time there had not been so many intermarriages between the court and the city as there have been since the needy days of his Majesty Charles the Second; and altogether, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the great old families of England were a distinct race, just as a cart-horse is one creature and very useful in its place, and Childers or Eclipse is another creature, though both are of the same species. So the old families have gifts and powers of a different and higher class to what the other orders have. My dear, remember that you try if you can smell the scent of dying strawberry leaves in this next autumn. You have some of Ursula Hanbury’s blood in you, and that gives you a chance.”
But when October came, I sniffed and sniffed, and all to no purpose; and my lady—who had watched the little experiment rather anxiously—had to give me up as a hybrid. I was mortified, I confess, and thought that it was in some ostentation of her own powers that she ordered the gardener to plant a border of strawberries on that side of the terrace that lay under her windows.
St. Valentine’s Day
From “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras,” Howitt’s Journal, 1847
It is noticeable that all Mrs. Gaskell’s earlier stories are tales of life in and around Manchester. In 1848 they were re-published under the title Life in Manchester, by Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., the nom de guerre under which Mrs. Gaskell tried to hide her identity.
Her idea was this; her mother came from the east of England, where, as perhaps you know, they have the pretty custom of sending presents on St. Valentine’s Day, with the donor’s name unknown, and, of course, the mystery constitutes half the enjoyment. The fourteenth of February was Libbie’s birthday too, and many a year, in the happy days of old, had her mother delighted to surprise her with some little gift, of which she more than half guessed the giver, although each Valentine’s Day the manner of its arrival was varied. Since then the fourteenth of February had been the dreariest of all the year because the most haunted by memory of departed happiness. But now, this year, if she could not have the old gladness of heart herself, she would try and brighten the life of another. She would save, and she would screw, but she would buy a canary and a cage for that poor little laddie opposite, who wore out his monotonous life with so few pleasures and so much pain.
I doubt I may not tell you here of the anxieties and the fears, of the hopes and the self-sacrifices—all, perhaps, small in the tangible effect as the widow’s mite, yet not the less marked by the viewless angels who go about continually among us—which varied Libbie’s life before she accomplished her purpose. It is enough to say it was accomplished. The very day before the fourteenth she found time to go with her half-guinea to a barber’s who lived near Albemarle Street, and who was famous for his stock of singing-birds. There are enthusiasts about all sorts of things, both good and bad, and many of the weavers in Manchester know and care more about birds than anyone would easily credit. Stubborn, silent, reserved men on many things, you have only to touch on the subject of birds to light up their faces with brightness. They will tell you who won the prizes at the last canary show, where the prize birds may be seen, and give you all the details of those funny but pretty and interesting mimicries of great people’s cattle shows. Among these amateurs, Emanuel Morris, the barber, was an oracle.
He took Libbie into his little back room, used for private shaving of modest men, who did not care to be exhibited in the front shop decked out in the full glories of lather; and which was hung round with birds in rude wicker cages, with the exception of those who had won prizes, and were consequently honoured with gilt-wire prisons. The longer and thinner the body of the bird was, the more admiration it received, as far as external beauty went; and when, in addition to this, the colour was deep and clear, and its notes strong and varied, the more did Emanuel dwell upon its perfections. But these were all prize birds; and, on inquiry, Libbie heard, with some little sinking at heart, that their price ran from one to two guineas.
“I’m not over-particular as to shape and colour,” said she. “I should like a good singer, that’s all!”