n the small circle of women writers who shed literary lustre on the early years of her present Majesty's reign was Dinah Mulock, best known to the present novel-reading generation as the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman."
To appreciate fully the position that we claim for her, it will be necessary to turn back to the period when she began to write, and see who were her contemporaries.
Pre-eminent among these stand out three names—names immortal on the roll of fame for so long as taste and critical judgment last; the books of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot must be regarded as masterpieces of fiction. We, their humble followers, bow before their genius which time, fashion, or progress cannot dim or take from; therefore, to have achieved success and to have made an abiding fame while such luminaries were shining in the firmament was a distinction to be justly proud of—the result of talent, delicacy of handling, and grasp of character that were only a little below genius.
How vast the difference that one small step would have made it is not our purpose to show; our intention is rather to take a general view of the work of a writer who—now that close upon half a century has passed, since, in 1849, timidly and without giving her name, she launched on the world her first novel, "The Ogilvies"—has never lost her hold upon the reading public of Great Britain, the Colonies, America, or wherever the English tongue is spoken.
Dinah Mulock was born in 1826 at Stoke-upon-Trent in Staffordshire. Her disposition towards literature seems to have been inherited from her father, who was connected—but in no very prosperous way—with letters, and was known to Byron and to the poet Moore, whose fellow countryman he was. At the time of his daughter's birth, he was acting as spiritual minister to a small congregation who were followers of what were then generally thought to be his advanced and unorthodox opinions. Few who forsake the established road for their own peculiar rut find that prosperity bears them company, and the fortunes of the Mulock family during the embryo authoress's early years were unsettled and unsatisfactory. We are all given to rebel against the clouds which overcast our youth, seldom realising that to this pinch of adverse circumstance we owe much of that power to depict the sorrows, joys, and perplexities of life in the setting forth of which Miss Mulock became so eminently successful.
Before she had reached the age of twenty, she left her home and came to London, "feeling conscious," we are told, "of a vocation for authorship."
Now, in the present day, when novel writing has become an employment, profession, distraction, I might almost say a curse, there would be nothing remarkable in such a conviction; but in 1846 the mania of desiring to see their names in print had not seized upon our sex; therefore the divine afflatus must have been very strong which sent a timid attractive girl, hampered by all the prejudices of her day, to try the fortunes of her pen in London.
That she had not been deceived in her quality is shown by the success of "The Ogilvies," which not only was popular with novel readers, but raised hopes that the writer possessed great dramatic power, to be more ably used when experience had corrected the crude faults of a first book. The story, based on passionate first love, is written with the enthusiasm and vigour which comes pleasantly from a young hand, and makes us disposed to view leniently the superabundance of sentiment which, under other circumstances, we should censure. The death of the boy, Leigh Pennythorne, is rendered with a pathos which calls for admiration, and we are not surprised to see it ranked with the death of little Paul Dombey; while that of Katherine Lynedon, spoken of at the time as possessing great dramatic force, strikes us now as melodramatic and sensational.