The author never refers to John Ball as the hero of the story, and indeed he is not unblemished. But he turns out to be Miss Mackenzie's hero, barely making the cut. He has a house full of children of his own, and though a barrister by profession, he hardly practices law. He is the Victorian equivalent of a day trader, going to town every day to follow the market prices and manage his investments, which seem to yield him barely enough to feed his family. He discusses his investments with his mother every night. When he proposes to Margaret, neither she nor the reader is sure whether it is for love or for money, but whatever, she accepts.
And then Trollope pulls a rabbit out of the hat. In doing research on disposition of the will that had seemed to leave Margaret her fortune, the lawyer determines that the bequest had already been deeded to the Ball family and was therefore not available to be left to Margaret. So now John Ball has it all and Margaret has nothing. And when Mr. Maguire appears and claims that Margaret is his fiancée, John fails the test. He says nothing when it is time for him to reassure Margaret that he believes her, and she immediately returns to the miserable lodgings on the Thames in London. And during the long deliberations about confirming whose money it really is, he says nothing to her. She considers herself bound to him even though he may no longer want her, having the money and not having to bother about the girl. She is still pretty low on the self-esteem scale.
All this makes for an entertaining story. The family history and the mystery of the will are complex enough to keep the reader on the hook. A high-born cousin steps in late in the game to help Miss Mackenzie think a bit more of herself. Mrs. Mackenzie, wife to another cousin who lives far away in Scotland, comes to London for a while and tells Margaret how the cow ate the cabbage. She tells her she is sure that Miss Mackenzie will become Lady Margaret by marrying John Ball, morose though he may be. Her instrument is a muslin flecked with black to replace the mourning that Margaret had been wearing in memory of her brother and then her uncle. A "make-belief mourning bonnet" is tossed in, and these are to be worn to the Negro Soldiers' Orphan Bazaar, at which John Ball sees her in something other than all-black mourning, and both of them get the hint that all need not be dark. This is a little set-piece in which two old favorites appear to play cameo roles: Lady Glencora Palliser, who steps out of the Palliser series, and Lady Hartletop, known to readers of the Barsetshire series as Griselda Grantly.
Lady Hartletop is not referred to by her Christian name, because the name Griselda is already in use in reference to Miss Mackenzie. ("'But you must positively bring Grieselda,' said Lady Glencora Palliser.") Readers of Trollope's day were more aware than those of today that Griselda figured in several folk tales, including Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales, as the personification of patience and obedience. In the former version, a Marquis marries Griselda and tells her that their first two children must be put to death, and then he tells her that he has received papal dispensation to divorce her. She is put away for years, brought back only to witness the wedding of the divorced Marquis. In this ceremony she is told that it is all a joke, and she is restored to her place as wife and mother of the children, who were never killed after all. Some joke; one wonders if her sense of humor is up to it.
Earlier in the book Margaret is referred to as Mariana in the moated grange, who waits vainly for her lover in Tennyson's poem "Mariana":
|
She only said, 'The night is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!' |
Another image comes to mind in reading Miss Mackenzie: that of Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp who revolutionized nursing with her service to the English troops in the Crimea. This revolution was probably still a work in progress when Trollope wrote Miss Mackenzie, describing her resolution to be a hospital nurse as a fall-back option if none of her matrimonial plans worked out. She cared for one brother for fifteen years, and when her brother Tom was on his deathbed, she assumed the role again.
There are women who seem to have an absolute pleasure in fixing themselves for business by the bedside of a sick man. They generally commence their operations by laying aside all fictitious feminine charms, and by arraying themselves with a rigid, unconventional unenticing propriety. Though they are still gentle—perhaps more gentle than ever in their movements—there is a decision in all they do very unlike their usual mode of action.
Miss Mackenzie is an excellent novel. The story moves well in the framework of a Victorian inheritance situation; Miss Mackenzie and John Ball appear as less than perfect but likeable and even admirable figures; those in the supporting cast play their roles well, and through it all the author maintains his deft ironic touch. And for better or worse, the enduring image is that of Rev. Maguire's squint. "[S]he could not help looking into the horrors of his eye, and thinking that innocent was not the word for him."