Wives and Daughters (108 page)

Roger and Molly are married; and if one of them is happier than the other, it is Molly. Her husband has no need to draw upon the little fortune which is to go to poor Osborne’s boy, for he becomes professor at some great scientific institution, and wins his way in the world handsomely. The squire is almost as happy in this marriage as his son. If any one suffers for it, it is Mr. Gibson. But he takes a partner, so as to get a chance of running up to London to stay with Molly for a few days now and then, and ‘to get a little rest from Mrs. Gibson.’ Of what was to happen to Cynthia after her marriage the author was not heard to say much; and, indeed, it does not seem that anything needs to be added. One little anecdote, however, was told of her by Mrs. Gaskell, which is very characteristic. One day, when Cynthia and her husband were on a visit to Hollingford, Mr. Henderson learned for the first time, through an innocent casual remark of Mr. Gibson’s that the famous traveller, Roger Hamley, was known to the family. Cynthia had never happened to mention it. How well that little incident, too, would have been described!

But it is useless to speculate upon what would have been done by the delicate strong hand which can create no more Molly Gibsons—no more Roger Hamleys. We have repeated, in this brief note all that is known of her designs for the story, which would have been completed in another chapter. There is not so much to regret, then, so far as this novel is concerned; indeed, the regrets of those who knew her are less for the loss of the novelist than of the woman—one of the kindest and wisest of her time. But yet, for her own sake as a novelist alone, her untimely death is a matter for deep regret. It is clear in this novel of Wives and Daughters, in the exquisite little story that preceded it, Cousin Phillis,
^en
and in Sylvia’s Lovers,
^eo
that Mrs. Gaskell had within these five years started upon a new career with all the freshness of youth, and with a mind which seemed to have put off its clay and to have been born again. But that ‘put off its clay’ must be taken in a very narrow sense. All minds are tinctured more or less with the ‘muddy vesture’ in which they are contained; but few minds ever showed less of base earth than Mrs. Gaskell’s. It was so at all times; but lately even the original slight tincture seemed to disappear. While you read any one of the last three books we have named, you feel yourself caught out of an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions, into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives; and, what is more, you feel that this is at least as real a world as the other. The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate ; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence which prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those that rot without it. This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters-their author’s latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent amongst the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.

We are saying nothing now of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works. Twenty years to come that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs. Gaskell’s are among the finest of our time. There is a scene in Cousin Phillis—where Holman, making hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm—which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the squire after the quarrel with Osborne. There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could ‘seize.’ There is no ‘material’ for him in half a dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son. Still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people; but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable. It is the same with the personages in Mrs. Gaskell’s works. Cynthia is one of the most difficult characters which have ever been attempted in our time. Perfect art always obscures the difficulties it overcomes; and it is not till we try to follow the processes by which such a character as the Tito of
Romola
is created, for instance, that we begin to understand what a marvellous piece of work it is. To be sure, Cynthia was not so difficult, nor is it nearly so great a creation as that splendid achievement of art and thought—of the rarest art, of the profoundest thought. But she also belongs to the kind of characters which are conceived only in minds large, clear, harmonious, and just, and which can be portrayed fully and without flaw only by hands obedient to the finest motions of the mind. Viewed in this light, Cynthia is a more important piece of work even than Molly, delicately as she is drawn, and true and harmonious as that picture is also. And what we have said of Cynthia may be said with equal truth of Osborne Hamley. The true delineation of a character like that is as fine a test of art as the painting of a foot or a hand, which also seems so easy, and in which perfection is most rare. In this case the work is perfect. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn a dozen characters more striking than Osborne since she wrote
Mary Barton
,
^ep
but not one which shows more exquisite finish.

Another thing we may be permitted to notice, because it has a great and general significance. It may be true that this is not exactly the place for criticism, but since we are writing of Osborne Hamley, we cannot resist pointing out a peculiar instance of the subtler conceptions which underlie all really considerable works. Here are Osborne and Roger, two men, who, in every particular that can be seized for
description
, are totally different creatures. Body and mind they are quite unlike. They have different tastes; they take different ways: they are men of two sorts which, in the society sense, never ‘know’ each other; and yet, never did brotherly blood run more manifest than in the veins of those two. To make that manifest withoutallowing the effort to peep out for a single moment, would be a triumph of art; but it is a ‘touch beyond the reach of art’ to make their likeness in unlikeness so natural a thing that we no more wonder about it than we wonder at seeing the fruit and the bloom on the same bramble: we have always seen them there together in blackberry season, and do not wonder about it nor think about it at all. Inferior writers, even some writers who are highly accounted, would have revelled in the ‘contrast,’ persuaded that they were doing a fine anatomical dramatic thing by bringing it out at every opportunity To the author of
Wives and Daughters
this sort of anatomy was mere dislocation. She began by having the people of her story born in the usual way, and not built up like the Frankenstein monster; and thus when Squire Hamley took a wife, it was then provided that his two boys should be as naturally one and diverse as the fruit and the bloom on the bramble. ‘It goes without speaking.’ These differences are precisely what might have been expected from the union of Squire Hamley with the town-bred, refined, delicate-minded woman whom he married; and the affection of the young men, their kindness (to use the word in its old and new meanings at once) is nothing but a reproduction of those impalpable threads of love which bound the equally diverse father and mother in bonds faster than the ties of blood.

But we will not permit ourselves to write any more in this vein. It is unnecessary to demonstrate to those who know what is and what is not true literature that Mrs. Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind; that these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days; and that she has gifted us with some of the truest, purest works of fiction in the language. And she was herself what her works show her to have been—a wise, good woman.

1
(p. 6)
the little town of Hollingford:
The town in which
Wives and Daughters
takes place is based upon Knutsford, a town in Cheshire where Elizabeth Gaskell was raised from the age of thirteen months by her aunt, Hannah Lumb. Elizabeth Stevenson, Gaskell’s mother, had died in London in October 1811. Gaskell’s aunt would take the mother’s place, and Knutsford would become a fertile source for Gaskell’s novels, including
Cranford
, in which the town of the title was also based upon Knutsford.

2
(p. 6)
Five-and-forty years ago
: Gaskell is setting the action of the story back in time, with the main action of the novel occurring in the late 1820s through the early 1830s.

3
(p. 6)
It was before the passing of the Reform Bill
: The novel is set before the 1832 Reform Act, an act that brought a broader share of power to the middle classes and that redistributed parliamentary representation from small electoral boroughs to the nation’s growing industrial centers. It is thought to have saved England from the kind of unrest and revolutionary action that occurred on the Continent. As a result of the act the number of enfranchised men was extended from 435,000 to 813,000-but this was out of an adult male population close to 6 million. Nevertheless, this was a significant piece of reform, mostly because it inaugurated a political shift from power based solely on rank, birth, and land ownership to one based on wealth and capital; it set a precedent that would be followed up on in the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884-1885.

4
(p. 6)
Whig
family ...
Tory family of Cumnor:
Gaskell here switches the political parties of these two families, which we will learn are central to the novel. The Cumnors are actually more enlightened and align themselves with the Whigs, a party that in the eighteenth century thought of itself as progressive, having defended constitutional monarchy against Stuart Catholicism. Later in the novel Gaskell refines the political distinctions between the two families by making the Cumnors into Whigs and alluding to the “Toryism” of Squire Hamley. This is an inconsistency in the novel that Gaskell did not have the opportunity to change prior to her death.

5
(p. 7 )
a school of the kind we should call “industrial”
: The aims of the school that Gaskell describes are self-serving in that the education it of fered to children of the working class prepared them to be servants. Gaskell’s take on education for the poor “nowadays”—that is, in the 1860s—makes it seem as if standards had changed more than they actually had. It was not until 18 71 that public education was established, and before then elementary education for the lower classes was voluntary and geared toward achieving only the most basic levels in reading, writing, and math.

1
(p. 1 S)
greenhouses and hothouses....
Lady Agnes
had a more scientific taste
: Lady Agnes’s interest in botany is not meant to be understood as an eccentricity, as the nineteenth-century saw a burgeoning fascination with the study of plants and flowers. Botany from the late eighteenth century was also considered an acceptable intellectual pursuit for young women. Although the study of plants was not only an upper-class endeavor, here the allusion to a “long glittering range” of greenhouses and the fact that Lady Agnes is a collector of plants, including rare orchids, is a clue to the wealth of the Cumnors.

2
(p. 22)
Molly had never read the “Three Bears
”: “The Three Bears,” of which Molly is ignorant, was and remains a common fairy tale. The question of whether fairy tales should be part of a child’s reading was a fraught one in the nineteenth century; one opinion had it that they were dangerous for children in that fairy tales did not conform to reason or fact. Lord Cumnor goes on to joke about her as “Sleeping Beauty,” of whom Molly also seems ignorant.

3
(p. 24) Lodge’s Portraits: Mrs. Kirkpatrick is showing Molly a work by Edmund Lodge entitled
Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain
(4 vols., 1821-1834).

1
(p. 30)
muscular Christianity
: This belief system, which equated moral and physical fitness, became widely accepted in the 1850s. Introduced by Thomas Arnold, a headmaster of Rugby, it is associated with educational reform. The ideal of muscular Christianity is associated most clearly in the novel with Roger Hamley, whose robust physical self corresponds with a strong moral sense.

2
(p. 30)
he must be Scotch:
Contemporary readers of the novel would have understood the reference to Mr. Gibson’s “Scotch” background as a suggestion of his superiority as a medical man. During the nineteenth century Edinburgh University in Scotland was the premier place for medical education, so to suggest Gibson was Scottish was to suggest that he may have had superior training during a time when most doctors learned their craft through apprenticeships rather than formal university training.

3
(p. 33)
apprentices ... bound by indentures, and paying a handsome premium to learn their business:
Apprenticeship remained the way in which most “surgeons” or “apothecaries” became qualified to practice. The length of the apprenticeship, which was a binding contract or indentureship, was typically five to seven years; the apprentice exchanged his labor for room, board, and education.

1
(p. 41 )
the Heptarchy
: The vicar is referring to Squire Hamley’s ancient family, which existed before the Norman Conquest. “The Heptarchy” refers to the seven kingdoms that are said to have existed in England in the seventh and eighth centuries.