In the winter of 1860—61, Mrs Margaret Oliphant, a penniless, undaunted little Scottish ‘scribbling woman,’ called at the office of the brothers Blackwood.
It was a very severe winter, and it was severe on me too…I had not been doing very well with my writing. I had sent several articles to Blackwood’s [Magazine] and they had been rejected. Why, this being the case, I should have gone to them…I can’t tell. But I was in their debt, and had very little to go on with. They shook their heads, of course, and thought it would not be possible to take such a story—both very kind, and truly sorry for me, I have no doubt. I think I see their figures now against the light, standing up, John with his shoulders hunched up, the Major with his soldierly air, and myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress, taking leave of them as if it didn’t matter, and oh! so much afraid that they would see the tears in my eyes. I went home to my little ones, and as soon as I had got them into bed, I sat down and wrote. I sat up all night in a passion of composition, stirred to the very bottom of my mind. The story was successful, and my fortune, comparatively speaking, was made.
This is Mrs Oliphant’s own account, in what she called her ‘few autobiographical bits,’ of the origin of the Chronicles of Carlingford.1 If we get the idea that she saw herself to some extent as the heroine of her own novel, and that she knew it perfectly well, we should be right, and right too in recognizing her as a woman with a strong visual imagination and an even stronger sense of human relationships. She sees the group in terms of dark and light, and feels the publishers’ embarrassed decency and her own desperation.
For nearly fifty years she led a working, or rather a fighting life as a writer. Her industry became a legend (‘I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ Queen Victoria said to her.) She never, it seems, had more than two hours to herself, except in the middle of the night. Up to a few days before her death she was still correcting proofs. But her fortune, alas, was not made in 1861, either comparatively speaking or ever.
She was twice an Oliphant (it was her mother’s name as well as her husband’s) and the family was an ancient one, ‘though I don’t think,’ she wrote, ‘that our branch was anything much to brag about.’ Although she was Scottish born (4 April 1828) she was brought up in Liverpool where her father worked in the customs house. It was a close-knit, plain family life, and from the outset it was a household of weak men and strong women. The father counted for very little, and her two elder brothers never came to much. All the fire and generosity of life seemed to come from the mother. Maggie herself, from a tender age, was out on the streets delivering radical pamphlets, and hot in defence of the Scottish Free Church. No formal education is mentioned. At six years old she learned to read and did so prodigiously, mostly Scots history and legends. When, in her teens, she began to write her own tales, ‘my style,’ she said, ‘followed no sort of law.’ Writing, of course, was in the intervals of housekeeping and sick-nursing. In 1849 (by which time her first novel had been published) she went up to London to look after her amiable brother Willie, who was studying for the ministry, and to keep him clear of drink and debt. ‘I was a little dragon, watching over him with remorseless anxiety.’ Lodging upstairs was her cousin Francis Oliphant, an artist; three years later, after some mysterious hesitations, she married him. This meant a hand-to-mouth studio life, in the course of which her first two babies died, and two more were born.
Although he exhibited history pieces at the Academy, Francis was by profession a glass painter, who had worked for eleven years as assistant to Pugin. (Margaret, unfortunately, had almost no feeling for art, and when he took her to the National Gallery she was ‘struck dumb with disappointment.’) He was not the kind of man ever to succeed on his own: when he set up his own studio, in 1854, he couldn’t manage either the workmen or the accounts. His failure has always been put down to the decline in demand for ‘mediaeval’ painted glass, but in fact there was no decline until well after 1870. ‘His wife’s success,’ wrote William Bell Scott, ‘was enough to make him an idle and aimless man.’ This is unkind, but certainly Margaret was the breadwinner from the first, even though she allowed seven of her first thirteen novels to appear under Willie’s name in the hope of setting him up on his feet. And poor Francis was consumptive. In 1858, when he was told there was no hope, his comment is said to have been ‘Well, if that is so, there is no reason why we should be miserable.’ They went off, as invalids so ill-advisedly did in the 1850s, to the cold winter damp of Florence and the malarial heat of Rome. To spare his wife, Francis did not tell her the truth. She never forgave him this, and was honest enough to admit it. When he died she was left pregnant, with two children to look after, and about £1,000 in debts. This was mostly owed to Blackwood’s, who had been generously sending her £20 a month, whether they printed her articles or not.
Margaret Oliphant gathered up her dependants and returned, first to Edinburgh, then to Ealing, west of London. Before long she found herself supporting not only her own children and the feckless Willie but also her brother Frank (he had failed in business) and his family of four. Like some natural force she attracted responsibilities towards her. But with this strength of hers there went a wild optimism and an endearing lack of caution. She was openhanded, like her mother. Nothing was too good for her friends. Her sons, whatever the expense, must go to Eton. Yet both of them, as they grew up, drifted into elegant idleness. Their vitality faded and she could not revive it. She had to watch them die in their barren thirties, one after the other. It is at this point that her autobiography breaks off. ‘And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.’
Mrs Oliphant’s novels show little of the indulgence of Jane Austen or George Eliot towards attractive weaklings. Did she, out of her love and generosity, encourage, or even create, weakness in men? Her autobiography is deeply touching, partly because she recognizes this. ‘I did with much labour what I thought the best…but now I think that if I had taken the other way, which seemed the less noble, it might have been better for all of us.’ She did not think of herself as in any way exceptional. She believed she had had the ‘experiences of most women.’ They had been her life and they became the life of her books.
Mrs Oliphant’s Carlingford2 is described for us in much less detail than, say George Eliot’s Milby in Scenes of Clerical Life. To draw an accurate map of it would be difficult. The railway station, with unhelpful porters, is to the south. The High Street is for shopping, George Street (with the Blue Boar Inn) is the business district. To the east of the town, Wharfside, down by the canal, is a slum, ignored by the respectable. Grange Lane and Grove Street are for the gentry, though Grove Street has ‘a shabby side’ and backs onto narrow lanes. St Roque’s, the chapel of ease for the Parish Church, is to the north. In the last of the Chronicles, however, Phoebe Junior, the sun is said to set behind St Roque’s. Plainly Mrs Oliphant is less interested in topography than in people. But in giving the atmosphere of a small community, almost resentful of arrivals and departures (although these are its main source of interest), complacent, hierarchical, inward-looking, and conscious of one direction, the canal-side, in which it dare not look—here she cannot put a foot wrong. Within these tight limits human beings must discover what a real life is, and contrive, somehow, to have it. I should like to say something here about her observation of human nature, but mustn’t, because she herself thought the idea an impertinence. All she ever did, she said, was to listen attentively.
Her first approach to Carlingford (though by no means its only one) is through its churchgoing. This was a natural choice for the mid-nineteenth century. Only a few years later Dickens, close to death, fixed on a cathedral city and its clergy for his last novel. For present-day readers, Carlingford means a direct plunge into the rich diversity of Victorian Christianity. At one end of the spectrum there are ‘viewy’ High Churchmen, inheritors of the Oxford Movement, eager to reunite England with its Catholic past and to show truth by means of ritual. Ritual, confession, vestments, candles, are all an offence to everyday worshippers—un-English, or worse. To the Low Church, shading into the Evangelicals, plainness and simplicity are also a way of showing holiness. Church building is still in its hard Gothic heyday. (St Roque’s, where the perpetual curate is ‘viewy,’ is by Gilbert Scott.) The Dissenters have only one red brick building, Salem Chapel, in Grove Street. It is attended mainly by ‘grocers and buttermen.’ Beyond lie the poor. Here both the Ritualists and the Evangelicals see their duty. They visit, and bring blankets and coal. But what church, if any, the bargees and brickworkers attend, we are not told.
On a lower level a thriving competition is in progress between the Parish Church, St Roque’s, and Salem. How many pews are filled, how many paid-for ‘sittings’ are taken up, will the Sunday sermon lose or gain supporters? But, unlike Trollope, Mrs Oliphant does not treat organized religion as a variant of the political structure, occupied in manoeuvres for position. The preoccupations of Carlingford are unspiritual and often ludicrous, but the church, no matter how far it falls short, is there to link them with an unseen world. In this way, although her human comedy is so much narrower than Trollope’s, it has a dimension that can hardly be found in Barchester.
The Rector most characteristically begins with a new arrival at Carlingford. Mrs Oliphant opens her story in a tone of shrewd irony, presenting Carlingford as its ‘good society’ sees itself—that is, the ‘real town,’ not the tradespeople or, of course, Wharfside. This real town stays secluded in Grange Lane, behind high walls ‘jealous of intrusion, yet thrusting tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom, like friendly salutations to the world without.’ These households, the mainstay of the Parish Church, are half-agreeably disturbed by the thought of a new incumbent. He may be a Ritualist, like young Mr Wentworth of St Roque’s. He may be Low Church, like the late Rector, who absurdly exceeded his duties and actually went down to preach to the ‘bargemen’ of the canal district. To look at it from another point of view, there are unmarried young ladies in Carlingford, and it is known that the new Rector, also, is unmarried.
This, like A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner, is the novel as parable. The houses of Grange Lane, as we first see them in the May sunshine, are an earthly paradise. To open the Wodehouse’s garden door—‘what a slight, paltry barrier—one plank and no more’—is to be elected, to find it shut is to be cast out. As the story opens the young curate, Frank Wentworth, is already, though not securely, admitted to the garden, the falling apple blossoms making light of his ‘black Anglican coat.’ He is too poor to propose marriage to Lucy, the pretty younger daughter. When the door closes behind him he walks stiffly away along the dry and dusty road. Out goes the frustrated young man from the display of fertile greenery, in comes the shy, celibate newcomer. ‘A tall, embarrassed figure, following the portly one of Mr Wodehouse, stepped suddenly from the noisy gravel to the quiet grass, and stood gravely awkward behind the father of the house’ in contrast to the blazing narcissi and the fruit trees. Morley Proctor has been ‘living out of nature.’ For the last fifteen years he has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles. ‘He was neither High nor Low, enlightened nor narrow-minded. He was a Fellow of All Souls’—about which Mrs Oliphant probably knew very little except for the irony of the name for an establishment which cared for so few of them. Proctor is honourable enough, upright and sincere, but in company he is ‘a reserved and inappropriate man.’ His heart is an ‘unused faculty.’ He is out of place, as he knows at once, in the vigorously flowering garden.
But Morley Proctor, too, has come from a Paradise to which he looks back regretfully, a haven of scholarship and ‘snug little dinner-parties undisturbed by the presence of women.’ This is in spite of the fact that his mother has come from Devonshire to look after him, a dauntless little mother who treats him with the mixture of love and impatience at which Mrs Oliphant (in fiction as in life) excelled. Old Mrs Proctor, young in heart, regards her son as a child, but as one who should be settled down with a wife. One of the Wodehouse daughters would do—the kindly, plain, elder one whose reserve seems an echo of Morley’s own timidity, or perhaps the dazzling Lucy.
Having placed this situation, Mrs Oliphant asks us to see it in a different light. It turns out that the new Rector has left All Souls, somewhat against his conscience, precisely in order to give his mother a good home. When he ‘turned his back on his beloved cloisters’ he knew very well what the sacrifice was, but he was determined to make it.
I have said that Mrs Oliphant is not writing of the religious life simply as a social mechanism, or for the sake of the psychological tension that it produces. Proctor’s flight from the possibility of marriage (not without an unexpected twinge of sexuality, since Lucy is so pretty) is domestic comedy of a delicious kind, since Lucy does not want him in the least. But the crisis of the story, when it comes, is spiritual. As a sharp interruption to the dull services that he conducts and the dinner parties that he awkwardly attends, the Rector is called to the bedside of a dying woman. He is asked to prepare her soul for its last journey. His reaction to the agony is dismay, and a very English embarrassment. Without his prayer book he is at a loss for a prayer. He has to leave even that duty to young Wentworth, who providentially comes in time to the sickroom. The Rector ‘would have known what to say to her if her distress had been over a disputed translation.’ The heart of the story is his trial and condemnation, and he has to conduct the trial himself. Carlingford doesn’t reject him—quite the contrary. But he perceives that Wentworth, ‘not half or a quarter part as learned as he,’ was ‘a world farther on in the profession which they shared.’ Among those who are being born, suffering and perishing he has no useful place. His training has not prepared him for such things. And yet, can they be learned by training? ‘The Rector’s heart said No.’
Mrs Oliphant, in fact, is asking: what is a man doing, and what must he be, when he undertakes to be an intermediary between man and God? She returns to the question later, in Salem Chapel. The answer, in her view, has nothing to do with formal theology, or she would not have proposed it. Nor is it a matter of duty. Morley Proctor was right, in his anxiety, to consult his heart.
The Doctor’s Family enlarges the view of Carlingford and takes us to a different part of it. The Doctor, however, like the Rector, has to face a painful ordeal of reality. This is all the more telling because in his hard-working medical practice he might be thought to be facing it already. But Mrs Oliphant shows him as another, although very different example of the unused heart.
Edward Rider is a surgeon, still, at that date, professionally inferior to a doctor. He is no hero, and Mrs Oliphant defines carefully what are ‘the limits of his nature, and beyond them he could not pass.’ He is shown as wretchedly in need of a woman, but unwilling to marry because he can’t face the expense and responsibility. His surgery is in the dreaded brickworkers’ district, partly because he is not a snob, but largely because he has to make a living. He would work in Grange Lane if he could, but that is the domain of old Dr Marjoribanks, who attends the ‘good society.’ To this ‘poor young fellow,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls him, strong-minded, short-tempered, comes a terrible visitation. His drunken failure of an elder brother, Fred, has come back in disgrace from Australia and installed himself in the upstairs room. ‘A large, indolent, shabby figure,’ he is incapable of gratitude but is always ready with a pleasant word for the neighbours, who prefer him, in consequence, to the doctor. Fred’s foul billows of tobacco smoke define him and hang over the first part of the book, just as the surgery lamp shines defiantly at the beginning and the end.
Mrs Oliphant was well acquainted with sickbeds and travel and the support of idle relations. The story seems almost to tell itself. It moves fast, as though keeping pace with the doctor’s rounds in his horse and drag, the quickest-moving thing on the streets of Carlingford. One encounter follows another, each outbidding the last. Fred is followed from Australia by his feebly plaintive wife and a pack of children. All have arrived in charge of his forceful young sister-in-law, Nettie. She is a tiny, ‘brilliant brown creature,’ a mighty atom, afraid of nothing ‘except that someone would speak before her and the situation be taken out of her hands.’ Having a little money left, she undertakes to support the whole lot of them, and whisks them away to new lodgings. The title The Doctor’s Family can now be seen in all its irony. First Rider, who has been too cautious to marry, is threatened with a whole family of wild children:
Nettie comes to his rescue, but this is no relief to the doctor, who falls violently in love with her. Fred’s squalid death in the canal may look like a solution, but isn’t. It means, or Nettie convinces herself that it does, that she has no right to marry and desert her weak-spirited sister. All the action seems checked, until the arrival of another Australian visitor, ‘the Bushman,’ who ‘fills up the whole little parlour with his beard and his presence,’ gives it quite a new direction. From the secluded top room where Dr Rider once hid away his brother, the whole drama has come into the open. There it has to be played out to the amazement of watching Carlingford, from the bargemen who drag in Fred’s bloated body to mild, elderly Miss Wodehouse, with whose gentle observations the book comes to rest. Dr Rider and Dr Marjoribanks, Frank Wentworth and the Wodehouses, will return in the later Chronicles, all of them less than perfect human beings. Mrs Oliphant is not much concerned with faultless characters. An exception, in The Doctor’s Family, is the honest Bushman, but even he, Miss Wodehouse points out, has made a woeful mistake. And by avoiding the Victorian baroque, the luxurious contrast between the entirely good and pure and the downright wicked that even George Eliot sometimes allowed herself, Mrs Oliphant creates a moral atmosphere of her own—warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just where we may not expect it. One might call it the Mrs Oliphant effect. In part it is the ‘uncomprehended, unexplainable impulse to take the side of the opposition’ that she recognized in herself and in Jane Carlyle. It is the form that her wit takes, a sympathetic relish for contradictions.
We are quite ready, for example, to accept Nettie as the saving angel of The Doctor’s Family, but when the drunken Fred says ‘Nettie’s a wonderful creature, to be sure, but it’s a blessed relief to get rid of her for a little,’ it’s impossible, just for the moment, not to see his point of view. Later on, when Nettie’s responsibilities unexpectedly disappear, she feels, not gratitude or ‘delight in her new freedom,’ but a bitter sense of injury. She has never had to see herself as unimportant before. Again, Freddie, the youngest child, adores her and refuses to leave her. But this passion, says Mrs Oliphant, is simply ‘a primitive unconcern for anyone but himself.’ Anybody who has looked after young children must reluctantly admit the truth of this. ‘When I am a man, I shan’t want you,’ says Freddie. In The Rector, young Mr Wentworth, even in his deep concern for the dying woman, cannot help feeling annoyed that the Rector was there before him. Mrs Oliphant hardly implies that men, women, and children should not be like this, only that this is the way they are. The often not-quite-resolved endings of her novels produce the same bittersweet effect. In Hester (1883) the strong heroine, who has shown herself perfectly capable of an independent career, is left without hope of the work she meant to do, but with two men, neither of them up to her mark, who want to marry her. ‘What can a young woman desire more,’ writes Mrs Oliphant dryly, ‘than to have such a possibility of choice?’ To take a very different example in one of her short stories, ‘The Open Door’ (1882), the ghost of a young man knocks at the door of a house in Edinburgh, ceaselessly trying to make amends to the family who lived there a century ago. A minister persuades the spirit to leave its haunting, but whether it is at peace as a result there is no way of telling.
As to the conclusion of The Doctor’s Family, Mrs Oliphant herself was not satisfied with it. ‘Sometimes,’ she wrote to Miss Blackwood in 1862, ‘one’s fancies will not do what is required of them.’ I think she underrated herself here. Surely she was right, in any case, to leave her readers to reflect on whether the end of the story is a defeat for Nettie. This, in turn, raises the question of the balance of power between men and women, and the world’s justice towards them. ‘If it were not wicked to say so,’ Nettie remarks, ‘one would think almost that Providence forgot sometimes, and put the wrong spirit into a body that did not belong to it.’ Nettie has had no education. One might call her self-invented. She speaks for her creator here. Still more so, when she has rejected Dr Edward and let him drive off, full of love and rage, into the darkness, while she goes into the house. ‘As usual, it was the woman who had to face the light and observation, and to veil her trouble.’ This is all the more effective because of its restraint. Mrs Oliphant is not asking even for change, only for acknowledgement.
The letter to Miss Blackwood makes it clear that her imagination was not always under the control of her will, and shows the natural spontaneous quality of all she wrote, as indeed of all she did. The mid-Victorian novel, Walter Allen once pointed out, ‘was an unselfconscious, even primitive form,’ and it suited her admirably. When she had good material—and in the Carlingford Chronicles she had—she was a most beguiling novelist. She saw her novels, she said, more as if she was reading them than if she was writing them. ‘I was guided by the human story in all its chapters.’
‘When I die I know what people will say of me,’ Mrs Oliphant wrote. ‘They will give me credit for courage, which I almost think is not courage, but insensibility.’ In the winter of 1861 she was living in a small house in Ealing. She was deep in debt and had three young children to support, one of them born after her husband’s death. Working, as usual, in the middle of the night, she continued her chronicles of provincial life with Salem Chapel.
At the heart of her new book is the unwelcome clash of the idealist with the world as it is. The world, this time, is represented by Salem—the Dissenters of Carlingford, in satisfied possession of their thriving shops and of the red brick chapel which they have built themselves. Salem, in appearance, is modest. On the shabby side of Grove Street, the chapel is surrounded by the ‘clean, respectable, meagre little habitations’ where the congregation live. They, of course, are condescended to by the gentry; they are tradespeople. But their independent worship and their free choice of their own minister, to be replaced if he fails to suit, give them an agreeable sense of power. Salem folk, the women in particular, are never happier than when they are ‘hearing candidates.’ As a community they are inward-looking—the poor of Carlingford are the church’s business, not theirs—but there is warmth and dignity in Salem, the warmth of neighbourliness and the dignity of self-help. To them comes Arthur Vincent, their just-elected minister, a gentlemanly young scholar fresh from theological college, ‘in the bloom of hope and intellectualism,’ asking only for room to proclaim the truth to all men. He is met by what Mrs Oliphant calls ‘a cold plunge.’ Salem wants him to fill the pews with acceptable sermons, and to do his duty at tea-meetings.
There is a strong hint, too, that the very best a young minister can do is to choose a wife from the flock, which in practice means the pinkly blooming Phoebe Tozer, the grocer’s daughter. He is told of another young pastor who failed ‘all along of the women; they didn’t like his wife, and he fell off dreadful.’ Arthur’s instincts prompt him to escape. ‘Their approbation chafed him, and if he went beyond their level, what mercy was he to expect?’ As in the two previous novels of the series, Carlingford will prove a test for the newcomer that is all the more painful because it is only half understood. Salem Chapel makes no claim to show the impact of Dissent on English life. There can be no kind of comparison, for instance, with George Eliot’s treatment of Methodism in Adam Bede. Non-conformism is not even shown as a significant moral force. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Mrs Oliphant admitted, ‘I knew nothing about chapels, but took the sentiment and a few details from our old church in Liverpool, which was Free Church of Scotland, and where there were a few grocers and other such good folk whose ways with the ministers were wonderful to behold.’ One of her earlier editors, W. Robertson Nicholl, pointed out that she got several of these details wrong. But this, even if she had realized it, would not have deterred Mrs Oliphant.
What she did understand, from the depths of her Scottish being, was the power of the spoken word as a communication from heart to heart. Arthur Vincent’s progress as a preacher, through the length of the book, is from mere eloquence to a painful success (which he no longer wants) before an assembly that ‘scarcely dares draw breath.’ In the second place, Salem, as she presents it, is a small community which, however comfortable and unassuming it is, claims a power that may be beyond the human range. Her concern is still with the urgent question that she had raised in The Rector: what does it mean for a man, living among men, to call himself their priest? Vincent has received his title to ordination, not from a bishop, but from the vote of the congregation itself, and when he first arrives in Carlingford he is proud of this. He agrees to deliver a course of lectures attacking the Church of England, a hierarchy paid for by the State. But the experience of ministry makes him question not only what he is doing, but who he is. If he is answerable to God for the souls of human beings, can these same human beings hold authority over him?
Almost certainly Mrs Oliphant had in mind two great unorthodox Scottish ministers, Edward Irving and George Macdonald, both rejected for heresy by their congregations. Only a year earlier, in 1860, she had been writing her memoir of Irving, in which she let fly, with generous indignation, at the ‘homely old men, unqualified for deciding any question which required clear heads,’ who had passed judgement on the great preacher. And Arthur Vincent, like Irving, comes to dream of a universal Church, with Christ as its only head, ‘not yet realised, but surely real.’ Irving, however, was the son of a tanner, and Macdonald the son of a crofter. Both of them were giants of men, with their own primitive grandeur, quite unlike the dapper young man from Homerton. But the distant echo of their battles can be heard in Salem Chapel.
Arthur believes that his first duty is to save himself from ‘having the life crushed out of him by ruthless chapel-mongers,’ all the more so because he constantly risks the ludicrous. His meditation on his high calling as a soldier of the Cross is interrupted by Phoebe Tozer, who blushingly comes to offer him a leftover dish of jelly. But, at all levels, the conflict is not as simple as he believes. The real fighting ground is psychological. He could, for example, have accepted the dish of jelly graciously, Mrs Oliphant tells us, if he had not been a poor widow’s son. His poverty and his Dissent give a painful edge to his ambition. English society, he finds, in Carlingford as elsewhere, is ‘a phalanx of orders and classes standing above him, standing close in order to prevent his entrance.’ He had hoped to make Salem a centre of light. Now, as Salem’s minister, he finds himself shaking hands ‘which had just clutched a piece of bacon.’ And in all the pride—not to say the vanity—of his intellect, he discovers not only how difficult it is to accept these people, but how easy it is to manipulate them. He sees himself as a teller of tales to children, and feels delighted, in spite of himself, with his own cleverness. This two-edged danger returns more than once. He grows disgusted with his own work, but ‘contemptuous of those who were pleased with it.’
In Mrs Oliphant’s novels, men turn for help to women. But in Carlingford the two women who mean most to Arthur act, in a sense, as his opponents without intending it or even knowing it. Beautiful Lady Western, with whom he falls so disastrously and pitiably in love, means no harm, either to him or to anyone else. She is quite conscious of her power, but not of the damage it is doing. Then there is Mrs Vincent, Arthur’s mother. The formal distance between Mrs Oliphant and her subject is often very slight, particularly when she introduces these frail, anxious widows who come to the rescue of their families with the unexpected strength of ten. Evidently she is drawing on her own experience here, and indulging herself a little. There is too much about the widow’s self-sacrifice, and far too much about her spotless white caps. But Mrs Oliphant is still able to take a clear look at Mrs Vincent. She loves Arthur dearly, her simple faith puts him to shame, and in his defence she confronts Salem, and even Lady Western, successfully, but she is a minister’s widow, and to her the ministry is everything. Nothing can make her see beyond the limits of pastoral duty. For this reason, in the end, she can be of comfort, but not of help, to her son.
Arthur Vincent’s struggle is a real one, and not only in terms of the mid-nineteenth century. He has enough to contend with, it might he thought, in Salem. Why did Mrs Oliphant feel it necessary to involve him, as she does, in such a lurid sub-plot? It starts off well enough with the mysterious, sardonic Mrs Hilyard, stitching away for a living at coarse material that draws blood from her hands. She and her dark sense of injustice are successfully presented, and it seems appropriate that she eventually puts the crucial question of the book, when she begs Arthur, as a priest, to curse her enemy, and he offers instead, as a priest, to bless her. But when the eagle-faced Colonel Mildmay makes his appearance (‘“She-Wolf!” cried the man, grinding his teeth’), and Arthur and his mother begin to chase up and down the length of England to save his sister from ‘polluting arms,’ the effect is not so much mystery as bewilderment, turning, sooner or later, to irritation. Arthur himself is singularly inefficient—at one point he arrives at London Bridge just in time to ‘glimpse’ not one, but two of his suspects gliding out of the station in separate carriages. Even Mrs Oliphant herself became doubtful about her contrivances. ‘I am afraid,’ she wrote to her publishers, ‘the machinery I have set in motion is rather extensive for the short limits I had intended.’
Like her contemporary Mrs Gaskell, she was not at ease with the ‘machinery,’ and this is the only time it appears in the Carlingford Chronicles. It is true that she was an admirer of Wilkie Collins (though not of Dickens), and in particular of The Woman in White. In May 1862 she wrote a piece for Blackwood’s under the title ‘Sensation Novels,’ which praised Collins for using ‘recognisable human agents’ rather than supernatural ones. But the goings-on of Colonel Mildmay are not much, if at all, in the style of The Woman in White. They are stock melodrama—abduction, bloodshed, repentance—though admittedly there is nothing supernatural about them. Mrs Oliphant however, was determined to produce a bestseller at all costs, and she did. Salem Chapel began running as a serial in Blackwood’s for February 1862, and came out in book form in 1863. ‘It went very near,’ she recollected, ‘to making me one of the popularities of literature.’ It paid the family’s bills, at least for the time being, and gave her the courage to ask an unheard-of £1,500 for her next novel.
This was a sturdy professional attitude, but I think she had another reason for the sensational elements in Salem Chapel. Arthur Vincent cannot come to terms with himself, or with his gift of words, until he has encountered what Mrs Oliphant (who knew something about it) called ‘the dark ocean of life.’ Poor though he is, he has been sheltered from the sight of absolute want and misery, and at Homerton he has never been led to think about such things. The shock of Mrs Hilyard’s mysterious poverty drives him out to visit the slums in Carlingford, even though he has no idea how to go about it. He believes everything he is told, gives money to everyone who asks, and returns penniless and exhausted. This is a beginning. But the wild scenes of flight and pursuit in which he is soon caught up distance him from Carlingford altogether. This, I think, is the effect Mrs Oliphant wanted. When at long last he admits to Salem that his old certainties are gone and that now he only faintly guesses ‘how God, being pitiful, has the heart to make man and leave him on this sad earth,’ he is talking about things which he could only have learned outside Carlingford, and beyond it.
When John Blackwood, however, said that the novel came very near greatness, but just missed it, he was probably regretting the disappearance of Salem for so many chapters. And if some of the readers thought that the book must be by George Eliot (this caused Mrs Oliphant an indescribable mixture of pleasure and annoyance), they, too, were thinking of Salem: Mrs Oliphant inherited the Victorian novelist’s birthright, the effortless creation of character. In Salem she is totally at her ease. She lets her readers know the people of Grove Street better than poor Arthur Vincent ever does. This is true even of those who only make two or three appearances. Mr Tufton, for example, Arthur’s predecessor, is a homely old minister who has fortunately been ‘visited’ by paralysis—‘a disease not tragical, but drivelling’—giving the congregation an excuse to retire him with a suitable present. A bland self-deceiver, he has never admitted his own failure, and the congregation (this is a convincing touch) has forgotten it. They assume that it will do the new minister all the good in the world to visit the old one and draw on his wisdom. Arthur suffers agonies of impatience in the Tuftons’ stuffy front parlour, dominated by its vast potted plant. But this place of amiable self-deception is, unexpectedly, also the source of truth. The crippled daughter, Adelaide, strikes the sour note of absolute frankness and absolute unpleasantness. Her eyes have ‘something of the shrill shining of a rainy sky in their glistening whites.’ She explains that she has no share in life ‘and so instead of comforting myself that it’s all for the best, as Papa says, I interfere with my fellow creatures. I get on as well as most people.’ She takes no pleasure in it; it is an ‘intense loveless eagerness of curiosity’ that the complacent old Tuftons scarcely notice. At the end o f the book Adelaide plays a curious small part in deciding Arthur’s future. This kind of detail, a novelist’s second sight, is characteristic of Mrs Oliphant.
Mr Tozer, the senior deacon of Salem, seems at first to represent the Victorian idea of the good tradesman. Never quite free of the greasiness of the best bacon and butter, he is proud of being ‘serviceable’ to the gentry and is all that is meant or implied by ‘honest’ and ‘worthy.’ He makes the familiar equation between morality and trade. All accounts, financial and spiritual, must be squared, and the new pastor’s sermons must ‘keep the steam up.’ His household, where the apprentices eat with the family, is patriarchal, and, it is suggested, belongs to times past. So, perhaps, does his unaffected kindness. Often, Salem knows, ‘he’s been called up at twelve o’ clock, when we was all abed, to see someone as was dying.’ All this is predictable, but Mrs Oliphant refuses to simplify it. Tozer is Arthur’s champion, but partly, at least, because he backed him from the first and can’t endure to be put in the wrong. When Arthur touches despair, Tozer shows him Christian kindness, but doesn’t conceal his pride in managing the minister’s affairs. Arthur finds it hard to bear Tozer’s perfect satisfaction over his own generosity. He feels, and so do we, that it would be ‘a balm’ to cut Tozer’s remarks short, and to ‘annihilate’ him. At this point he is goodness in its most exasperating form. Yet we can’t miss the weight of his reproach when the wretched young man ‘breaks out’ (his sister is suspected of murder): ‘Mr Vincent, sir, you mustn’t swear. I’m as sorry for you as a man can be; but you’re a minister, and you mustn’t give way.’
Comic characters on this scale generate their own energy, and grow beyond themselves. Tozer escapes from the confines of his ‘worthiness.’ In his own way—although Arthur feels he must be ‘altogether unable to comprehend the feelings of a cultivated mind’—he is a connoisseur, and even an aesthete. This appears in his description of a tea meeting, ‘with pleasant looks and the urns a-smoking and a bit of greenery on the wall,’ and, more surprisingly, in his tribute to Lady Western’s beauty: ‘She’s always spending her life in company, as I don’t approve of; but to look in her face, you couldn’t say a word against her.’ Again, Tozer’s reverence for education goes deep, although he is too shrewd to expect others to share it. It would, he thinks, be unwise to charge an entrance fee to Arthur’s lectures. ‘If we was amusin’ the people, we might charge sixpence a head; but, mark my words, there aren’t twenty men in Carlingford, nor in no other place, as would give sixpence to have their minds enlightened. No, sir, we’re conferring of a boon, and let’s do it handsomely.’ He, too, has his battle to fight, with his second deacon, Pigeon, who cannot believe that Salem needs a highly educated minister. And, in practical terms, Pigeon turns out to be right, but we can never doubt Tozer’s claim to authority. The last sight we have of him is his red handkerchief; he has drawn it out to wipe away a tear or so, and to Arthur, preaching for the last time in Salem Chapel, ‘the gleam seemed to redden over the entire throng.’ This is Tozer heroic. Mrs Oliphant herself, although she always refused to make any high claims for her own work, admitted that Tozer had amused her.
Salem can settle back to its own level, and find its own peace. ‘Unpeace’—this is Mrs Tozer’s word—is at all costs to be avoided. But there is no easy solution for Arthur Vincent, who has been called upon for something less than he can give, but has given, all the same, less than he might have done. Like The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, Salem Chapel points forward to the future without exactly defining it. As the story ends, Arthur knows what it is to mistake one’s calling, and to be misunderstood, and to suffer. He still has to learn what it is to be happy.
Frank Wentworth, the Perpetual Curate, was one of Mrs Oliphant’s favourites. ‘I mean to bestow the very greatest care on him,’ she told her publisher, William Blackwood, as she set to work, with her usual rush of energy, to expand Frank’s story from the glimpses we get of him in The Rector and Salem Chapel. In this fourth Chronicle, Carlingford is as respectable, slow moving, and opinionated as ever. Frank, on the other hand, is ‘throbbing…with wild life and trouble to the very finger-points.’ He is a dedicated priest, he is in love, and he is still (as he was in The Rector) too poor to marry, certainly too poor to marry Lucy Wodehouse, the young woman he loves.3
To be a perpetual curate, in the 1860s, meant exactly that. He was in charge of a church built, in the first place, to take the pressure of work off a large parish. To a great extent he was independent. But to rise higher he had (like any other curate) either to be preferred to a family living, or to be recommended by the Rector to his Bishop. If, however, he was ‘viewy’—meaning if he had views that his superiors didn’t accept—the result was bound to be a high-spirited clash with the Rector, with which the chance of recommendation was likely to disappear.
Frank Wentworth is ‘viewy.’ He is a Ritualist. At his little church, St Roque’s, built in hard stony Gothic, there are candles, flowers, bells and a choir in white surplices. The worship there represents the later phase of the Tractarian movement whose effect was so disturbing that the Established Church had begun to take legal action against it. (One of the first of these cases, in fact, was brought against the Perpetual Curate of St James’s, Brighton, who refused to give up hearing confessions.) Frank remains a good Anglican, and Mrs Oliphant never makes it very clear how extreme his opinions are, only that he holds them sincerely. And his Ritualism, of course, is not a matter of outward show, but of symbolizing the truth to all comers. But the candles and flowers of St Roque’s are a scandal to three-quarters of Carlingford.
Frank, however—and here he is in deeper trouble—doesn’t confine himself to St Roque’s. By the 1860s the Tractarian movement had spread out from Oxford into missions to England’s industrial slums. Frank’s first Rector, old Mr Bury, had asked the energetic young man to help him, for the time being, in Wharfside, Carlingford’s brickworking district down by the canals. Here his daily contact with extreme hardship, and the difficult lives and deaths of the poor, has brought out Frank’s true vocation. In Wharfside he is respected and loved. His plain-spoken sermons fill the little tin chapel. But Wharfside is not in Frank’s district. He has only come to think of it as his own. It is this that the new Rector, Mr Morgan, finds intolerable. Unquestionably the success of his ministry has gone to Frank’s head, Morgan challenges him directly. He proposes to sweep away the tin chapel and build a new church in Wharfside. This is not power politics, it is a dispute over a ‘cure of souls,’ but still a dispute. And ‘next to happiness,’ as Mrs Oliphant puts it, ‘perhaps enmity is the most healthful stimulant of the human mind.’
Since Frank cannot compromise on a matter of principle, he faces a future without advancement. This means the long-drawn-out waste of his love and Lucy’s. Here is the central concern of the novel, and there are two minor episodes, comic and pathetic by turns, which stand as a kind of commentary on it. In the first place, the Morgans themselves have waited prudently through many years of genteel poverty. The appointment to Carlingford has been their first chance to marry. But by now Mrs Morgan is faded, her nose reddened by indigestion, while Morgan has the short temper of middle age. With a touching determination they brace themselves, after so many delays, to make the best of things. The railway, for example, runs close behind the Rectory, the first house they have ever lived in together. The old gardener suggests that it won’t show so much when the lime trees have ‘growed a bit,’ but poor Mrs Morgan is ‘reluctant to await the slow processes of nature’; the processes, that is, which have tormented her for the past ten years. Then there is the terribly ugly, but perfectly good carpet left behind by the last Rector. Mrs Morgan detests this carpet. But she tells herself, with hard-won self-control, ‘It would not look like Christ’s work…if we had it all our own way.’ She cannot afford to complain. Time has robbed her of the luxury of ingratitude. And in her heart she is afraid that it has narrowed her husband’s mind, although this makes her more loyal to him than ever. ‘If only we had been less prudent!’ Mrs Oliphant shows that, in spite of everything, the love between the Morgans goes deep, but Frank, passing them in Grange Lane, sees them as grotesque, and feels his own frustration as demon thoughts.
Secondly, there is the story of the elder Miss Wodehouse, the gentle, ‘dove-coloured,’ forty-year-old spinster who appears in The Rector. To all appearances she is resigned to a life without self, devoted to her pretty and much younger sister. But the Reverend Morley Proctor returns to Carlingford and offers her her ‘chance.’ True, he proposes disconcertingly with the words ‘You see we are neither of us young.’ But he allows Miss Wodehouse, for the first time, to set a value on herself, ‘a timid middle-aged confidence.’ She even has it in her power, for a while at least, to patronize Lucy. She will have a home of her own. When Lucy’s happiness makes this unimportant, Miss Wodehouse has ‘a half-ludicrous, half-humiliating sense of being cast into the shade.’ A truly good-hearted woman, she cannot understand these new feelings. We have to recognize them for her.
Love, money, duty, passing time, the powerful interactions of the mid-Victorian novel, all bear down on the Perpetual Curate. But there is a possible way out. The Wentworths are a landed family and they have a living, with a good income, in their gift. The living is expected to fall vacant and Frank is the natural successor, unless—and the Wentworths have heard disturbing rumours of this—he has ‘gone over’ to Ritualism. To investigate this, Frank’s unmarried aunts, all firm Evangelicals, arrive in Carlingford. They are there to take stock of the flowers and candles, to hear whether their nephew preaches ‘the plain gospel,’ and to deliver their verdict accordingly. Although Mrs Oliphant objected to the fairy-tale element in Dickens, surely she is allowing herself to use it here. Three aunts—one gracious, one sentimental, whose hair ‘wavered in weak-minded ringlets’; one stern and practical—install themselves in Grange Lane. From there they circulate through the town, at once menacing and ridiculous.
It is no surprise, however, in a novel by Mrs Oliphant, to find enterprise in the hands of the women. Frank’s father, the Squire, is an attractive figure, but a bewildered one, with only ‘that glimmering of sense which keeps many a stupid man straight’. He is shown, in fact, as acting largely on instinct. Outside his broad acres (where he is shrewd enough) he seems at a loss. From his three marriages there are numerous children with conflicting interests, and he hardly seems to know what to do with them either. And the family not only descends remorselessly on Frank but summons him home to deal with the problem of his stepbrother Gerald.
Gerald is the Rector of the parish of Wentworth itself. But he has been struggling with doubts and has now been converted—‘perverted,’ the aunts call it—to the Roman Catholic Church. The wound to his family and their sense of betrayal leaves them almost helpless. ‘Rome, it’s Antichrist,’ says the old Squire. ‘Every child in the village school could tell you that.’ More monstrous still, Gerald hopes to become a Catholic priest. And then there is a very real obstacle: he is married. His wife, Louisa, is a fool. While Gerald struggles to be ‘content to be nothing, as the saints were,’ Louisa complains, through ready tears, ‘We have always been used to the very best society!’ But she has the power of weak, silly women, a power that fascinated Mrs Oliphant, herself an intelligent woman who had to struggle to survive. Gerald, obsessed with his wife’s troubles and his own ordeal, is ‘like a man whom sickness had reduced to the last stage of life.’
Frank’s generous heart aches for his brother. The whole family relies on him to bring Gerald to his senses, and the debate between the two of them is extended through the central part of the novel. It begins at Wentworth Rectory, where the solid green cedar tree on the lawn outside the windows seems to stand for ancient certainties, and it echoes the painful divisions in so many English families after the turning point of Newman’s conversion in 1845. Frank is aware that if Gerald resigns the Wentworth living it will be there for himself and Lucy, but he hates himself for remembering this. Indeed, all he has time for is the distress of his brother’s sacrifice.
Mrs Oliphant herself was no sectarian. The ‘warm Free Churchism’ of her early days was behind her, or rather it had expanded, in the course of a hard life, into tolerance. Forms of worship interested her very little. She knew only, as she told one of her friends, that she was not afraid of the loneliness of death because of ‘a silent companion, God walking in the cool of the garden.’ Time and again she relates religion to instinct and nature. This doesn’t mean that she treats Gerald and Frank’s debate as unimportant, only that it follows its own lines. There is, for instance, nothing like Charlotte Brontë’s romantic approach to the question in Villette (1853). The real point at issue is reached in Chapter 40 when Gerald explains himself in terms of authority. He needs a Church that is ‘not a human institution,’ one that gives absolute certainty on all points. Although the steps by which he has reached this decision aren’t given, there is a hint here of Charles Reding, the hero of Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848). Frank’s answer is unexpected. He bases it, not upon freedom of conscience, but on the sufferings and inequalities of this life. How can the Catholic Church, which can no more explain these things than anyone else, claim that its authority is sufficient when it comes to doctrine? If trust in God is the only answer left to us for the pain of life, then, says Frank, ‘I am content to take my doctrines on the same terms.’
Frank is to be seen here as the true priest, because he puts himself at the service of human suffering without pretending to be able to explain it. He understands, too, the relief from anxiety, which Mrs Oliphant herself thought was ‘our highest sensation—higher than any positive enjoyment in this world. It used to sweep over me like a wave, sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter—in all simple ways.’ The complement of this is the sympathy for others which relief brings, ‘the compassion of happiness,’ and this, too, Frank feels at the last. But this is the same Frank Wentworth who has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog, and who lies awake maddened by the sound of the drainpipe—his landlady has ‘a passion for rain-water.’ Mrs Oliphant is determined to keep him human. Indeed, it is only on those terms that he can truly be a priest.
After the success of Salem Chapel, Mrs Oliphant had asked for, and got, £1,500 for the The Perpetual Curate. It was the highest payment she ever had from a publisher. John Blackwood’s old clerk (she was told) turned pale at the idea of such a sum, and remonstrated with his master. The story began to run in Blackwood’s in June 1863, and was produced under even greater difficulties than usual. Mrs Oliphant wrote it only one or two instalments in advance—this at her own request, as the monthly deadline, she said, ‘kept her up.’ In the autumn she travelled, with her usual large party of friends and children, to Rome. There, in January 1864, her only daughter fell sick, and died within a few weeks. Maggie was ten, ‘the beloved companion,’ as Mrs Oliphant had been as a little girl, to her own mother. ‘It is hard to go out in the streets,’ she wrote, ‘to look out of the window and see the other women with their daughters. God knows it is an unworthy feeling, but it makes me shrink from going out.’
In spite of this, ‘the roughest edge of grief,’ as she found it, she missed only one instalment for Blackwood’s, for May 1864. Stress, perhaps, was responsible for a few mistakes (the church architect is called first Folgate, then Finial), and for the weakness of the sub-plot, involving Frank, as it does, in unlikely misunderstandings. Fourteen years earlier Mrs Oliphant had sent her first novel, Margaret Maitland, to the stout old critic Francis Jeffrey; he told her it was true and touching but ‘sensibly injured by the indifferent matter which has been admitted to bring it up to the standard of three volumes.’ The difficulty remained, the standard length was still demanded in the 1860s by publishers and booksellers, and she set herself to meet it. Certainly the story, with its comings and goings from house to house, moves slowly at times. But Mrs Oliphant, I think, is able to persuade the reader to her own pace, so that we can truly say at the close that we know what it is like to have lived in Carlingford.
Whatever we may think of the turns of the plot, she is at her shrewdest in this book, and at the same time at her most human. Her refusal to moralize is striking, even disconcerting. It is here in particular that she stands comparison with Trollope, whose titles Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right challenge readers not so much to judge as to refer to their own conscience. In The Perpetual Curate the worthless do not repent. Jack Wentworth, the bon viveur, seems on the point of sacrificing his inheritance but the old Squire tells him sharply to do his duty. Everyone is fallible. Young Rosa, who causes so many complications, looks as though she is going to be a helpless victim of society. She turns out to be nothing of the sort. Miss Wodehouse becomes not gentler, but tougher. In Chapter 43 she is treasuring up an incident that might be useful to her in arguments with her future husband. Lucy, because she had made up her mind to sacrifice herself and marry Frank, even though it means being a poor man’s wife, can’t rejoice whole-heartedly at his success; it lessens her, she feels ‘a certain sense of pain.’ And when Frank speaks of poetic justice, Miss Leonora says, ‘I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way.’
Frank Wentworth’s story returns to the problem of The Rector and Salem Chapel—What does it mean for a man to call himself a priest? and, closely related to this—What can he do without the partnership of a woman? ‘Partnership’ is the right word here. In The Perpetual Curate, the lesson Frank learns is this: ‘Even in Eden itself, though the dew had not yet dried on the leaves, it would be highly incautious for any man to conclude that he was sure of having his own way.’
Adapted from the introductions to the Virago editions
of The Rector (1986), The Country Doctor (1986),
Salem Chapel (1986) and The Perpetual Curate (1987)
‘I don’t think I have ever had two hours uninterrupted (except at night, with everybody in bed) during the whole of my literary life,’ said Mrs Oliphant. At night, therefore, she wrote—nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, history, biography, travel, articles ‘too numerous to list’ in the index even of this meticulous book.
She was born in 1828 in Wallyford, near Edinburgh, and brought up in Liverpool. Her father, a clerk, seems never to have counted for much. The mother kept everything going, and this pattern—the helpless man, the strong woman—persisted through her life and in her fiction. Of her two brothers, one became a drunkard, the other a bankrupt invalid. She married her cousin, an unpractical stained-glass designer. He died (for which she found it hard to forgive him), leaving her to drift about Europe for cheapness’ sake, with £1,000 in debts and three young children to feed.
Before long, her brothers, nieces, and nephews would also look to her for support. Words had to be spun into money, even when her only daughter died at the age of ten, leaving her to ‘the roughest edge of grief.’ She never expected help from her two idle, graceless sons; indeed she indulged them absurdly. Part of her rejoiced in taking charge and preferred her dependants to be weak. She knew this tendency of hers, and described it unsparingly in The Doctor’s Family. In her new biography of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay calls her ‘completely self-aware,’ able to see herself in both comic and tragic lights, or as ‘a fat little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied.’ This phrase comes from her Autobiography, still unpublished when she died in 1897. It reads as a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief, with sharp passages, too, when other women authors come into her mind. (‘Should I have done better if I had been kept, like George Eliot, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?’) Jay, who edited the Autobiography in 1990, makes it her starting-point here. But she didn’t want, she says, to go through the life and the work, comparing them blow by blow: a career is linear, but a woman’s life is cyclical. Her part-headings speak for themselves: ‘Women and Men,’ ‘A Woman of Ideas,’ ‘The Professional Woman.’ Her only firm ground, she tells us, has been Mrs Oliphant’s attempt to ‘evaluate her gender role,’ but her book, after eight hard years of original research, is much more comprehensive than this.
Mrs Oliphant, in any case, wasn’t evaluating so much as surviving. The necessities of the long battle made her unpredictable. More than once she described her visit, in 1860, to Blackwood’s offices—‘myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress,’ a humble supplicant who understood little about money—but when that didn’t work she negotiated advances with the best. She believed that women should be given the vote, but not that she herself would ever want to use it. She could be ‘almost fearsomely correct and in the middle of it become audacious.’ Often, too, her stories don’t give her readers the satisfaction of closure—a conventionally happy or even a well-defined ending. She doesn’t want us to expect too much of life, certainly not consistency.
Her subjects were the staples of Victorian women’s fiction—money, wills, marriages, church and chapel, disgraceful relatives, family power-struggles, quarrels, deathbeds, ghosts—though she fearlessly stepped outside this in her Little Pilgrim stories, which take place beyond the grave.
‘Is she worth reading?’ Elisabeth Jay has been asked time and again. The question is difficult to answer, since the books are so hard to find, and publishers who do reprint them always go back to the Chronicles of Carlingford, probably because the title suggests Trollope’s Barchester series (from which Mrs Oliphant borrowed a little when she felt like it). But although she wrote with marvellous fluency—writing, she said, felt to her much like reading—the length of the three-volume novel seems not to have suited her.
She is at her very best in novellas and short stories. Two of them, which might well be reprinted together, are ‘The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow’ in which a conventional widow with a large estate falls in love with her coarse-mannered steward, and ‘Eleanor and Fair Rosamond’. Here the wife finds out that her husband has made a bigamous marriage. She has the other woman’s address, and resolutely sets out for the distant suburb, the street, the house. What follows is ‘tragifarce,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls it, ‘the most terrible of all,’ and she risks a conclusion that dies away into silence and echoes.
This is a valuable study, strong on Mrs Oliphant’s religious experiences and on her professional life. As to her bewildering personality, perhaps no one understood her better than the thirty-years-younger James Barrie. In 1897, when she lay dying of cancer, he called to see her and ‘the most exquisite part of her, which the Scotswoman’s reserve had kept hidden, came to the surface.’ But he does not say what she told him.
Observer, 1995
1The first story was ‘The Executor,’ which appeared in Blackwood’s, May 1861, but in the end was not part of the Carlingford series. These are The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, published together in three volumes by Blackwoods (1863), Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876). During this period she published twenty-one other full-length books.
2If Carlingford is to be identified at all, I would suggest Aylesbury, where Francis Oliphant designed some windows for St Mary’s Church. Characteristically, when no donor came forward he offered to pay for them himself.
3Frank’s stipend isn’t given, but in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861) the Reverend Josiah Crawley, Perpetual Curate of Hogglestock, earns £130 a year.