Gore’s writing career began, however, with florid historical romances, such as Theresa Marchmont, or, The Maid of Honour (1824). She was ‘puffed’ outrageously by her publisher (the aforementioned ‘Prince of Puffers’) Henry Colburn, an enterprising rogue. It was under Colburn’s imprint that she had her first hit, Women as They Are, or, The Manners of the Day (1830). George IV, no less, pronounced it ‘the best and most amusing novel published within my remembrance’. Poor Sir Walter. She then embarked on a series of novels illustrative of English society, of which the finest are The Hamiltons, or the New Era (1834), a depiction of the social consequences of the 1832 Reform Bill; Mrs Armytage, or, Female Domination (1836); Cecil, or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841); and The Banker’s Wife, or, Court and City (1843).
In 1832, for reasons which are unclear (they may involve scandal or, more probably, debt), Gore moved to France and thereafter lived a life of seclusion. Domestically that life was full to overflowing. She had ten surviving children in these years and, doubtless, more pregnancies than that. Although she never managed, or wanted, to break out of the constricting frames of silver-forkery, Gore’s is a considerable literary talent. She has, at her best, as easy a narrative manner as Thackeray – a novelist who good-naturedly parodied her while admitting to admiration (Vanity Fair owes something to her). She writes a vigorous, slangy prose embedded with sharp epigrams. As a social novelist, Gore handles the theme of money and social mobility (‘rising’ in the world) more cleverly than any writer, of either sex, of her vintage. She was an able sociologist. Her Sketches of English Character (1846) bears comparison with Thackeray’s The Snobs of England (1846). Her fiction, in line with the changing mood of the time, became more ‘domestic’ in later years and lost something of its sparkle.
There was little in those later years to sparkle about. The ‘hungry forties’ were not conducive to Mrs Gore’s ‘tuft-hunting’ (i.e. snobbish) fiction. Of her ten children, only two survived their mother, and she was widowed in 1846. After a heroically long writing career, she inherited a substantial property in 1850, but was impoverished (again) five years later when her former guardian, Sir John Dean Paul, defrauded her of £20,000. He was subsequently sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for this and other offences against his clients. Gore died, prematurely, aged sixty-one. She had been blind for several years, but wrote, manfully, to the end. By the time of her death she had yet again written herself into prosperity, leaving £14,000.
FN
(Mrs) Catherine Grace Frances Gore (née Moody)
MRT
Mrs Armytage
Biog
ODNB (Winifred Hughes)
26. Harriet Martineau 1802–1876
For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen … than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe. Martineau, on housework
Harriet Martineau was born in Norwich, the sixth of eight children of a textile manufacturer of Huguenot origin. One of her younger brothers was the later theologian (and in later life, her ‘oracle’), James Martineau, and the family was Unitarian, a doctrine which approved of female education. The Martineau circumstances – during Harriet’s childhood, at least – were prosperous and Harriet herself was fearsomely precocious. ‘My first political interest’, she blandly recalls, ‘was the death of Nelson. I was then four years old.’ Her literary interests were even more advanced: she was reading Milton at the age of seven. It says much about the intellectual earnestness of the Martineau household that she was allowed to do so. The earnestness verged at times on morbidity. She recalls, as a little girl, digging two ‘graves’ in the garden with her brother James, lying in them, then discussing, afterwards, their impressions of ‘death’.
‘Life’ was to be hard. At the age of twelve there appeared symptoms of the deafness which was to blight her life. She ascribed the ailment to a dishonest wet nurse, during infancy, whose milk had dried up and virtually starved her. Lifelong she was prey to bowel complaints (described with disarming frankness in her autobiography). In her early teens, her hearing was largely gone and with it most of her marriage prospects. Her fiancé, John Hugh Worthington, a young minister, went mad and died shortly after they became engaged. In her autobiography, Martineau stoically records the tragedy as a lucky escape.
In 1829 the Martineau family was utterly ruined when her father’s business failed. Thereafter Harriet supported herself by her pen, claiming to find the loss of gentility intellectually liberating. Her material needs were simple and, as a political economist (from the age of fourteen!), she invested her eventually substantial earnings shrewdly. Ideologically Martineau moved from theism to Comtean rationalism and what she called ‘Necessarianism’ (although, famously, she was to dabble with the mystical cult of mesmerism in her later years, claiming a miraculous cure of her deafness in 1845). In 1852 she moved to London, a liberation that came with a ‘room of her own’, which she describes charmingly:
It was a dark foggy November morning when I arrived in London. My lodgings were up two pair of stairs … A respectable sitting room to the front, and a clean, small bedroom behind seemed to me all that could possibly be desired, – seeing that I was to have them all to myself. To be sure, they did look very dark, that first morning of yellow fog: but it was seldom so dark again; and when the spring came on, and I moved down into the handsomer rooms on the first floor, I thought my lodgings really pleasant. In the summer mornings, when I made my coffee at seven o’clock, and sat down to my work, with the large windows open, the sun-blinds down, the street fresh watered, and the flower-girls’ baskets visible from my seat, I wished for nothing better.
She enjoyed her first success with the didactic stories, Illustrations of Political Economy, serialised in monthly parts, 1832–5 (the form of publication used by Chapman and Hall, publishers of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, a year later). Up to 10,000 copies of these exemplary fables were sold monthly. By means of crude fictional narratives, the Illustrations introduced many of the themes picked up by later Victorian ‘social problem’ novels. Fiction, she demonstrated, could conduct a dialogue with the higher economics. Martineau thus found herself famous and £600 richer, though other series of the Illustrations were less popular. A little of her didacticism went a long way. Her Forest and Game-Law Tales (1845), based on spectacularly unsexy research supplied by a parliamentary committee, were overshadowed by the Corn Law repeal, and flopped.
Martineau’s major full-length fiction is Deerbrook (1839), a novel which Carlyle, no less, pronounced ‘very ligneous’ – not the kind of term which would do much for a dustjacket shout-line. This ‘study of provincial life’ follows the career of two orphaned sisters, Margaret and Hester Ibbotson, who come from Birmingham to the ‘rather pretty’ village of Deerbrook, to lodge with their cousins, the Greys. The narrative climaxes on a vividly described cholera epidemic. Aptly, if unkindly, called a ‘poor novel with a few good pages’, Deerbrook anticipates some plot complications in Middlemarch (George Eliot, as her notes indicate, was also thinking of a cholera episode for her story) and was influential on the so-called ‘novel of community’.
In 1834, Martineau travelled to America (not an easy trip at this date for a handicapped single woman) and wrote her impressions up in Society in America (1837). Unsurprisingly she was strongly abolitionist. In 1846 she travelled even further afield, to Egypt. As a non-fiction writer Martineau is admired for her candid autobiography (published posthumously), her forthright views on the woman question, her enlightened views on medicine – notably her 1844 essay on ‘Life in the Sick-room’ – and for her popularisation, and translation, of the inventor of ‘sociology’, Auguste Comte.
Fiction, however, still played a part in her life’s work. In addition to the above, she published: Five Years of Youth (1831), The Playfellow (1841) and – most interestingly – The Hour and the Man (1841), a romance on the career of the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ou
verture. In her later life Martineau was wealthy enough to construct not just a room, but a whole house of her own, in the Lake District, near her idol William Wordsworth’s Grasmere.
FN
Harriet Martineau
MRT
Deerbrook
Biog
R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (1960)
27. The Bulwer-Lyttons: Edward and Rosina
1803–1873/1802–1882
Bulwer must be counted among the eminent authors who have not made and not deserved success in married life. Leslie Stephen
What to call him has always been a bibliographer’s nightmare. His full name in his peacock prime was Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton. The multiply barrelled name proclaimed a distinguished pedigree: on the paternal side, his ancestors had been ennobled soldiers since the Conquest and his mother’s family (the Lytton line) were distinguished scholars. Novelists, until him, did not figure.
After one of the chronically awful marriages that ran in the Lytton family, his father died when Edward was four. The youngest of three sons, he was brought up, smotheringly, by his mother, which had an indelibly feminising effect on his personality. As Harriet Martineau put it, spitefully, he ‘dressed a woman’s spirit in man’s clothing’. Menswear would, in fact, be one of his more lasting legacies. His mother judged her Edward too delicate for Eton. Educated at home or in less gruelling establishments, given the run of one of the best private libraries in England, he emerged a prodigy of learning, precocious authorship and dandyism. At sixteen, he claimed, he had his first and only perfect love affair. Elders broke it off and he carried a fractured heart to his grave. At seventeen, he published his first book, Ismael; an Oriental Tale. He was judged strong enough to handle Cambridge and, in 1825, he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry. Now a young ‘pseudo-Byron’, he burnished his image with an affair with the wicked Lord’s cast-off mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb.
In August 1827, Bulwer (as he was called in early life) took a fatal misstep by marrying for love. Rosina Wheeler (1802–82) was Irish by birth – not a recommendation. When her mother fled her brutal husband, ten-year-old Rosina had been taken under the wing of an uncle, John Doyle, the Governor of Guernsey. She grew up a beauty, witty but (by the standards of Bulwer’s circle) penniless. The courtship was ominously stormy and the match was implacably opposed by Bulwer’s mother. In the most drastic of parental rebukes, she cut her disobedient son off without a penny.
It forced him into writing fashionable novels – not in the 1820s a profession for the fashionable. But he had a remarkably adaptive mind. What were people reading? He identified the popular appetite and hit the mark in 1828 with Pelham, a mystery story with murder, madness and seduction in high-life as its mainspring. Marketed by the notorious Henry Colburn, Pelham was a bestseller and promoted its author to the top of that elite league of novelists who could command £1,000 a title. It was read everywhere and had a lasting effect not merely on genre (‘silver fork’) fiction but on gentlemen’s dress. In one of his digressions the hero lays down twenty-two ‘Maxims’ as to how the gentleman should array himself. The most momentous was Maxim 17: ‘Avoid many colours; and seek, by some one prevalent and quiet tint, to sober down the others. Apelles used only four colours, and always subdued those which were more florid, by a darkening varnish.’
Pelham’s maxims drove the Scottish sage, Thomas Carlyle, into paroxysmic satire on the ‘philosophy of clothes’, in Sartor Resartus. The tailors and leaders of fashion fell into line, however. The Bennet girls, in Jane Austen’s novel, are thrown into a collective flutter when Mr Bingley calls at Longbourn in a vivid blue coat. Thirty years later, the eligible young man would have been dressed as for a funeral. Bulwer was not merely the new Byron but the new Brummel.
Between 1827 and 1834 Bulwer published eight full-length novels. He won a seat in Parliament and threw himself into the cause of political reform. He was marked as a rising man. Success on the literary and political fronts was, however, marred by spectacular domestic failure. On a trip to Italy in 1834 to research The Last Days of Pompeii, relations between him and Rosina broke down. It did not help that, as gossip reported, Bulwer was accompanied by his mistress. There were, by now, two children. A legal separation was enacted in April 1836 and two years later Rosina’s children were forcibly removed from her on the grounds of maternal neglect. It was untrue, but Edward wanted custody of his son, the eventual heir to Knebworth. The law was firmly biased towards the father in cases where wealth and titles were at stake. Rosina felt he could quite well make do with his three illegitimate children.
In the same year, Lytton became a baronet, a title of which he was inordinately proud. In the rage of losing her children, Rosina wrote a furious roman-à-clef, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour (1839). It regaled the world with Bulwer’s brutalities, his meanness (he kept her on a meagre allowance of £400 p.a.) and his gross, bastard-spawning adulteries. Over the subsequent years, Rosina bombarded the press with ‘revelations’ of Edward’s infamy and confected innumerable lawsuits. She wrote as many as twenty letters a day to his clubs, with obscenities scrawled on the envelopes. Although his lawyers frightened off the better class of publisher, she turned out a stream of frantic revenge novels. Her cause was taken up by the satirists of the time, notably Thackeray, who launched his early career with hilarious squibs against the ‘Knebworth Apollo’.
Lytton bore it all stoically, taking consolation in his mistresses, his opium pipe (there is a fine picture of him sucking one the size of an Alpine horn), his catamites (as gossip fantasised), and his increasing stature as a novelist. What had shaped up as a promising political career ended when in 1841 he resigned his seat in Parliament and effectively withdrew from public life. But he inherited the Knebworth Estate in 1843 and with it a huge fortune. He needed no longer to write for money and entered on the most interesting phase of his authorial career. His writing is preposterously high-flown (Thackeray was right about that), but he has a remarkable list of innovations to his credit. With Pelham he founded the fashionable genre. With Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) he pioneered novels which dealt intelligently with crime. Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur and, more distantly, the toga melodramas of Cecil B. DeMille can be seen as the progeny of The Last Days of Pompeii. Zanoni (1842), a ‘mystical mystery’, inaugurated several works on the paranormal (most readably, the long short story, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, 1859). The Caxtons, A Family Picture (1849) and its sequels made fashionable ‘domestic’ fiction of the Barchester kind. The Coming Race (1871), his last substantial work, is a hollow-earth fantasy, introducing subterranean aliens with new, electric technologies who will one day invade the surface of the planet, so fulfilling ‘the Darwinian proposition’. H. G. Wells, one suspects, could have recited The Coming Race by heart.
By mid-century, Lytton (as he now was) had put his public life back together again. His private life was something else. He had callously abandoned his daughter Emily to die of typhus fever in a London lodging house. Her body was brought back to the magnificent family house at Knebworth and it was given out to the world that she had expired there, by her loving father’s side. It is the most despicable of Lytton’s actions – unless one credits Rosina’s allegation that he once hired an assassin to poison her. She had not even been informed her daughter was ill, a fact she furiously publicised. As always, he rose above her ‘calumnies’ and, with the help of powerful friends, suppressed any mention of them in the press.
In the early 1850s, Lytton, now a land-owning Whig, decided to return to politics. This second parliamentary career began well with his appointment as Colonial Secretary in Lord Derby’s ministry. But Rosina haunted him, like a witch’s curse. When he and Dickens (a firm friend) put on a charity dramatic performance at the Duke of Devonshire’s house in 1851, Rosina threatened to turn up as Nell Gwyn, the orange girl. A nervous Dickens consulted his Scotland Yard friend, Inspector Charles Field (‘Bucket’ in Bleak House) and
posted private detectives at the door. She could make such occasions very awkward.
Her harassments climaxed at Hertford, in June 1858, where Edward was publicly canvassing. She heckled and was cheered on by the crowd who found the row more interesting than government policy. Lytton, driven to desperate remedies, had her abducted and incarcerated for a month in a private lunatic asylum. Tame doctors provided the necessary certification. The Telegraph, as part of its campaign against Derby, took up her cause and she was released. But the episode gave Wilkie Collins his donnée for the plot of The Woman in White and the wicked baronet, Sir Percival Glyde. Rosina wrote to thank him. An eventual accommodation was reached between the warring couple. She was given a handsomely increased stipend and access to her son Robert, in return for keeping quiet. She fired off one last work of furious fiction in 1858 – the interestingly named The World and his Wife, or a Person of Consequence: A Photographic Novel – and otherwise did as instructed. But it was the end of Bulwer’s public career. He faded into political obscurity with the fall of the Derby ministry. At least he had his opium pipe.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 13