The most popular American novel since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Southworth’s gothic tale, The Hidden Hand, was boosted by the readiness with which it could be adapted for the stage. There were an estimated forty dramatised versions – one of them, appropriately enough, starring John Wilkes Booth as the assassin. The novel opens at Hurricane Hall, set in the romantic scenery of ‘the Devil’s Hoof’ in Virginia. The bachelor proprietor of the Hall, Major Ira Warfield (‘Old Hurricane’), is called to the bedside of a dying midwife, Granny Grewell. Twelve years before, she had secretly delivered a pair of twins, a boy and a girl. The boy died, the girl was disposed of somewhere in New York. The motive was to misappropriate their rightful inheritance. This dastardly plot is the work of the villainous Colonel Le Noir and his depraved son Craven. Warfield discovers the urchin, Capitola Black, in Rag Lane, New York, where she is a child of the streets and dressed as a boy (cross-dressing features prominently in her subsequent adventures, an oblique allusion to the ‘Bloomerism’ – women in trousers – which was all the rage in 1850s America). After fearful complications, Capitola’s true identity emerges and poetic justice is measured out, overbrimmingly.
On the strength of the work’s popularity in Britain, where there were three piratically dramatised versions running concurrently, Southworth spent the years 1859–62 in London, fuelling the mania for ‘Capitola’ hats, suits and coats with her immensely popular public readings. True to her abolitionist affiliations, South-worth supported the Union during the Civil War and did voluntary work in hospitals during hostilities. She adapted well to changes in fictional fashion. Always up with the times, by the 1870s Southworth was using a typewriter and in the early 1880s she became a devotee of Swedenborg and spiritualism as the popularity of her fiction waned. By the time of her death, the mass of her readers had preceded her into the next world. Few remained loyal in this.
FN
Emma Southworth (Dorothy Eliza, née Nevitte)
MRT
The Hidden Hand
Biog
ANB (L. Moody Simms)
48. Eliza Lynn Linton 1822–1898
The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face as the first articles of her personal religion.
Remembered, if at all, as the novelist who sold Dickens his beloved house, Gad’s Hill in Rochester, Linton was, in her time, a powerful – if reactionary – force in Victorian fiction. She was born in the Lake District, the twelfth child of a clergyman of hidebound Conservative views, yet a manifestly philoprogenitive disposition. Her mother died five months after Eliza Lynn’s birth and her father was thereafter generally indifferent to his many offspring, leaving his youngest child with a residual guilt at being the indirect cause of her mother’s death. She was, however, surrounded by books and taught herself comprehensively.
In her early girlhood, Eliza underwent what was evidently a severe religious crisis, from which she emerged largely unreligious. In 1845 she enterprisingly took her future into her own hands and went off to London to live by her pen. There she worked on the Morning Chronicle for three years, as the first salaried journalist in England. She also wrote three unsuccessful novels. Azeth, the Egyptian, the best of them, was accepted by Emily Brontë’s notorious publisher, Thomas Newby, for a fee of £50 – payable by the author. The experience rankled all her life.
In 1851, after quarrelling with her editor, Eliza left the Morning Chronicle to work as a freelance foreign correspondent in Paris. By this period she knew and – more importantly – was known by many of the most influential literary figures in London, notably Walter Savage Landor, whom she liked to call her ‘beloved father’. Her less beloved biological father died, leaving her £1,500 and the property at Gad’s Hill, which she sold on to Charles Dickens in 1856. Two years later she married the artist, William James Linton. The couple shared a love of the Lake District, reflected in their work. That love was not, alas, enough to keep them together. William was ten years her senior, politically radical, and a widower with seven children. He quickly ran through her little fortune. The marriage failed and the couple separated – although they never divorced and Eliza kept on good terms with her husband, who drifted to America, and continued to support her stepchildren.
In the 1860s, Linton started a new career in which fiction was to play a major part. From 1866 she worked on the Saturday Review and wrote an extraordinarily powerful sequence of anti-feminist articles, collected as The Girl of the Period (1869). Hitherto she had been somewhat in favour of women’s rights. However, she made herself a novelist of the first rank with The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), a work which sardonically recasts the gospel in a modern setting. The free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh bought 1,000 copies to distribute for his cause. Her other major achievement, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), remains one of the best depictions of a writer’s spiritual growth (and the woes of authorship) to be found in Victorian fiction: she called it ‘the book of my whole career’. It deserves to be read more than it is.
Linton went on to write a string of powerful novels – many with melodramatic plots and usually focused on some problem of the day. Most interesting, if provocative, are those directed against the loathed ‘girl of the period’ and the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ (i.e. feminists). Typical is The One Too Many (1894), which excoriates the ‘Girton girl’ as a smoking, drinking, morally depraved harlot. The novel is dedicated to ‘the sweet girls still left among us’.
In later life, Linton is reported to have declared, ‘All the reforms we have striven for have been granted. Nothing further is now required.’ She died of pneumonia, leaving a lively memoir, published posthumously as My Literary Life (1899). It was, particularly for a woman of the period, a rather well-remunerated life: she left £16,000 on her death.
FN
Elizabeth Linton (‘Eliza’, née Lynn)
MRT
The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland
Biog
N. F. Anderson, Woman Against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (1987)
POSTSCRIPT
49. Beatrice Harraden 1864–1936
My Little BA. Eliza Lynn Linton’s nickname for Harraden
Beatrice Harraden was born in South Hampstead, the daughter of a musical instrument importer. She finished her education in Dresden and at Bedford College, London, where she studied classics and mathematics, graduating with a first-class degree. An early aspiration to be a cellist was given up and she went on to devote her subsequent life to travel, writing and, when the movement was at its height, to activity on behalf of women’s suffrage. Personally unassuming, physically small and prettier than she modestly gave herself credit for (she thought she had a ‘thin, eager, face’) and in later life bespectacled, she was, on her entry into London society, a protégé of Eliza Lynn Linton, who affectionately called her ‘my little BA’.
Harraden’s first novel, Ships That Pass in the Night (1893) was a bestseller. The hero and heroine are invalids who fall in love at an Alpine Kurhaus for consumptives. According to gossip of the time, this novel – and others she wrote that were centred on similar doomed brief encounters – ‘arose from the tragic experience of her life; she fell deeply in love with a man who falsified his clients’ accounts and whose body was found not long after in a crevasse on a Swiss glacier’. The narrative of Ships That Pass in the Night is veined with bitter and self-wounding remarks about life, such as that by the heroine, Bernardine: ‘I am tired of reading … I seem to have been reading all my life. My uncle, with whom I live [in London], keeps a second-hand book-shop, and ever since I can remember, I have been surrounded by books. They have not done me much good, nor any one else either.’ Read on.
Harraden was afflicted with TB herself, and travelled as far afield as southern California for the sake of her lungs. She evidently inherited money from her family, and in her mid-career was not impoverished. The settings of her fiction are correspondingly far-flung. Her later novels are more
pugnaciously feminist (she may have been disinhibited by the death of Linton): The Fowler (1899), for example, is so titled after a vicious predator who violates women’s minds and bodies. Harraden herself never married.
In the early years of the twentieth century, she worked for the Oxford University Press in their dictionary department. She also became increasingly involved with suffragism, direct action and the Tax Resistance League, formed in 1910 (the novelist Flora Annie Steel was a fellow member of the League). In 1913, Harraden allowed her property to be distrained rather than pay the income tax she owed a government which would not grant women the vote. At the auction where her goods were being sold, she and other protesters were assaulted by anti-suffrage ‘roughs’ and she later brought a charge against the London police for taking no action to protect her. The magistrates were unsympathetic. Though she and her fellow activists got the vote, her last years were penurious, made a little easier by a Civil List pension in 1930. The ODNB records bleakly that she died of delirium tremens.
FN
Beatrice Harraden
MRT
Ships That Pass in the Night
Biog
ODNB (Fred Hunter)
50. Sylvanus Cobb Jr 1823–1887
‘Meddling monk,’ he cried, ‘how dare you drag your detestable form hither! Out, reptile, out!’ Ejaculation from The Gunmaker of Moscow
What, it will be asked, is Sylvanus Cobb Jr – largely unknown, wholly unregarded by literary history – doing in the company of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce? Cobb is a writer of interest for the worthy reason that he helped lay the foundations of mass readership for American fiction. Millions of readers, particularly young readers, passed through his mass-produced stories to higher things. Or, if they did not, they supplied the financial turnover with which publishers could chance their arm with higher things. Fiction, like armies, marches on its belly. Cobb filled it and more.
He was born in Waterville, Maine, the eldest of nine children of a Universalist minister who believed in spreading his word by the printing press as much as by the pulpit. Among the anecdotes which make up all that posterity will ever know about Sylvanus Cobb, he is said to have been expelled from school for arguing with a teacher over a fine point of grammar – which of them was in the right is not recorded. He was subsequently apprenticed as a printer and worked on his father’s newspaper, The Christian Freeman. Hungry for unChristian freedoms, in 1841 he enlisted in the US Navy. Over the next four years, voyaging to the four corners of the world, he gathered the raw material and colour that ornaments his later romances.
Cobb returned to the US to take up work again with his father. He married his school sweetheart in 1845 and the following year founded a weekly temperance magazine, the Rechabite, with his brother Samuel. In its virtuously dry pages appeared his first published story, ‘The Deserter’. At this point Cobb was living in Boston. Much jobbing magazine work followed until, in 1856 – now a well-known tale-spinner – Cobb formed an exclusive arrangement to write fiction for Robert Bonner’s phenomenally successful New York Ledger. His first serial for Bonner was The Gunmaker of Moscow; or, Vladimir the Monk. The work was typical of what followed and, thanks to multiple reprintings, the best known of Cobb’s stories. Set in Russia in the sixteenth century, it features a heroic gunmaker, Ruric Nevel, who loves Rosalind Valdai, a ward of the Duke of Tula. The path to happiness is mysteriously helped by a well-disposed black monk of St Michael. The plot is nonsense, but rattles through its ten instalments in the required way, ending with young Ruric winning Rosalind’s hand and a knighthood from a grateful Tsar, whom he has saved.
Over the remaining thirty-one years of his life, Cobb wrote an estimated 130 novels, 834 short stories and 2,304 sketches for Bonner’s paper. His stories were overwhelmingly romances. Ruric is the first of hosts of innumerable buccaneers, swashbucklers, Gothic villains, all doing their best and worst against exotic settings where, typically, wild things lurk. On the strength of his connection with Bonner, and his indefatigable pen, Cobb could move up in the world and was able to indulge his love of tourism. In 1857 he moved to a luxurious house in Norway, Maine, where he was a prominent local citizen, an active freemason – his ‘religion’ in later life – and, as war loomed, a captain in Maine’s volunteer militia. He did not, however, serve in the Civil War – other than as an encourager of others to fight. He continued to write furiously, and doubtless many soldiers on both sides went to their death with a ‘Cobb’ in their knapsack (although, one is told, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was the most popular novel in both sides’ armies).
At the end of the 1860s, now seriously wealthy, Cobb and his family (how many children he had is unrecorded) moved to a mansion he had built for himself at Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Here it was he died, enriched and beloved by generations of his country’s juvenile readers.
FN
Sylvanus Cobb ‘Jr’
MRT
The Gunmaker of Moscow; or, Vladimir the Monk
Biog
ANB (Charles Zarobila)
51. Charlotte Yonge 1823–1901
She made goodness attractive.
The Victorians had less leisure time than we do, and the day of rest they did have – the Sabbath – was no friend to popular fiction, hence the dominance of the evangelical novel. Yonge, a Tractarian by doctrine, (i.e. halfway to Rome, but with both feet planted firmly in Oxford), is by far the best of the genre and a formidable woman of letters in her own right, with over 150 titles to her lifetime credit. She was born, and died, in Otterbourne, near Winchester, a few miles, it is pleasant to recall, from Jane Austen’s grave. Her family were old Devon gentry; her father was a firm-minded churchman and a local magistrate. There were two children, the other being a brother seven years younger than Charlotte. Precocious and virtuous, she became a Sunday school teacher at the age of seven and stuck to the task until she was seventy-eight. She was largely educated by her father ‘who believed in higher education for women but deprecated any liberty for them’.
The formative event in Yonge’s girlhood was the arrival of John Keble, thirty years her senior, as vicar of the neighbouring parish. Keble, a disciple of Newman’s, had left Oriel College (the burning bush of Tractarianism) to make himself practically useful, and help regenerate, England’s Christian ministry. Charlotte was confirmed in 1838 and it seems that receiving the sacrament was one of the momentous experiences of her life – she commemorates it in The Castle Builders; or, The Deferred Communion (1854). Keble urged Charlotte to use her literary talent for the propagation of Christian – more specifically Tractarian – instruction. But he warned her against the overt preaching which marred the efforts of other religious novelists. He edited her early work himself, rigorously. Before she committed to print, a conclave of the Yonge family resolved it would be wrong for her to make any profit from fiction, unless that money were turned over to some good cause.
Yonge’s first great success came with The Heir of Redclyffe, in 1853. It tells the story of Sir Guy Morville. Byronic and an orphan, he is distracted by wild passions which he gradually learns to subdue to Christian duty. After daring acts of heroism at sea (such scenes are not, it must be said, Yonge’s forte as a narrator), he marries Amy, the woman who has purified him. The novel does not, however, end there. On honeymoon, Guy catches fever and, in a deathbed chapter which became famous in the annals of Victorian fiction, is comforted in his last moments by an Anglican priest, who hears his confession in appropriately High Church style. The story was found universally moving, even by the intelligentsia. William Morris was impressed by it; Rossetti admired it; thousands of soldiers in the Crimea were consoled by it. True to her family decision, Yonge donated the profits to Bishop George Selwyn to buy a schooner for the Melanesian mission to take the Word to the Pacific savage.
Now ‘the Author of The Heir of Redclyffe’, Yonge went on to produce a constant stream of novels for adults and juveniles. The best regarded were the multi-volume saga of the May family, beg
inning with The Daisy Chain, or, Aspirations (1856). In 1851 Yonge had become editor of the magazine, the Monthly Packet, a post she was to hold for thirty-nine years. As her Preface puts it: ‘it has been said that everyone forms their own character between the ages of fifteen and five-and-twenty, and this Magazine is meant to be in some degree a help to those who are thus forming it’.
Yonge’s life was passed within strictly parochial boundaries and she never married. But her strong maternal instincts found an outlet in the series of stories she wrote for young children in her ‘Aunt Charlotte’ persona. At the same time she wrote one of the more intelligent novels about the problems of Victorian female adolescence, The Clever Woman of the Family (1865). Nor did she shrink from the horrors of old-maidhood in such works as Hopes and Fears; or, Scenes from the Life of a Spinster (1860). ‘She made goodness attractive,’ one critic observed. Yonge herself was in no doubt about the use she made of her talent: ‘I have always viewed myself as a sort of instrument for popularising Church views.’ She never made the mistake of ruining that popularity by churchiness, although the Anglican Church was the most important thing in her life.
Her father died in 1854 and she lived with her mother until she died in 1868. Her only brother died in 1892, and her last years were somewhat lonely – although she kept up a lively correspondence with literary acquaintances. She only twice in her life left England: for a short trip to Normandy in 1869 and another to Ireland. She left almost £13,000 on her death – to Christian charities, needless to say.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 22