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.
II. A Small Town and an Unseen World
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.
III. The Rector
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.
IV. The Doctor’s Family
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 B
ushman, 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.
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