Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

  There is, however, a homely proverb that may help to explain this: “You should never speak of a rope in the house of a man that was hanged,” and it is probably on the same principle, that no one speaks of the factory in the house of the manufacturer. Be this as it may, the fact is certain, and Mary Brotherton, like perhaps a hundred other rich young ladies, of the same class, grew up in total ignorance of the moans and the misery that lurked beneath the unsightly edifices, which she just knew were called the factories, but which were much too ugly in her picturesque eyes for her ever to look at them, when she could help it.

  Little did the kind-tempered, warm-hearted girl guess, that for hours before she raised her healthy and elastic frame from the couch where it had luxuriously reposed through the night, thousands of sickly, suffering, children were torn from their straw pallets, to commence a long unvaried day of painful toil, to fill the ever-craving purses, of which her own was one. She knew that Sir Matthew Dowling was considered as the richest man in the district — richer even than her father had been, and this was all she knew about him, except that her own sharp observation had enabled her to perceive that he was ignorant, vulgar, and most ludicrously crammed with pretensions of all sorts.

  After having looked into the face of little Michael, till she was perfectly convinced of his being exceedingly unhappy, she next directed her attention to his benefactor, as she heard him clamorously hailed on all sides; and his countenance, though smiling, spoke a language she liked not. It was evident to her that he was very keenly watching the boy, and more than once she detected a look from Sir Matthew, directed towards him, which was instantly followed by an attempt on the child’s part to look less miserable.

  Then followed all the nonsense about Mr. Osmond Norval, and his promised drama, which was to place upon the scene some prodigiously generous action of Sir Matthew Dowling’s, towards this little boy. Mary Brotherton did not believe a word of it, and sick of the false and fulsome flattery that was bandied about between the knight, the lady, and the poet, she made, as we have seen, a somewhat hasty retreat.

  On her road home she was more than usually silent, being occupied in a meditation on the features of Michael Armstrong. For sometime she suffered, her ridiculous ladyship to run on in a violent strain of panegyric upon Sir Matthew, his talents» and his generosity, without offering any interruption, but at length it struck her, that fool as she was, Lady Clarissa might be able to tell her what she wanted to know; and therefore, after answering “Indeed!” to some tirade about Sir Matthew’s great qualities, Mary ventured to come across the torrent of her ladyship’s eloquence by saying, “Pray, Lady Clarissa, who is that little boy?”

  “Who, my dear? Good gracious, what an odd question! Is it possible you do not know he is a poor little factory-boy, that Sir Matthew has most benevolently taken out of that sad way of life, because he behaved so remarkably well about that cow, you know, my dear, last night?”

  “But why should you call it a sad way of life, Lady Clarissa? It is the way that all our poor people get their bread, you know.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But yet, my dear, you cannot but allow that it must be a very different way of life from what the little children lead whose parents, from father to son, for a dozen generations, have worked on the mains of one family. There can’t be the same sort of family feeling and attachment, you know. However, I have not the least doubt in the world, that good Sir Matthew does his very best to make them comfortable.”

  “Is this boy to live in Sir Matthew’s family?”

  “I am not quite sure about that. I believe it depends in a great degree upon the manner in which the little fellow behaves; and so it ought, you know, my dear Miss Brotherton. I rather think Mr. Augustus was making himself too agreeable this morning for you to hear much of the story. However, the exquisite muse of our friend, Norval, will set the transaction before all the world in a proper point of view; and then you, like every body else, will be able to form your own judgment respecting the conduct of Sir Matthew.”

  Again, Mary sunk into a revery concerning the respective countenances of Sir Matthew and the little factory-boy; but feeling quite sure that she should obtain none of the information she was burning with impatience to acquire, from Lady Clarissa, the remaining part of the drive was passed entirely in silence on her part, excepting that when Lady Clarissa asked her if she did not intend to take a part in the theatrical performances about to be brought out at Dowling Lodge, she replied, “No, certainly Lady Clarissa Shrimpton, I do not.”

  CHAPTER X.

  MORE WILFULNESS ON THE PART OF THE HEIRESS — PRIVATE THEATRICALS — FAILURE OF A YOUNG PERFORMER, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES — PHILOSOPHICAL BREAKFAST-TABLE — A MORNING’S EXCURSION.

  No sooner did Miss Brotherton enter the room where she had left her old friend, who was still tranquilly enjoying the perfumed air which visited her through the open window as she sat knitting before it, than throwing her bonnet on one side, she began to examine, and cross-examine her as follows:

  “Pray, Mrs. Tremlett, do you know any thing about the factory people that work in all these great ugly buildings round about Ashleigh?”

  Mrs. Tremlett looked up at her for a moment before she replied, and then said, “I know very little about them, Miss Mary, — not much more than you do, I believe.”

  “I have just been thinking, Mrs. Tremlett, how exceedingly wrong it is that I should be so profoundly ignorant on the subject.”

  “Wrong? — I don’t see any thing wrong, my dear, in your not knowing what you was never told.”

  “I have been wrong in never wishing to be told; but, in truth, I have never thought upon the subject, and I have been very wrong in this. That silly body, Lady Clarissa, said a few words to-day, which — quite unlike the usual effect of what she utters, made a great impression upon me. Speaking of the children who work in these factories, nurse Tremlett, she said theirs was a very different way of life from that of the children whose parents, from father to son, have worked for a dozen generations on the lands of the same family. There could not be the same sort of family feeling and attachment, she said. But why should there not, Mrs. Tremlett? These people work on, I dare say, from generation to generation, and yet, God help them, poor souls! — from the hour of my birth to the present day, I never heard any body talk of attachment to them. Can you explain this difference to me? I do not at all understand it; but I am quite certain it cannot be right. Why do sot we know something about our poor people, as the people with landed estates do about theirs?”

  “Upon my word, my dear, you have asked me a question not over and above easy to answer — that is to say, as to its being right. But it is easy enough too, in another way, for I may say plain and straight, without any fear of blundering, that the thing is impossible.”

  “What thing is impossible, Mrs. Tremlett?”

  “Why that the factory people should be noticed by the gentlefolks, and treated in the same way as labourers that work the land.”

  You are too wise a woman, Mrs. Tremlett,” replied Mary, “‘to assert so positively, what you did not know to be true; therefore I will take it for granted, that it is impossible for people working in a factory to be treated in the same way as people working on a farm. And now, seeing, God help me! that I am most frightfully ignorant, I must beg you to tell me what it is that causes this extraordinary dissimilarity between the different classes of the labouring poor?”

  “My dear child, it would hardly be decent to enter into all the reasons. Country folks, that is the field-labourers I mean, are just as likely to be good and virtuous, as their betters, and so they are for every thing that I have ever seen to the contrary. But it is altogether a different thing with the factory people. By what I can hear, for of course I never went among them, they are about the worst set of creatures that burden God’s earth. The men are vicious, and the women desolate, taking drams often, and often when they ought to buy food; and so horridly dirty and unthrifty that it is a common say
ing, you may know a factory-girl as far as you can see her. So I leave you to judge, Miss Mary, whether such ladies as visit the cottages of the poor peasantry, could have any thing to say to such as these.”

  Mary uttered no reply, but sat for many minutes with eyes steadfastly fixed upon the carpet. At length she raised them again to the face of her companion, and said, “It is then among such people as these, that children, almost babies — for such is the one I have just seen — are often employed?”

  “Often, my dear? They are always employed with them. And there’s no particular hardship in that you know, because these very men and women are the parents of the children, and so they could not be separated any how.”

  “What a dreadful class of human beings, then, must these factory people form! Is it not considered as a great misfortune, Mrs. Tremlett, to the whole country?”

  “Why as to that, my dear Miss Mary, there’s many will tell you that it is the finest thing in the world for the places where the great factories are established, because they give employment to so many thousands of men, women, and even the very smallest children that can stand, almost. But you must not ask me, my dear, what I think about that, for of course I am no fair judge at all. I, that spent my childhood in playing among the hairbells, raking up little cocks of hay for the hardest work I was put to, and going to school to read, write, and sew, like the child of decent Christian parents in a civilized country — I can hardly pass fair judgment on goings on so very different. But I have heard, my dear, for I believe these things are talked of more in the servants’ halls than among the great manufacturers themselves, especially when the ladies are by, — I have heard that a great many of the learned gentlemen in parliament say, that the whole system is a blessing to the country.”

  “Then your account of it must be a very false one, nurse Tremlett,” said the young heiress severely.

  “I only speak after much that I have heard, and a little that I have seen,” replied the old woman meekly. “However, my dear, dear Miss Brotherton,” she added, “if you will take an old servant’s advice, who loves you very dearly, you will just make up your mind, neither to talk, nor to think any more upon the subject.

  I am quite sure that it will give you no pleasure, and it does not seem possible to me that you should do any good; for you know, my dear, that you have nothing at all to do with any of the factories now, any more than Lady Clarissa herself. Will you promise to take my advice, my dear child, and think no mote about it?”

  “On the contrary, Mrs. Tremlett,” replied the young lady; “I am perfectly determined that for some time to come I will think of nothing else.”

  * * * * *

  Mary Brotherton kept her word. During the whole time that the Dowling Lodge theatricals were in preparation, while every other young heart in the neighbourhood, male or female, was eagerly anticipating the fete, hers was fixed steadfast and immoveable upon the mysterious subject that had seized upon it. That man was born to labour, that he was condemned to live by the sweat of his brow, she knew from high authority; and though under the social compacts which civilization has led to, some portion of every race have found the means of performing the allotted task vicariously, she felt not called upon to say that the arrangement was a bad one. It was by no means difficult to conceive why it was so, nor why of necessity it ever must be so. She felt, as all must do, who reflect on the subject, that if all distinctions were by some accident suddenly removed, and the entire organization of society to begin de novo, each man standing precisely on the same level as his neighbour, the earth would not complete one revolution round the sun, ere the equality would be violated.

  “Strength will be lord of imbecility.”

  And when nature made one man more active, more intelligent, or more powerful of frame than another, she made the law in which originated inequality of condition. That, as time rolled on, and mankind became bound together nation by nation, substituting the conventional distinctions of civilized society for those derived from individual strength, — that when this happened, occasional anomalies should appear in the arrangement, seemed inevitable, and of necessity to be endured. That it was inevitable, she conceived to be pretty nearly proved by the fact that no single authentic record makes mention of a nation in which hereditary distinction of some kind or other did not exist. Nor did it seem desirable that when the prowess, the wit, the wisdom, or the toil of an individual had endowed him with wealth beyond his fellows, he should be denied the dear privilege of endowing withal the children he loved, instead of leaving it at his death to be struggled for, and borne away by the most crafty or the most strong. All this, Mary Brotherton, in her little wisdom of twenty-two years and a half, could without difficulty reason upon and understand. But that among those whom fate or fortune had doomed to labour, some should be cherished, valued, honoured by the masters who received and paid their industry, while “other some” were doomed, under the same compact of labour and payment, to the scorn, avoidance, and contempt of the beings whose wealth and greatness proceeded from their toil, was an enigma she could in no wise comprehend.

  “There must be something wrong,” argued the young girl, as day by day she paced her gravel walks in solitary meditation; “there must be something deeply, radically wrong in a system that leads to such results. I may perhaps be silly enough to look with something approaching envy at the noble who traces his thirty descents unbroken from the venerable ancestor, whose valour won in a hard-fought field the distinction he still bears on his armorial coat, yet when I look round upon what the industry of my father — the only one of his race whose name I ever heard — when I contemplate what one man’s industry can bequeath to his child, I feel that there is no very substantial cause for complaining of hereditary inferiority of condition. Nay, were I one of the peasants of whom the Lady Clarissa and nurse Tremlett speak, I can well enough believe that I might live and die contented with a life of healthful and respected toil. But to exist in the condition of these outcast labourers — to be thrust out, as it were, beyond the pale that surrounds and protects society — to live like the wretch, smitten by the witches’ curse, ‘a man forbid,’ must be hard to bear. Children, young creatures still wearing the stamp of heaven fresh upon their brows, are, as it seems, amongst these wretched ones. I will find out why this is so, or be worried to death by Sir Matthew Dowling and his fellow great ones in the attempt.”

  Towards the end of the month which preceded the grand display expected at Dowling Lodge, Mr. Osmond Norval requested permission to submit his composition to Miss Brotherton’s perusal; a compliment she graciously consented to receive, being desirous, before she witnessed its performance, of learning all she could respecting Sir Matthew’s rather mysterious adoption of the factory-boy, and also of the poor child’s equally mysterious sufferings under the benevolent process that was performing on him.

  The little drama, therefore, which for obvious classical reasons the poet denominated “A Masque,” reached her hands enveloped in delicately-scented paper. But all she learned thereby was, that Mr. Norval had thought proper to entitle it, “Gratitude and Goodness,” or, “The Romance of Dowling Lodge,” and to prelude it by a sonnet to be spoken by himself as prologue, in which a modest allusion was made to Milton’s composition of Comus for the use of the Bridgewater family. She had, moreover, the gratification of discovering in what order Sir Matthew, Lady Clarissa, the poet, the governess, most of the young Dowlings, and little Michael himself were to appear upon the scene, and then she returned the young gentleman’s MS. with a very honest assurance that she doubted not the composition would most satisfactorily answer every purpose for which it was intended.

  Absurd as the whole business appeared to her, she resolved to be present at the representation; and having perceived, in her study of the exits and entrances, that no part was allotted to the homely Martha, she determined to place herself near her during the performance, in the hope of eliciting the information she was so anxious to obtain.


  On many occasions Miss Brotherton had remarked that this young lady either kept herself, or was kept very much apart from the rest of the family, which circumstance had been quite sufficient to propitiate her kindness, for most cordially did Mary Brotherton dislike the whole Dowling race. But so deep-seated was the feeling of poor Martha herself that nobody did, or could wish, to converse with her, that the handshakings and smiles of the heiress had never suggested to her the idea that she might wish to be better acquainted. This shyness had hitherto effectually kept them apart; but no sooner did Mary perceive that the neglected girl was the only one of the family, above the age of a mere baby, to whom no part in Mr. Norval’s drama was allotted, than she resolved to profit by the circumstance, and, if possible, get from her such a commentary upon the piece, as might enable her to comprehend its plot and underplot.

  Accordingly, when the great night of representation arrived, Miss Brotherton reached the Lodge somewhat before the hour named in the invitation, and finding, as she expected, the room where the company were to be received, unoccupied, she desired one of the liveried attendants to send Miss Martha Dowling’s maid to her. A female servant soon appeared. “Are you Miss Martha’s maid?” said the young lady.

  “Oh! dear no, ma’am, I am Miss Dowling’s and Miss Harriet’s maid. Miss Martha never wants a lady’s maid at all; but I can take any message from you, ma’am, that you may please to send.”

  Miss Brotherton took one of her own cards, and wrote upon it with a pencil—” Dear Miss Martha, if you are not going to act in the play, will you have the kindness to come to me.”

  This note the soubrette, as in duty bound, first showed to her own young ladies.