My Lady Ludlow

Front matter

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

The Works of Mrs. Gaskell

Contents

PAGE

INTRODUCTION . xi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction To “my Lady Ludlow,” Etc

Great writers, even if like Mrs. Gaskell exceptionally free from the habit of self-imitation, are rarely unlike themselves; but no pretence need be made that there is any special kind of unity in the contents of the present volume. Indeed, one of its attractions will probably be found in the stimulating diversity of the intellectual interests which it shows its writer to have possessed, and in the fresh imaginative power with which she here finds fit and natural expression for all of them in turn. These tales range in their themes from the cloud-laden spheres of tragedy and weird mystery to the gentle tranquillity of the domestic idyll; their characters and incidents are gathered in from the past and from the present ; and their scenes are laid in the remote mountainvalleys of Wales and Lancashire, in the troubled streets of revolutionary I^aris, and in the green seclusion of rural England. I do not know whether, like Steele when superscribing the miscellaneous section of his contributions to The Tatler, Mrs. Gaskell might have dated all these tales “from my own apartment”; but, even had not most of them professed to have been told “round the sofa,” they would all alike remain instinct with the human kindness and sympathy which were part of herself, and of the atmosphere breathed by her in her home life. The frontispiece of the present volume, not inappropriately I think, recalls the centre of that

xi life, the drawing-room at 84, Plymouth Grove, where more than one of the stories here reprinted may have found their earliest readers, and where their writer may have first welcomed the clear-sighted criticisms of a watchful affection. Even to those of us who were admitted to the hospitality of that drawing-room in later years its kindly and inspiring associations seemed continuous: may they long remain such !

All the tales included in this volume were first published as contributions to periodical literature. My Lady Ludlow appeared in Household Words from June 19 to September 25, 1858; and in the same journal had been previously printed, An Accursed Race (August 25, 1855), Half a Lifetime Ago (October 6, 13, and 20, 1855), and The Poor Clare (December 13 to 27, 1855). The Doom of the Griffiths appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1858, and The Half-Brothers in The Dublin University Magazine , in November of the same year. Finally, The Manchester Marriage seems to have been first printed in Littell's Living Age , a paper published at Boston, U.S.A., in 1859. In that year all the tales included in the present volume, with the exception of Mr. Harrison's Confessions and The Manchester Marriage , were collected together by their authoress into a single volume, which was published by Messrs. Sampson Low and Co., under the title of Round the Sofa, with the “prologue” and “links” here reprinted. The literary device of which Mrs. Gaskell thus made use has commended itself to the tellers of stories from the days of Apuleius — and no doubt from far earlier days than his — to those of Boccaccio and Chaucer; and again from theirs to the days of Charles Dickens, who worked it with a will, and perhaps rather overworked it, though both “gods” and “columns” may be trusted to provide against its ex-

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tinction. In this form the tales in question have been repeatedly reprinted. As early as i860 there appeared a French translation, by Mme. H. Loreau, under the, of course, inevitable title of Autour du Sofa — which suggests the name of a once famous book, the Voyage autour de ma Chambre, by a man of genius, X. de Maistre.

Although the general idea of the framework of Round the Sofa could lay no claim to novelty, a certain biographical interest attaches to the particular form invented for it with ready tact by Mrs. Gaskell. It will be remembered that in her younger days, when a girl of eighteen or nineteen years of age, she spent a winter at Edinburgh; and nothing could have been more felicitous than the way in which she utilised this transient experience for her present purpose. Of course it is the old Edinburgh of which she speaks — the Edinburgh of some three-quarters of a century ago, though a good many of its old-fashioned ways survived after one of those quarters had passed, and some may survive even yet, together with the incomparable beauty of the city, the greatness of its University, and the ancient odours of the Canongate. Most things on the southern side must have seemed beautiful in 1830 to the young visitor, whose marble counterfeit remains as a memento of one beautiful sight there was to be seen in the Scottish capital that winter; but her opportunities of enlarging her experience of the world must still have been limited. Mrs. Dawson’s Monday evenings, we learn, were of a quite unpretentious kind; but the young stranger who does duty as preludist confesses that “if it had been to spend an evening at the dentist’s, I believe I should have- welcomed the invitation, so weary was I of the nights in our lodgings.” And, indeed, Edinburgh householders used to have a way of secluding their establishments which, as I well remember, rendered them ideal localities in which to prepare for an examination, for an unobserved exit from this life. Equally true to one’s remembrances of old Edinburgh and some aspects of its “society” are the figures of Mr. Sperano, the Italian exile and teacher of his native tongue, and of the wife of Mr. Preston, the Westmorland squire — not Mr. Preston himself — who had come to the northern Athens for the education of their numerous children.*

The story of My Lady Ludlow , far the longest of those contained in the present volume, only just, as it seems to me, misses making good its claim to rank among the more important works of its writer. Mrs.. Gaskell was strongly attracted to old-world figures like that of the high-bred and high-spirited, but at heart God-fearing and humble, chdtelaine of this pathetic tale. Somewhere — I think in a letter to Dickens — she writes that she would find pleasure in describing the life of a country squire of many ancestors and acres; and in My Lady Ludlow she found a figure exactly to her taste. “Very small of stature, and very upright,” this quaint but commanding little personage in the great lace cap, black silk mode gown and quilted lavender petticoat, with her great gold-headed cane, more

* By the way, Margaret Dawson, who tells the story of My Lady Ludlow, incidentally states that she has “never seen the sea” — not a very probable thing in the case of even an invalid inhabiting Edinburgh. Mrs. Gaskell, like Thackeray, was not over-careful in small things; at times the imaginative powers get the uppermost over an accurate memory. In this very story, Mr. Horner the agent’s wife sinks so rapidly that we are never expressly told about her death — another illustration of the swiftness with which an imagination, which never gives itself rest, is apt to forge ahead.

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for dignity than for use, has walked straight out of the gilt frame round her portrait by Romney or Hoppner into our story. It is she, not the late Earl, her husband, who spent so much of her income on improving his Scotch estates, or his successor, the diplomatist absentee — the last of their nine children, whom she is to survive — - that holds sway at H anbury Court, and in the village of which she esteems herself the “liege lady”; to her both estate and supremacy come by right of inheritance, and she has identified herself with the traditions and the duties of place and position for good and all. She had at one time been lady of honour to good Queen Charlotte, but had hardly more in common with that admirable, though rather insipid, mother of a very large family, than had the excellent Medlicott with the formidable Schwellenberg of Fanny Burney’s Diary.* The character of Lady Ludlow is drawn with great skill and delicacy, and even tenderness; if it fails in completely carrying away — or, as the phrase is, “ convincing” — the reader, the cause may probably be found in the disproportion between My Lady’s educational theories and general social philosophy, the origin which she ascribes to them, and the process by which they are finally uprooted. These factors may alike be necessary for the purposes of the story, which as such cannot be said to be very well or evenly constructed; and (what is of greater moment) they are, it must be conceded, all brought into action by means of the very best scene in the whole story. The arraignment of little Harry Gregson, the gipsy poacher’s son, who, to My Lady’s

*Mrs. Medlicott, if anything, comes nearer to Madam Johnson, the housekeeper in Crabbe’s “Silford Hall” {Posthumous Tales ) :

“ — distinguish’d from the rest By grandeur in her look, and state that she possess’d.’* xv horror, has been secretly taught reading and writing, and on the principle —

“ Please, my lady, I always hearken when I hear folk talking secrets; but I mean no harm” —

has possessed himself of the contents of a letter entrusted to him for delivery, is one of the most irresistible, and at the same time one of the subtlest, things in modern fiction — I will not say in educational literature ! But though thus set in motion, the mechanism does not work with the consummate ease which in general is second nature to Mrs. Gaskell. Lady Ludlow’s prejudices, as Dryden said of Jeremy Collier’s strictures, were “urged a step too far the narrative by which she seeks to justify them has obviously no very close connexion with them; and we know that she will get rid of them in spite of it — or rather, without any reference to it.

We shall probably not err in concluding that in this story Mrs. Gaskell either attempted too much, or allowed herself insufficient space and time for harmonising all that she attempted. It is not, of course, that the reader is unwilling, on the pretext of Lady Ludlow’s desire to point a moral, to be taken away from worthy Mr. Gray and his pastoral troubles, into the midst of the “Terror” of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s marvellous book had impressed Mrs. Gaskell as it impressed Dickens, whose singularly powerful Tale of Two Cities , curiously enough, made its appearance in Household Words in the year following on that of the publication of My Lady Ludlow in the same journal.* And the details of this thrilling episode are elaborated with the

* The continued cordiality between the two writers is marked by Margaret Dawson’s humorous reference to Mrs. Nickleby.

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care never absent from Mrs. Gaskell’s literary excursions into French life, past or present. But the story of Clement and Virginie de Crequy remains an episode only; and we have hardly turned the page, when we are asked to interest ourselves once more in the vicissitudes of the Hanbury estate and its agency, and in the oddities of Miss Galindo, with the history of their raison d'etre. We are again quite ready to do so; for Miss Galindo, whose eccentricity is not quite in the line of humorous creation most congenial to Mrs. Gaskell, is, notwithstanding, a true bit of humanity; but we are obliged to confess to ourselves that the varied interest, the swift play of humour, and the intensity of feeling which mark this interesting story, fail to make up in sum for its chief defect — a want of balance in its construction, discernible in the midst of its many and characteristic beauties.

The second contribution to the Hexameron, Round the Sofa , is the paper entitled An Accursed Race. It purports to have been prepared for the (Edinburgh) Philosophical Society; and, inasmuch as the author, Mr. Dawson, was an old and respected fellow-citizen, it no doubt there received a less chilling welcome than that with which the august society in question used to chasten the elation of young lecturers invited to address it. Mr. Dawson’s lecture had been “in a great measure compiled from a French book, published by one of the Academies” — very possibly from Francisque Michel’s Histoire des races maudites de la France et d'Espagne (2 vols., Paris, 1847). The researches of which so luminous and interesting an abstract is given in Mrs. Gaskell’s sketch were, however, materially supplemented by the publication, in 1876, of M. V. de Rochas’s xvn work on Les P arias de France et d’Espagne ( Cagots et Bohemiens); which was in its turn summarised in an excellent article by M. L. Louis-Lande in the Revue des Deux Mondes (vol. xxv., 1878). M. de Rochas, at the time an active member of a young scientific society at Pau, had taken a hint from an eighteenth century savant named Palasson, and had brought a careful personal physiological enquiry to bear upon a problem which antiquarian learning had hitherto failed to settle satisfactorily. Thus, while Mr. Dawson and Mrs. Gaskell, following their authorities, seem to regard the explanation that the Cagots were originally lepers as merely one of several more or less plausible theories proposed by way of accounting for the widespread persecution of this unfortunate race during many centuries, there can now be no doubt but that there is no other admissible solution of the question. This is not the place in which to attempt to explain the distinctions drawn by modern medical science between leprosy proper, the loathsome disease of common occurrence in Western Europe in the earlier Middle Ages, and the mere traditions of that disease which by descent or “equivocal symptoms” clung to large bodies of population free from the actual disease itself. Such were the Cagots or Agotes of Bearn, Navarre, and Aragon, the Gafets or Gahets of Guienne, and the Cacoux or Caqueux of Brittany. The difficulty (if there is such a thing as difficulty in the diversions of etymology) as to the derivation of these names, I must — though unconscious of superstitious restraints — decline from so much as approaching; but I will take leave to cite a single sentence from M. Louis-Lande, which would, I think, have commended itself to Mrs. Gaskell, and which will explain what to some readers of her admirable paper might xvm

“My Lady Ludlow,” etc.

seem a strange application of a blessed name to an “accursed race.” If the solution advocated by the French reviewer is the true one, then —

“The name of chrestiaa , chrestian , chrestien is nothing else than a charitable euphemism for designating lepers — in the same way as fr&re malau (jrfre malade), or, better still, as ladre, an abbreviation of Lazare (Lazarus). Lepers were called pauperes Christi, pauperes Sancti Lazari — in the vulgar tongue, les pauvres du Christ, les pauvres de Saint Ladre; and, if gradually the one word ladres came to be used by them, there is no reason why chrestian or chrestien should not have alike been an abbreviation of the other formula, les pauvres du Christ. The term Christiannerie was certainly employed to signify a hospital or community of lepers, together with the terms maladrerie and mezellerie (from the old French mezel [Anglice: ‘measel’], a leper.’!

The essence of Mrs. Gaskell’s account oi An Accursed Race remains unaffected by any additional light that may have been thrown upon its details by historical or linguistic enquiry. As she says at the beginning of her paper, we may not “have been so bad as our Continental friends’’ — she might have added, especially those of the Latin race — in the way of persecution. But, as she likewise says, we too “have our prejudices;” and she was herself well fitted, by the associations of her life and by the serene humanity of her nature, to hold up to the abhorrence of English readers an awful example of that intolerance from which few, if any, nations have refrained, and from which hardly a single creed has consistently sought to keep its adherents free.

Little or nothing need be said by way of introduction to any of the three tales which follow, alike instinct with imaginative force, and alike tinged with a melancholy difficult to resist in treating of human beings at issue with their destiny. The scene of The Doom

XIX of the Griffiths is laid in a gloomy valley in North Wales, running down from fir-woods, seemingly impenetrable, to the mist-shrouded vicinity of the sea. Here is enacted in pursuance of a curse ascribed to the half-legendary times of the great chieftain who “could summon spirits from the vasty deep,” a homely (Edipodean tragedy of half-conscious crime and of woe unutterable. To my mind, however, Half a Lifetime Ago, which plays in the midst of scenery consecrated to so many of us by associations of which Mrs. Gaskell’s love of it forms part, exhibits a far more powerful, and at the same time a far more attractive, aspect of her genius. Susan Dixon, the Westmorland “ Stateswoman ” — I wonder whether “her house is yet to be seen on the Oxenfell road, between Skelwith and Coniston”? — is also called upon to struggle against her fate; but the difficulty which she has to face, and which she overcomes at the cost of a broken heart, is that of the old conflict between duty (rightly or wrongly seen) and affection (worthily or unworthily bestowed). The conflict is a real one, and the figure of Susan Dixon that of a true and noble-hearted woman; while the solution which this pathetic tragedy finds is in harmony with the eternal laws of justice and mercy that “banish the ghosts from the haunted hearth.”

The third, and much the longest, of these stories, The Poor Clare , carries us still nearer home, to scenes most familiar to the authoress, and naturally haunted by her imagination. The north-east of Lancashire — and especially that part of it which adjoins the Craven district, the home proper of the Lancashire witches of Elizabethan days, and which includes the so-called Trough of Bolland or Bowland, where lay Starkey Manor-house — •

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is, or used to be, a strangely isolated part of the county. The late William Arnold, who, as I see from his recently published memoir, was fond of exploring the Trough (he compares its name to that of the Trouee de Belfort ), speaks of it as “the least known district of all England.” The gentry hereabouts long comprised (and probably still comprises) a considerable Roman Catholic element. Stonyhurst, mentioned in the story, owes its origin as an important seat of Catholic higher education to this circumstance. As a matter of course, in the days to which the historiographer of The Poor Clare looks back, Jacobitism largely prevailed here, as it did in so many parts of Lancashire. No locality could, therefore, have been more appropriately chosen for a story in which faith and superstition, bitter hatred and passionate devotion, are the “antithetically mix’d” ingredients.

Bridget Fitzgerald, however, the unhappy mother whose mysterious sin with its wonderful expiation is the real theme of this tragic tale, is Irish-born, and dies as Sister Magdalen in the Antwerp convent of the Poor Clares. I cannot tell what suggested to Mrs. Gaskell the invention of the striking close of her story. The Poor Clares — the second Order of St. Francis, called the Povere Donne , or, in French, Clarisses — in the second quarter of the fifteenth century returned, especially in Flanders and in France, to the unmitigated rule of their foundress, whose rigours towards herself her very ensample, St. Francis, sought to restrict; and, even at the present day, I believe, much of the severity of that rule is maintained. That during any troubles in the Austrian Netherlands, at Antwerp or elsewhere, the Sisters should have enjoyed the respect of both the insurgents and the Austrian soldiery, is quite in accordance with probability ;

XXI but the particular occasion of these troubles, somewhere towards the middle of the eighteenth century, is left conveniently vague. Though the French Revolution probably swept away their convent at Antwerp, as it did most of their houses elsewhere,* some of these, I learn, survived in Austria; their activity in Ireland (where they are known as admirable lace-makers) is well known; and a few of their communities are to be found in England. Among these is one at Levenshulme, within a quarter of an hour’s walk from Plymouth Grove, Manchester; and it is quite possible that this circumstance may have suggested to Mrs. Gaskell the form given by her to the final episode of her story.

The last of the Round the Sofa tales is another adventure of the Fells, in which, as in The Old Nurse's Story , a snowstorm plays — this time a tragic — part. The Half-Brothers is endeared to those best acquainted with the heights and depths of Mrs. Gaskell’s nature, because this story seems to them to typify the spirit of self-sacrifice which pervaded her life. It illustrates a famous passage in Thomas h Kempis ( Imitation of Christ , chap, xlix,, sections 4 and 5) which she was accustomed to cite with peculiar solemnity — the passage beginning, “That which pleaseth others shall go well forward; that which pleaseth thee shall not speed,” etc. Herself a stranger to the passion of envy — like the sister- fury of jealousy, one of the chief enemies of all human happiness — she knew what it meant to recognise its approach, and to set a firm foot on its monstrous neck.

* By the way, the “Place de Meir,” where the story locates the convent of the Poor Clares at Antwerp, should, it seems, read Meir Straet,” which, though a great street, is not a square, xxii

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The difference between sentimentalism and a pathos which wells up resistlessly by the side of a humour equally spontaneous, and equally true, was never more clearly shown than in the delightful little story which follows in the present volume, and for which, in its way, no praise could be excessive. It should be noted that Mr. Harrison's Confessions does not appear here in its proper place of chronological sequence; but it is only quite recently that the indefatigable bibliographerin-chief of Mrs. Gaskell’s publications has discovered that the story made its first appearance in a monthly magazine, entitled The Ladies' Companion* at as early a date as February, March, and April, 1851. Mr. Harrison's Confessions , although the story first became widely known when reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall with Lizzie Leigh , and other Tales , in 1855, was therefore anterior in date of publication, and doubtless also in date of production, to Cranford , of which a scientific literary biographer would very probably incline to classify it as a “ Vorstudie." Duncombe is manifestly Knutsford — and I am glad that the volume of Mrs. Gaskell’s works containing her earliest description of the little Cheshire town and its life should be illustrated by a drawing of the house which was the home of Mrs. Gaskell during so many years. The charming drawing of Mrs. Lumb’s house included in this volume is by Mr. Watt, to whose kindness this edition thus owes a twofold debt. The old doctor in the story (another variety of the profession of which Mrs. Gaskell

* Mr. W. E. A. Axon, to whom many thanks are due for the communication of this interesting discovery, writes that The Ladies' Companion was a very good magazine of its kind, the Howitts, H. F. Charles, and Mrs. J. K. Hervey being among the contributors.

xxiii had so early a knowledge) tells his young partner —

“You will find it a statistical fact, but five-sixths of our householders of a certain rank in Duncombe are women. We have widows and old maids in rich abundance. In fact, my dear sir, I believe that you and I are almost the only gentlemen in the place — Mr. Bullock [the lawyer], of course, excepted” —

and the entire little story is not less unmistakably in the Cranford manner so familiar to us all. Yet the merits of the earlier production are such as to be perfectly self-supporting. Here and there its comedy is just a little broader than that of Cranford; and the situation at the height of the plot, when the hero is surrounded by ladies who, or whose parents, have marked him for their own, is pure farce. The diction, too, to say nothing of the action, of Mr. John Marsland of Guy’s, and a phrase or two at the opening of the story, betray a rather conventional conception of a happily extinct species of medical student. On the other hand, there is in this charming little story a touch of the influence of Dickens at his very best and tenderest — in other words, an unconscious remembrance of some of the exquisite love-making in that most irresistible of all English works of fiction, David Copperfield. But the original genius of Mrs. Gaskell fully asserts itself in this early effort; nowhere has she drawn a sweeter picture than that as seen through the door-frame, of Sophy teaching her little brother the alphabet at the sunny garden- window ; nowhere has she more pathetically touched a chord which vibrates through so much of her writing, than in the passage telling of little Walter’s death —

“The street was as quiet as ever; not a shadow was changed; for it was not yet four o’clock. But during that night a soul had departed. ”

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The later passages, describing the anxiety of Sophy’s lover for Sophy herself, are nature itself in their truthfulness; and, though the assortment of wedding-bells with which the story comes to an end is almost portentous in its multiplicity, Mr. Harrison's Confessions are not too long by a line — a rare thing with reminiscences.

The last of the short stories reprinted in this volume takes us into the humdrum streets of Manchester and suburban London ; but the tragic tale here unfolded is one which has exercised the imagination of more than one writer,* though to most English readers it is best known as the story of Enoch Arden. Tennyson’s poem, it should be remembered, was published in 1864; Mrs. Gaskell’s story of The Manchester Marriage was first printed in 1859, in a Boston (U.S.A.) journal bearing the name of Littell's Living Age. (It was reprinted in this country, in i860, with Right at Last and other tales, by Messrs. Sampson Low). On first reading Enoch Arden , Mrs. Gaskell was at once struck by the resemblance in plot between the poem and her story. But in the homely Lancashire version of the theme elaborated by the great poet, when already in the decline of his creative power, with a refined delicacy of thought and a fluid elegance of diction beneath which the throb of human passion remains only just perceptible, the manner of treatment is as original as the surroundings are characteristic. Mrs. Gaskell contrives to furnish her story not only with two heroes — the husband and his innocent rival, the latter an admirable type of the Lancashire man who had been too busy all his days to know that he had any tenderness in his nature — but also with a heroine.

* Among others the German dramatist, Karl von Holtei, whose productions were usually in a lighter vein.

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This heroine is not Mrs. Openshaw, for whom, as for Enoch Arden’s Annie, we hardly know whether to be sorry or not — though even this is not her fault — but her Lancashire servant Norah, one of those embodiments of self-sacrificing faithfulness whom the authoress loved to draw.

It has not been thought expedient to seek permission to reprint in this edition two prefaces written by Mrs. Gaskell for books produced by other authors. But they signally illustrate that variety and vivacity of her numerous interests, to which the present volume bears exceptional testimony. In 1857 she edited, by arrangement with the authoress, Miss Maria S. Cummins, well known to many readers of many generations by her story of The Lamplighter , a production of the same class, bearing the title of Mabel Vaughan. The preface (which somehow reads more comfortably at the present day than it may have read half a century aso) dwells with genial warmth on the closeness of “our cousinly connexion with the Americans” — in our pride in the noble books which they write, and in the great things which they achieve. Neither the authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin , nor the American sailors who brought home the Resolute to our shores, are forgotten ; and “though I may be thought like the Tanner in the old fable who recommended leather as the best means of defence for a besieged city, ” the writer has no scruple in recommending a free interchange of English and American novels as an excellent way by which nations may become at home with one another. Mrs. Gaskell suited the action to the need ; for it has been seen how two of the tales reprinted in this volume made their first appearance in American journals. Of less intimate

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interest is a preface written by Mrs. Gaskell to an English translation of Colonel Vecehj’s Garibaldi at Caprera , published in 1862. It is a picture of the great Liberator’s home-life amidst his family and friends, and was intended to benefit the funds of the girls’ schools which an association of ladies at Turin were seeking, at the instigation of Garibaldi, to establish at Naples. Unless I mistake, the subsequent prosperity of these schools owed much to the exertions of Mrs. Salis-Schwabe of Manchester, a friend through whom Mrs. Gaskell may have been first interested in the wise and generous thought which led to their being instituted.