Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell (The Nineteenth Century Series)

SERVANTS AND PATERNALISM IN THE WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH AND ELIZABETH GASKELL

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Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell

JULIE NASH University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA

© Julie Nash 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Julie Nash has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nash, Julie Servants and paternalism in the works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell. – (The nineteenth century) 1. Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865 – Criticism and interpretation 3. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 4. English fiction – 19th century – Women authors 5. Servants in literature 6. Domestics in literature 7. Paternalism – Great Britain – History - 19th century 8. Domestics – Great Britain – History – 19th century I. Title 823.8’09352624 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nash, Julie. Servants and paternalism in the works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell / by Julie Nash. p. cm.— (Nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5639-5 (alk. paper) 1. Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810-1865—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Servants in literature. 4. Social change in literature. I. Title. PR4647.N37 2007 823’.7—dc22 2007005511 ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5639-5 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd., Bodmin.

Contents The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Servants in the “Good Old Days”

vii ix

1

1

Servants and Paternalism

11

2

“Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy”: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s English Domestic Fiction

31

3

“Submitting to Fate”: Servants in Gaskell’s Domestic Fiction

53

4

“True and Loyal to the Family”: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Novels

75

“Mutual Duties”: Servants and Labor Relations in Gaskell’s “Condition of England” Novels

95

5

Conclusion Bibliography Index

“Well done thou good and faithful servant”

115 119 127

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The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

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Acknowledgements It is impossible to acknowledge adequately the many colleagues, students, and friends who have helped to shape this book. Gina Barreca of the University of Connecticut knows how deeply I am in her debt, although she graciously never reminds me. Her scholarly advice and responses to early drafts were invaluable, and her friendship, humor, and moral support much more so. I am also grateful to Jean I. Marsden and Thomas Shea from UConn, who provided both encouragement and feedback early on. Gaskell scholar Deirdre d’Albertis of Bard College and Eve Tavor Bannet of the University of Oklahoma were both valuable sources of inspiration as well, and both have my gratitude. My colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell make my job a pleasure, and I am especially thankful for the feedback, support, and advice I receive from Melissa Pennell, who, in addition to being the world’s best department chair, shares my interest in literary servants. I am also grateful to Provost John Wooding and to Dean Charles Carroll for their generosity in helping to fund a trip to Manchester, England where I was able to research the industrial revolution there and connect with other Gaskell scholars. Once again, the editorial and production staff at Ashgate Publishing has made working with them a pleasure. I am thankful to Joanne Shattuck and Vince Newey, editors of the Nineteenth Century Series, for their support, to Ann Donahue for her early and continued enthusiasm for the book, and to Liz Pearce, Anne Keirby, Ann Newell, Emma McBriarty and Sandra Haurant for their excellent work from the editorial to the production stages. Also I’d like to thank Tom Norton for the Index. I could never have written this book without the patience and support of my friends and family. Paul and Kathy Nash, Paul Nash Jr., and Robert and Sylvia Miller have all kept me going through the ups and downs of writing this book. Additional thanks go to Joe and Mary Frances Gydus, Nancy Ishkanian, Steve Smith and Katherine Capshaw Smith, Joseph Black and Lisa Celovsky. My sons, Brennan and Owen Miller, keep my life balanced and joyful and I am always grateful to them. Finally, this book is dedicated with love to my husband, Quentin Miller, who read draft after draft, watched the kids, cheered me on, and never stopped believing in me.

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Introduction

Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Servants in the “Good Old Days”

At the risk of being called old-fashioned—we all had our place and we knew it, and as a result the world seemed a happier place. Elsie Raum, former maid

Elsie Raum was in service during the last years of “The Great Age of Servants,” which spanned the eighteenth century through the Edwardian age. Writing to author Frank Dawes in the 1970s, Raum is nostalgic for a seemingly less chaotic world in which social status was clearly defined and relatively stable. Far from resenting the leisured life of her employers as we might expect her to, Raum says, “I always respected my employers. In fact, if I despised them, ... it would have been degrading to work for them” (30). Raum shares the ideas of many social paternalists who find dignity in knowing their proper place and in performing their assigned duties. Yet the “happier” world that Raum looks back upon had been changing for over two centuries and not every domestic worker mourned its demise. One former servant described the “Great Age of Service” as “cruel and unjust times,” adding, “Let folk who imagine they were ‘good old days’ look back with nostalgia to them. For me, the present” (31). Between these two opposing positions on domestic service is a spectrum of ideas about the rights of the individual when weighed against the needs of society, ideas that led to a number of revolutions, from the French to the feminist. We can trace the excitement and anxiety of a world in social flux though the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose writings over the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century describe a Britain in which strict class hierarchies were being reevaluated and reinvented. Both authors questioned the status quo, and they were unwilling to limit their subject matter to the traditionally “feminine” areas of courtship and marriage. Edgeworth repeatedly addressed the exploitation of the Irish peasantry and the degeneracy of the Irish landed classes, in addition to addressing anti-Semitism, anti-Irish prejudice, and the imbalance of power within marriage. Gaskell’s novels addressed everything from the radical chartist movement to illegitimacy to courtship. In political novels, industrial novels, and domestic novels of manners, Edgeworth and Gaskell attempt both to describe the breakdown of traditional class structures, and also to prescribe a way of accommodating social change while maintaining order. Though their individual subjects differed in their specifics, the works of both authors are unified by a preoccupation with change. For Edgeworth and Gaskell,

Servants and Paternalism

2

change was inevitable and generally positive, though both writers anticipate Elsie Raum’s nostalgia for traditional institutions and a well-ordered society governed by a benevolent ruling class. This tension between revolutionary sympathies and longings for a “happier” time of definite duties is especially evident in the way both authors foreground servant characters and their unique position within their household and society at large. Nineteenth-century British servants, with their intimate knowledge of household affairs, their influence over children, and their own limited personal freedom, become for Edgeworth and Gaskell essential characters for examining the tensions produced by social transformation and conflicting values. This book is predicated on the idea that “separate spheres” was an important cultural myth, but one that sometimes ignored household and social realities. Domestic relations and domestic conflicts nearly always have broad cultural implications. In addressing relationships between their servants and masters and mistresses, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell collapse the false dichotomy of public and private realms. While sometimes stereotyping their servant characters, their fiction also questions the reasons these stereotypes exist. The representation of domestic servants is integral to Edgeworth’s and Gaskell’s mission to depict social change and to accommodate this change while maintaining an orderly world. They bring servants out from behind the scenes of their fiction and make them visible. In doing so, they attempt to integrate political, economic, moral, and domestic issues. Through the characters of servants, the authors demonstrate their vision of a transformative paternalism infused with social rebellion. Although the works of both writers are frequently categorized as falling either into the realm of the domestic/ private or the social/public, their novels resist these neat categories in the same way that they resist easy answers to the problems of social change.1 Edgeworth is perhaps best known for her Irish novels, which condemn lazy Anglo-Irish landowners for their corruption and neglect of the Irish peasantry. Many critics have been hard-pressed to reconcile the overt political concerns of these works (the relationship between England and Ireland, or between the aristocracy and the peasantry) with Edgeworth’s seemingly more conventional domestic novels of manners and marriage. Similarly, the industrial novels of Gaskell, often noted for their bold treatment of factory life, are rarely considered in conjunction with her domestic works, which focus more on courtship and household life. This apparent split between their “private” domestic novels and their “public” social novels masks a shared strategy in which servant characters can both participate in domestic activities and comment on larger social conditions. For example, Edgeworth’s Ennui (1804) and The Absentee (1809) are often grouped with her Irish novels, but both are partially set in upper-class England, with scenes and characters from high life that could have come straight out of Belinda (1801). Likewise, Gaskell’s North and South, a classic nineteenth-century industrial novel, is as much a novel of manners with uncomfortable dinner parties, snobbish 1

See for example, James Newcomer’s Maria Edgeworth the Novelist (1973) and Felicia Bonaparte’s The Gypsy Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell’s Demon (1992) for lengthy discussions about the femininity of each novelist, and the split between their feminine/domestic qualities and their intellectual/political qualities.

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characters, and star-crossed lovers that would not be out of place in a Jane Austen novel. Although they were born over a generation apart, the two writers’ lives and works intersect in a number of ways. Edgeworth was one of the leading educational reformers of her time, and Gaskell was raised according to the principles laid out in Practical Education (1798), written by Edgeworth and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Their careers are nearly contiguous; Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), one year before Edgeworth’s death.2 It appears that the two never met, though Edgeworth was a close friend of Gaskell’s cousin, Henry Holland, and a regular correspondent with members of his family. Even though their paths never crossed directly, the young Lily Stevenson (as Gaskell was then known) was immersed in the same intellectual atmosphere in which Edgeworth was working and writing3. Gaskell was certainly well acquainted with Edgeworth’s works, and her last novel, Wives and Daughters (1865), is clearly influenced by Edgeworth’s final novel, Helen (1834)4. The two also had similar childhoods: both lost their mothers at a young age, both of their fathers remarried relatively quickly, and both had stepmothers who withheld affection from the children. Gaskell’s biographer John Chapple sees an important connection in the early lives of the two writers: The very scanty evidence about [Gaskell’s father] William Stevenson’s second marriage suggests that he and his wife did not provide a home and a set of friends for Elizabeth. Maria Edgeworth’s childhood was in some respects similar. Her mother had died in March 1773, only ten days after the birth of a third daughter when Maria was little more than five years old. Four months later her father married again, a beautiful but severe woman. Thereafter, Maria showed all the signs of being a disturbed child ... [Similarly], Even whilst living with her aunt Lumb [who raised Gaskell in Knutsford], Elizabeth seems to have lacked true friends and companions. (163)

These similar childhoods launched different lives, at least on the surface. Edgeworth was raised on a large Irish estate, working with her father to reform the relationship between tenants and landlords and to propose a model of educational reform for children of all social classes, while Elizabeth Stevenson married the Reverend William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and left Knutsford for the industrial city of Manchester, England. Edgeworth came of age during the French revolution and Irish rebellions, a period in which social unrest and violence were never far from people’s minds. Gaskell’s generation was much more politically stable thanks to the passage of the 1832 reform bill and a period of relative prosperity. But despite these apparent differences, the two novelists shared an engagement with a paternalist 2

Edgeworth’s sister read Mary Barton to her, after which Edgeworth wrote to Gaskell’s cousin Mary Holland, praising the book in general while criticizing its many deaths. 3 See John Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years for a description of the Hollands’ intellectual and social circle. 4 See Marlyn Butler, “The Uniqueness of Cynthia Kirkpatrick: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Maria Edgeworth’s Helen” (Review of English Studies 23 (1973) 278-90 and Eva Ashberg’s Borromeo’s “Maria Edgeworth, Fredrika Bremer and Elizabeth Gaskell: Sources for Wives and Daughters” (Gaskell Society Journal 6 (1992) 73-6) for more on Gaskell’s sources for Wives and Daughters.

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social philosophy and an interest in servants in order to explore the complicated dynamics of the domestic, economic, and political spheres. Maria Edgeworth has been termed a “daddy’s girl,” a loyal defender of the paternal social order. Her personal and professional relationship with her father was unarguably the most significant involvement in her life. After her mother’s death, Edgeworth lived with her father and a succession of stepmothers on their Irish estate, helping to educate her numerous half-siblings and serving as a companion to R.L. Edgeworth. She credits him as a guiding influence on all of her novels (except Castle Rackrent (1801) and Helen), on several theoretical works on education, and on her numerous stories written for children. In turn, she assisted him in managing the Edgeworth estate and instigating tenant-landlord reforms. As a result of the close working relationship between the two Edgeworths, critics have accused Maria of over-identifying with male power and speaking in a paternalistic voice; Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, for example, argues that Edgeworth reinforced the cultural and political status quo of the Irish ascendancy and the dependency of the agricultural peasant class. Yet both in her Irish novels and in those which take place in British society, Edgeworth foregrounds the voices and experiences of servants—peasants, wet nurses, and ladies’ maids. Few of her servants fall neatly into the child-like role prescribed for them by the paternalist ideology, though the attractive vision of the responsible master/father figure gently guiding the grateful dependent is never far from the surface of her work. Edgeworth explores but ultimately rejects two common sets of literary stereotypes—that of the blindly faithful domestic family retainer and the selfishly scheming family destroyer. In most of her works, social and political change is depicted as inevitable and ultimately constructive. While her works may be wistful for an idealized social hierarchy, they reflect the reality that such an ideal is complicated at best. Her writings reflect the tension between the real changing world in which she lived and nostalgia for a relatively stable world in which social roles are clearly defined. Edgeworth’s literary career coincides with the emergence of the middle class as a power base in England. Between the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the passage of the Whig Reform Act in 1832 (which allowed middle-class men to participate in the political system), diverse groups of people in the middle ranks of society came to adopt a shared set of values and political aims. At the center of these values was a belief in the redeeming power of domestic happiness, and the sometimes contradictory beliefs “in a free market economy and a commitment to the importance of maintaining ties of belonging to social order” (Davidoff and Hall 21). Thus the feudal ideal of paternalism espoused for centuries by upper-class landowners was carried over to the marketplace and the middle-class home in the nineteenth century. “Wives, children, servants, labourers, all could be described in the language of paternalism as the dependents and children of their father, their master, their guardian” (Davidoff and Hall 21). As Gary Kelly writes, the “new economy of money and merit” (in which “the former was supposed to accumulate in proportion to the latter”) both legitimized the values of the newly influential middle class while “preserving the hierarchical social order which they could take over from within” (89).

Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Servants

5

Although Edgeworth herself was a member of the ruling class, as are many of her characters, she believed that the middle class, with its emphasis on bourgeois domesticity rather than high society, offered the greatest promise for a moral and happy life. The wealthy character Granville Beauclerc in Edgeworth’s final novel, Helen, reflects the author’s own predisposition to domestic retirement: From his metaphysical habits of mind, and from the sensibility of his temper, he had been too soon disgusted by that sort of general politeness [in London high society], which, as he said, takes up the time and place of real friendship; and as for the intellectual pleasures, they were, he said, too superficial for him; and his notions of independence, too, were at this time quite incompatible with the conventional life of a great capital [London]. His present wish was to live all the year round in the country, with the woman he loved, and the society of a few close friends. (319)

Throughout Edgeworth’s oeuvre, the works with the “happiest” endings are the ones in which characters achieve this middle-class ideal of the bourgeois nuclear family. I look at some of these domestic works in Chapter 2, which examines the servant characters in some of Edgeworth’s English writings. These works are less overtly political than her Irish works are, but through her servant characters, Edgeworth integrates domestic concerns with wider social issues. Edgeworth depicts memorable servant characters and gives them major roles, though not always positive ones. In her novels of manners, Edgeworth’s servants struggle to negotiate a place for themselves within their employers’ families. Power struggles between servants and their masters or mistresses expose the contradictions inherent in a social system in which birth and circumstance determine so much. In Belinda, Edgeworth depicts two servants in flatly stereotypical ways, a depiction that would seem to reinforce a paternalist philosophy in which servants—like children—need constant supervision and guidance. Yet in an important sub-plot, a waiting maid voices the grievances of servants who are too easily overlooked and disregarded by their “betters.” In her final novel, Helen, Edgeworth indicts those of her class who view the education of the lower classes as “dangerous.” Apparently seeking a compromise between her attraction to social order and her understanding that “the signs of the times should always be consulted” (235), she advocates an aristocracy based on talent rather than on birth, one in which “every man born in England, even in the lowest station, may [rise]” (96). Servant characters in Edgeworth’s English novels awkwardly but importantly emerge from the margins of the story as Edgeworth struggles to account for and depict the social change that she knew was inevitable and that she viewed with equal doses of suspicion and enthusiasm. Two decades later, Elizabeth Gaskell would address some of the same conflicts, but would resolve them with much less ambivalence. In 1813, Maria Edgeworth traveled to England and paid a visit to the family of Henry Holland, a successful doctor and travel writer. The fashionable Dr Holland was part of an intellectual and social circle that included some of the most famous explorers, authors, and scientists of his time. His correspondence with Edgeworth over several decades describes his encounters with Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge, among others. Edgeworth was charmed

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by Holland’s family and began a life-long correspondence with his daughter Mary. “There is in the whole [Holland] family a true simplicity of character and a mutual affection which touches and attaches,” wrote Edgeworth in 1813 (Chapple 148). Edgeworth described the attractive town of Knutsford, where the Hollands and their extended family lived, as “interspersed with railed-in nice gardens, little nooky green spots, and here and there in the fields picturesque paths and cottages” (Chapple 114). In short, the Hollands struck Edgeworth as models of the progressive middle class that she idealized in her many novels, including Belinda, Ennui, and Helen, a family in which children of both sexes are taught to think and explore for themselves under the wise guidance of their enlightened and loving parents. Unfortunately none of the Edgeworth-Holland correspondence mentions Henry Holland’s young cousin, Lily Stevenson, the future Elizabeth Gaskell, who would later join Edgeworth as one of the century’s most successful British novelists. As Unitarians, Gaskell’s extended family held that girls and boys should be well educated and taught to make their own moral judgments. Gaskell’s biographer Jenny Uglow writes that: “Unitarian women were as influential as men in social reform,” (7), and young Lily Stevenson enjoyed the benefits of this progressive thinking. As she grew older, her father William Stevenson ensured that she be well read in literature and foreign languages, and that she know Latin. According to Uglow: “He had no patience with the ‘submissive’ school of girls’ education. In an 1826 review in The Westminster he declared that women should be seen as ‘companions and cooperators’ with men in intellectual pursuits” (41). By the time Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel in 1849, the Victorian era was well underway along with many of the social changes that Edgeworth had foreseen. The French Revolution was a half-century-old memory, and a similar revolution in England had been avoided through political reforms. Yet while Gaskell viewed her generation as far more progressive and less “pompous” (a word she uses in Cranford to describe the writings of Samuel Johnson) than Edgeworth’s, she was aware that individuals continued to be governed by strict social codes. Writing to a friend in 1838, Gaskell expressed frustration at the limits imposed on her life as a wife and mother: “I feel a stirring instinct and long to be off ... just like a bird wakens up from its content at the change of the season ... But ... I happen to be a woman instead of a bird ... and ... moreover I have no wings like a dove to fly away” (Uglow 1). Gaskell clearly understood that being a woman meant being grounded to her place in life. Her envy of the bird’s ability to take off spontaneously in flight is apparent in these words and in her published writings as well. In her novels she repeatedly portrays intelligent and independent women who are hampered in their ability to bring about change in their own lives and in society as a whole. A well-to-do woman with a fulfilling personal and professional life, Elizabeth Gaskell still felt caged, though as a successful author, she would later enjoy the privileges of frequent travel and the friendship of the greatest writers of her time including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin. Far more clipped were the wings of the servants who supported her and others of her class. Gaskell, who was personally close to her own servants, recognized this lack of freedom in the servant class and used it in her novels to investigate issues of personal responsibility

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versus personal fulfillment, and the satisfaction of performing one’s duty verses the thrill of seeking one’s aspiration. Like Maria Edgeworth’s novels of English life, Gaskell’s portraits of domesticity depict characters wrestling with unavoidable social and political changes, as I explore in Chapter 3. Cranford (1851), a novel frequently praised for its “charm,” Ruth (1853), and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) take place far from the poverty and grime of industry and union strikes, yet each of these books is preoccupied with the inevitability of social change. In these works, Gaskell investigates the nature of class conflict as it manifests itself within the home, and she exposes the paternalist system as inadequate, often even dangerous, and socially constructed rather than “natural.” Critic Natalie Kapetanios Meir notes that in Cranford, Gaskell “demonstrates that concepts that people assume to be moral truths are ideas, creations of tacit social agreements that, when repeated, take on the appearance of truth” (13). In Cranford, Gaskell uses servant characters to represent the new social order and to expose the harm caused by those who refuse to submit to change. In Ruth a “nattered” old servant becomes the heroine’s surrogate parent and a prime agent in her moral reformation. The relationship between her and Ruth—like that of the characters in Edgeworth’s English novels—is complicated, but ultimately mature and intimate, reinforcing Gaskell’s view that servants would play an important role in the societal changes which were already taking place in England. In Sylvia’s Lovers, Gaskell presents another story of a servant who steps in as a moral guide and parental figure, filling a vacuum caused by the failures of Sylvia’s husband and father. In an article about Gaskell’s religion, Kay Millard argues that the author’s Unitarianism is at least partially responsible for her depictions of fully developed characters across the social spectrum: [An] aspect of the Unitarian approach to humanity is apparent in Gaskell’s treatment of characters at the lower end of the social scale. Always, but particularly in Mary Barton and North and South, they are treated as fully rounded human beings. They are respected; their language is used as a part of their own culture, rather than an attempt to patronise them by suggesting that they have not been taught to speak properly ... Also, what the characters say is often profoundly instructive, particularly when they discuss issues of political economy. (11-12)

Like many of Gaskell’s admirers and critics, Millard tends to focus on Gaskell’s industrial novels when discussing the author’s interest in class, but Gaskell saw the servant class as equally “profound and instructive” and gave those characters important functions in nearly all of her works. But neither Edgeworth nor Gaskell confined herself to writing about the acceptably feminine subjects of marriage and family life. Both of these writers took on more explicitly political subjects and, when they did so, servant characters featured prominently in their vision. I discuss in Chapter 4 how Edgeworth uses servant characters to address the complex relationship between the Irish peasantry and their Anglo-Irish landlords (the class to which she belonged). Writing during a time in which a peasant uprising was a realistic fear among the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Edgeworth’s literary voice is a call for moderation. In The Absentee (1809), her solution to the harsh conditions of peasant life—starvation, disease, violence—is

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classic paternalism: kindness and generosity on the part of landlords, rewarded with loyalty and service on the part of the tenants. The worthy poor are kept in their place, though their humanity is recognized and their suffering abated. This solution, however, is only one of Edgeworth’s many statements on the subject of the Irish people. In Castle Rackrent and Ennui, Edgeworth chooses to focus on servant characters as representative of the peasantry, and through them she writes a scathing critique of the landowning class. These characters, Thady Quirk and Ellinor respectively, initially come across as loyal dependents in the paternalist tradition. They claim no greater pleasure than to serve their masters faithfully to the exclusion of all else. Yet these two novels, written during a period of dangerous social unrest, surprisingly depict an ascendant class in the midst of self-destruction. In both novels the wealthy inhabitants of the Irish big house are ruined and replaced by the children of servants, and Thady and Ellinor play a direct role in elevating their own sons at the expense of “the family.” Just as Edgeworth created a link between servants and Irish peasants, Elizabeth Gaskell draws a parallel between servants and industrial workers in her two “Condition of England” novels. These novels, which are the focus of Chapter 5, have been widely read and discussed in light of Gaskell’s solution to class conflict, but most critics have not expanded their analysis to include Gaskell’s portrayal of servants. In Mary Barton, a novel that overtly endorses a paternalistic relationship between factory owner and employee, Gaskell creates a servant character to show the connection between the worlds of domestic and industrial labor. This character, Alice Wilson, embodies the ideal of sacrificial devotion, a quality that Gaskell clearly admires, but that she also indicts as having caused Alice much private pain. Throughout the novel, Gaskell exposes the condition of domestic servitude as difficult for workers and degrading to employers. In North and South (1855), Gaskell prescribes an ideal relationship between mill owner and worker, one that imitates the intimacy of the master/servant dynamic. In one of the work’s most important subplots, Gaskell shows the Hale family coming to terms with the role of a maid within the family, and the difficulties of maintaining distinctions between family members and other dependents, a difficulty that she says will be faced by industrial workers as well, but that will result in improved class relations and economic success. Gaskell and Edgeworth studies have undergone a bit of Renaissance in recent years, but for over a century, their names were linked not as two “serious” writers with complex responses to social change. Instead they were linked in terms of their feminine charm. In 1890, Wilbur L. Cross claimed that Gaskell’s works were “only tales” and that the author herself was “hardly aspiring to the title of novelist.” Despite being an admitted admirer of Maria Edgeworth, Cross marginalized the contributions of both authors: In form and in aim [Gaskell’s writings] were accordingly of the Edgeworth type. Indeed Mrs. Gaskell may be said, in a general way, to have performed in them the same noble service to her contemporaries that Maria Edgeworth did to hers. She entered into the thoughts and wayward moods of children with true insight; she gave us the first English nurses and housekeepers of common sense and racy wit, the Nancys and the Sallys. (234)

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Critic Thomas Recchio discusses the fact that Cranford was a required text in many American public schools in the early decades of the twentieth century. He notes that the preface to a 1905 edition of the novel compares it to works by Maria Edgeworth, and that the author focuses on Gaskell’s “female sensibility” (606). A.W. Ward in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (pub. 1907-1921) also cites Edgeworth as an influence on Gaskell (Vol XIII). Though the assessments of these writers tended to be reductive, these early critics were right to link these authors and to find significance in their depiction of servants. The Nancys and the Sallys that Cross refers to are not as prevalent in the literature of Edgeworth’s and Gaskell’s time as they were in life. As Judith Terry remarks about Jane Austen’s avoidance of the servant class: “Talented servants would have been difficult to deal with under most circumstances; Jane very sensibly left them out of novel” (115). By this definition, neither Edgeworth nor Gaskell were sensible, as they both depicted talented, intelligent, generous servants who were also sometimes needy, arrogant, and selfish. In short, their servants are like the rest of their characters— individuals with faults and strengths. As a result, they are (to use Terry’s words) often “difficult to deal with,” and we see both authors struggle to fit the servant class into their visions for a transformed future in which the classes work together more amicably. In an article on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, Anne K. Mellor argues that women writers of this period often exhibited ambivalence about racial and social integration and change. Citing Edgeworth’s novel Harrington as an example, Mellor suggests that: the women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embraced the multiethnicity and racial intermixing of the growing British Empire with concerned, if at times notably anxious, sympathy rather than with unmitigated horror or revulsion. ... As [critic Saree] Makdisi puts it, the subaltern ideology that characterizes women writers from 1700 through 1830 and that conceptualizes the self as fluid, permeable, and absorptive becomes the dominant ideology of high Victorianism, as the imperialism of high Romanticism (with its insistence on immutable difference) gives way to that of Victorianism (with its troubled quest for sameness amid ever-increasing hybridity) (121). Only by attending to these complex intersections of gender, class, and racial identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can we hope to understand in depth what most powerfully links the entire range of women’s writing between 1700 and 1900 … Surveying recent anthologies and volumes of essays on British women’s poetry, drama and prose between 1700 and 1900, what is perhaps most striking about the development of women’s writing across all the genres in this era is that the female author almost never thought of herself as a solitary genius, divinely inspired. Instead, she saw herself as woven into a web of affiliations with her male literary peers and precursors; with her female literary friends, sisters, and mothers; with members of her family circle; and with the flora and fauna around her. (403-4)

Mellor’s comments here regarding race and ethnicity can also be applied to Edgeworth’s and Gaskell’s treatment of servants in their novels and stories. “Concern” and “anxiety” about the changing roles of servants within the household (and what those changes mean for the structure of the family) are certainly present, but “horror” at the servant class’s increasing independence and integration into

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the world of masters and mistresses is not. Their best works struggle to negotiate that space between anxiety and enthusiasm for social change, and for the changing relations between master and servant.

Chapter 1

Servants and Paternalism

Middle-class employers did not always consider it beneath them to engage practically in the work of housekeeping. But since the frenzy for display and excitement has seized upon all classes alike, mistresses are apt to impose upon their servants responsibilities for which the latter are unfitted by previous training to discharge. Nothing is more natural than that vexations and disappointments should be the result. Cassells Household Guide, c.1880s

The disparity between the expectations of an increasingly gentrified and demanding middle class and those of the increasingly independent servants they employed became the primary source of “the servant problem” in the nineteenth century. The phrase is most often used to refer to the problems employers had in hiring and keeping “good help,” but it applies equally to the problems servants experienced in trying to balance the conflicting claims of autonomy and duty. If authors of fiction such as Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell sometimes depicted servants in contradictory ways, it should not be surprising. Servant characters enable these writers to voice the contradictions inherent in a paternalist philosophy because the very situation of domestic servitude embodies a number of paradoxes. Servants made up the largest category of workers in England by the nineteenth century, and their labor was essential to the economic and social functioning of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society. Yet although these servants lived in the same houses as their masters and mistresses and were an intimate part of family life, they were expected to be socially invisible. Standing in the margins of both family and society, servants held both of these institutions together while personally remaining anonymous. An example of servant’s invisibility can be found in an 1832 travel book attributed to Prince von Pückler-Muskau, Tour of a German Prince, which detailed the daily life of the English as seen through a foreigner’s eyes. When von Pückler-Muskau describes the artistocracy, he writes in the active voice, when he describes any action performed by a servant, his writing switches to the passive. Describing an English dinner, which he claims are “everywhere alike,” he notes that, “The gentlemen lead the ladies into the dining-room,” and “When you raise your glass, you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking,” and “Every man pours out his own wine” (83-4). Each of these actions is performed by the hosts or guests of an English dinner party, and it is very clear who the subject of each sentence is: “gentlemen,” “you,” and “every man.” In contrast, “servants” are never described as performing any action directly: “The tablecloth is then removed; under it, at the best tables, is a finer, upon which the dessert is set,” and “Clean glasses are set before every guest and, with the dessert plates and knives and forks, small fringed napkins are laid,”

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and “Three decanters are usually placed before the master of the house” (Pritchet 48). Von Pückler-Muskau is not deliberately trying to minimize the servants’ role in putting together an elaborate dinner. It’s not personal. More likely, he simply does not consider domestic servants as having a role in the event: “gentlemen” and “ladies” walk in, sit, eat, drink, pour wine, talk, and walk out. By contrast, “glasses are set” and “decanters are placed” by an invisible hand. It was within this context of invisibility that Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell gave servants significant roles in their fiction even as the place of servants was diminishing in British literature. Bruce Robbins points out in his groundbreaking study, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), that the majority of nineteenth-century literary servants are stereotypes—either comic fumblers, sinister spies, or loyal feudal vassals who live to serve others: “In the thin and functional figure [of the literary servant], there is very little of the heroism or the sufferings of the working class” (6). Although servants play a significant role in eighteenthcentury novels and plays, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741) and Henry Fielding’s satire Joseph Andrews (1742), by the nineteenth century, they are “less central, less distinct, more engulfed in their masters’ characters and interests” (79). Robbins explains that with the Victorian novel, “titular servant protagonists like Pamela disappear or are gentrified into governesses. Verbal confrontation diminishes in length, frequency, animation, and centrality. If servants are addressed, it is often only in ... mute or monosyllabic commands” (79). Many nineteenth-century literary servants resemble those in the writings of Edgeworth’s contemporary Jane Austen. Despite the numerous servants in Austen’s fiction, they “hover and cluster in [her] plots like movie extras, filling the background spaces, with hardly a recognizable face among them, absolutely necessary, almost always dumb,” (104) according to Judith Terry.1 One explanation for these reductive or even absent literary depictions is the revival of a strong paternalist ideology in England during the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Critic Susan Reilly’s essay on nationalism in Pride and Prejudice suggests that authors like Austen view social paternalism as the best solution for confronting the destabilizing forces of change: “For Austen ... the ideal landowner embraces not the revolutionary ideals of equality and freedom, but the rural paternalism which assures the stability of the landed class.” In the world of many nineteenth-century novels such as Pride and Prejudice, social equality is not a desired objective, and thus the servants in these novels often lack complexity. According to the philosophy of social paternalism, every individual is obligated to serve the social order, but individuals serve in different and pre-ordained ways, depending upon their social position. David Roberts, author of Paternalism in Early Victorian England (1979), explains that, “those who held a paternalist outlook believed in the body politic, one in which every part had an appointed and harmonious place” (3). Furthermore, it was God who did the appointing, and it 1 Ironically, film adaptations of Austen’s novels prominently feature servants. See Roger Sales, “In Face of All the Servants: Spectators and Spies in Austen” for a discussion of servants in the BBC adaptation of Persuasion.

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was not for mere mortals to challenge His authority. “MS,” the semi-anonymous “Old Servant” and author of the memoir Domestic Service (1917), embraced her servile role for just this divine reason: “Work is another great blessing, and it has been wisely arranged by our Divine Master that all His creatures should have a work to do of some kind” (10). For servants like “MS,” obedience to their earthly masters was an extension of obedience to their heavenly one and they would no sooner rebel against the former as the latter. Hannah More’s 1792 pamphlet, Village Politics: Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers, in Great Britain, articulates the paternalist philosophy for those working-class readers who were becoming increasingly attracted to revolutionary ideas of equal rights.2 In Village Politics, More depicts a debate between two rustic characters, one of whom is attracted to Paine’s rhetoric. The paternalist position is articulated by Jack Anvil, a blacksmith, who answers the objections of Tom Hod, a mason: Tom: I don’t see why we are to work like slaves while others roll about in their coaches, feed on the fat of the land, and do nothing. Jack: My little maid brought home a story-book from the Charity-School the other day, in which was a bit of a fable about the Belly and the Limbs. The hands said, I won’t work any longer to feed this lazy belly, who sits in state like a lord, and does nothing. Said the feet, I won’t walk and tire myself to carry him about; let him shift for himself, so said all the members; just as your levelers and republicans do now. And what was the consequence? Why the belly was pinched to be sure; but the hands and the feet, and the rest of the members suffered so much for want of their old nourishment, that they fell sick, pined away, and wou’d have died, if they had not come to their senses just in time to save their lives, as I hope all of you will do. Tom: But I say all men are equal. Why should one be above the other? Jack: If that’s thy talk, Tom, thou dost quarrel with Providence and not with government. For the woman is below her husband, and the children are below their mother, and the servant is below his master.3 (Keen 213)

According to advocates of social paternalism, providence, not the will of a socially-constructed government, ordered the world, setting men above women, parents above children, and masters above servants. More’s piece reflects the very real fear that changing that natural order will have fatal social consequences. Within a generation or two (the time period that separated Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell), the social hierarchy of England had changed, so much so that Gaskell would look back at this feudal attitude with an attitude of amused indulgence. In a piece published in an American periodical in 1849, “The Last Generation of England,” Gaskell’s description of the world of her ancestors suggests that she finds them perplexing. She details the social hierarchy of life in small town England in the 2 More’s pamphlet was one of many responses to Thomas Paine’s inflammatory piece, The Rights of Man (1791 and 1792), which was itself a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). 3 More’s language is of course inspired by Alexander Pope’s famous passage in his 1733 Essay on Man, in which he asserts that “Everything that is, is right.” He also compares the social body to the human one, and asks: “What if the foot, ordained the dust to tread,/ Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head” (ll. 259-60).

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early nineteenth century. At the top of social hierarchy, she says, were “large landed proprietors of a very old family” presided over by unmarried daughters, “stately ladies they were, remembering etiquette and precedence in every occurrence of life, and having their genealogy at their tongue’s end” (319). Below them on the social ladder were the distant relations and younger sons of the same family (“also proud, but ... more genial”), professional families, and widowed gentry. Gaskell emphasizes that the “aristocratic dames” had impeccable pedigrees but no money. Nonetheless they took their roles seriously, and perpetuated the distance between themselves and their social inferiors with a combination of intimacy and avoidance: [They] refused to meet in general society the ci-devant housekeepers, or widows of stewards, who had been employed by their fathers and brothers, [but] they would occasionally condescend to ask “Mason,” or “that good Bentley,” to a private tea-drinking, at which I doubt not much gossip relating to former days at the hall would pass; but that was patronage; to associate with them at another person’s house, would have been an acknowledgement of equality. (320)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, such aristocratic pretensions had become enough of an anachronism to be gently mocked, yet the paternalistic thinking that had fostered these dynamics continued to govern domestic life as a comforting alternative to the harsh realities of a free market economy. Lord John Manners, a conservative parliamentarian and poet gives voice to this nostalgia for a feudal past when, in his words: The greatest owed connection with the least, From rank to rank generous feeling ran And linked society as man to man (McDowell 37)

Manners’s poem goes on to wish for a leader to raise “The feudal banner of forgotten days”: Then would the different classes once again Feel the kind pressure of the social chain (McDowell 37)

For social paternalists, the chains that connect human society are “kind” rather than binding, or rather they are binding in a mutually beneficial way. Of course, social paternalism reinforced the class system, which depended on servants both for their work and for what was possibly their more important symbolic function as designator of middle-class status. As the above passage by Gaskell suggests, the separation of master and mistress from servant was not effected merely by giving and receiving orders and wages, but by a social ideology that distinguished the upper classes as more intellectually complex, physically delicate, and morally superior. According to this social model, servants had a duty to work willingly and hard, and to accept gratefully and gracefully the place ordained for them by providence. As Gaskell notes, this dynamic continued to govern the relationship between mistress and servant even after the servant had left the household. Paternalism is inherently linked to patriarchy, the subordination of women and children to men, both within the family and within society. Paternalism justified and

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sustained patriarchal power by tempering its harshest features (the domination of the weak by the strong) with protection and kindness. As Hannah More’s character Jack tells Tom, “We have a king so loving, that he wou’d not hurt the people if he cou’d” (214). Paternalism and patriarchy are related terms, but not interchangeable: it is possible for individuals to live in a patriarchal society (as they did in nineteenthcentury Britain), but not adhere to the paternalist philosophy that dependents (women, servants, tenants) are like children, in need of the wise guidance of a benevolent father. While the word “paternalism” first came into use in the 1880s4, its ideas originated in the Middle Ages. The medieval bishop and educator Fulbert of Chartres articulated the mutual duties of vassals and lords in 1020. In exchange for a vassal’s assistance, faithfulness, and loyalty, his lord “ought to act toward his faithful vassal reciprocally in all these things. And if he does not do this he will be justly considered guilty” (24). Throughout the centuries that followed, the upper classes (and later the middle classes) had important responsibilities to those who served them. In her conduct book, The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1675), Hannah Wooley focuses not on what is required of servants, but what is required of their mistresses. At the top of her list is kindness and even love: If by a thorough inspection and experience you find you have a faithful Servant give her to understand you are not insensible thereof by your loving carriage, and kind acknowledgment of her fidelity, and frequently find out some occasions to give her some little encouragement to engage her continuance therein: do not dishearten her in her duty by often finding fault where there is little or none committed, yet be not remiss in reproving where she doth amiss. (109)

Wooley advocates a parent-child relationship between servant and mistress. The call for a woman to be “loving” to her maid suggests a pre-utilitarian ideal in which the duties of a mistress and her servant are not limited to work and compensation, but extend to fidelity, gratitude, and gentle correction. In its ideal form, the paternalist system prevented a range of abuses between ruler and ruled; in reality, it also patronized workers, women, and other dependents as being incapable of governing themselves, and it left them vulnerable to abuse and abandonment. The problem with paternalism (as well as the servant problem) centers on this contradiction: a seemingly ethical approach to the preservation of class distinctions was typically espoused in good faith by people with benevolent intentions. In practice, however, this system could be condescending under the best of circumstances and cruel under the worst. The notion of reciprocal obligations between classes was violently challenged during the French Revolution, an event that impacted the writings of both Edgeworth and Gaskell. Paternalism and chivalry may have been “the decent drapery of life,” In its early uses, the term “paternalism” had a positive connotation, as in “kindly paternalism.” By 1928 that connotation had changed: according to The Oxford English Dictionary, an article in Britain’s Industrial Future states, “‘Welfare work’ has an unpleasantly paternalist and patronizing sound” (emphasis mine). 4

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according to philosopher Edmund Burke, “a pleasing illusion, which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” but even Burke, a staunch defender of tradition and the “natural” inheritance of class, acknowledged that it was merely an illusion as early as 1790. By the 1840s, the industrial revolution was well underway. Urban England had largely abandoned social paternalism for a laissez-faire economy, and the working classes had more autonomy but fewer protections. Yet despite— or maybe because of—the French Revolution and the subsequent shift toward a hands-off relationship between employer and employee, strong vestiges of social paternalism continued to govern family life well into the nineteenth century. In a post-revolutionary, newly-industrial world, a carefully controlled social hierarchy modeled after the patriarchal family nostalgically appealed to people from across the social spectrum. Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843), acknowledged that the working classes had traded dependence for freedom, but memorably pointed out that, “‘Liberty to die by starvation’ is not so divine!” In the polemic voice of an Old Testament prophet, Carlyle eviscerates Victorian England for the laissezfaire policies that divided classes of human beings from one another. He calls for an urban adaptation of the old agrarian world of lord and peasant, one in which the “captains of industry” subordinate their workers by inspiring loyalty and love rather than merely giving orders and paying wages: [The Feudal Baron’s] fruitful enlarged existence included it as a necessity, to have men round him who in heart loved him; whose life he watched over with rigour yet with love; who were prepared to give their life for him, if need came. It was beautiful! It was human!

Carlyle’s notion of “noble loyalty in return for noble guidance” appealed to the many people in England who lived in fear of a “French” Revolution at home or who merely felt distanced from a past world in which “everyone knew their place” to quote former servant Elsie Raum from this book’s Introduction. This ideal of noblesse oblige was reinforced by conduct books and extended from the upper gentry to the servant class. Isabella Beeton, whose popular Book of Household Management (1861) instructed Victorian women and their staff on all matters ranging from polishing boots to mothering, emphasized the importance of “charity and benevolence” to all household mistresses no matter how small their income: Visiting the houses of the poor is the only practical way really to understand the actual state of each family. ... Great advantages may result from visits paid to the poor; for there being, unfortunately, much ignorance, generally, amongst them with respect to all household knowledge, there will be opportunities for advising and instructing them, in a pleasant and unobtrusive manner, in cleanliness, industry, cookery, and good management. (14)

Beeton emphasizes acts of charity for two reasons: the first is to encourage “understanding” between classes. Writing in an industrial age in which employers generally had no knowledge of the living conditions of their workers, Beeton seeks to remedy this distance between classes by bringing well-to-do mistresses into the homes of the poor. This is an important goal for social paternalists as it emphasizes

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the familial nature of society. On the surface, this visiting brings the classes together, but it does not attempt to equalize them. Beeton’s second reason for encouraging charity, “advising and instructing” the poor, reinforces class differences. A respectable woman may herself be relatively poor, Beeton suggests, but there is a world of difference between her and the poor she seeks to assist. The differences between them are meaningful, and they are the differences between knowledge and ignorance, cleanliness and dirt, industry and sloth. Without directly stating it, Beeton suggests that a paternal social order, and middle-class women’s own powerful role within it, can be maintained if they perform their proper—and socially important— duties.5 The Irish aristocrat Maria Edgeworth and the well-to-do minister’s wife Elizabeth Gaskell both played the part of Lady Bountiful in their own lives and shared a strong belief that the well-to-do classes had obligations to relieve the suffering of those less fortunate than themselves. Yet while they were attracted to the notion of a society in which social hierarchies could be maintained to benefit all classes, they shared a distrust toward these hierarchies and were drawn to the idea of social change, both in the private world of domesticity and marriage and in the public world of politics and work. Through their depictions of servant characters, Edgeworth and Gaskell expose the potential for dehumanization and corruption in the paternalist philosophy. Both authors go so far as to create servant characters who are stronger, more successful, and more capable than their masters and mistresses, undermining the notion that these people are in need of the fatherly guidance of their “betters.” As noted, Edgeworth’s and Gaskell’s depictions of servants, and by extension their positions on social paternalism, can be contradictory. This ambivalence is not unusual and is often the hallmark of real social change. Feminist critics have observed that women writers are often confronted with contradictory impulses when they depict class conflict. Elizabeth Langland points out that bourgeois women, who comprised the majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, “were both oppressed as women and oppressors as middle-class managers [of the household and its servants]” (18). Caught between these two opposing positions, women were as often the unwitting agents of social change as they were the conscious defenders of their own privileged class. Rosemarie Bodenheimer makes a related statement about the novels of Gaskell, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Brontë, a statement that could be applied to Edgeworth as well: “Oscillations between sympathy for a revitalized paternalism and sympathy for its rebellious antithesis characterize [their works]” (17). Bodenheimer’s study examines “a way of thinking about middle-class heroine’s tales in terms that emphasize their flexible capacity to embody necessarily contradictory ideas about class and government or gentility and work” (17). Bodenheimer does not examine the role of servants, but she does describe an uncertainty about class issues common to works by nineteenth-century women writers. The term “female paternalist” might appear to be an oxymoron, implying 5 For an interesting study on the relationship between charity and power, see Peter Shapely, Charity and Power in Victorian Manchester (2000) in which he claims that, in industrial Manchester, charitable reputations “with notions of Christian duty, care, and benevolence, were central to the acquisition and maintenance of status” (63).

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as it does both womanhood and fatherhood. Thus, for women writers, even those attracted to the outlook, social paternalism is unavoidably complicated by gender. True paternalists, like General Clarendon in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Helen, recognize sovereign male authority, and generally take a dim view of social changes, particularly those that distribute economic, political, and social power to those in dependent positions. These dependents include domestic servants and other workers, but they also include women, even (or especially) those women from within their own families and class. Neither Edgeworth nor Gaskell was a direct advocate for “the rights of women,” but within their novels, their characters promote women’s right to education and self-determination. Similarly, neither authors were social “levelers,” but their servants and other working class characters convincingly and repeatedly voice their dissatisfaction with their assigned roles. The works of Edgeworth and Gaskell are most awkward when they unquestioningly endorse paternalism, suggesting of course, that they do not endorse it at all, but rather support an alternate form of stable social structure in which all—rich and poor alike—perform their assigned duties. This structure may look like paternalism at times, but more often, serves as a critique of it. Both Edgeworth and Gaskell feigned a lack of knowledge of, or interest in, politics and economics, laying claim instead to the more traditionally feminine knowledge of domesticity and the human heart. But of course, these disclaimers can be seen as disingenuous, masking potentially subversive ideas under the nonthreatening guise of female humility. In fact, the distinction between the domestic and public arenas has always been blurred. A number of critics have deconstructed the binary opposition between the domestic and professional worlds, positing the home as a site of economic activity and professionalism. As Dorice Williams Elliot writes in an article on Gaskell: “[A]lthough the domestic ideology that promoted the privatized and feminized home as a separate sphere and a refuge from the hostile public world of men was accepted as natural and true in nineteenth-century England, neither the public nor the private sphere was as discrete or unified as it seemed” (26). Elizabeth Langland explains: “Prevailing [nineteenth-century] ideology held the house as a haven, a private sphere opposed to the public, commercial sphere. In fact, a house and its mistress served as a significant adjunct to a man’s commercial endeavors. Whereas men earned the money, women had the important task of managing those funds towards the acquisition of social and political status” (8). Despite idealistic rhapsodies on the sanctity of the home, the domestic sphere did not exist apart from such “worldly” matters of labor management, social advancement, and trade. As Thad Logan notes: “Women, insofar as they were responsible for domestic arrangements, played a critical role, at a local level, in the management of things. It was women who were primarily responsible for deploying objects to create the interior space identifiable as ‘home.’ They were, in some sense, its inmates, but they were also its producers, its curators, and its ornaments” (26). And another study by Susan Johnson “challenge[s] ... arguments about the division of the political from other fictional genres and the private from the public sphere, reformulating the place of the household in the liberal polity” (4). When it came to the management of household staff, many nineteenth-century women no doubt would have preferred a more passive role. Unlike the feudal

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ideal, the actual relationship between servants and their masters and mistresses was often fraught with mutual distrust and marked by power struggles. By the 1930s in England and the United States, ladies’ magazines featured print ads that touted electricity as “the silent servant.” It was a brilliant marketing strategy: early electrical appliances may have made a lot of noise, but housewives weren’t likely to encounter an inebriated blender or a gossiping hairdryer. A silent servant would be a welcome addition to the home. The slogan suggests that the presence of servants in a middle-class household had become barely tolerable. Yet while electricity may have eventually played a role in eliminating the need for domestic servants, these same servants must have hailed its advent as a blessing. In the days before electrical irons, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners, maintaining even a modest household was the work of long hours and heavy physical labor, work often done by one teenage girl. Isabella Beeton devotes a long chapter to the management and duties of domestic servants accompanied by a staggering list of responsibilities. A footman’s duties, for example, included cleaning the family’s boots and shoes, cleaning and sharpening the kitchen knives, trimming the lamps, brushing the master’s clothes and hats, and polishing the furniture. While this may seem like a busy, but manageable day’s work, the author informs her readers that these are just the duties that should be performed before breakfast: “Having got through his dirty work, the single footman has now to clean himself and prepare the breakfast. He lays the cloth on the table; over it the breakfast-cloth, and sets the breakfast things in order, and then proceeds to wait upon his master” (2182). The rest of his day consists of waiting on his master, serving and cleaning up after meals, and standing behind his master’s chair during meals to refill the company’s glasses and to serve additional helpings. Footmen were a luxury and only the most well-off families would have been able to afford one. At the bottom of the servant hierarchy toiled the maids-of-allwork, often young girls brought in from an orphanage to work in a middle-class household. These servants worked alone, sometimes for seventeen hours a day, and often slept on a pallet on the basement kitchen floor. Beeton sympathized with these girls: “The general servant, or maid-of-all-work, is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration: her life is a solitary one, and in, some places, [sic] her work is never done” (2340). Before the family woke for breakfast each morning, this adolescent girl would have completed the following tasks: The general servant’s duties commence by opening the shutters (and windows, if the weather permits) of all the lower apartments in the house; she should then brush up her kitchen-range, light the fire, clear away the ashes, clean the hearth, and polish with a leather the bright parts of the range, doing all as rapidly and as vigorously as possible, that no more time be wasted than is necessary. After putting on the kettle, she should then proceed to the dining-room or parlour to get it in order for breakfast. She should first roll up the rug, take up the fender, shake and fold up the table-cloth, then sweep the room, carrying the dirt towards the fireplace; a coarse cloth should then be laid down over the carpet, and she should proceed to clean the grate, having all her utensils close to her. When the grate is finished, the ashes cleared away, the hearth cleaned, and the fender put back in its place, she must dust the furniture, not omitting the legs of the tables and chairs; and if there are any ornaments or things on the sideboard, she must not dust round them, but lift them up on to another place, dust well where they have been standing, and then replace

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A servant girl who performed these duties well, and also bore with the “rougher treatment” (2340) that accompanied such a low position in a relatively poor household, might eventually find a place in the home of a respectable middle-class family, but she could not expect to end her career as a lady’s maid in a large estate. Within the servant class, as beyond it, there were limits to social mobility. As necessary as their actual labor was, economist Thorstein Veblen noted in 1899 that “the chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay” (65). The presence of servants in a household meant respectability and status. The absence of servants meant social inferiority. In Austen’s Persuasion, when the author wishes us to be aware of a character’s reduced social standing, she describes her as “living in a very humble way, unable to afford herself the comfort of a servant, and of course almost excluded from society” (144, italics mine). A single woman living alone without a servant would have been excluded from society. Not even her friend, the novel’s heroine Anne Eliot, would have been expected to socialize with her publicly. Rather Anne pays charitable visits to the unfortunate companion. In an essay on nineteenth-century convict servants in Australia, Dorice Williams Elliott describes the desperate measures middle-class women sometimes went to in order to have household help. Due to a shortage of “respectable” servants in the penal colony, Elliott writes, “almost the only way to procure domestic servants was to have convicted felons ‘assigned’ by the government” (163). She goes on to highlight the significance of this fact: “That formerly English middle-class women were willing to employ such women in their homes shows just how important it was for them to have servants” (163). Clearly, it was preferable to live with thieves and prostitutes than to risk one’s social position by doing household labor. Without at least one servant, no home could claim to have achieved middle-class status. Most households had at least eight domestic servants, and larger estates had up to 50 (Horn 91). In her 1840 novel The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy, Frances Trollope depicts the social success of a new class of Englishmen and women, factory owners. These supplanters of the aristocracy received their wealth from industry, rather than land, and thus their standing in society was tenuous. Yet the novel’s Lady Dowling signifies her status by surrounding herself with the trappings of wealth and position: There was hardly an individual within ten miles who was not aware that Lady Dowling kept two carriages, six horses, one coachman, one postillion, five gardeners, two grooms, three footmen, one butler and a page—not to mention two nurses, four nursery-maids, and

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more ladies-maids, housemaids, cookmaids, kitchen-maids, laundry-maids, still-room maids, dairy maids and the like, than any other lady in the county. (5)

Lady Dowling’s servants, like her carriages and horses, exist as much for display as for use. They are signs of her wealth and status, signifiers to those who would question her position as an upper class woman. Even more important than the fact that Lady Dowling employs such an impressive staff is that “there was hardly an individual within ten miles was not aware” of it. Moreover, Lady Dowling has an impressive number of male servants. Female servants were relatively common (hence, their existence is dismissed with a “not to mention”), but 14 male servants is worth noting. Naturally, like the rest of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society, the servant class was hierarchical: at its top were butlers, housekeepers, and head cooks, with male servants receiving more pay and prestige than female ones (although 90 per cent of servants at this time were female). One historian notes that: “Only a tiny minority, perhaps no more than 5 per cent on whole, lived and worked in the great houses in country and town of the aristocracy, landed gentry, and the very wealthy upper class, and experienced the group customs and traditions of the servants’ hall” (Thompson 248). The sleeping spaces of many servants—shared attic bedrooms and dark basements—were damp and often crowded, creating living conditions so unhealthy that they eventually drew the attention of Florence Nightingale, who spoke out against the situation. While the physical labor performed by household servants was exhausting, the position was made even more difficult because of the nature of the masterservant dynamic. While the nation’s industrial employees were expected to fend for themselves no matter how desperate their lives might be, employers of servants took an active interest in the personal lives of their domestics. Even a high-ranking servant in a large household had practically no free time, and no independent social life. Some servants received one afternoon off per week (others one per month), they were expected to attend church services regularly, they were often expected to remain unmarried, and they were dismissed without references if their moral character was called into question. Cassells Household Guide, which was published in several editions during the nineteenth century, includes the following advice for regulating servant behavior: •

•

• •

Whether “followers” [suitors] are allowed is a question often put by a servant on applying for a situation. Except under very rare circumstances, it is better to disallow the privilege. (102) A mistress should be careful not to bind herself to spare her servant on a certain day in every month, as is sometime demanded. “Once a month when convenient” is a better understanding. (103) [Regarding church attendance]: the [servant’s] absence [to attend church] ought not to extend very much beyond the time occupied in church service. (103) Early rising is an essential quality in a servant who has to do any amount of housework before breakfast. Six o’clock is the latest hour at which she should rise. (147)

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As Jessica Gerard points out, employers had numerous motives for closely monitoring the private lives of their servants: “[Romance] among staff ... created jealousies; outside attachments introduced illicit guests, even thieves into the house; and both unwed pregnancy and marriage required a maidservant to leave service, necessitating a tiresome search for her replacement” (195). Despite careful vigilance, however, human nature apparently prevailed: during the Victorian years, servants were responsible for the largest percentage of illegitimate births in England (Kane). Periodical articles and other forms of social journalism of the nineteenth-century reflect a significant amount of anxiety about the autonomous behavior of domestic servants. One 1867 work, Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, comments with disgust on the prevailing epidemic of “servantgalism ... a combination of vanity, affectation, ignorance, and impudence” a problem that is “no joke,” considering that these girls will become “the wives of working men and mothers of their children” (190). While the author attributes such behavior in part to “the general fastness of the age,” he especially laments the tendency of servant girls to read novels published in “cheap serials” (191). As a result, imaginative girls dream of escaping from their dull lives, while “household duties are neglected in order to find time to read” (192). Clearly, despite their grueling work demands, servants did have talents, interests, and ambitions of their own, yet these were generally unnoticed by their employers. The Yorke family of Wales was unique in that they meticulously documented their servants’ experiences. Over a 300-year period, the Yorkes commissioned more portraits of their domestic staff than they did of themselves, and the family patriarchs wrote lengthy poetic inscriptions to accompany most of these portraits. The verses depict an idealistically harmonious relationship between master and servant (at least as viewed through the eyes of the master). Yet while the masters and mistresses of the Yorke’s Erddig estate did seem to value their servants to an unusual degree and treat them uncommonly well, documents reveal that they were reluctant to allow them the kind of personal fulfillment they might accord a member of their own class. One of their maids, Elizabeth Ratcliffe (known as “Betty the little”) was a gifted artist who enjoyed the patronage of her master’s family. The Yorkes commissioned from her a number of portraits, copies, and drawings, as well as models of Chinese pagodas and classical structures.6 Yet despite receiving considerable support from the Yorke family, Ratcliffe found that there were limits on how much she would be permitted to accomplish as an artist. In a 1768 letter to her son, Dorothy Yorke wrote: “Betty the little, is at work for you [painting a commissioned work]; but pray my dear do not imploy her in that again for one year at least, as all her improvements sink in drawing & then I shall have no service from her & make too fine a Lady of her, for so much is say’d on that occasion that it rather puffs up” (Waterson 36). Ratcliffe nonetheless continued her ambitious artistic output, but she must have done so without seeming too “puffed up,” as she was rewarded with a generous stipend upon Dorothy Yorke’s death in 1787. Unfortunately, there are no letters from “Betty the little” indicating how difficult it was to balance her two roles.

6

Ratcliffe’s work is still on display at the Erdigg estate.

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A century later, the Yorkes were still curtailing the freedom of their domestic help. In an 1871 letter to the Yorke housekeeper Harriet Rogers, J.C. Maddocks upbraids her friend for neglecting to visit: If I say I was pleased to receive your letter I should say what I did not feel. So often have we looked forward to the pleasure of your visit but as often as we have looked we have been disappointed and for what reason? First because Miss Rogers had not the courage to ask Mrs. Yorke for a week’s leave. Things seem impossible, until an effort is made, and as we said when we were speaking about this subject, the longer you remain satisfied with so little liberty the longer you shall be. (Waterson 85)

Harriet Rogers’s letter reminds us that human beings desire liberty even when they are well cared for by someone they respect, as they would necessarily be in an ideal paternalistic relationship. This lack of liberty that defined servants’ lives began to make domestic service a less desirable occupation for young people by the midnineteenth-century, while factory work became more attractive. An 1862 article in the Edinburgh Review records and tries to explain some of the reasons that the popularity of domestic work was diminishing: “The liberty which endears factory life to both lads and lasses is in strong contrast with the restraints of domestic service. ... Beyond their kitchen mates, [servants] seldom have any free and prolonged conversation; while the day workers pass to and from the factory in groups, can take walks, or spend the evenings together. ... In one word, it is independence against dependence” (Kane 76-7). Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Frederic Engels, and other writers of the industrial revolution record the appalling conditions of English factory life in their works, and it may be surprising that many young people came to prefer a life in industry to the comparatively protected world of domestic service. Yet young people were drawn to industry life for the very reasons that Gaskell and Dickens opposed it—because the laissez-faire policies of the mills allowed workers an amount of personal freedom they were not permitted as members of a domestic staff: English factory workers were typically viewed strictly in terms of their production value. Their feelings and their social lives were of no interest to the captains of industry. Despite a powerful medieval nostalgia from important nineteenth-century thinkers like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, there was little likelihood that industry bosses would become loving caretakers of their employees, most of whom neither desired nor sought such a relationship. In contrast, it was not enough for servants to abide by their terms of contract. They were expected to accept—even cherish—their subservient roles. And a proper servant accepted his or her role with gratitude. Thorstein Veblen writes: “The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously know his place ... Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical function” (emphasis mine). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century complaints about servants were commonplace, but the most distressing problem with servants seemed to be their tendency to forget their “place.” Daniel Defoe’s early-eighteenth-century complaint against the “Pride, Insolence, and Exorbitant Wages of our Women, Servants, Footmen, &c” expresses common fears that class distinctions between masters and servants were becoming obsolete:

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Servants and Paternalism The apparel of our women servants should ... be regulated, that we may know the mistress from the maid. I remember I was once put to the blush, being at a friend’s house, and by him required to salute the ladies, I kissed the chamber-jade into the bargain, for she was as well dressed as the best. But I was soon undeceived by a general titter, which gave me the utmost confusion; nor can I believe myself the only person who has made such a mistake. (7)

From Defoe’s perspective, servants may have been willing to do their appointed work, but their desire to appear like everyone else made life unnecessarily confusing. Factory hands, who were not living with their bosses and so were in less danger of being confused for them, were burdened with no such expectations of humility. By 1889, a study of female laborers in London found that “The greatest objection servants have to domestic service is ‘loss of independence’” (Toilers in London 151). The study quotes letters written by servants that illustrate this discontent. One “West End Housemaid” writes: “The work is not so hard as my last place, but it is bad enough. What is worse than the work is the whims of my mistress. ... I can scarcely ever get out for myself, but I must go whenever they choose to send me. If I am busy or ill it makes no difference. She is neither willing for me to go to see my friends nor for them to come to see me. ... If one’s brother comes on a visit, he is reckoned as a burglar” (156). Such employer “whims” were not part of the regulated well-defined tasks of factory life. As significant as it was, the labor shift from domestic to industrial labor occurred slowly; in 1851 almost a million girls and women were still employed as household servants (Kane 76), more than twice the number that were employed in industry. In fact, “between 1851 and 1871, the number of female servants increased twice as fast as the population as a whole” (Franklin, 212). Members of middle- and upper-class British society devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to the arduous task of servant management. Falling well short of the ideal of the loving master and mistress were the complaining ones, frustrated at the realities of living with and managing servants. Diaries and letters of the English middle-class and gentry betray a preoccupation with “the servant problem.” As far back as the early-eighteenth century, Defoe felt that his servants held him hostage: The great height to which women-servants have brought their wages, makes a mutiny among the men-servants, and puts them upon raising their wages too; so that in a little time our servants will become our partners; nay, probably run away with the better part of our profits, and make servants of us vice versa. But yet with all these inconveniences, we cannot possibly do without these creatures. (6)

Defoe clearly feared that the servant class was gaining power. His concern that domestics might “make servants of us” is pervasive in the journalism and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Edgeworth and Gaskell also depict masters and mistresses who worry about the reversal of the power structure and deem themselves the slaves of their domestic staff. While Defoe knows that he is unlikely to be seeking employment as his footman’s footman in the near future, the underlying apprehension is that things are changing: servants are defining their terms and are in fact more competent than their masters who cannot possibly do

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without them. If social paternalism is founded on the notion of mutual dependency, servants getting the upper hand might just bring down the system. A 1748 essay in Gentlemen’s Magazine expresses a similar helpless frustration at the servant class’s apparently shocking desire to earn money. The essay, by “a Foreigner,” criticizes the English custom in which guests tip the servants of a household following a visit. The author speculates that these actions reflect a lack of regulatory power on the part of the masters and are a sign of the “sordid mercenary souls of the servants” (456). The fact that servants desired compensation for their work is an unpleasant reminder that servants are not, in fact, members of the family, but are performing a job for pay. This reality undermines the paternalist ideal by pulling aside the “decent drapery” of chivalry and exposing the economic underpinnings of the master-servant relationship. Like Defoe, the author acknowledges his helplessness in trying to end the practice: “There is not a man of sense, who does not perceive the inconveniences of this custom; but it is an old one, and as such, universally observed” (456). Servants might have been overlooked when a household ran smoothly, but they were easy scapegoats when things went wrong. When Philip Yorke’s first wife left him early one morning shortly after their marriage (fleeing in the early morning hours and hitching a ride with a milk delivery float), Mr Yorke blamed his wife’s behavior on the bad influence of a servant. In a letter to a friend, he writes, She went off with her maid without ever wishing me Adieu or any one else in the house. Since then I have heard nothing of her, beyond that her maid came over to Erdigg to ask for her things. I, not unnaturally refused to see the hateful creature (who, I believe, is the cause of my wife’s estrangement from me), and as no note came with her, I know nothing more of her, and I must look forward to a lifelong misery and loneliness, as I am doing now. (Waterson 87)

Whatever role the maid actually played in Mrs Yorke’s disappearance, Mrs Yorke was gone for good. Merlin Waterson, chronicler of the Yorke family history (and the history of their servants) suggests that the cause of the marital breakup lay rather with Philip’s “tactless insistence that their honeymoon should be spent painting watercolours, never a particularly sociable activity.” Clearly, it was easier to blame the maid than the painting. What to do when one is completely dependent upon individuals who set a bad example with their “saucy and insolent behaviour, their pert, and sometimes abusive answers, their daring defiance of correction” (Defoe 6)? Accept it with resignation apparently: one new Victorian bride (another Mrs Yorke) records that she was “having great trouble with the numerous servants. Some are too noisy, some too grand, some find the work too much. I wonder if I shall ever be quite settled” (Waterson 90). Another woman recites a litany of complaints about her domestic staff and concludes by admitting: “My life feels shortened by these things” (Horn 92). Squire Dearman Birchall, whose diary offers insight into the day-to-day management of a large estate, wrote about his own domestic troubles in 1876:

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Servants and Paternalism Considered the servant problem. Mrs Newsholm had said that Sandy having left she would not mind coming back. Margaret said that Mrs Newsholm was conscientious and well disposed but prejudiced and inclined to listen to tales. Mrs N said that Sandy’s language was shameful and unfit for young girls to hear and he neither could nor did work, leaving all to the footmen to do. Ann said that for long servants had set one another against the place. Even Keen was unsettled the first year he was here, and told her he had heard tales to induce him to leave ten times. Tothill, although a good worker, had never been a friend to the family and never lost an opportunity of saying and hinting and insinuating things against us, and there was no love lost between Tothill and me. He was very ungrateful, Mrs Newsholm did not think Emily [Birchall, his wife] exactly put her in her right place in reference to underlings. (16 October 1876)

Living with and managing servants may have been viewed as a necessary part of life, but it was one that was in fact rarely embraced with enthusiasm or guided by affection. It didn’t help, perhaps, that unruly servants, like unruly children, were usually held to be the fault of poor management on the part of their mistresses. It must have added to a woman’s anxiety to read Beeton’s opinion that “[I]f they [servants] perceive that the mistresses conduct is regulated by high and correct principles, they will not fail to respect her” (19). Along similar lines, Florence Nightingale writes in Notes on Nursing (1860) that problems between mistresses and servants can usually be attributed to mistresses: “It is often said that there are few good servants now; I say there are few good mistresses now. As the jury seems to have thought the tap was in charge of the ship’s safety, so mistresses now seem to think the house is in charge of itself. They neither know how to give orders, nor how to teach their servants to obey orders—i e., to obey intelligently, which is the real meaning of all discipline.” Nightingale advises middle-class women to demonstrate the proper way to clean to their servants: If your chimney is foul, sweep it ... Don’t imagine that if you, who are in charge, don’t look to all these things yourself, those under you will be more careful than you are. It appears as if the part of a mistress now is to complain of her servants, and to accept their excuses—not to show them how there need be neither complaints made nor excuses.” In other words, there are no bad servants, only bad mistresses. Perhaps because of the numerous complications involved in keeping servants humble, sober, chaste, loyal and honest, members of the gentry relied heavily on references from previous employers in deciding whether to hire a servant. As Frank Dawes points out: “A servant was not a slave and was free to give notice and leave. But in practice, the servant was entirely dependent on the mistress for a reference, and without a satisfactory reference, stood no chance of getting another job in private service” (104). The gentry knew the power of these references. Hannah Wooley advises housewives to be careful about giving harsh references about a bad servant: “do not (as a great many much to blame) give too ill a character of her, which will raise you little benefit, although it may lay the basis of her utter ruin” (109). Since good help was hard to find, a good reference went a long way: Three days after the birth of his eldest son, Squire Birchall was more focused on his new butler than his new heir, recording in his diary the servant’s positive reference from “Countess Beauchamp who says she considers him to a butler thoroughly to be depended upon, very sober and steady and trustworthy” (29 September 1875).

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One woman apparently grew frustrated with the qualities a prospective employer demanded of her former servant, and wrote in her letter of reference: “If John Smith could answer to half your demands, I should have married him long ago” (Gerard 193). As Sarah Stickney Ellis noted in 1839, “Servants are required to have no faults” (180). Despite their often one-dimensional representation in literature, journalism, and conduct books, people living in nineteenth-century Britain knew that servants had something to offer beyond a clean house and a sign of status. Most servants found ways to enjoy themselves and many of their “betters” commented on their sense of fun. Semi-annual hiring fairs known as “mop fairs” ended with dances. London servants saw performances by German acrobats known as “The Flying Pretzels” on their days off. Some servants learned music in their masters’ drawing room after the rest of the family retired. Of course, servants had to find entertainment where they could, so an occasional hanging “was a favoured spectator sport of the lower classes” (Dawes 128). The eighteenth-century country parson James Woodforde reports in his diary in 1777 that “My servants Will and Suky went to a Puppett Show this evening and kept me up till after 1 o’clock” (54). In 1917, former servant “MS” remembered with fondness the Victorian “servants’ balls” in which “[t]he ... servants had to practice dancing every night as we all had to be present at the servants’ ball that was on the third night [of her master’s coming of age celebration]. The first was the gentry’s ball, then the tenants’ ball, and ours last; so most of us were tired, but we had a very nice time” (19). A Victorian hotel chambermaid reported that, “We have great fun among us servants, and we bet on steeple-races” (Toilers in London 158). As children, one set of Victorian cousins enjoyed the laughter and the jokes of the servants’ quarters, adding that the “the vivid and interesting life going on below stairs was like the difference between eating plain bread and rich cake” (Horn 27-8). Surprisingly, many British novelists often chose to avoid “the interesting life going on below stairs” in favor of a one-dimensional portrayal of servants’ lives, if they portrayed them at all. Consider some examples: Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is both a hero and a servant, but as he later turns out to be descended from gentry, we are left to assume that his finer qualities were inherited. The novel’s other servants include the virtuous Fanny Goodwill and the repulsive Mrs Slipslop, a lusty middle-aged woman who speaks in malapropisms, who attempts to seduce Joseph (and any other man she can find), who blackmails her mistress, and who lies about other servants, causing at least one unfortunate girl to lose her position. Her personal attractions are noteworthy: … being very short, and rather too corpulent in body, and somewhat red, with the addition of pimples in the face. Her nose was likewise rather too large, and her eyes too little; nor did she resemble a cow so much in her breath as in two brown globes which she carried before her; one of her legs was also a little shorter than the other, which occasioned her to limp as she walked. (72)

In addition to being hideously repellent, Slipslop is a spy. Like many literary servants, she listens at keyholes and uses her knowledge to advance her own interests. This lack of privacy was an inevitable part of living with servants, and possibly

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the most loathed. William Thackeray writes in Vanity Fair about the “servants inquisition,” warning the confident member of the upper class that, [Y]our secret will be talked over by those men at their club at the public house tonight. Jeames will tell Chawls his notions about over their pipes and pewter and beer pots. Some people ought to have mutes for servants in vanity fair—mutes who could not write. If you are guilty, tremble ... If you are not guilty, have a care of appearance: which are just as ruinous as guilt. (437)

Such passages help explain the appeal of “the silent servant.” While most servants did not, of course, ruin their masters and mistresses lives, the damage they did inflict could have serious consequences. In the eighteenth century, they were frequent witnesses in divorce trials: who would have better evidence of adultery than the people who answered doors and changed sheets? The idea that servants had access to private information about their masters and mistresses was accompanied by the even greater fear that they might publicize or even invent unflattering stories. Possibly as a result, many pains were taken to paint the servant class as dishonest. A Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1847 essay on the Discourses of the artist Joshua Reynolds gives voice to this anxiety. The piece refutes criticisms of Reynolds’s character because the accusations came from “the lips of servants, whose idle tales of masters who discard them, it is the common usage of the decent, not to say well-bred world, to pay no attention” (601). Such “idle tales” of servants play a relatively prominent role in novels by Edgeworth and Gaskell, as well as by other nineteenth-century novelists. Despite the Blackwood author’s insistence that well-bred people pay these stories no attention, telling tales proves, in fiction at least, to be one of the few sources of servant power. And why not? As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in her study of Privacy (2003), by the eighteenth-century: Servants [in large aristocratic houses] continued to preside over domestic affairs. I use deliberately ambiguous phrasing here: they “presided” in the sense that the housekeeper and butler and steward organized every large household’s operation—not only what was spent, what purchased, what consumed, but what masters and mistresses, and probably their sons and daughters, thought and felt and did. (197)

Bruce Robbins notes in his study the number of nineteenth-century servants who are narrators: Caleb Williams, Ellen Dean in Wuthering Heights (1847), Thady in Castle Rackrent. In addition, critic Jean Fernandez focuses on the small but important narrative by the servant Poole in an article about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In order to narrate these stories, truthfully or not, the servants must have something to tell. The general understanding was that they had plenty. In addition to their sinister roles as household spies, novelists also portrayed servants as a source of corruption, particularly the corruption of children. The most dramatic example may be Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898), in which two former household servants try to seduce children from beyond the grave, with tragic results. In reality, people were less concerned about ghostly servants than they were about flesh and blood ones. From John Locke, who warned against allowing children

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“to drink in private with the servants” (Some Thoughts Concerning Education) to Beeton, who worried that nurses would dose children with opium-laced drinks “to insure a night’s sleep for herself,” the fear of servants influence on the young and innocent was enormous. Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell also feature servant characters who might be grouped with these examples as we will see. But when they do, it is in a larger context of accommodating change, whether the change be on a national or on a domestic level.

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Chapter 2

“Standing in Distress Between Tragedy and Comedy”: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s English Domestic Fiction

Those who attempt to level, never equalize ... The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

In his 1790 piece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke celebrates a rather dubious merit: the English people’s “resistance to innovation,” and “cold sluggishness” (222). The former reformer and advocate for the emancipation of America and Ireland was alarmed by the violence of the French Revolution, and sought to convince his countrymen of the wisdom of Alexander Pope’s thinking that—at least where God and King are concerned—“Whatever is, is right. (Essay on Man, Book I) Burke goes on to defend the social status quo, including individual prejudices, saying that: “Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision—skeptical, puzzled, unresolved” (223-4). Maria Edgeworth may have had a few prejudices, but they did not prevent her from feeling skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Nor did she share Burke’s distrust of social change.1 Yet Edgeworth was hardly in danger of joining the “levelers” whom he feared would “corrupt our minds, vitiate our primary morals [and] ... make us fit for, and justly deserving of slavery, through the whole course of our lives” (233). Edgeworth generally kept quiet about political matters. According to her biographer Marilyn Butler, she once wrote to her aunt that she would be unable to respond to a political question: “I am very proud of the honor you have done me in asking me to criticize upon a subject which I feel to be far above my capacity and information; were the subject any other but politics you should find me pert and ready” (113). In her biography, Butler highlights Edgeworth’s conservative impulses, calling her “[b]y inclination ... the least controversial of Anglo-Irishwomen ... It was only through 1

As Andrew McGann demonstrates in his study, Cultural Politics in the 1790s, Edgeworth refers directly to Reflections on the Revolution in France in her 1801 novel, Belinda, when the radical feminist and revolutionary Harriet Freke calls Burke’s notion of “the decent drapery of life” (i.e. social conventions) “the most confoundedly indecent thing in the world.” Given Edgeworth’s unflattering portrait of Harriet Freke, the scene suggests some sympathy with Burke’s affection for traditional social conventions.

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complex personal circumstances that she became the author of three progressive, at times even radical, studies of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland” (125). Throughout her life Edgeworth stated her opposition to discussing politics, at the same time that she frequently engaged in political debates in her letters, her essays, and her fiction. An 1825 letter to her American correspondent Rachel Mordecai Lazarus is a case in point: the letter opens with Edgeworth thanking her friend for having sent her some representative American plants. The letter then shifts to an analysis of Lord Byron’s posthumous reputation and his engagement in “the Greek cause” (80) for independence in the years before his death. Edgeworth passionately defends Byron’s sacrifices in Greece and her own fears about the revolution’s failure: The Greeks like the Spaniards have been so long degraded by slavery that they cannot exert themselves sufficiently to regain or deserve liberty. This is the greatest evil and injury done by tyranny. It induces the vices of falsehood and cunning in the miserable, the only arms of the weak against the strong ... But we must not do the cruel injustice of supposing that these faults of character are natural and inherent and incurable, and make this imputation a plea for continuing the wrongs and oppression by which the faults were produced. (80)

Edgeworth draws an analogy between the Greeks and the Irish Catholics in her own nation, moving from there to an informed discussion of the progress of the industrial revolution in Ireland. She even encloses a prospectus from a new manufacturing firm. Having thus demonstrated her understanding of history, politics, and economics, the author modestly apologizes for her clear engagement with world and local affairs with a breezy, “I am sorry I mentioned it, for I generally avoid politics, sure that I can do no good by talking of them. I will now only say that the Irish Catholics ... have borne their disappointment with great temper” (80). Even after her half-hearted apology, Edgeworth issues one final comment on her favorite political subject, the Irish people. Many of her letters follow more or less the same pattern: political opinions sandwiched between family and literary gossip. Edgeworth’s comments on the politically weak people of Greece, Spain, and Ireland also reflect her views of an oppressed group closer to home—domestic servants. A look at Edgeworth’s servant characters reveals that while the author certainly shared Edmund Burke’s suspicion of revolutionaries, she did not condemn change. On the contrary, in another letter to Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, Edgeworth expressed her hopes that “steadiness and reasonable reform will produce and maintain tranquility” in political matters (202-3), and her writings about domestic life in England and Ireland speak passionately about the need to adapt to changing times. Edgeworth’s domestic novels do not often speak directly about matters of state and politics, but through her depictions of patriarchal families interacting with various social classes, the author actively engages with the same issues that inspired more overtly political writers such as Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Barbara Brothers and Bege K. Bowers make a convincing argument for rescuing the conventional novel of manners from its reputation as frivolous entertainment. Noting that “[m]anners reveal not just how a society conducts its business but also

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what its business should be,” Brothers and Bowers go on to define the genre as a complex union of private and social concerns: Novels of manners are concerned with selfhood and morality within a cultural context and thus depict the inevitable conflict between the private and public personas and between illusion (imagination and desire) and the actualities of daily existence. In fact, they are so concerned with the details of everyday life that some critics have dismissed them as “trivial,” “unimaginative,” or “dull.” (4)

In her study of Edgeworth’s novels of manners, Janet Egleson Dunleavy asserts that Edgeworth used the “familiar forms and themes of the novels of manners in what some critics have called the novel of social purpose” (56). Dunleavy writes that, ultimately, Edgeworth was most interested in ideas—ideas about gender, about nation, and about class. In novels such as Belinda, Harrington (1817), and Helen that expose the corruptions of English society, Edgeworth depicts the English home in the same way that she characterizes the Irish estate and in the same way that Elizabeth Gaskell characterizes both the home and factory: as a site for rebellion and resolution. Anne K. Mellor classifies Edgeworth as a “feminine Romantic,”2 opposing the radical social views of her masculine counterparts such as William Blake, William Godwin, and the young William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Instead, Mellor writes, “the women writers of the Romantic era offered an alternative program grounded on the trope of the family-politic, the idea of a nation-state that evolves gradually and rationally under the mutual care and guidance of both mother and father” (65). Writers such as John Locke and Burke had likened the state to a family before, but they tended to concentrate on the patriarchal underpinnings of both institutions.3 Inherent in the female Romantic philosophy is a critique of that patriarchal family structure and the paternalist social model to which it gave rise. As Mellor notes, in feminine Romanticism, “The oldest son is no better—or worse—than the youngest daughter; both are to be cherished equally” (66). Mellor’s study demonstrates that the female Romantics either directly or indirectly sought to “radically transform the public sphere ... and [their family politics] should be recognized as a viable alternative political ideology” (84). This redefinition of the family politic has implications for class as well as for gender. Edgeworth possessed many of the prejudices of her privileged upbringing, including prejudices against domestic help, but her vision of a more egalitarian society based on an ideal of the middle-class family overshadows her more conservative impulses to keep the servants quiet and in their place. Throughout her writings, Edgeworth demonstrates that while servants have very real (and often negative) power over the families they serve, these undesirable qualities are a result of their education (or lack thereof) and not their nature. Just as Edgeworth had argued that 2

Mellor also describes Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and other lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers as feminine Romantics. 3 Locke acknowledges that mothers should have “an equal title” with fathers to power over their children, but contends that the foundations of society are built upon paternal power.

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the oppressed Greeks had been “degraded by slavery” in her letter to Mordecai Lazarus, her servants are also flawed by ignorance and not by nature. By exposing the dissatisfactions of people who work in domestic labor, Edgeworth may not be consciously advocating for the kind of radical leveling decried by Burke, but her ideas amount to leveling nonetheless. Apparently, servants had always played a vital role in Edgeworth family lore, both as saviors and potential destroyers of the family. Although these stories may well be apocryphal, they were passed down through the generations, and no doubt informed Edgeworth’s strong views of the serving class. R.L. Edgeworth opened his Memoirs (1820) with a history of the Edgeworth family, a history that acknowledges the importance of servants to its very survival. According to family tradition, a seventeenth-century infant heir to the Edgeworth castle was about to be murdered by Irish rebels: One of the rebels seized the child by the leg, and was in the act of swinging him round to dash his brains out against the corner of the castle wall, when an Irish servant, of the lowest order, stopped his hand, claiming the right of killing the little heretick himself, and swearing that a sudden death would be too good for him; that he would plunge him up to the throat in a boghole, and leave him for the crows to pick his eyes out. Snatching the child from his comrade, he ran off with it to a neighbouring bog, and thrust it into the mud; but, when the rebels had retired, this man, who had only pretended to join them, went back to the bog for the boy, preserved his life, and, contriving to hide him in a pannier under eggs and chickens, carried him actually through the midst of the rebel camp safely back to Dublin. This faithful servant’s name was Bryan Ferral. (8-9)

R.L. Edgeworth not only includes this story in his memoirs, but notes several corroborating sources, and takes care to mention the servant’s name and fate (Ferral and his descendents served the Edgeworths for generations enjoying the family’s “support” and “protection” (9)). As Edgeworth’s 1904 biographer Emily Lawless dryly comments: “The expedient of hiding a child in a pannier, which is afterwards filled up with eggs and chickens, and carried through a camp of hungry rebels, does not somehow appeal to the mind as quite the safest that could have been devised” (22), but the story reinforces a belief that even the “lowest order” of servants can change history and can even make the history books. In stark contrast to the servant-savior in Edgeworth family history is the dangerous servant. Another family anecdote illustrates the idea that the upper class is never safe in the company of their domestic help, through either the malice or the incompetence of servants. The Edgeworths tell this story of a brave ancestor: While she was living at Lissard, she was, on some sudden alarm, obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was followed upstairs by an ignorant servant girl, who carried a bit of candle without a candlestick between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was halfway downstairs again, she observed that the girl had not her candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected and answered that she had left it “stuck in the barrel of black salt.” Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by herself to the room where the gunpowder was; found the candle as the girl had described; put her hand carefully underneath it, carried it safely out; and

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when she got to the bottom of the stairs, dropped on her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance. (13)

This anecdote would seem to underscore the need for a paternalistic social system in which the ruling class deservingly possesses power. Lady Edgeworth is depicted as brave, intelligent, and quick thinking. In addition, she has moral sense enough to thank God for her good fortune. The “ignorant servant girl,” on the other hand, would seem to need constant watching. Lacking the sagacity to recognize gun powder when she sees it or even to carry a candlestick with her, she is lucky indeed to be protected by the astute and fearless Lady Edgeworth (who, according to R.L. Edgeworth was known to have a violent temper. One shudders to imagine how it may have been turned on the—in this case nameless—servant). These two family legends reveal the polarities of Maria Edgeworth’s attitude toward the serving class, attitudes that are visible in her fiction as well. Versions of Bryan Ferral appear regularly in Edgeworth’s works, the blindly loyal near-slave, a remnant of the feudal vassal. This stereotype of the devoted retainer was a comforting one for paternalists who defined the relationship between employees and employers (as well as between poor and wealthy) in moral terms. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the social hierarchy was maintained by the belief that those of the lower order owed loyalty and service to their social betters as payment for their moral guidance and protection. One servant guide book advises those in service, “Whenever you are ordered to do anything, do it without grumbling whether you think it belongs to your place or not, for willingness and good nature are half a servant” (Brophy 212). Paternalists on both sides of the kitchen table promoted the idea that the masterservant hierarchy was natural and even divinely inspired. A guide book written by Samuel and Sarah Adams, a married couple with a total of fifty years in service between them states that, “The supreme Lord of the universe has, in his wisdom, rendered the various conditions of mankind necessary to our individual happiness: some are rich, others poor—some are masters, and others servants. Subordination, indeed, attaches to your rank in life, but not disgrace. All men are servants in different degrees” (Brophy 105). In Edgeworth’s Belinda, the relationship between the black servant Juba and his master Mr Vincent is a textbook example of this dynamic. Mr Vincent relies on Juba, “the best creature in the world,” less for his service than for his loyalty, which confirms Mr Vincent’s proper role as master. Juba, in turn, would be lost without his master’s protection. Superstitious and impetuous, he needs constant reassurance that he is safe: [Mr Vincent] had a black servant of the name of Juba, who was extremely attached to him: he had known Juba from a boy, and had brought him over with him when he first came to England, because the poor fellow begged so earnestly to go with the young massa. Juba had lived with him ever since, and accompanied him wherever he went. (199)

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The character of Juba richly illustrates Edgeworth‘s attraction to social paternalism. Essentially a slave,4 with a childlike mind, Juba needs his master’s protection because in his ignorance, he believes he sees ghosts, and believes in the superstitious Obeah traditions of his native West Indies. He is blindly obedient to his master, and frequently gets into boyish scrapes because of his insistence on Mr Vincent’s superiority in all things. For his part, Mr Vincent plays his paternalist role well. He treats Juba kindly, protects him, and is careful not to laugh at his ignorance. In an astonishing exchange, Mr Vincent goes so far as to compare Juba to his dog, also named Juba, and brags that Juba is “the quietest and best creature in the world”: “No doubt,” said Belinda, smiling, “since he belongs to you, for you know, as Mr Percival tells you, everything animate or inanimate that is under your protection, you think must be the best of its kind in the universe.” “But, really, Juba is the best creature in the world,” repeated Mr. Vincent, with great eagerness “Juba is, without, exception, the best creature in the universe” “Juba, the dog, or Juba, the man?” said Belinda, “you know, they cannot be both the best creatures in the universe.” “Well! Juba, the man, is the best man—and Juba, the dog, is the best dog, in the universe.” (315)

Man or dog. It doesn’t much matter. By confusing Juba the man and Juba the dog in this conversation, Edgeworth highlights the connection between the ideal servant and a household pet, both sentimentally appreciated for their loyalty and goodness, existing solely for their master’s gratification. Juba “belongs” to his master as any other object “animate or inanimate” might. Juba the man never emerges from the background of the novel as more than a loyal dog. His animal-like inability to control his temper when someone challenges his master’s status is mitigated by his general good nature and constant sense of gratitude. Though Juba is black, enough of Edgeworth’s white servants fall into this pet-like role as well, indicating that the blindly devoted companion like Bryan Ferral figures largely in Edgeworth’s conception of an ideal servant. Yet Edgeworth also distrusted such devotion, and her distrust is a critique of the hierarchical social system that governed English society. Edgeworth did not believe that most members of the poor and working class accepted their positions with gratitude. She frequently recognized and wrote about class conflict within the home, and this conflict often took the form of power struggles between servants and masters. Because the paternalist system depended not only upon the duties of the servant class but also upon the acceptance and performance of those duties as morally correct, a servant who stepped out of his proper “place” was a danger to 4

Edgeworth has been called an abolitionist for her line “I wish there was no such thing as slavery in the world” in her short story, “The Grateful Negro,” but as George E. Boulukos points out, she was more of a “moderate” with regard to slavery in Britain. Although she disliked the institution, she writes in her story that “the sudden emancipation of the Negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries” and she argues for a reform within slave plantations that would prevent a slave rebellion.

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the social system as a whole. Although the novel’s characters certainly had nothing to fear from Juba personally, Susan C. Greenfield points out that even this slavish character is more ambiguous than first appears: The reference to the religious practice of obeah, a widely feared source of slave resistance, is a reminder that slaves throughout the West Indies, and especially in Jamaica, are engaging in deadly rebellions ... Indeed, if Juba’s eagerness to follow Mr Vincent proves the reciprocal value of the master-slave relationship, the place Juba insists on going to, England, is one where in theory, if not in fact, he can be legally free. (220)

Anthea Trodd writes about the tradition in nineteenth-century detective novels that closely linked servants and crime. She cites a conventional plot used frequently by Arthur Conan Doyle in which “we see the main features through which servants and crime are conventionally associated ... the family secret which has fallen into the hands of the servants” (175). Though this convention may be more sensationalized in popular crime fiction, the stereotype of the dangerously disloyal servant is as common throughout nineteenth-century British fiction as that of the blindly obedient one. While these two images may appear to be contradictory, they are actually complementary: both types of servants, like the two who appear in Edgeworth family folklore, control the lives of their masters and even the survival of the family line. In Belinda, Edgeworth contrasts her portrayal of Juba with that of Champfort, a French page who, out of sheer maliciousness and desire for power, tries to destroy his master’s marriage and Belinda’s impeccable reputation. Champfort is a spy and a gossip, a malignant presence in the Delacour family who delights in seeing his master and mistress at odds with one another so that he can benefit from their divided and thus weakened power. Edgeworth gives this stereotypical character no more depth or moral ambiguity than she gives Juba the dog-like man, but his actions have serious implications for Belinda and for the Delacours. Like any proper villain, Champfort will stop at nothing to gain and maintain influence over everyone in his sphere. Champfort wants power over the Delacours, and he rightly senses that he is losing his to Belinda. In order to discredit her, he circulates a rumor that Belinda’s kindness to the Delacour family is motivated by a mercenary plan to marry Lord Delacour after his wife dies. The danger that Champfort causes is real: not only does he nearly destroy the strong friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, but he potentially ruins Belinda’s reputation, causing her to leave the home of her protectors under scandalous circumstances. Even after Champfort’s tactics are exposed and he is fired from the Delacour’s household, he continues to cause mischief by seducing a “stupid maid” of the Delacours and learning the family’s secrets from her. Edgeworth’s narrator comments that, “On these ‘coquettes of the second table,’ on these underplots of the drama, much of the comedy, and some of the tragedy of life depend. Under the unsuspecting mask of stupidity this worthy mistress of our intriguing valet-de-chambre concealed the quick ears of a listener, and the demure eyes of a spy” (268). With this commentary by the narrator, Edgeworth confirms the fears of every middle- and upper-class Englishman and woman: though often appearing “stupid,” servants are listening to and watching everything that goes on in their household, and behind their apparently humble situation, they hold all the cards.

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Conduct books and servant manuals speak to this terror of servant spies. A 1734 guide states that, “There cannot be a more famous Breach of the Rules of sound Morality, than for a Person to betray his Master’s Secrets ... which is so vile a breach of Trust, so high a Degree of Treachery, that it ought to make him odious to all men” (Folkenflik 259). A 1773 manual raises the stakes, making servant treachery a betrayal of divine rule: “[Telling a master’s secrets] is also a very great sin, and one of the breaches of the fifth commandment; for as we are commended to honour our parents, so it is necessarily implied that we also honour and respect all those who have authority over us” (Folkenflik 259). By drawing comparisons between masters and parents, these manuals reaffirm the paternalistic social order, but in revealing such deeply held fears about servile treachery, the manuals also reveal an understanding that these social relations are fragile. Edgeworth voices these concerns about the dangers of giving servants too much influence throughout her writings and the dangerous servant reappears in one work after another. In her 1817 novel, Harrington, Edgeworth foregrounds another dangerous servant. Harrington was written at the request of Rachel Mordecai (who later became Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, Edgeworth’s long-time correspondent), a young American Jewish woman. Mordecai had written to Edgeworth commenting on a strain of anti-Semitism that she had perceived in Edgeworth’s works. Edgeworth hoped to rectify this stereotype and so wrote a novel in which she presented Jewish characters in a positive light, free from common Jewish stereotypes.5 Ironically, Edgeworth exposes common anti-Semitic stereotypes by vilifying the servant class. Fowler, the only major servant character in Harrington, appears only in the very first and the very last chapters of the book. Yet she is the possibly the novel’s most dangerous character, and is responsible for nearly preventing Harrington’s marriage to Berenice, his Jewish love. Fowler appears as a central figure in Harrington’s childhood. As his personal servant and nurse, she fills his impressionable mind with rumors of Jewish villainy. Her purpose for doing so is partly a practical one: like many who care for children, she invents stories in order to encourage her charge to obey her. “If you don’t come quietly [to bed] this minute, Master Harrington,” she says, “I’ll call to Simon the Jew there ... and he shall come up and carry you away in his great bag” (2). Unaware of Harrington’s over-active imagination, she continues to use this threat whenever she needs to bring Harrington under control. Harrington explains, 5 Edgeworth wrote Harrington after receiving a letter from a Jewish American admirer, Rachel Mordecai, complaining that Edgeworth depicted Jewish characters as “mean, avaricious, and unprincipled” (Macdonald 6). As James Newcomber writes,

The Jewish lady ... was right. Miss Edgeworth did treat the Jews illiberally, always exemplifying the Jew by unattractive characters, permitting even her favored personae to speak disparagingly or scathingly of the Jew in general. She intended no prejudice, but, picturing society as it was, she gave the Jew his place in the society that she depicted. Reminded of the effect of this kind of portraiture, she undertook to make amends. (77) After this initial exchange of correspondence, Edgeworth and Mordecai entered into a correspondence that lasted over twenty years and ended only with Lazarus’s death in 1838.

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The threat of “Simon the Jew” was for some time afterwards used upon every occasion to reduce me to passive obedience; and when by frequent repetition this threat has lost some of its power, she proceeded to tell me, in a mysterious tone, stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying, and sacrificing them at their secret feasts and midnight abominations. (3)

With this example, Edgeworth highlights the servant’s power to frighten and mislead. Fowler is far from a helpless subordinate; her stories directly alter the views and actions of her young master. Instead of an ignorant servant who looks up to her betters, Fowler’s powers of speech allow her to manipulate and control her master. She, not he, is in charge. Servants like Fowler do not just harm their charges through their personal malevolence, they destabilize the social order by reversing the traditional power structure. Indeed. Fowler’s power over Harrington grows as he becomes increasingly terrified of Jewish people, and he tells us that. “I became her slave and victim” (4). Rather than respecting her master, this servant is “cursing [him] in her heart” (5). She has no education, few legal rights, and little money, but she has access to power. Fowler’s deeds are foul indeed, and Edgeworth depicts an intense animosity on the part of the serving class, making it ultimately impossible to believe in the comfortable system of paternalism. The role of Fowler is so central to the introductory chapters of Harrington that it is disconcerting when the character disappears from the novel after the opening chapters. In fact, the reader has nearly forgotten about this dangerous domestic when she reappears at the novel’s end to explain a certain mystery. Berenice’s father has told Harrington that there is a mysterious reason why he cannot give Harrington permission to marry his daughter. Inexplicably, he has told Harrington that this obstacle is insurmountable, and the two lovers are nearly separated. In the end we discover that the by-now forgotten Fowler is behind this sudden shift in Harrington’s fate. Working in conjunction with one of Harrington’s former friends and rival, Fowler has spread rumors about Harrington’s “insane” fear of Jews during his childhood, fears which she, of course, created. Edgeworth’s use of Fowler’s character here is in some ways a rather conventional one. Though the servant plays an important part in the outcome of the novel, this part is limited to advancing the novel’s plot. Fowler re-enters the narrative only to explain some strange behavior on the part of the novel’s more important characters. In his study of servants in fiction, Bruce Robins writes about this literary convention in which a character’s fate depends upon a servant’s interference: “Estimating all the sources, derivatives, and analogues of this central tradition in the other European literatures, one is tempted to redefine the deus ex machina as a servus ex machina” (131), the instrument of Fate who ultimately determines the hero’s destiny. Robins quotes Octave Mirbeau to illustrate how random and how powerful this servus ex machina can be: “When I think that each day a cook, for example, holds the life of his masters in his hands ... a pinch of arsenic instead of salt ... a drop of strychnine instead of vinegar ... and that’s that!” Responding to this quotation, Robins writes: “This combination of apparent irrationality with absolute power is perhaps a further reason why so much badinage about murder is overhung with the notion of servant as Fate, at once avenging and arbitrary” (141). Yet Fowler’s role is too important to

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dismiss as a mere plot device. Her return at the end of the novel is a potent reminder that the reach of a malicious servant knows no boundary. Decades after a servant has ceased to live in a household, the “underplots of the drama” continue to play themselves out with devastating results. This stereotypical role for servant characters appears elsewhere in Edgeworth. For example, her 1812 novel Vivian, in which servants play an uncharacteristically small role, does offer one plot twist that can only be disentangled by the sudden emergence of a servant. The novel’s hero, Lord Vivian, elopes with Mrs Wharton, a married woman whom he does not love. As he contemplates marrying her out of duty, his friend forwards him a letter from his lover’s former servant explaining that Mrs Wharton and her husband had arranged the elopement to advance Mr Wharton’s political ambitions. The maid’s motives for revealing this information, it appears, are personal: She had been [Mr Wharton’s] mistress; one of those innumerable mistresses, to whom he had, of course, addressed his transferable promises of eternal constancy. She too, of course, had believed the vow, in spite of all experience and probability; and while she pardoned his infidelities to her mistress, etc., all of which she deemed very natural for a gentleman like him, yet she was astonished and outrageous when she found him faithless to her own charms. In a fit of jealousy she flew to Mr Russell, whom she knew to be Vivian’s friend; and, to revenge herself on Wharton, revealed the secrets which she had in her power. (97)

Here again is the conflict between a servant’s powerlessness—as a betrayed lover of her master—and power—to do harm by revealing secrets. As in Fowler’s sudden confession, the maid’s information appears out of nowhere just in time to disentangle the hero from an awkward situation. Although in reality masters may have had little to fear from their servants, who depended on them for their livelihood, Edgeworth was acutely aware that servants still had the power to intervene in the affairs of their “betters.” In the case of Vivian’s informant, this power is strengthened when a master’s affairs literally include an affair with the help. These examples certainly suggest that Edgeworth was unusually interested in the servant class. They might even suggest that she was obsessed about servants’ potential to disrupt social roles and destroy lives. Certainly, she is passionate in her warnings about servants from her earliest writings. In Practical Education (1798), she and her father devote an entire chapter to the subject of household servants. In an opinion she would later exemplify in Harrington, the Edgeworths argue that children will be corrupted if they are allowed to spend too much time in the company of family servants. Too much exposure to household servants is likely to teach innocent children “the language and manners, the awkward and vulgar tricks” of the class as well as the more dangerous habits of “cunning, falsehood, [and] envy” (123). The Edgeworths caution parents rather hysterically, “If children pass one hour a day with servants, it will be in vain to attempt their education” (12). Yet even in the seemingly unambiguous anti-servant message embedded in Practical Education and some of the novels, the Edgeworths explain that the flaws in the characters of servants are a result of their circumstances, not their nature:

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What has been said of the understanding and dispositions of servants, relates only to servants as they now are educated. Their vices and their ignorance arise from the same causes, the want of education. They are not a separate cast of society doomed to ignorance, or degraded by inherent vice; they are capable, they are desirous of instruction. Let them be well educated and the difference in their conduct and understanding will repay society for the trouble of the undertaking. (124)

There is no reference to servants divinely appointed role, or to the sanctity of tradition. The Edgeworths write of the servant class with sympathy and respect for their potential. Yet even here they admit that blurring the line between social stations is confusing and disorienting. While acknowledging the justice of education for the servant class, they seem unsure about the effect such “levelling” might have on social stability. They discourage middle-class parents from allowing their young children to play with the children of servants chiefly because it will be difficult for everyone involved to assume their prescribed roles as they reach maturity: A boy who has been used to treat a footman as his playfellow, cannot suddenly command from him that species of deference, which is compounded of habitual respect for the person, and conventional submission to his station; the young master must therefore effect a change in the footman’s manner of thinking and speaking by violent means; he must extort that tribute of respect which he has neglected so long, and to which, consequently, his right is disputed. He is sensible, that his superiority is merely that of situation, and he therefore exerts his dormant prerogatives with jealous insolence... No servant feels the yoke of servitude more galling, than he who has been partially emancipated. (125)

Taken together, these two passages from Practical Education exemplify the servant problem and problems of social paternalism as Edgeworth presents them in much of her domestic fiction. On the one hand, she states that servants do not comprise a “separate cast of society.” On the contrary, they seek self-improvement through education and are fully capable of shedding their so-called vices. On the other hand, the logical extension of that argument is that if servants are not “separate” from their masters, then each class must have the same innate potential to lead or to serve. The only thing separating one class from the other is convention, situation, and the willingness and ability of each class to act out their roles. Thus, servants who are emancipated through education and the breaking down of social barriers are likely to resent their station and abuse, and be abused by, their masters. Edgeworth seems to want it both ways here: she argues that the education of servants be improved to make them fit companions for children, but laments the inevitable loss of deference and respect that will follow such measures and predicts that servants themselves will be less happy without the myth of their own innate inferiority to make servitude more palatable. Edmund Burke defends ostentatious displays of wealth for just this purpose: to remind the poor of their inferiority and to keep them in awe of their betters: [T]he wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it can be, in fomenting the luxury of individuals. It is the public ornament; it is the public consolation; it nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it, whilst the wealth and

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Rather than balk at this reminder of inferiority and degradation, says Burke, the humble classes take comfort in the luxury and privilege enjoyed by their superiors. By equating the wealth of individuals with the power of the state, the poor can believe themselves to be a part of something greater than their own low rank. Furthermore, Burke adds, the wealth of others is put to good use in reminding the poor individual of his own unfortunate circumstances so that he may focus on his heavenly rewards “when the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature” (234). Despite some apparent mixed feelings about the issue, Edgeworth clearly believes that members of the servant class do not have to die to achieve the status of “equal by nature.” Even when she is portraying her servants as flat stereotypes, Edgeworth questions the social system that excludes servants from having more freedom and a more open relationship with their masters and mistresses. For example, although characters like Fowler and Wharton’s maid are for the most part undeveloped stereotypes, Edgeworth concludes Harrington with an attempt to humanize Fowler. Despite Harrington’s fury at his former maid, his future father-in-law, the Jewish merchant Montenero, urges him to forgive her: She is guilty, but penitent; she suffers and must suffer. Her mistress refuses ever to see her more. She is abandoned by all her family, all her friends; she must quit her country … and carries with her, in her own feelings, her worst punishment. ... [Y]ou, my son, before she goes from happy England, see her, and forgive her. ... Let us see and forgive this woman. (260)

Edgeworth’s appeal for a servant who has lost everything has special significance because it is articulated by another victim of prejudice, the Jewish merchant. This moment has been overlooked in Edgeworth criticism, but it is remarkable. Montenero asks Harrington to identify with the prospects of a middle-aged, banished servant woman with no family, friends, or recommendations. Through him, Edgeworth asks her readers to do the same, and to take the generosity of a Jewish merchant as their model of “Christian” forgiveness. In doing so, she undermines the primacy of the Protestant gentry as having the sole claim to moral leadership. Edgeworth’s short fiction also depicts servants in prominent roles. “The False Key,” a story from The Parent’s Assistant, tells the story of Franklin and Felix, two young servants who respectively fall into the stereotypical roles of Juba and Champfort. Franklin, “the son of a man of infamous character,” is educated by the “benevolent and sensible” Mr Spencer. As a result of his upbringing, Franklin acquires the qualities of an ideal servant—loyalty, patience, gratitude, and selflessness. In short, he’s perfect. Felix, on the other hand, is a hypocritical thief, liar, and (at the age of thirteen) a drunkard. He manipulates the other servants and blackmails the butler into including him in a scheme to rob the family. Both Franklin and Felix are clichéd character types; if they were the only servants in the story, their roles might easily be dismissed.

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Yet “The False Key” features a number of other servants, domestics who do not fit so easily into these black and white stereotypes. For example, the housekeeper Pomfret is described as being “fond of power, and ... jealous of favour” (57). She distrusts Franklin on account of his father and declares that, “edication can’t change the nature that’s in one, they say; and one that’s born naturally bad and low, they say, all the edication in the world won’t do no good” (57). Her view reflects the commonly-held position that one’s birth is one’s destiny. Her own malapropisms are a signal to us that Edgeworth does not share Pomfret’s views, that she resists listening too much to what “they say.” But Pomfret, like Franklin himself, is capable of overcoming early influences. The narrator tells us that she “really was a good woman” (57), and she puts aside her prejudices when she sees that she “never was more mistaken at the first in any boy in my born days” (77). Through this servant character, Edgeworth exposes the paternalistic social model as being grounded in nothing more than unfounded gossip. She also uses a servant character to demonstrate the potential for change. Edgeworth even humanizes outright villainy in this story. The butler, Corkscrew, is a case in point: his name suggests that he will not be portrayed as a complex human being but rather as a flat personification of his role. As an accomplice in the plan to rob his mistress, he embodies the suspicions of many middle- and upperclass families of their servants. He is also verbally abusive toward Franklin, calling him a “stupid blockhead” (59) and generally making the boy’s life as miserable as he can. He would seem to be a stock villain. But unlike villains like Champfort and Felix, Corkscrew is reluctant to betray his lady’s trust. When he is invited to participate in the robbery, the butler hesitates: “The butler, who had the reputation of being an honest man, and indeed whose integrity had hitherto been proof against everything but his mistress’s port [which he drank without permission], turned pale and trembled at this proposal” (66). Edgeworth here depicts a servant character who has served his mistress honestly for years. Rather than attribute his betrayal to natural villainy, Edgeworth blames his crime on his dependence on alcohol; while she does not excuse his behavior (Corkscrew ends up in jail), she does go out of her way to explain it: His debt, his love of drinking, the impossibility of indulging it without a fresh supply of money, all came into his mind at once and conquered his remaining scruples. It is said by those whose fatal experience gives them a right to be believed, that a drunkard will sacrifice anything, everything, sooner than the pleasure of habitual intoxication. How much easier it is never to begin a bad custom than to break through it when once formed! (67)

This passage reveals both sympathy and insight into a character who is essentially an alcoholic. Edgeworth goes out of her way, within the limited space of a short story, to attribute a realistic motivation to the servant’s betrayal, going so far as to assure us that his behavior is “to be believed.” Corkscrew surprises us because he is more than just the stock character that his name suggests, and is instead a fullyrealized, flawed human being. In depicting him this way, Edgeworth challenges any notion that he is “innately” good or bad as a result of his divinely-ordered place.

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On the contrary, in Edgeworth’s world, one’s place is malleable. Corkscrew loses his place, but so does Franklin. He ascends the social ladder. At the end of the story, Mrs Churchill vows to “sell some of [her] old useless plate, and to lay it out in an annuity for Franklin’s life” (77). By the end of the story, Franklin overcomes the taunts of those who “used to tell him that he would turn out like his father” (55) to illustrate Mr Spencer’s (and Edgeworth’s) position that “he might make himself whatever he pleased” (55). Domestic service becomes for Franklin the steppingstone to middle-class respectability. Although the story reinforces and rewards Franklin’s gratitude and loyalty, it rewards him right out of poverty and into a life of greater independence, one in which he can “make himself whatever he pleased.” In other words, Edgeworth acknowledges the fluidity of social class and models the circumstances under which one might find himself rewarded. “The old useless plate” and all that it represents—tradition, decorousness—is sold to support a changing social world. The mistress and the servants both must accommodate themselves to this new way of life. Edgeworth best demonstrates the complexities of class conflict within the English home and her vision for accommodating a gradually changing society through the character of another servant, Marriott from Belinda. Unlike the “underplot” involving Champfort, the author suggests through Marriott’s character that the classes have much to gain by interacting honestly and seeing beyond stereotypes and misunderstandings. As the novel opens, Lady Delacour mistakenly believes that she is dying of breast cancer brought on by a injury she once received in a duel, a secret she has kept successfully hidden from everyone but her maid. Only Marriott knows that behind Lady Delacour’s apparent lightheartedness are a fearful and depressed mind and a deteriorating body. At this early point in the novel, Lady Delacour and Belinda share the common belief that servants cannot be trusted. Despite the fact that Marriott has never given her mistress reason to question her loyalty, Lady Delacour fears rather than befriends her waiting woman. The otherwise haughty mistress submits to her own servant in trivial matters, out of a fear that Marriott will betray the secret of her disease. Belinda, unaware of Lady Delacour’s illness, finds her hostess’s attitude perplexing: Upon many occasions she had observed, that Marriott exercised despotic authority over her mistress; and she had seen, with surprise, that a lady, who would not yield an iota of power to her husband, submitted herself to every caprice of the most insolent of waitingwomen. For some time, Belinda had imagined that this submission was merely an air, as she had seen some other fine ladies proud of appearing to be governed by a favorite maid; but she was soon convinced that Marriott was no favorite with Lady Delacour; that her ladyship’s was not proud humility, but fear. ... It seemed as if Marriott was in possession of some secret, which should remain forever unknown. (13)

Like Pomfret, Marriott is jealous of others and likes power. Because she does not conform to the ideal of the grateful and meek servant, as Juba does, both her mistress and Belinda suspect Marriott of treachery. The rightful roles of servant and master would appear to be reversed. Lady Delacour “submits” to a “despot.” Marriott is opinionated, occasionally rude, and she speaks her mind freely. In other words, she

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acts like a human being rather than a pet. In consequence, she lives under a cloud of suspicion that is well out of proportion to her actions. For example, when Lady Delacour finally tells Belinda the story of her life and the truth about her failing health, she laments that she has no true friends despite her immense social popularity. Belinda, in a rare moment of passion, declares, “Trust to one who will never leave you at the mercy of an insolent waiting-woman—trust to me” (24). Belinda implies that Marriott is more than insolent, that she is downright sinister. She does not speak of her friend being left to the “care” or “responsibility” of Marriott, but to her “mercy.” Belinda’s and Lady Delacour’s suspicions of Marriott reflect the common English fear of social unrest and revolutionary mercilessness on the part of the lower classes. Yet Lady Delacour is in absolutely no danger of becoming a victim of her maid, as Edgeworth goes on to reveal. Despite her “insolent” ways, Marriott genuinely loves Lady Delacour, although that love does not take the fawning, dog-like form that Juba’s does. After Lady Delacour is injured in a carriage accident, Marriott begs to care for her lady herself. Edgeworth uses this period of Lady Delacour’s recuperation to develop Marriott’s character more fully. While Lady Delacour convalesces, she becomes very irritated by the sound of Marriott’s pet macaw and orders her maid to get rid of the bird. Marriott understandbly resists this order and protests vehemently: “O dear, my lady! to call my poor macaw odious!—I didn’t expect it would ever come to this—I am sure I don’t deserve it—I’m sure I don’t deserve that my lady should have taken a dislike to me” (125). Marriott’s affection for the bird is obviously out of proportion to the context; after all, there has been no real disaster, simply a woman’s disturbance by a noisy pet. Yet Marriott sees Lady Delacour’s irritation as a serious personal affront, one that is beyond her comprehension. Yet what at first seems like an overreaction on Marriott’s part—spurious logic that because her lady does not like her bird, she does not like her—turns out to be correct. While we are laughing at Marriott’s foolish sentiment, Edgeworth uses the incident to highlight the maid’s perceptiveness and sensitivity. Marriott correctly understands that this conflict has more to do with her than it does with the macaw. Lady Delacour has made it clear that she resents the power that Marriott holds over her. The issue with the macaw becomes a means by which Lady Delacour can reassert her authority over her maid. After several similar exchanges with her maid, Lady Delacour finally exclaims, “Good heavens! am I reduced to this? ... [S]he thinks that she has me in her power. No; I can die without her: I have but a short time to live—I will not live a slave” (141). Now it is Lady Delacour who is overreacting. The subtext of this conflict has everything to do with power and very little to do with a pet bird. Lady Delacour’s assertion that she “will not live a slave” reveals her fear that the natural hierarchy of servant and master is threatened by Marriott’s possession of her mistress’s secret. In defending herself, Marriott rightly asserts that she “does not deserve” to be treated like a potentially dangerous criminal. Through this conflict Edgeworth illustrates the tension inherent in the servantmaster relationship. The upper-class dependence on servants for their duties as well as for the status they bestowed was in direct conflict with the need for domestic privacy. Lady Delacour believes herself to be “reduced” from her rightful position as ruler to one of “slave,” yet Marriott is hardly elevated as a result of Lady Delacour’s

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“reduction.” Marriott is torn between her loyalty to her lady and her love for her pet, the one creature in the house who does not suspect her of treachery. Edgeworth uses this example to point out that while Lady Delacour exploits the language of slavery and submission, it is ultimately Marriott who makes the personal sacrifice. Like the caged macaw, Marriott may be able to stir things up by making a lot of noise, but ultimately she too can be disposed of when she becomes inconvenient. Judith Terry points out this paradox of a servant’s position, at once part of the family and outsider: “The intimate nature of servants’ duties meant that they witnessed most of what went on: they saw their masters and mistresses dress and undress, in fair and dour temper; they watched, worried, rejoiced, criticized, despised or admired along with them. Yet they never really participated” (104). These intimate ties between masters and servants strain rather than strengthen relations between the two groups. As expected, Lady Delacour wins the power struggle over Marriott’s bird; the maid trades the macaw for a quiet goldfish, and becomes significantly less “insolent” as the novel progresses. But Marriott wins a battle of her own. The incident is a catalyst for a major shift in narrative perspective: we no longer see the character only through upper-class eyes, and Edgeworth provides insight into Marriott’s motives and gives the maid a powerful voice with which to defend herself and her situation. Marriott guesses that Belinda suspects her of plotting to betray her mistress and bristles: “[B]etray her!—Oh Miss Portman, I would sooner cut off my hand than do it. And I have been tried more than my lady knows of, or you either” (142). She goes on to explain that enemies of Lady Delacour had offered her money to reveal her lady’s secret, “and I defy them to get anything out of me. Betray my lady! I’d sooner cut out my tongue this minute! Can she have such a base opinion of me?” (142). Ironically, Lady Delacour has more to fear from the schemes of her “equals” than from her waiting-woman, who is shocked to hear the accusations against her. Marriott’s vow to dismember herself in defense of Lady Delacour might be a bit overdone, but she backs up these strong words with evidence that she has refused bribes already. She is both personally indignant and surprised to learn that her mistress does not share her affection. This speech and others like it allow Edgeworth to resist traditionally held views of servants and to give voice to the anger and resentment of their class. Marriott’s articulate defense moves her from a marginal position in the novel to center stage, at least briefly. Lady Delacour’s, Belinda’s, and even the reader’s opinions about Marriott have been wrong. Edgeworth exposes as a stereotype the prevailing view that servants are untrustworthy by allowing Marriott to reveal her integrity, insight, and strength of character. In addition, Edgeworth indirectly suggests that the strict hierarchy of English society, predicated on birth and rank, should give way to a more caring familial arrangement—more mutually supportive than paternal. Yet while Edgeworth does effectively expose the potential for the abuse of power within the existing system, she hardly shatters the social hierarchy. Marriott remains a loyal subject and Lady Delacour reforms into a more benevolent mistress. (She also becomes a better wife, mother, and friend in the process.) Through Marriott’s character, Edgeworth insists on the humanity and moral equality of servants, but Marriott’s self-defense is more an argument for gradual change than a radical equalizing of social position. Edgeworth endows Marriott with ideas, opinions, and

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rights, and throughout the remainder of the novel, the maid is treated by her mistress with respect and friendship. By the time Edgeworth completed her last novel, Helen in 1834, her views on social change had become less ambivalent. In Helen, Edgeworth continues to explore the inherent problems of a paternalistic social system, and she also presents one of her most scathing portraits of the obdurate family patriarch and the abuse of patriarchal power. As the novel’s plot unfolds and the narrative tension builds, characters converse regularly about the role of the class system in British society, the advantages and disadvantages of the British aristocracy, and the duties of the wealthy toward those who serve them. Published just three years before Victoria’s ascension to the British throne, Helen anticipates the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell in its clear statements about England’s class structure and the weaknesses of paternalism. As in most of Edgeworth’s novels, the world of Helen is a world populated with numerous servants, each with separate personalities, including Carlos, a stereotypically treacherous page, Helen’s loyal servant Rose, and Cecilia’s harmless but irritating maid, Felicie. Edgeworth casts some servants in a protective role. When Helen realizes she can no longer remain with her friends due to a scandal, she makes plans to move into the “safe and respectable home” of a former housekeeper. Yet Carlos—not Rose, Felicie, or the nameless housekeeper—is the servant who has the most agency in the novel and who receives the most attention from the author. He is another classic disloyal servant, one who readily turns on anyone he considers to be a threat. Helen and the others distrust him from the beginning: “Helen had often heard Lady Davenant’s particular friends complain that it was extremely disagreeable to them to have this boy constantly in the room, whatever might be the conversation. There was the page, either before or behind a screen, always within hearing” (256). His mistress, Lady Davenant, on the other hand, is too kind-hearted to imagine that anyone under her protection would betray the family. Her own attachment to the paternalist ideal makes it impossible for her to believe that others could undermine this system: When Helen confronts Lady Davenant with her suspicions that Carlos has been reading his mistress’s correspondence and selling it to her husband’s political enemies, Edgeworth reveals Carlos’s capacity for both ill-nature and deceit: Helen caught his figure in the mirror, and saw that he was making a horrible grimace at her behind her back, his dark countenance expressing extreme hatred and revenge. Helen touched Lady Davenant’s arm, but, before her eye could be directed to the glass, Carlos, perceiving that he was observed, pretended to be suddenly seized with a cramp in his foot, which obliged him to make these frightful contortions. Helen was shocked by his artfulness, but it succeeded with Lady Davenant. (258)

It is a scene that might be comical if Edgeworth had not included such menacing terms as “horrible” and “extreme hatred and revenge.” Eventually, Helen finds the evidence to expose Carlos for the criminal he is and to have him dismissed from the household, but in doing so, she becomes the target of his wrath. Carlos later acquires a set of love letters written years earlier by Helen’s friend Lady Cecilia Clarendon to the unscrupulous Colonel D’Aubigney. Mistakenly believing the letters to be Helen’s, Carlos mails them to Cecilia’s husband and Helen’s protector General Clarendon. These letters are evidence of Cecilia’s

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indiscreet, though not scandalous, past. However, Cecilia has told her husband that she never loved another man, so she and Helen allow the General to believe that the letters were written by Helen and not by Cecilia. Through a series of complicated plot twists, the letters are eventually published, Helen’s reputation is temporarily destroyed, and her engagement to Granville Beauclerc is nearly called off. Though much of the fault lies with Cecilia for allowing her friend to claim authorship of the letters, Carlos is the one responsible for their discovery and dissemination. Lady Davenant condemns Carlos, not simply for his criminal act of stealing correspondence, but for his more personal crime of violating the paternalist code of loyalty: The proofs of this boy’s artifice and long premeditated treachery, accumulating upon Lady Davenant, shocked her so much that she could not think of anything else. “Is it possible? is it in human nature?” she exclaimed. “Such falsehood, such art, such ingratitude! ... I see it, yet I can scarcely believe it! I, who taught him to write myself—guided that little hand to make the first letters that he ever formed! And this is human nature! I could not have conceived it—it is dreadful to be so convinced, it lowers one’s confidence in one’s fellow-creatures. That is the worst of all!” (263)

Lady Davenant had considered Carlos to be her personal project. She took him in, educated him, and believed him to be a member of the extended family. In turning against his mistress and those she loves, he has committed an unnatural betrayal in his lady’s eyes. Cecilia’s malicious cousin Lady Katrina causes just as much damage to Helen when she attempts to have the letters published and publicized, but the outrage directed against Carlos far exceeds the outrage directed against Lady Katrina. His actions violate the expectations of loyalty in the paternalist system represented by Lady Davenant; they are a social as well as a personal violation. Lady Katrina’s violations are private: she is jealous of Helen’s relationship with both Cecilia and Beauclerc. Yet while the novel so clearly condemns Carlos for his unwillingness to perform his servile role, conversations among the novel’s characters convincingly call the traditional social hierarchy into question. In her Introduction to Helen, Maggie Gee notes Edgeworth’s willingness to explore, though not necessarily settle, feminist questions. She writes: “Sexual difference and similarity is an area where Maria Edgeworth appears still to be in a state of fruitful conflict, still trying out new and dangerous ideas, more interested in debate than conclusions—all of which runs quite contrary to the critical notion of her as a rigid didacticist” (x). With regard to class too, Edgeworth is perhaps “more interested in debate than conclusions.” While her depiction of Carlos and other stereotyped servants appear to support a view of the author as a didactic paternalist, other portions of the novel reinforce Edgeworth’s openness to transformation, and an excitement about changing social roles. Growing up and helping raise her father’s family on their Irish estate, Maria Edgeworth valued spirited conversation and debate within her domestic sphere. Far from being the withering “little i” (as she sometimes called herself) who shrunk from any ideas that differed from her father’s, she actively sought to educate herself and her siblings about the political and social issues of her time. In many respects,

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she shared the views of her character Lady Davenant who tries to persuade Helen to become politically informed: Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational human being, can go through the world as it is now, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, “ladies have nothing to do with politics.” Helen blushed, for she was conscious that, wrong or right, namby-pamby, little missy, or not, she had hitherto satisfied herself very comfortably with some such thought. (253)

Lady Davenant’s attempts to steer Helen away from any “namby-pamby” ideas of the role of women should not be read as a feminist call to arms, however. Lady Davenant qualifies her beliefs about the influence of women in political matters: “I would keep the line between influence and interference. Female influence must, will, and ought to exist on political subjects as on all others; but this influence should always be domestic, not public—the customs of society have so ruled it” (254). It is interesting that Lady Davenant argues for women to limit their influence, not because to do so is inherently right or natural, but because not to do so would violate “the customs of society.” Edgeworth was certainly not the first woman writer to blend the personal and the political in this way, but Helen is a prime example of how a woman writer can explore political and social issues through a series of domestic debates. Edgeworth develops her discussion about class by contrasting the views of the Romantic hero Granville Beauclerc with those of the conservative patriarch General Clarendon. Beauclerc, a liberal idealist, firmly believes that, [E]very man born in England, even in the lowest station, may have [hopes] of rising by his own merits to the highest eminence . ... [Granville] agreed with the intelligent foreigner’s observation that the aristocracy of talent is superior in England to the aristocracy of birth. “Industry, and wealth, and education, and fashion, all emulous act in England beneficially on each other,” said Beauclerc. ... “And above all,” pursued Beauclerc,—“above all, education and the diffusion of knowledge.” “Knowledge—yes, but take care of what kind,” said his guardian [the General]. “All kinds are good,” said Beauclerc. “No, only such kinds as are safe,” said the General. The march of intellect was not a favourite march with him, unless the step were perfectly kept, and all in good time. (96)

In conversations such as this one, the General represents the conservative viewpoint that “the march of intellect” could result in dangerous changes to the very social system that has squarely placed him above everyone in his circle. Through Beauclerc, Edgeworth expresses enthusiasm for the demise of an aristocracy based on birth. Throughout the novel, Edgeworth depicts the General as rigid to the point of being cruel. Though at times well-intentioned, his inability to change his mind

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on any topic nearly destroys Helen and later, his own wife. He runs his home like a military camp, and though he has the respect of his wife and friends, they all feel the weight of his oppression. On the other hand, Beauclerc, whose ideas here Helen deems “common sense,” represents a more progressive viewpoint, one which still allows for an aristocracy, but advocates one based on talent, one to which even those of “the lowest station” can aspire to belong. Although this conversation reveals Beauclerc’s “common sense” to be superior to the General’s dated views, once again Edgeworth does not argue for a revolutionary overthrow of social conventions. In Helen, Edgeworth finds much to criticize in the social hierarchy, but she expresses a bit of regret for the loss of the social order as well. In another conversation, characters weigh the advantages and disadvantages of paying tribute to the outer trappings of class distinctions during … a discussion upon the advantages of ceremonials in preserving respect for order and reverence for authority, and then ... an inquiry into the abuses of this real good. It was observed that the signs of the times should always be consulted, and should guide us in these things. How far? was next to be considered. All agreed on the principle that “order is heaven’s first law,” yet there were in this application strong shades of difference between those who took part in the conversation. ... In a court quite surrounded and enveloped by old forms, the light of day cannot penetrate to the interior of the palace, the eyes long kept in obscurity are weakened so that light cannot be borne: when suddenly it breaks in, the royal captive is bewildered, and if obliged to act, he gropes, blunders, injures himself, and becomes incapable of decision in extremity of danger. (235)

In this and other conversations, Edgeworth attempts to balance a paternalistic belief that reverence for authority is a “real good” with her understanding that such a system is easily abused by both ruler and ruled. As in Lady Davenant’s advice to Helen, Edgeworth gives “the customs of society” highest priority in determining the relationships between human beings. Edgeworth argues for a progressive social system in which leaders bend to the changing times, yet she notes almost wistfully that “order is heaven’s first law.” Despite her clear vacillations, however, the most powerful image she creates here is that of a willfully blind aristocracy destroying itself in its refusal to accommodate inevitable changes in the class system. She suggests that those who keep themselves in this darkness by continuing to resist changing social roles are facing an “extremity of danger” that they will be unable to survive. Maria Edgeworth’s thinking was strongly influenced by a paternalist worldview, yet contrary social outlooks rivaled this view as she accounts for and depicts inevitable social change in her novels. Servants were a useful way for her to illustrate this tension in her novels of English manners, as they served practical and ideological purposes in her novels. Although all of her novels (with the exception of Vivian) are ultimately comic, Edgeworth injects them with tragic elements. As Eilean Ni Chuillean writes: “[F]or Maria Edgeworth, as an anti-classical writer the tragic and the comic will be frequently confused or disconcertingly alternated. This is indeed true of her fiction, especially when it places itself at a distance from the centers of power, dealing with the Irish, or lower-class, or women’s or children’s experience” (30). Edgeworth clearly saw the gap between the paternalistic ideal

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and the reality of the British social hierarchy. Throughout these domestic works of fiction, Edgeworth exploits all of the common literary stereotypes of servants only to reject these stereotypes as inadequate and to prescribe a new, more familial and egalitarian relationship between mistress and maid and to advocate for a society that is open to change. Early in Belinda, Marriott interrupts a conversation between Lady Delacour and Belinda, displaying two costumes for a masquerade ball, one that depicts the comic muse and one that depicts the tragic muse. Lady Delacour comments, “Whilst we are making speeches to one another, poor Marriott is standing in distress, like Garrick, between tragedy and comedy” (12). This anecdote illustrates quite literally the dual role of servants in Maria Edgeworth’s novels of manners, caught between two opposite roles: at times they function as flat comic stereotypes, indicating that these figures are well suited to their inferior station; other times Edgeworth gives their difficult lives and personal relationships a sense of dignity, indicating her belief in their moral and sometimes intellectual equality with their “betters.” Rather than exclusively creating a fantasy servant class of groveling subjects or a reactionary servant class of treacherous criminals, Edgeworth explored other possibilities. Although she did it in different ways, she struggled to understand and debate these issues from her earliest novels to her last, leaving the debate open until the end, but ultimately accepting the “common sense” of changing with the times. There is no doubt that Edgeworth, in confronting the problem of paternalism, did occasionally find herself “skeptical, puzzled, unresolved,” to quote Edmund Burke. While seeking to avoid taking political stands in her life, she ended up tackling them, however indirectly, in her writings. To write about family life and the relationships between employers and employees who live under the same roof was inevitably to address issues of power and politics. Servant characters allowed her to do so while occasionally hiding behind stereotypes, but more often by giving servants a sympathetic voice and a dynamic role in a changing social order. Elizabeth Gaskell does this as well, foregrounding servant characters while sharing Edgeworth’s skepticism about change and her reluctance to be seen as a political writer. Gaskell’s domestic novels, however, subvert paternalistic values more directly than her predecessor’s do.

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Chapter 3

“Submitting to Fate”: Servants in Gaskell’s Domestic Fiction

Have as many and as large and varied interests as you can; but do not again give a decided opinion on a subject on which you can at present know nothing. Elizabeth Gaskell to her daughter

Like her literary predecessor Maria Edgeworth, who publicly denied having an interest in politics even while she actively discussed and debated political issues, Elizabeth Gaskell was wary of coming across as too opinionated. It may be surprising that Elizabeth Gaskell, the controversial author of the industrial novels Mary Barton and North and South, advised her own daughter to refrain from any active discussion of politics and economics while she was a young woman away at school. The author whose writings stirred national debates about political and economic reform admonished Marianne Gaskell to hold her tongue: Seriously dear, you must not be a partizan in politics or in anything else,—you must have a “reason for the faith that is in you”,—and not in three weeks suppose you can know enough to form an opinion about measures of state. That is one reason why so many people dislike that women should meddle with politics; they say it is a subject requiring long, patient study of many branches of science; and a logical training which few women have had,—that women are apt to take up a thing without being able to state their reasons clearly, and yet on that insufficient knowledge they take a more violent and bigoted stand than thoughtful men dare to do. (l. 148)

In essence, Gaskell advised her daughter to keep her political views to herself rather than have them dismissed or criticized by “so many people.” She would know. As the “radical” author of Mary Barton and North and South, she had often faced accusations that her analysis of class conflict was based on insufficient knowledge of economic and political matters. Perhaps to disarm her critics, the author claimed to know “nothing of political economy,” and she clearly wished to shield her bright, well-educated daughter from the censure of popular opinion. Gaskell’s advice to Marianne echoes that Lady Davenant in Maria Edgeworth’s final novel Helen, who tells her protegé that “Female influence must, will, and ought to exist on political subjects as on all others; but this influence should always be domestic, not public—the customs of society have so ruled it” (254). In both cases, the authors do not claim that women are incapable of speaking intelligently on political issues, but that “many people” and “the customs of society” are uncomfortable with the idea of “violent and bigoted” women setting their views up against those of

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“thoughtful men.” As we will see in the following chapters, both Edgeworth and Gaskell did speak out directly about national and political issues, but even when they wrote about more private experiences—family, marriage, and household management—their political fingerprints are everywhere. Referring specifically to Mary Barton, Patsy Stoneman notes a trend that applies to all of Gaskell’s novels: “Although class struggle is most clearly seen in public confrontations, the family is the mechanism which reproduces class attitudes” (70). Like Edgeworth, Gaskell critiques the potential abuses within the paternalistic family model, revealing the parallel weaknesses in society at large and prescribing ways to accommodate change by breaking down class barriers in the home and in the world. Mrs Gaskell, the wife, mother, and hostess, and Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of controversial political novels, do not comprise a “split personality” as critic Felicia Bonaparte contends. All of Gaskell’s works depict characters struggling with new sources of authority and power in a changing society. Some do so in the larger economic arena of factory life; others do so in a smaller domestic setting. Like Edgeworth, Gaskell uses servant characters strategically in her novels of English domestic life, even more so than she does in those works that are more overtly political. Servant characters enable Gaskell to render the home as effective a setting as the factory for examining the tensions produced by changing social roles. Servants in these works function both as witnesses to and (often unwilling) agents of these changes. Far from being child-like dependents, these servant characters are an intricate part of Gaskell’s plan for revising the definitions of family and the roles of family members. Each of the novels and short stories covered in this chapter—“The Manchester Marriage,” Cranford, Ruth, and Sylvia’s Lovers —depict individuals struggling in their private lives, and each of them exposes the traditional family and social structures as inadequate remedies for the characters’ struggles. These works expose the self-destructive tyrannies and hypocrisies of individuals who bring about their own downfall and who are slowly bringing about a change in the rigidly hierarchical social system that had defined people for generations. In each of these works, it is a servant, rather than the powerful paternal figure who “rescues” a fallen family by serving as a surrogate parent, suggesting the necessity for a more fluid society with less rigidly defined roles. Ironically, the connections between the public and private dominions were becoming increasingly clear in the Victorian age just as the cultural zeitgeist emphasized the importance of keeping these spheres separate. While authors such as Coventry Patmore and John Ruskin were glorifying the Victorian home as a haven from the horrors of the working world, Victorian housewives were under increasing pressure to run their homes like factories, with regularized timetables and distinct duties. One advice manual suggests the following simple but daunting rules for making every house “a well-ordered one ... : 1. Do everything in its proper time. 2. Put everything to its proper use. 3. Put everything to its proper place” (Logan 28). As Thad Logan notes: “A rigid domestic schedule has its counterpart, of course, in the increasing regularization of time in the industrial and commercial spheres” (28). Despite the attractive notion that the world of the home was defined apart from that of the business sector, the two worlds resembled one another more than ever. Even in Gaskell’s industrial novels, the two worlds interact and influence one another.

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As Chapter 5 demonstrates, and as critic Constance D. Harsh points out: “Gaskell’s Mary Barton, like North and South, establishes domestic life as the fundamental reality upon which all else is built” (27). Elizabeth Langland’s study on Victorian middle-class women further deconstructs the notion of separate realms of home and business: Running the middle-class household, which by definition became “middle-class” in its possession of at least one servant, was an exercise in class management, a process both inscribed and exposed in the Victorian novel. Although the nineteenth-century novel presented the household as a moral haven secure from economic and political storms, alongside this figuration one may discern another process at work, the active management of class power. (14)

In her domestic novels, those which focus primarily on the private lives of individual characters, Gaskell exemplifies Langland’s notion that: “It was in the home, with its select, few workers, each under the surveillance of another in a rigid hierarchic chain, that the moral dimensions of class could be most fully and effectively articulated and enforced” (14). For Gaskell, as for Maria Edgeworth, many of the same problems were confronted in the public and private arenas, problems that could better be addressed by embracing inevitable changes in class relations. Gaskell’s motherly advice to her daughter to avoid controversial topics may not surprise some readers who know the novelist primarily through her reputation as the charming “Mrs Gaskell,” the proper Unitarian minister’s wife who managed to squeeze her literary career in between the more conventional and time-consuming demands of motherhood and marriage. Felicia Bonaparte points out that: “While many other women novelists escaped, at least in bare essentials, becoming models of ‘femininity,’ Gaskell appears to have been the epitome of the ideal Victorian woman. ... Except for the fact that she wrote fiction, Gaskell seems thus to have lived, in Coventry Patmore’s now infamous words, the life of ‘the angel in the house’” (12). Of course, Elizabeth Gaskell did write fiction, and she was a far cry from the Victorian ideal of the passive, self-sacrificing domestic angel. But her conventional domestic situation enabled her to critique the values of her culture from a safe and respectable vantage point. As an amiable minister’s wife, she could turn her critical eye toward the despotism within the Victorian home and family while still maintaining her non-threatening reputation, and appearing not to be “meddling in politics” when she was doing just that. Another way Gaskell was able to play it safe was to write in a genre that was not particularly threatening. Gaskell’s supernatural stories, in particular, explore guilty secrets and forbidden passions more directly than her longer, more conventional works. With the exception of “Lois the Witch,” Gaskell’s supernatural tales are domestic dramas—stories of women, children, and servants terrorized in their own homes. The villains are almost invariably comprised of those who should be society’s protectors: fathers, husbands, aristocrats, judges. Vanessa Dickerson, author of Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural, suggests that Gaskell felt freer to criticize these powerful figures while writing within this genre:

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Servants and Paternalism [The ghost story] was not a literature scrutinized and judged with the same strictness and wariness as were realistic works. ... Even though the nineteenth-century ghost story had its base in realism, its very nature, of course, was to treat the absent, the transcendent, and the unreal. Part of the reason that the ghost story was not subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as were historical and realistic texts is that it tended to take the form of the short story, not a particularly significant genre at the time. (110)

Thus Gaskell could address the same issues of illegitimacy, sexual jealousy, and class oppression in her supernatural tales as she would do in some of her more controversial novels without fear of public condemnation. Jenny Uglow writes in her introduction to her edited collection of Gaskell’s “Strange Tales,” “Under the guise of pure fun, Gaskell could be far more outspoken ... than in her ‘serious novels,’ where she had to brace herself for controversy” (ix). Uglow also points out that Gaskell’s tales of the uncanny have something else in common: they prominently feature loving, competent servant characters who take charge. These heroic domestics, according to Uglow, “offer counter-images of triumph and rescue which carried their own political and feminist message: the old nurse, with her brave protective love, is typical of another aspect of Gaskell’s writing, her admiration and respect for servants, so often wise and stronger than their supposed ‘betters’” (ix). “The Old Nurse’s Tale” is a classic example of Gaskell’s depiction of servants in a multiplicity of roles. Just as Maria Edgeworth’s novels feature servant characters who are honest and dishonest, strong and weak, selfish and giving, so does Gaskell’s fiction present servants in a similarly diverse light. Like Edgeworth’s, Gaskell’s servants all have names, personalities, and agency. The “old nurse” of the story’s title is the narrator Hester, who tells a story of being haunted during her younger days when she was nurse and lady’s maid to her former mistress, Rosamond. Hester is loving and honest, but Gaskell does not depict her as perfect. Though a servant, she is highly conscious of her own social status: when Hester learns that she and her mistress may be moving to a grand hall, she declares: “I was well pleased that all the folks in the Dale should stare and admire, when they heard I was going to be a young lady’s maid at my Lord Furnivall’s at Furnivall Manor” (2-3). Arriving with the orphaned Miss Rosamond at Furnivall Hall, Hester joins a group of servants whose relationships are hierarchically ordered, as was typical in Victorian homes, with upper servants keeping their social distance from those below them. At one point, hearing strange noises, Hester seeks an explanation from the housekeeper Dorothy and her husband James, but is met with only silence. She then turns to Bessy the kitchen maid, “though I had always held my head rather above her, as I was evened to James and Dorothy, and she was little better than their servant” (9). Hester’s pride at her relatively high-ranking position within the lower ranks in her household is a minor character flaw, but one Gaskell includes for a reason. Social pride is literally at the root of all evil in this story, and when we see that even Hester is capable of it, we see how pervasive it is. Hester eventually learns the history of the household, which had once been ruthlessly presided over by the now-dead Lord Furnivall and his two beautiful daughters: “The old lord was eaten up with pride. Such a proud man was never seen or heard of; and his daughters were like him. No one was good enough to wed them, although they had choice enough” (18). When

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Lord Furnivall learns that his eldest daughter has secretly married and had a child with a foreign musician, he turns them both out into a snowstorm, killing the child and driving the mother insane. The mysterious sounds Hester hears years later are the ghosts of this proud family, and the cries of the dead child, trying to lure Rosamond into the storm. Hester is the only member of the household able to protect Rosamond from this danger: “I held her tight with all my strength; with a set will, I held her. If I had died, my hands would have grasped her still, I was so resolved in my mind” (23). Hester’s courage and generosity contrasts both with the old Lord’s cruelty and pride and that of his aristocratic younger daughter who stood silently by as her sister and niece were banished many years before. This story illustrates that pride may be a normal human flaw—even Hester is guilty of it—but it can be particularly dangerous in the hands of the wealthy and powerful. The work that has been most influential in fostering the reputation of the charming and angelic “Mrs Gaskell” is Cranford, first published serially from 1851-53 in Dickens’ literary magazine Household Words. Written nearly simultaneously with Ruth, Cranford is in some ways the antithesis of that controversial tale of illegitimacy and redemption. Gaskell’s contemporary critics and those who wrote during the century after her death almost universally found Cranford to be “delightful” and “delicate” (Dickens), “exquisite” (John Forster), and of course, “charming” (A.B. Hopkins). Each of these words of praise, while welcomed by Gaskell herself, has done the author and her novel a disservice. To be charming means to be enjoyed and to be smiled over, but the word connotes a lack of depth or complexity. As Margaret Case Croskery writes, “[B]y dubbing Cranford ‘charming’ early critics dispensed with the necessity for explaining how it is that Cranford delights. Since charm dissolves under scrutiny, charming works and charming women neither deserve nor reward critical attention. In fact, they are best appreciated without it” (200). In some respects, the fictional village of Cranford, which Gaskell based on her childhood home of Knutsford, is a charming little town populated by charming characters, but the novel is also a serious investigation of a dying social system and the sometimes comic, often tragic, human consequences faced by those who cling too tightly to the old ways. Gaskell set Cranford in the 1830s and 1840s, allowing her to investigate the tension between her perceptions of the more orderly domestic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (which, as we’ve seen in Edgeworth’s novels, was not really so stable) and what Gaskell saw as the dynamic, energetic newly-emerging Victorian era. As Borislav Knezevic notes, “The railroad is already at Cranford in the first chapter, and there are cotton mills in Drumble. Thus, the Cranford ideology we are introduced to is one already in dialogue with the social effects of industrial capitalism” (413). A literary argument between the proper spinster Miss Jenkyns and the outspoken Captain Brown serves as a metaphor for the conflict of values which is at the heart of Cranford. Deborah Jenkyns embodies the values of the ruling class of the late eighteenth century. She is unyielding in her views, and wedded to the past, a character who resembles Maria Edgeworth’s General Clarendon from Helen in her distrust of change. Captain Brown, on the other hand, represents the changes facing Victorian England. He has made his career in the railroads, a symbol of movement and change, and is ignorant of the social

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hierarchy that defines the rest of the inhabitants of Cranford. Gaskell makes Captain Brown an avid reader of her own favorite author and friend, Charles Dickens. He reads scenes from Pickwick Papers out loud, evoking the ready laughter of his friends. Deborah Jenkyns, however, finds Dickens’ literary ascendancy appalling; she calls him vulgar, and recommends Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas as a better model of letters. When Captain Brown informs Miss Jenkyns that he “should be very sorry for [Dickens] to exchange his style for such pompous writing” (48), the resentment he engenders simmers unabated until his death: “Miss Jenkyns felt this [critique of Johnson] as a personal affront, in a way of which the captain had not dreamed” (19). In his “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of Cranford, Peter Keating comments on this important, if comical, exchange: Captain Brown may not appreciate the full significance of the revolution he is advocating, but Mrs Gaskell certainly did. She makes it clear in this exchange and later that Miss Jenkyns is merely mouthing opinions handed down ... [with] a mind closed to anything going on in the world around her. Captain Brown not only has more knowledge of Dr Johnson than Miss Jenkyns, he possesses the warmth and immediacy of character required to recognize the startling originality of a young writer. (19)

Keating’s use of the term “revolution” is not overstated. Gaskell rightly recognized that men like Captain Brown would do for society what writers like Dickens were doing for literature. In contrast to most of the Cranford gentility, who have “difficulty making ends meet,” but go to great lengths to conceal their poverty, Captain Brown bellows to anyone who will listen that that he is too poor “to take a particular house” (42). The captain’s unpretentious manner and his connection to the railroads, as well as his colloquial taste in literature, make him a classic representative of the changes facing Cranford, as well as the rest of English society. In the “new” society, dominated by characters like Captain Brown, the role of servants is less clear than it might have been a generation before. Their job description essentially remains the same, of course, but their relations with their employers become unsettled as the proper relationship between master and employee is debated throughout England. In an 1868 essay, the “progressive” proto-feminist Frances Power Cobb addressed some of the common middle-class anxieties about the changing nature of domestic service and the general sense that some of the “better” representatives of the lower classes were leaving service for work in industry. Just as liberals such as John Stuart Mill argued that the private lives of factory workers did not concern their employers, Cobb argued that the relationship between masters and mistresses and their servants must shift from one of paternal interest to a strict “contract of service” with “no moral element” to it if the service industry was to survive. Cobb admits that such a clear boundary is nearly impossible to draw: A contract to do the service of the employer at his direction is one thing; submission to orders having nothing to do with his service, but regulating the private and family affairs of the servant, is quite another. Here is the difficulty of the case, for some regulations of the servants’ habits may be indispensable to the comfort of the master and the order of his household. At this moment, the point where such regulations should stop is naturally a matter of dispute, for the old theory of service, wherein the patriarchal idea was

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predominant, has left behind it customs and notions wholly foreign to the new theory wherein contract is all in all. ... The transition, then, is troublesome. (124)

“Troublesome” might be an understatement. As I point out in Chapter 5, in Mary Barton and North and South, Gaskell argues that industry should adopt a system in which the relationship between employee and employer closely resembles the one between servant and master. In “Household Service,” Cobb argues for the opposite: that servants and their employers conduct themselves according to the laissez-faire model of industry. Her argument never completely caught on, mostly due to the nature of domestic service. Household servants, living and working intimately with their masters and mistresses, inevitably took on a hybrid role of family member/ employee. Still, Cobb’s essay suggests that both masters and servants were seeking a new way to define their relations at the same time that industry leaders were calling social paternalism into question. Cobb tells nostalgic members of the middle-class to brace themselves for a new era, like it or not: In the first place, employers must strive to eradicate from their minds the whole patriarchal idea of service. It may have been beautiful, it may have been happier than any other, but it is past and gone, and the sooner we bury it the better. A servant is not now or henceforth a retainer, a dependant, a menial who, in receiving from his master food and wages, becomes his temporary property—somewhat between a child and a slave—to be ordered in all things concerning, or not concerning, the master’s service. ... No obedience beyond the contract can be required of him; nor, on the other hand (and this is very needful to mark), has the servant any claims against the master beyond his stipulated contract of food and wages. (132)

Such a relationship between servant and mistress would have appalled Gaskell, whose only son died in the arms of his nurse, and who maintained close relationships with many servants long after they left her employment. Like Cobb, Gaskell recognized the tyrannies inherent in the social paternalist system, but her solution was not to give servants greater “freedom” away from the family, but to bring servants closer to their masters and mistresses as equals. In Cranford, which takes place at the beginning of this time of transition, “the subject of servants was a standing grievance” (64), according to the novel’s narrator, Mary Smith. Because of the genteel poverty of the residents of Cranford, mistress and maid live and work in close proximity, but both happily perpetuate the myth that a wide gulf separates the two classes. In one example, Mary Smith describes a dinner party given by Mrs Forrester “in a baby house of a dwelling.” Her guests: talked on about household forms and ceremonies, as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants’ hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never have been strong enough to carry the tray up-stairs, if she had not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew we knew, and we knew that she knew we knew, she had been busy all morning making tea-bread and sponge cakes. (41)

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Gaskell treats this class hypocrisy gently. A household with any servant, however humble, can still claim to be part of the gentry. As Thad Logan notes, “[I]t is by now clear how profoundly the bourgeois way of life was grounded in the availability and relative tractability of servants. The presence of a servant or servants was not only of enormous symbolic value in asserting a family’s claim to middle-class status, but it was also crucial in maintaining the exacting standards of housekeeping that had developed by mid-century” (29). Often the servant’s work is performed alongside her mistress, a fact that was less important than the status the servant’s presence confers. Gaskell makes it clear by the novel’s early chapters that this system cannot survive for long. The servants are willing enough to play their deferential role, but the fact that they conspire to maintain false appearances indicates that there is more social equality between the two classes than anyone will openly admit. These servants are not incidental to the happenings in Cranford; they make things happen, and everyone knows it. Gaskell was a passionate advocate of close interaction between social classes, and in Cranford, she creates intense personal bonds between servants and mistresses, bonds that eventually dissolve the class distinctions almost entirely. Gaskell believed that such intimacy served both classes well. In short piece entitled “French Life,” the narrator comments on the French practice of living in close proximity with one’s servants: [T]here is the moral advantage of uniting mistress and maid in a more complete family bond. I remember a very charming young married lady, who had been brought by her husband from the country to share his home in Ashley Buildings, Victoria Street, saying that, if they had to live in the depths of a London kitchen, she should not have tried bringing them out of their primitive country homes; as it was, she could have them under her own eye without any appearance of watching them; and, besides this, she could hear of their joys and sorrows and, by taking an interest in their interests, induce them to care for hers. French people appear to me to live in this pleasant kind of familiarity with their servants—familiarity which does not breed contempt, in spite of proverbs. (609)

Here, Gaskell expresses genuine enthusiasm for the mixing of classes, but also ambivalence about servants’ trustworthiness, a need to “have them under [one’s] own eye” as one would with children. This ambivalence is similar to Edgeworth’s uncertain depiction of Belinda’s Marriott, a servant whose interest in her mistress is suspect until she can prove her fidelity. Both authors prefer a solution in which “mistress and maid” are united “in a more complete family bond,” but both introduce barriers that make such a bond difficult. Edgeworth dignifies Marriott’s character and gives her a voice and agency, but she keeps Marriott in her place as a loyal dependent. Gaskell, on the other hand, ultimately places Cranford’s servant class on more equal footing with their mistresses. In the opening chapters, Miss Matty’s servant Martha is the type of country girl to whom Gaskell refers in “French Life.” Mary Smith believes that Martha needs to be kept “under her own eye” when she first begins her work as a servant. Like Captain Brown, Martha is “blunt and plain-spoken to a fault; otherwise she was a brisk, wellmeaning, but very ignorant girl” (67). Gaskell’s initial portrayal of Martha is that of a comic fumbler straight out of the long literary tradition of incompetent servants.

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Before entertaining some relatives of Miss Matty’s, Mary Smith instructs Martha “in the art of waiting, in which it must be owned she was terribly deficient” (67). Mary worries that too many instructions will “muddle the poor girl’s mind,” and Gaskell describes the maid as standing “open-mouthed” and “sadly fluttered” (68) as she listens to her job description. This depiction of a comically stupid servant character is unusual in Gaskell, and it should not come as a surprise to find that Gaskell soon remedies Martha’s incompetence, replacing that quality with generosity and wisdom. Although hardly a reader of Dickens, Martha resembles Captain Brown in that she represents some of the changes facing Cranford and she lacks the hypocrisy that keeps the community socially segregated. Gaskell had originally intended to write only one episode of Cranford, and the opening chapters that feature Captain Brown can stand alone as a short story. Gaskell later told John Ruskin that she “never meant to write more, so killed Capt Brown very much against my will” (Uglow 283). With the iconoclastic Captain out of the story, Gaskell had to find other ways to represent the possibilities of social change. She introduces the servant character of Martha soon after Captain Brown’s death, creating in Martha the embodiment of Gaskell’s ideal new Victorian society. Although Martha may be an uncouth country girl, she represents the future while the Miss Jenkynses represent the past. Many years before, the young Miss Matty had rejected a marriage offer from Mr Holbrook, a local farmer. She had reluctantly submitted to her sister’s and father’s objections to the match on the grounds of Holbrook’s inferior social status. According to Gaskell, these sacrifices to social rank are helping to tear down the very hierarchy that they are designed to preserve. Miss Matty is a victim of the aristocratic ideals that meant so much to her sister and her father. Meeting Mr Holbrook as a middle-aged woman, Miss Matty tries to suppress her intense feelings by thinking about the romantic life of her maid. She projects her own thwarted desires for romance and love onto Martha. After visiting Mr Holbrook’s house, Miss Matty is “pleased and fluttered,” but “gradually absorb[s her sentiments] into a distressing wonder as to whether Martha had broken her word, and seized on the opportunity of her mistress’s absence to have a ‘follower’” (77). “Having a follower” may seem like an innocent enough transgression, but the townspeople of Cranford are practically obsessed with preventing their maids from becoming romantically involved. The narrator Mary Smith tells the reader that: “if gentlemen were scarce, and almost unheard of in the ‘genteel society’ of Cranford, they or their counterparts—handsome young men—abounded in the lower classes. The pretty neat servant-maids had their choice of desirable ‘followers’” (64). Despite (or because of) the romantic odds in the maids’ favor, their mistresses generally forbade involvement, as was often the policy in Victorian households. Frances Power Cobb might have been referring to the residents of Cranford when she advised people to cease regulating the private lives of their domestic help: Martha’s only complaint about working for Miss Matty is her rule forbidding followers. Although Miss Matty expends a considerable amount of energy trying to prevent her servants from having followers, she reconsiders her restrictions as she confronts the many lonely and irretrievable years spent away from the man she once loved. On the day of Holbrook’s death, she tells Martha that henceforth followers will be

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permitted, provided they are respectable: “‘God forbid!’ said she, in a low voice, ‘that I should grieve any young hearts.’” After Martha eagerly informs her that she already has a would-be suitor: “Miss Matty was startled, [but] she submitted to Fate and Love” (82). Miss Matty recognizes that in preventing Martha from becoming romantically involved, she is perpetuating the tyrannical social system that sentenced her to an isolated life. In drawing this parallel between a maid and her mistress, Gaskell realigns Miss Matty with the servant class against the values of her own class. Miss Matty identifies with her young servant more than with the sister and father who determined her fate; she places the happiness of an “inferior” above the necessity of maintaining the longstanding regulations that govern domestic life in Cranford. In “submitting to Fate,” Miss Matty surrenders to the inevitable changes facing her community and acknowledges the failure of the existing class system to ensure the greater good. Gaskell makes it clear that the gentry cannot continue to function as a romantic police force, if they are going to continue to function at all. Unlike the spinsters who dominate social life in Cranford, Martha marries and has a child, bringing a new generation into the village. Martha’s relationship with Miss Matty deepens as the novel progresses, and Martha’s character evolves until there exists no sign of the comical country girl whose serving skills Mary Smith had so lamented. When Miss Matty later learns that she is financially ruined, Gaskell irreversibly blurs the line between mistress and maid. As Miss Matty increasingly assumes the role of the helpless child, Martha’s strength increases. She devises a plan that enables her to “save” her mistress. When Mary Smith begs the servant to “Listen to reason,” Martha retorts: “Reason always means what some one else has got to say. Now I think what I’ve got to say is good enough reason; but, reason or not, I’ll say it and stick to it” (155). Martha’s ability to stand up for her ideas and insist on the “reasonableness” of her own plan indicates that she is emerging from the shadows of dependency and into a new role within the family. Martha and her suitor Jem agree to marry and take in Miss Matty as a lodger. Within a year, Miss Matty has tentatively entered the commercial sector and opened a tea shop, and she and Martha live like family members, with Miss Matty helping care for Martha’s daughter Mathilda, and Martha presiding like a matriarch over a pieced-together family which includes her sister, husband, daughter, Miss Matty herself, and Miss Matty’s brother Peter, returned from India. In this new “family,” bonds of care trump bonds of kinship, and the family servant has become the new family matriarch. Toward the novel’s end, Mary Smith concludes, “As for Cranford in general, it was going on much as usual.” Yet just the opposite is true. Granted, some townspeople such as the rigid Mrs Jamieson and her imposing servant Mr Mulliner refuse to “submit to Fate and Love” like the rest of the town. They stubbornly draw their shades as if in mourning to protest the marriage of Lady Glenmire to a social inferior, and they isolate themselves from those of whom they disapprove. But the rest of Cranford adapts remarkably well. In this comedy, Gaskell celebrates social change and the breakdown of class distinctions while still retaining a distinct affection for the old-fashioned ways of Miss Matty who remains bewildered, though happy, through all the changes. Gaskell ends the novel by praising “Miss Matty’s love of peace and kindliness,” claiming that: “We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us” (218). Yet Gaskell is hardly advocating a

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return to the more traditional values that Miss Matty’s generation represents. As Peter Keating writes, “By ... gradually revealing the deep sadness of Miss Matty’s life, we see a society which for all its charm is narrow, exclusive, indifferent to the world outside its own boundaries, and, because of this, often unconsciously cruel” (24). We can admire Miss Matty’s love of peace and kindliness, but Gaskell also points out that these qualities are present in people of all social classes, specifically the servant class whose resourcefulness and energy will revive and ultimately dominate communities like Cranford. The caring and mutual dependence implicit in social paternalism are still present in Cranford’s new community, but Gaskell rejects the philosophy’s emphasis on an ordered society, specifically one dominated by a male authority figure. In fact, no individual roles are predetermined. People step up to help one another when needed, and the new arrangement works because everybody helps according to their talents. Although Gaskell’s novel is a stinging critique of the despotism inherent in a strictly hierarchical society and a fervent call for change, Cranford never earned Gaskell the type of criticism she feared for her daughter: that of being too political. In fact, the novel helped ensure Gaskell’s reputation as a charming lady of letters. In contrast, Ruth, written during the same period, threatened to have the opposite effect. The story of Ruth’s sexual fall, her love for her illegitimate child, and her moral redemption through self-sacrifice shocked some members of Victorian society and called into question Mrs Gaskell’s reputation as a writer of charming tales. Whereas Cranford merely hints at the effects of repressed sexuality on maid and mistress alike, Ruth holds a magnifying glass over the sexual nature of women, the predatory potential in upper-class men, and the hypocrisy of “respectable” society that condemns the first while turning a blind eye on the second. As in all of her works, Gaskell uses a private matter to shed light on the public issues of the abuses and proper uses of power. Yet many of her readers found themselves more concerned about the private matter: ironically, many were shocked by Gaskell’s “forgiveness” of Ruth’s sexual fall, but were less bothered by her scathing portrayal of Mr Bradshaw, the town’s tyrannical patriarch who condemns Ruth and terrifies his own wife and children. Mr Bradshaw embodies Gaskell’s most glaring critique of social paternalism. He is the most wealthy and influential member of his community, and as such he believes his duty is to care for and protect both his own family and the community at large. Yet the way he lives out these aims is antithetical to Gaskell’s ideal of caring: he beats his children, and terrifies his wife into meek submission. When he believes that Ruth is a virtuous widow, he offers her a position as governess to his children, and like a good paternalist, he also extends his patronage to her son and encourages her friendship with his daughter. Yet when he discovers the truth about her past, he uses the power that had once aided her to shame her and drive her out of his house. He is so resistant to the idea of Ruth‘s reformation and reintegration into respectable society, that he scoffs when Thurston Benson reminds him of God’s call to forgiveness: “The world has decided how such women are to be treated: and, you may depend upon it, there is so much practical wisdom in the world that its way of acting is right in the long run, and that no one can fly in its face with impunity” (351). Nowhere in Gaskell’s oeuvre do we find such a pitiless figure, one who would put the world’s laws before God’s in the name of protecting society. The “practical

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wisdom” that Bradshaw praises enables him to maintain his power over his family and community while ensuring that no one is able to threaten that power from below. Here again, Gaskell depicts the traditional patriarchal family, the model upon which social paternalism is based, to be the worst possible form of protection for those in need. Bradshaw’s own son is a criminal, his daughter is consumed with anger, and his wife is ineffective and childlike. Mr Bradshaw’s absolutism, rather than Ruth’s sexual transgression, was the primary target of Gaskell’s social critique, but the novel was controversial for other reasons. Gaskell compared herself to the martyr “St. Sebastian tied to a tree to be shot with arrows” (l. 221) in describing the hostile reception of Ruth. The Literary Gazette lamented Gaskell’s “loss of reputation” and the Christian Observer balked at Ruth’s message that “a woman who has violated the laws of purity is entitled to occupy precisely the same position in society as one who has never thus offended” (Uglow 338). Gaskell was so upset by the animosity awakened by Ruth that she was seriously ill for five weeks. Although Ruth had many defenders—including the Brownings, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens—Gaskell’s morals would always be suspect by some. She wrote: “I knew all this before; but I was determined to speak my mind out about it; only how I shrink with more pain than I can tell you from what people are saying, though I would do every jot of it over again tomorrow” (l. 220). As in Cranford, Gaskell argues for social change in Ruth, and creates a servant character, Sally, to demonstrate the possibilities for change and to help “rescue” Ruth. Although Faith and Thurston Benson take Ruth in and give her shelter and a place in society, it is their “nattered” maid Sally who becomes a mother figure to her and helps her grow into a woman. Like Martha, Sally becomes the voice of reason and generosity when the novel’s other characters lose their solid footing. Like Martha’s, Sally’s role in the Benson household changes as the novel progresses, shifting from domestic servant to family member. In many ways, she resembles another one of Gaskell’s servants, North and South’s Dixon: she has lived with the Benson family since Faith and Thurston were children and she loves the two of them devotedly. Like Dixon, she is old-fashioned, quick-tempered, and capable of inspiring terror in her master and mistress. Ruth notices that Sally’s comments are uttered “quite in the tone of an equal, if not a superior” (137). Sally begins the novel in open conflict with the heroine, and the story of their relationship is one of the most important told in Ruth because it is the story of how even the most prejudiced members of society can open their minds to the idea of redemption. Sally’s potential for change provides a model for the rest of society, most notably for Mr Bradshaw. Though Sally lives out her life on the bottom of the social hierarchy while Mr Bradshaw looks down from his place at the top, the two share a rather conservative belief in the “practical wisdom” of the world to dictate right and wrong. On the surface, Sally’s wisdom is that of the acquiescent subject who accepts her servitude as her divinely ordained place. Sally tells Ruth that: there’s a right way and a wrong way of setting about everything—and to my thinking, the right way is to take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed. Why! dear ah me, making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else what’s to come of such as

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me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time on earth for clapping ourselves down on our knees for set prayers. (174)

She goes on to tell Ruth that Mrs Benson had once told her “your station is a servant, and it is as honourable as a king’s, if you look at it right; you are to help and serve others in one way, just as a king is to help others in another” (174-5). Like many of Gaskell’s servants, such as North and South’s Dixon, Sally is an unwilling agent of change. She wishes no more than Mr Bradshaw himself to overturn the hierarchical structure social arrangements under which they both live or to alter the traditions and beliefs that have defined her. However, though she accepts her position on the social ladder, Sally is no meek dependent. Even before the Bensons return to their home with the pregnant Ruth, their thoughts are focused on how they will manage Sally who would certainly “go distraught” (125) at the thought of an unmarried mother and her baby in the house. It is clear from the early chapters of the novel that Sally will be a character to be reckoned with. Though the Bensons tell Sally that Ruth is a widow, the servant quickly sees through the lie and tests Ruth by cutting her long hair. Symbolically pruning away at Ruth’s sexuality, Sally roughly chops off the curls of the “brokenspirited” girl, but finds herself surprised at Ruth’s submissiveness: “I thought we should ha’ had some crying—I did. They’re pretty curls enough; you’ve not been so bad to let them be cut off neither. You see, Master Thurston is no wiser than a babby in some things; and Miss Faith just lets him have his own way; so it’s all left to me to keep him out of scrapes” (145-6). Her rigid morality resembles that of Mr Bradshaw: both characters have a strong sense of moral “duty” to protect those in their charge, and both characters will resort to intimidation and cruelty to maintain the status quo. Yet until the novel’s final chapters, Mr Bradshaw remains incapable of change while Sally’s character gradually comes to accept Thurston Benson’s view that “[it is] time to change some of our ways of thinking and acting” (351). Sally’s distrust toward Ruth begins to change when Ruth becomes a mother, and Sally witnesses Ruth’s repentance for her sexual transgression. Ironically, only Sally, Ruth’s harshest critic, can bring Ruth out of her self-pity and depression following the birth of her son: Sally took [the baby] briskly from his mother’s arms; Ruth looked up in grave surprise, for in truth she had forgotten Sally’s presence, and the suddenness of the motion startled her. “My bonny boy! are they letting the salt tears drop on thy sweet face before thou’rt weaned! Little somebody knows how to be a mother—I could make a better myself. ... Thou’rt not fit to have a babby, and so I’ve said many a time. I’ve a great mind to buy thee a doll, and take thy babby myself.” (174)

Sally’s harsh words do for Ruth what the Bensons’ care and kindness cannot. In claiming that she would make a better mother herself, Sally challenges Ruth to grow into her own place as a mother. From this moment on, it is Sally—not Faith or Thurston—who assumes the role of Ruth’s and her son Leonard’s surrogate parent. When Leonard is taunted about his mother’s past, Sally once again symbolically “nurses” the boy: “[H]e used to come back, and run trembling to Sally, who would hush him to her breast with many a rough-spoken word of pity and sympathy” (373).

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The scene in which Sally scolds Ruth for feeling sorry for herself is a turning point for Ruth’s character, in which she transforms into an adult woman responsible for her own life and that of her son: “Henceforward Ruth nursed her boy with a vigour and cheerfulness that were reflected back from him” (177). As the novel progresses, Sally’s position as the moral center solidifies. Like Cranford’s Martha, she insists on speaking “reason” regardless of whether her ideas contradict more conventional views of morality. In one instance, she prevents Thurston Benson from whipping Leonard as a punishment for lying. Reminding him that the family is deceptively passing Ruth off to the community as a widow instead of as an unwed mother, Sally states harshly, “I think it’s for them without sin to throw stones at a poor child, and cut up good laburnum branches to whip him. I only do as my betters do when I call Leonard’s mother Mrs —” (204). Reminded of his own hypocrisy, Thurston Benson puts down the switch like an obedient child. During the course of the novel, the social distinctions between the family and their servant are eclipsed by the stronger ties of caring and mutual dependence, as in Cranford. As the characters grow older, they begin to eat together in the kitchen, Sally’s domain: [T]hey all sat together in the kitchen in the evenings; but the kitchen, with the wellscoured dresser, the shining saucepans, the well-blacked grate and whitened hearth, and the warmth which seemed to rise up from the very flags, and ruddily cheer the most distant corners appeared a very cozy and charming setting; and besides, it appeared but right that Sally, in her old age, should have the companionship of those with whom she had lived in love and faithfulness for many years. (381)

Gaskell uses humble kitchen items—pots and pans, grate, dresser, and hearth— to symbolize the Victorian ideal of domestic private sanctuary. As in Cranford, this “family” has been created through ties of care and faithfulness: a brother and sister, an old servant, a young mother and her child. Notably absent in this familial tableaux is a patriarch. In fact, the novel’s only example of a father as family leader is Mr Bradshaw, who had failed to love and support his own family. Barbara Z. Thaden points out that “While many critics have seen this novel as a plea for greater sympathy with fallen women, Gaskell is also making the point that mothers do not need fathers to help raise their children” (62). What they do need, Gaskell implies, is a servant. Strikingly, in her representation of this ideal family image, Gaskell chooses to move the Benson family into the kitchen, rather than have the group gather in the parlour. Thad Logan’s study on The Victorian Parlour demonstrates that the parlour, in both Victorian literature and life, was “the center of the home and the most important room in the house” (23). It was depicted in literature and in art as the heart of domestic life, where families gathered in their most private moments. The parlour was one of the few rooms in the Victorian home from which servants were generally excluded, and it was considered the place where public cares were cast aside to seek refuge in the privacy of domestic life. Yet in Gaskell’s redefinition of the familial ideal, the servant’s territory—the kitchen—is the site where the concept of home and family is played out. Through Sally, Gaskell has demonstrated the need for a number of changes, changes in the way society is structured, and changes in the way human beings define morality. The climax in Ruth depicts a confrontation

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between Ruth’s seducer and Sally following the heroine’s death. More than any other character in the novel, Sally embodies Gaskell’s vision for Christian forgiveness, an ethical conversion that is both complex and difficult. In her story “The Manchester Marriage,” Gaskell depicts another servant whose relationship with her family is complicated and unusual. Unlike many of Gaskell’s servant characters, Norah is not a rural family retainer, but a Manchester woman whose relationship with her mistress is more socially equal than that of Sally and the Bensons, or any of Edgeworth’s English servants. Gaskell introduces Norah as “the only bridesmaid” at Alice Openshaw’s first wedding. As the story opens, Norah appears to be yet another one-dimensional self-sacrificing dependent. She foregoes her position with Alice’s in-laws to stay with Alice, she devotes her life to helping care for Alice’s deformed child, and at first she accepts matters obediently when Alice’s second husband dismisses her for her old-fashioned child-caring methods. It is not until about mid-way through the story that we see that the relationship between Norah and her new master will become the most complex relationship in the story. Although they live passably well together, “Norah and Mr Openshaw were not on the most thoroughly cordial terms, neither of them appreciating the other’s best qualities” (13), Gaskell writes, demonstrating the essential equality of these two characters. One is a successful businessman and the other a long-term servant, but they each have “best qualities” and they are equally prejudiced against one another. As in Ruth, the climax of “The Manchester Marriage” involves a confrontation between a servant and a man from her mistress’s past. Alice’s first husband, Frank, believed lost at sea, returns one night when her mistress and master are out. Contrary to our expectations, neither Alice nor Mr Openshaw confront Frank at any point in the story. The story’s dilemma does not center upon how Alice and her two husbands will resolve their impossible situation, as one might expect. Norah quickly sends Frank away in order to protect her mistress from the knowledge that her first husband is alive: “Norah had no time for pity. Tomorrow she would be as compassionate as her heart prompted. At length she guided him downstairs, and shut the outer door, and bolted it—as if by bolts to keep out facts” (18). In bolting the door against one master, she lets in the other, Mr Openshaw, the only person to whom she confides. After learning of Frank’s suicide, Mr Openshaw and Norah collude to keep Frank’s return and death a secret. Together they share a burden that will connect them for the rest of their lives and one that puts them on the same footing. As Mr Openshaw says, “‘I go with a dreadful secret on my mind. I shall never speak of it again, after these days are over. I know you will not either.’ He shook hands with her, and they never named the subject again, the one to the other” (29). Thanks to his servant’s decisiveness and her trustworthiness, the practical businessman Mr Openshaw was “from that time forth, curiously changed” (30). As a representative of the new wealthy class of businessmen, Gaskell suggests, Mr Openshaw must not revert to the old feudal relations between employer and employee. Their secret is sealed with a handshake and gesture of mutual respect. Gaskell’s 1861 novella, The Grey Woman, features an even more stinging indictment of patriarchal power and its failure to protect the vulnerable. Gaskell sets this gothic tale in Europe prior to the French Revolution, a time in which the paternalist social order still governed human relations, a time in which, ideally,

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daughters and wives were owed protection from their fathers and husbands in return for obedience. Instead, Gaskell describes a world in which women must protect themselves from powerful and dangerous men. The story’s narrator, Anna, is forced to marry a man who makes her uncomfortable because she discovers, too late, that she has permitted his attentions and people consider them to be betrothed. When Anna tells her father she does not wish to get married, he refuses to listen. It was as if, says Anna, “no one had any right over me but my future husband” (200). As a newlywed who is afraid of her husband and most of the servants in his household, Anna becomes close to her maid, Amante, who assumes the role of her mistress’s protector and friend: Perhaps one of the reasons that made me take pleasure and comfort in Amante’s society was, that whereas I was afraid of everybody (I do not think I was half as much afraid of things as persons), Amante feared no one. She would quietly beard Lefebvre [her husband’s servant], and he respected her all the more for it ... And with all her shrewdness to others, she had quite tender ways with me. (206)

Despite their differences of position, maid and mistress relate to one another as equals. The narrator tells Amante about her loneliness and her unhappy marriage, and, importantly, Gaskell notes that “Amante listened with interest, and in return told me some of the events and sorrows in her own life” (208). While it is not entirely unusual in literature for a servant to be the confidant of her mistress (as we saw in Edgeworth’s Belinda, for example), this mutual exchange of confidences is rare and marks this relationship as unusually close even within Gaskell’s oeuvre. Anna and Amande eventually discover that Anna’s charming but controlling husband is in fact a thief and a murderer, and Amante plans their escape from the castle. Like the Hester in “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Amante becomes her mistress’s savior, bravely confronting danger and risking her own life with the practical competence that characterizes so many of Gaskell’s servant characters: “She gave me direction—short condensed directions, without reasons—just as you do to a child; and like a child, I obeyed her ... For me, I saw nothing but her, and I dared not let my eyes wander from her for a minute” (221). The mistress of the castle has been reduced to an obedient child as her servant gives orders and leads her out of the home that had become her prison. While this escape marks a dramatic reversal of traditional hierarchical roles, it is only the beginning. Amante and Anna remain safe from Anna’s murderous husband by posing as husband and wife, with Amante in the masculine role. Amante had already assumed the social position of husband and protector when she helped Anna escape; all that was left was for her was to look the part: She looked into every box and chest during the man’s absence at this mill; and finding in one box an old suit of man’s clothes, which had probably belonged to the miller’s absent son, she put them on to see if they would fit her; and, when she found that they did, she cut her own hair to the shortness of a man’s, made me clip her black eyebrows as close as though they had been shaved, and by cutting up old corks into pieces such as would go into her cheeks, she altered both the shape of her face and her voice to a degree I should not have believed possible.

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All this time I lay like one stunned; my body resting, and renewing its strength, but I myself in an almost idiotic state—else surely I could not have taken the stupid interest which I remember I did in all Amante’s energetic preparations for disguise. I absolutely recollect at once the feeling of a smile coming over my face as some new exercise of her cleverness proved a success. (229)

Anna and Amante recast their roles of mistress and servant and become instead wife and husband, suggesting that both relationships are socially constructed rather than “natural.” Having been victimized by the men who should have protected them, the two women create their own family, based on the paternalist ideal, but with a twist: Amante becomes the strong husband that Anna clearly wants, one who uses “his” strength to nurture and lead, not to frighten and brutalize. While Amante is undoubtedly the stronger of the two characters, the two women have a clear mutual bond that does not depend on hierarchical status. Anna notes that Amante’s manner of speaking to her changes, “breaking out of her respectful formality into the way of talking more natural to those who had shared and escaped from common dangers, more natural, too, where the speaker was conscious of a power of protection which the other did not possess” (242). Aside from the fact of Amante’s sex, the two settle into a fairly conventional married life. Amante suggests that the two move to Frankfurt with Anna’s soonto-be-born child, where, “We will still be husband and wife; we will take a small lodging, and you should housekeep and live indoors. I, as the rougher and the more alert, will continue my father’s trade, and seek work at the tailor’s shops” (242). Their “married” life together consists of caring for Anna’s child, working to support themselves, and trying to stay safe. Although fear for their safety is always present, neither character expresses any wish to revert to previous positions with regard to gender or class. The “man” of the house is a female servant, and neither Gaskell nor her narrator seem to find that detail all that remarkable. Although the novella ends with Amante’s murder and Anna’s (bigamist) marriage to a male doctor, that relatively conventional ending does not change the story’s premise that social (and gender) roles are better determined by aptitude and inclination than by birth. In Sylvia’s Lovers, Gaskell once again weaves together the public, political world and the domestic, private world of struggling people, and she once again depicts a servant who emerges as the novel’s source of strength, wisdom, and moral leadership. The historical novel, which takes place in the 1790’s during the first phase of the Napoleonic wars, is rarely grouped with Gaskell’s public “condition of England” novels or her more private domestic works. Even Gaskell’s contemporary critics were unsure how to label this work. An anonymous critic in the Saturday Review of 4 April 1863 admitted that, “we can scarcely say in what class we should rank Sylvia’s Lovers or to what other novel we should liken it.” The novel takes place in a coastal Yorkshire whaling town, Monkshaven, and focuses on the character of Sylvia Robson, daughter of a farmer and former whaler, and her passionate love for the whaling specksioneer Charley Kinraid, who is kidnapped for naval service by one of England’s notorious press-gangs. More recent critics have agreed with the Saturday Review writer in finding it difficult to link this novel to Gaskell’s other works. Felicia Bonaparte writes that “[p]olitical and economic matters are central concerns in two

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of her novels [Mary Barton and North and South], and in the rest, as in her stories, they turn up in peripheral ways” (136). Words like “pastoral,” “non-political,” “noncontroversial,” and “non-engaged with social criticism” (Stoneman 139) have all been used in conjunction with the work, and it is true that the exotic setting does give Sylvia’s Lovers a feeling of distance and Romanticism which the realism of her industrial novels do not share. Yet Nancy Henry’s assessment of the novel—as “a tragic narrative of unforeseen encroachments of national events on individual lives” (Introduction xxiv)—stresses many of the same issues that Gaskell explores in all of her novels. Henry points out the connection that Gaskell draws between the pressgangs, which trapped men into service “for the good of the nation,” and the character of Philip Hepburn, who traps Sylvia into marrying him for her own protection: “Sylvia’s Lovers suggests that, in both political and domestic relationships, the line between paternalism and tyranny is easily crossed ... Obscure people like Sylvia are marginal to the making of political decisions and the fighting of national battles, but Gaskell represents their experiences as central to English history” (xxvi). The same Saturday Review critic who was unsure how to classify Sylvia’s Lovers did have the insight to take note of the Robson’s farm servant, Kester, whom the critic identified as one of three “careful studies” in the work. Since then, astonishingly little has been written about this important character who “was almost like one of the family” and who regards Sylvia “with loving, faithful admiration” (44). Yet in Sylvia’s Lovers, perhaps more than in any other full-length novel by Gaskell or her contemporaries, the relationship between the protagonist and a servant character is arguably the central relationship in the novel; in some ways Kester is Sylvia’s true “lover,” if not in a physical sense, then in the sense that he is the only man to remain faithful to her throughout her life. In the novel’s early chapters, “good old Kester” (45) is yet another a relatively one-dimensional character, yet another dutiful subject. He is happy enough working for the family, and is satisfied with the occasional privilege of basking in the light of Sylvia’s bright presence, gazing at his young mistress with “mooney eyes” (45). In the novel’s seaside town of Monkshaven, Gaskell tells us that “the distinction between class and class [was] less apparent” (9) than in other parts of England. As a result, the fact that Kester is merely a servant is less of an issue to the characters of Sylvia’s Lovers than it is in Gaskell’s novels in which maintaining social status and respectability are central concerns. Kester, it is true, looks up to his master’s family and dutifully accepts his servile position, but the social distance between the Robson family and their farm-hand is relatively slight. After Sylvia’s father Daniel is arrested during the press-gang riots, Kester asks Bell Robson if he may sleep in the house to be closer to the family. She replies, “God bless thee, my man; come in and lay thee down on t’ settle, and I’ll cover thee up wi’ my cloak as hangs behind t’ door. We’re not many on us that love him, an’ we’ll be all on us under one roof, an’ niver a stone wall of a lock betwist us” (249). Bell and Kester are united by their shared love for Daniel, and that bond is enough to bridge the social distance between them. Yet by morning, Kester has left his makeshift bed, so that “none knew of [his sleeping there] besides Bell” (249). Even in Monkshaven, people may try to keep up the appearance of class distinctions, but the classes are drawn to one another for comfort more freely than in Gaskell’s other works.

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Throughout Sylvia’s courtship with Charley Kinraid, her father’s execution, her disastrous marriage to Philip Hepburn, and her life as a mother, Kester is her only consistent confidant and friend. He assumes a paternal role after her own father’s death, and there is no other character in the novel who offers her an honest unconditional relationship: Charley’s trustworthiness is later called into question, and her marriage with Philip is based on a lie. As a man in his fifties, Kester is old enough to be Sylvia’s father and their relationship most resembles that of a father and daughter, but there is an underlying element of sexual attraction in his response to her that complicates their relationship. Although there is no possibility of a romantic storyline between the two characters, Gaskell strengthens the attachment between Kester and Sylvia by demonstrating that Kester is bound to Sylvia by more than merely dutiful ties. Though he had approved of Sylvia’s relationship with Charley, he comes to resent Philip’s overtures to Sylvia out of “hot jealousy” (276). He upbraids Sylvia for courting Philip “‘when her feyther’s in prison’ ... with a consciousness as he uttered these last words that he was cruel and unjust and going too far” (276). Kester’s jealousy increases after Daniel’s execution as he watches Sylvia and her mother return from the hanging accompanied by Philip: Kester ... went quickly out through the back-kitchen into the farm-yard, not staying to greet them, as he had meant to do; and yet it was dull-sighted of him not to have perceived that whatever might be the relations between Philip and Sylvia, he was sure to have accompanied them home; for alas! he was the only male protector of their blood remaining in the world. Poor Kester, who would fain have taken that office upon himself, chose to esteem himself cast off, and went heavily about the farm-yard, knowing that he ought to go in and bid such poor welcome as he had to offer, yet feeling too much to show himself before Philip. (286)

Kester’s real fear is that Philip will ostracize him from the Robson family. During Daniel Robson’s arrest and incarceration, we have seen that Kester had earned himself a place by the fire, “under the same roof” as the rest of the family. In stating his desire to be “the only male protector of their blood remaining in the world,” Kester implies his desire to do what most of Gaskell’s servants do—assume the role of family guardian. It is not until later, after Philip has shown his inability to perform that function that Kester will have his wish. Gaskell first demonstrates the failure of traditional marriage to “save” Sylvia before she allows the servant character to intercede. Kester’s warm feelings for Sylvia are not unrequited; far from being an invisible farm-hand, Kester is an object of Sylvia’s intense speculation and concern. Despite her own financial and emotional distractions, Sylvia immediately notices that Kester has not stayed to welcome the family home and, understanding him well, she knows why: “She knew by some sort of intuition that if Philip accompanied them home ... the old servant and friend of the family would absent himself; and so she slipped away at the first possible moment to go in search of him” (286). Like her mother had done before her, Sylvia takes Kester into the house and re-establishes him as a family member. The relationship between Sylvia and Kester evolves throughout the novel, and Gaskell relates numerous conversations between them in which both characters express

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their views honestly. Sylvia hides her doubts about her future husband from her mother and from Philip himself, but she confides in Kester that she is only planning to marry him because “he’s been so good to us in a’ this time o’ trouble and heavy grief, and he’ll keep mother in comfort all t’ rest of her days. ... [but] I’ve niver forgotten Charley; I think on him, I see him ivery night drowned at t’ bottom o’ t’ sea” (293). Kester is the novel’s only character to suspect that Philip is lying about Charley’s fate, reminding Sylvia that Philip was the source of that information: “An who telled thee so sure and certain as he were drowned?,” he asks, adding perceptively, “He might ha’ been carried off by t’ press-gang as well as other men” (292). His words are clearly out of line for a family servant, but Kester goes on to give Sylvia a final warning: “Sylvie ... dunnot go and marry a man as thou’s noane taken wi’, and another as is most like for t’ be dead, but who mebbe, is alive, havin’ a pull on thy heart” (293). Though she does not take his advice, Sylvia clearly values his insight. After Sylvia marries Philip, she moves away from the farm and into the town, but she continues to see Kester regularly. Despite an initial “estrangement caused by their new positions” (310), Sylvia continues to rely on Kester’s friendship and the two resume their confidences. Sylvia seeks Kester out as soon as she learns that Philip had lied to her about Charley, revealing to him the story of her husband’s deceit and disappearance. As time goes on, and she struggles to raise her daughter alone, Gaskell tells us that, “The only person who seemed to have pity on her was Kester” who came to see her “from time to time” (377). By the end of the novel, he continues to be charmed in her presence: “As the earliest friend she had, and also as one who knew the real secrets of her life, Sylvia always gave him the warm welcome, the cordial words, and the sweet looks in which the old man delighted” (423). Once again, Gaskell has exposed the traditional patriarchal family structure as inadequate at best and despotic at worst, and once again, she has placed a servant character in the role of the protector and parent in a redefined version of kinship. As in Cranford and Ruth, the servant character is also the embodiment of the possibility for change and redemption. Throughout the novel, Kester treats Philip as his rival and enemy. He had sought to prevent Philip’s marriage to Sylvia and vowed that “that chap has a deal to answer for” (361) when he learned of Philip’s deceit. Yet in the novel’s final scenes, Kester becomes a model of forgiveness. As Philip lies dying after saving their daughter from a drowning accident, Kester goes to Sylvia and tells her that Philip needs her “if iver a husband needed a wife” (441). Witnessing the reunion between the two, Kester “was sobbing bitterly; but she not at all” (449). At the climax of her long novel, Gaskell goes out of her way to detail the emotions of the family servant along with the novel’s heroine, giving the reaction of each equal weight. Like Gaskell’s other servants, Kester had been the voice of wisdom throughout Sylvia’s Lovers, and Gaskell gives him the last word. The final passage of the novel takes place years later, after Sylvia has died and her daughter has married and moved away to America. Two women relate the now legendary story of Sylvia and Philip Hepburn. At the end of the story, one woman adds, almost as an afterthought: “I knew an old man when I was a girl ... as could niver abide to hear t’ wife blamed. He would say nothing again’ th’ husband; he used to say as it were not fit for men to be judging; that she had had her sore trial, as well as Hepburn hisself” (450-1). That

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old man, of course, is Kester, and it is he who provides the final interpretation of her story. Like Cranford’s Martha, he rejects the notion that “reason always means what other people have to say,” and provides his own views, “reason or not.” Given the clear pattern of criticism that Gaskell leveled at the traditional family led by a firm patriarch, and the paternalist social structure that was based upon that familial model, it is ironic that “Mrs Gaskell” should be remembered as a paragon of domestic womanhood. And there is no question that Gaskell embraced her domestic side: “I am always glad and thankful that I am a wife and mother and that I am so happy in the performance of those clear and defined duties,” (l. 118) she wrote in a letter. That she derived satisfaction from both motherhood and her relationship with her husband is somewhat remarkable given that so many memorable women writers have been single or at least free from the dangers and demands of childbirth and childrearing. Biographer Winfred Gerin describes Gaskell at her writing, suddenly “called off yet once again by her busy household aides to settle some domestic problem, and resume, without perceptible strain, the role of housewife as she had just assumed that of author. No one can say which was her truer element” (303). Yet Gaskell did not exactly find her roles as wife and mother to be “clear and defined,” just as she felt that the duties of her characters were mutable and evolving. Like her characters, she was ambivalent about her assigned position in life. Ironically, given the importance that some critics have placed on her publishing as “Mrs Gaskell,” the author never used her husband’s first name when referring to herself. Chafing at the idea of being “Mrs William Gaskell,” she always signed her letters “Elizabeth Gaskell” after her marriage, accusing women who did not use their own “proper name” as indulging in “a silly piece of bride-like affectation” (Uglow 77). A “silly affectation” might also have been Gaskell’s opinion of those who cling too tightly to their social positions and worldviews. In Cranford, Ruth, and Sylvia’s Lovers, Gaskell does not address the kind of overtly political topics of Mary Barton and North and South, but instead keeps to the advice which she gave her daughter Marianne: not to “meddle” in politics, but keep to more private matters of relationships and family, matters to which many felt the proper minister’s wife was more suited. But the private world did not and could not exist apart from the worlds of power and commerce, and Gaskell’s comments on the private lives of her characters were at once comments on these political and economic issues. For her, there was no better way to drive home a critique of despotic authority while holding up an ideal of caring than to foreground servants as saviors of the family.

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Chapter 4

“True and Loyal to the Family”: Servants in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Novels

The Irish are perhaps the laziest civilized nation on the face of the Earth.

Maria Edgeworth, age 14 Lazy, deceitful, ignorant, and prone to drink—the previous chapters addressed ways in which servants confronted these stereotypes in England and the ways in which they were reinforced or challenged in literature. They were just as often applied to the Irish peasantry by their English rulers. No doubt, the 14-year-old Maria Edgeworth held her share of prejudices against the Irish people when she first arrived at her new home in Edgeworthtown from England, prejudices she had acquired in England, and that she had every expectation of seeing confirmed by experience. But Edgeworth does not make the logical leap that the inferior legal and political status of the Irish is justified by their idleness, as many did. Instead, she asserts that “for this indolence peculiar to the Irish Peasantry several reasons may be assigned, amongst others the most powerful is the low wages of labor 6d a day in winter and 8d a day in summer” (Kowaleski-Wallace 142). As she would later do in her fictional depictions of the servant class, Edgeworth invokes a familiar stereotype in order to undermine it, laying the responsibility for a lazy nation at the door of its parsimonious rulers. Despite her initial misgivings about the country, Edgeworth would eventually grow to love Ireland and identify with its people. During the famine of the 1840s, she suffered hunger and deprivation along with her tenants, and the people of Ireland came to regard the famous writer as one of their own—a friend and champion. Yet Edgeworth never completely lost her early ambivalence about the Irish. A poem that she wrote and enclosed in a letter in May of 1849, shortly before her death, reflects a combination of affection for and frustration toward her country: Ireland, with all thy faults, thy follies too, I love thee still: still with a candid eye must view Thy wit, too quick, still blundering into sense Thy reckless humour; sad improvidence, And even what sober judges follies call, I, looking at the Heart, forget them all! (Chosen Letters)

Edgeworth’s Irish novels contain a similar contradiction in which criticism of Ireland’s “faults” masks a clear admiration for Irish intelligence and resourcefulness.

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Like the “sober judges” of her poem, Edgeworth finds much to criticize about Ireland, but she ultimately affirms her faith in the Irish people. Her novels, too, reveal a close identification with the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and a paradoxical subversion of that class’s social position. As a writer and an estate manager, Edgeworth worked to reform the exploitative landlord/tenant relationship that structured life in the Irish “Big House.” The Edgeworths provided educational opportunities for their tenants; they developed a system that would enable workers to profit from improvements they made to the estate; and they took a personal interest in their tenants’ lives, helping their children find jobs and staying in touch with them after they left Edgeworthstown. This system became a model of progressive paternalism in Ireland. In return for their reforms and support, the Edgeworths expected and received their tenants’ loyalty and gratitude. For Maria Edgeworth, “paternalism” had personal as well as political implications. Her intense relationship with her father is well documented. Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace describes Edgeworth as “a particularly strong example” of a “daddy’s girl,” for whom “identification with patriarchal politics provided an opportunity for self-definition ... [a] chance for authority and for limited empowerment” (96). Gary Kelly writes that Edgeworth’s novels “followed plans and themes suggested by her father, corrected according to his criticisms, and published under cover of prefaces by him” (91). Yet like critics of Elizabeth Gaskell, Edgeworth’s readers have consistently noted the curious tension between Maria Edgeworth the dutiful daughter of patriarchy and Maria Edgeworth the progressive iconoclast. Mark Hawthorne writes that her novels should be read on two levels: the first, “didactic, purely and simply. It is this level which repels many 20th century scholars, for she could be ... crudely dogmatic. ... On the second [level] she advanced her own doubts ... [creating] a form of fiction that is at once outspoken and subdued” (3). Similarly, Kowaleski-Wallace, who closely associates Edgeworth with patriarchal values, nevertheless comments upon “the persistent shadows of an irrational force, one that never quite disappears from her work” (104). Marjorie Lightfoot describes Edgeworth’s outlook as “that of a radical and conservative Anglo-Irish woman, as she questions colonialism, traditional male/female relationships, and styles of art and life while trying to preserve moral boundaries” (119). Each of these critics approaches Edgeworth’s writings from a different perspective, yet they share the common view that Edgeworth’s life and work—at once moralistic and doubting, conservative and radical—resist easy categorization. Although Edgeworth never sought a direct role in politics, as I noted in Chapter 2, her choice to write about Ireland was, by definition, a political decision in a period of dangerous tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Her family’s Protestant loyalties were questioned by their Anglo-Irish peers, but the Edgeworths could not (nor did they wish to) assimilate with the Catholic nationals. Her novels about Ireland reflect a similar ambivalence about the relationship between England and Ireland that her English novels do about the relationship between master and servant. But when Edgeworth shifted her focus from the domestic sphere to a changing Ireland, she continued to use servant characters to embody the instability of social and national roles. Throughout these novels, servant characters often function as one of those “irrational” forces that enable Edgeworth to question both tradition and the

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possibilities for change. In the case of three of Edgeworth’s novels that take place (at least partly) in Ireland, Edgeworth extends her examination of class to issues of nationality. In these Irish novels, Edgeworth’s most important servant characters, Castle Rackrent’s Thady and Ennui’s Ellinor, are also frequently characterized as typically and distinctly Irish. Looked at another way, Edgeworth’s most important Irish characters also happen to be servants. Their dependent roles, as family steward and nurse respectively, are inseparable from their nationality. In choosing to foreground the lives of these servant characters, she also boldly foregrounds the colonized peasants upon whose labor the Irish ascendancy depended. Through a number of plot twists in which servants assume the roles of their masters or double as their mistresses, Edgeworth invites her readers to consider some potentially uncomfortable questions: who is worthy of wealth and power? How significant are differences in nationality and ethnicity? Despite Edgeworth’s attraction to a socially hierarchical society, her Irish novels reveal a changing world in which—to quote Ennui—“Any man can be made a lord; but a gentleman, a man must make himself” (290). Late eighteenth-century Ireland was plagued by conflict between the Irish Catholic natives and ruling English Protestants. The draconian Penal Laws of 1695 ensured the continual oppression of the Irish peasantry and kept the ownership of land in Protestant hands. A.C. Partridge writes, “This period in Irish history was therefore marked by violence and a large-scale disregard for the rule of law, which undermined the authority of the class to which writers like Maria Edgeworth belonged” (243). By the time Edgeworth wrote the final section of Castle Rackrent, the already tense political climate in Ireland was exacerbated by the French Revolution and then by England’s war with France. A successful peasant uprising was a pervasive and realistic fear, and the Edgeworth family narrowly escaped personal violence at the hands of both Catholic and Protestant mobs. It is therefore especially remarkable that Edgeworth’s most revolutionary novel would be written and published during this time. Castle Rackrent details the debaucheries and decline of an aristocratic Irish family. The book is more than a radical critique of the people who shared Edgeworth’s status; it makes a bold statement about the business class destined to replace them. The Rackrents are supplanted by Jason Quirk, son of Thady Quirk, the novel’s narrator and longtime Rackrent family steward. As Gilbert and Gubar point out, “whether consciously or unconsciously, this ‘faithful family retainer’ manages to get the big house” (151). With its multiple glosses by a fictionalized English editor, a parade of landowners, and the ultimate reversal of the social order, Castle Rackrent would certainly qualify as a work with an “irrational force,” written on “more than one level,” to quote Kowalski-Wallace. Taken at face value, Thady is the type of loyal servant any master could hope for. Although Thady’s own son Jason has become master of Castle Rackrent by the time the tale begins, Thady appears not to have benefited by that fact, stating, To look at me, you would hardly think “poor Thady” was the father of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen

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This passage resembles other moments in the novel where Thady denounces the rise of his son to wealth and power and affirms his complete allegiance to the Rackrents. The adjectives he uses to describe himself—“poor,” “honest,” “true,” and “loyal”—make him sound like a model of meek submissiveness. Thady has no use for those from his class who place their own self-interest before the “greater good” of maintaining social order. His loyalty, he affirms, is to the family even if it means forfeiting his family. Thady asks us to trust his story because, he claims, “there’s nothing but truth in it from beginning to end: that you may depend upon” (121). The novel’s fictional editor appears to concur when he writes in his preface that Thady’s humble background renders him incapable of lying: “Where we see that a man has the power, we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive us” (62). The editor, who glosses the novel in the academic voice of comfortable authority, dismisses Thady and others of his class but we should not confuse the voice of the editor with that of Edgeworth, who makes clear that Thady absolutely has the power, and quite possibly the will, to deceive. The novel is laden with examples of Thady’s seemingly incomprehensible loyalty to the Rackrents at the expense of his resourceful, if calculating, son Jason. By the novel’s end, Thady laments the fact that Jason has acquired the Rackrent estate, profiting from the neglect and errors of his masters. “[T]o his shame be it spoken,” says Thady, “I wondered for the life of me, how he could harden himself to do it” (106). Thady goes so far as to describe Jason as “very short and cruel” (107) to Sir Condy Rackrent and he claims that he is “grieved and sick at heart for my poor master” (109) as Jason assumes Sir Condy’s place as owner of the Rackrent estate. Thady pronounces this reversal a “murder” (109); he more appropriately called it a “treason,” since a servant’s usurpation of power had larger implications for the paternal social order. When he tells Jason to “recollect all he has been to us, and all we have been to him” (109), Thady asserts his belief that traditional roles should continue to dictate relationships between the two families. What Thady appears to forget (or what he ignores) is that Jason only ascends to power because the Rackrents have abdicated their role as caretakers of the castle, land, and tenants. Condy will always be a Rackrent and Jason will always be a Quirk, and those facts are apparently enough to secure Thady’s loyalty, even though the Rackrents never gave their loyal steward more than the occasional tip. Judy, Thady’s niece, challenges her uncle’s worldview by pointedly asking him how he could be “such an unnatural fader ... not to wish your own son preferred to another” (119). Even Thady is perplexed at this question. Judy’s use of the word “unnatural” underscores the divided loyalties of the paternalist subject. Unlike Judy and Jason, Thady confuses his socially constructed position of servant with his “natural” role as father. He responds to Judy’s accusation with a moment of rare selfdoubt: “Well, I was never so put to it in my life: between ... my son and my master, and all I felt and thought just now, I could not, upon my conscience, tell which was the wrong from the right” (119).

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This crisis of conscience, which comes toward the end of Thady’s tale, marks one of the few instances in which Thady openly questions his loyalty to the Rackrent family. But Thady actually identifies more with Jason than he may be willing to admit to his readers and possibly to himself. In fact, Thady’s loyalty to Jason is at least as powerful as his loyalty to the Rackrents, but his life-long position as a servant prevents him from expressing his honest views in language other than that of a grateful dependent. A good deal of the critical debate surrounding Castle Rackrent has focused on whether Thady is the simple loyal servant he claims to be or whether he clearly sees and wishes to expose the flaws of the degenerate family he works for. Coilin Owens writes, “Many readers have considered Thady as an uncritical servant of social and economic orders. But Maria Edgeworth’s personal contact with the Irish people did not leave her with any misapprehensions about the naiveté of members of his class, skilled as they were in the cultivation of a servility appropriate to their status as minions of a colonial order” (71). As Edgeworth herself writes in Ormond, “It is astonishing how quickly and how justly the lower class of people in Ireland discover and appreciate the characters of their superiors; especially of the class just above them in rank” (67). Edgeworth revisits this “cultivation of servility” in Ennui through the characters of Joe Kelly and Ellinor. And in Rackrent, too, Edgeworth suggests that Thady’s servility has served himself and his son more than it has served his masters. James Newcomer maintains that Thady is more sophisticated than readers have given him credit for, and writes that “we should at least be skeptical of the ingenuousness and the loyalty that appear to be Thady’s characteristics” (79). Is Thady an ignorant servant, stupidly loyal to undeserving masters and unfair to his own hardworking son? Or is he a shrewd manipulator, claiming a loyalty he doesn’t feel while damning the Rackrents with faint praise? Perhaps both characterizations tell a partial truth. Having lived so long as a dependent in a paternalist society, he has internalized the belief that his masters’ good is his own good, but he is also well aware of their degeneracy and his son’s industriousness. William A. Dumbleton looks at it this way: [T]hady’s been in the big house family service for four generations, and on the surface his anecdotes seem to say how wonderful the family is, but the ultimate revelation is how mean-spirited and profligate they are. Thady, an Irish peasant, is uneducated, but he is very shrewd and knowledgeable in the way of Irish life. He has what some call soft blarney. The reader recognizes that he gets along well by saying positive complimentary things. The peasant-landlord relationship makes it necessary to take this stance. (22)

According to Dumbleton, genuine honesty between landlords and peasants and between masters and servants is impossible in a paternalist system. Thus, Thady’s nickname, “Honest Thady” is the first and biggest lie of all. Clearly Edgeworth recognizes this irony and creates a loyal servant-narrator who is not always honest with his readers, and who is not always honest with himself. Outwardly denouncing his son’s triumph over the Rackrents, he nevertheless consistently expresses his pride in Jason’s achievements, defends Jason’s right to own property, and assists him every step of the way until the reversal of roles is complete.

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A close examination of Thady’s relationship with Jason reveals that his allegiance to the Rackrents instead of his son is more uncertain than it at first appears. Though the novel’s editor sets Thady up to be a stereotypical ignorant Irish stooge, the steward’s shrewdness and Quirk family pride come across throughout his narrative. Thady began his tale by claiming, “I wash my hands of [Jason’s] doings,” yet his descriptions of his son indicate the two have a much closer connection. Nearly every reference to Jason is prefaced with the possessive phrase, “my son,” and many of Thady’s stories reveal that he is as “true and loyal” to the Quirks as he claims to be to “the family.” When unscrupulous agents are exploiting tenants in the name of the absentee landlord Sir Kit Rackrent, Thady is unmistakeably critical of his master: [T]here was no such thing as standing it. I said nothing, for I had great regard for the family; but I walked about thinking if his honour Sir Kit knew all this, it would go hard with him, but he’d see us righted; not that I had any thing of my own share to complain of, for the agent was always very civil to me, when he came down to the country, and took a great deal of notice of my son Jason. Jason Quirk, though he be my son, I must say, was a good scholar from birth, and a very ’cute lad: I thought to make him a priest, but he did better for himself: seeing how he was as good a clerk as any in the county, the agent gave him his rent accounts to copy, which he did first of all for the pleasure of obliging the gentleman, and would take nothing at all for his trouble, but was always proud to serve the family. By-and-bye a good farm bounding us to the east fell into his honour’s hands, and my son put in a proposal for it: why shouldn’t he, as well as another? (74)

The passage begins with an expression of sympathy for the oppressed peasants and a half-hearted defense of Sir Kit who would rectify the situation were he at his estate. The unstated criticism behind this defense, of course, is that Sir Kit should be overseeing the activities of the agents on his own property. Practically in the same breath that Thady once again affirms his “great regard for the family,” he describes with pride the first time his son (described as such three times) remedied the abuses against the peasants and how his son acquired property of his own. This early land acquisition is just the first in a series that will end in Jason’s ultimately owning the estate. Although Thady will later profess “shame” at this final result, here— knowing full well how the story will end—he defends Jason. He describes Jason’s intelligence, his hard work, and, more importantly, his right to acquire property “as well as another.” He also attributes honest motives to Jason, claiming in language similar to that with which he describes himself, that his son “was always proud to serve the family.” Clearly, Thady approves more of Jason, taking pride in his financial and social advancement, than he does Sir Kit, the absentee landlord who cheats his tenants out of what little they have. Together, father and son collude in Jason’s progress and exchange information about the Rackrent’s problems. After the same unscrupulous agent writes a letter to Sir Kit explaining that he can not extract any more money from his tenants (a letter which implicates Sir Kit in these abuses), Thady writes, “I saw the letter before it ever was sealed, when my son copied it. When the answer came, there was a new turn in affairs, and the agent was turned out; and my son Jason, who had corresponded privately with his honour occasionally on business, was forthwith desired by his honour to take the accounts into his own hands, and look them over

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till further orders” (75). Here Thady acknowledges that he has had access to his master’s private correspondence via his son, an admission of collusion, and a confession of violating his master’s privacy, an infraction that the ruling class feared most from their servants. Far from “washing his hands” of Jason’s “doings,” Thady’s fingerprints are all over Jason’s advancement. Thady’s sympathy with the Rackrents is tested most acutely when Sir Kit returns to Ireland with his Jewish bride and promptly locks her up until he can steal her diamond cross. “I could not but pity her,” admits Thady, “though she was a Jewish: and considering too it was no fault of hers to be taken with my master so young as she was at Bath, and so fine a gentleman as Sir Kit was when he courted her, and considering too, after all they had heard and seen of him as a husband, there were now no less than three ladies in our country talked of for his second wife” (80). Not only does Thady make the traitorous admission of sympathizing with a foreigner at the expense of a member of the family, he goes on to criticize Sir Kit’s behavior as a husband and to wonder how any woman could wish to be next in line. Following Sir Kit’s death, Thady says, “We got the key out of his pocket the first thing we did, and my son Jason ran to unlock the barrack room” (81) where Lady Rackrent had been imprisoned. Again, Thady’s choice of pronouns reveals his loyalties: twice he uses the word “we” to indicate that the two are a team, and twice he refers to Jason as “my son.” Clearly, Thady and Jason share a mutual understanding about Lady Rackrent’s predicament; their first thoughts are with her, rather than with their dead master, when Sir Kit is killed in a duel. Sir Kit is replaced as master of Castle Rackrent by Sir Connolly (or Condy) Rackrent, the last Rackrent to own the estate and, despite his profligacy, the most sympathetic of Thady’s masters. He is clearly Thady’s favorite. It is Sir Condy whom Thady finally does choose over Jason, but Thady remains firm in his defense of his son until the end. As Thady first describes Condy to the reader, he writes with pride that as a child, “my son Jason was a great favorite with him” (85). Thady notes that Condy and Jason were educated together as children, but that Condy ceased to apply himself to his studies once it was clear he would inherit Castle Rackrent. These childhood friends are reunited as master and agent, and Jason increasingly bails Condy out of financial difficulty by buying Rackrent property. Thady seems to have no problems with this land acquisition, telling us at one point that Jason “got two hundred a year profit rent; which was little enough, considering his long agency” (87). Even this late in the narrative, as Jason succeeds at the expense of Sir Condy’s fall, Thady defends his son’s right to profit as a landowner and suggests that Jason has not been adequately compensated for his years of service. Thady’s loyalty to the Rackrents is based on the fact that they are his masters, but his loyalty to Jason is repeatedly justified on the basis of his son’s intelligence and hard work. Edgeworth gives the Quirks another reason to resent their master: Sir Condy chooses to sell a hunting lodge to his neighbor, Captain Moneygawl, despite the fact that Jason had initially made it clear that he was interested in the property. Thady points out that the decision to favor “a stranger” made Jason “jealous” (87). This slight against the Quirks was followed by another in which Sir Condy rejects Thady’s niece Judy in favor of the weepy Isabella Moneygawl. Despite his professed regard for the family, Thady maintains that “Judy McQuirk ... was worth twenty

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of Miss Isabella” (88). Thady clearly thinks his niece will be a suitable match for Condy Rackrent. Rather than insisting on maintaining the feudal relationship that had governed these families in the past, Thady admits to hopes of allying himself through marriage to the Rackrent estate, thus putting the Quirks and the Rackrents on equal footing. He later confesses to an “over-partiality to Judy, into whose place I may say [Isabella] stept” (91). In Thady’s opinion, his niece’s rightful place has been ironically usurped by a wealthy heiress. Thady’s insistence that Judy’s rightful place is mistress of Castle Rackrent is antithetical to a paternalistic notion of predetermined social roles. He takes these slights to his family seriously, and it is shortly after they occur that Thady (supposedly) unwittingly introduces one of Condy’s creditors to Jason, who provides him with a list of Condy’s creditors, initiating the final stage of the Rackrent decline. Thady denies any intentional complicity, saying, “Little did I think at the time I was harbouring my poor master’s greatest of enemies myself” (98), but the timing seems more than coincidental. Thady cooperates and colludes with Jason throughout Castle Rackrent until the moment that Jason finally comes into possession of the estate. At that turning point, Thady’s affection for Condy—or the tradition he represents—trumps his paternal feelings and he regrets seeing “the lawful owner turned out of the seat of his ancestors” (109). Even Jason is surprised by his father’s sudden change of heart. While Thady expresses sympathy for Sir Condy, Jason tries to signal his father with “signs, and winks, and frowns” (109) but Thady ignores him, “grieved and sick at heart for my poor master” (109). While Thady’s behavior toward his masters can be read as disingenuous throughout most of the novel, his loyalty to Condy and rejection of Jason in the end seem sincere. Through Thady’s grief, Edgeworth expresses her ambivalence about the social destabilization that she sensed was taking place. Having internalized certain attitudes and behaviors suited to their roles, the novel’s characters are lost when those roles are reversed. Sir Condy pathetically clings to a belief in himself as the beloved master though he has been banished to a cottage and dies unmourned. Jason becomes master of the estate, though Thady suggests that he, too, is alone, having alienated himself from his father and his peasants, many of whom, we learn, do not want him to have the land. As for Thady, he says, “I’m tired of wishing for anything in this world, after all I’ve seen in it” (121). What Thady has seen has been no less than the complete overthrow of an antiquated system, one touted by rulers and dependents alike for its success in maintaining order. Edgeworth’s novel radically attacks that system and exposes it as one that perpetuates alcoholism, spousal abuse, violence, and the starvation of workers. By foregrounding a servant character who is necessary to the functioning of the Irish big house, but whose conflicting sense of duty places him in an impossible situation, Edgeworth reveals that within the system lie the seeds of its own destruction. In her portrayal of Jason and Thady, Edgeworth complicates the literary stereotypes of servants as either loyal family vassals or malicious schemers, making their conflicts and their personal lives real. W.J. McCormack describes all of Edgeworth’s writings as “an imaginative historical projection of Enlightenment values in crisis” (52). Edgeworth was preoccupied with economic, social and political changes throughout her career. With the help of a “loyal” servant, the Rackrent family has destroyed

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itself and been replaced by a member of the professional class, the son of a servant. In an article on Edgeworth’s nationalism, Marilyn Butler writes, “Castle Rackrent ... challenges the system—the traditional landownership or aristocratic system of proprietorship, sustained by male primogeniture on the one hand, profitable marriages and the strategic extension of kinship on the other. Great-house stateliness is debunked when Castle Rackrent’s annals are handed over to an illiterate Irish chronicler to relate” (274). Edgeworth saw these social and economic changes coming, and in Rackrent, she critiques the ruling class as unworthy of their status and never mourns the destruction of the Rackrents and what they represent. Still, she never really celebrates the Rackrent’s destruction either. Jason is too cold and too self-interested to be a laudable representative of the next social order. Significantly, he does not marry, and his rule over the land is neither popular nor regenerative. Edgeworth takes the revolutionary implications of Castle Rackrent one step further in Ennui, her next Irish novel, written in 1804 (pub. 1809). This work addresses many of the same social and economic issues that Castle Rackrent does, but concludes by celebrating the decline of the old aristocratic order and its replacement with a new world of self-made men. As in Rackrent, Edgeworth employs servant characters to illustrate these changing times. McCormack writes, It has never been noticed, I believe, that Ennui all but begins where Castle Rackrent all but ends. Obliged to move to the lodge, Sir Condy Rackrent shams death in order to hear (as he fondly imagines) the lamentations of his bereaved followers. Thrown by a horse, the earl of Glenthorn is stunned and so willingly overhears the machinations of a steward who believes his master is dead. It is striking, not only that stewards should play a sinister part in each plot, but that at the narrator’s fall in Ennui is the sudden appearance of an Irish servant at the gate of his English residence. (53)

In both works, the old aristocratic order is dissipated, unproductive, and dying away. In both works, a member of the professional class, the son of a servant, becomes the new owner of aristocratic lands. However, unlike in Castle Rackent, the new order in Ennui is regenerative and positive. The plot of Ennui turns on the actions of a servant, Ellinor, the old nurse of the Earl of Glenthorn, who, we learn toward the novel’s end, had switched her own child with the legitimate earl during his infancy. The novel’s narrator is thus not an Anglo-Irish aristocrat by birth, as he has always believed himself to be, but an Irish peasant raised and educated in England as an Earl. As the novel progresses, this pretender must eventually overcome his aristocratic ennui enough to join the legal profession and to earn the right to the Glenthorn estate. Although the plot device of the changeling switched at birth is a familiar one, Edgeworth’s use of this device in this political and social context is nothing short of revolutionary. At a time when the English were struggling to maintain control over Ireland, belief in the “natural” inferiority of the Irish peasants was an easy way to justify England’s rule. English travel journals abounded with “evidence” that the Irish were naturally lazy, superstitious, dirty, immoral, and violent.1 Since the peasants were inherently 1

Maria Edgeworth satirizes these travel journals in Ennui and in a book review she wrote with her father, “The Stranger in Ireland.”

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incapable of ruling themselves, the argument went, they needed the rational English to rule them. In writing a novel in which an Irish peasant, a servant’s child, is able to pass for an English earl and in which an English earl grows up believing himself to be an Irish peasant (and adapting well to the role), Edgeworth subverts the concept of inherent inferiority or superiority of class or nation. As Meredith Cary writes: This plot device [of the changeling] requires a belief that there is no ethnic difference between the English and the Irish—a postulation which would have aroused protests from both contemporary cultures if its implications had not been obscured by Edgeworth’s naturalistic details. Contemporary readers and reviewers expressed delight in the “unique precision” of the “low-life Irish figures” and the “original and characteristic” treatment of “Irish aristocrats” without reminding themselves that the principal “low-life” is by birth and English aristocrat and the apparent “aristocrat” was born to be an Irish blacksmith. (31)

This ability to obscure some of her more radical premises enabled Edgeworth to become one of the leading novelists of her day, entertaining people while calling into question many of the values for which they stood. The intricate plot of the changeling provided enough shocking entertainment to mask the fact that Edgeworth was advocating the inherent equality of master and servant. According to critic Tess O’Toole, the adoption plot in nineteenth-century literature rivals only the marriage plot as a vehicle for “reshaping the family” (59), and is a tool for achieving the dual ends of “preserv[ing] and defend[ing] the family” while at the same time, “revitaliz[ing] the family” through “blood regeneration” (60). As the novel opens, there can be no question that the Glenthorn family line is in need of some regeneration. Like Edgeworth’s more famous degenerate aristocrats, the Rackrents, the pretender to the title of Earl of Glenthorn is lazy, profligate, selfish, and unproductive. He suffers from ennui, the result of his wealth and status. As he describes his youthful character to the reader: Bred up in luxurious indolence, I was surrounded by friends who seemed to have no business in this world but to save me the trouble of thinking or acting for myself; and I was confirmed in the pride of helplessness by being continually reminded that I was the only son and heir of the Earl of Glenthorn. (143).

By the time he is in his twenties, alcohol and gambling have nearly eradicated the Glenthorn fortune and the “earl” is forced to marry an heiress in order to gain control over her wealth, admitting that, “In my imagination young women were divided into two classes; those who were to be purchased, and those who were to purchase” (150). His attitude toward women reveals a good deal about his attitude toward humanity in general, especially those dependents whom he considers to be beneath himself. His short marriage shows the extent of his dissipation and its effect on others: his neglected wife resorts to an adulterous relationship with Glenthorn’s unscrupulous manager. She is divorced, disgraced, and dies a few years later in shame and poverty. The protagonist of Ennui—the rightful son of a servant—is both tormented by and saved by his English and Irish servants. The function of Ellinor, the Irish nurse

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in Ennui, can be compared to that of Thady in Castle Rackrent: she appears to be the pious and devoted nurse-maid, when in fact she has manipulated her servility to elevate her child’s status. The novel is also populated with numerous stereotypical servants who are at once incompetent and malicious. The false Lord Glenthorn is persecuted by his servants from the novel’s earliest scenes, and he later remarks that the best thing about losing his title and his money is the fact that he has also managed to rid himself of servants. Bruce Robbins writes that the imbalance of power between master and servant results in reductive portrayals of the class in literature: “Organized around the massive fact that one speaker is powerful and the other powerless, dialogues between master and servant can be reduced to a handful of standard types. ... [I]t is most difficult to find anything other than unrelieved ‘comic relief’ and degrading class stereotypes” (59). Ennui abounds in these comic moments between masters and servants; yet as Robbins points out, the balance of power can be easily shifted as servants undermine their masters through dialogue and wit. Ennui’s Lord Glenthorn2 fears nothing more than he fears the criticism of his servants. Glenthorn views any insubordination from his servants as a direct insult to his position and person. Though he firmly believes that his role of lord and master entitles him to unconditional respect, his own servants are out of control. He confesses, “[R]uined by indulgence, and by my indolent reckless temper, my servants were now my masters. In a large, ill-regulated establishment, domestics become, like spoiled children, discontented, capricious, and the tyrants over those who have not the sense or steadiness to command” (167). This comment, made in hindsight by a “wiser” Glenthorn looking back at his early years, is one of the points in the text where Edgeworth seems to speak in a clear paternalist voice, equating servants with children and implying that a good master is like a stern parent. She acknowledges that servants can be unruly, unpleasant, and even tyrannical. Their power is a negative power: the power to make their masters miserable. This connection between servants and children was not at all unusual. The word “paternal” suggests fatherhood, and fatherhood by definition necessitates that there be someone to father. In a paternalist social system, these “children” include all of one’s dependents: wife, offspring, tenants, servants, and workers. Advice manuals foreground this connection. In The English Housekeeper (1835), Anne Cobbett reminds her readers that “Servants, like children, and indeed like all dependents [sic] may be made good or bad; you may, by your management, cause them to be nearly what you please” (18). Another advice manual goes so far as to suggest that “It is better in addressing [servants] to use a higher key of voice” such as one would use on a child (Burnett 173). According to this logic, servants are no better or worse than their masters, since their simpler natures require them to take their cues from their betters. As Gaskell also demonstrates, this system only works when the “betters” are, in fact, better. Glenthorn’s criticism of his servants is actually a criticism of his own unwillingness to live up to his responsibilities as a master. Edgeworth questions the ruling class’s ability and willingness to fulfill its part of the social contract. 2

Because we know him through most of the novel by his assumed name, Lord Glenthorn, I will refer to him as such in this chapter.

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Glenthorn’s deficiencies are all deficiencies of his upbringing, not his nature. Edgeworth highlights these deficiencies using a comic touch: I remember one delicate puppy parted with me, because, as he informed me, the curtains of his bed did not close at the foot ...In his stead another coxcomb came to offer himself ... I unluckily required from him some service which was not in his bond; I believe it was to go for my pocket handkerchief: “He could not possibly do it, because it was not his business;” and I, the laziest of mortals, after waiting a full quarter of an hour, whilst they were settling whose business it was to obey me, was forced to get up and go for what I wanted. ... All great people, I said to myself, are obliged to submit to these inconveniences. (167)

The success of this type of comedy depends upon the reader and the author sharing the belief that any servant so impressed with his own importance is indeed out of control, as is any master who is incapable of fetching his own handkerchief. In this passage, masters and servants alike are lazy, self-interested, and self-righteous. The abuses of one class naturally cause and are caused by the abuses of the other. This connection between Glenthorn and his English servants foreshadows the plot twist which follows in which Edgeworth reveals Glenthorn to be the son of a servant while the son of a servant turns out to be the actual lord. While Maria Edgeworth often espouses a paternalist world view, she just as often undercuts that view. Through Glenthorn, she directly states that servants are like children and must be “commanded” with “sense” and “steadiness.” Yet the anecdotes which follow link the servants with their master to the point that they are almost indistinguishable, with servants demanding luxuries and the master performing the duties of the servant. Both classes are degraded by this arrangement, and—Edgeworth implies—the social hierarchy is due for some revisions. In Ennui, Edgeworth depicts a master who is considerably less productive and less astute than his servants. When Glenthorn overhears his servants’ conversation while feigning death after his fall, he is outraged to discover that his domestics are speaking critically of him, and they are in possession of information that he does not have: “What a fool that Crawley [an unscrupulous agent] made of my lord!” said the steward. “What a fool my lord made of himself,” said the footman, “to be ruled and to let all his people be ruled by such an upstart!” (156)

Although Glenthorn never forgives his servants for their betrayal, he learns that his servants are in possession of information that he does not have: his trusted agent is maneuvering behind his back. The servants have not said anything particularly vicious, but merely acknowledged the truth: their master has become the dupe of a scheming employee. Here is yet another scene in which Edgeworth likens the servants to their master, for they too are being “ruled by an upstart,” although no one knows it yet. Glenthorn’s prejudice against the servant class is nearly his undoing once he moves to his Irish estate and tries to restart his life there. He employs Joe Kelly, whom he wrongly dismisses as a “half-wit,” as his personal manservant. Joe Kelly

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is more sinister than Thady Quirk, but achieves his master’s favor through the same means. Glenthorn says, “By various petty attentions, this man contrived to persuade me of the sincerity of his attachment; chiefly by the art of appearing to be managed by me in all things, he insensibly obtained power over my pride” (255). Numerous advisors warn Glenthorn about Joe Kelly’s reputation for duplicity, but Glenthorn dismisses them: “[Servants] are none of them honest; I know that: but would you have me plague myself till I find a strictly honest servant? ... I must submit myself to be cheated, as all men of large fortunes are, more or less” (257). Joe Kelly appeals to Glenthorn’s pride of position and is able to insinuate himself into Glenthorn’s life. Secretly an Irish rebel, Kelly is the leader of a plot to kidnap Glenthorn and force him either to join the Irish rebellion or to be killed. Edgeworth based this portion of the novel on her family’s experiences. Like Glenthorn, her father was ostracized by fellow Anglo landowners in the late 1790s for suspected sympathies with the Catholic rebels. He and his family were forced to flee Edgeworthstown in 1798 after it fell into the hands of Catholic revolutionaries. While a refugee in the Protestant town of Longford, R.L. Edgeworth was almost lynched by a Protestant mob. In Ennui, Edgeworth transforms these frightening autobiographical events into a dramatic scene in which a betraying servant represents both the treacherous Catholic rebels who forced the Edgeworths out of their home, as well as the role of the violent Protestants who should have been protecting them. Through the servant character of Joe Kelly, Edgeworth once again unites the classes symbolically. The distinctions between Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, or servant and master become increasingly hard to define. Glenthorn, born Irish, Catholic, and servant, is suspected to have sympathies with the Irish rebels and thus is targeted for the attack. He denies these sympathies with an uncharacteristic energy, but Glenthorn is in fact closer to the Irish peasantry than he knows. Like Joe Kelly, he is an impostor who overturns the social system and in both cases, the result is confusion. Joe Kelly manipulates the role of servant to rule his master. Glenthorn usurps the role of master only to be ruled by his servants. The characters of Joe Kelly and the novel’s English servants overturn a number of stereotypes about servants’ inherent inferiority, but they also play to some upperclass fears. In some cases the perceived “treachery” of servants merely amounts to servants speaking the truth (as in the comment that Glenthorn has made a fool of himself), but the case of Joe Kelly is another matter. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stories of servants murdering their masters circulated widely. Edgeworth exploits this common fear by creating a servant who is willing to do just that. The portrayal of Joe Kelly validates common platitudes about the need for greater control over the servant class and the need for masters to be constantly on their guard against servant insurrection. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace writes that in Ennui (as in Castle Rackrent), Edgeworth writes in a “class voice” (140) in which her ideas are more representative of her class than of her gender. In other words, rather than write with the voice of a woman, someone outside the power structure, she writes with the voice of an ascendancy landowner, someone at the top of the power structure who has every reason to see to it that the structure is maintained. Yet Edgeworth once again undermines all these stereotypes with the character of Ellinor, the earl’s wet nurse and Glenthorn’s real mother. Although the novel is

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narrated by Glenthorn, there is actually very little action which he initiates until the narrative’s end. This fact is, of course, the point of the book: Glenthorn is paralyzed by ennui, really a depression brought on by his inferior education as an aristocratin-training and by the fact that he has been waited on (by servants) all his life. Only Ellinor, the poor Irish nurse, has the power to alter the novel’s events. Even aside from the momentous action of switching the children at birth, she plays a significant role throughout the novel, as significant a role as Thady Quirk plays in Castle Rackrent. Marilyn Butler writes that Ellinor (and other minor Irish characters including Joe Kelly) are “the animate figures and real agents of the plot” (Introduction 42). From the novel’s earliest pages, Ellinor’s mental energy contrasts with Glenthorn’s apathy. Glenthorn, raised as he was to believe in Irish stereotypes, is surprised to discover that Ellinor is remarkably intelligent. When he enlists her in a conspiracy to trick his servants into thinking he is dead, he notices that, “she took the hint with surprising quickness” (157). She even outsmarts and controls the English servants where Glenthorn cannot, and we learn that “[the servants] hated her ... for having been silenced by her shrewdness” (167). It is partly because of Ellinor’s insistence that Glenthorn finally leaves England and returns to his home in Ireland. Ellinor wins Glenthorn’s trust with a strange mixture of independence and servitude. Glenthorn comments on the fact that “the very want of a sense of propriety, and the freedom with which she talked to me, regardless of what was suited to her station or due my rank, instead of offending or disgusting me, became agreeable” (160). Of course, Ellinor knows that no amount of deference is due Glenthorn on account of his rank: by birth his rank is the same as hers, yet Glenthorn hardly suspects this truth about his history. Still, he enjoys the way in which she equalizes their ranks and even dominates him at times. Ellinor is able to achieve this power over Glenthorn because she knows when to take freedoms and when to submit. When Glenthorn arrives in Ireland, Ellinor tells him that only one thing will make her happy: “To be let to light your fire myself every morning and open your shutters, dear” (180). By acting the role of the dutiful vassal, Ellinor reinforces the notion that her entire happiness depends upon the opportunity to serve. Like Thady, she speaks the language of submission easily, and seems to take great pleasure in her inferiority. Yet Ellinor carries with her a secret that makes her more powerful than any other character in the book. Her lord and master is actually her son. Her submission to his rank is a private joke on her part. With the knowledge that she put her son into his position of wealth and power, she can go through the motions of servitude and loyalty with her pride intact. Ellinor’s power is not just symbolic, or mere pride in the knowledge that she has elevated her child to the rank of earl; she also possesses the very real power of keeping him there. For all her servility and humility, she knows that with a few words she can take everything away from Glenthorn that she has given to him. Certainly she has no intention of doing so, but when another of her sons, Owen, is suspected of plotting to kidnap Glenthorn, she reveals her secret in the hope of protecting her accused child. After Glenthorn refuses to allow Owen to escape, Ellinor reluctantly tells him,

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You hear the truth: you hear that I am your lawful mother. Yes, you are my son. You have forced that secret from me, which I thought to have carried with me to the grave. And now you know all: and now you know how wicked I have been, and it was all for you; for you that refused me the only thing I ever asked, and that, too, in my greatest distress, when my heart was just breaking: and all this time too, there’s Christy -- poor good Christy; he that I’ve wronged, and robbed of his rightful inheritance, has been as a son, a dutiful son to me, and never did he deny me any thing I could ask; but in you I have found no touch of tenderness. ... I tell ye, it is he who should live in this castle, and sleep on that soft bed, and be lord of all here—he is the true and real Lord Glenthorn, and to the wide world I’ll make it known. (272)

Not only does Ellinor reveal to Glenthorn his true identity, but she does so in an attempt to force him to capitulate to her demands. She begins by appealing to his sense of gratitude, then his sense of guilt for usurping the title of the rightful heir, and finally his sense of self-protection. In effect, she attempts to blackmail him, threatening to go public with her knowledge if he refuses her request. In retrospect, Ellinor’s behaviors as a dutiful servant have been a pose. When she deems it necessary, she is fully ready to assert her power over her son. Once again the roles are blurred. Ellinor exposes who Glenthorn has really been throughout the novel: a servant playing the role of the master. Edgeworth refuses to sentimentalize her portrayal of Ellinor. One might expect that the wet nurse and her natural son would have a strong affinity for one another, but the connection between the two is never fully realized. When she tells Glenthorn “in you I have found no touch of tenderness,” she is right. Glenthorn has been generous—he builds Ellinor a cottage and offers her comfort in her old age—but part of him remains repulsed by Ellinor’s “primitive” and passionate ways. Once he knows the truth of his birth, Glenthorn’s decision to renounce his title and fortune destroys his mother, revealing that the division of culture and education is stronger than any familial ties that might bind them. The novel contains no sentimental deathbed scene in which Ellinor recognizes her errors, nor does Glenthorn happily assume the life of a peasant to which he was born. Instead, he overcomes his ennui and becomes educated as an attorney. Meanwhile the true heir, the generous Christy O’Donohoe, is destroyed by his sudden position and wealth. Taken advantage of by his wife and her relatives, he soon loses his fortune. His son burns the castle down in a fit of drunkenness and dies in the fire. As in Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth demonstrates that there is nothing inherently superior in aristocratic blood. An aristocrat and a peasant are each capable of being decent or monstrous as their upbringing and education dictates. A servant by birth is as capable as a lord of ruling or ruining a grand estate. Glenthorn, now a member of the professional class, marries Lady Delamere and takes her name. Together, they rebuild Glenthorn castle and settle there happily. The parallels to Castle Rackrent are clear. In both books the son of a servant joins the professional ranks and takes possession of the estate. In both books this change represents a reversal of the social system. In both books characters are unsure how to relate to one another once they are stripped of their roles. Yet in Castle Rackrent, there is little hope for the future. All characters end up alone, and there is no indication that Jason will marry or that the Quirk line will survive into the next generation.

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In Ennui, Edgeworth celebrates this new order with the child of an Irish servant becoming the model Irish nobleman. Glenthorn’s “understanding has been cultivated,” and he learns “that a man may at once be rich and noble, and active and happy” (323). He is a new man now, with a new name. Yet his new name does not necessarily represent a complete break with the past: “Delamere” means “of the mother,” a constant reminder of Glenthorn’s true heritage. In Glenthorn’s initial weaknesses and eventual strengths, Edgeworth has created a remarkably radical character for her time, one that harmoniously unites the classes and the nations. In some ways, Edgeworth’s next Irish novel, The Absentee (1812), represents a retreat from this radical questioning of social hierarchies although the emphasis on education over birth remains strong. Lord Colambre, the novel’s virtuous hero, is another example of Edgeworth’s harmonious blending of Irish and English, but unlike Glenthorn and Jason Quirk, his origins are firmly rooted in the aristocracy. Born in Ireland and raised in England by parents who are absentee landlords, Colambre possesses [t]he sobriety of English good sense mixed most advantageously with Irish vivacity: English prudence governed, but did not extinguish, his Irish enthusiasm. But, in fact, English and Irish had not been so invidiously contrasted in his mind: he had been so long resident in England, and so intimately connected with Englishmen, that he was not obvious to any of the commonplace ridicule thrown about Hibernians; and he had lived with men who were too well-informed and liberal to misjudge or depreciate a sister country. (88)

In The Absentee Edgeworth sought to show the advantages of uniting the two countries so that Ireland could benefit from England’s education and England could benefit from Ireland’s vivacity and good nature. Edgeworth hoped to replace the stereotype of the lazy Irish tenant with a more positive vision of the Irish peasantry. Another purpose was less abstract: to convince Irish landowners living in England to return to their native country and relieve the agony of the peasants who were being exploited and starved by profiteering agents. Because Edgeworth was so intent on getting these messages across clearly, some critics have accused her of subordinating character and plot to ideas. As Marilyn Butler writes in her biography, “The Absentee belongs to that short phase in her career when she is over-involved with abstractions” (380). Edgeworth felt passionately about the didactic messages of The Absentee, yet Butler goes so far as to call the portion of the narrative which takes place in Ireland “insipid”: “they are sentimental idylls out of key with Maria Edgeworth’s best manner when describing the peasantry, which is based on observation from life” (375). Lord Colambre’s attitude toward his peasants is that of the benevolent paternalist, doling out kindnesses to the worthy poor. Because Edgeworth viewed the problems of English prejudice against Ireland and Irish absenteeism as literally matters of life and death for the Irish peasantry, this novel for the most part lacks the “persistent shadows of an irrational force” (Kowaleski-Wallace 104) that characterize most of her work. Yet even here, Edgeworth does not settle for mere one-dimensional portraits of her characters, including the servant class. The Absentee’s depiction of its one Irish servant is far more sentimentalized and uncomplicated than her depiction of Thady and Ellinor. Ulick Brady has all the

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surface subservience and loyalty to his master, Mr Reynolds, that Thady and Ellinor have to theirs, but with none of the tantalizing ambiguity. With Thady and Ellinor, Edgeworth suggests that servile duty and a self-interested relationship to power are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, Edgeworth describes Ulick as “a respectablelooking manservant” who “bowed respectfully—more respectfully than servants of modern date” (195). Ulick Brady is one of Edgeworth’s few invisible servants. Although he is given a name (unlike many servants in the literature of her time), his brief appearance in the novel only serves to reinforce his rightful place within the class structure. Yet Edgeworth does depict moments of energetic (and comic) insurrection in the form of Mrs Petito, an English servant who moves from Lady Clonbrony’s household to that of the scheming Lady Dashfort. Although a social-climbing stereotype (like her mistress), she is more colorful than many of the novel’s characters, including its virtuous hero and heroine. Mrs Petito is an audacious figure, one who is so bold as to wish herself out of the servant class and on equal terms with her “betters,” unlike the dutiful subservients who see their role as part of God’s larger plan. Like most of the novel’s characters from British society, high and low, Mrs Petito spies, schemes, gossips, and flatters in order to improve her position. When Lord Colambre asks her why she no longer works for his mother, but is now in the service of Lady Dashfort, she replies, “I and my lady had a little difference, which the best of friends, you know, sometimes have” (175). Petito’s language (“I and my lady”) reflects her attempts at gentility, and her aside about the “best of friends” tries to imply a closeness which the two certainly never shared. She describes herself to “my dear Mr Reynolds,” from whom Lady Dashfort hopes to receive an inheritance, as Lady Dashfort’s “double,” and Edgeworth once again signals the complicated connection between servants and their masters. As she does in Castle Rackrent with Jason and Sir Condy, and in Ennui with Glenthorn and Christy, Edgeworth here blurs the distinction between the classes. Although Petito simply means to imply that she has come on a visit in Lady Dashfort’s place, she is indeed a mirror image of her mistress, dressing in Lady Dashfort’s cast-off clothes, and hoping, like Lady Dashfort, to use whatever means necessary to advance her fortune and status. Just as Lady Dashfort exerts enormous amounts of energy to arrange a profitable marriage for her daughter, so does Mrs Petito have similar goals to raise herself out of her class through marriage. When the wealthy Mr Reynolds turns away both mistress and maid, Mrs Petito’s ambitions are made clear: Thus ended certain hopes; for Mrs Petito had conceived that her diplomacy might be turned to account; that in her character of an ambassadress, as Lady Dashfort’s double ... she might have in time—that is to say, before he made a new will—become his dear Mrs Petito; or (for stranger things have happened and do happen every day) his dear Mrs Reynolds! Mrs Petito, however, was good at a retreat; and she flattered herself that at least nothing of this underplot had appeared: and at all events she secured, by her ambition, Lady Dashfort’s scarlet velvet gown. (324)

In her sentimental portrait of Ulick and her satirical portrayal of Mrs Petito, Edgeworth reflects the belief that the best servant is one content with her station. It is a shift from the complex portrayals of servitude in her earlier Irish novels,

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but can be explained by her larger purpose for the book. Nearly all of the English characters in the novel are hypocritical schemers; nearly all of the native Irish (from the peasantry to the ascendancy) are basically good. So it is with the servants. Rather than investigate and question matters of class in The Absentee, Edgeworth subordinates these conflicts in order to contrast the corruption of British society with the honesty of the Irish people. Mrs Petito is, however, given a compelling and comic speech in which she defends herself against the invisibility of her station and provides an argument for servant rebellion. Although the scene and the speech are comic, Edgeworth highlights the servant’s status as an outsider and gives voice to servant discontent. The monologue occurs after Petito has once again been shut out of a conversation between her mistress, Grace Nugent, and a friend: I can’t abide to dress any young lady who says never mind, and it will do very well. That, and her never talking to one confidantially, or trusting one with the least bit of her secrets, is the thing I can’t put up with from Miss Nugent; and Miss Broadhurst holding the pins to me, as much as to say, Do your business, Petito, and don’t talk—Now that’s so impertinent, as if one wasn’t the same flesh and blood, and had not as good a right to talk of everything, and hear of everything, as themselves. And Mrs Broadhurst, too, cabinetcouncilling with my lady, and pursing up her city mouth, when I come in, and turning the discourse to snuff, forsooth; as if I was an ignoramus, to think they closeted themselves to talk of snuff. Now, I think a lady of quality’s woman has as good a right to be trusted with her lady’s secrets as with her jewels; and if my Lady Clonbrony was a real lady of quality, she’d know that. ...So I will tell my lady tonight, as I always do when she vexes me, that I never lived in an Irish family before, and don’t know the ways of it. (159-60)

Edgeworth suggests that an impertinent servant may have a reason for her complaints and a legitimate motive for improving her circumstances. Edgeworth may satirize Mrs Petito’s right to know family secrets, but she also comments on the inconsistencies of the master/servant condition, in which a servant may be trusted with wealth and property, but not with private matters of character. While Edgeworth mocks Mrs Petito’s assumption that she should be spoken to “confidantially,” she also gives Mrs Petito a voice with which to assert that she is not an ignoramus and is “the same flesh and blood” as her mistresses. Thus even in one of her more didactic novels, Maria Edgeworth finds herself creating a servant character, Mrs Petito, who is the “double” of her mistress, and who manages to assert her essential equality in one of the novel’s longest speeches. Mrs Petito remains a comic figure throughout the novel (like her upper-class mistress), yet Edgeworth also gives us a glimpse of the sense of alienation that fuels Mrs Petito’s social climbing. Although I join other recent critics in calling these books “radical” in their approach to the Irish peasantry and the servant class, “radical” was the last label Edgeworth would have applied to herself. According to Marilyn Butler’s biography of Edgeworth, “She found it unpalatable that she had made the quaint, archaic narrator [of Castle Rackrent] more interesting than the Rackrents, who as landlords had in reality a more significant part to play in Irish life” (306). Yet Edgeworth’s novels about Ireland are so multifaceted that in spite of her possible intentions, Thady, Ellinor, Joe Kelly, and Mrs Petito, come to life in ways that many of her

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English and Anglo-Irish upper-class protagonists do not with complex allegiances, motivations, and desires. In 1805, the Edgeworths entertained a man named Luke White, a former servant who had become a bookseller and who had earned a personal fortune. By middle age, he had bought estates in County Longford and two of his sons later became MPs. Maria Edgeworth was finishing Ennui at the time and wrote to her aunt about her fascination with the man’s life story: “I wish to heaven he had told me his history for I am sure it would make a fine companion to Ennui—Economy in opposition to extravagance & industry to indolence—But you know my dear aunt I could not well ask the man to tell me that he began life with a pack on his back could I? could you?” (Butler 237). Although Edgeworth found herself unable to confront her guest with his lowly beginnings, her novels suggest that she was certainly able to imagine those beginnings. Her own fictional depictions of servants who “double” as masters reveal that she questioned many paternalist ideas even as she appeared to advocate them. The alternative to social paternalism, according to Edgeworth’s Irish novels, is always complicated, frequently confusing, and often painful. Yet ultimately, Maria Edgeworth would illustrate in her fiction what she admired in life—figures like Luke White—as she envisioned an Ireland in which servants and other Irish people raised their voices and took their places beside the landowners.

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Chapter 5

“Mutual Duties”: Servants and Labor Relations in Gaskell’s “Condition of England” Novels

Yes that discovery of one’s exact work is a puzzle: I never meant to say it was not. Elizabeth Gaskell to Eliza Fox

One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s earliest critics, Henry Fothergill Chorley, compared Gaskell’s regional writing to that of Maria Edgeworth, praising both authors, along with Sir Walter Scott. In an 1855 review of North and South for The Athenaeum, Chorley writes, “The author of Mary Barton seems bent on doing for Lancashire and the Lancashire dialect with Miss Edgeworth did for Ireland” (419). He goes on to acknowledge Gaskell’s Lancashire and “class sympathies,” sympathies that result in a “disproportionate exposure of the trials and sufferings of the poor” (419). That Gaskell was appalled by the suffering of the poor is clear; less clear is her solution to these problems. Just as Maria Edgeworth created servant characters to underscore her views on a complex political and social issue (the relationship between the English and the Irish), Gaskell created “underplots” (to use Edgeworth’s word) involving servants to explore the relationship between industrial masters and workers. When Elizabeth Gaskell felt that her writing (or her life) was unclear and chaotic, she would describe herself as being “at sixes and sevens.” It was a phrase she often used with her close friend Eliza “Tottie” Fox and one to which she often resorted when she wished to avoid grappling with a difficult issue. In February 1850, she writes in a letter to Fox, “Women must give up an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount” (Gaskell’s emphasis), yet within two sentences she contends that “I am sure it is healthy for [women] to have the refuge of the hidden world of Art to shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares.” Later, exasperated with her own wavering, Gaskell ends her letter by apologizing: “I have no doubt that the cultivation of each [home and art] tends to keep the other in a healthy state,—my grammar is all at sixes and sevens I have no doubt but never mind if you can pick out my meaning” (l. 68). It is no wonder that Gaskell often found herself at sixes and sevens about the best use of her time and talents. On the one hand, she was an independent woman and a successful writer who viewed herself as the intellectual equal of any man. On the other hand, she was a wife and mother in an era that fetishized passive femininity. The idea of submission to a strong paternal authority appealed to Gaskell on a personal as well as a societal level, despite the fact that she consciously rejected the idea of female

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submissiveness. In another letter to Tottie Fox, Gaskell admits, “I long (weakly) for the old times when right and wrong did not seem such complicated matters; and I am sometimes cowardly enough to wish that we were back in darkness where obedience was the only seen duty of women” (l. 69). Although recognizing that such a state of submission is the same as living in “darkness,” Gaskell held a romantic ideal of the commanding male ruler and sustained it throughout her works. Her equivocal views about gender also apply to the relationship between masters and workers, and Gaskell was often at sixes and sevens when she tried to articulate a society in which worker freedom could co-exist with the comfort of social paternalism. In her first novel, Mary Barton, Gaskell lays bare all the rage of the industrial working class. She exposes the poverty and disease that were a way of life for thousands of factory workers and the criminal indifference of their masters. Yet as she does in her letter to Tottie Fox about the role of the woman artist, Gaskell refrains from presenting any sustained vision for social change. Instead she retreats to the paternalistic idea that masters should be kinder to their workers in order to mitigate their anger and earn their respect. In her later industrial novel, North and South, Gaskell’s outlook is more complex. Rather than throw up her hands and declare herself at sixes and sevens, she prescribes a new surprisingly intimate relationship for masters and workers. Despite these differences in approach, however, Gaskell depends on servant characters in both novels to help articulate the economic and social issues that concerned her. Both Edgeworth and Gaskell often sought out the traditional values of a hierarchical structure in the face of social upheaval, but they were in fact ardently drawn to change. Critic Robin B. Colby notes that “Gaskell lived in a century that was riddled with change; her fiction is in many ways a response to changes that were occurring in her lifetime and at the same time is an agent of change” (10). Debates about individual liberty versus duty and responsibility were on most Victorian tongues. Social paternalists such as John Ruskin and Arthur Helps believed that employers had a personal responsibility toward workers while liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill believed that such a relationship violated the workers’ rights of self-determination. In her two “Condition of England” novels, Mary Barton and North and South, Gaskell explores her attraction to both points of view, and she struggles to define what she sees as the most equitable relationship between industrial workers and their employees. Gaskell’s critics have likewise struggled to define the author’s position on this subject, and most have acknowledged that she displays a distinct ambivalence. David Roberts describes Gaskell as a “reluctant” (90) paternalist, and E. Holly Pike notes Gaskell’s many references to workers as child-like and in need of wise guidance. Yet Pike points out the tension in Gaskell’s approach to industrial problems: “While Gaskell ... does advocate paternalism in the operation of the large manufacturies, she clearly has many reservations ... as well” (23). In fact, Gaskell is not so “reluctant” or “reserved” in her approach to the relation between workers and employers. She is, however, resistant to thinking that would order the world in such binary oppositions as public and private, freedom and responsibility, worker and family. Gaskell frequently features servant characters to collapse these oppositions and prescribe a model for class relations that transforms these apparently mutually exclusive categories. Although Gaskell does not equate

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the lives and problems of domestic servants with those of industrial factory workers, she links them both explicitly and implicitly in her novels. In doing so, Gaskell suggests that the master-servant relationship—rife as it is with contradictions, diverse expectations, and messy human conflict—might serve as a model for the manufacturing community. Far from being a classic paternalist, Gaskell often portrays her domestic workers as stronger and more mature than their employers. In Gaskell’s novels masters and servants are mutually dependent and intimately connected. Ultimately, her prescription for social change calls for a transformed set of values in which different social classes learn from one another and mix more freely. Such a solution to class conflict destabilizes the rigid social hierarchy that was the foundation of Victorian British society without abolishing it entirely. Gaskell’s treatment of servants is a fundamental component of her examination of social class and social change, and is integral to her vision of a dynamic society. According to her biographer Jenny Uglow, “The importance of servants in [Gaskell’s] life is reflected in her fiction, where they play a more central role than in the novels of any of her contemporaries. Indeed the mistress often seems more like a child, while the servant is a source of strength” (264). Patsy Stoneman also notes the importance of servants in Gaskell’s oeuvre, writing that “the revolutionary function of domestic servants in Elizabeth Gaskell’s work has been largely over-looked ... [T]hey provide practical, moral, and psychological decisions in situations which are sometimes deadly serious” (48). They also enable Gaskell to articulate her ideas about social class beyond her discussions of factory workers and industry bosses. Elizabeth Langland reexamines the context of Victorian politics and economics to include the domestic sphere. She points out that the presence of servants in the Victorian home meant that women were more involved in political and economic matters than has generally been acknowledged. She writes: The persistent myth of idle women in the home, isolated by industrial strife and class conflict and unriven by class contradiction, testifies to the power of domestic ideology and familial values that persist stubbornly today. Of course, by employing domestic servants, Victorians were introducing class issues directly into the home and setting up the home as a site for all the conflicts between labor and management that afflicted the nineteenth century generally. (14)

Gaskell also viewed the Victorian home as the site of economic activity and class conflict as opposed to a haven from those tensions. By examining Gaskell’s depiction of domestic servants, her sympathy with their situation as laborers, her idealization of their loyalty, and her understanding of their quest for power, we can better understand her prescription for change in the larger realm of the manufacturing community as well. Like nearly all nineteenth-century English novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell had close daily contact with servants. In another letter to Tottie Fox, she complains amiably about the household whirlwind created by her large and changing staff: “I’ve got a new cook instead of Mary, who is to be married ‘by master’ in February and said new cook is coming in January. ... And we have got a Bessy instead of a Maria, and a Margaret instead of a Margaret, all changes against my will at the time, but improvements I think” (l. 108a). In this letter, Gaskell sounds like an

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entitled mistress—as if exchanging a Bessy for a Maria is an irritating but ultimately inconsequential alteration in her household. A deeper look at Gaskell’s relationship with her servants reveals a more complex outlook, though. Uglow contends that, “Elizabeth was closely involved in her servants’ lives. After her first maid Bessy left in 1837, she wrote ‘We still keep her as a friend, and she has been to stay with us several weeks this autumn’” (263). Gaskell’s personal dependence on servants went well beyond their function as household help. She became particularly close to Ann Hearn, who lived with the family for over fifty years, remaining with them even after Gaskell’s death. In one letter, Gaskell confesses to Fox that Hearn’s three-week absence to nurse her dying mother has left the household in confusion. Overwhelmed in the absence of her valued friend and assistant, Gaskell complains, “We are rather at sixes and sevens upstairs. The little ones come down upon us like the Goths on Rome; making in roads and onslaughts into all our plans” (l. 68). Gaskell’s relationship with her own servants was more typical of the eighteenth century than the nineteenth. Historian John Burnett chronicles the changing relationship between domestic employer and employee as it paralleled the changing labor roles of industry: The work of the domestic servants had always been much the same [throughout the nineteenth century]. What had changed was the position of the female employer. In earlier times, and throughout the eighteenth century, she had worked with and personally supervised her domestic staff: ... servants were assistants, who helped the housewife to bake and brew, wash and mend linen, cook and clean. But Britain’s industrialization had produced, by complex processes, the stereotype of the middle-class family patterns and the wife was functionless except for a long period of child-bearing. (165)

Burnett here reinforces the stereotype of the useless Victorian wife, not recognizing her important managerial role. Victorian wives were hardly functionless, but they did avoid working alongside their maids when they could afford to. The nineteenth-century shift toward an increasingly urban culture and a progressively industrial economy obviously affected factory workers even more directly than it did their domestic counterparts, but the end result was largely the same: an increased division of labor between employer and employed. With these changes came a new social hierarchy with wealthy factory owners at the top and impoverished industrial workers at the bottom. In this more urban economy, the social paternalism that had more or less governed class relations since medieval times, was being replaced by a more laissez-faire economy determined by the market place. Richard Altick writes that the changing relationship between master and worker was one of the most depersonalizing forces of the Victorian era: In the early factory system, before small handicraft operations had given way to large mechanized and steam-powered ones, the master, himself an artisan, had worked alongside his employees. Their relationship had often been warm and, like that which had prevailed in the country between squire and tenant farmer or laborer. ... But in the big factories, which employed hundreds or even thousands of workers, the master, as he continued to be called, typically was rich, remote, and arbitrary. The worker, or “hand,” became no more than a name on a wage sheet. Under these conditions, the very word

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“master” lost its formal connotation of an amiable relationship in which loyal acceptance of social inferiority on one side was met by human decency on the other, and acquired the connotations of petty tyranny. (245)

Industrial workers and domestic workers did very different jobs, but their relations with their employers were becoming more and more similar: distant, divided and indifferent. As the wife of a Unitarian minister in the industrial city of Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell saw close-up the struggles between the impoverished workers and the wealthy mill owners. Mary Barton realistically portrays the escalating class tensions between the industrial workers of Manchester and the city’s wealthy factory owners. The novel’s descriptions of the domestic lives of the Manchester poor placed a human face on abstract debates about social paternalism and laissez-faire economics. In making a manufacturing family the focus of a tragedy, Gaskell asks her readers to see the heroism and the dignity of those who struggle to put food on the table. Despite its occasional sentimentality, the novel’s working-class characters are fully realized human beings with admirable strengths and serious flaws. She tells her story through the eyes of the workers, and clearly admires the character of John Barton, while also humanizing his employer and enemy, Mr Carson. Gaskell’s solution to the problem of class conflict in Mary Barton requires wise and sympathetic leadership from the middle and upper classes. She posits a relationship in which workers are treated with greater respect and care, but which never really threatens the foundations of the Victorian social hierarchy. In Gaskell’s rather idealistic view, workers, like children, were to be educated, understood, and even loved by their fatherly masters. It is an individual and personal solution more than a political one, but for Gaskell the distinction between the two was irrelevant. Gaskell understood the workers’ desire to form unions and strike for better wages and working conditions, yet the novel suggests a change of heart—rather than violent action—for both worker and employer. Instead of being constantly at odds with one another, the novel recommends that both classes realize that the interests of one were the interests of all ... hence it was most desirable to have educated workers, capable of judging, not mere machines of ignorant men; and to have them bound to their employers by the ties of respect and affection, not by mere money bargains alone; in short to acknowledge the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law between both parties. (475)

Gaskell was one of many voices calling for an educated working class. In 1845 the future author of Self-Help, Samuel Smiles addressed a gathering of industrial laborers: The education of the working classes is to be regarded, in its highest aspect, not as a means of raising up a few clever and talented men into a higher rank of life, but of elevating and improving the whole class—of raising the entire condition of the working man [so that they might become] virtuous, intelligent, well-informed, and well-conducted; and to open up to them new sources of pleasure and happiness. Knowledge is of itself one of the highest enjoyments. (Altick 255-6)

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In granting better opportunities to the working class and providing an education to the workforce, Gaskell and other reformers believed (or hoped) that the resulting virtue (or, as Gaskell held, Christian love) would be enough to placate the workers and bind them to their employers. As Job Legh tells Mr Carson, “The masters has it on their own conscience,—you have it on yours sir to answer for to God, whether you’ve done and are doing all in your power to lighten the evils that seem always to hang on the trades by which you make your fortune” (473). Gaskell’s apparent solution to the complicated problems of worker exploitation and class animosity is a surprisingly simplistic version of social paternalism that would seem to ignore the realities of urban poverty, realities that Gaskell depicts in appallingly thorough detail. Historian David Roberts notes that “In Mary Barton a mill owner becomes penitent because his son is shot ... But how effective in removing widespread exploitation are remedies that require the murder of a mill owner’s son ... to turn hardhearted mill owners into softer-hearted ones?” (91). Roberts does point out, however, that despite Gaskell’s reliance on paternalism as the answer to social unrest, her social problem novels are more complicated than the last chapters of Mary Barton indicate. Without specifically using the term, Gaskell herself acknowledges in an 1850 letter to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth that she is at sixes and sevens over the issue: “[T]here is much to be discovered yet as to the right positions and mutual duties of employer, and employed. ... I think the best and most benevolent employers would say how difficult they, with all their experience, found it to unite theory and practice” (l. 120). One way in which Gaskell complicates her own solution to the problems of class conflict is by expanding the definition of laborers to include servants. Through her servant characters, Gaskell rejects a social system that strives to keep everyone in his rightful place. Roberts notes that Gaskell’s “paternalist assumptions, though most decisive, clear, and forceful, mix with rival social outlooks that are just as decisive, clear, and forceful” (9). Because Mary Barton primarily focuses on the industrial poor, Gaskell concentrates less on the position of domestic servants in this work than she does in her later novels. Even so, servant characters are essential to her exploration of class, revealing in no uncertain terms her awareness that it would take more than “the Spirit of Christ” and a personal change of heart to make workingclass life livable. In Mary Barton, Gaskell portrays her servant characters as relatively privileged compared to other members of the working class. When George Wilson goes to Mr Carson’s house to appeal for help, he encounters a comfortable home efficiently run by friendly servants. As Wilson waits in the kitchen for Mr Carson, he finds that “altogether the odours were so mixed and appetising that [he] began to yearn for food to break his fast, which had lasted since dinner the day before. If the servants had known this, they would have willingly given him meat and bread in abundance; but they were like the rest of us, and not feeling hunger themselves, forgot it was possible another might” (106). The portrait of the Carson servants—industrious, well-fed, and cheerful—might suggest a split between these two classes of workers. Gaskell’s narrator aligns them with “the rest of us” as opposed to the mill workers. Servants, this passage implies, are free from the kind of suffering that leads good men like John Barton to commit premeditated murder. Though both his domestic and mill workers are dependent on Mr Carson for their living, the servants live comfortably

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in his large home and eat his “abundant” food, while the factory hands watch their children die of “clemming” (starvation) and disease. Given this enormous difference, it might appear that Gaskell’s prescription of reform for the working classes would not even include the apparently privileged group of domestic workers. While Gaskell clearly does not equate servants with industrial workers, she does link the fates of the two classes through the character of Alice Wilson, a “tidy old woman” and former servant whose brother George is an out-of-work factory hand. In one of the novel’s most pathetic scenes, one of Alice’s twin nephews has died of scarlet fever and the other twin, Will, is dying painfully. According to Alice, Will’s mother is “wishing him,” and “there’s none can die in the arms of those who are wishing them sore to stay on earth. The soul o’ them as holds them won’t let the dying soul go free so it has a hard struggle for a quiet death. We mun get him away from his mother, or he’ll have a hard death, poor lile fellow” (117). Reluctantly, Mrs Wilson allows Alice to hold Will, who quickly “breathed his little life away in peace” (117). With her gentle presence, Alice is able to lead a struggling child to a peaceful death and provide comfort to the family. As a servant, Alice had acted as a parent to her surrogate families. Now retired from service, she cares for the industrial workers in the same way, doing for a dying child what the child’s own mother cannot. Yet Alice comes to the Wilson family as an equal—a real aunt and not a surrogate mother— and she is there voluntarily. In becoming part of the industrial community after her retirement from her life in domestic service, Alice demonstrates the kinship between these two underclasses. Felicia Bonaparte sees Gaskell as having a sort of split personality with writings that feature an ideally feminine “text” and a rebellious “subtext ... which challenges and subverts everything the text asserts” (8). She describes Alice Wilson as the ideal Victorian worker (143), noting that “[t]here are a great many servants in Gaskell” and most of them have the characteristics of “the ideal woman. Servants who belong to this class are devoted and loyal in everything” (41). Unlike her factory counterparts, Alice is uninterested in workers’ rights, unions, or strikes. She left her home as a child to go into service, and never saw her family or home again. She tells Mary that: I used to try to save money enough to go [home] for a week when I was in service; but first one thing came, and then another. First missis’s children fell ill of the measles, just when th’week I’d asked for came, and I couldn’t leave them ... Then missis herself fell sick and I could go less than ever. For you see, they kept a little shop, and he drank, and missis and me was all there was to mind children and shop and all, and cook and wash besides. (65)

When Alice becomes a servant, she attains the status of child within her new “family,” and never sees her own mother again. She is financially dependent on her new family, and has sacrificed her freedom of movement in order to serve them. Yet as her story makes clear, she is no childlike innocent. She describes a situation in which she worked side-by-side with her mistress and was equally (if not more) valuable to the household than the mistress was; certainly she was more essential than the drunken master was. When Mary responds that she is “Glad that she had not gone into service” (65), Alice chides her: “Eh! lass! thou little knows the pleasure

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o’ helping others; I was as happy there as could be; almost as happy as I was at home” (65). She goes on to describe the rest of her life in service, working in far less companionable jobs, explaining that she was never able to get away because “first one wanted me and then another” (67). Though servants were often classified as “dependents” in Victorian families, Gaskell hints that the reverse is true. Bonaparte’s contention that Alice is “the ideal worker” in a traditional paternalist social system is ultimately correct, although Bonaparte is missing the larger picture: Gaskell emphatically does not idealize Alice’s life. Though the author finds much to admire in Alice, she goes out of her way to point out that Alice’s success as a servant requires sacrificing her freedom and abandoning her home. There is a great deal of meaning in Alice’s claiming that she was “almost” as happy as she was at home. Though Alice asserts that serving the families of others while severing her own family ties has been a “pleasure,” the author does not romanticize Alice’s life of waiting on others, noting her tears at missing her mother’s funeral and her transient life of relative poverty which prevented her from returning to her childhood home except in her dying fantasy. Bruce Robbins points out that often in nineteenth-century novels, “[s]trangely enough, it is ... when the servants’ opposition is most loyal, when it emerges neither into consciousness nor into the plot, that it makes its most radical statements” (68). Alice’s narration of her life story to Mary is an example of such “servant self-reference” in which her own protests of satisfaction in her work reveal class abuses of which Alice herself is unaware. Robbins describes such moments in the text as “rhetoric that generates or allies itself with class consciousness even where the rhetor is too unconscious of her or his own interests even to imagine actually participating in them” (68). Gaskell explores more overtly the sacrifices required of servants through John and Mary Barton. Unlike Alice Wilson, these characters are acutely conscious of class abuses. Given his own experience with factory work and his sister-in-law’s sexual fall, John Barton refuses to allow his daughter to follow him into a life of drudgery in the mills. Yet “Mary must do something,” as the narrator says, and Barton considers either sending her “out to service” or apprenticing her to a dressmaker. In a long passage, Gaskell explores the downside of life as a domestic servant through the eyes of the working class: [John Barton] considered domestic servitude as a species of slavery; a pampering of artificial wants on the one side, a giving up of every right of leisure by day and quiet rest by night on the other. How far his strong exaggerated feelings had any foundation in truth it is for you to judge. I am afraid that Mary’s determination not to go into service arose from far less sensible thoughts on the subject than her father’s. Three years of independence of action (since her mother’s death such a time had now elapsed) had little inclined her to submit to rules as to hours and associates, to regulate her dress by a mistress’s idea of propriety, to lose the dear feminine privileges of gossiping with a merry neighbour, and working night and day to help one who was sorrowful ... Now while a servant must often drudge and be dirty, must be known as his servant by all who visited at her master’s house, a dressmaker’s apprentice must (or so Mary thought) be always dressed with a certain regard to appearances. (57-8)

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This revealing passage is worth examining in detail. It is tempting to confuse Gaskell with her somewhat condescending narrator, who coyly apologizes for John Barton’s radical views, calling his feelings “exaggerated,” and indicating that perhaps his opinions are not grounded in reality. Yet later scenes at the Carson home reinforce John Barton’s views by portraying upper-class existence as one of boredom and leisure. To support John Barton’s accusation that servants “pamper artificial wants” of their employers, Gaskell depicts Mrs Carson in her comfortable surroundings, sitting upstairs in her dressing-room, indulging in the luxury of a headache. ... [I]t was the natural consequence of the state of mental and bodily idleness in which she was placed . ... It would have done her more good than all the ether and sal-volatile she was daily in the habit of swallowing, if she might have taken the work of one of her own housemaids for a week; made beds, rubbed tables, shaken carpets. (190)

Just as Mr Carson separates himself from his industrial workers and is out of touch with their problems, his wife has distanced herself from the workings of her household. She has become one of the useless middle- and upper-class wives whom Gaskell both scorned and vowed never to become. Writing to Tottie Fox, she asserts that “I do believe we have some appointed work to do, whh [sic] no one else can do so well ... and our work in the end we ought to strive to bring about” (l. 68). In creating a character like Mrs Carson who appoints others to do her work, Gaskell reveals that the employers have a long way to go before the workers will experience justice. Both Mr and Mrs Carson end up paying a price for their disconnection to the working class. The appearance of ease has in fact led to disease. As Gaskell portrays it, the very existence of a servant class has the potential to weaken both mentally and physically the upper class that must resort to imaginary physical ailments to keep themselves busy and interesting. As upper-class women become increasingly reliant on the labor of others, they become less productive in their homes and in society at large. According to Bruce Robbins, these scenes demonstrate that in Gaskell, “work does not consume life, but produces life and preserves from death” (121). Ironically, though the devoted Alice Wilson derives pleasure from “helping others,” Gaskell implies that the servants are not doing the Carsons any favors by performing all the useful functions in the household. Not only is servant life detrimental to servants, Gaskell implies, but it can degrade the upper class as well. This scene at the Carson house reveals that John Barton’s angry opinions about domestic employers do indeed have basis “in reality.” Mary Barton’s own “less sensible” reasons for resisting a life of service reflected a historical reality of which Gaskell was no doubt aware. If Mary lacked sense for avoiding service for such intangible reasons as a desire for independence, she was not alone. During the nineteenth century, the service industry was losing thousands of workers to factories and other occupations for the very reasons that Gaskell attributes to Mary: a desire for freedom, the need for companionship, and the wish not “to be known as a servant by all who visited the house” (58). William Taylor, a nineteenthcentury footman, would no doubt have seen the “sense” in Mary’s feelings. He wrote in his diary that “the life of a gentleman’s servant is something like that of a bird shut in a cage. The bird is well housed and well fed but is deprived of liberty, and liberty

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is the dearest and swetes [sic] object of all Englishmen. Therefore I would rather be like the sparrow or lark, have less housing and feeding and rather more liberty” (Burnett 185). Although the dressmaker’s life is accompanied by its own dangers— as Mary later discovers—the profession was associated with glamour and freedom as opposed to dirt and slavery. By claiming that Mary’s motives for choosing the dressmaking trade lack sense, the narrator dismisses Mary’s legitimate desire for friendship and independence, but Gaskell herself does not. These sentiments, which place personal freedom and liberty above material considerations, echo the views of John Stuart Mill who wrote “the well-being of a people must exist by means of justice and self-government of the individual citizen” (762). In Mary Barton, Gaskell sees the human need for personal independence, but privileges caretaking above all else. Her next work set in Manchester explores the consequences on a society which has lost its caretaking ethos. Gaskell’s story “Lizzie Leigh,” published in Dickens’ periodical Household Words in 1850, does not directly depict factory life, but industrial Manchester is the backdrop of this tale. In this story, Gaskell depicts a world nearly bereft of mercy and compassion. The story opens with the death of James Leigh on Christmas day, 1836. Leigh dies with words of forgiveness for his fallen daughter Lizzie. Lizzie, a former servant who was turned away from her position when she became pregnant, has not been heard from since her disgrace and her family has disowned her. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Manchester and its surrounding environment is a place in which the paternalist social order has almost completely broken down. James Leigh’s lack of compassion for his fallen daughter has stripped him of his rightful role in the family, that of protector and master. While his wife had spent the better part of her marriage in a state of “confidence and loving submission,” she comes to see her husband in another light after he disowns their daughter and grandchild: [F]or three years the moan and murmur had never been out of her heart; she had rebelled against her husband as against a tyrant, with a hidden sullen rebellion, which tore up the old land-marks of wifely duty and affection, and poisoned the fountain whence gentlest love and reverence had been forever springing. (428)

As in many of her works, Gaskell here suggests that the line between “paternal” and “tyrannical” is a fine one, that obedience and deference is only owed to a social or familial position insofar as it is earned. In leaving his vulnerable and impoverished daughter to her fate in an impersonal city, James Leigh inspires rebellion rather than love in his wife. He inspires fear in his children. This family of characters may live on “Upclose” farm, but they are emotionally separated from one another, the antithesis of the paternalist ideal. In setting the opening of her story in a farming community, rather than in Manchester, Gaskell makes it clear that the changes brought about by industry are not wholly responsible for the breakdown of the social compact. The feudal notion of mutual obligations was a fragile ideal even in non-urban, nonindustrial circumstances. Social relations in the city of Manchester are also fragmented, though Lizzie’s former mistress is the one character who had attempted to perform her prescribed caretaking role. Mrs Leigh learns that her daughter’s former employer had not

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intended to turn Lizzie out into the streets of Manchester, as she had previously suspected, but did so only because Lizzie refused to return to her family: “I did ask her a bit about our Lizzie. The master would have turned her away at a day’s warning, (he’s gone to the other place; I hope he’ll meet with more mercy there than he showed our Lizzie,—I do,—) and when the missus asked her should she write to us, she says Lizzie shook her head; and when she speered at her again, the poor lass went down on her knees, and begged her not, for she said it would break my heart, (as it has done, Will—God knows it has),” said the poor mother, choking with her struggle to keep down her hard overmastering grief, “and her father would curse her—Oh God, teach me to be patient.” She could not speak for a few minutes,— “and the lass threatened, and said she’d go drown herself in the canal, if the missus wrote home, and so—” (437)

It is telling that Lizzie preferred the conditions of the workhouse to those which she knew she could expect at home. Indeed, upon learning of his daughter’s situation, her father had “declared that henceforth they would have no daughter; that she should be as one dead, and her name never more be named at market or at mealtime, in blessing or in prayer” (432). Of course, the workhouse is hardly an improvement. Mrs Leigh learns that “they’d turned her out as soon as she was strong, and told her she were young enough to work,—but whatten kind o’ work would be open to her ... and her baby to keep?” (437). This was, of course, the problem with the emerging free market economy of the nineteenth century: no one was responsible for anyone else. No one was obligated to care for an unwed mother and her child, not her employer, not her family, not the state. As in Mary Barton, the Leighs have to rely on the kindness and mercy of individuals, rather than institutional or political reform. In “Lizzie Leigh,” Gaskell depicts the problem of an impersonal society as ultimately unsolvable. Lizzie’s daughter dies, and while the Leighs find caring companions in Manchester, and Lizzie is reunited with her family, the story ends with the tragic images of “Lizzie sit[ting] by a little grave and weep[ing] bitterly” (453). Although servants are closely linked to the care-taking role in Mary Barton, Gaskell complicates their position in that work and in “Lizzie Leigh,” showing both the strengths and vulnerability of domestic workers. The author acknowledges domestic service to be physically dirty and tiring, and she also acknowledges the intangible price paid by servants: a loss of freedom and companionship. She portrays servant characters as helpless children, but she also places them in a nurturing maternal role. In addition, it is also the upper classes that need a firm and capable hand. In collapsing these traditional roles, the author undermines the very hierarchy she appears to be calling for when she advocates binding workers to their employers by “ties of respect and affection” (475). Gaskell’s next industrial novel, North and South, features a servant subplot that is more fully developed than any in Mary Barton. Like her previous novel about the mills, North and South is preoccupied with the conflict between a traditional hierarchical society and the individual impulse for freedom and change. Writing about a number of Gaskell novels, Suzy Clarkson Holstein points out that “Gaskell’s works reveal the flaws and cruelties of the patriarchal aristocracy as they simultaneously show her nostalgic love for a system she recognizes has disappeared forever” (383). In this novel, Gaskell reveals less ambivalence than she does in Mary Barton, siding

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more forcefully with change over tradition. When the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, first arrives from the slow-paced, agricultural south to the industrial city of Milton-Northern, she finds the society “strange,” with its citizens in a perpetual state of class conflict: “I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in such a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down” (165). At first Margaret finds the noise, the pollution, and the lack of deference to her own social position to be disconcerting, but she slowly comes to admire and thrive on the energy of the city and the excitement of social change. Through Margaret, Gaskell uses the position of servants to illustrate the differences between the North and the South: in Milton-Northern, Margaret is continually conscious of the working class. When she attends a dinner party at the Thorntons’, she is so mindful of the household servants that she tells her father that she “felt like a hypocrite ... sitting there in my white silk gown, with my idle hands before me, when I remembered all the good, thorough house-work [the servants] had done” (222). In contrast, while staying with her wealthy cousin in London, Margaret notes that in this life of luxury, “the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them” (458). This London household resembles that of the Carsons in Mary Barton in which the upper class is isolated from the working class, and consequently, is stagnant almost to the point of being in a state of slumber. For Margaret, who has come to prefer the dynamic life of the north, “[t]here was a strange, unsatisfied vacuum in [her] heart and mode of life” (458). Whereas Mary Barton relates the problems of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of the workers, North and South presents a more balanced picture, reflecting the complexity of the issues at stake. Chapter 15, entitled “Masters and Men,” features a debate between Margaret and the mill owner John Thornton about the possibilities for paternalism in worker/master relations. Gaskell allows her two intelligent and impassioned characters to make their arguments without editorial comment by the narrator, and the debate ends without a clear winner. Arguing for a more familial relationship between workers and their employers, Margaret likens the typical mill worker to a child who is “kept in [ignorance], in order to save him from temptation and error, [but who] does not know good from evil” (168). Margaret advocates for a “friendship” between “the adviser and advised classes,” but one that privileges the ethics of individual rights over care taking. Margaret’s views reflect the paternalist ideals of Arthur Helps, whose influential Claims of Labour (1844) argues that a good employer, like a good father, has the responsibility to provide both protection and freedom to his workers (or children) as well as understanding. He writes, “Indeed, I almost doubt whether the head of the family does not do more mischief if he is unsympathetic, than even if he were unjust” (Pike 85). Gaskell also admired the ideas of her friend John Ruskin, and Margaret Hale initially shares Ruskin’s nostalgia for a medieval way of life. Like Margaret, Ruskin frequently employs images of parents and children to illustrate his views about masters and workers:

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Disputant after disputant vainly strives to show that the interests of the masters are, or are not, antagonistic to those of the men; none of the pleaders ever seeming to remember that it does not always follow that the persons must be antagonistic because their interests are. If there is only a crust of bread in the house, and mother and children are starving, their interests are not the same. If the mother eats it, the children want it; if the children eat it, the mother must go hungry to her work. Yet it does not necessarily follow that there will be “antagonism” between them, that they will fight for the crust, and that the mother, being strongest, will get it, and eat it. Neither, in any other case, whatever the relations of the persons may be, can it be assumed for certain that, because their interests are diverse, they must necessarily regard each other with hostility. (129-30)

Margaret shares Ruskin’s familial view of master-worker relations, but she passionately believes that, far from having diverse interests, the masters and the workers are mutually dependent and their fortunes rise and fall together. Later in the novel, Gaskell affirms Margaret’s views on this issue. When Thornton’s workers go on strike, his mill fails. Though they were dependent on him for wages, he was equally dependent on them for their productivity. Thornton later learns this point well. During this debate with Margaret, however, he is a convincing advocate of the ideas of John Stuart Mill, who believed that any employer involvement in the lives of his workers violated the workers’ basic freedoms and the kept them in a state of dependency. Thornton, too, uses the language of parenting to elucidate his views, telling Margaret, I [also] ... consider our people in the condition of children, while I deny that we, as masters, have anything to do with the making or keeping them so. I maintain that despotism is the best kind of government for them; so that in the hours in which I come in contact with them I must necessarily be an autocrat. I will use my best discretion—from no humbug or philanthropic feeling, of which we have had rather too much in the North—to make wise laws and come to just decisions in the conduct of my business—laws and decisions which work for my own good in the first instance—for theirs in the second; but I will neither be forced to give my reasons, nor flinch from what I have once declared to be my resolution. (167)

Dorice Elliot Williams writes that “Although its narrative method depends on dualities like parent and child, masters and men, and North and South, the novel also rejects, or deconstructs, the polarity of such dualities because ... it aspires to construct a ground on which dualities can meet and be mediated” (45). By the end of the novel, Thornton’s love for Margaret and the failure of his “despotism” to ensure continued profits, has caused his economic views to shift, and his strict privileging of rights has been tempered by an acknowledgment of responsibility to those he employs. Thornton eventually concludes that “no mere institutions, however wise, and however much thought may have been required to organize and arrange them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact. Such intercourse is the very breath of life” (525). John Thornton calls his new approach to worker relations an “experiment,” but there was already a model for just such personal contact between classes: the relationship between servants and masters. While nearly all the criticism of

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North and South focuses on the conversion of the hard-hearted mill owner and the education of the proud Margaret Hale, Gaskell weaves into her novel a plot with important implications for Thornton’s new ideal relationship between classes. Living in the relatively small household of a minister’s family, Dixon, the long-time family servant, has certainly experienced the “personal contact” with her superiors that Thornton sees as “the very breath of life.” Although Gaskell herself clearly advocates Thornton’s new approach to class, her depiction of Dixon’s relationship with the Hale family reveals that Gaskell knew such a solution would be difficult; in the manufacturing community the relationship between the workers and masters is difficult because it lacks intimacy, whereas the relationship between Dixon and the Hales is difficult because it is so intimate. In this important and overlooked subplot, Gaskell presents the potential benefits and pitfalls to having close personal contact between classes. The Hale’s relationship with their maid is characterized by mutual dependence and loyalty, but also by mutual fear, distrust, and resentment. As the novel progresses, both Dixon and Margaret must learn to shed their ongoing power struggle and replace it with mutual understanding which can only be achieved by Thornton’s ideal of “close personal contact.” In his 1860 essay, “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin also compares the industrial worker to a domestic servant, ultimately concluding that mill owners must extend to their workers the affection and intimacy which (he believes) household masters give their servants. Arguing that “We shall find the best and simplest illustration of the relations of master and operative in the position of domestic servants,” Ruskin argues that if the master of a household tries “only to get as much work out of his servants as he can ... never allows them to be idle; [and] feeds them as poorly as they will endure,” he might experience success if the servant were an engine of which the motive power was steam. ... But he being, on the contrary, an engine whose motive power is a Soul. ... the largest quantity if work will not be done by this curious engine for pay, or under pressure, or by any help of any kind of fuel which may be applied to the chaldron. It will done only when the motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel: namely, by the affections. (131-2)

In this passage, Ruskin’s ideas dovetail almost exactly with Gaskell’s as she had voiced them through the character of John Thornton five years earlier. Affection, interaction, and understanding were, according to Thornton, worth trying if progress was to be made. Ultimately, this notion of progress is where Gaskell diverges from paternalists like Ruskin. As Uglow notes, “Gaskell was wary of medieval nostalgia; ultimately she believed in progress rather than a return to preindustrial innocence. One of Margaret’s ruling illusions is that there can be a ‘chivalric’ order in industry ” (380). This chivalric order, based on an agrarian feudal system, was not what Gaskell advocated. Her vision of interaction between the classes was far more controversial, and called for both conflict and competing worldviews from all social classes. In her exploration of Margaret’s relationship with her mother’s maid, she demonstrates how such a solution might play itself out.

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Like many fictional servants, Dixon embodies a number of humorous contradictions: she is a servant, but she “touch[es] no other part of the household work” (52) than to dust the room of the disgraced Frederick Hale, Margaret’s brother. (The narrator informs us that Dixon believes she “degrades” [119] herself by answering doorbells.) She believes herself to be near the top of the social scale, and looks down on the Milton workers who visit Margaret and Mr Hale, though the Hales themselves do not. Yet despite these comic limitations, Dixon is a force to be reckoned with within the Hale family. While they lived in the agrarian world of Helstone, Dixon’s position to Margaret and the rest of the Hale family was unquestionably parental and controlling. Having worked as a lady’s maid for Margaret’s mother prior to her marriage, Dixon viewed her mistress’s marriage to Mr Hale as her lady’s “affliction and downfall.” She sought to protect Mrs Hale as much as possible from the consequences of her poor choice in a husband, and as a result created a weak and powerless mistress who depended on her for everything. Like the Carsons in Mary Barton, Mrs Hale would have been better off doing for herself the work and household managing which Dixon does for her. The entire family submits to Dixon in most domestic matters, and the even the strong-willed Margaret finds herself like a child, having her hair brushed “viciously” (64) by the maid in the novel’s opening chapters. After the Hales begin making plans to move to the industrial Milton-Northern, all the familial roles need to be redefined just as Milton provokes Margaret to change her idealistic views on the stagnant world of the South. Mrs Hale is dying, and the titular head of the family, Mr Hale, is greatly reduced in confidence and strength. After a passionate exchange with Margaret, Dixon is surprised to find that her word is no longer law in the Hale family, and that Margaret is emerging as the family leader. After Dixon openly (but not uncharacteristically) criticizes Mr Hale, Margaret is outraged, and the maid discovers that such speech will no longer be tolerated: To hear her father talked of this way by a servant to her face! ... “Dixon! You forget to whom you are speaking.” She stood upright and firm on her feet now, confronting the waiting maid, and fixing her with her steady and discerning eye. “I am Mr Hale’s daughter GO! You have made a strange mistake, and one that I’m sure your own good feeling will make you sorry for when you think about it.” (83)

In speaking up to Dixon, Margaret appeals to her own superior social position (“You forget to whom you are speaking”), as well as to the human side of the maid (“your own good feeling”). This manner of dealing with her employee is a model of the Helps style of social paternalism in which workers are expected to obey, but in which employers are sympathetic to the worker’s feelings and situations. In other words, it is not enough for Dixon to merely feel her “place,” she must also arrive at the truth of Margaret’s words on her own. At first it would appear that she does so. The narrator notes that “From henceforth Dixon obeyed and admired Margaret. ... [T]he truth was, that Dixon, as do many others, liked to feels herself ruled by a powerful and decided nature” (83). This exchange is not the final word on Dixon’s place in the family or Margaret’s role as family head, but it does establish the conflict between the two characters,

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a conflict in which each woman is struggling to “parent” the weakened parents of the household. Mr Hale regards his wife’s maid with “a kind of helpless dismay” (86), but he is unable to replace her or even to diminish her power. It is Margaret who must interact with Dixon, and she is in the difficult position of needing to feel superior to the servant, while also acknowledging Dixon’s history with the family and importance to her mother. There are a number of battles to be fought before a truce can be declared. Ultimately, the two must move from conflict to understanding before a solution can be found, just as John Thornton needs to stop viewing his workers in adversarial terms and recognize the total humanity of his men who are more than just working “hands.” The chief source of the conflict between Dixon and Margaret is competition for Mrs Hale’s friendship and confidence. Like many of Gaskell’s heroines, Margaret is closely allied with her father: she defends him, works with him, and is his closest friend and advisor. Yet Margaret loves her mother “passionately” (172) and believes that Dixon, with her unwavering devotion, has come between them. Shortly after moving to Milton, Margaret and Mr Hale begin to suspect that Mrs Hale is seriously ill. As an indication of Dixon’s importance, both father and daughter acknowledge that the maid is more likely to know the truth about Mrs Hale’s condition than they are. Mr Hale asks, “Do you think she is really ill? Has Dixon said anything? Oh, Margaret! I am haunted by the fear that our coming to Milton has killed her. My poor Maria! “Oh Papa! Don’t imagine such things,” said Margaret, shocked. “She is not well, that is all. Many a one is not well for a time; and with good advice gets better and stronger than ever.” “But has Dixon said anything about her?” (156)

The two people who should be closest to Mrs Hale are in the dark about her health and seek clues to her condition from Dixon. When a doctor arrives to see Mrs Hale, Margaret “was excluded from the room, while Dixon was admitted,” (172) and Margaret acknowledges her jealousy at the maid’s intimacy with her mother. Mrs Hale’s illness brings to the foreground Margaret’s longstanding competition with Dixon—a form of equality—and the daughter’s concern for her mother in no way dilutes the intensity of the conflict. After the doctor sees Mrs Hale, Margaret is determined to speak with him herself, and she triumphed over all the obstacles which Dixon threw in her way; assuming her rightful position as daughter of the house in something of the spirit of the Elder Brother [from the parable of the Prodigal Son], which quelled the old servant’s officiousness very effectually. Margaret’s conscious assumption of this unusual dignity of her demeanour towards Dixon gave her an instant’s amusement in the midst of her anxiety. She knew, from the surprised expression on Dixon’s face, how ridiculously grand she herself must be looking. (172-3)

In this scene Margaret resembles John Thornton’s description of himself as the despotic employer. Acutely conscious that this role does not come naturally to her, Margaret nevertheless finds it a useful way to achieve her goal—in this case, to find out the truth about her mother’s health. Her problems with Dixon, however, remain

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unresolved until they can move beyond placing obstacles in each other’s way and work together to care for Mrs Hale. When Margaret first attempts to speak with her mother’s doctor, he tries to avoid telling her that Mrs Hale is dying, trying instead to persuade her that the patient is in Dixon’s capable hands: “My dear young lady, your mother seems to have a most attentive and efficient servant, who is more like her friend” (173). Even in domestic matters of life and death, Margaret is not acknowledged to be in a position of control and must learn the information by once again insisting on “her rightful position,” saying “I am her daughter, sir” (173). It is the knowledge of her mother’s impending death that forces Margaret to come to a resolution with Dixon, ending the struggle for dominance and control and replacing it with mutual sympathy. Margaret’s first instinct after learning of her mother’s illness is anger at Dixon for not including her in her mother’s care. She tells her mother, “Dixon could not give me credit for enough true love—for as much as herself! ... Don’t let Dixon’s fancies come any more between you and me, Mamma. Don’t please” (176). Mrs Hale’s reply, “Don’t be mad at Dixon,” is perhaps not the assurance that Margaret wants to hear, but it does elicit from Margaret a promise to try to change her relationship with the maid on one important condition: “I will try and be humble, and learn her ways, if you will only let me do all I can for you. Let me be in the first place, mother—I am greedy of that” (176). Not surprisingly, this emotional conversation causes Mrs Hale to become hysterical and in need of Dixon’s soothing presence, indicating that Dixon is still in “first place.” The maid angrily accuses Margaret of having “over-excited her mother,” but this time “Margaret bore all meekly” and “obeyed all Dixon’s directions. ... By doing so, she mollified her accuser” (177). Mollified, Dixon and Margaret have their first genuine conversation in the novel, coming together as two individuals who are “mutually dependent” just as Gaskell asserts that mill owners and mill workers are mutually dependent on one another. Dixon confesses that “I’ve loved her better than any other man, woman, or child. ... many’s the time I’ve longed to walk it off—the thought of what was the matter with her, and how it must all end” (178). Margaret, who, unlike Dixon, does have the freedom to go for a walk, replies with sudden understanding, “Oh Dixon! ... how often I’ve been cross with you, not knowing what a terrible secret you had to bear” (178). The scene ends with a kiss between the two women as Margaret leaves to “walk it off” and Dixon declares her love for Margaret. This scene marks a turning point in the plot between Margaret and Dixon. The attachment between the two becomes stronger as the two characters make plans to sneak Margaret’s brother, who has been banished from England for his role in a naval mutiny, to his dying mother’s bedside. The narrator tells us that, “Margaret and Dixon were laying their heads together and consulting how they should keep Frederick’s coming a profound secret to all out of the house” (308). Working together, the two are able to succeed where one alone could not, demonstrating Gaskell’s assertion that the two classes need one another to prosper and that prospering is indeed possible when their interests and investments are mutual. Yet Gaskell does not overly romanticize this close attachment between the classes. Though she states through the character of John Thornton that such attachment is “the very breath of life,” she continues to

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portray Dixon’s and Margaret’s relationship as challenging. Undeniably, they are each better off in their alliance than they were in their antagonism, but we also find that Mrs Hale continues to “trust in Dixon more than in Margaret” (287). The two continue to have different viewpoints on a number of issues, but their appreciation for one another and dependence on each other is deeply ingrained. After the death of both of her parents, Margaret stays with relatives in London, and finds that “she looked forward with longing, though unspoken interest to the homely object of Dixon’s return from Milton; where, until now, the old servant had been busily engaged in winding up all the affairs of the Hale family” (459). By the end of the novel, Dixon and Margaret have only one real source of conflict, and it is one that is, on the surface, particularly ironic: Dixon resents the Hales’ liberal attitude toward the integration of social classes. Gaskell makes Dixon one of the novel’s few spokespeople for maintaining the paternalist social hierarchy. While all the novel’s other main characters come to view the mixing of classes as the very breath of life, Dixon, who has herself benefited from such an attitude, is still attached to an agrarian order in which every person’s place is easily understood. She chastises Margaret for inviting the mill workers into their home: Why master and you must always be asking the lower classes up-stairs, since we came to Milton, I cannot understand. Folk at Helstone were never brought higher than the kitchen; and I’ve let one or two of them know before now that they might think it an honour to be even there. (380)

Dixon’s pleas to the Hales to assert their social superiority over the working class fall on deaf ears, but it is certainly not uncommon for a servant to be especially wedded to a social hierarchy in which everyone’s place is clear. As historian F.M.L. Thompson notes, servants had an unusual intermediary place in the social hierarchy: “With its mixed loyalties to its own members and to the interests of master and mistress, its capacity to combine deference with an ability to live well, and its airs of condescending superiority to everyone else, [the servant class] was not a class that could be fitted comfortably into any working-class social analysis” (249). Thus Dixon’s feelings are consistent with her unusual position in the social order, and her attraction to paternalism is understanding, given that Gaskell herself longed at times to be guided by a strong masculine ruler. Her solution to the labor problems of her day do not destroy the social hierarchy, which could be as comforting as it was potentially dangerous. Recognizing the inevitability of social change, Gaskell asks the ruling classes to take control of this change by defining its terms. In the factories and in the homes, she prescribes a world in which both worker and employer recognize and try to meet one another’s needs. John Thornton’s impassioned argument for intimacy between the classes breaks down certain barriers that had separated these mutually dependent groups, but it still allows for the existence of the class system divided by the production and consumption of labor. Patsy Stoneman writes that “Mary Barton develops a contrast between two ethical systems, that of the working class, based on caring and cooperation, and that of the middle class, based on ownership, authority, and law” (69). In that novel, Gaskell argued that the mill owners adopt the ethical system of Christian love toward the

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working classes in order to maintain their power over them. Yet through her complex depiction of servant life, Gaskell reveals a deeper understanding that putting such theory into practice would not be easily done. In North and South, Gaskell’s solution is more complicated, but not wholly different. Caring and cooperation remain the most important values to Gaskell, but she recognizes that a world of perfect accord between the classes will never exist, though friendship and respect can. Though Gaskell is not a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, neither is she a paternalist in the tradition of John Ruskin. Ultimately, she rejects both views in favor of an approach which recognizes the potential for abuse in the worker-master dynamic, but which acknowledges the great potential for progress as well.

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Conclusion

“Well done thou good and faithful servant”

Life is so unnerving/For a servant who’s not serving. Lumiere, from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

The bewitched singing and dancing dishes in Disney’s 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast are “obsessed” with serving Belle, their master’s beautiful prisoner. Having been turned into flatware, candlesticks, and teapots by a vindictive witch a decade before, these former servants have lost their purpose in life without someone to wait upon. Lumiere, a candlestick with a French accent, longs for the “good old days when we were useful,” and lives contentedly in a paternalistic world in which nothing makes a servant happier than the opportunity to remove spots or boil tea for one’s betters. Beauty and the Beast was released in 1991, and the film features many updates to the traditional folktale in order to appeal to a late-twentieth century audience: the heroine, while still characterized by her beauty, is also known for her intelligence, and constantly has her head in a book. When the handsome and conceited Gaston proposes marriage to her, she makes it very clear that she wants more from life than marriage and children with a good-looking, but brainless, bully. Indeed, she begins to fall in love with the “beast” after he provides her with full access to his library. Yet despite the film’s accommodations of changing gender roles, the servants are firmly cast in pre-nineteenth-century social roles, describing themselves as “not whole” without someone to serve. The “good old days” of masters and servants vanished with Victoria’s reign, but the presence of servants in popular culture has not. In addition to successful films like The Remains of the Day and Gosford Park, both of which focus on life “below stairs,” modern adaptations of Jane Austen movies and other period films such as Titanic give servants greater visibility today than they had in nineteenth-century novels. In England, there was recently a reality television show called Masters and Servants. The show’s website describes its premise: “Two families move in together. Each family has got one week to enjoy being masters and one week to suffer being servants. It’s a modern day, real life Upstairs Downstairs.” In general, these social experiments seem to have been colossal failures with mutual resentment about the roles of masters and servants alike. One woman was surprised at how much she hated being a servant: “I loathed it. I knew I wasn’t very good at taking orders, but I surprised myself how bad I was. I turned into a sulky teenager. Normally I’m really happy-go-lucky, but I turned into a bit of a witch.” Another woman noted, “Being a servant isn’t the best thing in the world. You might think you’ve got a roof and food,

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how hard can it be? But it is tough. You are knackered, you are split up from your family, you make this food but you can’t eat it.” She added, “I think I’d crack up if I was a servant for more than a few weeks.” What is interesting about this television show is that participants are asked to perform the role of servant as it existed under social paternalism, a premise that is destined for failure, as few people today believe that social class is divinely ordained. The website even has a servants’ handbook with a guide to performing the role of submissive dependent, as well as the ins and outs of cleaning and polishing. The advice it offers would have been familiar to Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell, but is anachronistic today: “Never let your voice be heard by the Masters of the house, except when necessary, and then as quietly as possible” and “Servants should never offer any opinion to their Masters, not even to say good night or good morning except in reply to salutation.” This enforced silence and invisibility was what most of the participants found most difficult to live with. One participant, Kevin Nutley, was asked to describe how being a servant is different today than it was in the past: “All staff need to be valued. In any industry you can see that valued staff are looked after. I wouldn’t particularly like to be a full time servant unless the person I was working for had respect for me. In this day and age you need to have respect for the people who work for you. It used to be the other way around.” Back when it was “the other way around,” relationships between masters and servants may have been slightly less contentious than they were in the artificial world of reality television, but as this book demonstrates, they have always been complex. Servants have never been as invisible and silent as they were supposed to be, except perhaps in literature. In fact, English servants presided over life’s major milestones for centuries. In April 1831, Maria Edgeworth went to the home of her friend the Duchess of Wellington. She was greeted by a porter and a butler who were conferring together rather mysteriously, though as she wrote to her stepmother, “nothing occurred to me but that the man doubted whether I was a person who ought to be admitted” (Chosen Letters 381). After Edgeworth presented her card, the butler informed her that the Duchess had died two days before. He then led her into a “great, silent hall” where she was greeted by a man-servant who led the internationally famous author to the one person she wished to see and whom Edgeworth knew could relate the circumstances of her friend‘s death: “that maid, of whose attachment the Duchess had the last time I saw her, spoken so highly and truly” (381). Edgeworth encountered no fewer than four servants in her visit, and from the way she relates the story, it is clear that she expected that many. It is not surprising that Edgeworth sought out the Duchess’s maid as the best way to mourn her friend. Years before, in Belinda, she had described the intimacy between the sick and (supposedly) dying Lady Delacour and her maid Marriott. Half a century later, months after Elizabeth Gaskell’s son died in his nurse’s arms, Gaskell presented a similar scene in Mary Barton in which the Carson family servants convey the news of Harry Carson’s murder to his parents. In North and South, the maid Dixon is the only confidante of her dying mistress and presides almost exclusively over her last days. Edgeworth and Gaskell understood that even the private acts of dying and grieving were mediated through servants who managed the death of their employers

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just as they managed their lives. According to Bruce Robbins, death is one of the few occasions in which servants continued to play a role in nineteenth-century fiction after their otherwise near-disappearance from the novel. He writes that, “Death gives servants the unaccustomed right to be heard” (123). In their lives and in their literature, Edgeworth and Gaskell gave servants the right to be heard and in doing so they presented serious arguments for a revised social system. Edgeworth and Gaskell employ servants to this end because, as Mitzi Myers writes, “servants were pivotal in furthering or impeding the eighteenth-century revolutions in mothering, child care, and education ... and ... servants grew starkly visible in the period’s increasingly privatized household“ (52). Both writers minimized controversy in their writings and in their personal lives, reflecting some ambivalence about their visions for change. According to Marilyn Butler, Edgeworth’s novels constitute “a sign that nineteenth-century realist novel is on the way: Old aristocratic stories of male dominance and legitimacy are being challenged by democratized women-centered plots of family life in which servants, including female servants, wield power, and almost anything is negotiable” (Edgeworth’s Ireland 274). As Edgeworth’s days of political revolution gave way to the Victorian period of industrial revolution, her “negotiations” were taken up by other women writers who often couched their revolutionary ideas in safer domestic terms. Like Edgeworth, Elizabeth Gaskell defined herself in terms of her domestic role. In 1862 she wrote to a young mother with literary aspirations that “I do not think I ever cared for literary fame; nor do I think it is a thing that ought to be cared for. It comes and it goes. The exercise of a talent or power is always a great pleasure; but one should weigh well whether this pleasure may not be obtained by the sacrifice of some duty” (l. 515). Though Gaskell wrote eloquently about the human imperative to fulfill one’s duties, she was less confident as to what those duties were. Like Edgeworth, she valued the idea of a society in which loyalty and gratitude were rewarded with care and assistance. She often idealized the master and servant relationship as holding the greatest potential to make that paternalistic model work. Yet in her novels the privileged classes are consistently inadequate to task of leadership. It is the servants, with their energy and willingness to work, who become the caretakers, reversing the “natural” hierarchy of the patriarchal order. During the “Great Age of Servants,” domestic workers were told that their loyalty would be rewarded in the next life. A typical tombstone epitaph read, Well done thou good and faithful servant: Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: Enter thou into the joy of thy lord. (Dawes 52)

For Edgeworth and Gaskell, there was no shame in hard work done honestly and well. These writers shared certain values of a paternalist model which they believed were becoming obsolete, most importantly the belief that different social classes had mutual obligations toward one another. Yet they were progressive in that they celebrated certain leveling measures for the working class: education, social mobility, political power. They condemned the inaction and ennui that were eating away at the

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leisure class, ironically rendering it unfit for the leadership that their positions in society demanded. Through their depiction of the servant class, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell raised the possibility that hard work, loyalty, intelligence, and ambition should be rewarded on this earth as well as the next.

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Index

(Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell are referred to as ME and EG respectively throughout the index, except for their own main entries) Adams, Samuel and Sarah 35 Altick, Richard 98-9 Anglo-Irish Ascendancy 7 anti-Semitism, in Harrington 38-9 Austen, Jane Persuasion 12fn1, 20 Pride and Prejudice 12 Beauty and the Beast, servants 115 Beeton, Isabella Book of Household Management 16 on servants’ duties 19-20 Birchall, Dearman, Squire 25-6 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 28 Blake, William 33 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie 17 Bonaparte, Felicia 54, 55, 101, 102 Bowers, Bege K. see Brothers Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights 28 Brothers, Barbara, and Bege K. Bowers 32, 33 Burke, Edmund 16 on change 31 Reflections on the Revolution in France 31 on wealth 41-2 Burnett, John 98 Butler, Marilyn 31-2, 83, 90, 92, 117 Carlyle, Thomas, Past and Present 16 Cary, Meredith 84 Cassells Household Guide 11 on servants’ behavior 21 change, Burke on 31 Chapple, John 3 Chorley, Henry Fothergill 95 Christian Observer 64 class conflict, in Mary Barton 99, 100 class system, and paternalism 14, 117-18 Cobb, Frances Power, on servants 58-9

Cobbett, Anne, The English Housekeeper 85 Colby, Robin B. 96 Coleridge, Samuel 33 crime, and servants 37 Cross, Wilbur L., on EG 8 Dawes, Frank 26 death, and servants 116-17 Defoe, Daniel, on servants 23-4 Dickerson, Vanessa, Victorian Ghosts 56-7 Doyle, Arthur Conan 37 Dumbleton, William A. 79 Dunleavy, Janet Egleson 33 Edgeworth family servants 34-5 tenants, treatment of 76 Edgeworth, Maria concerns 1 father, relationship 4, 76 Irish, ambivalence towards 75-6 Irish novels servants in 77 themes 76-7 Mary Holland, correspondence 6 nationalism 83 paternalism 41, 47, 50-51, 76, 93 politics 32, 76 Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, correspondence 32, 38 on servants 33-4, 116 slavery, attitude towards 36fn4 works The Absentee 2, 7-8 servants 90-92 Belinda 2, 5, 33 narrative perspective 46 servants 35-6, 37, 44-7, 51, 60, 116

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Castle Rackrent 4, 8, 28 Ennui, parallels 89 servants 77-83 Ennui 2, 8, 77, 79, 93 Castle Rackrent, parallels 89 changeling plot 83-4 servants 83-90 Harrington 9, 33 servants 38-40, 42 Helen 3, 4, 5, 18, 33 feminist issues 48-9, 53 servants 47-50 social hierarchy 49-50 Ormond 79 Vivian, servants 40 Edgeworth, R. L. 87 and ME Practical Education 3 servants 40-41 Edinburgh Review 23 Elliot, Dorice Williams 18, 20 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 27 feminist issues, in Helen 48-9, 53 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews 12 servants 27-8 “followers”, and servants 21, 61-2 footman, duties 19 Fox, Eliza (‘Tottie’), EG, correspondence 95-6, 97-8 French Revolution 15, 16 Fulbert of Chartres 15 Gaskell, Elizabeth concerns 1 “condition of England novels” 96 Eliza Fox, correspondence 95-6, 97-8 ME compared 95 influence of 9 paternalism 63-4, 96, 104, 106 servants, contact with 97-8 on social hierarchy 13-14 supernatural stories 55-6 Unitarianism 7 works Cranford 6, 7, 9, 66 characters 57-8 critical reception 57 publication 57

servants 59-63 setting 57 The Grey Woman, servants 67-9 “Lizzie Leigh”, servants 104-5 “The Manchester Marriage”, servants 67 Mary Barton 3, 8, 53, 54, 96 class conflict 99, 100 servants 100-4 North and South 2, 8, 53 servants 109-13 worker/master relations 106-8 “The Old Nurse’s Tale” 56 servants 56-7 Ruth 7, 57 critical reception 64 paternalism in 63-4 servants 64-7 Sylvia’s Lovers 7 critical reception 69-70 servants 70-3 Wives and Daughters 3 Gaskell, Marianne, EG’s advice to 53, 73 Gaskell, Rev William 3 Gee, Maggie 48 Gentleman’s Magazine 25 Gerard, Jessica 22 Gerin, Winfred 73 Godwin, William 33 Gosford Park, servants 115 Greenfield, Susan C. 37 Habits and Customs of the Working Classes 22 Harsh, Constance D. 55 Hawthorne, Mark 76 Hearn, Ann 98 Helps, Arthur 96 Claims of Labour 106 Henry, Nancy 70 hiring fairs (“mop fairs”) 27 Holland, Henry 3, 5 Holland, Mary, ME, correspondence 6 Holstein, Suzy Clarkson 105 household management 16, 54-5 Household Words 57, 104 Industrial Revolution 23 Ireland 18c scene 77 1798 uprising 87

Index James, Henry, Turn of the Screw 28 Johnson, Susan 18 Keating, Peter 58, 63 Kelly, Garry 4, 76 Knezevic, Borislav 57 Knutsford 6 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth 4, 76, 77, 87 laissez-faire economy 16 and paternalism 98, 99 Langland, Elizabeth 17, 55, 97 Lawless, Emily 34 Lazarus, Rachel Mordecai, ME, correspondence 32, 38 Lightfoot, Marjorie 76 The Literary Gazette 64 Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education 29 Logan, Thad 18, 54, 60 The Victorian Parlour 66 McCormack, W.J. 82 Manners, Lord John 14 Masters and Servants, servants 115-16 Meir, Natalie Kapetanios 7 Mellor, Anne K. 9, 33 Mill, John Stuart 58, 96, 104, 107, 113 Millard, Kay 7 Mirbeau, Octave 39 Moore, Hannah, Village Politics 13 Myers, Mitzi 117 nationalism, ME’s 83 Nightingale, Florence 21 Notes on Nursing 26 on servants 26 novels of manners 32-3 obeah practice 37 “Old Servant”, Domestic Service 13 O’Toole, Tess 84 Paine, Thomas 32 Partridge, A.C. 77 paternalism and class system 14, 117-18 contradictions 15 EG’s 63-4, 96, 104, 106

129

and laissez-faire economy 98, 99 ME’s 41, 47, 50-51, 76, 93 noblesse oblige 16-17 origins 15 and patriarchy 14-15 philosophy of 12-13 vs service contracts 58-9 Patmore, Coventry 54, 55 patriarchy, and paternalism 14-15 Pike, E. Holly 96 Pope, Alexander 31 Pückler-Muskau, Prince von language use 11-12 on servants 11-12 Tour of a German Prince 11 Ratcliffe, Elizabeth 22 Raum, Elsie 1, 2, 16 Recchio, Thomas 9 references, character, servants 26-7 Reform Bill (1832) 3 Reilly, Susan 12 The Remains of the Day, servants 115 Reynolds, Joshua, and servant problem 28 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela 12 Robbins, Bruce 28, 39, 85, 102, 117 The Servant’s Hand 12 Roberts, David 96 Paternalism in Early Victorian England 12 Rogers, Harriet 23 Ruskin, John 54, 96, 106, 113 ‘The Roots of Honour’ 108 Saturday Review 69 “separate spheres” 2, 54 blurring 18, 55 “servant problem” 11, 25-6, 28, 41 servants in 18c fiction 12 anti-Semite 38-9 in Austen’s fiction 12 behavior, regulation of 21-2, 85 as corruptors 28-9 and crime 37 days off 27 and death 116-17 Defoe on 23-4 as deus ex machina 39 duties, Beeton on 19-20

130

Servants and Paternalism in Edgeworth family 34-5 EG’s contacts with 97-8 in EG’s works 54, 97 entertainment 27 in fiction The Absentee 90-92 Belinda 35-6, 37, 44-7, 51, 60, 116 Castle Rackrent 77-83 Cranford 59-63 Ennui 83-90 The Grey Woman 67-9 Harrington 38-40, 42 Helen 47-50 Joseph Andrews 27-8 “Lizzie Leigh” 104-5 “The Manchester Marriage” 67 Mary Barton 100-104 Masters and Servants 115-16 North and South 109-13 “The Old Nurse’s Tale” 56-7 The Parent’s Assistant 42-4 Ruth 64-7 Sylvia’s Lovers 70-3 Vanity Fair 28 Vivian 40 in films Beauty and the Beast 115 Gosford Park 115 The Remains of the Day 115 Titanic 115 Florence Nightingale on 26 “followers” 21, 61-2 freedom, lack of 22-3, 24, 102-4 hierarchy 21, 56 illegitimate births 22 invisibility 11 male 21 masters, relationship 10, 19, 85, 97, 99 ME on 33-4, 116 in ME’s Irish novels 77 and middle-class status 20-21 as narrators 28 numbers, mid 19c 24 in popular culture 115-16 portraits of 22 Power on 58-9

in Practical Education 40-41 references, character 26-7 social mobility 20 as spies 38 stereotypical 12, 42-3, 70, 85 Veblen on 20, 23 service contracts, vs paternalism 58-9 slavery, ME’s attitude to 36fn4 Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help 99 social hierarchy, in Helen 49-50 social paternalism see paternalism Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Privacy 28 spies, servants as 38 Stevenson, R.L., Dr Jekyll and My Hyde 28 Stevenson, William 6 Stoneman, Patsy 54, 97, 112 Terry, Judith 9, 12 Thackeray, William, Vanity Fair, servants 28 Thompson, F.M.L. 112 Titanic, servants 115 Trodd, Anthea 37 Trollope, Frances, Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong 20-21 Uglow, Jenny 6, 56, 97, 98, 108 Veblen, Thorstein, on servants 20, 23 Ward, A.W. 9 White, Luke 93 Williams, Dorice Elliot 107 Wollstonecraft, Mary 32 Woodforde, James 27 Wooley, Hannah 26 The Gentlewoman’s Companion 15 Wordsworth, William 33 worker/master relations, in North and South 106-8 Yorke, Dorothy 22 Yorke family 22-3 Yorke, Philip 25