SOURCE: "Queen of Popular Fiction: Mrs. Oliphant and the Chronicles of Carlingford," in Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860-80, Macmillan Press, 1983, pp. 68-101.

[In the following overview of the Chronicles of Carlingford, Terry discusses Oliphant as a "striking example" of the Victorian popular novelist—based on her talent and enormous output—and asserts that the Carlingford novels comprise her best work, without which readers would have an incomplete record of mid-Victorian fiction.]

I might have done better work. . . . Who can tell? I did with much labour what I thought the best, and there is only a might have been on the other side.

Mrs Oliphant, Autobiography and Letters (1899)

Mrs Oliphant is a striking example of the professional woman of letters in the mid-Victorian period. Henry James, always notable for exquisitely ambiguous judgements on his fellow-writers, called her 'a gallant woman', praising her 'heroic production' (quantity uppermost in his mind rather than quality) but expressing admiration for her perception and subtlety.¹ Queen Victoria read and admired her novels, several times calling her to audience, and at her funeral in 1897 a wreath bore a message of respect and farewell from the monarch. She was a queenly personage herself in many respects. J. M. Barrie amusingly describes his first meeting with her, in 1886, when he was Ordered' to Windsor where she was then living. He bought his first umbrella for the occasion, but it was of little avail. The regal presence unnerved him.² In her obituary William Blackwood wrote, 'Mrs Oliphant has been to the England of letters what the Queen has been to society as a whole. She, too, was crowned with age and honour in her own empire; widow and mother, she has tasted the triumph of life as well as the bitterness.'³

I chose Mrs Oliphant as the first of my middlebrow authors simply because her natural gifts of storytelling and amazing industry perfectly represent the popular novelist's approach. She was supremely one of the 'race of middlemen'.⁴ More significantly, her slavery to her pen (though she enjoyed it, and wrote as spontaneously as she talked) and the compromises forced upon her for the market very well reflect the circumstances of minor writers at this time. Her output was prodigious and it is possible only to consider the best work—the Chronicles of Carlingford—of this 'considerable and original novelist'.⁵ In a career spanning fifty years she produced almost a hundred novels, plus biographies of Edward Irving, Principal (John) Tulloch, Montalembert and Laurence Oliphant. She wrote over 200 articles and essays for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, reviewing current books in 'Our Library Table' and earning distinction as a critic. As editor of Blackwood's Foreign Classics she steeped herself in European literature and herself contributed the volumes on Dante and Cervantes. She wrote a Literary History of England and a splendid labour of love, Annals of the House of Blackwood. Her energy and effort were phenomenal. As a young girl she worked, as Jane Austen had done, amidst the hurly-burly of the parlour. Later, as family tragedies threatened to engulf her, she wrote her way out of ruin and depression, as Mrs Trollope did, by working far into the night. 'As a breadwinner she began and as a breadwinner she was to end.'⁶ This indomitable woman is an example of unmerited oblivion among lesser writers of the age, in many ways an unlucky victim of the publishing-system and of the vagaries of fortune that attend those who fail to reach the pinnacle of critical recognition rather than popular acclaim.

One of three surviving children, her two brothers, Frank and Willie, both proved weak characters who sooner or later depended on her for support.⁷ When Willie failed as a minister of the English Presbyterian Church, it was the strong resourceful Margaret who rescued him from his London lodgings, insisting with typical spirit that they go without dinner for a week to pay off one importunate creditor. 'Mrs Oliphant could never believe in a hero',⁸ remarked L. P. Stebbins. The behaviour of brothers and later sons no doubt contributed to her disillusion, although there was also a young man to whom she was passionately attached as a girl, who emigrated to America and promptly dropped her. She tells the story with wry humour, but the painful incident may well have contributed to her heroines' unsentimental attitude to love: her depiction of marriage is decidedly frosty; the men in her novels decidedly weak.

In 1852 she married her cousin, Frank Oliphant, an artist in stained glass with a small business in London, but within a few years a succession of tragic events overtook her. Prospects were bright enough at first: her husband's business went well and her early literary successes brought contact with Frank Smedley, the S. C. Halls and the Howitts. Writing in her steady, carefree way she could expect about £400 for a novel—'already, of course, being told that I was working too fast, and producing too much'.⁹ By 1856, when her first son, Cyril, was born, she had already lost two infants. Then in 1859 her husband died of tuberculosis in Italy, where the family had moved in hope of a cure. Mrs Oliphant had now to begin literary drudgery that lasted until her death in 1897. She recalled in 1885, 'When I thus began the world anew I had for all my fortune about £1,000 of debt, a small insurance of, I think £200 on Frank's life, our furniture laid up in a warehouse, and my own faculties, such as they were, to make our living and pay off our burdens by.'¹⁰ She moved to London and, with three young children to care for, set herself doggedly to her nightly stint, often working until two or three in the morning, and producing sometimes two novels a year. But from this struggle emerged her best work, Chronicles of Carlingford, about which she said in 1894: 'The series is pretty well forgotten now, which made a considerable stir at the time, and almost made me one of the popularities of literature. Almost, never quite, though Salem Chapel went very near it, I believe.'¹¹

At the busiest time in her career, during the early sixties, domestic burdens and sorrows accumulated. Her only daughter, Maggie, caught gastric fever and died in 1864 in Rome. She returned hurriedly to England and by the following year settled in Windsor, for she was determined that both sons should attend Eton. There was a brief period when things went well, but then in 1868 came news of her brother Frank's ruin in Canada. Now there was Frank junior to see through Eton and university. But she kept up a cheerful countenance, living for the day in extravagant style (she was not, she once said, attracted to travel second-class), and made a cosy home where all the boys' friends were welcome. Reading her autobiography, we realise what it cost to maintain both social life and her colossal work schedule. She often pauses wistfully to wonder whether her work might have been better. And, with a strong sense of puritan guilt, whether her sons might have learned habits of work 'which now seem beyond recall' (this is in 1885), had she not so pampered them.¹²

Cyril and Francis (known as 'Cecco'), who was born in that terrible year in Italy in 1859, were, she said, 'my all in this world'.¹³ To provide for them was a central concern of her life and they are a focus of her autobiography and intimately bound up with the major concerns of her fiction—the intricacies of marital adjustments (usually the woman's sacrifices to the Victorian male ego), conflicts between parents and children, the pains of motherhood. Her love for her boys, A. C. Benson believed, 'had something almost morbidly passionate about it'.¹⁴ Even her open-handedness haunted her in respect of their characters. In a pathetic footnote in the autobiography she reproaches herself for hiding her anxieties from them and thereby encouraging their idleness and extravagance. For they proved unalterably feckless. Cyril had little capacity for work and, while his mother moved to Oxford to provide him with the creature comforts to which he was accustomed, frittered away his time. Typically, she blamed herself: 'My dearest, bright, delightful boy missed somehow his footing, how can I tell how? I often think that I had to do with it, as well as what people call inherited tendencies, and, alas! the perversity of youth, which he never outgrew.'¹⁵

At fifty-six, Mrs Oliphant looked back on 'a laborious life, incessant work, incessant anxiety', and, although she insisted it had not been unhappy, there is undoubtedly a sense of servitude in the way she described it. She recalled that when family responsibilities piled up on her, 'I said to myself having then perhaps a little stirring of ambition, that I must make up my mind to think no more of that, and that to bring up the boys for the service of God was better than to write a fine novel, supposing even that it was in me to do so.'¹⁶ Doubtless such thinking coloured her attitude to her contemporaries and to literary values in general. She harps on George Eliot's example with a guilty sense of her own compromises and at the same time a half-envying disdain for her protected life: 'Should I have done better if I had been kept, like her, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?'¹⁷ Beside Eliot and George Sand Mrs Oliphant feels 'a fat, little, commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied . . . there is a sort of whimsical injury in it which makes me sorry for myself.¹⁸ Anne Thackeray, far from finding her tongue-tied, said of her, 'She was one of those people whose presence is even more than a pleasure, it was stimulus; she was kindly, sympathetic, and yet answering with that chord of intelligent antagonism which is so suggestive and makes for such good talk.'¹⁹ A life of suffering etched character into her features. Observing her in the chapel of Eton College in 1874, A. C. Benson noted she had an expression of endurance 'more of repression than of suppression, as if a naturally expansive and genial nature had been thwarted and baffled'.²⁰

In the eighties both sons fell ill; Cyril died in 1890 aged thirty-four, and 'Cecco' four years later. Her nephew had already succumbed in India to typhoid in 1879. 'And now I am alone', she wrote, ending her fragment of autobiography, 'I cannot write any more.' Yet she had to keep on writing, partly out of habit, partly still out of need. Nine days before her death she corrected the first volume of the Blackwood history, and apologised that she could not correct the second: 'I am now lying, all possibility of work over, awaiting a very speedy end', she wrote to William Blackwood. She died on 25 June 1897, the names of her sons, it is said, continually on her lips. Anne Thackeray wrote to Rhoda Broughton, 'I have lost a life-long friend, and the world too, in that wise, tender and humorous woman whom all delighted to love and appreciate. She was to me one of those people who make life—so many unmake it'.²¹

The reason Mrs Oliphant caught and held her public takes us to the very heart of this study, for she is a true representative of mid-Victorian minor fiction, commercial without pandering to the market; professional without being slipshod or cynical; morally straight without being mealy-mounted or censorious; full of feeling without being gushy; stylish without being vulgar or affected. If Trollope is, as Alexander Innes Shand claimed, 'more distinctly the family novelist than anyone who has gone before him', then Mrs Oliphant comes close behind.²² But she is not a lesser Trollope. She has her own voice and writes unique novels. If she represents what Alfred Austin in 1870 labelled the Simple School, she wears her simplicity with a difference. Austin defines the type as

the school whose domain is the hearth, whose machinery the affections,—the school which talks to the heart without quickening its beat, yet not without moistening the eye,—the school to which home is sacred, all bad things are available only as contrasts—this we have always with us.²³

But in Mrs Oliphant it is often a troubled hearth and an unquiet heart. Her novels have far more astringent touches than Mrs Craik's or Anne Thackeray's, for example. Shand in 1879 called her 'the salt of the contemporary generation of novelists', and it is easy to see why.²⁴ Justly admired for her Scottish landscapes, and winning heroines in novels such as Katie Stewart (1853), she returned often to Scottish characters and backgrounds, notably in The Minister's Wife (1869) and Kirsteen (1890). A more important element in her appeal is her commonsense, realistic approach that caught, as the Spectator said of A Rose in June (1874), the beauty in the essentially commonplace. In particular she tapped a vein women could respond to, reversing Jane Austen's equation of salvation with matrimony. Unlike Trollope and other male novelists, she can see that staying single—or being widowed—has distinct advantages. The jolly spinster aunts that crop up in her novels have the best of it after all.

She is questioning women's role and in her own way getting back at sexual inequality, not by showing the sensation novel's drunkards, tyrants and boors (although they are sometimes part of the picture), but by tracing the remorseless sorrows, humiliations, envies about which women were supposed to be silent.²⁵ She was in some respects ahead of her time, showing a disquieting scepticism in both the consolations of faith and domestic felicity. Her menfolk are often ninnies who have given up on life, as in May (1873), or failures in their work, as in At His Gates (1872). Fruits of her own disappointed life can, of course, be discerned in all this. Robert Drummond in the latter novel is an unsuccessful artist (like Frank Oliphant), and the thrust of the novel lies with the wife's combined scorn, sympathy and guilt for not being patient about it. 'When a man must not be disturbed about bills his wife must be', she writes in A Rose in June (1874). Heroines frequently orphaned or prematurely widowed shoulder the burden, and do so with a healthy resentment, groaning at the unfairness of it all—the social system, husbands, brothers and sons who flopped or floundered, and even protesting God's mockery of innocent women, as in Agnes (1866) or Madonna Mary (1867). Mrs Oliphant's resentment plays quietly but no doubt to sympathetic listeners at the time, and the tune is that women's life is hard. Had she had the time, or been free of the need for cash—I do not think she lacked the courage—she had it in her to come close to tragedy like Hardy's.

This is not to deny that she wrote pot-boilers with perfunctory plots and cobbled-up endings; with such an output that is hardly surprising. Nor did she escape the more baneful influences of sensation, often marring a sensible domestic study with the apparatus of ruined heiresses, impossible wills, damning letters, skeletons in cupboards, misappropriated legacies and the like, but her novels often generate genuine feelings and not the cardboard emotions of the sensationists. It was said that there were two Mrs Oliphants: the shrewd painter of domestic realities and the more lurid storyteller who in Carita (1877) has a sophisticated and atheistically inclined lady suffering from cancer so revolted by her condition that she commits suicide with laudanum unwittingly supplied by her ten-year-old daughter. Lurid perhaps, but as a fictional device not entirely without significance from a psychological viewpoint.

Another Mrs Oliphant emerges in a later phase of her career and deserves brief comment. Partly because of her fascination with and proximity to death, and partly in response to a vogue for tales of the occult, Mrs Oliphant produced several striking fantasies, notably The Beleaguered City (1880) and Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen (1885). In the only full-length study of the author in modern times, V. and R. A. Colby claim that the former is one of the minor classics of Victorian literature.

The Carlingford novels, however, represent the peak of her achievement. When the first appeared there was speculation that George Eliot was the anonymous author. Eliot may have flared a nostril at the comparison, but Mr Mudie's patrons perceived similarities, and it is certainly possible that Mrs Oliphant was drawn to her subject by the popularity of Scenes of Clerical Life.²⁶ Mrs Oliphant follows Trollope in creating a rural southern county, probably Berkshire-cum-Hampshire, with a town, not as grand as Barchester (there is no cathedral), and characters who reappear in the series, changing with the interval of years. The town of Carlingford makes its first appearance in 'The Executor', a short story in Blackwood's for May 1861, but the Dissenting community which made the series famous did not appear until the novels: The Rector and The Doctor's Family (3 vols, 1863), Salem Chapel (2 vols, 1863), The Perpetual Curate (3 vols, 1864), Miss Marjoribanks (3 vols, 1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (3 vols, 1876).²⁷ Although geographical locations are obscurer than in Trollope's Barsetshire, it is possible to place the main spheres of action: the Dissenting chapel on the edge of town, the Anglican chapel of St Roque just half a mile from Carlingford, the parish church and, nearby, the best residential quarter. There is a canal, a railway, and a new suburb representing social changes the establishment resents and within which the young clergy and doctors carry out their progressive ideas. Whereas Barchester, however, is endangered by modernism, Carlingford is still a rural backwater: 'There are no alien activities to disturb the place—no manufactures, and not much trade'.²⁸

The thirty-four pages of The Rector make an admirable introduction to the series, its plot involving a clash between the Revd Frank Wentworth, curate in charge of St Roque's, and the new Rector of Carlingford, Morley Proctor. Mrs Oliphant establishes convincingly the predicament of the withdrawn, studious Proctor forced to compete with the sociable . Wentworth, who has the goodwill of the community to sustain him as well as natural endowments as a clergyman, and when Proctor is called in off the street to minister to a dying woman and finds himself unable to make any effective speeches either to bring her peace of mind or to prepare her for the end he feels he has forfeited the right to remain in Carlingford. He resigns his pulpit and scuttles back to Oxford, a defeated man, but one who is beginning to confront his spiritual and temperamental inadequacies. Proctor's academic life can no longer shield him, and he must endure the guilt of knowing that something was demanded of him that he failed to give. The story ends with the assumption that eventually he did take on another parish, having married the elder Miss Wodehouse, and found his way out of a sterile existence.

Such a synopsis might suggest merely another dreary exercise in improving fiction, but The Rector is no tract in the Martineau tradition, and its merit arises from the malice and pettiness glimpsed within the individual and the family. The Rector's shyness, long a source of amusement to his aged mother, complicates his wooing. With awful skittishness Mrs Proctor teases him about bringing home a bride, and her supposition that it is the older, plainer daughter, Mary Wodehouse, rather than her sister, Lucy—'twenty, pretty, blue-eyed, and full of dimples'—adds to his discomfiture:

When Mr Proctor saw his mother again at dinner, she was evidently full of some subject which would not bear talking of before the servants. The old lady looked at her son's troubled apprehensive face with smiles and nods and gay hints, which he was much too preoccupied to understand, and which only increased his bewilderment. When the good man was left alone over his glass of wine, he drank it slowly, in funereal silence, with profoundly serious looks; and what between eagerness to understand what the old lady meant, and reluctance to show the extent of his curiosity, had a very heavy half-hour of it in that grave solitary dining-room. He roused himself with an effort from this dismal state into which he was falling. He recalled with a sigh the classic board of All-Souls. Woe for the day when he was seduced to forsake that dear retirement! (ch.2)

This admirable prose reads well aloud and the cadence of the sentences and good plain diction are well directed to show Proctor's prim nature, afraid of commitment either as priest or lover. The images are not striking—bordering on cliché even—but, as with Trollope, a second reading fires the imagination: phrases such as 'funereal silence' and 'grave solitary dining-room' have a special resonance and irony in a story which is about a man being brought back to life, and there is a nice contrast between his aggravated melancholy, expressed in that splendidly rhetorical 'Woe for the day . . .', and her 'smiles and nods and gay hints'.

The art of the domestic realist is to infuse plain, ordinary, commonplace routine with dramatic intensity; as Trollope was always saying, the cardinal sin was to bore the reader. Mrs Oliphant is adept at creating conflict within the domestic circle. Here, the mutual tension is low-key and comic, but it is tension none the less. Mrs Proctor uses her deafness as a weapon, forcing her son to shout his confidences into her ear, so that the servants will overhear. 'His dismay and perplexity amused this wicked old woman beyond measure' (ch.2). But she loves him dearly, that is plain, and the bond between them is always clear to the reader without sentimentality.

Enmity between parents and children and sibling rivalry are frequently subjects of Mrs Oliphant's fiction. There is no malice in Mrs Proctor, but one feels there is more to Mr Wodehouse's baiting of his two girls than meets the eye. Indeed his humiliation of his elder daughter touches a darker vein of parental psychology than one might expect for so tranquil a story. He is slightly caricatured in a Dickensian manner: 'Mr Wodehouse was a man who creaked universally'; 'As he came along the garden path, the gravel started all round his unmusical foot' (ch.l), but Mrs Oliphant weaves insensitivity and coarseness into the character with more subtlety than is apparent from this metaphoric insistence. His teasing is totally different in quality from Mrs Proctor's; he seems resentful of his daughter's dependence, and is rude about Mr Wentworth behind his back. In The Doctor's Family he is still more cynical. Mr Wodehouse has some of the unpleasant underside Jane Austen gives several of her elderly male characters.

The charm of this prelude to the Chronicles rests on the contrast pointed out between the tranquillity of the rural scene and sleepy old town with its dusty roads, walled gardens and apple blossoms and the agitated hearts and minds of its inhabitants old and young. Its skill lies in the way Mrs Oliphant evokes comedy from the plight of her central character with his 'walled up' spirit. He is a ludicrously ancient young man, as his mother recognises, she being 'let us say, a hundred years or so younger than the Rector' (ch.2). The improvement in his temper and spirits at the end of the story has a beneficent effect on the town itself, for in The Doctor's Family we learn that Miss Lucy Wodehouse has learned from the former Rector's example and begun to exert herself with parish visiting.

The Doctor's Family is a longer but slighter tale with a conventional love plot. Edward Rider is a young doctor who has set up in practice in the unfashionable quarter of Carlingford—'a region of half-built streets, vulgar new roads, and heaps of desolate brick and mortar' (ch. l8). Secretly he is caring for his wastrel brother, Fred, who has returned from Australia and sits in an upper room all day, smoking coarse tobacco and reading even coarser novels from the circulating library. Fred's wife, Susan, then appears, together with several infants, and her sister, Nettie Underwood, 'all action and haste' and 'not only slender, but thin, dark, eager, impetuous, with blazing black eyes and red lips' (ch.2). Nettie is one of those masterful young heroines Mrs Oliphant draws better than anyone since Jane Austen, and naturally she and Edward are destined for one another, after some stock misapprehensions.

Given the rather improbable extent of Nettie's self-imposed martyrdom (she is, at the crisis of the story, prepared to accompany her sister Susan and the children back to Australia) and the even more unlikely deus ex machina of an Australian who appears with a proposal of marriage to Susan, now widowed (Fred having fallen into the river while drunk), the story moves briskly and turns out to be fairly entertaining. Indeed its farcical elements are perhaps the most engaging, especially when amidst shouting and disturbance Edward arrives as Nettie is packing and preparing to leave England for ever. A reckless ride through the respectable streets of Carlingford in pursuit of Nettie makes plain all misunderstandings and offers the prospect of lifelong felicity, though as Miss Lucy Wodehouse perceives it would have been a neater ending if Dr Rider could instead have fallen in love with Miss Marjoribanks, daughter of the town's leading practitioner:

If Miss Marjoribanks had only been Nettie, or Nettie Miss Marjoribanks! If not only love and happiness, but the old doctor's practice and savings, could but have been brought to heap up the measure of the young doctor's good fortune! What a pity that one cannot have everything! (ch. l8)

With such gentle Trollopian irony does the story exert its charm, although its chief interest is undoubtedly the character of Nettie Underwood. One can even believe, because of her impetuousness, that she will go to Australia, but what is more interesting is the degree to which Mrs Oliphant undercuts Nettie's self-imposed duty, her determination to provide for her sister and family, by showing just how much it cloaks managerial pride, and how much it is her defence against becoming dependent. In Nettie we have an inspiration which flowered in a splendid portrayal in Miss Marjoribanks.

The appearance of Salem Chapel in 1863²⁹ was greeted with justifiable enthusiasm. The narrative is brisk and assured, moving immediately into a rapid tour of a more geographically certain Carlingford than we have seen before, and a subject is announced without loss of time: the gulf between Carlingford society and its Dissenting community. This is a novel about English social snobbery as a Scotswoman can enjoy it. The centre of action, Salem Chapel, is at the west end of Grove Street, where the houses are 'little detached boxes, each two storeys high, each fronted by a little flower-plot—clean, respectable, meagre, little habitations' (ch. l). Greengrocers, dealers in cheese and bacon, milkmen, teachers of day schools, form the élite of this cheerful congregation. The cream of society, on the other hand, is centred on the parish church and the chapel of St Roque's, and the big houses of Grange Lane, where the Wodehouses and the Marjoribanks live.

The new minister of Salem Chapel, Arthur Vincent, fresh from Homerton, and aflame with both social and professional ambitions, quickly feels the limitations of his flock and begins to hanker after Grange Lane. Almost as particular about the cut of his coat as Mr Wentworth, the perpetual curate of St Roque's, 'he came to Carlingford with elevated expectations' and was rapidly enamoured of the young dowager, Lady Western. But Vincent, not being a Christ Church man, or even a fellow of Trinity, feels at a disadvantage. He gazes on the curate with some wistfulness. 'A poor widow's son, educated at Homerton, and an English squire's son, public school, and university bred, cannot begin on the same level' (ch.2). Mrs Oliphant thus poses her hero in a beautifully ambiguous position; even his lodgings are at what the Grange Lane people call the other end of George Street (ch. l). Brought up in 'painful gentility' by his mother, Vincent is between two worlds, and the early chapters make a good deal of comic mileage out of Vincent's mistaken notions of himself and those around him, from the time his ego is punctured by the well-meant gift of a left-over jelly from Mrs Tozer's welcoming-party to his mortification at being tongue-tied at Lady Western's breakfast. Bitterly resentful at being adopted by the Tozers and their daughter Phoebe, who is 'pink all over', and recoiling from the smugness of Salem, Vincent antagonises his flock.

The chapel people are as realistic as though Mrs Oliphant had lived among them all her life, especially old Mr Tufton, his crippled daughter, the admirable Mr Tozer, the butterman, and his buxom daughter, Phoebe. Indeed, much of the zest of the novel comes from scenes involving these good folk and their surroundings. The tea meeting (ch. 10), is full of fascinating detail, the blazing gas of the schoolroom, the decorations, the tables 'groaning with dark-complexioned plumcake and heavy buns', the urns, the ladies' bonnets, the fulsome speeches, and 'the triumphant face of Tozer at the end of the room, jammed against the wall, drinking tea out of an empty sugar-basin'—another jar to the sensibilities of the young Nonconformist.

Besides satirising the English preoccupation with class, birth and social mobility, Salem Chapel is also a growing-up story, explaining the constricting pressures of the social group against which the individual must struggle. Arthur Vincent, though naïve and self-satisfied, has many admirable qualities and gradually grows in maturity and self-confidence. This progress is underlined by the role of the butterman, Tozer, who sees himself as the minister's mentor and tries to manage his protégé's career. Vincent begins by hating his domination, but a bond grows between them as Tozer reveals a simple good nature that earns the minister's respect. Tozer is that rarity in a mid-Victorian novel, a tradesman drawn convincingly and without caricature. As principal deacon he obtrudes his opinions about the good of the chapel and meddles with Vincent's private life, but when troubles gather he grows stronger in his loyalty to the young minister, though Mrs Oliphant is careful not to lose sight of that proprietorial smugness in his attitude. 'I'll stand by you, sir, for one whatever happens', he declares when Vincent's fortunes are at their blackest, his face 'radiant with conscious bounty and patronage' (ch.25). But his counsel is sound, and when scandal breaks his advice is go into the pulpit as usual and face the flock; 'It's next Sunday is all the battle' (ch.27), and he grows in the reader's estimation. When Vincent most needs help he makes an oration worthy of Mark Antony to prevent the flock from repudiating its pastor.

The course of the solemn tribunal covers two splendid chapters of mingled pathos and comedy. Vincent's mother, disguised in her black shawl at the back of the Salem schoolroom, is the anguished witness, as Pigeon, the poulterer, declares that Vincent must go. Old Mr Tufton, the former minister, well-meaning but over-apologetic, only makes matters worse. Then Tozer rises and with his vigorous, ungrammatical, plain speaking both extols the minister's example and annihilates his enemies for their vindictiveness. His speech, some four pages long, is masterly characterisation, but it also expresses issues implicit in the whole novel: the tendency of the Dissenting community—of any social grouping—to cabal and conspire against its leader, and out of personal ambition to produce anarchy. Just as Tozer in his clumsy way had tried to show Vincent that he must conciliate his congregation without sacrificing his principles, he now makes a case against the tyranny exercised by the Salem people and calls for tolerance and understanding. When Vincent declares his intention of resigning, Tozer again enlists the reader's sympathy, groaning in his sleep with anxiety at the new cloud over Salem and poignantly expressing his vision of the ideal (far from Vincent's own imagining) of a friendly tea—'pleasant looks and the urns a-smoking, and a bit of green on the wall . . . a bit of an anecdote, or poetry about friends as is better friends after they've spoke their minds and had it out' (ch.40).

But the maturing of Vincent cannot reside in the kind of comfortable reconciliation that would have been accepted by his predecessor, Tufton. In a passage of Lawrencean rhetoric, Mrs Oliphant has her hero take his wounded sensibility into the countryside around Carlingford: 'Here were the hedgerows stirring, the secret grain beginning to throb conscious in the old furrows' (ch.40) and Vincent decides what to do. Once more he faces the flock in the decorated schoolroom, under the text 'Love one another' amid cheers and applause, but, 'angry, displeased, humbled in his own estimation', he discourses quietly until 'the very gaslights seem to darken in the air in the silence', and with new-found spiritual authority he leaves Salem.

Salem Chapel also contains crudely sensational plot elements, however, involving a mystery surrounding Mrs Hilyard, whose husband has for many years kept her from her own child, and for good measure almost seduces Vincent's sister, Susan. The ramifications, involving abduction, attempted murder, and ear-splittingly falsetto dialogue—'"She-wolf!" cried the man, grinding his teeth' (ch.9)—sit very uneasily with the dominant domestic realism, although the sensationalism can be defended in one important respect: it throws ironical light on the theme of irrationality in human affairs. People are subject to dark forces from within. Vincent's well-ordered life is suddenly overthrown by his infatuation with Lady Western; he is 'rapt out of himself (ch.7). His sister's near ruin and madness, and the passionate hatred of Mrs Hilyard for her husband, are, like the violence and mystery, manifestations of the irregularity that threatens Salem, and they force Vincent into knowledge of the real evil and pain in the world that it is his business as minister to attend to. His journey to Northumberland illustrates well the relation between theme and sensational plot. The search for 'the lost creature', his sister, has the usual melodramatic ingredients, but the narrative makes thematic sense: the church bell's jangling reinforces the idea of the chaos into which Vincent has fallen—'life all disordered'—and as a minister of religion he is painfully conscious of his imperilled position among the flock (whom he has temporarily abandoned) and of his responsibilities:

As they drove along the bleak moorland road, an early church-bell tingled into the silence, and struck, with horrible iron echoes, upon the heart of the minister of Salem. Sunday morning! Life all disordered, incoherent, desperate—all its usages set at nought and duties left behind. Nothing could have added the final touch of derangement and desperation like the sound of that bell. . . . (ch.20)

Mrs Oliphant also shows herself adept at the kind of mounting suspense that Wilkie Collins or Miss Braddon could create. At one point Vincent is idly gazing at a train just beginning to move out of the station:

Now the tedious line glides into gradual motion. Good Heaven! what was that? the flash of a match, a sudden gleam upon vacant cushions, the profile of a face, high-featured, with the thin light locks and shadowy moustache he knew so well, standing out for a moment in aquiline distinctness against the moving space.

It is the man he is pursuing, and as the train gathers speed Vincent struggles to open a door, until several porters seize him. Passengers stare out of windows, and in one of the end compartments he sees another familiar face, that of Mrs Hilyard, 'who looked out with no surprise, but with a horrible composure in her white face, and recognized him with a look which chilled to stone'. Over-emphatic, perhaps, but full of imaginative detail and the sudden impact one associates with a Hitchcock film.

The physical reality of a community and its environment is brought to life by a host of homely touches: Tufton's neat little house with its cabbages and huge geraniums, the green door leading to the Wodehouse villa, the cheering fire in a station waiting-room. Physical actions are highly suggestive: Mrs Vincent attending to the lamps and taking comfort from this routine activity; Tozer's hand over his empty cup and saucer eloquently conveying displeasure. Domestic details are equally exact. With Mrs Oliphant we know there is even 'Wooster sauce' on the dinner table and that beds must be well aired in January. Atmosphere is her strong card: you can smell the ham and cheeses in Tozer's shop; and, even where sensational effects are uppermost, they are often underpinned and given credibility by atmospheric touches, as when Mrs Hilyard takes her long lonely walk in the dark, rainy street.

Salem Chapel is the livelier novel, but The Perpetual Curate the more ambitious development of Mrs Oliphant's intentions with the series.³⁰ This was the novel for which John Blackwood risked £1500 to his associate's wonderment, and cheered by his encouragement Mrs Oliphant declared, 'The Perpetual Curate is the sharer of my inmost thoughts'. The hero, she said, 'is a favourite of mine, and I mean to bestow the very greatest care upon him'.³¹

Care was also given to plotting a more complex work, even though the spontaneous way she wrote was not conducive to adequate anticipation of climaxes. In chapter 37 she declares her anxiety about which of her many threads of narrative shall be taken up first, and a joke about events ending for the hero 'like a trashy novel' (ch. 48) perhaps betrays a certain unease about not having quite brought it off. It was apparent in her correspondence with Blackwood that the original intention was 'a little exhibition of all the three parties in the Church',³² to be achieved by making her hero, Frank Wentworth, a Puseyite confronting the newly installed, rather old-fashioned 'high and dry' Rector, William Morgan. At the same time, Frank is badgered by his Low Church aunt, Leonora, who has the power of securing a living for him in Skelmersdale, and engaged in an unsuccessful struggle to prevent his brother going over to Rome.

The Perpetual Curate has much to recommend it. The larger framework enables Mrs Oliphant to have her fling at several touchy subjects: doctrinal squabbles of High, Low and Roman Church, particularly the still fascinating topic of Catholic conversion, rivalries of parents and children, prickly marital relationships, class antagonism, and that abiding Victorian preoccupation with good name. What gives it unity is the way the author shows a well-governed world turned upside down, and normally sensible, respectable and sober members of the community squabbling like pettish children. '. . . this strange, wayward, fantastical humanity which is never to be calculated upon' (ch. 24)—the phrase takes on a special resonance as the epicentre of the novel. The opening prepares us for trouble by insisting that Carlingford is a place where nothing happens. 'It is the boast of the place that it has no particular interest' (ch. l). The rule of the clergy is emphasised:

But in every community some centre of life is necessary. This point, round which everything circles, is, in Carlingford, found in the clergy. They are the administrators of the commonwealth, the only people who have defined and compulsory duties to give a sharp outline to life.

It is the book's business to show how this order is turned upside down and how the state totters.

At first reading the novel invites comparison with one of the Barsetshire series, not least in its title, which adopts the conveniently independent though ambiguous post Trollope chose in Framley Parsonage (1861) for Mr Crawley, perpetual curate of Hogglestock. That element of independence is vital for Mrs Oliphant's hero, who is also of higher social standing than the new Rector, his father being the squire of another parish. So long as Frank stays within his own segment of the parish at St Roque's Chapel he is unassailable, but he has carried his muscular Christianity to the new housing-estate and the canal, forming an impromptu chapel among the brickmakers and bargemen. Pride, breeding, youth and a certain resentment at a newcomer's authority spark off an immediate clash, when Frank deliberately insults Mr Morgan by mocking the hideous architecture of the parish church, which the Rector is planning to improve. Thus a very Trollopian conflict of opposites is initiated: old ways and new, the invasion of territory, clashes of temperament and ideology, all promising a good fight. Moreover, there is enough ambiguity in both characters for the reader to sympathise at points with each. What loads public opinion against Frank is that he is suspected of having toyed with a young girl's feelings, a moral delinquency similar to that of Mr Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset (published three years after Mrs Oliphant's novel), who is suspected of misdemeanour over a cheque. In both unlikely circumstances some kind of public tribunal is involved, and it is an unfortunate sensational element in The Perpetual Curate that Wentworth could actually be suspected of abduction and end up before a kangaroo court of local worthies.

That dimension of clergymen in their ministry which Trollope studiously avoids is never shirked by Mrs Oliphant. Frank Wentworth gains in depth by being shown about his active ministry; he visits the sick, baptises (a flagrant invasion of his rector's parish, which adds fuel to the row), organises a Sisterhood and a Provident Society, and hears confession too. Mrs Oliphant shows him not only preparing his sermon, but also delivering it—at the Wharfside service, for example, when his text has more fervour and effectiveness than his preaching at St Roque's. Much later in the novel, when his personal troubles are at their worst, he visits the dying Mr Wodehouse and is seen to be increasing in spiritual maturity:

Mr Wentworth came into the silent chamber with all his anxieties throbbing in his heart, bringing life at its very height of agitation and tumult into the presence of death. He went forward to the bed, and tried for an instant to call up any spark of intelligence that might yet exist within the mind of the dying man; but Mr Wodehouse was beyond the voice of any priest. The Curate said the prayers for the dying at the bedside, suddenly filled with a great pity for the man who was thus taking leave unawares of all this mournful splendid world, (ch.27)

The mixture of emotions, the recognition of human responses getting in the way of priestly ones, the gulf between the vital young man and the dying old one, and the juxtaposition of 'mournful splendid' in that last sentence convey forcefully the ambiguity of human experience.

The characterisation of the little Welsh Rector, Mr Morgan, is equally substantial. His fundamental pleasantness, resentment at having a subordinate flout his authority, uncomfortable feelings of social inferiority, and most of all his rancour towards a young, attractive man, arising from sexual envy, are all well rendered. That the quarrel has its roots in psychological causes is understated and adds to the subtlety of characterisation, for the Rector's wife from the start shows sympathy for the curate and impatience with her husband's point of view. Indeed, the Morgans' marriage is the major achievement of the novel.³³ Some perceptive and touching comment is made upon deferred 'prudent' marriages practised among the clergy.³⁴ Mrs Morgan reflects drily at one point, 'how much better one knows a man after being married to him three months than after being engaged to him for ten years' (ch.5); and looking at her—'She was a good woman, but she was not fair to look upon' (ch.20)—Frank wonders what Lucy would be like if she had to wait ten years for him. The whole problem of lost years and disenchantment is beautifully rendered in chapter 28, demonstrating what insight and restraint Mrs Oliphant was capable of at her best. The scene begins with some mild skirmishes over trivia. Mrs Oliphant, true to most domestic imbroglios, notches up a list of petty irritations between both husband and wife: the Rector is late for dinner; Mrs Morgan has already changed her dress; anxious about the fish, she wonders how cook will get her own back next morning if the food is spoiled. It is a very hot day, and Mr Morgan is somewhat put about by his wife's tranquil coolness in her muslin dress. All this is a prelude to a tantalising verbal game in which the Rector, dying to impart the latest gossip concerning his curate, is held back by a mixture of propriety and pique at his wife's command of the situation. Even the sight of his favourite All-Souls pudding fails to unlock the tongue of this righteous man, while the peaches—a special care of Mrs Morgan's—are entirely overlooked in the Rector's agitation.

She put away her peach in her resentment, and went to a side-table for her work, which she always kept handy for emergencies. Like her husband, Mrs Morgan had acquired some little 'ways' in the long ten years of their engagement, one of which was a confirmed habit of needle-work at all kinds of unnecessary moments, which much disturbed the Rector when he had anything particular to say.

Unwisely, Mr Morgan decides it is time to administer a gentle reproof about patience: "'I am not patient," said the Rector's wife: "it never was my nature. I can't help thinking sometimes that our long experiences have done us more harm than good". . . .'

Next, arrival of the unpleasant curate, Leeson, drives Mrs Morgan out on a charitable errand. Her thoughts as she walks down Grove Street continually return to the old sadness:

She never could help imagining what she might have been had she married ten years before at the natural period. 'And even then not a girl', she said to herself in her sensible way, as she carried this habitual thread of thought with her along the street, past the little front gardens, where there were so many mothers with their children. On the other side of the way the genteel houses frowned darkly with their staircase windows upon the humility of Grove Street; and Mrs Morgan began to think within herself of the Misses Hemmings and other spinsters, and how they got along upon this path of life, which, after all, is never very lightsome to behold, except in the future or the past. It was dead present with the Rector's wife just then, and many speculations were in her mind, as was natural. 'Not that I could not have lived unmarried', she continued within herself, with a woman's pride; 'but things looked so different at five-and-twenty!' and in her heart she grudged the cares she had lost, and sighed over this wasting of her years.

Whenever she wrote a particular fine passage like this one, Mrs Oliphant would laughingly describe it as 'having a trot'. Here, the self-admonitory 'even then not a girl', the understated yearning for children, the oblique references to a sense of social inadequacy among the parishioners, and then the spurt of pride at the end cloaking a momentary regret for the single life, create a vivid, many-layered, sympathetic character. Soon after this Mrs Morgan meets Frank Wentworth, and her clumsy expression of sympathy, meeting with a rebuff, provokes a retort that tells the reader more about her unfulfilled longings:

'I don't think you would risk your prospects, and get yourself into trouble, and damage your entire life, for the sake of any girl, however pretty she might be. Men don't do such things for women nowadays, even when it is a worthy object', said the disappointed optimist.

Friendship or enmity hangs by a hair in this brief encounter.

The same tension now spills over into the Morgans' marriage, as Mrs Morgan is ashamed and angry at her husband's animosity towards his curate; he is lessened in her eyes, and it pains her deeply. The reconciliation is therefore especially touching. Mrs Oliphant, you might say, pulls off a corny trick with style. After the tribunal at which Frank Wentworth has been exonerated, Mr Morgan returns sheepishly to his wife, consumed with guilt and shame, and tells her it is time to leave Carlingford and start afresh in another living. Retiring behind her darning, Mrs Morgan senses their failure with mortification. Then he reveals that his departure will leave the Carlingford place open for Wentworth, and at once she melts, drops the stocking she was mending and begs forgiveness for her crossness: 'The excellent man was as entirely unconscious that he was being put up again at that moment with acclamations upon his pedestal, as that he had at a former time been violently displaced from it, and thrown into the category of broken idols' (ch. 45). While satisfying the romantic demands of the Mudie reader, Mrs Oliphant does not sacrifice her ironical tone; Mrs Morgan falls back into the adoring posture, flattering her husband's vanity, and he kisses her, smooths her brown hair 'with a touch which made her feel like a girl again' and goes contentedly downstairs:

Had Mr Morgan been a Frenchman, he probably would have imagined his wife's heart to be touched by the graces of the Perpetual Curate; but, being an Englishman, and rather more certain, on the whole, of her than of himself, it did not occur to him to speculate on the subject. He was quite able to content himself with the thought that women are incomprehensible, as he went back to his study.

The gulf between male and female points of view remains, and so does Mrs Morgan's wistful longing for romance.

Both Salem Chapel and The Perpetual Curate add sensational elements to what are realistic domestic studies; Miss Marjoribanks on the other hand is wholly in the tradition of Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell,³⁵ the story nothing more extraordinary than Lucilla Marjoribanks's 'grand design of turning the chaotic elements of society into one grand unity' (ch. 18), which also turns out to be her quest for a husband. It is, then, both romantic fairytale and comedy of manners, the most sophisticated and charming of the series, and a novel that can stand comparison with the best contemporary novels of its kind.

Gentility, breeding, and 'the painful pride of poverty' (ch. 10) are its serious topics, and upon these matters Mrs Oliphant descants with an ironic gravity worthy of comparison with Jane Austen's. The novel moves briskly, but dramatic action centres around the commotion over who will become the next member of parliament and the death of Dr Marjoribanks, events which can be accepted as part of the everyday life of Carlingford. In fact the novel sets out deliberately to mock the breathless style of the sensationists: 'the danger came sudden, appalling, and unlooked for' (ch. 14), but it is only the possibility that Mr Cavendish flirting with Barbara Lake will complicate Lucilla's plans for reforming Carlingford. And, when a more serious crisis looms, 'It was not a narrative of robbery or murder, or anything very alarming' (ch. 18), but Archdeacon Beverley recognising Cavendish, one of the pillars of Lucilla's drawing-room, as the son of a trainer or 'something about Newmarket', and the possibility that he will reveal it. At one point Cavendish's sister, Mrs Woodburn, a long-time resident of Carlingford, catching his panic at social ruin, dreads that 'there might be, for anything she could tell, a little bottle of prussic acid in his waistcoat pocket' (ch. 30). Thus the apparatus of sensation fiction is exploited for social comedy.

Lucilla is an outsize character, 'large in all particulars', with tawny hair 'curly to exasperation' (ch. 1). In other words, she is fat and has unmanageable hair—an unusual heroine for a romantic novel. She has, however, energy and generous spirit, and has sought to compensate for her physical disadvantages by developing her intellect. One psychological insight both humorously and sympathetically conveyed is that Lucilla's self-consciousness prevents real understanding of others' needs; it is sensitivity gone inwards, with results akin to selfishness. At fifteen, she returns home after her mother's death:

In the course of her rapid journey she had already settled upon everything that had to be done; or rather, to speak more truly, had rehearsed everything, according to the habit already acquired by a quick mind, a good deal occupied with itself. First, she meant to fall into her father's arms—forgetting with that singular facility for overlooking the peculiarities of others which belongs to such a character, that Dr Marjoribanks was very little given to embracing, and that a hasty kiss on her forehead was the warmest caress he had ever given his daughter—and then to rush up to the chamber of death and weep over dear mamma. (ch. 1)

Lucilla's sorrow is genuine, but it cannot subdue her sense of the dramatic. Later in the story a character says that she is an actress, and so she is, but at the same time she is never merely playing a part. She is utterly sincere and that is the danger. She is devoted to a heroic image of herself that makes her a mixture of bullying sweetness, queenly modesty and selfish benevolence. 'I will give up everything in the world to be a comfort to you!' she vows to her father, at which Dr Marjoribanks recoils, seeing in her the qualities of his late wife 'which had wearied his life out' (ch. 1). From finishing-school some four years later Lucilla returns, determined to show her devotion by making Grange Lane the focus of Carlingford society. Her first triumph is winning over the cook and taking her father's place at the head of the table: 'the reins of state had been smilingly withdrawn from his unconscious hands', while the drawing-room which is to be the 'inner court and centre of her kingdom' is transformed, according to her taste, from a 'waste and howling wilderness' (ch. 4).

Thus, in the first half-dozen chapters intriguing conflict extends from home into social sphere as Lucinda pursues her masterplan to rescue Carlingford from its social torpor. Lucinda combines Dorothea Brooke's idealism with Emma's egotism and there are reminders of Jane Austen in her 'well-regulated mind' (ch. 14) and that 'sublime confidence in herself which is the first necessity to a woman with a mission' (ch. 5).

Aphoristic sharpness enlivens the novel throughout. Carlingford's is 'the old fashioned orthodox way of having a great respect for religion, and as little to do with it as possible' (ch. 17). Lucilla herself keeps up 'civilities with heaven' (ch. 2) and observes of the clergy, 'A nice clergyman is almost as useful to the lady of the house as a man who can flirt' (ch. 15). Everything is for the best she reasons 'with that beautiful confidence which is common to people who have things their own way' (ch. 9). 'Lucilla had all that regard for constituted rights which is so necessary to a revolutionary of the highest class' (ch. 10). Much use is made of antithesis and hyperbole, particularly as regards Lucilla's character and attitudes. She is a 'distinguished revolutionary' (ch. 3), a 'gentle martyr' (ch. 16); she shows 'artless gratitude' (ch. 13), and possesses 'that serene self-consciousness which places the spirit above the passing vexations of the world' (ch. 23). Hyperbole is applied to Dr Marjoribanks, with his great watch 'by which all the pulses of Grange Lane considered it their duty to keep time'. The novel sparkles more than others in the Carlingford series by virtue of such linguistic exuberance.

Lucilla's mission is matrimony, although she may not realise it, and that she misses the suitor right under her nose, her cousin Tom Marjoribanks, and thereafter attracts a succession of men—all of whom she high-mindedly rejects in noble self-sacrifice both to her father and to society—becomes the essential comic point of the novel. Lucilla's belief in her altruism remains unshaken in the weeks that follow the successful receptions in her newly decorated drawing-room and her confidence grows; even religion sanctifies her mission to be a comfort to her papa. She is 'superior to earthly delight' (ch. 12), and when people fail to appreciate her sacrifices she can sigh and stand bravely to her post: 'a great soul, whose motives must always remain to some extent unappreciated' (ch. 9). Providence is definitely on her side. By such rhetoric Mrs Oliphant makes Lucilla outsize, outrageous, yet thoroughly real and lovable. For, like all good comic creations, Lucilla has the trick of remaking the world to her own specifications; against all evidence of her bulldozing, she sees herself as modest, gentle, tactful, 'fluttering her maiden plumes' (ch. 13), full of 'maiden candour and unsuspecting innocence' (ch. 27), always 'in harmony with herself (ch. 28).

Even as she stands by her resolution to put off marriage for ten years, by which time she says ruefully she will be 'going off, she has moments speculating about a succession of suitors. She is a Rosalind, enjoying her freedom for the present, but looking toward matrimony. This romantic quality of the novel is seen most obviously in chapter 16, in which the motif of the garden party is that of fairyland: the night air, moonlight, twin nightingales, all indicate that, although she is no Titania, Lucilla is a creator of magic. She behaves with the serenity that makes her superior to all vexations of this world, greeting her subjects with 'sweet humility'. The garden scene is a delicately painted idyll which ironically deploys Lucilla's coronation and the now acknowledged truth that her drawing-room is 'the seventh heaven of terrestrial harmony'.

Lucilla's pursuit of power makes Miss Marjoribanks a feminist novel as well as popular romance, and it is interesting to speculate how many girls relished its subversive delights. Lucilla yearns for the kind of power men have and, indeed, often exercises it. She overrules her father, she bosses Tom Marjoribanks, she scorns Mr Cavendish, and even General Travers on one occasion is cut down to his proper level. She runs rings around men, two at a time if necessary, as she proves when the rival parliamentary candidates confront each other in her drawing-room, and she is patently more capable, efficient and resourceful than anyone around her. Calling on Mr Lake the drawing-master, she knows she could give him his tea as he liked it:

And when the tea came it was all she could do to keep herself quiet, and remember that she was a visitor, and not take it out of the incapable hands of Barbara, who never gave her father the right amount of sugar in his tea. . . . She sat with her very fingers itching to cut the bread and butter for him, and give him a cup of tea as he liked it. . . . (ch. 28)

But it is not solely a matter of the domestic capabilities of women Mrs Oliphant is extolling. A serious point is being made here about the waste of womanly potential:

Miss Marjoribanks had her own ideas in respect to charity, and never went upon ladies' committees, nor took any further share than what was proper and necessary in parish work; and when a woman has an active mind, and still does not care for parish work, it is a little hard for her to find a 'sphere'. And Lucilla, though she said nothing about a sphere, was still more or less in that condition of mind which has been so often and so fully described to the British public—when the ripe female intelligence, not having the natural resource of a nursery and a husband to manage, turns inwards, and begins to 'make a protest' against the existing order of society, and to call the world to account for giving it no due occupation—and to consume itself. (ch. 42)

Lucilla therefore goes into politics, in the only way a woman can, by making campaign favours and electioneering for Mr Ashburton. Complementing this quiet comment on the subordinate role enforced upon women, is sympathy for the difficulties of running a household. As Mrs Centum puts it,

'. . . men are so unreasonable. I should like to know what they would do if they had what we have to go through: to look after all the servants—and they are always out of their senses at Christmas—and to see that the children don't have too much pudding, and to support all the noise. The holidays are the hardest work a poor woman can have', she concluded, with a sigh. . . . (ch. 10)

There is much understanding of the stresses and strains too for Mrs Woodburn, who had 'two men to carry on her shoulders' (ch. 39).

In the latter part of the novel Mrs Oliphant boldly leaps ten years. Lucilla is twenty-nine and a new crusade to get Ashburton elevated MP for Carlingford gives her abundant energy a fresh outlet, but there is a suggestion of greater maturity and yearning for happiness. The narrative has added pathos; life has gone on, people have aged. This is beautifully captured in the Chileys, on whom Lucilla calls seeking support for her candidate. Colonel Chiley expresses his impatience with the rival, Cavendish, by poking the fire vigorously, a habit that over the years has irritated, now frightens, his wife:

She gave a little start among her cushions, and stopped down to look over the floor. 'He will never learn that he is old', she said in Lucilla's ear, who instantly came to her side to see what she wanted; and thus the two old people kept watch upon each other, and noted, with a curious mixture of vexation and sympathy, each other's declining strength. (ch.39)

Change is conveyed also by the town itself, in the new people and the expanding housing-estate. The novel takes on an evening air, rather like that of the closing stages of As You Like It or The Tempest. This is particularly noticeable when Dr Marjoribanks pats Lucilla's shoulder as he says goodnight—a rare physical gesture which causes her to look at him almost in alarm. The narrative is muted:

Meantime the snow fell heavily outside, and wrapped everything in a soft and secret whiteness. And amid the whiteness and darkness, the lamp burned steadily outside at the garden-gate, which pointed out the Doctor's door amid all the closed houses and dark garden-walls in Grange Lane—a kind of visible succour and help always at hand for those who were suffering. (ch.42)

Despite this atmospheric anticipation, the news of the doctor's death next morning is shocking to the reader as well as to old Mrs Chiley, sobbing in her bed it was all a mistake, that it was she who ought to have died.

In the third volume, the discovery that Lucilla is not an heiress but must face a life of 'genteel economy' (ch.44) gives impetus to the plot, and the climax has appropriately romantic hyperbole as Lucilla faces the expected proposal from Ashburton and wonders about her absent cousin Tom: the 'very soul of good sense all her days, but now her ruling quality seemed to forsake her' (ch.49). Just as Ashburton starts his speech there is the sound of a coach rattling down the street, a door flung open, the crash of a china bowl, and Tom bursts into the house. The fairytale ending is assured: 'Fate and honest love had been waiting all the time till their moment came; and now it was not even necessary to say anything about it. The fact was so clear that it did not require stating. It was to be Tom after all' (ch.50).

The final touch is appropriate to Lucilla's character: having persuaded Tom to buy an estate near Carlingford she looks forward delightedly to work: 'It gave her the liveliest satisfaction to think of all the disorder and disarray of the Marchbank village. Her fingers itched to be at it—to set all the crooked things straight, and clean away the rubbish, and set everything, as she said, on a sound foundation' (ch.51). Thus Lucilla remains consistent, reconciles that heroic self-image with worthier objects, and to the end proves to Carlingford society that she is an exceptional young woman. What is more she succeeds in getting her own way, and can say to herself with secret delight that having married Tom she is Lucilla Marjoribanks still.

Ernest Baker described Mrs Oliphant as a 'Mrs Gaskell who has learned a good deal from Dickens and still more from Trollope'.³⁶ Of none of her novels is this more true than of Phoebe Junior.³⁷ It presents a more tranquil view of a society than any of its predecessors in the series, and perhaps for this reason has been underestimated. Echoes of Dickens occur in the caricature of the self-made man Copperhead, another Bounderby, a great unfeeling brute boasting of his struggle for success and bullying his genteel wife and nincompoop of a son, Clarence. But by far the greatest resemblance—or debt—is to Trollope. The subtitle, 'A last Chronicle' immediately brings to mind its Barset predecessor. Similarly its major episode, concerning a forged bill by the incumbent of St Roque's Chapel, Mr May, and, to an even greater degree the minor occurrence of May's son, Reginald, being offered a sinecure as warden of Carlingford Hospital for the aged, are distinctly Trollopian.

This is not to say that Phoebe Junior is a hotchpotch of other writers' ideas. The heroine has qualities of independence that Trollope would not quite countenance, and the milieu of chapel and tradesmen's houses, the minute observation of domestic economy, are all Mrs Oliphant's own. Ursula May's awareness of the cost of an entrée for a special dinner party and her anxiety all the way from purchasing to cooking and eating is a case in point, and when Ursula is taunted by her father about reading novels and not her cookery book, the reader is made to feel the frustration acutely:

Made dishes are the most expensive things! A leg of mutton, for instance; there it is, and when one weighs it, one knows what it costs; but there is not one of those entrées but costs shillings for herbs and truffles and gravy and forcemeat, and a glass of white wine here, and a half pint of claret there. It is all very well to talk of dishes made out of nothing. The meat may not be very much—and men never think of other things, I suppose. (I, ch.13)

'Ursula's entrées' play their part in the next chapter when father's unkind remarks about the food cause Nonconformist politician Mr Northcote to fall in love with her on the spot.

Progress has begun to affect Carlingford: the Wentworths and the Wodehouses have gone away, and the Tozers have moved into Lady Weston's old house in Grange Lane.³⁸ For Mrs Tozer 'the increase in gentility was questionable' (I, ch.12). For Copperhead, on the other hand, rise in status, by marrying a relative of Sir Robert Dorset, has been equally unsettling: 'Mr Copperhead felt the increase in gentility as well as the failure in jollity' (I, ch.2). Throughout the story people feel the strain of keeping up appearances or striving to maintain their superiority. Mrs Tozer secretly laments the old life over the shop in the High Street, and some of Mr Tozer's irascibility stems from his awkward social position, which makes him by turns sycophantic and belligerent towards the quality. As always in Mrs Oliphant's religious groups there is discomfort among the Nonconformists who feel their inferiority to the Anglican clergy. Not only clashes over status make Horace Northcote and Reginald May ill at ease with one another, but deep-seated divisions in religious attitudes.

Other kinds of change and displacement add to the groundswell of tension. These particularly concern the careers of the two heroines, Phoebe Beecham and Ursula May, both of whom are returned from London and experiencing the constrictions of rural Carlingford. Mr May is the voice of reaction, and both of his children are blamed, Ursula for demanding recognition as a woman and Reginald for daring to exercise his ministry in a more evangelical spirit. Reginald's opposition to his father's wish that he accept a sinecure is based on a modern radicalism challenging Victorian orthodoxies. In Ursula's case it is radicalism in the home. This is how Mr May sees the situation when Ursula wishes she could earn money:

'Do a little more in the house, and nobody will ask you to earn money. Yes, this is the shape things are taking nowadays,' said Mr May, 'the girls are mad to earn anyhow, and the boys, forsooth, have a hundred scruples. If women would hold their tongues and attend to their own business, I have no doubt we should have less of the other nonsense. The fact is everything is getting into an unnatural state.' (I, ch.10)

The question of women's status is thus implicit but unfortunately never debated; it was far too contentious for the popular market.

The roles of the novel's two heroines, however, are skilfully counterpointed to achieve greater depth and balance in the plot.

Both are intelligent and superior to the men around them, both affected in different ways by social pressures. Ursula, the clergyman's daughter, is one of the genteel poor, and at first regards the fashionably dressed and gracious Phoebe as an enviable model. Phoebe, however, has acquired her gentility by education and study, and is still the butterman's granddaughter. Her own mother, having risen in society, is painfully aware too of her past: 'the shop was still there, greasy and buttery as ever' (I, ch.5), and the reader who recalls that Phoebe of long ago (in Salem Chapel) appreciates the irony of the transformation. Sending young Phoebe back to relive her mother's social experience from a totally different position provides a splendid opportunity for social comment of which Mrs Oliphant takes full advantage.

Phoebe, armed with her finest wardrobe to meet Grange Lane society, is determined to be frank about the 'shop', but her first meeting with her grandparents is a shock:

Yes, there could be no doubt about it; there he was, he whom she was going to visit, under whose auspices she was about to appear in Carlingford. He was not even like an old Dissenting minister, which had been her childish notion of him. He looked neither more nor less than what he was, an old shopkeeper, very decent and respectable, but a little shabby and greasy, like the men whose weekly bills she had been accustomed to pay for her mother. She felt an instant conviction that he would call her 'Ma'am', if she went up to him, and think her one of the quality. (I, ch.12)

Mrs Tozer, her grandmother, has put on her best cap, but, despite the sustaining power of this gorgeous creation, a huge brooch and a dress of copper-coloured silk which rustled a good deal as she came downstairs, is as apprehensive as Phoebe, feeling a thrill of excitement and 'sense of the difference which could not but be felt on one side as well as the other'. Emotion tells through the polite exchanges:

'We thought', said Mrs Tozer, 'as perhaps you mightn't be used to tea at this time of day.'

'Oh, it is the right time; it is the fashionable hour', said Phoebe; 'everybody has tea at five. I will run upstairs first, and take off my hat, and make myself tidy. . . .'

'Well?' said Mr Tozer to Mrs Tozer, as Phoebe disappeared. The two old people looked at each other with a little awe; but she, as was her nature, took the most depressing view. She shook her head. 'She's a deal too fine for us, Tozer', she said . . .

Tozer takes a more hopeful view:

'She came up and give me a kiss in the station, as affectionate as possible. All I can say for her is as she ain't proud.'

Mrs Tozer shook her head; but even while she did so, pleasanter dreams stole into her soul.

'I hope I'll be well enough to get to chapel on Sunday,' she said, 'just to see the folks' looks. The minister needn't expect much attention to his sermon. "There's Phoebe Tozer's daughter!" they'll all be saying, and a-staring, and a-whispering.'

Phoebe, meanwhile, contemplating her grandmother's amazing cap and her grandfather's greasy coat, and facing the vast tent bed, moreen curtains and gigantic flowers of the carpet, bursts into tears:

But her temperament did not favour panics, and giving in was not in her. . . . Now was the time to put her principles to the test; and the tears relieved her, and gave her something of the feeling of a martyr, which is always consolatory and sweet; so she dried her eyes, and bathed her face, and went downstairs cheerful and smiling, resolved that at all costs, her duty should be done, however disagreeable it might be.

Doing her duty embraces being frank about her origin, and by this Mrs Oliphant not only makes Phoebe more attractive to the reader, but also exploits further the burdens of class feeling. Ursula May, for example, is acutely embarrassed at finding out that her friend is the granddaughter of a Carlingford shopkeeper; Phoebe, though mortified by her lowly origins, faces up to the Mays and Horace Northcote with 'masterly candour' (II, ch.6) and captivates Reginald May. She teases both him and Mr Northcote with assumed fears that two rival clergymen will quarrel, and then invites both to tea: 'She carried in her two young men as naughty boys carry stag-beetles or other such small deer. If they would fight it would be fun; and if they would not fight, why it might be fun still, and more amusing than grandmamma' (II, ch.10). This happy-go-lucky quality in Phoebe seems to promise an outcome in which the heroine of humble background marries the prince, but Mrs Oliphant varies the convention. Phoebe is presented more ambiguously as the story develops. The freedom with which she brings men to her side ('in the Tozer world, who knew anything of chaperons?'—III, ch.10) provides a clue to a character not only socially but morally ambiguous.

As reviewers recognised, Phoebe was 'not quite a lady', and while disapproving of the moral tone of the novel they had to admit that Phoebe's unconventional behaviour certainly made her interesting.³⁹ Her independent ways become the focus of a dramatic climax when she defies her grandfather and comes to the rescue of the curate of St Roque's after he has forged Tozer's name to a bill. With great impropriety Phoebe comes into possession of the incriminating document and withholds it from her distracted grandfather, a circumstance which led the Saturday Review to criticise Mrs Oliphant for preaching that a pretty girl could gain any end she set before her.⁴⁰ It is precisely this realism in her portrayal that is likely to appeal to the reader. When it comes to her dealings with suitors she is ready enough to flirt with Reginald May, but knowing full well which side her bread is buttered choose Clarence Copperhead and his fortune. This is a much bolder conclusion to a romance than Trollope permits himself.

Ursula, on the other hand, remains much closer to Trollopian type, and responds to the attentions of Mr Northcote with conventional reticence. The difference between Mrs Oliphant's two heroines is ably captured in the garden scene early in the last volume, where Janey, Ursula's sixteen-year-old sister, is the innocent observer of events under the stars, her naïveté an effective prelude to the scene—'was this how it was managed?' she wonders, as the figures move into the shadows of the laurels. Ursula feels 'a confusion strange but sweet' (III, ch.6) in the attentions of Mr Northcote, but Phoebe has no such problems when confronted by her suitors. She knows that proposals are imminent and weighs up the possibilities, concluding that she will make Clarence her career:

Yes; she could put him into parliament, and keep him there. She could thrust him forward (she believed) to the front of affairs. He would be as good as a profession, a position, a great work to Phoebe. He meant wealth (which she dismissed. in its superficial aspect as something meaningless and vulgar, but accepted in its higher aspect as an almost necessary condition of influence), and he meant all the possibilities of future power. Who can say that she was not as romantic as any girl of twenty could be? only her romance took an unusual form. It was her head that was full of throbbings and pulses, not her heart.

Mrs Oliphant handles the convention with some originality, hinting at the constrictions of being the angel in the house and rightly suggesting Phoebe's need for a more active role which she will take in the only form readily available, by proxy through a malleable husband. For a while, however, it seems that Phoebe will be punished for breaking with orthodoxy and accepting Clarence with reasons other than love in mind, because Copperhead says he will disown his son.⁴¹ Clarence speaks up with primitive eloquence for the first time; Phoebe feels proud of him and, although she shivers at the prospect of his being disowned, is prepared to accept the consequences of her decision and stand by him. Such an action reassures the reader that Phoebe is, underneath it all, the regular loving and self-sacrificing female, although Mrs Oliphant does not quite capitulate, since she has the old man repent and Clarence inheriting after all. Phoebe will have her career.

In the presentation of the Mays Mrs Oliphant is at her best, depicting the endlessly interesting complex of relationships within the family. Reginald indulges in outbursts similar to his father's and exerts his authority over the girls. Likewise Ursula is inclined to patronise Janey. All the children notch up on a mental slate their father's injustices and pay him back with spurts of malice. May himself, unlike the caricatured Copperhead, is splendidly realised.⁴² Indolent and self-centred—'He had never forgiven Providence for leaving him with his motherless family upon his hands' (I, ch.10)—he has turned in on himself, venting his subconscious resentments in spiteful attacks on the children. The girls for their part, 'having no softening medium of a mother's eyes to look at their father through', are harsher in their judgements than they should be; 'and he did not take pains to fascinate his children or throw the glamour of love into their eyes.' 'Both looked selfish to the other, and Mr May, no doubt, could have made out quite as good a case as the children did.' Quiet analysis of this kind shows once more Mrs Oliphant as a delicate student of character.

If the greatness of Archdeacon Grantly and Mr Harding in Barchester Towers or the Proudies and Mr Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset does not come quite within Mrs Oliphant's grasp, there is no denying the quality of her Chronicles of Carlingford and her moments of glory within the series. Vincent, Tozer, Lucilla Marjoribanks and Phoebe display the angularities and inconsistencies of superior creative imagination; they are capable of surprising, like other memorable characters of fiction. She deserves better from posterity than to be so unregarded as she has been since her death. At the very least the pattern of mid-Victorian fiction is incomplete without a readily available edition of the Chronicles of Carlingford.

That she wrote too much and too quickly remains for her as for others of her kind the penalty of commercial fiction; that she recognised how much better her work might have been was her personal anguish, as her autobiography clearly shows. What remains remarkable is what she did achieve within those limitations. 'Few writers in any age', said Herbert Paul, 'have maintained so high a level over so large a surface.'⁴³

Notes

¹ Quoted in Q. D. Leavis, Introduction to Autobiography and Letters p. 10. See also [Lady Ritchie, From the Porch (London, 1913)], p. 13; and A. C. Benson, Memories and Friends (London, 1924) p. 79.

² Introduction to A Widow's Tale, and Other Stories (Edinburgh and London, 1898). See also L. P. Stebbins, A Victorian Album (London, 1946) p. 189.

³ [F. D. Tredrey, The House of Blackwood 1804-1954 (Edinburgh, 1954)], p. 179.

⁴ [V. and R. A. Colby, The Equivocal Virtue: Mrs. Oliphant and the Literary Market Place (New York, 1966)], p. 199.

⁵ Leavis, Introduction to Autobiography and Letters, p. 10.

⁶ Isabel Clarke, Six Portraits (London, 1935) p. 197. See also Tredrey, The House of Blackwood, p. 136. Mrs Oliphant was awarded a Civil List pension of £100 in 1868, some small reward for her labours. As she observed, 'I have worked a hole in my right forefinger' (Autobiography and Letters, p. 427).

⁷Dictionary of National Biography, XXII (Supplement) 1102-6.

⁸ Stebbins, A Victorian Album, p. 160.

⁹Autobiography and Letters, p. 44.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 64.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 78.

¹² Ibid., p. 6.

¹³ Ibid., p. 141.

¹⁴ Benson, Memories and Friends, p. 79.

¹⁵Autobiography and Letters, p. 147.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 6.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 5.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁹ Ritchie, From the Porch, p. 23.

²⁰ Benson, Memories and Friends, p. 74.

²¹ Ritchie, From the Porch, p. 24.

²² Alexander Innes Shand, 'Contemporary Literature', Blackwood's Magazine, CXXV (Mar 1879) 338.

²³ Austin, in Temple Bar, XXIX (July 1870) 489.

²⁴ Shand, in Blackwood's Magazine, CXXV (Mar 1879) 337.

²⁵ Today's feminist criticism is giving long overdue attention to this aspect of Victorian fiction. See Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, 1837-67 (London, 1974); Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York, 1977).

²⁶ Trollope had begun to find fame with The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857), while Mrs Gaskell had already succeeded with Cranford (1853). A ready market existed for stories in rural communities. Anne Thackeray was one of several readers who made the comparison with George Eliot: see Ritchie, From the Porch, pp. 6, 13. Mrs Oliphant had no illusions: 'No one even will mention me in the same breath' (Autobiography and Letters, p. 7).

²⁷ For discussions on religious issues relating to these novels, see M. Maison, Search Your Soul Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London, 1961); V. Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975); and Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York, 1977).

²⁸The Rector, ch. 1. Serialisation of The Rector and The Doctor's Family was in Blackwood's Magazine, Oct 1861-Jan 1862.

²⁹Salem Chapel was first serialised in Blackwood's Magazine, Feb 1862-Jan 1863.

³⁰The Perpetual Curate appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, June 1863-Sep 1864.

³¹Autobiography and Letters, p. 191.

³² Ibid.

³³ An instance of Mrs Oliphant's shrewd observation of the strategies forced upon wives to placate male ego concerns her friend Ellen Blackett, wife of the publisher. See Autobiography and Letters, p. 82.

³⁴ A pictorial treatment is to be found in Arthur Hughes's painting The Long Engagement (1859), Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. See W. R. Greg, 'Why Are Women Redundant?', National Review, XIV (Apr 1862), which, among several suggestions concerning the surplus female population, argues that encouraging men to marry late incites cads to commit immoral acts.

³⁵Miss Marjoribanks was serialised in Blackwood's Magazine, Feb 1865-May 1866.

³⁶ [Ernest Baker, The History of the English Novel (London, 1924-39)], X, 200.

³⁷Phoebe Junior, a Last Chronicle of Carlingford was not serialised, but appeared in three volumes under Hurst and Blackett's imprint, 1876.

³⁸ A discrepancy; in Salem Chapel she was Lady Western.

³⁹ See the Athenaeum, no. 2539 (24 June 1876) 851.

⁴⁰Saturday Review, XLII (22 July 1876) 113.

⁴¹ The brazen Copperhead bears a resemblance to Trollope's Melmotte: The Way We Live Now had appeared the previous year.

⁴² The Athenaeum found him repulsive, declaring that he should have been killed off early in the story—no. 2539 (24 June 1876) 851.

⁴³ Herbert Paul, Men and Letters (London, 1901) p. 154.