In 1869 I was called on to decide, in council with my two boys and
their mother, what should be their destination in life. In June of
that year the elder, who was then twenty-three, was called to the
Bar; and as he had gone through the regular courses of lecturing
tuition and study, it might be supposed that his course was already
decided. But, just as he was called, there seemed to be an opening
for him in another direction; and this, joined to the terrible
uncertainty of the Bar, the terror of which was not in his case
lessened by any peculiar forensic aptitudes, induced us to sacrifice
dignity in quest of success. Mr. Frederic Chapman, who was then
the sole representative of the publishing house known as Messrs.
Chapman & Hall, wanted a partner, and my son Henry went into the
firm. He remained there three years and a half; but he did not like
it, nor do I think he made a very good publisher. At any rate he
left the business with perhaps more pecuniary success than might
have been expected from the short period of his labours, and has
since taken himself to literature as a profession. Whether he will
work at it so hard as his father, and write as many books, may be
doubted.
My second son, Frederic, had very early in life gone to Australia,
having resolved on a colonial career when he found that boys who did
not grow so fast as he did got above him at school. This departure
was a great pang to his mother and me; but it was permitted on the
understanding that he was to come back when he was twenty-one, and
then decide whether he would remain in England or return to the
Colonies. In the winter of 1868 he did come to England, and had a
season's hunting in the old country; but there was no doubt in his
own mind as to his settling in Australia. His purpose was fixed,
and in the spring of 1869 he made his second journey out. As I
have since that date made two journeys to see him,--of one of which
at any rate I shall have to speak, as I wrote a long book on the
Australasian Colonies,--I will have an opportunity of saying a word
or two further on of him and his doings.
The Vicar of Bullhampton was written in 1868 for publication in Once
a Week, a periodical then belonging to Messrs. Bradbury & Evans.
It was not to come out till 1869, and I, as was my wont had made
my terms long previously to the proposed date. I had made my terms
and written my story and sent it to the publisher long before it
was wanted; and so far my mind was at rest. The date fixed was the
first of July, which date had been named in accordance with the
exigencies of the editor of the periodical. An author who writes
for these publications is bound to suit himself to these exigencies,
and can generally do so without personal loss or inconvenience, if
he will only take time by the forelock. With all the pages that I
have written for magazines I have never been a day late, nor have
I ever caused inconvenience by sending less or more matter than I
had stipulated to supply. But I have sometimes found myself compelled
to suffer by the irregularity of others. I have endeavoured to
console myself by reflecting that such must ever be the fate of
virtue. The industrious must feed the idle. The honest and simple
will always be the prey of the cunning and fraudulent. The punctual,
who keep none waiting for them, are doomed to wait perpetually for
the unpunctual. But these earthly sufferers know that they are making
their way heavenwards,--and their oppressors their way elsewards.
If the former reflection does not suffice for consolation, the
deficiency is made up by the second. I was terribly aggrieved on
the matter of the publication of my new Vicar, and had to think
very much of the ultimate rewards of punctuality and its opposite.
About the end of March, 1869, I got a dolorous letter from the
editor. All the Once a Week people were in a terrible trouble. They
had bought the right of translating one of Victor Hugo's modern
novels, L'Homme Qui Rit; they bad fixed a date, relying on positive
pledges from the French publishers; and now the great French author
had postponed his work from week to week and from month to month,
and it had so come to pass that the Frenchman's grinning hero would
have to appear exactly at the same time as my clergyman. Was it
not quite apparent to me, the editor asked, that Once a Week could
not hold the two? Would I allow my clergyman to make his appearance
in the Gentleman's Magazine instead?
My disgust at this proposition was, I think, chiefly due to Victor
Hugo's latter novels, which I regard as pretentious and untrue to
nature. To this perhaps was added some feeling of indignation that
I should be asked to give way to a Frenchman. The Frenchman had
broken his engagement. He had failed to have his work finished by
the stipulated time. From week to week and from month to month he
had put off the fulfilment of his duty. And because of these laches
on his part,--on the part of this sententious French Radical,--I was
to be thrown over! Virtue sometimes finds it difficult to console
herself even with the double comfort. I would not come out in the
Gentleman's Magazine, and as the Grinning Man could not be got out
of the way, by novel was published in separate numbers.
The same thing has occurred to me more than once since. "You no
doubt are regular," a publisher has said to me, "but Mr. ---- is
irregular. He has thrown me out, and I cannot be ready for you till
three months after the time named." In these emergencies I have
given perhaps half what was wanted, and have refused to give the
other half. I have endeavoured to fight my own battle fairly, and
at the same time not to make myself unnecessarily obstinate. But
the circumstances have impressed on my mind the great need there is
that men engaged in literature should feel themselves to be bound
to their industry as men know that they are bound in other callings.
There does exist, I fear, a feeling that authors, because they are
authors, are relieved from the necessity of paying attention to
everyday rules. A writer, if he be making (pounds)800 a year, does not think
himself bound to live modestly on (pounds)600, and put by the remainder
for his wife and children. He does not understand that he should
sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers
and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to
the letter;--but that he, as a brain-worker, and conscious of the
subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from
bonds when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration
which will not always come,--especially will not come if wine-cups
overnight have been too deep. All this has ever been odious to
me, as being unmanly. A man may be frail in health, and therefore
unable to do as he has contracted in whatever grade of life. He who
has been blessed with physical strength to work day by day, year
by year--as has been my case--should pardon deficiencies caused
by sickness or infirmity. I may in this respect have been a little
hard on others,--and, if so, I here record my repentance. But
I think that no allowance should be given to claims for exemption
from punctuality, made if not absolutely on the score still with
the conviction of intellectual superiority.
The Vicar of Bullhampton was written chiefly with the object of
exciting not only pity but sympathy for fallen woman, and of raising
a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I
could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To
have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed
to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be
a second-rate personage in the tale;--but it was with reference to
her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with
their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a
preface,--in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old-established
principle. I do not know that any one read it; but as I wish to
have it read, I will insert it here again:--
"I have introduced in the Vicar of Bullhampton the character of a
girl whom I will call,--for want of a truer word that shall not in
its truth be offensive,--a castaway. I have endeavoured to endow
her with qualities that may create sympathy, and I have brought
her back at last from degradation, at least to decency. I have not
married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavoured to explain
that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still
things could not be with her as they would have been had she not
fallen.
"There arises, of course, the question whether a novelist, who
professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes,
should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as
that of Carry Brattle. It is not long since,--it is well within the
memory of the author,--that the very existence of such a condition
of life as was hers, was supposed to be unknown to our sisters and
daughters, and was, in truth, unknown to many of them. Whether that
ignorance was good may be questioned; but that it exists no longer
is beyond question. Then arises the further question,--how far the
conditions of such unfortunates should be made a matter of concern
to the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness
of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us. Cannot women,
who are good, pity the sufferings of the vicious, and do something
perhaps to mitigate and shorten them without contamination from the
vice? It will be admitted probably by most men who have thought
upon the subject that no fault among us is punished so heavily
as that fault, often so light in itself but so terrible in its
consequences to the less faulty of the two offenders, by which a
woman falls. All of her own sex is against her, and all those of
the other sex in whose veins runs the blood which she is thought
to have contaminated, and who, of nature, would befriend her, were
her trouble any other than it is.
"She is what she is, and she remains in her abject, pitiless,
unutterable misery, because this sentence of the world has placed
her beyond the helping hand of Love and Friendship. It may be said,
no doubt, that the severity of this judgment acts as a protection
to female virtue,--deterring, as all known punishments do deter, from
vice. But this punishment, which is horrible beyond the conception
of those who have not regarded it closely, is not known beforehand.
Instead of the punishment, there is seen a false glitter of gaudy
life,--a glitter which is damnably false,--and which, alas I has
been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of
young girls, than have those horrors which ought to deter, with
the dark shadowings which belong to them.
"To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex,
as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life
is, happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice
and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be
handled with truth to life, some girl, who would have been thoughtless,
may be made thoughtful, or some parent's heart may be softened."
Those were my ideas when I conceived the story, and with that
feeling I described the characters of Carry Brattle and of her
family. I have not introduced her lover on the scene, nor have I
presented her to the reader in the temporary enjoyment of any of
those fallacious luxuries, the longing for which is sometimes more
seductive to evil than love itself. She is introduced as a poor
abased creature, who hardly knows how false were her dreams, with
very little of the Magdalene about her--because though there may
be Magdalenes they are not often found--but with an intense horror
of the sufferings of her position. Such being her condition, will
they who naturally are her friends protect her? The vicar who has
taken her by the hand endeavours to excite them to charity; but
father, and brother, and sister are alike hard-hearted. It had
been my purpose at first that the hand of every Brattle should be
against her; but my own heart was too soft to enable me to make
the mother cruel,--or the unmarried sister who had been the early
companion of the forlorn one.
As regards all the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told.
The characters are true, and the scenes at the mill are in keeping
with human nature. For the rest of the book I have little to say.
It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very good. As I have
myself forgotten what the heroine does and says--except that she
tumbles into a ditch--I cannot expect that any one else should
remember her. But I have forgotten nothing that was done or said
by any of the Brattles.
The question brought in argument is one of fearful importance. As
to the view to be taken first, there can, I think, be no doubt. In
regard to a sin common to the two sexes, almost all the punishment
and all the disgrace is heaped upon the one who in nine cases out
of ten has been the least sinful. And the punishment inflicted is
of such a nature that it hardly allows room for repentance. How is
the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened?
Then comes the answer: It is to the severity of the punishment alone
that we can trust to keep women from falling. Such is the argument
used in favour of the existing practice, and such the excuse
given for their severity by women who will relax nothing of their
harshness. But in truth the severity of the punishment is not known
beforehand; it is not in the least understood by women in general,
except by those who suffer it. The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty,
the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all
good things, the banishment from honest labour, the being compassed
round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the
weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant,--and then
the quick depreciation of that one ware of beauty, the substituted
paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres,
hunger, thirst, and strong drink, life without a hope, without the
certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease,
starvation, and a quivering fear of that coming hell which still
can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here! This is the
life to which we doom our erring daughters, when because of their
error we close our door upon them! But for our erring sons we find
pardon easily enough.
Of course there are houses of refuge, from which it has been
thought expedient to banish everything pleasant, as though the only
repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily
be one of sackcloth and ashes. It is hardly thus that we can hope
to recall those to decency who, if they are to be recalled at
all, must be induced to obey the summons before they have reached
the last stage of that misery which I have attempted to describe.
To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this,--that
the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind if
possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed,
and that this ferocity comes not only from hatred of the sin, put
in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with
it. Very low as is the degradation to which a girl is brought when
she falls through love or vanity, or perhaps from a longing for
luxurious ease, still much lower is that to which she must descend
perforce when, through the hardness of the world around her,
she converts that sin into a trade. Mothers and sisters, when the
misfortune comes upon them of a fallen female from among their
number, should remember this, and not fear contamination so strongly
as did Carry Brattle's married sister and sister-in-law.
In 1870 I brought out three books,--or rather of the latter of
the three I must say that it was brought out by others, for I had
nothing to do with it except to write it. These were Sir Harry
Hotspur of Humblethwaite, An Editor's Tales, and a little volume
on Julius Caesar. Sir Harry Hotspur was written on the same plan as
Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, and had for its object the telling
of some pathetic incident in life rather than the portraiture of a
number of human beings. Nina and Linda Tressel and The Golden Lion
had been placed in foreign countries, and this was an English story.
In other respects it is of the same nature, and was not, I think,
by any means a failure. There is much of pathos in the love of
the girl, and of paternal dignity and affection in the father.
It was published first in Macmillan's Magazine, by the intelligent
proprietor of which I have since been told that it did not make
either his fortune or that of his magazine. I am sorry that it
should have been so; but I fear that the same thing may be said of
a good many of my novels. When it had passed through the magazine,
the subsequent use of it was sold to other publishers by Mr.
Macmillan, and then I learned that it was to be brought out by them
as a novel in two volumes. Now it had been sold by me as a novel
in one volume, and hence there arose a correspondence.
I found it very hard to make the purchasers understand that I had
reasonable ground for objection to the process. What was it to me?
How could it injure me if they stretched my pages by means of lead
and margin into double the number I had intended. I have heard the
same argument on other occasions. When I have pointed out that in
this way the public would have to suffer, seeing that they would
have to pay Mudie for the use of two volumes in reading that which
ought to have been given to them in one, I have been assured that
the public are pleased with literary short measure, that it is
the object of novel-readers to get through novels as fast as they
can, and that the shorter each volume is the better! Even this,
however, did not overcome me, and I stood to my guns. Sir Harry
was published in one volume, containing something over the normal
300 pages, with an average of 220 words to a page,--which I
had settled with my conscience to be the proper length of a novel
volume. I may here mention that on one occasion, and one occasion
only, a publisher got the better of me in a matter of volumes. He
had a two-volume novel of mine running through a certain magazine,
and had it printed complete in three volumes before I knew where I
was,--before I had seen a sheet of the letterpress. I stormed for
a while, but I had not the heart to make him break up the type.
The Editor's Tales was a volume republished from the St. Paul's
Magazine, and professed to give an editor's experience of his
dealings with contributors. I do not think that there is a single
incident in the book which could bring back to any one concerned
the memory of a past event. And yet there is not an incident in it
the outline of which was not presented to my mind by the remembrance
of some fact:--how an ingenious gentleman got into conversation
with me, I not knowing that he knew me to be an editor, and pressed
his little article on my notice; how I was addressed by a lady with
a becoming pseudonym and with much equally becoming audacity; how
I was appealed to by the dearest of little women whom here I have
called Mary Gresley; how in my own early days there was a struggle
over an abortive periodical which was intended to be the best
thing ever done; how terrible was the tragedy of a poor drunkard,
who with infinite learning at his command made one sad final effort
to reclaim himself, and perished while he was making it; and lastly
how a poor weak editor was driven nearly to madness by threatened
litigation from a rejected contributor. Of these stories, The Spotted
Dog, with the struggles of the drunkard scholar, is the best. I
know now, however, that when the things were good they came out
too quick one upon another to gain much attention;--and so also,
luckily, when they were bad.
The Caesar was a thing of itself. My friend John Blackwood had set
on foot a series of small volumes called Ancient Classics for English
Readers, and had placed the editing of them, and the compiling of
many of them, in the hands of William Lucas Collins, a clergyman
who, from my connection with the series, became a most intimate
friend. The Iliad and the Odyssey had already come out when I was
at Edinburgh with John Blackwood, and, on my expressing my very strong
admiration for those two little volumes,--which I here recommend
to all young ladies as the most charming tales they can read,--he
asked me whether I would not undertake one myself. Herodotus was
in the press, but, if I could get it ready, mine should be next.
Whereupon I offered to say what might be said to the readers of
English on The Commentaries of Julius Caesar.
I at once went to work, and in three months from that day the little
book had been written. I began by reading through the Commentaries
twice, which I did without any assistance either by translation
or English notes. Latin was not so familiar to me then as it has
since become,--for from that date I have almost daily spent an
hour with some Latin author, and on many days many hours. After
the reading what my author had left behind him, I fell into the
reading of what others had written about him, in Latin, in English,
and even in French,--for I went through much of that most futile
book by the late Emperor of the French. I do not know that for a
short period I ever worked harder. The amount I had to write was
nothing. Three weeks would have done it easily. But I was most
anxious, in this soaring out of my own peculiar line, not to disgrace
myself. I do not think that I did disgrace myself. Perhaps I was
anxious for something more. If so, I was disappointed.
The book I think to be a good little book. It is readable by all, old
and young, and it gives, I believe accurately, both an account of
Caesar's Commentaries,--which of course was the primary intention,--and
the chief circumstances of the great Roman's life. A well-educated
girl who had read it and remembered it would perhaps know as much
about Caesar and his writings as she need know. Beyond the consolation
of thinking as I do about it, I got very little gratification from
the work. Nobody praised it. One very old and very learned friend
to whom I sent it thanked me for my "comic Caesar," but said no
more. I do not suppose that he intended to run a dagger into me.
Of any suffering from such wounds, I think, while living, I never
showed a sign; but still I have suffered occasionally. There
was, however, probably present to my friend's mind, and to that
of others, a feeling that a man who had spent his life in writing
English novels could not be fit to write about Caesar. It was as
when an amateur gets a picture hung on the walls of the Academy.
What business had I there? Ne sutor ultra crepidam. In the press it
was most faintly damned by most faint praise. Nevertheless, having
read the book again within the last month or two, I make bold to say
that it is a good book. The series, I believe, has done very well.
I am sure that it ought to do well in years to come, for, putting
aside Caesar, the work has been done with infinite scholarship, and
very generally with a light hand. With the leave of my sententious
and sonorous friend, who had not endured that subjects which had
been grave to him should be treated irreverently, I will say that
such a work, unless it be light, cannot answer the purpose for which
it is intended. It was not exactly a schoolbook that was wanted,
but something that would carry the purposes of the schoolroom even
into the leisure hours of adult pupils. Nothing was ever better
suited for such a purpose than the Iliad and the Odyssey, as done
by Mr. Collins. The Virgil, also done by him, is very good; and so
is the Aristophanes by the same hand.