Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (17 page)

The feminist movement which has championed the elevation of Mary to canonical rank takes a different line. It was an enterprising woman scholar who brought
Mathilda
to light in 1959 – and with it the raging controversy over whether Mary was an incest survivor or not. It was the critic Ellen Moers, in 1974, who argued – persuasively – that
Frankenstein
should be read as the ‘trauma of the afterbirth’. Such moments as those in
Chapter 5
, when Victor looks down on what he has given birth to, do not, Moers suggest, strike one as the responses of a father:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils … It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?

Inventor’s remorse or post-natal depression?

Mrs Gore is a Woman of the World.

The undisputed queen of the ‘silver fork’ school, Gore fed the fantasies of the middle class about the depravities and sophistications of the upper class with more novels than anyone has been able to count. ‘Anonymity’ – with the thrilling implication that she was actually ‘inside’ the world she wrote about – was essential to her enterprise. It also allowed her to over-produce, shamelessly (as many as two novels in a week – under allegedly different hands – in her heyday).

Catherine Moody was born into a respectable bourgeois background. Her father
was a Nottinghamshire wine merchant: ‘trade’ – that shameful word – was her background, not ‘society’. Charles Moody died around the time of her birth; her mother then remarried and moved to London as the wife of a prosperous physician: a small step upwards in the social scale. The family circumstances were comfortable and – as Catherine’s later writing confirms – she was well educated by expensive governesses and tutors. At an early age she showed literary ability and was fondly nicknamed in her family ‘the Poetess’.

In 1823 she married Captain Charles Arthur Gore of the Life Guards. Another step up. The Gores were connected with the Earls of Arran. Captain Gore left the service in the same year he married. Spared foreign postings Catherine evidently saw at first hand some of the high Regency London life she describes so intimately in her fiction. As the
Athenaeum
put it, in 1837, ‘Mrs Gore writes for the world and she is herself a woman of the world.’ For ‘world’, read
monde
. Richard Hengist Horne, in his pen-portrait of her in
A New Spirit of the Age
, astutely noted that ‘Mrs Gore excels in the portraiture of the upper section of the middle class just at that point of contact with the aristocracy.’ She herself in the Preface to
Pin Money
(1831) – picking up Mrs Bennet’s crass comments in the opening paragraph of
Pride and Prejudice
– claimed that she was transferring ‘the familiar narrative of Miss Austen to a higher sphere of society’. Pemberton, not Longbourn, was Gore’s territory.

Gore’s writing career began, however, with florid historical romances, such as
Theresa Marchmont, or, The Maid of Honour
(1824). She was ‘puffed’ outrageously by her publisher (the aforementioned ‘Prince of Puffers’) Henry Colburn, an enterprising rogue. It was under Colburn’s imprint that she had her first hit,
Women as They Are, or, The Manners of the Day
(1830). George IV, no less, pronounced it ‘the best and most amusing novel published within my remembrance’. Poor Sir Walter. She then embarked on a series of novels illustrative of English society, of which the finest are
The Hamiltons, or the New Era
(1834), a depiction of the social consequences of the 1832 Reform Bill;
Mrs Armytage, or, Female Domination
(1836);
Cecil, or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb
(1841); and
The Banker’s Wife, or, Court and City
(1843).

In 1832, for reasons which are unclear (they may involve scandal or, more probably, debt), Gore moved to France and thereafter lived a life of seclusion. Domestically that life was full to overflowing. She had ten surviving children in these years and, doubtless, more pregnancies than that. Although she never managed, or wanted, to break out of the constricting frames of silver-forkery, Gore’s is a considerable literary talent. She has, at her best, as easy a narrative manner as Thackeray – a novelist who good-naturedly parodied her while admitting to admiration (
Vanity Fair
owes something to her). She writes a vigorous, slangy prose embedded
with sharp epigrams. As a social novelist, Gore handles the theme of money and social mobility (‘rising’ in the world) more cleverly than any writer, of either sex, of her vintage. She was an able sociologist. Her
Sketches of English Character
(1846) bears comparison with Thackeray’s
The Snobs of England
(1846). Her fiction, in line with the changing mood of the time, became more ‘domestic’ in later years and lost something of its sparkle.

There was little in those later years to sparkle about. The ‘hungry forties’ were not conducive to Mrs Gore’s ‘tuft-hunting’ (i.e. snobbish) fiction. Of her ten children, only two survived their mother, and she was widowed in 1846. After a heroically long writing career, she inherited a substantial property in 1850, but was impoverished (again) five years later when her former guardian, Sir John Dean Paul, defrauded her of £20,000. He was subsequently sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for this and other offences against his clients. Gore died, prematurely, aged sixty-one. She had been blind for several years, but wrote, manfully, to the end. By the time of her death she had yet again written herself into prosperity, leaving £14,000.

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen … than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
Martineau, on housework

Harriet Martineau was born in Norwich, the sixth of eight children of a textile manufacturer of Huguenot origin. One of her younger brothers was the later theologian (and in later life, her ‘oracle’), James Martineau, and the family was Unitarian, a doctrine which approved of female education. The Martineau circumstances – during Harriet’s childhood, at least – were prosperous and Harriet herself was fearsomely precocious. ‘My first political interest’, she blandly recalls, ‘was the death of Nelson. I was then four years old.’ Her literary interests were even more advanced: she was reading Milton at the age of seven. It says much about the intellectual earnestness of the Martineau household that she was allowed to do so. The earnestness verged at times on morbidity. She recalls, as a little girl, digging two
‘graves’ in the garden with her brother James, lying in them, then discussing, afterwards, their impressions of ‘death’.

‘Life’ was to be hard. At the age of twelve there appeared symptoms of the deafness which was to blight her life. She ascribed the ailment to a dishonest wet nurse, during infancy, whose milk had dried up and virtually starved her. Lifelong she was prey to bowel complaints (described with disarming frankness in her autobiography). In her early teens, her hearing was largely gone and with it most of her marriage prospects. Her fiancé, John Hugh Worthington, a young minister, went mad and died shortly after they became engaged. In her autobiography, Martineau stoically records the tragedy as a lucky escape.

In 1829 the Martineau family was utterly ruined when her father’s business failed. Thereafter Harriet supported herself by her pen, claiming to find the loss of gentility intellectually liberating. Her material needs were simple and, as a political economist (from the age of fourteen!), she invested her eventually substantial earnings shrewdly. Ideologically Martineau moved from theism to Comtean rationalism and what she called ‘Necessarianism’ (although, famously, she was to dabble with the mystical cult of mesmerism in her later years, claiming a miraculous cure of her deafness in 1845). In 1852 she moved to London, a liberation that came with a ‘room of her own’, which she describes charmingly:

It was a dark foggy November morning when I arrived in London. My lodgings were up two pair of stairs … A respectable sitting room to the front, and a clean, small bedroom behind seemed to me all that could possibly be desired, – seeing that I was to have them all to myself. To be sure, they did look very dark, that first morning of yellow fog: but it was seldom so dark again; and when the spring came on, and I moved down into the handsomer rooms on the first floor, I thought my lodgings really pleasant. In the summer mornings, when I made my coffee at seven o’clock, and sat down to my work, with the large windows open, the sun-blinds down, the street fresh watered, and the flower-girls’ baskets visible from my seat, I wished for nothing better.

She enjoyed her first success with the didactic stories,
Illustrations of Political Economy
, serialised in monthly parts, 1832–5 (the form of publication used by Chapman and Hall, publishers of Dickens’s
The Pickwick Papers
, a year later). Up to 10,000 copies of these exemplary fables were sold monthly. By means of crude fictional narratives, the
Illustrations
introduced many of the themes picked up by later Victorian ‘social problem’ novels. Fiction, she demonstrated, could conduct a dialogue with the higher economics. Martineau thus found herself famous and £600 richer, though other series of the
Illustrations
were less popular. A little of
her didacticism went a long way. Her
Forest and Game-Law Tales
(1845), based on spectacularly unsexy research supplied by a parliamentary committee, were overshadowed by the Corn Law repeal, and flopped.

Martineau’s major full-length fiction is
Deerbrook
(1839), a novel which Carlyle, no less, pronounced ‘very ligneous’ – not the kind of term which would do much for a dustjacket shout-line. This ‘study of provincial life’ follows the career of two orphaned sisters, Margaret and Hester Ibbotson, who come from Birmingham to the ‘rather pretty’ village of Deerbrook, to lodge with their cousins, the Greys. The narrative climaxes on a vividly described cholera epidemic. Aptly, if unkindly, called a ‘poor novel with a few good pages’,
Deerbrook
anticipates some plot complications in
Middlemarch
(George Eliot, as her notes indicate, was also thinking of a cholera episode for her story) and was influential on the so-called ‘novel of community’.

In 1834, Martineau travelled to America (not an easy trip at this date for a handicapped single woman) and wrote her impressions up in
Society in America
(1837). Unsurprisingly she was strongly abolitionist. In 1846 she travelled even further afield, to Egypt. As a non-fiction writer Martineau is admired for her candid autobiography (published posthumously), her forthright views on the woman question, her enlightened views on medicine – notably her 1844 essay on ‘Life in the Sick-room’ – and for her popularisation, and translation, of the inventor of ‘sociology’, Auguste Comte.

Fiction, however, still played a part in her life’s work. In addition to the above, she published:
Five Years of Youth
(1831),
The Playfellow
(1841) and – most interestingly –
The Hour and the Man
(1841), a romance on the career of the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture. In her later life Martineau was wealthy enough to construct not just a room, but a whole house of her own, in the Lake District, near her idol William Wordsworth’s Grasmere.

Bulwer must be counted among the eminent authors who have not made and not deserved success in married life.
Leslie Stephen

What to call him has always been a bibliographer’s nightmare. His full name in his peacock prime was Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton. The multiply barrelled name proclaimed a distinguished pedigree: on the paternal side, his ancestors had been ennobled soldiers since the Conquest and his mother’s family (the Lytton line) were distinguished scholars. Novelists, until him, did not figure.

After one of the chronically awful marriages that ran in the Lytton family, his father died when Edward was four. The youngest of three sons, he was brought up, smotheringly, by his mother, which had an indelibly feminising effect on his personality. As Harriet Martineau put it, spitefully, he ‘dressed a woman’s spirit in man’s clothing’. Menswear would, in fact, be one of his more lasting legacies. His mother judged her Edward too delicate for Eton. Educated at home or in less gruelling establishments, given the run of one of the best private libraries in England, he emerged a prodigy of learning, precocious authorship and dandyism. At sixteen, he claimed, he had his first and only perfect love affair. Elders broke it off and he carried a fractured heart to his grave. At seventeen, he published his first book,
Ismael; an Oriental Tale
. He was judged strong enough to handle Cambridge and, in 1825, he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry. Now a young ‘pseudo-Byron’, he burnished his image with an affair with the wicked Lord’s cast-off mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb.