Mrs. Crowe. Mrs. Archer Clive.
Mrs. Henry Wood

by Adeline Sergeant
Mrs. Catherine Crowe

Mrs. Catherine Crowe, whose maiden name was Stevens, was born at Borough Green, in Kent, about 1800, and died in 1876. She married Colonel Crowe in 1822, and took up her residence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were written chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best known by her novel, “Susan Hopley,” and her collection of ghost stories, “The Night Side of Nature.” She was a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of insanity. But love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels,
the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment and considerable dramatic power. As a writer, indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile; she wrote plays, children’s stories, short historical tales, romantic novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this generation. It is evident too, that she believed herself—rightly or wrongly—to be possessed of great philosophical discrimination; but it must be acknowledged that her philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander.

It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe’s ideas respecting the status and education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly “advanced.” In “Lilly Dawson,” for instance, a story published in 1847, she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education which women were then receiving. “It is true,” she says, “that there is little real culture amongst men; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they have still more advantages. If their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours
a day at worsted work and embroidery; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics than in strumming Hook’s lessons on a bad pianoforte.”

Her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words from the same work of fiction. “If, as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer; where man reasons she sees. Nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world’s history, if man would but let her play it out, and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom.” Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer herself, the very quintessence of Ibsenism! It must have required considerable courage to write in this way in the year 1847, and Mrs. Crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational reform. In many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong individuality and decided opinions.

Her first work was a drama, “Aristodemus,” published anonymously in 1838; it showed considerable ability and
was well regarded by the critics. She then wrote a novel, “Men and Women, or Manorial Rights,” in 1839; and in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction: “Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant.” This story was more generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest than the rest.

Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of “The Seeress of Provorst,” by Justinus Kerner, a book of revelations concerning the inner life of man; and in 1848 she published a book called “The Night Side of Nature,” a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the English language. Its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the author. She seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in her way. From the humble apologies, however, with which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a change has passed over people’s minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the Society for Psychical Research, and would have had no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject.
She divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams (where we get Sir Noel Paton’s account of his mother’s curious vision); warnings; double-dreaming and trance, with the stories of Colonel Townshend’s voluntary trance and the well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the ghost of Claverhouse; doppel-g?ngers and apparitions (including the stories of Lady Beresford’s branded wrist and Lord Lyttleton’s warning); and other chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to find among these the original account of “Pearlin Jean,” of which Miss Sarah Tytler has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. An account of the phenomena of stigmata and the case of Catherine Emmerich, are also described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of “The Night Side of Nature.”

Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for Christmas, in the year 1859; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the now almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years. It is also curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled “Pippie’s
Warning, or Mind Your Temper”—another instance of her versatility of mind.

“The Adventures of a Beauty” and “Light and Darkness” appeared in 1852. The latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. Mrs. Crowe’s taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this collection. There is an account of the celebrated poisoners, Frau Gottfried, Madame Ursinus, and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims; and of Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a visit. The histories of Lesurques, the hero of the “Lyons Mail,” and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who became a nun, are well narrated; but nearly all the stories are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of Mr. Wilkie Collins. “The Priest of St. Quentin” and “The Lycanthropist” are two of the most powerful.

Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was “Linny Lockwood,” issued in 1854. A sentence from the preface to this book anticipates—rather early, as we may think—the approaching death of the three-volume novel:
“Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time soliciting me to write them an original novel for their cheap series; and being convinced that the period for publishing at ￡1 11s. 6d., books of a kind that people generally read but once, is gone by, 1 have resolved to make the experiment.”

She wrote another tragedy, “The Cruel Kindness,” in 1853, and abridged “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for children. In 1859 a pamphlet on “Spiritualism and the Age we Live in,” constituted the last of her more important works, although she continued, for some time after recovery from the attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to write papers and stories for periodicals.

In spite of Mrs. Crowe’s love for the supernatural and the horrible, she is one of the pioneers of the purely domestic story—that story of the affections and the emotions peculiar to the Victorian Age. She is allied to the schools of Richardson and Fanny Burney rather than to those of Sir Walter Scott or Miss Austen; for although her incidents are often romantic and even far-fetched, her characters are curiously homely and generally of humble environment. Thus, for instance, “Susan Hopley” is a maid-servant (though not of the Pamela kind nor with the faintest resemblance to Esther Waters); Lilly Dawson, although proved ultimately to be the daughter
of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier life as a drudge and a dependent; and Linny Lockwood, while refined and educated, is reduced to the situation of a lady’s maid. The circumstances of her heroines are, as a rule, extremely prosaic, and would possibly have been condemned by writers of Miss Austen’s school as hopelessly vulgar; but Mrs. Crowe’s way of treating these characters and their surroundings bears upon it no stamp of vulgarity at all. Its great defect is its want of humour to light up the sordid side of the life which she describes. She is almost always serious, full of exalted and occasionally overstrained sentiment. And even when treating of childhood, it is rarely that she relaxes so far as (in “Lilly Dawson”) to describe the naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying for the cat. This is almost the sole glimpse of a sense of fun to which Mrs. Crowe treats us in her numerous volumes.

To the present age “Susan Hopley,” although so popular at the time of its publication, is less attractive than the stories of “Linny Lockwood” and “Lilly Dawson.” The form adopted for the recital of Susan’s narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises Susan’s reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and supposed to be told by her in mature age, when she is
housekeeper to the hero of the story. Nevertheless, the plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of Susan’s brother by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the subsequent exposure of his guilt by means of Susan’s energy and the repentance of one of his victims. It has all the elements of a sensational story, with the exception of a “sympathetic” heroine or any other really interesting character; for Susan Hopley, the embodiment of all homely virtues, is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the attractiveness of the “beautiful and haughty” dairymaid, Mabel Lightfoot, whose frailty forms an important element in the discovery of Gaveston’s guilt.

“Lilly Dawson” may be said to possess something of a psychological interest, which redeems it from the charge of dulness brought against “Susan Hopley.” The heroine is thrown as a child into the hands of a wild and lawless family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a household slave; and the child appears at first to be utterly stupid and apathetic. A touch of affection and sympathy is needed before her intellect awakes. In fear of being forced to marry one of the sons of the house in which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen, she escapes from her enemies, becomes the guide and adopted child of an old blind man, takes service as a nursemaid, is employed in a milliner’s workroom, narrowly
escapes being murdered by the man whom she refused to marry, and finally acts as maid in the house of her own relations, where she is discovered and received with the greatest affection. Nevertheless, she cannot endure the life of “a fine lady,” and goes back ultimately to marry the humble lover whose kindness had cheered her in the days of her childhood and poverty.

In “Linny Lockwood” there is a touch of emotion, even of passion, which is wanting in the previous stories. It embraces scenes and situations which are quite as moving as any which thrilled the English public in the pages of “Jane Eyre” or “East Lynne,” but, owing possibly to Mrs. Crowe’s obstinate realism and somewhat didactic homeliness of diction and sentiment, it seems somewhat to have missed its mark. Linny Lockwood marries a man entirely unworthy of her, whose love strays speedily from her to another woman—a married woman with whom he elopes and whom he afterwards abandons. Linny, being poor and destitute, looks about for work, and takes the post of maid to her husband’s deserted mistress, without, of course, knowing what had been the connection between them. But before the birth of Kate’s child, Linny learns the truth and nevertheless remains with her to soothe her weakness, and lessen the pangs of remorse of which the poor woman ultimately dies. A full explana
tion between the two women takes place before Kate’s death; and the child that is left behind is adopted by Linny Lockwood, who refuses to pardon the husband, who sues to her for forgiveness, or to live with him again.

The character of Linny Lockwood is a very beautiful one, and the story appeals to the reader’s sensibilities more strongly than the recital of Susan Hopley’s adventures or the girlish sorrows of Lilly Dawson.

Mrs. Crowe’s writings certainly heralded the advent of a new kind of fiction: a kind which has been, perhaps more than any other, characteristic of the early years of the Victorian Age. It is the literature of domestic realism, of homely unromantic characters, which no accessories of exciting adventure can render interesting or remarkable in themselves—characters distinguished by every sort of virtue, yet not possessed of any ideal attractiveness. She is old-fashioned enough to insist upon a happy ending, to punish the wicked and to reward the good. But amid all the conventionality of her style, one is conscious of a note of hard common sense and a power of seeing things as they really are, which in these days would probably have forced her (perhaps against her will) into the realistic school. She seems, in fact, to hover between two ages of
literature, and to be possessed at times of two different spirits—one the romantic and the supernatural, the other distinctly commonplace and workaday. Perhaps it is by the former that she will be chiefly remembered, but it is through the latter that she takes a place in English literature. She left a mark upon the age in which she lived, and she helped, in a quiet, undemonstrative fashion, to mould the women of England after higher ideals than had been possible in the early days of the century. Those who consider the development of women to be one of the distinguishing features of Queen Victoria’s reign should not forget that they owe deep gratitude to writers like Mrs. Crowe, who upheld the standard of a woman’s right to education and economic independence long before these subjects were discussed in newspapers and upon public platforms. For, as George Eliot has said, with her usual wisdom, it is owing to the labours of those who have lived in comparative obscurity and lie in forgotten graves, that things are well with us here and now.
Caroline Clive

Caroline Clive was the second daughter and co-heiress of Edmund Meysey-Wigley, of Shakenhurst, Worcestershire. She was born in 1801, at Brompton Green, London, and was married in 1840 to the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, Warwickshire. In the latest edition of her poems, her daughter states that “Mrs. Archer Clive, from a severe illness when she was three years old, was lame; and though her strong mind and high spirit carried her happily through childhood and early life, as she grew up she felt sharply the loss of all the active pleasures enjoyed by others.”

Her novel, “Paul Ferroll,” contains a touching poem which shows how deeply she felt the privations consequent on her infirmity.

“Gaeta’s orange groves were there

Half circling round the sun-kissed sea;

And all were gone and left the fair

Rich garden solitude but me.

“My feeble feet refused to tread

The rugged pathway to the bay;

Down the steep rocky way they tread

And gain the boat and glide away.

“Above me hung the golden glow

Of fruit which is at one with flowers;

Below me gleamed the ocean’s flow,

Like sapphires in the midday hours.

“A passing by there was of wings,

Of silent, flower-like butterflies;

The sudden beetle as it springs

Full of the life of southern skies.

“It was an hour of bliss to die,

But not to sleep, for ever came

The warm thin air, and, passing by,

Fanned sense and soul and heart to flame.”

A great love of nature and a yearning to tread its scenes breathe in every word of these lines, which possess an essentially pathetic charm of their own.

Mrs. Clive died in July 1873, from the result of an accident, by which her dress was set on fire when she was writing in her boudoir at Whitfield, with her books and papers around her. Her health was extremely delicate, and she had been for many years a confirmed invalid.

Her first work consisted of the well-known “IX Poems by V.” published in 1840. These poems were very favourably received, and were much praised by Dugald Stewart, by Lockhart, and by Mr. Gladstone, who says of them, “They form a small book, which is the life and
soul of a great book.” They were also very favourably reviewed in the Quarterly (66. 408-11). Her other poems, “I Watch the Heavens,” “The Queen’s Ball,” “The Vale of the Rea,” etc., have been re-published with the original “IX” in a separate volume. “Year After Year,” published in 1858, passed into two editions; but Mrs. Clive’s reputation chiefly rests upon her story of “Paul Ferroll,” published in 1855, and its sequel, “Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife.” The second story was, however, in no way equal to the first; and a subsequent novel, “John Greswold,” which appeared in 1864, was decidedly inferior to its predecessors, although containing passages of considerable literary merit.

“Paul Ferroll” has passed through several editions, and has been translated into French. It was not until the fourth edition that the concluding chapter, which brings the story down to the death of Paul Ferroll, was added.

There is little difference in date between the writings of Mrs. Crowe and those of Mrs. Archer Clive, but there is a tremendous gap between their methods and the tone of their novels. As a matter of fact they belong to different generations, in spite of their similarity of age. Mrs. Crowe belongs to the older school of fictionists,
while Mrs. Archer Clive is curiously modern. The tone and style are like the tone and style of the present day, not so much in the dialogue, which is generally stilted, after the fashion of the age in which she lived, as in the mental attitude of the characters, in the atmosphere of the books, and the elaborate, sometimes even artistic, collocation of scenes and incidents.

“Paul Ferroll” is often looked upon merely as a novel of plot, almost the first “sensational” novel, as we call it, of the century. But it is more than that. There is a distinct working out of character and a subordination of mere incident to its development; and the original ending was of so striking and pathetic a nature that we can only regret the subsequent addition, which probably the influence of others made necessary, just as in “Villette” Charlotte Bront? was obliged to soften down her own conception, in order to satisfy the conventional requirements of her friends.

The story of “Paul Ferroll” displays a good deal of constructive skill, although the mystery enfolded in its pages is more easily penetrated than would be the case in a modern sensational novel. The fact is, we have increased our knowledge of the intricacies both of human nature and of criminal law in these latter days, and our novelists
are cleverer in concealing or half revealing their mysteries than they were in “the forties.” For a few pages, at least, the reader may be deluded into the belief that Paul Ferroll is a worthy and innocent man, and that his wife has been murdered by some revengeful servant or ruffianly vagabond. But the secret of his guilt is too speedily fathomed; and from that point to the end of the book, the question turns on the possibilities of its discovery or the likelihood and effects of his own confession.

Mrs. Clive’s picture of the “bold bad man” is not so successful as that of Charlotte Bront?‘s Rochester. Rochester, with all his faults, commands sympathy, but our sympathies are alienated from Paul Ferroll when we find (in the first chapter) that he could ride out tranquilly on a summer’s morning, scold his gardener, joke with the farmer’s wife, and straighten out the farmer’s accounts, when he had just previously murdered his wife in her sleep by thrusting a sharp pointed knife through her head “below the ear.” Even although he afterwards exhibits agitation on being brought face to face with the corpse of his wife, we cannot rid ourselves of our remembrance of the insensibility which he had shown. The motive for the crime is not far to seek. He had fixed his affections on a young girl, his marriage with whom had been prevented by the woman who became his wife.
Dissension and increasing bitterness grew up between the pair; and her death was held as a release by Paul Ferroll, who hastened to bring home, as his second wife, the girl whom he had formerly loved.

No suspicion attached to him, and he is careful to provide means of defence for the labourer Franks and his wife, who have been accused of the murder. On returning home with his second wife, to whom he is passionately attached, he devotes himself entirely to literary pursuits, refusing to mix with any of the society of the place. From time to time his motive is allowed to appear; he has determined never to accept a favour from, nor become a friend of, the country gentlemen, with whom he is thrown into contact, so that they shall never have to say, supposing the truth should ever be acknowledged, that he has made his way into their houses on false pretences. But in spite of his seclusion, he lives a life of ideal happiness with his wife, Ellinor, and their beautiful little child, Janet, who, however, occupies quite a secondary place in the hearts of her father and mother, who are wrapt up in one another.

The events of the next few years are not treated in detail, although there is at one point a most interesting description of the state of a town in which cholera rages, when Paul Ferroll flings himself with heroic ardour into
every effort to stem the tide of the disease. Owing to a riot at the time of the Assizes, Ferroll fires on one of the crowd and kills him, so that by a curious coincidence, he is tried for murder, and has full experience of the horrors accompanying the situation of a criminal. He is sentenced to death but pardoned, and returns to his old life at home. The widow of the labourer who had formerly been accused of the murder of his first wife then returns to England, and Ferroll knows that her return increases the danger of discovery. He tries to escape it by going abroad, but finds on his return that Martha Franks, the widow, is in possession of some trinkets which belonged to the late Mrs. Ferroll, that she has been accused of theft and finally of the murder of her mistress. This is the very conjuncture which had always appeared possible to Paul Ferroll; the moment has come when he feels himself obliged to confess the truth, in order to save a fellow creature from unjust condemnation. He thereupon acknowledges his guilt, is at once conveyed to prison, and after a merely formal trial is condemned to death—the execution to take place, apparently, in three days, according to the inhuman custom of the time.

Ellinor dies on the day when she hears of his confession; and Janet, his daughter, now eighteen years old, and Janet’s young lover, Hugh Bartlett, are the only persons
who remain faithful to him or make efforts for his safety. Through Hugh’s efforts and the treachery of the gaoler, Paul Ferroll manages, in a somewhat improbable manner, to escape from prison; and he and Janet make their way to Spain, whence they will be able to take ship for America.

The conclusion of the story, as at first written, is particularly striking. Janet, after an illness, has come to herself: “She did not know the place where she was. The air was warm and perfumed, the windows shaded, the room quite a stranger to her. An elderly woman, with a black silk mantle on her head and over her shoulders, spoke to her. She did not understand the meaning, but she knew the words were Spanish. Then the tide of recollection rushed back, and the black cold night came fully before her, which was the last thing she recollected. ‘My father,’ she said, rising as well as she could. The woman had gone to the window and beckoned, and in another minute Mr. Ferroll stood by her bedside. ‘Can you still love me, Janet?’ said he. ‘Love you! oh yes, my father.’”

It seems a pity that a concluding chapter was afterwards added, containing a description of Janet’s life with her father in Boston, and of his dying moments and last words, which might well have been left to the imagi
nation. The original conclusion was more impressive without these details.

It is rather curious, too, that Mrs. Clive should have written another volume to explain why Paul Ferroll killed his wife; but possibly she thought further explanation was necessary, since she prefixed to the latter volume a quotation from Froude’s “Henry the Eighth”: “A man does not murder his wife gratuitously.” In this book she changes the names of all the characters except that of Ellinor. Paul Ferroll is Leslie, and his wife, Anne, is Laura. Ellinor, the young and beautiful girl out of a convent, completely enchants Leslie, whom Laura had intended to marry; and Laura contrives, by deliberate malice, so completely to sever them that he makes Laura his wife, while Ellinor returns to the convent. “Violent were the passions of the strong but bitter man; fierce the hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect. Wild was the fury of the man who believed in but one world of good, and saw the mortal moments pass away unenjoyed and irretrievable. Out of these hours arose a purpose. The reader sees the man and knows the deed. From the premises laid before him, he need not indeed conclude that even that man would do the deed, but since it was told in 1855 that the husband killed his wife, so now in 1860 it is explained why he killed her.”

This second volume is decidedly inferior to the first, but it shared in the popularity which “Paul Ferroll” had already achieved, and the author’s vigorous portraiture of characters and events was well marked in both volumes.

With her third volume, “John Greswold,” came a sudden falling off, at any rate as regards dramatic force. “John Greswold” is the autobiography of a young man who has very little story to tell and does not know how to tell it. No grip is laid on the reader’s attention; no character claims especial interest, but the thing that is remarkable in the book is the literary touch, which is far more perceptible than in the more interesting story of “Paul Ferroll.” The book is somewhat inchoate, but contains short passages of real beauty, keen shafts of observation, and an occasional flight of emotional expression, which raise the writer to a greater literary elevation than the merely sensational incidents of her earlier novels. She has gained in reflective power, but lost her dramatic instinct. Consequently “John Greswold” was less successful than “Paul Ferroll.”

The conclusion of the book, vague and indecisive, shows the author to be marked out by nature as one of the Impressionist School. It is powerful and yet indefinite; in fact it could only have been written by one with
a true poetic gift. “The seven stars that never set are going westward. The funeral car of Lazarus moves on and the three mourners follow behind. They are above the fir wood and that’s the sign of midnight. Twenty-three years ago 1 was born into this world and now the twenty-third has run out. The time is gone. The known things are all over and buried in the darkness behind. Before me lies the great blank page of the future and no writing traced upon it. But it is nothing to me. I won’t ask nor think, nor hope, nor fear about it. The leaf of the book is turned and there’s an end—the tale is told.”

“Paul Ferroll” may be considered as the precursor of the purely sensational novel, or of what may be called the novel of mystery. Miss Bront? in “Jane Eyre” uses to some extent the same kind of material, but her work is far more a study of character than the story of “Paul Ferroll” can claim to be. In “Paul Ferroll,” indeed, the analysis of motive is entirely absent. The motives that actuated Paul Ferroll are to be gathered simply from chance expressions or his actions. No description of the human heart has been attempted. The picture of the violent, revengeful, strongly passionate nature of the man is forcible enough, but it is displayed by action and
not by introspection. It is for this reason that Mrs. Clive may be placed in the forefront of the sensational novelists of the century. She anticipated the work of Wilkie Collins, of Charles Reade, of Miss Braddon, and many others of their school, in showing human nature as expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest. A vigorous representation of the outside semblance of things is the peculiar characteristic of the so-called sensational novelist; and it is in this respect that “Paul Ferroll” excels many of the novels of incident written during the first half of this century. It heralded a new departure in the ways of fiction. It set forth the delights of a mystery, the pleasures of suspense, together with a thrilling picture of “the strong man in adversity,” which has been beloved of fiction-mongers from the first days of fable in the land.

But perhaps it was successful, most of all, because it introduced its readers to a new sensation. Hitherto they had been taught to look on the hero of a novel as necessarily a noble and virtuous being, endowed with heroic, not to say angelic qualities; but this conviction was now to be reversed. The change was undoubtedly startling. Even Scott had not got beyond the tradition of a good young man as hero, a tradition which the Bront?s and Mrs. Archer Clive were destined to break down. For Scott’s
most fascinating character, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, was confessedly the villain of the piece; and the splendidly picturesque figure of Dundee was supposed to be less attractive than the tame and scrupulous personality of Henry Morton. It was a convention amongst writers that vice and crime must be repulsive, and that there was something inherently attractive in virtue—a wholesome doctrine, insufficiently preached in these days, but not strictly consistent with facts. To find, therefore, a villain—and a thorough-paced villain, the murderer of his wife—installed in the place of hero and represented as noble, handsome, and gifted, naturally thrilled the readers’ minds with a mixture of horror and delight. The substitution of villain for hero is now too common to excite remark, but it was a striking event in the days when “Paul Ferroll” was published, although there had been instances of a similar kind in the novels of the eighteenth century. The new fashion gained ground and speedily exceeded the limits which Mrs. Archer Clive would no doubt have set to it; but it is nevertheless in part to her that we owe this curious transposition of r?les, which has revolutionised the aims and objects of fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Mrs. Henry Wood

The art of the raconteur, pure and simple, is apt to be undervalued in our days. A rage for character-painting, for analysis, for subtle discrimination, down to the minutest detail, has taken hold upon us; and although we have lately returned to a taste for adventure of the more stirring kind, there is still an underlying conviction that the highest forms of literary art deal with mental states and degrees of emotions, instead of with the ordinary complications of every-day life. Hence the person who is gifted simply with a desire (and the power) of telling a story as a story, with no ulterior motive, with no ambition of intellectual achievement, the Scheherazade of our quiet evenings and holiday afternoons, is apt to take a much lower place in our estimation than she deserves.

This is especially the case with Mrs. Henry Wood. It is impossible to claim for her any lofty literary position; she is emphatically un-literary and middle-class. But she never has cause to say, “Story? God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir,” for she always has a very distinct and convincing story, which she handles with a skill which can perhaps be valued only by the professional novelist, who knows the technical difficulty of handling the numerous groups of
characters which Mrs. Wood especially affects. There is no book of hers which deals—as so many novels deal—with merely one or two characters. She takes the whole town into her story, wherever it may be. We not only know the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff and the Squire, but we are intimate (particularly intimate) with the families of the local lawyer and doctor. We are almost equally well acquainted with their bootmaker and green-grocer, while their maids and their grooms are as much living entities to us as if they had served us in our own houses. To take a great group of dramatis person?, widely differing in circumstances, in character, in individuality; to keep them all perfectly clear without confusion and without wavering; to evolve from them some central figures on which the attention of the subsidiary characters shall be unavoidably fixed, and to weave a plot of mystery, intrigue, treachery or passion which must be resolved to its ultimate elements before the last page of the book—to do all this is really an achievement of which many a writer, who values himself on his intellectual superiority to Mrs. Henry Wood, might well be proud. It is no more easy to marshal a multitude of characters in the pages of your book than to dispose bodies of soldiers in advantageous positions over an unknown country. The eye of a general is in some respects needed for both opera
tions, and the true balance and proportion of a plot are not matters which come by accident or can be accomplished without skill. It may not be literary skill, but it is skill of a kind which deserves recognition, under what name soever it may be classed.

Mrs. Henry Wood was born in Worcestershire in 1814, and died in London in 1887. She suffered from delicate health and passed the greater part of her life as an invalid. She was the daughter of Mr. Thomas Price, one of the largest glove manufacturers in the city of Worcester. She married Mr. Henry Wood, the head of a large banking and shipping firm, who retired early from work and died comparatively young. It was not until middle life that Mrs. Wood began to write; and her first work,—perhaps, of all her works, the most popular—was “East Lynne,” which first appeared in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine. Its success was prodigious and it is still one of the most popular novels upon the shelves of every circulating library. It has been translated into many languages and dramatised in different forms. It was published in 1861, and reached a fifth edition within the year.

Amongst her most popular works also are “The Channings” and “Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles,” 1862; “The Shadow of Ashlydyat,” 1863; “St. Martin’s Eve,” 1866;
“A Life’s Secret,” 1867; “Roland Yorke,” a sequel to “The Channings,” 1869; “Johnny Ludlow,” stories re-printed from the Argosy, 1874 to 1885; “Edina,” 1876; “Pomeroy Abbey,” 1878; “Court Netherleigh,” 1881; and many other stories and novels. Mrs. Wood was for many years the editor of the Argosy.

The reason of the popularity of “East Lynne” is not far to seek. It is, to begin with, a very touching story; and its central situation, which in some respects recalls the relation of the two women in Mrs. Crowe’s “Linny Lockwood,” is genuinely striking. It is perhaps not worth while to argue as to its probability. It is, of course, barely possible that a woman should come disguised into the house where she formerly reigned as mistress, and act as governess to her own children, without being recognised. As a matter of fact, she is recognised by one of the servants only on account of a momentary forgetfulness of her disguise. Her own husband, her own children, do not know her in the least; and although he and his kinswoman are vaguely troubled by what they consider a chance resemblance, they dismiss it from their minds as utterly impossible, until the day when Lady Isabel, dying in her husband’s house, begs to see him for the last time. The changes in her personal appearance,
her lameness, for instance, and the greyness of her hair, are very ingeniously contrived; but it certainly seems almost impossible that two or three years should have so completely changed her that nobody should even guess at her identity.

The present generation complains that the pathos of the story is overdone; but even if detail after detail is multiplied, so as to harrow the reader’s feelings almost unnecessarily, the fact still remains that Mrs. Wood has imagined as pitiful and tragic a situation as could possibly exist in the domestic relations of man and woman. The erring wife returning to find her husband married to another woman, to nurse one of her own children through his last illness without being recognised by him or by her husband, and to die at last in her husband’s house with the merest shadow of consolation in the shape of his somewhat grudging forgiveness, presents us with a figure which cannot fail to be extremely pathetic.

The faults of Mrs. Henry Wood’s style, its occasional prolixity and commonplaceness, the iteration of the moral reflections, as well as the triteness and feebleness sometimes of the dialogue, very nearly disappear from view when we resign ourselves to a consideration of this tragic situation. It cannot be denied that there is just a touch of mawkishness now and then, just a slight ring of false sentiment in the
pity accorded to Lady Isabel, who was certainly one of the silliest young women that ever existed in the realms of fiction. Nevertheless the spectacle of the mother nursing the dying boy, who does not know her, is one that will always appeal to the heart of the ordinary reader, and will go far to account for the extraordinary popularity of “East Lynne.”

A novelist of more aspiring genius would perhaps have concentrated our attention exclusively upon Lady Isabel’s feelings and tragic fate. Here Mrs. Wood’s failings, as well as her capacities, reveal themselves. She sees the tragic side of things, but she sees also (and perhaps too much) the pathos of small incidents, the importance of trifles. She spares us no jot of the sordid side of life. And in a novel of the undoubted power of “East Lynne” there are some details which might have been spared us. The rapacity of the creditors who seize the body of Lady Isabel’s father, the gossip of the servants, the suspicions of Afy Hallijohn, and, in short, almost all the underplot respecting Richard Hare—these matters are superfluous. The reader’s eye ought to be kept more attentively upon the heroine and her relations with Mr. Carlisle and Sir Francis. The one inexplicable point in the story is Lady Isabel’s desertion of her husband for a man whom she must despise. It is never hinted that she had for one
moment lost her heart to Francis Levison. She left her husband out of sheer pique and jealousy, loving him ardently all the while, although, in her ignorance and folly, she scarcely knew that she loved him. Here the story is weak. We feel that Mrs. Wood sacrifices probability in her effort to obtain a striking situation. For the strongest part of “East Lynne” is the description of what occurs when Lady Isabel returns as a governess to her old home, when her husband, supposing her to be dead, has married his old love Barbara Hare. To this situation, everything is subordinate; and it is in itself so strong that we cannot wonder if the author strains a point or two in order to achieve it.

But the curious, the characteristic, thing is that even in this supreme crisis of the story, Mrs. Wood’s essential love of detail, and of somewhat commonplace detail, asserts itself over and over again. The incidents she takes pains to narrate are rational enough. There is no reason why pathos should be marred because a dying child asks for cheese with his tea, or because the sensible stepmother condemns Lucy to a diet of bread and water for some trifling offence, or because Miss Cornelia Carlisle displays her laughable eccentricities at Lady Isabel’s bedside. The pathos is marred now and then, not because of these trifling yet irritating incidents, but because we get an
impression that the author has forced a number of utterly prosaic people into a tragic situation for which they are eminently unfitted. The ducking of Sir Francis Levison in the horsepond is an example of this. The man was a heartless villain and murderer, yet he is presented to us in a scene of almost vulgar farce as part of his retribution. If the author had herself realised the insufficiency of her characters to rise to the tragic height demanded of them, she might have achieved either satire or intense realism; but there is a certain smugness in Mrs. Henry Wood’s acceptance of the commonplaces of life which makes us feel her an inadequate painter of tragedy. We close the book with a suspicion that she preferred the intolerable Barbara to the winsome and erring Lady Isabel.

“East Lynne” owes half its popularity, however, to that reaction against inane and impossible goodness which has taken place since the middle of the century. Just as Rochester and Paul Ferroll are protests against the conventional hero, so Lady Isabel is a protest against the conventional heroine—and a portent of her time! We were all familiar with beauty and virtue in distress, from Clarissa Harlowe downwards. It is during later years that we have become conversant with beauty and guilt as objects of our sympathy and commiseration.

The moralists of the time—Saturday Reviewers, and others—perceived the change from one point of view, and were not slow to comment on it. Their opposition to the modern novel was chiefly based upon what they called a glorification of vice and crime. Now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, we can see very well that no more praise of wrong-doing was implied by Mrs. Wood’s portrait of Lady Isabel than by Thackeray’s keen-edged delineation of Becky Sharp or George Eliot’s sorrowful sympathy with Maggie Tulliver. What was at first set down as a new and revolutionary kind of admiration for weakness and criminality soon resolved itself into a manifestation of that remarkable Zeit-Geist which has made itself felt in every department of human life. It is that side of the modern spirit which leads to the comprehension of the sufferings of others, to a new pity for their faults and weaknesses, a new breadth of tolerance, and a generous reluctance to judge harshly of one’s fellow man. It has crept into the domain of law, of religious thought, of philanthropic effort, and it cannot be excluded from the realms of literature and art. It is, in fact, the scientific spirit, which says “there’s nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so;” which refuses to dogmatise or hastily to condemn; which looks for the motives and reasons and causes of men’s actions,
and knows the infinite gradations between folly and wisdom, between black and white, between right and wrong. If science had done nothing else, it would be an enormous gain that she should teach us to suspend our judgment, to weigh evidence, and thus to pave the way for that diviner spirit by which we refuse to consider any sinner irreclaimable or any criminal beyond the reach of human sympathy.

“East Lynne” was received with general acclamation, and has been translated, it is said, into every known tongue, including Parsee and Hindustanee. “Some years ago,” her son states, “one of the chief librarians in Madrid informed Mrs. Henry Wood that the most popular book on his shelves, original or translated, was ‘East Lynne.’ Not very long ago it was translated into Welsh and brought out in a Welsh newspaper. It has been dramatised and played so often that had the author received a small royalty from every representation it was long since estimated that it would have returned to her no less than a quarter of a million sterling, but she never received anything. . . . In the English Colonies the sale of the various works increased steadily year by year. In France the story has been dramatised and is frequently played in Paris and the Provinces.” On its first appearance, an enthusiastic review in the Times produced a tremendous effect upon the
public; the libraries were besieged for copies, and the printers had to work night and day upon new editions. In fact the success of “East Lynne” was one of the most remarkable literary incidents of the century.

The most popular of Mrs. Henry Wood’s books, next to “East Lynne,” seem to be “Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles” and “The Channings.” These are stories of more entirely quiet domestic interest than “East Lynne.” The situations are less tragical and the plots less complicated. Mrs. Halliburton’s quiet endurance of the privations and difficulties of her life, the pathetic life and death of her little Janey, and the ultimate success and achievements of her sons, linger in the memory of the reader as a pleasant and homely picture of the vicissitudes of English life.

There is a more humorous element in “The Channings,” from the introduction of so many youthful characters—the boys of the Cathedral school, notably Bywater, who is the incarnation of good-humoured impudence, giving brightness to the tone of the story. The schoolboys are in this, as in many other of Mrs. Wood’s novels, particularly well drawn. They are not prigs; they are anything but angels, in spite of their white surplices and their beautiful voices; and their escapades and adventures in
the old cloisters were wild enough to make the old monks turn in their graves. No doubt many incidents of this kind were drawn from life and owe their origin to Mrs. Wood’s acquaintance with the Choir School belonging to Worcester Cathedral.

It was not the only occasion on which the manufacturer’s daughter turned her knowledge of Worcester to good account. It may be said that the majority of her novels are coloured, more or less, by the author’s lengthy residence in a cathedral town. It was in 1874 that the first series of short stories, supposed to be narrated by Johnny Ludlow, began in the Argosy. Johnny Ludlow is a young lad belonging to a Worcestershire family, who is supposed to narrate incidents which have come under his observation at school or at home. Some of the stories thus produced are striking and vigorous; others are of less merit, but all are distinguished by the strong individuality of the characters, and by the fidelity with which Worcester and Worcestershire life are described. It now seems extraordinary that there should have been the slightest doubt as to the authorship of these stories, for Mrs. Wood’s peculiarities of style are observable on every page. Mr. Charles W. Wood, her son, remarks that “no one knew, or even guessed at, the authorship;” but this is a rather exaggerated statement, as we have reason to
be aware that the author was recognised at once by critics of discrimination. Still the general public were for some time deceived, imagining Johnny Ludlow to be a new author, whose stories they occasionally contrasted with those of Mrs. Henry Wood, and were said to prefer, probably much to the novelist’s own amusement.

The great variety of plot and incident found in the “Johnny Ludlow” stories is their most remarkable feature. The same characters are, of course, introduced again and again, as Johnny Ludlow moves in a circle of country squires, clergy, and townspeople. But it is astonishing with how much effect the stories of different lives can be placed in the same setting, and with what infinite changes the life of a country district can be reproduced. The characters are clearly drawn and often very well contrasted, and no doubt Mrs. Henry Wood’s memories of her earlier life in the district contributed largely to the success of this series. The first series ran in the Argosy and were re-printed, 1874-1880, while a second and third series maintained their popularity in 1881 and in 1885.

It has been computed that Mrs. Wood wrote not fewer than from three to four hundred short stories, every one
of them with a distinct and carefully worked-out plot, in addition to nearly forty long novels: a proof, if any were wanted, of the extreme fertility of her imagination and the facility of her pen.

It has, however, sometimes been wondered why Mrs. Henry Wood’s works should have attained so great a circulation when they are conspicuously wanting in the higher graces of literary style or intellectual attainment. The reason appears to lie chiefly in certain qualities of her writings which appeal in an entirely creditable way to the heart and mind of the British public. Mrs. Wood’s stories, although sensational in plot, are purely domestic. They are concerned chiefly with the great middle-class of England, and she describes lower middle-class life with a zest and a conviction and a sincerity which we do not find in many modern writers, who are apt to sneer at the bourgeois habits and modes of thought found in so many English households. Now the bourgeoisie does not like to be sneered at. If it eats tripe and onions, and wears bright blue silk dresses, and rejoices in dinner-tea, it nevertheless considers its fashions to be as well worth serious attention as those of the Upper Ten. Mrs. Henry Wood never satirises, she only records. It is her fidelity to truth, to the smallest domestic detail, which has charmed and will continue to charm, a large circle of readers,
who are inclined perhaps to glory in the name of “Philistine.”

Then there is the loftier quality of a high, if somewhat conventional, moral tone. Mrs. Wood’s novels are emphatically on the side of purity, honesty, domestic life and happiness. There is no book of hers which does not breathe this spirit, or can be said to be anything but harmless. Her character-drawing has merit; but it is not to be wondered at, considering the number of works she produced, that she should repeat the same type over and over again with a certain monotonous effect. The sweet and gentle wife and mother, not too strong in character, but perfectly refined and conscientious, such as Maria in the “Shadow of Ashlydyat”; the “perfect gentleman,” noble, upright, proud, generally with blue eyes and straight features, like Oswald Cray and Mr. Carlisle and Mr. North—these are characters with which we continually meet and of which, admirable in themselves as they are, we sometimes weary. But although the portraiture is not very subtle, it is on the whole faithful to life.

Then there is that especial group of Mrs. Wood’s stories already mentioned, into which an element of freshness, then somewhat unusual in fiction, is largely introduced. These are the stories which have much to do with boys and
boy-life—notably “The Channings,” “Roland Yorke,” “Orville College,” “Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles,” “Lady Grace,” and the “Johnny Ludlow” series. These books, less sensational in plot than many of Mrs. Wood’s novels, have been peculiarly successful, perhaps because the scenes and characters are largely drawn from real life. Mrs. Wood’s long residence at Worcester made her familiar with the life of the college boys, who haunt the precincts of the stately old cathedral, and she has introduced her knowledge of their pranks with very great effect. Her descriptions of the old city itself, of the streets, of the cloisters, of the outlying villages and byways, are remarkably accurate, and remind one of the use which Charles Dickens made, in the same way, of Rochester and its cathedral.

It is really extraordinary to see how large a part of Mrs. Wood’s work is concerned with Worcester, and how well she could render, when she chose, the dialogue of the country and the customs of its people. The reason is, of course, that these things are true; that she gives us in these books a part of her own experience, of her own life. Another group of her books is interesting for a similar reason—the novels in which she deals with business life, and the relations of employers to their men. Such are “A Life’s Secret,” which is the very interesting history of
a strike; “The Foggy Night at Offord,” “Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles,” and several of the “Johnny Ludlow” stories, where incidents of the manufacturing districts of England have been introduced with very good effect, Mrs. Wood’s own connection with glove manufacturers in Worcester having supplied her with ample materials for this kind of fiction. In “A Life’s Secret” there is an extremely clever picture of the lower type of workman, and some excellent sketches of poor people and of the misery they suffer during the strike and subsequent lockout.

The third class of Mrs. Wood’s books consists of what may be called works of pure imagination, with sometimes a slight touch of the romantic and supernatural—such as “The Shadow of Ashlydyat,” “St. Martin’s Eve,” “Lady Adelaide’s Oath,” “Lord Oakburn’s Daughters,” “George Canterbury’s Will,” etc. From the literary point of view these books are less worthy than the others, but they are particularly well constructed and ingenious. There are no loose ends, and Mrs. Wood’s skill in weaving a plot seems never to have diminished to the last day of her life. But her earlier and perhaps simpler work had more real value than even the books which display such great constructive skill. Mrs. Wood would possibly have taken a higher place amongst English novelists if she had avoided
mere sensation, and confined herself to what she could do well—namely, the faithful and realistic rendering of English middle class life. She has had, perhaps, more popularity than any novelist of the Victorian age; and her popularity is justified by the wholesomeness and purity of her moral tone, the ingenuity and sustained interest of her plots, and the quiet truthfulness, in many cases, of her delineation of character.

Her faults are those of the class for which she wrote, her merits are theirs also. It is no small praise to say that she never revelled in dangerous situations, nor justified the wrong-doing of any of her characters. When one considers the amount of work that she produced, and the nature of that work, it is amazing to reflect on the variety of incident and character which she managed to secure. Her plots often turned upon sad or even tragic events, but the sadness and the tragedy were natural and simple. There was nothing unwholesome about her books. She will probably be read and remembered longer than many writers of a far higher literary standing; and although fashions, even in fiction, have greatly changed since the days when “East Lynne” and “The Channings” made their mark, there is no doubt that they hold their place in the affections of many an English novel-reader. They neither aim high nor fall low: their gentle mediocrity
is soothing; and they are not without those gleams of insight and intensity which reveal the gift of the born story-teller—a title to which Mrs. Henry Wood may well lay claim.