Perhaps most niggling of all is the complaint that the novel is missing a conclusion, a complaint the reader will nevertheless feel when coming to the end of Wives and Daughters. Elizabeth Gaskell died before she was able to lend her pen to the ending, and while readers can have no doubt of the content of the ending, it is missed nonetheless. The novel ends thus on an odd and unintended note, but one that, owing to the author’s sudden death, takes on added significance. The novel’s last words belong to Mrs. Gibson:“You might have allowed me to beg for a new gown for you, Molly, when you knew how much I admired that figured silk at Brown’s the other day. And now, of course, I can’t be so selfish as to get it for myself, and you to have nothing.You should learn to understand the wishes of other people. Still, on the whole, you are a dear, sweet girl, and I only wish—well, I know what I wish; only dear papa does not like it to be talked about. And now cover me up close, and let me go to sleep, and dream about my dear Cynthia and my new shawl!” (pp. 643-644).
The unintentional humor behind the ever-self-centered philosophy of Mrs. Gibson is heightened here, now that the reader knows that Molly will soon be securely kept from daily exposure to it. That which “dear papa” does not “talk about” is the future that Molly is then contemplating, and that the reader, denied the author’s vision, must necessarily contemplate as well. The urge to fill in the blanks, so to speak, is a general impulse of the reader, and one that Frederick Greenwood explicitly understood when he wrote his “Concluding Remarks: by the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine.” The impulse is one that its filmic adaptors felt as well. The BBC film, otherwise quite true to the narrative, concludes on a note that is extra-textuaclass="underline" Molly stands in breeches, and looks out over a sublime African vista with Roger Hamley at her side. Whether one wishes to applaud or scold the costume designer for the breeches and the director for the interpretation behind the final scene, the reader of Wives and Daughters will understand the impulse and, more to the point, celebrate the delights of a novel that wanted to be nothing more, and perhaps nothing less, than “an every-day story.”
Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City and is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford University Press, 2003) as well as articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. King received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1998. She also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
CHAPTER 1
The Dawn of a Gala Day
To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room—a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o‘clock struck, when she wakened of herself ‘as sure as clockwork,’ and left the household very little peace afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was, the room was full of sunny warmth and light.
On the drawers opposite to the little white dimity bed in which Molly Gibson lay, was a primitive kind of bonnet-stand on which was hung a bonnet, carefully covered over from any chance of dust with a large cotton handkerchief; of so heavy and serviceable a texture that if the thing underneath it had been a flimsy fabric of gauze and lace and flowers, it would have been altogether ‘scomfished’ a (again to quote from Betty’s vocabulary). But the bonnet was made of solid straw, and its only trimming was a plain white ribbon put over the crown, and forming the strings. Still, there was a neat little quillingb inside, every plait of which Molly knew, for had she not made it herself the evening before, with infinite pains? and was there not a little blue bow in this quilling, the very first bit of such finery Molly had ever had the prospect of wearing?
Six o’clock now! the pleasant, brisk ringing of the church bells told that; calling every one to their daily work, as they had done for hundreds of years. Up jumped Molly, and ran with her bare little feet across the room, and lifted off the handkerchief and saw once again the bonnet—the pledge of the gay bright day to come. Then to the window, and after some tugging she opened the casement, and let in the sweet morning air. The dew was already off the flowers in the garden below, but still rising from the long hay-grass in the meadows directly beyond. At one side lay the little town of Hollingford,1 into a street of which Mr. Gibson’s front door opened; and delicate columns and little puffs of smoke were already beginning to rise from many a cottage chimney, where some housewife was already up and preparing breakfast for the breadwinner of the family.
Molly Gibson saw all this, but all she thought about it was, ‘Oh! it will be a fine day! I was afraid it never, never would come; or that, if it ever came, it would be a rainy day!’ Five-and-forty years ago,2 children’s pleasures in a country town were very simple, and Molly had lived for twelve long years without the occurrence of any event so great as that which was now impending. Poor child! it is true that she had lost her mother, which was a jar to the whole tenour of her life; but that was hardly an event in the sense referred to; and besides, she had been too young to be conscious of it at the time. The pleasure she was looking forward to to-day was her first share in a kind of annual festival in Hollingford.
The little straggling town faded away into country on one side, close to the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady Cumnor: ‘the earl’ and ‘the countess,’c as they were always called by the inhabitants of the town; where a very pretty amount of feudal feeling still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways, droll enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance at the time. It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, 3 but a good deal of liberal talk took place occasionally between two or three of the more enlightened freeholders living in Hollingford; and there was a great Whig family in the county who, from time to time, came forward and contested the election with the rival Tory family of Cumnor.4 One would have thought that the above-mentioned liberal-talking inhabitants of Hollingford would have, at least, admitted the possibility of their voting for the Hely-Harrison who represented their own opinions. But no such thing. ‘The earl’ was lord of the manor, and owner of much of the land on which Hollingford was built; he and his household were fed, and doctored, and, to a certain measure, clothed by the good people of the town; their fathers’ grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son of Cumnor Towers, and following in the ancestral track, every man-jack in the place gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of such chimeras as political opinion.
This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great landowners over humbler neighbours in those days before railways,d and it was well for a place where the powerful family, who thus overshadowed it, were of so respectable a character as the Cumnors. They expected to be submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of the townspeople was accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and they would have stood still in amazement, and with a horrid memory of the French sansculottese who were the bugbears of their youth, had any inhabitant of Hollingford ventured to set his will or opinions in opposition to those of the earl. But, yielded all that obeisance, they did a good deal for the town and were generally condescending, and often thoughtful and kind, in their treatment of their vassals. Lord Cumnor was a forbearing landlord; putting his steward a little on one side sometimes, and taking the reins into his own hands now and then, much to the annoyance of the agent, who was, in fact, too rich and independent to care greatly for preserving a post where his decisions might any day be overturned by my lord’s taking a fancy to go ‘pottering’ (as the agent irreverently expressed it in the sanctuary of his own home), which, being interpreted, meant that occasionally the earl asked his own questions of his own tenants, and used his own eyes and ears in the management of the smaller details of his property. But his tenants liked my lord all the better for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a little time for gossip, which he contrived to combine with the failing of personal intervention between the old land-steward and the tenantry. But, then, the countess made up by her unapproachable dignity for this weakness of the earl’s. Once a year she was condescending. She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should call ‘industrial,’5 where girls are taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;—white caps, white tippets, check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtsies, and ‘please, ma’ams,’ being de rigueur.