Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

1. Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen 2. Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politcs of Literacy Jean Fernandez

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Jean Fernandez

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fernandez, Jean, 1956Victorian servants, class, and the politics of literacy / by Jean Fernandez. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Servants in literature. 3. Domestics in literature. 4. Literacy in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Domestics—Great Britain—Biography—History and criticism. 7. Domestics—Education—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Working class—Books and reading—Great Britain—History—19th century. 9. Literacy—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR878.S47T39 2003 820.9'355—dc22 2009011138 ISBN 0-203-87088-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-80438-8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87088-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-80438-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87088-4 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

vii ix

1

Introduction

2

Literary Handmaids: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maid Servant (1841)

29

Oral Pleasures: Repression and Desire in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Story (1862)

54

Obedient Servants of Empire: Narrating Imperial History in William Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868)

87

3

4

5

1

“Master’s Made Away With”: Servant Voices and Narrational Politics in R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

106

6

The Ventriloquized Servant

124

7

In Their Own Voice: Servants and Autobiography

147

Conclusion

178

Notes Bibliography Index

181 193 205

Figures

1.1

The Idle Servant, Punch, January 24, 1863

14

1.2

The Force of Habit, Punch, September 29, 1883

15

2.1

The Servants’ Magazine

43

3.1

The Servants’ Magazine

55

6.1

Pamphlet 1850

133

7.1

The Servants’ Magazine

148

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the help and support I received from many well-wishers along the way. At the University of Iowa, Garrett Stewart encouraged and critiqued my project, from its very inception. Florence Boos introduced to me to working-class autobiography, and Teresa Mangum provided a wonderful training in culture studies. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, I am indebted to Jessica Berman for her judicious advice at different stages of the project. Lucille McCarthy was generous with resources and expertise on literacy, and Helen Burgess provided timely assistance. A grant from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County enabled research at the British Library. The staff of the University of Iowa Library; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Library; the British Library; the library of the University of Bristol; and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore also deserve thanks. I thank Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce “Master’s Made Away With: Servant Voices and Narrational Politics in R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” from LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. To my parents and my brother, I owe a life’s debt of gratitude. In Baltimore, Dorothy Ludwig and Bruce Keating cheered me on, and Randy Gaul provided invaluable technical and moral support.

1

Introduction Hire no servant who cannot read or write. —Dr. William Kitchiner, The Housekeeper’s Oracle

In 1829, William Kitchiner, author of several best-selling advice manuals, remonstrated quite solemnly against the employment of illiterate servants.1 An Etonian and a medical doctor, Kitchener, by the norms of our own times, might seem an unlikely authority on household management. But the prestige of Kitchiner’s status as professional gentleman, suggests that home science was becoming a serious business by the start of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the elaborate structure of servant hierarchies laid out in home management manuals by authors such as Isabella Beeton, attest to a growing perception that an efficient, well-trained, labor force was necessary for the production and sustenance of “sweet order”—an attribute of domesticity that Ruskin, writing a few decades after Kitchiner, would extravagantly sentimentalize in Of Queen’s Gardens. What is particularly noteworthy, however, is that, in addition to the traditional list of virtues required of servants, such as honesty, faithfulness and diligence, literacy begins to figure as a new and desirable pre-requisite for proficiency in domestic service. After his admonition, Kitchiner, in a legalistic vein, enjoins his reader that when new servants arrive, “the whole routine of their Business be given them in Writing, with full and particular directions about everything which they are expected to do” (126). 2 In stressing the essentially literate character of domestic culture, Kitchiner’s text reflects a growing public awareness of the impact of mass literacy upon the home. What could servants have possibly contributed to the Victorian home by their powers of reading and writing? And what dramas of literacy could be staged in fiction and non-fiction, around masters and servants? Kitchiner’s literate functionaries calculate grocery accounts, follow recipes, and obey written orders from their employers. But in doing so, they remain always content to allow the mistress’s hand to inscribe and dictate their uneventful lives. As obedient practitioners of a literacy that enables them to know their place, they are sharply distinct from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the most famous literate servant of the previous century. Pamela merits her elevated station in life ostensibly by the practice of virtue. Her narrative would have failed in its claims for reward, however, were it not for her literacy skills

2

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

that become the most subtly persuasive, if overlooked testimony of her entitlement to bourgeois status. In literature, apprehensions over servant illiteracy were not entirely new. Casting back several centuries to the Elizabethan Age, the passionate “starcrossed” love of Romeo and Juliet, we may recall, owed its beginning to Lord Capulet’s servant, who could not read his master’s invitation list. He naively proffered it to the young blades of the house of Montague, thus triggering their plans for gate crashing the ball. Shakespeare’s servant vanishes thereafter from the play, with no story of his own to tell, his social inconsequentiality the ironic index of his role as an agent of indifferent fate. In this, he was not atypical of literary representations of his profession. 3 Literate or illiterate, servants, for the most part, languished as “minor” characters within literary texts, without narratives of their own, unless coopted like Pamela into bourgeois status and the individualism it promised. And, indeed, how could a class restricted within the domestic sphere by routine and repetition, and widely denied access to history, possess narrative capability, given narrative’s inevitable connections with the teleological? 4 Causality, progression, and closure, necessary to any orthodox act of narration, do not manifest themselves very strongly in lives that remain bound within the monotony of the household’s daily cycle. In the eighteenth century, Pamela’s acquisition of a personal narrative of her own goes uncontested. By dint of her own moral resolve, she rewrites a classic servant narrative of seduction and betrayal, in order to realign herself as speaking subject within the marriage plot. By contrast, a hundred years later, advice manuals such as The Servant’s Behaviour Book counsels: “A servant’s voice should never be heard by the ladies and gentlemen of the house except when necessary and then as little as possible” (31). 5 Verbal restraint, if not outright silence had become a defi ning characteristic of the good servant in advice manuals, household guides, sermons, and tracts of the times, linked, as we shall see, to the management of their literacy practices. Servants were the largest category of workers for the greater part of Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1891, census figures revealed that there were 1,386,187 females and 58,527 males in domestic service, out of a total population of twenty-nine million in England and Wales. By 1901, at the close of Queen Victoria’s reign, more than one and a half million persons were in service.6 With the great changes that agricultural reform, industrialism, and capitalism ushered in, class, as both a socio-economic category and a rhetorical construct, began to impact household culture, displacing the older, more fi xed categories of estates and orders that had frozen society into what had once seemed like enduring stratifications. In the midst of social flux, for prosperous, upwardly mobile Victorians, servants, were now signifiers of social respectability. Hence, census figures demonstrated that the servant-keeping classes now varied greatly in station, from modest, lower-middle-class homes that employed a single maid to do all work, to the great houses with their elaborate retinues of stewards

Introduction

3

and butlers, scullery maids, and footmen.7 Not surprising, therefore, is the proliferation of sermons, tracts, and periodical literature that target the servant for “schooling” in politeness, refi ned speech, and spirituality. Increasingly, the “good” servant came to be socially, culturally and psychologically crucial for the maintenance of an employer’s class identity, while the educability of the servant class became an obsessive concern that was mirrored in literary and nonliterary texts of the age. Images of nineteenth-century hysteria over mass literacy and cultural illiteracy conjure up an Arnoldian “populace” rioting in Hyde Park; Charles Kingsley’s poet-agitator, Alton Locke; George Eliot’s Felix Holt castigating Jack who can’t read; and Gissing’s Grub Street.8 But, away from so-called public space, an alternative strategy for domesticating literacy would develop around the figure of the Victorian servant. Servants became the focus of a debate by Victorian elites over the hopes and possibilities domesticity held out for producing that mythical beast, the benignly literate working-class subject. The cult of domesticity that established the home as a spiritual and cultural sanctuary suggested a possible space where a wholesome literacy could be acquired and practiced by the working classes, transforming them into an amenable citizenry. Presided over by the angel in the house, the home was a guaranteed zone of respectable literacy. The reality, however, was somewhat at odds with the myth. The domestic world was a space strewn with texts both sacred and profane, where the pages of fiction, periodicals, and newspapers were as routinely consumed as texts from Scripture. In the nineteenth century, servants, more than any other category of worker, were witnesses to the literacy practices of the middle classes, which they could aspire to, imitate, or parody. Servants observed and assisted the writing practices of their employers, who kept journals and diaries, penned letters, and sometimes, wrote for publication. Conversely, as residential servants with rising levels of education became a regular feature of households, middle-class society was compelled to live in close proximity with working-class literacy, a new and unusual state of affairs. Census takers in Victorian England measured literacy by that most rudimentary of standards: the ability to sign one’s name in a marriage register. In 1840, at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, 35% of all males and almost 50% of all females had been unable to produce a signature.9 By 1910, those figures had fallen to 1% for both sexes. Mass literacy was one of the most dramatic developments of the age, and a thriving print culture and popular press in the Victorian age testify not only to growing numbers of readers, but more importantly for our purposes, to public concern over how this phenomenon might be managed for the social good. In responding to working-class literacy within households, Victorian elites envisioned domesticity as formulating its own strategies of containment, whereby pernicious literacy could be discouraged, if not outright forbidden, by the enforcement of pious literacy practices upon the serving classes. Victorian elites fixated on this binary, with uncanny consistency over the better

4

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

part of sixty years. Formulations of pious literacy drew upon Protestant, evangelical, spiritual traditions of Bible study, household prayer, and sermon reading. The miraculous efficacy of the Logos, whether read, studied, or transcribed, in schooling the restive reader in servitude, especially when performed within the sacred precincts of the Christian home, was a cultural superstition that died hard. In its secular avatar, wholesome literacy conferred efficiency and grace upon all who subscribed to its cultural influences. The consolations of literacy, its promise of rendering the citizen more tractable to social discipline, and its alleged power to redeem a secular society, were a counterweight to the horrors that the spectacle of mass literacy’s allegiances with low culture invoked. To train the laboring hand to handle the pen, and perform the delicate, controlled motions that were required for a cursive script, was to domesticate the brute body into exquisite civility. Acquiring a “good hand” was therefore as much about the acquisition of character as it was an exercise in the skillful wielding of the pen. Harnessed into domestic culture by aprons, caps, and uniforms, sexually policed and instructed in household practices, the servant was a test case of working-class amenability to embourgeoisement. If literacy was a distinguishing signifier of respectability, then its acquisition by servants signaled their assent to the rising cultural hegemony of England’s middle classes. Conversely, pernicious literacy or “ill/literacy” in servants could be the sign of their inherently crass, and implacably antagonistic character, as a class. The servant as consumer of sensation fiction, or brazen author of ungrammatical texts, was a cultural obscenity, and, at times, a specter of revolution. Given the wide currency of the master-servant binary, domestic workers were semantically, for large numbers of people, the most obvious representatives of the working classes. But the delinquent servant literate was also a transgressor and colonizer of cultural spaces associated with respectability. Low culture, imported into the household through improprieties of reading and writing on the part of its menials, possessed insidious powers of cultural contamination, and could interrogate the moral center. Pernicious literacy was, in fact, inherently pornographic and revolutionary, given its rejection of religious restraint and its embrace of the secular ego. Nevertheless, both categories remained strenuously contested, by masters and servants alike, over the greater part of Victoria’s reign. Masters and servants were condemned to a mutual awareness of each other’s literacy practices, and, quite inevitably, of functioning as each other’s subjects and audiences. Thus an on-going dialectic between servants and the servant-keeping classes developed over the former’s capacity for the use and abuse of reading and writing, staged in narratives purportedly and actually produced by the literate servant in fiction, non-fiction and life-writing. Consequently, narrative in all three genres grew increasingly reflective over its status as oral or written activity performed by either socially dominant “bourgeois” subjects, or subversive, neo-literate subalterns, who refused to “serve” the interests of their masters.

Introduction

5

In an era that was famous for its paranoia over mass literacy, how might its concerns about servant literacy shed light on the nexus between class and the will to narrative as played out in representations of servant narrative as either “oral” or “written,” in fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography? In configuring the servant as aspiring neo-literate, how did the nineteenth-century novel subtly critique the dominance of the writingfortified bourgeois subject that it so often overtly celebrated, and whose stories it generally appeared eager to relate? How might these texts explore servants’ narratives for questions regarding literacy’s relationship with narrative power and the allegiances writing forged with specific class interests? How did servant literacy come to be staged in nonfiction, such as diaries and best-selling pamphlets of the time, and what class anxieties or larger political agendas did such ventriloquized representations of servant literacy serve? Could servants forge autobiographical identities by self-consciously exploring how rhetorical displays of literacy could shape narrative form and modify generic dynamics in life writing? Traditionally, servants were accorded a propensity for tale telling that rooted them fi rmly within a culture of orality. Victorian novelists often attributed this talent and tendency to their real-life servants. A servant’s narrative often fell within the province of myth, legend, and folklore. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, records how Tabby, the Bronte nurse, was a repository of folk belief and folk history for the region, and given to blaming industrialism for driving away the fairy and elf inhabitants of the Yorkshire glens: this, despite her religious affiliations to literacy and the Book, as a prayer leader in the local Methodist church.10 Alison Cunningham, the nurse of Robert Louis Stevenson, terrified the young boy with colorful tales of ghosts, goblins, hellfi re, and damnation for the wicked, according to biographers such as Phillip Callow.11 Dickens’s childhood nurse offered blood-curdling recitatives that were a source of endless fascination. More than any other working-class category in the nineteenth century, servants were perceived as richly, at times subversively, imaginative, while also being frequently and perniciously associated with the practices of fiction, whether oral or written. Perhaps nobody expresses better than Dickens the different valences that the servant held for the Victorian gentleman, in regard to such inter-related concerns as reading, writing, and story telling. In the September 8, 1860 issue of All the Year Round, Dickens recaptured the effects of servant narrative upon him in childhood, in “Nurse’s Stories,” an autobiographical essay that reminisced over his nurse Mary Weller’s bed time fictions. Dickens nostalgically recalls: I never was in Robinson Crusoe’s Island, yet I frequently return there. . . . I was never in the robber’s cave where Gil Blas lived, but I often go back there and fi nd the trap door just as heavy as it used to be. . . . I was never in Don Quixote’s study . . . yet you couldn’t

6

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy move a book in it without my knowledge. . . . So with Damascus and Baghdad, and Brobdingnag . . .and Lilliput and Laputa and the Nile and Abyssinia and the Ganges . . . it is the affair of my life to keep them intact and I am always going back to them. (NS, 171–173)12

However, the novelist then proceeds to speak of places that he would rather not revisit in memory—places “that I was introduced to by my nurse before I was six years old, and used to be forced to go back to at night without at all wanting to go. If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we should fi nd our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to against our wills” (173). Dickens draws a distinct contrast between his reader-relations with works of canonical fiction, characterized by a pleasurable and volitional exercise of imaginative power, and the passivity, emasculation, and loss of control infl icted upon the middle-class male psyche by the narrating servant. The inescapable authority of the servant narrator destroys the poise of the literary sophisticate amidst his library, while interrogating fictional biases in favor of realism and rationality. The delightful and inviting terrain of Dickens’s literary masters are a contrast to the traumatic, fearful “dark corners” of the unconscious’s interiors, troped here as untended, disorderly, domestic space, over which the servant presides. Renamed Mercy, Dickens’s fictional nurse relates bloodcurdling tales of a Captain Murderer, who married women only to chop them to bits, pepper and salt them into pies, and devour them with relish. He fi nally meets his end when his last victim obtains her revenge by consuming a deadly poison of toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees, causing the captain to swell after engorging on her remains until he bursts, whereupon his horses go mad and trample every remaining member of his household to death. Menaced by reading relations that are an ironic reversal of established power relations between master and maidservant, the reader as literate, adult male seeks in vain to be delivered from the realm of the fantastic and the gothic through disbelief, only to be told by his nurse at the end of the piece that every one of her stories had happened to either a family member or herself. The servant narrator for Dickens in “Nurse’s Stories” emerges as a rival novelist, terrorizing the bourgeois imagination. As witnesses to the heimlich, that defi ning feature that characterized the middle-class home of the nineteenth century, servants acquired an access to an altogether new form of sensational tale. The association of the servant with life below stairs, and the realm of the repressed, for Dickens, would fi nd more sophisticated manifestation in Little Dorrit, where Affrey Flintwich dreams of household horrors too awful to name, until the moment of revelation arrives, when she seizes narrative initiative to affi rm that the nightmarish events that haunted her consciousness were entirely real. The servant possessed

Introduction

7

a narrative capability that could endanger the integrity of the self-made individual engaged in performing respectability, and the coherence of his world order. But, the servant’s proclivity for sensational narrative acquired a new edge with the acquisition of literacy. Partaking of the prestige of the written, servants’ tales could not be easily dismissed as the fanciful workings of a “primitive” imagination. Indeed, narratives in print, for consumption by the literate reader, could out-rival oral narratives in sensationalism, given the premise that authorship of the written word guaranteed veracity. Not surprisingly, then, the simple faith of a Kitchiner in the wholesome effects of servant literacy is counterpoised by the age’s recognition of its more devastating potential for narration of a kind that, far from being quaintly anachronistic, or harmlessly romantic, possessed capabilities for historical intervention. Consider, for instance, a scurrilous pamphlet published in 1871, entitled Brown on the Throne, a year after Forster’s Education Act, lampooning Queen Victoria’s relationship with her ghillie, John Brown. The pamphlet casts John Brown as literate “narrator” and the author of musings on his royal mistress. Brown “writes”: Now, you must bear in mind that the Queen of this country of “England and caetera” is a Lady. When that is understood the difficulty of the situation will be fully appreciated by the meanest capacity. . . . What is the use of having a throne if the Queen don’t sit upon it? And that I’ve proved beyond all controversy, that as Queen is neither a King nor a Pilot, she can’t be expected to sit down upon a seat that was never intended to be occupied. And small blame to her I say, for I wouldn’t do it myself. It ain’t to be expected. (7–8)13 The pamphlet demonstrates how domestic, national, and narrational politics are informed by concerns of class operating within the master-servant paradigm. While the lewd innuendo of the title suggests the servant’s assumption of sexual dominance over the queen, Brown dethrones Victoria as “sovereign subject” through his usurpation of narrative authority. Brown’s own class identity as narrator is foregrounded through his working-class dialect, even as his ironic reference to the Queen as “a Lady,” suggests that his relationship with the rhetorics of class is by no means innocent. The narrating Brown sullies the semantics of his superiors, while appearing to be in assent with its ideological valences. Interpellated by the servant’s narrative as “Mrs. Brown,” Victoria is no lady at all in her “wifely” submissiveness to her ghillie. Brown on the Throne is one of many instances of servant narration during the Victorian age, where the scandal of class relations operates through narrative’s mimicking of discourses favored by the upper classes (in this case those of respectability and the cult of true womanhood).

8

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Later “Brown” flaunts his “ill/literacy” in what seems like a mockery of the Arnoldian agenda set forth in 1866 in Culture and Anarchy. He boasts that “Bradshaw’s Railway Guide [is] . . . the standard literature of me; with the exception of an occasional glance at the heavier provisions served up with such consummate skill by Messrs. Lloyd, Reynolds, and Company; and of course always excepting the floating informations served up in the columns of the daily press” (7). A lapse of sixty years marks the distance between Kitchiner and the author of the Brown pamphlet, who represent the polar extremes of a wide-ranging spectrum of nineteenth-century opinion on the subject. One wonders if the same prurient interest and anxiety would have prevailed had John Brown been anything other than a servant in the queen’s household. Other working-class occupations might contest hierarchical social relations in the name of Chartism, Luddism, or socialism. Class relations in the case of domestics, however, were overdetermined by the very semantics of the master-servant paradigm. Literate servants, as independent practitioners of narrative, signaled a social pathology at once more profound and alarming in its effects, given their always-already identities as subordinates, prior to the current terminological preference for calling them “domestic workers.” What cultural evidence do we find of the ongoing debate on servant literacy as a part of the larger “servant problem” as it came to be known by the end of the century? Traditionally, servants were subjects of religious discourses on fidelity and obedience. The servant’s plight did not stir the consciences of bourgeois Victorians. The age might have felt a responsibility for bringing into existence new, and monstrously strange members of the laboring classes, such as factory hands and miners. But ideologies of service extended far back in time to a pre-industrial age, where faithfulness, loyalty, and obedience characterized the “good servant,” who was often powerfully mystified in religious and political discourse as a model worthy of imitation by all who conscientiously fulfilled their duties towards spiritual and temporal authority. Servants were, ideally, willing agents in the sustenance of a divinely ordained social order. Frank Dawes has noted that biblical texts such as Titus 2:9—“Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them in all things”—were often cited to persuade servants that “domestic service was esteemed by the Lord as service to Himself, which would be well rewarded in the next world, if not in this.”14 Henry George Watkins, founder of the London Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Servants, wrote several tracts on the subject, many of them going into frequent reprints. The 1844 edition of his 1814 tract entitled Friendly Hints to Female Servants offers no changes to its frankly hierarchical view of society, despite the decade’s mood of unrest associated with Chartism: “It manifests a divine superintendence,” Watkins writes “that civil society should be composed of subordinate and superior classes. . . . Every wise and good person will therefore enquire, what are the

Introduction

9

special duties of his or of her station; with a steady purpose, by the assisting grace of God, to discharge them faithfully” (3).15 But it was the proper or improper practice of literacy that determined success or failure in the maintenance of servant character and a culture of familiality in society. Watkins advocates a library for servants in his 1816 tract, Hints and Observations Seriously Addressed to Heads of Families in Reference Chiefly to Female Domestic Servants: A kitchen library may be formed of such books as these—a Bible— Jones’s Scripture Directory—Biddulph’s Prayer for the Morning and Evening of every Day through the week. price 2d [sic]—The Pilgrim’s Progress—Beveridge’s Private Thoughts—Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul—Tracts of the different Societies for promoting Christian Knowledge—and three volumes (of 108 Tracts) by the Author. (32–33)16 No secular works of fiction grace the shelves of Watkins’ sanitized kitchen library, so that, while Kitchiner considers servant literacy to be a valuable refi nement, its management appears to be as vitally important as the control and policing of servant desires and servant bodies. “Many novels, from the circulating library, most sadly ensnare and dissipate the minds of servants,” Watkins laments in this essay (33). Watkins’s concerns are not singular. In 1838 the London Female Mission Society brought out the fi rst issue of The Servants’ Magazine, a periodical that would function as a form of ideological state apparatus in harnessing servant literacy towards promoting the interests of their employers. The Preface in the fi rst volume, in 1838, addressed the potentially volatile relationship between reading, gender, and class in contexts of domesticity: Times are changed since the great bulk of female servants were unable to read . . . we look with higher feelings of gratification at the advancement of knowledge among the humbler classes of society, and we consider it an omen of still brighter days. At the same time we are quite aware that “knowledge is power” which may be used in a bad cause as well as a good one, and if thus used it is capable of doing great mischief. Servants are now fond of reading, and this is well; but it is of vast importance that what they read should be adapted to promote their real welfare, to render them more useful in their station, more contented with the arrangements of a kind Providence which have placed them in it, . . . We have too often in the hands of female servants, as well as in the hands of others, books of a very different tendency this; and we have felt no little anxiety lest the taste for reading should be rendered acurse instead of a blessing. (a2–iv).17 If the preface alludes to middle-class anxieties over the revolutionary power of literacy, then it does so in language that borders on the euphemistic, as if

10

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

literacy’s potential for “great mischief” in fuelling social discontent might never be explicitly stated, for fear of who might be listening. The Foucauldian ring to the phrase “knowledge is power” announces the periodical’s ostensible agenda for its intended reader: if young women in domestic service must be safeguarded from Jacobinism, then not only must suitable reading content be provided for their consumption; appropriate representations of the model servant-reader must also be placed before them. And indeed, Volume VII of The Servants’ Magazine carries a seductionand-betrayal narrative entitled “The Magistrate’s Visit” that configures the servant narrator as literate, and attributes her fallen condition to her slow corruption by the reading practices of a French household: “Instead of attending a place of worship on the Sabbath, as I had been accustomed to, I was required in the morning to sit and read novels to amuse my mistress” (31).18 Bad literacy, alas, is exchanged for good literacy, so that the fallen servant woman laments: “My bible I never read, I dared not look into it, I felt that every page of that holy book condemned me” (32). The subtext to this narrative is subtle but persuasive. “Ill/literacy” permits for a titillating life history of debauchery and disgrace to be “written,” even as it provocatively foregrounds its own sinful propensities by revealing the existence of profane, secular, and egalitarian reading communities that cut across class distinctions, with complete disregard for Watkins’s divinely ordained, hierarchical social order. Unwholesome reading practices reproduce themselves in scandalous forms of narrative, whereas pious reading practices preserve the unsullied, virginal innocence of the blank page. However, perverting literacy’s agenda of molding a servant to a master’s satisfaction held its own titillating possibilities for the Victorian imagination. In 1888, the anonymous Walter, in his pornographic “autobiography” that fetishizes servant women, entitled My Secret Life, offers his reader an episode that involves the seduction of a maidservant, “Jenny,” through his gifting of the eighteenth-century pornographic bestseller, The Adventures of Fanny Hill. In this metatextual moment of pornography reading pornography, the servant as neo-literate is educated to the taste of the degenerate master. “Do you like reading?” “Yes.” “Pictures?” “Yes.” “I’ve a curious book here.” “What is it?” I took out the book. “The Adventures of Fanny Hill.” “Who was she?” “A gay lady,—it tells how she was seduced. How she had lots of lovers, was caught in bed with men—would you like to read it?” “I should.” “We will read it together,—but look at the pictures,”—this is the fourth or fi fth time in my life I have tried this manoeuvre with women. (238)19 To Jenny’s objections “What a nasty book—such books ought to be burnt” (239), the author continues to turn over the pages of illustrations, till she knocks the book out of his hand to the other side of the room, declaring: “I won’t see such stuff” (239). In the next chapter, before what he calls “my

Introduction

11

next attack,” the author informs us that he “wrapped up the book, directed it to her, gave the boy a sixpence to deliver it, hid myself by a lilac which was in the front garden close to the road, and saw the boy give it to her, and go off quickly as I told him” (23). “Walter” proffers the book to the literate servant, fi rst as reading primer, and then as courting gift, in order to stimulate her imagination through “dirty reading,” a fear the periodical press of the times often associated with the effects of novel reading on ladies. In this inverse form of Bovaryism, the cultivation of reading habits works towards control over the laboring servant’s body, by blurring distinctions between reading as scholastic exercise and recreational activity. The effects of servant “ill/literacy” extended beyond the personal fate of the servant, affecting the well-being of the employer’s domicile. In 1847, Augustus Mayhew’s satirical work The Greatest Plague of Life, or The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant described the misfortunes and travails of a frazzled angel in the house at the mercy of a string of maidservants, whose laziness and eccentricities drive her to despair. Most villainous among these delinquent domestics is Betsy, who bears ultimate responsibility for the collapse of the bourgeois domicile at the end. “Of all the plague of servants I ever had anything to do with,” laments her indignant mistress, “that woman certainly was the greatest, and she got me into one scrape that I am sure I will never forget to my dying hour” (192). 20 Betsy’s vice is her incorrigible habit of reading “penny dreadfuls.” As avid consumer of fiction, she is described as “always marching about the house with a broom in her hand, either fancying herself ‘ADA THE BETRAYED’ or ‘AMY’ in ‘LOVE AND MARRIAGE’—or else sitting for hours on the fender, crying her eyes out, over ‘THE MURDER AT THE OLD SMITHY’ or ‘THE HEADS OF THE HEADLESS’ (192). In Betsy’s hands, the world of fiction refuses to remain confi ned between the covers of the book. The drudge, as spell-bound reader, crosses boundaries erected by social hierarchies. Engrossed in her reading, Betsy ruins the roast, burns the bottoms out of every saucepan, and leaves the kitchen in a chaos of dirty dishes. To the narrator, she is an impudent domestic, who presumptuously aspires to practices of literacy that are the prerogative of a class to which she does not belong: How on earth the horrid silly could ever have managed to pay for all the works she took in out of the wages I allowed her . . . it would take a much wiser head than mine to say: for independently of being a constant subscriber from the commencement to most of the penny novels, I declare nothing would please her stuck up literary ladyship but she must needs take in a newspaper of her own every week, and be a constant reader of “The Penny Sunday Times.” (200–1) Betsy’s addiction to reading fi nally leads her to distractedly overfi ll the warming pan with boiling water, after the mistress in a fury burns her

12

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

novels in the fi replace, on fi nding her weeping copiously over them instead of doing the dishes. Under Betsy’s hand the warming pan overflows to ruin the marital bed, becoming the metaphoric equivalence of her tears, in what seems like the revenge of the somatic subaltern reader. Conjugal discord ensues, resulting in a separation that the mistress petulantly declares in her farewell note will be “Forever.” Betsy is by no means an exceptional portrait of the delinquent servant literate. Indeed, for some Victorians, servants were poor subjects for reform efforts, since literacy and general education could not render their violent imaginations more tractable. In 1876, six years after Forster’s Education Act, the Reverend Henry Houseman in his preface to The Dignity of Service and Other Sermons, Especially Addressed to Servants remarks: While the general social and intellectual advance of the age is raising other classes to higher efficiency and greater self-respect, upon theirs its effects are disappointing, appearing to weaken what should have been strengthened, to strengthen what had better been weak. The spirit of the age has tended to develop an impatience of control, a disregard for authority, a restless craving for change, and a disposition to sacrifice duty to pleasure, which is telling with disastrous effect upon the generally fi ne character of the English servant. How far this retrograde movement may be attributed to the present transitional state of our national education is a question easier to ask than to answer. (vi)21 Houseman’s apprehensions over national education are a clear reference to compulsory primary education and the acquisition of literacy. Servants seem exceptionally immune to the positive effects of education, given the over-stimulated psychological condition of the educated servant, who restlessly craves pleasure, while possessing imaginative independence. Despite such anxieties over the subversive effects of servant literacy, there were advocates for mass literacy as promoting domestic order, and, by inference, social order. Theodore Buckley, writing in Household Words, three years after the William Ewart Act of 1850 had successfully enacted the establishment of public municipal libraries, was laying forth such cautious advocacy. In a piece entitled “The Babbleton Book Club,” he sentimentally describes the transformative effects of mass literacy in the social harmony that envelops a village community as a consequence of a lending library established by a local vicar. “Not a few good servants were produced by this system of moderate and judicious instruction,” Buckley confidently informs his readers (132)22 . He then goes on to state: “Babbleton furnished a class of girls, who, sufficiently poor to fi nd even a second-rate place an improvement in their condition, were still educated enough to be less barbarous companions for children than average”

Introduction

13

(132). Such contradictory and ambivalent responses suggest that the literate servant, “moderately” schooled through appropriate reading, would be rendered more docile and amenable to domestic discipline, while the servant who sought to rival the novelist in her powers of tale-telling and narration carried the threat of destabilizing and traumatizing the bourgeois subject. Nevertheless, the distinction between markers of harmless versus harmful servant “ill/literacy,” would grow increasingly blurred and indistinguishable over time, a development of special signifi cance for literary studies. Punch magazine demonstrates this social anxiety over four decades. In its 1845 volume 9 issue, “Punch’s Guide to Servants” parodied advice literature by offering tips on servant delinquencies such as tardiness, pilferage, and laziness, before proceeding to instruct the servant reader: You must not forget to cultivate your mind, and for this purpose you had better take in the “Penny Magazine,” and if you read through every week, your head at the end of the year will be full of volcanic rocks, the solar system, primary straits, electric eels’ organic remains and hints of preserving gooseberries. (10)23 The master or mistress, as nervous intended reader of Punch, is compelled to recognize the presence of the servant reader, whose preferred texts offer an education in venality and indiscipline—a far cry from the instructive material ordained as suitable reading by the advice manuals. By contrast, “proper” reading here seems intended to disorient and confuse the hapless servant into submission. Punch’s taunt remains as forcefully relevant over twenty years later, when the new series of The Servants’ Magazine in its January 1867 issue set forth its revised reading agenda, this time for “all classes of servants, both male and female” (2). 24 Exhorting servants to avoid “idle talk or novel reading,” and instead devote their time to “improvement in writing, and in reading what is worth remembering,” the editor promises that the “contents will consist of short papers—on Historical, Geographical and Biblical subjects; Biography, Natural History , useful Tales and general information—all so written as to interest those for whose benefit it is intended” (2). Like Gradgrind’s curriculum in “things ’ological,” reading material that consists of a smattering of facts is designed to stultify both emotional and intellectual maturity. Benign literacy is in fact designed to perpetuate servility. Small wonder then, that a liberal periodical like Punch was anxious to exclude itself from such conservative agendas. In its 24 January 1863 issue, Punch features a voluminous-skirted matron, who disapprovingly regards a liveried, juvenile servant, respectfully doffi ng his outsized gentleman’s hat.

14

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Figure1.1

The Idle Servant, Punch, January 24, 1863.

Upbraided by the mistress over his delay in bringing her the letter she holds in her hands, the boy offers her the following confession: “Boohoo M! If you please M, Me and another butler was a looking at Punch, Hoo-Hoo!”25 The boy’s outsize top hat, like his reading material suggests aspirations to gentility. The act of reading between butler and serving boy alludes to a unionized

Introduction

Figure 1.2

15

The Force of Habit, Punch, September 29, 1883.

resistance that literacy abets, as well as a reading community of servants, while the final “HOO-HOO” is doubly valenced as both contrition and derision on the part of the recalcitrant servant. In representing itself as circulating text, Punch affirms that reading may render social boundaries porous. The point continues to find elaboration, well into the later phases of the century. An 1883 illustration in the issue dated September 29 depicts a mistress playing amanuensis to her maid in an illustration entitled “Force of Habit.”

16

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

“Is there anything more you wish to add Mary?” asks the unnamed mistress. “No Marm,” replies the now individualized servant maid, “except just to say Please excuse bad writin’ and bad spellin’.”26 The servant’s uniform is the only marker of class. Unlike the more darkly shaded domestics of earlier Punch illustrations, the figures of mistress and maid here are equally “fair” and graceful. While a surface reading would suggest that the postscript is a betraying indication of the maid’s ineptitude as neo-literate, the tutelary expression on the servant’s face makes for a teasing ambiguity, subtly implying that literacy levels may no longer function as an index of class. Punch appears to hint that the serving classes could one day surpass their employers in literary talent. By 1884, the servant displays an adroit “ill/literacy” that glosses texts of oppression. In its 15 March issue, Punch carried a piece entitled “John Thomas on the Service Franchise,” where a butler comments on the Morning Post’s report on a “New Reform Bill” that offered franchise to gamekeepers and gardeners, but not to domestics. Declaiming his outrage to a maidservant, John Thomas, the butler declares: Wots upset me MIS MARIAR? Ah ! You may well arsk my dear! No it isn’t my neuralgy, nor the influinks of that beer. . . . Its this Morning Post, Mariar, as perdooses the effect, Not the paper, bang ontoodoo; though that isn’t wot it were When its figger wos three d dear; but it still keeps up a hair Of hairistocratic hortoor, though its done upon the cheap.27 Punch frequently attacked the Morning Post as the Fawning Post, for its sycophantic brand of journalism, and while the snobbery and pretensions of both the paper and John Thomas are something of a fudge, in the defiling clasp of the servant reader, the text suffers a loss of status. Mass literacy and cheaper costs of paper transform reading from an elitist pursuit to a popular pastime. But the now slightly revolutionary John Thomas proceeds to analyze the text before him in an exercise of hermeneutical skills that would be the envy of an Oxford don: Well I’ll arsk you Miss Mariar, quite imparshal like and frank— As I know you’ll answer ditto—wot does “Suvvice” mean? I’ll thank Anyone from Dr. Johnson, to Joe Chamberlain, to call Any defernishun puffect as excloods the Suvvinks ’All.

The literate servant can recognize his own invisibility and exclusion from the lexicon of his masters. As resistant reader, he contests the authority of Johnson and Chamberlain, the guardians of the English language. Literacy exacerbates class conflict, for meaning is never really shared or common. In

Introduction

17

pointing out how “service” is read differently by readers of differing class origins, the servant places ideologies such as the Queen’s English under duress. For Punch and Victorian readers then, class modified the way texts, readers and writers behave, altering meaning, value and even social relations. If servant speech was frequently inscribed as ungrammatical and deviant in illustrations of the time, it was because of the growing emphasis on homogenization through the Standard that mass literacy sought to enforce. Ian Michael’s The Hyperactive Production English Grammars in the Nineteenth Century: A Speculative Bibliography had established the phenomenal proliferation of the grammar text in the nineteenth century, from a mere 215 before 1800, to a record 856 printed and in circulation between 1800 to 1899. 28 In 1864, Henry Alford, in his grammar entitled The Queen’s English: A Manual of Idiom and Usage, likened the Queen’s English in a celebrated analogy, to “the Queen’s Highway, not meaning that her majesty is possessed of that portion of road, but that it is a highroad of the land . . . and so it is with the Queen’s English. It is so to speak this land’s great highway of thought and speech . . . that which the nation in the secular unfolding of its will and habits has agreed to speak and write” (185). 29 The perversions of grammar and pronunciation in the servant, who lived under the rule of the Standard in the middle-class household, were subtle signifiers of dissent and political indiscipline. Colonial servants, who signified the servant as other, are often represented as particularly capable of “murdering the Queen’s English.” Writing in Cornhill Magazine, Lady Broome recounted the eccentricities of colonial servants, including one West Indian “black giant” who, with open palm and child-like gaze, pleaded with her, “Kiss, missy, kiss” (796). 30 Her alarm is unfounded. The man seeks only to be awarded a gift because, as he seeks to remind her, the occasion is Christmas. In troping the colonial as servant, the author, like A. J.Munby, who demanded that Hannah Cullwick blacken her face and address him as “Massa,” conveys the anxieties over desire that accrue around the servant as alien body, and of the violative tendencies of servant voices and servant language. Broome also muses on the bizarre logics of servant literacy as in the instance of a petition “almost indecipherable on account of its ornate penmanship and flourishes” (803) by her polygamous Mauritian washerman against his lazy fourth wife, acquired expressly to assist in the laundering of the mistress’s gowns. A letter of farewell to the aide-de-camp by these same servants expresses in nonsensical if fanciful French, the sentiment that he would return with the “croix de la reine Victoria flottant dans sa casque” (803). Disjunctions in meaning between the vocabularies of masters and servants could render class relations within the household nonsensical. George Eliot’s essay “Servant’s Logic,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, 17 March 1865, addressed the comic deadlock in communication between the two classes. In this comic piece, servants resist logic on matters such as the bearding of oysters or the skimming of stock. But Eliot’s profounder concern is for

18 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy the inevitable epistemological crises that ensue from lexical divergences between masters and servants, given the latter’s failure in a post-Enlightenment world to acquire scientific rationality. In reasoning with servants we are likely to be thwarted by discovering that our axioms are not theirs. For example, they pre-suppose that an effect may exist without a cause, that like causes will constantly produce unlike effects, that all may mean only some, that there is no difference between little and none, that any two or more circumstances which can be mentioned will account for a given fact, and that nothing is impossible, except that they can have been wrong. (392)31 Servant logic resists bourgeois norms, because of the innately devious nature of domestics, who prefer to rely upon oral culture’s democratic vesting of authority in personal judgment, rather than literate culture’s faith in expert opinion. On the whole servants are little disposed to think that the opinions of gentlefolks can have any practical value for them . . . [they] get their views from other quarters . . . for the probabilities concerning the dryness of the coming summer, or the guilt of the man last taken up for murder, the person to be consulted with the most deference is the laundress who serves very good families, and whose husband is in the carrying line. (395) Servants, by virtue of their linguistic perversities, may thus slyly undermine law, morality, and social order. When told about a lapse in polishing a stove, a maid asserts that at one place where she lived “there was a bright fender with a sharp edge, and the nurse let the child fall on it and cut itself” (395). The proletariat proper might engage in fiery socialist and revolutionary polemic, but the domestic servant’s language nullifies referential meaning, so that Eliot’s servants prove profoundly unreasonable, a characteristic frequently mapped onto illiterates. However, despite elaborate efforts at theorizing the impossibility of dialogue between masters and servants, who each spoke a different language, in real life Victorian masters and mistresses did engage in emotionally or sexually charged writing and reading exercises with their servants. When such literacy acts transpired they tended to hold pornographic appeal for the age in general—a reminder that Victorians could view this kind of intercourse as tainted by impropriety, if not indecency. Queen Victoria learned Hindustani from the notorious Munshi, the Indian Muslim servant, who posed as a teacher to become the favorite of the aging queen and the odium of the court and the Prince of Wales.32 More notoriously, A. J. Munby’s fetish for servant women produced the Hannah Cullwick diaries, the writings of his maidservant, lover, and wife. Attention has been paid to

Introduction

19

the manner in which the maidservant was conflated into slave and housewife, with Munby’s demands that she address him as “Massa,” blacken her face, wear a slave locket, and offer written accounts of her chimney labors that covered her naked body in soot. However, more interesting is the fact that Munby enjoyed the pornographic value of a maidservant’s ungrammatical narrative of her defiling labors, preferring to encounter her textually through the daily missives that she posted to him. Cullwick’s diaries are intriguing evidence of the titillation that servant literacy held for the age. Imitating a genre of writing more appropriate to a lady rather than a servant, Cullwick’s private writing is a secret, yet immodest textualization of the servant’s body that is desired and consumed through the act of reading. Indeed, servant narration signals the intrusion of class consciousness into the realm of reader relations. To attend to a servant narrator, especially one who shamelessly inscribes narrative, is to suffer embarrassment over the pornographic implications that underlie the “dear reader” syndrome, so characteristic of narrator-reader intimacy, within a realist aesthetic. Such intimacies are taboo, since they betoken a familiarity that undermines the authority of masters and mistresses, degrading them to submissiveness under the domestic’s pleasuring skills. Cullwick offers a fitting paradigm. She not only posed semi-nude for photographic portraits, sneaked into her mistress’s evening gowns, and cleaned dirty fi replaces for Munby’s gratification. She also read aloud to Munby, from fiction of his choice. In “Life as Servant in the Temple,” her last known diary, Hannah records such literacy “at work” in her entry dated Tuesday, 30 September: I am reading out to Massa Miss Thackeray’s story Reine the French peasant, & very nice it is. I have enjoy’d it very much, & the latter chapters I have read over & over to myself as well as to M. Enfield’s History of Philosophy I like to look over to myself, but M thinks its too tedious for me to read every evening, & so he says I shall read Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe next. (283)33 The contradictions at play here between the respectable and the risqué, generate tensions that are paradigmatic of the relationship between servant narrative and the bourgeois reader. The decorous pleasures of parlor reading, with all its connotations of respectability, are compromised by the titillation afforded by mapping onto the rape victim the indeterminate accents of both serving maid and gentlewoman. Made thus audible to Munby, a gentleman of letters, the servant performs the dual role of narrator and surrogate reader. In a hall of mirrors effect, Munby desires Hannah’s narrative of her reading encounter with Clarissa Harlowe’s narrative. The reading servant constructed by the writing servant possesses a doubly transgressive appeal. It locates Munby, the master-reader, in a shameful spectacle of familiarity that must, inevitably, breed contempt. Class relations are skewed

20 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy through the improper intimacies that ensue between a servant narrator and her endeared reader. Servant literacy betokens the profane consequences that a classless society holds for a sacred domestic order. Anxieties regarding literate servants who blur class distinctions were paradigmatic for general apprehensions over social anarchy, in a not too distant future. The collapse of domestic order signified and predicted the collapse of a fragile social order. But servants as literates presaged insidious change rather than revolution. This was change that evolved out of the distressing ambiguities to class identities that they could embody, through cultural mimicry. Servants, who lived in close collusion with the cultural practices and ideological positions of their employers, and performed private, feminized labor, are, in the fi rst place, somewhat unsatisfactorily defi ned as proletariat. Servants were often numbered as family, even within census figures, and failed repeatedly in their efforts to unionize. The recurring focus upon literate servants in regard to anxiety over porous class boundaries may have more to do with the bewildered observations of nineteenth-century intellectuals on class, and its resistance to categorization, than to fears of a working-class revolution. Convictions over class’s immutable characteristics were offset by fears over class’s unpredictable tendencies to disrupt and confuse social distinctions. Certainly class structure was by no means easily apparent to Victorians. Orthodox Marxist defi nitions of class as defi ned by production relations suggest a far more rigid class structure than may have been the case, in regard to Victorian England. Hence, while Disraeli famously defi ned class as mutually antagonistic interest groups in his reference to the presence of “two nations,” Henry Mayhew in broader terms espoused a triadic model of those who will work, those who cannot work, and those who will not work. Other triadic models of class included Matthew Arnold’s division of barbarians, philistines, and populace in Culture and Anarchy. Nor were such positions consistently held. Arnold in Friendship’s Garland referred to “the rich diversity of our English life . . . the happy blending of classes and character” (9–50).34 By contrast, Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor perceived that crossing between the skilled and unskilled working classes was to fi nd oneself “at a new level . . . among another race” (6–7).35 Less tidily, R. D. Baxter offered sixty-nine different categories of workers. The rhetorics of class could also offer highly nebulous categories, as evident in popular phrases such as “the criminal classes.” Even a swift and cursory sampling of the rhetorics of class in the nineteenth century will therefore reveal that Victorians thought of class in a wide variety of ways that often overlapped, or co-existed with each other. Class could be perceived as a sphere of warfare and antagonism, and as an indicator of social mobility and economic opportunity. In recent times, scholarship by Gareth Stedman Jones, Asa Briggs, and David Cannadine has examined in immense detail the contending discourses on class that co-existed throughout the nineteenth century. 36 Cannadine has helpfully pointed out that

Introduction

21

class was always spoken of in the plural by the Victorians, so that society in the nineteenth century did not perceive itself as divided into homogeneous, broadly defi ned, antagonistic groups, but rather as a loose confederation of varied interests and occupational categories. The ideal of a layered society that functioned harmoniously was popular with Tory and Whig alike, so that the discourses of class confl ict in late Victorian society have been seen as the product of efforts of mass party politics to manipulate and control unwieldy social differences into manageable binaries. While Malthusian and Darwinian doctrines validated competitive and antagonistic class relations in a newly emerging industrial and capitalist economy, an alternative discourse of familiality emerged, espoused by advocates of paternalism such as Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Arnold. Tracts such as The Claims of Labour: An Essay on The Duties of the Employer to the Employed, by Arthur Helps in 1844, suggest not so much a national as a personal response to working-class unrest, modeled upon familial relations, and returning society to an older and, supposedly, more natural and benevolent social order. Servants, most especially, were a site for such competing discourses on class. The Servants’ Magazine 1 February 1867 issue offers an especially interesting sample of Victorian sensitivity towards the influential impact of class rhetoric on domestic servants. In an essay entitled “Domestic Service,” the author, Mrs. C. L.Balfour, reprimands “young women of the Industrial Classes” who choose professions other than domestic service for the “privilege of being called ‘Miss’” (25).37 Expatiating upon the dangers to character that work outside of the home poses to young women, she notes that domestic service “is most respectable, when respectably filled; and more remunerative than other pursuits, which some think more genteel” (27). Balfour then encourages her servant reader to self-consciously critique the semantics of class: “That word ‘genteel’ has a great deal to answer for. It has often made a foolish young girl restless and dissatisfied in her place; led her to think her mistress hard with her; and cause her to sigh for forbidden fi nery and dangerous liberty” (28). Rhetorical blandishments rather than monetary gain are what the upwardly mobile domestic covets by raising her class. If the seductions and pressures of class rhetoric rather than want and privation encourage social discontent, it may be safely assumed that the literate servant, reading herself inscribed by the language of class, is more vulnerable to foolish ambition than her unschooled counterpart. Hence the importance of a corrective literacy that The Servants’ Magazine could offer, tutoring the pious domestic in identifying authentic respectability. Such journalistic enterprises to the modern reader are an obvious exercise in sophistry. By ostensibly submitting to the yoke of servility, servants could paradoxically align themselves with a hallowed private sphere and partake of its status, albeit peripherally. The rhetoric of class grows especially muddied in regard to servants. Servants epitomized the more complicated

22

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

expressions that class relations could assume where work relations and familial relations blended, to obscure and distort each other. But for this reason too, the practice of literacy, in their case could be both revolutionary and a form of embourgeoisment. Servant narrative, as we shall see, functions in accordance with the range of possibilities ascribed to servant literacy by discourses of the age. The writing and reading servant could be co-opted, seduced, or pressured into forms of narrational activities that served the interests of his master. Alternatively, the servant could undermine narrational form and its intent, through a neo-literate’s ineptitude. At other times his narrations, whether oral or written, could critique a bourgeois class’s jealous efforts of control over writing, for their maintenance of social and cultural hegemony. In nineteenth-century fiction, this anxiety over narrative insubordination by literate servants finds its manifestation in the practice of locating their narrative activity within texts where multiple narrators compete for space and dominance, and servants ostensibly engage in narrative under contract or command. To trace this phenomenon, so radically at odds with Pamela’s narrative autonomy, is to discover the servant’s usurpation, mimicry, or derangement of mechanisms for narrative control. As a manifestation of orthodox narrational politics, contract narrative figures in best-seller novels such as Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley or The Advenures of a Maidservant (1841), where a master shares yet controls narrative authority with his elderly maidservant. Canonical fiction features its more ironized reworkings in texts such as Wuthering Heights and The Moonstone, where servant narration emerges as something of a command performance staged at the will and pleasure of a master, who may nonetheless suffer a measure of discomfiture as audience. In Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, Poole, the butler, who describes himself as “book-learned,” is commanded by Utterson to break his silence, only to have his sensational oral narrative be termed a “wild tale” that nevertheless has the power to destroy his master. Indeed, the literate servant narrator might at times masquerade as the innocent representative of an outmoded culture of orality as in the case of Gaskell’s “old nurse” Hester, an interesting precursor of Poole, who avers the same salvific agenda, in aspiring to narration. Hester recounts her ward’s gothic family history to the latter’s descendants, but her status as scholar in her class encourages a resistant reading of her tale. Servant narration, as written or oral performance by a neo-literate, transpiring within the context of multiple narration, becomes the occasion for the novel to explore the contentious relationship between orality and literacy, and their associations with naïveté and sophistication respectively, while dramatizing the impact of literacy’s politics upon narrative form and function. The figure of the narrating servant, who was placed at the interstices between the oral and the literary, is of particular significance for the device of multiple narration, where narratives compete for authoritative status.

Introduction

23

A significant factor that could determine the relative reliability of narrators, regardless of whether their narratives were oral or written, would be variations in literacy competence, a popular indicator of class identity for the Victorian reading public. Grammar texts of the period, as we have seen, attest to the growing phenomenon of Standard English as the mark of social refi nement. In their co-optation to literacy, servant writers could vex or interrogate the Standard employed by the authorial voice. Either way, they impede the reign of the written. Class identities of narrators, with specific reference to their status as literates, offer a heteroglossic complication that is of specific interest for the nineteenth-century novel, given the Standard’s claims for erasing class boundaries, and the ironical fact that the genre owed its existence to the servant-keeping middle classes, who as its subjects and consumers, were deeply invested in deploying a servant’s literacy towards the maintenance of the status quo. If Bakhtin defi ned heteroglossia as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (32), servant narration gives us occasion to examine how the imperfectly known social other, who in turn might echo authoritative discourse, could fray the weave of narrative through indeterminacies of meaning and intention. Servile in his or her obedience to good form, both in social and literary behavior, the narrating servant could either inadvertently or intentionally abuse decorum, travesty the master’s speech, or derange the form and function of the narrative that he or she was entrusted with reproducing. The power of the literate servant to interrogate or destabilize identities of masters and mistresses inhered in such deformations of genre that ensued from the servant’s literary imitations of narrative modes that, before the rise of mass literacy, were largely the preserve of masters and mistresses. Lower-class usurpations of narrative forms that were once the preserve of the upper classes, such as history, diary writing, letters, and memoirs, became increasingly available to a class of literary neophytes, in Maria, Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maid Servant, and The Moonstone. At other times, oral narrations performed by housekeepers, nurses, and butlers, in Wuthering Heights, The Old Nurse’s Story and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, transpire in resistance to acts of writing as a means of social and narrational control, executed by their masters and mistresses. Autobiographical acts, likewise—both real, as in instances of life history, and fictitious, as in best-selling pamphlets—address similar audacious acts of generic misappropriation by servants. Such literacy practices on the part of the servant could overturn or undermine reading relations, and disrupt narrative coherence and narrative consciousness. Contention and consonance thus remain rival possibilities invoked by fictional texts that proceed to ignore, marginalize, or co-opt voices and narratives of other classes, fictional servants included. Indeed, literary ambitions for servants and masters in fiction could be fraught with uncertainty over writing’s accomplishments, its antinomies arising out of

24

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

the stamp such writing could bear of differing and incompatible class insignias that in turn betokened its duplicity in serving confl icting social purposes and agendas. Autobiographical acts by servants, interestingly enough, as we shall see, do not deny or escape such concerns but, with amazing literary self-consciousness, address considerations of generic appropriation, parody, masquerade, and improvisation as conditions upon which self-hood becomes contingent. The interventions of literacy in the formation of class identities are a constant concern for the servant autobiographers that we shall examine. Literacy acquisition was never an unproblematic enhancement of communication skills, but always seemed to play out in the context of the “well-read” status that these servants seem eager to assume, that in turn dictates a self-conscious revaluation of the generic possibilities for narrativizing self-hood that are available to the subaltern. Yet, in both genres, the politics of narration remain fi rmly linked to questions regarding the indeterminacy of value attached to literacy. If autobiographical writing by servants continues to affi rm the Enlightenment faith in literacy as liberative, nineteenth-century fiction seems, more ambivalently, to recognize its mixed consequences for a society as a whole. Writing may function as an instrument of power and domination, a point made by Claude Levi Strauss, in Triste Tropiques: Writing is a strange thing. . . . The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals, into a hierarchy of castes and classes. . . . It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind. (291)38 If Levi Strauss’s position has undoubtedly too many over-generalizations, and subscribes to a neat oral-literate binary now long since discredited, it still has particular value as a modification of Enlightenment optimism, and is aptly fitted to nineteenth-century England that underwent transformation into a literate society accompanied by urbanization, electoral reform, the rise of a class system, and imperialism. The servant, associated with an older order that would be increasingly sentimentalized, was therefore the ideal locus of the novel’s preoccupation with the new technology of intellect that writing and reading represented. The ideological biases of a literate culture in which the novel remained deeply invested, given its own association with the rise of literacy, are selfconsciously explored through representations of the often wayward character of servant narration by a neo-literate: as an act of conversion, on the one hand, to the ideological and narrative forms that constitute the oeuvre of a literate middle-class culture, and of nudging towards insubordination, on the other hand, by interrogating their class biases, their literary prestige, and the ideological valences of their plots. For the servant, unlike

Introduction

25

other members of the working classes, was both insider and outsider, who resisted and colluded with social superiors in the sustenance of a culture that was not his own. The practice of fiction is especially fraught with the rhetoric of class and the contingencies of class relations. Certainly the role class played in narration is not new. Chaucer entitled his pilgrims’ narratives by references to their estates: “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” “The Reeve’s Tale,” and so forth. Class identities permitted certain kinds of narratives for some narrators, while prohibiting others. A lofty narrative of classical origins for a knight, a bawdy fabliau for a miller, a saint’s narrative for the serious-minded clerk: the categorization of each genre with its narrator’s occupation rendered fictional species as distinct and stratified as the social order that produced its narrator. Narrative maintained the order of the estates on the road to Canterbury. However, in the context of the nineteenth century’s commitment to maintaining the separation between a world of public strife and the sweet order of domesticity, concerns of servant narration in the novel demonstrate that Victorians acknowledged that the home was what Mary Louise Pratt in another context referred to as a “contact zone”—a space where primitive and sophisticate, provincial and urban, white and colored, ruler and ruled, literate and illiterate, dialect and the Standard encountered each other.39 In this sense, through its servants, it becomes a microcosm of the Victorian social, national, and imperial order, where a struggle for upward mobility, voice, authority, and freedom is waged through literacy. The consumption of fiction was especially enmeshed in the social and economic dynamics of class relations. The servant narrator becomes the agent employed by the novel to disturb the assumptions it has created about the scene of its reading and reception: the companionable sounds or tranquil silences of bourgeois reading animate or soothe only when those whose labors create domesticity hold their peace. The servant as “other” reader and imitator of narrative in fiction deprives the implied bourgeois reader of the serenity of the private reading idyll and the eidetic image of a sociable author/narrator whose class identity is assumed to be identical to his own. Instead, the sociability of the garrulous or obliging servant, whose narrative conversation and writing may have been sought or unsought, jostles the unwary reader in its familiarity. The conventionally interpellated “dear reader” and his fictional surrogates, who might have followed reading protocol in assuming a position of relaxed abandon, are jolted out of negligence, propelled on an inverse trajectory from interiority to exteriority that redistributes emotional focus, in a reversal of patterns of fictional engagement. Through the literate servant, fiction also puts a face upon what Wilkie Collins famously termed the unknown public, and records its dangerous proximity to the endeared reader of rhetorical address. Life writing and sensational pamphlets by servants respond to the unwholesome intimacies that ensued from the politics of literacy as it played out between

26

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

the respectable or rebellious servant author/narrator and the prurient or innocent upper-class reader, behind closed doors, in spaces associated with the heimlich. Literacy initiates a range of choices in narrative production, censorship, and narrative reception, yet even as fiction and nonfiction explore the limits of these new freedoms, literary and nonliterary texts continue to examine how the task of literacy’s domestication might best be accomplished, so as to ensure that norms of decorum in class relations are never violated. The servant, by virtue of his complicity in the maintenance of orthodoxy, possessed a unique potential for exploring such ambiguous agendas. Upward mobility of class could fi nd fictional configuration in the literate narrating servant, who could aspire to the status of author, so that the novel could contemplate and ironize the patterns of its own production and consumption. Through slyly stigmatizing the upkeep of a narrative “order” that supports a social order to which he appears committed both as servant and narrator, he becomes the agent by which the novel may indict a class of readers who remained its most stalwart patrons in the marketplace. Thus, too, does the servant also become the fictional trope of the author as humble narrator, drawing attention to the duplicity of poses that novelists adopted throughout the nineteenth century. In looking at servant narrators in fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography, I examine a span of roughly a hundred years, commencing with the revolutionary 1790s and concluding with the beginnings of modernism in the twentieth century. I trace a pattern that delineates the gradual derangement of the bourgeois protagonist and the narrative forms that s/he remains invested in, be it a servant-narrated text of wrongs, diaries, family and imperial histories, or letters. In doing so, I examine the unfolding implications this holds for generic integrity and the stability of reader relations in the realist novel, a form often associated with a bourgeois worldview. Both fictional and autobiographical genres will be seen to arise out of a dialogue with each other. Historical servants can no more write of themselves without reference to literary discourse than the narrative servitude of fictional servants can fail to address, directly or indirectly, the absence of true being as a cause for their un/witting undoing of narrative forms such as a text of wrongs, history, letters, or diaries that their masters either seek to practice themselves or impose upon their enslaved domestics. I begin by addressing servant narration in the context of an age of revolution, focusing upon Maria or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) and The Adventures of Susan Hopley by Catherine Crowe (1800), for the manner in which both texts address the narrative servitude of literate maidservants in the context of criminal justice. Looking towards the conservativiism and prosperity of the mid-Victorian era, the next chapter examines servant narrators, now shaped by the cult of respectability and the social phenomenon of embourgeoisement. Nelly Dean in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Hester in Elizabeth Gaskell’s

Introduction

27

The Old Nurse’s Story (1852) are both seen to epitomize such developments. As pseudo-representatives of an earlier culture of orality, the politics of their oral narratives are analyzed for the ways they reflect and ideologically address the reprehensible theme of the servant as desirous and desiring body, and the manifestations of proper and improper servant literacy within the feudal ethics of an agrarian society that strains to preserve itself in the face of historical change. The third chapter looks beyond the shortlived complacency of the 1850s, to the years of imperial glory and panic, in the decades following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The servant figure of Gabriel Betteredge is now the obedient, commissioned narrator in service of imperial and familial history in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). But the argument also takes note of the manner in which gender and deformity modify servant writing and narration in ways that either reinforce or threaten the historical project of the guilty master, Franklin Blake. R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) represents the last decades of the century, riven by class strife, and haunted by the prospect of a classless society that would be the death knell of the bourgeoisie. Stevenson’s novella is read in the context of a growing rhetoric of class war, and the increasing polarization of class identities engineered by the political discourse of party politics in the late nineteenth century. The chapter explores how the oral narrations of the butler, Poole, preside over the demise of Jekyll, the writing-fortified, bourgeois subject. It also raises the question of why the servant may never be permitted the last word, while attending to the implications for narrational politics in the recuperation of the written, through the novella’s epistolary conclusion. The sixth chapter explores the ventriloquized servant voice in nonfiction, for the manner in which the pornographic potential of servant “ill/literacy” acquires political significance for reading relations, which in turn functions as a paradigm for social relations during the Victorian age. Having tracked the morphings of the fictional servant narrator, the study seeks to grant the last word to historical servants engaged in narration, who remained outside of literary history, despite their penchant for displaying a literate’s awareness of the literary. Servants wrote and published their own stories, only to be ignored by established circles of literary production and consumption, such as publishers, libraries, and writers of poetry and fiction belonging to the middle classes and their reading public. Outside the dominant publishing culture and material modes of literary production of their time, servants’ writings are evidence of how biases of class fail to account for generic developments that were not shaped by the more visible influences of literary schools, intellectual fashions, public institutions such as universities and art museums, or the marketplace. Servant autobiographies are read in the context of three classical phases of working class history—the phase of Chartism and labor unrest in the 1800s, the years of mid-Victorian conservatism and prosperity that lasted into the 1870s, and the closing decades of socialist politics and class struggle. Their

28 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy autobiographical efforts display a self-conscious demonstration of literacy, and efforts at generic experimentation in order to make written life history a viable project for the serving classes. Servants’ voices and their relations with literacy remained disturbing and intriguing throughout the age, evoking desire, gratitude, fear, and loss. This is best emblematized in a review carried by the Athenaeum of 1 April, 1893, entitled “Faithful Servants.”40 As the “servant problem” grew more acute, with larger numbers of women turning to factory work, A. J. Munby’s fetish for servant women seems to take on a general relevance for the literary periodical reader. Munby’s work is entitled Faithful Servants: Being Epitaphs and Obituaries Recording Their Names and Services, and is a study of servants’ tombstones. The reviewer notes: We are most grateful to the author for having compiled this interesting collection which will help to perpetuate the memory of men and women whose lives of unobtrusive goodness are apt to be too soon forgotten. . . . We may assume that the greater part of these inscriptions have been written by educated people. They are nearly free from the inane vulgarity of those tombstone verses, which, when we wander in many a rural churchyard, compel us to regret that we have learned to read. As there is so great a passion for this stuff, it is surprising that the demand has not been met by a supply in which the principles of grammar are not violated. (405) Munby, the Victorian man of letters, rambling amidst tombstones for memorials to servants, is offered to us in the Athenaeum as a bizarre revisiting of a lost romanticism that was possible at the end of the earlier century for Thomas Gray, elegizing in a country churchyard. Gray’s obscure villagers, “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,” were “mute inglorious Miltons,” whose eloquent silences belong to a comforting and optimistic pastoralism where common-ness could be safely eulogized. Munby’s servants, by contrast, must be forcibly silenced even in death, their literacy and narratives an offense to gentlemen’s notions of social and literary decorum. In the eyes of the Athenaeum reviewer, the right to the pen is not to be injudiciously granted, and the rhetorical construction of the servant is best left to his educated masters. Heteroglossia has no place in his world. In fi ction, however, just as in servants’ own less-often-read autobiographies, servants possessed voice, pen, and text, with sometimes devastating consequences for narrational politics and the genteel reader. By the end of the century, servant narration as dissenting and troublesome found its point of culmination in the democratic shilling shocker of R. L. Stevenson and the fi ery life writing of Christian Watt, but its origins reach back to the eve of a new century, in the lofty egalitarianism of Mary Wollstonecraft, to which we may now turn.

2

Literary Handmaids Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maidservant (1841) Ladies have been educated in a very different manner to you. They have read many books, have travelled and seen many sights, talked with educated people, and know a great number of things about which you know nothing. —Mrs. Motherly, The Servant’s Behaviour Book

The figure of the educated maidservant could be problematic for Romanticism, long before Victorians were asserting differences between naïve working-class literates and bourgeois cultural sophisticates.1 For Romantic intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the servant remained the focus of repressed ambivalence towards the working-class familiar. Rousseau’s infamous framing of an innocent, defenseless servant maid on a charge of ribbon theft transpired in a home rife with literacy politics, where ambitious servants sought to thwart him in his role as amanuensis to their mistress. 2 Mutual jealousy over literacy was part of the dynamic that governed class relations within households, generating anxieties that even Romantic idealists found difficult to ignore. In England, at the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft would revisit the Rousseauvian romantic script in Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, with a servant literate figure functioning as its primary literary and social critic. For Wollstonecraft, this depiction of the writing and reading servant was a defi nite departure from her earlier stances on working-class women in general, and maidservants in particular. In the summer of 1795, she had undertaken a tour of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark that produced the famous letters to Imlay—richly Romantic in their contemplations of nature and the French Revolution’s effects on Scandinavia. Accompanying Wollstonecraft on these travels with her daughter was her French maid, Marguerite. In Wollstonecraft’s letters to Imlay, Marguerite draws only a few condescending references. Marguerite is fearful where her mistress is bold, silent where Wollstonecraft is articulate.3 Writing of her travel arrangements, Wollstonecraft remarks: “Marguerite’s respect for me could hardly keep her from expressing the fear, strongly marked on her countenance,

30

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

which my putting ourselves into the power of a strange man excited” (Wollestonecraft, Short Residence in Sweden 11). Referred to as “poor Marguerite” in her introductory letter, the maid at one point merits a passing remark that infantilizes her as the unthinking inferior of Mary. “Marguerite and the child,” Wollestonecraft wrote, “often fell asleep: and when they were awake, I might still reckon myself alone, as our train of thoughts had nothing in common” (Wollstonecraft, Short Residence in Sweden 175). 4 In Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft was therefore making a conscious choice to deviate from her previous representation of domestics. She chose in this novel to portray a speaking servant who was literate and possessed a narrative of her own. It was a choice that would provide an added dimension of irony to her creed of revolutionary feminism, preoccupied with exploring the nexus between power and writing. Jemima, the literary handmaiden of masters and mistresses in Maria or the Wrongs of Women, is an extraordinary departure from the stock servant figure who functions as confidante, aide, or gossip. In creating this volatile, perspicacious servingwoman, Wollstonecraft’s innovation lay in her interest in literacy’s impact on power relations between master and maidservant, and its manifestations in the uses and abuses of the literary text. Wollstonecraft’s novel is the story of Maria, an imprisoned lady of rank, confi ned by her husband to an institution that has distinctly Foucauldian overtones of the madhouse and the prison, and sadistically deprived of her infant daughter. Watched over by a servant woman, Jemima, her story of wronged motherhood strikes a sympathetic chord in her jailer, who offers her reading and writing materials in order to alleviate her distress. Marginalia in the texts Maria reads attract her to another imprisoned reader, the revolutionary gentleman, Darnford. A correspondence and affair ensues, with Jemima now acting as go-between. Jemima orally narrates her own tale of oppression to Darnford and Maria, who, as master and mistress, are at once her prisoners and her allies. Her story conforms to the conventional topic of seduction and betrayal narratives. The sexual villainy of masters towards maidservants is a predictable theme that Jemima expatiates upon at length. However, the most signifi cant innovation that Wollstonecraft introduces is the master-seducer as man of letters, cast in the mold of Rousseauvian philosopher. Jemima assists Maria in the literary production of her text of wrongs, its intended reader being the latter’s infant daughter. The reading of the text is therefore postponed, its complaint deferred because its reader has yet to be secured. The future of Maria’s text is therefore in jeopardy, given her loss of custody over her child, concomitant to her loss of reputation. In her legal battle as divorced woman, Maria’s written plea against her indictment for adultery will also fail in court. Wollstonecraft never completed her novel. She died in childbirth, leaving behind several possible conclusions in her notebooks. These revolve largely around

Literary Handmaids 31 Maria’s subsequent betrayal by Darnford, her divorce from her husband, and her attempts at suicide. One fairly lengthy option, however, presents the heroine resolved to live, after Jemima has enterprisingly discovered and restored the lost daughter to her mistress with the words: “Behold your child!” If Wollstonecraft considered granting Jemima agency at the end of the novel, then Jemima’s marginal narrative becomes increasingly signifi cant, and needs to be viewed in the context of the novel’s overall concern with margins, marginalia, and writing. For marginality and margins are what shape a text that addresses women’s powers to write or narrate themselves into visibility. The title certainly evokes a sense of the author “gnawing at the borders” (to use a Derridean phrase) of her own earlier text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and other revolutionary texts on rights, by authors such as Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson. 5 Wollstonecraft’s novel thus becomes a gloss and an ongoing commentary on the limitations of the revolutionary text. And if margins are where a narrative of wrongs comes to be written, then Jemima as marginal figure is paradigmatic to the entire enterprise. To begin with, the novel’s activity transpires on the margins of society: in the prison hospices. This is where outcasts and dissenters are consigned. As confi ned mistress and maid, Maria and Jemima are a prefiguring of Grace Poole and Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. Unlike Grace, however, Jemima has suffered a “confi nement” of her own, “put away” by her fi rst master in a poorhouse that is the functional equivalent of the prison house, where she “labored” to secretly abort their illegitimate child. As servant, Jemima has therefore also shared in those feminine, attic-like spaces associated with repression and invisibility. She refers bitterly to the secrecy enforced by her master, regarding their ongoing affair: “To avoid my mistress’s fury I was obliged in future to comply, and skulk to my loft” (107).6 For her part, Maria shares in Jemima’s marginality and servitude: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (79). Troped as servant, woman becomes a figure whose handmaid status is inescapable. Jemima represents the deep and vexing contradictions of woman, like the serving classes, being both helpmeet and enemy of the master.7 Wollstonecraft’s symmetrical patterning that averred a common estate of womanhood to which both mistress and maid belonged, is a standard against which later more tortuous, contradictory, and ironic perspectives on servants and their employers may be measured. In 1798, Romantic faith in the fundamental unity of human experience enables both mistress and maid to transcend class distinctions. Nonetheless, mistress and maidservant in this novel encounter diametrically opposed experiences of reading and writing, with Jemima’s story critiquing Maria’s ardent faith in literary Romanticism. Maria

32

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

aspires to write her autobiography of complaint within a literary tradition where women’s tales of wrongs go unwritten. “Unwritten” women’s stories are masked by those socially endorsed, cathartic lyrics or ballads that the female voice is permitted to recite, chant, or perform. Hence the ballad of Robin Gray sung by Maria’s mad fellow inmate is no more than the sign of her own absent narrative, a substitute for her own lament as victim, forcibly married to an old husband till she goes mad, quite significantly, at her lying-in. Such silenced or oral narratives, riddled with innuendo, stand juxtaposed to written, male texts such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dryden’s Fables, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise and a host of modern pamphlets that comprise the prison library and compete for the attention of the prisoner reading community. Maria and Darnford, numbered among them, are unswerving devotees of the literary masters. Together they believe wholeheartedly in reading and writing as activities that instigate profound personal and political transformation. Hence their intensely literary romance. For Maria, the written affords her an opportunity for encountering desire. Her interest and curiosity in Darnford are fi rst kindled when she comes across his marginalia, while reading classics from the literary canon. Some marginal notes, in Dryden’s Fables, caught her attention: they were written with force and taste; and, in one of the modern pamphlets, there was a fragment left, containing various observations on the present state of society and government, with a comparative view of the politics of Europe and America. These remarks were written with a degree of generous warmth, when alluding to the enslaved state of the labouring majority, perfectly in union with Maria’s mode of thinking. (86) Darnford’s sentiments echo those of the revolutionary text of “rights,” and, as avid reader, Maria is mesmerized by both. However, as her encounters with his marginalia increase, the “generous warmth” of Darnford’s sentiments come to be associated increasingly for her with the seductive charisma of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the cultic status of the hero as Romantic revolutionary that Rousseau enjoyed. The shadow side of Rousseau as the literary genius of Romanticism will emerge with the figure of Jemima’s writing master, and is a development that flows out of Wollstonecraft’s own long and ambivalent engagement with his texts and personality. Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with Rousseau for his sexualization of woman’s role in Emile, in her polemical text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is famous. However, her own response towards him was considerably more complex. Harriet Devine notes that “she was able to fi nd a great deal to admire in him and she explicitly identifies with him in a

Literary Handmaids 33 letter to Imlay, in March 1787: ‘he rambles into that chimerical world in which I too have often wandered’” (10).8 Writing to Imlay, in a letter dated 22 September 1794, she would joke that to honor Rousseau she intended to give Fanny a sash, “for I have always been half in love with him” (46). It was not, however, until Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, that she began to explore in depth the erotic appeal that Rousseau, the political philosopher of “rights,” held for women. Rousseau himself boasted of the effect The New Heloise had upon female readers. “Feelings were divided among the literary people,” he wrote, “but in society, there was only one opinion, and above all women were intoxicated by both the Book and the author” (456).9 In light of this Rousseauvian boast, an ominous fate hangs over Maria, the reader, who falls in love with Darnford through precisely this mediating text of Rousseau’s, namely Julie or the New Heloise. The riveting power of Darnford’s marginalia derives from its close approximation to the kind of signatory flourish that the text’s author reveled in: “Rousseau alone, the true Prometheus” (89).10 As an aside in the margins, its power to distract inheres in the way Darnford models the fl amboyant narcissism so typically associated with Rousseau. Darnford’s hyperbolical praise of Rousseau becomes an exhibitionistic assertion of the marginal author’s own revolutionary pose. However, even more radical irony ensues when this reading moment is considered in conjunction with the provocative preface that Rousseau appended to this epistolary romance. What, we might ask, are its imbrications with concerns of marginalia, writing, and authorship in Wollstonecraft’s novel? H. J. Jackson in Marginalia notes that some forms of marginalia eventually become an integral part of the text: “Writers, the book trade and government itself were all aware of the risks involved in sending books into the world with no guidance for the reader. The widely adapted solution was to provide printed commentary in order to control the readers’ efforts at interpretation” (51).11 Darnford’s annotation functions as just such a form of scholarly opinion, in its “affi liations” with the patriarchal revolutionary text. Maria’s unwary reading responses to Rousseau’s tale of defi ant passion between St. Preux and Julie confl ate Darnford, the author of marginalia, St. Preux, the “author” of love letters, and Rousseau, the author of St. Preux, into a common entity. In this fantasy of interchangeable authorial identities, an endless substitution of names and signatures function as signifi ers for the master-writer. But if she lent to St. Preux, or the demi-god of her fancy, his [Darnford’s] form, she richly repaid him by the donation of all St. Preux’s sentiments and feelings, culled to gratify her own, to which he seemed to have an undoubted right, when she read on the margin of an impassioned letter, written in a well-known hand—’Rousseau alone, the

34

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy true Prometheus of sentiment possessed the fi re of genius necessary to puortary [sic] the passion, the truth of which goes so directly to the heart.’ (89–90)

Enveloped in an erotic reverie, Maria reads Darnford’s marginalia as an extension of the text that is both St. Preux, the writer of the love letter, and Rousseau, its “actual” author. In doing so she grants Darnford a dangerous authority that can only end in further oppression and disillusion. Maria’s naïve belief in Romanticism’s expressive theories of art that affi rm writing as presence, can only serve to deepen irony, for Wollstonecraft’s readers would most certainly have known of Julie or the New Heloise’s famous metafictional introduction. In this introduction, Rousseau advertised the fiction of authorship and taunted his readers with the masquerade of the Romantic text that declares writing to be nothing but “pure” sentiment, an “overflowing of powerful feeling,” with its wellsprings in an authentic selfhood. In his fi rst preface Rousseau wrote: I have seen the morals of my times, and I have published these letters. Would I had lived in an age when I should have thrown them into the fi re! Although I bear only the title of Editor here, I have myself had a hand in this and I do not disguise this. Have I done the whole thing, and is the entire correspondence a fiction? Worldly people, what matters it to you? It surely is a fiction for you. (3)12 In his second preface Rousseau grew increasingly ludic in his interrogation of origins and authorship, representing himself to his readers as a divided self, in the form of a fictional dialogue between “the Editor” and “A Man of Letters”: N. When I ask you whether you are the author of these Letters, why then do you elude my question? R. For the very reason that I do not wish to tell a lie. N. But you also refuse to tell the truth? R. To declare that one wishes to keep the truth unspoken is still to honor it. You would have an easier time with a man who was willing to lie. Besides, do people of taste mistake Authors’ pens? How dare you ask a question that is for you to decide? (11)13 If Rousseau’s preface as an exercise in self-advertisement seems riddled with equivocation, it must inevitably invite an unromantic skepticism over the erotics of the text, and call attention to an author who is not so much a man of feeling, as a practitioner of a lover’s discourse. Romanticism’s aesthetic of sincerity is offered up to the worldly reader for consumption.

Literary Handmaids 35 To take into account the allusions to sophisticated literacy that the Rousseau text evokes is to recognize the naïveté of Maria’s trust in writing and origins, and her failure as reader to grasp the rhetorical character of authorship—factors that the skeptical Jemima’s narrative will foreground. Seduced by the revolutionary text, Maria fails to heed the very warning that Rousseau issued, tongue-in-cheek, to female readers like herself, in his fi rst preface: Never did a chaste maiden read Novels; and I have affi xed to this one, a sufficiently clear title so that upon opening it anyone would know what to expect. She who, despite this title, dares to read a single page of it, is a maiden already undone: but let her not attribute her undoing to this book; the harm was already done. Since she has begun, let her fi nish reading: she has nothing more to risk. (4) For Rousseau, the very act of reading marks an irreversible trajectory of ruin; the literate imagination, stimulated by immodest curiosity, is helpless in the throes of desire that the author as arch-seducer has kindled through his “presence” as text. Jemima’s narrative is also one of seduction and betrayal by the texts and authors of the Romantic Revolution, but, orally recited, it foregoes inscription, thereby operating inversely to the heroine’s story. Certainly, as servant maid, Jemima is an especially appropriate agent for interrogating the Rousseau myth, for Rousseau, in his Confessions, brazenly complicated the Romantic ideology of authenticity, relating how he once falsely accused a servant girl of theft of a ribbon and exulted in her misery, as a consequence of his perverse fiction. Jemima’s narrative of her ruin addresses precisely such corruptions of literate culture and the literary sensibility, something Maria, her mistress, cannot fathom. Jemima records her early, innocent faith in Romanticism: “I had often in my childhood, followed a ballad-singer, to hear the sequel of a dismal story, though sure of being severely punished for delaying to return with whatever I was sent to purchase” (111).14 Her description ironically resonates to the encounter between Blake’s poet-piper and child, in his Songs of Innocence. Unlike Blake’s child, who commands the piper with authority, and is male, Jemima is female, and her wanderings are rewarded by a “dismal story,” greatly different from the child who “wept to hear” Blake’s piper out of pure joy. Such romantic stirrings are therefore neither redemptive nor happy for the working-class female on the periphery of the poetic circle. Jemima’s childhood fascination with the poet figure prefigures her later sexual bond as servant prostitute to the literary master. Jemima’s narrative will later explore the full significance of such enamored “servitude.” As one who services a writer both domestically and sexually, Jemima, like Maria, is awakened to the allure of both the revolutionary text and the textual revolutionary. Oblivious to irony, she enters into a liaison with the

36

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Rousseauvian master, because she admits to being “galled by the yoke of service” (110). Jemima narrates the failure of a literate culture to accomplish the liberation from servitude she had been led to expect. Of her master Jemima says: The attention of my unassuming instructor, who without being ignorant of his own powers, possessed great simplicity of manners, strengthened the illusion. Having sometimes caught up hints for thought, from my untutored remarks, he often led me to discuss the subjects he was treating, and would read to me his productions, previous to their publication, wishing to profit by criticism of unsophisticated feeling. The aim of his writings was to touch the simple springs of the heart; for he despised the would be oracles, the self-elected philosophers, who fright away fancy, while sifting each grain of thought to prove that slowness of comprehension is wisdom. (112) Jemima’s literary servitude suggests both sexual and textual oppression. Her narrative interrogates both authority and authorship from the margins, opening up suspicions over writing and origins, which Maria, as mistress and lady, does not entertain. Is the Romantic poet-philosopher, the man of feeling who embraces simplicity and subscribes to the equivalent of the Kantian categorical imperative, the true author of the revolutionary text? The literary partnership practiced by man and woman as master and servant remains invisible within the text and historically “unwritten.” Jemima is undoubtedly a debased, corrupted version of the female muse/amanuensis fi gure, so idealized in a patriarchal literary tradition. But she is also “Anonymous,” deprived here of signature and her status as literate by Romanticism’s proclivity for mapping onto those of humble station the “wisdom” of preliterate primitives.15 The Roussueavian master assigns to Jemima a childlike propensity for spontaneous insight frequently ascribed to members of oral cultures, rather than acknowledging her capacity for conscious deliberation, so necessary for the editing and revision of the written text. Certainly, Rousseau’s claim for his novel as one that proffers sentiment over philosophy bears a remarkable similarity to Jemima’s description of her literary master’s enterprise. Rousseau’s privileging of honest intuition over objective ratiocination in his introduction reinforces the resemblance that he bears to Jemima’s literary master: Two or three simple but sensible youths discuss among themselves the interests of their hearts. . . . Would you have them know how to observe, judge, reflect? They know nothing of all that. They know how to love: they relate everything to their passion. . . . Their errors are more worthy than the knowledge of Sages. Their honest hearts carry

Literary Handmaids 37 everywhere, even in their very faults, the prejudices of virtue, always confident and constantly betrayed. (11)16 Jemima’s narrative, however, reminds us that the “simple springs of the heart” that the Romantic writer sought, in her case, were obtained through “mastery” rather than intuitive insight or empathy. In reality, the Romantic visionary, like the man of feeling, is a convoluted fi ction. Nor are feeling and imagination the pristine source of a humanity that a sophisticated rationalism corrupts. For, in Jemima’s words, as “a wornout votary of voluptuousness, his desires became fastidious in proportion as they grew weak, and tender, and the native tenderness of his heart was undermined by a vitiated imagination.” (110)17 In Jemima’s narrative, the lexicon of Romanticism comes to be rewritten, as she deconstructs the revolutionary poet and the revolutionary text. As an interrogation of the revolutionary text’s claims, her narrative of the wrongs of woman becomes an indictment against patriarchal revolutionary Romanticism. In articulating the violence and abuse that are the servant woman’s lot, it renders them paradigmatic of woman’s more general literary servitude to Romanticism’s masterful discourses. Harking back to Maria’s response to the revolutionary text, one might describe such a response as one that renders the text “readerly,” to borrow a term from Barthes, for we are told that in her vigil at the window to catch a glimpse of Darnford, she was “again true to the hour, yet had fi nished Rousseau, and begun to transcribe some selected passages” (90). Maria’s literacy is slavish, since her reader’s response to the text is nothing more than an exact replication and reproduction of it. As the story of the revolutionary text’s production, Jemima’s narrative warns against the trust in writing sponsored by cultures of literacy. It opens up the gap between literacy and orality, alerting us to the possibility of silences and “corruptions” within the text that are invisible but real. And, signifi cantly, Jemima as literary servant integrates the story of the revolutionary text’s production into her prostitution narrative. If Maria reads from margins to text, then Jemima’s story encourages us to read from text into the margins. In Jemima’s narrative, the revolutionary text becomes a minor detail, unread, while her own story from the margins invites us as readers to journey further into the margins where other stories reside. For not only does Jemima narrate her own story of servitude as rape, abortion, violence, and poverty. She enters into the margins of her own story in the tale of her pregnant servant rival whom she had turned out, and who, like Jemima, could not return to her father’s home. Her corpse is found the next morning, drowned within a tub for watering horses. Jemima narrates: “I passed by, just as some men, going to work, drew out the stiff, cold corpse—let me not recal [sic] the horrid moment!—I recognized the pale visage; I listened to the tale told by the spectators, and my heart did not burst” (117).

38 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy The story of the dead servant girl is what Shakespeare’s Viola termed “a blank.” This is a moment that comes closest to Gayathri Spivak’s description of a latter day suttee Bhuvaneswari, who hanged herself while menstruating in order to prove that she was not pregnant, but whose body could not ultimately articulate the full text of its oppression since its subaltern status denied it from being heard.18 The murmurs of the crowd are a gloss upon the retrieved text that is the dead servant’s pregnant, working-class body. Jemima, silent amidst the crowd, represents the willful suppression of narratives within narratives. This is a representation of both sexual and narrative wrongs, where the guilty author appears, momentarily, as a face among the crowd, a signifier of silence. By orally confessing the sins of narrative, Jemima’s story looks forward to her own elision from Maria’s text of the wrongs of woman. Maria’s writing—for all its claims to speak generically for her sex, centered upon her own individualistic history in its liberal humanism— makes no mention of her servant’s sufferings. Wollstonecraft does not endow women’s writing with any favored mystique. Her awareness of the limits of narration is by now too immense to permit such a naïve faith in polemics. If literacy manifests itself in Maria in a need for writing, in order to educate her infant daughter to bourgeois individualism, and is thereby associated with the gains of freedom, in Jemima’s case, literacy participates in a narrative of fallenness. Narrating the gains of literacy from a stage where she could “just spell and put a sentence together” (111), she describes her “domestic” education: “I listened to the various arguments, though often mingled with obscenity, which occurred at the table where I was allowed to preside: for a literary friend or two frequently came home with my master to dine or pass the night” (111). Literacy is therefore gained through servitude on the part of women to her literary masters. Jemima is another sinful Eve, waiting upon the table at which Adam and Raphael nobly converse. Coveting the crumbs of their conversation, Jemima’s narrative recasts earlier descriptions of literal starvation and hunger as child-servant, when she was “fed with the refuse of the table” (104), to signify on a deeper level, woman’s very real intellectual deprivation as domestic subaltern in a patriarchal household. Like Eve, therefore, Jemima’s fallenness is already inherent to her condition, because the fruits of literacy, the learning of the language of the patriarchs, comes only with the loss of innocence: “Having lost the privileged respect of my sex . . . I had the advantage of hearing discussions, from which, in the common course of life, women are excluded” (111). Jemima’s narrative includes several references to fallenness. She injures her leg at the washtub, while lifting a heavy load and fi nds herself “unable to stand” (118), she describes how she at one time had “sunk down senseless at a door” (118), and there are several descriptions of her crawling,

Literary Handmaids 39 skulking, and creeping from her tormentors who beat, starve, and abuse her systematically. Fallenness, however, does not attest here to Victorian anxieties over stability of character, as discussed by Amanda Anderson in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces.19 Given its associations with the acquisition of literacy skills and literary powers, fallenness is simultaneously a physically enforced condition and a transaction. Jemima narrates her negotiations with the literary fathers that result in the trading of her body for literariness. She is therefore aware of the irony behind Maria and Darnford’s often-repeated question, “why my sentiments and language were superior to my station?” Their query, as a description of the literate Jemima, inverts the rhetoric of fallenness, and renders it problematic. After the death of her literary master and “protector,” Jemima takes on the resonance of a Judith Shakespeare as she narrates her struggles to avoid prostitution and poverty afresh. For the problem with this neoliterate is not the want of refi nement (as feared by the age’s cultural jeremiads), but an excess of it that later makes domestic service intolerable. “I had acquired a taste for literature, during the five years I had lived with a literary man, occasionally conversing with men of the fi nest abilities of the age; and now to descend to the lowest vulgarity, was a degree of wretchedness not to be imagined unfelt” (113). We learn of her own writing talent in her narration of her efforts to petition literary friends of her former master. To another I wrote, stating my case, and requesting advice. He was an advocate for unequivocal sincerity; and had often, in my presence, descanted on the evils which arise in society from the despotism of rank and riches. In reply, I received a long essay on the energy of the human mind, with continual allusions to his own force of character. He added, that the woman who could write such a letter as I had sent him, could never be in want of resources, were she to look into herself, and exert her powers. (114) Jemima recounts here the manner in which professionalism is both offered and denied to woman by the champions of revolution. Not only is the Romantic revolutionary narcissistic in his essay that dwells on “the force of his own character,” the advocate of rights has no wish to entertain or acknowledge her text of wrongs. The irony deepens. Jemima cannot obtain honest employment at this point as a servant, because, as she notes: “The want of a character prevented me from getting a place” (113). Unable to inscribe herself into being for all her literary powers, and textualized by others, Jemima as potential literary professional is “written off” as prostitute, and, in her marginal narrative,

40 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy represents the scandal surrounding the female writer, that will not be glossed over. Jemima therefore draws attention not just to the wronged status of woman, but also to the wronged status of woman as writer, thus prefiguring the crisis of writing that will ultimately render Maria’s plea in court worthless. 20 Maria’s educational tract to her daughter remains within the realm of private writing. Hence the writing revolution fails, since Maria, unlike Jemima, never breaks out of the imprisoning confi nes of prescribed literary decorum for the “lady writer.” By contrast, Jemima’s powers as narrator are acknowledged. Such is the case not only with the man of letters, but also with an earlier master, who turns her out when pregnant with his child. Destitute and helpless, Jemima recounts that “one of the boys of the shop passing by, heard my tale, and immediately repaired to his master, to give him a description of my situation; and he touched the right key—the scandal it would give rise to, if I were left to repeat my tale to every enquirer” (108). He offers her in return for her silence, accommodation in a house for beggars, and warns her “not to make free with his name” (108). If Maria’s writing is private, with only her infant daughter as intended reader, Jemima’s narratives, both oral and written, circulate like her body, quite shamefully in public. Her narrative is therefore an act of social and textual indecorum, fundamentally transgressive in its discrediting of masters and their attempts to silence her socially and textually. Why then does Jemima’s powerful critique of bourgeois revolutionary writing go unremembered by the text? Jemima’s story is a handmaid’s tale in several senses. It is the life history of a maidservant; but the figure of the maidservant comes to be confl ated by the figures of both the prostitute and the writer, so that servitude encompasses within its embrace domestic, sexual, and literary professionalism. If the text wishes to preserve its bourgeois faith in an agenda of education through the written text, such a narrative must necessarily be elided from the “revolutionary” text that Maria will write. As handmaid’s tale, Jemima’s is a narrative of literary servitude, for she enables the writing of both the narrative of the rights of men and the narrative of the wrongs of woman. However, irony governs the dynamic that operates between the unwritten servant narrative, the written but unpublished text of wrongs and the printed text of rights. The printed text that proclaims the rights of man may be read as a palimpsest, for beneath it resides another text that tells of the wrongs of woman: the story of Jemima’s sexual exploitation and bondage, one that explores the multilayered signifi cance of what she terms “servitude” (110). As for the written but unpublished text of wrongs, like the text on rights it aspires to being a palliative, hence Maria’s promise to Jemima of its efficacious effects upon her daughter: “Let me but prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex, and I will teach her to consider you as her second mother, and herself as the

Literary Handmaids 41 prop of your age” (121). Maria’s text aspires towards a grand reformism that will permit for a triumphant maternity to emerge. However, in the process, we note that while bourgeois bodies and texts reproduce themselves, Jemima’s narrative, like her aborted children, are denied reproduction. Significantly, therefore, Maria’s text never achieves completion. Its fi nal paragraph is disjointed, and incoherent in its inconclusive character: “Such, my child, are the events of thy mother’s life to this dreadful moment—Should she ever escape from the fangs of her enemies, she will add the secrets of her prison-house—and—” Some lines were here crossed out, and the memoirs broke off abruptly with the names of Jemima and Darnford. (185) Maria’s love affair with Darnford and the tale of Jemima remain only as traces within her text of wrongs, no more. For all the power of her class, Maria is an inept narrator. Her narrative intimates a crisis in writing that never resolves itself in the text. The text of wrongs remains radically incomplete. In a sense it can never be fi nished, because, by its very nature as prison literature, it testifies to Maria’s continued existence within the confi nes of class, as both woman and woman writer. It therefore predicts the failure of Maria’s “public writing” in a court of law. As a corollary, Jemima and Darnford may roam free and adventurous, to search out her child, while Maria’s act of writing only serves to underscore her lack of true liberation Like Maria, Wollstonecraft remained unable to complete her text, due largely to her inability to decide upon the subaltern Jemima’s powers of agency. She remained uncertain of assigning to Jemima a pivotal role in accomplishing the desired revolutionary conclusion. Critical opinion has detected echoes of the Gilbert Imlay love affair in the betrayed and suicidal Maria. What has escaped notice, however, are the autobiographical connections with Jemima as enabling subaltern, a role Wollstonecraft herself played, rendering support to unhappily married sisters who feared divorce, because it often entailed the loss of child custody. The dual ending of the novel testifies to Wollstonecraft’s own divided and uncertain class allegiances. Despite her poverty, or perhaps because of it, she strenuously insisted upon her bourgeois moorings, in order to secure acceptance within late-eighteenth-century society. Jemima’s story remains “unwritten,” a gloss to be added by a future reader, to her name as it appears in the educational revolutionary text produced by the mistress. The process of glossing is performed by the actual reader, who is acutely aware of the inscribed reader’s inability to perform such a crucial act of marginalia, and of the incompleteness of woman’s education in the wrongs of her sex, as a consequence. Unable to fully reconfigure the marginal servant, Wollstonecraft’s own conclusions, in a profound

42

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

instance of formal irony, remained condemned to the status of appendices and marginalia. Such marginalia remind us of the narrative impasse that must result from a creed of liberal feminism and its faith in bourgeois individualism. Maria remains dependent upon her servant, a fact that Wollstonecraft’s narrative cannot bring itself to affi rm, and despite the novel’s celebration of the powers of literacy, without collective agency, woman as revolutionary subject cannot be written. Forty years passed between Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent response to servant literacy under the pressures of Romanticism and the emergence of another instance of master-servant coauthorship that also ensued within a context of crime detection and a quest for justice. However, Susan Hopley, an 1841 best seller by Catherine Crowe, emerged during the era of Chartism, with a vastly different agenda, affi rming the profitability of a maidservant’s literacy for a bourgeois class deeply invested in the maintenance of a social order threatened by the unrest, discontent, and venality typical of a newly emergent capitalism. Susan Hopley, a maidservant raised in the Leeson household, charged with the care of its young son, Harry, follows him, after he is orphaned, to the household of his guardian, Mr. Wentworth. There, while still a child, an attempt is made upon his life by Mr. Gaveston, a relation of Wentworth’s, who has hopes of marrying the latter’s daughter and inheriting the family business. The attempt is foiled by Susan and her brother Andrew, also in Wentworth’s service, as a groom. A few years later, Wentworth is found murdered. Gaveston points to evidence that Andrew has robbed and killed his master, before absconding with his haughty and pretty servant sweetheart, Mabel, who like Andrew, goes missing. Wentworth’s will, that bequeaths his business to Harry Leeson, also vanishes. Susan resolves to clear Andrew’s name, and her adventures and travels involve a vast number of characters who, are all victims of a crime ring presided over by the nefarious Gaveston and his henchmen. In the end, Gaveston, exposed as the true culprit, commits suicide, Andrew’s corpse is recovered, and Susan is offered a home by Harry Leeson, who has now come into a business of his own, by marrying his partner’s daughter. Hopley, despite solving a number of crimes suffered by a variety of characters, is far less active within the plot than the title suggests, but Crowe’s detective novel is of particular interest for the elaborate preamble that addresses how textual production and narrational politics ensue out of a master-servant rapprochement over the practice of literacy, with its promise of both authorship and authority. The text is an act of collaborative narration between a master and his maidservant, in their evening years. However, despite a subtitle that promises to relate “The Adventures of a Maid Servant,” the dominant narrative voice is that of Harry Leeson, the master, who is also the sole author of the text. The fi rst chapter, entitled “Which Introduces Susan to the Gentle Reader,” commences, quite unexpectedly, on an elegiac note: “Excellent Susan! She is dead now” (2). 21

Literary Handmaids 43

Figure 2.1

The Servants’ Magazine.

The disjunction between reader expectations of a servant protagonist’s robust agency within an incident-packed plot, and the opening revelation that this heroine is, in fact, long deceased, is one that both disorients and calms the imprudent consumer, lured by the sensational promise of the subtitle. But if the suggestive subtitle, with its reference to adventurous

44

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

maidservants, seems an invitation to prurient interest in servant sexuality on the part of the Victorian reader, the authoritative master-narrator quickly dispels such unseemly curiosity by furnishing us with a “character” of the servant in question: Worthy, excellent Susan! Methinks I see her now, in her neat plaited cap, snuff-colored stuff gown, clean white apron, and spectacles on nose, plying her knitting needles, whose labours were to result in a comfortable pair of lamb’s wool stockings for my next winter’s wear, or a warm waistcoat for poor old Jeremy; or in something, be it what it might, that was to contribute to the welfare and benefit of some human being. (2) Susan Hopley, the commendable maidservant, is, alas, no more than a shade, conjured up by the reminiscing master, a nostalgic reverie from a bygone age. Located fi rmly at the hearth, she is a sustainer of domesticity, laboring not just for the master, but for humanity at large. As an asexual provider of wholesome comfort, Susan, from the master’s perspective, accepts her vocation of service within an established natural order: I believe, if it had so happened that the whole human race had been miraculously provided to repletion with warm stockings and waistcoats, that Susan, rather than let her fi ngers be idle and not be doing something for somebody, would have knit jackets for the shorn lambs and blankets for the early calves. (2) Hopley, as maternal presence, tends to the welfare of both man and nature. Her tranquil sense of purpose propels her into the blameless round of “doing something for somebody.” Susan’s integration into the master’s household does, however, resonate with innuendo. The master-narrator’s lament, “sadly, sadly I miss her” (2), is justified on grounds that initially appear suspect: “When, by the death of my wife and the marriage of my children, I grew a lone old man, she became my companion as well as my housekeeper” (2). This maidservant, then, is associated with nightly intimacy, but her physical person is a chaste source of pleasure: “With the tea urn, in the evening, came Susan, so neat, so clean, with her honest, benevolent face, which though it was not handsome, was the pleasantest face I ever looked upon” (2). Homely and immaculate in her dress and person, the respectful drudge possesses a peculiar visual charm of her own. It is within such a context of a domesticity that is at once both wholesome and inappropriate, that narrative becomes a shared ritual, jointly performed by master and servant, attesting to the essentially harmonious character of their association: Sometimes I read aloud, but more generally we used to talk over old times and past adventures—and pleasant it was! Some people, if they

Literary Handmaids 45 had listened to us, might have thought there was a sameness in our conversation—a repetition of old stories—but they never wearied us; I think I liked them better every night; and so did she. (2) “Sameness” is a marker of consonance between narratives that master and servant produce. In this replication of stories from bygone days, dissent, contradiction, and novelty have no part. Mutual comfort and incremental delight make for a narrative idyll, blurring all distinctions between narrator and audience, author and reader. The repetitious recitative of master and maidservant suggests homogeneity to their discourse that will, in turn, produce a text immune to editing, revision, or corruption. As such, its reproduction is an act that testifies to its legitimacy, the blameless offspring of their domestic revels, and a testimony to their unified perspective as narrators. Transforming such oral recitative into a text for public pleasure, however, is undertaken only at the master’s initiative. “At length, one evening, it occurred to us that what amused us so much, might perhaps amuse other people. ‘Suppose we write our histories,’ said I. ‘Susan, I think we could make three volumes of adventures before we settled down into this quiet life, which furnishes nothing to tell’” (4). The text addresses its own moment of instantiation self-consciously; nonetheless, plurality of perspective and narrative dissonance are implicit in the reference to “histories” subsumed into a single, defi nitive chronicle. For this is no sensational account by a lowly and unreliable maidservant narrator. Instead the text of Susan Hopley’s adventures presents itself as the outcome of joint labor and, more significantly, by a rhetorical sleight of hand, owned to equally by master and servant, who affi rm a common narrative heritage. Inevitably, then, such “defi nitive” claims for history must formally aspire to the status of fiction, given the master’s authorial ambition to “make” or craft narrative into what hints broadly at resembling the three-decker novel. Susan Hopley, in keeping with models of seemliness that befit her gender and class, remains content, despite her travels and adventures, to orally narrate her adventures by the fi reside. Because this servant’s narrative functions as a critique of greed generated by a criminalized, capitalist order, it remains fi rmly located within the generous environs of domesticity, shunning altogether the profit-driven marketplace. Hence, Harry Leeson, the master-narrator, speculates at the end of the preface: “Whether the result of our labors will ever see the light—whether it will be considered worth publishing ‘by the trade,’ or worth reading by the public, is more than I can foresee” (4). Servants nostalgically evoke a precapitalistic order of narration, so that Susan, apostrophized in the opening sentences as “Worthy, excellent Susan!” becomes the touchstone of value, as both heroine and narrator, in a narrative economy now tainted by monetary considerations. Nonetheless, the narrative alludes to its double-voiced character, from the very outset:

46

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy I’ve a notion it wouldn’t be a bad story. The world don’t want extraordinary events, and improbable incidents to amuse it now. They have found out that “the proper study of mankind is man”; and he who can paint real life and human nature has the best chance of being read. It has often been said that few biographies would be uninteresting, if people would or could disclose the exact truth with all its details. Let us make an experiment, and relate simply, without addition or subtraction, the events of our early years. (4)

A sober realist aesthetic appears to be the favored choice of the bourgeois master. However, the promise of titillation has already begun to insinuate itself into the unembellished text, thanks to the master-narrator’s subtle pandering to public taste. For unlike the oral narrator, who instantiates narrative in the presence of an audience, the written tale must go in search of a reader. The “world” that Harry Leeson solicits is none other than Wilkie Collins’s unknown public, and the preface demonstrates the new and precarious relationship that the master forges with readers on the servant’s behalf. Experimental narrative rests, paradoxically, in the artlessness of the servant voice. The “honest” servant stimulates reader desire, hence the scandal that accrues around the servant narrator, whose oral narrative is written down: her plain style is sensational. The coauthoring process between master and servant is purposefully detailed, building towards self-conscious textuality: “In the evening we can collect our materials and arrange our plan: and on wet days, when I can’t get out, I’ll put it all on paper: and we shall then be able to judge how it reads” (4). The dilemma this raises renders reading relations problematic. What is the true nature of the text we are being presented with, and who might its author be? Is Harry Leeson a complex rhetorical construct presiding over the production of the text as authoritative author/ghost writer/amanuensis? Or is he no more than a literary thief, appropriating a servant’s narrative that, ironically, treats of her protracted struggle with thieving bourgeois villains like Gaveston? If the written text is self-consciously brought into existence before the reader’s eyes, does its inauthenticity remain a perplexing conundrum that accompanies and influences its reception? Not only is the servant denied control of the pen, the narrative, we are told, must “read well,” hence the necessity of a literary intelligence that supersedes the authority that Susan exercises as oral narrator. In addition, the promise of honest realism is rescinded by the end of the preface: Nearly all are dead now who would be pained by the disclosures; and we have but to conceal the names of places and of people, and wait a few years, and perhaps, when you and I are gone, some kind friend may revise our manuscript, and give it to the world; and we may thus by furnishing our quota to the amusement of mankind, pay back some part of the

Literary Handmaids 47 pleasure we have derived from the excellent tales that have cheered our fireside. (4) A tale of bourgeois villainy, where servants and their relations are robbed, calumniated, sold into prostitution, and falsely accused of crime, is now no longer a radical exercise in exposure, but is instead transformed into wholesome entertainment, carefully emended by discretion arising out of a regard for bourgeois reputations. Literacy permits for the sanitizing of narrative, the raw spontaneity of the oral performance offered by the servant to the master is civilized into literary form. The decorousness of literacy lies not just in its functions as an act of “re-telling,” or its postures at “recording” the human voice. Literacy offers decorum because its texts are always posthumous. The belatedness of the written word means that the historical agency of a narrating voice can never be wholly affi rmed. Censoring the narrator becomes possible when he or she is encouraged to silence in favor of the written word. Hopley’s narrative, doubly revised by both master and publisher, is no longer her own. Indeed, its status as servant narrative is ambiguous, its posthumous character already cast into doubt by the way the publication process renders an original text indistinguishable from its rewritten version. The “killing off” of the servant’s oral narrative is therefore what makes the story of her victimization a benign adventure narrative that affords a reading public good cheer. Why, we might ask, did Crowe not choose to offer us a simple, straightforward, third-person narrative of her complicated adventure story that often includes more characters than we can remember, and incidents and scenes that do not involve either Hopley or Leeson? What possible significance could her extended preamble on the production and status of the text in regard to master-servant relations have for an entertaining crime story? The politics of narrative control are imbricated in Susan Hopley’s status as literate, a fact foregrounded in the opening chapter. Born into a sober, agrarian household in the southeast of England, she is schooled in pious literacy by a widowed mother, who brought up her children “in the fear of God, taught them to spell out words from the Bible, and to be honest and true” (5). Later the ailing widow and her two children, Susan and Andrew, receive help and succor from Harry Leeson’s mother, the curate’s daughter. But among the many charities bestowed upon the Hopley family by Mrs. Leeson, we are told that “the greatest of all was, that she undertook to have Andrew and Susan taught to read and write” (6). The domestication of working-class literacy is a precondition for domesticating the servant’s narrating propensities. Such lessons in literacy are accomplished through the good offices of an older family retainer, Dobbs, also described as “a worthy, excellent servant” (6). Domestic culture may thus develop its own reciprocal dynamic in the transmission of wholesome literacy:

48 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Now, Dobbs had had a very good education from Mrs. Leeson’s father; and as she did not forget that part of her catechism which taught her to do to others as she would they would do to her, she very willingly undertook, at the request of her mistress, to impart to Susan and Andrew such instruction as was needful. (6) The pious literate is a product of Christian domesticity, and becomes the guarantor of harmony in class relations. Hence Susan Hopley informs her master sagely that “there are few things more valuable than an attached and worthy servant” (6). Indeed, as she points out, employers who remain insensible of the unique gift of a servant’s loyalty forfeit more than they realize: “People that don’t think it worth their while to make a friend of a good servant, lose more in life than they think of” (6). Leeson, the beneficiary of such servant enterprise, owes his good fortune and authority as master-narrator to the enlightened household that his mother presided over—a household where servant literacy was encouraged as compatible with bourgeois aspirations. The loyal, educated servant defends the bourgeois master’s life and property. In return, the master will record and publicize the inconspicuous servant’s life history. Susan Hopley, transformed into an amenable literate, proves a congenial narrating companion, summoned into narrative or dismissed from it by a master-narrator, who subsumes her voice and story into his text. References to Susan’s assumption of narrative control are always brief, formulaic and perfunctory: “Here we shall let Susan tell her own story” (7), or “here we shall let Susan once more tell her own story” (13). The servant enjoys no property rights over her “own” story. Appropriated as a voice through the politics of literacy, the servant maid may only engage in narration with her employer’s permission. The literate servant is a worthwhile investment, as Harry Leeson, narrative entrepreneur, will discover to his profit. Such ironies of narrative control are doubly significant in a text preoccupied with issues of legitimate ownership. Ownership claims “lie” at the heart of the murder mystery that Susan Hopley will help solve as vigilant and loyal servant. Gaveston’s acquisitive ambition fi nds its parallel in Harry Leeson, the master-narrator, who comes into his father-in-law’s business, thereby accomplishing safely, through the good offices of his servants, what Gaveston sought to achieve dishonestly, through the vilification, sexual abuse, and murder of members of the serving classes. Such ambitions for upward mobility through legal inheritance, business partnerships, and gains through coverture laws, shared by master and villain alike, make the aspiring petit bourgeois, rather than the humble servant, an emerging danger to society. In this changing social context, domestic ambiences become the new location for criminal activity. How then does one offer a text that records this new scenario to an audience drawn largely from an ambitious and growing middle-class populace that used the servant as a marker of class?

Literary Handmaids 49 Crowe’s adventure story must stage itself as a bourgeois text, yet its potential for sensationalism resides precisely in the audience’s ability for imagining it otherwise: as a reliable exposé of bourgeois corruption by a literate servant. As such, the threat of servant narration that inaugurates the text hovers constantly over the reader, who must remain breathlessly alert for signs of breakdown in narrative control on the part of the master. The anxiety of a narrative dynamic of cooperation deteriorating into a competitive struggle for narrative space between superior and subordinate is a sustained strain within the narrative’s aesthetic, and fi nds its equivalence in the undercurrents of class strife that reside just below the surface of its crime-fiction plot. Not surprisingly, the only narration that is permitted to Susan pertains largely to her role as servant, rather than sleuth: the origins of her connection with the Leeson household; the years of watchful protection over the young master, Harry; her suspicions of Gaveston’s criminal intentions towards the juvenile master-narrator; and the mysterious murder and robbery of Mr. Wentworth. However, the maidservant, situated on the interstices of the oral-literate binary, possesses a capacity for double-voiced narration that functions in ironic symmetry with the dualisms at play within the master-servant dynamic that pressures author-reader relations in the text. The fi rst phase of narrative establishes her perspective as servant-spy, who, unnoticed from the vantage point of her window, observes Andrew thwart Gaveston’s attempt at drowning the infant Harry. As such, the servant’s factual narrative enables the logical “designs” of realism to prevail. By contrast, her second narrative phase, with its excursion into realms of the fantastic, bears the impress of oral narrative culture, and recasts the servant-sleuth as visionary. On the night of the murder, Susan dozes in her chair, remembering Gaveston’s attempt on her young master’s life. As she informs us: “I kept pondering them, till insensibly my waking thoughts became dreams, and I gradually sunk into a slumber, in which the same train of ideas continued” (19). The initial images are “all confused and mingled together,” consisting of “my master and mistress, and Mr. Gaveston and Andrew— there was trouble and strife” (19). Susan’s initial subconscious intuitions of murder and mayhem link her to the realm of the repressed. More clearly, her instinctive sense of evil abroad on that night manifests itself in ghostly apparitions. First, her brother, Andrew, “in his grave clothes,” gestures warningly to Susan at villainous intruders in her bedchamber. He is succeeded by the ghost of Mr. Wentworth, “with a large gash on his throat” (19), after which the ghost of Andrew returns to intervene between the armed intruders and his sister with the words: “No, no: let her sleep! Let her sleep!” (19). The macabre moment gives way to her waking, uncertain if the footsteps and horses’ hooves that she hears are a part of her dream or not. The third phase of Susan’s narration occurs after news of Wentworth’s murder has arrived and treats of her resolve to renounce her

50 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy situation and her fiancé and go in search of a new life, intent on clearing her brother’s name. Susan Hopley’s dream narrative remains at odds with the written master-narrative. On the surface, such a narrative is benignly demystified by a literate culture as the fanciful or superstitious aberrations of a primitive preliterate mind. Harry Leeson, the stoutly rational bourgeois master, tactfully declines narration that addresses the uncanny. Susan’s oral narrative, however, gives voice to the good servant’s repressed intuitions of the murderous hostility that characterizes class relations between masters and servants. As pious literate, such sentiments can never be inscribed. The genteel character that pious literacy has conferred upon her indoctrinates her in personal and cultural loyalty towards bourgeois interests. Hence Susan’s narrative ruptures with realism, in order to articulate the servant’s superstitious terror of the bourgeois. Andrew’s ghost, clad in “grave clothes,” with its hollow, staring eyes, is an alert from a servant kinsman, in both a literal and figurative sense. Most significantly, at the very moment that he interposes between Susan and the intruders, the latters’ lantern goes out, and a baffled Susan, who has till this moment struggled to shake off sleep, confides to us that she fi nally and inexplicably “awoke in reality.” Her description of her return to a rational and literate domain as an awakening, is, of course, ironic. The daylight that marks a return to a realist aesthetic, brings with it the rule of logic founded upon scientific evidence, clues, and alibis, unscrupulously deployed for the purpose of defaming the name of the innocent servant-victim, Andrew. In this abuse of detective narrative that Gaveston scripts by reconstructing the crime as a murder of a master by a servant, Susan’s one objective is to “clear Andrew’s character . . . [and] live to see the day when we might lift up our heads again and cry to the world, ‘You’ve wronged us!’” (31). Despite her status as literate, Susan envisages her indictment of the unnamed enemy as fierce, loud, and oral. It is a cry that resonates throughout the text, despite her prudent and discreet demeanor as narrative collaborator. The maidservant, raising her voice, agitates a middle-class readership, for the pronoun renders indeterminate whether her accusation is levied at an individual, a class, or a society as a whole. 22 Despite Hopley’s apparent affiliations to primitive oral culture, she remains discreetly literate. Traces of criminal guilt, the master-narrator notes, are “read” by Hopley, whose sharp eye records details such as dates carved on coins, and initials on button studs. In parley with a chambermaid at the scene of the crime, she is given “ a pair of little studs united by a chain, with a bit of colored glass in each; on one was inscribed W. G., and on the other J. C. The fi rst were the initials of Mr. Gaveston: and though, even if the thing were his, the discovery amounted to little or nothing, yet Susan felt anxious to possess it” (36). The sign of Gaveston’s guilt is eventually deciphered, thanks to the literate servant’s sense of texuality. At the end of the trial, Gaveston’s loyal henchmen refuse to betray him,

Literary Handmaids 51 but Julia Clarke, a woman he once courted, but shoved into a stream to drown, comes forward to testify that the studs were a gift from her to Gaveston, who masqueraded under the name of Walter Godfrey. 23 Reading bourgeois guilt continues to the end. The narrator notes that “what human lips refused to reveal, the labours of the road-makers ere long disclosed” (400). After Gaveston’s death abroad is known, the road that runs through the Manor House is relaid. The fi ndings are predictable: “When they broke up the grounds of the Old Manor House, in the deep dry well alluded to by the crones in the early part of our story, under a heap of withered branches and furze, were found the remains of Andrew Hopley, with his clothes and other articles, amongst which were the remnants of a shirt stained with blood, marked ‘W. G.’ and bearing in one of its sleeves the fellow stud to that in Susan’s possession” (400). Hopley’s literacy has been silently at work, identifying the signature of the criminal, unread and unrecognized by her social superiors. Susan’s adventures are ultimately a record of the triumph of servant literacy, and a vindication of her family honor, but the servant’s reticence to record such a narrative in her own hand suggests both modesty and duplicity. It is of considerable significance to ponder why Susan loses narrative control at precisely that moment when her agency as detecting intelligence commences within the tortuous workings of the text’s plot. As her sleuthing operations grow exponentially within the narrative, so does Susan as narrator vanish from the text, replaced by the master’s omniscient narrative voice. As an actant of plot, Susan may display literacy. As a narrator, she is progressively marginalized, despite her adventurous travels that include such titillating events as a visit to Newgate prison, a body search by customs officials that leaves her feeling as though her modesty has been outraged, and her discovery of two men attempting to enter her bedroom through a trapdoor beneath her bed. At Gaveston’s trial she is a simple witness, offered a home by her grateful master after poetic justice has been handed out. The progressive passivity of Susan Hopley, the literate servant sleuth, who must yield to men of law and courts of justice at the end, has much to do with what might have made Crowe’s novel such a success with readers. How does one read the servant’s text of wrongs, without the terror of revolution disturbing the complacency of a bourgeois domicile? Crowe allows this subliminal anxiety in her text to surface at the end. The trial takes place, like much of the action, not in England, but in France, at the Court de Lisle, with a howling mob in attendance at the doors. However, the bogey of Jacobin fury in this tale of wronged servants is dispelled, since the excited crowds are present not because of the Gaveston trial, but out of eagerness to witness the sentencing of the murderers of a certain Duc de Rochechouart, who, we are told, had endeared himself to the local people. Apprehensions of the Terror are therefore unfounded, since the populace seems appropriately congenial towards enlightened social hierarchies.

52 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Nonetheless, the specter of revolutionary outrage has accompanied us to the very end of the text. Crowe’s plot stratagems are in fact quite elegant, achieving a precarious equipoise between radical and conservative politics. The bourgeois villain is spared the ignominious fate of being condemned to the gallows by the vengeful serving classes. He executes judgment upon himself. At the end of Crowe’s text, bourgeois narratival and social hegemony emerge unscathed, and the bourgeois home opens its doors as sanctuary to the righteous and loyal servant. Nearly forty years have passed between Wollstonecraft’s marginal servant, Jemima, and Crowe’s housekeeper/companion, Susan Hopley. If Jemima in her fallenness is relegated to oral narration despite her innate literary powers as Romantic revolutionary, Susan Hopley, as chaste sleuth, fi nds a home within the Victorian domicile, where she becomes the fi rst of a succession of literate, faithful retainers, who offer discreet narratives of scandalous family histories beside the hearth. What does this transformation of the wronged servant literate from dispossessed outsider to family insider suggest? In 1798 and in 1841, servant literacy was no free-standing activity, but transpired in relation to the master’s writ. As such, both novels afford the reader a subtext of how literacy activity between masters and servants might enact powerfully nuanced pathologies and potentialities for confl ict and cooperation. In order to envision class relations as newly affected by literacy, two major paradigms emerge: tutelary relations that are mutually enamored, but infused by a dangerous Romanticism that promises lyricism, signature, and ultimate equality to the social inferior, or a carefully guided, domesticated mode of literacy that serves and promotes the social peace and knows its place within a collaborative dynamic that renounces romantic aspirations. As such, the reading and writing activities of masters and servants are laden with conjugal and parental resonances. Familiality, that most Victorian of obsessions, is the possible ideology that will mitigate if not banish class strife, and in envisioning or practicing familial literacy, the domestic servant may rewrite scripts of romantic revolutions. Crowe’s text, unlikely as it may sound, harks back to Wollstonecraft, salvaging a subplot that may then be revisited at the beginning of the Victorian age. The distinguishing characteristic that ensures Susan’s co-optation into the bourgeois home, as opposed to Jemima’s relegation to the madhouse as prison, resides in the uses and abuses of literacy skills that both women deploy. Jemima’s tutor, as Romantic genius, fosters in the servant/whore yearnings for individualism, and the phallic authority of the pen. Literacy when manifested as literary ambition is a seduction as surely as any invitation to dalliance, but the narrative of the wronged servant maid remains the hypothetical revolutionary text, effectively marginalized. Susan Hopley at the hearth, by contrast, has gravitated to the center. The domestication of working-class literacy emerges as a model for class relations. Victorian homes become appropriate settings for servant narrative, and debates on

Literary Handmaids 53 class relations may find resolution around the maidservant schooled in Christian prose—the symbol of working-class sobriety. Benign literacy envisages its own cautious encouragement in servants under the supervisory control of employers. In this utopist vision of the collaborative text, Crowe suggests that class confl ict might, in fact, be mitigated by masters and servants who might come to share, among other things, a common vocabulary, parlor etiquette, and an aesthetic of vicarious pleasure. If the master draws delight from the adventurous and enterprising story of a maidservant, then the maidservant gains narratival pleasure or “amusement” in reading the manuscript that she has “dictated.” We are told in the preface that when Leeson broached the possibility, “Susan liked the idea” (4). The master avers that “the occupation it furnished afforded Susan and myself many a pleasant hour: and that come what may of it, it will not be all lost labour” (4). Leeson’s italicized conclusion carries strongly Shakespearean overtones. Authorship may be a labor of chaste love, if performed conjointly by the obedient servant literate with a master. Literate cultures, in order to contend with the politics of class, must resist the impulse of perceiving themselves in relation to orality in terms of trajectories. Instead the ghost of orality may be summoned as dead practice revived, reimagined as primitive performance, so that the servant literate permits for the symbiotic relationship between masters and servants to be mirrored in writing and oral narration performed in synchrony, each as the complement of the other. The themes and tropes that emerge from Maria and Susan Hopley are explored with uncanny repetition for their darker, ironic or perverse manifestations in the next sixty years. The search for a legitimate literacy for servants, the sabotage of cordial literacy relations and good penmanship, the incipient threat of Romanticism, the upstaging of literacy by “honest” orality, the threat to domestic reading idylls, and the demise of the writingfortified bourgeois subject are the outcomes that await the unwary interactions of master and servant who fail to accomplish the fi ne equipoise that Catherine Crowe advocated at the beginning of the Victorian age.

3

Oral Pleasures Repression and Desire in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852) On their virtue and modesty, the virtue perhaps of our own sons and daughters may be suspended. —Henry George Watkins, Hints and Observations Seriously Addressed to Heads of Families in Reference Chiefly to Female Domestic Servants

The idyll of the spinster Susan Hopley, residing in peace and serenity by the fi reside, would prove short-lived. Over the next ten years fiction would explore the increasingly complex impact of literate servants upon familial culture and the consequences of literacy’s contribution towards the embourgeoisement of the serving classes.1 By 1859, an anonymous scribe of the Edinburgh Review had perceptively recognized this process as contingent upon celibacy and cultural assimilation. The small proportion of marriages among domestic servants is no marvel . . . a considerable percentage of men are absent as soldiers, sailors, fishermen, commercial agents, &c. . . . This explains a great deal of celibacy of the class. . . . The household of which they form so useful and essential a part, becomes their home. Born for the most part in a cottage, and destined if they marry to struggle through married life in narrow circumstance and bitter privation, it is only in the houses of the middle and higher classes that they participate in those comforts and luxuries of domestic life which capital as well as labour affords. 2 And so it is with two of the most famous fictional servants of the mid nineteenth century: Emily Bronte’s Nelly Dean and Elizabeth Gaskell’s old nurse narrator, Hester. Bronte and Gaskell both choose to locate their stories in the rural countryside. More significantly, they are narrated by literate, unwed women servants—old family retainers, long past their prime, surrogate mother figures to their orphaned wards. Both servant-narrators mimic the culture of the middle classes, especially through their claims to literacy and familiality. Sober, industrious, and dedicated, Nelly Dean and Hester epitomize the phenomenon of “respectability” as it would develop in the 1850s.

Oral Pleasures

Figure 3.1

55

The Servants’ Magazine.

The phenomenon of respectability has been something of a conundrum to social historians. Historians such as Trygve Tholfsen, R. Q. Gray, and Geoffery Crossack have viewed it as an ambiguous response of workingclass pride to bourgeois society. Its function was to effect the assimilation of a labor elite into a society governed by bourgeois cultural and moral values of thrift, sobriety, and moderation. John Foster, more militantly,

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views it as a capitulation on the part of the working classes to middle-class cultural hegemony and social control. F. M. L. Thompson, adopting a different standpoint, views respectability as deriving from past custom.3 However, both Bronte and Gaskell locate their family histories in a rural past, where the faithful servant presides over a society that is familial in temper. Wuthering Heights narrates events that transpired in a previous century, for the concluding phase of the novel’s action commences with Lockwood’s visit to the Grange in 1801. Gaskell’s nurse, Hester, relates her story to her charge’s offspring. She is therefore both surrogate mother and grandparent, recalling events that occurred several decades ago. Traditional familiality is precisely what is threatened in Bronte’s and Gaskell’s worlds, by newly emerging, if indeterminate class identities that seduce and displace members of their households. In both texts, middleaged, respectably literate women servants forgo the power of the pen, to offer oral histories that flaunt their apparent godliness, discipline, and commitment to social and civic order. Such restraint on their part resonates strongly to ideologies of literacy as a condition of grace—a state that fosters the moral and spiritual improvement of the individual that literacy has called into being in the fi rst place. How might this impact upon our abilities as readers to affi x such narrators in terms of their class moorings, and what implications might their status as literate oral narrators hold for narrational politics? But both texts also foreground the reading and writing capabilities of their servant narrators, and thereby introduce into the narrative a politics of literacy that provokes anxieties over the politics of narration. Nelly Dean is of course modeled on Tabitha Ackroyd, the woman servant who came to live with the Brontes around 1825. Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait endorses the ambiguity that characterized class-relations within the Bronte household. Tabby was a thorough specimen of a Yorkshire woman of her class, in dialect, in appearance, and in character. She ruled the children pretty sharply; and yet never grudged a little extra trouble to provide them with such small treats as came within her power. In return, she claimed to be looked upon as a humble friend; and many years later, Miss.Bronte told me that she found it somewhat difficult to manage, as Tabby expected to be informed of all family concerns. (61)4 Authoritative subordinate, outsider and insider, nurturer and disciplinarian, Tabitha epitomizes not only the porous boundaries of class within the Victorian domicile, but also its increasing obsession and troubled relationship with the heimlich or hidden. However, a footnote in Elizabeth Jay’s introduction to Gaskell’s biography fleshes out the social paradox of the Bronte servant even further. Jay notes that Tabitha Ackroyd was no simple, unschooled countrywoman, but “a class leader at the Wesleyan Chapel”

Oral Pleasures

57

(462). Like Nelly, who is a poor farmer’s daughter, but has read every book in her employer’s library, Tabitha was a figure who mediated between literacy and orality. Gaskell’s account of her narratives testifies to this: Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week, with their tinkling bells. . . . What is more she had known the ‘bottom,’ or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the ‘beck’ on moonlight nights, and had known folks who had seen them. But that was in the days when there were no mills in the valleys; and when all the wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm houses round. ‘It wur the factories as gad driven ’em away,’ she said. No doubt she had many a tale to tell of bygone days of the country-side; old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies, and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details. (61–62) It is a matter of speculation if Gaskell’s romanticized servant as custodian of oral folklore and local family history was a construct of her own fancy, but it is significant that as autobiographer or as unconscious novelist she endowed the Bronte’s servant with a capacity for narrative, a knowledge of both the homely and the esoteric, and an equal familiarity with the domestic and the natural worlds. The indeterminacy of Nelly Dean’s social status as demonstrated by her propensity for both oral and literate activity is of central significance in a world haunted by unease over the instability and reversibility of social identities—anxieties that servant figures, with their capacity for cultural mimicry and economic mobility, could generate. The tenuous hold of the ego upon social identity remains an abiding trauma for the inhabitants of the Heights and the Grange. In Wuthering Heights, characters are haunted by the threat of a servanthood that may be imposed, assumed, desired, and rejected. Plotting servitude, Hindley in his dislike of Heathcliff “drove him from their company to the servants” (6:36).5 Resisting servitude, Heathcliff escapes to return as gentleman and to ensure that Hareton “lives in his own house as a servant deprived of the advantage of wages” (17:145). Catherine Earnshaw mockingly embraces servant status on Heathcliff’s return, asking Nelly to set a separate table for herself and Heathcliff, apart from the stupefied Edgar and Isabella: “Set two tables here, Ellen: one for your master and Miss Isabella being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being the lower orders” (10:74). Edgar Linton seeks at fi rst to interpellate Heathcliff as ploughboy, and admonishes Catherine for permitting the whole household to witness her “welcoming a runaway servant as a brother” (10:74). As for

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Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Isabella’s desire for Heathcliff, it earns the latter’s contempt for “that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach,” who dares “to dream that I could love her” (14:117).6 Brooding over this community of gentlemen and gentlewomen, for whom social identities are profoundly vexatious, are the surrogate-parent servant figures of Joseph and Nelly. In Joseph, the Law of the Father, as modified by the chiding, lower-order accents of Methodism, is a constant and unremitting curse upon the tumult-stricken domicile of the Heights. In the celibate Nelly’s care of the young, the sick, the living, and the dying may be found that principle of maternalism that seems otherwise incapable of survival in such environs. For the unrelenting pattern of maternal deaths includes within its sweep Mrs. Earnshaw, Frances, Mrs. Linton, Catherine Earnshaw, and Isabella Linton: in short every “lady” in the text save Catherine Linton, who alone successfully loves and rehabilitates a servant-figure in Hareton. Nelly’s narrative as “cuckoo’s history” is the story of an adoptive servant-sibling, narrated by a servant mothersurrogate. Its narrator’s class identity is therefore a complication of the narrative’s concerns with familiality, even as it also comes to be imbricated in the narrational politics of the story’s reception by its bourgeois auditor, Lockwood. The servant as desirous and desiring presages both the making and unmaking of selfhood. Hence the politically significant choice made by Emily Bronte of having a servant narrate a tale of psychic menace in which servants constitute a part of the gothic world of domestic politics, while calling attention to the fragile foundations of family life in Victorian houses. Discussions of repression have tended to develop largely around the figure of Catherine Earnshaw.7 However, Bronte, in order to treat it thematically, offers us a poetics of repression that operates through the narrative functions of a selfless, oral-literate servant narrator. What are the effects of selflessness upon a narrative that performs class, through its changing postures as “the written” or “the spoken”? The servant narrator, Ellen Dean, I would argue, is that crucial locus in the text where concerns of desire, repression, class identities, and class relations encounter each other. As a prelude to Nelly’s servant narrative, servants, surrealistically, seem to haunt Lockwood’s consciousness. Desire for the servant, and perplexity over weak boundaries and nebulous social identities are what initiate the narrational dynamics of the text. Lockwood’s “wading through heath and mud to Wuthering Heights” (2:7) for a second visit is a reaction to an encounter with that dangerous, repressed moment of desire for the servant that he knows he must flee. Lockwood initially plans to spend the day “by my study fi re” (2:7). The tranquil promise of such a morning is abruptly altered, for “on mounting the stairs with this lazy intention, and stepping into the room, I saw a servant-girl on her knees, surrounded by brushes and coal scuttles, and raising an infernal dust as she extinguished the flames with heaps of cinders. This spectacle drove me back immediately” (2:7).

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At fi rst glance it might be supposed that what repels Lockwood is the inconvenience generated by the performance of such a household task. Closer analysis, however, bears out that it is the spectacle of the female servant body, crouched indecorously, in Hannah Cullwick fashion, that provokes the panic and powerlessness suggested by Lockwood’s grammatical representation of himself as object acted upon, rather than as selfdetermining subject. The hearth, that site of domesticity and sweet order, over which the mistress conventionally presides, is trashed by the servant girl’s intrusive “occupation.” Shock, discomfort, and embarrassment at the “infernal mess” propel Lockwood to fl ight from this improper home. At the Heights, the recalcitrant servant as signifier of hidden domestic disorder has already caught the eye of Lockwood on his fi rst visit. Contemplating the sullen Joseph’s grudging compliance with Heathcliff’s compound commands, Lockwood ruminates: “Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose. . . . No wonder the grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters” (1:3). It is Joseph’s surly presence that magnifies signs of household decay to the narrator’s gaze, and, indeed, a subconscious awareness of servants persists throughout Lockwood’s descriptions of the Heights. His conscious acts of looking are reinforced by a heightened intuition of servants as fleetingly visible presences. Pausing to admire the carvings over the threshold with the date of 1500 and the name of Hareton Earnshaw inscribed upon it, Lockwood, after performing this initial act of literacy, is made suddenly aware of orality’s presence. For, on passing into the house, he notes that the kitchen at Wuthering Heights “is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter: at least I distinguished a chatter of tongues and a clatter of culinary utensils and tin cullenders on the walls” (1:4). In a household where both Hindley and Heathcliff as masters have assiduously endeavored to divide the domestic world into work and leisure spaces, only to be met with strenuous and subtle resistance, the spaces of the domestic worker seem to waver or recede from view, almost surreally, as if “the house” were in a constant state of flux and restructuring, as spaces compete for expansion or exclusion. The chatter Lockwood hears carries connotations of gossip, the incoherent commentary being the fi rst emanations of servant voices that will mark the beginning of his vertiginous experience of the Heights. As Lockwood meditates upon these disconcerting manifestations of the homely, the maternal voice comes back to him warningly, in his facetious if ironical recollection that “my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home” (1:5). The maternal then proceeds to grow increasingly vicious in its manifestations, when he turns his attentions to the wolfish bitch and its litter, seeking to “caress the canine mother” (1:5), only to be met with a snarling response.8 As he then proceeds to wink and make faces at the dog in what seems like an insulting travesty of his sea-resort fl irtation confessed to a short while earlier, the infuriated animal is metamorphosed

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into displeased female, as “some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that . . . she leapt on my knees” (1:6). The quest for the maternal will naïvely continue in Lockwood’s solicitations of care from Nelly Dean. For the present, his encounter with vicious maternity coincides with servant voices, for “Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the cellar” (1:6), even as the chaotic uproar caused by the attacking dogs is quelled by the appearance of the curiously erotic figure of Zillah. In Lockwood’s words: Happily an inhabitant of the kitchen made more dispatch; a lusty dame, with tucked up gown, bare arms, and fi re-flushed cheeks, rushed into the midst of us flourishing a frying pan; and used that weapon, and her tongue, to such purpose, that the storm subsided magically, and she only remained, heaving like a sea after a high wind, when her master entered the scene. (1:6) Only a servant figure seems capable of using her tongue to magically bring order to the din and tumult of the world of Wuthering Heights. That power, prefigured in the apparition of the unnamed Zillah, is what Nelly Dean will exercise as oral narrator. Zillah’s frying pan, as an instrument of nurturing, reinforces the mystique of the servant’s restorative powers of speech, foretelling the literal and metaphoric associations of Nelly’s narrative with food, when administered to the ailing Lockwood. Zillah and her servant words are what Lockwood desires, though her words are as indistinct as any spell, and he only registers her voluptuousness through his grateful recognition of a strange form of energy wielded by the socially powerless. But Lockwood dwells upon the body of the servant with what can only be described as lust, noting her flushed cheeks, immodestly hitched up dress, and the passionate force of her presence, as she heaves “like a sea after a high wind” (1:6). The frankness of Lockwood’s desire, and the energy of his prose, stand in stark contrast to his hackneyed descriptions of conventional amour for his “fascinating creature” from the seaside who was “a real goddess in my eyes” (1:5). His gaze upon Catherine Linton a little later produces an equally platitudinous string of complimentary epithets: she has “an admirable form” and “the most exquisite face I have ever had the pleasure of beholding” (2:9). The seductive force of Zillah constitutes an apocalyptic moment in Lockwood’s consciousness, a moment that approaches the solipsistic.9 Zillah, as focalized through the gaze of Lockwood or Nelly at other moments, is never anything more than bullied or complaining menial. It is Zillah, the servant, however, who conducts him to the haunted room where Lockwood will be vexed by nightmares in which servants continue to figure. Only, this time, it is the servant as judge and superego who appears, with Joseph leading him through a blank, snowbound landscape, territory as alien and unmarked as the winter countryside he has struggled through, into a deserted chapel where he is accused of the sin of the “First of the

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Seventy-First.” Lockwood inhabits a dream where there are names to nothing. The unidentified, nameless sin that is unpardonable has been variously attributed to be hypocrisy or pride. However, Lockwood’s guilt is powerful precisely because it remains, like his desire for the servant women, unnamed and unexpressed. Lockwood’s vaguely diffused sense of guilt has already caused him to intuit that either he, the Reverend Branderham, or Joseph, had committed the “First of the Seventy-First,” and were about to be publicly exposed and excommunicated. Such preoccupations with being cast out are subconscious promptings of the widespread alienation that seems to characterize the plight of several of the Heights’ inmates: Cathy’s ghost, Heathcliff, Nelly Dean, Isabella, Linton, the younger Catherine, and Lockwood himself, all of whom at different points in time suffer the fate of exile and excommunication. Lockwood is a man condemned to a retributive fate, for a sin he does not understand. From the sermon he learns of “odd transgressions that I never imagined previously” (3:19). He is accused by the preacher, in the words of Nathan, the prophet, to David: “Thou art the man.” Lockwood, it would seem, participates in those sins of lust and class oppression that characterized David’s affair with Bathsheba. Like the inmates of the Heights and the Grange, he has known and will know secret promptings of desire for sexual and social control over servant subordinates. However, unlike David, he has received no parable that will reveal himself to himself. Lockwood’s anxiety derives from the absence of narrative. Nelly’s narrations will supply this deficit that Lockwood only senses in his dreams. As yet clueless, he realizes that he has “no weapon to raise in my defence,” as Branderham urges the congregation to “execute upon him the judgment written!” (3:19). Lockwood, it might be noted, has already suffered a form of castration in his dream: Joseph has reproached him on the journey to the chapel for not having a pilgrim staff, “telling me I should never get in the house without one, and boastfully flourishing a heavy cudgel, which I understand to be so denominated” (3:18). Joseph’s phallicism, his association with the Law of the Father and the Word, as well as with books, like Zillah and her frying pan, attests to the powers that servants, unlike slaves, seem to wield—powers that are only unconsciously acknowledged. As he grapples with Joseph, his “nearest and most ferocious assailant,” what we witness, in this wrestling of social superior with social inferior, is the psyche beset by the unconscious reproaches and challenges of servants who constantly threaten to wrest authority by their powers of language, eroticism, and judgment, in the world of Wuthering Heights. The assailing blows of Joseph open the window of Lockwood’s consciousness to the assailing intrusions of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost. We are told that in “the confluence of the multitude, several clubs crossed, blows, aimed at me, fell on other sconces. Presently the whole chapel resounded with rappings and

62 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy counter-rappings” (3:19). Lockwood wakes to hear the fi r tapping against his window before his second dream of the child Catherine commences. Lockwood, therefore, dreams of the servant as conductor, mentor, and guide to the gothic regions of the hidden, before he can seek the fulfi llment of his promptings by having recourse to Nelly Dean’s narrations.10 They are self-consciously performed and self-consciously received. Her position as servant narrator, the indeterminacy of her own narratival identity and narratival functions, comes to be paradigmatic for a world where the servant figure generates anxieties over the flux of class identities that menace the Victorian household. Indeed, Lockwood’s desire for narrative has begun even earlier, on confronting the socially indecipherable figure that is Hareton: “I continued to doubt whether he were a servant or not” (2:9). Hence Lockwood, like the reader, must struggle to situate Nelly as narrator, as also to grapple with the protean nature of her narrative. Nelly’s narrative will disrupt the comfortable binary of orality versus literacy, and thereby destabilize those concomitant associations of selflessness and selfconsciousness that accrue around it. The struggle to situate Nelly and her narrative in terms of household spaces appropriate to class identity, or her narrative’s powers to disturb or heal class strife within the home are crucially linked to the vexatious issue of servant literacy’s benign or destructive potentialities.11 As a self-indulgent diary writer, who can lapse into pretentious prose, the condescending Lockwood’s initial expectations are that Nelly as oral narrator will prove “a regular gossip and either rouse me to animation or lull me to sleep by her talk” (4.26). In categorizing himself as reader of the leisured classes well-served by Nelly, a female working-class narrator, Lockwood complacently assumes that the politics of reading relations are in his favor. Nonetheless, by the very fi rst interruption, Lockwood gropes for metaphors of how such a narrator and narrative may be “read.” The whole exercise is part of a dilettante’s efforts at literariness. Describing Nelly as a text of sorts, he employs a metaphor that speaks of his confidence in his own powers of literacy, when he informs her that she has “no mark of the manners that I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class. I am sure you have thought a great deal more than the generality of servants think” (7:48). Given the disorienting effects of servants upon Lockwood that have disturbed his “habituated” conceptions of them, and contributed in no small measure to his illness, his self-assured compliment to Nelly Dean is shot through with unconscious irony. Nelly’s swift rejoinder will contest his poise as narrator, when she avers with a laugh: “I have undergone sharp discipline which has taught me wisdom; and then, I have read more than you would fancy, Mr. Lockwood. You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into, and got something out of also; unless it be that range of Greek and Latin, and that of French—and those I know one from another: it is as much as you can expect of a poor man’s daughter” (7:49). While Nelly’s literacy is apparently of the kind

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generated by the Babbleton Book Club, her acquaintance with the literary is an admonition to Lockwood and the unwary reader that, for all her apparent “selfless-ness,” the individualism that literacy famously enables and fosters is a lurking, if at times repressed force in her personal recollections of the loves and lives of the local gentry. Investing the servant with memory and consciousness is indeed a significant development in the aftermath of Romanticism. Nelly produces an “oral” narrative governed by personal memory. In doing so, the literate servant narrator will repeatedly succumb to moments of interiority, hovering on the verge of individualism, and suggesting her own dangerous desires for authoring herself as bourgeois. Hence Lockwood’s dominance as literate male over his oral narrator is by no means a foregone conclusion. Besides, Nelly’s fi rm assertion of her own literacy has already been prefigured in the authoritarian Joseph’s custody of the printed word. A problematic inversion of status between masters and servants has already been established. Servant literacy might hint at a latent authority they wield that their masters and mistresses do not perceive outright. Joseph forces reading upon the wild, savage pair, Heathcliff and Catherine, on a Sunday, declaring: “they’s good books enough if ye’ll read ’em” (3:17). The “uncivilized” pair, however, vandalize every “dingy volume” he presents them. Catherine, in her own words, takes hers “by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog kennel, vowing I hated a good book” (3:17). Joseph’s outrage that “Miss Cathy’s riven th’ back off ‘Th’Helmet uh Salvation,’ un’ Heathcliff’s pawsed his fit intuh t’ fi rst part uh ‘The Broad Way to Destruction’!” attests to a world where a powerless mistress violently rejects the authority of the book, which the servant, paradoxically, may preach from and possess (3:17). Any exercise of secular literacy by masters and mistresses, by contrast, seems doomed to failure. Cathy’s attempts at narrative authority in writing her diary are doomed to failure, for she cannot successfully relate her story any more than the literate Lockwood may shut out intimations of an untold tale by blocking up the window in his dream with books. His occasionally lush prose and literary posturing afford him no real power, for it is to the literate servant narrator, Nelly Dean, that he must yield if a desire for Catherine’s story is to be acknowledged, and, in the process, somewhat dubiously gratified. Nelly’s announcement of her literate status is the culminating point in a dialogue with Lockwood, with the latter’s energies directed towards searching out metaphors that will enable him to enjoy “authority” over the servant narrator. When Nelly apologizes for the detailed character of her narration, and offers to “leap over some three years” (7:48), Lockwood interjects with the following protest: “No, no, I’ll allow nothing of the sort! Are you acquainted with the mood of mind in which, if you were seated alone, and the cat licking its kitten on the rug before you, you would watch the operation so intently that puss’s neglect of one ear would put you seriously

64 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy out of temper?” (7:48) In this metaphor, Nelly, in Lockwood’s eyes, maternally nurtures narrative, much as she succored motherless infants such as Hareton and Cathy Linton. The untold stories of an Isabella Linton or a Catherine Earnshaw are preserved by Nelly in writing and memory, to be tended afresh in the presence of Lockwood. Her narrational acts are therefore benign, her ministrations to the minutest of details an exercise of that lost maternal principle that engrosses the vulnerable Lockwood. Unlike the “liver-coloured pointer bitch,” Nelly, likened to a cat, becomes the embodiment of those maternal powers that can domesticate a ferocious narrative, rendering it sociable as idle gossip. Situating Nelly seems a simple task: Nelly’s narrative here appears to belong properly in the parlor.12 Yet, like all Lockwood’s perceptions, his views on the maternal as innocuous prove myopic. Nelly later in her narrative will represent herself as lulling Hareton, “my little lamb,” to sleep (9:59), as she plays maternal confidante to Catherine Earnshaw in the long dialogue that expatiates upon bourgeois concerns of selfhood. The latter will explore a variety of ontological dimensions attached to experiences of love and home, discoursing on dissatisfaction in her dreams with heaven and angels, her inalienable sense of belonging to the Heights, to climax fi nally with her emotional declaration: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (9:64). Inaugurating this lyrical movement (that transpires, significantly, not in the parlor but the kitchen) is Nelly’s strange lullaby, “It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat. / The mither beneath the mools heard that” (9:59). Translated, the morbid meaning of her lullaby would read: “It was late at night, and the children wept, from under the clods, their mother heard.” Nelly is not just a surrogate to Frances, and old Mrs. Earnshaw, the dead mother. Her own maternal instincts, sublimated through long years of “selfless service,” enable her to aspire to the status of nurturing narrator, sensible to the repressed, or otherwise unheard grieving of her wards. Lockwood seems almost to sense this, for his metaphor is no sooner uttered, than it is supplanted by another that renders the situating of Nelly problematic. In what seems almost an act of fancy at fi rst, Lockwood orders Nelly to “continue minutely” (7:48) by observing: “I perceive that people in these regions acquire over people in towns the value that a spider in a dungeon acquires over a spider in a cottage, to their various occupants; and yet the deepened attraction is not entirely owing to the situation of the looker-on. They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things (7:48). Nelly here metamorphoses into an Arachne figure. Her narrational acts are the weavings of a secretly knowledgeable, if socially invisible practitioner of the craft of storytelling that transpires out of sight from her unsuspecting masters and mistresses. Nelly’s narrative here belongs to spaces associated with guilt, repression, and the violation of the law. The dungeon rather than the parlor becomes her province, the spaces of the hidden within the homely. Nelly troubles Lockwood, as indeed she must inevitably trouble the entire text, and the

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actual reader. Benign or malevolent, honest or secretive, hers is a narrative that could only be produced by the tantalizingly mobile servant who moves both in and out of the family, between public and private spaces of the home, refusing to be located as character. Lockwood, like the reader, seeks to “fi x” Nelly Dean as indeed does almost every member of the households she serves. Does Nelly belong in the parlor, the library, or the dungeon? Is she a maternal gossip, an authoritative author, or an esoteric weaver of tales—the sinister practitioner of a forgotten narrative art, far removed from the enlightened realms of literacy? Nelly’s indeterminate status as narrator is mirrored in her indeterminate status as servant. In an earlier time under old Mr. Earnshaw, Nelly recalls occupying spaces that were familial. The night of the old man’s death has her remember: “We were all together—I, a little removed from the hearth, busy at my knitting, and Joseph reading his Bible, near the table (for servants generally sat in the house then, after their work was done). Miss Cathy had been sick, and that made her still; she leant against her father’s knee, and Heathcliff was lying on the floor with his head in her lap” (5.33). In this curiously stylized tableau of Victorian domestic piety, Nellie and Joseph perform classic and even trite, parental roles: Joseph as custodian of spiritual authority in his possession of Scripture, and Nelly as provider of bodily comforts through her knitting. However, after Mr. Earnshaw’s death, Nelly notes that Hindley “told Joseph and me we must thenceforth quarter ourselves in the back kitchen, and leave the house for him” (6:35). As for Heathcliff, he “drove him from their company to the servants, deprived him of the instructions of the curate, and insisted that he should labor out of doors instead, compelling him to do so as hard as any other lad on the farm” (6:36). Hindley seeks a segregation of servants and masters, but the Victorian servant’s dangerous mobility proves to be a constant concern in the case of both Nelly and Heathcliff. Like most of her class, Nelly is an itinerant worker, she has made hay, played nursemaid, and “hung about the farm, ready for anything anybody would set me to” (4:28). Later, as a migratory body, whose identities and loyalties are always in flux, her narrative proves deeply unsettling because its narrator may never be truly situated. Nelly oscillates, not only between both leisure and work spaces in the home, but also between households, traveling between the Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Hence if the scene of narration changes, so does the geographical and ideological center of the servant’s narrative, for the “faithful” servant in fact serves many masters and mistresses in her lifetime. In the servant, Bronte offers us a narrator’s identity that, like Heathcliff’s, remains essentially “in process,” one that conforms to and yet reforms class roles of the mid-Victorian era. As “family” and “hireling,” servant and parent, insider and outsider, obedient conservative and disobedient radical, Nelly offers a variety of registers within a single narrative.13 Language and narration in Nelly Dean’s case are never entirely

66 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy natural in their manifestations. At varied points Nelly demonstrates selfconsciousness over linguistic performativity. She refers initially to her narrative, somewhat ironically, as one that she will continue in “true gossip’s fashion” (7:49). Her interrogation of Catherine Earnshaw on her love for Edgar Linton and Heathcliff is described retrospectively as “putting her through the following catechism” that “for a girl of twenty two . . . was not injudicious” (9:60) [emphasis added]. Shortly after her platitudinous comparisons of Hindley and Linton as bereaved husbands, who “chose their own lots and were righteously doomed to endure them,” she undermines her own sententiousness by a startling skepticism that alerts the reader to her own sophistication in predicting reader responses to her narrative: “But you’ll not want to hear my moralizing, Mr. Lockwood: you’ll judge as well as I can, all these things; at least, you’ll think you will and that’s the same” (17:142). In addition, the housekeeper also offers literary critiques of the literacy skills of ladies and gentlemen. Commenting, with a practiced reader’s judgment, rather acerbically upon Linton Heathcliff’s love letters, she proffers an editor-like assessment: “A fi ne bundle of trash you study in your leisure hours to be sure: why, its good enough to be printed!” (21:173). Such narrativally self-conscious utterances are cautionary postings within the servant’s tale, by a narrator who patronizes and undermines the bourgeois reader surrogate, complacent of his stylistic prowess as writer and hermeneutical powers as reader. Nelly, in her variety of allegiances and registers as a narrator, is at once oral subaltern and embourgoised literate, one who mirrors the divided consciousness of the men and women of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, riven as they are by class loyalties and disloyalties. It is no accident that the redemptive reading lesson provided by Cathy to Hareton that will dissolve boundaries between master and servant, parlor and kitchen, addresses the word “contrary” (32:233). The Nelly who narrates displays moments of desire marked by a heightened sensitivity to language and is completely at variance with the Nelly who speaks “in character” as servant. Nelly’s own sense of performing servanthood punctuates her narrative, as when she remarks on the altered Catherine Earnshaw’s return from the Lintons: “After playing the lady’s maid to the newcomer, and putting my cakes in the oven, and making the house and kitchen cheerful with great fi res befitting Christmas eve, I prepared to sit down and amuse myself by singing carols” (7:42) [emphasis added]. As stolid, unimaginative domestic, Nelly’s words when spoken “in character” suggest an uncomprehending intelligence that merely records events, with no perception of their significance. But the Nelly who narrates recaptures not just the deeds of her masters and mistresses, but also her own pivotal moments of consciousness and desire as literate individual that seem to fitfully commence and recommence the plot towards its multiple climactic moments of death and fulfi llment. Hence, when Catherine Earnshaw weds Edgar Linton, the closure that might conventionally attend this marriage-plot is foiled by its narrator.

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The introduction of Heathcliff, the serpent in the garden, occurs precisely because Nelly is not content to remain an impersonal narrating voice or a choric presence. It is Nelly’s capacity for the lyric life, a literate’s propensity, that instigates the return of the repressed in Heathcliff’s entry into the Linton household. As a prelude to the return of Heathcliff, Nelly has only just philosophized on the Linton marriage, and the impossibility of selflessness: “Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run” (10:130). It is, therefore, a moment of narrational irony when, in a change of key, Mrs. Dean, the narrator, chooses to foreground her own self, a self that has till this moment been sublimated in service. On a mellow evening in September, I was coming from the garden with a heavy basket of apples which I had been gathering. It had got dusk, and the moon looked over the high wall of the court, causing undefined shadows to lurk in the corners of the numerous projecting portions of the building. I set my burden on the house steps by the kitchen door, and lingered to rest and draw in a few more breaths of the soft, sweet air; my eyes were on the moon, and my back to the entrance, when I heard a voice say— ‘Nelly, is that you?’ It was a deep voice; and foreign in tone; yet, there was something in the manner of pronouncing my name which made it sound familiar. (10:72) Nelly’s prose enacts a moment of sensuous abandon, where she, as narrator, rather than Catherine, her mistress, is seduced by the overtures of Heathcliff in a distinctly Edenic setting, heavily laden with Miltonic overtones. The apples, long desired by the girl servant who once requested them of old Mr. Earnshaw on his fateful trip to Liverpool, reappear here as emblems of the forbidden, even as the servant’s eroticized body luxuriates in the heady fragrances of the night and the intimacy of the invisible Heathcliff’s “familiar” voice. Nelly focuses, trancelike, upon the moon, narcissistically depicting herself as the object of the moon’s voyeuristic and intrusive gaze as it “looks over” the high wall of the court. With her consciousness, like Lockwood’s, assailed by shadowy intimations of the undefi ned, Nelly narrates her own seduction that will ultimately cause Edgar and Catherine to forfeit their domestic paradise. She succumbs to Heathcliff’s persuasions to inform Catherine of his arrival. At this point, the diction employed by the servant narrator who privileges a moment of self-indulgence suggests an altered idiom not associated with homely orality. The language at play here is that which only a literate sensibility could revel in. And, indeed, the eroticism of such language, with its alliterative cadences and symbolic propensities, are the only seductions the celibate servant narrator can afford. It is Nelly’s capacity here for “sensuous apprehension of thought,” to use an Eliotean phrase, that will set

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in motion a plot that would otherwise never have transpired. Heathcliff’s question, “Nelly, is that you?” is indeed a paradigm for reader responses to this servant narrator. Several times over, Nelly proves a baffl ing entity to members of the household. She has been termed “a good for nowt slattenly witch” by Joseph for her collusion with the young Heathcliff and Catherine (9:68), an interpellation that will be strangely echoed later by the delirious Catherine who accuses Nelly of gathering elf bolts to hurt her charges. Nelly narrates her own unknowability, her servant sexuality here becoming an occasion of anxiety, given its powers for shaping narratives. In another moment of desire, one that enacts the irresistible pull she feels towards masters other than Linton, Nelly offers the reader her own problematic position as servant narrator, in “siting” her favorite spot to Lockwood. As a transitional moment that reflects the renewed dialogue and intercourse between the Heights and the Grange, with the return of Heathcliff, the servant Nelly narrates her own displacement by desire which resonates to the plight of both Catherine and Heathcliff. Nelly notes: One time I passed the old gate, going out of my way, on a journey to Gimmerton. It was about the period that my narrative has reached—a bright, frosty afternoon; the ground bare, and the road hard and dry. I came to a stone where the highway branches off on to the moor at your left hand; a rough, sand-pillar, with the letters W.H. cut on its north side, on the east, G., and on the south-west, T.G. It serves as guide-post to the Grange, and Heights, and village. The sun shone yellow on its grey head, reminding me of summer; and I cannot say why, but all at once, a gush of child’s sensations flowed into my heart. Hindley and I held it a favourite spot twenty years before. I gazed long at the weather-worn block; and, stooping down, perceived a hole near the bottom still full of snail-shells and pebbles which we were fond of storing there with more perishable things; and as fresh as reality, it appeared that I beheld my early playmate seated on the withered turf, his dark, square head bent forward, and his little hand scooping out the earth with a piece of slate. (11:84) The spaces Nelly claims for herself are indeterminate and unnameable: the interstices between the Heights, or the world of tumult; the Grange, or the world of domestic order; and Gimmerton, the world outside. Her mobility and her indefi nable moorings make her a narrator whose position and perspective remain radically “out-of-place” with her surroundings. Critical opinion has traditionally associated Nelly with the indoors, counterpointing Catherine and Heathcliff’s territorial claims upon nature and the outdoors. However, migrating between households and worlds, as she does here, Nelly is always an elusive subject. And the space that she claims as hers is, in fact, not so much a space, as a void or an emptiness. The interstices

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at which she locates herself, or belongs, is a hole, fi lled with snail shells that house no life—only pebbles and “perishable” things. Seeking to fi ll a hollow, the child Nelly can only add to the forces of absence and nonbeing that govern such spaces. Such accrual of emptiness attests to Nelly’s own deficiency of selfhood. In a world where being and selfhood grow increasingly tortuous and complex for her middle-class mistresses and masters, resulting in statements such as “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Nelly’s servant status prohibits access to an individualism that is a burgeoning concern for an emerging, prosperous gentry. Catherine Earnshaw must suffer death as a consequence of self-denial, and wander the moors in search of the home that she once recognized in a visionary moment as superior to a Victorian heaven. Nelly Dean, by contrast, seems the one character truly immune from death in the novel, because her spaces are those of emptiness and nonbeing. Nor can she know anything other than an existence based upon pure contingency. She is an existential necessity to the men and women whom she serves, granting them identity, purpose, and a name, through her narrative efforts. However, it is well to note that Nelly’s narration of her own displacement, as symbolically represented here, locates her beyond geography, even as her moment of desire seems to initiate a transfiguring effect over nature. Hence, under Nelly’s nostalgic gaze, the frosty landscape magically transforms itself into summer, and the repressed yearnings of the celibate servant erupt dangerously within her narrative. The moment is paradigmatic, for it serves to remind us as readers that it is repression and desire in the servant narrator that recreates for Lockwood, as much as for ourselves, a landscape lost beneath the blank, wintry, snowbound terrain that he has blundered through, risking death in encountering its unknowability and unreadability. If the passage on Nelly’s favorite spot has Nelly bypass her own story, eliding it from her narrative, its implications for her narrating functions are immense. For at the core of Nelly’s verbal narrative lies a silence that is not so much virginal as celibate. Nelly abstains from speaking of herself. Her desires are a subtext to her tale. Indeed it is out of servant sexuality’s complex mix of desire and denial that her narrative of repression emerges. For Nelly’s own narratival repression is the prism by which the repressions of bourgeois sexuality in her masters and mistresses comes to be refracted. Hence it is no accident that Nelly’s repressed desire for Hindley, articulated as nostalgia for the Heights, must culminate in a panic-stricken encounter with the object of her mistress’s repressed desires: Heathcliff. In her own words: “He [Hareton] went up the walk, and entered the house, but instead of Hindley, Heathcliff appeared on the door-stones, and I turned and ran down the road as hard as ever I could race, making no halt till I gained the guide-post, and feeling as scared as if I had raised a goblin” (11:86) [emphasis added]. Nelly’s magical or witch-like powers, articulated in the accusations of the dying Catherine, are a consequence of the mistress displacing the imaginative life, and its symbolic manifestations

70 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy of unconscious erotic drives, motives, and desires onto the servant-subaltern. These are destabilizing and deranging in their effects upon rational “bourgeois” existence. Like Tabby, Nelly is associated with the fairy cave of Penistone Crag, when Catherine dreamily offers her perception of the servant narrator: I see in you, Nelly . . . an aged woman—you have grey hair, and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending, while I am near, that they are only locks of wool. That’s what you’ll come to fifty years hence; I know you are not so now. I’m not wandering: you’re mistaken, or else I should believe you really were that withered hag, and I should think I was under Penistone Crag. (12:95) Catherine’s statement is both visionary and an act of displacement, considering her swiftly repressed recognition that her own bed, the locus of her erotic life, belongs to the very landscape and terrain where she seeks to locate Nelly. Nelly’s servitude permits such mapping. Relegated like many dispossessed figures to the realm of the unconscious and the primeval, Nelly nonetheless recognizes the dangerous agency that she is thereby endowed with, in her mischievous propensities for stimulating the bourgeois consciousness to an awareness of the realm of the repressed—a realm that she presides over as servant-confidante. At the root of such repression lies class and the compulsions it enforces upon narrator and narrative form. Condemned as servant-narrator to have no story of her own, Nelly’s desires work themselves out in longings for narrative endings of all kinds, to the stories of social superiors that she, paradoxically, may author. Meditating on her acquiescence to Heathcliff’s urgings that she carry a note from him back to the ailing Catherine, Nelly self-consciously explores the tangle of motives, expectations, and choices that she believed to have influenced her decision. “Was it right or wrong? I fear it was wrong, though expedient. I thought I prevented another explosion by my compliance; and I thought, too, it might create a favourable crisis in Catherine’s mental illness: and then I remembered Mr. Edgar’s stern rebuke of my carrying tales” (14:119). Nelly’s undirected eroticism as servant woman must result in diffused desires, sympathies, and longings, which assail her at this moment and on other occasions. The puzzle over Nelly’s “mischievous” interference in events has long been debated. It proves to be, on closer inspection, a manifestation of displaced desire, deprived as she is, like many servant women, of any focus for her erotic loyalties. Nelly’s fluctuating allegiances to honest masters, recalcitrant mistresses in love, husbands, lovers, and rivals of all sorts are a consequence of her “slatternly” qualities that Joseph has remarked upon: her capacity for being easily stimulated by—and responsive to—desires of all kinds, both lawful and illicit. Hence, on the one

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hand, when speaking of Edgar Linton, we have her drawing upon a kind of rhetoric frequently used to bespeak of marital fidelity, in her platitudinous avowals that “my heart invariably cleaved to the master’s in preference to Catherine” (10:83). Yet she also admits to an almost promiscuous indulgence in emotional sympathy, when, speaking to Heathcliff waiting outside after the death of Catherine, she confesses: “I was weeping as much for him as for her” (2:128). It is the servant’s consciousness that also perceives, formulates, and envisages the significance of events that are beyond inscription, perceiving them in a visionary manner that the teleology of writing seems to resist. Indeed, the narrating “I’’ that is Nelly does not seem strictly historical, subject to time and change, but locates itself, both centripetally and centrifugally at the core of the narrative, much like the spider in its web. Like the spider’s web, strict linearity cannot be traced in Nelly’s narrative where past, present, and future interconnect at a variety of points, so that the present seems as much a prelude to a tale of the past, as the past is a prophecy of a future. If Nelly beholds her former playmate “as fresh as reality” on the “withered turf,” “scooping out the earth with a piece of slate,” is the freshness of the truly real that which belongs to the past with its attendant hauntings and memory, or that which resides in the immediate present? Does the aged landscape of withered turf come to bear the impress of the past upon the present, or is there a recognition of the present as a problematic moment, antedating a past romance that nonetheless overtakes it temporally, given its memorable character, its powers of outliving time, so that the second generation of Lintons, Earnshaws, and Heathcliffs are no more than the living traces of their dead parents’ lost history? Is Nelly’s fetishistic pastime of filling the hollow with perishable things, while her ghostly playmate and companion scoops forth the earth with a piece of slate, indicative of Nelly’s narrating functions being that of burying or exhuming? As a servant who speaks of her “numerous diurnal occupations” (22:175), she is denied access to history and teleology. That is the privilege of Lockwood, who, like the actual reader, resides in a wholly literate world, where the teleological prevails. Nelly’s narrative, partaking as it does of both the immediacy of the oral and the historicity of the written, must leave the reader, like Lockwood, simultaneously contemplating both past and present. Performing both servanthood and embourgeoisement through language, Nelly leaves us always in radical doubt over as to whether her narrational efforts attempt a “fi lling” of her own emptiness or an affirming of her own “hollowness.” If, in the Hindley-Hareton metamorphoses, Nelly suggests that events of the present are transfigured into the past, through the restive consciousness of the desiring subject, so also may the future be envisioned through recourse to memory. Hence her visionary moments of Heathcliff’s death and burial, a future event, now already in the past, at the time of narration to Lockwood:

72 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy ‘Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?’ I mused. I had read of such hideous, incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy; and watched him grow to youth; and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. ‘But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?’ muttered superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness. And, I began, half dreaming, to weary myself with imaging some fit parentage for him; and repeating my waking meditations, I tracked his existence over again, with grim variations; at last, picturing his death and funeral; of which all I can remember is being exceedingly vexed at having the task of dictating an inscription for his monument, and consulting the sexton about it; and, as he had no surname, and we could not tell his age, we were obliged to content ourselves with the single word, ‘Heathcliff’. That came true, we were. If you enter the kirkyard, you’ll read on his headstone only that and the date of his death. (34:250) It is significant that Nelly is accorded the profoundest speculations and meditations on Heathcliff in the text. In a prose elevated far above the trite, catechetical discourses she expounds beside Heathcliff’s deathbed, the servant narrator suggests that “Heathcliff” as we know him is her own narratival response to a fundamentally unknowable being. Dismissing library reading, constructing herself as author engaged in dreaming origins, while “tracking his existence” with “grim variation,” Nelly self-consciously replays for her bourgeois surrogate reader the processes of narrative that seem endlessly revisioned in the story versions they generate. The narrative of Heathcliff, spun by the servant, can never attain such defi nitive form as aspired to by Lockwood in his journal. In obsessively writing and rewriting Heathcliff, the servant-narrator offers us a narrative that can never be read for closure, and hence harks back to the “oral.” Before arriving at her revelatory writing moment, Nelly has reminisced over her reading lessons: “Is he a ghoul or a vampire? . . . I had read of such hideous demons” (34:250).14 Recognition of the inadequacies of such library knowledge refute the notion of literacy as a state of grace, serving also as a moment to return Nelly from the parlor and the library to territory associated with the dungeon. “The little dark thing, harboured by the good man to his bane” that Nelly meditates upon addresses the intuited regions of the hidden and the repressed. When Lockwood, the male author, fi nally confronts the scene Nelly has narrated, he performs no act of reading. His literacy is no longer to be dexterously flaunted. The last significant act and critique of literacy, the reading and writing of Heathcliff’s name, has been performed by the servant.15 Lockwood’s literate conclusion, ironically, will refuse writing and history. It is nature, in the form of moss upon sunken headstones, rather

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than inscriptions of any kind that will catch his eye, and in the background, the church, where “decay had made progress,” falls to ruin with “black gaps” for windows, and “slates jutted off,” “to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms” (34:256). Lockwood, who embarked upon his journey into unknown territory charted by Joseph’s guidance and Nelly’s narrative from the church, is confronted with its derelict remains at the end. Driven by desire to actually behold the concluding scene depicted by the narrating Nelly, Lockwood discovers the reappearance of the church at the end, like a lost image from memory, now revisited. The scene is strangely cathartic; the battle and communal strife within the church is over. The servants are in the ascendant, while Lockwood amidst the sunken graves is indeed the outcast. Nelly’s narration has accomplished what he so strenuously fought against in the church with Joseph. Joseph has charge of Wuthering Heights, Hareton is to marry Cathy Linton, and Nelly declares that with such an outcome “there won’t be a happier woman than myself in all of England” (32:240). The disintegration of the church is a warning that the platitudinous Christianity that literate servants as respectable conscience keepers spouted to their masters is suspect. Does this scene announce the doom of Christian respectability, despite the culmination of the narrative in Christian marriage for Hareton and Cathy? If Nelly declares herself happy in superlative terms at this outcome, then what are we to make of her earlier contradictory declaration that she is “seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death”? (16:127). For Nelly’s narrative does preside over the death and disgrace of her masters and mistresses—Catherine, Isabella, Linton, Heathcliff, and Lockwood, as much as it does over the marriage of Hareton and the second Catherine, both of whom, significantly, are not so much lady and gentleman by the time the novel draws to an end, but truly dispossessed figures. Lockwood, like the reader, remains as baffled as he was at the beginning, by the multivalence of servant’s voices: their ability to mouth pious truisms, and undermine them simultaneously by their elf-bolt narratives that hurt the divided bourgeois psyche. Besides, servant narrative exceeds itself as maternally offered, or secretly spun, tale. In the pressing of a “remembrance” into Nelly’s hand, Lockwood, through his use of euphemism, also represses the transactive nature of his narrational relations with the servant. The embarrassed bourgeois reader discovers that Nelly is no feudal retainer, but a hireling and an accumulator of wages and capital. Relating her reception of Zillah’s news of affairs at the Heights, Nelly notes that Zillah sees Catherine Linton as “poorer than you or I—poorer, I’ll be bound, you’re saving—and I’m doing my little all, that road” (30:224). Hence, if Lockwood initially seeks to repress all marks of literacy from Nelly’s narrative, he later seeks to blur all symbols of the servant’s marketable powers of narration. The servant as wage earner becomes a muted reminder of a capitalist economy that Heathcliff represented. Narrational activity therefore remains on the side of Heathcliff,

74 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy for by the end of the text, the servant narrator, by her receipt of payment, has once again blurred class boundaries. As for Lockwood’s purchase on her tale, it results in what he calls his “diversion” to the scene narrated by Nelly, where, left to ponder both the scene and subaltern imaginings of unquiet slumbers disseminated by her narrative, Lockwood attempts but fails to truly own Nelly’s story. The sense of rest that endings supply is arrived at by an act of readerly resistance on Lockwood’s part to conclusions offered by Nelly’s servant narrative. Lockwood’s literate and cathartic ending is indeed a narratival “diversion” as much as it is a geographical one. Despite the pastoral perspective invoked by Lockwood at the end, there are scenes of narration that he may neither visit nor control, where subaltern narrators have power to resurrect the dead. As Nelly informs Lockwood of Heathcliff: “folks” swear that “he walks” (34:255) [emphasis added]. The oral narrative powers of common people remain vibrant. The reclamation of the dead into an ahistorical pastoral world is belied by the active powers of folk memory that will continue to raise “phantoms from thinking” (34:255). Their story continues to be narrated orally, long after the last page has been turned on pastoral lyricism, or the conventional closure of the marriage-plot. Lockwood orchestrates the text’s closure by dismissing the servant’s narrative and the folk imagination as fundamentally inadequate. Once ailing, and resigned to the bitter herbs of Nelly’s servant narrative, he now seeks a state of equipoise and serenity for himself and the world. Augusto Boal in The Theatre of the Oppressed has noted the inherently bourgeois bias to a classical concept such as catharsis, where confl ict works itself out in medicinal purgation, and directs the restoration of psychosocial equilibrium. It is a condition supremely desirable in a world where disputes over class identities have generated existential agonies that culminated in the demolishing and undoing of selfhood. The poetics of the middle classes are what Lockwood’s narrative draws upon, in bringing to a conclusion this drama of socially forbidden desire. However, Nelly’s narrative to the end refuses to be cast in terms of the oral-literate binary.16 While mimicking the three-decker novel or serialized installments of periodical fiction, its conclusion, rife with ghostly tales, sets the stamp of indeterminacy upon her narrative, which like her is both oral and literary. Unlike Lockwood, she tantalizingly forswears all certitude. Her concluding tales that return the narrative to its ghost story origins resonate to her earlier speculations, at the time of Catherine Earnshaw’s death: “Do you believe such people are happy in the next world, sir? I’d give a great deal to know” (16:128). Such imaginings of unquiet slumbers compel us to participate in the speculative intelligence and provisionality that are associated with the living voice. Even so, Nelly’s narrative, socially indeterminate like Nelly herself, attests to a neo-literate’s capabilities of exercising secular control, far greater in its reaches than Joseph’s Holy Writ. As the keeper of books, be they letters,

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accounts or literary texts, Nelly preserves the estates and the bourgeois self with her literacy skills, even as her capacities for self-reflection, selfconsciousness, reading, and writing permit for a narrative that will resist the parameters of the “parlour.” Asked by Lockwood about a matter of rent, she tells him that “it is with Mrs. Heathcliff that you must settle . . . or rather with me. She has not learned to manage her affairs yet, and I act for her; there’s nobody else” (32:234). It is Nelly who ultimately manages both the economy of the farm, as much as she managed the economy of narrative in her minting, saving, circulation, and exchange of narratives, be they Isabella’s letters, Zillah’s tales, or her own remembrances. Nelly’s narrative of a cuckoo’s history repeatedly acknowledges the nexus between origins and selfhood, whether in regard to Heathcliff’s origins in an Indian queen and emperor of China (7:44) or Catherine Linton’s possession of the “Earnshaw’s handsome dark eyes, but the Linton’s fair skin” (18:145). Yet, selfhood is also that which can be mimicked or acquired through literacy skills: no one would say that she was a poor man’s daughter, she informs Lockwood. Nelly as oral and literate narrator is therefore a living disproof of the tale she narrates. Class can be performed, enacted, and assumed, but only by one who is truly “selfless.” Nelly is therefore the narratival manifestation of the darker selflessness that is Heathcliff. In their benign and malignant aspects, both epitomize the essentially unreadable nature of class, its baffling, perverse semiotics, and its implications for a selfhood that is performative. In her tale of Heathcliff reside traces of her own parallel story of poverty, dismissal, desire, and restitution, and of her gradual ascendancy within a new capitalist economy, to which she is coopted. Lockwood must, for all these reasons, ultimately fail to frame her. The summative expression of this principle lies in her representation of a reading moment, where, exercising her literacy skills, she joins Hareton and Catherine Heathcliff, in their “several occupations as pupil and teacher” (233:243–244). The occasion is described as one that affords vicarious maternal gratification for Nelly. I came to sit with them, after I had done my work, and I felt so soothed and comforted to watch them, that I did not notice how time got on. You know, they both appeared in a measure, my children. . . . While I admired, and they laboured, dusk drew on, and with it returned the master. He came upon us quite unexpectedly, entering by the front way, and had a full view of the whole three, ere we could raise our heads to glance at him. . . . He took the book from his [Hareton’s] hand, and glanced at the open page, and returned it without any observation. (30:244) Nelly, strangely, is not de trop, in this vision of “the whole three,” so that, unlike Lockwood, who must remain forever an outsider, Nelly’s embourgoisement seems complete at this moment. Reassimilated into the family whose class structures are now more indeterminate, the servant presents us

76 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy with a moment where divisions are suspended, a moment that is “soothing,” “comfortable,” and enacts the Victorian reading idyll. Not even Heathcliff can disrupt such a moment. Content to enjoy the romance between the classes, through her powers of literacy, Nelly can recast herself as maternal, enjoying for a while the familial and social nature of reading and literacy, before her private, esoteric act of inscribing Heathcliff’s name upon his tombstone. There are, for this narrator, public and private acts of literacy, social and antisocial moments of reading. The old authority that servants oddly participated in through the custody and control of the written and printed word, in a world menaced by repressed desire for the lower orders, has vanished. Joseph’s legislated Sabbath reading, and Nelly’s disciplinary censorship of love letters borne by the milkmaid in her cans, have vanished along with Lockwood’s bookblocked window and Edgar’s claustrophobic library. The book has turned social object, circulating freely across barriers of property and propriety, with Nelly as patroness, who offers it as object to the sullen servant figure Hareton, on her mistress’s behalf. Yet behind this maternal moment resides a private, visionary act of unseen writing and reading, the only one performed without witness, by the secretive servant. Dreaming of Heathcliff’s death, the servant-narrator also informs Lockwood that she was vexed by the task of “dictating an inscription for his monument, and consulting the sexton about it” (34:250) [emphasis added]. Nelly is ultimately the only one to whom reading and writing is actually accorded apocalyptic authority. It is an authority exercised and submitted to unconsciously. For, in authoritatively dictating the single word “Heathcliff,” with neither surname nor a date of birth, only the servant woman may read and inscribe that which seems beyond the reaches of bourgeois patriarchal writing: a classless self with no origins or history. Furthermore, as sexed subaltern, she is also able to read Heathcliff’s essentially non-patriarchal identity, and inscribe him as such, both in her narrative and on his tombstone, despite all his efforts to mimic patriarchy’s powers, through his seduction, kidnapping, and appropriation of women, children, and property. Heathcliff’s own attempts at being the author of his existence are ultimately overturned by the servant-narrator who will rewrite both him and his story. Such a servant narrative has therefore forestalled all attempts of masters and mistresses to inscribe themselves and their authority into being. If Nelly seems to constantly mutate into a variety of class identities, the changing scene of narration attests to the equally transmuted character of her narrative. To trace its changing contexts, and its impact on readerly consumption, one must revisit the originating moment of her narrative, in order to read it anew in light of what we now know to be the outcome of Lockwood’s fate. The chatty domestic fi rst offers her story with gruel, in “in true gossip’s fashion” (7:49), to the starving Lockwood. Later she proceeds to label her tale as “dree” history, accompanied by what Lockwood

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metaphorically terms as extracts of “wholesome medicine from Mrs. Dean’s bitter herbs” (14:120). Her fi nal phase of narration at the Heights, on Lockwood’s return, acquires overtones of license and domestic indiscipline, as she proceeds to offer him ale, to Joseph’s outrage that “it warn’t a crying scandal that she should have fellies at her time of life?” (32:234). Fellies or “followers” were the bane of every mistress’s existence: they were the servant maid’s suitors and sexual partners, who trailed her from one domestic establishment to another, and were often forbidden by employers, for trespassing boundaries of middle-class property and propriety. The inversions that Lockwood’s class identity suffers carry a degree of irony for the narrational politics of the text. Lockwood is no master, exercising authority over Nelly Dean and her narrative services. He is instead a petitioning inferior, hopelessly besotted and enamored of the servant as narrator, his desire foretold in the encounters with servant maids that inaugurated his stay at the Grange. He has quite literally followed the servant in her changes of employment, to a new scene of narration where satiation and gratification from his “fair narrator” (15:120) are unapologetically sought. Nelly’s narration and her raiding of the cellars for wine are acts of libidinal pleasure and servant rebellion, a “crying scandal,” for they suggest a total loss of governance by the bourgeois or gentry who have always sought, like Lockwood, to manage the servant and her services. As a fulfillment of his original desire for the lusty dame and her words, Nelly‘s status as a fair narrator is justified by the compliment that Lockwood, the literary dilettante, pays her: “I don’t think I can improve upon her style” (15:120). Nelly offers her narrative for consumption, along with the gruel and the later “reaming silver pint” (32:234). In this low act of gratification, Nelly is a narrator who traffics with her voyeuristic, sexually inquisitive and restless master. She understands desire and seeks its stimulation in Lockwood: “These things happened last winter, sir. . . . Last winter I did not think I should be amusing a stranger to the family with relating them! . . . You’re too young to rest always contented, living by yourself; and I some way fancy, no one could see Catherine Linton, and not love her” (25:194). It is one more manifestation of her slatternly qualities. Nelly’s narrational services, metaphorically cast as sexual, acquire further irony, considering Nelly’s own tendencies for exciting sexual hostility and loathing. As a girl she once requested apples and pears, but the one occasion associated with Nelly and her own oral gratification and pleasure is when she is made to swallow the carving knife by Hindley, in what appears to be a scene laden with connotations of rape and sexual abuse. Later, when offering the young Hareton, as Hindley’s ghost, an orange, she is stoned and viciously cursed. Joseph on several occasions casts aspersions on her sexual morality, even as he denounces her lack of sex appeal: “nasty, ill nowt as shoo is. Thank God! Shoo cannot stale t’ sowl uh nob’dy! Shoo wer niver soa handsome, bud whet a body mud look at her ’baht winking” (33:241). The “undesirable” servant maid nonetheless possesses the power

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to generate desire as a narrator, and in a world where emotional starvation and death prevail, Nelly’s oral offerings of narrative are consumed by Lockwood, even if he, like her, must suffer actual sexual deprivation and loss in return for such oral gratification. It is therefore Nelly, in her status as celibate servant-narrator, who can most powerfully attest to the vicarious gratifications afforded by narrative. She is also, in her own state of amorphousness and unfulfi lled being, most suited as confidante to Heathcliff in his enunciation of the motif of hunger and appetite as a paradigm for a concept of selfhood that can be consumed, affi rmed, destroyed, or subsumed: an emerging, unstable, bourgeois selfhood that is always in search of itself: “I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned toward it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I’m convinced it will be reached—and soon—because it has devoured my existence. I am swallowed in the anticipation of its fulfi llment” (33:246). Pleasure as derived from such a servant narrative is problematized from the time of its commencement. Early in her narrative, Lockwood informs Nelly of her narrator nature arising out of being “of these regions” by having recourse to metaphors of appetite and taste: I could fancy a love of life here almost possible; and I was a fi xed unbeliever in any love of a year’s standing. One state resembles setting a hungry man down to a single dish on which he may concentrate his entire appetite, and do it justice; the other, introducing him to a table laid out by French cooks. He can perhaps extract as much enjoyment from the whole, but each is a mere atom in his regard and his remembrance. (7:48) Lockwood’s binary must, like all of his other comfortable binaries, fail. Is desire in this sophisticate diffused, returning from narrative “to the arms of the world” as he does, after his fl irtations with the mistress and servants of the Heights and the Grange? Is Nelly, the humble provincial, one who by contrast is driven by single-minded devotion to her narrative and “her children”? Lockwood’s commentary on her response may be too easily dismissed as evidence of Nelly’s stolid sensibility: “‘Oh! Here we are the same as anywhere else, when you get to know us,’ observed Mrs. Dean, somewhat puzzled at my speech” (7:48). Like the perplexed Lockwood, at the end, the reader fails to heed Nelly’s egalitarian warning of sameness until too late. Nelly’s tale may conventionally be read as a “wholesome” narrative that offers its reader gratification. Alternatively her narrative, told as it is from the margins, is also one of shifting centers, atomistic in its offerings of multiple and “grim variations,” diffused in sympathies and interpretations. The homely supplier of gruel is also the French cook. In its consumption, the servant’s narrative provides not so much for the gratification of bourgeois desire experienced by its surrogate and the actual reader. Instead its services to the reader, conversely, provides for the stimulation of restless

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“regard and remembrances.” Servant memory is exactly similar: marked by nostalgia, desire, grief, and vicarious satisfaction. In its reading effects, the text renders the bourgeois psyche the mirror equivalent of the servant psyche, for the last act the literary Lockwood confesses to is that he “wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (34:256) [emphasis added]. The text has thereby accomplished the blurring of class distinctions in reader relations as surely as they have been dissolved in marriage and the grave, for the subjects of the servant’s narrative. Has the middle-class reader been psychically humbled, or has the act of narration transformed the servant into pensive, bourgeois subject? Perhaps it is in reader relations that the “wuther of the other” is most profoundly addressed: mastered by servant narrative, the pensive Lockwood can never truly return to the arms of the world, any more than he can, with faith, seek out a pastoral idyll. Beyond the harebells and the silence of the present moment are the “coming autumn storms” as presaged in the recesses of his consciousness through the hulking image of the ruined church.17 Storms and strife are what Lockwood, the bourgeois narrator, seeks to suppress, but the weather forecast by the servant’s narrative bespeaks inevitable change and decay. The prospect of the literate servant presiding over social change manifests itself differently in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” that followed a few years later, in 1852. More than a decade earlier, as a young wife and mother, Gaskell’s diary entry on 4 August 1835 demonstrates an awareness of the maternal servant who offers an alternative model of familiality that challenges class boundaries. William told me the other day I was not of a jealous disposition; I do not think he knows me; in general Marianne prefers being with me I hope & think, yet at times she shows a marked preference for Betsy, who has always been as far as I can judge a kind, judicious, and tender nurse. (Gaskell Diaries 56)18 Confessing to twinges of jealousy, Gaskell, the bourgeois Victorian mother, perceives a mother-surrogate in the servant Betsy who seems capable of performing motherhood more efficiently than her mistress. At the end of 1852 she would write “The Old Nurse’s Story,” a Christmas ghost story that centered around this theme. Writing sometime in December 1852 to Mary Green, Elizabeth Gaskell made what is probably her only reference to this work that appeared anonymously. “Do you care,” she wrote, “to know the names of writers in the Christmas extra no. of H Words? Dickens the two fi rst. ‘Somebody’s Story’ by a poor young man in London named Thomas. Host’s Story a Mr. Edmund Ollier. Nurse’s story mine, (I hope it frightens you . . . ) Yours very affecly, ECG.”19 It seems almost obliquely fitting that Gaskell should play tantalizing guessing games over authorial identity, with one of her most trusted

80 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy correspondents, the wife of Henry Green, the Unitarian minister of Knutsford—even signing herself ECG, in unusually cryptic fashion—for this, a story that employs a self-effacing servant-narrator whose complete name is never revealed. She is interpellated only as “Hester” by the aristocratic Furnivall family, that prides itself on “name” as social possession. Set in the Cumberland Fells, Gaskell’s Christmas story employs gothicism’s radical agenda in order to narrate the fall of a household, where desire as a force that disturbs and interrogates class identities has long been repressed. Hester is hired as an eighteen-year-old nurse to the offspring of a member of the Furnivall family, a “real lady born” (184), disinherited upon her marriage to an earnest curate, son to a shopkeeper. On the death of both of her employers, Hester as surrogate mother is transported by the young lord Furnivall to the gothic precincts of the Furnivall manor house, presided over by the ghoulish mistress–servant duo of Miss Furnivall and Mrs. Stark. Mysterious sounds of furious organ playing disturb Hester, while visions of a beautiful mother and child beckon her charge into the winter landscape outside. Desperate to save the child from certain death in the cold, Hester compels two other lowly placed servant women, Bessie and Dorothy, to impart the secrets of the Furnivall household to her. Their tale is one of repressed female desire on the part of the two Furnivall sisters for the music master hired by their father, the old lord, who pursued organ playing with maniacal intensity. Rivalry between the sisters culminated in the secret marriage of the music master to one of them, the birth of a daughter, and his subsequent abandonment of both mother and child. In a frenzy of jealousy, the scorned sister chose to betray her sibling to their father, who drove mother and child out to perish in the snow under a holly tree. By naming and acknowledging the ghostly signs of repressed desire that are denied by the rest of the household, Hester and child cause the fi nal eruption of repressed guilt in a frightening climax that entails the ghostly reenactment of the family drama of dispossession and death that in turn results in the collapse and death of Miss Furnivall, who proves to be none other than the scorned sister. Once vengeful, now repentant, her cry of “O father! father spare the innocent little child!” presides over the spectral pageant of a wrathful patriarch striking his grandchild with his crutch, before turning it out of doors. 20 All the while Hester holds fast to her own charge, struggling to join her ghostly counterpart, who, she insists, has always summoned her. Guarded by the fervent and devoted maternal embrace of the nurse, the child remains unmolested by danger, swooning away as the specters pass out of the house. Now in old age, Hester transmits her story to the children of her grown-up charge. Significantly, Hester represents herself as both literate and respectable, when hired as nursemaid from out of the village school: I was just a girl in the village school, when, one day, your grandmother came in to ask the mistress if there was any scholar there who would do

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for a nursemaid; and mighty proud I was, I can tell ye, when the mistress called me up, and spoke to my being a good girl at my needle, and a steady honest girl, and whose parents were very respectable, though they might be poor” (284). 21 As an embodiment of the 1850s phenomenon of respectability, the literate servant, hired as surrogate maternal, was a prophecy of newly emergent class identities that she and other servants would narrate into visibility and existence. Drafted into service prematurely, Hester’s preeminent suitability as “a scholar, who would do for a nursemaid” is teasingly ambiguous. Was Hester an exemplary pupil, whose literacy skills fitted her for maternal responsibility, as the author of “The Babbleton Bookclub” had contended? Or was she a simpleton, whom the teacher deemed unsuited for scholastic pursuits? Was Hester’s literacy the outward sign of invisible grace that guaranteed her success as guardian angel to her ward, or was she in fact by nature and disposition the incompetent literate, who harked back nostalgically to a culture of servitude that partook of a feudal ethos? The question of how we might read a servant narrative that seems closely aligned with an oral folk tradition, given its focus on the supernatural, revolves around the conundrum of Hester’s literacy. By embracing oral narration, Hester offers a benign, maternal tale of the sort Lockwood envisaged from Nelly Dean. As a servant-scholar, her refi nement manifests itself in a selfless narrative that negotiates with the gothic to ensure the survival rather than the collapse of an ancient household, while relegating her own life story to the margins. Even more significantly, Hester transforms diffused chatter “below stairs” into coherent history that can ensure the rescue of the jeopardized bourgeois subject. Is Hester, then, the good neo-literate, whose newfound skills do not disturb a naïve loyalty towards social superiors? If so, she is the inverse of the subaltern musician who, as tutor to his musically unlettered master, interrogates class hierarchies, instructing the Lord and his daughters in desire and fathering the nameless bourgeois subject that must initially masquerade as a cottager’s child for survival. As a literate surrogate maternal parent, Hester, the celibate servant narrator, offers a model of familiality and class amity more palatable to the bourgeois reader than that of her subaltern counterpart, the biological paternal parent. The latter prefers sexual intimacy to sublimated service, and reverses, quite shockingly, conventional class roles in seduction and betrayal plots, so popular in sensation fiction at the time. Gaskell’s choice to have a servant, the traditional victim of such a plot, narrate its topos of a woman abandoned by a faithless outsider (who is something of servant figure), and going on to secretly give birth at a farmhouse, only to be turned out by her father, is a subversion of generic expectations. Furthermore, Hester’s proficiency in uncovering such a narrative intimates to the Victorian reader the sinister side to class relations within the domestic sphere, and its consequences for the reworking of conventional plots,

82 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy when the household employees exceed their masters in knowledge, skill, and social grace. 22 Moreover, the old nurse’s story commences on an almost pedagogical note, with the servant charge’s offspring regarding their lineage. The reader surrogates of Gaskell’s text emerge as infantilized bourgeoisie: “You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan and an only child, and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from” (284).23 As the guardian and protector of the bourgeois self, Hester makes mention only of Rosamond’s evangelical, middle-class family lines. Hence she offers to her charges a class identity that erases all traces of aristocratic ancestry. There lurks within this servant’s narration of family history an implicit radicalism that threatens to consign all aristocratic pretensions to oblivion. And while she seems to mask such radicalism with an older, traditional construction of family as inclusive of household servants, there emerges at the same time a subtle and audacious claim of shared provincial origins. As celibate narrator and surrogate mother, Gaskell’s Hester is spokesperson for a familiality that transcends social distinctions, making her the direct antithesis of the inauthentic familiality practiced by the embittered, sexually deprived Miss Furnivall, given the latter’s loyalties to family as an institution that seeks the preservation of class. But Hester’s interpellations of her charge are double-valenced from the outset. She is at once inoffensively conventional and politically radical in the several proprietary references she makes to “my pretty mistress” (285), “my bright and pretty pet”(285), and “my sweet little Miss Rosamond” (288). Thus, the property-owning bourgeois subject comes to be transformed into an object for possession by the servant. Later, when menaced by the ghostly visitations of the dead mother and child, Hester, in her protectiveness towards her “property,” offers up for consideration an alternative familiality, transgressive of patriarchal norms: “I would carry my darling back to my father’s house in Applethwaite; where if we lived humbly, we lived at peace.” Her audacity is countered by a fellow servant, Dorothy, who articulates the orthodox, patriarchal position that “she did not think I could take Miss. Rosamond with me, for that she was my lord’s ward, and I had no right over her” (299). But the servant-scholar’s power to exorcise through narrative those repressed specters of class pride, forbidden desire, and patriarchal guilt, by rendering them visible at the end, is contingent upon her retrieval of lost oral histories that the older servants must yield up. In exploring the symbiotic relationship between oral and literate servant cultures, a range of political possibilities for servant voices and their narrational functions within the un/familial household emerges. At one end of the spectrum is the silent and fearsome Mrs. Stark, whose familiality is a perversion of the bond between Hester and Rosamond: She had lived with Miss Furnivall ever since they both were young, and now she seemed more like a friend than a servant; she looked so cold,

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and grey, and stony, as if she had never loved or cared for anyone; and I don’t suppose she did care for anyone, except her mistress; and owing to the great deafness of the latter, Mrs. Stark treated her very much as if she were a child. (288) Mrs. Stark, the celibate servant, is the embodiment of narrational and sexual repression. As friend rather than employee, she has long been assimilated into the culture of silence that presides over the house of Furnivall. Associated with a constellation of images that signify sexual frigidity, the cold, stony, grey, aptly named Mrs. Stark is corpse-like in her appearance, her devotion to her mistress sterile and life-denying. Further along the trajectory of subaltern speech is the kitchen maid, Bessy, with her furtive and fragmentary narratives. In Bessy, Hester encounters a narrative voice that claims anonymity for itself, interpellating a single reader/auditor, in its secret acts of narration as gossip: She said I must never, never tell; and if I ever told, I was never to say she had told me; but it was a very strange noise, and she had heard it many times, but most of all on winter nights, and before storms; and folks did say it was the old lord playing on the great organ in the hall, just as he used to do when he was alive; but who the old lord was, or why he played on stormy winter evenings she either could not or would not tell me. (291) From Dorothy, Hester gains insight into the menacing signs of desire and guilt that haunt the household, and that only the servant, as the repository of oral history, may explicate. It is Dorothy who functions as subaltern historian, recounting the sins of aristocrats against desire. She is forcibly brought to speech by Hester’s vehement pressure upon her to perform her act of narration as a moral and maternal responsibility: She asked me would I leave the child that I was so fond of just for sights and sounds that could do me no harm; and they had all had to get used to in their turns? I was all in a hot, trembling passion; and I said it was all very well for her to talk, that knew what these sights and noises betokened, and that had, perhaps, something to do with the spectre child when it was alive. And I taunted her so, that she told me all she knew at last. (299–300) Finally it is Hester who narrates the actual eruption of repressed guilt in the household’s consciousness. As the ghosts stream through the great hall, Hester holds fast to her charge for the final time, as she whimpers to join the spectral child that she has always referred to as “my little girl.” Hester’s maternal instincts save the offspring of a Furnivall woman who married “below” from a similar fate, lured as the child is to a recognition of its own identity in its ghostly double.

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Why does Hester prove efficacious in her embrace of the Furnivall orphan, empowered by this retrieval of oral history? Dickens in his correspondence with Gaskell famously suggested that a better ending would result from only the child seeing the ghost, and while Shirley Foster observes that “Gaskell was probably right to refuse to make the change” (88), a more pertinent query would be why the story is enhanced by having the servant bear narrative witness to the spectacle. As simple neo-literate, the young servant woman retains a primitive, Romantic imagination, congenial towards narratives from oral cultures that address the fantastic and the supernatural. An ingenue, both in terms of her age and her status as neo-literate, she shares in the uncorrupted vision of her charge, the Wordsworthian child. The child, Rosamond, fi rst perceives the beautiful dead mother and infant through the window, as storms blow fiercely around the manor. In sharing her perceptions, Hester’s consciousness serves also as a window upon those images of desire, guilt, sex, and death, long shut out from the household’s consciousness. Repressed desire (as symbolized in the rekindled hearth that gave off no heat), maniacal self-obsession (as symbolized in the lord’s organ playing), and the rejection of the egalitarianism of Christmas (as symbolized in the reworked topos of the outcast Madonna and child found by shepherds beneath a holly tree) may all be remorsefully revisited after being suppressed in collective memory for many years. The servant-narrator’s consciousness, therefore, is open to those promptings and signs of class oppression that only holy innocents, such as Miss. Rosamond, may see or hear. Endowed with a capacity for the visionary, this servant, like Susan Hopley, possesses powers of perception and an access to narratives that a realist aesthetic as practiced by sophisticated and scientific literates effectively rejects. The embrace of the servant-madonna, however, is salvific, because, unlike the older generations of servants, the literate, embourgeoised Hester can claim to the familiality that she later asserts in her recitative to Rosamund’s children. Hester is therefore, as servantscholar, one who negotiates between orality and literacy, situated as she is ambiguously on its interstices. The voice that concludes Gaskell’s servant narrative is indeterminate. The last word is given to the remorse-stricken and dying Miss.Grace, who mutters incessantly: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age!” Is this the servant reporting the regretful sentiments of the guilty, servant-desiring lady? Or is this the lament of a dying aristocracy that rises elegiacally above the servant’s narrating voice? The acts of youth are unnamed; they could refer to her betrayal of her sister that resulted in the death of her child. But they could also refer equally to her desire for the servant, the music master that proved fatal to her class. Gaskell’s story may be read as a radical denunciation of class, but it also makes significant concessions to the bourgeois reader of Household Words, negotiating with middle-class anxiety over the servant’s sexuality and its powers of rendering class boundaries porous. In befriending the nascent

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bourgeois class in its historic infancy, the servant becomes its natural ally and relation, for Gaskell prefers to construct the aristocrat rather than the working classes as the true enemy of the bourgeois. In preaching familiality, Gaskell also advocates sexual repression in her celibate servant narrator, for purposes of ensuring the survival of the middle classes and the destruction of a common enemy, a patriarchal aristocracy. Gaskell’s elision of the musician figure is also strategic. He is banished from the servant’s narrative as outsider, never reappearing to complicate the affectionate and egalitarian scene of narration that transpires between the old nurse and a new generation of English gentlemen and gentlewomen. Bad working-class sexuality is troped as foreign, not English. The celibate, English working classes promote the well being of the rapidly multiplying middle classes, while narrating their servitude with pride. Authored for a special Christmas issue, “The Old Nurse’s Story” appears alongside other subaltern narratives, such as “The Charwoman’s Story” and “The Poor Relation’s Story.” Read in context, Gaskell’s piece seems to participate in a distinctly Chaucerian narrative cycle. However, these stories come to be narrated, not on the road, but within the precincts of the household, for that is how Dickens constructed the scene of reading with his periodical’s title. The original Victorian reader, therefore, would have pondered the significance of the heimlich and the familial in a metaphorically induced context. Produced for consumption by the household during a holiday season that celebrates and affi rms familiality, “The Old Nurse’s Story” would have provoked anxieties and allayed them, for the servant’s narrative comes to be domesticated as family reading. The periodical reader as the equivalent of Lockwood in 1801, would therefore enjoy a luxury that the fictional surrogate of Bronte’s text did not possess: the ability to control and own the material text of the servant’s narrative, in a world where print culture ultimately calls attention to its powers of making servant narrative safe, disposable, and “familiar to their mouths as household words.” The texts of Bronte and Gaskell demonstrate anxiety over situating the now “respectable” rather than revolutionary servant. Such a servant demonstrates how the stabilities of the bourgeois voice, its judgmental good sense, and its equable tone are echoed, mocked, and destabilized by the narrating servant voice. Indeterminate and unidentifiable class identities attest to the multivoiced, multi-valenced utterances of servants, whose education permits for a drift of meaning in servant narration that occurs through the servant’s ability to manipulate registers, perform class, and freely transit between the oral and the literary. Repression is not just the subject of narration. It also comes to be the condition of narration, performed by a servant narrator whose celibate status places her in an empathetic and ironic relationship with the desiring master and mistress. The text that emerges is, not surprisingly, one that offers free rein to the servant narrator as never before and never again in the nineteenth century. In seeking the servant as a means to selfhood, the

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bourgeois reader is configured as being in a state of largely infantile dependency, enamored of the oral pleasures that the narrativally dominant servant has to offer. But the nurturing narratives of servants also attest to the heimlich, offered both overtly and as a subtext, which the bourgeois reader seeks vainly to ignore or misread. Both texts seek to co-opt the servant’s voice. If such a narratival enterprise seemed only to complicate the politics of class in 1847’s Wuthering Heights, by 1852, Gaskell’s story seems to have exorcised the ghosts of Bronte, to ensure the safety of listening to the servant. Viewed in this light, Bronte’s conservative text proves revolutionary, while Gaskell’s revolutionary text seems conciliatory. And the pleasures of orality are no longer the dubious and dangerous gratifications and stimulations of the gossip. By 1852, they are instead a comforting testimonial to the temporary suspension of all class strife: at least for as long as the periodical reader suppresses from his consciousness the knowledge that his old nurse was also a scholar, and might possibly be not just an oral narrator, but also a literate reader of Christmas fictions.

4

Obedient Servants of Empire Narrating Imperial History in William Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) How then can you look down upon your calling as servants, and be blind to the dignity of serving, when you see that the Queen in her majesty and all good and useful persons whether high or low, yes and the very angels in heaven are servants too? —Henry Houseman, The Dignity of Service

By the 1860s, at the zenith of Victorian prosperity, the discourses of servitude found new meaning as an appropriate metaphor for the lower-class citizen’s functions in maintaining civic, national, and imperial order. The Moonstone features no less than three dubiously humble and obedient servants: a steward, his daughter, and a maidservant, demonstrating Collins’s profound awareness of the ironies that enshrouded domestic culture’s preoccupations with an increasingly enlarged public sphere, where the swelling ranks of subalterns, consisting of Britain’s working classes, ethnic minorities like the Irish, and her colonized subjects, were envisioned as servants of a now de facto British empire. In this context, the stately country house acquired a new significance, since its large servant retinues could transform a home into a microcosmic version of society, with disorder below stairs suggestive of social and political anarchy. Collins’s servants in The Moonstone belong to a great country house establishment in Yorkshire, a suitable place for concerns of history, wealth, propriety, class, and empire to meet and intermesh in the 1860s. Fewer than five thousand landed families were listed in Peerage and Baronetage and Landed Gentry in the 1870s. While many of these owned smaller estates or manor houses, the landed aristocracy and gentry were an elite. Their dominance in English affairs as enlightened guardians of society saw them seeking reform for the working and middle classes in the general interest of society and representing their cultural values of public service and probity of conduct in public and private life as models worthy of emulation. F. M. L. Thompson, noting the country house’s functions as the flagship of tradition, remarks that “the country house itself was a prime agent in the preservation of the old order, both as a vehicle used by the landed class to demonstrate that it was keeping abreast of the times and not being ossified into irrelevance, and as a prize which a section of the new wealthy were anxious to acquire or to imitate” (154).1 Hence, a country house in moral confusion, subjected to the knowing gaze of silent or gossiping servants,

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was a sign of cultural crisis. If country houses were in disarray, then the nation was in jeopardy. Wilkie Collins’s country house in The Moonstone is rendered especially dysfunctional, thanks to its discovery of its nexus with imperialism. The chaos and disorder that result from its traumatic encounter with an imperial heritage invites a rethinking of history’s ramifications for both family and nation. When the novel opens, we learn that its most celebrated heirloom, the moonstone, is a legacy from the family black sheep, John Herncastle, a rapacious military adventurer with the East India Company, who stole the diamond from the palace of Tippoo Sultan during the Siege of Seringapatam, in 1799. In recent years it has become something of a critical commonplace to view events in The Moonstone as resonating to the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. However, it is unlikely that Collins could have viewed the Sepoy Mutiny as an event that could sustain the kind of ironic inquiry into class and race relations that one encounters in The Moonstone. Certainly Collins’s own direct treatment of the mutiny, in his essay in Household Words entitled “A Sermon for Sepoys,” suggests that on this matter he was far more in concord with imperial orthodoxies of his day than readings of The Moonstone warrant. It is important to bear in mind that the defeat and death of Tippoo Sultan at Seringapatam was, in fact, a major and significant event in its own right that generated a far greater complexity of responses than the widespread national outrage over the mutiny that inflamed Britain in the late 1850s. To view Seringapatam, as much criticism of the novel has done, as a remote, inconsequential footnote that Collins selected to function as a paradigm for the events of 1857, is to overlook the debate on British-Indian historiography that the siege engendered—a debate that fi nds reflection in the novel’s attentiveness to the problematic character of eyewitness narration, and the production of family history. Popular British perceptions of Tippoo at the time saw him as a parvenu, his father, Haider Ali, being a Muslim usurper of the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty in Mysore. Even today in India he remains something of a controversial figure. Tippoo Sultan’s emergence as a symbol of nationalism and resistance on the subcontinent is much more of a Pakistani phenomenon. Collins’s depiction of Tippoo as the illegitimate appropriator of Hindu symbols of authority and power, emblematized in his illicit ownership of the Vishnu diamond, precludes any possibility of viewing the Seringapatam siege in the novel simplistically, as a moment where Indian nationalist and British imperialist interests collided over the acquisition of the fabled gem. The truth was that this instance of British intervention in eighteenthcentury India spawned a considerable range of interpretive possibilities for writers and readers of history alike. Historian Kate Brittlebank, commenting on the variety of accounts of the fall of Seringapatam by the likes of Alexander Beatson, William Kirkpatrick, Francis Buchanan, Mark Wilks, and others, observes that they were the result “of a deliberate attempt by

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the Governor-General Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington, to justify his invasion and defeat of Mysore, which had not been well received in Britain” (10).2 Accounts such as Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Beatson’s A View of the Origins and Conduct of the War with Tippoo Sultaun, Comprising a Narrative of the Operations of the Army under the Command of Lieutenant General Harris, and the Siege of Seringapatam (1800), were propagandist efforts by the East India Company to secure British support for an unpopular campaign. Then there were commissioned histories such as Mark Wilks’s Historical Sketches of South Indian History, published in 1817. Wilks was a supporter of Wellesley, a participant in the Third Anglo-Mysore War, and later British Resident at Mysore. Of the defeat of Tippoo and the reinstallation of the Wodeyar Hindu dynasty, Wilks wrote: “The raja was installed at the seat of his ancestors, in the presence of an immense multitude of Hindoos, who testified the most unfeigned delight at a spectacle which revived the long extinguished hope of perpetual emancipation from Mahomedan tyranny” (771). There was also the 1802 chronicle Neshan-I-Haidari, by Mir Husain Ali Khan Kirmani, translated into English in 1840. Kirmani was a pensioner of the British, and as might be expected, his version of the siege contains an especially damning assessment of Tippoo as a ruler. For the British public, Seringapatam was associated with imperial propaganda, spawning as it did multiple narrative accounts that elicited a profound suspicion of historiography, and an alertness to the subterfuges practiced by company historians. Throughout the fi rst half of the century, Tippoo, rather than the mutiny, was the nucleus around which ambivalent British responses to empire formed. East India Company offi cials required commissioned histories that would portray Tipoo Sultan as bigot, usurper, and conspirator with the French. F. W. Buckler, writing in 1922, noted that “Indian history has been represented in Europe almost entirely by the propaganda of the Trading Companies, which approached Indian politics and states under the influence of the Colonial System of Western Expansion” (44). 3 As for Victorian histories of India, by the early nineteenth century, historians such as Malcolm and Elphinstone were divided in their opinions over Britain’s ever-growing imperial agenda on the subcontinent. Hence when Collins came to write of the moonstone as stolen object, employing no fewer than eleven narrators, his own polyglossic approach to its changing of hands suggests that he was as strongly aware of the theft of meaning as he was of the theft of possession. And, if the British public was already the skeptical recipients of dubious productions of imperial historiography concerning British activities in Mysore, what resonances would the writing of a commissioned family history by a loyal servant, centered on misdemeanors tied to the siege, evoke for the reading public of The Moonstone in All the Year Round? Obsequious narrators and the deranging of historical narrative are what Collins’s text

90 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy addresses. Gabriel Betteredge, configured as “humble narrator,” enables the text’s confessing to its own corruptions, by exposing the servitude of the official historian. Literacy acts by two other servant narrators, namely Penelope Betteredge and Rosanna Spearmann, will complicate and comment upon a writing project “authorized” by a master, who is at all times deeply implicated and invested in the outcome of such a narrative enterprise. If Gabriel Betteredge, household steward, is the servant narrator officially chosen and entrusted by a master to inaugurate the story, the narrational politics of collaborative writing may well have been a more conscious concern of Collins than has been acknowledged, related to his own status as commissioned author. “There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told. And I think, Betteredge, Mr. Bruff and I together have hit on the right way of telling it,” Franklin Blake autocratically informs his steward, before he proceeds to outline his plans for narration. Blake, with unconscious irony, proceeds to acknowledge the servant’s superior claims to knowledge: “Nobody knows as much as you do, Betteredge, about what went on in the house at that time.” After which, he issues his fiat: “So you must take the pen in hand and start the story” (7–8).4 The relationship between writing servant and commissioning master bears a suspicious resemblance to Collins’s own authorial struggles with Dickens, where Collins was cast as “hired hand.” Lillian Nayder, in her study of the relationship between the two men, offers a telling metaphor on the power relations between Dickens and contributors to Household Words. The editorial and business practices of Dickens that initially denied signature to the latter had Collins share in what Nayder describes as “the discontent felt by such writers as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Augustus Sala. . . . To these writers, it appeared that Dickens had created a class system in which contributors were the servants or hands and Dickens himself was the master” (9).5 Gabriel Betteredge as paradigm for the author figure becomes the medium by which the servitude of the writer of official family history is explored within The Moonstone. The Moonstone, a story told by multiple narrators at the behest of its hero Franklin Blake, is the tale of a diamond stolen many times over—fi rst, by Muslim invaders from a Hindu idol, then by an East India Company soldier, Sir John Herncastle, from the court of Tippoo Sultan, thereafter from Sir John’s niece, to whom he had maliciously bequeathed the gem with its fabled curse of misfortune, and fi nally from Godfrey Abelwhite, by the Brahmin devotees of Vishnu, who smother him to death and make off with the sacred gem, restoring it to its place of true belonging: the idol of Vishnu. The narrative of The Moonstone commences in another country. Distance, both historical and geographical, is what the text foregrounds for its contemporary periodical reader, who nonetheless is assigned a reading

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position of kinship with a family burdened by a guilty inheritance. “I address these lines—written in India—to my relatives in England,” begins Cousin Herncastle’s fragmentary family paper that constitutes the prologue.6 As an account of the plunder of Tippoo Sultan’s wealth at Seringapatam in 1799, the form of Herncastle’s missive to an English reading public bears an uncanny resemblance to eyewitness accounts of soldiers at Seringapatam, such as Beatson and Major Alexander Dirom, that found their way back to Britain. But the writing of history proves problematic, for a crisis of focalization presides over the very event that instantiates narrative: the theft of the moonstone.7 The kinsman “historian” of events at Seringapatam foregrounds his own unreliability as narrator, in recording Sir John Herncastle’s dastardly acts of murder and theft and the curse delivered by the disguised Brahmin priest and secret guardian of the sacred gem in his dying moments: “The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!” (4). Cousin Herncastle acknowledges his own narratival impotence in a string of negatives that attests to the failure of eyewitness narration: I cannot prevail upon myself to be his accuser and with good reason. If I made the matter public, I have no evidence but moral evidence to bring forward. I have no proof that he killed the two men at the door; I cannot even declare that he killed the third man inside—for I cannot say that my own eyes saw the deed committed. . . . Let our relatives, on either side, form their own opinion on what I have written. (5–6) Blindness, obscurity, and indeterminacy are what confront narrator and reader of the “authentic” imperial text, a text whose lessons the neo-literate servant narrator Gabriel Betteredge blithely disregards in favor of the fictional imperial text, Robinson Crusoe, that he quotes with reckless abandon, as incredulous visionary. Defoe’s novel, a tale of a white man shipwrecked upon a desert island, who civilizes the wilderness through the offices of his native servant Man Friday, is a parable for the imperial enterprise. As such, the obsequious Betteredge inaugurates narrative by repressing his own voice, and resorting to quotation as the sign of his deferential relations with imperial authority, his acquiescence as Man Friday to the imperial project that his master wishes to execute through the manipulations of historiography: “In the fi rst part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will fi nd it written: ‘Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it’” (7). However, Betteredge, the house steward, through an imperfect grasp of literary idiom, commences with a homily rather than history, a prophet of doom, citing chapter and verse from his imperial bible. Imperial texts must proliferate, demanding imitation and replication to the exclusion of all other dissenting texts. Servants of empire know this, hence

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Betteredge, as pious literate and consumer of imperial creeds, can predict how imperialism produces imperial histories even as imperial histories perpetuate and sustain imperialism. Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning (May twenty first, Eighteen hundred and fi fty), came my lady’s nephew, Mr. Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me as follows: “Betteredge . . . the whole story ought, in the interests of truth to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better” (7).8 Thus validated as visionary, Betteredge’s introductory quote hangs as a prophecy of doom over the narrative enterprise of commissioned history that crystallizes around “the matter of the Diamond,” as surely as the curse pronounced by the dying guardian of the moonstone dogs the formation of all imperial enterprise centered upon it. After assigning the task of inaugurating the moonstone narrative to the steward, Betteredge, the text proceeds quickly to dispel any complacency over inequities in reader relations between neophyte servant-author and his literate audience. For Betteredge’s boastful confidence in his powers as writer indicts an audience of social superiors, smugly assured of their own literacy skills: “If you are curious to know what course I took under the circumstances, I beg to inform you that I did what you would probably have done in my place. I modestly declared myself unequal to the task imposed upon me—and I privately felt, all the time, that I was quite clever enough to perform it, if I only gave my abilities a fair chance” (8) [emphasis added]. The historian’s hubris affl icts both master and servant. The literate master, Franklin Blake, seeks “the whole story” (7) and “plain facts” (8). Naïve and disingenuous, his faith in the infallibility of historical narrative finds ironic expression in his narrative design of a collaborative series of eyewitness accounts that implicitly belie the possibility of omniscience: “we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends and no farther” (8). The recourse to multiple narrators by Blake in order to produce the monologic official discourse of defi nitive history is defi nitely a vertiginous venture. For not only does the theft of the moonstone from every setting—be it Seringapatam, Rachel Verinder’s bedroom, or Godfrey Abelwhite’s lodgings—consistently elude every narrator’s gaze. In addition, efforts at suppressing or masking the heteroglossic in voices recruited in service of narration also fail from the very start, as the text self-consciously announces its agenda of co-optation in regard to Betteredge’s voice. Blake’s narrative project reverberates with the propagandist mission of the hapless Richard Wellesley: “In this matter of the Diamond . . . the characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already—as you know. The memories of innocent people may suffer hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal” (7). Franklin Blake

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fears the judgment of posterity with good reason, since the innocent party he refers to is none other than himself. His sonorousness on the subject alerts the reader to suspicion, since the unfolding plot will bear out that it was he, as surrogate thief, who robbed Rachel Verinder of her “jewel.” Blake’s entry into her bedchamber at night under the influence of laudanum, in order to secure the diamond for safekeeping, before he was accosted by Godfrey Abelwhite, who persuaded him to hand over the stone, makes for a complicated nexus of guilt and criminality between “hero” and “villain” in the story. Betteredge, obediently writing a commissioned history that vindicates his master and coauthor Franklin Blake, is a tainted narrator, as noted by another servant narrator, reformed thief and maidservant Rosanna Spearmann. Seizing Betteredge by his coat while speaking of her own neurosis arising out of her guilty past, she offers the following analogy between herself and her “betters” by indicating the grease spots on his garment: “The stain is taken off,” she said, “but the place shows, Mr. Betteredge— the place shows!” (24). However, the discernment of “taint” in The Moonstone turns out to be a far more subtle matter than popular opinion on imperial rapacity can ever imagine.9 Critical opinion has long viewed the Honourable John Herncastle to be representative of John Company, as the East India Company was popularly known. However, closer scrutiny proves that Herncastle’s psychology doesn’t quite fit the mold of mercenary soldier. Like Betteredge, Herncastle is in thrall to the romance and mystique of imperial narratives. Recounting the legends attached to the fabled gem from Somnath and its curse, that passed “from one lawless Mohammedan hand to another” (3), the prologue’s narrator notes that “the fanciful story of the Moonstone . . . made no serious impression on any of us except my cousin—whose love of the marvellous induced him to believe it” (3).10 John Herncastle’s resolve to steal the diamond stems from outrage at the condescension fellow imperialists display towards Indian symbols of cultural and religious authority. Recounting Sir John’s reactions, his cousin writes: On the night before the assault on Seringapatam, he was absurdly angry with me and with others, for treating the whole thing as a fable. A foolish wrangle followed; and Herncastle’s unlucky temper got the better of him. He declared, in his boastful way, that we should see the Diamond on his fi nger, if the English army took Seringapatam. The sally was saluted by a roar of laughter, and there, as we all thought that night, the thing ended. (3) Like the faithful servant poring over Robinson Crusoe, Sir John is seduced by imperial narratives, and he sins bravely in order to prove the veracities of a culture under duress from colonization. Betteredge, the servant, in his veneration of the written word, and the titled Sir John, in his susceptibility

94 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy to a culture of orality, are in ironic reversal of their conventionally assigned roles in the mass-literacy debate. The naïve neo-literate becomes the keeper of conventional cultural capital, a literary acolyte of sorts. The skeptical gentleman of rank offers a critique of cultural illiteracy in his recognition of the moonstone as a narrative opportunity for an otherwise silenced people to articulate their own version of imperial historiography, a cautionary narrative of imperialism as a self-defeating enterprise. Long before the unfortunate moonstone came into his possession, Herncastle, in the words of his cousin, possessed an “unlucky temper.” This early if passing reference to the ill-fatedness of the imperial temperament, with its curious blend of desire and credulity over things Eastern, is astutely perceived by Betteredge, the imperial apologist. Through Betteredge’s eyes, Herncastle emerges as inexplicably driven by motives beyond the material. Of the diamond, Betteredge notes that Herncastle “never attempted to sell it—not being in need of money, and not (to give him his due again) making money his object. He never gave it away; he never showed it to any living soul” (30). The Honourable John, then, is something of a malcontent, who perversely lives by a code of honor entirely his own. In Betteredge’s words: “He had kept the Diamond in flat defiance of assassination, in India. He kept the Diamond, in flat defiance of public opinion, in England. There you have the portrait of the man before you, as in a picture: a character that braved everything; and a face, handsome as it was, that looked possessed by the devil.” (31). A neo-literate servant narrator, bearing residual traces of a culture of orality and thus predisposed towards the magical and the fantastic, can attempt to represent the enigma that is John Herncastle. Herncastle emerges as something of a Byronic hero, a figure shrouded in romance and rumor, whose fabled doings according to Betteredge included smoking opium, collecting old books, experimenting with chemistry, and carousing with the underworld of London. As a servant who witnesses to Sir John’s visitations at the Verinder household, and who bears communications back and forth between a mistress and the estranged brother whom she will not see, Betteredge is positioned as sole intermediary between respectable society and the imperial pariah, between prosaic English domestic opinion, and the suspicious fables that are generated by, indeed, that are the sum constituent of the imperial romancer. Collins situates his narrator on that border where outsider and insider, past and present, the respectable and the scandalous may encounter each other, for the servant figure as steward traffics with all. It falls to Betteredge, in the opening pages of narrative, to engage with a succession of figures who seek to gain entry into the Verinder household, and who possess potential for disrupting its carefully preserved, unsullied family history. Family black sheep like Sir John Herncastle, Indian jugglers, travelers like the cosmopolitan but dispossessed Franklin Blake, and deformed servant and reformed criminal Rosanna Spearmann, who hovers on edge of the novel’s social world, all threaten the Verinder estate. It falls to Betteredge’s

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narrative stewardship to manage or suppress their potential for interrupting historical narration. As naïve neo-literate, Betteredge’s disposition leaves him both obtuse and acute regarding the limitations of history. Betteredge’s comic perplexity in his discussion with Franklin Blake as to the motives behind Herncastle’s legacy, his reference to his wits as being of “the slovenly English sort” (38), his “steering a middle course between the Objective side and the Subjective side” (41), of Franklin Blake’s Germanic arguments and his monosyllabic advice to Blake—“Wait” (43), all invite skepticism regarding his competence as narrator. Nonetheless, Betteredge, the mystified neo-literate, may enjoy insights that elude the rational literary sophisticate. Enquiry into rational motivation may be the province of both history and conventional detective fiction. But the befuddled Betteredge may point out that the strange, malefic ways in which the moonstone is said to “behave” becomes the objective correlative for the perverse and inexplicable human behaviors generated through contact with the spoils of empire. “When you looked down into the stone,” Betteredge says of his own disorienting encounter with the diamond, “you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel that you could hold between your fi nger and your thumb seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves” (61–62). Blinded and fi xated upon imperial wealth, the beholder can no more understand himself than the diamond. His own unaccountable “fortunes” as imperialist are thus projected onto the perverse and malefic character of a diamond that possesses his imagination. Betteredge’s stupefaction over the “devilish Indian diamond” encourages our own recognition as readers of its potential for eliciting a tangle of confused, contradictory impulses and desires that place under pressure commonsensical assumptions about character, agency, and value. Hence Herncastle’s hidden demons or compulsions driving him to lust for possession of the stone; hence also Blake’s confusion as to his own powers of agency when he inquires of a bemused Betteredge: “In bringing the moonstone to my aunt’s house, am I serving his [Herncastle’s] vengeance blindfold, or am I vindicating him in the character of a penitent and Christian man?” (41). If the naïve neo-literate is best suited to narrate the mysteries of the moonstone, then the voyeuristic servant’s gaze can also unwittingly expose the obscenities of imperialism, frequently camouflaged within contexts of domesticity. He recognizes the incipient ornamentalism (that, as David Cannadine has noted, would soon become a marker of imperial culture), in Rachel Verinder’s immodest flaunting of it in “the bosom of her white dress” (64), making her “the centre-point to which everybody’s eyes were directed” (64). His visionary voyeurism continues in his description of Rachel as a prelapsarian Eve on the brink of the Fall, “innocent of all knowledge, showing the Indians the Diamond in the bosom of her dress” (70).

96 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Betteredge, at once innocent and slyly suggestive, registers the derangement of signification attendant upon the moonstone as anxious object that imperialism initiates. The moonstone is at once sacred and “fabled” precious stone, shut up from the gaze of men by the dissolute Sir John, and profane exhibit brazenly displayed by the virginal Rachel Verinder. It is simultaneously devalued and coveted by the materialistic Godfrey Abelwhite’s jibe: “Carbon, Betteredge, mere carbon” (62). Such a crisis of value must also affl ict narrative form. Betteredge’s bafflement is the mirror equivalent of the readers’, who, like Betteredge, draw upon their literacy skills to “read” what seems recognizably a novel, but discover, like Betteredge, that “this don’t look much like starting the story of the Diamond—does it?” (41). For, despite an identifiable detective story topos, Betteredge’s metafictional writing moments warn against trusting in the teleology of such a genre: “I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where. We will take a new sheet of paper, please, and begin over again, with my best respects to you” (9). Like a bewildered sleuth, Betteredge warns that the story of the diamond resists narrative solutions. As neo-literate, Betteredge becomes the vehicle and medium by which narrative failure may be written into the text. Betteredge’s failures as aspiring historian, reiterate themselves several times within the opening pages. He remarks upon his several “false starts and more waste of good writing paper” (13) by enacting the scene of writing and erasure several times for the irate reader’s consumption. “What’s to be done now? Nothing that I know of except for you to keep your temper and for me to begin all over again for the third time” (13). Narrative disappoints, confronting the reader with a tangled network of stories, beginnings and endings that render origins and conclusions indeterminate. “Thanks be to Heaven!” exclaims Betteredge by Chapter 8, “we have arrived at the eve of the birthday at last! You will own, I think that I have got you over the ground this time, without much loitering by the way. Cheer up! I’ll ease you with another new chapter here—and, what is more, that chapter shall take you straight into the thick of the story” (58). Exactly when and where did the tale of the moonstone commence? With Mohammed of Ghazni, who plundered Somnath, the fall of Seringapatam, or Rachel Verinder’s birthday? Betteredge remains uncertain, for the better part of eight chapters. At other points he backtracks on the story, foregrounding for the reader the awareness that multiple histories are an inescapable condition of narrative. Going in search of Rosanna Spearmann, whose favorite haunt is the quicksands outside the Verinder estate, Betteredge fulminates: Well, I took my stick, and set off for the sands. No! It won’t do to set off yet. I am sorry to detain you: but you really must hear the story of the sands, and the story of Rosanna—for this reason, that the matter of the Diamond touches them both nearly. How hard I try to get on with

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my statement without stopping by the way, and how badly I succeed!— Persons and Things do turn up so vexatiously in this life, and will in a manner insist on being noticed. (20–21) Betteredge’s confusions over narrative’s relationship with historical time suggest that he ironically recognizes the distractions and pressures of repressed historical moments and events upon narrative consciousness and narrative teleology. As custodian of the realm of the repressed, Rosanna Spearmann hears the stifled and suppressed voices of condemned imperialists from a forgotten time in the quicksand, when she draws her implicit analogy between its shivering surfaces and the jailed British victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta, who died of suffocation, much to the discomfort of Betteredge who believes in “the nineteenth century . . . an age of progress, and in a country that rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution” (33). Yet Betteredge himself, unconsciously straying into his own life history and the misadventure of his marriage to Selina Colby, remains vulnerable to such psychic pressure. He is brought up short by his daughter Penelope, who points out that all is “beautifully written, and every word of it is true” (45), save for one objection: She says that what I have done so far isn’t in the least what I was wanted to do. I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond, and instead I have been telling the story of my own self. . . . I wonder whether gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever fi nd their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?(13) Gentlemen authors like Franklin Blake, who will tell the story of themselves later in the novel, bear a suspicious resemblance to the neo-literate servant, and in both instances the hidden, unconscious agendas that shape historiography belie the pose of disinterested historian sought by the device of “eye-witness” narration. Profit and self-interest are what narration and imperialism conflate in the “story of the diamond”—a narrative embarrassment for history. Confused by mixed motives, narratives of empire, like imperial desire, must result in miscegenation, giving rise to a generic hybridity that defies categorization. Narrative form in The Moonstone, therefore, participates in the tropes of hybridity that are strewn across the text—in the interracial Ezra Jennings; the masquerading Murthwaite, who “passes” as Indian; the dismissed servant Limping Lucy; and Rosanna Spearmann with her transsexual name and one shoulder broader than the other.11Thus, writing too assumes uncontrollable mutations and deformations, in what Blake designates to be a “strange family story” (7), a phrase that with hindsight refers not just to mysterious content but equally to a generic indeterminacy whose delinquencies ultimately rebel against historiography’s efforts at social control.

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If Gabriel Betteredge seeks to write as “wanted” by his master, his instructor in historiography is his daughter Penelope. Penelope represents a newer generation of servants “sent to school, and taught, and made a sharp girl, and promoted when old enough, to be Miss Rachel’s own maid” (12). With her advanced literacy skills, Penelope understands the teleology of the written word far better than Betteredge, who is under the spell of the diurnal and suffers from historical naïveté. Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened regularly, day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Mr. Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to fi x your memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your memory will pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty is to fetch out the dates in the fi rst place. This Penelope offers to do for me by looking into her own diary which she was taught to keep when she was at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since. (13) If Gabriel Betteredge seeks to produce public, masculine writing for posterity, Penelope mimics feminine bourgeois forms of private writing. The diary form inducts Penelope into the realm of the historical, schooled as she has been in narrative conventions. For Betteredge, by contrast, the artifice of the calendar remains unlearned. Historical memory is inept in Betteredge’s case, and prophesizes historiography’s inevitable failure, for the entire narrative is ultimately centered around a major memory lapse: the somnambulist Blake’s inability to remember his stealing of the diamond from Rachel Verinder’s bedroom. By contrast, Penelope’s own diary, which she declares with “a red face” is “for her own private eye” (13), remains invisible and unread, its contents surmised in a single word by Betteredge: “Sweethearts” (13). Historical time, discretion, and the veiling of desire mark the embourgeoisment of Penelope’s literacy practices, mirroring as it does the silences of the young lady of the house, Rachel Verinder, whose “jewel” has been stolen.12 In Blake’s theft of the jewel that the wakeful Rachel Verinder witnesses, the paradigm for imperial rapacity is not so much an act of rape as some critics have preferred to see it, as an act of illicit and confused desire in which British masculinity and femininity collude equally, given Rachel Verinder’s earlier frank sexual pleasure in fl aunting the diamond. For if the jewel is the metaphoric equivalent of Rachel Verinder’s virginity, it would be well to recall that the diamond as described by Blake is fl awed. In Betteredge’s servant narrative, Blake informs the steward: “The question of accurately valuing it presented some serious difficulties . . . its colour placed it in a category by itself; to add to these elements of uncertainty, there was a defect, in the shape of a fl aw, in the very heart of the stone” (37). Implicated in the imperial drama, Rachel is no innocent victim. But the guilty collusion of silence and amnesia

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between lady and gentleman is buttressed by the collaboration of public, masculine, and private, feminine bourgeois models of writing performed by willing servants of imperialism such as Betteredge and Penelope, the better to preserve the mystifi cation that cloaks improprieties of desire of all kinds. The unseemly innuendos that lurk behind such writing alliances forged across class and gender between masters and servants rise briefly to the surface in the liberties Franklin Blake takes with Penelope, after she informs him of the presence of the Indian jugglers, and advises him to consult her father for further details. Betteredge recounts Blake’s “confession”and his own “fatherly” response to it: “‘Father will tell you, sir. He’s a wonderful man for his age; and he expresses himself beautifully.’ Penelope’s own words—blushing divinely. Not even my respect for you prevented me from—never mind; I knew her since she was a child, and she’s none the worse for it. What did the jugglers do?” I was something dissatisfied with my daughter—not for letting Mr. Franklin kiss her; Mr. Franklin was welcome to that—but for forcing me to tell her foolish story at second-hand. (28) Betteredge’s narration of Blake’s conversation with him on this point attests to the less than innocent functions of Penelope’s diary writings about “sweethearts.” The indelicacies of narrative collusion between servant-narrators and master, in silence as much as in speech, suggest a taint, a flaw in the story of the diamond that blemishes its “proper” conventional ending of marriage between lady and gentleman, Rachel Verinder and Franklin Blake. Indeed the narrative commerce that Blake seeks with the less socially powerful, carries resonances of sexual commerce, and finds grotesque extension in the spinster poor relation, Miss Clack. Of her own recruitment to narration, she confesses: I have continued to fold my clothes and keep my little diary. . . . The latter habit—hitherto mainly useful in helping me to discipline the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam—has unexpectedly proved important to my humble interests in another way. It has enabled poor Me to serve the caprice of a wealthy member of the family into which my late uncle married. I am fortunate enough to be useful to Mr. Franklin Blake. (191) Miss. Clack reconciles herself to being “bought” by Blake and his narrative project by means of her comical equivocations with the rhetoric of fallenness: “My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque” (192).

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Such narrative “taint” is countered by the larger smear campaign that Rosanna Spearmann wages against the Verinder family name. It is Rosanna Spearmann, who steals the incriminating nightgown from Blake that bears the stain of his nocturnal visitation to Rachel Verinder’s bedchamber. Smeared with paint from her sitting-room door, where, according to Betteredge, Blake and Rachel with libidinal abandon painted figures of Cupids in the style of Italian artists who painted “Virgin Maries” and “had a sweetheart at the bakers” (51), the two redecorate the door panel of her now suggestively renamed “boudoir.” Betteredge’s comments that their activity of “making a mess” “stank” (50–51), imply that Rachel and Blake share the promptings of the Italian artist, whose concerns with virginal innocence were no more than a masquerade for a less than savory lower order of desire. Rachel, perhaps then, is no lady at all, a question that Rosanna Spearmann poses in her suicide note to Franklin Blake. “Suppose you put Miss Rachel in a servant’s dress and took her ornaments off? . . . young ladies may behave in a manner that would cost a servant her place” (311). Thus does the “bad servant” contradict the good servant. Betteredge himself cannot escape this schizophrenic predicament. Hence his belief in Rachel’s innate value and attractiveness is expounded in his observation at once respectable and risqué, that “the graces of her figure (if you will pardon the expression) was in her flesh and not in her clothes” (52). In the mental undressing of the mistress by the servant lies a parallel to the amour between Blake and Penelope that suggests a loyalty both unseemly and offensive. Conversely, Rosanna, despite her dissent, cannot escape the spell of servitude. She will sign herself “Your true lover and humble servant” in her letter to Franklin Blake, yet she acknowledges her own deeply ambivalent motives behind her theft of a sign, in the stealing of the nightgown, and her uncertainty of how to deploy it: “Having determined to keep the nightgown, and to see what use my love, or my revenge (I hardly know which) could turn it to in future, the next thing to discover was how to keep it without the risk of being found out” (315). Rosanna’s narrative describes her tampering with the sign, her intervention in its refashioning as freshly sewn nightgown “made, wrung, dried, ironed, marked, and folded as the laundry woman folded all the others, safe in your drawer. There was no fear (if the linen in the house was examined) of the newness of the nightgown betraying me. All your underclothing had been renewed, when you came to our house” (318). Rosanna seems initially, therefore, to perform through her domestic ministrations, in a self-conscious, deliberate way, precisely what Gabriel Betteredge and Penelope undertake by acts of writing (both public and private), to reconstruct the guilty master as innocent. However, in the intrusive and violating intimacies she indulges in while tending Blake’s bedroom, kissing his pillow while lingering amidst his bed linen and nightwear, Rosanna Spearmann’s transsexual name permits for

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a reversal of gender roles. The embarrassment of the stain, its connotations of lost virginal innocence, and its effeminizing effect on Blake all suggest a phallic power that the “bad” servant may wield. Rosanna’s posthumous letter robs Franklin Blake of his honor and reputation, as surely as any villainous master who “ruins” his servant maid. Blake’s response to Rosanna Spearmann’s servant narrative is that of a swooning lady, whose virtue has been called into doubt. Taken by Betteredge to his sitting room, Blake recalls his coming to consciousness under Betteredge’s reviving hand while having not “the faintest recollection” (307) of what was said on the beach, after reading the letter: “I feel gratefully the coolness and shadiness and quiet of the room. I drink the grog (a perfectly new luxury to me at that time of day), which my good old friend mixes with icy-cold water from the well. Under any other circumstances the drink would simply stupefy me. As things are, it strings up my nerves” (308). Rosanna Spearmann’s discomfiting letter, embedded in the quicksand with her body, yet traced and recovered through her instructions, affi rms her dangerously liminal status as servant narrator. Her narrative resists cooptation into either masculine and public, or feminine and private models of bourgeois writing, in keeping with her transsexual name and appearance. Her letter, unlike Penelope’s diary regarding Blake’s elided kiss, or Betteredge’s loyal complimentary remarks regarding Rachel Verinder, is a frank confession of forbidden desire. Rosanna’s repressed and buried narrative that establishes the master’s guilt as surrogate thief of the moonstone, and the enamored servant as surrogate thief of meaning on his behalf, testifies to the tenuousness of literacy’s role in sustaining the romance between the classes. In readings of The Moonstone as detective fiction, Rosanna Spearmann’s narrative is a red herring, a distracter from the genuine solution of the mystery, since the “real” thief was Godfrey Abelwhite, a Christian and a gentleman, and the perfect epitome of English masculinity. However, when read within the context of The Moonstone as deranged historiography, her written narrative, at once masculine and feminine, public and private, is a literacy act that will not be co-opted into serving Blake’s narratival agenda, since it indicts rather than vindicates him in the crime through evidence of his stained nightgown. The motif of stain thus applies equally to Blake as to Betteredge, thereby interrogating the innocence of master and servant, who are coauthors of a narrative that Rosanna inconveniently interrupts. Exhumed out of the shivering sands with its incriminating relics, Rosanna Spearmann’s narrative acquires the status of historical artifact, its archaeological mode of recovery suggesting the substrata to historiography that contests the surface evidence and meaning. Significantly, Blake’s encounter with Rosanna’s letter is represented in the text as both an act of reading and transcribing. “I proceed to copy the continuation of the letter from the original, in my own possession,” Blake records, before the text of Rosanna’s suicide missive reappears (315). The reader is

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therefore encouraged to imagine the text of Rosanna’s letter in Blake’s own hand, a double act of confessional writing by guilty master and maidservant, fraught with irony in its implications of Blake’s scribal obedience to the authoritative, subaltern manuscript, the authentic historical document. Rosanna’s suppressed narrative, resurfacing, is the inverse counterpart to Ezra Jennings’s writings, destined for burial. If the half-caste Jennings is the obliging, self-effacing subaltern whose papers and diary are to be buried with him in order to save Franklin Blake distress, the disinterring of Rosanna’s text resurrects class strife, in her companion Limping Lucy’s strident denunciation of Blake’s culpability. The dismissed servant’s plans of class solidarity with Rosanna, of “going to London together like sisters” (184) come to nothing after Rosanna’s death. Limping Lucy, significantly, laments that both of them could not only sew but also write a good hand and “might have got a living nicely” (184). The hint that servant literacy, like sewing, might be practiced independently in spaces other than the domestic, anticipates the revolutionary sentiments she expounds a few moments later, while blaming Franklin Blake for Rosanna’s suicide: “Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him” (184). Betteredge’s ambiguous aside, as co-opted narrator, is both an overt dismissal and a tacit encouragement of such rant, given his plea of failure at narrative stewardship: “The parson himself (though I own this is saying a great deal) could hardly have lectured the girl in the state she was now. All I ventured to do was to keep her to the point—in the hope of something turning up which might be worth hearing” (184). Crippled in her rebellion, Lucy nonetheless mesmerizes Franklin Blake who describes her as “a wan, wild, haggard girl, with remarkably beautiful hair, and with a fierce keenness in her eyes” (183). Blake supposes the cause for her rage to be “that she was mad” (183), thus making Lucy a rare instance of a nineteenth-century female subaltern cast in the role of Cassandra. Lucy reverses the politics of the gaze, objectifying Blake first with her command, “Stand there. . . . I want to look at you,” before registering “the strongest emotions of abhorrence and disgust” (301). Overturning the power relations of class and gender that operate so powerfully in Franklin Blake’s favor, Lucy provides for a momentary eruption of resistance that disturbs the carefully crafted dynamics of his narrative enterprise aimed at the restoration of his reputation. As Blake confesses under her relentless gaze: “There is a limit to the length of the inspection which a man can endure, under certain circumstances. I attempted to direct Limping Lucy’s attention to some less revolting object than my face” (301). Transfi xed by the servant’s scrutiny, Franklin Blake comes face to face with himself through his unreciprocated desire for loyalty in the undomesticated literate. He thereby recognizes guilt that his commissioned narrative was designed to exonerate. Not surprisingly, it is the “good and faithful servant” Betteredge who seeks to preside over narrative closure by offering the reader a conventional resolution in the marriage of the vindicated Franklin Blake to Rachel Verinder. Yet,

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here too, Betteredge’s best efforts at narrative control fail. “I am the person . . . who led the way in these pages, and opened the story, I am also the person who is left behind as it were to close the story up” (458). Betteredge’s turn of phrase echoes his descriptions in the opening chapters of securing the Verinder house (as it turns out, quite vainly) against intruders, on the night of the moonstone’s arrival: “Towards midnight, I went round the house to lock up” (47). Betteredge seems to suggest that household and narrative stewardship are homologous. In his attempts to safeguard the story as he once endeavored to protect the big house from people and things that “ do so inconveniently turn up,” Betteredge recognizes that narrative may be vulnerable to trespass and the theft of voice, power, and meaning. In the marauding entry of the heteroglossic, narrative initiative may be snatched away, to be lost forever. The ills of narrative, its susceptibilities and fragilities, are to be remedied through closure. I applied the one infallible remedy as you know being Robinson Crusoe. . . . It was at page three hundred and eighteen—a domestic bit concerning Robinson Crusoe’s marriage as follows: “With these thoughts, I considered my new Engagement, that I had a Wife—(Observe! So had Mr. Franklin!)—one Child born—(Observe that might yet be Mr. Franklin’s case too!)” (458). Betteredge then proceeds to score the text and refuses to read it until the impending birth of Franklin and Rachel’s son is announced, whereupon he says: “I read those miraculous words with an emphasis which did them justice and then I looked him severely in the face, ‘Now, Sir, do you believe in Robinson Crusoe?’” (459). By writing the story of the diamond as a misreading of Defoe’s novel, Betteredge fulfills an imperial prophecy in one more effort at narrative stewardship. Betteredge plots a conventional domestic romance at home, as the fulfi llment of the imperial adventure abroad. But in doing so he ironically indicts Franklin Blake by establishing the essential identicality between the “exonerated” hero of domestic romance, and the mercenary imperial adventurer, Crusoe/Herncastle/Abelwhite. The dividedness of Betteredge’s narrational functions, despite his loyal efforts at complying with Blake’s narrative agenda, may best be summed up in his own words to Jennings over his experiments with Franklin Blake: Speaking as a servant, I am deeply indebted to you. Speaking as a man, I consider you to be a person whose head is full of maggots, and I take up my testimony against your experiment as a delusion and a snare. Don’t be afraid, on that account, of my feelings as a man getting in the way of my duty as a servant. You shall be obeyed. (401) In his strenuous efforts at seeking out a totalizing narrative and denying space to all other voices, Betteredge energetically declares, “When I write

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of Robinson Crusoe, by the Lord it’s serious—and I request you to take it seriously. When this is said, all is said. Ladies and Gentlemen, I make my bow, and shut up the story” (459). The intertextual echoes of Thackeray’s famous concluding lines to Vanity Fair, “Come, children let us shut up the box and the puppets for our play is played out” (663) suggest Betteredge’s own manipulativeness as narrator, even as his phrase “shut up the story” suggests a rude silencing of further narrative, or a forcible closing of the material text as book. The efforts of narrative stewardship continue to fail however, for the epilogue that floats beyond the official text returns the reader to the fragmentary records of imperial narratives that commenced with the Seringapatam papers. The traveler Murthwaite witnesses the restoration of the stone to the idol at Somnath, but in writing of the gem he also presides over the dissolution of the panoptic gaze to which empire, historiography, and detective fiction aspire. “You have lost sight of it in England,” writes Murthwaite, “and (if I know anything of these people), you have lost sight of it forever” (526). We are back in the realm of imperial blindness that afflicted the Herncastle cousin half a century ago, and Franklin Blake more recently. Murthwaite’s witness to the restoration of a Hindu order, desecrated by imperialism, both Muslim and British, carries the motif of servant and service, taint and purity, to its furthest conclusions. The Brahmin priests disguised as jugglers were already troped as servants by Franklin Blake, who informed Betteredge in the servant’s narrative: “I don’t want to force my opinion on you. . . . The idea of certain chosen servants of an old Hindoo superstition devoting themselves, through all difficulties and dangers, to watching the opportunity of recovering their sacred gem, appears to me to be perfectly consistent with everything that we know of the patience of Oriental races, and the influence of oriental religions.” (38–39) The disguised Murthwaite at Somnath, listening to the plaintive music that accompanies the embrace and parting of ways of the three Indians whom he once saw at the Verinder house, is informed by a bystander that they “were Brahmins . . . who had forfeited their caste, in the service of the god” (465). Tainted by service in the crossing of the waters, the Indians nonetheless revision a discourse of servitude, embracing pariah status in the service of what Blake termed “superstition,” as surely and paradoxically as Sir John Herncastle once did. Not for nothing, then, has Collins subtitled his novel on the moonstone “A Romance.” Detective fiction’s affi liations with the rational are dismantled, given the inexplicable psychological dynamic of the novel’s romancers, both British and Indian, whose idealistic faith in the exotic and pagan moonstone-narrative outlasts Betteredge’s evangelical zeal for the misrepresenting of Crusoe as imperial bible, a mission that he has continually remained at odds with and ultimately botched.

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If imperialists seek control over history and scribal servants, Murthwaite’s concluding lines that bring the novel to an end assert the defeat of historiography, and its assumptions of linearity and narrative teleology, by his assertion of an ahistorical, cyclic, Hindu vision of time: “So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventure of the Moonstone? Who can tell!” (466). Caught up in the self-aggrandizing illusion of historiography, imperialism fails to recognize its repetitive, sinful rebirths, through the ages, in one reincarnation or the other, be it “Mahomedan” or British. Empire’s servants, enslaved through literacy like Gabriel Betteredge, enact the Macaulayan agenda of cultural conversion through English literature to an imperial creed, with more success, ironically, at home than abroad. As for the adventures of the moonstone and imperialism, they defy narrative predictability and narrative capability equally. The disguised taunt of “Who can tell!” by a dissembling Murthwaite, who passes for both British and Indian at the end and speaks in two tongues, is the echo that lingers to haunt posterity. Spanning the entire social spectrum from household servants to professional detectives, landed gentry, and imperial travelers, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone rivals Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in offering one of the most comprehensively representative of narrative communities in all of English literature. While inserting literate servants into its narrative community, The Moonstone demonstrates that narratival and social coherence emerge as threatened, despite an apparent ethic of co-operation. In the dangerous tendencies of the text to fissure and fragment into discrete documents, Betteredge’s valiant efforts at narrative stewardship speak of the suspect character of narrative ethics, in its attempts at disguising the polyvocal. Besides, The Moonstone’s obedient narrating servants exemplify literacy’s masking of its own socially disruptive propensities. If some subaltern texts such as Betteredge’s may be inefficiently integrated into the record of history, others, such as Penelope’s diary, Rosanna Spearmann’s letter, and the subaltern Ezra Jennings’s writings may suffer a fate less predictable: sometimes secured out of sight, at other times interred or resurrected. But whether in the ineptitude of a narrative steward, or in the self-censorship of serving maids, the writings of servants, both comic and tragic, remain a narrative embarrassment that disturbs the social harmony of family, nation, and empire.

5

“Master’s Made Away With” Servant Voices and Narrational Politics in R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde (1886) Masters as well as servants sometimes make mistakes; but it is not expected that a servant will correct any omissions even if he should have time to notice them, although with the best intentions. —Mrs. Isabella Beeton, A Book of Household Management

When Isabella Beeton laid down her prohibition against servant speech in her manual of 1861, she offered an unusual departure from the age’s stereotypical construction of the chattering servant.1 Beeton’s silent servant is male, and his obsequious discretion is offered to a master, rather than a mistress. More than twenty years after Mrs. Beeton, we fi nd ourselves in the world of the bachelor household with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the mistress is an absence. Poole and Jekyll, like Crusoe and Friday before them, or Bertie Wooster and Jeeves who followed after, are a dyad, working always in close collusion together, affi rming a social and psychic isolation that renders their masculine domesticity at once prestigious and perverse. A sterile elitism of class and gender prevails in the Jekyll household over which Poole presides. The redundancy of the feminine in Jekyll and Hyde blurs demarcations that affi rmed the doctrine of separate spheres that prevailed more unequivocally, earlier in the Victorian Age. Disorder seems inevitable in this homosocial world where public and private sphere are rendered indistinguishable from each other. In the JekyllHyde domicile—with its laboratory, study, dining room, and drawing room—home and workplace overflow, merging into a single, common, indeterminate space. Household manuals of the age generally deemed male servants of the upper ranks to be custodians of domestic order. In doing so, they seem to suggest that life below stairs required its own representative of patriarchal authority, who enforced discipline while substituting discretion for modesty in his demeanor. Butlers mirrored patriarchal prestige, even as their cautious reserve hinted at patriarchy’s culpability requiring a perennial defensiveness in all its social and public postures.2 Exempt from livery, a butler’s right to gentlemanly costume was the visible sign of his complicity with his employer’s social ambitions. For, unlike the chattering scullery maids below stairs, this manservant, whose discretion was his trademark,

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was employed both as worker and status symbol. In his guarded transactions with an outside world that visited for social and trading purposes, he embodied the middle classes’ nervous obsession with reputation and respectability. The servant in the 1840s was already a signifier of silence as evidenced in literary texts such as Jane Eyre (“Too much noise, Grace”). By the late 1800s social analysts were vociferously denouncing the political implications of repressed servant speech. In 1896, writing of domestic service in Life and Labour of the People, Charles Booth observed with disgust that “ordinary relations between employers and employed in other walks of life cannot endure here, and the peculiar ones which do exist have a very unpleasant side and revolt those who are used to free speech and bold criticism” (224).3 If Grace Poole remained close-lipped and enigmatic to the end, forty years later, R. L. Stevenson’s “shilling shocker” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde afforded its readers the spectacle of another Poole’s innocent, yet fatal assault upon a sinful master, closeted within the respectable household, whose deformations of identity he unknowingly witnesses to in the story he relates to his master’s friend, Mr. Utterson, the lawyer. A Victorian readership would have instantly recognized the sensationalism inherent in Stevenson’s assigning a deadly narrative agency to a butler servant, with all its implications for cultural, social, and psychic violence. The bizarre events of the good doctor’s devolution and death are mediated at climactic moments by the narrating presence and consciousness of the butler Poole, in what turns out to be a dramatic encounter between servant and gentleman. In choosing to abandon discretion, through his volunteered status as narrator, Poole presides over the crisis of intrusion, discovery, and death that forms the epicenter of Stevenson’s plot. Stevenson’s novella participates in anxieties generated by a rhetoric of class conflict that gained increasing dominance after the Third Reform Act of 1885 enfranchised most males. In The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, David Cannadine has noted how the age of mass democratic politics and the polarized model of society that it generated may be viewed in a postmodern age as an instance where “mass party politics are as much about the attempt to create, manage, and manipulate social identities as they are the direct expression of them” (110).4 After the relative social calm of the 1850s and 1860s noted by many historians, the 1880s heralded the rhetorical production of class as a configuration of dichotomous, mutually antagonistic social and political identities. Such rhetoric placed an inevitable pressure upon the heterogeneous middle classes who now came to be increasingly interpellated as “bourgeois.” That Stevenson often succumbed to such discourses is evident from his private correspondence. Writing to J. A. Symonds in the spring of 1886, in the very same letter that declared “Jekyll is a dreadful thing,” he concluded with a few ramblings that suggest his own barely conscious perturbations

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over issues of class. After descanting on Raskalnikov, General Gordon, Marat, and Marcus Aurelius, and their immoral sources of happiness, Stevenson proceeded to make the following rather dissociated remarks: As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (quorum pars), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch with life. Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me two flaunting emblems of their hollowness. God knows where I am driving to. But here comes my lunch. (Stevenson, 325)5 The fragility of bourgeois selfhood and the Victorian hearth appear to haunt Stevenson in the imagery of mantelpiece china ornaments, while associated with a terror of death as a form of punishment is a free-floating anxiety over disaffected servants. Alienation, from both the self and the world, is the malady that affl icts Stevenson’s “out of touch” middle classes. The result of such a diagnosis is a sudden, vehement upsurge of loathing and disgust that overwhelms the earlier urbane tone of the letter. Some months earlier, Stevenson had already dramatized such social tensions within the home in The Strange Case by engendering class identities in Jekyll’s domestic establishment as predominantly masculine. For when the home ceases to be the separate sphere of the feminine, it can no longer be demarcated or protected from the public world of professional practice, political strife, and class war. As for Poole’s significance as butler in the maintenance of the master’s social identity, only months after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, in April 1886, Stevenson was mulling over the ironies of butlering in his correspondence with Sidney Colvin. Stevenson’s discussion of this manservant’s functions reads like a droll version of the Hegelian thesis of the slave as the master’s mirror. “We have a butler!” he exclaims in mock ecstasy. “He doesn’t buttle, but the point of the thing is the style. When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel. He opens the door, and I am told waits at table. Well, what’s the odds; I shall have it on my tomb—‘He ran a butler’” (Stevenson, Letters, 332). Stevenson then proceeds to write the epitaph of the master: He may have been this or that, A drunkard or a guttler; He may have been bald and fat— At least he kept a butler. He may have sprung from ill or well, From Emperor or sutler, He may be burning now in Hell— On earth he kept a butler. (Stevenson, Letters, 332)

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Penned a short while after the publication of a tale where a butler’s perplexity over his master’s identity results in the latter’s death, these verses suggest that at the time Stevenson was as preoccupied with social philosophies of identity as he was with metaphysical issues of dualism and dividedness. And in his novella the concerns of the one are complicated by the pressures exerted by the other. Preoccupations with dualism must of necessity result in concerns of narration that make the unitary subject an impossibility, even as its social manifestations must raise misgivings over unstable and adversarial class identities of characters, narrators, and readers within the text, who inhabit, produce, and consume its narratives. A straightforward, coherent telling of a tale about the collapse of bourgeois identity is an impossibility for The Strange Case. This is made evident by the elliptical tendencies of the text, with its disjointed narrative sequences produced by its multiple voices. The ambiguous character of Poole’s fi lial yet fatal act of narration as servant is not only a formal necessity but part of a larger crisis of narration that informs the text. The sign of servant narration in Stevenson’s novella may be read as a symptom of class neurosis, which the text displays, yet simultaneously seeks to repress. There is therefore a crisis of narrative consciousness that pervades the text. In the process, this narrative dysfunctionalism invades the speech-writing relationship so often highlighted in the text. Poole’s narrative of the strange entity in his master’s cabinet is deemed by Utterson to be no more than a fiction: “a wild tale” (65), associated with the practices of oral culture. Associated with orality, servant powers of narration in The Strange Case end up contesting the master’s writ, exposing the failure of writing. Such a contest, by extension, inevitably reflects class anxieties over mass literacy, and raises the question of why the servant in this text may never be permitted the “last word” by virtue of the recuperation of the written that transpires in the epistolary conclusion. If Stevenson’s novella establishes a general and all-encompassing anxiety over an imperiled bourgeois identity in the text, which moves beyond Jekyll/Hyde to include, among others, most especially, Utterson as reader surrogate, it nonetheless seeks to repress an all-subsuming sense of menaced class identity in representing its narrative as the singularly “strange case.” We may therefore follow the development of such a narrative trajectory as buttressed by concerns of writing and its implications for both reader relations and the repression of the literate servant’s voice. Hence, in tracing the slow and inevitable eruption of servant narration, we may monitor the way orality in this text deranges the writing-fortified bourgeois subject. In Stevenson’s novella, the imperiled and tenuous hold upon middle-class respectability and selfhood is not merely that which pertains to the “strange case,” the unique pathology of Jekyll. Although the text announces its subject to be the “strange case,” the crisis of class identity is everywhere. Its title fi rst deceives and distracts its respectable reader’s attention away from

110 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy the omens that presage the decline of an entire social class, manifested in the urban landscape of Jekyll’s neighborhood: Round the corner from the by-street there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate, and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan light, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. (40)6 The material collapse of the ancient house, now no longer occupied in its entirety by the bourgeois subject, becomes also a metaphorical configuration for the collapse and decay of bourgeois subjectivity, for these spaces are actually personified in the references to the wealth and comfort “worn” by Jekyll’s house. Such sites are now to let, hired, or rented rather than owned, for the urban professional has gone to seed. Law, architecture, business, and cartography, those professions which were once the mainstay of this class’s power and identity, have degenerated to “shady” dubious trades practiced by “all sorts and conditions of men.” Unknown to—and estranged from— themselves, the members of this class are a furtive, nameless crew, their offices derelict, their enterprises “obscure” and indeterminate. Bourgeois wealth, like bourgeois identity, remains murky, improvised, and unstable. This sense of a class in crisis extends to the reader. The respectable reader is in a nervous neighborhood, for to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is to be constrained into a bourgeois reading position as in danger of being assaulted as any of Hyde’s other victims in London’s mean streets. The reader’s empathetic relationship with his surrogate, the vexed lawyer, Utterson, is a constant stimulus to anxiety. As reader surrogate, Utterson is also the vehicle and medium of class interests, his lawyerly functions in mediating the circulation of wealth, and his anxieties about working-class criminality menacing respectability all being profoundly bourgeois. He fears that “if this Hyde suspects the existence of the will, he may grow impatient to inherit,” even as he muses, “It turns me quite cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening!” (42). Utterson, “as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life” (35) is preoccupied with wealth, which provides for his initial motivation as reader representative perusing the contents of Jekyll’s will, strongly aware as he is of reading and writing as “invested” activities. By the end of the story, the anxious reader will stand reminded of the investments he or she has in Utterson’s “readings” and of the disturbing presence of other interpretive communities, namely the servants who are left gathered around the fi re at the end, whose voices are present yet out of

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earshot within the text. It is Utterson who will enjoin the butler to silence at the end, for, as the lawyer informs Poole, “If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit” (73). At the very moment when it deems itself to be in jeopardy, the bourgeois self, anxiously contemplating its own creditworthiness, is confronted by a surfacing of the discourses of capitalism. Not only do character and reputation become social capital; Utterson as bourgeois subject must enter into transactions with other circulating narratives that are also, threateningly enough, material modes for the production of class. The circulation of meaning, which Utterson now dreads more than the circulation of wealth, has passed beyond control by the end. In all this, a bourgeois reading position remains necessitous in order that the frisson of fear and desire which the text produces remains accessible, since, despite Jekyll’s claims of being representative of all humanity, it is specifically middle-class rather than working-class consciousness that is exposed as divided by the text. Nor do daytime and nighttime lives engender anything remotely equivalent to an identity crisis in the aristocracy. Dead or alive, the titled Sir Danvers Carew remains always recognizable. Constrained into readerly allegiance with gentlemen professionals, in order to experience the menace to class identity that afflicts respectable middle-class masculinity, we must, like Utterson, “mount the street, pausing every step or two . . . his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity” (40). For we are in a world of literacy, where letters, wills, prescriptions, notes, journals, and instructions, as the private and confidential documents of gentlemen writers read by gentlemen readers in secret and under duress, reveal this to be a text about a professional middle class’s preoccupations with the control of reading and writing. This writing as the pharmakon is inevitably both poison and remedy, and one of the consequences of encountering writing as the pharmakon, which Derrida notes in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is its pernicious affect upon the reader.7 Utterson, as mobile restless reader who seeks speech but is offered only writing, in wills, letters, and prescriptions, wanders discomfited through the text. Stevenson’s community of middle-class male professionals, who encode, enclose, and set in motion the written word, is one that believes in the controlling power, the authoritative character of writing through the provisions of wills, letters, and written instructions. Jekyll possesses a faith in the pharmakon/pharmakos as a formulaic means for “doctoring” identity. Yet the true relationship between prescription and drug, sign and referent, eludes him to the end.8 His desperate search, during his last days, for the right chemical compound that will restore his lost identity as Jekyll, is dependent upon his capabilities as doctor for professional writing: his accuracy in prescribing the right formula. In pursuit of Plato’s pharmacy Jekyll must discover the gap between the ideal and the material, the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified, for a chemical salt of the same name exhibits different properties and effects till he is forced to conclude that the

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“fi rst supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught” (96). That impurity is the unknown quantity, the x in the written equation, which cannot be inscribed, that which signifies all that must elude the control of writing. Hence the tantalizingly incomplete texts that confront Lanyon as he peruses Jekyll’s notebooks. Hence also the absence of the formula as inscription, since the vital salt that Jekyll so frantically seeks, as his original supplies of it dwindle, is not the complete “solution” or remedy, but only “the last ingredient required” (83). The medical prescription as the master’s writ is therefore not a complete text. It remains plagued by the elusive “unknown factor” that will not permit the full text to be written. Jekyll, Lanyon, and Utterson must all share in the failure that attends professional writing. In the midst of this crisis, the presence of speech remains an incontestable if frequently overlooked power within the text, which frustrates the attempts of gentlemen to write their own master plots. It resides in the indiscreet voices of the master’s servants: the maidservant and the butler. As such, its traditional privileging in Western metaphysics as the logocentric is offset by its associations with working-class orality. It is nonetheless voice that overcomes writing, in the death-dealing “tale” of Poole, which frustrates the master’s writ. But this encounter between speech and writing in the text remains contradiction-ridden, where the victory of the one over the other is both simultaneously affi rmed and repressed. For among the many associations that overdetermine the pharmakon is that of pharmakos as an artificial paint, which disguises and perfumes the corpse. In Disseminations, Derrida notes that in Plato’s texts the magic of writing and painting performs “like a cosmetic concealing the dead under the appearance of the living. The pharmakon introduces and harbors death. It makes the corpse presentable, masks it, makes it up, perfumes it with its essence as it is said in Aeschylus” (142).9 Life history of the kind offered by Jekyll at the end is precisely a case of writing as cosmetic that conceals the dead under the appearance of the living. Middle-class masculinity uses writing to conceal its own death of personality. The fiction of signature suggests a unitary subject, even as it camouflages what Jekyll terms “the true hour of death” (97), the moment when his hold upon selfhood slipped irrecoverably away.10 Signature denies the actual loss of voice attendant upon bourgeois self-alienation. This is the irony underscored by having Poole overhearing Mr. Hyde in the study ask, “Sir . . . was that my master’s voice?” (64). Poole, as bearer of letters, prescriptions, and instructions, is at the service of the master’s writ. Such a writ is mystified in its invisibility and inaccessibility, present to the servant, yet unreadable. But Poole’s narrative propensities are what undermine and countervail it. As opposed to the master’s writing, the servant’s narrative is afforded presence, immediacy, and consciousness. By Victorian cultural norms, as we have seen, a servant’s narrative is also frequently transgressive, an act of “speaking out of

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turn.” Poole’s narrative initiative is one that interrupts the “natural” flow of events. It erupts as unsolicited intervention, at a point where plot seems to stagnate into silence, with the intriguing disappearance or invisibility of Jekyll/Hyde. It therefore affi rms narrative dysfunctionality, for the bourgeois subject cannot tell his own story, except beyond death. Lanyon and Jekyll/Hyde both defer narration. Only the dead bourgeois subject may engage in narration, and indeed this is because its narrative is precisely about its own shameful death and passing, the scandal of its own existence within the lexicon. Yet esoteric texts, such as Jekyll’s will, are also initially unreadable to their intended reading fraternity. Perplexed by this document, Utterson initially seeks out Poole, the manservant, in an attempt to solicit a servant narrative. Utterson’s interrogation of Poole is the fi rst of many oppositions that the text will invoke between oral and written testimony. The lawyer’s expectations are for a narrative that is unself-conscious, naïve, and oral, which, through his editing skills, he may subordinate and modify into a gloss or commentary upon the illegible, if literate, identity and signature that is Jekyll, as encountered in his will. This is the same illegibility signified in the “splutter of the pen” upon the despairing prescription, written by a besieged Jekyll to his chemist, when the pharmakon fails to become the master’s writ (66). Walter Ong points out that the privileging of the written statement over spoken testimony was an outcome of writing coming to be deeply interiorized by print culture. Before this, Ong notes, “Witnesses were prima facie more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements, whereas texts could not” (96).11 But Utterson’s initial encounter with Poole is also a moment of desire in the text, a request for narrative as gossip, for the “low” forms of narrative in a culture of orality. It stands opposed to the gentleman’s agreement following the “Story of the Door,” told by a narrator who eventually declares himself to be “ashamed of my long tongue” (34).12 There orality was a matter of guilt, a promiscuous indulgence, the scene of narration, a landscape of illicit desire, of sexualized streets, whose shops possessed “ an air of invitation,” “laying out the surplus of their gains in coquetry” like “rows of smiling sales women,” in a street that veiled its more “florid charms” on Sunday (30). Enfield has already declared his narration of orgiastic child abuse to be “a bad story” (32), a pornographic indulgence upon the Sabbath. His gentleman’s superego forbids orality, since indiscretion is an act of class disloyalty, destructive of “reputation,” which is the very condition of bourgeois existence. By contrast, Poole’s “exchanges” with Utterson are “telling” in a different way. “‘Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?’ asked the lawyer. ‘I will see, Mr. Utterson,’ said Poole. . . . He was ashamed of his relief when Poole presently returned to announce that Dr. Jekyll was gone out” (41). Initially Poole is gatekeeper to a bourgeois identity and its attendant fictions. He is described as “elderly” and “well-dressed” (40). As gentleman’s gentleman,

114 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy not only does Poole mimic discretion in his speech; he is at the service of a fictive bourgeois being. Is Jekyll in or out? Such linguistic etiquette makes for a bourgeois body accessible only when it chooses to be so accessed. The social and linguistic ritual that Poole enacts through his replies perpetuates and reproduces the master’s being through language, since to be “at home” does not point to either the location or presence of the master’s body. Instead, the master, disposed or indisposed towards company, who presences himself or disappears through his servant’s collusions with the formulaic, is a paradigm for Jekyll/Hyde in his social relations. In a more extended sense, Jekyll’s body, like all master’s bodies, remains a product of mystification, an ideological and rhetorical construct. Class-controlled and class-based, yet as material in its character and functions as any economic base or mode of production, the master’s language ritualistically incanted by the servant helps to preserve the master’s fictions of being. The story of “the Door” is one that continues to be acted out by Poole, in his ceremonial vigilance, till the moment when Utterson will exclaim, “Down with the door, Poole!” (69). The servant’s fi nding of his voice will indeed be death-dealing to the master, but this moment is deferred for as long as Poole echoes the master’s language. Here is Utterson’s need for the fractured or mediating gaze and speech of the servant. Jekyll, his fellow class member, remains unknown and invisible to him. Such alienation is all-encompassing in the text, from Lanyon’s estrangement from Jekyll, to the moment of Jekyll’s own transformation into Hyde, of which he writes: “I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house” (84). Narration and counter-narration between master and servant will set up a hall of mirrors that makes for the bourgeois subject’s contemplation of himself as “strange case.” A servant’s narrative permits for the alienated gaze within the text and dramatizes the fractures in gaze, which then produce fractures of narration. And indeed, in the fi rst eruption of servant narration and the alienated gaze, the narrative focalizes upon a servant maid, who focalizes upon nocturnally indistinct, “classless” identities in the street. In this “queer” domestic establishment, the feminine is rendered appropriately powerless as lowly domestic and relegated to the attic, that traditional space of repression, out of which revelation emerges. The “aged and beautiful gentleman” (46) is of titled rank, but the underworld of the city at night obscures all markers of class. In such obscurity lies that sinister loss of visible respectability that the servant’s gaze makes the more troubling. For a double voyeurism is at play here as the bourgeois reader watches the female subaltern watching homoeroticism’s potential for encounters that are “classless.” Elaine Showalter, writing of Hyde’s attack upon Sir Danvers Carew in the alleys of London, notes, “Hyde both strikes at a father figure and suggests a male prostitute mugging a client on the docks” (72).13 But more intriguing for narrational concerns is the mediating gaze of the servant maid. What transpires here is the rendering of the female domestic, the traditional object of the master’s

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lust, as de trop. The bourgeois reader who, like Utterson, is engendered as male, is permitted to have the unnamed domestic read more competently and narrate what the text in its politeness designates as indecipherable, invisible, or even directly unsayable to the respectable reader: the “pretty manner” (46) of the aged gentleman.14 The vantage point of her gaze may at fi rst glance suggest omniscience, given its elevated position. But on closer scrutiny its functions prove slightly more complicated. For events to the servant maid only “seem” or “appear as if.” Of the aged gentleman she notes that it “ did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance”; “it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way;” while Hyde “seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience” (46). The servant’s gaze is therefore not so much omniscient as interpretive, capable of hermeneutically reading and explicating the signs of the master’s degeneracy. If the power of subaltern hermeneutics hovers disquietingly over the scene of the crime, the logical corollary that ensues in its aftermath is the repressed specter of mass literacy that briefly surfaces through the metaphorical fog of Utterson’s perplexed consciousness. Traveling in search of the absconding Hyde’s address, we are told “the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads . . . and many women of many different nationalities, passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass” (48). The literary marketplace is located in a landscape of cheap appetite, addiction, and prostitution, while subalternity is conflated with the foreign for the respectable, abstemious, English gentleman. Later Jekyll confesses to his own trauma triggered by the invasiveness of the tabloid press, which. significantly enough. assails both him and Utterson not visually, but as voice, penetrating into the very heart of the ordered household. Asked by Utterson if he had “heard the news,” we are told: “The doctor shuddered. ‘They were crying it in the square,’ he said. ‘I heard them in my dining room.’” (51). The raucous voices of news vendors are equally a torment to Utterson. “The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves hoarse in the footways: ‘Special edition. Shocking murder of an M.P.’ That was the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal” (53). The reporting voices of both maidservant and butler are aligned, in their sensationalism, with the subaltern voice that represents the tabloid text: for if one is its source and origin, the other is its possible serialized conclusion. Both possess a potential for transactions with the written, which alarm the jealous custodians of professional writing. Such moments of narration are, therefore, what the text also seeks to repress. Hence the maidservant’s voice is rendered in indirect discourse, and thereby repressed by the narrator, who annotates and glosses her utterances. The narrator therefore remarks: “It seems she was romantically

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given; for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world” (46). In reporting on the stylistics of the maidservant’s narration, the narrator both objectifies it and renders it verbally jejune. Her story’s class accents function as a marker of orality and are pointed to by the editorial asides of a literate narrator to a literate reader, while its gendered character deprives it of all potency. Subsumed into indirect discourse, she signifies the narratival emasculation of her class, deprived of the phallicism of the pen. Although it is this narrative that fi rst produces the fugitive bourgeois subject, the full effects of servant narration will not be realized until the death-dealing narrations of Poole, which are located at the crisis of the plot. The ironic object of Poole’s narration is the finding of the lost or displaced fictive body of the master, which it instead “serves” to kill. Poole presents himself to Utterson as “book learned” (68), his literacy never in doubt to himself. His narrative to Utterson that enumerates and interprets the signs of bourgeois decay is frequently interrupted and interrogated by the lawyer, who valiantly seeks his own “masterly” readings and interpretation of “significant” signs, all of which are doomed to fail. At a slightly earlier point in the text, Utterson has already expressed perturbation over the excluded servant-reader’s literacy and its power to demystify and decipher the esoteric authority of the master’s writ. Hence his sharp query to Poole about the state of the prescription’s envelope: “How do you come to have it open?” (66). Further, Poole’s reading and narrative propensities affi rm his own affiliations with the logocentric, as when he swears to Utterson: “I give you my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!’” (68). Yet the text continues working to deny valorizing the servant’s word as Word. Poole’s narration commences against a landscape that hints suggestively of desire. Its occasion is a “wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous, and lawny texture” (63). This lewdly erotic detail of atmosphere prepares for the titillation of the servant’s narrative, that obscene gaze and speech of the servant which subjugates the master, and which found textual equivalence and manifestation earlier in a tabloid press that voiced itself as subaltern to bourgeois readers. Poole’s narrative stages the spectacularity of bourgeois shame. In narrative terms, it is the moment of gratification towards which the plot’s motor has driven. As his narrative progresses, the butler accomplishes the master’s demolition as he consciously edits and revises his pronouns: “All this last week (you must know) him, or it, or whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind” (65). Poole speaks the discourses of devolution, for the misrecognized master is seen “digging among the crates” (66). He cries out “like a rat ” (66), is “more of a dwarf ” (67) than a man, a masked figure

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that “like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet” (68). For as Poole solemnly affi rms: “that thing was not my master, and there’s the truth ” (66). If, as Hegel noted, the slave is the mirror of the master, more necessary for the affi rming of the master’s identity to himself in his existence rather than in his labor, it is only logical that the moment of death is the moment when the master’s absence is asserted by a servant who has, with unconscious irony, misrecognized that master all his life, and who continues to do so. For the voice behind the door is and is not the master’s voice. This mirroring image and function is articulated by Poole in the strange workings of grammar when he comments upon the mirror that we know Jekyll has installed himself. Breaking into Jekyll’s study, the two men are struck by this object’s incongruous “presence”: “‘this glass has seen some strange things, sir,’ whispered Poole. ‘And surely none stranger than itself,’ echoed the lawyer in the same tone” (71). Transferred into the nominative case, the inexplicable mirror, personified, now “sees” and the bourgeois subject is here objectified as a “strange thing.” It is Poole, the “reflecting” other, who must offer such an observation to Utterson. Here is an anxious, burgeoning moment of self-consciousness. William Veeder has noted the significance of the name Poole as lake or mirror. However, there are implications this holds for the way the text plots the gradual destruction of the self-sufficient Cartesian cogito, replacing it with the Hegelian self that cannot be known in isolation, but which needs to discover itself reflected in the affi rming presence of the other. In this mirror pattern, which is a reconfiguration of the classically bourgeois moment of self-contemplation or inwardness, alienation is fi nally affi rmed in the text’s re/presentation of the looking glass, that time-honored symbol of selfhood. The “depths” looked into with “involuntary horror” reveal not one but two “pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in” (71). Utterson and Poole, servant and gentleman, are now a dyad, and the autonomous self-image from henceforth has become impossible. In the verbal exchange of servant and master, where the voice of the master is unrecognizable in its authority, Utterson and Poole enact a similar exchange of mirroring glances, which Utterson seeks to strenuously maintain. “‘Sir,’ he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, ‘was that my master’s voice?’ ‘It seems much changed’, replied the lawyer, very pale, but giving look for look” (64–65). In this exchange of gazes, bourgeois master and servant seem to have unconsciously arrived at that Hegelian moment of struggle unto death, where, through the act of looking back or staring down, each resists objectification by the gaze of the other. Poole’s question seems a direct assertion of this purpose, demystifying the master into an object under scientific scrutiny. The butler speaks the language of scientific observation in his descriptions of height, build, and behavior as he evaluates the odd specimen within the cabinet. Such a dissection of the master is what Utterson seeks to

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resist, for Utterson is Jekyll’s bourgeois double. His crisis as bourgeois auditor of servant narration is as much a moment of crisis for bourgeois mastery as Jekyll’s crisis is, in his besieged estate as bourgeois subject. This is a moment of readerly embarrassment for Utterson, where the privacy of the act of reading, with its attendant moments of self-consciousness, is supplanted by the transgressive and discomfiting presence and consciousness of the oral narrator. The dismaying effects of servant narration in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are to be found less in the fact that Poole narrates, since narration as subject formation is less than fully realized in this instance. Mortification ensuing out of servant narration, here, stems from its compelling effects upon the gentleman of substance to listen to a narrative that hints of his own insubstantiality. In this climactic moment, servant narrator and his narrative content are inextricably entwined together. It is the moment when orality supplants literacy and when the comfort of absence in the written can offer no refuge. Utterson as bourgeois reader seeks at fi rst to devalue Poole’s narration in terms that suggest its generic affi liation with magical narratives that are affi liated with primitive oral culture: “This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale, my man,’ said Utterson, biting his fi nger” (65). The gesture attests to Utterson’s phallic and narratival impotence, his being at a loss for words. Poole’s narration is punctuated and interrupted by repeated efforts at interpretive hegemony by Utterson, who, as gentlemanly guardian of law and order in its currently form, is professionally “invested” in certain kinds of readings. “Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and his avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to fi nd this drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery—God grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well together and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms.” (66) Utterson’s hermeneutic merits closer scrutiny. His search for the “plain” and the “natural” grounds interpretation for him in the scientific, the empirical and the totalizing truth. Utterson’s is a profoundly “literate” reader response, and one that in its dismissal of the fantastic makes strenuous efforts to aver a bourgeois faith in realism. If his interpretation therefore “hangs well together,” it attests to his own readerly competence in rewriting the “fantastic” as medical case. Instead, in the process of servant narration, what we experience as readers is the spectacular responsiveness of the servant’s body, which becomes the visible medium of articulating the grisly sight that tests the lexical limits

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of language. This is precisely the emotional register which bourgeois sangfroid such as Utterson’s would prefer to overlook or understate. Poole’s body articulates the “sensation” attendant upon the fiction that is Jekyll. His face turns a “mottled pallor” (66); he speaks of how “the hair stood upon my head like quills” (66), of sensations that “went down my spine like ice” (68). The “queerness” of Hyde, he says, is “felt in your marrow—kind of cold and thin” (68). Poole’s dramatic narration transforms the servant’s laboring body into a reader’s libidinal body, one which knows in some ways a form of jouissance, a hedonistic erotics of fear that comes from reading the obscene and shameful text of the master’s body, in decoding the signs of the master’s bodily degradation. This degradation amounts in fact to the master’s shameful castration, for Poole records that sometimes he hears “it” weeping “like a woman or a lost soul” (69). The phallic power of the pen has therefore long since been lost, since Poole reports that the man at Maw threw Jekyll’s prescription back “like so much dirt” (66). Maidservant and master have exchanged positions, and as Poole proceeds to whisper of the unrecognizability of the master’s voice, it is precisely that loss of voice and identity that makes speech and narration impossible for Jekyll. Instead he must take refuge in the pharmakos, where writing conceals the death of voice. Poole’s narration possesses the agency required to penetrate the house, that literal “fortress of identity” (83) for the bourgeois master. Domestic spaces fi lled with dark closets and cellars with lumber, all cobwebbed over, unvisited, cluttered, and secret, are paradigmatic of bourgeois inwardness. Locked doors and forgotten, rusted keys suggest an interiority and privacy now grown sinister, so that the world of the heimlich must be assailed. The unhoused master is driven from the sanctuary of his study, that space named and associated with the powers and prestige of literacy. Given the ironical nature of his policing and retributive functions, Poole as both ministering and avenging angel must render the arrival of the law superfluous. And indeed, neither Utterson nor the police will ever return. So we must come fi nally to the question: Why does Poole, the agent of crisis who presides over the “end” of Jekyll/Hyde, remain so completely repressed within the text as to be rendered almost invisible in its reading? For answers one turns to the contradictory, indeterminate, and structurally unstable ending of the text. Addressing bourgeois self-alienation, this is a text that as strange case repeatedly seeks its own closure from the very outset: “Let us make a bargain never to refer to this again” (34), Enfield tells Utterson at the end of “The Story of the Door.” In the “Incident at the Window,” Enfield again tells Utterson, as he gazes at the back door: “That story’s at an end, at least. We shall never see more of Mr. Hyde”(60). After the discovery of Hyde’s body, Utterson vows to Poole to conclude the whole business by returning with the police before midnight, but law and lawyer vanish from the scene, never to return.

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Most significantly, Jekyll’s fiction of writing his own conclusion is the fi nal instance of bourgeois efforts to impose its own phallic authority upon events, this time through the pen. He writes: “Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (97). This is a fictional ending in which the middle-class literate reader remains invested. If law and medicine fail, then the pen must surely prevail in its authority. However, the agent of the chronological ending, who presides over the death of the master, is Poole. It is Poole’s unsolicited and oral narrative that impels the fi nal assault upon the master in his besieged state and his ensuing death. Speech and not writing accomplishes this end. Jekyll’s last sentence, with no return of either narrator or reader, is also, therefore, a textual pointer. It is an acknowledgement of attempts to fi x as text what in fact remains open and inconclusive in the absence of the law: the presence of the servants around the fi re who are both an alternative interpretive community and potential narrators, and the unclaimed, ultimately unidentifiable and unknowable bourgeois body, whose “case” could neither be treated nor pleaded. In its repressive character, Stevenson’s ending anticipates what John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman terms “the tyranny of the last chapter” (Fowles, 390).15 Positioned as it is, Jekyll’s letter as conclusion seeks not only to obscure servant narration, but also to reaffi rm the frighteningly shaken myth of bourgeois agency and self-sufficiency. It is the only conclusion tolerable after the nightmare of servant encroachment upon the ever-shrinking citadel of bourgeois subjectivity. From a bourgeois reading position, the reader would rather believe wholly in the divided bourgeois psyche as the cause of its own disintegration than acknowledge the role of other factors such as méconnaissance, subaltern narration, and mass literacy as causes for the demise of the bourgeois subject. For the truth of the matter is that the conspiracies for its survival as Hyde fail, not because the bourgeois subject discovers it cannot bear its own depravity, but because servants read the signs of such death, and, most disturbing of all, produce narratives which are contradictory: both innocent and murderous, loyal and subversive, and hence incapable of being categorized, contained, or policed. As auditor and reader of such a dangerously indeterminate servant narrative, Utterson is led, unwittingly, to serve as the instrument for the destruction of his own class. Besides, the class accents of Poole, who speaks of a drug being wanted “bitter-bad” (65), or of being “book learned ” (68), whose metaphors are homely even as he swears upon his “bible-word” (68), can never aspire to the full prestige of the logos.16 Poole’s self-described libidinal body is later replaced by the more prestigious, “literate,” bourgeois body, asserted most forcefully in all its mystifications at the very moment of its death. In the letter form, which remained an ostensible sign of literacy and therefore affected the most ostensible displays of literacy and

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culture, Jekyll draws upon the discourses of Platonism and Christian theology to valorize the already lost body of the bourgeois subject. Jekyll refers to the “immaterial tabernacle” (83), his “womb of consciousness” (82), “the fleshy vestment” (82), “the curtains of a pavilion” (82), and “the impenetrable mantle” (86), even as he is about to embark upon a tale of bodily depravity. A body thus inscribed and mystifi ed partakes of the prestige of those discourses, which the laboring body in its orality cannot access. It is a body for whose loss we cannot but mourn, and one more strategy of containment by which the bourgeois subject, dwarfed and shriveled under the servant’s gaze, may be restored. But the letter form is even more contradictory in its function. If the two letters of Lanyon and Jekyll reestablish bourgeois hegemony and repress servant narration, they also acknowledge the uncertainty of such an enterprise. For they are dead letters in several senses. They both quite significantly bear no salutations, although Utterson is interpellated in the course of both documents. Utterson himself, more signifi cantly, is an uncertain presence, for the scene of reading is never established. If most critical readings of this novella assume Utterson’s act of reading, it is because our identification with the bourgeois reading position is by now so complete that we assume he reads the letters because we do. But the letters may as easily be read as appendices, free-floating documents or relics with no overarching consciousness to survive them. For the disappearance of Utterson, as the representative of the law, seems a logical corollary to the disappearance of Jekyll. The disappearance of the bourgeois subject includes within its sweep the disappearance of the bourgeois reader. Is the alienation of the bourgeois subject from himself complete, his writ now completely demolished since his intended companionable reader’s presence is no longer a comfortable certainty? More disquieting, what if these letters are being read transgressively by somebody else, as indeed they are? What if these letters have fallen into the wrong hands, perhaps the crossover audience of the shilling shocker, or are now museum pieces, an archive of a bourgeois past? The anxiety of the bourgeois subject being read survives in the conscious choice of the letter form, a genre that emphasizes an intended reader. The menace of bourgeois shame therefore lingers in the imbrications between indeterminate class identities of a reading public, indeterminate generic identities of a text, and the memory of unpoliced servants around the fi re. The strange case’s political unconscious has begun to surface at the end. But the fi nal act of repression inheres in the indeterminate generic character of Jekyll’s document, entitled as it is as “Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.” Such a title implies plenitude and hence encourages the reader to view all previous narratives as redundant. Referred to by Jekyll as his confession in his prefatory note to Utterson, it is the opening sentences above all, that seem to rewrite the epistolary as literary confession and to aver romantic sincerity.

122 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honorable and distinguished future. And indeed, the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. (81) Beloved of the bourgeois since Rousseau, the confession becomes a literary genre that serves the textual politics of bourgeois writing well, right through the nineteenth century. Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading has noted the performativity of the confessional statement over its factual value in discussing the episode of Rousseau, the ribbon, and his accusation of theft against a servant maid. In what may be extended to read as a paradigm for class relations, the formula of qui s’accuse, s’excuse applies to all confessional writing and most especially to the pose of plenitude that Jekyll’s confession strikes.17 Other sides to the story or “other” narratives are rendered irrelevant. If Jekyll, like Rousseau presenting himself book in hand on the Day of Judgment, has literacy and writing with which “to confess,” then such confessions transpire in ways that enable the bourgeois to valorize an interiority which it has come to deem as its defi ning characteristic. As the content of servant narrative, the sins of the bourgeois are inscribed as gossip, a form of low culture, and may never match the elevated character of the literary confession or autobiography to which so many upper-class Victorian men of letters had recourse. In the fi nal analysis, servant narration remains an integral yet repressed dimension of the text, instrumental in demolishing the bourgeois subject and with it the cogito. First divided, and finally absent, bourgeois consciousness collapses as much with the death of the reader as with the death of the author, and by the end of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde it is no longer possible for the bourgeois reader to say “I think, therefore I am.” An indeterminate reading public’s presence, and an awareness of the circulation of unpoliced subaltern narratives within the masterless bourgeois home are all we are left with at the end. Poole, the butler, does not learn of the master’s confession. But for that very reason a potential for the multiplication of servant narratives, and the fruition of a workingclass imagination are both implied and guaranteed by the text, as domestics speculate upon the missing bourgeois body in the scene of the servants around the hearth. If Jekyll indulges in the fiction of an ending which asserts his bourgeois, proprietorial control over a text as its author, then the repressed specter of other classes, of other unruly bodies and voices surfaces in his Malthusian metaphor of the future self consisting of “multifarious, incongruous,

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and independent denizens” (82). The resident servant is of course one such independent denizen most evident to the bourgeois master. The working classes and their narratives will perversely continue to reside within both bourgeois texts and town houses, making for a clamor of narratives, and the rule of Mrs. Beeton is at an end.

6

The Ventriloquized Servant I was a Long time makin my Mind up to right to You of Coarse; says jemes will think me too forrad but this bein Leep yere I thout ide Make a Plunge speshialy as her grashius madjesty as Set the Exampel of Popin the queshton. . . . nex Sunday is my Sunday out And I shall be att the corner of witelion Street pentonvil at a quawter pas seven. —Percival Leigh, The Comic English Grammar, 1848 edition

When Percival Leigh offered an example of what he deemed “comic orthography” in his humorous grammar text of the 1840s, he chose to configure the semiliterate, immodest letter writer as female maidservant. Leigh’s letter, offered in his preface bearing the title “Address to Young Students and Young Gentlemen,” is an intriguing example of how servant literacy could be represented in Victorian culture. Despite the sly, ironic allusion to Queen Victoria and her “unmaidenly” proposal to Prince Albert (a topic of much mirth in the periodical press at the time), Leigh’s sample of “bad writing” implicitly suggests a profounder impropriety of form. The shameless inscription of a servant girl’s desire, signified in her disregard for the niceties of spelling and grammar, is an indelicate violation of epistolary form, a crude exercise in grammatical and cultural illiteracy. Leigh’s implied reader, by contrast, is young, male, upper-class, and well-educated. Such a reader is supremely capable of recognizing grammatical deviancy and participating in the condescension that is the privilege of his class and gender. “Bad English,” for Leigh’s reader, is associated with a serving class, specifically engendered here as female, and marked by a pronounced waywardness in sexuality, despite her avowed aspirations to married respectability. It is not as though Leigh subscribes blindly to classism and sexism. In his introduction, in order to develop the ironies that accrue around the idea of “the King’s English,” a concept gaining increasing currency with grammarians of his time, Leigh makes a reference to the founder of the House of Hanover, George the First, who spoke little or no English. Leigh observes: “A monarch, who, three or four generations back occupied the English Throne, is reported to have said, ‘If beebles will be boets, they must starve.’ This was rather a curious specimen of ‘King’s English.’ It is however, a maxim of our law, that the King can do no wrong” (13).1 If, as Leigh alleges, snobbery, rather than grammatical correctness, determines standards of literacy, then mapping bad grammar as a signifier of illiteracy onto the working classes in general, and servants in particular, must be an arbitrary act of textual politics, in support of the age’s hegemonic cultural standards. Certainly fetishizing “the servant’s hand” was something of an obsession for the Victorians. Why did the act of writing by a servant possess such

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a prurient fascination for the times? This chapter will explore instances of the servant as literate poseur, a narrative stance undertaken for express consumption by an inscribed reader, who is a class affi liate of the Victorian master or mistress. The manner in which servants’ sexualities came to be imbricated with their indecent propensities for literacy is what my reading of Hannah Cullwick’s diaries alongside two best-selling pamphlets of the time—“Seduction by Chloroform” by a Harriet WMN, published in 1850, and “Brown on the Throne,” published in 1871—will demonstrate. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick are viewed as a unique document on class and gender relations between master and servant during Victorian times. What has been overlooked is the way the diaries reflect a narcissistic engagement with literacy as a specific dimension of the Victorian pornographic text. 2 Hannah, the self-consciously literate servant, produces a text that returns with insistent, if subtle, determination to moments of reading and writing that function as tantalizingly indeterminate indexes of her own respectability—a taunt that renders her writing as the indecipherable sign of her status as servant, wife, and whore. Cullwick’s diaries, produced explicitly as epistolary documents, are a perversion of form and formality. As a form of private writing associated with modesty, inwardness, and upper-class femininity, the diary, when performed as a gynocentric narrative, was an exercise in literacy that affi rmed those growing, if secret spaces of individuality in the gentlewoman. In a household that laid claim to the thoughts, actions, and sexuality of its daughters, wives, and mothers, the writing desk was a space of retreat that permitted the female imagination an unfettered yet paradoxically genteel means of self-expression. The billet-doux, by contrast, was a daring, potentially indecent act of textualizing the self, given its intended male reader. Cullwick’s writings are situated on the interstices of both genres, a private record of labor mailed to “Massa,” the inscribed reader, lover, employer, husband, and voyeur to Hannah, the maidservant. Cullwick’s bodily self, blackened into racialized other, especially her fetishized hands, begrimed by dirt or chapped red with overuse, has been a matter of critical focus ever since the diaries were first discovered.3 However, what is equally important is that we recognize that Cullwick powerfully insinuates, over the course of her twenty or more years of diary production, that it was precisely those hands that held the pen. Without self-consciously calling attention to her acts of reading and writing, a disembodied narrative consciousness reciting a litany of household chores, or a naïve chronicle by an “unschooled” servant, could very well have lost its appeal in Munby’s eyes.4 Cullwick encodes herself as “author” by using a teasing interplay of signifiers regarding her status as literate subject. Throughout her diaries, she disperses images of herself as reader and writer—sometimes the decent, disciplined, literate maidservant, at other moments the ignorant, unlettered drudge. Such two-facedness on her part compels her diary readers (Munby included) to recognize their own guilty transactions with an indecent text masquerading

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behind a respectable cover.5 The diaries are more than just a fetishized account of domestic labor: a large part of their pornographic appeal for a Victorian reader lies in the way they self-reflexively focus upon the underlying literacy dramas that rescript Cullwick, the pedestrian diary keeper as the producer of obscene writing.6 The act of writing by a servant-subordinate was quite literally pornographic—an exercise that transformed the pen into a phallus, taming the master-reader into compliant submission. The eroticism that animates Hannah Cullwick’s often repetitious prose arises from the way the chore of writing, in her hands, can assume an edge of audacious metatextuality. A paradigmatic example in “A Servant’s Life 1866–72,” that sports with the perversely literate status of servant-author in relation to master-reader, would be a good place to begin. In this episode, Cullwick purchases a Valentine card for Munby. In her description of the incident, the sentimental and the salacious overwrite each other. Valentine’s Day was while I was there & I slipp’d out in my dirt to get one for Massa. . . . I found one—a dog with a chain around his neck & thought it fit for me so I asked how much it was. The woman very kindly said, ‘It’s a shilling, but I see you work hard for your living, poor thing, so you may have it for 6D.’ I said, ‘Well I do ma’am, but I don’t want it cheaper nor you can afford to sell it, & I dare say you wonder why I want one at all.” She said, “Oh no, everybody sends valentines nowadays.” So I thank’d her & came back & made a verse or two on the blank sheet & sent it to M.” (57)7 Cullwick represents her visit as a daring incursion into literate spaces by the soiled drudge, who bears the imprint of her labors upon her person. The acts of reading and writing she wishes to perform are conventional, and socially sanctioned: “Everybody sends valentines these days,” affi rms the shop woman. However, Cullwick also constructs herself as perverted reader, who glosses the innocent text with innuendo. In doing so, she suggestively gestures towards shocking, if secret significations, the card’s text a palimpsest for her own text, rendered visible through private reading. In doing so, she encourages the formation of covert interpretive communities. The dog with the chain around its neck is no wholesome nursery illustration but the private image of a secret self that Hannah boldly confesses to: “[I] thought it fit for me.” Bestiality, sadomasochism, and servitude are what she graphically alludes to, even as she coyly instigates the imaginative propensities of the naïve reader: “I dare say you wonder why I want one at all.” The shopkeeper as naïve reader represents the public gaze that Cullwick invariably invokes in order to recreate a vertiginous sense of “seeing double,” a prerequisite for according to Munby/Massa his singular status as ideal reader. For Cullwick, the obscenity of writing was contingent upon furtive production and furtive reception. Consequently, hermeneutics too becomes an esoteric, intimate exercise.

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At other times, acts of literacy are conflated with debasing bondage practices that Cullwick submitted to in her role as abused slave. Hence in the same document Hannah regrets her inability to practice writing as a leisured activity, by staging herself as ignorant bondswoman: a condition that the many details of her reading to—and with—Munby, recorded elsewhere in the diaries, contradicts. She complains of Munby “never teaching me nothing, nor for years have I read any books & my only practice in writing has been my diary, & my letters to M. & to my sisters” (62). For this reason, Cullwick invokes the scene of Munby-reading at precisely those moments in the text when she subjects herself to disgraceful labor, reminding him of how writing, for her, becomes the sign of abjection. Hence, her rationale for cleaning a fire grate for her employers is to demonstrate how Munby prefers her to perform the task, “yet I was afear’d they may think it a dirty way” (66). Cullwick’s exhibitionism is both literal and literary. On display is the literate subject’s masochistic submission to hermeneutical activity, made possible by Cullwick’s conflation of her genteel voyeurs with her intended reader and the power she bestows collectively upon them to reconstruct her as pornographic object. Indeed, Cullwick makes sure to insert her reader into the text : “you may guess how I looked as I crawled on my knees to & from the bedside & holding my hand up for water” (66) [emphasis added]. However, by calling attention to the textuality of this moment, a paradox emerges. Hannah’s position as submissive to the dominant’s gaze depends upon Munby’s willingness as reader to obey her narratival authority, and comply with reading positions that her authorial cues dictate. In addition, the filthy body that she proffers for consumption is signified textually, not just through begrimed hands and besmirched clothing, but through Cullwick’s orthographic representations of her own class accents. Voice, dialect, and even sociolect could be viewed by Victorian grammarians as extensions of the body that betrayed or affirmed the instinctive disposition of the owner towards crudity or refinement. Obsessions with deviancies from the standard had begun early in the century. W. H. Savage, writing in 1833, protested vehemently in The Vulgarisms and Improprieties of the English Language against “indifference upon the subject of pronunciation,” declaring: “Is the tainted breath preferable to the odour of the rose? Is filth to be regarded before cleanliness? We hesitate not to aver that a man whose colloquy is vitiated by barbarisms, is a nuisance which affects the nostrils.”8 It is interesting that Savage locates grammatical error, dialect, and mispronunciation in the unwashed, untended laboring body. Cullwick’s offending class accents signify her offending body, and without the former, the latter would lose much of its quite literally pornographic appeal as inscribed deviancy. More than an obscene body, Cullwick alludes to herself as obscene writer, who shamelessly acknowledges her intent of gratifying the somatic reader’s debased appetite for the “ill/literate”’s text. Hence she avers of her debasing labors in the Knight household: “I was satisfied that I was doing it for him & I could give him a nice account of it in my writing” (66).9 In

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Cullwick’s case, the materiality of writing supplants the materiality of the body. The former’s propensity for textural values such as coarseness or delicacy, elegance or crudity, explicitness or hiddenness, surpasses any physical manifestation of such properties in actual flesh, clothed or bared. Exhibitionistic passages such as this one compel us to reconsider the position that Cullwick hated her diary writing, and regarded it as unwelcome labor. Rather it might be argued that the ordeals of the neo-literate may have been numbered among the masochistic pleasures that Hannah enjoyed staging for Munby. Cullwick’s inconsistencies suggest that these varying poses as forced or free writer were necessary for satisfying Munby’s desires as reader. Repetitive writing exercises as a form of chastisement, a common punitive feature of Victorian education, might have been another model that Hannah, the diarist, had in mind.10 And indeed, some sections of Hannah Cullwick’s diaries display an odd repetitiousness of syntax and structure in the chronicles of her daily routine. The 1860 fragments suggest an almost rhythmic pattern to her labors: “Lighted the fires & cleaned the hearth . . . / laid the hearth & got the breakfast. / Made the beds and emptied the slops” (105). Cullwick’s monotonous prose here is also the servant’s lay, a droll ditty, hinting at her masochistic pleasure in domestic and literary drudgery. But Cullwick also invites her reader to contemplate her as respectable literate. By the time she writes the 1872 diary treating of Gloucester Crescent, Eaton Terrace, and “The Temple,” her descriptions of herself as drudge, slave, or racialized other become increasingly contingent for their effect on moments where she exercises social and cultural dominance through literacy, in poses as contrived as her displays of literary servitude. A visit to her cousin William Cullwick has her meet William’s children at tea, waited upon by a servant. Hannah informs Munby that their boy was preparing homework in Latin, geography, history, and arithmetic, and then records that she “said the Greek alphabet to him . . . & the German alphabet as Clara learn’t me, so I dare say he thought I was clever and learned too. . . . I read some out of the history book & heard him read” (232). Hannah at this point is both a spurious and a potential lady, educable to the refinements of Arnoldian culture, yet unable to suppress the betraying accents of working-class speech. Cullwick’s fraudulence is manifested metatextually as if to pleasure her reader in the way literacy permits for deception, dissembling, and dissonance in sexual relations. By staging herself as respectable literate and disreputable “ill/literate,” Cullwick may titillate the reader with her dishonest text. Consider for instance her entry dated Tuesday, 27 August 1872, describing herself among the colliers: I read an amusing tale out to ‘em & they liked it. . . . They seemed to think I was a scholar ‘cause I could read out, but I let them know I’d had very little schooling—none after I was eight years old & bin a servant ever since. ‘But then’ they said, ‘yourn bin a London a jel o’ your time.’ I said, ‘Ah, but that inna the best place to improve oneself.’ So I said no, what set

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me in learning to read & that well was going to live along o’ some little gentlefolks [when] I was nursemaid for a year or more. (236) Cullwick’s focalizing of herself as “scholar,” through the eyes of coal-blackened social inferiors, her self-deprecating claims of scanty formal education, and of imbibing literacy from upper-class children that she minded, take on a ludic dimension. Performing literacy, Cullwick sets in motion a tantalizing play of contradictions, clearly enjoying the paradoxes she embodies. As an apologist for domesticated literacy, Cullwick evangelizes other working-class subjects, through narratives that must surely have struck Munby as improvised. Service cut short her formal education at the age of eight, but it also recast her in an infantilized relationship with juvenile gentle-folks, thereby ironically affirming paternalism in class relations. With the nursery miraculously transmogrified into the lost schoolroom of Hannah’s girlhood, the acquisition of literacy skills becomes a benign and even charming prospect. Her innocent education remains uncontaminated by doctrines such as Chartism or Republicanism. As the almost coy representative of gentility, the serving woman effectively enthralls the laboring classes with her cultural imitation of the instructing mistress, reading aloud to the lower classes engendered here as masculine, but taming their potentially brutish virility through the grace of literacy. To read Hannah Cullwick as servant woman who played at being a lady is to grapple with how far her own “ignorance” was, paradoxically, a part of a literary construction that she willingly undertook in her diaries. Undoubtedly Cullwick was willing to permit Munby/Massa to exploit her literacy in order to fulfill a common male fantasy in Victorian society, the opportunity to educate and enslave woman simultaneously. However, as servant, she could also appease Munby in an inherently ambiguous representation of herself as good literate, whose reading and writing are inscribed as labor. Her problematic status as servant literate led Cullwick at times to contemplate how social impropriety finds its reflection in generic impropriety. In an early incident, a fellow maidservant talks in the pantry about her “writing so much” (83). Cullwick remarks, “As I couldn’t satisfy them who I wrote to, nor say I was writing a diary, of course the worst was made of it” (83). Aspiring to an illicit class identity was as blameworthy as penning a love note to a “follower.” The diary entry was an imaginative exercise that involved getting above one’s station, and attested to the inner life of feeling and private desire that servants were forbidden, and that writing made dangerously manifest. Letter writing was equally reprehensible, given its associations with the personal and the relational, and Cullwick seems to have viewed the products of her pen as belonging to both forms. The adventures that dogged her narratives demonstrate that for Cullwick, paradoxically, the practice of literacy was a struggle that compromised her reputation, and her respectability. Hence, shortly after the gossip generated in the kitchen over her writing, Cullwick refers to her writing as “my letters” that “I . . . gave to the butcher’s boy to post when I couldn’t get out” (83).

130 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy The indeterminacy of genre that haunted Cullwick’s writing clearly highlights issues of property rights that accrued around servants’ literacy practices. Who owned the text produced by Cullwick? If it were a diary proper, the text would have rightfully been the property of its author. As letters, however, the diaries are transmuted into a document endowed with a transactional dynamic that results in Cullwick’s discussion with her employer about whether or not they prove her to be “honest.” The bafflement that attends the discourse of the “honest servant,” deployed with ingenuity by Cullwick in her own defense, demonstrates that Cullwick could deploy rhetorical constructions of the good and faithful servant to provide for a provocative ambiguity to her textualized self. The exchange that followed is evidence of Cullwick’s cultural literacy in popular stereotypes of gender and class, and demonstrates that she enjoyed embodying warring forces of signification, offering herself up for misreading to those who would seek to interpret her plainly. Hence the dual faces of Cullwick that emerge as she relates this drama of misrecognition that “lies” at the heart of her literacy activity. To her employer’s accusation, “You are keeping company with a gentleman,” Cullwick retorts that “he’s a gentleman in every sense of the word, even as you are,” her vehemence convincing her master that “that he believes her to be ‘honest’” (83). Yet the stamp of honesty that the master in good faith accords Cullwick’s literacy practices returns us to the shop woman as surrogate of the naïve reader, who misread pornography as a Valentine. To the fellow servant, Harriet, who remarks that she is leading a wicked life, Cullwick responds: “I had a knife in my hand & said, ‘Harriet, you’ve said enough to me now to make me put this knife into you’” (84). In depicting this class war over literacy and reputation, Cullwick emerges as confident with its semantics, standing her ground with her social superiors. On the other hand the most censorious judges of Cullwick’s writing are from her own cohorts, and Cullwick, for Munby’s edification, emerges here as violent, brawling, and phallic, the very antithesis of the genteel letter-writer she defends. Cullwick offers to Munby here the fundamental undecidability of her own texts: are they pornographic offerings or chaste communications of routine matters? In this bizarre, two-faced representation of herself, Cullwick rewrites her own defenses of literacy. She does more than merely suggest that her viciousness belies her earlier pose of respectability. She dramatizes how literacy unleashes those very impulses that it claims to tame. Like the chained dog in the Valentine card, literacy’s potential for aggression, savagery, and psychic violence lurk constantly beneath the respectable surface of the texts it produces. It is such threatening subtexts that the unwary upper classes could myopically overlook. If the affects of her writing could sometimes be presented by Cullwick as brazenly exhibitionistic, her writing could also at times produce inhibition in the maidservant—a paradox that reinforces the dilemma of class identity for the servant literate. She alludes to this at a later date. Referring to a letter from Munby on the dilemma of disclosing to his parents their wish

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to be married, she responds: “So one may guess how I feel about it as well, more than I can say, . . . & I wrote as much as I could about it” (233). For Cullwick, the diary is not a private space, nor is writing cathartic or confessional. Constrained into exhibiting herself through her records of daily labor, Cullwick represents herself as struggling with restraint. The woman who consented to pose as slave, manservant, or topless angel, when no longer performing servitude, was often unable to put feelings into words. For Cullwick, literacy became the ultimate test of modesty, the inscription of selfhood a state of nakedness that she could not submit to without resistance, so that her writing becomes the formal inverse of the diary form. In an entry dated Wednesday, 14 October, from “The General Servant at Kilburn,” Cullwick fuses together these contradictory elements that comprised her function as self-effacing servant-author and ventriloquized voice. Cullwick describes the recitation of verses that transpire between her and Munby. They was rhymes in the country talk & some o’ the words I knowed to speak better than massa even. While I made the cigars I sat ‘tween his knees & heard massa read some verses he’d made up for me. They was very nice & all just as I should o’ said if I could o’ made made ‘em, for they was wrote as if I was saying it, & I’d to kiss Massa at all the best parts—about going up the chimney & that.” (138) In this hall of mirrors effect, Cullwick offers a parabolic enactment for her writing relationship with her reader, A. J. Munby. Ventriloquizing her voice, Munby demands literary appreciation from her as a form of sexual compliance. His rhymes in dialect flow more smoothly off her tongue, as distinctions between consumer and producer, author and reader grow blurred or interchangeable. She assents to her poetic persona, the verses being “very nice & all just as I should o’ said so if I could o’ made ‘em” (138). In doing so, a pseudo-authorship is conferred on Cullwick that she must admit to shamelessly enjoying, even though, paradoxically, the pleasures of the text are Munby’s and not hers. For the verses have no value as a form of either sexual or textual dominance unless Cullwick is willing to inscribe the exchange of functions between herself and Munby as author and reader, by narrating her performance of illiteracy through her ungrammatical, if double-voiced prose. Munby has made up the verses “for me,” says Hannah, whom he dandles on his knee, part child, part bawd, as she engages in the preparation of his phallic cigars. Literacy becomes the occasion for the masquerade of the illiterate’s infantile delight in the prowess of an upper-class male’s mastery over the servant’s voice. In this act of ventriloquism, the emasculating powers that the servant’s pen might wield are circumvented. Cullwick’s literary charade permits for her reader’s safe encounter with her equivocating sentences that simultaneously deny and affirm the dreaded potency of the literate handmaid. The desire to employ servant literacy for purposes of sexual gratification was a public fetish, as much as it was a private one. A pamphlet

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entitled “Seduction by Chloroform” in 1850–51, narrated by the fictitious persona of a late victim, “Harriet WMN,” went into twelve editions, and announced its topic on the cover page as addressing “the Tricks played to stupify the Senses and overcome virtuous FEMALE SERVANTS, . . . And fi nally the Art practised by Unfortunate Women In stupifying the Male Sex, by the use of Chloroform to rob and plunder them.”11 The narrator, Harriet WMN, claims to have been seduced by chloroform while working as a serving maid, and consigned to a brothel, where she in turn, under the instruction of the madam, used the anesthetic to drug and rob her gentlemen clients. She ultimately escapes to work as a shirt seamstress. By conflating the literate servant with the prostitute, the pamphlet’s shameful confession of fallenness becomes a brazen commercial text that sells itself cheaply to all who might wish to avail of the pleasures of the text: This valuable little Work has run through Eleven Editions in on [sic] year. It has been bought up with unusual rapidity by the Rich classes in London at 2s.6d. per copy; but the Publisher believing in the inestimable value of the Work to the British Public, has ventured to issue it at the price below, that every Living Soul, male and Female, Rich or Poor, may possess a copy. Rather like the street trollop under the gaslight, who might pass for a decent maidservant, the editorial note on the cover page asserts the pose of generic respectability, in order to permit for pornography to circulate as cautionary narrative. The Victorian debate on chloroform and the female body had largely revolved around its pernicious affects on the maternal instinct when used on women in labor, a debate stilled largely by Queen Victoria’s recommendation after she gave birth under its effects herself, in 1853. That chloroform, however, should become a signifier of a new, ubiquitous, scientific literacy that could circulate outside of the academy, is this pamphlet’s boastful taunt, given its highly symmetrical Faustian plot that delineates rival classes’ covetous claims over what is portentously termed “the Devil’s Secret.”12 Hence chloroform’s covertly illicit operations must redefine the “criminal classes” for the Victorian reader, as comprising a motley mix of medical students, evangelist-panderers, deflowered maidservants, whores, and “gentlemen” clients. As such, it jeopardizes midVictorian social faith in “respectability.” By representing the servant-whore as the author of an instructional pamphlet that imparts science education of a kind, servant literacy here becomes the demonstrable proof of education’s capacity to disturb class and gender relations. Servant literacy therefore flaunts a nemesis of role reversals between tutelary writer and naïve reader. The obscene spectacle of the writing maidservant resides at the heart of this scandalous text. A look at the pamphlet’s title page reveals the largest and boldest type used for the word “Seduction,” followed in size thereafter, by the phrase “FEMALE SERVANTS,” splashed across the center of the page, in capitals.

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Figure 6.1

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Pamphlet 1850.

The reduction of the broad narrative to a whisper by the use of smaller type, ensures that what the bold typeface screams aloud to the browsing Victorian reader are those disjointed, irrational, yet powerfully subliminal connections between celebrated doctors, senseless persons, devil’s secrets, seduction, female servants, and unfortunate women, thus offering a counter-narrative of prurient rather than instructional value, centered

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quite literally around the fallen female servant. For, the authorial identity of Harriet WMN as late victim renders her emblematic of her class and sex, rather than an individualized Victorian Moll Flanders. Unlike the latter’s reformation into Puritanism, the rehabilitation of Harriet WMN remains beyond determination at the end of her tract. “I am writing as if I enjoyed my unfortunate history,” she notes in her penultimate paragraph, “but when freed from such evil ways, the mind is more open to reveal these wretched and wicked abominations” (7). Even as her textualized self remains subject to the lewd imaginings of a reader who is at liberty to misread her cautionary narrative as pornography, her own writing becomes the self-infl icted imprimatur of her fallenness, attesting to a residual exhibitionism, so that Harriet remains tainted, not just by her former professions as serving maid or prostitute, but more significantly because of her unseemly aspirations to authorship. Such servant authorship, in Victorian literature, frequently has its origins in the will to undermine prevailing orthodoxies regarding domesticity, for servant narration exposes the soft underbelly of sentimental discourses such as the doctrine of separate spheres or the cult of true womanhood, so beloved of the Victorian literati, and their middle-class readership. Harriet WMN’s pamphlet traces her journey through a succession of houses, starting with the disorderly home of her first place of service with an idle mistress and three children, progressing to the better-paid establishment of the boarding house, where domesticity has lent itself to commercial purposes, and which proves to be the scene of her ruin, and culminating finally in the brothel, which resonates dangerously to familial culture, with references to chaperonage, vigilance, instruction, and fear over provoking “the fury of our mother” (7). As domesticity proves capable of mutating in environs where private sphere and public sphere melt and dissolve into each other, its sanctimonious pretensions to a state of purity uncontaminated by the exploitations of a profit-driven, industrial-capitalist economy are progressively dismissed. All three disorderly domiciles significantly are haunted by signs of a perverse literacy that the literate servant cites as evidence of moral decay. The fi rst home, with its “chairs without bottoms and broken legged tables” (2), has a cross mistress, who “used to “change her dress all day long” and possessed “a peculiar liking for reading and gossiping” (2). Such a mistress suffers from “paltry pride,” and flaunts the servant who trails behind her with her three children on her walks, “no doubt, to be taken for somebody.” (2) The lodgers at her second place of service are medical students, “whose constant jargon of physic and anatomy,” she confesses, “ used often to put me to the blush, which they, when they perceived, they carried on to such an extent, that I was obliged to leave the room altogether” (3). Not only does this maidservant possess sufficient scientific literacy to understand medical terminology, she also notes that “they were sure to make allusions that I well understood” (3). Intriguingly, it is the literate maidservant’s astute conversancy with the specialized vocabularies of gentlemen professionals that

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renders her vulnerable to their predatory tactics.13 If the language of the academy is obscene and misogynistic, it also disproves claims that universal literacy improves class relations. Hence, despite the fact that “many an insinuating smile and liberal offer was made to be admitted into my room,” the servant laments that “there was not one of them liberal enough to offer me marriage” (3). Her seducer, cast as spokesperson for a patristic Christian tradition, is “an elderly man whose exterior was that of a gentleman . . . extremely fond of humming some hymn or psalm tune . . . and very fond of talking on religious matters” (3). He bears a mischievous resemblance to the Reverend George Watkins and others of his ilk, for, as she complains, “he would frequently take the liberty of walking down to the kitchen, much to my annoyance and hindrance, and preaching about the doctrines of the precious saints, also patting me on the back and expressing his hopes that I was a good girl, which I was obliged to put up with on account of my situation” (3). Rhetorical postures of pastoral concern, adopted in sermons, tracts, and advice literature for servants, are no more than a mask for a salacious interest in their sexuality. It is he who proves to be the owner of the brothel to which she is confi ned after the loss of her job, where the inmates all have “unlimited access to the theatre” (7), even though “we were not allowed to read; and the newspaper which came into the house was always kept out of sight” (98). Pernicious literacy’s effects are all-encompassing: censorship, moral edification, scientific advancement, and pleasure are all part of an agenda to abuse, control, and debase the innocent neo-literate. Caught up within this network of literacy practices, the maidservant must find herself the hapless pupil of her masters, before she can assume control of the pen herself. Her encounter with chloroform is ultimately a literacy-related moment for Harriet WMN. Until the moment of her ravishment, it remains unnamed, referred to as “some beautiful perfume,” “an odoriferous scent,” or “the powerful narcotic” (8). Awakening as from a “beautiful dream” on her absent mistress’s bed, she can only speculate on the outcome of her swooning. Her treatise, however, devotes more space to her discovery of the drug’s name and properties than to the recognition of her rape: It was at this time that I heard of chloroform and its mysterious effects, and began to think such was what I inhaled from that infernal bottle, the agent of such a beautiful dream, and being determined to be further satisfied, I after many futile attempts obtained some, which by cautiously inhaling, I found had the effect of rendering me insensible, so that I was more than ever alive to the tricks that I might be played, not at all doubting that I had been the victim of an heartless and villainous seducer. (4–5) For Harriet, as servant, self-education is the only reliable and authentic source of knowledge. Yet her repetitious insistence upon the drug’s

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pleasurable effects, its hallucinatory powers, and its relaxing effects upon moral inhibitions, all suggest that her admissions to “enthrallment” (4) amount to a confession of seduction, rather than rape. What the alarming description of the snorting female domestic presents is the Faustian curiosity and will to knowledge and power that literacy generates. Furthermore, the delivery of her lecture on chloroform is justified on strange grounds: But to my task. It is not long since a case of beastliness occurred in Smithfield, a thorough proof of its private use to the purposes of villainy. Narcotics have been used for centuries for various purposes of science, and have been found wonderfully beneficial to nervous people, that is for a time, as afterwards they become as nervous or more so than ever, like from the fumes of a drink; but the devil’s secret is of a more deathly character, and takes a length of time to get thoroughly rid of its stupefying fumes. It is commonly used in the extraction of teeth, that the patient may be rendered insensible to pain, and to others having more serious operations performed upon them, which is a most excellent and wonderful discovery, and were it not for the bad use made of it, one of the most useful of its kind. (6) One can only speculate what the reference to beastliness might mean, as a startling prelude to her frank discussion on chloroform’s sinister uses. In nineteenth-century schoolboy slang, the word “beastly” referred to homosexuality, and if it is indeed used in this sense, then it must follow that the subtext to the account of chaste thievery that prostitutes and pimps infl ict on visitors to houses of ill repute is in fact a warning of the possible threat of sodomy. What follows is a strangely euphemistic description of the plight of the “manhandled” gentleman client.14 On being offered a bouquet of flowers, by a “coying sibyl” (6), the drunken visitor falls into a faint. “His seducer now leaves him to the kind and tender mercies of the keepers of the house. . . . The bullies now proceed to inspect the subject, who is gone to glory as the flash term expresses it, instead of embracing his lovely Sue, and rendered a hapless victim to his plunders” (6). The abused body of the gentleman-reader’s surrogate receives more visual attention here than the incognizant body of the authoress ever did, given her confessed verbal inability to formulate her own experience of violation: “What took place afterwards, from being insensible I cannot describe” (4). But the reversal of roles between ignorant victim and knowledgeable predator is rendered deeply threatening because the house of ill repute simulates scholastic environs: “Here we were instructed in all the arts, devices, and uses of Chloroform, which was so artfully applied, that it required a quick eye to detect deception” (7). The laboratory lesson is doubly illegal. Not only are prostitutes educated in crime, they are tutored in skills forbidden to women, debarred as they were from entering the medical profession for most of the nineteenth century. The servant narrator’s conversancy with

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literature on the subject actually has her presumptuously adopting the role of reference librarian: “I must not say much about the fatality of its adoption—if not administered in a peculiar state, and in a careful manner, as may be referred to in some news paperparagraphs [sic] of last June and July, which will perfectly satisfy the most curious who wish to know anything of its effects in such places as these” (7). Literacy acquires a noxious and threatening edge, the circulation of the printed word offering a dangerous diffusion of general knowledge that gives the lower classes in general, and servants most specifically, sophisticated notions of criminality. Schooled in science and crime through reading, and disseminating such heinous knowledge through writing, the servant-narrator coerces her reader to participate in an illicit education, through the procurement of her pamphlet. The pamphlet in turn becomes the literary parody of the tract, that most popular of publications in the nineteenth century, often marketed specifically towards servant women. Furthermore, the vocabulary of the servant narrator acquires a professionalism that suggests an ominous fluency with medical and legal discourse, all of which enables the literate criminal to elude the long arm of the law: I have known a whole company [to] suddenly swoon off as it were under its influence, that is when we had more than a usual party of gentlemen who were engaged at cards, and likely well grogged, all the girls would be ready with their bottles, and if well-timed, all or nearly all would sink off at once. What a booty would a well timed game like this produce . . . when sufficiently recovered scarcely would a murmur be heard, having their bones whole and no contusions, which I understand was the case before the introduction of the devil’s secret. (7) Her prose acquires an almost rapturous ring in detailing the awesome value of science put to the service of crime, the fi nesse of her diagnosis jarred only by a single instance of slang that betrays her lowly status.15 Unmarked by injury, the hapless victim succumbs to the servant-whore’s mastery over both him and science. “Seduction by Chloroform” is a narrative that stages the hubris of the master-reader, who must encounter the inscription of his own ignorance by a social inferior who proves the superior literate, thus shattering his pretensions to a more exalted position. Hence the masochistic pleasure of his status as humiliated reader stems from the inversion of his original pornographic desires for a narrative of “seduction,” as the seduction by chloroform that he hoped to read of proves, ironically, to be none other than his own. Instead, he must suffer a shocking exchange of status that renders him the illiterate victim of the text’s advances. The blatant commercialism that dictates and drives his transactional dynamic with the text as reader, loudly advertised by the pamphlet’s cover page, proves to be a bad bargain. It

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becomes the paradigmatic equivalent of the rifling and theft of the anesthetized gentleman’s pocket contents by prostitutes. In both instances, promises of gratifying desire for a monetary consideration prove to be no more than a cruel trick that deprives the eager customer of his expected pleasure. What the text offers the master-reader is his own befuddled and plundered body, the coarse chastisement of the brothel mistress slyly echoed in the demure admonitions of the servant text that delivers its comeuppance to the complacent client-reader. The sadomasochistic dynamic of reader relations, with its inversions of power between master and servant, gentleman and whore, the educated and the ignorant, demonstrates the violent potential for control and humiliation that neo-literacy in the serving classes suggested for employers of domestics. Such potential could find its metaphoric manifestation in a skewed sexual dynamic between employer and literate servant. But in doing so it could transcend the limitations of the pornographic, transforming the servant narrator into an ominous prophet of Republicanism, as the scurrilous pamphlet “Brown on the Throne” published two decades later reveals. Published in 1871, a year after Forster’s Education Act, “Brown on the Throne” appeared at the height of Queen Victoria’s unpopularity due to her obstinate seclusion following the death of Prince Albert, the prince consort, in 1861. The controversy that dogged the monarch for the next ten years over her dependency on her ghillie, John Brown, especially her decision to bring him south to London in 1864, has been well documented. Her alleged infatuation with the man designated as “The Queen’s Highland Servant” in her memorandum dated 4 February 1867, the rumors that he was her morganatic husband, and the sobriquet of “Mrs. Brown” that it earned her, meant that her capabilities as widowed queen were increasingly called into question by the press. The year 1870 witnessed the popularity of the Crown at a low ebb. The queen had declined to open Parliament in February 1870, on grounds of ill-health, the Charles Mordaunt divorce case had implicated the Prince of Wales, and the Franco-Prussian War had resulted in the public perception of Victoria as pro-German, whereas English sympathies lay largely with France. By 1871 Republican sentiment was at its zenith, with clubs to further its propagation mushrooming all over the country. The queen’s morbid mourning was giving rise to widespread discontent among her subjects. It is in this context that “Brown on the Throne” made its appearance. In this pamphlet, Brown, the servant-author, declares “Mrs. Brown” to be a properly ruled wife, and examines the lexical significance of words such as “throne,” “king,” and “monarch,” before enlarging in parabolic fashion on how a widow of a greengrocer and her irresponsible offspring are unfit to administer their estate after the demise of her husband, which they then relegate to “receivers,” who assume the role of rulers. The pamphlet is an irreverent and, at times, scandalous indictment of Victoria. But, most significantly, for our purposes of analysis, it chooses to represent John Brown as bumptious, ominously confident neo-literate, who proudly flaunts his

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phallic superiority with the pen, pausing repeatedly to admire his prose with the refrain: “Mrs. Brown can’t write like that” (6). In an editorial preface, the introduction to John Brown, neo-literate servant, is accomplished through the presentation of his manuscript. When the Manuscript of “Brown on the Throne” was placed in my hands, with a request that I would prepare it for publication, I told Brown the only preparation necessary would be a judicious expunction of certain ambiguous passages and a slight correction of the more flagrant errors of orthography. . . . The reader, gentle or severe, will readily perceive that the corrections have been but partial; to have rendered them complete would have been to destroy Brown’s identity, and probably to have thrown into still deeper obscurity the already somewhat hidden mystery which he is pleased to term his “meaning.” (3)16 The written text, however, is bewilderingly unreadable for its author’s “true” class identity. While grammatical errors are markers of neo-literacy and inferior social status, the neophyte’s incompetence with the pen permits for prose riddled with innuendo. For myopic grammarians, clarity might be a characteristic of good writing. But imperfectly mastered literacy skills give free reign to insinuation, double entendre, ambiguity, and veiled allusion, all of which characterize, paradoxically, not the turgid style of a Highland servant, but the sophisticate’s use of “the Queen’s English.” The sparingly edited manuscript therefore alerts the reader to John Brown as an unapologetic practitioner of pernicious literacy at its most powerfully persuasive. Brown’s brazen quest for textual and sexual dominance over his mistress is the sign of disorder in both a royal household and a nation: “I do not profess to be an indulgent husband. I do not call a man an indulgent husband because he lets a woman have her own way, if her way be’nt his way” (5). The bad servant takes liberties of all kinds. In Brown’s case presumptuousness resides in his literary intent “to let you know what my opinion is upon the Throne of this ’ere blessed country ” (6). If the throne, being above comment, is denied the respectful silence traditionally its due, then “ill/ literacy” is configured here as outspokenness, evidenced in the class accents of the serving man. Servant “ill/literacy” in Brown’s case, therefore, insists insolently upon its functioning as the dialogic inversion of social speech between the commanding mistress and the servant as a man of few words. More perturbing, personal opinion in the serving classes, once printed, circulated, and consumed, may metamorphose into public opinion. Powerful institutions of literate culture such as a national press and public libraries cannot therefore ensure social and political control over an “ill/literate” populace. It gives me a pain at the back of my forehead whenever I read ’em—and I can’t help reading ’em—for I do think when writers take up their pens

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The clumsy interchange of pronouns by the servant narrator mimes the contest for agency that developed between a cultural elite and the hoi polloi as the reading lesson that mass literacy inaugurated got underway. John Brown’s juggling with pronouns allows for masters and servants to be read as either active subjects or passive objects, thus endangering conventional positions of power and powerlessness assigned by social tradition to the servant-keeping and working classes respectively. In this reader’s dystopia, the untutored masses remain ineducable, despite apologist claims that universal literacy skills lead to progressive cultural and spiritual refinement. But delinquent servant literacy possesses a more radical agenda. John Brown’s newfound literacy skills are directed towards destabilizing Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, the lexicon associated with establishing the “Queen’s English,” as the standard.17 One hundred years after its publication, Victorian grammarians continued to vigorously promote its mystique. Its sacredness as cultural icon was largely due to its power as printed text to naturalize its functions as the arbitrary symbol of a national language. As the quite literal inscription of the standard, Johnson’s dictionary was for secular literacy, what the Bible was for pious literacy. It evangelized and converted deviant speakers. In 1864 Henry Alford, in a celebrated analogy, had likened the Queen’s English to “the Queen’s Highway. . . . It is so to speak this land’s great highway of thought and speech . . . that which the nation in the secular unfolding of its will has agreed to speak and write” (185).18 Dissension over the standard was therefore the ominous sign of national turmoil. Hence John Brown’s abusive misreading of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary is an act of treason that rejects the standard as an upper-class imposition upon a serving class that will no longer speak the language of its masters. Brown consultations for meaning in regard to words such as “throne,” “king,” “governor” and “pilot” result in misreadings that severely debilitate their conventional significance. Dr. Johnson’s ambition to “fi x the language” is thereby undone by the anarchic servant, who misappropriates meaning through the reading lesson he offers his superiors. Literacy in servants may institute variations to a dominant-submissive dynamic between the upper and lower classes, configured as mistress and manservant respectively, and epitomized in the relationship between Victoria and her ghillie. Hence the reading surrogate, in this case, is constructed as an empty-headed, young lady of the upper classes. Now, what is the throne of England and caetra? I think I hear a simper from the interesting young lady with a chignon wagging at the top of

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her head, like the dome of St. Paul’s with the ague, “Oh, the throne? What a silly man to ask ‘What is the throne of England and caetra?’” But still I asks the question again and echo says “Dun-no!” Well then, if echo have a dictionary let him turn down the page next door to the word “Throne” and he will be surprised to learn that a Throne is “The seat of a King.” (6) The pornographic implications to Brown’s role as tutelary are immediately obvious. The servant, as master, schools the ignorant upper classes, whose feminization may be read as a warning sign of their growing emasculation. Brown’s prowess evokes a simper in his pupil. The latter’s pretensions to morality and decorum are on the verge of collapse, given her sexually agitated state. As her locks threaten to come wantonly undone, the moral and social poise that betoken her superiority over a “silly” servant are in deep jeopardy. The wayward tresses of the mistress’s chignon, aquiver like St. Paul’s dome with the ague, suggest that the moral health of the establishment she represents has been seriously compromised. Everything about this reading lesson presages her imminent fall, as citadel of virtue. Her coy response to Brown’s “interest” in her prophesies that Republicanism’s seductive overtures might well prove irresistible. Indeed, her plight is a consequence of her unseemly interest in the sauciness that mass literacy has generated among the serving classes. As for the silence that echoes the ghillie’s question, it ensures that Brown’s narrative sovereignty will remain uncontested, as he proceeds to introduce his readers to the semantics of power. The contempt that marks pornographic reader relations between a male author and his female audience permits for John Brown’s sexist misreading of the question posed by a clamorous press at the time: “What nonsense it is to talk about a woman as if she was a man, and say “What is the use of having a throne if the queen don’t sit upon it?” (7). The man who notoriously interpellated the queen as “wumman” proceeds to defi ne her as sex object, incapable of functioning as sovereign subject, thereby executing judgment upon the queen’s inclinations to withdraw as grieving widow, rather than discharge her role as head of state. Brown’s credentials as an instructor of pernicious literacy reside in his reading list. Numbered among Brown’s choicest preferences are the greatly popular rhythmic moralist Martin F. Tupper, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, the “heavier provisions served up with such consummate skill by Messrs. Lloyd, Reynolds, and Company” (8), and “the floating information contained in the columns of the daily press” (8). Brown exudes a confident philistinism, and the vulgar mix of popular fiction, lurid journalism, train timetables, and hackneyed verse that he unapologetically consumes as common reader makes possible his ironic boast that is nothing short of an Arnoldian nightmare: “let me ask—who is there in this present day better able to represent certain persons at the Education Board than your humble servant?” (9) In a disturbing inversion of the established order, the “humble servant” as neo-literate stakes

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his claim to social and political authority. Such displays of officiousness augur ill for society, where servants assume cultural hegemony and masters must be schooled in the vulgarities of the populace. The humiliations of the reading lesson proceed apace. As Brown proceeds to explore the semantics of monarchy, he authoritatively silences the knowledgeable reader, who must witness his blundering pursuit of synonyms as growing evidence of the institution’s nonsensical character. Now when the people of this country ask why don’t the queen sit upon the throne? I answer, “Look at your Johnson and what does your Johnson tell you?” “A THRONE IS THE SEAT OF A KING.” Now, stop, let us turn over to “King,” and what do you see?— “KING, CUNING OR CYNING TEUT.” This is study, mind you. I don’t know what “Teut” means. I think it’s the printer’s error for “TIGHT,” because a fellow’s awfully “cuning” or “cyning” when he’s tight. Well then , a “KING IS LATIN FOR MONARCH, SUPREME GOVERNOR (POPE).” That means that the Pope of Rome is the Supreme Governor of Cardinal Cumming. All right! (9–10) Brown represents an imperfectly educated populace that apparently fails to comprehend the true significance of the throne, but in fact disentangles itself from the mystifications of language that enshrine the monarch as sacred shibboleth. Instead, the servant-narrator, as brazen neo-literate, proceeds to assign currency to his own derogatory, ill-formulated, Republican definitions, effectively rewriting Johnson’s lexicon. By confusing the Crown with the papacy, an institution popularly stigmatized in Britain as feudal and autocratic, the “ill/literate” Brown defames the British monarch, viewed for centuries as the quintessential embodiment of enlightened Protestant nationalism. Brown’s maladroit handling of vocabulary here resonates to censorious admonitions by nineteenth-century grammarians regarding the lower classes’ propensity to “murder the King’s English.” As far back as 1802, Alexander Crombie, in his text entitled The Etymology and Syntax of the English Language, was declaring that “the vulgar in this, as in every country, are, from want of education, necessarily illiterate. Their native language is known to them no farther, than is requisite for the most common purposes of life. . . . Their narrow competence they abuse and pervert. Some words they misapply, others they corrupt” (235).19 Brown’s devaluation of the Queen’s English is therefore no singular quirk, but an act of class warfare. His strategy aims at exposing the standard as cultural capital, ingeniously deployed by a literary elite to impoverish common speech. Hence his interrogation of the agenda of Dr. Johnson, the standard’s champion and hero:

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But Johnson didn’t stop there. He says, (No.2,) “A MONARCH IS ONE SUPERIOR TO THE REST OF THE SAME KIND.—Shakespeare.” Then the only question is, who are “the rest of the same kind? . . . Mrs. Brown never wrote like this, and I think I can hear the old woman say “Nor don’t want to.” If I tell the truth, I shall be glad when its over, for I’m blessed if I ain’t in a fog a’ready; and if it wern’t for the honor of the family name I’d give it up. I wish I hadn’t bothered myself about Johnson. . . . That is merely a facetious way of fi nishing a sentence to say “Shakespeare.” Whenever you’ve said anything clever that you don’t understand the meaning of, then say “Shakespeare.” (12) The Queen’s English, then, must be a myth, given Victoria’s own preference for the homely (and ungrammatical) turn of phrase. Johnson, as fi xer of the language, must be a hoax, his intent being only to obfuscate meaning and overwhelm a naïve public, as he “forges” an authority he does not possess, by citing Shakespeare. Hegemonic aspirations for the standard, so beloved of grammarians, are a clever plot designed by the ruling classes to linguistically enslave a people, by rendering them “illiterate” in the mystifying practices of lexicographers. “The rest of the same kind” is a phrase audaciously interrogated by Brown, the irreverent reader, who feels no awe for an English literary heritage and its heroes. The masses will not be anonymously relegated to an inferior status as “commoners,” while monarchs are accorded privileged recognition by the Bard of Avon. Johnson’s strategy of strenuously reinforcing meaning through citing evidence of usage by poets and men of letters (rather than referring to demotic or customary linguistic practice) is therefore disdainfully rejected, unmasked as a class-biased attempt to hoodwink the plain-speaking common man. Brown’s consultation of synonyms is, of course, a comic dramatization of what has long been an objection to Dr. Johnson’s dictionary: its complicated definitions requiring further reference, so that the reading of the dictionary becomes a self-reflexive exercise in an endless pursuit of meaning. As “throne” becomes the sliding signifier of “monarch,” “monarch” of “king,” and “king’” of “governor,” the endless deferral of meaning plays out to deconstruct the arbitrariness of “Mrs. Brown” as the sign of royalty. Victoria as woman must always be deficient as sign, when read as representing kingship and the throne. Hence his commentary on the definition of “Governor.” “GOVERNOR, ONE WHO IS INVESTED WITH THE SUPREME DIRECTION IN A STATE—(SOUTH).” Mrs. Brown once said to me, “Well Brown, you are in a state,” and I says “go to bed Mrs. Brown,” and I felt I was “monarch of all I

144 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy surveyed.” So this fully explains what Mr. Johnson means by being “Invested with supreme direction in a State.” But when I’m writing in a sober mood and trying to find out the connexion between a Queen and a Throne, I can’t allow myself to dwell upon this elevated definition, which must have been written by Mr. Johnson “in a state” after he had been to the “Rainbow” or when he was “Taking a walk down Fleet Street,” which was one of his favorite [sic] amusements, according to the gentleman who kept an account of this grave and remarkable speech of the old boy. (13) Brown’s misconstruing of the phrase “in a state” suggestive as it is that royalty has conferred authority upon him, is obscenely proven by his exercise of conjugal rights over the sovereign’s body. In doing so, he acquires powers of governance over the head of state, in an act of usurpation, through wordplay. The subjugated female body of the queen disables her efficiency as sign or symbol of the monarchy, so that the gap between sign and referent—the “connexion” that Brown searches for in vain—suggests that it is a lack of sobriety on the part of the lexicographer that produces the naïve equivalencies of meaning in the pages of his dictionary. The Queen’s English is no more than a drunken concoction by a reprobate, who lacked both respectability and powers of reason. Its elevated pretensions are therefore suspect, and the sturdy common sense of the neo-literate servant will rewrite the English language, thereby reinstating its reputation as an honest tongue. By demystifying Johnson, and shattering his iconic status, Brown sabotages all efforts to restrain common speech through the homogenizing effects of the standard. Brown’s wayward grammar and semantics refuse correction, while his incomprehension of the Queen’s English becomes an index of his resistance to co-optation, through literacy, into respectable society. Brown is no gentleman, and his vile slurs cast aspersions upon both the person of the queen and the standard. The delinquent character of Brown’s lexicon, with its crazy shifts of meaning, wrought by sliding signifiers that refuse control, demonstrates that the eighteenth-century dream of “fi xing the language” remained a futile struggle against anarchic lower-class orality, over one hundred years later. Mass literacy offers such speech the opportunity to be written down, and its violative effects upon the Queen’s English are as traumatic as a servant’s rape of a mistress. Brown’s question—“What’s the use of having a Throne if the Queen don’t sit upon it?”—is answered with triumphant logic: “As I’ve proved beyond all controversy, that, as the Queen is neither a King nor a Pilot, she can’t be expected to sit down upon a seat that was never intended to be so occupied” (17). Indeed, Victoria’s inadequacies as “Pilot” are bruited about during a moment of public literacy. The occasion, where candidates for Parliament canvas for votes, is a spectacle that would have produced twinges of apprehension in an upper-class readership, beset by anxieties over electoral reforms. Brown claims to have attended a meeting of free

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and independent electors of the “Boro of Lambeth,” where Sir Charles Napier, admiral and Liberal member of Parliament, flourishes the Times newspaper in the air and declares: “Shipmates. . . . Upon the return of the right man to the Commons Houses of Parliament depends the safe conduct of the tight little vessel Old England, through the troubled waters of discontent” (15). The politics of metaphor here encode democratic culture as virile and robust (given its exclusion of female suffrage), quite in contrast to the effete character of the monarchy with its widows, sons sporting “loud and vulgar scarf pins” (22), and an establishment as skittish as the lady with the chignon askew, whom Brown enthralled earlier during his address. The imprimatur to such sexist Republicanism is granted by the press, symbolically represented by “The Times.” Hence we must read “current” press opinion as a text complicit with the larger text of Brown’s Republican diatribe that the institution of the monarchy is now obsolete. Brown concludes with a parable of the greengrocer, who dies “snatched like an early vegetable,” while “the widow of the late lamented tries to carry on the concern” (20). He declares, “Everything goes wrong under the Widow’s management” (20). Brown’s advice to the son (the future Edward the Seventh) is to “put away his Bull terriers and his betting book,” “put in a modern front to the old shop,” and “give us a respectable right down undeniable defi nition of the word ‘Throne’ according to Dr. Johnson and your humble servant” (21). If the pamphlet seems to argue for a Regency under the reprobate Prince of Wales, then hopes for the restoration of the Queen’s/ King’s English as the standard are not bright. In a postscript Brown asks the concerned “gentleman” (the Prince of Wales) to drop “Citizen Brown” (22) a line if he can’t make up his mind to “stick to business.” His metamorphosis from servant to Jacobin is ominous. Brown declares that he has a friend or two who “understands this sort of thing since infancy and they was born to govern, and before many centuries is over their heads, govern they will, you mark my words” (22). Brown’s lapse into ungrammatical English as a prophet of Republicanism raises the specter of anarchy’s triumph over culture that the Hyde Park riots of 1866 intimated to Arnold. The ominous association of pernicious literacy with civil unrest that Victorian grammarians constantly alluded to is affi rmed by Brown’s drinking companion a few lines later. “Where should I have been without that inborn respect for the genius and the mental powers of the uneducated classes, and that contempt for an effete haristocracy,” asks the man that Brown “would like to appoint as Deputy of State” (23). What emerges from these strange nineteenth-century texts of the ventriloquized servant as neo-literate? Promiscuous literacy in servants that refuses the disciplinary restraints of good form, could be an act of private indecency, offer tutelage on indelicate topics, operate as a shameful reminder of literature’s relationship with the marketplace, or function as the voice of

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political dissent. In presenting the insubordinate servant as literate, the age could stigmatize working-class writing as unlearned, exhibitionistic, and predatory, thereby justifying a measure of political repression. However, in this construction of the lewd servant literate, the pornographic text’s primary interest remains that of reader relations. By staging the respectable reader as hypocrite lecteur, the true indecency that servant literacy demonstrates is the unveiling of egalitarian tendencies towards demotic cultural practices in Victorian elites. Hence servants read Samuel Richardson as pornographic author, or trash Samuel Johnson as lush-lexicographer—acts of cultural rebellion in which the master-reader may vicariously participate. All three texts presuppose the master or mistress as ideal reader, for without such an assumption the text loses its function of offering literacy as the ominous sign of social equality. Such equality is forecast by the texts’ obscene exposure of sexual relations between the serving classes and their employers as paradigmatic for textual relations between the two classes. In fact, the reading of the servant’s text may actually become the equivalent for sexual congress with the servant writer. Undoubtedly, if bad writing, grammar, and spelling were the marks of bad character, then “ill/literacy” was radically pornographic, the visible signifier of a rampant sexuality that, in turn, betokened social and political indiscipline. The embarrassments of the pornographic text then reside in its shameless flouting of all regulations, be they grammatical or cultural. But as diary entries, science lessons, or reading lessons, servants’ texts also mimic respectable writing, revealing the obscenities behind literate culture’s charade of respectability. Hence the true obscenity of generic masquerade that literacy permits lies in the potential for simulated authorial identities and reader preferences. The text of the ventriloquized servant literate collapses distinctions between producer and consumer, author and reader, into the all-subsuming identity of the master, permitting the scandal of class relations to truly reveal the inadequacies of the master-servant binary in defi ning social position or treating it as the index of character. The lewd spectacle of authorship by a servant permitted for a voyeuristic witnessing to the humiliations that unrefi ned penmanship wrought upon masters and mistresses. In what might be seen as a sadomasochistic aesthetic, the dominant-submissive relation of master to servant is reversed through literacy encounters. The spectral text of the servant is one that masters and mistresses both author and read for perverse pleasure, as the voyeuristic fantasy of their own undoing. But the act of ventriloquism ultimately redirects attention to the true “speaker,” the ventriloquist. Servant literacy becomes the means by which the master acknowledges his own “ill/ literacy.”

7

In Their Own Voice Servants and Autobiography It is not the object of this paper to state what the London Female Mission did for this poor degraded servant, but to give her history as written by herself, and thus to hold up her case as a warning to others. —Servants’ Magazine, Vol. VII

To attempt to inscribe selfhood under the rhetorical pressures of generic selves, imagined, formulated, and circulated by social superiors who wielded enormous influence on institutions of literate culture, such as the periodical press, the publishing industry, and the literary marketplace, is to struggle with a truly formidable autobiographical enterprise. The epigraph from The Servants’ Magazine demonstrates how the seduction-betrayal plot was deployed not just for its commercial and sensational value in pseudo servant autobiography, but in fact lent itself handily as cautionary narrative to the agendas of pious reading. Caught in this pincer grip of generic constraint, applied equally in contexts of pious and pernicious literacy, the servant subject searches to free itself, recognizing how formal freedoms begin in self-conscious literariness.1 The search to accommodate a self to uncongenial generic restrictions is, in the case of servants, compounded by other physical and psychic constraints that made life writing problematic. The slum dwelling of an industrial worker or the hovel of a peasant, despite its squalor, afforded an opportunity for retreat after the dehumanizing ordeal of daily toil in factory, mine, or cornfield. Not so in the case of the servant, who was consigned to attics, lofts, or cupboards beneath the stairs, within the master’s house. With no sanctuary to which the psychically pressured domestic worker might repair, where might the supervised and policed servant turn for authentic selfhood, free of the false consciousness to which he was condemned, in order to survive as faithful retainer? As already noted, selfhood for servants was undoubtedly beleaguered, given their highly performative function of maintaining employers’ class identities. Their own class identities could be equally problematic. Servants were drawn from a variety of social backgrounds, and given to migrating across occupational categories. To discuss them is to be reminded that neat taxonomies of class that emerged from the writings of economic historians such as the Mayhew brothers and Charles Booth did not apply to servants, who could marry “up” or “down,” enter service because of family misfortune, a bad harvest, or a poor fishing season, or quit it altogether in order to establish themselves in another line of trade, as the case of the

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Figure 7.1

The Servants’ Magazine

butler-and-wife serving couple who founded Claridges in the nineteenth century.2 Working-class subjectivity, in the case of servants, then, may have been doubly impaired, not just because of a general lack of attentiveness to the inner life, but also because of the more specific debilitations to class consciousness that must have ensued from such occupational shifts.

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Given such imposing constraints upon identity that could result in a relatively unformed ego, could autobiography as a genre ever be aspired to by the writing servant? The impact of a lifetime of professional “selflessness” and social amorphousness resulting from transient identities, often improvised, abandoned, or resumed out of social and economic compulsion, could be viewed as an impediment to the practice of traditional autobiography. More specifically, how might the servant negotiate for accommodation within autobiographical form and its practices, given the genre’s biases towards the introspective and teleological? The servant autobiographer, condemned to the diurnal, with meager opportunity for reflection, faced an inevitable sense of debilitation in this regard. Yet Victorian servants could and did practice life writing. Their initiatives are an intriguing interrogation of many current theories of autobiographical selfhood that address the problematic status of the “I” as either confessing subject, self-generated fiction, or historical entity, articulated, reclaimed, mined, or discovered through the process of writing. The servants whose autobiographies we shall examine quite ingeniously sought to structure life history as an ongoing engagement with literate culture. Literacy becomes, in their case, not just the stable signifier of selfhood. Instead, its powerful, bizarre, or ironic manifestations within servants’ lives become the focal point for exploring a selfhood under duress from the class biases that literate culture and literate practices could enforce and endorse. Mary Ann Ashford, William Tester, Janet Bathgate, and Christian Watt problematize class identity in order to retrieve a self adrift upon the flux of material reality by self-consciously performing autobiographical acts as literates who reread, revision, and redefi ne their relationship with literary form and the relationships that genre establishes with social contexts of literary production and consumption. In doing so, they construct themselves as literates in search of an autobiographical teleology that will generate its own narratival logic. Childhood, youth, marriage, maturity—the “natural” divisions of life experience that prove insignificant for a serving class—are recast as phases that offer variegated and complex encounters with books, pens, schools, texts, and readers. Hence what I choose to call an aesthetic of momentous literacy becomes the structuring principle for a kind of life writing that secures social mobility for the servant subject through its subtle appropriation, modification, or ironization of generic models that proceed to dramatize the “unconventional” life. For the “humble servant,” extraordinary, audacious, or serendipitous acts of literacy become the gravitational axis around which narrative self-consciousness might revolve. The four samples of servant autobiography read as narratives of momentous literacy are contextualized within three major shifts that characterized working-class politics in Britain during the nineteenth century: the attempts of the working class to defi ne itself from 1800 to 1848, ending with the failure of Chartism; the evolution of an artisan class as a “labor aristocracy” during the improved economy between 1848 to 1880; and the rise of political activism and agitational movements from 1880 to 1900. 3 The Life of

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a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, Written by Herself, published in 1844, tells a story of servitude and poverty in a woman who “came down in life” during the early half of the century. La Teste’s Poems and Autobiography of 1865, along with Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces, published in 1872, are cases of autobiographical writing intended to present the servant subject as an aspiring practitioner of literary arts. The Christian Watt Papers, produced between the years of 1880 to 1923 within the precincts of the Institution at Cornhill for the mentally ill, where the author was an inmate, is a militant retrospective account of labor-class life during the Victorian age. Written under vastly differing circumstances, these autobiographies parallel the years of the novel’s interest in the device of servant narration, by literate domestics.4 The Life of a Licenced Victualler’s Daughter, Written by Herself looks back to the early nineteenth century, but its narrative resonates to many of the major themes of the Hungry Forties: social inequality, workers’ rights, and a militancy that defi nes the autobiographical act as a search for voice. If such circumstances seem unpropitious for personal history, then Ashford must offer us a different rationale for her autobiographical act. That rationale pertains to life writing’s potential for challenging representational politics in fiction. Hence she commences her autobiography by describing in dramatic detail the conditions that account for the instantiation of her narrative. The compulsion to relate her life history is triggered by a casual act of public reading that foregrounds the ubiquitous presence of print and textuality. “In the month of July 1842,” she writes, “as I was passing the site of the Royal Exchange, . . . my attention was caught by one of the numerous bills with which the boards, at that time surrounding it were covered; it ran thus—‘Susan Hopley, or the Life of a Maid Servant’” (iii). The author’s encounter with the 1841 best seller The Adventures of Susan Hopley provokes reflections on the general invisibility of the servant woman from literary narrative, followed by a brief summation of the kinds of plots and texts where she is most likely to figure. This book, I thought to myself, must be a novelty; for although female servants form a large class of Her Majesty’s subjects, I have seen but little of them or their affairs in print; sometimes, indeed, a few stray delinquents, from their vast numbers, fi nd their way into the police reports of the newspapers; and in penny tracts, now and then, a “Mary Smith” or a “Susan Jones” is introduced, in the last stages of consumption, or some other lingering disease, of which they die, in a heavenly frame of mind, and are duly interred. (iii–iv) In registering existing literary trends, the autobiographer identifies the “generic” servant, imprisoned by “low form,” relentlessly reproduced by sensational pamphlets and a popular press that panders to the voyeurism

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of a middle-class reading public. Doubtless, the closure afforded to such narratives through the fatal consequences of “lingering disease” alludes to sexual ruin as the inevitable lot of the domestic maid in a seduction-andbetrayal narrative. Under such circumstances, Ashford’s autobiography becomes an interrogation of current fictional practices. Ashford, therefore, vigorously prosecutes the autobiographical postures of the novel, a genre with middle-class rather than working-class allegiances. In a short time after, I procured the “Life of Susan Hopley,” and felt disappointed at fi nding it to be a work of fiction. It occurred to me that the various events of my own life—not merely “founded on facts,” as is sometimes expressed, but the real truth—might afford amusement to matter-of-fact persons. (iv) By inaugurating a symbiotic relationship between servant autobiography and literary texts consumed by a middle-class reading public, Ashford rejects romanticism’s agendas for autobiography. 5 The paradigm of Susan Hopley, pseudo-author, and obliging entertainer of the master who narrates her into being, is a powerful one, invoked at the outset by an autobiographer who clearly understands how class relations govern reading relations. Her servant autobiography is a complex response from a working-class subject who understands the cultural dynamics of the master-servant binary at play within literary texts and literate culture. Ashford perceives the necessity for sophisticated resistance to the master-servant binary’s subtle, if pernicious influence on textual relations where narrating servants and servant life history are “mastered” by the fictions that their employers seek to disseminate. In her preface, Ashford’s autobiographical act is presented as a counter to existing fictional constructs of servant women. By invoking the rhetoric of realism, Ashford’s defi nition of entertainment supersedes in value what the novel has traditionally promised, through its quibbling poetics of veracity. The aesthetic of realism that Ashford claims to espouse is one that appeals to the “matter-of-fact” reader, who disdains sensation. In constructing her ideal reader thus, Ashford adroitly maneuvers for harmonious class relations between herself as working-class author and her reading masters. She herself is a reliable narrator, by virtue of constructing herself as discriminating literate. In such mutually flattering mirror images of each other, reader and author affi rm a shared faith in autobiographical narrative’s capacity for authentic representation. In a reciprocal dynamic, reader and author forge together an alliance against imaginative literature’s proclivity for the spurious. The fictitious narratives of invented personae with their promise of putative pleasures are the offerings of bad literacy, replaced now by sober, real-life testimony. Autobiography, for Ashford, must assert its identity against generic masquerades that seek to profit from its sturdy reputation for credibility.

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In addition, Ashford’s enhanced status as realist owes greatly to her ordeals being not so much the singular sufferings of the unique individual, but representative and typifying of her entire class.6 Hence they anoint her as the worthy spokesperson for all female domestic workers. Class identity, moreover, may be of greater value for working-class autobiography than personal identity. Given the fact that servants both suffered and enjoyed greater social mobility thanks to fluctuating economic conditions that often made entry into service an ad hoc and improvised form of labor, it comes as no surprise that servant autobiography often dwells upon the strange new dramas of shifting class identities that characterized a volatile post– Industrial Revolution society. Hence The Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter begins with tracing family ancestry and the flux of familial fortunes. Servants like Mary Ann Ashford establish origins in order to chart the vicissitudes of class identities suffered by many like her, as a result of changes wrought by a growing capitalist-industrialist economy. On her father’s side, she is descended of a petit bourgeois family of barbers and wig makers. What emerges as noteworthy in Ashford’s account of her childhood years is her attention to markers of class that are clearly of considerable importance to concerns of identity. By contrast, her silence regarding family relationships suggests that a servant woman might have considered material circumstances more crucial to the formation of selfhood and self-esteem than affective ties. Hence her claims that as a child she was “very well supplied with good apparel” (11), but that her nurse’s aim was only to have her “clean and tidy when she expected my father and mother to come” (11), her boast of “the good dinner” she generally enjoyed with her governess (12), and her evaluation of the merits of her upbringing by paid mentors. The early death of her parents, the loss of property to creditors, and the impoverishing cost of funeral expenses prove to be more than a financial crisis for the young Ashford. The interior wrestlings of the soul might determine selfhood for a Bunyan, a Ruskin, or a Newman, but, for the licensed victualler’s daughter and others like her it is the struggle of the self against the imposition of unwelcome social identities that constitutes the very essence of autobiographical drama.7 Advising Ashford against becoming a milliner, a friend of the family offers the following counsel: “I’ll tell thee what, Polly, that is all very well for those who have got a home and parents to shelter them, when work is slack; . . . Now, thee art a hearty, well-grown girl, and I think you would be better off in service” (20). Conferring with relations about plans “to place me out very genteelly” (20), she is met with the same philosophy that “gentility without ability, was like a pudding without fat” (20). A cousin of her mother’s whose husband is a clerk adds to the debate by remonstrating “a great deal about injuring my future prospects, as I could not be introduced into society by her or any respectable friends if I were a servant” (21).

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Identity, or the loss of it, depends upon a capacity for self-maneuvering in an economy that no longer guarantees lower orders an “estate” to which they might belong. To be without a trade is, in fact, to be bankrupted out of selfhood. The material maintenance of the self, its precarious location on social and economic boundaries that might at any given moment blur or vanish, its own ironic relationship to class struggle—given its constant imperative to cross battle lines onto the winning side, all combine to produce an autobiography that narrates a selfhood adrift on the ebb and flow of fortune, at times salvaged, at times submerged, contingent upon its ingenuities as survivor. Ashford’s interest in the wage is also a part of her concern with the material maintenance of selfhood. Her wages are withheld, another time she is offered “five pounds a year out of which I was to fi nd my own milk and sugar . . . but I soon considered that it would never fi nd me in apparel” (24) and she draws her reader’s attention to the endless wrangling over rates that servant women like herself must endure. Ashford, therefore, perceives of domestic work as paid labor rather than devoted personal service. Not surprisingly, in such a world, master-servant relations are at their most impersonal. Her masters and mistresses remain faceless and for the most part nameless: “a head clerk and his family” (21), “the wife of the then head waiter of Garraway’s Coffee House” at Hoxton (23), “the daughter of a Scotch earl, whose estates had been forfeited” (28), a family living at “10 Lambeth Terrace” (35), “a single gentleman, high in the law” (36). The servant-keeping classes are as anonymous as their domestics, since an impersonal dynamic of performance governs class relations in a domestic context, denying both master and servants personal substance. More importantly, in order to wrest narratival authority for herself as working-class author, Ashford must demolish middle-class claims to moral authority and call into question their cultural hegemony. This is accomplished by discrediting the mystique of domesticity. Perceived through the eyes of the alienated domestic worker, the “sweet order” that Ruskin eulogized emerges as a fabrication of the bourgeois imagination. Her fi rst employers are swindlers who set up a banking house to defraud “a young man of fortune out of his money” (22). Respectable homes have cellars that flood with water in the winter, which she must pump, “almost poisoned by the smell” (23); dirty houses of decayed Scotch nobility are cleaned with cold water for lack of fi re kindling (28); pets such as “a monkey, two dogs, a cat, and many birds” need feeding in the absence of the mistress who has “very high connections, and used to spend her time very much among them” (29); the judge’s housekeeper relative is suspected of being “a kept lady” (36); and none other than “Mrs. Radcliff, the authoress,” declares Ashford too young to be suitabl,e “as her time was otherwise engaged than looking after maids” (38). The Victorian household emerges as a chaotic space, where neglect, deceit, affectation, and vice thrive. By placing her innocent self within such squalid environs, Ashford becomes the arbiter of

154 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy social and moral norms, wresting for herself an authority that most advice manuals would deny a servant. Furthermore, the world of domesticity is as cruelly exploitative towards labor as any workplace in the public sphere. She works “notwithstanding I had cut my hand very badly, in splitting firewood” (22), is bolted in a flooded cellar “for hours together, till I have been nearly exhausted with pumping, and almost poisoned by the smell” (23), her ears hemorrhage (28), she is offered spinet lessons on condition that she will eat less (30), and is terrified of her mistress’s pet monkey, “the most vicious little beast there ever was” (32). The latter part of the autobiography addresses her years of service at an institution for the children of soldiers (possibly a school), that she euphemistically and ironically refers to as Fairyland. As servant autobiographer, Ashford can effectively collapse bourgeois distinctions between private and public sphere. If the private “I” has no space to call its own, its teleological evolution is also rendered problematic in Ashford’s unstructured narrative. It is a matter of speculation as to whether Ashford naively offers us a chapterless chronicle, or if, as astute literate, she consciously refuses a form that falsifies working-class experience, given her commitment to “matter of factness.” But the absence of form as reflective of the monotony of servant existence is imbricated in issues of literacy. Hence teleology truly develops only in the second half of Ashford’s autobiography, that records her struggle for agency in a world driven by a literate culture that, to the servant woman, appears nightmarishly arbitrary and alien. Material conditions of existence are shaped by the influential presence of literate culture that the autobiographical subject must encounter and master. As an employee of Fairyland, Ashford encounters a governmental bureaucracy that anticipates a Dickensian world misgoverned by the annihilatory logic of the Office of Circumlocution. While literacy, for Ashford, may be placed at the service of a representational aesthetic, it also emerges as an intimidating new dimension to social reality. The self is now enmeshed in a variety of literacy practices enforced by an indifferent administrative order. In this new culture of the written, it becomes mandatory that the self be officially documented, attested, verified, and endorsed, by way of signatures, certificates, testimonials, records, petitions, and orders, so that the bewildered working-class subject must struggle to gain mastery of these new forms of self-representation, self-expression, and self-advocacy. For Ashford, maternity becomes the peripatetic moment that induces change in her relations with literate culture. Agreeing that she should give birth in more dignified circumstances than her cramped living quarters will permit for, her mistress’s friend, the wife of the head doctor of the Brownlow Street Lying-In Hospital, prevails upon a patroness of the hospital to provide a letter of admission to the hospital board. Because the patroness is away from London, the head doctor agrees to sign the petition on her behalf.

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Ashford’s terror of this petitioning process results in a surreal, if prophetic nightmare that produces the one significant moment of interiority that occurs in the autobiography: a dream of being harassed by a porcupine, with the face of an old gentleman. The torments of a psyche acknowledging the imperative of negotiating with a literate culture are elaborated in detail. Ashford describes for her readers the visual terror of the nightmare and the accompanying emotional trauma: I dreamed that night, that I was going through Chelsea market, and was much annoyed, and frightened by a porcupine, which lay at my feet, and its quills kept going off like squibs; at last, I thought it burst open, and the face of a very cross, ugly old man came forth. I just awoke, and a dreadful fright I was in. (64–65) The power of the uncanny proves persistent. On coming before the gentlemen of the board, Ashford records the moment of recognition that “there was (or, at least I thought so) the very cross, ugly face I saw in my dream last night” (65). The moment is both hysterical and revelatory. By the associative principles of dream logic, the “quill” proves both beastly and phallic. As writing instrument and weapon, the quill menaces and impedes the progress of the hapless maidservant. Literate power is a discomfiting, brutish phenomenon, and effects a profound social and personal disequilibrium in those who remain alienated from literate culture’s practices. The interview that follows corroborates her dream vision. The members of the board, “four or five gentlemen” (65), quibble over the mechanics of the letter, demanding that it be signed by the lady patroness instead of “Mr. M.,” the head physician. They dismiss Ashford’s pleas that Mr. M. is physician to the Duke of York, and remain unmoved, even after their crude queries regarding her advanced state of pregnancy reveal the imminent date of her delivery. Ashford’s humiliation and fear—“all presence of mind had forsaken me: I trembled and was much confused” (65)—attest to the bewilderment and powerlessness generated by literate culture, a state of affairs that she has already subconsciously recognized in her dream of the previous night. The petition is rejected, Ashford is compelled to seek the patroness’s signature, and the outcome of the delay is that she ends up giving birth in her living quarters, losing the chance for dignified medical care in the lying-in hospital. This pivotal instance suggests that the self as entity can be lost, denied, or misplaced through literacy. Following this disastrous beginning, Ashford later goes on to become a successful writer of petitions. Her autobiography triumphantly concludes with her successful struggle, through letter writing, for dues owed to her ailing and aged husband by his military employers at Fairyland. The mastery of functional literacy and an understanding of its esoteric operations are vital for retrieving a self endangered by the crushing authority of bureaucracies in a literate culture. Not only is this a theme of

156 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Ashford’s autobiography, it also proceeds to become the very teleology of her narrative. A drab and uneventful personal life cannot offer narrative opportunity for change, development, and progress. By contrast, a struggle against the sheer weight of literate culture, with its power to authenticate or discredit, inscribe or erase, and recognize or ignore the working-class subject, becomes, for Ashford the autobiographer, a noteworthy and heroic enterprise. The servant writer must not only seek mastery of the quill, she must also wrestle with the prerogative exercised by master-readers, to heed or discard her texts at will, according to their whims and fancies. Ashford’s account of her petition-writing endeavors is therefore also an account of the search for the right reader of her texts. Narrating her quest for her fi rst husband’s dues, Ashford informs us of her struggle to be read: I fi rst applied to the Chelsea College; but I was informed they had nothing to do with it. I then applied to the heads of the different offices at the Horse Guards, and the petitions and letters I sent were always referred to the Commissioners of Fairyland; and the answer I got from these used to be, that “although my husband would have got it had he been living, as it was the custom of military pensions to be paid in advance there was nothing due. . . . I then wrote to the Commander in Chief: . . . but it no doubt never reached him, so back it came, according to custom.” (86–87) Ashford’s second husband is intimidated by her writing. Ashford, however, perceives of writing as a momentous undertaking. Hence she informs us that, after weighing the matter in her mind, she had duly arrived at her decision to petition the powers-that-be: I went to the house of an old acquaintance, and asked her permission to let me write a letter there, as I could not do it at home without my husband knowing it; and I did not want to implicate him, in the event of my being blamed. I then wrote a petition to Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Adelaide stating all the circumstances of the case, and humbly begging that she would cause an inquiry to be made as to why my husband was made an exception to a general rule. (88) After posting the letter, Ashford confides: “I would have given anything to have got it back again, I was so frightened” (88). Her audacious act of literacy is rewarded. A slothful bureaucracy is prodded to action, she testifies confidently to inquiring officials, her ailing second husband receives his pensions and benefits, and they live together in relative comfort a further six years, before his passing at the ripe age of eighty-two. If her ideal reader is the royal reader that Ashford won over, through her bold use of the quill, then we, the actual readers of her autobiography, can do no better than

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aspire to a similar exalted status, by according Ashford the same degree of credibility that Her Majesty did. It is on this note of pride and gratification in her literary initiatives that Ashford’s autobiography ends. If Ashford’s reading community has been established securely by the end of her narrative, it is nonetheless accomplished through her quite ingenious narrative maneuvers, by having us read her as she truly wishes to be read. In doing so, Ashford controls reader relations, compelling empathy and trust, since the servant’s voice may claim authority when recognizing reading incompetence, even in her social superiors. Ashford drily notes that she has had “experience of applications to ‘commissioners,’ ‘heads of public offices’ and so forth” (87). The actual reader wishes to escape the uncomplimentary fate of being included in their number. For this servant woman, the autobiographical act is tied to questions of readership as much as to issues of authorship. The autobiographical narrative, when produced by a nonentity, imagines appropriate reader responses that will enable the telling. Such responses may range ambitiously across a wide spectrum of the reading public. If Ashford’s earlier inscribed reader was a sensible literate in search of “matter-of-factness, then Ashford’s narrative at the close elicits a different intended reader, offering an alternative agenda for her life writing. And I think the many struggles I have met with in my journey through life, may be likened to some lines I saw in a newspaper, of which the following is a copy: A beacon, that perhaps another, Sailing on life’s stormy main— A forlorn and shipwreck’d brother Seeing, may take heart again. (90–91)

Read as exemplum, Ashford’s narrative is a pilgrim’s progress preached to the humble and lowly, thus co-opting both masters and servants to its unspoken agenda of self-recovery through life history.8 This servant autobiographer clearly perceived it necessary to formulate an alternative poetics of life writing that would allow for the telling of her life. Ashford cannot offer her insignificant self up for literary consumption save through justifications of its instructive value to both upper- and lower-class members of the reading public. Such self-consciousness of an audience on her part attests to the pressures under which the rhetorical production of selfhood for servants took place. In actively imagining her own readership, Ashford could open up spaces of narration for herself that might otherwise have been denied. Furthermore, her ability to practice momentous literacy in a context of class confl ict shapes her narrative, for her life story is one that traces her insertion into literate culture, her ongoing power relations with it, and the significance of a published and circulating self crossing class

158 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy divides that in real life were insurmountable. In the end, shared literacy practices and texts will unite a variety of classes, as has been the case with her own autobiography, Ashford seems to say. However, by the middle years of Victoria’s reign, a new sauciness and confidence informs servant autobiography in the work of William Hay Leith Tester, page boy, valet, butler, and servant to the British consul in France. Tester chooses to draw upon literary forms and genres from earlier eras, with satiric intent. In favoring medieval hagiography and the heroic couplet, Tester can flaunt his schooling in literary history. However, by adopting a parodist’s approach to life writing, Tester’s mock-heroic stance indicts the classist biases of the autobiographical enterprise, privileging as it did an individualism that “selfless” domestic servants were frequently forbidden. Born in 1829, William Hay Leith Tester, also known as La Teste, wrote poetry, much of it in a witty, eighteenth-century vein. His first edition of poems, published in 1862, was followed by a second edition, in 1865, that carried an appended autobiography. Tester’s poetic aspirations as a servant in the 1860s are particularly significant for the manner in which he chooses to construct an autobiographical image as something of a postscript to his published verse. Tester displays the same tendency towards a reflexive poetics that Ashford did. Unlike Ashford, however, he demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the fate of interpellation that most servants endured as a consequence of literate practices such as letters of recommendation and testimonials, and addresses the implications this held for life writing. To read his poem “The Flunkey’s Recommendation” alongside his autobiography that masquerades as a biography, purportedly authored by his grandmother, named in the text as Granny McDoodle, is to uncover Tester’s sense of how the “character” that servants were compelled to elicit from employers rendered the practice of autobiography problematic. In addition, unlike the “matter of fact” aesthetic of realism that Ashford claims for autobiography, both of Tester’s texts approach autobiographical acts as a performance of selfhood, where the pretentious, the spurious, and the theatrical may masquerade as Romantic sincerity. “The Flunkey’s Recommendation, ” addressed to a Mr. Grubb, is written on behalf of Will, the waiter, who has quite worn himself out with writing letters of application: “He’s written prose until he’s sick / From day to day and week to week, / Applying, longing for a place, / But still it seems without success.” (50). If such tedious displays of literacy prove ineffective, then the remedy may lie in the exhibition of greater literary prowess, in order to prove impressive. “He’s got a notion in his head, / to try a little rhyme instead; / Advertisements in verse, he says, / Are all the fashion now a days” (50). Literary dexterity, salesmanship, and self-representation are interlinked in a literate culture that increasingly accords a ridiculous weight to penmanship as an index of the individual’s worth.

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The life history of “Will, the Waiter,” as it emerges in the poem, unsurprisingly bears a suspiciously close resemblance to that of La Teste’s. As comic rogue, the servant’s dexterity is suggestive of a sexual prowess, that in turn signals an irrepressible vitality that lurks beneath a veneer of servility: “He’s passed through all the various grades / Of flunkey-craft— its lights and shades—/ From lady’s page to footman’s plush; / From butler’s rouge to valet’s brush—/ . . . He’ll hook a gown or pin a plaid / As well as Prim, my lady’s maid” (51).9 Impressively, Will is at home with “the wily Pruss,” “the Spaniard with his form Erect,” “the Italian, graceful and refi ned,” “the Hindoo,” “the Arab from the desert’s sand,” and “the Hottentot with monster hip” (53). Paradoxically, then, the mobile servant, protean and adaptable, emerges as the true cosmopolitan. Will is therefore the elegant, eighteenth-century gentleman-sophisticate, who exposes the provincial limitations of the bourgeois character. His critique extends to the sphere of literary activity, with the waiter’s vigorous wit disparaging the earnest tedium of Victorian sages: “He spent abroad part of his youth, / Amid the vineyards of the South; / . . . I would advise our Laureate Tenn., / To sojourn there some months and then / He may, ere he resumes the lyre, / Find what he wants, the poet’s fi re”(52). By aligning with an eighteenth-century mock-heroic tradition, “The Flunkey’s Recommendation” can explode several cultural myths of the current age. Thus it can discredit the servant as the signifier of his master’s respectability, for the work history of the servant is also, implicitly, the disreputable life account of the employer he serves. Chaperoning young ladies who will insist upon “Boating, racing, calling, shopping, dining out, balling,” Will is guardian and gigolo: “ Give him the job, he’ll do it for ye; / He’ll please them when no other can, / For Will is quite the ladies man; / He’ll take them out, and bring them home, / All safe and cosy in your brougham” (56). Uniquely, then, servant autobiography is both more than, and other than its ostensible servant subject. For the servant is inevitably the mirror image of the master. Innuendo is servant autobiography’s natural mode, alluding as it does to other narratives implicit within the scandalous text. In addition, “The Flunkey’s Recommendation,” as a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait of the ideal servant, mocks the literate authority of masters, who naively believe that their power to inscribe the servant character into existence can discipline and regulate behavior in their domestics. Instead, the bogus recommendation that is self-authored, out-dazzles masters and poets laureate in its witty powers of equivocation, to suggest that the servant as text can remain riddling and indecipherable, and that Mr. Grubb, the prospective master, is no ideal reader. Literacy permits for forged identities, duplicitous documents, misread texts, and the rhetorical construction of the author, all of which make servant “characters” impossible to record or ratify. In a literate culture, the honest servant is in doubt since literacy permits for masquerade, invention, and imagined identities. The power of

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writing to vouchsafe the truth is mocked by the testimonial text’s constant references to its own silences and gaps, so that “Will, the Waiter” proves elusive under the pen. Of his sojourn in France, the “recommendation” declares that “he behaved himself whilst there / Some documents I’ve heard declare, / Except some flirting with Bonnelle / But—bah! It ain’t worthwhile to tell” (52). Candor as an autobiographical virtue masquerades as discretion, establishing the unreadable text that constitutes the forged “character.” Furthermore, the servant “character” as defi nitive text can never be written. Servants’ characters are a compendium of narratives, variously authored by successive employers, each text a rereading and reconstruction of previous texts. The servant, then, may never be fully subject to the controls of literate culture. The autobiography that followed the poems in the second edition, in 1867, is an elaboration of this same theme. If the servant offered resistance to being “characterized,” then a rejection of realism with its strong faith in the concept of “human character” might seem an astute literary strategy. The “samin’ biography,” as its “author,” Granny M’Doodle, terms it, is in fact a generic hoax. The prankster author, cast in a cross-dressing charade, poses as female narrator, drawing attention to the rhetoricity of the autobiographical “I” in a manner doubly ironic, since, despite Granny M’Doodle’s claims to literacy as producer of a text, “her” narrative, presented in Scottish dialect, echoes back to an earlier culture of orality. In thus effecting the dual generic masquerade of autobiography as biography, and of life history as oral recollection, the servant author as Granny M’Doodle adopts the pose of castrate, renouncing the phallic authority of the pen, while both denying and affi rming his performance of the autobiographical act. The question of a suitable literacy for Granny M’Doodle is foregrounded in the opening paragraph as a debatable concern that reflects on the value of the servant’s autobiographical enterprise and the anxieties it could provoke among the upper classes. Nar doot some o’oor over-rigid sanctimonious gentry will be apy to mak’ the remark that Granny M’Doodle micht hae been better employed in readin’ a chapter o’Job, or hummin’ ower a Psalm o’ Dauvit, or gein the puir Pilgrim alift oot o’ the Slouch o’Despond, than takin’ in han’ sic a responsible bit o’ business as the writin’ o’ some half-hunner pages o’ biography, whilk very likely, whan written naebody will care a farthin’ aboot. . . . I’m an auld body, that’s true, in my auchtyan-fourth autumn; but I can haud the pen yet, an’ write Willie’s early life I will, in spite o’ ye a’. (197) The presumptuousness of the autobiographical enterprise for a servant, whose life history is a matter of supreme indifference to a gentry-readership, is a theme that La Teste, like Ashford, must address. Acts of reading and writing performed by a Scottish peasant are sanctioned if in conformity

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with eighteenth-century literacy practices, as modeled by Methodism and allied forms of evangelical Christianity. But literacy in the service of the secular ego is an intolerable prospect to the pharisaical upper classes. The irreverent connotations of Granny M’Doodle’s name, suggesting her preference for playful penmanship over Holy Writ, already hint at a transgressive agenda. Her defiant assertion that she can “haud the pen yet, an’ write Wiilie’s early life, I will, in spite of ye a’” avers frankly antagonistic reader relations that mirror existing hostilities in class relations. In so doing, the spectacle of authorship, narcissistically evoked by the autobiographer, seems almost to offer the text as a taunt. At once inoffensive and audacious in its display of writing as a self-willed pursuit, the androgynous identity of the author renders the reader diffident of his hermeneutical capabilities. The narrator, at fi rst, in a display of feminine sentimentality, coyly confesses that “a body canna weel help a drap saut water gatherin’ in the neuk o’ their e’e”(198). But such innocuous nostalgia is immediately replaced by a phallic display of penmanship. Hence, the brazen flaunting of momentous literacy that follows: “Sae I’se e’en dicht my specks, an dip ‘stumpie i’ the ink,’ an begin at the beginning, in my ain hamel wauy, my plain ‘oonvarnished tale’” (198). The reference to the “unvarnished tale” alludes to the phrase used by the rascally, Irish steward, “honest Thady,” in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, to describe the embarrassing history of his Anglo-Irish masters, the Rackrents. La Teste’s ethnicity, like Thady’s, renders him the primitive other in the eyes of his masters. In addition, the use of Scottish dialect in place of the Standard becomes a deliberate mask of unlettered orality that teases the reader into denying the evidence of the written that “lies” before his very eyes. Indeed, a radical indeterminacy of genre suggests that the status of the autobiography as oral or written narrative remains impossible to verify. On the one hand, La Teste’s account of his early life seems to participate in a folklore tradition, given its focus upon collective memory, the magical, and the fantastic. However, the story of the young La Teste’s “death” and “resurrection” is also a near-blasphemous expropriation of Scripture, that suggests the indestructible character of the servant narrator, who, against all odds, lives to tell his tale. In dealing with the inconspicuous origins and early life of the Scottish servant, the autobiography appropriates a variety of generic traditions in order to maintain its viability as narrative.10 To begin with, La Teste’s genealogy revisits the topos of medieval romance narratives, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A “wizard” Italian knight menaces the court of Scotland, slaying its lords by the hundreds; the king is perplexed, while the queen and her ladies “grat day and nicht for their lost lovers” (198), till fi nally, Her Majesty, in her “terrification,” seeks a worthy defender of the realm. The defense of this suspect Arthurian idyll, with its effete aristocracies and adulterous dalliances, falls to a brawny Scottish chieftain, Donald Og o’ Monaltrie. The evil Italian knight is slain, but the Celtic

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warrior is not the progenitor we are led to expect as readers. La Teste’s pedigree is one that befits a serving man, and he is descended, instead, of a French steward, evocatively named Tastard, who, overawed by Donald Og’s display of knightly prowess, volunteers his services and is appointed majordomo of Og’s noble household. Tastard’s name suggests base-born origins. In becoming the shifting center of focus, he displaces the legitimate protagonists of the chivalric romance relegating their saga of “noble” deeds to the margins of narrative. Since the serving classes have their own prideful family histories, the descendants of “Tastard” bear the stamp of chosen-ness, making them akin to the descendants of Abraham. So we are informed: “And Tastard, the son o’ Galia, begat a son, and he named the loon Andrew, in a’ probability after the patron saint o’ his adoptit country; and Andrew begat Alexander, a noted warrior o’ the Clan Fearchair; and Alexander begat Simon the Tall; and Simon begat Peter, the poet an’ famous scholar, generally called “Peter the Dominie”; and Peter begat Archibald” (200). Such claims of descent from a distinguished line carry more than a hint of presumption. Their prowess with sword and pen betokens a phallic power symbolically evoked in a variety of ancestors, one of them a renowned piper to the “prood lady o’ Invercauld; but he died in the prime o’ his youth, deeply regretted and by nane mair sae than the haughty dame already mentioned, for he was the only man on the estate to whom she deigned to open her lips” (200). La Teste’s lewd pun is a sly allusion to the devastating potency of the serving man’s literary talents. The narrative account that follows, of the butler’s early life amidst the glens and rivers of Scotland, acquires Wordsworthian resonances, but no “shades of the prison house” encroach upon this pastoral idyll, as the boy encounters the schoolroom. Instead its ordeals are a test of the young man’s mettle. Hence, he commences “the A B C o’ his education under the droothy an’ sair-dreaded Dominie Grassy” (205). He bears his floggings with “the courage o’ a lion,” being “too bold to wince an’ too proud to weep” (200). If the acquisition of literacy is a test of valor and stamina, the servant’s heroic temper, thus proven, is the guarantor of his innate nobility. The “biography” celebrates the progress of the servant-scholar “promoted to the Proverbs class, the standard skule-book o’ that day an’ generation, and frae the Proverbs to the Auld an’ New Testaments, but the Psalms o’ Dauvit an especially the paraphrases, were his chief delight . . . for his memory was so retentive in all that was poetical” (200). Such foregrounding of literary genius renders the working-class subject unrecognizable. Hence, having established his literacy “in all that was poetical,” Willie’s boyish escapades of climbing trees, stealing apples, and falling into streams, that belong with the topoi of The Prelude, become an impudent and self-conscious exercise in intertextuality. Recounted thus, the narrativizing of childhood becomes an act of generic presumption on the part of the autobiographer. Constructing the young scholar as romantic boy-hero,

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La Teste’s autobiography becomes a mocking interrogation of Romanticism’s tendencies to valorize the voice of the common man by confi ning working-class personae such as solitary reapers or leech-gatherers to the realm of orality. The biography’s crisis revolves around the life-and-death struggle of the boy-hero with the measles, and is staged with all the drama of a medieval saint’s legend. Described by the narrator as “the most romantic and miraculous stage o’ his early history” (207), Willie’s childhood disease is represented as a strange and fantastic phenomenon that resonates to the numerical logic of medieval balladry. “Three times did he drink the chaupin’ jug fu’ o’salts,” we are told (207). He is laid in his crib “for nigh twa years, the wonder o’ hundreds and the miracle of our time” (207). He swallows “powders by the hundreds” (208) and is the star attraction for “medical men frae all pairts o’ the country” (208). Willie’s spectacular malady lends itself to hyperbole. In rejecting the prosaic idiom of autobiography, Tester romanticizes the mundane servant body. Its magical powers of endurance, its behaviors that resist scientific explanation, and its deceptive tendencies are more than a humorous indulgence in self-mystification. Hence, though doctors might pronounce Willie’s “tortured body” dead, reading signs of “limbs wax’d rigid and cauld” (208) as irrefutable evidence of its defeat, the mother keeps guard over the “corpse,” refusing to allow it a Christian burial. The embarrassment of this macabre vigil ends with the body stirring to life, in response to poultices, faithfully applied by the obstinate maternal parent. It is the resilience of the servant body that comes to be celebrated in this resurrection narrative. Its miraculous ability to revive under duress harks back to medieval saints’ legends, given its likeness to the recuperative powers of decapitated, dismembered, or fragmented martyred bodies such as St. Agatha’s , that uncannily restore themselves to wholeness. In doing so, the servant body’s eccentricities ridicule life writing’s pretensions to rational self-representation. As in the saint’s legend, La Teste’s defiant body becomes the literal manifestation of life writing’s triumphalist agenda, a narrative quest for immortality. The immortality that La Teste audaciously pursues, however, is of another order. In his tenth year, the concluding paragraphs inform us, he moves with his father to Aberdeen, where he is once more put to school, and is an especial favorite of Maister Stuart of Gilcomston, with whom he keeps up a “poetical correspondence,” and who admonishes him in a letter “to be wise, vigilant, an’ persevere in his grammar”—‘The day will come, my dear boy, whan ye’ll mak’ a silk purse oot o’ a sow’s lug, an’ be ranked amongst oor modern classic bards” (212). Literacy and its potential for literary fame are never lost sight of by the narrative. It is therefore the aspired-to identity of poet that the autobiography seeks to establish, while the servant as autobiographical subject is deferred indefi nitely to a postscript of his future poetic productions: “His life as a flunkey, his travels abroad, his earlier loves, an’ his later sins an’ sorrows will be better described by himsel’ in a future edition o’ his works” (212).

164 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy The servant autobiography, therefore, remains deliberately “unwritten,” by a narrator who will not be subjugated by life writing’s generic laws. In this act of outwitting the dictates of genre, by refusing servant narrative, La Teste critiques the ethic of honesty and candor so frequently invoked (as in Ashford’s case) to establish the credentials of autobiography, preferring, instead, to brazenly privilege its more suspicious propensities for selfinvention. Indeed, La Teste’s autobiography calls attention to the fact that assumptions of selfhood as a given become infi nitely more tenuous when life writing is performed by subjects who focus upon identity in process. Servants like himself can resist the autobiographical mode’s tendentious power of textualizing the “self” into stability through a self-conscious literacy that irreverently appropriates a variety of genres, thereby calling attention to rhetorically constructed selves that resist being “characterized.” Janet Bathgate’s Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow (1872) makes for an interesting counterpoint to La Teste’s irreverent pseudo-biography, its earnestness of tone an appropriate match for the conservatism of the mid-Victorian era. Nonetheless, literary masquerade and generic experimentation remain essential to Bathgate’s search for autobiographical form, tied inseparably as it is to staging selfhood as a product of the bewildering and often unpredictable process of social mobility. Bathgate was a sometime domestic servant, whose arduous acquisition of literacy enabled her to become a schoolmistress. Like La Teste, however, Bathgate is also a poet, although her poems constitute the appendix to the autobiography, where La Teste’s life history functioned as an afterword to the poetry. In the title, Bathgate emerges as something of a literary poseur. Her intended readers are junior female relations, hence the autobiographical narrative’s representation of itself as private writing. The preface to the fi rst edition commences with a strategic disclaimer of its status as published text. “The Author of these Recollections” the preface declares, “had no thought while writing them of their appearance in any form than in manuscript, or being read outside the circle of her own relatives and friends, to whom she thought they might be interesting and helpful.” Like Ashford, Bathgate’s apologia for her life history is her claim for its potential as exemplum narrative. However, unlike Ashford, perusing sensation fiction at a public bookstall, Bathgate’s text belongs to a private reading community. By invoking the trope of modesty to describe authorial intention, Bathgate adopts a rhetorical posture associated more frequently with upper-class femininity. With the second edition, in 1894, Bathgate proceeds to dissociate herself from commercial publishing and mass circulation with even greater disingenuousness: “The Author of these Recollections was not more surprised that they ever appeared in the shape of a book than she has been at its acceptance by the public, the whole of the fi rst edition having been sold in a year. And now that a second edition is being called for, the Author looks up to God for His blessings on every reader, who may derive any

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spiritual help from its pages.”11 Referring to herself in the third person, the servant-subject renounces all agency as autobiographer. The manuscript metamorphoses into the book, spiritual and commercial profit coalesce, while Bathgate fi nds an alternative to the marketplace as the scene of reading for her autobiography, conscious though she might be of proffering herself up for public consumption. By alluding to earlier reading practices of evangelical Christianity that dominated eighteenth-century working-class society, Bathgate may justify by faith her own display of literary talent. Literacy here is invoked as a state of grace. Indeed, the inter-texts that her autobiography alludes to are the Old Testament Exodus narrative and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, since she avows that she aims at putting the reader in mind of “the ever-present guiding hand of a Father,” her subject matter being “trials and difficulties,” and the “battle of life,” with the author being “led through this great and terrible wilderness in which none of his promises ever failed.” By transforming autobiography into life testimony, Bathgate renounces the secular ego as its subject. The aims of the writer are declared afresh at the end of her narrative. Its purpose “is not to make her the object of interest, but to lead those who may read this story to put their trust in God” (190). By consistently affi rming “good literacy” as antithetical to the autobiographical mode, Bathgate may cast her narrative as Christian testimony rather than as life history. In her case, literacy has its wellsprings in the Logos. Bathgate details the practices of Scripture reading in her Yarrow household, and, more significantly, presents the young “Jenny,” as she refers to herself, engaged in citing biblical texts and offering up “notes” or written commentaries on scriptural verses under the disciplining gaze of her father. Literacy acquisition for Bathgate, therefore, possesses unfallen origins. Furthermore, the book becomes the signifier of inwardness, as the narrative charts the formation of spiritual awareness in the juvenile Janet. In a significant incident from childhood, “Jenny,” troubled by a pang of conscience over a childish misdemeanor of playing with her dolls on the Sabbath, is visited in her sleep by the portentous dream image of a great book: “During the night, she dreamed that she saw the heavens open, and an angel with a great book in his hand going forth throughout the whole world taking down the names of the righteous, and he was proclaiming aloud ‘This is the Lamb’s Book of Life.’ And Jenny asked him, saying: ‘Is my name in it?’ and he answered ‘No.’ At this Jenny awoke in great terror, crying that she was lost” (37–38). In order to calm the child, her mother administers a Scripture lesson and encourages her to pray that she be numbered among the elect. If “good literacy” teaches the abnegation of self, its postures are nonetheless contested within the text. It soon becomes apparent that Bathgate’s hidden agenda is a display of secular literary talent that finds its apex in her poetic offerings. For this reason, at the outset, she subtly establishes

166 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy the presence of secular literacy as a constituent of her labor-class heritage. Upon the family’s library shelf, alongside The Confession of Faith, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Bible, and a shorter catechism, repose Jack and the Beanstalk, a story of ambition and opportunism in a young man driven by his zest for upward mobility, and two texts that celebrate British imperial enterprise—Robinson Crusoe and The Life of Colonel Gardiner. The latter is a sensational narrative of a romance between an East India Company officer and a Muslim princess, that culminates in the former’s conversion to Islam. Bathgate’s home library suggests that the material self, its romantic promptings, and its heretical discontents are insinuating texts that distract from the practice of pious literacy. The autobiographical enterprise is therefore an agenda that enters covertly into play with the ostensible project of offering up Christian testimony. The autobiographical mode in Bathgate’s text is allied to the discovery of secular literacy, and operates as a parallel to witness writing, which owns its allegiances to Holy Writ. Holy Writ belongs with the rural idyll of Bathgate’s childhood, lost quickly and irreparably, on her entry into service. Servitude, in keeping with the Christian paradigm of history, is a “fall” from grace, the banishment from Eden that a rural family suffers when it succumbs to poverty and social displacement. Hence Janet can look back to prelapsarian origins in the pastoral idyll she establishes. The farm of Philipbaugh is “a beautiful place, backed with hills covered with heather, and surrounded by glens and roads well wooded” (1), while Janet or “Jenny” at seven has “eyes resembling the blue-bells of her native land bathed in morning dew,” with “rosy cheeks and red lips,” and “her chestnut locks fall in profusion over her shoulders” as she bids goodbye to “a little flower garden which had been fondly tended by Jenny and her brothers” on the day of the family moving away to Yarrowford (3–4). Her experiences of child labor, by contrast, speak of the ordeal of rising at five, trundling a barrow too large for a little girl, washing dishes, hoeing leeks, carrying milk up the hill to the lambs, skinning them for their fl eece, putting the cow out graze, herding it, and going late to bed. On returning home, her mother “was moved to see her hacked hands and swelled fi ngers, and more so when she learned that the glands in her armpits were swollen and hard” (80). But this chronicle, unlike Ashford’s, is not, ostensibly, a protest narrative. With each successive phase of service that sees the young Janet dispatched to nearby farm households, she grows increasingly attached to her “employers,” acquiring the status of family member, parting tearfully at the end of her tenure and reuniting warmly with them in later life. Janet’s “Christian” spirit preaches the ideology of respectability and assimilation, rather than that of revolution. Incidents of pious literacy attend moments of trauma and crisis. A storm, a nightmare, a weary Sabbath, a respite from labor on a visit home, are all opportunities to revisit Scripture or practice scriptural exegesis.

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At one farmstead, named Hartleap, where the farmwife, Katie, is a repository of oral folklore pertaining to ghosts, spirits, and devils, “Jenny” offers the “rationality” of Holy Writ to dispel such superstition. During a hurricane, Katie is filled with terror of the devil. Janet’s response is to cite Scripture: “I’m no fear’d; for my mother says that God walks on the wings of the storm; my mother learned me that psalm that says, ‘Fire and hail and snow and vapour, stormy wind fulfi lling His word’” (74). One is immediately struck by the irony latent in such ideologies of literacy that proffer reason as the hallmark of the literate subject. The orality-literacy binary invoked to represent the opposition between the primitive imagination and the ratiocinative intellect stands exposed for the ideological posture that it truly is. “Good” literacy has the power to re-present the fantastic story as realist narrative. The Christian God’s magical manifestations in the weather rival any animist’s interpretation of natural phenomena, but the credibility of Scripture owes greatly to its consumption by readers like Jenny’s mother, who may become its most effective apologists by dint of their strenuous efforts to pose as rational literates. However, true literacy occurs only with the ability to produce secular writing of one’s own, rather than the parroting of Holy Writ. Resistance and rebellion against witness narrative and the servitude of citation arise midway through the autobiography, in a chapter entitled “A First Experience of Letter Writing.” Ostensibly, the acquisition of literacy, even of the godly variety, is not the goal of the autobiographical subject. Self-abnegation rather than self-affirmation is the lesson her life-history preaches. Hence despite the sentimental description of her reading lesson under the tutelage of her mother, where she spends her time “turning over the leaves, . . . reading the little words, and longing, or may I say praying? That she could read the holy book” (82), aspiring to literacy remains potentially hubristic. Her delight on discovering that she could read, quite effortlessly, the story in Matthew’s Gospel of Christ riding into Jerusalem on an ass, is tempered by the caveat that later, on learning “that there was nothing too hard for God, she gave Him all the glory for helping her so” (82). “Good” literacy is a benediction of sorts. Its skills, transcendentally derived, lie essentially beyond the will of the autobiographical subject. Moreover, in true pietistic fashion, Bathgate renounces its empowering potential, preferring instead the humility topos of spiritual autobiography: “But Janet has a deeper lesson to learn than to read: she must yield up her own will to the will of God, and follow the leading of His providence without murmuring” (82). It is therefore profoundly paradoxical that the act of momentous literacy that constitutes the crisis of her narrative is described, at great length, as arising out of a disorienting mixture of personal resourcefulness, affective impulse, and creative imagination. The homesick child servant has been set to watch the sheep from entering the vegetable garden, and provided with a piece of green cloth and yellow thread after being instructed in sampler stitch. Transported by the pastoral view of the valley below her, she decides

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that “she would try to sew a map of the loch and its surroundings and send it home” (104). She confesses that she “knew as much about maps as the man in the moon” (104–105), before provocatively querying of her intended readers: “Why then does she entertain her nieces with the story of a bit green cloth and a little yellow thread?” (105). Bathgate’s catechesis of her reader regarding her authorial intentions includes the orthodox answer that befits her ostensible agenda: “it is just that they may mark God’s providence, and see how out of these little things he may bring great results” (105). However, she also quite subtly cues the reader in to her covert agenda, of demonstrating how life history evolves out of acts of momentous literacy: “This little bit of green cloth and yellow thread had a great deal to do with Janet’s history through all her after life” (105). To return to the narrative, the homesick Jenny, musing on her handiwork, “wishes that she had learned to write, for then she could have written a long letter and explained all about her green map” (105). In her pocket she also carries the letter her father had written to her employer, enquiring after his daughter. The talisman-like value accorded to it suggests that the written text’s mystique is intuitively grasped by the young child. She has pored over it several times, “has managed to trace out the words in an imperfect way” (105), and, while engaged in contemplating its material form, “considers the letters” (105), “thinks she could copy them” (105), and puzzles over her father’s orthographics, being unable “to distinguish very well E from F” (105). The fascination and attentiveness that the letter commands implies that writing here functions as the visible embodiment of a secular self that flows mysteriously forth into its own unique formations of the alphabet. What emerges from the written text is “the hand,” the object of study for the new science of graphology. The secular written word becomes the repository of personality. In doing so, it stands diametrically opposed to a logos that, by contrast, is made manifest in impersonal print. Jenny’s response to this specimen of literacy is to study her alphabetical letters from a “Question Book,” and on the small blank space of paper beneath her father’s written text, in the absence of a pen, she “pricks with the point of the pin their form and thus “writes” a letter to her father” (106). The message itself is brief: “My dear father and mother I am well thank God Peggie is kind to me I hope you are all well God bless you Your daughter Janet” (106). The parents, puzzled by the Braille-like missive, present the text to two gentlewomen, the Misses Pringle, who, on deciphering it, insist that she be recalled from service and sent to school. “This is one result of Janet’s fi rst letter,” we are informed, “but it is destined to have other effects in days to come” (107). The ingenuity of the servant’s ability to inscribe herself as literate to others, and her rationale for literacy acquisition—a yearning for release from servitude—prove especially ironic, given the humble and obedient sentiments that are dutifully proffered for her reader’s edification. Expressions of contentment rather than resentment at her lot, platitudinous avowals

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of gratitude towards employers, parents, and God in the face of hardships inflicted upon her—these remain at variance with her insistence, as narrating autobiographical subject, upon the life-altering outcomes of her one act of momentous literacy. What in fact happens is that the medium becomes the message, as Janet’s assertion of her desire for literate status remains the secret signification of her text, to be decoded by ideal readers, who recognize how her text mimics, and thereby aspires to the status of the written. It is only much later in the text that Bathgate directly admits to her intense dislike of domestic service.12 A former employer suggests that she go into service once more with her sister, after Bathgate has been widowed. The suggestion is met with dismay: Janet’s heart sank within her. . . . She was sure that the advice was well meant, and in a worldly point of view it was the best thing she could do; but to her mind the sacrifice would be great. . . . To have a home, however humble, her own quiet fi reside, her morning and evening devotions, her quiet sabbath, even with no more than a potato and salt, was a great possession. . . . To give up all these, and go into a large house amongst a retinue of servants, male and female, gay, thoughtless, and worldly—perhaps not a pious one among them—would be unbearable. (183) Although her protests are made in the name of Christian piety, it is significant that Bathgate describes her spirituality as contingent upon private space, and as expressive of an individualism that she now wishes to unabashedly affi rm. A suggestion that she turn schoolmistress is met with greater favor, despite modest protests that she “is not a learned woman” (186). The school project initially is approached in the same spirit of trepidation: “I feel it would be presumption to try” (186). However, “ere the end of the week she has nine scholars and is beginning to feel as if the thing was of God” (187). Bathgate’s embourgeoisement is presented not as the consequence of social ambition, but as an unmerited grace bestowed upon her, freely, through divine will. The school “prospers” (189), her students are “her little flock” (188), “her soul is feasting on the fat things of God’s own house” (187), and her former mistress offers her patronage and support by sending her own children to be Janet’s scholars. The schoolmistress is guided not by monetary gain, however, but by an evangelical zeal “to tell these little lambs about the Good Shepherd” (188). Literacy regains for Bathgate the Christian pastoral of her childhood. However, the apotheosis of Janet’s literacy skills lies beyond autobiography. Two poems, “The Widow’s Consolation” and “On Visiting the Scene of My Childhood,” provide for the triumph of the lyric self, and the celebration of the very ego that Bathgate’s “autobiography” has ostensibly spurned. Given the fact that no allusion is ever made to Bathgate’s literary talents in the autobiographical narrative, the two poems call attention

170 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy to autobiography’s gaps and silences, and the capacity of the literate subject to strike rhetorical poses that make self-representation a generically determined construct. As an exercise in witnessing, Bathgate’s autobiography denies all personal ambition and will, only to demonstrate at the end that these were rhetorical stances, and that, like her poems, they function equally as evidence of her familiarity with a variety of literary topoi. Both lyrics, “The Widow’s Consolation,” and “On Revisiting the Scene of My Childhood,” display a conversancy with Romanticism and its discourses. The fi rst, with its philosophy of stoicism and endurance, resonates strongly to the utterances of Wordsworth’s leech gatherer, in “Resolution and Independence,” while the second explores the great Wordsworthian themes of childhood and nature. Bathgate’s narration of her own embourgeoisement is grammatically mimed through her rhetorical acquisition of the autobiographical ‘I.’ In choosing to speak of her rustic self in the third person, and assigning regional dialect for the speech of all characters, the young Jenny included, Standard English becomes the preferred norm for the narrating voice. The overall effects of self-alienation produced by such dichotomous registers draws attention to the narrating subject’s multi-sitedness. As a custodian of Standard English, Bathgate is assimilated into a class that she once served. Bathgate indirectly exhibits her literacy as the acquisition of the Standard, even as she draws upon literary Romanticism to exoticize the dialect she once spoke unself-consciously. Contemplating the countryside, rusticity and literariness are reconciled, Spring up, thou little well, spring up, There is no change in thee, Thy pure, cool waters bubblin’ up. These threescore years and three. How long before, I canna tell, How long ye yet may be, O could my stammering tongue but tell, Half I’ve been taught by thee.

If sentimentality and embourgeoisement are the outcome of Bathgate’s autobiographical act, The Christian Watt Papers, written over thirty years in the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century, represents by far the most complex expression of the servant’s sensibility. Christian Watt, a Scottish fishwife, who also engaged in domestic service periodically, lived from 1833 to 1923, spending nearly forty years of her life in a mental asylum, after she suffered a breakdown from overwork. It was as an inmate of the Institution at Cornhill for the mentally ill that she discovered the free time to write her life story. Authored sporadically over several decades, the “papers” demonstrate that a single coherent narrative that we designate as

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the “life” of the individual, is a narrative convention, contingent upon certain conditions of literary production. Its fragmentary form, with its gaps and disjunctions, presents us with a multivalence of voices—revolutionary, evangelistic, stoic, nostalgic. Watt emerges as a conundrum, at times violent and visionary, at other times pietistic. Most obviously, the unitary subject is a fiction that cannot prevail when the multiply-sited subject as fishwife, Christian, domestic servant, mother, widow, disability victim, and senior citizen articulates her often contradictory and confl icting perspectives on experiences such as poverty, illness, marriage, class-relations, revolution, or religious faith. Less obviously, sporadic writings in an interrupted life generate a plurality of narratives, that reflect the self as always in process, shifting, scattered, textualized as “papers” rather than the literary “work,” and compelling the reader as editor to construct a life. With Watt, the servant autobiographer emerges as modern individual, tormented, alienated, and fragmented. But Watt’s autobiographical narratives also lay bare the class biases implicit to formulations of the woman writer configured as madwoman in the attic, driven to insanity by enforced idleness. In addition, they interrogate Foucauldian assumptions about madness, discipline, and the penitentiary model of institutional life. The asylum afforded Watt the leisure time required for reflection and writing, its protecting environs functioning as a room of her own, to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf. The Watt papers present us with the fragility of the individual under threat of psychic disintegration and collapse, as a victim of an industrial capitalism that destroys community and condemns each member of the working classes to a solitary struggle for existence. For Watt, who sometimes writes with hindsight after the Russian Revolution and the Great War, servanthood evokes a range of responses, from desire to resistance. Domestic service for Watt fosters profoundly anachronistic mind-sets and contradiction-ridden existences. Writing of the servants at Philorth House, where she spent most of her years in service, she notes their inauthenticity as members of the working classes, domesticated into subjugation: “The staff were very loyal . . . I told the girls—You have far too much time on your hands. The world is the harvest field. The waving grain is waiting for you to reap it, go along the fish cross and you will hear the anguished cry of a bairnie greeting who has had nothing in its belly for two days” (99). But the allure of embourgoisement haunts Watt’s narrative in repeated romantic encounters with masters, where Watt seems indeterminately cast as heroine of a potential marriage plot and victim of a seduction-and-betrayal narrative.13 As servant at the Saltoun house, Watt is courted by a relation of her employers, a member of the British Army in India. She is also wooed by the Master of Lovat, who proposes marriage. In her interview with his parents, who reject the match on grounds of class, Watt rudely denounces their social pretensions, making special mention of the silent, submissive butler and housemaid who eavesdrop in private, but spread the content of

172 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Watt’s rejoinders far and wide. She rebuffs the advances of another lord at Philorth House, by according him the derisive sobriquet of “Fairy,” after willfully spilling a decanter of scent over him. Later, towards the end of her life, she commiserates with the Saltouns over their mansion that was razed to the ground after being set on fi re, ironically, by a cook with German sympathies. Watt’s resistance to servanthood commences early, fortified by her mother’s tutoring in egalitarian ideology : My mother told me never to depend on a living from landed proprietors, for it took away one’s independence, in much the same way as a caged wild bird. It was preferable to be a poor fisher compared to being a well fed ladies maid: though a Lord or a servant, money will never make you if you are not right with yourself. (23) However, it is as servant that Watt encounters concerns of reading and writing, and their political implications for class relations. Watt takes care to point out that she was literate prior to entering service. “As bairns we went to the Congregational Sunday School and to the auld kirk bible class” (24). On her fi rst stint as a maid, under Lady Saltoun, Watt records the grudging concession of her mistress to her interest in literacy: “She was pleased with my work and wanted me to come south with her, but I had no intention of accepting this life at everybody’s beck and call. She offered me a dress length as a gift; I said I would rather have a dictionary. She thought it a strange request, but gave me one from the library. It opened up new realms in my life, for my nose was never out of it” (22). If, in the domestic sphere, literacy is a grudging concession to unreasonable working-class aspirations, the asylum as a space of irrationality, by contrast, fosters a perversely utopist, egalitarian, literate society: There was an excellent book library. There I met two young boys who could have been my sons. . . . One was a doctor who failed his exams, the other a lawyer who took too much drink. Many folks go into the asylum to evade the law, but the young doctor and lawyer shewed me how to keep a journal, and to make notes as something came into my head to revive my memory, and to write it down before I forgot. They do not encourage writing with quill pens, as if one went missing it could be a dangerous weapon with seriously affected patients. . . . All writing had to be done in pencil; the two boys kept sharpening my pencil for me. (112) The spectacle of authorship that this scene offers, returns us, uncannily enough, to the collaborative productions of narrative that we encountered between masters and servants in Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Crowe’s Susan Hopley. In this rare record of a writing lesson, the masters wait

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upon the serving woman, instructing her in literary self-representation and bourgeois concepts of literary selfhood. The nexus between memory, note-making, personal history, and journal keeping suggest that literacy skills are crucial to the uncovering of selfhood, and that, like La Teste and Bathgate, the servant must transcend class identities before autobiography can be written. Furthermore, Watt’s recuperation of selfhood after her nervous breakdown transpires through her production of a text of wrongs, that Jemima, a hundred years ago was discouraged from penning. The lunatic asylum becomes a space of dissent, perversely compatible with the neo-literate’s aspirations of release from the strictures of class and gender, since Watt is deftly able to display historical consciousness in conjunction with pious literacy. Watt’s fragmented history of poverty, overwork, and class oppression is integrated into what becomes a broader witness to world history as a fulfi llment of scriptural prophecy. Unlike Bathgate, Watt’s apocalyptic imagination enables her to imagine her own personal struggles within the broader context of world revolutionary narratives, and of sacred history. The Jacobin Uprising, the Great Exhibition, the Indian Sepoy Mutiny, the Russian Revolution, the Great War, are at times an accompaniment, at other moments a counterpoint to Watt’s personal fortunes, but they also become the occasion for demonstrating theological literacy, and a conversancy with a biblical poetic idiom: Had there been a bite for everybody there would have been no French Revolution and no Russian Revolution which was brought about by the German High Command who will live to rue the day: “Rear a crow and it will not pick your een.” We have seen but a vision of a vision of the emancipation of the working man. It is every human being’s desire for a classless heaven and earth, but how can it be when Satan is the Prince and power of the air. . . . One must admire the brave Russian people, for from my own experience, I know that being hungry is no fun. (146).14 Like Joseph in Wuthering Heights, and unlike Bathgate, Watt, as this passage demonstrates, fi nds Scottish dialect compatible with Holy Writ, appearing immune to the “literate” pretensions that the Standard could offer. The servant is also visited in the asylum by a former mistress, who now seeks the Word from the evangelical literate elevated to the status of visionary in her state of seclusion: “To my surprise, Charlotte, Lady Saltoun cane to see me passing through Aberdeen. . . . Charlotte, Lady Saltoun constantly asked me to unfold the scriptures until God shewed me I was to cease feeding the heads of those unwilling to do the word spoken (Ezekiel 33, 30–33)” (113). Through evangelical Christianity, the dissenting servant, again, like Joseph in Wuthering Heights, may exercise power relations through the Book, over her former social superiors.

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As serving woman, Watt details the complex social order of a large household, with its washerwomen, gardeners, cooks, housemaid, table maid, scullery maids, and footmen, at Philorth House. However, the attractions of servant life for Watt reside not in the feudal order of the country house, but in the mobility it offers her, so that servants emerge as precursors of the new woman. In 1852, Watt visits New York, where she works as a table maid in the home of Mrs. Jerome, the mother of Jennie Jerome, the future Lady Randolph Churchill. Watt’s wages are, she boasts, “a dollar a day, four times the pay at home” (61). Her account of New York is that of a young, lively girl, relishing the freedom of an urban culture: Both New York and Brooklyn were fascinating with all the streets and wonderful stores. I made friends with Mary Goldie, a housemaid from Ayr. . . . We would go to the Druggists, where you could get a cup of tea, or buy sausages at the end of the boardwalk out by Potters field at Madison Avenue. Mary would say, “Look that fellow keeps winking at us.” I said, “Poor chiel must have something wrong with his ee.” (60) Independence, sexual freedom, and travel are also available to the servant, free from the constraints of either rural or industrial labor, a theme that La Teste celebrates, and that Cullwick often returned to in her diaries. Watt did not return to service after her widowhood. Unlike Janet Bathgate, she did not choose the opportunities for embourgeoisement that service offered, preferring instead to cling proudly to her traditional social category as fi shwife. Her struggle to compete against middlemen in the fi sh markets of Scotland led to her breakdown and institutionalization. Her support for the Sepoy Mutiny, trade unions, peasant struggles, and the Russian Revolution, all reveal that Watt despised the co-optation that servitude entailed, placing her faith instead in class struggle. However, in her evening years, on learning that Philorth House was burned to the ground after the war, Watt surrendered to a moment of nostalgia for a lost way of life: In a way it was maybe better Philorth went quickly rather than slow malingering death like a hovel. Now there is a railway station leading nowhere, but in my mind’s eye it will remain the same, of how a young officer of the British India Co. and a laundry maid experienced the joy of fi rst innocent love as beautiful as a clump of snowdrops in the wood. From the garrett window comes the strains of “Annie Laurie” floating over the trees sung by Bobby Williams the strapper at the pitch of his voice or Mary Ritchie singing the 23rd Psalm. One day somebody may again build there but I am doubtful if they will capture the happy ghosts that fl it about that place. (140)

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The elegy for a grandeur long past, founded on the happy servitude of romantic and godly domestics, sits oddly on the lips of a victim of class oppression and an advocate for servants’ solidarity with the working classes.15 Watt’s recollection of her own wooing by a relation of the Saltoun family is paradigmatic of the romance between the servant classes and their masters, that haunts both the age and its fiction. Watt’s fragmented incursions into life history suggest that for the Scottish fi shwife/servant/madwoman identity was marked by discontinuity and rupture, captured by a spasmodic literacy that became the determining factor of form. The Watt “papers” are a spontaneous, unrevised inscription of selfhood that posit disorder and disability as the very essence of being. “Re-collection” therefore, for Watt, becomes both the substance and the form of life history. If, by the end of her narrative, Watt’s servant self emerges over other contending identities, it only does so in order that she, as autobiographical subject, may affi rm a selfassurance over former superiors that flows from her newfound authority as proficient literate. As prophet and pupil, her moments of servant literacy, foregrounded, demonstrate the richly disturbing complexities that haunted class relations during the Victorian age. Watt’s literate endeavors dramatize a reciprocal dynamic of tutelage, editing, collation, and exegesis between masters and servants. Momentous literacy as practiced by these servants is not a sustained engagement with subjectivity. It is, instead, a quirk of the pen, and its fortuitous or inventive manifestations become the paradigm for an unorthodox selfhood that leaps fitfully into being, lapses into dormancy, or seeks out its own genius in the obscure or eccentric literary endeavor. As such, literacy in these autobiographies is associated with the occasional opportunity, presented as the moment of respite from drudgery, snatched slyly, modestly, or perversely, as shirkers from service are wont to do. For this reason, its generic masquerades, hybridities, and improvisations are alert to the normative, as if the pressure of the moment requires the ad hoc and the whimsical response to a culture of literacy that is never fully owned by the literate drudge. Fiction, hagiography, diaries, poetry—all shape and contextualize life histories. In their life histories, these servants are responsive to texts and genres that they encountered quite routinely, in the course of their household labor. Autobiography by servants poses the challenge fi rst raised by Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Whether a self under such rhetorical pressure from genres alien to its own social origins might be efficiently accessed is a matter for speculation. In autobiography, servants seem to assume literate postures rather than bare an authentic inner being. Generic dexterity as a means to self-invention rather than unself-conscious confessionalism means that literacy becomes a game, at times a rhetorical trick, in order to reveal indirectly a capacity for the imaginative and the performative. Servants, more than any other occupational category, understood

176 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy the notion of class as performance. It is not surprising that in seeking to embourgeoise themselves through life writing, literacy becomes its own subject. For these servants, the gaining of literacy seems less about accessing spaces of freedom, and more about how they might ingeniously invent themselves as texts that could maneuver their way into circulation and consumption. In the early 1970s, a startling paradigm made itself manifest in a servant autobiography by Celeste Albaret, servant maid of Marcel Proust. Entitled Monsieur Proust, Albaret’s narrative is as much about herself as her master. Tracing the servant-master relationship between herself and Proust for his ten-year period as recluse, Albaret details the novelist’s writing habits and her own role in destroying time by blacking out the sunshine from his windows or policing visitors, in order that Proust could recapture the flux of memory, for his classic À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Proust nonetheless recognizes the servant’s inherent literary potential that rivals the author’s powers: One night—it must have been toward the end of the war, when I’d already been with him three or four years—he said: “I wonder what you are waiting for to write your diary.” I laughed. “I can just see it, monsieur! You’re teasing me as usual.” “No, Celeste, I am serious, No one really knows me but you, and no one knows all I do as well as you do, or can know all I say to you. When I am dead your diary will sell more copies than my books. (Albaret, 128–129)16 Proust’s words demonstrate the symbiotic relationship that exists between the literate drudge and the producer of the literary masterpiece. Workingclass writing transpires in response to prevailing literary and cultural hegemonies, and as such is both the complement and the rival of offi cial high culture. It may be both rebellious and derivative, at times independent, at times commissioned, recorded, instigated, or jointly produced by members of a literary establishment or a cultural elite, whose compulsions ensue out of a mix of conservative narcissism and liberal patronage. Cultures of literacy propound a utopist vision of dialogue, debate, and civil exchange across class lines, where all speak the same language. Its allure and appeal to both masters and servants was matched by a skepticism that recognized the fact that servants and masters told the same narrative differently. The very opportunities for the Standard that literacy provided could result in the evils of illiteracy: generic disruption, the discarding or acquisition of class identities, and the dethroning of fictitious narrative authority through autobiographical acts. Politeness, imitation, and subservience are as deadly as protest and rebellion. The fears of servant literacy are not fears of revolution, but of the loss of hegemony that

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must come with obsolescence, as mass literacy strengthens a democratic culture. Not surprisingly then, by the end of the Victorian era, and the beginning of the twentieth century, Prufrock, as gentleman—nervous, anxious and balding—retreats not from the socialist revolutionary, but from the smirking obsequiousness of the servant as Eternal Footman, who ushers him to extinction.

Conclusion

In 1901, Arthur Munby’s Poems Chiefly Lyric and Elegiac appeared as if in response to the passing of the Victorian age and its obsessive preoccupation with the serving classes. Munby’s own notorious passion for servant women constituted the subject matter of his anthology, but there is one particular poem, entitled “At the Window,” that perhaps most especially sums up the entire Victorian project of domesticating literacy that centered around the servant.1 In Munby’s poem, a young servant woman stands at the window, during a moment of respite from her daily chores. The dreaming maid gazes vacantly ahead, contemplating her future, because she has just “turned her teacup thrice,” and read her fortune in the tea leaves. They promise “kisses, a letter, and a sweetheart and a friend” (87). Pensive Polly goes demurely down to prayers, recognizing that the letter expected is from her seaman beau, who writes to instruct her about a romantic tryst on his return. “Ah she sees it all in vision: Jack is coming home from sea, / And he’s wrote for her to go to him, at MaryAnn’s to tea; / And the kisses she will have them, everyone of them no doubt, / On the very next of Sundays, which it is her Sunday out!” (87). What Munby’s “ill/literate” maid lacks in grammar she more than compensates for in romanticism. The delinquent servant reader imaginatively produces the secret text that eludes her mistress’s detection, in an act that makes her at once its author and consumer. Literacy stimulates a propensity for teleology, and the unholy Sabbath that she envisions is a rebellious rejection of domestic piety in favor of a secular future, liberated from the controls of the angel in the house. Superstitious and scientific, Polly deploys her talent for blending preliterate, magical thinking, with rational, literate culture. Victorian efforts at domesticating working-class literacy ended in failure, an outcome dramatized by Munby’s life and poem. Reasons no doubt abound—servants gravitated towards industrial labor; the Great War leveled British society, changing class relations forever; symbols of class identity altered, with the obedient servant no longer the index of social respectability. But other reasons emerge as well. As the “woman question” demystified and dismantled the cult of domesticity, skepticism engendered by such

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ideological failure extended to the angel’s capacity to inspire respectable literacy in her employees. With the coming of the modern era, Nora abandons her doll’s house and Lady Chatterley acquires a lover. Mistresses who were literary intellectuals, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf, proved no less reactionary than conventional angels in relations with their domestic servants. 2 With the domestic sphere discredited, all faith in its power to control working-class literacy ceased. As for Polly, her expectations of a private life achieved through literacy presage a new, self-possessed servant. In scripting her text, the servant asserts romantic selfhood, if only as an imaginative stance against the restrictions and repressions of pious literacy. However, the day is not far off when a modern era is compelled to reimagine wholesome literacy in secular terms. As for troping the ideal working-class subject as well-schooled, good and faithful servant, conditions of domestic service guaranteed that servants were temporary hands, whose mobility granted them an access to worldly sophistication as migratory and even metropolitan subjects. Like Susan Hopley, Nelly Dean, La Teste, Christian Watt, and Hannah Cullwick, Polly’s future visit to a space of erotic release and social insubordination highlights the paradox of the Victorian servant’s lifestyle that placed him or her beyond domestic discipline, even as it restricted them to the private sphere. Finally, the choice that Ashford felt compelled to make in 1841 between fiction and autobiography is resolved by the end of Victoria’s reign. Polly’s letter is at once fictional and autobiographical. Working-class subjects come to recognize how a potential for penning life history must render them capable of imagining themselves as protagonists of fictional texts. Such freedom marks the end of servitude.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. See William Kitchener, The Housekeeper’s Oracle (London: Whittaker, Treacher and Co., 1928), 126. 2. Ibid. 3. Eric Auerbach views servants in literary texts as signifying the presence of the random, where a text’s democratic sympathies shine forth. See Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953), 448. Bruce Robbins views servants as “the commonplaces of many times and places.” See Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: Fiction Below Stairs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 4. Narration could transpire in other circumstances, for which see Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 5. See Mrs. Motherly, The Servant’s Behaviour Book (London: Bell and Daldy, 1859), 31. 6. See General Reports of the Censuses of Population, Parliamentary Paper, 1901. 7. For a discussion of the wide range of households that afforded servants, see Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975; reprint, Sparksburg: Sutton, 2004), 27–35. 8. For an important study on hysteria over mass literacy, see Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 9. For a discussion of these numbers, see David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture in England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). See also David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Public Choice and Private Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 10. See Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1859), ed. Elizabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1997). 11. See Phillip Callow, Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Constable Press, 2003). 12. Charles Dickens, “Nurse’s Stories,” All the Year Round, September 8, 1860. Reprinted in The Uncommon Traveller and Other Papers: 1859–70, ed. Michael Salter and John Drew, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000) 169–179. 13. “Brown on the Throne” (London: Montague, Smith, Chapman, Lee & Co., 1871).

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14. Frank Dawes, Not In Front of the Servants: Domestic Service in England 1850–1939, (London: Wayland, 1972), 6. 15. Henry George Watkins, Friendly Hints to Female Servants (London: W. Gilbert, 1844). 16. Henry George Watkins, Hints and Observations Seriously Addressed to the Heads of Families in Reference chiefly to Female Domestic Servants (London: T. Hamilton, 1816). 17. The Servants’ Magazine 1:1 (1838), a2–iv. 18. “The Magistrate’s Visit,” The Servants’ Magazine 7 (1844), C: 13–15; D: 31–34. 19. Walter, My Secret Life (Amsterdam, 1888). 20. Augustus Mayhew, The Greatest Plague of Life, or The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant (London: Routledge, 1859). 21. Henry Houseman, The Dignity of Service (London: J. T. Hayes, 1876). 22. Theodore Buckley, “The Babbleton Book Club,” Household Words, 23 Oct. 1852: 129–33. 23. “Punch’s Advice to Servants,” Punch, Dec. 1845: 10–11. 24. “Introduction,” The Servants’ Magazine, New Series, 1:1 (Jan. 1867): 2–3. 25. “The Idle Servant” Punch, 24 Jan. 1863: 40. 26. “Force of Habit,” Punch, 29 Sept. 1853: 146. 27. “John Thomas on the Servant Franchise,” Punch, 15 Mar. 1884: 126–127. 28. See Ian Michael, “The Hyperactive Production of English Grammars in the Nineteenth Century: A Speculative Bibliography,” Publishing History 41 (1997): 23–61. 29. See Henry Alford, The Queen’s English: A Manual of Idiom and Usage (London: Longman and Green, 1864). 30. See Lady Broome, “Colonial Servants,” Cornhill Magazine, Series 3, 9 (1900): 79–87. 31. See George Eliot, “Servant Logic,” Pall Mall Gazette 17 Mar. 1865, Reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 391–396. 32. For discussions of the queen’s relationships with her servants, see Theo Aronson, The Heart of a Queen: Queen Victoria’s Romantic Attachments (London: John Murray, 1991), also Adrienne Rich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia UP, 1996). 33. See The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (London: Virago, 1984). 34. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism & Friendship’s Garland (NewYork: Macmillan, 1902). 35. See Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work and Those That Will Not Work (London: Griffi n, Bohn & Company, 1861– 1862). 36. For recent discussions on the rhetoric of class, see, among others, Asa Briggs, “The Language of Class in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” History and Class: Essential Readings in Theory and Interpretation, ed. R. S. Neale (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 2–29; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty in England in the Early Industrial Age (NewYork: Random House, 1983); R. S. Neale, Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); and David Cannadine Class in Britain (New Haven, Yale UP, 1998) and The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia UP, 1999). See also Arthur Helps, The Claims of Labour: An Essay on the Duties of an Employer to the Employed (London: William Pickering, 1844).

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37. See Mrs. C. L. Balfour, “Domestic Service,” The Servants’ Magazine, New Series, no.2 (February 1867): 2–28. 38. See Claude Levi Strauss, Triste Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1962). 39. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (London: Routledge, 1992). 40. “Faithful Servants,” Athenaeum, April 1, 1893: 404–405.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Mrs. Motherly, the Servants Behavior Book (London: Bell and Daldy, 186 Fleet Street, 1859) 31. 2. See Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 79. 3. Only brief references to Marguerite may be found. For Godwin’s embarrassment over her possible role as confidante, see Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, (London: Weiderfi eld and Nicolson, 2000), 197; for speculation that she was probably “the favorite servant” at Wollstonecraft’s deathbed, see Diane Jacobs, Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 272. 4. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1976). 5. See Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), also H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001). 6. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 107. All future references are from this edition. 7. Studies on Jemima have been few and far between. Vivien Jones, “Placing Jemima: Women Writers in the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative,” Women’s Writing 4:2 (1997): 221–234. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) views Jemima’s narrative as a radical feminist story that Wollstonecraft is not willing to take seriously; Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and Form in the British Novel1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) views sentimentality as forging a bond between Maria and Jemima, and attributes it to Jemima’s reading of novels and Maria’s text of wrongs. Saba Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2002), notes a common fate of seduction by men of knowledge that the two women share, while George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998) sees Jemima’s brutalization as that which “heightens the details of Maria’s own story” (115). 8. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1908). 9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1997). 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, 89. 11. Jackson, Marginalia. 12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise, First Preface, Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 6 (Hanover: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1997). 13. Julie, Second Preface. 14. Maria, 111.

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15. For a view of Maria as reader motivated by sensibility, see Shawn Lisa Maurier, “The Female Reader: Sex, Sensibility and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft’s Fictions,” Essays in Literature 19:1 (1992): 36–54. 16. Julie, Second Preface. 17. Maria, 110. 18. See Gayathri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossburg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 19. Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). 20. For a claim that literary professionalism for women grew in the eighteenth century, an exception being Mary Ann Radcliffe, see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992). 21. Catherine Crowe, Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maid Servant (1841), (London: Routledge, 1852). All future references are to this text. 22. For a commentary on Susan’s wide-ranging detective skills, see Lucy Sussex, “The Detective Maidservant: Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley,” in Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Brenda Ayres (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 57–66. 23. For a reading that notes this text’s sympathetic treatment of fallen women, see Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Popular Reading 1835–1880 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1981.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. See George Watkins, Hints and Observations Seriously Addressed to Heads of Families, Chiefly with Reference to Female Domestic Servants (London: T. Hamilton, 1816.) 2. See “Female Industry,” Edinburgh Review, April 1859: 293–296. 3. For discussions on respectability, see John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1974), 212–224; T. W. Laquer, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976); T. R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1976); Geoffery Crosssick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London 1840–1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1978); F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (London: Fontana, 1988). For literacy as grace, see Sylvia Scribner, “Literacy in Three Metaphors,” Literacy: Language and Power, eds. Diane Vipond et al. (Long Beach: University of California, 1994) 13–28. 4. See Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1859), ed. Elizabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1997). 5. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847) eds. William M. Sale Jr. and Richard J. Dunn, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). All subsequent references are from this text. 6. For a view of Heathcliff as an extreme parody of capitalist activity and of confl ict between a bourgeoisie and landed gentry, see Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes; for a reading that addresses the text’s political unconscious, see David Musselwhite’s “Wuthering Heights: The Unacceptable Texts,” in Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 75–108; for a view that regards Nelly as Milton’s cook, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,

Notes

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

185

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Yale UP, 1979). For discussions on the mother, see Margaret Homans, “The Name of the Mother in Wuthering Heights,” in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 68–99; also Marci B. Gordon, “Kristeva’s Abject and Sublime in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights,” Literature and Psychology 34:3 (1988): 44–58. For a discussion on Victorian rhetoric on animality in the novel, see Lisa Surridge “Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights,” Bronte Society Transactions 24, Pt.2 (1999): 161–173. For an essay that notes Zillah’s illicit sexual charm, see William Crissman “Zillah as Biblical Shadow in Wuthering Heights,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 14:3 (2001): 27–29. For a class-oriented reading of Lockwood’s dream as a rejection of repressive bourgeois laws, see Cates Baldridge, “Voyeuristic Rebellion: Lockwood’s Dream and the Reader in Wuthering Heights,” Studies in the Novel 20:3 (1998): 274–287. The 1950s debate on Nelly Dean, as benign or malignant which included participants such as John K. Mathison, Carl Woodring, and Dorothy van Ghent, is well known. More recently Edward Chitham has argued for Nelly Dean as a late addition to the novel. See Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Bronte, (Oxford; Basil Blackwell, 1987). For a view that situates Nelly as insider in the inside–outside binary, see Lyn Pykett, Emily Bronte (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); but the domestic site can be complicated, for which see the discussion that touches on libraries in Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in NineteenthCentury Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 239; a view of cat’s ears as small things on the surface that relate to hidden depths may be found in J. Hillis Miller, “Wuthering Heights : Repetition and the Uncanny,” in Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), 47–72. For a view that makes Nelly sister to Maggie Tulliver and Florence Dombey, see Robin Grove, “The Poor Man’s Daughter’s Tale: Narrative and System in Wuthering Heights,” Critical Review [Melbourne; Sydney] 36 (1996): 32–40. For an analysis of readers and reading moments in Victorian fiction, see Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Reader in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). For a view of this act of writing as a repressive laying of her doubting to rest, “literally to mark the grave of her desires,” see Ronald Thomas, Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999). For a view that sees Nelly’s narrative escape enclosure, because of its oral status, see Jan B. Gordon, Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1996). For further associations of pensiveness with the bourgeois text, see Roland Barthes’ S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Stephen Vine, “The Wuther of the Other in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49:3 (1994): 339–59, views Catherine’s delirium in Kristevan terms. However Lockwood’s intuitions of coming storms like Nelly’s perturbations suggest that speculativeness is by no means a wholly calm experience for master, mistress, or servant. See Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland (Staffordshire: Keele UP, 1996). See The Further Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Arthur Pollard, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000). For a study of servants in regard to paternal authority, see Julie Nash, Servants and Paternalism in the Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

186

Notes

21. See Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women, ed. Glennis Stephenson (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1993), 284–309. All further references are from this text. 22. For a view that perceives Gaskell’s fictional servants as “fighting mothers” with revolutionary functions, see Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). 23. Gaskell refers to her governess Hearn, who lived with them, as a “dear, good, valuable friend”; The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1966), letter 570.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. For a discussion of homes and houses during this period, see F. M. L.Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830– 1900, London: Fontana, 1988, 152–196. Especially of significance for the plot are Thompson’s remarks upon a new feature of segregating the sexes, in Victorian architecture, with guest quarters providing for “separate corridors for unmarried ladies and bachelors, and possibly with a quite separate bachelor’s staircase” (157). Also, see Life Below Stairs: Domestic Servants in England from Victorian Times (NewYork: Scribner, 1977). In his discussion of menservants, Huggett notes: “At the apex of the servant hierarchy was the house steward, who was responsible for the smooth functioning of the household and the transition from one house to another at the beginning or end of the season or any other time. He engaged and dismissed the lower servants and controlled the main accounts. Sometimes, when very important guests were present, he might condescend to wait at table” (Huggett, 31). 2. Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in the Hindu Domain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), discusses at length the credibility of sources that historians have long relied upon to reconstruct events pertaining to Haider Ali’s deposition of the Hindu Wodeyar dynasty at Mysore, Tipu’s succession to his father’s throne, the Seringapatam Siege, and the restoration of the Wodeyar dynasty by the British after Tipu’s defeat and death. For Brittlebank’s discussions of Alexander Beatson, Mark Wilks and W. Miles’s translation of the Neshan-i-Haidari, see 9–14. See also Mark Wilks and Murray Hammick, (1817) Historical Sketches of South Indian history, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1980), 771. On Collins’s view of the mutiny, see Wilkie Collins, “A Sermon for Sepoys,” Household Words 27 Feb. 1858: 244–247. 3. F. W. Buckler queried imperialist propaganda’s masquerade as history as early as 1922, in articles such as “The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny,” fi rst published in Royal Historical Society (London) Transactions, 5, 4th series (1922): 71–100, reprinted in M. N. Pearson, ed., Legitimacy and Symbols: The South Asian Writings of F. W. Buckler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 43–73. For a discussion of British historiography on India as it developed through the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, see George D. Bearce, British Attitudes towards India 1784–1858 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). Bearce lists among others Sir John Malcom’s Political History of India (1826) with its conservative advocacy of imperialism, Ephinstone’s History of India (1841), a combination of the Orientalist traditions of William Jones and the utilitarian traditions of James Mill, and regional histories such as Grant Duff’s History of the Mahrattas (1826), J. D. Cunningham’s History of the Sikhs (1849), and Sir J.W. Kaye’s History of the War in Afghanistan (1851).

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4. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868), ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). All future citations are from this text. 5. For the history of Collins’s publishing connections with Charles Dickens, see Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004). 6. Moonstone, 1. 7. Barry Mulligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in NineteenthCentury British Culture (Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1995) and Hyungji Park, “‘The Story of Our Lives’: The Moonstone and The Indian Mutiny in All the Year Round,” in Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, eds. Douglas Peers and David Finkelstein (London: Macmillan, 1999), .84–109, view the novel as invoking the “master narrative” of the mutiny. Ian Duncan in “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel and Imperial Panic” Modern Language Quarterly, 94:5 (1979): 919–930, argues that Collins harnessed the imperial panic generated by the mutiny to depict another world triumphant in its darkness” (305). The events of the Anglo-Mysore Wars were, however, a major ongoing concern for over fi fty years. The date of Dirom’s A Narrative of the Campaign in India which Terminated the War with Tippoo Sultan in 1792 (London: 1793), suggests chronicles of the Anglo-Mysore Wars preceded the fall of Seringapatam, in 1798. 8. For Collins’s correspondence, see The Letters of Wilkie Collins, vol. 2 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969). Concerns of representation in The Moonstone have been addressed by David Shaw in Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). Shaw locates the mystery of criminal detection within a larger crisis of hermeneutical effort and historical reconstruction as played out by texts such as Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. He perceives rival theories of detection in the novel reflecting rival theories of history, as expressed by David Friedrich Strauss and H. T. Buckle, arguing that “every attempt . . . to combine these two contradictory views of history—the Hegelian and the positivist—precipitate a crisis in representation” (289). 9. The article that inaugurated the debate on Collins and imperialism was John R. Reed’s “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone,” Clio 2 (1973): 281–290. Reed’s argument that Collins exposes imperial plunder has been echoed by several critics who followed. Patricia Miller Frick has argued for the superiority of the heroic Indians in “Wilkie Collins’ ‘Little Jewel’: The Meaning of The Moonstone,” Philological Quarterly 63:3 (1984): 313–321, as do Arthur Lieberman and David H. Galerstein in “The Signs of the Moonstone,” Baker Street Journal, 1994:71–74. Opposing viewpoints such as Ashish Roy, “The Fabulous Imperial Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 657–681, see The Moonstone as a justification of empire-building, given the restoration of Hindu ascendancy over Muslim domination through British intervention that transpires at the end. Robert Crooks, “Reopening the Mysteries: Colonialist Logic and Cultural Difference in The Moonstone and The Horse Latitudes,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 4:3 (1993): 215–228, perceives Collins as displacing heterogeneity of self as epitomized in Blake’s unconscious thieving onto “the larger more threatening alterity” of Hindu India (220), with gaps in explanations for the logic of motives in both cases. Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women Empire and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) dismisses the importance of the prologue, viewing Collins as replacing an older, militaristic model of imperialism with a hegemonic order that transpires through surveillance and discipline, as represented by Jennings. 10. Lillian Nayder, “Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Victorian Britain: ‘Discipline,’ ‘Dialogue’ and Collins’s Critique of Empire in The Moonstone,”

188

Notes

Dickens Studies Annual 21 (1991): 13–31, addresses Betteredge’s role as Man Friday, and the ironies of his connections with the exploited native. D. A. Miller, The Novel and The Police (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), asserts that the dialogism of Collins’s eleven narrators with multiple class identities is a ruse, since the monologic prevails through the policing functions of detective fiction. Peter Gordon Thoms, Detection and its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (Athens: Ohio UP, 1998) deems detective fiction to be inherently self-reflexive, but does not explore how servant narration participates in such narrative concerns. 11. Critical attention towards Collins’s use of deformity and freakishness has focused on figures such as Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White and Miserimus Dexter in The Law and the Lady. See D. A. Miller’s discussion of Marion Halcombe in The Novel and the Police. Teresa Mangum addresses the character of Miserimus Dexter and the unfeminine woman detective in her essay on The Law and the Lady, entitled “Wilkie Collins, Detection and Deformity,” Dickens Studies Annual 26 (1998): 285–310. 12. For a reading that conflates sexual and colonial exploitation, see, for instance, Jaya Mehta, “English Romance; Indian Violence,” Cennetennial Review 39:4 (1995): 611–657.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. See Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S. O. Beeton, 1861) 968. 2. For a view that aligns Poole with repression and the Law of the Father, see William Veeder, “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy,” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde After One Hundred Years, eds. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For a view that sees Poole as a “part of the substructure of patriarchy,” see Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 245. 3. See Charles Booth, ed. Life and Labour of the People of London, Vol.8 (London: Macmillan, 1896), 224. 4. See David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 110. 5. R. L. Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. 2, 1880–87, ed. Sidney Colvin, (New York: Greenwood, 1969). 6. R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (1888), ed. Jenni Calder (London: Penguin, 1979). All future references are from this text. 7. See Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 71. 8. Many critics have noted the way writing in this text functions as pharmakon. Ronald Thomas, “The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and the Voices of Modern Fiction,” in William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: After One Hundred Years, (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1988), 73–93, sees it as the formula that Jekyll has used to regain his identity after having lost it for a time to Hyde (74). 9. Derrida, 146. 10. Jekyll and Hyde, 97. 11. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982, 96. 12. Jekyll and Hyde, 34.

Notes

189

13. See Elaine Showalter, “Dr. Jekyll’s Closet,” in The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature, ed. Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 67–88. 14. Jekyll and Hyde, 46. 15. See John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). 16. Jekyll and Hyde, 65–68 17. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. See Percival Leigh, The Comic English Grammar, A New and Facetious Introduction to the English Tongue by the Author of the Comic Latin Grammar (London: Richard Bentley, 1848). 2. Condemnation of Munby’s treatment of Cullwick has gained great critical attention. For instance, see Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England” in Sex and Class in Women’s History, eds. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith Walkowitz (London: Routledge, 1983), 16–71. See also Griselda Pollack, “The Dangers of Proximity: The Spaces of Sexuality and Surveillance in Word and Image,” Discourse16:2 (1992–93): 3–50. 3. For interest in race as a dimension to the Cullwick-Munby relationship, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995). 4. For the letters of Munby, and his own response to working-class femininity, see Derek Hudson’s Munby: A Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Writing of Arthur J. Munby, 1828–1910 (New York: Gambit Press, 1972). 5. For views that perceive of Walter’s treatment of servant women as dehumanizing, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: New American Library, 1966); see also Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism and Depiction of Female Violation,” in Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, ed. Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 47–67. This fits Michael Mason’s observation in The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) that Munby and Walter are at the opposite ends of a sexual spectrum, despite both sharing the same need for release from sexual repression and shame: Munby the timid virgin, is the complete antithesis of Walter, the sexual omnipotent. For a critique of Cullwick as visual object and reading subject, see Barry Reed, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London: Reaktion, 2002). 6. The debate about what constitutes the pornographic is, of course, a complex one. The standard position, as held by Andrea Dworkin, is of classic pornography being a representation of men’s unquestioned sexual power over women. See, for instance, her essay “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drusilla Cornell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 19–38. She has been challenged by critics like Kaja Silvermann, Male Subjectivty at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), and Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), who are prepared to see it as a fantasy that addresses men’s felt lack of power. See also Catharine Mackinnon’s essay “Only Words,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drusilla Cornell, 121–129). See William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The

190 Notes

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke UP, 1996) for a specifically Victorian focus on this subject. See The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (London: Virago, 1984). All subsequent references are to this text. See Richard Savage, The Vulgarisms and Improprieties of the English Language (London: n.p., 1833). Cullwick, 66. See for instance, the episode in Chapter 2 of H. G. Wells’s Love and Mr. Lewisham (1899) (London: Penguin, 2005), where a schoolmaster discovers a half-written imposition that flutters from the grasp of a young woman, only to realize he has assigned it himself to his students. Harriet WMN, “Seduction by Chloroform” (50 Holywell St.: J.Turner, 1850). All subsequent references are to this text. Interest in this new advance in medical science was evident in periodical literature of the times. See, for instance, “Chloroform,” Bentley’s Miscellany 34 (1853): 33; “Chloroform,” Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal New Series 8 (1847): 393; “Chloroform” Household Words: A Weekly Journal 3 (1851): 151. For the dubious position of surgeons in Victorian pornographic writing, see Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003). Rosenman notes that Victorian surgeons believed they could control the sexual connotations to human anatomy by placing them in a scientific context, yet Dr. Kahn’s infamous exhibit of the “anatomical Venus” quickly generated public outrage (38–39). See also The Amatory Experience of a Surgeon (1881), (Moscow: Printed for the Nihilists, 1881), a pornographic text, where the surgeon as sexual predator declares: “We medical men are not ignorant of the secret pangs and unruly desires that consume the bashful virgin” (33). See, for instance, Kipling’s “Slaves of the Lamp” (1897), in Stalky and Co., ed. Isabel Quigley (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 61, where schoolboys discuss the policy of “beastliness” being the sole ground for expulsion. For a discussion of Victorian prostitution, see Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallen-ness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). “Brown on the Throne” (London: Montague, Smith, Chapman, Lee, & Co., 1871). All subsequent references are from this text. In the nineteenth century, Dr. Johnson remained a topic of periodical articles from time to time. See, for example, “Dr. Samuel Johnson and Warburton,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 8 (1820–21): 243; “Dictionary of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” by F. Lawrence, Sharpe’s London Journal of Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading 10 (1849): 221; “Ghost of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 1 (1859): 92; “Dr. Samuel Johnson, A House in Bolt Court,” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 1 (1859): 93, 251; “Dr. Samuel Johnson from a Scottish View,” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 23, New Series 3 (1869–70): 561. See Henry Alford, The Queen’s English: A Manual of Idiom and Usage (London: Longman and Green, 1864). See Alexander Crombie, The Etymology and Syntax of the English Language (London: J. Johnson, 1802). Crombie’s grammar went through many editions during the Victorian age.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. Theories of autobiography frequently assume “selfhood” as a given. Most notable for our purposes, Phillippe Lejune, Moi aussi (Paris: Seuil, 1986),

Notes

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

191

offers Lejune’s well-known and well-accepted definition, that autobiography is a “retrospective prose story that a real person relates about his or her own existence, in which he or she gives emphasis to his or her individual life, and to the history of his or her personality in particular” (14), while quoting from his own theoretical work, La pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Michael Ryan, “Self-Evidence,” Diacritics, June 1980: 10–14, cautions against the bourgeois illusion of the self as free from ideological pressures. See E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 165. For an elucidation of these phases, see Regina Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140. John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent’s The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, 1790–1900 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984) offers comprehensive listings of life history by the laboring classes of Victorian England. Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, Written by Herself (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street, 1844); William Hay Leith Tester (La Teste), Poems, 2nd ed, enlarged with autobiography (Elgin: 1857); Janet Bathgate, Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow in the Beginning of the Century (Selkirk: George Lewis & Son, 1872); The Christian Watt Papers, ed. David Fraser (Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1983). All subsequent quotations are from these editions. The question of the factual in autobiography is, of course, also a rhetorical stance. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” Modern Language Notes 94:5 (1979): 919–930, noted that the autobiographical “I” was not the self but its rhetorical surrogate; hence for de Man the inevitable defacement that autobiography entailed. See Ramon Saldivar, “Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography” Diacritics, Sept. 1985: 25–34, for an essay that examines the impact of powerlessness upon the autobiographies of historically marginal subjects. The absence of interiority may produce generic variation as noted in the hybridity of Victorian life writing, by L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism and Practice (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994). Hybridity has also been noted of women’s autobiography, for which see Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). David Amigioni, ed. Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) makes the point that “identities, communities and constituencies emerged out of, to borrow Raymond Williams’s term, a long revolution in communication” (9). Tester’s boastful life history may be read in context of the view that Victorian life writing was written by and about men “who did what they intended to do,” for which see A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (London: Collins, 1974), 18; see also Trev Lynne Broughton, Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/ Biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999). For corroborations of the view of autobiography as a hybrid genre, see Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989). The impact of spiritual autobiography on Victorian women’s autobiography has been noted by Linda Peterson; also see Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). See Burnett, Mayall, and Vincent for the view that autobiographies of selfimprovement “are the product of the growing use of literacy within the working class community” (xvi).

192 Notes 13. Watt’s response to these episodes suggests that the private self is of little concern, even for a woman who has suffered mental collapse. For views on women’s autobiography that address the private self as a serious preoccupation, see Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 14. For the view that autobiography invites us to move from the text to the world and back again, see Clinton Machann, The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. 15. Servant autobiography seems almost to anticipate the conflicted selfhood of Louis Althusser, who offered two autobiographies, one before and another after the murder of his wife. 16. See Celeste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (1973), trans. Barbara Fray, ed. Georges Belmont (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976).

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. See Arthur Munby, “At the Window,” Poems Chiefly Lyric and Elegaic (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1901), 87. 2. See, for instance, Margaret Forster, Lady’s Maid (New York: Random House, 1990), the historical novel on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s relations with her maidservant. Also Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (London: Figtree, 2007), the scholarly biographical study on Woolf and her indifference to her domestics.

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Index

A Adventures of Fanny Hill, The, 10 Albaret, Celeste, 176, Monsieur Proust, 176 Alford, Henry, 17, 140; The Queen’s English: A Manual of Idiom and Usage, 17 All the Year Round, 5, 89, 190 Althusser,Louis, 192 Amatory Experience of a Surgeon, The, 190 Anderson, Amanda, 39, 190 Arnold, Matthew, 20, and Culture and Anarchy, 20; and Friendship’s Garland, 20 Ashford, Mary Ann, 149, 179 and The Life of a Licensed Victualler’s daughter, Written by Herself, 150–58 Athenaeum, The, 28 Auerbach, Eric, 181

B Babbleton Book Club, The, 12–13, 81 Bakhtin, Mikail, 23 Balfour, C.L. , 21; “Domestic Service,” 21 Bathgate, Janet, 149, 164–170, 173; Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow, 164–170 Baxter, R.D., 20 Beatson, Alexander, 88, 89, 91; A View of the Origins and Conduct of the War with Tippoo Sultan, 89 Beeton, Isabella, 1, 106, 123, A Book of Household Management, 106 Blake, William, 35; Songs of Innocence, 35

Boal Augustus, The Theater of the Oppressed, 74 Booth, Charles, 20, 107, 147 Brantlinger, Patrick, 181 Briggs, Asa, 20 Brittlebank, Kate, 88 Bronte, Emily, 22, 54, and Wuthering Heights, 22, 26, 56–79, 173 Broome, Lady, 17 Brown, John, 138 Brown on the Throne 7–8, 125, 138–145 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 179 Buchanan, Francis, 88 Buckler, F.W., 89 Buckley, Theodore, 12 Bunyan, John, 152, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 165

C Callow, Philip, 5 Cannadine, David, 20–21, 95, 107 Carlyle, Thomas, 21 Chaucer, Geoffery, 25; Canterbury Tales, The, 25, 105 Chloroform, 132–138, 190 Clarissa, 19 Cohen, William, 190 Collins, William Wilkie, 25, and Moonstone, The, 22, 23, 27, 87–105 Cornhill Magazine, The, 17 Crombie, Alexander, 142, The Etymology and Syntax of the English Language, 142 Crossack, Geoffery, 55 Crowe, Catherine, 22, 26, 172; and Susan Hopley or The Adventures of a Maidservant, 22, 23,

206 Index 26, 42–53; 150–151, 172, 179 Cullwick, Hannah, 17, 18, 19, 125– 131, 174, 179; The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, 125–131

D Derrida, Jacques, 31, 111, 112, 183 de Man, Paul, 122 Devine, Harriet, 32 Dickens, Charles, 5–7, 90, 154 and “Nurse’s Stories,” 5–7; Little Dorrit 6 Disraeli, Benjamin, 20 Dirom, Alexander, 91

J Jackson, H.J., 33 Jacobs, Diane, 183 Jane Eyre, 31, 107 Jay, Elizabeth, 56 Jefferson, Thomas, 31 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 190 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 20

K Kirkpatrick, William, 88 Kirmani, Mir Hussain Ali, 89 Kitchener, William, 1; The Housekeeper’s Oracle, 1

E

L

Edinburgh Review, 54 Eliot, George, 17; “Servant’s Logic,” 17–18

La Teste, see Tester Leigh Percival, 124; Comic English Grammar, The 124 Lejune, Phillipe, 190–91 Levi Strauss, Claude, 24; Triste Tropiques, 24 London Female Mission Society, 8 London Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Servants, 8

F Forster’s Education Act, 1870, 7, 12, 138 Foster, John, 55 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 120

G Gagnier, Regina, 191 Gaskell, Elizabeth 5, 22, 26; Diaries, 79; The Further Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, 79; The Life of Charlotte Bronte, 5, 56–57; and “Old Nurse’s Story, The,” 27, 79–86 Gray, R.Q. 55

H Haider Ali, 88 Hegel, G.W.F, 117 Helps, Arthur, 21; The Claims of Labour: An Essay on the Duties of the Employer to the Employed, 21 Horn, Pamela, 181 Household Words, 84, 88, 90, Houseman, Henry, 12; The Dignity of Service and Other Sermons, Especially Addressed to Servants, 12, 87

M Marcus, Steven, 190 Mayhew, Charles and Augustus, 11 147; The Greatest Plague of Life, or The Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant, 11–12; London Labour and the London Poor, 20 Michael, Ian, 17 Morning Post, The, 16 Mrs. Motherly, The Servant’s Behaviour Book, 29 Munby, Arthur, 17, 18, 19, 125–131, 178; “Faithful Servants: Being Epitaphs and Obituaries Recording Their Names and Services,” 28; Poems Chiefly Lyric and Elegaic, 178

N Nayder, Lillian, 90 Neshan-i-Haidari, 89 Newman, John Henry, 152

I

O

Indian Mutiny, 1857, 88

Ong, Walter, 113

Index P Paine, Thomas, 31 Pamela, 1–2 Peterson, Linda, 191 Pratt, Mary Louise, 25 Proust, Marcel, 176, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 176 Punch Magazine, 13–17

R Richardson, Samuel, 1–2, 146 Robbins,Bruce, 181 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, 190 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 29, 31, 122; Emile, 32; Julie or the New Heloise, 33, 34–35; Confessions, 35 Ruskin, John, 1, 152; Of Queen’s Gardens, 1

S Saldivar, Ramon, 191 Savage, W.H., 127; The Vulgarisms and Improprieties of the English Language, 127 “Sermon for Sepoys, A,” 88 Servants’ Magazine, The, 9–10, 13, 21–22, 43, 55, 147, 148 Shakespeare, William, 2, 38, 53; Romeo and Juliet, 2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 161 Spivak, Gayatri, 38, 175 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 5, 22, 27, 28, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The, 22, 23, 27, 106–123; letter to Symonds, 107–108; letter to Sidney Colvin, 108

T Tester, William Hay Leith (La Teste), 149, 158–164, 179; “The Flunkey’s Recommendation” 158–160; Autobiography 160–163 Tholfsen, Trygve, 55 Thompson, F.M.L., 87 Tippoo Sultan 88–89 Todd, Janet, 183 Tupper, Martin, 141

V Veeder, William, 117 Victoria, Queen, 18, and Munshi, 18

207

Victorians servants and Class 20–22; 107–108, 147–148, 182; grammar and the Standard 17, 124, 127, 140, 142, 143, 144; pornography, 10–11, 18, 19–20, 113, 114–116, 124, 125–127, 131–138, 144, 145–146, 159–162, 190. See also Amanda Anderson, William Cohen, Steven Marcus, and Ellen Bayuk Rosenman; reading preferences 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 55, 135, 141, 147, 150–151, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 172; orality, 5–7, 56–57; writing 3, 7, 18–19, 28, 124, 126–128, 134, 139, 147–148, 151, 156, 157, 159, 160–161, 162, 164, 167, 169–170, 172 Vincent, David, 181

W Walter, 10; My Secret Life, 10–11 Watkins, George, 8; Friendly Hints to Female Servants, 8–9; Hints and Observations Seriously Addressed to Heads of families with Female Servants, 54 Watt, Christian, 28, 149, 170–175, 179; The Christian Watt Papers, 170–175 Wellesley, Richard, 89, 92 Wilks, Mark, 88, 89; Historical Sketches of South Indian History, 89 William Ewart Act, 1850, 12 WMN Harriet, 132; “Seduction by Chloroform,” 132–138 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 26, 28, 52, 172; Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, 26, 29–42, 52–53, 172; Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 29–30; The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, 32–33; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 31, 32; and Marguerite, 29–30, 183, See also Janet Todd and Diane Jacobs; and Rousseau 32–33 Wordsworth, William, 162, The Prelude, 162 Woolf, Virginia, 179