Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. first edition - 1900
This is the first time I have read one of M.E. Braddon's (1835-1915) novels. Opposite the title page is a list of (some?) of her works - they totalled 62 by 1900 - led by her most famous novel, Lady Audley's Secret. In fact, according to the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association (MEBA), a literary organisation founded in 2013 to promote international interest in the life and works of the author and subtitled Sensational Victorian, she wrote over 90 novels, 150 short stories, as well as numerous plays and articles. She takes up 41 pages in Robert Lee Wolff's Nineteenth-Century Fiction; he also wrote Sensational Victorian, The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Garland, 1979). Apart from the usual information about the first edition, a Note is added: MEB's diaries report that she "planned" this novel on January 17, 1898, and wrote it largely between then and the end of May, revising it at leisure, over the summer. A historical romance introducing Wesley and Whitefield, it deals chiefly with the intertwined themes of sex, money, philanthropy and religion, which preoccupied her during her last fifteen years.
Braddon's own life would make a fascinating novel. Born to a Cornish solicitor and an Irish journalist, she was educated at a private girls' school after her parents split up. Using a stage name, Mary Seyton she started on an acting career, aged 22, to support her mother and herself. This lasted for three years; once she started writing novels, this change of career took over. In 1860, she met John Maxwell (1824-1895), who published periodicals and moved (with her mother!) in with him in 1861. He was married with five children, but his wife was in a mental institution; only when the latter died in 1874, did Mary and Maxwell get married. By 1864, she had two children with a third shortly expected. They eventually had six children. In 1866, she founded the Belgravia Magazine. She lived finally in Richmond and was buried in the town's cemetery. She has a plaque in the parish church and several local streets are named after characters in her novels.
What I enjoyed most about The Infidel was the feeling I could engage with the characters; they became very real to me, whether I had sympathy for them or not. In Chapter I, Grub-Street Scribblers, we are pitched straight into the lives of William Thornton and his daughter Antonia (the Infidel of the book). They work together at the trade of letters. Father contributed verse as well as prose to periodicals; he wrote sermons - he, the unfrocked priest, the audacious infidel, who believed in nothing better than this earth upon which he and his kindred worms were crawling; nothing to come after the tolling bell, no recompense for sorrow here, no reunion with the beloved dead - only the sexton and the spade, and the forgotten grave. Thornton, as curate-in-charge of a remote Lincolnshire parish, had eloped with a farmer's daughter - a strapping wench of eighteen - and £200 from her father's cashbox. Caught in London about to sail for Jersey, Thornton did 2 years (of a 5 year sentence), coming out a rank atheist, a scoffer of all things holy, a scorner of all men who called themselves Christians...a natural product of that dark age which went before the Great Revival - the age when not to be a Deist and a scoffer was to be out of fashion. This is the milieu in which his daughter Antonia (Tonia) is brought up. Now 20 years-old, she is well educated, a lover of books but a despiser of religion - a hideous superstition of the dark ages. Voltaire and those of his ilk were her gods. The fascinating account of how Antonia has to address an increasing awareness and confrontation with Christian beliefs and its upholders, notably George Whitefield and John Wesley, forms a core of the book.
One of Antonia's few friends is the 29 year-old Patty Lester, a low-ranked and indolent actress at Drury Lane. Thornton tells his daughter, "I don't want you to imitate her", but Patty's companionship is a relief from the monotony of literary toil. Patty persuades Antonia to go with her to Mrs. Mandalay's dancing-rooms; Thornton gets two tickets from his old friend, and Irish peer Lord Kilrush. Initially horrified - "Oh, father, don't leave me among this rabble. I shall die of disgust if any one speaks to me..." - she is introduced to Kilrush, who looked young at a distance, but old, or at best middle-aged, when he came near her, the man who is destined to affect her life thereafter. His wife had long ago run away with his bosom friend and he was determined not to be entrapped in wedlock again. Both are intellectually stimulated by the other and become fast friends. However, lust must out and Kilrush amazes and repels Antonia by declaring his desires - not for marriage but for a carnal relationship. Disaster. She declines and he retreats - to Tunbridge Wells. Then, back to London and out to Clapham, where we meet the third major figure in the tale.
Twenty-nine year-old George Stobart, late of a famous dragoon regiment, lives with his mother Maria, the widow of a Bristol shipowner. She is Kilrush's first cousin and George is likely to be the heir to the childless peer. However, two years ago in 1749, at an evening service in John Wesley's chapel at the Old Foundery, George had been "convinced of sin". His mother is not happy: "Oh, those Oxford Methodists! You have caught their jargon. I am a good churchwoman, George, and I hate cant". Worse, George is determined to marry a young seamstress, Lucy Foreman, daughter of a journeyman printer, her mother a drunkard and her father an atheist. Her home was a hell upon earth. To Kilrush, she is a pretty bit of plebeian pink-and-white. True to his word, he disinherits George after the young man refuses to give up Lucy. In fact, George marries her.
Kilrush tries once more with Antonia. Saying "Marriage is the gate of hell" is not the way to win her. Suggesting another relationship pours oil on troubled waters: "You are determined to take no second wife; and I am determined to be no man's mistress". So off Kilrush goes again, not to Tunbridge Wells but abroad - but not before giving Thornton an income of £100 a quarter. Two years go by. Then Antonio is summoned to the deathbed of Kilrush. His pride has vanished and he asks her to marry him! "I want your love to follow me in death". And she succumbs. But, there is a caveat: "I have married you to make you mine beyond the grave...you are mind by this bond...swear that you will be true to me, that you will never give yourself to another man." The irony, which pursues Antonia for the rest of her life is how can a Voltarian, a contrarian so far as religion is concerned, believe in immortality, the fairy-tale of faith.
The reader is only on page 93 of a 341 page novel, but the rest of the tale is simply how Antonia first simply delights in the new-found wealth bequeathed to her - she become the belle of the London scene - then gets drawn into good works, after meeting George Stobart, and increasingly questions the very beliefs impregnated in her by her father and held for so long. She is clear to Stobart: "I have no religious views. I have no religion except the love of my fellow-creatures. I have never been a believer in Christianity as a creed, though I can admire Jesus of Nazareth as a philanthropist, and grieve for him as a martyr to the cruelty of man." What she does do, is regularly provide sustenance to the poor from Kilrush's legacy. Stobart, who is very much a muscular Christian and no quietist, increasingly works with Antonia and, then, blots his copybook. Although married, with a devoted but simple wife and a young son, he crosses the same boundary that Kilrush did. Whilst Antonia increasingly loves his company, poor Stobart's heart was beating furiously...this man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God...Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's soul - a woman's ineffable beauty. He throws himself upon her, drawing her averted face towards his own with a wild violence, till her brow touched his, and his lips were pressed against her burning cheek. She is angrily aghast: "You devil. You that I took for a saint! I will not breathe the same air with you." Like Kilrush, he flees abroad; rejoining the army to serve in North America under General Amherst. The distraught Antonia flung herself with a new zest and eagerness into the modish whirlpool.
Meanwhile, another peer, this time from Scotland, Lord Dunkeld, begins to hover around Antonia. Thankfully for both, the friendship remains just that. Additionally, Antonia meets and comes under the influence of John Wesley (the author is much more positive about him than she is of Whitefield). She doubles down on using her wealth and time to help those in need, whilst withdrawing further from the empty 'society' life she was once drenched in. In many ways, though, she is still 'The Infidel'; not even Wesley can change that. Awakening had been no sudden act, like the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, but a gradual change in her whole nature, the widening of her sympathies, the growth of pity and of love. It was not of Christ the Sacrifice she thought, not of his atoning blood; but of Jesus the Great Exemplar, of Jesus who went about doing good. It was the doctrine of 'good works', to which the Methodists attached only a secondary merit.
I will not disclose the ending, as it would spoil it for anyone deciding to read this thought-provoking, 'deep' novel. It deals with friendship at different levels (Patty Lester is possibly Antonia's truest friend); with religious fervour, its width of compassion but also its narrowmindedness; with philanthropy and hypocrisy; with spiritual and carnal love. The London Quarterly Review (1904) said: Mrs. Braddon reproduces the people, the scenes, the atmosphere, the spirit of the eighteenth century, and she describes the work and the influence of Methodism with insight and sympathy. One feels that, perhaps, Antonia's happiest times were spent with her father in the garret in Grub Street.
No comments:
Post a Comment