Janet's Repentance E-Book

George Eliot

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

"...the inhabitants became more intensely conscious of the value they set upon all their advantages, when innovation made its appearance in the person of the Rev. Mr Tryan, the new curate..." When Mr Tryan arrives in Milby, with his disturbingly Evangelical and puritan tendencies, the small town is deeply divided in a bitter fight over the suitability of his evening lectures. The proud but desolate Janet Dempster, alcoholic wife of one of Mr Tryan's most vociferous opponents, delights in the clergyman's persecution – until she unexpectedly finds her own redemption. Written when she was on the brink of her career as a novelist, Janet's Repentance is the third volume in George Eliot's masterly Scenes of Clerical Life.

Leseprobe

Janet’s Repentance

George Eliot

Foreword byKathryn Hughes

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street

London W1W 5PF

www.hesperus.press

First published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1857; published together with ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858.

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2007

eBook edition published in 2025

Foreword © Kathryn Hughes, 2007

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-158-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-84391-333-7

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Kathryn Hughes

Janet’s Repentance

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Notes

Biographical Note

Foreword

Kathryn Hughes

The thing that immediately strikes you about Janet’s Repentance is its absolute modernity. The heroine is a battered woman who has taken to drink as a way of softening the horror of her daily existence. Her husband’s alcohol-fuelled rages are less about any particular tensions in the marriage than his bullying need to control the person closest to hand. One day, after years of feeling she deserves no better, Janet Dempster finally finds the courage to leave her tormentor and admit to outsiders what has really been going on for the past fifteen years. Following a period of psychological struggle, during which she learns to depend on the support of her friends and family, our heroine finally conquers her cravings for the bottle.

So far, so neatly analogous: you can read this kind of redemptive tale in any mid-market newspaper or magazine today. This, though, is not the only contemporary echo in the concluding part of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. At first reading, the background story of a community coming to blows – literally – over religious doctrine might seem to have little to do with modern Britain. However, you have only to look at the way that the worldwide Anglican Communion is in danger of splitting over the ordination of female and gay clergy to see a parallel. Far from being a whiskery controversy with no possible application to life in the twenty-first century, the vicious falling-out between the Tryanites and the rest of church-going Milby becomes a cautionary tale about what happens when true religion gets perverted by arid sectarianism.

Of course, this is not to suggest that Janet’s Repentance springs crisply off the page like a modern novel. Much of the writing, especially when concerned with the spiritual struggles of Janet Dempster and Edgar Tryan, has the kind of melodramatic quality that instantly marks it out as ‘Victorian’. You lose count of the times that Janet – a provincial lawyer’s wife – is described in terms that turn her into a madonna, albeit a childless one. Tryan, meanwhile, with his fevered willingness to sacrifice his life for the sake of his flock, is as close as you can get to Christ while still remaining an Evangelical clergyman of gentlemanly stock. Both figures seem to hover several inches off the ground as they move through a landscape that reverently arranges itself to amplify their every fleeting mood. Thus a smile on Janet’s face ‘plays like the sunbeams on the storm-beaten beauty of the full and ripened corn’ while Mr Tryan makes his first appearance wearing a halo of sunshine. Sun and storm, trees and flowers, clouds and cold are pressed into service by the narrator to create two characters who start to feel, in some key sense, supernatural.

What is so odd about this elevated and highly wrought prose is that it lies in direct opposition to the kind of writing that Eliot was self-consciously trying to do. Smarting under a suggestion from her conventionally minded publisher John Blackwood that she soften what he saw as a rather coarse story about a drunken married woman forming an inappropriately close relationship with her pastor, Eliot declared defensively that her art was ‘real and concrete’ rather than ‘ideal and eclectic’. In other words, she intended to paint people and communities as they really were, rather than how sentimental readers, including Blackwood, wished them to be.

It is not fanciful, I think, to see Janet’s Repentance – the last piece of short fiction Eliot produced before embarking upon the full-length novels she had waited so long to write – as the place where she begins to wrestle with the challenges inherent in the literary genre that she has chosen to pursue. Her avowed intention is to show the life of the provincial lower middle classes of thirty years ago in all their unloveliness. Here are the people from whom she has sprung with their dropped aitches, silly feuds over small properties and, on the distaff side at least, an obsession with the minutiae of good housekeeping. In the masculine bluster of the Red Lion and the competitive chit-chat of Mrs Linnet’s parlour you feel Eliot working from memory, summoning up the flat vowels and petty concerns that furnished her own childhood community in the Midlands. Even if you did not know that the controversy surrounding Mr Tryan’s robust ministry was based on actual events recalled from Eliot’s youth, you would still feel that you are in the hands of a narrator who has seen at first hand the impact of the Evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century on the small urbanising communities of provincial Britain.

Yet, simultaneously, it is also clear that Eliot has not yet worked out how to get her main story-bearing characters to interact with this minutely realised background. Instead, as we have seen, Janet and Tryan appear to have all the qualities of slightly damaged saints. Janet, for all she is supposed to be an alcoholic, is never seen the least bit tipsy. Her beauty, we are told, is only enhanced by the faint physical traces of her addiction. There are references to her earlier ‘satire’, but we see none of that in the luminous and bountiful figure whose ‘purest enjoyment’ is visiting the poor. Mr Tryan’s saintliness, meanwhile, is barely dented by an unconvincing back-story, in which he is revealed as being a corruptor of women, or at least one woman in particular. (So clunky and unlikely was this inserted narrative that even Lewes, Eliot’s normally loyal partner, privately admitted that it was a mistake.)

The overall effect of Janet’s Repentance, then, is of a minutely realised social landscape against which a spiritual love affair between two monumental figures is played out. If the background and the foreground refuse ever quite to meet, and indeed seem to be always out of scale, it is less to do with Eliot’s status as a literary beginner than the problems inherent in the kind of fiction that she was trying to write. Creating a chorus of red-nosed bigots and thin-lipped matrons is one thing, but Eliot quickly found that there were limits to the aesthetic pleasures of strict realism. When it came to creating a hero and heroine Eliot, like her readers, wanted comparative youth, beauty and goodness. In the end Janet Dempster and Edgar Tryan are the first of a whole series of heroic and idealised central characters – Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda and even the incomparable Dorothea Brooke – who wander through George Eliot’s ruined universe, unable quite to comprehend the littleness of the world in which they have been set down.

Janet’s Repentance

1

‘No!’ said Lawyer Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, ‘as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralising, Methodistical⁠1 doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction for half a century.’

It was very warm everywhere that evening, but especially in the bar of the Red Lion at Milby, where Mr Dempster was seated mixing his third glass of brandy and water. He was a tall and rather massive man, and the front half of his large surface was so well dredged with snuff, that the cat, having inadvertently come near him, had been seized with a severe fit of sneezing – an accident which, being cruelly misunderstood, had caused her to be driven contumeliously from the bar. Mr Dempster habitually held his chin tucked in, and his head hanging forward, weighed down, perhaps, by a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between which his closely clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and new-mown table land.⁠2 The only other observable features were puffy cheeks and a protruding yet lipless mouth. Of his nose I can only say that it was snuffy; and as Mr Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at anything in particular, it would have been difficult to swear to the colour of his eyes.

‘Well! I’ll not stick at giving myself trouble to put down such hypocritical cant,’ said Mr Tomlinson, the rich miller. ‘I know well enough what your Sunday evening lectures are good for – for wenches to meet their sweethearts, and brew mischief. There’s work enough with the servant-maids as it is – such as I never heard the like of in my mother’s time, and it’s all along o’ your schooling and newfangled plans. Give me a servant as can nayther read nor write, I say, and doesn’t know the year o’ the Lord as she was born in. I should like to know what good those Sunday schools have done, now. Why, the boys used to go a-birds-nesting of a Sunday morning; and a capital thing too – ask any farmer; and very pretty it was to see the strings o’ heggs hanging up in poor people’s houses. You’ll not see ’em nowhere now.’

‘Pooh!’ said Mr Luke Byles, who piqued himself on his reading, and was in the habit of asking casual acquaintances if they knew anything of Hobbes⁠3. ‘It is right enough that the lower orders should be instructed. But this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down. In point of fact, these Evangelicals are not churchmen at all; they’re no better than Presbyterians.’

‘Presbyterians? what are they?’ enquired Mr Tomlinson, who often said his father had given him ‘no eddication, and he didn’t care who knowed it; he could buy up most o’ th’ eddicated men he’d ever come across.’

‘The Presbyterians,’ said Mr Dempster, in rather a louder tone than before, holding that every appeal for information must naturally be addressed to him, ‘are a sect founded in the reign of Charles I, by a man named John Presbyter, who hatched all the brood of Dissenting⁠4 vermin that crawl about in dirty alleys, and circumvent the lord of the manor in order to get a few yards of ground for their pigeon-house conventicles.’ ‘No, no, Dempster,’ said Mr Luke Byles, ‘you’re out there. Presbyterianism is derived from the word presbyter, meaning an elder.’⁠5

‘Don’t contradict me, sir!’ stormed Dempster. ‘I say the word presbyterian is derived from John Presbyter, a miserable fanatic who wore a suit of leather, and went about from town to village, and from village to hamlet, inoculating the vulgar with the asinine virus of Dissent.’

‘Come, Byles, that seems a deal more likely,’ said Mr Tomlinson, in a conciliatory tone, apparently of opinion that history was a process of ingenious guessing. ‘It’s not a question of likelihood; it’s a known fact. I could fetch you my Encyclopaedia, and show it you this moment.’

‘I don’t care a straw, sir, either for you or your Encyclopaedia,’ said Mr Dempster, ‘a farrago of false information, of which you picked up an imperfect copy in a cargo of waste paper. Will you tell me, sir, that I don’t know the origin of Presbyterianism? I, sir, a man known through the county, entrusted with the affairs of half a score parishes; while you, sir, are ignored by the very fleas that infest the miserable alley in which you were bred.’

A loud and general laugh, with ‘You’d better let him alone Byles’; ‘You’ll not get the better of Dempster in a hurry’, drowned the retort of the too well-informed Mr Byles, who, white with rage, rose and walked out of the bar.

‘A meddlesome, upstart, Jacobinical fellow, gentlemen,’ continued Mr Dempster. ‘I was determined to be rid of him. What does he mean by thrusting himself into our company? A man with about as much principle as he has property, which, to my knowledge, is considerably less than none. An insolvent atheist, gentlemen. A deistical prater, fit to sit in the chimney-corner of a pot-house, and make blasphemous comments on the one greasy newspaper fingered by beer-swilling tinkers. I will not suffer in my company a man who speaks lightly of religion. The signature of a fellow like Byles would be a blot on our protest.’

‘And how do you get on with your signatures?’ said Mr Pilgrim, the doctor, who had presented his large top-booted person within the bar while Mr Dempster was speaking. Mr Pilgrim had just returned from one of his long day’s rounds among the farmhouses, in the course of which he had sat down to two hearty meals that might have been mistaken for dinners if he had not declared them to be ‘snaps’; and as each snap had been followed by a few glasses of ‘mixture’, containing a less liberal proportion of water than the articles he himself labelled with that broadly generic name, he was in that condition which his groom indicated with poetic ambiguity by saying that ‘master had been in the sunshine’. Under these circumstances, after a hard day, in which he had really had no regular meal, it seemed a natural relaxation to step into the bar of the Red Lion, where, as it was Saturday evening, he should be sure to find Dempster, and hear the latest news about the protest against the evening lecture.

‘Have you hooked Ben Landor yet?’ he continued, as he took two chairs, one for his body, and the other for his right leg.

‘No,’ said Mr Budd, the churchwarden, shaking his head; ‘Ben Landor has a way of keeping himself neutral in everything, and he doesn’t like to oppose his father. Old Landor is a regular Tryanite. But we haven’t got your name yet, Pilgrim.’ ‘Tut tut, Budd,’ said Mr Dempster, sarcastically, ‘you don’t expect Pilgrim to sign? He’s got a dozen Tryanite livers under his treatment. Nothing like cant and Methodism for producing a superfluity of bile.’

‘Oh, I thought, as Pratt had declared himself a Tryanite, we should be sure to get Pilgrim on our side.’

Mr Pilgrim was not a man to sit quiet under a sarcasm, nature having endowed him with a considerable share of self-defensive wit. In his most sober moments he had an impediment in his speech, and as copious gin and water stimulated not the speech but the impediment, he had time to make his retort sufficiently bitter.

‘Why, to tell you the truth, Budd,’ he spluttered, ‘there’s a report all over the town that Deb Traunter swears you shall take her with you as one of the delegates, and they say there’s to be a fine crowd at your door the morning you start, to see the row. Knowing your tenderness for that member of the fair sex, I thought you might find it impossible to deny her. I hang back a little from signing on that account, as Prendergast might not take the protest well if Deb Traunter went with you.’

Mr Budd was a small, sleek-headed bachelor of five-and-forty, whose scandalous life had long furnished his more moral neighbours with an after-dinner joke. He had no other striking characteristic, except that he was a currier of choleric temperament, so that you might wonder why he had been chosen as clergyman’s churchwarden, if I did not tell you that he had recently been elected through Mr Dempster’s exertions, in order that his zeal against the threatened evening lecture might be backed by the dignity of office.

‘Come, come, Pilgrim,’ said Mr Tomlinson, covering Mr Budd’s retreat, ‘you know you like to wear the crier’s coat, green o’ one side and red o’ the other. You’ve been to hear Tryan preach at Paddiford Common – you know you have.’

‘To be sure I have; and a capital sermon too. It’s a pity you were not there. It was addressed to those “void of understanding”.’

‘No, no, you’ll never catch me there,’ returned Mr Tomlinson, not in the least stung: ‘he preaches without book, they say, just like a Dissenter. It must be a rambling sort of a concern.’

‘That’s not the worst,’ said Mr Dempster; ‘he preaches against good works; says good works are not necessary to salvation – a sectarian, antinomian, Anabaptist doctrine.⁠6 Tell a man he is not to be saved by his works, and you open the floodgates of all immorality. You see it in all these canting innovators; they’re all bad ones by the sly – smooth-faced, drawling, hypocritical fellows, who pretend ginger isn’t hot in their mouths, and cry down all innocent pleasures; their hearts are all the blacker for their sanctimonious outsides. Haven’t we been warned against those who make clean the outside of the cup and the platter? There’s this Tryan, now, he goes about praying with old women, and singing with charity children; but what has he really got his eye on all the while? A domineering ambitious Jesuit,⁠7 gentlemen; all he wants is to get his foot far enough into the parish to step into Crewe’s shoes when the old gentleman dies. Depend upon it, whenever you see a man pretending to be better than his neighbours, that man has either some cunning end to serve, or his heart is rotten with spiritual pride.’

As if to guarantee himself against this awful sin, Mr Dempster seized his glass of brandy and water, and tossed off the contents with even greater rapidity than usual.

‘Have you fixed on your third delegate yet?’ said Mr Pilgrim, whose taste was for detail rather than for dissertation. ‘That’s the man,’ answered Dempster, pointing to Mr Tomlinson. ‘We start for Elmstoke Rectory on Tuesday morning, so, if you mean to give us your signature, you must make up your mind pretty quickly, Pilgrim.’

Mr Pilgrim did not in the least mean it, so he only said, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if Tryan turns out too many for you, after all. He’s got a well-oiled tongue of his own, and has perhaps talked over Prendergast into a determination to stand by him.’ ‘Ve-ry little fear of that,’ said Dempster, in a confident tone. ‘I’ll soon bring him round. Tryan has got his match. I’ve plenty of rods in pickle for Tryan.’

At this moment Boots entered the bar, and put a letter into the lawyer’s hands, saying, ‘There’s Trower’s man just come into the yard wi’ a gig, sir, an’ he’s brought this here letter.’

Mr Dempster read the letter and said, ‘Tell him to turn the gig – I’ll be with him in a minute. Here, run to Gruby’s and get this snuffbox filled – quick!’

‘Trower’s worse, I suppose; eh, Dempster? Wants you to alter his will, eh?’ said Mr Pilgrim.

‘Business – business – business – I don’t know exactly what,’ answered the cautious Dempster, rising deliberately from his chair, thrusting on his low-crowned hat, and walking with a slow but not unsteady step out of the bar.

‘I never see Dempster’s equal; if I did I’ll be shot,’ said Mr Tomlinson, looking after the lawyer admiringly. ‘Why, he’s drunk the best part of a bottle o’ brandy since here we’ve been sitting, and I’ll bet a guinea, when he’s got to Trower’s his head’ll be as clear as mine. He knows more about law when he’s drunk than all the rest on ’em when they’re sober.’

‘Ay, and other things too, besides law,’ said Mr Budd. ‘Did you notice how he took up Byles about the Presbyterians? Bless your heart, he knows everything, Dempster does. He studied very hard when he was a young man.’

2

The conversation just recorded is not, I am aware, remarkably refined or witty, but if it had been, it could hardly have taken place in Milby when Mr Dempster flourished there, and old Mr Crewe, the curate, was yet alive.

More than a quarter of a century has slipped by since then, and in the interval Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as other market towns in Her Majesty’s dominions. By this time it has a handsome railway station, where the drowsy London traveller may look out by the brilliant gaslight and see perfectly sober papas and husbands alighting with their leather bags after transacting their day’s business at the county town. There is a resident rector, who appeals to the consciences of his hearers with all the immense advantages of a divine who keeps his own carriage; the church is enlarged by at least five hundred sittings; and the grammar school, conducted on reformed principles, has its upper forms crowded with the genteel youth of Milby. The gentlemen there fall into no other excess at dinner parties than the perfectly well-bred and virtuous excess of stupidity, and though the ladies are still said sometimes to take too much upon themselves, they are never known to take too much in any other way. The conversation is sometimes quite literary, for there is a flourishing book club, and many of the younger ladies have carried their studies so far as to have forgotten a little German. In short, Milby is now a refined, moral and enlightened town, no more resembling the Milby of former days than the huge, long-skirted, drab greatcoat that embarrassed the ankles of our grandfathers resembled the light paletot⁠1 in which we tread jauntily through the muddiest streets, or than the bottle-nosed Britons, rejoicing over a tankard, in the old sign of the Two Travellers at Milby, resembled the severe-looking gentleman in straps and high collars whom a modern artist has represented as sipping the imaginary port of that well-known commercial house.

But pray, reader, dismiss from your mind all the refined and fashionable ideas associated with this advanced state of things, and transport your imagination to a time when Milby had no gaslights; when the mail drove up dusty or bespattered to the door of the Red Lion; when old Mr Crewe, the curate, in a brown Brutus wig, delivered inaudible sermons on a Sunday, and on a weekday imparted the education of a gentleman – that is to say, an arduous inacquaintance with Latin through the medium of the Eton Grammar – to three pupils in the upper grammar school.

If you had passed through Milby on the coach at that time, you would have had no idea what important people lived there, and how very high a sense of rank was prevalent among them. It was a dingy-looking town, with a strong smell of tanning up one street and a great shaking of handlooms up another; and even in that focus of aristocracy, Friar’s Gate, the houses would not have seemed very imposing to the hasty and superficial glance of a passenger. You might still less have suspected that the figure in light fustian and large grey whiskers, leaning against the grocer’s doorpost in High Street, was no less a person than Mr Lowme, one of the most aristocratic men in Milby, said to have been ‘brought up a gentleman’, and to have had the gay habits accordant with that station, keeping his harriers and other expensive animals. He was now quite an elderly Lothario, reduced to the most economical sins; the prominent form of his gaiety being this of lounging at Mr Gruby’s door, embarrassing the servant-maids who came for grocery, and talking scandal with the rare passers-by. Still, it was generally understood that Mr Lowme belonged to the highest circle of Milby society; his sons and daughters held up their heads very high indeed; and in spite of his condescending way of chatting and drinking with inferior people, he would himself have scorned any closer identification with them. It must be admitted that he was of some service to the town in this station at Mr Gruby’s door, for he and Mr Landor’s Newfoundland dog, who stretched himself and gaped on the opposite causeway, took something from the lifeless air that belonged to the High Street on every day except Saturday.

Certainly, in spite of three assemblies and a charity ball in the winter, the occasional advent of a ventriloquist, or a company of itinerant players, some of whom were very highly thought of in London, and the annual three-days’ fair in June, Milby might be considered dull by people of a hypochondriacal temperament; and perhaps this was one reason why many of the middle-aged inhabitants, male and female, often found it impossible to keep up their spirits without a very abundant supply of stimulants. It is true there were several substantial men who had a reputation for exceptional sobriety, so that Milby habits were really not as bad as possible; and no one is warranted in saying that old Mr Crewe’s flock could not have been worse without any clergyman at all.

The well-dressed parishioners generally were very regular churchgoers, and to the younger ladies and gentlemen I am inclined to think that the Sunday morning service was the most exciting event of the week; for few places could present a more brilliant show of outdoor toilettes than might be seen issuing from Milby Church at one o’clock. There were the four tall Miss Pittmans, old lawyer Pittman’s daughters, with cannon curls surmounted by large hats, and long, drooping ostrich feathers of parrot green. There was Miss Phipps, with a crimson bonnet, very much tilted up behind, and a cockade of stiff feathers on the summit. There was Miss Landor, the belle of Milby, clad regally in purple and ermine, with a plume of feathers neither drooping nor erect, but maintaining a discreet medium. There were the three Miss Tomlinsons, who imitated Miss Landor, and also wore ermine and feathers, but their beauty was considered of a coarse order, and their square forms were quite unsuited to the round tippet which fell with such remarkable grace on Miss Landor’s sloping shoulders. Looking at this plumed procession of ladies, you would have formed rather a high idea of Milby wealth; yet there was only one close carriage in the place, and that was old Mr Landor’s, the banker, who, I think, never drove more than one horse. These sumptuously attired ladies flashed past the vulgar eye in one-horse chaises, by no means of a superior build.

The young gentlemen, too, were not without their little Sunday displays of costume, of a limited masculine kind. Mr Eustace Landor, being nearly of age, had recently acquired a diamond ring, together with the habit of rubbing his hand through his hair. He was tall and dark, and thus had an advantage which Mr Alfred Phipps, who, like his sister, was blond and stumpy, found it difficult to overtake, even by the severest attention to shirt-studs, and the particular shade of brown that was best relieved by gilt buttons.

The respect for the Sabbath, manifested in this attention to costume, was unhappily counterbalanced by considerable levity of behaviour during the prayers and sermon; for the young ladies and gentlemen of Milby were of a very satirical turn, Miss Landor especially being considered remarkably clever, and a terrible quiz, and the large congregation necessarily containing many persons inferior in dress and demeanour to the distinguished aristocratic minority, divine service offered irresistible temptations to joking, through the medium of telegraphic communications from the galleries to the aisles and back again. I remember blushing very much, and thinking Miss Landor was laughing at me, because I was appearing in coat-tails for the first time, when I saw her look down slyly towards where I sat, and then turn with a titter to handsome Mr Bob Lowme, who had such beautiful whiskers meeting under his chin. But perhaps she was not thinking of me, after all, for our pew was near the pulpit, and there was almost always something funny about old Mr Crewe. His brown wig was hardly ever put on quite right, and he had a way of raising his voice for three or four words, and lowering it again to a mumble, so that we could scarcely make out a word he said, though, as my mother observed, that was of no consequence in the prayers, since everyone had a prayer-book, and as for the sermon, she continued with some causticity, we all of us heard more of it than we could remember when we got home. This youthful generation was not particularly literary. The young ladies who frizzed their hair and gathered it all into large barricades in front of their heads, leaving their occipital region exposed without ornament, as if that, being a back view, was of no consequence, dreamed as little that their daughters would read a selection of German poetry and be able to express an admiration for Schiller, as that they would turn all their hair the other way – that instead of threatening us with barricades in front, they would be most killing in retreat,

And, like the Parthian, wound us as they fly.⁠2

Those charming well-frizzed ladies spoke French indeed with considerable facility, unshackled by any timid regard to idiom, and were in the habit of conducting conversations in that language in the presence of their less instructed elders, for according to the standard of those backward days, their education had been very lavish, such young ladies as Miss Landor, Miss Phipps, and the Miss Pittmans, having been ‘finished’ at distant and expensive schools.

Old lawyer Pittman had once been a very important person indeed, having in his earlier days managed the affairs of several gentlemen in those parts, who had subsequently been obliged to sell everything and leave the country, in which crisis Mr Pittman accommodatingly stepped in as a purchaser of their estates, taking on himself the risk and trouble of a more leisurely sale, which, however, happened to turn out very much to his advantage. Such opportunities occur quite unexpectedly in the way of business. But I think Mr Pittman must have been unlucky in his later speculations, for now, in his old age, he had not the reputation of being very rich, and though he rode slowly to his office in Milby every morning on an old white hackney, he had to resign the chief profits, as well as the active business of the firm, to his younger partner, Dempster. No one in Milby considered old Pittman a virtuous man, and the elder townspeople were not at all backward in narrating the least advantageous portions of his biography in a very round unvarnished manner. Yet I could never observe that they trusted him any the less, or liked him any the worse. Indeed, Pittman and Dempster were the popular lawyers of Milby and its neighbourhood, and Mr Benjamin Landor, whom no one had anything particular to say against, had a very meagre business in comparison. Hardly a landholder, hardly a farmer, hardly a parish within ten miles of Milby, whose affairs were not under the legal guardianship of Pittman and Dempster; and I think the clients were proud of their lawyers’ unscrupulousness, as the patrons of the Fancy⁠3 are proud of their champion’s ‘condition’. It was not, to be sure, the thing for ordinary life, but it was the thing to be bet on in a lawyer. Dempster’s talent in ‘bringing through’ a client was a very common topic of conversation with the farmers, over an incidental glass of grog at the Red Lion. ‘He’s a long-headed feller, Dempster; why, it shows yer what a headpiece Dempster has, as he can drink a bottle o’ brandy at a sittin’, an’ yit see further through a stone wall when he’s done, than other folks’ll see through a glass winder.’ Even Mr Jerome, chief member of the congregation at Salem Chapel, an elderly man of very strict life, was one of Dempster’s clients, and had quite an exceptional indulgence for his attorney’s foibles, perhaps attributing them to the inevitable incompatibility of law and Gospel.

The standard of morality at Milby, you perceive, was not inconveniently high in those good old times, and an ingenuous vice or two was what every man expected of his neighbour. Old Mr Crewe, the curate, for example, was allowed to enjoy his avarice in comfort, without fear of sarcastic parish demagogues; and his flock liked him all the better for having scraped together a large fortune out of his school and curacy, and the proceeds of the three thousand pounds he had with his little deaf wife. It was clear he must be a learned man, for he had once had a large private school in connection with the grammar school, and had even numbered a young nobleman or two among his pupils. The fact that he read nothing at all now, and that his mind seemed absorbed in the commonest matters, was doubtless due to his having exhausted the resources of erudition earlier in life. It is true he was not spoken of in terms of high respect, and old Crewe’s stingy housekeeping was a frequent subject of jesting, but this was a good old-fashioned characteristic in a parson who had been part of Milby life for half a century: it was like the dents and disfigurements in an old family tankard, which no one would like to part with for a smart new piece of plate fresh from Birmingham. The parishioners saw no reason at all why it should be desirable to venerate the parson or anyone else; they were much more comfortable to look down a little on their fellow creatures.

Even the Dissent in Milby was then of a lax and indifferent kind. The doctrine of adult baptism, struggling under a heavy load of debt, had let off half its chapel area as a ribbon shop, and Methodism was only to be detected, as you detect curious larvae, by diligent search in dirty corners. The Independents⁠4 were the only Dissenters of whose existence Milby gentility was at all conscious, and it had a vague idea that the salient points of their creed were prayer without book, red brick and hypocrisy. The Independent chapel, known as Salem, stood red and conspicuous in a broad street; more than one pew-holder kept a brass-bound gig; and Mr Jerome, a retired corn factor, and the most eminent member of the congregation, was one of the richest men in the parish. But in spite of this apparent prosperity, together with the usual amount of extemporaneous preaching mitigated by furtive notes, Salem belied its name, and was not always the abode of peace.⁠5 For some reason or other, it was unfortunate in the choice of its ministers. The Rev. Mr Horner, elected with brilliant hopes, was discovered to be given to tippling and quarrelling with his wife; the Rev. Mr Rose’s doctrine was a little too ‘high’, verging on antinomianism; the Rev. Mr Stickney’s gift as a preacher was found to be less striking on a more extended acquaintance; and the Rev. Mr Smith, a distinguished minister much sought after in the iron districts, with a talent for poetry, became objectionable from an inclination to exchange verses with the young ladies of his congregation. It was reasonably argued that such verses as Mr Smith’s must take a long time for their composition, and the habit alluded to might entrench seriously on his pastoral duties. These reverend gentlemen, one and all, gave it as their opinion that the Salem church members were among the least enlightened of the Lord’s people, and that Milby was a low place, where they would have found it a severe lot to have their lines fall for any long period; though to see the smart and crowded congregation assembled on occasion of the annual charity sermon, anyone might have supposed that the minister of Salem had rather a brilliant position in the ranks of Dissent. Several Church families used to attend on that occasion, for Milby, in those uninstructed days, had not yet heard that the schismatic ministers of Salem were obviously typified by Korah, Dathan and Abiram,⁠6 and many Church people there were of opinion that Dissent might be a weakness, but, after all, had no great harm in it. These lax episcopalians were, I believe, chiefly tradespeople, who held that, inasmuch as Congregationalism⁠7 consumed candles, it ought to be supported, and accordingly made a point of presenting themselves at Salem for the afternoon charity sermon, with the expectation of being asked to hold a plate. Mr Pilgrim, too, was always there with his half-sovereign, for as there was no Dissenting doctor in Milby, Mr Pilgrim looked with great tolerance on all shades of religious opinion that did not include a belief in cures by miracle.

On this point he had the concurrence of Mr Pratt, the only other medical man of the same standing in Milby. Otherwise, it was remarkable how strongly these two clever men were contrasted. Pratt was middle-sized, insinuating and silvery-voiced; Pilgrim was tall, heavy, rough-mannered and spluttering. Both were considered to have great powers of conversation, but Pratt’s anecdotes were of the fine old crusted quality to be procured only of Joe Miller; Pilgrim’s had the full fruity flavour of the most recent scandal. Pratt elegantly referred all diseases to debility, and, with a proper contempt for symptomatic treatment, went to the root of the matter with port wine and bark; Pilgrim was persuaded that the evil principle in the human system was plethora, and he made war against it with cupping, blistering and cathartics. They had both been long established in Milby, and as each had a sufficient practice, there was no very malignant rivalry between them; on the contrary, they had that sort of friendly contempt for each other which is always conducive to a good understanding between professional men; and when any new surgeon attempted, in an ill-advised hour, to settle himself in the town, it was strikingly demonstrated how slight and trivial are theoretic differences compared with the broad basis of common human feeling. There was the most perfect unanimity between Pratt and Pilgrim in the determination to drive away the obnoxious and too probably unqualified intruder as soon as possible. Whether the first wonderful cure he effected was on a patient of Pratt’s or of Pilgrim’s, one was as ready as the other to pull the interloper by the nose, and both alike directed their remarkable powers of conversation towards making the town too hot for him. But by their respective patients these two distinguished men were pitted against each other with great virulence. Mrs Lowme could not conceal her amazement that Mrs Phipps should trust her life in the hands of Pratt, who let her feed herself up to that degree, it was really shocking to hear how short her breath was; and Mrs Phipps had no patience with Mrs Lowme, living, as she did, on tea and broth, and looking as yellow as any crow-flower, and yet letting Pilgrim bleed and blister her and give her lowering medicine till her clothes hung on her like a scarecrow’s. On the whole, perhaps, Mr Pilgrim’s reputation was at the higher pitch, and when any lady under Mr Pratt’s care was doing ill, she was half disposed to think that a little more ‘active treatment’ might suit her better. But without very definite provocation no one would take so serious a step as to part with the family doctor, for in those remote days there were few varieties of human hatred more formidable than the medical. The doctor’s estimate, even of a confiding patient, was apt to rise and fall with the entries in the day-book, and I have known Mr Pilgrim discover the most unexpected virtues in a patient seized with a promising illness. At such times you might have been glad to perceive that there were some of Mr Pilgrim’s fellow creatures of whom he entertained a high opinion, and that he was liable to the amiable weakness of a too-admiring estimate. A good inflammation fired his enthusiasm, and a lingering dropsy dissolved him into charity. Doubtless this crescendo of benevolence was partly due to feelings not at all represented by the entries in the day-book, for in Mr Pilgrim’s heart, too, there was a latent store of tenderness and pity which flowed forth at the sight of suffering. Gradually, however, as his patients became convalescent, his view of their characters became more dispassionate; when they could relish mutton chops, he began to admit that they had foibles, and by the time they had swallowed their last dose of tonic, he was alive to their most inexcusable faults. After this, the thermometer of his regard rested at the moderate point of friendly back-biting, which sufficed to make him agreeable in his morning visits to the amiable and worthy persons who were yet far from convalescent.