The Poor Clare (1856), A Novella by Elizabeth Gaskell

I don’t usually include spoilers in my reviews, but The Poor Clare is obscure enough that in today’s post I’ll be throwing caution to the wind.

The work is a long short story/short novella by Elizabeth Gaskell, who’s better known for novel-length works including North and South (1854) and Mary Barton (1848), and for her biography of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which inspired my own forthcoming novel, Brontë’s Mistress.

The Poor Clare first appeared in serialised form in Household Words, a publication edited by Charles Dickens. Perhaps as a result of this, it alternates between feeling rushed and sorely in need of editing. There are no paragraph breaks, for instance, except in dialogue, and the development of the plot is uneven.

The story is narrated by an unnamed lawyer, who finds himself involved in ‘extraordinary events’ of a decidedly uncanny flavour. Employed to track down the rightful heir to a sizeable estate, he tracks down a strange old Irish woman, Bridget Fitzgerald, whose fervour for Catholicism is matched with a proclivity for meddling with magic. Bridget’s beautiful daughter, Mary, has disappeared years before, leading to her mother’s unhappiness and isolation. But now her child—if she had one—is next in line for this windfall inheritance.

What starts out like a mystery soon turns to a ghost story. Our lawyer tracks down the child, Lucy, more through luck than strategy, and promptly falls in love with her. But there’s a hitch. Lucy is suffering under a peculiar curse. She has a demonic double, which is hell bent on dogging her steps, ruining her reputation and driving men from her life. What’s more, it transpires that it was her own grandmother, Bridget, who unwittingly cursed her.

Gaskell writes Gothic well. Examples:

‘I was sitting with my back to the window, but I felt a shadow pass between the sun’s warmth and me, and a strange shudder ran through my frame.’

‘In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of a body it belonged.’

The tone felt most similar to Behind a Mask, an 1866 story by Louisa May Alcott, writing as A.M. Barnard, which I reviewed back in 2013. And the doubling motif is suggestive of earlier (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)) and later (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)) Gothic, as well as sensation fiction tropes. Notably, Laura, the heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which appeared three years later, also suffers due to her near resemblance with another.

The Poor Clare takes an unexpected turn when our characters end up in war-torn Antwerp (only Bridget’s service to strict religious order, the Poor Clares, will be enough, it seems, to undo the curse). It’s tempting to imagine that Gaskell was inspired by the Brontës to depict a Belgian setting.

All in, although set earlier, Gaskell’s The Poor Clare is delightfully Victorian, with lots to recommend it despite its flaws. Short enough to read in one sitting, it could also serve as a great introduction for teens to Gothic fiction or as a quick-to-digest comparison text for students focusing on some of the more canonical novels in the genre.

Which lesser-known Victorian novels/novellas/stories would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here or on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And keep up with every facet of my life (reading, writing, work and life in NYC) via Instagram.

Top 10 Victorian/Nineteenth-Century Halloween Costume Ideas

Halloween is nearly upon us and every self-respecting Victorianist is contemplating stepping back in time and into the breeches of our favourite historical characters—real and imagined.

Below is a list of the Secret Victorianist’s top picks of nineteenth-century-inspired costumes for you to consider.

1. Miss Havisham

The perennial bride in Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 Great Expectations is a killer Halloween choice. White dress? Check. Veil? Check? Grey hair and cobwebs? For extra Gothic flare consider singeing your gown and adding dramatic flames. Who says a wedding dress need only be worn once?

2. Queen Victoria

That’s right—go as the monarch of the era herself, with Prince Albert in tow if you’re after a couples’ costume. Otherwise, embrace widowhood and dress head to toe in black.

3. A character from Pride and Prejudice (zombies optional)

Who doesn’t want to an excuse to unleash their inner Lizzie Bennet? Grab some friends and argue about who is each sister if you’re not lucky enough to have found your Darcy. The Pride and Prejudice with Zombies movie is recommended Halloween viewing and could also provide a fun twist on the costume idea.

4. Long John Silver

Before Captain Jack Sparrow lit up our screens it was Long John Silver, the villain from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1882 Treasure Island, who was the world’s most famous fictional pirate. This costume is all in the accessories: strap on a wooden leg, perch a parrot on your shoulder and grab a map marking the way to those elusive pieces of eight.

5. Abraham Lincoln

The United States’ most-distinctive nineteenth-century president is a great costume choice. The top hat and facial hair will make you instantly recognisable, even if you don’t want to shell out on realistic historical garb.

6. Florence Nightingale

While others are donning their ‘sexy nurse’ outfits, dress up as the lady with the lamp, who tended to British soldiers during the Crimean War.

7. Napoleon

The French emperor shares the laurel with Queen Victoria for the most famous nineteenth-century look. Don’t forget the hat, the epaulettes, or, our course, the pose.

8. The Statue of Liberty

This famous gift from the French to the American republic was dedicated in 1886. Dress in copper tones, rather than green, for a true nineteenth-century feel.

9. Dracula

What could be more classic for Halloween than to dress as the count from Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic. Many won’t know the story’s Victorian provenance though, so try to read the novel before you go to your party!

10. The Nutcracker and Sugar Plum Fairy

If you’re itching for Halloween to be over, Christmas can come early with your costume choice. The ballet was first performed in 1892 and is great Halloween inspiration. Don your tutu to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, look distinguished in your red coat as the nutcracker himself, or maybe even go for a giant rat costume.

Do you have any other Victorian/nineteenth-century costume ideas (or pics!) to share? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Traces of Nineteenth-Century North America: The Secret Victorianist in Ontario and Hawaii

An accusation I hear a lot back home as a European transplant, living in the US, is that America has no history.

“How can you bear to live somewhere there’s no culture?” I’ve been asked, more than once. “Aren’t you the one who likes reading about the past?”

Yet, everywhere I’ve travelled since moving to this continent, I’ve found that history, and in particular nineteenth-century history, is very much alive and well in the popular imagination. Canada and the United States’ comparative youth makes this century (my century) loom even larger, and the sites and monuments that comprise their visible history, while fewer in number, seem to have a greater influence on the shaping of the countries’ current national identities.

Today I want to talk about two very different places I’ve visited in the last month — Fort George in Ontario, Canada and Iolani Palace, once home to Hawaiian royalty in Honolulu.

Fort George

Located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Fort George was a British military structure that housed soldiers and saw combat during the War of 1812.

Today’s reconstruction allows visitors not only to explore buildings designed to mirror those of the early 1800s (living quarters, workshops and the original powder magazine), but also to watch and interact with costumed ‘soldiers’. These re-enactors march, play the fife and drum and shoot rounds from their muskets, with such serious commitment to the tasks at hand that it’s easy to imagine adversarial American troops ranged on the other side of the narrow river.

These volunteers bring the place to life (indeed it almost felt at times like we’d accidentally wandered into 1812!) but I couldn’t help but consider their motivations. What was so attractive to these men, women, and, in many cases, children, about reconnecting with the past, and indeed with Canada’s close ties to the British?

In one way it was surreal to hear ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ played so far from England, but then, that’s how it was sung by the Redcoats the world over — no matter how far the march, how deep the ditch or how exhausting the labour, there was always something connecting you to home.

Iolani Palace

At Iolani Palace in Honolulu I certainly wasn’t expecting to see this same reach and influence of empire. But this spectacular royal home (built 1879-1882) out-European-ed many of the stately houses I’ve seen in Britain and beyond.

Portraits at Iolani Palace

It had electric lights before Buckingham Palace, a fact that dazzled visiting dignitaries and notables (I didn’t realise that Robert Louis Stevenson was once received there). Its reception rooms were decked out with portraits of European, as well as Hawaiian, royals. And, while the palace’s exterior seems designed for the temperate climate and in keeping with Hawaiian styles and traditions, once inside the dining room, ballroom, or music room you could have guessed you were anywhere.

The Music Room at Iolani Palace

The palace also served as a gaol for nine months in 1895 for the then independent kingdom’s final queen, Liliʻuokalani, who was forced out of power by the mainland-backed provisional government. In one of the upper bedrooms you can see the quilt she and one of her ladies in waiting stitched during this period, sections of brightly coloured fabric telling the stories of Hawaii’s unification, royalty and republic.

Visiting an American state with a royal past was as strange as hearing stirrings of British spirit in Canada.

The veranda at Iolani Palace

And Iolani Palace also shared something else with Fort George — the site’s reliance on reconstruction and detective work. Many pieces of the royal family’s furniture and other possessions were sold and scattered, but the team here has worked, and is working tirelessly, to recreate a version of the Palace Hawaii’s kings would have recognised.

Where else in North America would you like to see the Secret Victorianist visit? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Have a Very Victorian Halloween!

In honour of this Halloween season, the Secret Victorianist brings you five top tips for having a spooktacularly Victorian October 31^st!

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham in the 1846 Great Expectations

1. Read a Victorian ghost story

You might associate Victorian ghosts with Christmas and Charles Dickens’s ever popular A Christmas Carol (1842), but they are plenty more spine tingling reads to dip into before December. Check out some Sheridan Le Fanu (review here) or quake at Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher (1884).

2. Dive into a scary story with no ghosts at all

Some of the scariest nineteenth-century reads aren’t supernatural at all. I’d recommend Wilkie Collins’s A Terribly Strange Bed (1852), which I read for the first time recently. Unsavoury characters, an ingenious murder device and an intriguing frame narrative set this one apart.

3. Even better – read one of these stories aloud

Dim the lights, huddle round the campfire, and rekindle the Victorian tradition of reading aloud to family and friends. Bonus points for your best Tennyson-inspired voice!

4. Slip into a Victorian inspired costume

There are so many Halloween costume ideas out there for the budding Victorianist. Some of my favourites: find a tattered white dress and act the eternal bride Miss Havisham, grab a friend to go as Jekyll and Hyde, or perch a toy raven on your shoulder and you’re an instant Edgar Allen Poe.

5. Binge watch Steampunk’d

Don’t fancy painting the town red on a Monday night? Have a low key Halloween by binge watching the show that pitches makers of Victoriana against each other – Steampunk’d. I just discovered it on Netflix and am gutted GSN ruled out a second season.

The judges on Steampunk'd

Did you have any Victorian-inspired fun this Halloween weekend? Let me know what you got up to – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Victorian Literature for Kids

Have you always loved nineteenth-century novels and want the same for your children? Or did you learn to like literature later in life and want your kids to embrace classic literature earlier? In this post I’ll be giving you my top tips for getting children interested in Victorian writing and also suggesting a few things to avoid.

'A Life Well Spent', Charles West Cope (1862)

Foster a love of reading generally:

Presenting a seven year old, who isn’t in the habit of reading regularly, with a copy of Bleak House, is a bit like giving a six month old a steak. It’s not going to end well, however bright they are. So incorporate reading into children’s lives from early on. Make bedtime stories part of your night-time routine, give your kids books as gifts, and encourage them to read for fun and tell you what they enjoy about what they’re reading. At this stage, the amount kids read and how much they enjoy it is so much more important than being prescriptive about what they read.

Give them modern books which deal with Victorianism:

Nineteenth-century novels can be challenging because of the style in which they are written, more so than their content. Starting with contemporary novels and history books can introduce kids to some of the themes of Victorian writing and help them build up knowledge about the period, without dealing with difficult prose.

There are historical novels specifically written for children, like Jacqueline Wilson’s The Lottie Project (1997) and Hetty Feather (2010) and Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), and kids’ history books like Terry Deary’s Vile Victorians (1994) in the Horrible Histories series. Chat with them about differences they might have noticed between then and now. How was life different for boys and girls? What would life as a servant have been like? How did people travel and communicate with each other before cars and telephones? Appreciating lives very different from your own is a key reading skill and you’ll be encouraging critical engagement with texts as your children grow into more sophisticated readers.

'Teasing the Cat', William Henry Gore (c. 1900)

Read Victorian children’s literature:

Rather than diving straight in with Jane Eyre, when the time comes when you think your kids are ready to read nineteenth-century texts (or to have you read to them), turn to children’s literature. Books like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (1835-1872), E. Nesbit’s The Treasure-Seekers (1899) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) have an enduring appeal for kids and, unlike many nineteenth-century texts, do not deal with themes (e.g. illegitimacy, murder, inheritance) which may be too adult for your children at this stage.

Nineteenth-century poetry written for kids, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), can also be a low commitment way to get your kids reading some older writing and increasing their familiarity with poetry.

Watch TV and film adaptations of famous novels:

There’s absolutely no rule that people should read famous texts before watching adaptations of them and, for kids, already having familiarity with a story can be invaluable when it comes to tackling harder texts. Watching together also gives you the opportunity to talk about what’s going on and pause whenever something isn’t clear. I recommend BBC mini-series, like North and South (2004), Pride and Prejudice (1994) and Bleak House (2005), for quality and digestibility.

'Storytime', Charles Haigh-Wood (1893)

And what not to do:

Don’t tell your kids there are books they ‘should’ read. Similarly, I’d avoid the term ‘classics’. Reading should be fun – not a chore – and pushing too hard can have the opposite effect. It’s already sadly very likely that kids will come to dislike set texts they’re made to study at school (see my post on secondary school English literature teaching here), so don’t let the same happen at home!

Don’t make a big deal about length and number of pages. Lots of Victorian novels are quite long and, for a while, the ability to boast about having read a 300-page book may be motivating. But it won’t last and focussing on length will make reading seem a drag.

I’d also avoid abridged versions of nineteenth-century novels which are often marketed for children. Truncated and butchered versions of great texts aren’t that great at all. If you don’t think your kids are ready for the full-length version, I’d simply read something else and come back to this one in a couple of years!

Are you a parent? Do you agree and do you have any other advice or book recommendations? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: B is for Brownies in the Brain

‘for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.’

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1892) firmly situates the creative impulse to write in the subconscious – an area of mind outside the writer’s control. For Stevenson, visualising the birth of his creative processes is easier if he peoples his brain (humorously) with ‘brownies’ – elf creatures famed for their helpfulness. His playful conceit can even redirect critics to the ‘brownies’ when they seek to apportion blame to his work (‘For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies’).

But the idea – and the essay – are not solely light-hearted. In the passage quoted above Stevenson hints that locating creativity in a dreamland can have negative effects for the appreciation of the artist, be this in terms of self-satisfaction (which can only come from ‘fondly suppose[ing]’) or from the praise of others (his presumed reader). More than this, in a way reflecting emerging theories of psychology, dreaming is troubling, and born of trauma. Stevenson’s exposure to the strictures of extreme Protestantism as a child is linked to the stories his night time brownies bring – stories which often, if not always (Stevenson says his dreams are occasionally a ‘surprise’), have a frightening edge.

Stevenson is not the only nineteenth-century writer of Gothic who talks about creativity in this proto-Freudian way. Take the following passage from Bronte’s (earlier) Jane Eyre (1847) when Rochester looks through Jane’s portfolio of pictures. Jane responds to Rochester’s questions about how she felt when painting the disturbing images like so:

‘To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’

Rochester is dismissive about the exposure she can have had to pleasures but says:

‘you did exist in a kind of artist’s dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints.’

This argument is meant to explain the intensity of feeling working creatively has inspired in a girl with no experience of passion. What is more, as Jane doesn’t have the skill to execute her work to higher standard, her ideas – her dreams – must have been all the more extraordinary. Rochester says:

‘you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably.  You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar.  As to the thoughts, they are elfish.’

Like Stevenson, he draws on the language of the supernatural to explain the workings of the brain. Immediately after this he sends Jane to bed, so disturbed is he by the peculiar drawings. Jane’s paintings are passionate and suggestive of sexual passion, and they also seem distinctly masochistic. She was ‘tormented’ by her perceived failures, she worked on them for whole days without respite, her pleasure was ‘keen’, walking the line between enjoyable and painful sensation. Jane, like Stevenson, is a victim of childhood trauma – and so her imagination is a source of protection and further (self-)violence.

Edward Nash's portrait
of Robert Southey

As Jane, so Charlotte. Take this passage from a letter written from poet Robert Southey to Bronte in 1837:

‘The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and, in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else.’

Southey’s advice is tempered by his views on gender – he doesn’t believe women should write or they will not be ‘fitted’ to their roles. Charlotte can produce creative work, but only to the detriment of her mental health. In her reply, Bronte does not refute this – she makes out that she prefers her inner world, one she has, with her siblings, populated like Stevenson has his own:

‘It is not easy to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it for so long; they were my friends and my intimate acquaintances, and I could with little labour describe to you the faces, the voices, the actions, of those who peopled my thoughts by day, and not seldom stole strangely even into my dreams at night. When I depart from these I feel almost as if I stood on the threshold of a home and were bidding farewell to its inmates.’

Bronte’s explanation relies on the blurring of realities – different states of consciousness – and the time we have dedicated to each. Stevenson’s brownies seem relatively well-behaved compared with those of Charlotte Bronte and her Jane who can appear un-summoned in the day. The flavour of her analysis is Gothic – the ‘home’ of her brain becomes a self-made prison with ‘inmates’ – but the conclusions we draw are psychological.

Psychoanalysing authors is not the only response we can have to this. We can also see both Stevenson and Bronte identifying themselves in a tradition by which authors of Gothic seek to mystify their own writing processes – a tradition which finds a particularly potent example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This is a text with long-reaching influence over the Gothic genre, whose inception (thanks to the ‘Author’s Introduction’) is a key part of its legend.

Richard Rothwell's portrait
of Mary Shelley

Shelley recounts how she conceived her story when she, her husband (P. B. Shelley) and Byron each set out to write a ghost story in the summer of 1816. To start with she:

‘felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations.’

She argues:

‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.’

The ‘dark, shapeless substances’ clearly suggest a dream world and this is, finally, where material for her novel is found:

‘Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.’

Frankenstein’s monster is born and, fittingly for a work which questions creation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes a model for the tortured psychology of the writer.

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