John Halifax, Gentleman Read online

  iii

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  About the Author

  Also by Dinah Maria Mulock

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  vINTRODUCTION

  by Simon Van Booy

  When editor David Watson at HarperCollins asked if I would write an introduction to this 1856 novel by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, his kind request came at the perfect time. My wife, ten-year-old daughter, and myself were just about to leave our glass-and-metal Brooklyn condominium for my parent’s brick house in a Cambridgeshire village, not unlike the Gloucestershire village where John Halifax, Gentleman begins 220 years earlier in 1794.

  Reading a historical novel is sometimes a shortcut to wisdom, as the comparisons raised between them and us encourages self-awareness and empathy. Seldom do we consider those who came before us. It’s just not a part of modern North American life. Unlike other cultures there are no nationally recognized and celebrated days in the United States devoted entirely to acknowledging one’s dead ancestors.

  Thinking about the past and those who animated it is infinitely fascinating for the intellectually curious. For instance, if your apartment or house is older than you, then imagine the generations of people who have cooked in your kitchen, slept in your bedroom, and perhaps even reclined in your bathtub, vidaydreaming or worrying. Like us, they probably felt like they were the first to inhabit the space. The truth however is that we are all links in a chain we cannot see because we don’t live long enough to chart the progression of links. Learning about how people felt more than two hundred years ago through novels enables us to measure our own feelings, and sharpen perceptions of how we are different.

  Another benefit of reading historical texts like John Halifax, Gentleman comes from the sudden awareness of how the details and conditions of our lives, from architectural accents in our houses to the layout of our streets, the names of our children, the way we cook, and even the ingredients we use—did not occur spontaneously and arbitrarily to coincide with the years of our birth—but were passed down through custom, tradition, and even superstition.

  One day in the future, when people see photographs and videos of our lives, they will perhaps wonder how on earth we survived with any kind of happiness without the sorts of conveniences, technologies, medicines, and open-mindedness that we’re not even aware we live without. When we consider people of the past (fictional and otherwise) from books and photographs, we are often aware of atrocities they lived through or had coming—terrible acts not so much committed by individuals, but perpetuated or tolerated by people en masse.

  What are the current wrongdoings in society today that will have people of the future reeling with horror? Where are the evils veiled by obviousness? Disguised as custom? Will people in power fall on the right side of history? Or be loathed for their deeds by countless generations to come?

  For these reasons and more, John Halifax, Gentleman is an important book. And reading it gives us the opportunity to travel back through time and glimpse the stirrings of a rural English society, which would eventually evolve into the culture we are familiar with today.

  viiIf we mark the births and death of the two main characters of the book as boundaries of time within the novel, then the story takes place approximately between the years of 1778 and 1850. This period was a brilliant choice on the part of the author Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826–1887), as we not only witness the growing up of protagonist John Halifax and narrator Phineas Fletcher, but also the growing up of Europe, as modern [Enlightenment] ideas of equality and fairness, political reforms, the industrial revolution, and technologies such as steam and rail, within a short time, disfigured a bucolic way of life that had not changed for hundreds of years.

  Before the 1800s, Britain was a patchwork of towns and villages, with most people living in what today we would consider rural and isolated settings. It would have been a pastoral existence, inextricably connected to the fields and the rivers and meadows that would be known since birth, and probably never travelled beyond. The swiftest form of travel was of course by horse, and the most economical, by water. I once read that it was the same price to move a heavy load thirty miles by cart as it was to move it to North America by sea. The roads would have been bumpy, uneven tracks, with stretches most likely impassable in bad weather. People today searching for historic homes to buy are often discouraged by their frequent location on busy main roads. But these roads were once nothing more than grassy track, and traffic—an occasional clop of hooves or squeaky wheel.

  To digress a little, the ease with which we travel today has to some extent completely redistributed culture. Talented, ambitious, and creative people, through the ease of travel and access to cultural goings-on in cities, are no longer confined to small towns and villages—but are easily able to move between places such as Berlin, Beijing, and Brooklyn. This has caused cultural life in small towns and villages in parts of Europe and the United States to decline. Some villages in Europe are all but abandoned.

  viiiPeople would also have been unavoidably provincial in their outlook back then. For instance, the way Britons today compare differences between themselves and the Americans or the Chinese shows a united national consciousness. Two hundred years ago, people’s consciousness would have been more local—drawing comparisons not between people of other nations, but between people of other villages, towns, and shires.

  The England at the inception of this novel would have been a rolling green landscape, where the only noise was from wind, animals, rivers, streams, and humans. The young would almost certainly have had fewer expectations of life, and therefore perhaps less disappointment. However, the England inhabited by the characters at the end of the novel is a swiftly changing landscape of trains and factories: “those new and dangerous things called railways tempted travellers to their destruction.” (Ironically, Craik’s husband suffered the loss of a leg in a railway accident several years after the novel’s success).

  Cities were growing at an unprecedented rate, and a new, industrial middle class, born of hard work and ingenuity, began to emerge, with individuals rather like our hero, John Halifax, who makes his intentions (and the book’s) clear early on the story:

  “Madam,” said he with a bow of perfect good-humour, and even some sly drollery, “you mistake: I never begged in my life: I’m a person of independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.”

  Life expectancy in the late 17
00s was just over forty for men, and a little more for women. However, infant mortality rates were high, and so death and dying would have been a ixmore familiar experience to almost everybody. Today, our relatives and friends often pass away (note the euphemism) in hospitals behind curtains or in isolated rooms at a fairly advanced age. They do not die coughing, spluttering, or swollen, in a shared family bed with everyone watching. It’s strange to think that people in the past would inhabit their houses with the knowledge of who was born and who had died in certain rooms. With such close-knit communities—and the potential for travel limited—the intimacy shared between family and friends must have been intense. It brings to mind the opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

  And so if eighteenth-century characters behave dramatically when a loved one goes away or dies (I refer specifically to certain parts of this volume you will no doubt encounter), then we should try and understand that husbands, wives, and children would have seen each other every day, taken almost every meal together, and been each other’s chief source of entertainment (or despair).

  When we first meet the hero of the story, John Halifax—he is a cold, shivering, and hungry fourteen-year-old orphan. The narrator of the story, Phineas Fletcher is two years older, though not doing so well himself: “Ill health seemed to have doubled and trebled my sixteen years into a mournful maturity.”

  Phineas’s father, Abel Fletcher (a Quaker), is impressed with John Halifax’s apparent honesty, and honor—demonstrated by how he refuses payment for escorting his ailing son home in his absence. (For some reason he has to rush off to his business, a tan-yard). Much to Phineas’s delight, Abel Fletcher offers the young stranger employment, and the chance to make an “honest wage” and build a reputation in the town with people who almost certainly would have been suspicious of anyone they had not known since they were children.

  The mutual kindness shown by both John and Phineas at xthis initial meeting, under the stern eye of Phineas’s widowed father, sets the tone for the novel, and gives us our narrator. This early friendship is delightfully homoerotic, rather like the early chapters of Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, (1945), when Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte are an inseparable pair of undergraduates.

  There is a verse in a very old book—even in its human histories the most pathetic of all books—which runs thus:

  “And it came to pass when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit unto the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

  And this day, I, a poorer and more helpless Jonathan, had found my David. I caught him by the hand, and would not let him go.

  “There, get in lads—make no more ado,” said Abel Fletcher, sharply, as he disappeared.

  So, still holding my David fast, I brought him into my father’s house.

  Remember that in the 1790s, a sickly teenage boy like Phineas would have known very little entertainment outside of books, the garden, and the goings-on about his house. His closest friendships would have been with his family, and in this case his father and his governess, also a Quaker.

  Thus, after his first day, many days came and went before I again saw John Halifax—almost before I again thought of him. For it was one of my seasons of excessive pain; when I found it difficult to think of anything beyond those four grey-painted walls; where morning, noon, and night slipped wearily away, marked by no changes, save from daylight to candle-light, from candle-light to dawn.

  xiIn another chapter, following a spontaneous decision to experience a theatrical performance beyond the fields and pastures of their Norton Bury home, Phineas confesses the strength of his bond to John, which is enhanced by his physical weakness:

  If I had been a woman, and the woman that he loved, he could not have been more tender over my weakness. The physical weakness—which, however humiliating to myself, and doubtless contemptible in most men’s eyes—was yet dealt by the hand of Heaven, and, as such, regarded by John only with compassion.

  The years covered in the book coincide with significant political and social events. Britain is at war with France and her allies. The Revolutionary War (which began in 1775) ended in 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In the summer of 1789, the French Revolution began. When the book starts in 1794, the “Reign of Terror” is taking place across the Channel, as rival political parties jostled for supremacy. The result of all this chaos was the arrest of more than 300,000 people who were considered to be “enemies,” 17,000 of whom were executed without any sort of trial. Such events in France spread fear across England as the idea occurred to the ruling “elite” that the same thing could happen in Britain at any time.

  A census from 1801, estimates the population of England to have been about 8.3 million. In July 2013, there were 8.4 million people were living in New York City. Imagine the entire population of New York City today spread across England.

  Most people would have been born, lived, married, worked, and died in the same small town or village as their ancestors. This fact accounts for all the gossip-mongering. While it’s common for us to see faces we don’t recognize, even in small towns, in 1800s England, the opposite would have been true, xiiand a local person seen walking with a stranger would have caused waves of rumor and speculation. “Any taint upon a woman’s fame harms not her alone but all connected with her.”

  This was also a time without safe and reliable birth control. The measures most people would go to in order to prevent pregnancy were often dangerous and frighteningly bizarre. For some years in the late Victorian period, birth control was even illegal. This lack of contraception is perhaps why sexual rules and rights of marriage were so rigorously enforced.

  It is likely that our narrator Phineas (who never marries) remains a virgin his whole life. He lives with his father, Abel Fletcher, a hard-working business owner of modest means, until his death, when he moves in with John Halifax and his wife, Ursula Halifax. Phineas and his father are middle-class Quakers, who live comfortably, but at a distance from village life on account of their spiritual affiliation.

  “Oh! He’s a Quaker; the law don’t help Quakers.”

  That was the truth—the hard, grinding truth—in those days. Liberty, justice, were idle names to Nonconformists of every kind; and all they knew of the glorious constitution of English law was when its iron hand was turned against them.

  From the first few pages, it’s clear that this novel is going to be a moralistic “rags-to-riches” story, where a young, honest man rises to the ranks of gentleman through self-education and hard work.

  Despite the story’s ambition to propose honor, virtue, honesty, and toil as the defining ideals of a gentleman, there are still moments in the text where the narrator expresses an idea seemingly contrary to the plot’s intentions, which so effectively undermine the idea of “good breeding” or “good blood” as an indication of character.

  xiiiThus it seemed to me, and I doubted not it would to my father, much more reasonable and natural that a boy like John Halifax—in whom from every word he said I detected a mind and breeding above his outward condition—should come of gentle than of boorish blood.

  This reminds me of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which was published (serialized) in 1837, nineteen years before John Halifax, Gentleman. As you well know from your high school reading, or from the numerous film adaptations (David Lean’s 1948 version probably being the best, as there were most likely people involved who actually remembered the epoch depicted on screen), Oliver Twist is also an orphan, and who, like John Halifax is separated from the gentile conditions of his birth by some mysterious tragedy. Although Enlightenment ideas abound in this book, it’s disappointing to think that John Halifax, like Oliver Twist simply returned to his original “station,” rather than rising to it through admirable behavior.

  “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”—Jean-Jacques Rous
seau.

  John Halifax’s desire to marry a woman of a higher class explores new ideas of equality, not dependent on birth or breeding. Lady Caroline expresses succinctly what may have been a widely held view at the time by the aristocracy:

  “What! a bourgeois—a tradesman? with no more money than those sort of people usually have, I believe. You, who have had all sorts of comforts, have always lived as a gentlewoman. Truly, though I adore a love-marriage in theory, practically I think you are mad—quite mad my dear.”

  xivBut Ursula March is determined and states her reasons:

  “Because I honour him, because I trust him; and, young as I am, I have seen enough of the world to be thankful that there is in it one man whom I can trust, can honour, entirely. Also—though I am often ashamed lest this be selfish—because when I was in trouble he helped me; when I was misjudged he believed in me; when I was sad and desolate he loved me. And I am proud of his love—I glory in it. No one shall take it from me—no one will—no one can, unless I cease to deserve it.”

  Lady Caroline (to whom this speech is addressed) and other aristocratic persons in the novel are generally unhappy, corrupt, abusive, and unlikeable. The upper classes are respected in this novel in theory, but its agents, not revered. Most of them are unable to modernize, and meet with sad or pathetic fates. In the following passage, perhaps the least likable character in the story unleashes his view upon our poor hero:

  “Wouldn’t you be only too thankful to crawl into the houses of your betters, any how, by hook or by crook? Ha! Ha! I know you would. It’s always the way with you common folk, you rioters, you revolutionists. By the Lord! I wish you were all hanged.”

  When Ursula and John move in together after their marriage, we hear echoes of the writings of Craik’s American contemporaries, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.