No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Although the central concern of this essay is with early and mid-Victorian matters, it would be well to begin by stepping back into a longer historical prospective. Robert Burns' “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” contains an enduring literary image derived from a prevailing late eighteenth century tradition of self-conscious moral sentiment. This poem, with echoes of Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Oliver Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village,” celebrates the homely joys and Presbyterian virtues of Scottish peasants, their pastoral lives a reproach to readers of rank and fortune. It contains a rhetorical digression filled with a curious anxiety over the possible fall of the cotter's young daughter: Is there in human form, asks the poet
A wretch, a villain, lost to love and truth —
That can, with studied, sly ensnaring art,
Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth?
Curse on his perjured arts, dissembling smooth!
Are honour, virtue, conscience all exiled?
Is there no pity, no relenting ruth,
Points to the parents fondling o'er the child?
Then paints the ruined maid and their distraction wild?
We glimpse here, on the periphery of our literary consciousness, the houseless, shivering unfortunate of Goldsmith's “Deserted Village” (1770). In that case, the maid, led by idleness and ambition, had left her modest cottage: “Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,/Near her betrayer's door she lays her head.”
The Burns passage, the poem in fact, is earnest and evangelical in tone, commending itself to Victorian propriety in a way which dialect songs inspired by sweet hours among the lasses do not. Let us, in kindness, refrain from close questions about the folk mores of the 18th century Scotland; or how it was that, in the case of Jane Armour at least, one Robert Burns was permitted to make an honest woman out of a girl who had given scandal by the birth of a child before marriage. What matters here is the remarkable force of the larger myth within which the ruined maid functions as a recurring archetype, an image related to, but discontinuous with, the social realities of particular times that color it. We know instinctively that within the cultural tradition involved the potential villain is not Jenny's shy local suitor (who is courting with her parents' approval), but some gentleman with a taste for poor but honest girls. And there will be no way back. The hopelessly ruined maid, having stooped to folly and been left without a ring, will seek in vain for art to wash her scarlet mark away. She is fated to pregnancy, prostitution in city streets, a speedy death, or any combination of these. Something very much like this seems indeed to have been part of the early – and high-Victorian orthodoxy designed to preserve the purity of middle class homes and minds. Obviously these respectable readers, on whose behalf Charles Edward Mudie so long exercised power to exclude books from his lending library, were involved in such a social myth; and even if papa might have known better, he did have the ubiquitous “young person” to think of.
Paper read before the Conference on British Studies, Pacific Northwest Section, Calgary, March 4, 1972.
1 London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1862), IV, 212.Google Scholar
2 Prostitution: Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects(London, 1870)Google Scholar; ed. by Peter Fryer (New York, 1969), pp. 59-60. Hereafter cited as Prostitution.
3 The young Hardy, living in London, could observe at first hand the thriving vice of the metropolis at that time.
4 Cruse, Amy, The Victorians and their Reading (Boston, 1935), pp. 310–336Google Scholar. This is the indispensible account of taste in the first fifty years of the Queen's reign.
5 He administered a ‘Home for Homeless Women’ with a refreshing lack of moralistic humbug.
6 Two modern celebrations of this golden age of harlotry, both highly informative, are Pearl's, CyrilThe Girl With the Swansdown Seat (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, and Harrison's, MichaelFanfare of Strumpets (London, 1971)Google Scholar, to both of which, especially Pearl's book, this paper is indebted for its conception of the mid-century's paradoxical permissiveness.
7 Pearl, , Girl With the Swansdown Seat, pp. 40–41.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., pp. 60-62.
9 Prostitution, p. viii.
10 Quoted in Henriques, Fernando, Modern Sexuality (London, 1968), p. 228Google Scholar. Henrique's survey of Victorian sexual morality, pp. 211-232, presents the view of a professional sociologist.
11 The Academy, May 14, 1870.
12 Hayward, Arthur, The Days of Dickens (London, 1926), pp. 45–47Google Scholar. Pearl, , Girl With the Swansdown Seat, pp. 181–185.Google Scholar
13 Bailey, J. O., The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (Chapel Hill, 1970), pp. 208–209Google Scholar. This handbook to the poems, however, hardly gives an adequate notion of the nature of gay Cremone and other places frequented by the youthful Hardy.
14 Prostitution, p. 47.
15 Hayward, , Days of Dickens, p. 46.Google Scholar
16 Cruse, , Victorians, p. 263Google Scholar, notes the popularity of immoral Becky Sharp with the good ladies of the lending libraries; but Becky's veiled career as courtesan belonged to an earlier and more wicked age, at a safe distance from contemporary Victorian realities.
17 The career of this most illustrious of strumpets is the subject of Pearl's lively study. See Girl With the Swansdown Seat, especially pp. 126-140.
18 Henriques, , Modern Sexuality, p. 223Google Scholar, reports that Skittles, her outbursts of scatology notwithstanding, was interested in music, modern art, and serious subjects. Gladstone, a man of stern evangelical conscience, was known for his humanitarian interest in the welfare of fallen women. Nevertheless, what he may have said to this one in her comfortable latter days, and she to him, stretches the imagination.
19 With the aid of Mr. Gladstone, who praised the novel.