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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Bricks, Blood, and Progress – 3 Classic Industrial Revolution Novels is a compelling anthology that unites masterful narratives from the forefront of the 19th-century and early 20th-century European literary canon. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, these narratives grapple with the socio-economic upheavals and the human condition, offering a tapestry of literary styles ranging from realism to naturalism. The anthology presents an array of perspectives that underscore the era's dramatic shifts, highlighting the tension between progress and its human cost with remarkable poignancy. The anthology enlists the powerful prose of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and David Herbert Lawrence, all of whom have left indelible marks on English literature. These authors offer distinct, yet thematically interwoven tales born out of the radical transformations of their time. Eliot and Gaskell bring forth narratives steeped in keen social commentary and moral inquiry, while Lawrence explores the more intimate aspects of industrial society, threading them through vivid personal narratives. Together, their works reflect the myriad impacts of industrial progress on both society and individual lives, offering a lens into the past that echoes into today's world. For readers seeking an exploration of the Industrial Revolution through the eyes of three of its most skilled commentators, this anthology is an invaluable resource. It opens a dialogue between contrasting and complementary perspectives, inviting readers to ponder the enduring implications of industrialization. With its rich tapestry of themes and styles, Bricks, Blood, and Progress serves as an educational tour de force and a testament to the era's complex legacy. This collection promises a valuable and immersive experience for those wishing to engage deeply with the intertwined narratives of human progress and its discontents. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Bricks, Blood, and Progress – 3 Classic Industrial Revolution Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers to illuminate the human meanings of industrial modernity across three major English novels. Read together, they trace a sustained inquiry into how economic change enters the household, reshapes feeling, and tests inherited moral languages. Each work attends to labor, class, kinship, and aspiration, yet none reduces social transformation to abstract process. The selection therefore emphasizes fiction as a form of social thought, one able to register the pressure of mills, mines, and markets on consciousness, attachment, and judgment.
The unifying thread is not simply the presence of industry, but the way industrial society reorganizes relations between private desire and public life. In these novels, work is never merely background; it structures speech, authority, intimacy, and conflict. Gaskell examines industrial division through encounters across class boundaries, Eliot studies provincial life under the force of material limits and social expectation, and Lawrence follows emotional development within a world marked by extractive labor and constrained opportunity. Together they form an arc from early industrial confrontation to later psychological interiority, showing how the language of progress is inseparable from loss, discipline, and unsettled belonging.
Presented as a group, these works reveal a broader history of feeling than any one novel can contain alone. The collection aims to foreground continuities among social realism, moral inquiry, and the representation of family life under economic strain. It also draws attention to the different scales on which industrial change becomes legible: the town and workplace in North and South, the riverine community and domestic sphere in The Mill on the Floss, and the intimate emotional world of Sons and Lovers. Such juxtaposition clarifies how industrialization is experienced unevenly, through institutions, landscapes, and inward life at once.
The distinctiveness of this collection lies in its deliberate framing of these novels as a conversation about industry, embodiment, and moral development rather than as isolated achievements. Gaskell, Eliot, and Lawrence are often approached through separate literary histories, yet their works gain fresh force when read in sequence as meditations on the costs of advancement. The collection thus invites attention to a shared problem: how persons seek dignity, sympathy, and self-knowledge within systems that measure value through production and endurance. By assembling these titles together, it highlights a lineage of fiction that binds social transformation to the textures of ordinary life.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
North and South, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers speak to one another through recurring tensions between attachment and mobility, rootedness and change. Each novel places characters within environments where economic forces alter the terms of affection, obligation, and ambition. Home is repeatedly shown as both refuge and pressure point, a site where broader social conflicts become intimate. The movement between countryside and industrial district, between memory and aspiration, creates a shared pattern of displacement. Across all three works, material conditions do not cancel moral choice, but they narrow, complicate, and sometimes distort the field in which choice can be made.
Several motifs echo across the collection with striking persistence. Water, earth, and built environments serve as more than scenery; they register the relation between natural rhythms and human systems of production. In Eliot, the river bears deep moral and emotional resonance, while Gaskell sets industrial structures against older regional identities, and Lawrence renders mining country as both livelihood and inheritance. Equally persistent is the motif of the body under pressure: fatigue, desire, illness, and labor become ways of thinking about social order. These novels repeatedly ask how endurance is formed, what sympathy requires, and when discipline becomes a form of injury.
The moral dilemmas that link these works are rarely simple contests between good and evil; rather, they arise from competing claims that cannot be fully reconciled. Duty to family may conflict with personal vocation, loyalty with justice, tenderness with self-command. Gaskell often stages these conflicts in a more overtly social register, Eliot in a deeply ethical and communal one, and Lawrence in a heightened emotional and psychological mode. The result is a rich dialogue about responsibility under conditions of unequal power. Each novel acknowledges that moral seriousness must confront not only intention, but also the shaping force of class position and economic necessity.
Their differences in tone and method are central to the collection’s coherence. North and South carries the energy of social debate and public conflict, balancing argument with affective understanding. The Mill on the Floss offers a more elegiac and reflective movement, attentive to memory, character, and the slow pressure of circumstance. Sons and Lovers intensifies the inward register, turning toward the textures of desire, resentment, and dependency within a working family. These tonal contrasts produce a genuine conversation: Gaskell clarifies social antagonism, Eliot deepens moral perspective, and Lawrence sharpens psychological scrutiny, together broadening what the industrial novel can encompass.
There are also lines of literary inheritance that connect these authors without reducing one to another. Lawrence’s attention to the emotional life of people shaped by industrial labor can be read in continuity with the social and domestic concerns that Gaskell and Eliot had already made central to the English novel. At the same time, his fiction presses further into psychic conflict and erotic ambivalence. Gaskell’s commitment to sympathy across division anticipates later efforts to represent class not as abstraction but as lived relation, while Eliot’s searching moral intelligence establishes a standard of seriousness that remains audible in subsequent treatments of family and society.
Read alongside one another, the novels also reveal distinct understandings of progress itself. In Gaskell, progress appears as a contested social process demanding negotiation, recognition, and new forms of mutual regard. In Eliot, it is shadowed by the persistence of memory, custom, and irreversible consequence. In Lawrence, it becomes entangled with emotional deprivation and the fragmentation of desire. None of these writers accepts a simple celebratory account of development. Instead, they insist that material advancement carries psychic and ethical costs. The aesthetic interplay of the collection rests in this refusal of simplification, joining social observation to forms of feeling that remain difficult, divided, and unresolved.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels remain vital because they address questions that continue to organize modern life: how work enters the home, how class shapes intimacy, how regional identities are altered by economic change, and how individuals seek freedom within binding structures of care and necessity. Their historical settings do not confine them to the past. On the contrary, the pressures they depict resonate wherever labor reorganizes family life and measures worth through productivity. By pairing industrial transformation with moral and emotional complexity, Gaskell, Eliot, and Lawrence offer not only records of social change but enduring frameworks for thinking about inequality, aspiration, and the costs of becoming modern.
Their standing in literary culture has long been secure, though the terms of admiration have evolved. Gaskell has been valued for combining social breadth with humane intelligence, Eliot for unmatched ethical depth and psychological penetration, and Lawrence for his unsettling candor about feeling, embodiment, and familial bonds. Across generations, readers and scholars have returned to these works because they resist easy classification. They are at once social, philosophical, and intensely personal. That layered character has sustained debate about realism, gender, class, and the representation of desire, ensuring that each novel remains active within broader conversations about what fiction can know and reveal.
The afterlives of these works extend beyond literary study into performance, screen culture, and public discussions of industrial Britain. Their characters, settings, and conflicts have repeatedly invited reinterpretation because they crystallize tensions still legible in contemporary societies: employer and worker, parent and child, selfhood and duty, place and mobility. They are also frequently cited in discussions of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as exemplary instances of fiction that binds social structures to inner life. That continuing presence reflects more than canonical prestige. It shows that these books remain useful to collective thought, providing durable images of change lived at the scale of everyday experience.
Taken together, the three novels offer a powerful account of how literature remembers the making of the modern world. Their continuing relevance lies not in nostalgia for an industrial past, but in their exacting recognition that progress is unevenly distributed and morally fraught. They show that economic systems are apprehended through speech, gesture, silence, and the habits of family life. As a collection, they encourage reading across generations of writers who confronted related realities with distinct artistic means. The result is a composite vision of industrial society that remains intellectually serious, emotionally searching, and critically generative for readers seeking to understand the entanglement of labor, love, and social change.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South emerged from mid-Victorian Britain, when industrial capitalism had transformed the social map more rapidly than political institutions could adapt. Manufacturing towns in the North accumulated wealth, influence, and population, while older landed authority still shaped manners, education, and prestige. The novel belongs to a period in which class relations were being renegotiated under the pressure of factory production, urban migration, and increasingly visible poverty. Its historical setting reflects a society asking whether national prosperity justified harsh labor discipline, and whether mutual obligation could survive when economic life was governed less by inherited custom than by contracts, competition, and mechanical speed.
One of the defining debates behind North and South was the political aftermath of reform. Parliamentary change had begun to widen representation, yet working people remained only partially included in the national conversation. Public discussion of factory conditions, strikes, wages, and the rights of masters and workers intensified as industrial disputes revealed the limits of laissez-faire optimism. Gaskell writes within this climate of inquiry, when the so-called condition-of-England question pressed writers to consider whether social fragmentation threatened the moral legitimacy of the nation. Her perspective is shaped by a world in which philanthropy, paternalism, and labor organization all competed as possible answers to industrial conflict.
Religious difference also forms part of the socio-political context of North and South. The period was marked by tension between established authority and varieties of Protestant dissent, especially in rapidly growing towns where industrial wealth did not always align with traditional hierarchies. These divisions mattered politically because they shaped education, respectability, social networks, and ideas of duty. Gaskell’s attention to conscience, speech, and civic behavior reflects a culture in which moral authority was publicly contested rather than simply inherited. Industrial modernity did not erase belief; instead, it redistributed it across churches, chapels, and domestic ideals, making religion a force in class relations as much as in private life.
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is set earlier than its publication, looking back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, when provincial England was entering modernity unevenly. The novel’s world still bears the marks of a society rooted in family property, local credit, and customary status, yet that order is increasingly vulnerable to legal, financial, and commercial pressures. Its historical perspective is shaped less by the fully developed factory system than by the destabilization that precedes and accompanies it. Eliot reconstructs a moment when old forms of social authority remained powerful, but their security had begun to erode under expanding markets, print culture, and more impersonal economic relations.
The political environment behind The Mill on the Floss includes the lingering effects of the Napoleonic era, postwar economic uncertainty, and the uneven reach of national reform into provincial life. Even where large-scale industry is not central, the novel registers a society in transition, one attentive to bankruptcy, social standing, legal disputes, and reputational fragility. Eliot’s historical imagination is shaped by the knowledge that modernization did not arrive as abstract progress but as pressure on households and communities. Questions of education, gendered expectation, and social mobility therefore appear not merely private concerns but symptoms of a broader reordering of power, in which inherited norms increasingly met new economic realities.
The Mill on the Floss also belongs to a context in which women’s roles were being publicly scrutinized, even when formal political rights remained restricted. Mid-nineteenth-century readers would have recognized the force of debates about female education, obedience, self-cultivation, and the family as a moral institution. Eliot places these pressures within a provincial setting to show how broad ideological expectations are enforced through intimate judgment. The novel reflects a society where respectability could function as a mechanism of discipline, especially for women whose intelligence or desire exceeded the roles available to them. In this sense, private life becomes political history in miniature, revealing how social order was maintained.
D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers stands at the far end of the anthology’s historical arc, rooted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when industrial Britain had matured into a mass society marked by class consciousness, labor militancy, and intensified scrutiny of domestic life. Coal mining communities embodied both the wealth and the human cost of industrial power. Lawrence writes after decades of urbanization and labor conflict, in a world where industrial work had become hereditary for many families and where social identity was deeply shaped by wage dependence. The novel captures a Britain no longer discovering industry, but living inside its accumulated emotional and bodily consequences.
The socio-political background of Sons and Lovers includes the rise of trade union culture, the growth of socialist and labor politics, and the broader challenge these movements posed to older forms of deference. Although the novel is not a programmatic political tract, it is informed by a historical moment in which working-class experience could no longer be treated as merely local or incidental. Questions of masculinity, authority, alcoholism, education, and aspiration are inseparable from the structure of industrial labor. Lawrence’s treatment of family strain reflects a society where the home had become one of the main sites in which larger economic antagonisms were absorbed, reproduced, or resisted.
Imperial confidence and national unease also frame Sons and Lovers. Edwardian Britain projected global power, yet at home it faced anxieties about national efficiency, social degeneration, and the physical cost of industrial life. Debates about health, housing, and the vitality of the population gave new urgency to the conditions of miners and their families. Lawrence’s attention to the body, fatigue, and emotional suffocation belongs to this climate. The novel anticipates the fracture that the First World War would make unmistakable: that industrial modernity, often celebrated as progress, could also produce exhaustion, estrangement, and forms of damage not easily measured by economic growth alone.
Taken together, the three novels trace a movement from early provincial disruption, through the high Victorian confrontation between capital and labor, to the deeply internalized industrial pressures of the early twentieth century. Across that span, Britain experienced reform, expanded literacy, rail travel, new communications, and shifting class visibility. Yet these changes did not produce a simple story of emancipation. Instead, the anthology reveals how industrialization redistributed authority among employers, households, churches, and emerging political movements. Each work shows that power was experienced not only in Parliament or the marketplace, but also in courtship, education, family obligation, and the moral languages through which people interpreted social change.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
North and South belongs to the Victorian realist project of rendering social life with moral seriousness and material detail. Gaskell writes in a literary culture that increasingly valued the novel as an instrument for understanding modern society, especially its new urban and industrial forms. Realism here is not mere accumulation of facts; it is a method for testing ethical perception against structural inequality. Her use of dialogue, domestic scenes, and public conflict reflects a period when readers expected fiction to mediate between classes, regions, and belief systems. The novel is shaped by the conviction that imaginative sympathy might clarify antagonisms that economics and political rhetoric had hardened.
The intellectual climate surrounding Gaskell included political economy, moral philosophy, and social investigation. Industrial Britain generated new habits of counting, measuring, and theorizing labor, but also new anxieties about whether statistical knowledge could grasp human suffering. North and South responds to this tension by placing abstract disputes about wages, discipline, and responsibility within embodied relationships. The novel participates in a broad Victorian effort to reconcile economic modernity with ethical community. It neither ignores the language of productivity nor fully accepts it as sufficient. Instead, Gaskell’s realism probes the limits of utilitarian habits of thought when confronted with grief, pride, hunger, and mutual dependence.
The Mill on the Floss is shaped by a later and more self-conscious realism, one informed by historical reflection and psychological depth. Eliot writes with acute awareness that character is formed by circumstance, memory, and inherited social language. Her narrative voice brings philosophical scrutiny to provincial life, showing how apparently small events are embedded in broader patterns of causation. This method reflects the nineteenth century’s growing interest in history, moral psychology, and the relation between individual agency and social environment. Eliot’s realism thus differs from simple reportage: it is interpretive, analytical, and attuned to the tragic pressures created when inner life exceeds the categories available in a restrictive community.
Scientific and intellectual developments also matter to Eliot’s art. The period saw expanding interest in geology, evolutionary thinking, and forms of historical inquiry that made human life appear contingent, developmental, and embedded in long processes rather than fixed design. Without reducing experience to mechanism, The Mill on the Floss absorbs this enlarged sense of causation. Human beings appear as creatures of impulse, habit, and environment as well as conscience. Eliot’s attention to memory, error, and sympathy belongs to a culture increasingly interested in how minds are formed. The novel’s seriousness comes partly from this modern awareness that moral judgment must reckon with complexity rather than rely on inherited certainties alone.
Sons and Lovers stands at the meeting point of realism and early literary modernity. Lawrence retains close observation of place, class, and work, yet he shifts emphasis from public debate to psychic intensity, sexuality, and the unstable border between self and environment. This marks a broader change in the aesthetic climate of the early twentieth century, when many writers sought forms capable of registering desire, resentment, and bodily consciousness more directly than conventional Victorian narration allowed. Lawrence’s prose reflects that transition. Industry is not only a social system in the novel; it is a pressure felt in nerves, gestures, speech, and intimate attachments, requiring a language both concrete and emotionally volatile.
Technological and industrial transformation underlies the aesthetic worlds of all three novels. Mills, mines, transport networks, mechanized production, and expanding print culture changed not only labor and landscape but also perception. Distance contracted, urban crowds multiplied, and the rhythms of work altered domestic time. Gaskell confronts the factory town as a new social totality; Eliot remembers an earlier world on the edge of such transformation; Lawrence depicts an industrial environment so pervasive that it enters feeling itself. In each case, literary form responds to technology by asking how human value can be represented when life is increasingly organized by speed, extraction, productivity, and systems larger than any individual can control.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
The reception of these novels has been repeatedly reshaped by later history. In the twentieth century, two world wars, economic depression, welfare reform, and the decline of heavy industry changed how readers understood nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial fiction. What earlier audiences might have read primarily as moral or domestic narrative came to be recognized as a record of structural upheaval. North and South gained renewed force as a study of labor relations and regional division; The Mill on the Floss as an inquiry into gendered constraint within modernization; Sons and Lovers as a landmark in representing industrial family life, desire, and the psychological costs of class-bound existence.
Critical reassessment has also followed changing scholarly priorities. Earlier criticism often emphasized moral seriousness, character, and style, sometimes domesticating the social tensions that animate these books. Later approaches, especially those attentive to class, gender, and labor, restored the centrality of economic conflict and social discipline. North and South became important to studies of industrial relations and the politics of sympathy. The Mill on the Floss was reread through feminist and historicist lenses that highlighted the restrictions placed on female ambition and expression. Sons and Lovers, once discussed largely in terms of personal psychology, was increasingly situated within working-class history and the material world of mining communities.
Adaptations and classroom circulation have further transformed the novels’ afterlives. Screen versions, abridgments, and repeated inclusion in university curricula have broadened their audience while also influencing interpretation, often foregrounding romance or family drama as entry points into more difficult historical material. At the same time, scholars continue to debate whether these works reconcile social contradiction too readily or expose its intractability with unusual honesty. Their durability lies in that tension. In an age shaped by deindustrialization, renewed inequality, and arguments over the meaning of progress, these novels remain vital because they refuse to separate economic change from the intimate forms of love, injury, memory, and aspiration through which history is lived.
Bricks, Blood, and Progress – 3 Classic Industrial Revolution Novels
Industry, Labor, and Social Change
Family, Identity, and Moral Life
Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South
CHAPTER I—'HASTE TO THE WEDDING'
'Edith!' said Margaret, gently, 'Edith!'
But, as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street, looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons. If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her. Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin's beauty. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality and charm which Edith possessed. They had been talking about wedding dresses, and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed; and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little after-dinner nap.
Margaret had been on the point of telling her cousin of some of the plans and visions which she entertained as to her future life in the country parsonage, where her father and mother lived; and where her bright holidays had always been passed, though for the last ten years her aunt Shaw's house had been considered as her home. But in default of a listener, she had to brood over the change in her life silently as heretofore. It was a happy brooding, although tinged with regret at being separated for an indefinite time from her gentle aunt and dear cousin. As she thought of the delight of filling the important post of only daughter in Helstone parsonage, pieces of the conversation out of the next room came upon her ears. Her aunt Shaw was talking to the five or six ladies who had been dining there, and whose husbands were still in the dining-room. They were the familiar acquaintances of the house; neighbours whom Mrs. Shaw called friends, because she happened to dine with them more frequently than with any other people, and because if she or Edith wanted anything from them, or they from her, they did not scruple to make a call at each other's houses before luncheon. These ladies and their husbands were invited, in their capacity of friends, to eat a farewell dinner in honour of Edith's approaching marriage. Edith had rather objected to this arrangement, for Captain Lennox was expected to arrive by a late train this very evening; but, although she was a spoiled child, she was too careless and idle to have a very strong will of her own, and gave way when she found that her mother had absolutely ordered those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners. She contented herself by leaning back in her chair, merely playing with the food on her plate, and looking grave and absent; while all around her were enjoying the mots of Mr. Grey, the gentleman who always took the bottom of the table at Mrs. Shaw's dinner parties, and asked Edith to give them some music in the drawing-room. Mr. Grey was particularly agreeable over this farewell dinner, and the gentlemen staid down stairs longer than usual. It was very well they did—to judge from the fragments of conversation which Margaret overheard.
'I suffered too much myself; not that I was not extremely happy with the poor dear General, but still disparity of age is a drawback; one that I was resolved Edith should not have to encounter. Of course, without any maternal partiality, I foresaw that the dear child was likely to marry early; indeed, I had often said that I was sure she would be married before she was nineteen. I had quite a prophetic feeling when Captain Lennox'—and here the voice dropped into a whisper, but Margaret could easily supply the blank. The course of true love in Edith's case had run remarkably smooth. Mrs. Shaw had given way to the presentiment, as she expressed it; and had rather urged on the marriage, although it was below the expectations which many of Edith's acquaintances had formed for her, a young and pretty heiress. But Mrs. Shaw said that her only child should marry for love,—and sighed emphatically, as if love had not been her motive for marrying the General. Mrs. Shaw enjoyed the romance of the present engagement rather more than her daughter. Not but that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to shiver and shudder at; partly for the pleasure she had in being coaxed out of her dislike by her fond lover, and partly because anything of a gipsy or make-shift life was really distasteful to her. Yet had any one come with a fine house, and a fine estate, and a fine title to boot, Edith would still have clung to Captain Lennox while the temptation lasted; when it was over, it is possible she might have had little qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united in his person everything that was desirable. In this she was but her mother's child; who, after deliberately marrying General Shaw with no warmer feeling than respect for his character and establishment, was constantly, though quietly, bemoaning her hard lot in being united to one whom she could not love.
'I have spared no expense in her trousseau,' were the next words Margaret heard.
'She has all the beautiful Indian shawls and scarfs the General gave to me, but which I shall never wear again.'
'She is a lucky girl,' replied another voice, which Margaret knew to be that of Mrs. Gibson, a lady who was taking a double interest in the conversation, from the fact of one of her daughters having been married within the last few weeks.
'Helen had set her heart upon an Indian shawl, but really when I found what an extravagant price was asked, I was obliged to refuse her. She will be quite envious when she hears of Edith having Indian shawls. What kind are they? Delhi? with the lovely little borders?'
Margaret heard her aunt's voice again, but this time it was as if she had raised herself up from her half-recumbent position, and were looking into the more dimly lighted back drawing-room. 'Edith! Edith!' cried she; and then she sank as if wearied by the exertion. Margaret stepped forward.
'Edith is asleep, Aunt Shaw. Is it anything I can do?'
All the ladies said 'Poor child!' on receiving this distressing intelligence about Edith; and the minute lap-dog in Mrs. Shaw's arms began to bark, as if excited by the burst of pity.
'Hush, Tiny! you naughty little girl! you will waken your mistress. It was only to ask Edith if she would tell Newton to bring down her shawls: perhaps you would go, Margaret dear?'
Margaret went up into the old nursery at the very top of the house, where Newton was busy getting up some laces which were required for the wedding. While Newton went (not without a muttered grumbling) to undo the shawls, which had already been exhibited four or five times that day, Margaret looked round upon the nursery; the first room in that house with which she had become familiar nine years ago, when she was brought, all untamed from the forest, to share the home, the play, and the lessons of her cousin Edith. She remembered the dark, dim look of the London nursery, presided over by an austere and ceremonious nurse, who was terribly particular about clean hands and torn frocks. She recollected the first tea up there—separate from her father and aunt, who were dining somewhere down below an infinite depth of stairs; for unless she were up in the sky (the child thought), they must be deep down in the bowels of the earth. At home—before she came to live in Harley Street—her mother's dressing-room had been her nursery; and, as they kept early hours in the country parsonage, Margaret had always had her meals with her father and mother. Oh! well did the tall stately girl of eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild passion of grief by the little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes, in that first night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse, because it would disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly, but more quietly, till her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come softly upstairs with Mr. Hale to show him his little sleeping daughter. Then the little Margaret had hushed her sobs, and tried to lie quiet as if asleep, for fear of making her father unhappy by her grief, which she dared not express before her aunt, and which she rather thought it was wrong to feel at all after the long hoping, and planning, and contriving they had gone through at home, before her wardrobe could be arranged so as to suit her grander circumstances, and before papa could leave his parish to come up to London, even for a few days.
Now she had got to love the old nursery, though it was but a dismantled place; and she looked all round, with a kind of cat-like regret, at the idea of leaving it for ever in three days.
'Ah Newton!' said she, 'I think we shall all be sorry to leave this dear old room.'
'Indeed, miss, I shan't for one. My eyes are not so good as they were, and the light here is so bad that I can't see to mend laces except just at the window, where there's always a shocking draught—enough to give one one's death of cold.'
'Well, I dare say you will have both good light and plenty of warmth at Naples. You must keep as much of your darning as you can till then. Thank you, Newton, I can take them down—you're busy.'
So Margaret went down laden with shawls, and snuffing up their spicy Eastern smell. Her aunt asked her to stand as a sort of lay figure on which to display them, as Edith was still asleep. No one thought about it; but Margaret's tall, finely made figure, in the black silk dress which she was wearing as mourning for some distant relative of her father's, set off the long beautiful folds of the gorgeous shawls that would have half-smothered Edith. Margaret stood right under the chandelier, quite silent and passive, while her aunt adjusted the draperies. Occasionally, as she was turned round, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the chimney-piece, and smiled at her own appearance there—the familiar features in the usual garb of a princess. She touched the shawls gently as they hung around her, and took a pleasure in their soft feel and their brilliant colours, and rather liked to be dressed in such splendour—enjoying it much as a child would do, with a quiet pleased smile on her lips. Just then the door opened, and Mr. Henry Lennox was suddenly announced. Some of the ladies started back, as if half-ashamed of their feminine interest in dress. Mrs. Shaw held out her hand to the new-comer; Margaret stood perfectly still, thinking she might be yet wanted as a sort of block for the shawls; but looking at Mr. Lennox with a bright, amused face, as if sure of his sympathy in her sense of the ludicrousness at being thus surprised.
Her aunt was so much absorbed in asking Mr. Henry Lennox—who had not been able to come to dinner—all sorts of questions about his brother the bridegroom, his sister the bridesmaid (coming with the Captain from Scotland for the occasion), and various other members of the Lennox family, that Margaret saw she was no more wanted as shawl-bearer, and devoted herself to the amusement of the other visitors, whom her aunt had for the moment forgotten. Almost immediately, Edith came in from the back drawing-room, winking and blinking her eyes at the stronger light, shaking back her slightly-ruffled curls, and altogether looking like the Sleeping Beauty just startled from her dreams. Even in her slumber she had instinctively felt that a Lennox was worth rousing herself for; and she had a multitude of questions to ask about dear Janet, the future, unseen sister-in-law, for whom she professed so much affection, that if Margaret had not been very proud she might have almost felt jealous of the mushroom rival. As Margaret sank rather more into the background on her aunt's joining the conversation, she saw Henry Lennox directing his look towards a vacant seat near her; and she knew perfectly well that as soon as Edith released him from her questioning, he would take possession of that chair. She had not been quite sure, from her aunt's rather confused account of his engagements, whether he would come that night; it was almost a surprise to see him; and now she was sure of a pleasant evening. He liked and disliked pretty nearly the same things that she did. Margaret's face was lightened up into an honest, open brightness. By-and-by he came. She received him with a smile which had not a tinge of shyness or self-consciousness in it.
'Well, I suppose you are all in the depths of business—ladies' business, I mean. Very different to my business, which is the real true law business. Playing with shawls is very different work to drawing up settlements.'
'Ah, I knew how you would be amused to find us all so occupied in admiring finery. But really Indian shawls are very perfect things of their kind.'
'I have no doubt they are. Their prices are very perfect, too. Nothing wanting.' The gentlemen came dropping in one by one, and the buzz and noise deepened in tone.
'This is your last dinner-party, is it not? There are no more before Thursday?'
'No. I think after this evening we shall feel at rest, which I am sure I have not done for many weeks; at least, that kind of rest when the hands have nothing more to do, and all the arrangements are complete for an event which must occupy one's head and heart. I shall be glad to have time to think, and I am sure Edith will.'
'I am not so sure about her; but I can fancy that you will. Whenever I have seen you lately, you have been carried away by a whirlwind of some other person's making.'
'Yes,' said Margaret, rather sadly, remembering the never-ending commotion about trifles that had been going on for more than a month past: 'I wonder if a marriage must always be preceded by what you call a whirlwind, or whether in some cases there might not rather be a calm and peaceful time just before it.'
'Cinderella's godmother ordering the trousseau, the wedding-breakfast, writing the notes of invitation, for instance,' said Mr. Lennox, laughing.
'But are all these quite necessary troubles?' asked Margaret, looking up straight at him for an answer. A sense of indescribable weariness of all the arrangements for a pretty effect, in which Edith had been busied as supreme authority for the last six weeks, oppressed her just now; and she really wanted some one to help her to a few pleasant, quiet ideas connected with a marriage.
'Oh, of course,' he replied with a change to gravity in his tone. 'There are forms and ceremonies to be gone through, not so much to satisfy oneself, as to stop the world's mouth, without which stoppage there would be very little satisfaction in life. But how would you have a wedding arranged?'
'Oh, I have never thought much about it; only I should like it to be a very fine summer morning; and I should like to walk to church through the shade of trees; and not to have so many bridesmaids, and to have no wedding-breakfast. I dare say I am resolving against the very things that have given me the most trouble just now.'
'No, I don't think you are. The idea of stately simplicity accords well with your character.'
Margaret did not quite like this speech; she winced away from it more, from remembering former occasions on which he had tried to lead her into a discussion (in which he took the complimentary part) about her own character and ways of going on. She cut his speech rather short by saying:
'It is natural for me to think of Helstone church, and the walk to it, rather than of driving up to a London church in the middle of a paved street.'
'Tell me about Helstone. You have never described it to me. I should like to have some idea of the place you will be living in, when ninety-six Harley Street will be looking dingy and dirty, and dull, and shut up. Is Helstone a village, or a town, in the first place?'
'Oh, only a hamlet; I don't think I could call it a village at all. There is the church and a few houses near it on the green—cottages, rather—with roses growing all over them.'
'And flowering all the year round, especially at Christmas—make your picture complete,' said he.
'No,' replied Margaret, somewhat annoyed, 'I am not making a picture. I am trying to describe Helstone as it really is. You should not have said that.'
'I am penitent,' he answered. 'Only it really sounded like a village in a tale rather than in real life.'
'And so it is,' replied Margaret, eagerly. 'All the other places in England that I have seen seem so hard and prosaic-looking, after the New Forest. Helstone is like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson's poems. But I won't try and describe it any more. You would only laugh at me if I told you what I think of it—what it really is.'
'Indeed, I would not. But I see you are going to be very resolved. Well, then, tell me that which I should like still better to know what the parsonage is like.'
'Oh, I can't describe my home. It is home, and I can't put its charm into words.'
'I submit. You are rather severe to-night, Margaret.'
'How?' said she, turning her large soft eyes round full upon him. 'I did not know I was.'
'Why, because I made an unlucky remark, you will neither tell me what Helstone is like, nor will you say anything about your home, though I have told you how much I want to hear about both, the latter especially.'
'But indeed I cannot tell you about my own home. I don't quite think it is a thing to be talked about, unless you knew it.'
'Well, then'—pausing for a moment—'tell me what you do there. Here you read, or have lessons, or otherwise improve your mind, till the middle of the day; take a walk before lunch, go a drive with your aunt after, and have some kind of engagement in the evening. There, now fill up your day at Helstone. Shall you ride, drive, or walk?'
'Walk, decidedly. We have no horse, not even for papa. He walks to the very extremity of his parish. The walks are so beautiful, it would be a shame to drive—almost a shame to ride.'
'Shall you garden much? That, I believe, is a proper employment for young ladies in the country.'
'I don't know. I am afraid I shan't like such hard work.'
'Archery parties—pic-nics—race-balls—hunt-balls?'
'Oh no!' said she, laughing. 'Papa's living is very small; and even if we were near such things, I doubt if I should go to them.'
'I see, you won't tell me anything. You will only tell me that you are not going to do this and that. Before the vacation ends, I think I shall pay you a call, and see what you really do employ yourself in.'
'I hope you will. Then you will see for yourself how beautiful Helstone is. Now I must go. Edith is sitting down to play, and I just know enough of music to turn over the leaves for her; and besides, Aunt Shaw won't like us to talk.'
Edith played brilliantly. In the middle of the piece the door half-opened, and Edith saw Captain Lennox hesitating whether to come in. She threw down her music, and rushed out of the room, leaving Margaret standing confused and blushing to explain to the astonished guests what vision had shown itself to cause Edith's sudden flight. Captain Lennox had come earlier than was expected; or was it really so late? They looked at their watches, were duly shocked, and took their leave.
Then Edith came back, glowing with pleasure, half-shyly, half-proudly leading in her tall handsome Captain. His brother shook hands with him, and Mrs. Shaw welcomed him in her gentle kindly way, which had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired,—a winter in Italy. Mrs. Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she never liked to do anything from the open and acknowledged motive of her own good will and pleasure; she preferred being compelled to gratify herself by some other person's command or desire. She really did persuade herself that she was submitting to some hard external necessity; and thus she was able to moan and complain in her soft manner, all the time she was in reality doing just what she liked.
It was in this way she began to speak of her own journey to Captain Lennox, who assented, as in duty bound, to all his future mother-in-law said, while his eyes sought Edith, who was busying herself in rearranging the tea-table, and ordering up all sorts of good things, in spite of his assurances that he had dined within the last two hours.
Mr. Henry Lennox stood leaning against the chimney-piece, amused with the family scene. He was close by his handsome brother; he was the plain one in a singularly good-looking family; but his face was intelligent, keen, and mobile; and now and then Margaret wondered what it was that he could be thinking about, while he kept silence, but was evidently observing, with an interest that was slightly sarcastic, all that Edith and she were doing. The sarcastic feeling was called out by Mrs. Shaw's conversation with his brother; it was separate from the interest which was excited by what he saw. He thought it a pretty sight to see the two cousins so busy in their little arrangements about the table. Edith chose to do most herself. She was in a humour to enjoy showing her lover how well she could behave as a soldier's wife. She found out that the water in the urn was cold, and ordered up the great kitchen tea-kettle; the only consequence of which was that when she met it at the door, and tried to carry it in, it was too heavy for her, and she came in pouting, with a black mark on her muslin gown, and a little round white hand indented by the handle, which she took to show to Captain Lennox, just like a hurt child, and, of course, the remedy was the same in both cases. Margaret's quickly-adjusted spirit-lamp was the most efficacious contrivance, though not so like the gypsy-encampment which Edith, in some of her moods, chose to consider the nearest resemblance to a barrack-life.
After this evening all was bustle till the wedding was over.
CHAPTER II—ROSES AND THORNS
Margaret was once more in her morning dress, travelling quietly home with her father, who had come up to assist at the wedding. Her mother had been detained at home by a multitude of half-reasons, none of which anybody fully understood, except Mr. Hale, who was perfectly aware that all his arguments in favour of a grey satin gown, which was midway between oldness and newness, had proved unavailing; and that, as he had not the money to equip his wife afresh, from top to toe, she would not show herself at her only sister's only child's wedding. If Mrs. Shaw had guessed at the real reason why Mrs. Hale did not accompany her husband, she would have showered down gowns upon her; but it was nearly twenty years since Mrs. Shaw had been the poor, pretty Miss Beresford, and she had really forgotten all grievances except that of the unhappiness arising from disparity of age in married life, on which she could descant by the half-hour. Dearest Maria had married the man of her heart, only eight years older than herself, with the sweetest temper, and that blue-black hair one so seldom sees. Mr. Hale was one of the most delightful preachers she had ever heard, and a perfect model of a parish priest. Perhaps it was not quite a logical deduction from all these premises, but it was still Mrs. Shaw's characteristic conclusion, as she thought over her sister's lot: 'Married for love, what can dearest Maria have to wish for in this world?' Mrs. Hale, if she spoke truth, might have answered with a ready-made list, 'a silver-grey glace silk, a white chip bonnet, oh! dozens of things for the wedding, and hundreds of things for the house.' Margaret only knew that her mother had not found it convenient to come, and she was not sorry to think that their meeting and greeting would take place at Helstone parsonage, rather than, during the confusion of the last two or three days, in the house in Harley Street, where she herself had had to play the part of Figaro, and was wanted everywhere at one and the same time. Her mind and body ached now with the recollection of all she had done and said within the last forty-eight hours. The farewells so hurriedly taken, amongst all the other good-byes, of those she had lived with so long, oppressed her now with a sad regret for the times that were no more; it did not signify what those times had been, they were gone never to return. Margaret's heart felt more heavy than she could ever have thought it possible in going to her own dear home, the place and the life she had longed for for years—at that time of all times for yearning and longing, just before the sharp senses lose their outlines in sleep. She took her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future. Her eyes began to see, not visions of what had been, but the sight actually before her; her dear father leaning back asleep in the railway carriage. His blue-black hair was grey now, and lay thinly over his brows. The bones of his face were plainly to be seen—too plainly for beauty, if his features had been less finely cut; as it was, they had a grace if not a comeliness of their own. The face was in repose; but it was rather rest after weariness, than the serene calm of the countenance of one who led a placid, contented life. Margaret was painfully struck by the worn, anxious expression; and she went back over the open and avowed circumstances of her father's life, to find the cause for the lines that spoke so plainly of habitual distress and depression.
'Poor Frederick!' thought she, sighing. 'Oh! if Frederick had but been a clergyman, instead of going into the navy, and being lost to us all! I wish I knew all about it. I never understood it from Aunt Shaw; I only knew he could not come back to England because of that terrible affair. Poor dear papa! how sad he looks! I am so glad I am going home, to be at hand to comfort him and mamma.
She was ready with a bright smile, in which there was not a trace of fatigue, to greet her father when he awakened. He smiled back again, but faintly, as if it were an unusual exertion. His face returned into its lines of habitual anxiety. He had a trick of half-opening his mouth as if to speak, which constantly unsettled the form of the lips, and gave the face an undecided expression. But he had the same large, soft eyes as his daughter,—eyes which moved slowly and almost grandly round in their orbits, and were well veiled by their transparent white eyelids. Margaret was more like him than like her mother. Sometimes people wondered that parents so handsome should have a daughter who was so far from regularly beautiful; not beautiful at all, was occasionally said. Her mouth was wide; no rosebud that could only open just enough to let out a 'yes' and 'no,' and 'an't please you, sir.' But the wide mouth was one soft curve of rich red lips; and the skin, if not white and fair, was of an ivory smoothness and delicacy. If the look on her face was, in general, too dignified and reserved for one so young, now, talking to her father, it was bright as the morning,—full of dimples, and glances that spoke of childish gladness, and boundless hope in the future.
It was the latter part of July when Margaret returned home. The forest trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still. Margaret used to tramp along by her father's side, crushing down the fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light foot, and send up the fragrance peculiar to it,—out on the broad commons into the warm scented light, seeing multitudes of wild, free, living creatures, revelling in the sunshine, and the herbs and flowers it called forth. This life—at least these walks—realised all Margaret's anticipations. She took a pride in her forest. Its people were her people. She made hearty friends with them; learned and delighted in using their peculiar words; took up her freedom amongst them; nursed their babies; talked or read with slow distinctness to their old people; carried dainty messes to their sick; resolved before long to teach at the school, where her father went every day as to an appointed task, but she was continually tempted off to go and see some individual friend—man, woman, or child—in some cottage in the green shade of the forest. Her out-of-doors life was perfect. Her in-doors life had its drawbacks. With the healthy shame of a child, she blamed herself for her keenness of sight, in perceiving that all was not as it should be there. Her mother—her mother always so kind and tender towards her—seemed now and then so much discontented with their situation; thought that the bishop strangely neglected his episcopal duties, in not giving Mr. Hale a better living; and almost reproached her husband because he could not bring himself to say that he wished to leave the parish, and undertake the charge of a larger. He would sigh aloud as he answered, that if he could do what he ought in little Helstone, he should be thankful; but every day he was more overpowered; the world became more bewildering. At each repeated urgency of his wife, that he would put himself in the way of seeking some preferment, Margaret saw that her father shrank more and more; and she strove at such times to reconcile her mother to Helstone. Mrs. Hale said that the near neighbourhood of so many trees affected her health; and Margaret would try to tempt her forth on to the beautiful, broad, upland, sun-streaked, cloud-shadowed common; for she was sure that her mother had accustomed herself too much to an in-doors life, seldom extending her walks beyond the church, the school, and the neighbouring cottages. This did good for a time; but when the autumn drew on, and the weather became more changeable, her mother's idea of the unhealthiness of the place increased; and she repined even more frequently that her husband, who was more learned than Mr. Hume, a better parish priest than Mr. Houldsworth, should not have met with the preferment that these two former neighbours of theirs had done.
This marring of the peace of home, by long hours of discontent, was what Margaret was unprepared for. She knew, and had rather revelled in the idea, that she should have to give up many luxuries, which had only been troubles and trammels to her freedom in Harley Street. Her keen enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure, was balanced finely, if not overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them all, if need were. But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it. There had been slight complaints and passing regrets on her mother's part, over some trifle connected with Helstone, and her father's position there, when Margaret had been spending her holidays at home before; but in the general happiness of the recollection of those times, she had forgotten the small details which were not so pleasant.
In the latter half of September, the autumnal rains and storms came on, and Margaret was obliged to remain more in the house than she had hitherto done. Helstone was at some distance from any neighbours of their own standard of cultivation.
'It is undoubtedly one of the most out-of-the-way places in England,' said Mrs. Hale, in one of her plaintive moods. 'I can't help regretting constantly that papa has really no one to associate with here; he is so thrown away; seeing no one but farmers and labourers from week's end to week's end. If we only lived at the other side of the parish, it would be something; there we should be almost within walking distance of the Stansfields; certainly the Gormans would be within a walk.'
'Gormans,' said Margaret. 'Are those the Gormans who made their fortunes in trade at Southampton? Oh! I'm glad we don't visit them. I don't like shoppy people. I think we are far better off, knowing only cottagers and labourers, and people without pretence.'
'You must not be so fastidious, Margaret, dear!' said her mother, secretly thinking of a young and handsome Mr. Gorman whom she had once met at Mr. Hume's.
'No! I call mine a very comprehensive taste; I like all people whose occupations have to do with land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the three learned professions, as they call them. I'm sure you don't want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you, mamma?'
'But the Gormans were neither butchers nor bakers, but very respectable coach-builders.'
'Very well. Coach-building is a trade all the same, and I think a much more useless one than that of butchers or bakers. Oh! how tired I used to be of the drives every day in Aunt Shaw's carriage, and how I longed to walk!'
