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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The British Moral Compass: 3 Classic Social Novels is an anthology that traverses the intricate landscape of Victorian society, unveiling its moral complexities through an array of storytelling styles. Interweaving narrative with social critique, the collection encapsulates a range of themes such as class struggle, the conflict between traditional values and modernity, and the inner workings of moral decision-making. Each story within the collection highlights the diversity of thought and artistic approach prevalent in the era, with certain narratives standing out for their profound exploration of human resilience and ethical quandaries. The anthology brings together the vivid imaginations and societal observations of George Eliot, Anna Sewell, and Thomas Hardy, figures renowned for their insight into the human condition. These authors utilize distinct literary voices to address social reform and individual morality, painting a rich tapestry of the Victorian epoch. Through their eyes, readers gain insight into the period's sociopolitical landscape, witnessing the emergence of new moral orientations influenced by the rapidly changing world around them. Their works collectively resonate with the broader literary movements of realism and naturalism, enriching the dialogue on societal norms and ethical responsibilities. Highly recommended for those with an interest in Victorian literature and social history, The British Moral Compass provides a comprehensive examination of the multifaceted moral issues of the time. The anthology's strength lies in its capacity to offer readers a panoramic view of Victorian life through the convergence of diverse perspectives, narrative styles, and thematic explorations. It invites critical engagement and appreciation, prompting reflection on the timeless nature of morality as it adapts to ever-shifting cultural landscapes. 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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The British Moral Compass - 3 Classic Social Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together The Mill on the Floss, Black Beauty, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman as three distinct yet converging studies of conscience under pressure. George Eliot, Anna Sewell, and Thomas Hardy each examine lives shaped by social expectation, moral judgment, and the unequal distribution of sympathy. Read together, these novels form a sustained inquiry into how character is tested by custom, class, and power. The selection emphasizes the British social novel as a mode that joins intimate feeling to ethical scrutiny, showing how private suffering can expose the standards by which a society measures innocence, duty, and worth.
The unifying thread of the collection is the question of moral authority: who claims it, who suffers under it, and what forms of compassion may revise it. In Eliot, Sewell, and Hardy, conduct is never merely personal; it is read, regulated, and often misunderstood by the communities surrounding the vulnerable individual. These works therefore illuminate a shared philosophical concern with the distance between social respectability and genuine goodness. Their placement together highlights the movement from judgment to sympathy, from outward codes to inward experience, and from conventional categories of merit toward a broader moral imagination.
Presented as a triad, the novels trace an arc across different forms of social representation while preserving their individual artistic identities. The Mill on the Floss explores moral development through psychological depth and communal pressure. Black Beauty reshapes social criticism through an animal perspective that makes everyday habits newly legible as ethical acts. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman intensifies the conflict between social naming and lived reality, pressing the language of purity against the conditions that deform judgment. The aim is to reveal how varying narrative methods can converge on a shared critique of cruelty, complacency, and inherited moral assumptions.
The distinctiveness of this collection lies in its invitation to read these novels not as isolated classics but as a coordinated meditation on British moral life. Their conjunction foregrounds affinities that can remain less visible when each stands alone: the testing of innocence, the burden of imposed identities, and the demand that readers extend sympathy beyond familiar boundaries. The sequence also clarifies the range of the social novel, from domestic and provincial observation to broader ethical allegory and tragic social indictment. Together, these works map a moral landscape in which feeling becomes a form of knowledge and judgment itself is put on trial.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
These novels speak to one another through recurring scenes of exposure, where a life becomes legible to others under terms it did not choose. Eliot, Sewell, and Hardy each dramatize how reputations are made from partial knowledge and how institutions of everyday life convert assumption into consequence. Across the three works, vulnerability is not accidental but structured by family, labor, gender, and class. What differs is the angle of perception: Eliot attends to the slow formation of feeling, Sewell to the ethics of treatment and use, and Hardy to the collision between social doctrine and embodied experience. Their dialogue deepens through these complementary emphases.
A strong motif linking the three novels is the relation between voice and voicelessness. The Mill on the Floss centers moral misunderstanding within the speech and silence of a community. Black Beauty grants narrative authority to a being often reduced to function, making care, pain, and endurance newly audible. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman returns to the human cost of being spoken about rather than heard on one’s own terms. In each case, the act of narration resists blunt verdicts. The novels insist that ethical reading begins by attending to perspectives that dominant habits have ignored, diminished, or translated into convenient labels.
Nature and environment also create a shared symbolic field, though each author employs it differently. Eliot’s provincial world binds memory, attachment, and social belonging to place, so that landscape carries emotional and moral history. Sewell turns roads, stables, and changing conditions of work into visible measures of kindness or neglect, making surroundings a direct index of conduct. Hardy invests the natural world with a grave counterpoint to social judgment, setting human codes against larger rhythms that neither ratify nor erase suffering. Together, these settings show that moral life unfolds not in abstraction but in textured environments that shape dependence, exposure, and endurance.
The contrasts among the novels are as productive as their affinities. Eliot’s mode is analytic and inward, committed to tracing the fine grain of motive and memory. Sewell’s style is notably lucid and direct, using clarity and restraint to sharpen ethical appeal. Hardy’s manner is darker and more tragic, pressing social criticism toward a more severe reckoning with fate, convention, and historical pressure. These differences create a rich internal conversation about what the social novel can do. One work persuades through psychological penetration, another through humane immediacy, and another through tragic intensity, yet all seek to correct failures of recognition.
The relation among these authors is best understood as one of shared moral and social concern rather than simple linear influence. George Eliot established a powerful model for fiction that treats ordinary lives with intellectual seriousness and ethical breadth. Anna Sewell and Thomas Hardy, in different ways, participate in that enlarged field of sympathy by directing attention toward forms of suffering often normalized or excused. Black Beauty extends social feeling across the boundary between human and animal life, while Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman radicalizes the scrutiny of moral labels attached to women. The conversation is one of affinity, extension, and sharpened emphasis.
Read together, the three novels continually exchange questions about innocence, use, and responsibility. Black Beauty asks what it means to inhabit a world where dependence invites either mercy or exploitation. The Mill on the Floss considers how strong feeling and social expectation can become painfully misaligned. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman examines the devastating force of definitions imposed from outside. Across these differing frames, a common dilemma emerges: whether a society can recognize worth without first demanding conformity to narrow standards. The aesthetic interplay of the collection lies in this repeated testing of sympathy, where ethical insight arises through contrasted voices and narrative forms.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
This collection remains vital because its central concerns continue to organize public and private life. Moral judgment still circulates through social categories that claim neutrality while distributing blame unevenly. Eliot, Sewell, and Hardy reveal how easily communities mistake convention for truth and how often the vulnerable bear the cost of that confusion. Their novels speak with particular force to contemporary discussions of gendered scrutiny, labor and care, the ethics of dependence, and the limits of respectability as a measure of human value. What endures is not only their social criticism but their insistence that sympathy must be disciplined, attentive, and morally courageous.
All three works have sustained broad cultural presence and repeated critical engagement because each opens beyond its immediate story into larger ethical debate. The Mill on the Floss is regularly valued for its psychological intelligence and its searching account of familial and communal pressure. Black Beauty has had a long public life as both a narrative of feeling and a touchstone in conversations about humane treatment. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman continues to anchor debate about purity, sexual double standards, and the violence of social naming. Their reception has remained active because they combine emotional immediacy with ideas that resist settlement.
The afterlives of these novels extend across performance, visual storytelling, classroom study, and public discourse, yet their deepest influence lies in the moral vocabulary they preserve. Black Beauty has shaped ordinary language about kindness, cruelty, and responsible care toward animals. The Mill on the Floss endures as a searching representation of the conflicts between desire, duty, and social belonging. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman remains central wherever literature is asked to confront the mismatch between legal, social, and ethical judgment. Together, they continue to furnish images and arguments through which readers interpret vulnerability, accountability, and the failures of compassion.
Critical interest in these works has persisted not because they offer simple lessons but because they complicate the very grounds of moral evaluation. They ask readers to examine how pity can coexist with punishment, how affection can be entangled with control, and how innocence may be denied by the categories meant to define it. In bringing George Eliot, Anna Sewell, and Thomas Hardy into one frame, this collection underscores their shared power to unsettle complacent judgment while enlarging the scope of sympathy. Their continued relevance rests in that double achievement: rigorous social seeing joined to an enduring demand for humane imagination.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
The three novels in this collection emerge from nineteenth-century Britain, a society transformed by industrial capitalism, expanding markets, and sharpened class divisions. Political authority remained formally stable under constitutional monarchy and Parliament, yet daily life was marked by rapid and uneven change. George Eliot, Anna Sewell, and Thomas Hardy each register the strain between inherited customs and modern systems of exchange, mobility, and discipline. Their fiction belongs to a culture preoccupied with moral order at the very moment when older communal bonds were being tested. The result is not abstract social commentary but narrative attention to how large public structures press upon ordinary households, workplaces, and bodies.
The Mill on the Floss is deeply rooted in the early nineteenth-century Midlands, looking back to the years surrounding the Napoleonic era while being written in the high Victorian period. That double perspective matters. Eliot reconstructs a provincial world shaped by river trade, local credit, property anxieties, and the authority of family reputation. The period’s legal and economic frameworks favored male inheritance, commercial prudence, and social conformity, leaving women dependent on domestic roles and narrow educational expectations. By revisiting an earlier generation from a later vantage, Eliot shows how Victorian self-confidence rested upon unresolved histories of exclusion, especially within the ostensibly stable rural and small-town order.
Across Eliot’s novel, provincial society is not isolated from national life but connected through commerce, law, and social aspiration. The spread of accounting habits, debt relations, and competitive individualism creates a moral atmosphere in which personal worth is often measured by solvency and status. Such concerns reflect broader debates in nineteenth-century Britain about respectability, self-help, and the disciplining effects of the market. Yet Eliot also exposes the emotional costs of a culture governed by rigid judgment. In this setting, domestic life becomes a political arena in miniature, where power is exercised through custom, property, and the capacity of a community to forgive or stigmatize.
Black Beauty belongs to a later Victorian moment defined by urban expansion, railway growth, and the integration of animal labor into modern transport economies. Sewell wrote amid intense public discussion about cruelty to animals, especially horses used in cities for cabs, delivery work, and private display. The novel reflects the practical realities of a society dependent on horse power even as it celebrated technological progress. Its moral force arises from showing how class hierarchy, fashion, and profit could normalize suffering. In doing so, Sewell participates in reformist currents that linked humane treatment, Christian duty, and social respectability within the broad culture of Victorian improvement.
The political backdrop to Black Beauty includes the rise of organized humanitarian reform in Britain. Debates over regulation, public behavior, and moral education animated campaigns against cruelty, intemperance, and various forms of exploitation. Sewell’s novel fits this environment by translating reformist argument into intimate narrative experience. It addresses not only overt brutality but also the respectable negligence of employers, owners, and consumers whose habits sustain harmful systems. Because horses moved across class boundaries, from aristocratic carriage culture to working urban streets, the book reveals a social order in which dependence is widespread but unequally acknowledged. Humane conduct becomes a test of national character as well as private conscience.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is shaped by the late Victorian countryside under pressure from agrarian depression, migration, and the reorganization of rural labor. Hardy depicts a world where traditional village rhythms are increasingly vulnerable to market forces, mechanization, and the decline of older local solidarities. The social order remains strongly patriarchal, and sexual double standards structure public judgment with severe consequences for women. At the same time, class identity is unsettled: ancient lineage carries symbolic power, but economic reality often makes it hollow. Hardy situates private suffering within this broader transition, exposing how rural England was neither timeless nor protective but historically unstable.
By the time Hardy published Tess, Britain had passed through decades of parliamentary reform, expanding literacy, and intensified public debate about marriage, sexuality, and moral authority. Yet legal and cultural reforms did not dissolve entrenched inequalities. Respectability still governed reputation, and the burden of virtue remained asymmetrically assigned. Hardy’s treatment of these pressures made the novel controversial because it challenged readers to see social judgment itself as historically conditioned rather than morally absolute. In this sense, Tess belongs to the larger fin-de-siècle mood of unease beneath imperial and industrial confidence. The novel asks whether a nation proud of progress could recognize the human damage hidden within its own codes.
Taken together, these novels chart Britain from the era of provincial mercantile order through mature industrial society to the unsettled rural crisis of the late century. They illuminate different zones of power: the family and market in Eliot, the transport economy and reform culture in Sewell, and the village, estate, and sexual code in Hardy. None presents politics mainly through elections or ministers. Instead, each reveals how governance operates through institutions, habits, and accepted hierarchies. Their enduring social significance lies in showing that moral life in Britain was shaped not only by ideals of duty and sympathy, but also by economic vulnerability, social surveillance, and unequal access to dignity.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The intellectual climate shared by these works was marked by tension between evangelical morality, liberal individualism, scientific inquiry, and historical self-consciousness. Victorian Britain increasingly valued observation, classification, and social analysis, yet it also retained powerful religious vocabularies of conscience, sacrifice, and stewardship. Eliot, Sewell, and Hardy each engage this mixed inheritance differently. Their novels ask how sympathy can survive within systems driven by utility, ambition, and convention. The period’s moral discourse did not oppose realism; rather, realism often became the preferred means of ethical investigation. Detailed attention to speech, work, habit, and setting offered a way to test public ideals against lived experience.
Eliot’s fiction is central to the development of high Victorian realism, a mode committed to psychological depth, social texture, and moral complexity. In The Mill on the Floss, realism is joined to reflective narration that situates individual feeling within memory, history, and communal life. The novel absorbs contemporary interest in education, character formation, and the limits imposed by gender. It also reflects the era’s fascination with development, not simply in biological terms but in intellectual and ethical growth. Eliot’s art resists melodramatic simplification; instead, she cultivates patient understanding of motive and consequence, making provincial existence a serious field for philosophical and aesthetic inquiry.
The novel’s retrospective structure also relates to nineteenth-century historicism, the habit of seeing persons and institutions as products of time rather than fixed moral types. Eliot presents childhood, family custom, and local culture as formative forces that cannot be judged apart from circumstance. This approach aligns with broader Victorian engagements with causation and responsibility, especially after advances in historical scholarship and scientific thought encouraged more secular explanations of human behavior. Yet Eliot never abandons moral evaluation. Her distinctive achievement is to hold determinative pressures and ethical agency in productive tension, inviting readers to practice sympathy without surrendering judgment. That balance became one of the defining ambitions of serious realist fiction.
Black Beauty occupies a somewhat different aesthetic position. Sewell uses accessibility, emotional directness, and exemplary episodes to reach a broad reading public, including younger readers, while still engaging major Victorian concerns. The novel’s first-person animal narration turns sentiment into an instrument of reform: by asking readers to imagine labor, pain, and dependency from below, it expands the era’s discourse of sympathy. This strategy belongs to a wider nineteenth-century culture in which moral persuasion often traveled through domestic reading, tract-like clarity, and scenes of suffering designed to awaken conscience. Sewell’s innovation was to bind that humane didacticism to the everyday material world of stables, streets, harnesses, and commercial use.
The book also reflects Victorian debates about the relation between science and feeling. As new forms of knowledge classified animals more systematically and urban life made working creatures seem interchangeable, Sewell countered with a narrative insisting on individual experience and moral consideration. Her method does not reject practical knowledge; indeed, the novel is attentive to concrete techniques, bodily strain, and the consequences of particular devices and routines. But it frames knowledge within stewardship rather than mastery. In aesthetic terms, Black Beauty stands at the intersection of realism, sentiment, and reform writing, showing how literary form could shape public ethics beyond elite critical circles.
Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles emerges from a later literary climate often associated with naturalism, pessimism, and skepticism about providential order. While the novel retains lyric intensity and symbolic patterning, it also emphasizes impersonal forces—social, economic, hereditary, and environmental—that limit human freedom. Hardy writes in the aftermath of intellectual upheavals linked to geology, evolutionary theory, and biblical criticism, all of which unsettled traditional religious certainties. Tess reflects that destabilized world. Nature remains beautiful and emotionally charged, yet it does not guarantee moral justice. The novel’s power comes from joining sensuous rural description to a modern awareness that suffering may arise from structures rather than divine design.
Across the anthology, one can trace a movement from mid-Victorian confidence in sympathetic understanding to later, more troubled visions of vulnerability and judgment. Eliot refines realism into moral analysis; Sewell mobilizes sentiment for humanitarian reform; Hardy fuses realism with tragic and naturalistic pressures. All three respond to technological and social transformation, whether through river commerce, horse-drawn urban transport, or agricultural modernization. Their differences reveal the breadth of nineteenth-century prose fiction, which could be philosophical, pedagogical, and formally experimental while remaining accessible to common readers. Together they show that the British social novel was not a single doctrine but a flexible set of methods for examining conscience under historical change.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
The afterlives of these novels have been shaped by the major interpretive movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Early readers often approached them chiefly as moral tales, humane social criticism, or regional portraits. Later criticism, influenced by feminism, social history, animal studies, ecocriticism, and new historicism, has emphasized the ways each text reveals structures of power that earlier audiences naturalized. As Britain moved through world wars, welfare-state reform, decolonization, and debates about rights and personhood, these works acquired fresh relevance. Their longevity rests on their ability to speak both to Victorian moral language and to modern concerns about vulnerability, embodiment, and institutional injustice.
The Mill on the Floss was long admired for its autobiographical resonance, emotional seriousness, and evocation of provincial life. Over time, scholarship increasingly foregrounded its analysis of gendered education, constrained female aspiration, and the disciplinary force of community judgment. Twentieth-century feminist critics found in Eliot’s novel a powerful account of how intelligence and desire are narrowed by social expectation. At the same time, historicist readings connected the book more closely to legal and economic structures, especially property, debt, and inheritance. Adaptations and classroom canonization further secured its place, but they also encouraged renewed debate about whether Eliot ultimately consoles readers with sympathy or leaves them confronting irreparable social limits.
Black Beauty underwent one of the most striking reputational shifts of any Victorian novel. Hugely popular as a children’s classic, it was often simplified into a story of kindness and good behavior, obscuring its sharper critique of labor exploitation, fashion, and class indifference. In recent decades, scholars have reclaimed the novel as a foundational text for animal ethics and an important document in the history of humanitarian reform. Its influence on attitudes toward horse welfare and riding practices has become central to its legacy. Modern readers also note how effectively Sewell connects bodily suffering to systems of consumption, making the book newly relevant in discussions of empathy and nonhuman agency.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles has perhaps most dramatically benefited from changing moral climates. Condemned or censored by some early readers for its challenge to sexual convention, it later became a touchstone for feminist and social critiques of Victorian respectability. Twentieth-century critics explored its tragic form, symbolic density, and relation to naturalism; later scholarship added attention to class precarity, rural dispossession, and the politics of naming, purity, and blame. Film, television, and stage adaptations have repeatedly reintroduced Tess to new audiences, often emphasizing the novel’s indictment of unequal moral standards. Contemporary debate continues over whether Hardy offers protest, fatalism, or a complex mixture of both.
Read together in the present, these novels form a compact history of changing British ideas about who counts as a moral subject. Eliot broadens sympathy within the human community; Sewell extends ethical attention across species boundaries; Hardy exposes the violence hidden in social ideals of purity and order. Their reassessment has therefore moved beyond narrow questions of plot or sentiment toward larger inquiries about power, care, and recognition. Scholars continue to debate how far these books resist the assumptions of their age, yet their enduring importance lies precisely in that tension. They preserve Victorian forms of conscience while also providing later readers with tools to question the worlds that produced them.
The British Moral Compass - 3 Classic Social Novels
Conscience, Moral Agency, and Compassion
Victorian Society, Class, and the Constraints of Place
George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss
BOOK FIRST BOY AND GIRL.
Chapter I. Outside Dorlcote Mill
A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships—laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal—are borne along to the town of St Ogg’s, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river-brink, tingeing the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches of dark earth made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. There is a remnant still of last year’s golden clusters of beehive-ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees; the distant ships seem to be lifting their masts and stretching their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.
And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and look at it, though the clouds are threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. Even in this leafless time of departing February it is pleasant to look at,—perhaps the chill, damp season adds a charm to the trimly kept, comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast. The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs, I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above.
The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond. And now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking of his dinner, getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour; but he will not touch it till he has fed his horses,—the strong, submissive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild reproach at him from between their blinkers, that he should crack his whip at them in that awful manner as if they needed that hint! See how they stretch their shoulders up the slope toward the bridge, with all the more energy because they are so near home. Look at their grand shaggy feet that seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of their necks, bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty muscles of their struggling haunches! I should like well to hear them neigh over their hardly-earned feed of corn, and see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dipping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. Now they are on the bridge, and down they go again at a swifter pace, and the arch of the covered wagon disappears at the turning behind the trees.
Now I can turn my eyes toward the mill again, and watch the unresting wheel sending out its diamond jets of water. That little girl is watching it too; she has been standing on just the same spot at the edge of the water ever since I paused on the bridge. And that queer white cur with the brown ear seems to be leaping and barking in ineffectual remonstrance with the wheel; perhaps he is jealous because his playfellow in the beaver bonnet is so rapt in its movement. It is time the little playfellow went in, I think; and there is a very bright fire to tempt her: the red light shines out under the deepening gray of the sky. It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge....
Ah, my arms are really benumbed. I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill, as it looked one February afternoon many years ago. Before I dozed off, I was going to tell you what Mr and Mrs Tulliver were talking about, as they sat by the bright fire in the left-hand parlour, on that very afternoon I have been dreaming of.
Chapter II. Mr Tulliver, of Dorlcote Mill, Declares His Resolution about Tom
“What I want, you know,” said Mr Tulliver,—“what I want is to give Tom a good eddication; an eddication as’ll be a bread to him. That was what I was thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave the academy at Lady-day. I mean to put him to a downright good school at Midsummer. The two years at th’ academy ’ud ha’ done well enough, if I’d meant to make a miller and farmer of him, for he’s had a fine sight more schoolin’ nor I ever got. All the learnin’ my father ever paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th’ other. But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o’ these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish. It ’ud be a help to me wi’ these lawsuits, and arbitrations, and things. I wouldn’t make a downright lawyer o’ the lad,—I should be sorry for him to be a raskill,—but a sort o’ engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like Riley, or one o’ them smartish businesses as are all profits and no outlay, only for a big watch-chain and a high stool. They’re pretty nigh all one, and they’re not far off being even wi’ the law, I believe; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem i’ the face as hard as one cat looks another. He’s none frightened at him.”
Mr Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blond comely woman in a fan-shaped cap (I am afraid to think how long it is since fan-shaped caps were worn, they must be so near coming in again. At that time, when Mrs Tulliver was nearly forty, they were new at St Ogg’s, and considered sweet things).
“Well, Mr Tulliver, you know best: I’ve no objections. But hadn’t I better kill a couple o’ fowl, and have th’ aunts and uncles to dinner next week, so as you may hear what sister Glegg and sister Pullet have got to say about it? There’s a couple o’ fowl wants killing!”
“You may kill every fowl i’ the yard if you like, Bessy; but I shall ask neither aunt nor uncle what I’m to do wi’ my own lad,” said Mr Tulliver, defiantly.
“Dear heart!” said Mrs Tulliver, shocked at this sanguinary rhetoric, “how can you talk so, Mr Tulliver? But it’s your way to speak disrespectful o’ my family; and sister Glegg throws all the blame upo’ me, though I’m sure I’m as innocent as the babe unborn. For nobody’s ever heard me say as it wasn’t lucky for my children to have aunts and uncles as can live independent. Howiver, if Tom’s to go to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash him and mend him; else he might as well have calico as linen, for they’d be one as yallow as th’ other before they’d been washed half-a-dozen times. And then, when the box is goin’ back’ard and forrard, I could send the lad a cake, or a pork-pie, or an apple; for he can do with an extry bit, bless him! whether they stint him at the meals or no. My children can eat as much victuals as most, thank God!”
“Well, well, we won’t send him out o’ reach o’ the carrier’s cart, if other things fit in,” said Mr Tulliver. “But you mustn’t put a spoke i’ the wheel about the washin,’ if we can’t get a school near enough. That’s the fault I have to find wi’ you, Bessy; if you see a stick i’ the road, you’re allays thinkin’ you can’t step over it. You’d want me not to hire a good wagoner, ’cause he’d got a mole on his face.”
“Dear heart!” said Mrs Tulliver, in mild surprise, “when did I iver make objections to a man because he’d got a mole on his face? I’m sure I’m rether fond o’ the moles; for my brother, as is dead an’ gone, had a mole on his brow. But I can’t remember your iver offering to hire a wagoner with a mole, Mr Tulliver. There was John Gibbs hadn’t a mole on his face no more nor you have, an’ I was all for having you hire him; an’ so you did hire him, an’ if he hadn’t died o’ th’ inflammation, as we paid Dr Turnbull for attending him, he’d very like ha’ been drivin’ the wagon now. He might have a mole somewhere out o’ sight, but how was I to know that, Mr Tulliver?”
“No, no, Bessy; I didn’t mean justly the mole; I meant it to stand for summat else; but niver mind—it’s puzzling work, talking is. What I’m thinking on, is how to find the right sort o’ school to send Tom to, for I might be ta’en in again, as I’ve been wi’ th’ academy. I’ll have nothing to do wi’ a ’cademy again: whativer school I send Tom to, it sha’n’t be a ’cademy; it shall be a place where the lads spend their time i’ summat else besides blacking the family’s shoes, and getting up the potatoes. It’s an uncommon puzzling thing to know what school to pick.”
Mr Tulliver paused a minute or two, and dived with both hands into his breeches pockets as if he hoped to find some suggestion there. Apparently he was not disappointed, for he presently said, “I know what I’ll do: I’ll talk it over wi’ Riley; he’s coming to-morrow, t’ arbitrate about the dam.”
“Well, Mr Tulliver, I’ve put the sheets out for the best bed, and Kezia’s got ’em hanging at the fire. They aren’t the best sheets, but they’re good enough for anybody to sleep in, be he who he will; for as for them best Holland sheets, I should repent buying ’em, only they’ll do to lay us out in. An’ if you was to die to-morrow, Mr Tulliver, they’re mangled beautiful, an’ all ready, an’ smell o’ lavender as it ’ud be a pleasure to lay ’em out; an’ they lie at the left-hand corner o’ the big oak linen-chest at the back: not as I should trust anybody to look ’em out but myself.”
As Mrs Tulliver uttered the last sentence, she drew a bright bunch of keys from her pocket, and singled out one, rubbing her thumb and finger up and down it with a placid smile while she looked at the clear fire. If Mr Tulliver had been a susceptible man in his conjugal relation, he might have supposed that she drew out the key to aid her imagination in anticipating the moment when he would be in a state to justify the production of the best Holland sheets. Happily he was not so; he was only susceptible in respect of his right to water-power; moreover, he had the marital habit of not listening very closely, and since his mention of Mr Riley, had been apparently occupied in a tactile examination of his woollen stockings.
“I think I’ve hit it, Bessy,” was his first remark after a short silence. “Riley’s as likely a man as any to know o’ some school; he’s had schooling himself, an’ goes about to all sorts o’ places, arbitratin’ and vallyin’ and that. And we shall have time to talk it over to-morrow night when the business is done. I want Tom to be such a sort o’ man as Riley, you know,—as can talk pretty nigh as well as if it was all wrote out for him, and knows a good lot o’ words as don’t mean much, so as you can’t lay hold of ’em i’ law; and a good solid knowledge o’ business too.”
“Well,” said Mrs Tulliver, “so far as talking proper, and knowing everything, and walking with a bend in his back, and setting his hair up, I shouldn’t mind the lad being brought up to that. But them fine-talking men from the big towns mostly wear the false shirt-fronts; they wear a frill till it’s all a mess, and then hide it with a bib; I know Riley does. And then, if Tom’s to go and live at Mudport, like Riley, he’ll have a house with a kitchen hardly big enough to turn in, an’ niver get a fresh egg for his breakfast, an’ sleep up three pair o’ stairs,—or four, for what I know,—and be burnt to death before he can get down.”
“No, no,” said Mr Tulliver, “I’ve no thoughts of his going to Mudport: I mean him to set up his office at St Ogg’s, close by us, an’ live at home. But,” continued Mr Tulliver after a pause, “what I’m a bit afraid on is, as Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish. He takes after your family, Bessy.”
“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s way, and my father’s before him.”
“It seems a bit a pity, though,” said Mr Tulliver, “as the lad should take after the mother’s side instead o’ the little wench. That’s the worst on’t wi’ crossing o’ breeds: you can never justly calkilate what’ll come on’t. The little un takes after my side, now: she’s twice as ’cute as Tom. Too ’cute for a woman, I’m afraid,” continued Mr Tulliver, turning his head dubiously first on one side and then on the other. “It’s no mischief much while she’s a little un; but an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.”
“Yes, it is a mischief while she’s a little un, Mr Tulliver, for it runs to naughtiness. How to keep her in a clean pinafore two hours together passes my cunning. An’ now you put me i’ mind,” continued Mrs Tulliver, rising and going to the window, “I don’t know where she is now, an’ it’s pretty nigh tea-time. Ah, I thought so,—wanderin’ up an’ down by the water, like a wild thing: She’ll tumble in some day.”
Mrs Tulliver rapped the window sharply, beckoned, and shook her head,—a process which she repeated more than once before she returned to her chair.
“You talk o’ ’cuteness, Mr Tulliver,” she observed as she sat down, “but I’m sure the child’s half an idiot i’ some things; for if I send her upstairs to fetch anything, she forgets what she’s gone for, an’ perhaps ’ull sit down on the floor i’ the sunshine an’ plait her hair an’ sing to herself like a Bedlam creatur’, all the while I’m waiting for her downstairs. That niver run i’ my family, thank God! no more nor a brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter. I don’t like to fly i’ the face o’ Providence, but it seems hard as I should have but one gell, an’ her so comical.”
“Pooh, nonsense!” said Mr Tulliver; “she’s a straight, black-eyed wench as anybody need wish to see. I don’t know i’ what she’s behind other folks’s children; and she can read almost as well as the parson.”
“But her hair won’t curl all I can do with it, and she’s so franzy about having it put i’ paper, and I’ve such work as never was to make her stand and have it pinched with th’ irons.”
“Cut it off—cut it off short,” said the father, rashly.
“How can you talk so, Mr Tulliver? She’s too big a gell—gone nine, and tall of her age—to have her hair cut short; an’ there’s her cousin Lucy’s got a row o’ curls round her head, an’ not a hair out o’ place. It seems hard as my sister Deane should have that pretty child; I’m sure Lucy takes more after me nor my own child does. Maggie, Maggie,” continued the mother, in a tone of half-coaxing fretfulness, as this small mistake of nature entered the room, “where’s the use o’ my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded some day, an’ then you’ll be sorry you didn’t do as mother told you.”
Maggie’s hair, as she threw off her bonnet, painfully confirmed her mother’s accusation. Mrs Tulliver, desiring her daughter to have a curled crop, “like other folks’s children,” had had it cut too short in front to be pushed behind the ears; and as it was usually straight an hour after it had been taken out of paper, Maggie was incessantly tossing her head to keep the dark, heavy locks out of her gleaming black eyes,—an action which gave her very much the air of a small Shetland pony.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear, Maggie, what are you thinkin’ of, to throw your bonnet down there? Take it upstairs, there’s a good gell, an’ let your hair be brushed, an’ put your other pinafore on, an’ change your shoes, do, for shame; an’ come an’ go on with your patchwork, like a little lady.”
“Oh, mother,” said Maggie, in a vehemently cross tone, “I don’t want to do my patchwork.”
“What! not your pretty patchwork, to make a counterpane for your aunt Glegg?”
“It’s foolish work,” said Maggie, with a toss of her mane,—“tearing things to pieces to sew ’em together again. And I don’t want to do anything for my aunt Glegg. I don’t like her.”
Exit Maggie, dragging her bonnet by the string, while Mr Tulliver laughs audibly.
“I wonder at you, as you’ll laugh at her, Mr Tulliver,” said the mother, with feeble fretfulness in her tone. “You encourage her i’ naughtiness. An’ her aunts will have it as it’s me spoils her.”
Mrs Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person,—never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability. But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.
Chapter III. Mr Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for Tom
The gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking his brandy-and-water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver, is Mr Riley, a gentleman with a waxen complexion and fat hands, rather highly educated for an auctioneer and appraiser, but large-hearted enough to show a great deal of bonhomie toward simple country acquaintances of hospitable habits. Mr Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as “people of the old school.”
The conversation had come to a pause. Mr Tulliver, not without a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadn’t made the lawyers. Mr Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect, and had arrived at several questionable conclusions; amongst the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichæism, else he might have seen his error. But to-day it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed—look at it one way—as plain as water’s water; but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadn’t got the better of Riley. Mr Tulliver took his brandy-and-water a little stronger than usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his banker’s, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friend’s business talents.
But the dam was a subject of conversation that would keep; it could always be taken up again at the same point, and exactly in the same condition; and there was another subject, as you know, on which Mr Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr Riley’s advice. This was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative manner. He was not a man to make an abrupt transition. This was a puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your wagon in a hurry, you may light on an awkward corner. Mr Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient. Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.
“There’s a thing I’ve got i’ my head,” said Mr Tulliver at last, in rather a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and looked steadfastly at his companion.
“Ah!” said Mr Riley, in a tone of mild interest. He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids and high-arched eyebrows, looking exactly the same under all circumstances. This immovability of face, and the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr Tulliver.
“It’s a very particular thing,” he went on; “it’s about my boy Tom.”
At the sound of this name, Maggie, who was seated on a low stool close by the fire, with a large book open on her lap, shook her heavy hair back and looked up eagerly. There were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book, but Tom’s name served as well as the shrillest whistle; in an instant she was on the watch, with gleaming eyes, like a Skye terrier suspecting mischief, or at all events determined to fly at any one who threatened it toward Tom.
“You see, I want to put him to a new school at Midsummer,” said Mr Tulliver; “he’s comin’ away from the ’cademy at Lady-day, an’ I shall let him run loose for a quarter; but after that I want to send him to a downright good school, where they’ll make a scholard of him.”
“Well,” said Mr Riley, “there’s no greater advantage you can give him than a good education. Not,” he added, with polite significance,—“not that a man can’t be an excellent miller and farmer, and a shrewd, sensible fellow into the bargain, without much help from the schoolmaster.”
“I believe you,” said Mr Tulliver, winking, and turning his head on one side; “but that’s where it is. I don’t mean Tom to be a miller and farmer. I see no fun i’ that. Why, if I made him a miller an’ farmer, he’d be expectin’ to take to the mill an’ the land, an’ a-hinting at me as it was time for me to lay by an’ think o’ my latter end. Nay, nay, I’ve seen enough o’ that wi’ sons. I’ll never pull my coat off before I go to bed. I shall give Tom an eddication an’ put him to a business, as he may make a nest for himself, an’ not want to push me out o’ mine. Pretty well if he gets it when I’m dead an’ gone. I sha’n’t be put off wi’ spoon-meat afore I’ve lost my teeth.”
This was evidently a point on which Mr Tulliver felt strongly; and the impetus which had given unusual rapidity and emphasis to his speech showed itself still unexhausted for some minutes afterward in a defiant motion of the head from side to side, and an occasional “Nay, nay,” like a subsiding growl.
These angry symptoms were keenly observed by Maggie, and cut her to the quick. Tom, it appeared, was supposed capable of turning his father out of doors, and of making the future in some way tragic by his wickedness. This was not to be borne; and Maggie jumped up from her stool, forgetting all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender, and going up between her father’s knees, said, in a half-crying, half-indignant voice,—
“Father, Tom wouldn’t be naughty to you ever; I know he wouldn’t.”
Mrs Tulliver was out of the room superintending a choice supper-dish, and Mr Tulliver’s heart was touched; so Maggie was not scolded about the book. Mr Riley quietly picked it up and looked at it, while the father laughed, with a certain tenderness in his hard-lined face, and patted his little girl on the back, and then held her hands and kept her between his knees.
“What! they mustn’t say any harm o’ Tom, eh?” said Mr Tulliver, looking at Maggie with a twinkling eye. Then, in a lower voice, turning to Mr Riley, as though Maggie couldn’t hear, “She understands what one’s talking about so as never was. And you should hear her read,—straight off, as if she knowed it all beforehand. And allays at her book! But it’s bad—it’s bad,” Mr Tulliver added sadly, checking this blamable exultation. “A woman’s no business wi’ being so clever; it’ll turn to trouble, I doubt. But bless you!”—here the exultation was clearly recovering the mastery,—“she’ll read the books and understand ’em better nor half the folks as are growed up.”
Maggie’s cheeks began to flush with triumphant excitement. She thought Mr Riley would have a respect for her now; it had been evident that he thought nothing of her before.
Mr Riley was turning over the leaves of the book, and she could make nothing of his face, with its high-arched eyebrows; but he presently looked at her, and said,—
“Come, come and tell me something about this book; here are some pictures,—I want to know what they mean.”
Maggie, with deepening colour, went without hesitation to Mr Riley’s elbow and looked over the book, eagerly seizing one corner, and tossing back her mane, while she said,—
“Oh, I’ll tell you what that means. It’s a dreadful picture, isn’t it? But I can’t help looking at it. That old woman in the water’s a witch,—they’ve put her in to find out whether she’s a witch or no; and if she swims she’s a witch, and if she’s drowned—and killed, you know—she’s innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned? Only, I suppose, she’d go to heaven, and God would make it up to her. And this dreadful blacksmith with his arms akimbo, laughing,—oh, isn’t he ugly?—I’ll tell you what he is. He’s the Devil really” (here Maggie’s voice became louder and more emphatic), “and not a right blacksmith; for the Devil takes the shape of wicked men, and walks about and sets people doing wicked things, and he’s oftener in the shape of a bad man than any other, because, you know, if people saw he was the Devil, and he roared at ’em, they’d run away, and he couldn’t make ’em do what he pleased.”
Mr Tulliver had listened to this exposition of Maggie’s with petrifying wonder.
“Why, what book is it the wench has got hold on?” he burst out at last.
“‘The History of the Devil,’ by Daniel Defoe,—not quite the right book for a little girl,” said Mr Riley. “How came it among your books, Mr Tulliver?”
Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father said,—
“Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale. They was all bound alike,—it’s a good binding, you see,—and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy Living and Dying’ among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday” (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy); “and there’s a lot more of ’em,—sermons mostly, I think,—but they’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’ outside. This is a puzzlin’ world.”
“Well,” said Mr Riley, in an admonitory, patronizing tone as he patted Maggie on the head, “I advise you to put by the ‘History of the Devil,’ and read some prettier book. Have you no prettier books?”
“Oh, yes,” said Maggie, reviving a little in the desire to vindicate the variety of her reading. “I know the reading in this book isn’t pretty; but I like the pictures, and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you know. But I’ve got ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ and a book about Kangaroos and things, and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress....’”
“Ah, a beautiful book,” said Mr Riley; “you can’t read a better.”
“Well, but there’s a great deal about the Devil in that,” said Maggie, triumphantly, “and I’ll show you the picture of him in his true shape, as he fought with Christian.”
Maggie ran in an instant to the corner of the room, jumped on a chair, and reached down from the small bookcase a shabby old copy of Bunyan, which opened at once, without the least trouble of search, at the picture she wanted.
“Here he is,” she said, running back to Mr Riley, “and Tom coloured him for me with his paints when he was at home last holidays,—the body all black, you know, and the eyes red, like fire, because he’s all fire inside, and it shines out at his eyes.”
“Go, go!” said Mr Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers; “shut up the book, and let’s hear no more o’ such talk. It is as I thought—the child ’ull learn more mischief nor good wi’ the books. Go, go and see after your mother.”
Maggie shut up the book at once, with a sense of disgrace, but not being inclined to see after her mother, she compromised the matter by going into a dark corner behind her father’s chair, and nursing her doll, toward which she had an occasional fit of fondness in Tom’s absence, neglecting its toilet, but lavishing so many warm kisses on it that the waxen cheeks had a wasted, unhealthy appearance.
“Did you ever hear the like on’t?” said Mr Tulliver, as Maggie retired. “It’s a pity but what she’d been the lad,—she’d ha’ been a match for the lawyers, she would. It’s the wonderful’st thing”—here he lowered his voice—“as I picked the mother because she wasn’t o’er ’cute—bein’ a good-looking woman too, an’ come of a rare family for managing; but I picked her from her sisters o’ purpose, ’cause she was a bit weak like; for I wasn’t agoin’ to be told the rights o’ things by my own fireside. But you see when a man’s got brains himself, there’s no knowing where they’ll run to; an’ a pleasant sort o’ soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads and ’cute wenches, till it’s like as if the world was turned topsy-turvy. It’s an uncommon puzzlin’ thing.”
Mr Riley’s gravity gave way, and he shook a little under the application of his pinch of snuff before he said,—
“But your lad’s not stupid, is he? I saw him, when I was here last, busy making fishing-tackle; he seemed quite up to it.”
“Well, he isn’t not to say stupid,—he’s got a notion o’ things out o’ door, an’ a sort o’ common sense, as he’d lay hold o’ things by the right handle. But he’s slow with his tongue, you see, and he reads but poorly, and can’t abide the books, and spells all wrong, they tell me, an’ as shy as can be wi’ strangers, an’ you never hear him say ’cute things like the little wench. Now, what I want is to send him to a school where they’ll make him a bit nimble with his tongue and his pen, and make a smart chap of him. I want my son to be even wi’ these fellows as have got the start o’ me with having better schooling. Not but what, if the world had been left as God made it, I could ha’ seen my way, and held my own wi’ the best of ’em; but things have got so twisted round and wrapped up i’ unreasonable words, as aren’t a bit like ’em, as I’m clean at fault, often an’ often. Everything winds about so—the more straightforrad you are, the more you’re puzzled.”
Mr Tulliver took a draught, swallowed it slowly, and shook his head in a melancholy manner, conscious of exemplifying the truth that a perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.
“You’re quite in the right of it, Tulliver,” observed Mr Riley. “Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education, than leave it him in your will. I know I should have tried to do so by a son of mine, if I’d had one, though, God knows, I haven’t your ready money to play with, Tulliver; and I have a houseful of daughters into the bargain.”
