A House of Air. Hermione Lee

wrote. I sat up all night in a passion of composition, stirred to the very bottom of my mind. The story was successful, and my fortune, comparatively speaking, was made.

This is Mrs Oliphant’s own account, in what she called her ‘few autobiographical bits,’ of the origin of the Chronicles of Carlingford.¹ If we get the idea that she saw herself to some extent as the heroine of her own novel, and that she knew it perfectly well, we should be right, and right too in recognizing her as a woman with a strong visual imagination and an even stronger sense of human relationships. She sees the group in terms of dark and light, and feels the publishers’ embarrassed decency and her own desperation.

      For nearly fifty years she led a working, or rather a fighting life as a writer. Her industry became a legend (‘I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ Queen Victoria said to her.) She never, it seems, had more than two hours to herself, except in the middle of the night. Up to a few days before her death she was still correcting proofs. But her fortune, alas, was not made in 1861, either comparatively speaking or ever.

      She was twice an Oliphant (it was her mother’s name as well as her husband’s) and the family was an ancient one, ‘though I don’t think,’ she wrote, ‘that our branch was anything much to brag about.’ Although she was Scottish born (4 April 1828) she was brought up in Liverpool where her father worked in the customs house. It was a close-knit, plain family life, and from the outset it was a household of weak men and strong women. The father counted for very little, and her two elder brothers never came to much. All the fire and generosity of life seemed to come from the mother. Maggie herself, from a tender age, was out on the streets delivering radical pamphlets, and hot in defence of the Scottish Free Church. No formal education is mentioned. At six years old she learned to read and did so prodigiously, mostly Scots history and legends. When, in her teens, she began to write her own tales, ‘my style,’ she said, ‘followed no sort of law.’ Writing, of course, was in the intervals of housekeeping and sick-nursing. In 1849 (by which time her first novel had been published) she went up to London to look after her amiable brother Willie, who was studying for the ministry, and to keep him clear of drink and debt. ‘I was a little dragon, watching over him with remorseless anxiety.’ Lodging upstairs was her cousin Francis Oliphant, an artist; three years later, after some mysterious hesitations, she married him. This meant a hand-to-mouth studio life, in the course of which her first two babies died, and two more were born.

      Although he exhibited history pieces at the Academy, Francis was by profession a glass painter, who had worked for eleven years as assistant to Pugin. (Margaret, unfortunately, had almost no feeling for art, and when he took her to the National Gallery she was ‘struck dumb with disappointment.’) He was not the kind of man ever to succeed on his own: when he set up his own studio, in 1854, he couldn’t manage either the workmen or the accounts. His failure has always been put down to the decline in demand for ‘mediaeval’ painted glass, but in fact there was no decline until well after 1870. ‘His wife’s success,’ wrote William Bell Scott, ‘was enough to make him an idle and aimless man.’ This is unkind, but certainly Margaret was the breadwinner from the first, even though she allowed seven of her first thirteen novels to appear under Willie’s name in the hope of setting him up on his feet. And poor Francis was consumptive. In 1858, when he was told there was no hope, his comment is said to have been ‘Well, if that is so, there is no reason why we should be miserable.’ They went off, as invalids so ill-advisedly did in the 1850s, to the cold winter damp of Florence and the malarial heat of Rome. To spare his wife, Francis did not tell her the truth. She never forgave him this, and was honest enough to admit it. When he died she was left pregnant, with two children to look after, and about £1,000 in debts. This was mostly owed to Blackwood’s, who had been generously sending her £20 a month, whether they printed her articles or not.

      Margaret Oliphant gathered up her dependants and returned, first to Edinburgh, then to Ealing, west of London. Before long she found herself supporting not only her own children and the feckless Willie but also her brother Frank (he had failed in business) and his family of four. Like some natural force she attracted responsibilities towards her. But with this strength of hers there went a wild optimism and an endearing lack of caution. She was openhanded, like her mother. Nothing was too good for her friends. Her sons, whatever the expense, must go to Eton. Yet both of them, as they grew up, drifted into elegant idleness. Their vitality faded and she could not revive it. She had to watch them die in their barren thirties, one after the other. It is at this point that her autobiography breaks off. ‘And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.’

      Mrs Oliphant’s novels show little of the indulgence of Jane Austen or George Eliot towards attractive weaklings. Did she, out of her love and generosity, encourage, or even create, weakness in men? Her autobiography is deeply touching, partly because she recognizes this. ‘I did with much labour what I thought the best…but now I think that if I had taken the other way, which seemed the less noble, it might have been better for all of us.’ She did not think of herself as in any way exceptional. She believed she had had the ‘experiences of most women.’ They had been her life and they became the life of her books.

      II. A Small Town and an Unseen World

Mrs Oliphant’s Carlingford² is described for us in much less detail than, say George Eliot’s Milby in Scenes of Clerical Life. To draw an accurate map of it would be difficult. The railway station, with unhelpful porters, is to the south. The High Street is for shopping, George Street (with the Blue Boar Inn) is the business district. To the east of the town, Wharfside, down by the canal, is a slum, ignored by the respectable. Grange Lane and Grove Street are for the gentry, though Grove Street has ‘a shabby side’ and backs onto narrow lanes. St Roque’s, the chapel of ease for the Parish Church, is to the north. In the last of the Chronicles, however, Phoebe Junior, the sun is said to set behind St Roque’s. Plainly Mrs Oliphant is less interested in topography than in people. But in giving the atmosphere of a small community, almost resentful of arrivals and departures (although these are its main source of interest), complacent, hierarchical, inward-looking, and conscious of one direction, the canal-side, in which it dare not look—here she cannot put a foot wrong. Within these tight limits human beings must discover what a real life is, and contrive, somehow, to have it. I should like to say something here about her observation of human nature, but mustn’t, because she herself thought the idea an impertinence. All she ever did, she said, was to listen attentively.

      Her first approach to Carlingford (though by no means its only one) is through its churchgoing. This was a natural choice for the mid-nineteenth century. Only a few years later Dickens, close to death, fixed on a cathedral city and its clergy for his last novel. For present-day readers, Carlingford means a direct plunge into the rich diversity of Victorian Christianity. At one end of the spectrum there are ‘viewy’ High Churchmen, inheritors of the Oxford Movement, eager to reunite England with its Catholic past and to show truth by means of ritual. Ritual, confession, vestments, candles, are all an offence to everyday worshippers—un-English, or worse. To the Low Church, shading into the Evangelicals, plainness and simplicity are also a way of showing holiness. Church building is still in its hard Gothic heyday. (St Roque’s, where the perpetual curate is ‘viewy,’ is by Gilbert Scott.) The Dissenters have only one red brick building, Salem Chapel, in Grove Street. It is attended mainly by ‘grocers and buttermen.’ Beyond lie the poor. Here both the Ritualists and the Evangelicals see their duty. They visit, and bring blankets and coal. But what church, if any, the bargees and brickworkers attend, we are not told.

      On a lower level a thriving competition is in progress between the Parish Church, St Roque’s, and Salem. How many pews are filled, how many paid-for ‘sittings’ are taken up, will the Sunday sermon lose or gain supporters? But, unlike Trollope, Mrs Oliphant does not treat organized religion as a variant of the political structure, occupied in manoeuvres for position. The preoccupations of Carlingford are unspiritual and often ludicrous, but the church, no matter how far it falls short, is there to link them with an unseen world. In this way, although her human comedy is so much narrower than Trollope’s, it