Mrs. Molesworth (1839–1921)

What survives of a literary career after the author’s death, monumental societal changes and the fluctuations of fictional styles and fashions? Mrs Molesworth was born in 1839 and did not die until 1921, although her writing career had effectively ended before the start of the First World War.

Her most republished works were Carrots (1876), The Cuckoo Clock (1877) and The Carved Lions (1895). Dent’s Children’s Illuminated Classics (from the 1960s) republished both the latter two as well show more as Charlotte M. Yonge’s Little Duke. Choosing between Cuckoo Clock and Carved Lions is hard but this reader would have to plump for the latter as well as asking for the inclusion of The Story of a Year.

While some of Mrs Molesworth’s fantasy works require a certain indulgence with their copious doses of whimsy, sentimentality and the fantastical, The Carved Lions always, always charms and soothes because of its roots in the ordinary everyday world of Manchester (Mexington) before she deploys her magic. Even the dreary old city can produce a touch of suburban pleasure for this story’s heroine Geraldine.

'It was not a very cheerful prospect before us – the gloomy, dirty streets of Mexington were now muddy and sloppy as well – though on the whole I don’t know but that they looked rather more cheerful by gaslight than in the day.'

That’s without the kindness of the Miss Fryer the Quakeress, ‘confectioner, or pastry-cook … she was grave and quiet, but we were not at all afraid of her, for we knew that she was really very kind.’ There is Geraldine’s fondness for two carved wooden lions in the entrance of Cranston’s furniture shop, ‘a pair of huge lions carved in very dark, almost black, wood they were nearly if not quite, as large as life, and the first time I saw them, when I was only four or five, I was really frightened of them. …But when mamma saw that I was frightened, she stopped and made me feel the lions and stroke them to show me that they were only wooden and could not possibly hurt me. And after that I grew very fond of them, and was always asking her to take me to the lion shop’.

But Geraldine’s world, where comfort can be found in ordinary things, is shattered when the family has to separate and Geraldine is sent unhappily to a school called Green Bank. She runs away from school, finds Cranston’s and once it is closed dozes by the side of the lions. It is then that she begins to hear the brother lions talking about her unhappiness and their plan to comfort her. Their stratagem involves a ride through the night sky – ‘overhead in the deep blue sky innumerable stars were sparkling’ - to reunite her magically with her family across the seas.

Here Mrs Molesworth mixes fantasy with psychological truth – a distraught and sorrowful young girl needing comfort and reassurance. For this reader at least The Carved Lions is a perennial favourite and especially because this enchanting tale begins in the muddy streets of Manchester. show less

Here is a Mrs Molesworth novel with the delicacies of Victorian class distinctions at its heart although Celestina Fairchild with ‘her innocent mind’ is too young to understand the precarious position her family occupy. Besides she’s far too concerned with her tiny dolls ‘Eleanor and Amy still reposing on the hearthrug’.

Mr Fairchild, her father, is the proprietor of Seacove’s only bookseller’s and stationer’s in Pier Street, the principal thoroughfare in the little town. show more Seacove is a seaport ‘though not a very important one.’ Mr Fairchild is not very strong and worries about his enterprise when a new vicar for Seacove is announced and that is the Rev. Bernard Vane. The sea air it is hoped will help Mr Vane grow stronger and he arrives with his wife and three children Rosalys, Randolph and sparky, uncomplicated and tearaway Biddy. They are the rectory children.

In her anxiety Mrs Vane depends on Rosalys and rather despairs of Biddy, ‘as merry and thoughtless as can be.’ Her younger daughter receives more sympathy from Smuttie the family dog. ‘And off she set, her short legs exerting themselves valiantly for Smuttie’s sake. He of course could have run much faster, but he was far too much of a gentleman to do so, and stayed beside her, contenting himself every now and then by stopping short to look up at her, with a quick cheery bark of satisfaction and encouragement.’

Settling into the town the rectory children visit the Parade* and the bazaar and there’s Celestina choosing furniture for the doll’s house she doesn’t yet own: ‘the child stood absorbed, weighing the comparative merits of the blue and pink cotton chair seats, and of dark and light coloured wood.’

Biddy, who needs a friend, warms to Celestina. Is this a friendship that both families can approve? As Mr Fairchild warns his daughter ‘don’t you be getting any nonsense in your head of setting up to be the same as ladies’ children.’ As their acquaintance tentatively increases Mrs Vane rather envies Mrs Fairchild’s Celestina who has a biddable and obedient nature while Biddy seemingly grows wilder.

For any doll’s house fans (I’m looking at you Queen Mary, Princess Marie Louise and Colleen Moore) there is a wonderful reprise of the children’s first encounter in the bazaar when an old doll’s house is done up, despite Walter Crane’s awful illustration of the scene. With a renovated doll’s house being celebrated by all the children Mrs Molesworth closes her final page.

* This novel was first published in 1889. Commenting on the Parade Mrs Molesworth wrote that the southern Vane children had not experienced such shopping before. ‘For London shops were not as magnificent forty years ago as they are now’ implying her novel was set in about 1850. Walter Crane’s illustrations reflect the publication year. show less

People-watching can be a pleasure, but it can also be dangerous and the lives we create for the observed and the tales told of them can run away with the teller. This is the dilemma for Jasper and Hebe Clavering while they are staying in the watering-place Oldenwells for the benefit of their elder invalid sister Luda. The children are fascinated by ‘the queerest-looking creature you ever saw in your life’. With the air of a boy detective Jasper announces, ‘I have my own ideas about her show more … but I’m not ready to tell you all about them yet.’

Eventually he can’t resist sharing his belief that the hobbling creature he has spotted down in the street is a witch. This sparks a revealing discussion between the siblings about witches. Hebe responds that it’s all nonsense. ‘There aren’t any things like that now – not fairies or mermaids or wood-sprites or those other things …[sirens] beautiful ladies who sang lovelily magic songs and that made people hunt about to see who was singing, and then they tumbled into the water and got drowned.’ This indeed reflects the changing fashions of Mrs Molesworth’s writing career where she had employed all of those traditions but they were no longer so popular or marketable in Edwardian times.

But Jasper convinces Hebe, despite his own horror of how the witches were treated ‘pitching them into the water to see if they’d drown, and horrible things like that. It was very wicked, of course, though the laws allowed it.’ Hebe confesses, ‘I’ve read something about it too. Some quite good, nice old women were treated like that. It was horrible.’ The way to spot them, as Jasper confidently announces, is that ‘They go in threes … at least generally.’ Remember those ‘in Shakespeare – and in my mythology – three Fates’.

Having spotted their first witch, the children need to find the remaining two witches. The perplexity for the children is about whether all witches are really ‘poor and beggar-like’? Or can they pass as ordinary woman – young or old, rich, or poor, hale, hearty or poor in spirit? How can the children find the other candidates because of course, as Jasper has explained, there has to be three.

This is only the beginning of their self-imposed quest and a thickening plot of shifting identities – there’s one they call ‘Cinderella’s godmother’ in her ‘Cinderella chariot’ or is she the one they call ‘Red Riding-hood’s sham grandmother” – the wolf one’? Eventually Luda herself is drawn into the guessing game. But the story is, of course, set in a sensible English spa town so any magic is of the ordinary everyday variety of a well-constructed plot and Mrs Molesworth’s amusing, determined and confused child detectives. show less

The Story of a Year is the narrative of one Fulvia Derwent who was the happiest of girls until she was ten. Then ‘came the tidings which were to change our happy life’ and the Derwent home has to be broken up, Mr Derwent has to leave and poor Mrs Derwent is thrown ‘suddenly on her own resources’.

Mr Derwent must go away and attend to his ‘good deal of property in the West Indies, which had come to him from a godfather.’ A letter, one of those fatal Victorian letters, announces show more the ‘exceedingly bad news from St. Benito – in fact as bad as it well can be. The manager of my property, the head man, has decamped, leaving things in the direst confusion, and carrying off all he could lay hands on … and the friendly neighbour who writes to me says I must go out at once, if I don’t want to be utterly ruined.’

In the subsequent discussion and shock Mr Derwent explains why he cannot take his wife and daughter with him. ‘You see it is some way from Jamaica and the more civilised parts of the West Indies. It would be terribly rough – in short, I don’t know what it would be! I have never been there you know. I trusted this fellow completely. Perhaps I should have gone out to see for myself, but my work here has tied me so. And … there is the money to consider! I gather that none will be forthcoming from St. Benito – none’.

The Derwents’ backstory is obvious even with Mrs Molesworth’s always delicate handling, and their ruined inheritance is some kind of plantation and almost inevitably associated with slavery. The novel was first published in 1910 but, from internal evidence, set much earlier. The illustrations in my edition were by Gertrude Demain Hammond and were hazily somewhere between the 1870s and 1880s. Mr Derwent goes off to Jamaica to do the manly task of recovering the family fortune, despite its horrific origins, and leaves his family behind. Mrs Molesworth does not mention whatever happened to the money they (or perhaps more likely his godfather) must have been awarded under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 but she is concerned more with the family left behind in England.

Like Charlotte M. Yonge in Heartsease; or, The Brother's Wife (1854) Mrs Molesworth examines obliquely the legacy and dynamics of enslavement and exploitation through the fate of Fulvia and her mother. They are taken in by a distant elderly and rich relative a Miss Leinster. Mrs Derwent and Fulvia travel to 27 Montagu Gardens, Northborough and their new home. It is a long train journey and Fulvia longs for ‘some hot tea, and bread-and-butter, or cake’ but as her mother whispers, ‘of course it costs two or three shillings.’ Miss Leinster will have tea ready for them mother is sure.

Ominously, they are not met at the station by Miss Leinster, there is no waiting confidential maid and ‘There was no one at all to meet us!’ But Miss Leinster never intended to meet them, she has a ‘dried-up heart’ and Montagu Gardens is a ‘house of cold and gloom’ where they have to unpack for themselves, Mrs Derwent overpays the driver of the fly much to Miss Leinster’s horror, there was just a ‘small bit of candle’ , a damp bedroom for Fulvia, a tiny fire in the drawing-room (more than begrudgingly provided) and some kind of milk pudding ‘of which the predominant liquid ‘must certainly have been water’. This is only the beginning of her two guests being subjected to unnecessary straightened circumstances, encompassed by petty rules and regulations, neglected and having to subsidise their own survival to stave off physical illness and worse. Miss Leinster has taken ‘elegant economy’ to a dangerous almost inhuman level being a thorough miser. Throughout their uncomfortable stay the unforgiving Miss Leinster blames Mr Derwent for the financial disaster in Jamaica. ‘Why, his criminal carelessness is the cause of it all!’

Plot spoiler alert! The Derwents are aided but in a delicate way that Mrs Molesworth borrows directly from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford – through female friendship and agency and the intervention of Miss Guise. Here is Mrs Molesworth’s description of her, ‘a small, middle-aged woman, dressed so neatly, though plainly as almost to look like a Quakeress.’ Her dwelling is pure Cranford being ‘of grey stone, the windows small-paned and not very large – something demure and “old-maidish” … one felt their inhabitants were scrupulously neat and tidy; the doors were painted bright green, as were the window frames, the brass knockers sparklingly polished.’

The borrowing from Cranford is not unexpected as it occurs in The Cuckoo Clock (1877) too. Remember also that Mrs Molesworth was educated by the Rev. William Gaskell and told to write down her stories by Elizabeth Gaskell herself when she lived in Manchester in her youth. There we will leave The Story of a Year because we can’t tell the ending and whether Mr Derwent is of any use at all. His travails in Jamaica are a subplot but one steeped in the story of empire and looking the other way, and while Mrs Molesworth does not tussle with it, she does survey empire’s sister arts of capitalism, the accumulation and maintenance of wealth, exploitation and the dangers of too little money in this compelling and highly recommendable novel. show less