“We forge the chains we wear in life”: this simple yet powerful statement, contained in Mary Price (1851-1852) and Joseph Wilmot (1853-1855), served as a personal guide into the fascinating fiction of G. W. M. Reynolds…
I came across Reynolds’s narratives by researching the novels written by Dickens on a previous project and I must admit that as I set out to read Reynolds’s novels, I deemed pertinent to look into the liminality and complexity of his writing. His socio-political radicalism and pursue of tolerance amidst classes, together with the morales which were imprinted in his dramatically, beautifully written novels, led me to the problem statement that subsequently gave birth to the doctoral thesis that I defended at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Focusing on the power relations between masters and servants from a Foucauldian perspective, I studied Mary Price, or The Memoirs of a Servant-Maid (1851-1852) and Joseph Wilmot, or the Memoirs of a Man-Servant (1853-1855), which placed the figure of the domestic in a central role. My studies led me to ponder on the degree of devotedness in Victorian servants, on how blind loyalty was originated in the first place from the lower class towards the upper class, and on the existing void between reality and fiction in terms of the divergence between historical and cultural representations of the figures of domestic servants in the 1850s.
At the moment of inception of Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot, Reynolds had to adapt to the conventions of his time in terms of the narrative structure most in vogue from a commercial viewpoint, that of sensation fiction, wherein novels were designed with a fixed moral purpose and intended to lay emphasis on a particular social injustice within the Victorian legal system or family hierarchy.[i] Certainly, these two novels were based on the core principle of power relations as seen through the lens of law and morality, which Reynolds externalised by means of a servant versus master/mistress duality in order to present, before the cross-class readership, a representative example of the hardships and life realities endured and/or experienced at each level in the chain of command. Still, a contradiction between Reynolds’s political and narrative ideology lies dormant on the pages of these two novels. Without a doubt, his Chartist beliefs led him to promote the need for a political reform amongst his working-class readers; hence his choosing two servants as the main characters. Joseph and Mary aspire to ascend the social pyramid and they do so without criticising such pyramid wherein society seems to remain in a constant state of stratification. Thus, the question would be to what extent did Reynolds intend to direct his social critique against the scourge that was social stratification? One passage of considerable extension in Mary Price describes the constitution of the household in quite a sarcastic tone that clearly shows the tension between those in charge and those under it and which can be paralleled and replicated in the stratified society of the time, “But even in the servants’-hall, immense class-distinctions prevailed: because the housemaids would not sit next to the scullions, while the stable-boys were made to eat at a table by themselves […] But those nice divisions which I have been describing, as marking out the “aristocracy,”, the “gentility,” and the “vulgarity” amongst the household servants, were not alone the causes of incessant heartburnings, envies, hatreds, jealousies, and complainings […] Thus is it that the laziness and absurd vanity of aristocratic and wealthy families are both alike most demoralizing in their effects, and at least as culpable as the knavery of the systems which they generate or allow to exist” (p. 63-64, 66, vol. 1).
Was Reynolds shaping his readers’ response to Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot? Most likely, some sort of identification between the reader and the main character was intended in order to allow the former to understand and empathise with the figure of the (abused) servant so that a change in society could be effected. In Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot, however, the reader is guided through other settings without leaving the family home out of sight under the narrative perspectives of two reliable narrators –Mary and Joseph— who pen their memoirs in the literary style of a Bildungsroman. Whereas Mary is the daughter of Robert, a journeyman-carpenter from Ashford married to a kind woman who taught their children to read and write instead of sending them to school, Joseph is an orphan who attended a seminary in Leicester. Both set the recollection of their memoirs at ages eleven and fifteen, respectively, when two traumatic events occurred that would shape their paths in life. These fictional narrators bring to the attention of the readers a series of anecdotal, life experiences through which Reynolds explains the harmonious development of the individual’s role within social echelons and the importance that this entails as a domino effect on society as a whole, “In a few days it [a page’s dress] was sent home; and I assumed the livery of a domestic servant. But I was by no means distressed nor humiliated thereby: I was only too happy at having obtained a comfortable home, and to be afforded an opportunity of earning my own livelihood […] And so I believe it is in large things as well as in little, -that our aspirations seldom exceed that which we intuitively feel ourselves competent to perform- and that when the humble struggler with the world keeps his gaze steadily fixed upon the attainment of wealth or position, it is simply from an inward conviction that what he grasps at is within his reach, however remote its ultimate attainment may be” (JW, p. 14, 415, vol. 1). Combining, therefore, the Entwicklungsroman –a specific form of Bildungsroman considered a development novel which focuses on the general growth of the character rather than on their self-culture (Köhn 1969)[ii] — with the genre of memoirs and the epistolary novel, Mary and Joseph make the readers participate either by identifying themselves with them or by empathising with their situations of conflict, struggle, and eventual success or joy. Reynolds here conveys his concern with the individual, the childhood experience, the formation of personality, the growing human mind and the hypostasis of society.
Similar journeys of self-realisation are undertaken by Mary, Joseph, Wilhelm and Pip –the latter two from Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) — within their corresponding socio-cultural settings. Indeed, the Zeitgeist (or time-spirit of Victorian England) at the time of the serialisation of these novels was concerned with grand values such as prudence as well as excitement and belief in the progress of industrial technologies.[iii] Accordingly, Joseph and Pip (orphaned narrators) as well as Mary and Wilhelm (whose parents are presented as a journeyman and merchant, respectively, with little knowledge being shared about their mothers other than Mary’s mother’s death in the opening of the novel) introduce the readers to a humanistic ideal of self-education which was already in vogue during the 18th century.[iv] What seems to be innovative in Reynolds, therefore, is his combination of the Entwicklungsroman and the epistolary novel so as to interpolate his personal, socio-philosophical beliefs in the plot(s) thus facilitating a means of change within society through the re-education of his readers.
Further to this, the choice that Reynolds made in favour of adding the term “memoirs” in the titles of Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot contributes to the blurring of their narrative lines in terms of reality and fiction given that “memoirs” refers to a nonfiction narrative and has been categorised as a subgenre of autobiography. This is arguably what lures readers into a symbiotic status with the fictional narrators/memoirists Mary and Joseph. The effect which their biographical substrata produce in readers is enhanced by the mixing of reality and melodrama and the constant counterpulls of realism and fiction which take place in the midst of tensions emerging in either domestic settings or as a result of uncanny, gothic events.
A prevalent feature in the stories of Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot is that of a gendered and heterotopian spatial framework. Everywhere in the plots of these two novels the reader finds themself in liminal places which evoke and iterate the ultimate moral lesson to be reaped. Michel Foucault (1986) came up with the concept of heterotopia by juxtaposing the medical definition of heterotopia, i.e., displacement of any given organ in the human body from its normal position and the philosophical notion of utopia, i.e., an unreal, chimerical and perfected space under the metaphor of the mirror.[v] This metaphor indicates the duality and contradictions posed by the coming together of heterotopia and utopia. That is, the mirror is a real object that relates the vision one has of oneself to the manner in which one behaves in a given context and time. In Reynoldsian fiction, the mirror may well be the vision of society as shaped in the mind of the novelist, with utopia representing the attainment of an ideal and idyllic society wherein morality reigns supreme and heterotopia standing for the places and spaces which allow for the human behaviour to be pondered upon and eventually modified in order to bring about such utopia.
Intertwined with heterotopian spaces, gendered spaces can be observed throughout Mary Price and Joseph Wilmot fulfilling the role of assigning or even forming identities and shaping the behaviour of the characters. Despite the rigid demarcation of the public and private spheres still being employed in fiction, Reynolds adopted an uncommon approach which offered the reader the possibility of a deeper understanding of each of the characters, not only of their physiognomy but also of their personality and behaviour, usually dependent on the space they would inhabit. As a radical and highly popular novelist, he was able to focus on literary characters not generally approved amongst the higher echelons of society and confer human dignity and integrity on them.
Nowadays, with the re-emergence of inclusion and diversity and the embracing of multiculturality, writers like Reynolds are being rescued from oblivion thanks to their efforts to make society a better place.
Lourdes E. Salgado completed her PhD at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her thesis, “‘We forge the chains we wear in life’: The Intellection of Servitude in Mary Price (1851-1852) and Joseph Wilmot (1853-1855) by G. W. M. Reynolds”, which received a Cum Laude, centred on power dynamics between servants and masters in Victorian sensationalist fiction with reference to the novels of Reynolds from a Foucauldian and Chartist viewpoint. At present, she works at the University of Liverpool as Spanish and Portuguese Tutor and Language Adviser for Spanish and Portuguese.
L.Salgado-Vinal@liverpool.ac.uk
[i] Jessica Cox, “Sensation fiction,” in “Literary and Cultural Contexts,” eds. Kirsty Bunting and Rhian Williams, in The Victorian Literature Handbook, eds. Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (New York, NY: Continuum, 2008), 44-88.
[ii] Lothar Köhn, Entwicklungs -und Bildungsroman. Ein Forschungsbericht. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969.
[iii] Robert Angus Buchanan, The Power of the Machine: The Impact of Technology from the 1700s to the Present Day. England: Viking, 1992.
[iv] Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. Yale: Yale University Press, 2004.
[v] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27.
G. W. M. Reynolds Society 