Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (19 page)

The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.

‘Yes,’ resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’

‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.

‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’

‘Young England’ was, as its slogan-name asserts, an intellectually youthful creed (although Disraeli was well into his forties when he expounded it). All three novels express the optimistic belief that ‘the Youth of the Nation are the trustees of Posterity’ and that the world is their oyster, which they with sword will open. Romantic as the novels are,
Sybil
contains the most graphic depictions of working-class wretchedness to be found in Victorian fiction. Disraeli had, by the 1840s, come a long way from silver-forkery. The Young England trilogy represents the most effective use of fiction by a politician on record in English politics.

For the next two decades Disraeli was preoccupied either with high office, or
achieving it. His resignation from the premiership in 1868 (having got the second Reform Bill enacted) allowed him time to embark on a third career in fiction. Now a Longmans, Green author, he wrote the political
Bildungsroman, Lothair
(1870) and, at the end of his phenomenally full life (and yet another term as Prime Minister) the narcissistic autobiographical romance,
Endymion
(1880). For this last work Disraeli received the then record sum of £10,000 from Longman. He had ascended to the top of yet another slippery pole. England remains two nations.

That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.
D. H. Lawrence

Nathaniel Hawthorne was four years old when his mariner father died of fever in the Dutch colony of Surinam (the same fever-pit where, one recalls, Aphra Behn sets
Oroonoko
, and where
her
father died). It meant that Nathaniel grew up emotionally close to his sister, Elizabeth (‘Ebe’). The two children learned to read together and shared their thoughts. Closeness was further fostered by an obscure injury to his foot which Nathaniel incurred at the age of thirteen playing cricket – this may have been psychosomatic but none the less kept him mooning about at home for a year.

Elizabeth was a strong-minded, highly literate child – she herself had pretensions to authorship – who grew up into a fine-looking, dark-haired, fiercely independent woman. The Hawthornes were the product of two distinguished family lines: the ‘Hathornes’, who could trace their pedigree back to the original Puritan settlers, and the Mannings on his mother’s side – more commercially minded than the Hathornes, who were governors by nature. Nathaniel added the ‘w’ in young manhood to distance himself, it is presumed, from the Salem witch-trials, in which his ancestor, John Hathorne, had been a judge. He was never easy with that heritage.

On being widowed, Nathaniel’s mother moved to her parents’ house only a few streets away in Salem, the children’s birthplace. The Hathornes later moved to family property in Raymond, Maine, where Nathaniel and Ebe would spend their childhood years – he returning to Salem more often than she.

On Nathaniel’s leaving school, their adult paths necessarily separated. He
enrolled at Bowdoin College and on graduation, with high, but not class-topping, honours in 1824, he embarked, for over a decade, on his ‘attic years’. The Hathornes were now living in Salem again, his mother having returned from Raymond and taken up her abode in her deceased father’s house, ‘a tall, ugly, old grayish building’. Here Nathaniel secluded himself in his ‘haunted chamber’. As he recalled in a memoir twenty years later, ‘I scarcely held intercourse outside of my own family; seldom going out except at twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient solitude.’ Ebe was to him, over this period, more than a sister, but less than a wife. It was she, it is recorded, who fetched the books he needed from the Salem public library.

What was going through Hawthorne’s mind and soul at this period will never be fully known. He was writing the stories – typically dark in tone – later collected as
Twice-Told Tales
, which brought him some reputation. Full recognition of his genius would await the publication of his major novels, ten years later. It was during these attic years that he wrote one of his darkest meditations on human sin. But what sin? In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, a nameless ‘secret sin’ leads the hero, as a young clergyman, to appear everywhere with his face covered. He obstinately refuses to have it removed, even on his deathbed. In his stories of this period, Hawthorne is given to such resonantly ominous, but vague, statements as that in ‘The Haunted Mind’: ‘In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon.’ What is Hawthorne alluding to?

Of specific interest, it is suggested, is an early work called ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’. It is, by Hawthorne’s standards, poorly constructed, which might explain why he was reluctant to have it reprinted after first publication, anonymously, in 1835. It was Ebe, interestingly enough, after Nathaniel’s death, who arranged for ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ to be brought back to print. The Doane children, we learn, were orphaned in infancy by a savage Indian attack on their homestead. Leonard and his sister Alice have been brought up together, in Salem. Their ‘tie’ is of the ‘closest’ and marked by a ‘concentrated fervour of affection’. Enter a stranger, Walter Brome, from the ‘Old World’ – the snake in the Doanes’ garden. ‘Evil’ by nature, Walter seduces Alice. Strangely, he has strong physical resemblances to Leonard, who senses a horrible ‘sympathy’ with someone whom he hates. Walter is, it finally emerges, Leonard’s twin and – more horribly – brother to Alice. Was he aware of the incestuous implications? The story is maddeningly vague on the matter, as it is on why it was that Walter’s existence is unknown, and how he happened to be raised – with a different identity – three thousand miles away.

Leonard kills Walter, and half-buries his body in the winter ice, though it will, of course, rise again. There is a bizarre
Walpurgisnacht
episode in which the dead rise
from the Salem graveyard. All those once thought respectable citizens proclaim their secret sins. All are guilty. The story ends with suggestive, but imprecise, phraseology, hinting at things not clearly said:

We build the memorial column on the height which our fathers made sacred with their blood, poured out in a holy cause. And here, in dark, funereal stone, should rise another monument, sadly commemorative of the errors of an earlier race, and not to be cast down, while the human heart has one infirmity that may result in crime.

What crime? There is other grist in Hawthorne’s life for the psychobiographer’s mill. Why did he emerge from his ‘haunted chamber’ in 1835, enter the world of books, become a minor Massachusetts ‘Custom House’ functionary, and marry in 1841? Why, on his mother’s death in 1849, did he embark on that astonishing burst of creativity which, in three years, produced
The Scarlet Letter
(1850),
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851) and
The Blithedale Romance
(1852)? The most sensational investigations focus on Hawthorne’s relationship with Ebe. She never married and loathed her brother’s blameless wife, Sophia, whom he had married, on the verge of middle age, after a sibling relationship of thirty-eight years. Ebe did everything she could to frustrate the match and never formed a civil relationship with her sister-in-law.

The outright allegation of incest between Nathaniel and Ebe was delivered by two books, published within months of each other, in 1984: Philip Young’s
Hawthorne’s Secret: An Untold Tale
and, less aggressively, Gloria C. Erlich’s
Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web.
The incest hypothesis was fanned to the pitch of critical furore, following a review of Young’s book in the
New York Review of Books
by Leo Marx. A venerable critic of American literature, Marx seemed to give some provisional assent to the idea that there may have been something of the like between Nathaniel and Ebe, and it could indeed explain things.

The incest hypothesis depends on thematic deductions from texts of the fiction, bolstered by dark hints by friends such as Herman Melville, who detected ‘a blackness, ten times black’ shrouding Hawthorne’s soul. He believed, said Melville, that all his life Hawthorne had ‘concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries in his career’. Young and Erlich presumed to have found the source of that ‘great secret’ buried in distant Manning family history. The documentary source (a ‘smoking gun’) was Joseph B. Felt’s
Annals of Salem
, a volume which Hawthorne is known to have borrowed from the Salem Library and which Ebe almost certainly also read (she may even have taken it out for her brother). In 1681, the
Annals
record that Nicholas Manning was, at his enraged
wife’s complaint, found guilty of incest with his two sisters. This skeleton in the Manning-Hathorne closet had escaped critical notice for 150 years because the
Annals
recorded the event anonymously. As was usual, it was the women who bore the brunt of the public humiliation and punishment in 1681. They were sentenced to a night in prison, to be whipped publicly on their naked bodies (or pay a fine) and to sit on a high stool in the aisle of the Salem meeting house with a paper on their heads inscribed: ‘This is for whorish carriage with my naturall Brother.’

The connection with the opening scenes of
The Scarlet Letter
are manifest. Hester Prynne emerges into the marketplace at Salem, with the letter of her sin inscribed on her breast:

Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer – so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time – was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Hester’s physical appearance, notably her ‘dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam’ plausibly recalls Ebe’s crowning glory. And, arguably (very arguably), Hawthorne is recalling ‘whorish carriage’ between himself and his sister. It’s exciting stuff. But Philip Roth – abhorrer of biographers – pours cold water on it by noting, with much sarcasm, in
Exit Ghost
, that novelists do not use novels to confess their sins. It would be like inscribing love letters on lavatory walls.

I consider myself very like Lord Byron.
Harrison Ainsworth in a letter to the Edinburgh Review, aged sixteen

For Victorian novelists, historical romance was the bow of Ulysses. The greatest practitioners (Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, Bulwer-Lytton) wrote at least one – and of none of them can it be said it was their best work. For every disappointed modern reader of
Romola
, there are ten thousand satisfied readers of
Middlemarch
. No one, it seemed, could emulate the author of
Waverley
. Harrison Ainsworth qualifies as the most consistently successful. He was born in Manchester, the son of a solicitor with a distinguished Lancashire pedigree. He enjoyed the benefit of a grammar-school education: then, as now, Manchester’s was the best in the country. At sixteen, having penned some appalling ‘Lines on Leaving Manchester School’, he was articled to his father’s profession (just as Scott had been). No pettifogger, he affected Byronic airs and a taste for antiquarianism from his youth onwards. He was indoctrinated with Jacobite and Tory beliefs which would remain with him throughout his writing career.

When his father died in 1824, aged only forty-six, Ainsworth, freed from the scrivener’s pen, travelled south to London – ostensibly to read law at the Inner Temple. He promptly threw himself into the literary world. Shrewdly he married Fanny Ebers, the daughter of his first publisher, in 1826. Dashing as he was, Ainsworth was unlucky in love and both his marriages would end unhappily.

In 1831, inspired by a visit to Chesterfield, he began writing
Rookwood
. Following the French – principally Hugo’s – model, he introduced into his gothic tale, which features the highwayman exploits of Dick Turpin (notably the legendary ride from London to York on Black Bess, which Ainsworth invented),
chansons d’argot
and ‘flash’ or low slang. Dickens would borrow Ainsworthian feathers for the low-life scenes of
Oliver Twist
. Richard Bentley brought
Rookwood
out to huge sales success in 1834 and Ainsworth was hailed as the new Scott. The novel was illustrated, sumptuously, by George Cruikshank. The two men would forge a useful partnership over a series of novels. Later in life, Cruikshank would claim to be the ‘inventor’ of the narratives. He was certainly the more gifted of the two.