Servants and Paternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell (review)

Pairing Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell might seem odd at the outset, given that they wrote a generation apart and under very different personal, social, and cultural circumstances, but Julie Nash makes a strong case for considering them together. First, the two authors "shared an engagement with a paternalist social philos-ophy" and documented its moral contradictions in novels that represent class conflict from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century (3–4). As a nostalgic ideal, paternalism seems to check the escalating abuses of both Anglo-Irish colonialism and laissez-faire capitalism, which dehumanize rural Irish peasants and Mancunian factory workers alike. However, because it infantilizes the laboring classes as perpetual depen-dents, paternalism inflicts its own abuses under cover of kindness: denying individual rights, enforcing the social hierarchy, and retarding political progress. Both Edge-worth and Gaskell attempted to transform an effectively regressive philosophy into a potentially liberal one—compassionate but no longer condescending—that would ameliorate future class relations.

Second, as they struggled to envision that future, the two authors both "gave servants significant roles in their fiction even as the place of servants was diminishing in British literature" (12). While Sam Weller or Nelly Dean might dispute that generaliza-tion, Nash convincingly argues that Edgeworth and Gaskell used the liminal figure of the servant—at once member of and outsider to the family—to develop and test a hybrid model of class relations that would account for both the moral obligation of employers and the individual liberty of employees, and that might apply equally well outside the home. Servants are therefore "essential characters for examining the tensions produced by social transformation and conflicting values" (2). Moreover, by moving servants from the margins toward the center of their fiction, both authors suggested that the laboring classes deserved fuller and fairer representation in the real world as well.

Fuller and fairer, but not equal: Nash makes it clear up front that critiques of paternalism by both authors were far from radical, as they wrote novels that sought a middle way of "accommodating social change while maintaining order" (1). After a chapter that surveys a range of historical materials (periodical essays, pamphlets, house-hold manuals) in order to stake out the vexed ideological intersection of servants and paternalism, Nash turns to the novels to explore the same problems. The detailed and insightful close readings that follow—in chapters on first Edgeworth's and then Gaskell's domestic fiction, followed by Edgeworth's Irish novels, and finally Gaskell's industrial fiction—track not only the symbolic ambivalence of servant characters but also the polit-ical ambivalence of the two authors, both of whom remained attracted to the paternalistic model even as they showed just how corrupt and outmoded it had become.

Nash argues that Gaskell committed herself to social progress "with much less ambivalence" than did Edgeworth (5), but that argument leads to some questionable overstatements when reading Gaskell's fiction. For example, if Martha—the Cranford (1853) servant who has become her bankrupt mistress's friend and landlady—really is "the embodiment of Gaskell's ideal new Victorian society" (61), then why does the author so quickly bring the mistress's wealthy brother all the way back from India to rescue his sister? Or, in the same novel, how can the future of Victorian England be "dominated by characters like Captain Brown," who "would do for society what writers like Dickens were doing for literature" (58), when he is run over by a train in chapter 2?

It is tempting to quibble like this because, on the whole, Nash's argument fits so comfortably within previous critical debates about Gaskell and Edgeworth: to what extent they either "reinforced or challenged" class and gender stereotypes (75), and whether their fiction belongs to "the realm of the domestic/private or the social/public" (2). With respect to the first question, Nash cites other...