Child Sacrifice and the Crisis of Gender in Mary Cholmondeley's Major Fiction

By the mid-nineteenth century popular narratives of childhood such as Jane Eyre (1847) and David Copperfield (1850) had opened up numerous possibilities for the child protagonist, as both judge and uncomprehending victim of the adult world. In Brontë's text it is the adult Jane who narrates, "'I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered: now … I see it clearly.'"¹ When the young David first encounters Mr. Murdstone, the adult recalling narrator retreats from the scene, allowing him to give no reason for his instinctive dislike. Between them they nonetheless convey a more reasoned dread to the reader in the comment: "'He patted me on the head, but somehow I didn't like him or his deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother's in touching me.'"² Similarly naive, Pip in Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) believes himself to have been chosen by the wealthy Miss Havisham as a future husband for her beautiful ward, rather than as a tool for her personal vengeance on the male sex. In all three cases, the first-person narrators directly influence the reader through their control of the texts, regardless of their initial failures of comprehension.

Cholmondeley of course knew the work of both Dickens and the Brontës, but by contrast, her writing of the 1890s allows her child characters surprisingly little comment on events, and they are rarely presented as central to the narrative. Nonetheless the figure of the child is used in her major novels, Diana Tempest and Red Pottage, as a filter through which the reader is encouraged to scrutinise traditional adult gender roles. In both novels a child's hero-worship of an adult educator will be problematised, and taken together, the two novels offer a powerfully counterpoised critique of the attribution of gendered qualities, leading to crisis and potentially tragedy.

In Diana Tempest (1893) the reader is first introduced to the schoolmaster Mr. Goodwin through a newspaper article, detailing his daring rescue of his young pupil John Tempest, successor to a wealthy family estate, from a supposed accident at a railway station. The boy is in fact the object of a number of murder attempts after his uncle (who knows that John is illegitimate and so has no moral right to the estate) makes a drunken bet that he himself will not succeed. Goodwin is first presented as a publicly accessible myth, the romantic hero: "Narrow escape of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Tempest on the Metropolitan Railway.… Tremendous crowd on the platform. Struggle for the train as it came in. Mr. Tempest pushed down between the still moving train and the platform. Heroic devotion of Mr. Goodwin. Rescue of Mr. Tempest uninjured. Serious injuries of Mr. Goodwin."³ The idea of a "narrow escape" won by "heroic devotion" is a familiar feature of late-Victorian boys' adventure stories, as well as newspaper headlines, but Goodwin's status is further intensified by the narrator's implied précis of this already titillating account, the excision of all unnecessary phrases, as in a telegram stressing the urgency of the situation.

In a clever use of flashback, the tutor's characterisation is initially filtered through this act of heroism. During the lifetime of the older Mr. Tempest, Goodwin has met John at the station (an augur of his later act of courage) on his first day at school, and the two are drawn to each other by an understated exchange of emotion. Gesa Stedman has shown that the "central paradigm that orders the discourses on emotions in the 19th century is the relation between expression and control,"⁴ and this encounter between the two serves as a moral test through which the boy and his tutor are enabled to assess each other's worth without contravening the laws of social decorum. John, whose neglected childhood has increased his natural reserve and self-sufficiency, refuses to cry despite his distress at leaving home, and Goodwin respects his silence. In a substitution for the tears that he...