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Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

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Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

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FICTIONS OF HEALTH: MEDICINE AND THE NINTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL

by

Erika Wright

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Erika Wright

ii

Dedication

For Ted

iii
Acknowledgements

I could not have completed this project without the support and guidance of
several people. I want to thank first and foremost my dissertation chair, Hilary Schor, for
sharing her genius and talent with me. She challenged me to become a more nuanced
thinker and sophisticated writer. I also want to thank Joseph Boone for his insight,
intellect, and enthusiasm; he was a constant source of inspiration. To Jim Kincaid I owe
my heartfelt thanks for his generosity and attention. His wit and wisdom shaped not only
my project but also my approach to graduate study. To all my professors and colleagues
at USC, I am eternally grateful for their encouragement, thoughtful (and quick) feedback,
friendship, and humor. In particular, I want to thank Emily Anderson, Michael Blackie,
Leslie Bruce, Beth Callaghan, Kathy Strong, and Alice Villaseñor. I must also thank the
many friends I made outside of USC who contributed to my work. The Dickens Universe
was crucial to my personal and professional development. My fellow Dickensians shared
their passion and knowledge. I am indebted to John Jordan, Jonathan Grossman, and
Becky Woomer for their thoughtful comments and warm friendship.
The generous funding I received from USC made it possible for me to complete
this project. The Graduate School provided me two years of Merit Fellowship, while the
Marta Feuchtwanger Foundation and the English Department supported me with
Dissertation Fellowships. The College of Physicians honored me with a grant to conduct
research at their library and the English department at USC funded my trip to the
National Library of Medicine.
iv
Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my husband, Ted Johnson, who
read essay and chapter drafts, timed conference papers, solved computer problems, and
made me laugh.

v

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Introduction: Fictions of Health 1
Chapter 1: Inventing the Invalid, Narrating Health: 15
Harriet Martineau, Omniscient Narration, and the Victorian Novel

Chapter 2: Prevention and the Novel: 69
Jane Austen, William Buchan, and Thomas Beddoes

Chapter 3: Dickens in Quarantine: 107
Social Theory, Narrative Acts, Little Dorrit

Chapter 4: The Doctor’s Story in 146
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters

Bibliography
vi
Abstract
Since the rise of the novel, readers have been trained to expect conflict and
resolution, crisis and recovery, and beginnings that move (but not too quickly) toward
ends. Such patterns have been likened to disease: narrative begins in a state of
dysfunction and works toward the recuperation of order or the presumably healthy state
of quiescence. However, underlying this traditional structure, which is embedded in the
medical and fictional texts I analyze, is another sense of narrative, one determined by the
vagaries to be found within plots of health rather than an inexorable trajectory leading
from illness to cure. For health is more than a mechanism of closure or an absence of
narrative. Health is a precarious state marked by uncertain chronology, invented plots,
and hopeful characters and provides writers with narrative possibilities rather than simply
an ending, an ongoing drama rather than a condition of stasis.
Fictions of Health charts this unexpected relationship between health and the
novel, beginning with the figure of the chronic invalid, who holds a privileged—because
detached—perspective on what it means to be well. Invalidism provides a vital mode of
narration through which health can be seen as a dynamic element of storytelling. In
Chapter two, Austen’s Fanny Price both embodies invalid narration and marks, for the
domestic novels that follow, the romantic trajectory toward health, which comes from the
impulse not of cure but of prevention. By mid-century, as I show in Chapter three,
Dickens creates social health when the characters in Little Dorrit find community and
compassion in quarantine, offering therapeutic contagion rather than the prevention of
disease; Gaskell’s Molly Gibson concludes this project by learning, through a kind of
vii
medical training, that novelistic acts, the caring attention of a sympathetic listener,
rather than medical treatment, bring about what is truly narrative health.

1

Introduction: Fictions of Health
Disappointed by what he saw as the Victorian novelist’s turn to the pathological
and the morbid, John Ruskin argues that “[i]n modern stories . . . the funereal excitement
is obtained, for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death; but by
the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and recognized, mortal
phenomena [sic] of the sick-room” (274).
1
For Ruskin, scenes of illness are morally and
aesthetically suspect, largely because any writer can, without much effort, “chronicle the
broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too
surely recognized, image of familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had
been false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on
the applause of a gratified audience . . .” (274). Ruskin is calling for a “healthy”
literature, one in which the sickroom scene is understated or even absent. To reinforce his
point, he contrasts Dickens’s novels, especially the death-filled Bleak House, and Eliot’s
Mill on the Floss with those of Walter Scott. In lauding Scott, however, Ruskin observes
that not all was well—even Scott succumbed occasionally to the “conditions of
commercial excitement” (274), and his later novels (Castle Dangerous, St. Ronan’s Well
and The Fair Maid of Perth), which were written during the period of sickness just before
his death, sink “into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the
whole body of our lower fictitious literature” (276). Literary production, according to

1
From “Fiction, Fair and Foul—I” (1880).

2
Ruskin, is tied too much to disease and both the physical condition of the author and that
of the modern city are as much to blame as anything.
2

Ruskin’s critique, especially of Scott and the effect illness had on his writing,
represents a type of evaluative criticism that has largely fallen out of favor.
3
And yet,
critical interest in the literary value of disease has not. The number of books about illness
in literature is vast. And as Kirstie Blair notes, in a 2000 Victorian Institute conference on
“Victorian Illness, Health, and Medicine,” “almost every speaker focuses on illness rather
than health . . . Pathology . . . has been the focus of Victorian criticism for some time”
(138).
4
While scholars may be less interested in how novelist felt as they wrote, we are
still asking why sickness is so pervasive in Victorian novels.
5
Fictions of Health, though
certainly interested in answering a version of this question, takes a cue from Ruskin by
asking how health, more than illness, advances our study of the novel.

2
Ruskin argues that city living dulls the senses and helps to create an audience for this “diseased”
literature: “There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the modern novelist in the fact that
he cannot easily, in a city population, find a healthy mind to vivisect . . .” (281).

3
A notable exception is D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen; Or the Secret of Style. For Miller, Sanditon, the novel
Austen died before finishing, marks the “breakdown . . . of Austen Style” (80), as if her illness caused
Austen to lose control of her language and thus, finally, reveal herself in her prose.

4
Roger Cooter, medical historian, makes a similar point in a 2003 review for Victorian Studies, noting that
“a major part of the literary turn in cultural studies has been its somatic turn. . . . corporeality and pathology
have become obligatory points of passage in the study of Victorian society and culture” (514).

5
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) is one of the earliest studies to explore the link between
disease and art, particularly the metaphors surrounding tuberculosis and cancer. Miriam Bailin’s The
Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (1995) examines the cultural and aesthetic value of the
sickroom in both fiction and non-fiction of the period. See also Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions:
Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (1995), Pamela Gilbert’s Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian
Women’s Popular Novels (1997), Catherine Judd’s Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian
Imagination, 1830-1880 (1998), Jane Wood’s Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (2001), and
Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004). Although
not focused on illness per se, Lawrence Rothfield’s Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (1992) establishes a link between the advent of clinical discourse and the shift toward realism in the
nineteenth century.

3
The sheer variety of manuals, pamphlets, lectures, letters, and diaries that
promoted prevention, charted illness, and proffered cures during the nineteenth century
attests to a cultural desire to read and write about and to imagine what it meant to be
healthy. The bulk of medical guides follow in some way from Galenic medicine, which
touted the importance of moderation in diet and exercise. Some, such as William
Buchan’s Domestic Medicine and Thomas Beddoes’s Hygeia, two texts I study in more
detail in chapter one, focus their efforts on preventive conduct rather than simply offering
remedies for common illnesses and advice about proper foods, clothing, and living
conditions. Physicians and laymen alike were defining what it meant to be healthy and
how one should go about maintaining or achieving this state.
As nineteenth-century definitions suggest, however, it is hard to separate health
from illness. In A Manual of Domestic Medicine and Surgery with Glossary of Terms
Therein (1858) J. H. Walsh includes the following entry:
Sect 1.—Definition of Health

1. In the present artificial state of society, the health, both of individuals
and communities, is always comparative, none of us being quite free from
the ill effects upon our constitutions, of excess in the indulgence of our
appetites, or the influence of bad air, defective drainage or mental
excitement upon our nervous systems. Just as it is almost impossible to
find a perfectly sound horse in this country, because all have a “screw
loose” somewhere, so a human being with a “sound mind in a sound
body” is equally a “rara avis.” But in common language, we are
accustomed to use the term “good health” as meaning that state of the
system which is the average condition of those who are free from absolute
disease. The different degrees of health ascend from “good” to “strong”
and “perfect,” which is the highest term used; while below the average the
adjectives “pretty fair,” “delicate,” “feeble,” “bad,” and “very bad” mark

4
the descending scale—the last term being of course only applicable to
those who are the subjects of disease.
6

Disease may be central to Walsh’s definition of health, but health is, ultimately, the
foundation upon which we build our sense of physical and mental fitness. To be in “very
bad health” means to be diseased—we begin, rhetorically, in a state of health and move
down from there, all of us being at least a little below the line. As Walsh notes, health
must be defined in relation to what it is not, so when I speak of health in this project,
disease is always in the shadows. But more than that, health is, by definition, a fiction, for
although it is a lived experience (we can feel when we are well) it is also an ideal,
imagined state to which we must aspire (we all have a “screw loose somewhere”).
Walsh’s definition offers a simple taxonomy for describing different states of being, but it
also enlists the reader’s imagination; we must implicitly construct a story about potential
“effects” of certain behaviors and “influences.” Stories about the pitfalls of excess
abound in medical literature, and the act of preventing these inevitable dangers defines
what it means to be healthy or to experience health.

6
A number of handbooks define health in relation to disease. In his three-volume A Medicinal Dictionary
(1743), R. James describes “three dispositions of the human Body,” which are “Soundness, its Reverse, and
a neutral State.” He explains that the body is in a “sound state” when “nothing is wanting: Such a
constitution or habit,” he acknowledges, “is very rare, and even perhaps never to be met with; but this does
not hinder us to suppose or imagine such a Model for regulating our Judgments, with respect to other less
perfect constitutions” (lxvi). Over one hundred years later, William Strange offers the following: “Disease
is the negative or opposite of health, as evil is of good. Health may be, and indeed generally is, defined as
normal (proper) performance of all function of the body, that body being organized in a normal manner as
regards the type of the race; in other words, the proper action of a good constitution. But when are all the
functions duly and perfectly performed? When can we lay our finger upon a period of our lives and say,
Now everything is going on within exactly as it should do; now I am in as perfect health as my organization
is capable of? Again, who shall say what is a normally constituted frame? Who shall carry off the palm of
physical perfection, and make the nearest approach to the Apollo Belvidere? Who shall decide upon the
standard of physical beauty or of perfection in the constitutional power?” Like Walsh, Strange notes the
difficulty of pinpointing what exactly it means to be healthy, since nobody can really achieve it.

5
In an implicitly literary and moralistic version of health, surgeon James Hinton
suggests that a man is “healthy when his body is in harmony with the ceaseless activities
of nature; when his blood is warm with the soft kiss of air, his muscles vigorous with toil,
his brain fertile in wise and generous thoughts, his heart glowing with generous purpose.”
Hinton constructs health as pastoral and sensual, as something we achieve or maintain
primarily through an active relationship with nature, for, as he goes on to say, “[health]
exists in ceaseless adaptation to all the infinite variety of nature—ever the same, yet ever
new . . . Health knows no monotony” (333, emphasis added). Both Walsh and Hinton
allow us to see health largely in terms of a process, as the movement of loss or gain, in
short, as a narrative. It is this dynamic aspect of health I seek to examine.
Fictions of Health, therefore, is primarily a study of the ways that novels use
health to make meaning. Since the novel’s rise in the eighteenth century, readers have
been trained to expect conflict and resolution, crisis and recovery, and beginnings that
move (but not too quickly) toward ends. The endings of eighteenth-century texts such as
Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote and Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker announce cure as
the desired goal. To be healthy, then, is a sign or symptom of closure, of the end of
narrative. Like Athena Vrettos, who points out that “to be ill is to produce narrative,”
John Wiltshire argues that “[i]f the healthy body is largely passive, unconscious of itself,
then the unhealthy body, as a site of anxious self-concentration, is the source of events, of
narrative energies” (9).
7
Where Ruskin sees the thematic flaws of the “modern
[nineteenth-century] novel,” literary critics and theorists see an apt metaphor for the

7
This sense of health as an absence or non-story is not new, as Alexander Shand notes in “The Pleasures of
Sickness” (1889), “the pleasures of health are taken as a matter of course, and are only passively
appreciated” (546).

6
energies it takes to drive stories. Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot (1984) and D. A.
Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents (1981) are particularly relevant to my study, as
both examine the complexities of the reader’s and the narrative’s relationship to
beginnings and ends, to the traditional narrative of crisis and recovery. Peter Brooks
challenges “the static models” of narrative developed by formalists, because they fail to
account for “reading narrative as a dynamic operation” (47). He uses “motor” and
“engine” to explain the type of movement that occurs in narrative and couples this model
with a Freudian understanding of psychic mobility, suggesting that desire for the end (the
death instinct) initiates the narrative and drives the plot. As he explains it, “narrative
desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end” (52, original emphasis).
8
But even as
Brooks asserts the death drive as narrative’s primary force, he calls on the language of
medicine to describe this narrative event. In his examination of Great Expectations, he
argues that “at the end [of the novel] we have the impression of a life that has outlived
plot, renounced plot, been cured of it . . .” (138, emphasis added). Cure, in this case,
refers to the end of narrative, or what DA Miller describes as the “non-narratable” state of
“quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at
the end” (ix emphasis added). The medical rhetoric, particularly the language associated
with health, seeps naturally into the theories of narrative action.
For Miller, “narratability” is “the instance of disequilibrium, suspense, and
general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise” (ix). He offers Mary
and Henry Crawford from Mansfield Park as examples, noting that both characters defer
textual closure—Henry through his flirtatious behavior and refusal to commit to marriage

8
Kermode sees this desire in terms of apocalyptic thinking.

7
and Mary through discourse, her “perpetual promise and deferral of knowledge and right
nomination” (27). Miller highlights these two characters because for Austen narratability
“coincides with what the novelist strongly disapproves of (waywardness, flirtation) and . .
. closure is associated with her most important official values (settlement, moral insight,
and judgment)” (xiv). These non-narratable or, we might say, “healthy” behaviors are,
then, what the novel (and the novel reader) seeks to achieve. In another example, Miller
explains that we know Emma Woodhouse has been “cured” when she begins to think of
herself in terms of her “blindness” and “blunders” (20), when her language shifts from
self-absorbed to self-aware. Both Miller and Brooks call on the health (cure, recovery,
death) of narrative as a means of constructing their theories.
9
In doing so, they reinforce
the notion that traditional narratives are marked by the drive toward cure, and toward the
expulsion of that which is undesirable or unhealthy.
Admittedly, disease is more interesting than health. A story in which everyone is
healthy and happy is, as Tolstoy famously noted, no story at all; but neither is one in
which all characters are constantly burdened with illness and disease. We need, as
Brooks might argue, the detours that move us between these two states and keep us
slightly off balance. And yet, while the content and form of many novels appear to rely
on the crisis-recovery model, underlying this traditional structure is another sense of
narrative, one determined by the vagaries to be found within plots of health rather than an
inexorable trajectory leading from illness to cure. The story I seek to tell about the
novel’s interest in medicine addresses a version of Ruskin’s lament about diseased
novels. The requirements of narrative would seem to call out for a crisis, and health then

9
See also Miller’s “The Late Jane Austen.” Raritan (Summer 1990): 55-79.

8
appears only as an absence of narrative urgency. But, as I demonstrate in Fictions of
Health, we need to see health itself as a dynamic, a seductive, and at times even a
dangerous state, calling out for narratives of its own. Health is more than a mechanism of
closure that follows upon crisis; it is a precarious condition marked by uncertain
chronology, invented plots, and hopeful characters, providing writers with narrative
possibilities rather than simply an ending, an ongoing drama rather than an absence or
end of action.
In her study of Victorian sickroom scenes, Miriam Bailin begins to challenge the
traditional view that deems health and cure as the desired and necessary end. She argues
that “[t]he conventional pattern of ordeal and recovery takes on its particularly Victorian
emphasis in the location of the desired condition of restored order and stability not in
regained health but in a sustained condition of disability and quarantine” (6). Speaking
about Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens in particular, she goes on to note that the
“narrative cure for disorder is more often than not illness itself and the therapeutic
situation constructed around it” (7). If, as Bailin proposes, the Victorian novel uses
illness as cure (narratively speaking), then I would like to suggest that we redefine health
as action, as a form of narrative crisis in itself.
Charlotte Bronte’s novels, which figure prominently in the study of illness in
fiction, depict the important tension between health and illness in a way that allows us to
see the relationship between states of narratability and the dynamics of health. Jane
Eyre’s autobiography begins with a physical injury and psychological collapse. After
being locked in the red room, young Jane gets diagnosed and treated by the kind doctor,

9
who is the first person to listen to and believe her story. The move to Lowood, though it
provides Jane with the longed-for escape from the Reeds, is physically dangerous—
indeed, a health hazard. Bronte captures the tragic conditions of this “charitable”
institution with her depiction of the girls’ frozen limbs, their starvation and humiliation,
as well as the typhus that kills so many of them and the tuberculosis that dooms Helen
Burns. But Lowood is not strictly or even primarily a scene of illness as much as it is an
affirmation of the narrator’s (Jane’s) relative health—significantly, Jane never gets sick
while she lives at Lowood, at least not physically. In describing the typhus outbreak at
the school, Jane explains:
While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and
death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls;
while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and
the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that
bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland
out of doors. Its gardens, too, glowed with flowers: hollyhocks had sprung
up tall as trees, lilies had opened, tulips and roses were in bloom; the
borders of the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double
daisies; the sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice
and apples; and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the
inmates of Lowood, expect to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and
blossoms to put in a coffin.
But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties
of the scene, and season . . . (92).

Disease and death appear, at first, to be the focus of this paragraph and certainly the focus
of Jane’s attention. But the fact of disease is subordinated to the vitality of the spring day.
Jane begins: “While disease,” and therefore prepares the reader for something other than
disease. She delays the real subject of the passage by repeating this subordination
(“while”) in order to highlight the “gloom” and “hospital smells”—all the byproducts of
illness—before reaching her main point: it was “bright May.” With this turn to the

10
freshness of spring—to the flowers in “bloom”—we are relieved from the smells of
death. Bronte juxtaposes death/disease and life/health rhetorically (with the gloom/bloom
rhyme) and imagistically by substituting the “effluvia” for the “fragrant treasures” of
spring. These “treasures” are, as Jane explains, “useless” to the sick girls, and while
Jane’s story is meant, in part, to bear witness to the tragedy of Lowood, it is not her sole
or even guiding purpose. Jane begins the subsequent paragraph: “But I,” asserting once
again her difference from the other characters in her story and laying claim to her
authority as narrator. This “I” is decidedly “well” and “enjoy[ing] fully the beauties of
the scene, and season.” Sickness has the potential to shut down narrative, not just because
it leads to death, but because it prevents the girls from engaging in action. For Jane’s
story to continue she must be and she must stay healthy.
10

In fact, Jane Eyre asserts the value of health (hers in particular) as self-defense.
The first time she meets Brocklehurst, he asks: “What must you do to avoid [hell]?” Jane
replies, quite pragmatically, “I must keep in good health, and not die” (39). The right
answer, of course, has something more to do with being good, memorizing the psalms,
and following orders, because, as he explains, “[c]hildren younger than [Jane] die daily”
(39). It is not enough, then, to “keep in good health”; one must “be good.” Jane doesn’t
quite see it this way. Holding firm to her initial claim, but “[n]ot being in the condition to

10
As “healthy” as Jane is, she is not in “perfect health”; she struggles not just physically but mentally,
particularly in relation to Bertha Mason. Though even in this case, Jane continues to assert her sanity. In
order to limit my study of health, each chapter begins from or focuses solely on questions of physical health
rather than issues of nervous disease or hysteria. There are a number of studies that deal primarily with the
thematic and formal questions surrounding sanity. In The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English
Culture, 1830-1980 (1985), Elaine Showalter offers an historical perspective, examining various texts,
including women’s diaries and novels written by women, to help uncover the vexing connection between
women and insanity. See also Peter Logan’s Nerves and Narratives, Janet Oppenheim’s Shattered Nerves,
Jane Wood’s Passion and Pathology, which tackles both physical and mental health.

11
remove his doubt,” she simply sighs and gets herself into more trouble. Here, health
becomes a point of conflict; it facilitates Jane’s rebellion and supports her unorthodox
behavior, part of which is to speak and to tell her story.
Jane Eyre is, perhaps, the healthiest protagonist featured in this project, for in
order to answer the question: “What does health mean to the novel?,” I turn, in my
chapters, to a handful of invalids (Chapter one), a meek girl (Chapter two), people in
quarantine (Chapter three), and a doctor in training (Chapter four). In focusing on these
supposedly sickly conditions, however, I demonstrate how metaphors of health and
questions of what to do with crisis/cure enter deeply into the way the novelist imagines
her work. I want to turn briefly, here, to the great medical novel, Middlemarch, for
although it is not part of my larger project, and, in fact, appears well after the works I
study, it was written by a novelist who has thoroughly absorbed the lessons of health and
has made them central to realist practice. Two moments from George Eliot’s novel
demonstrate this point, because while both involve the doctor-hero, Tertius Lydgate,
neither features the doctor engaged in medical practice or relies on the clinical and
scientific verisimilitude that is generally associated with her realism.
In the first instance, Eliot stages a climactic scene of Bulstrode’s expulsion from
the community at a town meeting on sanitary reform—the town’s literal and figurative
health are at stake, as the scandal surrounding Bulstrode taints all with which he comes
into contact. Mr. Hawley does not want Bulstrode to comment on the town’s sanitary
concerns if he (Bulstrode) is not himself free from scandal. Bulstrode cannot refute the
allegation that he “was for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that he won

12
his fortune by dishonest procedures,” and his body registers the shock—he becomes too
weak to walk unassisted. Lydgate, though he realizes that any association with Bulstrode
will harm his reputation (and already has), cannot refuse to see Bulstrode as his patient
and help him according to his duty. The narrator explains that “[Lydgate’s] own
movement of resentful hatred was checked by his instinct of the Healer which thinks first
of bringing rescue or relief to the sufferer” (449). The action of this scene comes largely
from the publicity of Bulstrode’s misdeeds, but it also arises from the doctor’s drive to
preserve health. Our interests as readers lay not so much with Bulstrode’s potential or
impending illness and concern about his cure, but with Lydgate’s impulse to act as a
guardian of health, which keeps him in the story. If not for his reflex to offer the weak
man his arm and to lead him from the meeting, Lydgate might have been absorbed, at
least temporarily, into the status quo and there would be no more story to tell. The town
and the narrative require his act of sympathy more than they require any type of formal or
medical cure.
In the second, parallel moment, Dorothea posits a relationship between character
transformation and health, as she turns her attention to Lydgate. Enlisting Farebrother
into a kind of diagnostic assessment, Dorothea tries to convince him to believe that
Lydgate is innocent of killing or purposely mistreating Raffles, the man who has exposed
Bulstrode. She asks Farebrother to consider Lydgate’s character, to which he explains:
“But my dear Mrs Casaubon . . . character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid
and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our
bodies do.” Appropriating the language of medicine as Farebrother does, Dorothea

13
responds in kind: “Then it [character] may be rescued and healed” (454). Health is both a
driving force and an end point in this exchange. The goal is to “heal” Lydgate’s
character, but health is also the impetus for Dorothea’s action. On the one hand, this
scene appears (more so than the first example) to be a moment of crisis in need of cure.
And to some extent it is, but we might also see that health—to be “healed” and to be a
healer—is not simply the end of the story; it is a persistent force, a dynamic operation
and a from of compassion. Eliot provides readers with a model of social action that does
not depend on the sickroom scene, and thinking novelistically means turning to the
impulse generated by health.
The following chapters chart this impulse toward health, and while I am interested
in the evolution of fictional form and medical practice during the nineteenth century, it is
not my primary aim to tell a linear history of either field. Rather, I want to suggest that
health requires of us an alternate rhythm of reading, one that challenges our ideas about
linearity and operates outside of the crisis-cure model. The novel, as a result, requires
unexpected forms of narration, unusual constructions of character, and a slightly
combative, almost sibling relationship to contemporary medical discourse. It uses
medicine, in short, to construct the fictions of health. I begin my exploration of these
fictions with the figure of the invalid, who holds a “privileged” and strangely healthful
perspective on what it means to be well. She provides a vital model of narration, as we
need the invalid to show us what healthy narrative looks like. In Chapter two, Austen’s
Fanny Price both embodies invalid narration and marks, for the domestic novels that
follow, the romantic trajectory toward health, which comes from the impulse not of cure

14
but of prevention. By mid-century, as I show in Chapter three, Dickens creates social
health when the characters in Little Dorrit find community and compassion in quarantine,
offering therapeutic contagion rather than the prevention of disease; Gaskell’s Molly
Gibson concludes this project by learning, through a kind of medical training, that
novelistic acts, the caring attention of a sympathetic listener, rather than medical
treatment, bring about what is truly narrative health. This way, I hope we realize that
reading about health, unlike experiencing it, is anything but boring.

15
Chapter 1: Inventing the Invalid, Narrating Health:

Harriet Martineau, Omniscient Narration, and the Victorian Novel

Despite, or perhaps because of, the Victorian preoccupation with health, one of
the most idealized figures in the literature and culture of the period was not the robust,
sociable hero. That fate belongs to the delicate, isolated invalid. Although the invalid is
not generally the Victorian novel’s primary character, invalids often function as a
powerful center around which the narrative’s action develops and around which the
fiction of health unfolds. From the feeble though ambulatory Fanny Price to the wise yet
wheelchair-bound Ermine Williams and the vengeful, bedridden valetudinarian Peter
Featherstone, the chronically ill were everywhere in the novel, and by century’s end
readers were sick of them. The invalids who are particularly annoying are not the
complainers and curmudgeons, but rather the ones who became almost divine as a result
of their condition. As the writer of “An Invalid’s Grievance” (1887) claims, open up a
novel and
you are gravely assured that beauty, talent, goods, nay every gift desired
by man, varies in inverse proportion to health. [The novelist’s] heroines—
for I must confess this species of fetishism is generally reserved for ladies,
though from time to time, men come in for their share—become more and
more beautiful, amiable, and unselfish as their strength fades away. The
little frailties inherent in them as human beings gradually disappear; their
minds, no matter how dull in the days of their strength, in weakness
become transcendent in penetration and judgment. (443)

“The cruelest rub of all,” he goes on, has less to do with their talent and beauty than with
the supposed intellectual improvement that comes from sustained ill health. The writer
sneers, “No doubt a whole day spent wondering whether that confounded pain will ever
cease its gnawing will have a marvelous effect in brightening my intellect and rendering

16
my penetration more acute, my arguments more convincing” (443). Even were such an
impossible standard achievable in real life, it carries with it, the writer claims, a loss of
reality, of innate humanness: “they [non-fictional invalids] are no longer men and
brethren, but something beyond—above if you will—the ken of poor weak mortals”
(444). This writer fixates on a particular version of invalidism, one that saw in disability a
transcendent vitality—a “peculiar privilege” as Harriet Martineau says—that rivaled the
healthiest of conditions and created the kind of clear perception that exists, it seems, only
in fiction. The invalid’s value, at least for the novel, centers on her capacity to provide an
objective overview, as she sits on the sidelines ready to watch, report, and guide. The
invalid, I want to argue, is a model for omniscience; she becomes, in effect, the ideal
narrator against whom subsequent narrators will be measured.
Invalids, fictional and non-fictional, are not generally read in relation to narrators.
They are seen, rather, in terms of their cultural and aesthetic value, for the idealized
invalid has long been a part of the literary landscape. Those dying angels, such as Little
Eva and Paul Dombey, transcend their bodies and the vanities of the world; their
condition makes us weep, repent, and reform. They are fortunately not the rule. The
typical invalid made famous in fiction tends toward the cranky, the demanding, and the
just plain odd. Mr. Woodhouse fixates on himself, oblivious to everything but his own
alimental remedies; Linton Heathcliff is a sniveling pawn in his father’s revenge tragedy;
Mr. Fairlie’s selfishness marks him as a morally suspect and socially dangerous. These
are hardly model citizens worth emulating and they are certainly not worth listening to.
These are the truly diseased. Such characters are “above” nobody and their view of the

17
world lacks the stability to function as a narrator does, as the omniscient narrator must.
But the transcendent narrator exhibits the paradox of healthy illness that aligns with the
necessary perspective of the Victorian narrator, and both (narrator and invalid) become
central to the depiction of health in the Victorian novel. Omniscience develops as a
dominant mode of narration in the nineteenth-century novel at least in part as a response
to the culture’s investment and interest in seeing the healthy side of invalidism, and as a
consequence of the invalid’s desire to stake out her claim in society.
Famous as both a writer and an invalid, Harriet Martineau ardently asserts this
identification, as her works, particularly Deerbrook and Life in the Sick-Room, define the
complex relationship I am tracing between invalidism and narration in the Victorian
novel. In many ways she invented a character in fiction and in her personal life that later
novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Dinah Mulock Craik, would turn to when
narrating their popular novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and John Halifax, Gentleman.
Constructed as “peculiar” and “special,” the invalid’s perspective came to be invested
with a form of knowledge that often deemed morally superior and socially necessary.
Technology, politics, and science advanced at an unprecedented rate and Britons needed
someone to watch and guide them. As Jonathan Arac suggests, “the chaos of the urban
experience fostered a wish for a clarifying overview” and the novelist took on this
responsibility (3). Martineau’s invalid contributes to the novelist’s conception of such a
stance.

18
Martineau was not, of course, the first to assert the invalid’s transcendent power.
In 1827, The Christian Spectator devotes an essay “On the Privileges of Invalids,”
observing:
The situation of the invalid, with the concomitant appendages of pain and
sickness, the pill and bitter draught, solitary days and “wearisome nights,”
the restrictions necessarily imposed, and the privations to which he is
subject, has very little to excite the envy of the world, which “places its
bliss in action,” or luxurious “ease,” in parade, and noise, and bustle, and
(may I not add?) in vanity. But the world knows little of what may be
enjoyed, even under all those seeming disadvantages.

This is because invalids do not see the world as others do; their vision, which is shaped
by pain and solitude, becomes more acute, and as a result the invalid is “rendered more
extensively useful to mankind, than if blessed with health to participate in the active
duties of life” (The Christian Spectator 634). Removed from the bustle and parade, these
invalids, at least according to this essayist, are outsiders looking on with clarity and
purpose; physical limitations free the mind to contemplate the many truths of the self,
humanity, and the world. Thus, rather than complain incessantly or die gloriously, this
class of invalids sits on the sidelines in order to observe, think, and act for a greater good.
Edward Bulwer Lytton echoes this view of the mind’s strange powers in The
Student (1835), an essay Martineau read before writing her memoir on invalidism
11
:

11
In a letter to Bulwer Lytton, Harriet Martineau praises a collection of his essays entitled The Student, a
Series of Papers (1835) and responds to his observation or perhaps accusation that there are similarities
between a portion of that work and Martineau’s own, recently published Life in the Sick-Room (1844).
Addressed to “Dear Sir Edward,” Martineau writes:
I like the Student the best of your earlier works . . . It is curious, --I had ordered the Student, just
two posts before your first letter came,--a fortnight since. I read it on my voyage out to America,
and was much struck with it, but never saw it again, and had forgotten all about the invalidism in
it,--remembering the speculations. It is very possible that the part about sickness may have dwelt
in my mind, without my consciousness, and have had something to do with my late volume: but if
so, it was quite unawares. (Letters 82-83)

19
Every one of us must have observed that during a lengthened illness the
mind acquires the habit of making to itself a thousand sources of interest .
. . out of that quiet monotony which seems so unvaried to ordinary eyes.
We grow usually far more susceptible to commonplace impressions:--As
one whose eyes are touched by a fairy spell, a new world opens to us out
of the surface of the tritest things.

For Bulwer and others, the condition of invalidism brought together vision and
knowledge in order to create a new world out of the everyday. The same qualities touted
as unique to the invalid—the separation of his eyes from “ordinary” ones, the ability to
see something special and new in the everyday—are among the qualities that characterize
the novel’s authoritative perspective and its rise as the period’s dominant genre.
Martineau knew this and used it to develop her narrative authority.
Because the invalid has been such a pervasive character in fiction and the culture,
scholars rarely distinguish the formal qualities associated with this condition from the
thematic or characterological ones. A number of critics have demonstrated the political,
social, and aesthetic function of invalids in fiction and culture, paying less attention to
their connection to narration and novelistic form. Diane Price Herndl’s seminal work,
Invalid Women, examines representations of female illness in American literature and
culture, arguing that invalidism can be redemptive and destructive, resistant and
dominated, libratory and oppressive. Her work sheds light on the struggle between female
writers and male medical authority that seeks to define women as pathological.
12
Maria

While not caring to admit the role of Lytton’s influence on her work, Martineau suggests that the
invalidism was either “forgotten” or that it lodged in her sub-conscious, as if silently directing how she
thought and, more important, how she wrote—it may, she concedes, have “had something to do” with her
late volume, but the precise nature of its influence is uncertain.

12
See also Miriam Bailin The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (1994), Athena Vrettos
Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (1995), Jane Wood’s Passion and Pathology in
Victorian Fiction (2001).

20
Frawley’s study, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2004), expands
the way we understand the invalid, arguing that although invalidism has been and will
always be associated with “infirmity and incapacity,” it is also something other than a
medical concern; it is “a posture, a stance, a position taken, a role endorsed, or embraced
so as to become visible and therefore recognizable” (Frawley 23). Invalidism and Identity
offers the first and most comprehensive exploration of non-fictional texts written by
invalids in order to determine what it meant to be an invalid, to be static, during this era
of tremendous movement—scientific discovery and political progress. Frawley argues
that invalidism carried with it an array of potential meanings and that by examining the
various “rhetorical strategies and cultural codes embedded within the [invalid] author’s
discourse” (5) we can develop a clearer sense of the contradictions that contribute to its
definition, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century when these texts
were most abundant. The invalid, she observes, “could embody productivity and at the
same time be emblematic of fatigue and waste” (1); he or she might signify inertia as well
as action, truth as well as falsehood, illness as well as health. Frawley’s approach allows
us to see the complexities inherent to the historical condition and narrative construction
of the invalid in terms of health rather than illness.
13

While my interests center on a particular type of invalid—those who take a
position above the fray and outside of the plot—my argument follows from Frawley’s

13
A variety of forces converged during the nineteenth century to make the invalid a recognizable, if not
completely coherent, identity category: “Evangelicalism, the emergence of an industrial national identity
and a concomitant middle-class, capitalist work ethic, self-help ideology, and the ‘rise’ of professionalized
medicine all worked in various ways to produce a climate in which the figure of the invalid could assume
prominence and narratives about invalidism could prosper” (Frawley 32).

21
sense that invalidism more generally is a key nineteenth-century identity category.
14
In
highlighting autobiographical accounts of invalid authors, Frawley’s study complicates
how we might read the “Invalid’s Grievance,” which claims that novelists are to blame
for creating the myth of the privileged invalid. A number of writers (not just novelists)
were responsible for constructing this narrative of superiority, but the “Grievance” with
which I opened this chapter’s discussion is not interested in condemning these other
writers for telling and perhaps idealizing their own tales; instead the essay singles out the
novelist for fictionalizing that ideal. This focus on the novel-as-culprit tacitly
acknowledges the genre’s ability to shape perception and to tell people what to expect
and how to be. And while such a concern about fiction’s power is not unique to narratives
featuring invalids, the connection that the writer of “Invalid’s Grievance” makes between
the novel and illness firmly locates the invalid’s privilege within a framework of
novelistic invention, fantasy, and “fairy spells.” The critic implies that, without novelists,
all would be well—or at least, the sick could simply be sick in peace. While I agree in
part with this assessment (there is something fetishistic about novelists’ interest in
invalids), I want to propose an alternative form of influence, one that considers more
carefully how novelistic perspective, specifically narration, is shaped by the rising
narrative presence and ethos of the chronic invalid. Novelists do, in many ways, help to
construct the invalid’s identity, but they adopt it as both a formal and epistemological
concern. Invalidism is mode of seeing and thus knowing and engaging with health.

14
As Frawley and others point out, the chronic invalid’s incurability posed a challenge to medical
knowledge and treatment. Furthermore, while invalidism was often deigned a feminine trait, it was not,
strictly speaking, a woman’s condition. It signified, as well, a sense of intellectualism and exhaustion
increasingly associated with male mental and physical labor.

22
Insight, duty, and truth, all characteristics associated with chronic illness, are not
only part of a theory of invalidism; they are also part of a theory of narrative. For while
invalidism is both a medical experience and a narrative construction, it is also a mode of
narration and a form of knowledge, one that is both thematically and structurally
important to the development of the Victorian novel. More than simply being omniscient
(like a narrator), the invalid becomes a sign of or synonym for omniscience. There are, to
be sure, significant differences between the two conditions—when confined to bed with a
cold or broken limb, one is not referred to as “omniscient.” Yet both states of being rely
to some degree on the transcending the material condition of the physical body in order to
create the kind of privileged and distanced knowledge that energizes plots and engages
readers.

The Rise of the Invalid Narrative: The Case of Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau, one of the period’s most famous invalids and productive
writers, published several texts that were shaped by her experience with illness and
incapacity. “Letter to the Deaf,” Letters on Mesmerism, and portions of the
Autobiography all detail her experience with disability, treatment, and recovery and
function, as well, as a counter-narrative to medical authorities who assume superior
knowledge of her condition. Maria Frawley notes that “[s]ickness was not only the
linchpin of [Martineau’s] self-understanding, her guiding frame of reference, it was the
lens through which she wanted her readers to see and understand her life and career”
(Life 11). Martineau’s most popular illness narrative, Life in the Sick-Room (1844),

23
depicts her experience with chronic illness and outlines her views on the invalid’s social
role. Believing that recovery was unlikely, Martineau wrote this pivotal text during a five
year confinement for a prolapsed uterus. Covering a range of topics from pain and
endurance to homeopathy and mesmerism to the penny post and privacy, Life in the Sick-
Room stands out among sick-room literature of the period because of its emphasis on the
invalid’s mental capacity and agency.
15
As one contemporary reviewer for The Christian
Examiner put it, the title may lead readers “to expect . . . a manual of the common sort,
for the use of invalids. But it is found to be far other, and vastly more than this” (Life
164).
Like the essay “The Invalid’s Grievance” and Bulwer Lytton’s The Student,
Martineau’s writings continually claim that the invalid’s removal constitutes a privilege
rather than a dilemma, a healthy stance rather than a sick one. They demonstrate the
tension between invalidism as a social and medical problem to be cured and invalidism as
a necessary condition of social duty and narrative action. Martineau goes farther than
these earlier writers to lay out a model for invalid behavior that relies heavily on literary
principles, and particularly on a principle of omniscience. In Life in the Sick-Room, she
explains to her fellow invalids:
By our being withdrawn from the disturbing bustle of life in the world; by
our leisure for reading and contemplation of various sides of questions,
and by our singular opportunities for quiet reflection, we must, almost

15
Several critics have talked about Life in the Sick-Room’s uniqueness. Most notably, Alison Winter
claims in “Harriet Martineau and the Reform of the Invalid in Victorian England” that it “was unusual
among sick-room literature and patients’ testimonials for its intense focus on the invalid’s experience of the
room rather than a visitor’s management of it, its focus on the present rather than the afterlife, and its
advice on how to manipulate the structure of the room in order to enhance the experience” (604). Frawley
suggestions, “[n]ever again would a nineteenth century British author deem it necessary or desirable to
analyze chronic illness in so extended a manner” (Invalidism 234).

24
necessarily, see further than we used to do, and further than many others
do on subjects of interest, which involve general principles. (117)

The narrated (rather than the lived) version of the invalid experience is not so much about
diagnosis, treatment, and desired cure; it is about seeing the “old” in a “new,” truer,
way.
16
In an effort to express fully what this position is like and how it works, Martineau
finds an analogy in poetry. She likens the invalid’s powers to the seraphs she read about
as a child in Milton and Akenside, “poised on balanced wing, watching the bringing out a
world from chaos” (Life 78). The young Martineau “longed for the privilege of the
supposed seraph,” and the invalid Martineau believed she found it: “Though I, and my
fellow in lot, must wait long for the seraphic powers, which would enable us fully to
enjoy and use our position, we have the position” (78). This “position“ so assertively
demanded for the invalid by Martineau becomes an important marker of omniscience in
Victorian fiction.
The seraphic figure Martineau uses to describe the invalid’s role is strikingly
similar to the imagery used by nineteenth-century novelists to describe narrative
perspective and novelistic authority. As Arac explains, the mid-nineteenth century
novelist “arrogated the power of ‘commissioned spirits’ [articulated by Wordsworth in
the Prelude] to set their readers, along with themselves, in a position of overview, as if
pinnacled high about the world they viewed” (2). The “good spirit” in Dickens’s Dombey

16
John Mullen’s “Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians” in Sentiment and
Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988) discusses the ways in which
physicians such as Cheyne and Blackmore construct the hypochondriac the eighteenth century as
possessing a heightened sensibility. In these cases, according to Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary
(published 1743-45), the “hypochondriacal constitution” generally refers to “those who lead a sedentary
Life, and indulge themselves too much in Study . . .” (Qtd. in Mullen). As Mullen suggests, this malady
became part of a continuum that included insanity and madness. Martineau is working against this medical
view.

25
and Son and the “SHADOW” of semi-omniscience he imagined as directing Household
Words share common ground with the invalid who, although immobile, has the same
theoretical ability to lift the rooftops off of the city’s houses in order to reveal the action
inside.
17
The invalid sits apart from society in order to gain a perspective that enables him
or her to see and have knowledge about the larger picture of the world.
18
I use
omniscience, therefore, not simply to describe the actual form of narration—Life in the
Sick-Room is, after all, narrated in the first-person—but to describe a way of knowing
and of being that is central to the novel and to Victorian conceptions of the invalid’s
identity.
The critical discussion surrounding narrative point of view offers various ways to
understand the meaning and function of omniscient narration.
19
Particularly relevant to
my study is the way we imagine the narrator’s presence in fiction, and how his or her
place transforms into duty. Audrey Jaffe offers a generous definition of omniscience, one
that I take to encompass the invalid’s particular powers and relationship to narrative. In
Vanishing Points, Jaffe argues that “[w]hat we call omniscience can be located . . . not in
presence or absence, but in the tension between the two” (4); “omniscience in general . .
. is a fantasy: of unlimited knowledge and mobility; of transcending the boundaries

17
The Asmodeus is another trope for narrative overview.

18
See Maria Frawley’s “‘A Prisoner to the Couch’: Harriet Martineau, Invalidism, and Self-
Representation,” in which she explains that Martineau “construct[s] invalidism as a condition of mental
activity, as opposed to physical disability” (185). In “Mothering and Mesmerism in the Life of Harriet
Martineau,” Diana Postlethwaite suggests that “Martineau’s sickroom was transformed from a cloistered
retreat to a place of visionary perspective” (603). Alison Winter argues in Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in
Victorian Britain that Martineau “defended the invalid’s authority over her environment and made a case
for the advantages invalidism could confer on the life of a mind” (218).

19
See, for example, some of the seminal works in this area of narrative study: Henry James’s The Art of
the Novel, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, and Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse.

26
imposed by the physical being and by an ideology of unitary identity” (6). This reading of
omniscience, though specifically referring to Dickens, refer to how invalids write about
themselves and their condition, and also how they function generally within the Victorian
novel.
20
The physical stasis associated with invalidism allows for mobility of the mind,
and while the invalid characters I discuss are also characters in the story, the cultural
understanding and narrative construction of the invalid’s power marks their presence in
the narrative as a form of absence, their knowledge as form of transcendence, their being
as “beyond the ken.”
While Martineau theorizes fully the power of the Seraph-like perspective in Life
in the Sick-Room, it is in her novel Deerbrook (1839) that she first demonstrated how this
kind of privilege is central to her authority as a novelist. It is here—in the novel, not the
memoir—that Martineau essentially invents the invalid. The popularity of Life in the
Sick-Room and subsequent controversy about Martineau’s cure overshadow
Deerbrook’s importance to understanding Martineau’s invalidism.
21
Written five years
before the memoir, the novel shaped how Martineau imagined the invalid’s and thus the
narrator’s privileged perspective. Generally considered an early example of domestic
realism—as one of the few transitional novels to bridge the gap between Jane Austen and

20
Jaffe points out that critics disagree on the precise nature of the omniscient narrator, noting that “the
novel critic must now choose, it seems, between treating omniscient narrators as a presence or a
personification, or an impersonal technique” (3). Her call for an alternative that sees this type of narrator as
moving among these poles is akin to how I approach the invalid and the condition of invalidism, at least as
it existed during the nineteenth century.
21
After Martineau publicized mesmerism not medicine as curing her condition, her brother-in-law and
doctor, Thomas Greenhow, presented details about her illness in a cheap pamphlet “open,” as she says, “to
all the world!” (Life, Frawley 21). Letters published in the Athenaeum, presumably by Sir Benjamin
Collins Brodie, attempt to discredit Martineau’s claims, suggesting that she was hysterical. He argues that
her lack of expertise and her status as a patient preclude her from making an accurate diagnosis of her
condition (Winter, Mesmerized 226).

27
the Brontes—Deerbrook does not at first appear to be about invalidism or invalids. Told
from a third-person omniscient perspective, Deerbrook follows the complicated love
plots of Margaret and Hester Ibbotson. The sisters, aged 20 and 21 respectively, have just
moved from Birmingham after the death of their father and are ideal candidates for the
marriage market. Their Aunt Grey wastes no time in speculating about Hester’s prospects
with the eligible apothecary, Mr. Hope. The kind, intelligent doctor falls in love with
Margaret, only to realize that everyone else, including both sisters, believes he has been
courting the prettier but intellectually inferior sister, Hester. Bound by a sense of duty,
Hope marries Hester and the three live together until the end of the novel, when, after
overcoming numerous obstacles, Margaret marries the town’s other eligible bachelor,
Philip Enderby.
The main action of Deerbrook, therefore, comes from the crisis and recovery that
marks the marriage plots of Hester and Hope and Margaret and Enderby, but it is through
a fifth character, the crippled governess Maria Young, that Martineau anchors the novel’s
narrative point of view and disrupts the closural value of “recovery” through literal and
metaphorical health or cure. Before the novel’s beginning, Maria is on her way to
becoming the heroine of her own domestic tale. The narrator tells us that “there had been
some gossip . . . that Philip Enderby would be Maria’s lover, when he should be old
enough to think of marrying” (48). In fact, Philip Enderby admits to Margaret that “[t]ime
was . . . when some boyish dreams connected themselves to Maria Young” (331). This
plot never develops, because a gig accident that killed her father (her only living relative)
“lamed [her] for life”(48). As a result, Maria deems herself “out of the game” (46) and

28
becomes a governess for the two main families of Deerbrook—the Greys and the
Rowlands (Philip Enderby’s sister). Removed from one important narrative role, she
relocates to a position of philosophical and moral overview. No mere fifth-wheel, Maria
demonstrates what happens when the marriage plot fails and the invalid lives on, when
the recovery from a crisis does not always lead to closure.
22

Certainly, this novel could be told without Maria Young—indeed, as scholars are
fond of pointing out, a version of Deerbrook was told better by George Eliot in
Middlemarch. But this story is not told without her and, in fact, Maria becomes central to
its telling. Critics describe Maria as the most “complex” and “absorbing” character of the
whole novel, but because she is often “used to articulate feminist ideas” (Weiner xiv),
most scholars focus their analysis on the politics of her role as single woman and
governess.
23
To substantiate this interpretation, they are drawn to a scene toward the
novel’s end in which Margaret asks Maria about employment opportunities for women.
Maria tells Margaret about the few options available to educated women; she can be a
teacher, an artist or a writer, although the latter two should not “be regarded as resources
for bread” (515). Moments such as these lead the critic Valerie Sanders to claim that
“Deerbrook may be read as an exploration of the narrow futures available for single
women of reduced means, strong sensibilities, and no very tempting exterior” (60). The
governess/single-woman matrix seems to animate Maria’s role in the novel—in this
capacity, she grounds the novel in real-world concerns about the very limited

22
See Miriam Bailin’s The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction (6) and Athena Vrettos’ Somatic Fictions for
discussions of illness and narrative closure.

23
See Deirdre David’s Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Martineau, Barrett Browning, Eliot
(1987) and Caroline Roberts’ The Woman and the Hour (2002).

29
opportunities women such as Martineau herself have for supporting themselves. If,
however, this were Maria’s primary role, why must she be “crippled”? In part, Maria’s
invalidism keeps her from invading the marriage plot, as later literary governesses do.
More important, while her status registers the cultural attitude (and novelistic fetish) that
often conflated women with invalids, Maria offers an alternative narrative by which to
reconsider how both invalids and narrators function as a presence that is also an
necessary absence. Martineau will take a personal interest in this question when she goes
to write Life in the Sickroom.
Critics rarely discuss the parallels between Deerbrook and Life in the Sick-Room.
Sanders hints at a link between the two texts when she notes, in passing, that Martineau’s
use of the seraph in Life in the Sick Room “was, perhaps, just a logical extension of
Maria Young’s position in Deerbrook” (92-93). Instead of exploring the ways in which
the rhetoric and imagery Martineau uses in Life in the Sick-Room were developed in her
depiction of Maria Young in Deerbrook, critics generally focus on the notion that Maria
is like Martineau, “a kind of alter-ego figure” (Thomas 113). In some ways, the reverse is
true—Martineau becomes like Maria Young, for writing this character taught her how to
speak both as an invalid and as a narrator. While certain elements of Maria’s story can
and should be read in terms of the “cult of feminine invalidism,” we must also recognize
the ways in which Martineau removes the invalid (male or female) from the social
realm—from the invalid couch—and repositions her in relation to the novel’s form,
particularly its narration. In this sense, the invalid ceases to function as an historical
figure and becomes more a figure of omniscience. Her body, evacuated of its biological

30
qualities, gets written into the structure of the story and becomes an agent of knowledge,
a technique of narrative overview.
Martineau introduces Maria and the key elements that link chronic invalidism to
narration early in the novel, and these are, at first, physical and spatial rather than wholly
spiritual or mental. During the Ibbotson’s first visit to Maria at her schoolroom, Hester
asks Maria if she “spend[s] all of your time here.” Maria offers a very forthcoming
explanation:
Almost the whole day. I have a lodging in the village; but I leave it early
these fine mornings, and stay here till dark. I am so lame as to make it
inconvenient to pass over the ground oftener than necessary; and I find it
pleasanter to see trees and grass through every window here, than to look
out into the farrier’s yard,--the only prospect from my lodging. (28)

For Maria, questions about how she uses her time entail descriptions of her body. She
spends most of the day at the schoolhouse because her physical condition makes it
difficult to go anywhere else. But, rather than dwell on the “inconveniences” of her
lameness, she immediately links her debility to the act of looking from her lodgings and
from her workplace—in fact, she derives a knowing pleasure from it. This early
correspondence between Maria’s “lameness” and vision establishes her function as a
stationary observer who, as we will see, often guides the narrative experience in a way
that non-invalids, at least within Martineau’s novel, cannot.
Not only does Maria’s introduction invoke a connection between immobility and
heightened perspective, but it indicates the role that solitude plays in the development of
the invalid’s narrative powers. When Maria continues her description of the difference
between the view from her lodgings and the school room, she explains that “[t]he furnace

31
and sparks are pretty enough on a winter’s evening, especially when one is too ill or
dismal to do anything but watch them; but at this season one grows so tired of old horse-
shoes and cinders; and so I sit here (28). By ending with “and so I sit here,” Maria
confirms her isolation, which allows us to imagine her perched at her window as a static
observer and prepares us for her role as a locus of narration and an authority that presides
like the good spirit over the events of the plot. Margaret and Hester, and, perhaps, the
reader, sense “a world of desolation in these words” (28), but as we learn during one of
Maria’s solitary musings later in the novel, she will not be pitied. For Maria, “to be alone,
and to be let alone, . . . is to be put in the post of observation on others” (46-47).
Martineau makes a distinction here between being “alone” and being “let alone”; solitude
means being alone, but it also means being free from the demands that come with
marriage and family.
24

Her alternative position does not, however, come without its own duties. That is,
being a woman who is “not to have . . . a home [and] an intimate” means having the
responsibility to act on behalf of others. Maria tells herself and the reader that “[w]ithout
daring to meddle, one may stand clear-sighted, ready to help”(44). While this passage
reflects an aspect of domesticity that figures women solely as helpmates, it also points to
an alternative form of action for the invalid, one that registers an ethics inherent to

24
As many critics have noted, Martineau makes strong claims about the disadvantages of marriage for a
woman like herself. In her Autobiography (1877), she writes:
My strong will, combined with anxiety of conscience, makes me fit only to
live alone; and my taste and liking are for living alone. The older I have grown, the more
serious and irremediable have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life,
as it exists among us at this time: and I am provided with what it is the bane of single life
in ordinary cases to want,--substantial, laborious and serious occupation. My business in
life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have
thought and learned. (101-102)

32
observation and storytelling. Maria is not content simply to observe and record; she has
responsibilities attached to this vision. For Maria, this kind of “seeing” demands a keen
imagination, which she says is “a better medium than the eye” (Deerbrook 45). Maria
assumes that she has the ability and in fact the authority to watch and to guide others. Her
physical condition, more than her gender, here, helps to establish Maria’s power to “stand
clear-sighted.”
25
Such council has a decidedly novelistic quality. To be sure, Maria is by
vocation a teacher and confidant, continually modeling practical advice and admonishing
immoral behavior, but her place in the novel is initially defined in literary terms. She is,
above all, a storyteller, a narrator.
We first witness Maria in this role when she sits at her window during an
unexpected holiday from work. Her internal monologue at the window defines her as a
peripheral figure while also demonstrating the dynamism of her stasis: “‘It is a luxury,’
thought the gazer, ‘for one who cannot move about to sit here and look abroad. I wonder
whether I should have been with the party if I had not been lame’” (44). Her initial
tentativeness (her position is at first a luxury and then an obstacle) signals a remnant of
desire leftover from her initial romance plot. And although Maria could “move about” if
necessary and with assistance, as we see later in the novel when Mr. Hope provides her
with a pony, she chooses to remain in doors, sitting at her window, contemplating the
“party” before her. This choice highlights the invalid’s relationship to narrative time:
retrospection and projection, as old plots versus new plots all come under her purview.
By referring to Maria as “the gazer,” a term Martineau will use later to describe the

25
Charlotte Yonge develops such figures in her fiction later in the century, most notably Ermine Williams
in The Clever Woman of the Family (1865).

33
invalid in Life in the Sick-Room, the narrator emphasizes the degree to which stasis and
observation signify agency and narrative privilege.
26
She is not labeled in terms of her
social role as “the governess” or her physical status as “the invalid” or “cripple” at this
point. Rather, she is represented by her actions, as one who sees and knows and tells; her
disabled body limits mobility, and as a result fades into the background, as her mind and
vision travel “about” and “abroad” and she takes comfort in pleasures of her condition.
Taking a cue from the Romantics, Maria explains her condition in relation to
memory (“the mind’s eye”) and narrative. People like herself, she notes, find “pleasure . .
. more in the recollection of . . . natural enjoyments than at the moment” of experience
(45), particularly when they “see others tripping over commons and through fields where
[they] cannot go” (46).
27
Maria explains the benefits of imagination, musing that Byron
could not write about Lake Leman until he was “within four walls” and that the opening
lines of Paradise Lost far surpass any sunrises she has personally experienced. Maria
convinces herself that “[o]nce having received pictures into our mind’s eye, and a clear
eye in the mind to see them with, the going about and obtaining more is not of very great

26
In a chapter entitled “Some Gains and Sweets of Invalidism,” Martineau writes: “Where there is a habit
of mutability, there is intellectual infirmity, as is shown, with indescribable clearness, to us gazers in the
mirror of events” (Life 157). Maria Frawley suggests that Martineau constructs the invalid in Life in the
Sick-Room as “in control of the ‘gaze’ that some theorist believe divests the clinical patient of individuality
and a sense of self” (Invalidism 228). Caroline Roberts explores the function of the clinical gaze in
Deerbrook, noting that unlike Hester and Margaret, Maria is never subject to its control (74). Neither critic
notes ways in which the gaze reverberates in both texts.

27
Critics have noted Martineau’s connection to Romanticism in both Deerbrook and Life in the Sick-
Room. Deirdre David claims that “[i]f not exactly advocating Wordsworthian recollection in tranquility,
Martineau certainly preached retrospection as central to a detached analysis of experience . . .” (83).
Deborah Logan reads the lessons put forth in Life in the Sick-Room in terms of “Wordsworth’s phrase—
“the world is too much with us.” For Martineau, “mundane busyness . . . prevents people from grasping
what is meaningful and essential in life . . .” (Logan 26).

34
consequence” (45-46).
28
This detour into Maria’s thoughts is a curious one. Instead of
using Maria simply to comment on what her students or the main characters are doing in
the novel, Martineau uses her to remove us from the immediate action and to express a
philosophy of perspective and overview.
But within this philosophy we sense a slight tug between the enjoyment of
participation and the enjoyment of imagination and observation. As Maria reminds us, the
imagination we use when reading poetry or “good descriptions in books” far surpasses
any enjoyment we might experience from physical mobility (45). A good narrator makes
us long to read; he keeps us invested in the text and glad we are there. Maria constructs
her identity within this framework, for although she does not articulate a precise analogue
(she is not like Byron, who gets to experience and then recall and write) Maria does draw
on her memories. She creates in the moment, as she sits within the four walls. By
attaching Maria’s body and philosophy to the experience of reading, Martineau recasts
the invalid in terms of narrative possibility rather than the narrative ends that her medical
condition implies. And while she does not transfer this narrative authority completely to
Maria, Martineau does construct this character in terms of omniscience.
Maria’s impulse to tell stories and her “semi-omniscience” become more overt
when she describes and speculates to herself about what she sees but cannot hear:
O, there are the children! So that is their cowslip meadow! How like
children they all look together, down on the grass!—gathering cowslips, I
suppose. The two in black are more eager about it than Sophia. She sits on
the stile while they are busy. The children are holding forth to their
cousins—teaching them something, evidently. (46)

28
Deirdre David reads this scene as autobiographical, noting that reading Milton and “overlooking people .
. . are Martineau’s pleasures” (83)

35
She creates a vignette that works within a pre-established fictional structure, as she
assumes the impending love story and projects the eventual pain. While her description
sets the scene for the reader, Maria is limited in what she can offer in this role as
“substitute narrator”.
29
She can only “suppose” they are gathering cowslips and speculate
that the children are “teaching something.” Maria’s limitations at this moment could be
represented by any character caught on the other side of the glass, but Martineau locates
this experience only in Maria, and in so doing represents what it means to be both outside
of the action of the plot yet central to its narration.
30
Although it would have been
possible for Maria to become “part of the party” if she had asked, she remains fixed
inside to speculate and to enjoy her privacy, as if to protect her privilege as spectator and
her relationship to the reader. She moves from speculation about what the children are
doing to imagining potential love plots for Margaret and Hester, noting that “[t]he
tempest of passion may be brewing under the soft sun” and hinting at two possible
(traditional) conclusions: either they will be lucky in love or suffer from it (46).
Martineau narrates through the invalid, using her to foreshadow the complications and
detours that accompany any marriage plot. This sense of projection, which Jaffe identifies
with narrative authority, marks Maria as more than an observant character within the

29
In “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept,” Manfred
Jahn discusses the role of interior monologues in the works of Genette and Cohn, who describe the
“monologist” as a “‘substitute’ narrator” (247).

30
Mrs. Enderby (Philip and Mrs. Rowland’s mother) suffers from unspecified attacks that physically and
mentally drain her. Like Maria, Mrs. Enderby enjoys observing from her window. At one point, she asks
her grandchildren to “make a snow-man in [the] field” so she can “sit here and watch” and “think [they] are
saying something kind to [her]” (189). I do not treat Mrs. Enderby more fully because she functions
primarily as a plot device and a means for revealing Mrs. Rowland’s evil machinations. Although there are
parallels between Maria and Mrs. Enderby, the narrator focalizes our reading through Maria. Moreover,
the parallels between Life in the Sick-Room and Deerbrook revolve around Maria’s perspective rather than
Mrs. Enderby’s.

36
diegesis. Certainly, other characters in the novel watch and gossip about imagined
relationships and love plots, but the fact that Maria engages in this activity in solitude, for
only the reader to hear, separates these two versions of speculation.
This scene allows Maria increasing self-consciousness and narrative awareness;
she intrudes on her own narrative, commenting at one point on her role as observer and
would-be narrator. “I love to overlook people,” she says, “—to watch them acting
unconsciously, and speculate for them! It is the most tempting thing in the world to
contrast the little affairs one sees them busy about, with the very serious ones that await
them—that await every one” (46). Maria guides the narrative here by imagining or
predicting the futures—the stories— that await the subjects of her gaze, and in the
process offers a commentary on the way Deerbrook’s plot moves (or will move) from
small affairs to big ones. Innocent match-making and neighborly feuds give way to more
serious events: broken engagements that ultimately result in happy marriages, death from
fever, and repentance for lying. Although Maria does not reveal the substance of her
speculations, she does presume to know that her subjects act “unconsciously,” that they
are unaware of their futures, in a way that narrators treat their characters.
This desire and capacity for narration, which comes from physical transcendence,
is framed, quite literally, by the sickroom window. Like the rooftops for Dickens’s good
spirit, the window becomes the portal through which private truths are revealed to the
invalid. For Martineau in Life in the Sick-Room, the window is so important that she
must describe the ideal configuration for cultivating what Frawley calls “the omniscience

37
of sick vision” (“Prisoner” 184).
31
Martineau explains in Life that “[w]e [invalids] should
have the widest expanse of sky, for night scenery. We should have a wide expanse of
land or water, for the sake of a sense of liberty.” Of course, “there must not be too much
sea,” as such a view might become too hard on one’s nerves (Life 67). She goes on to
describe the view from her own window, which includes among other things a Priory,
grazing cows, a harbor “where there are frequent wrecks,” children playing, lovers
talking, maids working, and a farmer gossiping (68-69).
32
Martineau periodically aids her
view by the use of a telescope, simultaneously extending and narrowing her perspective.
This shift between the panoramic and the telescopic demonstrates how the invalid,
moving easily between the general and the specific or the community and the individual,
takes on the qualities of a narrator of fiction. Deerbrook’s narrator moves frequently
between general commentary and the thoughts and actions of a particular character.
33

Life in the Sick-Room requires the centrality of the invalid’s voice in a way that
Deerbrook does not. The memoir, after all, is by, about, and mostly for invalids. But the
rhetorical similarities between the novel and the sick-room narrative speak to Martineau’s
dependence on the fictional invalid, for like Maria Young the narrator in this “story”

31
Frawley also notes that the window “marks the invalid’s access to the wider world” and “signif[ies] the
meditative and visionary powers of invalidism” (“Prisoner” 183).

32
Martineau wrote about the window in several letters before publishing her theories about its efficacy in
Life in the Sick-Room. To Anna Jameson she writes on June 15, 1841: “I have no prospect of leaving my
two rooms; but my window-seat, (wh[ich] I have cushioned, & made a couch of) is enough for anybody
with eyes. Besides the sea & rocks, I have a fine green field, with shady hallows, larks, cows, & a young
frisky colt, the castle with the red soldiers, find gardens, & fine pig sties, & a cottage below, with some
capital ‘blackguard’ children. Then there is Shields the other way; but I always forget to look on that side”
(Letters 59).

33
In “Mothering and Mesmerism in the Life of Harriet Martineau,” Diana Postlethwaite notes the parallels
between Martineau looking out of her sick-room window with her telescope and Dorothea Brooke of
Middlemarch “looking out her window at the sunrise to ‘the largeness of the world and the manifold
wakings of men to labour and endurance’” (603).

38
(known only as “An Invalid”) finds value in solitude and duty in observation. Martineau
turns to the window as a key symbol of the invalid’s narrative potency. Borrowing the
content and, in particular, the window imagery from Deerbook, Martineau explains in
Life in the Sickroom:
When I think of what I have seen with my own eyes from one back
window, in the few years of my illness; of how indescribably clear to me
are many truths of life from my observations of the doings of tenants of a
single row of houses; it seems scarcely necessary to see more than the
smallest sample, in order to analyze life in its entireness. (Life 88-89)

This passage positions the invalid as sociologist, as one who has the right and duty to
speculate about and speak for large segments of society based on a random sampling.
34

But her description of her actions also undercuts this scientific sense by suggesting that
some sort of magical reaction occurs when the invalid sits at her window—the truths of
life are revealed without too much effort on the part of the observer. The tenants
Martineau observes offer a “truth”—they have a story to tell—but we never hear the
entire story. In fact, she boasts that although she could “fill a volume—an interesting one
too—with a simple detail of what I have witnessed [,] . . . I must tell nothing” (89).

Martineau only hints at some of these details she might include in this “volume,” as she
“look[s] forward to the time when the bad training of children—the petulancies of
neighbours—the errors of the ménage—the irksome superstitions, and the seductions of
intemperance, shall all have been annihilated by the spread of intelligence” (89). As the
invalid-narrator in Life in the Sick-Room draws on her “sick vision” in order to bring the
reader into her perspective, she remains vague about the knowledge it reveals but clear

34
Maria Frawley describes Martineau as an “invalid ethnographer, filling volumes with what she observes,
creating samples, and analyzing her findings” (“Prisoner” 184).

39
that she guards that knowledge. The story becomes less important than the fact that the
invalid has the ability to “see” it in its entirety.
When read in isolation, Martineau’s invalid memoir offers a justification for the
invalid’s social relevance. When read in tandem with Deerbrook as part of a larger theory
of invalidism, however, the memoir begins to look more like a portrait of the invalid’s
narratological function. The author of the “Invalid’s Grievance” might argue that what
we are seeing is how masterfully the novel influences behavior— Martineau can model
her own invalidism after the idealized, fetishized “cripple” in her novel. But it is more
than that, for we see in Maria and the anonymous invalid who narrates Life in the
Sickroom how narrative point of view gets constructed around the invalid’s place in the
world and in the plot.
This formal expression occurs in Deerbrook as Maria looks out her window at the
cowslip party. After she asserts her love for “overlook[ing] people,” Maria goes on to
narrate a scene before the novel’s narrator does. Maria notices “[h]ow the children are
flying over the meadow toward that gentleman who is fastening his horse to the gate! Mr.
Hope no doubt” (47). Five pages later, after the narrator tells us about Maria’s past and
moves on to some of the village gossip about Mr. Hope we learn (from the narrator this
time) that “Mr. Hope threw himself from his horse at the entrance of the meadow,
fastened his steed to the gate, and joined the party. The children ran to him . . .” (52).
Maria and the narrator both use the word “fasten,” which joins these two scenes together
and fixes this moment from the invalid’s perspective. Not only does this repetition
momentarily collapse the distinction between narrator and invalid, but it also allows

40
Maria to be present in a scene even when she is not part of it and to see without being
seen. Maria sees things and in ways others cannot because they are too busy participating
in the bustle of the world and the plots of novels. Even when she is absent, she has a
presence that helps move the story forward. In the reverse angle of the above scene, taken
from the narrator’s point of view, Maria is not mentioned—that is, nobody (not even the
narrator) notices her sitting at the window and she becomes a shadowy presence in the
reader’s memory. We forget even that she has been watching until the party meets up
with Philip Enderby and they begin talking about her. Despite the limitations on Maria’s
omniscience in this moment, we get a sense that she is not completely in the dark about
the contents of this interaction. Margaret explains to Philip that she and Maria met before
breakfast and plan to study German together and goes on to observe that “if [Maria] were
a man, she would be called philosophical.” This comment leads to group discussion about
Maria’s social and physical status and an extended conversation about exactly what it
means to be philosophical. Philip Enderby suggests that “it is a happy thing that she is
philosophical in her circumstances, poor thing” (62). Maria is socially peripheral but
narratively central, becoming a topic of conversation and a device that brings the two
main characters, Margaret and Philip together.
Even when Maria is decidedly “with the party,” she still functions as an outsider,
as if perpetually looking through her school-room window. During the children’s tea
party, which is held in the school house, the narrator directs our reading of the other
characters through Maria. As the festivities get underway, the narrator notes that “Maria’s
pleasure was, as usual, in observing all that went on” (104). This vantage point provides

41
the reader with a survey of the events: “[Maria] could see Mr. Hope’s look of delight”
with Margaret; “She saw how he helped Mary pour out the tea . . .”; “She observed Mr.
Rowland’s somewhat stiff politeness to Hester”; “She could see Mrs. Grey watching
every strawberry and sugar plum that went down the throats of the little Rowlands”; “ . . .
she saw Hester’s color and manner change as Mr. Hope came and went” (104-105). She
notices all this, we are told, while others speak to her about her superior “management”
and offer her some of the treats. Any conversation that she may be having is subordinate
to her observations and her ability to direct our field of vision and reading experience.
This is not to say that Maria is the only silent observer in the novel. Morris
(Hester and Margaret’s maid and former nurse) demonstrates her ability to observe her
beloved Hester’s marital woes. Some characters even notice when Maria seems out of
sorts, particularly Margaret. At one point, the narrator describes Maria through
Margaret’s eyes. During a debate with Philip Enderby about the “art of wooing,”
Margaret “chanced to perceive that Maria’s hand shook so that she could not guide her
needle” (77). Although the reader knows about Maria’s thwarted marriage plot, Margaret
does not, and it does not occur to her to speculate, as Maria might in such a case, about a
failed love plot involving the invalid. Maria sublimates any leftover feelings about
marriage in the development of her philosophy and moves outside of the realm of
lovelorn governess.
35
This remnant of her lost narrative reminds the reader of her
complex position in the current narrative; she fills a gap between the omniscient narrator
who must remain outside of the plot and a secondary character who has (or had) the

35
Valerie Pichanick describes Maria as “suffering from an anguished and humiliating unrequited passion”
(117), while Valerie Sanders calls her “the first in a long sad line of drearily unfortunate governesses” (60).

42
potential to generate a plot of her own. The invalid’s status, in this case, converts not only
her desire for marriage but the narrative’s desire for a marriage plot into her authority to
observe and guide.
Martineau reemphasizes Maria’s power by ending the novel from within Maria’s
perspective. Three days before Margaret leaves Deerbrook to marry Enderby, she and
Maria sit “by the window, whence they loved to look abroad upon the meadow, wood,
and stream” (596). After waiting roughly five hundred pages for this marriage, we end
with a slightly unexpected meditation on the future of Maria Young. Although Maria is
physically well at the moment, we learn from an earlier scene that her “health is bad” and
that she “cannot expect to be able to work always” (296). Margaret tells Maria that only
one thing mars her happy ending—that Maria is “infirm and suffering in body, poor,
solitary, living in toil, without love, without prospect” (598). To this frank reminder of
her plight, Maria asks “why we should demand that one lot . . . be as happy as another”
and why hers should be like Margaret’s (599). Maria’s alignment with the narrator
throughout allows us, at this point, to read her assertion about different “lots” not simply
as a sign of resignation or stoicism, but as a comment on the limitations of certain plot
structures, especially for women. While we have been asked periodically to see as Maria
does or at least notice the differences between Maria’s perspective and that of the other
characters, the bulk of the novel encourages our identification with Margaret and the
marriage plot. In the last few pages, however, Martineau asks us to question the well-
worn narrative paths we have come to expect. We are asked at this moment to identify
with the power of omniscience rather than the heroine’s romance, as Maria goes on to

43
explain to Margaret that “[i]f you could, for one day and night, feel with my feelings and
see through my eyes . . . you would know . . . that there are glimpses of heaven for me in
solitude, as for you in love” (599). While critics routinely note the religious overtones of
Maria’s request, they fail to recognize how such as statement deviates from traditional
plots and closure and paves the way for Martineau’s turn as an invalid narrator.
Part of this critical inattention comes from the fact that Martineau wraps Maria in
the shroud of the redundant woman. Maria’s friendship with Margaret often makes her
seem as though she is the heroine’s uncanny double, but the moments in the novel that
identify the invalid with the narrator are moments where Maria transcends her social role
and becomes instead a function of narrative. This alternative role for the invalid, as we
have seen, becomes more developed as Martineau writes about her own experience. In
Life in the Sick-Room, Martineau echoes Maria Young’s philosophy, explaining that
it is for the interests of truth and temper to remind the healthy and busy . .
. that there may be influences in the life of the meditative invalid which
may render his views more comprehensive, and his judgments more,
rather than less, sound than heretofore. (Life 118)

And further, that “[t]he sufferer may well be satisfied, and needs be abashed before no
mortal, if he obtains, sooner or later, the power to achieve divine ends through the
experience of his lot” (Life 123, emphasis added). Maria makes a claim for equality,
while Martineau asserts a kind of superiority; both define their perspectives, their “lots,”
against the normal in order to assert, at least narratively, a form of health. And while the
audiences for these two texts may be different, both hear the same counsel and the same
intense tone—Maria’s capacity to “see glimpses of heaven” and the Invalid’s ability “to

44
achieve divine ends” become the dividing line between those who are in the plot and
those who are outside it, between the ordinary and the invalid.
The Problem with Invalid Narrators: Two Cases
Where Martineau sees heaven and divinity, Charles Dickens and Dinah Mulock
Craik see interference and limitation. Dickens offers and then “unceremoniously drop[s]”
the invalid narrator for The Old Curiosity Shop (xiv), while Craik, who sustains the
invalid narration in her best-seller, John Halifax, Gentleman, struggles with the invalid as
a desiring character who threatens to derail the hero’s marriage plot. Yet both novelists
draw on (are drawn to) the invalid’s peculiar privilege. They see, as Martineau did, that
the invalid’s unique position in society—his place “beyond the ken”—is a form of
narrative omniscience; these male invalids are characters in the story, and, by virtue of
their condition, they carry out the role of omniscience in a way that the healthy, robust
hero and the dying, angelic heroine cannot. By installing this type of invalid as both a
character and a first-person narrator in their novels, Dickens and Craik test the limits and
possibilities not only of invalidism but of omniscience.
Case #1: Charles Dickens
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), published during the years between the
Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839) and Life in the Sick-Room (1844), is famous for the death
of little Nell, the unfortunate child who walks herself into an early grave. One of the great
myths surrounding the novel is that readers became so invested in Nell’s survival that
they implored Dickens (without success) to let her live. The novel is less well known, at
least in the popular imagination, for the “demise” of its narrator (Preface, OCS 8). As part

45
of the weekly series, Master Humphrey’s Clock, Dickens began The Old Curiosity Shop
from the first-person perspective of an infirm old man, who, on his nightly walk in the
city, meets a lost, young girl and becomes curious about her situation. At the end of the
third chapter, however, the narrating old man explains: “I shall for the convenience of the
narrative, detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and
necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves” (35). As Audrey Jaffe argues, the
“replac[ment] [of] autobiographical narration with curiosity about others[,] . . . invites us
to explore the genesis and problematics of Dickensian omniscience. . . . [O]mniscient
narration, like curiosity, represents a displacement rather than a disappearance—the
hiding, but not the removal, of the self ”(49). The unnamed man might remove himself
from the story, but he is still a necessary and pervasive presence. For Dickens, this
condition of omniscience (this absent presence) is authorized by the condition of
invalidism.
Critics tend to describe the shift from first to third person perspective within The
Old Curiosity Shop, and Dickens’s subsequent attempt to recover the first-person voice in
Master Humphrey’s Clock as (failed) experimentation, the mark of “maturing novelist’s
desire for narrative design and unity” (Mundhenk 656, 659).
36
Jaffe and others see a
complex exploration of omniscience, a “blurring of the boundaries that define and
separate narrator and narration, subject and object” (50). For all the critical discussion of
how narration functions both within the novel and as part of Master Humphrey’s Clock,

36
Mundhenk argues that “Dickens’s experiment with narration in the form of Master Humphrey’s Clock
left him with a prematurely truncated miscellany and a flawed novel whose initial narrator deserts in
chapter 3.” “But the experiment” she goes on to explain, “seems to have taught, or have played a role in
teaching, Dickens several things”: 1) to avoid “publishing fiction in weekly installments”; 2) to plan ahead;
3) to exert more “control of the design of the whole”; 3) to “choose future narrators more wisely (657-8).

46
however, little has been made of the way that Dickens attaches omniscience to
“infirmity.” The first-person narrators (both the unnamed man from the novel and Master
Humphrey) suffer from chronic physical disability; and by shuffling the texts among
these narrators, Dickens demonstrates how the invalid functions as both a necessary and
problematic presence. Although Dickens “free[s] [the novel] from the incumbrance of
associations and interruptions” of Master Humphrey’s Clock by canceling the frame
narrative in which Master Humphrey identifies himself both as the narrator of the novel
and as another character (the “single gentleman”), the narrative nonetheless remains
invested in their debility.
37
Whether or not the narrator, Master Humphrey, and the single
gentleman should be read as the same or as three different characters is less my concern
than the fact that they all define themselves and the stories they tell in relation to their
ailing bodies. And further, this link to incapacity authorizes their ability to narrate and to
claim an omniscient stance. The narrators of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and
Master Humphrey’s Clock thus register a larger interest in the relationship between
knowledge and duty—between what one can know and how one should act— that marks
the invalid’s particular perspective and increasingly marks Victorian narration.
Like Maria Young, the unnamed narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop is a solitary
observer whose condition initiates narrative. He explains, “I have fallen insensibly into
the habit [of walking], both because it favors my infirmity and because it affords me
greater opportunity of speculation on the characters and occupations of those who fill the
streets” (9). Though he is decidedly mobile, his infirmity and his desire to speculate place

37
See Robert L Patten’s “‘The Story-weaver at His Loom’: Dickens and the Beginning of The Old
Curiosity Shop” for a discussion of the novel’s publication history and its relationship to Master
Humphrey’s Clock.

47
him in the world of invalid-omniscience Martineau constructed with Maria Young.
Speculation is not just a hobby; it is a compulsory act, a duty not just to observe but to
tell a story. Nell attaches herself to the narrator because he is old and because he “walks
so slow” (OCS 11). His “infirmity” offers him the time and inclination to watch and to
guide her home and to guide the readers through her story. After he introduces readers to
the secondary characters who will influence Nell’s plot, and then wanders the streets for
two more hours thinking about her, the narrator returns home and thinks not only of what
might happen to Nell but about what it means to imagine such narratives in the first
place. In the concluding paragraphs that Dickens added for the publication of the novel,
the narrator explains:
We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us
by external objects, which should be produced by reflection alone, but
which, without visible aids often escape us; that I am not sure I should
have been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of
fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer’s
warehouse . . . I had her image, without any effort of imagination,
surrounded and beset by everything foreign to its nature . . . I could not
dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would. (22)

The narrator gives credit to the foreign objects that surround Nell as inciting his intense
interest and the subsequent story he imagines for her, but it is his sensitivity to these
differences and objects, a sensitivity that no other character demonstrates, that shapes the
narrative perspective through which we understand her story.
38
So although it is the case,
as Mudhenk and others note, that the first-person narration puts physical limitations on
the narrator, it is also the case that these physical limitations help to create the story in the
first place. The narrator goes on “to imagine her in her future life, holding her way among

38
Patton discusses the role that contrasts play in the novel (see especially pages 54-57).

48
a crowd of wild grotesque companions; the only pure, fresh youthful object in the
throng,” which is, of course, what happens (22). As far as the novel is concerned, the old
man never returns to guide Nell’s course, although, as Tony Giffone points out, we never
quite lose the first-person narrator’s sensibility.
39

If we follow Dickens’s initial claim in Master Humphrey’s Clock that the narrator
has been shaping the reader’s experience of Nell’s story all along, then we can see more
clearly how Dickens uses physical debility as a narrative stance. Master Humphrey’s
significance, both as a character in his own story and as the narrator of Nell’s, comes
from his invalid perambulations, which allow him to connect to others. He explains to his
readers that his neighbors had been, at first, suspicious of him: he was thought “a spy, an
infidel, a conjuror, a kidnapper of children, a refugee, a priest, a monster” (MHC 28).
Despite this “unjust usage,” Master Humphrey wins his neighbors’ affections, and
“gradually became their friend and adviser, the depository of their cares and sorrows, and
sometimes, it may be, the reliever, in a small way of their distresses” (MHC 29). Fearing
that we will accuse him of “mak[ing] acquaintance with [his] readers under false
pretences,” Master Humphrey is then compelled to tell us that he is a “mis-shapen,
deformed, old man” (31) and that he had been a “crippled boy” (32). Here, the facts of
his physical condition are central to his authority as a narrator. He does not want readers
to “complain . . . that [he] [has] withheld any matter which is essential to them to have
learnt at first” (29). On the one hand, this confession has to do with trust, but it also

39
Giffone suggests that “[e]ven after the narrator has withdrawn from the plot, his sensibility remains
dominant, and we continue to see things from his emotional perspective” (103).

49
allows Master Humphrey to present his incapacity as justification for his role as observer,
guide, and confidant.
His medical history, then, provides some of the reason for his interest in narrative,
and, in particular, his investment in Nell’s story. Since he was a child, we learn, Master
Humphrey has had a “crooked figure” and, as a result of his incapacity and pain, he has
been, it seems, “imbued with a quick perception of childish grace and beauty, and a
strong love for it” (31). His condition gives rise to a particular vision or perspective, one
that he is not sure “other children” have—he is the privileged one. Narrating the sorrows
of his past helps to justify his current project of collecting and telling stories, as his
affection for his “Clock” in particular sets the story in motion. He explains, “I have all
my life been attached to the inanimate objects that people my chamber, and . . . have
come to look upon them rather in the light of old and constant friends, than as mere chairs
and tables . . .” (32). The narrator in the novel, as we have seen, echoes this kind of
sensitivity to “external objects.” The clock, like Maria’s window, becomes the invalid’s
“comfort and consolation” in solitude and pain, and, more important, the vessel for
narration.
Dickens concludes The Old Curiosity Shop in Number 45 of Master Humphrey’s
Clock with Master Humphrey’s confession that he is the “single gentleman,” the
mysterious secondary character in Nell’s story. Perhaps more surprising is his admission
that the introductory “adventure was fictitious” (133); he claims never to have met her on
his walk or to have observed her among the strange objects and queer people that night in
the shop. This revelation seems to undercut some of his earlier claims about full

50
disclosure, but Dickens has already mitigated this potential distrust when he turns the
single gentlemen into the narrator of his own embedded tale. Roughly twenty-five pages
from the end of the novel, the single gentleman tells “a short narrative” (525).
40

Adopting a third-person perspective, he begins in a familiar fairy tale mode: “There were
once two brothers, who loved each other dearly” (525). As in the early numbers of
Master Humphrey’s Clock, we are faced with the story of a “sickly child,” one who,
presumably because of his illness, is “sensitive and watchful.” He sees what the older
brother cannot, that they have both fallen in love with the same girl. We learn that the
older brother,
patient and considerate in the midst of his own high health and strength,
had many and many a day denied himself the sports he loved, to sit beside
his [the sick boy’s] couch, telling him old stories till his pale face lighted
up with an unwonted glow; to carry him in his arms to some green spot he
loved, where he could tend to the poor pensive boy as he looked upon the
bright summer day, and saw all nature healthy but himself. (525)

The narrator contrasts the athletic, healthy brother who tells “old stories”—stories that
have already been told—with the thoughtful invalid who observes the new story, the
romance plot, developing around him. The sick boy’s vision dominates the narrative, as it
is the one we know has been leading rapidly to the death of the novel’s heroine. His
ability to see and his desire to do his duty convinces him to leave the older brother to
marry and be happy. Of course, as we learn, the older brother suffers from the death of
his wife and then of his daughter. Left to care for his grandchildren, he fails miserably. In
returning to tell the tragic tale, the younger brother/single gentleman attempts to write a
new ending, to, as he explains, “spare ourselves the sequel” (527).

40
He is given the status of narrator by Master Humphrey’s confession, but even without this overt claim in
the serial, the single gentleman becomes a narrator of the embedded story.

51
As critics have pointed out, Dickens’s revelation in Master Humphrey’s Clock
that the surly, single gentleman is also Master Humphrey himself “seems a blunder”
(Mundhenk 655). The single gentleman, who is aggressive and rushed, and the narrator,
who is quiet and slow, are physically and temperamentally opposite. Robert Patten claims
that “Master Humphrey, misshaped, deformed recluse, has nothing in common with the
haphazardly energetic Single Gentleman. Nor do their portraits bear any resemblance. It
is clear that Dickens, at the last minute, was straining his ingenuity beyond credible limits
. . .” (63). Patten goes on to suggest that it is fortunate that Dickens removed the
confession from the novel. And yet, when we compare their respective childhood stories,
they appear rather similar. Master Humphrey and the Single Gentleman’s shared
experience with debility and pain, and the ways in which this condition leads them from
speculation and curiosity to duty and to narration, unify their function as the guiding
presence within the novel.
Master Humphrey’s Clock and the Old Curiosity Shop offer a version of
omniscience that depends on and challenges the invalid perspective so distinctly drawn
by Martineau. As Jaffe explains, “[i]n both . . . , the story of the narrator competes with,
and threatens to displace, the stories he tells” (50). For unlike Maria Young, whose story
of desire Martineau keeps relatively tucked away, Master Humphrey threatens to become
too much a part of what he is narrating. Dickens manages this invasion by expelling the
narrator in a timely manner (as in the novel) or by using the invalid as a simple framing
device for multiple stories (as in Master Humphrey’s Clock). The threat becomes a full-

52
scale assault in Dinah Mulock Craik’s novel, which takes on completely the invalid’s
first-person authority.
Case #2: Dinah Mulock Craik
Dinah Mulock Craik was not an invalid but she did have, as Henry James puts it,
a “lively predilection for cripples and invalids”(167).
41
Several of Craik’s novels feature
invalids, but only one puts the invalid’s cultural authority to its most logical narrative use,
not simply as metaphor or symbol but as narrative technique. Phineas Fletcher, the self-
described “puny and diseased” son of a Quaker tanner, is the first-person narrator of John
Halifax, Gentleman. His physical condition lends authority to the narrative’s point of
view and provides a tidy device for introducing middle-class readers to Craik’s vagabond
hero. Like Maria Young, he is both removed from and part of the action, fit only to
observe and act in the interests of others. But where Maria converts her personal desires

41
In two essays she wrote for Once A Week entitled “Strolls With Invalid Children” (1867), Craik purports
to take bedridden children on imaginary walks through the countryside. These mini-travelogues are billed
as being “by the author of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’” and are intended to entertain and instruct. In the first
of two installments, although Craik spends most of her time describing her little dog, the various plants and
animals, and the climate, she does manage to convert her observations into narratives about patience,
gratitude, and duty. She explains to her readers that even though sickness tends to make us self-centered,
our thoughts have the ability to “take us out of ourselves.” And “the more we can shut our mind’s eye
upon the things around us, and open it upon those which, being invisible, we can look at whenever we
please, the better will it be for us all” (385). The invalid, therefore, should strive to find pleasure in looking
outside the self and beyond the visible. This is, in fact, the invalid’s special gift—his duty— and Craik goes
so far as to assert a kind of heroism in this version of sickness by connecting her description of a frosty
cave to a story about the tragic adventurers involved in the search for the North-west Passage. She notes,
“they [the adventurers] have taught us one thing—how much for duty’s sake men can do, and dare, and
endure.” Craik acknowledges that endurance is “not quite synonymous with suffer[ing], one being active
and the other passive,” but her point has been made—better to endure than to suffer, better to find action in
imagination than to stagnant in self-pity. Depicting transcendent observational abilities of invalids is not
new for Craik. In her earlier novel, Agatha’s Husband (1853), Craik introduces Elizabeth Harper as “the
eye, ear and heart of the house” (Ch 6). Although (or because) she suffers from a spinal disease that
prohibits movement, while withering her body and arresting her mental growth, Elizabeth’s “mind [was
like] a hidden gallery in which were clearly daguerreotyped, and faithfully retained, all impressions of the
external world” (Ch 12). The narrator tells us that speaking to her “did not seem like talking to a mortal
woman, mixed up continutally with the affairs of life, but to one removed to a different sphere . . . ,” a
sphere Craik insists is one of privilege (Ch 20). Similarly, Phineas’ removal from ordinary life faciliates a
capacity to “retain,” but unlike Elizabeth Phineas’ mental ability has not been stunted and he uses it to
create a story—to compile “this history.”

53
into duty, Phineas struggles to reconcile his duty as narrator with his personal needs, as
his gaze initiates narrative and guides our reading experience.
By dividing Phineas between his roles as a desiring character on the one hand and
as a reliable, even omniscient narrator on the other, Craik allows the hero’s story to
become overtly a story about the narrator and healthy narration. This opposition, which is
erased in Maria Young and excised from The Old Curiosity Shop, dominates the early
part of Phineas’ story. The narrative’s perspective (its authority) emerges from the
productive tension between the invalid’s duty and desire. His story begins when (and
because) he observes the hero-to-be, John Halifax, caught in an alleyway during a
rainstorm. Temporarily immobilized by the weather, Phineas, his father, and the
unknown boy each respond differently to their enforced stasis in the tiny shelter. Abel
Fletcher, ever the efficient Quaker businessman, looks at his watch, anxious to get back
to his tan-yard, while John, the penniless fourteen year old, “[keeps] his eyes fixed on the
pavement” (31), contemplating how he will earn his next meal. Phineas, however, sits in
his wheel chair, rather enjoying the situation. He tells the reader: “I liked staying at the
mouth of the alley, watching the autumnal shower come sweeping down the street:
besides, I wanted to look again at the stranger lad” (31). Phineas then goes into a rather
lengthy and sensuous description of John’s
[b]rown eyes deep-sunken, with strongly-marked brows, a nose like most other
Saxon noses, nothing particular; lips well-shaped, lying one upon the other, firm
and close, a square, sharply outlined, resolute chin, of that type which gives
character and determination to the whole physiognomy, and without which in the
fairest features, as in the best dispositions, one is always conscious of a certain
want. (31)

54
Phineas explains John’s allure, noting “everything in him seemed to indicate that which I
had not: his muscular limbs, his square, broad shoulders, his healthy cheek, though it was
sharp and thin—even to his crisp curls of bright thick hair” (31-2). This initial attraction
stems from the fact that they are physical opposites and that Phineas imagines himself—
an able-bodied, ideal self—in John. But more than demonstrating that Phineas wants to
be like John, this opening scene suggests that Phineas’ fixation on John’s body, on his
physical rather than social condition, arouses his desire to create narrative. From the
beginning, we see Phineas as both a presence (he is literally a part of the scene) and an
absence (he is “not” the hero). As the story unfolds, we see two models of “invalid”
narration and two fictions of health emerge: one stems from the invalid’s frustrated desire
and the other from a tension between the hero’s mobility and the narrator’s stasis.
As a figure who can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the invalid seems an
ideal narrator for this rags to riches story of self-help and English determination.
42

Phineas’ curiosity about John Halifax, then, is no mere whim; it is, as a comparison to his
busy father and to the hungry “stranger lad” suggests, specific to the invalid’s condition,
giving him purpose and creating the desire for more story. While his mental capacity
generates narrative, it is his physical condition that provides the excuse for keeping John
in Phineas’ sights. Their acquaintance might have ended at the alleyway if Phineas had
been able to move on his own. By refusing to, Phineas creates a new plot for himself and
for John. Since Able Fletcher does not have time to wheel Phineas home, Able hires John

42
In her analysis of Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1825), Frawley explains that “In his sophisticated
handling of tensions between the impulse to produce and the desire to disengage. . ., Lamb exposes just
why later writers would find invalidism, however threatening its associations with egotism, a powerful
model of identity in the world increasingly identified with the energetic devotion to work both trumpeted
and seemingly mandated by industrial and self-help cultures” (Invalidism 212).

55
as Phineas’ escort. As the two boys converse, Phineas tells the reader he “had been
revolving many plans, which had the sole aim and object, to keep near me this lad, whose
companionship and help seemed to me, botherless, sisterless, and friendless as I was, the
very thing that would give me an interest in life, or, at least make it drag on less wearily”
(12). Not only does John’s presence give Phineas something to do, but, as the use of the
word “interest” indicates, it gives him a claim or share in life that, up till now, his
condition has prevented him from exploring.
Although Phineas does not tell us exactly what his plan involves, he has clearly
taken his cue from a famous English legend. Commenting that John is “uncommonly like
a childish hero of mine—Dick Whittington” (15), Phineas uses the Dick Whittington as a
template for the kind of story he wants to tell about John. He signals his plan to advance
John’s career in the tan-yard by asking: “Suppose, after Dick Whittington fashion, you
succeeded to your master’s business” (35). In part, Phineas’ actions reflect an attempt to
find an able-bodied replacement-son for his father and, therefore, ease the burden he feels
of being “as helpless and useless to [his father] as a baby” (3). It also demonstrates
Phineas’ need to, as he says, “think and act” for someone else (38). But by couching his
plans for John in terms of a popular legend, Phineas also hopes to reproduce his
childhood hero by enacting a narrative fantasy, a fantasy that is as much about bringing
Dick Whittington to life as it is about having something of interest or value to do—that
something is to spin tales of heroic, healthy manhood.
Like the Dick Whittington legend, John Halifax, Gentleman (though not based on
an historical figure) is an extraordinary tale. Set precisely between the years 1794 and

56
1834, Craik’s novel covers a full range of the economic, medical, political and religious
developments. John Halifax works his way up from the lowest position at Abel
Fletcher’s tan-yard—collecting animal skins—to apprentice, partner, and, finally, owner.
This narrative of economic achievement is punctuated by illness, death, and scandal. Not
only does John possess the work ethic and moral fortitude to raise himself from poverty
to parliament,
43
but he also has a foresight that puts him on the cutting-edge of science
and technology and saves him from some of the tragedies that befall his neighbors.
John’s personal acquaintance with Dr. Jenner and the use of small-pox vaccine on his
children, for example, saves them from a deadly epidemic; when a nearby landowner,
Lord Luxmore, diverts the water supply from the fountains at his estate, John introduces a
steam engine into his company, so that he can be independent of his aristocratic
neighbor’s petty revenge; after the panic of 1825 sets in, John Halifax, who refused to
speculate with his money or keep it in the bank, saves the local bank and his neighbors
from financial ruin. At one point, his benevolent wife, Ursula March, reminds John that
“there is hardly a scheme for good, public or private, to which [he has] not len[t] a
helping hand” (359). She lists, among his accomplishments, Catholic Emancipation,
Abolition of Slavery, and Parliamentary Reform.
Despite John’s near perfect citizenship, he cannot completely avoid personal
tragedy. Indeed, his grace during tragedy is what marks him as the ideal Briton. For John,
these devastations are directed at his paternal affection and domestic management. His
oldest child, Muriel, is born blind and eventually dies from an unknown illness; his eldest

43
He is asked several times to run for parliament but refuses until the Reform Bill of 1832 is passes. By this
time, however, John is dying of heart disease and will not run for fear that he will not be able to carry out
his duty to the people.

57
son goes into a self-imposed exile after discovering that the governess whom he has
asked to marry him is already engaged to his younger brother. The break-up of the family
is a fate worse than death for John and his wife, and although he lives long enough to see
his family reunited, we are meant to admire the hero who has endured rather than
suffered. As a reward, he dies while napping on a hillside next to his longtime companion
and narrator, Phineas. In order to make this death a sweet reward, Craik has Ursula rise
from her own sick bed to observe her dead husband and die at his side. They live happily
in the hereafter, having fled a world of change. The one constant throughout this
remarkable tale is Phineas Fletcher.
Exemplifying, as Phineas constantly reminds us, all that is righteous and holy
about the British middle class, John’s extraordinary life touches on every aspect of
British politics and culture. Lest readers deem this hero too good to be true, Phineas
establishes the veracity of this story early in the novel by tying it to his invalidism.
Chapter three begins with Phineas’ description of the process by which he creates
narrative:
When I was young, and long after then, at intervals, I had the very useless,
sometimes harmful, and invariably foolish habit of keeping a diary. To
me, at least, it has been less foolish and harmful than to most; and out of
it, together with much drawn out of the stores of a memory, made
preternaturally vivid by a long introverted life, which, colorless itself, had
nothing to do but to reflect and retain clear images of the lives around it—
out of these two sources I have compiled the present history (50).

He aligns the diary with any number of troubling activities only to retract these claims in
the next (long) sentences as they apply to his condition. Keeping a diary may, indeed, be
harmful “to most,” but for an introvert or invalid like himself it is a practical application

58
of his particular skills of observation. He thus sets himself apart from ordinary people in
order to establish his credentials and his authority as a narrator. And it is not just any
first-person narration, but the kind we have come to associate with omniscience, with the
ability to see and to know in a way that “most” cannot.
We witness this throughout, as Phineas constantly interprets various characters’
motives and explains to the reader what these characters do not know. In one
representative instance, Phineas describes John’s inability to accept his daughter’s fading
health. When John claims that his family’s move to the country is motivated by work,
Phineas tell us: “I fancied I could detect a secondary reason, which [John] would not own
even to himself; but which peered out unconsciously in his anxious looks” (323). Later,
when John claims that his daughter looks healthier, Phineas notes: “I had to answer with
a vague assent; after which I was fain to rise and walk away, thinking how blind love
was—all love save mine, which had the gift for seeing the saddest side of things” (334).
Phineas’ superior sight allows him and thus the reader the privilege of knowing what his
characters do not. Although Phineas portrays his invalidism as the root cause for his
special powers, he masks his own agency and the emotional investment that his condition
enables by depicting himself as a passive vessel with “nothing to do” but record the
actions and lives of those around him. He claims that he has no control over the
narrative’s content—that he is merely holding up a mirror to life—but as we already
know, he constantly chooses what to tell and what not to tell, and he acts in
demonstrative ways that shape the plot.

59
Phineas’ ability or right to control the narrative does not, however, always go
unchallenged. This is where Craik’s “invalid” and Martineau’s invalids part ways and
where the invasiveness or presence of omniscience (and the invalid’s privilege) becomes,
as it did for Dickens, a burden. Chapter five opens on Phineas’ twentieth birthday, after
he and John have been friends for four years. Phineas explains to the reader that he
“woke to the consciousness that [he] was twenty years old, and that John Halifax was—a
man” (78). This sudden awareness that neither of them is a boy anymore depresses
Phineas the character and worries him as the narrator of John’s tale. What was once the
story of a boyhood ambition will inevitably change to romance and marriage and where
does that leave Phineas? John attempts to cheer Phineas by creating a little story of his
own about the invalid; as Phineas did, John begins with “a catalogue of [the invalid’s]
qualities, internal and external” (79). Phineas tries to stop John by telling him not to be
“foolish,” a term that echoes Phineas’ earlier claims about who should and should not
produce narrative. John persists:
“I will [be foolish], if I like though perhaps not quite so foolish as some
other people; so listen:--‘Imprimis,’ as saith Shakespeare—Imprimis,
height, full five feet four, a stature historically appertaining to great men,
including Alexander of Macedon and the First Consul”

“Oh, oh!” said I, reproachfully; for this was our chief bone of
contention—I hating, he rather admiring, the great ogre of the day,
Napoleon Bonaparte.

“Imprimis, of a slight, delicate person, but not lame as once was.”

“No, thank God!”

“Thin-rather—”

“Very—a mere skeleton!”

60

“Face elongated and pale-“

“Sallow, John, decidedly sallow.”

“Be it so, sallow. Big eyes, much given to observation, which means hard
staring. Take them off of me, Phineas, or I’ll not lie on the grass a minute
longer. Thank you. (79)

This exchange demonstrates the tension that arises from the invalid narrator’s gaze and
the hero’s ability to disrupt the narrative. When John attempts to hold up a mirror to
Phineas, he is interrupted and edited. Phineas starts out as a collaborator or chorus for
John, but as John persists, Phineas actually revises John’s prose, substituting “skeleton”
for “thin” and “sallow” for “pale.” Not only does this scene reveal Phineas’ inability to
give up narrative control, it also illustrates the multiple aspects of Phineas’ desire. He
wants to be like John and he wants to love John; the only way to do both is through his
narration of John’s story.
But when Phineas’ “hard staring” becomes too invasive, John warns him to stop
or he will leave. If he leaves, both the relationship and the narrative will end. Part of
John’s discomfort with Phineas’ fixation comes from the disparity in their physical
conditions, but we can also understand John’s threat as a symptom of his own
restlessness—his longing for more adventure and, as we quickly learn, female
companionship.

Although John does not acknowledge this desire directly, he concludes
his portrait of Phineas by commenting on Phineas’ “long hair, which, since the powder
tax, has resumed its original blackness, and is—any young damsel would say, only we
count not a single one among our acquaintance—exceedingly bewitching” (79). This
mention of a non-existent “young damsel” introduces the question of Phineas’s marriage,

61
which, as we saw with Maria Young, cannot be addressed for Phineas through a
traditional plot. John’s joke provokes Phineas to tell the reader that while his “hereditary
disease” has made it impossible for him to marry, “Friendship was given me for love—
duty for happiness. So best, I was satisfied” (80). Despite these putative claims of
satisfaction, Phineas’ intense feelings for John begin to interfere with his ability—his
duty—to function as an objective, omniscient narrator. Craik grapples, here, with two
kinds of narratives: those sustained by an invalid’s desire and those disrupted by the
threat of the hero’s abrupt departure.
These two narratives coalesce at a moment of crisis when our hero (John) enters
the romance plot. Slightly less than one quarter of the way into the novel, John and
Phineas go to the country in order to improve Phineas’ failing health. Once there, the pair
meet Ursula March and her father, who ask them to tea. At this offer, Phineas notes “that
when John came on the scene, I, Phineas, subsided into the secondary character of John’s
‘friend’” (159). It amuses Phineas that although his social status is above to John’s their
roles are, in effect, reversed. In the country setting and in terms of the novel, John is the
titular figure, while Phineas remains peripheral. Moreover, by labeling this role in
narratological terms (as a character), not only does Phineas draw attention to the fictional
nature of narrative itself, but he discloses his status as an observer and storyteller rather
than a participant. He begins to take himself out of John’s line of sight, and this
secondary position establishes the distance (the absence) that allows him to speak as a
narrator rather than adoring lover. In an effort to control his desire for John’s love, he

62
replaces it with his desire to preserve the story of John Halifax, Gentleman and to do this
he must cultivate the inevitable marriage plot that fits with such a story.
As the traditional marriage plot takes over and Phineas’ narrative status shifts, he
becomes more mobile and physically healthier than when we first met him.
44
No longer
getting wheeled around in his “little hand-carriage,” Phineas becomes stronger, giving
credit to John for his improved condition. He explains, “sickness did not now take that
heavy, overpowering grip of me, mind and body, that it once used to do. It never did
when John was by. He gave me strength, mentally and physically. He was life and health
to me, with his brave cheerfulness” (110). Craik must strike a balance for Phineas
between the poles of health and illness. If he recovers completely, he loses the privileges
of omniscience he has gained as an invalid, but if he becomes totally bedridden, he loses
access to John, which makes that narrative position possible. Although Phineas moves
from a wheelchair, to crutches, to horseback and spends the bulk of the novel following
his hero around, his fixation on John and his fixed position as observer create a sense of
stasis, of immobility, that resonates with their first meeting in the rain. Phineas does not
sit at a window watching (like Maria Young does) nor is he dropped out of the field of
action (as in The Old Curiosity Shop); however, the fact that Craik casts him as an
invalid invokes this sense of privileged limitation that we associate with such figures. If
he had not been “lame,” there would have been no need for John to escort him home on
that rainy day and he would have taken his rightful place in the tan-yard or at least been

44
Mary Klages observes that “Phineas’ role as the object that can demonstrate and strengthen Halifax’s
compassionate capacities is necessary for the first third of the novel” and that “Phineas’ main function is to
be . . . a sign understood as meaning suffering, and as evoking sympathy and care.” Therefore, once
John’s tenderness has been established, “Phineas’ role diminishes, which may explain why Craik ceases to
mention his crippled condition further” (67).

63
expected to do so. He would have been too busy to do anything be act in his own
narrative. As an invalid, Phineas’ only option or duty has been complete devotion to John
as a friend and narrator.
45

Once John’s marriage plot takes over, Phineas has to reimagine his role and as
much as he tries, he cannot control John at this point—Craik takes the pen out of his
hand. Still, he retains his privileged perspective, seeing what no other character sees and
acting in ways that can either advance or end the plot. When John becomes ill from heart
break, Phineas must choose between keeping John alive by giving him over to the rival
other or containing their relationship forever by allowing him to die. Narrative forces
dictate that Phineas choose the former. He visits Ursula in order to explain, “while John
does not love me best, he to me is more than anyone else in the world. Yet even I have

45
Craik’s use of an invalid as a narrator did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries. In a review essay
about female novelists in general and Craik’s novels in particular, R.H. Hutton notes that “[Craik] unwisely
takes up her point of sight in the mind of a man,--a delicate, gentle valetudinarian, it is true, which gives
her every advantage; but still she fails in catching the general attitude and bearing of masculine friendship”
(475). This comment reflects concern over point of view, but only in so far as it relates the narrator’s and
author’s gender(s). Hutton argues that the only way a female author, such as Craik, can write from a male
perspective is by disguising herself as a male invalid. Of course, in Hutton’s estimation this tactic offers
only a slight advantage because it still falls short of helping Craik represent authentic masculinity. In fact,
Hutton worries that one might mistake this friendship for something less masculine; he notes “[d]uring the
early part of the tale, it is difficult to suppress a fear that Phineas Fletcher will fall hopelessly in love with
John Halifax, so hard is it to remember that Phineas is of the male sex” (475). If, as Hutton claims, we are
in danger of forgetting that Phineas is “of the male sex” it is because Phineas describes himself as
“womanish”(58) and declares his love for John in heterosexual terms, explaining “[i]f I had been a woman,
and the woman that he loved, he could not have been more tender over my weakness” (72). By drawing
attention to the fact that he is not a woman but rather, “womanish,” Phineas keeps his sex at the forefront.
We cannot help but remember that Phineas is male, which, perhaps, is really Hutton’s concern—he is not
afraid that we will forget Phineas is a male but that we won’t forget and that we will read him as a male
with romantic feelings for another male. Hutton’s analysis, therefore, reflects anxieties about gender and
sexual desire, conflating the invalid with femininity and female authorship. More recent critics make the
same, to my mind, problematic gesture, pointing out that an invalid male “bridges the separate spheres of
woman and man; he has a feminine viewpoint yet he can share a man’s life and thoughts” (Mitchell 48).
Others go so far as to suggest that Phineas represents one side of Craik’s own “self-image”—that she sees
herself, like Phineas, as a “crippled on-looker at other people’s happy marriages and lives” (Showalter 18).
These readings offer useful ways of considering how gender works both in the novel and throughout the
nineteenth century, but they tell us very little about how invalidism—and the desires and knowledge that
characterize this condition—works as a narrative technique that establishes the novel’s authoritative point
of view.

64
given up hope, unless—But I have no right to say more. There was no need. She began to
understand” (218). Phineas’ declaration prompts Ursula to go to John, who believes she
has come to him in a dream to tell him to stop being a coward—a “true man would live,
and live nobly, for the woman he loves” (220). The only way for Phineas to regain
control as a narrator, at this point, is by giving up the thing he wants most: total control
over John himself.
After Phineas saves John’s life—and the narrative—he drops more fully into the
peripheral position of observer by staging himself as an eavesdropper, recording all that
he hears and sees, just as he had during their early walks when he was the secondary
character who “heard all they said” (164). This new role is difficult for Phineas to accept
at first. He repeatedly reminds the reader that Ursula is an ideal mother and wife and that
her marriage to John is divinely ordained: “He was a married man now, the head of a
household; others had a right—the first, best, holiest right—to the love that used to be all
mine” (237). In his revised position, Phineas is both more present and more invisible. He
is the couple’s confidant and friend, but he also blends into the background out of
everyone’s notice. He comments on they way his nearly-invisible status allows him to
witness significant events of the novel’s plot. When John’s proposes to Ursula, Phineas
notes, “where I sat, I do not clearly know, nor probably did anyone else” (223),
explaining later that that “[his] involuntary listening could do no harm” (224). As the
scene progresses, Phineas focuses his and the reader’s attention on John and Ursula; he
reproduces their conversation, noting that as the room darkened, he “could not see them”
but he could hear their voices, which “seemed a great way off” (226). Craik shifts the

65
emphasis from Phineas’ “hard staring” to his “involuntary listening” so that, seraph-like,
he can reveal the private moment between the two lovers. Phineas’ ability to be on the
scene without being seen—a pattern that recurs throughout the second half of the novel—
marks his presence as a form absence that characterizes omniscient narration.
Phineas’s primary mode of control, particularly when the marriage plot takes
over, is withholding narrative through removal or refusal. That is, at key moments, he
removes himself from a scene or he refuses to tell the readers what was said. Near the end
of the novel, when Ursula talks to her son Guy about leaving the family, she laments the
decision and tells her son that her “heart is breaking.” She makes him promise that if she
lets him go, he will always be her “own good boy.” Phineas shuts off the narrative at this
point, explaining that “what further passed between them, was not for me either to hear or
to know. I left the room immediately” (439). Because of his status as an invalid, he could
have stayed and watched the mother and son. Instead, he uses his limited mobility to
allow them their privacy, infusing the narrative with drama and suspense while also
reminding us of his privilege to do so.
46
Alternatively, at the end of the penultimate
chapter, Phineas actually participates in the scene but refuses to tell the reader what
transpires. In this case, Phineas witnesses John clutch his chest in pain and after the
attack, John tells Phineas that he has been suffering these “paroxysms” for a while. John
believes he will die soon. After we learn of John’s condition, Phineas concludes the
chapter: “[we] stood . . . as we used to stand when we were boys, talking. What we said I
shall not write, but I remember it ever word. And he—I know he remembers it still”

46
Robyn Warhol’s term, “unnarrated” applies here. As Warhol points out in “Neonarrative; or How to
Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film,” the unnarrated marks “instances of
narrators’ making explicit the boundaries of the narratable” (221).

66
(491). Once he dies, however, we realize that John’s memory and the narrative help to
maintain what Phineas has wanted all along—their initial boyhood intimacy. This desire
for time to pass (so that they can accumulate memories) and for time to stop (so that they
can remain innocent lads) can only be satisfied through narration, and despite his claims
early in the novel that he “shan’t live long,” Phineas Fletcher is healthiest of all, outliving
his peers in order to tell this tale.
***
For Harriet Martineau, the invalid gets narration by watching and not wanting, by
being removed like the seraph. For Craik and Dicken, invalids must explore the limits of
desire and of action in some more energetic way, before subsiding into the quiet of the
(watched) happy ending or disappearing in the face of a more tragic one. As the ultra-
observant and speculative friends with no traditional plots of their own, these invalids
should function as neutral characters through which to filter a story. But as we have seen,
the condition of invalidism, just like the condition of narration, is anything but neutral
and the privileges of this kind of omniscience come at some cost. Martineau hints at some
of the problems with the invalid’s privilege in Life in the Sick-Room. In a chapter
entitled, “Some of the Perils and Pains of Invalidism,” Martineau warns that “[w]e
[invalids] are in ever-growing danger of becoming too abstract—of losing our sympathy
with passing emotions” (136), and that too much self-consciousness can lead to false
perception (145). These concerns are presented as a caution to invalids—to “the
initiated”— so that they may manage their condition and achieve their potential. Such
caveats would lead later to Martineau’s reevaluation of her “little volume.” In her

67
Autobiography, written over ten years after Life in the Sick-Room, she notes that if she
were to write Life again, she “should have a very different tale to tell” (450). While she
will still “swear” to the “facts . . . and practical doctrine,” Martineau is embarrassed by,
as she says, “the magnifying of my own experience, the desperate concern as to my own
ease and happiness, the moaning undertone running through what many people have
called the stoicism, and the total inability to distinguish between the metaphysically
apparent and the positively true” (450). It would, she claims, have been better to write a
strictly “pathological” study (432), a kind of medical report for the benefit of science
rather than a treatise on the pleasure and value of suffering.
47

But Martineau did not tell a different tale—she did not write a medical manual—
and the one she told was tied very much to novelistic fiction; her tale reflects the role that
stasis, solitude, and sight play in the construction of the invalid’s condition and thus in
the production of narrative intelligence. In both texts, Martineau expects her readers to
believe in the “peculiar privileges” (Life 42) of the invalid that nobody else, except
perhaps the narrator in a novel, enjoys. This idealized sense of authority—this access to
truth and clear vision—marks the invalid as the stable observer who makes order out of
chaos and has the power to see enough, know all, and narrate the stories of others. Each
of the texts I have examined offers a different portrait of how the invalid’s stance creates
narrative, but they all share a common interest in the fantasy of being an omniscient
body, of being perched between presence and absence, insight and foresight,
connectedness and isolation. The invalid narrator exposes a range of desires, both social

47
Martineau criticizes religions who, “proud of its Christian faith as the ‘Worship of Sorrow,’ thin[k] it a
duty and a privilege to dwell on the morbid condition of human life” (Autobiography 432)

68
and narrative, that generate plot but also threaten to disrupt it. As such, this figure is not
an anomalous kind of narrator, but in some ways representative of the ambivalence of
story telling, of the way that telling a story and achieving a happy ending may, indeed, be
very different things.

69
Chapter 2: Prevention and the Novel:
Jane Austen, William Buchan, and Thomas Beddoes
In the second of eleven installments of Hygeia, Thomas Beddoes, offers the
following fictional dialogue between a woman and her doctor:
“What is good against the head-ache, Doctor?”
“Health, Madam.”
“Well, if you feel no interest about an old woman like me—Marianne
there, you perceive, has been hacking all afternoon. Do tell her of some
little thing, [sic] that is good against cough.”

“Health, Madam.”
“But are you resolved not to give a more satisfactory answer?”
(Essay II 14-15)
In order to make a case for prevention over cure, Beddoes satirizes those who turn to
their doctors for easy remedies. In fact, Beddoes “explicitly declare[s] PREVENTION of
mischief to be [his] exclusive objective” (II 14), for being healthy is less about getting
cured than it is about preventing illness in the first place. Health, in this way, is a
preemptive strategy. One does not become sick; rather, one loses the opportunity to stay
well, and the woman’s response to her doctor suggests that such a concept was, if not
difficult to accept, at least highly unsatisfactory. The fictional woman interprets the
doctor’s prescription (“Health, madam”) as a refusal to practice medicine, and while the
old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” was a common enough
phrase, it did not quite capture one’s interest in the way, say, “Widgeon's Purifying Pills”

70
did.
48
Beddoes makes a clear distinction in his manual between taking “some little
thing” and becoming a preventionist, arguing that “[w]ritings intended to warn against
the destruction of health, can hardly be confounded with such as pretend to teach people
how to restore it. To direct a stranger how to traverse a slippery ground without injury is
one thing. To instruct him how to set his leg should he break it, is quite another” (Essay II
35).
Beddoes and other eighteenth and nineteenth-century medical writers, such as
William Buchan, struggle to make prevention legible in a culture bent on finding cures.
49

In his highly popular Domestic Medicine,
50
Buchan acknowledges his presumed reader’s
disappointment in the dearth of “pompous prescriptions, and promised great cures” they
will find in his manual, asserting that he would “much rather teach men how to avoid the
necessity of using [pills and cures], than how they should be used” (1803 xvii). But how,

48
In Patient’s Progress: Doctor’s and Doctoring in Eighteenth-century England (1989), Dorothy Porter and
Roy Porter note that “from the mid-eighteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth century, specialist
druggists’ shops proliferated, proving that there was money to be made out of medicine, toiletries and
cosmetics, and offering to the public one further ready entrée into medical supply services.” See also their
“The Rise of the English Drug Industry: The Role of Thomas Corbyn” in Medical History 33 (1989): 280.

49
Beddoes’s greatest concern is that people who take medicine into their own hands are dangerous to those
they hope to treat. In his introduction to Hygeia, Robert Mitchell describes Beddoes’s manual as “one of a
group of ‘radical’ self-help medical texts published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, designed to
promote the Enlightenment goal of widespread diffusion of practical knowledge. At the same time, though,
Hygeia was a particularly complicated example of the genre, . . . it is a self-help book that is deeply
suspicious of self-help books” (v). See Roy Porter’s Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick
Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (1992).

50
Domestic Medicine (1769) had more popular appeal than Beddoes’s Hygeia. As C.J. Lawrence explains,
from its first publication in 1769, “new editions, reprints and pirated versions appeared every few years in
Britain until 1846” (20). It, along with Beddoes’s Hygeia (1802-3), was part of the influx of medical
manuals written for popular audiences during this period. Though Buchan and Beddoes have different
attitudes toward therapeutics as it relates to home health care, both physicians invoke prophylactic
medicine as central to the medical education of the general public. Lawrence points out, in fact, that
Beddoes criticized Domestic Medicine because it failed to offer enough “basic science,” but that “Beddoes’
inclusion of too much basic science in his own Hygeia rendered it useless for practical application” (32).

71
exactly, does one do this? What does a narrative of prevention look like?
51
As Ginnie
Smith explains, in “Prescribing the Rules of Health: Self-Help and Advice in the Late
Eighteenth Century,” “[p]revention [. . .] is and was barely newsworthy being a passive
or negative operation” (249). No statistics exist for the number of healthy citizens of a

51
I am not suggesting that manuals purporting cures ignore prevention or that preventive medicine
disregards the importance of therapeutics. Indeed, prevention has always been an important part of the
medical discourse. However, while advice about diet and exercise, temperature and temperance, have been
a mainstay of both professional and lay medicine since the Greeks, such advice was seldom the featured
aspect of popular health care guides. John Wesley’s Primitive Physic, or An Easy and Natural Method of
Curing Most Diseases (1747), one of the most popular health manuals of the period, offered simple and
easy recipes and treatments for the most common maladies. As the title suggests, the key draw of his
manual is its promise of cures—“cold-bathing,” for example, treats everything from convulsions to “want
of sleep.” But as with other therapeutic guides, Wesley often notes the preventive benefits of various
cures.:
Washing the Head every Morning in cold Water, prevents Rhuems, and
cures Coughs, cold head-achs, and sore Eyes.
Water-drinking prevents:
Apoplexies,
Asthma’s [sic],
Convulsions,
Gout,
Hysterik Fits,
Madness,
Palsies,
Stones,
Trembling,
To this Children should be bred up from their Cradles.
Thus, even when prevention is overtly championed, it reads as though it were a version of cure. Indeed, the
bulk of Wesley’s advice offers simple cures, as his goal is to provide safe and affordable medicines to poor
people.
Buchan enjoyed similar success almost twenty years later with Domestic Medicine.

Like Wesley, he hoped
to open up medicine for lay readers. As he explains it, “[d]isguising medicine [through Latinate language
and technical jargon] not only retards its improvement as a science, but exposes the profession to ridicule,
and is injurious to the true interests of society” (xi). Thus, like Wesley, Buchan provides an appendix of
common cures. But instead of burying his preventive advice among these cures, Buchan reverses the
proposition by dedicating most of his introductory narrative to the story of prevention. In an advertisement
for the 1798 edition, Buchan explains that as a token of his appreciation for the public’s warm reception of
his work, he has “enlarg[ed] the prophylaxis, or that part which treats of preventing disease” (emphasis
original). He goes on to explain in the Preface to that edition that although Tissot’s popular Advice to the
People shares his views, “The Doctor has also passed over the Prophylaxis, or preventive part of Medicine,
very slightly, though it is certainly of the greatest importance in such a work” (viii). Buchan must justify
his emphasis on prevention as both a reward and a corrective—that is, he must condition his readers to read
for more than “great cures.” Buchan’s excuse for more prophylaxis reflects a shift from similar health
manuals of the period, such as Wesley’s, whose main goal was to offer “cheap, and safe, and easy
Medicines; easy to be known, easy to be procured, and easy to be applied by plain unlettered Men”
(Postscript). Despite their similar aims, guides that emphasize cure need not justify the value of their advice
in the same way. Both Buchan and Beddoes spend several pages explaining why preventive behavior is
worth reading about. Prevention, it seems, was a hard sell.

72
given period, so we cannot know if something has been prevented, we can only know
when it has not. In order to grasp the significance of the warning, we must witness the
destructiveness—the proverbial broken leg—that results from avoidable behavior. The
great paradox at work in such narratives is that one can only write about prevention by
showing what must be prevented—that is, showing what they want to keep from
happening. This is a narrative challenge as much as it is a medical one.
Physicians are not alone in their attempt to tell the story of health in terms of
prevention, and as Beddoes’ dialogue suggests, the combination of fictional narratives
and case studies offers medical writers a way to promote what appears to be a kind of
foreign logic. Situated during a period when home health care guides were becoming
more accessible than they had been in previous decades,
52
Jane Austen’s novels reflect a
similar impulse toward a rising preventionist ethos, one that asks readers to imagine a
time both before and beyond cure and to envision what might or could happen in the
future. Having less to do with hindrance, prevention narratives articulate a complicated
relationship between the past, present, and future. Etymologically, prevention means “to
come before” (præ: before and venīre: to come) and this sense of beforeness captures the
imagined state of preserved health and the caution to do as one ought that we see in
Austen’s novels.

Her narratives reach forward and backward in time simultaneously in
order to regulate current behavior and advocate, as the manuals do, not just a cure but the

52
In her extensive survey of popular self-help medical manuals, Ginnie Smith notes that while we cannot
know what percentage of medical guides were aimed at a popular (lay) audience, we can “suggest . . . that
vernacular medical works were an expanding market in the eighteenth century” (251). Citing Smith, Roy
Porter offers that “Georgian England experienced a boom in ‘popularized medicine,’ taking the phrase to
mean advice works purveying regular medical information in simplified language to a broad public”
(“Spreading Medical” 215). Neither Smith nor Porter makes a distinction between prevention and cure.

73
absence of crisis in the first place. By focusing on the uneasy ground shared by the
novelist and the physician as they struggle to assert the authority of absence, we can see
more clearly how the social and medical aspect of prevention shapes and is shaped by its
formal properties. Buchan and Beddoes did not write ordinary health care guides and
Austen did not write ordinary novels and this distinction comes precisely out of their
common interest in a preventionist ethos. My analysis attempts to move beyond simple
parallels between the novels and the manuals by engaging a more abstract interest in the
problems these writers have with telling the story of prevention.
***
Most health guides, like Austen’s novels, focus their attention on middle-class
family conduct. Buchan claims that he was inspired to write Domestic Medicine, in part,
because his patients needed a “plain directory for regulating their behavior” (xvi).
Similarly, in a section in Hygeia entitled, “Art of Preserving Health” (Essay VI 90),
Beddoes advocates “practical instruction” for parents on “the structure of the human
body.” He even proposes public clinical and anatomical lectures for both men and
women, the goal of which would be
to make fully sensible the mischief arising from systematic irregularity;
from injudicious management after exposure to the inclemencies of
weather, and from the other innumerable ordinary errors of individual
conduct. They must explain the origin and conduct, much more minutely
than the treatment of disease. . . . (Essay VI 91)
53

53
In “Spreading Medical Enlightenment: The Popularization of Medicine in Georgian England, and its
Paradoxes,” Roy Porter explains that Beddoes was “passionately committed to the practical, sense-oriented
pedogogics championed by Rousseau and his own father-in-law, Richard Lovell Edgeworth.” Thus,
Beddoes was a strong proponent of public forums for health education, which would include “general
courses in anatomy and physiology” (222).

74
Beddoes links one’s attention to the body and health to conduct and management rather
than to treatment. Certainly, treatment depends heavily on the compliant patient, but both
physicians assume that patients are almost too willing at times to follow doctor’s orders
when it comes to cures. Buchan and Beddoes offer a prescription for health, as they
encourage, even require, individuals to become keen observers of their own and others’
bodies.

As Beddoes asserts: “There is nothing [mankind] [is] so slow in learning, as how
to direct their foresight, and portion out their cares properly” (Hygeia, Essay “Misc.” 3).
54

For Austen, this means learning to “do as one ought.” Indeed, a preventionist ethic
assumes and even creates the “ought” with which Austen’s novels are so concerned and
consumed.
We see this sensibility in Beddoes’s essays, which range from sermon-like
proclamations to medical observation to patient narratives. The case-study as cautionary
tale, like the fictional story, is often his most compelling form of instruction. These
“stories” about what has been and what might be feature “characters” who behave
imprudently. In a section on the “Consumptive disposition,” for example, he transcribes a
story written by one of his patients, Louisa, as a warning to readers. She begins quite
simply: “Our family was large.” She goes on, as the narrator of a domestic novel might,
to describe this family: “There were twelve of us in all, eight sisters and four brother. I do
not reckon three others, [sic] that died in their infancy.” Louisa reaches back into her
family history, noting that with the exception of her grandfather’s gout, “no hereditary

54
In an earlier section dealing with scrophula [sic], Beddoes argues that parents should “teac[h] children
accurately to distinguish the parts of the body. Such information will lead them to observe many important
changes, which as they take place slowly, are apt to proceed unobserved. It would also render them alive to
sensations, that would otherwise escape attention” (VI 46).

75
disorder had appeared on either side.” The family’s problems develop as a result of her
father’s “ambitio[n] that his sons should shine,” and that his daughters should “have more
information than in general falls to the share of women” (Essay VII 10). Initially, his
attentiveness appears progressive, but as his ambition turns into vanity and then neglect,
the children suffer. Instead of merely describing her symptoms or speculating about
proximate causes for her consumption, Louisa tells a story of what happens to the
children of well-meaning but vain and ignorant parents. They “grow up to be the veriest
of wretches,” because in such a household, “health was never a constant, and seldom an
occasional, concern” (IV 12). In Louisa’s tale, domestic management—a basic
understanding of what constitutes a proper diet, exercise, climate and leisure activities—
is the source of prevention: only a well run household, we surmise, produces healthy,
happy children.
Most moral and medical successes and failures, then, can be attributed to family
management. For this reason, Buchan and Beddoes both begin their narratives before the
problems, stresses, and dangers that come from living in the world infect the healthy
body. Buchan offers an earlier version of the cautionary tale Beddoes’ Louisa tells. The
first chapter of his Domestic Medicine highlights the importance of our pasts, of our
childhoods, to our future health: “The better to trace disease from their original causes,
we shall take a view of the common treatment of mankind in the state of infancy. In this
period of our lives, the foundation of a good or bad constitution are laid” (1). Buchan
uses an architectural metaphor to emphasize the relationship between the health of the
home—the family—and the health of the individual. Beddoes offers a similar metaphor

76
in Hygeia to describe the importance of this originary moment and the consequences of
domestic management. He notes that bad childrearing is akin to “rearing an edifice
without tie or foundation, in the face of a tempestuous sky!” (Essay I 26). The value of
this metaphor relies on the reader’s awareness and fear of shaky structures. The family,
then, is like a house, and raising either without proper forethought and guidance will lead
to its future destruction.
55

The lessons for such conduct come, Buchan and Beddoes say, from the home.
Unfortunately, parents are often ignorant of ways in which to teach these lessons and
must be taught through the stories their doctors tell them. Buchan and Beddoes’s focus on
what parents should do for their as-yet-uninjured children differs from earlier eighteenth-
century manuals, which tend to address their advice to sick adults.
56
To be sure, both
doctors’ manuals offer directives to the intemperate or consumptive adult individual, but
they do so only after establishing the importance that parental care plays in laying a
foundation for future health. Anticipating Austen and numerous Victorian novelists after
her, Buchan blames mothers for their ignorance and fathers for their lack of interest. He
laments the fact “that more care is not bestowed in teaching the proper management of
children to those whom Nature has designed for mother” (2) and that the gentleman

55
The desire to locate an origin of disease in the improperly managed family hearkens back to the stories of
Adam and Eve. Many medical guides refer to the Fall as the beginning of medical suffering. Wesley uses
this rhetoric in his manual to explain why everyone should have equal access to medical knowledge. Before
the fall, “[Man] knew no sin, so he knows no pain, no sickness, weakness, or bodily disorder” (Wesley).
Wesley demonstrates how we can use medicine to live with the consequences of this rebellion.

56
In the widely read, An Essay of Health and Long Life (1724), George Cheyne directs his advice to those
who are already sick or who, by virtue of their occupation, will likely become sick and to those who are
willing to follow the regimen he lays out—“The Robust, the Luxurious, the Pot-Companions, the Loose,
and the Abandoned, have here no business—there Time is not yet come.” Rather, his treatise is for “The
Sickly and the Aged, the Studious and the Sedentary, Persons of weak Nerves, and the Gentleman of
learned Professions” (xiv).

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father is more interested in the management of his dogs and horses than his own child,
“the heir of his fortunes, and the future hope of his country” (3). And these are the
healthy parents. If they are diseased to begin with, their chances of raising healthy
children diminish greatly. While Buchan blames both parents, suggesting that “a person
labouring under an incurable malady, ought not to marry,” the health of the child falls
primarily to the mother. Taking a cue from Rousseau, Buchan warns that “[a] delicate
female, brought up within doors, an utter stranger to exercise and open air, who lives on
tea and other slop, may bring a child into the world, but it will hardly be fit to live” (4).
Buchan argues that, in some instances, the best way to prevent disease or debility means
preventing life in the first place.
Beddoes does not go as far as Buchan, but he does focus his attention similarly on
what parents do wrong. Beddoes’s advice acts as a warning and a plea, for the manual, he
claims, will help these parents “equip [their] children, as they advance to that age when
they must be left at their own guidance, with the most precise instructions respecting the
hazards they will soon have to encounter” (Essay I 15). Hygeia demonstrates over the
next thousand pages what Austen takes only a few hundred to show: how a mismanaged
household produces debilitated children who grow up to be wretched adults. Bad diet,
lack of exercise, poor schooling conditions, and intemperance—all the stuff of which
novels are made—are just some of the “hazards” children suffer when left “at their own
guidance.” The more pernicious activities of masturbation, shopping, and novel-reading
similarly matter less as moral vice than as detrimental to the medical health of the
household.

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The full subtitle of Beddoes’s collection, Essays Moral and Medical, on the
Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes, articulates the
connection between the moral and the medical, and in his first essay he instructs his
readers how to interpret this relationship: “To form a moral sense . . . is not more
practicable in itself, than to form a sense for health, or happiness, which latter must be, in
great measure, composed of the sense of health” (84). Beddoes conflates the moral and
the medical in order to construct a comprehensive story of middle-class conduct and
health. He demands that his readers become moral managers of their own bodies and the
bodies of those around them, particularly their children. To emphasize his point, he ends
his first essay by asking his readers to imagine their own child, “[t]hat being, whose
happy smiles thou art now watching,” crying out in the future, “‘Ah! had not the affection
of my parent been as blind as it was strong, never should I have been the wretch I am’”
(Essay I 92). Beddoes does not simply explain causes to his readers so that they can avoid
their effects; he creates characters we recognize from the fictional narratives that
nineteenth-century novelists reverted to time and again. We hear traces of the story of the
fallen woman and the profligate son, whose demise was initiated by ignorant parents.
Beddoes offers this ominous ventriloquizing of the reader’s child as a “wretch” in the
future to suggest that parental responsibility is the key to familial health and happiness.
As the last sentence of his first essay, this is quite a cliffhanger. What parent, especially
one with strong affection, would not look out anxiously for the next essay, while keeping
a more vigilant eye on his or her child? When we turn from the doctors to the novelist,
we can see that plenty of parents ignore the warnings that prevention provides.

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Prevention and Cure in Sense and Sensibility
Parents in Austen novels neglect their children. They fail as domestic managers,
which means they fail as preventionists. In Sense and Sensibility (1811) Austen depicts
the type of affectionately neglectful parent to whom Beddoes might be addressing his
essays. Nobody doubts Mrs. Dashwood’s maternal affection, but we all recognize she is
more than a little “blind” to the truth of her middle daughter’s affair. The plot that
unfolds, Beddoes might suggest, is a result of domestic mismanagement and a lack of
foresight. From the start, Sense and Sensibility functions not so much as a manual of
what to do or even of how to recover from what has been. Rather, its structure relies
heavily on the tension between prevention and cure, complete with a cautionary wretch,
Marianne Dashwood, and her more vigilant, older sister, Elinor. During Marianne’s
initial encounter with her would-be lover, Willoughby, when she twists her ankle, all
propriety is lost in the face of physical harm. Willoughby, a complete stranger, must
carry Marianne through the rain. Although her embarrassment prohibits Marianne from
fully examining him, “his person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for
the hero of her favourite story” (38), a story that soon becomes all too real. Willoughby’s
constant overtures eventually lead all but Elinor to assume that the couple is engaged.
When Willoughby takes his leave of Barton, Elinor’s foresight directs her to urge Mrs.
Dashwood into proper conduct and to ask Marianne whether or not she and Willoughby
have a formal understanding. Mrs. Dashwood refuses and the narrator tells us, “common
sense, common care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic
delicacy” (74).

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Like her mother, Marianne ignores “foresight” in favor of romance. She would
rather be a wretch than have no story at all. To this end, Marianne refuses to eat, finds it
“very inexcusable” to sleep, and develops a “head-ache” in response to her lover’s
departure. This unchecked grief initiates her decline and turns into the type of narrative
that requires either cure or death at its end. But before she is fully sunk, Marianne
embraces her grief, which as Buchan tells us, is a potentially dangerous precursor to
wretchedness. In his section “On Grief” in Domestic Medicine, Buchan offers guidance
for preventing the physical decline that attends this form of “Passion of the Mind.” When
in a state of grief, he suggests that we “turn the attention frequently to new objects.
Examine them for some time. When the mind begins to recoil, shift the scene. By this
means a constant succession of new ideas may be kept up, till the disagreeable ones
entirely disappear” (69). “Indolence,” he warns, “nourishes grief” (69), which is precisely
what Marianne wants. Austen initially presents Marianne’s behavior as comical—we are
meant to laugh at the deliberateness of Marianne’s romantic symptoms. But under the
ridiculousness of her behavior lurks the seriousness of Buchan’s warning, and the
potentially tragic outcome of Marianne’s conduct. The narrator tells us that she plays
Willoughby’s favorite songs and “read[s] nothing but what they had been used to read
together” (73). In short, she does the opposite of what the manuals recommend. “This
nourishment of grief,” we are told, “was applied [by Marianne] every day” (73).
Nourishment generally has a positive association; we might think of hearty food or a
mother’s milk or any number of domestic terms that invoke notions of home, health, and
care. Buchan’s use of “nourish” thus hints at the domestic aspects of indolence and grief.

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Indolence occurs in the home, and therefore comes under the purview of domestic
management.
Austen adopts this sense of indolence, but she undercuts the danger we have
learned to read into it from Buchan by recasting nourishment as the act of a silly young
girl. Like Buchan, Austen applies the term to something that shouldn’t be nourished. An
important difference between their usages is the agent of the action. For Buchan,
indolence does the nourishing. For Austen, Marianne does. Buchan recommends that the
grieved reader replace the sad story that has resulted in her current condition with a
“new,” more agreeable one. Instead of following this model, Marianne cares for and
nurtures her grief, deliberately allowing it to grow. Yet, rather than simply condemning
Marianne for, in some sense, failing to follow Buchan’s advice, Austen depicts her
actions as necessary to the plot. Had Marianne properly prevented her grief, stopped it
from growing, her narrative may well have stopped here. Yet instead, this grief becomes
the first in a series of presumably preventable yet highly desirable episodes that propel
the story and must, we expect, move us toward cure.
57
Marianne’s resistance to
prevention nourishes the narrative of cure and it is the struggle between these two
narratives that energizes the novel.
The similarities I have demonstrated between Sense and Sensibility and the
medical manuals thus far are meant to establish the cultural connections between the two
texts. What prevention tells us about the nineteenth-century novel comes not solely from

57
One could argue that Marianne’s initial fall is the first preventable injury, but I do not see the fall as a
conscious act in the same way this is or her later practices of walking in wet grass and sitting around in wet
stockings are. John Wiltshire refers to Domestic Medicine in order to diagnose Marianne’s fever and thus
demonstrate Austen’s realism—Austen’s description of remitting fever follows what Buchan writes about
(46-47).

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content or thematics but from its formal structure. Austen’s anatomy of wretchedness
offers an alternative style of grief-management through the parallel plot of Elinor, the
novel’s chief preventionist. During Edward Ferrars’s final visit to Barton, Elinor senses a
difference in his treatment toward her. She does not, at this point in the novel, know that
Edward is engaged to Lucy Steele, but the changes she detects are enough to cause her
grief. Instead of indulging her grief, Elinor, however, becomes “determin[ed] to subdue
it, and to prevent herself from appearing to suffer.” “She did not” the narrator tells us,
“adopt the method so judiciously employed by Marianne, on a similar occasion, to
augment and fix her sorrow, by seeking silence, solitude and idleness” (90). Elinor is not
invested in the romance of cure in the way that Marianne is. Rather, Elinor “[sits] down
to her drawing-table . . . [and] busily employ[s] herself the whole day” (90). So far,
Elinor engages in recommended behavior and Austen appears to be adhering to Buchan’s
guidance. But the narrator explains that “[Elinor’s] thoughts could not be chained
elsewhere . . . these thoughts must be before her, must force her attention” (91). Instead
of complying completely with popular advice for managing grief—that is, thinking of
“new ideas”—Elinor allows her mind to reminisce freely on past memories and indulge
in future fantasies built upon her love for Edward (91). Despite Buchan’s claims to the
contrary, this type of attentiveness to one’s grief—the presentness of one’s thoughts—not
only proves unavoidable, even by the best preventionists, but beneficial. Upon the
Steeles’ departure, just after Lucy tells Elinor about her engagement to Edward, Elinor
finds herself “at liberty to think and be wretched” (114). Only in private can Elinor
accept and acknowledge, and therefore manage, her wretchedness. Elinor’s failure to look

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for new ideas seems a rejection of preventive advice, but her actions invoke a sense of
privacy and propose an alternative, potentially therapeutic, relationship to the past and the
present that the manuals deem important.
At the same time that Elinor attempts to protect herself, she must also keep
Marianne from becoming the heroine of a cautionary tale. From jokes about the intensity
of Marianne’s feelings to the scoldings about accepting inappropriate gifts from
Willoughby, Elinor holds firm to the spirit of prevention, lovingly coaxing Marianne into
healthier conduct. In London, after witnessing Marianne’s continued, futile and improper
attempts to correspond with Willoughby, Elinor invokes the specter of the precautionary
“wretch” by writing to her mother in order, the narrator says, “to awake[n] her fears for
the health of Marianne” and get her “to procure those inquires which had so long been
delayed” (145). Such inquiries, Elinor hopes, will force Marianne to acknowledge that
she has been participating in a romantic fantasy and therefore save her from becoming the
tragic heroine in a love story of her own making. Elinor thus imagines the story that
could be—indeed, the story that we know has already been written by Austen herself—in
order to manage its outcome.
Austen pits Elinor’s plot of prevention against Marianne’s plot of crisis and cure,
which, as we know from the manuals, is the only way to render the narrative of
prevention intelligible. When Marianne finally learns of Willoughby’s engagement to
another woman, she becomes the self-described wretch Beddoes portends and that Elinor
fears. After Willoughby rebuffs Marianne at a London party and returns her letters,
Marianne resists Elinor’s remonstrance to maintain her composure. She cries out: “I care

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not who knows I am wretched . . . I must feel—I must be wretched” (160). Austen
employs the wretched child on whom preventative medicine relies and for whom it
laments, but she revises the meaning of the child’s cries. Marianne embraces her
wretchedness just as she had nourished her grief, as if it were precisely the thing she had
been waiting for all along. Despite Elinor’s best attempts to prevent Marianne’s
wretchedness (a state we already know she has experienced herself), Marianne claims she
“must feel— . . . must be” the wretch. In some respects, Elinor’s attempt to teach Mrs.
Dashwood the methods of prevention is an attempt to regulate how Marianne conducts
herself and, thus, what Marianne signifies.
But Elinor is not the only one who attempts to prevent Marianne’s wretchedness.
The ghosts of two other wretched young women do this work as well. All of Austen’s
later novels have, to varying degrees, embedded narratives that function as warnings. The
stories of Eliza Brandon and her daughter, Eliza Williams, precede Marianne’s and
Elinor’s plots of wretchedness.
58
The flannel-waistcoated Colonel Brandon, the novel’s
other preventionist, introduces these stories, believing that the younger Eliza’s story will
be useful to Marianne. He begins his narrative by referring to events that precede the
novel’s beginning, as well as ones that occurred earlier in the novel but were never
narrated. He tells Elinor about his love for Eliza Brandon, whom he claims resembles “in
some measure” Marianne (173). He speaks of her coerced marriage to his brother, the
subsequent divorce, and her tragic decline into disrepute. He describes how he found her

58
While the Eliza story is probably the most tragic of Austen’s embedded narratives of a fallen woman,
Mrs. Smith’s story in Persuasion comes close to replicating the type of wretch-story prevention manuals
foresee, with its similarly tragic moral and medical consequences.

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in a sponging-house, a “melancholy and sickly figure” in the last stage of consumption.
59

This story of lost love precedes the story more relevant to Marianne’s case: Willoughby’s
affair with Eliza Williams and the pregnancy that resulted from it. Austen delays this
information in order to give the reader the time and reason to appreciate Colonel
Brandon’s attraction to Marianne and to anticipate Marianne’s eventual acceptance of
him as a husband. By the standard set in this pre-narrative, Colonel Brandon and
Marianne are destined to be together. But for the purpose of prevention, this part of the
story is also important in that it rehearses the deadly consequences of the improper
conduct of one who was so “blooming” and “healthful” (175)—it’s a story that just didn’t
have to be.
The younger Eliza’s story echoes a portion of her mother’s, beginning, as the
wretch’s narrative must, with domestic mismanagement and parental neglect. At three
years old, Eliza comes under the management of Colonel Brandon, who, having “no
family, no home,” places Eliza at school, with a “very respectable woman” (176).
Unfortunately, respectability is not quite the guard against wretchedness the Colonel had
hoped—if only he had paid attention to the first Eliza Brandon’s story. At sixteen, Eliza
Williams visits Bath with a young friend and her “well-meaning, but not quick-sighted

59
In “A ‘Sweet Face as White as Death: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility,” Claudia
Johnson demonstrates the extent to which Austen’s novels critique the trope of the dying sentimental
heroine. Johnson explains that the “male characters, not Austen’s narrator, are the tellers of heroines’ sad
stories. Each transforms the heroine’s story into a highly conventionalized narrative about himself,”
suggesting that Colonel Brandon “yearns for the safety from further harm which a heroine’s death affords”
(166). She goes on to suggest that “his story about poor Eliza reads like an imbedded radical novel of the
1790’s, arraigning the callousness of tyrannical patriarchs whose principal object in life is to repair the
waning fortunes of dissipated estates” ( 167). I would add that the initial Eliza tale, with its negligent
parenting and consumptive ending, resonates with the discourse of prevention as well as the discourse of
sentimentality that she sees structuring the parallel between Marianne and Eliza. Sentimentality and
certainly melodrama are components of the prevention narrative.

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father” (176)—yet another ignorant parent. Under such care, the impressionable and
orphaned young Eliza is easily ruined and left by Willoughby. At the time the Colonel
tells Elinor the story, Eliza has been hidden away in the country with her bastard child.
Although we can read both of the Eliza stories as cautionary tales of what Marianne
might have become, Colonel Brandon does not exactly mean for Marianne to draw
parallels between herself and the Elizas, despite the resemblance. Rather, he presents
their stories to Elinor as examples of how well Marianne behaved. She has the potential
for prevention after all. Brandon hopes that she will “turn with gratitude towards her own
condition, when she compares it with that of my poor Eliza, when she considers the
wretched and hopeless situation of this poor girl” (177). Marianne’s sufferings “proceed
from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace” (177). While Austen condemns
Marianne’s misconduct more than the Colonel wants to, she depicts Marianne’s
wretchedness and any misconduct she may have engaged in as proceeding from domestic
mismanagement and the crucial disconnect between the moral and health sense of which
Beddoes speaks. A “[c]onsciousness of health” Beddoes explains, “will become just as
much a source of pleasure as the consciousness of virtue” (Essay I 84). The novel works
toward helping Marianne reach this level of awareness and health. Or, more specifically,
it works toward helping the reader see how Marianne develops this sense.
Colonel Brandon aids the reader by pointing out that while Marianne has been
saved from the moral fate of the Elizas, she is still in danger of suffering the same
physical consequence and thus has not quite gained that balance between virtue and
health. Part of the tragedy for Colonel Brandon is that the once healthy girl he loved has

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become melancholy and sickly. Eliza’s social decline, we are lead to believe, enacts a
physical one. One must have the sense to know that improper attachments are both
physically and morally unhealthy. The Elizas are Austen’s version of the cautionary
wretch, but they do not entirely work in the way we might think the should, for even after
hearing their sad tales from Elinor, Marianne continues to neglect her health. Her
“violent” cold comes on the heels of two long walks in the “longest and wettest” part of
the grass, after which she “[sat] around in her wet shoes and stockings” (259). Her cold
turns into an almost fatal fever, which begins to resemble the physical decline we
imagine preceded Eliza Brandon’s consumption. The Eliza stories reach back into the
past as a means of predicting the future and of developing not so much Marianne’s but
the reader’s narrative foresight.
Before both Marianne and Elinor can find happiness in marriage, Marianne must
emerge from her fever with a clearer moral and health sense. Once out of physical
danger, Marianne expresses her wish that Willoughby will not suffer too much. To this,
Elinor asks: “Do you compare your conduct with his?” “No,” Marianne replies, “I
compare it with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours” (293). This
comparison is what Austen has been encouraging her readers to see all along. But while
we can read Marianne’s contrite, “what it ought to have been,” as a reference or
comparison to Elinor, we can also read it in terms of prevention. The semi-colon
interrupts Marianne’s claim that she should have compared her behavior to her sister’s.
Certainly, the syntax of the sentence asks us to read the pause between “ought to have
been” and “yours” as Marianne’s recognition of Elinor’s superior—healthier—conduct.

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However, underneath this comparison between Marianne and her sister lies the more
tragic one between Marianne and the truly wretched women who haunt this novel.
Marianne recognizes, if only for a moment, that through almost no will of her own, she
has survived an ordeal that two women before her did not—it ought to have been her fate,
too.
Prevention as Narrative: Mansfield Park
While Austen articulates the relationship between cure and prevention—between
“happily ever after” to what “ought to have been”—in Sense and Sensibility through the
parallel plots of Marianne and Elinor, it is not until her “mature” work that Austen
embeds prevention into the deep structure of her narrative. Mansfield Park, more than
Sense and Sensibility, is interested in exposing root causes as a means of avoiding future
effects; it is a novel about rendering the imagined story of what “comes before” in order
to prevent what could be. As with Sense and Sensibility—indeed, as with all Austen
novels—Mansfield Park centers on the problem of badly managed homes. Nowhere is the
emphasis on domestic mismanagement more evident than in a comparison of the two
families, the Bertrams and the Prices. Class and geographical distance separate these two
households, but Austen depicts both as afflicted by the same “disease.” Both homes
feature spoiled, misbehaved children and distracted, disengaged parents, and the narrator
describes both in terms of “mismanagement”: Portsmouth is a “scene of
mismanagement” (324). Sir Thomas comes to recognize his “grievous mismanagement”
of his daughters’ upbringing at Mansfield Park (382).

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In Volume I, Chapter 1, the narrator condemns the Prices for being out of control,
bursting at the seams, while allowing the Bertrams, particularly Sir Thomas, to look like
careful domestic managers. Mrs. Price must reconcile with her sisters after an eleven year
rift because as she “prepar[es] for her ninth lying-in” she fears for the “maintenance” of
the eight other children (6). To be sure, the Bertrams and Mrs. Norris appear snobbish
and self-congratulatory (we are never meant to assume that they are morally superior to
the Prices), but they do not yet seem incapable of raising a healthy children. Fanny Price
will come to live with them, but as the vigilant patriarch, Sir Thomas is on the lookout for
the harm this arrangement might cause his own family. He warns Mrs. Norris that
“[s]hould [Fanny’s] disposition be really bad, . . . we must not, for the sake of our
children, continue her in our family” (10). This concern about her “disposition” refers
initially to Fanny’s presumed class-bound “bad” manners and the potentially negative
influence they may have.
The use of “disposition,” here, is important, because it brings together the moral
and medical relationship that figures so prominently into the preventionist perspective.
The definition of the term in regard to Fanny means both “a frame of mind” and a “state
of bodily health” (OED). Sir Thomas invokes the language of disease and prevention,
explaining to Mrs. Norris that he does not really think their new charge will be bad and
notes that what they are likely to encounter is “gross ignorance, some meanness of
opinion, and very distressing vulgarity of manner.” Such conduct, he determines, is
neither “incurable” nor “dangerous” (10). Sir Thomas constructs Fanny’s “disposition” as
potentially diseased but easily curable, and although he still refers, here, to her habits, this

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language shifts our focus from the social to the physical, from her behavior to her body.
Mrs. Price’s letter offers “assur[ance] of her daughter’s [Fanny’s] being a very well-
disposed, good-humoured girl,” but then confirms the alternate meaning of “disposition”
when she shares her hope that her “somewhat delicate and puny” daughter will become
“materially better for the change of air” (11).
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While all signs seem to point to curing
Fanny as the novel’s central concern, her unhealthy body is offset by her healthy manners
and her purpose is less clearly articulated than we might think.
Austen’s focus on a single, “puny” heroine prepares us for a narrative of growth
and development, of physical and social maturation, and in many ways, Austen fulfills
this promise. Fanny does, as Lionel Trilling points out, “become taller, prettier, and more
energetic” (128); she gets her man and, as Mrs. Norris predicts, “settl[es] well” (7). But
oddly, Fanny does not improve as much as or in the way that we might expect of an
Austenian heroine.
61
She never quite achieves the strength and mobility or evolved
attitude of an Elizabeth or an Emma. We never see Fanny Price become as robust as

60
Critics interpret Fanny’s physical condition in a several ways. In “What is Wrong with Marianne?
Medicine and Disease in Jane Austen’s England,” Laurie Kaplan and Richard Kaplan, M.D. note that
“Fanny Price may simply be anemic” (117). They go on to suggest that what is important about disease in
Austen’s novels is the way it “tests the sense and sensibilities of the other characters by dividing loyalties
or demanding attentions at the most inopportune moments” (119). In general, critics view Fanny’s
invalidism as psychosomatic and representative of a variety of sexual and social anxieties. John Wiltshire
suggests that Fanny’s physical status reflects her social position and is symptomatic of her repressed
sexuality or thwarted desire. Tony Tanner suggests that it functions as a form of “resistance against the
corrosive unfettered impulse of change” (149). Gloria Gross reads her as simply manipulative.

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In Jane Austen and the Body: “The picture of health,” John Wiltshire notes that “Fanny Price is the only
one of Jane Austen’s heroines whose body is frail, ‘debilitated’ or ‘enfeebled’ and, partly because of this,
the character is notoriously an obstacle to the appreciation of Mansfield Park.” He goes on to argue that
“[o]ne way round the obstacle of Fanny Price’s unloveableness is to think of her as a study in
developmental psychology, in the power of formative influences . . .” (63). Wiltshire provides a
compelling analysis of Fanny’s psycho-social and sexual development—the way her body manifests her
repressed and transgressive desire—but my focus on the way Fanny’s debility marks her as an agent of
prevention challenges the type of reading, such as this, which emphasizes her development and growth.

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Marianne once was or as healthy as Elinor continues to be. She appears, rather, to be a
composite of the two, a watchful preventionist in a sick girl’s body; she has a
Wordsworthian appreciation for nature but would never purposely walk in wet grass. And
she is meant to stay this way. Her debility, which is a result of her upbringing, conceals
an inner strength and acts as a protective shield. Wretched children are everywhere in this
novel, but the one who appears most wretched of all functions not so much a victim of
mismanagement but an inoculation against it. We will come to see, as Edmund does
finally, that Fanny needs no “future improvement” (388), and that the narrative depends
on keeping her just a little bit ill in order to avoid more serious illness. It needs her to
maintain a low-grade version of dis-ease so that she can operate as an agent of
prevention, knowing how one ought to behave and imagining what might be.
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In this way, Mansfield Park is not at all about Fanny, because it is not about
curing. Rather, it is about staying healthy in the first place. Where Marianne and Elinor
represented different versions of the prevention/cure conflict, Fanny represents mild

62
In Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (2002), Clara Tuite invokes the preventionist
metaphor to describe Fanny, suggesting that “[t]he predictable Christian irony of this pedagogical fable of
transplantation is that is the sickly Fanny who initiates the programme of inoculation within the Bertram
household” (110). Instead of exploring the full implications of what it means for Fanny to be an inoculation
or how prevention structures the narrative more generally, Tuite moves quickly from the discourse of
prevention to the discourse of cure: “The figure of the leech suggests [Fanny’s] two-way programme of
reform. She is the meek person, the hanger-on, the sponge, the curative leech who takes on the sicknesses
of others, allowing Mansfield to throw up and rid itself of its decadent tendencies” (110). Fanny is not
ipecac, and inoculation works quite differently than Tuite’s extended metaphor suggests. Over thirty years
before Edward Jenner discovers the small-pox vaccine, William Buchan noted the contradiction and the
genius involved in this procedure: “the artificial method of communicating the disease, could it be rendered
universal, would amount to nearly the same as rooting it out” (1803, 221). To “communicate” the disease
means, of course, to administer it. Austen takes up this logic in Mansfield Park—to communicate disease
and dis-ease in order to root it out. Inoculation harnesses the disease so that it becomes a protection against
the imagined possibility of getting sick at some future date. Such an inoculation functions as a medicalized
form of managing (protecting) the home and provides Austen with a model for structuring the plots of her
novel and for her characterization of Fanny as not the center of the narrative but an outside, preventive
agent.

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sickliness as a preventive tactic and turns the very notion of cure into a secondary
concern. The invalid, as we know from the previous chapter, becomes the privileged
watcher through whose eyes the narrative unfolds. While “curing the wounded Bertram
line” may be a by-product of Fanny’s “inoculative programme” (Tuite 127) her energy—
the novel’s energy—is much more narrowly focused than on keeping the youngest son,
Edmund Bertram, safe. He is the first to gain Fanny’s affection and becomes the target of
her preventionist perspective. Certainly, the novel is interested in the improvement of the
estate and by extension the family, but it is equally, if not more, interested in
demonstrating how to prevent the dangers that may harm the family in the first place.
Fanny, we comes to see, is here to clean house, and preventing Edmund’s misalliance
will become hers and the novel’s primary objective.
We see this in an early preventionist episode. After the “old grey poney [(sic)]”
Fanny has been used to riding dies, the narrator tells us that Fanny “was in danger of
feeling the loss in her health as well as her affections” (31). Nobody thinks to replace her
pony until Edmund, the only one to attend to Fanny’s physical well-being, notices “its ill
effects” (32). Both the lack of a horse and the family’s lack of interest in getting Fanny a
horse contribute to her potential decline. Edmund exchanges his road horse for a suitable
mare for Fanny and lends it to her as form of therapy. Medically speaking, horseback
riding, or some comparable activity, was often prescribed as therapeutic during this
period. Buchan observes that “exercise is not less necessary than food for the
preservation of health. . . . It seems to be a catholic law throughout the whole animal
creation that no creature, without exercise, should enjoy health, or be able to find

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subsistence” (48). It is no surprise then that the riding makes Fanny feel better and that
without it she is in danger of getting sick again. Of course, what’s important about this
horse is that it is Edmund’s horse, and it is his interest that preserves her health. And
while this episode establishes Fanny’s dependence on Edmund’s medical care and reads
as cure, it also presents Fanny’s desire for Edmund in terms of prevention.
When Edmund lends Mary Crawford the same horse, we see instantly what must
be prevented, and it is not Fanny’s ill health. Fanny ceases to look like a patient and
becomes, instead, a vaccine bent on inoculating Edmund against Mary. The static and
“delicate” Fanny must hinder the “active and fearless” Mary Crawford from winning her
cousin’s affections. Fanny watches from a distance as Mary rides her horse under
Edmund’s guidance. As she waits for them to return with her horse, she “fe[els] a pang”
at the thought that Edmund should forget her. The narrator never goes so far as to
describe Fanny as jealous, but we learn that Edmund and Mary’s “merriment ascended to
[Fanny],” and “[i]t was a sound which did not make her cheerful” (57 emphasis
original).
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When Edmund asks Fanny for permission to lend Mary the horse again, he
assures Fanny that her health has priority over Mary’s pleasure. “It would be wrong,” he
explains, for Mary to “interfere” with Fanny’s regimen: “she rides only for pleasure, you
for health” (59 emphasis original). Fanny must acquiesce—it is, after all, Edmund’s
horse. But more to the point, she does not want Edmund to think continually of her as
incapacitated or in need of cure. When his only excuse for Fanny’s riding is her health,
she reminds him that she is “strong enough now to walk very well” (59). For Edmund,

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Wiltshire notes how this scene introduces the taboo of Fanny’s desire for Edmund. We already know that
the family has forbidden her to think of him as a love interest, but Fanny’s unconscious, sexual passion
comes through (66).

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the horse represents a narrative of Fanny’s perpetual cure. For Fanny, the horse incites a
narrative of Edmund’s prevented affections. Fanny struggles to assert her own pleasure
and also maintain Edmund’s interest. By burying prevention (which is to say, Fanny’s
desire for Edmund) within the language of cure, Austen demonstrates the challenge of
rendering, as narrative, such a passive operation. And yet, prevention is the motivating
impulse here; it is the marker of health.
By the time we get to the Sotherton Gate excursion, which some have described
as the “key” to the novel,
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we see more clearly the type of narrative anxiety and
frustration that prevention can create. This is the moment in the novel when what ought
not happen happens, when what might easily be prevented isn’t. Significantly, Austen
does not frame the Sotherton scene as a moment of crisis in need of cure; she frames it in
terms of prevention and Fanny’s highly developed foresight. Once again, Fanny is static,
sitting on her bench amid the Sotherton wilderness. Because she has become too fatigued
to walk,
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Fanny can only watch Edmund and Mary walk off to “determine the dimension
of the wood” (81). She must then observe Maria and Henry slip dangerously over the Ha-
Ha. We experience, through Fanny, the erotics of prevention, as her condition forces her
remain on the bench while both of these couples roams free, unchaperoned and hidden
among the shrubs. Initially, she attempts to prevent Edmund and Mary from leaving her,

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Marilyn Butler describes it as the “ideological key to the novel,” because it brings together the anti-
Jacobin elements of nature, religions, and marriage (23). Inger Brodey also reads it as “key to the entire
novel,” because it exposes the various differences and relationships among the characters, foreshadows the
end, and “reveal[s] to us important issues about authority, restraint, and rebellion,” particularly in terms of
female mobility (91).

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Numerous critics have observed the importance of Fanny’s stillness. George Levine identifies Fanny’s
objective observations as pre-Darwinian, suggesting that Fanny’s “passive observations become a source of
power, dramatizing key principles of scientific and novelistic practices” (56). Tony Tanner explains that
“Fanny does not participate in the world but as a result she see things more clearly and more accurately.”

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but she gets rebuffed: “Edmund urged her [to] remai[n] where she was with an
earnestness which she could not resist” (81). The narrator tells us, “she was left on the
bench to think with pleasure of her cousin’s care, but with great regret that she was not
stronger” (81). At this moment, Edmund doesn’t want her and neither do we, because
she prevents us from following the more illicit, narratable couples.
When Fanny sees that Maria is about to abandon her fiancé in order to explore the
other side of the Ha-Ha with another man, she knows this to be wrong, and as with
Edmund, she “mak[es] an effort to prevent it” by telling Maria of the dangers (84): “‘You
will hurt yourself Miss Bertram,’ she cried, ‘You will certainly hurt yourself against
those spikes—you will tear your gown—you will be in danger of slipping into the Ha-
Ha.’” Fanny’s warnings reflect three very good reasons for Maria to stop her current
behavior. The first and last arguments refer to preventing bodily injury. All three hint at
the real reason for Fanny’s concern—Maria’s virtue is at risk. Perhaps Fanny should have
taken a cue from Dr. Beddoes and warned Maria that she will most certainly become a
wretch if she travels down this path, for as meek and quiet as Fanny is, she can speak her
mind. We see this later in the novel, when Mary Crawford attempts to convince Fanny of
Henry Crawford’s love and devotion to her. The usually-reserved Fanny makes it clear
that she has followed Henry’s antics: “I was quiet,” she tells Mary, “but I was not blind”
(300). As Fanny sits on her bench at Sotherton, however, she has not yet seen enough to
warrant such candor. All she can do at this point, and all Austen really wants her to do, is
watch, for this is what the preventionist looks like. She is not somebody who actively
hinders what might be; rather she allows us to see and know what, in the words of

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Marianne Dashwood, “ought to have been.” Fanny fails to stop what she is sure will (and
what does) lead only to mischief and heartache, but despite her seeming passivity or what
some critics have described as her “impotence,”
66
Fanny embodies good sense and emits
an incredible amount of narrative force.
67

Only in volume three, nine years after we first meet Fanny, will we finally get to
see where this “health sense” comes from. Like her entrance into Mansfield, her return to
Portsmouth is imagined as a “medicinal project” (305). Sir Thomas hopes that sending
her away from her upper-middle class environs will “cure” her “diseased” understanding
and make her appreciate Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal. What we find when we
arrive at Portsmouth is a house full of unruly children, ill-trained servants, and greasy
dishes. As the narrator explains, “[i]t was an abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety”
(322). Over three hundred pages after our initial introduction to the Price family, we feel
for the first time the burden that nine pregnancies and “a husband disabled for active
service” must be (6). We meet a drunken father who fails to notice his daughter, and a
mother too busy with her eight other children to be more than merely “not unkind” (323).
The narrator shifts allegiances here, for at the end of the opening chapter of volume one,
we are encouraged to sympathize with the “Poor woman!” who just wants her children to

66
For a discussion of Fanny’s impotence in this scene, see Peter Gardside and Elizabeth McDonald’s
"Evangelicalism and Mansfield Park." Trivium. 10 (1975): 34-50.

67
As Fanny’s feelings for Edmund progress, we can see even more of this restrained passion. This is
particularly true in the theatricals, when her constant refusal to participate and her anticipation of Sir
Thomas’s displeasure annoy, but do not hinder, the rest of the characters from engaging in infectious and
infected behavior. The acting bug starts with an “itch” (102) (as many infections do), and after a slight
incubation period, during which the party argues the merits of various plays and part, it becomes what Tom
will later describe as “the infection” (154). Forced to witness a partial love-making between Edmund and
Mary, Fanny doesn’t do anything, except embody good sense, which is all she has to do and which is what
Edmund will see.

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be well. Fanny’s chief antagonist, Mrs. Norris now appears positively maternal when
compared to Mrs. Price. The narrator describes Fanny’s reaction to her mother in relation
to Mrs. Norris: “Mrs. Norris would have been a more respectable mother of nine
children, on a small income” (323). To be fair to the Prices (although the narrator and
Fanny hardly let us), they are in a tumult over the Thrush leaving the harbor earlier than
expected. “The officers” have been to the house to look for William, adding anxiety to
the already anxious family. Presumably, however, this is precisely the kind of activity
Mrs. Norris was born for—she would have been prepared for this and for any situation.
Mr. Price proves hardly more fit than his wife.
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Not only does he show little
interest in his daughter’s well being and absolutely no interest in Mansfield, but he has no
authority in his home. Fanny’s first point of comparison to Sir Thomas is the fact that all
he can talk about is William going away: “[I]n her uncle’s house there would have been a
consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propriety, and attention
toward every body which there was not here” (317). But more than lacking the ability or
desire to properly direct conversation, Mr. Price has none of the patriarchal control that
Sir Bertram seems to enjoy. His empty threats are, as Fanny notices, “palpably
disregarded” by the noisy young boys, who only quiet down after they appear to have
worn themselves out. Fanny feels the contrast between Mansfield and Portsmouth both
physically and emotionally.

68
In his earlier and much shorter manual, A Guide for Self Preservation, and Parental Affection, or, Plain
Directions for Enabling People to Keep Themselves and Their Children Free From Common Disorders
(1793), Beddoes asserts that “To keep the children strong, and in good plight to stand such complaints
[measles, sore-throat, fever, or any violent disorder], there is but one way. The father must be sober and
industrious; and the mother must learn to manage well. Much may be done by forecraft; a crown laid out
with care will go as far to supply the wants of a family as a pound laid out thoughtlessly” (9).

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Even prior to the lackluster greeting, Fanny appears to be disconnected from
Portsmouth. She initially looks forward to her homecoming, imagining a more
affectionate relationship with her mother than she had experienced in the past, despite
William’s warning that “we seem to want some of your nice ways and orderliness” (308).
Her return to Portsmouth seems less like a return home than the first-time visit we are
making. The narrator describes the route William and Fanny take to get to the house with
none of the nostalgic reminiscences one might expect from someone of Fanny’s
sensibility. After all, she is the one who turns to Cowper when she imagines the prospect
of the groves at Sotherton (a place she has never seen) being “cut down” (48). We hear
no such lamentations or recollections of past memories from Fanny upon her first seeing
Portsmouth after being away for nine years. The narrator tells us that “[Fanny and
William] were rattled into a narrow street, and drawn up before a door of a small house
now inhabited by Mr. Price” (312 emphasis added). This description suggests that Fanny,
like the reader, is seeing the house for the first time. It is not “their” small house or “the”
house but rather “a” house. The “now” adds to the ambiguity, implying at first that Mr.
Price is at that present moment in the house, but also suggesting that Mr. Price and the
Price family formerly inhabited another house—the house Fanny grew up in—and “now”
inhabit this one. Upon entering the house, Fanny confuses the parlor for “a passage-
room” (313), and later Mrs. Price complains about the inconvenience of not having a
“butcher on the street,” noting that “[w]e were better off in our last house” (314). This
“we” does not appear to include Fanny. Her complaint serves as a general comment to
anyone who will listen about her dissatisfaction but also suggests quite simply that Fanny

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does not know this particular street—this is not her home. Austen tells us about Fanny’s
Portsmouth life and through this estrangement and structural disorder. It is as if we need
to see Portsmouth as a new place in order for this return to feel more like an originary
moment, a moment that has “come before” earlier episodes.
This return does not stand in completely for her past. Certainly, a lot has
happened since Fanny last lived at Portsmouth. The babies have grown into adolescents,
two more have been born, and William is no longer her companion. Whether the place to
which Fanny returns is her former home or not, or whether it is more chaotic than it once
was or not, is not at issue. The basic condition—the domestic mismanagement—we
witness during Fanny’s return replicates that which made Fanny’s initial “change of air”
so desirable. And once again, Portsmouth makes Fanny sick, as we are told that “she had
lost ground to her health since her being in Portsmouth” (359). Not only does Fanny
reject Portsmouth, but Portsmouth seems to reject Fanny. The house virtually squeezes
her out, almost suffocating her with “the smallness of the rooms” and “the narrowness of
the passage and staircase” (321). Inactivity and lack of air accelerate her decline, such
that when Henry Crawford comes to visit, he feels compelled to explain to Susan, as if
talking about a cocker spaniel, that “[Fanny] requires constant air and exercise” and that
“she ought never to be long banished from free air, and liberty of the country” (340).
Since this scene takes place after Fanny has been living at Mansfield, we initially read it
as a psychosomatic response to her separation from Edmund and as evidence of her
altered disposition. But Henry’s reference to “free air” recalls Mrs. Price’s initial hope
that Fanny will be “materially better for change of air,” thus collapsing, if only

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momentarily, narrative time and allows us to read the Fanny of volume three as the Fanny
from volume one. This is the very situation which paradoxically fortified her against
Mansfield.
Austen offers a particularly telling story of mismanagement and prevention in this
final volume, one that haunts (has haunted all along) Fanny’s narrative. Shortly after
Fanny came to Mansfield Park, her favorite sister died. Austen withholds the news of
Mary Price’s death until we are in Portsmouth and see the conditions under which the
sister lived. We never get to witness Fanny’s response, learning only during her return to
Portsmouth that when she found out, she “had for a short time been quite afflicted” (320).
We can read Fanny’s sorrow back into the narrative, speculating that it occurred
somewhere between Mrs. Norris’ haranguing, Maria’s and Julia’s teasing, and Edmund’s
care. At the same time, Mrs. Price’s wish that her children might be “materially better”
becomes more firmly grounded in bodily health and prevention as the antidote for this
situation.
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Fanny’s move to Mansfield—the “change of air”— may have prevented her
own death. The change of space—the movement from Mansfield Park to Portsmouth—
allows Austen to compress time and revise our imperfect knowledge about Fanny’s early
life, so that we can see and feel what prevention means. By presenting the Portsmouth
episode as both Fanny’s past and potential future, Austen asks us to imagine,
simultaneously, what was and what might be. Fanny’s plot and her perspective

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Physical health and material health are, no doubt, combined here. The correlation between poverty and
mortality is obvious. However, in the Portsmouth episode, we are not lead to believe that Fanny’s puniness
and her sister’s death are related to their financial or social status. Rather, they seem to relate more to
mismanagement and bad home economics. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth suggests
as much, noting that “what is disclosed is not so much a social condition that has been economically
determined as a social order that has stemmed from factors other than economic, however much it is
aggravated by these . . .” (77).

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demonstrate (on two different levels) the kind of imaginative thinking that prevention
demands of its readers. That is, her return to Portsmouth, which functions as a look to the
past and the future, enacts structurally, what her relationship to Edmund and her role in
the narrative signify thematically.
It is this kind of thinking that we can apply to her attachment to Edmund and to
her observations of his relationship with Mary Crawford. After their walk in the
Sotherton woods, Edmund and Mary seem to be the main characters in Fanny’s
prevention narrative. Edmund is headed down a slippery path that nobody has taught him
to traverse. He has been mesmerized by Mary’s manipulative ways—enough to make
him partake in the “acting scheme” he initially condemned (128). But Fanny has been
watching and, in a sense, narrating for us, the danger that awaits him if he were to marry
a woman who has no desire to be a clergyman’s wife. When Edmund finally realizes that
the woman he courted was not “Miss Crawford” but only a “creature of [his] own
imagination” (378) we sense some of what has been prevented. Even this change,
however, reflects minimal growth. His “impulse . . . to resist” Mary’s “saucy playful
smile” is slightly contaminated by his admission that he “sometimes—for a moment—
regretted that [he] did not go back” to Mary (379). For even though he has witnessed her
deception, he still fantasizes about “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen
into good hands earlier.” Here, Edmund puts a preventionist ethic to potentially
dangerous use, imagining Mary as something she is not and cannot become, turning her
into the woman he would have married. Mary is a cautionary wretch, and Fanny puts an
end to Edmund’s revisionist fantasy by “adding to his knowledge of [Mary’s] real

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character.” She explains to him that Tom’s ill health and thus the potential for Edmund
(as the younger son) to be heir were quite appealing to Mary (379). Austen reveals
Edmund’s response to this “hint” through the narrator’s ambiguous observation that
“[t]his was not an agreeable intimation. Nature resisted it for a while.” But only for a
while. Eventually, outside of the narrative, he grows out of his fantasy—“his vanity was
not of a strength to fight long against reason,” and “exactly at the time when it was quite
natural that it should be so,” he sees as he ought and chooses Fanny (379, 387).

In the end, what has been prevented? The only real illness that matters in the
novel is Tom Bertram’s; its cure rather than its prevention is important to the plot
primarily because his illness brings Fanny back from Portsmouth so, it seems, that she
can expose Mary Crawford.
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But while Tom’s story reflects a discourse of cure, it does
so within a framework of prevention; he, like Maria and Julia and Mary, become
cautionary tales about the dangers of debauchery and of bad parenting. Tom’s illness and
recovery enable him to “bec[o]me what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and
quite, not merely living for himself” (381); Maria must be sacrificed to the story of
prevention, while her sister, though initially wretched, gets a reprieve. The narrator tells
us, Sir Thomas finally becomes “conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent [and]
was the longest to suffer” (380). Only in hindsight—and because he lacked the
foresight—does he realize what he “ought not to have” done (380). But he quickly

70
John Wiltshire suggests, too, that the illness brings Tom and Fanny closer together. Both are away from
home, yearning to come back: “Fanny brought so low by anxiety and loneliness at Portsmouth, Tom by
illness and the desertion of his friends at Newmarket, The pair are linked too by the way Fanny’s response
to the news of Maria’s adultery replicates the symptoms of his fever” (105).

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comforts himself with the notion that his own daughters’ “real dispositions were
unknown to him” (381). They had been spoiled by Mrs. Norris and ignored by himself,
yet he refuses to take fully the blame for their “real disposition,” reasoning that there was
something inherent or congenital, “something . . . wanting within” (382 emphasis
original). And presumably no amount of proper management or inoculation could
counteract that simple medical fact.
But the novel does not spend much time worrying over these obvious prevention
tales. It has been rather more interested in what will become of Edmund. But can we say
that he has been Edmund has been inoculated or has he merely been “cure[d]” of what the
narrator calls “unconquerable passion” (387)? After all, the Crawfords have been
described as needing “cure”; Mrs. Grant promises early on that “Mansfield shall cure
[them] both” of their cynical views of marriage, which they seem to have developed as
part of a bad upbringing. And, moreover, because they do not “wan[t] to be cured,”
Mary’s status as potentially infections remains open (40). We might even give Mary
credit for inoculating Edmund—his limited contact with the morally tainted Mary helps
to fortify Edmund against future “disease” and keep him healthy for Fanny. Austen’s
language in the pivotal exchange between Edmund and Fanny—that his “nature” resisted
the truth and that he only recognized Fanny’s worth when it was “natural” for him to do
so—suggests that Edmund was never really in danger, that Fanny’s preventive project
(her presence) helped to preserve Edmund’s naturally healthy disposition and has,
perhaps, protected him from future wretchedness.

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In Edmund’s epiphany about Fanny, Austen implies that Fanny has been his guide
and protector all the while he imagined himself to be hers. The narrator explains that
[w]ith such a regard for her, indeed, as his had long been, a regard
founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness, and
completed by every recommendation of growing worth, what could be
more natural than the change? Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had
been doing ever since her being ten years hold, her mind so great a degree
formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object
to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own
importance with her than any one else at Mansfield . . .. (387)

Edmund’s claim to have been “loving, guiding, and protecting [Fanny]” since she was ten
does not account for the unintentional neglect she suffered at his hands, giving her horse
to Mary or leaving her on the bench at Sotherton. His version of the story is slightly
inaccurate. We know, too, that without Fanny’s “hint,” his nature could not have detected
Mary’s “real character,” it would have only fantasized about her excellence and his loss.
Austen means for us to speculate about what could have been. The narrator states
explicitly that “had [Henry] done as he intended,” he would have won Fanny, and
Edmund would have married Mary. But the narrative has never been interested in curing
Henry Crawford, which is precisely what would happen with that alternate ending. Nor
has it been interested in protecting the other Bertram children, whose stories, as Beddoes
might say, only “pretend to teach people how to restore [health].” Rather, the narrative
has always been concerned with advancing Fanny’s project of prevention, which is to
direct Edmund “on the road to happiness” (388).
If, as I have suggested, prevention asks us continually to imagine what was and
what might be, how, then, can we ever find closure in the present? I return to the
physicians for part of the answer to this question. Buchan has difficulty addressing

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prevention’s narrative constraints about ends. And for all his emphasis on prophylaxis, he
can only conclude his manual by returning to the sickly body in need of some “great
cure.” Beddoes, on the other hand, ends his final installment by explaining that there is no
conclusion. He maintains that “[t]here yet remain many subjects in preventive medicine,”
and goes on to express what we know or hope to be true of our favorite writers—namely,
that they will have more to offer. “I find myself,” he says, “far from spent with the toil,
and I can say with as good a heart as many who have lain by, all the time, in the shade—
‘To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new’” (Essay XI 96). There will always be
something that threatens health. There will always be a story to tell.
Austen provides the rest of the answer to preventative closure, for she does so
well what Beddoes can only describe—she leaves her readers with this sense of the
newness of tomorrow, a kind of opened closure, while still managing, as the narrator of
Mansfield Park states so bluntly, to “restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves,
to tolerable comfort . . .” (380). The curt ending disrupts the kind of tidy “restoration”
generally offered by cure. And what some critics see as an uncharacteristically rushed
conclusion, Tony Tanner sees as purposeful abstention, as a transfer of the “obligation of
the author to the discretion (or fantasy) of the reader”; it becomes an invitation to “write
this part of the novel” (172). Though Tanner is specifically referring to Austen’s refusal
to depict Edmund and Fanny in conjugal bliss or something quite like it—“they are after
all cousins”(173)—I see this gesture toward the development of the reader’s imaginative
capacity as coincident with the project of prevention. For although cures and restorations
are important to narrative, the stories that come before and beyond cure, the ones that

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carry us outside of the crisis-recovery model of narrative provide the central tension that
keeps readers invested in the story.

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Chapter 3: Dickens in Quarantine: Social Theory, Narrative Acts, Little Dorrit

In Chapter Two of Little Dorrit, the novel’s hero, Arthur Clennam, and his friends
are stuck in quarantine, even though they are perfectly healthy. In fact, Mr. Meagles
cannot help but wonder: “What have we ever been in for?” Arthur repeats prevailing
medical knowledge and public health policy, explaining that “we come from the East,
and as the East is the country of the plague—” (30). Described by the narrator as “comely
and healthy,” Mr. Meagles interrupts Arthur and offers his own theory about quarantine:
I have had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a
sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I
came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague
is to give me the plague. And I have had it—and I have got it. (30)

Mr. Meagles’ complaint registers the potential mental, if not physical, trauma inflicted by
quarantine, and yet later in the novel he remembers it not as an insane asylum but as “an
uncommonly pleasant thing”; he even claims that he “often wished [him]self back again”
(209). Like Mr. Meagles, Dickens fluctuates between finding quarantine both medically
absurd and socially valuable. This tension between the medical and the social allows
quarantine to function in the novel not simply as a symbol of reform but as a model of
narrative itself. Quarantine is, for Dickens, not a sign of disease and danger but a
necessary mechanism of social and narrative connection that helps to structure plots and
link characters invisibly to each other.
We are used to seeing Dickens’s novels critique the ills of society. From Jacob’s
Island to Tom-all-Alone’s, from the “vitiated air” of London to the contaminated waters
of the Thames, the city in Dickens’s novels is deadly. Between the 1830s and the 1860s a
series of reports, acts and committees alleged that the places in which people lived—their

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houses, their neighborhoods—were killing them. These environments generated epidemic
diseases before their eyes and under their noses. The most famous of the studies, Edwin
Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Poor (1842), identified a
range of unsanitary conditions—overcrowding, poor ventilation, improper sewage, and
putrefaction—that put everyone in the metropolis, not just those who lived in the affected
area, at risk. As Dickens observes in his 1851 speech to the Metropolitan Sanitary
Association:
That no one can estimate the amount of mischief which is grown in dirt;
that no one can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either in its physical or
its moral results, . . . is now as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane
will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, and that if you
once have a vigorous pestilence raging furiously in Saint Giles’s, no
mortal list of Lady Patronnesses can keep it out of Almack’s. (The
Speeches 128)

Since the physical and social “mischief” emanating from the “dirt” cannot be contained,
it must be prevented. Dickens found the answer, as others did, in sanitation legislation.
He goes on in his speech to credit two important proponents of the “Sanitary Cause,”
“Mr. Edwin Chadwick and Dr. Southwood Smith,” for “strengthening and enlarging [his]
previous imperfect knowledge of this truth” (129).
In fact, Dickens explains in the 1849 Preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, “[i]n all my
writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity of showing the want of sanitary
improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor.” Bleak House (1853) stands out
among his fiction as the quintessential depiction of disease as political protest and

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narrative device.
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When Jo the crossing-sweeper carries an unnamed illness from the
city to the country and transmits it to Esther through her maid Charley, the illness unites
plots as much as it critiques public policy. As critics (and the novel itself) observe, the
spread of disease from London to Bleak House becomes the primary link between classes
and represents the physical and social disease plaguing British society.
72

But within this push for public health reform lies a sense of social and narrative
theory that, at times, bumps up against Dickens’s political views, for what is also
significant about the care Jo receives is the way it registers each character’s personal
response to the sick body. Although the decaying houses of Tom-all-Alone’s, the
decomposing bodies of the burial grounds, and the muddied streets of London are largely
responsible for his illness (in no small part because they represent society’s
inattentiveness to the basic needs of the poor), it is Charley’s and Esther’s direct contact
with Jo that communicates the disease. Yet when Jo comes to Bleak House, nobody,
except for Skimpole, who “retreat[s] . . . to the drawing room,” seems to register this fact
(493). The rest fear for Jo’s well-being and demonstrate their lack of concern about their
own health by bringing him into their home, standing next to him and caressing him,
touching and carrying him. Jarndyce, Esther, Charley and the rest of the servants at Bleak
House seem, despite Skimpole’s prophetic warning, take no precautions against possible
infection. (Ada is significantly absent with a cold). And why should they? Not everyone

71
Mary Burgan uses Bleak House as a “guide” for her discussion of the differences between Victorianist
and Americanist views on disease, noting that “there is nothing like Bleak House in American literature”
(837).

72
In “Bleak House: The Social Pathology of Urban Life,” F.S. Schwarzbach focuses on the meaning of fog
and mud, arguing that to assume “that [they] are symbols of social malaise is to miss the point entirely:
Dickens is pointing to a literal economy of filth and disease that functions . . . as fact to poison the very air
the readers breathe” (95).

110
he comes into contact with becomes ill. Jarndyce willingly and without fear “touch[es]
him and examin[es] his eyes” before he determines to keep him in the “wholesome”
stable loft (493). And Esther finds pleasure in the sight of Jo bundled in the arms of the
servants who carry him to the loft and call him “Old Chap” (496). Esther’s illness, then,
is less a criticism of their irresponsibility than it is, as Laura Fasick points out, “a way to
demonstrate the goodness of those around her.” Disease in Bleak House begins as “a
marker of social wrong,” but when Jo transmits it to Esther, it becomes a way to
recognize “the essential health and worthiness of the smaller society of social
individuals” (Fasick 140). In this way, contagion and quarantine—contact between the
healthy and the sick—becomes a matter of ethical behavior.
Fasick examines the paradox of disease in Bleak House, arguing that sickness
allows individuals to demonstrate that they care, while at the same time it reveals the
carelessness of society. But embedded within this difference is a narrative of another sort,
one that complicates the good/bad, private/public divide. Jo’s infection highlights the
medical and political distinctions between the two dominant modes of disease
transmission—contagion and miasma. Broadly speaking, contagionists asserted that
disease spread from person to person, whether by direct or mediated contact, while
miasmatists argued that the conditions of particular places caused and spread epidemic
disease through the air. Southwood Smith, Dickens’s friend and occasional public health
advisor, outlines the differences between these modes in “Contagion and Sanitary Laws,”
with the express purpose of demonstrating the relevance of miasma to contemporary
debates over epidemic diseases prevention. Contagious diseases, such as small pox,

111
measles, or venereal disease, he explains, “[are] capable of being communicated from
person to person,” while “epidemic” diseases (the term he uses to refer to diseases that
spread miasmically) “prevai[l] through the influence of the atmosphere” (Smith 134-5).
73

Sanitation reform was built on the theory that miasma—the spontaneous generation of
putrid effluvia—transmits disease, and that only a wholesale cleaning up the environment
will prevent it.
Though certainly not opposed to cleanliness, contagionists, on the other hand,
argued that minute particles (“contagia”) caused disease and that contact between people
or affected articles spread it (Rosen, “Disease” 635). The ability to inoculate or purposely
communicate the infecting agent from one person to another (as with small pox) proved
the contagiousness of a disease. Isolation answered the call for prevention; it meant
keeping the sick or those suspected of carrying disease apart from the general, healthy
population. Of course, even contagionists recognized that the air acted as a vehicle for the
spread of disease; if you were close enough to the person, you might not have to touch
him in order to get infected by the emanations from his body. But despite the long-
standing distinction between “contagionists” and “anti- or non-contagionists,” medical
professionals could not convincingly articulate a stable definition of either mode.
Christopher Hamlin points out that “the two terms [contagion and miasma] were
variously and vaguely defined and used . . . Sometimes they were used synonymously
and sometimes they were answers to different questions” (60-61). A more moderate and
some say more popular theory, labeled “limited or contingent contagion” by George

73
Smith acknowledges that etymologically “epidemic” means “generally prevailing” but notes that
medically it has come to mean a class of diseases that follow particular “laws.” He uses it as an antonym
for contagion.

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Rosen, attempted “to conciliate or compromise the miasmatic and contagionist theories”
(Rosen 288).
74
In this view, one that Smith never mentions, the belief was that “infections
were caused by contagion, but only arose if other elements existed such as appropriate
atmospheric conditions” (Kessel 36). Limited contagionists accommodated both views,
but they sided with miasmatists (sanitarians) when it came to preventive measures.
75

While the cultural and medical meanings of all three of these concepts resonate
narratively in Dickens’s fiction, as each version of transmission puts pressure on a
different form of social interaction, what interests me most is the instability and conflict
embedded in the distinctions, particularly the distinction between persons and places,
contact and quarantine. Nobody could explain with any degree of certainty how epidemic
diseases spread. People could see (or smell) that diseases moved but nobody could see
how disease moved. John Snow’s discovery that cholera was transmitted by a
contaminated water supply during the 1854 outbreak would change all of this, but not for
a while. His theory did not curry favor among powerful miasmatists, such as Chadwick,
and, therefore, was not accepted as conclusive until the subsequent epidemic in 1866.
Even then, miasmatists found a way to hold strong to their theory of transmission. Part of
the problem is that Snow did not know precisely what caused the contamination. As
Steven Johnson explains in The Ghost Map (2006),

74
Margaret Pelling notes that both contagionists and anti-contagionists, “although influential, were . . . very
much in the minority. . . . The bulk of contemporary opinion preferred to consider each disease in the
‘epidemic, endemic and contagious’ category individually and specifically, and to see ‘doubtful’ diseases
[plague, yellow fever, continued fever, influenza, and cholera] as contingently contagious” (“Meaning of
Contagion” 26).

75
Rosen explains that limited contagionists “tended to concentrate on cleaning up the environment and
providing proper drainage, rather than on isolation or quarantine procedures” (“Disease” 636).

113
Cholera, Snow argued, was caused by some as-yet-unidentified agent that
victims ingested, either through direct contact with the waste matter of
other sufferers, or, more likely through drinking water that had been
contaminated with that waste. Cholera was contagious, yes, but not in the
way small pox was contagious. Sanitary conditions were crucial to
fighting disease, but foul air had nothing to do with its transmission. (71-
72)

Johnson’s study demonstrates that Snow’s works on public health benefited from the
sociablity of the curate, Henry Whitehead, whose “local knowledge” (173) of the people
and their interactions would aid Snow’s developing theory. Whitehead located the “index
case” (the initial cause of the infection), which allowed Snow determine the route of
transmission through the Broad Street pump. But until bacteriology was fully accepted,
which would not happen until the end of the century, the best anyone could do was to
think in terms of people and places and to understand prevention as isolation or
sanitation.
That Dickens is not bound by the distinctions between these theories (contagion
and miasma or contingent contagion) is evident. That he is invested in the uncertainty of
these terms and of modes of transmission is, perhaps, less so. For although Dickens
publicly supported the sanitary movement and appeared to subscribe whole-heartedly to
miasma theory, he was continually drawn, at least in his fiction, to the narrative value of
contagion, of people in contact, within a sanitary economy. We see this fissure in the key
moment of transmission between Jo and Esther in Bleak House. Dickens adopts a
contagionist stance in a novel famous for its miasmic setting, invoking but then
ameliorating the Skimpolean anxiety that such contact produces. Esther’s quick thinking
contains the disease so that it does not have a chance to spread beyond her cordon

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sanitaire. This shift from miasma to contagion and from sanitation (Tom-All-Alone’s) to
quarantine (Esther’s isolation) is both a medical shift but it is also an ethical one, because
it takes our attention away from public response and responsibility and focuses, instead,
on individual connections.
76

If Bleak House is mostly a miasmatist novel, then Little Dorrit, with its quarantine
settings, is primarily a contagionist one. The set of laws and theories that quarantine
enacts, the imaginative demands it makes on “readers” in terms of bringing bodies
together and forcing them apart, initiates character interaction and (re)orders narrative
movement in a way that sanitation alone, with its emphasis on places, cannot. Disease in
Dickens and in the Victorian novel functions, then, not only as social or political protest
but as a form of narrative transmission. Articulated by Smith and others in terms of
opposing preventive measures (sanitation v. quarantine), disease transmission in fact
becomes the narrative’s animating force. That is, the movement between theories of
transmission (contagion vs miasma) and theories of prevention (quarantine vs sanitation)
govern characters' connectedness and arrange the proliferation of plots in the novel,
because, for Dickens, these very different models were not in hopeless conflict but in
productive and narratively generative tension.
Set during the mid-1820s and published in the late 1850s, Little Dorrit straddles
the high period of sanitary and quarantine legislation, and Mr. Meagles’s lament about
being “shut up” and Arthur’s response that they come from the East contribute to this

76
Margaret Pelling asserts that “[i]deas of contagion are [and had always been] inseparable from notions of
individual morality, social responsibility, and collective action. This is shown strikingly in response of
measures of isolation and quarantine, and the public health movements subsequent to industrialization”
(“Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity” 310).

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ongoing debate. But while all of Dickens’s novels are invested in the discourse of public
health, Little Dorrit, a novel that engages directly with the language of disease and
prevention—beginning with a healthy hero in quarantine and ending with his sickness in
prison—is curiously free of epidemic disease. To be sure, there are plenty of sick
characters in the novel, and many more whose mental suffering manifests somatically,
but the fear of contagion is not, as it is in Bleak House, predominantly a literal and public
one. The title of Chapter 8 in Book II, which promises to depict “The Progress of an
Epidemic,”
77
refers to speculation-mania and Merdle’s fraudulent behavior. But despite
the fact that the plague was thought, as Southwood Smith’s first Report on Quarantine
(1849)
78
notes, to be contagious—a problem of individual, personal contact
79
—Dickens
disconnects his metaphor from the body. This is a contagion of a different sort:
[T]hat such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the
Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no
pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest of health,
and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as

77
The footnote in the Penguin Classics edition for the chapter title explains that “Dickens’s readers would
no doubt have recalled the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854; also the high mortality rate from smallpox
. . .” (970). Cholera and smallpox were entirely different forms of “epidemic” disease. Most believed that
cholera was caused and spread by the environment. Smallpox, thanks in large part to Jenner, was known to
be spread by direct contact. The elision of this distinction in the footnote is similar to the elision that
Dickens makes here. I do not see Dickens as conflating the ideas of disease transmission but rather shifting
between the two. The effect of this slippage is to alternate between persons and places, between
individual/private and social/public responsibility at key moments in the narrative. At times the two
overlap, one contributes to or exacerbates the other, but they are generally not the same.

78
While the Report on Quarantine was written by the General Board of Health and signed by Carlisle,
Ashley, Edwin Chadwick, and T. Southwood Smith, Margaret Pelling notes that “contemporary admirers
were inclined to make Smith responsible for the General Board of Health’s cholera and quarantine reports”
(Cholera 10 fn 3). In the introduction to Smith’s “Epidemics Considered with Relation to Their Common
Nature,” the publisher lauds Smith’s work by quoting Dean Peacock, who claims that “[i]f Dr. S. Smith . . .
had no other claims on the lasting gratitude of the nation, I would refer to his reports on quarantine, as quite
sufficient to establish them” (iii).

79
Contagionists also believed that contact with things, particularly fabrics, could transmit disease. See
O’Connor for a discussion of infectious disease and material culture (33-34). I am focusing on person to
person because that is what Dickens focuses on. He does not seem as interested in infected objects.

116
firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an
atmosphere. (Little Dorrit 597)

The narrator refers only to the bodies of the formerly healthy who succumb to disease,
and although “the contagion,” in this case, originates in Merdle it is not spread by contact
with his person.
80
Rather, it is “the name of Merdle” that “fill[s] the air” and transmits the
disease. Dickens invokes “an atmosphere” here not so much as an endorsement of
miasma theory but as a simile to describe the ubiquity of “disease.” This comparison cuts
two ways. The narrator’s description implies that “people in the soundest health” and “we
human creatures” are victims of the Plague, that we have no control over the will of this
disembodied Plague. But the logic of the simile—just as humans must breathe, disease
“will spread”—also equates human with disease, thus making disease not only inevitable
but a necessary part of healthy society.
The infection becomes increasingly embodied, however, as the narrator draws the
reader’s attention from the spread of disease to its prevention. We are assured that it
would be “a blessing beyond appreciation . . . if the tainted, in whose weakness or
wickedness these virulent disorders are bred, could be instantly seized and placed in close
confinement (not to say summarily smothered) before the poison is communicable”
(597). No longer are we in the world of sanitary concerns. Seizure, confinement, and
extermination of individuals—“the tainted”—become the ideal, even divine, hope for
stopping transmission. Quarantine, as Esther Summerson demonstrates quite
successfully, blocks the communication of disease. Ada is spared, we assume, because
Esther refuses contact. Southwood Smith and the public-speaking Dickens, on the other

80
The article “the” in front of contagion suggests that Dickens is referring to the actual poison and not the
theory of transmission. It is what we would now refer to as the germ or bacteria.

117
hand, seem to disagree, arguing that prevention has less to do with quarantine and contact
between people than with proper management of the households and neighborhoods they
inhabit. Here, in Little Dorrit, the narrator is not concerned with cure or even with rooting
out the cause all together. Rather, the language seems resigned to the necessity of these
“virulent disorders” and hopeful about blocking their transmission.
Quarantine, in this instance, is figured as a prison designed to protect the healthy
from the sick, the good from the bad. As the title (“Little Dorrit: The Prison and the
Critics”) of Philip Collins’ essay for the Times Literary Supplement implies, prisons are
somewhat of a cottage industry in early Dickens scholarship, particularly when it comes
to Little Dorrit.
81
Lionel Trilling suggests that “the subject of Little Dorrit is borne in
upon us by the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book, which is the prison” (578). To
say, then, that quarantine—or any other version of confinement that permeate the novel—
is a prison is not to say much. Indeed, in an early review of the first number of the novel,
Hepworth Dixon, the first to remark on the importance of the prison, observes that
quarantine is “a prison of another, and scarcely more agreeable, kind.” What is significant
and worth remark, however, is that in Dixon’s admission of the similarities between
prison and quarantine he qualifies this relationship by explaining: “[i]n a prison, you
may, perhaps, catch a fever and die. In quarantine you are pretty certain to do so” (1394).
Dixon’s claim, while an exaggeration and, no doubt, a jab at quarantine laws, highlights
disease as the defining factor, the common threat, and thus positions the medical model

81
Philip Collins’s “Little Dorrit: The Prison and the Critics” TLS April 18,1980 traces the critical interest
in prison imagery in Dickens scholarship.

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and quarantine as the controlling image. Prison becomes an extension of quarantine and
not the reverse.
82
The narrative spins out from quarantine.
In order to understand how quarantine shapes Arthur’s story, and Dickens’s sense
of narrative, we must look briefly at the problems it posed for Smith. In the Report on
Quarantine, a document intended to do away with quarantine laws, Smith argues that if
quarantine is necessary, sanitary reform is not and any preventive that imagines
contagion as the primary cause of epidemic disease is no preventive at all. For Smith, “To
assume the propagation by touch, whether by the person or of the infected articles, and to
overlook that by corruption of the air, is at once to increase the real danger, from
exposure to noxious effluvia, and to divert attention from the true means of remedy and
prevention” (47). “Air” not “touch” is responsible for the spread of disease and thus
sanitary reform not quarantine is the only “true” form of prevention. In a lecture
delivered to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1855 entitled “Epidemics
Considered with Relation to Their Common Nature,” Smith explains that epidemics

82
In “Little Dorrit and the Disease of Modern Life” (1970), Edwin Barrett comments on the relationship
between quarantine and prison, particularly as the settings for the first two chapters of the novel. He
explains that “[Dickens] ordered his larger vision, his dominant imagery, and his language on the new
theory of infection he had learned from sanitary reformers and on the inferences about psychological,
moral, social, and spiritual malady which he drew from that theory” (200). The important point about
prison, then, for Barrett is its link to “jail fever” and to the sanitarian theory of miasma. Barrett notes that
the opening chapter of Little Dorrit, “full of sick fetor and choking,” helps to establish miasma as the
controlling image. But instead of exploring how quarantine and contagion work in contrast to sanitation
and miasma, Barrett moves rather quickly through the quarantine chapter in order to shift from the
description of “Marseilles [as] a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted” to the description of London as
“gloomy, close, and stale” (qtd. in Barrett 202). “The second chapter” of Book I, he explains, “takes the
reader [from the criminal prison] into the quarantine barracks on the other side of the port; and, when the
British travelers arrive at home, it is a Sunday evening of brooding heat in the capital of Christendom”
(202). For Barrett, the narrative moves through quarantine, it seems, only to get the travelers home.
Significantly, and despite Mr. Meagles’s claim that they have been “jail-birds,” the taint or miasma does
not follow the reader into quarantine, and so neither does Barrett. Because quarantine is a world governed
by contagion, it conflicts with the aims of sanitarians and its presence in the narrative, as in medical fact,
thus challenges how we read miasma in particular and the function of disease transmission more generally.

119
occur in particular atmospheres and under particular environmental conditions, such as
poor ventilation, cesspools, overcrowding and bad water. Quoting Doctor William
Fergusson at length, Smith emphasizes that “Places, not persons, constitute the rule of its
[epidemic disease’s] existence. Places, not persons, comprehend the whole history, the
etiology of the disease. Places, not persons!” (30). Fergusson is speaking in particular of
Yellow Fever in Africa, but by invoking this maxim (“places, not persons”), Smith
attempts to allay anxieties about bodies and individuals and reinforce the miasmatist view
that environment and atmosphere are to blame.
83
Framed in this way, one may fear
quarantine without needing to fear contact with people—bodies become innocent, since
“places, not persons” are to blame, and quarantine (the fear of touch) is, by extension,
equally absurd. Quarantine is dangerous, Smith argues, because it reproduces the
conditions— overcrowding, stagnant air, filth—that cause and spread epidemic; the
“congregation and confinement [in quarantine] of the sick and of those who . . . are
suspected to have in them the seeds of disease . . . produces the very calamity it
endeavours to prevent” (Smith 61). Such an argument suggests that quarantine is a self-
sustaining institution, creating the situation that it is designed to guard against. But this is
only a hypothetical concern, as the bulk of the evidence submitted in the Report implies
one of two things: 1) People do not spread disease in quarantine or 2) If they do, it is the
miasmatic environment and lack of prompt care that is to blame.

83
Hamlin claims that Southwood Smith erases the body, arguing that “[i]n Smith’s poison-centered view of
disease, we lose that subjective authority. No longer is the ill person a self, cultivating a constitution with
the advice of a helpful healer, but only a sort of barograph displaying contact with decomposing matter”
(119).

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For Smith, contagion, a theory that holds contact between people responsible for
the spread of epidemic disease, not only defies experience but exists only as a fiction.
When he goes on to illustrate his conviction, he asks, as a novelist might, for his readers
to imagine what for him and other sanitationists is purely fictional. He points out, in a
hypothetical example, that the theory of contagion (and quarantine) assumes that,
no matter how pure the air, no matter what the condition of the fever ward, if the
physician only feels the pulse of the patient, or touches him with the sleeve of his
coat, though he may not catch the disease himself, he may communicate it by a
shake of the hand to the next friend he meets; or that friend, without catching it
himself, may give it to another . . . (Report 47)
84

This transmission narrative features a doctor-hero who must be fearful of caring for his
patient, as the basic job of taking a pulse or a chance brush of the sleeve could unleash an
epidemic. The patient’s body may be the host of the disease, but the physician is
responsible for spreading the disease through the most basic forms of sociable human
interaction: shaking hands with a friend. The fallout from contagion—the inability to
touch each other, to touch a friend—becomes unimaginable to Smith.
85
He portrays this
structure of contact as both something that we should fear but also as something that does
not exist. An article in Fraser’s Magazine (January 1853) criticizes Smith’s Report and
supports quarantine by reinforcing the focus of potential danger on physical contact:
“whatever its [quarantine’s] defects, barbarities, and abuses, it avowedly prevents the one
medium of communication (disputed, if you will) namely, touch” (“Quarantine” 82).

84
In the Second Report on Quarantine (1853), Smith reaffirms his position but qualifies his claims about
contagion. He explains that the differences between contagion and miasma do not matter—the important
point is that quarantine cannot prevent either.

85
In the “Contagion and Sanitary Laws,” Smith goes so far as to claim that “Epidemic disease is not
contagious because the human race continues to exist” (147).

121
While Smith’s narrative does not take place in quarantine, it applies to the quarantine
experience. Rhetorically, quarantine becomes a concentrated version of contact, a way
not to prevent touch but to promote it. Dickens doesn’t agree with Smith in order simply
to promote a political agenda; he is rather more drawn to the terrifying story—the
fiction—Smith must tell about the end of physical contact, and the end of the human race.
In constructing this alarmist, absurdist story, Smith suggests exactly where the power of
contagion resides for Dickens, who, more than anything else in Little Dorrit, must create
a world of alluring, perilous, socially hopeful contact—and where contact is imagined,
quarantine (and disease) lurks. By transforming quarantine from a medical reality into a
sensational fiction, Smith (unwittingly) depicts the narrative possibilities of quarantine
and contagion that become so useful to Dickens.
Dickens’s own experience in quarantine published in Pictures from Italy (1844)
five years before Smith’s first Report anticipates the contact and sociability we find in
Little Dorrit. Here, quarantine is much less dangerous and certainly less over-determined
than Smith’s, but it is similarly invested in “touch.” Though initially distraught about
being detained when there was “nothing whatever the matter all the time” (PI 94),
Dickens makes the most of his isolation by hosting an impromptu party.
86
When
Dickens’s tour guide procures (of his own volition) “a wicker basket, folded in linen
cloth; . . .[with] two great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some salt fish chopped with
garlic, a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so peaches, and a few other trifles, . . . the whole

86
Trey Phillpots’s note on Dickens’s experience in quarantine is misleading. In his Companion to Little
Dorrit, he explains that in Pictures from Italy, “Dickens describes the heat and discomfort of his own one-
day experience” (45). The bulk of Dickens’s description, however, makes quarantine seem rather
enjoyable. This makes more sense when read in terms of Little Dorrit.

122
party on board were made merry . . .” (95). Two figures in particular stand out in
Dickens’s account of the quarantine party: the “little loquacious Frenchman,” “who had
got drunk in five minutes,” and the Cappuccino Friar, “who had taken everybody’s fancy
mightily and was one of the best friars in the world” (95). Dickens becomes the
omniscient narrator, who observes and comments on these two men. He tells his readers
that the Frenchman took an especial interest in the Friar, as “a mouse might bestow on a
lion,” “occasionally [rising] on tiptoe to slap the Friar on the back” (96). Though the
Friar is not as invested in the friendship as the Frenchman, he fully embraces the
sociability of the moment—“laughing lustily from pure good-humour” (96).
The “congregation and confinement” that define quarantine as dangerous for
Smith make it bearable and even enjoyable for Dickens. Isolation and closeness foster not
disease and death but community, connectedness, and narrative. This description of
quarantine takes up only a few pages of Dickens’s travel narrative. Rather than speak to
the politics of quarantine, he focuses on two characters whose relationship captures his
imagination and expresses the slap-on-the-back sociability that makes contagion and, by
extension, quarantine, medically dangerous yet socially and narratively desirable. In the
end, the friar and the Frenchman go their separate ways, but the moment of sociability
lives on in Dickens’s narrative. The social, which is to say the human, aspect of
contagion displaces if only momentarily the dominance of miasma in Dickens’s thinking.
Contagion is human contact.
In Little Dorrit, Dickens combines the sociability he witnessed on the boat with
the politics of public health prevention he gets from Smith, and this is how Dickens

123
propels the hero’s journey. Mr. Meagles’s earlier claim that the real danger and fear
associated with quarantine is “the suspicion of the thing” draws the same conclusion
(with different evidence) that Smith does, implying that far from preventing anything,
quarantine proliferates or exacerbates the threat.
87
By drawing a parallel between physical
and mental contact, between touch and suspicion, Dickens expands the parameters of
what quarantine can do and how contagion functions. Here, thought, not just touch,
transmits disease. And as the narrative unfolds, suspicion as well as touch becomes a
significant form of contact and connection among characters; it motivates Arthur, terrifies
Affrey, and undoes Mr. Dorrit. At this point in the narrative, suspicion (not just
contagion) is a sign of the plague and induces Meagles’s claim: “I have had it—and I
have got it,” which of course, he has not.
But if Mr. Meagles has not “got” the plague from quarantine, then what has he
got? The persistent assumption that one is ill and the constant scrutiny to determine
whether or not one will become ill take their toll. Meagles imagines himself to be the
evidence for the plague, arguing that the “fellows” can only “mak[e] out their case” for
declaring quarantine if they see signs of disease. To prove himself innocent, Meagles
turns to his daughter, asking Arthur, “simply as between man and man, you know, DID
you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in quarantine?” (31). We are only
left to assume the Mr. Meagles refers to her beauty, purity, and good manners as
somehow immune or impermeable and thus incapable of becoming a threat. By

87
Proponents of quarantine recognized the danger of this type of contact, noting that the potential collateral
damage caused by isolating the healthy with the sick is a small price to pay for protecting the public at
large. As the A.T. Thomson explains in The Lancet, “there can only be one sentiment respecting the
hardship which [quarantine laws] impose upon the uninfected coming from infected places; but the good of
the few must yield to the benefit of the many” (72).

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presenting Pet in this way, Mr. Meagles asks Arthur to become an officer of health and
deem her healthy, non-threatening, and beyond suspicion. It gives Arthur permission to
admire Pet and to look at her body. All Arthur can do when faced with this request is
reply that Pet has “ma[de] even quarantine enjoyable” (31). Meagles reappropriates
suspicion, transforming it from a mental to an ocular operation, and draws on consensus
(agreement that Pet is not a threat) to develop his connection with Arthur. Arthur
continues to admire Pet even after she leaves the room. Mr. Meagles can only draw him
back into conversation by “tapp[ing] him on the arm” (31), a physical reminder of their
relationship. This detour into Pet’s presumed health, which we learn is not quite the
whole story, fails to explain what Mr. Meagles has “got.” It does, however, begin to
direct our attention to what Arthur has “got” and how we might read the quarantine
experience as central to his health and his story.
The word “contagion,” which is etymologically related to “contact,” as both
derive from con: together and tangĕre: to touch, signifies not simply the transmission of
disease but the process of transmission more generally. Thomas Carlyle draws on this
generative sense of contagion in Past and Present (1843) when he describes his vision for
reform as one that must “radiate outwards [from home], irrepressible, into all that we
touch and handle, speak and work; kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion,
spreading in geometric ratio, far and wide—doing good only, wheresoever it spreads, and
not evil” (39). Contagion in this scenario equals social health and the “incalculable” that
Carlyle embraces is what Smith fears. To be sure, Carlyle and Smith use contagion
differently, one metaphorically and the other medically, but both refer to a process of

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infinite connectivity that only the concept of contagion represents, particularly at this
early stage in the development of public health.
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Carlyle draws on disease metaphors in
order to represent England as a body in need of cure, but he transforms contagion in a
way that echoes Smith’s hypothetical scenario. Both Carlyle and Smith imagine
contagion in terms of proliferation, invisibility and connection. Carlyle draws on the
moral aspect of this type of contact, while Smith presents it as something that if it were to
spread epidemic disease (which it does not) would be too horrible to consider. Dickens
adopts a middle ground or rather he adopts both extremes, and because Smith has
evacuated quarantine of its ability to stop contagion from spreading, Dickens can use it as
a metonym for community and a metaphor for narrative. Quarantine becomes a space in
which contagion refers to an active or generative form of contact that is potentially both
good and bad, one that connects us to each other. Dickens recasts isolation and contagion
as socially and narratively desirable.
What Arthur (and Mr. Meagles) “get” in quarantine, then, is not disease but
community and a place in the narrative,
89
for although the two men meet while touring
the East, it is not until quarantine that they cultivate their friendship. It is here, during
their final hours in the barracks, that Arthur first connects his story to someone else. He
takes the opportunity to solidify his relationship with Mr. Meagles by asking, “in no

88
Carlyle draws on literal contagion later in Past and Present when he presents the story of an Irish widow
suffering from typhus whom nobody will help. “Nothing is left,” he argues, “but that she prove her
sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof
that she was flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living may lay it to heart” (151).

89
Chapter One, which is set in a Marseilles prison, sets up a similar narrative of transmission in that Rigaud
tells his story to John Baptist. This narrative transmits in one direction—Rigaud tells his story to Baptist—
and therefore does not constitute the kind of connectedness and sociability we see between Arthur and Mr.
Meagles.

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impertinent curiosity,” if Pet has any siblings. He goes on to explain, “I have had so
much pleasure in your society, [and] may never in this labyrinth of a world exchange a
quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an accurate remembrance of you and
yours” (33-34). Arthur’s query exposes the Meagles’ unhealthy family history. Not only
has Pet’s twin sister died as a child from an unnamed malady, but Pet continues to suffer
from moderate ill health. Mr. Meagles explains that they “have been advised more than
once when [Pet] has been a little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we
could—especially at about this time of her life—and to keep her amused” (34). At twenty
years old, an unmarried young woman in the nineteenth century would be particularly
vulnerable to the diagnosis of hysteria. We later learn that during one of these earlier trips
for Pet’s health and amusement, she “catches” what for Meagles is the worst contagion of
all—a profligate husband, Henry Gowan. Henry’s mother explains to Arthur that the
Meagles “strain[ed] every nerve to catch him” for their daughter. Arthur assures her that
quite the opposite is true and that Mr. Meagles would like nothing better than to prevent
Pet from catching anything of the sort. Henry and Pet met in Rome several years before
the novel’s beginning, and the Meagles have been trying to cure Pet ever since. In fact,
when we meet the Meagles in quarantine, they have been traveling as a means of
isolating Pet from Henry. Pet “had been taken away to be out of his reach” (701). It is, of
course, too late.
The story Meagles tells about his daughters permits Arthur to tell the story of his
own diseased childhood. Arthur’s misery is different in kind rather than degree. It is not
until much later, as the mysteries of Little Dorrit are resolved, that we learn the death

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haunting his family history is that of his biological mother, a fact Arthur seems never to
learn. He explains to Mr. Meagles that he is “the son . . . of a hard father and mother. . . .
the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything: for whom what
could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence” (35). This description of
parental feeling contrasts with the story we have just heard from Mr. Meagles, in which
even the absence of a child through death does not lessen her value or her existence.
Arthur goes on to describe the “gloom[iness]” of his parents’ religious practices,” which
makes Mr. Meagles “very uncomfortable” (35). It seems that quarantine has done its job
after all; the sickness that plagues both of these physically healthy families expresses
itself after enough time in sequestration. Arthur and Meagles connect their stories of sad
children—one dead and one unloved. If, as Hilary Schor argues, “everything that follows
from the novel follows from Arthur’s attempt to connect his story to Amy’s Dorrit’s”(9),
then Arthur, it seems, learns how to connect in quarantine with Mr. Meagles.
The paradox of quarantine—keeping people apart (the healthy from the sick),
while forcing them into even closer and potentially dangerous contact—structures
Arthur’s progress and interactions throughout the novel. We see this more pointedly
when, in “Progress of an Epidemic,” Pancks, like Meagles, is quarantined with Arthur.
This scene of sociability features the dangerous side of social contact. Arthur invites
Pancks to join him for dinner because he is lonely and depressed. In his words, he is
“weary and out of sorts” (606); the longstanding struggle with the Circumlocution Office
on Doyce’s behalf and his recent encounter with Rigaud at his mother’s house weighed
“heavy on his lonely mind” and, by his own admission, he needs a trusted friend in whom

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he can confide (610). This affection, the narrator reminds us, developed as a result of
Pancks’s role in restoring Little Dorrit to what Clennam believes to be her rightful
station. After their dinner, Arthur offers Pancks his Eastern pipe, and the two friends
discuss the wisdom of investing with Merdle. Once Pancks assures Clennam that the
investments are “safe and genuine,” he “[takes] as long a pull as his lungs would permit
at his Eastern pipe, and look[s] sagaciously and steadily at Clennam while inhaling and
exhaling too.” The narrator goes on to explain with some specificity that “[i]n those
moments, Mr Pancks began to give out the dangerous infection with which he was laden.
It is the manner of communicating these diseases; it is the subtle way in which they go
about” (609). The dangerous infection is identified with the East and with person to
person contact. But, here, it is the air rather than touch (the smoke, the conversation, the
trust) that provides the infection with its path. The pipe functions not simply as a symbol
of foreign contamination; it represents male intimacy, comfort, and support, something
the novel has endorsed throughout, despite its emphasis on Amy Dorrit’s superior
companionability.
Instead of condemning Arthur’s contagious friendship by depicting Pancks as a
“breeder” of disease or an extension of Merdle, Dickens figures both men as victims,
bound together by their circumstances and surroundings. The narrator argues that
although the disease originated with “weakness and wickedness,” it is not always
transmitted by this same method:
Of whom Mr Pancks had taken the prevalent disease, he could no more
have told than if he had unconsciously taken a fever. Bred at first, as many
physical diseases are, in the wickedness of men, and then disseminated in
their ignorance, these epidemics, after a period, get communicated to

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many sufferers who are neither ignorant nor wicked. Mr Pancks might, or
might not, have caught the illness himself from a subject of this class; but,
in this category he appeared before Clennam, and the infection he threw
off was all the more virulent. (609-610).

Dickens relies not so much on what is known about the transmission of epidemic disease
but what is not known. The uncertainty about origins and etiology seem to make
prevention a near impossibility; the recommended confinement and smothering we get at
the beginning of the chapter loses some of its force. We do not know who (what “class”
of person) originally infected Pancks. We do know that he is responsible for
“communicating” it to Clennam, and that the scene of contagion relies on the individual,
a fact that will weigh heavily on Pancks’s heart and mind by the end of the novel. This
description both accuses and exonerates Pancks; he is “neither ignorant nor wicked” and
this, it seems, makes the infection more dangerous than it might otherwise have been.
The only way to have protected Arthur, particularly in this vulnerable state, would have
been to limit his personal contact with Pancks, and thus subtract from his already limited
domestic circle.
A newly infected Arthur moves from the world of sociable contact into the world
of public health. The day after Pancks transmits his contagion, Arthur “observed anew
that wherever he went, he saw, or heard, or touched, the celebrated name of Merdle; he
found it difficult to remain at his desk a couple of hours, without having it presented to
one of his bodily senses through some agency or other” (612). The disease envelopes his
body, and the chapter concludes as it began, as a medical guide of disease diagnosis:
“such symptoms,” the narrator explains, “when a disease of the kind is rife, are usually
signs of sickening” (613). This sickening, though, is a sign of health, for the narrative

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needs for him to become ill so that Amy can care for him, so that he can get the proper
connection that he has needed (been searching for) all along.
This version of contagion and quarantine does not and cannot apply to everyone
in the novel. Dickens also uses it to represent total blockage, taking quarantine to its
logical conclusion by demonstrating what happens when we refuse contact altogether.
We see this in the odd way that Dickens represents the isolated Miss Wade, who
functions as quarantine within quarantine and embodies the kind of extremist scenario
that Smith offers. As if following strict laws of contagion, Miss Wade isolates herself and
refuses or at least resists touch—the “one medium of communication” that quarantine is
designed to prevent. When Pet Meagles attempts to cultivate a relationship with Miss
Wade, offering her father’s assistance and “timidly touching her hand,” Miss Wade
rejects the offer both verbally and physically; under Pet’s touch, Miss Wade’s hand “lay
impassive on the sofa between them” (39). When Mr. Meagles offers to shake her hand,
the narrator explains, “She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr.
Meagles put out his so straight before her, that she could not pass it. She put hers in it,
and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch” (39). This resistance to touch,
particularly after they have just been released from quarantine, represents a contagionist
ethos, one that interprets contact between “persons” as undesireable.
Mr. Meagles, like Arthur had done earlier, observes to his fellow travellers that
they now that they are out of quarantine they “may never meet again.” Miss Wade
responds with the knowing and enigmatic: “In our course through life, we shall meet the
people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and many strange roads . . .

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and what is set to us to do to them, and what is set to them to do to us, will all be done”
(39).
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Dickens makes the narrative’s anxiety about persons, which has been established
by quarantine, explicit in Miss Wade’s premonitory statement, so much so that the
narrator repeats her observation at the end of the chapter:
And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars,
climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by
land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to
act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the
pilgrimage of life. (43)

Significantly, the narrator’s version emphasizes places (“dusty hills,” “weary plains,”
“land,” and “sea”) over persons (“we restless travellers”), delaying the subject of this
litany until the end of the sentence and the end of the chapter. By placing the weight of
the sentence on “we travellers”—we readers—Dickens underscores his and the novel’s
interest in people (plots) meeting and acting and reacting. Amanda Anderson observes
that this “narrative revision” distances Miss Wade’s “fatalis[m]” and “bitter[ness]” from
the narrator’s and the narrative’s own sense of contact by “stressing the universal weary
struggle of life” (79). As Anderson notes, the narrator presents the “potentially interactive
quality of social encounters” (79). I would add, too, that within the quarantine setting and
in a novel that continually turns to the rhetoric of contagion and epidemic disease, acting
and reacting take on a pathological sense of contact that Miss Wade represents and that
the novel counteracts through Arthur’s story.
The sense of inevitable contact, of doing to each other what is set to do, then, has
less to do with places and everything to do with people. When Miss Wade sees Pet shrink

90
Schor explains that “the narrative’s own metaphor for its activity, one based on roads and prisons, comes
from [Miss Wade]” (129).

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from her vision, for “it implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil,” Miss
Wade reemphasizes her point by speaking directly to Pet: “You may be sure that there are
men and women [who are] already on their road, who have their business with you and
who will do it” (40). By representing contact as a mass of people—“men and women”—
who are on their way, it seems, to trample Pet, Miss Wade implies that there is nothing
anyone can do to stop it. She claims, in fact, that these various, unknown people “may be
coming, for anything you know, or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest
sweepings of this very town” (40). This warning marks a momentary shift into a sanitary
model of transmission, where the people that come to “do evil” must come from
somewhere (“the vilest sweepings”), but the overwhelming sense that, while in
quarantine, Pet is safe from these encounters reinforces Miss Wade’s contagionist
sympathies. For despite her interest in Pet, she has not come to do what she will. Rather,
she has come to observe and to hate from a distance. When Pet asks, “Are you . . .
expecting any one to meet you here, Miss Wade,” Miss Wade responds with a question:
“I? No” (39). By her own philosophy Miss Wade should know to expect someone to meet
her somewhere, but in this instance, her initial refusal to understand Pet’s inquiry (the
“I?” response to a direct address, “Miss Wade” seems excessive) represents her desire to
remain aloof from the party in general and from Pet in particular. We learn that Miss
Wade “had either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest—nobody,
herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which” (36). The narrator repeats this
question just a few pages later: “it would have been as difficult as ever to say, positively,
whether she avoided the rest, or was avoided” (38). Within the context of quarantine,

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avoidance is protection, but the ambiguity invoked by the narrator’s “perhaps” allows us
to question just how much control one has over her own protection.
The possibility of healthy (because totally preventive) isolation that Miss Wade
represents breaks down further, as she replaces her curiosity about Pet with her interest in
“the maid with the curious name” (40). Seeing Tatty in a fit for the third time, Miss Wade
extends a metaphorical helping hand, asking Tatty what is wrong. Like Pet, Tatty is
afraid of Miss Wade, but she is afraid for a very different reason. Tatty identifies Miss
Wade with her “own anger, [her] own malice, [her] own—whatever it is.” And for her
part, Miss Wade sees her own infected self in Tatty. The narrator explains that she “stood
with her hand upon her bosom, looking at the girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part
might curiously watch the dissection and exposition of an analogous case” (42). The
accompanying illustration, entitled “Under the Microscope,” depicts Miss Wade in such a
stance, observing Tatty crouched on the floor with her head and arm partially covered by
the coverlet. Although Miss Wade is in the position of observer, both women are, in
effect, “under the microscope,” both are reduced to a clinical case. This pathological
similarity draws Miss Wade to Tatty and becomes the driving metaphor for what the
novel condemns as an unhealthy form of contact. Here, the connection is figured less as
contagion and more as chronic or hereditary, embedded in a character’s temperament.
Dickens limits the negative side of contact to this female triad, leaving Arthur’s
story free to benefit instead from a similar contagion.
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As Pet learns that Tatty has seen
Miss Wade, Pet rejects Tatty’s touch: “Take your hands away. I feel as if some one else

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For an extended discussion of Miss Wade and contagion as a commentary on female sexuality, see
“Remember Miss Wade: Little Dorrit and the Historicising of Female Perversity” by Annamarie Jagose

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is touching me!” (214). Pet reacts as a contagionist, but even more than fearing that Tatty
has been tainted by her contact with Miss Wade, Pet imagines Tatty as the embodiment
of Miss Wade. Pet’s only recourse is to refuse touch, and to draw an imaginary boundary
around her person. In an attempt to conciliate Tatty, Pet gives her hand back, explaining,
“Miss Wade almost frightened me when we parted, and I scarcely liked to think of her
just now as having been so near me without my knowing it” (214). While this nearness
refers primarily to Miss Wade’s presence on the property, Pet’s “involuntary” withdrawal
from Tatty speaks to the anxiety over contact—both preventing it and permitting it—that
drives the narrative.
But even for Miss Wade (and for Dickens), absolute isolation is impossible to
maintain. Quarantine is, as Smith depicts it, permeable and faulty, and our need to reach
out, physically, to each other overrides even the strictest medical advice. Offering Arthur
the letter of her life story is one of the only moments Miss Wade initiates “touch,”
literally and metaphorically extending her hand: “Shall I give you something I have
written,” she asks, “or shall I hold my hand?” (690). Arthur takes the letter and reads it,
but the curious way her narrative stands alone, isolated from novel’s plot, questions the
extent to which we can interpret this gesture as a form of character connection. Rather,
we begin to see instead the ways that narratives get transmitted but also the way such
transmissions get blocked and thus end narrative. The one time Miss Wade might link her
story with Arthur’s is to give Mr. Meagles the documents Rigaud asks her to keep, but
she refuses and her story ends.

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The only other character to achieve and even exceed the type of physical and
narrative isolation Miss Wade cultivates is Mrs. Clennam. Dickens presents the lack of
connection that Arthur experiences with and learns from his mother in direct contrast to
the sense of community he develops in the quarantine barracks and even with Pancks.
Arthur’s childhood tale told in quarantine has prepared us for Mrs. Clennam’s aloofness.
He describes her to Meagles as “strict,” “stern,” and “austere,” and her religion as “a
gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies” (35). The road to this sterilized maternalism,
however, is paved with disease and filth. The narrator explains that “[i]n every
thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell
was throbbing, jerking, tolling as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were
going round” (43). We are back in quarantine, the place where Plague (at least as
metaphor) should have been stopped and was not. Epidemic disease becomes the
common marker against which all other desolation and despair must be measured. As
Arthur braces himself at a coffee house before going to see his mother for the first time in
twenty years, he takes in the London of his childhood:
Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived unwholesomely,
that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be
corrupt Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their country member, was
amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher’s meat.
Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for
air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the
heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed in the place of a fine
fresh river. (44)

This is the Dickens who gives speeches to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association; this is
the London of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens “surround[s]” Arthur with
the Sanitary Cause, a place where people “gas[p] for air” that has been tainted by

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slaughterhouse stench; a place where people are forced to smell and drink water tainted
by “deadly” sewage. But he does not dwell here.
Mrs. Clennam’s debilitated house and “airless room” at first fall under the
umbrella of such unwholesome places (49). The “musty smell” and the impression of
dirtiness Arthur finds in his own room register the unhealthiness of the place of his
childhood and seem to particularize and personalize the public health dangers and the
“condition of England” problem we witnessed on the way. But while a moral cleansing
seems in order, this sanitary stance gives way to the language of invalidism and inherited
disease. When Arthur comments on the change in Mrs. Clennam’s activities, she claims
that a “rheumatic affection” and the “debility or nervous weakness” that comes with it
prohibit her from leaving her room. Her “immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her
stony head-dress” is mimicked by the “maimed table” and “crippled wardrobe” in
Arthur’s room. It is as if Mrs. Clennam has infected the furniture; objects that are by
design immobile become even more so when imagined as extensions of her will.
However, from the first, the invalid’s investment in isolation and stasis takes on a
contagious quality. She configures her room and her body as quarantine, limiting her
interaction with the outside world and the world’s outside interaction with her. She greets
her son with “one glass kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted” (48-49). The
narrator draws attention to the momentousness of this gesture by referring to it as an
“embrace,” as if to suggest that within Mrs. Clennam’s world even the touch of four
covered fingers counts as full physical contact (49).

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Unlike the initial quarantine, which suspects disease and finds none, Dickens
depicts this version as containing sickness and incubating disease. While Mrs. Clennam
imagines that she protects herself and Arthur from disease, we soon learn that she is the
disease. Mrs. Clennam’s self-imposed quarantine, effected though not demanded by her
invalidism, does not come from an innate or even cultivated abhorrence of contact and
people. It comes, rather, from a morality that requires a particular form of connection and
from the disappointment of being rejected. She isolates herself and her story from
virtually everyone around her, imagining that she can control and protect both. As the
narrative unfolds, however, and Rigaud forces Mrs. Clennam to tell her story, it becomes
clearer that underlying her desire for complete isolation is a more tragic need for
connection.
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Dickens frames the revelation of her history in terms of contagion, which raises
the specter of contact and touch as both necessary to narrative and potentially life
threatening. The narrator explains that Rigaud “leaned an arm upon the sofa close to her
own, which he touched with his hand.” He gives her arm a sinister tickle and then adopts
the language of medicine, calling himself “something of a doctor” and asking her to “[l]et
[him] touch [her] pulse.” Even after she wrests her arm from his grip, he “tap[s] her arm,
to beat his words home” (804). Rigaud cannot keep his hands off of her, using touch as a
way to activate the story about what he describes as “a strange marriage, and a strange
mother, and a revenge, and a suppression” (804). As Riguad and Affrey piece the events
of the Clennam family history together, we learn that Arthur’s father was too weak to

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Hilary Schor explains that “what [Mrs. Clennam] wanted was Arthur’s affection; if she cannot win it
from his ‘other mother,’ she will settle for taking the other inheritance. But the story she tells leaves little
doubt that if she had more love, she would need less money—and fewer documents” (136).

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resist his uncle’s decree to marry Mrs. Clennam. It is not until Rigaud imagines Gilbert
Clennam’s description of the wife-elect as “a lady without pity, without love, implacable,
revengeful, cold as stone, but raging as fire” that Mrs. Clennam registers her protest. Up
to this point, her face had remained unchanged. When Rigaud presumes to know her
feelings, Mrs. Clennam responds physiologically: “[t]here was a remarkable darkness of
color on [her face] and the brow was more contracted.” Rigaud notes the difference: “I
perceive I interest you. I perceive I awaken your sympathy” (805), but it is only when he
asks her to reveal “[w]hat it is [she] is not” that Mrs. Clennam determines to speak and to
tell her story so that Rigaud cannot “taint” it with his “wickedness” (807).
Mrs. Clennam needs to connect through narrative and, like so many other stories,
hers begins with a description of a tragic childhood. It is a story we have heard before
from Arthur about his own upbringing. She explains that she was “brought up strictly,
and straitly. [Hers] was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. [Hers] were days of
wholesome repression, punishment, and fear” (807). Her father assured her that young
Clennam had experienced a similar upbringing, that he had “lived in a starved house,
where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day of toil and trial
like the last.” Most important, though, she had been told that “his uncle’s roof had been a
sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute” (808). Believing
they are both free from infection and that they can both be starved together, Mrs.
Clennam accepts the marriage only to find out within a year that her husband has a
mistress and a child, that he has known passion and pleasure. The disease—the type of
contact—she feared most had already infected him.

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The only way for Mrs. Clennam to prevent further contagion is to terminate
communication between the two lovers and raise the “lost boy” as her own in the hope
(or “half-hop[e]”) that he will love her (810 & 824). But such a treatment or quarantine
has its side effects, and Mrs. Clennam felt the “consequences” of the sinners’ love. As
she explains it to Rigaud, “Arthur’s father and I lived no farther apart, with half the globe
between us, than when we were together in this house” (810). Her initial desire that her
husband would be someone with whom she could identify and connect is destroyed.
Instead, she experiences the type of isolation she will spend the rest of her life (save for
one brief and rather gothic moment when she goes to Amy Dorrit) cultivating. It is only
through such isolation that she maintains or believes she maintains any connection to
Arthur. He is the only one who can know what it means to be raised with a “restraining
and correcting hand,” and Mrs. Clennam becomes uncharacteristically desperate to keep
this one relationship intact (824). If the story were to reach Arthur, she fears she will lose
his respect and that “empty place in his heart” that not even he understands (824).
Mrs. Clennam protects the bond by transmitting the “contagion,” the story, to
Amy. From the first, Mrs. Clennam has incorporated Amy into her isolation. In fact, the
only person Mrs. Clennam reaches out to is Amy Dorrit. We first see this in an odd
moment of contact that totally astonishes Affrey. This is when “Mrs. Clennam put out her
hand, and laid it on [Amy’s] arm” and then “she drew down her face and kissed her on
the forehead” (364). Amy, who has configured herself as a kind of quarantine, offers Mrs.
Clennam protection, as she promises to absorb and safely dispose of Mrs. Clennam’s
secret, though not without “confid[ing] the general outline of [it] to Mr. Meagles” (839).

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In order to give the story to Amy, Mrs. Clennam must first “reclaim it” (822). She asks
for the documents that Rigaud left for Amy to give to Arthur, and Amy quickly and
simply complies with her request. Mrs. Clennam then returns the packet to Amy, asking
her to read it and discover its contents. Mrs. Clennam takes back some of the control she
had lost and by physically handing the documents to Amy herself initiates the saving
contact. Once Amy learns what has been done to her heritance and to Arthur’s heritage,
she complies with Mrs. Clennam’s command to preserve the link that binds them as
mother and son: “Let me never feel, while I am still alive, that I die before his face, and
utterly perish away from him, like one consumed by lightening and swallowed by an
earthquake” (825). Mrs. Clennam requires only that she remain visible to Arthur, that she
not “perish away” in some biblical catastrophe.
Amy represents a religion of communication and touch, of contagion, that both
Arthur and his mother need. Amy does not use the fact that her own life “has been passed
in this poor prison, and [her] teaching has been very defective” (826) to explain away her
misery. Rather, by recalling her childhood in the prison, Amy demonstrates the
correctness—the justice—of her behavior. She urges Mrs. Clennam to “[b]e guided only
by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and
forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities.” Amy
directs the language of sickness, infirmity and care to one who has been raised from a
form of death herself. It is advice we know that Amy has followed herself. Indeed, it
describes Amy’s actions (particularly the way she treats her sick, afflicted, forlorn, and
infirm father) throughout the novel. And it will describe how she conducts herself to the

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last, as she cares for Arthur. Mrs. Clennam offers no response. She only stands as a
“black figure” with her “head low” in contrast to Amy. Mrs. Clennam, were she so
inclined, will never have a chance to take Amy’s advice. Moments later, as they make
their way to Rigaud, they witness the collapse of Mrs. Clennam’s house. Mrs. Clennam
drops to the ground, never to move or speak again: “she lived and died a statue” (827). In
part, Amy’s sermon merely reinforces the division between the women, but its emphasis
on a universal care of the enfeebled masses, functions also as an antidote to the myopic
and obsessive isolationism from which Mrs. Clennam has suffered.
Amy Dorrit, then, proves herself to be one of the healthiest, which is to say the
most contagious, characters of all, the more so because nobody really believes that she
has a significant strength or presence. We are constantly surprised that she is more of a
Florence Dombey than a Little Nell. Arthur, Flora, and the prostitute are all shocked that
she can survive with such cold feet and hands. She must constantly assure her friends, “I
am quite well” (301). When she meets and nurses a pregnant Pet Meagles, who has been
bruised in a fall, Amy preemptively assuages her concern. Pet invites Amy to stay by her
bedside, though she fears it will be too cold, and Amy explains what we already know to
be true from the night she was locked out: “I don’t mind cold. I am not delicate, if I look
so” (468). She is a traveling cordon sanitaire, but instead of refusing contact and
connection, she gathers the invalids of society around her. She gives Mr. Nandy her arm,
Pancks her wrist, the prostitute her hand, and Arthur her heart. She functions or tries to
function as a safe haven, an idealized quarantine that not only keeps bad out but

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transforms it into good, into plot and narrative. Nowhere is this contact more therapeutic
than with Arthur.
Arthur’s story ends where it began, for although he is in the Marshalsea prison at
the end of the novel, his sickness and subsequent care have more to do with contagion
than with criminality. (Rigaud even refers to the Marshalsea as hospital for imbeciles.)
Arthur’s investments with Merdle, specifically his investment of Doyce’s money,
precipitate his collapse, but Arthur’s illness is strictly a family matter. His parents get ill,
go insane, become catatonic and die. But while his imprisonment and illness begin
familiarly enough—each of his parents suffers a medical response to their isolation or
exile—his trajectory takes on a much different cast. He will not die alone and
disconnected and we know from the moment John Chivery, though he finds that he can’t
shakes hands with Arthur, gives him Mr. Dorrit’s former room in the Marshalsea, that
Arthur’s story will be saved in quarantine. The room is a space which Arthur believes
was “sanctified” by Amy; where once Arthur saw the “taint” of the “prison atmosphere”
on Little Dorrit, now he imagines the overwhelming presence of Little Dorrit in the
prison atmosphere and on the prison walls. This does not mean the taint is gone but rather
that its infectiousness creates a bond between Amy and Arthur. While alone in John’s
room, the room that used to be Amy’s, Arthur becomes overwhelmed by the memory of
her presence and “la[ys] his hands on the insensible wall, as tenderly as if it had been
herself that he touched” (757). When John attempts to speak of Amy’s love for Arthur, it
becomes clear that Arthur does not fully comprehend. John must not only name the man
of her affection (“You!”), but he must physically remind Arthur who that “You” is. He

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“touch[es] [Arthur] with the back of his hand up on the breast” (762). This connection
with Amy through John convinces Arthur to revise the narrative he had constructed
around his Little Dorrit. He rethinks the past with this new information in mind: her
letters and his kiss the day she was forgotten all have “new meaning” and a new plot
emerges, which is to say with the one that was always already there (764).
Arthur’s reaction to the “place,” to the atmosphere, invokes a miasmatic theory
and to a sanitary model of narrative, one designed to tidy things up and accelerate
closure. Initially, however, the Marshalsea quarantine is too much for Arthur to bear,
largely because it appears to isolate him from Little Dorrit.
93
He imagines what a tragedy
it would have been if they had acted on their love before his incarceration. The narrator
explains, “Granted that she loved him, and he had known it and had suffered himself to
love her, what a road to have led her away upon—the road that would have brought her
back to this miserable place!” (766). His “dread and hatred of the place became so intense
that he felt it a labor to draw his breath in it” (787). He develops a “slow fever” and
eventually becomes insensible, loosing track of people and time, as a result of his anxiety
and sorrow. But, as if in answer to his “longing for other air [,]. . . some abiding
impression of a garden st[eals] over him—a garden of flowers, with a damp warm wind
gently stirring their scents” (789). The beauty and fragrance of the flowers that Little
Dorrit leaves for Arthur revive his senses and his spirit. With Little Dorrit comes the
fresh air Arthur so desperately needs. She comes to him in her old dress with an “old
friend,” Maggy, who helps to make the environment “fresh and neat” and provides

93
In “Confinement and Character in Dickens’ Novels,” John Reed explains that Arthur’s “incarceration is a
quarantine” but then focuses primarily on how his illness allows him to recognize Little Dorrit’s worth.
“His incarceration facilitates the intimacy with Little Dorrit that will free his spirit” (47).

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necessary supplies for the invalid room. Sanitation and quarantine blur, as the lovers are
connected and Arthur is cleansed, but it is not until Arthur’s debt has been paid and Amy
can prove her poverty that their plots and lives can unite. He asks her not to visit him
“soon or often” because he believes the prison is “now a tainted place, and . . . [that] the
taint of it clings to [him]” (794). He imagines “brighter and better scenes” for Little
Dorrit, forgetting that as the Child of the Marshalsea she is immune to its taint, having
“[drunk] from infancy of a well whose waters had their own peculiar stain, their own
unwholesome and unnatural taste” (86). Little Dorrit needs no cure. This contaminated
well may have stunted her growth, but it replaces size with a kind of fortitude
unprecedented in the novel.
Despite the presumably miasmic setting, the prison gets redeemed not by
healthful sanitation but by a “stained” individual, by Amy. The beginning of the final
chapter reinforces the irony of quarantine as a unifying device. The narrator begins: “On
healthy autumn day, the Marshalsea prisoner, weak but otherwise restored, sat listening
to a voice that read to him” (847). The passage aligns healthy autumn with Amy, the
contaminated former (or perpetual) prisoner; we are asked to focus our attention not on a
place or atmosphere but on a voice, a person. It is a scene best imagined as quarantine,
for Arthur and Amy are brought together in order to be isolated—“inseparable and
blessed”—from the world around them. If anything, we might object to their
sequestration and to the way Dickens excludes all other contact in the end. But this is the
story that quarantine allows Dickens to tell, one that imagines connection framed,
perhaps perversely so, by isolation. We can see in their union how persons and touch, the

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things that are feared by the laws governing quarantine, become, for the novelist who
believes quarantine is mistaken but understands its potential, a way of connecting plots,
uniting characters, and writing a healthy story.

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Chapter 4: The Doctor’s Story in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters
Being healthy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain meant following
doctor’s orders. Or so it seemed, as numerous medical guides of this period lament the
fact that so many neglect what George Cheyne calls the “self-evident Rules of Health.” In
Essay on Health and Long Life (1724), he claims that to ignore these directives is
tantamount to suicide. The medical narratives that doctors such as Cheyne produced
have long shaped our conception of health. Readers of such texts put their trust in these
experts to keep them well or fix them when they are ill. They expect their doctors to
understand their bodies and interpret their symptoms. Doctors did this largely by telling
stories: Buchan and Beddoes created narratives (actual case studies and fictionalized
anecdotes) about neglectful parents and ailing children, about symptoms and treatments;
Southwood Smith imagined a doctor’s risk of infection to make a point about avoiding
epidemic disease. And yet, for all of their expertise and knowledge, most medical men
had to fight with each other and with their patients to assert their authority and justify
their practices.
94
Even after the passage of the Medical Act of 1858, which regulated
medical licensing, standardized education, and offered legal protection for registered
medical practitioners, only elite medical men enjoyed the kind of prestige and financial
reward that doctors would gain in subsequent centuries. The rest struggled for respect.
As doctor’s gained recognition, they became subjects of narratives themselves.
The political and cultural conflict associated with the rise of the doctor, and in particular,

94
In their study of the long-eighteenth century, Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter note in Patient’s Progress
that “the sick—footing the bills—rarely resigned their health and lives unequivocally into doctors’ hands,
and commonly skirmished with them over diagnosis and treatment” (134). While I focus primarily on the
figure of the doctor, I am aware (as my earlier chapters suggest) that doctors’ narratives and their practices
are necessarily shaped by their patient readers.

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the general practitioner, offered the Victorian novelist a new type of hero and a new type
of story to tell. Beginning with Harriet Martineau’s Dr. Hope and finding perhaps its
finest representation in the tragic story of George Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate, the doctor
emerges in the nineteenth-century novel as a socially respectable and narratively
desirable figure, valuable both as a bridge between the professional and the domestic
worlds and as the arbiter of public and private narratives of health. The first fictional
doctor-hero, Martineau’s Dr. Hope, endures personal and political difficulty, as he strives
throughout Deerbrook to conquer his desire for his wife’s sister and to regain his social
standing and his income after voting against the village’s wealthy patrons in a local
election. The townsfolk condemn his new medical ways out of ignorance but eventually
praise his efforts after he works tirelessly to save and comfort his neighbors and former
patients during a deadly epidemic. Thirty-some years after Deerbrook, Eliot creates
Tertius Lydgate and, by this time, the doctor was no longer considered an inappropriate
romantic hero, a mere “medicinal lover,” one who, as Sydney Smith claimed of Dr.
Hope, “if he takes his mistress’s hand with the utmost fervor of a lover, . . . will, by mere
force of habit, end in feeling her pulse.”
95
Lydgate also suffers domestically because he
chooses the wrong wife and professionally because he ignores the power of status quo
medical practice. Other characters distrust him because he gets caught up in the wrong
story. Unlike Hope, however, Lydgate is never rewarded for his troubles. Instead of
becoming the scientific pioneer and medical reformer he had shown the promise of
becoming, Lydgate ends his days administering to the needs of gouty patients in a
wealthy spa town. In both cases, the conflict surrounding the medical profession during

95
Sydney Smith mocks Martineau’s choice of a doctor hero in a review (Cited in Vineta Colby 213).

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the early part of the century provides not just a backdrop for these novelists, but it also
gives shape and depth to the romance plots around which these novels are built. The
conflict between the personal and the professional, the domestic and the medical, drives
our narrative interests.
During those thirty-three years separating Hope and Lydgate appears Mr. Gibson,
the doctor-protagonist of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1865). Unlike these
other fictional doctors, this one has a professional life utterly void of competition and
intrigue. Mr. Gibson’s most pressing medical problem is that he is too good. The
“prohibitory” fees he charges his new students in the hopes of deterring them from
seeking his guidance are “willingly paid, in order that [such] young m[e]n might make a
start in life, with the prestige of having been a pupil of Gibson of Hollingford” (33). This
doctor lives and works in a world where his patients respect him, his peers esteem him,
and people are happy to pay him. The professional uncertainty and financial hardships
with which characters such as Lydgate and Hope must contend never enter Wives and
Daughters directly. In fact, with its focus on the love plots of the doctor’s daughter,
Molly Gibson, and her step-sister, Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Wives and Daughters seems
hardly to concern itself centrally with the professional conflicts of a village doctor. This
is not because Gaskell is unfamiliar with these struggles—her short story, “Mr.
Harrison’s Confessions,” deals precisely with the problems a young general practitioner
faces when attempting to enact a reforming agenda in a world suspicious of new

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methods.
96
The fact that none of his peers, pupils, or patients question Mr. Gibson’s
medical authority, however, does not mean it escapes scrutiny. He may not experience
political pressure from outside the home, but Mr. Gibson must contend with the
challenges waged from within it.
Earlier chapters of this dissertation suggest that the doctor preserves health by
telling stories. Mr. Gibson, as an ideal doctor, should be among the best at this; he has a
highly successful and, in DA Miller’s term, highly unnarratable practice. But while he
proves to be an excellent manager of health, he is less adept at telling stories; for this, he
needs assistance, and Gaskell provides him with it in the form of his daughter. Thus, two
things that have comfortably gone together in other chapters of this project—managing
health and telling stories—get put to the test by Gaskell in her novel. Any question of the
doctor’s expertise comes not from his peers or even his regular patients, but from his
daughter, a character whom we expect to need rather than to appropriate the tools of her
father’s trade. Molly Gibson does both. She gets sick but also becomes something of
practitioner in her own right, learning to manage her own health as well as the health and
the stories of others.
Growing up a happy girl in a peaceable kingdom, with a well-respected father and
friends who love her, Molly Gibson does not, at first, appear to need a doctor. She
awakens in the novel to a world of expectation and the excitement of attending her first
gala. As she looks out her window, she is thankful that “it will be a fine day!,” for she
was afraid “it never never would come; or that if it ever came, it would be a rainy day!”

96
In her analysis of “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions,” Marie Fitzwilliam observes that Gaskell’s portrait of a
young doctor demonstrates the author’s understanding of the social and professional trials facing the
general practitioner.

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(6). The gratitude and excitement, however, cannot be sustained. Once at the party, she
becomes sick, wanders into a strange garden, falls asleep, and must be saved. Hyacinth
“Clare” Kirkpatrick, her would-be rescuer and the woman who will become her step-
mother, demonstrates little interest in her well-being, however. In fact, she eats the food
that has been sent to revive the “[p]oor dear” (18), invents a story about Molly’s
overeating, and forgets about the girl completely. In such a manner, Gaskell introduces
readers to the type of improper management with which Molly must contend; it is such
mismanagement she learns to revise throughout the novel. Realizing that Molly has been
left by her chaperones at the party, the father-doctor arrives on the scene to take her
home, prompting readers to assume that they can relax their vigilant care. All seems to be
well again, as Molly promises never to leave her father’s side. But then the novel begins
again, giving us a second version of the daughter’s need for care—and a second version
of what proper doctoring might be.
The second beginning—the one in which “the real story of the novel begins”
(Schor 187)—occurs five years and four chapters later. This time, the doctor must
confront his daughter’s desirability and the problems that come with romance and
intrigue: Molly, at “nearly seventeen,” becomes the unwitting heroine of a clandestine
romance plot (53). Mr. Gibson intercepts a love-letter intended for Molly. As a young
woman, the Molly of this second introduction requires an even more watchful eye, her
plot becoming even more intertwined with her father’s profession, for while she is not yet
physically ill, her healthy and maturing female body portends the kind of malady—“love
sickness”—that her father fears but that readers so enjoy: Mr. Gibson is “startled into

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discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman and already the passive
object of some strong interests that affect a woman’s life” (55). As in so many novels,
healthy female sexuality has to be managed as disease. In response to this social and
biological reality, Mr. Gibson sends his daughter away, isolating her from these
“interests” that will soon affect her life and have already affected her story. Molly Gibson
may not have been forgotten this time, but the type of doctoring she receives has a similar
effect: she becomes the focus of the narrative’s attention and anxiety, in no small part
because her doctor-father’s diagnosis of her situation leads to her removal from its
potentially harmful center.
Having been trained in novelistic medicine as well as in the novel’s love-plot
formulas, however, we know that by sending Molly into a quarantine in order to keep her
healthy, the doctor cannot stop the narrative’s progress. In fact, this removal does the
opposite, creating the time and space for an “interesting” story to develop. Molly’s case
seems, at first, to fulfill these narrative expectations. Her father sends her to Hamley Hall
to visit the invalid Mrs. Hamley at a time when the two eligible sons of the house will be
away. While Molly’s father and Mrs. Hamley’s husband are, for different reasons, glad of
this fact, the repeated assurances that there will be no romance at Hamley Hall suggest
that this is precisely where Molly will find love.
97
And, of course, she does, but not
before Gaskell’s narrative takes an extended detour that removes Molly from romantic

97
Mr. Gibson does not want any romance for Molly, observing to himself that if the Hamley boys were at
home, sending Molly there would be like “passing from Scylla to Charibdis” (56). The squire, on the other
hand, is relieved because he doesn’t want his sons to marry beneath them, noting to his wife that “we might
have had a love-affair if they had been home” (56).

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attention and, instead, frames the heroine’s story within the doctor’s plot of expertise, as
she herself takes on the role of medical practitioner.
The kind of heroine Molly will come to represent is, at its core, a medical one,
engaging in multiple diagnoses, treatments, and cures. The medicalization of Molly’s plot
does not mean, however, that the daughter will simply adopt the doctor-father’s authority
and reject the step-mother’s false stories, which range from little white lies to dangerous
plotting; nor does it mean that Molly will be subsumed by her nascent professionalism
and removed from future romance altogether.
98
Her brand of medicine, while feminized
as sororal or maternal and depicted as an antidote to her step-mother’s domestic
(mis)management, offers an alternative to her father’s paternalistic dosing. The daughter
must synthesize and re-imagine the two forms of care—the medical and the domestic—in
terms of their shared dependence on narrative competence. She must become a reader of
her “patients” but also the author of her own narrative, her own story. In offering
medicine as a cure for the romantic interests that interfere with but also sustain domestic
health, Gaskell articulates a version of medicine that must be attentive to stories and to
narrative.
99
To be a doctor means more than being a practitioner of medicine or a taker of

98
This kind of heroine appears later in the century as the new woman. Charlotte Yonge represents a failed
version of the new woman in Clever Woman of the Family, published the same year as Wives and
Daughters. In this story, Rachel Curtis dabbles in medicine, but ends up killing a young girl with one of her
holistic remedies. She learns by the end of the novel that it’s better to be married and not so clever.

99
In Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late Enlightenment England (1991), Roy
Porter discusses Thomas Beddoes’s views on the value of patient narratives. In Hygeia, Beddoes talks
about requesting a “particular narrative, in writing of all circumstances which they suppose to have any
relation to their complaint” (quoted in Porter 45). Beddoes thought that all data from doctors should be
“systematically preserved for public consultation” (46). He proposed a “more energetic medical
publication” and “more systematic collection and indexing of medical facts in convenient archives” (46). A
good physician, Beddoes believed, must be a good listener—take histories of patients (77-8).

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pulses, it means combining the lessons of domestic fiction with the teachings of scientific
discovery in order to produce a healthy body and a healthy narrative.
Medical Practice: The Doctor
Gaskell initially signals the importance of the doctor’s professional history to her
heroine’s story by embedding it in the novel’s structure; she fills the time and space
between Molly’s two introductions with the story of Mr. Gibson’s rise as the town’s
doctor.
100
The chapter that tells us about “Molly Gibson’s Childhood” does not begin
when Molly is born or even when her parents first meet. It takes place “[s]ixteen years
before [the gala]” with Mr. Gibson’s ascension as the town’s new doctor (29). The
narrator describes the moment when Mr. Gibson moves into Hollingford as a
“disturb[ance]” for the town’s citizens (29). Mr. Hall, we are told, “‘slyly’ . . .
introduce[s] [Mr. Gibson] into practice” (30). A sense of harmless deception and a
disruption to the status quo surrounds the doctors’ partnership, qualities that will become
increasingly important to Molly’s development. Mr. Hall is too old and too sick to fulfill
his duties, but his patients are suspicious of newcomers and new ways. As “blind and
deaf, and rheumatic as he might be,” we are told, “he was still Mr. Hall, the doctor who
could heal all their ailments—unless they died meanwhile—and had no right to speak of
growing old, and taking a partner” (30). Gaskell’s portrait of the power of patient desire
and the friendly conflict between old and new medicine adds verisimilitude to the story,
but it depicts as well the kind of fluidity that allowed for change and innovation in

100
Critics have noted the important ways in which Mr. Gibson’s profession reinforces the novel’s interest
in evolutionary science; his interest in medical science is part of a larger narrative of progress and
masculine knowledge. See Hilary Schor, Dierdre D’Albertis, Leon Litvack. My reading isolates medicine
and the profession from science.

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medical practice to occur.
101
While Mr. Gibson’s gentility and mysterious lineage appeal
to the townspeople, it is his professional ability that helps “the younger doctor carr[y] the
day.” Within the year of his arrival, he becomes the preferred partner, earning the respect
of Sir Astley (president of the College of Surgeons) and the patronage of “the Towers”
(31). Mr. Gibson lodges us firmly in the world of expertise and talent—his cutting-edge
training in Edinburgh and Paris and his professional ethics are beyond reproach.
102

Even with the right education, the right credentials, and the right looks, Mr.
Gibson, we soon learn, lacks the right kind of narrative competence. Or rather, he lacks
the capacity to see, as Molly will, that doctoring is as much a narrative endeavor as it is a

101
In Making a Medical Living (1994), Anne Digby observes viewing medical practice strictly in terms of
a tripartite structure (physician, surgeon, apothecary) is historically inaccurate. She notes: “This
stereotypical division of labour supposedly meant that: physicians dealt with diseases amenable to physic
or medicine under intellectual direction or management; surgeons treated conditions for which manual
operative interventions of a mainly local and external character were involved; and the apothecaries
prepared or compounded drugs and medicine. However, a more nuanced and complex interpretation is
needed since these distinctions were less than clear-cut. Studies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century
medicine have emphasized the dominance of general practice rather than a tripartite division” (29). Even
with this fluidity, the conflict between the three dominant branches of medicine and the general practitioner
continued to shape professional debates during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thomas Wakely’s
sarcastic, 1843 editorial in The Lancet captures this conflict: “With [the Royal Colleges] the chief
qualification for eminence in the healing art is ignorance of one or the other half of it. A physician need not
know much of physic; an entire ignorance of surgery will be sufficient to give him respectable standing; a
surgeon need not possess any real knowledge of surgery, but if he is sufficiently ignorant of physic—if he
do not know the gout from the measles—that will render him “pure”, and make him eligible to receive the
highest appointments; but a “general practitioner”—a man who is so preposterous as to understand both
physic and surgery—is fit only to become a subordinate” (721). Wakley’s commentary features purity as
professional protectionism. The unwillingness for a kind of collaborative effort or boundary crossing is a
sign of ignorance. Digby’s historical perspective and Wakely’s personal and political interests speak to the
volatility and complexity of the profession that allows the doctor-hero to become such a compelling and
potentially transformative figure.

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Julia Wright argues that the novel’s setting and the doctor’s Scottishness connect Mr. Gibson to William
Cullen, John Brown, and Thomas Trotter, and thus “resurrect” theories about the relationship between
mental excitement and physical health (166). This “Romantic-era” medical training, she suggests,
encourages us to interpret the characters in terms of neurophysiology and to read Molly as representing a
transition from Romantic puberty to Victorian maturity. It is true that Mr. Gibson’s presumed training and
medical theories allow Gaskell to separate sentimental and self-indulgent characters from the practical and
self-sacrificing ones.

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clinical one.
103
Gaskell eases the reader into this narrative view of medical practice with
an early scene that uses the written prescription as a vehicle of its satire. As with medical
manuals and reports, a prescription holds out the promise, potentially a guarantee, of
health, though in some cases it can only offer mild comfort. Regardless of its outcome,
the prescription is instruction, generally written, that tells the patient how to get well. Mr.
Gibson is, we presume, an expert prescriber, knowing precisely which draughts and doses
to offer. In this instance, however, he uses the prescription to perform a textual joke.
After intercepting a “flaming love-letter” from his apprentice, Mr. Coxe, to his daughter,
Mr. Gibson interprets its contents as symptomatic of illness—“Calf-love,” he calls it—
and responds to it by writing a supposed cure. He sends the “patient” the follow
prescription:
Rx Verecundiae 3 i.
Fidelitatis Domesticae 3 i.
Reticentiae gr. iij.

M. Capiat hanc dosim ter die in aquâ purâ.
R. GIBSON, Ch

Modesty, domestic fidelity, and deference, mixed with pure water and taken three times a
day, will, Mr. Gibson jokes, cure the ailment. This mock prescription is designed to
humiliate the suitor and redirect Molly’s story, and although it is not a real prescription, it
does act as curative agent; it obstructs the lover’s and the reader’s (if she does not speak
Latin) momentum and delays Molly’s entrance into the romance plot. Rather than speak
to Mr. Gibson as a frustrated suitor, Mr. Coxe accepts the medical terms of the joke and
allows the doctor-patient performance to continue, leading Mr. Gibson further down the

103
In Doctor’s Stories, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter explains, “[t]he practice of medicine is an interpretive
activity” (xvii).

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path of metaphorical doctoring. Mr. Coxe objects to the treatment, but the doctor claims
that “patients are sometimes offended at being told the nature of their illnesses; and, I
dare say, they may take offence at the medicine which their case requires” (52). Though
we know from his history that Mr. Gibson is a respected doctor, Gaskell begins to
challenge his authority here, for he is only playing doctor when it comes to domestic
matters of romantic affection. Though playfulness is certainly in order, Gaskell exposes a
slippage between the medical and the romantic, and Mr. Gibson’s discomfort with
negotiating successfully between the two modes, which opens the space that Molly will
fill.
The prescription appears to do its job of staving off infection, but it does little to
halt the narrative’s desire to move Molly into the realm of romance. Mr. Gibson may be a
“clever surgeon” (33), but he is an ineffectual practitioner of domestic management. This
is not to say that he is a bad doctor or father. The novel represents him as superior in both
respects. But his misreading of Molly and his utter unpreparedness for Mr. Coxe’s
interests in his daughter speak to an important blindness, a gap in his knowledge that
cannot be filled by a traditional or even fictional prescription. Upon learning of Molly’s
desirability, Mr. Gibson reasons with himself that she cannot be an object of desire
because “she is only just seventeen—not seventeen, indeed, till July; not for six weeks.
Sixteen and three-quarters! Why she is quite a baby” (49). He describes Molly in terms
that do not quite match her chronological age, calling her “a mere child” (52), even
though we know from the narrator that her childhood is over, neatly contained within a
single chapter. For a doctor, whose ability is to see the body in ways others cannot, this is

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not a good sign. Mr. Gibson ignores Mr. Coxe’s rejoinder that “Miss Gibson is nearly
seventeen! I heard you say so only the other day” (53) and holds to the argument that
such clandestine behavior violates “the laws of domestic honour” (53, 52). The doctor’s
insistence on keeping Molly a child exposes both his professional and paternal fallibility,
particularly when it comes to reading romance. Only at the end of the novel, when
Molly’s physical health is endangered, does he regain his authority as a medical doctor
over her. For now, because she has always been his little “Goosey,” he is “startled” by
Molly’s womanhood in a way that we assume a mother would not have been. With her
governess away, taking care of a nephew with scarlet fever, and a father who must be
away from home attending to his patients, Molly is left unguided and vulnerable to
romantic overtures. Instead of talking to Molly about the letter or his concern about her
safety and thus inoculating her against future advances, he sends her away—in full health
and because she is in full health—in order to buy some time to find the right preventive.
It is, however, precisely while she is removed from her father’s sphere that she
begins to develop a sense of domestic medicine that will prove to challenge her father’s
supposedly stable authority as a practitioner. Molly’s entrance into Hamley Hall protects
her from a premature engagement or, perhaps worse, the anxiety of having to refuse a
suitor, but, more than that, it expands her understanding of the forces that affect personal
and family health. For while the novel has thus far been motivated by the desire to
maintain Molly’s health, its energies shift now into developing Molly’s healthy interest in
the stories of others. The doctoring hero turns out to be the daughter after all and Hamley
becomes an important training ground for her apprenticeship, as she begins to learn how

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the desire for and the loss of health shape the narrative’s of those around her. Up to this
point in the novel, Gaskell has afforded Mr. Gibson qualified authority as a doctor. By
relocating Molly in the sickly household, however, Gaskell begins to transfer control of
the story and of the medicine from the doctor to his daughter, and what seemingly better
place to isolate Molly from romance and introduce her to the world of doctoring than the
home of an invalid wife? Molly is transformed in this environment from a heroine-in-
waiting to an apprentice-in-training, as this temporary home teaches her about marriage,
medicine, and the value of narrative authority to both.
But Molly must first learn what it means to be a wife and a mother, two
components of domesticity absent from her upbringing. Because Molly’s mother died
when she was a child, Molly has not witnessed the relationship between husband and
wife—the Hamleys provide her with her first experience of this matrimonial bond. But
the kind of marriage and maternal care she encounters is sickly. Mrs. Hamley’s
invalidism, we are told by the narrator, is a result of her marriage to the squire. Any sense
of a romantic past we might imagine for this husband and wife is overtly pathologized.
Marriage, family, and illness are of a piece in this home. It is true Mrs. Hamley had been
a “delicate fine London lady” before meeting the Squire, but this alone does not account
for her current invalidism (42). In the same breath we are told that Squire and Mrs.
Hamley are “very happy” together and that “possibly Mrs. Hamley would not have sunk
into the condition of a chronic invalid, if her husband had cared a little more for her
various tastes, or allowed her the companionship of those who did” (42). The narrator’s
speculation that Mr. Hamley’s insecurities contributed to his wife’s condition, though not

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an endorsement of matrimony, seems less a critique of marriage and more a commentary
on a particular match. Theirs was “one of those perplexing marriages of which one
cannot understand the reason” (42). The Squire is “awkward and ungainly,” “obstinate,
violent-tempered, and dictatorial,” but he is also “generous, and true as steel,” something
Mr. Gibson, as our initial arbiter of good character, observes—he likes the Squire and
that is enough to make us accept Mr. Hamley’s marriage to a woman who is “great
reader” and “literary,” as well as “gentle and sentimental; tender and good.” Her
willingness to “sacrific[e]” her social and intellectual life, though ultimately fatal, makes
the squire “lov[e] his wife more dearly” (43). And for that we might forgive him.
At first, Mrs. Hamley’s story invokes a common use of illness within the marriage
plot, where the suffering female spouse is sickly, frail, or an invalid. Critics have
observed that Molly learns about pathological womanhood in this setting.
104
With Mrs.
Hamley we witness, according the doctor, “real secret harm” and “growing and
indescribable discomfort.” And although her illness resists a specific diagnosis—it is
“nothing definite” (43)—Gaskell is quick to assert that Mrs. Hamley was not “[a] merely
fanciful invalid” (44). Mr. Gibson hoped that by “careful watching of her symptoms he
might mitigate her bodily pain” (44). Her body, however, resists permanent cure and the
narrator proposes the daughter as an alternative. “Perhaps if [Mrs. Hamley] had had a
daughter,” we are told, “it would have been better for her” (43). It is too late for this, and
Molly appears in the wake of the sympathetic doctor as the salve for a sickly marriage
and an invalid wife.

104
As Schor notes, “the lesson of the dead mother, and the few living mother figures in the novel, is that to
be female is primarily to be an invalid, to be passive, to suffer victimization. This is what both [Cynthia and
Molly] try to overcome” (190).

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But just as Molly’s apprenticeship involves more than expressing daughterly
affection or nursely care, Mrs. Hamley’s invalidism is not designed simply to registers
the toll of living in a patriarchal society. Rather, the role Mrs. Hamley fills so well is that
of the storyteller. Molly must learn from the invalid’s privileged perspective what health
looks like before she can engage in any doctoring of her own. And invalidism in this
instance is, for Gaskell, emblematic of the kind of authority and control afforded to
narrators; following in the tradition set by Harriet Martineau and others, Gaskell imagines
that genuine pain and the stasis to which it gives rise is the foundation for a kind of
guiding power. This facet of the invalid’s identity is put to its greatest use by Gaskell in
Round the Sofa (1859), a collection of previously published short stories and the novella,
My Lady Ludlow.
105
Here, the “crippled” Mrs. Dawson is simultaneously at center stage
and on the sidelines. Gaskell connects the various tales in this collection by framing them
as part of an invalid’s entertainment, a break in the “monotony of the nights.” Invalidism
becomes the source and cause of narration—if not for the Mrs. Dawson, there would be
no stories, no narrative. We see this potential in Mrs. Hamley, and although she does not
reflect the kind of assertiveness, omniscience, or healthfulness we get from Gaskell’s
other invalids, she does offer Molly a model for what it means to be simultaneously a
teller of stories and a listener. This position and the ability to move between these roles
becomes a marker of Molly’s domesticated medical practice.
It is not that Molly learns to mimic Mrs. Hamley or even idolize her. In fact, Mrs.
Hamley’s perspective is faulty and quite dangerous. Rather, what Molly must experience

105
Maria Frawley suggests that Gaskell is “the Victorian novelist who perhaps made the most frequent use
of the invalid in her writing” (245).

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is the power of the story to heal as well as to harm. This is part of her “clinical” training,
as it were. We understand early on that
[t]he greater part of [Mrs. Hamley’s] life was spent on a sofa, wheeled to
the window in the summer, to the fireside in the winter. The room which
she inhabited was large and pleasant; four tall windows looked out upon
the lawn dotted over with flower-beds, and melting away into small wood,
in the centre of which there was a pond, filled with water-lilies. About this
unseen pond in the deep shade Mrs. Hamley had written many a pretty
four-versed poem since she lay on her sofa, alternately reading and
composing poetry. (44)

Highlighting the artistic facets of Mrs. Hamley’s identity, and setting her up as a detached
observer, looking out the window from her sofa, Gaskell nonetheless does not give this
ailing woman the “clear-sightedness” that other invalids in this study possess. Mrs.
Hamley is blind to her eldest son’s, Osborne’s, character, a fact that lulls Molly into
thinking he is “his mother’s hero” (81). His failure at school, his inability to earn a living
as a poet, and, we learn eventually, his secret marriage are a far cry from the story Mrs.
Hamley tells about her delicate, clever, and beloved son. This view of Osborne contrasts
implicitly with her loving but certainly not so adulatory perspective of her second son,
the robust, practical, natural scientist, Roger Hamley.
The role of observer and the authority that comes with the invalid’s perspective,
gets dispersed in Gaskell’s novel; part of it given initially to the doctor, who can diagnose
“real pain” and catch would-be suitors in the act, and part of it given to the daughter, who
develops the powers of subtle narrative understanding that the novel values more than the
doctor’s diagnostic skills. In “Gaskell’s Daughters in Time,” Susan Morgan attributes
Molly’s superior doctoring to her expressiveness and to her “warm, loving heart” (112).
These attributes, coupled with her “effort and sense,” allow her to excel in her father’s

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field (113). “The real doctor,” as Morgan asserts, “is, of course, Molly” (112). But what
links Mr. Gibson to his daughter—or rather, what puts them in competition—has to do
with the different ways they understand and use narrative in medicine. Not only does
Molly develop her sympathy through contact with the invalid, but she develops a keen
awareness of the role that stories play in comfort, treatment, and health.
By constructing the relationship between narrative competence and proper
doctoring through Molly’s interactions with Mrs. Hamley and invalidism, Gaskell offers
a version of care that relies on storytelling. But it is not until Molly returns to Hamley
later in the novel that we begin to see her doctoring abilities more clearly. That is, her
initial visit introduces her to this practice but we see later in the novel how she puts it to
use. Mrs. Hamley’s health eventually deteriorates once she learns the truth about her son
Osborne’s failings, and internalizes the conflict this causes in the family—Squire Hamley
will not speak to Osborne. Mr. Gibson has already been to see Mrs. Hamley after this
revelation and the downward turn of her health, but it is only when the daughter returns
that we see a truly domestic medicine at work. The squire announces Molly, noting that
“the doctor’s daughter [is] nearly as good as the doctor himself” (190). As if taking this
cue, Molly assesses her patient’s symptoms before offering her treatment: the narrator
explains that “even with Molly’s small experience of illness she saw how much of
restless fever there was in [the invalid’s] speech; and instinct, or some such gift,
prompted [Molly] to tell a long story of many things” (190). “Telling a long story” (the
content of which is irrelevant) is not just a diagnostic tool here
106
; it becomes for Molly a

106
See Porter and Porter’s Patient Progress for discussion of “postal consultations” as part of Georgian
medical practices. They note that “a sick person would write to an eminent physician enclosing his own

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treatment, a temporary restorative. Molly has a “gift,” a kind of vocational talent for
developing such a remedy, something her father’s medicine does not quite possess. The
daughter’s presence cannot save Mrs. Hamley. But contact with the invalid allows Molly
to achieve a sense that stories must matter to the doctor and to her own plot of
development.
Domestic (Mis)Management: The Mother
At the same time that Molly undergoes her apprenticeship with the Hamleys, her
father takes pains to fortify his home for her return. If his wife (Molly’s step-mother),
Hyacinth “Clare” Kirkpatrick, is not precisely the opposite of Mrs. Hamley, she certainly
represents an alternative version of mother, doctor, and storyteller. Both women engage
in deceptive narrative practices. Mrs. Hamley creates a romance about Osborne that
precipitates both of their tragic ends, while Hyacinth tells endless, adulterated tales about
herself and her daughter, Cynthia Kirkpatrick, that get the mother in trouble. We see a
glimpse of this propensity in the small lie she tells about the eating habits of young Molly
in the opening segment (Chapter 2). By marrying the doctor to a woman whom Molly
calls a “plotter,” Gaskell instantiates a tension between medicine and storytelling that the
heroine and the reader will learn to negotiate.
We have seen Mr. Gibson’s flawed domestic management when he refuses to
read Molly’s sexual age, yet we accept this bit of parental amnesia because even the most

medical history; the physician’s reply would include diagnosis, directions for a regimen and a prescription
to be made up by he local apothecary or druggist, or, if simple, at home. In following this procedure, the
patient was expected . . . to internalize the doctor” (76). These narratives are replaced in the nineteenth
century by the physical exam. Gaskell demonstrates both a nostalgia for and an anticipation of story-based
diagnostics and therapy.

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loving fathers refuse to see their daughters as women.
107
But choosing Hyacinth as his
wife is a misstep of a different sort. How could he have picked so poorly? And why does
Gaskell choose for him to do so? In part, he is desperate. With Molly’s governess
exposed to scarlet fever and unable to return as chaperone (Molly has never had the
disease), and with the recent rebellion of his servants, Mr. Gibson has no one left to
oversee his domestic affairs. A visit from Lord Hollingford’s becomes “the final drop—
the last straw” that convinces Mr. Gibson to find a second wife. When the fellow
widowers sit down to lunch at Mr. Gibson’s house, the disorder is too noticeable to avoid
comment. The lunch is delayed, the dishes are dirty, and the servants are sulky. The
doctor explains: “You see a man like me—a widower—with a daughter who cannot
always be at home—has not the regulated household which would enable me to
command the small portions of time I can spend there” (101). The dashes in his speech
betray a discomfort and hesitancy that we have not seen in Mr. Gibson nor would we
expect from our doctor. Hollingford offers specifications for a second marriage: “If you
found a sensible agreeable woman of thirty or so, I really think you couldn’t do better
than to take her to manage your home, and so save you the discomfort or worry; and
besides, she would be able to give your daughter the kind of tender supervision which, I
fancy, all girls of that age require” (101). When presented in this light—more as a job for
hire—Mr. Gibson wastes no time setting about the business of getting a second wife to
manage his home.

107
Gaskell explores the dangers of such parental ignorance in Cousin Phillis, published in Cornhill just
prior to Wives and Daughters. In this novella, the parents’ inability to see that their daughter has outgrown
her pinafores, that she is a woman capable of romantic love, almost kills her.

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From our first introduction to Hyacinth—that day she finds Molly ailing but eats
her food—we know she will not be an ideal mother, even though she does appear to be an
astute manager of her own self-interest. While the novel holds Mrs. Gibson up as a
negative example, it cannot deny her abilities as a social and household manager.
Elizabeth Langland offers a recuperative reading of Hyacinth, claiming that to “interpret
[her] negatively” is to miss Gaskell’s social critique. I agree with Langland that Mrs.
Gibson is “a social mentor who makes the doctor and his daughter figures to be reckoned
with socially” (Langland 137), but in order to put forth this positive model of Mrs.
Gibson, Langland must omit the fact that Hyacinth’s daughter Cynthia’s childhood has
been dangerously, almost tragically, mismanaged. The reader knows (and Mr. Gibson
must learn) that his wife has her own interests, her own story to tell, which will very
quickly conflict with doctor’s and with Molly’s and has already conflicted with
Cynthia’s. She offers a decidedly unhealthy narrative of domestic and maternal
nurturance
We witness, before Molly does, Mrs. Gibson’s management of Cynthia, which
prepares readers for the preventive stance Molly must take in relation to her step-mother.
When Mr. Gibson provides the necessary money to bring Cynthia home for the wedding,
Hyacinth Kirkpatrick (soon to be Mrs. Gibson), temporarily moved by this gesture and
the funds, imagines that she wishes Cynthia to be a bridesmaid. However, as the narrator
explains,
a hundred little interruptions came in the way of letter-writing; and by the
next day maternal love had diminished; and the value affixed to the money
had increased: money had been so much needed, so hardly earned in Mrs.

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Kirkpatrick’s life; while the perhaps necessary separation of mother and
child had lessened the amount of affection the former had to bestow. (140)

Financial and domestic necessities cannot always accommodate maternal affection.
Absence and limited funds, it seems, do not make the heart grow fonder. Not only does
Hyacinth wish to keep her attractive daughter away from the wedding, but she wants to
use the money intended to bring Cynthia home to pay her debts and buy gowns that will
impress the Hollingford ladies. The narrator acknowledges that Hyacinth’s financial
fastidiousness is a credit to her otherwise “superficial and flimsy character” (140), but it
comes at a price for the daughter, whose inability to pay her own debt creates the central
problem to be solved before the novel’s end, the problem that will become Molly’s
greatest case. By filling the vital role of domestic manager with a neglectful and
unobservant mother, Gaskell creates necessary condition for Molly’s ascension, and for
the rise of a domestic medicine not only in Mr. Gibson’s home but in the novel more
generally. The person who is supposed to mitigate future sickness and preserve health—
the mother—becomes the very person who creates the “dis-ease” that can cause physical
and psychological illness.
It is not until just before Cynthia Kirpatrick enters the Gibson household that
Molly sees for herself Mrs. Gibson’s lack of interest in her daughter. Through the
presence of Cynthia, Gaskell begins to establish Molly, rather than Cynthia’s mother or
Molly’s father, as the superior domestic manager and doctor. When Mrs. Gibson off-
handedly refers to Cynthia as “poor dear,” Molly thinks immediately of Cynthia’s health.
Why else would a mother call her daughter “a poor dear”? Mrs. Gibson assures her that
the “poor” refers to her status as “a fatherless girl” and that “Cynthia never is ill. She’s as

167
strong as a horse” (214). Mrs. Gibson does not fear for her daughter’s well-being in the
way Molly expects a mother might, worrying instead about her own health and comfort.
When mother and daughter reunite, Mrs. Gibson comments simply that Cynthia has
grown and “look[s] quite a woman”; Cynthia reminds her mother that she has “hardly
grown since” she went away and that, in appearance at least, she is relatively the same
(215). Later, however, when Miss Hornblower (an acquaintance from Ashcombe) sees
Cynthia for the first time in two or three years, she, too, observes: “How she has grown!”
(283). Thus we see that Cynthia, in fact, has denied the truth of her mother’s statement:
she has “grown” but she cannot abide the perfunctoriness of her mother’s greeting, a
greeting that any Miss Hornblower might give.
Such faulty observations combined with blind confidence in her daughter’s health
mark Mrs. Gibson as a bad mother. In this novel, bad mothers are bad storytellers.
Cynthia criticizes her mother for “invent[ing] stories” (346, 374), and until she comes to
Hollingford and can represent herself, Cynthia’s narrative must be filtered through her
mother; Cynthia is, as Schor explains, “introduced through her mother’s accounts, her
character suggested through her mother’s inattention” (Schor 187). But from very early
on, Molly demonstrates the desire to manage Cynthia’s narrative, to take on her “case,”
attempting to extricate her story from Hyacinth’s. During Molly’s first extended
conversation with her father’s fiancée, prior to the wedding, she asks about the daughter
who is to come and live with them: “When will she come?”; “When will she leave
school?”; “Is she like you?”; “Is she very clever and accomplished?” (128-29). Far from
providing satisfying answers, Hyacinth’s responses redirect the conversation to her own

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concerns: “I don’t think I must let her leave before next summer”; “She is very
handsome, people say. In the bright-coloured style—perhaps something like I was”; “She
ought to be [clever and accomplished]; I’ve paid ever so much money . . .” (128-29).
Mrs. Gibson refuses to give over the narrative to her daughter—the “She” must always
defer to the “I,” as the mother continually thinks in terms of her own interests, comfort,
and story.
For Gaskell, the relationship between mothers and doctors is both deeply personal
and intimately tied to her own development as a writer. In My Diary: The early years of
my daughter Marianne, the journal she began keeping in 1835, shortly after the birth of
her daughter, Gaskell describes the tremendous work that goes into maintaining good (or
at least moderate) health.
108
From it, we get a sense of the pleasure one feels when health
has been maintained or achieved, as well as the pleasure one feels when writing about
that success. Gaskell begins her first entry by remarking that she wished she had begun
the journal sooner because Marianne has already given her so much to write about; she is
becoming “every day more and more interesting” (6). Mr. Gibson will find “interest” in
his pubescent daughter something to fear, while Gaskell sees it, even in her baby, as the
impetus for writing. In fact, in the second entry, written almost five months later, Gaskell
laments that she has waited so long to write about her “little darling”; she deems herself
“negligent.” Here, Gaskell not only imagines writing to be an important duty, but that,
with each passing entry, is increasingly tied to observations about her daughter’s health.
Throughout, Gaskell turns the reader’s attention to Marianne’s physical state: she is

108
Written 10 years before Mary Barton, the diary has been considered by some to be “[Gaskell’s] first
sustained effort as a writer” (Companion, 21).

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described variously as “still a delicate child” (12), “a frail little treasure” (13), “very weak
in her limbs” (19). We also learn of the improvements, as when, on February 7
th
1836,
Gaskell explains: “[Marianne’s] whole body bespeaks a more healthy child”; “[s]he has a
colour like a cherry, instead of the flushed wavering red it used to be; and certainly with
health, beauty comes” (21). These episodes—the shift from the flushed, frail treasure to
the cherry-cheeked beauty—shape the story Gaskell wants to tell about her daughter’s
development and the advice she wants to give her daughter should she ever have a child
of her own.
Though the Diary is more episodic than novelistic, Gaskell develops her maternal
musings and a sense of the value of narrative within and against larger framework of
expert, professional opinion. She complains in one entry that it is difficult to know how
to handle her daughter’s impatience because “every body and every book says that
decision is of such consequence” (emphasis orig. 12). Gaskell finds little comfort in these
kinds of child-care “books,” which, as she says, “do so differ,” but such guides are not
the only “books” Gaskell refers to in her diary. She cites Andrew Combe’s Principles of
Physiology as having “prepared” her to understand the relationship between her
daughter’s “bodily feeling” and her mental temperament. Published in 1834, Combe’s
book endeavors to teach people how their bodies work and how best to care for them.
109

But instead of deferring to the advice Combe and others offer, Gaskell writes herself into
a collaborative partnership with them. She suggests at one point that it is only through

109
Combe was educated in Edinburgh and apprenticed as surgeon during the first part of the nineteenth
century. He trained in Paris, where he became interested in anatomy; he returned to Scotland to begin his
practice and completed his MD. Eventually, he became famous for his work on phrenology and the study of
mental illness.

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experience, a mother’s experience, that one can understand fully the relationship between
the “temper” and the “body.” “Mothers,” she explains, “are sometimes laughed at for
attributing little freaks of temper to teething, &c., but I don’t think those who laugh at
them (I used to be one) have had much to do with children” (14). Her experience and
newfound expertise are not subordinate to Combe’s; neither are they held out as superior.
Later, however, when discussing one of Marianne’s various recoveries, Gaskell does
begin to introduce her own expert authority more overtly: “With her strength has her
good temper returned, which is in accordance with my theory that when children . . . are
irritable something is physically the matter with them” (emphasis original 17). Here,
Gaskell identifies herself as a theorist among the experts and a manager among doctors.
Doctors are not, as the diary suggests, the sole authority on healthy families. And
Gaskell’s authority comes not only from her status as a mother but from her narrative
competence, which she herself is developing through the very writing of this diary.
This relationship between mothering and writing transforms in Wives and
Daughters into a relationship between medical expertise and proper story telling. It is a
relationship that Gaskell locates in the figure of the daughter. As a daughter (and not yet
a mother or a wife) Molly inhabits a kind of training ground, suspended in that moment
of “interest” when so much is still possible. But rather than offer Molly or the reader an
ideal version of the mother-doctor on which to model her behavior, Gaskell presents us
with its opposite in Mrs. Gibson. Nowhere do we see the clash between medicine and
domestic management more clearly than when Mrs. Gibson overhears her husband
discussing Osborne Hamley’s medical diagnosis with another physician, Mr. Nicholls. As

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if eavesdropping on a patient consultation were not enough of an invasion, Mrs. Gibson
sneaks in to the surgery to look up the name of Osborne’s disease before deciding what
kind of advantage it will give her. Up to this point, she had been trying and failing to
create a love plot involving Osborne and Cynthia. It is not until Mrs. Gibson realizes that
he has a fatal illness and that his younger brother, Roger Hamley, is likely to become the
heir to the estate that she supports the relationship between Roger and Cynthia. When
Mrs. Gibson exposes her enthusiasm for the engagement and reveals her knowledge
about Osborne’s health, Mr. Gibson becomes greatly concerned. A diagnosis, which is
only speculative, has reached his wife’s ears and this creates a personal and professional
dilemma for the doctor. Mr. Gibson forces his wife to repeat what she has overheard, thus
turning her into the bearer of Osborne’s diagnosis for the reader—it is from her mouth
that we hear he has “an aneurism of the aorta” and that “there is a pretty clear indication
of symptoms” (381). She recapitulates his diagnosis word for word, such that Mr. Gibson
cannot pretend that he was referring to another patient.
Rather than mark a distinction between Mr. Gibson and his wife, this episode
aligns the two performers, and thus makes way for Molly’s form of domestic medicine.
When he asks, “How do you know we were speaking of Osborne Hamley?,” Hyacinth
takes this as a sign that “he was descending to her level of subterfuge,” a shift that gives
her more “courage” and a sense of authority to speak (381). The narrator explains that at
this moment she takes on “quite a different tone to the cowed one which she had been
using” (381). The doctor and his wife speak, if only momentarily, the same language, as
it becomes Mr. Gibson’s turn to articulate for the reader what Mrs. Gibson has been

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thinking and doing. He takes on her perspective, surmising that she “made [Roger] more
welcome in the house than [she] had ever done before, regarding him as proximate heir to
the Hamley estate” (382). When Mrs. Gibson claims not to know the meaning of
“proximate,” Mr. Gibson retorts, “[g]o into the surgery, and look in the dictionary then”
(382). This spatial and rhetorical breach of public and private, of doctor and wife, marks
the limits of how these roles can be traversed. It is not that the mother should not enter
the realm of medicine—mothers, as Gaskell’s diary demonstrates, are de facto doctors,
observing symptoms, making diagnoses, and determining treatment. Rather, it is that
Mrs. Gibson’s uses the expertise of the surgery to draw the wrong kind of conclusions.
For her, Osborne’s diagnosis is economic rather than medical, and entirely self-interested.
Although we know that her “maneuver” has no real authority—Osborne is already
secretly married and Cynthia has already accepted Roger’s proposal—it functions as a
model against which we see Molly cultivate her own connection between medicine,
domestic management, and narrative.
Domestic Medicine: The Daughter
While the focus of the plot turns to Cynthia Kirkpatrick’s romantic relationships,
the novel is ultimately interested in developing Molly’s authority through her ability to
keep Cynthia morally rather than physically healthy. Cynthia’s story becomes a way for
Molly to assert her expertise.
110
For although Cynthia is “as strong as a horse,” Gaskell
brings her into the doctor’s house in order to get her cured of her incessant plotting. The

110
Margaret Homans convincingly interprets Molly as “a receiver of secrets” and “selfless mediator,”
arguing that this role “require[s] a kind of death of the self” (256, 259). But her assertion that “Molly
begins to shift from the language of one kind of mother to that of the other” ignores the way Molly adopts
and adapts her father’s language of medicine.

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person to cure Cynthia is not the clever doctor but the clever doctor’s daughter. Like her
mother, Cynthia has stories to tell and if she were in charge of the narrative, this would
be a very different novel. When she arrives from boarding school, she brings with her a
secret, unwanted engagement, which we do not find out about until much later. For now,
she cryptically and teasingly tells Molly that she is “not good, and . . . never shall be,”
though she leaves room for the possibility that she “might be a heroine still” (221). At
one point, she explains that her plan is to become a governess and move to Russia. Set in
a foreign land, the story she might invent for herself would center on an English
governess who, neglected by her mother and taken advantage of by an older man, never
marries. We only get glimpses of this potential narrative, but from early on we are
suspicious of Cynthia’s threat to abscond to Russia and live as a governess. That is, we
are fairly certain she will never fulfill this promise.
By the time Cynthia comes to live with the Gibsons, Molly, though still innocent,
has already learned a great deal about sickness and love-stories. Summoned to Hamley in
order to sooth the dying wife, Molly learns that such stories, which seem always to have
secrets, can be “very uncomfortable” and that their heroes can be rather disappointing.
Molly’s apprenticeship has prepared her for Cynthia’s secret anxiety, and while the
illness in Cynthia’s plot is largely metaphorical—she never becomes an invalid like Mrs.
Hamley—Gaskell nonetheless stages Cynthia’s story as in need of medical intervention.
The action of the novel revolves around Molly honing her abilities to read and manage
plots, thus delaying or rather disrupting her own entrance into romance and marriage. For
although we know that Molly is never truly absent from the plot, by handing the

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management of Cynthia over to her, Gaskell gives Molly time (and several hundred
pages) to become something other than a daughter or a wife—she becomes a manager
and storyteller, which, for Gaskell, is what the daughter must do in order to become a
healthy wife and mother.
Molly’s skills are put the test with Cynthia. We see the beginnings of her
“practice” when Mr. Preston, the man who has extorted an engagement from Cynthia,
calls on the Gibsons. As the Cumnor land agent and friend from Hyacinth’s days at
Ashcombe, Mr. Preston’s attentions are expected and fit well within the bounds of social
etiquette. Molly knows Mr. Preston from her father’s wedding, and his flirtatious,
insincere manners make her uncomfortable and impatient. It is no surprise then that when
Hyacinth lies to him about Cynthia’s whereabouts Molly attempts to participate in
deception. Hearing the “click” of the door, Molly realizes that Cynthia has returned and
tries to stop her (without any hint from Mrs. Gibson) from entering the room. Molly’s
dislike for Mr. Preston and her uncharacteristically “maliciou[s] desir[e] to baffle him”
aligns her momentarily with Mrs. Gibson. But instead of blocking the encounter, Molly
gets tangled up in “crewels of worsted” (226): in effect, Gaskell prohibits her heroine
from participating in subterfuge. While Molly is physically incapable of (or too clumsy
for) this kind of trickery and intrigue, her thwarted attempt to become a bit of a “plotter”
suggests she will need to offer Cynthia a different form of care than what the mother has
provided.
Her aborted effort to stop the encounter between Cynthia and Preston is not
simply an example of bad management. It provides Molly with an opportunity to begin

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her physical examination of Cynthia, to begin using the medical training she developed at
Hamley Hall. When Cynthia sees Mr. Preston in her drawing-room the narrator explains
that “[h]er colour, which had been brilliant the first moment of her entrance, faded away
as she gazed; but her eyes—her beautiful eyes—usually so soft and grave, seemed to fill
with fire” (227). Though we do not know yet the reason for Cynthia’s reaction, it is clear
that his interest in Cynthia is sexual and thus dangerous. The description of Cynthia
appears to be focalized through all three characters (Molly, Mr. Preston, and Mrs.
Gibson) simultaneously, though with very different meaning. The refrain “her beautiful
eyes” is the language of a lover, a sisterly statement of admiration, and a momentary
reflection of a mother’s pride; the narrator notes that “all were looking at [Cynthia] with
different emotions” (227). The additional observation that Cynthia’s eyes are “usually so
soft and grave” seems to be wholly of Molly’s notice (and a product of her diagnostic
gaze). As objects of Cynthia’s disaffection, Mr. Preston and Mrs. Gibson are rarely on the
receiving end of such “softness.” And, indeed, when Cynthia has a similar physical
response later, only Molly questions what it means. As the step-sisters read the too-
familiar note Mr. Preston sends to Cynthia, signed only “R.P.,” the narrator explains that
“Cynthia looked extremely irritated, indignant, perplexed—what was it turned her cheek
so pale, and made her eyes so full of fire?” (280). The question and thus the observation
is Molly’s, and while she has already seen Cynthia turn pale and fire-eyed in the presence
of Mr. Preston, she does not connect the man with his initials. This time Cynthia
intensifies her symptoms by making them literal, by throwing the flowers—“the

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remind[er] of that man”—into the fire (280). This event becomes part of the “case
history” of Cynthia that Molly implicitly puts together.
111

Gaskell thus links the sisters’ plots by attaching Molly and her diagnostic gaze
fully to Cynthia’s case. The primary action of the charity-ball they attend comes neither
from Molly’s excitement about its being her first, nor from her pleasure at having so
many interesting partners. Rather, what drives this episode is Molly’s intense
commitment to Cynthia’s well-being. She was, the narrator explains, “more occupied in
watching Cynthia” than in attending to her mother’s chastisement. Molly devotes all of
her interest to “understand[ing] the change that seemed to have come over” her sister. It
is that mode of “curiosity” that Roger had helped “nurs[e] . . . into a very proper desire
for further information” (120). Molly notices all the ways in which Cynthia’s demeanor
changes over the course of the evening: Cynthia exhibits “the same lightness and grace
[when she dances], but the smooth bounding motion as of a feather . . . was gone; “she
was conversing with her partner, but without the soft animation that usually shown upon

111
It is worth noting that while Cynthia’s story depends in large part on Molly’s reactions to it, we get
pieces of her past outside of Molly’s perspective that help us develop our own expertise of Cynthia’s case.
In a bit of gossip, Miss Hornblower hints, though somewhat unwittingly, at a romantic triangle involving
the mother and daughter. In her comments to Miss Browning about Cynthia’s womanly appearance, Miss
Hornblower corroborates the fact that Cynthia was, even as a young girl, rather beautiful, noting that
“people [at Ashcombe] did say Mr. Preston admired her very much; but she was so young.” Her age keeps
“people” from assuming that there is an inappropriate relationship, and shortly after this history, we learn
of Mrs. Gibson’s past involvement with Preston. Though she may be “condescending” now, Mrs.
Hornblower complains, there was a time when “[Mrs. Kirkpatrick] would have been glad enough to marry
Mr. Preston” (283). Mrs. Hornblower quickly retracts her inference, telling Miss Browning, “don’t go and
repeat what I’ve been saying about Mr. Preston and Mrs. Kirkpatrick to her ladyship. One may be
mistaken, and you know I only said ‘people talked about it’” (284). This exchange exposes an
uncomfortable competition between mother and daughter that explains, in part, Hyacinth’s desire to leave
Cynthia behind or send her away. Molly learns much later, during Cynthia’s confession, about Mrs.
Kirkpatrick’s “desperate” advances toward Mr. Preston. Oddly, this is the only time Cynthia comes to her
mother’s defense—when she learns from her schoolmate that people joke about “the very pretty widow . . .
who made love to him,” she becomes even more disgusted by her attachment to “that man” (472). This part
of the story ceases to matter, however, as Cynthia’s and Molly’s plots overlap through their common,
though different, interest in Roger.

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her countenance”; and finally, she “change[s] colour” and her eyes are now “dreamily
abstract” (294). With Molly’s visual examination complete, she has enough evidence to
ask what’s wrong. When Cynthia denies any problem, Molly presents her with the
symptoms and tentative diagnosis: “you look different to what you did—tired or
something” (294). Though she cannot yet figure out the problem—she doesn’t know
exactly which questions to ask or how far she should probe—Molly does reveal her
nascent competence in domestic medicine. Brought up in a doctor’s house, trained as an
invalid’s confidante, Molly has become skilled in reading bodily signs of distress.
These diagnostic instincts are tested shortly after the ball, when Cynthia becomes
mildly indisposed. Her languidness and altered looks during this period are not, as Mrs.
Gibson later casts it, attributable to Roger Hamley’s absence. They are a direct result of
Cynthia’s encounter with Mr. Preston. This indisposition is the first physical sign of the
seriousness of her secret arrangement, and Mrs. Gibson fails to understand its
significance. The narrator compares the mother’s and the sister’s response to Cynthia’s
health, explaining that “Mrs. Gibson noticed it” but “Molly became positively uneasy”
(311). The sick daughter, who should cause at least some maternal anxiety, only makes
Mrs. Gibson “impatient”; she “accuse[s] Cynthia of being fanciful and lazy” (311). Mr.
Gibson, partially “at Molly’s instance [sic],” conducts “a professional examination,”
which reveals “that there was nothing very much the matter, only a general lowness of
tone, and a depression of health and sprits” (311). He offers his patient a prescription,
which, as we have seen, is the doctor’s standard response: Cynthia can either take a
“tonic” or she can talk about the problem. “If you tell me your sorrows and cares,” he

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cajoles, “I’ll try to find some other remedy for them than giving you what you are pleased
to term my nauseous mixtures” (311). Both options hold the same weight for Mr. Gibson,
for even though he agrees to hear her story, it is only for the sake of determining “some
other remedy.” Cynthia chooses the “nauseous mixtures” without telling her story. As
expected, she does not waste away under the anxiety and pressure; she recovers from her
“supposed invalid[ism]” (310), and while Mrs. Gibson is right (Cynthia’s illness is not
serious), the mother’s inability or unwillingness to take her daughter more seriously—to
hear her story—blinds her to the true cause of her metaphorical disease, a plot at the end
of which Cynthia sees only “doom” (329).
The problem with Cynthia’s story is not simply that it involves intrigue
(something we know is forbidden in the Gibson household), but that it affects Roger. At
the same time Molly struggles with Cynthia’s mysterious behavior, she must also contend
with Roger’s obvious attachment to Cynthia and with Molly’s own growing desire for
him. Molly is not the only one who observes Cynthia’s waning health: “the first person
out of the house to notice Cynthia’s change of look and manner was Roger Hamley.”
(312). This is the concern of a lover and registers differently than the quasi-clinical
(albeit affectionate) observations of Molly. For the lover, illness provides the perfect
cover for talking to and about the object of one’s affection. He speaks openly about her
appearance: “Molly, how ill your sister is looking! What is it? Has she had advice? You
must forgive me, but so often those who live together in the same house don’t observe the
first approaches of illness” (312). Here, Roger puts his scientific training to medical use,
reasoning that one must step back and take in the whole picture in order to see the story’s

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evolution over time, to compare the past with the present condition in order to recognize
change. Roger’s concern shows not only just how attuned he is to Cynthia’s appearance
of health, but also how far he is willing to go to express his feelings—he has, in effect,
accused the town doctor of failing to do his job. Of whom would Cynthia receive expert
“advice” but her own step-father, the doctor? To be sure, we have already seen that Mr.
Gibson has difficulty recognizing that his own daughter has grown, but when it comes to
symptoms of illness, he has yet to fail. Roger’s questions masquerade as objective
concern for medical neglect, and he begins to offer his own advice, advice that would
allow him to see Cynthia more regularly: “I wonder if she wants a change of air? . . . I do
wish we could have her at Hamley Hall” (312).
That fact that Roger engages Molly under the auspices of a kind of professional
concern, gives the authority over Cynthia’s case to Molly, rather than her father. That is,
rather than approach the doctor with these remedies, he defers to Molly, asking if there is
“anything [he] can do for [her] sister. We have plenty of books . . . Or flowers? she likes
flowers. Oh! And our forced strawberries are just ready—I will bring some to-morrow”
(313). Roger uses Cynthia’s “indisposition” as an excuse for visiting almost every day,
bringing “some fresh offering” (313). This affection, which she knows is not
reciprocated, keeps Molly on the outside, as an observer rather than a preventionist: “I
must wait and watch, and see if I can do anything for my brother [Roger]” (354).
Although Gaskell presents Molly as a long-suffering would-be wife who, like Austen’s
Fanny Price, “did not know her own feelings,” this “sister” identifies her role in clearer
terms than we see with Fanny (354). She realizes that while it is beyond her power to

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prevent Roger from falling in love, she might in observing his symptoms closely be all
the better positioned to administer proper treatment to his broken heart when the occasion
arises. Molly can foretell Roger’s pain because she has observed enough of Cynthia’s
heart (without knowing the particulars of her situation) to know that her affections are
“out of [his] reach” (354).
Molly has, by now, become an educated observer, and Gaskell is clear to
distinguish hers from other types of examinations that go on in the novel. Her interest in
Cynthia is one of “affection” rather than “the coarser desire of knowing everything for a
little excitement.” It is linked more with Roger’s interest in natural science and her
father’s attention to his patients than with the social cares of her mother or the other
women of Hollingford. She sees and hears everything not to gratify her curiosity but to
know what to do and how to act. Molly “cho[oses] to use” only “delicate instruments” in
order to break through the “dead wall[s]” Cynthia builds (414). Certainly, a more curious
heroine would have extracted the truth from Cynthia much sooner. We witness Molly’s
delicacy or naïveté at the ball, where she suspects that Mr. Preston has some “power over
her [Cynthia]” but cannot determine what it is. She does not have the data (nor do we) to
figure out that Cynthia is being blackmailed by Mr. Preston into marriage. Indeed, even
the women most schooled in these matters could not suspect such a plight. The difference
is that Molly is surprised when she finds out about Cynthia’s liaison, while someone like
Lady Harriet suspects all along that Cynthia “is the real heroine of this story” [526]).
When Molly finally learns about Cynthia and Preston’s secret engagement, she
approaches it with literal as well as social medicine, for although Cynthia works herself

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into a physical frenzy, she requires primarily a moral intervention. Molly stumbles upon
the couple arguing in the bushes and, finding Cynthia “hysterical” and unable to move,
takes it upon herself to “restore her calmness” (461). She orders Preston to get water from
a cottage nearby, which temporarily gets rid of him but eventually becomes part of the
evidence used to sully Molly’s name. Molly’s job, as she sees it, is to help “extricate
Cynthia . . . by thought, or advice, or action” from what has become a dangerous and
physically traumatic entanglement (464). While Molly’s desire to protect Roger, who has
by now professed his love to Cynthia, motivates her, we also know that she would have
acted on Cynthia’s behalf without considering his interest. Molly’s energies seem focused
almost entirely on diagnosing and treating Cynthia, which delays Molly’s own marriage
plot but allows her to represent more clearly the therapeutic value not only of hearing
stories but of telling one’s own.
Anticipating the kind of therapy Freud will develop at the beginning of the
following century, one based almost entirely on telling one’s story, Gaskell presents
Cynthia’s confession to Molly as a talking cure. Although Cynthia’s story is a secret
rather than a repressed memory or emotion, Gaskell moves us from somatic medicine and
the physical exam of the father to the psychological and narrative medicine of the
daughter. If we have not yet seen the parallels between Molly’s actions and her father’s
profession, we do now. Mr. Gibson had offered a similar treatment to Cynthia during the
first signs of her “indisposition,” but for him, the talk was not itself the remedy. What
Cynthia refuses the father, she now willingly gives to his daughter, and Molly determines
the course to be taken: “[l]ie down on the bed, and I will sit by you, and let us talk it over

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. . . When did it all begin?” Cynthia refuses to lie down but agrees, with Molly’s
prompting, to speak. The story functions as both a case history and a form of cure.
Cynthia finally gets to tell a story that is more about a mother’s neglect than about the
imminent problem of a coerced engagement. And, as if we are back in that fairy tale
opening of “Once upon a time,” Cynthia begins her story: “Long ago—four or five years.
I was such a child to be left all to myself . . .” (467). A story that begins with children
left alone cannot end well. We learn that Hyacinth left Cynthia alone during a holiday
when the latter was slightly younger than Molly is now, and although she gave Cynthia
permission to visit another family, she did not give her any money for the journey. Mr.
Preston fills the void left by the mother, offering the sympathy and money. Eventually,
when it comes to pass that Cynthia cannot repay the debt, Mr. Preston extracts a promise
of marriage, which is to be repaid when Cynthia turns twenty. That time is now, and the
payment is due. Mr. Preston has threatened to show the letters in which Cynthia dilates
on her mother’s many faults. As much as Cynthia disdains her mother, she does not want
her mother’s faults to face public scrutiny. More specifically, she does not want Mr.
Gibson to read the letters. As Cynthia begins to tell her story, Molly notices that “an aged
and careworn expression . . . had taken temporary hold of the brilliant and beautiful face”
(467). But once she reveals her story and Molly determines the remedy, Cynthia, crying
“out of weariness and despair of mind,” nonetheless regains her former countenance, as
she “presse[s] the beautiful head to [Molly’s] bosom” (474).
Molly’s subsequent actions on behalf of Cynthia recast Molly as the heroine of
dangerous seduction plot, something her father had attempted to prevent when he sent her

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to Hamley. But unlike Cynthia, she knowingly and with purpose puts herself—as a
doctor might—in harm’s way in order to bring this portion of the story to a close, in order
to comfort and to cure. When she confronts Mr. Preston, Molly sounds strikingly like her
father did when he reasoned with Mr. Coxe about the inappropriateness of his affection
for Molly. When Preston claims that Cynthia gave her promise to marry him “as
solemnly as ever woman —.” Molly cuts him off before he can finish, asserting (quite
rightly) that “[s]he was not a woman, she was only a girl, barely sixteen” (480). Unlike
her father, Molly has got it right—she sees the sex and power disparity represented in her
young age. The illness from which Cynthia suffers is much less physical than social and
moral, but it still demands medicalized (if not specifically medical) treatment and has
everything to do with the power of narrative. Molly retrieves the written documents and
redirects Cynthia’s plot toward closure.
What acts as closure for Cynthia, however, serves to make Molly more vulnerable
to moral sickness. The town speculates about the Molly’s propriety, which turns her into
the focus of diagnostic scrutiny. Gaskell imagines the fallout from Cynthia’s plot as a
sanitationist might, for Molly is temporarily “defiled” because of her contact with
Cynthia’s story. The tête-à-tête with Preston and the presumed privacy of such an
interaction can mean only one thing when witnessed in public, that the two are engaged
in some secretive, potentially sexual liaison. When Mr. Gibson learns that his daughter
has been “carrying on a clandestine correspondence with Mr. Preston” (513)—the very
activity he prevented Molly from engaging in with Mr. Coxe—he warns her that the
“slight[est] thing may blacken a girl’s reputation for life” (518) and accuses Cynthia of

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“dragging Molly’s name down into the same mire” (543). Mr. Gibson moves between the
language of sanitation and theories of contagion, first imagining Molly’s situation in
terms of filth but then crediting Cynthia with transmitting it. But rather than hand over
the case to Mr. Gibson, Gaskell uses Molly’s condition to bolster the daughter’s
authority.
Once the “reports” of Molly’s behavior with Mr. Preston “are abroad,” she is
treated as a public threat and the town fixates on her as the dangerous contaminant: “Mrs.
Goodenough openly pull[s] her grand-daughter away” from Molly (507). When Mr.
Gibson learns of this kind of treatment, he wishes he “had the doctoring of these
slanderous gossips” so that he can “make their tongues lie still for a while” (513). Molly
refuses her father’s brand of treatment; instead of allowing him to engage in any sinister
act, even if only in his thoughts, she explains to him that the situation must run its course,
that he must be “patient with the gossip and cackle” (519). While she correctly assumes
that her father’s remedy would not cure, she does not quite realize that something must be
done. The only way to prove Molly’s innocence and to prevent serious harm is to
demonstrate that contact with her is not only safe but desirable. Lady Harriet, a woman
who has always been drawn to Molly’s morality and knows a bit about how stories can
heal, spends the day in total contact with Molly. Her social rank has the power to prove,
with one handshake, Molly’s innocence more than any “doctoring” Mr. Gibson could do.
She walks Molly through town, and finally “stand[s] on the white door-steps, at the Miss
Brownings’, . . . holding Molly’s hand while she wish[s] her good-by” (533). Molly,
who does not realize all the Lady Harriet has done for her, is no longer a blight; she

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stands as an emblem of purity in that transitional space between the street and the home.
Though Lady Harriet takes control over Molly’s treatment, it is Molly who knows to take
her case out of her father’s hand.
Molly has successfully escaped contamination and maintained Cynthia’s health;
but these are social rather than physical problems. And although the language of
medicine permeates these episodes, it isn’t until Molly takes part in Osborne Hamley’s
treatment that we see her engage more directly with the practice of medicine. Though she
has a deep affection for the entire Hamley family, her relationship to Osborne is the least
intimate and most disinterested. She is objective without losing her sympathetic care. Her
final case, one that will lead to her own physical illness, pits doctor against daughter in a
decidedly professional encounter. When word comes to the Gibsons that Osborne
Hamley is dead, the doctor is out and Molly determines to go in his place. To the
repeated question “Is the doctor coming, Miss?,” Molly decides, “I will go myself” (550).
As if recalling the Squire’s earlier claim that having the doctor’s daughter is “nearly as
good as the doctor,” she does not hesitate to think that she will be a satisfactory
substitute, at least in this case, when the patient is already dead. And indeed she is. Molly
finds the Squire in serious distress and convinces him to take a spoonful of soup. The
Squire even requests that Molly stay the night, and Mr. Gibson, unsure if it is the right
thing to do, allows Molly to decide. She agrees and Molly and her father engage in a
post-mortem of Osborne’s case:
“[W]hat did Osborne die of?” She asked the question in a low awe-
stricken voice.
“Something wrong with the heart. You wouldn’t understand if I told you. I
apprehended it for some time; but it is better not to talk of such things at home.

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When I saw him on Thursday week, he seemed better than I have seen him for a
long time. I told Dr. Nicholls so. But one never can calculate in these complaints.”

“You saw him Thursday week? Why, you never mentioned it!” said
Molly.

Mr. Gibson responds abruptly: “No. I don’t talk of my patients at home. Besides, I didn’t
want him to consider me as his doctor, but as a friend. Any alarm about his own health
would only have hastened the catastrophe.” This exchange begins simply enough as a
discussion between a layperson and an authority, a daughter and her doctor-father. Molly
is “awe-stricken” by the gravity of her own question, but it is her interest in the cause of
death that marks her as something more than a grieving friend or family member—the
squire never asks what killed Osborne. And while her father asserts his authority and her
relative ignorance (“you wouldn’t understand”), he does share the details of Osborne’s
treatment, explaining what he knew, when he knew it, and with whom he consulted. The
doctor asserts a protective division between “home” and work that has already been
tested by his wife by making a distinction between the personal and the professional—a
doctor, it seems, can only demonstrate friendship by not talking about health.
But Molly pursues the point, because something in her father’s response does not
quite fit her own experience with the case. She probes the point about Osborne’s own
knowledge:
“Then he didn’t know that he was ill—ill of a dangerous
complaint, I mean: one that might end as it has done?”

“No; certainly not. He would only have been watching his
symptoms—accelerating matters, in fact.”

“Oh! papa!” said Molly, shocked.

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“I’ve no time to go into the question,” Mr. Gibson continued. “And
until you know what has to be said on both sides, and in every instance,
you are not qualified to judge.” (554)

The authority shifts when Molly challenges her father’s decision to withhold information
from Osborne. Mr. Gibson interprets her “shock” as an accusation—Osborne should have
been told—and feels compelled to defend his actions by reminding her that she is not
“qualified to judge” his decision. If we think back to Mrs. Gibson’s “diagnosis,” we
recall a similar reflex on the part of the doctor. In that instance Mrs. Gibson was correct
in what she overheard, though the use to which she puts the information is faulty and
ineffective. Molly is correct in thinking that her father is wrong for withholding
information and for thinking that Osborne was unaware of his health. Since the novel has
been working toward developing her judgment, Molly’s response displays a level of
knowledge worth attending to. Both Mrs. Gibson and Molly intrude on the doctor’s
territory, but with different results.
Gaskell highlights this contest between father and daughter structurally, by
transferring Osborne’s case over to Molly in the next chapter. Chapter 51 ends with Mr.
Gibson telling Molly to go bed, and Chapter 52 continues the scene but begins with
Molly’s revelation of Osborne’s secret: “Papa, I think I ought to tell you something. I
know a great secret of Osborne’s, which I promised not to tell; but the last time I saw him
I think he must have been afraid of something like this” (555). This is the only time in the
novel Gaskell places a chapter-break in the middle of a conversation, as if to divide
Molly’s authority from her father’s. To be sure, Molly begins sobbing as she shares this
information, but, realizing her moral and, we might say, professional responsibility, she

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“suddenly master[s] herself” and continues on. In telling her father about Osborne’s
secret marriage and child, Molly speculates that, contrary to her father’s belief in his
patient’s ignorance, Osborne knew he was dying. She recalls for her father the day when
Osborne had come to their house in order “to see [Mr. Gibson] professionally” (492). The
doctor had been away, but, as she had done with Cynthia’s case, Molly took over for her
father and gave Osborne the chance and the time to talk. Molly controls the session by
telling Osborne not to “go on talking so fast . . . Rest. No one will interrupt us” (493-4),
recognizing that talking alleviates his anxiety. While it was not a cure, it was the only
palliative that would do any real good at the time. Osborne claimed, “I feel better already
now I feel that some one else knows the whereabouts of my wife and child” (494). Molly
listened to Osborne then and retells the story to her father now, actions which, though
they do not save the patient, pave the way for his son, the Hamley heir, to heal the ailing
estate.
Doctored Daughter
At the height of Molly’s medical assertiveness, Gaskell pulls her out of the role as
the doctoring daughter and turns her into her father’s patient. The desire to sustain health
in the midst of so much disease and dis-ease, which has thus far generated this narrative,
gives way to sickness, which provides a mechanism for closure. Once Osborne’s wife
and son appear on the scene, sick with grief and in the early stages of scarlet fever,
Molly’s body breaks down, unable to sustain the constant mental and physical labor. She
waits until after she hears that Osborne’s widow is on the mend before admitting to her
father that she feels “unaccountably weary” (580). Molly begins to describe her

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symptoms, and thus transforms from a consulting partner to a patient. Her father responds
swiftly and authoritatively, blaming himself for failing to notice earlier and for giving her
too much responsibility. He does not diagnose her with any disease, saying only that
“[s]he has been overworked, and I’ve been a fool” (582). When he gets Molly home, Mr.
Gibson’s concern that her “illness might be a precursor of a still worse malady” comes to
pass. While it is not “acute,” her case is severe enough to make him “fea[r] that she might
become a permanent invalid” (583). As Molly’s apprenticeship ends, her romance begins.
No longer does she listen to or tell stories that heal others. And yet, even by ending with
Molly in her invalid gown, the narrative of health remains a persistent force—we are not
reminded of Mrs. Hamley or the first Mrs. Gibson, nor do we see Molly within the
tradition of crisis needing cure. We are left with the promise of a wife who has the
authority of mother and doctor, but whose body has been (must be) inured by sickness in
order to fulfill her proper role as the novel’s center.
Confined once more to her bed, Molly regains her position as the narrative’s
focus, and appears as a body in need of cure. Mr. Gibson associates Molly’s “nervous
fever” with her recent overwork, but this is not the first time she has been ill. The narrator
first mentions concern over Molly’s health well before her encounter with Mr. Preston.
Shortly after her father’s marriage and Roger’s proposal to Cynthia, the narrator explains
that “she . . . gradually [fell] into low health, rather than bad health. Her heart beat more
feebly and slower” (411). The thought that her father knows his wife’s faults but cannot
fix them and that Roger fails to see Cynthia’s faults seem to cause a “languor . . . [and]
slow depression of manner” (420). In this regard, Molly seems a rather typical “heroine”;

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her breaking heart (both filial or romantic) leads to physical illness, or at least to the kind
of delicacy associated with young women in love. But Gaskell does not take us down this
road; Molly’s illnesses function much more ambiguously, in part because Gaskell has
been training her all along to become a practitioner of domestic medicine. The next time
we hear of Molly’s “delicate health,” the narrator attributes it to “rapid growth during the
last few months” (446). Molly is not, then, the sickly heroine waiting for a curative
encounter with her beloved; she is, rather, a growing girl, experiencing the physical pain
that comes with a physiological fact. The idea that Molly’s body seems to be growing too
fast has metaphorical resonances; she can physically, not just mentally, feel the effects of
becoming a woman.
Curiously, Molly’s illnesses do not build over the course of the novel toward the
eventual invalidism that gets her father’s notice. Rather, we can read her “low health” and
“growing pains” as separate incidents attributed to different causes. By the time Molly
becomes an invalid at the end of the novel she has been introduced into the tradition of
lovesick women. And while her earlier lapses bespeak a delicate constitution, Gaskell is
careful to distinguish these moments from the kind of physical and mental labor that
leads to Molly’s fever—as her father says, “she has been overworked.” Indeed, she has
been. While at the Hamleys’ she had to care for the squire, who became frighteningly
insensible: when she first attempts to soothe him, he suddenly cries out, “thr[owing]
himself across the corpse, and we[eping] in such a terrible manner that Molly trem[bles]
lest he should die” (553). After the arrival of Osborne’s secret wife, Aimee Osborne, and
her son, Molly must look out for the interests of the grieving widow. When the Squire

191
begins to complain to Mr. Gibson about Osborne’s refusal to tell him about the wife,
“Molly gr[ows] impatient on the mother’s behalf,” telling her father that “[Aimee] [i]s
very ill; perhaps worse than we think” (577). She asserts her diagnostic authority,
because she knows something about the toll of clandestine love affairs. Her turn to
sickness forces us to recall what the narrative has been asking her to know and learn
about the powerful relationship between medicine, management, and narrative.
Overwork may have been the cause of her illness, but the effect is that she
becomes the primary object of desire and experiences the benefits of her own medical
treatment: she gets to tell her own sad, therapeutic story. Mr. Gibson initially prescribes
“a trashy novel or two” to help Molly sleep but it is by rehearsing the story of Osborne’s
death and his wife’s sudden arrival to Cynthia that “Molly’s health and spirits improv[e]
rapidly” (586). Cynthia allows Molly to “continually recu[r] to all the time of distress and
sorrow at Hamley Hall,” because, as the narrator explains, Cynthia “instinctively knew
that the repetition of all these painful recollections would ease the oppressed memory,
which refused to dwell on anything but what had occurred at a time of feverish
disturbance of health” (586). Mrs. Gibson, by contrast, only says, “You told me that
before, my dear. Let’s talk of something else” (586). Thus, by the time Roger sees Molly
in her “pretty white invalid’s dress” (592), she has recovered just enough to become, as
he observes, “the delicate fragrant beauty” of his brother’s prediction (593).
In a reversal of the crisis-cure trajectory, illness not only reunites Molly with
Roger, but removes Cynthia from the picture and makes way for a new romance plot
involving the heroine and provides closure. After Molly recovers from her more serious

192
nervous fever, she contracts a rather convenient and harmless cold that keeps her and the
reader away from Cynthia’s wedding. Now that Mr. Preston is out of the way, Cynthia is
free to marry Mr. Henderson. We are relocated to Cumnor Towers, where Molly’s love
plot speeds toward the inevitable conclusion. With Roger as a guest at the Towers, the
stage is set for the convalescing heroine to find comfort from a newly-professed lover.
But instead of allowing for sickroom confessionals or care to bring Roger and Molly
together, Gaskell returns to a model of prevention designed to keep the lovers apart—
quarantine. Once again, Molly’s romance plot is framed as medical intervention. Scarlet
fever, which helped bring Roger and Molly together earlier in the novel, now keeps them
separated. Recall that Molly’s extended stay at Hamley in the beginning of the novel was
the result of her governess (Miss Eyre’s) being in contact with her nephew who suffered
from scarlet fever. Now, Osborne’s child contracts scarlet fever, the “one illness [Mr.
Gibson] dread[s]” (639), because Molly has no immunity against it; “from the strict
quarantine her father evidently thought it necessary to establish between the two houses,
she was not likely to see Roger again before his departure for Africa” (640).
The closest we come to a marriage proposal occurs during a discussion between
Roger and Mr. Gibson, which turns into a medical encounter. When Roger reveals his
disappointment in not being able to see Molly again before he leaves, Mr. Gibson “turn[s]
his keen, observant eyes upon the young man, and look[s] at him in as penetrating a
manner as if he had been beginning some unknown illness” (641). And of course, to
some degree it is a type of illness. Once Roger pours out his feelings to “the doctor and
the father” (641), Mr. Gibson acknowledges that he would “rather give [his] child . . . to

193
[Roger] than to any other man in the world!” (643). This does not change the medical
risks involved if the lovers were to meet and, once again, Mr. Gibson asserts his
professional and paternal authority, denying Roger’s request to see Molly with a
resounding: “Decidedly not. There I come in as a doctor as well as a father. No!” (644).
The doctor-father regains control of the narrative by calling on the logic of prevention
and asserting yet another prescription. This time, though, it is no joke. Mr. Gibson is on
firm, professional and domestic ground. The doctor returns Molly to quarantine and his
reasons are based on sound, preventative medicine. It is a true quarantine, for the lovers
know why they will be separated and through the sequestration Gaskell creates the kind
delay that serves to heighten our anticipation for the their union and for the narrative’s
closure. With poor Mr. Coxe, Molly never knew she was separated from a possible
romance—the one-sided quarantine served not to provide closure so much as it offered
the opportunity for other forms of contact to initiate narrative. For Molly and Roger, and
for the novel more generally, the separation and the tension that this creates keeps
everyone healthy and keeps the story alive at the same time that it provides us with its
end.
Had Gaskell lived long enough to complete the final number, she would have, the
Cornhill editor tells us, “charmingly . . . drawn” Roger and Molly’s reunion. Instead, we
get an ending—a better ending, perhaps—that reminds us of where we have seen Molly
before. We find her again looking out a window onto a day that “[she] was afraid would
never never come” (6). But this Molly is different from the Molly we were introduced to
in the beginning of the novel, for she has grown wise, having learned to modulate her

194
emotions and to manage her health. Instead of an over-excited little girl who makes
herself sick, or an innocent young woman whose father must manage her affairs, we see
someone who is “happy, glowing, sad, and content” (645). The “sadness,” here, speaks
to her separation from Roger, the risk involved in his journey to Africa, and the inability
to finally speak of her love (it is still merely “friendship”[645]). It also reflects the
combined authority and perspective she has gained from being a doctoring (and now
doctored) daughter. For even though Molly does not become quite the expert that modern
readers might hope she will become—she is not going to write any medical tracts—she
nevertheless brings us closer to a model of medical practice that requires narrative
competence. Gaskell did not intend to conclude Wives and Daughters with Molly’s
ambivalence—the editor explains Molly was to be “happier than [Roger]” (649)—but it
is a more fitting ending to a novel that has been preoccupied with the elusiveness of
preserving health and the difficulty of managing stories.

195
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wright, Erika (author)

Core Title Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2009-08

Publication Date 08/06/2009

Defense Date 05/07/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag doctor,invalid,Medicine,narrative theory,OAI-PMH Harvest,Prevention,victorian

Language English

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Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Boone, Jospeh Allen (committee member), Kincaid, James R (committee member), Levine, Philippa (committee member)

Creator Email ewright@usc.edu,wrighterika@gmail.com

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