Reading "Shirley," Part One

In this series I am reviving and reviewing Charlotte Bront?’s third novel of four, Shirley. Appearing in 1849 under her pen-name Currer Bell, it documents events in the north of England in 1811–12, when—besides the human losses and agitation of war—the public’s concerns were economic hardship and blackouts of reason in the pig-headed.?

I have been storing my Penguin edition of Shirley, with its cover image of a moonlit textile mill, since the 1980s. Every now and then I take it off the shelf, open it to check for compatibility, hit upon some dogmatic dialogue of yesteryear (“ ‘France is Israel, and Napoleon is Moses’ ”), and put it back pronto.1?

In mid-June, however, happening to remember that the novel is set in Yorkshire during the Luddite riots, I reached for Shirley and began reading. The social geography in the north of England has begun to make an impression on me. My American view of events is horrid in making the analogy that this region is coming together for me like a persistent floater in one eye. Still, the image is apt and strikes like shared history does, with reflective velocity. American commercial responses tangled with trade rulings imposed by the British government throughout Napoleon’s Wars, and in 1812 a straining in relations didn’t untie a knotted situation or stop the impact, on these shores, of open protest riots on English soil by frame-breaking, cloth-working Luddites. Rioting is what people do when they’re disrespected. Today, technology has changed but the song remains the same, and in America the folk epithet “Luddite” still flies. It defies (or ridicules resistance to) a capitalist system teeming with money that overreaches human endeavor with power-driven machines.?

Considering Shirley as an early industrial novel with a footing in Luddism was a revelation. Too exhausted from the personal losses and public scenes which are the legacy of the last five years, many of us in the world economy have wanted more but have had to put up with economic and industrial distress amidst rationalizations that change is justified, and suggestions that we switch jobs or locations, or simply endure. This book sounds a note of encouragement. Consider this: the novelist stopped working on it under the pall of the deaths of her three siblings (writers Branwell, Emily, and Anne Bront?), and picked it up again after. Charlotte Bront?’s anger at millionaires, whilst her siblings were falling, must have been palpable.2?

The chance to see this great novelist dedicate herself to the story of the beginnings of the cloth industry setting its clock to the inferior tune of “beating the bush to drive the game” is a concert I decided I didn’t want to miss.3

In the novel’s first scenes it is February, and societal unrest is afoot at a dinner a curate is holding for two other “rods of Aaron” living “within a circuit of twenty miles.” The chief dependency in this exercise of ritual is the blame game of people making more work for each other: the curate’s child-rearing landlady is being “kept in a continual ‘fry’ by this system of mutual invasion”. Mealtime is found to be wanting in terms of what is served (the narrator shares that even readers are about to be reduced to a diet of “Good Friday in Passion Week: it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb”). From the start there’s a cyclical binding of wages to visits (think, “I’m going to a party, I’ll take on an Instacart order”) and the young priesthood is evidently taking on a policy for low-hanging fruit by lowering goodwill. Complaints sync: the roast beef is tough, there’s a demand “ ‘More bread!’ ’’,?and the beer is criticized for being flat (39–42).

Without enough supply of happy visits to go around, the designated role of dictator opens. In walks the Rector, Mr. Helstone, who in a later scene commands his niece not to “confound generals with particulars” (125). The word "general" could easily be a synecdoche for the dictator role he embodies. Asserting control over the carousing curates, Helstone demands the protection of one, the Irishman Malone, at a textile mill belonging to Robert Moore, because Moore is expecting new equipment that night and there are riotous, frame-breaking Luddites on the move.?

They do break Moore’s frames. In the ensuing action, when characters glance at one another, Peter Gabriel’s lyric comes to mind: “If looks could kill, they probably will”.? Philadelphia, the American city where I reside, still shows Quaker influence, an overall blind eye to the course of violence while sanctuary is an option, but I know judgement when I see it. A close reading shows that the narrator injects herself precisely at such moments of character discord, and disconcerts the reader’s judgement. A mystery so far is, is the narrator reliable? There’s an opposing Schoolmarm-y force (schoolmarm-y is a behavior, remember, not a real figure, and can easily flip between narrator and narrative), who clearly thinks the folk’s objections should be downgraded to, “I often wonder what life would be like without expectations.” It goes to work to tamp down Mr. Helstone, a powder keg on legs if ever there was one, remarking at some length and with kindness that he is essentially being pig-headed, “adherent to prejudices” (68).

Scenes in the novel that feature Caroline Helstone, Mr. Helstone’s niece, whose childish lust is directed at her mill-owning cousin, Robert Moore, are remarkable for their sexual candor, and the reader and the narrator share the irony of knowing that her bubble will be burst. Caroline na?vely believes that workers have to be handled with care, a “soft” position to take in tough times. At eighteen, Caroline has tongue smarts, but little emotional squareness in the face of reality. She is, says the narrator, “sadly deficient in finished manner, though she had once been at school a year” (133).

The editors Andrew and Judith Hook note Shirley’s good standing among nineteenth-century “condition of England” novels patterned on the examination of forms and frameworks of oppression (7–9). While historically it is her fictionalizing of women’s independent sexual and personal disturbances that make Charlotte Bront?’s biography (and a lot of her output) come alive, it’s not all there is to talk about. Evident is that “yahoos with low morale” was a position to societal unrest she took to heart. I’m not an authority on Bront?’s biography, but her father’s surname could be a poshed-up flourish on his humble Irish ancestry. We shall probably find more definition on this issue going forward.?

Here ends Part One. Have questions about the novel Shirley? Feel free to message or comment on LinkedIn.

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1Charlotte Bront?, Shirley, eds. Andrew and Judith Hook, 70 (1985). Other page references appear parenthetically in the text.

2As his summer guest after the publication of Shirley, Charlotte Bront? evidently found the monied Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth hard to take. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, 248 (1993).

3The textile industry doesn’t have a monopoly on workers’ discontent. George Fox, Jr., quoted in N. M. Penzer, Paul Storr, 1771–1844: Silversmith and Goldsmith, 60 (1971).

?Peter Gabriel, “Games Without Frontiers,” Games Without Frontiers (1980).