seri$ I I sslsh G".nd - Canterbury Christ Church University

Alrcady published in viclodaD ndor Re!€.ftb cuider: CAROLINE CLM
seri$ I I sslsh G".nd
1E0r_1973
2 Jesie Fotheirill
3 Edmund Yat€€
4 lld.res to Fictid in rine (lsze-er), Mrr.y,r Mis.,i (rEE74l),
Thc Quarto (1896-98)
seriq 2 5 rndcrcs ro Fictid hrhe r,sdy,s R€otm
6 Mart Cholmondeley
7 Itrd.,t* io Ficrion h lbsleyk Mrgad$, l,r€I The Noycl RGd.r (r$t
92')
E Fr3lB CahdHory
S€rie! 3 9 IndEx$ io Fiction in Pau MrI Mrggire (1E9U914)
10 ID&rs to FictioD in Tb. Hrlmrworrh Magarin€, latd Tt Llldon
Masdre (1898-r9rt
1l Mrrgarct Onphsd
12 Lrdcrcs to Fictid h Crss€lt fanlly Mr$riDe, lttc. C.!r.ll's
Mryarhc (ff41910)
Series 4 13 Mr6 Humphry Wrrd
14 Inder.q to Fidiotr ir BelgaYia
15 Rola Prr€d
16 RoEa Nouch€{te Crr€y
Series 5 17 Indqes to FictioD in Chmb€.s" JoUInrl O8*r910)
18 Philip Meadors Tryln
19/20 I4tterE of G,A. SrIr to EdDEd Yrtls (double volune)
Series 6 2l TIle f,dmund Ysaes P.p.n in tte Univcrsity of Quffildd Libnry
22 Elizrb€lh RobiG
23 Indets io Fiction in The Idl€r (1E92-1911)
24 FYmd. AdMs
A BIBLIOGRAPIfI
Compiled by Charloite Mitchell
Series 7 25 Bram Stoker
26 Margaret Oliphant: Non-fictional Writings
27 Mary Fortune Victorian Fiction Research Guide 28
fA)
Victorian Fiction Research Unit
Department of English
The University of Queensland

Copyright @ Charlotte Mitchell 1999
ISBN 1-86499-t194
ISSN 0158 3921
Published by
Victorian Fiction Research Unit
Department of English
The University of Queensland
Australia 4072
VICTORIAN FICTION RESEARCH GUIDES
Victorian Fiction Research Guides are published by the Victorian
Fiction Research Unit within the Department of English, The University
of Queensland.
The Unit concentrales on minor or lesser-known writers active during
the period from about 1860 to about 1910, and on fiction published in
journals during the same period. We would be interested to hear from
anyone working on relevant author-bibliographies or on indexes to
fiction in journals of ttre period. Any information about the location of
manuscripts, rare or unrecorded editions, and other material would be
most welcome. Information about gaps or errors in our bibliographies
and indexes would also be appreciated.
The subscription for the current (seventh) series of Victorian Fiction
Research Guides is $40 (Ausnalian) for four Guides; single volumes
$A12. Copies of earlier Guides are available at the following prices:
Series 1, 2,3,4,5: $A25 (single volumes $A7); Series 6: $A35 (single
volumes $A10).
Orders should be sent to Dr Barbara Garlick and editorial
communications to the general editor, Professor Peter Edwards, both at
the Department of English, The University of Queensland, Australia
4O72: fax: 7 -3365-2799; email: b.garlick@mailbox.uq.edu.au.

Caroline Clive in about 1860
Introduction
CONTENTS
Primary Bibliography
Non-fiction
Verse
Fiction
Contributions to periodicals and anthologies
Translation
Diary
Microfilm edition
Manuscripts
Secondary Bibliography
Obituaries
Contemporary Reviews
Other References by Contemporaries
Later Criticism
Thesis
Reference Works
Brief References
lll
29
30
30
32
36
37
38
38
38
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4I
45
47
48
48
49

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lDrtr SfITr(d Ltrriftd.
Jourtt itrElitior,
IYITII A CONCLUDINC IfOTIUII.
'ONDON:
s,ruNDnRS ltND OTtrry, coNl)ul'f sTnI'nT.
&

INTRODUCTION
Mrs Cayhill, in Henry Handel Richardson's first novel Maurice Guest (1908),
is an indolent American who uses fiction as a drug, happy to settle in l-eipzig
because of its "circulating library rich in English novels". Maurice himself
appeases her with tribute of "old Taucbnitz volumes". One of the novels Mrs
Cayhill reads "like a tippler in the company of his bottle" is Caroline Clive's
third novel, Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife (1860); she finds it, Richardson
says, "dry reading".l No doubt she had the Tauchnitz edition, published in
Leipzig in 1861, one of the little cream paper-covered Collection of British
Authors Series which entertained generations of English-speaking travellers on
the continent of Europe during the railway age.
One would like to know what Richardson expected her readers to
understand by this reference; whether, for example, she assumed that some of
them would be aware that the novel and its predecessor, Paul Fenoll (1855),
are, like Maarice Guest itself, studies of a triangular sexual passion, treated
with more detachment and more emphasis on sexual violence than
contemporary audiences expected from novels by women. Perhaps she simply
took the title because it contrasted nicely with Mrs Cayhill's lazy and
unreflecting personality, so as to emphasize how an appetite for novels may
coexist with an absolute lack of interest in art and ideas and an indifference to
the human personalities which surround one. That Mrs Cayhill is an
undiscriminating reader is suggested by the heterogeneous list of other novels
she reads:
Shadowed by Three, a most delightful Book. On Friday, Richard
Elsmere, and-oh yes, I know, it was about a farm, an Australian farm
... a nice book, but a little coarse in parts, and very foolish at the end.2
The Story of an African Farm (1883) arfi Roben Elsmere (1888), so
controversial in their day, are reduced to fictional fodder for Mrs Cayhill,
down at the level of. Shadowed by Three (1884), a forgoffen detective story by
Emma M. Murdoch. To those intrigued by the dense undergrowth of Victorian
fiction, this picture of Mrs Cayhill indulging herself with the Leipzig
circulating library offers tantalizing possibilities. Richardson is interested in
the ironies thrown up by the sordid lives of dedicated artists; no doubt she also
remembers that her own novel may meet an obscure fate like that of those titles
she plays with. In another irony, the unpredictable fashions of twentieth-

2
century literary history have belatedly canonized Richardson in the namo of
"Australian literature" and *women's writing". They have also brought somo
revival of interest n W Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife and, in its author, an
interesting personality and a notable diarist, the disabled wife of a rich
Victorian clergyman, author of meditative verse and sardonic, intermittently
impressive novels which shocked and impressed her contemporaries.
$$$$$0$$$$$$
The author of Paul Fenoll was born on 30 June 1801 at Brompton Grove, a
now demolished Georgian terrace in the Brompton Road some hundred yards
west of the present site of Harrods,3 then a pleasant suburban area. She was the
second daughter and third child of a barrister and, from 1789 to 1802, Whig
M.P., Edmund Wigley (1758-1821) and his wife, Anna Maria Meysey (1770-
1836). Her mother had inherited the ancient Meysey estate of Shakenhurst,
near Cleobury Mortimer, on the Shropshire/Worcestershire border. When
Caroline was about ten Edmund Wigley changed his surname to Meysey
Wigley; soon afterwards he retired from legal practice and settled at
Shakenhurst, a country house to which he and Anna Maria had addcd, in 1798,
soon after their marriage, a red-brick classical facadc in the latest modcrn
fashion.
The Wigleys had five children, Anna, Edmund, Caroline, Mary rnd
Meysey, and seem to have been a happy, prosperous and united family,'
However, when Caroline was two she contracted a severe illness with a high
fever (perhaps infantile poliomyelitis). She recovered, but both legs worc
partly paralysed, and she never walked without a stick. Her younger sister,
describing her own childhood in idyllic terms, remembered that the handicap
seemed to affect Caroline more as she grew older:
... though her strong mind & high spirits canied her through childhood
with the same feelings as the rest her privations told as she grew up &
she felt sharply the loss of all the active pleasures in which all her
companions revelled.5
Her consciousness of being crippled was later deeply to affect her writing; it is
also likely that her enthusiasm for literary pursuits was encouraged by her
enforced passivity. A diary of hers which survives for the year 1815 indicates
that she was learning music, drawing, French, Latin, Greek, history,
geography, mathematics, and possibly also German; and the attempts at verse
and passages of flowery moralizing which she has copied into it speak
eloquently of adolescent intellectual aspiration.6 Scribbled at the front are the
words:
Swift says "that after all her boasted acquirements Woman will generally
speaking be found to profess less of what is called learning than a
common school-boy["] Alas! Alas! Alas! Alas! Alas! Alas! Alas! Alas!
Alas!
During Caroline's childhood the Wigley family lived betrveen London
and Worcestershire. They had a house in Sackville Street, off Piccadilly, until
about 1813, and used to spend some time each year at Shakenhurst, which was
three days'journey from London. They seem also to have kept a house at
Richmond, from where one could visit London and return within the day, but
to which they used to go and stay for a week or so. After the move to the
country there were occasional visits to London or Cheltenham, and a tour of
Scotland in 1815. They had a house in Cumberland Square in London in 1819.
It was probably at about this time that Caroline developed an attachment,
remembered later with embarrassment, to the novelist Catherine Gore (1799-
1861):
... she was a gay London y[oun]g lady & very kind to me in my
chrysalis state ... I used to fall into the most viol[en]t friendships & the
one I felt for her was n[ea]rly the str[on]gest of my pass[ion]s. Of
course she did not return it, to an ugly, awkward, half taught,
unintelligible girl like me ...7
In 1821 Edmund Meysey Wigley died leaving his widow and three
unmarried daughters of 24, 20 and 19 living together in genteel comfort.
Edmund, 23, was already in the army; Meysey, 18, was to be a clergyman.
Anna, the eldest daughter, was attached to a family friend, John Severne,
whom she married in 1825. Caroline and Mary, who would inherit some
money, were naturally expected to marry likewise. But Caroline was
handicapped by a plain face and crippled legs and, besides, had immortal
yearnings. The literary critic Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848) wrote to her in 1823,
answering an impassioned letter about her aspirations which she had written
under a male pseudonym:
I have offered you at your desire such advice as I should give my Son;
but I own I should be uneasy that my son should suffer such a feverish
irritability after... a Poet's name, as you evidently do. Your personal
happiness is too deeply involved in your writing.

4
In 1827 she addressed a similar lener, with samples of her poetry, to the
philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), whose wife replied in friendlier
terms. She also published under an assumed name, and no doubt at her own
expense, a volume of theological essays which seems to have been greeted with
absolute indifference by an ungrateful public.
In 1829 the Meysey Wigleys were delighted to hear that a distant and
childless cousin on their father's side had died, leaving a large estate, Malvern
Hall, Solihull, near Birmingham, and a handsome fortune (more than f8000 a
year) to Caroline's brother Edmund, who was to change his surname to
Greswolde. Caroline seems to have undertaken the office of lady of the houee
for him (he remained in the army and was often absent with his regimcnt),
while also visiting her mother and sister.
However, this piece of good forhrne was followed by uncxpcctcd
disasters. First of all her younger brother, the Rev. Mcysey Meysey Wigley,
died as a result of an accident in the house in 1830. Then Edmund, who seems
to have been close to Caroline, also died young in especially distressing
circumstances. As was not unusual among the English landed class, the
Malvern estate was entailed; Edmund had, that is, a life interest in the estatc
which was held by trustees for the benefit of the family's male heirs. Wishing
to raise a large sum of money to buy himself a colonelcy, he borrowed it
against the security of insurance policies taken out with several different
companies. As he was a young man in apparently good health, with a largc
income and no dependants, there seemed nothing especially imprudent in this
step. Unfortunately, however, Edmund was one of the victims of the first
European cholera epidemic (he died with his regiment in Ireland in January
1833). The insurance companies refused to pay up, claiming that Edmund was
an alcoholic and an epileptic. It is hard to determine the rights and wrongs of
this issue, which led to a prolonged and inconclusive legal battle, but Caroline
and her sisters were convinced of Edmund's innocence and the wickedness of
the insurance companies. She was later to use the experience in her second
novel, Year after Year (1858).
As a result of Edmund's death, Caroline left Malvern, which was
inherited by their uncle Henry Wigley (who changed his name to Greswolde),
and she moved to Olton Hall nearby, a house of some antiquity which had also
come to the family by inheritance. She spent her time between there and her
mother's house. The latter's death in 1836 (which had followed Mary's
marriage in 1834) left her living full+ime at Olton. In the division of assets
between the three sisters, Mary and her husband Charles Wicksted took the
estate at Shakenhurst and Anna and Caroline other property, which amounted
to approximately f75,000 each. Caroline was thus extremely well-off, but
rather lacking in obvious duties and occupations. She solaced her loneliness
and filled her leisure partly with literary pursuits, and partly with an increasing
obsession with her closest friend, the Rector of Solihull, the Rev. Archer Clive
(1800-1878). Like him she engaged in charitable work in the neighbourhood
and was interested in the new Poor Law. She also held office as a Surveyor of
Highways. He was friendly to Caroline (she was already showing him her
manuscripts before Edmund's death) but wanted to marry a much younger and
prettier woman, Georgiana Duff Gordon (c1815-1906), whose mother was
keener on his suit than she herself, and who finally refused him in February
1839.8 After this experience he seems to have turned increasingly to Caroline.
She discussed with him her reading and her compositions-for she was still
writing poetry. In May 1840 he brought from London for her the first copies
of her first volume of verse, N Poems fo V. In the summer of that year they
read the first complimentary reviews and planned a holiday together in
Germany. Soon after their return in September he proposed marriage to her,
and they were married at Bayton Church, near Shakenhurst, on l0 November.
Thus in a very short space of time she obtained, aged 39, belatedly,
unexpectedly and to her great delight, a measure of public recognition of her
literary work, the companionship of the man she loved and the status of a
married woman. This was followed by the birth of a son in January 1842 and a
daughter in October 1843. Nor did she find that these longed-for pleasures
turned to ashes. Her children proved healthy and beloved; she continued to
idolize her congenial husband; her small literary success gave her enonnous
satisfaction. In Solihull Rectory, to which she moved after her marriage, she
published two more slim volumes of verse, a story rn Blachuood's and a satire
on the Oxford Movement. None of these made a gte t noise in the world,
though there were some respectful reviews.
In 1845 their prosperity was further enhanced by the successive deaths
of Archer's elder brother and his father. From their comfortable rectory in
Warwickshire they moved to Whitfield, near Hereford, and they became
people of consequence in society. Archer Clive gave up his parish and lived
the life of a country squire; they had a house in London as well as a large
country house, and in both places they entertained more people more often and
more lavishly. Caroline's pronounced taste for literary life was given scope,
and she cultivated the acquaintance of a number of the celebrities of the day. In
1853 the Clives left England for sixteen months on the Continent while their
house was enlarged, spending the winter in Rome with their two children. The
year after their return Caroline published her first novel, Paul Ferroll, which
made something of a sensation. In 1856 they visited Paris and she enjoyed a
taste of fame. Her poems were republished, and a new career seemed about to
open to her as a novelist. In March 1857 she wrote in her diary:
5

6
I thtinlk the past winter has been the happiest time, the culminat[in]g
point of my life. Not that I expect any misfornrnes, but it has been high
Tide-Personally I have enjoyed Life, reading interest[in]g books, &
writing freely-I have given m[ysellf over to Comfort-wheeling about
the house in a chair-not riding; therefore being neither cold tircd nor
afraid.
But advancing age and successive falls and strokes inexorably limited
her mobility and probably prevented her from taking full advantage of the
success of her first novel. Though she published three mote, Year afier Year
(1858), Wy Paul Ferroll Killed his Wik Q860), md John Greswold (1864),
reviewers made it clear (and a modern reader may well agree) that the promise
of the first was not completely fulfilled. An accident in July 1860 paralysed
her completely at first, and her legs were almost useless afterwards. In 1865
she had a seizure at the foot of the Alps while on a journey to spend another
winter in Rome. She recovered the use of one hand, though her handwriting
from this point is very shaky, and her voice was permanently affected. After
this stre never wrote anything more which was published, but she continued to
correspond with friends, and she supervised the selection of her Poems (1872),
In the late afternoon of 12 July 1873 she was sining in this helpless state
by the fire in the library at Whitfield, surrounded by newspapers, when a spark
caught her dress; by the time the footman answered her feeble ring at the bell,
she was enveloped in flame. He beat out the fire with cushions, but she had
been badly burned and soon sank into a coma, dying at 5 p.m. the following
day.n
$$$$$$$$$$$s
Though she lived more than three score years and ten, Caroline Clive's career
as a published writer was thus not a long one: she began late and her career
was cut short. Between 1840 and 1864 she published with some frequency and
experimented with a considerable variety of literary forms. Rougily speaking,
she began with verse and moved on to prose, and on the whole her most
considerable achievements are in prose. Her work in various gerues, however,
does exhibit cornmon features. There are similarities of theme-she is
preoccupied with tension, transience, foreboding, violence and death-and
there are stylistic similarities-she loves clarity, precision, irony, the morbid
and the fantastic.
In the spring of 1840 Caroline Meysey Wigley published her first book,
a small thin volume of verse entitled IX Poems. Like most women writers at
this period, she refrained from putting her name on the title page, but signed
the title page "V.", short for "Vigolina', a nickname given her by Archer
Clive. Review copies were sent out, and she soon received a letter, dated 12
June 1840, from John Gibson Lockhart, the editor of the Quanerly Revi*v,
which afforded her undying pleasure:
It is impossible to read the verses of V without being deeply impressed
with his talents, & accomplishments[.] I regret that this No of the
Quarterly Review had been made up before yr little volume reached and
take the liberty, in the view of noticing it next time if possible, of asking
whether you have not published some work of more considerable bulk or
meditate doing so soon[.]to
This was followed by an enthusiastic review in the September issue
which was part of Henry Nelson Coleridge's article on "Modern English
Poetesses", and which was often referred to by later critics of Clive's work.
He quotes her poem "The Grave", which, probably as a direct result, became
much the best-known of her poems. Terseness and masculine clarity of thought
were detected by Coleridge and by subsequent critics, such as Thackeray's
friend Dr John Brown, an Edinburgh physician and belleslettrist, whose oncepopular
volume ofessays Horae Subsecivae (1858) includes a rapturous review
of IX Poems which he had first published in 1849. But, in spite of this, neither
a second edition, with additions, of IX Poems, nor the longer, melancholy and
reflective narrative poems which followed it-/ Watched the Heavens (L842),
The Valley of the Rea (1851), The Morlas (1853)-achieved as much
recognition as had that first thin little book. She also published two occasional
poems, The Queen's Ball (1847), a grim comedy in octosyllabic couplets based
on a friend's story that invitations to a court ball had been sent to 150 dead
people; and The Glass-berg (1851), a blank verse celebration of the Great
Exhibition in the Crystal Palace.
In l85l Clive recorded in her diary a meeting with the travel writer and
historian Eliot Warburton, who "said such fine things about my poetry that I
was quite astonished. It seemed to me to have so entirely passed out of every
bodys head."rr She made one more attempt to impress the public with a long
poem, also in octosyllabic couplets. In a preface to The Morlns she declared
that she had been working on the poem for many years, and had had it
corrected by "one of the ablest pencils of the day"(probably that wielded by
Caroline Norton, 1808-1877):
I improved it as far as I was able according to those criticisms, and now
I feel justified in offering it to the world as the best I can do; which if it
fails to please, fails through want of ability, not for want of pains.
7

8
The narrator of the poem, resting in a clearing in a forest, hears the voice of
the spirit of the valley, speaking of the change of history, the progress of man
towards enlightenment, the inevitability of the natural cycle of lovc and death,
all of which appear mysterious until Christianity gives them meaning. The
paradox of the existence of suffering and multifarious humanity in the midst of
a calm and inexorable universe is the contrast which interests her. The spirit
remarks to the narrator:
I love thy melancholy eye,
The portal of a musing mind,
The lip where the long stifled sigh
Tums to a smile for human kind.
The poem was no more popular than its predecessors, and this may have
influenced Clive's decision to embody her quizzical view of life in fictional
form. She had hitherto published in prose only a macabre story in Blacl

l0
gentry. He discourages the attachment between his daughter Janet and one of
their neighbours, and refuses a seat in parliament after hearing that Franks's
widow has recovered from an illness. When Mrs Franks is arrested he
confesses that he had himself killed his first wife. His second wife dies of
shock. Janet with her lover's help bribes the prison governor and escapes
abroad with her father. The novel ends with him asking if she can still love
him. She says yes. A Concluding Notice, in effect an additional chapter, was
added to the third and subsequent editions of the book. It shows the death in
America of Ferroll, who has escaped from prison.
The Concluding Notice was no doubt added in response to the anxiety
and perplexity the book created in its first readers. The principal reasons for
this were two: Ferroll escapes punishment, and the way the story is revealed
leaves it extremely unclear what the reader is supposed to think about his
character. Is he a villain? Or is he a hero? Is he (most unsettling of all) both at
once? What does the novelist mean by having this plot and telling it in this
way? None of these questions can be answered straightforwardly.
The epigraph to the novel is: "How little we know of what passes in
each other's minds." The gradual revelation of Ferroll's guilt is contrived
through indirect hints. At moments Clive seems to be suggesting that her
technique is purely dramatic, in a way which recalls the experiments of
Dickens and Wilkie Collins:
If he had been in the habit of talking over his secrets to himself, it is
probable he might have said something very much to the purpose of this
story. However, he was not, so what he thought remains unrevealed;
what he did say, casts no light on the past or the future. (118)
The reader is only to know what is revealed by utterance, by action. This is, of
course, disingenuous; we have already gathered more than we have been told.
But even the approach to such a technique challenged the reading-habits of her
mid-Victorian audience. The central innovation is the presentation of the hero.
We are invited to find him selfish, autocratic and obsessive, but also admirable
and exceptional. Clive plays with the reader's expectations throughout. Early
on, his indifference to his first wife, his failure to visit her corpse or pray
beside her coffin, are ambiguously placed so that the reader is uncertain
whether the function of the incidents is to indict Ferroll or to mock the
simplicity and conventionality of the onlookers:
A man more anxious about appearance would probably have constrained
himself to visit the room where the body of his wife lay; but Mr. Ferroll
was perfectly indifferent in this, and all other instances, as to what was
said of him. (15)
In fact the comment has both effects: it is an early example of the way his
crime is made to elevate him above as well as set him apart from other men.
Thus the authorial detachment conceals a real ambiguity of attinrde throughout.
Even after his crime is apparent Ferroll continues to assert his intelligence and
humour at the expense of his neighbours, and the novelist, regardless of
literary morality, never satisfies her readers with a thoroughgoing expression
of remorse from her hero's lips.
Clive replied to her critics after the book came out in the Concluding
Notice, in the Prefix to her next novel, Year after Year, and in the 1860
"prequel" Wlry Paul Fenoll Killed His Wife.ln the first she killed him off; in
the second she described him as "a man in whom conscience is superseded by
intellect"; and in the third she elaborated on his sufferings at the hands of his
first wife. She also recorded in her diary a conversation with the novelist
Prosper M6rim6e in which she denied that Ferroll was amiable.l6 None of
these statements amounts to a recantation, and it is difficult to see how she
could have resolved the difficulties of her early readers without extensive
rewriting. In the late twentieth century the shock of discovering that a man of
high intellect and good social standing is a murderer is no doubt less keenly
felt, but in 1855 Ferroll's mixture of good and bad qualities, and the fact ttrat
his crime is revealed only by his own scrupulous confession, subverted
fundamental beliefs in the consistency of character and in the effectiveness of
social controls.
Reviews of Paul Ferroll gave almost unanimous praise to the writing,
even though the story was often found immoral and/or unlikely. The reviewer
in the National Review (perhaps R. H. Hutton) responded to Clive's
characteristic irony:
There is a peculiar mixture of emphatic simplicity and yet rhetorical art
in the style; so that a thought or sentence which begins in the
commonplace is heightened into point and pungency by a single
unexpected finishing-stroke as it concludes. t7
The structural irony is underlined by the tone of the narrative voice, in a way
that, as Hutton implies, becomes one of the chief pleasures for the reader.
Black comedy is not infrequent; Ferroll often makes jokes at tense moments,
as when a chatty neighbour observes that no-one will mention Mrs Franks to
Mrs Ferroll, "Certainly it is not a subject upon which any judicious person
would wish to entertain her" Q29).
Another noteworthy feature of the book is its treatment of Ferroll's
ll

12
obsession with his second wife. When she is absent he displacos his sexual
frustration by riding furiously on a horse and swimming undcr a waterfall.
When she is present he monopolizes her, is jealous of their child, domands her
attention regardless of her health. It is all very unusual as a portrayal of
reciprocated married love at this period. The author refrains from offering her
opinion as to how far the Ferrolls' mutual passion is ideal, how far excessive,
morbid and distorted. On ttrat subject as on others, one has to make up one's
own mind.
Ferroll himself is a writer, a contributor to reviews and an occasional
poet. This is curious, because Clive's own first book, the long-forgotten
venture into theology, had been published under the name Ferrol. One begins
to suspect an element of identification, especially when she attributes her own
verses to him and treats his literary eminence with a deference amounting to
intellectual snobbery, which is striking in a book so concerned to mock
pretension of all kinds:
He had written a few things which gave him fame, and from time to
, time there issued from the Tower a brilliant article, a few exquisite
verses, or a fine fiction, which kept the attention of the reading public
upon him. (28)
The extent to which the hero is a projection of the author's fantasies of literary
success is perhaps the final enigma in a very enigmatic text.
Year after Year (1858), Clive's next novel, though it made less noise
than its predecessor, also bears her personal stamp. It is based on a single
character and a single idea: it is concise, harsh, ironical, intelligent, and relates
interestingly to some developments in the contemporary novel.
The story is recounted by Katherine Buckwell, the plain and illegitimate
daughter of a rich baronet. She is brought up with her legitimate brother Gray,
whom she adores and who is the only person who values her. Orphaned, they
set up house together, and for a year live quietly and happily, saving money to
pay off debts Gray has contracted as a child. But a friend tempts Gray to join
in county society, and Katherine becomes gradually isolated. Then he is
accidentally killed, and the insurance companies from whom he has raised
money make difficulties, claiming he has acted dishonestly. The rest of the
novel is taken up with the legal processes, as Katherine risks destitution to
fight for her brother's honour. It ends as she wins.
It is a novel about the individual and society, the pressures of the
community, the needs of the affections and family love and loyalty. Katherine
is an interesting character; her tone is dry and plangent, her anitude plausibly
shaped by her condition, "a disgraceful situation, and an unamiable exterior"
(4). Of her brother she says:
He was of honourable station, beautiful, and rich; and his feelings
towards the world were the very opposite to those which I acquired.
Confident of welcome, accustomed to ornament society, and to be
wished for when he was to come, missed when he stayed away, he took
frankly to the world ... (4)
Katherine is a spectator, conscious of the doubleness of life: "the things
spoken in a corner, and those which are said aloud in company, may differ
very much from one another" (2). Her role is to expose to the reader the ugly
reality. The figure of Dr Monkton, disillusioned by an unhappy past, stands
for those who have abandoned optimism. He recommends resignation to
Katherine:
It was very evident that philosophy was made on purpose for me. I was
ugly, and philosophy says beauty is of no sort of consequence; I held to
happiness by only one tie, and that was my connexion with Gray, which
the natural progress of life and its events threatened almost visibly to
weaken. Philosophy said that self-dependence was the finest state of
mental existence, and that solitude had charms of the first order for
those who knew how to enjoy it. To impart philosophy to me, therefore,
was a favourite aim of Dr. Monkton; and I was a very docile pupilonly
in my heart I never either understood nor allowed that it would not
be better to be rich, admirable, and happy, than to be poor, plain, and
philosophical. (64)
Her voice mingles irony and indignation. Another aspect of this theme is
touched on in the figure of Jonathan Wolfe, a lone autodidact befriended by the
Buckwells, who weeps over Alison's Essays on Taste because he has no-one to
discuss it with: "He said he never heard any comment, except 'That's all very
good, and all very right, and all very true ...'' (37). While she has Gray,
Katherine has a companion to sympathise with "the crude strange fancies
which haunt everybody's youth" (30); losing him, she is cut off from
everything familiar. His uncle inherits and she sees:
... how a hundred objects were become superfluous in the house, which
used to belong to its most intimate habits. All those which had got their
place through the custom ofa life spent there, and which were necessary
to our old ways of passing time, or which were the marks of how it had
been passed, were now fit only to be cast away by a new possessor.
13

l4
(183)
Such is the tone of the novel: morbid, tense, self-conscious and acute.
Katherine reproves the heartlessness of Dr Monkton, but her own emotions
find no satisfactory outlet, and she ends in much the same case as Jonathan
Wolfe was found in: cut off from the commerce of the intellect or the
affections. In her role as narrator she is given the novelist's authority to
interpret and understand the other characters. In this capacity she contrasts
with Gray, whose straightforwardness permits him to be deceived by the
fashionable beauty Mrs Carey-he takes people at face value. There is a
persistent theme about the interpretation of the feelings of others. A relation,
Mr Tapeworm, is a caricature of precision, who reminds us of the difficulty of
sympathy: "I see, by fictitiously representing myself to be the inner man of
your consciousness ... the state ofyour ratiocination on the subject ..." (140).
On another occasion he says of the insurance men: *Do you know their
interest is so great in disbelieving the truth, and believing the untruth, that
obliquity of vision is not unlikely to be generated by fiction of self-concern
[?]" (204-0s).
As the word "fiction" reminds the reader, the task of the novelist is to
put the reader into sympathy with the minds of others, to enlarge his solipsistic
vision. PauI Ferroll had been attacked for doing so too thorougtrly, for
abandoning the moral spectacles which correct vision. In that novel the
unexpectedness of the story's being told from the murderer's point of view
achieves an effect of freshness, of a narrative slightly askew. Year afier Year,
very much an autobiography about ways of interpreting the world, continually
reminds us that the heroine's personality gives her a special obliquity of vision.
In fact there is mutual understanding between none of the characters, and only
in a few cases mutual affection. The extent to which even Katherine's feelings
are governed by her own interests is expressed when during the legal process
she has to go and see Dr Monkton: "I ... remembered, with great pleasure,
that my old friend was at this time suffering from one of his frequent attacks of
lumbago, which I was quite certain would secure me in finding him at home"
(275-6). Another scene with a similar and characteristic irony occurs at the
height of the insurance trial, at a moment of great tension:
The door of the court opened again, and nvo dusky figures issued
together, whom we presently recognised to be the two principal
champions, and of whom, Mr Son's burning face and moist brow bore
witness that he had but that moment ceased from energetic exertion. Sir
John Interest and he walked slowly round the hall, in order, probably,
that they might grow cool before going into the outer air; and it seemed
v
i
I
as though they had taken the moment to confer on some point in which
they both were greatly concerned.
... They were so intent upon their own conversation that they did not
observe us; and as they passed, Mr. Son said-
"There's no doubt Jenkins will be acquitted if you can prepossess the
jury that train oil is of the nature of spermaceti." (362-3)
The grand illusion of the legal process, its acting, its arcana, contrasts
with the burning emotion of Katherine's feelings about the outcome, but
matches the preoccupation throughout the book with the way objective reality'
is patterned by the subjective view of the individual. Like the debris of
Katherine's daily life at the house she must leave, the material of her law case
is, for other people, devoid of significance. In the examples I have quoted and
throughout the novel there is an effective tension between the passion of her
feeling and the coldness of her description, and between the importance of her
identity and experience to herself, and the indifference of those about her.
Llke Paul Ferroll, Year afier Year is full of waiting and of anticipation:
and again there is a marked absence of interpretive conclusion, a refusal to
undertake the part of fate dispensing justice, to an extent which might be held
to indicate a lack of faith in such patterns. Clive terminates both books without
asserting the authority of the narrative voice. Her concern seems to be
principally with the individual under the pressure of neurotic states of mind. At
the end of both books the outsider has no prospect of readmission into society,
for Ferroll is a murderer and Katherine's brother is dead. The reader is
deserted at what is only a moment of stasis, and the author does not
acknowledge a duty to resolve these difficulties: conveying the uncertainty of
the operations of the universe appears to be part of her project. Characters and
reader remain in the hands of an ordering principle as unknown as it is
perverse.
Great emphasis is laid on the necessity for love, conversation, comfort,
family and friends. The time which Katherine and Gray spend alone together
peacefully and charitably is referred to as "my own Eden", and their gradual
involvement with the outside world is the beginning of her troubles, just as
Ferroll's domestic haven is threatened by the encroaching world. However
Clive proposes no source of comfort other than family love: Christian
asceticism is explicitly rejected both as Monkton's cold philosophy and as
Wolfe's self-flagellating fanaticism. God is absent; and all that remains is the
individual, with a subjective view derived from personal experience, operating
ignorantly within the networks of society, upheld only by a stoic pride.
The form in which Year afrer Year is cast was a popular one in the
1850s: the plain woman's autobiography. The huge success of. Jane Eyre
15

l6
(1847) set a fashion for first-person narratives, and stories of clever,
independent women. The 1840s had seen a move towards the novel of middleclass
domesticity, usually patterned as a love-story, and there was a fashion for
naming novels after their heroines, which indicates a bias in favour of the stuff
of female lives: examples are Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Ellen Middleton: A
Tale (1844), Elizabeth Sewell's Margaret Percival (1847), Anne Marsh's
Emilia lfindham (1846), and Catherine Sinclair's Jane Bouverte, or,
Prosperity and Adversity (1846). Such a title also is Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography, indicating that it proposes to deal with a woman's life from a
woman's point of view, and, in the deliberate unpretentiousness and
unglamorousness of the name, making a statement about the novel's realism.
Publishers notoriously influence the selection of titles in response to the
demands of the market, and the flood of titles of this kind after 1847
undoubtedly reflects the Jane Eyre phenomenon. Not unheard of before
(Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, 1804; Disraeli, Henrietta Temple: A Inve
Story, 1837), it was used for the first time by many novelists after 1847. Julia
Kavanagh published Daisy Burns (1853); Geraldine Jewsbury, Marian Withers
(1851). Even the hack G.W.M. Reynolds turned fromThe Parricide , or, The
Youth's Career of Crime (1847) to Mary Prtce, or, The Memoirs of a Servant-
Maid (1852), and the veteran historical novelist G.P.R. James was reduced to
writing a love story about Poor Law reform called Margaret Graham: A Tale
Founded on Fact (1848). Elizabeth Gaskell called her first novel Mary Barton:
A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), and Margaret Oliphant called hers Passages
in the Ltfe of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, of Sunnyside, Written by Herself
(1849). Other novelists announced in title or subtitle that their novel was
prosaic, domestic, autobiographical, or concerned with the outsider; examples
include Dinah Craik, Bread upon the Waters: A Governess's Life (1852), Mary
Martha Sherwood, Caroline Mordaant, or, The Governess, Harriet Parr
("Holme Lee'), Kathie Brande: A Fireside History of a Quiet Life (1856).
Not all these novels, of course, live up to the expectations raised by
their titles, but the fashion reflects a desire to depict the lives of "ordinary"
middle-class women which was inspired by Charlotte Brontd. This raised
groans from some contemporary critics. The Westmiruter Review declared in
1854 that "these self-involved and self-reliant young ladies, misunderstood, as
a matter of course, by their nearest kindred, and all apparently 'done after'
'Jane Eyre' ... have been much the fashion of late".lE The Examiner observed
plaintively in 1856:
Here are four of the last story-books that have reached us. They are all
written in one form- ... autobiographies by women .... Perhaps this
may not be an unsuitable oppornrnity of calling the attention of all
persons who are at this moment, or may be hereafter, engaged on
projecting novels, to the fact that the form, and much of the subject too,
of that kind of sentimental autobiography whereof a lady is the heroine,
is by this time very nearly as familiar to the public as it can be made.le
Walter Bagehot complained in 1858 of the fraud perpetrated on the
unsuspecting purchaser of a novel who discovers that "he has only to peruse a
narrative of the conduct and sentiments of an ugly lady'.2o One of the
reviewers of The MilI on the Floss in 1860 praised Maggie Tulliver for being
"far, far removed from the 'faultless monster' of the old romance, and still as
far from the pale, clever, and sharp-spoken young women whom Jane Eyre
made fashionable for a time".21
Margaret Oliphant, discussing the phenomenon of the influence of Jane
Eyre less sarcastically and and at greater length in Blachuood's in 1855,
realized the feminist implications of the new heroine, who does not want
deference but fights with men on tenns of emotional equality.22 This novel of
anti-romance and anti-chivalry was a crucial stage in the serious treaEnent of
women in fiction. Though the heroine of Year afier Year is not a governess
and does not have a love-affair, her sense of being an outsider, her
autobiographical self-analysis, and her passionate desire for involvement in
society, identify her strongly with this fashion of the 1850s; the novel thus
belongs firmly in its period, though its author wrote it out of memories more
than nrenty years old, an example of the evolving novel of the woman of
character.
Late in 1860 Clive published Why Paul Feroll Killed His Wife, which
purports to show the events which preceded those n Paul Fenoll: the
machinations whereby his first wife estranged him from his second, an episode
which has only been mentioned in the earlier book. Elinor Ladylift, pretty and
poor and brought up in a man-hating convent, is sent to live with her elderly
guardian and his young, rich half-sister Laura. Laura loves Leslie (not his real
name, we are told), who is arrogant and possessed of great ability, but has
been brought up without parents and therefore lacks humanity. Leslie teaches
Elinor to admire waterfalls, and gradually she learns something of the world's
corruptions. He abandons his original intention of simply making her love
him, and offers her marriage. Laura, however, succeeds in making him think
Elinor deceitful, and, after nursing him through brain fever, marries him
herself. The marriage proves unhappy, her lies are revealed, and kslie finds
Elinor in the convent, where he is permitted one interview. The novel ends in
deadlock:
Violent were the passions of the strong but fettered man, fierce the
17

l8
hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect; wild was the fury of the
man, who believed in but one world of good, and saw the mortal
moments passing away, unenjoyed, and irretrievable.
Out of those hours arose a purpose. The reader sees the man, and
knows the deed. From the premises laid before him, he need not indeed
have concluded that even that man would do that deed; but since it was
told, in 1855, that the husband killed the wife, so now, in 1860, it is
explained why he killed her. (333)
It is not so much a justification as an explanation, and has no surprises to offer
the reader of the earlier novel. The hint of atheism which we are given here
("believed in but one world of good") is not a persistent theme: Ferroll is
indeed godless, but so is the novel as a whole-no character is a touchstone of
grace, for Elinor's religiosity is merely an aspect of her placability and
obedience. As is usual in Clive's novels, the moral reflections are left for the
reader to infer. The narrator preserves some, though not all, of the detachment
maintained rn Paul Fenoll. The plot, being less ambiguous, renders more
explicit the reflections on the selfishness of Leslie and Laura, and this is
accompanied by authorial comments to that effect. Yet, though it is clear that
our sympathies are to be with Elinor, against Laura, and partly for Leslie, the
story is told by an omniscient narrator whose interest is evenly shared between
the three characters, and is told dramatically, mostly in dialogue and action, so
as to postpone the moral implications to some area outside the reading process.
Nevertheless the innocence of the second wife and the cruelty and selfishness
of the first are heavily stressed, and Fenoll/Leslie himself is portrayed as at
once arrogant and sensitive in a way which is consistent with his later
behaviour in Paul Fenoll.
Like Clive's other novels it is short, with few characters, and few
episodes, and its best features are the dry narrative voice and the moments of
observant irony. Laura/Anne is a stock character of selfish worldliness, and
her machinations, involving forged notes and false assignations, are extremely
hackneyed, but Clive shows her customary interest in abnormal states of mind
in depicting Laura's jealousy:
She learned to know that beating heart, that dry mouth, that distaste to
food, that early waking and no more falling asleep, which make up the
personal sufferings of mental anguish. She had to talk, to listen, to make
music, while intensely preoccupied ... (47)
Though some readers seem to have thought so, it would not be accurate to say
that this novel is a clearer condemnation of Ferroll's character than the other,
but as before he is the object of the occasional authorial irony:
"How moveable her nature is," said he. "It was made on purpose, I
think, to complete mine, cast in my mould, when a man had been
completed, and it was fit only to form a woman." (140)
There are some touches of feminist feeling: Laura says, "'I could have
laughed at times to think how the great, tle manly intellect yielded to despised
woman."' (316), and at the end we are told that "He was fast bound in the
meshes, which a woman, a mere woman, had found the means to twine around
him" (332). Three women, in fact, the author, Laura and Elinor, have by the
end tied him down, Clive by inventing him and thus in a way acquiring his
self-confidence and the genius ascribed to him. Though he does not dominate
this book quite as he did Paul Ferroll, he is the central character, and his
brilliance and authority are much referred to, though less convincingly evoked
than in that novel. His literary genius is attested to by the fact that he has
written Clive's early poem "The Grave" (151).
Wy Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife has some of the properties of a short
story, being elliptical, theatrical, striking and brief. It is unique :rmong Clive's
novels in that it contains no violent crime or frightful death, but its title,
promising both, kept it on the railway station bookstalls throughout the
century. Though it suffered the fate of most sequels and was adjudged inferior
to Paul Fenoll, it was approved by some reviewers. The Saturday Review
thought it written by a "pen of genius" and that it made reparation for the
"ambiguity of tone" in the earlier novel.23 The Examiner objected to the
"purely narrative' method adopted by the novelist, but thought that within the
limitations of such a technique she had shown 'rare and precious" strengths.24
Some critics were impressed with the coherence of the two-part story,
including the Rev. James Davies:
A tragedy, in its entirety worthy to be classed with the intensely wrought
creations of the Greek drama; a tragedy evoking strongest sentiments of
indignation, pity, and sympathy; a tragedy in which, though convention
will not suffer us to justif, the chief actor, yet every one agrees that the
wretched successor of the Clytemnestras and Lady Macbeths of the
ancient and modern drama deserved her fate, or even a worse.2s
Classical tragedy offered a convenient analogy: "we feel that we are in the
unrelenting grasp of a Greek fate ..." wrote William Allingham.26 If the novels
were intended to depict a long-drawn-out cycle of inevitable retribution,
Ferroll's outrageous behaviour can be seen as elemental, Clive's starkness as
19

20
strength. The dearly-held conviction that the universe is ultimately orderly and
providential, which Clive's novels, so unusually at this date, seem to
undermine, could be surreptitiously reasserted. Guided, surely, by such
feeling, Florence Nightingale wrote to Clive:
So far from "not liking" your book, it interested me extremely. To the
truth of Paul Ferroll's character I can testify from personal experience.
... But I think as a work of art it is now lop-sided. It ought to be like a
Greek Trilogy ought it not? Ought there not to be a third part, shewing
what Janet the offspring of those two characters, became, and what Paul
Ferroll himself became in his old age. I think this would be the most
curious and interesting part of all.27
Clive gratified Nightingale's curiosity, but in a letter which apparently does
not survive, and the public was not vouchsafed another sequel.28
In 1864 Clive published the last, least noticed, and perhaps oddest, of all
her novels, John Greswold. The hero, younger son of a poor gentry family,
tells the story. He is first articled to an attorney, who drops down dead in a
gaming house leaving the narrator a fortune which he nobly resigns to his
employer's family. He falls in love, becomes a land agent, witnesses the
unsuccessful romances of his brother and his new employer, and has no better
luck in love himself. The novel ends with him still ignorant of what the future
holds, and the reader no wiser. Her calm and ironic style was praised by
reviewers in the Examiner and the Saturday Review, who saw the novel as a
kind of still life: "less a novel than what the French call an 6tude" .2e But these
were exceptional; the novel was little noticed and never reprinted. Like Paul
Fenoll and Year after Year it ends with a central character speaking, on a note
of indeterminacy:
Twenty-three years ago I was born into this world, and now the twentythird
is run out. The time is gone; the known things are all over, all
buried in the darkness behind. Before me lies the great blank page of the
future, and no writing is traced upon it. But it is nothing to me; I won't
ask, nor think, nor hope, nor fear about it. The leaf of the book is
turned, and there's an end-the tale is told. (ll,2l9)
Clive's detached authorial technique, brought to bear in both Paul
Ferroll and Wy Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife on a retribution plot with a
recognizable pattern, encounters tnJohn Greswold a story nearly as formlessly
serial as realiry, to curious effect. There is an absence of authoritative closure
which is formally disruptive-there are pathos, humour, melodrama and the
Characteristic tension in John's story, but no resolution. Clive's customary
unwillingness to provide a point of authority reaches a peak in the last chapter
with the revelation that the autobiographer has nearly reached the reader's own
time, so ttrat the story exists like the reader on the edge of ignorance of the
future:
It was the 5th of last February, a night, as the reader will recollect, of
severe frost; the thermometer was down below zero fifteen degrees in
the Southern counties. (ll,2l7)l
There is an intrusion of reality which makes the statement desultory,
conversational. The weather has at this point none of the significance one
anticipates in a nineteenth-century novel, where it usually functions
symbolically, or affects characters or action. Here it simply demonstrates, as
do other episodes in the novel, the inexplicable hazards of experience. Just as
Katherine Buckwell's household arrangements were reorganized by others, so
John Greswold is forced to realize the failure of his attempt to bring Pattern to
his life. His story tails off, as real autobiographies so often do, into anecdote,
because no plot can be detected in recent or current experience. Novelists,
however, generally i[range that closure will take place at some significant
moment: the breaking-off will affect our interpretation of the preceding story.
Thus ending and morality are intimately connected, and Clive's eccentric
treatment of her last hero is the final expression of her indifference to the
literary proprieties.
The freshness which her contemporary admirers conrmented on derives
partly from this feahrre of her work. one might argue that it is as much a
-onsequence of incompetence as of a deliberate attempt to break the mould of
mid-Victorian convention; a certain amateurishness undoubtedly clings to her
fiction. Yet her eccentricities were ones which had imporant implications for
the future of the novel: having a murderer for a hero; having a plain spinster
for a heroine; ending novels without telling the reader what has happened and
what it means; ending two autobiographies with neither death nor marriage;
writing very short fictions. By the end of the century some of these aberrations
were cornmonplaces: the three-decker was dead, and literary morality had been
transformed.
$$s$$$$$$$$$
Unlike many of the women who embarked on literary careers during the
nineteenth century, Clive was not out to make money. She was gratified to
receive her small eamings, but they were never significant to the family
2l

BFI'
22
income, and her decision to publish was uninfluoncod by financial
considerations. This fact is highly significant. One cannot know whethcr, had
she published more and been under pressure to respond to tho domands of the
market, the oddity of her style would have been modiflod for bottcr or for
worse-whether she would have refined it, or degenerated into a mere hack.
Speculation on this point is profitless. But her carcer affords somc interesting
sidelights on the profession of authorship in her time.
All discussion of authorship and literary genius in the nincteenth century
was pervaded by the languages of gender and class. Clivo's own remarks on
the subject are no exception to this rule-two women writers of her
acquaintance were described as having "something nameless about them which
was Authoress more than Lady'3o Her early letters to men of letters, full of
ambition, signed with male pseudonyms, indicate aspirations towards an ideal
of Poetic Genius not wholly congruous with her identity as a lame young lady
of the landed gentry. Reviewers of her work respond to the same sense of
discrepancy when they praise it for its unfeminine virtues:
.... these few pages are distinguished by a sad Lucretian tone, which very
seldom comes from a woman's lyre.3t JOf IX Poems by V.l
... the distinctive features of V.'s poems are virile force and a stern
simplicity.32 [Of Poems, 18721
Similarly, when her first novel Paul Fenoll (1855) came out, reviewers were
to praise the power of its writing and marvel at the sex of its author. One
should not exaggerate the significance of this-sales of her poetry were never
considerable, and until 1855 she was not a well-known writer. But had she
been less isolated from the literary market-place, had she, for instance, tried to
earn her living selling verse to illustrated annuals as Caroline Norton did, she
might have developed a more sentimental, picturesque and lyrical strain. She
might sooner have tried her hand at a novel. But, financially independent, she
could indulge a fantasy of herself as a Poet transcending barriers of gender,
while being cautious of those whose circumstances, less socially secure, forced
them to try and reconcile the roles of Authoress and Lady:
She [Caroline Norton] was anxious to please & to flatter-why should
she be except that she feels her position doubtful [?] however, exciting
& new as her sociefy is, I was delighted to get o[u]t lofl it.33
It is customary to think of the gender prejudice of Victorian readers as
being a handicap to women writers. However, it seems clear in Clive's case
it
I
thst the unexpected qualities of her writing were recognized partly because she
was known to be a woman. Reviewers of PauI Ferroll were conscious of
surprise that a woman should publish such a book, and the terms in which they
refer to this point indicate that their assumptions about women and writing
tended on the whole to impress them with Clive's literary skill:
We are the more ready to canvass the strange moral of this story from
deference to the remarkable power with which it is written, and which is
the more remarkable still if its author be a lady.3a
We are naturally anxious lest the masculine nerve pass wholly from our
letters .... We must needs look askance at the maudlin effeminacy that is
stealing in [to English fiction] .... Yet, on the other hand, we cannot
wholly sympathize with the unfeminine strides of a Mrs. Shelley or a
Mrs. Clive ...35
A complex of prejudices surrounded the ideas of genius, immorality and
fenrininity. Growing numbers of women writers led to an anxiety about their
influence on English literature, although they were acknowledged as the
guardians of mid-Victorian social morality. Deeply as most reviewers believed
in that morality, they worried whether its rigour sorted well with genius. As
Fitzjames Stephen observed in 1857, "surely it is very questionable whether it
is desirable that no novels should be written except those fit for young ladies to
read?'36 Justin MacCarthy echoed him in 1864, disparaging novelists who
"coldly, stiffly, prudishly agreed to paint for us as a rule only such life as
might be lectured on in a young ladies'boarding school".37 Just as in 1840
Caroline Clive's verse was seen as possessing strengths in comparison with the
sentimental lyrics turned out by ladies for publication in illustrated annuals, so
in the 1850s, her first novel was favourably contrasted with the domestic
realist novels then dominating the market. And in both cases a gendered
hierarchy of literary merit, and an anxiety about the feminization of literature,
were deployed in her favour.
Between the publication of IX Poems W V. n 1840 and the publication
of PauI Ferroll most of Clive's literary experiments were in verse. After its
success she added only a handful of new poems to the collections which were
published subsequently: most of her efforts went into fiction. As well as her
increasing physical debility the fact that she was not under any kind of
financial pressure to publish probably contributed to her comparative failure to
capitalize on its popularity. In April 1859 she was approached with a request
for a serial story by the editors of Once A Week, the new magazine founded by
Bradbury and Evans to replace Household Words when it ceased publication
23

24
after their dispute with Dickens about his marital difficulties:
I wish I c[oul]d; but I am not quick enough, nor provided. They had
engaged Thackeray, but Smith & Elder are undertaking a periodical, &
offered him f9000 ... for two years on wh[ich]: he pleaded to the others,
& they let him off. Mr. Russell s[ai]d they had thought, in this
embarrassm[en]t. of Troloppe & of Liggins & me, & w[oul]d ask me
first.
"Liggins" here is George Eliot, then at the beginning of her career (the Clives
were friends of C.H. Bracebridge, who had been convinced that the author of
Adam Bede was a local tradesman). The magazine edited by Thackeray was of
course the Cornhill. Anthony Trollope was then also at the threshold of his
career, and the serialization of Framley Parsonage which started the first issue
of the Cornhill, was a turning-point for him. In the end the first issues of Once
A Week carried an early version of Charles Reade's bestselling historical novel
Thq Cloister and the Heanh. In short, Caroline Clive was one of several
novelists who might have seized this oppornrnity. Dickens, temporarily under
a cloud, might be vulnerable to competition from rivals. Magazines were the
fashion-publishers like Smith, Elder and Bradbury and Evans were gambling
on taking serial fiction upmarket with their new, handsomely produced titles.
The 1860s were to be the heyday of a new generation of engravers who came
to prominence in the periodicals. In the early 1860s George Smith was
dignifying the novelist's profession by offering Thackeray and George Eliot
unprecedented sums of money for highbrow novels such as Romoln. But Clive,
though her credentials as a serious novelist impressed her contemporaries, was
not able to step into the breach, and she passed into the obscure corners of
literary history.
Later in the same year a negotiation with Thackeray about contributing
to the new Comhill was initially more promising but the upshot was in the
similar:
[28 October 1859]
Our manifesto was in preparation and I have waited a day or trvo until I
could get a rough proof from the printer before I answered your kind
note. I hope you will approve of our ends and aims; and I am seeking
for good company round our Magazine-table I am sure Paul Fenoll & V
will be most welcome.
If you please how long is your story? In a list of contributors may we
mention your (literary) name? At this present moment* we can afford
long continuations. The Editor is committed to one: and another writer
is engaged for anorher-not a srory uut " pi.trr";G';;;"phy. our
page is the size of-the virginians (very much smaller than rhe National
Magazine) If you.,have l.Copy of any-of my yellow U""f.r-i, your the
[sic] house you w'l be.able toluage or trtr nurur;;f ;"g;y"" require.
The virginian's page is aboui 3000 retters the srops a".p"i., berween
each word counting as letters.
Now please admire the vast field our cornhilr opens. Not stories merely
do we want, but you who are a country lady, would you- think what
more country produce you can give us? Thire are Country Schools,
curacies, dissenters, dairies, Hirefordshire cyder a;fu legends.
Didn't poor Dick steele die in Herefordshire oi near itt itrere,s your
garden, your hunt, your fishing-river, your Arcadian villagers. I want to
be interested about everyrhing interesting do try, oear turs] ciive to help
me, and believe me
very faithfully yours
W. M. Thackeray
* I mean that if your story is long, we could begin it in the first
number.38
In the event he made difficulties about the story, saying he wourd take it, but
adding plaintively, "I am reading articres and iosin! ti", *J Rnoing tt "r,
and mislaying and answe.ring letteis alr day", and askling ir rr" ,igrri shorten it,
"will you amputate? wil you ret me ur" tir" miruz;t irre ,io"ry *", n"u".
published' but she didhave a.^poem in the first issue (January is;6), *ti"t,lr"
called "noble and touching".ad In April rg60 he tu-"a do; ;;fi;r poem as
unsatisfactory, and crive acquiesced, saying she wourd write no more.ar when
the Fortnightly Review was started in tsoithere was another approach to her
for contributions from G.H. Lewes, but by then clive was a confirmed
invalid.a2 In poor health, in her sixties, with nvo large houses to run and prenty
of money, it is not artogether surprising that she did not feel inclined
struggle
to
in the market against younge., *finer
and needier competitors.
career
Her
was effectively over.
$$$$$$$$$$$$
This Bibliography aims to list.each distinguishable edition of clive,s works,
and, since they are not particurarly numerJus, it probably does not-omit very
25

26
many, though it is possible that there were other foreign editions which I have
missed. The most striking feature of the publishing history of Clive's works is
the small size of the editions printed by Saunders & Otley, and her valuable
testimony to their shady practice of printing continuously while calling every
few hundreds a new edition. It is regrettable that the Saunders & Otley
archives, of which a few survive in Reading University Library, do not
provide any information about her dealings with the firm, though the Smith,
Elder accounts in the John Murray collection are very interesting. Enough
evidence survives to make clear that Clive's reputation was not based on
enormous sales, but on a succis d'estime. It is partly as a result of the small
editions that I have sometimes thought it appropriate to name the library which
holds a copy of a given edition, usually in cases where I have not been able to
see the book for myself.
$$$$$$$$$$$$
Most of the research on which this bibliography has been based was done
while I was a postgraduate sfudent writing the thesis which is listed below as
No. 184. I should like to thank all the people who helped me then and since:
especially Professor Rosemary Ashton, the late George Clive, Lady Mary
Clive, Mrs Virginia Murray, Mr Michael Severne and Professor John
Sutherland. I am grateful to the staff of the Slavonic and Scandinavian sections
of the British Library who helped me obtain details of the foreign editions of
Clive's works, and to the staff of Princeton University Library who established
that there was no 1862 American edition of Paul Ferroll.I should also like to
thank Professor Peter Edwards and Dr Barbara Garlick for including Clive in
the Victorian Fiction Research Guide series, and for all their help in the
preparation of this bibliography.
$$$$$$$$$$$$
Notes
I . flenry Handel Richardson, Maurice Gzesr (london: Virago, l98l), 74, 81, 127 , 230.
2.tbid.,78.
3.Brompton Grove was a terrace of seven houses on the south side of the road, standing
approximately where Beauchamp Place and Beaufort Gardens now meet the Brompton
Road. James Elmes, I Topographical Dictionary of London.(London: Whittaker, Treacher
& Arnott, l83l); Southern Kensington: Brompton. (London: Athlone Press, 1983), vol. 41
of The Survey of London., ed. C.R. Ashbee et al., (London: 1900-).
4.Her brothers and sisters were:Anna Maria Meysey Wigley (1797-1884), married (1825)
John Michael Severne; Edmund Meysey Wigley (1798-1833); Mary Charlotte Meysey
Wigley (1802-1878), married (1834) Charles Wicksted, nd Tollet; and Charles Meysey
Meysey Wigley (1803-1830).
5.Shakenhurst MS, Memoir of Mary Wicksted.
6.Hereford and Worcester Record Office, Worcester branch, 8.A.6442,Box3.
T.Whitfield MS, Diary (24 May 1838).
8.Georgiana Duff Gordon was the sister-in-law of the writer Lucie (Austin) Duff Gordon
(1821-1869).
9."Fatal Accident to Mrs. Archer Clive", Hereford Journal (19 July 1873):7.
l0.whitfield Ms, A5.
I I . Diary (l I March 1851).
l2.Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton:
1980), 6.
l3."Sensation Novels", Blackwood's 91 (May 1862), 564-85, 565.
14.Paul de Kock, Frdre Jacques,4 vols (Brussels 1834), I,44.
15.There is a more extended discussion of the reception of Paul Ferroll'n my introduction
to the reprint in the Oxford Popular Fiction series (1997), x-xv.
l6.Diary (May 1857).
17."The Author ofPaul Ferroll", National Review 12 (April 1861): 488.
18. [Jane Sinnett], "Belles Lettres" , Westminster Review n.s. 5 (April 1854): 619-33, 622.
19.Examiner (1 March 1856): 133.
2O.[Walter Bagehot], "The Waverley Novels", National Review 6 (April 1858): 444-72,
cited by Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Owr (London: Virago, 1978), 122-23.
2l.Spectator 33 (7 April 1860): 330-31.
22.[Margaret Oliphant], 'Modern Novelists-Great and Small", Blackwood's 71 (May
1855):554-68, 557-60.
23,Saturday Review 1.0 (29 December 1860): 838.
24.Examiner (8 December 1860): 773.
25.James Davies, "The Poems and Novels of the Author of 'Paul Ferroll"', Contemporary
Review 23 (January 1874): 197-217,216.
26.[William Allingham?], "Mrs Archer Clive", Fraser's Magazine n.s. 8 (September
1873): 348-52,349.
2T.Whitfield MS 4246, Florence Nightingale to Caroline Clive (29 December 1860).
28."I have been long intending to write & thank you for telling me what became of
'Janet"', Ibid. (Easter Eve 186l).
21

28
29.Saturday Review 17 (4 June 1864): 694. See also Examiner (16 July 1864): 454.
30.Whitfield MS, Diary (2 htly 1846). The writers were Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake (1809-
1893) and the Etruscan historian Elizabeth Caroline Gray.
31.[H.N. Coleridge], "Modem English Poetesses", Quarterly Review 46 (September
1840): 374-418, 410.
32.[William Allingham?], "Mrs Archer Clive", Fraser's Magazine n.s.8 (September 1873):
348-52.
33.Whitfield MS, Diary (10-12 July 1845).
34.The Times (2 February 1856): 7.
35.[Cockburn Thomson], "Modern Style", Norr& British Review 26 (February 1857): 339-
75,354.
36.U. F. Stephenl, Review of Madame Bovary, Saturday Review 4 (11 luly 1857): 40-41.
37.[Justin MacCarthy], "Novels with a Purpose", Westminster Review 82 (July 1864): 24-
49,49.
38.Whitfield MS Cl32 (28 Oct ?1859).
39.Whitfield MS A49 (18 Nov ?1859).
40.Ibid.
4l.Pierpont Morgan Library MS, Thackeray to George Smith (9 April 1860).
42.Whitfield MS 4274, G.H. Lewes to Mr Cox.
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