Well, my cunning plan for monthly reading round-ups has obviously failed, so it’s back to traditional reviews for me for now. The main problem is that at the end of each month I’d forgotten what I’d read and anything interesting I might have thought about it. Make notes, Helen? Perhaps I will. Perhaps that can be my new year’s resolution.
I only finished Salem Chapel a few days ago so I can at least vaguely remember it... It’s a slightly odd novel, imagine if Barchester Towers was walking down the street and was suddenly assailed by East Lynne and you might have an idea. Peopled with the kind of full-blooded characters, from Mr Tozer, the dependable butterman and deacon, to Adelaide Tufton, the acerbic and relentlessly curious invalid, that I delight in a Victorian novel, it does become a page-turner when the melodramatic subplot gets going and I stayed up late anxious to find out what happened...
Fresh from theological college, John Vincent arrives in Carlingford as the new Dissenting minister for Salem Chapel. Brimful of idealism, he sees himself tending to the destitute and delivering sermons so inspiring he will soon be mixing with the town’s highest echelons of society. Alas! The poor, though poor, are not quite as needy as he had anticipated and his congregation is drawn not from the upper classes but from trade. Not only are they smug about their wretchedly middle-class ways, but they expect him to participate in their endless tea meetings and pay them social calls as well. Vincent pleases them by preaching so vigorously that pew subscriptions soar, but then promptly falls in love with the young dowager Lady Western, who is of the Anglican persuasion. Mrs Tozer, Mrs Pigeon and Mrs Brown all heartily disapprove of young men chasing ladies above their station (especially when there are unmarried Tozer and Pigeon daughters around) and so Vincent quickly loses his bloom and finds himself struggling to retain the confidence of his congregation – who pay his wages and therefore call the shots. Respectability and value for money are both highly prized in Salem Chapel, and mooning after Lady Western casts doubt on whether the new minister represents either of those ideals. Vincent, certain of his superiority to the cheesemongers and greengrocers of his flock, is blind to his danger.
An anomaly among the Salem Chapel worshippers is Mrs Hilyard, a thin, sardonic woman with a secret past and an endless pile of sewing. And far away in Lonsdale, a mysterious gentleman begins to court Susan, Vincent’s beautiful sister. Could there be a connection here? Reader, there most assuredly is – and thus the sensation part of the novel bursts in.
According to Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote the excellent introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition, Margaret Oliphant (a widow with three children to feed) seems to have introduced the sensation plot in order to increase sales, but was herself unsure of it. Beside the acute observations of Carlingford life, and the wonderfully drawn characters – the Tozers, Mrs Vincent, Lady Western – the sensation plot does come over as histrionic peopled with cardboard figures. Nevertheless, its unnaturalness does reflect the feeling, when something so terrible happens, that it is all a nightmare, unreal, discombobulating. And although it might be artistically weaker than the realist novel into which it irrupts, it does raise the stakes and make for compulsive reading, while testing Vincent and the chapel-goers and finding them, in their different ways, wanting.
The very extremity of the crisis somehow points up the ridiculous binaries that govern everyday life. It excites the prurience of Carlingford but, conveyed to them principally through the newspapers, does not belong to everyday life and fails to awaken their empathy. Far from rallying to their embattled minister, they chafe at his absences and failure to place them above his own family.
Oliphant uses the drama to point up the hypocrisies of Victorian society in general and the cruel double standards that existed against women. And yet,while the men have power and freedom and so delightfully prefer death to dishonour for their womenfolk, the female characters are not without resource. They wield the soft power within their community and, when the chips are down, avenge and escape without male assistance. Even the self-deprecating Phoebe has her eye on the main chance. As Tozer, endlessly politicking but outmanoeuvred by Mrs Pigeon, says, ‘it’s all along of the women, sir – it’s them as is at the bottom of all the mischief in a flock.’
(Portrait of Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881, thus almost twenty years after she wrote Salem Chapel; National Portrait Gallery; found here)
