The Rector most characteristically begins with a new arrival at Carlingford. Mrs Oliphant opens her story in a tone of shrewd irony, presenting Carlingford as its ‘good society’ sees itself—that is, the ‘real town,’ not the tradespeople or, of course, Wharfside. This real town stays secluded in Grange Lane, behind high walls ‘jealous of intrusion, yet thrusting tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom, like friendly salutations to the world without.’ These households, the mainstay of the Parish Church, are half-agreeably disturbed by the thought of a new incumbent. He may be a Ritualist, like young Mr Wentworth of St Roque’s. He may be Low Church, like the late Rector, who absurdly exceeded his duties and actually went down to preach to the ‘bargemen’ of the canal district. To look at it from another point of view, there are unmarried young ladies in Carlingford, and it is known that the new Rector, also, is unmarried.
This, like A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner, is the novel as parable. The houses of Grange Lane, as we first see them in the May sunshine, are an earthly paradise. To open the Wodehouse’s garden door—‘what a slight, paltry barrier—one plank and no more’—is to be elected, to find it shut is to be cast out. As the story opens the young curate, Frank Wentworth, is already, though not securely, admitted to the garden, the falling apple blossoms making light of his ‘black Anglican coat.’ He is too poor to propose marriage to Lucy, the pretty younger daughter. When the door closes behind him he walks stiffly away along the dry and dusty road. Out goes the frustrated young man from the display of fertile greenery, in comes the shy, celibate newcomer. ‘A tall, embarrassed figure, following the portly one of Mr Wodehouse, stepped suddenly from the noisy gravel to the quiet grass, and stood gravely awkward behind the father of the house’ in contrast to the blazing narcissi and the fruit trees. Morley Proctor has been ‘living out of nature.’ For the last fifteen years he has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles. ‘He was neither High nor Low, enlightened nor narrow-minded. He was a Fellow of All Souls’—about which Mrs Oliphant probably knew very little except for the irony of the name for an establishment which cared for so few of them. Proctor is honourable enough, upright and sincere, but in company he is ‘a reserved and inappropriate man.’ His heart is an ‘unused faculty.’ He is out of place, as he knows at once, in the vigorously flowering garden.
But Morley Proctor, too, has come from a Paradise to which he looks back regretfully, a haven of scholarship and ‘snug little dinner-parties undisturbed by the presence of women.’ This is in spite of the fact that his mother has come from Devonshire to look after him, a dauntless little mother who treats him with the mixture of love and impatience at which Mrs Oliphant (in fiction as in life) excelled. Old Mrs Proctor, young in heart, regards her son as a child, but as one who should be settled down with a wife. One of the Wodehouse daughters would do—the kindly, plain, elder one whose reserve seems an echo of Morley’s own timidity, or perhaps the dazzling Lucy.
Having placed this situation, Mrs Oliphant asks us to see it in a different light. It turns out that the new Rector has left All Souls, somewhat against his conscience, precisely in order to give his mother a good home. When he ‘turned his back on his beloved cloisters’ he knew very well what the sacrifice was, but he was determined to make it.
I have said that Mrs Oliphant is not writing of the religious life simply as a social mechanism, or for the sake of the psychological tension that it produces. Proctor’s flight from the possibility of marriage (not without an unexpected twinge of sexuality, since Lucy is so pretty) is domestic comedy of a delicious kind, since Lucy does not want him in the least. But the crisis of the story, when it comes, is spiritual. As a sharp interruption to the dull services that he conducts and the dinner parties that he awkwardly attends, the Rector is called to the bedside of a dying woman. He is asked to prepare her soul for its last journey. His reaction to the agony is dismay, and a very English embarrassment. Without his prayer book he is at a loss for a prayer. He has to leave even that duty to young Wentworth, who providentially comes in time to the sickroom. The Rector ‘would have known what to say to her if her distress had been over a disputed translation.’ The heart of the story is his trial and condemnation, and he has to conduct the trial himself. Carlingford doesn’t reject him—quite the contrary. But he perceives that Wentworth, ‘not half or a quarter part as learned as he,’ was ‘a world farther on in the profession which they shared.’ Among those who are being born, suffering and perishing he has no useful place. His training has not prepared him for such things. And yet, can they be learned by training? ‘The Rector’s heart said No.’
Mrs Oliphant, in fact, is asking: what is a man doing, and what must he be, when he undertakes to be an intermediary between man and God? She returns to the question later, in Salem Chapel. The answer, in her view, has nothing to do with formal theology, or she would not have proposed it. Nor is it a matter of duty. Morley Proctor was right, in his anxiety, to consult his heart.
IV. The Doctor’s Family
The Doctor’s Family enlarges the view of Carlingford and takes us to a different part of it. The Doctor, however, like the Rector, has to face a painful ordeal of reality. This is all the more telling because in his hard-working medical practice he might be thought to be facing it already. But Mrs Oliphant shows him as another, although very different example of the unused heart.
Edward Rider is a surgeon, still, at that date, professionally inferior to a doctor. He is no hero, and Mrs Oliphant defines carefully what are ‘the limits of his nature, and beyond them he could not pass.’ He is shown as wretchedly in need of a woman, but unwilling to marry because he can’t face the expense and responsibility. His surgery is in the dreaded brickworkers’ district, partly because he is not a snob, but largely because he has to make a living. He would work in Grange Lane if he could, but that is the domain of old Dr Marjoribanks, who attends the ‘good society.’ To this ‘poor young fellow,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls him, strong-minded, short-tempered, comes a terrible visitation. His drunken failure of an elder brother, Fred, has come back in disgrace from Australia and installed himself in the upstairs room. ‘A large, indolent, shabby figure,’ he is incapable of gratitude but is always ready with a pleasant word for the neighbours, who prefer him, in consequence, to the doctor. Fred’s foul billows of tobacco smoke define him and hang over the first part of the book, just as the surgery lamp shines defiantly at the beginning and the end.
Mrs Oliphant was well acquainted with sickbeds and travel and the support of idle relations. The story seems almost to tell itself. It moves fast, as though keeping pace with the doctor’s rounds in his horse and drag, the quickest-moving thing on the streets of Carlingford. One encounter follows another, each outbidding the last. Fred is followed from Australia by his feebly plaintive wife and a pack of children. All have arrived in charge of his forceful young sister-in-law, Nettie. She is a tiny, ‘brilliant brown creature,’ a mighty atom, afraid of nothing ‘except that someone would speak before her and the situation be taken out of her hands.’ Having a little money left, she undertakes to support the whole lot of them, and whisks them away to new lodgings. The title The Doctor’s Family can now be seen in all its irony. First Rider, who has been too cautious to marry, is threatened with a whole family of wild children:
Nettie comes to his rescue, but this is no relief to the doctor, who falls violently in love with her. Fred’s squalid death in the canal may look like a solution, but isn’t. It means, or Nettie convinces herself that it does, that she has no right to marry and desert her weak-spirited sister. All the action seems checked, until the arrival of another Australian visitor, ‘the Bushman,’ who ‘fills up the whole little parlour with his beard and his presence,’ gives it quite a new direction. From the secluded top room where Dr Rider once hid away his brother, the whole drama has come into the open. There it has to be played out to the amazement of watching Carlingford, from the bargemen who drag in Fred’s bloated body to mild, elderly Miss Wodehouse, with whose gentle observations the book comes to rest. Dr Rider and Dr Marjoribanks, Frank Wentworth and the Wodehouses, will return in the later Chronicles, all of them less than perfect human beings. Mrs Oliphant is not much concerned with faultless characters. An exception, in The Doctor’s Family, is the honest Bushman, but even he, Miss Wodehouse points