A NOVEL WITH MORE THAN ONE PURPOSE.* SINCE Mr. Marcus
Clarke wrote the powerful and painful story which, under the title of His Natural Life, gave us a picture of the old times of "transportation," never to be forgotten, and whose terrible grimness no other writer has approached, we have had no such facts used for the purposes of fiction, no such fiction employed for the enforcement of facts, as in the present instance.. The author of this novel has produced a book faulty in many important respects, whether it be regarded as a work of fiction,. and the artistic aspect of it be in question, or as a social study, and the views of life which it unfolds be contemplated; but indisputably interesting, and uncommon to a degree which secures it a place entirely its own. A story of the prison and the madhouse suggests at once comparison with Mr. Charles Reade in his best days, when he wrote It is Never too. Late to Mend and Hard Cash, but there is no similarity between those works and this strange story,at once attractive and repul- sive, of the present, except in so far as each deals with simliar- abuses of power and with human suffering of a similar kind ; but the order and range of imagination displayed by the author of A Prodigal Daughter, is essentially different from those of Mr. Charles Reade ; his tone is pessimist, and the indigna- tion which occasionally inspires him with true eloquence, haa in it great bitterness and hopelessness respecting the folly, and the cruelty, and the injustice of men. He is not, however, one- of those writers of our time who, dealing in fiction with the terrible evils of life and society, complacently propose to cure them by the elimination of God ; he is no philosophical un- believer, no purveyor of pedantic blasphemy calling itself science, and subtle immorality calling itself emancipated intel- lect; he believes in God, and in obedience to Him as the first step towards the cure of those wounds, and bruises, and putrefy- ing sores which he bares with an unhesitating hand; and there- fore the book is not altogether depressing and terrible. Two of the personages in the story, Michael Christy, the gaol chap- lain, and Rose Graham, the beautiful victim of the atrocious. wickedness of Colonel Forrester—a melodramatic villain, some- what too profusely criminal for credibility—are such finely conceived characters, and so well drawn, that there is no writer of whatever eminence who might not be proud of having produced them. On the other hand, the real heroine of the story, the prodigal daughter herself, is never distinct enough, and is certainly not pleasing or sympathetic, either in the brief glimpse of her previous history which is afforded to the reader,. or even during the terrible inflictions of her imprisonment in the gaol and the madhouse respectively.
It is not really unfair to the writer of A Prodigal Daughter to dismiss the consideration of his book as a novel somewhat summarily, with the acknowledgment that if there be any who will read it merely for amusement and the excitement of a stirring story of crime, sorrow, injustice, and cruelty, such readers cannot fail to derive from it all they seek in it ; for the
• 4 Prodigal Daughter: a Story of Female Prison 141e. By Moak Hope. London: Chapman and Hall. work appeals principally to a class of sentiment and an order of thought which have little in common with the woes and the compensations of fiction. When we have said that Colonel Forrester, the criminal hero of the story, who is not only out- rageously wicked, but an incomparably mean rascal to boot, is lent a faux air of heroism in his death, which injures the moral effect of the story, and is violently improbable as well, we have found all the fault that needs to be found with the book as a novel, and are free to pass on to the consideration of it as a powerful pic- ture of certain evils of our present prison system, and a forcible appeal on behalf of the victims of the system of private lunatic asylums. Concerning the evils of the latter, the public mind is sufficiently excited at present to lead us to hope that some real progress towards reform will be made; and it is a curious coin- cidence that the terrible infliction of "the bath," which figured so largely in the recent trial, "Nunn v. Hemming," forms one of the most striking incidents of this powerful story, and is de- scribed with a terrible realism, which leaves that given by the late Mr. Lefanu, in his novel, the Rose and the Key, very far behind, though we remember to have read the latter with a shudder. It may be neither possible nor wise that legis- lation should interdict "the bath," as a mode of either treat- ment or punishment for the " perduta gente," of those "citth dolenti " with which few among us are so happy as to have no near or distant association of kinship or friendship, and from which, if we can turn our eyes unmoved, we must be indeed hard- hearted; but it may surely be practicable, as it would be just, to oblige all keepers of lunatic asylums, a class whose emoluments are exceptionally large, to be present on occa- sions of its administration ; and to employ educated and competent persons as attendants upon their highly remunerative boarders, instead of the coarse and ignorant servants to whose companionship ladies and gentlemen, for the most part mad only nor'-nor'-west, are condemned. A poor gentleman who imagines himself to be Plato, or the Emperor of China discrowned by a conspiracy, is rather more than less likely, on account of that delusion, to find himself uncomfortable under the rule and in the company of an able-bodied individual of the servant class, from whom, although his madness is only a pervading accident, he is unable to escape during all the hours and under all the conditions of his life which it does not affect. One of the most terrible penalties of madness is that it is so hard to love the insane, and that insane people are hardly ever capable of loving; it is, therefore, all the more binding on the non-afflicted ones to endeavour to preserve their brethren in bondage from the sufferings which are inflicted by ignorance and harshness, combined with the terrible temptation of power and irresponsibility. It would need all the grace of supernatural charity to tend the insane aright, and to alleviate their lot as it might be alleviated; we cannot command that, or legislate so as to ensure it, but there might be such a movement of public opinion and common-sense as would convince the -keepers of private lunatic asylums—if, indeed, private lunatic asylums are still to exist at all—that their large profits are no longer to be made, except on a change of system. They may be obliged to recognise the sane as well as the insane elements in their unhappy charges, and then might we not hope that, just as educated nurses are replacing Mrs. Gamp, men and women whose feelings are quickened by instruction, " gentle "
people, in the good old sense of the word, will be found to give their intelligent and educated services in those wretched abodes where all that can be done must unhappily be so little, and from which ignorance ought especially to be excluded, for the reason that it so often leads to cruelty, just as children, not ill-disposed, will, from want of knowledge and poverty of imagination which leaves them void of sympathy, torment the lower animals.
Towards the promotion of these two ends—the probibition of " the bath" except under medical inspection, and the employ- ment of educated persons (which involves payment such as the large charges of madhouse keepers can well bear) as keepers, nurses, and companions for the insane—we believe this novel is capable of doing a great deal. It will be widely read, it must make an impression on all who read it, it must find its way into hundreds of houses where there are vacant places, once filled by the living-dead, those over whom loving hearts yearn with anguish more cruel than that which rends them by the grave's side, because there is in it the fear in which is torment, and it will put that vague fear into words, and rouse people to a deter- mination that such things shall not continue to be. The author himself is not very sanguine about producing much effect ; he gives in a good deal to the great depression which is naturally produced by dealing in detail with the miseries and the wrongs of the insane, though he not unwisely hopes to persuade those who have friends so afflicted at least to place them in public institutions, where there is provision made for some cheerful associations for them, and where it is nobody's interest to keep them mad, in preference to the dismal places, one of which he describes, in a passage too long for complete extract, but which is to be found in the sixteenth chapter of the second volume, and concludes thus :—
"Private asylums for the temporary treatment of curable brain diseases may be tolerated, like other private hospitals, subject to proof of the undoubted medical skill of those who conduct them ; but private asylums for the perpetual detention of the insane should no more be allowed than private prisons. Recollecting how helpless a creature a lunatic is, how repulsive often, how essentially deserving of forbearance and pity, and remembering, too, what a propensity there is in human nature when education has not refined it to tyrannise over the weak, it is not too much to ask that confirmed maniacs should be placed under the same enlightened protection as-guards criminals in gaols and convict establishments. It would be considered a mon- strous thing to commit the custody of men and women under a life- sentence to a number of private speculators, subject to no other supervision but the brief visit of an inspector once in three months. Explicit rules, frequent magisterial inspections, and impartial investi- gations into all complaints by governors who have no interest in pro- moting abuses, ensure to the prisoner proper food, warmth, and clothing, and shield him against the oppression of warders. Surely the lunatic has as strong a claim on the public sympathy as the felon !"
Until, then, there is an entire reform in the Lunacy laws, until it is made impossible for sane people to be confined in private lunatic asylums upon the certificates of doctors who are either ignorant or corrupt men, or fanatical specialists ; and for insane people to have the torture of "the bath," or the indignity of such society as the writer's heroine is condemned to, inflicted upon them; or to be stowed away in mean rooms, and turned out into bare yards, no more like the places their too confiding relatives are introduced to than the show drawing- room of a fashionable boarding-school is like the school-room and the dormitories ; until the commonest specimens of a notoriously venal class cease to be the employes in such places,—for God's sake, urges the author, in many different forms, place your insane friends in public, not in private asylums. We wonder whether it has ever occurred to any relative of an insane patient to insist on being present during the administration of "the bath ;" and if it has, and he has carried his point, what he thought about that institution, with the terrible knowledge of what it might be made of exhausting agony, when there should be nobody there but a " troublesome " lunatic, none the less susceptible of pain and terror, and the able-bodied persons to whom helpless gentlemen and ladies are delivered over. The writer of this book draws a terrible enough picture of prison life, and he is not tolerant of its evils, or reticent concerning the reforms which are of urgency ; but we do not wonder that when Margaret exchanges Tolminster Gaol and the matron thereof (who answers, in some respects, to Hamlet's description of his uncle in his imprecatory soliloquy) for Dr. Billings' asylum, and the semi-bestial " attendants " provided by that gentleman for his lady-patients, she regards the prison as Paradise, by comparison.
A powerful, painful, useful, and timely book, written with earnest and profound conviction, A Prodigal Daughter is so absorbing in its interest that we do not feel inclined to look closely at its defects of style and its errors of taste. We must, however, comment on the presence of both in the author's description of military life, and his portraits of officers and gentlemen. We should be sorry to believe that mess-room conversation is of the vulgar and silly sort of which Captain Christy and his brother-officers afford us specimens, and that such easy-going scoundrelism as that of the gaol chaplain's brother ordinarily finds its reward in general popularity, and the love and hand of a charming and pure-minded girl. The author has been thinking more deeply of his theme than of his story, or he would not have attempted to whitewash such a character as Frank Christy, utterly false and unprincipled, the base accomplice of a whole series of crimes, by means of a senti- mental fidelity to his friend Forrester, who is as vile a wretch as ever figured either in fact or fiction. This is the moral blot of the book, and it provokes us, because the book is so remark- able, and otherwise so excellent.
Previous page
