CHAPTER XXIII
THE PUBLICATION OF _OUR VILLAGE_
Miss Mitford writes to Sir William Elford on March 5th, 1824: “In spite of your prognostics, I think you will like _Our Village_. It will be out in three weeks or a month.... It is exceedingly playful and lively, and I think you will like it. Charles Lamb (the matchless ‘Elia’ of the _London Magazine_) says that nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for a long while. It is not over modest to say this; but who would not be proud of the praise of such a _proser_?”
Sir William Elford, in answering this letter, expressed his opinion that the sketches of rural life would have been better if written in the form of letters.
“Your notion of letters pleases me much,” replies Miss Mitford, “as I see plainly that it is the result of the old prepossessions and partialities which do me so much honour and give me so much pleasure. But it would never have done. The sketches are too long, and necessarily too much connected for _real_ correspondence.... Besides, we are free and easy in these days, and talk to the public as a friend. Read _Elia_, or the _Sketch Book_, or Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_, or any popular book of the new school and you will find that we have turned over the Johnsonian periods and the Blair-ian formality, to keep company with the wigs and hoops, the stiff curtsys and low bows of our ancestors. Now the public—the reading public—is, as I said before, the correspondent and confidant of everybody.
“Having thus made the best defence I can against your criticism, I proceed to answer your question, ‘Are the characters and descriptions true?’ Yes! yes! yes! As true as is well possible. You, as a great landscape painter, know that in painting a favourite scene you do a little embellish, and can’t help it; you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere, and if anything be ugly you strike it out, or if anything be wanting you put it in. But still the picture is a likeness; and that this is a very faithful one you will judge when I tell you that a worthy neighbour of ours, a post-captain, who has been in every quarter of the globe and is equally distinguished for the sharp look-out and the _bonhomie_ of his profession, accused me most seriously of carelessness in putting ‘The Rose’ for ‘The Swan’ as the sign of our next-door neighbour, and was no less disconcerted at the _misprint_ (as he called it) of B. for R. in the name of our next town. _A cela près_ he declares the picture to be exact.”
Miss Mitford thus prefaces her work in the first sketch entitled _Our Village_:—
“Of all situations for a constant residence that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses ... with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold.... [Where we] learn to know and to love the people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we pass every day.
“Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White over his own parish of Selborne and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice and squirrels who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his man Friday ... or to be ship-wrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island—the island of Prospero and Miranda, and Calaban and Ariel, and nobody else ... that is best of all. And a small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose; a village neighbourhood such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from B—— to S——, which passed through about ten days ago, and will, I suppose, return some time or other.”
_Our Village_ soon made its mark, and towards the end of June Miss Mitford was able to write to Sir William Elford, “It sells well, and has been received by the literary world and reviewed in all the literary papers better than I, for modesty, dare to say.”
Seven months later she wrote to the same friend, “The little prose volume has certainly done its work and made an opening for a longer effort. You would be diverted at some of the instances I could tell you of its popularity. Columbines and children have been named after Mayflower[9]; stage-coachmen and post-boys point out the localities; schoolboys deny the possibility of any woman’s having written the _Cricket Match_ without schoolboy help; and such men as Lord Stowell (Sir William Scott, the last relique, I believe, of the Literary Club) send to me for a key. I mean to try three volumes of tales next spring.... Heaven knows how I shall succeed!
[Footnote 9: Her favourite greyhound.]
“Of course I shall copy as closely as I can Nature and Miss Austen, keeping, like her, to genteel country life, or rather going a little lower perhaps, and I am afraid with more of sentiment and less of humour. I do not _intend_ to commit these delinquencies, mind—I _mean_ to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid of their happening in spite of me.”
Before the first volume of _Our Village_ had been a year in the hands of the public it had passed into three editions, and by 1826 a second volume had made its appearance, whose success was equally great. With the money gained Mary was soon enabled to add to the comforts of her small establishment. She writes to a friend in the summer of 1824: “We have a pretty little pony-chaise and pony (oh! how I should like to drive you in it!), and my dear father and mother have been out in it three or four times, to my great delight; I am sure it will do them both so much good.”
Among the various letters of warm appreciation of _Our Village_ received by Miss Mitford was the following from Mrs. Hemans, written on June 6th, 1827:—
“I can hardly feel that I am addressing an entire stranger in the author of _Our Village_,” she writes, “and yet I know it is right and proper that I should apologise for the liberty I am taking. But really after having accompanied you, as I have done again and again, in ‘violeting’ and seeking for wood-sorrel—after having been with you to call upon Mrs. Allen in ‘the dell,’ and becoming thoroughly acquainted with May and Lizzie, I cannot but hope you will kindly pardon my intrusion, and that my name may be sufficiently known to you to plead my cause. There are writers whose books we cannot read without feeling as if we really _had_ looked with them upon the scenes they bring before us.... Will you allow me to say that _your_ writings have this effect upon me, and that you have taught me, in making me know and love your ‘village’ so well, to wish for further knowledge also of _her_ who has so vividly impressed its dingles and copses upon my imagination, and peopled them so cheerily with healthful and happy beings? I believe if I could be personally introduced to you that I should in less than five minutes begin to enquire about Lucy and the lilies-of-the-valley, and whether you had succeeded in peopling that ‘shady border’ in your own territories with those shy flowers.”
Writing to her mother from London in November, 1826, Mary says: “I hope that you have by this time received the new number of Blackwood[10] in which I am very pleasantly mentioned in the last article, the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ.’”
[Footnote 10: Blackwood’s _Edinburgh Magazine_.]
It was under this title, the reader may remember, that the celebrated “Christopher North” (John Wilson) was bringing out a series of entertaining conversations on all sorts of subjects supposed to be spoken by North himself and a few fellow habitués of an old-fashioned Edinburgh inn. The character of the “Shepherd,” it seems, was drawn from James Hogg the “Ettrick Shepherd.” This is the passage alluded to by Miss Mitford—“Noctes Ambrosianæ.”
“NOCTES AMBROSIANÆ”
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SHEPHERD, NORTH, AND TICKLER
SCENE—_Ambrose’s Hotel, Picardy Place, Paper Parlour_
_Tickler._ Master Christopher North, there’s Miss Mitford, author of _Our Village_, an admirable person in all respects, of whom you have never, to my recollection, taken any notice in the Magazine. What is the meaning of that?...
_North._ I am waiting for her second volume. Miss Mitford has not, in my opinion, either the pathos or humour of Washington Irving; but she excels him in vigorous conception of character, and in the truth of her pictures of English life and manners. Her writings breathe a sound, pure and healthy morality, and are pervaded by a genuine rural spirit—the spirit of merry England. Every line bespeaks the lady.
_Shepherd._ I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna wunner at her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi’ sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seein’ themselves in lookin’-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o’ me is her pictures o’ poachers and tinklers ... and o’ huts and hovels without riggin’ by the wayside, and the cottages o’ honest, puir men and byres and barns.... And merry-makin’s at winter-ingles, and courtships aneath trees atween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father’s ha’. That’s the puzzle, and that’s the praise. But ae word explains a’—Genius—Genius—wull a’ the metaphizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious monysyllable?
_Tickler._ Monosyllable, James, did you say?
_Shepherd._ Ay—monysyllable. Does na that mean a word o’ three syllables?
_North_ (in a later review). The young gentlemen of England should be ashamed o’ thirselves fo’ letten her name be Mitford. They should marry her, whether she wull or no, for she would mak boith a useful and agreeable wife. Thet’s the best creetishism on her warks.