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.