Mother Cannot Guide You, Now You're On Your Own

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Fifteen. So what happened?

When last we left MDTaW, poor suffering Abigail had just died without dignity and without anyone to mourn her but her son. We spend a little time with him in this chapter, and learn what his childhood was like: it wasn’t fun. John Christie spent much of his young life hiding from and stealing from his mother’s clients, lovers and husbands, and has made it to adolescence with a conscience and love for his mother and siblings, but little love for the world. Her death leaves him alone and friendless, and more pertinently, without any means of supporting himself. The Darcy family, apparently one of the only employers in Derbyshire, are starting to look like his destination.

What’s Obviously Wrong Here?

I want to talk about workhouses, which John fears most of all in his life of poverty. He seems to liken them to essentially prisons. But what were they like, really?

First of all, they were everywhere. John reflects, after his mother’s death:

Where was he to go? At least his mother’s poor sense of timing had improved enough to have her die in the country instead of town. He knew he would be but a half-day from the workhouse in London.

The implication is that there were no workhouses in the country. This is false. There were workhouses everywhere there were people at this point in the 19th century, and they existed long before industrialization (which was really kicking off in this period). They weren’t necessarily state run, and in fact usually weren’t - they were run by parishes, and all parishes throughout England tended to have them. The same parish that John reflects paid for his mother’s burial would have given him a place in one; these tended to all be part of the same process. A small village like Lambton would likely have a small workhouse, unlike those in large cities, but it would have been an option, and everyone would have known that. There would be many large workhouses between Derbyshire and London as well - as there were several large cities in between, not to mention the larger industrial and port cities to the north. Workhouses were not pleasant, and John was right to fear them, but they were generally voluntary - the problem was that they were the only option if you could not support yourself or make a living by begging.

Though England did not have anything like a proper modern welfare state at the time, the problem of what to do with people who have no place of their own to go to is as old as civilization itself. There have been numerous ways of dealing with those people, throughout human history - many of those ways have been frighteningly cruel. Yet one of the rarest was to simply allow them to fend for themselves in droves, if for no other reason than that non-poor people don’t usually like looking at poverty if they can help it. Workhouses, segregated slums, prisons, tent cities, transportation, and murder by neglect or deliberate killing: these are all solutions to the problems of poverty and they were all more or less known to Georgian and Regency society. The very parish that felt a moral responsibility to pay for Abigail’s burial would have felt the same moral responsibility to find a place for her son, even if that only meant hustling him off to one of Derbyshire’s numerous workhouses. More likely for an able bodied young man, it would have been arranging work at one of the many, many landed estates in the county.

All of this, of course, speaks to a broader problem with this book that I’ve written about more than once: Berdoll doesn’t seem to realize where and when her characters are actually living. England is a small country, but in the early 1800s nobody had cars or trains, and the vast majority of people did not have horses or access to them. If penniless people like Abigail or John wanted to travel, they did it on foot in whatever weather there was at the time. Which means that the biggest inaccuracy of all remains the fact that when Abigail was first thrown out of Pemberley as a young girl, she went to London - a city very far away, that she would have needed money to get to. She could have gone to Derby, to Nottingham, to Lincoln, or any of a dozen other places. And when she left London, she could have gone again to any of those places or a dozen others closer to London than Derbyshire. The same goes for John. 

Berdoll always seems to write as if London, Longbourne and Derbyshire are the only locations in England, and that all locations in England are very close together. This happens over and over: characters move from place to place on a whim, and apparently overnight. Lydia travels from one side of the country to the other for his sisters’ weddings - apparently alone? With what carriage? With what money? John thinks he even has the option of returning to London - how? With what money? In the middle of winter, on foot? Maybe put it down to Berdoll being a car-brained American. Travel, and the economics of travel, matter a lot in Pride and Prejudice, and Berdoll has no appreciation for it.

Purple Prose: What’s the worst written line in the chapter?

Look, this chapter is comparatively well-written. Berdoll tends to do best with her original characters, not because they’re great characters but because we don’t have Austen’s versions to compare them to. John doesn’t have much of a personality, he mainly exists to be sad and preternaturally noble so the reader will assume he’s Darcy’s son (we know where this is going, right?) but he’s less annoying than he could be, and his situation is genuinely pitiable.

That said, there are, as ever, some problems. The main one is something that again, has cropped up more than once: namely, that Berdoll had a thesaurus and used it but did not have a great ear for language. An example:

…John bewailed the more caitiff strains of that man’s nature.

“Caitiff” isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s not quite right. It ought to contain within it a sense of contempt - it’s a word you use about somebody beneath you in every way. John’s stepfather may have been beneath him morally, but he had power over John. You want to convey fear here, not dismissal.

Asshole award: who acts the most like a jerk or the least like themselves?

You could certainly pick the sorry excuse for a welfare state in 19th century Britain, but I want to stick to actual people. And for all that John and Abigail have both had a very rough time of it, it remains bizarre that they left John’s younger sisters behind in London. If having children would slow Abigail down, then the decision makes some sense - but then why take John? Kids younger than him worked full time back then; it would make more sense to leave him to fend for himself.

Hey Look, a Poor Person: how is class portrayed in this chapter?

John Christie is the only lower class character in this novel who has something you could reasonably call a character arc, and in the end he only exists to develop the story for the Darcy family and then die. He’s certainly a sympathetic kid, but his thoughtfulness is a striking contrast to the slovenly thoughtlessness of every other working class person who crosses the pages of this book. The fact that we’re clearly meant to credit his relative personal merits to his aristocratic origins is a little gross.

Hey Look, a Plot: how does this chapter move things forward?

John is making his way to Pemberley, where his story will intersect with that of our heroes. This intersection will take a long time to develop.