An Englishwoman's Workhouse is her Castle: Poor Management and Gothic Fiction in the 1790s

Abstract

An Englishwoman's Workhouse is Her Castle:Poor Management and Gothic Fiction in the 1790s Scott R. Mackenzie The young unmarried woman in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction may be the most overdetermined character in all of English literature. She is always surrounded by a throng of themes, contests, anxieties, polemics, and proprieties. She has been asked, and often coerced, to represent domestic harmony, the aspiring middle class, patriotic sentiment, reproductive sexuality, and the community of taste and decency. Among her responsibilities are paternity, legitimacy, property, social relations, and the maintenance or overthrow of aristocratic privilege. She is endangered and dangerous, innocent and guilty, prudent and wasteful, modest and brazen. Her admirers call her proto-feminist, exogamous, and duplicitous, and her detractors charge her with the same. The young single woman is in fact double, or indeed multiple. She is, as recent critics have thoroughly established, a privileged locus for the identification and examination of collective anxieties. My purpose here is to add yet another determinant to the list that already encumbers our heroine. She is also very frequently the focus of anxiety about the poor. Debates about poverty acquire sufficient cultural prominence in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century to inflect most prose fiction of the period, and, most often, it is the young unmarried woman who carries the burden of figuration. She embodies the vulnerabilities of the poor and the dangers they pose, and from her fortunes we may generally derive ideological formations relevant to matters of poor management. Of course the relationship between poverty debates and fiction does not work in one direction only. The vogue for sentiment provided vocabulary and attitudes for talking about the poor. Indeed, sentimentalism arguably began as a mode of talking about (and sometimes to) the poor. The bleeding of sentimental language into political discourse is especially notable around the turn of the century, when philanthropic benevolence became more and more institutional and national and advocates of the poor formed alliances with evangelical activists such as [End Page 681] Hannah More and the abolitionist William Wilberforce. Sir Egerton Brydges, MP for Maidstone, writes in 1813, "Never before did I meet with a subject in which the driest details of business were associated with all the best furniture of a poetic mind; where the blaze of fancy, and the best emotions of the heart could throw the truest, the most philosophical, and most virtuous light on a complicated subject of artificial legislation."1 As prominent traffickers in sentimental language, novelists could hardly avoid comparing the attributes and experiences of unmarried women with those of the poor. When we compare representations of single women and paupers we will find striking similarities in the kinds of condemnation or sympathy, bitter or happy endings they receive. At the same time, radical and anti-sentimental writers like Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld contested the terminology proposed by sentimental authors but affirmed the urgency of the poverty debates. The French Revolution, the decay of parish governance, and the wage and food-price crises of the 1790s and 1800s forced most, if not all, representations of British nationality to reckon with the underclasses. Gothic fiction of the 1790s, I will argue, is especially dense with rhetorical and thematic echoes of the poor debates, and the reverse is certainly also true. My exemplary text is Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, a work published in 1791. Radcliffe's work anticipated, and undoubtedly influenced, a remarkable portion of the topoi and attitudes that came to dominate poor-law discourse until around 1815. Her novels, and the gothic fiction of her era generally, are deeply involved not only with digesting fears about what was happening in France but also with sustaining a much longer cultural conversation about the poor in England. If sentimental fiction codified personal affective responses to individual examples of poverty and suffering, the first major wave of gothic fiction deals in personal and political encounters with collective bodies of the poor—figuring contests over regulation and discipline of the poor as battles between private subjects and mysterious, implacable mechanisms of coercion. Following Radcliffe's lead, both novelists and poor-law advocates...