10 January: Boreham on Mary Mitford

A Painter of Village Cameos
Charles Lamb thought the work of Mary Russell Mitford, the anniversary of whose death we mark today, absolutely incomparable. Mary was a doctor's daughter; but the pity of it is that the good man had preoccupations that entirely drove from his wayward mind the aches and pains of any unfortunate patients who may have been misguided enough to consult him. He inherited a fortune which he quickly squandered on his dice, his cards, and his ridiculous investments. He married a woman who brought him about thirty thousand pounds. It all went down the drain. His one redeeming feature was his passionate devotion to Mary, his only child. Believing her to be infallible, he took her with him, when she was nine, to buy a lottery ticket. He insisted on her choosing the number. She demanded No. 2224, and it won a prize of twenty thousand pounds.

They were at the time, living in a poor tenement near Blackfriars Bridge. Mrs. Mitford had been at her wit's end for housekeeping money, whilst her husband spent most of his time in evading his creditors. The lottery enabled them to purchase Grasely Court, a fine old mansion near Reading, replete with all the grandeur and comfort of an ancient English home, including hidden panels, mysterious passages, and secret rooms in which in the days of romance, priests, cavaliers, and other fugitives had been known to hide.

Always restless and eager for change, the doctor shortly afterwards decided to demolish this antique dwelling and to erect a new home, on modern lines, nearby. Here, at Bertram House, Mary spent the remainder of her girlhood, and then their finances being, for the old reason, at their lowest ebb, they were driven to content themselves with a cottage at Three Mile Cross—a cottage so small that Mary said that it could scarcely be called a cottage—and it was here that she wrote "Our Village", the work that established her fame.

Brilliant Portrayal Of Obscurity
It is just possible that at Three Mile Cross, the doctor, who had now dissipated three separate fortunes, and was living on the literary earnings of his clever daughter, made some slight contribution to the economy of the household. He loved the village. He was hail-fellow-well-met with all the cranks and oddities of the countryside. He described them to Mary, even introduced her to some of them. And so they found their way into the pages of "Our Village" and, before long, were endeared to thousands of people all over the country. The work inspired the raptures of Charles Lamb, whilst Savage Landor burst into poetry in its praise. The success of the work led her to write four companion productions.

Mary possessed an uncanny flair for dissecting, analysing, and describing people. She saw through them. Her biography, in three volumes, consists almost exclusively of her letters. These intimate epistles are masterpieces of incisive and penetrating criticism. She tells of the people she has met—many of them famous people—and of the books she has read, many of them popular classics. But name and fame are nothing to Mary. She has a mind of her own, and, in this correspondence of hers, we see the outstanding figures of the 19th century in a new and often surprising light.

In the same way the phenomena of the village took on fresh colour and fresh charm when Mary strolled down its crazy street to do her shopping, or walked on Sunday to the village church. The hamlet of Three Mile Cross became a mirror, in which all the simplicity, the beauty, and the sweetness of English country life stood reflected and everybody who loved rural scenes and rural people revelled in her writings. In the course of a visit to London, Mary was introduced to the theatres with the result that she tested her powers as a playwright. Three of her dramas—"Julian," "The Foscari," and "Rienzi"—made their appearance at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. She also wrote a good deal of poetry, an autobiography and a novel or two; but her claim to remembrance must always rest on her artistry in portraying the idyllic grace of English country life.

Marvel Of An Unmerited Devotion
With the most unselfish and beautiful devotion, Mary supported and tended her parents until they died—the mother in 1830 when Mary was 43 and the father 13 years later. She herself passed away in 1855 at Swallowfield, the village in which she spent the last five years of her life, tasting the fruits of success and enjoying the friendship of Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and other eminent people of that time. Charlotte and she died within a few weeks of each other.

The insoluble mystery of Mary's life consists in her relationship with her scapegrace father. He kept her in a state of chronic impecuniosity. Yet, although he was the heartbreak of her entire existence, she worshipped the ground he trod. The phraseology of all her letters to him is the phraseology of a girl addressing the lover she adores. Still more incredibly, she implicitly trusted him. He never went to London without getting into all sorts of trouble; yet she confided to him all her business arrangements with her publishers, the making of terms, the control of the manuscripts, and the collection of the money.

She knew perfectly well that he could be victimised by any smug and oily-mouthed scoundrel who had some fantastic scheme for turning his pennies into shillings and his shillings into pounds. Her childish confidence in him remained as boundless as it was incomprehensible. Her frailty is one that we find it easy to forgive, and we cheerfully forgive her for the sake of the sheer downright goodness by which she endeared herself to everybody, high and low, who enjoyed the rare privilege of her friendship.

F W Boreham

Image: Mary Mitford