The novel Miss Mackenzie is one of Anthony Trollope's little gems. I say little, though it is 330 pages long, because typically Trollope novels were much longer and were originally published in three volumes, as three-deckers as they called them. It has no subplots; it focuses entirely on Miss Mackenzie. It's also gem-like in that it's highly polished and sparkles.
Margaret Mackenzie is for me one of Trollope's most interesting women. She is 35 as the book opens and has spent her entire life nursing her parents and then nursing her brother, Walter, who took her in after their deaths. She has lovely hair but she is not at all pretty. She has had no social life and although a young clerk from Walter's office courted her briefly 10 years earlier her brother forbade the romance. She has never been to a dinner party or a tea party, she has no friends, and she has no experience with men.
Now a middle-aged spinster (remember this is 1865), Miss Mackenzie has unexpectedly inherited her brother's fortune and finds herself free of obligations and prosperous but alone with no idea what to do with her life. How does she go about meeting people? What can she do to make herself useful? Where should she live? And does she have a hope of marrying, which she would like to do if she could find the right man? Or rather if the right man could find her as she is not, in that era, allowed to do any active looking herself.
She chooses to move from London to the town of Littlebath (by which the author means Bath), to take one of her nieces to live with her and educate, and to become part of the social circle of a popular evangelical clergyman and his Mrs Proudie-like wife. Now Trollope did not like evangelicals; low-church was in his mind connected with closed-mindedness, with hypocritical men and prune-faced women. No cards, no Sunday mail delivery, three services on "the Sabbath," and heaven knows no dancing. Miss Mackenzie, now living in Bath where cards and parties and laughter are a great draw for most people, finds that by adhering to this religious group she has drawn a tight circle around herself, limiting severely what she can do and whom she can associate with.
This is mistake #1 and the second is like unto it: Miss Mackenzie is courted by yet another evangelical clergyman, Mr Maguire, whose ooze is obvious to the reader but not to the inexperienced Miss Mackenzie. He suffers from a "squint" - what we would now call strabismus - but is otherwise quite handsome. He is of course interested only in her money, but she does not understand his mercenary motives and is tempted into at least thinking about marriage with him. One of the many things about him that I dislike is that he takes the liberty of calling her Margaret. Even the author does not call her by her first name and in the mid-19th century this was an enormous intrusion.
She has another suitor, Mr Rubb, whose primary problem is that He Is Not a Gentleman. He is the son of the business partner of her other brother, Tom. Tom has invested his money in oilcloth manufacturing, which might have been marginally ok, but Rubb and Mackenzie have a shop, a storefront. And no one in trade can be considered a gentleman. Mr Rubb starts out by talking Miss Mackenzie out of some of her money, which she invests without interest in the oilcloth company. But he is not bad looking, has a good deal of charm, is fundamentally honest, and he truly loves her. She allows herself to think of Mr Rubb in terms of a husband despite her embarrassment when she is with him in company.
What the modern reader has to understand and accept, at least within the frame of this novel, is that it is not appropriate to be a democrat. Class is important to Trollope as it was important to most people in 1865 England. To associate with those who are of a lower class is not commendable. To marry Mr Rubb would be to marry beneath her and Miss Mackenzie would no longer be welcome, for example, in her evangelical circle, who, whatever their faults, are ladies and gentlemen.
Miss Mackenzie has another suitor, her cousin John Ball, who is about 10 years older than she and is plump and has nine children. He is living with his parents in distressed circumstances and is a gloomy man, thinking continually about the money that his uncle left to Miss Mackenzie's brothers Tom and Walter, money that he thinks should have been left to him. He would like to marry Miss Mackenzie to get her half of the money and his mother strongly eggs him on in this endeavor. Lady Ball is a harridan, a termagant of the first water. Many of Trollope's old ladies are mean and overbearing but Lady Ball is evil. She and Mr Maguire cause a great deal of trouble for Miss Mackenzie.
Miss Mackenzie likes her cousin very much and he her, and as an indication of how much she admires and respects him they are soon on first name terms. This is acceptable because they are cousins and because Miss Mackenzie is pleased to allow it. She asks John Ball for advice about what she should do with the money that she knows he considers his own because he is so honest - she trusts him entirely. He, too, asks her to marry him but Miss Mackenzie may be 35 and beyond first youth but she still yearns for a bit of romance, to be really loved by a man with a bit of dash. Once again she is tempted, however, until his mother urges her to marry him because she would eventually become Lady Ball and would have a carriage. Miss Mackenzie is so insulted by these supposed enticements that she says no.
This situation is in place with Miss Mackenzie waffling between her suitors when her brother Tom becomes fatally ill and it is discovered that he will leave his family with almost nothing to live on. Miss Mackenzie hurries to London to help nurse him and decides she must give half her money to his widow and her many children. But when she visits her lawyer, Mr Slow, of the firm of Slow and Bideawhile, she is in for a shock that changes everything in her life and her relationship to all three suitors.
2012 No 76
