Talk:The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family

Reviews
The Reader (Scotland, Ireland) 1863 June 6:

HE republication of this earlier series of the “Chronicles of Carlingford” was probably suggested by the success of “Salem Chapel.” That success was partly due to the novelty of the subject—an advantage which is not shared by the new volume. The scene is not laid among the little dissenting community, and there are few traces of that humour which was probably drawn out by the recollection of real experiences among the Pigeons and the Tozers. Mrs. Oliphant's clergymen and doctors are rather shadowy and unreal by the side of her ministers and deacons. But the longer of these two stories, “The Doctor's Family,” has an advantage which, to some readers, will compensate for this inferiority. It has a veritable heroine—not merely a young lady who does duty as one. Nettie Underwood does succeed in impressing you with her individuality. Mrs. Oliphant has not thought it enough to associate her with a colour or a gesture; she has given her a character as well. Of course she is always “shedding back her luxuriant dark brown hair with her tiny hands,” because in these days a heroine could hardly be considered complete without a trick of some kind; but this is not the solitary revelation of her peculiarities which is vouchsafed to us. The Doctor's Family belongs to the Doctor only by a figure of speech. Edward Rider is a young physician, doing his best to establish himself in the world, and not much assisted in that end by a helpless, worthless elder brother, who, after driving him out of his first practice by his bad name, and sending him “to begin life a second time at Carlingford,” has again dropped listlessly in upon him—an incumbrance not to be got rid of, nourishing a lazy sense of exasperation at the small comforts with which Edward has been able to surround himself as so much money withheld from his own tobacco and spirits, and contriving to impress the servants, who go out secretly for him with bottles and jugs, with a certain sense of compassion, which compels them to remark that “to see how the Doctor do look at him, and he his own brother as was brought up with him, is dreadful, to be sure.” “Fred”' has not thought it needful to inform his brother that he has left a wife and three children out in Australia; but the Doctor is hardly disposed to thank him for this considerate reticence when he comes down one morning to find the hall filled with boxes and an unknown sister-in-law waiting for him in his room. Fred's wife is worthy of her husband; and, with an equally vivid sense of the beauty of vicarious sacrifice, she has contrived to make herself and her children absolutely dependent on her younger sister, “Nettie,” under whose guidance she has come with them to England.

Nettie's arrival relieves the Doctor of his brother's presence. She takes lodgings for her sister's family in Carlingford, and manages with some trouble to make her own income support them all. She is a wonderful little person—“thin, dark, eager, impetuous, with blazing black eyes and red lips,” and an utter unconsciousness that she is doing anything out of the common.

It is hardly necessary to say that the real cause of the irritation is that he is in love with Nettie. In this relation he certainly does not show himself quite worthy of her. She rejects him on the ground that marriage is quite incompatible with the more serious business of her life; and, though Mrs. Oliphant sets up an ingenious defence for his making no effort either to relieve her of her duties or to share them with her, it does not strike us as a very successful one.

Certainly the “limits of a nature” must be rather confined when they prevent a man, “eager as love and youth can make him,” from marrying a girl because she has taken on herself the support of her own brother and his family. Even after his brother's death the difficulty remains. The best thing that can be said for Doctor Rider is that he does not talk about his unwillingness to condemn the woman he loves to poverty. He quite realizes that it is himself upon whom he is unwilling to inflict suffering. A peevish sister-in-law and unruly children are more than he can make up his mind to bear, even with Nettie to lighten the load.

In the end, however, he comes off better than he deserves. Just when Nettie has determined to return with her sister to Australia, the burden is taken off her hands by a Deus ex machina in the shape of an opportune and feeble-minded Bushman, who falls in love with Mrs. Fred, and the only vengeance Nettie takes upon the Doctor is a verbal one:—

It was a very natural speech; and it was equally natural that she should tell him shortly after, “I did not mean to vex you—at least I did mean to vex you, but nothing more.”

We are quite ready to give our hearty praise to this further instalment of the “Chronicles of Carlingford;” but we cannot do so without remembering that we had occasion, only a few weeks back, to speak in a very different tone of another novel—generally, and we believe correctly, attributed to the same author. It is difficult to read “The Doctor's Family ” so soon after “Heart and Cross” without believing that Mrs. Oliphant can write in very different styles at one and the same time. It is possible that she may do this with some pecuniary profit, since, as the precise point of demerit at which a novel ceases to pay has never been exactly ascertained, it is just conceivable that “Heart and Cross” may not have reached it. Where there has been no intellectual outlay whatever, the smallest surplus, after the payment of publishing expenses, must be reckoned as clear gain. But, if Mrs. Oliphant has any care for her own literary fame, she will do well to discontinue the practice of contemporaneous writing in opposite styles. A bad novel may serve to set off a good one; but, even if she thinks this foil indispensable, she may safely leave the task of providing it to some one else. To undertake to write both kinds herself argues a reprehensible indifference to the advantages of division of labour. If a writer persistently goes on doing her worst three times out of four, she must not complain if, in the long run, she is judged by that which she has chosen to do oftenest. Reputations are made, for the most part, not by a few happy efforts, but by the balance of successes over failures.