Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Who Goes There?

Here we have one of the most respected Victorian writers, if also perhaps underread to this day, with Mrs. Gaskell. A lot of her work was, even after her dead, accompanied with the byline of “Mrs. Gaskell,” but Elizabeth Gaskell was very much her own woman. She was born in 1810 and was close contemporaries with the likes of George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, to the point of being close friends with Charlotte Brontë and writing the first major biography of her. Gaskell was also an accomplished novelist, in part helped by her friendship with Charles Dickens at a time when Dickens was the most popular author in England. “The Old Nurse’s Story” was itself first published in the Christmas 1852 issue of Household Words, a magazine Dickens was editing at the time. While she’s not as popular now as Eliot or the Brontë sisters nowadays, her novels, especially Cranford, North and South, and the sadly unfinished (on account of Gaskell dying suddenly just before she could write the ending) Wives and Daughters, are very well-liked. Her biography of Charlotte Brontë, whilst now being acknowledged as a biased account, also guarantees her a spot in Victorian literature that will probably always be considered worth remembering.

Gaskell, aside from writing novels about social justice (namely the downtrodden lives of those living in the newly industrial parts of England) and more personal topics, partook in what was becoming a fine tradition among British (and to a lesser extent American) writers: the ghost story. In the years long before Fortnite and even the internet, long before even the horror story got walled off and put in its own genre ghetto, it was quite common for “literary” authors in the Anglosphere to write spooky tales of the supernatural, especially with the intention of them being read aloud at Christmastime. Ya know, for the fun of it. “The Old Nurse’s Story” is a very good example of such a tale, as well as being a Gothic narrative in the most classic sense. While the Gothic novel had waned in both popularity and works being written by the 1820s, the Gothic short story picked up the pieces a couple decades down the road.

Placing Coordinates

First published in 1852 and reprinted in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It’s also been reprinted in The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (ed. Robert Aickman), The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies (ed. Peter Haining), Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (ed. Jen Baker), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (ed. Tera Moore), The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (ed. Michael Newton), and the Gaskell collection Curious, If True. Because it’s very old and very public domain, you can find it online easily.

Enhancing Image

Hester, the titular nurse, relates to us (in the position of Rosamond’s children) the story of a particularly strange and traumatic series of events in both their lives. Rosamond, now a grown woman and a mother, was once a child in Hester’s care, at first part of the time and then full-time, following the deaths of both of Rosamond’s parents. Her father died of fever while her mother died shortly after childbirth, to a stillborn baby which would’ve been Rosamond’s younger sibling. (Sounds dramatic, I know, but it would not have been so unusual back in those days.) On her deathbed the mother makes Hester promise to look after the little Rosamond, although really she didn’t have to say anything about that, for “if she had never spoken a word, I would have gone with the little child to the end of the world.” Hester, herself barely an adult at this time, is made to be both Rosamond’s nurse and surrogate mother whilst the two are taken in by the Furnivalls, that is Rosamond’s mother’s relatives. After that slightly convoluted prelude, we find ourselves at Furnivall Manor, the big spooky mansion where the rest of the action is to take place. Given that the framing device sees Hester and Rosamond alive and in good health, we can safely assume that they will come out of these spooky happenings more or less fine, but then we’re not reading this story for the question of if Our Heroines™ will persevere, but rather how. That Hester is also telling us this story in first-person, in a conversational tone, gives the impression that this is a story one should read aloud to an audience, perhaps on the night before Christmas.

(Of course, I say “conservational,” but this is by the standards of mid-Victorian speech, which is more verbose and long-winded than what we’re used to nowadays. Let’s say that Gaskell, in a way not untypical for her time, likes to abuse the semi-colon.)

Furnivall Manor is home to four old farts, namely Grace Furnivall, her maid “and companion” Mrs. Stark, and James and his wife Dorothy. The only exception is Agnes, the one servant in the house who does not have a close relationship with anyone else. As for the current Lord Furnivall, he’s always away from the manor, and I don’t think we ever see him. The west drawing-room is open, but the east drawing-room is locked shut and nobody ever goes in there, for reasons Ms. Furnivall refrains from giving. It doesn’t take long at all for us to find that this mansion has a dark family secret, and we can infer this straight from the fact that Ms. Furnivall had an older sister who died many years ago, from decidedly unnatural circumstances. There’s also eerie organ music that plays in the halls at night, despite there being no one playing the instrument and everyone having gone to bed. Oh yeah, “The Old Nurse’s Story” wastes no time in getting to the good stuff. In fact, despite its length, this is by no means slowly paced, but rather is as long as it is because of Gaskell’s style that she uses here, where there’s no stone left unturned and paragraphs tend to go on for nearly a page at a time. There’s a whole family history delved into here, in a story that’s only about 25 pages, much like in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But whereas “Usher” has to do with a rich family dooming itself via an incestuous streak, the Furnivalls are cursed from a combination of pride and jealousy. Just how exactly these sins play into the ghostly proceedings, we will soon see, for as I said, it’s a question of how the manor is haunted.

For one, we know (or rather are told) that Old Lord Furnivall loved music, both to hear and to play it, and also that he was quite the bastard when he was alive. He apparently mistreated his two daughters, Maude and Grace, although just to what extent we can’t say for sure. We know that the Furnivalls are dominated by pride in their wealth, or at least the appearance of wealth, even in the living relatives, to where James can’t help but look down on his wife Dorothy a bit for having been a farmer’s daughter. Rosamond’s own mother, despite being from a high-born family, had chosen to marry a man of the cloth (I believe it was Anglican, not Catholic, kinda goes without saying), who while virtuous also didn’t make much money. Class figures greatly into “The Old Nurse’s Story,” both thematically and even how it plays a major role in the underlying conflict. This is unsprising, given that Gaskell, like Dickens, was politically progressive, despite being actively religious (specifically she was a Unitarian Christian). The idea that one can be both a practicing Christian and decidedly on the political left may sound far-fetched now, but believe it or not, such strange creatures can occasionally be found in the wild to this day. As for the characters in the story, religion doesn’t play much of a role; but still there’s a palpable class tension between the modest Hester and Rosamond and the rather haughty upper-class Ms. Furnivall and Mrs. Stark. And then there are the ghosts, who are a different matter entirely. There’s Old Lord Furnivall at his organ in the dead of night, and more distressingly there’s a child, slightly younger than Rosamond, who prowls the frosty manor grounds…

(It’s worth mentioning that Hester says winter has hit the manor when it’s only October, which sounds weird, but it’s also worth mentioning that in the northernmost part of England the murderous chill of winter would have set in quite early in the year.)

The first big scare, and the most effective (mostly because it’s something that can happen in real life), is when Rosamond goes missing one day, and it’s both frightfully cold and snowing outside the manor. Hester nearly scares herself to death with fright in trying to find Rosamond, who herself is only rescued thanks to a farmer who lives not too far from the manor, the child nearly frozen to death. Yet strangely Rosamond is not scared of what she found in the snowy outdoors, namely a child who beckons Rosamond to come play with her. The child is obviously a ghost, and is implied not to be leading Rosamond to her death out of malice, but rather out of loneliness, not being fully aware of what she’s doing. It’s unclear if the ghost child is even aware that she’s a ghost. But between the ghost child and the ghost of Old Lord Furnivall, there are a few spirits lurking at the manor that have not yet been laid to rest. Ms. Furnivall has been keeping a secret all these years, and despite being somewhere in her seventies and being deaf enough that she has to use a horn, she’s not too feeble to confess a wrongdoing of the past. Again it’s worth observing that Rosamond is saved by a man of low stature, and that Hester, being merely a nurse-maid, is unequivocally the most heroic figure in the story—which is not to say that all the low-born characters in the are story are virtuous. Gaskell generally sides with the working class, but her view of individual virtue and how it relates to class conflict is more nuanced, as we are about to discover.

There Be Spoilers Here

Back when they were young, Maude and Grace Furnivall were the starlets of the manor and two fine ladies from that part of the country. Old Lord Furnivall wanted nothing less than the best for his daughters, although when I say “the best” I specifically mean the best in terms of status. Only a man with high enough status is deserving of either of these sisters, which doesn’t stop the ladies from having ambitions of their own. There was a time when a “dark foreigner” would visit the manor from abroad once a year, being a talented musician but naturally also one who was not rich. Old Lord Furnivall admired the man’s talent, and also loved to have the foreigner listen to his own playing, but he probably would not have approved of the musician marrying one of his daughters. This didn’t stop the musician from “walking abroad in the woods” (going on walks between man and woman was like going on a date) with each of the sisters at different points. The musician and Maude got married in secret and the musician knocked her up. Maude managed to hide her pregnancy and even to raise her daughter, under the guise that the child was a charity case from some working-class home. But the musician had skipped town, never to return, and Grace was the only other person who knew the secret; so, in a moment of fiery jealousy, she ratted out her sister to their father, who was not pleased. Maude and her child were evicted from the manor, with her later being found under a tree, crazed and nearly frozen to death, her child dead in her arms. Maude died not long after that, and the guilt never left Grace.

Hester coming to the manor with Rosamond reopened a wound that seemed to have nearly healed, or at least would have probably died along with Ms. Furnivall. The climax is theatrical, and if I had a gripe with this story I think the final confrontation is a bit overblown, compared to what came previously, although the very end is haunting. Having confessed to what she had done to Maude, Ms. Furnivall has lifted the curse from the manor and placed all on her own shoulders. There’s peace for everyone else, but not for her. She dies in her bed shortly after, in agony, with the words: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” It’s a pretty bleak ending, the only thing preventing it from being a total downer being that Hester and Rosamond come out of the ordeal in one piece. If we can infer from the framing device, Rosamond (although we hear not a word from her adult self) has not repeated the mistakes of her relatives.

A Step Farther Out

I had read this one only yesterday, and part of me wishes I got to sat it on longer. This is a story that requires some retracing of steps and understanding the whole of it in order to better appreciate. The syntax Gaskell uses here also takes some time getting accommodated with, but this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t read that much Victorian literature. While the walls of text and the convoluted family dynamics can be a bit intimidating, I do very much recommend seeking out “The Old Nurse’s Story,” especially if you’re into ghost stories by the likes of Robert Aickman and M. R. James.

See you next time.