Dinah Mulock (Craik) emphasized nonconformist ideals in her popular fifth novel, John Halifax, Gentleman. Nonconformist churches believed that each member should freely respond to the Gospel and take responsibility for their own membership, while the church should maintain its congregation’s purity by considering only potential members of strong character. Raised in a family stressing evangelistic piety, Mulock valued hard work as benefiting one’s spiritual life. When her protagonist, John Halifax, begins with nothing of material value and manages to work his way up the social chain to wealth and comfort, he realizes the lower-class dream. As some of her contemporaries made light of old-fashioned values of self-respect and hard work as narrow-minded and too materialistic, she vindicated those values, reflecting through her protagonist the strong character that can be built through work.

John Halifax, Gentleman begins the book as a destitute orphan. When Halifax first meets the Quaker family that will rescue him from the streets, Mulock carefully describes him as bedraggled but clean. Simply by looking into his eyes, the tanner of Norton Bury, aptly named Abel Fletcher, can discern the boy’s high character. Contrasted to Abel’s weak, disabled son and first-person point-of-view narrator Phineas, Halifax is a near-perfect physical specimen. Phineas notes his desire for such a vigorous body but does not become jealous of Halifax. Instead, he declares strong feelings for the boy almost his age, comparing his reaction to Halifax to that of the biblical Jonathan for David, an immediate love and devotion. That reference allows Mulock to stress the importance of a strong character to spiritual matters.

Dinah Maria Craik (née Mulock), by Sir Hubert von Herkomer (died 1914), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1946.

When Halifax is hired by Abel Fletcher to escort Phineas home and carries the helpless boy into his house, he symbolically offers through his physical support the emotional support that the lonely Phineas has long needed. Another character introduced in the first scene is Ursula March, daughter of the wealthy mayor, who can discern Halifax’s hunger when she sees him standing with Phineas under an eave to escape the rain. The rain signals a cleansing of the past and a new beginning for all involved. Moved to offer the boy “wheaten” bread, which the narrator notes as a luxury for the poor, who normally consume rye, she leaves the comfort of her house to do so, only to be pulled back inside with a sharp cry by a family servant. That retraction symbolizes the hesitancy Mulock observed in her culture of the middle and upper classes to aid those in need.

Halifax picks the bread up off the ground and, rather than ravenously attack it, consumes it thoughtfully and slowly, as if the bread represents more than mere physical nourishment. Phineas learns later from his father that Ursula had an accident with a knife and had to be sent away from home. Readers understand that her injury occurred following her slicing the bread for Halifax. Mulock later adds a bread riot scene to emphasize the often-dire straits of the poor.

Early on, Halifax requests that Phineas note his mother’s death in the family Bible, a blunt reference to his illiteracy, but also a clear recognition of his spiritual values. Only one of many references Mulock uses to emphasize the gulf separating the lower classes from the middle and upper, it emphasizes the importance of education for all children, regardless of social rank—a social leveller. An independent individual possessing great integrity, Halifax goes to work for Fletcher. When Fletcher offers him a position driving a cart carrying the carcasses of dead animals to his tannery, Phineas is appalled, but Halifax willingly accepts, demonstrating that no honest work should be rejected, regardless of its nature.

Perhaps because Mulock understood that readers might feel Halifax’s high character to be inflated, she adds a narrative comment from Phineas: “Perhaps I may be supposed imaginative, or, at least, premature in discovering all these characteristics in a boy of fourteen; and possibly in thus writing of him I may unwittingly be drawing a little from after-experience; however, being the truth, let it stand.” This allows readers to accept instances in which Halifax rejects the offer of money from Abel Fletcher, commenting, in one instance, “It is quite enough reward that I have been useful to my master, and that he acknowledges it.” When Fletcher thoughtfully agrees with him, signaling he has become the pupil and Halifax the teacher, readers understand that Halifax’s transformation has begun.

Mulock takes care that the station of “gentleman” is understood as one possible to earn. Halifax will be helped along the way by characters such as Mr. Charles, an orator who quotes Shakespeare, and those who help him gain literacy. When Halifax later comments to Phineas, “You have a bad habit of jumping at conclusions,” he reveals a new stage in his intellectual development that makes him somewhat superior to his benefactor. He meets up with Ursula March again through the help of Mrs. Tod and deems her fresh, healthy, youthful, and pleasant “as a breeze in spring.” Halifax eventually marries Ursula and has fine children, symbolizing his rise in society, but more important, that his fine character reaps emotional as well as material rewards.

However, the novel does not end with those circumstances. It incorporates all of the class structure conflicts that do not disappear simply due to marriage and work, using as a negative example an aristocrat of questionable character, Ursula’s cousin, Lady Caroline Brithwood. She does not learn from her “wickedness” that brings her to divorce and a bedridden dementia, followed by an early death, allowing her to stand as a cautionary tale to her own community and to readers. Ursula and Halifax must also face problems with their eldest son, Guy, in which Phineas sympathetically shares. Guy’s separation for years from the family becomes Halifax’s greatest burden. The novel concludes with a reunion of the family and Guy as Halifax dies peacefully. Ursula lies beside him in the bed and is found there dead as well, with the two joined in the predicted heavenly reward awaiting them both.

Interesting to feminist critics will be the feminine characteristics of Phineas Fletcher. Not only is he physically weak, he longs for tenderness in treatment by others, indicating what contemporaries would have considered a weak personality. Due to his semi-useless legs, he also must spend much time in the prone position, as female characters traditionally did, investing his energy in such luxuries as reading; several literature references, from Dick Whittington, hero of adventure books, to the classics, have prominent places in the narration. Feminists also will note that a woman, Caroline Brithwood, provides the strongest target of criticism.

Formalist critics point out that, while Phineas’s voice adds strength and interest as a narrator recalling events with the perspective of 50 years’ experience, his character rarely appears in the action of the novel’s second half. That weakens the narrative, which supported action that hints of the melodramatic without the strong realistic voice. But Mulock makes her point regarding the value of work. She would continue her reformist approach in her next book, A Life for a Life, attacking capital punishment and prison life, as had Charles Reade, another prominent member of the movement.

John Halifax, Gentleman, while little read or studied in later decades, well represents mild didactic literature, important to the mid-19th century’s reformist movement through literature. It remains readily available in book form.

Bibliography
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship.” Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 5–23.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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