That singular anomaly, the lady novelist!
In The Mikado, “that singular anomaly, the lady novelist” was on Koko the Lord High Executioner’s “little list” of people who wouldn’t be missed – but although some male critics may have wished it so, lady novelists certainly weren’t singular anomalies during the Victorian era.
In fact, W.S. Gilbert himself was in love with one such “anomaly.” Before he met and married Lucy Turner, who was, as he later told a friend, “his centre of every bit of happiness he had, his only peace, his only safety, his guardian angel, the only person he trusted unchangingly”, Gilbert proposed to, and was rejected by, Miss Annie Hall Thomas.
Gilbert had many women friends throughout his life. He seemed to enjoy the company of intelligent females and worked with many women in the theatre. He sold his first ever burlesque script, Dulcamara, or The Big Quack and The Little Duck, to Miss Herbert, the lessee of the St. James’ Theatre. He was an intense, volatile man with a passionate hatred of injustice, and many of his plays and lyrics are designed to point out and satirize the unfairness, inequality, and hypocrisy that existed in society, so it’s very likely that he intended “that singular anomaly” line to be understood ironically.
Annie Thomas, Gilbert’s first love, published her first novel at age 24 and went on to write more than one hundred more, as well as numerous articles, short stories, and verses. She was “a light-hearted girl, and a writer of bright, easy-reading fiction, of which she could write almost acres in a short time. But when she found time to write so much was often a puzzle to me, for she seemed always to be out and about. She was in a bright and merry set at the time, many of whom had ‘at homes,’ dinner parties, dances, and merry meetings of different kinds, including some theatre going,” according to William Tinsley, a publisher who was a friend of hers.
During the Victorian era, the role of women in British society was changing – the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act gave a woman a limited right to seek a divorce, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act allowed married women to retain and control the income they earned. Novels written by Victorian women began to question the position of women in society, and their tales often served as a jumping-off point for discussions about the injustices that existed. Naturally, this rebellion gave rise to a considerable amount of push-back.
No doubt it was the prevailing Victorian attitude that women should remain ignorant of any unpleasant aspects of life that led a male critic to complain that Annie Thomas, like her friend Florence Marryat and other writing women, “appeared to know everything men knew,” and wrote about it so that their readers would then “attain an almost perfect knowledge of every vice that festers beneath the sun,” according to W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and his Theatre by Jane W. Stedman.
It is strange, then, that the “festering vice” the male critic complained of would have included subjects like the sexuality of young girls and illegitimate pregnancy – things that women would naturally know more about than men did, since they actually happened to women. An example of Annie’s handling of the subject of a woman with an illegitimate child is her 1868 novel False Colours, in which Mrs. Scorrier is a ‘fallen woman’ who was kinder and more virtuous than the proper society around her.
Annie Thomas seemed to like Gilbert well enough as a friend. She even made him the hero of one of her stories – W.S. Gilbert is generally thought to have inspired the character ofRoydon in her 1866 novel Played Out. Stedman, in the book cited above, described Roydon and compared the fictional version to the real one:
Roydon is over 6 feet tall; unlike Gilbert he has had no military training but possesses a lounging grace and can arrange a plaid picturesquely over his shoulders (William transferred from the West Yorkshire Militia to the Aberdeenshire Militia the year before). Rather shy, Roy nevertheless has a dangerous knack of looking suddenly serious and a little hurt when he wants to appeal to a woman. Girls mistakenly think him “German looking” because he is fair, with tawny mustaches and blue eyes; although he is not handsome, he commands observation. Like Annie herself Roy loves horses and she sees him as a thoroughbred, bearing the mark of the governing classes even though he is only a third-class clerk, making 200 pounds a year at Somerset House.
Away from the office, Roydon belongs to journalistic Bohemia, where one of his highest ambitions at the moment is to have a burlesque produced. When Annie describes Roy as a writer, his identity is even more obvious for he has ‘the art of wording nonsense epigrammatically” and his phraseology is happy, tricky, and ear-catching. …
Prophetically, in the last volume he marries a beautiful, fresh blonde who appeals to his artist’s soul.
When Annie wrote him in July 1867 that she was going to marry the Reverend Pender Cudlip, Gilbert replied that he was happy for her and added that he was getting married himself – to Lucy Turner.
The courses of our love lives never do run as we expect !them to, do they?
From the descriptions above, do you think that Annie and William would have made a good couple, or were they better off as friends? Has there been a man or a woman in your life who you once thought would be a good match, but you later changed your mind about? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts!