Miss Clack

Miss Clack (Drusilla) is a character, and part-narrator, in Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel The Moonstone.

A poor relation of the Verinder family, Miss Clack is an ardent Evangelical, perhaps most notable for her habit of handing out improving tracts to strangers and family alike.

Caricature or realism?

P. D. James suggests that, as "an evangelical busybody...Miss Clack occasionally gets close to being a caricature".[1] A quasi-editorial footnote alerts us to the way her narrative is intended to have "unquestionable value as an instrument for the exhibition of Miss Clack's character"; and when she describes her eavesdropping as "A martyrdom was before me", or exclaims "Sorrow and sympathy! Oh, what Pagan emotions to expect from a Christian Englishwoman", her role as comic self-betrayer becomes very apparent.[2]

However, there was another side to her presentation: Collins - like Dickens, aware of the power behind Victorian evangelicanism, and of how spite and aggression could be concealed under a philanthropic cloak - mingled the serious with the comic in his portrayal of Miss Clack.[3] The issue comes to a head with regard to her apparently endless distribution of tracts - to the modern eye, a seemingly unique eccentricity. We first see her giving tracts to a servant and a cabbie in place of a tip; and then concealing no less than "twelve precious publications" around her aunt's house to remorselessly ambush her.[4] Yet there really was a Religious Tract Society, which published literally millions of tracts from 1799 onwards of precisely the kind Collins describes;[5] its members did congratulate themselves on going to any lengths to foist tracts upon the unsuspecting;[6] and what G. M. Trevelyan called "the peculiarly nauseous form of charity as a vehicle for tracts and enforced religion"[7] really was applied to social inferiors with what many saw (as in Drusilla's case) as aggression masquerading as generosity.[8]

Only in the context of the strength of the evangelical mobilisation of public opinion behind the enforcement of Victorian morality,[9] for better or worse, can the very real threat represented by Miss Clack be fully appreciated.

See also

References

  1. ↑ P. D. James, 'Introduction', Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford 1999) p. ix-x
  2. ↑ Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford 1999) p. 229n, p. 274, and p. 254
  3. ↑ C. Oulton, Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian Britain (2002) p. 32 and p. 115
  4. ↑ Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Oxford 1999) p. 229-30, p. 255 and p. 269
  5. ↑ C. Peters, The King of Inventors (2014) p. 305
  6. ↑ C. Oulton, Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian Britain (2002) p. 97
  7. ↑ G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (London 1922) p. 55
  8. ↑ Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) p. 211
  9. ↑ B. Wilson, Decency and Disorder (Loondon 2007) p. 379 and p. 431

External links

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