My dearest, sweetest Amelia,
With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the
pen to write to my dearest friend! Oh, what a change
between today and yesterday! Now I am friendless
and alone; yesterday I was at home, in the sweet company
of a sister, whom I shall ever, ever cherish!
I will not tell you in what tears and sadness I passed
the fatal night in which I separated from you. You
went on Tuesday to joy and happiness, with your mother
and your devoted young soldier
by your side; and I thought of you all night, dancing
at the Perkins’s, the prettiest, I am sure,
of all the young ladies at the Ball. I was brought
by the groom in the old carriage to Sir Pitt Crawley’s
town house, where, after John the groom had behaved
most rudely and insolently to me (alas! ’twas
safe to insult poverty and misfortune!), I was given
over to Sir P.’s care, and made to pass the
night in an old gloomy bed, and by the side of a horrid
gloomy old charwoman, who keeps the house. I did
not sleep one single wink the whole night.
Sir Pitt is not what we silly girls, when we used
to read Cecilia at Chiswick, imagined a baronet must
have been. Anything, indeed, less like Lord Orville
cannot be imagined. Fancy an old, stumpy, short,
vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby
old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his
own horrid supper in a saucepan. He speaks with a
country accent, and swore a great deal at the old
charwoman, at the hackney coachman who drove us to
the inn where the coach went from, and on which I
made the journey outside for the greater part of the way.
I was awakened at daybreak by the charwoman, and having
arrived at the inn, was at first placed inside the
coach. But, when we got to a place called Leakington,
where the rain began to fall very heavily will you
believe it? I was forced to come outside; for Sir
Pitt is a proprietor of the coach, and as a passenger
came at Mudbury, who wanted an inside place, I was
obliged to go outside in the rain, where, however,
a young gentleman from Cambridge College sheltered
me very kindly in one of his several great coats.
This gentleman and the guard seemed to know Sir Pitt
very well, and laughed at him a great deal. They
both agreed in calling him an old screw; which means
a very stingy, avaricious person. He never gives
any money to anybody, they said (and this meanness
I hate); and the young gentleman made me remark that
we drove very slow for the last two stages on the
road, because Sir Pitt was on the box, and because
he is proprietor of the horses for this part of the
journey. “But won’t I flog ’em
on to Squashmore, when I take the ribbons?” said
the young Cantab. “And sarve ’em right,
Master Jack,” said the guard. When I comprehended
the meaning of this phrase, and that Master Jack intended
to drive the rest of the way, and revenge himself
on Sir Pitt’s horses, of course I laughed too.
A carriage and four splendid horses, covered with
armorial bearings, however, awaited us at Mudbury,
four miles from Queen’s Crawley, and we made
our entrance to the baronet’s park in state.
There is a fine avenue of a mile long leading to
the house, and the woman at the lodge-gate (over the
pillars of which are a serpent and a dove, the supporters
of the Crawley arms), made us a number of curtsies
as she flung open the old iron carved doors, which
are something like those at odious Chiswick.
“There’s an avenue,” said Sir Pitt,
“a mile long. There’s six thousand pound
of timber in them there trees. Do you call that nothing?”
He pronounced avenue evenue, and nothing nothink,
so droll; and he had a Mr. Hodson, his hind from Mudbury,
into the carriage with him, and they talked about
distraining, and selling up, and draining and subsoiling,
and a great deal about tenants and farming much more
than I could understand. Sam Miles had been caught
poaching, and Peter Bailey had gone to the workhouse
at last. “Serve him right,” said Sir Pitt;
“him and his family has been cheating me on
that farm these hundred and fifty years.” Some
old tenant, I suppose, who could not pay his rent.
Sir Pitt might have said “he and his family,”
to be sure; but rich baronets do not need to be careful
about grammar, as poor governesses must be.
As we passed, I remarked a beautiful church-spire
rising above some old elms in the park; and before
them, in the midst of a lawn, and some outhouses,
an old red house with tall chimneys covered with ivy,
and the windows shining in the sun. “Is that
your church, sir?” I said.
“Yes, hang it,” (said Sir Pitt, only he
used, dear, a much wickeder word); “how’s
Buty, Hodson? Buty’s my brother Bute, my dear my
brother the parson. Buty and the Beast I call him,
ha, ha!”
Hodson laughed too, and then looking more grave and
nodding his head, said, “I’m afraid he’s
better, Sir Pitt. He was out on his pony yesterday,
looking at our corn.”
“Looking after his tithes, hang’un (only
he used the same wicked word). Will brandy and water
never kill him? He’s as tough as old whatdyecallum old
Methusalem.”
Mr. Hodson laughed again. “The young men is
home from college. They’ve whopped John Scroggins
till he’s well nigh dead.”
“Whop my second keeper!” roared out Sir
Pitt.
“He was on the parson’s ground, sir,”
replied Mr. Hodson; and Sir Pitt in a fury swore that
if he ever caught ’em poaching on his ground,
he’d transport ’em, by the lord he would.
However, he said, “I’ve sold the presentation
of the living, Hodson; none of that breed shall get
it, I war’nt”; and Mr. Hodson said he was
quite right: and I have no doubt from this that the
two brothers are at variance as brothers often are,
and sisters too. Don’t you remember the two
Miss Scratchleys at Chiswick, how they used always
to fight and quarrel and Mary Box, how she was always
thumping Louisa?
Presently, seeing two little boys gathering sticks
in the wood, Mr. Hodson jumped out of the carriage,
at Sir Pitt’s order, and rushed upon them with
his whip. “Pitch into ’em, Hodson,”
roared the baronet; “flog their little souls
out, and bring ’em up to the house, the vagabonds;
I’ll commit ’em as sure as my name’s
Pitt.” And presently we heard Mr. Hodson’s
whip cracking on the shoulders of the poor little
blubbering wretches, and Sir Pitt, seeing that the
malefactors were in custody, drove on to the hall.
All the servants were ready to meet us, and
* * * * * * * * * * *
Here, my dear, I was interrupted last night by a dreadful
thumping at my door: and who do you think it was?
Sir Pitt Crawley in his night-cap and dressing-gown,
such a figure! As I shrank away from such a visitor,
he came forward and seized my candle. “No candles
after eleven o’clock, Miss Becky,” said
he. “Go to bed in the dark, you pretty little
hussy” (that is what he called me), “and
unless you wish me to come for the candle every night,
mind and be in bed at eleven.” And with this,
he and Mr. Horrocks the butler went off laughing.
You may be sure I shall not encourage any more of
their visits. They let loose two immense bloodhounds
at night, which all last night were yelling and howling
at the moon. “I call the dog Gorer,”
said Sir Pitt; “he’s killed a man that
dog has, and is master of a bull, and the mother I
used to call Flora; but now I calls her Aroarer, for
she’s too old to bite. Haw, haw!”
Before the house of Queen’s Crawley, which is
an odious old-fashioned red brick mansion, with tall
chimneys and gables of the style of Queen Bess, there
is a terrace flanked by the family dove and serpent,
and on which the great hall-door opens. And oh, my
dear, the great hall I am sure is as big and as glum
as the great hall in the dear castle of Udolpho.
It has a large fireplace, in which we might put half
Miss Pinkerton’s school, and the grate is big
enough to roast an ox at the very least. Round the
room hang I don’t know how many generations
of Crawleys, some with beards and ruffs, some with
huge wigs and toes turned out, some dressed in long
straight stays and gowns that look as stiff as towers,
and some with long ringlets, and oh, my dear! scarcely
any stays at all.
At one end of the hall is the great
staircase all in black oak, as dismal as may be, and
on either side are tall doors with stags’ heads
over them, leading to the billiard-room and the library,
and the great yellow saloon and the morning-rooms.
I think there are at least twenty bedrooms on the
first floor; one of them has the bed in which Queen
Elizabeth slept; and I have been taken by my new pupils
through all these fine apartments this morning. They
are not rendered less gloomy, I promise you, by having
the shutters always shut; and there is scarce one
of the apartments, but when the light was let into
it, I expected to see a ghost in the room.
We have
a schoolroom on the second floor, with my bedroom
leading into it on one side, and that of the young
ladies on the other. Then there are Mr. Pitt’s
apartments Mr. Crawley, he is called the eldest son,
and Mr. Rawdon Crawley’s rooms he is an officer
like somebody, and away with his regiment. There
is no want of room I assure you. You might lodge
all the people in Russell Square in the house, I think,
and have space to spare.
Half an hour after our arrival, the great dinner-bell
was rung, and I came down with my two pupils (they
are very thin insignificant little chits of ten and
eight years old). I came down in your dear muslin
gown (about which that odious Mrs. Pinner was so rude,
because you gave it me); for I am to be treated as
one of the family, except on company days, when the
young ladies and I are to dine upstairs.
Well, the great dinner-bell rang, and we all assembled
in the little drawing-room where my Lady Crawley sits.
She is the second Lady Crawley, and mother of the
young ladies. She was an ironmonger’s daughter,
and her marriage was thought a great match. She looks
as if she had been handsome once, and her eyes are
always weeping for the loss of her beauty. She is
pale and meagre and high-shouldered, and has not a
word to say for herself, evidently. Her stepson Mr.
Crawley, was likewise in the room. He was in full
dress, as pompous as an undertaker. He is pale, thin,
ugly, silent; he has thin legs, no chest, hay-coloured
whiskers, and straw-coloured hair. He is the very
picture of his sainted mother over the mantelpiece Griselda
of the noble house of Binkie.
“This is the new governess, Mr. Crawley,”
said Lady Crawley, coming forward and taking my hand.
“Miss Sharp.”
“O!” said Mr. Crawley, and pushed his
head once forward and began again to read a great
pamphlet with which he was busy.
“I hope you will be kind to my girls,”
said Lady Crawley, with her pink eyes always full
of tears.
“Law, Ma, of course she will,” said the
eldest: and I saw at a glance that I need not be afraid
of that woman. “My lady is served,”
says the butler in black, in an immense white shirt-frill,
that looked as if it had been one of the Queen Elizabeth’s
ruffs depicted in the hall; and so, taking Mr. Crawley’s
arm, she led the way to the dining-room, whither I
followed with my little pupils in each hand.
Sir Pitt was already in the room with a silver jug.
He had just been to the cellar, and was in full dress
too; that is, he had taken his gaiters off, and showed
his little dumpy legs in black worsted stockings.
The sideboard was covered with glistening old plate old
cups, both gold and silver; old salvers and cruet-stands,
like Rundell and Bridge’s shop. Everything
on the table was in silver too, and two footmen, with
red hair and canary-coloured liveries, stood on either
side of the sideboard.
Mr. Crawley said a long grace, and Sir Pitt said amen,
and the great silver dish-covers were removed.
“What have we for dinner, Betsy?’ said
the Baronet.
“Mutton broth, I believe, Sir Pitt,” answered
Lady Crawley.
“Mouton aux navets,” added the butler
gravely (pronounce, if you please, moutongonavvy);
“and the soup is potage de mouton a l’ιcossaise.
The side-dishes contain pommes de terre au naturel,
and choufleur a l’eau.”
“Mutton’s mutton,” said the Baronet,
“and a devilish good thing. What ship was
it, Horrocks, and when did you kill?” “One
of the black-faced Scotch, Sir Pitt: we killed on
Thursday.
“Who took any?”
“Steel, of Mudbury, took the saddle and two
legs, Sir Pitt; but he says the last was too young
and confounded woolly, Sir Pitt.”
“Will you take some potage, Miss ah Miss Blunt?
said Mr. Crawley.
“Capital Scotch broth, my dear,” said
Sir Pitt, “though they call it by a French name.”
“I believe it is the custom, sir, in decent
society,” said Mr. Crawley, haughtily, “to
call the dish as I have called it”; and it was
served to us on silver soup plates by the footmen
in the canary coats, with the mouton aux navets. Then
“ale and water” were brought, and served
to us young ladies in wine-glasses. I am not a judge
of ale, but I can say with a clear conscience I prefer
water.
While we were enjoying our repast, Sir Pitt took occasion
to ask what had become of the shoulders of the mutton.
“I believe they were eaten in the servants’
hall,” said my lady, humbly.
“They was, my lady,” said Horrocks, “and
precious little else we get there neither.”
Sir Pitt burst into a horse-laugh, and continued his
conversation with Mr. Horrocks. “That there
little black pig of the Kent sow’s breed must
be uncommon fat now.”
“It’s not quite busting, Sir Pitt,”
said the butler with the gravest air, at which Sir
Pitt, and with him the young ladies, this time, began
to laugh violently.
“Miss Crawley, Miss Rose Crawley,” said
Mr. Crawley, “your laughter strikes me as being
exceedingly out of place.”
“Never mind, my lord,” said the Baronet,
“we’ll try the porker on Saturday. Kill
un on Saturday morning, John Horrocks. Miss Sharp
adores pork, don’t you, Miss Sharp?”
And I think this is all the conversation that I remember
at dinner. When the repast was concluded a jug of
hot water was placed before Sir Pitt, with a case-bottle
containing, I believe, rum. Mr. Horrocks served myself
and my pupils with three little glasses of wine, and
a bumper was poured out for my lady. When we retired,
she took from her work-drawer an enormous interminable
piece of knitting; the young ladies began to play
at cribbage with a dirty pack of cards. We had but
one candle lighted, but it was in a magnificent old
silver candlestick, and after a very few questions
from my lady, I had my choice of amusement between
a volume of sermons, and a pamphlet on the corn-laws,
which Mr. Crawley had been reading before dinner.
So we sat for an hour until steps were heard.
“Put away the cards, girls,” cried my
lady, in a great tremor; “put down Mr. Crawley’s
books, Miss Sharp”; and these orders had been
scarcely obeyed, when Mr. Crawley entered the room.
“We will resume yesterday’s discourse,
young ladies,” said he, “and you shall
each read a page by turns; so that Miss a Miss Short
may have an opportunity of hearing you”; and
the poor girls began to spell a long dismal sermon
delivered at Bethesda Chapel, Liverpool, on behalf
of the mission for the Chickasaw Indians. Was it not
a charming evening?
At ten the servants were told to call Sir Pitt and
the household to prayers. Sir Pitt came in first,
very much flushed, and rather unsteady in his gait;
and after him the butler, the canaries, Mr. Crawley’s
man, three other men, smelling very much of the stable,
and four women, one of whom, I remarked, was very much
overdressed, and who flung me a look of great scorn
as she plumped down on her knees.
After Mr. Crawley had done haranguing and expounding,
we received our candles, and then we went to bed;
and then I was disturbed in my writing, as I have
described to my dearest sweetest Amelia.
Good night. A thousand, thousand, thousand kisses!
Saturday. This morning, at five, I heard the shrieking
of the little black pig. Rose and Violet introduced
me to it yesterday; and to the stables, and to the
kennel, and to the gardener, who was picking fruit
to send to market, and from whom they begged hard a
bunch of hot-house grapes; but he said that Sir Pitt
had numbered every “Man Jack” of them,
and it would be as much as his place was worth to
give any away. The darling girls caught a colt in
a paddock, and asked me if I would ride, and began
to ride themselves, when the groom, coming with horrid
oaths, drove them away.
Lady Crawley is always knitting the worsted. Sir
Pitt is always tipsy, every night; and, I believe,
sits with Horrocks, the butler. Mr. Crawley always
reads sermons in the evening, and in the morning is
locked up in his study, or else rides to Mudbury, on
county business, or to Squashmore, where he preaches,
on Wednesdays and Fridays, to the tenants there.
A hundred thousand grateful loves to your dear papa
and mamma. Is your poor brother recovered of his
rack-punch? Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How men should beware
of wicked punch!
Ever and ever thine own
Rebecca
Everything considered, I think it is quite as well
for our dear Amelia Sedley, in Russell Square, that
Miss Sharp and she are parted. Rebecca is a droll
funny creature, to be sure; and those descriptions
of the poor lady weeping for the loss of her beauty,
and the gentleman “with hay-coloured whiskers
and straw-coloured hair,” are very smart, doubtless,
and show a great knowledge of the world. That she
might, when on her knees, have been thinking of something
better than Miss Horrocks’s ribbons, has possibly
struck both of us.
But my kind reader will please
to remember that this history has “Vanity Fair”
for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain,
wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs
and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist,
who is holding forth on the cover ( an accurate portrait
of your humble servant), professes to wear neither
gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared
livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look
you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one
knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a
shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must
come out in the course of such an undertaking.
I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade,
at Naples, preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing
honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself
up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains
whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing,
that the audience could not resist it; and they and
the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths
and execrations against the fictitious monster of
the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi
tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of
sympathy.
At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you
will not only hear the people yelling out “Ah
gredin! Ah monstre:” and cursing the tyrant
of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves
positively refuse to play the wicked parts, such as
those of infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what
not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in
their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the
two stories one against the other, so that you may
see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that
the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce
his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred
of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must
find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.
I warn my “kyind friends,” then, that
I am going to tell a story of harrowing villainy and
complicated but, as I trust, intensely interesting crime.
My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise
you. When we come to the proper places we won’t
spare fine language No, no! But when we are going
over the quiet country we must perforce be calm.
A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. We will reserve
that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely
midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others But
we will not anticipate those.
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask
leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce
them, but occasionally to step down from the platform,
and talk about them: if they are good and kindly,
to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are
silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader’s
sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse
them in the strongest terms which politeness admits
of.
Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering
at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds
so ridiculous; that it was I who laughed good-humouredly
at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet whereas
the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except
for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success.
Such people there are living and flourishing in the
world Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have
at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there
are, and very successful too, mere quacks and fools:
and it was to combat and expose such as those, no
doubt, that Laughter was made.