I continued my Thomas Richardson and Sons read-through with F. W. Faber's Ethel's Book, or Tales of the Angels (1858), which Faber dedicated to a young Etheldreda Fitzalan Howard (1849-1926), later a Sister of Charity. Faber was not, shall we say, a natural story-teller, but the longest story in this collection, "The Melancholy Heart; or the Child to Whom Nobody Was Kind," is interesting as a loose response to A Christmas Carol. The book's foreword (dated on Christmas) in fact makes it clear that it is intended as a Catholic intervention of sorts into the "Christmas Book" tradition: "Suppose we take the Angels instead of fairies, and the Dead instead of ghosts, and then see how we get on?" In part, Faber asks the child to contemplate the real workings of the divine, as opposed to the fictional (and, in the case of fairies, frequently amoral) workings of the fantastic, but the stories also presuppose an entirely different relationship between children and angels than between humans in general and ghosts. It's not just that Victorian ghosts can be malicious, but that ghosts frequently exist in a kind of temporal loop (playing out a series of specific events over and over again) that nevertheless has an endpoint (a living person "solves" the haunting and lays the ghost to rest, the ghost's location burns down, etc.). Faber's point, as one might expect, is that the angels are ever-present and ever-engaged with human life; they respond actively, they take an interest in particular beings, they communicate.
"The Melancholy Heart" takes the basic narrative of A Christmas Carol--jerk undergoes a conversion experience thanks to ghosts awakening his powers of self-reflection via a grand tour of time and space, everyone lives happily ever after--and reworks it by, ironically enough, taking the human beings out of it. Our protagonist, Rosamond (who must learn to be less a rose of the world and more a Marian rose), "was not a nice child" (56), and Faber makes a point of associating her non-niceness with her dislike of Nature itself. While Faber is clear that Rosamond's problems are not wholly of her own making--she's a not-very-pretty orphan, her guardians treat her poorly, and other children misjudge her--he nevertheless notes that she suffers from "melancholy" (60), which fatally affects her worldview. However, she also fantasizes based on her reading, and in fantasizing that her lost mother is a "fairy" (65) (a call-back to the foreword), she entraps herself in that most stereotypical Victorian danger--misreading the world through books--and thus forgets the presence of both her guardian angel and, implicitly, the divine mother, Mary.
The novella thus tries to distinguish between a self-imprisoning fantasy life, in which Rosamond directs all of her emotions towards a purely private construct, and an opening-out of the self, in which Rosamond can learn to find joy in a world that everywhere speaks of God. While, unlike Scrooge, Rosamond has the right idea about how to proceed (praying, for example), she consistently fails to put ideas into proper practice. More seriously, whereas the adult Scrooge is truly brought face-to-face with the prospect of his own death only in his final vision, Rosamond's experience begins with the actual threat of death, as she finds herself "floating like a white speck on the black and stormy sea" (75) after a shipwreck. The sea both externalizes Rosamond's own conflicted self and echoes Mark 4.36-40 (Douay-Rheims), in which Christ quiets the sea during a potentially deadly storm. Indeed, the first step of Rosamond's conversion occurs when, out of "fear" (77), she truly prays for the first time, and promptly loses her fear while gaining her first sight of her guardian angel. Notably, the experiences that follow, in which she is immersed in the worlds of fish, birds, insects, animals, and angels, are not about herself, or even humanity, but rather about recognizing the signs of divine love and "happiness" everywhere--even among wasps (91). And unlike Scrooge's terrifying vision of his own tombstone, Rosamond sees instead the promise of her own future amongst the angels (97). Rosamond's journey, that is, instructs her in her own failings precisely by diverting her from herself; even her ultimate reward in heaven appears as an empty space awaiting her arrival, whereas part of the terror of Scrooge's experience rests in the unseen presence of his body (the corpse on the bed or beneath the tombstone). Her realization that "I do not care any longer for people being kind to me; I only want to be kind to them, to be kind always, and to be kind to everybody" (99), with which her vision climaxes, is very similar to Scrooge's promise to "honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." But Scrooge's primary reward is this-worldly and mutual: he reenters society, acquires an extended family via the Cratchits, and apparently lives happily ever after within his newfound community. Rosamond, too, becomes a boon to all in her new life as "The Kind Lady" (101)--yet this is explicitly a celibate life of good deeds and self-sacrifice, and the novella leaves her, not enjoying her happiness in the present (like Scrooge), but dead, mourned, and (implicitly) among the angels.
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