Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues
Rowland Hill's enormously popular (and enormously long) Village Dialogues (1801; republished frequently thereafter) is notable, as Adrian J. Wallbank argues, for its "eclectic assortment of residual literary techniques and strategies of the type associated with eighteenth-century didacticism, catechetical guidance, parables, and 'stories-within['] while also drawing heavily upon sentimental aesthetics, pathos, and more contemporaneous, if not 'new' strategies such as narrative realism, characterization, and satirical invective."1 Unlike Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, the Village Dialogues function as a coherent novel, albeit with some loose ends not tied up. In terms of genre, though, the Village Dialogues are also the kitchen sink of Romantic-era evangelical fiction: there are multiple death-bed narratives (good and bad), an abolitionist narrative, multiple conversion narratives, and various diatribes against Catholicism (not good) and Unitarianism (also not good), interspersed with outbreaks into epistolarity and inset lyric verse. (I did wonder, incidentally, if Jane Eyre's response to her unexpected inheritance, which involves subdividing it amongst her newfound relatives, was a reaction to Hill's Mr. Lovely, who gives away much of his inheritance to his family and others [although the inheritance was expected] and receives some criticism for it from the evangelical clergyman Mr. Lovegood.) The Village Dialogues2 are at their most novelistic, though, in their treatment of the adulterous and stereotypically emotional Mrs. Chipman, whose fate is notably different than it would have been some decades later.
Mrs. Chipman's passionate affair with the evil and atheistic Sir Charles Dash does not come to a good end, as one would expect from this type of narrative. Dash is a classic rake, a type Hill tackles three times, insisting that the only means of reforming a rake (an implicit critique of Pamela) is his own conversion. Hill represents not the affair but its aftermath, in which Mrs. Chipman, overcome by remorse after hearing Lovegood preach on Hebrews 13:4, comes to him and Mr. Worthy in search of assistance. What interests me about Hill's approach to the situation is that his critique of Mrs. Chipman is at the level of narrative form, far more than it is in terms of the text's content. Messrs. Lovegood and Worthy, although obviously disapproving, nevertheless spend most of their time trying to restrain Mrs. Chipman from blaming herself too much: Mr. Worthy points out that Dash was obviously a designing seducer who took advantage of her while her husband is gone, an "accidental circumstance" that "must be considered an alleviation of your crime" (XVIII); similarly, Lovegood immediately agrees to intercede with her father in hopes of returning her to her home, on the grounds that she has become a truly "humble penitent" (XIX). Mrs. Chipman, however, is a problematic narrator of her own plot and characterization, as it were. When first invited to tell her story, she immediately collapses into "strong hysterics" (XVIII) and castigates herself, leading Lovegood to finally interject "[b]e calm" (XVIII)--but, instead of beginning her narrative, she again berates "the pride and wickedness of my own heart" (XVIII), which prompts a perhaps understandably exasperated Lovegood to point out that they cannot really get anywhere with this subject unless she is "not somewhat more particular in relating your calamities" (XVIII). The novel in fact sets up Mrs. Chipman's self-loathing as moral excess, incompatible with faith in Christ's ability to save sinners. Her fragmented narrative is not only punctuated by such stage directions as "too much overcome" to keep going (XVIII), but also by inappropriate attempts to manipulate her audience into a negative reaction; when she cries "[a]fter hearing no more than this, surely you will say that I am the most abominable wretch that ever lived upon the earth" (XVIII), Mr. Worthy simply notes that they really don't have sufficient information to judge her story yet. Hill treats her hyperbolic and, in some ways, narcissistic interpretation of her own behavior, which the men clearly don't think is all that unusual (i.e., adultery is sinful, but not some shocking novelty), as itself the ongoing manifestation of the emotional flaw that allowed her to give in to Dash's blandishments in the first place. "Again her grief is excessive" (XVIII), as another stage direction observes. A letter from her father again reduces her to "strong hysterics" (XIX); after praying, she is the "picture of misery and frantic grief" (XIX); thinking of her child, she gives way once more to "excessive grief of mind" (XIX). Far from being fully converted, the novel suggests, Mrs. Chipman's passionate and self-imploding narrative strategies actually entrap her at the stage of being convicted of sin, in such a manner as to prevent her from contemplating the possibility of transformation or forgiveness. As tract narration goes, this is the "wrong" approach, one that frustrates and upsets its auditors. In fact, when other characters spot her later on, one of them inquires if she is suffering from "melancholy derangement" (XXII)--which proves to be foreshadowing. Upon hearing of her husband's death, she collapses into "total derangement" from her agony (XXVI), and experiences, among other things, Gothic visions of her husband's "murdered emaciated apparition" (XXVI). But this (temporary) situation, which momentarily reduces her to the status of Gothic victim, is itself an aberrant mode of narration--the most extreme section of the text, even worse than the "bad" death of Mr. Lovely's uncle Mr. Greedy. Mrs. Chipman is consistently incapable of developing an autobiographical character for herself that does not involve some form of eternal emotional self-punishment, maintained at fever pitch.
But this is not, in fact, the destiny that the novel intends for her: far from sending her to Australia (as happens to another female character married to a rake) or, as Mrs. Gaskell would later do, immuring her in an isolated valley or killing her off, Hill sends her back to her home town to help run her deceased husband's business and raise her child. Although her plot is never fully resolved, Hill pointedly insists that she needs to be fully reintegrated with her family and community in order to thrive, physically and spiritually. Forgiveness, in the world of this novel, is precisely that. Yet in leaving the conclusion of her plot open-ended, Hill also rejects the mode of evangelical narrative that insists on clearly elucidating all of the this-worldly consequences for behavior. When she returns home, Mrs. Chipman is still in emotional overdrive; Lovegood is finally reduced to speaking "rather sharply to her" (XXXVI) in order to get her to knock it off. In a sense, Lovegood becomes the good version of Dash, this time seeking to redirect her emotions to religious rather than erotic purposes. And like Dash, Lovegood leaves--not because he is disgusted, but because conversion can only be between Mrs. Chipman and God. While Lovegood offers the community the parable of the Prodigal Son as a means of developing their own narrative about her return, he cannot intervene beyond a certain point in how she chooses to tell her story--and it is at that point that the novel brings her plot to an end, with Hill leaving her to her own narrative devices, as it were, just as Lovegood does.
1 Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute (2012; Routledge, 2016), 70.
2 Dialogue numbering varies between editions; I'm citing from the 1825 printing.