Sutcliffe: Mistress Barbara Cunliffe

Sutcliffe's Pennines: a compressed map of the pass west of Haworth

1] = Oldfield and Oldfield Farm

2] = Laverack Hall

3] = Height Laithe Farm

4] = Scar Top and Scartop Hall

Halliwell Sutcliffe

Mistress Barbara Cunliffe

London, Wright & Brown ND [1901]

 Clouds over Forest of Trawden.

Social and Literary Placing

In chapter XII Barbara reads Pride and Prejudice and comes up with a familiar criticism: ‘There’s so little in the story – so little movement, so little life of any sort’ (XII.183), ‘I cannot live for a day without the wind; I cannot find life in a book unless the sky is big above it, unless there’s the breadth of the hills and the sweep of a far-off sky-line to make the people in it live,’ [emphasis in the original] (XII.184). 

The criticism is familiar because it is an echo of Charlotte Bronte’s complaint about Pride and Prejudice to G.H. Lewes; the novel offers  ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck,’ http://www.theloiterer.org/ashton/women.html

There has been a careful replacement of Bronte’s phrases with equivalent words:  ‘carefully fenced’ becomes ‘so little movement’, ‘no fresh air’ becomes ‘without the wind’, ‘no blue hill’ becomes ‘the breadth of the hills’ and ‘bright vivid physiognomy’ becomes ‘make the people in it live’. 

Moorscape near Haworth

More fundamentally the Marshcotes novels are populated by characters who echo Cathy from Wuthering Heights in their identification with not only the life offered by the moor but the composition of the moor itself: ‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees.   My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary,’ (Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, int. Margaret Lane, London, Everyman’s Library, X.69).  

The description of Barbara uses similar rhetoric:

     She had not the womanhood only, but something of the manhood too, of the bygone generations

     in her blood; the grey old house, with its gables and its gardens and its guardian moor – the  

     nooks and corners, the very knots and pattern of the grain in the oak wainscoting –the wild

     legends of the countryside, the tangles web of hate and passion, that clothed the bare hill-fields –

     all were part of her by this. (XII.184).  

The homage is so faithful it even reproduces some of the pedantry that adds an unconscious comedy to Emily’s presentation of passion.  ‘A source of little visible delight’ is echoed by ‘the nooks and corners, the very knots and pattern of the grain’. 

'Grey old house on moors'; 

the small settlement of Sladen Bridge, between Haworth and Wycoller.

Alignment with the Brontes means that Mistress Barbara Cunliffe, and the later ‘Marshcoates’ novels reflect on the past more than the present.  The restless, uneasy, satirical contemporary tone ofThe Eleventh Commandment is lost in texts that seem more interested in the creative tension between realism and Gothic that are a central feature of novels of Emily and Charlotte.  This tension has become less creative, more nostalgic and given to a resolution by bathos not drama.   Mistress Barbara Cunliffe refers to the supernatural Yorkshire dog, the ‘Guytrash’ (XV1.220), that Jane Eyre is reminded of in chapter XII (Charlotte spells it ‘Gytrash’) and another ghost called ‘The Sorrowful Woman’.  However, in the same way that Jane’s ‘Gytrash’ turns out to be Rochester’s dog, so in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe the old ghosts fade out and attention is turned to the Squire’s dark secret.    It is supposed by the characters in the book to be the search for the legendary Philosopher’s Stone that can turn lead to gold but, prosaically, his secret is finally revealed to be that he combs wool to make an additional income.  As the text shows trade despised, this is seen as reason enough to conceal his actions.    This plot and its denouement are symptomatic of the way in which Mistress Barbara Cunliffe, like the later ‘Marshcoates’ novels, builds up narrative tension only to lead to a climb-down.     In the case of political themes, there appears to be a strong element of wish-fulfilment; Sutcliffe wishes that all labour confrontations would end in anti-climax but the similar undercutting of Gothic themes is harder to explain, especially in the light of his historical romances.  

Guytrash  

 The Black Shuck, East Anglia’s equivalent of the Guytrash, is commemorated by a weather vane in the town of Bungay, supposedly attacked by the being in 1577.

Politics

The Eleventh Commandment selected Saxilton to show ‘a curious blending of the modern and the feudal – the most objectionable developments of modernism combined with the most impossible remnants of past abuses,’ (1.I.9).     Now the setting is deeper in the Dales, Sutcliffe has dropped this balance in favour of an idealised depiction of the feudal loyalties that once dominated the Dales.  The Squire of this tale is not the lecherous hypocrite of The Eleventh Commandment but a man struggling to uphold his family honour and fortunes; the hero is a man who should have been squire of The Heights, had his father Jasper not ruined the family economy.    From the age of sixteen Stephen Royd has worked in the wool trade to replace the lost money until he is a mill owner, living like a miser but buying up the mortgages of estates that are no longer viable, hoping to regain The Heights, abandon trade and live like a squire again.       

There seem to be significant obstacles to this, like the snide and superficial Bancroft who occupies The Heights when the book opens, becoming Royd’s rival for the hand of Barbara Cunliffe and the threat a strike that might ruin Royd.    Nevertheless, both threats end anti-climactically.  Bancroft simply ruins himself, fails to marry Barbara and is last seen by Royd walking into Lancashire ‘with a boisterous laugh’ and ‘light unsteady steps’ (XXIII .280).    The strike is defeated with equal ease.   From chapter IV, page 55 strikes have been threatened in Bradford.    In chapter XI, called ‘Unrest’, an agitator, in the ironically named ‘Friendly Inn’, is trying to persuade men at Royd’s mill to go on strike in support of the striking workers in Bradford.   They reach the point of capturing Royd’s ‘overlooker’ (overseer) to tar and feather him.  Royd walks in and squares up to Eli, the strongest of these men: ‘then Royd shot out his fist, and caught the comber on the chin and dropped him,’ (XI.148).   Instantly the rest of his workers look at him ‘with respect, and almost with good-humour,’ (XI.149).  Nonetheless Royd still faces an ideological argument from the agitator.  

Mill at the foot of Haworth hill

Mistress Barbara Cunliffe was published in 1901 and Sutcliffe uses anachronism to reflect on the present.   A man living off the ‘alms’ of ‘workers’ is a figure more likely to have existed in 1901 when Trades Unions and Labour Parties were legal and well-established and could afford to pay officials (https://spartacus-educational.com/Pilp.htm).  By contrast the small mill owned by one man is becoming rare by the turn of the century.  Most of Phyllis Bentley’s works show how vulnerable such concerns are in the face of the corporations and global organisations that rose throughout the twentieth century.     In Mistress Barbara Cunliffe, Royd, a figure who could scarcely exist in the early 20th century is used to see off the kind of labour activist who could hardly have existed in the early 19th century.    The date of Mistress Barbara Cunliffe is not precisely established, though references to ‘Wilberforce’ and ‘Oastler’ being active would place the text sometime around the 1820s.   Parson Horrocks claims ‘there’s Wilberforce and Oastler, and a dozen others, all crying on the housetops that it is shameful to sell black men into slavery; and they have done something.  How if men get up and cry out upon this English slavery?’  (XIV.197).    If Oastler is known as an abolitionist and not as a proponent of the ‘Ten Hour Bill’ and opponent of child labour, then the action of the novel takes place before 1830, though this is set in a world where no one refers to the Luddites or the  West Yorkshire Rebellion of 1820 http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-yorkshire-rebellion-of-1820.html

John B Wordsworth gives a more precise date of 1825 (http://www.users.waitrose.com/~jbwords/hsbib.html)

From chapter III the text is aware of the exploitation of children by the early mills.  Stephen Royd and Parson Horrocks come across a sleep-walking child who works at Ephraim Booth’s Goit Mill. ‘Goit’ is a dialect word for ‘stream’ or ‘channel’ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goit) but the word creates unpleasant associations with ‘gout’, a disease once thought to originate through self-indulgence, or ‘goitre’, a swelling on the neck caused by thyroid troubles.     Her plight is swiftly summed up by Stephen: ‘it is over-much work and over-little food,’ (III.35).  However, Royd runs a mill without the aid of child-labour, so the use of children is made to seem gratuitous and the mill a symptom of the god-less dis-ease of industrialisation.   The child’s mother blames Booth for her child’s suffering: ‘God knows there’ll be one more i’ hell if prayers can send him there,’ (iii.39).  The prayers may work because by the end of the book Booth is literally haunted by the ghosts of children he’s worked to death: ‘Little children – dead and’ buried, some of ‘em, up on th’ lonely moor,’  XXIII.284). 

Though this sounds a Gothic detail it fits into a local pattern.  All the ghosts mentioned on the ‘Shuddersfield Ghost Trail’ are ghosts of the industrial era, such as the ghost of Jonah Marr, a porter who broke his legs on the tracks in the railway station.  https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/leisure/countryside/pdf/routes/discover_hudds_shuddersfield_trail.pdf

Booth’s haunting may be inspired by another local event, the fire at Colne Mill that killed 17 girls and young women (https://huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Colne_Bridge_Tragedy_of_1818).   Their deaths have been linked to supernatural experiences supposedly occurring at buildings on the site of the old mill and at the Royal & Ancient Inn where the bodies were placed in the cellar.

 https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/haunted-mill-creepiest-place-work-12160428  The site  https://huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Colne_Bridge_Tragedy_of_1818 includes Fred Brown’s 1950’s poem  ‘T'Shadder Show’ where the concept of ‘ghost’ is used as it is in Sutcliffe, to stand for the dark secrets of the early mills.   Stephen Royd wants to retreat from these horrors to live off the land as his ancestors did and, by the end of the book, has achieved his aim.  

The Royal and Ancient Inn, Huddersfield

The plot of a movement from trade to land might appear self-indulgent, fanciful and unrealistic in the face of the advance of industry.  It is made all the more unrealistic because Mistress Barbara Cunliffe never considers the link between industry and farming.    If Royd gives up his mills and becomes a squire living off the rents of his tenants, he will still be involved with industry because the only way in which his tenant-farmers can make a living on the Pennine hills will be by raising sheep for their wool, wool which will be processed in the new mills.    The link is tacitly admitted when it turns out that Barbara’s father can’t live off his rents without supplementing that income by wool-coming himself.    Nevertheless, it is a popular and widely shared dream.   Kenneth Grahame’s  near-contemporary text  The Wind in the Willows (1908) hopes that, if only the motor car will prove to be a fad of the spoiled aristocracy, the lanes of traditional England and the pre-industrial world might be left untouched.     Sutcliffe’s three Marshcoates ‘Mill’ novels are set in pre-railway Haworth and Keighley.  The idea that industry is an unnecessary conspiracy aimed at destroying an idyllic, agricultural existence and a settled feudal hierarchy, is the myth that will prove surprisingly persistent.  Far from disappearing between 1901 and 1949 the myth was powerfully reinforced by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-5) where the evil Saruman despoils the rural Shire by imposing an Industrial Revolution on it.  Increased ecological awareness has made the concept even more appealing and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of Lord of the Rings (2001-3) and the Hobbit (2012-14) court this audience as well as sword-and-sorcery fans.

Set into the hillside in the small village of Oldfield; a farm that looks like a hall.

This kind of building is a model for Wynyates. 

Feminism

Although the book is named after her, Barbara Cunliffe lacks even the potential for feminism shown by Barbara Daneholme or Gertrude in The Eleventh Commandment.   ‘Little’ Barbara gains little depth as the story goes on but simply remains what chapter I described her as: ‘worth a strong man’s winning,’ (I.17).   Royd eventually proves that strong man and Bancroft a weak suiter only interested in her dowry.   She appears as representative of the old aristocracy of the moorlands, playing the ‘spinet’ (II.26).   Though the term was sometimes used in the 19th century for the small, square piano-forte (www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/performing-arts/music-theory-forms-and-instruments/spinet) here it seems to be an 18th century instrument of the harpsichord family on which she plays songs like ‘Barbara Allen’, that Pepys knew.    Despite Royd seeing her as part of an interior of a ‘hundred little symbols of luxury and ease,’ (II.27), she identifies herself with the moors: ‘Stephen, have we never known the moors together you and I?   Have you taught me nothing of wind and rain and thunder, and the bogs that drown a wayfarer and the great hills that lift him into life?’ (II.28).  This sounds like the first Cathy in Wuthering Height, who was equally at home on the moors between the ages of 10 and 14 but Barbara represents herself as being not the equal of Stephen but his pupil.  Though he replies ‘We learned that together’ (II.28) Barbara never shows Cathy’s independence.    In accordance with the novel’s pursuit of anti-climax, she is never disastrously tempted by Bancroft’s life-style, as Cathy is tempted by Edgar Linton’s but she is not so passionately in love with Stephen as to organise the secret wedding Barbara helps arrange in The Eleventh Commandment.    

As the book progresses, readers realise that her life of luxury is being paid for not by her father but by Stephen, who has bought up the mortgage of the Cunliffe’s house.    Where The Eleventh Commandment has shown that female desire may run in a counter-direction to patriarchal wishes, in Mistress Barbara Cunliffe, Barbara simply exchanges the guardianship of her father for the guardianship of a father-figure.  Despite Sutcliffe’s use of Bronte against Austen there is little evidence of passion in the text, only of the movement of money.  At the end the Squire refuses to marry Barbara to Stephen but it transpires that this is because he cannot provide Barbara with a dowry: ‘I knew she would be penniless,’ (XXV.311).   This does not matter because Stephen can replace the Squire financially as in every other respect.   By the end of the book Barbara has shown to be mistress of nothing except what her father or the father-substitute Stephen give her.  There is a pre-Freudian innocence attending the equivalence of father and lover that occurs in other contemporary texts such as Henry James’ Watch and Ward (1878) or Jean Webster’s Daddy- Long-Legs (1912).   However, Mistress Barbara Cunliffe allows Barbara even less personality or will than these texts; she is little more than a status-symbol to be purchased, a reduction-ad-absurdum of the use of new money to buy old prestige.    As Sutcliffe’s novels move into the twentieth century it is Barbara not Beatrice who becomes typical of the heroines of his books concerned with recent history.

A track to Wycoller, runnign through the Pennies with Pendle and the hills of Lanashire on the horizon.

‘the great hills that lift him into life’ (II.28). 

Geography  

Ling Crag may be Stanbury (Stanbury has an inn called ‘The Friendly’)

Marshcotes = Haworth;  ‘The Bull’ = The Black Bull

There is a hamlet called 'Marsh' south of Haworth which probably suggested the name 'Marshcotes' to Sutcliffe. 

Haworth: industrial cottages

Haworth Church, St Michael and All the Angels (old church);

Sutcliffe is talking about the old church pulled down in 1879.  He describes it as a ‘rude building with the mortar scarcely smoothed between its ragged blocks of stone,’ (IX.119).    Old photos of the church, on which the drawing is based, do not show a ‘rude building’, instead a medieval building with 18th century windows inserted tucked at an odd angle into the hill amidst similarly askew buildings.    In 1879 this church was pulled down and rebuilt because it was structurally unsafe and water, contaminated by the shallow graves around it, was seeping into the building.  Only the base of the tower, that dates from 1488, survived the renewal.    (http://www.haworthchurch.co.uk/history/).

Pendle, visible from  Boulsworth Hill

Saxilton (Bingley) No trace of a squireachy in the industrial areas.

Stocks

According to Sutcliffe and Mrs Banks (The Story of a Struggle), stocks are still in use in Yrokshire townds and villages even at the start of the 19th century.

These stocks have a Bronte connection.  These stand outside Hartshead Church where Patrick Bronte was a curate.

Wycoller Village: ‘sleepy Wycoller,’ (XVII.233)

Wynyates:  Another possible model?  Laverock Hall, near Oldfield

'Laverock' is a Scottish and Northern England word for 'skylark'  

Other place names seem to belong to Sutcliffe’s romantic imagination rather than local tradition as far as this is recoded on a modern OS map.  A good example is ‘Dead Lad’s Rigg’ (ridge), supposedly above Wycoller (I.8).    There is a ‘Dead Man’s Hill’ in the Pennines but far to the north east of Wycoller near Kettlewell, whilst one of the summits of Boulsworth Hill has less ominous but still enigmatic name of ‘Lad Law’.

Lad Law trig point.