Sutcliffe: The Eleventh Commandment

Sutcliffe's Bingley

1 = St Ives 

2 = Harden Grange

3 = The Guide Inn

Sutcliffe: The Eleventh Commandment

Halliwell Sutcliffe

The Eleventh Commandment

London, Wright & Brown ND [1896]

Social and Literary Placing

The Eleventh Commandment is an anomaly in Sutcliffe’s work in that it is closest he comes to a sardonic vein of social realism.    John B Wordsworth’s thorough Halliwell Sutcliffe site comments on The Eleventh Commandment: ‘It is based on Sutcliffe’s memories of Bingley in the eighteen-eighties, and some of the inhabitants of the place recognised themselves in the characters, and were not always pleased by what they read.’ http://www.users.waitrose.com/~jbwords/hsbib.html

Perhaps for this reason Sutcliffe takes care to differentiate ‘Saxilton’ (the fictional setting of The Eleventh Commandment) from Bingley.  The ‘small town of Saxilton’ is ‘situated on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire’ (1.I.9), whereas Bingley is comfortably within the boundaries of Yorkshire.   Sutcliffe’s intention seems to be to construct a typical rather than a distinctive small Pennine town in which he can explore the social geography with satiric intent.    In his more romantic novels Sutcliffe sees the rocks and moors embodying the ‘throb of waking life beneath its harshness’ (Mistress Barbara Cunliffe, London, Wright & Brown, nd, I.7), a life which is more true and real than the life offered by industry.   In The Eleventh Commandment the free life of the moors has mostly vanished, merely leaving ‘little islands of passion’ and a few people who are ‘human volcanos’ (I.i.9) and it is on the moors that that the Squire goes mad rather than finds salvation. 

Bingley church & ‘close’

This is one of the few parts of Bingley untouched by Victorian industrialisation.

Standing here it is possible to imagine pre-Industrial Revolution Bingley in which the church would have been the tallest and grandest stone building in the township.  

Where Bentley interrogates her Bronte models, Sutcliffe is content to simplify.   Wuthering Heights operates a dialectic contrast between the dwellers of the uplands in Wuthering Heights and the dwellers of the valley in Thrushcross Grange.   The Eleventh Commandment offers a tamed version of this contrast where the Squire’s discarded mistress and daughter live ‘At Edge of the Moor’, as the title of 3.V, has it and the squire loses his mind in ‘The House on the Hill’, a ‘small inn on the edge of the moor’, (3.ii.223) and the squire’s hypocritically respectable life is led in ‘Plover Court’ (1.II).  As in Jane Eyre there is a tragic secret marriage, though one that saves not imperils the reputation of the heroine.

The Guide Inn 

A probable model for ‘The House on the Hill’.

In common with many other 19th century writers, including the Brontes themselves, Sutcliffe enters into dialogue with Shakespeare.   Daisy Baines has no scruples in including a full-blown Macbeth-like witch in its cast of charters; by contrast Bentley’s A Modern Tragedy questions the relevance of the neo-Shakespearean blank-verse tragedies written by Gordon Bottomley.   Sutcliffe does not have Bentley’s qualms and, like Bottomley (King Lear's Wife, 1920), he courts high cultural prestige by borrowing from King Lear.   Like Lear, Squire Denholme raves on the moors, in the first instance in a manner equally reminiscent of Nebuchadnezzar: ‘’with a cry of “Hilda!  Hilda!” grovelled like a wild beast.  Between the pauses of his cries he gripped a piece of heather with his teeth and bit it off piece by piece,’ (3.ii.222).  Touches of Mad Tom’s ravings are added: ‘Inside I may have seven hundred devils, but outside I am the Squire, and I will be honoured,’ (3.ii.223).   As in King Lear madness becomes a vector for social criticism.  He mentions ‘The rights of property’ which becomes the trigger for this outburst:

     That brings me to another point: what of the wrongs of humanity which follow in the wake of

     these other rights?  We don’t mention them at ordinary times, and the Church doesn’t mention

     them; so that we get on comfortably enough.  But they’re there all the same, just waiting for a

     chance of lifting up their heads.  Wrongs, wrongs!  Oh, in the name of Satan, won’t someone

     knock them on the head?’

    (3.ii.226).

Sutcliffe has difficulty establishing the tone of these scenes.   There is a formality about the language that could be read as comic:

  The sight of the dead body had a curious effect upon the Squire.   He was quiet for some time,

   sobered and horrified by that which reposed at so short a distance from him.  (3.ii.226).

The conventional phrases ‘curious effect’ and ‘that which reposed’ are echoed within the Squire’s madness ‘That brings me to another point’ giving this episode not a mock-heroic but a mock-tragic quality.

Politics

Such qualities, the Shakespearean echoes, mad scenes, social criticism and comedy are frequently found in other Victorian Sensational literature or in the Victorian Melodrama.  Mary Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or Dion Boucicault’s play The Streets of London  ( 1864) had points to make about sexual double standards, rank and social hypocrisy.    In a more respectable vein Trollope entertained his readers with six volumes about the struggle between High and Low Church factions in the fictional town of Barchester.    

At the start of the text it looks as if Sutcliffe might produce a mixture of the two strands; social melodrama reinforced by a clash between idealists and pragmatists in the Church of England.   However Sutcliffe steers his material in an unexpected direction when Knipe leaves the Church to become a novelist.    He leaves behind a Bishop who is more remarkable for his doubts than his belief: ‘my Church is always respectable, rarely sincere,’ (3.xii.308) and Mr Burmantofts, whose complacency he has jolted.  Readers might expect that Knipe’s first novel would try to create the sincerity and spiritual commitment that is lacking in the Church he has served but this does not appear to be the case.    Expressing a credo that might be Sutcliffe’s he says ‘It is better to be read than to produce a good book, if you will insist on epigram.  I happen to believe in the public rather; it has a habit of coming out right in the long run,’ (3.ix.284).  Ralph seizes on the political implications: ‘Something rampant and revolutionary and hitting straight between the eyes?’ but Knipe rejects the idea of ‘books with “Purpose” scrawled large over every page,’ (3.ix.284).     Knipe’s novel is instead ‘a love-story’ (3.ix.284), presumably based on his disappointed love for Beatrice.

Knipe’s early political views are shown through the eyes of other people.  The vicar fears he might be ‘a kind of ecclesiastical Labour Candidate?’ (I.iv.34).  His later political views seem expressed through his support for Ralph.   Ralph is persuaded to stand as an MP in a mere two pages (3.xi.297-8) and is elected for Saxilton in the following two pages.  He stands as an Independent who appeals to people at a time when ‘Politics have sunk about as low as they can,’ (3,xi.298).    In this he is supported by Knipe and the Squire who has turned his back on his old Church and Tory views and is now ‘a Democrat, a sentimentalist – in the right sense – ‘(3.ix.284).    However the electorate is described by the Squire in terms that might suit an 18th century pocket borough: ‘I would help you and so would Knipe.  You are tremendously popular with my tenants, and they would vote for you in a body.  Knipe is equally popular with the operatives, and his influence should carry you a long way,’ (3.xi.298).  In this context it is hard to work out if Ralph’s subsequent victory is to be seen in a sentimental or sarcastic light.  All that is clear is that no Third Way emerges.   Ralph opposes the views of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’  parties ((3.xi.298) but his own programme is described imprecisely, using words like ‘honest’ and ‘making things hot for the Government,’ (3.xi.299-300).    Though Ralph is said to be a popular speaker, readers never hear his speeches.  In a similar way Part 2 chapter xi does not reproduce Knipe’s controversial sermon, only giving the Squire’s reaction: ‘rank blasphemy, Socialism heresy, “resumed the Squire, whose classification off anything not Tory was a trifle vague,’ (2.x1.188).    Here the word ‘vague’ surfaces but it is not confined to the Squire’s views.  Sutcliffe does not try to orient Ralph’s radicalism with that of the formation of the Independent Labour Party (1893) or the social views of John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera writings (1870s).  

In the absence of detailed ideas about economics, Ralph appears as the embodiment of either Disraeli’s’  ‘One Nation’ dream or a response to the appearance of the Populist Party in America in 1892 (https://www.britannica.com/event/Populist-Movement).    Both these political ideas depend on what Ralph is said to have:  a ‘boldness’ that ‘appealed to the working-classes,’ (3.xi.299).    The text does not show this approach as achieving anything in the way of political ambition or social reform; Ralph refuses ‘to accept office of any kind,’ but is content to make ‘things hot for successive governments,’   (3.xi. 300).   

Sexual Politics

The sexual politics are equally vague.    The eleventh commandment appears to be to marry for love and not social position.    The Squire makes a more advantageous match than his true love Hilda, who pines discreetly in Cambridgeshire.   His daughter Beatrice marries in secret because she knows the man she loves will not provide the social or monetary advancement the Squire expects out of marriage.    This eventually leads to the killing that triggers the Squire’s madness.     The potential feminism of this idea is undercut by several factors.   Firstly readers are not encouraged to have much sympathy with Mrs Daneholme, the Squire’s wife.    There is little about her to contradict the Squire’s view of her as ‘a kind of wax figure bound to you for life, with cheeks that you fear to kiss because the paint might come off!’ (3.iii.232).    The first description of her describes her as ‘well-preserved’ (1.ii.15) as if she is a cadaver and not a woman.  Once she has been confronted by and then reconciled to ‘Mrs’ Farrell, the Squire’s ex-mistress, the narrative can do little with her except have her die blaming herself: ‘have I not robbed Hilda of enough caresses?’ (3.xii.310).  Secondly, though Lil Farrell is redeemed by the maternal care she shows for the Squire during his madness, she has spent the first part of the book by seeking revenge on the Squire through encouraging her daughter to try to seduce the Squire’s son Lionel.  Neither Lionel nor her daughter (also called ‘Lil’) realise that this would be incest but Mrs Farrell does.    Thirdly the idea of votes for women never surfaces.  Ralph’s wife is said to take up ‘Ralph’s cause with untiring energy,’ (3.xi.300) but this appears to be socially not intellectually.   Her contribution to his life as an MP is not ideological debate but giving ’some of the “jolliest little parties going”’ (3.xi.300).     Fourthly it is assumed that a woman’s main aim in life is to get married.    The younger Lil Farrell’s manoeuvres to get married are rhymed with those of her nouveau riche counter-part Edith Bilbram to marry Fynche; as her mother warns her  ‘Things have gone much too far between you to think of letting him escape,’ (3.iv.241).  The chapter is called ‘Woman Disposes’ and the comment made on Edith about the wish to get hold of a man: ‘with equal brains a woman is less of a fool than a man,’ (3.iv.243) is not significantly challenged by any of the other events in the text.   Fifthly most of the women are stereotypes frequently used by Melodramas.  Hilda is a Patient Griselda and Mrs Farrell a woman of the ‘hell has no fury like a woman scorned’ type.   Her intended revenge is more ambitious and imaginative than most women in this category because it is based on incest, otherwise Sutcliffe does not show much depth in his characterisation.  The transformation from revenging fiend into comforting carer who tends to the Squire in his madness merely replaces one stereotype with another.    

Nevertheless by the end of the text the formulas of the sensation novel have been as much rejected as exploited.  Only the minor characters meet predictable ends; Justin Daneholme and Fynche both get trapped by marriage and Mrs Farrell’s plot fails.   However many of the other characters experience unexpected reversals of fortune, especially in the Daneholme family.   Knipe finds it impossible to keep his faith, the Squire reverses his political beliefs, Mrs Daneholme dies, almost unlamented, and the intelligent, virtuous Beatrice has to cope with widowhood.   All these reversals are accomplished by a deus-ex-machina plot rather caused by the economic forces that clash in the valley.   Tension between owners and their tenants or operatives is suggested but encapsulated not by industrial strife but by a murder committed by a poacher. The National Trust has set up an information board above Marsden to show how violent such confrontations could be but the incident in the text is undermined by the Squire confessing that he enjoyed poaching from his father when he was young ((3.vii).  

Buckstones

This leads to the revelation that the Squire’s father enjoyed poaching from himself and sets up another Shakespeare derived scene.  The elder Squire dies literally playing ‘the part of God’ (3.vii.269) and condemning his poachers to Heaven or Hell.  It is a magnification of Henry IV, Part 1, 1.2 where Falstaff plays a judge and Hal tells Falstaff that once he is king Falstaff will never enter court.   Given that the text shows itself aware of the ‘Nihilist’, ‘Dynamitard’ and ‘Anarchist’(2.viii.162) operating in the century, the poacher seems an apolitical anachronism, reinforcing the novel’s lack of interest in the lives or aspirations of the working class.    Only two working men are given speaking roles in the text.  The first is a familiar stage-figure, the comic servant (Brown) with his misplaced ‘h’s:

  “Something is hup,” he observed sotto voce, as he pursued his way.  “The hupper circles don’t in

   general take little affairs of this kind so much to heart. [emphasis in the original] (3.iii.229)  

The second is Mr Dacey who runs a ‘low lodging-house’ in ‘the slums of the town’ (1.iii.28-9).  He expresses his scorn for the effeminacy of Fynche; ‘his pretty Miss Spooney ways’ (1.iii.300) in order to show Knipe as a manly curate: ‘the two men were firm friends as long as Knipe stayed in Saxilton, ‘(1.iii.31).   None of the operatives or tenants, who will form Ralph’s political base in Part 3 enter into the text to express their hopes or fears.  Despite this, by the end the text has shown a world ripe for change.  As in Eliot’s Silas Marner the day of the squirearchy has passed and that of the Church of England passing.  For all its imprecision the text anticipates the world Freud will describe ‘the frenzy that years of repression had generated,’ (3.ii.222), even though it does not aspire to the ‘scientific’ methods of Marx or Freud in locating the source of ‘repression’.       

Geography

The geography of the novel is typical more than precise.    The only place in the text called by its true name is ‘Cambridge’.     The village of ‘Bottisham’, six miles east of Cambridge has become ‘Cottisham’.  It is described as having a ‘little country station’ (1.vi.46).  This would have been relatively new when the book was published; it was part of the Great Eastern Railway’s Cambridge to Mildenhall railway, that was constructed from 1894-5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_to_Mildenhall_railway)

There is no similar transformation of Yorkshire names except for the briefly mentioned ‘Landford’ that sounds like ‘Bradford’ (3.iv.  238). The likeness is reinforced by the context where a heavily accented uncultivated local is described as: ‘a millionaire, hailing from Landford,’ (3.iv.238).   As late as 1922 Eliot’s The Waste Land seems to regard the association of Bradford, vulgarity and riches as proverbial: ‘a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire,’ (III The Fire Sermon, www2.bc.edu/john-g-boylan/files/ts_eliot_wasteland.pdf)

The name ‘Saxilton’ has no elements in common with ‘Bingley’ but the description fits most of the small Pennine towns that lie in the Aire Valley from Leeds to Skipton, especially those between Rombalds Moor and the hills north west of Bradford ‘built on an oval plain from which hills sweep up on all sides to the moorlands beyond,’ (1.i.10). 

Bingley from the Druid’s Altar 

Within and around ‘Saxilton’ are many features that have equivalents in the upper Aire valley.    

Not all Aire Valley churches are pre-Victorian but Bingley parish church of All Saints, like Saxilton Parish Church, could be described as  ‘hoary’ 1.iii.23.    It probably dates back to pre-Norman times but was rebuilt after 1066 in stone.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_All_Saints,_Bingley / 13/14/iv.35

Bingley Parish Church. 

Bingley itself, like neighbouring Baildon or Shipley is ‘a medley of shops, cottages, mills and the painfully substantial houses of well-to-do tradesmen,’ (1.1.10)

Damart Mill  A working mill still dominates the centre of Bingley.

The social geography of Saxilton is matched by Bingley:

  On the south side of town, a great private estate contains within its well-stocked preserves every   

  element that is antagonistic at once to the democratic operatives who form the bulk of the town’s 

  population to the now conservative nouveux-riches who hold sway on the opposite side of the     

  valley.    

Bingley: ‘medley of shops, cottages, mills’

Bingley ‘leprosy of modern mansions’ .

 A sarcastic description of the prestigious Victorian houses on the north side of town.

The south side of town preserves the feudal elements of Bingley chiefly the Parish Church.

Parish Church from ‘Bailey Hill’.

The name ‘Bailey hill’ suggests a Norman motte and bailey once stood above the church.

It is still true that ‘On the south side of the town’ there is ‘a great private estate’(1.1.10).  It is now mostly a golf course, surrounded by the old estate wall.   This is not called ‘Plover Court’ but ‘St Ives’.

St Ives started life as a manor house 1616 before being replaced by a larger building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingley_St_Ives

                                                                                   Old St Ives (once ‘Harden Grange’)

The park lands are very close to Harden Moor; there is a footpath leading out onto the moor beside Lady Balntyre’s rock: ‘The Squire unconsciously took the path that led up to the moors; (III.ii.221)

Lady B’ s rock

On the moors he chews heather (III.ii.221)

Harden Moor: grass, heather and rock

Across the moor ‘not a quarter of the mile away’ (III.ii.223) (an underestimate or poetic licence) he comes across ‘a square, weather-beaten building, bearing the sign, The House on the Hill’ (III.ii.223).  The Guide Inn is a similar building in a similar spot, isolated from any village, standing at a cross-road of minor roads and tracks;

Guide Inn 

‘Holme Wood’, where Lorrie has his fatal encounter with the  poachers could be a spot like Deep Cliff Hole, which is outside the ‘boundary wall’ of St Ives Estate ((III.i.215) but close to it and not far from the inn in which his body waits for a coroner.

Deep Cliff Hole 

A final confirmation of the identification of Saxilton as Bingley is in 3.iv when a picnic party travels ‘some forty miles up the line’ ‘to as famous cave’ (3.iv.237) which turns out to be a ‘dripping well’(3.iv.239).   Knaresborough is forty miles away by rail, assuming the party have to travel into Leeds and out again, and is famous for its ‘Dropping well’ that slowly encrusts objects with limestone.   Sutcliffe mentions neither petrification nor Mother Shipton, whose cave is next to the Dropping Well but Yorkshire has no other dropping wells.

Inserted into the typical Pennine Mill town landscape are more symbolic locations.  The vicar Mr Burmantoft’s failure to instil true Christianity into the rich Bilbram family is emphasised by the name of their house ‘Stonylands House’ (1 .I.11) alluding to Christ’s parable of the sower:

           4:5 And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; 

           and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: 

          4:6 But when the sun was up, it was scorched; 

           and because it had no root, it withered away.  (Mark: 45-6, King James Version ) 

The only eagerness evident in Stonylands House is the social eagerness of Edith Bilbram to flirt.  She eventually marries the curate Fordham Fynche for his social expectations not his spiritual vocation. 

Bingley Parish church

The Parish Church commands the forground of this picture but Damart Mill Chimney rises in the distance to challenge any dominance the church might have over 19th century Bingley, architechturally or morally.