A hundred daily comedies: Anne Thackeray Ritchie's comic identity in Old Kensington.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie's virtually forgotten novel Old Kensington (1873) deserves recognition as one of Victorian fiction's most powerful and dramatic narratives of self-construction. A Bildungsroman concerned with female subjectivity and self-expression within the stifling constraints of mid-Victorian English culture, Old Kensington, like its more famous relation Jane Eyre, is also fundamentally comic, not only in its conventional plot resolution (inheritance and marriage), but in its adherence to the eighteenth-century Addisonian ideal of disinterested comic sympathy as a standard for true self-consciousness. (1) Ritchie's narrative demonstrates that a comic resolution to the self's larger epistemological crisis--how to transcend the individual's radical isolation from others--involves a painful process of self-division and projection, a recognition that the achievement of self-consciousness means rejecting the very idea of a coherent, concretized individuality. (2) This process of displacing the self in or der to save it is familiar to readers of Victorian fiction, and Ritchie's heroine, Dolly Vanborough, is reminiscent not only of Jane Eyre, but of Margaret Hale, Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and others. But quite distinctly from these novels, Ritchie's impressionistic narrative enacts the very diffusion of the self that comic self-consciousness requires, revealing an identity between the act of novel-writing and the formation of self-consciousness itself. Telling a story is nothing more than narrating the self into being--Ritchie' s Bildungsroman reveals that aesthetics and comic epistemology are one and the same.

If Jane Eyre is a novel about the development of a comic sensibility in a self that is persistently and negatively constructed by others, Old Kensington traces a similar development in a self that is explicitly conscious of its own fleeting coherence. (3) Bronte's use of the first person "autobiographical" narrative creates a powerful yet misleading impression of Jane's "self-image." While purporting to tell her own tale, Jane unconsciously repeats the tales others tell of her. Only in moments "out of herself" (in the Red Room, or in her dreams and visions, for example) does Jane's subjectivity emerge, empowering Jane to acts of self-definition. True intersubjectivity, the essence of disinterested comic sympathy, is possible only if the self identifies its own individuality--its ability to speak in its own voice. Despite Jane's apparently concrete grasp of her own narrative, she is rarely speaking for herself, but for others in the novel who construct her for their own self-protective purposes. Moreover, Jane is not only a threat to them individually, but to the social structure they both represent and exploit. Jane thus becomes a composite of "detestable" and "ridiculous" identities--an animal, an incubus, a demon, a liar. However, Jane's shadow self, which is obscured by externally imposed identities, asserts itself during moments of vision, when Jane is driven to the brink of complete self-effacement by Mrs. Reed's cruelty, Rochester's siren song, and St. John's over-mastering control. These moments of self-leaving allow Jane the subjective space for the evolution of her comic relationship with Rochester, one marked by its Carlylean sensibility of sport, its mutually corrective and deeply sympathetic dynamic. (4) Jane's true self-identity--her self-speaking voice--is ultimately illuminated by an open, unconstrained natural laugh, a laugh that identifies her as one of Addison's own.

With Dolly Vanborough, Ritchie starts from different ground. Here we have an Eliot-like third person narrative voice, with a distinct perspective on the events and characters narrated in the text. Unlike Jane Eyre, where Jane's misleading self-assuredness contributes to a narrative instability that tends, consciously or unconsciously, to raise epistemological barriers between the teller, the tale, and the reader, there seems to be less conflict between the authority of the self-interested teller and the authenticity of the tale. Instead, Ritchie deliberately distances us from the text, mediating it through a sympathetic, yet strangely fragmented, Wordsworthian memory of recaptured time. "A quarter of a century ago the shabby tide of progress had not spread to the quiet old suburb where Lady Sarah Francis's house was standing," the narrator begins, "with its many windows dazzling as the sun travelled across the old-fashioned housetops to set into a distant sea of tenements and echoing life" (Chapter 1, 1). We are deliberately separated not only in terms of time and space, but in terms of movement and stasis-the differential rates of change of time and space. In other words, in this first sentence of the novel, the narrator establishes the relativity of seemingly fixed narrative concepts. Time is at once a constant (a quarter of a century ago) and a variable, marked by the differential rates at which the "shabby tide of progress" spreads and the sun travels across "the old-fashioned housetops." Likewise, space is conceived as both static and dynamic. The "quiet old suburb" is excluded from the "echoing life" of the city just beyond the park walls, the permanence of its ancient houses contrasted to the modernity of the urban tenements. There is also a moral relativism associated with these rate differentials. Progress, temporality, change are somehow already tainted, "shabby," whereas the "dazzling" windows of the old suburb promise a certain moral beauty, at least on the surface.

This type of narrative distance immediately poses an epistemological dilemma for the reader. How can we begin to consider the question of self-identity in a world of radically variable perspectives on the conventional narrative framework? If the narrative cannot place us in the same frame of reference with its subjects--the same historical field of apprehension--how can our perspective ever be fixed long enough to apprehend, much less to understand, our own subjectivity, to say nothing of another's? If comic self-consciousness depends on an ability to fix another's subjectivity in our gaze so that we may sympathize with it in a mutually corrective manner--through marriage, friendship, or disinterested social action--what can be the basis for such self-consciousness if subjectivity is always already distorted by the essential formlessness of its composite materials?

Simply put, Ritchie's narrative never allows us a fixed perspective from which to view Dolly Vanborough' s evolving consciousness. Events and sense impressions intrude upon and subtly influence the development of the characters, conversations are interrupted and diverted in other directions, motives are hopelessly mixed and misunderstood. "Rather than keep dinner waiting people break off their talk, their loves, their prayers," the narrator interjects when Dolly's mother calls her away from the dying Lady Sarah's bedside. Again, in contrast to Jane Eyre, whose narrative follows a more or less diachronic, chronological sequence, Dolly exists in a synchronic narrative world in which each object seems independent of every other object; each exists in its own time and space, its particular zone of isolation. Like Teufelsdrockh's vision of individual beings emerging out of the Cimmerian darkness, crossing the world stage, and disappearing back into oblivion, these objects move among and past one another on differ ent planes, unconsciously casting their shadows on one another but not mutually entwined in an Eliot-like web of life.

Frank Raban, for example, exemplifies this essential psychic isolation:

There are some years of one's life when one is less
alive than at others, as there are different degrees of
strength and power to live in the course of the same existence.
Frank was not in the despairing state in which we
first knew him, but he was not yet as other people are,
and in hours of depression such as this, he was used to
feel lonely and apart. He was used to see other people
happy, anxious, busy, hurrying after one another, and he
would look on as now, with his hands in his pockets, not
indifferent, but feeling as if Fate had put him down
solitary and silent, into the world--a dumb note (so he
used to think) in the great music. And yet he knew that
the music was there--that mighty human vibration which
exists independent of all the dumb notes, cracked
instruments, rifted lutes, and broken lyres of which we hear so
much, and he had but to open his ears to it. (Chapter 30, 271)

Here "life" is imagined not as a "history" in the biographical sense, but as a kind of energy, more or less intense at any given moment. While Frank's "depression" may have many explanations for those in search of causal relationships--his as yet unrequited love for Dolly, his guilt over his first wife's death, his estrangement from his family, his jealousy of Henley--his self-image as a "dumb note ... in the great music" bespeaks a much bleaker view of personal identity as a nullity. Whatever Frank's feelings may be, they cannot resolve the fundamental epistemological impasse at which he finds himself. At the same time, however, Frank "knew the music was there" and "had but to open his ears to it"; he is squarely on the horns of the Humean dilemma between extreme skepticism and implicit faith in some reality beyond the senses. He also appears conscious of the comic implications of that dilemma, of the paradox of individual ineffectiveness ("all the dumb notes, cracked instruments, rifted lutes, and broken ly res") and collective power ("that mighty human vibration"). Frank is poised on the edge of comic consciousness, the self-knowledge that cannot rationally accept the self's connection to the collective but that can nevertheless create a provisional, fictional relationship between the self and the collective for the purpose of promoting an aesthetic ideal of individual and social happiness. Just as Hume himself, Ritchie has no illusions about the evolution of that consciousness. To open one's ears means to understand that although we are each broken instruments in our own essential isolation, we must continue to play as if there is an orchestra and we are members of it.

By the same token, Dolly is repeatedly characterized as unconscious, absent: "There was no knowing exactly what she was, her mother used to say," the narrator tells us. "One day straight as an arrow--bright, determined; another day, grey and stiff, and almost ugly and high-shouldered":

Did she do it on purpose? In early life she didn't care a
bit what people thought of her. In this she was a little
unwomanly perhaps, but unwomanly in the best and
noblest sense. When with time those mysterious other
selves came upon her that we meet as we travel along the
road, bewildering her and pointing with all their different
experiences, she ceased to judge either herself or others
as severely; she loved faith and truth, and hated meanness
and dissimulation as much as ever. Only, being a woman
too honest to deceive herself, she found she could no
longer apply the precepts that she had used once to her
satisfaction. To hate the devil and all his works is one thing,
but to say who is the devil and which are his works
is another. (Chapter 13, 111-12)

Like Raban, Dolly is characterized as disconnected from the collective. But whereas Raban imagines his isolation as a silence or nullity in the music of humanity, Dolly imagines hers as fidelity to "faith and truth." Her "self-imagination" thus reverses the moral position occupied by Raban, who contrasts the powerlessness of the individual with the mightiness of the whole. For Dolly, the self is the touchstone, the container of good; the collective, in contrast, is corrupted by "meanness and dissimulation."

This difference in moral perspective is related to and implicitly critiques Raban's and Dolly's relative gender positions. Ironically, it is much easier for Raban to project an existential powerlessness for the simple reason that he holds all the power. Despite the fact that he incurs substantial gambling debts and his first marriage, which ends in his wife's premature death, is clouded by suspicions of neglect and mistreatment, Raban nevertheless secures a teaching appointment at Cambridge and inherits his uncle's estates. While Raban's repentance is undoubtedly sincere, the consequences of the actions of his own "mysterious other selves"--which incidentally destroy the lives of Emma Pen-fold and her family--do not include his actual impeachment from political and economic power. Dolly, on the other hand, does not have that luxury. She is truly powerless, culturally constructed to perform, through her proposed marriage to Henley, the transfer and consolidation of Lady Sarah's wealth. Dolly's only defense to this externally imposed self-identity is to be "unwomanly"; to ignore her cultural construction as a wife and adhere to a self-generated moral standard. Her achievement of comic consciousness, which involves her growth into sympathy and the realization that the devil and his works are as much projections of self as anything external, is a much greater leap of faith than that taken by Raban. Dolly's leap requires her to give up that part of her subjectivity that empowers her to imagine herself as individual and against cultural norms. For Raban, individuality, however fictional, is culturally granted; to be sure, his self-consciousness is bought at a price, but the price is much easier to pay for those who have always had the wherewithal to pay it.

In this context, it is not surprising that Old Kensington has been read as novel about Dolly's resistance to masculine power and the importance of relationships between women, as demonstrated by Dolly's loyalty to Lady Sarah--a loyalty that ostensibly costs her her engagement to Henley (see Schwart-Mackenzie xxx). I'm not sure that this is entirely the case. Dolly's unstinting love and sympathy for her brother George seems equally as formative as her bond with her aunt. At the same time, her relationships with other key women in the novel, particularly with her mother, Rhoda, and Lady Henley, are marked by jealousy, misunderstanding, and injured feelings. Dolly does form a close friendship with Mrs. Fane, by whom she is nursed through the illness brought on by her grief at the virtually simultaneous deaths of George and Lady Sarah, but even this relationship is initiated and mediated by Colonel Fane. It is thus somewhat questionable to me whether Ritchie intends to foreground bonds between women as a hedge ag ainst male authority, or whether she finds that both women and men, although starting from far different positions of individual and social relationships. Could it be that those "mysterious other selves," so reminiscent of Pater's friendly companions, exist synchronically for each one of us, layer upon layer accruing with each moment of experience, each a self onto itself? And could it be that each of those other selves exists in its own dimension of time and space, always simultaneously part of and separate from "the course of the same existence'? If this is the case, Ritchie provides another possible key to the Carlylean hierogram, a key Bronte finds in Jane's visionary moments of self-leaving. For Ritchie, that key is not the sanctity of one type of relationship over another, but the willing suspension of that overpowering sense of isolation and the inexpressible sadness that accompanies it.

This suspension of the silent self might also be thought of as the resistance of tragedy. Preoccupied with the dying Lady Sarah, Dolly attends a dinner party with Henley, who is annoyed by her "constant depressions":

It is fortunate, perhaps, that other people are not silent
always because we are sad. With all its objections--I
have read this in some other book--there is a bracing
atmosphere in society, a Spartan-like determination to
leave cares at home, and to try to forget all the ills and
woes and rubs to which we are subject, and to think only
of the present and the neighbour's fate has assigned for
the time. Little by little, Dolly felt happier and more
reassured. Where everything was so commonplace and
unquestioning it seemed as if tragedy could not exist.
Comedy seems much more real at times than tragedy.
Three or four tragedies befall us in the course of our
existence, and a hundred daily comedies pass before our
eyes. (Chapter 34, 303-304)

Here, perhaps, is what Ritchie means by the "mighty human vibration"--the notion that "other people are not silent always because we are sad." As we have seen, Raban's depression is associated with feelings of isolation, of being in but not part of the world. He senses its existence without being able to project himself into it, to forge sustainable human relationships. For Dolly, on the other hand, depression is a function of misprision, both in her external relationships and in her confusion over the authenticity of her mysterious other selves. In other words, Dolly's sadness springs partly from a nascent awareness that the self is incoherent and fluid, an awareness awakened by the very changes in her relationships that sadden her.

Moreover, Dolly's sense of the "mighty human vibration" is much more concretized than Raban's. Rather than viewing intersubjective human relations in the abstract, as Raban does, Dolly is deeply affected by minute changes in register of specific relationships. "Dolly was haunted by the sense of coming evil; she was pained by Robert's manner," the narrator tells us during the dinner party scene. "He was still displeased, and he took care to show that it was so. She was troubled about George; she was wondering what he was about....Again she told herself that it was absurd to be anxious, and wicked to be cross, and she tried to shake off her depression, and to speak to the courteous though rather alarming neighbour on her right hand" (Chapter 34, 303). Note the disjunction between the foreboding opening clause "Dolly was haunted" and the relatively transitory feeling implied by the conjoined clause that begins "she was pained." What is the coming evil that haunts Dolly? The circumstances of her immediate impres sions--pain at Robert's annoyance, worry about George (this scene occurs just after George breaks with Rhoda and leaves Cambridge)--do not seem to justify her "sense of coming evil," yet events soon bear out her worst fears. Dolly's mysterious other self has already forecast George's death in the Crimea and Henley's duplicitous relationship with Rhoda, yet she suppresses that self as "absurd" and "wicked." Again, her suppression of these voices, her confusion over their authenticity, is partly attributable to the gender role she is expected to play. Robert is irritated when be overhears someone say, "That girl does not look happy"; it is "unwomanly" to appear unhappy in society. Her unhappiness, in fact, is a direct challenge to Robert's authority. "I wonder when you will learn to trust me, Dora," Robert asks her. "How shall we ever get on unless you do?" (Chapter 32, 286). To listen to her mysterious other self, which seems to discern her past, present, and future in a single comprehending insight, is to tru st her own voice instead of that of her male protector. Her resistance to that voice is at the root of her depression, which, when viewed in light of her subsequent exhaustion and debilitating illness, is clinical and eventually life threatening.

Yet at the same time Dolly begins to manifest the physical and emotional signs of her self-instability, she finds in the society of Colonel Fane a degree of happiness and reassurance. Ritchie's characterization of this moment as a "forgetting" and a containment of the experience of the present moment is consistent with her imagination of the self as synchronic, existing on many planes at one time. Dolly experiences a similar moment during a visit to Cambridge:

There are blissful moments when one's heart seems to
beat in harmony with the great harmony: when one is
oneself light and warmth, and the delight of light, and a
voice in the comfortable chorus of contentment and praise
all around about. Such a minute had come to Dolly in her
white muslin dress, with the Cam flowing at her feet and
the lights dazzling in her grey eyes.

Mrs. Morgan gave a loud sneeze under the tree.
and the beautiful minute broke and dispersed away. "I
wonder what it can be like to grow old," Dolly wonders,
looking up; "to remember back for years and years, and
to wear stiff curls and satinette?" Dolly began to picture
herself a long procession of future selves, each older and
more curiously bedizened than the other. Somehow they
seemed to make a straight line between herself and Mrs.
Morgan under the tree. It was an uncomfortable fancy.
Dolly tried to forget it, and leant over the wall, and
looked down into the cool depths of the stream again.
Was that fish rising? What was this? Her own face again
looking up from the depth. (Chapter 22, 200)

Dolly's moments of forgetting are often characterized as fleeting instances of harmony, contrasting with Raban's sense of discord. But the narrative never allows these moments to be sustained; they are always "dispersed away" by the incongruity of the "real" with Dolly's transcendent vision. Yet curiously, Dolly's "beautiful minute" segues into a reflection on her own self-identity as, in Hardy's terms, "a series of seemings." In another vision she sees herself as a future reiteration, each more bizarrely clothed than its predecessor, leading to old age and, ultimately, to the ghastly clothing of the tomb. When she tries to forget this darker vision, she is confronted with her own image in the stream. While this reflection suggests Dolly's sometimes narcissistic self-absorption, it likewise deepens her sense of her own self-division, her growing consciousness that her feelings of wellbeing and integration occur only in moments of forgetting. While harshly incongruous with the external markers that work to cla ssify her (primarily her great expectations), these moments of fully realized self-consciousness are capable of suspending Dolly's "life-time": they reveal her entire history in a glance, allow her to remember forward as well as "back for years and years." This forward memory closely mirrors the narrative movement of the text, as if the narrator's, or perhaps Ritchie's, consciousness somehow fuses with Dolly's, always looking in all directions at one time within these epiphanic moments of vision. (5)

But at the same time she recognizes the paradox of her visions of harmony and fragmentation, Dolly also seems to achieve, at least provisionally, a practical realization of the "mighty human vibration," which she is capable of identifying in individual human bonds. Raban and Dolly might even be said to represent tragedy and comedy, respectively. His absorption in the operation of fate and essential detachment from the world is clearly a tragic attitude; her ability to continue to engage in the world, even in the face of her growing awareness of its arbitrary and capricious nature, is certainly a comic one, at least within conventional terminology. Tragedy, Dolly perceives, cannot exist if we resist despair at the existential insight of our loneliness. At certain times in our lives, particularly the death or estrangement of a loved one, that loneliness is brought home to us with crushing force. With respect to Dolly, however, tragedy is also a matter of denying the authority of her own voice, of submitting to the false voices that urge compliance with cultural norms--for example, the expectations of Henley and her mother. Comedy, on the other hand, is found in the "commonplace and unquestioning." At first glance, this could be read to mean that comedy is associated with precisely the social conformity Dolly resists. To engage in society, to submit to its superficialities and controlling hypocrisy, is to float with the stream, just as Dolly allows Henley to row her down the Thames in the last untroubled twilight of their engagement.

Yet that submission to authority is not what is represented in the text. Colonel Fane, a good-natured, noble English soldier in the mold of Colonel Newcome, befriends Dolly, who is "surprised to find herself talking to Colonel Fane, as if she had known him all her life. A few minutes before he had been but a name" (Chapter 34, 305). He tells her of her father's courage, urges her to meet his sister-in-law, a nurse in a fever-ward, and offers to assist George in military advancement:

There is something in life which is not love, but
which plays as great a part almost--sympathy, quick
response--I scarcely know what name to give it; at any
moment, in the hour of need perhaps, a door opens, and
some one comes into the room. It may be a common-
place man in a shabby coat, a placid lady in a smart
bonnet; does nothing tell us that this is one of the friends to
be, whose hands are to help us over the stony places,
whose kindly voices will sound to us hereafter voices out
of the infinite? Life has, indeed, many phases, love has
many a metempsychosis. Is it a lost love we are
mouming--a lost hope? Only dim, distant stars, we say,
where all was light. Lo, friendship comes dawning in
generous and peaceful streams! (Chapter 34, 306)

This translation of a "name" to a "known" is the comic process at work. Dolly's tragedy, borne of her conformity to Henley's "trust" and the suppression of the "voices out of the infinite," is transformed by the "commonplace" comedy of "sympathy" or "quick response." Again, this "quick response" is not only a reaction to the proffered friendship or kindness of another, but to the voice of the mysterious other self that travels with us and emerges out of loss and the despair of isolation. As we have seen, comic self-projection assumes the division and identification of the paradoxocal individuality and collectivity of the self. Ritchie takes the comic idea of the divided self even further, imagining the self as always in the process of division and multiplication even as it envisions the potential for transcendent harmony. "Life has, indeed, many phases, love has many a metempsychosis": those phases are life's individual present moments, each contained within itself yet linked by memory and the "infinite" voic e which mysteriously tells our whole story in a fleeting instant of coherence. Dolly senses the approaching evil in one of these flashes of "kindly" insight, yet that very self-knowledge allows her to resist the impulse to tragedy and to embrace the transcendence of comic self-consciousness, the "generous and peaceful streams" of friendship. (6)

Of course, it is important to remember that the narrator glosses Dolly's response to Colonel Fane's kindness, once again raising the issue of the narrator's mediation of the text and leaving us to evaluate her authority to tell the "truth" of the tale. At the end of the novel, the narrative shifts to the narrator's own voice, which describes the loving home in which she writes and the regenerative power of the domestic ideal "of the phoenix of home and of love springing from the dead ashes":

Take courage. say the happy--the message of the
sorrowful is harder to understand. The echoes come
from afar, and reach beyond our ken. As the cry passes
beyond us into the awful unknown, we feel that this is,
perhaps. the voice in life that reaches beyond life itself.
Not of harvests to come, not of peaceful home hearts do
they speak in their sorrow. Their fires are out, their
hearths are in ashes, but see, it was the sunlight that
extinguished the flame. (Chapter 56, 531)

Just prior to this passage, Dolly finds a packet of letters written by Henley to Emma Penfold, Raban's first wife. They reveal that at the time Henley was courting Dolly, he and Emma were having an affair, which Henley broke off with the assertion that "I am not a marrying man" (Chapter 56, 530). With this revelation, Dolly finally realizes that Henley's marriage proposal was premised solely on the expectation of her inheritance. Frank sees the letters burning in the fire and "understood all and stooping he took his wife's hand in his and kissed it" (Chapter 56, 531). This conclusion is far different. for example, from the "Reader, I married him" resolution of the marriage plot in Jane Eyre. In this tale of betrayed and broken relationships, it seems clear that Dolly's is the message of the sorrowful, whose cup nevertheless run-neth over.

Overwhelmed with grief over the deaths of George and Lady Sarah, Robert's duplicity, and--the final blow--the demolition of Church House at Rhoda's behest, Dolly seems to give up:

She was looking for something that was not any more,
listening for silent voices, and the girl's whole heart
answered as she stood stretching out her arms towards the
ulterior shores. At that minute she would have been very
glad to lie down on the old stone terrace and never rise
again. Time was so long, it weighed and weighed, and
seemed to be crushing her. She had tried to be brave, but
her cup was full, and she felt as if she could bear no
more, not one heavy hour more. This great weight on
her heart seemed to have been gathering from a long way
off, to have been lasting for years and years; no tears
came to ease this pain. Marker had sat down on the stone
ledge and was wiping her grief in her handkerchief.
Dolly was at her old haunt by the pond, and bending over

and looking into tile depth with strange circling eyes.
(Chapter 55, 514)

This vision of her dead self, drowned in the pond, completes Dolly's prior vision, when she looked at her image in the Cam and saw a succession of selves leading to old age and the grave. Those silent voices Dolly seeks are all the dead selves associated with the ruined Church House and its inmates, the house characterized at the beginning of the novel as standing outside of time and warping space around it. It is the intrusion of time into this stasis that crushes Dolly's spirit, the consciousness that prior selves do not remain fixed, even in memory, but must alter along with the context in which they were constructed. That incongruity is almost too bitter to bear, yet it is in essence a comic incongruity, borne of the self-consciousness that both greets and mourns each iteration of the dividing self as a friend and fellow-traveler. (7)

Raban's sympathetic intervention forestalls Dolly's suicide and restores her to this self-consciousness, this comic peace:

        If there are certain states of mind ill which facts
seem exaggerated, and every feeling is over-wrought, it is
at these very times that people are most ready to accept
the blessings of consolation. "Peace, be still," said the
Divine Voice, speaking to the tossing waves. And voices
come, speaking in human tones to many a poor tempest-
tossed soul. It may be only a friend who speaks, only, a
lover perhaps, or a brother or sister's voice. Love,
friendship, brotherhood give a meaning to the words.
Only that day Dolly had thought that all was over, and
already the miracle was working, the storm was passing
from her heart. (Chapter 55, 516-17)

The "message of the sorrowful" is a consolatory one, difficult to hear for those who are "happy." But Ritchie speaks of two distinct species of happiness: one associated with "harvests to come" and "peaceful home hearths," and the other with those fortunate few who hear the call of their own voices, their mysterious other selves. The former describes, in the end, a specious conception of the relationship between individual and social identity, structured by oppressive rules that are hopelessly at odds with the true nature of the self and its social relations. The latter is a truer vision of the "happiness' of self-consciousness. Dolly's refusal to rebuild Church Houe and erection of a "row of model lodgings" instead represents not only a comic movement from self to community interest, but the doubly comic acceptance of the self as a provisional idea, whose coherence is only a fiction of convenience.

Indeed, Dolly's Church House self can never be reconstructed, only remembered in fleeting moments of transcendence when all iterations of the self in time and space are simultaneously present to interior apprehension. In these moments, each self views the other, speaking of its pain in a silent voice. The vestige of that self-experience is sympathy, the comic self-projection identified by Addison, Hume, Smith, and their nineteenth-century counterparts as the only possible path to reconciliation of self and society. But as Ritchie shows, the development of comic self-consciousness is an intensely personal and often painful experience, one that is even likely to end in sorrow. Yet it is "the sunlight that extinguished the flame," the enlargement of life at the expense of life's incidental externalities. Ritchie's narrative enacts this enlargement, illuminating not only the material and social inequities that stifle and distort true social bonds, but the comic peace necessary to restore them.

(1.) As Stuart Tave and Ronald Paulson have persuasively argued, Whig aestheticians such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele reimagined Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model for British civility and social virtue, in contrast to savage Tory satire and the Hobbesian laughter of superiority. See especially Paulson, Chapters 1 and 3. I would argue that this "amiable humorist" concept of Whig comic theory was adopted by nineteenth-century British novelists as a fictional construct--the comic consciousness--in an attempt to combat radical individual isolation implied by eighteenth-century philosophical skepticism, secularism, and economic industrialization. The realist novel, the dominant literary mode of the British nineteenth century, both modeled and disseminated comic consciousness to a nation of alienated readers, promoting an essentially aesthetic vision of social reform and reconnection of the individual to the collective.

(2.) See J. Jeffrey Franklin's lengthy discussion of Smith's concept of selfdivision in Serious Play, Chapter 3. On Smith's theory of sympathy, see also David Marshall. Roy Cain earlier identified Hume and Smith as sources for Hazlitt's use of the concept of disinterested sympathy.

(3.) On Old Kensington as an "autobiographical" novel, see Gerin, 171-174. However, she also criticizes the novel for its "want of structure, want of an independent existence. . . . The personal experience on which it was based was all-pervading, leaving little or no license for invention to lend it a life of its own. The story is built up of a succession of vividly realized, or rather remembered, episodes, feebly linked together. Lacking a unifying structure, Old Kensington still has charming and original qualities of its own, which can well account for its great success" (172-173). I hope my own reading contributes to changing this perception.

(4.) Carlyle's conception of comedy is closely akin to that of Addison. His most explicit writing about comedy is found in his essays on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, a German writer and aesthetician of the Napoleonic period. Carlyle's highest praise of Richter is that "Humour" is "the central fire that pervades and vivifies his whole being. He is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a humorist: Sport is the element in which his nature lives and works" ("Richter" 14). "Sport" is an important, if ambiguous, idea. Carlyle, borrowing the term from Schiller, opposes it to "sentimentality." According to Carlyle, sentimentality converts "true humour" into "falsehood" and is the product of overwrought sensibility. "The essence of humour is sensibility," Carlyle announces, "warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence. . . but it is this sport of sensibility; wholesome and perfect therefore; as it were, the playful teasing fondness of a mother to her child" ( "Richter" 16). Carlyle points to Rousseau as an example of sentimentality "run wild"; true humor is more disinterested, a "playful easing fondness" which seems to spring from a deep philanthropic impulse.

(5.) On memory and the effacement of the boundaries between past and present as central to Ritchie's writing, see Abigail Bloom. In a reading of one of Ritchie's recollections of youth, Bloom observes: "The past in some ways is more real than the present and it is a pan of the present. Thus, Ritchie's experiences in Rome are given a rebirth by the transformation of memory into art" (80). I would argue further that part of Ritchie's narrative strategy in the novel is to enact this forward and backward movement of consciousness, as it constructs the present "real" out of both these aestheticized memories of the past and projections of the future.

(6.) Carol MacKay's distinction between women's empathetic humor and men's aggressive humor is instructive here. As MacKay observes, "In point of fact, women writers create images which embody both hate and humor. thus enabling the reader to experience the two emotions at once, in an altogether new way. in the writings of Anne Thackeray Ritchie we can recognize this creative consolidation in her unique brand of whimsy. What first appears as mere caprice of odd fancy enables Ritchie to critique stereotypes and conventions--especially those that have limited societal roles for women--with disarming success" ("Hate and Humor" 118). Although MacKay does not specifically refer to Old Kensington. I believe that Dolly's moments of "kindly insight" represent tile kind of emphathetic response MacKay identifies.

(7.) Again Carol MacKay's work on Ritchie's Chapters front Some Memoirs (1894) provides some insight regarding Ritchie's narrative voice and this relation of time stasis. MacKay argues that "Ritchie does tint write in tile ego-centered tradition of autobiography that has been especially associated with male authors: instead, by evoking herself through her subject, she creates 'reflected biography.' The result for Anne Thackeray Ritchie. in terms of both biography and autobiography, is a rich literary form created in response to a characteristically Victorian dilemma. Apart from the specific proscription against writing his biography uttered by Thackeray, Ritchie had her own reserve to contend with, but she also held in common with other women writers what George Eliot called that 'precious speciality'--which leads them to quiet self-discovery" ("Biography as Reflected Autobiography' 65-66). Consequently, Ritchie's voice is ambivalent, decentered, "weaving fact and imagination to establish a meeting-ground in which images of fertility conjoin her as a creative writer with her father. Gardens and flowering often inform these images but Ritchie also uses any focal point of creativity. such as memorable locations and works of art, as the catalyst for an epiphany. This form of autobiogaphy is thus much more than factual information arranged in chronological order" (67). Indeed, in Old Kensington Dolly's visions--her epiphanies--of her divided self occur when she is looking at her own reflection in a pond or imagining past and future forms of herself under a flowering tree. For Ritchie, the self is its own creator, as well as the creator of others, as her biography of her father may be said to create him. This is also the way comic consciouness works to construct self and oilier, and why I think MacKay attributes an "optimistic tone" to Ritchie's work (66).

Works Cited

Bloom, Abigail Burnham. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Anne Thackeray Ritchie." Studies in Browning and His Circle 19 (1991): 76-83.

Cain, Roy E. "David Hume and Adam Smith as Sources of the Concept of Sympathy in Hazlitt." PELL 1 (1965): 133-140.

Carlyle, Thomas. "Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1827)." Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Vol 1. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1899; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969. 1-25.

Franklin, J. Jeffrey. Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

Gerin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.

MacKay, Carol Hanberry. "Biography as Reflected Autobiography: The Self-Creation of Anne Thackeray Ritchie." Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender. Eds. Susan Bell and Marilyn Yalom. Albany: State U of New York P, 1990. 65-79.

_____. "Hate and Humor as Empathetic Whimsy in Anne Thackeray Ritchie." Women's Studies 15 (1988): 117-133.

_____. "'Only Connect' : The Multiple Roles of Anne Thackeray Ritchie." The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 30 (1985): 83-112.

Marshall, David. "Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments." Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 592-613.

Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Tave. Stuart M. The Amiable Humourist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. 1960.

Thackeray, Anne Isabella. Old Kensington. 2nd. ed. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873: rpt. Bristol: Thoemmes P, 1995.