A Woman’s Thoughts About Men: Malthus and Middle-Class Masculinity in Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman

ABSTRACT From its publication in 1856 to the present-day Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman has intrigued readers in its representation of masculinity and potential to be read “aslant”, offering a divergent model of manliness, or even the “split consciousness” of the woman writer’s self-image refracted through her depiction of a cast of male characters (Showalter, 1975). Most recently Karen Bourrier has discussed the novel’s exploration of industry and invalidism as told through the narrative framework of an “intense homoerotic friendship between a strong man and his disabled friend” (Bourrier, 2015), and, in a 2007 article, Silvana Colella uses gift theory to demonstrate the intrinsic codes of gentlemanliness inherent in capitalist economics faithfully embodied in the text. This article considers Craik’s representation of men in the novel as a lens through which Craik could engage with, and question, some of the largest theoretical areas of nineteenth-century, male-dominated intellectual life: economics, science, and politics. The article begins with an examination of the novel in relation to Malthus’ economic theories of population and the tensions between Lamarckian and Malthusian ideology in the field of evolutionary theory in the works of Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, and others. The article will then explore the effect of Malthusian theory on discourses that emphasised masculine self-control as articulated in the symbiotic relationship of the two male protagonists, before concluding with Craik’s intervention in the history of the woman writer as woman writer. I will demonstrate how this enormously popular novel interrogated and intervened in the assumptions of sentimental fiction by contextualising Craik’s construction of a male narrative voice and an interdependent male relationship in terms of nineteenth-century economic, scientific, and political theoretical debates.

women. 6 Hence, the contemporary reviewer's justification for positioning Craik as a writer of sentimental, "womanish" works. 7 Having previously worked at a rate of at least one novel a year (plus various other literary outputs), there is a gap of three years between Craik's publication of Agatha's Husband and John Halifax, Gentleman, the novel which she is best known for today and a bestseller in her own time. 8 This signals a change in Craik's working patterns and, more significantly, her subject matter. Despite R. H. Hutton's insistence to the contrary, John Halifax, Gentleman contains many of the "things" from his list of items that occupy the male mind and where, as in the case of the telegraphcable, it falls outside the purview of the novel's carefully plotted historical framework, we find no anachronistic slippages. 9 In Craik's enormously popular novel we see ballot-boxes and a critique of rotten boroughs; a run on the town's bank-reserves and the panic of 1825; those "new and dangerous things called railways" (355); "cotton lords" (294); war with France and "Lord Wellington's entry into Madrid" (248); smallpox and debates about vaccination; legal disputes and the ill-treatment of Nonconformists; historical figures, including the early-modern poet Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650), and the actor Sarah Siddons (1755-1831); the abolition of slavery; and discussion of natural phenomena such as tidal surges or "eagres" (36). 10 But, more importantly, and in direct contrast to Hutton's claim, we find the "laws of thought" diffused throughout the novel in the views and feelings of the narrator Phineas Fletcher. Craik's novel is not only concerned with the issues and interests raised by Hutton in his list, as it has what Hutton believes you can only find in a novel written by a man: "a kind of intellectual framework". 11 Craik's framework, this article argues, is a popular distillation of some of the most significant economic, scientific, and political ideas of the period; an attempt to recodify an idealised form of masculinity in relation to these ideas; and an intervention in the history of the woman writer as a woman writer.
Since Sally Mitchell and Elaine Showalter's recovery of Craik in that immensely fertile period of feminist revisionary studies in the 1970s and '80s, scholars such as Silvana Colella, Kathryn Ledbetter and, in particular, Karen Bourrier, have expanded our critical understanding of Craik in relation to the careers of women writers in the nineteenth century, both as novelists and as contributors to periodicals; in relation to disability studies; and as a writer of works for children. 12 Showalter's foundational 1975 article, "Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship"produced as it was in the context of recovering the work of forgotten women writerstakes as one of its tasks the correction of a "flowery" version of Craik's life propagated by Margaret Oliphant's obituary of the writer, which was published in Macmillan's in December 1887, two months after Craik's death in October of that year. It probes at the codes of gentle(wo)manly performance of authorship as "heroic necessity" foisted upon the woman writer by economic necessity. Showalter argues that whilst it is the case that financial family difficulties were the "catalyst" for Craik's move into the field of authorship, after marriage in 1864, and "in spite of her husband's objections", Craik "came to accept the need to write as essential and primary", and continued to write into the last decade of her life. 13 Despite this, Showalter detects an "obsession" "with the role of the unmarried woman in society" in the novels written by Craik prior to her marriage, and she uses Henry James' scornful review of A Noble Life (1866) to argue that when Craik depicts invalids, "afflicted characters of both sexes", she is in fact representing unmarried women: "freaks in a society that had no use for them". 14 Whilst this is a forceful and convincing reading of characters like Phineas Fletcherwho, elsewhere in his essay on Craik, Hutton declares "is really an aunt" when "he professes to be an uncle"it negates one of Craik's most powerful feminist interventions: her decision to focus, in multiple novels, on the interiority, the psychic life, of male protagonists. 15 In her biography of Craik, Bourrier demonstrates, via the author's letters to her brother Ben, that writing John Halifax, Gentleman was a creative process unlike Craik's first four novels, which had each taken a year or less to write. The three years between Agatha's Husband (1853) and John Halifax are attributed by Bourrier partly to Craik's "frequent headaches", but also, crucially, to a "conscious decision on her part to try to improve her writing". 16 We must add to this that Craik was constructing a radically different text: a historical novel related from a male perspective, about male friendship, about masculinity, and representing the impact of one of the most dominant pieces of masculinist theory of the nineteenth century. 17 The influence of An Essay on the Principle of Population A common reading of Craik's hugely popular novel, criticised and lampooned for its "wholesomeness", can miss the way in which the novel engages with the cultural diffusion of Malthusian ideology, interrogating what we might now, albeit somewhat awkwardly, refer to as the proto-Darwinian, intellectual mood of the decade in which it was published. 18 In 1856 Thomas Robert Malthus had been dead 22 years, but the influence of his pamphlet An Essay on the Principle of Population, which first appeared anonymously in 1798, and was popularised through many editions, including A Summary View (1830), continued to expand, not unlike his theory of population growth. 19 The influence of An Essay on the Principle of Population on works of politics, economics, scientific theory, moral philosophy, and many other branches of intellectual endeavour in the first half of the nineteenth century has been well documented, often by the authors themselves, most famously by Charles Darwin. 20 Malthus' writings on population growth, and the "difficulty of subsistence" if growth increased "unchecked", helped to promote John Rickman's advancement of a "general enumeration of the people of the British Empire", which led to the 1800 Census Act and the 1801 census: the first Census of England, Scotland, and Wales to be undertaken. 21 The work of Malthus and Rickman raised awareness of the very idea that there could be such a thing as a problem of overpopulation, so much so that by 1851, as Showalter explains, when the population return showed "a full 30 percent of women over the age of twenty were unmarried, and another 13 percent were widowed", this was interpreted as a "surplus in the population of 750,000 adult women without male protection […]". 22 Craik was well aware of this statistic, as her 1857 contributions to Chambers' Journal, then collected as A Woman's Thoughts about Women (1859), demonstrated: "It is the single women, belonging to those supernumerary ranks, which, political economists tell us, are yearly increasing, who most need thinking about". 23 Craik was cognisant of the popularity of Malthusian-inflected discourse circulating in the dominant form of cultural dissemination, the periodical press, and she was of the class of men and women who discussed such topics at dinner parties, in print, in private correspondence, and in other social situations such as the one Craik found herself in during the winter of 1854, whilst taking the water cure at Moor Park in Surrey, whose patients, at various times, included Charles Darwin and Alexander Bain. 24 In her biography of Craik, Victorian Bestseller, Karen Bourrier provides details of the "Malthusian" environment of Moor Park, where Craik spent her time during a period of recuperation, whilst also working on John Halifax. As Bourrier charts, each day, from lunch onwards, Craik engaged in lengthy dialogues with George Drysdale, until retiring for the evening. This meant that in November 1854, whilst Craik was in a crucial period of writing John Halifax, she was engrossed in daily intellectual debates with Drysdale, who had recently completed his book The Elements of Social Science; or, Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1855). Drysdale's book was a mostly positive recapitulation of Malthusian doctrine, including a review of "Malthus' influence both in England and abroad", but he departed from Malthus in advocating the use of contraception, in contrast to "Malthus' recommendation of celibacy as a check to population growth". 25 In their "four hours of conversation […] daily", Bourrier suggests, Drysdale and Craik "may well have been discussing Malthus' ideas about population control, or the consequences of new research into geology and the transmutation of species for religious faith". As I will show in the next section of this article, in John Halifax, Gentleman Craik was employed in a form of transmutation of her own, exploring these "revolutionary" theories of population management and evolution, whilst simultaneously taking on, for the first time in her literary career, a detailed exploration of masculinity and the male psyche. 26 At the same time as Malthusian ideology was permeating nineteenthcentury critical discourse, insisting upon the "grinding law of necessity" that, "Man cannot live in the midst of plenty. All cannot share alike the bounties of nature", Lamarckian theories of evolutionary biology were working in contradistinction, as Piers J. Hale has demonstrated in Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England. 27 In his 2014 book, Hale contend[s] that from 1859 there existed two rival traditions of evolutionary politics in Victorian England: the one, deeply Malthusian, which focused upon the adaptation of the individual through struggle as a means to a progressive social evolution; the other, radical and predominant[ly] Lamarckian and anti-Malthusian, that tended to emphasize the role of social cohesion as a means to the social evolution of a society in which individual interests tended to be subordinated to the welfare of the group. 28 Craik's novel, in particular the relationship between her narrator Phineas and hero John, can be read as an exploration of the tensions between these two rival traditions which predate Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859. Lamarck's theory of evolution, described in his 1809 work Philosophie Zoologique, was influential for Robert Chambers, Craik's publisher and friend, who caused a sensation with his anonymous contribution to the evolutionary debates of the 1800s, Vestiges of Natural Creation, in 1844, the same year that the Chambers' Journal launched Craik's career. 29 Robert Chambers and his brother William were part of the same social network as the phrenologist George Combe, medically-trained brothers George and Charles Drysdale, and the hydrotherapist Edward Wickstead Lane, whose treatment Craik was undergoing at Moor Park. 30 These men were Craik's peers, socially as well as in print, and, as Karen Bourrier has shown, "When Dinah visited Edinburgh, she often stayed with Robert Chambers [taking] extended visits to the Chamberses' home at 1 Doune Terrace in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town". 31 From at least the 1840s onwards, therefore, Craik existed in an intellectual milieu of men and women who were heavily invested in debating the two "rival traditions" described by Hale, as so many of their contemporary societal concerns seemed entangled in a negotiation of these theories about population control, about men and women, about class, and about heredity.
Joel S. Schwartz, in his article on the influence of Chambers' Vestiges on Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Thomas Henry Huxley, has demonstrated the importance of the "ventilation of evolutionary ideas in the 1840s and 1850s" and the way in which they "shaped the debate that followed the appearance of Darwin's work in 1859". 32 Craik's novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, has yet to be read as a text that intervenes in discussions of evolutionary biology and population checks, despite the fact that its central study is a mutualistic relationship between two male characters: one physically weak but socially powerful, the other physically strong but socially impotent. I want to suggest that, in a decade identified by Tracy Seeley as "one of the most significant periods in women's essay writing […] inaugurated by the 1851 census", Craik made a deliberate departure from the topic of her previous novels to focus her critical faculties on, not what to do with those "supernumerary" women, but a vision of two ostensibly superfluous men, made meaningful by cooperation. 33 As Craik was surrounded by discussions about the future of social and societal relations, this departure can, in part, be explained by Hale's assertion that, Competition or cooperation, self-interest or altruismacross the history of our species, and certainly across the history of our study of our own evolution, […] have become key issues in how we make sense of ourselves, of how we might live, and ultimately, of how we think about what it means to be human. 34 The relationship between our protagonist-narrator, Phineas Fletcher, and protagonist-hero, John Halifax, is one of self-interest and altruism, of successful survival as a negotiation of the limits of male cooperative relations.
The tension in John Halifax between competition and cooperation, as well as self-interest and altruism, has hitherto been read as a piece of middle-class propaganda: a cloying celebration of the capitalist economic principles of individual endeavour. Many critics have acknowledged the influence of Craik's novel in relation to the "ideology of upward mobility, self-help […] success" and self-interest that marked the mid-century. 35 In her 1983 critical biography, Sally Mitchell argued that Craik "distilled the ideals of the new commercial and industrial middle class in the novel", and that the book "echoed the mood of the 1851 Great Exhibition with its celebration of British technology, industry, and commerce". 36 Joseph A. Kestner reiterates Mitchell's point in his work on reform narratives, similarly situating John Halifax within "the mid-century consciousness that found expression in the Great Exhibition of 1851". 37 Silvana Colella's exploration of John Halifax and gift theory emphasises the historical significance of the fact that the novel "articulates the pursuit of self-interest" as not "stigmatized or considered vulgar". 38 One reason why so many scholars have found the link between the novel and the commercial middle class compelling is because Craik's presentation of self-restraint, self-improvement, and selfrespect, as noble qualities of idealised masculinity, prefigured another enormously popular non-fiction text also published first in 1859: Samuel Smiles' Self-Help. 39 Patrick Brantlinger, in 1977, described Craik's novel as "one of the most interesting of the midcentury novels celebrating the triumphs of middle-class industry" in another reading of the text as focused on the elevation of the individual, or more precisely: the evolution of homo economicus to the Carlylian "captain of industry". 40 All these readings concentrate, as our narrator does, on what Henry James termed the "awful perfection" of John Halifax: the supposedly "self-made man", rendered heroic, in stark contrast to Charles Dickens' vulgar Josiah Bounderby of Coketown: "a man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a selfmade man", but who is revealed to be nothing but a "self-made Humbug" and is stigmatised thereafter. 41

A Symbiotic Arrangement: John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher
In their focus on Craik's story as an "industrial success" narrative, Brantlinger and others perform the surface reading of the novel presented to us by our narrator Phineas Fletcher. 42 In fact, what sits directly beneath this ostensible celebration of middle-class industriousness portrayed as ultimate heroic masculinity, is the very "intellectual framework" that Hutton claimed women writers were incapable of creating, cursed as they are with an inability to separate themselves "from the visible surface and form of human existence". 43 Subcutaneous to "John Halifax, the hero of the people" (150), who Brantlinger compares to George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866)arguing that in both novels there is a "displacement of focus from social to personal forces" and thus the potentially "radical" social message is lostis Phineas Fletcher. 44 What emerges, if we bring Phineas' role in John Halifax, Gentleman to the surface, is the kinship model put forward by the text, very particularly articulated so as to enable Craik to normalise the symbiotic relationship between John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher.
Unlike Josiah Bounderby, John Halifax, our "tradesman hero", has no bashfully proud parent skulking in the shadows of his narrative. 45 His single possession is a copy of the Greek Testament inscribed with the only record of his parentage: "Guy Halifax, gentleman, married Muriel Joyce, spinster, May 17, in the year of our Lord 1779" (10). Beyond this our narrator insists: [John] was indebted to no forefathers for a family history: the chronicle commenced with himself, and was altogether his own making. No romantic antecedents ever turned up: his lineage remained uninvestigated, and his pedigree began and ended with his own honest name -John Halifax (11).
From the very opening pages of this story the narrator, Phineas Fletcher, is setting up an opposition, a challenge, to understandings of the relationship between male lineage and value, apparently positioning John as familially beholden to no one. Craik too, is setting up a secondary challenge to her literary forebears, like Dickens, whose plots regularly revolved and resolved around the revelation of a character's provenance.
In contrast to John Halifax, Phineas Fletcher is named by his father Abel Fletcher, as a reminder "of the advantages of good descent", and therefore after a forefather "not unknown -Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the 'Purple Island'" (5-6). Phineas not only has a traceable ancestral line but an ancestor who lived outside the pages of Craik's fictional narrative, from 1582 to 1650, and who attended Eton and Cambridge before being ordained to the priesthood in 1611. 46 Craik deliberately enhances the difference between orphan John and invalid Phineas, by providing Phineas with a real historical figure of secure social standing for an ancestor, while John has only his "word" from which to project "a mind and breeding above his outward condition" (6). Despite Phineas' real familial evidence of being from "good stock" (6), his only tangible advantage over John is a comfortable home provided for him by his father and his father's struggling (as we later learn) tanning business. Born with an unnamed condition, our narrator tells us he will not live to see adulthood (12) and that his body is "puny and diseased", plagued by a "succession of sicknesses" (26). Upon meeting John, vulnerable in his homelessness, poverty, and lack of family, Phineas recognises an opportunity in this "tall and strongly-built" boy. To Phineas, John radiates physical health, and in observing his "muscular limbs", "square, broad shoulders", "healthy cheek", "even […] his crisp curls of bright thick hair" (2), Phineas forms a "plan" (9) to ensure his and John's future simultaneously. Phineas appeals to his father to get John work at his tan-yard, judging John's character to be of a grateful and loyal nature, and his father complies. This is a calculated move. We learn that Abel Fletcher has hopes that Phineas will one day be his "assistant and successor" in the business, but his son is "a sickly creature", "as helpless and useless to him as a baby" (2). Phineas therefore must find alternative means of performing his duty, securing the future of the business, and his own existence. Our narrator informs the reader that he feels pain at "deceiving" his father in his "project" of embedding John in the tan-yard (John does indeed sleep there at first), with its "deep fosses of abomination" (25), but we begin to understand that Phineas has taken inspiration from the legend of Dick Whittington and is plotting for John to succeed his father in the tanning business .
At the surface level of the narration Phineas' health prevents him from ever assuming the role his father would wish for him, or so we are told by our narrator. Yet, deliberately, Craik reveals Phineas' aversion to his father's trade is not simply an issue of poor health. Phineas "mentally and physically" "revolts" from the tanning trade. He does not hold back his vehement feelings of "abhorrence" for the place which "to enter […] made [him] ill for days" (24). 47 Unable and unwilling to become a tanner, the future of Phineas' safety and comfort is a concern that necessitates the pecuniary-minded behaviours of the marriage market, and a woman's dependency upon it for survival, as depicted in so many novels of the period. With the practical mindset of Jane Austen's Charlotte Lucas, whose frank considerations of marriage as "the pleasantest preservative from want" leads her to a match with Mr. Collins, Phineas must find some way of securing his financial future after his father's death. 48 Thus, Phineas is inspired by John's circumstances, and his own, to engineer a symbiosis: a fusing together of their existences which emboldens him to seek lodgings for John without asking his father's permission or advice. The reader is told "it was astonishing how bold I felt myself growing, now that there was another beside myself to think and act for" (30). In his review of Craik's novels, Hutton takes this as evidence that in portraying Phineas Craik drew on "the experience of a mother, or at least a sister". He argues, It is scarcely possible to persuade one's self that the tender, devoted manner in which courage comes for the first time in thinking and acting for another, and the self-sacrificing resignation with which all monopolising desires are resigned on the glimpse of that other's dawning passion,are not taken from the experience of a mother, or at least a sister, very thinly disguised under the masculine pretensions of Phineas Fletcher. 49 Hutton's explanation for Craik's depiction of Phineas is a biological one and, in that respect, it is not entirely wrong, but he argues that the character's sympathies must be the thinly veiled instincts of a mother or sister, transposed unrealistically into a male narrator. 50 Rather, the "devoted manner", as Hutton phrases it, in which Phineas commits himself to the advancement of John Halifax, is in fact explained entirely by his self-interest. This is a matter of survival. Phineas tells the reader "brotherless, sisterless, friendless as I was […] I had […] one sole aim and object, to keep near me this lad […].
To say that what I projected was done out of charity or pity would not be true; it was simple selfishness […]" (9). This is the Malthusian ethos of self-interest, as dictated by the logic of life as a struggle, justified by an absence of "kin assistance". 51 As well as being unable to take on the family business due to ill-health and "abhorrence" of the work, "stricken with hereditary disease", Phineas has also come to the conclusion that he "ought never to seek to perpetuate it by marriage" (45). Our narrator admits that this decision was not an easy one, and Craik uses the language of the evolutionary debates to demonstrate that fact: weak invalid as I was. I was, nevertheless, twenty years old; and although Jael and Sally were the only specimens of the other sex which had risen on my horizon, yet once or twice, […], I had had a boy's lovely dreams of the divinity of womanhood.
[…] Soon dawned the bare, hard truth, […] one sickly as I was, stricken with hereditary disease, ought never to seek to perpetuate it by marriage. I therefore put from me, at once and for ever, every feeling of that kind; and during my whole life -I thank God!have never faltered in my resolution. Friendship was given me for love-duty for happiness. So best, and I was satisfied (45).
Here, Phineas demonstrates to the reader that he has internalised Malthusian ideology in his "moral restraint" from marriage. 52 In her analysis of Malthus' influence on women writers of this period, Ella Dzelzainis demonstrates just how much "Malthusianism ha[d] shifted in popular meaning in the 40 or so years since the Essay's original publication", and "had become shorthand, in the literary arena and beyond, for an emphasis on reason and a denial of the needs of the body". 53 Phineas represents an alternative but equally heroic idealisation of the middle-class gentleman in Craik's depiction of him as "the incarnation of an ascetic regimen, an elaborately articulated program of self-discipline". 54 He describes reaching this decision as a "hard struggle" and stresses it is "natural" that it should have been so (45). His attraction to John Halifax and subsequent scheme to form an alternative kinship model with himwhere John becomes the head of the Fletcher family business and Phineas takes on the role of nonbiological "uncle" to John's children by living in the family and providing a supportive parental rolecan be seen as a rationalisation of what Joseph Carroll and others have termed "kin assistance". In Literary Darwinism, Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, Carroll explains: The logic of selection at the level of the gene has shaped our motivational systems, and as a consequence […] [we] now recognise 'kin assistance' as one of the elementary human behavioural systems. In order to account for social interaction beyond the kin group, evolutionary social scientists invoke the principle of 'reciprocation' or 'reciprocal altruism'. This is simply the principle of mutual back-scratching.
[…] As Darwin himself recognised, social animals can often benefit themselves through cooperative effort with others. 55 In order to effect his plan of reciprocal altruism, after establishing John in the tan-yard and finding him lodgings, Phineas turns his attention to improving John in other ways: he teaches John to read via "printed letters" and "a book or two", which he manages to send to him on "rare" occasions despite fear of his father's disapprobation . Slowly, by "hint" (47), and by nudge, and by virtue of the family doctor's intervention, which puts an end to Abel Fletcher's "last lingering hope of having a son able to assist, and finally succeed him in his business" (47), Phineas is able to plant in his father's mind the suggestion that John Halifax be taken on as a surrogate son and inheritor in Phineas' place. 56 Elaine Showalter reads this symbiosis as a demonstration of Craik's "split consciousness". Phineas, Showalter argues, "crippled, gentle, domesticclearly had the attributes of one kind of Victorian woman", while Halifax "was also a projection of a different kind of female experience, much closer to Craik's own". In this reading of Halifax, he is "the epitome of Christian gentlemanliness, a manliness stripped of all virility" as one side of Craik's "self-image", and Phineas is the "crippled looker-on at other people's happy marriages and lives, permanently disbarred from such joy". 57 And yet, even if we put to one side the fact that Halifax's virility is such that he has five children, at the novel's end, Phineas, our "sickly creature" (2), has outlived John Halifax, his wife Ursula, and their first-born child Muriel. It is Phineas' restraint, restraint from ever trying to "win any woman's reverence or love", which came after that "hard struggle" (45), that the novel ultimately rewards. By internalising Malthusian population anxiety, exercising "Moral restraint", and fulfilling one of the possible checks to population growth in "abstinence from marriage", Phineas is rewarded with a long and meaningful life. 58

Conclusion: Writing Men
At a time when Elaine Showalter and Tracey Seeley have shown there to have been deep cultural anxiety about the future of the single woman in society, Dinah Mulock, unmarried as she then was, chose to write a novel in which she imagined the life of a male spinster whose being is given meaning through the process of achieving a symbiosis with another male character whose needs coalesce with his own. 59 In her essay on Craik's non-fiction writings, Seeley argues that Craik's best abilities were in presenting a "popular distillation of the arguments employed by her contemporaries". 60 I have attempted to show in this article how Craik also achieved this "popular distillation" in her fiction -fiction that was, if not dismissed, at least diminished in its claims to "genius" by reviewers who felt threatened by her daring to adopt a male narrative voice and, perhaps even more so, by her depiction of a male co-dependent relationship.
In his review of A Noble Life, Craik's third novel after John Halifax to focus on the psychic life of a male protagonist, Henry James argued "since, indeed, the history of a wise man's soul was in question, a wise man, and not a woman something less than wise, should have undertaken to relate it". 61 This echoes a sentiment in Hutton's 1858 review article where, comparing Craik to Charlotte Brontë, Hutton tells his reader that both authors demonstrate a "curious inability to conceive of men as they are in relation to each other". 62 In Mrs Parr's contribution to Margaret Oliphant's Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations, she quotes another review of Craik from 1866 where the writer declares it "impossible for women to describe a man as he is" because "'they are ignorant of the machinery which sets the thing going, and the principle of the machinery'". 63 Both Brontë and Craik were aware of this resistance to women writing men. In Brontë's 1849 novel, Shirley, we are treated to a wry inversion of the complaint levelled against her, and other women writers: If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them.
Shirley goes as far as to make an outright challenge to the reviewers, telling Caroline: Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted. It will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's. 64 Craik would have recognised the humour here. Writing at the end of her life, in an article entitled "Concerning Men" (1888), she acknowledged, "I have shared with many other female writers the accusation that all my men are 'women's men'". 65 Craik was often pitted against George Eliot as the "feminine" novelist of sentimental, domestic fiction, to Eliot's "masculine" novelist of intellectual fiction, of wider, more ambitious frame, and both authors made use of this gendered comparison to stake claims for themselves in the crowded literary marketplace. 66 Eliot, perturbed by a French reviewer's comparison of The Mill on the Floss (1860) to Craik's work, wrote, "the most ignorant journalist in England would hardly think of calling me a rival of Miss Mulocka writer who is read only by novel readers, pure and simple, never by people of high culture. A very excellent woman she is, I believebut we belong to an entirely different order of writers". 67 Craik, for her part, in an article entitled 'To Novelistsand a Novelist' took issue with Eliot's world vision in The Mill on the Floss, asking the reader: 'what good will it do?' Craik saw Eliot's depiction of Maggie's isolation as unrealistic in its 'doctrine of overpowering circumstances.' Provoked by her reading of Eliot's version of the struggle for existence, so lacking in cooperative opportunities, Craik lamented 'we cannot help askingwhat is to become of the hundreds of clever girls'? Perhaps for her, as a woman who had lived independentlyin multiple senses of the wordfor some time by this point in her career, it did not ring true to Craik that a girl as clever as Maggie Tulliver would sink under the tide of society's inequities. 68 What a strange, unnerving creature that woman writer must have been who knew 'the value of a thing' she had written, and negotiated terms herself; who saw herself as equal toenough to critiqueher contemporary George Eliot; who wrote, despite assertions to the contrary, because she chose to; and whose ability to distil complex ideas into popular fiction was so skilled it remained undetected by many of her contemporary critics. 69 More unnerving still that woman writer who dared to look at masculinity aslant, by depicting male protagonists in ways that unsettled received notions of the male character, and which cemented in popular consciousness a form of middle-class masculinity that promoted a cooperative, non-combative alternative for male relationships.
Craik was a highly intellectual person who at one time in her life was actively learning at least five languages including French, Italian, 'Latin, Greek, and Irish'. 70 Like Eliot, she took on a variety of literary work including translation: indeed, her 'first recorded publication' in Chambers' was a 'little […] translation […] from the Italian'. 71 In producing novels for 'novel readers' that contained, in Hutton's words 'a whole outlying world of thought which cannot be introduced into the tale, and which is yet suggested to the writer by the story told,' Craik was doing precisely what Hutton said the woman writer could not. 72 She was that 'really cultured woman' of Eliot's now famous essay, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', first published anonymously in the same year as John Halifax. Craik's fiction 'is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge' of the word-wars that were being waged in conversation, in the periodical press, in pamphlets, and in books written by her peers in those crucial years of the evolutionary debates and anxieties about the future of population management. In John Halifax, Gentleman, Craik 'does not give you information, which is the raw material of cultureshe gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence.' 73 Her lasting achievement in depicting the sympathetic, symbiotic relationship of Phineas Fletcher and John Halifax is a domestication of the complex, masculinist debates about the future of societal cohesion provoked by Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population and developed in the evolutionary works of Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, Charles Darwin, and others. In Craik's most enduring work of fiction, 'a whole outlying world of thought' is popularly distilled into a study of idealised masculinity, cooperative yet self-interested, altruistic yet competitive: a hopeful vision of life not as a struggle but as reciprocation.