| The Revealer of Secrets; or The House that Jack Built, a New Story Upon an Old Foundation (1817), by the author of Eversfield Abbey, Banks of the Wye, Aunt and Niece, Substance and Shadow, etc., etc., published by A.K. Newman (Minerva). “If ‘sermons are found in stones,’ surely lessons may be learnt from houses; and if, like me, the walls of every house could speak on the scenes I have witnessed, I have sometimes thought that they might not be unworthy of public attention…” -- the house as narrator in The Revealer of Secrets |
CMP#237 This is the novel about the house that Jack built, part one
The Revealer of Secrets is the last-published title in the long list of novels attributed to the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1809). It is the story of a house, narrated by the house.
Whoever wrote this novel, I'm going to declare that it was not the author of the first novels in the chain, such as The Duke of Clarence (1795) or Rebecca (1799). The difference in detail and narrative complexity between the early novels and the later novels is striking. It’s hard to imagine any writer maturing and improving her style to such a degree over the years. It’s like when one of your students hands in some homework that they clearly didn’t write themselves—you just know.
On the other hand, I initially thought the style of this novel didn't match the later novels such as The Splendour of Adversity (1814) either, because I was well into the first chapter and there was no mention of God, Heaven, or salvation. The story begins with an unrelated prologue consisting of two old men standing in front of the house and debating how old it might be. However, once we get into the actual narrative, the moralizing strain arises...
Whoever wrote this novel, I'm going to declare that it was not the author of the first novels in the chain, such as The Duke of Clarence (1795) or Rebecca (1799). The difference in detail and narrative complexity between the early novels and the later novels is striking. It’s hard to imagine any writer maturing and improving her style to such a degree over the years. It’s like when one of your students hands in some homework that they clearly didn’t write themselves—you just know.
On the other hand, I initially thought the style of this novel didn't match the later novels such as The Splendour of Adversity (1814) either, because I was well into the first chapter and there was no mention of God, Heaven, or salvation. The story begins with an unrelated prologue consisting of two old men standing in front of the house and debating how old it might be. However, once we get into the actual narrative, the moralizing strain arises...
This is the house that Jack built
We learn the house was built for a nouveau-riche native of Gloucestershire, and in those days, nouveau-riche meant colonial wealth. Jack was not an East Indian nabob, or a plantation-owner from the West Indies, characters I’ve encountered many times before in these old novels. He is a slave-trader. Jack rose from being a cabin-boy to becoming “the captain of a ship, which was constantly employed in the inhuman and nefarious service of conveying negroes from the shores of Africa to the West India islands.”
When Jack returns to his native village he is shunned by his neighbours: “they thought his wealth ill gotten”. Serves him right to be rootless, the house-narrator declares, like “the poor African whom he had torn from his country and from social life, whom he had transported to a clime far over the Western Ocean, and who never ceased to sigh for the shore he had been compelled to quit.”
“[T]he trafficker in human blood” is haunted by “the horrors of conscience”. To distract himself, he commissions a large and handsome house. The neighbours come to inspect the finished home and find fault with a smoking fireplace. The miserable Jack goes up to the roof and hangs himself from the chimney. A distant relative in London inherits the property and directs his agent to rent it out.
We learn the house was built for a nouveau-riche native of Gloucestershire, and in those days, nouveau-riche meant colonial wealth. Jack was not an East Indian nabob, or a plantation-owner from the West Indies, characters I’ve encountered many times before in these old novels. He is a slave-trader. Jack rose from being a cabin-boy to becoming “the captain of a ship, which was constantly employed in the inhuman and nefarious service of conveying negroes from the shores of Africa to the West India islands.”
When Jack returns to his native village he is shunned by his neighbours: “they thought his wealth ill gotten”. Serves him right to be rootless, the house-narrator declares, like “the poor African whom he had torn from his country and from social life, whom he had transported to a clime far over the Western Ocean, and who never ceased to sigh for the shore he had been compelled to quit.”
“[T]he trafficker in human blood” is haunted by “the horrors of conscience”. To distract himself, he commissions a large and handsome house. The neighbours come to inspect the finished home and find fault with a smoking fireplace. The miserable Jack goes up to the roof and hangs himself from the chimney. A distant relative in London inherits the property and directs his agent to rent it out.
Separate episodes
Jack’s house is first used for storing malt (used to make beer). Then the house is briefly used as a hunting lodge by a young nobleman, who installs his beautiful mistress. The villagers shun her, and her servants are impudent to her because she's a fallen woman. Trapped in the house with nothing to do and nothing to read but “enervating and mawkish” novels, her conscience preys on her.
Next, in an amusing stand-alone episode, the house is rented to a coterie of educated single women determined to devote themselves to their creative pursuits.
Naturally, the narrative pokes fun at bluestockings (bas bleu). The eccentric group try to set up a communal style of living and resolve to help educate the village urchins. The whole thing degenerates into a brawl over the best system of education and the experiment falls apart. Even the dog runs away.
Next comes a less-interesting episode in which the actual owner arrives from London for a few months. Mr. Prune is a grocer who only thinks about his next meal and his digestion, rather like Dr. Grant in Mansfield Park or Mr. Barnet in the novel Edward (1796).
Next, an actual narrative gets underway when the house is leased to our novel’s main character, a woman past the first bloom of youth, but of sterling qualities. Agnes Carey is intelligent, kind, and pious—neither plain nor a great beauty. Raised by an unkind stepmother, to whom she was unfailingly dutiful, she finally has independence. Her friends and confidantes are the local rector and his wife, the only happily married couple that we meet in the novel.
This passage makes me think of Jane Austen in her cottage in Chawton: Agnes “had an active mind… her own pursuits and studies were of a higher sort than are usually sought by women; but these were carefully concealed from every eye but mine [ie the house-narrator]; and I have known her lay them by, when… she has gone to receive a chance visit of a neighbour, from whose conversation she could derive neither improvement or pleasure.”
Jack’s house is first used for storing malt (used to make beer). Then the house is briefly used as a hunting lodge by a young nobleman, who installs his beautiful mistress. The villagers shun her, and her servants are impudent to her because she's a fallen woman. Trapped in the house with nothing to do and nothing to read but “enervating and mawkish” novels, her conscience preys on her.
Next, in an amusing stand-alone episode, the house is rented to a coterie of educated single women determined to devote themselves to their creative pursuits.
Naturally, the narrative pokes fun at bluestockings (bas bleu). The eccentric group try to set up a communal style of living and resolve to help educate the village urchins. The whole thing degenerates into a brawl over the best system of education and the experiment falls apart. Even the dog runs away.
Next comes a less-interesting episode in which the actual owner arrives from London for a few months. Mr. Prune is a grocer who only thinks about his next meal and his digestion, rather like Dr. Grant in Mansfield Park or Mr. Barnet in the novel Edward (1796).
Next, an actual narrative gets underway when the house is leased to our novel’s main character, a woman past the first bloom of youth, but of sterling qualities. Agnes Carey is intelligent, kind, and pious—neither plain nor a great beauty. Raised by an unkind stepmother, to whom she was unfailingly dutiful, she finally has independence. Her friends and confidantes are the local rector and his wife, the only happily married couple that we meet in the novel.
This passage makes me think of Jane Austen in her cottage in Chawton: Agnes “had an active mind… her own pursuits and studies were of a higher sort than are usually sought by women; but these were carefully concealed from every eye but mine [ie the house-narrator]; and I have known her lay them by, when… she has gone to receive a chance visit of a neighbour, from whose conversation she could derive neither improvement or pleasure.”
Led astray: Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede Blighted hopes
Agnes is struggling to overcome a wounded heart. Growing up, she loved her step-mother’s son Henry Raby. He admired and loved her, and offered to marry her, but she feared he was too young and impetuous to commit to such a step. He is a soldier, so she urged him to go abroad without her. His letters from abroad dwindle down until he confesses that in Portugal, he fell for a young English girl and impulsively married her.
Agnes carries on alone, finding fulfillment by helping the local deserving poor. She also writes up the tragic story of a local dairy maid as a cautionary tale for the lower orders. This story forms a lengthy inset narrative in the middle of the novel and is similar to the story of Hetty Sorrel in George Elliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Anne Groves is good-natured but rather shallow and vain. She disobeys her mistress to go to a market fair in the neighbouring village and is a victim of date rape. Once her pregnancy becomes evident, she chooses to marry her rapist rather than bear an illegitimate child. Things only get worse from there, and Anne eventually dies.
We return to the main narrative. One stormy night, our heroine Agnes is visiting a local cottager down by the Severn river, when she rescues a young lady from drowning and brings her home. This girl, who will not reveal her name, was trying to travel from London to Wales on her own. She is very young, very pretty, wears a wedding ring, and is pregnant.
It becomes obvious to the reader that this is Henry Raby’s wife returned from Portugal, though Agnes has no inkling, no clue. Henry is still on the continent, and the couple have been separated for more than nine months, if you get my drift and I think you do. The baby is born and soon dies, and the fair incognita continues her journey.
Agnes is struggling to overcome a wounded heart. Growing up, she loved her step-mother’s son Henry Raby. He admired and loved her, and offered to marry her, but she feared he was too young and impetuous to commit to such a step. He is a soldier, so she urged him to go abroad without her. His letters from abroad dwindle down until he confesses that in Portugal, he fell for a young English girl and impulsively married her.
Agnes carries on alone, finding fulfillment by helping the local deserving poor. She also writes up the tragic story of a local dairy maid as a cautionary tale for the lower orders. This story forms a lengthy inset narrative in the middle of the novel and is similar to the story of Hetty Sorrel in George Elliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Anne Groves is good-natured but rather shallow and vain. She disobeys her mistress to go to a market fair in the neighbouring village and is a victim of date rape. Once her pregnancy becomes evident, she chooses to marry her rapist rather than bear an illegitimate child. Things only get worse from there, and Anne eventually dies.
We return to the main narrative. One stormy night, our heroine Agnes is visiting a local cottager down by the Severn river, when she rescues a young lady from drowning and brings her home. This girl, who will not reveal her name, was trying to travel from London to Wales on her own. She is very young, very pretty, wears a wedding ring, and is pregnant.
It becomes obvious to the reader that this is Henry Raby’s wife returned from Portugal, though Agnes has no inkling, no clue. Henry is still on the continent, and the couple have been separated for more than nine months, if you get my drift and I think you do. The baby is born and soon dies, and the fair incognita continues her journey.
| The poor young poet A bout of poor health leads Agnes to try the waters at Cheltenham, and the house is briefly rented by another bluestocking, an aspiring but mediocre writer. The blue-stocking hires Mr. Hammond, an impecunious young poet, to be her ghostwriter, but he can’t bring himself to touch her terrible poetry. Despairing, he goes for a walk in the wet grass—without his hat! —and promptly catches a near-fatal illness, as one does. The moral of his story is, if you are the son of a respectable but lowly tradesman, don’t try to rise in the world by becoming a poet, because without connections or patronage, you’ll starve.  |  Although it's not essential to the plot, every line in the old children’s poem comes into play in the novel.
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As the rector says, "We are all born for some purpose; we ought all, in the language of the Church of England, ‘to do our duty in that state of life unto which it hath pleased God to call us’”. Rev. Stanhope finds the poet a job as a schoolmaster and he resigns himself to working for a living. But before he goes, the local gossiping nurse says enough about the previous occupants of The House That Jack Built for the poet to realize that the kept woman who lived there a few years ago was his own long-lost sister! To be continued...
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| The Revealer of Secrets is a variation on the “it” novel, or a novel of circulation. An “it” novel is a story about and told by a non-human. Other examples of “it” novels are: Adventures of a Shilling (1710), or The Sopha, a moral tale (1742). Some children’s books were also “it” novels. Here, the “it” is a house, so it does not “circulate,” or move around from owner to owner. The Woman of Colour is also written in first person, being an epistolary novel, but the almost all the other novels in the attribution chain are in third-person narration. According to the authoress, her portrait of Mr. Hammond the impecunious poet is not taken from the life of Thomas Chatterton (1752 -1770), pictured above, but from another impecunious poet who died in Bath. In my Mansfield Trilogy, I included the character of William Gibson, an impecunious writer who fortunately has a best-seller about his time with the Navy's anti-slave patrol off the African coast. For more about my novels and short stories, click here. |
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