Mr Hogarth's Will

Mr Hogarth's Will by Catherine Helen Spence

Mr Hogarth's Will opens at Cross Hall in the south of Scotland, where the eccentric laird Mr. Hogarth has just died, leaving his nieces Jane and Alice (Elsie) Melville, whom he raised and educated as he would have educated sons, to hear his will read. Believing that men and women have equal capacities and that wealth would ruin the girls' independence, Hogarth leaves his entire estate instead to Francis Ormistown, otherwise Hogarth, his previously unacknowledged illegitimate son by an irregular marriage with Elizabeth Ormistown, currently a bank clerk in Edinburgh. Jane and Alice receive only twelve pounds a year each for three years and their personal effects, on condition Francis never marries either cousin or gives them further help, on pain of forfeiting the estate to charity. Francis, stunned and guilt-ridden, meets his newly discovered cousins at the reading, conducted by the lawyer Mr. MacFarlane and witnessed by the doctor Mr. Baird. He vows to help if he legally can, but Jane recognizes the will cannot be overturned and refuses to hold him responsible. Alice despairs, while Jane resolves to find work. Their neighbor and suitor William Dalzell, who had been courting Jane, calls; when Jane bluntly tells him of her disinheritance, he retreats from his attentions, and Jane releases him without bitterness, privately relieved to be free of a match she recognizes was never wholehearted on either side. Jane and Elsie reflect on their unusual upbringing: physically vigorous, taught bookkeeping, chemistry, classics, and languages, but not music, and drilled in practical accomplishments over ornamental ones, at their uncle's insistence that education should fit them for independence. Neighbors regard the Hogarth household as scandalously unconventional, and the girls have few real friends. Their former suitor Dalzell's mother offers only vague sympathy. Jane seeks advice from Miss Thomson, a formidable self-made gentlewoman-farmer, who cannot employ Jane but gives her five pounds and encouragement, and recommends trying Edinburgh. Jane goes to Edinburgh to stay with Francis while Elsie remains at Cross Hall, throwing herself into writing poetry as a hoped-for source of income. In Edinburgh, Jane fails to obtain the post of second matron at a lunatic asylum, is refused a bank clerkship by the manager Mr. Rennie despite demonstrating her bookkeeping skill, is turned away by a publisher who will not employ a woman as a proofreader (though he employs women cheaply as stitchers), and is declined by her old dressmaking teacher Mrs. Dunn and by the lawyer Mr. MacFarlane for clerical work. Everywhere she is told such work is "not the custom" for women. She attends a party at the Rennies' where fashionable literary chatter contrasts with her real desperation, and stays overnight rather than risk any appearance of impropriety in Francis's bachelor house, at Mrs. Rennie's prompting. Jane and Francis search Mr. Hogarth's papers for clues to Francis's parentage and find only a series of French letters from a Madame de Vericourt, a widowed friend and correspondent of the elder Hogarth, offering reflections on marriage, education, and raising her children Arnauld and Clemence; the letters yield no legal help for Francis. Jane applies for the asylum matronship and is passed over as too young and unmarried. Returning to Cross Hall, Jane and Elsie prepare to leave their old home permanently as Francis takes possession; Jane shows him around, secures his goodwill toward the servants, tenants, and pensioners, and the cousins grow close, discussing his hope of tracing his unknown mother and his plans to use his new wealth responsibly, including allotments for laborers and improved cottages. The sisters move to Edinburgh to lodge with Peggy Walker, a laundress who had once nursed and supported her dead sister's orphaned children, taking in the Melvilles in exchange for sewing help and bookkeeping. Elsie struggles with the poverty and roughness of their new circumstances, while Jane adapts and finds purpose tutoring Peggy's nephew Tom and the other children. Elsie's manuscript of poems is rejected first by an Edinburgh publisher and then by several London houses, with one crushing critical letter reducing her to despair; she nearly burns the manuscript. Peggy recounts at length her own history: raising her sister's five orphaned children alone, emigrating to Australia as a servant, working at remote sheep stations for Mr. Brandon and then the Phillips family, resisting numerous suitors including the persistent Powell, surviving a bushfire and a dangerous childbirth crisis caused by a drunken doctor, receiving a hundred pounds from the grateful Mr. Phillips to start a shop, and eventually returning to Scotland to care for the children herself. Francis visits Edinburgh and attends a New Year's party at the Rennies' with his cousins, where he and Jane discuss his French travels, his acquaintance with Clemence de Vericourt (now Madame Lenoir), his ideas on land reform and peasant proprietorship inspired by French and Flemish farming, and his plans to build better cottages and allotments for his laborers, which Jane enthusiastically endorses as fulfilling their uncle's true intentions. At the party, William Dalzell reappears, now courting the wealthy West Indian heiress Laura Wilson, and Elsie is introduced to Mr. Walter Brandon, newly returned from Australia — unknowingly the same Mr. Brandon of Peggy's stories — who is immediately struck by her.

By Catherine Helen Spence · First published 1892 · Genre: Fiction, Drama, Mystery · 45 chapters · 183,419 words

First lines

In a large and handsomely-furnished room of a somewhat old-fashioned house, situated in a rural district in the south of Scotland, was assembled, one day in the early summer of 185-, a small group in deep mourning.

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Mr Hogarth's Will is listed on Textopian as a novel by Catherine Helen Spence, dated 1892 CE.

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inheritance · family · mystery · Australia · 19th century · social issues · women's rights · class struggle · character development · legal drama · romance · adventure

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