William’s Wife is the natural history of a bag lady. Starting from the day of Jane Atkins’s wedding to grocer William Chirp, a widower in his late fifties, G. E. Trevelyan takes us step by step through her metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service (a good position, more of a lady’s companion) to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood.
In Jane’s case, the process is triggered by William’s tight-lipped parsimonious complacency and intolerance, but eventually becomes self-propelled. It all starts with a broken window cord: “‘The window cord’s gone, upstairs,’ she told William, watching him chip warily at the gaping mutton leg. ‘Eh? Ah?'” A week later, she raises the subject again:
“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”
“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.
“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”
“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”
Then there is the matter of her clothes. Two years after the wedding, Jane gingerly suggests that the few dresses that made up her trousseau are growing shabby:
And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”
“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”
“Save something for a rainy day.”
He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.
Jane does have some small sum of her own, some twenty pounds saved from her wages. But this money now belongs to William, of course. Makes no difference to him: it’s all wastage.
And so Jane begins a slow, quiet campaign of guerrilla warfare, saving a few pennies from her weekly grocery allowance. It must be a small amount, for William carefully totals the bills. And then what she does accumulate must be spent with even greater care, as he would notice anything new. She resorts to having near-copies made of her old dresses.
Then William announces one day that he’s sold the shop and retiring. Now it is not just the money given for groceries that Jane has to safeguard, but her time as well. Each Tuesday, William stands at the door as she returns, questioning any deviation from her normal forty-five minutes. And once a day at four, if it’s not too wet, he goes out for a walk: “If she slipped upstairs at once she had half an hour for certain, if it didn’t come to rain, to do any little thing she wanted: to sew a bit of new frilling on a collar without him asking what she was doing, or turn out a drawer, or just stand, drumming on the window, and look out at the road….
It was the only bit of pleasure she got.
Even the outbreak of the Great War doesn’t alter William’s steadfast routine or his selfishness. Jane takes up knitting for the soldiers, which gives her the gift of an extra hour out of the house each week, but finds it hard to convince William to send a parcel to his son-in-law serving at the front:
“Socks, eh?” And then he began to chuckle. “He doesn’t want any socks. What does he want with socks? Socks? He’d smoke them!” He burst into a loud chuckle, knocking his pipe on the bar of the grate.
Smoke-them. Hu. Hu. Smoke-them.
Then one day, William catches a cold and within weeks is gone. And now we notice how much of him has infiltrated Jane’s thinking:
She saw Mrs. Peat out and shut the door after her and put up the chain. And that was the last, she hoped. Didn’t want any more coming round to help, poking their noses in, for that was all it meant. Minnie Hallett would have come there to sleep fast enough for the asking, and she wasn’t the only one either. Sooner be without: doing nothing but make work and there was enough to do as it was. Some might like it, but she didn’t. At a time like that you wanted to be quiet to yourself. Whoever would have thought.
Left with an annuity of two hundred pounds, Jane is free to buy new furniture for the house, to have someone in for repairs, to buy some new clothes. Instead, she decides the best way to be quiet to herself is to sell the house and move to something smaller and newer in a different town, closer to London. And to rent: “It made you shudder to think your money might be tied up in property like that, and no way to get at it.”
But she finds it harder to get rid of William’s old Victorian furniture. It seems such a shame: “good solid furniture that had years of wear in it yet, and twice the quality of what you could buy new: nasty rubbishy stuff, a lot of it, painted up to sell, and no wear or value in it.” And her new neighbors too forward, the new town less attractive than it seemed at first. She moves. And moves again. And again.
Each move takes her to a smaller space, but Jane just stacks up her furniture. Finally, she is living in a dank basement on a busy street, a place of too little account for anyone to notice. Which is fine with her: fewer eyes spying in and coveting her things. But even this is not enough, so she buys a large black shopping bag and begins to fill it with her best gloves and newest pair of stockings. Plus her umbrella and good scarf. And the spoons and forks. And the sack with her important papers. Can’t afford to have someone breaking in and taking them.
And she sets out each day to spot the very cheapest produce and meat. Shocked when she first comes across a stall selling odd bits of meat as cat food, she finds herself wandering in. “Not that that didn’t look good enough very often, as if anyone could have eaten it.” When a potato rolls off a greengrocer’s cart and lands at her feet, she picks up. “Waste not, want not, as my poor husband used to say.”
We experience the entirety of William’s Wife through Jane’s eyes, so we are slow to recognize her metamorphosis into a suspicious, miserly, and tight-lipped old woman until the process is irreversible. The ability of Oxford-educated Trevelyan to slip inside the mind, culture, and language of a woman of a different age and class is remarkable and utterly convincing. As with Theme with Variations, I found it as riveting as watching a car crash — or, in this case, a human crash. When I set the book down, I felt as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. William’s Wife is a chapter of the human comedy that would have made Balzac proud.
Thanks for the comment. She was not (closely) related to G.M. Trevelyan the historian (but somewhat more closely to Lord Macaulay, another famous historian).
Another fascinating writer who has unjustly fallen into neglect. I suspect partly because she is so harsh and unrelenting in her critique of the status quo. There are paralells between her and Kathleen Sully. Is G.E. Trevelyan related to the hstorian of the same surname?
Thanks,
Andrea
I seriously doubt that Bennett was an inspiration. Trevelyan was a pretty harsh critic of the status quo. Her work was rare to start with and I suspect my reviews have only made the situation worse.
Was Bennett’s Riceyman Steps an inspiration, I wonder? Your description of her books make it look as if she was more harshly realistic than Bennett. Trevelyan must be in demand with some people, or her books wouldn’t cost so much, yet she doesn’t get reprinted. I’ll try to look at one of her books on my next trip to the BL