This book is absolutely freezing cold. There is no passion, no love and no vitality whatsoever in the Lamb household, it is of course not permitted. Horace Lamb, the father and head of the family, is maybe a perfect ascetic, physically, mentally and spiritually, his only desire is to make use of as little of the life around and inside him as he can. Yet he is also at all times clutching at a kind of perverted, polite Victorian domestic tyranny at all times. Very reminiscent of certain Dickensian characters, but for me in many ways even more disturbing than the likes of Scrooge or a Uriah Heep.
As for the titular manservant and maidservant, the butler Bullivant who has “served the master for forty-five years” and the family cook Mrs. Selden, it seems to me that they for the most part serve as extensions of Horace’s ascetic ideals for much of this novel, perpetuating the generational misery through their influence on the younger servants, the orphan Miriam and workhouse boy George. Even more than Mortimer or Horace’s wife Charlotte, it seems that their lives can only exist if the master does, or at least the correct kind of master since “not even Mr. Mortimer has the mien of one having authority, as the master had.”
Some of the most strangely written children you’re ever going to come across in any book. So much of this book feels like a kind of exaggerated homage to the domestic drama of Victorian literature, and nowhere is this clearer than in the Lamb children, especially in their speech. The vernacular of the children feels completely to odds with the reality of their lives. Despite it being brought up several times that not even all of them can read or write, and the eldest of the flock being only about a dozen years old, they all still argue, speak and reason in an even more serious manner than you would expect adults to, and often times they do. However strange this stylization might be, I don’t think it takes away any of the sympathy that you might develop for the children and their situation, I know it didn’t for me. There isn’t for example, almost any scene with children that I can remember affecting me more than the beyond miserable Christmas Day that they are subjected to by their father, and despite the severity of their speech all the emotion behind it feels real.
In some ways worse off than the children, who still at least have the potential of future adulthood intact and in front of them, are Horace’s wife and his cousin Mortimer, who despite planning to elope and escape from Horace’s miserly, tyrannical grasp, realise when Horace falls ill and seems to be not long for this world that there is really nothing they can do other than remain in submission to his will. Both are absolute dependents and are incapable of leading life on their own terms, as is showcased further by Mortimer during his time alone after being banished from the household by his cousin after his desired, but ultimately unsuccessful transgression comes to light.
Ivy Compton-Burnett has a clearly defined mission in writing this novel, and from what I understand her task is very similar in several of her novels, that being trying to understand the domestic tyranny that certainly was in her household, as it has been in countless since the very beginning of the concept of family. The kind of cruelty on display here has a more unique, and assuredly more personal, Victorian flavour to it. Its a kind of intellectual brutality which rather than any outward violence or displays of control, deals in politeness, insinuations and a twisting of logic to subdue ones opposition and over time rot away any instinct they might have to rebel or attempt to live in one’s own way.
by marqueemoonchild