The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Written and Moving but also Manipulative and Complacent Well-written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and well-read by Richard Armitage, The Christmas Hirelings (1894) is a heart-warming Christmas novella audiobook in the vein of Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Braddon is a female late-Victorian author of eighty plus novels whom I’d never even heard of before listening to this audiobook of The Christmas Hirelings. I am glad to have made her acquaintance, but-- In the story, Sir John Penlyon is an aging baronet widower planning to spend a quiet Christmas at his family’s manor estate Penlyon Place on the Cornish coast with his “smart young lady” niece Miss Adela Hawberk and his best friend Danby (who lives in a series of other people’s homes but is so charming that he’s usually “booked” for his visits far in advance), when Danby suggests hiring for the Christmas holidays “some children … of respectable birth and good manners, but whose parents are poor enough to accept the fee which our liberality may offer.” Sir John accedes to the plan but insists that whatever kids Danby hires, they are not to have any claim on him or Penlyon Place. Background chapters reveal that after bearing two daughters Sir John’s young wife died unloved because the baronet mistakenly thought she’d only married him for his land and title. Although in early childhood the two little girls spent their days healthily running wild and doing as they pleased with a permissive and sympathetic governess, Sir John’s sister finally entered the scene and took charge, bringing in a new governess and transforming the daughters’ lives into one of constant study so as to enable them to make reputable debuts in society. The older sister died childless not long after marrying, while the younger daughter eloped with a penniless parson and was disowned by Sir John. The hirelings duly arrive at Penlyon Place: three little kids, Laddie (the eldest), Lassie, and then four-year-old Moppet, who’s quite the spunky cutie. Then follows the bulk of the story, which involves the hirelings’ Christmas holidays at Penlyon, a serious illness, and the revelation of a well-intentioned scheme. The novel is capably written: British upper crust life, the psychology of its members, the descriptions of moors and manors. Braddon knew the Victorian British novel. Plenty of neat descriptions of the kids, like, “Her quaint little face in which the forehead somewhat overbalanced the tiny features below it was all aglow with mind. One could not imagine more mind in any living creature than was compressed within this quaint scrap of humanity.” There is also at times something almost cloying in her depiction of the kids, whom we just know are going to melt old Penlyon’s frozen heart. There are some intriguing hints about gender and sexuality and Mr. Danby, whom Sir John refers to as “a lady’s man” (not the Casanova kind) and as “Nurse Danby.” The guy is an eternal bachelor who loves playing with kids. . . Reader Richard Armitage does an excellent job enhancing the story and its characters and scenes, never overdoing it even when voicing Moppet, nailing gruff Penlyon and good-natured Danby. He made listening to a three-star story a four-star experience. I did find something smug and conservative about class in the story. There are, of course, no words about changing a patriarchal social system that has a small number of lords like Sir John living in luxury in palatial mansions on vast estates and passing them on to his male heirs while most people are working poor, and his gestures of charity mainly (to this reader) highlight the inequity of it all. Although Moppet momentarily cannot be happy when she imagines poor kids who can’t enjoy Christmas as she is doing, she is soon enough almost condescendingly presiding over the distribution of leftover toys to the lower-class village kids. Even the hirelings’ mother seems partly a cultural snob, in that she won’t let her children play with the local French kids living in the continental coastal village where they all live. There are lines that effectively convey how much little kids hate having to go to bed before grownups, like “The idea of bed is pretty much like the idea of Portland or Dartmoor is to the criminal classes,” but then that is another reinforcement of the class consciousness of the novel. (And just who belong to the criminal classes, anyway, and why?) If you think that this novella was published in 1894, near the end of the Victorian era, while Dickens’ books were published much earlier, you might be a little disappointed that Braddon didn’t seem (in this work anyway) to absorb more of his social conscience. Finally, I really did mostly enjoy this Christmas story and was moved or amused by much of it, but will I now hunt for more of Braddon’s old novels? Honestly, I probably won’t, but I am glad I chose this one as one of my free Audible Member monthly books. I recommend it to people who like The Secret Garden but want something similar and shorter for adults… View all my reviews
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