| <The Saturday Review, Dec. 22, 1855>
| <Rachael Gray>
| <pb n="142">
| <p> "Have you seen <hi rend="italic"> Rachael Gray </hi> 
| yet?" </p> is a question which will doubtless often be asked by 
| the diligent frequenters of circulating libraries during the 
| next fortnight or so. <p> "No ~~ what is it like ~~ do you 
| recommend me to read it?" </p> will be the answer which we 
| may safely predict will be made. As we, having read 
| <hi rend="italic"> Rachael Gray, </hi> may consider 
| ourselves in a position to answer the question of such an 
| inquirer, we proceed to give the reader the benefit of our 
| experience.
| <hi rend="italic"> Rachael Gray </hi> is a story of 
| humble life ~~ one of those which are intended to be 
| classed among <p> "the short and simple annals of the poor." 
| </p> Being in one volume, it may in one sense be termed 
| simple; but whether its shortness and simplicity be of the 
| kind which the poet means by the terms, may be a 
| question. Rachael is the daughter of a carpenter, who for 
| no other reason than that he wished to be ,p> "alone," </p> 
| forsook his wife and his two daughters, and went off to America, 
| whence, after having spent some time there, he returned to 
| England ~~ where, however, he still chose to live apart 
| from his family. The interest of the tale turns on the 
| affection which Rachael bears to her father, and the way in 
| which he repulses it, in spite of all her endeavours to win 
| his affection. She is a dress-maker by trade, and lives in 
| one of the London suburbs, with her step-mother ~~ a 
| hard, morose, ill-tempered, vulgar woman, who had once 
| been a cook in a Prime Minister's household ~~ and with 
| two apprentices; one of them a sickly fretful girl of sixteen 
| ~~ the other, <quotation> 
| </quotation> These are the principal 
| characters in the book, with the exception of Thomas 
| Gray, Richard Jones, the father of the fretful apprentice, 
| and Mrs. Bedow, a cousin of Mrs. Gray's. They are, 
| however, but sketches compared with the character of the 
| heroine, upon whose virtues the authoress is never weary 
| of dilating. She tells us that the story is founded on fact, 
| and, of course, we are bound to believe a lady's word; but 
| as she concerns herself much more with the inner than 
| with the outward life of her heroine, we are at a loss to 
| conceive how she managed to arrive at such an intimate 
| knowledge of it. Moreover, it is almost impossible to 
| believe that a person so perfect as Rachael ever existed. 
| She never errs, unless in carrying patience and resignation 
| to a fault; and unfortunately, her very perfection, instead 
| of commanding our admiration, makes us regard her as 
| though she were but a piece of statuary, and prevents us 
| from giving her that full measure of sympathy which her 
| trials and her behaviour under them, ought to excite. Then 
| the tone of the story is far too lugubrious. In the course of 
| some three hundred and thirty pages, we are obliged to 
| attend no less than three deathbeds, and are treated to so 
| many meditations on the subject that we cannot help 
| sometimes thinking of the authoress as a second Hervey 
| amongst the tombs. One of the first conditions of a novel 
| is to be entertaining; and though we do not object to its 
| being made a medium of instruction also, we decidedly 
| prefer not to have its moral lessons forced upon us ~~ such 
| teaching being only tolerable when it is gently insinuated 
| into our minds, we scarcely know how. Miss Kavanagh 
| apostrophizes her readers at far too great length, and much 
| too frequently. Not an event occurs but she must use it as a 
| point for a moral; added to which, she is constantly 
| adorning her tale with passages which savour strongly of 
| the philosophy of Tupper. We do not mean to say that we 
| approve of purposeless writing; but as we are not all of us 
| cast in the same mould ~~ no two human beings, in fact, 
| being exactly alike ~~ we would rather be permitted to 
| draw our own moral from stories; and we can assure 
| authors in general that morals so sought for, and so 
| applied, will be much more useful, and produce far better 
| results, than any of the cut and dried ones which they so 
| obligingly place at our disposal.
| Again, we look in vain for an subtle analysis of feeling 
| throughout the story, notwithstanding that Rachael's 
| biographer is constantly telling us what are the subjects of 
| her heroine's solitary meditations. Moreover, when she 
| attempts to reason, she fails, in common with most 
| women, although, unluckily, she seems to require to go 
| through some process of reasoning to enable her to arrive 
| at a perception of the moral truth which she is seeking. 
| There was nothing wrong in Rachael Gray setting her 
| heart upon gaining her father's affection. One so good, so 
| pious, and with so well-regulated a mind as hers, would 
| not be likely to desire anything inordinately; and indeed 
| her resignation to the will of heaven is one of the most 
| marked traits of her character. Yet the moral with which 
| Miss Kavanagh concludes her story is, that because 
| Rachael had set her heart on human love, it was not 
| granted her. A better lesson to be drawn form the 
| withholding of the blessing would have been, that there 
| are mysteries which we cannot fathom, and trials which 
| are
| <pb n="143">
| sent us, apparently for no other reason than to exercise our 
| faith, and to prove whether, in spite of them, we can still 
| believe and trust.
| There is a want of keeping in Miss Kavanagh's characters 
| which strikes us very much, when we remember that her 
| story professes to be founded on fact. It is scarcely likely 
| that a woman so coarse, repulsive, and vulgar as Mrs. 
| Gray should use such refined language as she does when 
| speaking of her dead child. We can <line hard to read>
| conceive her passionate emotions, but we do not consider 
| the words, in which she expresses it to be at all in 
| harmony with her character.
| One of the portraits, however, gives us unmingled 
| pleasure; it is of a kind in which the authoress always 
| excels, and we cannot help regretting that she ever should 
| have turned away from La Belle France, whose people she 
| paints so admirably, in order to depict English notions, 
| which she does not seem to understand half so well. 
| Hence, although Madame Rose does not occupy a very 
| large space in the story, her figure will be longer and more 
| pleasantly remembered than any other of its various 
| groups. It is in this way that she is first introduced to us: 
| ~~
| <quotation> </quotation>
| <paragraph>
| Richard Jones, with his heart set on his little sickly 
| daughter, stands out in strong contrast to Thomas Gray, 
| Rachael's unnatural parent. According to Miss Kavanagh's 
| theory, we suppose that it was because Richard loved his 
| child so tenderly that he was deprived of her. But we do 
| not think, and we should be very sorry to believe, that 
| such a rule as this holds good in real life. It would throw a 
| funeral pall over the indulgence of the best and purest 
| affections of our hearts, and fill us with nothing but sad 
| distrust. Through fear of loving too much, we should be 
| afraid of allowing ourselves to love at all; for who is to tell 
| us at what degree in the scale of affection we are to stop? 
| If one who appeared to have her affections set on things 
| above could not desire her father's love rightly and wisely 
| too, what hope is there for 
| <reg orig="any one?"> anyone? </reg> Happily, there are not 
| many who are likely to be tried in the same manner as 
| Rachael was; and, whilst her example is thus scarcely 
| suited for ordinary use, it will fail of the effects which the 
| exhibition of a more ordinary kind of virtue, under more 
| ordinary circumstances, would have been likely to 
| produce.
| One word more, and we have done. We imagine that  
| <hi rend="italic"> Rachael Gray </hi> is intended to be 
| classed among what are called religious novels; at any 
| rate, it is pretty well filled with religious ideas and 
| sentiments, but in a way and to a degree which sometimes 
| transgress the limits of good taste ~~ to call the error by 
| no stronger name. One instance of this we particularly 
| mark. It is where the authoress dwells on Rachael's love 
| for the Divine Being, of whom Miss Kavanagh speaks in 
| terms of such familiarity as we should only think of 
| applying to a dear and honoured earthly friend, and of 
| which the hymns of Madame Guyon are an extreme 
| example.