Old Tabley Hall (demolished 1927)

On December 9th, 1872, A.J. Munby sent a letter to Charles Darwin, furnishing one of the many heterogenous reports from across the British empire that the famous naturalist would use to theorize emotional expression.  Munby, a prolific diarist, had been collecting images of working-class women for twenty years: sketches, descriptions, and photographs, with varying degrees of critical distance and sensationalizing staging.  His letter, which Darwin appends in a footnote to the revised edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, is called “a graphic description of terror,” but it reads today like a case study in the eroticization of class relations and the materiality of affective states in Victorian narrative.  Or a kind of ghost story turned inside out, so that that the mysterious stranger is no longer an enchanting figure we are alternately attracted to and repelled by, but a voyeur-position for a particular sort of observer (a situation I’m tempted to describe as taken, rather than possessed).

Here’s Munby’s set-up, explaining several possible viewing positions before locating the “I” of the story:

It was at Tabley Old Hall, in Cheshire, a mediæval house, unoccupied except by a housekeeper who lives in the kitchens, but fully furnished with its ancient furniture, and preserved in status quo by the family, as a memorial and museum.  On one side of the great hall of the house is a noble oriel window, full of shields and arms: a balcony, overlooking the hall, runs round the other three sides, and into this balcony the doors of the first floor chambers open.  I was in one of these chambers, an antique bedroom.  I stood in the middle of the floor, with the window of the room behind me, and in front of me the open doorway, through which I was looking at the sunlight tinting the oriel window across the hall. 

Then, a surprising addition (which affords several different paths for readers’ skepticism):

Being in mourning, I wore a dark suit–shooting coat, knickerbockers, and leggings; and had on a black Louis XI wideawake, the very shape of hat which Mephistopheles wears at the opera.  The window behind me of course made my whole figure seem black to a spectator in front, and I was standing perfectly still, being absorbed in watching the sunlight on the oriel. 

Munby continues (and, in many editions of Darwin’s text, the footnote rolls over onto a second page, surprising us with the length and detail of the anecdote):

Steps came shuffling along the balcony, and an old woman (she was, I believe, the housekeeper’s sister) appeared crossing the doorway.  Surprised at seeing the door open, she stopped and looked towards the room, and in looking round, she of course saw me, standing as I have described.  In an instant, with a sort of galvanic jerk, she faced me, bringing her whole figure round so that it stood parallel to mine; immediately afterwards, as if she had now realised all my horrors, she rose to her full height (she was stooping before), and stood literally on the tips of her toes, and at the same moment she threw out both her arms, placing the upper-arm nearly at right angles to her body, and the forearm at right angles to the upper-arm, so that the forearms were vertical.  Her hands, with the palms towards me, were spread wide, the thumbs and every finger stiff and standing apart.  Her head was slightly thrown back, her eyes dilated and rounded, and her mouth wide open.  She had a cap on, and I am not sure whether there was any visible erection of her hair.  In opening her mouth she uttered a wild and piercing scream, which continued during the time (perhaps two or three seconds) that she stood on her toes, and long after that; for the moment she recovered herself somewhat, she turned and fled, still screaming. 

Finally, Munby offers an ambivalent interpretation–and I begin to wonder whether the “terror” represented in the narrative is predominantly the housekeeper’s sister’s or Munby’s own.

She had taken me either for the devil or for a ghost, I forget which.  All these details of her conduct were impressed on me, as you may suppose, most vividly, for I never saw anything so strange, of the kind, before or since.  For myself, I stood gazing at her, and rooted to the spot: the reaction from my previous mood of quiet contemplation was so sudden, and her appearance so strange, that I half fancied her a thing ‘uncanny’, being in a house so old and lonesome, and I felt my own eyes dilating and mouth opening, though I did not utter a sound until she had fled; and then I realised the oddity of the situation and ran after her to reassure her (267-68, n.21).

“Oddity” barely begins to describe the situation.  Did Munby stage this encounter?  If so, what could he have been hoping for?  Was he expecting the housekeeper rather than her older sister?  Would the evident theatricality of this event, including Munby’s shadowed position as an audience for the sisters’ horror, undercut its validity as an example of intense, “unmediated” affective and emotional response?  Or would it, in its experimental simplicity–including the narrowed aperture of vision through the doorway and the limiting color spectrum of the light behind the figure–create a more empirically valuable account?

When Munby sent the letter, it had been five years since the passage of the Second Reform Act and the vast expansion of the electorate in England.  The speeches given by John Bright to mass meetings across England prior to its passage provoked Arnold’s insistence on education reform and disinterested criticism in Culture and Anarchy (1869): Bright failed to confront “pauperism and ignorance and all the questions which are called social” and instead unthinkingly glorified towns and industry; in the process, Bright had mistakenly learnt “to call the desires of the ordinary self [...] the community edicts of the national mind and laws of human progress and to give them a general, a philosophic, and an imposing expression” (quoted in Wilson, xxvii).  After the passage of the bill, conservatives followed Carlyle in worrying about the unrest across the country: bloody attempts to steal weapons and free Irish republican prisoners in Clerkenwell and Manchester, as well as anti-Catholic riots in Birmingham.  Arnold’s more moderate response, although still opposing the ignorance and violence of the “mob,” focused on critiquing various hypocritical attempts to interfere with triumphs of culture, which could only be maintained with careful attention to long-standing traditions.  In the same years, Charles Gounod’s revised version (with an added ballet) of his grand opera, Faust, had premiered in Paris in 1869 and become a cultural sensation.  How do such facts fit into the working of Munby’s letter?  How does he use the cultural value accumulating around a medieval hall in Cheshire, and how does his Mephistophelian hat work on readers?  How was it intended to work in the first place?  –And couldn’t these uses plausibly be connected to Carroll’s grinning cat?

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