YMMV / The Old Nurses Story

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Especially easy as some parts of the second nested story are told third-hand — by Hester to Rosamund's children (and hence possibly censored), regarding matters that Hester heard of the old Lord, Maude and Grace Furnivall from Miss Furnivall, the old Lord's maiden sister (and hence also possibly censored).
  • Lord Furnivall: He's definitely too proud, but look at it from his point of view. His formerly-trusted foreign musician friend seduces his eldest daughter and skips town, and this beautiful and well-born (hence highly-marrigeable) heiress has now given her virginity to said musician and borne him a daughter. The story doesn't even make clear that Furnivall knew Maude had married him! Given early 19th century morals, it's not surprising that the old Lord was furious with her. He might have come to regret his decision, but she died the very night he drove her off.
    • Lord Furnivall's death, of what is strongly implied to be a broken heart, a year after his daughter's and grand-daughter's strongly implied that he actually loved Maude and — too late— regretted his impulsive expulsion of them into inclement weather.
  • Maude Furnivall: Is she the victim of her father's pride, her own, or both? Or simply of bad luck?
    • Her father's pride was why she kept her marriage secret. That's important, because he might have treated her more kindly had he known from the start she was lawfully-wed.
    • Her own pride was why she defied him, and may not have revealed her secret marriag((e to him even after her father found out that she had borne a daughter to the now-absent musician.
    • Both their prides definitely clashed, fatally for Maude and ultimately breaking her father and leading to his own death a year later.
    • Bad luck definitely played a role. Had the weather been better, Maude might have just spent an uncomfortable night outside, to be rescued by a repentant father, leading to a tearful reconciliation between the two.
  • Grace Furnivall: How badly did the foreign musician compromise her? Even old Miss Furnivall and Hester admit
  Hester (narrating old Miss Furnivall's account of events): He taught the old lord to play on it [the organ]; but many and many a time, when Lord Furnivall was thinking of nothing but his fine organ, and his finer music, the dark foreigner was walking abroad in the dark woods with one of the young ladies: now Miss Maude, and then Miss Grace.

  • A couple of points here. This is a dramatic apposition. The implication is that the dark foreigner taught the old lord to make music on the (pipe) organ, while the dark foreigner made quite another sort of music upon Lord Furnivall's daughters. And "walking abroad in the dark woods" would be a very compromising situation, especially since "going walking in the woods" was one of the ways in which Regency or Victorian couples could find privacy to make out — or perhaps have full sexual intercourse.
  • We know Maude had sex with the foreigner, either before or after their marriage. The question is: did Grace have sex with the foreigner?
  • This is an important question, because if she did, she was completely compromised, and it would be hard for her to find someone respectable of her own social status willing to wed her. This may be part of the reason why she was willing to marry the lower-status, but kindly and virtuous, Rev. Esthwaite.
  • Finally, the darkest possibility is that Rosamund is the daughter of the dark foreigner. If that were true, she would be a bastard. For numerous reasons, both Miss Furnivall and especially Hester would keep this secret, even to Rosamund's own children.
• Fair for Its Day: Despite the examples of Values Dissonance in the tale, Gaskell's take on events is surprisingly-modern.
  • Lord Furnivall is shown as clearly wrong, even monstrously wrong, for his cruel treatment of his daughter Maude for "disgracing" the family.
  • Hester, who is of lower social status (a young servant) than most other characters, is by far the most admirable and heroic one.
  • Rosamund Furnivall, a small child in an age when children were unironically preferred "seen but not heard," is quite vocal and active, given her limited capabilities. This is seen as admirable, even heroic — though perhaps misguided.
  • In general, at least three of the female characters — the protagonist Hester, Rosamund Furnivall, and Maude Furnivall — have strong agency and take actions decisive to the story's situation and resolution. There is no male hero, though there are three important male characters, one of whom (Mr. Esthwaite) is admirable but deceased, and the other two of which (old Lord Furnivall and the foreign musician) are villainous.
• Values Dissonance: The story was written in the mid-19th century and is set in the early 19th century. Attitudes have changed since then, and to some extent changed even between the time of setting and time of writing.
  • Family Honor: While both the Late Georgian and Mid-Victorian Ages would have deemed it dishonorable for a woman to lose her virginity and bear a child out of wedlock, the concept of "honor" was rather more familial and less individual than by the Mid-Victorian than it had been in Late Georgian time. This would have been even the more so for an old rustic lord like Furnivall, who would have formed his values in the late 18th century. Today, most of the assumptions about the importance of pre-marital virginity that fueled this disgrace have been abandoned.
  • Honor-Related Abuse: Mid-Victorian upper-class society was much more humane than it was decades earlier. It would be monstrous in the eyes of mid-Victorians to drive a daughter and her little child out into freezing weather in the middle of nowhere, as old Lord Furnivall does to his daughter Maude and his grand-daughter. (It was rather harsh even by the standards of around 1800, for that matter). Today, this would be considered premeditated murder, and the motives of Family Honor involved close to incomprehensible to many readers.
  • Hester's own story, involving what seems like a lifetime of service to Rosamond, with little attainment of any other personal goals, seems rather sad from the point of view of the early 21st century. However, in both the early and mid 19th centuries, it was taken for granted that the happiest fate for a servant was to find a master (or mistress) to whom they could show unstinting loyalty, and be appreciated for it. That has clearly been the pattern of Hester's life.