This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make.
She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:
“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”
There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.
Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy:
“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.
Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”
Amy always had to count the pennies as a child, and she had seen her father unable to pay the rent after gambling his money away and spending it on drink. She should have been grateful for her new financial security after having to live from hand to mouth like that. However, if she had been content with her new life in London she might not have gone to America: her unhappiness serves the purposes of the plot.
Before his death, Amy Lee's father's behaviour had been getting worse; he became increasingly morose and frequently came home drunk:
“He had also begun to grumble when he handed over the weekly thirty shillings he gave her for their food, saying that it was a great deal of money...”
He redeems himself just before he goes off on the journey from which he never returns by giving her something that at the time she would have seen as a small fortune and been very grateful for:
“He felt in his pocket and a big silver coin flew glittering towards her...She held up the half-crown in the sunlight, her little face smiling with pleasure...”
It is not altogether convincing that someone who lived like this would not later appreciate having a large income.
After she becomes rich, the Beedings continue to treat Amy in much the same way as they always have done :
“And they were all so proud, the self-respecting, independent Yorkshire strain of their mother’s blood so dominated the emotional Welsh strain of their father’s, that they never said, even among themselves, “She might have done a bit more for us now she’s got all that money.” Even Maurice never said it, even Mona, with her envy of Amy’s clothes and her supposed hob-nobbings with film-stars.”
This is just about believable, but outright envy is much more common.
Once again, Stella Gibbons balances a positive attitude with a negative one. The editor's middle-aged secretary at the boys' magazine where Amy worked as the office girl is very mean-spirited and resents Amy's success as a writer:
“There was an exceedingly sour and heated atmosphere in the outer office as though someone had been boiling the vinegar..."
"Miss Grace had filled the office on the occasion of Amy’s farewell visit with the familiar hot-vinegar odour of envy. The words Upstart and Cheat seemed to hover in the air above Miss Grace’s elaborately curled head, and she could barely bring herself to give Amy a sour farewell smile...and if envy…could have miraculously procured Miss Grace a mink jacket, Miss Grace would have had more mink jackets than she knew what to do with. But as she said good-bye to Amy Miss Grace had to face the fact that she had only a squirrel coney collar on a three and a half guinea coat. Small wonder that the vinegar boiled and seethed.”
'Hot vinegar' - this is a really good expression!
The previously featured Canadian novelist L. M. Montgomery, who like Amy Lee was a solitary child and created imaginary friends, wrote this in a letter to her literary pen-friend Ephraim Weber in 1908 shortly after the publication and great success of her first book, Anne of Green Gables:
“If you want to find out just how much envy and petty spite and meanness exists in people, even people who call themselves your friends, just write a successful book or do something they can’t do, and you’ll find out!“
From The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber 1905-1909
This is all very true, at least at the lower levels of humanity and among the sort of people who begrudge others their success. They feel threatened when someone leaves their circle and goes where they can't follow; they resent the perceived escape to a better life, often because they are not satisfied with their own lives.
L. M. Montgomery said this in a later letter:
“Miss Grace had worked off her feeling about Amy by building up an elaborate theory among her friends that Amy had a man friend who wrote all her books, based on the fact that Maurice Beeding had once rung Amy up at the office with some information about dog-racing which she wanted to work into a story. Miss Grace’s friends used to nod their heads and compress their lips and smile whenever Amy’s books came up in conversation...”
How pathetic!
I wonder whether Stella Gibbons herself was the object of similar envy and mean-spiritedness when Cold Comfort Farm, her first published novel, was an immediate success. Did any of the people around her exude the sour smell of hot vinegar?
The silver half-crown that Amy Lee's father gave her would have been similar to this King George V specimen from 1928:
