The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-15 00:00:00

Miss Braddon's New Romance.
The Doctor's Wife. By the Author of "Lady
Andley's Secret." Three Vols. John Maxwell

and Co.
" Another and another"—of Miss Braddon's
fictitious narratives—" still succeeds." Succeeds in
more senses than one. Succeeds (the one the other)
in rapid sequence. But succeeds also in the sense
(each in due time) of instant popularity. We should
begin to have serious anxiety lest this singularly
accomplished authoress might be overtasking her
imagination injuriously, by the extraordinary
strain she has unquestionably been putting upon
it within the last three or four years, but that
we recognise with peculiar gratification the
fact that her artistic capacities evidence
very distinct and appreciable advancement. As a
work of art, as a contribution to imaginative
literature, her last work is in many respects her
best. It lacks the horrible glamour, no doubt
which enveloped as with a mephitic atmosphere
the scenes and creatures depicted by her pen of
fascination in " Lady Audleyea Secret." It cannot be
pronounced as, ou the whole, quite so enthralling,
from first to last, as " Aurora Floyd "—Aurora
remaining still to our thinking the first and fore-
most among all Miss Braddon's heroines. But, as
a work of art—it is but right that we should here
re-assert this vary emphaticelle—both as a work of
art and as a more highly elaborated and strenously
thought-out contribution to imaginative literature,
The Doctor's Wife" is beyond either of those
celebrated hietoriettes. To begin with—it is not
(although uninietakeably, as well as avowedly,
from the hand of Miss Bra ddon) a Sensational
Novel. Nay, it is not only not Sensational—it
is directly decisive of the Sensational School of
Modern Novelists conspicuous among whom,
of course, stands quite notoriously, the authoress
herself. In testimony of its satirical character
•in this way as a good-humouredly censorious com-
mentary upon the extravagance of literary sensa-
tionalism, it is only nect Beery that we should refer
—and refer, moreover (as we can) in the highest
terms of commendation—to the singularly humour-
ous portraiture of Sigismund Smith, the Penny
Novelist—in its way, as a humourous portraiture,
an unquestionable masterpiece. " I'he Doctor's
Wife," in point of fact, reveals in our authoress an
eminently delightful sense of the ludicrous. A sense
of the ludicrous so poignant, indeed, at times as to
be just fairly irresistible. Of this fact the every
touch (even the minutest) applied to the delineation
of Sigismund Smith, affords triumphant attestation.
As to the mere verbal facilities of word-painting,
Miss Braddon had already, of course, supplied her
readers with abundant proofs of her capabilities in
thit direction as a vividly realistic woman-of-letters.
" A nice derangement of epitaphs," as Mrs Maloprop
expresses it, being among her most easily recognis-
able characteristics as a writer of fiction. It is no
marvel in the leant, therefore, when we find
her, here, once more, by soma apt choice
of words or phrases, realising instantane.
ously a whole scene or locality—city or sylvan
it matters little which. We remember the per.
fumed cloister of the Lime Avenue, murmuringly
musical with bees,in "Lady Audley's Secret"—we
recall to mind the trelissed lodge under the fra-
grantly festooned eaves of which that pitiless
horse-jockey husband of Aurora Floyd's coolly
smokes his tobacco, looking out for the advent of
the travelling carriage—and we in consequence
welcome here as the merest matters of course
those singularly slight but marvellously sufficient
freaks and turns of the pen by which the same
writer contrives at moments to sketch a scene in a
sentence. As evidence of which—are we not with
her in imagination in the early morning out
upon the pavements of the London suburb, at
her momentary mention, quite casually as it were, of
" the clattering tin pails and the slopping of milk,"
there blending pleasantly, she reminds us, with the
cry of the milkman. It is, as a realistic touch of
phraseology, like Mrs Beecher Stowe's realisation
of the raw windy day blowing in through an inch.
open window, where, in " Uncle Torn's Cabin," she
writes of the curtain " flopping and snapping" in
the uncomfortable current of air. Accus-
tomed though we had become to these minute,
though not by any means wholly insignificant excel-
lencies of style in Miss Braddon, W 3 acknowledge
ourselves to have been here fairly taken by sur-
prise, upon the recognition of her nice appreciation
and vivid sense of the ludicrous. The character
of Sigismund Smith alone, would be quite sufficient
to make good her claim to be regarded as
a humorist. 'lle whole conception of that
character is, in simple truth, unmistake-
ably and delightfully humorous. But, apart
from Sigismund, the book under notice has other,
and some among them hardly less distinct evi-
eences of Miss Braddon's lively and exhilarating
sense of the ridiculous. Take, for auample, her first
mention of tie eldest among her new heroine's
brothers—that very type or arch-exemplar of the
genus—

HOBBLEDEHOY!
The person who had admitted them was a boy who had just
arrived at that period of life when boys are most obnoxious.
He had ceased to be a boy pure and simple, and not yet pre-
sumed to call himself a young man, Rejected on ono side by
his juniors, whc found him arrogant and despotic, mooting
strange and unorthodox theories with regard to marbles,
and evincing supremo contempt for boys who were not
familiar with the latest vaticination of the sporting pro-
phets in Bell's Life and the Sunday Times ; and flouted
on the other hand ,by his seniors, who offered him half-
pence for the purchase of hardbake, and taunted him with
base insinuations when he was seized with a sudden fancy
for going to look at the weather in the middle of a strong
cheroot— the hobbledehoy sought vainly for a standing-
place upon the social scale, and finding none, became a
misanthrope, and wrapped himself in scorn as in a mantle.

For a purely comic delineation, however, corn
mend us to Mr. Sigismund Smith, as we have him
here pourtrayed for our amusement, time and again,
in various parts of these three volumes, by the ex-
hilarating pen of Miss Braddon. It is peculiarly
and especially as a Novel of Character
that " The Doctor's Wife" is remarkable. It is
not in the popular acceptation of the term, in any
way a Sensation Story. Nay, as already indicated,
it is for the most part the reverse of a Sensational
story—being, to some extent (that is through the
medium of Sigismund Smith's character), comically
sarcastic upon the matter of what is called, for the
nonce, Sensationalism. The chief, prevailing, para•
mount merit of The Doctor's Wife as a work of art
in imaginative literature, being the highly appre-
ciated and subtly diminutive delineation of The
Doctor's Wife—that is, of the Doctor's Wife con-
sidered, not as a Book. but as a Character
—lsabel Slsaford is the maiden name of
this new heroine of domestio romance. Her
father, ostensibly at the outset a barrister, not
only briefiese but hard up, eventually turns out
to be no barrister at all, but a low scoundrel who
begins life with systematic forgery and ends his
career by perpetrating a brutal assassination.
Separated from her father upon the first
detection of his forgeries—separated afterwards
from the rest of her family, from her common-
place stepmother and those three vulgar cubs
her half-brothers—lsabel, after the 'fashion of
so many young girls who are doomed, somehow
or another, as best they can, to make their own
way in the world entirely for themselves, becomes
a governess. It is while she is a governess that the
young Provincial Surgeon (Mr George Gilbert)
—from her marriage with whom the book takes
its title—proposes for her hand, and without
very much difficulty on her part, but also, it should
be said, without, on her side, one particle of
love, obtains it. George Gilbert's character
and home we cannot but regard as very pitilessly
delineated. Insomuch so that we can hardly for the
life of us very much blame Isabel for beeoMing bored
almost to death by the tedium of both the one and
the other. Surely, never was there a less home-like
house-room than that horrid parlour at the surgeon's
dwelling. And as for the young surgeon's insa-
tiable appetite for rank spring onions and
knobby, prongy radishes as a relish with the
cheese at supper well, really, it becomes
even to the reader of the tale, a some-
thing just simply insufferable. George, how.
ever, the onion-munching surgeon at Graybridge—
a good-natured comely young buxum animal, with-
out two ideas worth speaking of in his head—is not