The Ruined Maid and Her Prospect: Some Victorian Attitudes in Life and Art
Authors: Inniss Kenneth 
Published: November 2007

Although the central concern of this essay is with early and mid-Victorian matters, it would be well to begin by stepping back into a longer historical prospective. Robert Burns' “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” contains an enduring literary image derived from a prevailing late eighteenth century tradition of self-conscious moral sentiment. This poem, with echoes of Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Oliver Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village,” celebrates the homely joys and Presbyterian virtues of Scottish peasants, their pastoral lives a reproach to readers of rank and fortune. It contains a rhetorical digression filled with a curious anxiety over the possible fall of the cotter's young daughter: Is there in human form, asks the poet

A wretch, a villain, lost to love and truth —

That can, with studied, sly ensnaring art,

Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth?

Curse on his perjured arts, dissembling smooth!

Are honour, virtue, conscience all exiled?

Is there no pity, no relenting ruth,

Points to the parents fondling o'er the child?

Then paints the ruined maid and their distraction wild?

We glimpse here, on the periphery of our literary consciousness, the houseless, shivering unfortunate of Goldsmith's “Deserted Village” (1770). In that case, the maid, led by idleness and ambition, had left her modest cottage: “Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,/Near her betrayer's door she lays her head.”

The Burns passage, the poem in fact, is earnest and evangelical in tone, commending itself to Victorian propriety in a way which dialect songs inspired by sweet hours among the lasses do not. Let us, in kindness, refrain from close questions about the folk mores of the 18th century Scotland; or how it was that, in the case of Jane Armour at least, one Robert Burns was permitted to make an honest woman out of a girl who had given scandal by the birth of a child before marriage. What matters here is the remarkable force of the larger myth within which the ruined maid functions as a recurring archetype, an image related to, but discontinuous with, the social realities of particular times that color it. We know instinctively that within the cultural tradition involved the potential villain is not Jenny's shy local suitor (who is courting with her parents' approval), but some gentleman with a taste for poor but honest girls. And there will be no way back. The hopelessly ruined maid, having stooped to folly and been left without a ring, will seek in vain for art to wash her scarlet mark away. She is fated to pregnancy, prostitution in city streets, a speedy death, or any combination of these. Something very much like this seems indeed to have been part of the early – and high-Victorian orthodoxy designed to preserve the purity of middle class homes and minds. Obviously these respectable readers, on whose behalf Charles Edward Mudie so long exercised power to exclude books from his lending library, were involved in such a social myth; and even if papa might have known better, he did have the ubiquitous “young person” to think of.