Marriage Farce

And button manufacturing

John Dobbs by John Maddison Morton

This is not a funny farce, at least it’s not for modern readers. No one will scream with laughter; no one will roll in the aisles. Audience members are not — emphatically not — told by this reviewer to wear girdles and corsets, if ever this play is staged, to prevent their sides from splitting. We will have no deaths from laughter on account of this one. No Greek philosophers, resurrected by arcane magic, will lose their lives while commentating the ins and outs of this farce, as they might if they saw a donkey eating a fig.

But this play is still interesting. It’s interesting mostly because of its time and its setting. Written in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a period of theatrical change. Dialogue was still forced and far from natural. People still exclaimed things like ‘pooh!’ and ‘stuff!’ when they really could have raised an eyebrow. But it’s a moment of divergence nonetheless. Think, for a second, of what the theatre meant, for new urban classes and in the rest of the country. Theatre was like television. Many people went to the theatre as often as they could afford it. It was entertainment for everyone who could scrape together the fee. It was TV; it was watching a football match; it was boxing. And it was often a riot.

The most successful dramatists and theatre owners were extremely rich; they had an immense public, an insatiable demand for their works.

This is who Dickens and Thackery and Ainsworth and Collins were competing with. This is why their plots were so sensational. Why they wished to be successful on the stage themselves.

But I’m talking too much and about things that don’t matter.

First, we must think about setting.

The play, at least initially, is set in the home of the squire. He’s a rich man, an important man, a local powerhouse and potentate. He has two daughters; one of them a young widow, Mrs Chesterfield (Mary), and another daughter who is unmarried and rather young. The widow is under attack from many corners. One of those attackers is the button manufacturer Paternoster — a tedious prig, an awful bore. A rich man but not an interesting one. He’s wearing her down, or so he thinks. Eventually, Paternoster thinks, she will accede and they’ll be wed.

The squire says, quite openly, that in matters of the heart, he leaves the choice to his daughters. So if Mrs Chesterfield can be sufficiently assailed, she may well give up her long resistance and marry the button-maker. Despite so many, so many indications that he is a dullard.

In the house, too, is a major — a local military man. But we don’t need to know all that much about him.

Second, however, we need to know a little about a character called John Dobbs. Dobbs writes to the widow, too, and suggests that he might pay her court himself. (Years ago, before her marriage, he more than once did likewise; and he was most cruelly rebuffed.)

John Dobbs, who’s also interested in the hand of the widow, is a despised arriviste. He was born the son of a farmer, evilly common in his origins, and only acquired the rudiments — the bear rudiments — of gentility with the help of his father’s money. It is true, the squire says, horrified, that when Dobbs was growing up, his father arrived before the squire and produced a lot of notes and coin from a greasy sack. And when asked what he wanted for his money, the elder Dobbs said that the squire could have it for free — just a token of his appreciation for all the good work the landowner had done for a man who was his tenant. But then the elder Dobbs dropped the hammer; he said that his son had taken rather a fancy to the squire’s daughter — Mary — and that his money could be the squire’s (could be all his) if he would but permit the younger Dobbs to take his daughter’s hand in marriage.

And of course, the squire says, I threw the man out. Just as my daughter later threw the man over. He was denied, entirely and violently denied, and then my daughter married Mr Chesterfield — who has now departed — and we have been free of this Dobbs ever since.

More than once he chanced his arm — has tried to get my daughter to wed. But she’s dismissed him, written polite but strong letters to say that, in actualite, we do not want his sort here, want never to hear from him, would rather spurn him as we would a leper. If it’s all the same to his kind.

And yet he does not let us go! He was abroad, so we hear. He was off soldiering — a common soldier, a very common soldier — and now he is back. And we suffer again under his attack. Here! See he has sent my daughter another letter. A letter of perfect propriety, of course. But one that is bitterly offensive to all of us, and must be rejected with violence and vigour, lest we lose all face, all status, all pride.

But of course, since this is a farce, this John Dobbs will shortly appear. Although he will appear in a form that is a little unexpected, a little different, a little deceptive in the most harmless possible way.