Gabriel Betteredge Biography, The Moonstone

As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to Christmas, 1847, when there came a change in my life. On that day, my lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage. She remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in the time of the old lord, I had been more than fifty years in her service, and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that she had worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather. 

​I received this magnificent present quite at a loss to find words to thank my  mistress with for the honour she had done me. To my great astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an honour, but a bribe. My lady had discovered that I was getting old before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days as steward in the house. But my mistress knew the weak side of me; she put it as a favour to herself. The dispute between us ended, after that, in my wiping her eyes, like an old fool, with my new woollen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it. 

​The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being truly dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which I have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency. I smoked a pipe and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe. Before I had occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight,) as follows: “To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate.’ I saw my way clear directly. To-day I was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; to-morrow, on the authority of Robinson Crusoe, I should be all the other way. Take myself to-morrow while in tomorrow’s humour, and the thing was done. My mind being relieved in this manner, I went to sleep that night in the character of Lady Verinder’s farm-bailiff, and I woke up the next morning in the character of Lady Verinder’s house-steward. All quite comfortable, and all through Robinson Crusoe! 

In order to understand a character we need some sense of their biography. At some point a writer is going to have to step into a character’s backstory. Wilkie Collins lets us see Gabriel Betteredge’s conversion from an outdoors man, the estate bailiff, to domestic steward, his transition from younger to older man. It is a watershed moment in his life and marks the beginning of his retirement. 

​We are given strong clues as to Betteredge’s literary inspiration. Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe provides him with a heroic narrator, voice, a tone, a persona. ‘As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to Christmas, 1847, when there came a change in my life.’ The confessional mode of personal history, along with the clear provision of dates -- the announcement of calendrical time, Christmas 1847 --- suggests a mode of personal writing or autobiography encapsulated in the diary form. Within this mode Betteredge’s ‘me’ leads the way. ‘Me’ is built around a relationship between himself and his lady, Lady Verinder, his long-term employer. Betteredge’s biography is one of service, and in acknowledgement of this, his lady brings him a gift: a woollen jacket. If we take this object and apply it to the realm of grammar, then the jacket as object meets with the personal ‘me’ of Betteredge’s account in which ‘me’ is the reflexive object of ‘I’ which stands in for Betteredge’s personal self: the self he might deliver to his private diary. 

​A private interlude follows. His lady comes to see him alone in his bailiff’s cottage to take tea with him and to deliver a gift, and in exchange for her present of a woollen jacket, Betteredge is asked toagree to give up his role of bailiff and take up the role of steward in her household. In real terms, Lady Verinder is asking her bailiff tomove inside and take up residence with her as she has taken up some space in his, no doubt, modest cottage. The exchange is intimate and personal; a tender gift giving ceremony reminiscent of a medieval lady rewarding her knight for his chivalric deeds. 

​But something more is going on than a symbolic exchange. Betterdge is being asked to domesticate himself; to convert himself to a different sort of species; to give up his outdoor labour and convert himself to a domesticated servant. Such a complete relinquishing of his former self brings with it real mental distress; some “perturbation” in his mind, an unsettled conscience. Should he or should he not take up this new role? And if he does, will he manage to continue with himself; to remain close to his ‘I’ and ‘me’, his source of self-knowledge? 

Seeking advice, and a higher source of authority, Betteredge turns toDefoe’s novel of survival, his beloved Robinson Crusoe, where he will seek advice and find mental release and perhaps a way forward. Defoe’s diaristic novel – inspired by the tradition of the Puritan journal whose methods of spiritual cleansing by written confession Defoe was himself raised upon --- is thus established as source of authority and advice. Defoe’s text serves as a source of evangelical influence upon Betteredge; a space of literary wisdom and a place --Crusoe’s remote island-space -- where he can imagine himself intimes of perturbation and doubt; where he might hear (Collins’ tone is ironic) the clarion call of a divinely inspired voice. 

Authority is at the heart of Betteredge’s backstory. Firstly, the authority of his lady in her position as employer with all that entails; that is, knowledge of the history of his service. Lady Verinder is indebted to her servant; but more than this, Betteredge is indebted to his lady for making his life: without her patronage he would have no biography to tell, no history. And so surely, he has no choice now but to accept her request as he has already accepted her gift? 

(For my detective fiction class reading The Moonstone, published 1868. Robinson Crusoe was published 25, April 1719. We are practising reading scenes carefully and closely to attend to their literary forms and literary influences. We are practising writing with clarity and precision and without jargon and then with a sense of history).