Tattycoram [Hardcover]

This well-researched novel by Audrey Thomas, twice nominated for a Governor General's Award for fiction, is set in Victorian England and explores the world of a maid, Harriet Coram, who worked for Charles Dickens. Deftly weaving fact and fiction, the author follows the orphaned Harriet, nicknamed Tattycoram, from her first days in the prison-like Foundling Hospital of London, to her role as a domestic in the Dickens household, to her search for and return to her first adoptive farm family in the countryside. "Tattycoram" originally appeared as a character in the Dickens novel, Little Dorrit, which lends the story resonance and depth, especially when she confronts the famous writer late in his life with his caricature of her.

The author's descriptions of the Foundling Hospital and the world of Dickens are excellent, including the Dickensian names used: Mr. Twigg the gardener, Mr. Standfast the choirmaster, and Grip the caged raven, for example. For most of the book (told from Harriet's point of view), Dickens comes across as a kind, generous, and energetic character: "noisy, full of fun, bellowing and teasing or presiding at dinners where the sauce was always laughter. He could imitate just about anyone: soldiers, sailors, barrow men, the Prime Minister even." The characters grow and change realistically and Thomas imbues them with a humanity that is refreshing. The writing is characterized by clarity and a deceptive simplicity, the mark of a skilled novelist, and the use of colloquial language in the dialogue is not overdone. Altogether, this is a lovely small novel and a rare glimpse into a famous author's private world. --Mark Frutkin

Audrey Thomas plucks a fictional character from obscurity and presents her centre stage in her latest novel. Perhaps this trend began with the dazzling disinterment of an intriguing minor character in Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea. The Caribbean-born Rhys made a whole generation take a second look at the woman she called Antoinette Cosway, the “mad woman in the attic” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys’s portrait was not only dangerous and exciting; it also engendered a re-examination of the colonialism that had shaped Mr. Rochester’s Creole wife, the creature he locked away in England like a dirty secret.
West coast writer Audrey Thomas similarly refashions a character called Tattycoram, who first appeared as a temperamental foundling, ultimately redeemed by her kind employers, in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. A delight from start to finish, Thomas’s novel-seemingly without effort-reinvents the Victorian genre, stripping away excess verbiage, removing the omniscient narrator, and giving us instead the voice of young Harriet Coram, an honest outsider in search of her identity. Having spent halcyon childhood years in the bosom of her wet nurse’s family in the village of Shere, Harriet, a “child of shame”, is forcibly removed to a foundling home in London. While she is still happy in the village, her foster grandfather, a blind woodcarver, makes a remark that rings with Freudian prescience: “What a child sees in the first six years of his life, he never forgets. . . It’s in there, somewhere, and all he has to do is draw it out.”
Harriet’s memories are of village life, its changing seasons, its magical skies, the adventures she shared with big brother Sam and little brother Jonnie. These, and the kind ministrations of her foster mother and father, prove enough to sustain her when, as the law requires, she is returned to London. Not yet six, the child is seized and put on a cart with dozens of others. On arrival in the foundling home, she is issued a name, Harriet Coram, a number (19,176), and a uniform “made from heavy brown material that scratched [her] neck raw.” Here she spends the next several years behind institutional walls. Receiving a basic education, she shows a talent for needlework, including crocheting and “tatting”. Ladies and gentlemen visit for Sunday services, and the foundlings, including Harriet, sing hymns and are put on display for the gentry.
When a youthful Charles Dickens, a regular at the services, offers to hire her as a servant, innocent Hattie asks if he’s her father. Dickens seems eager to help children who have been dealt a rotten hand by life; he takes the girl home to Doughty Street and his ever-pregnant wife, Catherine. Sensing a rival in the servant girl, Georgina, Mrs. Dickens’s younger sister, invents the derogatory moniker “Tattycoram”. In another scene Georgina taunts Harriet by waving a foundling’s uniform under her nose, and saying that she intends to wear it as a fancy dress. The provoked servant dashes a china cup against the wall, a firing offence. But kind Mr. Dickens intervenes, telling her to count to “two-and-twenty” before losing her temper again. Still, he stores these tics and rivalries in his fertile brain for future use.
Harriet proves to be no mere servant; she goes on to teach in the village school, and to work at Urania Cottage, an institution established by Dickens and a wealthy benefactress to train young women who have strayed from the straight and narrow. Adhering to the old dictum that “character is fate”, good things come Harriet’s way. She’s able to care for her mother in her last days, and she is reunited-however improbably-with her long-lost foster brothers Jonnie and Sam. Such happy episodes mirror the best of Dickens, and Thomas generously allows us to bask in her character’s deserved good fortune.
At first it seems that the energetic Dickens owes no debt to the people who inspire his fiction. As he remarks of a fat cockney boy who guards the street entrance, “I conjure them up, and then, by God, they appear in real life! I must be more careful.” It comes somewhat as a surprise, therefore, that late in Hattie’s life, a second Little Dorrit character, an embittered grudge-holder named Elisabeth Avis-whom Harriet remembers from Urania Cottage-knocks on her door. Accompanied by a dwarfish male, Avis explains that she’s planning a lawsuit against the author who has portrayed them unflatteringly. Before the novel can turn into Several Characters in Search of an Author, Harriet declines. But she does visit Mr. Dickens, with disastrous results. This witty and wise tale seems to suggest that a modest role-whether real or invented-if well and truly played, offers greater satisfaction than the more coveted, yet far more exhausting role of genius.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)