Bachelor Girl Read Online Free Page A

uncharitable.
    And I leave out her dog, a cursed animal. Tabitha kicked it.
    Before the debuts of the Dickensian sideshow freaks—the world-renowned bride, Miss Havisham, Miss Wade of Little Dorrit, and Rosa Dartle of David Copperfield —and even before Hawthorne’s Hepzibah, the “mildewed piece of aristocracy” wandering her way through The House of the Seven Gables, many voices articulated the case against the old maid. In 1748 the Oxford English Dictionary defined her as “any spiteful or ill-natured female gossip or tattler.” Alexander Pope made it personal: “My soul abhors the tasteless dry embrace/of a stale virgin with a winter face.” Wordsworth commented with cool remove—describing a maiden withering on a stalk—while Henry Fielding expressed pure and immediate disgust: “She did not resemble a cow so much in her breath, as in the two brown globes which she carried before her.” A few years later he added this advice: “Young ladies” dared not venture too close to one of these “types for the girl was sure to be bitten by one, as by a mad dog.” That is, if the maid in question still had teeth. A widespread public discussion had established that the old maid’s teeth were rotting at a faster-than-average rate. Without explaining exactly why, one medical treatise, circa 1766, featured a spirited debate about whether or not the maid should have them all pulled to avoid embarrassment “to one’s relations” caused by rotting incisors.
    In her early incarnations, the old maid was not associated with the industrious and respected spinner. Rather, she was a toothless parody of the uneducated minor noblewoman who had been trained for nothing more than marriage and then had failed to capture a husband. Just think of Cinderella’s stepsisters. (It’s not surprising that this groping sadistic duo emerged in their distinctive modern form in the Perrault version of the fairy tale published in seventeenth-century France.)
    But the industrial revolution and its aftermath would permanently blur the distinctions between the goodly spinner and the crazy old maid.
    Once the self-sustaining mercantile household—the entire working system of artisan, apprentice, and journeyman—collapsed, those who’d worked there, the spinners included, were left to negotiate a place within the new economy. Many spinsters sought work inside the textile mills, although the mills favored the very young girl and then usually fired her when she turned twenty, or at whatever point she began to seem “older,” meaning tired and likely to complain. More mature spinsters took custom sewing or quilting assignments known as “out work.” When they could. The competition was intense, there was never enough work to begin with, and many were forced to quit. A few daring misses took more public positions in small token or “cent” shops, but the large majority moved in with former employers or distant relatives, who supplied room and board in exchange for household work and child care. Those without any connections advertised. Governess, companion, nurse, fine seamstress—these positions would be pinned onto the spinster’s image like a wilted, brown-edged corsage.
    Among the castaways were hundreds of unlucky upper-class girls. Insome cases they’d been orphaned and their family homes lost to male relatives through the machinations of British inheritance laws. And some stood to lose prospective mates. With the industrial revolution, it had become common practice among the upper classes to postpone marriage until the groom had established himself financially. But in both Europe and the United States, many men had quickly learned to live well as bachelors, renting private rooms, joining private clubs, taking mistresses. Now, when the intended had suffered so drastic a setback, there was even less urgency to wed. As one MP put it, “Before us lies the disaster we have…watched coming. A girl who has trained for the arts of