Rummagings 1: Charles Sangster

I lay there . . . lay there through the lone long night, but sleep was out of the question, and Nature’s sweet restorer came not at my bidding. The cause was on this wise: opposite to my berth in the lower Cabin, occupying two different beds, one above the other, lay two French-Canadian damsels—heaven knows how they got there, or why they besieged the place. Morpheus was no [Page 5] companion of theirs, Muta had given them up long ago; they slept not, neither did they try to sleep, but kept up such a running fire of talk, talk, talk, gabble, gabble, gabble, from nine o’clock until two, that the mere thought of sleeping was an absurdity, and sleeping itself a downright impossibility at best. I opened the curtains and peeped out. Young la-Belle France, in the lower berth, was getting up in superbly-tempting dishabille—a kind of Nun’s dress, (I suppose it was—I know nothing about these things) to snuff the candle. What brilliant eyes! what healthy cheeks! what well-turned ankles, and such a pretty foot! Oh, Lawrence Sterne! where would have been thy Tristram’s philosophy had he been here where poor Pilgarlic lay, as quiet as an oyster in its shell? In his head—No! I thought of the evening when good harmless Corporal Trim was, with all the gallantry of an old soldier, explaining the mysteries of the fortifications to the fair Mistress Bridget—when the ramparts fell! I was fairly besieged. To attack and conquer young France with my British arms, would have been the work of a moment—but the Nun’s dress popped into bed again, and the candle went out.—Why was the old she sentinel in that upper berth? I thought of what Richard III said to Lady Anne, and thinking I went to sleep. The consequence of all this was, that I awoke next morning with no joke of a headache, and not in the very liveliest of moods. (122-23)

The fact that this passage was published in 1853 in a Canadian newspaper (The British Whig [Kingston]) is only one of the remarkable things about it. Especially startling is its unabashed appreciation of the physical attributes of "Young la-Belle France" and much more so its unembarrassed expression of a desire to re-enact Britain’s conquest of New France in terms suggestive of a sexual assault—a sexual assault that might actually have occurred, Sangster implies, but for the presence of "the old sentinel . . . in that upper berth." Almost certainly the passage was acceptable to the publisher and readers of The British Whig because it describes nothing more than a fantasy, but it was probably also saved from censure by its elaborate use of a military conceit and by its playfully self-dramatizing and self-deprecating allusions to classical mythology (Morpheus, Muta)¹ and to a variety of literary texts, not least Tristram Shandy. Yet there is a darker side even to Sangster’s playfulness, for the allusion to Shakespeare’s Richard III in his second-to-last sentence is to the soliloquy that Gloucester delivers at the end of Act 1, Scene 2 after Lady Anne has left the stage:

Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long. [Page 6]
What! I, that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by—
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And nothing I to back my suit at all
But the plain Devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
Ha!
                                                                (1.2 230-41)

Note

1. Morpheus, of course, was the Greek god of dreams and Muta the Roman personification of silence. [back]