Maria Graham: A Literary Biography
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Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

Chapter 1:  The Early Years
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The detached tone of the account does not conform to the distressing content of the story; on the contrary, it appears to be a narratological strategy intended to cause a greater impact through this disparity. The tone changes, nevertheless, when Maria Graham describes the state of the family house. Dickens himself could have created these images:

The thatch was off the roof, the bedsteads broken, the bedding in tatters, and it was evidently impossible to drag it into any corners in which it would be sheltered from the rain and snow. The mud floor in the room downstairs was all in holes, the window was broken, and stuffed in places with bits of rag, the children’s clothes were thin and ragged, though patched by the poor mother as long as patches would hold, the little garden fence, originally of mud, had given way, so that the bean haulm which she and her children had gleaned for winter fuel was open to the depredation of children and swine. (Ibid.)

Maria never mentions her mother in her texts after her sad parting scene, which I mentioned earlier, yet there is a trace of feeling for her own loss in the detailed descriptions just quoted. The strong images of the ravages of winter, lack of shelter, and insufficient clothing for the orphan children provide a moving representation of destitution. A great part of the force of this descriptive passage lies in that the narrator makes the dead mother more visible than the living father and therefore her death more poignant. Her presence is felt in her pitiful attempts to darn the clothes of her children, in her hoard of dry sticks for fuel, and in the rags that stopped the wind from coming in through the broken panes. For the children, the loss of their mother means that now they will lack even her ineffectual efforts at caring for them. Maria communicates these ideas through implication, a technique that adds strength to her narrative.

One interesting personal remark made by Maria Graham at the end of ‘Reminiscences’ can be more revealing than pages of her usual rhetoric. It is a cryptic reference to a certain unnamed friend and to the fact that their friendship was misunderstood: