The Old Nurse's Story

The child Rosamond’s character is a device to set the events of the ghost story in motion. She ages from an infant to a small child of perhaps four or five over the course of the main tale, and the frame narrative shows that she has lived to have children of her own. However, Rosamond only needs to be an attractive, charming little girl to win over her dead mother’s cousin. That’s sufficient for him to decide that he will keep her in the Furnivall family. Once the nursemaid-child pair arrive at Furnivall Hall, Rosamond’s charm and winning ways again make her the darling of both the upper-class inhabitants and the small circle of servants. As a pretty and winning child, Rosamond contributes an innocence that heightens the suspense of the tale when she might become a victim of the house’s evil spirits. Her characterization also emphasizes the cruelty of old Lord Furnivall and Miss Grace, who cause the death of another innocent child.

The evident affection between the nurse and Rosamond is a device to support the positive characterization of Hester, especially the fact that Rosamond has kept Hester in her service. 

There are two characters who are referred to as Lord Furnivall. The first one introduced is the cousin of little Rosamond’s mother who comes to settle her parents’ affairs after their death and takes her to the family estate further in the north. The story reveals very little about him, except that Hester makes clear he is not as prone to admire Rosamond as any of the other characters in her tale are. After hearing the full story, readers might come to see the young lord as sharing some of his grandfather’s selfishness (if not his brutality) when he leaves Hester and Rosamond in the charge of servants and never makes any effort to treat the young child as a real family member. His lack of interest enables the premise of the story and also juxtaposes Hester’s protection of and dedication to Rosamond: as the story makes clear, Hester has no right to his ward, but is by far the better guardian.

With the two Lord Furnivalls, Gaskell makes use of the confusion that noble titles can lead to across generations. The older lord is the clear antagonist in the tale. A cruel patriarch without any moral virtue, but with all the power social status can grant, the depth of his selfishness comes through when we see him willing to use force on a vulnerable child simply to have his will. He is a proud, cruel man whose love of music might be his only attractive quality. His grandson may have learned some of his callousness, but the narrative draws back from offering positive evidence that those lessons have been passed on through generations of patriarchal lineage.

The oldest sister in the Furnivall family is a minor character who serves as a cautionary tale. When Miss Maude secretly marries the family’s foreign musician and hides her secret daughter, she comes dangerously close to the Victorian stereotype of the fallen woman. Because she married her child’s husband, she is still presented as morally intact, although eloping with a retainer of the family without her father’s consent would be shocking. Her haughtiness and her petty jealousy toward her sister demonstrate her vices, as does her willful lack of judgment in choosing a man who flirts with both sisters. More symbolically, when Maude takes to riding “wildly” across the countryside to see her daughter, she reveals the lack of moral and emotional restraint required by the Victorian ideal of femininity. Without endorsing Maude’s flaws, Gaskell manages to point to the excess of these societal expectations for female restraint when she has the dying Maude lament that the beating did not kill her wounded child, but “it was the frost and the cold” of being turned out on the Fells. That cry hints at the unjust mortal peril that Gaskell knew patriarchal culture exercised on women who stepped outside the tightly restrictive social limits of Victorian femininity.

These three characters are the servants who become Hester’s colleagues and friends when she moves to Furnivall Hall: James is the manservant or “footman”, Dorothy is his wife, the housekeeper, and Agnes is the young maid of all work. The story makes clear that the servants maintain a sense of status difference within their interactions. This, along with their dedicated maintenance of the house and its inhabitants, speaks to their reliability: They do not take advantage of their employer’s vulnerability to disrupt the established order. James holds a deep allegiance to the Furnivall family that his wife does not entirely share, but he also makes efforts to welcome Hester and becomes charmed by Rosamond. Dorothy is also from Westmoreland and befriends Hester immediately. Their sociability contrasts sharply with the coldness that Hester encounters from the elderly aristocratic inhabitants. After the bereaved Hester and Rosamond make the long journey to the hall and find themselves discomfited by the strange circumstances, James and Dorothy are the ones who make the effort to make the strangers feel comfortable. As Hester puts it, “old James called up Dorothy, his wife, to bid us welcome; and both he and she were so hospitable and kind, that by and by Miss Rosamond and me felt quite at home” (9). The hauteur of the gentlewomen is emphasized by comparison.

The younger sister Grace and her companion Mrs. Stark are all the only remaining members of the generation whose spirits haunt the house. When Hester arrives, both the elderly women strike her as cold and detached. Their only activities are dining together and continually embroidering tapestries, a refined but useless occupation for idle ladies. The women don’t seem to serve any useful function in the house, and are emblematic of the signs of the physical decay around them in the house, and the moral decay of the family. Mrs. Stark is Miss Furnivall’s longstanding “maid-companion” (i.e., a well-born but poor woman who serves her employer in return for her upkeep), but Hester finds her cold and distant, rather than caring. The two sisters Maude and Grace are alike in their haughty nature and their jealousy of each other. Though Miss Maude marries the musician so that events set the two sisters apart, they are identical in their character traits. The wildness that Miss Maude betrays in her riding, her younger sister reveals in her jealous spite. Some difficulty in determining which sister is being referred to is a mark of how flat these two characters are in their interchangeability. That flatness is literalized in the way that Miss Grace the younger seems to step straight out of her two-dimensional portrait to appear as a spirit next to her father in the final scene.