A Social Revelation.
by Wilkie Collins.
Originally published in The Leader (John Chapman) vol.2 #91 (20 Dec 1851).
I am a young man of domestic habits, studious tendencies, and commercial occupations; or, in other words, I live with my mother, dote on natural history, and get my bread in an office. My scientific researches (the innocent cause of all I have now to relate) are exclusively directed to the subject of reptiles. I have studied alike the anatomy of the Asiatic boa constrictor and the British eft; and am ready at a moment's notice to calculate the exact poison-power of any serpent in any part of the world you choose to mention. My taste may seem an odd one; but I can't help it, and can't account for it. All I know is, that I am passionately attached to reptiles, and that I have a tremendous social grievance in connection with them to make public. Without further preface, here it is:–
I live in the pastoral village of Stoke Muddleton, which, as everybody knows, is within easy omnibus distance of London. The other evening, while I was taking a walk, a labouring man accosted me, and asked if I would like to buy a live snake. Of course I would!–if he had offered a live boa constrictor for sale I would have mortgaged a quarter's salary to get it. The reptile in this case was only a common, harmless, English snake, between two and three feet long–one of a large family, residing, if I may use such an expression, in a wood near our neighbourhood. The man asked four shillings for it: I gave him the money. He recommended me to carry it home wrapped up in my pocket-handkerchief: I took his advice. I felt a calm sense of triumph as I walked back to the house with the first live specimen I had ever possessed–with the nucleus of the great reptile ménagerie I was now determined to form, coiled snug in my own bandana, and lightly pendant from my own finger and thumb. Little did I then think that I had tied up in that one small bundle the requisite materials for producing the public misery of all Stoke Muddleton.
That night I said nothing to my mother about the snake. I stealthily took him up to my bed-room, and put him into an empty hatbox, humanely cutting an air-hole in the lid before I shut it down. Then I went to sleep, full of trust and tranquillity. In the middle of the night I awoke; and, experiencing a strong, but unaccountable desire to have a look at my snake, got up and struck a light. When I state that my mother's bedroom is under mine, that she is a light sleeper, and that I took particular pains not to wake her, it is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that I knocked down everything within my reach in searching for the match-box. However, I lit the candle at last, eagerly opened my temporary snake cage, and the next instant found myself sitting on my bed, covered with a cold perspiration of horror–the reptile was gone!
I believe I was frantically rolling about in the flue under my bed feeling for the runaway snake, when I heard my mother's voice, hysterically desiring to know whether I was not taken dangerously ill, and casually adding that she was frightened out of her wits at the noise I was making. I calmed the maternal anxiety, bounced into bed again in despair, dropped asleep, and had frightful dreams, which, however, fell so far short of the reality that was soon to follow them as to be not worth mentioning. Let me pass on to the next morning.
Shortly after sunrise I began to search the house–no snake. Then I went into the garden, and there I found him, apparently breakfasting on snails. How he had got out of the room I had not the slightest idea; but now he was in the garden, the next thing to do was to fix him there. This I fondly imagined I could effect by turning over him an old cage that had been used to keep bantams in, and covering the cage with a cloth. That done, I went in to breakfast, told my mother all about it, and set off to business, feeling pretty sure of the snake till I got back again. Fatal security!
And now let us shift the scene to next door, the house of Mr. Frostick, of the well-known firm of Frostick, Yaxley, and Frostick. Mr. Frostick is at business: Mrs. Frostick, a most charming person, is upstairs in the nursery, fondling her first child. She has been amusing herself with that kind of thing for the last three hours, and is not tired yet. She is so fond of her baby, she hardly knows what to do with it next. Something of this sort is passing through her mind in reference to the infant at the present moment. "What shall I do with my baby now? I have washed my baby, kissed my baby, suckled my baby, dressed my baby, dandled my baby, stuck a pin by accident into my baby, laid my baby on the floor, the bed, the ruff, the chair, and my own knees; made my baby laugh, and cry, and go to sleep, and wake up again. Nothing, I imagine, is now left for me to do but to air my baby." Acting on this sweet and sanitary impulse, Mrs. Frostick advances with the infant to the window, and, buoyant with maternal bliss smartly throws it open. What starts up on the parapet before her? What erect and hissing shape of terror flies out like a jack-in-the-box before her eyes! Horror! unspeakable horror! It is my snake, my infernal, gadabout snake, that no crafty imprisonment whatever can confine to his proper premises!
Is it necessary to say that Mrs. Frostick uttered a piercing scream, and, clasping the baby to her bosom, fell back fainting on the floor. Of course she did this, and I respect her for it. It was a natural and dignified and femininely proper mode of proceeding. Could she know that the snake was harmless, was asleep on her parapet in the sun, and had only started up and hissed in fear at the sudden noise of the opening window? Certainly not. It was her business, under the circumstances, to scream and faint: and she did her business.
Now let us shift the scene again. Mr. Frostick is returning in the evening from his office–returning eager for domestic enjoyment, impatient to fondle his wife and child. The servant opens the door to him, pale as if all her blood had been turned to whitewash; and muttering fearfully about "Missus" and a serpent. He rushes into the parlour–there is his beloved partner, as nearly as possible raving mad, pressing the baby convulsively to her bosom. She has been attacked by a boa constrictor, twenty feet long, who lives in the roof of the house–nothing shall induce her to sleep up stairs again, or to let the baby sleep up stairs–no! no! it is of no earthly use for Mr. Frostick to stare, and taunt her about dreaming in broad daylight, her mind is made up: she would infinitely prefer going to the workhouse, or roaming the streets all night, to setting foot on the bedroom floor again. It is in vain for her husband to soothe, and promise, and expostulate–she is determined to pass the night on a chair in the back parlour; and she sticks to her determination.
I am soon made aware that I have unconsciously introduced a serpent into a domestic garden of Eden. I have already told my mother that I have a snake; my mother tells our servant; our servant tells Mr. Frostick's servant; and I get a message, requesting to know what I mean by ruining for ever the tranquillity of a whole household. I apologise, explain, and prove from natural history that the snake is perfectly harmless. In answer to this I get another message. Mrs. Frostick has consented to sleep up stairs again, provided the whole roof of the house is taken off, to assure her that there is no snake in it: Mr. Frostick, as in connubial duty bound, has consented to this tremendous course of proceeding, conceiving at the same time the diabolically revengeful design of bringing an action against me to pay expenses. I laugh contemptuously at this, and dare him to meet me before our country tribunals; but serious considerations soon overcome me again, when I hear that the house roof has really been taken off, and no reptile found in any part of it.
Where is the snake? is the momentous question I now ask myself. What scrape will he get me into next? Whose house will he visit, now he has done with Mr. Frostick's house? What babies will he frighten into fits, what mothers into swoons, what old gentlemen into apoplexies? From the Church pulpit to the workhouse dusthole, there is no place in Stoke Muddleton into which he may not at this moment be introducing himself; and there is no individual in Stoke Muddleton who will not know him, by this time, to be my property whenever he appears. Talk about Frankenstein and the Monster, that's all stuff and fiction! here's an appalling reality for you that no novelist of the lot of them can have the smallest conception of! here I am, expecting every minute to be told that I have innocently frightened to death some fellow parishioner; and all because I have bought a snake, price four shillings, and failed to persuade the ungrateful reptile that my best hat-box was a comfortable lodging for him!
I have not omitted making some attempt at putting an end to this frightful state of suspense. The other day I paid two labouring men to become provisionally snake-hunters, and to search all Stoke Muddleton for the missing reptile. This proceeding mollified even the furious Frostick (who is putting on a brand new slate roof to his house); but it produced no other effect. Once, indeed, my two labouring men–Dabbs and Clutton–saw the snake crossing the road; changing his quarters, perhaps, from a baby's cradle to an old woman's nightcap.
Dabbs gave chase, while Clutton stood still and called for extra help. The snake got away, and has not been seen since. Dabbs felt certain that he was on his way home to his native wood–Clutton firmly believed that he was directing his course straight to the house of the Reverend Morbus Lipscus Stretch, our respected minister, who has twelve children to be frightened out of their wits, and one more soon expected, for the snake to begin upon again when he has done with the first dozen.
In the mean time, public opinion assumes, day by day, a more threatening aspect towards me. I am already, socially speak- ing, the Pariah of Stoke Muddleton. The reports circulated–especially among my poorer neighbours–about my snake, are worthy of the Dark Ages, or the Cannibal Islands. In some quarters it is believed, that I have let loose a boa constrictor, whose breath can poison people, yards and yards off. In others, it is averred that my so called snake was in reality an alligator from "foreign parts," accustomed in his native country to feed exclusively on human flesh. One select party, headed by the cheesemonger's overgrown errand-boy, stoutly assert that my vagabond reptile has been seen crossing the high road, in the shape of a winged serpent. This last superstition gains ground immensely among all who remember that the snake not only escaped, nobody knew how, from a hatbox into a garden, but extended his wanderings still further, from a garden to the top of a house. In spite of the trellis-work that runs up the back of Mr. Frostick's abode, many people are still determined to believe that my snake could only have got to the parapet outside the nursery window by flying there. This is a fact–I am exposing the bare truth, without adding one atom of embroidery. I am not writing for effect; and, being no author, I could not do so if I would. The present is a serious statement, seriously intended–if I thought anybody would laugh at it, I should be utterly disgusted and disappointed. When a man has become, as I have, the accredited perpetrator of a perfectly original species of public nuisance, his position is far too solemn to be joked about either by himself or by others.
No! persecuted and proscribed by a whole parish, publicly charged with predilections for keeping monsters, and letting them loose on society, ribald feelings are not the feelings which accompany such a revelation as mine. When I remember that the outrageous reports which I have described are spread abroad and firmly believed in this nineteenth century of education and cheap literature, by people who live within a sixpenny ride of the great metropolis, I really cannot accuse myself of revolutionary tendencies in crying aloud for social reform, in calling lamentably and imper- atively for an immediate supply of Missionaries of the Brotherhood of Common Sense to convert Stoke Muddleton. The social disease is laid bare in these unpretending pages; let the remedy be forthwith applied, and I shall not have been ignorantly "sent to Coventry" by all my neighbours without some good coming from it, after all.
Beyond this, I don't think I have much more to say. Up to the present time I have not heard of my snake again; he has either wriggled himself back to his native wood, or is lurking in impervious concealment in somebody else's house. Mr. and Mrs. Frostick have toned down, under their new roof, into a state of dignified sullenness. Among the Stoke Muddleton mob opinion is still violently exasperated against me. The last proof that was given of the estimation in which I am held by the populace generally, came from our own maid servant, who gave us warning yesterday, assigning as the reason that the bare idea of her living in the same house with a gent who was fond of serpents made the affectionate young lead-smelter's journey-man with whom she "kep' company" so nervous about her that she was compelled to leave her place, in common regard for her lover's peace of mind. Insults such as these have long ceased to move me; persecutions, public or private, strike vainly at my tranquillity. I may have lost my snake and lost my character; but I have not lost my ardent interest in reptile creation. While this survives, I can calmly expose my sufferings from the ignorance and malevolence of a large parochial neighbourhood, and feel all the better for it–I can boldly claim the sympathies of my naturalist brethren throughout the world–and, best of all, I can still conscientiously sign myself (certain that I am as good as my name), PHILO-SERPENS.
I open my paper again to say that I have just received a letter from my brother Tom, who is in the navy, and now with his ship at Borneo. Tom (bless him!) writes word that, knowing my peculiar tastes, and anxious to gratify them, he has secured a live boa constrictor for me (!) and has sent it off to my address here by a homeward-bound ship (!!) Need I say that I shall receive it joyfully–receive it as a rod of chastisement opportunely arriving to scourge a calumnious neighbourhood? Welcome, avenging reptile! Welcome, thrice welcome, to the village of Stoke Muddleton!