THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH

It is especially in connection to George Eliot's work that a brief look at Charles Reade's popular 1861 novel, The Cloister and the Hearth, yields a crucial paradigm for Victorian novelistic domesticity. Based on a section of Erasmus' Compendium in which the late medieval scholar narrates the history of his parents' courtship and quasi-legitimate marriage, The Cloister and the Hearth places the idea of the Home formally in a tale of vocational choice and historically at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. Set in fifteenth-century Holland, Charles Reade's widely acclaimed novel opens when Gerard Eliassoen surrenders his plan of “going into the Church” (The Cloister and the Hearth 5) so that he might marry instead; a decision his family vehemently opposes since Gerard's ecclesiastical career would have provided them with a primary source of income. Betrothed but not yet married to the beloved Margaret, Gerard must quit his Dutch homeland and hearth for Rome. The novel's laborious, quasi-episodic yarn is thus initiated by Gerard's search for the Roman education that would turn his monk-taught skills in penmanship and manuscript illumination into an artistic career by which he might support his now pregnant wife, her father and a variety of other “friends” who have found their way into his household.

After a series of tedious travel anecdotes and picaresque complications Gerard reaches Rome, where he is tricked into believing that Margaret has died. Near despair, he attempts suicide, is saved, enters one of the ubiquitous monasteries that the novel sprinkles along each of its European highways, and finally becomes a Dominican priest sporting a new name, Clement.