Little Victorian Heroines

and Their Appalling Behavior

[Excerpted, with generous permission, from the memoirs of Georgina Nesbitt.]

In my early childhood, I was afflicted by a series of governesses.  Among them was poor old Miss Benton.   Miss Benton was infuriating.  She would believe (at once!) all manner of things that Papa told her, even when these things were nonsense.  However, if I dared to bring anything interesting to her attention, she treated me as she might a gibbering mongoloid.  For Miss Benton, all of human knowledge could be divided into three categories: common sense, madness and filth.

For instance: arithmetic was common sense, algebra was madness and calculus was filth.

I do not exaggerate.

Papa once told her that I was never to go up the stairs to the attic.  Miss Benton accepted this - it was common sense.   I told Miss Benton that the command was absurd - we had no attic.  The stairs that should have led to our attic, I explained, led instead to a cellar.

“Don’t be foolish, Georgina,” she scolded me.  “How can stairs that go upward lead to a cellar?”

Miss Benton was all of five and forty, and yet I had to speak to her as if she were a child of three or a man of one hundred and two.

“Stairs that go upward can lead to a cellar, Miss Benton, if the cellar is not our cellar but rather someone else’s.  For instance, what if someone lived in a home directly above us?  Should he be denied a cellar simply because our home is in his way?  Though architecturally unorthodox, might he not place his cellar in the space between our home and his?”

Miss Benton, to her meager credit, allowed that this could conceivably come to pass.  Though it would be madness, and quite possibly filth.

“But, Georgina,” she persisted.  “There is no one living above us.  The house belongs entirely to Master Nesbitt, your father.”

“Very true,” I said.  “Our situation is more roundabout.  The cellar at the top of our stairs does not exist above us in space, so much as ahead of us in time.   It is the cellar of Mr. Gregory Shame, who resides in the early years of the Twenty-First Century.  Papa does not like me to visit, because he believes it is a bad influence.”