A Little Pilgrim: N

by Mrs. Oliphant

A Little Pilgrim by Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (née Margaret Oliphant Wilson) was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs. Oliphant. Her fictional works encompass "domestic realism, the historical novel and tales of the supernatural".

Margaret Oliphant was born at Wallyford, near Musselburgh, East Lothian, and spent her childhood at Lasswade (near Dalkeith), Glasgow and Liverpool. As a girl, she constantly experimented with writing. In 1849 she had her first novel published: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland which dealt with the Scottish Free Church movement. It was followed by Caleb Field in 1851, the year in which she met the publisher William Blackwood in Edinburgh and was invited to contribute to the famous Blackwood's Magazine. The connection was to last for her whole lifetime, during which she contributed well over 100 articles, including, a critique of the character of Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Reviews

[LiB · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know Mrs Oliphant as the 19th C author of clever ghost stories, very good ones, and I was vaguely expecting that any book of hers with “unseen” in the title would be a collection of those.

It turns out that the two stories that make up this collection, A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen and The Little Pilgrim Goes Up Higher are not that at all. Mrs Oliphant suffered a lot of grief in her life. Her husband died early, and she outlived her six children. These two stories are a memorial to a another loss, a close friend, and take the form of imagining her friend’s afterlife. They are set in Heaven, although neither the protagonist or author would presume that explicitly.

These stories are sentimental and pious, the kind of literature that could never hope to be commercially successful today. However, while I find most examples of this kind of Victorian literature awful and their visions of the afterlife absolutely unbearable, this was a vast improvement. I doubt I’d recommend these stories as an entertaining read, outside of historical value. However I was surprised to find that Mrs Oliphant’s version of heaven is a utopia a modern person can contemplate without shuddering. This afterlife is not a static colourless land where all individuality is subsumed into a collective desire to do nothing but praise, but a carefully worked out vision of how people could differ from each other, love, have real emotions, learn and seek fulfilment forever. Her god, while clearly drawing on contemporary Christian symbolism, is kinder than most other Victorian depictions, not at all punitive and actually loving.

This is very clearly a wish fulfilment fantasy, Mrs Oliphant‘s wishes for her dead children heartbreakingly and directly expressed. It‘s hard to read, but also the first depiction of Heaven I‘ve read that actually sounded at all like somewhere any one would want to end up in. If Mrs Oliphant is right, we’ll all get there in the end.

[amy booe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweetest Joy

For anyone who has wondered about the place that is being prepared for us, and where some that we love have already traveled.