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By Root 1382 0

Smollett (1771), a novel reexamined in a 1990 doctoral thesis, “Singleness of Heart,” by scholar Susan Leslie Katz. The spinster part is small but highly detailed, as if the curtain had risen on a sitting-room drama and there, standing rigidly far stage left, was an odd-looking woman in conversation with herself. As the creature inches her way center stage, a male voice relates the woeful tale of one Tabitha Bramble. (The name Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches. The baby witch on the beloved 1960s TV series Bewitched was named Tabitha. The grandmother witch, Endora, was exceptionally catty, a real Tabby. And, to switch popular forms, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey called his troops of excellent war-widow detectives “the Cattery.”) But back to the tragically appointed Miss Bramble:

In her person, she is tall, raw-boned, aukward, flat-chested, and stooping; her complexion is sallow and freckled; her eyes are not grey, but greenish, like those of a cat, and generally inflamed…. her forehead low; her nose long, sharp,…her lips skinny, her mouth extensive, her teeth straggling and loose, of various colours and conformation; and her long neck shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles—In her temper, she is proud, stiff, vain, imperious, prying, malicious, greedy, and uncharitable.

And I leave out her dog, a cursed animal. Tabitha kicked it.

Before the debuts of the Dickensian sideshow freaks—the world-renowned bride, Miss Havisham, Miss Wade of Little Dorrit, and Rosa Dartle of David Copperfield—and even before Hawthorne’s Hepzibah, the “mildewed piece of aristocracy” wandering her way through The House of the Seven Gables, many voices articulated the case against the old maid. In 1748 the Oxford English Dictionary defined her as “any spiteful or ill-natured female gossip or tattler.” Alexander Pope made it personal: “My soul abhors the tasteless dry embrace/of a stale virgin with a winter face.” Wordsworth commented with cool remove—describing a maiden withering on a stalk—while Henry Fielding expressed pure and immediate disgust: “She did not resemble a cow so much in her breath, as in the two brown globes which she carried before her.” A few years later he added this advice: “Young ladies” dared not venture too close to one of these “types for the girl was sure to be bitten by one, as by a mad dog.” That is, if the maid in question still had teeth. A widespread public discussion had established that the old maid’s teeth were rotting at a faster-than-average rate. Without explaining exactly why, one medical treatise, circa 1766, featured a spirited debate about whether or not the maid should have them all pulled to avoid embarrassment “to one’s relations” caused by rotting incisors.

In her early incarnations, the old maid was not associated with the industrious and respected spinner. Rather, she was a toothless parody of the uneducated minor noblewoman who had been trained for nothing more than marriage and then had failed to capture a husband. Just think of Cinderella’s stepsisters. (It’s not surprising that this groping sadistic duo emerged in their distinctive modern form in the Perrault version of the fairy tale published in seventeenth-century France.)

But the industrial revolution and its aftermath would permanently blur the distinctions between the goodly spinner and the crazy old maid.

Once the self-sustaining mercantile household—the entire working system of artisan, apprentice, and journeyman—collapsed, those who’d worked there, the spinners included, were left to negotiate a place within the new economy. Many spinsters sought work inside the textile mills, although the mills favored the very young girl and then usually fired her when she turned twenty, or at whatever point she began