Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 26

22 Popular Culture Review Once again combating this Victorian misperception, Regiment shows us a functioning charity organization: The New Temple in God. While the focus of the Temple is local, it doesn’t limit itself to work in the home, as Bleak House's message would imply is right. The relief wing of the church combines elements of Victorian middle-class women’s sense of superiority in guiding the unwashed masses and the practicality of actually helping people. As in Gissing’s The Odd Women, the church’s charity trains women for professional roles by teaching literacy and typing, as well as providing food, shelter, legal assistance, and asylum from abusive spouses. Regiment effectively combats the reputation of the unattractive busy body, merely using charity as a means of building a personal soapbox. The effectiveness of renunciation of Victorian attitudes is exemplified in the cynical and circumspect Russell’s assumptions. She comes ready to judge (as Bleak House would) the “earnest young woman with her Good Works a nd. . . pasty skin” (30). Her reticence to admit that the women of the church are doing good comes from the historical predisposition to assume they are not. Even the novel’s title alludes to John Knox’s 1558 tract (“. . . Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”) disparaging Mary Tudor specifically and women in public positions of power generally. It is only when Russell is ensconced in the walls of the church, teaching the women herself, does she change her mind. Her revelatory moment comes when she teaches a poor woman how to read, “.. . her eyes shining with the suddenly comprehended magic of the written word.” Here Russell is uncharacteristically effusive, declaring that though the poor woman’s “teeth were mostly gums [and] she smelt of unwashed wool. . . for the moment, she was beautiful” (227). Afterward, Russell admits that her charitable friend Veronica who introduced her to the church and its good works “knows what she is about here” (228). Despite this more modem and impartial interpretation of women in the public sphere through philanthropy, there is the issue of the murder and fraud surrounding the church in Regiment. While it’s true that the Temple is used as the mechanism with which Claude is able to ply his criminal trade, it is exclusively him that is corrupt, not the church itself or its charitable work. This is the distinctive difference: Dickens does more than imply that it is the women and their activities themselves that are inadvisable. He absolutely points to it as a sign of cultural and moral decline. Bleak House does all of this without even getting into the problems of colonialism in Mrs. Jellyby’s pet project, the African tribe she supports, which would be the only valid criticism of women’s work in philanthropy. In thinking of Claude, the most corrupt element in Regiment, though, there is a similarity between the novels that contributes to theme and setting as the atmosphere of fog does. Claude’s Frenchness/foreignness cannot be ignored given the history of Victorian thinking about the negative influence of foreigners. The weak continental morals and their potentially negative impact on the British Empire at large and the individual citizen more particularly is a well-