Tipping the Velvet
by Sarah Waters
Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam
472 pages, $25.95
Editor’s Note: With the exception of the following, all of the reviews in this “best of” issue are previously unpublished, and they refer to new books and films.
The following piece, which appeared in our Fall 1999 issue, reviewed a book by Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet, a new edition of which has just been published by Little, Brown Book Group. This review of Waters’ debut novel seems prescient in light of this writers’ subsequent critical and popular success as a lesbian novelist. The GLR would go on to review three more of her novels in subsequent issues. Reviving this review is also a way to thank its author, Martha E. Stone, for her extraordinary service to the GLR over the years.
IS SARAH WATERS the lesbian Charles Dickens for the 21st century? In this, her debut novel, which has already received well-deserved praise in the mainstream press, Waters establishes herself as a viable candidate for that designation. In Tipping the Velvet she has crafted a well-written, eminently Victorian soap opera populated by believable, three-dimensional characters whose lives are determined by luck and coincidence.
Tipping the Velvet is the story of the narrator’s rise and fall and slow re-ascent. Nancy Astley began life as a tomboyish fishmonger with a passion for the music halls. After a full day of shucking oysters, she would leave her close-knit family and take herself to the nearest theatre, where she would soon fall for “the diminutive Faversham masher,” Kitty Butler, whose “hair fitted her head like a little cap that had been sewn, just for her, by some nimble-fingered milliner. … She looked, I suppose, like a very pretty boy … she strode like a boy, and stood like one.” And she was brought back for encores. When they finally meet, Kitty tells Nancy, who’s ashamed of her fish-scented hands, that she smells “like a mermaid.” When Kitty hires Nancy to be her assistant, the two move to theatrical digs in London, where they begin a closeted affair in their tiny room.
Kitty’s manager Walter decides to “broaden Kitty’s repertoire” by adding another “pretty girl in trousers” to the act—Nancy (of course), for whom his only advice is “study the men.” Soon Nancy learns to sing, dance, and overcome her stage fright. But her happiness is short-lived: Kitty suddenly gets married to Walter, and Nancy suffers a breakdown and finds herself penniless, wallowing in London’s meanest streets, desperately looking for a place to stay. An urchin informs her, “They ain’t werry smart, miss, the lodgings round these parts.” Walter’s advice pays off when she decides to earn her living as a rent boy. Alas, her first trick happens to look like Walter: “I had pleasured him, in some queer way, for Kitty’s sake; and the act had made me sicken.” But her luck improves from there, as she learns how to escape ill treatment by the men she picks up, and avoids detection regarding what lies beneath the strategically rolled handkerchief.
As Nancy’s rent earnings increase, she finds an ideal room with a kindly widow and her “simple” daughter. “I could come home in a jacket crusted, at the collar, with a man’s rash spendings—and [the landlady]would only pluck it from my nervous hands, and wash it at the tap: ‘I never saw a girl so careless with her soup!’” But restless in her career, Nancy is soon picked up by a wealthy, thoroughly detestable woman, who showers her with expensive gifts in exchange for “obedience [which]seemed at that moment a very trifling labor.” As Diana Lethaby’s “kept boy” in her St. John’s Wood villa, Nancy wallows in every luxury known to sophisticated Victorian Sapphists. Yet when she indulges in an ill-considered dalliance, she finds herself penniless again, and she accepts her fate with equanimity. She reinvents herself yet again, having reached the advanced age of 23, finally finding happiness with a group of Socialists in Bethnal Green.
