ABSTRACT
The enormous importance and the lasting fame of Mrs Gamp are not to be accounted for on statistical ground. Mrs Gamp appears in only eight of the novel's fifty-four chapters: XIX, XXV, XXVI, XXIX, XL, XLVI, XLIX and LI, with one brief mention in chapter LII. If chapter-headings are what we go by, investigation proves still more disconcerting: Mrs Gamp's name is encountered only once, in the heading of chapter XLVI (where, the reader is told, 'Mrs. Gamp makes tea', while three other characters make other things). Mrs Gamp's close friend Mrs Harris does put in an appearance in one chapter-heading - that to chapter XLIX, which reads: 'In which Mrs. Harris, assisted by a teapot, is the cause of a division between friends' - and, as Mrs Harris has no existence independently of Mrs Gamp, that chapter-heading may be regarded as a reference to the latter person. Finally, there are three chapter-headings which seemto allude to Mrs Gamp with typical Victorian prudery, in the form of the adjective 'professional' : 'some professional persons' in chapter XIX (glorified by Mrs Gamp's first appearance), 'in part professional' in chapter XXV and 'In which some people are . . . professional' in chapter XXIX. As Mrs Gamp's profession is that of nurse and midwife, it is not to be openly mentioned in so prominent a place as a chapter-heading. On the other hand, the allusion may give the Victorian reader a delightful sense of complicity and initiation into a slightly indecent mystery. But that is only the slightest, least enduring and least interesting of the mysteries connected with Mrs Gamp and her two friends, Mrs Harris and Betsey Prig. The most fascinating of these problems is no less than that of literary creation and art.
