ABSTRACT
‘A Legend of Provence’ was the last of Adelaide Procter’s narrative poems published in the Christmas numbers of Household Words and All The Year Round. In response to Charles Dickens’s editorial authority Procter’s poetry challenges implicitly his authoritative voice through her choice of themes and tropes and in her resistance to the narrative frameworks devised by Dickens. The poem resists Dickens’s pairing of Belinda Bates and the ridiculous Alfred Starling, who have become engaged by the conclusion of Dickens’s narrative. Dickens’s choice of Alfred Starling for Belinda’s lover, a man plagued by incapacitating ague-fits of love and with a penchant for strenuous Lancashire clog dancing, was surely designed to tease and irritate Procter. Dickens does award Procter an adult and womanly status. He avoids romanticising and infantilising Procter and is keen to dispel the illusion of the recessive poetess. Dickens’s narrative voice is dominant and the pieces he wrote have come to exist independently of the numbers.
