It was growing dark in the city. Out in the open country it would be light for half-an-hour or more; but in the streets it was already dusk. Upon the wooden door-step of a low-roofed, dark, and unwholesome-looking house, sat a little girl, earnestly gazing up the street.
The opening lines of the novel set the stage for the theme of a young woman being helped out of the darkness toward the lightness of piety and happiness through the acquisition of self-discipline. The little girl’s earnest gaze up the street from the shadow of the ramshackle creates perhaps an underappreciated vividly realized metaphor for the admittedly routine sentimentalist fiction to follow.
Left at three years of age dependent upon the charity of a world in which she was friendless and alone, Gertrude had, during her residence at Nan Grant's, found little of that charity. But, although her turbulent spirit rebelled at the treatment she received, she was then too young to reason upon the subject, or come to any conclusions upon the hardness and cruelty of humanity; and, had she done so, such impressions would have been effaced in the home of her kind foster-father.
Although these are the opening lines of the twenty-first chapter of the novel, they serve pretty well as a capsule summary of the entire narrative. Although substantially less effective as metaphorical imagery than the actual opening lines quotes above, from the perspective of expository information capable of providing for a curious reader what the story is about, it does not get more effective anywhere than this passage.
She has begun; and though her footsteps often falter, though she sometimes turns aside, and, impatient of the narrow way, gives the rein to her old irritability, she is yet but a child, and there is a foundation for hopefulness in the sincerity of her good intentions, and the depth of her contrition when wrong has had the mastery. Emily has taught her where to place her strong reliance, and Gerty looks to higher aid than Emily's, and she leans on a mightier arm.
The narrator often steps outside her role as observer of action and conduit into the thoughts of the characters to more directly address her readers. This is an example of those occasions and also perhaps serves as an example of why Nathaniel Hawthorne was moved to bemoan in response to the astonishing commercial success of the novel "America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women."
This new direction for the attainment of a great accomplishment was received with countenances that indicated as great a variety of sentiments as there was difference of character among Fanny's audience. Mr. Graham bit his lip, and walked away; for his politeness was founded on no such rule, and he knew that Gertrude's was. Belle looked glorious disdain; Mr. Bruce and Kitty, puzzled and half amused; while Lieutenant Osborne proved himself not quite callous to a noble truth, by turning upon Gertrude a glance of admiration. Emily's face evidenced how fully she coincided in the opinion thus unintentionally made public, and Miss Patty expressed her approbation.
A somewhat different take on the popularity of The Lamplighter would be expressed a century later by editor James Hart, who proposed that popular fiction “pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past.” Hart might well have been referring to this quoted passage which provides a kind of cross-section insight into the temper of the time regarding feminine progress in society.
