Mrs. Merridew Character Analysis

Rachel Verinder’s widowed aunt on her father’s side, with whom she goes to live after her mother Julia’s death. When it is time for Rachel to attend Ezra Jennings’s “experiment” with Franklin Blake, Mrs. Merridew insists on coming along, because she finds it inappropriate for the 19-year-old Rachel to travel alone without a “chaperone.” When she arrives at the Verinder estate with Rachel, she is overcome with anxiety because she is convinced the Jennings’s science must involve an explosion. The other guests lie that the explosion will be the next morning, and she spends that morning waiting and searching for it, only to be astonished that this alleged explosion (which, of course, never happened) was too quiet for her to notice. As a character foil who contrasts with the young, intelligent, independent-minded Rachel, Mrs. Merridew’s character demonstrates the absurdity in the Victorian assumptions about gender that suggest someone like Rachel needs a guardian or husband’s “protection.” Mrs. Merridew’s comical fixation on the nonexistent “explosion” also allows Collins to ridicule many of his contemporaries’ anxieties and misunderstandings about science and technology.