Berlin

Berlin is a city in the early portion of Philip Carey’s life, associated chiefly with Miss Wilkinson’s work as a governess and with the aftermath of their brief intimacy. The city itself remains largely offstage: its importance lies in the distance it creates between the two, in the stories Miss Wilkinson tells about her past, and in the correspondence through which she tries to keep Philip emotionally bound to her. Berlin thus marks a relationship that Philip experiences as an episode, while Miss Wilkinson presents it as a claim on a more lasting future.

Definition and Setting

Miss Wilkinson lives in Berlin in a governess’s situation after a succession of similar jobs in France and Germany. She is the daughter of a clergyman, and her family history connects her to the Careys: her father had been a rector in Lincolnshire, and Mr. Carey had served his last curacy with him. After her father’s death, she had to earn her own living. She had maintained a correspondence with Mrs. Carey and twice spent holidays at the Blackstable Vicarage, paying a small sum for her keep like the other occasional guests.

When Philip’s future became uncertain after he left school, Mrs. Carey asked Miss Wilkinson for advice. She recommended Heidelberg as a place to learn German and arranged for Philip to live with the Erlin family there. Berlin therefore belongs first to the practical network of employment and acquaintance that helps direct Philip abroad: Miss Wilkinson’s own situation there gives her a role in the decision, even though Philip goes to Heidelberg rather than to Berlin.

Miss Wilkinson’s Berlin Life

Miss Wilkinson’s account of Berlin is shaped by dissatisfaction. She resents having to support herself and contrasts her current circumstances with the more luxurious life she claims to have known in Lincolnshire, including horses to ride and carriages to drive. Her account of a wealthy maternal uncle who supposedly intended to leave her a fortune is complicated by Aunt Louisa’s knowledge: the uncle had married and had children before Miss Wilkinson was born, so there could have been little reason to expect an inheritance. The difference between Miss Wilkinson’s version and Aunt Louisa’s recollection makes her self-presentation uncertain, and Philip is puzzled by the discrepancy.

She also condemns what she calls the vulgarity of German life and sets Berlin against the brilliance of Paris, where she says she spent several years as a governess in the household of a fashionable portrait painter. Her tales of celebrated visitors, including actors from the Comedie Francaise and writers whose names impress Philip, give her a more glamorous past than her present position suggests. She lends him Daudet’s Sappho, a volume she treasures despite having forgotten to ask the author to inscribe it. Berlin consequently appears in her stories as the dull present from which she measures an imagined or remembered social brilliance elsewhere.

Boarding-House Respectability and Social Pressure

The social world around Miss Wilkinson’s situation is governed by the practical economics of a boarding house as well as by its public claims to respectability. In the house where Philip stays in Heidelberg, the Frau Professor faces scandal when Fraulein Cacilie and Herr Sung are seen together in secluded places. The Frau Professor dislikes the affair, but Herr Sung rents two ground-floor rooms and buys an expensive bottle of Moselle with each meal, while Cacilie’s parents pay well for her care. Both are valuable residents, and the landlady is reluctant to lose either.

Three elderly women who pay little but are permanent residents insist that the affair is disgraceful and that the house is losing its respectable character. Their pressure finally overcomes the Frau Professor’s attempts to ignore the situation. This episode is not a scene in Berlin, but it illuminates the kind of respectable, commercially dependent lodging-house society surrounding Miss Wilkinson’s European employment. Social judgment operates alongside financial calculation: the residents demand moral discipline, while the landlady weighs that demand against the income her guests provide.

The Relationship Across Distance

During Philip’s stay with Miss Wilkinson, she hints at a future in which they might remain close. As the fortnight before his departure passes, she repeatedly notes that one more day has gone. Philip, buoyed by his expectations of life in London, does not let the approaching separation depress him. When she suggests that a London position would allow her to see him constantly, he replies that it would be pleasant, but the idea does not excite him; he wants to begin his new life without feeling hampered. His frankness makes clear that their prospects are not equal: she is imagining continued intimacy, while he is already looking beyond it.

After their parting, the arrangement is for Miss Wilkinson to write to him through the Charing Cross Post Office until he can send her a permanent address. Philip finds three letters there. They are written on blue paper in violet ink and in French, a choice he regards as affected. Her passionate language, which reminds him of a French novel, leaves him emotionally cold. He struggles even to decide how to address her, unable to write either an endearment or her first name, and settles on a bare Dear. Instead of making the declarations he imagines a lover ought to make, he writes about his rooms and his office.

Miss Wilkinson interprets his reserve as rejection and answers with reproaches. She says that she waits for his letters, that she has given him all a woman can give, and that his silence makes her feel abandoned. Her later letters threaten suicide if he does not love her, then propose that she come to London for Christmas. Philip tells her that he would like to see her, but says he already has a country engagement that he cannot break. She takes this as proof that he does not want her. Distance turns their unequal expectations into a cycle of accusation and evasion: her letters demand emotional certainty, while Philip answers with excuses that spare him a direct declaration but cannot satisfy her.

Narrative Significance

Berlin’s role is defined less by scenes in the city than by the relationship and social history attached to it. It is the setting of Miss Wilkinson’s present employment, a position she resents and repeatedly compares with a more brilliant past. Her stories make her appear worldly to Philip, but the contradictions in her account and his later indifference to her letters expose the gap between the image she offers and the life she is actually living.

The city also helps mark a shift in Philip’s life. Miss Wilkinson is connected to the arrangements that send him to Heidelberg, yet she cannot turn that practical connection into a lasting bond. Philip’s move toward London and its promised freedom competes with her wish to establish a life in which they can see each other constantly. Berlin therefore stands at the edge of his passage into adulthood: a place of work and separation, and the distant address from which an emotionally insistent past tries to follow him.