Herbert Baulk

Herbert Baulk is a clergyman in Randolph and Ellen Ash’s circle whose visits bring religious argument into the intimate business of the Ash household. Through Ellen’s journal he emerges as both a voice of doctrinal assurance and a man unsettled by the questions of his age: he discourages her from troubling her intellect, yet his own doubts darken their prayers. His dealings with Bertha, the pregnant servant, add a practical dimension to this conflict, as he helps Ellen seek her a place where she may give birth and learn a trade.

Identity and Place in the Household

Baulk appears in Ellen’s account as the Reverend Mr Baulk and, in later entries, as Mr Baulk. He is a recurring visitor and conversation partner, not an abstract theological opponent: Ellen plays chess with him, asks his advice about Bertha, and listens to his arguments about Christian belief. Her journal gives the reader access to his presence through her responses and judgments rather than through an independent account of his thoughts.

His conversations reach beyond private devotion into the intellectual climate of the period. Ellen reads Charles Lyell’s geology and considers the implications of immense geological time for inherited religious narratives. She does not conclude that scientific inquiry necessarily destroys faith; she distinguishes the possible poetic invention of the Flood story from the enduring moral message she finds in it. Baulk, by contrast, believes her intellect should not be troubled by questions that her intuition can recognize as vain. He describes that intuition in terms Ellen finds gendered and flattering—womanly, virtuous, and pure—and looks to her assent as if it might strengthen his own position.

Faith, Doubt, and Ellen’s Response

The tension in Baulk’s counsel is that his confidence is not as settled as he wants Ellen’s to be. She reports that he tells her she knows her Redeemer lives, and she answers that she does know it; nevertheless, she longs for him to resolve his intellectual doubts respectably. In her view, their prayers have become darkly riddling where they might have expressed honest praise and robust faith in a watchful Providence. Baulk’s insistence that Ellen refrain from intellectual questioning thus sits beside the very uncertainty he has not overcome himself.

Ellen’s account also places his position against her own understanding of religious feeling. She trusts instinctively, but does not treat that trust as a reason to forbid inquiry. Her reflections on geological time and biblical narrative leave room for uncertainty without surrendering religious meaning. Baulk’s instruction attempts to make faith a protection from questioning; Ellen’s journal instead records how his doubts enter the household and alter its prayers. Their difference is not simply belief against disbelief, but a conflict over whether belief can be honest while questions remain unresolved.

Bertha and the Household’s Moral Crisis

Baulk becomes involved when Ellen and her sister Patience recognize that Bertha is pregnant and must decide how to respond. Patience urges prompt action and regards continued cohabitation with the visible evidence of sin as contaminating. Ellen recalls their mother’s practice of chastising erring young servants and firmly rejects physical punishment: neither she nor Patience, whatever Patience says Barnabas might approve in selected circumstances, will beat Bertha. Ellen concludes that Bertha must leave before Randolph returns, framing the decision as her duty.

After Patience and her children depart, Ellen consults Baulk. During a visit over tea she proposes chess partly to distract him from what she calls his vehement expression of doubts and certainties. He compliments her play as good “for a lady,” and she accepts the condescension without protest because she wins handsomely. The scene makes their social assumptions visible in miniature: Baulk’s praise measures a woman’s skill against a restrictive expectation, while the game gives Ellen a moment of competence and victory on her own terms.

Ellen then asks for his help with Bertha. Baulk identifies an institution that provides for women in Bertha’s position through childbirth and, if possible, helps them return to useful employment. He offers to inquire whether there is a place for her. Ellen commits herself—and, in effect, Randolph—to contribute to Bertha’s keep until the birth if that support will help secure admission. The institution’s dormitories are kept clean by the women themselves, and its plain, nourishing food is prepared by them too. Baulk’s intervention does not erase the moral judgment surrounding Bertha’s pregnancy, but it turns the household’s concern into a concrete effort to provide care and a possible path to work.

Chess, Gender, and Narrative Significance

The chess scenes connect Baulk’s everyday authority to Ellen’s reflection on women’s restricted agency. After sleeping badly, she dreams that Baulk has decreed her Queen may move only one square, like his King. She recognizes the injustice but, within the dream, cannot connect it to the large, incapacitated King occupying the back rank. The Queen can ordinarily make long moves and cross the board freely; in life, Ellen observes, it is otherwise. The dream turns Baulk’s presence into the voice of a rule-bound world in which women’s possible range is curtailed, even as the waking game shows Ellen defeating him.

Baulk’s character is therefore presented through a revealing juxtaposition rather than a simple verdict. His counsel limits Ellen’s intellectual freedom, and his confidence about doctrine coexists with doubts that trouble his own speech and their prayers. Yet when Bertha’s need becomes immediate, he offers practical assistance and helps Ellen approach an institution that may shelter her through childbirth. Because the record comes through Ellen’s private journal, these traits are held together in her sharply observant perspective: the clergyman who asks a woman to trust intuition over intellect is also the visitor who can help translate concern for a vulnerable servant into material support.