Nation and Novel
Nation and Novel
Nation and Novel
H. G. Wells
Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching
James Joyce
The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction
Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750–1990
Shadows of the Future
( AS EDITOR )
H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage
Science Fiction: A Critical Guide
H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism (with Robert M. Philmus)
Learning from Other Worlds
The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe (with John S. Partington)
Nation
& Novel
The English Novel from its
Origins to the Present Day
PATRICK PARRINDER
AC
AC
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Nation and Novel is a literary history of the English novel and its dis-
tinctive, often subversive contribution to ideas of nationhood. In it I have
concentrated for the most part on the major novelists, those whose
writings have been most influential and have attracted a lasting and
international readership. I have engaged in more detailed textual inter-
pretation than is usual in literary history, pursuing the approach to the
nature of the novel form and its relationship to English national identity
that I outline in Chapter 1. My primary intellectual debt in writing this
book has been to the small army of literary critics and cultural historians
who have transformed the study of English fiction of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in recent decades. This
book could not have been written without their labours of historical
research, textual editing, cultural theorizing, and reinterpretation. Few of
the scholars on whom I have drawn are explicitly named in the chapters
that follow—the alternative would have been to have put their names,
which can be distracting for the non-specialist reader, on every page—but
my appreciation of their work is no less heartfelt for that. All citations in
the text are identified in the notes, and it is there and in the Further
Reading that my indebtedness can be traced.
Nation and Novel has taken me many years to write—I am embar-
rassed to say how many—and there have been a number of false starts. At
every stage I have benefited from the encouragement, criticism, and
support of more friends and colleagues than I can possibly name. Above
all, I would thank the University of Reading for institutional and technical
support and for research leave, and my students with whom I have dis-
cussed so many of the novels that feature in these pages. I am profoundly
indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for granting me a Major Research
Fellowship (2001–4), without which this book might never have been
completed. I have received invaluable detailed comments from those
friends who have been willing to read and criticize draft chapters or
sections, including Eric Homberger (a comrade of almost forty years),
Andrzej Gasiorek, David Gervais, David Smith, Zohreh Sullivan, and Jim
Hurt. Earlier versions of some of this material have been given as seminar
or conference papers and, in some cases, published in journals: in this
respect I would particularly thank David Blewett, Regenia Gagnier and
Angelique Richardson, Annette Gomis, Susana Onega, Max Saunders,
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction 1
Notes 415
Author Biographies 455
Further Reading 472
Index 487
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Introduction
E
nglish novels—like French, Russian, and American novels—are
read all over the world, and the fact that they express and help to
define a particular nationality is part of their appeal. Fictional
narrative gives us an inside view of a society or nation, just as it gives
access to personal experiences very different from our own. There are few
more enjoyable ways of increasing our knowledge and satisfying our
curiosity than reading a novel that we cannot put down. But the ideas and
information that we derive from reading fiction are not always easy to
single out. The Frenchness of a French novel, or the Russianness of a
Russian novel, is a thing that most readers (whether native or foreign)
only vaguely sense. Often it resides in impressions that are wholly or
largely subconscious as well as in those that are crudely obvious. The
same is true of English novels, with the added complication that English
identity has itself come to be seen as notoriously elusive and idiosyncratic.
We must begin, then, with a brief preliminary account of what the
historian E. P. Thompson once called ‘the peculiarities of the English’.1
There is no written constitution and no readily available national ideo-
logy, as in the United States. There is no generally agreed name for
the Anglo-British state (England? Great Britain? The United Kingdom?
The UK?) except in a formal or ceremonial context. To the extent that the
state is held together by time-worn institutions such as the monarchy, the
House of Lords, and the national system of patronage and titles, it wins at
best a grudging allegiance from many English—and Scottish, Welsh, and
Northern Irish—people. But the British mainland with its three separate
nationalities has learned to live fairly easily with political and cultural
divisions. The necessity of division is enshrined in such typically English
social forms as the adversarial system of justice and the two-party system
(Government and Opposition) in Parliament.
What, then, is the novel’s representation of Englishness? Does it reflect
what seems to be the national characteristic of unity-in-division? If the
answer to this question is far from being simple and straightforward, it is
not only because of the multiplicity of English novels themselves. The
2 Introduction
What, then, can a study of the English novel add to the topic of English
and British identity as investigated by recent historians, social scientists,
cultural commentators, and political journalists? First of all, the nature of
national identity and of its now rather unfashionable counterpart
‘national character’ has been consistently debated by English novelists
across the centuries. Secondly, novels are the source of some of our most
influential ideas and expressions of national identity. Works of art which
are enjoyed and appreciated by subsequent generations play a key part in
the transmission and dissemination of national images, memories, and
myths. Thirdly, the fictional tradition adds a largely untapped body of
evidence to historical enquiry into the origins and development of our
inherited ideas about England and the English.
At one extreme, this identity is traced back to the Anglo-Saxon founda-
tions of English common law; at the other, it has been claimed that the
English lacked a sense of common nationhood until the late nineteenth
century.13 Antony Easthope, a literary scholar, has described the period
1650–1700 which saw the fall of the Stuarts as ‘the great foundational
moment for Englishness’.14 England, that is, is neither a revolutionary
republic like France nor an absolute monarchy; it is a constitutional
monarchy, the product of a failed revolution, a Restoration, and a historic
compromise to establish the Protestant ascendancy and the ability of
Parliament and the legal system to control the actions of the monarch.
The same period saw the rise of British naval power, without which the
nation’s constitution would have been a matter of purely local interest;
the growth of Dissent and the hard-won achievement of religious freedom;
and the foundation of the Royal Society which symbolizes England’s
growing pre-eminence in empirical philosophy and natural science. But in
literary and popular culture reaction to these foundational seventeenth-
century events was somewhat delayed, so that English national pride was
not fully developed—as the work of historians such as Linda Colley and
Gerald Newman, among others, has shown—until the next century.15 The
new sense of Englishness found expression in journalism and satire and
then in the novel, which was less in thrall to the state and more a vehicle
for popular feeling than either poetry or drama. A number of the major
novelists were also polemicists and historians concerned with English
identity and English history. Critics of eighteenth-century English fiction
such as Hazlitt and Scott were, perhaps, the first to identify and describe
the ‘cast of nationality’ in the English novel. The development of the form
from the earliest times to the twenty-first century has been intimately
linked to changes in national consciousness in successive epochs. At the
Introduction 7
same time, fiction is, at best, a distorting mirror of the society that pro-
duces it, since it is subject to varieties of class, caste, racial, gender, and
other kinds of bias that are, no doubt, the blindnesses contingent upon its
insights. Both blindness and insight are part of the historical record, but
the fictional canon will continue to change as new works come to join it,
familiar texts are reinterpreted, and novels either fall into or are rescued
from literary obscurity. A study of national identity in the English novel
cannot be more than a frozen snapshot of a moving object.
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=1=
The Novel and the Nation
N
ovels are stories of ordinary people, not kings and princes.
They are written in prose not verse, and are intended for silent
reading, not recitation in public. A few novelists such as
Dickens have given public readings of their work, but the fact that novels
are not written for performance has profound implications for their
relationship to the state and civic authority. Novels can be and are subject
to censorship, but the reading of prose fiction is a private act. There are no
court novelists or prose writers laureate, and patronage has played very
little part in the history of fiction. Famous novelists are rewarded by their
popularity, not by any kind of official status, and they have often depicted
the apparatus of government from a satirical or subversive standpoint.
They may speak to the nation but rarely, if ever, do they see it as their
task to ‘speak for the nation’. Novels exert a powerful influence on our
perceptions of society and of our individual selves precisely because they
lack any official sanction. Their authority comes from their readers and
not from the cultural apparatus of the state.
The novel is a latecomer among literary forms. Unlike epic poetry,
myths, drama, folk tales, and ballads it was not present at the origins of
recorded history or the birth of the idea of nationhood. While there is a
dispute over when the novel began—since some scholars extend the term
to include all forms of prose narrative including romances and written
folk tales1—it is clear that it could only come to prominence in an age of
widespread literacy. The novel superseded both epic verse narrative and
popular oral or semi-oral forms such as the ballad, but, unlike them,
it was a medium of individual and not of communal expression—the
product of a single author or narrator addressed not to an audience but to
separate and isolated readers.
The distinction between the novel and forms of verbal expression which
depend on performance for their full effect is a fundamental distinction in
literary history and genre theory. The long-standing but never uncon-
troversial distinction between the novel and the romance is a secondary
distinction, resting on the authority of individual writers and critics and
10 The Novel and the Nation
has not. It gives a different pace to the mind. We are in a world where nothing
is concluded.10
Woolf is of her time in referring to the reader as ‘he’ even though novel
readers are so often female. Oral poetry and drama appealed to public
audiences observing the social codes of male-dominated society. The
novel, by contrast, inserts itself into the interludes of domestic life and
finds its readers there. Its status as private reading-matter gives it its
unstable and potentially subversive function in relation to the family and
the community at large. Novels, in highly regulated societies, are treas-
ured by the young because what they teach is intimate, immediate, and
not to be found on any approved syllabus. They can only be read in
periods of leisure, but the leisure is often stolen from time meant to be
spent working, studying, in religious observance, or in some form of
service to the community. (The novelist J. B. Priestley recalled that,
during nearly five years in the army, he devoured books ‘as if they were
hot buttered tea-cakes’.)11 The ‘long drawn continuity’ of fictional
narrative encourages daydreaming, self-dramatization, and imaginative
identification with the hero or heroine, all of which can take place outside
the leisure hours specifically allotted to reading.
We must beware of associating daydreaming, imaginative identifica-
tion, and other extended pleasures of reading solely with novels, since
Robert Louis Stevenson, for one, claimed that they belong more exclusively
to the romance.12 (The classic English novels, in any case, have long been
canonized and put on syllabuses, so that the book read by torchlight under
the bedclothes is more likely to be a teenage novel or a work of con-
temporary popular fiction.) The revival of traditional romance from the
late eighteenth century onwards had a huge impact on the novel, spawning
subgenres explicitly mixing the characteristics of novel and romance such
as the Gothic, the sensation novel, the thriller, the crime novel, science
fiction, children’s fiction, and modern fantasy. Frequently theorists of the
novel praise the idea of romance with one hand while censuring it with
the other; it is as if the intense, secret pleasures of reading should not be
too freely indulged. William Hazlitt—perhaps the greatest early critic of
English prose fiction—is exemplary in this respect. Hazlitt’s essay
‘Standard Novels and Romances’ (1814; later revised in Lectures on the
English Comic Writers, 1819) outlines a series of flexible, subtle, and
occasionally puzzling contrasts between the novel and the romance.
Without romance, Hazlitt asserts, we should have no ideas of beauty,
no hope, no belief in social progress. Romance is inextricable from desire,
14 The Novel and the Nation
Falstaff and John of Gaunt die thinking of England, of the land and its
neglected agriculture. For John of Gaunt it has become like a ‘pelting’
(paltry) tenant-farm, while Falstaff babbling of green fields must be
remembering his neglected estate; when all is said and done, the roistering
Knight of Eastcheap is a country squire who has left his substance behind.
John of Gaunt’s speech is a deathbed oration, a piece of public theatre
theatrically represented, while the Hostess’s account of Falstaff’s death is
familiar storytelling expressing deep feeling in the plainest and most
colloquial terms. The difference between the two passages has little to do
with the presence or absence of rhetoric—since the Hostess’s narrative
is full of figures of speech—but it very clearly relies upon a difference
of social register, setting the polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary of the
court against a series of plain Anglo-Saxon monosyllables which in
the Hostess’s speech become a kind of wild poetry. Put side by side, these
passages from Shakespeare’s historical cycle exemplify a deep split in the
English language and English society.
Both extracts help to define the idea of a national literature. They do so,
first, by virtue of their explicit or implicit subject matter—the land of
England—although (as Paul Gilbert has written in a wide-ranging
examination of this topic) something more than a certain kind of content
is needed to typify a national literature. For Gilbert, ‘the treatment of the
subject matter must express an insider’s view of it’, but beyond that there
are no intrinsic properties which belong to one literary nationality rather
than another: ‘What is exemplary of a national literature is something
chosen to be so, without any grounding in properties that make it so.’18 In
other words, Falstaff’s green fields are English by habitual association,
not because the fields in other countries or literatures—the fields of
Ireland, for instance—are necessarily less green. Within Shakespeare’s
own writing we can see, through abundant examples, how the associations
The Novel and the Nation 17
There are some underlying problems in this passage, since the idea of the
‘English character’—relatively new in Hazlitt’s day, as we shall see—
could seem to be inherently biased in favour of the native and against the
immigrant. Moreover, if the English have settled down into ‘one common
name and people’, when did the settlement take place? According to the
great conservative theorist Edmund Burke, England is an ‘old establish-
ment’ with an ‘antient constitution of government’ deriving from Magna
Carta. Burke’s ‘firm ground of the British constitution’ is a foundation
likely to be radically disturbed by new waves of immigrants.24 Popular
hostility towards new arrivals and ‘asylum seekers’ is not likely, therefore,
to be assuaged by simple appeals to national history. In conservative
thought, however, the idea of the ‘true-born Englishman’ was taken at
face value and Defoe’s irony was soon forgotten. Walter Scott, for
example, described Defoe’s hero Robinson Crusoe (the English-born
son of a German immigrant father), ‘with his rough good sense, his
prejudices, and his obstinate determination not to sink under evils which
can be surpassed by exertion’, as ‘no bad specimen of the true-born
Englishman’.25 Crusoe has not merely acquired the ‘English character’; he
exemplifies it. Not only has Scott apparently forgotten that Crusoe was
20 The Novel and the Nation
English: A Portrait of a People (1998), but the last serious academic study
of national character, Ernest Barker’s National Character and the Factors
in its Formation, was published in 1927.
The emergence of the idea of national character has itself been linked to
the rise of the novel, since fiction and biography are the literary genres
most typically associated with character portrayal and character ana-
lysis.29 The concept of character, in Anderson’s words, is a comprehensive
and self-sufficient principle, ‘covering all the traits of an individual or a
group’.30 ‘Character’ like ‘identity’ may be invoked in purely external and
summary fashion—in the sense that employers require character refer-
ences and the police hold identity parades—but in the literary context, as
George Eliot wrote, ‘character . . . is a process and an unfolding’.31
Moreover, character is not subjective; an individual cannot truly know his
or her own character. It is for this reason that first-person narrators and
autobiographers are notoriously unreliable, since readers are likely to
arrive at a judgement of their character which differs to a greater or lesser
extent from the narrator’s declared self-perception. Conscious attempts
to live up to our ideas of our own character introduce a histrionic, self-
dramatizing element into behaviour, which may in the end lead—as, most
famously, in Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900)—to complete self-deception. To
enquire into one’s own character is to ask the, at best, very imperfectly
answerable question ‘What am I?’, whereas enquiry into identity involves
the much more negotiable question ‘Who am I?’
The idea of character, then, presupposes an objective standpoint from
which character can be observed in action or behaviour. The idea of
character in fiction and biography also presupposes a degree of subtlety
and complexity in human behaviour, since the literary presentation of
character is typically an accumulation of apparently conflicting traits
which cannot be understood without prolonged observation. (Even the
most absorbing and memorable fictional characters, such as Robert
Lovelace or Emma Woodhouse, can in principle be analysed as structures
of oxymorons or self-contradictions.) Popular ideas of national character
are very much simpler than the idea of character conveyed in fiction.
Character in the novel, however, is fixed, since the actions through which
it is revealed are circumscribed and there are no traits left to be exhibited
once the novel is over. Biographies similarly end with the death of the
individual subject, while national character is perpetually open to change.
It is, then, hardly surprising that nearly all accounts of an achieved and
settled national character are marked either by the fear of loss or by an
unconcealed idealization and nostalgia. Early twentieth-century novelists’
22 The Novel and the Nation
The term ‘eccentricity’ did not come into use until a generation after
Hume. It is, Paul Langford has remarked, a more benign idea than
Hume’s ‘peculiarity’ and ‘singularity’, since it provides ‘an engaging
diversity without threatening conformity’. Eccentricity implies a common
‘centricity’ from which it deviates.34 If this is very much in the spirit of
Hume’s passage, it is because the shift from character to identity as a basis
for nationality is already implied in it. In fact, an underlying tension
between character and identity runs through the whole tradition of
thought about cultural nationality.
Identity, in Anderson’s words, ‘always possesses a reflexive or sub-
jective dimension’, involving self-awareness and self-identification.35 The
plot of many novels hinges on the external verification of an identity that
the protagonist has all along embodied and seemed to take for granted—
Tom Jones, for instance, behaves like a well-born young gentleman long
before he is proved to be one—and first-person narratives typically
The Novel and the Nation 23
For all his no doubt sincere admiration, Scott is suggesting that Fielding’s
‘verisimilitude’ has been bought at the cost of insularity, untranslatability,
and obsolescence: in other words, it runs directly counter to the novelist’s
own neoclassical principles. Even the somewhat jocular reference to ‘Old
England’ plays its part in reminding Scott’s readers that the England of two
generations earlier reflected in Fielding’s novels now only survives in the
imagination. Fielding was not, apparently, even aware that his personages
were ‘peculiar to England’ and that they offered a true representation of
the national character. It takes a cosmopolitan reader such as Scott—a
26 The Novel and the Nation
reader thoroughly acquainted both with the English and with other
nationalities—to see this, or so Scott implies. He does not define what he
calls the English ‘cast of nationality’—he rather assumes that those ‘in the
know’ will know it when they see it—but he clearly thinks that the novelist
should be a conscious analyst of national character, as he himself was. The
Scottish novelist is gently patronizing the English one.
Scott’s essay on Fielding has the effect of making space for a new kind
of novel, the so-called ‘national tale’ by which he himself had been
decisively influenced. The national tale originated in Irish fiction, in
novels such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Lady
Morgan (Sydney Owenson)’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and O’Donnel: A
National Tale (1814), where Anglo-Irish colonists were juxtaposed with
typical specimens of ‘native’ Irish people. Scott’s own Waverley novels
often follow a young English gentleman on an expedition of discovery
through lowland and highland Scotland. The term ‘national allegory’ has
been applied to this kind of fiction, which sets English wealth and power
against a defeated but potentially resurgent Celtic nationalism.45 An
earlier kind of national allegory, however, was of English, not Scottish or
Irish, origin; this was the body of Augustan essay-writing and prose satire
based around such obvious national caricatures as Joseph Addison’s
Tory squire Sir Roger de Coverly and John Arbuthnot’s robust English
tradesman John Bull. The History of John Bull (1712) has a cast of
characters representing the contending nations in the War of Spanish
Succession, but the satire is purely ephemeral and Bull’s fame owes
everything to the eighteenth-century cartoonists who turned him into the
epitome of the truculent English bully.
If John Bull is the eighteenth century’s most famous characterization of
the typical Englishman, his nearest rival (as we shall see in Chapter 3) is
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It is no accident, perhaps, that the novel in
which he appears is for most of its length more sparsely populated than
almost any other work of world literature. Novelists have usually been
concerned with contrasts and differences of character, so that Fielding’s
reflection of Englishness in a novel such as Tom Jones is spread across
several characters rather than being concentrated into a single one.
Where, as often, these differences of character serve to dramatize the
nation’s internal divisions we have a form of national allegory which may
be covert or hidden, rather than foregrounded as in the ‘national tale’.
An acute critical reader will often detect national allegory as a level of
submerged meaning in the work of a novelist with apparently very dif-
ferent intentions. In the words of one recent literary historian, a novel
The Novel and the Nation 27
may ‘contain the nation within its form, its structure, its silences’—above
all, through the interplay of its characters.46
The strength of characterization in English fiction up to the time of
Dickens is due partly to the novel’s effectiveness as national allegory and
partly to the perceived link between English character and eccentricity.
The novelists delight in the foibles and peculiarities of individual tem-
peraments. Hazlitt, for example, explains in ‘Standard Novels and
Romances’ that the achievement of Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and
Sterne belongs to the age of the early Hanoverian kings in which the
English character was ‘more truly English than perhaps at any other
period—that is, more tenacious of its own opinions and purposes’. It was
an ‘age of hobby-horses’ (19–20). The ‘hobby-horse’ here alludes to
Sterne’s Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby; the latter is a disabled army
veteran living out his days in tranquil retirement, and Hazlitt strongly
implies that the English novel’s genial view of character could not survive
the domestic repression and the devastating wars of the revolutionary
epoch that succeeded the ‘age of hobby-horses’.
What gradually overshadowed the prominence of individual eccen-
tricity in the novel was not, however, an awareness of war and political
revolutions but rather the growing consciousness of society as a mono-
lithic institution or organization containing and dwarfing the individual.
This sociological awareness begins with the idea of the social machine
first expounded in Thomas Carlyle’s early essays such as ‘Signs of the
Times’ (1829). The social machine was figured as an interconnected
system or grid, holding its members in narrowly confined positions and
reducing them, ultimately, to animated puppets. The efflorescence of
individual character which had fascinated earlier novelists now came to
seem something of a charade. For H. G. Wells’s narrator at the beginning
of Tono-Bungay (1909), for example, the social system is a complex
arrangement of ‘character parts’:
Most people in this world seem to live ‘in character’; they have a beginning, a
middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the
rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that.
They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than ‘character actors’.
They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and
what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly
they have played the part.47
of glass boxes one separate from another, each housing a group with
special habits and qualities of its own’.48
Once character and a fixed place in the social organization are seen to
go together, the emphasis naturally falls on those who have somehow lost
their place and no longer know ‘what is becoming in them and what is due
to them’—who no longer know who they are. Novelists beginning with
Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) had described protagonists who feel
themselves to be aliens and misfits, and who, like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,
repeatedly have to ask themselves ‘Who am I?’ By the early twentieth
century the search for identity had become open-ended and exploratory;
in a novel such as D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), it almost
entirely supersedes the depiction of individual character as traditionally
understood. The following exchange takes place between two of
Lawrence’s protagonists, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, as they travel
by train from Nottinghamshire to London:
‘What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?’ [Birkin]
asked. . . . ‘Wherein does life centre, for you?’
‘I don’t know—that ’s what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can
make out, it doesn ’t centre at all. It is artificially held together by the social
mechanism.’49
E
nglish prose fiction was a comparatively late arrival in European
literature. Before The Pilgrim’s Progress in the late seventeenth
century there is no popular masterpiece comparable to Giovanni
Boccaccio’s story cycle The Decameron (1349–51) or François Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–4), let alone to Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote de la Mancha, which is the greatest of all early novels.
Until the Elizabethan period English prose fiction consisted of romance
narratives translated or adapted from Latin and French, together with a
few original short stories.1 The two prose works that survive as literary
classics are Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Latin in 1516 and not
translated into English until 1551, and Sir Thomas Malory’s translation
of the Arthurian romances from French and Welsh originals. It is small
wonder that the conventional history of the English novel begins with
Defoe and fails to acknowledge the novel’s prehistory.
But English fiction before Defoe outlines many of the national themes
that were to become familiar in the later tradition. Sixteenth-century
prose narratives provided stories and plots for Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama, a mode of expression that matured so much faster that it
comprehensively outclassed the early novel. The comparative failure of
Elizabethan fiction reveals, above all, the futility of the idea of the novel
as a ‘book of the Courtier’, a sophisticated, learned, and highly elaborate
art intended, like much of the poetry of the time, to win royal patronage
and the praise of the aristocracy. John Lyly, Sir Philip Sidney, and other
writers of Elizabethan courtly prose were thwarted by the novel’s adapta-
tion to private reading and its inability to engage with the public and
performative role of the arts in the life of the court.
Nor did prose fiction have any roots in, or much apparent connection
with, English popular culture. The surviving early accounts of folk heroes
36 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
page, thief, and so on, but he is born a gentleman and manifestly thinks
himself the equal of any Englishman alive. For some time he travels in the
service of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, but when Surrey wishes to pass
incognito in order to pursue his career of gallantry, he and Jack Wilton
exchange places. (Predictably this leads to a farcical mix-up in which
both men claim to be the real Earl of Surrey.) Wilton’s narrative is itself
a cavalier act of defiance on the part of Thomas Nashe, a penniless
university graduate who was manifestly not a blue-blooded aristocrat
like the Earl of Surrey or Sir Philip Sidney.
Rogue is the conventional English translation of the Spanish pı́caro,
whose fictional career began with the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes,
first translated into English in 1586. The Unfortunate Traveller is a
picaresque novel in all but the strictest sense of the term. Unlike the
protagonists of the Spanish picaresque, Jack Wilton has an accepted, if
subordinate, place in the English gentry, and it is his desire for adventure,
rather than poverty and hunger, that sets him wandering across Europe.
But his story, like the pı́caro’s, consists of a long series of lurid episodes
involving hair’s-breadth escapes from prison, from the gallows, and (in
Jack’s case) from being disembowelled by the Pope’s physician in the
course of an anatomy lesson. His instinctive individualism draws intel-
lectual justification from his meeting at Rotterdam with the most revered
of English humanists, ‘Quick-witted Sir Thomas More’. In More’s opin-
ion, we are told, ‘principalities were nothing but great piracies which,
gotten by violence and murther, were maintained by private undermining
and bloodshed . . . in the chiefest flourishing kingdoms there was . . . a
manifest conspiracy of rich men against poor men’ (240). More’s response
to this is to ‘lay down a perfect plot of a commonwealth or government
which he would entitle his Utopia’; but for the cynical Jack Wilton, such a
diagnosis of existing society confirms the absolute necessity of living by
his wits. Only at the end does he elect to go straight, marrying his mistress
or ‘courtesan’ and hastening back to France to rejoin the King’s army.
Where Lyly had portrayed the English court as a virtuous model
for Europe to emulate, Nashe wallows in the vicious excitements awaiting
an English traveller abroad. Once he has left the ordered society and
(somewhat lax) military discipline of the court, Wilton enters the
no-holds-barred world that would be described half a century later in
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan:
To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that
nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice
Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues 41
have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no
Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues.12
Here life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’, and it is ‘thought no
dishonour to be a Pyrate, or a High-way Theefe’ (156–7). Hobbes adds
that, where there is no writ of society higher than the family, men live by
the ‘Lawes of Honour’ (224). Jack Wilton’s adventures culminate in the
nauseating spectacle of the execution of Cutwolfe, a murderer who makes
a defiant last speech to the crowd before his body is broken on the wheel
and left out for the vultures. Cutwolfe, who claims to speak for ‘[a]ll true
Italians’, maintains that ‘Revenge is the glorie of armes, and the highest
performance of [valour]’ (355). He has, in his own eyes, lived by the
principle of honour, while the state’s retribution, brutally performed by
the executioner or ‘hackster’, is simply another kind of vendetta. At
Rome, Jack Wilton has earlier met with a banished English earl, who self-
righteously holds Italy responsible for teaching young English visitors ‘the
art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of
poysoning, the art of Sodomitrie’ (336). These words, ‘worse than an
upbraiding lesson after a britching’ (337), could sum up the lessons of The
Unfortunate Traveller, although Jack’s scorn for the banished earl is also
part of the story. Nashe’s novel seems in retrospect like an early pre-
emptive strike against the Puritan ideology that was to transform English
society in the coming century. Together with Lyly and others, Nashe had
written in defence of the Anglican bishops against the Presbyterians in the
Marprelate controversy of 1588–9, and it is part of Jack Wilton’s ‘cava-
liership’ that Puritans are to be despised as poisonous, malicious toads.
Since life and art are worthless without a ‘lyttle spice of wantonnesse’
(310), the Puritan, in Jack’s eyes, is inevitably a hypocrite. Fifty years
before the outbreak of the Civil War, the conflict between Puritan and
Cavalier values in English fiction had already begun.
the hero of the first part of The Gentle Craft who is also celebrated in
Thomas Dekker’s play The Shoemaker’s Holiday, was a shoemaker’s
apprentice from the North of England who rose to become Lord Mayor of
London in the fifteenth century. The Eyre of The Gentle Craft owes his
legendary good fortune not to a fairy-tale sequence of events like Dick
Whittington’s, but to a smart confidence trick in which the penniless
apprentice persuades the captain of a newly arrived merchant ship to sell
him his whole cargo on credit. Deloney’s novel displays a kind of social
realism that is absent from the Whittington legend. Eyre’s ability to
inspire confidence and to return a profit to the person who invests in him,
while keeping a handsome percentage for reinvestment in his next ven-
ture, is the way in which City fortunes have been made from his day to
ours. By the end, he has become in reality the rich alderman he had earlier
pretended to be. But there is no breath of satire in Deloney’s revelation of
capitalism’s dependence on the creation of illusory confidence and the
calculated exploitation of risk. Eyre’s trickery ends in triumph as he
becomes one of the City’s founding fathers, building Leadenhall and
keeping his promise to feast his fellow apprentices once he has become
Lord Mayor. (The Lord Mayor’s Banquet continues to this day, though it
has long ceased to be for the benefit of City apprentices.)
If The Gentle Craft reveals the foundation of London’s wealth as a
centre of world trade, Thomas of Reading (c.1600) celebrates the growth
of provincial manufacturing industry. Its characters are rich clothing
manufacturers from the West of England who journey to and from
London on business in the early twelfth century. They are large
employers, so much so that half the population of England, including
children as young as 6, are said to earn their livelihood through the
clothing trade. Textiles are ‘the greatest merchandise, by which our
Countrey became famous through all Nations’, or so Deloney alleges,18
and he shows how this was achieved by strict regulation of the home
market, including the grant of a royal monopoly and the introduction of
a standard yard, regular coinage, and capital punishment for stealers
of cloth. The very remote historical setting of Thomas of Reading is
puzzling, since there were no merchant princes like Deloney’s clothiers in
the reign of Henry I.19 But the story illustrates both the power of the
middle-class merchants and their fear of an anarchic, Hobbesian social
state in which they could be cheated or robbed at will. The mood of
civic self-congratulation that Deloney creates is brutally interrupted by
the murder of the Reading clothier Thomas Cole at the Crane Inn at
Colnbrook on the western edge of Hounslow Heath (later to become one
44 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
It has never become part of the English literary canon. One reason for
this is that, of the 450 new works of prose fiction published in England
during the century, 213 were translations.20 Another is that some of the
liveliest seventeenth-century fiction is underground literature, scandalous,
immoral, and unashamedly popular. Highly derivative, if not openly
plagiarized, it has been contemptuously dismissed by literary historians
who would like to believe that the English novel had more respectable
antecedents.
The great political contention of the seventeenth century was that
embodied in the Civil War between King and Parliament. There are few
memorable depictions of the Civil War and the Commonwealth in the
fiction of the time or, indeed, in English novels of any period. At most the
novel would mirror the experience of civil war indirectly, leaving the task
of providing straightforward narrative accounts of the most traumatic
episode in modern English history to historians from the Earl of
Clarendon onwards. There is, however, one contemporary fictive version
of the Civil War that has recently been rediscovered: Percy Herbert’s The
Princess Cloria: or, The Royal Romance, a turgid, long-winded allegory.
The first two volumes, published in 1653 as Cloria and Narcissus, take the
story up to the defeat of King Euarchus of Lydia (Charles I) and his
imprisonment by his senate. The full five volumes appeared in 1661,
immediately after the Restoration, with a prefatory address to the reader
setting out the work’s Royalist credentials. Here the author explained
that the Princess Cloria was an allegorical conception who was ‘not only
to be taken for the Kings Daughter, but also sometimes for his National
Honour’. The allegorical form had been adopted to escape the censorship
of Cromwell’s ‘Tyrannical Government’, but also because readers
would find it more instructive and entertaining than an unvarnished
historical account.21 (For example, Euarchus’s speech on receiving the
death sentence is set out at length, although Charles I had been prevented
from making any such speech.)
Beneath the historical struggle between the King and Parliament was
the contest between anarchy and the rule of law, which was central to the
political philosophy of the age. At his trial in Westminster Hall, Charles I
demanded to know ‘by what authority, I mean lawful’, he was accused
of being a ‘tyrant, traytor, murtherer and publique enemy of the Com-
monwealth’. The King repudiated the prosecutor’s claim to speak for the
people of England, retorting to his ‘pretended judges’ that there were
‘many unlawful authorities in the world, thieves and robbers by the
highways’.22 Parliament, he was asserting, had brought England back to
46 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
what Hobbes would soon call an anarchic state of nature. Later in the
century John Locke, in answer to the Royalist Sir Robert Filmer, set out to
justify the impeachment of a tyrant by a properly constituted tribunal.
If there were no circumstances in which the king’s authority could be
overruled, then there must be open war between the ‘Rulers Insolence’
and the ‘Peoples Wantonness’, according to Locke.23 The popularity of
criminal biography and crime fiction (two genres that are often barely
distinguishable) after the Restoration may be seen partly as a response to
Charles II’s relaxation of censorship, but partly, also, as reflecting the
widespread sense of a suspension or usurpation of lawful authority in the
preceding decades. Once the Puritan judges and regicides had been
silenced, there was a feeling that thieves and highway robbers might be
allowed to put their case and try to justify their actions, at least through
the medium of fiction. In particular, the rogue narratives drew attention
to crucial changes in seventeenth-century England which had passed
almost unnoticed while the nation was obsessed by the conflict between
King and Parliament. England was fast becoming a major European
power, its national and international trade was growing steadily, and it
was beginning to acquire a global empire.
The prototype of seventeenth-century rogue fiction was not the courtier
Jack Wilton but the Spanish ‘Guzman’ or pı́caro whom society regards
as no better than a common thief. James Mabbe’s translation of The
Rogue, or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache was published in 1623 with a
dedicatory poem by Ben Jonson, who claimed that its hero was already a
byword at home and abroad:
For though Spaine gave him his first ayre and Vogue,
He would be call ’d, henceforth, the English-Rogue.24
Guzman leaves his home in Seville after his father’s death to seek out his
‘Noble Kindred and Alliance’ in Italy.25 Fortune always eludes him, and
he is by turns a kitchen scullion, a beggar, a page, and a thief. He spends
periods in the service of a cardinal and an ambassador, and twice marries
in the hope of gain, but all to no purpose; at the end, after four volumes,
he suffers the ultimate degradation of being sentenced to the galleys. By
the middle of the century Guzman was such a proverbial figure that a
biography of the Royalist highwayman James Hind was published in 1652
as The English Gusman. Thirty years later, the Essex-born Thomas
Dangerfield adopted the name of Don Tomazo when he set out on the
road to become a ‘young Gusman’.26 The story of Dangerfield’s supposed
adventures is a tiresome rodomontade, but his book is full of memorable
Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues 47
asides about ‘gusmans’ and ‘gusmanry’. Far from being a helpless victim
of society, the English rogue is ‘Lawless as an Irish Tory’ (a species of
highwayman), ‘as impatient as Ajax and as choleric as Hector’ (374).
Tomazo goes rampaging round the Mediterranean, deals in counterfeit
money in several European countries, fits out a pirate ship, and runs a
network of spies for Prince William of Orange. ‘He delights in large-scale
operations’, as one critic has commented.27 Dangerfield contrasts his
greedy, imperious hero with the poor-spirited Spanish pı́caro: ‘See here
the difference between a Spanish and an English gusman: the one pursuing
a poor, hungry plot upon his penurious master’s bread and cheese, the
other designing to grasp the riches of a fourth part of the world by the ruin
of a national commerce’ (390). London is the ‘grand receptacle of all the
most refined virtuosos in gusmanry’ (389), making the English rogue a
symbol of the fall of the Spanish and the rise of the British empires.
There is a notable female ‘English rogue’ biography, The Case of
Madam Mary Carleton (1663), revised ten years later as The Counterfeit
Lady Unveiled by Francis Kirkman. Carleton, a thief who defends herself
in court against a charge of bigamy, has been identified as the prototype
of Defoe’s Moll Flanders.28 The most famous and popular of the rogue
novels, however, was Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665), to which
three further volumes were appended (with or without Head’s collab-
oration) by Francis Kirkman. The English Rogue spawned a series of
imitations, all by English writers: The French Rogue (1672), The Dutch
Rogue (1683), The Irish Rogue (1690), and The Scotch Rogue (1706).29
Head’s rogue Meriton Latroon (roughly translatable as the Virtuous
Highwayman) is a Royalist who, unlike his martyred King, narrowly
escapes execution in the year 1650. He sits out the rest of the Common-
wealth years in exile in Siam and the East Indies. The three later volumes
consist largely of the life histories of various members of the English
trading fleet whom Meriton, now a substantial local businessman,
entertains when they arrive at Java.
Don Tomazo and The English Rogue are narratives of empire,
celebrating an unscrupulous lawlessness that was felt to be a powerful
weapon of the English abroad even if it was frowned upon at home.
Significantly, both Tomazo and Meriton Latroon initially set out as self-
styled knights-errant intent upon winning their spurs. They are travelling
in the footsteps not only of the Arthurian knights but of the hero of
Don Quixote, which had been translated into English by Thomas
Shelton immediately after its first publication in 1605–15. Meriton’s
first stopping-place is a barn rather than an ‘enchanted castle’, while
48 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
colony of Surinam, ‘an obscure world, that afforded only a female pen to
celebrate [the hero’s] fame’.35 Another novel, Love-Letters Between a
Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), ostensibly a saga of amorous intrigues
in France and the Low Countries during the sixteenth-century Huguenot
wars, contains a thinly veiled allegory of events leading up to the
Monmouth rebellion of 1685.
Behn’s fiction offers fantasies of aristocracy and gallantry; Bunyan
offers allegorical fantasies of virtue and justice. The English courtship
novel of the eighteenth century would later combine these two sorts of
fantasy in a decorously romantic fable with a moral calculated to appeal
to the respectable middle classes. Some of Behn’s novellas, such as ‘The
Unfortunate Happy Lady’ in which the libertine Sir William Wilding is
eventually reclaimed by his virtuous sister, end in a triumph of innocence
just as the courtship novel generally does. But her most memorable
characters are aristocratic rebels living by a code of ‘honour’ and ruth-
lessly intent on following their desires. Retribution follows, sometimes in
the gruesome style of Cutwolfe’s execution in The Unfortunate Traveller.
For the novel to function as a fantasy of aristocracy, the middle-class
professional novelist must either impersonate an upper-class narrator or,
at least, claim to reveal the inner feelings and secrets of a higher social
class. Aphra Behn’s fiction has all the marks of social aspiration: its
subject matter consists of upper-class scandals and the intimate histories
of wealthy families, told in a sometimes gossipy, sometimes high-flown
and declarative style, and introduced by witty dedications to people of
fashion whom Behn addresses as friends—possibly lovers—and political
allies. In The Fair Jilt (1688) and Oroonoko she appears as an eyewitness
narrator who was on the periphery of the events she relates. The Fair Jilt
is supposedly a true story of crimes committed in Antwerp in 1666, the
year in which Behn had visited the city as a Royalist spy, and biographers
have deduced from Oroonoko that the author must have lived in Surinam
at some point in her earlier life. Love-Letters is one of the first epistolary
novels in English. The novel in letters was a particularly appropriate
forum for portraying the intimate lives of persons of ‘quality’, who were
presumed to have more time on their hands, a higher standard of literacy,
freer access to writing materials, more to write about, and more reliable
means of sending clandestine letters than their social inferiors.
The epistolary novel has two apparently contradictory purposes. It
reveals the scandalous secrets of the aristocracy at the same time as
providing its readers with information on the modes of conducting love
affairs, engaging in polite discourse, and corresponding with friends of
52 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
either sex. Epistolary novels might be presented, in the jargon of the age,
as ‘true secret histories’, but they exemplify a kind of narrative language
that is informal, gossipy, full of emotion—both true and pretended—and
unashamedly subjective. Although not an easy form for the writer to
negotiate, the novel in letters soon became one of the most influential
models of fictional narration. Readers were quick to identify with an
aristocratic or genteel protagonist who was a keen letter writer, and often
the letter writers were also represented as readers of novels. For all the
rigid stratifications of rank in the societies they depict, the works of Behn
and her successors and imitators tend to promote solidarity and cultural
homogeneity between the upper and middle classes. They express a fantasy
of social assimilation, and function as a guide to the socially aspiring.
Love-Letters is to some extent based on a French epistolary novel, Gabriel
de Bremond’s Hattigé, which reflected the love affairs of Charles II.36
But Behn’s protagonists, Philander and Sylvia, allude to the Duke of
Monmouth’s associate Lord Grey of Werke and his sister-in-law Lady
Henrietta Berkeley, whom he abducted in 1682. Philander and Sylvia are
supporters of the Prince of Condé, who died in the Huguenot wars in
1569, but the two lovers live in exile in the Low Countries, to which
Monmouth and his closest supporters had fled in 1683. The topicality of
Love-Letters must be approached through an intricate series of masks,
one of which is the mask of the chronique scandaleuse or novel of
adultery. The defeat of the Huguenots at the end of the third volume
(echoing Monmouth’s defeat at Sedgemoor in 1685) is introduced with
the proviso that ‘it is not the business of this little history to treat of war,
but altogether love; leaving those rougher relations to the chronicles and
historiographers of those times’ (447). ‘Little history’ here refers to the
scandalous and fashionable genre of petites histoires, such as the ‘little
French novels’ (300) that Behn’s characters use to while away the odd
brief interlude between episodes of sexual dalliance.
The characters of Love-Letters are so besotted with sex that they tend
to disregard politics even when political allegiance has put their lives in
danger. Philander frequently ignores the Prince’s summonses; the Prince
only with the greatest reluctance tears himself away from erotic dalliance
to lead an ill-prepared and half-hearted rebellion. At least one recent
commentator has read Love-Letters as a ‘cautionary romance’ warning
against the immorality of Lord Grey and his fellow Whigs, though its
moral atmosphere closely resembles that of Behn’s well-known comedy
The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers (1677), where Willmore, the
‘Rover of Fortune’, suggests the future Charles II living in exile during the
Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues 53
Earlier we have been told that Badman courted his future wife ‘under a
Vizzard of Religion, as if he had been for Honesty and Godliness, one of
the most sincere and upright-hearted in England’ (66). The situation
would reappear in countless English courtship novels, and we cannot
help being curious as to how this devout and intelligent woman was
so thoroughly deceived. But, once again, this is not the thing Bunyan
aims at.42
A vizard is literally a face mask, and Bunyan’s allegorical method could
be described as a sustained masquerade. His characters’ ‘true’ identities,
which are so clear to the reader, are often mysterious to one another. The
names by which we know them are nicknames or given names rather
than patronymics.43 (It is true that Badman is one of a large family of
‘Badmans’, ‘both Brothers and Sisters’, yet they are the ‘Children of a
godly Parent’ (16), whose name can hardly have been Badman as well.
Nor, it would seem, is Badman’s wife Mrs Badman, since she admonishes
her husband on her deathbed that she is going ‘where no bad man shall
come’ (142).) Characters in Bunyan’s other narratives occasionally hide
56 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
the streets. This is truly a bloody assize, the more so since Bunyan’s narrator
is aware that some of the characters’ punishments do not seem to fit either
their names or their crimes. Clip-promise, for example, is guilty of reneging
on a commercial contract, but, we are told, his hanging is in no sense unduly
harsh: ‘truly my judgment is that all those of his name and life should be
served even as he’ (243). The ‘holy war’ turns into a holocaust carried out in
the name of godliness and good business.
During his long imprisonment, John Bunyan himself seems to have been
treated punctiliously according to the law, and in many ways leniently.
What should we make of his allegory of the soul as a well-run town or city
where godless miscreants are judicially murdered in an orgy of legal ven-
geance? The Holy War draws on Bunyan’s knowledge of actual Civil War
sieges, and its immediate stimulus was Charles II’s political campaign to
take back control of the English cities and boroughs from the Dissenters by
‘remodelling’ their corporations and issuing new charters. In Bunyan’s
home town of Bedford this led to the granting of a new charter in 1684.48 It
seems, to say the least, a slender basis for a long and bloodthirsty fiction of
military history. The crucial point, no doubt, is that The Holy War is an
allegory of the individual soul in which, as one scholar has put it, ‘the
battles of the interior self are conflated with the battles of saints against
sinners and of Roundheads against Cavaliers’.49 The ruthlessness with
which a Puritan ought to suppress a rebellion within his own soul does not
translate very happily into methods of civic government.
If the City of Mansoul itself were seen as Bunyan’s protagonist, then
The Holy War could be understood as a distorted version of the tradi-
tional tale of suffering, of which the most distinguished example is the
Book of Job. The lesson of Job—perhaps the most influential of all
devotional texts in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English culture—
was that the true Christian must have the patience to withstand suffering,
however harsh and unjust it might seem. Mansoul is fought over by
Diabolus and King Shaddai (the Hebrew name for God used in Job and
Revelation) and his son Prince Emanuel. Like Job, the rulers of Mansoul
cry out to Shaddai and Emanuel for help, but receive no response. On one
occasion when the Lord Mayor is sent away empty-handed, ‘he smote
upon his breast and returned weeping, all the way bewailing the lamen-
table state of Mansoul’ (160), a very Job-like reaction. It is only when
Shaddai judges that the people of Mansoul are ‘heart and soul in the
matter’ (208)—that is, that they are at their last extremity—that he sends
Prince Emanuel to relieve them and to accomplish the ethical and spiritual
cleansing of their city.
Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues 59
‘footmen’ (170), in sharp contrast not only with the Arthurian knights but
with the rogues, gentlefolk, and haughty Cavaliers of other seventeenth-
century fiction. The only legitimate rider in The Pilgrim’s Progress is
Faithful, the martyr of Vanity Fair who is taken direct to the Celestial City
in a heavenly chariot.
Bunyan’s pilgrims stop at roadside inns and other resting-places such as
the Delectable Mountains and the House Beautiful. They must also keep a
perpetual lookout for highwaymen and robbers. Christian’s advice to
travellers on the road combines both spiritual and practical good sense:
they should go armed (with the shield of faith), and in a convoy with other
pilgrims. Preferably they should be accompanied by an experienced guide
such as Great-heart, who kills the robber captain Slay-good, or Valiant-
for-Truth whose bloody face and drawn sword reveal that he has just
dispatched three highwaymen. The pilgrim who has his purse snatched is
called Little-faith, a name suggesting he is too ill-equipped to travel safely.
If Christian is both pedestrian knight-errant and fortunate traveller, he
is also a young man in search of his destiny. Thanks to the parchment roll
given to him by Evangelist, he goes to ‘seek an inheritance’ (42). This
inheritance lies in the city of the ‘righteous nation’ (203), a city whose
streets are paved with gold. Here the New Jerusalem of the biblical
Apocalypse, in which ‘the street of the city was pure gold’ (Revelation
21: 21), joins hands with Dick Whittington’s London even though the
profanity of the folk tale would have appalled Bunyan. But neither
Christian nor the other pilgrims are shown actually entering the Celestial
City. Instead, they wait by the riverside on the opposite bank while the
Shining Ones, emissaries from the city, move among them. And far from
portraying Christian’s life inside the City of Gold, the second part of
The Pilgrim’s Progress accomplishes a remarkable doubling-back by
showing the women Christiana and Mercy undergoing the same journey
that Christian has already made.
To write a narrative sequel in which the protagonist’s steps are literally
retraced by new characters would be unthinkable in a modern novel. It is
one of the features that most clearly reveals the uniqueness of Bunyan’s
allegory. A novel cannot appropriately describe the same journey twice,
and even a reverse journey (such as the return up or down a river in
late nineteenth-century romances like Huckleberry Finn and Heart of
Darkness) is normally got over as quickly as possible. A novel, whether or
not it is a tale of travel and adventure, relies on vivid, unexpected, and
unique events, while Bunyan’s allegory openly valorizes repetition and
recapitulation just as a fairy tale does. It is possible that part one of
62 Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues
The Pilgrim’s Progress was too much like a novel or a modern fantasy
narrative for Bunyan’s austere purposes. In the second part the landscape
and adventures become less vivid, and as the itinerary is repeated the
allegory is foregrounded. The physical journey that seemed to take
Christian a matter of days or perhaps weeks now takes several years,
becoming a pilgrimage of life during which Christiana ages, her sons grow
up, and Mercy marries and has children. But the journey is also a textual
one in which the pilgrims in part two find that their predecessors’ journey
has already been narrated, being inscribed on stone monuments along
the King’s highway that they have to follow. This narrative self-
consciousness is a profoundly novelistic touch, reminding us, for example,
of the second part of Don Quixote where the knight-errant’s fame
is already established because the characters have read and laughed over his
adventures in the first part.
John Bunyan died in 1688, the year before Aphra Behn, and is buried
with his fellow Dissenters, including Daniel Defoe, in London’s Bunhill
Fields. Bunyan and Behn belong to the period immediately before the
so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, when England took a turn
towards national unity and reconciliation to which neither the Puritan
saint nor the libertine novelist ever had to accommodate themselves.
Neither author would have been at ease (though Behn, doubtless, was
more adaptable) with a nation broadly at peace with itself, or with a civil
society whose greatest conflicts were not between contending spiritual
and temporal powers, but simply between political parties. Bunyan’s The
Holy War with its tyrannical vision of justice was soon forgotten by a new
England anxious to bury its memories of religious division and civil war.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, on the other hand, found its readership not only
among the tiny minority of Nonconformists but throughout a decidedly
unrighteous nation.53
=3=
Cross-Grained Crusoe: Defoe and the
Contradictions of Englishness
F
ew writers have been as insistent about their nationality as Daniel
Defoe. He was a prolific journalist and author of histories, travel
books, handbooks, and advice books, whose titles include A Tour
through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), The Complete
English Tradesman (1726), and A Plan of the English Commerce (1728).
Not only is he the principal claimant for the title of father of the English
novel, but his non-fictional writings amount to a kind of ramshackle
encyclopedia, a comprehensive compendium of facts and opinions about
the English nation. His greatest contribution to world literature was
his creation of Robinson Crusoe, a fictional character who has long
been regarded as an archetypal Englishman. Yet Defoe and his fictional
creations have a more complex relationship to national identity than
appears at first sight.
The historian Linda Colley argues that the construction of the sense of
British national identity began with the union of England and Scotland
in 1707, more than a century after the two countries were first brought
together under the Stuart monarchy.1 The early eighteenth century was
a time when nationalities were forcefully asserted and new national
symbols invented. However, it is Englishness, not Britishness, that is
stressed in Defoe’s works and in the literary characterizations of his
contemporaries such as Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverly (the prototypical
country squire) and Arbuthnot’s John Bull. Sir Roger and his friends
are old-timers who reflect the Whig belief in the healing of national dif-
ferences and the mellowing of the English nation two generations after the
Civil War. John Bull is a symbol of outwardly turned national aggression,
an expression of England’s growing readiness to challenge France,
Holland, and Spain for dominance on the world stage.
In Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays of 1711–12, the Tory country
squire is shown on his visits to London attending the Club frequented by
Mr Spectator, Will Honeycomb, and the City merchant Sir Andrew
64 Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness
more cheated by Partners, Apprentices, and Servants: This was occasioned by his
being a Boon-Companion, loving his Bottle and his Diversion; for to say Truth,
no Man kept a better House than John, nor spent his Money more generously.4
the Turkish nickname acquired when she was mistress of the English king.
Eventually she marries a Dutch merchant and settles in Holland. The
anonymous narrator of Memoirs of a Cavalier is a Shropshire landowner’s
son who gains his military experience in the Swedish Army before fighting
for Charles I in the Civil War. He is a remarkably dispassionate observer
who turns Royalist for partly mercenary reasons, without, as he puts it,
troubling himself to examine sides: ‘I was glad to hear the Drums beat for
Soldiers; as if I had been a meer Swiss, that had not car’d which Side went
up or down, so I had my Pay’. It is true that he later feels some remorse over
his lack of concern for his country’s ‘approaching Ruin’, but nationality
and allegiance are often no more than flags of convenience for Defoe’s
protagonists.10 Their cosmopolitanism and capacity for switching identities
is still more remarkable when set beside Defoe’s lifelong output as a
journalist and commentator on national themes, beginning with his Essay
upon Projects (1697) with its pioneering futurological vision of a recon-
structed and modernized England.
Defoe served as a government agent and as a commentator on English
politics in the Review (1704–12), and by the time of his death in 1731 he
had published more or less comprehensive accounts of English commerce,
geography, politics, history, religion, sex, and family life. His urge to
demonstrate mastery of such a disparate catalogue of knowledge reminds
us of Crusoe laboriously teaching himself all the trades necessary for his
island existence. His novels written in the early 1720s were followed by A
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and by his series of advice
books culminating in the unfinished Complete English Gentleman. It
could be said that his slowly maturing ambition had made him a kind of
English Walt Whitman whose large, all-embracing song of himself was
also a song of the nation. His fiction is centrifugal, his non-fiction cent-
ripetal, with London always as the centre. Moreover, his vision of the
national life projects the nation as a kind of body in which the blood
courses back and forth from centre to circumference, from nucleus to
periphery. This is most plainly announced in his descriptions of the cir-
culation of trade, where London is the heart, the main roads are the
arteries, and commerce is the instrument of national prosperity joining
together the remotest parts of the kingdom.11 In terms of the volume of
home trade and foreign trade, England, as Defoe asserted ‘without the
least partiality to our own country’, was the ‘greatest trading country in
the world’.12 His schemes in the Essay upon Projects for a national
banking system, for the improvement of main roads, and for better
Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness 67
education for men and women would all tend to promote the circulation
of trade.
Defoe observes in The Complete English Tradesman that ‘trade increases
people, and people increase Trade’ (226). A healthy economy implies a
constantly moving and circulating population, with plentiful immigration
and emigration. The more pluralistic the nation, the better its prospects.
Thus the narrator of The Consolidator (1705)—Defoe’s strange and
tedious politico-religious satire cast in the form of a moon voyage—lives in
a country which ‘had been peopled from all parts, and had in it some of the
blood of all the nations in the moon’. Its people are ‘the weakest, strongest,
richest, poorest, most generous, covetous, bold, cowardly, false, faithful,
sober, dissolute, surly, civil, slothful, diligent, peacable, quarrelling, loyal,
seditious nation that ever was known’.13 That The Consolidator was a
national allegory about the English nation would have been immediately
evident to readers of The True-Born Englishman (1700), Defoe’s witty,
impassioned verses prompted by a pamphlet attacking King William for his
foreign birth. Defoe’s England is the world’s melting-pot, its population
the bastard fruit of ‘spurious generation’ from ‘all the nations under
Heav’n’:
A True-Born Englishman ’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.14
tasteless in English ears. Defoe was not invariably a good judge of his
readers’ responses, and soon after The True-Born Englishman a badly
aimed satire would have him sent to the pillory; but here, speaking in the
voice of ‘Satire’ (with a brief interlude of Britannia’s song eulogizing King
William),17 his sense of tone is almost unerring, and he can get away with
lampooning the English as a ‘vile degenerate race’ (58) who have nothing
to boast of but their bastardy. This does not mean that the poem is free of
self-contradiction—far from it. As an ardent Williamite, Defoe dismisses
the growing opposition to the Dutch Protestant King on the grounds that
the English are a ‘discontented nation’ of hot-headed rebels, ‘Easily set
together by the ears’ and ‘Harder to rule in times of peace than war’ (44).
But English truculence and discontent must have their uses, since without
them William would never have come to the throne; so Defoe in his role as
people’s tribune asserts that
Whate ’re the dialect of courts may tell,
He that his right demands, can ne’re rebel. (48)
Elsewhere in the poem his fulsome praise of ‘great Nassau’ (King William),
who was Charles I’s grandson, is hard to square with a rollicking populist
attack on the worship of heredity and rank. Radical as he may have been
in his statement of the people’s rights, Defoe was by no means a modern
democrat.
Who exactly are ‘the people of England’? In The True-Born Englishman
they appear as a promiscuous, unruly, crime-ridden multitude, but a later
tract addressed to the King, The Original Power of the Collective Body of
the People of England, Examined and Asserted (1702), puts forward a much
more restricted and legalistic definition of the English people. Here Defoe
maintains that the public good, the commonwealth, the English constitu-
tion, and the laws and ‘liberties of England’ are all reducible to ‘that great
term, the People of England’, but the latter consist only of freeholders and
property owners.18 The others have ‘no right to live there but upon
sufferance’. Only the property owners qualify as full citizens, or rather as
free subjects under the King, the ‘universal landlord’ (102). For Defoe in
this tract submission to constitutional monarchy is part of the national
character—‘The genius of this nation has always appeared to tend to
a monarchy, a legal limited monarchy’ (96)—while property-owning
Englishmen enjoy ‘more freedom in our regal, than any people in the world
can do in a popular, government’ (97).
On examination, then, Defoe’s radical Englishness contains as many
self-contradictions as the xenophobic notions he set out to attack. He was
Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness 69
self-hatred, Defoe’s characters find comfort, first in the life of action, and
later, when their time for repentance has officially come, in reliving and
retelling the exploits of their wicked lives in narrative.
Robinson Crusoe freely confesses to the ‘original sin’ of filial
disobedience, and critics have suggested that his self-dramatization as a
Job-like figure is spurious, since he is the author of his own tribulations.23
His shipwreck on the island is, he thinks, a manifest sign of God’s dis-
pleasure. He has ‘Reasons . . . to expect particular Misfortunes to my self’,
and he cannot believe that God has singled him out without cause.24 He
tries to eliminate the word ‘accident’ from his vocabulary, since nothing
in his world is accidental. Experience is full of ‘secret Hints and Notices’
which may be put down to a ‘Converse of Spirits’, and which ought to
guide the conduct of the wise man (128, 180). The need to pay due regard
to these ‘providences’ is the chief spiritual lesson of his life on the island.
Crusoe’s superstitions, and above all his belief that ‘there was a strange
Concurrence of Days in the various Providences which befel me’ (97), are
faithfully repeated throughout Defoe’s works. As we read in the Serious
Reflections, ‘a man killed by accident is a man whom God has delivered
up . . . to be killed in that manner, perhaps vindictively, perhaps not’ (204).
Defoe’s God is frequently a jealous and vindictive God. Not even Crusoe’s
twenty-eight years of punishment and repentance on the island are enough
to satisfy Him, since in the Farther Adventures Crusoe again suffers
bewildering reversals of fortune exhibiting the ‘justice of Providence’ (185).
But, in an eloquent passage from the Serious Reflections, Crusoe claims to
support his afflictions with the proverbial patience of Job:
I, Robinson Crusoe, grown old in affliction, borne down by calumny and
reproach, but supported from within, boldly prescribe this remedy against uni-
versal clamours and contempt of mankind: patience, a steady life of virtue and
sobriety, and a comforting dependence on the justice of Providence, will first or
last restore the patient to the opinion of his friends, and justify him in the face of
his enemies; and in the meantime, will support him comfortably in despising
those who want manners and charity, and leave them to be cursed from heaven
with their own passions and rage. (225)
The difficulty for Crusoe is that if he obeys his belligerent instincts and
launches an attack on the cannibals, he may be guilty of murder. Yet not
to act in a case where conscience required him to act would clearly be
sinful. As time goes on and his firepower is increased by the addition of
Friday, it becomes increasingly obvious that, like any leader anxious to go
to war, he is looking for a lawful casus belli. He finds it, needless to say,
when he realizes that there is a captive European about to go into the
cannibals’ cooking-pot. Now at last the moment has come when, as he
has foreseen, God ‘would take the Cause into his own Hands, and by
national Vengeance punish them as a people for national Crimes’ (168).
Armed at last with prophetic certainty, Crusoe and Friday open fire.
Three pages later, our narrator offers a meticulous body count of one
wounded and seventeen dead.
Is this an isolated moment of bloodthirsty action in an otherwise
peaceful story? Taking Robinson Crusoe on its own, this is arguably the
case, notwithstanding Crusoe’s earlier fight with Moorish pirates. But
adding in the Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections gives a very
different picture. At Madagascar, in the Farther Adventures, Crusoe
witnesses the sacking of a village and the massacre of its men, women, and
children by the crew of his ship in revenge for the killing of one of their
Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness 75
number. He condemns this at the time, and later says he grew ‘sick of
killing such poor savage wretches’ (231); but then he advocates massac-
ring the inhabitants of a Tartar village whom he accuses of devil-
worship, citing ‘the story of our men at Madagascar’ as a moral precedent
(285). (Although his partner dissuades him from spilling blood, they
manage to set off a full-scale war by stealing the Tartars’ wooden idol and
burning it.) Crusoe’s hypocrisy about European imperialism is further
evidenced in his Serious Reflections. Where in Robinson Crusoe he had
condemned the Spaniards’ slaughter of the Aztecs in Mexico as ‘meer
Butchery’ (125), he now compares them to Joshua and Moses casting out
the heathen in the name of ‘God in his Providence’ (215). The newly
militant Crusoe disclaims any belief in planting religion by the sword
(217), but this again is pious humbug. What is needed, he asserts, is ‘an
universal war against paganism and devil-worship’ (224), a Holy War to
be launched by the Christian princes: ‘This is my crusado; and it would be
a war as justifiable on many accounts as any that was ever undertaken in
the world, a war that would bring eternal honour to the conquerors and
an eternal blessing to the people conquered’ (232). This ‘crusado’ is
assured of certain victory, thanks to the ‘concurrence of Heaven’ (227).
‘Crusoe’ is supposedly a corruption of ‘Kreutznaer’, but it seems he is also
a true-born Crusader.
Not content with his trumpet call to the Christian princes, the author of
the Serious Reflections is also a visionary and mystic who claims special
insight into the ways of Providence. The Reflections culminate in a
‘Vision of the Angelic World’, in which Crusoe affirms the ‘reality of
spirits, and of the intelligence between us and them’. His argument for
the ‘superintendency of divine Providence in the minutest affairs of this
world’ relies on the evidence of dreams, voices, impulses, hints, appre-
hensions, and other phenomena which the unreflecting would be likely to
dismiss as merely accidental. It is, to say the least, hard to reconcile the
soothsayer convinced of the ‘manifest existence of the invisible world’
(314) with the hard-headed, pragmatic colonist intent on building a
rational and civilized life on his desert island. It would be tempting to
argue that the Serious Reflections is not a true sequel and that there is no
continuity between its narrator and the Crusoe of the original story. (In
fact, the later book has rarely been reprinted, and most admirers of
Robinson Crusoe are unaware of its existence.) Crusoe’s preface to the
Reflections invites us to consider his life as a ‘parable or allegoric history’
written for the purpose of moral and religious improvement (p. xii). If this
is, after all, to be taken seriously then we must conclude that, at some
76 Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness
Watts’s hymns’,34 but the portrait is wildly inaccurate. Above all, Crusoe
fails to display any ambition to take ‘permanent possession of the
country’. Instead, he cannot wait to leave it.
Robinson Crusoe’s global popularity suggests that its hero cannot
simply be identified with any one nationality, and another school of cri-
ticism suggests that he is not a second John Bull but, as Defoe had said of
the ‘true-born Englishman’,
A metaphor invented to express
A man akin to all the universe.35
people’, but he prefers not to, omitting even to name the island, and
leaving it ‘belonging to no man’. He will neither govern it properly nor
relinquish the governorship to one of the other settlers. Not surprisingly,
the plantation fails to prosper, being racked by wars within and without.
Crusoe, ‘possessed with a wandering spirit’, is content to play at being an
‘old patriarchal monarch’ over this no man’s land, leaving it as a refuge of
outlaws and accidental castaways, a fallen utopia not marked on any map
(184). The ‘truth’ about the place that he hears many years later—that
‘they went on but poorly; were malcontent with their long stay there’
(184–5)—is offset by his remarkable capacity to idealize and senti-
mentalize the island once he has abandoned it. It is his idealization, not
the supposed reality, that is remembered. The whole narrative of
Robinson Crusoe is testimony to this idealization, which teeters over into
absurdity at the end of the Farther Adventures when he finds himself
stranded in Siberia, the polar opposite of his tropical island. Here Crusoe
boasts to his companion, a Russian political exile, that his power over his
dominions exceeded the ‘Czar of Muscovy’: ‘never tyrant, for such I
acknowledged myself to be, was ever so universally beloved, and yet so
horribly feared, by his subjects’ (300). For Crusoe his colony has now
become a mere fantasy, with no more substance than the island over
which Sancho Panza was governor.
Crusoe, despite his dreams of imperialist wars, is far from being the
practical empire-builder envisaged by Walter Raleigh, James Joyce, and
others. In Defoe’s own allegory (as stated in the Serious Reflections)
Crusoe is meant to embody the examined life; ironically, though, he is
most English in his unexamined inconsistencies. His life and thought are
cross-grained and self-contradictory, exemplifying both miracle and
muddle. For all his successful self-projection as a calm, efficient, practical
Englishman, he is perpetually homeless, wandering, and lost, a prey
to superstition and religious mania. The defeated, quixotic fantasist
pondering obsessively over his lost greatness and his unhappy destiny is
also a magnificent storyteller. He is a representative of the European
adventurer, but his loyalty is entirely to himself and not to an English king;
his island is less a one-man colony than a one-man nation. Nevertheless, his
Puritan origins cannot be concealed, and they come out most tellingly in
moments of pretended abstinence, self-denial, and down-to-earth bluntness.
When he loots the second (Spanish) wreck on the island he helps himself to
rich clothes, liquor, cordials, sweetmeats, and bags of doubloons and pieces
of eight. He lugs the money home to his cave, adding it to what he has
already stowed there, and dreams of coming back from England one day
Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness 81
to fetch it. But, as his feet are itching, he stoutly protests that ‘I would
have given it all for three or four pairs of English Shoes and Stockings’ (140).
Here is Defoe’s contradictory Englishman made flesh. To Crusoe the
colonist, Crusoe the religious fanatic, and Crusoe the wanderer must be
added Crusoe the whingeing Pom and home-grown humbug.
=4=
Histories of Rebellion: From
1688 to 1793
Once, when Mr Crawley asked what the young people were reading,
the governess replied ‘Smollett.’ ‘Oh, Smollett,’ said Mr Crawley,
quite satisfied. ‘His history is more dull, but by no means so dan-
gerous as that of Mr Hume. It is history you are reading?’ ‘Yes,’ said
Miss Rose; without, however, adding that it was the history of
Mr Humphry Clinker.
(Thackeray, Vanity Fair)
I
n this anecdote from Becky Sharp’s life as a governess, Thackeray
has managed to pick one of the few mid-eighteenth-century novels
that did not contain the word ‘history’ in its title. Eighty years before
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or
the Royal Slave had been subtitled ‘A True History’. The popular novels
of Delarivier Manley (1670–1724) and Eliza Haywood (?1693–1756) were
presented to the public as ‘true histories’, ‘secret histories’, or even ‘true
secret histories’. Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1) was
followed by Clarissa: or the History of a Young Lady (1748–9) and The
History of Sir Charles Grandison (1754), while Fielding’s masterpiece was
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Fielding repeatedly plays
on the various meanings of ‘history’ in his novels. In The History of the
Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) he ridicules ‘those romance writers
who entitle their books, ‘‘The History of England, the History of France,
of Spain, & c.’’ ’.1 In The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) he calls
romance the ‘confounder and corrupter of true history’.2 The narrator of
Tom Jones pours scorn on ‘some pages, which certain droll authors have
been facetiously pleased to call The History of England’.3 Here Fielding’s
target was the Jacobite historian Thomas Carte, and Fielding’s writings
in the anti-Jacobite cause included a brief pamphlet on The History
of the Present Rebellion in Scotland (1745). His successors among the
eighteenth-century novelists include Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, and
Histories of Rebellion 83
William Godwin, each of whom was also a historian in something like the
modern professional sense of the term. In November 1791 the 16-year-old
Jane Austen made her own crisp comment on English history-writing with
‘The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of
Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Historian’.4
Histories of England, like English dictionaries, lives of the poets, and
editions of Shakespeare, bear witness to the systematic construction of a
‘republic of letters’ or national literary culture in eighteenth-century
Britain. For the first time, the modern nations of Western Europe could be
identified by their possession of a separate syllabus of knowledge, a
codified language, and a distinctive literary canon and library of books.
The demand for patriotic reference works and textbooks was exploited to
the full by the commercial booksellers, who competed fiercely to fill the
vacant shelves of this putative national library. Beginning with White
Kennett’s Complete History of England (1706) there are over twenty
separate works carrying the general title History of England during
this period, often in multiple volumes, and with the title prefixed by
adjectives such as Chronological, Critical, General, and Impartial, as well
as Complete.5 At a lower level than the encyclopedic histories were works
for the schoolroom, from John Lockman’s History of England, by way of
Question and Answer (1735) to works by the novelists Oliver Goldsmith
and Charlotte Smith. Goldsmith’s History of England, from the Earliest
Times to the Death of George II (1771) was confessedly an abridgement
compiled from the works of Rapin, Carte, Smollett, and Hume. His
choice of rival historians suggests an attempt at fair-mindedness, but
Goldsmith was aware of the impossibility of pleasing all parties.6 As
Mr Crawley’s comparison of Smollett and Hume implies, most eighteenth-
century historiography was, and was seen to be, intensely partisan. The
historians of the time are easily divisible into Whigs and Tories,
Hanoverians and Jacobites, Anglicans and Dissenters, and Royalists and
republicans. David Hume’s History of Great Britain (1754–7) is condemned
as dangerous by the Whiggish Mr Crawley even though its claim to be
above party has stood the test of time better than any of its rivals.7
For history to be partisan, it must have something to be partisan about.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whigs and Tories traced their
ancestry back to the contending sides in the English Civil War, and the
same is true of numerous fictional heroes beginning with Tristram Shandy
and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Two hundred and fifty years after
Charles I had raised his standard at Nottingham, William Lecky could
write in The Political Value of History (1892) that ‘We are Cavaliers or
84 Histories of Rebellion
crown and the people had been settled, for better or worse, by the
sequence of rebellion, restoration, and deposition in the previous century.
Hume’s History of Great Britain keeps this firmly in view throughout his
narrative of the reigns of the four Stuart kings. Parliaments, he observes,
invariably arose from the ‘consent of monarchs’, but monarchies owed
their existence to the ‘voluntary submission of the people’.15 The Civil
War stemmed from Charles I’s decision to treat the nation like a con-
quered province (278). The Parliamentary victory, however, destroyed the
balance of powers necessary to a stable society:
No sooner had they subdued their sovereign, than their own servants rose
up against them, and tumbled them from their slippery throne. The sacred
boundaries of the laws being once violated, nothing remained to confine the
wild projects of zeal and ambition. And every successive revolution became a
precedent for that which followed it. (626)
Hume’s use of the term ‘revolution’ here is closer to its modern sense than
that of earlier political theorists such as Hobbes and Locke; but his
vertiginous picture of successive revolutions consuming one another has
only one likely end, which is eventual restoration—the wheel turning full
circle, having accomplished a revolution in the old sense.16 The effect of
the 1688 constitutional settlement was to stop these imploding forces and,
in the words of an anonymous writer of 1760, to turn political conflict
into a ‘transient dispute among friends, not an implacable feud that
admits of no reconciliation’.17 (It may be noted that in Parliament under
the two-party system the bitterest opponents have to address each other as
‘my honourable friend’.)
In the self-congratulatory vein that was to become known as the Whig
interpretation of history, the English Civil War became a necessary
bloodletting prior to an age of prosperity, political civility, and overseas
expansion. Oliver Goldsmith wrote that the miseries of the Civil War
were ‘ultimately productive of domestic happiness and security; the laws
became more precise, the monarchy’s privileges better ascertained, and
the subject’s duty better delineated; all became more peacable, as if a
previous fermentation in the constitution was necessary for its subsequent
refinement’.18 The metaphor of fermentation combines the idea of pop-
ular turbulence with the settling and maturation necessary to produce a
superior vintage. This quotation from Goldsmith’s professedly monarchist
history suggests how the nation could be seen to have undergone its period of
rebellion and restoration like a stormy adolescent on the verge of adulthood.
At such moments, the underlying patterns of English historiography and
86 Histories of Rebellion
was not fully admitted to the Defoe canon until the twentieth century.28
The narrator begins with a preface claiming to correct some errors in
Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, a book from which Defoe had in fact
freely plagiarized. In the text the Cavalier claims hitherto secret knowledge
of such matters as the arguments in the Royalist camp before the Battle
of Marston Moor, and Charles I’s regrets after the defeat at Naseby.
He includes an appendix of superstitious ‘Remarks and Observations’,
advancing the theory that nemesis overtakes a king or statesman on the
‘very same Day of the same Month’ on which he committed his greatest
crime (272), and revealing the conspicuous providential justice of the war
and its outcome. As with The Princess Cloria, the narrative concludes with
the Restoration, which puts an end to the ceaseless feuding on the Parlia-
mentary side, so that ‘the same party that began the war ended it’ (279).
The texture of Memoirs of a Cavalier, and still more of A Journal of the
Plague Year, is that of meticulously detailed documentary and eyewitness
reporting. One text anticipates modern autobiography, the other modern
journalism. Yet, unobtrusive as is Defoe’s fictional shaping of these nar-
ratives, its purpose is to reveal the hand of Providence behind seemingly
contingent events. His Cavalier memoir, therefore, paradoxically belongs
to the Puritan tradition of narrative drawing on popular superstition and
apocalyptic fantasy in order to testify to an order of divine justice hidden in
the events of everyday life. This would eventually be transmuted into the
‘poetical justice’ of the classical English novel with its providential plot
resolutions. It has its sublime counterpart in John Milton’s post-Restoration
verse epics, which transfer the pattern of a political rebellion succeeded by a
restoration from Earth to Heaven. Memoirs of a Cavalier seems to argue
that, regardless of political rights and wrongs, God will punish those whose
actions on Earth amount to rebellion against the divine order. But what
exactly does constitute a rebellion against the divine order? How far does
God underwrite the authority of the monarch over his subjects, or of the
patriarch over his family? These questions, hotly debated in political and
moral philosophy, also stand behind the classic literary theme (which
extends from ancient drama to the modern novel) of youthful rebellion
against arbitrary authority.
the English novel mirrors the larger political world and contains the
essence out of which states are constructed. The fictional family repres-
ents the state both in miniature and in embryo.
When Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) described the family as a
‘little Monarchy’,31 he was repeating a conception that can be traced back
to Plato and Aristotle. Cicero, for example saw the family as ‘the founda-
tion of civil government, the nursery, as it were, of the state’.32 Where
some thinkers including Hobbes sought to distinguish between the gov-
ernance of the state and the family, the seventeenth-century defence of
absolutism came to derive political obligation from the father’s authority
over his family: if the family was in its nature an absolute monarchy, the
same must be true of the state. James I at the end of the sixteenth century
used the patriarchal analogy to assert that subjects could not legally rebel
against their rulers. Fifty years later Sir Robert Filmer based his justifica-
tion of absolutism on the obedience that all men supposedly owed to
their father and first ancestor Adam.33 Locke’s Two Treatises of
Government ridiculed Filmer’s patriarchalist ideas while continuing to
argue from the supposed origins of society in the ‘voluntary Compact
between Man and Woman’ exemplified by Adam and Eve, the joint
rulers of the first family.34 Where Filmer held that the power of the father
over his offspring was potentially lifelong, Locke and the Whig historian
James Tyrrell asserted that children were only subject to their parents’
absolute dominion during the period of ‘nonage’ which lasted, according
to Tyrrell, to the age of 25 at most. By such means the patriarchal defence
of absolute monarchy had been intellectually discredited by the end of the
seventeenth century, but it had also been rendered largely irrelevant in
England by the fall of the Stuarts.35 After 1688, Locke’s declaration that
absolute monarchy was ‘inconsistent with Civil Society’ (369) could be
regarded as a basis for national pride and as evidence of England’s
superiority over France and other European nations.
Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, is one of Sir Robert Filmer’s last
disciples and a believer in absolute monarchy both in the state and the
home. Mrs Shandy is the victim of Walter’s tyranny—she must stay at
home to knit her husband a pair of breeches, for example, while the rest
of the family go on the Grand Tour—but, so far as Tristram is con-
cerned, Walter’s authority is so feeble that his son has no need and no
impulse to rebel. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67)
undermines Walter’s patriarchalism as surely as it stages the castration
of Tristram and Uncle Toby. The result is a comprehensive defeat for
the jus paternum, or Law of the Father, and an ironic victory for the
92 Histories of Rebellion
which tend to proliferate at points in his novels where his plots are
sagging and his characters’ rhetoric is at its most expostulatory. The
implicit chauvinism of these phrases should not be overlooked. While
Miss Bedfordshire must defer to Miss England, the ‘loveliest woman in
England’ is, as Sir Charles Grandison shows, a far more fitting match for
the hero than the beauties of other nations.48
Pamela’s virtue is rewarded and her beauty validated by marriage to a
landowner and Member of Parliament; but her virtue, as one critic has
said, is in large measure the virtue of rebellion.49 Her rebellion is that of a
servant against a tyrannical master who claims the right of absolute
government over her person. For her to withhold her sexual favours from
him, Mr B claims at one point, is an act of theft. Pamela retorts that, as a
Justice of the Peace, he has the right to send her to jail (91)—a sinister
reminder of the extent to which Mr B and his like in eighteenth-century
England might genuinely consider themselves to be above the law. But B
understandably prefers to keep their conflict within the bounds of the
family rather than invoking the corrupted powers of the state. He holds
her under house arrest at his property in Lincolnshire, where her jailer,
Mrs Jewkes, is a family retainer who loyally affirms her master’s droit de
seigneur: ‘ ‘‘And pray,’’ said I . . . ‘‘how came I to be his property? What
right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen goods?’’ ‘‘Was
ever the like heard!’’ says [Mrs Jewkes]. ‘‘This is downright rebellion, I
protest!’’ ’(163). Pamela is a ‘rebel’ in the terms of the libertine’s code, but,
though Mr B claims the prerogative of an absolute ruler, he has no title to
his claim, and he knows it. He is no ‘professed debauchee’ (165) but
an inexperienced opportunist. Fairly soon he will forgive Pamela’s
‘treasonable resistance’ (265) and agree to marry her. In retrospect his
accusations of treason and rebellion become part of the game of love in
which Pamela, knowingly or not, so successfully plays her part. But, if her
honour is to be saved in more than name, her conduct has to be judged by
the standards of spiritual integrity as well as of amorous politics.
In refusing to comply with her oppressor’s demands Pamela may act
like a political rebel, but—since she believes that her suffering is sent to
try her virtue and is, to that extent, divinely ordained—she cannot be seen
to rebel against the fact of suffering. Instead, Richardson’s focus on his
female protagonist’s ordeal allows him to portray a state of passive (but
supremely articulate) victimhood. Pamela can do nothing apart from
patiently and steadfastly resisting her oppressor’s demands, but she can
record everything. When she does act, as in her abortive escape attempt
when she is tempted to commit suicide by drowning herself, she is in grave
96 Histories of Rebellion
spiritual peril. On more than one occasion she is saved from Mr B’s
advances by ‘Providence’ in the shape of a timely fainting fit. Pamela’s
most successful and positive actions are those by which she is able to
maintain her stores of ink and paper and, as she thinks, to conceal the
minute-by-minute account of her ordeal that she is incessantly writing.
Literature becomes her salvation as Mr B, the would-be rapist, becomes
seduced in his turn by the power of her storytelling.
The novelist as Christian reformer may approve of political rebellion in
the domestic sphere (in so far as resistance to a lawless tyrant is properly
described as ‘rebellion’), but will always condemn spiritual rebellion.
This means that Richardson judges the question of rebellion from two
opposing points of view, the temporal and the eternal, the one using
political and military, and the other biblical, terms and analogies.
Pamela emphatically places her suffering in a biblical context when she
adapts Psalm 137 to fit the circumstances of her own imprisonment in
Lincolnshire, thus putting herself in the position of the Jewish nation in
Babylonian captivity.50 The contradictory imperatives of political and
spiritual rebellion are much more sharply juxtaposed in Clarissa, where
the language of government and war is systematically ransacked for
analogies to the heroine’s domestic ordeal.
How far should we read Pamela’s rebellion as a political allegory?
Thomas Keymer, one of the novel’s modern editors, has pointed out that,
before becoming a respectable government printer under the Walpole
ministry, Richardson had narrowly escaped charges of sedition for
printing Jacobite propaganda in the 1720s. Mr B thus ‘seems very much
the embodiment of Walpole’s oligarchy’.51 At the same time, Pamela’s
implicit comparison of herself to the Jewish nation is one of many details
which identify her predicament with that of seventeenth-century Pur-
itanism. Her moral and sexual scruples, her filial and religious piety, and
her humble social station are in sharp contrast to Mr B’s Cavalier habits
of careless generosity, sexual indiscretion, and haughty family pride. Mr B
speaks of randy young squires such as himself as ‘keen fox-hunters’ (269)
and boasts of being ‘without disparagement to any man, the best fox-
hunter in England’ (342) once he has secured Pamela. What makes her
such a challenging quarry is her beauty, her displays of piety—‘thou art a
perfect nun, I think’ (117), he sneers on one occasion—and what, as an
avid reader of her letters and journal, he comes to think of as her
romanticism. The symbolism of clothes expresses the gulf between them.
Mr B gives her a suit of her late mistress’s fine silk, and then (to Pamela’s
great embarrassment) some stockings; but she retaliates by buying a
Histories of Rebellion 97
length of cloth and making her own ‘home-spun gown and petticoat’ (43)
worn with plain leather shoes, a Quakerish uniform that she steadfastly
continues to wear until the eve of her marriage. Her plain clothes are the
sign of a Puritanical renunciation of worldly display, yet, by a paradox
that is entirely typical of the courtship novel, they also serve as a mark of
coquetry. Her mentor Mrs Jervis tells her that ‘ ‘‘I never saw you look
more lovely in my life than in that new dress of yours’’ ’ (43).
Pamela for her part avows her interest in the state of Mr B’s soul,
regardless of his mockery of her ‘unfashionable jargon’ of piety (101). The
more he persecutes her, the more her sexual awareness of him grows. This
has led many readers to accept B’s characterization of her as a Puritanical
hypocrite, though it may also be viewed as the emotional transference of a
kidnap victim. In the end, however, the sexual attraction of opposites
prevails and the civil war between the two lovers subsides into a highly
charged courtship. But their reconciliation cannot be staged without a
grand religious conversion, as B renounces the errors of his past and
agrees to marry his bride in the hastily refurbished chapel of his
Lincolnshire retreat. (Pamela, meanwhile, has rejected the advances of the
plain and virtuous Mr Williams, the clergyman who later performs her
wedding ceremony.) As Pamela becomes a fine lady, not omitting to thank
God for his mercies, Mr B has to undergo the indignity of his sister Lady
Davers’s ridicule: ‘ ‘‘Egregious preacher!’’ said she: ‘‘my brother already
turned puritan!’’ ’ (443). The opposing values for which the lovers once
stood will continue to spice their relationship, as in the masquerade scene
in Pamela: II where Pamela goes appropriately dressed as a Quaker, while
Mr B is a Spanish Don or ‘caballero’. (Things threaten to get out of hand
when he is all but seduced by a masked Nun, offering an impious parody
of the Cavalier–Puritan courtship which sustained the earlier volume.)
Jones is the story of a foundling who, expelled from his family and forced
to live by his wits, prepares to become a soldier. Not only was the army a
respectable profession for younger sons of the gentry, but the portrayal of
a military campaign was an easy way to bring the processes of history into
fiction. Billy Booth, the male protagonist of Fielding’s Amelia (1752), is
also an army officer, though neither Jones nor Booth sees active service.
In Tom’s case, the supposed rebel against his family is put in a situation
where he might have helped to put down the state rebellion of 1745—but,
despite his professions of loyalty to the King, he chooses not to do so.
Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, written a century earlier under the
Commonwealth, had celebrated the ‘forward youth’ who in times of
rebellion eagerly turns to ‘adventurous war’. Tom Jones, we are told, ‘has
some heroic ingredients in his composition’ (336), and in Clarissa Robert
Lovelace boasts to his friend Belford that ‘Had I been a military hero,
I should have made gunpowder useless’ (ii. 55). Yet, when it comes to
marching to the colours, Tom, Lovelace, and most other male protagon-
ists in eighteenth-century English fiction turn out to be remarkably
backward youths.
Henry Fielding had made his literary debut at the age of 20 with odes on
the coronation and the King’s birthday. Later he wrote the original lyrics
for ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, a song in the Grub-Street Opera
(1731). His fiercest writings as a political journalist date from the period
of the Jacobite rebellion, when he edited The True Patriot, to be followed
in 1747 by the ironically titled Jacobite’s Journal. His ‘Serious Address to
the People of Great Britain’ (1745) seeks to rouse his countrymen against
invasion by ‘a Banditti, a Rabble of Thieves or Outlaws’ intent upon
replacing English liberty with French slavery and the tortures of the
Spanish Inquisition.52 The ‘Serious Address’ calls on every able-bodied
man to do ‘his Duty in the defence of his Country’ against the Jacobites
(31), a call repeated in the True Patriot and the History of the Present
Rebellion in Scotland. For a short time Tom Jones acts as if inspired
by his author’s political journalism, only to abandon the defence of his
country at the first opportunity.
Both Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison offer contemporary
accounts of England during and just after the 1745 rebellion. Grandison,
however, is in Italy when the ‘troubles, now so happily appeased’ break
out in Scotland (ii. 124). Tom, disgraced and penniless, is on the road in
England. His initial intention is to seek his fortune at sea, but no sooner
does he encounter a company of soldiers than he decides to join them as a
gentleman volunteer. Fielding now confides, as a ‘circumstance which we
Histories of Rebellion 99
rebellion, even though the analogy between the governance of family and
state is less than exact. The novel ends with a form of restoration as both
Tom and Sophia resubmit to parental authority. Western’s motives for
approving his daughter’s marriage to Tom are in a sense dynastic (if
not merely greedy); earlier he had favoured Blifil’s suit when Blifil was
Allworthy’s heir. Allworthy seems indifferent to the union of their two
estates, viewing it as a mere property transaction rather than as a sym-
bolic reunification of Hanoverian and sentimentally Jacobite—or Whig
and Tory—England.56
In old age, we are told, Western is distinguished for drunkenness and
jollity, and Allworthy for ‘discretion and prudence’ (874). Tom and
Sophia and their children, we must believe, will somehow combine these
eternally conflicting qualities. Fielding’s ecumenical poise—which
involves consolidating the squirearchy rather than overturning its
values—would have been difficult, if not impossible, to maintain had
Tom played an active part in defeating the ’45 rebellion. The plot of Tom
Jones turns on danger and division which are on the point of tearing apart
both family and state, but the conclusion—with its happy reunion of
parents and children and, somewhere in the background, the retreat of the
Jacobite rebels back to Scotland—reaffirms the sturdy, pluralistic, and
basically benevolent nature of Fielding’s England.
It is to Yorick that Uncle Toby makes his apology for the military life:
For what is war? what is it, Yorick, when fought as ours has been, upon principles
of liberty, and upon principles of honour—what is it, but the getting together of
quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious
and the turbulent within bounds? (444)
I
n his History of England from the Revolution to the Death of
George the Second, Tobias Smollett digressed from the royal,
political and diplomatic events of the year 1753 to give a surprisingly
circumstantial report of an episode which, he says, ‘could not deserve a
place in a general history, if it did not serve to convey a characteristick
idea of the English nation’.1 The story he tells bears a close parallel to
one of the greatest of eighteenth-century novels, Richardson’s Clarissa
published four year earlier; and it also bears all the hallmarks of tabloid
journalism.
Elizabeth Canning, an ‘obscure damsel of low degree’, claimed to have
been abducted by two men outside Bedlam hospital and taken to the
house of a Mrs Wells at Enfield Wash, where she was robbed of her stays
and kept on bread and water in a small cell because she refused to turn
prostitute. After a month’s imprisonment she escaped and ‘ran home to
her mother’s house, almost naked’ (iii. 357). Later she testified before the
novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding, who was strongly convinced by
her story and wrote a pamphlet in her defence. But her allegations were
not sustained in court. Mrs Wells’s maidservant, Virtue Hall, retracted
evidence she had earlier given on Canning’s behalf, while other witnesses
were shown to have been intimidated by Canning’s supporters.
Mrs Squires, the ‘old gipsey-woman’ charged with removing Canning’s
stays, produced an alibi and eventually secured a royal pardon. Despite
intense popular agitation on her behalf, Canning was eventually found
guilty of perjury and transported.
Could Elizabeth Canning have been a reader of Clarissa? Her story was
either a true deposition or, more likely, a fabricated or semi-fabricated
account of an absence from home that she felt otherwise unable to
explain. Its most intimate moment, the removal of her stays by the old
gipsy woman, is either a criminal violation of her bodily integrity or the
symbol of some kind of release of imprisoned libido. Canning is either a
The Novel of Suffering 107
Clarissa’s antecedents lie in the theatre rather than the novel: they include
Charles Johnson’s Caelia (1732), where the innocent heroine is seduced
by a villain called Wronglove and imprisoned in Mrs Lupine’s whore-
house.3 But the novel, unlike eighteenth-century drama, could invest a
heroine’s sufferings with spiritual dignity as well as prurient melodrama,
heightening the reader’s emotional identification to such an extent that it
was said that all Europe cried over the death of Clarissa Harlowe.
Richardson’s second work of fiction set a fashion for novels wallowing in
what one modern critic has called the ‘unrelenting, irredeemable hope-
lessness’ of their heroines’ histories.4 Rejecting false comforts and con-
solations, Clarissa can find true comfort only in the religious promise of
heavenly rewards as compensation for earthly sufferings. Pamela comes
through her relatively brief ordeal unscathed and triumphant, but the much
darker-toned Clarissa leads inexorably to the heroine’s passage from this
world to the next. As Clarissa’s meditations show, there was in English
Protestant culture a recognized scriptural model for the course taken by the
heroine’s suffering, in the Old Testament story of Job. The Book of Job
was the subject of intense theological debate in the very decades in which
Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and others found themselves rewriting
aspects of the Job story.5 By telling stories of female suffering within this
biblical framework, Richardson was able to achieve his aim of ‘enlisting the
passions on the side of Virtue’.6 Other novelists, however, entertained less
high-minded notions of virtue. As the Gothic villain Montoni says to Emily
St Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), ‘ ‘‘You
speak like a heroine . . . we shall see whether you can suffer like one.’’ ’7
Clarissa’s Rebellion
The novel of modern courtship with a background of national allegory is
Richardson’s hallmark. The events of Pamela lead to the reconciliation of
the Puritan and the Cavalier under the sign of moral reformation and
middle-class family propriety. In Sir Charles Grandison, the well-travelled
English aristocrat elects to marry a home-grown Protestant rather than an
Italian Catholic bride. Clementina, his Italian lover, displays a refined
spirituality which at last finds its appropriate home in a convent. In
Clarissa, however, an outbreak of civil war between two families becomes
an irreconcilable split, with tragic consequences for the female victim.
Clarissa’s tragedy begins with her family’s determination to make an
arranged, political marriage for her; political in the sense of furthering the
The Novel of Suffering 109
family’s, rather than her own, material interests. Christopher Hill has
explained the complicated reasons why the Harlowes prefer an alliance
with Roger Solmes to one with Robert Lovelace, whose connections are
likely to get Clarissa raised to the peerage.8 The Harlowes’ determination
to marry her to a man who ‘knows nothing but the value of estates and
how to improve them’ is the cause of Clarissa’s suffering.9 Her Aunt
Hervey had thought that Clarissa and Lovelace were destined to become
the ‘finest couple in England’ (i. 9), but it is not to be.
Solmes’s father was Sir Oliver, recalling Oliver Cromwell, while Lovelace
is named after England’s most famous Cavalier poet. Richardson’s
later hero Sir Charles Grandison takes his family name from a leading
seventeenth-century Royalist aristocrat and his first name from the Stuart
kings.10 The presence of a political subtext in the names of Richardson’s
characters was not lost on subsequent English novelists, including Jane
Austen, as we shall see. Solmes, however, makes very few direct appear-
ances and we are forced to reconstruct his mean and malicious nature from
Clarissa’s instinctive loathing. She finds him morally repugnant, just as her
family’s objections to Lovelace are invariably couched in moral terms. The
civil war between the Harlowes and Lovelace begins with the so-called
‘rencounter’ in which hot-tempered James Harlowe draws his sword
against his sister’s suitor without provocation and without apology,
apparently with the mistaken idea of defending his sister’s honour. Jealous
Arabella Harlowe is convinced that Lovelace is a ‘roving’ type, a rake with
‘half a score [of] mistresses’ (i. 11), and of course she is right. Their mother
expostulates with Clarissa that ‘a young creature of your virtuous and
pious turn . . . cannot surely love a profligate’ (i. 72), an assertion that
Richardson’s previous novel had disproved and that must seem absurd to
romance readers everywhere.
Apart from his name, Lovelace is not given a political dynastic history
of the kind that would become commonplace in English fiction one or two
generations later. But there is no need for his Royalist antecedents to be
specified, since he embodies the conception of absolute monarchy in his
own person. He has no intention of going into Parliament, ‘though
nobody knows the interests of princes and courts better than he is said to
do’ (i. 50). He has learnt his manners at the French court, the model of
absolute monarchy throughout Europe. As his fevered imagination turns
his pursuit of Clarissa into a full-scale military campaign, he uses the
terms ‘king’, ‘emperor’, ‘tyrant’, ‘monarch’, and ‘conqueror’ to describe
himself, and models himself on Alexander, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar.
After he has raped her he will be ‘the greatest conqueror in the world’, he
110 The Novel of Suffering
thinks (ii. 250). His three passions, ‘all imperial ones’, are ‘love,
revenge, ambition, or a desire of conquest’ (ii. 495). He is tireless in self-
justifications and those who oppose his will are accused of rebellion,
enmity, and high treason. At times his military vocabulary of love seems
half-demented. Metaphors of world domination are used to justify a
series of ultimately trivial pranks and escapades; his imperial ambitions
become the excuse for a kind of permanent stag party. He represents
a degenerate aristocracy whose hunger for power has been transmuted
into a love of sport, with Clarissa as his quarry.
Lovelace’s resort to physical violence to defend himself against James
Harlowe is over almost before the novel has begun. Both here and in
Sir Charles Grandison the Richardson hero demonstrates his physical
prowess with occasional, highly effective, and very quickly stifled out-
breaks of swordplay, but the hero’s real game lies elsewhere. How
serious, in the end, are Lovelace’s crimes? The exaggerated rhetoric to
which he is prone is easily turned against him, so that he can be viewed
as a criminal psychopath and devil incarnate. One recent critic has
described him as the ‘archetypal enemy of society’, which aligns him
with the worst torturers and mass murderers of history.11 It can,
however, be said that his vampirish fastening onto Clarissa and the
mental tortures he inflicts upon her are manifestations of a game that has
gone wrong. He did not expect Clarissa and her family to resist him so
fiercely, and his decision to drug and rape her since he cannot preside
over a willing surrender is in fact a humiliating defeat. Beneath the mask
of the Cavalier, Lovelace will stoop to anything rather than admit that
his game is lost.
But for Lovelace as well as the Harlowes, patriarchy, or what Clarissa
calls the ‘prerogative of manhood’ (i. 61), is more than a game. His will to
dominate is confronted by her belief in sexual equality. Harriet Byron
in Sir Charles Grandison protests to her abductor Sir Hargrave Pollexfen
(a pale shadow of Lovelace) that she is a ‘free person’.12 Clarissa, too,
demands the freedom which is her ‘birthright as an English subject’
(iii. 267). It is her fate, however, to be torn between the tyranny of her
family and the tyranny of libertinism. Her civil rights and her rights
within her own family should have been assured by the fact that she is an
independent property owner, having been left a small estate by her
grandfather. She owns a house that she is never allowed to occupy. Her
financial independence has earned her the hatred of her brother and sister
and her uncle Antony, despite the filial piety that has led her to place
control of her estate in her father’s hands. This voluntary renunciation of
The Novel of Suffering 111
power marks the distance between Clarissa and Lovelace, and also
between Clarissa and the rest of the Harlowes.
In volume one, Clarissa refuses to submit to her family’s tyranny while
insisting that she would be prepared to submit to an authority that is
lawful. By definition, the Harlowes’ determination to marry her off
means that (in the Lockeian terms discussed in the previous chapter) she
must have outgrown the period of nonage during which she owed
unquestioning obedience to her parents. But her family defines her as a
rebel and uses a rich vocabulary of terms such as ‘opposition’, ‘defiance’,
‘sullenness’, ‘perverseness’, ‘obstinacy’, and ‘pervicacity’ to condemn her
resistance to an arranged marriage. Clarissa asserts her ‘liberty of refusal’
(i. 226), and resents all attempts to treat her as a ‘child’ or a ‘slave’. ‘My
brother is not my sovereign’, she asserts (i. 227), although she does
acknowledge her father as legitimate sovereign. Mr Harlowe weakly
delegates his authority to his other children, James and Arabella, but
Clarissa refuses to accept such a delegated authority, complaining that her
brother and sister are pursuing their own selfish interests and are not,
therefore, entitled to obedience. During her month-long imprisonment
at home (which takes up some 400 pages of Richardson’s narrative) the
novelist exercises extreme ingenuity in keeping Clarissa and her father
physically apart, often with only a door between them. In this petty
monarchy the headstrong and vindictive James takes on the role of
day-to-day governor and prime minister, with communications flying
back and forth via an endless series of deputies and intermediaries.
Having failed to command her ‘absolute obedience’ (i. 36), Mr Harlowe
eventually orders that ‘the rebel’ should be expelled from under his roof
(i. 390). But she still refuses to define herself as a rebel, and it is James,
not her father, whom she defies outright: ‘If you govern everybody else,
you shall not govern me,’ she asserts (i. 381).
Clarissa tries for as long as she can to justify her behaviour as that
of a loyal parliamentary opposition, attacking her father through his
‘ministers’ such as James.13 Slowly we realize that she is more deeply
involved in acts of rebellion than Pamela was. Although the novel is made
up almost entirely of secret letters, nearly all her letters to Lovelace are
edited out of the narrative. Were we allowed to see her perseverance in
writing to him repeatedly once her family has forbidden it, we might take
a different view of Clarissa, as Lovelace himself does. Her rebellion is
inseparable from her pen, which ‘roves’ (i. 61) in ways that neither the
reader nor her faithful correspondent Arabella Howe are always privy to.
Her elopement with Lovelace towards the end of volume one is, of course,
112 The Novel of Suffering
Clarissa’s Patience
Clarissa has been called ‘the eighteenth century’s ultimate example of
a religious novel’.16 After her abduction and rape, the heroine gradually
114 The Novel of Suffering
from his position of power, but finally restored. Because he never curses
God in his heart, God accepts his repentance. Modern biblical scholarship
acknowledges that there are two versions of the Hebrew God in the poem
(Jahweh and Shaddai) whose words and behaviour are inconsistent, and,
moreover, the poem seems to show that Job does in fact rebel; but in any
case the divine experiment concludes with Job gaining a new family and
another great estate, ‘So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than
his beginning’ (42: 12). Two of the ‘miserable comforters’, Eliphaz and
Bildad, argue that God will see that Job receives his just deserts in the long
run, but Job rejects their assurances, since true religious faith cannot be
based on the promise of earthly rewards. This is the doctrinal issue that
gripped the eighteenth century. Belief in an ‘unequal Providence’ asserts
that it is only in the afterlife that the manifest injustices and wrongs of this
world can be righted. On earth, it is part of God’s plan that the virtuous
should suffer and the vicious should prosper.20 An observer like Robinson
Crusoe who marked down instances of ‘providential justice’ in earthly
affairs would, therefore, be guilty of superstition rather than showing the
abject humility demanded of Job.
At this point, the dominant view of eighteenth-century theologians
contrasts sharply with the ethos of eighteenth-century fiction and drama,
since in literature ‘poetical justice’ is normally dispensed at the moment of
narrative denouement rather than being reserved for a future state.
Richardson’s novels show the full force of the tension between earthly
and heavenly justice. In Pamela the heroine’s prudence leads to an out-
come celebrated in the novel’s title as Virtue Rewarded, whereas the final
volume of Clarissa turns into a prolonged elegy for a heroine deprived of
any possibility of earthly reward.21
Richardson carefully manipulates the plot to keep Clarissa in solitary
confinement, perpetually separated from her correspondent Miss Howe.22
We are told that her Bible opens naturally at the Book of Job. In her will she
orders a funeral sermon to be preached on a text from Job, and another text
from the same book, along with two from the Psalms, is engraved on her
coffin. Before this, as her bodily presence fades, the biblical texts begin to
take the place of the reams of epistolary narrative she has earlier generated.
A series of ‘meditations’, almost all of them taken from the words of her
‘admired exclaimer’ (iii. 578), fill up the space of her letters. Readers’
interest in these meditations was so great that Richardson subsequently
extracted them from the novel, added to them, and published them sepa-
rately as Meditations Collected from the Sacred Books (1750).23 The fact
that Clarissa’s meditations begin with Job’s curses—so that Lovelace sees
116 The Novel of Suffering
unfairly disinherited. When, in fury, she abandons her children and drives
to a magistrate’s house only to find Booth and Harrison dining together in
triumph, she is judged too confused and distraught to be told their good
news at once. But soon they are complimenting her on her heroism while
she readily accepts that she has passed her ordeal in the true Christian
spirit: ‘ ‘‘If it had pleased Heaven . . . to have tried me, I think, at least
I hope, I should have preserved my humility’’ ’ (ii. 587). For much of
Amelia Fielding’s sense of humour seems to have deserted him, but the
novel ends with what seems a sly joke at the expense of his Job-like
heroine. Finally we are assured that Booth and his long-suffering wife will
leave for the countryside to produce more children and live happily ever
after, since ‘Fortune seems to have made them large amends for the tricks
she had played them in their youth’ (ii. 593).
Shortly before this, Harrison has announced to Booth that ‘ ‘‘Your
sufferings are all at an end, and Providence hath done you the justice at
last which it will, one day or other, render to all men’’ ’ (ii. 581). There is
an air of temporizing, not to say outright casuistry, about Fielding’s
narrative interventions devoted to ‘Fortune’ and ‘Providence’ in Amelia.
To what extent should a benefactor such as Harrison be expected to
shoulder the burden of Providence? Booth somewhat implausibly takes
advatage of his imprisonment in the bailiff’s house to become a sincere
Christian, studying the sermons of the seventeenth-century Royalist Isaac
Barrow, which teach him to revere Harrison’s benevolence and Amelia’s
self-sacrificing love.35 His religious conversion makes him a fit object
of Harrison’s charity and the justice of Providence, a conclusion that
suggests that coming to the aid of Booth and his family was a matter of
less urgency while he remained a religious reprobate.
The other side of Amelia, barely compatible with its presentation as a
religiously orthodox Job story, is Fielding’s bitter onslaught on the ruling
Whig aristocracy. The novel contains not just frequent references to the
divinity (‘Our Lord’), but no less than four peers who are not named but
referred to as ‘my lord’. One of these is the petty seducer, riddled with
venereal disease, who attacks Amelia’s chastity; the last that we hear of
him is that he has ‘become so rotten that he stunk above-ground’ (ii. 592).
Another is the nobleman whom Harrison approaches, in a chapter called
‘Matters Political’, to secure Booth’s preferment in the army. ‘My lord’ is
thoroughly amenable so long as Harrison promises, as a quid pro quo, to
vote for his nominee in a local election. This attempted bargain, com-
parable (it might be suggested) to the position of a God who would only
see earthly justice done for the devout, is angrily rejected by Harrison,
The Novel of Suffering 121
the only spot in the world, in which this argument can be properly
debated!’ (iii. 242). The argument about female independence is a sec-
ondary matter; what is primary is the warm glow created by England’s
superiority. In the Gothic novel, English superiority is taken for granted
and the supposed corruption, cruelty, and immorality of Catholic Europe
provide lurid and thrilling entertainment. Radcliffe’s and Lewis’s sagas
involving perverted monks and mad or debauched nuns offered their
readers a satisfying definition of what could not happen in the Protestant
homeland.
If the social-problem novel modelled on the Book of Job has a prota-
gonist forcibly detained in the grim metropolis, while Gothic melodrama
is usually set in an exotic southern Europe, the novel as humorous pas-
toral ought to begin and end in a lush English countryside. There was
ample suffering in ordinary rural England, though it is recorded by late
eighteenth-century poets (particularly George Crabbe) rather than in
English fiction. A partial exception might be made for Oliver Goldsmith,
the poet of The Deserted Village (1770) and author of a single classic
novel, The Vicar of Wakefield published four years earlier. The Vicar of
Wakefield is yet another rewriting of the Book of Job, though it also
suggests another ancient literary model of the tale of suffering involving
sudden and violent changes of fortune, The Transformations of Lucius,
otherwise known as the Golden Ass by the second-century Latin writer
Apuleius. In The Golden Ass Lord Lucius, led astray by his love for a slave
girl and his interest in the black arts, is changed into a donkey and shown
the underside of society through a series of horrifying but highly enter-
taining ordeals. Finally he prays to the Moon-Goddess and is released
from his misery to become a rich and famous lawyer. Lucius looks back
on his adventures as a donkey with considerable complacency, since, as he
says, they have enormously enlarged his experience.39
In English fiction Defoe had pioneered the male adventure story with
a moral loosely tacked on from the Book of Job. Goldsmith’s great
innovation was to centre his fiction on a clergyman and man of God who
would naturally echo the Jobian sentiments, yet whose pious reflections
were consistently subjected to gentle mockery. Beginning in a state of
patriarchal complacency where he is ‘happier . . . than the greatest mon-
archs upon earth’, Dr Primrose suffers calamitous misfortunes with what
might seem undaunted good spirits.40 He shares Job’s human fallibility,
but his impetuous outbursts are soon stilled either as a result of his angelic
temperament, his Panglossian quality as a retrospective narrator, or sheer
obstinacy. He loses his fortune, his house burns down, his daughters are
124 The Novel of Suffering
A
t the beginning of Tom Jones Fielding presents Squire Allworthy
in his glory, ‘a human being replete with benevolence, meditating
in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his
Creator, by doing most good to his creatures’.1 The eighteenth century
saw submission as the duty of the weak, and benevolence as the duty of
the powerful and wealthy. Lord Shaftesbury in his Characteristics (1711)
argued that human virtue was derived from the ‘natural and good
affections’, following the example set by a loving and benevolent deity.2
But benevolence has its dark side, as Bernard Mandeville pointed out in
The Fable of the Bees (1714). For Mandeville, the ‘disinterested’ virtue that
Shaftesbury idealized was an invitation to hypocrisy and a mask for pride.
The dispute between Shaftesbury and Mandeville forms a background to
the comedy of Tom Jones, since Allworthy’s firm belief in Christian ben-
evolence is contested on theological grounds by his brother-in-law Captain
Blifil, the father of Tom’s rival as Allworthy’s heir. Blifil finds little to
praise in acts of charity, even when they give pleasure to the benefactor,
since we are ‘liable to be imposed upon, and to confer our choicest favours
often on the undeserving’ (101). Whether or not Allworthy’s benevolence is
a mask for pride, it certainly proves an open invitation to the hypocrisy of
the Blifils, father and son.
Shaftesbury’s Characteristics represents a crucial moment in the
emergence of the idea of the English gentleman, or, as he put it, the ‘man
of thorough good breeding’ who is ‘incapable of doing a rude or brutal
action’ (86). Shaftesbury was both a Whig and the grandson of a leading
Royalist statesman, and his doctrine of natural goodness is arguably the
old Cavalier ideal, sublimated and sanitized. He believed that ‘Gravity is
of the very essence of imposture’ and that the weapons of the gentleman
are wit and raillery rather than the old Puritanical ‘mill-stones’ of pedantry
and bigotry (10, 48). Social privilege, or what he calls the ‘liberty of the
club’, should lead to freedom from prejudice and liberality of outlook: ‘It
The Benevolent Robber 127
the circulation of blood in the body, and that monopolies and the
hoarding of wealth were a ‘Disease’ akin to physical inflammation or
pleurisy (300, 374). Mandeville praises riotous sons and spendthrift heirs
for ‘refunding to the public what was robbed from it’. The whole nation
stands to benefit when a miser is robbed:
A highwayman having met with a considerable booty, gives a poor common harlot
he fancies, ten pounds to new rig her from top to toe . . . She must have shoes and
stockings, gloves, the stay and mantomaker, the sempstress, the linen-draper, all
must get something by her, and a hundred different tradesmen dependent on those
she laid her money out with, may touch part of it before a month is at an end. The
generous gentleman, in the mean time, his money being near spent, ventured again
on the road, but the second day having committed a robbery near Highgate, he was
taken with one of his accomplices, and the next Sessions both were condemned,
and suffered the law. The money due on their conviction fell to three country
fellows, on whom it was admirably well bestowed.5
Here the harlot is the first of the hundred different tradespeople to benefit
from the highwayman ’s generosity, while the ‘three country fellows’
(whose circumstances Mandeville proceeds to describe) also receive a
handsome reward. Mandeville’s passage is not unlike one of Defoe’s
novels, reminding us how the novel itself, with its fluctuations of fortune,
reproduces the tonic effects of circulation within the social body.
Mandeville ’s casual allusion to his highwayman as ‘the generous gen-
tleman’ suggests the extent to which highway robbers, in the early
eighteenth century, had inherited some of the glamour of the Cavalier
blade and Restoration rake. The highwayman is naturally gallant towards
the opposite sex, even if the object of his fancy is only a ‘poor common
harlot’. The Fable of the Bees was contemporaneous with the first
edition of Captain Alexander Smith’s Complete History of the Lives and
Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, a classic compilation
of criminal biographies (once wrongly attributed to Defoe) which went
through several editions in the next few years. The popularity of the
highwayman as a subject for criminal biography reflects the ‘gentleman of
the road’s’ position as an emblem of national character. The legendary
English highwayman, in his temporary position of power over his victims,
chooses to exercise that power benevolently, unlike the robbers and
thugs bred by continental absolutism. Defoe’s Cavalier reports that ‘the
Highway-Men in France do not always give a Traveller the Civility of
bidding him Stand and Deliver his Money, but frequently Fire upon
him first, and then take his Money’.6 Oliver Goldsmith spent his first
The Benevolent Robber 129
Fielding’s Highwaymen
Introducing his collection of highwaymen’s lives in 1734, Captain Smith’s
successor Captain Charles Johnson asserted that a ‘universal History of
Robbers’ would be little less than a ‘general History of all Nations’.
130 The Benevolent Robber
Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the founders of all monarchies were
notorious plunderers, and even in Great Britain, ‘where Property is better
secur’d than anywhere else in the Universe’, robbery was endemic—but
only the ‘little Villains’ tended to get caught.11 A very similar message is
conveyed in The Beggar’s Opera, and later in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild
(1743). In Gay’s drama one of Macheath’s gang speaks of the avaricious
rich as the ‘robbers of mankind’, whose ‘superfluities’ it is the ‘free-
hearted and generous’ highwayman ’s task to retrench. The ‘gentleman of
the road’ whom the ‘fine gentlemen’ imitate, and vice versa,12 is, however,
only one of several contemporary versions of the highwayman figure in
fiction and criminal biography. The robbers’ gallery in Fielding’s novels
provides a much more varied and realistic picture of the eighteenth-
century criminal fraternity. Fielding, after all, was an experienced and
influential magistrate whose non-fictional writings include An Enquiry
into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), designed to ‘rouse
the CIVIL Power from its present lethargic state’. In a single week in 1750,
Fielding was reported to have sent nearly forty highwaymen and street
robbers to prison.13
The causes of the perceived increase in highway robbery in the period
1600–1750 include the expansion of overland trade and commerce within
Great Britain, the poor state of the nation’s roads, the lack of a provincial
banking system which meant that merchants and tradesmen had to carry
their wealth around with them, and the displacement of the population by
civil and foreign wars.14 After 1750 there was much less need for money to
be transferred physically from place to place. In the later eighteenth
century not only were Fielding’s fears for the safety of travellers in and to
the metropolis unfulfilled, but forgers rather than robbers became the
most celebrated contemporary criminals. By then, however, the glamour
of the masked and mounted highwayman had become a seemingly
permanent part of popular culture. The nostalgic romance of high-
waymanship reached its culmination in the ‘Newgate novels’ of the 1830s,
against which Dickens was to react in Oliver Twist. Dick Turpin, hanged
in 1739, is the hero of Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834), while the
protagonist of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) is first seen as a boy
reading Turpin’s life and adventures. In reality, the majority of highway
robberies were committed by gangs of footpads15—a prosaic detail that
had little impact on the legends although it is faithfully reflected in Joseph
Andrews.
Fielding’s first novel begins as a satire in which the supposed brother of
Richardson’s Pamela Andrews virtuously rejects the amorous advances
The Benevolent Robber 131
of his employer Lady Booby and her maid Mrs Slipslop. Dismissed from
their service in London, Joseph is returning to his family in Somerset
when, walking alone down a dark, narrow lane (not the traditional open
heath), he is robbed, beaten, stripped of his clothing, and left for dead by a
gang of ruffians. As an unemployed servant Joseph is barely worthy of the
thieves’ notice, yet he insists on fighting them although they are armed
with pistols and clubs. The episode is one of violent initiation comparable
to the physical force and threats of rape that Pamela had to undergo. The
robbers manage to relieve Joseph of the gold keepsake given to him by his
sweetheart Fanny, something that Lady Booby and Mrs Slipslop have
notably failed to do. Joseph’s eventual rescue by a postilion leads to a
second hold-up as the highwaymen rob the stagecoach, treating the
middle-class passengers far more leniently than they have treated Joseph.16
One member of the gang is later arrested, but soon escapes as a result of
bribing the constable. The robbers play no further part in the story.
Once he has been robbed and stripped naked, Joseph’s prospects are
transformed by his chance encounters with two benefactor figures, first
the quixotic traveller Parson Adams and then the reclusive Mr Wilson.
Adams is a fervent believer in charity—defining it, unlike Captain Blifil,
as a ‘generous disposition to relieve the distressed’—although he never
has any money.17 Wilson as a young man wasted his inheritance in the
City and then languished in a debtors’ prison. Now, having failed in
business as a wine merchant, he lives in rural retirement until Adams and
Joseph find him out. The theme of robbery re-emerges to play a romantic
part in the resolution of the plot, since it turns out that both Joseph and
Fanny were stolen by gipsies in their infancy. Fanny is Pamela’s sister;
Joseph is Mr Wilson’s son, and thus a gentleman fit to be entertained at
Mr Booby’s country house. The introduction of Mr Booby (who is, in
effect, Pamela’s Mr B) at the end constitutes a curious return on Fielding’s
part to the sub-Richardsonian parody with which, here and in Shamela
(1741), he had begun. For the most part, thanks to the interruption pro-
vided by the robbers, Joseph Andrews occupies a much wider world
symbolized by the open road and the hero’s unpredictable and frequently
hazardous journey.
Fielding would return to the open road in Tom Jones, but the year after
Joseph Andrews he published his satirical fable The Life of Jonathan Wild
the Great, in which the hero leads a gang of robbers. Wild, whom Fielding
invariably represents in capital letters as a ‘GREAT MAN’, is a Caesar or
Alexander among thieves, an aristocrat in command of subordinates
who—apart from his youthful dexterity as a pickpocket—rarely gets his
132 The Benevolent Robber
hands dirty. His gang may engage in ‘that noble kind of Robbery which
was executed on the Highway’, but Wild, nobler still, is seen creaming off
their takings, courting the ladies, and playing cards with a fellow criminal
known as the Count.18 He has a distinguished genealogy, being a des-
cendant of the legendary seventeenth-century robber James Hind and of
another ancestor who ‘distinguished himself on both Sides the Question in
the Civil Wars’ (14). His gang are divided into two parties, one called
‘Cavaliers and Tory Rory Ranter Boys’, the other going by the names of
‘Wags, Round-Heads, Shake-Boys, Old-Nolls, and several others’ (276).
Jonathan Wild, like The Beggar’s Opera, is in one respect a satire on the
rapacious prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, illustrating the roundabout
tactics of the political allegorist. Fielding takes care to have one of his
characters state that ‘there is a nearer Connection between high and low
Life than is generally imagined, and . . . a Highwayman is entitled to more
Favour with the Great than he usually meets with’ (28). But, though it is a
Newgate novel, Wild’s story is very different from those presented in the
more straightforward criminal biographies.
Where we might have expected an episodic narrative illustrating the
range, scope, and ingenuity of his hero’s crimes, Jonathan Wild is in
effect the story of a single obsession, Wild’s pursuit of the harmless
small tradesman Heartfree. The root of Wild’s character is not, therefore,
gallantry and dash, but the ruthless, scheming hatred and hypocrisy later
to be associated with Mr Blifil in Tom Jones. Like a master politician (to
use Fielding’s own analogy) Wild knows how to ‘play with the Passions of
Men, and to set them at Variance with each other, and to work his own
Purposes out of those Jealousies and Apprehensions, which he was
wonderfully ready at creating’ (92). The reverse of Fielding’s benefactor
figures, Wild is a deliberate malefactor who does not hesitate to use the
instruments of corrupted justice to achieve his ends. When one of his gang
tells him to ‘ ‘‘Take your Pistols yourself, and go out on the Highway, and
don’t lazily think to fatten yourself with the Dangers and Pains of other
People’’ ’ (178), Wild shows no compunction in turning him over to the
constable and getting him hanged. The innocent Heartfree narrowly
escapes a similar fate. Wild finally overreaches himself and is led in the
cart through a cheering crowd to the ‘Tree of Glory’ (254). His last act at
Tyburn is to steal a corkscrew from the parson’s pocket, so he will be well
provided for in the next world. He expires with a curse, not the traditional
show of repentance, and his demonic apotheosis is complete.
Fielding’s sympathies lay not with the robber as ‘great man’, and still
less with the lower-class ruffians who beat up Joseph Andrews, but with
The Benevolent Robber 133
suitor’, but in all of them the female victim is subjected to theft and
‘deliverance’ like a piece of personal property.28
The links between robbery, theatricality, and sexual aggression in these
episodes suggest that they might be considered in relation to the formal
masquerade scenes in English fiction.29 But while robberies in fiction
frequently involve transgression, identity confusion, role reversal, and a
manifest sexual symbolism, there are crucial differences between repres-
entations of public entertainment and violent crime. The normal range of
eighteenth-century masquerade costumes does not seem to have included
the dress of the ‘gentlemen of the road’ or even of Robin Hood and his men.
(There are, however, reports of highwaymen being arrested at a London
masquerade.30) For masqueraders to have dressed up as highwaymen,
rather than vice versa, might have been uncomfortably reminiscent of the
pickpockets and rogues who haunted the streets outside any public
assembly.
Why, then, is the legendary highwayman masked? The obvious
answer—to escape detection—is not entirely convincing, since at some
point the highwayman needs to be discovered. To become famous, he
must be unmasked. His masking, reminiscent of the domino and the
knight’s lowered visor, is as much theatrical as practical. It goes together
with the rather intimate violation involved in forcing travellers to hand
over their property. Unlike the clandestine thief or the ruffian armed with
a cosh, the legendary highwayman openly confronts his victims, putting
on a show of gallantry and striking up with them a relationship of sorts,
which is why his command to ‘stand and deliver’ is so well remembered.
If in the moment of self-revelation he ritualistically hides himself, this
makes it easier for the victims to part with their money. Robbery becomes
a fetishistic act, and the legendary highwayman is one ‘by whom it would
be delightful to have been robbed’.31
There is another element in the highwayman’s masking, since he is
asserting a double identity as ‘gentleman’ and thief. Wearing a mask, an
unemployed tradesman might be able to convince his victims that he was
a real gentleman down on his luck; or he might simply put on a deliberate
travesty of genteel behaviour.32 The highwayman’s double identity was
already explicit in the tales of Ratsey. So far as fictional highwaymen are
concerned, the duality or duplicity that they express is a general feature of
the novel’s dealings with crime and its transgression of class boundaries.
‘Without the appearance of the whore, the rogue, the cutpurse, the
cheat, the thief, or the outsider’, it has been said, ‘it would be impossible
to imagine the genre of the novel’.33 This comment reveals both the
The Benevolent Robber 137
to market to buy a new dress, he gallantly gave her the money for a
petticoat as well. The ballad of ‘Turpin’s Appeal to the Judge’ praised
Dick Turpin for fulfilling the biblical commands to clothe the naked,
feed the poor, and send the rich away empty.42 Does the benevolent
robber stand for ‘true justice’, or are his motives prudential rather than
disinterested? The casuistical highwayman Luke Page, who told the
Ordinary at Newgate that he thought robbing was ‘no great sin’ and that
‘persons getting the unrighteous Mammon this way might be saved if
they, out of it, be charitable to the poor’, sounds more like a modern
businessman than a rebel against society.43 Some historians of eighteenth-
century crime have argued that the highwayman’s protest against social
injustice is too self-serving to be taken seriously, while others maintain
that the highwayman ballads helped to keep alive the radicalism of the
Civil War and the Commonwealth.44 Later in the century, the revival of
revolutionary sentiments coincided with the scholarly editing of the
Robin Hood ballads by the Jacobin supporter Joseph Ritson.
The Robin Hood of the ballads and legends is a political figure of a
distinctly ambiguous kind. He is at once a fighter against tyranny and a
loyal subject, a peer and a commoner, an outlaw and an upholder of the
true law. Some say he was born at Locksley and is the dispossessed Earl
of Huntingdon, others that he is the son of poor shepherds. The Robin
Hood play acted at Nottingham on the day of Charles II’s coronation in
1661 and ‘alluding to the late rebellion, and the subject of the day’
implied that Robin, as Earl of Huntingdon, was a direct ancestor of the
banished Cavaliers and of the highwaymen who robbed the Common-
wealth. To Captain Smith, however, the story of his aristocratic origins
was a mere fiction.45 As the century progressed Robin became both a
hero of popular melodrama and a subject of learned discussion in Bishop
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); meanwhile groups of
urban radicals were forming Robin Hood Debating Societies, which
attracted Fielding’s scorn.46 In Ritson ’s definitive edition of the ballads
the plebeian bandit of the highwayman biographies, who stole the
King’s deer and robbed Richard I and his retinue on the Great North
Road, became both a high-born revolutionary and the ‘prince of all
robbers’.47 His legendary benevolence was now seen not as exhibiting the
‘Grandeur and Hospitality’ of his temperament but as a sign of innate
political virtue.48 Nevertheless, Robin Hood’s political uses were always
double-edged—was he Royalist or Roundhead, a champion of the people
or a defender of hereditary rights?—and the more he came to be idealized
and incorporated into English literature (as in the Ritson-influenced
140 The Benevolent Robber
a threat. The hidden link between robber and benefactor is the most
subversive element in the discourse about the English highwayman, which
in some other respects simply placed an acceptable gloss on the century’s
actual experiences of plebeian violence, and on the vengeful and retribu-
tive acts constituting ‘British justice’.
The legendary highwayman is a marginal and nostalgic presence in
some of Scott’s novels, such as Rob Roy (1817) and The Heart of Mid-
Lothian (1818). Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy hears ‘the names of the
Golden Farmer, the Flying Highwayman, Jack Needham, and other
Beggar’s Opera heroes’ as he travels away from London on the Great
North Road. Rob Roy himself, Scott writes, ‘is still remembered in his
country as the Robin Hood of Scotland, the dread of the wealthy, but the
friend of the poor’.55 When Jeanie Deans travels southwards in The Heart
of Mid-Lothian, she hears Dick Ostler at York singing a snatch of a Robin
Hood ballad, while her landlady warns her against highwaymen, ‘ ‘‘for ye
are come into a more civilized, that is to say, a more roguish country’’ ’.56
Rob Roy is set in 1715, The Heart of Mid-Lothian in 1736. The high-
wayman continued to enjoy a nineteenth-century afterlife in the novels of
Lytton and Ainsworth and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished
romance The Great North Road, as well as in children’s writing and
popular entertainment. In Rookwood Harrison Ainsworth speaks of Dick
Turpin as ‘ultimus Romanorum, the last of a race’, but offers no explana-
tions for the ‘decline and fall of the empire of the tobymen’.57 Not only
was the theme now confined to historical fiction, but the coup de grâce
to the ‘old English highwayman’58 was surely administered by Dickens in
his preface to Oliver Twist (1837–8): ‘Here are no canterings on moonlit
heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible caverns, none of
the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, no jack-boots, no
crimson coats and ruffles, none of the dash and freedom with which ‘‘the
road’’ has been time out of mind invested.’59 But for all Dickens’s power-
ful defence of a new, more brutal, and sordid mode of criminal realism,
Oliver Twist raises similar issues about crime, property, and benevolence
to its eighteenth-century predecessors. The cruel benevolence of the
Guardians of the Poor is openly contrasted with Oliver’s deceptively free-
hearted and generous reception in Fagin’s den. As the hapless protagonist
circulates back and forth between his two ‘fathers’ Fagin and Brownlow,
our sense of the robber shadowing the benefactor and vice versa confirms
the hidden affinity between the two figures. The Artful Dodger, a would-
be fine gentleman, has earlier been sent out ‘on the road’, though with the
task of recruiting new gang members rather than robbing rich travellers.
144 The Benevolent Robber
‘I
t may be asked, it has been asked, ‘‘Have we no materials for
romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of
whatever is original and striking in this kind?’’ ’ wrote Hazlitt in
his essay on Sir Walter Scott in The Spirit of the Age (1825). ‘Every foot of
soil is with us worked up; nearly every movement of the social machine is
calculable. We have no room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque
quaintnesses; for wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism
are seen hovering (in Sir Walter’s pages) over the Border.’ Hazlitt might
have added that, like the Gothic novels to which they succeeded, Scott’s
romances were set in an increasingly remote past; and that Scott’s fiction
beginning with Ivanhoe (1819) had brought historical romance back to
England. Nevertheless, the ‘England’ of Hazlitt’s essay is a nation of
rational economics and agri-business. Even the gipsies, he says, ‘live
under clipped hedges, and repose in camp-beds’.1 England in the early
nineteenth century had been pacified and brought to order; Scotland and
Ireland had not.
The contrast between romance and realism implied by Hazlitt is a
contrast between violent landscapes and peaceful ones. Ann Radcliffe’s
Gothic romance demands the most dramatic mountain scenery, and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) takes us to the highest Alps and the remote
Arctic ice-fields; Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) begins and
ends, however, in a ‘happy valley’, the lush valley of the Garonne, which
is much closer to the well-tilled landscapes of English domestic fiction.
Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s avid romance reader in Northanger
Abbey, concludes (even as she is becoming somewhat disillusioned with
her favourite Gothic authors) that ‘human nature’ is perhaps different in
mountainous regions:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe ’s works, and charming even as were the
works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least
in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and
146 Romantic Toryism
Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful
delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France, might be as fruitful
in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her
own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern
and western extremities. . . . Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were
no mixed characters. . . . But in England it was not so; among the English, she
believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture
of good and bad.2
Here the ‘mixed’ English character matches the temperate English land-
scape. Austen paid her best-known tribute to this landscape in the view of
Donwell Abbey, the home of Mr Knightley, with its river and Abbey-Mill
Farm, in Emma: ‘It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind.
English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright,
without being oppressive.’3 What is missing from this little vignette,
though presupposed by it, is what numerous eighteenth-century landed
proprietors would have cleared away out of sight in order to preserve
the green view from their windows: the cottages of Mr Knightley’s farm
labourers.
this history, however, came the image of the tranquil and picturesque
English village that was perpetuated in prose fiction from the 1820s
onwards.
Walter Scott was a true-blue Tory, but he had little to do with
constructing this image of what was essentially a Tory England. In an
anonymous review of his own Waverley novels, he praised them for
‘conveying the genuine sentiments of the Scottish peasant in the genuine
language of his native land’.4 But he felt no such responsibility towards
the English peasantry: his Berkshire village in Kenilworth (1821), for
example, is almost deserted apart from an eccentric schoolmaster and a
legendary rural spirit. It was, however, Scott’s friend the American
novelist and essayist Washington Irving who, more than any other writer,
created the image of the stereotypical English village. In The Sketch Book
of Geoffrey Crayon (1820) Irving offered a tourist’s-eye view of con-
temporary England as, in Malcolm Bradbury’s words, a ‘half-mythic
land of stage coaches and ivy-covered cottages, festive Christmases and
forelocked peasants, high church spires and quaint crooked byways’.5
The Sketch Book was, as Hazlitt remarked in The Spirit of the Age, a
collection of ‘literary anachronisms’ (349), but it was also hugely popular.
It would become a topic of conversation in novels ranging from Disraeli’s
Vivian Grey (1826) to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), and it
would move George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver to tears.
For Irving, rural England with its ‘charms of storied and poetical
association’ was a refuge from the raw and imaginatively barren
landscapes of his native America.6 But he was also aware of the spread
of industrialization in England, and of the ravages of war and revolu-
tion in neighbouring Europe. His Sketch Book portrays the victorious
nation which had just defeated Napoleon and restored Europe’s old
monarchies. The signs of domestic conflict and class oppression are
largely ignored by his narrator Geoffrey Crayon, a ‘humble lover of the
picturesque’ who moves from one rural scene to the next like a stroller
admiring the displays in print-shop windows (745). Conveniently,
the very first object of the newly arriving traveller’s gaze is a village
landscape rather than the port of Liverpool where he is about to
disembark:
As we sailed up the Mersey I reconnoitered the shores with a telescope. My eye
dwelt with delight on neat cottages with their trim shrubberies and green grass
plots. I saw the mouldering ruin of an abbey over run with ivy, and the taper
spire of a village church rising from the brow of a neighbouring hill—all were
characteristic of England. (750)
148 Romantic Toryism
Characteristic of England, too, are its ‘little home scenes of rural repose
and sheltered quiet’, where the ‘lower orders’ in their cottages nestle
down next to the nobility and gentry in their castles and palaces. All
gather together on the hunting field, where ‘the sound of hound and horn
blends all things into harmony’ (799–800). The tourist idyll reaches its
apotheosis in the English Christmas, which for Irving is an unmistakably
Tory Christmas. The country gentleman presiding over these deliberately
archaic festivities is a direct descendant of the old Cavaliers and Royalists.
Until the Sketch Book appeared, English writers since the Restoration
had had remarkably little to say about Christmas customs.7 Geoffrey
Crayon reminded his readers that the Christmas holiday had been banned
under the Commonwealth, and that Parliament sat on 25 December from
1652 onwards. Plum puddings were denounced as ‘mere popery’, roast
beef as anti-Christian, and there was a ‘fiery persecution of poor Mince-
pie throughout the land’ (943). Crayon’s host, Squire Bracebridge of
Bracebridge Hall, belatedly sets out to revive the old customs observed
‘when England was itself’ before the Puritan Revolution (925). His
ancestors went into exile and returned with the Restoration, and now he
has created a symbol of the lost ‘merry England’ of Elizabethan times; his is
perhaps the ‘only family in England’ where the full English Christmas is
punctiliously observed (961). The stagecoach on Christmas Eve is loaded
with hampers and returning schoolboys, while Christmas dinner is eaten in
front of a crackling log fire in the great hall, with minstrels singing carols,
and a mummers’ performance including a Robin Hood and a Maid
Marian. These festivities provided the model for Dickens’s Christmas at
Dingley Dell in The Pickwick Papers some sixteen years later.
Irving’s ‘worthy old Cavalier’ (929) is a portent in other ways, too,
since he is necessarily opposed to the changes which were becoming
increasingly obvious in the English countryside. Bracebridge Hall (1822)
describes the Squire’s resentment of Mr Faddy, a retired manufacturer
who has abandoned his ‘steam-engines and spinning jennies’ for the life of
a country gentleman:
In his warmth [the Squire] inveighed against the whole race of manufacturers,
who, I found, were sore disturbers of his comfort. ‘Sir,’ said he, with emotion, ‘it
makes my heart bleed to see all our fine streams dammed up and bestrode by
cotton mills; our villages smoking with steam-engines, and the din of the hammer
and the loom scaring away all our rural delights. What ’s to become of merry old
England, when its manor houses are all turned into manufactories, and its sturdy
peasantry into pin-makers and stocking-weavers? I have looked in vain for merry
Sherwood, and all the greenwood haunts of Robin Hood; the whole country is
Romantic Toryism 149
covered with manufacturing towns. I have stood on the ruins of Dudley Castle,
and looked around, with an aching heart, on what were once its feudal domains
of verdant and beautiful country. Sir, I beheld a mere campus phlegrae; a region
of fire; reeking with coal-pits, and furnaces, and smelting-houses, vomiting forth
flames and smoke. The pale and ghastly people, toiling among vile exhalations,
looked more like demons than human beings; the clanking wheels and engines,
seen through the murky atmosphere, looked like instruments of torture in this
pandemonium. What is to become of the country with these evils rankling in
its very core?’ 8
and stories, chiefly of country life, in the manner of the ‘‘Sketch Book’’,
but without sentimentality or pathos’ in what became the five volumes of
Our Village (1824–32).9 The village and its history were ‘half real and half
imaginary’, and it was not until the fifth volume that Mitford identified it
as her home village of Three Mile Cross in Berkshire, divulging what must
long have been an open secret.10 Like Geoffrey Crayon, she is a con-
noisseur of English rural scenery. A landscape forms a ‘pretty English
picture’,11 and the village itself ‘sits for its picture’.12 For public con-
sumption Mitford praised Washington Irving’s ‘delightful but somewhat
fanciful writings’ (144), although she privately dismissed them as
‘maudlin trash’.13 Jane Austen’s portrayal of the English countryside was
much more to her taste. Our Village begins with an effusive tribute to
what can only be the portrayal of Highbury in Emma (it doesn’t fit any of
the other Austen novels): ‘nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a
country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels, quite sure before
we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it con-
tains’ (2). This is disconcertingly inaccurate (we cannot be said to make a
very wide acquaintance with the villagers of Highbury), but typically
Mitfordian in its invocation of a kind of literary picturesque. On a walk in
the meadows in ‘The Cowslip-Ball’, she feels ‘out of this world’ like
‘Robinson Crusoe in his lonely island’ (37). The landscape is experienced
as if it were already a text from English fiction.
The countryside represented in Mitford’s work is peaceful, unchan-
ging, and uninterrupted even by the rumblings of reactionary squires. Its
variety is that of the ‘dappled things’ Gerard Manley Hopkins would later
celebrate in his sonnet ‘Pied Beauty’. In ‘shady and yet sunny’ Berkshire,
‘the scenery, without rising into grandeur or breaking into wildness, is so
peaceful, so cheerful, so varied, and so thoroughly English’ (131). The
seasons roll round in their regular course and, for the most part, conflict
and rivalry are confined to the annual cricket match with the next village.
(Mitford is one of the earliest and best writers on village cricket.) The
busy life of Reading, only three miles away, was the subject of a separate,
long-forgotten book, Belford Regis (1835). There is no agricultural
machinery in ‘Our Village’, despite the popular agitation in Berkshire
which led to the so-called Captain Swing riots. In her 1832 volume,
Mitford briefly outlines the riots which had disturbed the even tenor of
‘peaceful and happy England’, bringing home ‘to our very household
hearths’ horrors normally connected with the ‘sister island’ of Ireland.
Three Mile Cross is ‘in the centre of the insurgents’, Mitford alarmingly
reports, though fortunately it has remained unaffected by political
Romantic Toryism 151
after 1745. From his sixty years’ retrospect, Scott’s narrator judges that,
once the ‘romance’ of Waverley’s youth has ended, his historical role is to
represent the resolution of inherited conflicts in the building of a new,
modern Scotland.20
Scott believed that his native country had changed beyond recognition
during the previous sixty years, but he would not have said the same
of England. In the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe he compared the
eighteenth-century Highlands to the world of the Iroquois and Mohawks,
a barbaric society in need of colonial suppression. Scotland had now
‘caught up’ with England, moving from primordial savagery to the status
of a modern bourgeois society. But Scott, the great national writer of
modern bourgeois society, had no interest in describing his own times. His
mission, instead, was to turn historical memory into the material of
modern popular entertainment. In Old Mortality he begins by visiting the
neglected graves of the Covenanters who had died fighting for freedom of
worship against the forces of Charles II. The old man tending the graves is
based on one Robert Paterson, whom Scott claimed to have met in the
1790s. History here is a matter of intimate tradition and of respect for the
dead, though Scott recasts it as romantic adventure. When he turned to
English history the novelist was prepared to look much further back,
‘amidst the dust of antiquity’, as he put it;21 later he would move forward
from the medieval chivalry of Ivanhoe to Queen Elizabeth’s court and
eventually, in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823),
and Woodstock (1826), to seventeenth-century England. Like the young
Waverley, Scott believed that romantic fiction was ‘of all themes the most
fascinating to a youthful imagination’ (76), and he offered nineteenth-
century versions of the romances of Tasso and Spenser which his hero is
shown devouring in his youth. Scott’s antiquarianism in his English
novels is manifestly faked, although his novels of eighteenth-century
Scotland lay some claim to linguistic plausibility and historical accuracy.
In the latter he could draw on living traditions and surviving dialects; but
the English novels are comparatively superficial entertainments evoking
the nation’s aristocratic and Royalist past. They were the first of Scott’s
romances to fall out of critical favour after his death.
For the Victorian critic Archibald Allison, the period portrayed in
Ivanhoe was ‘one in which great national questions were at stake, and the
conversations and characters afforded the means of bringing them pro-
minently before the mind of the reader’; and the result was a novel which,
like Old Mortality, exhibited ‘the perfection of historical romance, so far
as subject goes’. Yet Allison had to admit that the later English novels
154 Romantic Toryism
barons’ Realpolitik and saves Rebecca from otherwise certain death; but
this is only possible thanks to the way in which his life has been preserved
by Rebecca, by the Saxon churls Gurth and Wamba, and by the stout
English yeoman Locksley. Locksley, or Robin Hood, is acknowledged
‘King of Outlaws’ by Richard (360), and his management of his band of
outlaws offers the real King a lesson in good government. But he too
is a curiously muted figure. The burden of true heroism—heroism of
character—in Ivanhoe falls entirely on the saintly Rebecca.
Rebecca comes into the novel together with her father Isaac, the Jew of
York whose moneylending keeps Prince John and his minions afloat. The
vehement anti-Semitism aimed at Isaac comes from ‘Norman, Saxon,
Dane, and Briton’ alike (61). Scott clearly deprecates the ‘despotism of
religious prejudice’ (195), though Isaac is portrayed as a stereotypically
grasping and avaricious Jew who has come to England to make his for-
tune. What John Ruskin was to say rather dubiously of Scott’s Puritans—
that they are ‘formal and slavish’, whereas his Cavaliers are ‘free and
masterful’—is most certainly true of the contest between Isaac and
the treacherous Norman knights.30 Isaac frequently falls back on Old
Testament invocations, and when he is called before the Grand Master of
the Templars he shows ‘all the submission of oriental slavery’: ‘No naked
slave, ushered into the presence of some mighty prince, could approach
his judgment-seat with more profound reverence and terror than that with
which the Jew drew near to the presence of the Grand Master’ (308). Here
Scott’s polished and flattering periods mock at Isaac’s obsequiousness. In
this scene, as in the torture scenes at Front-de-Boeuf’s castle and in the
sadistic preparations for Rebecca’s death, the novelist seems to relish the
sight of Jewish prostration and terror.
But Rebecca shows a spirit of heroism which rises above both her
family inheritance and the Jewish religious forms. Faced with threats of
rape, abduction, and execution over a slow fire she shows ‘that strong
reliance on heaven natural to great and generous characters’ (196),
something which Scott differentiates sharply from from Isaac’s gabbled
prayers and invocations. She has the moral authority to denounce the
‘fantastic chivalry’ of the Christian knights (250) and to tell Bois-Guilbert
that a woman’s endurance of suffering surpasses all the male’s ‘vaunted
courage’ (344). At the same time, she devotes herself to healing men
wounded in combat and has to call on the ethic of chivalry to save her
own life. But she has no belief in the restoration of order promised by
Richard’s return, and her eventual decision to leave England passes a final
judgement on the nation. Richard’s clash with the Templars is referred to
Romantic Toryism 159
the Pope for arbitration, making the point that even a king who believes in
reconciling Saxons with Normans does not yet have full dominion in his
own land. Rebecca decides to emigrate because, as a ‘land of war and
blood’, England remains an unsafe place for her: ‘ ‘‘The people of
England are a fierce race, quarreling ever with their neighbours or among
themselves, and ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other.
Such is no safe abode for the children of my people,’’ ’ she tells Rowena
(399). The Jews could only prosper under the protection of a strong
central authority, but Richard remains the ineffectual monarch who,
when ambushed by his enemies, had to rely on the clown Wamba to
blow the horn and summon the men of Sherwood to his assistance.
W. M. Thackeray wrote a sequel to Ivanhoe, Rebecca and Rowena
(1850), in which a dissatisfied and no longer passive Ivanhoe leaves
England in search of his dark-haired siren. Thackeray had perceived how
far Scott’s epic romance of English national identity turns away from its
ostensible subject in another direction. The pattern is repeated, as we
shall see, in his seventeenth-century romance Peveril of the Peak.
portray the Saxons’ defeat of the Danes, and Elizabeth moralizes on the
attributes her people have inherited from the ancient Britons, Romans,
Saxons, and Normans. Merlin in a sycophantic address to the Virgin
Queen describes multiracial England as ‘in some measure the muster of
the perfections of the other nations’ (351–2). But, while Scott celebrates
Elizabethan England’s imperial power and national pride, he shows it as
being ridden with villainy and corruption, while the Queen is a control-
freak whose diplomacy and cunning are at the mercy of her capricious
vanity. The Fortunes of Nigel portrays her weak-minded, irresolute
successor James I. In Woodstock both the debauched Cavalier Prince
Charles and his arch-enemy Cromwell are shown as weak and vacillating.
The latter novel ends with the old Royalist knight Sir Henry Lee and his
faithful dog dying of happiness at the moment of Charles II’s triumphant
return to London at the Restoration; one reason for their happiness, we
might think, is that they will not have to live through the dreary excesses
of the Restoration monarchy. Peveril of the Peak begins at the Restoration
and ends with a long and tedious outline of manoeuvrings at Court during
the Popish Plot of 1678–9. None of these novels can be said to flatter the
reigning monarch. Yet in each of them the protagonist’s quest for a
personal interview with the monarch is the hinge on which the plot turns.
Peveril of the Peak ends, predictably enough, with the King conferring
his blessing on a ‘roundheaded alliance’—the marriage of Julian Peveril,
the descendant of an old Cavalier family, to the daughter of the staunch
Puritan Major Bridgenorth.32 The warring Derbyshire estates of
Martindale (Cavalier) and Moultrassie (Puritan) are joined together by
this marriage, but, as so often, Scott presents this final token of national
reconciliation with offhand unconcern. He cares, and we care, remark-
ably little about the happiness of his insipid hero and dutiful but beautiful
heroine. One reason for this is that in Peveril, as in Waverley and Ivanhoe,
there is a dark heroine as well as a light heroine vying for the protagonist’s
affections.
In The Hero of the Waverley Novels Alexander Welsh argues that
Scott’s fiction typically balances the official hero against a ‘dark hero’,
who is not to be confused with the villain—an outlaw whose ‘intentions
are ‘‘good’’, though fierce and mistaken’.33 Vich Ian Vohr in Waverley,
Burley in Old Mortality, Rob Roy, Hugh Redgauntlet, Richard the Black
Knight and Locksley in Ivanhoe, Leicester in Kenilworth, and Bridgenorth
in Peveril could be said to belong to this type. Then there is the ‘light
heroine’ whom the official hero, the blond hero, must marry; she is
usually a kind of sister to him, an adopted member of his own family.
Romantic Toryism 161
before the King and ensnaring the Duke of Buckingham, whereas Alice,
the light heroine, fails to captivate either the King or Buckingham despite
the attempts of her kidnappers to prostitute her at court. Only the dark
heroine has sexual magnetism, and only the hero (for whom she sacrifices
everything) is impervious to it. Moreover, the light heroine confirms
national identity and the dark heroine challenges it. By marrying the light
heroine who belongs to an estranged branch of his own family, the hero
does his duty for England, reclaiming his inheritance and unifying a
divided estate. But the Scott of the English novels is bored by this very
proper fable, and yearns for his Celtic-Semitic heroine who represents
both the spirit of romance and the defeated subjects of imperial power.
At times Scott, like some of the male novelists who succeeded him
(notably Thackeray and Trollope), affects not to care for the narrative of
courtship. His readers demand a suitably romantic climax, and he is
willing to provide one, but with an air of masculine unconcern that almost
destroys the mood. He equivocates about Ivanhoe’s prospect of marital
happiness with Rowena, and at the end of Old Mortality he invents a
frivolous female reader, Miss Martha Buskbody, whose persistent ques-
tioning elicits the details of the hero’s marriage from a disengaged and
supercilious narrator. Does this mean that the story Scott really cares
about is that of his male protagonist’s reintegration into the nobility and
recovery of his hereditary rights?35 (Naturally in the process he must
acquire a trophy wife.) This may be so, but there is something faked in the
very idea of nobility in Scott. He could celebrate aristocratic values, just
as he could celebrate Scottish national difference, precisely because they
seemed to be disappearing and could be invested with fondness and
nostalgia. In one of his earliest pieces of writing he set out his aim of
contributing to the history of his native country, ‘the peculiar features of
whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those
of her sister and ally’.36
The son of an Edinburgh advocate, Scott was quintessentially a middle-
class writer, and there is much evidence that his main concern was with
achieving commercial prosperity through appealing to readers who were
both predominantly middle class and predominantly English. Heinrich
Heine argued that, where Cervantes had introduced a democratic element
into romance, Scott, writing for the ‘prosaic bourgeoisie’, had restored to
romance its aristocratic element.37 Thus the Waverley novels turn feudal
Scotland into an adventure playground where his readers can imagine
living a more colourful, a more strenuous, and a more exciting life.
Martin Green has commented that ‘There is a fatal gentility to the
Romantic Toryism 163
‘All but regal dominion’: the dream, ultimately, is not one of aristocratic
obligations and responsibilities but of absolute power. The downtrodden
member of the middle classes hopes to become king of all he surveys.
Scott was an ardent monarchist. He had begun life as a successful poet,
and in 1813, shortly before the publication of Waverley, he turned down
the laureateship. But this did not prevent him from becoming a favourite
of the Prince Regent, to whom he was presented two years later. He was
made a baronet in 1820, the first novelist to receive a knighthood. His
contemporary William Maginn wrote Whitehall; or, The Days of George
IV (1827), a burlesque poking fun at Scott’s eagerness to kowtow to
royalty. George IV, for his part, donned the kilt (made fashionable by
Waverley) on his sole visit to Scotland in 1822. After a state banquet in
Edinburgh, Scott took home the wineglass in which the King had just
pledged the health of his people, but the novelist accidentally broke the
glass, and was thrown into despair. (Leslie Stephen commented on this
incident that ‘that wretched bit of mock loyalty amounts almost to a
national misfortune’.40) Scott also asked for, and received, permission to
dedicate the collected Waverley novels to George IV. The dedication is
considerably more fulsome than the dedication to Emma that the King, as
Prince Regent, had extracted from a manifestly embarrassed Jane Austen.
It is, however, as an entertainer, not as a patriot or historian, that Scott
puts himself forward as a candidate for royal patronage. Far from
expressing servility, he offers himself as the people’s choice, backed, like a
modern prime minister, by the votes of ordinary readers:
The Author of this Collection of Works of Fiction would not have presumed to
solicit for them your Majesty ’s August Patronage, were it not that the perusal
has been supposed in some instances, to have succeeded in amusing hours of
164 Romantic Toryism
This dedication marks one of the very few significant instances of royal
patronage in English prose fiction, but in literary history it is a dead end.
We have seen that in each of Scott’s English novels the plot leads up to a
personal interview with the sovereign, who (for the moment at least)
reaffirms his subject’s liberties. The absence of comparable portraits of
any contemporary monarch, or even of an ideological role for the mon-
archy, in fiction before and after Scott’s time is very noticeable. Kings and
queens could be openly presented in the historical romance, but not in
English domestic fiction, where the reader is barely even conscious of their
absence. But Scott’s example suggests that, even for the novelist who is a
monarchist and a Tory romantic, the fictional portrayal of royalty has
certain dangers. Scott’s show of loyalty towards George IV does not
disguise the fact that he claims absolute dominion over his own fictional
creation, and is confident of being a much wiser ruler than most English
kings. As a novelist he is nobody’s subject.
It was the ‘Big Bow-wow strain’ that ushered in the Victorian novel.
According to the critic R. H. Horne, Scott’s achievement in historical
romance bred ‘hundreds of imitators’ throughout the civilized world:
‘Everybody thought he could write an historical novel.’43 Horne’s con-
temporary Archibald Allison noted that since the advent of historical
romance the sentimental fiction of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte
Smith, and even Samuel Richardson had become ‘wellnigh unreadable’.
Writing in 1845, Allison saw the historical romance as a contemporary
political force, since Scott’s conservatism had counteracted the democratic
tendencies of sentimental romance and had even ‘gone far to neutralise the
Romantic Toryism 165
English nation declares against them’ (181). The ‘nation’ as Disraeli under-
stood it was more than the apparatus of the state, but it was not to be arrived
at simply by counting heads among the population. Instead, it resided in the
‘great national institutions’ which it was the Tories’ task to defend:
It is these institutions which make us a nation. Without our Crown, our Church,
our Universities, our great municipal and commercial corporations, our Magis-
tracy, and its dependent scheme of provincial polity, the inhabitants of England,
instead of being a nation, would present only a mass of individuals governed by a
metropolis, whence an arbitrary senate would issue the stern decrees of its harsh
and heartless despotism. (181–2)
unmingled hate and scorn which she associated with Norman conquerors
and feudal laws’ (349–50). She believes that the English nation can be
saved (even as its class divisions are perpetuated) by one-nation Toryism.
undulating and richly wooded, the traveller on the opposite heights of the dale
would often stop to admire the merry prospect, that recalled to him the tradi-
tional epithet of his country.
Beautiful illusion! For behind that laughing landscape, penury and disease fed
upon the vitals of a miserable population! (80)
Does Charles Egremont carry within him the solution to the people’s
misery? Despite his quarrels with Lord Marney, his elder brother, he
becomes MP for the family borough (which is at Marbury, not Marney).
Not once is this apostle of social welfare shown visiting his constituency
or taking any interest in the people who regularly re-elect him to Par-
liament. Instead, he studies social conditions in Mowedale, where Walter
Gerard is employed at a model factory which, in its rural setting, is
another Millbank. When Egremont eventually makes a ‘beautiful speech’
in the Commons on the subject of the 1839 Chartist petition, Sybil con-
gratulates him but adds that ‘ ‘‘They will listen to you, they will cheer you,
but they will never follow you’’ ’ (354). This is said before her conversion
to Egremont’s ‘one-nation’ outlook, but it is a convincing prophecy which
only a generously inclined and biographically minded reader is likely to
dismiss. However honourable and sympathetic a character, Charles
Egremont is no Benjamin Disraeli.
In any case, Disraeli’s aristocratic young Tories lack the most crucial
element in his own identity—his Jewishness. The banker Sidonia (whose
name itself suggests ‘Disraeli’55) serves as a cosmopolitan Jewish mentor
for the ‘Young England’ heroes. Sidonia stems from an old Spanish family
that financed the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign, he is master
of the learning of every nation, and he holds opinions that Disraeli may
have found too radical for his Tory heroes. In Coningsby he is described
as a specialist in the ‘secret history of the world’, a history in which, so he
claims, ‘the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence’ (215, 246). Although
he sends Harry Coningsby to Manchester, he is also close to the ‘Venetian’
Lord Monmouth, whose executor he becomes. His presence in Coningsby
means that the novel cannot just be concerned with England’s Saxon and
Norman legacy, any more than Ivanhoe was. If the pampered Disraeli
hero is a potential English statesman, Sidonia stands for the necessary link
between national governance and imperial politics. But his presence in
Coningsby is largely symbolic,56 and he does not reappear until Tancred,
where he supports the hero’s Middle Eastern venture.
In his role as political talent-spotter Sidonia sees that Tancred, though
‘as ignorant of the world as a young monk’, possesses ‘all the latent
176 Romantic Toryism
I
n Marriage (1818) by the Scottish novelist Susan Ferrier, Lord
Courtland demands that his daughter should make a traditional
aristocratic marriage:
‘She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst
people of birth—that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of
their political influence—for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual
interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of
marriage.’1
fictional marriages involve either filial rebellion or, at the very least,
the exercise of independent judgement by the hero and heroine. But the
fact that novel heroines usually marry for love does not prevent these
marriages from bearing a political as well as a moral significance.
The normal pattern is one in which selfish and short-sighted family
interests are set against the wider social interests that the lovers embody
and the novelist implicitly or explicitly endorses.
Is there a ‘national interest’ in marriage? Before the Victorian period, the
politics of marriage in English fiction mainly reflect internal divisions within
the aristocracy and gentry. There were few successors to Pamela, in which
the cavalier Mr B is redeemed by marrying his Puritanical serving-maid.
Clarissa’s rebellion is against a caste marriage dictated by the ‘family fault’,
the Harlowes’ greed to acquire more land. In Tom Jones Squire Western
is a landed gentleman anxious to enlarge his estate and willing, therefore,
to marry his daughter to Mr Allworthy’s heir whoever that heir may be.
Legal and economic changes in the eighteenth century gave increasing
importance to the concentration and augmentation of landed estates.3 The
most successful practitioners of aristocratic marriage as recommended by
Lord Courtland were perceived as being the ruling Whig dynasties, the
‘small knot of great families’ later to be lampooned by Disraeli.
For all their sympathies with the French Revolution, the English
‘Jacobin’ novelists of the 1790s such as Charlotte Smith, Thomas
Holcroft, and Robert Bage produced parables of a reformed aristocracy
rather than visions of an aristocracy overthrown by the people. In Smith’s
The Old Manor House, Orlando’s marriage to Monimia and his
inheritance of Rayland Hall represent the renewal of the estate which
gives the book its title. Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St Ives (1792) shows the
heroine, a baronet’s daughter, rejecting an arranged marriage with Coke
Clifton, an unscrupulous libertine, who (as she complains) ‘acts more
from the love of his rank and family, that is of himself, than of me’.4 Her
preference is for the lower-class radical Frank Henley, a ‘true liberty boy’
for whom (in Clifton’s colourful idiom) a ‘Lord is a merry andrew’, and
‘a Duke a jack pudding’ (94). But Anna refuses to disobey her father
by eloping with Henley, and shoulders the burden of Clifton ’s moral
rehabilitation, a task in which she finally succeeds. The hero of Robert
Bage’s Hermsprong (1796), by contrast, is a mysterious American
republican, the owner of 60,000 acres on the Potomac, whose stay in
England leads to suspicions that he is a Jacobin and a French spy. His
chosen enemy is the tyrannical mine-owner Lord Grondale, who has him
charged with sedition. All too predictably, Hermsprong turns out to be
182 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
the rightful Lord Grondale. He marries his cousin and settles in England
as a reformed, radical lord with a popular appeal that augurs well for the
maintenance of the class system.
The Jacobin writers were without aristocratic connections, although
their novels tend to suggest that an enlightened aristocracy could still
form the backbone of the English nation. Charlotte Smith was born into
the minor gentry and married a City merchant. Holcroft had worked as
an actor, shoemaker, and stable boy, while Bage was a Quaker factory-
owner. Jane Austen, who possessed a copy of Hermsprong,5 came from a
solidly genteel background and was strongly anti-Jacobin. Her characters
are far more ill at ease in fashionable society than those of the Jacobin
novelists whose radical politics she so disliked. The Jacobins remembered
the anti-Royalist origins of the Whig party and dreamed of an alliance
between radicals and reformed Whig aristocrats. For Austen, however,
the eighteenth-century division between the Tory country gentry and the
ruling Whig aristocracy was a deeply personal matter.
Austen has been described as the ‘Tory daughter of a quiet Tory
parson’, and her novels as ‘Tory pastorals’.6 Although party names
never appear in her fiction, the stinging portrayal of an aristocratic grande
dame such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh implicitly involves party politics.
Austen was a daughter of the clergy and a partisan of the devout, patriotic
lower gentry, while Charlotte Brontë, who differs from her in so many
respects, resembles her in being a Tory clergyman’s daughter. Austen’s
Catherine Morland and Brontë’s Caroline Helstone are the daughters
of country parsons, as is Margaret Hale at the beginning of Elizabeth
Gaskell’s North and South (1855). Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë’s friend and
biographer, was the daughter of a Unitarian minister.
Austen’s and Brontë’s novels reflect their authors’ rural and Anglican
backgrounds in their concern with patriotism, paternalism, pastoralism,
and the moral accountability of the individual. Patriotism is a stronger
emotion in Austen and Brontë than in most English women novelists
before or since. Austen lived through the Napoleonic Wars and had
brothers in the navy; Charlotte Brontë, born in 1816, reflects some of the
chauvinistic prejudices of a generation growing up in the aftermath of a
successful war. There was an intense loyalist reaction to the French
Revolution and the threat posed by Napoleon’s armies, ‘orchestrated by
the rich’, as one historian writes, but spreading to all classes.7 Jacobin
novelists like Charlotte Smith tried to warn their readers against the
dangers of nationalism, balancing England against France and Royalism
against republicanism. The heroine of Smith’s Marchmont studies
Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage 183
English history and concludes that, for one who has gone beyond the
abridged histories written for children, since the reign of Elizabeth I ‘there
is hardly an interval that can be read with pleasure’.8 Jane Austen’s
outspokenly Royalist teenage History of England, admittedly a burlesque,
reveals the ‘strong political opinions’ which later mellowed into her
family’s moderate Toryism.9 Charlotte Brontë, the daughter of an Irish
father and a Cornish mother, idolized the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington,
the victor of Waterloo who later became Tory prime minister. Wellington
and his sons are the central figures of the fantasy world of the Glass Town
(later Angria) created by Charlotte and her brother Branwell in their youth.
At the age of 13 Charlotte copied out Walter Scott’s tribute to Wellington
in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, adding the following exclamation: ‘If he
saved England in that hour of tremendous perils, shall he not save her
again?’10 The Victorian critic Leslie Stephen saw Charlotte Brontë as a
typical example of the ‘patriotism of the steeple’.11
As the phrase implies, the Church of England parson had a recognized
duty to support the monarchy and the ruling class, and (at least in times of
crisis) to preach patriotism and social obedience to his flock. Patriotism
went with paternalism, the clergyman’s duty to oversee the lives of his
congregation and to act as its spiritual father. The priest’s personal
authority was also vested by proxy in his family—primarily his wife,
but also his daughter. ‘Clergyman’s wife’ is the role that the fashionable
Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park will do almost anything to avoid, both
in the play of Lovers’ Vows and in reality. In North and South, Margaret
Hale, returning from the metropolis to her father’s parish of Helstone in
the New Forest, anticipates the ‘delight of filling the important post of
only daughter in Helstone parsonage’.12 The social standing and duties of
a clerical family were taken very seriously by Victorian readers. The
paternalism of the clergy was pastoral in two senses of the word: not
merely caring and guiding, but, for these early nineteenth-century nove-
lists, also essentially rural. Edmund Bertram ardently wishes for a country
living, disregarding Mary Crawford’s hints that it would be more suitable
to become a celebrated preacher in a large town. Jane Austen was a child
of Steventon Rectory, Charlotte Brontë of Haworth Parsonage, both of
which have come to represent country idylls of a sort, though in very
different kinds of rural landscape. Helstone in North and South, which
Margaret makes sound ‘like a village in a tale rather than in real life’, is
‘one of the most out-of-the-way places in England’ (9, 17). Margaret also
likens it to a ‘village . . . in one of Tennyson’s poems’ (10), reminding us
not only of the poetic tradition of the rural idyll but of Tennyson’s
184 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
Donald Greene points out that Thomas Willoughby, the first Lord
Middleton, was a distant relative of Austen’s on her mother’s side.21 Sir
John Middleton is a personification of the ideal country squire. John
Willoughby, however, is a man-about-town who foresakes a love match for
traditional aristocratic marriage.
Willoughby comes upon the impoverished Marianne Dashwood for the
first time when she has fallen and twisted her ankle, so that she is literally
swept off her feet and carried home. He is heir to a nearby property,
one of several locations where he pursues his expensive tastes in
horses, carriages, and guns. Sir John Middleton twice describes him in
Richardsonian style as the ‘boldest rider in England’.22 He offers Marianne
a horse, and is also a notable dancer, causing her to exclaim that ‘ ‘‘that is
what a young man ought to be’’ ’ (77). Unlike almost all previous novelists
Austen does not give him the opportunity to attack her heroine’s chastity,
which is just as well since Marianne would certainly have succumbed. She
fails to recognize that his careless extravagance with horses and women
will force him in the end to marry for money. He is a landed gentleman in
straitened circumstances and his behaviour is caste-determined rather
than chivalrous.23 In a heavily contrived sequence, he reappears at what he
thinks is Marianne’s deathbed and confesses his real motivation to her
sister Elinor; the result is to reveal him as spoilt, weak, and selfish, but not
wholly evil or unprincipled. He marries the wealthy and appropriately
colourless Miss Grey, and lives (we are told) ‘to exert, and frequently to
enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always
uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of
every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity’ (367).
Austen feels no great animus against this young man who eventually
retreats into the customary pursuits of the Tory country squire.
All that we are told of Willoughby’s politics is that he is ‘in the
opposition’ to Mr Palmer, a fashionable and haughty young man who is
standing for Parliament. Palmer is ‘always going about the country can-
vassing against the election’ (136); he is an ardent newspaper reader, and
has no interest in rural pursuits. Nevertheless, he moves in the same circles
as the country squire Sir John Middleton, being brother-in-law to Lady
Middleton. Willoughby is apparently the Tory and Palmer the Whig,
although the novel (originally written before Northanger Abbey) lacks a
clear party-political meaning. What is crucial, however, is the rivalry and
enmity between Willoughby and Sir John Middleton’s close friend
Colonel Brandon. In the past Willoughby has seduced and abandoned
Brandon’s female ward, leading them to fight a duel, and now they are
Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage 191
only marries but tames him, turning him into a harmless country squire
whose greatest feat will be to ‘ ‘‘kill more birds on the first of September,
than any body else in the country’’ ’ (274). Once again the Cavalier’s sting
has been drawn.
Wickham is the son of the estate manager at Pemberley, and godson to
Darcy’s father who has supported him through school and university.
The Darcys’ patronage has produced in him not gratitude but an intense,
almost fratricidal hatred of Fitzwilliam Darcy, the unchallenged heir to
Pemberley. In fact, Wickham’s profligacy together with his jealousy and
resentment suggest that, in his own eyes, he too had a claim to the estate.
A more melodramatic novelist than Austen would have made him a
bastard offspring of the great estate and Darcy’s unacknowledged half-
brother. It is he, unsurprisingly, who alerts Elizabeth to the endogamous
marriage that Darcy is expected to make with his cousin Miss de Bourgh.
Had Wickham been Darcy’s half-brother, his very existence, let alone
his conduct, would have suggested the aristocratic degeneracy of the
Darcy-Fitzwilliams, and Lydia’s marriage to him would have provided a
direct symbolic parallel to Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy. But Austen is
more subtle than this. Darcy’s condemnation of Wickham’s behaviour
is thoroughly vindicated, and the threat to the future of Pemberley is
represented instead by Lady Catherine and her daughter Miss de Bourgh,
who exemplify the paradox of high-born ill-breeding and bad manners of
which Austen was always sharply aware. In terms of literal ‘breeding’—
blood, or dynastic succession—Miss de Bourgh is evidently degenerate.
Mr Collins sycophantically describes her as having ‘that in her features
which marks the young woman of distinguished birth’ (58), but she strikes
the sharp-eyed Elizabeth as being ‘pale and sickly’, ‘thin and small’ and,
worst of all, ‘insignificant-looking’ (142). As for Lady Catherine, her bad
manners have apparently rubbed off on her nephew Darcy. Elizabeth not
only rejects his first proposal, but rebukes him for not making it in a ‘more
gentleman-like manner’ (168)—as Wickham would presumably have
done. Austen then introduces Darcy’s long letter of explanation and
self-justification—a fictional contrivance as transparent as Willoughby’s
confession—to allow him to exculpate himself. The purpose of the letter
is to show that his faults of behaviour stem from priggish rectitude
and not from aristocratic ill-breeding, since Elizabeth can learn to love
priggish rectitude. But Elizabeth is also determined to force Darcy and his
family to treat her on terms of equality.
Austen’s greatest confrontation between the gentry and the Whig
aristocracy comes when she states her right to marry Darcy, telling Lady
Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage 193
however, that Emma’s own fortune has presumably come from a similar
source several generations back. Here is one critic’s reconstruction of her
family’s probable origin:
we may assume that the progenitor of the Hartfield Woodhouses was a younger
brother in a landed family, who entered trade, made his fortune, purchased the
Hartfield estate (from the Knightleys, no doubt) and settled in Highbury . . . the
Woodhouses in fact stand in almost the same position as the Westons, the Coles,
and the Sucklings of Maple Grove.35
amiable; Knightley disagrees: ‘ ‘‘No, Emma, your amiable young man can
be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘aimable’, have
very good manners, and be very agreeable, but he can have no English
delicacy towards the feelings of other people; nothing really amiable
about him’’ ’ (166). ‘English delicacy’ here is the quality of the morally
scrupulous, sympathetic, and socially aware English gentleman—a figure
who is both a paragon in himself and an appropriate mentor for others.
It is what Knightley has in common with Edmund Bertram. In fact,
the phrase sounds so natural and so well-earned in George Knightley’s
mouth that we are apt to forget its novelty. Coming from a character
who, in Emma’s view, represents ‘true gentility, untainted in blood and
understanding’ (353), it marks Jane Austen’s standard of manners.
Some forty years before Mansfield Park and Emma, Lord Chesterfield’s
Letters to His Son (1774) had idealized the manners of the French aris-
tocracy. For Chesterfield, to be ‘both respectable et aimable’ was ‘the
perfection of a human character’.36 The Tory Samuel Johnson declared
that the Letters taught ‘the morals of a whore, and the manners of a
dancing master’.37 (Chesterfield, though he became a Tory, was brought
up as a Whig grandee.) It might have been Austen’s admiration for
Johnson that led her to make Frank Churchill, who is determined to put
on a ball at Highbury, appear in the novel as a kind of dancing master.
Knightley refers to him with the slightest hint of a sneer as a ‘gallant
young man’ (298) and, when Frank’s secret understanding with Jane
Fairfax begins to appear, it becomes a case of ‘gallantry and trick’ (344).
Knightley ’s praise of ‘English delicacy’ comes in a novel written at a
period of intense English patriotism, in the year of the Battle of Waterloo.
‘Delicacy’ is not, perhaps, a word that is often associated with the English
temperament, although delicacy of observation, humorous characteriza-
tion, and moral discrimination are the hallmarks of Jane Austen’s fiction.
Her lightness of touch and the moral and social decorum surrounding her
plots distinguishes her novels from most of the fiction of the later eight-
eenth century, heavily laden as it is with sexual melodrama and Gothic
sensationalism. The ‘gallantry’ of Frank Churchill is a case in point, since
he is evidently a sincere, generous-minded, and good-hearted young man
even if his ardour and thoughtlessness tie him up in knots. He keeps
his promise to marry Jane and, unlike the gallants who proliferate in
eighteenth-century novels, he makes no attempt to seduce any of his
female admirers. His ‘French manners’ are therefore harmless. He does,
however, display a careless lack of respect for his elders that Austen
perhaps associates with Jacobinism and French republicanism. When he
Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage 201
Highbury as a ‘Tory utopia’ and a citadel against change, even though its
genteel society can only survive by constantly redrawing its boundaries.
allegorical level, Rochester is the hard ‘rock’ for Jane to base her life on, not
a breaking ‘reed’ or a ‘river’ for her to drown in.) His ancestor Damer de
Rochester died on the Civil War battlefield of Marston Moor. The union of
the Royalist Rochesters with the Fairfaxes has evidently come about more
recently, since the housekeeper at Thornfield Hall, doubtless a poor rela-
tion, is Mrs Fairfax. The latter sees fit to remind Jane, Mr Rochester’s
newest employee, that ‘Gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to
marry their governesses’.39 Jane soon jumps to the conclusion that he
intends to marry Blanche Ingram (a peer’s daughter with a fashionably
French name) ‘for family, perhaps political reasons; because her rank and
connexions suited him’ (215). Both partners are, she thinks, acting in
conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them in childhood: ‘All
their class held these principles’ (216). But the recklessness with which the
Rochesters were prepared to apply the principle of aristocratic marriage is
something of which Jane has no conception. Edward, a younger son, was
sent out to Jamaica, where his father’s old acquaintance Mr Mason was a
sugar planter. Edward’s marriage to Bertha Mason was encouraged by all
parties, even though they knew that there was congenital insanity in
Mason’s family. (Bertha is a ‘Creole’, which means that she and her family
would have been classed as white plantation owners, but her mixed-race
background is blamed for her insanity.)40 When Rochester first sees Bertha
she is the belle of Jamaican society, and Brontë is notoriously vague about
the process of mental degeneration after her marriage which leads to her
virtual imprisonment at Thornfield. On separate occasions she tries to kill
Jane, Rochester, and her brother Richard Mason, and eventually she suc-
ceeds in burning the house down. Before she learns of Bertha’s existence,
Jane remarks of the relationships among her master’s guests at Thornfield
that ‘They generally run on the same theme—courtship; and promise to
end in the same catastrophe—marriage’ (227–8). Despite her light-hearted
play on the innocent meaning of ‘catastrophe’ as the outcome of a dramatic
plot, the moral is clear: marriage, it would seem, is invariably catastrophic.
No wonder, then, that Jane, the orphan child of the Eyres and the
Reeds, enters the novel as a self-proclaimed outcast. When in Northanger
Abbey Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland to remember that she
is English, he assumes her underlying conformity with the ‘national
character’, a settled constitution temporarily obscured by her Gothic
enthusiasms. According to Henry she need only consult her ‘under-
standing’ and ‘observation’ to see things in their right perspective again.
But Catherine’s Gothicism pales beside the tortured imagination of Jane
Eyre, who hides herself away from her adopted family and questions her
204 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
St John Rivers presents Jane with a newly published first edition of Scott’s
Marmion, does not fit in with other parts of the action. When Jane is sent
to Lowood she says that she ‘brushed up [her] recollections of the map of
England’ (120), yet the novel’s meticulous details of journey times and
distances travelled by the stagecoach cannot be plotted on any map.44
Jane has her first lesson in English history soon after arriving at
Lowood School. The girls are studying the reign of Charles I but Jane has,
as yet, no opinion on the great question of the Civil Wars. Instead, she
reports Helen Burns’s measured but Royalist view:
‘I was wondering how a man who wishes to do right could act so unjustly and
unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did; and I thought what a pity it was
that, with his integrity and conscientiousness, he could see no farther than the
prerogatives of the Crown. If he had but been able to look to a distance, and see
how what they call the spirit of the age was tending! Still, I like Charles—I respect
him—I pity him, poor murdered king! . . . How dared they kill him!’ (89)
Helen, who stands for stoical resignation and Christian forgiveness, takes
a far more balanced view of the regicide than, say, Jane Austen in her
History of England. The passage is a model of the capacity for judicious
appraisal that Brontë’s heroine needs to learn after her furious rebellion at
Gateshead. But it seems like a digression until Jane comes under the spell
of Rochester, whose full name (as we have seen) evokes both sides in the
Civil Wars. The style of courtship that Rochester adopts with Blanche
Ingram clearly belongs to a Cavalier hero: it is a style which ‘if careless
and choosing rather to be sought than to seek, was yet, in its very care-
lessness, captivating, and in its very pride, irresistible’ (214). Blanche plays
along in an equally cavalier style: ‘She appeared to be on her high horse
tonight; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the
admiration, but the excitement of her auditors: she was evidently bent on
striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed’ (208).
From a nineteenth-century point of view Blanche’s manners, like her
name, are those of the francophile Whig aristocracy. It is her wealth and
breeding, not her conduct or morals, that distinguish her from Céline
Varens, the actress who was Rochester’s French mistress (he has had
others in Germany and Italy) and mother of his ward Adèle. Jane finds in
Adèle a ‘superficiality of character, inherited probably from her mother,
hardly congenial to the English mind’ (176)—a distinction recalling
Mr Knightley ’s ‘English delicacy’ but cast, as often in Charlotte Brontë, in
invidiously racial terms. It could apply equally to Blanche Ingram, though
Blanche appears at Thornfield not as a French orphan needing an English
206 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
His blindness is the blindness of Samson, who also found himself under
‘foreign guidance’ (the guidance of strangers), but Jane’s arrival at
Ferndean puts him back into familiar English hands. As his nurse she
restores him to happiness and the power of sight, and as his wife she bears
his children, though the novel takes no interest in the children or their
future. Yet, as is shown by the curiously dislocated tone of her confession,
‘Reader, I married him’ (474), Jane both enjoys her heart’s desire—
England and Mr Rochester—and remains somehow alienated in her
enjoyment. She is mistress of Ferndean, but her world has manifestly
diminished since the burning down of Thornfield, where she first dreamed
of marrying her aristocratic lover. There is an ambivalence about the
ending of Jane Eyre which looks forward to Brontë’s last novel, Villette
(to be discussed in Chapter 10), the confessional narrative of an English-
woman who both remains single and chooses to live overseas.
The contrast between the rough world of northern industry and the
genteel ‘aristocratic’ South is at the heart of Gaskell’s liberal middle-class
outlook.
Gaskell had earlier portrayed the genteel middle classes fallen on
hard times in Cranford, her linked collection of stories reminiscent of
Mitford’s Our Village. Here there is no geographical opposition of North
and South, but simply a group of respectable old ladies living on reduced
incomes in a small town twenty miles from the city of Drumble, the centre
of ‘that ‘‘horrid cotton trade’’ ’ and one of Gaskell’s fictive incarnations of
Manchester.47 The Cranford ladies pride themselves on their high-born
connections—‘though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic’ (3)—
and their ideal of good manners is that of Lord Chesterfield’s letters. The
principal characters, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty, are the daughters of
the deceased rector. When the bank in which Miss Matty has invested
fails, she resorts to an upmarket form of trade, selling specialist teas, to
make ends meet. But her long-lost brother comes back from India and
saves her from this temporary descent into shopkeeping. He is by no
means as ‘rich as a nabob’, but thanks to his mercantile activity in
the East Miss Matty is once again able to ‘live . . . ‘‘very genteelly’’ at
Cranford’ (217).
The quoted phrases illustrate how Gaskell turns the language of
gentility into a defensive class idiom, fortified, as it were, with inverted
commas. The utopia of the Cranford middle classes depends upon their
refusal to acknowledge their lower-class neighbours, with the partial
exception of shopkeepers and servants. In North and South, Margaret
Hale has no such defences. At Helstone in Hampshire, where her father
is rector, she relapses into solitude, failing (apart from her charitable
visits to outlying cottages) to do anything to alleviate the village’s wret-
ched backwardness. She never acts on her resolution to become a teacher
at the village school, despite her father’s rebukes. When the family moves
to Milton-Northern the bigoted matriarch Mrs Thornton regards her
as an idle product of the ‘aristocratic counties’ who speaks like a ‘duke’s
daughter’ and is fit for nothing but to go ‘angling after husbands’
(89, 225).
Mrs Thornton, however, is the mother of Milton’s most successful
manufacturer, and the social distance between the Thorntons and the
Hales—like similar class divisions in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849)—
is shown as being directly connected to the divisions of the Civil Wars
and, before that, of the Saxons and Normans. In her Life of Charlotte
Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell noted that the West Riding of Yorkshire was
210 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
Despite his desire for classical learning, Thornton remains true to his
creed that ‘A man is to me a higher and a completer being than a
gentleman’ (195–6), yet neither he nor his mother would think it odd if
he were to marry a lord’s daughter.
When Margaret moves from the New Forest to Milton-Northern she
feels a sense of physical affliction, a ‘stupor of despair’ that she breathes
in with the polluted city air:
The heavy smoky air hung about her bedroom, which occupied the long narrow
projection at the back of the house. The window, placed at the side of the oblong,
looked to the blank wall of a similar projection, not above ten feet distant. It
loomed through the fog like a great barrier to hope. (75)
The manufacturers, blinded by pride and their contempt for their factory
hands, have ignored the human cost of their work and power. Margaret,
however, becomes a kind of social worker, moving at ease (as she did not
feel able to do in her Hampshire village) among the ordinary people. Her
friendship with Jessy Higgins, the factory girl who is dying of an indus-
trial lung disease, is based on a sense of equality and not of religious
charity. People are dying all around her—during the eighteen months or
so of narrative time there are, in true Victorian fictional style, no less than
seven deaths—but Margaret grows in stature. When a crowd of striking
workers storms the factory gates she alone shows heroism and presence of
mind, although she also feels a ‘deep sense of shame’ at her public
exposure to the ‘unwinking glare of many eyes’ (229). Her godfather, an
Oxford don, jokes that Milton has turned her into a ‘democrat’, a ‘red
republican’, and a ‘socialist’ (397). But what Milton-Northern actually
finds in her is ‘breeding’, the traditional aristocratic fearlessness
and integrity which inspires respect, not mockery. Dr Donaldson, the
212 Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage
I
f any single writer has been said to embody the Englishness of the
English novel it is Dickens. The novelist George Gissing wrote of
his great predecessor that ‘No man ever loved England more’.1
G. K. Chesterton called him ‘the most English of our great writers’.2
Dickens’s reputation rests above all on his characters, who are portrayed
with marvellous vividness and symbolic power, and in a register that
veers melodramatically between satire and sentiment. Their variety is
that of a whole nation—of a nation centring on its metropolis—but the
nation in Dickens’s novels is sharply divided between public and private
spheres, one of which inspires his mockery and the other his reverence.
Many of his most famous satirical creations gleefully debunk the pro-
fessional classes and holders of minor public office—beadles, midwives,
lawyers, clerks, schoolteachers, and ministers of religion—and figures
such as Bumble, Gradgrind, and Squeers have become proverbial mon-
sters outliving the fictional contexts in which they first appeared. Their
power over the lives of Dickens’s ordinary heroes and heroines produces
a sense of monstrous oppression and injustice. Dickens, then, is a radical
novelist, but his reflection of national character has certain manifest
limitations. Gissing wrote that ‘his art, splendidly triumphant, made
visible to all mankind the characteristic virtues, the typical short-
comings, of the homely English race’.3 The key word here is ‘homely’.
He has no interest in the ceremonial aspects of English history or the
national life, nor is his fiction international in outlook. What he wishes
most for his protagonists is an untroubled, unambitious domestic
happiness. He is the novelist as instinctive republican but also as Little
Englander.
George Orwell contrasted Dickens’s lack of ‘vulgar nationalism’ with
the jingoism of his Victorian contemporaries:
never anywhere does he indulge in the typical English boasting, the ‘island
race’, ‘bulldog breed’, ‘right little, tight little island’ style of talk. . . . He is
214 Dickens and the Fiction of the City
city, which those who had been bred up in country parts had no idea of. It was the
very place for a homeless boy, who must die in the streets unless someone helped
him. (97)
London, as the legendary Dick Whittington had found, is the place for the
orphan, the ‘lad of spirit’, the restless adolescent who up to now has only
been humiliated and downtrodden. Once in the city his public career can
only flourish and broaden, yet the ideas of public life and citizenship have
far more sinister connotations in Dickens than they do for a commentator
such as Hazlitt.
When Noah Claypole follows Oliver Twist to London, adopts a false
name, and joins Fagin’s gang of thieves, Dickens sardonically describes
him as having become a ‘public Character in the Metropolis’ (376). A
‘public character’ in his novels is as often as not someone with a police
record, a notorious impostor, rogue, or confidence trickster. In Our
Mutual Friend (1864–5) the Limehouse criminal Rogue Riderhood
describes himself to Lawyer Lightwood as a ‘Waterside character’ (152),
while the grave-robber in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) owns to being an
‘Agricultooral character’.10 Not surprisingly, Dickens’s heroes and her-
oines do their best to shun publicity, so that the happy endings to most of
his novels combine prosperity with complete obscurity. The phrase
‘public character’ in his fiction is tarnished by its association with crime
even when it is applied to someone who is completely innocent. Thus Sir
John Chester in Barnaby Rudge (1841) tells Gabriel Varden (whose name
has been in the newspapers after giving evidence in court) that he has
become ‘quite a public character’.11 When Mr Micawber, the Australian
magistrate, is described by his wife as an ‘important public character’, we
cannot but remember his past as an inveterate sponger and debt-bilker in
London.12 In Our Mutual Friend a book containing portraits of people
of fashion is described as illustrating ‘public characters’ (410), hinting at
the narrator’s contempt for wealthy and fashionable society. The phrase
occurs very naturally in a plot linking the pompous and respectable face
of society to the criminal underworld. Dickens may be most renowned for
his creation of characters, yet to be called, or to call oneself a ‘character’
in his novels is usually undesirable. Dickens’s love of London must,
therefore, be squared with his profound distrust of urban society and
citizenship. What is most remarkable (as we shall see) is that in novel after
novel he alludes to the legend of Dick Whittington, London’s archetypal
Lord Mayor who, above all, stands for Hazlitt’s idea of the Londoner as
a ‘public creature’.
Dickens and the Fiction of the City 217
envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets’’ ’ (i. 313–14). The press with
its ‘ambassadors’ and ‘officers’ is like an alternative state apparatus, a
literary republic with global imperial ambitions. But Pendennis becomes
a stylish belle-lettristic essayist, not a thunderous leader writer like
Warrington. His job is to remind his paper’s readers that it is ‘written by
gentlemen for gentlemen’ (i. 330). Pendennis the fashionable essayist is
seen from Thackeray’s disillusioned perspective as a personification of
opportunism and selfishness, not of stern ambition and a noble mission.
He is a ‘man and a brother’ but not a ‘hero’ (ii. 394). His heavily auto-
biographical first novel is the story of a prime minister ’s son whose rival is
a young duke. (Doubtless Thackeray was cocking a snook at the more
established Disraeli and his novel The Young Duke.) Pendennis’s party
allegiances change with the fluctuations of fashionable political opinion,
and when Laura, his stepsister and future wife, innocently remarks that
he must intend ‘to do a great deal of good to the country’ by going into
Parliament, he covers his sense of shame with the remark that women
should not meddle in politics (ii. 301).
Thackeray famously regretted the Victorian prurience that prevented
him from portraying his hero’s young manhood as explicitly as Fielding
had done: ‘Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction
among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We
must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper’ (i, p. xviii).
So Pendennis is not actually allowed to make love to his lower-class
inamorata Fanny Bolton, but this is not the only respect in which his
military assault on London turns into something approaching a fiasco. He
remains a country gentleman at heart, and, far from committing himself
to the democracy of city life, he prefers to remain a prince in his family’s
eyes. Finally he marries the long-suffering Laura and returns to the values
he once learned from his mother, a ‘country bred woman’ for whom the
‘book of life’ told ‘a different story to that page which is read in cities’
(i. 70). Pendennis’s metropolitan adventures are only a detour. London
for both Dickens and Thackeray was the ‘modern Babylon’,15 but their
protagonists often seem to languish there like the Israelites in captivity.
Pendennis’s story may be viewed as either one of failure in the city or of
exploiting the city, of taking its gifts of celebrity and riches while reserv-
ing oneself for a finer and more permanent life elsewhere. Subsequent
English attempts at the form of the metropolitan Bildungsroman tend to
explore one or the other of these alternatives, although H. G. Wells in
Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911) shares some of
Thackeray’s ambivalence. In Tono-Bungay (to be further discussed in
Dickens and the Fiction of the City 219
vulgar, and that the novelist should be concerned with ‘finer issues’,
brings us back to Dickens’s wrestling with the Whittington story.
paved with gold, and he was willing to get a bushel of it; but how great was his
disappointment, poor boy! when he saw the streets covered with dirt instead of
gold, and found himself in a strange place, without a friend, without food, and
without money.22
Whittington, fair flower of merchants, bells have come to have less sympathy
with humankind. They only ring for money and on state occasions. Wanderers
have increased in number; ships leave the Thames for distant regions, carrying
from stem to stern no other cargo; the bells are silent: they ring out no entreaties
or regrets; they are used to it and have grown worldly. (237)
Most telling here is Dickens’s sombre reference to the crowded emigrant
ships, leaving London for more distant Eldorados. Dickens sends the
Micawbers, the Peggottys, and Little Em’ly to Australia, and Martin
Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley in search of fool’s gold to the United States.
Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) also flee
from London. Of these characters, only Joe Willet (who volunteers for the
army and fights in the American War of Independence) and Martin
Chuzzlewit are able to return to the city and come into an inheritance.
It is the city slicker Montague Tigg, not anyone more creditable, who
envisages Martin and his friend Tom Pinch as ‘a pair of Whittingtons’.24
Similarly, in Oliver Twist it is not Oliver but Bill Sikes, after the murder of
Nancy, who finds himself powerless to escape from the environs of
London once he has passed the ‘stone in honour of Whittington’ (424).
In The Old Curiosity Shop Whittingtonian hopes are put in the mouth of
the petty rogue Dick Swiveller, who thinks that if he goes to Highgate
‘Perhaps the bells might strike up ‘‘Turn again, Swiveller, Lord Mayor of
London’’ ’.25 Richard Carstone in Bleak House (1852–3) dreams idly of
miraculous good fortune like that of his ‘namesake Whittington’.26 Oliver
Twist’s fate sums up what could be taken as Dickens’s general advice to
homeless orphans in his novels: whatever you do, steer clear of London.
At Sowerberry’s he has already been ill-treated in the kitchen by Noah
and Charlotte. On the Great North Road at Barnet, some way before
Highgate, he is accosted by the Artful Dodger, taken to the metropolis,
and shown into the thieves’ kitchen presided over by Fagin (where Nancy,
however, does not ill-treat him). Oliver’s career in crime reaches its
logical ending when, wounded by a pistol shot after being forced to take
part in an attempted burglary, he is left for dead in a ditch and disappears
for six whole chapters. He is brought back to life thanks to the recognition-
inheritance plot, and from this point on he is a country gentleman in the
making.
Nicholas Nickleby, in Dickens’s next novel, takes public employment
as a Yorkshire schoolteacher and as secretary to a Member of Parliament,
but gives up both positions in disgust. Eventually he finds complete
satisfaction as a humble clerk to the Cheeryble brothers, who are ultra-
benevolent London merchants. More to his surprise than ours, they
Dickens and the Fiction of the City 223
entrust him with their fortune, but he moves to Somerset and runs their
business from a great distance. It is not until Dickens’s middle period
that he seems able to dispense with the Cheeryble brothers’ miraculous
benevolence and to show characters relying on their own resources. His
reckoning with the Whittington theme is summed up in his middle-period
and later novels, beginning with David Copperfield and Dombey and Son.
David Copperfield (1849–50) is sufficiently autobiographical for it to
have been rather awkward for its author to portray his hero as another
Whittington. Nevertheless, David is constantly shown travelling the road
to Highgate (the home of Steerforth, of Dr Strong and, for a time, of Betsy
Trotwood) and looking down from its hill; moreover, his early sufferings
as a ‘ragged way-worn boy forsaken and neglected’ (863) are never for-
gotten even though he finds a fairy godmother in his aunt. For most of
the voluminous narrative David lives a life of gentility and growing
prosperity. It is when he has become an established writer and an
employer of servants that his domestic ‘page’, later to be transported for
theft, is shown quarrelling with the cook like a ‘perfect Whittington,
without his cat, or the remotest chance of being made Lord Mayor’ (691).
Nevertheless, the young David is identified by Uriah Heep as a fellow
‘upstart’ (760), and David succeeds where Uriah fails in marrying their
respective masters’ daughters, Dora Spenlow and Agnes Wickfield. To
add to his rival’s sense of injury, David eventually takes Agnes for his
second wife while Uriah languishes in prison. As a respected novelist,
David also manages to achieve his ambition of becoming ‘learned and
distinguished’ (155) while remaining wholly within the domestic sphere;
Dickens does not show him as being in any respect a public figure. There
are other possible Whittingtons in David Copperfield, since Tommy
Traddles is finally about to become a judge, while Micawber’s faith that
‘something will turn up’ has been duly rewarded in Australia. But when
David comes back to England after three years abroad, he reflects that
‘both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be
taken by storm’ (822).
Since Dickens increasingly saw the English state as a monstrously
corrupt social organism, resistant to change—with its age-old corruption
symbolized by institutions such as the Court of Chancery in Bleak
House—it was the ‘master’s daughter’ theme, rather than the hero’s
accession to public power and success, that continued to attract him to the
Whittington story. The potential complexity of this theme is evident from
the case of Estella in Great Expectations (1861): initially identified as the
stepdaughter of Miss Havisham who is Pip’s supposed patron, she is
224 Dickens and the Fiction of the City
This passage seems almost out of place in Dombey and Son, evoking as it
does the sombre worlds of Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, and Dickens’s
last novels. The figuration of London as a cannibalistic ‘monster’, like the
Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, suggests that those who enter the
226 Dickens and the Fiction of the City
The question of what exactly London’s streets are paved with is the
subject of a dialogue between Mr Podsnap, the chauvinistic middle-class
Englishman, and his French dinner guest:
‘And Do You Find, Sir,’ pursued Mr Podsnap, with dignity, ‘Many Evidences that
Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets Of The World ’s Metropolis,
London, Londres, London?’
The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether
understand. . . .
‘I Was Inquiring,’ said Mr Podsnap . . . ‘Whether You Have Observed in our
Streets as We should say, Upon our Pavvy as You would say, any Tokens—’
The foreign gentleman with patient courtesy entreated pardon; ‘But what was
tokenz?’
‘Marks,’ said Mr Podsnap; ‘Signs, you know, Appearances—Traces.’
‘Ah! Of a Orse?’ inquired the foreign gentleman. (136)
Podsnap thinks that the streets might be paved with evidences of the
British Constitution, but all that the French visitor can find there is horse
manure, yet another component of the waste that has made Harmon’s
fortune. The British Constitution, notoriously unwritten, is a kind of gold
standard for Podsnap: it applies everywhere, even though the Frenchman
(and, by implication, Dickens) can find it nowhere. The city’s gold,
however, has been turned into paper, another incipient waste-product.
Old Harmon’s fortune is tied up in legal documents of doubtful worth—
neither the will that has been made public nor the one that Wegg and
Venus find on the dust-heap is actually valid. Bella Wilfer reads (sig-
nificantly, in her evening paper) of gold being ‘taken to the Bank’ (666–7),
but the City ’s actual financial medium is now ‘scrip’ or share certificates
and receipts. Dickens’s narrator grandiloquently informs us that ‘As is
well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one
thing to have to do with in this world’ (118). Veneering’s business success
earns him a place among the ‘Fathers of the Scrip-Church’ (610), a
company doubtless including present and future Lord Mayors. The ori-
ginal dictionary meaning of ‘scrip’ is scrap or waste, as in a scrap of paper,
and the city’s scrip is constantly turned into scrap, producing ‘[t]hat
mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind
blows’ (147).
Among the other products blown about by the wind are sawdust, and,
very likely, bran. Dickens refers to the Veneerings and their wealth
as ‘bran-new’ (17) rather than ‘brand-new,’ probably because of the
dictionary sense of ‘bran’ as ‘muck, excrement, filth.’ Then, no doubt,
there are rags, since, as Mortimer Lightwood puts it, ‘everything wears
230 Dickens and the Fiction of the City
even to Bow Bells, John Harmon the phantom City merchant is not even
known to his family lawyer. He is not so much a figure of doubtful
identity as a virtual non-presence or nonentity—the perpetual third party
or spiritual absentee implied by the phrase ‘our mutual friend’ itself.
By the end of the novel, the dust-heaps have been cleared away in
exchange for a paper fortune, while the gold that was supposedly at the
city’s centre has disappeared. Veneering, the potential Lord Mayor, is on
the brink of bankruptcy and will be forced to flee to Calais and live off his
wife’s diamonds. In Our Mutual Friend, written at the culmination of
Dickens’s dazzling career and at the height of his powers, mercantile
ambitions are dismissed as so much chaff and the novelist seems to revel
in the integrity of idleness. John Harmon clearly has no intention of
engaging in business, so that his future existence is that of a gentleman of
leisure like the briefless barrister Eugene Wrayburn. After his ‘downward
slide’ from the house where he was drugged and kidnapped into the
Thames, Harmon recalls that ‘a heavy horrid unintelligible something
vanished, and it was I who was struggling alone there in the water’ (363).
It is the aim of all Dickens’s protagonists to shrug off the heavy, unin-
telligible weight of a city where the bells have ‘grown worldly’ and the
noble merchant of the Whittington legend has given place to a phantom.
The homeliness and domesticity of Dickens’s family idylls is the result of
his disillusionment with the effects of wealth and power on the England
that idolized him.
= 10 =
At Home and Abroad in Victorian
and Edwardian Fiction: From Vanity
Fair to The Secret Agent
W
illiam Makepeace Thackeray, born in Calcutta in 1811,
might have become the first great novelist of Anglo-India. His
father, an East India Company official, died when he was 3,
and in 1817 he was sent back to England. In his early twenties he lost the
money he had inherited from his father, partly as a result of the collapse of
Indian investments, and he never returned to the East. Since Thackeray is
a satirist who manifestly loves and admires what he pokes fun at, it is
significant that his juvenilia includes The Tremendous Adventures of
Major Gahagan (1838), a hilarious send-up of the military memoir which
in some ways anticipates the Boy’s Own Paper style of imperial romance.
(Who can forget the siege of Futtyghur, when the gallant British officer
commanding the defence takes off the trunks of 134 enemy elephants with
a single cannon shot?) In Vanity Fair (1848) Jos Sedley, the Indian nabob
with the ‘honourable and lucrative post’ of Collector of Boggley Wallah,1
is another figure of fun even though Thackeray’s father had held the title
of Collector. Major Dobbin is posted to Madras, and plans to devote
the rest of his life after retiring from the army to writing a history of the
Punjab. But, out of more than sixty chapters, only one is set in India, and
that is mainly devoted to home thoughts from abroad.
for a pocket borough. It is through Sir Pitt that Becky gains access to
Rawdon Crawley and then to Lord Steyne, leading to her ascent to a level
of society so august that Thackeray hardly dares to name it.
Lord Steyne, who is descended from the druids and owns castles and
palaces all over the British Isles, stands for the bloated and degenerate
Whig aristocracy. He is the provider of Becky’s diamond earrings and
the ‘superb brilliant ornament’ which adorns what Thackeray calls her
‘famous frontal development’ (481, 184), as if her bosom, suitably clad,
were itself a sign of Britain’s imperial splendour. But Lord Steyne is also
Lord of the Powder Closet, ‘one of the great dignitaries and illustrious
defences of the throne of England’ (481). Thanks to him, Becky is
presented at court, giving her the opportunity of entering the royal
apartments with a swagger that ‘would have befitted an empress’ (478).
When the King or, as Thackeray calls him, the ‘Imperial Master’ briefly
appears in the audience chamber, the usually ebullient narrative voice is
cowed and silenced: ‘The dazzled eyes close before that Magnificent Idea.
Loyal respect and decency tell even the imagination not to look too keenly
and audaciously. . . . but to back away rapidly, silently, and respectfully,
making profound bows out of the August Presence’ (482). Is Thackeray
laughing behind his sleeve here? We cannot tell. Certainly he is unsparing
about Mr Osborne, of whom he says that ‘Whenever he met a great man
he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton
can do’ (119). Thackeray himself seems to grovel before royalty, yet a
nation stuffed with power and self-satisfaction is transfixed under his gaze
until we perceive it as no more than a freak show, a box full of puppets
strutting their way through a pompous charade that presages the vanity of
human life and the impermanence of empires. The death of the gallant,
flawed George Osborne on the field of Waterloo is to some extent the
novelist’s retribution for his heartless flirtation with Becky, yet it also
portends the eventual passing away of the British Empire, which will fall
just as Napoleon fell. But there is life after such a bereavement, as
Thackeray shows through Amelia’s gradual return to happiness.
The certainty of eventual political decline is an implicit element in
Thackeray’s allegory, even though Sir Pitt Crawley’s prophecy of the
‘speedy ruin of the Empire’ (696) when he loses his two pocket boroughs
as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill is manifestly absurd. We may consider,
for example, the complex irony of the novelist’s allusion to Lady Hester
Stanhope: ‘Lady Hester once lived in Baker Street, and lies asleep in the
wilderness’ (504). Baker Street (slightly to the west of the Anglo-Indian
quarter of London popularly known as the ‘Black Hole’) had recently
236 At Home and Abroad
differences within Europe rather lightly. The same cannot be said of the
major women novelists who were his contemporaries. Charlotte Brontë’s
strong feelings, not to say prejudices, about national character are evident
throughout her writings. The narrator in ‘Ashworth’, an unfinished novel
written in her mid-twenties, declares that ‘Ferocity, treachery, and
turbulence are strong characteristics’ of the Irish and the French nations,3
while in her last novel Villette (1853) both a place and a family are
named Bretton (Britain). George Eliot contributed to the contemporary
intellectual debate about national character in her late essay ‘The
Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (1879), which belongs with the statements of
political thinkers and historians such as Mill, Bagehot, Ernest Renan, and
J. R. Green. The essay reflects the commitment to the idea of Jewish
nationality that inspired Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), while outlining
her belief in the ultimate triumph of cosmopolitanism and the fusion of
races and nationalities.4 But the time is not yet ripe for cosmopolitanism,
in Eliot’s view. Instead, a ‘too rapid effacement of those national tradi-
tions and customs which are the language of the national genius—the
deep suckers of healthy sentiment’ would lead to the moral degradation of
society.5 For this reason, Eliot warns against mass immigration, which
would put the ‘distinctive national characteristics’ of a historic people
such as the English ‘in danger of obliteration by the predominating quality
of foreign settlers’ (283)—an early instance of the anti-immigration
scaremongering that would become associated a century later with the
Conservative politician Enoch Powell.
Even more strikingly, Eliot’s idealistic rhetoric has the effect of
elevating nationality into a kind of secular religion:
The eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability of being stirred
by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends—ends which consist
not in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling
that animates the collective body as with one soul. . . . It is this living force of
sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness. . . . A common
humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes
a complete man. The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous,
any more than for communism to suffice for social energy. (264–5).
allude to the seventeenth-century Civil Wars and the Wars of the Roses.
The Angrian saga was written before Charlotte Brontë’s crucial residence
in Brussels as a student and English teacher, which brought the themes
of cosmopolitanism and the conflict of nationalities into her writing.
Brussels is the setting of her rejected first novel The Professor as well as
providing the model for the city in Villette, her mature masterpiece.
In The Professor William Crimsworth, the younger brother of a York-
shire mill-owner, goes to Brussels to teach English on the advice of his
mentor Yorke Hunsden, an industrialist and republican radical. Hunsden
appears by turns as saviour, demonic tempter, ‘Saxon’ Englishman,
and cosmopolitan wanderer, while Crimsworth ultimately aspires for
recognition as an English gentleman. Where Hunsden claims to be a
‘universal patriot’ and world citizen, Crimsworth sees his Belgian hosts
through a veil of racial prejudice and religious bigotry. His pupils’
‘true Flamand physiognomy’ betrays their intellectual inferiority, or so he
thinks; and the continental climate is to blame for their ‘deformity of
person and imbecility of intellect’.10 Brontë herself had expressed similar
views in letters home, describing the ‘national character of the Belgians’
as ‘a character singularly cold, selfish, animal and inferior’.11 But the
accusation of coldness is mutual, since Crimsworth’s Belgian colleague
M. Pelet describes him as a ‘cold, frigid islander’ (89). The same stereotype
is present in Villette, where the English heroine Lucy Snowe—herself
cold, secretive, and emotionally repressed—describes the Anglo-Scottish
Graham Bretton as a ‘cool young Briton’ who is as impassive as the ‘pale
cliffs of his own England’.12
The idea of emotional reserve and self-suppression as defining features
of the English character was implicitly present in Jane Austen’s
Mr Knightley. Maria Edgeworth had commented in The Absentee that
‘however reserved the English may be in manner, they are warm at
heart’,13 while Thackeray in Pendennis remarks on the ‘Curious modesty,
strange stoical decorum of English friendship!’ (ii. 325). In The Professor,
when Crimsworth and Hunsden are shown parting from one another
after a meeting in Brussels, ‘With a simultaneous movement each turned
his back on the other. Neither said ‘‘God bless you,’’ yet on the morrow
the sea was to roll between us’ (234). Elizabeth Gaskell writes of John
Thornton and his mother in North and South that ‘a stranger might have
gone away and thought that he had never seen such frigid indifference
of demeanour between such near relations’ (252). In Shirley, Caroline
Helstone’s mother remarks on the ‘reserve of English manners and
the decorum of English families’ (298). When in Villette Lucy and her
242 At Home and Abroad
godmother Mrs Bretton are reunited after ten years, all that passes
between them is summed up as ‘few words and a single salute’ (249). The
phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ is mid-Victorian, though it is credited to the
American poet Phoebe Cary rather than to an English writer.
While often seen as a sign of emotional inadequacy—of the kind that
would lead Edwardian novelists such as E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence
to send their characters to the Catholic Mediterranean countries to find a
sensual awakening denied to them at home—the habit of English reserve is
also a form of power, an expression of the governing mystique of an
imperial elite or of the spiritual arrogance and superiority of successful
middle-class Puritans like Hunsden and Thornton. To show English reserve
means to refuse to betray emotional weakness or openness to persuasion by
subordinates, so that it is clearly linked to a habit of class decorum and
respectability (‘Not in front of the servants’). In this vein Rudyard Kipling,
for example, could write of an effusive greeting between an Indian father
and son, both native officers who had served under the British, that ‘they
embraced as do father and son in the East’ (52).14 This passing remark,
which embodies the very English reserve to which it silently alludes, is
a reminder of Kipling’s intense suffering as a child who was sent back
from the warmth of India to the cold English schooling that was seen as
a prerequisite for a future imperialist.
Self-suppression is scarcely characteristic of the male protagonists
of eighteenth-century English fiction—of a Lovelace, a Tom Jones, or a
Roderick Random. It may be seen, rather, as a female attribute, the public
face of the suffering, endurance, and deprivation undergone by a heroine
such as Clarissa. Novels, however, reveal their protagonists’ suppressed
feelings, and Charlotte Brontë above all develops the contrast between her
characters’ outward mask and their raging inner life. At the same time,
she portrays self-suppression as a generalized code of conduct applicable
to the more Puritanical members of both sexes. Female stoicism and male
undemonstrativeness now look remarkably similar. As an indication of
national character, English self-suppression receives what is perhaps its
fullest statement in the early twentieth century, in the writings of Ford
Madox Ford. Ford’s essay The Spirit of the People (1907) illustrates the
theme with two anecdotes, each concerning an inter-generational and
filial or quasi-filial relationship like the meeting between Lucy and her
estranged godmother in Villette. In the first anecdote, a young volunteer
comes back from the Boer War maimed and crippled, and is met at the
station by his father. The only words spoken are ‘ ‘‘Hullo, Bob!’’ . . .
‘‘Hullo, Governor!’’ ’. The second anecdote tells of an English gentleman’s
At Home and Abroad 243
frigid and virtually silent parting from his ward, with whom he has fallen
in love and who is being sent on a round-the-world voyage in order to
cover up their passion. Their parting, once again, is at a railway station.15
This anecdote famously became the germ of Ford’s novel The Good
Soldier (1915), where the silent parting takes place between Edward
Ashburnham, who has served in India, and Nancy Rufford, who is on her
way there. Ford’s view of English reserve, like Kipling’s, suggests that
it is part of the cultural apparatus of military and imperial power.
In The Professor, however, Crimsworth’s outward coldness and silence
is principally a sign of his Puritanical seriousness and the intensity of his
inner life. He undergoes solitary spiritual struggles, hears angelic and
demonic voices, and eventually finds his path to redemption when he
meets a Swiss Protestant, Frances Henri, whom he marries and brings
back to England. They settle down in a picturesque Yorkshire cottage
close to Hunsden, who has retired from trade to a region unspoilt by
‘the smoke of mills’ (246). Frances rapidly turns into a conservative rural
English housewife, rebuking Hunsden’s cosmopolitanism in terms very
like those later to be used by George Eliot’s Theophrastus Such.
‘ ‘‘Sympathies so widely diffused must be very shallow’’ ’ (230), she
remarks. But Hunsden remains the novel’s most intricate and disturbing
character, a Yorkshire industrialist who is also a cosmopolitan intellec-
tual, a hereditary landowner doubling as Mephistophilian outcast.
Where Crimsworth falls in love with a Protestant and moves back to
England, Villette is a novel of expatriation in which the English heroine
agrees to marry a continental Jesuit whose anglophobia has earlier roused
her to fury. Harriet Martineau, in a contemporary review, described
Brontë’s portrayal of life in a foreign pension in a ‘third-rate capital’ as
something new in English literature, while at the same time detecting a
vein of religious zealotry in Lucy Snowe’s gloomy Protestantism and her
passionate hatred of the Catholic Church.16 The difficulty of controlling
the balance and tone of a first-person narrative, already apparent in The
Professor and Jane Eyre, is exacerbated in Villette by Lucy’s manifest
duplicity and secretiveness. Lucy’s vehement anti-Catholicism is at once
a measure of the attractions of the Catholic faith, and a cover for her
rejection of English identity. Or we could say that Lucy manages to
separate the core of her national identity—her Protestant faith—from any
sentimental or material attachment to England as a cultural or political
nation.
Lucy’s life, like Crimsworth’s and Jane Eyre’s, is a pilgrimage, but the
pilgrimage cannot end in marriage to a Protestant since her love for
244 At Home and Abroad
in the City is his for the asking, but he prefers to marry Henrietta and
settle at Carbury Hall. Above all, he patiently listens to Roger’s final
homily about the necessity of living within his income. Trollope, blithely
overlooking the long history of rural capitalism, profit fluctuations,
enclosures, property sales, evicted tenants, and bankrupted estates,
represents speculative finance as an alien intrusion into the English
countryside. His novel was published at the beginning of the great agri-
cultural depression of the late nineteenth century, which fundamentally
altered the way of life of most rural landowners. For its earliest readers as
well as for later ones, The Way We Live Now offered the consolations of
a vanished age.
In the opening scene of Daniel Deronda, the heroine Gwendolen Harleth
is shown gambling in the casino of a German spa. Soon afterwards she, like
Paul Montague, has to listen to lectures on the need for domestic economy.
Her family’s wealth, which is ultimately derived from the West Indies, has
suddenly been lost in mining speculations. Gwendolen has earlier been
asked by her cousin Rex Gascoigne what she wishes to do in life: her
answer, that she may ‘go to the North Pole, or ride steeplechases, or go to
be a queen in the East like Lady Hester Stanhope’, perfectly catches the
recklessness of her character.19 She is the spoilt child of a cosmopolitan
upbringing who finds herself reduced to shabby-genteel poverty in a
country cottage. From this she might be saved by a wealthy marriage, and
the novel’s allegory rests on the contrast between two possible male con-
tenders for her hand, Daniel Deronda and Henleigh Grandcourt.
Daniel is the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, a prominent Whig baronet
with Norman and crusading ancestors. Like Disraeli’s young aristocrats,
he is determined to broaden his social experience in the hope of dis-
covering a political mission, but he rejects Sir Hugo’s ossified Whiggism
in order to become a Zionist, not a Disraelian Tory. Unaware of his
Jewish identity, he finds a mentor in the unworldly religious fanatic
Mordecai Cohen, and a potential bride in Mordecai’s sister Mirah.
Eventually he learns his own, hitherto secret, family history.
Daniel’s story is what one critic has called a ‘chivalric quest’, a
‘romantic search for a father, an identity, and a mission’.20 Such a quest is
reminiscent of the Scott romance, and it is no surprise that, when Daniel
saves Mirah from drowning, his friends immediately link her to Rebecca
in Ivanhoe. But Eliot portrays Deronda’s quest as part of the late nine-
teenth-century struggle between nationality and cosmopolitanism that
she was to analyse in Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Georgiana
Longestaffe in The Way We Live Now suggests that racially mixed
At Home and Abroad 249
East which had earlier inspired Kinglake’s Eo@then and Disraeli’s Tancred,
and would later be pursued by Kipling and E. M. Forster.21 Like other
forms of ‘positive orientalism’, Daniel’s proposed mission to the East is
something of an imperial crusade as well as a journey of self-discovery.
It is no accident that his adopted English family has crusading ancestors.
Although the novel remains deliberately unspecific, Daniel’s desire to
restore a political existence to the Jewish people and to bring them back
to nationhood can only be accomplished by liberating Jewish Palestine
from Ottoman rule and from Muslim religious hegemony. Daniel learns to
revere his grandfather who ‘mingled all sorts of learning . . . like our Arabic
writers in the golden time’ (791), yet, like Lucy Snowe’s expatriation, his
renunciation of English identity is far from complete.
Daniel’s Zionism, however, is set against the Englishness of Henleigh
Grandcourt, an altogether stronger, crueller, and colder personality than
Trollope’s aristocratic playboys. Henry James described Grandcourt (who
is a wealthy kinsman of Sir Hugo Mallinger) as a representation of ‘the most
detestable kind of Englishman’, ‘a consummate picture of English brutality
refined and distilled’;22 these judgements, delivered at the time of the novel’s
first publication, suggest that he is both a symbol of national character
and a figure whom James found unpleasantly realistic. Grandcourt is well
travelled—he enjoys yachting in the Mediterranean and has gone tiger-
hunting in India—and his dictatorial manner towards his subordinates
suggests the corruptions of imperialist power rather than of a stagnant
aristocracy. Gwendolen’s uncle, an Anglican clergyman, considers that
Grandcourt’s rank exempts him from the ‘ordinary standard of moral
judgements’: ‘the almost certain baronet, the probable peer, was to be
ranged with public personages, and was a match to be accepted on broad
general grounds national and ecclesiastical’ (176–7). This means that for
Gwendolen to become Grandcourt’s wife is a matter of patriotic duty
rather than personal preference. Eliot’s portrayal of ‘English brutality’ in
Daniel Deronda lends weight to Daniel’s renunciation of his English identity.
Yet here, as in The Way We Live Now, the novelist’s moral allegory con-
siderably oversimplifies the issues involved in the choice of nationality.
fullest statement about his and Winnie’s married life takes the form of
an ironic obituary tribute:
Except for the fact that Mrs Verloc breathed [she and her husband] would have
been perfectly in accord: that accord of prudent reserve without superfluous
words, and sparing of signs, which had been the foundation of their respectable
home life. For it had been respectable, covering by a decent reticence the pro-
blems that may arise in the practice of a secret profession and the commerce of
shady wares. To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by unseemly
shrieks and other misplaced sincerities of conduct. (213)
The decorum of the English family goes together with the English peo-
ple’s ‘idealistic conception of legality’ and their ‘scrupulous prejudices’,
which both the terrorist Professor and the agent provocateur Mr Vladimir
see as political obstacles (67). Verloc scorns these idealistic prejudices yet
secretly shares them, so that he remains sublimely unaware that his wife
could be capable of murdering him to avenge her brother’s death. But the
murder and Winnie’s subsequent suicide are the acts of a woman who is,
like her husband, a kind of secret agent. She does not go to the police or
denounce her husband with ‘unseemly shrieks’, but keeps her revenge to
herself. All that the world ever learns of the affair comes from the
newspaper report of the ‘Suicide of Lady Passenger from a cross-Channel
Boat’, which concludes that her ‘act of madness or despair’ is destined to
remain mysterious (246).
Conrad himself was (as has often been remarked) a kind of secret agent.
His English marriage to Jessie George and the start of his literary career
both took place in 1895, after twenty years at sea. Born of Polish parents
in the Ukraine, he had been a British subject since 1886. Conrad settled in
England for the last three decades of his life, but England (as opposed to
Englishmen) appears in his fiction only rarely, and usually as an alienated
and sinister environment. Heart of Darkness (1902), the story of a journey
to central Africa, begins on the Thames estuary with the reminder that
‘this also . . . has been one of the dark places on the earth’.26 The London
of The Secret Agent is still a dark place, a city where the façade of
respectability can easily break down and nobody feels truly at home. In
a powerful image of the dissolution of traditional family structures,
Winnie’s mother is ejected from Mr Verloc’s residence and is put into an
almshouse. Soon Winnie finds herself ‘alone’ in a city which ‘rested at the
bottom of a black abyss from which no unaided woman could hope to
scramble out’ (218). The novel’s final image of metropolitan alienation
is the meeting of two of the surviving revolutionaries, Ossipon and the
At Home and Abroad 257
Professor, who share this condition of internal exile. Ossipon now seems
destined for the ‘black abyss’ of unemployment, while the Professor
moves unseen and unsuspected among the city crowd, a suicide bomber
who might blow himself up at any moment.
Ossipon is a washed-up immigrant, and the Professor speaks of
England and its social institutions with a cold detachment that suggests he
is essentially stateless. Nevertheless, his roots are in provincial Puritanism
of a recognizably English type:
His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect—a man
supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness. In the son, individualist
by temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of
conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of
ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy. (73)
T
homas Carlyle, echoing the tones of a revivalist preacher,
declared in 1845 that ‘The Age of the Puritans is not extinct
only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the
capabilities of memory herself . . . Its earnest Purport awakens now no
resonance in our frivolous hearts.’1 The ‘Age of the Puritans’ may be said
to have ended with the birth of the modern English nation in 1688, the
year of John Bunyan’s death as well as of the Whig triumph which
Thomas Babington Macaulay and others celebrated as the ‘English
Revolution’.2 In Victorian England Macaulay’s progressive or ‘Whig’
interpretation of history found at least as many adherents as Carlyle’s
harking-back to an epic past, yet Macaulay found it curiously difficult to
shake off the memory of seventeenth-century Puritanism. His uncom-
pleted History of England (1848–61) begins with a lengthy discussion
of the ‘State of England in 1685’, and terminates less than twenty years
later with William III’s death in 1702. Looking for the beginnings of the
two-party system, Macaulay suggests that the division of English politics
between progressives and conservatives began with the meeting of the
Long Parliament in October 1641.3
Carlyle as a young man had planned to write an essay on the Civil War
and the Commonwealth as a reflection of ‘some features of the national
character’; what he eventually produced was his edition of The Letters
and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845), a work of biography rather than
history.4 The idea that history could be explained by ‘character’—whether
the character of individuals, a nation, or an age—was one of the great
commonplaces of nineteenth-century thought. It joins political history to
literary narrative, emphasizing history’s relationship to the novel rather
than to drama. Walter Bagehot, for example, found Macaulay’s History
of England too theatrical: brilliant in its portrayal of politics as spectacle,
it was deficient in character analysis. For Bagehot the ‘form and life’ of
the Civil War was that of the ‘two great characters—the Puritan and the
Puritan and Provincial Englands 259
(or dreams that he fights) with Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost at the window
pane. The novel’s final paragraph depicts the graves of Catherine,
Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton, with the narrator wondering how we could
ever have imagined ‘unquiet slumbers’ for those buried there (300). It is
his encounter with Catherine’s ghost that makes Lockwood curious to
hear her story from Brontë’s principal narrator Nelly Dean; once the story
is over, these tortured spirits can be laid to rest. The central figure of
Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff, a man who—like the hero of such a
Gothic novel as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk—has allegedly sold his soul
to the devil and become a fiend in human shape. But The Monk was set in
seventeenth-century Germany and Spain and its plot involved a corrupt
prioress, the tortures of the Inquisition, and the hero’s discovery in his last
agonies that he had raped his sister and murdered his mother. These
things were not likely to happen (or so Catherine Morland was assured in
Northanger Abbey) in the Midland counties of a respectable Protestant
England. But could ghosts and fiends be roaming the moors of wildest
Yorkshire?
The sensational Gothic material in Wuthering Heights is balanced by
its status as a tale of courtship and domestic passion. The striking two-
part structure, with bitter conflict in the first generation and gradual
reconciliation in the second, had been anticipated in at least one earlier
courtship novel, A Simple Story (1791) by Elizabeth Inchbald, the author
of the English version of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows which was performed
at Mansfield Park. A Simple Story is set among the Catholic aristocracy,
with a plot that moves between fashionable London, a large country
house, and a lonely retreat in Northumberland. In the first part, the
heroine falls in love with Dorriforth, a Catholic priest, and marries him
when he succeeds to a peerage; but the marriage breaks down irre-
trievably. In the second part, the couple’s daughter succeeds in gaining
recognition from her father, who has disowned her. Much of the novel’s
drama hinges upon Dorriforth’s Jesuitical self-righteousness and his
emotional dependence on his confessor. In Wuthering Heights, provincial
Puritanism to some extent takes the place of A Simple Story’s high-bred
Catholic spirituality.
‘Wuthering’, glossed as a ‘significant provincial adjective’ (2), is the first
of the numerous dialect words to be singled out by Brontë’s narrator.
Wuthering Heights is owned by gentleman farmers, as is shown by the
standard English spoken by Heathcliff, the master of the house; the name
Hareton Earnshaw and the date 1500 are carved over the front door. On
his first visit Lockwood speaks to Heathcliff and then to Joseph, the
Puritan and Provincial Englands 263
misanthropic old servant whose ‘pious ejaculation’ (2) introduces the role
he will play throughout the novel—that of a Puritan fundamentalist
voicing his grumbling disapproval of everything that takes place. In the
third chapter Joseph reappears as a lay preacher, caught in a pen-and-ink
cartoon in Catherine Earnshaw’s diary. The children have been forced to
listen for three hours to Joseph’s Sunday sermon.
On fine Sundays the family goes to Gimmerton chapel, where the
preacher is the Reverend Jabes Branderham; on wet days they must make
do with Joseph. Catherine’s diary is written in the margins of one of
Branderham’s published sermons. When Lockwood falls asleep over the
diary, he dreams that he is accompanying Joseph (who carries a pilgrim’s
staff) to hear Branderham preach. Seized by a ‘sudden inspiration’ in the
church, Lockwood denounces Branderham as the ‘sinner of the sin that no
Christian need pardon’ (19), while the minister responds by excommu-
nicating his attacker. The sermon ends in fighting and uproar, until
Lockwood is awoken by the rattling of a branch against his window, but
the branch, in his next dream, becomes Catherine’s ghost.
Joseph’s sermon and Jabes Branderham’s address to the chapel at
Gimmerton thus set a Puritanical devotional context for the love story of
Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s diary records how she and Heathcliff,
a castaway of Asian or American descent brought back from Liverpool
by the late Mr Earnshaw, decided to rebel against the tyranny of her
brother Hindley Earnshaw. Later, Catherine tells the housekeeper Nelly
Dean of her love for Heathcliff—though her declaration is shadowed by
her decision to abandon him for Edgar Linton:
‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well
aware, as winter changes the trees—my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am
Heathcliff—he ’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I
am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being—’ (73)
Heights and becomes a ‘cruel hard landlord’ (174). He is the sinner against
the Holy Ghost whom Joseph and Jabes Branderham wished to see
excommunicated. This means that the romantic passion of Catherine and
Heathcliff is not a bond between eternal soul-mates, as Catherine once
thought, but a union of opposites, a Puritan–Cavalier love tragedy in
which the vengeful Puritan outcast tries to drag his former lover down the
‘broad way to destruction’.
This opposition between Heathcliff and Catherine is to some extent
masked by the more obvious opposition between Wuthering Heights and
Thrushcross Grange, between the savage, brutal, Earnshaws (including
Heathcliff, who is an Earnshaw by adoption) and the polite, respectable,
namby-pamby Lintons. The more that Catherine seems to identify with
the family into which she has married, the more Heathcliff accepts his
demonic role of eternal excommunication. When Nelly piously tells
Heathcliff that it is for God to punish the wicked, he retorts that ‘ ‘‘God
won’t have the satisfaction that I shall’’ ’ (53). After Catherine’s death we
are told that he has become a kind of Satanist, shutting himself up and
‘praying like a methodist: only the deity he implore[s] is senseless dust and
ashes; and God, when addressed, [i]s curiously confounded with his own
black father!’ (153). Nelly and Joseph think that conscience has ‘turned
his heart to an earthly hell’ (289). He teaches Hindley’s son to call him
‘Devil daddy’, but is himself haunted by Catherine’s ghost.
But Heathcliff’s elaborate plan of revenge cannot prevent a growing
alliance between the Earnshaws, who are ‘remnants of the old yeoman
class of independent farmers’, and the Lintons, who are genteel land-
owners.13 The Lintons inhabit a house and park rather than a farm
kitchen, but Hindley Earnshaw’s banishment of his servants to the
‘back-kitchen’ has already started his family on the path of gentrification.
He is entirely in favour of his sister marrying Edgar Linton. Edgar seems
to live in genteel idleness and doubtless employs a farm manager; he is
delicate enough to catch pneumonia as a result of staying out late to see
the end of the harvest. The Earnshaws’ life is not wholly dissimilar, since
neither Hindley nor Heathcliff, when master of Wuthering Heights,
appears to engage in manual labour.
Heathcliff’s death sums up the novel’s themes of dynastic succession,
sin and punishment, excommunication, and devil-worship. He has made
arrangements for an un-Christian burial, with his body ‘carried to the
churchyard in the evening’ (297) and no minister present. Lockwood’s
elegiac visit to the graveyard to view the three headstones is preceded by
another, far more discordant oration spoken by Joseph over Heathcliff’s
Puritan and Provincial Englands 265
dead body. Joseph has invariably called on God to ‘spare the righteous,
though he smote the ungodly’ (75), and now he believes his prayers have
been answered. His words, in broad dialect, are reported by Nelly, the
peasant woman who has taught herself middle-class manners and speech:
‘Th ’ divil ’s harried off his soul,’ he cried, ‘and he muh hev his carcass intuh t ’
bargin, for owt Aw care! Ech! what a wicked un he looks girnning at death!’ and
the old sinner grinned in mockery.
I thought he intended to cut a caper round the bed; but suddenly composing
himself, he fell on his knees, and raised his hands, and returned thanks that the
lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights. (298)
Here Nelly effortlessly puts ‘the old sinner’ in his place, turning his moment
of triumph into a grotesquely blasphemous outburst. Whether or not he
really intended to ‘cut a caper’, the lay preacher and self-elected saint stands
as a blatant example of Puritan hypocrisy. Emily Brontë, as we have seen,
was an Anglican vicar’s daughter who would have had little sympathy with
Joseph’s Nonconformity; Lockwood is tellingly vague about whether
Joseph attends a Methodist or Baptist chapel at Gimmerton. Charlotte
Brontë’s warnings about the ‘unintelligibility’ and ‘repulsiveness’ of
Wuthering Heights may be taken to apply to Hindley’s brutality and
Heathcliff’s devilry, but they apply equally to the uncouth, curmudgeonly,
and perpetually dissenting Joseph. He represents the novel’s most extreme
example of Yorkshire provincialism and hell-fire Puritanism.
Like Wuthering Heights, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is
a tragic novel of overmastering passion set in a markedly provincial
landscape. While the moors in Wuthering Heights form a passive, if bleak
and forbidding, environment, the alluvial plain of the Floss finally takes
command at the end of the novel when there is a devastating flood.
St Ogg’s and the river mouth, however, are based not on Eliot’s native
landscape of Warwickshire (the Loamshire of Adam Bede, Felix Holt, and
Middlemarch) but on Gainsborough and the Humber estuary, with which
she was much less familiar. Critics have noted the unreality of the flood
episode.14 The provincial world of The Mill on the Floss is, ultimately, a
more artificial and less compelling literary creation than Emily Brontë’s
West Riding or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.
Eliot does not use a dramatized external narrator like Lockwood.
Instead, there is a pervasive contrast between the provincial insider’s
viewpoint, represented by the nervous sensitivity and rural isolation of
Maggie Tulliver’s childhood, and the broader, more judicious perspective
of the third-person narrative voice. The unsophisticated language and
266 Puritan and Provincial Englands
‘You could not live among such people’: after what has gone before, this
has a startling vehemence. It leads to the classification of the Dodsons
and Tullivers as ‘emmet-like’, a simile with scientific associations (since
antlike creatures can only be closely observed through a microscope or
magnifying-glass), but still strongly expressive of Eliot’s impatience with
provincial narrowness.
The author of this passage was an agnostic intellectual who (as she wrote
in a letter) sought to find the ‘lasting meaning that lies in all religious
doctrine’.15 Her characterization of the Dodsons and Tullivers contrasts
Christianity with paganism, and vigorous superstition with sluggish
inertness. (Somewhere behind it lurks the distinction between a ‘great river’
flowing with its customary tranquillity, and a river in flood.) What is odd
about this train of reflection is that, though it condemns the Tullivers for
having ‘no standard beyond hereditary custom’, it functions as a com-
mentary on one of the novel’s decisive acts, which does indeed seem to be
prompted by a ‘vigorous superstition’: Mr Tulliver’s curse on his rival John
Wakem, which he causes to be written down in the family Bible. The curse
marks an obsession with vengeance which, as in Wuthering Heights, works
itself out over two generations. Tom Tulliver’s emotional life is entirely
Puritan and Provincial Englands 267
consumed by his determination to get back Dorlcote Mill and avenge his
father, regardless of the suffering this brings to himself and his family.
In constructing her plot around a vendetta and a ‘family curse’, Eliot
underlines her belief that the fiction of provincial realism ought to echo
the great tragic themes of classical drama and myth—a belief shared by
Thomas Hardy, and later by Arnold Bennett. The ‘history of unfa-
shionable families’ possesses a tragic sublimity even if it is the ‘unwept,
hidden sort’ of tragedy (183). The novel’s tragic form also means that the
continuity of its provincial world will be shattered, and the narrowness of
the Dodsons and Tullivers changed beyond recognition. The first sign of
this lies in the individual spiritual development undergone by both
Maggie and Tom, for all their differences from one another.
Eliot has defined the Dodsons’ and Tullivers’ torpid religion as a
hitherto uncharted variety of Protestantism.16 Maggie’s intense spiri-
tuality is entirely self-taught, emerging from her reading of an illustrated
Bible in her infancy and, later, from her discovery of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ in a parcel of old books. Maggie dreams of a life of
abject renunciation, self-denial, and self-humiliation, an ideal all too
obviously reflecting her passionate attachment to her cruel and unfeeling
brother. But her openness to sexual passion leads to her involvements
with Philip Wakem, the son of the hated John Wakem, and with the
unscrupulous Stephen Guest. Fittingly, she admires the ‘dark unhappy’
heroines of Scott such as Rebecca and Flora MacIvor (312), and Philip
with some truth accuses her of self-torture and self-repression.
George Eliot, the daughter of an evangelical land agent, became a
rationalist and agnostic in adult life, but her sense of supernatural sanc-
tions never deserted her. Walking with the poet and critic F. W. H. Myers
in a Cambridge college garden, she is said to have spoken ‘with terrible
earnestness’ of the concepts of God, Immortality, and Duty—‘how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how
peremptory and absolute the third’.17 If the element of self-punishment
here suggests Maggie Tulliver, the need to cling to an idea of unques-
tioning rectitude suggests Tom. It is this that enables him to wipe out the
memory of his father’s bankruptcy and to return to Dorlcote Mill,
rejecting what might have been a far more prosperous career in his uncle’s
expanding business. At the same time, he becomes an unloved and
unlovable recluse who restores the family’s good name while cutting
himself off from the family itself. Maggie’s weakness is that in the very
moment of rebelling against Tom’s rigid morality she has an irresistible
need to humiliate herself before him, as if he were ‘a reflection of her own
268 Puritan and Provincial Englands
hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires
and their parks, the rectors and their churches.20
the next, recording their private gossip, and overhearing what they have
to say about one another. Individual moral development is measured on a
scale ranging from egoism to altruism, so that the moments of greatest
psychological drama in her novels are moments in which her characters’
sympathies are unexpectedly extended. Typically this happens through
silent communication, mediated by eye-contact between two individuals.28
These mutual gazes in her novels vary greatly in openness and intensity,
ranging from the shifty, furtive, and superficial to the profoundly emotional
and direct. At the higher end of the range is the exchange of looks between
a spiritual mentor and a character assuming the humble position of dis-
cipleship. Usually mentor and disciple are of opposite sexes, so that the
scene is a sublimation of fiction’s more conventional motifs of sexual
romance. What happens is a kind of seduction of the spirit.
The figure of the clergyman or religious mentor plays a major part in
Eliot’s fiction, although most of her clergy fall far short of her altruistic
ideal. Perhaps the earliest of her characters to possess the gift of commu-
nicating sympathy is the evangelical Mr Tryan in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, the
most substantial of the three tales that constitute Scenes of Clerical Life.
Tryan is regarded by Eliot’s provincial Anglican community as a zealot and
a prig, but he is able to help Janet Dempster to achieve a reconciliation with
her brutal, dying husband. The evangelical clergyman has made the tran-
sition from Puritanical preacher to mentor and healer, a man whose
sympathetic nature can inspire sympathies in others. His role is a mirror
image of the role that Eliot claims for the novelist. Tryan’s successors in her
fiction include Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher in Adam Bede; the
Independent minister Rufus Lyon and his radical protégé Felix Holt; and
Dorothea in Middlemarch, who is married to a clergyman of the most
unsympathetic sort.
The farmhouse, not the country house, is at the centre of Adam Bede,
Eliot’s first full-length novel, and this alone was a momentous departure
in English fiction. The Poysers are much lower on the social scale than the
Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights, and their farm kitchen brings together
Dinah Morris, a former mill-worker turned preacher, and the illiterate,
empty-headed Hetty Sorrel. The fact that Hetty has ‘never read a novel’
means that she cannot understand the real meaning of the attentions that
Arthur Donnithorne, a young army captain, is paying to her;29 moreover,
Eliot unsparingly describes her as a ‘little trivial soul’ who lacks the
maternal instinct and is indifferent to the ‘joys and sorrows of foregone
generations’ (340, 284). The Poysers of Hayslope are tenant-farmers who
regard their landlords, the Donnithornes, with a ‘whispering awe’ as they
Puritan and Provincial Englands 273
subtitle tells us, a ‘Study of Provincial Life’, but it portrays provincial life
at a higher social level, and in a vein that is closer to the novels of Trollope
than to Eliot’s earlier fiction. Both Hayslope and the Treby Magna
of Felix Holt are more topographically distinctive than the town of
Middlemarch and its surrounding countryside. Middlemarch centres on
the local gentry, the clergy, and the urban middle classes, with doctors, an
industrialist, a banker, and a land agent among its characters. Puritan
tenderness is represented by Dorothea Brooke, with her thwarted deter-
mination to make a success of her marriage to Casaubon, the unfeeling
clergyman and desiccated scholar; her second husband will be Will
Ladislaw, Casaubon’s scapegrace and somewhat Cavalier relative. The
banker Nicholas Bulstrode, by contrast, has followed what Eliot regarded
as the typical itinerary of the rising Nonconformist businessman. For-
merly a Dissenter and Calvinist, he cements his position in Middlemarch
by joining the Church of England and supporting its militantly evangelical
wing.32 In the novel we see him trying to stage-manage the appointment
of an evangelical candidate to the post of hospital chaplain, and ulti-
mately he is unmasked as a fraud and a hypocrite and forced to leave
Middlemarch. But, if provincial life no longer has a place for this pre-
tended embodiment of Puritan rectitude, the other remaining principal
characters—Lydgate the doctor, Dorothea, and Ladislaw—are like him in
seeking their fortunes elsewhere. Casaubon, Lydgate, and Ladislaw have
intellectual ambitions which, in any case, look beyond Loamshire, while
Fred Vincy, the manufacturer’s son who does fit easily into the provincial
horizon, is roundly condescended to by the narrator. As in The Mill on
the Floss, the ‘provincial life’ of Middlemarch never quite escapes the
stigma of provincial narrowness.
grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean’ are played out among them.34 But
they are also geographically isolated, with only the vaguest sense of what
lies beyond Wessex. While the realm of nature in Hardy transcends the
local and particular—it is ‘conterminous with the universe in space, and
with history in time’35—his more ambitious characters do not look to the
nation or the national metropolis as the arena in which their desires might
be satisfied. Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare accompany the milk churns
to their local railway station, since London is the market to which the
Vale of the Great Dairies sends its produce, but it never occurs to the
lovers themselves to go there. Jude Fawley is a ‘sort of Dick Whittington’,
but Christminster (or Oxford), not London, is his city of light. In The
Return of the Native (1878) the great city where Clym Yeobright has
lived, and where Eustacia Vye longs to go, is not London but Paris.
Nevertheless, Tess and Angel’s trip to the station and Eustacia’s
dreams of Paris indicate Hardy’s pervasive concern with the mobility and
rootlessness of modern life. His most widely read novels do not verge on
historical fiction, as George Eliot’s do. Tess has passed the sixth standard
in the National School (which should not be confused, however, with a
post-1870 Board School) and has thought of becoming a teacher; Jude
lives to see the birth of the university extension movement and the
beginnings of mass higher education. Even Hardy’s traditional rural
crafts are not always what they seem. Diggory Venn the reddleman is, we
are told, ‘one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling . . . the
place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of
animals’.36 But Venn is a prosperous farmer who takes up the reddle trade
for a time because he fancies a wandering life, not a traditional reddle-
man. He is a bit like the weekend hobbyists of the late twentieth century
who set out to reopen disused railway lines and to revive the age of steam.
If Venn is (once we penetrate his disguise) as modern as any of Hardy’s
characters, he is also presented as a countryman and, therefore, a natural
antiquarian. Modern Wessex deliberately and self-consciously lags behind
the modern city. This is why Clym Yeobright’s return from Paris to Egdon
creates such expectations—the local labourers talk about it ‘as if it were of
national importance’ (128)—and why his relapse into the traditional and
lowly occupation of furze-cutting is felt to be so disturbing. As Hardy says
of Clym, ‘Mentally he was in a provincial future, that is, he was in many
points abreast with the central town thinkers of his date’ (196), but until the
end of the novel he fails to act like someone influenced by town thought. As
for Hardy himself, he is manifestly not a metropolitan intellectual like
George Eliot, but nor is he as countrified as Clym. His novels record the
Puritan and Provincial Englands 279
As the name ‘Sir Pagan’ and the d’Urberville family history suggest,
there is a theme of rural paganism (much more heavily emphasized here
than in George Eliot) and also a contrast of Cavalier and Puritan types
running through Hardy’s novels. The Durbeyfields’ marauding Norman
ancestor may have been a pagan in the sense of following the unscrupu-
lous, lawless conduct of one living in a Hobbesian state of nature, and
there is a hint that the Victorian d’Urbervilles, who have bought the
family name, are similarly disposed. But ‘paganism’ in Hardy usually
means the pre-Christian superstitions of the Wessex countryside. His
characters are closer to the land than those of any earlier English novelist,
largely because they are shown working on the land. Tess, for example,
mixes up the scriptures she has learnt at school with the ‘[p]agan fantasy
of their remote forefathers’ which Hardy says is natural to field labourers
(124). Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders (1887) appears at harvest
time as an emanation of nature, a ‘fruit-god’ or ‘wood-god’ who ‘looked
and smelt like Autumn’s very brother’ (305, 235). Hardy sometimes refers
to pre-Christian religious practices and rites, as with the ‘Druidical mis-
tletoe’ which persists in the primeval forest of the Chase where Tess is
raped (47). On other occasions he portrays secular folk rituals such as the
skimmington ride in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).
The contrasted sets of Cavalier and Puritan male characters in Hardy
include Damon Wildeve and Clym in The Return of the Native, Henchard
and Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Fitzpiers and Winterbourne
in The Woodlanders, and Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare in Tess.
‘Puritan’ in this context does not necessarily mean a religious affiliation; in
Tess it is Alec, not Angel, who briefly becomes a Puritan preacher. Angel
Clare and Giles Winterbourne are identifiable as Puritans largely because of
their sexual fastidiousness, as when Giles, ill with fever, refuses to share a
cottage, let alone a bed, with his lover Grace Melbury when she flees to him
for shelter in the depths of winter. One of Hardy’s most distinctive char-
acter types, however, is the post-Puritan preacher in the style of Felix Holt.
Clym Yeobright is the grandson of a curate and the son of a narrowly
possessive, Puritanical mother; he comes back from Paris, fired with the
brotherhood of man, to the remote community of Egdon, a heathen
‘world’s end’ (417) where there is little or no churchgoing because the
church is too far away. Eventually Clym announces his intention to ‘keep a
night-school’ (413), and he becomes an ‘itinerant open-air preacher and
lecturer on morally unimpeachable subjects’ throughout Wessex: ‘He left
alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than
enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all
Puritan and Provincial Englands 281
good men’ (423). Hardy has, perhaps, a Socratic ideal in mind, but Clym’s
avoidance of religious or political controversy suggests that the action of
preaching is more important to him than any message he might have for
his hearers.
Clym’s successor as a secular preacher and lecturer is Jude Fawley; and
one thing that both men have in common is their inability to dispense with
religious language and, above all, the language of the Book of Job. They
see themselves as reliving the story of Job.39 Clym quotes the Book of Job
at least once—‘ ‘‘I have made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should
I think upon a maid?’’ ’ (412)—and Jude does so repeatedly. Clym’s life
and preaching might suggest the possibility of a direct progression from
the paganism of Egdon Heath to a provincial future of rational agnosti-
cism, as if doctrinal Christianity had been superseded or sidelined. But
Jude the Obscure (1896) permits no such conclusion.
Biblical texts play a crucial role in both Tess and Jude, most notably in
the Pauline epigraph to Jude, ‘The letter killeth’, and in the work of the
sign-painter in Tess, who puts the words ‘THY, DAMNATION,
SLUMBERETH, NOT’ on a stile (97). When he turns to a nearby wall, he
begins to write out the seventh commandment but hesitates over the word
‘adultery’. Hardy’s defence of Tess’s moral innocence is evident from the
novel’s subtitle—‘A Pure Woman’—although the concept of purity is
naturally ambiguous. A ‘pure woman’ means, in one of its senses,
the quintessence of womanhood, but the supposed purity of Nature is
frequently called into question. Very early in Tess we encounter the name
of one of the two public houses of Marlott, the Pure Drop, suggesting
both the natural purity of water and the artificial purity of fermented and
distilled liquors, but in any case carrying a warning against adulteration.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles a standard of rigid Puritanism is repres-
ented by Angel Clare’s father, the Reverend Mr Clare of Emminster,
whose name we first hear from the sign-painter. He is an ‘uncompro-
mising Evangelical’ and a strict Calvinist, a ‘man of fixed ideas’ (137),
who punishes Angel for his loss of faith by refusing to allow him to follow
his brothers to university. Alec d’Urberville, like the sign-painter, comes
under his spell and becomes an unlicensed preacher. Hardy tells us that in
Alec’s conversion ‘animalism had become fanaticism’, and ‘Paganism
Paulinism’, but it is all ‘the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new
sensation’ (344, 364). Mr Clare, unlike his priggish elder sons and their
friend Mercy Chant, is shown as being capable of human sympathy. It is
unlikely, however, that—like the Broad Church vicar of Marlott—he
would have accepted Tess’s christening of her ailing infant Sorrow as
282 Puritan and Provincial Englands
in the direction of you, and had all at once gushed through. The religious channel
is left dry forthwith; and it is you who have done it!’ (369–70)
Alec’s hypocrisy has at least this element of truth, that in Tess of the
d’Urbervilles Christianity is tried and found wanting. It is for this reason
that Tess and Angel finally fetch up at Stonehenge, the legendary altar of
pagan sacrifice, and that when his heroine is executed for murder Hardy
concludes that ‘ ‘‘Justice’’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in
Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess’ (446). If Tess caused
some disquiet among its early readers, it was because Hardy was so
clearly saying that there was no just God.
Although Jude the Obscure provoked a still more savage outcry, it is
ostensibly neo-paganism, or the attempt to go beyond Christianity, that is
put on trial in Hardy’s last novel. The representative of neo-paganism is
Sue Bridehead, the intellectual who persuades Jude to drop his deep-rooted
Christian piety and to give up his intention of training for the ministry.
An older, more instinctive rural paganism is personified by Jude’s wife
Arabella, who cheerfully commits bigamy but then, after her second hus-
band’s death, becomes for a time a devout evangelical. Arabella, who
originally seduced Jude and later reseduces him, is like a comic version of
Alec d’Urberville. No sooner has she seen Jude again than she abandons
her devout widowhood, announcing her apostasy by throwing her bundle
of religious tracts into a hedge. In a novel even more full of spiritual
vacillations than Tess of the d’Urbervilles, her apostasy is the cue for Sue
Bridehead to return to a hysterical, self-denying form of religious faith.
It is, however, Jude who (as Sue remarks) knows his Bible intimately
and is always quoting it. In his youth, Jude’s capacity for religious
devotion is manifested through his adulation of Christminster, which he
sees as the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’.40 But there are two sides to Christmin-
ster, the Christian and the pagan, since it is at once an ‘ecclesiastical
romance in stone’ and a centre for the study of pagan literature (43).
Hence the ghosts that Jude summons up on his first arrival in the city
include not only the great divines but the mockers of Christianity such as
the historian Edward Gibbon. Christminster is the source of Sue’s pagan
statues of Greek gods and of the Voltairean rationalism that she has
picked up during her relationship with a former undergraduate. When
Jude arranges to meet her for the first time, their rendezvous is at the
Martyrs’ Cross, but Sue insists on moving further down the street; later,
when Jude invites her to go and sit in Melchester cathedral, she prefers the
railway station since the cathedral has ‘had its day’ (154). She thinks of
284 Puritan and Provincial Englands
Jude as ‘a man puzzling his way along a labyrinth from which one had
one’s self escaped’ (157). But neither of them has in fact escaped. As Jude
later laments, ‘ ‘‘Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such
experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!’’ ’
(372). As so often in Hardy, the failure of Sue’s and Jude’s neo-pagan
experiment in free love is partly put down to their ill-omened family
heredity. It is also due to the ‘labyrinth’ of Christminster, which they are
unable to forget as they move disconsolately from one Wessex town to
another in search of employment. When the couple try to make some
money at Kennetbridge fair, they do it by selling ‘Christminster cakes’.
The colleges offer Jude his most skilled work as a stonemason even
though they will not admit him as a student. His self-identification with
the biblical Job is graphically announced when, having been summarily
rejected by the Master of Biblioll College, he responds by chalking the
following text on the college wall: ‘ ‘‘I have understanding as well as you; I
am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?’’—
Job, xii 3’ (138). The moment of his arrival back in the city, on the day of
the academic procession, is that in which he discovers his vocation as a
public speaker on behalf of the working classes, like Felix Holt and Clym.
Previously he was known as the ‘Tutor of St Slums’ (344); now Tinker
Taylor, one of his old drinking companions, responds to his confession of
spiritual despair with the words ‘ ‘‘Well preached!’’ ’ (346). Finally Jude
dies repeating a text from Job that has appeared once before in the novel:
‘ ‘‘Let the day perish wherein I was born . . . Wherefore is light given to
him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?’’ ’ (423–4). These last
words are not the sign of a return to the faith, but rather, as one critic has
remarked, a ‘blasphemous parody of Job’s legend’.41 Neither Puritanism
nor paganism can comfort the modern Job, who dies without any hope of
a redeemer.
Although Hardy’s renunciation of prose fiction after Jude has been
taken as a retreat in the face of the storm of protest that the novel aroused,
it is hard to see how he could have continued with the plan of the Wessex
novels. In Jude, provincialism like Puritanism had become an empty shell.
The hero’s ambitions, like Whittington’s, were focused on a city, and at
one point Hardy thought of naming him ‘Jack England’. The characters
no longer speak a pure Wessex dialect, like the Dorsetshire of Tess,42 and
their increased mobility is emphasized by their endless railway journeys.
Their confinement to the region of Wessex is increasingly artificial, and
Hardy has some difficulty in preventing Jude and Sue from going to seek
anonymity in London. Of Jude as a boy we were told that ‘his dreams
Puritan and Provincial Englands 285
were once as gigantic as his surroundings were small’ (41). Logically such
a protagonist ought to leave his province behind even if he was destined
eventually to return to it.
Puritanism as an Anachronism
Puritanism in Thomas Hardy is represented by itinerant preachers and by
Anglican evangelicals such as Mr Clare, but not by the Dissenting chur-
ches. The latter became a substantial political force in the late nineteenth
century owing to the extension of the franchise. They were a mainstay of
Gladstonian Liberalism and, later, of the Labour movement, and their
influence remained strong in English provincial fiction down to Winifred
Holtby’s South Riding (1936), where one of the main characters is a local
councillor and Methodist lay preacher. Yet the Puritan faith was held to
be increasingly anachronistic. Its internal decay is memorably registered
in the novels and autobiographical writings of William Hale White, the
Bedford shopkeeper’s son who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Mark
Rutherford’. As a young man White was expelled from theological college
for questioning the authority of the scriptures, and in The Autobiography
of Mark Rutherford (1881) he wrote that it took Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads to show him what true religion might mean: ‘Wordsworth
unconsciously did for me what every religious reformer has done,—he
re-created my Supreme Divinity; substituting a new and living spirit for
the old deity, once alive, but gradually hardened into an idol.’43 Mark
Rutherford’s novels include The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (1887),
which begins in 1814 and has a second part set in the early 1840s, and
Clara Hopgood (1896), also set in the 1840s. Zachariah Coleman, the
protagonist of the earlier part of The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, is a
descendant of the seventeenth-century Puritans who becomes involved in
radical politics and eventually suffers imprisonment. His political beliefs
grow naturally out of his membership of an Independent chapel, since the
Independents were by tradition Cromwellian republicans. His minister,
the Reverend Thomas Bradshaw, is related to Bradshaw the regicide.
Zachariah is a democrat because he believes in the spirit of the people, not
in deferring to the will of the majority; as Rutherford comments, ‘He
believed in the people, it is true, but it was a people of Cromwellian
independents.’44 The second part of the novel portrays the disillusionment
of the next generation, when parliamentary reform has been achieved and
a new kind of Dissenting minister begins to meddle in electoral politics.
286 Puritan and Provincial Englands
Here the setting is the provincial town of Cowfold, where the Independent
congregation of Tanner’s Lane is headed by the Reverend Thomas Broad,
whose name is clearly a satire on the Anglican ‘Broad Church’. Broad
doubts the wisdom of ‘sermons against covetousness, or worldliness, or
hypocrisy’ (284), since they might upset the businessmen whose pew rents
pay his salary. He refuses to support the radical candidate in a bitterly
fought local election, leading to a riot in which (in an echo of Felix Holt)
Rutherford’s new protagonist, George Allen, becomes unwillingly caught
up. George rejects the ‘gospel according to Tanner’s Lane’ (296) and finally
emigrates to America, while the protagonist of Clara Hopgood also leaves
England to give her life in the struggle for Italian independence.
For most of the nineteenth century, the moral values affirmed by
English novelists were largely synonymous with Christian values, how-
ever broadly interpreted. But authors born after 1850 brought a distinct
air of secularism into their fiction. George Gissing, according to his friend
Morley Roberts, ‘had no religion’, and regarded religious faith as ‘a
curious form of delusion almost ineradicable from the human mind’.45 In
Gissing’s The Unclassed (1884) the protagonist, Osmond Waymark, is ‘a
student of ancient and modern literature, a free-thinker in religion, a lover
of art in all its forms, a hater of conventionalism’.46 Waymark’s scepti-
cism also extends to politics, since he is a disillusioned ex-socialist.
Aestheticism is his new creed, so he writes a novel about the London poor
which is intended to tell the ‘absolute truth’ no matter how hideous and
repellent it may be (201). Unsurprisingly, it falls dead from the press, but,
like the secular homilies of a Felix Holt or a Clym Yeobright, its most
striking resemblance is to a Puritan sermon. One of Waymark’s friends
tells him that ‘ ‘‘It was horrible in many parts, but I was the better for
reading it’’ ’ (282), while another predicts that ‘ ‘‘Such a book will do more
good than half a dozen religious societies’’ ’ (201). Waymark has an
unhappy relationship with the devout Maud Enderby, whose ‘over-
powering consciousness of sin’ he regards as ‘an anachronism in our time’
(213); eventually he marries the reformed prostitute Ida Starr. Never-
theless, his own urge to bear witness to the full degradation of the
working classes seems to reflect a transferred religious impulse.
Gissing’s most influential exploration of the fate and function of the
contemporary novel came in New Grub Street (1891). His major novel on
religious themes, however, is Born in Exile (1892), where Godwin Peak, a
declared secularist and freethinker, poses as a Christian apologist and
prepares to train for the ministry as a result of his infatuation with Sidwell
Warricombe, a provincial middle-class Anglican girl. Peak first sets eyes
Puritan and Provincial Englands 287
for one who has ‘fraternized with sinners, like Christ’ (199). Their religion
is idolatry.
D. H. Lawrence’s provincial background was very similar to Bennett’s,
as he acknowledged in 1912 when he read Anna of the Five Towns during
the first of his numerous periods of residence outside England. Bennett’s
attack on the Nonconformist tradition did not go far enough, according
to Lawrence in one of his letters:
I am so used to the people going by outside, talking or singing some foreign
language, always Italian now: but to-day, to be in Hanley, and to read almost my
own dialect, makes me feel quite ill. I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate
Bennett ’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery. But Anna
of the Five Towns seems like an acceptance—so does all the modern stuff since
Flaubert. I hate it. I want to wash again quickly, wash off England, the oldness
and grubbiness and despair.50
spends all day at the fair serving at the bar to add to his wages, while
Gertrude is reluctantly dragged there late in the afternoon by her children.
The next day Walter goes off on a jaunt to Nottingham with a crony,
comes back heavily drunk, and locks his pregnant wife out in the
moonlight:
The moon was high and magnificent in the August night. Mrs Morel, seared with
passion, shivered to find herself out there in a great white light, that fell cold on
her, and gave a shock to her inflamed soul. . . . She became aware of something
about her. With an effort she roused herself to see what it was that penetrated her
consciousness. The tall white lilies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was
charged with their perfume, as with a presence. Mrs Morel gasped slightly in fear.
She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. . . . Except for a
slight feeling of sickness, and her consciousness in the child, herself melted out
like scent into the shiny, pale air. After a time the child, too, melted with her in
the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses,
all swum together in a kind of swoon. (34–5)
A
t the end of the nineteenth century, Krishan Kumar has claimed,
‘English intellectuals and artists—historians, political theorists,
literary and cultural critics, composers, poets and novelists—for
the first time began an inquiry into the character of the English people as
a nation—as a collectivity, that is, with a distinct sense of its history, its
traditions and its destiny’.1 Such an inquiry was hardly unprecedented, as
this book has shown. In early twentieth-century fiction it was pursued
with greater self-consciousness than ever before, but also in an increas-
ingly sceptical and critical spirit. If any novelist of the time was dedicated
to investigating the English character it was E. M. Forster, but Forster
wrote in ‘What I Believe’ (1939) that ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had
to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope
I should have the guts to betray my country’.2
Early in Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907) the protagonist, Rickie
Elliot, is being shown around Sawston School, a Jacobean foundation
that is now a boarding school for the upper-middle classes. Rickie, who
will become a teacher at Sawston, is deeply ambivalent about the public-
school ethos. But as he looks reverentially at a fragment of Jacobean
brickwork he and his guide, the schoolmaster Herbert Pembroke, are
joined in a moment of sympathy:
The two men, who had so little in common, were thrilled with patriotism. They
rejoiced that their country was great, noble, and old.
‘Thank God I ’m English,’ said Rickie suddenly.
‘Thank Him indeed,’ said Mr Pembroke, laying a hand on his back.
‘We ’ve been nearly as great as the Greeks, I do believe. Greater, I ’m sure, than
the Italians, though they did get closer to beauty. Greater than the French, though
we do take all their ideas. I can ’t help thinking that England is immense. English
literature certainly.’3
rhapsodies. They might, like Lucy Snowe, defend their country in the heat
of a passionate argument with foreigners, but they do not appraise and
describe their Englishness as Rickie does. Herbert Pembroke, who is a
conventional Victorian, quickly removes his hand from Rickie’s back,
since he ‘found such a patriotism somewhat craven’. ‘Genuine patriotism’,
he reflects, ‘comes only from the heart’ (51). What offends Herbert is
Rickie’s air of judicious, comparative judgement, as if the English were no
more than temporary victors in a kind of European champions’ league. The
shadow of liberal internationalism lurks behind Rickie’s words. In the very
moment of affirming his national identity he is implicitly setting himself
above the provinciality of petty nationalism.
It is true that Rickie’s outburst of patriotism originates in a sponta-
neous, almost visceral feeling and that Herbert initially shares it. Herbert
seems to view patriotism as being like religious faith in coming from the
heart, while Rickie is experimenting with patriotism as a substitute for
religion. He is an orthodox, undemonstrative Anglican who regards his
faith as ‘personal, and the secret of it useless to others’ (51–2). His
patriotism, on the other hand, is something he feels an urge to confess.
Unlike the Puritan heroes and heroines of earlier novels, an early twentieth-
century protagonist like Rickie feels driven to explore his patriotism rather
than his religious beliefs.
In England before the First World War the power and wealth of the
Empire were at their height, yet there was a new awareness of competition
between the European powers. There was red all over the globe, but the
German domination of Central Europe led the British government, for
the first time, to enter into defensive alliances with France and Russia.
What we find in the Edwardian novelists’ view of England is often a sense
of shrinkage. It is not just that (Kipling apart) they tend to be exclusively
concerned with the national homeland, feeling little interest in or loyalty
towards the outer reaches of empire. The homeland too seems small and
fragile, something that can be protectively encircled by the imagination.
The threat to England comes, in part, from cosmopolitanism and
globalization, as George Eliot had foreseen; but it also comes from the
emergence of rival great powers with its message of England’s impending
relative decline. Rickie, for example, is shown contemplating England’s
‘immensity’, but all he feels certain about is the canon of English litera-
ture. The love of England that openly speaks its name in this manner is an
anxious, protective love.
The fiction of the last decades of the nineteenth century includes a
remarkable series of apocalyptic fantasies portraying England’s future
The Novel of England’s Destiny 293
at the narrowest point of the English Channel, they were ‘the door
through which the course of empire had fared westward’; England itself
was ‘perhaps, but the door for a larger movement’.20 In The Spirit of the
People he describes the English as ‘a people descended from Romans,
from Britons, from Anglo-Saxons, from Danes, from Normans, from
Poitevins, from Scotch, from Huguenots, from Irish, from Gaels, from
modern Germans, and from Jews’ (44), indicating that significant immi-
gration had continued up to the time when he was writing. But his vision
is of peoples finding in England ‘no home, but a hotel’ (54)—of a
movement of continuous passage whose ultimate destination is appar-
ently North America and the other lands open to white settlers. England is
an island upon which ‘the hordes of European mankind have rested
during their secular flights westward in search of the Islands of the Blest’
(46). The immigrants who have come to England are precisely the restless
and adventurous types whose descendants are most likely to move on
further. Ford’s history is at once poetic and imperialist—he describes
the Englishman as the ‘eternal frontiersman of the world’ (51)—but he
celebrates England for the role it has played in the broad process of
European expansion rather than for its peculiar national destiny.
If ‘whig history’ was inherently the history of a settled, largely Anglo-
Saxon, people, it was also inherently Protestant. The Whigs owed their
power to the constitutional monarchy established after 1688, while the
Tories remained compromised by associations with Jacobitism and with
the Stuart kings, the last of whom, James II, was a practising Catholic. In
his trilogy of historical novels The Fifth Queen (1906–8), Ford became the
first twentieth-century novelist to look at English history from an imagined
Catholic perspective. The novels are set not in the time of the Stuarts
but a century earlier, when the first of many failed attempts to reverse
the English Reformation was supposedly inspired by Henry VIII’s fifth
wife Katharine Howard. Ford regarded Henry’s chief minister Thomas
Cromwell, rather than his descendant Oliver Cromwell, as England’s
greatest Protestant nation-builder. Katharine’s antagonist, therefore, was
the ‘great man . . . who welded England into one formidable whole’.21
Unlike his later masterpieces The Good Soldier (1915) and Parade’s End
(1924–8), Ford’s attempt to dramatize sixteenth-century power politics is,
at best, of minor interest. Nevertheless, there is a memorable moment in
The Fifth Queen when Katharine and Henry VIII share a vision of the
‘blessed Utopia of the lost islands’, a world that is not only lost to the papal
realm but to the English people as well. The idea of a Utopia alludes to
Henry’s former chancellor Sir Thomas More, but this Utopia, Katharine
298 The Novel of England’s Destiny
tells the King, is not to be found in a distant ocean but ‘hidden in this realm
of England’.22 Ford’s image of the Fortunate Isles or ‘Islands of the Blest’ is,
therefore, a symbol of what England has lost in its triumphant assertion of
Protestantism and progress. It is, like Forster’s Howards End, a glimpse of
a true England constructed in opposition to the real England.
century, his thoughts and passions would triumph in England. The dead who had
evoked him, the unborn whom he would evoke—he governed the paths between
them. By whose authority? (288)
nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once,
lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world ’s
fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (165)
enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former ones have grown
bright and strong, so that the new England of our children ’s children is still a
riddle to me. . . . In the meantime the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly
changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants. (15–16)
Wells’s choice of the ‘Bladesover system’, the land tenure of the ruling
classes (and specifically of the Whig aristocracy) as the foundation for this
social model suggests that he views the commercial development and
financial corruption of modern England in a similar way to Trollope in
The Way We Live Now. George Ponderevo, however, lacks the basic
soundness of Trollope’s erring Paul Montague, let alone his straitlaced
Roger Carbury. George’s narrative begins with his offhand confession
that, in the course of an illegal prospecting mission, he once murdered an
African native. Later in a moment of introspection he comments that ‘It
may be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay’ (382). As
one critic has observed, ‘it is difficult to guess where Wells’s ostensible
purpose in writing the book—exposure of the condition of England—
leaves off, and a more uncanny, undiluted fascination with evil takes
over’.34 George is at once a Fellow of the Royal Society and a desperate
adventurer, a devotee of impersonal scientific truth and a designer of
warships. Both his marriage and his love affair with the aristocratic
Beatrice Normandy are childless and sterile. He has little, if any, personal
stake in the ‘new England of our children’s children’ about which he
speculates so freely.
The source of the Ponderevos’ intoxicating rise to power and wealth is
not a constructive scientific invention but a trashy patent medicine. The
novel portrays a spectacle of unbridled capitalism which is, apparently,
leading the nation to ruin. The name Bladesover suggests ‘the poised
sickle of Father Time’, as one critic remarks, and also the flaming sword
guarding a paradise to which modern humanity can never return.35 The
title of the penultimate chapter is ‘Love among the Wreckage’, and this is
succeeded by the voyage of the destroyer down the Thames, a voyage
which seems to George ‘to be passing all England in review. . . . To run
down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of
England from end to end’ (382–4). England here has become a history
book or a museum, while the panorama seen from the river is a ‘London
symphony’ (a phrase that inspired the London Symphony of the composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams). The first movement of Wells’s ‘symphony’
invokes the royal and religious associations of Kew and Hampton Court,
while the second movement includes Parliament, New Scotland Yard, the
Inns of Court, and the City. But the third part ‘is beyond all law, order
The Novel of England’s Destiny 305
and precedence, it is the seaport and the sea’; it is the chaotic hub of
modern global capitalism, and, beyond it, ‘windy freedom and trackless
ways’ (386–7). So Tono-Bungay with its ‘Dissolving Views’ ends with an
allegory suggesting England’s dissolution.
D. H. Lawrence knew the novels of Forster and Wells, and his work
alternates between Forsterian optimism and the pessimism of Tono-
Bungay. The central symbol of The Rainbow (1915) consciously or
unconsciously alludes to Forster’s image in Howards End of the ‘rainbow
bridge’ which connects the ‘prose in us with the passion’: ‘Without it we
are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches
that have never been joined into a man’ (174). Lawrence uses the rainbow
symbol primarily to signify the achievement of sexual connection between
man and woman, but it also stands for the succession of generations and
for an apocalyptic reconstruction of English society. So, at the novel’s
conclusion, his heroine Ursula Brangwen sees ‘in the rainbow the earth’s
new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories
swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the
over-arching heaven’.36 Lawrence embraces transcendental religion where
Wells embraces social science, but both are prophetic novelists, as this
passage suggests.
Lawrence wrote in an autobiographical essay that the countryside
surrounding the Nottinghamshire mining district where he grew up was
‘still the old England of the forest and agricultural past’. It was ‘the old
agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George
Eliot’.37 But in The Rainbow the immemorial rural past has been brought
to an end by the building of a canal around 1840, to carry barges to and
from the rapidly expanding collieries. In the next generation, Tom
Brangwen of the Marsh Farm marries a Polish immigrant. Tom’s marital
happiness is largely inarticulate and instinctive, but in each succeeding
generation there are greater obstacles to sexual and emotional fulfilment.
Thus Will Brangwen is ‘aware of some limit of himself, of something
unformed in his very being, of some buds which were not ripe in him,
some folded centres of darkness which would never develop and unfold
whilst he was alive in the body’ (210). When Will’s daughter Ursula, at the
age of 15, first meets the Anglo-Polish Anton Skrebensky, she feels that he
is one of the ‘Sons of God’ (292), but they soon prove to be sexually,
intellectually, and emotionally incompatible. Ursula is moved by her
generation’s feminism and by her experiences outside the home as a
teacher and a university student; Anton, an orphan, becomes an army
officer and transfers his affections from his family to his regiment. Ursula
306 The Novel of England’s Destiny
Ursula rejects Anton just as Jane Eyre rejects the missionary St John
Rivers, and her final vision of the rainbow confirms that she has been
right to do so. In Lawrence’s sequel Women in Love (1920), Ursula finds
personal fulfilment with Rupert Birkin, but the couple (a schoolteacher
and a school inspector) give up their jobs, leave the country, and resign
any responsibility for England’s future. They ‘want to be disinherited’,
Birkin says.38
Anton Skrebensky’s spiritual successor in Women in Love is Gerald
Crich, the ex-army officer who takes over his father’s business and
ruthlessly stamps his will and authority on the coal mines. Faced by a
‘world of creeping democracy’, he imposes a ruthlessly efficient, auto-
cratic regime:
There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its
very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful
machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. . . . Otherwise
Gerald could never have done what he did. (244, 260)
It has been objected that this passage bears no relation to actual social
history, since there was intense industrial militancy among the mine-
workers in the early twentieth century.39 But Lawrence was writing
during the First World War, so that this aspect of the novel may be read as
a displaced response to the mass self-sacrifice entailed in trench warfare.
Gerald is a military officer transferring the lessons of military discipline to
the coalfields (where they probably would not have worked), but the
destructive social machinery that he creates has numerous twentieth-
century parallels. And Gerald himself is a symbol of death, failing as a
lover and eventually committing suicide.
The First World War kept Lawrence in England like a prisoner, and
after 1918 his spiritual odyssey took him to Italy, Australia, and the
United States. The Lost Girl (1920) and some of his stories depict English
heroines who, like Forster’s Lilia Herriton, take a one-way trip to Italy.
The Novel of England’s Destiny 307
Woolf shared her predecessors’ explicit concern with ‘the way we live
now’, but believed that only new and experimental fictional structures
could render it adequately. Nevertheless, her early novels The Voyage
Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) are manifestly continuous with
Edwardian fiction. Throughout her career she remained a literary intel-
lectual appealing to Meredith’s ‘conscience residing in thoughtfulness’,
and she was as deeply concerned with national history and destiny as any
of her contemporaries.
This concern, it is true, is one that both she and her characters some-
times seem inclined to repudiate. In her political essay Three Guineas
(1938) Woolf affirmed that ‘as a woman, I have no country. . . . As a
woman my country is the whole world’.44 English history and the English
literary canon, she argued, were oppressively dominated by men. This
may be why her characters find so little inspiration in the compulsory
study of history. Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out is unenthusiastic
about Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, while in Night and Day (1919) a
reluctant Cassandra Otway is told to read Macaulay’s History of Eng-
land. Miss Kilman is employed to teach history to Clarissa Dalloway’s
daughter in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Kitty Malone in The Years (1937) has a
tutor whose Constitutional History of England is prescribed reading.
Woolf evidently sympathizes with these bored and put-upon young
minds. At Cambridge the protagonist of Jacob’s Room (1922) is set an
essay on whether history is the same thing as the biographies of great men,
a question that doubtless meant more to him than to Woolf’s young
ladies. Woolf herself sometimes mocked the conventions of male bio-
graphy, of which her father, Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Dictionary of
National Biography, was an acknowledged master. And yet she makes her
peace with historical writing in her last novel, Between the Acts (1941),
where Lucy Swithin is an ardent student of history, and the plot is based
on the performance of a pageant representing English history from its
earliest times. Moreover, this pageant has a female author.
The Voyage Out satirizes conventional English patriotism in the person
of Richard Dalloway, a Tory politician later to reappear in Mrs Dalloway.
The Dalloways, shipboard companions of Rachel and her father,
fondly contemplate ‘the line of conservative policy, which went steadily
[backwards] from Lord Salisbury to [King] Alfred’.45 Richard is an ardent
imperialist who can conceive ‘no more exalted aim’ than to be a citizen of
the Empire. But his female listeners are unimpressed and, for his part, he
complains that ‘ ‘‘I have never met a woman who even saw what is meant
by statesmanship’’ ’ (69). Richard and his ideology then smartly leave the
310 The Novel of England’s Destiny
Three weeks later, when Coventry Cathedral had just been destroyed by
German bombers and she was about to finish a draft of Between the Acts,
she wrote more appreciatively of the History of England: ‘And pin my
faith still to Trevy’s history. And now return to that’ (339). Trevelyan, she
thought, occupied a ‘low rung’ on the ladder of art, but nevertheless she
copied passages from his history into her notebooks.
Woolf’s comparison of the ‘Insider’ to a Roman road reminds us of the
Roman road which is the site for the cesspool in Between the Acts. Woolf
associates Roman roads with conventional male history and biography,
as when Bernard in her novel The Waves (1931) speaks of the ‘biographic
style . . . laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives’.54 Roman
312 The Novel of England’s Destiny
roads were laid across the primeval forest, or what Trevelyan calls the
‘virgin woodland wilderness of all England’,55 which appeals to Lucy
Swithin as she reads her ‘Outline of History’: ‘ ‘‘England,’’ she was
reading, ‘‘was then a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. On top of
their matted branches birds sang . . . ’’ ’ (196). The pageant in Between the
Acts is held on an open-air terrace framed with trees, and it begins with
an empty stage and the producer, Miss La Trobe, hiding behind a tree.
A small girl representing England emerges from behind the bushes. In
Between the Acts the primordial essence of England is represented as a
feminized virgin forest.
Village pageants had earlier appeared in John Cowper Powys’s novel
A Glastonbury Romance (1932) and Anthony Powell’s From a View to
a Death (1933), and, as we have seen, E. M. Forster had written two
historical pageants. One of Woolf’s working titles was simply ‘The
Pageant’. Her innovation was to imagine a pageant with a female author,
Miss La Trobe, who presents a highly ambitious and implicitly feminist
version of English history. Its principal episodes parody upper-class
fiction and drama from the periods of the three great female reigns, those
of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Anne, and Queen Victoria. The pageant’s
most dramatic and experimental moment comes at the end, with the scene
described in the programme as ‘Present time. Ourselves’ (158). Some of
the audience want a grand ensemble with the Union Jack and the army
and navy, as in the popular Empire Day celebrations of the period.56 But
Miss La Trobe offers nothing of the kind. At first the stage is empty and
the audience are left to their own devices, but then the actors suddenly
reappear, holding up mirrors which are pointed at the audience. These
offer a splintered, discordant, almost Cubist version of social reality, a
vision of modern people as ‘orts, scraps and fragments’ (169). There
follows a well-meaning speech by the local vicar, rudely interrupted by a
flight of warplanes roaring overheard. We are back amid the ominous
uncertainties of June 1939.
Woolf’s eventual title for her novel refers to the deceptive interlude
between two world wars, as well as to what seems a brief intermission in
the marital conflict of the young couple at Pointz Hall, Isa and Giles
Oliver. The novel mirrors the play—the actors holding up mirrors to the
audience suggest the troubled mutual gaze between the writer and her
readers—while Miss La Trobe, the play’s author and producer who is last
seen beginning to devise her next drama, is also an important fictional
character and symbol. Her name suggests a troubador or wandering
minstrel, but like Lucy Swithin she retains a female connection to the
The Novel of England’s Destiny 313
between the male brutality of impending war (including the report of the
gang-rape of a girl in a London barracks and news of Nazi atrocities) and
the primordial brutality of nature. The artificially prolonged serenity of
the country-house weekend will soon be shattered. Meanwhile Miss La
Trobe is planning her next play—not a historical pageant this time, but
an elemental drama set in prehistoric times in a ‘land merely, no land in
particular’ (189). Between the Acts thus ends by suggesting that the
pageant of national history as seen by an ‘Insider’ such as Trevelyan is
now effectively over. The nation has a future, but Woolf (who committed
suicide immediately after finishing the novel) implies that the future will
be nasty, brutish, and very likely short.
policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes
fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.62
Searchlight Books, the series for which Orwell wrote his essay on the
English character, was devised in response to the Battle of Britain, but
316 The Novel of England’s Destiny
earlier in 1940 he had used the same title, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ for a
very different project. It is hard to read his picturesque account of the
national family without recalling his unfulfilled plan, announced in letters
to his friends in 1939 and 1940, to write a huge novel which he called a
‘family saga’.66
Orwell scholars have been quite dismissive about this unwritten work,
for which only a few notes survive. His biographer Bernard Crick calls it a
‘socialist Forsyte Saga’, while the editor of his Complete Works speculates
that he must have planned it ‘when time lay heavy on his hands’ at
Wallington, the remote Hertfordshire village where he lived in 1939–40.67
Orwell’s notes for the long novel that he abandoned describe a stuffy,
shabby-genteel family in which his unnamed hero (referred to as ‘H’) is
brought up by his elderly, conservative aunts. The stifling atmosphere of
his childhood was to have been conveyed through a series of catchphrases,
proverbs, and commonplaces, which Orwell carefully jotted down. The
notes deal with H’s sexual frustration and confinement within the family,
but they also show him as being destined, like Orwell himself, to become a
volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. There is a scene at Charing Cross
Station in 1918 where H, presumably still a schoolboy (certainly he is too
young to fight), catches sight of an older cousin in officer’s uniform being
brought back from France on a stretcher. He contrasts the soldier’s lot
with his own comfort, and the notes state that ‘His death in Spain in 1937
is a direct result of this vision’.68 There is very little more, though it is hard
to believe that his death would have ended the story.
Orwell’s unwritten novel has a bearing on a crucial contradiction in
The Lion and the Unicorn and its successor The English People (1947)—
the fact that these essays purport to describe a settled and permanent
national character at a time not merely of domestic political change, but
of invasions, foreign wars, and the mass displacement and emigration of
peoples across Europe. Orwell is much less alive to the possible impli-
cations of mass immigration than Ford Madox Ford had been in The
Spirit of the People, although Ford was writing in what came to be seen as
the golden years of stability before the First World War. Admittedly,
in The English People Orwell acknowledges that the ‘chances of war’
have ‘brought to England, either as soldiers or as refugees, hundreds of
thousands of foreigners who would not normally have come here, and
forced them into intimate contact with ordinary people’.69 But he plainly
envisages these ‘foreigners’ as being like the US forces stationed in
Britain—temporary visitors, that is, like himself and his fellow inter-
national volunteers in Spain, who would eventually depart having made
The Novel of England’s Destiny 317
I
t was not until the British Empire was nearing its end that it became
both a major presence in English fiction and a controversial topic in
the discussion of English identity. Before Rudyard Kipling’s birth in
1865 the English, in Sir John Seeley’s words, had ‘conquered and peopled
half the world in a fit of absence of mind’.1 There had been representations
of British seafaring, trading, plantation-owning, and colonial administra-
tion in English novels since the seventeenth century, yet these activities
were mostly taken for granted and nearly always kept in the background.
The heroes of the early journey novels and rogue novels were likely to visit
Britain’s overseas settlements, but not to stay there except as fugitives
from British justice. In the novel of courtship, the need to manage a colonial
estate provided a convenient explanation for a lover’s or father’s absence.
Early Victorian novels such as David Copperfield, Mary Barton, and
Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) end with the emigration of char-
acters who cannot find a suitable place in English society. By the end of
the nineteenth century, the emphasis was no longer on the wealth to be
garnered from colonial exploitation but on imperialism as an extension,
or even a quintessence, of the national identity.
In 1869 John Seeley, formerly a professor of Latin at University College,
London, was appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.
Seeley made little impact as a historian until 1883, when his lectures on
The Expansion of England offered a fundamental challenge to the con-
ception of the modern British nation put forward by Macaulay and his
successors. The proper subject for English historians, in Seeley’s view,
was not the domestic politics of the British Isles but the ‘Greater Britain’
or ‘vast English nation’ spread all over the globe. England, Seeley argued,
was now and in the future ‘wherever English people are found’ (88–9,
141). Seeley’s confidence in the strength of imperial institutions makes
him an intellectual forerunner of the twentieth-century Commonwealth;
he was strongly opposed to the conventional liberal view that the
322 Losing the Empire
certificate, his white skin, and two other mementoes left behind by his
father. His nationality is confirmed when he shows these documents to the
Catholic chaplain of his father’s old regiment, but no sooner is his identity
validated than he begins to question it, a questioning from which he will
never escape.
In Kim, unlike traditional English fiction, race and nationality are
therefore problematic from the start. Differences of identity are con-
stantly highlighted and explained, and the narrative logic is one of ines-
capable hybridity and divided allegiances. The novel is full of ideological
statements about Europeans and Orientals masquerading as truisms and
commonplaces. Some of these reflect a callow European ignorance which
the narrator uses to satirical effect—as when the Reverend Bennett
pompously opines that ‘one can never fathom the Oriental mind’ (77)—
but most carry Kipling’s manifest endorsement. Kim’s restlessness and
impatience, his horror of snakes, and his dislike of a vegetarian diet are
all, supposedly, inherited traits of the ‘white man’. At the same time, his
future lies among the elite of Anglo-Indian civil servants who combine
strong ethnographic interests with a genius for secret intelligence work.
Since their vocation is to fathom the ‘Oriental mind’ to its depths, they
alone can fully appreciate the value of Kim’s local knowledge and his
Indian upbringing. The ‘white man’ as both secret agent and imperial
master must not only recognize the alienness of the ‘Indian’ character: he
must be able to assume that character, with none of the defects of
imperfect imitation that Kipling exploits for comic effect when an Indian
poses as a European.
The more Kim is trained to act like an imperial ruler, the more para-
doxical his Englishness seems. But it was paradoxical at the outset, since
the ‘Little Friend of all the World’ is the son of an Irish father, and Kipling
makes several derogatory references to Kim’s Irish blood. Nevertheless,
the novelist was manifestly aware of the part played by the Irish in
building the empire. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair the regimental com-
manding officer Major O’Dowd and his wife are Irish, and in 1830
Irish troops constituted over 40 per cent of the British Army.4 The elite
Anglo-Indian academy that Kim attends, St Xavier’s at Lucknow, is a
mission school run, we must assume, by Irish Catholics. Kim is recom-
mended to go there by Father Victor, the Catholic priest of the Mavericks,
whose regimental banner consists of a ‘great Red Bull on a background of
Irish green’ (70). Kim has known the symbol of the Red Bull on a green
field since his earliest childhood, and it may be taken to signify British
imperial dominance over Ireland, though a bull was also the symbol of
Losing the Empire 325
From this there arises almost inevitably the fantasy of the imperial ruler as
Haroun al-Raschid, the Caliph of the Arabian Nights who wanders in
disguise among his subjects in order to find out what they will say and do
when he is not watching them. Kipling’s own experiences may have been
‘only a queer jumble of opium-dens, night houses, night strolls with natives’
and so forth, but they are a preparation for Kim, the small boy whose
apparent insignificance is a new version of the Englishman in Oriental
disguise, a role pioneered by the mid-Victorian Arabist Sir Richard Burton.7
Like the curator of the museum, Kim seeks a knowledge of ‘all India’, the
India he sees symbolically ‘spread out to right and left’ (56) as he travels on
the Grand Trunk Road. In a novel that is (as Kipling himself confessed)
‘nakedly picaresque and plotless’, his survey of India takes shape as a
pilgrimage.8 It involves inevitable self-questioning and should lead to self-
knowledge, but this knowledge eludes him, so that the English identity
confidently announced at the beginning is finally left in limbo.
326 Losing the Empire
Kim is not yet weaned from the Indian motherland, from Indian earth. He
is on the verge of adulthood, but no more. The symbolism of the empty
bullock-cart reminds us of his father’s regimental banner, but the brown
Indian dust has replaced the banner’s field of Irish green. The Lama,
meanwhile, has found his ‘River of the Arrow’ and plunged into it, only to
be saved from drowning and brought back to watch over Kim in his
328 Losing the Empire
illness. In the novel’s final sentence the Lama smiles ‘as a man may who
has won salvation for himself and his beloved’ (240). The ending recalls
The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the pilgrims arrive on the river bank and
have to wait to be ferried across to the Celestial City of their salvation.
Whether or not the Lama believes that he and Kim will enter the river,
Kim seems likely to be about to give him the slip (or, perhaps, to mourn
his death) before distinguishing himself in the secret service. But Kipling
cannot envisage Kim’s life after the point where he must choose between
the secret service and the Lama’s service, so that the novel fails to turn
into an adult Bildungsroman and remains a kind of children’s literature.
As an ‘Englishman’ whose motherland is India Kim is like Strickland,
the British agent who features in a number of Kipling ’s stories and who is
proud of having had an Indian wet-nurse. Zohreh T. Sullivan detects a
‘characteristic indecisiveness and glide’ in Kipling’s narrative voice, as
it shifts from objective to subjective and from omniscience to lyrical
impressionism, revealing ‘a kind of evasiveness that raises issues and
problems it does not intend to resolve’,12 and Kim’s national identity is
one of these problems. His ‘Indian Englishness’ is sharply but not always
convincingly distinguished from that of the educated, Westernized Indian
Hurree Babu, a graduate of Calcutta University whose (not necessarily
unrealistic) ambition is to become a Fellow of ‘the Royal Society, London,
England’ (219). Hurree comes from the Bengali middle class which was to
lead the fight for national independence, but he is a loyal British agent and
a reliable and resourceful player of the imperial ‘Great Game’—in fact,
he is a better and more experienced agent than Kim. But Kipling cannot
resist laughing at him, since in Edward W. Said’s words he is, in part, ‘the
ontologically funny man, hopelessly trying to be like ‘‘us’’ ’.13
Does Kim’s Irish or half-Irish birth make him more authentically
English than the ‘brown Englishman’14 Hurree? If Kim becomes a Sahib
who can pass as a native, Hurree is a skilled impersonator who completely
deceives Kim with his disguise as a ‘Dacca drug-vendor’ (182). Unlike
Kim, he does not have to dye his skin in order to pass as a ‘native’, but nor
can he bring off the ‘British’ act to perfection, as the mission-educated
Kim O’Hara presumably can. When Kim leaves school Hurree tells him
that ‘If you were Asiatic of birth you might be employed right off; but this
half-year of leave is to make you de-Englishized, you see?’ (155). It is also
true that Kim is still only playing at the Great Game as a hero of
schoolboy fiction might, while Hurree and his colleagues live in constant
danger for little reward. When Kim asks agent E23 if the government
offers no protection to its foot soldiers in the Great Game, the reply is
Losing the Empire 329
him furiously—‘And then,’ he concluded, half kissing him, ‘you and I shall be
friends.’ (316–17)
Quested), but his supposed lack of a sense of evidence implies that his
‘Asiatic’ temperament negates his Western medical and scientific training.
A few pages later Forster takes on the role of cultural diagnostician,
explaining Aziz’s mistake with a resoundingly clinical metaphor: ‘Suspicion
in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes
him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the
same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend. It is his demon, as
the Westerner’s is hypocrisy’ (272). One would guess that some experience
of personal hurt might have led Forster to write this passage, but its even-
handedness is only apparent and it has the effect of reducing Aziz and
Fielding to well-meaning but blinkered representatives of their respective
nations and races. Like George Eliot, Forster believes that the world is not
yet ready for cosmopolitanism, and may never be so. After the final con-
frontation between Fielding and Aziz over the question of nationhood it is
their horses, the earth, and even the Indian sky that force them apart,
insisting that this is neither the time nor the place for cross-cultural
friendship to ripen. In a novel whose plot hinges on Adela’s disastrous
passage to India and her ignominious return home, Forster leaves it to his
readers to judge whether or not the English should go back to England.
misunderstood. Doing as much as you can for the natives’’ (he minced the
word like a stage memsahib) ‘‘so that you can rub your hands over a
mounting hoard of no appreciation.’’ ’24 There is an element of play-
acting here—the two men relaxing in wicker chairs feel themselves ‘begin
to enter a novel about the East’ (418)—and Burgess, who spent six years
in the colonial service, evidently sees Crabbe as a successor to Forster’s
Fielding. A schoolteacher who later becomes a provincial education
officer, it is his love for Malaya that leads him to reject the prospect of a
headmastership back in England although his wife Fenella longs to go
home. Like Flory he has a native mistress, a Burmese dance hostess who
makes him feel that he is ‘somehow piercing to the heart of the country, of
the East itself’ (38). But he has come too late to the East. The Malayan
jungle is in the grip of Communist insurgents, the British are preparing to
leave (his task as Chief Education Officer is to hand over to his Malay
deputy), and racial tension is growing as the Malays try to take back
power from the Chinese, Sikh, and Tamil communities that have flour-
ished under the empire. Crabbe’s former college friend Hardman tells him
that independence should be granted right away: ‘ ‘‘It’s probably going to
be a hell of a mess, but that’s not the point. Whether the fruit’s going to
be good or rotten, the time is ripe’’ ’ (288). In Crabbe’s reflections the
perception of imperial twilight becomes an occasion for self-pity: ‘If you
loved, your love was rarely returned. Malaya didn’t want him’ (325). But
whether or not Malaya wants him, he is obstinately determined to stay
in Malaya.
The reason he gives himself for staying is the classic justification for
liberal imperialism: to help the development of a new nation. He holds an
interracial ‘bridge party’ (another echo of Forster’s Chandrapore) and
tells his guests that nation-building requires the emergence of a secular
state, intermarriage, and the creation of an indigenous culture capable of
voicing the sense of nationhood. He discovers a young musical prodigy,
Robert Loo, whose compositions, he believes, give expression to a
‘national image’ (417); but nobody else perceives this, and Loo goes on to
write second-rate pastiches of Hollywood film music. Crabbe’s other
personal and political initiatives end in similar indignity and farce. His
fate has been predicted very early in the trilogy by his Indian colleague
Mr Raj: ‘ ‘‘The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor
Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which
you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be
swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric’’ ’ (175). Burgess’s
achievement in the Malayan Trilogy is to have absorbed much of the
Losing the Empire 339
linguistic and cultural profusion of the East into what remains very
recognizably an English novel, but his hero in the end is almost literally
swallowed up by Malaya. His undignified, accidental death stands as a
symbol of the British imperium which was always doomed to dissolve,
leaving barely a wrack behind. His character is memorable in proportion
to its futility, and what Burgess calls the ‘romantic dream’ (334) of liberal
imperialism dies with it.
In Paul Scott’s Staying On the grand themes of Burgess’s imperial
lament are virtually forgotten. Compared to Victor Crabbe, Scott’s hero
Tusker Smalley, a retired colonel in the Indian Army, is a small-minded
bigot. His death at Pankot in April 1972 from a massive coronary
expresses the collective sclerosis of diehard Anglo-India, since Tusker’s
only real difference from his military contemporaries lies in his refusal to
go home after independence. His growing perverseness and misanthropy
are seen from several viewpoints, including those of his landlord and
friend Mr Bhoolabhoy (‘Billy-boy’), his wife Lucy, and their servant
Ibrahim. The novel’s pathos centres on the fate of Lucy, the daughter of
an English clergyman who will be left to spend her widowhood isolated
and poverty-stricken in a country for which she feels little affection
despite having lived there for most of her adult life. She and Tusker are, as
she says, ‘people in shadow’.25 Tusker, Lucy belatedly realizes, had never
intended to go home: ‘It was as though he bore a grudge against his own
country and countrymen’ (96). He was not an impressive man in his
prime, but retirement a long way from England gives him the opportunity
to act out a fantasy of cantankerous English eccentricity and to play the
charade, as it were, of being the last Tory squire—for, however reduced
his circumstances in India, he remains ‘Tusker Sahib’ and still has the
glamour of being an ex-ruler.
With Staying On the colonial adventure that began as epic romance and
foundered in disillusionment and despair had ended in a mixture of dark
comedy and sentimental farce. Not only are Tusker and Lucy childless,
but they do their best to ignore Pankot’s small Eurasian community, who
represent the hybrid identity produced by imperialism. For, Lucy reflects,
the history of interracial sex that they represent was ‘a physical connec-
tion between the races that had continually to be discouraged’ (204–5).
Her belief in racial purity is part of the fantasy of an ‘English character’
that could not easily be sustained in England itself, where (for example)
Ibrahim’s brother-in-law has settled as a slum landlord in Finsbury Park.
Staying On is, perhaps, a novel of its time in implying that, in large
part, Britain had simply washed its hands of the empire, with little
340 Losing the Empire
I
n twentieth-century English fiction there are novelists of expansion
and novelists of contraction. D. H. Lawrence’s œuvre after the First
World War is an outstanding example of expansion through time
and space. It reflects Lawrence’s restlessness as he journeyed to Australia,
New Mexico, and southern Italy; it explores his fascination with primitive
cultures and ideas of prehistory, and hints at transcendental realities
beyond the material world. Novels and stories like The Plumed Serpent
(1926) and The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) are fantastic fables
foretelling the defeat of Western civilization and European imperialism.
No novelist has done more to distance himself from his beginnings in
Victorian provincial realism, yet Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
executes a final if rather hesitant return to England.
In the work of Lawrence and other ‘expansionist’ novelists—Aldous
Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, and later in the century Doris
Lessing—the novel form itself comes under intense strain. Their fiction is
unstably poised between topical satire and dream romance, between the
‘discussion novel’ of ideas and visionary science fiction. But the majority
of twentieth-century English novelists did not follow their lead. Far from
representing an ever-widening circle of life and intelligence, their novels
portray a distinctly diminished social circle. Theirs is the fiction of what
one critic has called the ‘shrinking island’.1
If the novelist’s social range was shrinking, so was the novel itself as a
physical object. In the 1890s the Victorian circulating libraries lost their
virtual monopoly of the book market and the conventional three-volume
novel was replaced by single volumes which were far more attractive
to purchasers. Ambitious novelists continued to write long novels, and
many bestsellers were extremely bulky, but the average novel became
much shorter. By the middle of the twentieth century there was a striking
342 Round Tables
uniformity in the design of new novels, which rarely exceeded 250 pages.
The younger English novelists of the 1930s and after rarely seem to have
questioned this format. Graham Greene, for example, was even more
cosmopolitan than Lawrence in his choice of settings, but his fiction
regularly falls back on the disciplined plotting and melodramatic con-
ventions of the thriller and the detective story. Evelyn Waugh’s early
novels Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) are tightly knit
social comedies set among the English gentry and aristocracy; the same is
true of Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931) and From a View to a
Death (1933). Like many of their contemporaries, Waugh and Powell
present English society on a deliberately limited scale, as a small upper-
class clique living a virtually self-contained life in defiance of a wider,
rapidly changing world.2 The aristocracy, once feared and respected, is
now a dying breed treasured for its very absurdity. Its manners have been
reduced to mannerisms, its habits of command to helpless and impotent
gestures. Far from seeking revenge on their ancient enemy, the middle-
class reading public were content to see the former ruling class turned
into figures of fun, as was supremely the case in the master-and-servant
comedies of P. G. Wodehouse.
But more serious ideas of national identity were at stake. The American
narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) states in his
opening paragraph that ‘Six months ago I had never been to England, and,
certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known
the shallows.’3 Ford’s embodiment of the ‘English heart’ is Edward Ash-
burnham, a member of the landed gentry and a captain in the Indian Army
who eventually commits suicide. Ashburnham’s successor in Ford’s work
is the much more likeable Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of the
Parade’s End sequence, who observes in No More Parades (1925) that ‘Our
station in society naturally forms rather a close ring’.4 The small circle or
microcosm corresponds to the formal desire for a tight fictional plot at the
same time that it appeals to a generation of novelists less curious about, and
less confident in handling, the diversity of English society than their pre-
decessors had been. The novel-sequences of Ford, Waugh, and Powell
enable an extension of the timespan rather than a widening of the social
range of single-volume fiction. Their novels suggest that England is run by
an old-boy network based on ‘private education, wealth, and pedigree’.5
The novel-sequences tend to ‘turn sequence into a cycle’ through techniques
of thematic repetition and temporal looping back.6
Nevertheless, the English upper classes as represented by Ford, Waugh,
and Powell are not simply inward-looking. Protagonists like Tietjens and
Round Tables 343
Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697). Wordsworth once thought
of writing ‘on some British theme, some old j Romantic tale, by Milton
left unsung’.10 Scott’s verse romances of sixteenth-century Scotland
include the Arthurian-inspired The Lady of the Lake (1810). But prose
fiction since Cervantes had prided itself on displacing the romances of
chivalry, and before the twentieth century the Arthurian revival had very
little impact on the novel. Smollett, who had translated the History and
Adventures of Don Quixote (1755), went on to mock Arthurian feats
of arms in Sir Launcelot Greaves seven years later. Tennyson’s Idylls of
the King was ridiculed in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court (1889), while chivalric romance was among Lewis
Carroll’s targets when, for example, he created the White Knight
in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Tweedledum and
Tweedledee in Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Bulwer-Lytton’s King
Arthur (1849) was not a novel but a much-ridiculed verse epic.11 The one
hero of Victorian prose fiction who seems indebted to Arthur is Charlotte
M. Yonge’s Sir Guy Morville in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), who writes
an Arthurian epic as a boy and later models for a picture of Sir Galahad;
but his chivalry is confined to the domestic sphere. Yonge’s novel was a
favourite of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, two of the most
influential figures in the tradition of Arthurian poetry and painting.12
It was not until the twentieth century, long after the Arthurian legends
had exhausted their poetic and pictorial appeal, that a significant body
of Arthurian fiction began to appear. This ranges all the way from the
modern rewriting of the legends as prose romance, most notably in
T. H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King (1938–58), to the
diffused reflection of Arthurian themes in novels of contemporary
life such as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Iris Murdoch’s The
Green Knight (1993).
The long-delayed ‘return of Arthur’ in twentieth-century English fiction
was by no means a purely literary phenomenon. Modern warfare and,
above all, the introduction of conscription in 1916 brought the experience
of soldiering home to everyone. Far from being absurdly antiquated,
Arthurian romance became a symbol of all that was missing from the vast
and deadly machinery of warfare which no longer discriminated between
soldiers and civilians, or between brave fighters and expendable cannon
fodder. At the same time, modern anthropological studies beginning
with Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915) revived interest
in the Grail and other mystery elements of the Arthurian legends. The link
between Arthurian romance and warfare is seen not just in novelists such
Round Tables 345
as Ford and Waugh but in the flawed, ambiguous writer and adventurer
T. E. Lawrence, who first visited the Middle East in connection with his
undergraduate thesis on Crusader castles. Later he became a member of
Lord Milner’s imperialist pressure group known as the Round Table.
Lawrence’s whole life, it has been said, was inspired by his ‘mystical and
poetic conception of the Order of Knighthood’ and by the personal ideal
of the medieval knight as ‘clean, strong, just and completely chaste’.13 In
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) Lawrence recalls that, as he took part in
the Arab Revolt of 1917, he kept a copy of the Morte d’Arthur in his
saddlebags: ‘It relieved my disgust.’14 Lawrence distinguished between
two kinds of Englishmen: one, ‘the John Bull of the books’, a ‘complete
Englishman’ in his ‘armoured certainty’, is a kind of King Arthur. The
other, ‘subtle and insinuating’, whose ‘own nature lay hid’ as he directed
them secretly, is a Merlin-like magician and an evident self-portrait
(354–5). It led to what he called the ‘rankling fraudulence’ of his ‘daily
posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech’ (514). A British agent
posing as a Bedouin Arab just as Kim was able to pass for an Indian,
Lawrence represents the elements of imperialism, asceticism, and primi-
tivism that had come to cluster around the Arthurian legend.
Lawrence, for all his self-dramatization and self-pity, deplored the
betrayal of the Arabs by Britain and France; his ideal of chivalry was
not simply confined to national identity and the ‘matter of Britain’. By
contrast, the need to identify the Arthurian legends with an approved
version of national origins led to the consolidation of the ‘English’ Arthur,
a figure who (as we saw in Chapter 2) was already present in Malory. By
an extraordinary historical reversal, T. H. White, for example, portrays
Arthur as a champion of the victorious Saxons instead of the defeated
Celts.15 The historical conflict between Celt and Saxon is a principal
theme in the major twentieth-century novel to take the Arthurian legend
as its explicit subject, John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance
(1932). Powys (1872–1963) has recently been claimed as a Welsh writer,
although he was born in Derbyshire in 1872 and brought up in the West
Country. A Glastonbury Romance sets out to repossess not just the
Arthurian legend but England itself as a land for Celts rather than Saxons.
This huge narrative saga, a kind of grotesque parody of the sexual
obsessions, eccentric characterizations, and melodramatic confrontations
of Hardy’s Wessex novels, portrays Glastonbury in Somerset as the
ancient refuge of the defeated Celts which has become, in modern times, a
tourist attraction and pilgrimage centre. The novel begins in Norfolk, in the
traditional heart of Saxon England, where the Crows are descended from
346 Round Tables
The Novel-Sequences
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour
(1952–61), and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–
75)—sequences of four, three, and twelve volumes respectively—are
among the major achievements of twentieth-century English fiction.
Central to each of them is the experience of participating in a world war,
so that the narrow social circle of the principal characters is necessarily,
even pitilessly exposed to modern global realities. The novel-sequence
(reminiscent, in some ways, of Thackeray and Trollope) avoids the
artificiality of modern single-volume fiction in which the social milieu is
rigidly circumscribed, usually by a plot device such as a sea voyage—as in
Round Tables 351
Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Powell’s The Fisher King—or a country-
house weekend. It is what distinguishes Waugh and Powell from authors
sometimes compared to them such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry
Green, and Muriel Spark, in whose novels characters brought together by
family relationship, similarity of situation, or pure accident are held
rigidly in place within an institution such as a village, a school, a literary
circle, or a residential building for young ladies. The characters may come
and go from this campus or precinct, but the narrative itself rarely if ever
steps outside it. Such novels make up in intensity of focus what they lack
in rounded characterization, and they may, indeed, be written in the belief
that a coherent and integrated personal identity is an anachronism in the
modern novel. However well we think we know other people, these
novels imply, they can only be known as they appear in particular con-
texts and particular roles. C. P. Snow in Strangers and Brothers (1940–70)
showed how an eleven-volume sequence might be constructed out of
a series of such deliberately circumscribed vignettes. Perhaps the most
successful of Snow’s individual volumes is The Masters (1951), a political
thriller with a timespan of a few weeks during which the action never
strays beyond the gates of a single Cambridge college.
What Snow offers, apart from simple entertainment, is social history
(as underlined in an ‘Appendix’ to The Masters)23 and a shrewd but
limited form of worldly wisdom. But the title Strangers and Brothers at
least hints at the romance roots of the modern English novel-sequence.
The sequences by Ford, Waugh, and Powell have numerous preoccupa-
tions in common, all of them manifestly paralleling the themes of
Arthurian legend. There is a band of two or more brothers-in-arms who
are destined to grow apart and possibly fight with one another; a close
link with a leader who is at once friend, father-substitute, protector, and
enemy; a relationship with a harpy or powerfully evil woman involving
emotional torment and sexual betrayal; devotion to a higher cause
sanctioned by supernatural forces whether Christian or pagan; and a last
battle in which the hero’s legacy, and with it the ‘matter of Britain’,
are determined. It is true that the ‘last battle’ is not portrayed in the
apocalyptic terms found in Malory and Tennyson, or indeed in Bernard’s
final vision of death in The Waves. It is more likely to be presented as
a conventional struggle over inheritance, succession, and the stewardship
of property. Seen as a whole, this complex of themes takes shape as an
elegy for a dying aristocracy.
The sequences of Ford, Waugh, and Powell are conservative and even
diehard in their ideology. The novelists’ social vision is nostalgic and
352 Round Tables
the supposed betrayal of France by Britain and America at the end of the
war. Christopher resigns after discovering that his work as a government
statistician has been used to double-cross the French. Mark’s awareness
of national disgrace finds expression in the phrase ‘The last of England’,
and the Last Post, blown by a drunken bugler on Armistice Night, again
makes him think of ‘The Last of England’ (234, 787).
‘The Last of England’ necessarily alludes to the famous painting by
Ford Madox Brown, the novelist’s grandfather, of emigrants leaving the
English homeland. Parade’s End, however, concludes with a withdrawal
into the English countryside rather than an escape from it. Christopher ’s
ideal is summed up in the seventeenth-century Anglican poet George
Herbert and his retreat to a country parsonage, and he blames Disraeli,
the ‘jerry-building Jew’, for inspiring England’s imperial ambitions:
‘ ‘‘Damn the Empire!’’ ’ he reflects. ‘ ‘‘It was England! It was Bemerton
Parsonage that mattered!’’ ’ (639). Mark also retreats to a cottage in
Sussex. He takes no interest in the family estate to which he is the heir,
although the fate of Groby and its Great Tree is much on Christopher ’s
mind. Since one of the puzzles of Parade’s End is the extent to which it
appears to be at odds with Ford’s earlier assertions, in The Spirit of the
People and elsewhere, of the intrinsically changing and transient nature of
English identity, it is important to note that neither the tree nor the
Tietjenses themselves are native to England. The Great Tree is a cedar
imported from Sardinia, not a Forsterian wych-elm or an English oak.
The Tietjenses (as their name reveals) are Dutch opportunists who came
to England with William III at the time of the Glorious Revolution. As
Protestants who were able to dispossess the Stuart-supporting Catholic
owners of Groby they became subject to an ancestral curse, laid down by
the seventeenth-century author of ‘Speldon on Sacrilege’ who denounced
the seizure of Catholic lands. Christopher’s knight-errantry is rooted in
guilt and superstition, since he believes that each of his ancestors who
lived at Groby has ‘died of a broken neck or a broken heart’ (189).
Moreover, the persecution of British and Irish Catholics continues in the
twentieth century and is, Ford implies, part of the dark underside of
British imperialism. Sylvia’s mentor Father Consett is hanged during the
Great War for refusing to divulge the confessions of Irish Republican
prisoners. This atrocity plays its part in Sylvia’s devastating rants against
the Tietjenses and their values. It reflects the extraordinary ambivalence
of Ford Madox Ford, a novelist who in The Critical Attitude (1911) had
contrasted the ‘insularly English novel’ with the works of Joseph Conrad
and Henry James which were, he said, in the ‘mainstream of the current of
358 Round Tables
who will make a good heir to Groby, and that his father did not, as it had been
believed, commit suicide, and Valentine is about to have a child. His honor
remains unimpaired, but his sufferings have made him humble; the one real defect
in his character as a young man, his arrogance, is gone.29
One reason for distrusting this account is that The Last Post is structured
around Mark’s dying monologue and Christopher is absent until the end.
It is significant that he has redeemed himself in his elder brother’s eyes,
but the final verdict on the beleaguered Tory gentleman and soldier
striving to make his peace with England’s Catholic past remains as
uncertain as ever. In No More Parades Christopher was shown trying to
look after the 2,000 men in his care at the base camp in France as if they
were an extended family, but after the Armistice he rejects any kind of
public-service role and becomes a private entrepreneur exporting antique
furniture. We cannot exactly describe the England of Parade’s End as a
family with the wrong members in control, since the dour, introspective
Tietjenses seem largely unfitted to exercise any kind of control. Their
record in the civil service is less impressive than the stubborn eccentricity
of their withdrawal from society in order to preserve their integrity and
honour.
Mark reflects in The Last Post that ‘All the Tietjenses were born with
some sort of kink. It came from the solitude maybe, on the moors, that
hard climate, the rough neighbours—possibly even from the fact that
Groby Great Tree overshadowed the house’ (797). It would seem, how-
ever, that the Tietjens ‘kink’ owes little or nothing to these ostensible
causes. Mark and Christopher were very easily recruited into the upper
echelons of the civil service, and their idiosyncrasies do not seem to spring
from the Yorkshire locality which, throughout the tetralogy, Ford only
represents by hearsay. Their ‘solitude’, perhaps, is that of the Dutch
Protestant family who uprooted themselves with William III and took
over land which did not belong to them. Mark and Christopher have
spent their working lives in Whitehall and appear to be at home there, but
somehow—as we see from the obsessive recirculation and recall of private
memories and feelings in their interior monologues—they have gone on
speaking in their own private language regardless of their neighbours. It is
this instinctive inbreeding that constitutes Ford’s critique of the English
ruling class. Meanwhile the threat to Groby and what it represents is
brought home by the ludicrous proposal of Sylvia’s American (and pre-
sumably Catholic) tenants, the de Bray Papes, to turn the Yorkshire estate
into a Regency theme park with powdered footmen and the tenants’
360 Round Tables
Holy Greal had been born through the hall, then the Holy Vessel departed
suddenly, that they wist not where it became: then had they all breath to speak.39
Waugh was, no doubt, aware that T. S. Eliot in his poem ‘Little Gidding’
(1944) had used mystical Christian symbolism to evoke the bombing of
London. Beneath the superficial jokiness of this opening scene of Officers
and Gentlemen is the sense of Guy’s rededication to his spiritual quest.
(From his later perspective, as we shall see, he is still living in a ‘Holy Land
of illusion’ (O 240) or enchantment.)
As if reflecting both the terror of war and its banality, Sword of Honour
blends its moments of almost visionary solemnity with long episodes of
broad farce. The first section of Officers and Gentlemen, featuring Ritchie-
Hook as the leader of the commando unit Hookforce, is titled ‘Happy
Warriors’. While Guy is training in the Hebrides and waiting for action in
Egypt the narrative turns aside to pursue the adventures of Trimmer, a war
hero invented entirely by the media (represented here by the ‘former
sporting-journalist’ Kilbannock). British propaganda requires a dashing,
lower-class commando leader, and Trimmer, on the strength of one
botched and shameful episode, becomes a national celebrity. Even Guy’s
saintly father is taken in by the newspaper stories about the former
hairdresser. As Mr Crouchback naively reflects, ‘When the country needs
them, the right men come to the fore. . . . He downs his scissors and without
any fuss carries out one of the most daring exploits in military history’ (O
152). In Officers and Gentlemen not only is the ‘hero’ not a real hero, but
constant transformations of identity mean that nobody is what he seems to
be. Apthorpe’s old African comrade ‘Chatty’ Corner becomes King Kong,
while Guy, as he approaches Corner’s Hebridean lair, becomes Browning’s
medieval knight Childe Roland. But at the end of the novel the make-
believe world of Hookforce is exposed to an unsparing test of reality, in
the doomed Cretan adventure which ends in headlong retreat.
Waugh’s Cretan narrative has been criticized for its inexplicitness,40
but the moral judgements passed on the characters, though cryptic, can
hardly be missed. Major Hound tells Colonel Tickeridge that ‘ ‘‘They say
it’s sauve qui peut now’’ ’, to which Tickeridge, every inch a Halberdier,
replies ‘ ‘‘Don’t know the expression’’ ’ (O 179). Hound is manifestly a
‘lost soul’ (177), whether or not he is one of two people murdered by the
ruthless sauve qui peut expert Ludovic. Then there is Ivor Claire, the
dashing commando whom Guy hero-worships in the earlier part of
Officers and Gentlemen: ‘Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of
them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken
Round Tables 367
into account, Guy thought’ (O 114). In his 1965 revision Waugh cut out
the final ‘Guy thought’ which he doubtless found overemphatic, but it
underlines the extent to which his protagonist has been taken in by an
officer whose civilian avocation, appropriately enough, was showjump-
ing. Claire leaves his men to their fate in Crete in order to avoid being
taken prisoner himself, abandoning the ‘path of honour’ (O 221) while
Guy, who also escapes back to Egypt, manages to preserve his honour.
During the battle of Crete Guy comes upon the body of a dead Catholic
soldier, who reminds him of Sir Roger de Waybroke and whose identity
tag he secures, intending to return it to headquarters. But in Cairo he
entrusts it to the socialite Julia Stitch, who destroys it under the
impression that it is a deposition concerning Ivor Claire.
Guy is unaware of Julia’s treachery—his disenchantment proceeds at a
different pace from the reader’s—but his recuperation in Cairo coincides
with a momentous world event, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, which all but
destroys his personal crusade. During the two years (1939–41) of the
Nazi-Soviet Pact, Guy has sought to defend Christendom against the
‘Modern Age in arms’, but once Britain is allied with the Soviet Union his
sense of being part of a national crusade disappears: ‘he was back after
less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old
ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved
traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour’ (O 240). The
happy warrior is now disenchanted. His growing detestation of the
wartime alliance is suggested in book one of Unconditional Surrender,
‘State Sword’, where the central symbol is an actual sword manufactured
at the King’s command in 1943 for presentation to Stalin as a gift to the
people of Stalingrad.41 This ‘sword of honour’, put on display in West-
minster Abbey, is supposed to have been suggested to the King by
Trimmer. But, whatever the moral fate of the nation, in Unconditional
Surrender Guy’s personal honour is once again (almost) vindicated.
Guy was most closely identified with the nation’s war aims when
Britain was fighting alone against the Axis powers. He reflects (in a
passage that Waugh deleted in 1965) that ‘There was in romance great
virtue in unequal odds’ (M 174). Once Russia and America have joined in
on Britain’s side victory is certain, but Guy’s Catholic chivalry makes him
increasingly isolated. He is no longer a Halberdier and cannot rejoin his
old battalion even when he comes across them fighting a rearguard action
in Crete. Like most of the British land forces he is condemned to long
years of tedium and inactivity. Soldiers, he reflects, ‘should be laid away
in their boxes in the nursery cupboard’ between engagements; they should
368 Round Tables
‘repose among the briar like the knights of the Sleeping Beauty’ (O 84). In
Unconditional Surrender his romantic reveries are contrasted with the
dark romanticism of Ludovic, the increasingly paranoid officer who
becomes a bestselling novelist. Ludovic’s childhood has ‘furnished few
models of chivalry’ (U 37), but he makes his name with The Death Wish, a
melodramatic tale of the pre-war cosmopolitan aristocracy. (According to
Waugh’s friend and biographer Christopher Sykes, the novel and its
success are a send-up of Brideshead Revisited.)42 Another crucial char-
acter in Unconditional Surrender is Guy’s estranged wife, Virginia, who
finds herself pregnant with Trimmer’s child and, having failed to procure
an abortion, decides to go through with the birth. Guy, as a Catholic, will
not divorce his wife and, to his friends’ dismay, he agrees to a reconci-
liation. After he has been posted to Yugoslavia Virginia converts to the
Catholic faith, gives birth, and is promptly killed by a flying bomb. Guy’s
legal son and heir escapes uninjured. As Guy’s brother-in-law resentfully
concludes somewhat later, ‘ ‘‘things have turned out very conveniently’’ ’
for Waugh’s protagonist (239).
At the time of his reconciliation with Virginia, he is forced to defend his
actions by a friend who finds his behaviour foolish and deluded. To her
charge that ‘ ‘‘men aren’t chivalrous any more’’ ’, he replies that
‘Knights errant . . . used to go out looking for noble deeds. I don ’t think I ’ve ever
in my life done a single, positively unselfish action. I certainly haven ’t gone out of
my way to find opportunities. Here was something most unwelcome, put into my
hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as ‘‘beyond the call of
duty’’; not the normal behaviour of an officer and a gentleman; something they ’ll
laugh about in Bellamy ’s.’ (U 151)
If chivalry sets Guy apart from his fellow clubmen and brother officers, it
also compensates for the virtual impotence of which Virginia accuses him.
In an outburst reminiscent of Sylvia Tietjens she denounces his whole ‘over-
bred and under-sexed’ race: ‘ ‘‘You’re dying out as a family,’’ she con-
tinued. . . . ‘‘Why do you Crouchbacks do so little——ing?’’ ’ (U 146). At the
end of Unconditional Surrender Guy has fathered two more sons after the
war, although in the 1965 revision of the text Waugh significantly removed
this detail. Guy has found a successor without actually begetting one.
Guy’s chivalry is put to a different kind of test in Yugoslavia. As in his
previous military exploits his success is equivocal and he is shown to be
well intentioned but blundering and naive. He flies from the Italian city of
Bari (a port that he associates with the Crusades) to take up his post as
liaison officer with the Communist partisans, who constitute a new kind
Round Tables 369
of secret society or round table from which he is firmly excluded. His old
regimental colleague Frank de Souza arrives on a short visit and achieves a
level of access to the partisan leaders that Guy can only envy: ‘They
trusted him and treated his advice with a respect they would not have
accorded to Guy or even Brigadier Cape; or for that matter to General
Alexander or Mr Winston Churchill’ (U 207). De Souza, of course, is a
Communist Party member, and other British officers—like the major at
Bari who is shown ‘dispatching royalist officers—though he did not know
it—to certain execution’ (U 234) do the Communists’ bidding. Guy,
however, tries to save the lives of a group of Jewish refugees whom the
partisans allege to be guilty of collaboration and class treachery. He saves
all but two of them since, led astray by personal kindliness, he foolishly
compromises their spokeswoman Madame Kanyi and her husband.
Guy’s thoughtlessness in this case, like his chivalry in taking on
Virginia’s child, should be judged according to the spiritual principle
expressed by his devout Catholic father in his last letter to his son.
‘Quantitative judgements don’t apply,’ Mr Crouchback wrote. ‘If only
one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of
‘‘face’’ ’ (U 17). If this principle applies positively in Guy’s reconciliation
with Virginia it also applies negatively, so that the rescue of the vast
majority of the Jewish refugees is no compensation for his failure
to protect the Kanyis. Doubtless Guy is a victim of his times and of the
death of chivalry in the modern world, a conclusion that is reinforced by
the novel’s ironic final scene of a commando reunion at the time of the
Festival of Britain. Waugh’s comment on the state of the nation at the
beginning of this scene—‘In 1951, to celebrate the opening of a happier
decade, the government decreed a Festival’ (U 237)—is commendably
restrained. But the mid-century celebrations of an ageing group of
happy warriors are overshadowed by our memory of Madame Kanyi’s
last words to Guy, a speech that once again illustrates Waugh’s deft
modulation from melodrama and farce to romantic moral seriousness.
Shortly before Guy’s last meeting with the Jewish refugee, Ritchie-
Hook has been killed leading a suicidal attack on an enemy strongpoint in
an operation which, as he well knows, is only a publicity stunt put on by
the partisans to impress visiting dignitaries. Now Guy’s moment of self-
understanding is prompted by the words of a woman who knows him
only slightly:
‘It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men
thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their
manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense
370 Round Tables
for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not
very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’ (U 232)
It does not matter that Guy has not actually killed anyone. In
Mr Crouchback’s dogmatic moral terms, what must really count is that,
although Guy’s attempts to rescue two damsels in distress (Virginia and
Madame Kanyi) both failed, one of the women died in the Catholic faith.
Catholic and non-Catholic readers may differ sharply as to whether this
affects the value of his actions, but, as we have seen, Guy’s knight-
errantry is surrounded by ambiguities from beginning to end. Waugh
allows the actions and events of the trilogy to speak for themselves, and
his only attempt to enforce a final verdict comes through the words of
Madame Kanyi. Her judgement applies to the whole history of aristocratic
chivalry and the romance of the knight in shining armour, not simply to
one uncharacteristic Englishman’s battle against the ‘Modern Age’.
thought, either in the ‘looser society’ of the United States or the ‘tighter
society’ of Western Europe.48 The connections are, of course, all made by
Jenkins the narrator, and their prominence results from his usually very
rigorous selection and foreshortening of the details of his experience. The
more unlikely his encounters, the greater their occult resonance. In
Hearing Secret Harmonies the Reverend Paul Fenneau tells Jenkins of
his ‘deeply held conviction . . . as to the repetitive contacts of certain
individual souls in the earthly lives of other individual souls’ (HSH 120).
Fenneau is a figure specially invented for Powell’s final volume—though
he claims to have been a contemporary of Jenkins’s at university, we have
never heard of him previously—and we might therefore view him with
suspicion as a medium for authorial self-justification. But he is also
the last in a series of recurring characters—notably Myra Erdleigh,
Dr Trelawney, and Scorpio Murtlock—who appear in the sequence as
Merlin-like wizards and mages, aware of the workings of destiny that
determine the recurrence of individual characters and events. Thus, on
the one hand, we have the sociological shrewdness of Kucherman, the
Belgian liaison officer in The Military Philosophers (1968), who instantly
understands the extent to which the British ruling class is a closed circle:
‘ ‘‘Your fathers were in the War Office too,’’ ’ he tells Jenkins, who seems
almost dumbfounded by this observation.49 On the other hand there
is Myra Erdleigh casting Pamela Flitton’s horoscope, identifying her as
being ‘under Scorpio’ and as possessing ‘many of the scorpion’s cruellest
traits’. ‘ ‘‘I fear she loves disaster and death,’’ ’ Mrs Erdleigh adds (MP
136), thus setting out the plot line for the next two novels and preparing
the ground for Pamela’s eventual successor, Scorpio Murtlock.
Although The Music of Time cannot be reduced to Arthurian
allegory—its characters and situations are much too various for that—in
the early novels Powell’s Camelot is Stourwater, the country mansion of
the tycoon Sir Magnus Donners where Jenkins is an infrequent and
marginal guest. Stringham and Widmerpool are quick to join Donners’s
circle. The house itself is a neo-Gothic folly which strikes Jenkins as a
‘Hollywood film set’ rather than a home: ‘Here was the Middle Age, from
the pages of Tennyson or Scott, at its most elegant.’50 Donners likes to
take his friends on a tour of the ‘dungeons’ and to tie up some unsus-
pecting young lady guest; Widmerpool, on Jenkins’s first visit, confesses
that he has just rescued a damsel in distress (he has paid for Gipsy Jones’s
abortion) and then backs his car, an unruly charger, into a Gothic
flowerpot. At Stourwater Jenkins meets Jean Templer, his first love, who
is ‘like a great lady in a medieval triptych or carving’ (AW 141), while her
374 Round Tables
emphasis of reported speech’ (AW 38). The opacity of English life meets
its match in Powell’s scrupulously elaborate, often ponderous style, with
its air of self-mockery which exerts an irresistible hold over the novelist’s
devotees.
Consider the opening of The Soldier’s Art (1966)—to do Powell justice
he must be quoted at length:
When, at the start of the whole business, I bought an army greatcoat, it was at one
of those places in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, where, as well as
officers’ kit and outfits for sport, they hire or sell theatrical costume. [ . . . ] The
deal was negotiated in an upper room, dark and mysterious, draped with skiing
gear and riding breeches, in the background of which, behind the glass windows
of a high display case, two headless trunks stood rigidly at attention. One of these
effigies wore Harlequin ’s diagonally spangled tights; the other, scarlet full-dress
uniform of some infantry regiment, allegorical figures, so it seemed, symbolising
dualisms of the antithetical stock-in trade surrounding them . . . Civil and
Military . . . Work and Play . . . Detachment and Involvement . . . Tragedy and
Comedy . . . War and Peace . . . Life and Death . . .
An assistant, bent, elderly, bearded, with the congruous demeanour of a
Levantine trader, bore the greatcoat out of a secret recess in the shadows and
reverently invested me with its double-breasted, brass-buttoned, stiffly pleated
khaki folds. [ . . . ] In a three-sided full-length looking-glass nearby I [ . . . ] criti-
cally examined the back view of the coat ’s shot-at-dawn cut, aware at the same
time that soon, like Alice, I was to pass, as it were by virtue of these habiliments,
through its panes into a world no less enigmatic.
‘How ’s that, sir?’
‘All right, I think.’
‘Might be made for you.’
‘Not a bad fit.’
Loosening now quite slowly the buttons, one by one, he paused as if con-
sidering some matter, and gazed intently.
‘I believe I know your face,’ he said.
‘You do?’
‘Was it The Middle Watch?’
‘Was what the middle watch?’
‘The show I saw you in.’
I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in
almost all the undertakings of life; but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little
enough. There was no reason why he should not suppose the Stage to be my
profession as well as any other. [ . . . ] Accepting the classification, however
sobering, I did no more than deny having played in that particular knockabout.
He helped me out of the sleeves, gravely shaking straight their creases.
‘What ’s this one for?’ he asked.
376 Round Tables
‘Which one?’
‘The overcoat—if I might make bold to enquire?’
‘Just the war.’
‘Ah,’ he said attentively, ‘The War . . . ’54
holding court in the Hero of Acre pub in Fitzrovia, the district that had
taken over from Bloomsbury as the post-war headquarters of literary
London. He is one of the ‘great egoists’ (BFR 167) of The Music of Time,
an actor or role-player rather than an artist. After his death he becomes
a literary legend and the subject of the biography that the American
Gothic scholar Russell Gwinnett eventually publishes as Death’s-Head
Swordsman. He is present in spirit at Pamela’s death in Gwinnett’s arms
in Temporary Kings and, perhaps, at the death of Widmerpool in Hearing
Secret Harmonies.
Pamela as sadist and necrophiliac initiates both Trapnel and
Widmerpool into what one critic calls ‘The Abyss of Carnality’, a darker
costume drama hidden beneath the social surface.57 This corrupt sexual
masquerade (which parallels Proust’s portrayal of the French aristocracy)
is a sign of what Jenkins calls ‘the general disintegration of society in its
traditional form’ (AW 128). In one of his numerous Gothic similes, he
compares both society between the wars and (by extension) his own
narrative to a ride on a ghost train rushing headlong past frightening
obstacles towards a ‘shape that lay across the line’ (CCR 221). The image
suggests the decadent, gaudy unreality of fashionable upper-class society
while leaving it ambiguous whether the corpse on the line portends a final
apocalyptic collision, or simply one more macabre element in the charade.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of Jenkins’s sanity, moral scruple,
and good humour, the energies unleashed by Pamela and Widmerpool are
self-destructive and do not in the end prevail. Jenkins is fully aware of
the absurdity of his old schoolfellow’s final incarnation as the populist
Lord ‘Ken’ Widmerpool, a ‘man in a life-and-death grapple with the
decadent society round him’ (TK 20). Jenkins, too, sees revival and
resurrection as features of late twentieth-century English life, alongside
its undeniable decay.
In Hearing Secret Harmonies Scorpio Murtlock and his followers form
a ‘sacred circle’ (HSH 156) so that they can indulge in group sex at an
ancient monument known as the Devil’s Fingers. Nearby is another
prehistoric site, the Whispering Knights, where a group of treacherous
knights were turned to stone by a witch. The two images sum up the more
sinister side of The Music of Time. But against them should be put
the elements of rebirth in Powell’s final volume, such as the revival of
Trelawneyism, the rediscovery of Edgar Deacon’s pictures, and the
publication of Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel. New characters from
the young generation, like Murtlock and the Quiggin twins, take up roles
left vacant by those who have gone before. If death and, above all, the
Round Tables 379
K
arim Amir, the narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990), introduces himself as ‘an Englishman born
and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind
of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old
histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am (though not proud of it),
from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.’1 As critics have
noted, the much-quoted opening passage of Kureishi’s novel has the
quality of a mission statement for a new world in which cultures and
traditions are intermingled and hybrid fusion is the norm.2 Nevertheless
Karim, born in London of an Indian father and an English mother, is an
Englishman by any standards except those of the racial extremist. His
Englishness, as he acknowledges, is a given identity, not a matter of
choice. Writing for an American readership in 1964, the novelist John
Fowles set out to distinguish English from British identity, describing the
latter as ‘an organizational convenience, a political advisability, a pass-
port word’. His definition of Englishness, though conservative and
racially exclusive in its orientation, clearly includes Karim: ‘It is having at
least two grandparents out of four English; having lived at least half one’s
life in England; having been educated at an English school; and of course
having English as a mother tongue.’3 Fowles’s stipulation of two grand-
parents out of four introduces a racial element while allowing for the
possibility of mixed parenthood which must be part of any healthy and
dynamic community. What are we to make, however, of first-generation
immigrants for whom England must necessarily be a country of adoption?
According to Fowles, only their children or grandchildren may become
English. Is the ‘organizational convenience’ of Britishness the most to
which they can aspire, or do people become English by self-identification?
The novel of immigration—now recognized as the most vital form of
English fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century—considers
these questions.
Inward Migrations 381
slow to register much change. In 1996 the critic James Wood noted a turn
towards ‘novels of Englishness—rather than English novels’, but judged
that ‘what most of these books proved was that English writing in the
last thirty years has largely failed to tell convincing national stories’.
Wood blamed this failure on ‘the weight of tradition’.6 It could be argued
that he was looking in the wrong place and that the fiction of immigrant
communities in England deserved far more attention than it was then
receiving. By the time that Wood was writing there was already a
century-old tradition of novels about immigration into Britain.
Earlier generations had had a rather different idea of the ‘new England’
of the twentieth century that was waiting to be discovered and recorded in
literature. A significant example is J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934),
published six years before Orwell’s celebration of Englishness in The Lion
and the Unicorn. Like Orwell, Priestley was both a successful novelist and
a lover of ‘little England’—that is, of non-expansionist, non-imperial
England.7 But much of what he noted in his tour of the country was
neither the legacy of traditional England nor of the empire. Its ‘real
birthplace’, instead, was America:
This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories
that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés,
bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wire-
less, hiking, factory-girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks,
swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons. (401)
Apart from Esther’s story, two of the other plot lines in Children of
the Ghetto are concerned with religious fundamentalism, which would
become one of the most sensitive issues in the novels of Rushdie and
Kureishi a century later. Esther’s suitor Raphael Leon edits a paper, The
Flag of Judah, partly financed by Henry Goldsmith (the host at the
Christmas dinner party) with a paradoxical mission to defend Jewish
orthodoxy. In the earlier part of the novel Hannah Shemuel, a rabbi’s
daughter, finds her happiness in love thwarted by an obscure but dracon-
ian provision of Jewish religious law. Her lover wants her to elope to
America so that they can get married under a more liberal dispensation,
but at the last minute she remains true to her father’s faith. This senti-
mental tragedy of non-assimilation became central to the dramatized
version of the novel.
In itself, Children of the Ghetto cannot be described as a neglected
literary classic, but it is a pioneering work of extraordinary interest and
continuing relevance. The controversies within the Jewish community
that it reflects were paralleled more than a century later when Monica
Ali’s bestselling Brick Lane, set in the same part of Whitechapel, was
condemned by Muslim community representatives for its ‘insulting and
shameful’ depiction of Bengali immigrants.20 The author, it was claimed,
knew little of the community represented in her 400-page novel; equally
relevant, perhaps, was the fact that the novel’s strongly feminist and
integrationist values clearly challenged fundamentalist orthodoxy. Prob-
ably the Brick Lane controversy would have attracted little notice had it
not been for the precedent of The Satanic Verses, which was denounced
all over the world and burnt by Muslim protesters in Britain once its
author had received a religious death sentence in 1989. (The opening
sequence of The Satanic Verses shows its two protagonists, Gibreel
Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, suffering a kind of fall from the heavens
and fetching up in contemporary London, but Rushdie is not an immig-
rant novelist, influential as his London scenes have been. The controversy
over the novel relates to its dream sequences set in the Arabian peninsula.)
The motives of the British anti-Rushdie protesters in London were
portrayed with a certain sympathy in Hanif Kureishi’s immigrant novel
The Black Album (1995). It seems likely that immigrant fiction will always
retain the capacity to disturb some of its readers, since it explores issues of
national and cultural identity which give rise to profound and passionate
disagreement. The example of Children of the Ghetto is a reminder that
fiction dealing with the trauma of migration and resettlement has a long
history.
Inward Migrations 389
Metropolitan Alienation
When Esther belatedly confesses to Raphael that she is the author of
Mordecai Josephs, she declares that
‘I wrote it and I glory in it. Though all Jewry cry out ‘‘The picture is false,’’ I say it
is true. So now you know the truth. Proclaim it to all Hyde Park and Maida Vale,
tell it to all your narrow-minded friends and acquaintances, and let them turn and
rend me. I can live without them or their praise. Too long they have cramped my
soul. Now at last I am going to cut myself free.’ (428)
The city here is the place of judgement, but also the place of freedom.
Even if ‘all Hyde Park and Maida Vale’ point the finger of censure at her,
Esther can survive their condemnation. The figure of the writer in the
metropolis has long been a central trope in immigrant fiction: the writer
as truthful witness and potential betrayer of her community’s secrets,
but also as a solitary outcast cherishing her loneliness amid the city’s
anonymity. The freedom the city offers is, as often as not, the freedom to
fantasize, and the fantasies it breeds are often outrageous, from visions of
drugged hallucination, unlimited sexual possibility, and mental break-
down to those of terrorist violence and civil war. While Esther’s defiance
of her own community in the above quotation suggests the extent to
which she has become Anglicized, we may suspect that it is Anglicization
as a negative identification, the product of disillusionment and disgust
rather than a genuine reaching out towards a non-Jewish mode of life.
Her confession is made privately to Raphael—a dissident intellectual who
takes a strong interest in her—and her moment of defiance leads to a
renewed discovery of love and comradeship within the Jewish community,
which proves to be less narrow-minded than she had feared. This senti-
mental ending suggests that Esther’s rebellion is, in the end, little more
than a family quarrel. She does not suffer permanent intellectual isolation
of the kind depicted in the novels of Zangwill’s contemporary George
Gissing.
Gissing in his time was a much less popular writer than Zangwill, but
his presentation of metropolitan alienation and the separation of the
intellectual from the community anticipates the artistic introversion and
solipsism of some of the most famous twentieth-century fiction: the novel
as, first and foremost, a ‘portrait of the artist’. Any artist who is, in
Gissing’s sense, ‘unclassed’—who has turned against the section of
society from which he or she came—is by definition a kind of migrant,
whose work is likely to be either a record or, at least, a product of the
390 Inward Migrations
eventual divorce, together with his rapid rise as a populist leader on his
home island of Isabella. Finally, overcome with self-disgust and world-
weariness, he throws in his hand as a politician and retires to London. He
turns into a secular, Westernized version of the Hindu ‘Holy Man’, but his
message is that the migration of peoples is unnatural and fundamentally
wrong. Like Rhys’s heroines, Naipaul’s introspective, self-pitying prot-
agonist remains defined by his restlessness. An immigrant who is content
to stay on as an ‘overseas guest’, he has found only a disconnected artistic
identity in Britain.
Metropolitan Fantasies
In The Pleasures of Exile (1960) the novelist George Lamming spoke of
the tension between the West Indian writer’s need to ‘win the approval
of Headquarters’ (England) and his responsibility to his own people.28
Naipaul’s Olympian prose in The Mimic Men and later books has
secured his ready acceptance as a master of English fiction, but it is the
novels of his compatriot Samuel Selvon that give expression to what
Lamming called ‘the people’s speech’—a compound of Trinidadian and
other dialects that constitutes the earliest literary form of black British
English.29 Naipaul’s early novels of Trinidad life, The Mystic Masseur
(1957) and A House for Mr Biswas (1961), are based on a ‘trickster’ hero,
an ingenious and resourceful self-made man whose imagination is nour-
ished by the distant influence of the metropolis. Selvon in The Lonely
Londoners (1956) introduced a rather similar figure, Moses Aloetta,
a Caribbean immigrant undergoing the transition from metropolitan
alienation to belonging. The hero of Selvon’s humorous, anecdotal
third-person narrative bounces back after innumerable defeats, valiantly
maintaining his vision of London as the immigrant’s promised land. In
the end, like Ralph Singh, he settles on the goal of writing his memoirs.
Selvon’s two sequels, Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating
(1983), are instalments of these memoirs, portraying the hero’s progress
from homesick outsider to absurdly ultra-loyal black Englishman.
The folk-tale roots, both English and Caribbean, of Selvon’s storytelling
are never far from the surface. At the start of The Lonely Londoners Moses
is hanging out at Waterloo Station—‘Perhaps he was thinking is time to go
back to the tropics, that’s why he feeling sort of lonely and miserable’30 —
when he meets the newly arrived Henry Oliver, who immediately acquires
the name of the quest-hero Sir Galahad. Moses warns Galahad that
394 Inward Migrations
Londoners will view him as a greedy, upstart Dick Whittington who has
come to the city in search of wealth and women: ‘So don’t expect they will
treat you like anybody special—to them you will be just another one of
them black Jamaicans who coming to London thinking that the streets
paved with gold’ (25). Moses and Galahad soon become members of a
mixed West Indian group known as ‘the boys’, and Selvon (who was
himself of Asian descent) is studiously vague about his characters’ racial
identities.31
According to Moses, ‘if it was that we didn’t get together now and then
to talk about things back home, we would suffer like hell. . . . Nobody in
London does really accept you. They tolerate you, yes, but you can’t go
in their house and eat or sit down and talk. It ain’t have no sort of family
life for us here’ (114). But while Moses acknowledges the poverty and
exploitation of immigrant ‘Brit’n’, the fantasy life of ‘the boys’ as they
come together to drink, joke, and exchange stories is at the heart of The
Lonely Londoners. Moses becomes the ‘master of ceremonies’ (98) at their
regular get-togethers, and his ten years in London are seen as a small epic
of survival and adaptation.
Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating lack some of the casual,
improvised grace of The Lonely Londoners. Moses becomes a property-
owning British patriot and slum landlord, but is virtually imprisoned in
his own basement after being outwitted by Bob, the white immigrant to
London from Leicestershire whom he first employed as his Man Friday.
By the end of the trilogy Moses is on the run from the police in both
England and Trinidad. Selvon thus puts an abrupt end to the career of a
hero who was able to boast in Moses Ascending that ‘I have weathered
many a storm in Brit’n, and men will tell you that in my own way I am as
much part of the London landscape as little Eros with his bow and arrow
in Piccadilly, or one-eye Nelson with his column in Trafalgar Square,
not counting colour’.32
‘Colour’ is, of course, made to count throughout Selvon’s trilogy,
which aims to dissolve the cruelty and prejudice of British institutional
racism into laughter. In Moses Ascending Galahad and some of the other
‘boys’ join the Black Panthers, challenging Moses, now a self-conscious
memoirist, to show whether he is cut out to be a campaigning writer like
the American James Baldwin or, as always seems more likely, a British
Uncle Tom. When Moses puts up the bail money to get the Black Panther
leaders out of prison, he declares with splendid absurdity that ‘No
Englishman with black blood in his veins can stand aside and see innocent
victims hang’ (96). His ‘black Englishman’ persona reaches its apotheosis
Inward Migrations 395
romance, desire, feeling. They wanted to be kissed, stroked, sucked, held and
penetrated more than they could say. The platform of Baker Street Station was
Arcadia itself.34
schoolgirl visit to England before the war thought that she might be
Catholic, implying German or Austrian nationality, and there is a hint
that she comes from the Rhineland. A German refugee at liberty in
wartime England must certainly be Jewish, but Larkin carefully avoids
giving her this label. The novel’s formal structure traces her life on a
single winter day, with her pre-war visit to the family of her English ‘pen
pal’, Robin Fennel, being recalled in a long retrospect. Larkin hints
without actually stating that the upper-middle-class Fennels, who are not
a religious family, were dismayed by their belated realization that they
were entertaining a Jewish guest. Robin’s future brother-in-law, an Aryan
type with ‘cold blue eyes’, does his best to ignore her, while her unguarded
response to being told that she is ‘almost one of the family’ evokes the
latent anti-Semitism in Robin:
‘It would be amusing if I were,’ said Katherine absently. ‘Don ’t you think families
with a foreign side are more interesting? They become much stronger. And the
one branch can help the other.’
‘That ’s what the Jews think, isn ’t it,’ he said rather distantly.38
At the same time, the novel depicts class hostility and resentment as the
underlying forces fuelling racial antagonism. Meena Kumar’s parents
decided to settle in a terraced house in Tollington, a former Black
Country mining village, because it was all they could afford when they
first came to England in search of what Meena calls ‘the promised gold
beneath the dog shit on the streets’.39 But the Kumars are plainly destined
for the middle class: Meena’s father works in an office, her mother is an
infant teacher, and she eventually passes the eleven-plus to go to the local
grammar school. The novel is an autobiographical account of Meena’s
pre-teenage years when she attends the village school (subsequently
bulldozed by a property developer) and lives in what seems to her in
retrospect to have been an idyllic, self-enclosed working-class community.
Tollington, ‘a forgotten village in no-man’s land between a ten-shop town
and an amorphous industrial sprawl’ (135), is in a state of transition. The
men are mostly out of work, while the local engineering factory takes on
women only. At first Tollington is still just rural enough to remind
Meena’s mother of her Indian homeland, but by the end of the novel it has
become part of the new England that Priestley foresaw, with new housing
estates, bored teenagers, a supermarket, and a motorway.
Meena, caught between her upwardly mobile parents and their
working-class neighbours, is ‘a freak of some kind, too mouthy, clumsy
and scabby to be a real Indian, too Indian to be a real Tollington wench’
(149–50). She is not allowed to speak the Tollington dialect at home:
‘ ‘‘Just because the English can’t speak English themselves, does not mean
you have to talk like an urchin. You take the best from their culture, not
the worst’’ ’ (53), her mother tells her. As a ‘Junglee’ or wild, naughty
child she is deeply attracted to Anita, the glamorous older girl who
eventually falls for Sam Lowbridge, the leader of a gang of skinheads. But
Anita and Sam are abused and deprived youths, while Meena’s loving,
supportive parents makes her realize that ‘there was a corner of me that
would be forever not England’ (112). When Sam repeats the notorious
racist political slogan of the 1960s—‘ ‘‘If You Want A Nigger For
A Neighbour, Vote Labour!’’ ’ (273)—and beats up a visiting Asian
businessman, he earns Meena’s hatred and contempt; but her relationship
to Tollington can never be one of simple antagonism, since Tollington,
she discovers, is as much part of England ’s imperial history as her own
family is. A white neighbour suddenly addresses Meena’s grandmother in
Punjabi, while the last owner of the local coal mine, now a notorious
recluse, turns out to be a Sikh like her own family. Meena eventually
comes to a deliberately staged, somewhat unlikely understanding with
Inward Migrations 401
Sam, who gives her her first kiss and excuses his hostility to her as a matter
of class, not race: ‘ ‘‘You’ve always been the best wench in Tollington. . . .
But yow wos never gonna look at me, yow won’t be stayin will ya? You
can move on. How come? How come I can’t?’’ ’ (314). Sam and Anita can
develop no further and must remain in Tollington, while Meena and her
family prepare for the ‘next reincarnation in our English life-cycle’
(327)—a suburban house close to the grammar school, with plenty of
Hindu neighbours. We could say that, like Israel Zangwill’s novel, Anita
and Me is a sentimental romance about the problems of Anglicization and
leaving the ghetto. But Meena’s ghetto, the ‘tiny, teeming and intimate
world’ (250) that she recalls so vividly, is that of the beleaguered white
rural working class.
The Enigma of Arrival has succeeded in living out a pastoral fantasy very
like Singh’s.41 The name of the Wiltshire village in which the narrator
resides, Waldenshaw (a reminiscence of Thoreau’s Walden), is an
obvious pastoral touch. One of the difficulties in referring to The Enigma
of Arrival as a pastoral, however, is its strongly autobiographical content.
The novel’s form recalls an earlier example of the fictional literary
memoir, George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)—
originally to have been titled ‘An Author at Grass’—but Naipaul, unlike
Gissing, actually lived in the setting he describes. For much of the time
it seems an excessive delicacy not to refer to the narrator as Naipaul,
although the book is labelled a novel on its title-page.
When Naipaul first moves into his cottage on a Wiltshire estate he
tends to read the landscape through literary spectacles, describing an
old labourer as a ‘Wordsworthian figure’ and the seasonal rhythms of
agriculture as being like a ‘Book of Hours’ (20). But these are naive
perceptions, and the self-conscious literariness of his vision recedes as
his intellectual and emotional intimacy with Waldenshaw grows. At a
deeper level, the indebtedness to literary modes of vision remains. The
Conradian idea of the ‘secret sharer’ underlies the affinities that the
solitary, reclusive narrator feels for the neighbours he observes with
such fascinated concentration: the garden-loving Jack, Pitton the
groundsman, Les and Brenda the unhappily married couple, and, above
all, the lord of the manor, a last decayed representative of the class of
imperial rulers.
The landlord and the colonial immigrant are opposites, but each is to
some extent the other’s creation, and, moreover, both Naipaul and his
landlord are writers of sorts. The landlord once had a reputation as a
promising poet. In middle age Naipaul represents artistic success and his
landlord artistic failure, so that the one travels the world on literary and
journalistic assignments while the other shuns all mental activity and
human contact, rarely stepping outside his mansion. One of the literary
precedents shadowing Naipaul’s characterization of his landlord is
Yeats’s poem ‘Ancestral Houses’, about the last days of the British
ascendancy in Ireland. Yeats (who is never quoted in The Enigma of
Arrival) contrasts the ‘Bitter and violent men’ who built the great estates
with their puny, contemptible successors:
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?42
Inward Migrations 403
The neglected and shrunken Waldenshaw estate also becomes the source
of the narrator’s childlike sensual delight, a setting for imaginative rebirth
as well as a symbol of post-imperial decrepitude.43
As he ponders the mystery of the manor and its landlord’s inactivity,
Naipaul turns to that central (if covert) obsession of traditional pastoral,
the presence of death in Arcadia. His landlord has perhaps ‘stalled in
what might be considered a state of perfection’ (254), and this may be
equated with what, taking the longest possible view of English history,
Naipaul calls the ‘plateau of historical light’ (50) stretching from the
Saxons to the present. The idea of a new impending English dark age is
written into the novel’s rural landscape, since Waldenshaw is close to
Amesbury, and ‘It was to a nunnery in Amesbury that Guinevere,
Arthur’s queen, the lover of Lancelot, had retired when the Round Table
had vanished from Camelot’ (50). But for the work of change—including
Naipaul’s own immigrant presence there—Waldenshaw might be a
place of refuge from impending barbarism as secluded and peaceful as
Guinevere’s nunnery.
For Naipaul, however, the immigrant rather than the slippered recluse
is a universal figure, an Everyman, as we see in his reflections on the
Giorgio de Chirico painting which gives the novel its title. Sometime in
the classical period a traveller arrives by ship at an unknown Medi-
terranean port. He disembarks and plunges into the streets:
The mission he had come on—family business, study, religious initiation—would
give him encounters and adventures. He would enter interiors, of houses and
temples. Gradually there would come to him a feeling that he was getting
nowhere; he would lose his sense of mission; he would begin to know only that he
was lost. His feeling of adventure would give way to panic.
Finally the traveller returns to the ‘quayside of arrival’, but the ship has
gone: ‘The traveller has lived out his life’ (92).
As it happens, this allegory of the ‘enigma of arrival’ strongly recalls
the plot of George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), an early novel
of immigration to Britain by a Trinidadian novelist whom Naipaul con-
sidered an inferior rival.44 The Emigrants begins with a ship arriving at a
strange port in the French Caribbean. The transit passengers disembark,
go into the town, and later rejoin their ship, which takes them to England.
Lamming’s account of their adventures in London conveys a strong sense of
the city’s strange and rather sinister interiors—those of an immigrant hostel,
a workshop, an unlicensed hairdressing saloon, an Englishman’s suburban
house, and so on. In the end, the characters’ sense of bewilderment is acute.
404 Inward Migrations
When Jack, the garden-lover (the term seems appropriate), knows that
he is dying, he drives to his favourite pub on Christmas Eve for a last,
determined public appearance. The narrator also describes the funeral
observances for his sister in Trinidad, so that the novel’s final section,
‘The Ceremony of Farewell’, balances the ‘enigma of arrival’. The book’s
dedication—‘In loving memory of my brother Shiva Naipaul’ (here at
least is the word ‘love’)—records a still more deeply felt loss: Shiva
Naipaul, a novelist and journalist living like his older brother in England,
died at the age of 40. Within this sombre perspective we can more fully
appreciate the narrator’s own joy at what he calls ‘this gift of the second
life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were’ (83), a rebirth
all the sweeter for being necessarily transient. Waldenshaw for him is the
happy valley, one of the traditional locations, together with the garden
and the island, of utopia or paradise. The ‘second chance’ he has found
there is a ‘miracle’ (96). It is in this countryside that Naipaul claims (in one
critic’s words) ‘to have come, eventually taken root, and in his own way
conquered’.49
Naipaul’s way is more than a highly individual writer’s eccentric
odyssey, although as a first-generation immigrant he cannot speak
directly for younger British-born writers. The Enigma of Arrival is his
version of the dialectic of assimilation, self-assertion, and hybrid inherit-
ance suggested by the following passage from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
(2000), in which a British Asian teenager records her fascination with a
middle-class white London family, the Chalfens:
She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness.
Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn ’t occur to her that the Chalfens were,
after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and
Poland, née Chalfenovsky) or that they might be as needy of her as she was of
them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English.50
I
n 2001 Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement was shortlisted for the
annual Booker Prize. Starting with an epigraph from Jane Austen
(‘Remember that we are English . . . ’) and a long episode portraying
a 1930s country-house party, it was the story of the childhood and youth
of an English novelist—a novelist, moreover, of the generation before
McEwan’s own. Atonement proceeds to evoke the retreat to Dunkirk in
1940 and the arrival of the casualties from Dunkirk at St Thomas’s
Hospital in London. Apart from a brief concluding section dated
‘London, 1999’, all the narrated events take place well before McEwan’s
own birth in 1948.1 Critics found nothing unusual in this degree of
retrospective vision. Historical reconstruction had become such a regular
feature of late twentieth-century English fiction that Atonement was not
generally classed as a historical novel.
With the exception of some little-understood foreigners encountered by
the British soldiers near Dunkirk, all McEwan’s characters are English.
Atonement was published at a time when self-consciously Anglocentric
fiction (including a number of novels with ‘England’ or ‘English’ in their
titles) was back in fashion. McEwan was concerned with class conflict
within his country-house society, and with the contrast between the
private world of upper-class manners and regimented mass institutions
such as the army and the hospital. Dunkirk and its aftermath were pre-
sented as a time of national crisis successfully surmounted by most of his
characters. One of Atonement’s few direct acknowledgements of the vast
social changes that took place subsequently was the bare information
that, in 1999, the country house of the opening section had been turned
into a hotel. Presumably it would have been staffed by members of
Britain’s recent immigrant population, but that was not one of the
novelist’s concerns.
Lamenting the death of the American novelist Saul Bellow in 2005,
McEwan wrote that ‘In Britain we no longer seem able to write across
Conclusion 407
literary self-consciousness means that your purpose ceases to be, say, just telling
your story as effectively as you can; it comes to include doing what other people
have decided you should be doing. A close and intricate relationship between
novelists and academics means that the novelists are writing for the academics,
not for anything as vulgar as fans. . . . the link with the readership is impaired.4
join Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s heroines once she starts making love to
Gerald—but she cannot entirely shake off the legacy of Maggie Tulliver
and Dorothea Brooke. As an adulteress, she tells herself, ‘you’ve joined
Anna and Emma and parted company for ever with Dorothea and
Maggie—although Dorothea would have understood—would she?’ In the
Eye of the Sun is not a novel of immigration, since after her doctorate
Asya returns to Egypt to teach literature to a new generation of students,
including Islamic fundamentalists whose declared motive is to learn
the ‘language of [the] enemy’.6 Soueif’s narrative spans the period of
decolonization in the Middle East including the Nasser regime, the Suez
invasion, the oil boom, and the Arab-Israeli wars. Asya’s mother was
originally inspired to study English literature by the sight of British
women volunteers driving lorries for the Eighth Army in Cairo during the
Second World War. That was a passing historical phase; so, we might
conclude, is the ‘postcolonial’ world which has brought about her
daughter’s deep love for the English novel and her self-identification with
its heroines.
The literariness of recent English fiction may also be a strictly tem-
porary phenomenon. For many writers and critics it is associated with
Postmodernism, an international style affecting all the arts which came
to dominate cultural theory and critique from about 1970 onwards.
But, although Postmodernism builds on the self-referentiality which is a
perennial aspect of artistic forms, the English novel has been affected by
specific local circumstances as national politics and the national economy
have undergone profound and continuing changes. The agricultural and
manufacturing base declined, the heritage and tourist industries grew
in importance, and fiction often seemed to reinforce an essentially
backward-looking national image. A novel like Atonement which revisits
the English country house and the events of May 1940 is to a certain
extent complicit in Patrick Wright’s description of ‘National Heritage’ as
‘the extraction of history—of the idea of historical significance and
potential—from a denigrated everyday life and its restaging or display in
certain sanctioned sites, events, images and conceptions’.7 Novelists,
however, are equally capable of satirizing the heritage industry, as Julian
Barnes does in England, England (1998) where an entrepreneur buys up
the Isle of Wight and converts it into ‘England’, a hugely successful tourist
theme park, while the rest of the country, now known as Albion, is left to
rot. Barnes’s satire does not make economic sense (as was shown, for
example, by the financial disaster of London’s vaunted Millennium Dome
in the year 2000) and so perhaps invites dismissal as a mere fantasy. But
410 Conclusion
there is a danger for the English novel—as Barnes, for one, was evidently
aware—in a self-conscious pursuit of Englishness that leads to the
spiritual evacuation of ordinary, everyday England.
In more recent essays A. S. Byatt has defined a second major strand in
modern English fiction, a strand that is metaphysical in its ambitions and
that draws on the whole of human history and geography in tales which
often specialize in ‘tricks of consciousness, dreams, illusions’. The authors
are ‘fabulists’ and their works, rather than dwelling on the English class
system or the decline of the British Empire, are ‘European fables’.8 The
novels that Byatt cites are often historical, with settings that include
medieval Italy, fifteenth-century Cairo, eighteenth-century Germany,
and elsewhere. They are ‘European’ in that they reflect the influence of
European writers such as Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Isak Dinesen,
Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, and others. But Byatt might equally have
mentioned the impact in Britain of Latin American ‘magic realism’ and of
Postmodernist fiction from the United States.
In the British context, what Byatt and others call fable or ‘fabulation’
might also be seen as a revival of the romance. The romance tradition
with its preference for the marvellous over the mundane is strongly
present in such post-Second World War English novelists as William
Golding, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and the later Doris Lessing.
Broadly interpreted, most successful modern romances are fables about
identity, some of which address issues of national identity. William
Golding’s early novels, for example, include two tales of castaways—
Lord of the Flies (1954) and Pincher Martin (1958)—and a prehistoric
romance, The Inheritors (1955). All three have been widely understood
and analysed as moral parables about universal human nature, with the
Englishness of Pincher Martin and the boys in Lord of the Flies being seen
as a major contributing factor. ‘Englishness’ here, though not always in
Golding’s later work, is an end-of-Empire phenomenon reflecting the
author’s own Royal Navy experience; it is, therefore, in sharp contrast
with the work of Byatt’s ‘European fabulists’ (including Angela Carter,
Penelope Fitzgerald, and Jeanette Winterson as well as Murdoch and
Spark) who may be seen as reflecting a new sense of post-imperial
national identity. The more recent novelists are writing in the context of
Britain’s membership of the European Union, a context which, if it does
not mean the erasure of national identity, certainly entails its possible
reduction to something like regional identity.
The revival of romance, and especially the recent popularity of
historical romance, might be dismissed as simple escapism. The critic
Conclusion 411
Jason Cowley wrote in a review of Byatt’s essays that the ‘retreat into
history’ is evidence of a ‘powerful loss of confidence in the fictional pos-
sibilities of England, particularly beyond the metropolis. One struggles to
think of a handful of novelists who bring urgent news of our contemporary
condition, in the way that Dickens must have done.’ (But—for all his
wealth of journalistic experience—Dickens in his own time was more often
seen as a fabulist than as a faithful reporter on contemporary conditions.)
Cowley concedes that one way of writing about the modern world is to
‘write about the present through the aspect of the past, so that the novel
becomes a kind of palimpsest’.9 Among modern novelists, Angela Carter
had a lifelong concern with rewriting the corpus of traditional folk tales
and fairy tales; this is seen at its purest in The Bloody Chamber (1979). Her
fiction continually returns to the contemporary, though in ways that are
wholly different from the world of newspaper reporting.
Where Cowley was undoubtedly right was in urging that novelists
should not lose sight of the ‘fictional possibilities of England’ and the
changing nature of English identity. The work of a number of recent
novelists, as well as historians and literary critics, points towards a much
more open and hospitable definition of national identity than was found,
for example, two or three generations ago in the writings of George
Orwell and J. B. Priestley. The novelist and critic Peter Ackroyd—who is
often seen as a conservative figure—acknowledges Ford Madox Ford as a
precursor in his sketch of Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
(2002). Ackroyd defines Englishness as ‘the principle of appropriation.
It relies upon constant immigration, of people or ideas or styles, in order
to survive.’10 A new style of historiography is exemplified by Norman
Davies in The Isles: A History (1999), a work whose very title bypasses the
genre of histories of ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ to which it nevertheless
belongs. Crudely summarized, Davies’s theme is both the construction of
a United Kingdom comprising the major part of what are sometimes
called ‘these islands’, and the losses (and, to a lesser extent, gains)
resulting from that kingdom’s severance from Europe. For Davies,
Britain’s severance from Europe was not an inevitable consequence of
geography or the national temperament, but—more or less—the chance
outcome of the Hundred Years War and the Reformation. Henry VIII’s
adoption of Protestantism as the English state religion, in Davies’s words,
‘cut England off from the cultural and intellectual community to which
she had belonged for nearly a thousand years; and it forced her to develop
along isolated, eccentric lines. The English have had little chance but to
take pride in their isolation and eccentricity.’11 Davies seems to believe
412 Conclusion
that the severance from Europe is almost over, with popular hostility to
the European Union constituting a last rearguard action on behalf of an
outdated national pride.
Davies is in full-scale reaction against the triumphalism of former
British imperialism, but in some respects The Isles perhaps falls short
of its best insights. Not only is ‘England’ in the above quotation still
resolutely female, but national development is implicitly presented as a
species of individual development leading to the emergence of a pro-
nounced national character: insular, eccentric, and full of pride. We need
to remember that Davies has suggested that this was largely accidental—
less a matter of inbuilt ‘character’ than the emergence and, in the end, the
conscious adoption of a particular identity. The Isles, unlike most
previous national histories, is at bottom a story of changing identities
rather than of the consolidation of the English character. In this book
I have argued that the movement from ‘character’ to ‘identity’ as a
framework for analysis reflects certain tendencies that had long been
present in the tradition of English fiction, including the work of novelists
who are well known for their commitment to the ideas of fictional
character and characterization.
Virginia Woolf, for example, vowed in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’ (1924) ‘never, never to desert Mrs Brown’, whom she imagined as
an ordinary old lady in a railway carriage and, therefore, as ‘the spirit we
live by, life itself’.12 It is only by sticking to Mrs Brown that writers,
apparently, can overcome the social stratification and compartmental-
ization that Woolf in her later essay ‘The Niece of an Earl’ (1932) saw as
typifying English society. For Woolf, the idea that ‘We are enclosed, and
separate, and cut off’ is a structural and sociological fact, which creates
the multi-textured social reality that novelists delight in:
We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off. Directly we see ourselves in the
looking-glass of fiction we know that this is so. The novelist, and the English
novelist in particular, knows and delights, it seems, to know that Society is a nest
of glass boxes one separate from another, each housing a group with special
habits and qualities of its own.13
American fiction.14 Woolf seems to have half hoped and half feared that
the advance of democracy would trample down all minor social distinc-
tions, rendering the ‘English novelist’ obsolete: ‘Novels may be written as
seldom and as unsuccessfully by our descendants as the poetic drama by
ourselves’ (219).
Woolf’s doubts about the immediate future of the English novel were
manifestly misplaced. At the same time, her reference to the ‘looking-glass
of fiction’ is a reminder that what we recognize when we look in a mirror
is identity, not character. The identities that she chose to highlight in her
1932 essay were already vanishing, yet it can be argued that her intuition
about English society as represented in the novel is still largely correct. It
is the contents of the ‘glass boxes’ that have changed, so that instead of the
subtle class divisions of Woolf’s world we now have ‘identity boxes’.
That is, they house the cultural, ethnic, regional, and gender identities of
the mixed and changing English population that is charted, most notably,
in the novel of immigration. The England of many recent novels is less a
network of different kinds of character (despite the continuing import-
ance of characterization in fiction) than a chequerwork of increasingly
deliberate and self-conscious identities. While many of the novels referred
to in Chapter 15 were essentially realistic reports bringing news of con-
temporary experience, the modes of romance and fable are equally able to
represent an England in which conflicts of identity and intricate problems
of self-recognition have become part of the social and cultural fabric.
Two recent novels by Marina Warner, Indigo, or Mapping the Waters
(1992) and The Leto Bundle (2001), offer an imaginatively reworked and
slightly askew version of English society as the backdrop for fables of
identity, colonial and postcolonial in the case of Indigo and international
and stateless (in the sense that modern refugees and asylum seekers are
perceived as stateless) in The Leto Bundle. In the former novel, the
imperial summer game is not cricket but ‘Flinders’, while in the latter
England has become, once again, ‘Albion’, and one of the protagonists sits
on a government committee in the newly created Department of Cultural
Identities. ‘ ‘‘Some of us are mongrels, yes. Some of us aren’t. Some of
those don’t wish to entertain the mongrelisation of the nation,’’ ’ Kim
McQuy tells his fellow committee members.15 Kim is the son of Leto,
an adopted child from a war-torn part of the world who is also the
age-old goddess of migrants and an outcast member of the classical
mythological pantheon. Her arrival on the shores of Albion joins
universal history to the strictly contemporary. Warner is a student of
mythology and an intellectual commentator whose use of the term
414 Conclusion
Introduction
1. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory
and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978), 35–91.
2. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 130.
3. Florence Noiville, ‘Jonathan Coe, l ’homme-orchestre’, Le Monde (23 July
2004), p. viii: ‘Que les ‘‘anglo-addicts’’ se rassurent. Le roman ‘‘made in
England’’—une appelation originale aussi authentique que le Pim ’s ou le
Stilton—ne s’est jamais, lui, aussi bien porté’ [‘ ‘‘Anglo-addicts’’ should take
heart. The novel ‘‘made in England’’—a label of origin as unmistakable as
Pimm’s or Stilton—is stronger than ever’].
4. Henry James, Letters, vol. iii: 1883–1895, ed. Leon Edel (London: Macmillan,
1981), 244; Milan Kundera, ‘Wisdom of Being’, Guardian, 27 January
1994, ii. 8.
5. Quoted in Ulick O’Connor, ed., The Joyce We Knew (Cork: Mercier, 1967), 97.
6. Cf. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in
England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1.
7. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1998),
394.
8. Margaret Drabble, The Ice Age (New York: Popular Library, 1977), 15.
9. See Esty, A Shrinking Island, passim.
10. See e.g. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character
1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
11. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 10.
12. Ibid. 26.
13. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14. Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999), 28.
15. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1992); and Gerald Newman, The Rise of
English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld,
1987).
25. Sir Walter Scott, The Lives of the Novelists (London: Dent, and New York:
Dutton, 1910), 385.
26. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984),
16–22, esp. 20.
27. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ in Political Essays, ed. Knud
Haakansson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78.
28. Perry Anderson, ‘Nation-States and National Identity’, London Review of
Books 13: 9 (9 May 1991), 7.
29. See e.g. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character
1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.
30. Anderson, ‘Nation-States’, 7.
31. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, World ’s Classics edn.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 157.
32. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed.
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1997), 36.
33. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, 85–6.
34. Langford, Englishness Identified, 300–1.
35. Anderson, ‘Nation-States’, 7.
36. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 4, 71.
37. Anderson, ‘Nation-States’, 8.
38. John Stuart Mill, ‘Representative Government’ (1861), in Utilitarianism,
On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, Remarks on
Bentham ’s Philosophy, ed. Geraint Williams (London: Dent, and North
Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle, 1993), 391, 395.
39. Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: or Thoughts on the Application of the
Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society, 6th
edn. (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), esp. 37, 100, 147.
40. Ibid. 21.
41. Ibid. 40, 150.
42. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Arthur Humphreys, rev.
edn. (London: Dent, and North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle, 1993), 47, 218.
43. The phrase was used by a contemporary German critic of Fanny Burney ’s
fiction; Langford, Englishness Identified, 10.
44. Scott, The Lives of the Novelists, 46.
45. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the
British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), passim. The
term ‘national allegory’ is specifically associated with the cultural theory of
Fredric Jameson. See e.g. his Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the
Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 87–104.
46. Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction
(London and Chicago: Pluto, 1997), 20. Smyth is explicating Jameson ’s
notion of national allegory.
47. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (London: Macmillan, 1909), 3. Subsequent page
references in text.
48. Woolf, ‘The Niece of an Earl’, 214–15, 216.
49. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. Charles L. Ross (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), 108–9.
418 Notes to Pages 29–36
44. Wilton House was the home of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, sister
of Sir Philip Sidney and niece to the Earl of Leicester. By naming his scabrous
page Wilton, Nashe seems to express his hostility to Herbert and her literary
circle. Robinson Crusoe is, as Defoe ’s character explains, Anglo-German,
and Crusoe almost rhymes with Defoe. Moreover, Defoe plays on the
association between Crusoe and crusade, as will be seen in Ch. 3.
45. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European
Culture (London: Verso, 1987), esp. 185–6, 213–14.
46. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim ’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965), 362. Subsequent page references in text.
47. According to Leopold Damrosch, Jr., his name represents human free will,
‘fickle’ but ‘active and powerful’, and he changes sides during the conflict. See
Damrosch, God ’s Plot and Man ’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagina-
tion from Milton to Fielding (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 142, 146.
48. Bunyan, The Holy War, 256 n.
49. Damrosch, God ’s Plot and Man ’s Stories, 143, 149.
50. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 93. Subsequent page references in text.
51. There is a Valley of the Shadow of Death in both books. The ‘land of
Darkness’ in The Holy War (227) might be identified with Darkland in The
Pilgrim ’s Progress (350).
52. See Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century
Controversies (London: Penguin, 1997), 39–40.
53. William III ’s census found that in England in the 1690s there were only
108,000 male Nonconformists as against nearly 2.5 million Anglicans. Ernest
Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (London:
Methuen, 1927), 202.
8. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Being the Second
and Last Part of his Life, ed. George A. Aitken (London: Dent, 1895), 319.
Subsequent page references in text.
9. Daniel Defoe, The Life of Captain Singleton (London: Dent, 1906), 6.
Subsequent page references in text.
10. Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 125. Subsequent page references in text.
11. See e.g. Defoe’s Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1938), 14, 167. Quoted in David Trotter, Circulation:
Defoe, Dickens, and the Economies of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1988), 4.
12. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (Gloucester: Sutton, 1987),
212. Subsequent page references in text.
13. Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator, in Henry Morley, ed., The Earlier Life and
Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe (London: Routledge, 1889), 298.
14. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed.
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1997), 30, 36. Subsequent
page references in text.
15. Daniel Defoe, ‘Explanatory Preface’ to The True-Born Englishman in The
Shortest Way With the Dissenters and Other Pamphlets (Oxford: Blackwell,
1927), 23.
16. Ibid. 24.
17. Britannia ’s Song properly consists of lines 893–956 of the current Penguin
text edited by Furbank and Owens, which however omits to begin a new
paragraph when Satire resumes at line 957.
18. Daniel Defoe, The Original Power of the Collective Body of the people of
England, in The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, 92. Subsequent
page references in text.
19. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures
of Robinson Crusoe, With his Vision of the Angelic World, ed. George A.
Aitken (London: Dent, 1895), p. ix. Subsequent page references in text. This
is the third volume in the Robinson Crusoe ‘trilogy’, following the Life and
Surprising Adventures—the Robinson Crusoe that everyone knows—and the
Farther Adventures.
20. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton,
1930), 236.
21. Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 260.
22. Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable
Colonel Jack (London: Folio Society, 1967), 317.
23. See e.g. Alan Downie, ‘Robinson Crusoe ’s Eighteenth-Century Contexts’,
in Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson, eds., Robinson Crusoe: Myths and
Metamorphoses (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), 20.
24. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism,
ed. Michael Shinagel, 2nd edn. (New York and London: Norton, 1994), 31.
Subsequent page references in text.
Notes to Pages 71–79 423
25. See David Fausett, The Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe
(Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1994), 167.
26. Cf. ibid.
27. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Anthony Burgess and
Christopher Bristow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 119, 249. Subsequent
page references in text.
28. Martin Green notes that ‘Defoe or his characters disguise themselves as
Quakers, in costume or dialect; but they also clearly regard Quakerism as the
purest of moral positions’. Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire
(London and Henley: Routledge, 1980), 87.
29. A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969),
131; Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, in Robinson Crusoe, ed.
Shinagel, 299.
30. For a relevant discussion see Michael Seidel, ‘Crusoe’s Island Exile’, in Richard
Kroll, ed., The English Novel, vol. i: 1700 to Fielding (London and New York:
Longman, 1998), esp. 197. Seidel implies that, through his absence from
England, Crusoe is able to sustain the capitalist and expansionist ideals of the
Commonwealth.
31. Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England 1650–1820 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 220. For a comparable argument see Tom Paulin,
‘Fugitive Crusoe’, London Review of Books 23: 14 (19 July 2001), 15–20.
32. Walter Raleigh, The English Novel: A Short Sketch . . . , 5th edn. (London:
Murray, 1911), 133. Cf. James Joyce, ‘Daniel Defoe’, in Robinson Crusoe, ed.
Shinagel, 323.
33. Leslie Stephen, ‘Defoe ’s Novels’ (1868), in Pat Rogers, ed., Daniel Defoe: The
Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1972), 176.
34. Ibid. 177.
35. Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, 36.
36. Coleridge ’s marginalia quoted in Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage, 85.
37. Cited in Harvey Swados, ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Man Alone’, in Daniel
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Signet edn. (New York: New American Library,
1961), 307–8.
38. Louis James, ‘Unwrapping Crusoe: Retrospective and Prospective Views’,
in Spaas and Stimpson, eds., Robinson Crusoe, 6–7.
39. Samar Attar, ‘Serving God or Mammon?’, ibid. 91–2.
40. Quoted in Swados, ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Man Alone’, 312.
41. Ibid. 307.
42. Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and
‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 154, 162.
43. Trotter, Circulation, 37.
44. This point is made by Sara Sancini, ‘The Island as Social Experiment’,
in Marialuisa Bignami, ed., Wrestling with Defoe: Approaches from a
Workshop on Defoe’s Prose (Milan: Cisalpino, 1997), 40.
45. Cf. Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, 296: ‘For Crusoe hard work
seems to be a condition of life itself, and we notice that the arrival of Friday is
a signal, not for increased leisure, but for expanded production.’
424 Notes to Pages 82–86
22. The Princess Cloria: or, The Royal Romance . . . Written by a Person of
Honour (London: Wood, 1661), ‘To the Reader’.
23. ‘The Double Marriage: or, the Fatal Release. A True Secret History’, in Eliza
Haywood, Three Novellas, ed. Earla A. Wilputte (East Lansing, Mich.:
Colleagues, 1995), 105–41.
24. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd
(London: Penguin, 1992), 140. Subsequent page references in text.
25. See S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Plymouth: Northcote, 1996), 85; and Janet
Todd, ‘Introduction’ to Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, 19.
26. S. J. Wiseman argues that the plays ‘increasingly invite the audience to take
pleasure in the staged defeat of republicanism’, a defeat expressed largely
in terms of sexual humiliation and which indicates the ‘powerful frisson’
that the fascinating but repellent Puritan cause held for Behn and her
contemporaries. Wiseman, Aphra Behn, 45.
27. See Ch. 1, n. 2 above.
28. Colonel Newport, born in 1623, was too young to have won his spurs in the
Swedish Army, as Defoe ’s narrator does before returning to England in 1635.
See Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (London:
Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. vii–viii. Subsequent page references
in text.
29. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
ed. Michael Holquist, (Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 1981), 13.
30. Paul Hunter, quoted in Homer Obed Brown, ‘Tom Jones: The ‘‘Bastard’’ of
History’, Boundary 2 7: 2 (1979), 210.
31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 257.
32. Quoted in Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The
Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 24.
33. Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution
(London: Routledge, 1954), 199.
34. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, revised edn.
(New York: New American Library, 1965), 362. Subsequent page references
in text.
35. See Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, 148–9, 198–9, 274.
36. Mary Astell ’s work is discussed in relation to Richardson in Jocelyn Harris,
Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18.
37. On dramatic metaphors see ibid.
38. Congreve ’s The Way of the World (1700), for example, has been described as
a displaced representation of the Whig interpretation of the fall of the Stuarts;
see Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body
Politic in English Literature, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 213.
39. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (London:
Virago, 1987), 3.
40. William Congreve, The Way of the World, in Restoration Plays, Everyman ’s
Library edn. (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1968), 180.
426 Notes to Pages 93–100
41. Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1964), 85–6.
42. Samuel Richardson, title-page to Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas
Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1; and
Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (London: Routledge,
1928), p. 187.
43. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, vol. ii, Everyman’s Library edn. (London: Dent,
and New York: Dutton, 1914), 458. Subsequent page references in text as ‘P2’.
44. Brian W. Downs, Richardson (London: Routledge, and New York: Dutton,
1928), 159. Clorana contains characters called Clarissa and Clementina, so
that it may be a source for the names of two of Richardson ’s four heroines.
45. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, 4 vols., Everyman ’s Library edn. (London:
Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1932), i. 23. Subsequent page references
in text.
46. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn
Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), ii. 199. Subsequent
page references in text.
47. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 82. Subsequent page references in text.
48. For an interpretation of Sir Charles Grandison as national allegory reflecting
Richardson ’s Anglican and anti-Catholic bias see Ewha Chung, Samuel
Richardson ’s New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and ‘Native’
Virtue (New York: Lang, 1998), passim.
49. Margaret A. Doody, ‘Introduction’, in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, ed.
Sabor, 9.
50. On this point see Michael Austin, ‘Lincolnshire Babylon: Competing
Typologies in Pamela ’s 137th Psalm’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12: 4
(2000), 501–14.
51. Thomas Keymer, ‘Introduction’ to Pamela, ed. Keymer and Wakely,
pp. x–xi, xix–xx.
52. Henry Fielding, The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 13, 23, 31.
53. In Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding ’s Plays and Novels
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 162, Jill Campbell argues that
Fielding ’s portrayal of the King ’s army as ‘unruly, inchoate, and divided’
implies that there is little to choose between the two sides. But there is no
suggestion in Tom Jones that the King ’s cause is not just.
54. Thomas Cleary draws attention to the allusions to the War of Austrian
Succession early and late in the novel, and concludes that its reference to the
’45 must result from a hasty, last-minute revision of the book ’s central
chapters. But the War of Austrian Succession had ended in 1748, the year
before Tom Jones was published, and it seems equally possible that it was
the early and late parts of the novel that were updated. We do not know
whether the sub-theme of the ’45 was belatedly added or whether material on
the rebellion was actually removed from the story. See Thomas Cleary,
‘Jacobitism in Tom Jones: The Basis for an Hypothesis’, Philological
Quarterly 52: 2 (1973), 239–51, esp. 239, 241.
Notes to Pages 100–108 427
55. See Martin C. Battestin, ‘Tom Jones and ‘‘His Egyptian Majesty’’: Fielding ’s
Parable of Government’, PMLA 82: 1 (1967), 68–77.
56. Peter J. Carlton, however, argues that Tom ’s and Sophia ’s marriage repres-
ents the ‘reconciliation of England ’s Stuart past with her Whig-Hanoverian
present’. See ‘Tom Jones and the ’45 Once Again’, Studies in the Novel 20: 4
(1988), 371.
57. See John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–80: An Equal, Wide
Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 199–200.
58. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,
ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 447. Subsequent page
references in text.
59. Graham Petrie notes that Slop is a caricature of Dr John Burton, who was
imprisoned during the 1745 rebellion at the instigation of Sterne ’s rigorously
anti-Catholic uncle. See Tristram Shandy, 626 n.
60. Samuel Johnson, ‘The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers’, in Johnson:
Prose and Poetry, ed. Mona Wilson (London: Hart-Davis, 1963), 627. An
early text praising the bravery of English soldiers is Richard Hawkins ’s A
Discourse on the National Excellencies of England (1658). See Peter Furtado,
‘National Pride in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Raphael Samuel, ed.,
Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol i:
History and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 48.
61. T. Smollett, The History of England from the Restoration to the Death of
George the Second, iv. 475.
62. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 109.
63. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969), 523. Subsequent page references in text.
64. Cf. Loraine Fletcher, ‘Four Jacobin Women Novelists’, in John Lucas, ed.,
Writing and Radicalism (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 123.
65. See Jacqueline M. Labbe, ‘Metaphoricity and the Romance of Property in
The Old Manor House’, Novel 34: 2 (2001), 216–31.
5. See Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in
the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), esp. 4.
6. Smollett, The History of England, v. 381–2.
7. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Everyman edn., 2 vols. (London:
Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1931), ii. 51.
8. Christopher Hill, ‘Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times’, in Puritanism and
Revolution (London: Panther, 1968), esp. 351–5.
9. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, 4 vols., Everyman edn. (London: Dent, and
New York: Dutton, 1932), i. 33. Subsequent page references in text.
10. Among the critics who have commentated on Richardson ’s naming are
Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Richardson ’s Politics’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
2: 2 (1990), 121–4. Carol Kay considers that James Harlowe ’s name implies
an association with Stuart tyranny: Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe,
Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume and Burke (Ithaca,
NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 167. Paul J. Korshin, by
contrast, sees Clarissa and Lovelace as theological ‘type names’—Clarissa is
‘the superlative of perfection’, while Lovelace means ‘bereft of the love of
God’: Korshin, Typologies in England 1650–1820 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 246.
11. Tom Keymer, Richardson ’s ‘Clarissa’ and the Eighteenth-Century Reader
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 157.
12. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn
Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), i. 84. Subsequent
page references in text.
13. Kay, Political Constructions, 170.
14. Quoted in Keymer, Richardson ’s ‘Clarissa’, 119.
15. Recent criticism of Clarissa has largely avoided discussing this episode.
According to Terry Eagleton, for example, Lovelace is a ‘reactionary
throwback, an old-style libertine or Restoration relic’, and the ‘mechanism of
his downfall’ shows the ‘triumph of bourgeois patriarchy’. In that case
Richardson should not have found it necessary to fall back on the reactionary
aristocratic code to ensure Lovelace ’s punishment. Eagleton, The Rape of
Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 76.
16. Korshin, Typologies in England, 245.
17. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 43.
18. Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan
Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 201.
19. I. A. Richards, Beyond (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1974), 48.
20. Battestin, The Providence of Wit, 199, 208.
21. Nevertheless the divine justice which Clarissa may expect is expressed by
Lovelace’s friend Belford in terms of an earthly metaphor. Warning that ‘thou
wilt certainly meet thy punishment . . . as she will her reward, HEREAFTER’,
he adds, ‘It must be so, if there really be such a thing as future remuneration’
(iii. 456).
22. See Hill, ‘Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times’, 364.
Notes to Pages 115–123 429
23. See Korshin, Typologies in England, 250 n. A number of critics have analysed
the role of the Job story in the plot of Clarissa. Lovelace, as Lois E. Bueler
observes, explicitly identifies with Satan and pretends that his testing of
the heroine ’s virtue is actually in her own interest; Bueler, Clarissa ’s ’ Plots
(Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated
University Presses, 1994), 55–6. Both the Harlowes and Anna Howe (who
urges Clarissa to enter into a marriage of expediency with Lovelace after the
rape) can be regarded as false comforters; see ibid. 67, and Tom Keymer,
‘Richardson ’s Meditations: Clarissa ’s Clarissa’, in Margaret Anne Doody
and Peter Sabor, eds., Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 98–9.
24. Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering, 230; Robert A. Erickson, ‘ ‘‘Written in the
Heart’’: Clarissa and Scripture’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2: 1 (1989), 41.
25. Keymer, Richardson ’s ‘Clarissa’, 212; Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering, 112.
26. Korshin, Typologies in England, 249.
27. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution
(London: Allen Lane, 1993), 262.
28. Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering, 230.
29. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton,
1930), 236.
30. Cited in Battestin, The Providence of Wit, 209.
31. Henry Fielding, Amelia, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 3. Subsequent page
references in text.
32. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 334, 415.
33. Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Extracted from her own
Journal, and now first published (London and New York: Pandora, 1987),
429. Subsequent page references in text.
34. Henry Fielding, Amelia, Everyman edn., 2 vols. (London and Toronto: Dent,
and New York: Dutton, 1930), i, p. xv.
35. On the implausibility of the novel ’s denouement see Patricia Meyer Spacks,
Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), esp. 281,
285–6.
36. Brian McCrea comments on the improbability of this scene, though doubtless
in Fielding ’s experience the necessity of kowtowing before the great was all
too familiar. McCrea also remarks of Amelia that ‘her virtue is lame because
Fielding will not permit it to combat the vice it encounters’. See McCrea,
Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Athens,
Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 186–7.
37. Ibid. 187.
38. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary
Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. xxxi. Subsequent page
references in text.
39. Lucius Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius, otherwise known as the
Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 214.
430 Notes to Pages 123–129
40. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, Everyman edn. (London: Dent,
and New York: Dutton, 1962), 56. Subsequent page references in text.
41. The fact that the Vicar ’s father was killed with Lord Falkland at the Battle
of Newbury in 1643 means that Goldsmith ’s novel is set very early in the
eighteenth century, at least fifty or sixty years before its publication date.
Primrose is a contemporary of the controversialist William Whiston
(1667–1752), some of whose opinions he shares.
42. For other accounts of Goldsmith ’s use of Job in The Vicar of Wakefield see
Battestin, The Providence of Wit, esp. 198–9, 214; Korshin, Typologies in
England, esp. 256; and Ronald J. Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-
Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967),
270–4.
43. See Frank Morley, Literary Britain: A Reader ’s Guide to Writers and
Landmarks (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 390–1.
11. Johnson, General History, 1. The Newgate Calendar first published in five
volumes in 1773 was a collation of Smith, Johnson, and some later pub-
lications. See J. L. Rayner and G. T. Crook, eds., The Complete Newgate
Calendar, 5 vols. (London: Navarre Society, 1926).
12. John Gay, The Beggar ’s Opera, in John Hampden, ed., The Beggar ’s Opera
and Other Eighteenth-Century Plays (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton,
1964), 127, 158.
13. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988),
73, p. lv (where the editor cites the Whitehall Evening-Post, 3–6 February
1750). For an exploration of Fielding ’s complex attitudes to crime see also
Ian A. Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan England (London and
New York: Routledge, 1991), esp. 183–9.
14. Defoe in An Essay upon Projects advocates provincial banking and the
improvement of the road system. His pamphlet Street-Robberies Consider ’d
(1728) advises people not to carry too much money around with them; see
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the
Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 211–12. Fielding wrote that
the ‘Wandering’ of the poor was one cause of the ‘Increase of Robbers’.
Another reason for his somewhat alarmist view of the problem in 1751 was
that, three years earlier, 54,000 men had been discharged from the army and
navy after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Fielding, Enquiry, 75 n., 138.
15. Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal
Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178.
16. The highwayman ’s traditional show of gallantry towards his wealthy victims
may be related to the fact that only the rich were likely to initiate the private
prosecution needed to bring a thief to trial. See Hay, ‘Property, Authority and
the Criminal Law’, 41–2.
17. Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His
Friend Mr Abraham Adams, Signet edn. (New York: New American Library,
1960), 326. Subsequent page references in text.
18. Henry Fielding, The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the
Great, World ’s Classics edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 133.
Subsequent page references in text.
19. For the real-life Tom Jones see Captain Alexander Smith, A Complete
History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen,
Footpads, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes, ed. Arthur L. Hayward
(London: Routledge, 1926), 177–80.
20. The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey, Shakespeare Association Facsimiles
10 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935) (unnumbered pages). Ratsey also
makes use of the classic phrase ‘Stand and deliver’.
21. Smith, Complete History, 44.
22. See Joan Parkes, Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (London:
Oxford University Press, 1925), 154.
23. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Great Rebellion, ed.
Roger Lockyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 456.
432 Notes to Pages 135–138
24. For Howard, see Johnson, General History, 160; for Cottington see Smith,
Complete History, 325. Other Royalist highwaymen whose reputations
survived into the eighteenth century include Nevison, Hind, Stafford, Frith,
and Gilder-Roy. On the targeting of Cromwell Captain Johnson comments
that ‘the Writers of that Time . . . have probably made this Usurper and his
Friends to be serv ’d in this Manner much oftener than they really were’ (311).
25. See for example Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His
Sister (London: Virago, 1987), 438: ‘ ‘‘you have attacked me on the King ’s
high-way, and have robbed me of a heart.’’ ’
26. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1985), 165, 337.
27. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn
Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), i. 197.
28. See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the
English Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
104–5.
29. According to Terry Castle in her study of this topic, the masquerade offers
the ‘image of an ecstatic anti-society’ pervaded by a ‘World-Upside-Down
ambience’ and threatening to undermine the dominant narrative ideology.
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-
Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), esp. 92–3,
106, 120–1.
30. Ibid. 31, citing the Gentleman ’s Magazine of 1753. The culprits appeared
before Justice Fielding.
31. Rt. Hon. Lord Lytton, Paul Clifford, Stevenage edn. (London: Routledge,
n.d.), 217.
32. See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, esp. 184–9, for evidence that the
highwaymen of the late 1730s were mostly unemployed tradesmen. By con-
trast, a number of the earlier figures celebrated in the criminal biographies
were university graduates and/or younger sons of the gentry.
33. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 123–5. See also Frederick
R. Karl, A Reader ’s Guide to the Development of the English Novel in the
Eighteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), 48–9.
34. Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, 18, 53.
35. Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit
1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 8.
36. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders,
ed. G. A. Starr, World ’s Classics edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981), 280, 301.
37. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983), 97.
38. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Louis M. Knapp
and Paul Gabriel Boucé (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1984), 150. Subsequent page references in text.
39. Fielding, Enquiry, 136.
40. Gay, Beggar ’s Opera, 127.
Notes to Pages 138–143 433
61. Cf. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 119.
62. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 199.
63. Rt. Hon. B. Disraeli, Alroy. Ixion in Heaven. The Infernal Marriage.
Popanilla, new edn. (London: Longmans, n.d.), 141.
19. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Everyman edn. (London: Dent, and
New York: Dutton, 1960), 205. Subsequent page references in text.
20. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir, 54.
21. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, 156. This Lord Middleton was
unrelated to John Middleton, the seventeenth-century cavalry commander
who joined the Royalists and was ennobled by Charles II.
22. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969), 76, 223. Subsequent page references in text.
23. See Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56.
24. Ibid. 89.
25. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’,155.
26. Cf. Johnson, Jane Austen, 165.
27. The phrase ‘the same interest’ has been strangely misunderstood by some of
Mansfield Park’s editors, including Tony Tanner (458); its normal application
is to party politics. See Igor Webb’s discussion of Mansfield Park in From
Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca,
NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), esp. 102–4.
28. See Miles, Jane Austen, 98.
29. See Webb, From Custom to Capital, 104.
30. Loraine Fletcher points out that Henry and Mary Crawford ‘are never
allowed to argue a sceptical point of view in religion or politics, though to
speak and act as they do, they would have to have one’. Fanny blames Mary ’s
frivolous impiety on her upbringing. Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A
Critical Biography (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), 313.
31. See Ann Banfield, ‘The Influence of Place: Jane Austen and the Novel of
Social Consciousness’, in David Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social
Context (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), 44; and Claudia Johnson, Jane
Austen, 119.
32. For a general discussion of Austen’s fictional use of the Deadly Sins see
Donald Greene, ‘Jane Austen’s Monsters’, in John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen:
Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 262–78.
33. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 231, 231 n.
34. Sugar prices plummeted in 1807, for example, at the time when the slave
trade was outlawed. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The
Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 177.
35. Shinobu Minma, ‘Self-Deception and Superiority Complex: Derangement
of Hierarchy in Jane Austen ’s Emma’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14: 1
(October 2001), 62.
36. See Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966), 32.
37. Boswell ’s Life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 188.
38. Terry Eagleton, ‘Class, Power and Charlotte Brontë’, in Gates, ed., Critical
Essays on Charlotte Brontë, 54.
39. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1966) 294. Subsequent page references in text.
Notes to Pages 203–213 439
40. For discussion of these issues see Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The
Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), esp. 45–7.
41. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Women, ed. Gary
Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 159.
42. On the complexity of Jane ’s childhood self-identifications see Cora Kaplan,
‘ ‘‘A Heterogeneous Thing’’: Female Childhood and the Rise of Racial
Thinking in Victorian Britain’, in Diana Fuss, ed., Human, All Too Human
(New York and London: Routledge, 1996), esp. 181–8.
43. Chapter 1 of Jane Eyre incorporates verbatim quotations from Bewick. See
Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds, vol. ii: Water Birds (Newcastle,
1804), p. xii.
44. Kathleen Tillotson writes that ‘though everyone thinks of Jane Eyre as
a Yorkshire novel, no district is specified and the name Yorkshire never
appears.’ Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1961), 90. We do know that the Gytrash is a ‘north-of-England
spirit’ (143) and that Jane hears about it from Bessie, a native of Gateshead,
which is presumably in the north. Lowood and Whitcross are cold, hilly,
Pennine regions; Leeds and Sheffield seem to lurk behind the large towns of
‘L——’ between Lowood and Gateshead, and ‘S——’ close to Whitcross; but
the distances between these places and Thornfield mean that England north
of the Trent is simply not large enough to contain them all.
45. Cf. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 46.
46. Cf. Enid L. Duthie, The Foreign Vision of Charlotte Brontë (London and
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), 128–30. We are told that after their marriage
Jane does travel, presumably with Rochester, to France and Germany.
47. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (London: Hamish Hamilton, and New York:
Pantheon, 1951), 87. Subsequent page references in text.
48. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Smith, Elder,
1889), 23.
49. Blair Worden suggests that Thornton ’s ‘iron’ and ‘rough’ figure, bent on
‘ ‘‘justice’’ and a ‘‘wise despotism’’ ’, is modelled on Thomas Carlyle ’s heroic
view of the Protector in Oliver Cromwell ’s Letters and Speeches (1845).
Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions
of Posterity (London: Penguin, 2001), 286.
50. Cited by Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis
(London: Elek, 1975), 114.
51. Gaskell ’s biographer A. B. Hopkins, quoted by Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The
Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 53 n.
25. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London: Panther, 1964), 333.
Subsequent page references in text.
26. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 60.
Subsequent page references in text.
27. Besant and Rice, Sir Richard Whittington, 87.
28. Charles Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale,
Retail and for Exportation (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 135.
Subsequent page references in text.
29. Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance, 51.
30. Based on a letter of Dickens to John Forster (July 1846). See Gissing, Charles
Dickens, 78.
31. David Piper, The Companion Guide to London (London: Fontana,
1970), 386.
32. Numerous critics have written on Dickens ’s uses of the labyrinth topos. See
e.g. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); and Richard Maxwell, The Mys-
teries of Paris and London (Charlottesville, Va., and London: University
Press of Virginia, 1992), both passim.
33. George Augustus Sala, Charles Dickens (London: Routledge, [1870]), 27.
34. See e.g. John Lucas, Charles Dickens: The Major Novels (London: Penguin,
1972), 99; and James Buzard, ‘ ‘‘Anywhere ’s Nowhere’’: Bleak House as
Autoethnography’, Yale Journal of Criticism 12: 1 (1999), 30–4.
12. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Mark Lilly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979),
73, 341. Subsequent page references in text.
13. Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and The Absentee, Everyman edn. (London:
Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1910), 88.
14. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan, Norton Critical edn.
(New York and London: Norton, 2002), 52.
15. Ford Madox Hueffer, The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English
Mind (London: Alston Rivers, 1907), 148–50.
16. Harriet Martineau, review of Villette (1853) in Barbara Timm Gates, ed.,
Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë (Boston: Hall, 1990), 254.
17. Susan Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, in
Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century
Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press, 1995), 160.
18. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, ed. Sir Frank Kermode (London:
Penguin, 1994), 414. Subsequent page references in text.
19. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1967), 101. Subsequent page references in text.
20. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18.
21. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988),
esp. 178, 182.
22. ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’ [1876], in Henry James, Selected Literary
Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (London: Heinemann, 1963), 36–7, 46.
23. Henry James, The Ambassadors (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 5.
24. Henry James, ‘Preface’ (1909) to The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek
Brewer (London: Penguin, 1987), 33. Subsequent page references in the text
are to this edition.
25. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 23, 33.
Subsequent page references in text.
26. Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Three Short Novels (New York:
Bantam, 1960), 4.
27. George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life: Riehl’, in Works, xii.
490–1. Subsequent page references in text.
28. See Patrick Parrinder, ‘The Look of Sympathy: Communication and Moral
Purpose in the Realistic Novel’, Novel 5 (1972), 135–47.
29. George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Valentine Cunningham, World ’s Classics edn.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 136. Subsequent page references
in text.
30. Stephen, ‘George Eliot’, 142.
31. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ‘Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary
Barton, and Felix Holt’, Novel, 18: 2 (1985), 140.
32. Cf. Martin J. Svaglic, ‘Religion in the Novels of George Eliot’, in Haight, ed.,
A Century of George Eliot Criticism, 291–2.
33. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London:
Macmillan, 1962), 278.
34. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. David Lodge (London: Macmillan,
1974), 38. Subsequent page references in text.
35. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d ’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1968), 41.
Subsequent page references in text.
36. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Derwent May (London:
Macmillan, 1974), 37–8. Subsequent page references in text.
37. Florence Emily Hardy, Life, 61.
38. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Alan Monford, World ’s Classics
edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8.
39. Book v, chapter 1 of The Return of the Native, describing Clym ’s despair
after his mother ’s death, is titled ‘ ‘‘Wherefore is Light given to him that is in
Misery?’’ ’ (Job 3: 20).
40. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Macmillan,
1974), 97. Subsequent page references in text.
41. Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-
Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 318.
42. See ibid. 295, 321.
43. The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Edited by his friend Reuben
Shapcott (London: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d.), 19.
44. Mark Rutherford, The Revolution in Tanner ’s Lane (London: Cape, 1927),
37. Subsequent page references in text.
45. Morley Roberts, ed., The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 2nd edn. (London:
Eveleigh Nash, 1923), 112–13.
46. George Gissing, The Unclassed (London: Benn, 1930), 41. Subsequent page
references in text.
47. George Gissing, Born in Exile (London: Nelson, n.d.), 266. Subsequent page
references in text.
48. Unsigned review of Born in Exile in The Times, 1 July 1892, in Pierre
Coustillas and Colin Partridge, eds., Gissing: The Critical Heritage (London
and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 204.
49. Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
235. Subsequent page references in text.
Notes to Pages 289–296 445
20. Ford Madox Hueffer, The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive
Record (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1900), 20.
21. Hueffer, The Spirit of the People, 71.
22. Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
163–4, 191.
23. E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest and England ’s Pleasant Land, ed. Elizabeth
Heine (London: Deutsch, 1996), 399.
24. E. M. Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’, in Abinger Harvest and
England ’s Pleasant Land, 4–5.
25. Martin Green, The English Novel in the Twentieth Century [The Doom
of Empire] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 56. Forster himself,
however, happily spent the last two decades of his life in what was then the
all-male institution of King ’s College, Cambridge.
26. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London:
Penguin, 2001), 113. Subsequent page references in text.
27. George Meredith, Beauchamp ’s Career (London: Chapman & Hall, 1894),
506. Subsequent page references in text.
28. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a
Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), 2 vols. (London: Gollancz and Cresset
Press, 1966), ii. 495.
29. John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
85. Subsequent page references in text.
30. See Len Platt, Aristocracies of Fiction, 53.
31. Forster, Abinger Harvest and England ’s Pleasant Land, 349.
32. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005),
16. Subsequent page references in text.
33. See Bryan Cheyette, ‘Introduction’ to Tono-Bungay, ed. Cheyette (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. xxxi–xxxiv. Cheyette also discusses
Wells’s ‘use of the language of socialist anti-Semitism’ and observes that
George’s uncle is ‘named after the reigning monarch, Edward the Seventh, who
was . . . said to be in the hands of plutocrats which embodied the ‘‘Semitic’’
corruption of old England’ (p. xxxiv). George is named after the Prince of
Wales, who became King in 1911.
34. Daniel Born, The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens
to H. G. Wells (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995), 163.
35. Michael Draper, H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 89.
36. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 496.
Subsequent page references in text.
37. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, in A Selection
from Phoenix, ed. A. A. H. Inglis (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1971), 103, 106.
38. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 408.
Subsequent page references in text.
39. See David Craig, The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change
(London: Chatto, 1973), 144–54.
40. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, 103.
Notes to Pages 307–315 447
18. Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 366.
Subsequent page references in text.
19. Contrast Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), 112.
20. Cf. Len Platt, Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late
Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Culture (Westport,
Conn., and London: Greenwood, 2001), 116, 121.
21. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 218.
22. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 16. Subsequent
page references in text. Compare Powell’s The Acceptance World, where
Nicholas Jenkins says of himself and Mark Members that ‘Viewed from some
distance off, Members and I might reasonably be considered almost identical
units of the same organism, scarcely to be differentiated even by the socio-
logical expert’. Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (London: Fontana,
1974), 39. Subsequent page references in text are prefixed ‘AW’.
23. C. P. Snow, The Masters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), 300–12.
24. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London: Pan, 1955), 241.
25. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Introduction’ to Ford Madox Ford, Parade ’s End
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), p. xxi.
26. During the ten years covered by Parade ’s End, Tietjens ’s father possibly
commits suicide after listening to malicious gossip which leads him to believe
that his son Christopher has disgraced himself. Christopher ’s saintly mother
also dies, but he finds a substitute mother in the widow of his father ’s oldest
friend, who is also Valentine ’s mother. Valentine herself is alleged by Sylvia
to be Christopher ’s illegitimate half-sister, though it is also suggested that
Christopher is actually Campion ’s son.
27. Ford Madox Hueffer, The Critical Attitude (London: Duckworth, 1911), 88–9.
28. Quoted in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), ii. 288.
29. W. H. Auden, ‘Il faut payer’, Mid-Century 22 (1961), 9.
30. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of
Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 8. Subsequent
page references in text.
31. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977), 336.
32. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 149,
151.
33. Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, 474.
34. Evelyn Waugh, Preface to Sword of Honour: A Final Version of the Novels
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), 9.
35. Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 12. Subsequent
page references in text are prefixed ‘M’.
36. The status of the 1965 version is controversial, since Waugh made some
savage and (many have thought) unnecessary cuts. For this reason I have
generally preferred to make reference to the three novels as originally pub-
lished; see notes 35, 37, and 38.
Notes to Pages 364–381 451
32. Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (London: Heinemann, 1984), 44. Subsequent
page references in text.
33. Sam Selvon, Moses Migrating (London: Longman, 1983), 25. Subsequent
page references in text.
34. Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album (London: Faber, 2000), 124. Subsequent
page references in text.
35. See e.g. Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds., Writing Englishness 1900–1950:
An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
36. Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (London: Vintage, 2004), 3.
37. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 7.
38. Philip Larkin, A Girl in Winter (London and Boston: Faber, 1975), 158, 160.
Subsequent page references in text.
39. Meera Syal, Anita and Me (London: Flamingo, 1997), 31. Subsequent page
references in text.
40. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005),
15, 274.
41. See e.g. Nasta, Home Truths, 120; Timothy F. Weiss, On the Margins: The
Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1992), 213. Selwyn R. Cudjoe in V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 213, calls The
Enigma of Arrival ‘the most intense of all [Naipaul ’s] fantasies’.
42. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), 225–6.
43. Contrast Salman Rushdie’s assessment of the ‘tiny world’ in which The
Enigma of Arrival is set as a mirror for its author’s ‘exhaustion and turning-
towards-death’. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 150.
44. Bruce King is one critic who has endorsed this judgement. King, The Inter-
nationalization of English Literature, 47.
45. George Lamming, The Emigrants (London and New York: Allison & Busby,
1980), 228–9.
46. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1975), 189.
47. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley ’s Lover (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1960), 5.
48. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 151.
49. Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993), 148.
50. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001), 328.
4. Kingsley Amis, ‘Introduction’ to The Golden Age of Science Fiction, ed. Amis
(London: Hutchinson, 1981), 20.
5. Kingsley Amis, Take a Girl Like You (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962),
59, 317.
6. Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 723, 754.
7. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Con-
temporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), 69.
8. A. S. Byatt, ‘Parmenides and the Contemporary British Novel’, Literature
Matters 21 (December 1996), 6–8. See also Byatt ’s On Histories and Stories:
Selected Essays (London: Chatto, 2000), passim.
9. Jason Cowley, ‘How the Dead Live’, review of On Histories and Stories by
A. S. Byatt, New Statesman (4 December 2000), 51–2.
10. Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London:
Chatto, 2002), 237. On Ackroyd ’s conservatism see Mette Bollerup Doyle,
‘ ‘‘The Mystical City Universal’’: Peter Ackroyd ’s London’, European English
Messenger 11: 1 (Spring 2002), 29–32.
11. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 2000), 434.
Subsequent page references in text.
12. Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in Woolf, The Captain ’s
Death-Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1950), 111.
13. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Niece of an Earl’, in Woolf, The Common Reader,
vol. ii, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Vintage, 2003), 215. Subsequent
page references in text.
14. See n. 2 above.
15. Marina Warner, The Leto Bundle (London: Chatto, 2001), 93.
16. Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (London: Four Square,
1966), 41.
Author Biographies
(1867) and Physics and Politics (1872). His essays on Dickens, Macaulay, Scott,
and others were collected in Literary Studies (1879).
Ballard, James Graham (1930– ), novelist, born in Shanghai, China, resident in
England from 1946. His novels include The Drowned World (1962), Crash
(1973), Concrete Island (1974), and Empire of the Sun (1984).
Barnes, Julian (1946– ), novelist, born in Leicester, author of Metroland (1980),
Flaubert ’s Parrot (1984), Staring at the Sun (1986), England, England (1998),
and other works.
Behn, Aphra (1640–89), novelist, playwright, and outspoken Royalist. Her early
life is obscure, but it is thought that she was born in Kent and visited Surinam.
In 1666 she was sent to Antwerp as a government agent. From 1670 she was a
leading writer for the London stage. Her principal novels are Love-Letters
Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–7) and Oroonoko (1688).
Bennett, Arnold (1867–1931), novelist, born in Staffordshire. He was author of
A Man from the North (1898), Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives ’
Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910), Riceyman Steps (1923), and many other works.
His criticism includes Literary Taste (1909).
Besant, Walter (1836–1901), novelist and historian of London, born in
Portsmouth. Much of his fiction, beginning with Ready Money Mortiboy
(1872), was produced in collaboration with James Rice (1844–82), with whom
he also wrote a biography of Sir Richard Whittington (1881). His best-known
solo novel is All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882). He helped found the
Society of Authors in 1883, and was knighted in 1895.
Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654–1729), physician and poet, author of Prince
Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697), epics which have been seen as allegorical
representations of the Glorious Revolution and the expulsion of the Stuarts.
Bradbury, Malcolm (1930–2000), novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, author
of Eating People is Wrong (1959), The History Man (1975), and other novels.
His non-fiction includes The Modern British Novel (1993) and Dangerous
Pilgrimages (1994).
Brontë, Anne (1820–49), novelist, sister of Charlotte and Emily, author of Agnes
Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), both published under the
pseudonym ‘Acton Bell’.
Brontë, Charlotte (1816–55), novelist, sister of Emily and Anne, born near
Bradford, Yorkshire, the daughter of an evangelical clergyman. In 1820 the
family moved to Haworth parsonage. Charlotte was a pupil and, later, a
teacher at Roe Head, and then studied French and taught English in Brussels
(1842–3). She spent her remaining years at Haworth. During her lifetime she
published Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853) under the
pseudonym ‘Currer Bell’. Her first novel The Professor was published post-
humously in 1857.
Author Biographies 457
Brontë, Emily (1818–48), novelist and poet, sister of Charlotte and Anne, author
of Wuthering Heights (1847) published under the pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’. She
accompanied Charlotte to Brussels in 1842, but soon returned home and spent
the rest of her life at Haworth.
Bunyan, John (1628–88), author and Nonconformist preacher, born near
Bedford. He served in the New Model Army (1644–6), and was imprisoned in
1661 for denouncing the Church of England. He was not released until 1672.
He wrote several books in Bedford Jail, including his spiritual autobiography
Grace Abounding (1666) and The Pilgrim ’s Progress (1678). His later works
include The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) and The Holy War (1682).
Burgess, Anthony (John Burgess Wilson) (1917–93), novelist and critic, born in
Manchester. His ‘Malayan trilogy’ The Long Day Wanes, consisting of Time for
a Tiger (1958), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East (1959), was
written while he was an education officer in Malaya and Brunei. His many later
novels include A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Earthly Powers (1981).
Burke, Edmund (1729/30–97), Anglo-Irish politician and author, born in Dublin.
A Member of Parliament from 1766, he expounded his political philosophy in
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and other works.
Burney, Frances (Fanny) (1752–1840), novelist, born in Norfolk. She was the
author of Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer
(1814). She served as a keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte (1786–91).
Butterfield, Herbert (1900–79), historian, author of The Whig Interpretation
of History (1931) and The Englishman and his History (1944). He was knighted
in 1968.
Byatt, Antonia Susan (1936– ), novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, sister of
Margaret Drabble, author of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1986),
and Possession (1990), which won the Booker Prize.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), Scottish biographer, historian, and social critic,
author of Chartism (1839), On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in
History (1841), and Past and Present (1843), and editor of Oliver Cromwell ’s
Letters and Speeches (1845).
Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98), lecturer in mathematics
at Oxford and author of Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and
Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
Carter, Angela (1940–92), novelist, born in Sussex, author of The Magic
Toyshop (1967), Heroes and Villains (1969), The Passion of New Eve (1977),
The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), and other works.
Caxton, William (c.1421–91), editor, translator, and printer, who established
the first English printing press at Westminster in 1476. His edition of Malory ’s
Le Morte d ’Arthur was published in 1485.
458 Author Biographies
Chesney, George Tomkyns (1833–95), soldier and novelist, author of The Battle
of Dorking (1871). He was knighted in 1890.
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanfield, 4th Earl of (1694–1773), politician,
author, and sometime patron of Samuel Johnson, whose Letters to his son were
published posthumously in 1774.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1874–1936), political journalist, novelist, and poet,
born in London. His books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904),
Charles Dickens (1906), and A Short History of England (1917).
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of (1609–74), Royalist politician, lord
chancellor to Charles II from 1658 until his impeachment in 1667. His History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, begun in the 1640s, was completed
in exile in 1672 and published posthumously in 1702–4.
Collins, Wilkie (1824–89), novelist, born in London, author of The Woman in
White (1860), Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1868), and other ‘sensation
novels’.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy (1884–1969), novelist, born in Middlesex, author of
A House and Its Head (1935), Parents and Children (1941), and many other
works.
Congreve, William (1670–1729), dramatist, born in Yorkshire and educated
in Ireland. His novel Incognita (1692) was written before his success as a
playwright, which began with The Old Bachelor (1693).
Conrad, Joseph (Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski) (1857–1924),
novelist, born in the Polish Ukraine. He joined the Merchant Navy in 1878,
became a naturalized British subject in 1886, and settled in England from 1894.
His novels include Almayer’s Folly (1896), Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness
(1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes
(1911). He also wrote two novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford
(q.v.).
Dangerfield, Thomas (1654–85), informer and thief, born in Essex, probable
author of Don Tomazo, or The Juvenile Rambles of Thomas Dangerfield
(1680).
Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731), novelist, journalist, and satirist, born in London
and educated for the Nonconformist ministry. He was the author of The True-
Born Englishman (1701), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720),
Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722), Roxana (1724), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1724), and numerous other
works. The exact extent of his authorship is still debated among scholars.
Deloney, Thomas (c.1543–c.1600), novelist and balladeer, probably born in
Norwich. He was the author of Jack of Newbury (1597), The Gentle Craft
(1597–8), and Thomas of Reading (c.1598).
Author Biographies 459
Gay, John (1685–1732), poet and dramatist, author of The Beggar’s Opera (1728).
Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), historian, author of The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).
Gissing, George (1857–1903), novelist, born in Wakefield, author of The
Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street
(1891), Born in Exile (1892), The Whirlpool (1897), The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft (1903), and other works. His non-fiction includes a study of Charles
Dickens (1898).
Godwin, William (1756–1836), novelist and political philosopher, husband of
Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, born in Cambridgeshire. He
was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Things As
They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), St Leon (1799), and
Fleetwood (1805). His later works include a History of the Commonwealth of
England (1824–8).
Golding, William (1911–93), novelist, born in Cornwall. His novels include
Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), The
Spire (1964), and Darkness Visible (1979). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.
Goldsmith, Oliver (c.1728–1774), Irish novelist, poet, and playwright, resident
in London from 1756, author of The Citizen of the World (1762), The Vicar of
Wakefield (1766), and of two histories of England (1764, 1771).
Green, Henry (Henry Yorke) (1905–73), novelist, born in Gloucestershire,
author of Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Loving (1945), and other
works.
Green, John Richard (1837–83), historian, author of A Short History of the
English People (1874; expanded in later editions).
Greene, Graham (1904–91), novelist, born in Hertfordshire, author of England
Made Me (1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and
many other works. He travelled extensively, and during his later years lived
mainly in France.
Haggard, Henry Rider (1856–1925), novelist, born in Norfolk. He spent the
years 1875–81 in South Africa, and later published King Solomon ’s Mines
(1885) and She (1887). He was knighted in 1912.
Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), novelist and poet, born in Dorset. His novels
include Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Far from
the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d ’Urbervilles (1891),
and Jude the Obscure (1896).
Hays, Mary (1759–1843), novelist, born in Southwark, author of Memoirs of
Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799).
462 Author Biographies
Scott, Walter (1771–1832), Scottish novelist and poet. Waverley (1814) was
published anonymously. Its successors, known as the ‘Waverley novels’,
include Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), The
Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), The Fortunes
of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), and Woodstock
(1826). His Lives of the Novelists (1821–4) were prefixed to Ballantyne ’s
Novelist ’s Library. He was knighted in 1818.
Seeley, John Robert (1834–95), historian, author of The Expansion of England
(1883). He was knighted in 1894.
Selvon, Samuel (1923–94), Trinidadian novelist who lived in England from 1950
to 1975, author of The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975),
Moses Migrating (1983), and other works.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of (1671–1713), philosopher
and author, whose Characteristics was first published in 1711.
Shelley, Mary (1797–1851), novelist and romancer, born in London, daughter of
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Her fiction includes Frankenstein
(1818) and The Last Man (1826).
Sheridan, Frances (1724–66), Irish novelist and playwright, resident in London
from 1754. She was the author of Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761).
Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), poet and courtier, born in Kent, whose prose
romance Arcadia was published posthumously in 1590.
Smith, Alexander (fl.1714–26), criminal biographer, whose History of the Lives
of the Most Noted Highwaymen was first published in 1714.
Smith, Charlotte (1749–1806), poet and novelist, born in London, author of
Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor
House (1793), Marchmont (1796), and other works.
Smith, Zadie (1975– ), novelist, born in London, author of White Teeth (2000),
The Autograph Man (2002), and On Beauty (2005).
Smollett, Tobias (1721–71), Scottish novelist, resident in England from 1744 to
1768, when he moved to Italy. He was the author of Roderick Random (1748),
Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Sir Launcelot
Greaves (1760–2), and Humphry Clinker (1771). He translated Cervantes ’s
Don Quixote (1755), and wrote a Complete History of England (1757).
Snow, Charles Percy, Baron (1905–80), novelist, scientist, and politician,
author of the eleven-novel sequence Strangers and Brothers (1940–70). He was
knighted in 1957 and made a life peer in 1964.
Soueif, Ahdaf (1950– ), novelist, born in Cairo, resident in England since 1981,
author of In the Eye of the Sun (1992), The Map of Love (1999), and other
novels.
Author Biographies 469
Spark, Muriel (1918– ), Scottish novelist, resident in Italy since 1966. Among her
many novels are The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of
Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender
Means (1963), and Loitering with Intent (1981). She became a DBE in 1993.
Stephen, Leslie (1832–1904), biographer and critic, father of Virginia Woolf,
founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. His literary essays
were collected as Hours in a Library (1874–9). His later works included a study
of George Eliot (1902).
Sterne, Laurence (1713–68), novelist and Church of England clergyman, born
in Ireland, resident in England from 1724. He was the author of Tristram
Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94), Scottish romancer and novelist, whose
works include Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), The Ebb-Tide (1894), and
Weir of Hermiston (1896). His unfinished romance The Great North Road was
written in 1884–5. He lived in England for three years (1884–7), and made his
home in Samoa in 1890.
Sturt, George (‘George Bourne’) (1863–1927), rural writer, author of Memoirs of
a Surrey Labourer (1927), Change in the Village (1912), and The Wheelwright’s
Shop (1923).
Swift, Graham (1949– ), novelist, born in London, author of The Sweetshop
Owner (1980), Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996), The
Light of Day (2003), and other works.
Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish satirist and clergyman, born in
Dublin, frequently resident in England between 1689 and 1714. His works
include A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Syal, Meera (1963– ), novelist, actor, and screenwriter, born near Wolverhampton,
author of Anita and Me (1996) and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999).
Taylor, Philip Meadows (1808–76), army officer and novelist, born in Liverpool,
resident in India from 1823 to 1860. He was the author of The Confessions of a
Thug (1839).
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), novelist and satirist, born in India,
resident in England from 1816. His fiction includes The Tremendous Adventures
of Major Gahagan (1838), The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), Vanity Fair
(1847–8), Pendennis (1848–50), Rebecca and Rowena (1850), The History of
Henry Esmond, Esq (1852), The Newcomes (1853–5), The Virginians (1857–9),
and many other works.
Tolkien, John Richard Reuel (1892–1973), romancer and philologist, author
of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). The Silmarillion
(1977) was published posthumously.
470 Author Biographies
Norway and Denmark (1796), and the novels Mary: A Fiction (1788) and the
unfinished The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798).
Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), novelist and essayist, born in London, daughter of
Leslie Stephen, author of The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919),
Jacob ’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),
Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts
(1941). Her literary essays were collected in The Common Reader (1925–32);
many others have been published posthumously.
Wyndham, John (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris) (1903–69),
science-fiction writer, born in Warwickshire, author of The Day of the Triffids
(1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), and many
other works.
Yonge, Charlotte Mary (1823–1901), novelist, born in Hampshire, author of
The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), The Daisy Chain (1856), and many other works.
Zangwill, Israel (1864–1926), novelist and Zionist, born in London, whose
works include Children of the Ghetto (1892), Ghetto Tragedies (1893), The
Master (1895), and the play The Melting Pot (1908).
Further Reading
This guide to further reading focuses on modern scholarship on the English novel
and its history, excluding original editions, earlier collections, and simple reprints
such as the early twentieth-century volumes of Everyman’s Library and World’s
Classics (invaluable as many of these still are). For the sake of simplicity, books are
in general only listed once, without cross-referencing even though they may be
relevant to more than one chapter. The place of publication given is the first place
mentioned on the title-page.
English Comic Writers (1819) has been much reprinted, while the earlier version
of his essay on the English novelists is ‘Standard Novels and Romances’, in
Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1933), xvi. 5–24. Walter Scott ’s
prefaces to Ballantyne ’s Novelist ’s Library (1821) were collected as Lives of the
Novelists (London, 1910).
Studies of particular fictional forms include Claudio Guillén’s ‘Toward a
Definition of the Picaresque’ in Literature as System (Princeton, 1971), 71–106;
Walter L. Reed ’s An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the
Picaresque (Chicago, 1981); and Franco Moretti ’s essay on the Bildungsroman,
The Way of the World (London, 1987). English courtship fiction is the subject of
Nancy Armstrong ’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel (New York, 1987), Joseph Allen Boone ’s Tradition Counter Tradition
(Chicago, 1987), and Ruth Bernard Yeazell ’s Fictions of Modesty: Women and
Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago, 1991). Lionel Trilling ’s reflections
on the ‘young man from the provinces’ are found in his essay on Henry James ’s
The Princess Casamassima in The Liberal Imagination (London, 1951). Martin
Green contrasts domestic fiction with the imperial adventure novel in his
brilliant and provocative study Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London,
1980).
History 1730–80 (London, 1983) and Laura Brown ’s English Dramatic Form,
1660–1760 (New Haven, 1981) are particularly notable.
Studies of the eighteenth-century novel in relation to other contemporary
genres include Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit (Oxford, 1974); Terry
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (London, 1986); Paul J. Korshin, Typologies
in England 1650–1820 (Princeton, 1982); Ronald J. Paulson, Satire and the Novel
in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1967); and, on fiction and auto-
biography, Patricia Meyer Spacks ’s Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
Jonathan Lamb surveys eighteenth-century readings of the Book of Job in The
Rhetoric of Suffering (Oxford, 1995).
Modern editions of the political classics of the period include C. B. Macpherson’s
edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan (Harmondsworth, 1968); Locke’s Two Treatises of
Government, ed. Peter Laslett (revised edn., New York, 1965); and Shaftesbury’s
Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis, 1964). Gordon J. Schochet
discusses versions of the ‘authoritarian family’ in Patriarchalism in Political
Thought (Oxford, 1975). Carol Kay’s Political Constructions (Ithaca, NY, 1988)
and Everett Zimmerman’s The Boundaries of Fiction (Ithaca, NY, 1996) are studies
of the novel in relation to political thought, while Richard Braverman’s Plots and
Counterplots (Cambridge, 1993) is concerned with ‘sexual politics and the body
politic’ in the literature of the period 1660–1830. Other studies of literature in
relation to politics are Miranda J. Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of
Social Order, 1740–1830 (Cambridge, 2000); W. Austin Flanders, Structures of
Experience (Columbia, SC, 1984); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to
Walpole (Oxford, 1994); and Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (Cambridge,
1993).
On crime and society in the eighteenth century, two classic studies are Douglas
Hay and others, Albion ’s Fatal Tree (London, 1975) and Peter Linebaugh, The
London Hanged (London, 1991). Lincoln B. Faller discusses the criminal
biographies in Turned to Account (London, 1987), while Ian A. Bell ’s Literature
and Crime in Augustan England (London, 1991) includes a notable analysis
of Fielding. More generally, Bertrand H. Bronson published a biography of
Joseph Ritson (2 vols., Berkeley, 1938), while Graham Seal relates the English
highwayman to American and Australian outlaws in The Outlaw Legend
(Cambridge, 1996). Among the vast popular literature on Robin Hood and other
outlaws, the only title that need be mentioned here is E. J. Hobsbawm ’s Bandits
(London, 1958).
Modern editions of Defoe include A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Anthony
Burgess and Christopher Bristow (Harmondsworth, 1966); Memoirs of a
Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (London, 1972); Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr
(Oxford, 1981); Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (2nd edn., New York,
1994); Roxana, ed. Jane Jack (Oxford, 1981); and A Tour through the Whole
Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, 1971). Rogers has also
edited Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972), while David Fausett
Further Reading 477
collected in Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Kelly (London,
1987) and Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G.
Boucé (New York, 1971). Among modern editions of other eighteenth-century
fiction, I have used the following: Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele and Eustace
Budgell, Sir Roger de Coverly, ed. John Hampden (London, 1967); John
Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull, ed. Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Erickson
(Oxford, 1976); Fanny Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian
D. Bloom (Oxford, 1982); Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed.
Malcolm Kelsall (Oxford, 1994); William Godwin, Things As They Are or the
Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London, 1988); Oliver
Goldsmith, Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1966); Eliza
Haywood, Three Novellas, ed. Earla A. Wilputte (East Lansing, Mich., 1995);
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (London, 1970);
Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London,
1969); Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham
Petrie (Harmondsworth, 1967); Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed.
W. S. Lewis (Oxford, 1964); and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction and The
Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (London, 1976). Kelly is the author of The
English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford, 1976); other studies of Jacobin fiction
are Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel (Oxford, 1993) and Loraine Fletcher,
‘Four Jacobin Women Novelists’ in John Lucas, ed., Writing and Radicalism
(London, 1996), 102–27.
Recent editions of Dickens ’s novels that I have consulted include Bleak House,
ed. Norman Page (London, 1985) and ed. Nicola Bradbury (London, 1996);
Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. P. N. Furbank (London, 1986) and ed. Patricia Ingham
(London, 1999); Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough (London, 1985); Our Mutual
Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (London, 1997); and A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard
Maxwell (London, 2000). Among Dickens criticism, I particularly recommend
James Buzard, ‘ ‘‘Anywhere ’s Nowhere’’: Bleak House as Autoethnography’,
Yale Journal of Criticism 12: 1 (1999), 7–39; J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens:
The World of his Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); John Kucich, Excess and
Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Athens, Ga., 1981); John Lucas,
Charles Dickens: The Major Novels (London, 1972); Richard Maxwell, The
Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville, Va., 1992); William J. Palmer,
Dickens and New Historicism (Basingstoke, 1997); Anny Sadrin, Parentage and
Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge, 1994); and two books
by Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford, 1971) and From Copyright to
Copperfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
Disraeli ’s Sybil is edited by Thom Braun (Harmondsworth, 1980). The
standard biography is Robert Blake ’s Disraeli (London, 1966); to this may be
added Charles Richmond and Paul Smith, eds., The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli
1818–1851 (Cambridge, 1998).
Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre has been edited by Q. D. Leavis
(Harmondsworth, 1966). Other modern Brontë editions are Villette, ed. Mark Lilly
(Harmondsworth, 1979); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford,
1995); and Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. G. D. Hargreaves
(Harmondsworth, 1979). Christine Alexander has edited two volumes of Charlotte
Brontë’s Early Writings (Oxford, 1987, 1991). Barbara Timm Gates, ed., Critical
Essays on Charlotte Brontë (Boston, 1990) is highly recommended, as is Enid L.
Duthie, The Foreign Vision of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1975). Terry Eagleton’s
Myths of Power (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 1988) is a Marxist study of the Brontës. See
also the books by Bodenheimer, Meyer, Sharpe, and others listed above.
Editions of Elizabeth Gaskell ’s fiction include Cousin Phillis and Other Tales,
ed. Angus Easson (Oxford, 1981); My Lady Ludlow and Other Stories, ed. Edgar
Wright (Oxford, 1989); North and South, ed. Dorothy Collin (London, 1986);
Sylvia ’s Lovers, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford, 1982); and Wives and Daughters,
ed. Frank Gloversmith (Harmondsworth, 1969). Two critical studies are Deirdre
d ’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions (New York, 1997) and Coral Lansbury,
Elizabeth Gaskell: the Novel of Social Crisis (London, 1975). Editions of Anthony
Trollope include An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page
(Oxford, 1992); Doctor Thorne, ed. David Skilton (Oxford, 1980); The Warden,
ed. Robin Gilmour (London, 1986); and The Way We Live Now, ed. Sir Frank
Kermode (London, 1994).
George Eliot ’s Adam Bede has been edited by Valentine Cunningham (Oxford,
1996); Daniel Deronda, ed. Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1967); Felix Holt,
482 Further Reading
the Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford, 1988); Middlemarch, ed. David
Carroll (Oxford, 1998); The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford,
1980); and Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford, 1988). Haight
has also edited A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London, 1966), while
Barbara Hardy is the editor of Critical Essays on George Eliot (London, 1970).
More recent criticism includes Nancy Henry, George Eliot and the British Empire
(Cambridge, 2002); Neil NcCaw, George Eliot and Victorian Historiography
(Basingstoke, 2000); Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National
Inheritance (New York, 1994); and Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1986).
Thackeray ’s novels have been comparatively neglected in recent years.
Scholarly editions include The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, ed. Andrew Sanders
(Oxford, 1984) and Vanity Fair, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford, 1983). Geoffrey
Tillotson and Donald Hawes edited Thackeray: The Critical Heritage (London,
1968), while John Carey ’s Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London, 1977) is a sti-
mulating critical study. The works of Henry James most relevant to the present
book are The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek Brewer (London, 1987) and
Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (London, 1963). Clara Hopgood
by ‘Mark Rutherford’ is edited by Lorraine Davies (London, 1996), while Arthur
Morrison ’s A Child of the Jago is edited by P. J. Keating (London, 1969). Pierre
Coustillas and Colin Partridge edited Gissing: The Critical Heritage (London,
1972). Coustillas has also edited Collected Articles on George Gissing (London,
1968). Raymond Williams discusses Gissing ’s ‘negative identification’ in Culture
and Society 1780–1950 (London, 1958); see also Fredric Jameson, The Political
Unconscious (London, 1981). Modern editions of Thomas Hardy ’s novels
include Jude the Obscure, ed. P. N. Furbank (London, 1974); A Pair of Blue Eyes,
ed. Alan Monford (Oxford, 1985); The Return of the Native, ed. Derwent May
(London, 1974); and The Woodlanders, ed. David Lodge (London, 1974).
George Orwell’s Complete Works have been edited by Peter Davison (20 vols.,
London, 1998). Davison has also edited a selection entitled Orwell’s England
(London, 2001), but Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia
Orwell and Ian Angus (4 vols., London, 1968) remains a valuable source for his
essays. The fullest Orwell biography is still Bernard Crick’s George Orwell (Lon-
don, 1980). Criticism on Orwell includes Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory
(London, 2002) and Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left (New Haven, 1974).
H. G. Wells ’s Tono-Bungay has been edited by Bryan Cheyette (New York,
1997) and by Patrick Parrinder (London, 2005). Critical works include Michael
Draper’s H. G. Wells (Basingstoke, 1987).
Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts has been edited by Frank Kermode
(Oxford, 1992) and by Gillian Beer and Stella McNichol (London, 1992); Jacob ’s
Room, ed. Sue Roe (London, 1992); The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage (Oxford,
1992); The Years, ed. Hermione Lee (Oxford, 1992). Selections of Woolf ’s essays
include Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (London, 1979) and The
Common Reader, Vol. ii, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London, 2003). Her unpub-
lished essays ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’ have been edited by Brenda R. Silver in
Twentieth-Century Literature 25: 3–4 (1979), 356–441. See also Woolf ’s Diary,
ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (5 vols., London, 1984). A recent
biography is Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1966). For criticism see
Margaret Homans, ed., Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), and Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, eds., Virginia
Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London, 1975); also Gillian Beer, ‘Virginia Woolf
and Prehistory’ in Arguing with the Past (London, 1989), and Rachel Bowlby,
Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford, 1988).
Chapters 13 and 14 (ii) , 15, and Epilogue: English Fiction Since 1950
Modern discussions of English national identity may be said to begin with Tom
Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (2nd edn., London, 1981); see also Patrick Wright’s
study of the ‘national past’ in contemporary Britain, On Living in an Old Country
(London, 1985), and Declan Kiberd, ‘Reinventing England’, Key Words 2 (1999),
47–57, as well as the works by Ackroyd, Colls, Easthope, Kumar, and Scruton
listed in the first section of this bibliography. An influential work of contemporary
national historiography is Norman Davies, The Isles (London, 1999).
Recent studies of contemporary English fiction include the following: Steven
Connor, The English Novel in History 1950–1985 (London, 1996); Andrzej
Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction (London, 1995); Dominic Head, The Cam-
bridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge, 2002);
Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, eds., Contemporary British
Fiction (London, 2003); Zachary Leader, ed., On Modern British Fiction
(Oxford, 2002); Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain
(Oxford, 1989); D. J. Taylor, After the War: The Novel and English Society since
1945 (London, 1993); Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London,
Further Reading 485
2004); Patricia Waugh, The Harvest of the Sixties (Oxford, 1995); and James
Wood, ‘England’, in John Sturrock, ed., The Oxford Guide to Contemporary
Writing (Oxford, 1996), 113–41. The final two volumes of the Oxford English
Literary History cover the later twentieth century: Randall Stevenson, The Last
of England? (Oxford, 2004), and Bruce King, The Internationalization of English
Literature (Oxford, 2004). Volumes of essays specifically concerned with national
identity are Ian A. Bell, ed., Peripheral Visions (Cardiff, 1995), and Tracey Hill and
William Hughes, eds., Contemporary Writing and National Identity (Bath, 1995).
Two earlier books are still well worth consulting: Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation
of the Novel (London, 1970) and Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, eds., The
Contemporary English Novel (London, 1979). A. S. Byatt’s critical essays have
been collected as On Histories and Stories (London, 2000).
Studies of multicultural English fiction include Ian Baucom, Out of Place
(Princeton, 1999); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (New York, 1996); A.
Robert Lee, ed., Other Britain, Other British (London, 1995); John McLeod,
Postcolonial London (London, 2004); Susheila Nasta, Home Truths (Basing-
stoke, 2002); James Procter, Dwelling Places (Manchester, 2003); and Lars Ole
Sauerberg, Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature (Basingstoke,
2001). See also Caryl Phillips ’s anthology Extravagant Strangers (London, 1998),
Salman Rushdie ’s essays collected in Imaginary Homelands (London, 1991), and
Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society
(Cambridge, 1993). Israel Zangwill ’s Children of the Ghetto has been edited by
Mari-Jane Rochelson (Detroit, 1998).
Jean Rhys ’s pre-war fiction has been collected as The Early Novels (London,
1984). Anthony Burgess ’s ‘Malayan Trilogy’ was reprinted as The Long Day
Wanes (London, 1984), and Evelyn Waugh ’s ‘final version’ of his trilogy has
appeared in a critical edition as Sword of Honour, ed. Angus Calder (London,
1999). See also Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (London, 1990), and
Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (2nd edn., Harmondsworth,
1977). Isabelle Joyau is the author of Investigating Powell ’s ‘A Dance to the
Music of Time’ (Basingstoke, 1994).
Critical introductions to V. S. Naipaul’s work include Landeg White,
V. S. Naipaul (London, 1975) and, more recently, Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul
(Basingstoke, 1993) and Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge, 1995). See
also Selwyn R. Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst, Mass.,
1988); Rob Nixon, London Calling (New York, 1992); and Timothy F. Weiss, On
the Margins (Amherst, Mass., 1992).
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Index
228–31; Pickwick Papers 148, 215, The’ 237–8, 243; ‘Natural History
226; Tale of Two Cities, A 216, 226 of German Life, The’ 271;
Dictionary of National Biography 309 Romola 271; Scenes of Clerical
Dinesen, Isak 410 Life 269, 271, 272; Silas
Disraeli, Benjamin 18, 34, 84, 121, Marner 269, 270–1, 274, 443 n. 24
165–79, 181, 218, 248, 269, 273, 279, Eliot, T. S. 366
300, 357; Alroy 171, 178; Elizabeth I, Queen 112, 153, 159–60,
Coningsby 149, 166, 168, 169, 172, 183, 312
173–5, 177; Contarini Fleming 171, empire 18, 34, 46, 47, 77–8, 104–5,
172; Lothair 178; Sybil 149, 242, 249–50, 292, 295–6, 297, 303,
165–71, 172, 174, 176–7, 436 n. 49; 320, 321–40, 341, 345, 400, 410; and
Tancred 166, 168, 173, 175, 176–9, Dickens 214; in Behn 88; in
250; Vindication of the English Burgess 357–9; in C. Brontë 207,
Constitution, A 165, 166–7; Vivian 240; in Defoe 75, 80; in
Grey 147, 171–2; Young Duke, Disraeli 171, 175–9; in Eliot 274; in
The 171, 172, 218 Ford 357; in Forster 299, 301–2,
Disraeli, Isaac 84, 171 329–34, 347; in Kipling 323–9; in
Dissenters, see Nonconformists Kureishi 381; in Lawrence 306; in
Dondy, Farrukh, Come to Mecca 384 Naipaul 401, 402–3; in Orwell 317,
Doyle, Arthur Conan 4–5 334–7; in P. Scott 339–40; in
Drabble, Margaret, Ice Age, The 2 Smith 104–5; in Thackeray 232–7;
Dryden, John 343 in Woolf 309–10, 349–50;
Dutch Rogue, The 47 seventeenth-century 46, 47
English Review 303
Easthope, Antony 6 Englishness 1–2, 3–5, 15–24,
Edgeworth, Maria 4, 171, 180, 234; 32–3, 63, 213, 241–3, 255–6, 318,
Absentee, The 161, 241; Castle 337, 380, 382, 405, 410–11; and
Rackrent 26 empire 179; in Austen 146, 186–7,
Eliot, George 14, 21, 33, 151, 176, 219, 200–1; in C. Brontë 245; in
245, 259, 265–77, 278, 280, 292, 293, Defoe 68–9, 76–81; in
300, 305, 334, 408–9; Adam Dickens 213–14; in Disraeli 174;
Bede 260, 265, 269, 272–4, 282, 408; in Doyle 5; in Eliot 250; in
‘Address to Working Men’ 275; Fielding 25–6; in Forster 251–2; in
Daniel Deronda 179, 185, 212, 237, James 251–2; in Kipling 324–5,
238, 246, 248–50, 251, 274, 276, 386; 329; in Kureishi 381; in Orwell 315,
Felix Holt 257, 260–1, 265, 272, 335, 336; in Powell 374–5; in
274–7, 280, 286, 288; Impressions Sterne 102; in Thackeray 233, 236;
of Theophrastus Such 248, 269; in the eighteenth century 6; see also
Middlemarch 90, 212, 259, 261, 265, national character; national identity
271, 272, 274, 275, 276–7, 409; Mill Etherege, Sir George 64
on the Floss, The 147, 259, 265–8, European Union 410, 411–12
277, 409; ‘Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, Eyre, Simon 42–3, 220
492 Index
Seeley, Sir John 321–2, 340; Expansion social-problem novel 117, 119, 123
of England, The 295–6, 321–2 Sophocles 278
Selkirk, Alexander 73 Soueif, Ahdaf 408–9; In the Eye of the
Selvon, Samuel 4, 393–6; Lonely Sun 408–9
Londoners, The 386, 393–4; Moses Southampton, Earl of 39
Ascending 393, 394–5; Moses Spanish Civil War 314, 316
Migrating 393, 394–5 Spanish Succession, War of 26
Shaftesbury, Lord, Spark, Muriel 351, 410
Characteristics 126–7 Spectator 63–4
Shakespeare, William 14, 15–17, 37, Spencer, Herbert 287
44, 83, 134, 159, 305, 315, 318, 448 Spenser, Edmund 153
n. 71; Hamlet 152; Henry V 16–17, Squires, Mrs 106
239; King Lear 92; Measure for Stalin, Joseph 367
Measure 124; Midsummer Night ’s Stanhope, Lady Hester 235–6, 248
Dream, A 159; Richard II 15–17; Stendhal 217, 436 n. 40
Romeo and Juliet 92, 180; Winter ’s Stephen, Leslie 77, 154, 163, 183, 275,
Tale, The 159 309, 311
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 112, 145 Sterne, Laurence 25, 27, 102–3;
Shelton, Thomas 47 Tristram Shandy 33, 91–2, 102–3,
Sheridan, Frances, Memoirs of Miss 427 n. 59
Sidney Bidulph 118 Stevenson, Robert Louis 13; Great
Sidney, Sir Philip 12, 35, 40; North Road, The 143
Arcadia 12, 37–9 Strafford, Earl of 188
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 364 Sturt, George, Change in the
Smith, Alexander 134, 135, 139; Village 397
Complete History 128, 129, 138 Sullivan, Zohreh T. 328
Smith, Anthony D. 23, 315 Surrey, Earl of 40
Smith, Charlotte 5, 83, 103–5, 164, Sutherland, James 78
171, 181, 182–3, 187; Desmond 171; Swados, Harvey 78
Marchmont 104, 116, 152, 182–3, Swift, Graham 407; Waterland 407
188; Old Manor House, The 103–5, Swift, Jonathan 18, 318, 418 n. 51;
140, 181 Gulliver ’s Travels 418 n. 51
Smith, Zadie, White Teeth 405 Syal, Meera 5, 398, 399–401; Anita
Smollett, Tobias 4, 27, 82, 83, 101–2, and Me 399–401
152, 171, 217, 424 n. 17; Don Sykes, Christopher 368
Quixote 344; Expedition of
Humphry Clinker, The 82, 116, Tasso, Torquato 153
129, 138; History of England 103, Taylor, Philip Meadows, Confessions
106–7; Peregrine Pickle 101–2, 116; of a Thug 323
Roderick Random 101, 116; Sir Templars 156
Launcelot Greaves 344 Tennyson, Alfred 140, 151, 183–4,
Snow, C. P. 351, 353; Masters, 343, 361, 373; Idylls of the King,
The 351; Strangers and Brothers 351 The 343, 344, 351
Index 501