Billy Peebles stationary shop had canes of various gauges with a crook on the end. As you made you way in towards the counter to buy a nib, a pencil or a copy book they hung over it still fresh and unblooded by the educators of the town. Until corporal punishment was abolished in the 60‘s everyone accepted that the rod ought not to be spared lest the child be spoiled. All classes used it freely though within the family the wooden spoon was nearest to hand. Probably a cane would have been regarded as the teacher’s mode of correction of everything from bad behaviour to irregular verbs.
‘Divil the bit of harm it ever did anyone’. No I’m not so sure of that and Samuel Butler would concur. Regular thrashings for anything and everything humiliates and breaks the spirit. In the rectory schoolroom of Theobold Pontifex the cane’s saving sternness was plied freely as a prophylactic against all manner of naughtiness, consummated and projected. Interestingly the few internet reviews of ‘The Way of All Flesh’ that I have read do not dwell on this aspect of correction which embittered most children’s lives. The other critical lapse is that the Lamarkian theory re the transmission of acquired characteristics which was held by Butler and by Overton the narrator of the novel passes unnoticed which makes the long lead into the story of Ernest Pontifex a redundant indulgence. We see the same business acumen move through the generations and if the entrepreneurial spirit is weaker in Theobold, Ernest’s father, at least he can sit and save.
Overton is both a narrator and an actor. His views on matrimony and family life are decidedly bleak, a classic misogynist. The one independent woman in the novel Ernest’s aunt Alethea Pontiflex he has proposed marriage to several times. Wisely she declines his control of her life and loot. Independently wealthy she takes on Ernest as a potential heir but knowing the lad’s lack of judgment fears that if the money is put into his hands too soon he will waste it. Overton and she come up with a plan to keep him from inheriting her money until he reaches the age of twenty eight should she die before that. Indeed this was a wise move because Ernest gets into various scrapes eventually even landing in goal for sexual assault. His career as an ordained minister of the Established Church is definitively over and he is rejected by his parents as beyond redemption. We can blame his landlady Mrs. Jupp for that. She is the classic fruity Cockney with a comical run of free associative dialogue. There are quite good character sketches of the lodgers in the house of Jupp.
When Ernest comes out of goal he sets himself up with Ellen, the maidservant of his family dismissed for falling pregnant years before. The tailoring skill which he has picked up in goal he uses as the foundation of trade in old clothes. That goes well for a while until his wife drinks the profit and runs off. Ernest’s suffering continues and only Overton knows that if he sticks it out until he comes into his aunt’s money all will be well.
It’s quite a long novel which I had read years ago and forgotten. It reflects many of the Victorian themes, money, respectability lost and found, the entree into the genteel class that was the Church, fallen women and duty. There are many minor characters that are well sketched and the constant tension as we wait to discover what the next torment for Ernest Pontiflex will be keeps us interested. I recommend it. A classic.
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| (Ernest as a Clergyman)
He lived among the poor, but he did not find that he got to know them. The idea that they would come to him proved to be a mistaken one. He did indeed visit a few tame pets whom his rector desired him to look after. There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to Ernest himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield; an aged lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched and munched her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to her, but who could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle merchant in Birdsey’s Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps half a dozen or so others. What did it all come to, when he did go to see them? The plumber wanted to be flattered, and liked fooling a gentleman into wasting his time by scratching his ears for him. Mrs Gover, poor old woman, wanted money; she was very good and meek, and when Ernest got her a shilling from Lady Anne Jones’s bequest, she said it was “small but seasonable,” and munched and munched in gratitude. Ernest sometimes gave her a little money himself, but not, as he says now, half what he ought to have given.
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