'What Will he do with it' by Lord Lytton (published 1858)

 

If you are troubled by an excess of coincidence to the extent that it ruins your enjoyment of the reading of novels then stay away from Lord Lytton.  I’m not so I can enjoy the uncanny neatness with which the dramatis personae are linked.  In ‘What will he do with it’ a late novel though they start out not being aware of it all the characters are blood relations.  There are no six degrees of separation in Lytton world.  Does it matter?  Not at all.  It is the counterpoint of character that that supplies the narrative harmony.  Counterpart drama is an ancient narrative device that never fails to engage.  Theatre is a theme central to this novel, an ancient disabled actor and the juvenile lead, his grand daughter the theatrical phenomenon.  The scoundrel  son who wished to use his relationship  to this child from his father in law.  That Lord who has a faithful retainer is  a man whose belief in the sacredness of lineage that must be preserved from pollution guides his whole life.  His scoundrel son in law threatens to ruin the carefully curated image of nobility and must be bought off, sent to Australia, somewhere anywhere away from the ancient site of righteousness. This vile interloper relative has his own guardian nemesis who prevents him with sublime passive aggressiveness.  Incidentally another one of the great bad women that crop up in Lytton.  One loves the glee in which he delineates their gifts used in the pursuit of torment.  That Rosina Wheeler the Irishwoman he married is an inspiration requires no great perspicuity to divine.  A very talented woman who wrote novels herself.  Turning up at one of his election meetings, crying ‘make way for the wife of the member’ she gained access to the platform and started to traduce him.  Was it at that point she accused him of brothel creeping and unnatural relations with Benjamin Disraeli?  He contrived to have her locked up in an insane asylum  after this episode though they never divorced from the fear of valid counter accusations that would flow from a court case.

It’s a good but very very long read.    The plot could be a special subject for the quiz show ‘Mastermind’.  Don’t let that deter you.  Be one of those six people in the reading world.

'Night and Morning' by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (pub. 1841)

 

Being bothered by an excess of coincidence debars you from the enjoyment of the fiction of Lord Edward or is it Edward Lord Bulwer-Lytton.  In ‘Morning and Night’ pub. 1841 he strains your tolerance of a characteristic Victorian novel hazard to the ultimate point.  Add in the melodrama of lost marriage lines, multiple changes of fortune from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, walking on the wild side with coiners and con men and all dressed in fustian with periodic excursions into euphuism.  A slugging brew which you can admire for its insolence as you suspect that he may be trifling with you to see how much you can take.  I happen to enjoy that sort of excess.  Anything may happen and it usually does.  The point of this novel is the study of character; don’t let the cumulative unlikeliness put you off.  There are great portraits of evil, the sort that stays within the bounds of the law and also that which is outlawry to the uttermost.  The latter is represented by William Gawtrey:

"William Gawtrey was one of those men who are born to exert a certain influence and ascendency wherever they may be thrown; his vast strength, his redundant health, had a power of themselves—a moral as well as physical power. He naturally possessed high animal spirits, beneath the surface of which, however, at times, there was visible a certain undercurrent of malignity and scorn. “

The man that is saved by him from the Bow Street Runners is Philip Beaufort aka Philip Morton the issue of a secret marriage to Catherine Morton the daughter of a tradesman.  The uncle of Philip père is a stickler for the separation of the classes and would cut him off without a penny and leave everything to his brother Robert Beaufort.

"“If ever,” said he, and he looked grimly at Philip while he spoke, “a gentleman were to disgrace his ancestry by introducing into his family one whom his own sister could not receive at her house, why, he ought to sink to her level, and wealth would but make his disgrace the more notorious. If I had an only son, and that son were booby enough to do anything so discreditable as to marry beneath him, I would rather have my footman for my successor. You understand, Phil!”

 After many years of keeping this marriage secret the uncle finally dies leaving everything to Beaufort senior and the two boys Sidney and Philip are set to be scions of the aristocracy with £20,000 income a year.  Having secured in a good hiding place the marriage lines not telling anybody where and also just about to solemnise the union before the eyes of the world, Papa has to go and get killed by a fall from a horse.  Robert the younger brother who has been promised a goodly cut of the legacy beyond his legal entitlement according to the will:

"Well, to return to Arthur. Don’t trouble yourself about his education—that shall be my care. He shall go to Christ Church—a gentleman-commoner, of course—and when he is of age we’ll get him into parliament. Now for yourself, Bob. I shall sell the town-house in Berkeley Square, and whatever it brings you shall have. Besides that, I’ll add L1500. a year to your L1000.—so that’s said and done. Pshaw! brothers should be brothers.—Let’s come out and play with the boys!”

Arthur is Robert’s son, a pleasant if insipid sort of chap being generally good but weak and easily led by false friends when without the marriage lines the estates fall into his brother’s hands who reverts to type cutting off the widow and her putative bastards with £200 a year.

The character of Robert Beaufort is described thus:

“Mr. Robert Beaufort was generally considered by the world a very worthy man. He had never committed any excess—never gambled nor incurred debt—nor fallen into the warm errors most common with his sex. He was a good husband—a careful father—an agreeable neighbour—rather charitable than otherwise, to the poor. He was honest and methodical in his dealings, and had been known to behave handsomely in different relations of life. Mr. Robert Beaufort, indeed, always meant to do what was right—in the eyes of the world! He had no other rule of action but that which the world supplied; his religion was decorum—his sense of honour was regard to opinion. His heart was a dial to which the world was the sun: when the great eye of the public fell on it, it answered every purpose that a heart could answer; but when that eye was invisible, the dial was mute—a piece of brass and nothing more.”

All the evil characters are given the same degree of attention and one cannot doubt their efficacy in pursuit of their ends.  This brings in that crushing irony which we call coincidence.  If Lytton were to speak to us he might say:

' I’ve made it silly enough even for you, complacent bourgeois, consumer of three volume novels that under the penumbra of Mudie must be fit for the maiden aunt with a serious aspidistra habit, of course it must, but you my true reader know that this is precisely what does not happen; the coach with its quarterings is not spotted in the fog and the naive girl is fallen into the clutches of a libertine lord to be used and then discarded, worn out bedizened frailty of the night.

Now do you get it.  Solicitor Blackwell is a sink of turpitude.  Bow Runner Sharp is blunted by contact with soveriegns.  Good solicitor Barlow is not overwhelmed with work, naturally, so he can pursue righteousness to the ends of the kingdom.

But you know all this because you complained bitterly about the sordid Newgate novels and I wrote preface after preface defending my portrayal of a society that swallowed up the weak and deprived the orphan of his due portion’.

It all came out right in the end.  Justice is done, of course it is.  Excellent novel.  When you wear your irony glasses euphuism becomes penetrating satire.

Kenelm Chillingly by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions was published in 1873 and was the last of his works written in a very productive career which covered many different genres.  ‘Kenelm’ is in that unusual mode, the quest tale.  The clue to this characterisation of the novel is given in the choice of name for our hero.  The family are foregathered to decide on a name for the child whose birth has edged out of the running for the title to the lands and the nobility of the Chillingly another remote cousin whose expectations seemed secure.  This would be Chillingly Gordon and in the fullness of time  Sir Gordon.  It is that ‘Sir’ that is the problem.  It requires something of a more noble ring than Sir Peter the daddy of the child.  He has always felt overborne by the ordinariness of the name Peter even though the Chillinglys have done no more than survived and stuck to their lands from the time of the Heptarchy.

“All the disorders and revolutions that have occurred in England since the Heptarchy have left the Chillinglys the same race in the same place. Somehow or other the Norman Conquest did not despoil them; they held fiefs under Eudo Dapifer as peacefully as they had held them under King Harold; they took no part in the Crusades, nor the Wars of the Roses, nor the Civil Wars between Charles the First and the Parliament. As the dace sticks to the water and the water sticks by the dace, so the Chillinglys stuck to the land and the land stuck by the Chillinglys. Perhaps I am wrong to wish that the new Chillingly may be a little less like a dace.”

The dace by the way are the Three Fishes Argent on the Chillingly escutcheon.  There you have the mock heroic tone of the novel, its wit.

Consultation of the family tree brings forth the suggestion from the parson Chillingly who has the family living:

“I have it! I have it!” cried the Parson. “Here is a descent from Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley. Sir Kenelm Digby! No finer specimen of muscular Christianity. He fought as well as he wrote; eccentric, it is true, but always a gentleman. Call the boy Kenelm!”

That’s one noble Kenelm a swashbuckling hero of the 16th.century the man who among other thing had the recipe for the cure of wounds by sympathetic magic.  The aggravating sword must be treated by the application of a potion and thereby the wound itself was speedily healed.  In the 19th.century there is another Kenelm Digby a well known author not mentioned in the book who wrote a treatise on chivalry as the guide to the code of the modern gentleman.  This book was entitled  The Broad-Stone of Honour  published in 1823.  It sold massively and any young sprig of the aristocracy such as Bulwer-Lytton would have read it or have it thrust upon him.

There then is the clef, as it were, to the progress of the hero Kenelm Chillingly.  He will find his way in life by means of a quest.  Will he find joy and love this knight of the Sorrowful Countenance?   First he must be schooled in pugilism in order to subdue the bullying ways of Butt at school.  This training stands to him as he will later have to protect and defend maidens in distress.  Other forms of instruction in the best modern ways of cynicism and progress in the 19th.century will leave him a man without a true spiritual foundation and deficiency in joy.  Mivers Chillingly, a remote cousin/uncle has just the plan. Mivers is the editor of a very successful literary magazine called ‘The Londoner’ and one of his contributors is Welby:

 He is an elegant scholar, an effective writer, much courted by public men, a thorough gentleman, has a pleasant house, and receives the best society. Having been once taken in, he defies any one to take him in again. His experience was not bought too dearly. No more acute and accomplished man of the world. The three hundred a year or so that you would pay for Kenelm would suit him very well. His name is Welby, and he lives in Chester Square.”

What Welby teaches the young Kelelm is a refined gentlemanly sort of melioristic materialism but so far ahead of the general received enlightened opinion that when he goes to Cambridge he is bored by the stale opinions of his fellow students.  He takes a good degree, wins prizes for latin verses and precipitated into the world is at a loss.

 We now find him at 21 years of age a strapping lad about to set out on his journey in life.  But where to?  

It may here be said that Kenelm was not without great advantages of form and countenance. He was tall, and the youthful grace of his proportions concealed his physical strength, which was extraordinary rather from the iron texture than the bulk of his thews and sinews. His face, though it certainly lacked the roundness of youth, had a grave, sombre, haunting sort of beauty, not artistically regular, but picturesque, peculiar, with large dark expressive eyes, and a certain indescribable combination of sweetness and melancholy in his quiet smile.

The orotundity of expression is not mere fustian to clothe banal observation but a deliberate dignity due a story of quest. How shall he begin?  In the best way, by happenstance.  He encounter a wandering minstrel on the high road composing a verse as he ambles:

“Black Karl looked forth from his cottage door, 

   He looked on the forest green; 

  And down the path, with his dogs before, 

   Came the Ritter of Neirestein: 

  Singing, singing, lustily singing, 

   Down the path with his dogs before, 

  Came the Ritter of Neirestein.”

After his conversation with the minstrel Kenelm decides to walk away from home and ramble on the country roads for a while and discover whether there be anything to this thing called love which the singer of the Germanic ballad proposes as an aim in life.  He must do it in disguise so as not to attract attention though his mien and manner are a key to his rank.  The letter he writes to his father:

 My dear father, I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience, and the first fees are heavy.

What follows is so charming, witty, ironic withal, that a mere itemisation would be bathetic.  There are maidens to rescue, observations on the fatuity of the worldly, gentlemanly virtue that stays within the bourne of possibility, and a lady fair indeed a Fairy Queen.  I do believe that it is one of those fabulous books called an undiscovered classic.  Please read it.  

Novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton - general note.

 

So I’ve read two novels by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton,LucretiaandA Strange Story.My bottom line, a significant metaphor when considering the Victorian three volume novel, would be that the form exacerbated what would normally be a positive: Lytton’s facility.  He would have been a better writer if he had found it more difficult to write.  His prolixity would have been checked and the disappointing habit of creating interesting characters and then leaving them marooned in volume one might have been avoided.  Had he hoarded his darlings like Trollope fully expanding their intricate motivations the novels would have been the better for it.  In ‘Strange’ for instance the ruler of her exclusive neighbourhood Mrs. Colonel Poyntz gave a promise which Lytton didn’t keep. Was she in love with Dr. Allen the protagonist and narrator.  Dr. Allen is too much of a gentleman to speculate, he couldn’t possibly comment.  Easily a Trollope novel there with elaborate humiliation, exquisite comeuppance, and extra added cringe.

I readLucretiafirst and that novel with an omniscient author gave Lytton too much scope for moral commentary.  The tell and show ratio was unwieldy and crippling.  However there is a pleasant level of reality in the depiction of a vengeful woman and was again a pleasant counter to the usual Victorian treatment of the female of the species.  The triumvirate of evil Lucretia, Dalibard and Verney his son are superb.  How evil originates in pride and domination and manifesting in psychopathic cruelty, and murder, leads in the end to a grisly fate is the story in brief.  There is ample room in the three volume format for filler unrestrained by authorial ignorance but along with that are many good descriptions and ruminations.

The usual criticism of Lytton’s novels is that he is euphuistic and prone to fustian and that is true judged from the perspective of a taste formed by modern literature  that values the simple declarative sentence.  I consider the novels to bear the same relation to the realistic novel as the opera does to drama. Their language has a more expansive, ample scope than the normal narrative.  Right off in‘Lucretia’Dalibard brings his son by the actress mother who has betrayed him to her execution by guillotine.

Cytherea and the Graces, what relentless fate has conducted thee to the shambles? Butterfly of the summer, why should a nation rise to break thee upon the wheel? A sense of the mockery of such an execution, of the horrible burlesque that would sacrifice to the necessities of a mighty people so slight an offering, made itself felt among the crowd. There was a low murmur of shame and indignation. The dangerous sympathy of the mob was perceived by the officer in attendance. Hastily he made the sign to the headsman, and as he did so, a child’s cry was heard in the English tongue,—“Mother! Mother!” The father’s hand grasped the child’s arm with an iron pressure; the crowd swam before the boy’s eyes; the air seemed to stifle him, and become blood-red; only through the hum and the tramp and the roll of the drums he heard a low voice hiss in his ear “Learn how they perish who betray me!”

Say what you will, not to descend into bathos after such a start is a triumph of characterisation.  Put aside that trifling tape measure enjoy the grotesquerie. I did. 

More anon on an author that is unduly neglected.