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Trouble for Lucia by E.F. Benson (1939)

‘I won’t give up the morning shopping. Besides, one learns all the news then. Why, it would be worse than not having the wireless! I should be lost without it.’
(Georgie Pillson, like all the Mapp and Lucia characters, gaga for gossip)

Only a few minutes ago some catastrophic development seemed likely, and Tilling’s appetite for social catastrophe was keen…
(The endless thirst for gossip)

Her eye had that gimlet-like aspect, which betokened a thirst for knowledge.
(What happened? Any news? What’s the latest?)

Endless interpretations could be put on this absorbing incident…
(Summary of Benson’s technique)

Lucia… went down to the High Street for her marketing. Her mind resembled a modern army attended by an air force and all appliances. It was ready to scout and skirmish, to lay an ambush, to defend or to attack an enemy with explosives from its aircraft or poison gas.
(The unrelenting battle for social supremacy which is the books’ subject)

‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’
(Lucia’s revenge)

‘Trouble for Lucia’ is a 1939 comic novel written by E.F. Benson. It is the sixth and final novel in the ever-popular Mapp and Lucia series. As you know by now, the novels are set in the town of Tilling, a thinly disguised version of Rye on the Sussex coast where Benson himself lived (and, like his fictional heroine Lucia, served as mayor).

The novels give minute descriptions of the petty rivalries and jealousies among a tiny cohort of characters, the comedy deriving from the discrepancy between the intense triviality of the tiny events described, and the po-faced earnestness of Benson’s treatment. It struck me this could be symbolised by the rich Wyses’ who own an enormous Rolls Royce complete with chauffeur but only ever use it to drive the 50 yards from their house to Lucia’s house, or the 100 yards down to the High Street to go shopping.

The lead characters are Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, and her bitter rival for supremacy of Tilling’s social scene, Elizabeth Mapp. At one point Georgie says of Lucia that:

That was her real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others.

in a phrase which could be Benson describing his own subject matter.

Cast

Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, now Pillson (since she married Georgie, in the preceding novel)
- Grosvenor – her maid
- Chapman – her chauffeur (I was puzzled whether this was a mistake; the chauffeur is called Cadman in all the other novels)
- Mrs Simpson – the lady she hires to be her secretary
Georgie Pillson – her camp husband, ‘He and his petit point, and his little cape, and his old-maidish ways…’
- Foljambe – his peerless parlour-maid and valet
Elizabeth Mapp-Flint – Lucia’s longstanding enemy
Major Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Mapp-Flint – Elizabeth’s long-suffering husband, plays golf every day, given to sneaking off to have a few whiskeys whenever his wife’s back is turned
Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow – along with gay Irene, the only single woman in the set; speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lovely to see you after all this long time. Tea going on. A few friends’ or ‘Two of your councillors here just now. Shillings. Didn’t charge them. Advertisement’; during the course of this novel she sets up a successful tea rooms
- Janet – her maid
- Paddy – her Irish terrier
‘quaint’ Irene Coles – the unshockable lesbian painter – I was staggered to learn in this novel for the first time that she is only 25 years old! (page 196) I thought she was middle-aged like all the others…
- Lucy, her 6-foot-tall maid
Mr Algernon’s Wyse – rich, owner of a Rolls Royce
Mrs Susan Wyse MBE – fat, her ‘immense bulk’, ‘Susan’s great watery smile spread across her face’
Amelia, Contessa di Faraglione – Algernon’s sister, married an Italian count, makes occasional flying visits to Tilling where she’s always hugely amused by the tittle tattle
The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett – vicar, addicted to speaking a weird combination of Highland Scots and Elizabethan English so as to be barely comprehensible
Evie Bartlett – his mousey wife; ‘Evie emitted the mouse-like squeak which denoted intense private amusement’
Olga Bracely – the internationally renowned opera singer, ‘a dream of beauty with her brilliant colouring and her high, arched eyebrows’, who appeared in the first and third novels but has been on a world tour; in those books Georgie was deeply in love with her
Cortese – the Italian composer
Dorothy – Cortese’s English wife
Lady ‘Poppy’ Sheffield – owner of rundown Sheffield Castle, the cause of so much trouble in the final part of the novel, develops an amusing crush on Georgie
Miss Susan Leg – real name of the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci
Mr Rice – the poulterer
Mr Twistevant – the grocer
Mr McConnell – editor of the Hampshire Argus in which a lot of these shenanigans are reported
Mr Fergus – the dentist
Inspector Morrison – of the Tilling police

Plots and storylines

‘Trouble for Lucia’ takes up very soon after where its predecessor left off. To the reader’s amazement, in the preceding novel, ‘Lucia’s Progress’, the forceful widow Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas had married her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, thus becoming Mrs Pillson.

She had also made herself the most eminent person in the town of Tilling through a string of charitable donations, to the local church, the local hospital, the cricket and football clubs, until she was finally nominated first woman Mayor of Tilling. (For the biographically minded, Benson himself served as Mayor of Rye between 1934 and 1937 so a lot of the detail of council business and formal costume is presumably based on first-hand knowledge.)

This final novel opens at this point: it is October and Lucia’s nomination to Mayor is confirmed but she hasn’t yet taken up office, she’s due to do that in a month’s time. So she’s fussing about related problems. When she’s mayor should she continue to do her own shopping in the high street?

She shares with Georgie her plans: to make Tilling a centre of intellectual and artistic activity, to help the poor, to clear away the old slums, an end to overcrowding, pasteurisation of milk, strict censorship of films, benches in sunny corners, flower boxes in windows, affordable concerts of first-rate music. All very admirable.

Meanwhile, Georgie is offended that no place might be found for him at her inaugural dinner, which is usually restricted to the Corporation, the aldermen, other councillors and so on; until Lucia comes up with a seating suggestion for him. He has bought a red velvet jacket specially, to mark his new status. Lucia has engaged a shorthand and typewriting secretary, a Mrs Simpson, in readiness for her mayoral work.

Today’s gossip: Diva wants to convert her house into a café; Iris has been refused permission by the council to cover her house with a fresco depicting an immense naked woman standing on shell representing motherhood; Susan Wyse has sat on her own pet budgerigar and squashed it flat.

Everyone Lucia and Georgie meet in the High Street asks who she is going to choose to be her Mayoress, and all the usual suspects are soon vying for the post, appealing directly like Diva or getting their partners to send begging letters. This wave of appeals coincides with a dinner and bridge evening Lucia holds at which the different parties make their pitches.

Typically muted comedy as Georgie, immensely proud of the new red velvet jacket he’s ordered, is dismayed to find Mr Wyse turning up in a similar velvet jacket but of sapphire blue. As Diva puts it:

‘Aren’t the Tilling boys getting dressy?’

But Lucia has decided. She will have Elizabeth as her mayoress and invites her round to tell her so. Within an hour Elizabeth has told everyone. Her version is that Lucia begged her to take the post. Lucia doesn’t lower herself to tell the truth which is that Elizabeth had been loitering round her house all day, gagging for the job. And the reality is that Lucia, although she doesn’t put it like this, would, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s words, rather have Elizabeth inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

Irene’s photo

Irene is outside her house enjoying the sun and making sketches for her fresco when Elizabeth hoves into view, fresh from Lucia telling her she’ll be her mayoress. Flush with enthusiasm she happily adopts a silly pose for Irene to sketch and take a photo of. But when she goes on to boast of how Lucia begged her to take the role, Irene (a passionate fan of Lucia) knows she’s lying and despises her. When Lucia comes by later on, and tells the true account of the interview, Irene’s suspicions are confirmed and she tells Lucia she will send the photo of Elizabeth in a silly pose to the newspaper, the Hampshire Argus, purporting to be a serious image of the new mayoress.

When the paper uses the disrespectful photo of Elizabeth in their story about the mayoress appointment, Liz and husband Major Flint are furious and Flint sets off for the newspaper offices with a riding-whip which he promises his wife he’ll horsewhip the editor with. But 1) while he waits he has a few nips of the newspaper’s hospitality scotch and 2) the editor turns out to be an imposingly massive man. Combine the two and the result is that a tipsy major not only ends up having a nice chat with Mr McConnell, but brings him home to Grebe (the cottage where Elizabeth and Benjy live) for dinner!

But the repercussions haven’t finished. Drunk Benjy Flint left his riding-whip at the newspaper offices so Elizabeth calls by to collect it. On the way home she stops at Diva’s place, where Diva is testing her tea offering on a few guests (Evie, the Padre and Georgie). Here she 1) puts a brave face on the Benjy-visiting-the-Chronicle story (claiming not to have seen the silly photo of herself, though all present know she has). But 2) she puts the riding-whip down for the duration and it is swiftly grabbed by Diva’s dog Paddy who (unseen by everyone) takes it outside and chews it to pieces. So that when Elizabeth rises to leave she can’t find it anywhere, searches high and low and leaves in high dudgeon. Only later does Diva spot the shiny silver cap of the riding-whip in her garden, attached to some chewed remains and realise her dog has destroyed it. So she guiltily buries the silver cap in her back garden and hopes the whole thing will blow over.

This is typical of how Benson takes the most trivial incidents and spools them into low-key, mildly amusing but very endearing comedy. It’s too low-key to be called farce (which is frantic and extreme), it’s more like charming amusement. And in this particular case, it’s not over yet because the issue of the riding-whip is destined to crop up later in the book…

Mayoring day

The great day arrives and Lucia is inducted as mayor of Tilling amid much pomp and ceremony. Later on she takes the first tea at Diva’s new tea rooms although, as she insists, purely in a personal capacity, as Mrs Pillson – mustn’t lower the dignity of her high office! After tea she and her friends repair to the back room to play bridge (which the characters are all addicted to) while actual paying customers arrive in the front.

Then the mayoral banquet in the evening. Not all the local dignitaries attend, but Lucia makes a fine speech and even gets to play her signature tune, the slow movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, on the piano, to respectful applause. That night she tells a tired Georgie she is determined that a new era in Tilling’s history is about to begin.

The new era

Lucia plunges into teaching herself about planning regulations and zoning policy and scads of other local government concerns. She becomes ‘excruciatingly didactic’, insisting on sharing every particle of her new knowledge with Georgie whose eyes glaze over. Elizabeth is a pest, phoning her bright and early every day: ‘Anything I can do for you, dear Worship?’ she asked. ‘Always at your service.’

She takes to referring to Lucia as ‘dear Worship’, to her face and to all their friends, to the latter’s intense irritation.

The new parsimony

Now that Lucia is mayor, she believes she needs to set an example of frugality and restraint. She orders her maid Grosvenor to prepare more humble meals at home (mutton hash and treacle tart). And decides to set an example to the general population by giving up gambling in the form of the little bets she and her friends have on their bridge games (threepence per hundred points).

In both these Puritan moves she is, of course, under the delusion that anybody in the general population either knows or cares what she does in her private life, but the bridge decision, in particular, upsets her friends. The harmless little stakes they place on their bridge games are what give them their zest and they resent Lucia’s high-handedness. As Diva puts it:

‘She may be Mayor but she isn’t Mussolini.’

The unintended consequences of Lucia ceasing to play bridge for money are 1) all the games when she invites guests round at a stroke become boring and flat, and so 2) the others start inviting Georgie alone to their games, without killjoy Lucia, because he resists Lucia’s new rule and continues to gamble. All of a sudden he finds himself invited everywhere without Lucia. In addition, 3) the group as a whole finds it most congenial to go to Diva’s for tea then cards afterwards. None of the bother of hosting and providing refreshments, and everyone pays their own way. Thus Diva’s cafe becomes a new social haunt, not only for the bridge set but with the town at large, and she’s soon coining it.

The council election

An election approaches for a vacancy on the town council. I don’t understand how, but apparently Elizabeth can stand for this as well as being mayoress. So Lucia persuades Georgie that he must stand against her (Elizabeth). The campaign is briskly described and then the announcement from the steps of the town hall in a howling gale: Elizabeth got 805 votes, Georgie is humiliated with just 421. It is universally seen as a humiliation for Lucia.

Budgie spirituality

I mentioned that right at the start there was gossip about whether large Susan Wyse accidentally sat on her pet budgerigar and squashed it to death. Answer: yes. I neglected to mention that, in a ghoulish development, she attached the wings and body to a hat as decoration (you have to remember how ornate many ladies’ hats were in the 1920s and ’30s). But this theme persists because Susan becomes convinced that she is in touch with the spirit of the dead bird and starts to have budgie séances.

The twist is that, on the afternoon before Lucia is invited to such a séance, Mr Wyse himself appears at her door, explains how his wife is becoming obsessed with the séances, has lost interest in all other activities, and spends hours mulling over the voluminous automatic writings which are generated at each session. Now since the sessions focus round a little shrine to the dead (and reassembled and stuffed) budgie placed on the séance table, Mr Wyse has gone to the subterfuge of stealing the bird when his wife was otherwise busy, wrapping it up, and has brought it to Lucia to hide. Which she agrees to do.

Cut to that evening when Lucia and Georgie arrive at the Wyse house, Starling Cottage. It is of course all ludicrous. Susan is a large lady and is wearing a white dress and a wreath in her hair so she looks like an immense Ophelia. The lights are low and the room is full of incense. In the event Lucia decides to play along, saying the can feel the little bird’s wings fluttering against her cheek and then, just before Susan goes to open the shrine, declares she feels an immense manifestation: ‘Blue Birdie has left us altogether!’ Which is just what Susan discovers when she opens the doors of the little ‘shrine’: the bird has gone. Lucia piles on the deceit, claiming that the bird has spent enough time in the temporal plane and has now decided to depart forever to the spiritual plane and what a good thing that is, leaving Susan puzzled and sad at the loss of her new hobby.

Bicycling

Talking of hobbies, Lucia and Georgie take up a new one, bicycling. They get trainers from the bicycle shop to jog along beside them holding the bicycles upright until they’ve gained enough confidence. Then they feel confident enough to go for trial runs along the flat wet sand of the beach, which has wide enough space for turning, until they’ve mastered that manoeuvre.

And so the grand day comes when they are ready to cycle in unison down to the High Street. Here they encounter the seven or eight people in their circle who are all dazzled by their skills and cycling quickly becomes the new fad of the town. The comic climax comes when Lucia and Georgie decide to be adventurous and cycle out from the town to the country, which first entails going down the steep Landgate Street. Lucia quickly hits such speed that she panics and, instead of pulling her brake rings her bell. When a policeman steps out in front to block the way she’s going far too fast to stop and so, in the manner of an Ealing Comedy, at the last minute he has to leap out of the way. She only narrowly makes the gap between a van and a pedestrian and runs along the flat for some way before finally trundling to a halt.

Next day the Inspector of Police calls to say that one of his officers spotted a female riding a bike at dangerous speed and the bicycle shop confirmed it had recently been sold to her address. Lucia confesses straightaway, insists on signing a summons issued to herself. At the next court sessions she tries a couple of cases with fellow magistrates, before announcing that she needs to take her place in the court, and coming before them as a plaintiff. She pleads guilty to dangerous cycling and is fined 20 shillings. Far from triggering the public shame which Elizabeth hoped for, this little scandal has the opposite effect, with the people of Tilling quietly proud to have such a spirited female mayor, and cycling becomes even more fashionable. Very sweetly:

It became fashionable to career up and down the High Street after dark, when traffic was diminished, and the whole length of it resounded with tinkling bells and twinkled with bicycle lamps.

It’s notable that fat rich Susan Wyse buys a grown-up tricycle, making her an amusing figure, trundling up and down the high street.

Olga Braceley

Back in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’, we met the opera singer Olga Bracely who visited and then, for a season, moved into the novel’s setting, the village of Riseholme. She popped up again in ‘Lucia in London’, on both occasions ruffling Georgie’s gay heart and making him fall head-over-heels in love with her.

Now Georgie receives a letter saying she is back again, after an extensive world tour performing in the modern opera Lucrezia composed by the Italian composer Cortese, and she is writing to invite him and Lucia to Covent Garden Opera House for a gala performance.

The trouble is that Lucia has arranged a series of public lectures, starting and ending with ones given by herself, and one of these clashes with the gala night. For once, the worm turns. Georgie has gotten fed up with her municipal obsessions, and insists he will go to the gala night, with or without Lucia which gives Lucia pause.

Public lectures

Back to Lucia’s plan to raise the tone with a series of public lectures. It’s quietly amusing that none of the celebrities she improbably invited (John Gielgud, Sir Henry Wood) can attend and, in fact, not even many Tillingites buy tickets, so she ends up having to give out hundreds of ‘complimentary’ tickets.

Lucia gives the first lecture, on Shakespearian drama, using Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy to demonstrate the simplicity of Shakespeare, no sets, hardly any props, just extreme force of personality and situation. It’s effective, as well as comic moments (the torch she intends to place under her face once the house lights go out, fails to work first time).

The saga of the Major’s riding-whip

Major Flint’s lecture is all about shooting tigers in India, with some tigerskins dramatically hanging on the wall. But remember I mentioned the riding-whip earlier, now it recurs. Because Elizabeth and Benjy have had the leather goods man in town create a new one. This is due to a sequence of small farcical events, namely:

Georgie offers to help Diva plant tulip bulbs for the spring and as he is digging a hole for the third or fourth one digs up the silver head of the famous riding-whip; realising what it is, he quietly pockets it and gets on with his gardening
for the next few days he carries it round in his jacket pocket pondering how it got reduced from whip to silver caps
one day he is rooting around in his pockets and accidentally spills it onto the table where neither he nor Lucia notices it (‘It fell noiselessly on the piece of damp sponge which Mrs Simpson always preferred to use for moistening postage-stamps, rather than the less genteel human tongue.’)
later the same day Elizabeth comes for a visit to Mallards, spots the cap lying on Lucia’s the stamp sponge and quickly pockets it, taking it home and is just as puzzled as Georgie was as to a) how it got reduced to just the cap and b) what it’s doing in Lucia’s house when she thought she’d left it at Diva’s

But Elizabeth determines to puzzle her enemies and this is why she gets the leather goods man to knock up a complete replica of the original riding-whip and then has Major Flint very visibly brandish it during his lecture and even make it the centrepiece of one of his stories about biffing a fearsome tiger with it. To the great puzzlement of Lucia, Georgie and Diva.

Irene’s allegorical painting

Meanwhile, remember that when Elizabeth came swanning past Irene on the way from Lucia having told her she was going to choose her to be her mayoress, and that Irene made her pose in a boisterous pose (like a skater with one arm stretched in front of her and the other stretched out behind)? And how she sent the photo to the newspaper which published it and made Irene a laughing stock?

Well, Irene continued on to use this photo of Elizabeth as the model for a sort of parody of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, updated to mock the Victorians, with large Miss Map, dressed in Victorian costume, as Venus, with a parody of Major Flint, in full uniform, lounging in the clouds and blowing a great gale of wind which is propelling Elizabeth across the waves towards Tilling in the distance. Well Irene finishes this satirical masterpiece and sends it to the Royal Academy of Art annual competition, no less, which is not only chosen to be included in, but becomes the hit of the season! Irene’s painting is reproduced in a number of national newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Mirror!

Mapp and Benjy go up to London and see it 3 times in one day and come back glowing with fame. Lucia is bitterly jealous and wishes now that it was she who Irene had satirised, seeing as how it’s brought Elizabeth national fame!

More of the Major’s riding-whip

To partly get her own back, Lucia hatches a plan to do with the famous riding-whip. Like Diva and Georgie Lucia was mystified how the Major produced his riding-whip onstage when they knew it had been reduced to a silver cap and buried in Diva’s garden. So Lucia hatches a slightly bizarre plan. She goes to the leather goods shop and asks the man to make a perfect replica of the Major’s riding-whip, using the silver cap, which he hands over a day or two later. Lucia then wedges it in the climbers outside her window in order to weather it, where it will be assailed by wind and rain and birds and insects and generally weathered and aged.

When she thinks it’s looking worn and used, she extracts it, wraps it up and takes it with her to the next bridge session at Diva’s place. She gets there earlier than the others and, while Diva’s off serving customers, slips it behind the crockery cupboard in the bridge room. There follows a long game of bridge during which tempers (as usual) fray, not least because of Lucia’s barely concealed jealousy of Elizabeth’s great Painting Triumph.

But when the game is finally concluded and everyone is getting their things to leave, she says she can’t find her umbrella and gets Georgie to agree that maybe it fell behind the crockery cupboard and together they pull the wardrobe forward and… out falls the Major’s missing riding-whip!! This plunges Diva into even deeper confusion as well as embarrassing but also puzzling Elizabeth and the Major.

Georgie is as puzzled as anyone by this mysterious turn of events, as well he might be, but when, on the way home, he asks Lucia to let him into the secret meaning of her hiding the fake Benjy riding-whip in Diva’s house, she refuses to tell him and this makes Georgie genuinely cross.

‘You’re too tarsome,’ said Georgie crossly. ‘And it isn’t fair. Diva told you how she buried the silver cap, and I told you how I dug it up, and you tell us nothing. Very miserly!’

For the first time dawned on me that, what with his frustration at her endless yakking about municipal affairs, what with her mysterious behaviour in this and other incidents, what with the reappearance of his old flame Olga — is Benson setting us up for Georgie to leave Lucia?

Chapter 8. To London

Regarding Olga’s gala concert, Lucia gives in to Georgie and rearranges the schedule of public lectures. So Lucia and Georgie go up to London 1) to see Irene’s famous picture at the Academy, and then 2) on to Covent Garden Opera House to see Olga sing in Lucrezia.

(In an interesting aside, on page 155, the narrator tells us it was only three years ago that Georgie met and fell in love with Olga Bracely, as described in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’. Since that novel was published in 1920 and this one was published a generation later, in 1939, the narrative asks us to accept the rather ludicrous notion that all the events which have occurred in the intervening 4 novels – 19 years apart – have taken place in just three years. I’m betting Benson never meant people to take this literally, it’s merely a gesture towards explaining why, despite the passage of so much time ‘in the real world’, his characters don’t appear to age.)

That night, in bed in his London hotel room, Georgie can’t get Olga out of his head and for the first time admits that he feels trapped in Tilling and by marriage to Lucia.

Next day he goes to meet Olga for lunch at the Ritz. She adores him and he is thrilled but then Lucia arrives and kills the spirit. The lunch is also attended by the same ‘your grace’ as the night before, who Olga casually introduces as ‘Poppy Sheffield’ and who affably chats. Olga tells them she is going down to Riseholme for a week and invites them to come and stay with her. When Lucia says she is far too busy infuriates Georgie so much that she is forced to concede that maybe she could spare a short weekend. But it isn’t the only thing that angers Georgie. When the Italian composer arrives at the end of dinner, Lucia, terrified of being humiliated all over again (by having it shown that she can speak hardly any Italian), insists that she and Georgie are busy and must leave. Georgie acquiesces but is furious at being forced to leave the lunch and the company of the woman he still carries a torch for.

Next evening Lucia meets up with the ladies for bridge and milks her London experiences. During the opera, a large grand lady (‘a large lady, clad in a magnificent tiara, but not much else’) and diminutive escort had been introduced into their box (the box reserved for guests of the main singer i.e. Olga) by the attendant who referred to her as ‘Your Grace’. This woman held completely aloof from Lucia, in fact the latter only finds out her name (Lady Sheffield) by asking the attendant after the show.

But the presence of Lady Sheffield in her box is reported in the next day’s edition of The Times so that by the time Lucia holds a bridge party the following evening (for ‘Mr. Wyse and Diva, (Susan being indisposed) the Mapp-Flints and the Padre and Evie’) they are dying to know more. This allows Lucia to skate dismissively quickly over seeing Irene’s famous painting at the Academy and tell outrageous lies about how she is on first-name terms with Lady Sheffield (‘poor Poppy Sheffield’), knows all about her little foibles (‘she simply lives off dressed crab and black coffee’), awing the Tilling ladies with her snobbish showing-off. But once again, Georgie is not impressed.

Back to Riseholme

Next morning Georgie and Lucia drive to Riseholme. In many ways it’s a shock to be back here. Lucia left it behind in the fourth novel, ‘Mapp and Lucia’, but it feels like an age ago. And for some reason, I’d forgotten how genuinely patronising and condescending she could be. It’s as if simply stepping out the car in Riseholme transforms her back to the painful snob she was in the early books.

Olga gave a garden-party in her honour in the afternoon, and Lucia was most gracious to all her old friends, in the manner of a Dowager Queen who has somehow come into a far vaster kingdom, but who has a tender remembrance of her former subjects, however humble, and she had a kind word for them all.

When everyone’s left, Lucia loftily dismisses the place as a vegetating backwater, but Georgie bristles and delivers a summary of the exciting developments in the place, providing a neat summary of most of the charming old characters we haven’t heard of for three books. (I always liked deaf old Mrs Antrobus who wielded an ear trumpet and had to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. I’d like to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. All this walking around under your own steam is much over-rated.)

Lucia infuriates Georgie and Olga with her endlessly boasting and humblebragging about how much work she has to do as mayor, but how rewarding it is to serve. But when Olga announces that the Italian composer Cortese will be coming tomorrow night, with his lovely wife, Lucia is struck with terror that, once again, she will be found out and humiliated. Benson puts it more bluntly than I’ve seen in any of the previous books, having Lucia admit to herself that she can’t speak Italian and knows next to nothing about music.

‘If only I could bring myself to say that I can neither speak nor understand Italian, and know nothing about music!’ thought Lucia. ‘But I can’t after all these years. It’s wretched to run away like this, but I couldn’t bear it.’

This has never been so explicitly stated before, nor has Lucia’s voice been so bluntly referred to as ‘her superior, drawling voice.’

Anyway, to escape the looming humiliation of meeting Cortese, Lucia tells Olga she must leave on Sunday evening to return to Tilling. But when Olga begs Georgie to stay, he simply says yes. Lucia wasn’t expecting him to say this, but Georgie is fed up of being bossed around by the impossible woman.

Chapter 9. The Lady Sheffield fiasco

There then follows something approaching real farce in its complexity.

For a start, ten minutes before she sets off for Tilling Cortese arrives and it turns out that his wife is English and has told him to speak only in English so he can learn it. In other words, Lucia would not have been humiliated and so she need not have fled so precipitately.

Not only that, but Cortese has arrived with the first act of his new opera, for Olga to try out. So Lucia is missing this incredible private world premiere opportunity.

And not only that but it turns out that Cortese’s English wife, Dorothy, is cousin to Lady Sheffield and, half an hour after Lucia’s left, Lady Sheffield phones up and invites cousin, Cortese, Olga and all to drive over to her place, Sheffield Castle, the next evening for dinner and stay the night. During the call there is a misunderstanding because the cousin tells Lady Sheffield that a guest of Olga’s is the mayor of Tilling, and the old lady mistakenly thinks this refers to Georgie, who she remembers meeting at Covent Garden, then for lunch at the Ritz, and took rather a fancy to, him and his stylish Van Dyck beard.

So next morning Georgie phones Lucia in Tilling and tells her the exciting news that they’ve all been invited to Lady Sheffield’s castle (‘A Norman tower. A moat. It was in Country Life not long ago’). Lucia is thrilled for him, and pleased when he goes out of h is way to explain that Lady Sheffield was pleased at the thought of seeing the Mayor of Tilling again (both of them misunderstanding Lady Sheffield’s misunderstanding that the Mayor is Georgie). But, as Lucia’s day wears on, and she has little if any work to do, she is bitten by the desire to join the party. What’s more, won’t it be a lovely surprise for everyone if she just turns up out of the blue and unannounced!

And so she asks her deputy to stand in for her, gives her secretary Mrs Simpson the rest of the day off (making sure to tell her why i.e. she’s going to stay at Lady Sheffield’s, with the result that the news spreads like wildfire around Tilling). After lunch she packs her things, brings the car round and is about to set off when there’s a phone call. It’s a servant from Sheffield Castle phoning ‘the mayor’ to tell her that her Grace has been taken ill and has cancelled the party. Lucia thinks quickly and wheedles the woman on the phone, telling her she still wants to come, not for dinner but just to check that Her Grace is alright. The servant goes away to convey this to her Ladyship, and returns with the reply that Her Grace would be delighted to see the Mayor, but the rest of the party has been cancelled. Neither of them realise the old lady is mistaking ‘the Mayor’ for Georgie.

She puts down the phone and finalises her packing. Just as she’s leaving the phone rings again but, scared that it will be Lady S ringing to cancel, she ignores it. What she doesn’t realise it that it’s Georgie phoning to say that, since the party has been cancelled, he and Olga are going to motor back to Tilling, for Olga to stay a few days.

So on the same afternoon that Lucia sets off for the long drive across England to Castle Sheffield on a doomed mission, Georgie and Olga are driving in exactly the opposite direction, from the heart of England to the South Coast. Both are to be surprised.

When Lucia finally arrives at Sheffield Castle she is, of course, surprised to find it dark and not lit up as for a party. A reluctant servant shows her into the courtyard and the first disappointment is that the whole place is overgrown, dirty and weed infested. The second one is that Lady Sheffield is dozing on a bench and when she awakes, asks who Lucia is. When Lucia answers ‘the mayor of Tilling’ Lady S says ‘No you’re not’ and Lucia realises her mistake. All along Lady Sheffield just wanted to spend some solo time with Georgie, who she’d taken a fancy to!

Lady Sheffield makes it crystal clear that she was looking forward to a quiet evening with a handsome male companion, not a middle-aged snobbish woman. She is most disappointed. This really is a test of Lucia’s mettle and she rises to the occasion. She persuades Lady Sheffield to show her round her home, snapping away on the camera she’s brought with her to record the heady social party which turns out not to exist.

But after barely an hour of this (in fact 45 minutes) Lady Sheffield is visibly tired and escorts Lucia to the door, shaking her hand, thanking her for coming and politely but firmly getting rid of her. What to do? It is still the middle of the evening. She toys with staying at the local inn but realises Foljambe, the maid who’s come with her, would give her away. Best to brazen it out and return to Tilling. So they have dinner at the inn and then set off on the long drive home, arriving at 10.30m back at Mallards. Reflecting on what a busy day she’s had, Benson has Lucia make an uncharacteristically up-to-date literary reference:

‘Quite like that huge horrid book by Mr. James Joyce, which all happens in one day,’ she reflected, as she stepped out of the car.

The Olga surprise

As she steps out of the car, Lucia is astonished to hear the sound of piano and of Olga singing in her house. She waits till she’s finished and then enters the garden room. Georgie is astonished but, strange to say, relieved. Having spent to long with Olga he was troubled by his old feelings for her. Lucia’s return will help him to return to superficial politeness. Olga, for her part, is tickled by Lucia’s absence and return: she finds Lucia a hilarious person. When Lucia in her pompous superior way goes on to congratulate her for her performance of the Prayer from Lucrezia, Olga restrains herself from saying she was actually singing some Berlioz.

It was only by strong and sustained effort that Olga restrained herself from howling with laughter.

So they chat gaily, have a few sandwiches and then, it being well past 11, they all go to bed.

The affair misapprehension

But the ramifications are far from complete. Because the next morning everyone in Tilling sees Georgie proudly squiring round town the gorgeous, lipsticked Olga. Heads turn and tongues wag. Soon everyone knows that he had her to stay at Mallards the second Lucia was away. Surprisingly, people aren’t moralistic but nod in sympathy. Diva goes so far as to say it must be hard for Georgie, living among so many ‘old hags’. To their surprise, the ladies of Tilling see Georgie in a new light, as a red-blooded Lothario.

Unaware of the impact all this has had, Lucia (who, as we saw, came home the previous evening i.e. there was never any hanky panky) phones round her friends, strongly gives the impression she has only just returned from Sheffield Castle, and invites everyone to dinner that evening.

The beauty fad

Olga is so ravishing and cosmopolitan that the old ladies (or ‘hags’ as Diva calls them) set about beautifying themselves with comic results, trying to hide from each other the little packets they set about buying in the chemist’s shop, and turning up at Lucia’s dinner looking grotesque (p.191). Here’s an extensive quote, to give the full comic effect.

Evie’s finger nails looked as if she had pinched them all, except one, in the door, causing the blood to flow freely underneath each. She had forgotten about that one, and it looked frost-bitten. Elizabeth and Benjy came next: Elizabeth’s cheeks were like the petals of wild roses, but she had not the nerve to incarnadine her mouth, which, by contrast, appeared to be afflicted with the cyanosis which precedes death. Diva, on the other hand, had been terrified at the aspect of blooming youth which rouge gave her, and she had wiped it off at the last moment, retaining the Cupid’s bow of a vermilion mouth, and two thin arched eyebrows in charcoal. Susan, wearing the Order of the British Empire, had had her grey hair waved, and it resembled corrugated tin roofing: Mr. Wyse and Georgie wore their velvet suits. It took them all a few minutes to get used to each other, for they were like butterflies which had previously only known each other in the caterpillar or chrysalis stage, and they smiled and simpered like new acquaintances in the most polite circles, instead of old and censorious friends.

Olga, when she appears, effortlessly outclasses them all. Over dinner they all babble to get her attention. There is no bridge, but Lucia insists Georgie does a little dance with her to Olga’s accompaniment and when she turns she sees all of them staring at her with their tongues hanging out like dogs that want to go for a walk, and so she gives in and sings for them.

Chapter 10. The Poppy and Olga crisis

The fad for wearing make-up endures. Lucia commissions Irene to paint her portrait. To my astonishment Irene tells her she is 25 years old! (page 196)

But when Irene says how much she admired Lucia for being so daring and so modern as to spend the night away (at Lady Sheffield’s) in order to give her husband and her lover (Georgie and Olga) a night of passion together, Lucia is genuinely horrified at how everyone must be interpreting those events. She realises she has to put the record straight. She has to confess to Irene that she did not spend the night at Sheffield Castle but, having driven all the way there, found Lady Sheffield unwell, had some tea and a little tour, and then drove home, arriving in time to find Olga serenading Georgie. And then everyone went off to their own bedrooms. Irene is disappointed:

‘Darling, what a disappointment!’ said Irene. ‘It would have been so colossal of you. And what a comedown for poor Georgie. Just an old maid again.’

Soon the disappointing news is spread all round town and Tillingites feel let down. ‘Everything had been so exciting and ducal and compromising, and there was really nothing left of it…’ As Mapp puts it:

‘Worship let it be widely known that she was staying the night with Poppy, and then she skulks back, doesn’t appear at all next morning to make us think that she was still away–‘

The annual Tilling art exhibition

The annual Tilling art exhibition comes round and all the characters donate works typical of them (Elizabeth and Georgie’s rival watercolours). Since you ask, they are:

Elizabeth – ‘A misty morning on the Marsh’ she likes mist because the climatic conditions absolutely prohibited defined draughtsmanship
Georgie – ‘A sunny morning on the Marsh’ with sheep and dykes and clumps of ragwort very clearly delineated
Mr Wyse – one of his still-life studies of a silver tankard, a glass of wine and a spray of nasturtiums
Diva – a still life of two buns and a tartlet on a plate
Susan Wyse – a mystical picture of a budgerigar with a halo above its head and rays of orange light emanating from its wings

But the show is, of course, dominated by Irene’s famous allegory of Elizabeth and Benjy and her new portrait of Lucia. She has depicted Lucia in her home, with the piano, an art set, municipal boxes of papers and various other adjuncta of her character. Unfortunately it makes her look like the auctioneer at a jumble sale. Lucia tries to grandiosely donate it to the Council to hang in the town hall but Elizabeth is now a councillor (as well as mayoress) and she sways the other councillors (who can’t make head or tail of it) not to.

But Elizabeth doesn’t have it her own way because Irene, reviewing her allegory, decides it is too pale and insipid, especially given the Tilling ladies new penchant for wearing make-up. And so after the first hang, Irene adds some rouge and a line of lipstick to Elizabeth’s portrait, scandalising Miss Mapp. She goes round to beg Lucia use her influence on Irene to get her to remove the additions.

August rents and the arrival of Miss Leg

August comes round again, the season when all our characters rent out their homes and move into smaller properties to turn a little profit. Miss Mapp rents hers out to a Miss Susan Leg, who turns out to be none other than the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci. (Elizabeth and Benjy have temporarily moved into the house of the vicar who has gone with his wife on holiday to Scotland.)

Immediately Mapp and Lucia start fighting over who will own and influence Miss Legg and Elizabeth gets a good head start since Leg is renting her property, showing her round town, introducing everyone (with her own comments) and then hosting a dinner where she comprehensively rubbishes her rival.

However, the tide turns as Miss Leg turns out not to be so obliging. She fiercely dislikes the famous Botticelli portrait but, ironically, raves over the Lucia portrait. She offends half the people Mapp proudly introduces her to as being pushy and vulgar. When Elizabeth rings up Lucia to ask her to get access (in the town hall) to the Corporation plate and let Miss L sign the visitors’ book, Lucia apologises but says it’s impossible. Suddenly Elizabeth finds she’s hitched her wagon to a falling star.

And by the same token, it dawns on Miss Leg that she might have made a mistake. After a few days she draws the conclusion that maybe the Lucia that Elizabeth has spent so much time defaming is, in fact, the key to Tilling, and so she pays Lucia a solo visit. Lucia expected this and is set up with Georgie to receive her, playing the piano, art works on display, and so on, in order to create the best impression. Miss Leg perceives Lucia’s snobbery and artistic pretensions but can also see she is the Top Dog of Tilling and so likely to provide the best copy for a writer like herself.

Lucia lays on tea and buns and then plays a trump card, ringing up the town hall and instructing the Serjeant on duty to get the corporate plate and visitors’ book out for Miss Leg to sign, thus demonstrating her clout. Then she invites her to dinner with the gang, carefully excluding Elizabeth and Benjy, so that Miss Leg is shown who runs the Real Tilling. Miss L has a delightful evening, by the end of which she and Lucia are on first name terms (her name is Susan).

Chapter 11. More blows

1. Georgie and Olga leave This is a surprise. The narrative doesn’t follow them, but Georgie and Olga go for a week’s holiday at Le Touquet (on the north French coast). The tongues which wagged about their (erroneous) night of passion together, wag all over again.

2. The council reject Lucia’s portrait Second shock is that the council art committee chaired by Elizabeth decides not to buy the portrait of Lucia done by Irene and not to hang it in the town hall. This is a real blow to Lucia’s pride and prestige, and she goes home grinding with envy that the Mapp Botticelli painting is going on display at a big London gallery and then is likely to be bought by an American millionaire, while the portrait of her will simply come home to her house, with the same kind of status as Diva’s wretched watercolours.

3. Lady Sheffield publicly doesn’t know who Lucia is The third blow is that she sets off down the hill to put a brave face on the portrait debacle when who should she almost bump into getting into her posh car, but Lady Sheffield. But it’s bad, very bad, because 1) although Lucia goes to shake her hand, Lady Sheffield has no idea who she is and has to be elaborately reminded, and even then reveals out loud that she only met invited Lucia to her castle because she thought she was handsome Georgie. But worse, 2) Elizabeth is with her, Elizabeth witnesses first hand this excruciating encounter, and double worse, her Grace has just emerged from Diva’s tearooms where Elizabeth will have manipulated the situation to make it perfectly plain to all her Tilling friends that Lady S had no idea who Lucia was, and she was the opposite of a bosom friend.

Lucia is fearless as ever and invites her Grace up to her simple abode to view the photographs she took, but it turns out that her ladyship is also catching the ferry across the Channel, planning to go and stay with Georgie and Olga. Lucia squeezes in an invitation for her to come and stay on her way back. Maybe. Please. And her Ladyship climbs into her car and is gone, leaving Lucia standing distraught with smirking Elizabeth.

Lucia is committed and so has to go on, into the tea rooms, and face all the ladies who’ve just witnessed Lady Sheffield’s complete ignorance of her. She puts on her very best face, and braves their sarcasm, but she is mortally wounded.

Making her tea as brief as possible, Lucia returns home a stricken animal and this is new. Suddenly Lucia acquires something like actual depth. In all of these novels she and the other characters have been comic mannequins, puppets put through never-ending series of humiliations which they outface with heroic chutzpah but this novel is the first one which has anything like depth. For the first time you feel genuinely sorry for Lucia, something the reader never has before. And she feels sorry for herself.

Surely some malignant Power, specially dedicated to the service of her discomfiture, must have ordained the mishaps (and their accurate timing) of this staggering afternoon: the malignant Power was a master of stage-craft. Who could stand up against a relentless tragedian? Lucia could not, and two tears of self-pity rolled down her cheeks. She was much surprised to feel their tickling progress, for she had always thought herself incapable of such weakness, but there they were. The larger one fell on to her blotting-pad, and she dashed the smaller aside.

She pulls herself together, of course, but it’s a very rare moment of something like psychological realism. For a moment we glimpse the Samuel Beckett bleakness which is lurking beneath the endless backbiting and rivalry.

And then, finally, a break. She is playing the piano when the phone rings and guess who it is? Lady Sheffield! She missed her boat, will catch the one tomorrow, and remembers Lucia’s hurried invitation, and now wants to take her up on it: may she come and stay the night? To say Lucia is overwhelmed with relief is an understatement. She rings for Grosvenor and they hurriedly get the place ready, and Lady S does indeed arrive, have a little supper, spend the night, then get up early the next morning and leave.

Lucia can’t wait till marketing hour, when all the ladies mingle in the High street, but she is down there as soon as possible, and very calmly tells Elizabeth who came to stay last night. Elizabeth immediately pops into Diva’s tearoom, tells her but ridicules the whole thing as a desperate attempt to save face.

As it happens, Elizabeth and Benjy have invited Lucia to dine with them that evening. She goes but doesn’t understand why they keep changing the subject whenever she mentions Poppy Sheffield, but there you go, they’re odd people, and after dinner they play bridge as usual. It’s only on her walk home that the truth hits her: they don’t believe her. All her ‘friends’ think she made up the entire story of Poppy coming to stay. Indeed, seen one way, her coming late and leaving early and being seen by no-one is worse than if she’d never come at all.

Once again Lucia is plunged into real ‘misery’ and once again the reader is struck. These ‘troubles’ are the real thing, are really biting into her character.

Quite suddenly Lucia knew that she had no more force left in her. She could only just manage a merry laugh.

Chapter 12. Lucia’s low point

Very unlike her, Lucia is so demoralised that she can’t face going out the next morning. The day after is Sunday and she attends church and puts on a brave face but again, after the service, confronts Elizabeth’s scepticism and for once, and very unlike her, Lucia loses her temper and delivers a series of cutting ripostes to each of her ‘friends’.

At that precise moment there took possession of Lucia an emotion to which hitherto she had been a stranger, namely sheer red rage. In all the numerous crises of her career her brain had always been occupied with getting what she wanted and with calm triumph when she got it, or with devising plans to extricate herself from tight places and with scaring off those who had laid traps for her. Now all such insipidities were swept away; rage at the injustice done her thrilled every fibre of her being, and she found the sensation delicious.

Georgie returns

Next morning she drives to Seaport (presumably a fictional name) to meet Georgie off the boat back from Le Touquet. She is delighted to see him but so is the reader; in his absence she hasn’t been herself at all. All this plunging into misery and tears of vexation are very unlike her and threaten the rationale of the whole series, which is how comically unsinkable she is, the comedy lies in her ability to bounce back from every kind of humiliation and setback.

With Georgie’s return we enter the final end phases of the narrative. Lucia tells Georgie everything that has happened, in full unvarnished detail and Georgie refreshes her with his sympathy and support. In exchange Georgie tells us that Poppy Lady Sheffield was a pain at Le Touquet. She insisted on sitting right next to Georgie on the sofa and at meal times touching his hand and generally coming on to him. Olga thought it was hilarious, which wasn’t much help.

At which point he springs the news that Poppy said she’d like to stop over at Lucia’s for a couple of days on her way back. Lucia leaps out of her chair. Salvation! Yes! If Lady Sheffield stays for a few days, then all her friends will be poked in the eye. They’ll have to admit it’s true. And at that moment a telegram arrives confirming the request.

Georgie is horrified. If Poppy’s coming he’ll leave but Lucia begs him not to go and he reluctantly acquiesces.

Lucia’s revenge

And so Lucia has her revenge. Poppy Lady Sheffield does indeed come to stay with her the following evening and the next day Lucia makes quite sure to take her for a stroll through Tilling at marketing hour. Lucia and Georgie debate whether to invite her friends for tea or dinner. Georgie is all for ignoring them both nights but Lucia ponders and concludes that the best revenge would be to rise above all the slights and sarcasm she’d received and invite them as if nothing had happened.

‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’

She will adopt a policy of what Benson amusing calls ‘vindictive forgiveness’. Although she doesn’t lower herself to call them in person, She gets Foljambe to ring them all to apologise for the short notice and ask if they’d like to pop round for dinner that evening. The last little burst of comedy comes from the way all of them had other appointments, often with each other, and how they all worm out of them with weasel words, but then all arrive at Lucia’s realising how they’d lied to each other.

Poppy is late coming down and all the guests have arrived and are trying to control their excitement at meeting a real live Duchess. For a moment I thought Benson might pull one last comic trick and have her having expired in Lucia’s spare bedroom, but nothing that dramatic happens in Benson (well, not very often) and instead Lady Sheffield makes a modest but dramatic entrance and the evening is a great success. The last touch of comedy is that Poppy still fancies Georgie, insists on sitting next to him, touching his hand more than necessary and tries, after dinner, to go for a walk with him in the garden until Lucia hastens to Georgie’s rescue and fetches them both back indoors. But overall:

A most distinguished suavity prevailed, and though the party lacked the gaiety and lightness of the Olga-festival, its quality was far more monumental.

And so, after the genuine trials and tribulations of the last few chapters, the novel, and the series, ends on a quiet but firm note of Lucia triumphant.

Thoughts

This one feels different from the previous five M&L novels. Long though they all are, the preceding five stick to the same superficial equable tone throughout. Lots happens – the novels, after all, consist of long series of events, often fairly disconnected, one incident after another with rarely what you’d call an overarching ‘plot’ – but the tone rarely varies from one of amused and charming social satire.

But as I’ve indicated, all that changes in this one. In the last few chapters, Lucia is genuinely humiliated, experiences real ‘misery’ and, for the one and only time in all six novels, loses her temper. For the 30 or 40 pages in question, the novel hints at something like real psychological depth, more depth and ‘realism’ than we’ve previously seen before, as I’ve summarised, ending abruptly with Lucia’s unqualified triumph. But you’re left wondering how deliberate this was. Did Benson even know he was doing it, giving his character, right at the end of her history, more depth and genuine feeling than in the previous 1,000 pages? It feels not because the ending, when it comes, when Lucia is redeemed in those last few pages, feels incredibly abrupt. It just ends.

Credit

‘Trouble for Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1939. Page references are to the 1992 Black Swan paperback edition.

Mapp and Lucia reviews

Queen Lucia (1920)
Miss Mapp (1922)
Lucia in London (1927)
The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
Mapp and Lucia (1931)
Lucia’s Progress (1935)
Trouble for Lucia (1939)

Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Life As We Have Known It (1931)

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

This blog post summarises one of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’, titled ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931). For reference I list all 6 essays in the section. I reviewed the other five in a previous blog post. The essay is an introduction to a volume titled Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women‘, and it inspired me to go and read the whole book, which I have reviewed separately.

The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
Women and Fiction (1929)
Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

This is the longest and most complex essay in the section, at 14 pages. Well, maybe not complicated in structure, but complicated in 1) the eccentrically roundabout way in which Woolf addresses the subject matter and her own complicated responses to it, and 2) the multi-text nature of the book she’s introducing.

I’ll try to give a summary overview of the content, and then a description of my changing impressions as I read it through.

Summary

In 1931 Woolf was asked to write a preface to a collection of letters and photos written by members of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild and collected into a book titled Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women. The Guild was founded as far back as 1883 and Woolf was commissioned by one of its co-founders, Margaret Llewellyn Davies. The book was to be published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so it was very much an in-house project.

Woolf approaches the commission in a rather roundabout way and most of the introduction feels like a meandering digression. This is because she kicks off by describing two memories.

1) First of all, she casts her mind back to the annual Congress of the Guild she attended as long ago as 1913 and recalls, very vividly, being frustrated and bored. And also alienated by the fact that so many of the women speakers were solid working class and she found, to her dismay, that she had nothing in common with them, not even the language they spoke.

2) This is supplemented by a second memory, of going soon afterwards for a meeting with Davies at the head office of the Guild, in Hampstead, north London. Here Woolf raises the sense she had of being alienated from the predominantly working class membership of the Guild and frustration at not being able to break out of the prison of her class. She wishes the two classes of women could break through the class barriers, and simply share their experiences, talk and exchange experiences and ideas. But she fears that will never happen in her lifetime.

Although I’ve made it sound brisk and logical, that is not at all how it reads. I became quite irritated with Woolf’s alienated, detached self obsession, her inability to care about what any of the social and political issues the speakers at the Congress raised and discussed, her fatal tendency to drift off into her own world, focusing on what colour their dresses are, or inventing completely imaginary home lives for each of the speakers, rather than paying them the elementary respect of listening to what they were saying.

She tells us that it was at this point of the discussion in Hampstead that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the hundreds of letters she’d received from members of the Guild over the years, thanking her for giving them an opportunity to expand their horizons, to meet and talk and learn and gain the confidence to speak up and address political issues.

Woolf was immediately interested to read all these first-hand accounts and Davies promised to send them on but, for whatever reason, never did. Then the War came and a thousand other distractions and then the social confusion of the post-war period. So it was only years later that Davies got round to posting Woolf a big parcel packed with folders containing letters, notes and photographs from working class women, which she went through with fascination.

3) And this provides the third section of this little text, which is only three or four pages long but really vividly summarises the content of loads of those letters, one- or two-sentence summaries of the cramped, exploited, violent lives and abuse so many of these women suffered, for decades, for all their lives. It is shocking and sometimes harrowing evidence. Suddenly this short text bursts into colour, stops being about mimsy Virginia, becomes three-dimensional, acquires a completely different force from the idle, middle-class reveries which preceded it. It’s worth reading for this three-page summary alone.

These, of course, are some of the letters which were then included in the volume which Woolf was asked to write a preface to. Now the whole text comes full circle. Now you realise why she began with the apparently inconsequential and self-obsessed memories of attending the Congress. Crabwise, her introduction approaches the real core of the text – the working women’s experiences – so obliquely that when they arrive, the contrast with Woolf’s leisurely upper class existence – all opera and Shakespeare – is all the more shocking and dramatic.

So was it planned? Was this artful structuring? The self-description as a snobbish, alienated middle-class lady all a ploy to make the working class content, when it comes, more shocking? Or the much simpler result of Woolf’s artless self-absorption? Much the same question could be asked of her novels: to what extent they are artful constructions or, conversely, just the result of her letting her mind drift and then arranging the blizzard of details and sense impressions into a sort of order based grouped into a handful of characters and a vague plot…

Background

From the Yale Review archives is an introduction to this piece which must be out of date but is still useful.

These pages relating to the English Women’s Co-operative Guild are addressed to a former officer of this organization who had placed in Mrs Woolf’s hands a collection of letters written by its members. The Guild, which now has an enrolment of some 70,000 and is the largest association of its kind in England, was founded in 1883 to stimulate the ideas and activities of working women. It holds important annual Congresses, and it is of one of these which met at Manchester, in 1913.

We know the Yale text is out of date because it talks about the Guild in the present tense but we know that the Guild closed in 2016, according to the Co-operative Women’s Guild Wikipedia article.

No prefaces

This text is the Introductory Letter to a social history book called Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. She was actually invited to write a preface to the book by its editor, the founder of the Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but refused on principle, the principle being that a book should stand or fall by its content without loads of prefaces and other bric-a-brac surrounding it.

But you also quickly come to suspect it’s because Woolf couldn’t write that kind of thing. She couldn’t gracefully summarise the themes of a book, its content and the achievement of its author, that’s not how her mind worked. Not without subterfuge and artifice.

Instead of directly grappling with the content of the book or the issues it raises about working class women collaborating to improve their lives, Woolf starts by going off at a tangent. With characteristic solipsism, she approaches the book by asking what memories it prompts in her and goes on to share two in particular.

Out of her inability to concentrate, out of her tendency to lose track of what anyone’s saying, out of her tendency to drift off and look out the nearest window, daydreaming and noticing all kinds of inconsequential details, Woolf made a style, a magnificent style, a new approach to narrative which characterises her classic novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Years and Between The Acts. In the context of essays which are meant to be about something, it can make for a frustrating read.

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

So Woolf whisks us to a hot June morning in 1913 in Newcastle where she attended a meeting of, presumably (it’s not really made clear) the Women’s Guild. She describes the hall and the people as if in a novel and describes a succession of women who’ve come from all over the country to make their 5-minute speeches. She namechecks the issues of the day:

reform of the divorce laws to allow women to petition for divorce
taxation of land
campaign for a minimum wage
the Trades Board Act
education of children over 14
complete adult suffrage

She namechecks them but, of course, she doesn’t go into them. You have to turn to Bradshaw’s notes at the back of the OUP edition to find out more about any of them. Instead Woolf glories in her superficiality, dwelling on the mustiness of the room and the appearance of the ladies. She candidly admits that all these political issues leave her ‘in her blood and bones, untouched’. And explains why – it’s a matter of class. Woolf isn’t really engaged in any contemporary politics because she is a comfortably off, middle class lady.

If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my comfortably capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock. (p.148)

This is the characteristic attitude of all her fictional characters: they all experience the sense of being outsiders, outside the conversations other people are having and, at their most delirious, of being outside their own lives, looking on. You can’t help thinking of her mental illness and repeated mental breakdowns.

Also Woolf is afflicted by a strong sense of what’s the point? None of these women or any of their resolutions will have any impact because it is 1913 and none of them have the vote. This one thought leaves her feeling ‘irritated and depressed’, as well it might, but with the rather more Woolfian threat of ‘boredom and despair’ lurking behind. See how it’s all about her, her and her mental problems?

So Woolf does what she always does and drifts away from the present and daydreams, fantasises, imagines the home life of some of the speakers, of Mrs Giles and Mrs Edwards, imagines the view from their windows (windows, that talismanic Woolfian image). In a pretty patronising tone she imagines what it must be like to be a working class woman, so very different from her own la-di-da habits of ringing up the opera to book tickets or lying in the garden enjoying sensitive reveries of Greece and Italy. Without speaking to a single working class woman she imagines their lives, and her position of irredeemable hauteur and snobbery comes out clearer and clearer.

Here is Virginia Woolf imagining the lives of the working class women of her time.

There were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms.

They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs.

They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief.

Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance.

Vivid enough, very vivid and persuasive, but at the same time so patronising and privileged. Back to the Congress, where Woolf dismissively reports that there were innumerable more speeches, exchanges of home-made jams and biscuits, songs sung and meals consumed, a new President elected, then it was over and everyone caught their trains home.

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s really rammed home why this text is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’. In another writer’s hands this might involve memories of other people, of what they were like, what they said and what they achieved. In Woolf’s hands everything is always about her and her sensitive perceptions and concerns.

In the inconsequential way which you either find charming or irritating, according to taste, Woolf doesn’t remember the substance of any of the conversations she takes part in at the Hampstead headquarters – instead she remembers that the Guild’s secretary, Miss Kidd, was stout and fierce and dressed in a deep purple dress.

Nowadays, if you’re a man, you’re likely to be criticised for judging women purely on their appearance instead of their character, thoughts and achievements. Yet this is exactly what Woolf does. Lacking the mental ability or interest in what anyone says, it is appearance and quirks which appeal to her most consistently. Presumably she’d have said this is the novelist’s eye. Forget issues. Enjoy characters.

Miss Lillian Harris who, whether it was due to her dress which was coffee-coloured, or to her smile which was serene, or to the ash-tray in which many cigarettes had come amiably to an end, seemed the image of detachment and equanimity.

Had one not known that Miss Harris was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Newcastle would not have thumped and throbbed without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one.

She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Harris who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters infallibly and sat listening, without saying very much, with calm comprehension, to whatever was said. (p.151)

‘She had nothing whatever to do’. Yes. Again Woolf repeats her troubled sense of class superiority to most of these working women.

To expect us, whose minds such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and we have money. Therefore, however much we had sympathised our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and nerves.

This turns into a complaint about the way some of the working women who spoke at the Congress imitated and mocked the dainty speech of middle and upper class women. As you can imagine, Virginia didn’t like this, but she comes up with a principled reason. It’s because she found the working class speakers more authentic and real when they stuck to their own voices and concerns and despite the fact that ‘the range of expression is narrower in working women’.

So much does she like this authenticity that she wonders why they want to acquire money and become middle class and so lose the thing they have, their ‘contact with life’, ”facing facts’, ‘the teaching of experience’, call it what you will. Ah the bourgeois fondness for the dignity of labour, as long as it’s other people doing the labouring.

In among all this Woolf makes a claim which is so preposterously privileged it is laugh-out-loud funny, claiming that:

No working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. (p.152)

Yes, her sister, Vanessa, and all the Rogers, Quentins and Duncans in the Bloomsbury Group, they all knew far more about hard work than a coal miner! It’s precisely attitudes like this which gave the group its reputation for high-minded snobbery and condescension. And stupidity.

Woolf is painfully aware of being trapped in her upper-middle-class bubble, what she calls ‘shut up in the confines of the middle classes’. This first part of the essay records all the aspects of embarrassment and boredom and frustration which this plight triggers in her.

She finds many things to admire in ‘them’, these working class women, such as their robust sense of humour, their energy and, especially interesting for Woolf the writer, their way with words, the phrases which Shakespeare would have enjoyed (Woolf and all her characters endlessly invoke Shakespeare, in a thumpingly obvious way, as the absolute peak of poetic expression), their ‘shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely’ (p.153).

Finally she arrives at the frustrated wish that if only the classes could come together and remove the class barriers between them.

We are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans.

And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable.

And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you [Davies] must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them… but only when we are dead. (p.153)

Which prompts the question, Have class barriers been removed in modern England, 90 years after Woolf wrote this, 112 years after the Guild Congress which prompted it?

My impression is that these class barriers have substantially loosened, are not as absolutely impassable as they were in Woolf’s day, but they still remain. The chavs on the council estate round the corner are a slightly threatening mystery to me as I, with my civil service job and interest in the arts, might be for them. I think. The real point is that I don’t know. To a large extent everybody else is a mystery to me.

And also the entire question of ‘class’ has been ruptured and recast by the huge immigration which has changed the nature of English society over the last twenty years. In 2021 63.2% of London residents identified with an ethnic minority group. People identifying with the White ethnic group are now in a minority in London.

I grew up in an England where the main divide was between the middle and working classes and so leaned towards socialist politics on behalf of the downtrodden. But the advent of progressive or woke politics – the rise and rise feminism, the revelation of a dazzling range of gender identities, alongside the immigration of hundreds of ethnic groups which all retain their ethnic identities and allegiances – has massively confused the sociology of England and the old politics. No wonder it (the old two-party system) can’t keep up.

In my opinion these sociological changes have permanently fragmented what used to be called the Left, not only here but all across Europe, leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties. I don’t really judge any of these changes, I’m just observing what I consider to be the biggest social and cultural issue of my time, which presses fairly heavily on all of us, and so colours my readings of political or social writings from the past.

Back to Woolf, my point is that her worry about trying to break down barriers between the unknown white working class women and posh white ladies like herself who go to the opera and understand Shakespeare, these concerns now seem quaint and charming. Of historic interest. Like watching an Ealing Comedy. It is an issue from an England which has disappeared.

Her clarion cry to break down the barriers of class between women is fine and inspiring but I don’t know what they’d mean to the Kurdish hairdressers based in the Kurdish barbers I go to; to the till woman at Tesco from Ghana and Mauritius that I always chat to; to the wives of the Albanian builders who put up a new fence for me; to the Somali family or the Afghan family who live in the flats across from my place. Enjoying the blessings of Shakespeare? Most of them can barely speak English. I’m not saying that’s fatal. I’m just saying it restricts the relevance of Woolf’s discourse, these days, to an even tinier, bookish clique than it did in her day.

To summarise, Woolf feels that in this conversation at the Guild headquarters in Hampstead, she tried:

to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence. (p.154)

Scene 3. The letters themselves

Apparently it was at this point in Woolf’s lament to Davies in the Hampstead headquarters, that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the many letters she had received from working women around the country. Woolf asked to see them but Davies, at that meeting, demurred. It was only years later, after the Great War, that she finally sent Woolf a packet of letters.

And here comes the radical transformation in the content and tone of the piece which I mentioned earlier. The simple unvarnished lives of these staggeringly poor women, the brutal conditions they grew up in, the childhood exploitation, the lives of unremitting labour garnished with the brutality of overseers, fathers and husbands, the horrors of childbirth, the lack of any healthcare, beggars belief.

Yet out of all these terrible stories, Woolf emphasises the positives, praising ‘that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench’. The women describe lives packed with debilitating toil, long hours working in fields and factories and domestic service, six days a week, with sometimes only a few hours free time each week, along with the struggle to support husbands, often ill or thrown out of work, and all the time raise numerous children, often going hungry in the process, worn out by stress and continual work, old and ill before their time.

And so, as I mentioned in my summary, the reader at last gets to the nub of the subject, the testimony of these many women and, as I suggested, realises that maybe the self-obsessed vapourings of the first half of the essay are intended as a deliberate contrast with the shocking lives depicted in the letters. Maybe. Or was Woolf that artful? Discuss.

Because of the in-your-face reality of these last few pages, this essay stands head and shoulders above the others. Maybe it’s just my old left-wing leanings being triggered, but I felt the essay only came to life with them and suddenly, from whimsical Woolfian sepia, changed into colour. Woolf, too, is thrilled by what she calls:

the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench

This is all very moving but, unfortunately, Woolf rather undermines herself, and in a characteristic way, which is that she in particular praises the women who made time in their wretched lives to read and to read the classics, which she then goes to the trouble of namechecking for us:

They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please,” and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books…

All true no doubt, and education begins with reading, but you can’t help feeling there’s something everso narrow about Woolf’s view of life. In her view the good life is reading the books she loves, the books she grew up reading in her father’s library, the same relatively short, restricted list of Great Books, Masterworks of the Spirit etc. Very narrow. Very limited.

Anyway, in the last pages she moves on to praise the work of the Guild and at this point the text morphs more into what you’d expect an introduction to be like, praising the work of the organisation it’s introducing.

It was the Guild that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. It was the Guild that made a central meeting place where formed and solidified all that was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what ‘clean ground’ had been given to the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had been to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place that rarest of all possessions – a room where they could sit down and think, remote from boiling saucepans and crying children… (p.157)

And she goes on to describe the growth of the organisation, its importance as a place where women could meet and share and think and develop their ideas.

And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult childbirths, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere.

His final section which actually summarises the letters and the achievements of the Guild is as genuinely inspiring as Three Guineas is excoriating and anger-making. But again Woolf partly undermines what she’s saying, because she feels the (wholly unnecessary) need to pass literary judgement on these stories, lamenting their lack of literary finish like the crustiest of male critics.

The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. (p.158)

It’s not only socially that Woolf was a snob, but in her very narrow, elitist view of Great Art. But she does condescend to comment that some of the accounts have the rude ‘accuracy and clarity’ of Defoe. In the midst of pontificating, she says something very, very symptomatic, she writes:

Writing is a complex art.

But is it? She would like to think so, but much of the great writing is not that complex. Worked over and elaborated, maybe, but not necessarily that complex. And the history of twentieth century literature since her heyday tends to demonstrate a steady simplification and de-complicating of literary writing, until our own day when much ‘literary’ writing is not, sentence by sentence, complex or difficult.

Here as in most of her writings, Woolf is judging others by her own standards and these standards are themselves a kind of aspiration to an ideal made up of a bunch of Victorian writers mashed together, Keats and Shelley and Lamb, into a vague icon of high Poetry and Truth. Her judging of the working class women’s writings says more about Woolf and her narrow idea of Literature than it does about the working class women.

This is characteristic of all her criticism. She doesn’t really engage with the meat and texture of the works under review, she tends to use them as pretexts to sound off about her hobby horses, to repeat her commitment to Poetry and Truth and hold Shakespeare up as the Great Model, time after time.

A Virago classic

I already knew that the book was published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so there was a more than usually close connection between her and the book i.e. she was more than just an admirer of the Guild asked to write something, but the book’s publisher.

From looking on Amazon and Ebay I learned that Life As We Have Known It was one of the first books published by the feminist publishing house, Virago. So there are multiple layers of feminist history at work here: the women’s original personal experiences; the Guild which encouraged them to write about them; the collection of writings itself; the Woolf connection (publishing it and writing the introduction); and the Virago revival of it. It is quite a dense, multi-layered cultural artefact, then.

So I bought and read it and have reviewed the book as a whole, in a separate blog post.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction to the book can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

‘Matters are gloomy – I never saw them gloomier.’
(Lord Salisbury in March 1885, but could have been at any time in his long life, quoted on page 318 of ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’)

‘The first of duties is to be pachydermatous’ (p.286)

The great thing about Tory writers is they are completely untroubled by theories, ideas or doubts. Living in a dream world of privilege and entitlement, they radiate confidence and suavity. This explains why the writings of so many Conservatives are often so clear and attractive. It explains one of the reasons why Andrew Roberts is so attracted to the hero of this huge biography – for his adamantine certainty:

Unlike so many conservative leaders before and since, Salisbury was a true, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, entirely lacking in either middle-class guilt or ideological doubt. (p.365)

Andrew Roberts is an accomplished biographer and journalist with a very strong Tory bent. He comes from the same kind of privileged, public school background as his subject (though not, admittedly, from the same kind of grand and venerable old family Salisbury came from).

Roberts attended Cranleigh public school then went on to Cambridge, where he chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He has had a distinguished career as a freelance i.e. non-academic, historian, writing 19 books, including four about Winston Churchill, along with countless papers and articles. He writes regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He lives in Knightsbridge. In 2022 he was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia by that reputable politician Boris Johnson (who has also, coincidentally, authored a book about Winston Churchill; I think everyone should write a biography of Winston Churchill, at least once in their lives) and so took his seat in the House of Lords draped in much the same ermine cloak as Lord Salisbury wore. You get the picture.

This is a blockbuster of a political biography, enormously researched and enormous sized, weighing in at 852 pages. It covers all the political issues its subject was involved in, in extraordinary detail, giving daily, sometimes hour-by-hour descriptions of changing events and opinions. And yet it is written with such tremendous clarity and verve, with such an authoritative presentation of the facts in such a logical order, presented in such beautifully lucid prose and with such amiable good humour, that the pages fly by.

Lord Salisbury

This is a blockbuster biography of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury KG GCVO PC FRS DL (1830 to 1903), British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times, for a total of over thirteen years. He was also Foreign Secretary before and during most of his tenure, holding these posts at arguably the high peak of the British Empire, 1886 to 1892 and then 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury’s forebears were the Cecils, advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, who built the imposing Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. The 7th Earl of Salisbury, politician and courtier, was raised to the marquessate, becoming the Marquis of Salisbury, by George III in 1789. (There are currently 34 marquises in Great Britain and Ireland.)

The first Marquis of Salisbury was a solid Tory, as was his son, the 2nd marquis, born in 1791, and so was his son, our hero, when he himself became the 3rd marquis on the death of his father in 1868. Cecil’s own father, the second marquis, had been a successful politician in his own right, Lord Privy Seal in 1852 and Lord President of the Council between 1858 and 1859.

Anyway, this is why Roberts refers to our hero by the family name of ‘Cecil’ in the first past of the book, up till the moment when his elder brother died, in 1865, at which point he inherited the title of Viscount Cranborne, from which point Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. When his father died in 1868 and he inherited the marquisate to become the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, from that point onwards Roberts refers to him as ‘Salisbury’.

1830 to 1865 – Cecil
1865 to 1868 – Cranborne
1868 to 1902 – Salisbury

In 1821 Cecil’s father had made a strategic marriage into the wealthy Gascoyne family, marrying Frances Mary Gascoyne, daughter of Bamber Gascoyne of Childwall Hall, Lancashire, which explains why the family name became Gascoyne-Cecil.

Lonely, sensitive and sad

Cecil’s siblings were either a lot older or younger than him, his father was away in London a lot, so he had a lonely childhood, wandering the echoing corridors of Hatfield House, his only company the house’s 40 or so servants and its vast library. He became a book addict.

Cecil was sent to Eton where he was so mercilessly bullied that he wrote his father a letter begging to be allowed home, and Roberts includes excerpts from his letters with quite harrowing accounts of being punched, kicked in the shins and spat on by older boys.

Cecil was lonely, hyper-sensitive, often depressed and his boyhood experiences made him an extreme pessimist about human nature, always ready to believe the worst, convinced that just beneath the civilised veneer lurked the savage, a belief he saw confirmed by, for example, the savage fighting of the American Civil War. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill,’ he wrote in 1872. But what if there isn’t?

High Tory conservatism

This extreme pessimism formed the basis of Cecil’s arch conservatism: we must hang on to what we’ve got because all change and innovation risks opening the door to democracy, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to barbarism.

Cecil didn’t just go up to Oxford but to Oxford’s poshest college, Christ’s Church. It was the time of the Oxford Movement to restore quasi-Catholic decorations to Anglican belief and services. This attracted him because it gave the C of E a more solid foundation in the central tradition of Christianity. At Oxford he crystallised into an arch conservative in religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs. High Anglican, High Tory. He was vehemently against all forms of change or innovation, in any sphere of life; after all, he was doing just fine, so why change anything?

That said, Cecil was too sensitive to complete his degree at Oxford and so was awarded an honourable 4th. But then academic qualifications didn’t matter. Oxford had done its job of putting the finishing touches to another deep-dyed reactionary member of the English aristocracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that he was a lifelong bibliophile, Cecil was solidly, thumpingly philistine, in that dim conservative aristocratic way. He didn’t like contemporary fiction, he disliked theatre and ballet and had no time for art. He didn’t even like music very much. He was also notoriously scruffy and badly dressed all through his life, even on state occasions, even when meeting royalty.

All this is what makes Cecil so funny, a very amusing caricature of a huffing, disapproving old buffer. Given his family name of Gascoyne-Cecil, I wondered whether the extended family of doddery old aristocrats of the Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family in the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ were based on him.

In line with tradition, Cecil was packed off on the Grand Tour of the Mediterranean sights. But then, a little unusually, he continued on to the southern hemisphere and visited Britain’s main colonies there, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

Like upper-class Englishmen before and since, Cecil got on well with the ‘natives’, conceiving an admiration for the ‘Kaffirs’ in SA and the Maoris in New Zealand, liking to think that he detected in them a certain aristocratic independence and natural superiority, much like his own. Just as predictably, he complained about the ghastly, awful, vulgar middle class people he was forced to mix with on the long sea voyages between these places. He hated the Boers of South Africa who he thought crude slave-drivers, an antipathy which mattered 40 years later when he was to be Prime Minister during the Boer War.

In Australia and New Zealand he saw how white men behave when far removed from the steadying hand of England with its hierarchy of Queen, Lord lieutenants, justices of the peace etc, which was appallingly. In colonial towns like Melbourne and Sydney he saw drunkenness, prostitution, violence, and unfettered lust for gold and money. It confirmed him in his High Toryism: human nature is essentially barbarous and needs to be restrained, by order, disciple, hierarchy, an established church, monarchy etc.

Married and elected MP

Within ten weeks of returning he was ‘elected’ unopposed i.e. nominated, to the ‘pocket borough’ of Stamford (p.20).

Surprisingly, he married not for money or to make an aristocratic alliance, but for love of a middle-class woman, Georgina Alderson, much against his father’s wishes, in 1857. Cut out of the family inheritance, he turned to journalism to support his wife and growing family (he quickly had seven children) and wrote a prolific amount, mainly reviewing and articles in a wide range of publications, notably The Saturday Review. The period 1857 to 1866 (i.e. from age 27 to 36) were his Journalism Years.

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Roberts does a great job of showing the themes and attitudes which informed Cecil’s huge output, demonstrating his fierce satire and sarcastic opinions on everything from women’s fashion to foreign affairs (his policy was to ‘encourage supporters and anger opponents,’ p.261). He was a fierce opponent of nationalisms on the continent and prophetically warned against the rise of German nationalism; scratch the sophisticated veneer of a German professor, he wrote, and you find the same barbarism which transacted the Thirty Years War. The twentieth century was to prove him right.

Cecil was anti-slavery but supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War because of a deep dislike of Americans as a whole, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He thought Lincoln’s actions during the war, such as closing the free press, suspending habeas corpus and interning up to 14,000 political opponents, was exactly what you got if you let democracy run rampant i.e. tyranny.

He also thought that letting the Confederacy win would have the benefit of splitting the US into two countries, both a lot weaker and less of a rival for Britain. He also worried that if the Union won the war, it would attack Canada next.

Roberts’ descriptions of Cecil’s vehement and bigoted views makes for hilarious reading. Cecil had strong views about everything, which he expressed in often very funny satire and sarcasm. For example, he hated the Irish. While happily admitting that England had behaved terribly to the Irish for centuries and possibly even owed the Irish reparations, he still wrote waspish satire such as that Ireland ‘had given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions, and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting’ (p.53).

Having just read Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, which highlights the need for capital investment in the poorest African countries, it’s interesting to see that Cecil thought this was precisely the trouble with 19th century Ireland too, that investors didn’t want to invest because of the poor returns and, above all, the lack of security i.e. threat of violence. Interesting to think of 19th century Ireland as experiencing the same problems as 21st century Africa.

So regarding Ireland, in Salisbury’s view, if inward investment was the solution, then it was vital to establish security and the rule of law in order to attract investors; in which case, the continual agrarian unrest in Ireland had to be ruthlessly crushed.

Cecil approved of Ireland’s high migration rate and, indeed, looked forward to a time when every single Irish person had emigrated and the island could be populated with law-abiding Scots and Saxons: ‘the sooner they are gone the better’ (p.53). Mind you, he was just as scathing about the Orangemen and ‘the special fanaticism of Ulster’ which is, of course, still causing trouble one hundred and sixty years later.

Another major issue was electoral reform on which Cecil had a very blunt utilitarian view: if the working classes were given the vote they would elect radicals who would redistribute wealth via fierce taxation on the rich. So in defence of his class, and out of naked self interest, Cecil was against extending the franchise. It wasn’t that the ruling class was morally better than the plebs – he wrote plenty of satirical articles criticising the lifestyle of the Victorian rich – but that the leisure and education they enjoyed made them likely to be better, more disinterested legislators, who would act for the national good, compared to radicals who, if elected, would owe their position to pleasing i.e. bribing, the electorate, probably by levying unjust taxes on the wealthy i.e. Cecil and his class.

(Cf Richard Shannon’s excellent book, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915, which also drums home how both conservatives and opponents believed that the 1832 settlement had produced a nice balance between the interests of the landed aristocracy, the new business-based bourgeoisie, and the skilled working class. It wasn’t extending the franchise to the lower middle classes and rest of the working class they objected to, as such (although some did), it was upsetting this delicate balance by giving too much prominence to one particular part of the population, which they thought risked toppling the country into either anarchy or demagoguery.)

Cecil also pointed to the baleful example of America where, once every four years, the entire administration ground to a halt while the political parties competed in offering bribes (tax cuts, favourable government policies) to the electorate.

Timeless issues

The appeal of reading about old politics like this is that as well as the obvious appeal of explaining how political leaders behaved as they did and so helping to explain how and why we got from there to here – it also takes you way out of your comfort zone and presents you with completely different ways of thinking about all sorts of political problems. In my opinion this is useful because closely observing how people in the past were prisoners of their age’s assumptions, their level of technological, economic and social development, sheds light on how we, in our own time, are just as much prisoners of our technological, economic and social conventions. It prompts the thought that our descendants will view us with the same curiosity, puzzlement and disgust as we view the Victorians.

And it’s always disconcerting to learn how few of those issues have really changed: electoral reform; trade reform; worrying about economic rivals; worrying about our poor standard of education; squabbles about the rights of trade unions and strikers; managing clean water and sewerage; difficulties with Ireland; small wars in Africa; instability in the Middle East; how to fend off the growing threat from Russia. Ring any bells? Plus ça change… (a phrase which was coined in 1849 and itself hasn’t changed).

Using the Saturday Review

By the time I got to the end of the book I realised a simple central fact about it which is that Roberts uses Salisbury’s early journalism as a central structuring device. The main structure of the book is straightforwardly chronological, he covers all the events in Salisbury’s career as they occur. But almost every single one of these topics or themes is introduced with a quote from a Saturday Review article which Salisbury wrote about it. Sometimes, 10, 20 or 30 years later, and now in power, his early opinion as evinced in a Review article shows the continuity of his thinking; sometimes, on the contrary, the quote from an article shows how either his thinking or the situation has changed.

But either way, Roberts uses the fact that he has clearly read and carefully annotated all of Salisbury’s early journalism as a kind of running commentary on his later career. Thus almost every incident of Cecil’s long political career is seen from two perspectives: that of the cocksure young journalist writing in humorous, general, cynical terms; and that of the older, experienced statesman, acting on experience. Two voices, two perspectives. Or a running commentary on the mature politician by the cocky young tyro.

Viscount Cranborne

In June 1865 (two months after the end of the American civil war) Cecil’s older brother died, aged just 42, and so Cecil inherited the courtesy title Viscount Cranborne, he and his wife becoming Lord and Lady Cranborne. From now on Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. From now on Cranborne enjoyed the income associated with the title and so his journalistic activities wound down, as Roberts demonstrates with a graphic statistic: before his brother’s death he wrote 589 articles for the Saturday Review; afterwards, he wrote just 19, mostly to whip up support for policies he was trying to promote.

Four months later Lord Palmerston died and the numerous competing forces in British politics which he had been holding in check were let loose. Lord Derby and Disraeli formed a joint leadership of the Conservative Party, Derby in the Lords, Dizzy in the Commons. Cranborne grew to dislike and distrust ‘Dizzy’. He was the lead figure in the attempt to water down if not cancel Disraeli’s reform bill of 1867.

In 1868 Cranborne’s father died, aged 77, and he inherited Hatfield House and all its incomes, becoming the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and, of course, being forced out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords.

Cecil was a surprisingly ramshackle father who let his kids run wild. They all remember a boisterous sociable happy childhood, the exact opposite of his. Lady Salisbury grew into a formidable hostess and manager of the Hatfield Estate, which employed well over 100 staff. Parliamentary colleagues nicknamed him ‘Buffalo’ because he was big (well over 6 foot), solemn and obstinate. In 1870 he built a big ugly red-brick holiday home near Dieppe on the Channel coast of France, naming it Chalet Cecil.

Victorian Prime Ministers

Lord Derby – February 1858 to June 1859 (Tory)
Lord Palmerston – June 1859 to October 1865 (Whig)
Lord John Russell – October 1865 to June 1866 (Whig)
Lord Derby – June 1866 to February 1868 (Tory)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1868 to December 1868 (Tory)
William Gladstone – December 1868 to February 1874 (Liberal)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1874 to April 1880 (Tory)
William Gladstone – April 1880 to June 1885 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1885 to January 1886 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – February 1886 to July 1886 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – July 1886 to August 1892 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – August 1892 to March 1894 (Liberal)
Lord Rosebery – March 1894 to June 1895 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1895 to July 1902 (Conservative)

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

He never canvased to be an MP but was simply appointed one by the Earl of Exeter to a pocket borough.

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

In 1865, his older brother died, he inherited the title of Cranborne, and in 1866 Disraeli appointed him Secretary of State for India.

Salisbury was blamed for mishandling the Orissa famine of 1866, a disaster which affected the east coast of India from Madras northwards. At least a million Indians died, roughly one third of the population of the area. New to his brief, Salisbury believed his officials and experts who said it wasn’t serious, until it was too late, leaving him with a lifelong suspicion of experts. It made him quick off the mark and insistent on spending whatever it took to save lives in later Indian famines. The scale of the disaster made educated Indians realise maybe Britain wasn’t the all-powerful protector she pretended to be. The famine was one among many triggers for Indian nationalism.

Fear, awe and respect

Salisbury thought Britain’s rule over India was achieved by psychological means. There was no way 250,000 (mostly native) troops could hold down 250 million people if they chose to rebel against them. Earlier India officials such as Macauley had recommended that a select number of upper class Indians be educated, in English, up to western standards, in order to become intermediaries between western and Indian culture. Salisbury was sceptical about even this colonial, patronising idea, in fact he thought it was catastrophic since it just produced a class of ‘seditious article writers’. He thought India was vital to Britain’s prestige in the world i.e. vis-a-vis the other powers, and must be kept down by ‘fear, awe and respect for the law’ (p.139).

As Secretary of State for India, where British resources depended to a large degree on prestige rather than actual resources employed, Salisbury…was one of the first people to appreciate quite the extent to which militarily the British Empire was a gigantic bluff. (p.178)

And, criticising the more enlightened policies of Gladstone’s Liberals, Cecil declared in a speech that:

‘They will not learn that these tribes, these vast uncivilised multitudes, are not governed merely by the sword. They are governed by the imagination. They are governed by their fears.’ (p.293)

As Roberts summarises:

He stood out against the Whig ethos propagated by Macauley and others that Britain’s duty was simply to prepare Indians for eventual self-government. In Salisbury’s view, India was a prize that should remain Britain’s until it was forcible wrested from her. (p.216)

The 1867 Reform Act

The big issue was electoral reform in which Disraeli dished i.e. scuppered the Whigs. Salisbury made himself a master of electoral statistics and predicted reform would eliminate support for Tories. Salisbury made a big speech attacking Disraeli for rubbishing the Whig bill in 1866 then introducing one which was even more radical in 1867. Disraeli calculated that the newly enfranchised middle classes would be grateful to the Tories. Salisbury had done the math and said they wouldn’t and they weren’t. In fact he was fanatical about research, and always read everything he could get his hands on about whatever issue was at hand, electoral reform in 1867, and then again in 1885, being classic examples.

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Gladstone’s Liberals won the 1868 election and were in government for 6 long years which they devoted to reforming all aspects of British law and society

Cranborne’s father died and he inherited the title of Lord Salisbury, the big house at Hatfield and a seat in the House of Lords. Roberts describes the ecclesiastical and political issues around his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the core of high Anglican high Toryism.

Roberts also has a passage describing Salisbury’s unexpected interest in new technology. He was an early adopter of electricity and built a laboratory at Hatfield House where he carried out quite serious experiments about light. Cecil had a surprisingly scientific openness, for example he refused to be drawn into attacking Darwin after the ‘Origin of Species’ was published.

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Queen Victorian wished to be awarded the title Empress of India was sharpened when a newly united Germany, after its victory over France, declared itself an empire in 1871, so there as a danger that her daughter, Vicky, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, would take precedence over her, a mere queen. Also the Tsar made a state visit to Britain in 1874 after the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. In other words, everyone else was, or was becoming, an emperor – why not her?

The delicate handling of the issue, for British public opinion, abroad, and, of course, in India itself, are covered by Robert with typical thoroughness. He describes the great hou-ha that was held across India on the declaration on New Year’s Day 1877 (p.215).

The extremely complicated manoeuvring during the crisis triggered by uprisings against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria and Serbia in the summer of 1876. The Turks crushed the Bulgarians with great brutality, sending in mercenaries (the notorious bashi-bazouks) who were allowed to rape, pillage and murder at will. Gladstone publicised all this with his famous pamphlet of September 1876, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’.

You have to understand that this was all caught up in the long-term consequences of the Crimean War. The Crimean War had been fought to prevent Russia’s extension of its influence into the Balkans i.e. further into Europe, at the expense of the Ottomans. The Treaty of Paris which concluded it pledged the allies i.e. France and Britain, to come to the support of the Ottomans.

The point of a detailed account like Roberts’ is to take you right into the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, and describe in very great detail the different positions of the 12 men who comprised it. And this issue split them up into half a dozen factions as the crisis dragged on and a host of different responses, political, diplomatic and military all emerged.

Basically, some of the Cabinet thought the Ottoman Empire was irrevocably doomed to collapse and so we should never have pledged to prop it up. This led to the view that the Crimean War should have never been fought and was a colossal mistake. But this didn’t mean we supported Russia and its restless aims for expansion. Some supported Russia but opposed any expansion of its territory or power. Some thought we should continue to prop up ‘the sick man of Europe’. Some trod a middle way, trying to find a formula to support the Christians in the Balkans – the Bulgarians and Serbs – without insulting the Turks and without allowing undue Russian influence. Some went to an extreme and thought the European powers should partition the Ottoman Empire and civil servants in European capitals began drawing up suggestions for who would get where.3

Queen Victoria was a confirmed Russophobe. I was startled to learn that she threatened to abdicate no fewer than five times through the course of the crisis, leading Salisbury to speculate privately about her sanity (p.174). Disraeli had made it his policy to suck up to Her Majesty, maybe because it was good politics to have the monarch behind you, maybe because he saw it as his duty as ‘a minister of the Crown’, maybe because he liked sucking up.

Foremost in everyone’s minds was how to keep the route to India, the jewel in the British Crown, open and secure, but there were multiple answers to this problem: the most extreme was letting Russia invade and conquer through Bulgaria and down into Ottoman territory until she, possibly, took Constantinople and restored it as an Eastern orthodox Christian capital, as Russian extremists wanted to. In that case, some Cabinet members were for a) pre-emptively seizing Constantinople ourselves or b) sending an Expeditionary force to seize the Dardanelles i.e. the gateway from the Black Sea. The point of this would be to prevent the Russian fleet from freely passing through it and staking a claim in the Eastern Mediterranean. A simpler route would be to annex Egypt, thus securing the south east Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The rearguard position was continuing to prop up the sick man – and our power and influence in the region – hoping something would come along.

The enormous pleasure of a book like Roberts’s is that he takes you right into the detail of this complex chess game, in which everyone – not just Russians, Ottomans, and neighbours like Austria – had multiple points of views and proposals, but even within the British cabinet there were multiple beliefs and strategies and that these kept changing and evolving as the situation changed.

Thus Salisbury was chosen to attend the Constantinople Conference (December 1876 to January 1877) to try and sort out the crisis, very usefully meeting the heads of all the important states en route (including huge, coarse, very clever Count von Bismarck), but Roberts shows in great detail how his ostensible aim of securing peace between Turkey and Russia was secretly sabotaged by Disraeli and his ally Lord Derby who, along with the Queen, loathed Russia, but couldn’t be seen to be supporting the perpetrators of the atrocities. Roberts’ suggests that Disraeli’s reputation for two-faced slipperiness was well deserved.

Anyway, the peace conference failed and so Salisbury’s mission failed, but many commentators in the press realised that he had been set up to fail by his boss. It was a hugely useful experience of the realities of power and diplomacy for a man who was to become Foreign Secretary then Prime Minister.

And so war between Russia and Turkey broke out, lasting from April 1877 to Match 1878, with Russia recruiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro to her side. Russia won. Her army fought all the way to the gates of Constantinople at which point the western powers intervened again.

In victory Russia reclaimed provinces in the Caucasus but more importantly, the principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro formally proclaimed their independence from the Ottoman Empire and, after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination, the Principality of Bulgaria emerged as a free nation.

So there’s one layer of pleasure to this narrative, which is watching the drama of high politics play out like an episode of House of Cards. But there’s a huge additional pleasure deriving from Salisbury’s Eeyorish character, always pessimistically convinced of the worse – ‘Things that have been secure for centuries are secure no longer,’ (p.274) – a doom-laden attitude which very often converts into hilariously satirical attitudes and observations. Roberts cites from Salisbury’s letters and dispatches countless examples of ironic reversals and witty sarcasms, a permanent attitude of ‘amused cynicism’ (p.215).

His unexpected juxtapositions aren’t on the level of Oscar Wilde’s deliberate paradoxes, but indicate the taste for aristocratic humour which characterised the age:

‘General Ignatiev is an amusing man without much regard for truth and an inordinate vanity which our Embassy takes every opportunity of wounding.’ (p.159)

Salisbury was an inveterate phrase-maker’ (p.247). Epigrams came naturally to him:

‘No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.’ (p.194

Good government avoids one of the causes of hate; but it does not inspire love.’ (p.214)

And ran in the family. Salisbury’s daughter, Maud, accompanied him on his journey across Europe to Turkey, and kept a diary. Roberts cites her being told by beaming Ottoman officials that they were travelling on had been built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, to which she politely enquired whether anyone had mended it since.

Beaconsfieldism

In 1876 Queen Victorian rewarded Disraeli for his ~~toadying~~ services to the nation, by making him Earl of Beaconsfield. From this point onwards contemporaries, and Roberts, refer to him as ‘Beaconsfield’.

From 1878 to 1880 the leading opponent of the Tories, William Gladstone, gave a series of speeches as he campaigned to win the parliamentary seat of Midlothian in Scotland. There were 6 very long speeches and over twenty shorter ones, addressed to halls full of thousands of voters, which harped on four main themes. He charged Disraeli’s administration with: financial incompetence, neglect of domestic legislation, and mismanagement of foreign affairs. In particular he charged Disraeli with a strategy of distracting public opinion from the economic and financial problems of Britain by means of foreign adventures. Gladstone gave the name Beaconsfieldism to ‘the immoral, bullying acquisition of territory almost for its own sake’ (p.212). One Tory critic defined it as: ‘occupy, fortify, grab and brag’ (p.227).

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

As mentioned above the recurring concerns of Britain in foreign affairs were: continual wars, unrest and Russian threat in the Balkans; management of Egypt and her southern extension, Sudan; management of South Africa and fractious relations with the Boers and the irritating little states like the Transvaal which kept being claimed or created with resulting tribal wars where we had to decide where we stood. And above all else, the running sore of Ireland.

Russo-Turkish War (April 1877 to March 1878)
Second Afghan War (November 1878 to September 1880)
First Zulu War (January to July 1879)
Egypt

Congress of Berlin

Roberts gives an intricate account of the multi-layered diplomacy which brought an end to the at the Congress of Berlin, June to July 1878, for which he was rewarded by the Queen with the Order of the Garter (as was with Disraeli).

Afghanistan

Many in the Foreign Office panicked about Russian intentions in Afghanistan i.e. it was placing diplomats there with a view to infiltrating/overthrowing the Amir, with a view to eventually invading India. Salisbury was sceptical about this talk of Russia attacking. He believed that the expansion of the Russian empire, or ‘the Russian avalanche’ as he called it, was unstoppable but was moving east across central Asia.

‘If it keeps north of the Hindu Kush it may submerge one caste of Muslim robbers after another without disturbing our repose.’ (p.145)

The Afghan war was the fault of Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India. Lytton’s despatches had become steadily more hysterical and Salisbury predicted to a cabinet colleague that he expected him [Lytton] would no conduct operations ‘so as to achieve the most brilliant results – lose the greatest number of men – and spend the largest amount of money’ (p.221).

Sure enough Lytton disobeyed instructions to disengage and sent a British force to force the Amir to accept a British representative at his court, which was defeated at the Khyber Pass. This forced Salisbury’s hand because he believed Britain must be seen to be strong.

The Battle of Maiwand

The war included the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 when Afghan forces under Ayub Khan defeated an admittedly smaller British force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows, some 969 of whom were killed.

The point of mentioning this is that when British forces were dispatched to south Afghanistan in 2006 their bases in Helmand Province turned out not to be very far from the site of the battle and they discovered that local Afghan leaders and fighters still remembered it as a great patriotic victory over the infidel invader. The moral being that we, the British, have forgotten or never even knew most of our imperial history whereas, for scores of nations which we fought and conquered, our violent interventions are very much part of their national story.

The Anglo-Zulu War

From Wikipedia:

Following the passing of the British North America Act of 1867 forming a federation in Canada [Salisbury’s friend and ally in Disraeli’s cabinet] Lord Carnarvon thought that a similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African Kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as British High Commissioner to effect such plans. Among the obstacles were the armed independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand. Frere, on his own initiative, sent a provocative ultimatum on 11 December 1878 to the Zulu king Cetshwayo and upon its rejection sent Lord Chelmsford to invade Zululand. The war is notable for several particularly bloody battles, including an opening victory of the Zulu at the Battle of Isandlwana, followed by the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a small British force from attack by a large Zulu force. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region.

Salisbury in several places rages against the way the men on the spot, politicians or viceroys or diplomats or sometimes buccaneering businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, were forever stirring up trouble and starting conflicts which the government back in London then had no option to follow through. It was true of both the Afghan and Zulu wars where the same ends might have been achieved through diplomacy, trade and deals.

Roberts tells how Salisbury couldn’t understand why the Queen was so keen to allow the son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III (who had sought refuge in Chislehurst in Kent) Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, to accompany British forces, but she insisted. He was promptly killed on 1 June 1879 by Zulus who stripped his corpse, all except for one blue sock bearing the initial N from which he was identified.

Egypt

Salisbury wanted to exercise ‘informal empire’ over Egypt not officially annex it. In theory Egypt was run by a Khedive appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. In practice, in return for propping up the Sultan and broadly supporting him against the Russians, Britain was allowed to interfere in Egypt. Apart from anything else Britain had huge sums invested in the Suez Canal and associated businesses. When the stroppy Khedive Ismail Pasha threw out British representatives, Salisbury had the British ambassador to Istanbul ask the Sultan to oust him in favour of his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would be more pliable. A few weeks later Salisbury wrote with typical dour cynicism to a colleague:

‘The only form of control we have is that which is called moral influence, which in practice is a combination of nonsense, objuration and worry.’ (p.229)

I had to look up ‘objuration’. It means ‘a firm binding by oath’. Salisbury’s cynicism is deliberately witty but it’s also bullshit, isn’t it? We also had a massive army (in India a truly huge army), the Royal Navy (which bombarded Alexandria and docked at Istanbul to threaten the Sultan with their guns), and various instruments of financial control through the City of London. A lot more tangible than ‘nonsense, objuration and worry.’

British troops used Egypt as a base to head south to defeat the forces of the Mahdi in what is now the Sudan. Despite all Salisbury and other British politicians’ insistence that the occupation of Egypt was purely temporary, it was, of course, strategic and long term, designed to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India (p.343). British troops didn’t leave Egypt until 1956, leaving a deep legacy of suspicion and resentment.

Tory defeat in 1880

The Tories were surprised at the scale of the landslide which turned them out in the 1880 election: Liberals 352, Tories 237, Irish Home Rule MPs 60 (p.238). Beaconsfield was ill, he had looked tired at the Conference of Berlin, had fluffed his lines and missed sessions due to chronic asthma (p.203).

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Salisbury took up some of his old hobbies including experimenting with electricity and collecting seaweed. Beaconsfield continued as Tory leader until his death in April 1881.

The Liberal Party had only been founded in 1859 as a coalition of anti-Tory forces. As the number of Radical Liberal MPs increased, it alienated the other wing of the party, the landed aristocratic Whig faction (p.244). In opposition, one of Salisbury’s cunning plans was to subtly egg on Gladstone’s radicalism, specially regarding Irish Home Rule and electoral reform, in order to inflame the Radicals’ expectations and rhetoric and so scare the landowning Whigs that they would come over to the Tories. There’s huge amounts of that kind of Machiavellian scheming in this book.

Electoral reform

The big issue at the end of Gladstone’s ministry was electoral reform. Eventually he passed two acts, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Both were passed by the Liberal House of Commons but strongly resisted in the House of Lords led by Salisbury. This was for the simple reason that both acts tended to favour the Liberal, Whig and Radical interest at the expense of the aristocracy.

For the first time Britain was divided into 670 constituencies of roughly equal size, each returning just one Member of Parliament (previously many constituencies had returned two MPs, who tended to be one Liberal and one Tory, who didn’t even bother campaigning against each other. In other two-member constituencies the fractured Liberal Party had handed one to a Whig and one to a Radical. Salisbury cannily calculated that forcing them to choose one or the other would drive wedges between the two factions.

A lot more constituencies were created in cities, but Roberts shows that Salisbury, with characteristic thoroughness, had done intensive research into British psephology and correctly guessed that although some of these cities might turn Liberal or Radical, a lot of Britain’s big cities now had extensive suburbs and the inhabitants of these were just as scared of working class radicalism as the aristocracy (p.306). This was referred to ‘villa Toryism’ and came to be seen as a legacy of Disraeli.

A small symbol of this was the establishment in October 1882 of the periodical the National Review, designed to produce intelligent journalism for these middle-class Tories.

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

Roberts chronicles the extraordinary manoeuvrings which surrounded Salisbury’s first spell as Prime Minister. In February the Liberals were defeated in an amendment to a bill and Gladstone immediately resigned. But the organisation required by the new Reform Act had not yet been put in place and wouldn’t be until the end of the year so, if he accepted power, Salisbury was faced with the unappetising prospect of being Prime Minister of a minority government for 6 months which was just long enough to make numerous mistakes and, at the next election, be unceremoniously chucked out. It’s fascinating to read the long maze of negotiations this led to, centrally getting Gladstone to agree to pass various nuts and bolts laws and acts which needed to go through. Gladstone had done the same thing to Disraeli in 1874; Salisbury had watched and learned.

There were two other problems. Salisbury wasn’t a shoe-in for Prime Minister. He sat in the House of Lords whereas the leader in the Commons throughout the period in opposition had been Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Baronet [Eton]. Northcote expected the job but was widely seen to be too weak and lacking drive whereas Salisbury (as we’ve seen) enjoyed nothing more than making swingeing attacks on his enemies.

The second problem was Winston Churchill’s father, the radical and unreliable Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (Eton). Randolph had set himself up with a cohort of followers on the Radical wing of the Conservative Party the leaders of which came to be referred to as ‘the Fourth Party’ (Churchill, Henry Drummond Wolff, John Gorst and Arthur Balfour). He promoted something called ‘Tory democracy’, that the Tories should accept the 1885 Reform Act, and the rise of the working class which lay behind it, but ensure the boundaries and details were drawn up to their advantage. A flashy update of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Conservatism’. He created the National Union of the Conservative Party, created to ‘organise propaganda to attract working men’s votes, registration, choose candidates and conduct elections’, had many followers but refused to serve in Salisbury’s cabinet unless various demands were met.

Salisbury’s juggling of all these issues, trying to square various circles, makes for fascinating reading, insight into the real, smoke-filled rooms nature of actual party politics, more like a soap opera or school playground, with gangs and threats and changing alliances, than anything to do with principles, let alone serving the country.

Salisbury only finally accepted the job when Queen Victoria shed tears and pleaded with him. It was called a ‘caretaker’ government. He was 55. Lord Northcote was gutted but rewarded by being made Earl of Iddlesleigh and packed off to the Lords. Apparently, this is the origin of the expression, being ‘kicked upstairs’.

It is impossible to take the honours system seriously when you see titles like this being used with the utmost cynicism as rewards for mediocrity or being a big donor to party funds or simply to shut people up and get them out of the way. The people these made-up ‘titles’ get handed out to are generally lapdogs, the superannuated or inconvenient mediocrities who need to be shut up. That the givers or takers of these ‘honours’ then get on their hind legs and spout about ‘honour’ and ‘tradition’ and all the rest of it is risible, pathetic: see the way Boris Johnson simply rewarded key allies with peerages, damehoods and knighthoods. Dame Priti Patel. Or Liz Truss’s ‘honours’ list which even the Daily Telegraph described as ‘shameless’.

IRELAND

Salisbury was as solid as a rock against any form of home rule or national assembly for Ireland, because:

the 1800 Act of Union was a bulwark of property rights, law and order
it would be a slippery slope, the first step on an irresistible drive towards independence
as the first and nearest colony of Great Britain, giving Ireland any measure of home rule would immediately trigger calls for the same from every other colony in the empire, especially India (cf pages 574, 587)
it would mean abandoning the minority of the population of Ireland who were active supporters of the Union i.e. mostly in Ulster
on a moral level, it would be an ignoble surrender to the forces of violence (what was later called terrorism) i.e. the continual low-level agrarian protests and occasional murders all across Ireland
losing our prime colony would undermine Britain’s prestige in the world, make us look less powerful, and also
an independent Ireland led by people who hate us would become a serious security threat, even a starting point for invasion by enemy powers (as it had been for the French during the Revolutionary Wars)
a neutral or hostile Ireland would threaten Britain’s ability to import food in time of war (p.587)

Ireland quotes:

‘Are we to cut our country in two and, in the smaller portion, are we to abandon a minority of our own blood and religion to the power of their ancient enemies, in spite of their bitter protests against the debasing and ruinous servitude to which we propose to leave them?’ (p.586)

There was also rabid anti-Catholicism. Salisbury wasn’t just an Anglican, he was a fierce insister on the rights and perquisites of the Church of England in all its aspects. There was, therefore, a strong element of religious bigotry in his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. It’s not just in the last few years that politicians have come up with superficial trivialising jingles: it was about this time that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’ began to be repeated by the lighter minded Conservatives and chanted at meetings and conferences (p.380).

But Roberts gives the game away, on the same page, about Ireland and the whole imperial ethos, by telling us that the very First Earl of Salisbury had been instrumental in the wholesale CONFISCATION of land in Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone between 1607 and 1609 and selling it in lots roughly the size of parishes to Scottish and City businessmen for settlement. He makes it crystal clear that the Protestant English stole the land from its rightful owners, then distributed it according to English law and from that point onwards, for the next 400 years, insisted it was a bulwark of English law when it was plain for any bystander to see that English law was, in that case, just a form of organised thieving, looting, imperial confiscation.

To then turn around and claim that this act of grand larceny, the organised theft of an entire nation’s patrimony, represented the epitome of ‘law and order’ and defending the theft amounted to ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276):

Hartington looked upon the Irish Question primarily as one of defending property and landowning rights. (p.367)

is either to lie to yourself or be guilty of ridiculous hypocrisy. Ask any Irish historian what they think of English ‘honour’ and ‘legality’.

Roberts’ long account of the lengthy manoeuvrings about Home Rule is interrupted for a brief mention of how the British ‘formally annexed’ Upper Burma. The king of Burma, King Theebaw, was negotiating a convention with France but Salisbury was having none of that – Burma had little or no value in itself but might be a useful conduit to western China, and the French certainly weren’t going to have it! — so he sent a force of 9,000 troops who smashed the Burmese army, overthrew the king and put him in prison, installing a friendly Buddhist in power.

Invading foreign countries, overthrowing their traditional rulers, making them subservient to British rule. Only a special kind of mental perversion could talk about this in the same breath as ‘preserving law and order’ and ‘the inviolable rights of property’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’, let alone think that ‘Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation and mankind [was her] empire’ (p.370).

The violent overthrows, the coups, the imposition of rule by military force, the suppression of opposition voices, were all carried out to defend British strategic and business interests. The fact that they were dressed up in fancy rhetoric was what prompted continental observers like the French or Germans to routinely accuse the British of stunning hypocrisy.

Anti-democracy

It’s worth exploring the thinking behind Salisbury’s opposition to expanding the franchise. Basically he thought liberty was based on a) property and b) tradition and c) the law which upheld them. Only people with property have an interested in the existing system. Give the vote to people who have no property and their opinions will be wild and unpredictable, harmful to tradition, security, property etc. It would be mob rule, unjust, arbitrary and destructive. This is why he often referred to ‘the tyranny of numbers’. Just because a majority of the voters vote for something doesn’t make it right.

If you start from the position that property is the bedrock of liberty, then it follows that all attacks on property are, to the same extent, attacks on liberty. Thus Salisbury put a wide variety of reforms, such as extending the franchise or a graduated death duties, under the heading Attacks on Property which, in Salisbury’s mind, was synonymous with Attacks on Liberty.

It’s a coherent and logical position, but one which doesn’t take account of poverty. Its twinning of liberty with property, the more the better, gives no representation, voice or opinion to the large number of people who have little or no property: should they have no say in the running of the country? No, according to Tories of Salisbury’s stripe.

This was because he had nightmares that enfranchising the working classes and the poor would encourage in them, or demagogues, a wish to overthrow the aristocracy and take the money and property of everyone better off than themselves. He had a lifelong fascination with, and horror of, the French Revolution, not only read books on the subject but amassed a collection of pamphlets and ephemera, often some up from Paris bookshops and second-hand stalls (p.541). The conclusion he drew from it was that it was the fault of weak-willed liberals who set off with the best of intentions but broke down the constitutional checks and restraints and so opened the door to Terror and tyranny. That’s how he viewed the Liberals of his day: as well-intentioned but weak-willed types who, by attacking ‘privilege’ and ‘property’, threatened to sweep away restraint and open the door to anarchy.

Ironically, however, the actual result of electoral reform was virtually the opposite: as a result of the 1884 Reform Act, during the 1890s Salisbury began to worry that the effect of widening the franchise would not be revolution but the opposite, the triumph of super-patriotic Jingoism which, with his incurable pessimism, he regarded as almost as bad.

Salisbury sayings

‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.’ (p.173)

When a member of his own party objected to the way bits of other countries were traded like counters at the Berlin Conference, Salisbury robustly replied:

that if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ (p.185)

Comedy

At the Conference of Berlin in the summer of 1878 it was very hot. At the Kaiser’s residence in Potsdam there were mosquitoes, but at Berlin there were ‘minor powers. I don’t know which is worse.’ (p.201).

Of the army hero and adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who had undertaken a 1,000 mile midwinter expedition across Central Asia, he wrote: ‘I cannot see any reason for interfering with the natural right of a Briton to get his throat cut when and where he likes,’ (p.218). (Burnaby was subsequently killed in hand-to-hand fighting against followers of the Mahdi at the Battle of Abu Klea, 16 January 1885.)

When, at the time of the Congress of Berlin, an Admiral Hornby demanded that preparations for war with Russia be stepped up, Salisbury wrote to a cabinet colleague that:

‘If Hornby is a cool-headed, fearless, sagacious man, he ought to bring an action for libel against his epistolary style.’ (p.192)

At a tricky point of negotiations with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Salisbury wrote to the British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, Sir Austen Henry Layard, that they might get their way in small matters with the Sultan but at the risk of inflaming his Muslim people and risking revolution, which was ‘rather like burning down a house to procure roast pork.’ (p.237).

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ (p.250)

In 1889 the Shah of Persia, Nasr-el-Din, visited England for a month. When he was taken to see a model modern prison, he asked to see a gallows in action. On being told that no-one was due to be hanged that day he offered one of his own entourage (p.543).

Of the Daily Mail Salisbury quipped that Alfred Harmsworth had:

‘invented a paper for those who could read but not think’ (p.668)

He liked to say that bishops came in two mutually exclusive categories: those who were fit to be made bishops but unwilling, and those who were willing but unfit. A lot of bishops died and needed to be replaced during his premiership, he appointed 38 new bishops, more than any other Prime Minister before or since. He joked: ‘They die to spite me’ (p.676).

Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1895 to 1902 was so appalled by the rapidly escalating cost of the (second) Boer War that he repeatedly threatened to resign from the cabinet. So many times in fact, that Salisbury joked that he had a special drawer in his desk just for Hicks Beach’s resignation letters (p.744).

Balfour said of his uncle that he certainly believed that all men are equal, ‘by which he means, equally incompetent’ (p.746).

When the Liberal politician John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, attacked the dire management of the Boer War, Salisbury replied that:

‘A more gloomy collection of lugubrious vaticinations I never heard.’ (p.755)

In 1896 Victoria asked Salisbury to promote Lord Waldegrave from being a Lord in Waiting to the Yeoman of the Guard, because as a Lord he was constantly in her presence and she found him simply too ugly to look at (p.794).

Roberts says that Salisbury’s wit was the equal of Disraeli’s but different in kind, relying on ‘high irony rather than mere paradox’ (p.849). Discuss.

Roberts the fanboy

Roberts loves his hero:

Protecting the Royal Family from embarrassment, whether it be political in Berlin, financial over the Royal Grants, sexual over disappointed mistresses, or even highly tangential, as over the Cleveland Street Scandal, Salisbury simply saw as part of the duties of the premiership, and he carried them out impeccably. (p.561)

This is not the tone of an objective historian but of an impassioned fan. Robert devotes pages 336 to 338 to citing witnesses to Salisbury’s sense of fun, his dry humour and cynical wit:

Just as he could not write a boring sentence, so Salisbury was also incapable of uttering a commonplace or canting remark. Lord Rosebery [Eton] once wrote that reading old political speeches was as dull as drinking decanted champagne. Salisbury’s extra brut speeches are the exception, and of a vintage that is still effervescent. (p.208)

Roberts himself often mimics or echoes Salisbury’s drollness:

Sultans of Turkey lived on the grand scale, some compensation for their occasional short life expectancy. (p.161) [E.g. Midhat Pasha was dismissed as Grand Vizier during the Russo-Turkish War, banished to Baghdad and eventually strangled.]

They both have that lofty Tory irony, that droll detachment and amused good humour, which makes the book so readable.

Conclusion to part one

This is a magnificent biography, huge, compendious but written with a tremendous lightness of touch and good humour throughout, echoing the ethos of its subject who portrayed himself as a gruff old Tory but, as his letters and speeches reveal, was a lifelong humorist. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy for the 35 years when Britain reached the peak of its economic and imperial might, 1867 to 1902. It is massively enjoyable on every level.

But none of this should blind us to the fact that Salisbury was the enemy. He was the rooted opposition to everything progressive that was attempted through the period. He stood for a level of privilege and entitlement that almost no one nowadays can conceive, an almost incomprehensibly dedication to the life-or-death importance of hierarchy, the aristocracy, the Church of England. Like all conservatives and authoritarians he thought that if any of this was tampered with it would open the floodgates to anarchy. Thus he resisted every move to give Ireland more home rule because he saw it as threatening a wider collapse:

He saw the [Home Rule] campaign in Ireland as merely the precursor for a general class struggle over the rights of property. (p.258)

Of course it didn’t. Trying to hang onto this world of privilege in the face of changing technologies, social norms and culture, in the increasingly embittered clinging onto India, in the embittered clinging on to Ulster, in the embittered fight against electoral reform (all leading to the climactic struggle between Tories and Liberals in 1911), it was these rearguard positions which nearly led to anarchy.

Above all, he held positions of power during the height of empire and openly admitted it was based on threat and intimidation. In Roberts’s view: ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and revenge’ (p.247).

The single biggest conundrum is how he managed to reconcile the windy rhetoric of his speeches about ‘the highest interests of Empire’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276) (cf Ireland p.351) with the acid cynicism of his private papers and correspondence, which bluntly state that we had to hang onto India and Ireland by whatever means possible because they’re what made Britain ‘great’.

You know the cliché ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’? Well, every time you read a Victorian politician talking about ‘honour’ you can be sure it’s high-sounding cover for either he and his class clinging onto their wealth and privileges or, in an international context, for the British clinging on to countries they acquired by force, with no right or law or ‘honour’ involved in either.

Roberts’ central argument is that Salisbury kept the peace between jostling European Powers for a generation by his foresight and intelligence and diplomacy. This is all true and yet we know that the sweeping changes across all aspects of society which he held back for so long were inevitably going to come about, and it could be argued that, by delaying them for so long, Salisbury made the process of managing them when they became unavoidable (votes for women, rights for workers, Irish independence) much more violent and painful than they need have been if they had been addressed more sympathetically and much earlier.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)

This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:

Tiro’s memoirs

As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:

I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)

A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.

Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).

Sources

Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.

Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:

Part one: Exile (58 to 47 BC)

‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.

The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.

They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.

Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).

Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.

But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).

Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)

Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).

Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).

Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).

Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.

Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.

Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).

Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).

But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).

Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)

The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.

Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).

Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.

First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).

And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.

Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).

He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).

Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.

After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.

And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.

Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.

But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).

Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).

(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).

Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):

politics is the most noble of callings
there is no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men
no individual or combination of individuals should be allowed to become too powerful
politics is a profession not a pastime for dilettantes
a statesman should devote his life to studying the science of politics in order to acquire all the knowledge that is necessary
that authority in a state must always be divided
that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the optimum is a combination of all three, since kings can be capricious, an aristocracy self-interested, and an uncontrolled multitude is a mob

Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission

Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators

detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)

Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).

En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).

In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.

Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.

Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.

So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.

Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.

Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.

Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.

Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.

It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).

The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.

And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:

out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)

In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).

Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.

Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.

Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).

Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).

In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.

Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.

It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.

‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)

The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).

Part two: Redux (47 to 43 BC)

They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).

He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.

Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).

Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).

Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.

Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).

His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).

Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:

On the fear of death
On the endurance of pain
On the alleviation of distress
On the remaining disorders of the soul
On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:

to desire nothing too much
to be content with what you have
to be entirely self sufficient within yourself so that whatever you lose, you can carry on regardless
to do no harm
to realise it is better to suffer an injury than inflict one
to acknowledge that life is a loan from nature which must be paid back at any time

‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).

Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.

Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.

Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.

Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).

Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).

Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).

Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.

On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.

Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.

Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:

A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)

Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)

So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).

The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).

Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.

Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.

One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.

An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.

Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).

Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.

Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.

He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).

Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).

It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).

Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).

It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.

Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).

Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).

Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.

BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).

But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.

A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.

The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.

It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.

Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)

In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.

When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:

That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)

And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.

Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.

At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).

Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).

Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).

Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.

A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:

the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)

So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.

At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).

Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.

It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.

They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).

They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.

Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.

They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.

They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.

The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).

Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.

They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).

Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.

All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)

The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.

It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.

And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.

Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.

Key themes

Politics

As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.

There is always this to be said of politics: it is never static. (p.51)
‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years.’ (p.137)
It is the most important rule in politics always to keep things moving. (p.433)

But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.

Power

I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.

And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.

It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.

With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).

And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.

It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.

Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.

The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.

The law

A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.

Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.

Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.

So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:

‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)

War atrocities

As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:

Dyrrachium is still recovering from the fate ordained by the Senate in the 150s, namely razed to the ground and its entire population of 150,000 sold into slavery
Harris makes room for a scene in which Tiro reads through Caesar’s Commentaries on his Gallic Wars and works out that by Caesar’s own account, he has been responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 Gauls and Germans in just one campaigning season (p.45)
Metellus Nepos reads out a despatch from Caesar to the senate in which the great man admits that of the 65,000 strong army of the Nervii only 500 were left alive (p.70)
Caesar’s lieutenant wins a great naval battle against the Celts, has their leaders executed and their entire nation sold into slavery. (p.147)
Caesar lures 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes across the Rhine and then annihilates them. (p.148)

It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.

Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.

Family ties

The stern republican Brutus was the nephew of the stern moralist Marcus Portius Cato (140).
Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey.
Mark Antony was the stepson of Publius Lentulus Sura, one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death. One among many sources of enmity between the two men.
Cassius Longinus was married to Brutus’s sister.
Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Cato’s sister.
The consul Marcus Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece (142).
Octavian was Caesar’s great-nephew.

Dated diction

In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.

I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.

Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.

It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.

‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).

On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?

Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.

When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:

‘What an utter villain that fellow is.’ (Cicero about Crassus, p.154)
‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable!’ (Milo on Pompey, p.178)
‘I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly.’ (Dolabella to Tiro, p.296)

Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.

I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)

Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.

Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.

The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.

But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.

Scraps

Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).

Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).

Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).

Credit

Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. Page references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

My Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

My ancient Rome reviews

Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Thriller

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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022

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Scott-King’s Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh (1947)

Nowadays it is not what you do that counts, but who informs against you.

Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a short, high spirited, at times farcically crude satire on the state of Britain and Europe just after the Second World War. I found it humorous and enjoyable all the way through and, as so often with Waugh, also packed with fascinating social and political history.

Waugh’s worldview

Born in 1903, Waugh had been to a good public school and Oxford, experiences which had trained him to be a snobbish, superior, social climber. In all the pre-war novels this attitude doesn’t come over as offensive because the aim of the novels is to mock, satirise, caricature and lampoon the pranks, foibles, eccentricities, cruelty and amorality of just these same upper classes.

However, the Second World War forced Waugh, like so many other people in the arts and the broader population, to really think about what they were fighting for. For a large part of the British population this crystallised into a determination that the country would never go back to the mass unemployment and poverty seen in the 1930s. The mood was captured in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942, which proposed widespread reforms to social welfare system in order to address the big five issues of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’

So, well before the war ended the Labour Party made it known it proposed a programme of mass housebuilding, nationalising the medical profession to create a national health service, reforming and extending the state school system, and introducing comprehensive unemployment insurance and state pensions.

Sensible though these ideas might seem to you and me (and they were widely adopted in most other European countries at the time) someone like Waugh could only see the negative sides of these sweeping changes: beautiful countryside disappearing under horrible council estates; dictatorial state intervention into medicine and other professions; the promotion of ghastly grammar school types into the civil service and other professions; the triumph of the crude and common lower middle classes; all to be paid for by ruinously high taxes and, in particular, the introduction of death duties, designed by socialists to ensure the ‘redistribution of wealth’, meaning that old and venerable families, owners of the big estates and country houses so beloved of Waugh, would find themselves financially ruined and having to sell off their property in order to pay the new death tax.

So by mid-way through the war which he and his peers had so enthusiastically joined up to fight in (as described in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy) Waugh and his peers could see which way the wind was blowing: in the direction of crushing the upper classes, the fox-hunting landed gentry and the high society party society he loved, and replacing it with a more meritocratic, grammar school-run, council housing and welfare state society, paid for by the ruination of everything he loved.

Brideshead Revisited

Thus, as he turned 40, Waugh hardened his heart against every aspect of the modern world and this finds its fullest expression in his longest novel, Brideshead Revisited, which amounts to a prolonged, often self-indulgent, over-written lament for the old ways. It is, in a way, a reprise of his first novel, Decline and Fall, but whereas that was written with all the carefree high spirits of youth, Brideshead is written in a grim mood of middle-aged melancholy. Brideshead is Decline and Fall without the lolz.

This trajectory of fall and collapse is clearly enacted in the main storylines:

the decline of Sebastian Flyte from high-spirited undergraduate in Oxford to wrecked alcoholic in North Africa
the long drawn-out decline of the Marchmain family through generations of infidelity (first Lord Marchmain’s and then Julia’s), symbolised by:
the death of old Marchmain and the inheritance of the estate by the eldest son who has married a ghastly middle-class (and barren, post-menopausal) woman
the way their pad in London, Marchmain House, one of the last grand old family houses in London (so the gloomy narrator tells us) is sold off to developers who tear it down to build yet another anonymous block of flats
and then The War and the way that their entire world of fine feelings, fine meals, fine wine and fine theological scruples is swept away in the vast deluge of the war in which the venerable old house is requisitioned by the army and treated appallingly, trees cut down, terrace badly damaged, interiors of all the rooms boarded over or desecrated, and all swarmed over by chavvy squaddies half-heartedly supervised by scruffy NCOs like the demon figure, Hooper, Hooper, the long-haired, unshaven, lackadaisical junior officer whose lack of backbone, discipline or morality comes to epitomise for the narrator the shabby new world which is taking over
and the other negative figure, the brash, confident Canadian careerist Rex Mottram, whose admittedly impressive efficiency in dealing with the authorities, his loudmouth friends and political ambitions seemed to be going nowhere in peacetime but suddenly come into their own with the arrival of war

So in its outline and mood Brideshead is a surprisingly grim and downbeat novel – venerable old families decline and disintegrate to be replaced by the swarming mob of the new social welfare state. Nonetheless, there are many moments of humour and some passages recapturing Waugh’s old-style, high-spirited comedy.

A grumpy old man complaining about the modern world

But despite its gloom Brideshead can also be seen as beginning to include a new source of comedy, which is the pose of a grumpy-old-man complaining about all aspects of the modern world. As with grumpy old men in general, it’s not clear whether Waugh is genuinely vexed by elements of the modern world or playing up to the role of grumpy old man who can’t be doing with all these new-fangled gadgets and rules. There is an element of exaggeration for comic effect.

This new thread in his comedy is most obvious in the passage set in New York whither the narrator, Charles Ryder, has returned from a long trek through South America before boarding a transatlantic liner back to Blighty. He loathes American hotels and American service. He hates the way Americans, unbidden and uninvited, embark on long soliloquies about their lives on train journeys (‘Their matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in American railway trains’).

He loathes the way his New York hotel room is overheated but, if he opens the window to get relief, is assailed by the unceasing noise of New York’s streets. This growing dislike of America and Americans reflects the resentment of (some of) Waugh’s generation at the way American manners and idioms were infecting British culture at all levels, most obviously through the medium of the movies, the cinema, which he and his characters enjoyed in the 1930s but which came to symbolise the unstoppable rise of common, vulgar culture (he laments the modern townscape with its ‘close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas‘; the over-the-top party his wife arranges for him is, in a phrase obviously intended to convey contempt for shallow, meretricious glamour, ‘a cinema actor’s dream.’)

On this transatlantic liner all kinds of things vex the narrator, not least the impractical tackiness of the big ice swan containing caviar which his wife organises as the centrepiece of an overcrowded party. But his irritation with the modern world is maybe epitomised by the utterly trivial but symptomatic way that the ship claims to offer every convenience of the modern world and yet he can’t get a simple whiskey and soda without ice because all the soda water on the ship is iced, that’s the American way, sorry sir.

Scott-King’s Modern Europe

At just 50 pages in the Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh and 17,285 words long, Scott-King’s Modern Europe is longer than a short story but far short of being a novel. If anything it reads like a prose version for a screenplay for a particularly madcap Ealing Comedy.

The novella takes the thousand and one aspects of the horrible modern world which the grumpy old man described above detests, and plays them entirely for laughs, high spirited satirical laughs although (as always with Waugh) with an increasing sense of bite.

As to the plot, Scott-King is a dusty old failure of a dull-as-ditchwater classics teacher at some public school, Grantchester who the boys nickname ‘Scotty’ and the other teachers ignore. He has devoted his spare time to the fabulously pointless task of translating an epic poem by the unknown 17th century poet Bellorius into Spenserian stanzas (i.e. the stanza form used in the genuinely wonderful English epic poem The Faerie Queene by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser). The key thing about this fictional poet Bellorius is he is made to come from the utterly fictional nation of ‘Neutralia‘.

Once Scott-King has completed his opus he sends it off to a few literary magazines who politely rebuff him and there the matter lies until he receives an unexpected invitation. A smart envelope contains an invitation with an embossed coat of arms from ‘His Excellency Dr Bogdan Antonic, international secretary of the Committee, Simona University, Neutralia.’ Turns out it’s the tercentenary of the death of the great Bellorius and, to his surprise, Scotty-King discovers that he has been invited to attend an academic conference about Bellorius’s Great National Poet. Fortunately the little week-long break falls during the school vacation and so Scott-King accepts the invitation, secures permission from the headmaster, packs his bags and reports to the airport for to collect the ticket which has been bought for him.

Neutralia

You won’t be surprised to learn that just about everything which can possibly go wrong, does go wrong. For a start, where is ‘Neutralia’? Waugh cleverly blends aspects of central, eastern and south-eastern (Balkan) nations, but when he says that the current military ruler of the country, The Marshall, shrewdly kept Neutralia out of the Second World War (hence its name) the reader suspects there’s a strong element of Franco’s Spain. Its capital:

Simona, stands within sight of the Mediterranean on the foothills of the great massif which fills half the map of Neutralia.

The text describes Neutralia’s history in a kind of St Trinian’s, Ealing Comedy caricature:

For three hundred years since Bellorius’s death his country has suffered every conceivable ill the body politic is heir to. Dynastic wars, foreign invasion, disputed successions, revolting colonies, endemic syphilis, impoverished soil, masonic intrigues, revolutions, restorations, cabals, juntas, pronunciamentos, liberations, constitutions, coups d’etat, dictatorships, assassinations, agrarian reforms, popular elections, foreign intervention, repudiation of loans, inflations of currency, trades unions, massacres, arson, atheism, secret societies—make the list full, slip in as many personal foibles as you will, you will find all these in the last three centuries of Neutralian history. Out of it emerged the present republic of Neutralia, a typical modern state, governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal, supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption.

At the airport Scotty hates being treated as a ‘VIP’. He hates being strapped into his plane seat like a chicken in an oven, he hates the safety demonstration the smooth and insincere air stewardesses give.

She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner.

Dripping with grumpy old man condescension. Anyway, Scott-King befriends another British academic flying out, Whitemaid, but soon discovers he knows next to nothing about Bellorius and is along for the freebie. There’s a pushy woman journalist, Miss Bombaum, another type who rubs the grumpy old man up the wrong way:

She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the callings of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little sexless face under the too feminine hat and the lavish style of hair-dressing. He came near the truth in suspecting her of being, what he had often heard of but never seen in the life, a female novelist.

When you read a paragraph like that you realise that Waugh has concocted the character of a fuddy-duddy old Classics master in order to give his narrative maximum scope for grumpiness and complaint. And you realise the enormous scope the pose of grumpiness gives you. If you stop trying to keep up with all the changes in the modern world and resign yourself to settling into a kind of permanent sulk against everything – well, it’s surprisingly easy, it’s very reassuring, and by turning the attitude up a little you can soon have friends and family laughing at your grouchy soliloquies.

Viewed from another angle, you can see how Scott-King is a middle-aged version of the naive young Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, only stumbling into a world with far more shadows and darkness. So that thought gives rise to the question: was the external world, the world situation, significantly gloomier in 1946 than it was when Decline and Fall was conceived, in around 1927? I.e. is Waugh’s grumpy aversion to the world of 1946 genuinely justified ? Or purely a result of growing old and resenting change? Discuss.

It’s a darker vision than the earlier books because, beneath under the various running jokes and the comic mishaps of the various characters, is a half serious description of life under a modern dictatorship. The Marshall speaks, and so all the newspapers and media of Neutralia echo his speeches, about ‘Revolution and Youth and Technical Progress and the National Genius’, and all the Neutralians have to parrot the Party line about the wisdom of the Marshall and his regime.

But the shabby reality that Scott-King encounters is poverty and starvation, fear and political manipulation. The host of the motley group of academics and hangers on from all over Europe who assemble for the so-called conference are hosted by Arturo Fe, doctor of Bellacita University. On the bus journey from the airport into the capital Dr Fe casually tells them that Neutralia has lovely food, it’s a shame only the very rich can afford it. Dr Fe explains that everyone who is anyone has to have at least five jobs to keep their heads above water. Thus Dr Fe is not only a scholar,

he is also a lawyer, a judge of the Lower Court. He edits the Historical Review. He has a high position in the Ministry of Rest and Culture, also at the Foreign Office and the Bureau of Enlightenment and Tourism. He speaks often on the radio about the international situation. He owns one-third share in the Sporting Club.

Among the other guests at the reception and gala dinner is the very funny comic figure of an ice blonde from Sweden named Svenginen.

He had taken notice of her in London where she had towered some six inches above the heads of the crowd.
‘I come,’ she said.
Dr Fe bowed. ‘Fe,’ he said.
‘Sveningen,’ she answered.
‘You are one of us? Of the Bellorius Association?’ asked Dr Fe.
‘I speak not English well. I come.’
Dr Fe tried her in Neutralian, French, Italian and German. She replied in her own remote Nordic tongue. Dr Fe raised hands and eyes in a pantomime of despair.
‘You speak much English. I speak little English. So we speak English, yes? I come.’
‘You come?’ said Dr Fe.
‘I come.’
‘We are honoured,’ said Dr Fe.

There is plenty more comedy. The Brits are introduced to a range of comic foreign types, for example, Engineer Garcia (yes, definitely Spain) who once worked for seven years with the firm Green, Gorridge and Wright Limited at Salford and is convinced all the guests must have heard of it and know Salford well, an assumption in which he is sadly disappointed.

But at the same time the sky slowly darkens and things start to unravel. At the night of the gala dinner both Scott-King and Whitemaid get plastered as a result of having travelled all day and had nothing to eat. A few days later they are taken to Bellorius’s home town and forced to be present at the unveiling of a statue of Bellorius which turns out to be the worst thing Scottie has ever seen.

More sinisterly, they are driven some distance out of town to a vast memorial to the war dead and told to lay a wreath in honour of the national poet while being photographed by a rank of photographers – only realising too late that the photos are used by the Neutralian press to show ‘foreign dignitaries’ laying wreaths at the tomb of the dead in the most recent Neutralian civil war.

Slowly they realise the entire conference is a sham and an elaborate public relations exercise in which they are being used by the regime to bolster its international credentials. Scottie enters the hotel drawing room to find the other guests (from numerous European countries) in a dark mood:

The cause of offence emerged through many words and the haze of tobacco smoke. In brief it was this: the Bellorius Association had been made dupes of the politicians.

When he meets Dr Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary of the Bellorius Association, who invited him, he discovers him to be a very anxious man, a Croat not a Neutralian at all, worried that the authorities are closing in on him, convinced there are spies everywhere. As another Neutralian attending the gala dinner tells him:

‘There is jealousy and intrigue everywhere.’

Two of the delegates to the ‘conference’, a Swiss Professor and a Chinese, go for a little drive in a rented car and are kidnapped by partisans, left over from Neutralia’s civil war. Chances are the two foreigners will be murdered.

In a similar dark vein, as Scott-King’s stay progresses Dr Fe comes under increasing pressure to deliver positive results. He tells Scott-King that there is a plot against his (Dr Fe’s) life and, towards the end of the story, is rumoured to have displeased the Marshal and so ‘disappears’.

Catastrophe

Unfortunately, with the disappearance of Dr Fe go all arrangements for Scott-King’s hotel stay and, more importantly, his return flight. He goes from one government office to another with no joy, in a sample of the bureaucratic obstructionism of new, model post war dictatorships.

Worse is to come because when Scott-King visits the British Consul (the contemptuously named Horace Smudge) he discovers that, since he didn’t register his visit with the British government and does not have all the requisite visas, he is not officially in Neutralia and so the Consul can do nothing to help. Well, how long will it take to apply for a visa, Scottie asks. Ooh could be a long time, old boy; 3, 4 weeks.

But Scott-King only has £75, nowhere near enough to live in the hotel where he’s staying. The consul tells him they’ve already had one sticky case, man named Whitemaid who tries to evade the money-changing laws. Tut tut. Very sad.

Scott-King staggers out of the Consul’s office a broken man. Well, maybe he’ll just stay at the conference hotel till his money runs out and then…?

Scott-King has another, longer meeting with depressed Dr Antonic, supposed host of the Bellorius conference, who takes him to see his even more pessimistic wife in their shabby flat in a tower block whose lift has, in the classic style, broken down. There Scotty sees Neutralian life in all its despair and paranoia:

Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that in Neutralia Western Culture might be born again? That this country has been preserved by Destiny from the horrors of war so that it can become a beacon of hope for the world?’
‘No,’ said Scott-King.
‘Do you not?’ asked Dr Antonic anxiously. ‘Do you not? Neither do I.’

This is coming across as bleak, and it is, but various moments are also very funny. Black humour. But also because it is a return to the clipped and often heartless dialogue of his best comic novels such as Vile Bodies, the comedy of hopelessness.

Anyway, luckily for Scott-King that evening in the hotel restaurant he bumps into Miss Bombaum, the go-getting modern lady journalist, tells her his problem, and she reveals the existence of ‘the Underground’. This is on the model of the underground networks which smuggled Allied airmen out of occupied Europe (or, further back, of the Underground Railway which smuggled slaves out of the American South into the free North)

Bombaum she takes him to meet a man who takes him to meet another man, who turns out to be a ‘major’ in the police, leading the breaking of one of his own laws in an acme of the kind of corruption which flourishes in this kind of repressive state. The policeman agrees to smuggle him out of the country in exchange for all his money, he does it all the time.

In a comically brutal aside, the major also tells Scottie that he has a deal with the government to help ‘disappear’ inconvenient persons.

‘I also have a valued connexion with the Neutralian government. Troublesome fellows whom they want to disappear pass through my hands in large numbers.’

So that’s how later that night Scott-King finds himself travelling in a packed charabanc with six other escapees all dressed up as Ursuline nuns (!). They are taken to a warehouse down by the docks in the port of Santa Maria where he waits for over a week in very hot, very unhygienic conditions. He gives a comically exaggerated but still very pungent sense of post-war Europe, which for several years after the end of the war continued in a state of chaos, with huge numbers of displaced persons (DPs) travelling in all directions:

There were a detachment of Slovene royalists, a few Algerian nationals, the remnants of a Syrian anarchist association, ten patient Turkish prostitutes, four French Pétainist millionaires, a few Bulgarian terrorists, a half-dozen former Gestapo men, an Italian air-marshal and his suite, a Hungarian ballet, some Portuguese Trotskyites. The English-speaking group consisted chiefly of armed deserters from the American and British Armies of Liberation. They had huge sums of money distributed about the linings of their clothes, the reward of many months’ traffic round the docks of the central sea.

One day there’s a panic when it becomes clear that a new police chief has been appointed who isn’t as corrupt as the old one (yet) and is on his way to raid the warehouse. With the result that all the waiting evacuees are rounded up and loaded onto the one boat moored for them in the harbour, far more than it was ever designed for.

Scott-King is locked below decks with this gang of desperados with no food or drink for three very long days as the ship sails the hot Mediterranean. At last the ship docks, the hatches are opened and Scott-King and the others stagger into the dazzling Mediterranean sun. But where is he?

There are soldiers; there is barbed wire; there is a waiting lorry; there is a drive through a sandy landscape, more soldiers, more wire. All the time Scott-King is in a daze. He is first fully conscious in a tent, sitting stark naked while a man in khaki drill taps his knee with a ruler.
‘I say, Doc, I know this man.’ He looks up into a vaguely familiar face. ‘You are Mr Scott-King, aren’t you? What on earth are you doing with this bunch, sir?’
‘Lockwood! Good gracious, you used to be in my Greek set! Where am I?’
‘No. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants’ Camp, Palestine.’

Home sweet home

And then, as in so many Waugh the text cuts drastically and completely and we are back in the common room at Grantchester and so, after no doubt difficult diplomatic complications, is Scott-King.

There’s a joke that all the other teachers are swapping yarns about the adventures they had on their summer holidays which all, of course, pale into insignificance to the trauma of what Scott-King has been through but is too shy, or traumatised, to mention. And so everyone carries on thinking what a dull dog ‘Scottie’ is.

Later the headmaster asks him into his study and informs him there’ll be fewer students for the classics class than ever before. Parents are going off the subject. ‘They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?’

But Scott-King does blame them. He is determined to teach classics for as long as he possibly can. For him they represent humane values, civilisation and culture. And as to preparing boys for the modern world, well after what he’s seen of the modern world this summer, he declares:

‘It would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.’

Grumpy old man

Scott-King is made to be exactly the same age as Waugh when he wrote this lampoon, 43. He serves several ends. As a fusty classics teachers he is a kind of grumpy old man par excellence, for whom every aspect of the modern world is displeasing. His retired situation also allows him to be naive and simple, a fool abroad, in the time honoured manner of this kind of comic picaresque.

Lastly, Scott-King can be made, however improbably, into a champion of the very best of Western culture – if, that is, you accept the notion that the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome represent the best of Western culture – so that his stubborn refusal to relinquish teaching classics, his determination to hold out for these values of clarity and civilisation as long as he can, and his disgust at the idea that education is about fitting boys to the disgusting ‘modern world’, can be depicted as heroic.

The pleasure of the text

Maybe Waugh’s attitude is risible but it has the merit of being a coherent worldview. Easier to analyse and argue with a worldview which is, at least, coherent, even if you disagree with it.

But also, opinions don’t necessarily matter if their ultimate purpose is to give rise to comedy. An artist may pain the same thing over and over again until you are completely familiar with the subject – take Cézanne’s obsessive painting and repainting of Mont Sainte-Victoire: the point is not that it’s a mountain, the point is the experiments in light and shade and tone and, ultimately, the pleasure of painting itself, the joy of technique.

Something similar with Waugh. On one level you can take issue with his politics, his religion and his general worldview, revealed with increasing grumpiness as he got older. But on another level, you can simply enjoy the absurdity of the farce and, above all, the pleasure of his prose. Almost everything Waugh ever wrote is a joy to read:

The little Mediterranean seaport of Santa Maria lay very near the heart of Europe. An Athenian colony had thrived there in the days of Pericles and built a shrine to Poseidon; Carthaginian slaves had built the breakwater and deepened the basin; Romans had brought fresh water from the mountain springs; Dominican friars had raised the great church which gave the place its present name; the Habsburgs had laid out the elaborate little piazza; one of Napoleon’s marshals had made it his base and left a classical garden there. The footprints of all these gentler conquerors were still plain to see, but Scott-King saw nothing as, at dawn, he bowled over the cobbles to the water-front.

Credit

Scott-King’s Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 24, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Literature, Novella

Posted by Simon on December 24, 2021

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The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (1957)

‘I say, sir, this is a bit of a facer, isn’t it?’ said Alan
‘I’m afraid it is,’ Zellaby agreed.
(The Midwich Cuckoos, page 80)

John Wyndham’s husband-and-wife teams

The Midwich Cuckoos opens as if it’s going to be another husband-and-wife story, much like The Kraken Wakes. Having read the 15 short stories in Jizzle I can now see that Wyndham is, by inclination, a whimsical and humorous writer. He slips into a homely, drawing room style whenever he writes about his nice middle-class couples, in which the woman is invariably the stronger, more determined one and the slightly-henpecked, narrating husband wryly acknowledges her superior qualities. The entire attitude is epitomised in one of many similar exchanges from Kraken:

‘Mike, darling, just shut up; there’s a love,’ said my devoted wife.

Like Kraken (whose couple are named Mike and Phyllis), Midwich (couple named Richard and Janet) is littered with throwaway jests about this or that aspect of married life, along with sardonic jokes about his or her jobs, stereotyped social attitudes to marriage, pregnancy and so on, pregnancy being, of course, the central subject of the story.

A village story

That said, after the opening scenes, Midwich Cuckoos quite quickly opens up to cover a far larger canvas than just a husband and wife. Indeed Richard and Janet disappear from the text for long stretches, as it focuses more on the household who live at Kyle Manor, namely the thoughtful but long-winded old author, Gordon Zellaby, his (second) wife, Angela, their fragrantly pukkadaughter Ferrelyn, and her fiancé, dashing Second-Lieutenant Alan Hughes, currently serving in the army.

But it’s more than just these half dozen upper-middle-class types; the novel opens out to include a larger cast of characters and to become a kind of portrait of an English village in the mid-1950s. Thus there are quite large speaking parts for the vicar and his wife, the village doctor and his wife, the landlord of the village pub (The Scythe and Stone), the village baker, half a dozen labourer families, and various pretty village girls and their sweethearts, not forgetting the striking inclusion of a pair of village lesbians, Miss Latterly and Miss Lamb.

Cast list

One aspect of the large cast of characters is the sense the novel gives you of the gentle but persistent class divide between the (presumably privately) educated, upper-middle-class types (the Gayfords and the Zellabies), the middle-to-lower-middle class professionals who service them and the other authority figures (the vicar, doctor, police chief, fire chief) and ‘the rest’, the ruck of villagers and rustics, ranging from small shopkeepers (pub landlord, baker, grocer) and local farmers down to the manual labourers and their harassed wives, with a floating population of pretty young things who are no better than they should be. It’s sweet.

The Posh

Gordon Zellaby, who Janet jokingly refers to as ‘the sage of Midwich’ (p.101), working away on his latest book, facetiously referred to as the ‘Current Work, lives at spacious Kyle Manor with his second wife, Angela
their posh daughter Ferrelyn
her fiancé Lieutenant Alan Hughes
the initial narrator, writer Richard Gayford and his wife Janet
Mr Arthur Crim OBE, Director of the Research Station located in the Grange (p.52)
Tilly Foresham, jodhpurs and three dogs

It’s worth noting that the Zellabies employ a cook and maybe other domestic staff, as breakfast, luncheon, tiffin, dinner and late supper all appear as if by magic, prepared by unseen, unnamed hands.

The admin class

the Reverend Hubert Leebody, the vicar (p.91) and his wife, Dora Leebody (who has a breakdown and is sent away to a rest home)
Miss Polly Rushton, their pretty young niece
Dr Charley Willers and his wife, Milly (p.89)
Nurse Daniels

The lower-middle class

Miss Ogle, an elderly gossip who runs the village post office and telephone exchange
Mr Tapper, the retired gardener
Miss Latterly and Miss Lamb the village lesbians (pp.82)
Wilfred Williams, landlord of the Scythe and Stone
Harriman the baker

The working classes

Mr Brant the blacksmith and his wife
Alfred Wait
Harry Crankhart
Arthur Flagg labourer
Tom Dorry, rating in the Navy
Mr Histon

As we hear more about all these figures and are given little vignettes about them, the village comes to seem more like an Ealing Comedy than a disaster movie. There are quite a few bits of dialogue which come straight from the lips of pukka chaps in 1950s movies (‘I say, I’ll have to step on it. See you tomorrow, darling’) or which you can imagine being voiced by Joyce Grenfell in one of the original St Trinian’s movies (which appeared over exactly the same period as Wyndham’s classic novels):

The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954)
Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957)
The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s (1960)

There are two schools of thought about this aspect of Wyndham. One is the well-known Brian Aldiss criticism that his novels portray all-too ‘cosy catastrophes’ in which decent middle-class types respond with improbable decency and moral rectitude to global catastrophes, never going to pieces or being corrupted. There’s a lot of truth in this rather brusque putdown.

But there’s the equal and opposite interpretation, that the catastrophes he describes are made all the more realistic and scarey for not having technicolor special effects and not having characters go into psychotic states as per J.G. Ballard’s stories, but remaining stiff-upper-lip, pukka Brits in the face of complete social collapse (Triffids and Kraken in particular).

Having met so many public school types, now, I’m inclined to think most of them would survive a world apocalypse very well, and put their experience of the officer training corps, running big organisations, and huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ to very effective use in post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Either way, The Midwich Cuckoos is obviously a science fiction yarn, but it’s maybe useful to flag up the way it is also a fascinating piece of 1950s social history.

Wyndham’s fateful nights

Of Wyndham’s four Big Novels, three start with ‘fateful nights’ when ‘the world changes forever!’

In Day of the Triffids, it’s the night of Tuesday 7 May when the whole world watches the spectacular meteor shower and, as a result, goes blind.

In The Kraken Wakes, it’s 11.15pm on the night of 15 July when Mike and Phyllis, on a honeymoon cruise, see the first fireballs fall into the sea.

And in The Midwich Cuckoos the novelist narrator and his wife are up in London celebrating him having signed a book contract with an American publisher, which means they’re not present in the nondescript, quiet little village of Midwich on the fateful night of 26 September!

(And, once you realise that The Chrysalids is set in the aftermath of a calamitous nuclear war, you realise it’s likely that that, too, took place on a specific day, maybe night, although, centuries later no-one has any way of knowing when.)

Brief plot summary

The Midwich Cuckkos is 220 pages long in the old Penguin classic edition I own, a comfy, sensible length for an adventure novel. The text is in 21 chapters divided into 2 parts, 15 in the long part one, five in the short part two.

The story is fairly well known, not least from the terrifying 1960 movie adaptation, Village of the Damned, so successful at the box office that it prompted a sequel.

During the ‘fateful night’ of 26 September all the occupants of the village of Midwich pass out. Everyone trying to enter a perfectly circular radius around the village also passes out, presumably due to what used to be called a ‘force field’. The authorities get wind of it and the village is sealed off. 24 hours later the mystery condition disappears and everything returns to normal. Except that, a few months later, all the women of childbearing age report that they are pregnant (which causes obvious difficulty among couples who have stopped having sex, or for single women).

Nine months later the pregnant women all give birth. Their babies are all perfectly healthy but, as they develop, have an eerie similarity of appearance, with platinum blonde hair and piercing golden eyes. The inhabitants knew something strange has happened, and realise the children aren’t natural. And as they grow it becomes clear that the Children can impose their wishes on their parents through some form of telepathy or mental control, which is eerie enough. But it’s only towards the end of the story that one of the leading figures, retired author Gordon Zellaby, comes to appreciate just how much of a threat they pose to all human life, and decides to take drastic action.

Detailed plot summary

Chapter 1 No entry to Midwich

Sets the scene, describes Midwich in the county of ‘Winshire’ (p.34) as an average English village with a handful of the usual historical episodes, including the dissolution of the local monastery, Cromwell’s men stopping over en route to some battle, a notorious 18th century highwayman, and so on.

The initial narrator of the story, author Richard Gayford, has lived in the village for just over a year (p.11) with his wife Janet. They are out of the village, up in London celebrating him signing a contract with American publishers on ‘the fateful night’ of 26 September.

On returning they find the village sealed off by the Army. Being naughty, they drive away from the roadblock but then double back, park at the entrance to a field and try to cut across fields to their cottage. Janet is making her way across a field when she suddenly drops to the ground unconscious. Richard runs forward and similarly blacks out.

Chapter 2 All quiet in Midwich

Quick overview of the village and what all its characters were up to on ‘the fateful night’ i.e. bickering in the pub, listening to the radio, trying to get a new-fangled television set to work, on the phone to a friend in London, relaxing in front of a nice roaring fire.

Chapter 3 Midwich rests

Briefly describes how a succession of early morning visitors to the village disappear, are heard from no more, including the baker’s van, local bus, an ambulance sent to find out what’s going on, a fire engine which goes to investigate reports of smoke, and so on.

Chapter 4 Operation Midwich

The army gets involved. Lieutenant Hughes finds himself consulting with the chiefs of the local fire brigade and police who are establishing a cordon round the village. Alan has the bright idea of getting a soldier to drive off to find a pet shop and requisition a canary in a cage which they can tentatively push forward into the ‘zone’ to see if it collapses. Then another soldier paints a white line on the ground and another indicates the perimeter on a map.

Richard and Janet are dragged by soldiers using a long hook a few yards from where they’re lying prone to just outside the ‘zone’ and immediately wake up and feel fine. They are driven along to the pub in the next door village, which they find packed with journalists, radio and TV people, and Richard is delighted to be hailed by Bernard Westcott, a colleague of his from back in the army days, who, it becomes clear, is now something in Military Intelligence.

Military Intelligence? Yes, they’re here not only because it’s an anomalous event, but because of The Grange. The Grange?

The Grange Upon investigation, it turns out that Midwich is not quite such a boring, average, run-of-the-mill village as the narrator initially implied. It is also home to an old grange building which has had a modern extension added which contains laboratories, amounting to a Research Station, supervised by Mr Arthur Crim OBE, Director of the Research. What kind of research goes on there? Well, a little surprisingly, we never really find out. And the entire question is, I think, a red herring, thrown in to complexify the early part of the story and make readers wonder whether the mysterious event is some kind of attack on the grange by ‘the enemy’. But by half way through it’s become clear that it wasn’t and the existence of the Grange is more or less irrelevant to the story.

But not here at the start. There is an impressive gathering of military and civil administrator types – army, air force Group Captain, chief policeman, head fireman and so on – who have a summit conference about how to deal with it. An airplane flies over and takes photos of the village. That and the patient perimeter work with the canary establish that the ‘zone’ comprises a perfect circle two miles in diameter., and at the dead centre sits a large object, which has a metallic appearance and looks like a convex spoon (p.36).

The Russians As in The Kraken Wakes there is much speculation about whether the event is an attack by the Russians, by ‘the other side’, by ‘those Ivans’ (p.38). This turns out to be irrelevant to the plot but it is a fascinating indication of how heavily the Cold War rivalry, and the threat from the Soviet bloc, and the constant fear of what new trick they might pull, weighed on the imagination of the West, or of western writers, or of western writers of science fiction, or of John Wyndham anyway.

Chapter 5 Midwich reviviscit

And then suddenly everybody wakes up. The advantage of Wyndham’s realistic style is he gives a very vivid description of what it feels like to wake up after 2 days suspended animation, in an unnatural position on the sofa or the floor, how you are utterly numb, the pain when the feeling slowly starts to return to your limbs and extremities.

Chapter 6 Midwich settles down

Describes how everyone concerned comes to cope with it, this strange event, which comes to be called the Dayout (p.47). No fewer than 11 people perished, several when their houses caught fire, several from exposure from lying out in the open for two days and nights (there’s a list on page 47).

Bernard Westcott pays a couple more visits to the village, specifically to check up on the Grange but drops into the Gayford cottage for chats. They invite Bernard for dinner and he asks Richard and Janet if they’ll be informal eyes and ears i.e. spy on the village. Janet is at first sceptical, what’s the need? Bernard points out there may be lingering after-effects: after all X-rays, radiation and so on are invisible. There’s no sign of those in the village, they’ve tested, but who knows what other after-effects there may be…

Chapter 7 Coming events

About two months later, in late November, Ferrelyn, after much nervousness, summons up the courage to tell Angela Zellaby, over posh breakfast at the Manor, that she’s pregnant. Angela astonishes Ferrelyn that shs is, too. What worries Ferrelyn, though, is that it isn’t Alan’s. It isn’t anyone’s. She’s a virgin. How can she be pregnant and she bursts into tears.

Briefly, the narrative explains how, over the next few days, women come forward to confide to the vicar, Mr Leebody, or the village doctor, Willers, that they are pregnant – from the oldest to the youngest, all fertile women in the village are pregnant!

Chapter 8 Heads together

Dr Willers calls on Gordon Zellaby to break the news that every fertile woman in the village is pregnant. Zellaby, in his detached intellectual way, considers the options, giving them smart Greek names:

parthenogenesis
some form of artificial insemination
xenogenesis

It is suggestive that the fertile women who spent the Dayout unconscious in the village bus are not pregnant because the bus was, for the duration, in plain sight of people outside the zone. Maybe whatever was done to the women inside the zone was not to be observed.

The Thinker Several points: Zellaby fulfils something of the same role as Bocker performs in Kraken Wakes and, up to a point, Uncle Axel, in The Chrysalids – he is a figure peripheral to the main action, who can comment and analyse it. Exactly as Bocker is the first to realise that the fireballs in Kraken might come from another planet and is the first to grasp the threat they pose, so Zellaby in Cuckoos is the first to articulate the theory that the pregnancies are the result of conscious and co-ordinated action, the first to establish the Children’s telepath, and the first to grasp what a serious threat they pose.

But the role of all three characters (Bocker, Alex, Zellaby) is not only to crystallise the reader’s suspicions and move the plot forward, but to express intellectual ideas prompted by the book’s events. Thus Bocker not only warns about what is happening to earth, but speculates about what kind of intelligence has arrived on earth and interesting ideas about whether two intelligent but very different species can ever share a planet. (No, is the short answer).

Similarly, the central theme of The Chrysalids is ‘What is normality and what is deviance?’ and Uncle Alex is the mouthpiece of the author’s interesting ideas on the subject. For example, when Alex made his long sea voyage he discovered lots of communities which were ‘deviant’ in one way or another but each one regarded themselves as normal and all the others as the mutations. On a different but related trajectory, it is Alex who shares the speculation that, maybe David’s family and community, by trying to keep plant, animal and human lineage ‘pure’ and how they were before the nuclear holocaust, maybe they are setting themselves against biological change, when, in fact, evolution and change is the one constant of Life. So that maybe David’s mutation (he is a telepath) is an inevitable next step in human evolution and his family are trying to prevent the inevitable.

And so it is retired author and easily distracted Gordon Zellaby, his mind wandering on strange elusive patterns, who fulfils the same role in Cuckoos not only crystallising the action (I mean drawing together scattered events, making sense of them, as he explains them to Richard or Alan) but going on to express ideas and implications arising from the book’s premise.

Chapter 9 Keep it dark

This is a very interesting chapter because of the way the subject matter is treated. The plot level it is straightforward. Gordon and the doctor decide they must hold an Emergency Meeting of all the village’s womenfolk to explain to them what they think they’ve discovered, to bring it into the open and to air it.

What’s interesting is the extreme care they take to make it a women’s event – to invite only the women, and to ensure that the actual presentation is made by Angela Zellaby. It is a meeting for women, organised by women, and led by a woman. After she has made the initial presentation of the facts, she is emotionally shattered but insists to Gordon and the Willers (waiting in a room off to one side) that the next bit is the most important – it is absolutely vital that the women be given the space and time to talk about it, to talk it through and cultivate a feeling of communal solidarity.

Before and after Zellaby is given speeches, in his conversations with the village doctor, about how strange it is to be a woman and know your body is designed for childbirth, at the best of times, about the uncanniness of being so obviously an animal with a basic animal function of producing offspring, and yet fully human at the same time. A duality which men simply can’t understand, never fully.

This is also the chapter, at the meeting, where Miss Latterly, one of the pair of village lesbians gets up to storm out, outraged at the idea that she – who has never had anything to do with men – could be pregnant, only to be forced to stay when her lesbian partner, Miss Lamb mutely remain, dramatising in a surprisingly sensitive and effective way a) that the latter is pregnant b) her shame c) her partner’s mortification. It’s a good example of the way Wyndham’s terribly British way of handling these things conveys subtle shades of emotion.

Chapter 10 Midwich comes to terms

The Emergency Meeting leads to several outcomes. One is secrecy. No-one will tell anyone outside about it, not even the neighbouring villages, because Angela Zellaby made quite clear how hellish life would become if the world’s press were alerted and came to observe and report on every development during the remainder of the pregnancies.

The other is mutual support. Angela had made it plain that it is happening to all the women, regardless of married status, and so went out of her way to defuse stigma and shame and get all the other women to agree. Instead she led in setting up a programme of social activities and support and we are told the Zellabies themselves help out with money for the less well-off and for single mums.

Religion. In Triffids there was a conference of the survivors of the Great Blinding, held in a lecture room in Senate House during which a Miss Durrell expressed the Christian view that the catastrophe was God punishment of an immoral world. Similarly, in this novel, Mrs Dora Leebody, the vicar’s wife has a sort of breakdown and takes to preaching at the village war memorial that all the pregnant women have been cursed by God. A few days later she is found in the market square of the neighbouring town, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, preaching about God’s punishment. She is quietly brought home, sedated and then sent off by her husband to a rest home

But rather like the concern with the Russians expressed early in the novel, this brings home to the reader how prominent a factor in British culture Christianity was in the 1950s, in a way it probably wouldn’t be in the multicultural 2020s UK.

This comes out even more clearly in the final chapters where Zellaby engages in extended debates with the vicar about the morality of dealing with the Children, as they grow ever-more threatening.

Chapter 11 Well played, Midwich

Nerves hold up well through the spring until, in May, some of the heavily pregnant women start to crack under the uncertainty of not knowing what they are carrying in their wombs. Resilient and intelligent Angela Zellaby is given a speech declaring that men can never understand what it is like to be a woman, and not to have the faintest idea of the nightmare strain the pregnant women of Midwich are under (p.87).

Funnily enough, the first to have her baby is the lesbian Miss Lamb, who stumbles on a milk bottle on her doorstep, takes a fall and goes into labour. Hours later, having delivered the baby, the village doctor returns to his anxious wife and declares the baby is perfect in all respects. Over the coming month all the other babies are delivered, physically perfect specimens, but with golden eyes and blonde hair. 61 in total, 31 males, 30 females.

Chapter 12 Harvest home

The vicar falls into a stroll with Zellaby and assures him all the women have now had their babies. He is uneasy. Can’t shake the feeling it’s some kind of test. Zellaby makes remarks repeating his sense that, as men, they are hors du combat, outside the zone and cannot hope to understand what the women are going through.

Walking on Zellaby observes Mrs Brinkman pushing a pram and is a little surprised when she abruptly stops, takes the baby out, sits on the war memorial, unbuttons her blouse and starts suckling it. She is embarrassed when Zellaby draws abreast and explains that the baby made her do it. Walking up to the lodge, there’s a beep and Ferrelyn is in a car behind him. She too, flushed and upset, and says the baby made her come. Aha.

Chapter 13 Midwich centrocline

A centrocline is: ‘An equidimensional basin characteristic of cratonic areas, in which the strata dip to a central low point.’

Over the coming weeks every single mum who’d moved away from Midwich (for example most of the women researchers from the Grange who had been on secondments and gone elsewhere for their pregnancies and births) find themselves compelled to return

The text quotes a report Dr Willers submits to his superiors, outlining the sequence of births, the compulsion all the mothers felt to return and other matters, above all emphasising that some kind of official study should be being made of the children’s births, weights, development and so on.

Bernard turns up, goes for a chat with Zellaby, then comes for dinner with Richard and Janet, repeating some of Zellaby’s speculations. Apparently, Zellaby wonders whether it was a mistake that Homo sapiens is so very different from all other animal species, if our culture would be improved if we had to deal with at least one other intelligent life form on the planet. (This is one of the ideas floated in the Kraken Wakes.)

Chapter 14 Matters arising

Precisely half way through the book, Alan pays a call (he is currently stationed by the army a long way away, in Scotland, and can only get leave to visit Midwich occasionally).

Gordon takes him for a chat out in the garden of the manor. In garden chairs on the fine lawn under the old cedar tree, Gordon expounds his theory that the women have borne alien children. Earlier generations would have recognised them as changelings (p.106) – ‘deformed or imbecilic offspring of fairies or elves substituted by them surreptitiously for a human infant’. We moderns, Zellaby says, might think of them as cuckoos (p.106), laid in another species’ nests, force the mothers to work themselves to death to feed them, then exterminate all the true fledgelings.

That’s why he’s asking Alan to persuade Ferrelyn to leave the baby in his care and depart Midwich, go with him to Scotland. Nobody knows what it means or what might happen, but Zellaby introduces the idea that, if you were going to attack a civilisation and had plenty of time to plan it, might it not be a good idea to introduce a fifth column to work against the host nation from within. Maybe that’s what the babies are.

Chapter 15 Matters to arise

Months pass. The Grange is emptied and all its staff leave, but leaving four babies behind, in a new nursery. Over the winter pneumonia carries off some of the parents and three of the babies, leaving 58.

A dessicated couple called the Freemans move into the cottage vacated by Crim, and turn out to be officials sent to monitor developments, but they do it in a very ham-fisted way and become known as the Noseys.

Early in the summer Gordon pays Richard and Janet a visit and asks them to come with him to witness an experiment. The Children (everyone refers to them with a capital C, now) are barely a year old but look like healthy 2-year-olds. Gordon drops in on a family with one, asks the mum’s permission, then presents the child with a cunning Japanese wooden box with a sweet inside. The child struggles for a while, then Gordon shows him how to unlock it, relocks it. Given it again, the child unlocks it easily, but that’s not the point. Gordon takes them to see several other children and they all unlock it easily. Once one knows, they all know. Gordon presents his interpretation: they may have different physical bodies, but what if the Children compose one mind! He has christened it collective-individualism’ (p.123)

With typical intellectual sprezzatura Gordon speculates that maybe Homo sapiens is stagnating, the race limited to individuals with just the one mind, all jostling. Maybe the next breakthrough in evolution would be to combine the powers of individual minds into a collective. Maybe they are the progenitors of a new race. That’s why, he says, looking vaguely out the window at a bumble bee hovering over the lavender, he keeps thinking the collective boys and the collective girls should be renamed – Adam and Eve.

On the last page of Part One, Richard gets a job in Canada, leaving at once, and Janet follows soon after. She expresses relief to be shot of Midwich and its weird atmosphere and God, so grateful they were out of the village on ‘the fateful night’ and so she never bore one of those monster children.

Part two

Chapter 16 Now we are nine

Eight years pass. Richard and Janet live in Canada now, but occasionally pop back to the old country. On one such trip, Richard bumps into Bernard, who is now a colonel. They go for a drink and the subject of Midwich comes up. Richard has almost forgotten about it, says how are things going, Bernard says he’s scheduled to pop down for a visit next day, would Richard like to come?

The reader thinks this might be the first of several episodic visits, but in fact it turns into one continuous visit which leads to the climax of the story.

On the drive down Bernard tells Richard the Grange has been converted into a special school for the Children. Zellaby was right, what one boy learns they all learn, what one girl learns, ditto. The Children have developed at twice normal speed and now look 17 or 18. The news blackout has continued to be a success, the neighbouring communities regarding Midwich as ‘touched’ by the event, and the inhabitants retarded. The word they use is ‘daytouched’ (p.133). They consider the entire community a kind of open asylum. Some of the mothers were reluctant to let their children attend the new school but one by one the Children went of their own accord, to be together.

Bernard is driving down for a post-mortem on a local young man, Jim Pawle. Richard attends. It is a tense affair, with a very bad mood among the villagers attending, although nothing out of the ordinary is done or said. Zellaby greets Richard as if they’d only said goodbye the day before, invites him and Bernard to the Manor, describes what happened. He was an eye-witness. The local boy was driving his car along a lane when he hit one of a group of four Children by mistake. Zellaby watched as the other three focused their mental force on making the unhappy driver get back into his car and set off at top speed towards a wall, hitting it head on and dying.

Others saw it too. It gave Zellaby a very bad shock. Now he shares his feelings with Bernard and Richard. What if it had been him or Angela or Ferrelyn driving? He tells them Dr Willers died a few years earlier, suicide, overdose of barbiturates (p.143). Richard is surprised, he didn’t seem the sort. Gordon agrees, and wonders now whether… Whether the Children made him do it? Richard completes the thought. My God. Now for the first time, Zellaby says he is scared, thinking he should send Angela away.

Angela appears from the house, comes onto the veranda, joins the conversation, and mentions the incident of the dog – which bit one of the Children and promptly ran in front of a tractor – and the bull – which attacked one of them and promptly ran through several fields and drowned itself in a mill pond. She is in no doubt the children cause the deaths of anyone or anything which harms them.

The mother of the driver of the car wanted to attend and denounce the Children, but her other son and husband prevented her. What good would it do? The entire village is now living in fear.

Bernard and Richard say their goodbyes and leave, driving very carefully. They come on a group of four Children and Bernard slows down to let Richard appreciate just how much they have grown. Their golden eyes make them look like semi-precious stones. Both are stunned when a gunshot goes off and one of the Children falls to the ground. Richard gets out, a Child turns to look at him and he feels a gust of confusion and weakness flood through him.

Then they are aware of a high moaning keening sound and realise it is the other Children, a way off, expressing the same pain the shot one is feeling. And then they hear whimpering and another shot fired and screaming. Pushing through the hedge they come across a young man who has blown his own head off and his girlfriend, Elsa, next to him, hysterical. It’s the brother of the young man whose inquest they attended. He was taking revenge on the Children by shooting one of them and now they’ve killed him, too.

Local labourers come running, lift up the girl, take her home, the ones Richard hears vowing revenge against ‘the murderin’ young bastards.’ Richard and Bernard motor back to the Manor where Gordon hears the full story over a fortifying drink. Hmm. This is how blood feuds begin…

Chapter 17 Midwich protests

Shaken, Bernard and Richard return to Kyle Manor where the Zellabies graciously offer to put them up and invite them for dinner. They have barely withdrawn to the living room (the cook and other invisible servants having, presumably, cleared away the meal things) than the vicar, Leebody, enters in a fret. He warns that the situation is escalating.

Leebody and Zellaby engage in quite a high-flown debate about the morality of the Childrens’ activities. Leebody says they have the appearance of humans but, if they are not human inside, in their souls, then the laws of the Bible and conventional morality do not apply. Zellaby gives his view which is that the laws devised by one species to regulate its societies do not apply to a completely different species.

This high-flown talk is interrupted by Mrs Brant, who makes her apologies to ‘is worship Mr Zellaby, and then physically drags Leebody to the door, saying the Midwich men had been gathered in the pub, working themselves up into a fury, and have now set off in a body to burn the Grange to the ground and murder all the children. Only Mr Leebody can stop them, and she drags him, fluttering and stammering off into the night.

Zellaby, Bernard and Richard are about to follow, but Angela slams the door shut and stands in front of it, absolutely implacable. She knows there is going to be trouble and absolutely forbids any of them to leave. And they meekly accept her orders.

Chapter 18 Interview with a child

The Chief Constable of Winshire looked in at Kyle Manor the next morning, just at the right time for a glass of Madeira and a biscuit.

That gives you a sense of the sedate, well-mannered, upper-middle-class milieu we are operating in. We quickly learn that the attempt to torch the Grange backfired disastrously, as the Children made the attackers attack each other with the result that three men and a woman are dead and many others injured. Angela was quite right to prevent her menfolk going along.

What quickly transpires is the chief constable knows nothing about the Children, their special history or ability, and Zellaby, Bernard and Richard struggle to convey it to him.

The mildly comic scene where the phlegmatic policeman becomes more and more frustrated is interspersed with vignettes from the village. Passengers attempting to enter the village bus find their feet unable to move. Polly Rushton seeking to drive back to London finds herself stopping at the village perimeter and turning back. In other words, the Children have set up a kind of psychic boundary which the villagers can’t escape.

The Chief Constable goes up to the Grange where the current administrator, Mr Torrance, arranges an interview with one of the Children. This boy announces in forthright tones that the Children did make the village men attack each other in self defence because they knew the men had come to burn down the Grange. Well, why not just turn them back? asks the policeman. Because they needed to make an example to warn off other would-be attackers.

The Chief Constable is so appalled at the boy’s arrogance and the casual way he mentions the murder of four civilians that he starts abusing him and goes to stand, when he suddenly freezes, choking, then falls to the floor gasping and whimpering, vomits and passes out. Bernard watches all this in terror. He and Torrance call some of the police officers and have the CC carried to a car and taken away, still unconscious, then Bernard returns to the Manor.

Richard tries to leave but finds himself unable to, unable to shift gear or push the accelerator and so reluctantly turns back. Looks like he’s trapped along with the others.

Chapter 19 Impasse

Bernard returns to the Manor, has a couple of strong whiskeys and recounts what he saw. Gordon and Angela, Bernard and Richard sit down to another fine luncheon prepared by cook (p.178), and their conversation includes some major revelations. These last 40 pages of the novel become very wordy. There is more and more theorising and less and less action – up until the abrupt climax, that is.

Now, at this meal, Zellaby and Bernard both agree that they think the children are the result of the intervention of non-terrestrial aliens (p.188). But Bernard now makes the revelation of the book: that during the three or so weeks surrounding the Dayout, radar detected an unusual number of unidentified flying objects and that Dayouts happened at other communities.

He knows about incidences in the Northern Territory of Australia where, for reasons unknown, all the children died on birth. In an Eskimo settlement in northern Canada where the community was so outraged at the incident that it exposed the babies at birth. One at a remote community in the Irkutsk region of Mongolia where the local men considered their women had slept with the devil and murdered not only babies but mothers. And another in Gizhinsk. This is the important one.

For here the children were allowed to grow by the Soviet authorities who, after initially suspecting a capitalist trick, decided the children’s powers may be of some advantage in the Cold War. However, the Soviets eventually concluded their Children were a threat not only to the local community but to the state itself and – here’s the point – struck the town with atomic weapons. The town of Gizhinsk no longer exists.

And the other guests are electrified to learn that this happened only the previous week, just before the Children murdered Pawle. They knew. Somehow they knew about the murder of their peers in Russia and, from that moment, have escalated their actions, retaliating for even mild slights with immediate disproportionate violence.

After luncheon Bernard announces he is going back up to the Grange for a proper conversation with Torrance. He walks. However on the way he stops by two Children sitting on a bank. They are looking up. Bernard hears the drone of a jet plane passing high overhead. He sees five dots appear from it. For a moment I thought they were bombs and that’s how the book might end, but instead they are parachutes. The Children have made the five crew on the plane bail out, the plane will fly on till it crashes somewhere.

Bernard tells them that’s a very expensive plane, they could just have got to the pilots to turn back. The children calmly logically reply that that might have been put down to instrument failure. They must make their message plain.

‘Oh, you want to instil fear, do you? Why?’ inquired Bernard.
‘Only to make you leave us alone,’ said the boy. ‘It is a means; not an end.’ His golden eyes were turned towards Bernard, with a steady, earnest look. ‘Sooner or later, you will try to kill us. However we behave, you will want to wipe us out. Our position can be made stronger only if we take the initiative.’
The boy spoke quite calmly, but somehow the words pierced right through the front that Bernard had adopted. (p.196)

The Children explain in terms way beyond their years (and reminiscent of Zellaby who has, after all, been teaching them for years) that it is a clash of species. They explain that they know about the murder of the Children of Gizhinsk. And then they proceed to give a merciless analysis of the political and moral situation here in England. In Soviet Russia the individual exists to support the state and individuals can be arrested, imprisoned or liquidated if their existence or thoughts, words or actions threaten the state.

By contrast, here in the West, the State exists to support the wish for self-fulfilment and freedom of vast numbers of heterogenous individuals. No government could unilaterally wipe out a settlement like Midwich with all its innocent civilians. That’s why they’ve erected an invisible barrier and no-one can leave. The civilians are hostages. Any government which wipes Midwich out will never be re-elected. Meanwhile all kinds of mealy-mouthed do-gooders and experts on ethics will wring their hands about the Childrens’ rights. And they will use this time to get stronger.

Bernard becomes aware that he is sweating, panicking at hearing such cold-blooded sentiments coming out the mouth of a teenager. The Child moves beyond a shrewd analysis of the Realpolitik of the situation to a deeper, biological or Darwinian interpretation.

‘Neither you, nor we, have wishes that count in the matter – or should one say that we both have been given the same wish – to survive? We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically strong, but mentally undeveloped; it made us mentally strong, but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport, perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very, very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well.’ He paused, and smiled. ‘A real bit of Zellaby, that – our first teacher,’ he put in, and then went on. ‘But the life force is a great deal stronger than they are; and it won’t be denied its blood-sports.’ (p.200)

Chapter 20 Ultimatum

Meanwhile Zellaby takes Richard for a turn round his favourite Thinking Walk. Here he propounds at length his speculation that, we maybe describing the Children as aliens, but what if the human races are also alien interlopers? Impregnated into low-intelligence Neanderthals by the aliens, to create a step-change in evolution?

His evidence is the remarkable lack of fossil evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens combined with the huge gap between us and any other living thing. What if we too were planted here by a Maker or a team of extra-terrestrial scientists carrying out experiments in evolution and the earth is their testbed? (p.205)

Bernard arrives back from his conversation with the two Children. They had concluded by presenting an ultimatum, hence the title of the chapter. More accurately, a demand. They want to be transported to somewhere where they will be safe. They will supervise all aspects of the transportation. They want Bernard to escalate it to his superiors and, ultimately to the Prime Minister.

Zellaby is not surprised. In the latest of his many speculations and formulations, he amuses himself by saying the they now face a ‘moral dilemma of some niceness’:

‘On the one hand, it is our duty to our race and culture to liquidate the Children, for it is clear that if we do not we shall, at best, be completely dominated by them, and their culture, whatever it may turn out to be, will extinguish ours. On the other hand, it is our culture that gives us scruples about the ruthless liquidation of unarmed minorities, not to mention the practical obstacles to such a solution.’ (p.208)

If you like moral dilemmas, this is the one at the core of the book. Do we have the right to ‘liquidate’ the apparently harmless, if we have good suspicions they will eventually come to pose a threat to us?

If absolute moral values can’t help us decide, then Zellaby invokes the classic Utilitarian argument for making decisions based on their practical outcomes.

‘In a quandary where every course is immoral, there still remains the ability to act for the greatest good of the greatest number. Ergo, the Children ought to be eliminated at the least possible cost, with the least possible delay. I am sorry to have to arrive at that conclusion. In nine years I have grown rather fond of them…’ (p.208)

And that is what he does. Bernard says his goodbyes and sets off to London to convey the Children’s ultimatum. Richard stays on at the Manor.

Chapter 21 Zellaby of Macedon

Next morning Gordon asks Angela to get a jar of bullseyes, the Children’s favourite sweet, from the shops in Trayne. He is preparing to give them one of his regular film shows, about the Aegean Islands. When Richard joins him on the veranda before luncheon, Zellaby calmly says life goes on, he’s happy to give the Children another film show and lecture, they enjoy it, he likes them despite everything. The key thing is they trust him.

Early that evening Richard helps load his projector gear into the car, a surprising number of surprisingly heavy boxes and then drives Gordon to the Grange, helps the Children unload and carry the equipment into the building. Richard asks to stay, since he is still recently enough returned to be fascinated by the Children but Gordon suavely asks him to go back to the Manor and be with Angela, her nerves are so high strung, poor thing. So Richard reluctantly drives off.

He has barely parked, entered the Manor, poured a drink and begun chatting to Angela who is expressing her fears about what the children will do next, when there is a flash, a colossal bang and then a shock wave hits the Manor and shatters all its windows. When Richard picks himself up and runs to the french windows he sees detritus all across the lawn, creepers ripped off the facade of the Manor, and flames rising from the Grange up on the hill.

Gordon had packed the projector boxes with explosive and has set it off, killing himself and all the children. From the endless stream of speculations and musings which dominate the final chapters, it appears there were real conclusions and a practical outcome endless. It was a war of species. The Children needed to be liquidated in order to preserve our species. And if moral speculation was no use, then utilitarian considerations provided a basis for action. Which he took, knowing that the Children’s trust was a unique quality which he alone of maybe the entire human race had. And so he abused it to murder them all. If it was murder (see the long discussion with the vicar about the morality of inter-species killing).

The Midwich Cuckoos is a gripping, thrilling read, which is strangely inflected between, on the one hand its jolly pukka, upper-middle-class, English characters and, on the other hand, the frequent and very thought-provoking debates about morality, the rights and wrong of eliminating a racial threat, the possibility that the entire human race is a galactic experiment, and other quietly mind-bending topics.

John Wyndham reviews

Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
The Day of the Triffids (1951)
The Kraken Wakes (1953)
Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
The Chrysalids (1955)
The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
The Outward Urge (1959)
Trouble with Lichen (1960)
Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
Chocky (1968)
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)

Other science fiction reviews

Science fiction blog posts

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by Simon on March 15, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Science Fiction

Tagged 26 September, Alan Hughes, Alfred Wait, Arthur Crim, Arthur Flagg, artificial insemination, Bernard Westcott, Canada, centrocline, changeling, Christianity, class system, Cold War, Dayout, Dora Leebody, Dr Charley Willers, Ealing Comedy, England, Evolution, fateful nights, femininity, Ferrelyn Zellaby, flying saucers, gender, Gizhinsk, Gordon Zellaby, Harry Crankhart, Homo sapiens, Hubert Leebody, identity, J.G. Ballard, Janet Gayford, Jim Pawle, Joyce Grenfell, Kyle Manor, lesbianism, marriage, Midwich, Milly Willers, Miss Lamb, Miss Latterly, Miss Ogle, morality, Mr Tapper, Mrs Brant, novel, parthenogenesis, Polly Rushton, Richard Gayford, Russia, science fiction, Soviet Russia, Soviet Union, story, telepathy, text, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, Tilly Foresham, Tom Dorry, Trayne, UFOs, utilitarianism, Wilfred Williams, Winshire, xenogenesis

Posted by Simon on March 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/03/15/the-midwich-cuckoos-john-wyndham/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Ealing Comedy

Trouble for Lucia by E.F. Benson (1939)

Cast

Plots and storylines

Irene’s photo

Mayoring day

The new era

The new parsimony

The council election

Budgie spirituality

Bicycling

Olga Braceley

Public lectures

The saga of the Major’s riding-whip

Irene’s allegorical painting

More of the Major’s riding-whip

Chapter 8. To London

Back to Riseholme

Chapter 9. The Lady Sheffield fiasco

The Olga surprise

The affair misapprehension

The beauty fad

Chapter 10. The Poppy and Olga crisis

The annual Tilling art exhibition

August rents and the arrival of Miss Leg

Chapter 11. More blows

Chapter 12. Lucia’s low point

Georgie returns

Lucia’s revenge

Thoughts

Credit

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Mapp and Lucia reviews

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Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Life As We Have Known It (1931)

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

Summary

Background

No prefaces

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

Scene 3. The letters themselves

A Virago classic

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

Lord Salisbury

Lonely, sensitive and sad

High Tory conservatism

Married and elected MP

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Timeless issues

Using the Saturday Review

Viscount Cranborne

Victorian Prime Ministers

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

Fear, awe and respect

The 1867 Reform Act

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Beaconsfieldism

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

Congress of Berlin

Afghanistan

The Battle of Maiwand

The Anglo-Zulu War

Egypt

Tory defeat in 1880

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Electoral reform

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

IRELAND

Anti-democracy

Salisbury sayings

Comedy