Victorian "Darker" Novels

Anthony Trollope is the author of the much-loved Barchester novels, about the sweetie-pie Rev. Septimus Harding, cello player, and his bumptious son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly. And of course he wrote the Palliser novels about another rather sweetie-pie character, Plantaganet Palliser, and his decimal coinage plan for Britain.

In these novels Trollope examined the rights and wrongs of Britain through the lens of comedy.

But there are darker novels, which really take a whack at British society. I am thinking of The Way We Live Now, featuring really nasty characters like the swindler, and probably Jewish, Augustus Melmotte and the worthless young Sir Felix Carbury.

Or The American Senator, in which Trollope cunningly uses a pompous American US Senator to illuminate many unjust corners of British life. But it's all perfectly harmless, because, ha ha, how can you take offence when it's a blow-hard American Senator complaining about Britain!

Or the harrowing Linda Tressel. It is set in Nuremberg, and is about a young 21 year-old girl raised by her super-religious aunt, who decides one fine day that Linda is to marry her long-time 50-year-old lodger. The aunt puts enormous moral and religious pressure on Linda to agree to the marriage so that eventually Linda runs away, gets sick and dies. Again, perfectly harmless, because we are talking about those crazy Germans in Nuremberg. Could such a thing happen in Britain? Never mind.

We all like to criticize Charles Dickens for his overdrawn gargoyles. But maybe there was a method to the madness, that we could happily ignore the brutal reality of life in Dickensian London because his characters were so over the top. Truth is that, compared to the nice comfortable world of middle-class novel readers, life was nasty, brutish and short for most people back in those days.

And don't get me started on Thomas Hardy. His novels are full of the darkness of life, from Jude the Obscure to Far From the Madding Crowd to Tess of the Durbervilles. Then there is The Well-Beloved that is so dark I could not finish it.

But whatabout today's writers? Why am I not engaged in their critiques of society? Maybe it's because I think that, e.g., Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale is rather missing the point. Yes, there might be a time where eevil white Christian men are breeding with handmaid concubines, but I think we could rather go to work on the manifold hypocrisies of our present educated Gentry in religion, in culture, in sexuality, in politics before we get to work on crazy Christian bigots. On the other hand, when Atwood is writing about university culture in Life Before Man, she nails it. 

Somehow, with Tom Wolfe dead, there seems to be nobody around to pick up the torch of satirical social analysis.

(I except, of course, my own daughter, the writer Beatriz Williams, whose oeuvre is a magnificent critique of modern society, but done more in the Victorian style of suggestion rather than modern wokie bludgeon.)

Maybe our modern world will be rescued by Chinese writers. Whatabout Kevin Kwan, of Crazy Rich Asians, a delicious romp that dances around the hole in the middle of crazy rich life? Or the excellent Liu Cixin, whose sci-fi Three Body Problem series goes as deep into modern problems as anyone could wish?

Strictly speaking, what with the current wokie ban on all social critique that goes anywhere near the Holy Sanctuary of left-wing culture there ought to be a burgeoning satirical literature that goes just up to the boundary of canceling, but no further. I suppose if I were younger I would know all about it. There is, after all, an eternal yearning in the young to poke at the hypocrisies of their elders and teach them a lesson.

Instead, I am perfectly happy to twaddle around with Trollope and Hardy. And, of course, My Girl George Eliot.

Meanwhile I am chugging through Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843. Young Martin has just arrived in New York City and is getting to experience its splendid newspapers, from the New York Sewer to the New York Stabber to the New York Peeper, including "the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse." 

Golly. You mean to say that digging up a politician's past goes all the way back to the 19th century? That the practice of digging up dirt on Supreme Court nominees is old hat? "I literally can't even." As the ladies say.