SOURCE: "The Victorian Era: Social Reform in Fact and Fiction," in English History in English Fiction, 1940. Reprint by Kennikat Press, 1970, pp. 251-69.

[In the following excerpt, Marriott presents an overview of nineteenth-century historical fiction, noting that its authors were concerned with portraying the Victorian way of life and discussing the social issues of that time.]

At each stage of our journey the way becomes more arduous, the impedimenta heavier, the problems more baffling. That is pre-eminently true of the Victorian era. The embarrassment is, however, to some extent relieved by the fact that not all the great Victorian novelists dealt with contemporary affairs. Thackeray's (1811-63) history, for instance, belongs to the eighteenth century. The best-beloved characters of Charles Dickens (1812-70) are very early if not prae-Victorian. Even George Eliot (1819-80), though she herself had more of the Zeit-geist than any of her contemporaries, drew inspiration for her best work from her reminiscences of childhood and early life. Yet, in fact, her recollections were tinged as much by the scientific spirit of Darwinism as by the moral problems which never ceased to haunt a mind permeated by the evangelical teaching imbibed in youth. Of the Anglican Establishment in mid-Victorian days, Anthony Trollope is among novelists the most faithful analyst; of the difficulties which, in the scientific era, were beginning to beset clergy and laity alike, there is no better illustration than that of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere.

The reign of Queen Victoria, in respect of fiction as of politics, divides into three periods: (i) a period of unrest, agitation, and depression extending from the Queen's accession (1837) to the "Hungry Forties", to the Irish Famine (1845), and the "Young Ireland Rebellion" (1848); (ii) the period of ever-expanding prosperity in trade and agriculture, and the political ascendancy of the middle classes (1846-85), and (iii) the Imperialist revival which began about 1885 and culminated in the "Diamond Jubilee" of 1897. The last four years of the reign were an unhappy anticlimax.

This [essay] is concerned with the middle period marked by the ascendancy of the "Manchester School", whose policy was based on the physiocratic formula of laissezfaire, laissez-aller. The free-trade experiment initiated by Peel (1841-46), and steadily pursued until the Great War of 1914-18, was only one manifestation of that policy. Not that any policy is ever in England carried to its logical extreme. If abuses obtrude themselves they must be remedied without regard to philosophic dogmas. If laissez-faire led to scandalous conditions in the coal mines and the cotton-mills, the State must interfere to protect the women and children who were sacrificed by unscrupulous employers on the altar of Mammon. If laissez-faire had allowed the new factory towns to grow up in drab ugliness, without regard to amenities or even to decency and sanitation, in order to enrich greedy builders and groundlandlords; if it permitted brave sailors in the Merchant Service to pursue their arduous calling in unseaworthy ships; if it refused to interfere between capitalist employers and the wage-earners, and permitted the exploitation of the most defenceless workers by sweating, and by unrestricted hours of labour; if it allowed new generations of children to grow up to manhood without the rudiments of education, and excessive drinking to undermine the health and morale of a considerable section of the adult population—if in the sacred name of Liberty all such things were permitted, retribution was bound to fall upon the whole community, and reaction to embody itself in legislation and administration.

The result was a strong encroachment (as some regard it) of the State upon the free action of individual citizens, and an ever increasing volume of legislation designed to correct abuses which wise prevision might altogether have avoided.

The pace at first was slow; advance was exceedingly cautions. But it gathered momentum as the reign went on. Enquiries were instituted by Select Committees and Royal Commissions, notably in regard to the employment of women and children underground and in cotton mills. The revelations appalled the public conscience. Children under five were sent into mines and into factories. Not least to be pitied were the "apprentices" who were sent off by the parish authorities from London and the southern counties by wagon loads at a time to be apprenticed to the millowners in Lancashire, there to be "used up" as the "cheapest raw material in the market". Even more pathetic, perhaps, because more unnatural, was the lot of children forced into the mills by the poverty of parents. Such were the children of whom M. T. Sadler tells in The Factory Girl's Last Day, a simple little poem that makes an even stronger appeal than Mrs. Browning's more elaborate Cry of the Children: for Sadler summarizes a mass of firsthand evidence which, with "Dick" Oastler, he was foremost in collecting. The new middle-class electorate turned Sadler out of Parliament in 1832, but not even the Report of the Royal Commission did more than that philanthropic Tory to secure the passing of Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours'Act of 1847. The Act, though its terms went only half way, really settled the principle that in the interests of the community the State was not merely entitled but was bound to protect the weak and restrain the avarice of the strong.

Factory legislation affords only one illustration of a movement which with ever increasing force and velocity has now almost entirely obliterated all traces of laissez-faire.

In the course of a century nothing less than a social revolution has been effected. By this means the abuses arising from the economic revolution which preceded it have been to a large extent corrected. No longer could Carlyle complain that "in the midst of plethoric plenty the people perish". If there is no plethora of wealth, such as remains is more equally distributed. Great fortunes are still made, but it is increasingly difficult to transmit them to heirs. There is, moreover, general appreciation of the truth that great accumulations of wealth are as a rule due to the exceptional abilities of organizers of industry, that it were suicidal to penalize them, and that such fortunes represent not a deduction from the wages of labour but an addition to the wealth of the community.

The wide sweep of such developments does not afford appropriate subjects for prose fiction. Just as the landscape painter looks for his subject not to a great range of snow-capped mountains, but to a clump of fir trees on some gentle eminence, to the water-lilies covering the surface of a pond, to cattle chewing the cud, or to a flock of sheep on a mountainside, so the novelist seizes upon an incident apparently isolated, and demonstrates the effect of great movements, political or economic, by their reactions upon individuals.

Take, for instance, the subject of trade unionism and strikes, as treated respectively by the social historian and the novelist. The historian explains how both the Common Law and Statutes innumerable operated to prevent combination among workmen, and how economic pressure gradually wore down the resistance of legislative restraints; how the outrages committed by trade-unionists in industrial centres in the winter of 1866-7 compelled the attention of Parliament, and how the legislation of 1871-76 not only gave to trade union funds the benefit of the Friendly Societies Acts, but put combinations in furtherance of trade disputes in a position legally privileged.

That is not the way of the novelist. Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton shows how a trade dispute led to the murder of Harry Carson, a young, thoughtless but not ungenerous employer, to the trial and almost to the conviction of Jem Wilson, a young workman; how John Barton drew the lot which to his dismay made him an assassin. Very temperately and impartially Mrs. Gaskell puts the case for and against both sides: blaming the masters less for avarice than for want of imagination, and showing how the men were driven to the fatal weapon of the strike for lack of the information as to trade conditions which the masters refused to impart to them. Even more clearly is the same lesson taught in North and South. In that deeply pathetic story a beautiful contact is established between Thornton, the self-made highly successful cotton lord, and the gentle scholarly Hale who, driven by conscientious doubts to resign his living in the New Forest, has settled in the "Cotton" town as a private tutor. Equally beautiful is the contact between the parson's daughter, Margaret Hale, tender-hearted and gently nurtured, and Nicholas Higgins, weaver and trade-unionist, and his consumptive daughter. Of masters and men Thornton and Higgins are admirable representatives. Though deemed to be a "hard man", and uncompromising in his views as to the part which capital and management must play in industry, Thornton is, in fact, as thoughtful for his men's interests as for his own, so long as they don't meddle in matters that the masters can alone decide. Higgins holds the views of his class about the strike weapon. Farm labourers, so Margaret Hale assures him, do not strike. "I know naught of your ways down south," he retorts. "I have heard they're a pack of spiritless, downtrodden men; welly clemmed to death; too much dazed wi' clemming to know when they're put upon. Now it's not so here. We know when we're put upon; and we'en too much blood in us to stand it. We just take our hands fro' our looms, and say, 'Yo' may clem us, but yo'll not put upon, my masters!' And be danged to 'em, they shant."

That is the men's case in a nutshell. There is, however, another side to the picture. Charles Reade had no such firsthand knowledge of industrial conditions as Mrs. Gaskell, but he studied blue books with all the fervour of a scholar engaged in research. Some of the results are embodied in Put Yourself in his Place—where we see Henry Little, young and manly, waging single-handed a successful fight against the cruel and heartless tyranny of the trade union.

The essential difference between the novelist and the historian is one of method. The historian deals with facts, in the general; the novelist must illustrate their reaction upon individuals. Thus, Mrs. Henry Birchenough in her excellent story, Potsherds, tells us nothing about the "evolution of the potter's industry" (as the historian would). She tells the story of William Handley, a successful potter, who having, by sheer hard work, sagacity, and courage, made a little fortune, bought out his old master's daughter (foreseeing difficulties ahead) and presently turned the business into a limited liability concern. In an equally good novel, Probation, Jessie Fothergill tells the story (again in reference to the actors rather than the action) of the quiet but heroic courage with which the working men of Lancashire faced (1861-63) the calamity of the cotton famine. In 1862, Cobden estimated the loss in wages at £7,000,000 per annum. Yet through it all the cotton operatives adhered to the cause of the Northern States, though it was Abraham Lincoln's blockade of the Southern ports that brought the famine upon Lancashire. The men had convinced themselves that the North was fighting in the cause of righteousness and freedom, and not all their sufferings induced them to waver in their devotion to the North.

Another illustration. There are at least three novels dealing with a half-forgotten incident in the social history of South Wales. S. Baring Gould's In Dewisland, K. L. Montgomery's The Gate-Openers and Violet Jacobs' The Sheep-Stealers all deal with the "Rebecca Riots" of 1843. The following passage from The Sheep-Stealers explains the position. "At this time a wave of wrath which had a considerable foundation of justice was surging over South Wales. By a General Highway Act, a new principle of road-government had been brought in under which the trustees of turnpike roads might raise money through tolls sufficient to pay the interest of the debts and keep the high-ways in repair. The gates had in some cases been taken by professional toll-renters, men who came from a distance, and who were consequently regarded with suspicion by the intensely conservative population of the rural districts. These people having higher rents to make up had refused to give credit to farmers, or to allow them to compound for tolls on easy terms as had been formerly their custom. The effect of all this had been to rouse the public to a state of fury which had resulted, in many places, in serious riots. In carrying out the provisions of their respective acts, the trustees were under little or no control; they erected fresh gates, interpreted the laws as they thought fit, and there was no appeal from their decisions." The first riot had broken out at Carmarthen, where the methods adopted by "Rebecca and her children" met with remarkable success. The name "Rebecca" had been chosen by a bible-reading community in reference to a text in Genesis (xxiv-60): "And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her … let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them." Rhys Walters, a substantial young farmer, was chosen to be captain of one of the many bands of rioters. Like other "Rebeccas" young Walters disguised himself by wearing a woman's clothes; and so effectual and popular did the disguise prove that Rebecca and her children "grew bolder and bolder: they possessed many of the gates of those which hated them, and spread terror throughout many parts of Central and South Wales. The leaders were never caught, and the few followers who were arrested were treated with leniency. The Government issued a commission to enquire into the grievances and as a result the tollbars in many districts of Central Wales were abolished. Disorder, however, especially if successful, is infectious: "Rebecca's reputation did not suffer from lack of imitators."

No discerning reader can read the above passage from The Sheep-Stealers without perceiving that the "Rebecca Riots" afford a good illustration of the debt which history owes to fiction. Many histories of the period contain a brief and arid reference to the riots: but they do not supply the touches by which the novelist gives to the incident—not, admittedly of the first importance—a real, living and human interest.

Charles Reade (1814-84) dramatist, Bohemian, country-gentleman, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, has a place of his own in the history of Victorian fiction. Not all his novels are didactic or historical. In Griffith Gaunt, for example (generally accounted his masterpiece) the interest is psychological. But between 1856 and 1884 he devoted novel after novel to the exposure of some economic or social scandal. W. L. Courtney, a fine critic, deemed Charles Reade worthy to be ranked with such literary giants as Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot. But his gifts were dissimilar. "He was not," says Courtney, "an artist like Thackeray: he had not the undeniable genius and prodigality of power which is found in Dickens; nor had he the gift of keen analysis or the profound thoughtfulness of George Eliot. Here and there he has the note of Dickens, witness the magnificent funeral scene of Edward Josephs in It is Never too late to Mend (Chapter XXVII)," but in his conscientious accumulation of evidence he excels them all. Among historical novels Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth is among the greatest, but it is outside the scope of the present survey. Others not merely come within but illustrate with exceptional clarity the central thesis of this book. Here is Reade's own apology for the method he adopted. "I have taken a few undeniable truths out of many, and have laboured to make my readers realize those appalling facts of the day which most men know, but not one in a thousand comprehends, and not one in a hundred thousand realises until fiction … comes to his aid, studies, penetrates, digests the hard facts of chronicles and blue-books, and makes the dry bones live."

Reade's plea is, surely, irresistible. A fellow-craftsman bears testimony to his success. "Mr. Reade … can make a blue-book live and yet be a blue-book still.… The reader is not conscious that he is going through the boiled-down contents of a blue-book. He has no aggrieved sense of being entrapped into the dry details of some harassing social question. The reality reads like romance; the romance lives like reality."

Thus It is Never too late to Mend is based upon disclosures of the cruelties which disgraced the administration of the prison-system. The gaol described by Reade was at Winson Green, Birmingham, and Warder Brown is a portrait of Warder Evans. Francis Eden, the courageous and sympathetic chaplain, equally no doubt had an original. From English prisons Reade's story moves off to the gold-fields lately (1851) discovered at Ballarat in Victoria. No more vivid description of the wild confusion that followed the frenzied rush alike of "emancipists" (ex-convicts) and free settlers was ever penned. There is poetry and pathos, too, even in a novel dealing primarily with prisons and convicts. Witness the scene of the gold-diggers at Ballarat gathering round one Sunday morning to listen to the skylark: "These shaggy men, full of oaths, strife, and cupidity had once been white-headed boys and strolled about the English fields with little sisters and little brothers, and seen the lark rise and heard him sing this very song.… And so for a moment or two years of vice rolled away like a dark cloud from the memory and the past shone out in the song-shine; they came back, bright as the immortal notes that lighted them, those faded pictures, and those fleeted days; the cottage, the old mother's tears … the village church and its simple chimes; … the chubby playmates that never grew to be wicked, the sweet hours of youth—and innocence—and home."

Hard Cash turns upon the iniquities of private lunatic asylums and of the doctors who by their venality and gullibility played into the hands of those who found those institutions a convenient means of gratifying spite or greed. Alfred Hardie, the hero of Hard Cash, a young man of refinement and culture "with an indefinable air of Eton and Oxford about him", the victim of an unnatural father, finds a staunch ally in Dr. Sampson against the conspiracy against his liberty, supported by "the most venal class (in Reade's judgment) upon earth". A subsidiary interest in Hard Cash is the panic that resulted from the bursting of the Bubble induced by the wild speculation in railway shares. Up to 1844 the annual expenditure on railways had not exceeded £5,000,000. During the next three years it was £185,000,000. Sir Robert Peel was greatly concerned for the financial stability of the country, and in November, 1845, The Times (apparently at his instance) sounded a note of alarm at the revelation that the railways, completed, under construction, and projected, were seeking to raise no less than £700,000,000. Hard Cash (1863) illustrates the results of the gigantic gamble. And who, but for Charles Reade, would to-day recall it, or take warning by that disastrous incident?

Charles Dickens is, in the present connexion, more difficult to "place" than Charles Reade. His one indisputably historical novel commands the admiration of many readers to whom the rest of his novels make but slight appeal. But the deeply moving Tale of Two Cities is outside the scope of this survey. Barnaby Rudge contains a vivid account of that curious and almost isolated outburst of Protestant fanaticism known as the Lord George Gordon riots. Sir George Savile's Bill for the removal of certain penalties imposed on Roman Catholics had received the assent of Parliament in 1775. Scotland had successfully opposed its application to the Northern Kingdom. Protestant zealots in London hoped by violence to secure its repeal in England. For nearly a week, 2nd-7th June, 1780, London was in the hands of the mob. An attack was made on Lord North's official residence in Downing Street; Catholic chapels were burnt down; prisons were broken open; the Bank of England was threatened. Only the courage and firmness of King George III saved the situation. "There shall be at least one magistrate in the kingdom," he declared, "who will do his duty." By his orders the military acted with effect. Nearly three hundred lives were lost and the hospitals were filled with the wounded; but despite the lamentable weakness of the Government and the magistracy, London was saved from wholesale incendiarism. Gordon himself became a Jew and ultimately died insane in Newgate.

But for Barnaby Rudge this disgraceful episode would, for the public at large, have passed into oblivion. In other novels Dickens was concerned less with history than with the amendment of contemporary abuses. American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) reflect his bitter disappointment with the "Great Republic". "We must be cracked up," says Hannibal Chollop, speaking of his fellow countrymen in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens failed to come up to expectations. The American Notes he dedicated "to those friends in America who giving me a welcome which I must ever gratefully and proudly remember left my judgment free". His judgment might be left free, but the expression of his views on international copyright, on American slavery, and above all on the experiences of Martin Chuzzlewit, the younger, and Mark Tapley in New York and in "the thriving City of Eden" (Chapters XVI and XXI) gave bitter offence. Perhaps Dickens kept too constantly in mind the advice given by old Weller to Sam when he proposed to get a "pianner" to carry Mr. Pickwick out of the Fleet prison: "There ain't no vurks in it (whispered his father). It'ull hold him easy vith his hat and shoes on, and breathe through the legs vich his holler. Have a passage ready taken for 'Merriker. The 'Merrikin Government will never give him up ven once they find as he's got money to spend, Sammy. Let the guv'nor stop there till Mrs. Bardell's dead, or Mr. Dodson and Fogg hung … then let him come back and write a book about the 'Merrikins, as'll pay all his expenses and more if he blows 'em up enough." Dickens certainly "blew 'em up enough" in 1842-44, and deeply they resented it. But it is pleasant to recall that when he returned to lecture there in the winter of 1867-8, he had a magnificent reception and came home with £19,000 in his pocket.

To come nearer home. Oliver Twist (1838), was written with the express purpose of exposing the cruelties practised on a workhouse child as punishment for "the impious and profane offence of asking for more", and the still greater cruelties inflicted on the child who fell into a den of thieves. More definitely it was Dickens's object to provide an antidote to Gay's Macheath and Lytton's Paul Clifford. He deemed it a social duty to "draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity … in all the squalid misery of their lives … with the great black ghastly gallows closing up the prospect". That duty he effectively discharged in Oliver Twist. In Nicholas Nickleby (1839), the tyranny of the ignorant proprietor of a private academy was the object of his denunciation. Bleak House (1853) was written to show how the law's delays in such a suit as "Jarndyce versus Jarndyce"—a "monument of Chancery practice"—inflicted "monstrous wrong" upon long suffering litigants. Dickens had been assured by an eminent Chancery Judge that the Court "despite a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress" was, in the administration of justice "almost immaculate". Armed with the facts of a case, still undecided (in August, 1853), after twenty years of litigation, involving £70,000 in costs, Dickens resolved by Bleak House to disturb the complacency of the distinguished lawyer. Hard Times (1854) popularized Carlyle's impeachment of the economics of the "Manchester School". Mr. Bounderby is an unlovely figure, and Thomas Gradgrind the pedagogue is not much better. "A man of realities, a man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over." The picture is a caricature, but as there is no smoke without fire, so caricature would lose its appeal if not based upon a substratum of truth.

Little Dorrit (1855-7) has historically a twofold interest: the administrative muddle which inflicted such suffering upon British soldiers in the trenches before Sebastopol led to Dickens's castigation of the "Circumlocution Office"; his own personal experiences are recalled in those of William Dorrit, the "Father of the Marshalsea" and his brother Frederick. Dickens's savage portrayal of the unreformed Civil Service may be compared with the not dissimilar pictures in Trollope's Autobiography and in his The Three Clerks (1857). Mr. Sadleir has described Trollope's as "an inexpert picture of a vanished age". The age had not vanished in 1855-7 when Dickens was writing Little Dorrit. Reform began, indeed, in 1855: it had not come when, in 1853, Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan reported that "admission to the Civil Service was, indeed, eagerly sought after, but it was for the incompetent, indolent or incapable that it was chiefly desired". Patronage was evidently the root of the evil: their report virtually got rid of it, though it was not until 1870 that the competitive test was definitely imposed. That Dickens and Trollope contributed substantially to the reform of a gross abuse is indisputable. David Copperfield also proved how deeply Dickens felt for the debtor's unhappy lot. In Mr. Micawber he drew a portrait of his own father, who was committed to the Marshalsea, and in the very words of Mr. Micawber warned his son "to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence he would be happy, but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched". Mr Dickens senior may well have derived consolation as did Mr. Dorrit, from the reflection that an imprisoned debtor knew "the worst of it". "We have got to the bottom, we can't fall, and what have we found? Peace. That's the word for it.…" "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here; there's no knocker here to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at home and to say he'll stand on the doorstep till he is.… It's freedom, sir, it's freedom." "Freedom" it was in all cases, and in the case of wealthy debtors who refused to pay imprisonment involved little if any discomfort. But with the majority it was otherwise, and the picture of Little Dorrit, the complacent debtor's devoted daughter, is evidently drawn from life. Nor did Dickens ever draw a more pathetic figure. But by the time Little Dorrit was published the Marshalsea had disappeared. An Act of 1844, though not entirely abolishing imprisonment for debt remedied all the worst abuses connected with the old system.

In Dickens, then, we have one of the best examples of the novelist who throws light upon some special incident or some particular feature of past days that deserves to be borne in mind, even though not of the first historical importance. "Works of fiction indirectly are great instructors of this world; and we can hardly exaggerate the debt which we owe to a Charles Dickens." So said Benjamin Jowett, preaching the funeral sermon on Dickens in Westminster Abbey.

The debt which the historian owes to George Eliot is of a totally different order. She was not a social reformer but a psychologist. Her one strictly historical novel was one of her less successful efforts. Anyway, Romola, dealing with Florentine history, does not concern us. The Scenes of Clerical Life, on the contrary, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede no historian of the nineteenth century can ignore.

Though all George Eliot's novels were written during the last twenty years of her life, all that was best in them was supplied by recollections of the days when, after her mother's death, the charge of her father's household and the farm devolved upon her. Nevertheless her novels clearly bear the impress of the circumstances of her later life. Again and again as we read of the lives of the squires, the parsons and the farmers, of the doctors and the tradesmen of rural England and provincial towns, we are sharply reminded that the novels were written by a woman who had left all that early life behind her, who had become a brilliant star in a firmament of intellectuals, who had translated Strauss's Leben Jesu, had helped to edit the Westminster Review, and shared the home of George Henry Lewes.

Born at Arbury Farm, Chilvers Coton, near Warwick, in 1819, Marian Evans was (as some one has said) "saturated with the racy sap of the English Midlands". Her father, Robert Evans, was the son of a carpenter and builder and he himself started life in the same business but rose to be land agent to Sir Roger Newdigate in Warwickshire. Entirely trusted by his employers, greatly respected and liked by their tenants, Robert Evans was the original of Caleb Garth and supplied traits—all of them wholly admirable—to the characters of Adam Bede and Mr. Hackit. Of Mrs. Evans there are traces in the Dodson family, in Mrs. Hackit and above all in Mrs. Poyser. She was a woman of clock-work regularity—all her farm work was done by 9 O'clock, and of any irregularity—even in the natural world—she was wholly intolerant. "She brought out her furs on the first of November, whatever might be the temperature. If the season didn't know what it ought to do, Mrs. Hackit did." Marian's earliest views on religion were largely derived from an aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans, who was the prototype of Dinah Morris, and told her niece the story which supplied the germ of Adam Bede. Though country bred, devoted to the work of the farm, and especially skilled (as we should guess from the picture of Mrs. Poyser's dairy) in butter-making, Marian had all the instincts of a scholar. When she was about one-and-twenty she became intimate with a family (the Brays of Coventry) who held strong secularist views, and it was in this alien atmosphere that George Eliot first inbibed doubts (deepened by her task of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu) concerning her early evangelicalism. The period of blank agnosticism was, however, transient. Thus, in 1862, she writes to a friend: "Please don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought that my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have negative propaganda in me." Most vigorously she protested against what she well described as the "quackery of infidelity", and insisted on the contrary that "the great thing is reverence, reverence for the hard won inheritance of the ages".

Thus as an historical authority George Eliot holds a two-fold position. Herself "the authentic voice of Darwinism", her novels, though descriptive of country life in the 'thirties, re-echoed the scientific spirit and the intellectual unsettlement of a generation that was profoundly influenced by the teaching of the biologists. That the later work of George Eliot was overweighted by her philosophy is undeniable, yet R. H. Hutton was surely right when he said: "What is remarkable in George Eliot is the striking combination in her of very deep speculative power with a very great and realistic imagination. It is rare to find an intellect skilled in the analysis of the deepest psychological problems so completely at home in the conception and delineation of real characters."

The explanation is that the characters were real and the scenes in which they played their part were those familiar to George Eliot from childhood. "Shepperton" was Chilvers Coton and the curate, the Rev. John Gwyther, was the original of the Rev. Amos Barton, who served three churches and maintained a wife and six children on a stipend of £80 a year. Cheverel Manor is Arbury Hall and its owner, Sir Christopher Cheverel, is a portrait of Sir Roger Newdigate, some of whose traits reappear in Sir James Chetham of Middlemarch, if not in Mr. Brookes, the kindly but fatuous uncle of Dorothea—Mr. Casaubon's unhappy wife. In the long gallery of George Eliot's parsons, Mr. Casaubon, the self-centred scholar squarson stands apart; but Mr. Cadwallader, the lovable devotee of trout-fishing, has much in common with the Rev. Augustus Debarry, the sporting Rector of Treby Magna, something less with his colleague, Mr. Farebrother (the most admirable of all George Eliot's parsons) and hardly more with Parson Irwine in Adam Bede. Old Mr. Crewe, the Curate of Milby who in a "brown Brutus wig delivered inaudible sermons on a Sunday, and on a week day imparted the education of a gentleman … to three pupils in the upper Grammar School" is sharply contrasted with Mr. Tryan, the zealous evangelical who brought comfort to poor Janet Dempster. All these different types are brought together at the Milby clerical meeting, and each is as perfectly discriminated from the others as are Jane Austen's parsons. George Eliot's specific contribution to the religious history of the nineteenth century is, however, her appreciation of the beauty and power of the Evangelical movement, within and without the Established Church. Of course she perceived and exposed its failings. But the woman who could compose Dinah Morris's sermon in Adam Bede, who could pray as Rufus Lyon prays in Felix Holt, who could minister comfort to the stricken soul of Silas Mamer as did Dolly Winthrop, with her simple creed of faith and love—that woman, sceptic though she believed herself to be, was not far from the Kingdom of God.

Of George Eliot's novels the one most definitely permeated by politics is Felix Holt the Radical. It gives a vivid account of an election contest under the old system of open voting and a long drawn out poll, and, all through, the private lives of the persons of the drama are inextricably mixed up with, and largely determined by, the public events attending on the Reform battle of 1830—32.

The Reform Bill also plays a considerable part in Middlemarch. Nevertheless, the real historical value of George Eliot's novels consists less in such incidents, and much more in her faithful picture of the rural and provincial life of England a century ago.

George Eliot enjoyed, of course, no monopoly. Interested readers may seek additional information from M. Betham Edwards's The Lord of the Harvest, A Suffolk Courtship, A Humble Lover and Mock Beggars Hall, which specially illustrate rural conditions in East Anglia. They must not ignore Lytton's The Caxtons, My Novel and Kenelm Chillingly, nor some of Henry Kingsley's works; least of all can anyone afford to neglect the works of Anthony Trollope. Trollope's prolific pen ranged from England to Australia, from St. Martin's le Grand to Barchester, but it is on his delineation of "county" and Cathedral society in midVictorian days that his title to be a genuine historical authority will rest. For widely as Trollope ranged his social outlook was narrow.

Except so far as he came across them in the hunting field he knew little of any class below that of the squires and the parsons—except, indeed, in Ireland where for nearly twenty years he went in and out among all classes: peasants and farmers, peers and squireens, priests, gombeen men and the rest. His Irish novels are in fact political pamphlets in the guise of fiction. In Can you Forgive Her? Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children, the Background is parliamentary, and some of the characters are recognizable. Daubeny, the Tory leader, was on Trollope's admission Disraeli, whom he detested as a man, a politician, and a novelist. Turnbull was John Bright, Phineas Finn was in part Joe Parkinson, an English journalist who married a millionaire's daughter, and in part John Pope Hennessy, a young Irish politician who was taken up by Disraeli.

If, however, the wider definition of "Historical" be accepted, these political novels are perhaps less historical than the Chronicles of Barsetshire and many others.

Barchester has taken so strong a hold on popular imagination that Trollope's work has come to be identified with the Anglican Establishment, with Bishop (and Mrs.) Proudie, with Archdeacon Grantley, his imposing presence and hot temper; with Mr. Harding, the gentle, humble-minded warden of Hiram's Hospital; with Mr. Roberts, the weak but well-meaning parson of Framley; with poor Mr. Crawley of Hogglestock, driven to desperation by poverty; with Mr. Ovid, the saintly and scholarly Tractarian, and the rest of the cloth. Rightly so. But if Trollope is preeminently the chronicler of the Church, as by law established and comfortably if unevenly endowed, it is the Church as an integral part of a coherent social system that he is concerned with.

His theme is rural England centred on the cathedral city which is also the county town. Trollope has been happily described as "the supreme novelist of acquiescence". If that means that he carefully analysed, shrewdly observed, and accurately described, but studiously refrained from passing judgment, it is true. Trollope is never, like George Eliot or Thackeray, didactic. He sums up the evidence with impartiality: the verdict he leaves to the reader.

Some of the novels such as He Knew He was Right (1869), and The Way We Live Now (1875) may perhaps be cited as exceptions: but if more censorious than the earlier novels, they are not less truly historical. The last-named may, indeed, be said to mark the beginning of the transition from the England of Trollope to the England of Galsworthy, from squirearchy to plutocracy, from dignified comfort to pushful restlessness. But The Forsyte Saga has a further significance. As the domestic counterpart of the Imperialist revival, it illustrates the last period of the Victorian era.