"The Unexplored. By Caspar Brooke. Price One Shilling. Tenth Edition."
She took the book in her hand and gazed at it curiously. This was the "wonderful book" of which Maurice Kenyon had spoken. This little shilling pamphlet—really it was little more than a pamphlet! It seemed an extraordinary thing to her that her father should write shilling books. "A shilling shocker" was a name that Lesley happened to know, and a thing that she heartily despised. Her taste had been formed on the best models, and Lady Alice had encouraged her in a critical disparagement of cheap literature. Still—if Caspar Brooke had written it, and Maurice Kenyon had recommended it, Lesley felt, with flushing cheek and suspicious eyes, that it was a thing which she ought to read.
Holding it gingerly, as if it were a dangerous combustible which might explode at any moment, she hurried away with it to her own room, turned the key in the lock, and sat down to read.
At the risk of fatiguing my readers, I must say a word or two about Caspar Brooke's romance "The Unexplored." It had obtained a wonderful popularity in all English-speaking countries, and was well known in every quarter of the globe. Even Lady Alice must have seen it advertised and reviewed and quoted a hundred times. Possibly she had refused to read it, or closed her eyes to its merits. Possibly what a man wrote seemed to her of little importance compared to that which a man showed himself in his daily life. At any rate, she had never mentioned the book to her daughter Lesley. She certainly moved in a circle which was slightly deaf to the echoes of literary fame.
"The Unexplored" was one of those powerful romances of an ideal society with which recent days have made us all familiar. But Caspar's book was the forerunner of the shoal which the last ten years have cast upon our shores. He was one of the first to follow in the steps of Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, and picture life as it should be rather than as it is. His hero, an Englishman of our own time, puzzled and distressed at the social misery and discord surrounding him, leaves England and joins an exploring expedition. In the unexplored recesses of the new world he comes across a colony founded in ancient days by a people who have preserved an idyllic purity of heart and manners, together with a fuller artistic life and truer civilization than our own. To these people he brings his stories of London as it is to-day, and fills their gentle hearts with amazement and dismay. A slender thread of love-making gives the book its romantic charm. He gains the affections of the king's daughter, a beautiful maiden, who has been attracted to him from the very first; and with her he hopes to realize all that has been unknown to him of noble life in his own country. But the book does not end with its hero and heroine lapped in slothful content. For the heart of the maiden burns with sorrow for the toiling poor of the great European cities of which he has told her: to her this region has also the charm of "The Unexplored," and the book ends with a hint that she and her husband are about to wend their way, with a new gospel in their hand, to the very city of which he had shaken the dust from his shoes in disgust before he found an unexplored Arcadia.
There was not much novelty in the plot—the charm of the book lay in the way the story was told, in the beauty of the language; and also—last but not least—the burning earnestness of the author's tone as he contrasted the hopeless, heartless misery of the poor in our great cities with the ideal life of man. His pictures of London life, drawn from the street, the hospital, the workhouse, were touched in with merciless fidelity: his satire on the modern benevolence and modern civilization which allows such evils to flourish side by side with lecture-rooms, churches, intellectual culture, and refined luxury was keen and scathing. It was a book which had startled people, but had also brought many new truths to their minds. And although no one could be more startled, yet no one could be more avid for the truth than the author's own daughter, of whom he had never thought in the very least when he wrote the book.
Lesley rose from her perusal of it with burning cheeks and humid eyes. She herself, without knowing it, was in much the same position as the heroine of her father's book. Like the girl Ione, in "The Unexplored," she had lived in a charmed seclusion, far from the roar of modern civilization, far from the great cities which are the abomination of desolation in our time. Knowledge had come to her filtered through the minds of those who closed their eyes to evil and their ears to tales of sin. She did not know how the poor lived: she had only the vaguest and haziest possible notions concerning misery and want and disease. She was not only pure and innocent, but she was ignorant. She had scarcely ever seen a newspaper. She had read very few novels. She had lived almost all her life with women, and she had imbibed the notion that her marriage was a matter which her mother would arrange without particularly consulting her (Lesley's) inclinations.
To a girl brought up in this way there was much to shock and repel in Caspar Brooke's romance. More than once, indeed, she put it down indignantly: more than once she cried out, in the silence of her room, "Oh, but it can't be true!" Nevertheless, she knew in her heart of hearts that the strong and burning words which she was reading could not have been written were they not sincerely felt. And as for facts, she could easily put them to the test. She could ask other people to tell her whether they were true. Were there really so many criminals in London; so many people "without visible means of subsistence?" so many children going out in a morning to their Board Schools without breakfast? But surely something ought to be done! How could people sit down and allow these things to be? How could her father himself, who wrote about such things, live in comfort, even (compared with the wretchedly poor) in modest luxury, without lifting a finger to help them?
But there Lesley caught herself up. What had Mr. Kenyon said? Had he not spoken of the things that Caspar Brooke had done? For almost the first time Lesley began to wonder what made her father so busy. She had never heard a word concerning the pursuits that Mr. Kenyon had mentioned as so engrossing. "The splendid work at Macclesfield Buildings:" what was that? The people whom he had helped: what people? Whom could she ask? Not her father himself—that was out of the question. He never spoke to her except on trivial subjects. She remembered with a sudden and painful flash of insight, that conversations between him and his sister were sometimes broken off when she came into the room, or carried on in half-phrases and under-tones. Of course she had heard of Macclesfield Buildings; and of a club and an institute and a hospital, and what not; but the words had gone over her head, being destitute of meaning and of interest for her. She had been blind and deaf, it seemed to her now, ever since she came into the house; but Maurice Kenyon and her father's book had opened her eyes to the reality of things.
Later on in the day her maid came to help her to dress for dinner. Lesley looked at her with new interest. For was she not one of the great, poor, struggling mass of human beings whom her father called "the People?" Not the happy peasant-class, as depicted in sentimental storybooks: whether that existed or not, Lesley was not learned enough to say: it certainly did not exist in London. She looked at the woman who waited on her with keenly observant eyes. Her name was Mary Kingston, and Lesley knew that she was not one of the prosperous, self-satisfied, over-dressed type, so common amongst ladies' maids; for she had been "out of a situation" for some time, and had fallen into dire straits of poverty. It would not have been like Miss Brooke to hire a common-place, conventional ladies' maid; she really preferred a servant "with a history." Lesley remembered that she had heard of Mary Kingston's past difficulties without noting them.