Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

To Meredith the exasperating thing about polite society was its impoliteness,—its delight in gossip and scandal, its petty but venomous persecutions, and the false courtesy that takes refuge in conventionality. This impression apparently deepened with time, for it is glimpsed only in Evan Harrington and Sandra Belloni, of the earlier books, but is entirely absent from none of the last half dozen.

Butler, preoccupied with other subjects, takes time for only one good shot at this, but that one is so good that it forms a fitting climax. He mentions casually an Erewhonian custom, which may be taken as symbolic of that country’s social behavior and philosophy:[287]

“When any one dies, the friends of the family * * * send little boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to the degree of intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number which they ought to send. Strange as it may appear, this attention is highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are now no longer worn.”

Whether the last clause may be viewed as a hopeful augury for the future, the author does not state.

The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of some scope. It is evident that the Victorians enjoyed these excursions into the masculine domain of Government, for not one of the list forbade his mind to roam into its boundaries, and not one is wholly silent as to the impressions gained by this adventuring. Here the resemblance ends. Interest in public problems and The People varies from a minimum in Thackeray and George Eliot to a maximum in Peacock, Disraeli, and Butler. There is also great diversity in both breadth and intensity. Lytton, Dickens, Trollope, have several irons in the fire. Gaskell, Brontë, Reade, Kingsley, have but one or two, but the heat is none the less fervent. In some cases, indeed, it is too fervent to give off the sparkle of ridicule, and thus falls without our province. And in some cases, while it is meant seriously as propaganda, it cannot be taken seriously as literature; for the artist is not expected to speak with the tongue of statesmen and economists, and conversely, as Dowden reminds us, “a political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of art.”[288]

Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic antiquity:[289]

“Political science they had none. * * * Still they went to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something or other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people to fight for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech, when it was, like Hamlet’s reading, ‘words, words, words.’”

In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its parody of Lord Canning’s Defense of the British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith’s, whom he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[290]

“We shall make out a very good case; but you must not forget to call the present public distress an awful dispensation; a little pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts of men from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking into moral and political causes for moral and political effects.”

It is in Melincourt also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election camps,—later pushed along by the authors of Pelham, The Newcomes, Doctor Thome, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Beauchamp’s Career.