Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

[146] Barchester Towers, 472–3.

[147] Last Chronicles of Barset.

[148] Book II, Chapter I.

[149] Vol. I, 78–9.

[150] Lytton’s Kenelm Chillingly, 1873, and Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career, 1876.

[151] Lytton’s Kenelm Chillingly, 38.

[152] Ibid., 39. An echo from The Coming Race, published two years earlier.

[153] Ibid., 40.

[154] Ibid., 90. Later he imagines a hypothetical contribution to The Londoner, bringing “that highly intellectual journal into discredit by a feeble attempt at a good-natured criticism or a generous sentiment.” 161.

Kenelm grows into some likeness to his old tutor Welby, an unpedantic, versatile scholar, who belonged to “the school of Eclectical Christology.” The Rev. John Chillingly, for instance, did not perceive Welby’s realism, for the latter listened to idealistic eulogies without contradicting them; having “grown too indolent to be combative in conversation, and only as a critic betrayed such pugnacity as remained to him by the polished cruelty of sarcasm.” 34.