Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

If we measured our laughter by the real feelings of its object instead of our conception of the frivolity or sacredness of those feelings, we should undoubtedly find it much diminished. We could not enjoy the predicament of Sir Willoughby or Sir John Falstaff or Malvolio or any of the notable company of the Mighty Fallen. Whereas we do enjoy them with unrestrained relish on the supposition that their fall is not that of a Cæsar or a Napoleon. Yet these also were egoists, and those would fain have been conquering heroes. Meredith testifies to this in his preliminary analysis:[142]

“The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person.”

In addition to these instances where the continual and final absurdity of the situation is made the motif of the novel, there are several cases of minor episodes, quite as suggestive though on a smaller scale.

Dickens is, as might be supposed, the most fertile in these scenes of comic retribution. Aside from Pecksniff and Uriah Heep, he is most successful with the Lammles, Mr. Dorrit, and Silas Wegg.

The Veneering Dinner, which introduces Our Mutual Friend, is only an understudy to the Veneering Breakfast, which celebrates the marriage of two of the Veneerings’ oldest friends.

“But, there is another time to come, and it comes in about a fortnight, and it comes to Mr. and Mrs. Lammle on the sands at Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lammle have walked for some time on the Shanklin sands, and one may see by their foot-prints that they have not walked arm-in-arm, and that they have not walked in a straight track, and that they have walked in a moody humour; for, the lady has prodded little spirting holes in the damp sand before her with her parasol, and the gentleman has trailed his stick after him. As if he were of the Mephistopheles family indeed, and had walked with a drooping tail.”[143]

It is not an angelic council that follows, though it has the virtues of candor, contrition, and a judicious conclusion, proposed by the Belial of the conference, to make the best of a bad bargain by forming a union of intrigue against the world in general and the diabolical Veneerings in particular. Thus mutual in greed, in gullibility, in consequent remorse, and in unholy alliance, this pair of frauds form the real mutuality of Dickens’ Vanity Fair.

Silas Wegg and William Dorrit stand at the two extremes, for one is farcical and the other tragic, yet they meet on a common ground, the comedy of exposure. The farcical villain may be dismissed with the comment that his dramatic exit, though richly done, bears some marks of the childishness and vulgarity that his author could not always avoid. The tragic comedian, on the other hand, stands before us in an unconscious self-betrayal no less impressive and startling in its way than that of the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth. Nowhere in English literature, indeed, is there a picture more awful in its simple inevitability than the eloquent speech addressed to the guests at Mrs. Merdle’s dinner table by the affable, patronizing Father of the Marshalsea.

Such ironic penalizings as these are satires of circumstances, sport which beguiles the ennuied Immortals. Immeasurably lower in the scale is the practical joke indulged in by mortals; yet in such deeds we may reckon Mistresses Ford and Page, Sir Toby and Maria, as human deputies acting for a requiting destiny. Perhaps our best example of this obvious but joyous kind of satire is one found in almost the first novel of almost the first name on our list, Lytton’s Pelham. It is the Parisian incident of the amorous M. Margot and the clever Mrs. Green, wherein the conceit and credulity of the former is played upon by the shrewd and merry malice of the latter, until he finds himself distressingly suspended in a basket from her lofty window late in a chilly night, to the great amusement of divers spectators previously invited there for that purpose.