Books Without Heroes

Books read this week: The British Revolution 7/10 (Robert Rhodes James), Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles 5/10 (Kim Newman), David Copperfield 6/10 (Charles Dickens)

Something of a miscellany of books this week, united only by their almost total lack of heroism. The British Revolution is a history of British politics covering the period 1880-1939. As something of a politics junkie myself, I found it fascinating, entertaining and terrifying in turn. It cover a tumultuous period; world wars and economic crises, the suicide of the Liberal party and the birth of the Labour party, the introduction of old age pensions, universal suffrage (a death blow to the Liberal party) and unemployment benefit. But it was also a period of intensely personal politics; a period when a personal antipathy between Joseph Chamberlain and Gladstone could shake the entire nation and destroy political parties, and also a period when the ability to  perform in the House of Commons was the skill and up and coming politician had to develop; something that changed during the period the books covers, as electorates became larger, and the mass media developed, but never entirely went away. It is the personal nature of the politics here that gives rise to most of the humour;    that and the leisurely lifestyle of the upper classes, which gave plenty of time for the refinement of barbed wit, and the construction of bon mots; a particular high point is Kitchener's observation that "All of my cabinet colleagues discuss military secrets with their wives - except X, who discusses them with other people's wives."

It has to be said that Rhodes is more charitable to Asquith, Baldwin and MacDonald that I would be; Baldwin's admission in the House of Commons that he had lied to the electorate about his policies because otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him is particularly damning, and of course Ramsay Mac occupies a place in the popular conscience of the Labour party somewhere between Judas Iscariot and Nick Clegg.

I said the book is terrifying, and it is, mainly because it all feels so familiar; we have misbehaving press barons, and economic stupidity on a grand scale (Churchill's return to the gold standard was a massive low point in what was a very chequered career), collusion between the Liberal and Conservative parties to lock the nascent Labour party out of power, by fair means or foul (Lloyd George even proposed the Alternative Vote as a means to that end), coalitions and mass unemployment. The book was written in the late 70s, and is absolutely damning about the prevailing wisdom in the 20s and 30s that it was possible to cut your way back to prosperity (whoever would think that now?) and about the ability of the upper classes to ignore mass unemployment. But the main failure we see in the book is one of political leadership: there was a long succession of governments very happy to blunder carelessly from disaster to disaster, enthusiasm undimmed, with no plan and no strategy, except a (misplaced) confidence that if they waited long enough eventually "something would turn up". This is really what scares me: not the prospect of long term mass unemployment (although that is a terrifying, soul-destroying thing) but of the extremism that it gives rise to. This is a dance we have been through before and we know how it ended last time - and yet no one seems to want to stop it.

My second book, Moriarty has no heroes but plenty of villains: it's an anthology by Kim Newman (of Anno Dracula fame) of stories about Dr Moriarty and Col. Moran - it includes "The Adventure of the Six Maledictions" which was the stand out story in Gaslight Arcanum which I read last week; unfortunately this is by far the best story in the book, although the rest does have it's moments. However I found the book's tendency to put in footnotes explaining or pointing out allusions to other works of Victorian fiction, and to minor aspects of 19th Century history quite grating: if I can't spot the allusion without a hint I don't really to spot it - the story should be enjoyable without needing a knowledge of esoteric Victoriana (not that I don't have a knowledge of esoterica Victoriana, but it really shouldn't be necessary) and the constant footnotes distract from the flow of the story: Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does this much better (or did, at any rate, before it turned into pornography: impeccably referenced, period appropriate pornography, but pornography nonetheless).

And rounding off a Victorian-heavy entry, my final book this week was Dickens' David Copperfield. I have read relatively few of these gigantic mid-nineteenth century doorstoppers; the books where the author was paid by the work, and which were published in serial form. The only other ones I've read are Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo - both of which are on my list of best books of all time. Other than that, I tend to read older novels (Austen, Laclos and Scott) or newer ones, so this was something of a departure for me. I found David Copperfield interesting, and I'm certainly going to read more Dickens now I've started, but it didn't really compare to the Count of Monte Cristo or Vanity Fair for me. I read Orwell's stupendous essay on Dickens a long time ago, and having finished David Copperfield now I'm strongly inclined to agree with him: Dickens writes phenomenal, memorable caricatures. This is a great strength: Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep and Mr Murdstone will stay with me (although in the case of Mr Murdstone this is mainly because he could almost be the ur-example of a domestic abuser: all the signs they tell people to look out for are there) but also a weakness: caricatures don't develop, and they don't mature: they turn up, speak their catch phrases, and then retire. So although I'll remember them, the characters don't feel rounded enough that I care deeply about what happens to them; you can contrast this with Vanity Fair, which, when I read it for the first time, I stopped reading for two weeks when half way through because I didn't want bad things to happen to Dobbin and Becky Sharp. In fact, once past the part of the book on David Copperfield's early life, the only passage that moved me was when Uriah Heep tells David that for generations his family have been sent to schools where they teach them nothing except to by "umble". But I think the main thing that I found strange about the book is that David Copperfield never really seems to do very much - certainly he does almost nothing to move the plot forward. He is an observer; brought in to witness other people's actions and reactions. Obviously, when he's a child this is understandable, but when he grows up I kept waiting for him to actually do something, and he never did: of course, that statement probably ultimately applies to most of us, but I typically hold the protagonists of novels to a higher standard of being interesting. Indeed, I was reflecting on how the characters of Vanity Fair and The Count of Monte Cristo would deal with a man like Mr Murdstone: Becky Sharp would leave his reputation in tatters and his bank account empty, whilst if he dealt with Edmond Dantes, he would be lucky just to end up penniless and insane, his life's work in ruins (and I don't mean an entertainingly eccentric urge to write memorials on Charles I, but rather the screaming, raving strait-jacket wearing insanity that lands you deep in the Bedlam). Certainly neither of them would be content to let him live unmolested with a new family.

Of course, what David Copperfield shares with Vanity Fair is estwhile heroines who are stulifyingly boring (although Agnes shows a little more spark than Amelia Sedley, which is remarkably wet); it is, I think a very strange commentary on Victorian social mores that being as dull as ditch water was seen as something to aspire to: Jane Austen and Walter Scott's heroines, by contrast, have far more fire in the belly (although Rowena in Ivanhoe has something a little drippy about her, of course Rebecca is the real heroine of that book). The introduction assures me that Dickens' approach to "fallen women" was, for the time, extremely progressive, but his attitude toward Little Em'ly does not compare well with Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp (either in terms of modern ethics or sensible character development).

The only other thing I have to note is the strange belief Dickens expresses at the end of the book that the "separate system" in Pentonville where Uriah Heep and was somehow more humane than the unsanitary Georgian prisons that it replaced (the type of prison where you could pay the gaoler for food and rooms - the kind of prison you see in Hogarth prints); of course, the reason why the separate system was scrapped soon after it was introduced wasn't because it was too kind - it was because the sensory deprivation drove a sizable proportion of the prisoners mad.