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LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY

OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS

Edited by

William E.Cain

Professor of English

Wellesley College
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
 LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL
THEORY
WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor

EUGENIC FANTASIES
Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s
Betsy L.Nies

THE LIFE WRITINGS OF OTHERNESS

Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson
Lauren Rusk

FROM WITHIN THE FRAME

Storytelling in African-American Fiction
Bertram D. Ashe

THE SELF WIRED

Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative
Lisa Yaszek

THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM

The Little Magazine in New York
Adam McKible

THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton
Jill M.Kress

WORD OF MOUTH
Food and Fiction after Freud
Susanne Skubal

THE WASTE FIX

Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos
William G.Little

WlLL THE ClRCLE BE UNBROKEN?

Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker,
1830–1845
John L.Hare
 POETIC GESTURE
Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language
Kristine S.Santilli

BORDER MODERNISM
Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism
Christopher Schedler

THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM

The Economic few in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939
Gary Martin Levine

THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST

Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market
Bradley Deane

OUT OF TOUCH
Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker
Maureen F.Curtin

WRITING THE CITY

Urban Visions and Literary Modernism
Desmond Harding
 FIGURES OF FINANCE
CAPITALISM
Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens

Borislav Knezevic

Routledge
New York & London
 Published in 2003 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or
Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
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Copyright © 2003 by Taylor and FrancisBooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Portions of Chapter Two have previously appeared in the essay “An Ethnography
of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford.” Victorian Studies 41:3 (Spring 1998): 405–426. Copyright 1998 Indiana
University Press.
Portions of Chapter Four have previously appeared in the essays “A Study of
Aggression: A Tale of Two Cities.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 36–37
(1991–1992): 251–270; and “Dickens and Civil Society.” Studia Romanica et Anglica
Zagrabiensia 45–46 (2000–2001): 355–372.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knezevic, Borislav
Figures of finance capitalism : writing, class, and capital in the age of Dickens
/ Borislav Knezevic.
p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-415-94318-3
1. English fiction–19th century—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism and
literature—Great Britain–19th century. 3. Macaulay, Thomas Babington
Macaulay, Baron, 1800–1859–Views on capitalism. 4. Capitalists and financiers
in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Capitalism in literature.
7. Finance in literature. I. Title. II. Series
PR878.C25 K57 2003
823'.809355–dc21 2002014229
 ISBN 0-203-48513-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-60347-8 (Abobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-94318-3 (Print Edition)
For my father
 Contents

Preface xi

INTRODUCTION The Novel, the Class System, and Finance

Capital
CHAPTER ONE A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B. Macaulay, the 44
English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism
CHAPTER TWO Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth
70
Gaskell’s Cranford

CHAPTER THREE The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M. Thackeray’s The
91
Newcomes

CHAPTER FOUR Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little

119
Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities

Afterword 152
Notes 157
Works Cited 182
Index 187
 Preface

IN HIS HlSTORY OF ENGLAND, T.B.MACAULAY STATED THAT THE “FISCAL

revolution” unfolding in the 1690s was a crucial part of the settlement of the Glorious
Revolution. A statement like this could have reminded his contemporaries that the
industrial revolution, which they had the opportunity to witness, was not the first form of
capitalism in England. Few Victorian writers of any kind doubted that finance was
capitalism, and while most realized that finance capitalism was both different from and
necessary to industrial capitalism, quite a few were not sure whether finance was, in the
language of much middle-class moralizing about capitalism, “industrious” too, that is, an
acceptable and socially beneficial form of endeavor. Other middle-class writers were
worried about the class affiliation of finance capitalists, for were they not the most likely
candidates to seek co-optation into the patrician elite, that is, to emulate its lifestyle, try to
marry into it, and try to assume its social and constitutional privileges? But if finance
capitalism had been around for such a long time, why is it that all of a sudden in the mid-
Victorian period it becomes so ubiquitous in the novel? Even in those mid-Victorian
narratives in which there are no bankers, speculators, and financiers in the narrative
foreground, they populate the background so densely that the simple understanding of the
Victorian novel as social panorama cannot explain them away. On the other hand, was
the interest in finance capitalism merely topical—is the fact of frequent speculation
manias during the 1830s and the 1840s a sufficient context for the discussion of this
interest? What role did issues of class relations, especially between the middle classes
and the patrician elite and especially in the light of the persistence of the patrician elite
that held onto power despite industrial revolutions and political reforms, have to play in
this narrative interest? Did the fact of industrialization really reform English fiction
around mid-century solely and sweepingly? Did the novelistic fascination with finance
capital have anything to do with the fact that a mass market for middle-class literature
was now formed for the first time in history, and that middle-class writers writing for this
market were now in possession of quite a new stock of social authority, allowing them to
address what they considered as the fundamental problems of contemporary British
society?
It is questions like these that I was preoccupied with as I started to work on this
manuscript. As I was reading my primary texts, I realized that some of the received
wisdom routinely transmitted by Victorian criticism needs to be reviewed, especially the
commonly held idea that 19th-century Britain was socially and politically dominated by
the middle class, and that the “Victorian” age was all about some rigorously disciplining
emanations of middle-class ideologies and proprieties. The historiography coming out of
Britain in the last three decades or so, which I rely on to a substantial degree in the book,
took on the question of the class system in the 19th century from a fresh perspective.
P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, for instance, furnished my analysis with a conviction that
industrial capitalism was not the sole director of social change in the 19th century, but at
best one of the forces vying for influence. Their notion of gentlemanly capitalism implied
that the development of capitalism in England since the late 17th century unfolded under
a specific politicoinstitutional and global-economic context, in which a gentlemanly elite
functioned as a political and economic manager of this development. In other words,
Cain and Hopkins helped emphasize the way in which capitalism in Britain was a
specifically British capitalism.
In contrast to the commonplaces, familiar to readers of Victorian criticism, that the 19th
century saw the definitive rise of the middle class as well as the definitive triumph of a
modernizing industrial economy, this book seeks to rediscover the complexities of 19th-
century British capitalism and the fragilities of 19th-century constructions of the “middle
class,” and to find a way to read those complexities and those fragilities into the
economies and textures of 19th-century literature. In presenting my readings and
arguments, I draw on a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. I propose, for
instance, that the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu could be a very useful resource for
students of mid-Victorian literature and culture, especially in trying to examine relations
between economic capital and symbolic capital in the contemporary field of culture. The
bulk of the study is based, however, on an attempt to integrate into literary analysis the
insights and problematizations of recent historiographies of Britain, in which I insist less
on their partisan differences than on their conceptual similarities. While the chapters are
conceived as close readings of individual novels, in all the readings I try to keep in play
the three distinct thematic questions of representations of finance capitalism, the class
system, and the social authority of writers.
Many people have helped me in the process of writing this book. Ivo Vidan and Sonja
Bašić were the important readers of my first attempts in Victorian criticism. During the
writing of my dissertation, on which this book is based in part, I benefited greatly from
the support and supervision provided by the chair of my dissertation committee, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick. I would also like to thank Fredric Jameson, who inspired me with an
appreciation for thinking literature through history. My thanks also go to the other
members of my dissertation committee—Marianna Torgovnick, Thomas Pfau, and the
late Clyde Ryals, for their invaluable support and guidance, as well as to Jennifer Thorn,
who was a perceptive reader of the dissertation in its early stages. In composing this work
I profited greatly from the help of my friends and colleagues Loren Glass, who read
through many draft chapters of this work with patience and discernment, and George
Faraday, whose general intellectual good sense was always a good resource to consult. I
would also like to thank William E.Cain, the editor of the Literary Criticism and Cultural
Theory series, for the interest he showed in this manuscript and the suggestions for its
revision, and Damian Treffs, the Routledge editor, for guiding me through the process of
preparing this book for publication.
FIGURES OF FINANCE
CAPITALISM
 Introduction
The Novel, the Class System, and Finance Capital

The great, broad, true case that our public progress is far behind our
private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private
wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public
folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the existence of
the sun, moon, and stars.
(Dickens’s speech at the third meeting of the Administrative
Reform Association) 1

THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE ANALYSIS THAT FOLLOWS IS THE

PERCEPTION of an unevenness in British social development in the 1850s, a
discrepancy between the “public” world still very much of patrician dominance and the
“private” world of middle-class economic power. The sentiment expressed by Dickens in
support of civil service reform is informed by a characteristic Dickensian frustration with
the pace of change in the domain of political society, a frustration that similarly informs
much of his writing in the 1850s. The social world that Dickens knew and wrote about,
that of the metropolitan middle classes, was still politically underrepresented, as well as
socially subservient to patrician influence and interest. Another important thing that the
above quote illustrates is the sense of social authority of literature informing its context:
Dickens backed the Administrative Reform Association as a writer of great public
stature, someone whose social capital was made through literature alone, which in turn
speaks of a new level of social influence won by literature as a social practice.
This book deals with three interrelated themes that are profoundly inscribed in the
literature of the period. One has to do with the class make-up of British society at mid-
century. This was still very much a patrician-dominated society, and that was not merely
Dickens’s impression. The texts examined in this book can be viewed as attempts to scan
the social world of mid-Victorian Britain, and in particular the place of the middle class
in this heavily hierarchical society. Secondly, a defining moment of the period is to be
found in the restructuring of the field of culture that very much coalesced around the
literary practice of Charles Dickens. Professional novelists became not only providers of
relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and
representatives of that middle-class wisdom and success to which Dickens alluded in the
above speech. The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power in which
middle-class novelists tried to come to terms with the fact of patrician persistence in the
loci of political power, as well as with what to most of them was an even more annoying
fact of the continued power of patrician norms of social prestige. In very simplified but
necessarily crude terms, the mid-Victorian middle-class novelist had to contend with
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 4
middle-class snobbishness, tuft-hunting and toadyism—contemporary names for the
social obsequiousness of the middle class which effectively supported patrician
ideologies. Finally, this book brings into focus, in terms of the first two themes, the
contemporary cultural fascination with finance capitalism, for which there is a variety of
historical reasons. What is key to my purposes here is the uncertain class status of finance
capital itself: a crucial ingredient to Britain’s global commercial and imperial supremacy,
since its sudden emergence at the end of the 17th-century finance capital had interests that
most often coincided with those of the patrician governing elite, into which it was
occasionally absorbed. Over the next two centuries finance capital became a limit to the
imagination of middle-class identity, and the texts under scrutiny here can all be read as
more or less awkward attempts to come to terms with that limit.
Admittedly, this kind of concern with issues of class simplifies the Victorian social
world by not taking into account other class relations and dynamics, and primarily the
place of the working class in the social imagination of the middle-class mid-Victorian
writer. This is partly due to the fact that this relationship historically received much
valuable critical attention; the role of mid-Victorian industrial relations in cultural
imaginations was discussed with a great deal of insight and influence by Raymond
Williams and Catherine Gallagher among many others. On the other hand, I thought it
very necessary to show just how much the debates over middle-class identity in mid-
Victorian Britain included a concern with the fact of the persistently governing patrician
elite. And that concern is not merely about the relationship between the two social groups
(the middle classes and the landed class); it is also about the posi tion of the middle class
in a class system dominated as well as constructed by patrician criteria of distinction.
Indeed, that is why Mary Barton projects a fragmentary view of the condition of England
at the time, irrespective of the merits of its social vision that recorded a new class and
new class dynamics; for a complementary and in some senses more complete picture we
should look to Cranford.
The kind of analysis that follows in this book necessarily involves attempts to paint, in
necessarily broad strokes, a big picture of the Victorian world, or rather, two big pictures
superimposed on one another. One of these big pictures tries to frame the social and
political forces of Victorian society as a hierarchical society; the other takes stock of the
mid-Victorian literary field, and while the first is indebted to the work of a number of
recent historiographers that undertook a reexamination of the peculiar social, political and
economic histories of Britain, the second is indebted to the idea of literary sociology
contained in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The influence of historiographers such as
P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins and David Cannadine is yet to be felt more strongly in
contemporary Victorian criticism. In my view, their analyses of the unique character of
the historical British state and the unique character of the historical British class system
present strong challenges to the old narrative of the rise of the middle class. More than
just rendering the common critical parlance of the hegemony and domination of the
middle class in the 19th century highly problematic, these new histories point to a need
for rethinking the development of capitalism in 19th-century Britain (specifically the
questions of interactions between industrial and finance capitalism, and of different
cultures of management of capitalism), a task too complex to be entered upon here. At
the same time, using historiographers like Cannadine or Cain and Hopkins necessarily
 Introduction 5
makes obvious the need for rethinking the common textualist and/or culturalist bias in
criticism so as to come up with more historicist accounts of the interplay between text
and context, literature and society.
In an obvious way, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture is a form of historicism that sought
to understand the big picture of the relationship between the field of culture and the field
of power. While many of Bourdieu’s propositions about this relationship are certainly not
innovative and a good many appear too much bound to the French historical situations he
studied, Bourdieu pursued in unparalleled detail the view that culture is a space of
semiautonomy, and that textuality is not the only appearance of culture. The notion that
the field of culture is not comprehensively structured by power (political, economic, etc.),
but that it functions as a structuring structure itself reaffirms the kind of critical practice
that can establish connections between, for instance, the structure of the class system and
the habitus of certain kinds of art without losing sight of the ability of cultural producers
to set their own laws regarding artistic value and to participate in managing the
circulation of economic and symbolic capital in the field of culture.
As for finance capital, there are surprisingly few extensive studies of the way it is
figured in Victorian novels. The most focused study of this subject is Norman Russell’s
The Novelist and Mammon (1986); the book is a valuable source of information on
Victorian finance, and Russell did the important job of documenting just how much
Victorian novelists knew about the fine print of the world of finance, in which way he
was able to reconstruct important aspects of the topical background to specific novels.
Among more interesting forays in this field is Mary Poovey’s discussion of mid-
Victorian novelistic concern with the ethics of speculation (in a chapter on Dickens’s Our
Mutual Friend in Making a Social Body); her focus is on the way the banking practices in
the 1860s became the subject of a “moralizing analytic,” of which Dickens’s novel was a
part. 2 Poovey’s reading also gestures in the direction of studying the effects of
developments in British finance capitalism on the construction of subjectivity. One
significant way in which contemporary conceptions of subjectivity were affected was
through changes in legislation of finance, especially the introduction of the category of
limited liability into company law, which is the focus of Andrew H.Miller’s essay on
Cranford. 3 While my study will occasionally touch on the issues of ethics and
subjectivity, my aim is primarily to highlight the representation of finance capitalism in
novels by mid-Victorian celebrity novelists in conjunction with specific historical issues
of class system, and cultural and social authority—in the context of that Dickensian
perception of the British private success and public failure.

A PATRICIAN ASCENDANCY

The old historiographic wisdom that the middle class dominated the British 19th century,
riding the joint effects of industrialization and political reform, has been subject to a
thorough reexamination since the 1970s. The old orthodoxy, up to then shared by the two
most influential schools in historiography, Marxist and liberal, has been gradually
replaced by a wide consensus that the idea of the ever-rising middle class required at the
very least another look. A new society was born in the 19th century, so went the old
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 6
wisdom; that a version of the old society continued is the tenor of much of the new
historiography of Britain. The most vigorous and persuasive re-view of British history
has come from David Cannadine, who, not unimportantly, is a historian of the
aristocracy. In his studies of the British aristocracy and the British class system published
over the course of the 1990s, he offered a new interpretation of British history designed
to accommodate an explanation for the per sistence of a hierarchically-based culture of
class so proverbially associated with Britain. As my choice of phrase here already
suggests, Cannadine’s perspective was not entirely new. Among the more recent
historians, it was Arno Mayer’s The Persistence of the Old Regime that insisted on the
inadequacy of the old narrative of industrialization and the rise of the middle class in the
19th century, by arguing that European aristocratic elites clung to power well into the 20th
century. In Britain, at least since Tom Nairn in the 1970s, historians began to claim that
historical evidence does not authenticate the old narrative of the ever-rising middle class.
It would therefore be scarcely fair to credit Cannadine with a historiographic Copernican
revolution. What Cannadine did do is clearly understand that such a revolution has
already taken place, and that now an inventory has to be taken of its methodological and
ideological consequences, and principally, of the changing position of the notion of class
in historiographic discourse. Undaunted by the old ideological debates in British
historiography that were heavily suffused with the idea of reading history through highly
abstract notions of class, Cannadine understands his own work as an attempt to read the
various articulations of class positions and ideologies as yet another thing to be
historicized.
The most important casualty of the new historiographic perspective is the simple view
of the 19th century as a radical break with an older power system and a massive
reorganization into a new social order. Importantly enough, the question of novelty
versus continuation weighed heavily on the minds of Victorians themselves. One of the
central protagonists of my study, Charles Dickens, famously wanted to believe that
British society was changing, but he also often spoke and wrote in great frustration that it
was not, as the speech to the Administrative Reform Association in 1855 clearly
illustrates. Supremely irritated by the undiminished power of the patrician elite, Dickens
presented in Little Dorrit, published around the same time, his most direct renunciation of
British political society. The novel’s satire centered on the Circumlocution Office, a
thinly disguised allusion to the British civil service, staffed and controlled by the
patrician elite. Little Dorrit betrayed impatience not only with patrician bureaucracy, but
also with the inability of the middle classes to achieve a distinct identity in opposition to
patrician rule. The main political question in the Dickens’s novel is not a political
question of representation; it would take a very careful reader to demonstrate that the
extension of franchise, let alone the question of universal franchise, even appears as an
issue on the political horizon of this novel. What Dickens set out to do was to educate his
readership, which I am conventionally calling here middle-class, into a sentiment of
primarily civil self-respect and independence; and to wean them from patrician influence.
True enough, Dickens was in the main careful to speak of his audiences using the
sufficiently vague term of “people,” which evoked a sense of opposition to the elite, but
did not mean the population at large. Nevertheless, even beyond the vague and almost
feudal binarism of Dickens’s rhetoric (aristocracy/people), Little Dorrit makes the
 Introduction 7
language of class a problem as it attempts to grapple with a failure of middle-class
identity formation. And conversely, part of the appeal of Dickens’s novels lies in that
very undefined space of class formation, where fantasies of class mobility are as possible
as fantasies of new class identities. Such fantasies are offered as models of reform action
in civil society. As we shall later see.
How can one best describe that class system that irritated Dickens so much? According
to David Cannadine, when speaking of class Victorians utilized three models of social
description, the most pervasive being the model of hierarchy. The binary model and the
triadic model were used less often. The model of hierarchy describes society as “a
carefully graded order of rank and dignity,” the triadic model “place[s] people in discrete
collective groups [defined more by] wealth and occupation and [gives] particular
attention to the bourgeoisie;” and the binary model of social description “emphasize[s]
the adversarial nature of the social order by drawing one great divide on the basis of
culture, style of life, or politics.” 4 While at several points during the Victorian period the
language of binary or triadic differentiation seemed to enjoy rhetorical ascendancy,
Cannadine argues, the reality was that a hierarchical view of society persisted as the main
model of social description, and provided the main discursive terms in which different
social groups defined their social identity.
Cannadine’s models are certainly not exclusive to British society in the 19th century;
they have a much wider historical and geographic incidence. Nor are they mutually
exclusive; over the last three hundred years of British history, Cannadine maintains, they
could regularly be seen competing with one another as part of real political and social
struggles. The important question here is this: what is the historical reality that gave
prominence to and maintained the rhetoric of hierarchy? And since the hierarchy model is
inexplicable without reference to the persistence of the patrician elite that anchored it, the
above question is in turn connected with another one: how did it happen that the
ascendancy of a patrician elite continued well into the 19th century?
A perspective offered by Cannadine in an earlier book was that the “upper class” in
Great Britain remained powerful throughout much of the 19th century (until the third
Reform Bill which for Cannadine marked the beginning of the end of the “patrician
polity”), 5 because it thoroughly refashioned itself in the period from roughly the 1780s
to the 1820s. This refashioning was a resultant of a series of changes: “territori al
amalgamation” and “internationalization” which gave rise to an increasingly
homogeneous British (as opposed to English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish) upper class; a
renewed vigor in the creation, hierarchization, and pageantry of the titled orders; a
growing monopoly of the upper classes in politics, civil service, diplomacy, and the state
apparatus in general; creation of “a more rational, more efficient, more capitalist
agriculture;” indirect and often direct involvement of the landed elite in the burgeoning
industrialization. The upshot of this process of refashioning of the patrician class, indeed
of “the making of the upper class,” was at least twofold. On the one hand, the new,
refurbished elite managed to continue in the governing position during the time of the
industrial revolution and the corresponding strengthening of the middle classes that
pushed for more political influence. On the other hand, the elite managed not only to
reinvent itself as a dominant group, but also to perpetuate the very terms in which
society, social relations, and especially relations of dominance were perceived—the terms
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 8
of hierarchy (as opposed to other possible markers of distinction such as wealth, property,
industry, labor, etc). On this view, even the Reform Act of 1832 cannot be seen as a great
landmark in class relations, and certainly not a landmark in changing the parameters of
social description. In the long perspective, the Act was important in that it inaugurated
the era of gradual extensions of the franchise that would continue over the next hundred
years, a very slow pace indeed. But it did not have the immediate consequence of
empowering the middle class(es) at the expense of the patrician elite; if anything, the
aftermath of the Act showed that greater political representation did not necessarily
translate into greater political power for the middle classes, just as the 1867 or 1884 Acts
did not immediately result in greater political power for the working classes. For many
Victorians the promise of political change was so slow that by the 1850s the frustration
we find in Dickens was a cultural commonplace.
Cannadine’s analysis takes into account the rise of the language of class in the 19th
century, but he is also very careful to distinguish it from the language of the rise of class:
“if the middle class arose as anything during those years [the early 19th century], it was
largely as a new rhetorical formation.” 6 The very term “middle class” only emerged at
the end of the 18th century, succeeding but not entirely superseding the older appellations
such as “middle ranks” and “middle orders,” and its use, according to Cannadine,
intensified in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill. While certain social groups
identified more readily with the term than others, it would be wrong to assume that
middle-class identity was a discursive reflection of an objective social reality. Rather, it is
much more useful to see it as a rhetorical construct that sought to impose a sense of class
interest and sentiment on an otherwise rather diverse seg ment of society. That the term
middle classes was equally commonly used in the Victorian period testifies to the fact
that even the triadic model (upper, middle, lower or aristocracy, middle class, working
class) often appeared in a hybrid triadic/hierarchical form. 7 In fact, much of Victorian
literature participated in that project of making—rhetorically—a single middle class, and
Dickens in particular invested both his civic activism and his writing with the discontent
that there was no unified middle class where he wanted to see one.
However, in order to understand the success of the patrician elite in the 19th century
and Dickens’s anxieties about the failure of the middle class, we must move in ever wider
circles of historical context. If traditional power, albeit refashioned, had such a way of
asserting itself over the course of the 19th century, then part of the reason for its
ascendancy must lie in the character of the political and social process in which this
power was couched and exercised. No less than a constitutional perspective needs to be
brought to bear on this question—what was it that allowed the patrician elite to not only
keep reinventing itself, but also to impose on the rest of society its own idea of the British
polity? In The Break-up of Britain (1977), Tom Nairn argued that the settlement of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 set the course of British history for the next couple of
centuries. The Revolution created and institutionalized a culture of compromise between
the landed aristocracy and the middle class, one of the results of which was that political
modernization in Britain ended up on a slower track than on the continent, where
representative democracies were emerging through revolutionary transformation, that is,
presumably through a clean break with the old regime.
Tom Nairn wrote his book on the break-up of Britain in the 1970s, spirited by both a
 Introduction 9
neo-nationalist and a neo-Marxist opposition to the structure of the British state. Twenty-
five years later, his expectation that before long the British state was going to undergo a
constitutional change, possibly to the point of break-up, has a peculiar resonance. The
British state is now being reformed, though the ultimate outcomes of that reform process
are still not in sight. Certainly, Nairn’s expectations from the 1970s were not quite
accommodated by the gradualist devolution espoused by Tony Blair nor by the
transnational context supplied by the European Union, itself an unfinished process that
will most likely continue to have an impact on the future evolution of national identities
and polities in the British isles. But there still is validity to Nairn’s overall analysis of the
historical character of the British polity over the last three hundred years, and it lies
primarily in his assumption that the British polity developed a form of state substantially
different from continental polities. The British revolutionary era, which lasted from the
1640s to 1688, produced the British state; the second revolutionary era, unfolding from
1776 to 1815, suggests Nairn, gave birth to modem constitutionalism, in imitation of the
British example. The British state was “the first state-form of an industrialized
nation” (14), but its peculiarity was that it remained a “transitional” one, characterized by
a form of government that was “patrician as well as representative” (19). This transitional
state, forged by the settlement of 1688, inaugurated the idea and the era of representative
democracy, but it never fully implemented that idea. It retained significant trappings of
the pre-modern state, including a hereditary house (which is only now being dismantled
by the government of Tony Blair).
Another aspect of the British state-form that was not repeated by postrevolutionary
continental situations has to do with the relationship between civil society and the state:
in Britain, “one social class was the State […] one part of civil society wholly dominated
‘the state’ and lent it, permanently, a character different from its rivals” (25). This class
monopolizing the personnel of the state was the territorial aristocracy (which was, let us
not forget, well-versed in agrarian capitalism, unlike continental aristocracies). This class
was not a rigid, exclusive club, but a “co-optive elite,” absorbing certain elements of the
middle classes. After 1688, Nairn claims, the elite established a state-form that eventually
“turned into ‘the nightwatchman state’ of the Industrial Revolution, and presided over the
most dramatic initial phase of world industrialization” (26). Unlike the continental state-
form, with its insistence on formality and impersonality of the political process, the
British was a “low-profile” state. It cultivated a climate of informality and personal
domination in civil and political life—the boundary between civil and political societies
in Britain was soft and loose, allowing for easy patrician access to government and
administration, and the political process favored the agency of dominating personalities.
At the same time, this state was marked by an “absence of a strong, centralized state
armature” (27), underscoring the low-maintenance image of the whole constitutional
arrangement. This state, which Nairn occasionally calls “patrician” and occasionally
“crypto-bourgeois,” was supported by a particular “constitution of civil society
itself” (27), in which patrician influence remained strong.
Nairn locates the defining element of post-1688 British civil society in the “upper-class
compromise.” Cooperation between the landed aristocracy and the middle class in
avoiding political modernization was first cemented in the realm of civil society. The
interests common to the two classes had to do with the expansion and defense of the
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 10
empire, which supplied the patricians with administrative jobs and the middle classes
with an international political framework for the laissez-faire economy; economic
homogeneity between the two classes, with a sort of capitalist agriculture emerging in the
late 17th century (an agrarian revolution preparing some of the ground for the subsequent
industrial revolution); and a joint stance against the industrial working class emerging
with the industrial revolution as a social force seeking political representation, which
strengthened the reasons for a political alliance of the upper classes in the political realm
and reinforced the cautiousness and gradualness in reforming the political-institutional
infrastructure of the country. 8 In this perspective, the history of the relationship between
the patrician elites and the middle class(es) in Britain is less one of grudgingly accepted
compromise, than of convenient cooperation. While there were frictions between these
two classes and their various segments, Nairn argues that the compromise was such that it
“furnished sufficient homogeneity among the upper strata for mutual adjustments to be
possible, and for the question of power never to be made too acute.” 9
While in The Break-up of Britain Nairn did not examine in great detail the role of the
British constitution in supporting that homogeneity, he made the important point that the
unique character of the British state—and the British constitution as the legislative
infrastructure of that state—is indispensable to any discussion of the “upper-class
compromise.” Nairn rightly argues that the patrician elite exercised power, and combined
its civil and political identities, in a manner that was both very personal and informal. It
almost goes without saying that the very informality was possible due to some very
formal attributes of the British constitution. Due to its decentered existence as a series of
acts enacted and modified over many centuries through complicated negotiations between
forces of tradition and forces of innovation, the British constitution is of course a
notoriously complicated concept to fix in discourse. But that complicated legal entity had
always involved quite uncomplicated and quite conspicuous modes of securing patrician
privilege and creating the framework of law and custom that ensured that the state
remained, formally and informally, a preserve of the landed elite throughout the 18th and
19th centuries (and of other elites, some would argue, in the 20th century).
Interconnectedness among the upper classes, the parliament, the government, the
administration, the Anglican Church, the ancient universities, and the military had been
for a long time a central part of that intricate arrangement of law that made up the British
constitution. It is only slowly and with a great legislative reluctance that disabilities were
lifted against Catholics and Jews over the course of the 19th century, granting them full
privileges of political citizenship—to name a few cases of formal inaccessibility of the
state apparatus on the grounds of religion. One should consult Cannadine’s Aspects of
Aristocracy for more complete information on the formal exclusiveness of the British
state in class terms, and in particular on the class make-up of the personnel of
government.
Of course, the upper-class compromise of which Nairn spoke goes beyond the purely
constitutional context. Therein lies precisely one of the driving questions of new British
historiography—trying to explain why even after the various religious emancipations and
franchise extensions the patrician elite at mid-19th century continued to dominate the
state apparatus, including the legislature, the government, the civil service, the diplomatic
service, the military, and the Anglican church (which remained an established, that is,
 Introduction 11
state religion). Regardless of whether this domination was facilitated by a lack of middle-
class political ambition or through patrician familiarity with the mechanisms of power, or
both, it is certain that it was supported by the complicated constitutional informality of
the British state, which defined its constitution in terms of privilege, not of right. If
Nairn’s diagnosis of “informality” carries explanatory weight, it is because of this
constitutional privileging of privilege. As any reading of Dickens’s Circumlocution
Office satire will show, Dickens did not merely denounce the incompetence of a patrician
bureaucracy; what fueled his frustration was the formal armature of the British state that
facilitated patrician informality in the exercise of power.
Nairn’s analysis raised a fundamental question about the way we imagine the
operations of capitalism in British history. It is easy to confuse the commonplace of
England as the “first industrial nation” with the idea that it was also a nation in which
industrialization was the foremost force of social formation. In contrast to what was once
a conventional wisdom, Nairn argued that the English class compromise had entailed “the
containment of capitalism within a patrician hegemony, which never, either then or since,
actively favored the aggressive development of capitalism or the general conversion of
society to the latter’s values or interests.” 10 In other words, not only did not capitalism in
Britain form a political structure suited to its own purposes, but the very opposite
happened: the structure of British political hegemony created a form of capitalism suited
to its own purposes.
A somewhat similar view can be found in the work of P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins,
whose recent history of British imperialism was written in the like spirit of reappraising
the forces and agents that shaped British history in the last three centuries. Seeking to
explain the economic context of British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins have argued that
“the metropolitan economy” needs to be at the “center of the analysis” (5). In the process
of examining that economy, they de-emphasize (but profess not to minimize) the
significance of industrial capitalism, and focus instead on service-sector capitalism, for
the understanding of whose role they “lay stress on the concept of gentility and its
relation to economic activ ity and political authority” (4). Starting their analysis with the
revolution of 1688, Cain and Hopkins follow the development of a gentlemanly order,
born out of co-operation between the landed elite and service-sector capitalists, the latter
primarily composed of City financiers and merchants. Without explicitly referring to
Arno Mayer’s book, Cain and Hopkins seek to demonstrate that the “gentlemanly order”
presiding over British capitalism from 1688 to deep into the 19th century, was not a
continuation of the old regime; rather, the regime inaugurated by 1688 was substantially a
new order, much of whose “innovative character stemmed from the financial revolution it
helped to sponsor.” This resulted in “the creation of a new form of capitalism headed by
improving landlords in association with improving financiers who served as their junior
partners.” 11 The emphasis on the historical newness of the gentlemanly order is indeed
helpful in allowing for a distinction to be made between the persisting forms of feudal-
absolutist states on the continent and the British state-form. This eliminates some of the
problems of Mayer’s approach, which came close to conflating the two developments
under the category of old regime. By seeing the post-1688 British regime as distinct and
new, one can also better appreciate its ability to act as an agile power regime and to
opportunely keep reshaping itself under pressures of new social developments such as
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 12
industrialization while still preserving an elitist position and composition.
That the change of 1688 revolved around a substantially new position of finance
capitalism, as Cain and Hopkins suggest, is by no means a novel argument. A modern
proponent of it is P.G.M.Dickson, who placed the discussion of financial developments in
the center of the study of the revolution of 1688. 12 A Victorian who had arrived at pretty
much the same conclusion much before Dickson was T.B.Macaulay. In his History of
England, Macaulay argued that the establishment of the Bank of England and the creation
of national debt created a dynamic of mutual dependence of finance capital from the City,
economic growth, imperial expansion and interest in political stability. But if Cain and
Hopkins’s interpretation of 1688 is not new, they gave a new name to what they saw as
the specifically British type of capitalist economy arising from the 1688–“gentlemanly
capitalism.” In addition, trying to explain the British empire through metropolitan
contexts, they also produced a more complete understanding of how the metropolitan
polity itself was to a large extent arranged the way it was arranged because of imperial
concerns. The empire, whether it be the “formal” or the “informal” empire under British
domination in the 19th century, created the playing field for service-sector capitalism
which is at the center of Cain and Hopkins’s analysis.
The temporally long and geographically expansive perspective assumed in their
analysis allows them to argue that the history of Britain during the British Empire
requires a discussion of the continuity of the governing elite, its ability to reinvent itself
over the period of three centuries. This is of course similar to the positions taken by Nairn
and Cannadine; what Cain and Hopkins bring into focus more than the other two
historians is the smoothness of transition from the patrician regime as it existed at the
close of the 17th century to the gentlemanly governing elite in Britain at the beginning of
the 20th century, an elite that was no longer exclusively patrician but that certainly was
not merely bourgeois, and that definitely did not represent the triumph of industrial
capital. The very term gentlemanly capitalism comfortably embraces the fact that the
patrician caste managing the revolution of 1688 was already composed of genteel
capitalists (in fact, capitalist landowners), and that the revolutionary settlement could not
have been possible without the supporting role of newly arisen finance capitalism.
Equally comfortably does this term embrace the fact that by the end of the 19th century
service-sector capitalism was the most important and most dynamic part of the British
economy. Of course, the constitution of the gentlemanly elite changed over time: by “the
late nineteenth century, […] the amalgamation had taken place and the landed interest,
once the senior partner, had come to lean heavily on money made in the service sector,
especially in the City of London. The nineteenth-century gentleman was therefore a
compromise between the needs of the landed interest whose power was in decline and the
aspirations of the rising service sector” (33).
Thus, while the term “gentlemanly capitalism” does not make visible the actual
evolution of the gentlemanly elite—its many editions and internal gradations and
distinctions that shaped up and disintegrated over the centuries—it does emphasize the
continuity between elites at different points in British history after 1688. This continuity
in turn had to do with reproduction of a specific “gentlemanly” attitude towards both
governance and wealth. As in the case of the gentlemanly prototype, the medieval knight,
the idea of gentleman came to be associated with “adher[ing] to a code of honour which
 Introduction 13
placed duty before self-advancement” (23). The making of a gentleman, while requiring
support in the form of wealth, was not constituted by wealth alone; in fact, “[a]
gentleman required income, and preferably sizeable wealth, but he was not to be sullied
by the acquisitive process any more than he was to be corrupted by the power which
leadership entailed” (23). The duties of governance were accepted as a responsibility not
to be compromised by hunger for wealth and power. It is of course one of the
commonplaces of Victorian studies to point to Victorian revivals of chivalric
medievalism in literature, architecture, and art. The Victorian fascination with the
medieval world of chivalry, Cain and Hopkins point out, went hand-in-hand with an
unyielding emphasis in public schools and in the ancient universities of Oxford and
Cambridge on classical studies—both forms of retro-culture worked to reinforce the
ideological formation of “an elite cadre dedicated to the service of the state” (31).
Under the gentlemanly regime of distinction, not all kinds of wealth were equally
valued: aristocratic status ranked as the most prestigious manner of possessing wealth,
which often came with a “contempt for the everyday world of wealth creation and of the
profit motive as the chief goal of activity” (24). In course of the evolution of gentility
over the centuries, other classes affected such contempt, including service-sector
capitalists, higher clergy, commissioned officers, and the learned professions. One of the
corollaries of the casual attitude towards acquisition of wealth, but also towards
performance of work, claim Cain and Hopkins drawing on Jonathan Powis’s study
Aristocracy, was the genteel penchant for the cult of the amateur in every kind of political
or social activity. Finally, part of the reason for the historical success of the gentlemanly
ideology is that, as Cain and Hopkins point out, “the English gentleman was made as well
as born” (22). Certainly, any history of the genesis of gentlemanly culture and ideology
would have to account for the fact that the “gentlemanly” had always been meant as more
inclusive than “noble” or “aristocratic” (already Chaucer’s tales offer telling evidence of
the difference)—a concept with a built-in space for further inclusivity. The concept of
gentility proved flexible enough to allow for gradual expansion and co-optation over
centuries, even as it remained subject to the sanction of the elite (genteel status was
ultimately a matter of perception by the social groups already secure in their possession
of it).
While Cain and Hopkins offer of necessity a sketchy attempt to discuss the genealogy
and ideology of gentility, the brunt of their argument is that the “gentlemanly” ideology
established itself as a crucial factor in the overall development of British capitalism.
Since the normative aristocratic model of wealth acquisition boasted no visible
connection with the world of work, under this system of prestige the forms of acquisition
that involved a greater degree of invisibility were seen as more eligible for co-optation
into the elite than the forms that involved a direct connec-tion to production. A literary
example, among a myriad, in evidence: one of Dickens’s arch-scoundrels, Mr Rigaud in
Little Dorrit, defines himself as “not so much a man of business, as what the world calls
(arbitrarily) a gentleman” (399). While Rigaud’s statement is a reminder that gentlemanly
status is an uncertain affair that requires in-group sanction, it also suggests that the idea
of gentility presupposes a distance from the visible and striving production of wealth. In
the 19th century, the model of coming into wealth associated with territorial aristocracy
continued to serve as the norm, so that an indirect and inconspicuous relation to the
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 14
creation of wealth certainly facilitated the ideological incorporation of first finance
capital and then commercial capital into the governing elite. By now numerous studies
have been done on the co-optation of different segments of the middle classes into the
patrician elite; typically, such co-optation involved an emulation of the lifestyle of the
aristocracy—middle-class magnates typically aspired to purchase a broad-acred estate in
the country, as well as to achieve ennoblement, i.e. official conferral of patrician status.
Both the emulation and the ennoblement were significantly sooner and much more often
accessible to service-sector capitalists, especially financiers, and much more rarely, and
much later, to industrialists. 13 Cain and Hopkins show that the manner in which the
ranks of the gentlemanly elite were replenished has to be read side by side with the ascent
of service-sector capitalism in the British economy and the relegation of manufacturing
capitalism to a subordinate role. A related development, British loss of the leading role in
industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, cannot be fully explained without
reference to the persistence of the ideology of gentility.
Charles Dickens, without the benefit of hindsight that we have, often mused in
frustration that technological modernization in Britain was not accompanied by political
modernization, and even predicted that the British technological edge would soon be lost.
That Dickens (among others) became preoccupied with such uneven speeds of
modernization is one of the reasons why the mid-Victorian period merits special
attention. As Dickens clearly saw in the 1850s, the terrific transformative potential of
industrialization was stymied by the structure of British civil and political societies.
Retroactively, historians have come to refer to the mid-Victorian period as the age of
equipoise, implying some sort of a historical truce during which the level of social
conflict ebbed in the face of economic growth and social cooperation.
It is opportune at this point to remember that industrialization in Britain was a world-
first experience, and therefore in some measure a learning process. Eric Hobsbawm
divided British industrialization into two phases, the first one based on textile industry
(1780–1840), and the second one on coal and iron (1840–1895). By the time the second
phase began to unfold, Hobsbawm argues, industrialists were no longer unfamiliar with
the rules of the industrial game. In the early, pioneering years of industrialization
manufacturing capitalists sought to create profits by long working hours and low wages,
but already by the 1840s they began to realize that shorter working hours and higher
wages did not mean decrease in productivity. Factory legislation, such as the Ten Hours
Act of 1847 sped up such processes, but it did not initiate them—they were already being
set in motion by the northern industrialists who became known as “New Model”
employers. Certainly this does not explain fully the reasons for the relative social peace
between industrial workers and manufacturing capitalists in the 1850s, but it does help
put in perspective the tremendous novelty and the terrible human cost of the early years
of industrialization, and offset those years by the subsequent improvements in the
condition of the working class. The fact remains that by 1850 the condition of England,
of which Thomas Carlyle wrote, was in the public eye no longer as dramatically tied to
the condition of the working class, of which Friedrich Engels wrote. On the other hand,
the achievements of industrial capitalism opened up new ways of perceiving the
condition of the country within a narrative of modernization. As Hobsbawm put it, “the
railway became a sort of synonym for ultra-modernity in the 1840,” 14 and many a
 Introduction 15
Victorian writer marveled at the social consequences of the railway boom. In 1851, the
Great Exhibition was staged in London, and this spectacle of unprecedented proportions
projected to Britons as well as the world an image of British industrial superiority. But if
at the outset of the 1850s technological innovation seemed to provide a uniquely British
promise of social progress, it also could not help but foreground the anachronism of other
aspects of British society.
It is in this gap between the possibilities and failures of modernization that much of
Dickens’s writerly ethos resided. At the beginning of the 1850s Dickens started
Household Words, a miscellany in which he often ran editorials exposing and
condemning the obsolescence of British political society, and summoning wishfully the
power of the steam engine to dispel it. Dickens’s most concentrated novelistic critique of
British political society was presented in Little Dorrit, one of the first modern critiques of
state bureaucracy (admittedly, we could say after Nairn that the bureaucracy itself was a
“transitional one). In the Circumlocution Office Dickens created the image of a state
apparatus whose defining principle was “how not to do it,” 15 meaning how to avoid
taking care of public business—and “all the business of the country went through [it].” 16
The obscure and absurd inefficiency of the Office conveys a recognizably Dickensian
topos of labyrinthine wastefulness of British institutions (akin to the later portrait of the
Chancery in Bleak House). The Office is mainly staffed with members of an aristocratic
family, the Barnacles, who “were dispersed all over the public offices, and held all sorts
of public places.” 17 Indeed, of the Barnacles there are “shoals.” Irresistible colonization
of the state apparatus by the Barnacles is accompanied by their attitude of casual
entitlement towards the business of government. An advocate of meritocracy, Dickens
was a keen critic of aristocratic entitlement, the culture of informality, and the cult of the
amateur that informed the British civil service at mid-century. One of the corollaries to
Little Dorrit in Household Words was a 1856 article published under the title “Nobody,”
a scathing attack on the posture of unaccountability assumed by the patrician civil
servant. 18
However, Dickens did not portray the Barnacles’ attitude towards government as a
mere habit, a leftover from an older order of things, but as a matter of political choice and
expediency. A junior Barnacle in the Circumlocution Office “fully understood the
department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus-pocus piece of machinery for the assistance
of the nobs in keeping off the snobs.” 19 Dickens barely had a class war in mind: the
Barnacles use the armature of government not so much in a power struggle as in a
jockeying for compromises with the “snobs.” What is left unsaid, but is nevertheless
strongly assumed, is that the “snobs” cannot be entirely kept off; rather, they are
gradually and selectively brought into the fold of the governing elite. That indeed is the
premise underwriting the story of Merdle the banker, whose position in the City of
London also ensures him “Society” connections, and whose finance capital is needed for
the support of the gentlemanly governing elite and its regime of power. Another form of
middle-class failure in the novel is William Dorrit’s pursuit of a genteel lifestyle. It takes
two to reproduce this particular regime of power—the novel condemns, in its
melodramatic way, what it perceives as middle-class collusion with the patrician political
culture. A Barnacle member of the Circumlocution Office is described as “altogether
splendid, massive, overpowering, and impracticable” 20 —while there is an obvious
 Literary criticism and cultural theory 16
exasperation here with the indifference and ceremonious inefficiency of British political
society, there is also a sense that it is hard to imagine for this order of things to change—
the latter clearly coinciding with Dickens’s view that the middle class lacks enthusiasm
for attempting political reform. Middle-class sub-servience in the contemporary field of
power was all the more lamentable to Dickens because he felt that one of the results of
the persistence of the patrician elite is devaluation of precisely the social achievements
and attitudes associated with the middle class. For instance, the indifference of the
patrician bureaucracy forces the industrial inventor Doyle to peddle his inventions
abroad—a distinctly Dickensian proposition that Britain is losing its position of world
leader in new technology and industrialization. For Dickens, the failure of political
modernization (or the absence of administrative reform) also led to economic failure.
What needs to be stressed here is that in lamenting the slowdown in British political and
social modernization Little Dorrit is not merely an indictment of the political society in
Britain, but also of its civil society—inasmuch as Dickens held that the British middle
class failed to build an effective civil society in opposition to the patrician political
monopoly.
Another remarkable contemporary critique of British civil society that I want to bring
into focus came from W.M.Thackeray, who in fact popularized the term snob that
Dickens was to use later in Little Dorrit In The Book of Snobs, a satirical piece published
serially in Punch in 1846–47, Thackeray gave the term snob its modern meaning. The
work amounts to an exercise—albeit a satirical one—in class ethnography. Asserting that
“Snobs are to be studied like other objects of Natural Science,” 21 Thackeray summoned
the image of a systematic discourse of social analysis. The idea of ethnography (or
ethnology as it was known at the time to disciplinary pioneers like J.C.Pritchard) was in
its disciplinary cradle at the time; the founders of ethnology saw the discipline as a
branch of natural science, aspiring to both the perceived methodological solidity and the
prestige that natural science was beginning to enjoy in this age of scientific and
technological progress. Disciplinary ethnography started out as a way of interpreting
accounts of unfamiliar cultures in other parts of the globe, very often in the imperial
realm. But some areas of the domestic social world were increasingly becoming opaque,
necessitating some form of systematic exploration and explanation, so that a
protoethnographic idea of putting presumably unfamiliar domestic cultures on record
informed a good deal of contemporary discourse, literary and otherwise. For instance,
another Punch contributor, Henry Mayhew, started publishing his own form of class
ethnography of the London poor a few years after Thackeray’s catalog of the snobs of
England. An ethnographic design was built into the premise (again a satirical one) of
Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s novel that ushered in a new novelistic era. Another novelistic
form of ethnography followed with the industrial novel: the novelists such as Disraeli and
Gaskell offered detailed descriptions of (their perception of) the working-class way of
life. Such novelistic documentarism was meant to record and explain the ways of a part
of the national culture presumably unfamiliar to the implied readership of such works
(the middle- and upper-class audiences), and it participated in creating an image of the
culture of the working class and the urban poor in ways similar to the government-
commissioned reports such as Chadwick’s Sanitary Report and the journalism of amateur
documentarists like Henry Mayhew. To use Cannadine’s terminology, the Victorian
Exploring the Variety of Random
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THE BLUE GROSS is the mystical association which

connects the idea of nuts marked as oranges with the idea of two
clergymen, one tall and the other short ? ' The eyes of the
tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's; he really seemed for
an instant likely to fling himself upon the stranger. At last he
stammered angrily : "I don't know what you 'ave to do with it, but if
you're one of their friends, you can tell 'em from me that I'll knock
their silly 'eads off, parsons or no parsons, if they upset my apples
again." ' Indeed ? ' asked the detective, with great sympathy. ''Did
they upset your apples?' 'One of 'em did," said the heated shopman;
"rolled 'em all over the street. I'd 'ave caught the fool but for havin'
to pick 'em up." "Which way did these parsons go?" asked Valentin.
"Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the
square," said the other promptly. 'Thanks," replied Valentin, and
vanished like a fairy. On the other side of the second square he
found a policeman, and said : "This is urgent, constable; have you
seen two clergymen in shovel hats ? " The policeman began to
chuckle heavily. "I 'ave, sir ; and if you arst me, one of 'em was
drunk. He stood in the middle of the road that bewildered that " 13
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN "Which way did they

go? " snapped Valentin. "They took one of them yellow buses over
there," answered the man; "them that go to Hampstead." Valentin
produced his official card and said very rapidly: "Call up two of your
men to come with me in pursuit," and crossed the road with such
contagious energy that the ponderous police man was moved to
almost agile obedience. In a minute and a half the French detective
was joined on the opposite pavement by an inspector and a man in
plain clothes. "Well, sir," began the former, with smiling importance,
uand what may- — ?' Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. "I'll
tell you on the top of that omnibus," he said, and was darting and
dodging across the tangle of the traffic. When all three sank panting
on the top seats of the yellow vehicle, the inspector said : "We could
go four times as quick in a taxi." "Quite true," replied their leader
placidly, "if we only had an idea of where we were going." ' Well,
where are you going ? " asked the other, staring. Valentin smoked
frowningly for a few seconds ; then, removing his cigarette, he said:
'If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want
to guess what he's doing, keep behind him. Stray when he strays;
stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he. Then you may see
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THE BLUE GROSS what he saw and may act as he acted.

All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing." " What
sort of queer thing do you mean ? ' asked the inspector. "Any sort of
queer thing," answered Valentin, and relapsed into obstinate silence.
The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed
like hours on end ; the great detective would not explain further, and
perhaps his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his errand.
Perhaps, also, they felt a silent and growing desire for lunch, for the
hours crept long past the normal luncheon hour, and the long roads
of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after
length like an infernal telescope. It was one of those journeys on
which a man per petually feels that now at last he must have come
to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come to the
beginning of Tufnell Park. London died away in draggled taverns and
dreary scrubs, and then was unaccountably born again in blazing
high streets and blatant hotels. It was like passing through thirteen
separate vulgar cities all just touching each other. But though the
winter twilight was already threatening the road ahead of them, the
Parisian detective still sat silent and watchful, eyeing the frontage of
the streets that slid by on either side. By the time they had left
Camden Town behind, the policemen were '5
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN nearly asleep ; at

least, they gave something like a jump as Valentin leapt erect, struck
a hand on each man's shoulder, and shouted to the driver to stop.
They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising why
they had been dislodged; when they looked round for enlightenment
they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a
window on the left side of the road. It was a large window, forming
part of the long facade of a gilt and palatial public-house ; it was the
part reserved for respectable dining, and labelled 'Restaurant." This
window, like all the rest along the frontage of the hotel, was of
frosted and figured glass; but in the middle of it was a big, black
smash, like a star in the ice. "Our cue at last," cried Valentin, waving
his stick; 'the place with the broken window." "What window ? What
cue ? " asked his prin cipal assistant. 'Why, what proof is there that
this has anything to do with them ? ' Valentin almost broke his
bamboo stick with rage. "Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is
looking for proof ! Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one
that it has nothing to do with them. But what else can we do? Don't
you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home to
bed ? ' He banged his way into the restaurant, followed by his
companions, and they 16
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THE BLUE GROSS were soon seated at a late luncheon at a

little table, and looking at the star of smashed glass from the inside.
Not that it was very informative to them even then. " Got your
window broken, I see," said Valentin to the waiter as he paid the bill.
44 Yes, sir," answered the attendant, bending busily over the
change, to which Valentin silently added an enormous tip. The
waiter straightened himself with mild but unmistakable animation.
"Ah, yes, sir," he said. " Very odd thing, that, sir." "Indeed? Tell us
about it," said the detective with careless curiosity. "Well, two gents
in black came in," said the waiter; "two of those foreign parsons that
are running about. They had a cheap and quiet little lunch, and one
of them paid for it and went out. The other was just going out to
join him when I looked at my change again and found he'd paid me
more than three times too much. [ Here,' I says to the chap who
was nearly out of the door, you've paid too much.' ' Oh,' he says,
very cool, 'have we?' Yes,' I says, and picks up the bill to show him.
Well, that was a knock-out." 'What do you mean?" asked his
interlocutor. 'Well, I'd have sworn on seven Bibles that I'd put 45. on
that bill. But now I saw I'd put 145., as plain as paint." c 17
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN "Well?1 cried

Valentin, moving slowly, but with burning eyes, "and then?' "The
parson at the door he says all serene, ' Sorry to confuse your
accounts, but it'll pay for the window.' What window?' I says. The
one I'm going to break,' he says, and smashed that blessed pane
with his umbrella." All three inquirers made an exclamation ; and the
inspector said under his breath, ''Are we after escaped lunatics ? '
The waiter went on with some relish for the ridiculous story : "I was
so knocked silly for a second, I couldn't do anything. The man
marched out of the place and joined his friend just round the corner.
Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I couldn't catch
them, though I ran round the bars to do it." "Bullock Street," said
the detective, and shot up that thoroughfare as quickly as the
strange couple he pursued. Their journey now took them through
bare brick ways like tunnels ; streets with few lights and even with
few windows ; streets that seemed built out of the blank backs of
everything and every where. Dusk was deepening, and it was not
easy even for the London policemen to guess in what exact direction
they were treading. The inspector, however, was pretty certain that
they would eventu ally strike some part of Hampstead Heath.
Abruptly one bulging and gas-lit window broke 18
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THE BLUE CROSS the blue twilight like a bull's-eye lantern ;

and Valentin stopped an instant before a little garish sweetstuff
shop. After an instant's hesitation he went in ; he stood amid the
gaudy colours of the confectionery with entire gravity and bought
thir teen chocolate cigars with a certain care. He was clearly
preparing an opening; but he did not need one. An angular, elderly
young woman in the shop had regarded his elegant appearance with
a merely automatic inquiry ; but when she saw the door behind him
blocked with the blue uniform of the inspector, her eyes seemed to
wake up. "Oh," she said, "if you've come about that parcel, I've sent
it off already." " Parcel ! ' repeated Valentin ; and it was his turn to
look inquiring. "I mean the parcel the gentleman left — the
clergyman gentleman." "For goodness' sake," said Valentin, leaning
forward with his first real confession of eagerness, "for Heaven's
sake tell us what happened exactly." "Well," said the woman a little
doubtfully, "the clergymen came in about half an hour ago and
bought some peppermints and talked a bit, and then went off
towards the Heath. But a second after, one of them runs back into
the shop and says, ' Have I left a parcel ? ' Well, I looked
everywhere and couldn't see one; so he says, ' Never mind ; but if it
should turn up, please post 19
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN it to this address,'

and he left me the address and a shilling for my trouble. And sure
enough, though I thought I'd looked everywhere, I found he'd left a
brown paper parcel, so I posted it to the place he said. I can't
remember the address now; it was somewhere in Westminster. But
as the thing seemed so important, I thought perhaps the police had
come about it." "So they have," said Valentin shortly. "'Is Hampstead
Heath near here ? ' "Straight on for fifteen minutes," said the
woman, " and you'll come right out on the open." Valentin sprang
out of the shop and began to run. The other detectives followed him
at a reluctant trot. The street they threaded was so narrow and shut
in by shadows that when they came out un expectedly into the void
common and vast sky they were startled to find the evening still so
light and clear. A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid
the blackening trees and the dark violet distances. The glowing
green tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crystal one
or two stars. All that was left of the daylight lay in a » golden glitter
across the edge of Hampstead and that popular hollow which is
called the Vale of Health. The holiday makers who roam this region
had not wholly dispersed ; a few couples sat shapelessly on benches
; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked in one of the swings.
The glory of 20
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THE BLUE GROSS heaven deepened and darkened around

the sublime vulgarity of man ; and standing on the slope and looking
across the valley, Valentin beheld the thing which he sought. Among
the black and breaking groups in that distance was one especially
black which did not break — a group of two figures clerically clad.
Though they seemed as small as insects, Valentin could see that one
of them was much smaller than the other. Though the other had a
student's stoop and an inconspicuous manner, he could see that the
man was well over six feet high. He shut his teeth and went forward,
whirling his stick impa tiently. By the time he had substantially dimin
ished the distance and magnified the two black figures as in a vast
microscope, he had perceived something else; something which
startled him, and yet which he had somehow expected. Whoever
was the tall priest, there could be no doubt about the identity of the
short one. It was his friend of the Harwich train, the stumpy little
cure of Essex whom he had warned about his brown paper parcels.
Now, so far as this went, everything fitted in finally and rationally
enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a
Father Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with
sapphires, a relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign
priests at the congress. This undoubtedly was the " silver with blue
21
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN stones " ; and Father

Brown undoubtedly was the little greenhorn in the train. Now there
was no thing wonderful about the fact that what Valentin had found
out Flambeau had also found out; Flam beau found out everything.
Also there was no thing wonderful in the fact that when Flambeau
heard of a sapphire cross he should try to steal it; that was the most
natural thing in all natural history. And most certainly there was
nothing wonderful about the fact that Flambeau should have it all his
own way with such a silly sheep as the man with the umbrella and
the parcels. He was the sort of man whom anybody could lead on a
string to the North Pole ; it was not surprising that an actor like
Flambeau, dressed as another priest, could lead him to Hampstead
Heath. So far the crime seemed clear enough ; and while the
detective pitied the priest for his helplessness, he almost despised
Flambeau for condescending to so gul lible a victim. But when
Valentin thought of all that had happened in between, of all that had
led him to his triumph, he racked his brains for the smallest rhyme
or reason in it. What had the stealing of a blue-and-silver cross from
a priest from Essex to do with chucking soup at wall paper? What
had it to do with calling nuts oranges, or with paying for windows
first and breaking them afterwards ? He had come to the end of his
chase; yet somehow he had missed the middle of it. When he failed
(which was seldom), 22
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THE BLUE GROSS he had usually grasped the clue, but

nevertheless missed the criminal. Here he had grasped the criminal,
but still he could not grasp the clue. The two figures that they
followed were crawl ing like black flies across the huge green
contour of a hill. They were evidently sunk in conversation, and
perhaps did not notice where they were going ; but they were
certainly going to the wilder and more silent heights of the Heath. As
their pur suers gained on them, the latter had to use the un dignified
attitudes of the deer-stalker, to crouch be hind clumps of trees and
even to crawl prostrate in deep grass. By these ungainly ingenuities
the hunters even came close enough to the quarry to hear the
murmur of the discussion, but no word could be distinguished except
the word " reason " recurring frequently in a high and almost
childish voice. Once over an abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of
thickets, the detectives actually lost the two figures they were
following. They did not find the trail again for an agonising ten
minutes, and then it led round the brow of a great dome of hill
overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and deso late sunset scenery.
Under a tree in this com manding yet neglected spot was an old
ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in
serious speech together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to
the darkening horizon ; but the dome above was turning slowly from
peacockgreen to peacock-blue, and the stars detached them23
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN selves more and

more like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin
contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, stand ing
there in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests for
the first time. After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was
gripped by a devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English
policemen to the wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner
than seeking figs on its thistles. For the two priests were talking
exactly like priests, piously, with learning and leisure, about the most
aerial enigmas of theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more
simply, with his round face turned to the strengthening stars ; the
other talked with his head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to
look at them. But no more innocently clerical conversa tion could
have been heard in any white Italian cloister or black Spanish
cathedral. The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's
sentences, which ended: *' . . . what they really meant in the Middle
Ages by the heavens being incorruptible." The taller priest nodded
his bowed head and said : "Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to
their reason ; but who can look at those millions of worlds and not
feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where
reason is utterly unreasonable? " 24
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THE BLUE GROSS " No," said the other priest; " reason is
always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost bor derland of
things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason,
but it is just the other way- Alone on earth, the Church makes
reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God
himself is bound by reason. ': The other priest raised his austere
face to the spangled sky and said : "Yet who knows if in that infinite
uni verse ? ' "Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning
sharply in his seat, ; not infinite in the sense of escaping from the
laws of truth." Valentin behind his tree was tearing his finger nails
with silent fury. He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the
English detectives whom he had brought so far on a fantastic guess
only to listen to the metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons. In
his impatience he lost the equally elaborate answer of the tall cleric,
and when he listened again it was again Father Brown who was
speaking : " Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest
star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single
diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or
geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of
brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine
sapphire. 25
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN But don't fancy that

all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the
reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out
of pearl, you would still find a noticeboard, ' Thou shalt not steal.'
Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching
attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled by the one
great folly of his life. But something in the very silence of the tall
priest made him stop until the latter spoke. When at last he did
speak, he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees :
"Well, I still think that other worlds may per haps rise higher than
our reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one
can only bow my head." Then, with brow yet bent and without
changing by the faintest shade his attitude or voice, he added : 'Just
hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you ? We're all alone
here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll." The utterly
unaltered voice and attitude added a strange violence to that
shocking change of speech. But the guarder of the relic only seemed
to turn his head by the smallest section of the com pass. He seemed
still to have a somewhat foolish face turned to the stars. Perhaps he
had not under stood. Or, perhaps, he had understood and sat rigid
with terror. " Yes," said the tall priest, in the same low voice 26
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THE BLUE CROSS and in the same still posture, "yes, I am

Flam beau." Then, after a pause, he said : "Come, will you give me
that cross?' "No," said the other, and the monosyllable had an odd
sound. Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions.
The great robber leaned back in his seat and laughed low but long.
"No,5 he cried, "you won't give it me, you proud prelate. You won't
give it me, you little celibate simpleton. Shall I tell you why you
won't give it me ? Because I've got it already in my own breast-
pocket." The small man from Essex turned what seemed to be a
dazed face in the dusk, and said, with the timid eagerness of "The
Private Secretary " : "Are — are you sure?' Flambeau yelled with
delight. "Really, you're as good as a three-act farce," he cried. "Yes,
you turnip, I am quite sure. I had the sense to make a duplicate of
the right parcel, and now, my friend, you've got the dupli cate and
I've got the jewels. An old dodge, Father Brown — a very old
dodge." "Yes," said Father Brown, and passed his hand through his
hair with the same strange vagueness of manner. "Yes, I've heard of
it before." The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest
with a sort of sudden interest. 27
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN "You have heard of

it?" he asked. "Where have you heard of it ? ' "Well, I mustn't tell
you his name, of course," said the little man simply. "He was a
penitent, you know. He had lived prosperously for about twenty
years entirely on duplicate brown paper parcels. And so, you see,
when I began to suspect you, I thought of this poor chap's way of
doing it at once." "Began to suspect me?' repeated the outlaw with
increased intensity. "Did you really have the gumption to suspect me
just because I brought you up to this bare part of the heath ? ' 'No,
no," said Brown with an air of apology. "You see, I suspected you
when we first met. It's that little bulge up the sleeve where you
people have the spiked bracelet." "How in Tartarus," cried Flambeau,
"did you ever hear of the spiked bracelet ? ' "Oh, one's little flock,
you know! said Father Brown, arching his eyebrows rather blankly.
'When I was a curate in Hartlepool, there were three of them with
spiked bracelets. So, as I suspected you from the first, don't you
see, I made sure that the cross should go safe, anyhow. I'm afraid I
watched you, you know. So at last I saw you change the parcels.
Then, don't you see, I changed them back again. And then I left the
right one behind." " Left it behind ? ' repeated Flambeau, and for 28
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THE BLUE GROSS the first time there was another note in
his voice beside his triumph. "Well, it was like this," said the little
priest, speaking in the same unaffected way. "I went back to that
sweet-shop and asked if I'd left a parcel, and gave them a particular
address if it turned up. Well, I knew I hadn't; but when I went away
again I did. So, instead of running after me with that valuable
parcel, they have sent it flying to a friend of mine in Westminster."
Then he added rather sadly : ' I learnt that, too, from a poor fellow
in Hartlepool. He used to do it with handbags he stole at railway
stations, but he's in a monastery now. Oh, one gets to know, you
know," he added, rubbing his head again with the same sort of
desperate apology. " We can't help being priests. People come and
tell us these things." Flambeau tore a brown-paper parcel out of his
inner pocket and rent it in pieces. There was nothing but paper and
sticks of lead inside it. He sprang to his feet with a gigantic gesture,
and cried : * I don't believe you. I don't believe a bumpkin like you
could manage all that. I believe you've still got the stuff on you, and
if you don't give it up — why, we're all alone, and I'll take it by force
! " 'No," said Father Brown simply, and stood up also, ' you won't
take it by force. First, because 29
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN I really haven't still

got it. And, second, because we are not alone." Flambeau stopped in
his stride forward. " Behind that tree," said Father Brown, point ing, '
are two strong policemen and the greatest detective alive. How did
they come here, do you ask ? Why, I brought them, of course ! How
did I do it ? Why, I'll tell you if you like ! Lord bless you, we have to
know twenty such things when we work among the criminal classes
! Well, I wasn't sure you were a thief, and it would never do to make
a scandal against one of our own clergy. So I just tested you to see
if anything would make you show yourself. A man generally makes a
small scene if he finds salt in his coffee ; if he doesn't, he has some
reason for keeping quiet. I changed the salt and sugar, and you kept
quiet. A man generally objects if his bill is three times too big. If he
pays it, he has some motive for passing unnoticed. I altered your
bill, and you paid it." The world seemed waiting for Flambeau to leap
like a tiger. But he was held back as by a spell ; he was stunned with
the utmost curiosity. "Well,' went on Father Brown, with lumber ing
lucidity, " as you wouldn't leave any tracks for the police, of course
somebody had to. At every place we went to, I took care to do
something that would get us talked about for the rest of the day. I
didn't do much harm — a splashed wall, 30
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THE BLUE GROSS spilt apples, a broken window ; but I

saved the cross, as the cross will always be saved. It is at
Westminster by now. I rather wonder you didn't stop it with the
Donkey's Whistle.' "With the what? " asked Flambeau. "I'm glad
you've never heard of it,' said the priest, making a face. " It's a foul
thing. I'm sure you're too good a man for a Whistler. I couldn't have
countered it even with the Spots my self; I'm not strong enough in
the legs.' " What on earth are you talking about ? ' ' asked the other.
"Well, I did think you'd know the Spots," said Father Brown,
agreeably surprised. " Oh, you can't have gone so very wrong yet ! :
"How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" cried Flambeau. The
shadow of a smile crossed the round, simple face of his clerical
opponent. 'Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose," he said. ;
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but
hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil
? But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me
sure you weren't a priest." 'What? " asked the thief, almost gaping.
'You attacked reason," said Father Brown. " It's bad theology." And
even as he turned away to collect his property, the three policemen
came out from under 31
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN * the twilight trees.

Flambeau was an artist and a sportsman. He stepped back and
swept Valentin a great bow. 'Do not bow to me, mon ami,'' said
Valentin, with silver clearness. "Let us both bow to our master.' And
they both stood an instant uncovered, while the little Essex priest
blinked about for his umbrella.
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II THE SECRET GARDEN ARISTIDE VALENTIN, Chief of the

Paris Police, was late for his dinner, and some of his guests began to
arrive before him. These were, however, re assured by his
confidential servant, Ivan, the old man with a scar, and a face almost
as grey as his moustaches, who always sat at a table in the entrance
hall — a hall hung with weapons. Valen tin's house was perhaps as
peculiar and celebrated as its master. It was an old house, with high
walls and tall poplars almost overhanging the Seine; but the oddity
— and perhaps the police value — of its architecture was this : that
there was no ulti mate exit at all except through this front door,
which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury. The garden was large
and elaborate, and there were many exits from the house into the
garden. But there was no exit from the garden into the world
outside; all round it ran a tall, smooth, unscalable wall with special
spikes at the top ; no bad garden, perhaps, for a man to reflect in
whom some hun dred criminals had sworn to kill. As Ivan explained
to the guests, their host had telephoned that he was detained for
ten minutes. He was, in truth, making some last arrangements D 33
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THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN about executions and

such ugly things ; and though these duties were rootedly repulsive
to him, he always performed them with precision. Ruthless in the
pursuit of criminals, he was very mild about their punishment. Since
he had been supreme over French — and largely over European —
policial methods, his great influence had been honourably used for
the mitigation of sentences and the puri fication of prisons. He was
one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only
thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than
justice. When Valentin arrived he was already dressed in black
clothes and the red rosette — an elegant figure, his dark beard
already streaked with grey. He went straight through his house to his
study, which opened on the grounds behind. The garden door of it
was open, and after he had carefully locked his box in its official
place, he stood for a few seconds at the open door looking out upon
the garden. A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and
tatters of a storm, and Valentin re garded it with a wistfulness
unusual in such scien tific natures as his. Perhaps such scientific
natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremen dous
problem of their lives. From any such occult mood, at least, he
quickly recovered, for he knew he was late, and that his guests had
already begun to arrive. A glance at his drawing-room when he
entered it was enough to make certain that his 34
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THE SECRET GARDEN principal guest was not there, at any

rate. He saw all the other pillars of the little party ; he saw Lord
Galloway, the English Ambassador — a choleric old man with a
russet face like an apple, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter. He
saw Lady Gallo way, slim and threadlike, with silver hair and a face
sensitive and superior. He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham,
a pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair.
He saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and
with her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also. He saw Dr.
Simon, a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown
beard, and a forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are
the penalty of super ciliousness, since they come through constantly
elevating the eyebrows. He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex,
whom he had recently met in England. He saw — perhaps with more
interest than any of these — a tall man in uniform, who had bowed
to the Galloways without receiving any very hearty acknowledgment,
and who now ad vanced alone to pay his respects to his host. This
was Commandant O'Brien, of the French Foreign Legion. He was a
slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired,
and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an officer of that famous
regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides, he had an air
at once dashing and melan choly. He was by birth an Irish
gentleman, and 35
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.43%
accurate

THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN in boyhood had

known the Galloways — especially Margaret Graham. He had left his
country after some crash of debts, and now expressed his com plete
freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre
and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador's family, Lord and
Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away. But for
whatever old causes such people might be interested in each other,
their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No one
of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentfn
was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame,
whose friend ship he had secured during some of his great de
tective tours and triumphs in the United States. He was expecting
Julius K. Brayne, that multi millionaire whose colossal and even
crushing en dowments of small religions have occasioned so much
easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English
papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an
atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but' he was ready to
pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried
vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare
— a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more "progressive'
than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he 36
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.27%
accurate

THE SECRET GARDEN thought "progressive." He thought

Valentin "progressive," thereby doing him a grave in justice. The
solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive as a
dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us can claim,
that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge fellow,
as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without so
much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well
brushed back like a German's; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise
infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean.
Not long, however, did that salon merely stare at the celebrated
American ; his lateness had already become a domestic problem,
and he was sent with all speed into the dining-room with Lady
Galloway upon his arm. Except on one point the Galloways were
genial and casual enough. So long as Lady Margaret did not take the
arm of that adventurer O'Brien, her father was quite satisfied; and
she had not done so, she had decorously gone in with Dr. Simon.
Nevertheless, old Lord Galloway was restless and almost rude. He
was diplomatic enough during dinner, but when, over the cigars,
three of the younger men — Simon the doctor, Brown the priest, and
the detrimental O'Brien, the exile in a foreign uniform — all melted
away 37
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