The Centre of Things

Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present

Christopher Harvie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780044455936
• eBook ISBN: 9781134998234
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

`This is an excellent survey of the British political novel.' - Contemporary Review

1
The Conversation of People Who Counted

I

TOWARDS THE END of Trollope’s novel The Prime Minister (1876) the Duke of Omnium takes his cabinet colleague Phineas Finn to his favourite view on his estate of Matching. Omnium’s coalition government is falling apart; he is alienated from his ambitious and tactless wife; he will never be prime minister again. As they walk, the Duke haltingly explains his political philosophy to the young Irishman, who doesn’t much like it. The Duke talks about equality. He envisages a time when the condition of a future duke and that of his coachman will converge. Finn implies his dissent. ‘By equality?’ he asks. ‘The millennium’, answers the Duke, ‘…is so distant we need not even think of it as possible’; and Finn, who has painfully pulled himself up over six volumes from the doctor’s surgery of Killaloe, in the west of Ireland, to the Cabinet and marriage with a wealthy widow, can draw breath. ‘Equality would be a heaven, if we could obtain it’, the Duke continues, ‘How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of the country, and say that it is all as it ought to be?’ The Duke looks up into the clouds and, lost for words, sits down. ‘Equality is a dream. But sometimes one likes to dream—especially as there is no danger that Matching will fly away from me in a dream…’¹

I quote this episode because, although it’s a discussion of political ideology—and, indeed, an expertly ‘composed’ view of the well-heeled humanitarianism of the English ruling class, from Gladstone to Prince Charles—it can only be conveyed by fiction. The fumbling, fudging discourse of the Duke, the setting and the metaphors both for morally necessary social change and the possessions on which Omnium’s power depends, the scepticism of the younger career politician: all give a density and solidity far beyond conventional political writing. If we want to understand why the political theme has been so strong in English literature, this is the obvious place to start.

But is there a proper genre to be investigated? If there is, what does it consist of? Why is it important? Is this for intrinsic reasons, or because of the politics of its own production and reception? I believe the importance of the genre lies in its praxis: it merged ‘entertainment’ and ideology to produce a useful political discourse for a traditional society intent on social and economic change, and then, more capriciously, it commented on and provoked its increasingly eccentric development in the twentieth century. The genre’s success also depended on its being as complex as the social reality it had to explain; in other words, its apparent equipoise has stemmed from internal tensions being debated and, at least in earlier days, worked out.

The political novel was more than a commentary on the politics of its golden age, the epoch of Trollope and Disraeli; it was an important part of them. This duality has continued, in step with the decline of British civil society. In the 1980s, as imports from Europe, America and Japan decimated British manufacturing, and trade unions and Celtic nationalism threatened to pull the State apart, the weakness of British political imagination seemed basic to the failure to cope with new situations and problems.² The conventions which had once made for stability seemed now only capable of producing stasis.

At the same time this imperilment focused attention on what, precisely, those conventions had been. What codifications of political custom and usage had held the State together? And where did political fiction fit in? H.A.L.Fisher, historian, education minister under Lloyd George, and Virginia Woolf s cousin, defined the political novel in 1928 as ‘the novel which chiefly concerns itself with men and women engaged in contemporary political life and discussing contemporary political ideas’.³ Obviously this meant something more than political ideas or metaphors: a realistic treatment of parties, Parliament, the work of government— and the relationship of this to less overtly political things like religious and economic conflicts, public opinion and the media, industry, war and foreign policy. Even in Britain the occasional abstract idea, conveyed by treatise or by non-naturalistic fiction—Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example—might have to be admitted. Political fiction is a literary artefact, which deals with historical events and ethical quandaries, but a mirror in the Whitehall roadway cannot reflect a simple scene.

The British political novel has only incidentally been about the relationship of ideals to personal life and psychology, as in the great European novels of society from Le Rouge et le Noir to Anna Karenina or The Man without Qualities. When Doris Lessing complained in 1973 that ‘There isn’t one [British] novel that has the vigour and conflict of ideas in action that is in a good biography of William Morris’,⁴ she highlighted the importance in Britain of ‘institutional’ novels—political novels, university novels, spy novels—not of low quality but necessarily restricted in scope. E.M.Forster in Aspects of the Novel rejected such themes as a means of categorizing—denouncing this as ‘pseudo-criticism’—but the existence of these genres also seems to account for what he regarded as the marginality of the nineteenth-century English novel, when confronted with the monuments of Balzac, Turgenev or Tolstoy.⁵

Yet fiction was taken seriously by the political intelligentsia of Trollope’s day. Men such as Frederic Harrison, John Morley or James Bryce, who as reviewers, editors and publishers’ readers—a small élite linked by family relationship, profession and education—mediated between the legislature and law-courts and the ‘upper ten thousand’: the guardians of convention in a constitution-less state.⁶ This makes disentangling the significance of the corpus complex: relating the novels, their plots, characterization, and symbolism, not only to the biography of their creators, but also to their publication and reception and thus to their function in society. What follows is an attempt at a general topography whose major source cannot, alas, be reproduced here: a bibliography of political fiction that I started in 1984 and which had accumulated some 600 titles at the last count— ranging from classics to pulp, and at least indicating when activity in this area was particularly noticeable, and what sort of themes were being stressed at any given time.

II

The standard account of political fiction sees it evolving in the 1840s, and the central figure is Benjamin Disraeli, spelling out his political creed in the trilogy of Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred in 1844–7, and then dominating the Conservative Party for a further thirty-three years.⁷ Although Trollope hated him, Disraeli made relevant, in George Watson’s words, ‘a corpus of fiction unique in the world…in the simple prominence it confers on the parliamentary idea’.⁸ Watson was following the American scholar Maurice Edmund Speare who had published The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America in 1924, taking the political novel from the 1840s to H.G.Wells’s The New Machiavelli of 1911.⁹ According to Watson, such novels thrived only in a particular epoch:

Most of the novels considered here are about a parliamentary state… perhaps one-sixth of male adults had the right to vote…Democracy is among the issues raised…but it is not itself the background of assumption, and this fiction concerns itself rather with an elective and deliberative process for which ‘parliamentary’ seems the only name.¹⁰

Yet in 1973, while parliamentarianism was less than thriving, political fiction was pouring out, as novels, plays, films and television series. By 1984 the commemoration of George Orwell’s dystopia had to share publicity with Jeffrey Archer’s lucrative Westminster soap-opera First among Equals.

Whether Archer’s commercial success showed the health of the genre was another matter. It could be argued that in the 1980s there re-emerged a much more intimate and critical idea of politics, not just region- but class- or sex-specific. This could be linked to a parallel political culture which reflected more of a European bourgeois cast of mind, originating in the ‘Jacobin novelists’ of the 1790s and the ‘theoretical histories’ of the Scotsman John Galt, who applied Machiavelli’s ‘civic humanism’ to the parliamentary life in the first political novel tout court: The Member of 1832.¹¹ At no point did the ‘parliamentary novel’ totally supplant this ‘civic humanist’ tradition in political fiction. Indeed, the high Victorian period, Trollope’s epoch, substantially integrates it.

So we can say that: first, for over a century political fiction—from Galt and Disraeli via George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Trollope’s Palliser novels to Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career and H.G.Wells’s The New Machiavelli— was an important component in a constitution which, being unwritten, was peculiarly dependent on its political culture; second—and much less positively—the failure of these conventions to solve the economic and structural problems of British society after the First World War— the period in which Arnold Bennett’s Lord Raingo and Joyce Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim and Chester Nimmo trilogy are set—has been reflected in the dissolution of the genre: not a total collapse, but an eviction of those ‘considered’ and subtle literary treatments which once endorsed the general political structure.

Why, then, has political fiction been neglected? One problem is that the range and importance of the ideas and activities covered—controversial almost by definition—go beyond the novel to tap all sorts of literary communication: plays, short stories, dramatic poems, films, television and radio dramas. One story can appear in two or three modes, in different contexts, and with different results. Take Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? This started out as a play, became a novel, was broadcast and ultimately televised in 1973. Its setting changed from the French Revolution to the Victorian ruling class; but after a period when the notion ‘Trollope’ embodied a bluff confidence in the resilience of ‘the British way’ it made its greatest impact in the 1970s, when its solidity stood in stark contrast to a Britain riven by industrial action and chronic inflation—not all that far from what Trollope originally wanted to convey, back in 1850.

Is politics not also the wrong classifying factor in novels still dominated by the sequences of love, ‘from the first meeting of the eyes to bed’? Love-interest, Trollope for one continually tells us, is what makes the world of his novels go round. Yet all aspects of relationships between the sexes, from physical desire through idealistic inspiration to the ensnaring of heiresses and inheritances, play particular political rôles. The same could be said for ‘action’, dominant in one kind of political novel, the thriller, which has in fact been an ingredient from the earliest days.

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Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: THE CONVERSATION OF PEOPLE WHO COUNTED
• 2: THE LITERATURE OF CRISIS
• 3: THE TRIUMPH OF DISRAELI
• 4: LANDSCAPE WITH CANDIDATES
• 5: THE GOLDEN AGE: THE MID-VICTORIAN POLITICAL NOVEL
• 6: REVOLUTIONARIES AND ELITISTS, 1886–1914
• 7: IN TIME OF STRIFE, 1914–26
• 8: CLASS? NATION? COMMONWEALTH?
• 9: THE FALL AND RISE OF BRITISH POLITICAL FICTION