This is Sybil, the daughter of Walter Gerard, who is to lead the Chartists. Sybil is a
religious sister, and a source of spiritual wisdom. The speaker who has just
instructed young Egremont on the economic actualities of contemporary English
society is a political journalist, a friend of Walter Gerard, and in love with his daugh-
ter. Walter Gerard ideally represents the People. Sybil, though she seems rather a
free-range nun, represents the wisdom of the Church. The novel ends with Sybil
agreeing to marry Egremont, who represents the future of England.
Disraeli’s myth of English history gives prominence to the former role of the
Church in securing what is the only ‘duty of power: the social welfare of the PEOPLE’.
The social provision made by the medieval church is not a theme of Carlyle, nor of
Ruskin. Cobbett and Pugin had preceded Disraeli in attacking the Dissolution of the
Monasteries. Walter Gerard describes the Dissolution as ‘worse than the Norman
conquest; nor has England ever lost this character of ravage ....’ ‘Ah!’ said Gerard, ‘if
we could only have the Church on our side, as in the good old days, we would soon
put an end to the demon tyranny of Capital.’
Such claims as these, made by Disraeli’s spokesmen for ‘the PEOPLE’, may surprise
readers who know of him only that he was the first Jew either to lead the
Conservative Party or to become Prime Minister. But Benjamin Disraeli had been
baptized into and remained a member of the Church of England. Though written at
hectic speed, and wildly unpredictable in plot and in quality, Disraeli’s novels
contain brilliant analyses of politicians (especially in his late novel,Lothair, 1870).
His witty analyses of the life of high society were later to be imitated by Oscar Wilde
and Evelyn Waugh.
***For the sake of clarity, the cornucopia of Victorian fiction is treated author by
author, at the expense of chronology, interrelation, context. Dickens coincidentally
published his first novel in the year of Victoria’s accession. Although the Brontë
sister s wrote ten years later, they are treated first, not in chronological order. Their
nove ls are closer to the genres of Romantic poetry than to the realism of the main-
stream novel; fantasy and family are more relevant to their work than the currents
ofnational histor y. This also allows Mrs Gaskell, Dickens and Thackeray, who are
closer to historical developments, to be taken together.
Two Brontë novels
Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) tells this family story of misery and
splendour, dwelling on the misery. The eldest Brontë sister, impresario, editor and
survivor, impressed first, and her Jane Eyre is a first-person autobiography of
emotive, narrative, and at times mythic power. The orphan heroine suffers, is tried
many times, and triumphs. We are to feel for and with her; insofar as we are asked
to judge, she acts rightly. She opposes the misuse of authority, whether by an aunt, a
clergyman, an employer or an admirer. She puts conscience before love, refusing to
become Rochester’s mistress and declining marriage to a clergyman less interested
in her than the support she would give his mission. She returns to a Rochester now
free to marry, and in need. Jane deserves her final happiness, whereas the plucky
young protagonists who win through in Dickens’s novels are lucky as well as good.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 287