RECENT NOVELS.*
Au who have had the good fortune to read Mrs. Trafford's former work, " Too Much Alone," will understand that it is no small praise we bestow on her last effort when we say that if it do not exalt her literary reputation, it will at least sustain her right to hold a very high position among contemporary novelists. In one respect she stands almost, if not quite alone, upon ground but vaguely known to most male writers of fiction, and known not at all to any of their sisters in art except herself and Miss Martineau, who is not a novel- ist though she might be. Mrs. Trafford does not debar herself from the right of making occasional excursions into Belgravia, or into the country even as far as Cumberland, but she fixes her head-quarters in the City or its manufacturing environs, and there she plants her people, and bids them become part and parcel of that wondrous struggle for wealth, an existence which has not its parallel in any other spot on the face of the globe. Other writers have looked upon the bewildering spectacle from without, and caught by snatches some of its more salient features, some of its isolated elements; she alone appears to have been in the thick of the turmoil, and to have ac- tpured a living knowledge of its multitudinous chances, as well as of the laws by which they are evolved and determined. Landsmen may introduce sailors into their novels, and not misrepresent them very grossly, provided they be discreet enough not to attempt too much, but a sterling sea novel can only be written by a thorough seaman. It would be equally impossible for any one who did not combine with great literary capacity an intimate knowledge of business details, and of the habits, feelings, and fortunes of business men, to produce such a novel as either of the two for which we are indebted to Mrs. Trafford. Her plan in both has been to take for her central figure a man of inventive genius and great force of character—a manufacturing che- mist, or an engineer—and set him down single-handed to achieve success in despite of enormous difficulties, which sometimes become aggravated by his own errors ofjudgment. Passion sometimes mis- leads him, and for all his faults he is punished through his domestic affections, for on that side he is intensely sensitive, though stubborn as granite to endure the buffetings of fortune. Pride of birth was Alan Ruthven's darling sin, as it had been that of the ruined house of which he was the eldest survivor, and its intensity in him was demoniacal. It was not wholly bad, for in part it was a manly pride, * City and suburb. By F. G. Trafford, Author of "Too Mush Alone," So. In three volumes. Skeet. that did not withhold his hand from any task which he could perform by his own unaided strength, but what made it a curse to its pos- sessor was its anti-social virulence. "There is a pride," says the author, "which is not vanity, nor assumption, nor insolence, but misery—that from which every Sunday we pray the Lord to deliver us, and which. rears its giant head against God himself, and is beaten and trodden down by the Almighty into the dust, so that the man's soul may live." As we do not choose to rob the reader of any part of the pleasure that awaits him in the perusal of the story, we leave it to his own imagination to surmise what chastisements may befal a pride like this in the person of a poor man, unknown and friendless, with a profession to make in the City of London, and with four per- sons dependent on his exertions—a young brother, two sisters, and a ward, the daughter of his father's steward, whose fortune has been engulphed in the common ruin. This ward is the heroine of the novel, but of her we shall only say that if not " a perfect woman" she was yet " nobly planned," that she was tenderly and steadfastly attached to the Ruthven family, was the true and trusted friend of Alan, whom she did not lov,e, in the spe- cial sense of the word, and who " would as soon have thought of proposing to the Monument" as to ha Trenham. It may seem com- paratively an easy task to depict two such characters, each so in- tensely positive, as ha and Alan, but it is something marvellous to be able to invest with more than momentary interest a creature so lovely in person and so fascinating in manner, but in all else so mere a piece of moonshine upon mist, as Alan's eldest sister, Ruby. " She was just one of those tiresome women who make the best of everything till they weary of it : and if she had been shipwrecked on some distant island, she would first have shrieked till she had no voice left, and then have fascinated the chief of the tribe and played at being queen till she tired of her lord and her subjects, when she would have compassed heaven and earth to get off in the first vessel, the sail of which she saw against the horizon." Imagine Ruby presiding at the Mansion-house as Lady Mayoress, turning the heads of the whole corporation, and making game of them to their faces. " She was a girl a sensible man might have been drawn into marrying, and cursed his own folly afterwards for doing so. Beguiled by her apparent pliability, a lover would possibly have indulged in visions of moulding and studying her character, and found out after marriage that she was as capable of `formation' as a sandbank, that he might as well think of leading a will-o'-the-wisp as Ruby, that whatever sense, and knowledge, and feelings God had given her, were so twisted that they only served to make her more inconsistent and difficult to understand."
To sum up our opinion of this novel, we find in it remarkable freshness and force, both of conception and expresion ; a simple but sufficient plot, the details of which come forth in a natural manner out of the inward condition and outward circumstances of a few well- defined and consistently developed characters, whilst the scene of action is one of surpassing national interest, and yet almost a terra incognita in novels. Possessing as it does, all these distinguishing merits, we cannot but think City and Suburb entitled to high rank in its class, but we do not hold it in equal esteem with its predecessor, Too Much Alone. Its interest is neither so various nor so profound; the secondary characters are much more slightly sketched, and we feel no such concern about their fortunes as we did about those of the young commission agent and his wife; above all we cannot sympathize so freely with Alan or even with Ina as we did with the genial couple whom we know so well in the old chemical factory near Eastcheap.
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