THE BANE OF A LIFE.*
Tuns is a " working-man's novel," written, we are told, at the suggestion of friends of the author, who considered that his wide experience, not personal or accidental only, but derived from systematic inquiry, of the inner life of his own class, would specially fit him for the task of illustrating it in a work of fiction. Mr. Wright, whose title of " The Journeyman Engineer " we assume to be more than a mere nom de plume, has already written several works descriptive of working-men's habits, customs, and mode of life ; but this, we believe, is his first essay in the orthodox form of a three-volume novel. And, carrying out his main idea, he has made it, in the strictest sense of the word, a working-man's novel, and nothing else. It is true that the interest of the story turns, to a great extent, upon the supposed differences in social grade exist- ing between different members of the great working-man family, but the man who corresponds to the aristocratic villain in penny stories is a working-man whose flashy dress and smart conversation have been acquired by a connection with the provincial stage ; and the heroine, whose social graces and dash have made her the object of the envy of all her compeers, is a working milliner. So the intending reader need have no fear of meeting with any rubbishy, composite romance of high and low life ; all is really and truly concerning working-men and their • The Bane of a Life. A Novel. By Thomas Wright C The Journeyman Engi- neer.") 3 vole. London Isitialoy, 1070, habits only. The author has even abstained from directly intro- ducing the masters-and-men difficulty as an element in his story. We are not, on the whole, quite sure that he was .wise in choosing to view the working-class world as thus entirely self-con- tained in Japanese-like isolation,—certain it is that it is acted and reacted upon by other classes lying immediately in contact with it to an extent far greater than Mr. Wright would lead one to suppose. But he has evidently had his reasons for adopting his plan, and has adhered to it, while he assures the reader that his story is " more than merely founded upon facts," and that his characters are all drawn from life. He has worked-in "scenes of an artizan's home life" into a "novel of purpose." What that purpose is, is not too clearly manifest, except in so far as it is intended to show that if a clever, conceited, over-ambitious, and somewhat unscrupulous working-man marries a handsome, vain, selfish, extravagant milliner's apprentice, spoiled by the admiration of her class, dressy out of doors and slatternly at home, the pair will inevitably come to grief. The general moral here conveyed is one which, mutatis mutandis, is practically pointed every day in every class of society, and in every description of law court. It is only in its special application to the circumstances of a certain class that Mr. Wright's claim to " a purpose" can be founded.
Of one thing at least Mr. Wright cannot be fairly accused, and that is an attempt to present the classes amongst which his story is laid in too favourable a light. On the contrary, although he credits one or two of his characters with qualities of the most estimable nature, displayed under most trying circumstances, it is impossible not to feel that at heart he evidently considers his true vocation to be that of a censor morunz in a particular line, and a satirist of the fashionable follies and weaknesses, so to speak, of a particular class. To be considered the Thackeray of the artizan elite would probably be an object of ambition very near to his heart. But he is not a master of the art of satire, and constantly falls into one of the two evils of simple tedious- ness or unpleasant cynicism. We can quite understand that an artizan of the higher class, when " cleaned up " for the evening, as on Sundays, feels a legitimate pride in his personal appearance and the becoming character of his apparel ; but we are not pre- pared to believe that it occupies his mind to the extent Mr. Wright would have us think, to judge by his continual description of So- and-So's views of what correct "evening dress should be," or his contempt for somebody else's theory on the subject. On this point Mr. Wright contrives to be both tedious and malignant at once. No doubt social heartburnings and jealousies do exist amongst the working-classes as well as amongst any other, but the prominence given by Mr. Wright to the question of somebody being above or beneath somebody else would lead one to believe that the working- classes of any particular locality resembled that celebrated English county town in which there are said to be thirteen distinct strata of society, each one separated from those immediately above or below it by impassable lines of demarcation. We know also what are the temptations and besetting sins of a quick, ambitious work- man, with a superficial and unequal education, and a belief in his own capacity for leading or managing his fellows. But Mr. Wright's portrait of such a character, though far from destitute of some sharp and fair hitting, is in many respects nothing but clumsy caricature. As for the womankind of Mr. Wright's story, we should indeed commiserate the English artizan if his choice of a wife were, indeed, limited to young women such as those described as " Bentley's young ladies," or " needle-drivers," with their dressiness and slanginess, and their evident belief that the one object in life is to -ape the manners and customs of the worst kind of girl of the period, as presented in the glaring colours of cheap serial works of fiction. True, we are favoured with one specimen of a better kind ; but if " Queen Kate," " The Dauntless Three," "The Prima Donna," and their friends are really types of the people whom aspiring workmen con- sider it a boon to marry, we really don't see what an artizan has to be thankful for in not belonging to the upper ten thousand, and having to seek a wife in the heartless and frivolous saloons of Belgravia. And yet Dlr. Wright represents the mere idea of an introduction to the society of such divinities as calculated to shake the nerves even of the most self-reliant and accomplished workman. In fact, servile imitation of the social follies and meannesses of the upper classes would appear to be the prevailing characteristics of the working- classes, were we to take Mr. Wright sine grano, which, we are happy to say, we don't. Apart, too, from the individual instances of his story, he assures us that so keen is the craving for social success amongst the classes to whom he refers, that it is no uncommon thing for the sons and daughters of working-people
who are moving in a different sphere from that of their humbler parents, to make " the article of non-recognition in public" a sternly-insisted upon condition, without which all relations whatever with the vulgar and unnatural parent are repudiated. The genteel " needle-driver " would think it in- jurious to her chance of making a good match to be addressed in the street by her mother the laundress, and the son would shrink from the ridicule which his fashionable companions would shower upon him in a similar case. In some cases, according to Mr. Wright, this state of things is acquiesced in by the parents through a blind hero-worship of their offspring, or through a feeling that while beaten in the fight themselves, they long to see their children succeed, unfettered by degrading domestic associations. But in other cases, Mr. Wright assures us it is enforced by no less bar- barous logic than that of threats and physical force. Mr. Wright has put his finger on an evil which undoubtedly exists amongst the working-class,—are all others free from it? But that he is too hasty in generalization we cannot doubt. In fact, perhaps, merely through heaviness of touch, he has converted what was meant as a salutary condemnation of an evil into a wholesale libel en a class.
Of course one could not expect Mr. Wright to fulfil his task without a savage assault on the social "natural enemies" of the working-m'an,--shopkeepers and their assistants. The French epitaph, " Born a man ; died a grocer," affords ex- quisite pleasure to one of his characters ; and another, while faintly defending the class assailed, can go no further than to say that he "doesn't believe in the extreme doctrine that a counter-jumper is only half a man, except when he has been made ferocious by having butcher's meat." Poor "young men" ! 4' -Guy Livingstone" somewhere or other devotes a page or two of contemptuous scorn to describing a party of them crossing the Channel, with one of his heroes, picked men, " than whom hand .alii leviore salts took the counter in their stride "; and here we have the mechanics of a railway-shop treating them with scarcely greater consideration. To whom are they to look for sympathy ? As a story, Mr. Wright's first attempt can scarcely be called a success, though the crisis, in which the rising artizan is driven by his wife's giddiness into despair, and by her extravagance into embezzling the funds of a trade society, is far from wanting in power. Should he attempt another, we trust he will take a some- what wider and deeper view of the special characteristics of his class, and not dwell so incessantly upon certain of their petty foibles. His style is fair, and he is not without notions of dramatic effect ; but satire is too fine a weapon for him to handle, and he lacks the power of knowing when to stop in pursuing a subject. But for all that, though general readers may declare The Bane of a Life to be tiresome and unpleasant, and though working- men will not be wanting to declare it, not altogether without justice, an odious libel on themselves, there is enough in it to show that Mr. Wright has the power, if he would use it properly, to write a u-working-man's novel" that might be at once interesting and instructive.
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