Well, a weekend in Cambridge was bound to see an outbreak of book buying, although I was really quite restrained, squandering only £5.50 on three books. I have the excellent G. Donald in St. Edward’s Passage to thank for my finds, which included an early edition of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Lady Rose’s Daughter for just 50p. First published in 1903, it sold 20,000 copies in the first month, and went on to net Mrs Humph around £500,000. John Sutherland has dismissed it as a “mélange of high melodrama and silver forkery”, but for me, the subtle anti-women’s suffrage theme lends it literary interest. The author thought that women should quietly express their political views in domestic environments, subtly influencing their men folk, rather than actually having the vote. Her opposition became much more vocal in her later fiction.
Fanny Trollope
Another Victorian woman writer with strong views was Fanny Trollope, and I was very pleased to find a copy of her 1839 novel, Michael Armstrong. It is credited with being the first industrial novel, and is essentially a tract in favour of the Ten Hours Bill, a piece of legislation designed to limit the exploitation of child labour in the factories. As in Jessie Phillips, Trollope’s novel that deals with the inequities of the Poor Laws, the reader is shown how the old system of paternalism and philanthropy is unequal to the task of solving the ills caused by rampaging industrialisation and capitalism.
Lastly, I bagged a copy of Wilkie Collins’ final novel, The Legacy of Cain (1888). I must confess to never having heard of it, despite having read many of his novels, so it’ll be interesting to see how it compares with his more famous works. The blurb leads me to expect an exploration of heredity and the idea of “bad blood”, and I’m wondering whether it influenced Mary Braddon’s later novel Thou Art the Man (1894), which deals with similar themes.
I shall report back in due course, once I’ve got into the swing of writing about books, rather than just buying and reading them.
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