Wheeler's Progress

THE MUDLARK (305 pp.)--Theodore Bonnet--Doubleday ($3).

For late summer days the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen this breezy tale about a seven-year-old ragamuffin who wandered into Queen Victoria's dining room one evening, and thereby briefly set the Empire on its ear. Since it appears that something like this did happen once upon a time, Author Bonnet's job in The Mudlark was to fluff up the fact into a light historical novel. This, with the help of a lot of imaginary speeches and caperings by the Queen, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, he has done well enough.

Little Wheeler, who started the whole thing, was a "mudlark" who worked the Thames for the leavings of the tides. He didn't know much, but one of the things he knew was that the Queen was the mother of her country; motherless Master Wheeler made up his mind to see her. So past the Windsor Castle guards he slipped one foggy November night, into the castle yard, and then, startlingly, down into an open coalhole. When the grimy urchin eventually groped his way upstairs and surprised the Queen at her dinner table, she forgot her composure sufficiently to shout "Great Heavens!"

Was it a regicide conspiracy? Poor little Wheeler was grilled at length to discover if it was. Rumors spread that he was really a dwarf, or a scout for a gang of thieves, or "a Certain Gentleman's idiot bastard that had been shut up in the Devil's Tower since birth and had escaped after braining his keeper..."

Castle officials trembled before the wrath of their superiors, who also trembled before the blows of the press and the demands of the public, all intent on discovering the plot behind Wheeler. When Scotland Yard's best inspector reported that Wheeler was little more than a curious small boy, the inspector was told to look again. Wheeler himself suffered untold indignities: examinations, denunciations, investigations, and once even a bath.

It took Disraeli to put an end to the nonsense. In a brilliant speech in the House of Commons, he exonerated Wheeler, elevated him to the rank of a momentary national hero, and incidentally maneuvered Gladstone into looking like a blackhearted oppressor of the poor. Disraeli, it appears, shared Novelist Bonnet's notion that Wheeler was chiefly a pretty good little symbol of the 1876 "lower classes"--grimy but devoted to the Queen.

There is just enough ingenuity in The Mudlark's conception and skill in its writing to sustain a fine long story. Author Bonnet has chosen to pad it outrageously in order to fill the regulation-size novel. The book suffers as a result, but it is pleasant enough for an afternoon of hammock reading.

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