Humors | Gentlemen in England

By Paul Gray

With such novels as Wise Virgin (1983) and Scandal, or Priscilla's Kindness (1984), English Author A.N. Wilson has won increasing renown as a satirist in the classic mode, a chronicler of lofty ideals and comic, mortal diminutions. His name has been mentioned in the same breath with that of Evelyn Waugh; comparisons to Barbara Pym have not been lacking. Readers aware of Wilson's reputation will naturally turn to Gentlemen in England expecting some laughs and intelligent fun. They will not be disappointed, but they may be surprised by the range of humors that arise in the course of the tale.

The setting, at first, seems fabricated solely for farce. The place is London, the year is 1880; high Victorian earnestness rules the day, and people with funny names start assembling onstage. Waldo Chatterway, a society gossip who has spent the past 25 years cultivating the "tall poppies" of Continental royalty, decides to move back to his native London for good. He visits his longtime friend Severus Egg, "the last of the romantic poets," who retains a malicious wit and the conviction, in his mid-70s, that "I have survived into the era of the goody-goodies." Egg, naturally, has a black valet and factotum named Bacon.

The old man also possesses a daughter named Charlotte, 39, who has been married some 20 years to Horace Nettleship, a dry-as-dust geologist 15 years older than his increasingly unhappy wife. Horace's long research into volcanic lava has convinced him "that Creation has been a more ponderously slow and haphazard process than was suggested by the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis." The resultant loss of his faith in Christianity has left Horace painfully vulnerable to other blows. Bad enough that Charlotte has not spoken to him during the past 15 years of their marriage. Now his son Lionel writes from Oxford that he wishes to become an Anglican priest. And Chatterway's reappearance, as an old friend of his wife's side of the family, has further disrupted Nettleship's domestic routine. The scandalmonger comes calling, along with Egg and a young artist who has been working on the old poet's portrait. Horace does not like to see his womenfolk, particularly his beloved daughter Maudie, 16, in such raffish company. So he does the only sensible thing and forbids wife and child to receive the gossip and painter at home again.

With this edict, Wilson sets in motion an exquisite comedy of errors. Clandestine meetings become necessary, with the following results: the painter, Timothy Lupton, falls in love with Maudie, while her mother decides that this dashed handsome young bohemian's attentions are directed at her. Added to this mix-up are cameo appearances by Victorian notables like Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Huxley. But beneath this sparkling surface roil undercurrents of genuine pain. Nettleship, a figure of fun in all his balding, pedantic outward manifestations, knows himself well enough to realize that he has botched his life and that the gloom he suffered when he could no longer believe in God "earned him the hatred of both his children." His wife Charlotte is scarcely less pathetic, as she stares "down the wrecked vista of all the wasted years in which she had been Mrs. Nettleship" and throws herself at a younger man wholly indifferent to her.

When he subjects his characters to such moments of self-realization, Wilson, 36, edges across the boundary between satire and tragedy. It is amusing to watch fictional figures break rules or fall short of standards that they do not know exist. When such people understand both what is expected of them and how they have failed, laughter fades. With all its historical trappings and incidental humor, Gentlemen in England is a serious reminder of a time when life and responsibilities truly mattered.