Commonplace 186 George & Demos (Again) PART ONE
Today, we Brits (well, us lot who have the vote) go to the polls to decide to either Remain or Leave the European Union. I am confident we will vote to Remain. Why? Because, as demonstrated so eloquently in WWII, we Brits are not a nation of quitters. And, because the sometimes apathetic working class, socially engineered to feel powerless by a ruling class determined to keep them ignorant, will rise up, get off its arse, switch off the tv, put down the lager bottle, and march to the polling stations to ensure its Human Rights are not removed. A vote to Leave plays directly into the hands of our despotic rulers, amounting to a coup designed to bring on a silent revolution against the interests of the working class and poor. The primary function of any political party is to counter the effects of want, before any other agenda rises up. Sadly, we nowadays have returned to the scaremongering of the 1930s, and racism is once more centre-stage on the political hustings. As we saw in the twentieth century, the poor can be manipulated into conflict by those determined to divide and conquer and ultimately dominate, the working class, that most valuable resource of any economy and nation. We must resist the tyranny of the rich and support each other by sticking together, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or skin tone - or nationality. As ever, the fight for freedom from any form of oppression starts with a war against poverty.
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| Rosa Luxembourg daughter of the Revolution click |
It's at times like these (and entirely for the purposes of this blog post) that I stop and ask: 'What would George do?' Would he vote to Leave or Remain? To save the suspense, I suspect he would vote to Leave. He was a modern thinker in terms of literature, and he deplored blind nationalism, but his Conservative mindset would have prevailed, and he would have agreed with those who think Britain should remain aloof, and continue to think of itself as an elite. In his later years, he had grown too cynical to have faith in any agency but his own power of mind, but in his youth, for a brief time, George followed the path of Socialism. He was not a conspicuous political animal, but his father had been somewhat left of centre in matters of local politics back home in Wakefield, so maybe George felt he was honour-bound to appear to make a contribution to a cause. He attended meetings and explained himself in correspondence with his brothers, and tried to convince himself that Socialism was the best path, but it all fizzled out. George was never what you might term a 'joiner' of anything that did not serve his ambitions, or reflect well on his curriculum vitae, and he did not support any cause in particular, save that of his own self-service. Perhaps he saw that the battle lines had finally been drawn - the rich versus the poor - and he didn't want to end up on the wrong side, because most social revolutions tend towards meeting out harsh treatment to collaborators on the losing side.
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John Tenniel's cartoon published in Punch. Tenniel also illustrated Alice In Wonderland and
Alice Through The looking Glass click. The battle was between party leaders Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone - Tories versus Liberals. |
In George's day, very few British people had the vote. The Reform Act of 1867 was a milestone as it introduced the right to vote for some of the male working class - those wealthy enough and in careers stable enough to enable them to be home owners and thus, rate payers. But the Act's lack of precision meant it was still a many-flawed piece of legislature, open to exploitation by unscrupulous politicians. No-one knew if there would be anarchy following the implementation of the Act in a time when monarchy was not popular (Victoria was in deep mourning for her consort and had withdrawn from public life) and Revolution was in the air. In fact, the Act let down the ordinary person because it introduced the need for politicians to pick a side (previously, parties had worked together) and then spend vast amounts of money on campaigning, thus excluding the poorer classes from putting themselves up for candidature. However, it produced a surge in numbers eligible to vote, almost trebling in the fist ten years of the Act. George was a potential rate payer, so would have had the right to vote if he had ever owned a house or a flat of his own.
Demos is George's 1886 novel about Socialism and the vileness of the working class when compared to the holiness of the genteel middle class. Actually, many of George's books include his thoughts on the dreadfulness of the poorer classes, but Demos sets out to put any notions that the working class could ever be elevated to an order of gentility themselves firmly into place as a socialistic pipe-dream enjoyed by well-to-do enlightened folks - like William Morris - who lived in a world of unreality fuelled by wealth and privilege. For more about the novel see Commonplaces 12 &13.
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Mary Harris Jones co-founder of the Wobblies -
the Industrial Workers of the World group click. |
Demos is one of my favourite George novels, because it reveals the author's real self as a backward-looking snob and passive aggressive paranoid Tory. He doesn't bring us imagined biographies of complex, fully-formed characters: he provides us with taxonomies of stereotypical types classified to demonstrate his strongly-held point of view. The whole thing is annoyingly didactic and shallow in its understanding of psychology - it is definitely no Crime and Punishment!! It seems unable to make its mind up about what it wants to be remembered for - too many subplots, is one of my memories haha - but it moves along at a brisk pace, which must have been a boon if you were reading the three volume edition hot off the press. But George is not reaching out to a readership of the oppressed; he wants to speak to those in power, to reassure them the working class couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery because 1) they are incapable of working selflessly for a common goal; 2) they are essentially venal and would drink all the beer; 3) the natural order would prevail and the rich would win in the end. It is an ambitious work, and because it is his third novel, it is still full of bits of authentic George, before he covered over his soul and turned into that odious creep, Henry Ryecroft.
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| The Belgian Revolution by the splendidly-named Egide Charles Gustave Wappers 1834 |
In Demos, everyone is pulled in to serve a purpose - the trophy bride bought as much as wooed; the scheming mother intent on arranging a good marriage; the dumped, innately saintly true love who really believes love means letting his woman go, the ambitious worker with an intriguing, entrepreneurial, skill-set but a hole where his moral compass should be; the dumped girlfriend with the heart of gold; the flighty girl seduced then broken like a butterfly on a wheel by being too free with her favours; the middle class girl whose inner grace is tested but always rises to the occasion; the common man a shallow step up from the beasts always returning to type at the drop of a hat; the undeserving baddie inheriting riches he is not entitled to at the expense of the man who should have them; the innate, lack of integrity at the dishonest heart of the common man (skating on thin ice for an author who'd done porridge with hard labour for stealing haha); the mob intent on mayhem for no good purpose; the stupid grasping nature of the poor; the amalgamated mass of meat that is the lumpen proletariat; the jealousy of the grasping have-nots intent on dragging their betters down into the mire; the violence held deep inside the average man's heart; the chance of redemption only possible through death, or religious conversion, or public humiliation... Demos has all of this, and more. It's Dallas and The Forsyte Saga and King Vidor's movie The Crowd all rolled into one soupy tale where the hero gets offed for no good reason and the wrong people prosper. Inevitably, the moral tones of the thing drag it down to the floor, but there are luminous moments - such as the famous 'Manor Park Cemetery' scene.
JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE THAT.
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