Gentlemen in England by A. N. Wilson

First published: 1985

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: 1880

Locale: Victorian England

Principal Characters:

• Horace Nettleship, a Victorian geology professor who has lost his faith in God and man
• Charlotte Nettleship, his troubled wife, who is searching for balance in the midst of family upheaval
• Maudie Nettleship, Horace and Charlotte’s daughter, who is coming of age without a compass
• Lionel Nettleship, Horace and Charlotte’s son, who is seeking a spiritual purpose in his life
• Tlmothy Lupton, a bohemian artist who inadvertently exposes the emptiness of the Nettleship home
• Waldo Chatterway, Charlotte s old friend, a social gadfly who helps arbitrate the family turmoil

The Novel

Geologist and volcano expert Horace Nettleship has long ago lost his inherited Christian faith; the world to him seems “an infinitely empty, infinitely extensible accident.” Unwilling to confront or debate her husband’s negative affirmation of faith, Charlotte retreats from him psychologically, consumed by the task of leaving “footsteps on the sands of time by embroidering cream-jug covers or writing letters, or managing the servants.”

They speak only in public, their lack of intimacy extending from the bedroom to the dinner table—where they converse only with their daughter, Maudie, and never with each other. Into this static household one morning comes the promise of release, or, at least, diversion; Maudie receives two letters: one from her brother, Lionel, who declares his desire to become a priest, and another from her godfather, Waldo Chatterway, who announces his return from self-imposed exile on the Continent.

When Waldo, or Marvo, “the marvelous bore,” arrives, he becomes the catalyst for a series of events which signal both the coming of age of Maudie and the spiritual maturity of Lionel. He brings with him not only a sprightly, unsettling worldliness unknown to this staid and barren home, but also Timothy Lupton, the living embodiment of unbridled sensuality and forbidden passion.

The remainder of this complex satire of the crumbling Victorian ethos evolves as a tragedy of errors which focuses on the further disintegration of the Nettleship marriage and the loss and recovery of innocence in the Nettleship children. Charlotte mistakenly interprets Lupton’s passion and attention as affection for her. Looking for sympathy and liberation, she earnestly confesses to Lupton, “when you are married, it is like living in a house where almost all the cupboards and rooms are locked up for ever.” Lupton, however, is infatuated with Maudie and finds Charlotte’s tragic pose and underlying sexuality “spiritually unbecoming,” since “naked passion . . . is something nightmarish and ugly.” Horace, meanwhile, rummaging inside and out for his lost manhood and fearing cuckoldry, rapes Charlotte in his futile search for renewal.

These events reveal to the Nettleship children for the first time how fractured and unnatural their family relationships have been, further convincing them of their need to remain devoted friends to each other. The narrative proceeds to its ironic conclusion as Horace falls down a flight of stairs, emblematic of his fall from grace, injuring his ankle; he is thus unable to accompany Charlotte and Maudie on holiday, a vacation designed to relieve the “sea-lion bark,” or consumptive cough that Maudie has developed. Thus resigned to fate, Charlotte sighs, “There is plenty to see, heaven knows, in England.” Lionel resolves to become a priest, his life now “subsumed in the farce of a broken ankle.”

In the novel’s last scene, one finds Maudie and Lionel on the proverbial Dover Beach, speculating about whether the tide is going out or coming in. It is coming in, they conclude, and as they “squeal with childish merriment,” they regain a kind of faith and achieve a kind of rebirth, retrieving a humanity that had been detached and trampled upon in the death of their parents’ marriage.

The Characters

Gentlemen in England depicts a post-Darwinian Britain which has lost its faith in a Supreme Being fully in control of His created universe. This loss is exemplified most dramatically in the lives of the geologist Horace Nettleship and the painter Timothy Lupton, but it is just as true of Charlotte Nettleship’s life.

Through his geological research, Horace, the unhappy atheist, has helped “shed the last vestiges of credence in Archbishop Ussher’s theory that the world had been fashioned at a precise date in 4004 b.c.e.” His speciality is volcanoes, but he confines his potency to his scholarship. An aunt “had told him at a formative age that it was injurious to the constitution if one’s back touched a chair,” hence he must never relax his guard or he might fall into a genuine and thus “improper” relationship with others.

Charlotte and Horace can find nothing to talk about for fifteen years, and when Nettleship eventually uncovers Charlotte’s buoyant but misspent desire for Timothy Lupton, he assaults her in an attempt at self-affirmation. Actions speak louder than words, and, in this case, such actions solemnly ratify Horace’s public break from faith of any sort. Lupton, who seemingly had no faith to lose, is apparently disgusted by Charlotte’s innocence in all this; the novel’s narrator comments, “only innocents commit adultery; of all sins it is the one which suggests the most optimistic capacity to alter the status quo. She actually thought her life could be improved!”

The result of this pervasive human apostasy is the death of marriage and the demise of the family as a stabilizing institution in society. Charlotte comes to represent a generation of daughters, mothers, and wives who lived lives of quiet desperation in touch with the world, if at all, only through their fathers, husbands, or children. She reminds herself, “We must make our pleasures at home,” and thereby resigns herself to a hollow, shadowy existence on the periphery of human life.

Critical Context

Gentleman in England is preceded in the Wilson canon by acclaimed novels, two of which, The Sweets of Pimlico (1977) and The Healing Art (1980), have won for him international literary prizes. Wilson is also the author of three well-received biographies of British men of letters and a monograph on Christianity, How Can We Know? (1985). The latter volume helps amplify Wilson’s clear intention to imbue his fiction with the haunting impact of religious faith or its absence upon British culture.

Gentlemen in England thus takes its place among these works as another of his carefully stylized inquiries into British sensibilities at the end of the twentieth century. Whether set in the present libertarian age or in the seemingly repressive Victorian period, Wilson’s texts aim to expose the thin veneer of unacknowledged nihilism within which contemporary culture operates.

In this, Wilson’s themes and styles of narrative often resemble those of such American writers as Saul Bellow and Walker Percy, and as well such British writers as Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. While neither as sober as Amis and Bellow, nor as comic as Waugh and Percy, Wilson stands beside them as a conservative advocate for restoring a moral, even religious, voice to modern letters.

Bibliography

Library Journal. Review. CXI (February 1, 1986), p. 95.

The New Republic. Review. CLXCI (March 17, 1986), pp. 37-38.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. XCI (March 9, 1986), p. 7.

Time. Review. CXXV (March 17, 1986), p. 81.

The Wall Street Journal. Review. CCVII (April 8, 1986), p. 28.