3 - The Violence at the Heart of the Social Problem Novel

Summary

Among the ways in which North’s City of the Jugglers refuses to conform to the expectations of period fiction is its approbation of an escalating series of collective actions by the citizens of London. Easiest for its imagined nineteenth-century readers, among them fellow journalists and novelists, to accept, perhaps, would have been the “glorious conspiracy of talent against capital” engineered by Viridor and Darian at their unstratified social gala (240). The resulting unanimous strike by the metropolis’s professional “journalists of all grades, editors, sub-editors, compilers, financiers, reporters, and even penny-a-liners,” brings all London business to a halt for a full day before “revolutioniz[ing]” every newspaper and journal in the capital except the “leviathan Timeserver [which] began gradually to diminish” (238, 241, 241). Viridor’s successful election to parliament occurs one month after the subsequent “great political battle … between the House of Commons and the Press” has forced the fall of the government, and, although it remains within the franchise limits set by the First Reform Act, his victory is, itself, a sign of the strength of the people (241). Even though “every five-pound note was in favour of the Plutocrat,” and Viridor’s campaign refuses to bribe his unspecified constituency’s electors, he wins “by a majority of nine, the number of the muses” (242). The evening after Viridor’s election witnesses a general rising of London’s population, during which “the mob … joined, either openly or secretly … [by] the greater number of the middle classes … rushed and surged, and recoiled, in the principal thoroughfares of the capital” (244). Although Viridor and Darian rescue the Soul Agent from incipient lynching, pacify the crowd, and avert a violent overnight revolution –Grey’s financial backer, Brown, does have “the misfortune to the hanged from a lamp-post on Blackfriars Bridge” (247) –the novel emphatically reserves a place for collective action by the nation’s un-and under-enfranchised majority. The “violent opposition” raised in Parliament to Viridor’s bill for universal male suffrage is overcome with help from the “choral eloquence” of fifty thousand supporters stationed outside Westminster Hall (247).