The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 by John Carey

Author:John Carey [Carey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This shaky reasoning might lead us to suppose that Osmond would discover, by the end of the novel, that he had gone wrong somewhere. Sure enough, his faith in art fails him in his hour of need, and he recovers his zeal on behalf of the downtrodden masses.59

Godwin Peak in Born in Exile is another deluded superman. He believes himself ‘an aristocrat of nature’s own making – one of the few highly favoured beings who, in despite of circumstance, are pinnacled above mankind’. The uneducated revolt him: ‘I hate them worse than the filthiest vermin. They ought to be swept off the face of the earth.’ But Godwin is a pathetic case. His whole life is a fraud. A working-class scholarship boy, he worms his way into the confidence of a rich family, hoping to marry their daughter. Union with a ‘perfectly refined’ woman of high birth has always been his dream. There is a revealing scene when he stands in a crowd in Hyde Park, watching two aristocratic women drive by in their carriage. He feels, in himself, their fineness and their scorn for the herd.

They were his equals, those ladies; merely his equals. With such as they he should by right of nature associate … In his rebellion, he could not hate them. He hated the malodorous rabble who stared insolently at them and who envied their immeasurable remoteness.

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