IN LONDON TOWN.*
IF the author of this story had called it In Bloomsbury, there would have been more reason in the title. There is largeness and latitude, promise and possibility, all of the vaguest kind, about the name she has given her novel ; while the action of it
is in reality narrow, extending to but a few persons, and com- prising, so far as London Town is concerned, only a small portion of the British Museum and a lodging-house in its We are reminded by the first paragraphs of the beginning of a clever though extravagant novel by Mrs. Trollope, called Love and Jealousy, in which the writer hazarded what at that time was the daring assertion that all widows are not necessarily to be pitied or inevitably broken-hearted. Sentimentalism was still having a good time when Mrs. Trollope was writing those pleasant books which, as we learn from her son, were all produced after she was fifty : the voice of Haynes Bayley was still heard in the land. The happily-released young widow was a courageous novelty, but it succeeded ; now the lady who is " a doosid deal better off without" the Colonel, or the Major, or Jack So-and-So, is a familiar feature of the society novel. Here she is amusingly treated by the author of In London Town :—
" David Everest was the only son of a widowed mother, who, how- ever, was not altogether to be pitied, on account of her widowhood. Colonel Everest had certainly done his best to make his decease bearable to his wife, by making her life spent with him as unbearable as debt, indifference, and drinking could make it. He had not been a good husband, but, nevertheless, she made him an excellent widow, and did her duty by his memory as ably as she had exceeded her duty in her endeavours to lecture him into a better state of behaviour."
There is a touch of real humour in " she made him an excel- lent widow," and it excites a hope that there may be more of the same as we get on. On the whole, this hope is not fulfilled ; there is a good deal that is amusing in the story ; but there is much more that means and tries to be amusing, but is not, so that the result is in that particular disappointing. The author fails to distinguish between the positively and the relatively funny. Her Miss Hatclaard, a kindly charitable spinster, who earns her living by the humbler processes of art, and lives in the Bloomsbury lodging-house which is the principal scene of the story, is not made the more interesting by her exaggerated vul- garity. She is a Miss La Creevy of a bolder sort, and when she ex- presses her opinion of the conduct of Mr. Thorold, the father of
• In London Town. By Katharine Lee. London: Bentley and Son.
Fiammetta, a pretty young lodger who sits as a model to Miss Hatchard, and is the heroine of the story, the reader is reminded of Miss La Creevy's denunciation of Ralph Nickleby :-
" If I had that there father of hers," said Miss Hatchard to her- self, as sbe flourished the knife with which she was cutting bread and butter, " I'd—rd—dunno what I wonld'nt do to 'im. Keeping that 'ere fine girl hanging around, with no meat, and no clothes, nor no nothink, and all because of his fads and fancies. Oh my, if I had the fashioning of 'im !' And Miss Hatchard sliced off a tremendous round of bread, as if it had been the offending Mr. Thorold's bead."
This is very like the paper-knife that Miss La Creevy would have liked to run into Ralph Nickleby, and Miss Hatchard is described almost in Dickens's words :—" Perhaps in all London there was not a busier, brighter, more helpful, contented, under- paid, little woman." The would-be comic Mr. Fowler has a family likeness to Traddles, and is much better without his stutter, of which the writer kindly cures him at an early stage of our acquaintance with him.
Although the author, by a certain forced friskiness of style, reminds us of Miss Mowcher's "Ain't I volatile P" to an extent that is worrying, we are obliged to her for writing a story about middle-class people with at least a suggestion of work, worth, heart, and meaning in their lives. We are so unspeakably weary of the contemptible people and the sickening lives depicted by the ladies who write fashionable novels, that we heartily wel- come this quite unfashionable fiction, with no balls, boudoirs, brandies and sodas, dubious situations, or society slang in it, and from whose pages the Algies, Bellies, and Monties,—more odious than the ruffianly demigods of a preceding school of fiction, because they are more unmanly—are absent. In some instances the author is very successful in drawing character. Mrs. Everest, the Rev. Theophilus Burney her brother, and Fanny, the com- mon-place cousin with a good fortune, whom the obstinate David will not marry, although the arrangement is manifestly so good as to lead his mother to believe that not only herself but Providence has designed it, are real and living ; more so, we think, than either David or Fiammetta. We do not care much for the excellent David ; he is too imperturbably of his own way of thinking; he is a prig—of an uncommon sort, indeed, but still a prig—and is needlessly underbred; but we recognise with pleasure a successful attempt on the author's part to convey worth and principle, and an acceptable departure from beaten tracks in his regard. The reason for Fiammetta's being represented as entirely without a religion of any kind, we fail to perceive. She is not made more attractive by being perfectly ignorant on that sub- ject, and it is difficult to realise that such ignorance could really exist under the circumstances and with the surroundings of her life ; while it is not necessary to explain the one terrible tempta-
tion to which she yields. The nature of this temptation it is not our intention to disclose ; the reader will be deeply inter- ested in the discovery of it ; but it might have come as forcibly
to the girl if she had had the vague and loose-sitting religious ideas of the people about her. A point of that sort, unless it is made very forcibly, weakens the effect it is intended to strengthen. The author ought either to have made more of Fiammetta's savage ignorance of the Christian religion, or left it out of account altogether.
The pleasant qualities of this novel are originality,—for although we have met with persons in both life and books like those whom we meet here, the combinations are original,—hearty sympathy with work and suffering, and a keen sense of the ridiculous (for which see Miss Markham, an attendant on lectures who outdoes " the matron in blue, Mrs. Jefferson Brick ").
Finally, it is an interesting story, well sustained.
The charm of the impulsive, high-minded, hot-tempered Fiammetta is skilfully conveyed, although we know all the time that she would be a very uncomfortable, if not impossible, per- son in real life ; but the achievement of the book, the one thing which gives it a clear claim to more than passing mention —the full due of two-thirds of the novels of the day—is the story of Thorold, Fiammetta's father, the man with a craze, as ruinous as that of Barnard Palissy, but absolutely baseless to boot. This episode, the central one of the story, is of marked excellence.
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