The Gay-Dombeys: A Novel
By . With a Preface by . New York: The Macmillan Company. 1919. 12mo, 397 pp. $2.00.
THE GAY-DOMBEYS is not so much a novel as a ‘document.’ The ancestors of its characters are certain of the personæ in Dickens’s novels, notably Dombey and Son; but I the literary ancestor of its author is not so much Dickens as Samuel Butler. What Butler’s posthumous masterpiece. The Way of All Flesh, did for — and to the Victorian family system, that, or something like it, The Gay-Dombeys does for the Colonial and Foreign offices in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the period when Great Britain was gaining and consolidating her African empire. The book is made up of generous, somewhat shapeless fragments of Victorian life, embodied in letters, diaries, diatribes, gossip, reports, reminiscences, and plain narration, all agglomerated rather than composed into a story. The life of the English upper classes during the time treated is considered in a miscellany of aspects domestic, political, literary, journalistic, dramatic, theological, æsthetic, scientific, philanthropic, faddish — by an author who is a blend of wit,
man of the world, sociologist, raconteur, scientist, savant, and enfant terrible. But what most gives the book centrality is its record of the career of Eustace Morven, British administrator and explorer in Africa, a man who, as the story suggests, has chosen Africa for his mistress. Morven sinks his whole life in furthering the humaner and more civilizing aims of imperialism, and in fighting mere crude exploitation; he makes himself by a quarter-century’s experience a sound authority on African problems; he lives his life without political axes to grind or narrowly personal ends to serve; and when at length he has reached his point of greatest potential usefulness to the colonial policy of his government, at the cost of all that men commonly live for, he, the trained specialist, is thrust aside with airy casualness and left to begin his career anew in the vulgar sound and fury of an English Parliamentary election. This man’s career, unfolding against the complex background of Victorian life, and especially against those combinations of muddle, greed, ability, and occasional good sense, which were the Colonial and Foreign offices, makes the book.
From it emerge two distinct ideas, reiterated throughout in one shape or another.
First, it is constantly suggested that the blindness and bewilderment of England’s colonial and foreign policies in one century had something to do with the occurrence of the Great War in the next, and also with England’s lack of mental and physical preparedness.
Secondly, it is urged by precept and horrible example, as in Mr. Wells’s recent books, that England develop a system of public education which shall measurably fit her budding imperialists to be something better than amiable ornaments of diplomatic society and complacent agents of exploitation. Like the Paul Dombey of his story, he sees the need of ’forcing on the intention of our Government the supreme importance of Botany, Ethnology, Anthropology, Zoölogy, Entomology, Ornithology, Ichthyology, Egyptology, Modern Languages and Modern History, Geography, and Pathology in the schedule of subjects to be taught intelligibly at our Public Schools and Universities.’ W. E.