Politics and the Gargerys (Paperback or Softback)

Malcolm Gargery and his friend Tom Hesketh, now married to Pip’s daughter Hannah, become deeply involved in national politics by campaigning to become MPs, and both are elected to Parliament in 1906. Political ambition demands continuing reflection on ability, motive and experience. Ability is a given for these men and both find motive not in individual gain, but in a commitment to service enhanced individually by Malcolm’s time investigating conditions in the British concentration camps during the Boer War and Tom’s work on the Trust’s estate in Ireland. Experience is still to be gained in a fraught environment.

For the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902 marked the beginning of an era of immense political turbulence. Unions had begun to reshape management-labor relations, especially in the mines, with strike action a major weapon. The demand for votes for women was yet to reach a crescendo, dogged by internal disputes over militancy. With the Liberals’ crushing electoral victory in 1906, the power exercised by the House of Lords would become a constitutional crisis. Abroad, the shock of Japan’s naval victory over Russia prompted questions about how to sustain the dominance of the British navy at sea, and the conduct of foreign policy in the aftermath of the Boer War. And then there was Ireland.

Paths for men to influence politics are familiar, but for women in this era, every endeavor is set within their second-class status as citizens. In the face of male intransigence, militancy becomes the central argument in the suffragist movement and its supporters. Meantime women can pursue public causes, as did Florence Nightingale. Angharad Llewellyn, married first to the love child of Abel Magwitch, the old convict, uses her wealth to help families of miners following the many calamitous pit disasters, especially in South Wales.

The experiences of women in this final book of the Gargery Trilogy find a strange illustration in the authority of a woman in a séance as a spiritualist medium, which gained some popularity after the Queen sought to engage with the spirit of her dead husband. Consensual divorce was not legally possible, leading to bizarre fake adulteries gleaned from a night in a hotel for the man, but legal separation often meant release and freedom for a woman. How women were brought up was especially critical in their lives. Illustrated here is the striking contrast between a grandmother who when young was the cause of a lynching in the American South and her grand-daughter encouraged by her mother to explore physical love before marriage.

As this book is about politics, a few of the major actors of the time appear including David Lloyd George, Augustine Birrell, Winston Churchill, The Marquis of Salisbury, Arthur Balfour and Emily Hobhouse, and Dr. Hutchinson in the Rye by-election. Their expression of political or social views here are representative of their recorded opinions, and, in the case of Lloyd George, his reputation as a philanderer.

This was also an era of inventions, but only gradual medical progress: The King’s coronation was delayed by his having the first operation for appendicitis. The automobile arrived just in time for large cities like London to find out how to deal with the burgeoning need for mechanical transport, rather than feeding 50,000 horses, and clearing their manure off the highways. Trains were in general reliable but were subject to inexperience leading to numerous accidents with many fatalities.

Yet there in the midst of the hustle and bustle of dramatic social change are the descendants of that wonderful character Dickens portrayed for our admiration – Joe Gargery, the country blacksmith. He would have had difficulty in imagining the complex lives of his son and his grandchildren and the breadth of their social circle and experiences, although he would have considered much of their experiences as a lark.