A VICTORIAN CLASSIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 14

A VICTORIAN CLASSIC

JOSEPH VANCE, by William De Morgan; the World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, English price 8/6. OSEPH VANCE is a novel which was once immensely popular, and which has perhaps been unduly neglected of late: its reappearance in the most pleasantly-produced series of English reprints may win it a new generation of readers. First published in 1906, when its author was already 67, this remains a very Victorian book in its setting and colouring, and in its amplitude. The opening is Dickensian: the heroic. encounter of Christopher Vance and Peter Gunn, "the buttin’ Sweep," is justly celebrated; later, when the boy Joseph has passed through the middle-class mill of public school and university, we seem nearer the milieu of Thackeray: the mature experiences of an engineerinventor carry us Over to the threshold of the new world of H. G. Wells. Despite some mild excursions on temperance and modern finance, this remains a personal rather than a social novel. It has two notable portraits of women: and if the great renunciation of Joseph Vance-who sacrifices half his life to spare the feelings of his beloved

Lossie for the memory of a worthless younger brother-seems almost impossibly high-minded, the treatment skilfully avoids melodrama. This is a rich and satisfying novel, a little cumbrous in its technique (contemporary writers are defter with time-sequences) and elementary in its psychology, but strong on character, A. C. Ward contributes a useful and judicious introduction.

J.

B.