| <Saturday Review 19 January 1867: Stephen>
| <Christie’s Faith>
| This is a novel of very varying merit; part of it is almost 
| down to the lowest circulating library level, and part of it is 
| really excellent. There is enough of the last quality to entitle 
| it to respectful treatment from its critics; for it may be hoped 
| that a writer who can occasionally do so well, and who 
| takes so much pains, may learn to employ his talents a 
| little more skilfully. At present, he mixes good and bad at 
| random, and seems to be as proud of the crudest daubs as 
| of genuine studies from nature. The strongest point of <hi> 
| Christie’s Faith, </hi> as of previous novels by the same 
| author, is the description of low London life. It is rather 
| singular that this mine should have been so little worked, 
| considering that it lies under the very noses of the main 
| army of English novelists. The few who have touched upon 
| it have generally done so in the spirit of Mr. Dickens; they 
| produce the impression that London streets must be a 
| museum of oddities, each distinguished by some queer 
| eccentricity, and known by some previously unheard-of 
| name. Such descriptions remind one of the old-fashioned 
| collections of <p> “curiosities,” </p> with trees in the shape 
| of animals or stones resembling works of art, where freaks 
| of nature are preferred to good typical examples of a 
| species. And yet the life which is swarming all round us is 
| certainly deserving of more serious study for artistic 
| purposes. It does not present us so much that is 
| picturesque externally as the provincial idiosyncrasies in 
| which most novelists delight; but, for a writer who can 
| afford to dispense with brogues and costumes and bits of 
| local custom, the cockney is really a far more interesting 
| animal than the simple-minded or, in other words, grossly 
| stupid peasant. he has more wits, more variety in his life, 
| and more both of the comic and tragic element; as was 
| admirably expounded to Alton Locke by old Sandy 
| Mackaye. It is, or should be, a great thing for a novelist to 
| find a scene where murder and robbery, and every variety 
| of crime and passion, are highly probable incidents; where 
| the villain may be starved, and the hero sumptuously 
| rewarded, without any far-fetched expedients; and which is 
| yet near enough to us all for its truthfulness to be 
| recognised. Few writers take the trouble to gain more than 
| a very superficial and external glimpse of such a region. 
| The author of <hi> Christie’s Faith, </hi> however, has the 
| rare merit of painting London blackguards and 
| semi-blackguards, and the strata immediately above them, from 
| the life, and with considerable skill. The main heroes of the 
| present story are two brothers, brought up in the streets by a 
| father who has gone utterly to the bad. An old night-watchman
| in a warehouse; his daughter, who makes a 
| living as a sempstress; his son, who is a skilled mechanic; 
| and this son’s daughter, the Christie who gives her name 
| to the novel, are the actors next in importance; and they all 
| talk the true cockney slang, and take the genuine cockney 
| view of life. The plot, moreover, is simple, and is well 
| contrived to bring out the characteristics of the persons 
| concerned. The two brothers have an aunt in a superior 
| station, who gives one of them a chance of rising; he is a 
| sharp fellow naturally, and manages to climb upwards, 
| though trampling very severely upon his unlucky relatives 
| in the process. The other brother, who is helped by the 
| mechanic, turns out much better. he undergoes a great 
| many trials, suffers from false suspicions produced by his 
| previous evil connections, submits to them in a heroic spirit, 
| till, after due allowance of evil fortune, he is ultimately the 
| means of bringing his brother and his aunt to a more 
| Christian frame of mind, and is rewarded with overflowing 
| poetic justice by marrying Miss Christie Wynn, winning the 
| gratitude and admiration of all who had cruelly 
| misunderstood him, and being dismissed to live very 
| happily every afterwards. Teddy Fernwell, the name of this 
| hero, although, like most heroes, rather too faultless, is, 
| unlike most heroes, interesting in spite of his virtues. His 
| scandalous old father, and various supplementary 
| characters who revolve around him, are excellently 
| adapted for their several purposes. Some of the scenes in 
| which they figure deserve very high praise indeed.
| So far, the, we can very sincerely commend both the plot 
| and the characters; but we now come to the defects, which 
| are almost equally conspicuous with the merits. The 
| strongest part of the writing consists in the realistic 
| descriptions of a peculiar phase of life. When the author 
| attempts to introduce more lofty sentiments, he generally 
| strikes a false note; he moralizes in a strain which reminds 
| us by turns of the sentiments summed up in the touching 
| poem “Turn again, Whittington,” of Mr. Dicken’s very 
| mildest tap of eloquence, and of the sermons of a 
| Scripture-reader. We are all to be very good and very kind, 
| and not to rob our master’s till, and we may ultimately rise 
| to be Lord Mayors of London. We are treated to such 
| aphorisms as the following, in the course of casual 
| conversation: ~~ <q> </q> <reg orig=“Every one”> 
| Everyone </reg> recognises the ring of such philosophy. 
| The insipid morality might be endurable; but a far worse 
| blemish is produced by the attempt to introduce 
| fashionable life. The author convinces us, by the care 
| which he takes in describing the rich lady of fashion, Mrs. 
| Henwood, that he fancies himself as well able to deal with 
| persons in the higher ranks of life as with burglars, casuals, 
| watchmen, or marquetarie-workers. he consequently 
| plagues us with a mere phantasm and her daughter, who 
| move about among the real flesh-and-blood characters 
| with painful unreality, and who take up an unreasonable 
| amount of room, considering the palpable fact that they 
| never did nor could exist. They are sketched, not so much 
| in caricature, as with a sort of random and uncertain aim, 
| which sometimes produces caricature, and is sometimes 
| simply feeble. The fine lady is introduced to us upon the 
| deck of a steamboat, where her proceedings are intended 
| to give us a vivid picture of her foibles. We are told that she 
| has been waiting six weeks for fine weather at Boulogne, 
| and complains that the day is a little rough, on the ground 
| that she had booked herself for a fine day as well as for the 
| passage. We see at once that this is the fine lady of 
| popular fiction. She has no heart, is sick of the pomps and 
| vanities of the world, though unable to live herself above 
| them, and spends most of her time in painting her face. 
| She is the person frequently mentioned in tracts, and in the 
| sermons of youthful curates. The conversation and the 
| small details by which she is described are inaccurate and 
| feeble; but, even if they could be justified, the matter would 
| not be mended. We see that the author is merely copying a 
| conventional figure, not making a study from life; and, in 
| contrast with the really vivid descriptions of the lower 
| sphere, this shadowy glimpse into the upper world of 
| society annoys us by its flimsiness. If Mrs. Henwood had 
| been modestly kept in the background, we need not have 
| complained; we must put up, even in Shakspeare, with a 
| certain number of Nyms and Bardolphs to fill up the space 
| left by Falstaff and Prince Henry. But here the weakest 
| personage is put into the most conspicuous part of the 
| scene; everything turns upon her character, and she is 
| evidently a favourite creation of the author. Thus, one of 
| the great points of the novel is that Mrs. Henwood 
| suddenly makes an offer of marriage to the skilled 
| mechanic. We will not say that this is unnatural; ladies of 
| fashion do odd things sometimes, though it is not very 
| often that they make offers to skilled mechanics; and a 
| novelist is fully justified in introducing this or any other 
| eccentricity into this story. He must, however, to do it 
| successfully, observe one very obvious condition, which 
| novelists too often neglect. When we hear of such a story 
| in real life, it interests us because we know that, having 
| happened, it must have had some cause. When we are 
| told of it in a novel, there is always the alternative that it did 
| not happen at all, and was merely invented by the novelist 
| to serve a purpose. It is one chief aim of a good novelist to 
| prevent this alternative from ever occurring to our minds. 
| Hence, when he introduces a very strange event, he 
| should carefully prepare for it, and suggest some possible 
| explanation. It does not justify him to allege, even if he can 
| allege with truth, that such things have happened in real 
| life. He is bound to make it credible and intelligible to us 
| how they happened, or the unreality of his story, instead of 
| being concealed, will be obtrusively forced upon our notice. 
| A great writer might have exhibited Mrs. Henwood’s 
| character to us in such a way as to make such an 
| extraordinary proceeding perfectly credible, and even the 
| natural thing under the circumstances; but then we should 
| have been rendered familiar with some peculiarities of her 
| character. Before the shock was administered to our belief, 
| we should have been prepared for it by seeing that she 
| was very original, or very impulsive, or very sentimental. 
| But the author of <hi> Christie’s Faith </hi> shows us a 
| mere thing made up of paint and fine gowns ~~ and these 
| of a very doubtful reality ~~ and after she has 
| systematically behaved in a selfish and commonplace way, 
| makes her take this sudden and most startling step. if we 
| were reading a true story, we should look about for some 
| explanation; as it is, there is an explanation only too ready, 
| that Mrs. Henwood never existed, and that the author has 
| made her do a very absurd thing in order to point a very 
| feeble moral. Because a lady who is a mere creature of the 
| imagination makes an offer to an imaginary mechanic, it 
| does not prove, as apparently it is meant to prove, that 
| persons of fashion are heartless and frivolous, and will 
| grow so tired of heartless frivolity that they will be ready to 
| marry the working-man of fiction; it only proves that it is 
| very easy to make a creature of the imagination do 
| anything you please. Mrs. Henwood might as well have cut 
| Martin Wynn’s throat with her parasol, or made him 
| Archbishop of Canterbury, or done anything else purely 
| impossible. The only effect is to destroy our pleasure in the 
| story for the time, and to leave us unaffected by the 
| morality.
| This desire to establish certain morals of a tolerably 
| obvious nature is another blemish which the author would 
| do well to consider, and which is produced by the same 
| sort of blunder. The worldly brother climbs to a 
| considerable position by his energy and acuteness. he 
| becomes the head of an important firm; and in real life he 
| would probably have succeeded in becoming a millionaire, 
| as he had made many thousand pounds by his wits before 
| he was thirty, having started from the streets. Now a real 
| moral might have been incidentally conveyed by showing 
| that, after all, his brother, who was more honest and 
| unselfish, lived a nobler and, rightly viewed, a more 
| attractive kind f live. But the author is not satisfied with this 
| sound, if not very new, morality. The selfish brother must 
| be punished. Accordingly, his desire of wealth induces him 
| to overwork himself. His selfishness would have thoroughly 
| succeeded if it had been a trifle more intelligent. The effect 
| of the catastrophe, as related, is simply to make us feel 
| that the selfish man is a puppet, and that the moral is 
| absurd; for Providence does not always strike selfish men 
| with paralysis. if the author would be content to carry out 
| his realistic treatment systematically ~~ to describe 
| characters with which he is familiar, and those only, and to 
| depict life as he sees it, and not as it would be if all men 
| had their deserts ~~ he might achieve a far more 
| satisfactory success and preach quite as good morality.
|