Gallichan, Blight of Respectability

Geoffrey Mortimer, from The Blight of Respectability: An Anatomy of the Disease and a Theory of Curative Treatment. Watford: The University Press 1897.

[“Geoffrey Mortimer” was the pseudonym of Walter Matthes Gallichan (1861-1946), a busy journalist and miscellaneous author who turned his pen to anything that might make a saleable book. He wrote on subjects as various as trout fishing, tourist guides to Spain, popular psychology and sex education.]

[From Chapter 8 “Villadom”]

[W]e have no option, many of us; we have to live in Villadom at some time or another in our lives. Thackeray, Guy de Maupassant, George Gissing, and George Moore have given us some clever studies of the kind of folk who live in these genteel residences in the suburbs. …

Villadom cares nothing for naturalness, nor liberty of opinion and conduct; and, unconscious of the madness of its severe conventionality, it deems those insane who cultivate ideas and try to live up to them. What! Is there one man in ten in this great sheep-pen who would like to be seen blacking his own boots or sweeping the snow from the front of his house? No, they prefer to ill-pay some man’s daughter to do all their irksome and dirty work. What does Villadom read, talk of, and think upon? The fathers read the newspapers, the mothers and daughters peruse John Halifax,[1] and such like literature of the Pap-boat and Pumplighter sort;[2] and the talk is of money, the neighbours, and the back-parlour window curtains and carpets—all good themes enough in their season, but not the only things in life of vast importance. The denizens of Villadom tell you that they have their livings to earn, dinners to cook, and houses to control; therefore there is no time for cultivating their intellects, and developing their sense of the beautiful in nature and art. No time! It is the old plea of the men and women who squander hours in tittle-tattle and loafing. Gerald Massey, a barge-man’s son, and a fag in a factory;[3] Elihu Burritt, a blacksmith;[4] Thomas Edward, a shoemaker;[5] Walt Whitman, a compositor;[6] Bradlaugh, a soldier, and afterwards a clerk;[7] James Hosken, a postman,[8] not to mention a hundred other hard-working men, found time to read, and think, and improve themselves. It is the will, and not the leisure, that is lacking in Villadom, the will to be something better than mere Respectables in the eyes of society.

The foppery and frippery of Villadom are miserable outlets for human energy. If this is the end of civilised beings, give me rather the wildest life of primitive barbarians, for they, at least, wish to learn higher arts of living. No past civilisation presents this picture of Philistine apathy to the nobler interests of life. (88-92)

[1] John Halifax, Gentleman (1856): a morally improving novel by Dinah Mullock, whose hero rises from nowhere to become a “gentleman” by sheer industry.

^[2] A pap-boat was a utensil for feeding baby food to infants. “Pumplighter” is obscure: possibly an abusive term for temperance advocates.

[3] Massey (1828-1907) was a Chartist, poet and spiritualist: George Eliot is said to have based her novel Felix Holt on his career.

[4] Burritt (1810-1879) was known as the “learned blacksmith” because of his skills as a linguist.

[5] Edward (1814-1886) was a self-taught writer on natural history.

[6] Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the famous American poet.

[7] Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), controversialist, birth-control pioneer and MP, notorious for his atheism.

[8] Hosken (1798-1885), was a pioneer of steam navigation who rose to be a vice-admiral.