money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is
discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by
handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one
representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in
the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp
practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the
licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded
Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of
Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound
whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much
chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a
good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things
very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the
serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his
mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that
he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is
impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray
was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some
years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George
Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are
even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr.
Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and
"Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and
uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,
original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with
something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her
unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her
pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years
before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]