Before he made the big time as a fully fledged comic
novelist David Lodge was principally a literary critic who wrote the occasional
novel. When I was taught by him at Birmingham University his reputation rested
not on his four novels—Ginger You’re
Barmy, The Picturegoers, The British Museum is Falling Down, and Out of the Shelter, but on his doorstep-sized
anthology of literary theory and his books
and articles on mainstream twentieth century Catholic novelists.
Lodge’s article on the hardly known late Victorian novelist
Edmund Randolph, which I discovered in a copy of the Aylesford Review for Spring 1960, belongs to the period when he
regarded himself as primarily a writer on the history of Catholic novel, a
subject he had chosen for his M.A. dissertation at London University. This
research involved reading a number of ‘forgotten Catholic novelists‘of the nineteenth
century. Clearly, he had not been impressed by their quality:
‘…Between the waves of
the Oxford movement and the Decadence there lies a trough in which English
Catholic novelists produced little besides sentimental pietistic romances and
propagandist historical novels…’
Lodge argues that although Randolph himself was guilty of
some of the faults of his contemporaries in this field, his best novel, Mostly Fools; a Romance of Civilisation
(1886) deserves to be regarded as the ‘ the most impressive English Catholic
novel to appear between Newman’s Loss and
Gain (1848) and Mrs Wilfred’s Ward’s One Poor
Scruple (1899).’ This is a glowing recommendation
from a notoriously severe critic, but Lodge backs it up. Mostly Fools, he avers, is remarkable in that it is unafraid to
take on some of the glaring faults of the late Victorian Catholic church, which
Randolph felt was unwilling to ‘come to terms with nineteenth century thought,
in political, social, intellectual and scientific matters ‘, a viewpoint which,
according to Lodge, took considerable courage to express.
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| Roman Catholic College Kensington (now Heythrop College) |
The novel, whose hero, Roland Tudor, was a heroic projection
of Randolph himself, aimed satirical barbs at a number of Catholic
institutions. These included the religiously hidebound public schools of his
time personified in the author’s own alma
mater of Downside. Roland also ridicules one of Manning’s pet projects—the
Catholic University College in Kensington—which was established to give young
men of the faith a higher education that would shield them from the liberal and
sceptical influences of Oxford and Cambridge, but which ended in abject
failure. The Oxford Movement itself is criticised by Roland for not producing enough
capable Catholic laymen and by failing to recruit supporters from among the
working classes.
Disillusioned by his brushes with the modern Catholic
church, Roland marries and then obtains a commission in the British army but
becomes so bored that he emigrates to make a name for himself in the Carlist
wars, only to return home to his old regiment. The ludicrous picture he paints
of a bumbling, inefficient military system reminded Lodge of Evelyn Waugh’s
early novels. After a while, Roland resigns his commission and enters
Parliament as an Irish Nationalist candidate, but resigns when his ideals are
frustrated. At this point the action is set in the near future (around 1900).
Roland emigrates to South America, where by dint of an accelerated military
career which ends in him becoming a benevolent dictator, he decides that he
will ignore the clamour of the Church to return Protestant Europe to Catholicism
and instead establishes religious toleration in his own country. Not long
after, he dies during his return from the battlefield. Randolph himself passed
away in 1889, just three years after his novel appeared.
Lodge compared Randolph’s ‘paranoic fantasy’ to that of Frederick
Rolfe (Baron Corvo), although he felt that a more useful comparison might be made between Randolph
and Belloc, both of whom were Catholics who distrusted democratic systems. In
conclusion, Lodge felt that although Mostly Fools is vitiated by’ a dichotomy
between its satirical and romantic elements’, it remained a novel that ‘ should still command our interest and
admiration’. Unfortunately, fifty-five years later, Lodge’s reassessment
doesn’t appear to have revived any interest in either Randolph or his three
novels. Wikipedia has nothing to say on the author and only reprints are
available through Abehbooks.[
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