The Wednesday morning Keele ‘Continuing and Professional Education’ class today featured The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Hard going to read this for me, but rewarding on looking back at and through it with the group. I decided Howells – or at least as evidenced in this book – was a bit of a leftie, if not even an armchair Marxist. This last paragraph from the book seems to convey the conditions/consciousness dialectic of Marxism, as Silas reflects on whether he has any regrets: “About what I done? Well, it don’t always seem as if I done it…Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it. I don’t know… as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.” An excellent study of social class, with observations through his characters’ actions and thoughts that are as recognisable in today’s society as they evidently were in the Boston of the 1880s.
Too long, many thought, but this may be a function of such works being first published in serialised form.