A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

6. A World of Men

 &6 A World of Men An Elegy for Clubbability A fellow must live his own life. —man of the world Montague Dartie in Galsworthy, The Man of Property Masterful at shaping narrative structure, John Galsworthy knew precisely where to begin The Forsyte Saga (1922): a chronicle of a family can start at no better place than at home, with an “at home” at old Jolyon’s Stanhope Gate in celebration of his granddaughter June’s engagement to the architect Philip Bosinney. This trilogy (The Man of Property [1906], In Chancery [1920], and To Let [1921], published as a single volume in 1922 as The Forsyte Saga) takes its first step by halting the reader, arresting the eye upon a family portrait, as the Forsytes gather to pose for an introductory tableau. The opening sentence directs us: “Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage” (15). Indeed, the Forsytes do enjoy Victorian London’s highest rank within the prosperous middle class; they are its microcosm, “so clear a reproduction of society in miniature” (15). They prove to be London’s investors and collectors , figureheads of British capitalism and its late-stage form, imperialism, in the trilogy’s second volume, In Chancery. Bound by their familial traditions and strong sense of self, the Forsytes are the personification of what Galsworthy in his 1922 preface calls “that tribal instinct,” with the man of property, Soames Forsyte, leading their pack. Fastidiously protective of this a room of his own  & flame of tribalism, the complacent Soames flourishes, empowered as he is by the corporate, familial ego. He is the most welcomed guest at his uncle Timothy’s, an emporium or bourse of family gossip, and one who enjoys great currency, we are told, on the “Forsyte ’Change.” It quickly becomes clear that family itself is the most precious form of property in the book, as embodied in the monolithic figure of Aunt Ann: “her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea” (16). Yet amid the visual majesty of the family in its “feathers and frocks,” “light gloves [and] buff waistcoats” (15), the saga’s opening page offers sufficient detail to unsettle the reader. For despite the privilege this tribe enjoys, The Forsyte Saga unravels as a chronicle of familial decline (the microcosm) from 1886 to 1920, capturing the struggles of Britain (the macrocosm) as it undergoes the transition from late-Victorianism to modernism. Galsworthy’s homage to the Forsytes strikes the reader for the ugliness of its language: like the tree to which Galsworthy compares it, this family flourishes “with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity” (16). Furthermore, Galsworthy uses this opening tableau to place in motion the odd temporality that characterizes the entire chronicle: this snapshot moment of Forsyte eminence sets up an ekphrastic image only then to counter it.1 Galsworthy makes the familial dynasty seem mercilessly fleeting, whether through his delimiting of the moment of eminence—“June 15, 1886, about four in the afternoon”—or through his use of the subjunctive, with its implied indifference to the observer once deemed privileged to be present who is now a figure that chances to see or not—“the observer who chanced to be present . . . might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes” (15). The apex then becomes a vanishing , and the clan an absent presence. In this genealogy that reads more like a postmortem, the Forsytes begin their family history as a doomed family, whether emblematized in old Jolyon’s clock, which “kept with its ticking a jealous record of the seconds slipping away for ever from its old master” (32), or marked through the precious loss of old Jolyon’s grandson and namesake, the piquantly named Jolly, in the Boer War—the boy who was to have represented the beginning of the twentieth century, to “open the ball of the new century,” according to his father (446). As it unfolds, the plot continues to gather its momentum from an odd source: capturing its characters’ experiences in aging, offering up a sequence of deaths as the old Forsytes die off in what Galsworthy memorably calls “a dissolving Progress” (preface, 7). A World of Men: An Elegy for Clubbability  & No wonder then that, however much at home he is in the first chapter, old...