Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days, and getting at last returned to Parliament by a constituency who paid his expenses.

Middlemarch

The 'hopefulness' being 'much checked in our days' speaks the caution of 1867 as against the enthusiasm of 1832. But Ernest Jones could have done with Will Ladislaw's luck. If Ladislaw's connections with a 'good family' had been hopelessly vitiated by a parentage involving foreign and thus dubious, blood, Jones was well connected and wholly English, although born and brought up abroad. Jones's father served in the household of the Duke of Cumberland, Ernst Augustus, later King of Hanover, and he spent his youth near Hamburg and went to school in Lüneburg. In short he was, like Will, an exotic, and played to the fact. More important, he had been educated, to the limit of his father's shabby genteel means, in the German Romantics. He was also, in youth, extremely handsome and could have slipped comfortably into any number of Victorian novels.

LRB 6 November 2003 | PDF Download