The Conscience of the Rich

I like British postwar fiction, and among its more celebrated examples CP Snow’s – he of the “two cultures” thing – Strangers and Brothers series of eleven novels seemed like it might appeal. So I decided to read them – but not in order of publication, in order of internal chronology. The Conscience Of The Rich is the third book in the series, but was written and published seventh. It’s the late 1920s, Lewis Eliot has moved to London and joined an inn of court, under Herbert Getliffe. He meets a fellow trainee barrister, Charles March, the eldest son of a wealthy Jewish family, and is slowly drawn into their fold. Eliot is there when Charles gives up the law for medicine; and when he decides to marry a distant cousin with show more ties to the communists, Eliot is also there. Much of the novel is taken up with the March family’s domestic crises – not just Charles’s career and marriage, but also his sister’s marriage to a gentile, Getliffe’s younger brother. The two sort of come together in the final third of the book, in the late 1930s, when some shady dealing by barrister Getliffe seems to incriminate the March family patriarch, a Whitehall mandarin and Charles’s uncle, and a communist-backed magazine to which Charles’s wife contributes intends to publish details of it all. There’s a considered, and mannered, voice to Snow’s prose, more evident I felt in this novel than the earlier two I’ve read, and while the plot is not exactly gripping, the characters are well-drawn and engaging, and the whole is an interesting window on an earlier time. show less

The Conscience of the Rich places Lewis Eliot in his habitual outsider role - in this case to a set of rich British Jews in the 1930s. This is a sympathetic portrait, if perhaps a little cliched - the March family, of rich banking stock, are very assimilated but at the same time outsiders, marrying in and out of the faith, seemingly little touched by the rise of Hitler, engaged with communism and capitalism and at the same time the rhythms of upper class british life, within which the March family keeps to its own patterns and ways of being. An interesting book, but the series is never less than an interesting insight into many different lives in the first half of the last century, and is sometimes more. There are moments of real power show more here, and the interest is well sustained. show less

1889 The Conscience of the Rich, by C. P. Snow (read 6 Dec 1984) This is the seventh novel in Snow's 11-volume novel series, but the second in the time sequence. It tells of Charles March and his brother Leonard March. Lewis Eliot--"I" in the book--is a friend of Charles and tells of the conflict between Leonard and his children.