The Late George Apley [antikvár]

When I first read The Late George Apley in college a quarter of a century ago, I filed it in the category of satiric novels that exposed the foibles of members of a society which had long since passed away—and a good thing, too. This was the time before the Second World War when young men believed that the casting away of class privilege would bring about a brave new society. In George Apley and all that he represented, we found a convenient whipping boy. Here was a man whose world was limited to Boston and its environs: Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Milton, and Cambridge. Here, we felt, was a smug, complacent, self-satisfied world, cut off from reality, unconscious of the great forces of modern times, clinging to "a creed outworn." When I reread the novel recently, I was surprised to find my former ideas about the work returning but at the same time I was conscious of their shallowness. To be sure, George Apley is often a ridiculous figure, a bigoted, prudish Bostonian —there is no other word that conveys the meaning. But George Apley is not a man to be scorned. He is no hypocrite. He lived according to his standards, standards that had been carefully inculcated in him by his parents and by his environment. The city of Boston at the turn of the century is as much of a character in the novel as any of those people who move about its streets. For the group to which George Apley belonged, Boston was, in the words of the old cliché, the Hub of the Universe. It was a world and a way of life to be valued, but its values have to a great extent vanished from the scene, though perhaps it is only their surface manifestations which have disappeared. In common with most Boston Brahmins, George Apley, as he tells us in a letter to his children, was descended "from yeoman stock, small English shopkeepers and farmers." The