Arthur & George

Edinburgh, Newcastle, London. Followed by Paris, Moscow, Timbuctoo – why not?
    And then, as suddenly as it began, it stops. No more letters, no unwanted goods, no hoax advertisements, no intemperate brothers in Christ on the doorstep. For a day, then a week, then a month, then two months. It stops. It has stopped.

TWO
    Beginning with an Ending

George
    THE MONTH THE persecutions stop marks the twentieth anniversary of Shapurji Edalji’s appointment to Great Wyrley; it is followed by the twentieth – no, the twenty-first – Christmas celebrated at the Vicarage. Maud receives a tapestry bookmark, Horace his own copy of Father’s
Lectures on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians
, George a sepia print of Mr Holman Hunt’s
The Light of the World
with the suggestion that he might hang it on the wall of his office. George thanks his parents, but can well imagine what the senior partners would think: that an articled clerk of only two years’ standing, who is trusted to do little more than write out documents in fair copy, is hardly entitled to make decisions about furnishing; further, that clients come to a solicitor for a specific kind of guidance, and might well find Mr Hunt’s advertisement for a different kind distracting.
    As the first months of the new year pass, the curtains are parted each morning with the increased certainty that there will be nothing but God’s shining dew upon the lawn; and the postman’s arrival no longer causes alarm. The Vicar begins to repeat that they have been tested with fire, and their faith in the Lord has helped them endure this trial. Maud, fragile and pious, has been kept in as much ignorance as possible; Horace, now a sturdy and straightforward sixteen -year-old, knows more, and will privately confess to George that in his view the old method of an eye for an eye is an unimprovable system of justice, and that if he ever catches anyone tossing dead blackbirds over the hedge, he will wring their necks in person.
    George does not, as his parents believe, have his own office at Sangster, Vickery & Speight. He has a stool and a high-top desk in an uncarpeted corner where the access of the sun’s rays depends upon the goodwill of a distant skylight. He does not yet possess a fob watch, let alone his own set of law books. But he has a proper hat, a three-and-six-penny bowler from Fenton’s in Grange Street. And though his bed remains a mere three yards from Father’s, he feels the beginnings of independent life stirring within him. He has even made the acquaintance of two articled clerks from neighbouring practices. Greenway and Stentson, who are slightly older, took him one lunchtime to a public house where he briefly pretended to enjoy the horrible sour beer he paid for.
    During his year at Mason College, George paid little attention to the great city he found himself in. He felt it only as a barricade of noise and bustle lying between the station and his books; in truth, it frightened him. But now he begins to feel more at ease with the place, and more curious about it. If he is not crushed by its vigour and energy, perhaps he will one day become part of it himself.
    He begins to read up on the city. At first he finds it rather stodgy stuff, about cutlers and smiths and metal manufacture; next come the Civil War and the Plague, the steam engine and the Lunar Society, the Church and King Riots, the Chartist upheavals. But then, little more than a decade ago, Birmingham begins to shake itself into modern municipal life, and suddenly George feels he is reading about real things, relevant things. He is tormented to realize that he could have been present at one of Birmingham’s greatest moments : the day in 1887 when Her Majesty laid the foundation stone of the Victoria Law Courts. And thereafter, the city has arrived in a great rush of new buildings and institutions: the General Hospital, the Chamber of Arbitration, the meat market. Money is currently being raised to establish a university; there is a plan to build a new Temperance Hall, and serious talk that Birmingham might soon become a bishopric, no longer under the see of Worcester.
    On that day of Queen Victoria’s visit, 500,000 people came to greet her, and despite the vast crowd there were neither disturbances nor casualties. George is impressed, yet also not surprised. The general opinion is that cities are violent, overcrowded places, while the countryside is calm and peaceable. His own experience is to the