The 1858 novel Dives and Lazarus, or the Adventures of an Obscure Medical Man in a Low Neighbourhood was the first book by William Gilbert, published when its author was nearly sixty. A searching study of slum life in London, it appeared anonymously, as many of his books did, and it drew on the contrast between the lots of rich and poor that would remain his favourite subject. Gilbert came to fiction late and from an unusual direction — a former midshipman, medical student, and journalist who had inherited enough money to abandon his profession — and the book’s relative success seems to have encouraged a man who had long felt he had accomplished little.
“He was a strong liberal, and his tall thin figure was familiar at the Reform Club, of which he was for many years a member.”
The Story
An Obscure Medical Man in a Low Neighbourhood
The novel takes its title from the parable of the rich man and the beggar, and its subject is the deepening gulf between wealth and poverty in the London of its day. Its protagonist is a medical man of modest standing, working among the poor, and the book follows his adventures in that low neighbourhood — the daily life, hardship, and human variety he encounters there. Gilbert writes as one who knows the territory: the story is a searching study of slum conditions rather than a sentimental tour, and the medical man’s position lets the author move between the suffering of the poor and the indifference or comfort of the rich.
The World of Dives
Against the life of the obscure doctor stands the world of Dives — the wealthy, the respectable, the insulated. The novel’s organizing contrast is between these two lots, and it is the contrast itself, more than any single plot turn, that drives the book. Gilbert’s narrator observes both sides with a dry, clever eye, and the adventures of the medical man repeatedly bring the two worlds into collision.
Characters
The central figure is the obscure medical man himself, through whose eyes the low neighbourhood is seen. Around him are the poor among whom he works and the rich whose lives form the counterpart to theirs — the Dives of the title. Gilbert peoples the book with the inhabitants of a London slum and with the comfortable classes who rarely look at them, and it is the friction between these groups that gives the novel its shape.
Themes
The book’s governing theme is the deepening contrast between the lots of rich and poor — the subject Gilbert returned to again and again, and the one he handled here for the first time. The parable behind the title frames the whole: the rich man and the beggar at his gate, separated in life and judged thereafter. Gilbert’s treatment is that of an observer rather than a preacher; his style is lucid and sparkling, his observation clever rather than profound, and his humour dry and subtle, with something of the spirit of Democritus in it. He was a strong liberal, and the novel’s sympathy lies plainly with Lazarus, but the book’s power comes from its clear-eyed rendering of a neighbourhood and its people rather than from argument.
Why It Endures
Gilbert’s novels were never very popular, but a select circle esteemed them highly for their originality, and he was a story-teller of his own kind — lacking in perspective and continuity, yet possessed of a style that sparkles. Dives and Lazarus holds its place as the first of those books and as the fullest early statement of the theme that obsessed him. It also has a curious afterlife through its author’s family: the son who illustrated several of his father’s works was W. S. Gilbert, of the Bab Ballads and The Mikado, and the novelist’s tall thin figure, a familiar sight at the Reform Club for many years, belonged to the father of one of the most famous names in Victorian comic opera. Gilbert died at Salisbury in 1890, still full of literary projects, and was buried in the cloisters of the cathedral; the novel he began with, a study of the social deposits of his own city, remains the clearest introduction to the dry, observant, reform-minded storyteller he was.
