Arthur & George

Blackpool is at least a hundred miles as the crow flies. Shapurji has a vision of the persecution spreading throughout the whole country. Blackpool might be only the begi

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 Begi

George

The month the persecutions stop marks the twentieth a

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 amp; 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-pe

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 contrary: the country is turbulent and primitive, while the city is where life becomes orderly and modern. Of course Birmingham is not without crime and vice and discord – else there would be less of a living for solicitors – but it seems to George that human conduct is more rational here, and more obedient to the law: more civil.

George finds something both serious and comforting in his daily transit into the city. There is a journey, there is a destination: this is how he has been taught to understand life. At home, the destination is the Kingdom of Heaven; at the office, the destination is justice, that is to say, a successful outcome for your client; but both journeys are full of forking paths and booby traps laid by the opponent. The railway suggests how it ought to be, how it could be: a smooth ride to a terminus on evenly spaced rails and according to an agreed timetable, with passengers divided among first-, second- and third-class carriages.

Perhaps this is why George feels quietly enraged when anyone seeks to harm the railway. There are youths – men, perhaps – who take knives and razors to the leather window straps; who senselessly attack the picture frames above the seats; who loiter on footbridges and try to drop bricks into the locomotive's chimney. This is all incomprehensible to George. It may seem a harmless game to place a pe

Such actions are naturally covered by the criminal law. George finds himself increasingly preoccupied by the civil co

He decides to appoint Horace and Maud as the Man and Woman on the Clapham Omnibus – or, in the present instance, the Man and Woman on the Walsall, Ca

'Once upon a time,' he begins, walking up and down in a way that seems necessary to the story, 'there was a very fat Frenchman called Payelle, who weighed twenty-five stones.'

Horace starts giggling. George frowns at his brother and grips his lapels like a barrister. 'No laughter in court,' he insists. He proceeds. 'Monsieur Payelle bought a third-class ticket on a French train.'