George Edalji (that’s
Ay-dal-ji, by the way, since Parsee names are always stressed on the first
syllable) is the son of a Staffordshire vicar of Indian origin and his
Scottish wife. George is thus a half-cast, to use the language of his
late-Victorian and Edwardian age. He’s a diligent, if not too distinguished
a scholar. He is uninterested in sport, is of small stature and doesn’t see
too well. He sleeps with his father behind a locked door, is in bed by 9:30,
becomes a small town solicitor who develops an interest in train timetables
and, by way of outlandish diversion, publishes a traveller’s guide to
railway law.
Arthur
Conan Doyle (later Sir Arthur) is born in Edinburgh, completes medical
school and generally accomplishes whatever task he sets himself, including
becoming a world famous writer. Despite the fact that he kills off his
creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, ostensibly to devote time to tasks
of greater gravity, popular demand insists that he raise the character from
the dead. He does this and proceeds to generate even greater success than
before. He marries happily twice and pursues and interest in spiritualism,
amongst other good causes.
Perhaps
because of who they are, the Edalji family become the butt of the campaign
of poison pen letters. When they complain, all they accomplish is the
focusing of further unwanted attentions on themselves. When a series of
ripping attacks on animals remains unsolved, George, somehow, becomes the
prime suspect. Convinced of his villainy, police, judicial system, expert
witnesses, jury and press see him convicted of the crime and sent down for
seven years. Good conduct sees him released after three.
Sir
Arthur wishes to do good and takes up George Edalji’s case. He researches
the facts, analyses the possibilities, tracks down neighbours and officials
who have been involved. He creates an alternative explanation of events and
presents it to officialdom, seeking a pardon and compensation for George,
who by this time has transferred to London to start a new life. The two men
meet and the incongruity of their assumed expectations of life are as
irreconcilable as they are irrelevant to their joint focus on George’s case.
After official review, however, the Home Office Committee eventually
concludes in an ambiguous manner. Edalji was convicted of the crime and the
conviction is declared unsound; but crucially he is not declared innocent.
He is therefore found not guilty but then not innocent either and so not
worthy of compensation. When, years later, Sir Arthur dies and his
associates stage a spiritualist gathering in his honour in the Royal Albert
Hall, George is invited and attends, complete with binoculars lest he miss a
detail of the proceedings. The illusion of the event draws him in and at one
stage he feels himself to be the centre of attention, only to find that it
is a near miss. Most of the detail refers to himself and his father, but the
reality then points to another who is immediately identified.
But,
paradoxically, the quiet George Edalji and his Parsee (not Hindoo) father,
Shapurji, were always the centre of attention simply by being who they were.
Even Sir Arthur, the son’s eventual champion, states this in one of his
letters when he writes that it was perhaps inevitable that a dark-skinned
clergyman taking a station in central England would attracts other’s
attention of a kind that would seek to undermine him, vilify him and attempt
to oust him. The message is clear, that to be different from an assumed norm
is to invite hatred, envy, discrimination and eventually ignominy. It is
presented as a universal assumption, an unwritten element of universal
common sense. Thus, as an intruder, the usual rules of justice will never
pertain, a reality alluded to late in the book when George, scanning the
Albert Memorial with his binoculars, discovers a statuesque embodiment of
the concept of justice that is not wearing a blindfold.
What is
eventually so disturbing about Arthur and George, however, is the
realisation that both characters are outsiders. George is set apart from his
Staffordshire peers by his skin colour and perceived race. Arthur, however,
lives no humdrum life. He attends private schools, qualifies as a doctor and
then becomes an international celebrity by virtue of his writing. He takes
up minority causes and identifies with them but, despite his obvious
separateness from mainstream society, in his case his position is never
interpreted as a threat or a handicap, obviously because the separateness of
privilege has a different currency from the separateness of even relative
poverty.
Now an
enduring memory of my own school history lessons was a textbook reproduction
of a mid-Victorian cartoon of the universal pyramid of creation. It had God
at the apex, immediately in touch via the saints with the Empress of India
and then, layered beneath in widening courses were the gentry and
aristocracy, the members of government and civil service, the professional
classes and merchants. The working classes could perhaps temporarily ignore
their poverty in the solace offered by knowing that they are a cut above
members of all other races who, themselves, were just one up from the apes.
It was not many more layers down to the low animals, most of which slithered
or crawled. Arthur and George ostensibly tells us much about racism and
racial discrimination in a society that was portrayed as the apex of a
worldwide empire, a heavenly focus for aspiration. It also tells us about
the power of presumption and has much to say very quietly and by suggestion
about social class and its ability, especially in Britain, to legitimise
difference as originality or eccentricity in some areas, differences which
elsewhere would be threats.
