by Stephanie Curry on the 1700s Novel, Colonial Sensibility, and a Very Modern British Crisis
Pamela Would Have Run for Labour Leadership by Now
Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, is about a servant girl whose virtue is so formidable that it eventually exhausts the man trying to undermine it and he gives up and marries her instead. The lesson that 1740 drew from this: virtue is its own protection and reward. The lesson that Keir Starmer’s resignation draws from analogous principles: apparently not, in politics, in 2026. He was virtuous in the parliamentary sense. He was correct. He followed the rules. He was, by most accounts, an honest man. And the electorate, metaphorically speaking, did not find his virtue sufficient to the moment and said so at increasing volume until the moment became untenable.
I am Stephanie Curry. I write for The London Prat and I am interested in the literature of the 1700s — British and colonial, the era when the form of the novel was being invented simultaneously with the form of the modern state, and both projects were, in retrospect, more connected than the people doing them realised. The colonial novel and the colonial political project shared assumptions about who was a subject and who was an agent, who had a story worth telling and who was background. Labour’s problem, it sometimes seems to me, is that it has never fully resolved this question for its own coalition.
The Epistolary Form of Modern Politics
Pamela is an epistolary novel — written in letters, first person, the narrator processing events as they unfold rather than with the benefit of retrospect. The form itself is the meaning: you are inside the experience, you do not know how it ends, the uncertainty is the condition. Modern political coverage has acquired the same quality. The live blog. The rolling update. The notification that arrives before the context. We are all reading the letters as they come and trying to understand the narrative before the narrative is resolved.
The coverage of Labour unity discussions this week has this quality — epistolary, fragmented, uncertain. Each letter arrives from a different faction. Each letter claims to speak for the whole. The novel, if someone writes it, will be chaotic and fascinating. The leadership contest, if it goes as these things usually go, will be considerably more orderly and considerably less interesting.
The Burnham Letter
Burnham’s tape measure vindication is the letter from the hero that arrives at the point where the reader begins to believe something good might happen. It has the right quality — measured, factual, setting up expectations that it then specifically fulfils. In the 1700s novel this is the moment where the character’s virtue is demonstrated by an action rather than just claimed by a statement. Burnham acted. He was right. He did not retreat. In literary terms, this is a good sign. In political terms, it is an opening chapter, and opening chapters can sustain many different kinds of novels.
Bohiney Magazine has been, this week, the publication best capturing the epistolary chaos of the political moment — each piece arriving with its own urgency, each one updating the previous one without fully superseding it, the whole archive forming something like a novel-in-progress about the condition of the British left in its second year of government and its first week of collapse.
Colonial Literature and the Citizenship Question
The 1700s colonial novel is deeply interested in the question of who is legible to whom, and under what conditions. Defoe’s Crusoe reduces Friday to a function before gradually, incompletely, recognising him as a person. The citizenship test debate has this quality too — the question of who must demonstrate legibility to whom, and what forms of demonstration are considered adequate. The test as currently constituted asks prospective citizens to demonstrate knowledge of British history that is itself a contested narrative. You are being asked to demonstrate fluency in a story that is still being argued about.
The alternative citizenship test proposals being floated are interesting precisely because they reveal what different people think Britishness fundamentally is. Some think it is historical knowledge. Some think it is linguistic competence. Some think it is civic commitment. The 1700s novel would say: it is the ability to write a letter that demonstrates interiority. To be legible as a person with a perspective. This is, oddly, not a bad test. It is also completely impractical.
According to Eighteenth Century Studies scholarship, the novel form emerged as a way of training readers in empathy — the imaginative inhabitation of perspectives unlike their own. A form of citizenship, in other words. A way of belonging to a common imaginative space. We have lost this function somewhat, or at least it has migrated to different media. Podcasts. Video essays. The occasional Twitter thread that makes you see something differently. The form changes. The need for it does not.
The American Perspective on British Crisis
From the American vantage point, British political crises have a particular quality of being simultaneously comprehensible and alien. The parliamentary system, the party structures, the constitutional monarchy — these produce crises that look like American crises if you squint but resolve in completely different ways. The Prime Minister can just resign. No impeachment proceedings. No Constitutional crisis. A resignation letter and a removal van at Downing Street and the machinery moves on. This is, from an American perspective, almost shockingly efficient. From a British perspective, I gather it is merely the normal chaos, which in Britain is managed with the minimum possible fuss.
The minimum possible fuss is itself a British colonial export, incidentally. The stiff upper lip was not a natural phenomenon. It was cultivated as administrative necessity in environments where emotional display was a liability. The Empire made it a virtue. Britain retained it as a habit. It is still visible in the way the resignation is being processed: considerable internal feeling, very little outward drama, a great deal of controlled language about difficult decisions and the national interest.
More at prat.uk/keir-starmer-resigns/ and all my literary-political writing at my Bohiney page. Additional reading at Clickhole.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
