Blog #3: Is Felix a radical?

While it is quite obvious that Harold Transome is no “radical,” the question I have is what exactly makes Felix one. Such a question can only be answered if we know what political radicalism signified in nineteenth-century Britain. Leaving this aside for the moment, what is certain is that, contra Mr. John Johnson, Felix is not at all a “revolutionary” (334). He opposes universal suffrage because he does not believe that voting can accomplish real change. Since most of the workers seem to fall far short of his own ideals, he thinks that they would misuse the power that comes with suffrage or that it would do more harm than good. As he argues, “[i]gnorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery” (288). It is not clear, however, whether Felix understands that the workers’ flaws are inextricably bound to their socio-economic oppression. Indeed, it seems that rather than seeing them liberated from such oppression, he wants to see them delivered from vice. For Felix, then, the problem in society is not necessarily class inequality but instead a general lack of moral-cultural refinement. 

To be sure, giving workers the right to vote does not guarantee their situation will improve or get worse. But I do not see how this justifies in the least Felix’s position that they should therefore not be given suffrage and the little autonomy that comes with it. Far from wanting to positively alter the status quo, it seems that his aim is to preserve its fundamental order. Thus, if Felix does desire social change (as Bossche maintains), this change implies a passive resignation to society’s established hierarchy rather than a “radical” re-organization of it. From this perspective, it is not surprising that he feels the need to silence the revolutionary sentiments of a nameless worker (see chapter 50) with his anti-revolutionary “cant” about the “nature of things” (305).