| Prefatory Note |
| The following book
blends fiction, biography and social history in order to tell
the story of a man who, while in no sense famous, seems to me
to have led an exemplary life. In saying this, however, I am
not so much trying to redeem him from what E.P. Thompson famously
called the enormous condescension of posterity as to endorse
Thompson's conviction that "history from below" is
both valid and valuable. H.W.S. Kelly ("Hod") wasn't
a saint of humanity, not as George Eliot understood the term.
On the other hand, the closing words of Middlemarch apply as
fittingly to him as they do to those altruistic characters she
so ardently admired. "For the growing good of the world
is partly dependent on unhistoric acts," she wrote, "and
that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have
been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden
life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Her words apply equally
well to innumerable others, of course. They no doubt deserve
their biographers, their historian. But The Good That We Do
is the story I want to tell. |
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