Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

These protests were not the symptoms of a minor disturbance. Something was happening throughout England, a set of changes the consequences of which they were only beginning to fathom. Oxford, which consistently ran about a century behind the rest of England’s major cities, could only pretend to be immune to change for so long. The vicissitudes of the world outside had now become impossible to ignore. This was about more than mill workers. Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade. The full impact of a so-called silver industrial revolution, a term coined by Peter Gaskell just six years before, was just beginning to be felt across the country. Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens. Rural agriculture was in decline; men, women, and children moved en masse to urban centres to work in factories, where they laboured unimaginably long hours and lost limbs and lives in frightful accidents. The New Poor Law of 1834, which had been designed to reduce the costs of poverty relief more than anything else, was fundamentally cruel and punitive in design; it withheld financial aid unless applicants moved into a workhouse, and those workhouses were designed to be so miserable no one would want to live in them. Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized. Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.

These currents were unsustainable. The gears of history were turning fast in England. The world was getting smaller, more mechanized, and more unequal, and it was as yet unclear where things would end up, or what that would mean for Babel, or for the Empire itself.

Robin and his cohort, though, did what scholars always did, which was to bend their heads over their books and focus solely on their research. The protestors eventually dispersed after troops sent in from London dragged the ringleaders off to Newgate. The scholars stopped holding their breath every time they ascended the steps to the tower. They learned to put up with the swarming police presence, along with the fact that now it took twice as long for new books and correspondence to arrive. They stopped reading the editorials in the Oxford Chronicle, which was a newly minted proreform, pro-Radical publication that seemed intent on destroying their reputation.

Still, they couldn’t quite ignore the headlines, hawked from every street corner on their way to the tower:

BABEL A THREAT TO THE NATIONAL ECONOMY?

FOREIGN BARS SEND DOZENS TO THE WORKHOUSE

SAY NO TO SILVER!

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

One stormy night, on his way to dinner at Professor Lovell’s home, Robin glimpsed a family sitting at the corner of Woodstock Road holding out tin mugs for alms. Beggars were a common sight in Oxford’s outskirts, but entire families were rare. The two small children gave him little waves as he approached, and the sight of their pale, rain-streaked faces made him feel guilty enough to stop and fish several pennies out of his pocket.

‘Thank you,’ murmured the father. ‘God bless you.’

The man’s beard had grown out, and his clothes had got a good deal tattier, but Robin still recognized him – he was, without question, one of the men who had screamed obscenities at him on his way into the tower several weeks ago. He met Robin’s eyes. It wasn’t clear if he recognized Robin as well; he opened his mouth to say something, but Robin quickened his pace, and whatever the man might have called after him was soon drowned out by the wind and the rain.