What’s Wrong with the World · Chapter
A Doubt explained
The narrator reveals a suspicion that Hudge and Gudge, despite their public quarrels, are secretly in partnership, each playing into the other's hands to keep the common man homeless and oppressed.
What happens
The narrator reveals a suspicion that Hudge and Gudge, despite their public quarrels, are secretly in partnership, each playing into the other's hands to keep the common man homeless and oppressed.
Themes in this chapter
Social Class and Oligarchy
The secret partnership between Hudge and Gudge reveals how idealists and plutocrats collude to maintain the oppression of the common man.
Family and Domesticity
The narrator criticizes how the system of sacking, sweating, and bisexual toil destroys the free family, while Hudge claims the family will be outgrown.
Characters to notice
- Unknown
The narrator whispers the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are in secret partnership.
- Hudge
Hudge is the idealist who provides lyric praises of anarchy and preaches teetotalism to workmen, playing into Gudge's hands.
- Gudge
Gudge is the plutocrat who wants anarchic industrialism, cheap women-workers, and a tame population.
- Count Tolstoy
Hudge uses Tolstoy to argue that nobody must take arms against anything.
- Lieutenant Jones
Jones is the common man walking the streets, homeless and looking sadly at the barriers guarding the house that is his.
Key passages
“I will whisper in the reader’s ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership; that the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job; and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other’s hands is not an everlasting coincidence.”
The narrator confides a troubling thought: Hudge and Gudge may be colluding behind their public disagreements, deliberately supporting each other's agendas.
The narrator exposes the hidden alliance between the idealist and the plutocrat.
“I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his because he has never been in it.”
The narrator sees Jones wandering homeless at dusk, gazing at the barriers that protect a house that is rightfully his, even though he has never entered it.
Jones symbolizes the common man excluded from the home that belongs to him.