A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust portrays the competition for social status as a source of conflict in the lives of its characters. The novel takes place in the years after World War I, when the power and influence of the British Empire passed its peak. The war has taken a toll on the breadth and wealth of the Empire, though England is not yet entirely changed by the imperial collapse. Against the backdrop of the late-stage Empire, the novel portrays the complexities of the British class system. Tony Last, the novel’s protagonist, lives in a large country house that neither he nor his wife Brenda particularly likes. Despite the ruinous expense of maintaining the house and its staff, Tony feels compelled to keep it up because it is his family’s legacy. This preoccupation with legacy and heritage illustrates how tightly class is bound to identity in Tony’s world. He could sell the house and use the money to pursue a life of his choosing, freeing himself and his wife from the alienation and ennui that characterize their lives at Hetton Abbey, but to do so would be to lose his all-important sense of identity as a member of the landed gentry.

John Beaver, the man with whom Brenda begins an affair, represents a very different experience of the English class system. While Tony clings to his family’s elevated status, Beaver is struggling to climb up. Neither man works, but Tony lives in an ancestral home while Beaver shares a small house with his mother. He is routinely mocked for his unwillingness to spend money that he does not have, even while he is paying membership fees to the same private clubs occupied by Tony, Jock, and others. Those private clubs signal an elevated social status that Beaver does not really possess—his social reputation is such that people invite him to parties whenever they need an extra man, confident that he will come for the promise of a free meal. Beaver’s longing to join the upper classes is what draws him to Brenda in the first place, and as soon as it becomes clear that she has no fortune to offer him, he disappears from her life.

The novel features very few working-class characters, but those who do feature are typically contrasted with their middle- or upper-class employers. Foremost among these is Ben, who works at Hetton Abbey and teaches Tony and Brenda’s eight-year-old son John to ride. John could not be more effusive about Ben, yet Tony immediately fears that John may be influenced by a lower-class person. When he hears John imitating Ben, he castigates his son and warns him to act according to social expectations. Tony does not mention this to Ben, who he presumes lacks the education or the mentality to refrain from using such language. This constant policing of class differences reminds everyone in society of their status. This is reinforced at Christmas when the Last family buys gifts for their employees. The value of these gifts is carefully conditioned on the person’s standing in the social order of the house. Even Christmas is an opportunity to reinforce class differences and remind everyone of their place.

The rigid class structures of interwar England are contrasted again with the Indigenous people of the Amazon. Tony joins Dr. Messinger’s expedition to give meaning to his life. As he travels farther from England, the functions of English class structures fade away. On his ship, for example, there comes a point in the voyage when Tony is the only passenger who still dresses for dinner. The old manners and expectations ebb away as England vanishes into the distance. In the jungle, Tony’s wealth and status mean nothing. The local guides abandon him, as they are not tempted by the cheap toys he wishes to pass off as fine gifts. Mr. Todd, his eventual jailer, does not care at all about Tony’s status in England. In Todd’s village, class is decided by who has the guns. The ultimate irony of Tony’s fate is that he is demoted to the rank of prisoner, forced to live out the rest of his days in a subservient manner, as he reads from the books of Charles Dickens. At Todd’s demand, Tony reads through the novels that depict the familiar class structures of England, now an increasingly distant memory.