BELCHAMBER

Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers-Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmund and Chambers - known familiarly as Sainty, is the scion of an ancient English aristocratic family. Behind him stretches a rogues’ gallery of picturesque upper-crust scoundrels. But he is uninterested in going to hounds or drinking or whoring in the great tradition of his forebears, and though he sympathizes with his puritanical Scottish mother, he also lacks her unrelenting moral self-assurance. Sainty is instead a sensitive soul, physically delicate, sexually timid, intellectually inclined, deeply decent, and constitutionally incapable of asserting himself. When it comes to assuming the responsibilities of his inheritance, to managing his feckless younger brother Albert or fathoming his sly cousin Clyde, and, above all, to the business of marrying and continuing the family line, he hasn’t a prayer.

Howard Sturgis, a Bostonian who lived most of his life in England, was close friends with Henry James and Edith Wharton. He wrote three novels, of which 'Belchamber' is the finest. A brilliant, frequently hilarious satire of the English ruling class, it is also a powerful lament for individualism destroyed and innocence deceived. It is this that marks it, notwithstanding its English setting, as a profoundly American book and one of the overlooked triumphs of our literature.