The English years: 1874-1888

The new post was Newcastle, where Queiroz arrived on Dec. 30, 1874. It entailed quite a weight of responsibility. The great port and his industrial hinterland were confronted with strong social difficulties at the time. For a young diplomat, however with socialist leanings, it had to be a shock, and he wrote indeed to a friend, soon after his arrival: 'Here I am at the focus of events. It is not pleasant, to be at the focus'. He was to stay in Newcastle until 1878 when he was appointed to Bristol. He used his precision and quality of analysis in his professional chores. His diplomatic mail, that has been edited by Alan Freeland, is well worth reading, as well as his report on the British social and economic situation.

Queiroz did not enjoy his stay in England. The people he had to meet socially — that is, professionally — were business people, tradespeople, worlds away from the literary or artistic sets he naturally associated with. They were concerned with making money. He was concerned about having enough of it to write and publish his work. However, in less emollient an atmosphere than Havana, his mind stimulated by the regular flow of correspondence and newspapers, he became very prolific as a writer.

From England, de Queiroz sent to magazines in Portugal and in Brazil essays and articles that even to-day reflect the clearness of his analysis, the sharpness of his judgment and the exactitude of his synthesis. The pages, written during the war of 1877-1878 between Turkey and Russia (fought in the wake of the events in Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia), are again significant in light of our own recent crises.

In 1878, he published a new novel, Cousin Bazilio, which focuses on the society of Lisbon. His heroin, Luisa, is a bored woman who tempers her ennui with a 'calling' to adultery. The world that bores her is that of petty intrigue in politics, in love and in business-of the capital, that 'dusty and sleepy city' Queiroz always wanted to 'shake up', that he bitterly criticizes, but describes so precisely and so lovingly that it is hard, even today, to find in downtown Lisbon a street corner that does not carry Queirozian memories. The psychological route of Luisa is followed in counterpoint, following a constant practice of Queiroz, by the action of very elaborate secondary characters, partly reconstructed from observed and memorized elements. They acquire considerable substance and veracity, and some have become archetypal, as in the cases of the maid Juliana, Counsellor Acácio and, of course, Cousin Bazilio himself, the egoist lover, a complacent snob always disparaging his surroundings.

At the same time, Queiroz completed the last and final version of P. Amaro. A little later, he would publish two long novellas: The Mandarin (1880) and The Relic (1887). The Mandarin is a witty interpretation of a well-known theme: a man is tempted to kill an old man living on the other side of the world, in order to inherit his fabulous wealth. The Relic targets, once again, the morally weak and socially powerful clergy that Queiroz always considered a plague both for Christian ethics and for the progress of the national community.

At that time, there existed in Lisbon a group of men who believed that Portugal should get out of its inertia and set up a more effective type of government, inspired either by the British system or by the German Empire. Most of them were lifelong friends of Eça de Queiroz. They came from political families, like Count Valbom, from intellectual circles, like Ramalho Ortigão and the economist-historian Oliveira Martins, or from the high aristocracy and palace officials, like Count Ficalho and Marquess Soveral.

This gathering, to include de Queiroz himself whenever he could be in Lisbon, called itself, with strange humor, 'Os Vencidos da Vida'—The Vanquished of Life. These men refused to appear as a progressive lobby in the shadow of the Crown, but they were just that, although with an audience limited by their own communicative capacity, by the wiliness of in-place politicians and by the cautious indulgence of the King. Their failure to give a 'new life' to their country is forever inscribed in a pathetic filigree in the later works of Queiroz.