Lady Acland spared no effort in certifying that she belonged four-square with the establishment: conservative, colonialist, British-supre­macist. But reading her carefully, I could not help feeling a conscious or unconscious ambivalence.

Too timorous to challenge the conventional dogmas in person, she introduces The Socialist, a character tasked with the role of saying things that had to be said, but that she felt too well-mannered to put her name to. The Socialist has the function of giving a voice to the Maltese, to anti-colonial ethics, to castigate the unashamed caste system, with the natives as the ones you passed holding your nose.

Acland may have harboured those sentiments herself, but found it less politically bruising to hide behind The Socialist, and foist those seditious notions on him. Willcox could, I believe, well be acting as Acland’s ventriloquist.

Apart from Willcox (“not what you would call a gentleman”) and his nerdy blue-stocking fiancée Sophy (“the creature has no more manners than she has taste in dress... she is old and ugly, poor thing. How can she even dream of marrying a man who has an accent like that?”), everyone else who mattered was white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

But even in this area, Acland can be quite nuanced. Canon Curteis, a wise and distinguished Church of England prelate also hosted at Bello Sguardo, discreetly attends Catholic Mass every day. The lovely Margaret too, hitherto uncompromisingly Anglican, falls under the spell of the Church of the Maltese faithful: “She had heard of beautiful Roman Catholic services to which people went in order to hear the music, and the atmosphere of St John – almost the only Maltese church she had entered – could not fail to impress her naturally reverent mind, but the idea of joining in Roman Catholic worship had never seriously occurred to her, until she saw this English clergyman going regularly to Mass as part of his daily duty.”

The British, Acland acknowledges, had never had it so good as they did in Malta: “Money seemed to go a long way. People who in England looked twice at their butcher’s bill, [in Malta] owned a cart and a pair of ponies, drove to tandem meets and rode in races, subscribed gaily for their box in the opera and their tickets at the club dances and consulted earnestly as to the costume they should wear at the carnival ball.”

And then ploughed fortunes into having the most eye-grabbing and extravagant outfits made to dazzle the others, but mostly to raise the levels of the neighbours’ envy to satisfactory heights. Examples: “Lady Maude Beaufoy was gorgeous as Madame de Pompadour; Margaret wore a graceful dress of pale green and white, as a daisy [her name actually meant daisy]; Dr Masters, who accompanied them, was in the crimson robes of a doctor of medicine, which made a splendid piece of vivid colour.”

The author is well aware of the debate for women’s rights and gender equality, and with deliberate timidity, takes a marginally less-than-orthodox view of the matter. Exchanged between two women: “‘Do you think that, if the husband and wife disagree, that the wife ought always to give in?’ ‘No, not necessarily. There must be give and take, it ought not to be all on one side, and the more equality there is between the two, the happier in my opinion. But I do think that the husband ought to be the head of the house; there can’t with any comfort or order be two heads to anything. The woman is weaker physically; speaking generally, her part is passive and the man’s active. We may not like it, but we can’t alter our constitution, and the facts in nature are plain.’” The suffragettes had not advanced noticeably over the trenches of testosterone chauvinism.

The Socialist has the function of giving a voice to the Maltese, to anti-colonial ethics, to castigate the unashamed caste system, with the natives as the ones you passed holding your nose

Some predictions in the book hit bull’s eye, and others failed: “Bicycling is a fashion [for ladies] that has already begun to go out, as lady doctors will, as all the other fads of the 19th century. It is not elegant, and nothing about a woman survives except elegance.”

And Acland’s escalating faith in electrical energy as the brave new frontier in medical treatment, did not last long either: “I have just had an account of a most wonderful cure – pure electricity. I will show you all about it. You might take it up, Dr Masters, and make your fortune and beat the Mattei system all to fits.”

Count Cesare Mattei had devised an electrical treatment for cancer. Though eventually dismissed as quack medicine, his ‘cure’ enjoyed a period of wide popularity, culminating in its adoption in European hospitals, including some British ones.

The passage of well over a hundred years since Acland wrote the novel has left its mark, and not only on social attitudes, scientific developments and political preferences, but on the English language too. Some words and phrases have lost their previous meaning, to acquire a new one.

Children are already the American ‘kids’, gay still points to happy or high-spirited, and queer only defines an eccentric; a marriage dowry is a ‘dot’, to act “cool” meant to be inconsiderate, and “making love” referred only to the chastest of flirting. But, apart from these minor stumbling blocks, the novel can be read fluently, and quite pleasantly too, I may add. Not Jane Austen, to be sure, but far from pulp, either.

The book does not lack a number of telling excursions into local colour, much of it now packaged in oblivion: the weighted leather curtains that used to hang heavily inside church doors, to seal the faithful from the winds outside, grand tombola on the Floriana granaries, eagerly frequented by both the bourgeoisie and by the tattered under-proletariat, ear-splitting fireworks during village festas, the fierce gregale, desperate suicides leaping over the Porta Reale bridge, crowds gathering there to watch the train depart and arrive, vows to Our Lady of Liesse for safe sea passages, the opera where the Maltese went to enjoy and the English went to blab (they would anyway have chattered endlessly had Callas crossed Pavarotti in duet).

And then the goats on doorsteps delivering milk and fever, the mousy Maltese wives of government employees who cannot talk about anything, Bisazza (Bizacca in the text) the yummy Sicilian confectionery in the Strada Reale who retailed delicious cholesterol, Christmas midnight Mass at the cathedral in Mdina, picnics in Marsascala and the Boschetto, Maltese men “barefooted, of course, with enormously developed toes”. And the beggars, the never-ending beggars, who believed they spoke English “...Poor miserably (pronounced like Maltese miżerabbli) auld man, give penny Signora, and then, without a pause, Poor miserably, etc”.

At the geographical centre of the novel stands the delightful villa Bello Sguardo “almost as well kept as in England” (almost, but not quite), just outside Valletta, unsure whether Floriana or Pietà. When the main cluster of the English visitors occupies it, they are horrified to find what the local servants look like: everyone is “shocked at the appearance of their Maltese subordinates”.

Their English housekeeper apologises on their behalf or, rather, she despairs of making anything decorous out of the Maltese servants: “I couldn’t get the maids to wear caps – they never do. It do look dreadfully untidy, there’s no denying, but then they wear their hair so funny and they’re so dark and that, I thought your ladyship would p’raps excuse it. I did take the liberty to give them aprons for their own wasn’t fit to be seen. And the wages is high, too, very high, [one euro a week] considering the sort of servants they are.” Too dark but, though borderline, quite possibly human.

That put the Maltese maids in their place. The butler then puts the Maltese men in theirs: “I ’ope you won’t think I ’aven’t took no pains with the young men’s liveries. But there! With moustaches and such like, how can they look smart and well set up?”

The lady of the manor had no option left but to be philosophical about the inevitable scruffiness of the Maltese underlings: “The look doesn’t matter so much here as in England.” You’re in Malta now, where low wages were a virtue and low standards a necessity. The glossy English wives had to settle for that on the island.

Though focussed on Malta, Acland wants her book to touch on the geo-political complexities that blighted the end of the Victorian era. She gives her own bird’s eye view: “One Power after another took umbrage at the increasing greatness of the British Empire. The peasantry of Russia was in the hands of usurers; German finances no longer showed any elasticity; the population of France had ceased to increase; Italy was almost bankrupt; the United States were struggling with depression of trade, commercial unsoundness and political jobbery; the republics of South America continued a series of internecine wars and revolutions with, of course, disastrous results to their commerce...” As an early catalogue of gloom and doom, this beats most of the competition.

The subject of the Maltese language crops up a few times. Has any Englishman ever tried to learn “this most extraordinary lingo”? One naval officer says he knows absolutely nothing about it. Another assured his audience he had never heard of anyone “taking the trouble to learn Maltese. The only thing to do in Malta was to get as much fun as possible, dance, play polo and ride to picnics”. Hard work? That’s what the natives are for. They had to be made to know their place.

The third love story revolves round Christopher Beaufoy, son of the manipulative Lady Maude, who holds court at Bello Sguardo. He lived a comfortable, idle, laid-back life, liberally subsidised in his every whim by his wealthy mother. Much to her chagrin he falls in love with a girl well below his social standing, and, to compound the horrors of that tragedy, an Italian too, who could speak no English and was an opera singer to boot.

Maddalena Bianchi, the shamelessly beautiful Signorina, had enthralled everyone with the striking splendour of her voice when she sang Gilda in Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House. She performed so magnificently that “she carried the audience away and, for once, the English in the boxes forgot to talk”. Most servicemen went to the opera not to see and listen to the singers, but to be seen and to listen to themselves.

The book does not lack a number of telling excursions into local colour, much of it now packaged in oblivion

Maddalena was born to wretchedly poor parents in Calabria, but, recognising her extraordinary gifts, they had the discernment to push her into studying bel canto in Naples. As not infrequently happened with budding Italian opera artistes, Malta had been her first singing engagement outside Italy, and the audiences just raved. The lover went one step further: he suspended all rational processes in his obsessed pursuit of the fresh Italian opera star. She, in turn, was equally smitten by Beaufoy, caro nome che il mio cor, festi primo palpitar...

The Englishman would instantly have waltzed her to the altar in Malta were it not that Maddalena had shortly before meeting him already promised marriage to the principal tenor of her opera company. That betrothal had, according to an ancient Maltese law, a binding effect which would have enabled the tenor to obtain an “impediment” (a prohibitory injunction) from the local court stopping her marrying anyone else.

Lady Acland, usually quite well-versed in things Maltese, got this all wrong – the bizarre old Maltese law on sponsali (incidentally, enacted by the British in 1834, not by Hammurabi) enabled the jilted fiancée who had been promised marriage in writing, to sue for moral and material damages, but not to enforce the promised marriage or restrain a future one.

Only one way remained open to the two innamorati: to elope stealthily from Malta and get married in Italy. A scheme they planned and carried out in noble secrecy, when the whole island was engrossed in the Governor’s carnival ball, held annually in the Armoury.

This event, barring royal visits, was by far the grandest affair in the island’s social calendar, and took up whole weeks in strategic planning and preparations. “The subject of the Carnival Ball at the Palace absorbed attention, almost to the exclusion of everything else.”

The book recounts how the current protocol for fancy dress dances at the Palace strictly banned all plain civilian clothes; the lady guests could only wear fancy costumes and masks, but military gentlemen who turned up in full uniform would be grudgingly allowed in.

This exception survived until the wife of one Governor had second thoughts and decreed that even army and naval officers had to attend in carnival costumes. A number, mostly because of “their respectable age and very comfortable proportions” receiv­ed this order with mutinous indignation. They revenged themselves on the Governor’s wife by all turning up wearing caps and aprons borrowed from their cooks, demeaning to those of a scullery the towering levels of aristocratic chic expected in the Armoury. The conspiracy of the faux chefs worked and, after that, Her Excellency surrendered to military uniforms being worn again.

Learning of the calamitous elopement, Lady Beaufoy instantly disowned her son and her daughter-in-law, and formally disinherited him. He could enjoy his svelte Italian siren, high top notes and all, to his heart’s content, with not one penny from her going their way.

“Such bad taste” Lady Beaufoy griped in outraged distress, to marry a foreign woman! When he could have settled for handfuls of nice English girls all elbowing to barge the queue! Good thing Maddalena was Italian and not Maltese. Had she been, no way would Lady Maude have survived an apoplectic fit. Certainly not had her physician been Maltese. Nor, quite likely, had he been London-trained, true-blue British born and bred with the most impeccable Oxbridge accent, either.

(Concluded)