The blindness of virtue

The Blindness of Virtue is a novel by Cosmo Hamilton, the English novelist and playwright who lived from 1879 to 1942 and who produced a substantial body of popular fiction and drama across the first decades of the twentieth century. Hamilton was born Henry Charles Hamilton Gibbs and used the Cosmo Hamilton pen name for his literary work.

Hamilton worked in the substantial commercial popular fiction and West End theatrical world of late Edwardian and interwar Britain. His novels typically combined romantic plot with substantial social observation and occasional moralising commentary in the manner that the British popular fiction of the period favoured. He produced more than forty novels across his career, along with various plays for the London commercial theatre, and was a substantial commercial success for several decades before the broader cultural transformations of the interwar period eventually pushed his particular literary mode toward the margins of the English literary scene.

The Blindness of Virtue takes up the kind of contemporary moral and social subject matter that the more serious popular fiction of the late Edwardian and early Georgian period addressed. The title suggests the central theme. Virtue in the conventional sense can sometimes prevent the people who possess it from seeing important aspects of the actual moral situations they face, and the novel works through a particular dramatic situation that illustrates this broader theme.

Hamilton’s particular literary position combined the romantic and dramatic interest that the commercial fiction market required with substantial attention to the actual social and moral questions that thoughtful English readers of the period were thinking about. He was not afraid of subjects that the more conservative commercial fiction tradition would have avoided, including various aspects of contemporary sexual ethics, class conflict, religious doubt, and the various other questions that the loosening of late Victorian moral consensus had opened up for serious popular fiction.

The novel is of interest now to readers of late Edwardian and early twentieth century British popular fiction, to historians of the changing moral assumptions of British middle class culture during the period, and to specialists in the commercial fiction tradition that Hamilton worked within. It pairs naturally with the work of his contemporaries including W J Locke, A E W Mason, and various of the other commercially successful English novelists of the period.