The Martyrdom of Man

The Martyrdom of Man is a book Harry Astley gives Bella Baxter as part of an argument about cruelty, survival, and whether people can change the conditions that harm the helpless. In this scene, it serves less as a source of settled wisdom than as one element in a challenge Bella refuses to accept without resistance.

A Book in Astley’s Argument

During Bella’s travels from Alexandria to Gibraltar, she says that thinking has maddened her for weeks and that arguing with Astley is her only relief. He claims that peace requires her to embrace his bitter wisdom, while she wants neither his philosophy nor his advances, except insofar as she can oppose him. Astley argues that cruelty toward the helpless will never end because the healthy sustain themselves by trampling the vulnerable.

To substantiate this bleak view, Astley gives Bella three books: Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. The novel identifies the titles as books Astley says prove his conclusion; it does not detail the contents of Reade’s work or establish that Bella accepts Astley’s reading of it.

Bella’s Response and the Scene’s Stakes

Bella answers Astley’s argument with a practical moral objection: if the world works as he says, people must stop living in that way. The books make her head ache, but they do not silence her disagreement. Their role in the scene is therefore double: they represent Astley’s attempt to give intellectual authority to resignation, and they mark the limits of that authority for Bella, who continues to insist on the possibility of action.

The conversation unfolds while Bella changes the dressing on Astley’s hand. He tells her that his wife died a year earlier, then asks whether she is legally married to Duncan Wedderburn. Bella answers with ironic praise for his guess; Astley asks her to call him Harry. The book is thus embedded in an exchange where philosophical argument, physical care, bereavement, and personal intimacy converge, without resolving the fundamental disagreement between Astley’s fatalism and Bella’s refusal to accept cruelty as inevitable.