The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Back in his rooms at the White Lion, Charles stares into the mirror. He feels vaguely defeated due to the lunch conversation at Aunt Tranter’s and uncertainty whether paleontology is a good vocation for him or Ernestina will ever really understand him. He puts his dissatisfaction down to the wet afternoon. Charles probably wouldn’t have been too surprised if he learned of the inventions of the future, but he would have been surprised by the different attitude towards time. The twentieth century is marked by a lack of time, and everyone tries to find ways to do things faster. But people like Charles have the opposite problem; they have to find enough to do to occupy their vast amounts of free time. Nineteenth-century wealth is marked by boredom.

Though the revolutions of 1848 are important to the era, they failed to really make a change. The 1860s were prosperous enough to make revolution seem unlikely. Although Das Kapital is about to be published, Charles is entirely unaware of Karl Marx and wouldn’t have believed it if someone told him what effect this man would have.

Charles’s grandfather, a baronet, was a foxhunter and a collector. In his old age he excavated his land in search of ancient relics. His older son never married, meaning that his younger son, Charles’s father, was left plenty of money. Charles’s mother died in childbirth when Charles was one, and his father lived for pleasure, never paying Charles too much attention. When his father died, Charles was heir to both his father’s money and his uncle’s. Charles and his uncle, Sir Robert, like each other, even though Charles refuses to foxhunt and likes walking too much for a gentleman. Once, Charles accidentally shot one of the last Great Bustards of Salisbury Plain on his uncle’s land, and his uncle was thrilled to be able to stuff and display the bird. Whenever his uncle is inclined to disinherit Charles for not writing to him or for spending too much time in the library, he convinces himself against it by staring at the stuffed bird.

At Cambridge, Charles was actually learning until he fell in with a bad crowd and found himself sleeping with a girl in London. Soon after, he told his father that he wanted to become a priest, so his father sent him off to Paris to dissuade him of this wickedness. Charles slept with many women and decided against joining the Church. When he returned to England, he read a number of religious theories and became an agnostic, though the term didn’t yet exist. His father died soon after, and Charles moved into a small house in Kensington, where he had a modest staff. He traveled frequently and did a bit of travel writing, never setting himself to any particular occupation.

Charles eventually realized that only his family thought his grandfather’s archaeological pursuits a joke—other people truly respected his work. Charles himself began to pursue paleontology, though his uncle didn’t entirely approve. Sir Robert was also frustrated by Charles’s refusal to run for Parliament as a Tory. Charles secretly admires Gladstone, a Whig, but he could never have admitted this to his family. He’s essentially lazy. He sees that England now wants only to seem respectable, rather than to do good. But he feels there are many pursuits he can’t follow because he can never measure up to the distinguished people already doing the work. He sets his sights high in order to justify doing nothing.

Even though Charles’s cynicism indicated moral deficiencies, he’s been much sought after by marriageable girls and their families, and he became known for leading them on. Sir Robert would chide him for this, but Charles pointed out that he himself never married, accusing him of never even trying. His uncle regrets his lack of a family, if not his lack of a wife. Charles would say that he hadn’t yet found the right girl.