Brief note: Manservant and Maidservant

In her introduction to the NYRB reprint of Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1947), Diane Johnson argues that Compton-Burnett's fiction is "more clearly rooted in Victorian literature" (viii) than in modernism.  Johnson interprets the Victorian-ness of Manservant and Maidservant in terms of its setting (1892), characters, and major themes--the nightmarish pater familias, the squabbles between upstairs and downstairs, the ever-present question of money, and so forth.  To me, though, one of the funniest things about the novel is how it constantly invokes and then implodes Victorian genre conventions, drawn pell-mell from anything and everything: evangelical conversion novels, sensation fiction, melodrama, the romance.   All sorts of terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad things almost happen.  And then...they don't.  The wife of the house is about to elope with the live-in cousin! (Whoops, never mind.)  The father, Horace Lamb, undergoes a dramatic conversion experience! (Actually, it's a calculated attempt to make the aforementioned elopement impossible.)   The live-in cousin is now engaged to the tutor's sister, and they're going to live happily ever after! (Until the cousin finds out that the tutor's sister was the one who let Horace know about the elopement.) Two of Horace's sons neglect to tell their father that he's about to walk over a dangerous bridge! (He doesn't.)  George, one of the young servants, steals! (Nothing happens.)  George decides to commit suicide! (No.)  George decides to sabotage the bridge and murder Horace! (Doesn't work the second time around, either.)  Everybody knows George tried to murder Horace! (He remains employed.)  Horace utters a series of moving deathbed speeches! (And yet, he's still alive at the end of the novel.)  Fittingly enough, the novel even begins and ends in roughly the same place, with Bullivant, the butler, trying to fix a smoking fireplace.  Manservant and Maidservant isn't just set at the tail end of the Victorian era; it's also dancing on the grave of the Victorian novel itself.