Stretton by Henry Kingsley

A very long foreseen confusion now occurs in this story. If the kind reader has been patient enough to notice the fact, he will perceive that not one of the people whom I have tried to present to him in an amiable light had been doing anything at all. The energetic Gray, the most active among our characters, hitherto had been only vegetating. There had come no question between him and the world. Aunt Eleanor's chief glory was in her plan of sowing white rock stubble turnips, and arguing with Mr. Martin Sutton, of Reading. As for the boys, they had been doing rather less than nothing. Sir Jasper Meredith having now attained his majority, had built some cottages, but finding a return of scarcely one per cent., had gone off into doctrinaire radicalism, and had screeched his commonplaces of supply and demand into the ear of a sympathising vestry, who said that they always knew that no Meredith was the man to raise the rates on them. But none of them had done anything.

The whole lot of them would have slept through life, and awakened wondering in eternity, had it not been for a bouleversement in affairs, which brought out the character of all.