R.D. Blackmore's 'Cradock Nowell. A Tale of the New Forest' 1866

 

Chapman and Hall first edition - 1866

This is an early Blackmore effort - and it shows. It is often said, particularly with non-fiction books, that a first is not always the best edition to read. A bookish friend of mine, on hearing I was struggling, informed me that his Cradock Nowell is the new and cheaper edition, 'diligently revised and reshapen'. R.D.B. says in the preface, dated 1873, that the reviews of the original edition were so unanimously bad that he set to work to improve it: "a new book might have been written wilst this old one was a-mending". What had gone wrong? One reason, perhaps, was the appearance of Macmillan's Magazine (and, soon after The Cornhill and other popular magazines). Cradock Nowell was accepted for serialisation in Macmillan's between  May 1865 and August 1866. It did not inspire, mainly because the author could not and would not supply the kind of sensationalism wanted by the majority of readers.

More relevantly, the plot is clumsy (I regard it as 'wayward'). It hinges upon the fact that  the twin sons of the owner of the great New Forest estate of Nowellhurst, Sir Cradock Nowell, were confused by their nurse shortly after their birth. The younger Cradock had expected to be heir, but the doctor who delivered the twins (now returned from abroad after many years) discovers the error - by marks on their shoulders. When his brother Clayton is shot dead close by where young Cradock is hunting, suspicion naturally falls on the latter.

Although Cradock escapes conviction for the murder, his father blames him for it, and he leaves in disgrace for London, beginning a new life in the slums as Charles Newman. His health disintegrates during a long nightmare with thoughts of suicide brought on by feelings of guilt. Taking a ship for the tropics appears the only way to recover his physical and mental stability. Then he gets inadvertently stranded off the south-west African coast (the ship he was on is subsequently destroyed in a hurricane, leading his family back home to think he had been lost at sea with the rest of those on board). Finally, he returns home, health restored to find his honour has also been recovered. The actual murderer had confessed; it was his 'unacknowledged' uncle Bull Garnet, who had shot Clayton for trying to seduce his daughter, Pearl. 

The novel was cruelly 'whiplashed' by the critics. They found the author guilty of obscurity, want of proportion, crudeness, imperfect development, pedantry, involution of diction, and prolixity. Kenneth Budd, in his slim biography of Blackmore - The Last Victorian (1960) - commiserates with the reader who persevered through the novel, stating that the long sentences, the many digressions, the scores of classical allusions and quotations, must render the book unreadable today by any except those who can endure such things for the sake of the occasional felicities of description of field and forest. Ironically, it was the repetition of yet another digression on stately oaks and all sorts of fauna and flora that got me skim-reading sections. But, I do agree that the classical allusions were, after a time, irritating - they were never translated for the ignorant reader such as myself. But, I did read all three volumes, even if I did occasionally struggle to keep going. 

There are, however, some strong positives to take away from the reading. Two of the most powerfully written chapters in the novel are V and VI in volume II, dealing with the real-life, devastating storm of October 1859. Officially known as the Royal Charter Storm (named after the steam clipper which went down off the coast of Anglesey where 459 lives were lost, with only 40 survivors), it struck the English Channel on 25th October, producing ferocious winds. The Solent took a direct hit, wreaking havoc on shipping, coastal defences and seaside properties across Hampshire and Dorset. Over 800 lives were lost in total, with more than 200 ships sunk or severely damaged.  Blackmore's long description is brilliant: beginning with the blobs of cloud which threw feelers out, and strung themselves together, until a broad serried and serrate bar went boldly across the heavens, he paints a vivid picture of the violence of nature which smashed and wrecked and killed. Crusted with hunks of froth and foam-drift, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf...they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.

The description of Cradock junior's first day as a shipping clerk in the railway yard of the Grand Junction Wasting and Screwing Line is compelling: the maelstrom of steam engines and lurching wagons, where danger ran in converging lines, where a man must stand sideways, like a duellist, and with his arms like a drill-sergeant's, and not shrink an inch from the driving wheels evokes the hellish life endured by so many engaged by rail companies in the 1860s.

There are some fine, compellingly drawn characters, such as the Rev. John Rosedew, Rector of the New Forest parish of Nowellhurst, and Bull Garnet. In the first, the beloved friend of old Sir Cradock and respected pastor of the small New Forest community, the author has created a country parson of the finest type - a man with a good taste in wines, a man who can fish and swim and shoot. In all the parish of Nowellhurst there was scarcely a man or a woman who did not rejoice to see the rector pacing his leisurely rounds, carrying his elbows a little out...and smiling gently upon the children who tugged his coat-tails for an orange or a halfpenny. It is a pity that Rosedew, who always thought in Greek, except when Latin hindered him, is made the mouthpiece for the author's interminable classical allusions. In the second, the proud man of power is one of near tragic stature - stubborn, violent and repressed. His almost permanent anger comes from knowledge of his base birth (his mother was wronged by Sir Cradock's father) and his crime is due to his love and protection of his daughter's purity. But he is not a villain in the author's eyes (he dies in bed surrounded by his two children, with young Cradock's forgiveness echoing in his ears).    

++++++++++++++++++++++

Some extracts from the text:

The varieties of canine are as manifold and distinct as those of human nature. But the dog, be he saturnine or facetious, sociable or contemplative, mercurial or melancholic, is quite sure to be one thing - true and loyal ever.

Of a larger-than-life wife: she turned round suddenly on little Rufus (her husband), and standing head and shoulders above him, she opened her great eyes down upon him, like the port-holes of a frigate.

Of Bull Garnet: whoever saw him once was sure to know him again. If you met him in a rush to save the train, your eyes would turn and follow him. "There goes a man remarkable, whether for good or evil."

Do what we will, and think as we may, enlarging the mind in each generation, growing contemptuous of contempt, casting caste to the winds of heaven, and antiquating prejudice, nevertheless we shall never outrun, or even overtake Christianity.

Mark Stote, the head-gamekeeper on the Nowellhurst estate, was a true and honest specimen of the West Saxon peasant - slow, tenacious, and dogged, faithful and affectionate, with too much deference, perhaps, to all who seemed "his betters."

Mr Jupp's face was a villainous one; as even the softest philanthropist would have been forced to acknowledge. The enormous jaws, the narrow forehead, the grisly, porkish eyebrows, the high cheek-bones, and the cunning skance gleam from the black, deep-ambushed squinters...

So, a rambling tale (Blackmore himself says at one point, But, lo! here again we are wandering), with so many asides and byways and inconsequentialities (I need a rest from yet another paeon to trees); BUT, I enjoyed the character drawing and touches of humour and will remember with some affection the following personalities that helped to overcome the weaknesses of the tale - Sir Cradock and young Cradock; Amy, her father Rev. John Rosedew and Aunt Eudoxia; Bull Garnet and his two children, Robert and Pearl; the Rev. Octavius Pell; the scheming Mrs. Georgie Corklemore and slippery lawyer Simon Chope; the flamboyant Eoa Nowell. A grand array of characters.

The Guardian Readers' 100 Greatest Novels!

The Hundred Greatest Novels

(according to The Guardian readers)

Inevitably, this caught my eye on my MSM page. Intrigued, I actually printed out the List to see if I agreed with it. To start with, I'd never heard of 30 of the 100 books detailed. That is not a criticism, just an observation that the typical Guardian reader's tastes do not usually align with mine.

What were the top ten novels?

1. Middlemarch  2. Beloved  3. Ulysses  4. To the Lighthouse  5. In Search of Lost Time  6. Anna Karenina  7.  War and Peace  8.  Jane Eyre  9. Pride and Prejudice  10. Madame Bovary

Call me an old cynic, but I wonder how many readers had actually read the two Tolstoy books - Anna Karenina and War and Peace? Was it, more likely, a response to the silver screen version or to appear 'well-read'? Would that be true about Pride and Prejudice? As for Ulysses, well good luck to them! I'd never heard of Beloved, so I looked it up. Apparently, this 1987 novel by the American Toni Morrison  is famously challenging because the fragmented, non-linear narrative forces you to experience the disorienting, paralysing nature of trauma. It isn't a traditional novel... Unsurprisingly, it is also about slavery.  Well, just up guardianistas' street, then; but not for me.

Secondly, my dear old bête noire, Virginia Woolf is number 4, with that dreadful To the Lighthouse. Moreover, her Mrs. Dalloway (No.14); Orlando (No.54); The Waves (No.55); and Jacob's Room (No.92) are also in the List. It is worth repeating Philip Hensher's strictures: the idiotic The Waves, for instance, in which six incredibly uninteresting people engage in interminable and ludicrously over-written monologues, interrupted from time to time by fey prose-poems about the sun rising over the sea, or something. Orlando, an unstoppably arch fantasy about someone living for ever...is one of very few works of literature than can actually make the reader want to vomit. (see my 17 March Blog) Not to the typical Guardian reader, apparently. Five by Woolf and only two by Hardy; and just one each by William Thackeray, Josef Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Albert Camus and Daphne Du Maurier.

Of course, Sir Walter Scott is not there; neither is Anthony Trollope or L.P. Hartley. On a more positive note, it was comforting to see Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (No.31), di Lampedusa's The Leopard (No.46), Jean Rys's Wide Sargasso Sea (No.50), and Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (No.80). Such lists are really only useful for provoking arguments. We are not told how many readers actually responded to the request for their choices. These lists are always highly subjective; what makes a 'great' novel anyway? What about detective and spy fiction (both of which I enjoy reading) or Science fiction (which I can't abide!). I suppose I should say "Well done, Virginia"; but it would be with gritted teeth.                                               

G.P.R. James' 'The Last of the Fairies' [1848]

 

Parry & Co. first edition - [1848]

Another G.P.R.? Yes, and a delightful short one, too! There is no date on the title page - it is registered elsewhere as 1848, but it probably came out in December 1847, as it is clearly marketed in a 'Christmas Book' format - as Wolff maintains and the bookseller Jarndyce states in its catalogue.

The title, admittedly, rather put me off, as I have little time for the supernatural. However, the tale turned out to be a straightforward one about the aftermath of the Battle of Worcester in 1651, with a time-jump to 1660 and the Restoration. The father of Michael Foot (one-time Leader of the Labour Party 1980-1983) was Isaac Foot, a prominent Liberal M.P. and a Founder of the Cromwell Association. He used the 1644 Battle of Marston Moor to define a person's ideological alignment: "I judge a man by one thing, which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?" Well, Isaac and I would have been on opposing sides and I think G.P.R. James would have joined Prince Rupert and me, going by the political slant of this novel.

The first two chapters, entitled Epoch the First, are really a Prologue to the rest of the novel. It commences on 3rd September 1651, with a description of the Battle of Worcester. The Royalist Lord Charles Eustace gallops up to a moderate sized brick building on the outskirts of the city. James' famous horseman therefore takes centre stage in a first chapter yet again! He joins his wife Lilla and his little daughter Kate, whom he urges to flee to Pershore if the battle goes against the Royalists. Soon after, Denzil, a lad some seventeen or eighteen years of age, richly dressed and accoutred, with his long dark hair flowing down over his laced collar to his shoulders, comes speedily up to tell his master that Cromwell is in sight. The battle is fought and lost; but Kate cleverly, on hunting for her father on the battlefield, manages to assist him in escaping from the Parliamentarians. A shrill scream is heard after they send a volley of musket shot against the fleeing figure (only towards the end of the novel do we find out that it is his wife who is killed).

Epoch the Second transports the reader to scenes nine years' later, i.e. 1660. We are in an unnamed village, which has a ruined medieval castle on its higher slopes.  In its midst there is a well, which was in fact a spring of very beautiful water - here villagers would come to fill up their pitchers. The old clergyman of the place, good Doctor Aldover, a very meek, peaceful, and timid man had been dispossessed by a Presbyterian minister, Rev. Gideon Samson, though somewhat starch and caustic in his manner, was a good man and a kind, at heart, and both clergymen got on tolerably well with each other. Onto the castle sward comes a very handsome young man, of some seven or eight and twenty years; ... the bright glossy curls of his long abundant hair suited his face much better than the short crop of the Parliamentary soldier, or the sleek straight-cut hair of the puritanical preacher. It doesn't take much guesswork by the reader to realize it is dear Denzil again. He has ridden long and far and sensibly falls asleep in the castle's archway. Awakening, he beheld, with a strange peculiar feeling which he could not account for, a female form of exquisite beauty and grace standing on the opposite side of the little well... Oh, no, this reader thought - not another Walter Scott type supernatural being? It appears so as, when he tries to follow her, she seemed to become thinner, less substantial, more shadowy...and finally disappears.

The perplexed Denzil makes his way down to the village and it is confirmed that he has seen the Fairy of the Castle! He first meets Doctor Aldover and Rev. Samson, the former suggesting it was merely an astral spirit and the latter arguing the sprite is the spirit of a returning dead. Aldover has a vague recollection of Denzil's face, but is counselled to be cautious due to the rank and suspicious persons in the village. Denzil again has a sleep and is this time awakened by a woman's voice, saying Come to the church at midnight! Aldover takes him down to another cottage, that of a good lad, John Brownlow, and his curmudgeonly father. Also there, Denzil meets a young girl of seventeen or eighteen years of age, who had all the lightness of youth with a perfect symmetry of every limb - it is Alice Brownlow, the old man's niece. She agrees to take Denzil to the church - at midnight. Romance is already in the air!

She leaves him at the porch, but, in the ensuing darkness, within the sepulchral surroundings once again the ethereal voice, already heard at the castle, beckons him on. This means descending into a crypt and groping along a quarter of a mile tunnel. Finally, the beautiful figure, clothed in white and already seen at the castle, tells him to pray at a tomb (in fact, it is that of Lilla Eustace). Denzil is also told to pick up a parchment scroll, read it back at Doctor Aldover's cottage and obey its instructions. Alice Brownlow turns up again and Denzil realises his heart is lost to her. The scroll has told him to go swiftly North and hand it over to an unnamed gentleman. Before he goes, he and Alice more or less plight their troth! He leaves just in time, as Parliamentary soldiers are coming to bivouac in the village.

Although there are still 90 pages to go, the rest of the tale can be quickly described. It is General Monk who Denzil has to hand over the scroll. It clearly relates to the General supporting the Restoration of Charles II. In Epoch the Third, Denzil returns to the village and finds a nasty Parliamentary soldier, Colonel Okey terrorizing the inhabitants. It is in the description of Okey that the author's prejudices are clearly shown. He harangued his men with the common-place cant of the wilder and more enthusiastic sectaries, who then struggled to retain that power and predominance which they had for many years enjoyed and misused in the land... Notwithstanding a near-fatal fall from the castle battlements, brought on by the ethereal beauty leading Okey to be shoved by a black arm to the court below, the Colonel leads a court of so-called justice against John Brownlow and others. It is at this juncture that Denzil returns, to be named by his true title, Denzil, Lord Blount, who Okey accuses of slaying his nephew at Worcester. However, all is luckily lost for Colonel O - Denzil has surrounded the court with Royalist troops; moreover, it is the very end of May 1660 - King Charles II is on the throne!

The 'Fairy' has one last message for Denzil - forswear the Court and the cities and live amongst your own people on your own lands. Then, it's time to meet Lord Eustace, who had survived Worcester, but for the loss of an arm - now replaced by a contrivance (yes, it was the Lord's black arm that pushed Okey off the castle battlements). He had been hiding in the ruins for nearly a decade, safe against villagers' snooping by the supernatural terrors and Alice Brownlow's taking him sustenance. Eustace teases Denzil that years ago he had planned for his daughter Kate to become the latter's wife. Denzil, however, refuses to budge from wanting Alice. Well, guess what?! (I had, in fact, guessed some while back) - Alice proves to be the disguise Catherine (Kate) has assumed since Worcester. Of course, they marry and, of course, Catherine/Kate had played the Fairy to keep simple villagers away from her father's hideout. Gideon Samson flees to Scotland, Doctor Aldover proves to be Lord Eustace's chaplain.

A much tighter story from James for once and quite enjoyable.

Mrs. Blackford's 'The Scottish Orphans' and 'Arthur Monteith' 1822

 

W. Wetton second edition - 1823

Only last month, I read Mrs. Blackford's  The Eskdale Herd-Boy (1819) and commented on its didacticism  (see my Blog of 23 April). These two related tales, here published bound together, are in the same vein. The sub title includes the phrase and calculated to improve the minds of young people. Mrs. B lays it on with a trowel.

The story begins with a Chapter devoted to the aftermath of the 1745 Scottish Rebellion on behalf of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Mr. Monteith, being brought up in principles of firm attachment to the house of Stuart felt in honour obliged to support the doomed insurrection. Captured in the aftermath of Culloden, taken prisoner to Stirling Castle and about to be transported to Carlisle for an inevitable execution, he persuaded his loyal retainer, William Mathieson, to secrete his three young children away to safety. The reason - Monteith knew his dastardly uncle Colonel Monteith, who had supported the Government side, would undoubtedly wrest the forfeited estates away from his offspring. The escape is successful, but Mrs Monteith, naturally seized with a deep melancholy on her husband's demise, followed him to the grave one short week afterwards. Hence The Scottish Orphans - 5-year-old Arthur, his younger brother Allen and sister Jessie. The tale swiftly jumps to six years later. A Colonel and Mrs. Jane Beaumont have recently purchased a small estate at the foot of the Pentland Hills, 12 miles to the south of Edinburgh. They are childless, so when they see a group of young children playing on part of their estate they start to watch. The upshot is neat. We are, in fact, meeting William and his siblings again; this time, they have been joined by William and Jane Mathieson's own children, Annie and Jamie. All five youngsters believe the Mathiesons are their parents, although Arthur, now nearly a teenager, has a dim recollection of the escape from Stirling.

Mrs Beaumont is so taken with Jessie that she persuades Jane to let her come and be a companion to her, with a promise to educate her as a genteel young lady. Arthur, who has high hopes of going into the army, much to his 'father's' dismay, refuses the chance to be educated with Colonel Beaumont, although this, too, would have helped him to bridge the cultural gap between the apparent son of a small farmer and a well-to-do laird. The reason? In one of his many rambles in the nearby hills, he links up with an old man who is clearly in some sort of hiding. They get on so well, that the latter agrees to help Arthur's education, especially in learning Latin. No-one else knows about this relationship. These arrangements go on for some years - Jessie being brought up at the Beaumonts, being regularly visited by her 'sister' Annie; Arthur delighting in learning from his secret friend; and the two young boys helping on the Mathieson's smallholding. So pleased is Col. Beaumont with William's farming prowess that he settles the family in a much improved estate.

Throughout the novel, the author makes it clear that class matters and is God's plan. When Arthur suggests that Jamie learn Latin with him, William says of his real son, He will be a farmer, like myself, and as much information and knowledge as is required with the rank of life it has pleased Providence to place him in... your birth entitles you to look higher than any son of mine has a right to do. (By now, Arthur has been told about his origins). A boost come Arthur's way, when Col. Beaumont, on the strength of a pamphlet he has written on Indian affairs, is offered a promotion to General and a five-year posting to the sub-continent. Arthur eventually persuades him to take him with him as his aide-de-camp. The 13-year-old Allen, who is destined for the church, now becomes the confidant and pupil of the old man in the hills, known to Arthur simply as Robert. Thus ends The Scottish Orphans. Apart from the unmet uncle Col. Monteith and his ghastly son, everyone is so brimming with Christianity and goodness, it makes the reader feel rather unworthy.

The Author of the "Scottish Orphans", grateful for the very flattering reception which the first part of that tale has received from an indulgent public, hastens to redeem her pledge of publishing a Second Part of the same History. Thus begins Arthur Monteith, although the ensuing tale is as much about the rest of the family as it is about Arthur. The story-telling is in the same mould as the previous book - sentimental, occasionally cloying and certainly with a determination to improve young readers' minds. General Beaumont and Arthur thrive in India; however, cousin Colin Monteith, attached to the General's party, is as bad and dissolute a character as his father Col. Monteith. 

The years roll by. Allen has now been at  University for three years; Old Robert still lives - in splendid isolation in the hills; Mrs Beaumont is now receiving regular notes from the latter (it turns out he is her father, presumed dead after Culloden!); Jamie is steadfastly learning the farming trade; 17-year-old Jessie is now tall and elegant in her person, with features perfectly regular and beautiful. Well, class will tell. Annie, however, is declining in health. Taken to Edinburgh by Mrs Beaumont and her father, she is examined by physicians who could give no hope of her recovery. Annie is to die a Christian death: "Oh! weep not for me, my beloved parent. I trust, that in the mercy of God I may be pardoned, and received, through the intercession of his dear Son, into everlasting peace..."  Later, as she declines further, she says to Jessie: "Be steady, my beloved Jessie in pursuing the race you have begun, whatever temptations may yet be thrown in your way. Remember always, that without perseverance in godliness, there can be no safety for a Christian..." Mrs Blackford, clearly, wants not only Jessie but also her young readers to take note. Annie holds up to the very end: she grasped Mrs Beaumont's hand hastily, saying, "Lord Jesus receive my spirit!" and sunk down upon her pillow, a lifeless corpse.

Three more years pass. General (now Sir Charles) Beaumont writes regularly home, as does Arthur. One day, Sir Charles surprises Arthur hurriedly hiding a packet with a seal on it. Sir Charles exclaims:  That seal belonged to my wife's father, Sir Alexander M'Donald. and since his death, I have never seen it. Over the next 90 pages, all is to be happily revealed. Both uncle Colonel Monteith and his dissolute son Colin - who had been sent home from India in disgrace - die. But before doing so, in pangs of shame the former makes a Will leaving the whole Monteith inheritance to Arthur. There is an overlong explanation of the years before and after Culloden, explaining the Colonel's behaviour. By now, Sir Charles and Arthur are also back in England and, once the Will is proved and the King restores Arthur to his attainted inheritance, they make the way north. 'Old Robert' is indeed unmasked as Sir Alexander, leading to a tearful reunion with his daughter and son-in-law. Jane Mathieson, on returning to the Monteith estates, is also reunited with her brother and father; James marries and takes over his father's farm; Allen gets a living on the Monteith estate and marries the sister of James' wife; Jessie resides with the  Beaumonts until, aged 24, she marries a nephew of Sir Charles; Arthur himself married an amiable young woman in the neighbourhood;

William and Jane settle in their old home on Monteith land; and the author spends the last few pages writing up a few more moralistic bon mots. Thus have I brought to a conclusion the history of ARTHUR MONTEITH. If I have related it properly, it must have carried its own moral in it...we will begin with the first foundation of all those good and honourable feelings, which distinguished our hero throughout the course of his life. "Honour thy father and thy mother", was the law early and deeply imprinted on his young heart...in comparing Annie's death with that of Colonel Monteith, my young friends will learn the inestimable value of a well-spent life. It is this that smooths the pillow of the dying Christian...if any child be taught to imitate the active virtues of Arthur, and so to live, as at last to die like Annie...the author will not have laboured in vain. A book for 1822 - 204 years ago.

Allan Cunningham's 'Traditional Tales' 1822 - Part II

 

Taylor and Hessey - 1822

After the Trollope interlude, I returned to Allan Cunningham's Traditional Tales - there are ten of them in this second volume. Once again, I was drawn to some more than to others and, eventually, felt there was a 'sameness' about them, concentrating as they do on the Solway and its coastlines of Cumberland and Dumfries/Galloway. Above all, the injection of verse, so-called original ballads, were rarely to my taste. To be fair, I think many of them had appeared in the London Magazine over a period of time. The first story, Miles Colvine, the Cumberland Mariner was one of the best. It starts well: On the Cumberland side of the firth of Solway lies a long line of flat and unelegant coast [I know it well], where the sea-fowl find refuge from the gun of the fowler, and which, save the barren land and the deep sea, presents but one object to our notice, - the ruins of a rude cottage, once the residence of MILES COLVINE, the Mariner... Colvine was a seaman, a soldier, a scholar, and a gentleman who had been shipwrecked there in slightly mysterious circumstances. Three persons had been visible on the ship's deck, but only he survived. The planks from the deck which floated ashore seemed stained with blood and with wine. Colvin gave nothing away and remained thereafter a silent and melancholy man. Although he took to the sea again, he seldom looked in the face of any one; man he seemed to regard with an eye of scorn, and even deadly hatred; but on women he looked with softness and regard. When meeting a mother and child, he gazed on them with an eye of settled sorrow and affection. 

The narrator recalls stopping by Colvine's cottage with an idle friend or two and seeing within not only a smarter dressed mariner but also a female richly dressed, and of a beauty so exquisite, who busied herself about the room and then sang a Ballad  O Mariner, O Mariner, which clearly related to the story of her father's and mother's misfortunes. Suddenly a band of smugglers from Ireland Scotland appear and seem determined to break in. The narrator helps Colvine and his daughter (both armed with pistols) force the gang to flee to their boat; he is invited in to the cottage and is introduced to May Colvine with an increase of loveliness, such as a rose appears when refreshed in dew. The grateful father then tells the narrator his sad story of his loss of fair domains, a stately house and a beauteous wife due to an involvement with a ruthless band of smugglers. His wife is seized and despoiled; thanks to the drunkenness of the smugglers on one trip, Colvine manages to kill several before the ship sank in Allanbay.  Only later did Colvine find out his daughter had been saved by a passing vessel. Albeit, the story ends sadly, with Colvine being found, years later, cold and dead gazing out across the Solway dressed in the garb resembling that of a pilgrim.

Other stories, such as Honest Man John Ochiltree and Elphin Irving. The Fairies' Cupbearer are full of romance, pathos and elements of the supernatural. As the author says of the latter Tale, In the legends of the people of Corrievale there is a singular mixture of elfin and human adventure, and the traditional story of the Cupbearer to the Queen of the Fairies appeals alike to our domestic feelings and imagination. There is the occasional touch of humour: There has not been a fairy in the land since Donald Cargil, the Cameronian, conjured them into the Solway for playing on their pipes during one of his nocturnal preachings on the hip of the Burnswark hill.

The story of Richard Faulder, Mariner again deals with a shipwreck, where his father and three brothers are drowned. Locals refer to the Faulders as a doomed race. Once more, as with nearly all these Tales, a Ballad - along with many other singular rhymes full of maritime superstition and adventure - is placed in the text. The Last Lord of Helvellyn is actually a story related by the same Richard Faulder of Allanbay. It includes this observation about the Scots: [they] are a demure, a careful, and a singular people; and, amid much homeliness of manner, have something of a poetical way of displaying their affections, which they treasure too for great occasions, or, as they say, "daimen times".  By the time I reached the sixth Tale - Judith Macrone, the Prophetess - I was beginning to feel mildly bored with the 'sameness' and simplicity of the stories. The brief touch of humour again (The sun was, to use the expression of a Scottish poet - "wading 'mang the mist", or as a fastidious Englishman would say, "struggling amid drizzly rain"), did not disguise the fact that story was overlong. It made much of Judith's skill in minstrel lore - with her, each oak-tree has its tale, each loop of Annanwater its tradition, and every green knowe or holly-bush its ballad of true love, or song of knightly bravery.

The Ghost with the Golden Casket - dealing with a supernatural being and Caerlaverock Castle - The Haunted Ships (Richard Faulder is mentioned in both) again concentrate on the superstitions singularly wild and unusual linked to both sides of the Solway. The second Tale, involving two sunken and haunted Danish ships, was, admittedly, quite spooky! The Laird of Warlsworm focused on a miserly old man, consumed with grasping and incessant greed, his face gross and covetous, being looked after by his niece, remarkable for her gentleness and beauty...glowing in health and ripe in beauty, her tresses bright, her hands, white and shapely, and small, clasped over a white and a perturbed bosom (what is a perturbed bosom?!). This Bessie Lamond loves a young man, Gawain, but her miserly uncle pledges her to another old skinflint, Haudthegrup. The old laird dies; Haudthegrup is chief mourner and, to elude the expense of a toll-bar, he proposes to ford a river, red and swollen with rain. But, I'll stop there as I don't want to spoil my other favourite of the ten stories for any potential reader.

I repeat - the Tales are very similar to one another and can 'drag' a little if one reads them immediately one after the other. The near-doggerel verse - ballads - grated on me after awhile. I always prefer prose to verse anyway. 

Sitting with a beguiling trollope in Salisbury

 

The view across the Avon to the cathedral spire

Once again, we found ourselves in Salisbury, staying at the atmospheric Rose & Crown hostelry with its beautiful green sward leading down to the Avon. The view above is from our ground-floor bedroom, looking across the river to the spire of the cathedral. It is but a few minutes walk, across the Grade I listed Old Harnham Bridge, which dates back to the 1200s, to reach the cathedral close.

One has to pass by this plaque, which relates to the building below.                                         

Of course, the book I took with me was Anthony Trollope's The Warden, the first in what became known as the author's Barchester series. So, I sat out on that green sward and read one of my favourite novels for, perhaps, the fifth or sixth time. I won't chart the story, slim as it is. If you have read the book, it is probably more than once; if you haven't, hie thee down to the nearest bookshop or pester Amazon or Ebay. You are otherwise missing a few pleasurable hours. I can't afford a first edition (it's on the Internet at £5,797, £3,275 and £2,976); but, I have a lovely 1976 first printing of the Folio Society's edition, in its slipcase. Julian Symons' Introduction is a useful refresher, reminding us that although Trollope in his old age said that Barset was Somerset, it was more likely a blend of three or four western counties. Barchester itself, Trollope averred, was Winchester, but the novel was conceived during a visit to Salisbury in 1851. The actual writing began a year later, but for several reasons it was not published until January 1855. Originally entitled The Precentor, it was his fourth published novel - it made only £9. 2s. 6d. by the end of the first year. It was clearly planned as a single work, not as the first part of a series. Symons may be right in labelling the book a minor work by a major novelist, but the memorable figures in it were, as it were, being given a trial run [and the author] realised their possibilities, and began to understand the extent of his own talents. I was not keen on Peter Reddick's illustrations.

Can I just share some of the author's superb character sketches and shafts of humour? So Trollopian! 

Who could lie basking in the cloisters of Salisbury (as I did this week), and gaze on Jewel's library and that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich!

The bishop did not whistle: we believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron.

It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice! In the present case so little of this sort have I overheard, that I live in hopes of finishing my work within 300 pages, and of completing that pleasant task - a novel in one volume...

John Bold has all the ardour and all the self-assurance of a Danton, and hurls his anathemas against time-honoured practices with the violence of a French Jacobin.

Mary Bold was older than her brother, and, at the time of our story, was just over thirty. She was not an unattractive young woman, though by no means beautiful. Her great merit was the kindliness of her disposition. She was not very clever, nor very animated, nor had she apparently the energy of her brother; but she was guided by a high principle of right and wrong; her temper was sweet, and her faults were fewer in number than her virtues.

Archdeacon Grantly in the world never lays aside that demeanour which so well becomes him. He has all the dignity of an ancient saint with the sleekness of a modern bishop; he is always the same; he is always the archdeacon; unlike Homer, he never nods...

As the archdeacon stood up to make his speech, erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there, as a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; his shovel hat, large, new, and well-pronounced, a churchman's hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker's broad brim; his heavy eyebrows, large open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well to do was its estate; one hand ensconced within his pocket evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight if need be in her defence; and, below these, the decorous breeches, and neat black gaiters showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the decency, the outward beauty and grace of our church establishment.

The Bishop, though he had never been an active man, was one whose qualities had rendered him dear to all who knew him. He was the very opposite to his son; he was a bland and a kind old man, opposed by every feeling to authoritative demonstrations  and episcopal ostentation.

Sir Abraham Haphazard was a tall thin man, with hair prematurely grey, but bearing no other sign of age; he had a slight stoop, in his neck rather than his back, acquired by his constant habit of leaning forward as he addressed various audiences. He might be fifty years old, and would have looked young for his age, had not constant work hardened his features, and given him the appearance of a machine with a mind. His face was full of intellect, but devoid of natural expression...with him success alone was praiseworthy, and he knew none so successful as himself.

And the Warden, Septimus Harding? - is a small man, now verging on sixty years, but bearing few of the signs of age; his hair is rather grizzled, though not grey; his eye is very mild, but clear and bright, though the double glasses which are held swinging from his hand, unless when fixed upon his nose, show that time has told upon his sight; his hands are delicately white, and both hands and feet are small; he always wears a black frock coat, black knee-breeches, and black gaiters, and somewhat scandalises some of his more hyper-critical brethren by a black neck-handkerchief.

Even in the short time of our acquaintance, I felt I knew them all quite well.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Earlier in the year, I rewatched the first couple of episodes of the BBC's Barchester Towers - delivered in the days when that institution produced good quality drama.

I will leave comment on Alan Rickman's Obadiah Slope for another time, as he does not figure in The Warden. I found both Mary Bold and Eleanor Harding played well by Barbara Flynn and Janet Maw;  rather like I imagined the characters to be. David Gwillim was a good casting for John Bold, as was Joseph O'Conor for Bunce. The problem with Nigel Hawthorne's Dr. Grantly is that the actor nowadays is indelibly linked with his portrayal of Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. However, he gave a decent rendering of the Archdeacon. George Costigan was a solid Tom Towers and Michael Aldridge a splendid Sir Abraham Haphazard. I would not have cast Donald Pleasence as Mr. Harding. Pleasence was squat rather than small. There was a real Mr Harding, who lived in our tiny Somerset village in the late 1950s - thin, courteous, smallish and clearly a gentleman. He was my choice! 

Allan Cunningham's 'Traditional Tales' 1822 - Part I

 

Taylor and Hessey first edition - 1822

As is usually the case after reading a novel by an author one knows virtually nothing about, looking up information about him/her is well worth any effort. Allan Cunningham (1784-1842) is no exception.

Born at Keir, Dumfries, (his father was a neighbour of Robert Burns), he became a friend of James Hogg, "the Ettrick Shepherd". Apprenticed to a stonemason at the age of 11, he spent his leisure time reading and collecting old Scottish ballads. He started to write imitations of them from an early age. In 1809, whilst finding such ballads for Robert Hartley Cromack's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, he often sent in unsolicited poems of his own. In 1810, he went south to London, where he worked for four years as a journalist and reporter on Parliament. He lived for the rest of his life in the Great Wen, as superintendent of works for the leading British sculptor, Francis Chantrey. Although based in the capital city, Cunningham continued to publish a huge variety of works about southwest Scotland and Cumberland, especially his own Nithsdale. He published songs, poetry, novels, tales and biographies of writers and artists. He edited the Works of Robert Burns (1834), which some critics say was "unreliable"! Apart from these Traditional Tales, which are a mixture of assimilated prose and verse/ballad, I also have his three novels, the first two in the UK first edition and the third in the USA first edition: Paul Jones. A Romance (1826); Sir Michael Scott (1828); and Lord Roldan. A Romance (1836). All still to read.

Volume I has a useful Preface by Cunningham, where he states that I am more the collector and embellisher, than the creator of these tales; and such as are not immediately copied from recitation are founded upon traditions or stories prevalent in the north. There are six of them, of uneven interest (to me). Ezra Peden is the story of one of the shepherds of the early Presbyterian flock, and distinguished himself as an austere and enthusiastic pastor; fearless in his ministration, delighting in wholesome discipline, and guiding in the way of grace the peer as well as the peasant...he spared no vice, he compounded with no sin... 

He had no time for Establishment flummery: plain and simple in his own apparel, he counted the mitred glory and exterior magnificence of the hierarchy a sin and an abomination, and preferred preaching on a wild hill or in a lonesome glen to the most splendid edifice. Wherever he sojourned, dance and song fled: - the former he accounted a devoting of limbs which God made to the worship of Satan; the latter he believed to be a sinful meting out of wanton words to a heathen measure. Clothes, on either sex, were to be sober; young love watched carefully; witches, elves and spirits were to be persecuted. He wandered forth at night, as a spiritual champion, to give battle to the enemies of the light. He laboured for 15 years until, one winter in 1705, he is summoned to a dying man's bedside - the soul of an evil man, a worker of iniquity, is about to depart. He reaches this Bonshaw's decaying mansion, where an old  Covenanter William Cameron kneels at the tower's portal. The reader then has to ponder over eight stanzas of minstrelsy before Cameron departs. Ezra confronts the dying man - a persecutor of such as Cameron.  One evening in the following spring, Ezra is joined by a sepulchral figure on his way home; it is the ghost of Bonshaw who berates Ezra for his lack of charity. The tale ends with Ezra being found, raving in a deep wild dell, to be carried home to die on the third day. Not a bad story.

The Selbys of Cumberland, being a three-parter, is by far the longest and one of the best of the tales. A descendant of that noble house, once the fairest of its daughters, but now aged and poor, is supposed to relate some legends of her unfortunate family; she tells how she accompanied her cousin and lover young Walter Selby, the last of his name, when he marched under the banner of the exiled Stuarts, and fell at the battle of Preston. It includes an animated description of the rebel army and again has sprinkles of minstrelsy. Walter's head ends up on Carlisle's city gate, but is taken down by a friend and a tress of his hair is given to the disconsolate Eleanor. 

I enjoyed Placing a Scottish Minister, as it ran the gamut of ghastly intolerance and erstwhile acceptance over the young Joel Kirkpatrick's induction into his first ministry in the kirk adjacent to the ancient abbey of Bleeding-Heart (surely the real Sweetheart) in Dumfries. The place where this multitude of motley beliefs and feelings had assembled, was one of singular beauty. It starts badly for the young minister, who is provided with an escort of dragoons - pebbles were thrown, and the symptoms of fiercer hostility began to manifest themselves...John Cargill, a gifted Cameronian weaver, from one of the wildest Galloway mountains, brandished an oaken treddle with which he had armed himself, like a quarter-staff, and cried, 'Down with the men of Moab'.  Joel helps an old man to his feet, the dragoons are dismissed and matters quieten down. All eventually ended well: Joel Kirkpatrick became one of the moist popular pastors of the Presbytery, and one of the chief luminaries of the ancient province of Galloway.

The King of the Peak. A Derbyshire Tale relates the legendary tale of the elopement of Dorothy Vernon (d. 1584), the second daughter of Sir George Vernon of Haddon Hall, with Lord John Manners (c.1534-1611), the second son of the Earl of Rutland. Sir George had disapproved of their relationship - the Vernons were Catholics and the Manners Protestants - so she fled during a ball at Haddon Hall. If the elopement did happen (it has been the subject of several novels, plays and a 1924 film starring Mary Pickford), the by-now married lovers were soon reconciled with Sir George and inherited his estate on his death two years later. Haddon Hall and the ball itself is well described by Cunningham, as is Dora/Dorothy: her short rosy upper-lip was slightly curled, with as much of maiden sanctity, perhaps, as pride; her white high forehead was shaded with locks of sunny brown, while her large and dark hazel eyes beamed with free and unaffected modesty. No wonder Lord John is waiting in the bushes. 'Ah, fair and stately Haddon,' said Lord John Manners, 'little dost thou know, thou hast lost thy jewel from they brow'.

Dorothy Vernon's steps, Haddon Hall

The Mother's Dream is set again in Dumfriesshire and concerns the eerie and forbidding Ladye's Lowe, a sheet of water where tradition related that a submerged causeway led to a sunken tower - seven fathoms deep - which held narratives of perils, and bloodshed, and chivalry, and love. Regularly, a young man is seen watching from or lying on the foreshore: the remains of health and beauty were still about him; but his locks, once curling and long, which maidens loved to look at, were now matted, and wild, and withered; his cheeks were hollow and pale, and his eyes, once the merriest and brightest in the district, shone now with a grey, wild, and unearthly light. Truly, a melancholy wreck. As the story unfolds, it transpires that this Benjie Spedlands, caused the death of five young other boys by incautiously skating on the too-thin iced over lake. The tale is told by the distraught mother of one of the boys. One stormy, dark night, Benjie disappears - his hat was found floating by the side of the water, but he was never more seen nor heard of - his death-lights, glimmering for a season on the lake, told to many that he had found, perhaps sought, a grave in the deepest part of the Ladye's Lowe.

The final tale, Allan-a-Maut, is of a youth who enjoys many a drink and a love tryste. Returning one day from such a tryst, during the grey of the morning, he falls into a kind of reverie. He seems to wander into a wood of Scotch firs, where he is accosted by a large and hungry dog. It was soon joined, to my utter dismay, by a human being. I never beheld a man with a look so startled and threatening. He was tall and strong-built, with hair long and matted, the colour of ashes, while his eyes, large, and staring, and raw... He forces Allan to follow him to a rude structure, resembling a shepherd's shed, half cavern, and half building, and nearly hidden under the involving branches of two luxuriant firs. This Mungo Macubin shows Allan to an even fiercer companion, one Jock Mackleg, who thinks the lad is a gauger (revenue man). With a third rogue, Jock Laggengird, they are engaged in illicit distilling. Fortuitously, Allan saves the building when the drunken Laggengird throws a quaigh full of spirit into the fire and the whole place threatens to go up in flames. Saved not for long, however. The real excisemen have tracked down the illicit distillery and the building is destroyed, but not before Allan escapes into the wood.

Not a bad collection overall - I have already started on the tales in Volume II.