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 dress 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) 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. Local refers 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 nis 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.

Alexander Balfour's 'Campbell; or, The Scottish Probationer' 1819

 

Oliver and Boyd, first edition - 1819

I am minded of Walter Scott's Wandering Willie's Tale (1824) - not so much for its content but for its title. Alexander Balfour's Campbell could easily have been entitled Weary Willie's Tale, or even Wimpish Willie's Tale. Over its three volumes, we have to experience almost a melancholic monologue, as it is couched in the first person.

William Campbell, true to form throughout his autobiography, tells the reader in his first sentence that, having spent the greater part of a long life in unremitted, but generally ineffectual endeavours to be useful to myself and others, he is therefore anxious that my errors and misfortunes should be recorded pro bono publico.  Well, he certainly does just that. Son of a plain, honest Scottish farmer, born in 1746 between the Tay and the Grampians, he suffers an old maid's kindergarten; a mediocre parish school with an indolent teacher; studies for an MA at university; and returns home to preach occasionally for the clergymen in the neighbourhood. Prospects brighten when he is employed to teach the children of a Mr and Mrs B. The eldest, Miss Maria B., was 17 and possessed a form and features capable of inspiring the admirers of female beauty with adoration; but these were only the ornaments of a casket, which contained a jewel of the brightest lustre and inestimable value. In fact, unhappily, she will inadvertently ruin his life. They fall in love, but his conscience means he leaves the family. Then disaster strikes: Miss B dies of consumption. For the next forty years his life is blighted; his only solace is that one day he will join her, when we shall meet to part no more.   

He has an unsuccessful dalliance with a Miss Burton; he is ejected from two livings, one for being too conservative, the other for being too radical!; he  loans a travelling player 5 guineas, who much later turns out to be Mr. Belfield, a young farmer of some standing and who not only repays Campbell the money, but sets him up in a small cottage on his land. However, eventually his long-time friends and patrons - Belfield and his wife Anna - both die, the latter with consumption having pined away after the death of their only child, the former subsequently in a boating accident in Ireland, trying and failing to rescue the daughter of another friend from drowning. One paragraph summed up Campbell's recurring self-pity: the interest which I took in the unhappy state of my friends, and indelible impression which their miseries left on my mind, have inclined me to dwell upon the gloomy subject till it has probably become tiresome [too true!]: but the garrulity of old age is proverbial; and grief, after having settled down to chronic melancholy, often become loquacious.

Further misery follows. when the man who looked after his slender savings went bankrupt, as did the Glaswegian who had employed him to educate his offspring. Again I became a solitary and friendless wanderer on the land that gave me birth.

Throughout, there is his fixation with Maria B., who had died at the age of 21, his first and only love, which borders on the unbalanced. His final visitation to her grave finds him stretched out on the turf above her grave throughout a cold night, oblivious to all but her seraphic spirit. Previously, Campbell intones: Beloved Maria B., thou hast fled to the chambers of light, and left me to wander alone, like a stranger on the dreary heath, in a moonless night! Who cares for me? or why should I linger behind thee? I am like a tree that has been left alone in the field; its buds blighted by the frost, and its branches broken by the storm; its trunk drooping in decay...Pull yourself together man. It's a wonder you have any friends.

On his final retirement from occasional teaching, he has recourse to the poems of Campbell, Crabbe, and Walter Scott; to which a friend in Edinburgh has kindly added Waverley, Guy Mannering, Tales of My Landlord, and Byron's Poems. Interestingly, Campbell (and the author?) muses that if not that there is so much manual labour in novel-writing, I find it, at present, the easiest of all literary subjects. This is a novel-reading age, and the appetite still grows with what it feeds on: quantity and not quality, is required. It is quite unnecessary, either to study nature in drawing characters, or probability in the adventures. In fact, there are too many ridiculous coincidences scattered throughout the author's own tale. Campbell meeting up with long-lost acquaintances at roadside inns, whether separated wives from friends made much earlier or characters linked to totally different circumstances and surroundings.

In the penultimate page of his final chapter, looking back in 1816 aged three score and ten, he is still wallowing in melancholia and self pity: From the refined enjoyments and delicate endearments of domestic felicity, I have ever been excluded; and, for years past, no one has participated in my pleasures, or sympathised in my sorrows. I constitute no link in the chain of social life; and there is not a fellow mortal who has an interest in my existence. On his death, the sexton will press down the turf upon my head...and before the next Sunday, when the company meet on the same spot, I shall be forgotten. O misery me. He conveniently forgets a recent offer of help from his long-time friend. Elizabeth Maitland (once Miss Burton) but, as she wrote, foolish modesty and false delicacy have been your foibles through life. He has previously quoted Shakespeare's Jaques in As You Like It -

...it is a melancholy

Of mine own, compounded of many simples,

Extracted from many objects; and, indeed,

The sundry contemplation of my travels,

In which my often rumination wraps me

In a most humorous sadness.

And again, after passing a sleepless night, he viewed myself, at present, as nearly a useless being - a drone in the public hive...

 

At one point, the narrative is merely a travelogue, detailing the countryside around Perth, Dunkeld and Killicrankie, which is followed by one of the many insertions of verse into the text. The flow of the autobiographical narrative is punctured by several other characters relating their history to Campbell: in Volume I these are a man who swindled Campbell with forged banknotes, which takes up pages 116 to 131; Mr Belfield's story on pages 260 to 290; Roger, Mr. Belfield's grieve,   reminiscences in Volume II pages 52-76; Dr. Stanley pages 172-185. 

So, an interesting but uneven in quality tale. It felt that the author was striving to find material to reach the allotted three-volume requirement. In fact, the last volume is 65 pages shorter than the first. I am not a great fan of gobbets of verse being inserted into prose - by all means start chapters with such extracts (e.g. Scott and others). I am still mildly bewildered that such a self-pitying and melancholic man could have reached 70 years of age. He appeared to have suffered from a form of PTSD, occasioned by Maria B's untimely death. I know it's only a fiction, but I wish he had snapped out of it!

Mrs. Blackford's 'The Eskdale Herd-Boy' 1819

 

J. Harris first edition - 1819

This is didacticism with a capital 'D'. To be fair, Mrs. Blackford (actually the nom de plume of Lady Isabella Stoddart [c.1775-1846], the wife of the well-known lawyer and journalist Sir John Stoddart) was explicit about this, with a sub title for the Instruction and Amusement of Young persons. In the Introduction, moreover, Mrs. Blackford makes it crystal clear that the adventures of John Telfer, the Eskdale Herd-boy, were to impress, on the minds of her young readers, the permanent advantages of early integrity and gratitude. She goes on - in the short and unfortunate life of William Martin, she has attempted to show the duty, that is incumbent on all young people to subdue that disobedient and self-willed temper, which may otherwise undermine, not only their own comfort and happiness, but those of their parents and friends. In addition, her portrayal of Helen Martin, the sister of William, is meant to illustrate the inestimable value that a dutiful daughter may be of, both to father and mother.

On the first page, the author draws attention to the [Eskdale] cottages in general...having too frequently a look of neglect, the windows broken, the walls dirty, and instead of a pretty garden, a heap of mud before the door. I thought I was moving into Elizabeth Hamilton territory and her Cottagers of Glenburnie (see Blogs of 4th July 2020 and 3rd January 2021) and one or two comments even suggested a demeaning approach like that of Margaret Woods in her A Village Tragedy (see my Blog of 26th April 2020).  However, the reader is quickly taken to a small cottage, with its neat white walls, well-thatched roof, and clean casement-windows; it is 1808, and it is the home of John and Marion Telfer, whose story forms the major - but not the only - thread in the narrative. The text immediately leaves the present (and doesn't return there until page 257, four pages before the end) and commences John's story as a little boy of ten, recently orphaned by the death of both parents of a fever.

He is taken up by the local pious pastor, Mr. Martin, who becomes his loco parentis. The boy is nurtured, becoming a trustworthy, competent lad. He is given the job of herd-boy to a neighbour, Mr. Laurie. By day he learns shepherding, by evening he learns to read and write proficiently under Mr. Martin's tutelage. He makes firm friends with the good-natured Helen, the pastor's daughter. and Mrs Martin. Other players in the tale are gradually introduced: David Little, the shepherd, and his family; Mr. Armstrong, the local, kindly doctor, and Mr. Scott, the gardener at Craigie Hall. It is at the Scott home, that John first meets his future wife, the then seven year-old, Marion Scott. Many of these early pages are devoted to setting the scene, both as far as the characters are concerned and the homes and countryside around them. Mrs. Blackford is quick to praise the Scottish peasantry of the time: no race of men, of an rank or country, that took more mains in instructing their children, both in their moral and religious duties; and John had been taught early, that the shadow of a lie was contrary to the duty of a Christian, and that a child who, in the slightest degree, deceived his parents, masters, or companions, would never merit or obtain the character of an honest and just man. How far have we fallen by 2026?

The common round and daily task continue. Morning service is daily taken at the pastor's. In Scotland, the observance of Sunday is strict, but not morosely severe. It is considered by the peasants as their grand day of innocent recreation. Nothing that is trifling, or that can any how be done on Saturday, is left for the Sabbath. The men are all shaved on Saturday evening; and they would even scruple to gather a cabbage, out of their garden, on the lord's day. How times have changed.

There are pitfalls. The doctor has to be called out to treat first Helen and then Marion for dangerous illnesses. We are introduced to the scamp, William Martin, who had been sent first to his grandmother in Melrose and then to a tutor in Kelso, to try and tame him. When Captain Elliott, Mrs Martin's brother turns up on leave from the navy, William absconds and follows him first to London, and then joins his ship, much to the forebodings of his parent and sister. For many pages, John the herd-boy leaves the stage and the story concentrates on the Martins. Years go by. John, in turn, joins Captain Elliott and William  on board the Amazon bound for Mediterranean duties. About a year after the three had left England, the first of  four deaths occur over twelve pages. Mrs. Martin succumbs to a stroke of palsy; William is drowned in the ship's small boat; Captain Elliott is shot through the heart in an engagement with two large French frigates; and Mr. Martin dies from a heart attack on hearing the news of William's death. Ah, woe, all is woe for Helen.

She takes a job as an apprentice seamstress in Edinburgh and is left a little money when her employer, Miss Maxwell, dies (yes, another one gone). She returns to Eskdale and, as good fortune would have it, the pastor who succeeded her father - nice, young Mr. Johnson - after having sadly lost his wife, asks her to marry him. Meanwhile, John - who had been captured, imprisoned and escaped from France, has also returned and wed - dear Marion. They now have three children, the eldest named William Martin Telfer - how thoughtful. The author uses Helen as her mouthpiece to remind the Telfers to train him from his earliest days in habits of obedience.  Mrs. Blackford also adds an Epilogue, where she counsels her readers to practise affection, gratitude, industry, and obedience. Overt moralising? Too much pathos? Perhaps. But there are moments of excitement, for instance with the sea-battle and shipwreck and John's escape through France. I have two more of the author's tales to look forward to: The Scottish Orphans. A Moral Tale (1822) and Arthur Monteith. A Moral Tale (1822). Well, at least the subtitles state what to expect!

James Hogg's 'The Brownie of Bodsbeck' 1818

 

William Blackwood first edition - 1818

At last, I have read a work by James Hogg (1770-1835). 'The Ettrick Shepherd' repeatedly cropped up in my researches into early 19th century Scottish literature. A great pal of Sir Walter Scott - in 1801 he was recruited to collect ballads for Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border - he was also friends with the poet Allan Cunningham (I have three of his works still to read) and dined with John Galt. He was born on a farm near Ettrick in Selkirkshire, his father being a tenant farmer there. His mother, Margaret (née Laidlaw) was well-known for collecting native Scottish ballads. James did general farm work and acted as a shepherd's assistant during his early years. In 1788 he was given his first job as a shepherd, learning to read while tending his flock. In 1790, he began ten years of service to James Laidlaw of Blackhouse in the Yarrow Valley. Laidlow lent James books from his own library as well as from a local lending library. James actually founded a debating society of shepherds. By the early 1800s, he had published a booklet on Scottish pastorals, made three tours of the Highlands, began working for the Edinburgh Magazine, and had letters to Scott published in the Scots Magazine.

James Hogg

By the early 20th century, Hogg's work had fallen out of fashion; but the situation changed in 1924 when the French writer André Gide was loaned a copy of the Scottish author's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: written by himself  (1824) and wrote that It is long since I can remember being so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented by any book. I have a dust-wrappered copy of the republication of the book in 1947 with a laudatory introduction by Gide  - this edition not only helped to bring about the modern critical appreciation of the novel, but also brought Hogg's work to the fore again.

Although The Brownie of Bodsbeck was published in 1818, Hogg maintained that he had composed it some years earlier, possibly (at least contemplated) in 1813. This matters, in that it has been seen as a counterblast to Sir Walter Scott's very different Old Mortality, which came out in December 1816. Scott's version of the Covenanters is less sympathetic to them and his portrayal of Claverhouse less harsh (see my Blog of 8th February 2021, where the latter has the higher attributes of undaunted and enterprising valour as part of an unbiassed picture of that unhappy period - Scott's own words). Hogg's short novel depicts a very different Claverhouse: the violence of all tender ties of nature was his delight...the way in which he threatened and maltreated children, and mocked and insulted women, not to mention more brutal usage of them, proved him at once to be destitute of the behaviour and feelings becoming a man...he seemed to regard all the commonalty in the south and west of Scotland as things to be mocked and insulted at pleasure, as beings created only for the sport of him and his soldiers, while their mental and bodily agonies were his delight. There was more than a grain of truth in one Covenanter's shaft: Gude-sooth, lad, but ye'll mak mae whigs wherever ye show your face, than a' the hill preachers o' Scotland put thegither.

Walter Laidlaw of Chapelhope, a man of minimal religious views, aids a group of Covenanters hiding near his farm. His daughter, Katharine, is also secretly helping them; in addition she is encouraging the idea, based on local superstition, that their leader is a Brownie. Claverhouse is prowling the area with his troops and takes Walter into custody. Walter witnesses the viciousness and lack of humanity shown by Claverhouse. On being taken to Edinburgh for trial, Walter makes mockery of his accusers and is released. When he returns to his farm, his daughter finally admits she has been helping the fugitives and takes Walter to see them in their hideaway cave.

Laidlow's daughter Katharine/Kate/Keatie is the real heroine of the tale. She is the one who gives regular succour to the Brownie and his companions - in fact, John Brown and his fellow Covenanters; she is the one who sees off the lascivious curate Clerk (ignorant, superstitious and fanatical); and she is the one who takes her father to the Covenanters' hideaway by the precipitous linn on the South Grain. The author clearly had a very soft spot for her: Katharine's mien had a tint of majesty in it, but it was naturally serious. She scarcely ever laughed, and but seldom smiled; but when she did so, the whole soul of delight beamed in it. Her face was like a dark summer day, when the clouds are high and majestic, and the lights on the valley mellowed into beauty. Her smile was like a fairy blink of the sun shed through these clouds

And the Brownie? In Scottish folklore, Brownies are small, shaggy, brown-clad spirits that haunt farms, barns and homes, working at night to perform tasks such as churning butter or threshing corn. Thanks to John Brown's disfigurement, his small stature further despoiled by mistreatment which included a twisted back, his sightings around the Laidlow steading was easily mistaken for one of the spirits. This worked in the Covenanters' and Katharine's favour, scaring away the rural folk. Here is Hogg's description of 'the Brownie': small of stature, and its whole form utterly mis-shaped. Its beard was long and grey, while its look, and every lineament of its face, were indicative of agony - its locks were thin, dishevelled, and white, and its back hunched up behind its head.

A major problem for me was the frequent and sustained use of the Scots vernacular. Some of the dialogue/speeches I could scarcely understand. No matter; I managed to get the gist of them! Only two words I looked up:

dass = ledge (on a hill etc.); leglen  = milk pail.

The volumes also include two much shorter stories, one of which I enjoyed, the other I endured! The Wool-gatherer, which involved a young Laird, Lindsey, being harangued for his idleness by his stirring, talkative, industrious mother. He rather grudgingly takes up fishing, but gradually gets to enjoy it. Out one day, he ventures further upstream and comes to a clear pool where the farmers had lately been washing their flocks and by the side of it a most interesting female, apparently not exceeding seventeen years of age, gathering the small flakes of wool in her apron that had fallen from the sheep in washing; while, at the same time, a beautiful well-dressed child, about two years old, was playing on the grass. Well - he chats to her, finds out she is an orphan, the little boy calls her 'Mamma' but she is not married. Notwithstanding this, Lindsey meets her in her little cottage regularly. His mother hears of this and by some gerrymandering gets the girl to leave the area, luckily being helped by a young shepherd lad, Barnaby, who escorts her to his elderly, doting parents. Of course, he falls for her, as had Lindsey. The latter, after raging at his mother, offers a reward for her finding  and she is brought back by Barnaby, who pockets a sizeable reward but not Jane/Jeany. The latter has to tell her backstory - the child is her deceased sister's who, it is found out, had married Lindsey's brother (killed in the Peninsular War). So the little lad is actually Lindsey's nephew! The tale ends: It was not many months until this amiable pair were united in the bonds of matrimony, and they are still living, esteemed of all their acquaintances. Barnaby is the laird's own shepherd, and overseer of all his rural affairs...

I wasn't keen on the second novella - The Hunt of Eildon - which was a tale of the supernatural, based around Melrose and district. Walter Scott was no fan, either. He called it a ridiculous story and wondered whether Hogg had any 'tradition' or source for it. He then thought he may have heard a similar tale when I was on the nurse's knee or lying in the cradle. Whatever; Scott still thought it a very ridiculous story...the most ridiculous of any modern story I have ever read. What a pity it is that you are not master of your own capabilities for that tale might have been made a good one. Does one detect an element of authorial jealousy here?! The combination of supernatural and religious elements from Borders traditions just did not appeal to me. The heroine and her lover are transformed into moorfowl, where they live in harmony - 'till last year, that Wauchope shot the hen and a group of Edinburgh folk ate it. This gave rise to a Scottish proverb: when anyone is in a peevish humour, it is said has got a wing of Wauchop'es moor-hen. The cock survived.