Thomas Hamilton's 'The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton' 1827

 

First edition - 1827

This reads very much like 'The Youth and Manhood of Thomas Hamilton'. The author was born in 1789, was schooled in the south of England, and entered Glasgow University c.1803. Wishing to enter military service, he first had to prove that he was unfitted for a commercial career; in 1810, he obtained by purchase a commission in the 29th Regiment. He saw active service in the Peninsula, where he was wounded in the thigh at the battle of Albuera. He also served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick during the American War. He retired on half pay c.1818 and returned to Scotland to live in Edinburgh. He was a regular contributor to Blackwood's magazine. Carlyle described him as a pleasant, very courteous, and intelligently talking man, enduring, in a cheery military humour, his old Peninsula hurts. For several summers, he resided near Melrose and got on well with Scott. Much of this novel was written at his cottage near Melrose.

Sir George Douglas, in his The Blackwood Group (1897), accurately describes the book as fragments of autobiography embedded in a paste of romance. Cyril Thornton also goes to Glasgow University - in 1802 - (after accidently killing his older brother, thereby losing his father's affection); he links up with his uncle, an old, childless man, whose affection he gains (he finally inherits his estate); he visits an aristocratic connection, the Earl of Amersham (round and squab, of ungainly proportions...of a disposition insatiably restless and bustling) and falls deeply in love with the latter's 16 year-old daughter, Lady Melicent (who, apparently, returns his love). Disinherited, after his mother's death, at last he joins the army. Hamilton knows his stuff and the details of army life in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the campaigning in Spain and Portugal is brought to life (albeit at some length - I am given, I confess it, to a little tediousness and prolixity...- and it becomes a book of travels occasionally). The author clearly knew at first hand about the lines of Torres Vedras, the siege of Badajos and the battle of Albuera. Wounded and disfigured (he has lost an arm and has a huge facial sabre-cut scar), Cyril returns to England, gets the cold-shoulder from Lady Melicent but ends up with the good-egg Laura Willoughby (whose brother marries Cyril's sister).

There are scathing portraits of Glaswegian commercial types (the Lord Provost was a little squab man, with a high-powdered head and a pigtail, and an air somewhat strutty and consequential; also the coarse and fat Mr Mucklewham) - to be dissipated in Glasgow, one must cease to be a gentleman - and disgust at the dirty and miserable expanding suburbs; satirical comments on the Duke of Kent, Commander-in-Chief (head was large, but well formed, and on the upper part entirely bald. In his face there was nothing intellectual...); and gritty life-like descriptions of warfare. All positive points. I also thought some of his character drawing was commendable:

Uncle David Spreul (known by some as Auld Girnegogibby): he was certainly a hale man, and bore about him no mark of decrepitude. The features of his face were coarse, and his nose, in particular, far transcended, both in length and diameter, the ordinary and vulgar limits of nasal protuberance. His countenance was strongly marked throughout by shrewdness and intelligence, and the curvature of his upper lip, and an habitual contraction of the eyebrows, gave indication of a temper at once irascible and pertinacious.

The brisk and bustling matron, Girzy Black, Uncle Spreul's housekeeper, nearly gives as good as she gets from her master. I quite enjoyed the author's descriptions of her and her behaviour. Tak a few mae o' the collups, they'll no hurt ye...just tak ae spoonfu' mair; at your age, yer teeth's langer than yer baird. Then there are the Highland nieces of Uncle David - Peggy, Jean, David, Archy and Thomasina who are the object of much ribaldry when they mix with the haut ton of Bath.

The author pays tribute to Scott and Wordsworth in passing - both undoubtedly high authorities in everything connected with the human heart...and again, Scott or Shakespeare, the great master spirits of our national literature. John Galt is also mentioned as my friend, and there is a similarity between Hamilton's Colonel Culpepper and Galt's Mr Roopee.. There is an interesting episode involving Cyril and one Mary Brookes.  She has a violent father and the story is very similar to that of Mary Morison in John Wilson's The Foresters (1825). She, too, becomes pregnant; she, too, dies not long after. This time, though, the rotter is Cyril himself. There are touching scenes relating to his father's dementia and his sister Jane's onset of madness. Also a humorous Malvolio-like account of Mr Shortridge's attempt at dancing at Bath.

I liked the comparison between Cyril's two 'loves': There was certainly a striking contrast between the two females, by whom my feelings had been most deeply interested, and who seemed destined by turns to become the engrossing object of my thoughts and impulses. Yet, even in the influence they exercised over me, they were different. Lady Melicent had subdued my heart, by her power of exciting my imagination; Laura Willoughby excited my imagination, only from having touched my heart. There were several humorous moments, which I thoroughly enjoyed. A book well worth the effort of reading.