Amelia Smyth's 'Probation and Other Tales' 1832

 

Adam Black first edition - 1832

 

This is a 'heavy' book, in more senses than one. Perhaps it should have been published in two volumes. I've noticed that I wrote of the same author's 'The Return' (in her Tales of the Moors, 1828) that ''It is a solid tale without a sparkle'. I had a similar feeling about this, much longer Tale; but, perhaps, this would be a unfair. The volume is solid, stolid even, and 'meaty' and well worth persevering with. The main story, Probation, is 392 pages long and it often feels that the author spends three pages describing something, when one page would have been enough. Notwithstanding this, she never lost control of the plotting.

The hero certainly experiences enough pitfalls in his early years to last him a lifetime. His father, also Edmund, marries an orphan kinswoman Emily Aspinall, and is 'cut off' by a doggedly inveterate parent. They go to India, where Edmund has secured a military appointment. Here the hero is born. The family uproots for America, where the old Doctor Aspinall - our American oddity - has a fortune of at least 200,000 dollars and not a soul to leave it to! Only the boy is allowed to visit the grizzled, uncouth old man. The family, failing to be promised anything, decide to return to England and throw themselves on the mercy of Edmund's father. Alack and alas, the boat founders; all are  lost, bar Edmund and honest Jack Norton, who not only saves young Edmund but takes him home.

The reader has to concentrate, as the story gets further entangled. Jack and Edmund, journeying to London, find that grandfather has died, so they return to Kent empty-handed. Then Providence (or the first of a serious unlikely coincidences) which had once miraculously preserved, still watched over Edmund. Knocked down, while tumbling for money, by a carriage, it turns out that the occupant is none other than his step grandmother, to whom all his grandfather's fortune was left! Years pass, under her and a tutor's care. A dull routine of visits to spas and stiff sepulchral parties follow, until, aged nineteen, Edmund, as the heir, is left £200,000 on her death (she was found one day as if asleep in her chair). For the next two years, he plunges into bacchanalian orgies, gaming and other disreputable expenses, frittering away his inheritance.

Three years rolled away in a course of idleness and extravagance. Then, another amazing coincidence. Edmund stops at a village inn and sees an advertisement: The nearest of kin, if any, to the deceased Gideon Aspinall, M.D., who settled in America...may hear something to their advantage... The fly in the ointment proves to be another claimant - Mrs Clitheroe. Edmund decides, incognito, to join her and her daughter in a coach returning to Manchester and an invalid husband. Under his nom de plume, Mr Maberly, he not only makes their acquaintance but saves the girl, Pauline, when the coach overturns. With a fractured arm, Edmund stays with the Clitheroes for some time, admits to who he really is, proposes to Pauline, is rejected, so journeys to Edinburgh on the advice of Mrs Clitheroe.

It is to meet and stay with Mrs Sydney Hume, a family friend who looked after Pauline for two years when she was younger. At last, we meet the real 'heroine' of the tale - the septuagenarian Mrs Hume. She dominates the rest of the book - rich as she was in all besides, her influence became in later like an inexhaustible mine of happiness to others, and thus of course to herself. The grand dame holds regular dinners and Edmund is introduced to none other than Walter Scott - ...with a smile escaping from beneath his shaggy eyebrows and high o'erarching forehead, like the line of  dazzling sunshine so often seen at sea just skirting the base of a beetling cliff... Edmund goes with Mrs Hume to Glen Falconer, in the Highlands, where he meets the laird, Mr Falconer - a stately ruin of one of those majestic figures of the olden time, whom we certainly do not see growing up among their degenerate descendants to replace them  and his sister, Miss Annie, quick and irritable and very mischievous, with a fund of mother wit and shrewd observation. Edmund also meets, and falls for,  the beautiful Alice Moray, mistress of a nearby castle and of thousands of acres. Sensibly, he is warned off by Mrs Hume.

Whilst in Edinburgh, another mammoth coincidence occurs. Edmund meets a disabled beggar, who turns out to be Jack Norton! Of course, Jack is helped to a future life of comfort far beyond silver or gold. The rest of the Tale can be briefly told. First Edmund thinks he has won old Dr Aspinall's fortune; then it turns out it is Pauline who is left the money due to a Will lately re-found. Thus, they marry and live at Edmund's revivified ancestral pile in Gloucestershire, with the blessing of Mrs Sydney Hume. Pauline, who rarely figures in person throughout the book, is totally outshone by the latter.

It struck me that the Tale was essentially a sequence of short stories (exemplified by The Cavaliere Servente on pages 170 to 197, which has no bearing on the main narrative). The 'other Tales' are slight; one of 61 pages - 'The Voturier's Daughter'; the other a mere 14 pages long - 'The Deserter of Castel Gandolfo'. Both merited reading, with elements of humour and pathos in each.