William Blackwood first edition - 1872
At last, a return to a triple-decker! It's great when you reach page 325 and realise there are two more volumes to go. Not everyone's cup of tea, but for me it is tea and cake. The Maid of Sker was regarded by Blackmore himself as his best novel. Most commentators would probably plump for the well-known Lorna Doone, but the most famous is not necessarily the best work of an author, vide. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Blackmore's novel was first serialised in Blackwood's Magazine from August 1871 to July 1872, before being published in book form. The author's boyhood visits to Newton Nottage in Glamorganshire gave him both the geographical background and knowledge of an ancient legend, told in ballad form. The latter Maid of Sker bears little resemblance to the plot of the novel, but the gloomy Sker House, just west of Portcawl, is one of the central images for Blackmore.
The nominal heroine, the lost little girl Bardie, is drawn from the author's own precocious niece, whom he called by that name. She was only three years old and Blackmore transcribed her baby talk (much to my increasing irritation!). The villain of the tale, the demonic Parson Stoyle Chowne, was drawn from the Rev. John Froude, well-known in Devon as a "shocking fellow", according to Blackmore's father, "a disgrace to the Church". Chawne's muscular companion, the Rev. Jack Rambone, a boxer and wrestler, was modelled on the Rev. Jack Radford, a sporting parson who went with a scissor-grinding truck all over Wales and Cornwall, challenging all comers to fist or fore-hip.
The story is narrated by Davy Llewellyn, a late middle-aged fisherman, who rescues little Bardie from a small boat, which has drifted onto a beach in Glamorganshire, just before a raging storm. Davy parts with the girl but not the boat - the former being lodged at Sker House, the latter being tarted up for his own use. It is clear from the infant's deportment and quality of clothes that she is the offspring of a well-to-do family. Here lies one of the weaknesses of the plot - the child has to grow up to become marketable! Some 16 years have to be got through. Blackmore does this by first leaving Bardie with the Sker Household, then employing a tutor, but otherwise going off to Devon to continue his fishing trade and then re-joining the Navy. Being couched in the first person narrative, the tale becomes more one of Davy's exploits and less of Bardie's growing up. At least one Reviewer suggested a different title - Davy Llewellyn - would have been more apposite.
Davy is certainly the propelling force - a selfish old rascal who boasts his way through the narrative. He has a veritable halo of self-interest which is, however, relieved by a romantic generosity for others. In the very first sentence of Volume I, Davy sets out his stall, with all the pathos he can muster: I am but an ancient fisherman upon the coast of Glamorgan, with work enough of my own to do, and trouble enough of my own to heed, in getting my poor living, yet he has enough time and literary capability to embark on a three volume narrative!. He moans that the work of writing must be very dull to me, after all the change of scene, and the noble fights with Frenchmen, and the power of oaths that made me jump so in his Majesty's navy. Notwithstanding this, he girds his literary loins and ploughs on, being on the whole, pretty well satisfied with myself...
On a fishing trip for congers, lobsters, mullet and spider-crabs, he lands an unexpected fish - a smoothly-gliding boat...a finer floatage I never saw, and her lines were purely elegant, and she rode above the water without so much as parting it...the little craft was laden with a freight of pure innocence...a little helpless child...all in white, having neither cloak nor shawl...but lying with her little back upon the aftmost planking. And thus Bardie enters his life; he deposits her with Moxy Thomas (an old girlfriend, but now married to 'black' Evan, a morbid drunk, with dark face, overhung with hair)) at Sker-house - a very sad and lonesome place, close to a desolate waste of sand, and the continual roaring of the sea upon black rocks. A great grey house, with many chimneys, many gables, and many windows, yet not a neighbour to look out on, not a tree to feed its chimneys, scarce a firelight in its gables in the very depth of winter. Of course, it is said to be haunted... Tragedy soon occurs - five of the six sons of Evan and Moxy - aged from 15 to 22 - are buried in a sand drift during a violent storm. The chapter Sand-Hills turned to Sand-Holes contain some of the author's most atmospheric writing. The sky was spread and traversed with a net of crossing fires, in and out like mesh and needle...some were yellow, some deep red, and some like banks of violet...
It is as a result of this same horrendous storm, that a slave-ship is wrecked and its cargo of Africans drowned. The description that follows would give heart attacks to 21st century reviewers. The negroes, crouching in the scuppers, or clinging to the masts and rails, or rolling over one another in their want of pluck and skill, seemed to shed their blackness on the snowy spray and curdled foam, like cuttle-fish in a lump of froth. Poor things! they are grieved to die as much, perhaps, as any white man; and my heart was overcome, in spite of all I knew of them...now I hope no man who knows me would ever take me for such a fool as to dream for a moment - after all I have seen of them - that a negro is "our own flesh and blood, and a brother immortal", as the parsons began to prate, under some dark infection. They differ from us a great deal more than an ass does from a horse. Blackmore (surely ironic that he had such a surname) even uses the now forbidden word n-----r more than once. The tale is 152 years old, but this hardly excuses such sentiments.
The novel is peppered with a goodly array of minor characters: Colonel Lougher of Candleston Court, one of the finest and noblest men it was ever my luck to come across and who takes part with his widowed sister Lady Bluett, in helping to bring up Bardie in a manner to which her obvious gentility demands. It is his nephew, the Hon. Rodney Bluett who, desperate to join the Navy (and helped every so often in his subsequent illustrious career by Davy), later becomes besotted by the teenage Bardie and eventually marries her. Davy, meanwhile, finding his fishing scarcely bringing in enough to live on, departs in a fishing vessel for Devon (the author's own spiritual home). One thing I will say of these sons of Devon: rough they may be, and short of grain, and fond of their own opinions...queer, moreover, in thought and word, and obstinate as hedgehogs - yet they show, and truly have, a kind desire to feed one well.
Devon provides the other main skein to the tale. Here Davy meets the bête noire of the novel, Parson Chowne: it was the most wondrous unfathomable face that ever fellow-man fixed gaze upon; lost to mankindliness, lost to mercy, lost to all memory of God...disdain was the first thing it gave one to think of; and after that, cold relentless humour; and after that, anything dark and bad. It is Chowne who is responsible for the loss of two babes from the family the (one of whom one realises immediately must be Bardie), the other, a boy, finally emerges - naked - (nicknamed Harry Savage by Davy and others) from a gipsy-looking tribe on Chowne's estate. Davy also links up with Sir Philip Bampfylde, his second son in the Navy, Captain Drake Bampfylde and the latter's long-time girlfriend, wealthy heiress Isabel Carey. Machinations amongst all these Devonians lead to Davy rejoining the British Navy, voyaging to the West Indies, fighting under Nelson (the author's undoubted hero) and the Battle of the Nile/Aboukir Bay (another marvellous descriptive chapter, Nelson and the Nile, and for which success Davy gives himself some credit) and finally returning to Glamorgan, secure in the knowledge that more people now think as highly of him as he does himself. Drake gets his Isabel, Rodney his Bardie, and Watkin Thomas, the only surviving boy from Sker House, gets Bunny, Davy's grand-daughter.
David Llewelyn's boasting:
Now I have by nature the very strongest affection for truth...but sometimes it happens so that we must do violence to ourselves for the sake of our fellow-creatures.
It is an irksome task for a man who has always stood upon his position, and justified the universal esteem and respect of the neighbourhood...
...you may go miles and miles, I am sure, to find a more thoroughly honorable, good-hearted, brave, and agreeable man.
The very next day, I was afloat as a seaman of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom...the King and the nation won the entire benefit of this.
It may be the power of honesty, or it may be the strength of character coupled with a more than usual brightness of sagacity - but whatever the cause may be, the result seems always to be the same, in spite of inborn humility - to wit, that poor old Davy Llewellyn, wherever his ups and downs may throw him, always has to take the lead!
Other humorous asides:
Joe Jenkins was a young fellow of great zeal, newly appointed to Zoar Chapel, instead of the steady Nathanial Edwards, who had been caught sheep-stealing...all the maids of Newton ran mightily to his doctrine. For he happened to be a smart young fellow, and it was largely put abroad than an uncle of his had a butter-shop, without any children, and bringing in four pounds a-week at Chepstow.
Such sentiments are to be found, I believe, in the weaker parts of the Bible, such as are called the New Testament, which nobody can compare to the works of my ancestor, King David; and, which, if you put aside Saint Paul, and Saint Peter (who cut the man's ear off) exhibit to my mind nobody of a patriotic spirit.
(About the Chaplain on board during the Battle of the Nile) "Go down, parson, go down", we said, "Sir, this is no place for your cloth". - "Sneaking schismatics may skulk", he answered, with a powder-mop in his hand, for we had impressed a Methody, who bolted below at exceeding long range, "but if my cloth is out of its placer, I'll fight the devil naked."
Description of the weather:
[September] the sky is bright and fair, with a firm and tranquil blue, not so deep of tint or gentle as the blue of springtide, but more truly staid and placid, and far more trustworthy. The sun, both when he rises over the rounded hills behind the cliffs, and when he sinks into the level of the width of waters, shines with ripe and quiet lustre, to complete a year of labour....at dusk the dew fog wavers in white stripes over the meadowland, or in winding combes benighted pillows down, and leaves its impress a sparking path for the sun's return.
Islam:
There is a most utterly pestilent race arising, and growing up around us, whose object is to destroy old England, by forbidding a man to drink. St Paul speaks against them, and all the great prophets...and although I never read the Koran, and only have heard some verses of it, I know enough to say positively, that Mahomet began this movement to establish Antichrist.
Description of landscape, regular bouts of humour, real flesh and blood characters - although Davy himself is a well-nigh impossible creation - all help to create an enjoyable tale.
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