Smith, Elder & Co first edition - 1846
The scene is narrow, certainly, but very important things are often enacted in a very confined space...which is, in this case, a small Midlands village called Mallington. We are introduced to a variety of village inhabitants, including Dr. Western, the rector and his wife; Mr. Nethersole, the doctor; and the lawyer, Mr. Middleton. Included are the Misses Martin, two maiden sisters, somewhat past their prime, who employed a portion of each day in settling the business of everyone in the place. I was slightly reminded of the gossips in John Galt's stories or, at a more extreme level, the busybodies in The House with the Green Shutters of George Douglas Brown.
What of the step-mother of the Tale, Mrs Emily Latimer? - on first meeting, she is a widow: the lady herself did not look more than two or three and thirty...a very pretty woman, moreover, with bright blue eyes, fine teeth, a good complexion, soft clear skin, a chin somewhat too prominent perhaps, a beautiful hand and arm, and as smart a foot and ankle as ever was seen. She was tall...well formed, plump, but not stout, with a very charming fall of the neck and shoulders, and a waist of a mere span. A catch, then. In fact, the catcher proved to be a wealthy man, much older than her, Mr. Charlton, a widower who lived at Mallington House, the large red building at the top of the hill above the village. He had a daughter, Louisa, of some ten years of age; she had a son, Alfred of about twelve or thirteen, strong, and active, but with something unpleasant in the expression of his face.. Louisa is to prove the heroine of James' story, Alfred the arch villain amongst several. By the end of Chapter III, Mrs Latimer has become Mrs Charlton and has embarked on her increasingly nefarious career as Step-Mother to Louisa. It is not long before Mr Charlton flees this mortal coil, and the two-time widow (unsurprisingly, as we shall eventually discover) proves to have the control of her wealthy step-daughter's matrimonial prospects. She, with another guardian, is arbiter of whom Louisa marries, gaining one half of the inheritance if it is with her approved but the entire fortune if her step-daughter flouts her wishes!
The years roll by. Louisa is now nineteen, Alfred into his twenties. The latter is regularly in trouble, usually supported by two other blackguards; initially it is merely a question of poaching from the estate of nearby Mallington Hall. Its childless owner has died and the mansion is slowly degrading, if not to ruin certainly to rack, and the grounds reverting to wilderness. Onto the pages comes the hero of the story, one Edmond Morton - his complexion was dark, with hair, eyes, and whiskers nearly black, and the eyebrows strongly marked. His forehead was both wide and high, rising straight from the brow, and surrounded by wavy curls...in age, perhaps, six or seven and twenty. No, not Lord Byron or, even, Mr. Darcy. Well, even if Louisa didn't twig who he was until much later (her step-mother far too late and the Misses Martin not until near the end), I guessed almost immediately who he was - and that he would end up marrying Louisa, out foxing the Step-Mother in the process.
I liked the regular touches of humour:
The fair widow (Mrs. Latimer/Charlton) was all smiles and graciousness, though, to say sooth, some part of her youthful grace had fled, for she had become rather fuller in her proportions than was altogether consistent with exact symmetry.
The constable made his appearance; a keen stout man, with hawk's nose, and a pair of sharp bright eyes, not altogether parallel in their direction. The degree of obliquity which they possessed could hardly be called a squint, but nevertheless, the effect was a certain cunning and not very satisfactory expression, which conveyed to the mind of the beholder, perhaps wrongly, the idea of a shrewd but not very sincere character.
Mrs. Dixon, who was a tall, large-boned, gaunt woman, with the frame of a life-guardsman, and the face of a hyena.
There are many varieties, indeed, of the post-boy genus: the loquacious, the taciturn, the observing, the stolid, the drunken, the grave, the smart, the slow, the impassable, the picturesque, and the poetical...
There is a nice depiction of small town Society:
...they all met and they all played cards, and they all drank tea and ate cakes and bread and butter, it is true; but they all tore one another to pieces with their tongues, if not with their teeth; and, as in most other societies, the grand, though secret object of meeting seemed to be for every pair to say some ill-natured thing to each other of a third, whose back was turned... what a happy and fortunate thing it is for certain classes of society that there are vices and wickedness, accidents, misfortunes, and sorrows, in this good world that we inhabit!
On why Mallington residents were not keen on Morton: the body of the rest of the townsfolks hated him for two very sufficient reasons - first, because he did not deal with them; and, secondly, because they knew nothing about him, and would have liked to know something about him.
There are kidnappings, burglaries, gaol breaking, a Bow Street runner; Mr Tobias Gibbs a travelling vendor of Balm of Trinidad for a brilliant head of hair (and the only really irritating character in the novel!); a murder or two and plenty of excitement to sustain a three-decker novel. Moreover, the main cast are admirably supported by a range of fascinating support characters.
On the Misses Martin: malignity scorns all the bounds of probability, and is not checked by gross absurdity itself...
Captain Tankerville, a very dangerous person, a villain; Jack Williams, a seafaring gentleman and sturdy rogue; and two unpleasant henchmen, Billy Maltby and Tom Brown. They were all very different scoundrels one from the other...
Mr Timothy Quatterley Esq., the lawyer - whose upper part was large, round, and bulky; the lower part minute enough to make an almost ludicrous contrast with the rest - could have come straight out of a Charles Dickens novel.
There is a trace of anti-semitism again in a James story: Moses Levi is a little fat, dirty, blear-eyed Jew who knowingly accepts the stolen good of Mallington Hall from the villans.
The novel could as well have been entitled The Step-Brother, as a major theme is the decline of a rascal into an out-and-out criminal who meets a deserved end.
Bankrupt in purse and reputation, contemned by those who might have loved and esteemed him, alienated from those classes of society in which he was born to move, cut off from all chance of raising himself above that rank from which he had chosen his companions, hopeless of improving his means but by adding crime to vice, with nothing to look back upon in the past but wasted advantages and evil passions pampered, with nought to hope for in the future but a wild life of feverish pleasure, mingled with deadly peril, and intervals of sickly lassitude, he was going to take the first profound plunge into the dark ocean of crime...Such was Alfred Latimer, burglar, thief and murderer.
A fascinating story of true love, deceit, villainy and good triumphing over all. James keeps control of the narrative, with several major strands. I now move on to another of his three-deckers - The Forgery, published three years' later, in 1849.
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