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.
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.
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