R.D. Blackmore's 'Cradock Nowell. A Tale of the New Forest' 1866

 

Chapman and Hall first edition - 1866

This is an early Blackmore effort - and it shows. It is often said, particularly with non-fiction books, that a first is not always the best edition to read. A bookish friend of mine, on hearing I was struggling, informed me that his Cradock Nowell is the new and cheaper edition, 'diligently revised and reshapen'. R.D.B. says in the preface, dated 1873, that the reviews of the original edition were so unanimously bad that he set to work to improve it: "a new book might have been written whilst this old one was a-mending". What had gone wrong? One reason, perhaps, was the appearance of Macmillan's Magazine (and, soon after The Cornhill and other popular magazines). Cradock Nowell was accepted for serialisation in Macmillan's between  May 1865 and August 1866. It did not inspire, mainly because the author could not and would not supply the kind of sensationalism wanted by the majority of readers.

More relevantly, the plot is clumsy (I regard it as 'wayward'). It hinges upon the fact that  the twin sons of the owner of the great New Forest estate of Nowellhurst, Sir Cradock Nowell, were confused by their nurse shortly after their birth. The younger Cradock had expected to be heir, but the doctor who delivered the twins (now returned from abroad after many years) discovers the error - by marks on their shoulders. When his brother Clayton is shot dead close by where young Cradock is hunting, suspicion naturally falls on the latter.

Although Cradock escapes conviction for the murder, his father blames him for it, and he leaves in disgrace for London, beginning a new life in the slums as Charles Newman. His health disintegrates during a long nightmare with thoughts of suicide brought on by feelings of guilt. Taking a ship for the tropics appears the only way to recover his physical and mental stability. Then he gets inadvertently stranded off the south-west African coast (the ship he was on is subsequently destroyed in a hurricane, leading his family back home to think he had been lost at sea with the rest of those on board). Finally, he returns home, health restored to find his honour has also been recovered. The actual murderer had confessed; it was his 'unacknowledged' uncle Bull Garnet, who had shot Clayton for trying to seduce his daughter, Pearl. 

The novel was cruelly 'whiplashed' by the critics. They found the author guilty of obscurity, want of proportion, crudeness, imperfect development, pedantry, involution of diction, and prolixity. Kenneth Budd, in his slim biography of Blackmore - The Last Victorian (1960) - commiserates with the reader who persevered through the novel, stating that the long sentences, the many digressions, the scores of classical allusions and quotations, must render the book unreadable today by any except those who can endure such things for the sake of the occasional felicities of description of field and forest. Ironically, it was the repetition of yet another digression on stately oaks and all sorts of fauna and flora that got me skim-reading sections. But, I do agree that the classical allusions were, after a time, irritating - they were never translated for the ignorant reader such as myself. But, I did read all three volumes, even if I did occasionally struggle to keep going. 

There are, however, some strong positives to take away from the reading. Two of the most powerfully written chapters in the novel are V and VI in volume II, dealing with the real-life, devastating storm of October 1859. Officially known as the Royal Charter Storm (named after the steam clipper which went down off the coast of Anglesey where 459 lives were lost, with only 40 survivors), it struck the English Channel on 25th October, producing ferocious winds. The Solent took a direct hit, wreaking havoc on shipping, coastal defences and seaside properties across Hampshire and Dorset. Over 800 lives were lost in total, with more than 200 ships sunk or severely damaged.  Blackmore's long description is brilliant: beginning with the blobs of cloud which threw feelers out, and strung themselves together, until a broad serried and serrate bar went boldly across the heavens, he paints a vivid picture of the violence of nature which smashed and wrecked and killed. Crusted with hunks of froth and foam-drift, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf...they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.

The description of Cradock junior's first day as a shipping clerk in the railway yard of the Grand Junction Wasting and Screwing Line is compelling: the maelstrom of steam engines and lurching wagons, where danger ran in converging lines, where a man must stand sideways, like a duellist, and with his arms like a drill-sergeant's, and not shrink an inch from the driving wheels evokes the hellish life endured by so many engaged by rail companies in the 1860s.

There are some fine, compellingly drawn characters, such as the Rev. John Rosedew, Rector of the New Forest parish of Nowellhurst, and Bull Garnet. In the first, the beloved friend of old Sir Cradock and respected pastor of the small New Forest community, the author has created a country parson of the finest type - a man with a good taste in wines, a man who can fish and swim and shoot. In all the parish of Nowellhurst there was scarcely a man or a woman who did not rejoice to see the rector pacing his leisurely rounds, carrying his elbows a little out...and smiling gently upon the children who tugged his coat-tails for an orange or a halfpenny. It is a pity that Rosedew, who always thought in Greek, except when Latin hindered him, is made the mouthpiece for the author's interminable classical allusions. In the second, the proud man of power is one of near tragic stature - stubborn, violent and repressed. His almost permanent anger comes from knowledge of his base birth (his mother was wronged by Sir Cradock's father) and his crime is due to his love and protection of his daughter's purity. But he is not a villain in the author's eyes (he dies in bed surrounded by his two children, with young Cradock's forgiveness echoing in his ears).    

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Some extracts from the text:

The varieties of canine are as manifold and distinct as those of human nature. But the dog, be he saturnine or facetious, sociable or contemplative, mercurial or melancholic, is quite sure to be one thing - true and loyal ever.

Of a larger-than-life wife: she turned round suddenly on little Rufus (her husband), and standing head and shoulders above him, she opened her great eyes down upon him, like the port-holes of a frigate.

Of Bull Garnet: whoever saw him once was sure to know him again. If you met him in a rush to save the train, your eyes would turn and follow him. "There goes a man remarkable, whether for good or evil."

Do what we will, and think as we may, enlarging the mind in each generation, growing contemptuous of contempt, casting caste to the winds of heaven, and antiquating prejudice, nevertheless we shall never outrun, or even overtake Christianity.

Mark Stote, the head-gamekeeper on the Nowellhurst estate, was a true and honest specimen of the West Saxon peasant - slow, tenacious, and dogged, faithful and affectionate, with too much deference, perhaps, to all who seemed "his betters."

Mr Jupp's face was a villainous one; as even the softest philanthropist would have been forced to acknowledge. The enormous jaws, the narrow forehead, the grisly, porkish eyebrows, the high cheek-bones, and the cunning skance gleam from the black, deep-ambushed squinters...

So, a rambling tale (Blackmore himself says at one point, But, lo! here again we are wandering), with so many asides and byways and inconsequentialities (I need a rest from yet another paeon to trees); BUT, I enjoyed the character drawing and touches of humour and will remember with some affection the following personalities that helped to overcome the weaknesses of the tale - Sir Cradock and young Cradock; Amy, her father Rev. John Rosedew and Aunt Eudoxia; Bull Garnet and his two children, Robert and Pearl; the Rev. Octavius Pell; the scheming Mrs. Georgie Corklemore and slippery lawyer Simon Chope; the flamboyant Eoa Nowell. A grand array of characters.