Louisa Egerton; or, Castle Herbert (Part 1)

I have previously discussed, with respect to Henry Savery and Mary Leman Grimstone, the difficulties associated with bestowing the title of “the first Australian novel” upon any one work.

While there is no doubt that Savery’s Quintus Servinton was the first novel to be published in Australia – and the first also have a significant part of its content set there – this work has a challenger for the title of first novel to be written in Australia, in Grimstone’s Louisa Egerton; or, Castle Herbert (also known as Louisa Egerton: A Tale From Real Life).

The matter is complicated, and has been the subject of much debate. Michael Roe, an Australian academic and historian (now retired), is the leading expert in this area. Roe’s own research, conducted while he was Professor of History at the University of Tasmania, was later supplemented by that of Peter Arnold, a Melbourne-based bibliophile. In 2016, Roe published what he called “Final Words On Mary Leman Grimstone” in Volume 63 of the Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, in which he summarised his own and Arnold’s conclusions.

According to the two men’s account of the matter, the success of Grimstone’s first novel, The Beauty Of The British Alps, in 1825, prompted a publisher (who they assume to be George Virtue) to contact her, requesting a follow-up work. Grimstone had been married and widowed in what seems to have been rapid succession, and may have written her first novel (she was also a poet and essayist) either to distract herself, or as a way of earning money. She appears to have begun her second work while still in England, but made so little progress that, when asked about it by her sister Louisa, she had not even thought of a title. (Is this how / why she named her heroine? – or because that Louisa was being left behind?)

In September of 1825, Grimstone embarked with her second sister, Lucy Adey, and her brother-in-law on the Cape Packet, bound for Tasmania, where Stephen Adey was an official with the Van Diemen’s Land Company. The novel that would become Louisa Egerton was written partly on board, but chiefly during Grimstone’s time in Hobart—and, it seems, in fits and starts. Having come into possession of a second edition of the novel, which was published in three volumes by George Virtue in 1830, Peter Arnold discovered that it carried a preface by Grimstone in which she states:

“…the volumes were written at very distant intervals and, as they were thrown off…were transmitted to England, and without my knowledge, printed as they came to hand… On my late arrival from a remote country, with the completion of my task, and purposing to review the whole, I found that all opportunity of so doing was gone bye…”

The publishing history of Louisa Egerton is therefore complicated in itself. Evidently, a first edition was published piecemeal in 1829, as George Virtue received Grimstone’s “transmissions”. It is not clear whether there was a misunderstanding between the two, or whether Virtue went ahead against her wishes and/or their agreement. However, when Grimstone returned to England in 1829, and discovered how her manuscript had been handled, she negotiated for revision rights, and in May of 1830, a second, revised edition of her novel appeared, carrying the explanatory preface.

But there is an additional, rather confusing aspect to the publication history of Louisa Egerton, which is that the copy of the novel held by most of those libraries that do hold it – and the source of the GoogleBooks ebook that is today the only practical (or semi-practical) way of reading it – is a two-volume edition clearly dated 1830.

So where did this come from? I’m inclined to wonder whether, confronted by an angry author (who, perhaps, he did not expect to actually return from Australia), George Virtue placated her via a limited, three-volume edition carrying her revisions—but made the book generally available via a less-expensive, unrevised, two-volume edition. The fact that the latter is available today, whereas only two copies of the former survive (one of them, that held by Peter Arnold), would seem to support this; and if so, this would have the side-effect of increasing the novel’s “Australian-ness”.

Now, unclear as some of this is, there at least seems no doubt either as to when Louisa Egerton was written—or, more importantly, where; and I am inclined to accede to Michael Roe’s description of the work as the first novel of Australian provenance.

It also turns out that a copy of the two-volume, 1830 edition of Grimstone’s novel is held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney—and the very fact that it is held further supports the “provenance” argument: someone, at some point, recognised Louisa Egerton as “an Australian novel”.

And these discoveries being made in those long-ago, fondly remembered days when it was actually possible to visit a library (sigh), I went in to take a look at the book for myself, to see if the text offered any more clues to its origins.

Broadly the answer is “no”; but three details are worth highlighting: (i) this version carries the second-edition title of Grimstone’s first novel, which was altered upon its re-release to Love At First Sight; or, The Beauty Of The British Alps; and (ii) it reproduces the illustrations included in the first, 1829 release, a frontispiece of Grimstone among them, which the three-volume version of the novel does not. (These also appear in the GoogleBooks edition.)

And (iii)—the book’s spine incorrectly calls its title / heroine Louise!—

 

  

   

 

How you do go on!

I noted in a previous post the 108-word sentence with which Catherine Cuthbertson opens Rosabella; or, A Mother’s Marriage; but that effort pales beside the one she produced in summing up the fate of one of her characters in Forest Of Montalbano: a 251-word masterpiece built on a framework of one colon, three semi-colons, and three dashes.

It’s not quite up to Sydney Owenson’s astonishing closing passage for The Wild Irish Girl, nor Henry Neville’s anti-climactic conclusion to The Perplex’d Prince; but it still made me giggle.

(Spoilers, I guess.)

The refinements, the accomplishments, the allurements of his son, once the pride of his toils—the basis of expectation’s aggrandisement—now debased and sacrificed at the shrine of dissipated folly; the honour of his family for ever tainted by the infamy of so many individuals of it, and from the virtues of his own conduct deriving no consolation; Lorenzago wandered from spot to spot of the habitable globe, a miserable man: sometimes in the bustle of cities, sometimes in the shade of the most secluded retirement, striving to amend his life, but oftener plunging into the vortex of dissipation’s Lethe, endeavouring to lose the poignancy of the stings his sensitive pride and ambition smarted from, or in vain to vanquish the deep and everlasting anguish of that passion he had, by the retribution of Heaven, imbibed for her whose ruthless assassination he would not have shrunk from prior to the moment in which his speculating interest led him to commence her friend and champion—a speculation caused by his powerful penetration having led him to develop through a discovery he had made of the embryo treason, that the agent of it, the pretended merchant Mahmoud, was the Conte Nicastro; and that the Duca di Montalbano was yet in existence, and his imprisonment caused and continued by this very Conte Nicastro, whom he began to mine for ensnaring into his toils, at the same moment he commenced his plans for uniting the heiress of the existing Theodore di Montalbano to his son.

 

 

Just the appendix

 

    It is a Matter not unworthy the Observation, how dextrously the Government there could prevaricate in their dealings with the poor enslaved Protestants; for upon any apprehension of Succours arriving from England, or other pretext to fleece and squeeze them; an Information was presently given, how numerous the Protestants were, and what danger may arrive from thence; and then they were forthwith confined, and hurried away to Prison, and their Houses and Goods expos’d to the Rapine of the Irish and French…
    What a miserable an unexpected Oppression is it, that the poor Subjects shall be Compelled to part with their Goods and Merchandize, for a Contemptible lump of Brass or Pewter? Yet such hath been the Constant proceeding of the late King towards his Subjects of Ireland; whose Goods and Commodities he rather Seizeth than Buyeth; and becoming the grand Merchant of the Kingdom, he was the general Ingrosser of all Trade, which he Vends and Exports, to his dear Correspondent in France…

 

 

 

 

 

Remember when I thought we’d gotten rid of James? MWUH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

Sigh.

As we have seen, there was a resurgence of political writing between 1689 – 1691; but curiously, most of it took a plethora of cracked pitchers back to the well, hashing over the same old material – Charles’ secret Catholicism, his sexual transgressions, the circumstances of his death, James’ open Catholicism, the Sham Prince, the arrival of William – for what we would hope would be the final time (though by this time I know better than to have any confidence on that point).

Conspicuously missing from the 1691 lineup is any writing about what you would think would be the most important recent event: the Battle of the Boyne, which in July 1690 saw James driven off British soil for the final time by forces led in person by William.

It is difficult to assign a reason for this reticence. The only suggestion I can come up with is that the Williamite War (as it became known) continued for another fifteen months in the absence of the Irish forces’ Commander-in-Chief, concluding with the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691; and perhaps the political writers of the time didn’t want to commit themselves to anything while matters – including most importantly William’s life – were still in the balance.

It is, however, this general silence that finally drove me – with great reluctance – back to the writing of Nathaniel Crouch, aka Richard / Robert Burton, aka “R. B.”

Though there was debate about its authorship at the time (and much abuse of the wrong person, the unfortunate John Phillips), with hindsight it is very evident that the author of The Secret History Of The Reigns Of K. Charles II, And K. James II was printer, bookseller, plagiarist and pot-stirrer, Nathaniel Crouch. Over time, Crouch became less concerned about hiding his authorship; and the later editions of his work, which he continued to update and reissue, are fairly easily traced to him.

Crouch published The Secret History… anonymously in 1690, and followed it with The Secret History Of K. James I And K. Charles I. Compleating The Reigns Of The Last Four Monarchs. Then, in 1691, he compiled the two and added an appendix which promised an update on the activities of James—

—from the Time of his Abdication of England, to this present January, 1691—

—and which, like so much of Crouch’s writing, promises more than it delivers. Rather than getting anywhere near “this present”, the appendix deals predominantly with the events leading up to the Siege of Derry—which, granted, is considered now the first decisive act of the Williamite War, but which took place from April to August 1689.

In fact, it’s hard to understand why Crouch even bothered; except perhaps as the means of squeezing a few more pennies out of his readers, while foisting on them the same old rubbish. The appendix shows every sign of being a hasty bit of scribbling, and unlike The Secret History… itself, it doesn’t have the saving grace of being bad enough to be funny.

As we have touched upon previously, James had no sooner set foot in France following his departure from England in November 1688 than Louis placed an army at his disposal. It was agreed that Ireland should be James’ base of operations in his efforts to reclaim his throne. The country had been undergoing a transformation since the appointment of the Earl of Tyrconnel as Lord Deputy in 1687: Tyrconnel had since readmitted Catholics to parliament and allowed them to hold public office, and removed Protestants first from command positions in the army, then from within the ranks.

This is the first action Crouch takes note of in his Appendix; though in keeping with the tone of The Secret History…, the men’s actions are simply about “introducing Popery” rather than William’s imminent arrival (and James’ subsequent departure):

And now it was judged, by the late King, and his doubty Deputy Tyrconnel, the surest time to put the long conceived Design of subverting the Protestant Religion, and introducing Popery into full execution; upon which, in Nov. 1688, there was a motion made in Council for disarming all the rest of the Protestants of that Kingdom, which being known, and most concluding that as soon as their Arms were taken (there being then a hot discourse of a general Massacre intended) ’twas only to leave them more naked and exposed so as that might have its full effect more easily, and with less opposition upon them, which alarm’d the Protestants so, that many Thousands came flocking over to avoid that fatal stroke. Now were the few Protestants who lived, disperst, left to shift for themselves. In the mean time, the Lord Tyrconnel (who still had the Sword undemanded, and undisposed of to any other) issues new Commissions, not only to the Ro. Ca. who had some Estates, but to all, who were willing to stand up for the Cause, that were men of broken fortunes, and worse Fame, that could influence the Rabble, and raise Companies…

Crouch then goes into a detailed yet tiresomely uninformative scree about the subsequent upheaval, full of who wrote to whom, who broke what promises, whose cattle was stolen, who went where and who went somewhere else, and so on and on. This part is so badly written it’s almost impossible to follow events, let alone get a feel for the bigger picture; but eventually we find a a general movement of the action towards Derry, in the north of Ireland, which along with Enniskillen formed the remaining Irish Protestant enclave.

With William’s arrival growing imminent, and doubting that he could rely upon his English troops, James asked Tyrconnel to send him Irish troops instead—which by this time meant Catholic troops. This was done across September and October of 1688. However, the regiment stationed at Derry itself, under Viscount Mountjoy, a Protestant loyal to James, was considered “unreliable”; and instead of sailing for England, these troops were sent to Dublin. It was intended they be replaced by Scottish mercenary forces (“redshanks”) under the command of the Earl of Antrim, but they were delayed, creating a gap between their arrival and the departure of Mountjoy’s men—and when they did arrive, the city was forewarned by Colonel George Phillips, a former governor. In response, thirteen Derry apprentices seized the city keys and locked the gates of the walled city against them.

Though history now views this as the first blow struck in the Williamite War, this incident occurred some months before formal hostilities, and was peacefully resolved when the keys to the city were given up to Phillips. Subsequently, two regiments under Mountjoy, but consisting of Protestant soldiers, were allowed to occupy the garrison; the commander of one of them, Robert Lundy, was appointed governor in place of Phillips.

In February 1689, William accepted the crown from the English convention—and Derry promptly declared itself for William. It also set about preparing for a siege. To aide these efforts, William sent Captain James Hamilton (whose uncle, Richard, would lead the Catholic forces against the Irish Protestants) to Derry with arms, money and provisions, which would ultimately prove crucial to the city’s survival.

However, when Protestant forces under the command of Robert Lundy suffered a bad defeat against those of Richard Hamilton, Lundy began planning to surrender Derry, and refused to allow recently arrived English reinforcements into the city. Local dissatisfaction with Lundy had been growing since he had withdrawn troops from Sligo and Dungannon, and when it was seen that the local gentry and many of the senior officers were quietly leaving, matters were taken out of his hands. Lundy ended up fleeing the city, which went back to preparing to defend itself. Matters reached crisis-point on the 18th April, when Richard Hamilton called upon the city to surrender. The city asked for two days’ grace, and demanded Hamilton’s troops halt at St Johnston, some eight miles away

Meanwhile, James had landed in Ireland, in company with a mixed force led by the Comte de Lauzun: about one hundred French officers, but troops who were largely English and Irish Catholics who had taken refuge in Europe. (Louis by this time was busy with the Nine Years’ War.) James arrived in the north of Ireland at just this time and was persuaded that these stubborn Protestants would surely submit to a personal plea. Instead, the city forces took his approach to the gates as a violation of their agreement with Hamilton, and fired upon his retinue.

So began the Siege of Derry.

This is a brief though hopefully not too inaccurate summary of the events that Nathaniel Crouch covers in his Appendix—not that you’d know it from reading the Appendix. He doesn’t actually deal with the siege itself, but repeatedly veers off to pursue what was obviously a personal obsession, the financial cost to both sides of the situation—dwelling upon the fact that no-one on either side was getting paid either directly, or compensated for their confiscated goods.

And above all, he bangs the Popery drum.

Here, for example, is his description of the Capture of Bandon in March 1689:

    …at the Prince’s arrival in Ireland to ingratiate himself with the Protestants, and to begin an Opinion of his great Clemency among the Peoples, he very Graciously condescended to grant a general and free Pardon to the inhabitants of the Town of Bandon, amusing them with an assurance of their absolute indemnity for their Transgression, but soon afterwards he remitted them to the Severity of the Law, and exposed them to a Tryal for their Lives; upon which they were all found Guilty of High Treason; and no other Consequence could rationally be expected, when both Judges and Jury were composed of inexorable Papists: And, in the mean time, that this mighty Crime was no more, than that the Inhabitants of the Place observing their neighbours to be openly Rob’d and Pillag’d, and from Clandestine Thievery to proceed to violent Depradation, they though it prudent to shut their Gates, and avoid Plunder by a necessary Defence, and self-preservation.
    This was the first Essay of the gracious Indulgence of a Popish King to his Protestant Subjects: This was a plain Specimen of what is to be expected from him who will Mortgage his Reason to the Humour of his Priests.

…except what happened was that, fearing an uprising, the government sent troops into Bandon, which is in the south of Ireland. Resenting their arrival while the populace was in church, the next day the townspeople attacked the soldiers, killing several and driving the rest away, before closing the city gates. Subsequently, however, the townspeople surrendered—having negotiated an extraordinarily light punishment in the form of a £1000 fine and an agreement to tear their walls down.

And this was in fact part of a campaign by James to convince the local Protestants of his goodwill: a campaign which infuriated his Catholic followers and which, after two years of Tyrconnel, had none of the desired effect.

(That passage is also an excellent example of what might loosely be called Nathaniel Crouch’s “writing style”…)

In any event, we approach with caution Crouch’s description of an incident in which English prisoners in Galloway under sentence of death were promised their lives if they could help raise a regiment for Colonel Robert Fielding, whose own men had been ordered to France to replace the troops sent to Ireland, but who deserted before embarking, “…according to their natural and usual custom.” The prisoners agreed and complied, only to be immediately reimprisoned:

…an Order was sent from the late King, to seize upon those deluded Gentlemen, and to recommit them to their former Prison, on pretence that Fielding’s Contract with them was not done with his Allowance: The Great Turk would blush to be charg’d with such an action! and the very Heathen would abhor it! An action fit only for the Monsieur of France, and such Princes as are influenc’d by his example…

Crouch then offers up some descriptions of atrocities committed by the French troops upon their arrival in Dublin; and it is here, on the final page of the Appendix, that we get our first, last, and only allusion to what we might have expected this addendum to deal with:

A motion was made in Council, that the City of Dublin should be fired, the Protestants being first shut up in the Churches and Hospitals, and if they lost the day at the Boyne, to set Fire to all; whereupon the Irish Papists Trades in the City, and those of the Army, that either Themselves, Relations, or Friends, own’d Houses in it, apply’d Themselves to their King, and told him They should suffer in that Expedition, as well as the Protestants; and that they would not draw a Sword in his Defence, unless all thoughts of burning the City, were set aside; and declared, that as soon as they saw or heard of any appearance of Fire, they would fly from his Service, and submit to King Williams Mercy; of which now they have had a good Experiment.

The end.

No, really.

Not really THE end, though—because in 1693 Nathaniel Couch reissued these compiled volumes YET AGAIN, and with YET ANOTHER APPENDIX—this one promising once again to catch us up with James, from the time of his abdication of England, to this present Novemb. 1693: being an account of his transactions in Ireland and France, with a more particular respect to the inhabitants of Great-Britain.

So I guess this isn’t quite the last of either James or of Crouch: I’m not sure which of those realisations I regret more.

This is, however, the end of 1691 – WHOO!!!! – which turned out to be a grim and poorly written literary year, in terms of both its fiction and its non-fiction.

But there’s hope for better on the horizon…though that is a story for another time…

 

A late entry

We have been accustomed to considering the late 17th century as the pinnacle of the run-on sentence – helped, of course, by its pre-dating of most of the formal rules of punctuation – but it appears that this peculiar art-form died very hard.

I highlighted previously the opening of Catherine Cuthbertson’s 1817 novel, Rosabella, bemoaning the mere 108 words she managed to string together and mourning the apparent death of this particular skill.

But perhaps the eulogy was delivered a little prematurely. I have been re-reading Sydney Owenson’s defiantly nationalistic novel, The Wild Irish Girl, from 1806, which unexpectedly challenges the best that the 17th century could produce. This epistolary work ends with a letter from the hero’s father laying out his son’s new duties and the attitude he should adopt towards his tenants, a lecture which concludes with the following exhortation—one running a full 308 words, and built upon a framework of three colons and six semi-colons:

Cherish by kindness into renovating life those national virtues, which though so often blighted in the full luxuriance of their vigorous blow by the fatality of circumstances, have still been ever found vital at the root, which only want the nutritive beam of encouragement, the genial glow of confiding affection, and the refreshing dew of tender commiseration, to restore them to their pristine bloom and vigour: place the standard of support within their sphere; and like the tender vine which has been suffered by neglect to waste its treasures on the sterile earth, you will behold them naturally turning and gratefully twining round the fostering stem, which rescues them from a cheerless and grovelling destiny: and when by justly and adequately rewarding the laborious exertions of that life devoted to your service, the source of their poverty shall be dried up, and the miseries that flowed from it shall be forgotten; when the warm hand of benevolence shall have wiped away the cold dew of despondency from their brow; when reiterated acts of tenderness and humanity shall have thawed the ice which chills the native flow of their ardent feelings; and when the light of instruction shall have dispelled the gloom of ignorance and prejudice from their neglected minds, and their lightened hearts shall again throb with the cheery pulse of national exility;—then, then, and not till then, will you behold the day-star of national virtue rising brightly over the horizon of their happy existence; while the felicity which has awakened to the touch of reason and humanity, shall return back to, and increase the source from which it originally flowed: as the elements, which in gradual progress brighten into flame, terminate in a liquid light, which, reverberating in sympathy to its former kindred, genially warms and gratefully cheers the whole order of universal nature.

 

Hey, *I* have a list too, you know!

Wow.

I don’t know what could have gotten into The Fortune Press of London, but it turns out that, far from offering any sort of “Gothic bibliography”, they basically just published Montague Summers’ research notes.

And in a 620-page-long limited edition, at that.

In 1938, Summers published The Gothic Quest: A History Of The Gothic Novel, which is a more focused if typically idiosyncratic study of the by-then forgotten genre. A Gothic Bibliography, I would guess, represents a list of the works he accessed in preparation for writing that book. Rather than a coherent attempt to trace the roots of the Gothic novel, it is a completely random hodge-podge of books and authors.

In other words—exactly the same kind of book-list that I have, only of course mine is electronic, while Montague did his by hand. And no-one’s paying to read mine.

*sniff*

This is not to say that A Gothic Bibliography isn’t valuable, but it certainly isn’t what’s on the label. The book makes no attempt to confine itself to compiling a list of Gothic and proto-Gothic novels, but includes fiction of all sorts. It also extends well into the 19th century – embracing both Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E.D.E.N. Southworth, and both George Reynolds and Thomas Prest – and includes a vast number of works by French authors.

(While I have no intention of going down THAT road, these inclusions underscore the argument made by James Foster’s The History Of The Pre-Romantic Novel In England about the often-unacknowledged influence of French literature on the evolution of the English novel.)

In terms of the Gothic novel, the value of Summers’ study was rather of the negative kind—confirming that I haven’t missed much on the way through.

This suggests that Sophia Lee’s 1783 novel, The Recess, is even more important than I had previously realised. There is, so to speak, a gathering of forces beyond that point; though the critical year remains 1789. That was when Ann Radcliffe published her first novel, The Castles Of Athlin And Dunbayne – not a Gothic novel, but one of the many historical dramas that paved the way for the genre. Several other works from the same year indicate (at least by title) that matters were reaching critical mass—a point emphasised by the fact that some authors were already feeling the need to label their novels “domestic” or “taken from real life”, to distinguish them. Then, in 1790, Radcliffe published The Mysteries Of Udolpho, and the gloves were off once and for all.

But to return to the first stirrings of the Gothic impulse—

So far in this respect, I have considered the following (though – gasp! – not in order):

– The Adventures Of Miss Sophia Berkley by “a young lady” (1760)
– Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury by Thomas Leland (1762)
– The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
– Barford Abbey by Margaret Minifie (1768)
– The History Of Lady Barton by Elizabeth Griffin (1771)
– The Hermitage by William Hutchinson (1772)
– Sir Bertrand, A Fragment – in Miscellaneous Pieces, In Prose by John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld (1773)
– The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (1777)
– Julia de Roubigné by Henry Mackenzie (1777)
– Reginald du Bray by “a late nobleman” (1779)

All of these were brought to my attention by one researcher or another—though not all of them by any one source. Despite his wanderings, Montague Summers does not list Sophia Berkley or Julia de Roubigné, or either Miscellaneous Pieces or Sir Bertrand; and he has the date wrong for The Hermitage. None of these is a true Gothic novel, not even Otranto, but all of them (with greater or lesser degrees of tentativeness) exhibit touches that would later be considered hallmarks of the genre.

Browsing through A Gothic Bibliography, and using 1789 as a cut-off date – and trying not to get carried away – I have noted the following as possibly worthy of investigation:

– Anecdotes Of A Convent by Helen Maria Williams (1771)
– The Spectre by Charles Andrews (1779) (a play?)
– The Convent; or, The History Of Sophia Nelson by Anne Fuller (1786)
– St. Bernard’s Priory, An Old English Tale by Mrs Harley (1786)
– Olivia; or, The Deserted Bride by Elizabeth Bonhote (1787)
– The Solitary Castle, A Romance by Mr Nicholson (1789)

Meanwhile—I have also added the following to The List; not from the Gothic point of view, but from the perspective noted:

– the works of Alexander Bicknell, who in the 1770s seems to have had a serious run at the historical novel proper, something generally considered not to have happened until the early 19th century
– the works of Charlotte Smith who, heaven help me, I’d very much like to include in Authors In Depth
– The Widow Of The Wood by Benjamin Victor (1755), which seems very early for a possible sentimental / rhapsodies of nature novel
– Female Stability; or, The History Of Miss Belville by Charlotte Palmer (1780), already brought to my attention by Pamela’s Daughters (which we likewise have to thank for Munster Abbey)
– The Cottage Of Friendship by Sylviana Pastorella (1788), because someone actually had the nerve to adopt the pseudonym “Sylviana Pastorella” (and got published under it!)
– Audley Fortescue; or, The Victim Of Frailty by John Robinson (1795), the author of the bizarre Sydney St. Aubyn; Summers quotes a critic on Robinson: “Remarkable for the murderous catastrophe of his pieces.”
– Memoirs Of A Magdalen; or, The History Of Louisa Mildmay by Hugh Kelly (1767), the first “respectable” prostitute bio??
– Memoirs Of An Hermaphrodite by Pierre de Vergy (1772), because “MEMOIRS OF AN HERMAPHRODITE”!!??

And meanwhile meanwhile…

…this browse reminded me of something else that happened in 1789:

The first American novel, The Power Of Sympathy, was published…which of course really should be the first work considered in a new blog-section…

…right alongside my consideration of the beginnings of the Australian novel…

Sigh…

 

Get a little carried away, did we, Montague?

In my quest to keep things ticking here, I recently read the next work on my ‘Gothic timeline’ list, Reginald du Bray. I have already made a few notes about the origin of this shortish work, and now have some more details to share when I get around to blogging it.

Of course, one of the great joys of ticking off a list item is seeing what’s up next. In this case it was something called Edwy And Edilda by Thomas Sedgwick Whalley. However, a little research revealed that Whalley was known as a poet, rather than a novelist. (He was also a clergyman, which makes his serial marrying for money more than usually distasteful: apparently when Whalley discovered that his third wife, far from having a fortune, was in debt, he deserted her.) Still, it wasn’t until I located and downloaded a copy of his 1779 work that I noticed a contradiction between its relative brevity and its declaration of being “a tale in five parts”…and realised that a further reference to its being “a poetic tale” was intended literally:
 

 
I promptly made an executive decision: that I wasn’t reading (or reviewing) 174 pages of that twaddle.

So! – onwards in my Gothic timeline.

I was very excited when I discovered that my next noted work was The Recess by Sophia Lee, from 1783: a bizarre piece of faux-history that was nevertheless extremely popular with the reading public and the critics alike, and which introduced and/or developed quite a number of touches that would evolve into Gothic tropes.

However…this sudden lurch from works of complete obscurity to a well-known piece of fiction, and across several publishing years too, gave me pause. I began to wonder if I was missing anything important…

(Of course I did. Actual progress? – feh!)

My research into Reginald du Bray had reminded me of the existence of Montague Summers’ A Gothic Bibliography, which he published in 1940. It turned out that my academic library held a copy, so I thought a quick browse of Summers’ study might be the easiest way to check whether I had overlooked anything of significance during the years prior to the publication of The Recess.

A quick browse, did I say?—
 

 

 
However…my state of jaw-dropped horror was relieved by the discovery that Summers had been very liberal with his definition of “Gothic”, and that he had indeed got “a little carried away”, extending his research right from the very earliest progenitor works of the genre through to the mid-19th century penny-dreadfuls. He also included plays in his lists, both those adapted from works of fiction and those written direct for the stage.

Furthermore, all his results were effectively duplicated by his cross-referencing everything, first by author, then by title.

Critically, every work noted in A Gothic Bibliography is listed by publication date—so if I hold myself to my original plan, and check through those works published between (say) 1760 – 1783, this shouldn’t represent such a terrifying plunge down the rabbit-hole as it first seemed.

ETA: Apparently I’m not the only one frightened off by the dimensions of this volume: it has pages that are still uncut!

 

I bet it’s not as much fun as it sounds…

Ahem.

Evidently Benjamin Disraeli’s third novel, The Young Duke, fits the general parameters of the silver-fork novel; it has accordingly been added to my provisional reading-list for the genre. However, The Young Duke was published in 1831, four years after Vivian Grey—and therefore after the silver-fork novel had become “a thing”. It will be interesting to compare the approaches of these two novels to their subject matter…

…or perhaps I should say, if and when I can compare them.

Having wrapped up Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, I rewarded myself by starting my hunt for a copy of Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, considered the first English response to Goethe’s Bildungsroman and a silver-fork progenitor work.

This proved unexpectedly difficult, due (in the first instance) to a combination of the novel’s publishing history and the idiosyncrasies of the cataloguing system recently adopted by our major libraries: because the book was initially published anonymously and then later reissued as by “the Earl of Beaconsfield”, it doesn’t always come up if you search for it as by Benjamin Disraeli.

But that was, or soon became, a relatively minor speed-bump. A more immediate obstacle was the surprising discovery that neither of the usual suspects (i.e. Penguin and the Oxford University Press) had ever issued an edition of Vivian Grey; that except for an expensive, limited-edition reissue by Pickering & Chatto of “The Early Novels Of Benjamin Disraeli” in 2004, there has not been a hard-copy, English-language edition of the book since 1968; and that the edition before that was from 1934 (in the US) and 1927 (in the UK). There are, of course, ebook and print-on-demand editions around, but I prefer to avoid those if I can.

Well. Okay. It turned out there was a copy of 1968 edition available for interlibrary loan, and inexpensive ones of the 1927 edition online. But while I was pondering that, a far more insidious issue raised its head: the incompatibility of these single-volume releases with the fact that Vivian Grey was originally published in five volumes, two of them in 1826 and the other three in 1827.

And my ugly suspicions were correct: when Vivian Grey stopped being by “Anonymous” and was reissued as by “the Earl of Beaconsfield”, it was also cut to pieces – “severely expurgated”, to use one academic’s description – and (I gather) lost a lot of its fun in the process. The much-shortened 1853 edition is now considered the standard text.

This, of course, shall not stand…

It seems that my academic library holds the five-volume version in its Rare Books section; and while this is theoretically tempting, trying to get it not only read, but written up, in-library is too impracticable even for me.

Fortunately some online library collections do hold scans of the original edition; and while reading a five-volume novel online isn’t exactly appealing, this finally seems like the most sensible way of tackling Vivian Grey.

Meanwhile—a separate issue altogether is the simultaneous discovery that while Vivian Grey and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham represent the English reaction to Wilhelm Meister, and certainly did significantly inspire the development of the silver-fork novel proper, there are a couple of other works that also played an important part in the latter, and which pre-date both of these better-known books.

One of them, indeed, may also have been an influence upon these two—as we may judge from its title alone: Robert Plumer Ward’s Tremaine; or, The Man Of Refinement, published in 1825.

And before that we find something that is not strictly a novel at all, but nevertheless appears to warrant a place in this timeline: Theodore Hook’s Sayings And Doings; or, Sketches From Life, from 1824. Published in three volumes, these were a collection of short stories – “tales” – intended to illustrate particular maxims…and, it seems, offer not-infrequently malicious portraits of public figures, including most of Hook’s acquaintances. These proved so popular that the perpetually debt-ridden Hook continued to write them, eventually producing two more “series” of tales that eventually filled nine volumes.

I haven’t looked into the availability of these yet. I’ve been too busy slamming my forehead against my keyboard…

 

Very critical indeed…

While doing a little research with respect to my timeline for the development of the Gothic novel, I ended up – as frequently happens upon these occasions – slipping down a rabbit hole.

As was the case with The Adventures Of Sophia Berkley and Longsword, Earl Of Salisbury, Reginald du Bray was brought to my attention via the writings of Christina Morin, who has made an argument for the Irish origins of the Gothic novel. I did a quick search for access and information about this work after wrapping up the previous entry in my timeline, Miscellaneous Pieces, In Prose and, while not delving too deeply at the time, became aware that there was something odd about its publishing history.

The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) listing for this work asserts that Reginald du Bray is:

A reprint of the second volume of ‘The rival friends, or the noble recluse’, London, 1776.

While we know that publishers at this time often did release novels volume by volume, rather than all at once, it seems unlikely that anyone would reprint just one volume out of a novel—particularly the middle one out of three.

Chasing up information about The Rival Friends; or, The Noble Recluse brought me to “Volume the Forty-First” of The Critical Review, a British magazine published between 1756 and 1817: it was initially edited by Tobias Smollett, and carried writings from some of this era’s most prominent literary figures, including Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and David Hume. Of more immediate interest, the magazine made a concerted effort to provide a short review of every novel released in Britain (!). Thus, as you can imagine, it is an invaluable source of information about the now-obscure literature of the time.

In fact, this 1776 issue of The Critical Review offers the only evidence that The Rival Friends ever existed, via the following dismissive paragraph—which, given what I just got through saying about the publishing practices of the time, as illustrated by Susannah and Margaret Minifie’s exceedingly flimsy novel, The Picture, made me laugh like a loon:

But funny as that paragraph struck me, it was distinctly unhelpful with regard to the subject matter of the novel in question, and the issue of its putative connection to Reginald du Bray.

Though Christina Morin does not seem to have been aware of this asserted connection, she is right that the earliest version as such of the work in question carries a Dublin imprint: it appeared in 1779 under the title Reginald du Bray: An Historick Tale, with the author given as, A late lord, greatly admired in the literary world. This particular publication also came to the attention of Montague Summers in his important work from 1938, The Gothic Quest: A History Of The Gothic Novel, wherein he comments that, “Little attention was excited by [it].” Importantly from the point of view of the current literary thread, however, Summers adds that Reginald du Bray, “Acknowledges itself ‘the literary offspring of Longsword'”, which both places it as an early attempt at historical fiction, and suggests that one edition of the tale, at least, carried a foreword by its unidentified author.

A second edition of Reginald du Bray was issued in Dublin in 1784, this time simply as by, A late nobleman (and having lost the ‘k’ in ‘historick’). This is the version available through ECCO, which links it to The Rival Friends—and as it turns out, out of all its different editions and sources, at the present time this is the only available copy.

Accessing it online, we immediately notice something odd about this edition: it carries what is listed as a “Preparatory Discourse”, by “A Celebrated Female Pen”. This, without identification or acknowledgement of any kind, turns out to be Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld’s essay, On The Pleasures Derived From Objects Of Terror, which first appeared in Miscellaneous Pieces by Barbauld and her brother, John Aikin. Furthermore, this odd preface to Reginald du Bray also appends, also without attribution, Sir Bertrand, A Fragment, Barbauld’s attempt to illustrate the principles of her essay.

This same version of Reginald du Bray subsequently received a London release, being published in 1786 by William Lane (although prior to his founding of the Minerva Press). At this time it came to the notice of The Critical Review where, while paying little attention to the novel itself, the reviewer took offence at the “Preparatory Discourse”:

Ahem. My conclusion was that “the greater part” belonged to the lady, but we won’t quibble.

Of course we don’t know who wrote either of the brief critical responses here highlighted, so we can’t know if the same person wrote both or not: the tone is similar, but that might simply reflect the Review‘s editorial policy. But there is certainly no indication that the person who rescued Reginald du Bray from “the vale of oblivion” in 1786 recognised in it any of The Rival Friends‘ one-too-many volumes from a decade earlier.

Perhaps a more important point, however, is that remark of Monague Summers’, in which he quotes the author of Reginald du Bray. While the 1784 Dublin edition, as far as a brief examination has revealed, carries no such quotation, Summers presumably found it somewhere, perhaps the 1779 edition. As noted, it sounds like an excerpt from a preface—which makes the unavailability of that edition a frustration, as surely the author’s own words would settle once and for all the question of Reginald du Bray‘s origins: whether it was a standalone work or, the second volume of a three-volume novel, a case of the interpolated narrative gone mad.

Footnote:

I was moved to look into the local availability of Christina Morin’s The Gothic Novel In Ireland, c. 1760 – 1829. Unfortunately it is not held by any library here; and while it is available on Kindle, well…

That’s pretty much the face I made, when I saw the price:

Reynolds the Radical

Mystery and detective fiction as we now understand it emerged via a one-hundred-year-long literary journey, during which the Gothic novel – itself a backlash against the repressive tenets of the Age of Reason – gave rise to the Newgate novel and “domestic-Gothic” fiction, such as Jane Eyre, which in turn inspired the rise of sensation fiction, best exemplified by the works of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in England, and in America, those of E. D. E. N. Southworth.

From such melodramatic fiction emerged the detective story proper: a final turn of the evolutionary wheel not without irony, inasmuch as, instead of dwelling upon transgression and challenges to the “natural” order of things, the detective story was very much about the restoration of that order. It offered, in effect, the tenets of the Age of Reason in an entertaining package, being in general all about the intellect, and often comprising cautionary tales of the dangers of the passions.

An important stepping-stone, which appeared almost exactly midway through this evolutionary process, was the French feuilletons and their English equivalents, the penny-dreadfuls: both of which began to offer readers long, tortuously complicated narratives built around a central mystery, the unravelling of which gave at least some semblance of structure to an often mindbogglingly discursive plot.

This subgenre had its birth with Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, which initially appeared in Le Journal des Débats between June 1842 and October 1843, and went on to achieve immense popularity all over the world. In the nature of things, it was not long before others tried to copy Sue’s formula. The first to do so was Paul Féval, whose Les Mystères de Londres was published in Le Courrier Français during 1844—almost coincident with the appearance of the first English attempt at such fiction, also called The Mysteries Of London, by George William Macarthur Reynolds.

Reynolds was an intriguing individual, one of Victorian England’s great anomalies. He was born into a naval family, but not only rejected this tradition (or it rejected him: there was some early trouble), he left England for France when only sixteen to immerse himself in the excitements of the July Revolution. Reynolds remained an unabashed Francophile all his life, openly celebrating the revolutions of 1830 and 1848; yet (despite what his enemies said) always advocated political change in England via constant but non-violent agitation.

Reynolds was a Chartist and a socialist who dabbled in politics, but ultimately focused upon pushing his radical agenda in his own newspapers and magazines, and in his fiction. He was in favour of universal male suffrage, and fought for it throughout his life. (It is not clear to me if he was against votes for women, or if he simply felt that he already had a big enough battle on his hands.) He championed the cause of the working-classes, and made it his business to inform the workers of their legal rights, and how those rights were being violated by their employers.  He was an anti-imperialist and an anti-colonialist who despised the upper classes, the aristocracy, the monarchy, the military and the church, and attacked these institutions at every opportunity; and while he generally avoided being too critical of Victoria, he made up for it up by absolutely pummelling Albert. He wrote melodramatic fiction aimed chiefly at the newly literate, in which he wove radical social criticism into tales full of crime, violence and sex; becoming notorious for his blunt treatment of such things as rape, prostitution and incest, and his open hostility towards the British class system.

It is, therefore, not altogether surprising that in most sections of Victorian England, Reynolds was persona non grata.

Indeed, it was not long after Reynolds’ The Mysteries Of London starting appearing in weekly penny issues that it began, in spite of – or because of – its enormous contemporary popularity, to be held up as the exemplar of everything that was vicious and vile about “lower-class” literature; and it took little more time for it to enter the vernacular as a yardstick of criticism. Mainstream authors went out of their way to say how much they hated it, or at least – since they didn’t want it thought they had read it – what it represented. (We may feel inclined to question whether Charles Dickens’ open animus had its roots in Reynolds’ politics, the nature of his writing, or in the fact that Reynolds outsold him.) By the end of the century, Reynolds having died in 1879, The Mysteries Of London, along with most of the author’s other fiction, had been buried under a torrent of middle-class scorn.

And so things remained for quite some time. The first hints of a Reynolds revival happened in the 1930s, but it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that a real effort was made to resurrect his reputation—as a politician, as a journalist, and as an author. Fast forward a few decades more, and we find Reynolds and his world an accepted and fruitful area of academic study.

It will be obvious even from this brief overview that the subject of George Reynolds is a very big one—too big for this blog. However, in my efforts to get my head as least some of the way around the facts, I read G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, And The Press, a series of essays edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James published in 2008, from which the above was extracted.

Meanwhile, my intention here is to focus upon that part of Reynolds’ career most relevant to us, his fiction: not in detail – even THAT would be too big a subject – but noting his fecundity, and highlighting some works we might want to return to.

In addition to his non-fiction and short stories, Reynolds wrote approximately forty novels – as always with these habitual serialisers, they were sometimes issued and reissued under different titles, so it isn’t easy to be sure – dealing with a wide range of subject matter, but generally pushing his political agenda. (It seems that the blending of that with more conventional novel aspects such as a romance-plot did not always have a happy result.)

It was, however, Reynolds’ historical fiction that first leapt out at me; and while the last thing I want to do is plunge myself back into the Restoration (although, mind you, Chronobibliography has its own ideas about that), I am finding myself drawn to The Rye House Plot; or, Ruth, The Conspirator’s Daughter: Reynolds loathed the Stuarts (Charles even more than James), and uses this novel to put the boot into them. However – proving that he was an equal-opportunity loather – Reynolds also wrote The Massacre Of Glencoe, in which he not only supports the Scots against the English (no great surprise), but offers an enthusiastically nasty of portrait of William III, who turns out to be the story’s villain. Nor did Reynolds confine himself to the male of the species: in Canonbury House; or, The Queen’s Prophecy, it is Elizabeth who takes a beating. On the other hand, Reynolds’ pro-French, pro-Scottish attitude led him to attempt a just portrait in Mary Stuart, Queen Of Scotland—which is evidently one of his few dull novels.

In the context of this blog, I feel I must mention that Reynolds not only followed Catharine Crowe in writing novels with servant heroes, Mary Price; or, The Memoirs Of A Servant-Maid and Joseph Wilmot; or, The Memoirs Of A Man Servant, in addition to an exposé of the abuses committed against working-class girls, The Seamstress: A Domestic Tale, he also wrote a rare British temperance novel, The Drunkard’s Tale.

However— I suspect that most of you might be more interested in the fact that Reynolds was the author of what is, perhaps, the third most famous penny-dreadful of all time: Wagner The Wehr-Wolf.

(Third most, that is, after A String Of Pearls, aka Sweeney Todd, and Varney The Vampire, both probably but not definitely by either or both of Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. And yes, I am fighting desperately right now against the temptation to add yet another section to this blog…)

But what we’re really here for, of course, is The Mysteries Of London and its even more massively long follow-up, The Mysteries Of The Court Of London.

Reynolds himself considered these two works as part of a single text, wrapping up the latter with a reference to their collective “six hundred and twenty-four weekly Numbers”, but their publication history works against this claim. The Mysteries Of London was published in weekly penny issues from October 1844 until September 1846; this “first series” comprised Volumes I and II when it was released in book form. The “second series”, later Volumes III and IV, ran from October 1846 until September 1848.

At this point Reynolds had a falling out with his publisher, George Vickers, and refused to write any more of his serial for him. Vickers responded by hiring two other authors, Thomas Miller and E. L. Blanchard, and having them continue it on under the same title. Reynolds, in turn, went into partnership with his assistant, John Dicks (who rose to become an important publisher of low-cost literature), and began writing The Mysteries Of The Court Of London—which eventually ran to four “series” between September 1848 and December 1855. Together, the two works comprise twelve volumes, a total of some nine million words.

It is impossible to estimate just how many people read Reynolds’ penny-dreadfuls (even taking into account the ones who felt obliged to deny that they did), since – as with much literature aimed predominantly at the working-classes – they were often purchased by clubs and societies, with each single issue being read by numerous individuals. Reynolds himself, in one of his newspapers, boasted about weekly sales of 250,000 copies, and studies suggest that if this was an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one. In any event, it was enough people for The Mysteries Of London and its successor to become the focus of an early moral panic about the “corrupting effects” of this “cheap sensational literature”.

I don’t know about you, but I’m salivating in anticipation…

Now, obviously – very obviously – tackling these works will be no light undertaking. And indeed, until very recently it was one that was difficult to undertake at all. In 1996, Trefor Thomas, through the Keele University Press, published the first modern edition of The Mysteries Of London. It’s a good, well-intentioned, respectful book, prefaced by lots of interesting information about Reynolds and his works—but it’s also abridged. Fortunately, in 2012, the wonderful, wonderful people at Valancourt Books bit the bullet and put out unabridged, annotated editions of The Mysteries Of London, which are now also available in (rather more manageable) ebook form. As for The Mysteries Of The Court Of London, it seems to be available through the Internet Archive and other such online sources…but I’m not going to start worrying about that just yet…

 

Speaking of evangelicalism…

I always enjoy it when my reading threads accidentally cross.

Having completed my post on Bernard Leslie, I relaxed with my current read, Vineta Colby’s Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism In The English Novel. Although I have my problems with Colby’s style, I like the fact that she gets off the beaten track when examining the 19th century novel. In this particular study she examines the novel’s shift from romanticism to reality during the first half of the century.

After discussing “the fashionable novel” and “the novel of education”, Colby gives us a lengthy chapter on “the evangelical novel”, which in the context of Bernard Leslie and William Gresley’s use of “Evangelical” offers yet another way of thinking about this most fluid of terms. She uses it, most deliberately, with a small ‘e’ – “evangelical” – to indicate not a form of religious belief or practice, or even a religious party, but an attitude, an approach to religion:

The English church of the Victorian period was Protestant. Beyond that simple declarative statement it is impossible to make any generalisation about Victorian religion that cannot be seriously challenged. The stability, tranquillity, and homogeneity so often and so wrongly attributed to the Victorian age was nowhere more vulnerable and tenuous than in matters of religious belief. The half century from 1800 to 1850 that saw the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act and the first Reform Bill, the flourishing of the Claphamite sect and the Oxford Movement, the evolution of Evangelicalism and Dissent from the status of radical fringe to solid respectability, the emergence of textual criticism and revisionism in biblical study, and open expression of scepticism and even atheism, was a period of religious ferment and turmoil less violent but no less dramatic than the Reformation…

The strongest religious force in nineteenth-century English life was evangelicalism. This term is to be understood in its broadest sense, referring not merely to that school of Protestantism which, by dictionary definition, maintains that “the essence of the Gospel consists in the doctrine of salvation by faith in the atoning work of Christ, and denies that either good works or the sacraments have any saving efficacy,” but to the many movements of religious enthusiasm and reform that swept through every Christian denomination. Victorian evangelicalism…was all but ecumenical in spirit if not in fact…

Evangelicalism embraced not only the entire spectrum of Protestant belief but also the widest social scene. It cut across class divisions and barriers that no political revolution could have trampled. Emphasising practical morality and philanthropy rather than theology, directed primarily to the emotions rather than to reason, it appealed to all ages and all classes…

The nineteenth century began with revolution in France, a tired and debauched monarchy in England, a starved and exploited working class both in the farms and in the industrial towns, massive drunkenness, prostitution, and crime. By the middle of the century, social and moral reform had swept England. No historian of the period underestimates the importance of evangelicalism in that reform movement…

Take THAT, William Gresley!

Of course, Gresley himself would no doubt argue that all this is quite irrelevant beside the Evangelical rejection of the sacraments; that all the people helped by reform and perhaps converted by Evangelical zeal are going to hell anyway, because they’re being taught the wrong doctrine. (I keep getting a mental image of an exasperated individual stamping his foot and saying crossly, “No, no, no! – that’s not how you do religion!”)

But as Vineta Colby makes clear in her introduction, we are talking here about emotional evangelicalism: a definition that allows her to classify together the novels of an amazingly disparate group of writers. Colby is uninterested in straight doctrinal “novels” like Bernard Leslie and Steepleton, whether they be for or against Evangelicalism, focusing instead upon the increasingly popular domestic-evangelical school of writing, a female dominated sub-genre of the religious novel:

We may therefore stretch the designation “evangelical novel” to embrace the extremes from Low Church to High, from Charlotte Elizabeth (Mrs Tonna), whose passionate anti-Catholicism made her positively regret her missed chance for Protestant martyrdom (as a child inspired by “that magic book” Foxe’s Acts And Monuments, she asked her father if she might someday hope to become a martyr; “Why, Charlotte,” he replied, “if the government ever gives power to the Papists again, as they talk of doing, you may probably live to be a martyr”), to Charlotte Yonge, whose Anglo-Catholicism inspired her to translate the intellectual issues of the Oxford Movement into romances of daily life that enchanted several generations of readers. In between we may include novelists of every variety and sect—Methodist, Presbyterian, Low-Broad-High Church. Even Roman Catholic converts like Lady Georgiana Fullerton and John Henry Newman wrote novels with the same zeal and fervour though for a different faith. And a Jewish novelist, Grace Aguilar, was evangelical, affirming in her Preface to Home Influence: A Tale For Mothers And Daughters that Christian readers need not fear: “…as a simple domestic story, the characters in which are all Christians, believing in and practising that religion, all doctrinal points have been most carefully avoided, the author seeking only to illustrate the spirit of true piety and the virtues always designated as the Christian virtues hence proceeding. Her sole aim with regard to Religion has been to incite a train of serious and loving thought toward God and man, especially toward those with whom he has linked us in the precious ties of parent and child, brother and sister, master and pupil…”

Call me crazy, but right now a religious novel in which “all doctrinal points have been most carefully avoided” seems strangely attractive…