3 stars
A Victorian romance dressed up with some social commentary on the class
differences between the north and south of the country and between the working
and middle class, I'm finding this book rather hard to rate; I think I
enjoyed it, while at the same time hating most of the characters and the
heavy-handedness with which they were drawn.
Having been brought up by her wealthy relations, on her cousin's marriage
Margaret Gale returns to live with her parents in the picturesque village of
Helstone. Already quite a drop in circumstances, when Margaret's father leaves
his position as parson due to a crisis of conscience, their removal to the
northern industrial town of Milton sees their fortunes fall even further, and
puts them into contact with the impoverished labourers from the local mills.
While Margaret strikes up a condescending friendship with the dying daughter of
one of the local Union men, Margaret's father becomes a private tutor to Mr
Thornton, one of the mill owners.
Margaret is the kind of heroine that everyone falls in love with (and I
think we're supposed to love her too, although in my opinion she's a snotty
little twerp) and Mr Thornton is no exception. Unhappily for him, Margaret has
already dismissed him in her mind as a mere tradesman, and reacts to his
declaration of love as if somebody had just presented her with a bowl of
vomit. But Mr Thornton isn't one to be put off by her scorn and, while his
relationship with his employees slowly starts to change as he develops a social
conscience, Margaret slowly comes to realise that she might love him back.
Like many of its time, this book was apparently initially serialised - something which
probably accounts for its tedious pace, with far too much waffling over the same
ground (I felt like I'd heard every iteration possible of Mr Thornton's feelings
towards Margaret) to ever feel like we were getting anywhere.
Its characters had a tendency towards the melodramatic - I was soon sick of
Bessy Higgins, the poor, dying waif who spends her time lying around looking
waif-like and making sure that she includes the fact that she's dying in every
sentence, and didn't find Margaret's parents (especially her poor, fragile
father who can barely be told anything without breaking down into anguished
sobs) any better. And whilst appreciating that the novel made a focus of the
conditions that affected the labouring classes, I was annoyed that most of those
we came into contact with (save for Nicholas Higgins) were portrayed as bovine
and simple (Mary Higgins) or slovenly and plagued with children, whom they
viewed (as in the case of Mrs Boucher) "as incumbrances, even in the midst of
her somewhat animal affection for them."
Yet for all that it sounds as though I loathed every second of this book, I
still found myself constantly promising myself just one more chapter whenever I
ought to have been putting it down and getting on with something else, so I'm
giving up and giving it a three.
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