Read in 2023 - 4: Starvecrow Farm

Starvecrow Farm

by Stanley John Weyman

Another free ebook I came across at Amazon’s Kindle shop, and although I can not really recommend it without reservations, it did make for an interesting and somewhat different reading experience.

Published in 1905, Starvecrow Farm is set in 1819, a year that saw much action from and against radical political forces in England. The previous decades of industrialisation had brought great changes to society, with few profiting and many suffering from them.

Lancashire and the city of Manchester were centres not only of industry but also of political radicals. The events of the French Revolution, barely 20 years ago, were still fresh in people's collective memory. Not only for radical ideas and plans of revolution, but even for offences such as poaching a person could be imprisoned, deported to Australia or even hung.

In such a setting 19-year-old Henrietta, of a respectable but unloving family, flees the prospect of an arranged marriage and falls for a radical who entices her to elope with him.

During an overnight stop at a country inn, the man vanishes, and her romantic notions soon follow – especially when she learns the truth about him. Still, she has disgraced her family and can’t simply go back to pick up her old life. Also, there is still the matter of the man she was supposed to marry…

The young woman is falsely accused of being an accessory in the radical’s crimes, and faces aversity from all sides. She shows remarkable courage and resourcefulness to set things straight, and eventually does not only manage to clear her name, she even rescues a kidnapped child and finds a husband.

All events and places are described in much detail, which made the book more interesting than it would have been otherwise. But dialogue is lengthy and sometimes of the kind that makes you want to shake the persons who are speaking, urging them to say what they mean, and say it quickly.

The roles of men and women, of various classes and wealth, are very much rooted in the time not only of the setting, but also of the writing oft he book. Characters are very black and white with few redeeming features for the "bad" and few true faults with the "good" ones. There is humour in the book, too, but how much of that a modern reader will actually grasp is hard to say.

Anyway – it was my companion on the way to and from work for several weeks, and I have read worse (but also much better) books; if nothing else, I learned a lot about the social and political landscape of the time.

More about the author is here Stanley J. Weyman - Wikipedia. A version of the book with its original illustrations can be read online here (Project Gutenberg).