INTRODUCTION. If the gentlest of gentle readers who may be attracted by the title of this story expect to find in it any unconscionable amount of what is erroneously called "sensation," if they hanker after details of bigamy, seduction, or mysterious murder, if they desire to sigh over the unmerited afflictions of a beautiful governess, or to admire the all but superhuman skill, ingenuity, and cunning of a detective police officer, with more brains in his head than Lord Thurlow, or any other Lord Chancellor, who looked wiser than it was possible for any legal luminary to be, he or she need not turn the page. But if he or she can be interested in anything so common as the loves, the hopes, the fears, the joys, the sorrows, the fortunes, the misfortunes, the ups and downs, the reverses and the successes of the sons and daughters of an ordinary English household, told in language that, if unpretending, aspires to be good English, with every word in its proper place, and no words too many, they can read on, and find such entertainment as they may. It is “a plain, unvarnished tale." that the author has told, and if here and there the incidents may appear to be extravagant, the extravagance, if such it be, is not to be attributed to the invention of the writer, but to his perhaps too obstinate and literal adherence to a fact which he knew to be a fact; that is to say, if he or anybody else knows anything to be a real, indubitable fact, which is far more than the author would like to assert of anything. Anyhow, he has not written the book idly, but with as much conscientiousness as any Archbishop ever put into a sermon. Not that he considers, or wishes any reader, gentle or ungentle, to consider his novel to be a sermon, or anything like one. Perhaps, like the epistle of Robert Burns to his "young friend," one of the finest of his immortal poems, there may be more of song in it than of sermon, and more of a faithful portrayal of the virtues and the follies of human life in our day and society than of either. Vogue la galère. March 7, 1881. |