The Dark Lantern

(, Main)

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Description

Spanning the years from the late Victorian period up to the Second World War, The Dark Lantern (first published in 1951) is the first of Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series.

The story follows Richard Maddison, a countryman working in London. As a clerk in the City, Maddison struggles to make do on a few shillings a week. Then he meets Hetty Turner, the youngest daughter of a prosperous City merchant, and falls in love. However, he is not the kind of man her father wants her to marry and the narrative follows Richard as he courts and eventually marries Hetty.

Full of period detail The Dark Lantern is a sympathetic and evocative read of what it was like to be a humble clerk in a time when south London was rapidly expanding and reaching ever closer into rural Kent.

Author Bio

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.'