Ravenshoe

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley, Illustrated by R. Caton Woodville
To MY BROTHER, CHARLES KINGSLEY, I DEDICATE THIS TALE, IN TOKEN OF A LOVE WHICH ONLY GROWS STRONGER AS WE BOTH GET OLDER.
The language used in telling the following story is not (as I hope the reader will soon perceive) the Author's, but Mr. William Marston's.
The Author's intention was, while telling the story, to develop, in the person of an imaginary narrator, the character of a thoroughly good-hearted and tolerably clever man, who has his fingers (as he would say himself) in every one's pie, and who, for the life of him, cannot keep his own counsel—that is to say, the only person who, by any possibility, could have collected the mass of family gossip which makes up this tale.
Had the Author told it in his own person, it would have been told with less familiarity, and, as he thinks, you would not have laughed quite so often.


I had intended to have gone into a family history of the Ravenshoes, from the time of Canute to that of her present Majesty, following it down through every change and revolution, both secular and religious; which would have been deeply interesting, but which would have taken more hard reading than one cares to undertake for nothing. I had meant, I say, to have been quite diffuse on the annals of one of our oldest commoner families; but, on going into the subject, I found I must either chronicle little affairs which ought to have been forgotten long ago, or do my work in a very patchy and inefficient way. When I say that the Ravenshoes have been engaged in every plot, rebellion, and civil war, from about a century or so before the Conquest to 1745, and that the history of the house was marked by cruelty and rapacity in old times, and in those more modern by political tergiversation of the blackest dye, the reader will understand why I hesitate to say too much in reference to a name which I especially honour. In order, however, that I may give some idea of what the hereditary character of the family is, I must just lead the reader's eye lightly over some of the principal events of their history.