CHAPTER XXII
THE “LORNA DOONE COUNTRY”
We have here come into the very centre of what has in these later years become known as the “Lorna Doone Country”; the neighbourhood of Oare and the so-called “Doone Valley.” Oare lies in a profound valley, giving upon Exmoor, on the left hand, and to it we must needs go, for to write upon these parts of Somerset, where they march with Devon, and not to enter upon the subject of the Doones, would in these times be impossible, if the resultant book is to be at all representative.
No one who travels through North Devon and Somerset can escape “Lorna Doone.” Nor, indeed, should they greatly wish to do so, for it is a stirring romance. Since 1871, when the story first became popularised, it has pervaded the whole countryside, much to the combined profit and astonishment of the natives, who accept the good gifts it has brought, chiefly in the shape of greatly increased numbers of tourists, but at the same time they do not profess to understand it all, and have not been generally at pains to inform themselves as to whom all these developments are due.
“A Lunnon gennelman—I doan’t rightly knaw th’ name of ’en—wrote all about thesyer Doones there is so much tark of, an’ put’n into a book, yurs since. Read it? Not I, but my darter, she hev, an’ she do say that Lorna Doone was a proper fine gell; not that I b’lieve much on’t; although, mark you, it’s my idea that if so be them ‘Doone’ houses they do let on so much about wer’ tarned auver an’ dug up, ther’d be a deal o’ gold found there. There was some mighty queer folk lived up to Badgery in wold times.” Such are the somewhat contradictory opinions to be heard between Oare and Malmsmead.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, author of the novel, “Lorna Doone,” came of a North Devon and Exmoor ancestry, and so was, as it were, the predestined author for these regions. He was born in 1825 and educated largely at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, where Jan Ridd, hero of the novel, got his schooling. Blackmore afterwards went up to Oxford, and imbibed there a certain fondness for classical studies and a love of literature that never left him; although a great part of his life, from 1858, was devoted to the cultivation of choice fruit at his residence at Teddington, beside the Thames. The public, however, that knew of Blackmore the novelist never heard of Blackmore the grower of choice pears and plums for the London market, on his eleven Middlesex acres.
His first book was “Poems by Melanter,” published in 1835 and heard of no more. In 1855 the Crimean War stirred him to authorship again, with “The Bugle on the Black Sea,” and 1864 saw his first novel, “Clara Vaughan,” published anonymously. It was not a success, nor was “Cradock Nowell,” in 1866, more fortunate.
In March 1869 was published “Lorna Doone,” with the same dispiriting want of success. The first edition was still hanging on hand in 1871, and seemed likely to go the unhonoured way of all completely unsuccessful books, when a strange reversal of fortune befel it. In the preface to the twentieth edition, years afterwards, Blackmore tells us vividly of this. One clearly perceives, in the manner of apostrophe to a personified “Lorna” he adopts, that he was, at the time of writing this preface, still entirely amazed at the abounding success that had at last come, but in a wholly mistaken fashion. He says:
“What a lucky maid you are, my Lorna! When first you came from the Western moors nobody cared to look at you; the ‘leaders of the public taste’ led none of it to make test of you. Having struggled to the light of day through obstruction and repulses, for a year and a half you shivered in a cold corner without a sunray. Your native land disdained your voice, and America answered, ‘No child of mine!’ Still, a certain brave man, your publisher, felt convinced that there was good in you, and standing by his convictions—as the English manner used to be—‘She shall have another chance,’ he said; ‘we have lost a lot of money by her; I don’t care if we lose some more.’ Accordingly, forth you came, poor Lorna, in a simple, pretty dress, small in compass, small in figure, smaller still in hope of life. But, oh—let none of her many fairer ones who fail despond—a certain auspicious event occurred just then, and gave you golden wings. The literary public found your name akin to one which filled the air, and, as graciously as royalty itself, endowed you with imaginary virtues. So grand is the luck of time and name—failing which more solid beings melt into oblivion’s depth.” In short, the dear, dunderheaded add-two-together-and-make-them-five British public came to the wholly erroneous conclusion that “Lorna Doone” was in some way connected with the marriage of Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter the Princess Louise with the Marquess of Lorne; an event which took place in 1871. The times were remarkable for the strong wave of anti-monarchical feeling then rising, in consequence of the recluse life led by the Queen in her widowhood; and there can be no doubt that “Lorna Doone” was, in the first instance, purchased so freely because it was suspected of being one of the many scandalous satires then issued in plenty and bought eagerly.
Books have strange fortunes. Their careers hang upon a hair. Many nowadays live but a season: others may be said never to have lived at all. Others yet enjoy a furious, but short, vogue, and then die as utterly as those that never enjoyed real life. The public originally purchased “Lorna Doone” under a misapprehension that was, perhaps, not very creditable, and then read the book and continued to buy it for its own merits. And so it continues to run ever into new editions, and has made the fortune of the Exmoor and North Devon districts, and the adjoining parts of Somerset. Here it should be noted that, although the public persists in regarding “Lorna Doone” as essentially a Devonshire book, it is really chiefly concerned with Somerset.
Written in the first person singular, as the memoirs and experiences of John Ridd, a seventeenth-century yeoman of Oare, the book, it will be seen, is cast in a fashion not easy to make convincing reading, but it successfully surmounts the difficulties of armchair expressions, and the strong story carries the reader over many a passage otherwise dangerously weak. But it is not great art. It does not compare with Stevenson’s novels in the same manner, written nearly twenty years later.