The best of his novels are The Ayrshire Legatees (1820), in the form of a letter-series, containing much amusing Scottish narrative; The Annals of the Parish (1821), his masterpiece, which is the record of a fictitious country minister, doing in prose very much what Crabbe had done in verse; The Entail (1821); and The Provost (1822). Galt had a vigorous style and abundant imagination, with a great deal of humor and sympathetic observation. He is too haphazard and uneven to be a great novelist, though he has value as a painter of Scottish manners.
3. William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) was an early imitator of Scott. He wrote a great number of novels, which cover many periods of English history. The first was Sir John Chiverton (1825), but he scored his great success with the Dick Turpin romance Rookwood (1834). A few of the many others were Jack Sheppard (1839), an immense success, The Tower of London (1840), Old St. Paul’s (1841), Windsor Castle (1843), The Star Chamber (1854), The Constable of the Tower (1861), and Preston Fight (1875). Ainsworth possesses little of Scott’s genius, for his handling of history is crude and heavy, and consists of throwing in large, undigested lumps of history. He is feeble in his treatment of his characters, but when he is in the right vein he can give the reader a vigorous narrative and a fair quality of description.
4. George P. R. James (1801–60) was another follower of the method of Scott, and he was responsible for a hundred and eighty-nine volumes, chiefly novels. He was born in London; traveled abroad; settled down to novel-writing; on the strength of some serious historical work was appointed Historiographer Royal; entered the consular service; and died at Venice.
Richelieu (1828), which bears a strong resemblance to Quentin Durward, was his earliest, and is by many considered to be his best, novel. Others include Darnley (1830), De l’Orme (1830), The Gipsy (1835), and Lady Montague’s Page (1858). As was almost inevitable with such mass-production, he makes his novels on a stock pattern. He is fond of florid pageantry, and can be rather ingeniously mysterious in his plots. He has little power in dealing with his characters, and no imaginative grasp of history. In style he is undistinguished, but fluent and clear.
5. Charles Lever (1806–72). Lever was born in Dublin, was educated at Trinity College and Göttingen, and became a physician. The success of his novels caused him to desert his profession, and in the course of time (1842) he became editor of The Dublin University Magazine, which had published his first stories. In his latter years he lived abroad, was appointed consul in Sardinia (1858), and after some other changes died when consul at Trieste.
Harry Lorrequer (1839), his first novel, made a great hit. It is a novel of the picaresque type, dealing with the adventures of the hare-brained but lovable hero. Charles O’Malley (1841) is of the same species, and others are Jack Hinton (1842) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844). The scenes of these novels are pitched in Ireland; there is little plot, what there is consisting of the scrapes of the heroes; the humor is rough-and-tumble, though agreeably lively; and the heroes, who are all much the same, are amiable fellows, with a propensity for falling into trouble and falling out of it. A later class of Lever’s novels was more of the historical cast, and includes The O’Donovan (1845) and The Knight of Gwynne (1847). Others dealt with the Continent, and include The Dodd Family Abroad (1854) and The Fortunes of Glencore (1857). These latter are more stable and serious, and as novels are better than the earlier groups.
6. Frederick Marryat (1792–1848) followed the Smollett tradition of writing sea-stories. He was born in London, entered the Navy at an early age (1806), and saw some fighting just before the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. He saw further service in different parts of the world, rose to be a captain, and spent much of his later life writing the novels that have given him his place in literature.
His earliest novel was The Naval Officer (1829), a loose and disconnected narrative, which was followed by The King’s Own (1830), a much more able piece of work. From this point he continued to produce fiction at a great rate. The best of his stories are Jacob Faithful (1834), Peter Simple (1834), Japhet in Search of a Father (1836), Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and Masterman Ready (1841). All his best books deal with the sea, and have much of its breeziness. Marryat has a considerable gift for plain narrative, and his humor, though it is often coarse, is entertaining. His characters are of the stock types, but they are lively and suit his purpose, which is to produce a good yarn.
7. Michael Scott (1789–1835) was another novelist whose favorite theme was the sea. Scott was not a sailor like Marryat, but a merchant, first in Jamaica and then in his native city of Glasgow. His two tales, Tom Cringle’s Log (1829) and The Cruise of the Midge (1834), were published in Blackwood’s Magazine. They have attempts at fine writing which Marryat did not aspire to, and are none the better for it, for Scott seldom succeeds in being impressive. His actual nautical details lack the intimacy and freshness of Marryat’s. He was, however, a gifted story-teller, and his tales are rarely dull.
8. Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Lord Beaconsfield, was a Londoner of Jewish race, and after many struggles and failures rose to be leader of the Tory party in Parliament and Prime Minister. His political career does not concern us here.