It was a project originally undertaken by its author for no other purpose than to try her hand at delineating the scenery and characteristics of a town in the same way that she had treated the country in Our Village. The original scheme was for one volume, but the thing grew and the characters afforded such scope to the writer that, by the time it was published, it had extended to three volumes.
While Dr. Mitford was in town—he went up in the early part of 1835—he opened up negotiations on the subject with Richard Bentley, the publisher, and secured very good terms, with the result that Bentley published Belford Regis: or Sketches of a Country Town, late in the same year. Charming and valuable as the book may be for its picture of life in the Reading of that day, it cannot compare in the slightest degree with the similar work which preceded it. It is slipshod as to style and is full of repetitions, bearing all too plainly the marks of hurried compilation and the harassed, overworked mind of its author. Miss Mitford, recognized these faults, but attributed them to another cause, viz., “its having been sent up at different times; having been first intended to appear in one volume, then in two, and now in three volumes.”
It had a certain success; that was inevitable with a book from Miss Mitford’s pen now that her reputation had been established; but the success was not maintained, and now Belford Regis is looked upon as a literary curiosity by students and with affection by all who claim a more than passing interest in the town which it describes. The critics of the day were divided in their opinions; some preferred it to Our Village, but most found fault with it in that it pictured life as too bright and sunny. The author’s own estimate was conveyed in a letter to Miss Jephson.
“In my opinion it is overloaded with civil notes, and too full of carelessnesses and trifling repetitions.... Nevertheless, I myself prefer it to my other prose works, both as bolder and more various and deeper in sentiment, and as containing one character (a sort of embodiment of the strong sense and right feeling which I believe to be common in the middling classes, emphatically the people) which appears and reappears in several of the stories, giving comfortable proof of the power to carry on a strongly distinguished character through three volumes which, if I do not comply (as I suppose I must) with Mr. Bentley’s desire for a novel, will be very valuable.”
This project of a novel was one which Miss Mitford thought upon as a sort of nightmare. Longmans had proposed it years before but had been met with a refusal, and now Bentley was renewing the attack, though he did not succeed.
Altogether the year was one which should have been regarded as prosperous. It saw the issue of the fourteenth edition of the first volume of Our Village and the issue of a two-volume edition (five vols. in two), illustrated with woodcuts by George Baxter, who visited Three Mile Cross early in the year to take sketches under the author’s supervision. It also saw the production of the opera Sadak and Kalasrade at the Lyceum, but this can hardly be accounted a success as its performance was restricted to one night.
The publication of Belford Regis naturally inspired the writing of many congratulatory letters to its author and brought shoals of visitors to the little cottage to see the author and her flowers—the latter she had described in great detail in the work. Among the visitors were William and Mary Howitt, both of whom went away charmed with all they had seen. Mary Howitt told Miss Mitford that her study of the development of intellect in the heroine of “The Dissenting Minister,” might pass for the history of her own mind, and that the author must have lived much amongst rigid Dissenters to give so exact a picture of the goings-on in the interior of their families.
William Howitt paid his tribute in a delightful account of his visit which appeared in the Athenæum of August of that same year. It was entitled, A Visit to our Village, and, although Miss Mitford thought the praise was overdone, she yet hoped her old friend, Sir William Elford, would read it:—“It is at once so pretty and so kind; the praise does not describe me as I am, because I fall far short of the picture; but it is just how I should wish to be—and how very seldom does that happen!”
And, in addition to all this, the September brought a commission from the editors of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. “It is one of the signs of the times, that a periodical selling for three-halfpence should engage so high-priced a writer as myself; but they have a circulation of 200,000 or 300,000.” This was Miss Mitford’s passing comment on the transaction, but it was to be of far more lasting importance than she anticipated, resulting as it did in a close friendship with William Chambers and in a scheme of collaboration in which she took a prominent part.