The Dark Lantern (A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight)

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The little family are invited to go for a holiday, together with John and Jenny, by Theodora, to Lynmouth on the north Devon coast, where she had taken a cottage for a month’s holiday before leaving for an extended stay in Italy and Greece, ostensibly to escape from her disastrous love for a married man within the Turney family. Mary Leopoldina certainly spent time in Greece at this point in her life, seeing for herself all those ancient places so beloved of the great Romantic poets. So this first volume ends with a lyrical description of an idyllic holiday, the two brothers happily fishing together in the river Lyn. Entirely serendipitously, this sets the scene for the appalling contrast of the storm and flood at Lynmouth that forms the climax at the end of the very last volume of the Chronicle.However, HW wrote this first scene in 1949/50 – some time before that devastating flood of August 1952. That is extraordinary, and almost uncanny. E per quanto le ambientazioni sono ben descritte e vivide non ho sentito l'era vittoriana in quanto libro, potrebbe benissimo essere ambientato nella maggioranza di epoche passate. Wedgwood, Hensleigh (1855). "On False Etymologies". Transactions of the Philological Society (6): 66. Since his publishers refer to it as “the first of a sequence of novels” Mr. Henry Williamson’s book The Dark Lantern may prove to be the foundation stone of an imposing edifice . . . [there follows a somewhat satiric outline of plot/characters] . . . His late Victorian scene is sometimes lurid, sometimes dark, but he introduces us to many interesting people, which is good augury for the rest of the sequence.

Millar, Preston S. (30 April 1920). "Historical Sketch of Street Lighting". Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society. New York, New York: Illuminating Engineering Society. XV (3): 185–202. Those of us who are self-confessed admirers of the translucent prose of the author have not been disappointed. . . . There is no need to point the fact that Henry Williamson’s place as the fore-most prose writer of the day remains largely unchallenged. . . . [analysis of plot] . . . It is easy for a book of this reminiscing sort to be merely an accurate catalogue. Only magic can turn it out of the museum into life; Mr. Williamson has the magic and has done it. Tribune (Philip Parrish), 11 January 1952. Having already rather dismissed in this article L. P. Hartley’s My Fellow Devils (as absurd rather than true) and Wyndham Lewis’s Rotting Hill (grouchy and boring) the reviewer continues: Lanterns may be used in religious observances. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, lanterns are used in religious processions and liturgical entrances, usually coming before the processional cross. Lanterns are also used to transport the Holy Fire from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Great Saturday during Holy Week.

How to get into the Well in Tunic

If the other volumes are up to the present standard, we have something to look forward to. “The Dark Lantern” establishes its family in surrey and north-western Kent during the last decade of the 19 th century and describes the troubled courtship and marriage of its hero. Mr. Williamson’s descriptions of London and the countryside are memorable and, though his story is no thriller, the drama is tense and absorbing. darklantern , #historicalfiction , #policelantern , #bullseyelantern , #victorian , #detectivethriller , #mystery Brightwell has fashioned a multilayered, Upstairs Downstairs-type mystery that drew me in completely. When I finally paused to reflect, I realized it had everything but the kitchen sink. To wit: a young servant girl moves from the country to London and hides her past from her new employers; the matriarch of this household is on her deathbed while her daughter-in-law longs to return to Paris; and her son is intent on proving that anthropometry is a superior method to fingerprinting in identifying criminals. One more thing—when the eldest son is expected to return from India, what the family gets instead is a woman claiming to be his widow and the news that he has drowned at sea.

Illustrated London News (unsigned), 29 December 1951. An opening paragraph decries the ‘family chronicle’ as ‘fiction at its least gay’ and continues: I shall read the sequels with interest and pleasure. But I put in a plea . . . [that Mr. Williamson should] . . . weave his pattern with slightly more intricacy and verve.

The real central character of the whole Chronicle does not appear until nearly the end of this first volume, when Hetty gives birth with some difficulty to a son, Phillip. Because she is ill after the birth, the baby does not immediately thrive and is fed with donkey milk, and so the local children call him ‘donkey baby’. I liked that this book was able to put me into the Victorian Era for awhile, at least as long as I read it. The grime and sights and smells of London in the 19th century were just there, waiting for me. Between 2000 and 2002 Peter Lewis, a longstanding and dedicated member of The Henry Williamson Society, researched and prepared indices of the individual books in the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series, with the first three volumes being indexed together as 'The London Trilogy'. Originally typed by hand, copies were given only to a select few. His index is reproduced here in a non-searchable PDF format, with his kind permission. It forms a valuable and, indeed, unique resource. The PDF is in two sections: