Month: March 2026

William – EH Young

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Continuing with my project to read the first ten Penguin books in first edition to mark the 90th year of Penguin publications I have now reached book eight, William by Ethel Hilda Young. Now almost completely forgotten Young was a popular writer in the 1920’s and 30’s indeed this book, first published in 1925, made its eighteenth edition when published by Penguin in 1935 which is a considerable number of copies produced in just ten years so she clearly had a readership. I continue to be surprised by how good the first ten Penguins are, obviously Allen Lane was trying to start off his new venture with as good a selection as he could put together but he struggled to get reprint rights from a lot of the existing publishers, this one was from Jonathan Cape who were co-operative. Like Susan Ertz and Beverley Nichols I had never heard of Young, but also like those I have greatly enjoyed reading the book and being introduced to a sadly neglected author. I have heard of both of the two remaining writers that make up the first ten Penguins, but haven’t read anything by either of them, so this voyage of discovery will be continuing for another couple of months yet.

William and Kate Nesbitt have five grown up children, one son and four daughters, and by the time of the book all apart from the youngest daughter have married and left the family home in Upper Radstowe, a fictional town but which appears to be based on Clifton, with the docks of Radstowe below being based on the city of Bristol and the foundation of William’s wealth with his flotilla of vessels providing goods shipping along with passenger carrying pleasure steamers. They met when he left the Merchant Navy and set up on his own gradually growing his fleet as the family grew. As the book was written in 1925, the Nesbitt’s clearly met and were married in the late Victorian era and it becomes clear as the book progresses that although William has embraced the changing times Kate’s moral compass is firmly stuck in the straight laced Victorian era and this would result in conflict between the couple that have grown comfortably familiar with each others routines and mannerisms over the decades. The first half of the book introduces all the characters and their inter-relations and builds up a happy prosperous family with each person having their own quirks and William as the father and grandfather to a largely adoring and expanding group of people. Indeed by about half way through I was thinking that yes I like these characters who are so well fleshed out by Young that you really feel you know them but what is going to happen as something must as it is too much happy families.

Then daughter Lydia made a surprising move, she upped and left her husband in London and moved in with an aspiring writer in an out of the way place in Somerset. The book then takes a dramatic turn with William, who has always had a particular soft spot for Lydia beyond his other children, defending her right to live her life as she chooses being against Kate whose Victorian upbringing cannot consider one of her daughters ‘living in sin’ and who attempts to turn the whole family against Lydia. The upsetting of the quiet life of the Nesbitts and the gradual resolution of the ructions within the family is beautifully drawn by Young and the reader is pulled in all directions as first one side and then the other takes precedence as Kate gradually works through her outrage at both Lydia and her lover and also at her abandoned husband who seems to be making insufficient effort to win her back.

Whilst attempting to do some research on Young for this blog I came across this article by Rebecca Hutcheon, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales, which I totally agree with and I’m pleased to see that my guess that Radstowe was based on Bristol is confirmed. I don’t have any other books by Ethel Hilda Young, indeed none of her other works were published by Penguin so although this title presumably sold well enough they weren’t inspired to print any others. The most recent published retrospective of her works was in the 1980’s and was printed by the feminist publisher Virago, however they only have ‘Miss Mole’ still in their catalogue but did have several more including ‘William’. If you can find a copy I do recommend the novel, it is very much of its period, but so are the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen and as Hutcheon points out in her article Young has much to recommend her amongst those great writers of relationships and family tensions, yet is closer to our own time so the characters are somewhat easier to relate to.

The beauties of a Cottage Garden – Gertrude Jekyll

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It is now March and thoughts turn to the great outdoors as the weather slowly improves with the first hints of spring. Sadly I no longer have a garden of my own so I get my joy vicariously from the woodlands that make up the sides of the gorge where I live and the gardens I pass on strolls through the town. I miss the small garden I had at my last house and am determined that my next move will bring a little bit of land back under my control. Until then I can dream and read books like this one by Jekyll or The Garden by Vita Sackville-West which I reviewed eight years ago at around this time, thoroughly enjoying its evocative poetry. ‘The beauties of a Cottage Garden’ is ten extracted chapters from Gertrude Jekyll’s classic 1899 work ‘Wood and Garden’ which was her first book and is a good introduction to her somewhat opinionated style and also the scale that she normally worked on in designing gardens for other people, of which she did over four hundred several of which can still be visited. A quotation is I think appropriate here:

The large lawn space I am supposing stretches away a good distance from the house and is bounded on the south and west by fine trees: away beyond that is all wild wood. On summer afternoons the greater part of the lawn expanse is in cool shade, while winter sunsets show through the tree stems. Towards the south-east the wood would pass into shrub plantations, and further still into garden and wild orchard. At the end of the lawn would be the brilliant parterre of bedded plants, seen both from the shaded lawn and the terrace, which at the end forms part of the design.

and so she goes on… The book starts with her growing love of plants and gardens from a young age with her own section of her parents garden and how she learnt what worked and what didn’t by practical application and reading standard references of the time (the 1850’s) her own works have become reference works for horticulture even up to today and it is Jekyll we have to thank for promoting the blend of colours in a planted border much as an artist draws together various paints to gain an effect greater than the individual parts. The chapter on flower shows clearly displays her distaste for the artificially contrived ways of presenting flowers at such events at her time, that this chapter is entitled ‘The Worship of False Gods’ speaks volumes in itself. She is also scathing with regard to ‘novelties’ especially the late Victorian love of dwarf varieties of plants she would much rather extend to their full beauty. “When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd”, and as for messing with the natural balance of colours well she is not happy to say the least. She also has much to say regarding ill-educated gardeners of large estates who are stuck in their ways and are not willing to accept the idea of the masters of those properties.

Yes Gertrude Jekyll is a product of her time but nobody could deny her influence and her writing is definitely entertaining both for and against trends and fads in gardens and plants. Her own home has recently been purchased by The National Trust, not only for its important gardens but also for the house itself designed by the great architect Edward Lutyens whom she worked with many times to create grounds for his various houses across the country. Together they became one of the leading lights of the Arts and Crafts movement which flourished largely between 1880 and 1920. An interesting article from The National Trust on the thoughts on preservation of her home and especially its garden can be read here.

A is For Arsenic – Kathryn Harkup

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An absolutely fascinating read, Kathryn Harkup is has a doctorate in chemistry and for six years ran an outreach program for the University of Surrey producing work on science that would “appeal to bored teenagers”. This skill set is admirably suited to explaining the chemistry in a technical, yet easy to understand way when approaching the various poisons utilised by Christie in her novels. What I hadn’t known before reading this book is that Christie was herself a dispensing chemist in a hospital up until the publication of her third book in the early 1920’s and returned to this role during WWII after retraining to update her knowledge of the various substances to be found in a hospital pharmacy. It is this background that allowed her to accurately describe not only the poisons themselves but the dosages needed and the symptoms when taken in excess and Harkup notes that she was by and large very accurate with the few errors being largely down to lack of knowledge at the time especially of the more unusual substances.

The book concludes with a couple of appendices, the first is a list of each of Christie’s novels with both UK and American titles, it’s amazing how many were changed, and the method of how each victim was killed or was attempted to be killed. For example with Christie’s own favourite book ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ we have Arsenic, Veronal *, Stabbed. The asterisk indicates that this was suicide there is also ** for attempted murder, *** for medication withheld and **** for an invented poison of which there is just one example ‘Calmo’ in ‘The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side’. This appendix in itself is a massive piece of work, whist the second appendix gives the chemical structure of he various products referred to in the book. There is also a bibliography and a comprehensive index which underlines the scientific background of the author. Veronal by the way is one of the chemicals with its own chapter in the book and is a barbiturate and the structure of this chapter, which is mirrored by the thirteen others, will give you an idea of the thoroughness Harkup has approached her task:

Firstly we get some historical context which in this case points out that the use of barbiturates dates the books with them in as they were commonly used for suicides in the 1920’s and 30’s but have unpredictable dosages, a large amount can be survived but small doses can kill depending on various factors which cannot be accurately determined in advance. The second section looks at a real life example of the poison being used and how this may have provided a basis for Christie and compares that to the chosen book to represent the use. In this example the book chosen is ‘Lord Edgeware Dies’, which is one of several stories to have barbiturates mentioned, four of which involve murder and two suicide.. As I said before, the level of analysis of the books is really noteworthy and any Christie fan should really have a copy of this volume as they will find it fascinating. The third section looks at the history of barbiturates in general, from their discovery to their usage in medicine and beyond. This also includes an explanation of how the drugs work, how they interact with the body and the effects that will be seen both whist being administered, the aftereffects and detection at autopsy if possible if they are used to kill. There is also a section on how they kill rather than just provide medical assistance. this can be a bit technical but Harkup explains things in as simple a way as practical for the non-chemist. This is then followed by consideration of any antidotes or remedial processes from an overdose. We then look at other real life cases to better understand the problem of the poison administered and finally a look at Christie’s own experience with handling the drug. An excellent and comprehensive overview both of the poison itself and how it featured in Christie’s books and in the real world.

The chemicals looked at in this volume are the eponymous Arsenic then Belladonna, Cyanide, Digitalis, Eserine, Hemlock, Monkshood, Nicotine, Opium, Phosphorus, Ricin, Strychnine, Thallium and Veronal. There is a second volume already out in hardback but as I have ‘A is for Arsenic’ in paperback I will wait for the matching book. But I’m really looking forward to ‘V is for Venom’ which is due out in paperback on the 24th September 2026.

The Fall of The House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

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Another beautiful volume from the Vintage Collectors Classic series by Penguin Books and easily the most comprehensive collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories that I have read so far. Below you can see the contents list of this book, which includes thirty one tales including all the most famous ones such as the one that lends its title to this collection ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ along with ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and one of the very earliest detective stories ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. all of which I’ve read before but it was a delight to encounter them again after a gap of several decades.

Poe was an outstanding writer and very much out on his own stylistically in the early 1800’s, he was born in 1809 and died, appropriately in mysterious circumstances, in 1849 after he was found delirious and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him, but was never sufficiently coherent afterwards to explain what had happened to him before he died. But back to 1831 and after his court martial from West Point military college, which he deliberately engineered as a means of getting out of the army, he turned to journalism to earn a living. He had been writing poetry since 1824 but his first short story was Metzengerstein from 1832 and that story opens this collection and is an indication of the horror/mystery style that would mark most of his subsequent works. I was surprised however by ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, which definitely falls into the category of comedy although with a satirical twist that only Poe would have thought of. I mentioned ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as an early detective story and in this collection I found the two follow up tales of Poe’s detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin of Paris, these are, the largely unsuccessful, and overly long, story ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and the much better ‘The Purloined Letter’. Dupin is so obviously a basis for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes including in Rue Morgue a passage where he interrupts his unnamed companion and narrators thoughts just as Holmes does in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ written in 1893, fifty two years after Poe’s tale, indeed Doyle references Poe in the story. ‘The Purloined Letter’ also has shadows of Sherlock Holmes but the less said about ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ the better, although it does have the distinction of being the first ever fictional detective story based on a real crime.

Still onto the contents list of this collection and a very well collated selection it is too:

I’m not going to go though all of these stories, I heartily recommend you have a go yourself, some are not as good as others, as you would expect from any book like this but almost all are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Gold-Bug’ which explains simply cryptology on its way to the discovery of pirate treasure and the humour in ‘The Sphinx’ which I cannot explain without giving away the whole story. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ both deal with the concept of placing a dying man in a hypnotic state just as he was about to expire although the effects of such a trance is markedly different in the two stories. There are murders aplenty and vengeful spirits abound if you like your reading dark and unexpected then there is much in Poe to explore.

Below is the contents list for the collection I already had of Poe’s writings entitled ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ and published in 1938. As can be seen the best known works are all here along with ‘Hop-frog’ which is the only tale in this volume that is missing from my latest purchase, so I have quickly read again that short story and enjoyed the tale of the revenge of two captive dwarfs who were being abused and made to entertain a medieval king and his courtiers. Yet again Poe surprises with his imagination and this story more than holds its own with the ones in the new book.