The Worldlings

by Leonard Merrick, Neil Munro (Introduction)

Leonard Merrick (1864-1939) was a widely admired English novelist, whom J. M. Barrie called "the novelist's novelist." The Worldlings (1900) is a psychological investigation of a crime.

326 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2005

About the author

Leonard Merrick was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the "novelist's novelist."

Reviews

[Creolecat]

A Thief in Paradise (1925)

[Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of all Leonard Merrick’s novels, ‘The Worldlings’ is the least typical, and perhaps the only one that shows signs of aiming at the public taste. Not that it panders – indeed, George Orwell considered it one of Merrick’s best books. And it starts exceptionally strongly, with a harsh depiction of life on the South African diamond fields (where Merrick had worked as a young man, after his father’s business in London collapsed), and an equally harsh depiction of the social bitterness of the protagonist. This is strong stuff, for Merrick.

However, once the protagonist returns to England, after a melodramatic reversal of fortunes, the book develops into a rehash of the Tichborne Claimant story – which was a bit of a chestnut even when Merrick was writing – and starts to move in upper society, where Merrick is not really at his best.

Merrick’s short-story ‘The Laurels and the Lady’ (which was filmed by Cecil B. De Mille) has similarities to ‘The Worldlings’: it too begins with a bleak and powerful depiction of the diamond-mines, then switches abruptly to melodrama. It is as if Merrick, who was desperate to leave South Africa in real life, can scarcely bring himself to stay there in fiction. A shame, because on the basis of his opening sections it seems that he could have written an extraordinary ‘colonial’ novel...