The Revolution in Tanner's Lane

by Mark Rutherford (Pseudonym), William Hale White

The 20th April 1814, an almost cloudless, perfectly sunny day, saw all London astir. On that day Lewis the Eighteenth was to come from Hartwell in triumph, summoned by France to the throne of his ancestors. London had not enjoyed too much gaiety that year. It was the year of the great frost. Nothing like it had been known in the memory of man. In the West of England, where snow is rare, roads were impassable and mails could not be delivered. Four dead men were dug out of a deep drift about ten miles west of Exeter. Even at Plymouth, close to the soft south-western ocean, the average depth of the fall was twenty inches, and there was no other way of getting eastwards than by pack-horses. The Great North Road was completely blocked, and there was a barricade over it near Godmanchester of from six to ten feet high. The Oxford coach was buried. Some passengers inside were rescued with great difficulty, and their lives were barely saved. The Solway Firth at Workington resembled the Arctic Sea, and the Thames was so completely frozen over between Blackfriars and London Bridges that people were able, not only to walk across, but to erect booths on the ice. Coals, of course, rose to famine prices in London, as it was then dependent solely upon water-carriage for its supply. The Father of his people, the Prince Regent, was much moved by the general distress of "a large and meritorious class of industrious persons," as he called them, and issued a circular to all Lords Lieutenant ordering them to provide all practicable means of removing obstructions from the highways.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1887

About the author

A pseudonym of William Hale White.

Reviews

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an oddly uneven book, presumably intended to make a moral point, but I'm not sure which. It starts off as a story about anti-government plotters at the time of the restoration of Louis XVIII, and the author clearly espouses their cause of Liberty and Democracy while reviling the Prince Regent (not hard to do), but for the most part it seems to be about the troubled marriage of the main protagonist, and his extreme predestinarian religious beliefs, which the author evidently does not share, but commends as being at least the logically consistent outcome of the Christian creed. The revolutionaries are completely inadequate, and Zachariah, for such is his Old Testament name, finds himself repeatedly on the run and eventually imprisoned. At this point we are suddenly told in the space of two paragraphs that his unloved wife dies, that he marries the French girl he has been interested in for the last 150 pages, and that she gives birth and then also dies. And then the remaining hundred pages are about something almost completely different.

Nor is it clear to me what the titular "Revolution in Tanner's Lane" actually is; possibly the very briefly alluded-to downfall of the unctuous preacher Mr Broad, whose Baptist chapel in Tanner's Lane and whose family dramas are the focus of the second section of the book, but it doesn't really constitute a revolution so much as a divine retribution. He is "suddenly struck with paralysis" offscreen, as it were, and not even at the height of the drama.

I think the author is aiming to make a parallel between the unhappy marriage of Zachariah and the unhappy marriage of George Allen with pretty, foolish Priscilla Broad, but that isn't really enough to tie the two improving narratives together (even when Broad's son Thomas is offensive towards Zachariah's daughter in distant London). And neither of the two narratives is particularly satisfactory or conclusive on its own; George emigrates and disappears, and the book actually ends by saying "What became of Zachariah and Pauline? At present I do not know", which seems an inadequate final line if ever I heard one... especially as Zachariah's story was the more interesting and compelling of the two!

[Jim Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a fan of late-Victorian writer Mark Rutherford but this book left me a bit bored and ultimately confused. The first 2/3rd of the book moves along well with the story of Zachariah, a dissenter shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, who slowly loses his faith as he becomes more involved in radical politics and begins reading Byron and scientific books which call into question his religious beliefs. He and his wife live in a loveless marriage and both find people more to their liking amongst Zach’s radical friends. As he becomes more involved in a secret political group, he becomes known to authorities and must flee London for Manchester. There he gets into even more trouble and ends up in jail after a failed march by the unemployed is dispersed. Then the narrative skips 20 years ahead--his wife is dead and he has married the daughter of a French radical whom he has long been in love with. The scene moves to a small town between London and York and the dissenting families living there. At this point I totally lost interest in the book. Rutherford can write beautifully, and he can also go on for pages about things that no one cares about. This constant disruption of the book’s tempo made it difficult to enjoy. There’s a great book in here somewhere, but it is buried in too much detail and a confusion on Rutherford’s part as to what he wanted to focus on.