Mervyn Clitheroe

by William Harrison Ainsworth

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604 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2007

About the author

William Harrison Ainsworth was educated at Manchester Grammar School and later articled to a solicitor, deserting this profession for literature.

Among his best known novels are The Tower of London (1840), Old St. Paul's (1841), Windsor Castle (1843) and The Lancashire Witches (1848).

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

[These notes were made in 1985:]. This is certainly the most novelistic of Ainsworth's novels that I have read, and I think it bears strong impressions of David Copperfield on it. It starts in the hero's boyhood and is a first-person account; and it has the conventional 'get the girl at the end' structure, the girl being a more quiet and wise young woman than is common in Ainsworth. Mervyn, who is early characterized as hot-tempered and impulsive, grows up in competition with a handsome young villain, Malpas Sale, for the affections of an elderly relative. It is the disappearance of the rightful will of this relative which provides most of the action in the plot, and allows Ainsworth to pull in a family of gypsies (the women are better than the men) and a charlatan/swindler/barber (Simon Pownall). There is a strictly Ainsworthian excursion into the (ostensibly) haunted house of an amiable eccentric ("Old Hazy," whose brain has been turned by magic books). On the side of the angels, (i.e. Mervyn) we have a large rustic named Ned, and his flirty Welsh wife Sissy, who is seduced - but not irretrievably - by the infamous Malpas, and who makes a rather sudden descent into madness, and an even more sudden recovery. Mervyn himself is not of obscure parentage, but has never met his father, who returns under an assumed name for the flimsiest of reasons. Mervyn's friend, John Brideoake, brother of the Beloved, is of obscure parentage, in that his excessively proud mother refuses to acknowledge her connection with the aristocratic family who have disowned her. This too is all sorted out in rather a huddle at the end. A far more conventional novel than usual, then, and not without charm, tho' more or less completely without originality.