"Lorna Doone" by R D Blackmore

Romantic historical fiction, set in England in the days of the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II after the English Civil war; continuing into the early days of the reign of his brother James II, when the Duke of Monmouth led a rebellion in south west England.

The hero, protagonist and narrator John Ridd must leave school after his father also John) is murdered by the Doones, a set of bandits living on Exmoor. Even the journey home, on horseback, has its jeopardies, as John encounters a party of Doones returning after attacking a family in a coach.

The boy grows, learning to be a farmer. One day, following a stream to catch fish, he climbs a waterslide and enters Doone Valley where he encounters a beautiful young girl, Lorna Doone. Love at first sight.

He returns home and grows into manhood, more concerned with farming and family matters, such as his sister's infatuation with a cousin, one of the local highwaymen. After a while he resumes his acquaintance with Lorna and the pair of them declare their love for one another. But she is threatened with a coerced marriage to Carver Doone, the man who killed John's father, and, in a winter full of blizzards and snowdrifts, John needs to rescue her from his clutches. Surely the Doones will extract a terrible revenge.

All this and more. The subplots include John being summoned to London to give evidence about the Doones, the strange behaviour of his uncle Reuben Huckaback whose daughter Ruth has set her cap at John, the fermenting of rebellion on Exmoor on behalf of the Duke of Monmouth, raids and counter raids. And there's the mystery of Lorna's birth. It is a thriller of a plot, full of foreshadowing and carefully constructed, which never for a moment flags, and keeps the rollercoaster drama going almost to the very final page.

What of the characters? All flat, I fear. Not so grotesque as the caricatures of Dickens but none of them with a developed arc. John is a giant of a man, more brawn than brain, but not so daft as he repeatedly protests. Lorna is little better than a love object. Annie, John's sister, is a much more developed woman, as is Ruth. Tom Faggus, the highwayman, is a loose cannon, designed to add jeopardy on demand, and John Fry the farmhand is the butt of the narrator's humour, a stereotypical stupid and lazy yokel with a rich line in dialect. 

They're not particularly realistic characters but at least they're fun.

As for the prose. John expresses himself in an extraordinarily long-winded style. If he could only be a little more terse, the story would have been wrapped up in half the time. And yet it is so full of incident that rarely if ever did it drag. And his view of the world, for all his pretence to be dim-witted, is full of astute observations and he regularly pokes sly fun at his characters. 

It's also a mine of historical information about a period I scarcely knew, the later years of Charles II when the 'county party' (prototype Whigs) sort to exclude the King's brother from being heir to the throne on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. There were political shenanigans and plots to assassinate the royal family (eg the Rye House plot) and the 'Popish Plot' which seems to have been entirely fictitious and dreamed up by a fantasist called Titus Oates. 

Finally, it is wonderfully evocative of farm life on Exmoor. The book was worth reading just for the descriptions of the Great Winter (1683 - 1684). And I've just finished Andrew miller's The Land in Winter, set during the winter of 1962 - 1963, also in a west country farm.

But it is a classic of its kind. My mum was a great fan of the book, believing herself to be descended from the Ridds. We spent several family holidays exploring 'Lorna Doone' country, including Bagworthy Water, and visiting Oare church and other places mentioned in the text such as Dunster and Watchett.

This novel is a classic Victorian romance with quite a side serving of humour. For my money it is streets ahead of Charles Kingsley's Hereward the Wake (which is dreadful) and could be compared with some of the Walter Scott novels such as Ivanhoe, or Guy Mannering.

Selected quotes:

• “The principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another.” (Ch 2)
• “All of them very sober; for father would have no company with any man who went beyond half-a-gallon of beer, or a single gallon of cider.” (Ch 4)
• “The greatest point in learning is to find that you must do it.” (Ch 7)
• “We desolate more than replenish the earth.” (Ch 7)
• “We call all this part ‘Gibbet-moor’ ... but though there were gibbets enough upon it, most part of the bodies was gone, for the value of the chains, they said, and the teaching of young chirurgeons.” (Ch 13)
• “Nothing is easier than sharp words, except to wish them unspoken.” (Ch 14)
• “‘Tis the surest heirship to the block, to be the chip of an old one.” (Ch 26)
• “They had resigned themselves, as even pigs do, to a kind of fast, hoping to break their fast more sweetly on the morrow morning. But now they tumbled out all headlong, pigs below and pigs above, pigs point-blank and pigs across, pigs courant and pigs rampant, but all alike prepared to eat, and all in good cadence squeaking.” (Ch 32)
• “The two villains looked very happy - which villains have no right to be, but often are, meseemeth.” (Ch 37)
• “The three learned professions live by roguery on the three parts of a man. The doctor mauls our bodies; the parson starves our souls; but the lawyer must be the adroitest knave, for he has to ensnare our minds.” (Ch 39)
• “Broad white curtains of the frost-fog looped around the lower sky.” (Ch 42)
• “She was not so utterly unreasonable; although she did read books.” (Ch 42)
• “Of all human dealings, satire is the very lowest ... it is the equivalent in words, for what bullying is indeed; and no more bespeaks a clever man, than the other does a brave one.” (Ch 46)
• “True and false are but a blind turned upon a pivot.” (Ch 51)
• “But women, who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy.” (Ch 57)
• “I thought it a wise precaution ... to load my gun with a dozen slugs made from the lead of the old church-porch, laid by, long since, against witchcraft.” (Ch 58)
• “No doubt but that some men enjoy it, being born, like worms, to dig and to live in their own scoopings.” (Ch 59)
• “True charity begins at home, and so did his; and was afraid of losing the way, if it went abroad.” (Ch 68)
• “Her eyes, which none on earth may ever equal, or compare with, told me such a tale of hope, and faith, and heart’s devotion, that I was almost amazed, thoroughly as I knew them. Darling eyes, the clearest eyes, the loveliest, the most loving eyes - the sound of a shot rang through the church, and those eyes were dim with death.” (Ch 74)
• “For in my sick distracted mind ... like the bead in a wisp of frog-spawn drifted by the current, hung the black and worthless burden of the life before me. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; and no body.” (Ch 75)

September 2026; 679 pages

First published as a three volume novel in 1869 and then as a single volume novel in 1870

My edition was published by Thomas Nelson; it is undated.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Meets Lorna at 10% mark.

The rescue of Lorna from Doone valley is in the centre of the book

Tarr-steps (Ch 18)

Mother Melldrum (Ch 18)

Valley of the rocks (Ch 18)

The accounts of the battles (two attacks of Doone Valley and the Battle of Sedgemoor) seem to be understated and come off as rather damp squibs

The revelations of Lorna’s true parentage comes at the 2/3 mark, where the second of the three volume original publication would have ended.





History

Lord William Russell’s death in the time of Charles II. From 1668, Charles ruled through a group of ministers called the CABAL (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale) who technically formed the Committee for Foreign Affairs. They were perceived as having conspired to topple Clarendon and to form an organised group intent on control of the King, the Privy Council. and Parliament. They were opposed by the ‘country party’, a forerunner of the Whigs, of which Russell was a prominent member. He was a passionately anti Roman Catholic and opposed the King’s friendship with Louis XIV of France (which involved a secret treaty in exchange for French money). Russell seconded the Exclusion Bill in Parliament, an attempt to exclude the Duke of York, brother and heir to Charles II, from becoming King after Charles, on the grounds of his roman Catholicism, and promoted the alternative, protestant, illegitimate son of Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth. Following his peripheral participation in the Rye House plot, an attempt to attack Charles and James on their return from the Newmarket races, Russell was executed for treason. Lord Essex and Algernon Sidney were also Rye House plotters.



The Black Box was an alleged box which contained papers proving that Charles II was legally married to the mother of the Duke of Monmouth, which would have made him, rather than James, the Duke of York, heir to the throne.

The meal-tub refers to another alleged conspiracy, written details of which were found at the bottom of a tub of ground meal.

Titus Oates was a fantasist who claimed to have evidence of a 'Popish Plot' against Charles II; alleged conspirators were convicted and some executed on the basis of his flimsy evidence. Eventually he himself was tried and convicted of perjury.