A needy aristocrat falls in love with a proud cotton-manufacturer’s daughter.
Archibald Boyd (1801-1864), born in Scotland, emigrated to Australia in 1838, and in the 1840s worked to represent the interests of the Australian squatters in the British Parliament. In 1849 he returned to England and took up novel writing; this is the second of the four novels he wrote between 1850 and 1856.
The obviousness of its plot “does not prevent ‘The Delameres’ from being a fairly good novel of its kind.—Too much time is spent at its commencement among the small people of the small town where the tale begins . . .; but from the moment that the curtain falls upon their twaddle and tea-drinking, the action and passion move rapidly enough:—and we read on, with as much eagerness as though we had been unable to foresee for a page’s length what was going to befall the lessoned hero and the lesson-giving heroine!” Athenaeum, January 24, 1852
“The most remarkable quality of this novel is style, or the power of presenting the writer’s images and ideas neatly, tersely, and with a quiet but sustained animation. . . . The author has studied the externals of life and nature; he has a certain knowledge of present society from observation or hearsay, and of the past from books or tradition; he is clever in the mere contrivances of the fictionist to extricate his story from entanglements, or to carry it on. . . . But . . . he is better in narrative than in dramatic development. . . . When the author has to plunge his dramatis personae into difficulties in order to clear them up . . . he breaks down, from the want of knowledge of the events of life.” Spectator, May 22, 1852
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