David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Novel 194: Charles Gibbon, What Will the World Say? (1875)

Charles Burton Barber, An Elegantly Dressed Horsewoman Jumping Over a Gate
Charles Burton Barber, An Elegantly Dressed Horsewoman Jumping Over a Gate

In Scotland, a self-made millionaire’s daughter and niece fall in love with the same man.

Charles Gibbon (1843-1890) wrote some 30 novels beginning in 1864.  This one features, in addition to some stock Victorian-novel figures (the ill-bred, wealthy industrialist, the self-sacrificing virtuous young lady, the young lover enraged by a misunderstanding) two carefully delineated and thoroughly interesting main characters.

Gibbon “has imagined the extraordinary fluctuations of” a main character’s “feelings . . . with remarkable felicity, and has drawn them with great skill. . . .  It is an excellent and a very rare thing when the interest of a novel decidedly increases as it goes on.”  Academy, September 9, 1875

The novel “should do much to give him a high place among delineators of character. . . .  Besides containing several very masterly studies, it is full of humour, of quaint, wise, remark, and may be taken as a reliable picture of life in the district where the scene is laid.”  Spectator, October 2, 1875

Download this week’s novel:

http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014735908
(Right-click (or control-click, if you have a Mac) on the “view digitized copy” links to download the novel’s three volumes in pdf form)