Settling Day

Settling Day is a horse racing novel by Nat Gould (1857-1919). The title refers to the racing-week settling day on which betting accounts were reconciled and winnings or losses paid out between bookmakers and punters, one of the central practical institutions of the English and Australian racing world that Gould wrote about for decades.

Gould produced racing fiction at a remarkable pace across his career, with more than one hundred novels appearing across the late Victorian and Edwardian decades. He knew the racing world from personal experience as a journalist who had covered races on both sides of the world, and his novels carry the authority that personal familiarity provides.

The novel works the standard Gould ingredients including a particular horse, its trainer and connections, the various betting interests circling the race, romantic complications among the characters, and dramatic events surrounding the major race that drives the plot. Gould’s commercial success during his lifetime made him one of the most-read English authors of the period.