Silcote Of Silcotes

Silcote of Silcotes is a novel by Henry Kingsley, published in three volumes in 1867. It came in the late middle of his career, after Ravenshoe and Austin Elliot and before the later domestic novels of the 1870s. The book is one of his more ambitious attempts at the kind of large social novel that Trollope was producing in his Barsetshire and Palliser sequences during the same period.

The story centers on the Silcote family of Silcotes, an old English county family with a long history and several complicated branches. The main figure is the patriarch Silcote himself, an older man whose hard temperament and difficult past have created strained relations with most of his children. The novel works through the various family conflicts, the romantic attachments of the younger generation, an inheritance question, and a series of long set pieces in which Silcote himself reveals more of his history than he had previously been willing to share.

Kingsley is doing something more sustained here than in most of his earlier work. The character of Silcote is developed at length and with considerable psychological depth. The novel takes seriously the question of how a man who has been hardened by life can or cannot soften in his later years, and the answer the book gives is more complicated than the easy reconciliation that mid Victorian fiction often supplied for such questions. The supporting characters are less fully developed but the central portrait of Silcote himself carries the book.

The novel runs about six hundred pages and asks the same kind of commitment as Ravenshoe. It is less famous and is read less often, partly because it does not have the dramatic Crimean War set pieces of the earlier novel and partly because the central figure is less immediately sympathetic. For readers who have already worked through Ravenshoe and Geoffry Hamlyn and want more Kingsley at his serious best, Silcote of Silcotes is the next book to attempt. It pairs naturally with Austin Elliot and with The Hillyars and the Burtons.