Stretton

Stretton is a novel by Henry Kingsley, published in 1869. By this point Kingsley was an established novelist, with The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn and Ravenshoe behind him. Stretton is one of the lesser known novels in his middle period, but it shows the qualities that earned him his reputation and that have kept a small steady readership coming back to him.

The novel follows two young Englishmen, both connected to the village of Stretton, through a wide range of events that take them from the English countryside to the Crimean War and back. The plot has the typical Kingsley shape, which involves a great deal of incident and travel, several romantic complications, an inheritance question, and a series of long set pieces in which characters of various ranks and backgrounds find themselves thrown together in unusual circumstances. The Crimean sections are based on Kingsley’s reading of contemporary war reporting and on conversations with officers who had served in the campaign, and they have the slightly secondhand quality of fiction based on research rather than direct experience.

What is most enjoyable in the novel is the looser social texture. Kingsley was always at his best when he was writing about country gentlemen, parsons, soldiers, and the slightly raffish young men of his own social class. The dialogue is good and the descriptions of horses and hunting and country sport are observed with the particular knowledge of a man who had grown up around them. The plot machinery is sometimes creaky, with coincidences that strain belief, but the texture of the writing carries the reader along.

The novel runs about four hundred pages and reads less easily today than some of Kingsley’s other work, partly because the Crimean material is now distant historically and partly because the plot involves several conventions of mid Victorian fiction that have aged poorly. For readers who already love Geoffry Hamlyn or Ravenshoe and want more in the same vein, Stretton is a reasonable next stop. For readers new to Kingsley, the better starting places are still The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn for the Australian material and Ravenshoe for the English country house novel.