Richard Dadd, Portrait of a Young Man
A man is murdered; several characters are suspected in turn.
Here is the sequel to last week’s novel, The Channings, featuring (in addition to a few members of its exemplary title family) its scapegrace anti-hero, back from Africa and plunged in the midst of a murder mystery. It includes also a virtuous novelist killed by a bad review in a journal called The Snarler.
“A murder is started, pursued, worried, treated in fact like a hunted criminal. Anxious to find its proper home, it seeks refuge, first under a flimsy disguise of suicide, then in the arms of this or that innocent person. The most unlikely persons are pitched upon inevitably by the reader, and the real author of the disaster is untouched by suspicion up to the very last moment. We must, in fairness, give Mrs. Wood credit for much care and ingenuity in keeping us in the dark so long. . . . There is something of original conception in the character of Roland Yorke.” Athenaeum, October 16, 1869
“It says a good deal for Mrs. Wood’s powers of narration that her story should show so smoothly as it does, interwoven as it is with a tissue of extravagances and incongruities.” Saturday Review, March 5, 1870
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