Helen Allingham, At the Cottage Door
A wealthy solicitor’s son is secretly engaged to be married.
Here is another clever and lively novel by Cook, for whom see Novels 040, 111, and 166.
“Much of the painting it contains is not inferior to Mr. Trollope’s. . . . The novel has scarcely any poor work in it, and no bad, trashy work.” Spectator, October 3, 1868
“Mr. Cook has done a new and somewhat daring thing” in his plot, and “has, moreover, achieved this new and somewhat daring thing in a style and with a completeness of success that . . . put him amongst our best living novelists. This high praise is given . . . after cool reconsideration of the numerous merits of the story; its skilful construction, uniform freshness and sprightliness of diction, wholesomeness of interest, and . . . the unconstrained humour of its somewhat superficial but thoroughly truthful delineations of character.” Athenaeum, October 10, 1868
A contrasting view:
“Mr. Cook stands just outside the circle of penny romanticists—one half-penny beyond them, so to speak. . . It would be difficult to imagine a slighter story, yet Mr. Cook spins and spins with a hundred-spider power, and clothes the poor bit of plot in three volumes. . . . The thing is a literary cobweb. . . one of the most vicious specimens of the porous, no-thinking, windy school of novelists that we have seen for many a day. A course of such reading would in a few years materially increase the amount of national imbecility.” London Review, October 21, 1868
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