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Updated: June 13, 2025
For study of character, wide charity of outlook, brilliant descriptive writing as, for instance, in the charge at Balaclava, and real, not mawkish, pathos as in the hopeless misery of Charles, invalided, with only eighteen shillings, out of the army "Ravenshoe" will always deserve to be read. It is the work of a writer who was not ashamed to avow himself an "optimist."
"What do you mean?" "There is no reasonable doubt, although we cannot prove it, that your grandfather Peter was married previously to his marriage with Lady Alicia Staunton, that your father James was the real Ravenshoe, while poor Cuthbert and William " "Cuthbert! I will hide again. I will never displace Cuthbert, mind you." "Cuthbert is dead. He was drowned bathing last August."
In London, Charles Ravenshoe committed suicide deliberately. He did not hang himself or drown himself; he hired himself out as groom being perfectly accomplished in everything relating to horses to Lieutenant Hornby, of the 140th Hussars; and when the Crimean War broke out, enlisted, under the name of Simpson, as a trooper in Hornby's regiment. On October 25 Charles was at Balaclava.
Even in Silcote of Silcotes there are intermittent glimpses of finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in foreign intrigue. With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid good-natured cynic of Ravenshoe, is, however, a clever exception.
The children of fiction are a mixed company, some lifelike and some eminently the reverse. In Joan Miss Rhoda Broughton drew with unequalled skill a family of odious children. Henry Kingsley look a more genial view of his subject, and sketched some pleasant children in Austin Elliot, and some delightful ones in the last chapter of Ravenshoe.
The superior position usually accorded to Ravenshoe among Kingsley's novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise.
Only one thing was certain, and that was that Charles Ravenshoe's career in the army was over for ever. At home they all believed him dead, for William had traced him to Varna, and there had been informed that his foster-brother had died of cholera. The change of name was partly responsible for this, for among the dead or living there was no signs of Charles Ravenshoe.
How was Charles to know that Cuthbert Ravenshoe was dead; that William, now master of Ravenshoe, still hoped for his foster-brother's life, and that old Lady Ascot was doing all she could to atone for a mistake? Charles, in fact, was still very weak and ill, and served his friend the cornet in a poor way.
When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his fiancée.
If you must sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship, in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at their head, waving to each other calm farewells.
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