Coldharbour Gentlemen: A Novel of Georgian England (Darking Hundred)
Rural Surrey, England, 1800: Lee’s novel, the first in the projected series, the Darking Hundred, is set against the background of the war with Napoleonic France. Twelve-year-old Harry Steer, son of a gentleman farmer, is the despair of his tutor. The boy is dreading his imminent departure for Winchester School when adventure presents itself in the form of a band of smugglers, but Harry finds himself in over his head with some pretty unscrupulous individuals.
Lee is an elegant writer with a convincing voice who has written a neatly-plotted story with echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson. Thoroughly researched (I recommend the author’s website), the novel weaves into a backdrop of actual events (the Act of Union with Ireland, the posturings of an eccentric local Jacobin) along with a believable cast of farmworkers, ostlers, broomdashers, innkeepers and a singularly ineffective highwayman. The smugglers find ready collaborators because of lack of employment and low wages. Their leader— ‘milord’ as he is known—is seen as a good ‘employer’ who ensures his men are properly housed. Yet anyone who betrays him cannot expect any quarter.
The natural world of rural Surrey is beautifully observed; the geography that Lee describes has not entirely disappeared and can be discovered in places like Box Hill and the Leith Hill Tower. But this is no rural idyll, and wider injustices impinge as when Harry’s mother, kind and affectionate to him, blithely remarks of her kitchen garden: ‘I have read that beans are much in demand for feeding the slaves in the West Indies, so I shall try if I can locate an export agent who will market them for me.’ I look forward to more from this author.
