Wikipedia says, “Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.” That’s why I read it. But I liked Lorna Doone much better.
(I guess readers can’t be expected to agree with authors about their work; Mark Twain liked Joan of Arc best of his novels, whereas I preferred Connecticut Yankee; E.M. Forster liked The Longest Journey best of all his novels, whereas I preferred A Room with a View.)
This 213,414-word novel is supposedly about a two-year-old high-born girl who mysteriously washes up alone in a boat on the coast of a farm called Sker. However, in actual fact, the book is about the narrator, an old Welsh fisherman and sailor, and could more accurately have been titled David Llewellyn of Newton-Nottage. Old Davy finds the child, who calls herself Bardie, in the summer of 1782, but the tale spans eighteen years, and Davy has spent most of them far away from Bardie. Large swaths of the book are devoted to Davy’s adventures in Devon, which eventually shed some light on Bardie’s origins—but large swaths of the book are also devoted to his adventures in the navy, which do not.
As a narrator, Old Davy suffers greatly in comparison to John Ridd, the narrator of Lorna Doone. Both men profess a commitment to honesty, but Old Davy not only exaggerates (particularly about himself, while pretending to be modest), he lies, and calls his rationalizations honesty! Early on in the novel, he describes to the reader how he tricks people into buying fish he caught that aren’t fresh anymore. That’s disgusting to me for three reasons: I don’t eat fish at all because I don’t like the taste; rotting fish don’t taste good even to people who normally like fish; habitually lying to and running from your customers is the opposite of admirable. He also poaches, smuggles, and simultaneously collects both a pension and a salary from the government. The louder he says he’s not doing something, the more certain you can be that he is (like the duck in the comic at this link). Davy is intended to be funny, and to an extent, he is. But to have this weasely, money-grubbing, boastful man conveying the story is intermittently quite irksome, especially when he says nothing whatsoever related to the maid of Sker for many pages at a time—and all the more when I already read a book by the same author that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Still, the book is a kind of unusually cheerful mystery; everything works out all right in the end, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested along the way. The story’s origin as a serial publication probably explains the plot tangents.
See below for passages that illustrate the humor of Old Davy.
The humor of Old Davy
“[He was] very free from cleanliness.”
“She and I were of one accord, upon so many important points; and when she differed from me, perhaps she was in the right almost: which is a thing that I never knew happen in a whole village of grown-up people.”
“[The children were] as hard at play as if they were paid fifty pounds for it.”
“They turned and looked at me, as if they had never enjoyed that privilege, or, at any rate, had failed to make proper use of it before.”
“Being so used to his pretty company, and his admiration, also helping him as I did to spend his pocket-money, I missed him more than I could have believed.”
“To me it was no small relief to find their business peaceable, and that neither a hare which had rushed at me like a lion through a gate by moonlight, nor a stupid covey of partridges (nineteen in number, which gave me no peace while excluded from my dripping-pan), nor even a pheasant cock whose crowing was of the most insulting tone— that none of these had been complaining to the bench emboldened me, and renewed my sense of reason.”
“Many a time I have reasoned to my own conviction and my neighbours’, that a man who can stand on the mizzen-top-gallant yard in a heavy gale of wind, must find it a ridiculously easy thing to hold on by a horse with the tackle to help him, and very likely a dead calm all round. Nevertheless, somehow or other, the result seems always otherwise.”
“Once for all, I never poach, I never stab salmon, I never smuggle, I never steal boats, I never sell fish with any stink outside of it— and how can I tell what it does inside, or what it may do afterwards? I never tell lies to anybody who does not downright call for it; and you may go miles and miles, I am sure, to find a more thoroughly honourable, good-hearted, brave, and agreeable man.”
“Thus, if you find any very close-texture and terseness in my writings, the credit is due to my dear, good wife, who never let me finish a sentence.”
“ ‘Let not the sun go down on your wrath,’ are the very words of St. Paul, I believe; and we never fired a shot until there was no sun left to look at it.”
“Our antagonist was the first that struck, being the second of the Frenchman’s line, and by name the Conquerant. But she found in Captain Foley and David Llewellyn an ant a little too clever to conquer.”
“He fitted me with a hook after this, in consistence with an old fisherman; and now I have such a whole boxful of tools to screw on, that they beat any hand I ever had in the world— if my neighbours would only not borrow them.”
“I never yet did come across any other man half so modest [as myself].”
“ ‘From her my friend the Captain shall decouver the everything of this horrible affair,’ said Nanette, who now spoke fine English.”
“We know that we are of the oldest blood to be found in this ancient island, and we ask nothing more than to be treated as the superior race should be.”
When and Why I Read The Maid of Sker
I'm reading this because I enjoyed Lorna Doone, by the same author.
Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 03-May-25 to 29-May-25
Length: 474 pages
ISBN:
Originally published in: 1872/2014/2024
